She basically ignored the wisdom of her own advice. A corollary of "don't blame the original author" is "it's not your story once the film company has the contract signed"
"Saving Mr Banks" is this for PL Travers and Mary Poppins.
Tolkien estate, Philip K Dick estate, CS Lewis estate....
And nobody asinine enough to ask "where's my jetpack" because we'd need Von Neumann self replicating machines, a supply chain and significantly more robust coding to get there.
He might have done better to push it another 50 years. Problem being the other half of the MAD deal.
Not that the future isn't bleak, but I take heart we didn't all die in a massive thermonuclear war this timeline in the multiverse.
From memory, Glasgow University CS had serious buy in to VLIW models of computation for a while, predating Itanium. There was good reason for believing it might have some interesting behaviours. I think they worked on languages targetting it, data models, things like reversible computation, long lived processes.
Explaining WHY 400hz power weighs less would have been useful. The article is a one-paragraph "because" with a lot of padding.
Power doesn't come from nowhere. It's taken as some form of output from the gas turbines driving the turboprop. There are several ways this COULD be done, bearing in mind that these things rotate at 2,000 to 20,000 RPM depending on where you are between the fan and the actual turbine jet engine part. It's done as a shaft drive through a gearbox as I understand it, which implies mechanical parts, wear and cost.
I have no idea if the step down from 2k to 50hz is painful but I can see from the web 400hz is closer to the same functional RPM of the engine parts as-is so it may be this simplies the gearbox considerably: less gear stages == less loss over the gearing.
The other aspect is that the electrical parts of the power system are lighter at the higher frequency too. A 400hz transformer is meaningfully smaller and lighter than a 50hz one.
This is the same idea as switching power supplies but planes had to solve that before power semiconductors were cheap enough.
The power frequency also has an impact on the size of all the induction motors.
I guess if you were designing it from scratch today you would let the generator produce power at whatever frequency the mechanical engineers tell you they want to and the power electronics could convert it without problems. You would do the same thing the other way around on the motors.
A transformer works on A/C only, for one thing by being electromagnetically sensitive to the cyclic reversal of incoming voltage.
The higher the number of windings in the coil, and/or the amount of iron in the core, the greater the impedance to this constant polarity reversal. And the more sensitive to the lower frequencies.
These are basically audio frequencies and the inductance presented by the transformer's primary winding acts almost as a low-pass filter whose effectiveness changes rapidly as frequency approaches zero. IOW a small transformer doesn't have as much frequency response to the "lows", and that sensitivity is what is needed before it can induce current into the secondary winding to begin with. All other tings being equal, bigger iron would respond stronger to the same more-gradual fluctuations in primary voltage.
Now with the alternator as the source of the frequency, a physically smaller alternator running at higher RPM could produce as much power as a bigger one running at lower rpm.
Edit: Also when you use the 115V/400Hz A/C elsewhere on the aircraft like to power a radio, when it it rectified to DC inside the radio it takes a lot smaller capacitors and stuff to filter out the 400Hz line noise than it would for the low hum of 115V/60Hz.
Somebody, either Buderi or Rhodes has the magnetron appearing in the MIT Radar labs and somebody saying "oh, thats obvious" and being asked "ok smartass, how does it work then..."
Sometimes, simple things are obvious in hindsight.
Decca navigation gear was common in British boats operating in near coastal waters right up to the 70s and 80s. The fundamentals of how this system worked were not radically different to the beam systems used for navigation in the war.
I had some exposure to Decca, we mainly got by with early Loran (less accurate than Decca), then transitioned to Loran-C (better accuracy) in parallel with reverse engineered NavStar, then onto early civilian GPS with home grown base stations and post processing .. and some time ground truthing older maps to the newer WGS ellipsoid standards.
Galahs are highly socialised and live in large groups. I certainly want to believe they take pleasure in flight, and I love seeing them fly above the Brisbane River where I live but I am drawn to observe they are also probably subject to social pressure like flocking behaviour, peer and dominance establishment, and threat of exclusion. Reduction in stress hormones would be normal in an animal conforming within it's group and not being bullied or put under stress. Still there's a determinism in poo testing I like. It's pretty black and white.
Also, these were presumably cage bred. Not sure I'd generalise from this cohort to the wild.
More work to be done I'd say. The evidence of crows and others repeatedly gliding and swooping from roof ridge to eves and back again suggests they ideate beyond some sense of purpose in flight, doing repeated orbits up and down, on and on, and it looks playful. They do similar compex things not flying very clearly playing (riding frisbees in the snow), which definitely look play like, so it seems reasonable to assert the flight which simply displays an ability to fly with no other purpose is done for pleasure as much as any other reason.
Very different to the environmental shut-downs elsewhere (france) which are about water temperature effects on the ecology: this is a pretty straightforward physical/engineering limit. Danube low, less water available.
Didn't early Victorian Train lines have shareholders tokens which functionally entitled the holder to free travel? I am sure this was an understood concept probably handed down from Turnpike and Canal days.
"Saving Mr Banks" is this for PL Travers and Mary Poppins.
Tolkien estate, Philip K Dick estate, CS Lewis estate....
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