Disney spent a quarter billion dollars to build, Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser hotel, and it only remained open for a year and a half. This girl spent $6000 to be immersed in the experience. Fortunately, she’s cute and made an engaging 4-hour video about her Star Wars adventure that’s been viewed by 7 million people. She should recoup her expenses.
Category: Engineering (Page 3 of 4)
City Journal: Politics and Physics Collide
The legislature and unelected regulators enjoy magical thinking because the time frames are long, they will never be held responsible and perhaps engineers can meet the goals. Automakers have long been burdened with fleet economy standards that must be met. The Laws of Thermodynamics are problems for engineers, not legislators. Cars became lighter and less safe while also becoming more complex and expensive.
The idea that the United States can quickly “transition” away from hydrocarbons—the energy sources primarily used today—to a future dominated by so-called green technologies has become one of the central political divides of our time.
WSJ: Elon Musk on Woke Mind Virus
WSJ: Elon Musk on Woke Mind Virus
For months and months, the world’s richest man has been talking about the “woke mind virus”—let’s call it WMV for short. He describes it as a threat to “modern civilization” and says those concerns motivated his decision more than a year ago to buy the social-media platform now known as X.
On the Moon, astronauts will need protection from a different set of hazards. They’ll have to contend with cosmic and solar radiation, meteorites, wild temperature swings, and even impact ejecta. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has found hundreds of lunar ‘skylights,’ locations where a lava tube’s ceiling has collapsed, making a natural opening into the tube.
SciTechDaily: CalTech satellite beams energy from space.
A space solar power prototype, SSPD-1, has achieved wireless power transfer in space and transmitted power to Earth. The prototype, including MAPLE, a flexible lightweight microwave transmitter, validates the feasibility of space solar power, which can provide abundant and reliable power globally without ground-based transmission infrastructure.
This is one of those dangerous ideas that sound wonderful until you understand it.
“I’m usually an early adapter,” said Wiesen, 46 years old. “It might be the gadget part of me that made me buy it, but it’s also the safety aspect.”
Weisen is self-aware enough to know that it’s a novelty.
Making a good electric car is challenging. It’s also difficult to make a good aircraft. Making a flying car isn’t likely to be very good at either function, but it’s fun to see them try.
Electric motoring is, in theory, a subject about which I should know something. My first university degree was in electrical and electronic engineering, with a subsequent master’s in control systems.
I never knew that Mr. Bean is an engineer.
WSJ: Automakers get into mining.
WSJ: Automakers get into mining.
When General Motors began outlining plans in 2020 to fully switch to electric vehicles, it didn’t account for one critical factor: Many of the battery minerals needed to fulfill its plans were still in the ground.
“I remember seeing a report from our raw-materials team at the time saying, ‘There is plenty of lithium out there. There is plenty of nickel’,” said Sham Kunjur, an industrial engineer now in charge of securing the raw materials for GM’s batteries. “We will buy them from the open market.”
GM executives soon came to discover how off the mark those projections were, and now Mr. Kunjur’s 40-person team is scouring the globe for these minerals.
“Why Magical Thinking isn’t Whimsical” or “No Shit, Sherlock” would also have been serviceable titles for this article.
This isn’t my invention. One of my students told me that her dad built a system to use the heat from the central air conditioning heat pump to warm the water for their swimming pool.