DE: Is the grace....er, grass really greener?

[bjornwilde]

Complete the statement:
Wouldn't it be awesome if...?

Minimal  daily brought to you by the letter z and its lack in my mornings.

ETA: Grace instead of grass? Really pre-coffee self?

Comments

[wanderlustlover]

...we all had teleporters.

[bjornwilde]

This would make my work commute so much more awesome. Of course I would lose my book time.

[silveraspen]

Seconding (thirding?) this. I would love access to working teleporter technology.

[withherhands]

The first thing that comes to mind with that is "I could go to so many more yarn stores!"

And, y'know, be able to just hang out with friends that live hours away, visit places I have no hope of going anytime soon, but...YARN.

[bbq_platypus]

Not without guarantees, it wouldn't be. I'm not too keen on stepping into a machine that disintegrates me and then creates a copy of me X number of miles away. For all I know, all I've done is kill myself and create an exact copy.

[shinyhappygoth]

...I didn't get sick the week before a convention?

[cameoflage]

urrrrrgh that happened to me before my last con and it was awful

Thankfully I managed to de-sick most of the way before the con happened, apart from a somewhat runny nose.

[shinyhappygoth]

Yeah, I'll be fine, I think. I just feel guilty for contributing to the con crud. Still, I will make up for it by distributing cookies as well.

everyone loves switching journals mid-conversation

[doctorscaryteeth]

Yeah I brought a hand-packed bag of jelly babies since I was dressed as the Doctor and then I was like "wait I can't hand these out to people, they will get a sick".

So I ate them all myself.

Re: everyone loves switching journals mid-conversation

[shinyhappygoth]

Awww. Well, I don't touch the cookies after baking, just the container. People can grab their own. Which means the cookies may still spread disease, but it's not my disease.

[ceitfianna]

..my supervisor paid attention to what I did.

..cars deiced themselves.

[bjornwilde]

Or that there was flash heaters for the inside so you could wait in warmth.

[ceitfianna]

My car's not too cold and does work quick, its the scraping the ice off that I hate. Though my parents gave me a nice new ice scraper for the holidays and I have warm gloves, just a pain to do.

And my supervisor just realized that oh, I provide office supplies to students. She wanted to check I knew you about the closet full of supplies in my back office, I'm not sure she's ever really listened to most things I've said since I've talked about these supplies before. I've even asked her questions about them. Right, end of rant.

[silveraspen]

Just so you know, I read this at first as a wish for cats to deice themselves, and was very confused.

[ceitfianna]

Hee, that would be strange but also possibly adorable, little icicles hanging from their ears, all the glares.

[bjornwilde]

...everyone saw us as we are rather then as a label?

...we had a Steven Colbert in Milliways?

...it was May already and we were all in an Imax theater watching Iron Man 3?

...we all became great friends with Peter Jackson and were treated to all three installments of the Hobbit in one go?

[herr_bookman]

...we had a Steven Colbert in Milliways?

This can be done. Hopefully awesomely.

[knightoftheswan]

Wait, we had a Stephen Colbert in Milliways, didn't we?

[bjornwilde]

Did we? I don't remember.

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

We did, very briefly. I don't think his mun brought him in more than about twice, tops.

[bjornwilde]

He does seem like a very hard voice to get right.

[gavin62truck]

This reminds me, I think it was around when Bush got re-elected that a hilarious political RPG popped up on Deadjournal (or maybe it was Insanejournal...), and it seriously had the best players ever, from dead presidents to pundits, including a spot-on Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. I miss it.

[leeshajoy]

...I didn't have to work this morning?

[abitofawildman]

...Milliways was a real place.

What? Just me?

[bjornwilde]

To quote the motto of another comm. I'm in, "It's never just you."

[ceitfianna]

This, yes, I'd love to find Milliways when I opened my back office one day.

[abitofawildman]

I can think of three detrimental things about stumbling upon Milliways one day:

- The overwhelming wave of disillusionment
- The crashing realization that somewhere, some how, someone is writing fan fiction about my life.
- Getting my ass handed to me by my characters

[aleister_author]

Getting my ass handed to me by my characters

Ah ha, yeah. Tyler is already on that train.

Writing horror stories doesn't help with that at all either.

[genarti]

It's not just that they'd be writing fan fiction about my life. It's that if I'm at Milliways, I'm the version from the fic -- and what if it's OOC.

[withherhands]

Getting my ass handed to me by my characters

AHAHAAAA YES, OMG. Somehow I don't think the explanation of "CANON IS MEANER I SWEAR" would work.

There's also the good chance of having all these fictional characters I love in the bar...and having no more luck in the nookie department than IRL. :D

[withherhands]

Fuck, I would love that.

[jjprobert]

... We had jetpacks.

... I got a job. This brought to you by two job interviews inside three days.

[shinyhappygoth]

I would like to amend this with: ...we had the kind of jetpacks seen in ReBoot, with air jets. Not the classic flame-jet kind. That way lie third-degree bottom burns.

[jjprobert]

The problems they never mention with that type, is that expanding gas gets very cold on release from compression, so you end up with a frozen butt instead...

That way lies frostbite. ;-)

[shinyhappygoth]

Ouch, good point. Curse you, Boyle's Law!

[jjprobert]

So the only viable option is a fan or impeller based option.

I've been wanting to do the maths on this for a while, so now seems as good a time as any:

If we assume the fan to be approximately the width of a human body, so, to make the mathematics easier, call it 1/pi metres in diameter. This means that we have a propeller length of about 16cm, and one revolution means the tip travels 1 metre. The propeller radius is therefore 1/2pi.

So, we can safely say that this fan rotates at 300 complete revolutions per second, without needing to worry about shockwaves because of the tip going supersonic.

So, erm, I went back to first principles on this one (Because I'm a geek like that!)

I won't show my working here, but I can if people want me to. But, anyway

Force produced by a fan = (pi x density of air/2) x (radius of propeller x depth of propeller x rotation speed x number of blades on the prop shaft)^2

keeping the radius at 1/2pi lets the rotations per second be 300 (equivalent to 18000rpm), then we can assume a depth for the propeller of pi cm (to make the maths easier) and with 4 blades, gives us a theoretical limit on the force from this fan as being:

F= pi x (1.225/2) x ((1/2pi) x pi x 300 x 4)^2 = pi x 0.6125 x 600^2=693 KN = (6.93x10^5 N)

Or, more than enough to lift a man, given a man weighs ~70Kg, so it only takes 700N (again, approximately) to overcome the force gravity is applying to him.

Of course, this is an exceptionally high revolution rate (about double what indycar engines pull, and the limit for a Formula 1 car), and also assumes perfect efficiency.

Halving the revolution rate gives us 173 KN, which still lets us have an efficiency of 0.1 (ie for every 10 turns, one volume is expelled).


In summary, wow this has gone on a bit more than I initially planned, but a man sized fan based jetpack is certainly viable, and I'll just leave you with a nice link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Jetpack

[shinyhappygoth]

*finally finds a moment to read this*

Sweeeeeeet.

[baptizemyself]

... I lived in the same time zone as my RP partners.