Speed of Dark Blog

I stumbled accidentally upon a set of airplane engines that, in my opinion, would be fun in various other applications.  The interest comes from the design, they seem similar to another design I looked at, and have the kind of fuel economy to power ratios you’d expect.

http://www.ulpower.com/engines/ul350iS/index.html

High torque motors with a reasonable amount of HP, ideal for small aircraft.  I think they’d be fun in a small automotive application, 3L of displacement making 237 ft-lbs of torque at a low rpm would be extremely drivable, even fun.

The aircraft covered in the blog section of the site is capable of 600 nautical miles on a single tank of gas using the UL260iSA, which has some fancy oil system additions to be able to run upside down.

While not an “alternative energy”, the real focus of science and engineering should be into architectures like these, where the current fuel options are conserved and efficiency is improved.  What we’re seeing in the current hybrid crop is a group of vehicles who are only marginally more efficient in the face of immense collateral environmental impact.  On the same note, an improved engine uses the dame materials and chemicals as a conventional, so the manufacturing and disposal would be something the industry is well acquainted with, unlike the current pushing of Compact Fluorescent (CFL) light bulbs (mercury) and hybrid vehicles toting multi-kilowatt Lithium and NiMH batteries, which, if disposed of incorrectly, can contaminate thousands of gallons of water.

My hats off to these people, they’ve made some good products.

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I decided I wanted to have the same functionality found in Google Docs on my site, and not have to make equations there and move them to my server and embed them as images.  So I did some digging and found mimeTex, and and a simple recipe for wrapping the cgi into PmWiki for use there.

I like it.

Today I heard some more news regarding the release of new HP/Palm WebOS devices, including a few tablet form factors.  Essentially I’m gearing up for the second week of February, I need a new phone  (my Pre has served me well, but is beginning to age rapidly), and would like to get a tablet with this awesome OS running on it.  As a programmer and OCD individual, the interface is incredibly important, and personally I can’t stand iOS.  It’s too limiting on the user.  While typing this, for example, I was listening to Pandora, and had a few updates running in the background.  I just responded to an email and text, all without ever closing out of any open program.  A linux kernel and well thought out task-switching interface are to thank for that.

As to the posting user, this is my mobile publisher.  Look for on-the-go updates about tech and environment.