Alex - I really don't think it's a matter of innovation. As I understand it, it's a well-established technology. It's just a matter of choosing whether or not to commercialize it. This government action attempts to put financial pressure on them to start using an existing alternative fuel source. It's true that the commercial infrastructure may not be in place, but I'm quite sure that the "innovation" aspect of the issue is old news. I think they're willfully misleading you.
I admit that I have not yet read the article, so I apologize if I'm totally wrong here, but aren't they basically asking for woodgas? As in the same fuel that was used in Germany (and Australia and many other places as well) in WWII when normal fuel supplies were cut off? I understand that it may not be on the market, but it seems to me that it's far from an impossibility for them to include it. It sounds to me like they're playing games with their excuse and are choosing to keep this product off the market in order to avoid using it...?
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_gas
I will read the article later and find out whether I made a fool of myself with this post.
I was just going to say that this is done on some experimental subs and torpedos for increased speed, but since that's already been mentioned I'll say that there are some airplanes that do something analogous, but they do it to control laminar flow. It was quite costly to build but radically increased the efficiency of the plane by reducing drag.
These are pretty common at museums. I know they have a bunch of them here at the Ontario Science Centre in Toronto, and I've seen them elsewhere as well. It's cool but not as amazing as it might seem -- it's "just" an overhead projector facing down connected to a webcam to sense the motion of people walking around.
You can see the woman's shadow in the video here so I'm certain it's the same technology -- so it's not actually a digital carpet. The floor/carpet is just the "screen" for the video projector.
The one at the Ontario Science Centre goes through a bunch of modes including a virtual fish pond that you can jump around in and scare the koi. Kids go nuts for it. I'll bet dogs would too if they were permitted!
Google tells me there are at least three breweries making a beer with this name... I wonder what how the other company that I'm sure got a C&D responded. Maybe they will see this and get inspired. But they did get one thing right in the letter -- big waste of the thousand dollars they probably paid their lawyer to do this. In the end all it did was get their competitor a bunch of free press for having a sense of humor.
I was initially very excited but this is ABSOLUTELY NOT what is sounds like. All they are doing is turning out the lights!!! Making it so you can't see something is not the same as making it disappear unless you are a baby.
What they're doing is taking a light beam and speeding up some of the frequencies and slowing down others, so that there is a "gap" in the beam. That is, DARKNESS. It would be absolutely no different than temporarily turning the beam off. The fact that they then have a second processor that normalizes the beam is irrelevant. At no point is "time" altered. All they've done is that at a certain place and a certain time, the lights are off.
What these custom limo builders rarely realize is that you can't just take a curvy sportscar and stick a straight section into the middle of it. It completely destroys the aesthetics of the vehicle!!! It seems to me that you could get MUCH better results by designing a beautifully curved matching centre section in a CAD program and then having it 3D printed in a giant block of foam for mold-making (like most prototype cars are done these days). This ends up just looking cheap.
I'm assuming that they started with a real Ferrari 360 (although I was surprised that the chassis is so cheap looking), which seems like an odd decision. A kit car would have made a lot more sense for a variety of reasons. Not only would you not be destroying a limited-edition collector car, but you'd be able to mount much more appropriate suspension, engine, and so on. All in all, interesting idea, but TERRIBLE execution.
A more interesting question/comment about this is its strength. Aerogels are quite strong, and have a number of other outstanding properties such as their utility as an insulator. It looks like this material (or "structure", since it seems to me more akin to miniaturized scaffolding) has a completely different set of pros and cons than aerogel so it greatly increases our palette of options when it comes to ultralite construction -- quite useful for aerospace and many other industries...
Amazing watching the sun reflect off the top of the Burj Dubai long before it actually visibly rises over the horizon... Isn't that something -- if you're in the tower, the sun rises and hour earlier for you than for those on the ground.
As a Torontonian who was a little disappointed to lose the "tallest structure" title (ie. our CN Tower) by a wide margin to this impressive monstrosity, I have to admit that I'd kind of like to go and see this spectacle in person... although as a heavily tattooed somewhat outlandish individual, I have a certain paranoia about traveling in countries like Dubai!
It's a pretty normal part of learning to fly to put your plane into slow flight into the wind and look down and see that you're flying extremely slowly or even backwards... I think everyone who's gone through flight school has done something like this (I did it in a little Cessna).
That reminds me -- planes like the Vought V-173* ("Flying Pancake") with *EXTREMELY* slow stall speeds could actually be pointed into the wind and appear to take off vertically, hovering straight up or even in reverse in the right conditions... Even though strictly speaking they had no special capabilities for VTOL beyond what all normal planes have.
Ryan - I am German (and Canadian, dual citizenship) but have lived in Canada all my life. We spoke German at home and I didn't really learn English until I started going to school, and spoke with a German accent when I was younger. As a young child I was regulary beat up on the school bus by teenagers who "hated Germans" presumably because of things their grandparents had conditioned them with... Not a fun experience. The schoolboard's dubious solution was to bring in a speech therapist to eliminate my accent (they did the same for some Dutch kids going through the same thing).
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_gas
I will read the article later and find out whether I made a fool of myself with this post.
You can see the woman's shadow in the video here so I'm certain it's the same technology -- so it's not actually a digital carpet. The floor/carpet is just the "screen" for the video projector.
The one at the Ontario Science Centre goes through a bunch of modes including a virtual fish pond that you can jump around in and scare the koi. Kids go nuts for it. I'll bet dogs would too if they were permitted!
What they're doing is taking a light beam and speeding up some of the frequencies and slowing down others, so that there is a "gap" in the beam. That is, DARKNESS. It would be absolutely no different than temporarily turning the beam off. The fact that they then have a second processor that normalizes the beam is irrelevant. At no point is "time" altered. All they've done is that at a certain place and a certain time, the lights are off.
Unless I'm completely missing something, who cares. Highly, highly misleading title.
I'm assuming that they started with a real Ferrari 360 (although I was surprised that the chassis is so cheap looking), which seems like an odd decision. A kit car would have made a lot more sense for a variety of reasons. Not only would you not be destroying a limited-edition collector car, but you'd be able to mount much more appropriate suspension, engine, and so on. All in all, interesting idea, but TERRIBLE execution.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dethklok
"Oh, your 300mph supercar isn't so fast, don't you know the earth is flying through space at 67,000mph?"
But alright, you are a very clever boy for pointing out the irrelevant-obvious.
As a Torontonian who was a little disappointed to lose the "tallest structure" title (ie. our CN Tower) by a wide margin to this impressive monstrosity, I have to admit that I'd kind of like to go and see this spectacle in person... although as a heavily tattooed somewhat outlandish individual, I have a certain paranoia about traveling in countries like Dubai!
That reminds me -- planes like the Vought V-173* ("Flying Pancake") with *EXTREMELY* slow stall speeds could actually be pointed into the wind and appear to take off vertically, hovering straight up or even in reverse in the right conditions... Even though strictly speaking they had no special capabilities for VTOL beyond what all normal planes have.
* See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vought_V-173