When alkali metals dissolve in liquid ammonia, they do something exceptionally weird. They dissolve as electrons and metal ions. The electrons are actually blue in color at low concentration, and at higher concentrations turn an immaculate metallic golden. In principal you can do the same thing with water, except it usually explodes before you see anything. Because the water molecular is more polar than water, the solvated electron cavities are about half the size, and this makes them MUCH mo...
2021-07-30 13:32:16 +0000 UTC
View Post
REALLY sorry for late getting this up! Big announcement/ video up today :-)
Its really interesting just how minor the error was that led to the Apollo 13 disaster. It really was as simple as trying to get the liquid oxygen out of the tanks with a broken/ dislodged siphon tube. They tried several ways of getting the oxygen out, just blowing it, heating it then venting it rapidly, and eventually they just turned the heaters on and let the oxygen boil off. You have to have some...
2021-07-28 11:45:04 +0000 UTC
View Post
My problem with Elon Musk started simply with the hyperloop. I knew that was BS from the second I heard it. Hes then repeated this with the supersonic vertical take off and landing electric jet, and ‘full self driving’ cars…. Oh and solar roofs and his 150mph loop system!
As a result when he claims hes going to make $50 bn a year from providing satellite internet to sparsely populated parts of the planet, Im maybe a little more than skeptical! The simplest numbers are accord...
2021-07-15 15:28:38 +0000 UTC
View Post
Its so depressing to search for this stuff on youtube. You will get DOZENS of videos with millions of hit, all with the same faux-experts saying that pips on the radar do impossible things. However the one thing it never comes with is high definition video. This always reminded me of the Battle of the Pips: one of the more entertaining battles in ww2. In the Alaska campaign a US task group suspected the arrival of a Japanese invasion fleet. They tracked several enemy vessels on multiple...
2021-07-07 13:40:18 +0000 UTC
View Post
My eyes popped when I saw this ‘private and confidential’ Boring Tunnel Project for ‘slightly larger tunnels’. It was not so much that part of The Boring Companies plan was to make smaller tunnels to speed up the tunneling, but the fact that the intermodal containers were going to be transported by ‘battery powered freight carrier’. This is basically what a truck does…. So how has it been miniaturized to fit under the intermodal shipping container? This is what the Tesla Semi wa...
2021-06-28 13:28:34 +0000 UTC
View Post
It was an explosion on an oxygen tank that crippled Apollo 13. Now its actually quite an interesting question, how do you get an oxygen tank to explode? The Apollo 13 review board says this was due to some burning wire. But when you go into the details you find the entire size of the fire required only 10grams of combustible stuff. 0.01kg of stuff burning, where the tank and its contents weighted over 100kg! Is that even possible? :-)
2021-06-21 13:44:45 +0000 UTC
View Post
-sorry Im late in getting this up!
FOUR years ago Elon Musk was promising ‘loop’ systems everywhere… NY, DC, Chicago, LA and Vegas - ‘A solution to soul destroying traffic’. The NY-DC route was even promoted as being a 700mph hyperloop with Musk even tweeting that he had gotten ‘verbal permission’ to build it!
Now all of these projects that were featured on The Boring Company website have all been deleted… except one! Las Vegas. The thing is the LVCC loop is ...
2021-06-07 15:21:12 +0000 UTC
View Post
CNN, Fox and the BBC have all reported the ‘ufo’ footage of ‘unidentified triangles’ as a threat to the US military- its just an out of focus airplane!! Tucker Carlson even suggested this was one of the greatest challenges to the US military every! This has now, unbelievably, precipitated a report from the US government. The US government has already wasted over 20 million dollars on this! -makes Solar Roadways look like a conservative money burning party! This is exactly the pa...
2021-05-25 14:26:27 +0000 UTC
View Post
Apollo 13 is an amazing episode in history because of just how close they all came to dying. You can listen to the whole mission now thanks to websites like Apollo13 in realtime (https://apolloinrealtime.org/13/). But they speak in a lot of jargon in mission control, and its not always clear whats going on….. however when you understand whats going on, the live mission audio is so much more intense than the dramatiza...
2021-05-18 22:46:31 +0000 UTC
View Post
Again and again news organizations were reporting this ‘strange triangular UFO’ sold almost entirely on the fact that the US Navy confirmed the footage was real. Well yes, the footage was indeed real…. Its just the footage was of a real out of focus passenger plane. The main giveaway of course being… since when did aliens, or secret Russian drones, go to the trouble of running FAA navigation lights when flying over US destroyers?! On top of the millions of views of hype, the ‘UFO’...
2021-05-12 14:59:58 +0000 UTC
View Post
I just couldn’t believe it when I started getting bombarded with messages about how I should apologize for ‘busting’ the Martian Helicopter about 3 years ago. Its almost surreal because in that original video I conclude that the Martian helicopter is challenging, but completely possible! Sadly due to my prolonged criticism of folks like Elon Musk, I now have this stunningly dedicated anti-fan base so eager to try to discredit me that they will demand that I apologize for things that I n...
2021-04-27 22:32:51 +0000 UTC
View Post
It’s a RACE to build Elon Musks ‘moonshot’ hyperloop….. no really it is!
Meanwhile in reality, while its true these companies have 100s of millions of dollars to blow, they are not, and will never get anywhere close to building a working hyperloop. HyperloopTT is suggesting they might build a 3km test track, and Virgin Hyperloopone says theirs will be 6km long. Both have a construction time of about 5 years. Even if these were realisitic construction times for a working system, ...
2021-04-22 12:42:10 +0000 UTC
View Post
Its one thing for Elon Musk to unveil his ‘brand new form of transport’ of chauffeur driven taxis driving slowly through tiny tunnels. Its COMPLETELY another for news reporters to look at this and gush about it like it’s the best thing since sliced bread. Its not. Its cars driving very slowly through tiny tunnels. They were not particularly cheap to dig, they were not particularly quick to dig! It carries less people than if they ran trains in it, and it less safe than if they ran train...
2021-04-14 14:51:42 +0000 UTC
View Post
Over 5 years in the making this video! The core observation is remarkably simply and easy to make- Heavy water tastes sweet compared to regular water. The underlying cause is anything but simple! It instantly raises questions about why sweet? Why not salty or bitter? In the end we managed to confirm that the sweet water receptor was indeed being triggered by the slightly different structure of heavy water- the origin of those slight differences is quantum nuclear effects! Further experiments ...
2021-04-07 12:00:52 +0000 UTC
View Post
This video by Jixuan and Sebastian was a strong contender for ‘maximum fractal wrongness’! You have to be pretty desperate to call a guy who has been a research scientist for 20+ years a technophobe and luddite! This probably stems from the fact that the last video Jixuan and Sebastian made was trying to defend the hyperloop based on the science. That REALLY didn’t go so well for them. Their next go-to defense is to simply call anyone who is critical of Musk a 'inferior human' wit...
2021-03-24 15:37:14 +0000 UTC
View Post
Understanding explosions!
What more else is there to say!! Hope you enjoyed it :-)
2021-03-18 11:45:49 +0000 UTC
View Post
There seem to be a LOT of people out there who think that just because Spacexs ‘starships’ look a little like the renderings, that they are close to being operational. In reality, if they constitute a step forward at all, its about 1/1000th of what is needed to get people to Mars. Having to reignite three temperamental turbo pump engines (or everyone dies), with no fail-safes or backups is not a viable suggestion for any vehicle that will carry people. Elon Musk has claimed that these veh...
2021-03-09 20:01:13 +0000 UTC
View Post
Its amazing that the most common comment on the SpaceX busted video (Part 1) was Elon Musk fans saying how stupid I was for not including inflation in the comparison between the shuttle launches and spacex.
The fact that I did include inflation really didn’t seem to bother them at all! Yes, facts didn’t seem to bother Spacex fans… who could have seen that coming!
When you compare the litany of futuristic promises that Elon Musk has made (Hyperloop, supersoni...
2021-02-23 14:23:19 +0000 UTC
View Post
The bullshit meter twitches every time Elon Musk claims hes made things 10 or 100 times better. I had always assumed with the rockets though he actually had made some real progress. After all it does look very impressive when his rockets reland. However, impressive does not mean you did it cheaper. The space shuttle orbiter after all was fully reusable, but wasn’t actually that cost effective. Well when you start looking at the metrics of comparison between the space shuttle and the f...
2021-02-16 12:38:04 +0000 UTC
View Post
The Qanon stuff is just genuinely depressing.
Choose a fictitious boogie man, and piously crusade against it! Witches, commies, satan worshiping pedophile……with hindsight I should have included the satanic panic. That was in the 80s when evangelical Christian folk were all in a tissy about their children being programmed by the devil by rock music….. cos they thought there was hidden messages in the music if you played it backwards!…. Yeah, it was qanon, but without pedophiles.<...
2021-02-12 20:09:56 +0000 UTC
View Post
About 10 years ago I made a video about how the internet is where religions come to die!
This seemed like a good time to update this.
The driving forces are very different today compared to what they were in early youtube. Money drives social media to deliver things to people to keep them online. This is the start of a positive feedback, in that..... what if what people want to watch isnt true!!
2021-01-31 22:36:59 +0000 UTC
View Post
Theres this very popular line of reasoning that ‘rockets are just like the planes of 100 years ago’, and that its ‘only a matter of time before rocket flight becomes routine’. However it falls apart the second you look at it in detail. Rockets have been around almost as long as planes. People were flying rockets to the moon at about the time jet travel was becoming mainstream.
The simple reality is rocket engines work under FAR harsher conditions than jet engines. You have...
2021-01-26 18:11:55 +0000 UTC
View Post
Vertical take-off and landing SUPERSONIC ELECTRIC JETS!!! Coming soon! Well at least according to one Elon Musk fans with an almost million hits on a video.
In reality of course, these were vacuous speculation from Elon Musk almost 10 years ago that his fans think is actually a real plan that Musk first of all created out of his sheer genius, and just has sitting in a draw somewhere in his office. This is actually a worse idea than the hyperloop!- even according to Musks back of an enve...
2021-01-07 20:28:12 +0000 UTC
View Post
The Las Vegas convention center ‘loop’ system is scheduled to open early in 2021. It was claimed it was to travel at up to 150mph. Its less than a mile long and cost more than 50 million USD.
Far from being a highly advanced, futuristic, automated mass transit system, in reality it’s a bunch of chauffeur driven Tesla cars driving in some very cramped tunnels. The system is way too short to allow high speeds, and way to windy to allow high speeds.
The size of the tunnel...
2020-12-31 16:08:43 +0000 UTC
View Post
.... no sooner than you think you are making headway, then Business Insider puts up another viral video on the hyperloop making all the old (almost decade old) promises. 700mph.....LA to SF in 30mins, less than $100... cheaper than regular rail etc.
However the end is actually now in sight for the hyperloop. Once they try to put one of these systems together, it will fail like solar roadways. The impracticalities are vast. In this video we go over the calculation...
2020-12-25 21:41:35 +0000 UTC
View Post
Getting someone saying they are going to EXPOSE all of your mistakes raises the bar. The sad thing is the only thing they expose is their ignorance. Elon Musk didn’t invent the hyperloop in the white paper, and indeed his only contributions to it in the white paper doesnt survive contact with reality. This is why all these ideas have been discarded by everyone seriously looking at the hyperloop- its too preposterous… even for them! Everyone has discarded Musks ideas of an air hockey...
2020-12-16 14:48:50 +0000 UTC
View Post
This was never going to end well!
Yes, Juxian and Sebastian decided that they were going to EXPOSE all my hyperloop mistakes. Quite why they chose 2020 as the year to expose all these mistakes in a video from 2016 is a little beyond me as virtually everything in this first video I made on the hyperloop has already proven to be true! Metaphorically what they have done here is like defending Theranos as a superb blood testing company 4 years after they were liquidated as a fraud. Incident...
2020-12-08 16:04:46 +0000 UTC
View Post
Sky-Diamonds! Mining the sky for ‘SkyDiamonds’…. then calling this eco-friendly! -sigh.....
The bit they don’t mention of course is turning carbon dioxide into diamond hasn’t been challenging for the last 20 years, it just takes an OBSCENE amount of energy. You have to keep your chemical vapor deposition diamonds at about 1000C for about a week to make a small diamond. To get a reasonable sized diamond you have to keep it at that temperature for over a month. In the end it wil...
2020-11-30 15:53:47 +0000 UTC
View Post
FIVE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS!
Ive not seen this sort of level of people throwing money at hype since Theranos. People were sinking billions into that before people started stating the obvious…. ‘but it doesn’t work’
The hyperloop has the warnings ALL over it. Why build a hyperloop test track in one of the worst places to build one in the country? Why didn’t they have the foresight to put their original test track on a site that could be extended?
Even in the best c...
2020-11-26 13:28:39 +0000 UTC
View Post
People continue to throw millions of dollars at Theranos v2.0.
The latest crap to come out of the empty promises machine of the hyperloop is this ‘ground breaking’ test. They show that you can put someone inside a vacuum chamber in an oversized coke can (nothing new) and move up and down on a skate (nothing new) at 100mph. These haven’t been challenges for over 50 years! We’ve been putting people in oversized coke cans and have them move around at 6km per SECOND in orbit. In thi...
2020-11-17 11:57:37 +0000 UTC
View Post
