Intrepid.com.au

I came across an interesting physics thought experiment. There are lots of sites discussing it but it seems to have originated here.

A plane is standing on a runway that can move (some sort of band conveyer). The plane moves in one direction, while the conveyer moves in the opposite direction. This conveyer has a control system that tracks the plane speed and tunes the speed of the conveyer to be exactly the same (but in the opposite direction). Can the plane take off?

This answer seemed obvious to me at first, the plane does not take off because the conveyor belt keeps the plane stationary preventing the planes wings from getting lift. This is incorrect. The thing that confuses people, including me at first, is that the movement of the conveyor does not keep the plane stationary or move it backward, it just spins the wheels. Because the wheels are spinning faster the wheel mechanism will generate more friction than normal, but this would not be enough to prevent the plane from taking off.

So basically, the plane needs its normal take off thrust plus some additional thrust to over come wheel mechanism friction in order to take off. If you assume the system is frictionless then only normal thrust is needed. That’s my understanding anyway, what do you think?

I added this site to Technorati.com barely a week ago and things were going great at first but in the last couple of hours I have been getting constant errors. When I visit the site I get the following friendly message:

Doh! The Technorati Monster escaped again. We’re scouring the blogosphere attempting to find it. Back in a flash!

And this is what it looks like:

Sometimes I don’t even get the Technorati Monster error page and instead get a Proxy Error that looks like this:

Technorati is a great service for bloggers so It would be a real shame if they couldn’t sort these problems out quickly.

Ok I know this sounds bizzare so hear me out before you get your knickers in a knot. I wanted to add a link to the blog from the main page at www.intreipd.com.au, so I changed the name of an existing flash button and gave it an appropriate name. When I uploaded the new page and button then loaded it in my browser neither the new button or the old button appeard. I sort of expected this because I have encountered it in the past when changing flash buttons, and I have no idea why.

So I cleared my Firefox 2 cache and reloaded the page, no change. I then fired up both IE and Opera but still the new button did not appear. I went back checked everything, no spelling mistakes in the code and all the needed files were indeed on the server. Loaded the page on my laptop, still no dice. So I’m getting a little frustrated about now wondering why it was happening and whether or not users could see the button because it looked stupid with just a gap where there should be a button. I was sure it was some sort of weird caching problem so I came up with the idea of doing a clean browser install. The only other browser I had on my drive was Firefox 1.5 so I installed that and lo and behold, the button works.

So it was indeed a cache problem. I still don’t know what or why but I am finally getting to the point of this post, I like Firefox 1.5. Not because it loaded the flash button properly, that would have happened with any clean browser install. No, I like 1.5 because it is loading pages faster than 2.0, and also because there is just one close tab button, so I can just click on one spot to close multiple windows. Just a few taps of the button and all the tabs I don’t want are gone. Nice. Now that I think back to pre 2.0 days I can remember thinking this was one (of many) reasons why Firefox was better than safari which had a close button on every tab.

Now I’m sure someone will tell me about better security or better features of Firefox 2 but I’ m not too interested in that, all I want to do is load pages as quickly as possible and use it as quickly as possible and on those fronts I have to say 1.5 has 2.0 beat. You might also say that 2.0 is infact faster than 1.5 but thats not my experience. So it has me a little worried about the impending Firefox 3.0 release, I haven’t used the beta so I Just hope it lives up to the hype because despite my criticism, I do love firefox.

On a completely different topic to that last post, McDonalds Australia recently re-introduced the McFeast and when I heard about it I felt just a little bit fuzzy inside. Not because I’m a huge Maccas fan, but because it is easily their best burger and the closest thing to a real hamburger they have ever made and several years ago they stopped making it. But have you noticed that it’s not a McFeast but a McFeast Deluxe. That shouldn’t be a problem I thought because Deluxe is better right? Well I have tried the burger and it’s fairly close to the original but there is just one flaw, they use way too much sauce. It tastes OK but the excessive amount of sauce drips out everywhere and just ruins the whole experience I telly you.


While on the topic of Junkfood re-releases I have to mention Maggie 2 minute noodles. Again I’ve never been any huge fan but they go down well when your hungry and need food instantly. The problem is that Maggie have re-introduced them as New Maggie noodles. Why they have done this is I can only guess but the problem this time is that the new flavours are disgusting. I notice that the noodles are no longer made in Australia but imported from Malaysia this is obviously why they taste so different. I have no problem with them being imported and nothing against Malaysia, in fact my girlfriend is half Malaysian but I do have a problem with the fact that they are so bad I just cant eat them. I guess they are doing me a favour because I definitely won’t be buying them anymore so that’s less junk food in my diet. Thanks Maggie!