Odd Concepts

Production delays are over and the first 2 Boeing 787 Dreamliners have been delivered to All Nippon Airways, with 18 more expected to be delivered by the end of FY2012. ANA has a total of 55 Dreamliners on order.

The first commercial flight was a 4½ hour charter from Tokyo to Hong Kong:

Journalists, special guests and representatives from ANA and Boeing
joined Chief Executive and President of ANA, Shinichiro Ito aboard
today’s flight. Business Class seats were also sold in a charity auction
with one passenger shelling out US$30,000 for a ticket.

The carbon fiber composite 787 offers passengers increased overhead
luggage space, 30 percent larger auto-dimming windows, power, USB and
iPod connections, touch panel LCD screens and more comfortable air
pressure.

The Dreamliner also promises significant fuel savings of around 20
percent, which ANA says will eventually help it save JPY10 billion
(US$130m) a year.

Aeronautics engineer (but non-blogging) Advised by Wolves writes:

The big thing about the 787 is how different it is from previous airliners.

1. The aircraft will have a much higher percentage of composite materials as opposed to 90% metals for all previous airliners. The fuselage tube is carbon-carbon with metal reinforcement. The rudders and elevators are composites, but the wing, vertical and horizontal stabilizers are still aluminum alloy.

2. Aerodynamics is much slicker in this aircraft. That is a function of the greater knowledge of the physics and the composites that allow the minute bends of the slicker shell.

3. It has electrical actuators for the flaps and all control surfaces instead of hydraulics that is the norm for airliners. It has additional and more powerful APUs (auxiliary power units) to provide the additional electrical power. Other aircraft use the main engines to provide hydraulic power.

4. The biggest difference is how the aircraft was designed and built. Partners (i.e. subcontractors) were much more responsible for designing their components and the components were supposed to be completed so that major parts could be assembled easily at the shop floor in Seattle and the new shop in the Carolinas. And that is why the plane was delayed two years.

Boeing, 787, Dreamliner, All Nippon Airlines, ANA

A do-it-yourselfer named Wendell had the time, the interest, and evidently a spare pumpkin. The result, a fully functional Dalek recreation!

HT to SyFy Blastr, which notes:

Wendell didn’t use the traditional Kaled to power the Dalek shell. Instead, he outfitted the pumpkin with wheels, a servo motor and a remote control. So this particular Dalek might not look the part of universe-threatening alien … but it moves as if it could exterminate you.

OK, so “fully functional” may be stretching things a bit as it can’t actually exterminate you. But it really looks cool.

Wendell posts complete instructions so you can build your own. But first, watch the YouTube video to see just how scary this thing can be.

A recent oil spill off the coast of New Zealand has volunteers flocking to help. But you don’t have to go all that way to help. You can just turn out a few “sexy knits” for stricken penguins to wear “so they don’t freeze or are poisoned as they preen themselves.”

Certainly better looking than one of those silly neck things they put on dogs to keep them from grooming themselves after an operation. Ah, those wacky environmentalists! What will they think of next?

Penguins, Humor

From Harvard Natural Sciences comes a video of “fifteen uncoupled simple pendulums of monotonically increasing lengths.” That’s what they call it. I call it awesome.

CNET interviews Roger Kay, principal analyst at Endpoint Technologies, about the buying frenzy kicked off by the $99 price tag on the HP TouchPad. Kay believes that this challenge to the iPad market dominance should give Apple pause:

Kay explained. “If you were a big company like HP and you were doing a new category product launch, it would not be weird to have a marketing budget in the hundreds of millions,” he said in a phone interview. “So, you could have used that money to subsidize the price of the TouchPad and you can flood the market with these devices that are worth way more than you have to pay for them. And get them in everybody’s hands. Get everybody talking about it. That could have been the loss leader entry into the market,” he said.

“So, it wasn’t really a product failure, it was a pricing failure.”

Fascinating point, and not unprecedented. Remember that the PS3 is sold at a less-than-cost price point because Sony makes much more off the games and subscriptions. Another tablet manufacturer may just take the hint.

If so, I would certainly be tempted to buy one. The Apple is pretty, but far too expensive for a toy. And the screen is just too small to be  anything but an extension of the dual monitor setup of today’s knowledge worker.

On the left, a 2.50 GHz quad-core computer with 8 GB of memory running 64-bit Windows 7. That’s the computer I use.

On the right, a computer with a 50 MHz 80486 chip with 20 MB of RAM running Windows 95. Most recent file is dated 1997.

That’s a 6-inch ruler sitting below the screen which, by the way, is a giant 9.5 inches. Note that the iPad 2 has a 9.7 inch screen.

I can’t find drivers for the wireless PMCIA card that I have sitting around here somewhere, but it’s clean and works fine. So I just don’t know what to do with it. Hate to toss it. Hate to insult Disabled American Vets with something so useless.

Of course, to the extreme right is Mountain Dew, which is timeless … thanks to the support and continuous consumption by geeks the world over.

From Mashable: How AT&T and Verizon iPhone Users Compare [STATS]

Strangely enough, customer satisfaction for iPhone users on each network are almost identical.

Hey AT&T, put me down in the “dissatisfied” column.

Via Engadget comes one of the most fascinating geeky videos ever created. YouTuber Andrew Tait (aka “TheRasteri”) installed DOS 5.0 and Windows 1.0 on a VMWare instance and then proceeded to upgrade it through every Windows version right up to Windows 7 (except for Windows ME, because it couldn’t be upgraded to Win2K). On every version he examines things like whether or not color settings were carried forward and  tests Doom II.

Yes, it’s a little long. But I swear it felt like only 3 minutes to me. ‘Cause it’s so fascinating.

I wonder what that ways about me.

NASA’s Solar Dynamic Observatory caught a solar flare on film. While not as large as the Valentine’s Day X-class flare, the picture angle on this M-class flare gives us a spectacular view of the eruption:

Now that’s awesome.