[ExI] Space governance

[spike at rainier66.com]

From: extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> On Behalf Of Ben
Zaiboc via extropy-chat




>
That would mean short, fat cylinders, not long thin ones, no?

 

Hi Ben,

 

Ja, or we attach masses on the rim in order to make the axis of rotation the
maximum moment of inertia.

 

 


>
It's interesting that we hadn't really understood this until relatively
recently. Makes me wonder what other physics we are still completely in the
dark about.



 
 
We were weren’t really in the dark on this one.  Granted the weightless
environment offered a lot of cool chances to do stuff like this (and by the
way
 do you ever wonder what we are STILL doing in the space station?)
 
I could write on and on about this topic, but perhaps at some point you saw
a toy which looks like ¾ of a sphere with a cylinder attached.  The physics
teacher spins the tippy top, it turns upside down:
 
https://www.real-world-physics-problems.com/tippe-top.html#:~:text=The%20tip
pe%20top%20is%20a,in%20an%20upside%2Ddown%20orientation.
 
She asks her students: did the CG of the tippy top rise in inversion?
Clearly it did.  And so
 how and why?  Did it borrow energy from the
universe somehow?  And if so, is the universe willing to loan some more of
that? etc.
 
We love this one, because it is a rare example of where guys with the
physics degrees don’t always understand it but the controls engineers do.  
 
Usually the physics jockey hafta explain everything to us bonehead
engineers, but we show them this, which appears to defy conservation of
energy.  It doesn’t, and it isn’t magic.  We controls engineers have
equations which deal with products of inertia and even have that icky
coefficient of friction that physicists don’t like to deal with, all those
distasteful non-linearities, swoon.


>
I'm also wondering if a long thin cylinder flipping about a perpendicular
axis would be the disaster




-- 
Ben Zaiboc
 
That isn’t what happens.  More later if I get time.
 
spike
 
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