Cheaper than the Large Hadron Collider and way more fun!

Atmospheric pressure at sea level is about 100 kPa, or 15 PSI, and on a surface with area 1m² it exerts a force of about about 100,000 newtons, enough to lift 10 metric tonnes. That’s a lot of force.

Now if I was sitting in a sealed capsule made to fit snugly in a long metal tube a little over 1m in diameter, and the incredibly long vertical tube above me was sealed and evacuated (using lots of pumps), all that force would be trying to push me upwards. It would be rather like the upper atmosphere was trying its best to suck me up through a giant straw.

If my beautiful assistant were to then cut the rope keeping my capsule anchored to the ground, it would result in me rocketing upwards with quite a phenomenal acceleration, which can be calculated using good old F = ma.

F = 100,000 newtons
m = mass of myself plus capsule, let’s say 200kg

a = F/m = 100,000/200 = 500 ms^-2

This means the maximum acceleration that might be achieved at the moment of release is approximately 50G, or about twice the acceleration survivable by a human lying on his back… oops! To put that in perspective, if your car had that kind of acceleration it could go 0-100 in less than a tenth of a second. But never fear; we can just chuck another couple hundred kilos of sandbags in there to slow things down a little (and then have them released as we approach higher altitudes with lower pressures).

Assuming then that we might be able to sustain 20G acceleration over the majority of the ascent, we can now calculate my muzzle/exit velocity based on this. Assuming the tube is 10km tall (yes that’s ridiculously tall, almost the cruising altitude for passenger jets), we can plug some values into the equation s = ut + at²/2 and get a t value of 10 seconds, the time it would take to ascend, and then we can use that to calculate that my velocity on exit would be about 2000ms^-1, or more than 5 times the speed of sound.

At that height the altitude is about a third the pressure/density as it is at ground level, so hopefully the drag would not be too bad. Also, at this point I would be counting on the superb aerodynamic qualities of my capsule to stop me exploding into a million pieces as I emerge from the rarefied tube interior and hit the atmosphere rather hard. Once out of the tube the only forces acting on me would be gravity and drag, the major bummer being the latter. Depending on whether I had ditched my sandbags at this point, the sudden deceleration would be quite eyeball popping-ly awful, somewhere in the vicinity of 10 to 20G. So let’s be optimistic and pick the lower estimate for now.

If my muzzle velocity is 2000ms^-1, then assuming my subsequent deceleration was constant at 10G it would take another 20 seconds to come to a stop, at which point an altitude of 30km would be achieved, which is close to the altitude record for non-rocket powered human flight (about 114,000 ft). The good thing here is that deceleration would not be constant, but would taper off rapidly as my velocity decreased, since drag is proportional to both the square of velocity and the density of the atmosphere, both of which would be decreasing continuously as I fly upwards. So I’m pretty sure I would happily sail past 30km, and probably even 40 (130,000 ft)… Some point after which I would reach apogee. At that moment I would feel true weightlessness for the first time, and I could exit my capsule to look down at a blue expanse below and a black sky above, and silently begin the long, free-fall descent.

So now I just need $100M $200M or so… Maybe I should add a tipjar to the sidebar to get things moving.

I don’t know if this is real, but if it isn’t then these girls deserve awards for their incredible acting.

UPDATE: The general vibe is that it’s a parody, and Molly’s other videos tend to ever so vaguely imply that this might be true (and there are many edits, so they could have cut all the parts where they broke character). I’m not about to bet either way, because nothing shits me more than anonymous online douchebags yelling “FAKE!”. Kudos to the girls if it’s a fake, OMFG if it isn’t.

Batman is all about revenge and/or proving something to himself. He is full of the kind of pointless internal conflict that only a truly narcissistic poor little rich boy could carry all the way into his adult life. When he talks he sounds like a dick who needs to make himself more threatening, like you’d better not laugh at him or he’ll be real mad.

Iron Man is about penance, but not in the Christian self-flagellating way. Tony Stark is full of swagger and thankfully devoid of brooding introspection. When he realizes how much damage his enterprises have caused, instead of voluntarily checking himself into some godforsaken Asian gulag he decides to do something useful about it; Instead of dicking around searching for masochistic ways to build character he just gets to work building a kick-ass suit that can fly.

Batman appears to be inexplicably strong with virtually unlimited agility and endurance, surpassing any weightlifter, gymnast or athlete, and this just makes no sense. Especially when he can apparently be beaten senseless by a skinny lunatic in a purple suit. His accessories are compromised by having to be entirely bat-themed– like a throwing star isn’t enough; it has to be freakin bat-shaped. He rides a “batcycle” with tires so wide that it shouldn’t even be able to take a corner, and he uses machine guns to clear a path for this monstrosity– What a douche.

Iron Man has no problem with technology providing all the muscle, and being unencumbered by flying rodent vermin obsessions he can put whatever damn features he needs in his suit. He is ready to experiment and try new things. He is able to appear human and doesn’t need to hide his alter ego. He’s flawed, he knows it, but he’s not obsessed with beating the living shit out of himself for it.

Bruce Wayne comes off creepy, because he is always living a lie while fancying himself a martyr walking among the sheep he so selflessly defends. Tony Stark comes off as real, he knows who he is and he doesn’t try to hide it.

Also, Christian Bale is a bit of a dick, totally disappointing in the role of John Connor in T4, and sounding like he’s about to hock a loogie whenever he speaks in his Batman voice. Robert Downey Jr on the other hand has wit and charisma, and somehow manages to be twice the actor while only taking himself half as seriously.

I have to say that I am really getting into the whole dynamic HTML/JavaScript thing as well as the MySQL/PHP thing. It’s quite cool how much you can do even with fairly limited knowledge. Of course you can make a hell of a mess too, but since most “apps” I use these days are web apps I think I’ll definitely be doing more of it in the future.

Quite often when dealing with clunky win32 API stuff at work I long for the flexibility and scriptability of a web page. The whole look and feel of an interface can be described in CSS and the interaction provided by a reasonably comprehensive event model and a little asynchronous updating (via Ajax or even the hidden frame technique I’m playing with for the new blog).

Compare the ease of letting a web designer create a nice well laid out UI with trying to get a bunch of C++ coders to create something that doesn’t make you want to barf, with hideous resource editors and copious amounts of compiled boiler plate code that can mean a small change takes anywhere from an hour to a day. I guess this is the gap that Microsoft is trying to bridge with Windows Presentation Foundation and thin client friendly frameworks like Silverlight, but unfortunately one cannot simply port old win32 style apps to these shiny new technologies– legacy code is a bitch.

It’s crunch time at work, and instead of spending my downtime relaxing I suddenly feel very driven to complete the new blogging platform. I’ve worked out how to achieve most if the effects I needed and it’s really close to being able to switch over.

I finally sussed how to dynamically load a comment after posting it without reloading the page and without using Ajax (hint: uses invisible frames to return results of form actions) so that’s one of my original goals met. The other was to avoid XML-RPC for posting, but since I’m less and less likely to use a desktop editor for composing that’s largely irrelevant now.

I am still yet to integrate the wysiwyg component for editing posts (and comments?) but plan to do that after the structural/navigation stuff is all working.

One major pain is that it runs differently on my home server than when I upload it… specifically with regard to the handling on cookies for login, and this is kind of bugging me. At home I log in and log out and everything behaves perfectly, but online it seems to be nearly impossible to log out again; even when I delete the damn cookies they somehow persist and it gives the disconcerting (but false, I assume) impression that others might be able to get write access to my blog. I think it must be something to do with intermediate proxies but can’t really be sure at this point.