Ray Garrison

WOW!!! I remember those!

Then the big question is how do you obtain, achieve and/or earn eternal life? Travis Okay, you asked. The thing is, each of us exists in multiple parallel universes. Our concious minds inhabit each. Events occur that are analogous, if not identical, in each. As we go through life, events occur that could, and sometimes should, kill us. As we pass through each event, in some of those parallel universes our existence halts, while in others it continues, at a slightly higher degree of improbability. The more likely the event is to kill us (being in a plane that crashes from 40,000 feet, perhaps) the less likely is our survival, and the fewer the number of universes in which our concious minds can find a repository. As we continue to experience life, the likelyhood of our survival continues to become less and less probable, and the number of universes in which we continue to exist decreeses. In conjunction with this, the plysical laws of those universes in which we find ourselves continuing on become more and more strained, as the loopholes that allow for our continued survival become more and more improbable. Eventually, we, each of us, winds up constrained to a universe in which physical laws are taxed to the extreme, and the likelyhood of our survival is less and less. You may eventually arrive at a point where the plane will not take off.

This one was Ray's fault - the famous Feynman sprinkler. The sprinkler should not turn at all. You can do some fast talking, skewing some physics, and convince people the sprinkler can turn either way. In the normal case, where water jets out of the sprinkler nozzle, it's pretty easy to predict the reaction intuitively. In the submerged suction case, the water isn't jetting into the nozzle but is flowing toward the nozzle uniformly from all angles. The forces all cancel and there is no net force to turn the sprinkler. You can't pull on a mass of water like a string. Well, maybe... Look at it this way. Think simple conservation of momentum. When we start, the water is a mass at rest. After we finish sucking it in through the sprinkler and blowing it out the pump, I'm not sure what, exactly, it's doing, but it's certainly not at rest. Force has been imparted to the water to accelerate it, and move it in some direction. What happens from a Neuton's 3rd law perspective here? Please note I have no effing idea what the answer is, and judging from Google neither do Cal Tech, MIT, RPI, or a whole gaggle of really smart people who like to chatter on about things like this. BTW of course it takes off. I *STILL* like my roller coaster example.

funkyhambone, Just a heads up so you're prepared. If you shipped the first one using FedEx, UPS or DHL, you did not buy "insurance", you paid a "declare value" charge. There is a *HUGE* difference. Insurance will pay you if something is damaged. You buy insurance, something happens, the insurance carrier pays you, deal done from your end. Declared value is something completely different. When you pay a declare value charge (FedEx is $2.50 for the first $500, then $0.50 for each $100 after that) you are paying a surcharge that establishes the value of the product you are shipping. If you don't pay this fee, the value of any item shipped in the express shipping environment is capped at $100. This fee simply raises the cap. To collect the value of the product, you will still have to show (a) that the carrier was liable for the damage, as opposed to something like poor packaging on the part of the shipper, and ( produce a bullet-proof invoice that establishes the replacement value of the item that was damaged. Not to say that you can't successfully prosecute a claim for the product, just wanted to be sure you understood what your starting position is. Ray, CTO of www.periship.com Perishable shipment? PeriShip It!

Mas signed off on the "Will it fly" thread with the following observation... "Hey kids, you can all yell at me, but this is one of those discussions that reinforces the notion that 100 monkeys placed in a room with typewriters will never recreate Shakespeare!" Well, could they? The following discussion is from the Math Forum. As large as Shakespeare's collected works are, they are still finite. If you type at random, eventually some six-jillion-letter combination you type will end up being the collected works of Shakespeare. Let's do an actual example. Since the collected works of Shakespeare are a pretty lofty goal, let's just see about how long we would expect it to take for a monkey to crank out one of Shakespeare's sonnets, for example the following: Look in thy glass and tell the face thou viewest -48 Now is the time that face should form another -45 Whose fresh repair if now thou not renewest -43 Thou dost beguile the world unbless some mother -47 For where is she so fair whose uneard womb -42 Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry -37 Or who is he so fond will be the tomb -37 Of his self love to stop posterity -34 Thou art thy mothers glass and she in thee -42 Calls back the lovely April of her prime -40 So thou through windows of thine age shall see -46 Despite of wrinkles this thy golden time -40 But if thou live rememberd not to be -36 Die single and thine image dies with thee -41 In the above sonnet I removed all punctuation, just leaving the letters and spacing--we can't expect too much; they're only monkeys, right? If my letter count is correct, this leaves 572 letters and spaces. To further simplify, we won't worry about carriage returns, capital letters, or any other such stuff. Anyhow, say we give a monkey a special typewriter that has 27 keys (26 keys for the letters of the alphabet along with a space bar). We let the monkey type 572 characters at a time, pull the sheet out, and see if it's the sonnet. If not, we keep going. We'll do some calculations on the fly here to see how long this process will take. Got a calculator handy? First of all let's find out how many 572-letter possibilities there are for the monkey to type. We have 572 characters, and 27 choices for each character, so there will be 27^572 possibilities (that's 27 times itself 572 times). Punching this into my calculator... er... okay, on second thought better use a computer....I get the following number of possibilities: 5496333784561099393693048531368044344887926194198532520694117049056247 2568424395482058851927075593679213263223991649095444601504350463483987 5025610104140864608504908534119526789608399222986117684072414622768253 6214908304427395812519474546086831288010236639735783766919573127540345 2575089566044810413932116060031762894505524988451285440971813773606694 0163946473467668970711919689863460271936750837609798272198814318196353 5086770723528603185438692855503864007605689811533968043988986405766599 4634626982653271152473969190655534329764726804924235126863461599117918 7453007805890829071114522894672065623217961791812204851353664903930975 3565419938168852881272755213408072890621434530416560019423439471934830 8488558728285338553045399661579902802268940348808763480359167736446637 8909091744053824079947245708112252748079248200721 It's a big number, about 5*10^818. Let's say our monkey can type about 120 characters per minute. Then the monkey will be cranking out one of these about every five minutes, 12 every hour, 288 per day, and 105120 of them per year. Divide that big number by 105120 and you get that it would take that monkey about 5*10^813 years to type out that sonnet. Now say we get 10^813 (that's ten followed by 813 zeros) monkeys working on the job. With that many monkeys working 24 hours a day, typing at random, one of them is likely to crank out the sonnet we are looking for within five years. If the monkeys are particularly unlucky, you may have to let them run an infinite amount of time before they crank out the desired sonnet, but chances are with this many monkeys on the job you will get results in five years. To make a long story short, if you have only a finite number of outcomes and you take an infinite number of trials, you will end up getting the outcome you are looking for. Well, forget about making a long story short, I'll give you one more mind-blowing example. A typical digitized picture on your computer screen is 640 pixels long by 480 pixels wide, for a total of 307200 pixels. Using only 256 different colors, you can get decent resolution. Now if you take 256^307200 (256 times itself 307200 times) you get... well, a pretty big number, but a finite number nonetheless. That's the number of different images you can have of that particular size. Any picture you would scan into a computer at that size and resolution will necessarily be one of those images. Therefore, contained in those images are the images of the faces of every human being who ever lived along with the images of the faces of every person yet to be born.

When I was about 7 I got a Sears record player for Easter. This was one of those big things that folded up like a suitcase when you weren't using it, with a turntable, arm, electronics and a speaker built into it. The music *I* was listening to then (1962) was Turkey In The Straw, Jimmy Crack Corn, The Arkansas Traveler, Jesus Loves the LIttle Children, I've Been Working on the Railroad, The Legend of Wyatt Earp and similar 45s. I didn't hear "real music" until much later.

When I was at RPI the textbook we used in the freshman phsics class was the "Feynman Lectures on Physics" series. One of his gifts was the ability to express complex and perplexing questions in simple, easily understood terms. It was the *solutions* to those questions that left me scratching my all too often thick head. I still think his water sprinkler question is one of the most deceptively simple and yet insruitably complicated questions I've ever bumped into.

pauln, One of the (few) things that I find frustrating about life is that some of the most interesting and fascinating things, things I would *LOVE* to be able to read about and understand, are unfortunately so beyond me that I can't even understand the basic vocabulary needed to think about them. For example, when I read your post, I did a quick Google® on aberration of gravity, just to see what might be written about it. This is typical of what I found... "We describe our explicit Lorentz-invariant solution of the Einstein and null geodesic equations for the deflection experiment of 2002 September 8 when a massive moving body, Jupiter, passed within 3.7' of a line-of-sight to a distant quasar. We develop a general relativistic framework which shows that our measurement of the retarded position of a moving light-ray deflecting body (Jupiter) by making use of the gravitational time delay of quasar's radio wave is equivalent to comparison of the relativistic laws of the Lorentz transformation for gravity and light. Because, according to Einstein, the Lorentz transformation of gravity field variables must depend on a fundamental speed c, its measurement through the retarded position of Jupiter in the gravitational time delay allows us to study the causal nature of gravity and to set an upper limit on the speed of propagation of gravity in the near zone of the solar system as contrasted to the speed of the radio waves. In particular, the v/c term beyond of the standard Einstein's deflection, which we measured to 20% accuracy, is associated with the aberration of the null direction of the gravity force ("aberration of gravity") caused by the Lorentz transformation of the Christoffel symbols from the static frame of Jupiter to the moving frame of observer. General relativistic formulation of the experiment identifies the aberration of gravity with the retardation of gravity because the speed of gravitational waves in Einstein's theory is equal to the speed of propagation of the gravity force. We discuss the misconceptions which have inhibited the acceptance of this interpretation of the experiment. We also comment on other interpretations of this experiment by Asada, Will, Samuel, Pascual-Sánchez, and Carlip and show that their "speed of light" interpretations confuse the Lorentz transformation for gravity with that for light, and the fundamental speed of gravity with the physical speed of light from the quasar. For this reason, the "speed of light" interpretations are not entirely consistent with a retarded Liénard-Wiechert solution of the Einstein equations, and do not properly incorporate how the phase of the radio waves from the quasar is perturbed by the retarded gravitational field of Jupiter. Although all of the formulations predict the same deflection to the order of v/c, our formulation shows that the underlying cause of this deflection term is associated with the aberration of gravity and not of light, and that the interpretations predict different deflections at higher orders of v/c beyond the Shapiro delay, thus, making their measurement highly desirable for deeper testing of general relativity in future astrometric experiments like Gaia, SIM, and SKA." Jeepers. (the quote, by the way, is from here... ) I guess I'll go back to trying to explain why an airplane can take off.

PhilMays said "I guess one other area that I am stuck at, and perhaps the "it will fly crowd" can explain is. If it is on a conveyer belt, and that is the "Red Herron", are you saying you will still need the length of the runway for it to take off? Am I understanding that the thrust will still act like it does and that the wheels and conveyer belt is just a point to throw people?" Yes. It actually might need a slight bit more than the standard take off length, because there is some additional rolling friction due to the higher rotational speed of the wheels, but that should be pretty much diminimus.When you said your were stuck at this point, what did you mean?

Phil, In my opinion you have the best Avatar on the forum. It will not fly, just as a car on a dyno with not reach any speed. The wing needs air to move over it's wings, and it is not getting any. Just like the car's tires need friction to move forward, it is not getting any on a dyno. If you are talking about propulsion (jet thrust) there could be enought, but then it is not longer an airplane, it is a rocket, and by definition it is not flying. The Space Shuttle is perfectly stationery on the pad, but it sure can take off. However, when it takes off it is a rocket, when it lands it flying. Travis I am really having a problem understanding why there's so much misunderstanding here. A car moves by using it's tires to push against the road. Put a car on a dyno, or conveyor belt or whatever, and it won't move, because the surface the tires are pushing against is going in the other direction at the same speed, so the car's body doesn't move. A plane moves by pushing against the air, not the ground. What the ground beneath the plane is doing has no impact on what the air the plane is sitting in is doing. If the air is stationary, and the plane is pushing against the air, the plane will move relative to the air. What is happening underneath the plane, and what the surface its wheels are in contact with is doing, has no impact on the plane's ability to move forward by pushing against the air. If the conveyor belt had some way to drag the air backwards, so the air above the belt was moving along with the belt, then yeah, the plane would never take off. But that doesn't happen. The air remains stationary, the plane pushes against the air, the plane begins to move forward relative to the air, the plane takes off. Suppose the plane was using an air cushion, like a hovercraft, instead of wheels. Would you say the plane would take off then? If so, what's the difference between the air cushion and the wheels? The wheels are not driven, remember, they just rotate as the plane moves relative to the ground. Try this. You're flying above this conveyor belt. Your landing speed is, say, 100 mph. The belt is moving in the opposite direction at 100 mph. Could you do a touch and go? Well, sure. When the wheels touch the belt, they will begin rotating at a speed of 200 mph (you're going forward at 100 mph, belt is going backwards at 100 mph) but you could touch down, run down the belt at an airspeed of 100 mph, and take off again. Now go around, touch down, throttle back a bit to, say, an airspeed of 50 mph, then accelerate and take off. We can do that, right? Okay, do another go around. Touch down, throttle almost all the way back until you have an indicated airspeed of 0 mph, and the only thing the prop is doing is resisting the rearward force the belt is imparting through the friction of the rotating wheels. this is exactly the starting point of the question, except that the belt is moving faster in this scenario. Now accelerate and take off. Still with me? The belt could be moving at any arbitrary speed, it doesn't matter. The plane's thrust comes from pushing against the air, not the belt. As long as the air is not moving in the same direction and the same speed as the belt is moving, the plane will propel itself through the air and take off.

Here's another way of looking at this that might maybe possibly convince some people that the damn plane will fly away. Let's say you have a plane with a maximum level flight velocity of, uh, 450 mph. A nice P-51 or something. You put it on a conveyor belt, with wheel chocks in place and the engine off, and accelerate the belt (with the plane going backwards) to, uh, 500 mph. The belt is whizzing along with the plane sitting on it, going backwards at 500 mph. Now, remove the wheel chocks, climb in, and fire the plane up. Begin moving forward (relative to the belt) and attempt to take off. Can you? Answer (A). No, stupid, of course you can't. The belt is going backwards at 500 mph, and the plane's maximum velocity is 450 mph. Even if you reached this maximum velocity while running with your wheels on the belt, which I doubt you could do, you'd still be going *BACKWARDS* at 50 mph when you reached your maximum velocity. Obviously you can't fly. Answer (. Look, let's try one more time. The plane's maximum velocity of 450 mph is a maximum *AIRSPEED*, not a maximum *GROUNDSPEED*. The first thing that's gonna happen when you remove the wheel chocks is that the air rushing past the plane at 500 mph is going to begin pushing the plane forward (relative to the belt.) When you climb in and fire up the engine, you will begin moving forward along the belt, or reducing your rearward velocity, however you want to look at it, and doing so at quite a rapid pace. As you apply engine thrust you will reach a point where the plane is not moving at all relative to the surroundings (zero airspeed), and is wheeling along at 500 mph relative to the belt. At this point the engine is hardly working at all, because all it's doing is fighting the "pull" of the belt passing beneath its wheels. As you continue to throttle up, the plane begins to move forward relative to the air. You reach the Vlof speed, and take off. Granted, at that point the wheels are travelling at a rotational speed equal to moving at 500 mph + Vlof, but we shod the thing with really, really good tires. Answer ©. The belt produces a thrust vector that imparts a transient kinentic moment equal in magnitude to, but opposite in gradient scale, to the forward lift component of the rotating prop, or the expulsed compustion products. As is clearly stated in the original suppopreposition, the vector magnitude of the scale of the velocity of the belt is diametrically opposing and offset to the velocity component of this vector. This being the case, no amount of force application will circumtranslate into the derivation of forward velocity sufficient to exceed the amount required to negate the rearward component. The system is in a statis equilibrium that cannot be violated without ignoring the 2nd law of thermodynamics. This should be clear to anyone who has half a brain and spends any time at all thinking about this. I've seen example of all three answers in this thread. [] I'll B waiting for your analysis. B. goode.

Just one more try at this. Suppose the plane is flying above the belt with wheels retracted. No matter how fast the belt goes in the other direction, the plane will still fly, right? Okay. Now, lower the gear, but keep flying. When the wheels touch the belt, the plane will continue to move forward, right? Okay. Now, throttle back bit by bit. As our airspeed slows, we will begin to transfer some weight to the wheels, until at some point we can say we're no longer flying, but taxi-ing (?spell?) really, really fast. But we're still moving forward, right? Okay. We could speed up and take off again, right? Okay. Now, repeat this process, each time slowing down a bit more, until we reach the point where we come to a complete stop (zero airspeed) before we start speeding up again. We are now at the starting point poised by the question. We can still take off, right? Hello? What's the frequency, Kenneth?

joke noun 1. something said or done to provoke laughter or cause amusement, as a witticism, a short and amusing anecdote. Of *COURSE* it will fly. I've been saying that for 15 pages. I was just getting so frustrated the last few posts I was attempting a bit of levity. I still really like my roller coaster example of a few pages back. The treadmill example on the previous page was pretty good too. If there's this much trouble with something as simple as a plane taking off while some surface moves beneath it, image what would happen if we asked a basic relativity question. Here's one. A meter stick if moving at nearly the speed of light parallel to a plane that lies beneath it. The plane is slowly rising towards the meter stick. There is a hole exactly one meter across in the plane. The plane and meter stick are converging such that, at the point when their positions cross, the center of the meter stick is at the center of the hole. Now, from the meter stick's frame of reference, the hole has been relativistically forshortened, and is less than a meter across. It won't fit through. From the hole's perspective, the meter stick has been relativistically forshortened, and will fit through the hole with no problem. What happens?

Gilbert, How does the speed of the conveyor negate the engine's thrust? I can't wait to hear your answer. 16 pages, because people don't analyze the problem correctly and/or don't bother to read previous posts before they jump in and restate obvious points about airspeed and lift. Cool. It just occured to me the Navy's been missing a real opportunity here. These steam catapaults they're using are expensive, dangerous and hard on the planes. *THEY DON'T NEED THEM!!!* We install a conveyor belt on the flight deck. We put a plane on the belt. We fire up the engines, and start the belt moving backwards. We throttle up the engines and speed up the belt until the belt is going about 500 ft/sec (which ought to be above Vlof for just about any plane I know of), with the plane sitting there furiously burning fuel, stationary on the deck. Then, we *STOP THE BELT!!!* The plane launches forward immediately at 500 ft/sec, safely taking off with a huge safety margin. This is, like, *SO COOL...* Way to go Klipsch BBS! Making the world safe for technology!

okay, let me take a specific set of circumstances. I'm curious what you think would happen here. This is a restating of the original question, so this is really a different question, I know, but what's the answer to this one? Suppose the plane was sitting on the belt with its engines off. The belt begins to accelerate at a slow rate, say 1 ft / sec / sec. I'm pretty certain that the plane will move with the belt - I doubt the plane's inertia is sufficient to overcome the static friction of the wheels at such a low rate acceleration. The plane will not move relative to the position on the belt where it started, and it will begin to move backwards relative to the ground at that rate of acceleration. Now, suppose we set the throttles at a position so the thrust would generate exactly the same amount of acceleration, 1 ft / sec / sec. We start with the plane and belt sitting still. We simultaneously begin moving the belt backwards and start the engines. What happens?

It doesn't need to. The original question states that "a plane is standing on a movable runway (something like a conveyor). As the plane moves the conveyor moves but in the opposite direction. The conveyor has a system that tracks the speed of the plane and matches it exactly in the opposite direction." The question here is the "...speed of the plane..." relative to what? If we're talking the speed of the plane relative to the *GROUND* then the plane will take off. As the plane begins to accelerate, it is moving slowly at first, and the belt is moving slowly beneath it. I have no problem with the plane gaining enough forward air speed to take off. By the time it does, the belt will be moving at Vlof in the opposite direction, the wheels will be spinning at 2 X Vlof, and the plane will fly merrily away thumbing its nose at us. However, suppose we mean the belt will move in opposition to the plane based on the plane's speed relative *TO THE BELT*. I tried to wrap my brain around this, and to be honest the mechanics are beyond me. I think the end result is that if the initial conditions are to be met (belt moving at exactly same speed as plane in opposite direction, relative to plane's speed on belt) the only possible scenario is that the plane is stationary relative to an external frame, and never moves from its initial starting place. If the plane were moving forward, however slowly, it would be going faster relative to the belt than the belt would be going relative to the ground - a violation of the stated conditions. How you could make that happen seems to involve rapid and continous acceleration of the belt such that the small amount of force transmitted through the tires to the airframe (and to create the angular momentum of the rotating tires *SOME* energy is transferred to the plane, even if the wheel bearing were perfectly frictionless) is sufficient to offset the engine's thrust. My brain hurts.

Okay, I am changing my position on this. Previous position of course itll take off. Youre all bunch of dunderheads if you dont get that. The motion of the plane through the air is independent of and not correlated to the motion of the belt beneath the plane. Current position no, the plane will not take off. If I read the initial question to state that the conveyor belt is measuring the speed of the plane *RELATIVE TO THE CONVEYOR BELT* and the belt is moving in the opposite direction at the same speed, then the plane will never move from a fixed reference point on the ground next to the conveyor. I apologize to anyone I belittled for seeing this before I did. I dont have time now to go through the whole process that led to my flip flop on this, but Ill post it later today if anyone cares.

I just reread this whole thing, and realized there is another way to look at this. (I was once told by my grandad that being positive about something is being wrong at the top of your voice.) I have been assuming that the plane was already moving forward when the belt began moving backward, and we were just concerned with whether the drag of the belt on the wheel bearings would be enough to "pull" the plane back and prevent it from taking off. And I think the answer to that is "no". However, suppose the plane is *stationary* on the belt when the belt begins to move. Actually, give the belt a head start. Before we turn on the engines, the plane is moving backwards at some speed. As the plane begins to accelerate relative to the belt (and thus slows its rearward speed relative to the ground, but it's still going backwards) the belt begins to speed up. Now what happens?

Sorry about the car battery, but science marches on, etc...

This has got to be one of the most depressing threads I've been involved with in at least 6 years. I really can't believe there's any argument about it. Of course the plane takes off. What the ground under the plane is doing while the plane is moving forward through the air has nothing whatsoever to do with the forces acting on the plane. I don't know how many other ways to express this. The fact that there's even any question about it shows how little basic physics understanding there is. I'm gonna go to bed and hope that when I wake up Dorothy has found her shoes.

Tom, Pretty simple. As the plane flys, the wings are furiously throwing air down toward the ground like a rabid gorilla sittingin a tree throwing bananas at bystanders. Just as the gorilla can lift the tree off the ground by throwing a sufficiently massive amount of high carbohydrate fruit towards the crowd with sufficient velocity, the plane remains in the air through the same mechanism.

I'm sorry, but that explination is incomplete. The belief that wings generate lift solely as a result of Bernoulli's Principle is a misconception that's been taught as gospel for too many years. Here's a link to a NASA educational website that does about the best job of explaining the relationship between Bernoulli's principle, angle of attack, lift, drag and stall that I've seen. Yes, the Bernoulli Principle does contribute some lift as a result of the decreased pressure over the top of the airfoil. But the primary contribution to lift comes from the deflection of the air downward by the wing due to its angle of attack and forward motion. The primary contribution of the shape of the airfoil is to prevent the airflow from separating from the surface of the wing as the angle of attack is increased. As you know, increasing the angle of attack increases lift and increases drag. When the critical angle of attack is exceded, that aircraft stalls because the airflow around the wing goes from laminar to turbulent as the boundry layer separates from the surface of the wing. The airfoil shape allows an increased angle of attack before this critical angle is exceded. I am *NOT* saying that Bernoulli's Principle plays no role in the lift generated, just that the forward motion of the wing through the air combined with its angle of attack contributes a larger share. If you took a flat sheet of some material that was strong enough to support itself, attached a powerful engine to it and propelled it though the air at an angle, it would fly. It wouldn't be very efficient, because it would generate a huge amount of drag, but it would fly. This is how a box kite works. The camber of the wing reduces the drag, allows an increased angle of attack, and adds some lift as a result of Bernoulli's Principle. If Bernoulli's Principle were the *SOLE* component of lift, obviously no aircraft could fly inverted unless it could alter the shape of the wing while inverted. The fact that aircraft *CAN* fly upside down, when the contributing forces of the angle of attack and the Bernoulli's Principle force are acting in opposition to each other, indicates that the force component due to angle of attack is greater than that due to Bernoulli's Principle.

couldn't resist one more attempt to make this simple. You have a roller coaster. You place it on the downhill side of a steep slope. You've set up the rails so they can move under the car. You let go of the car. It begins to descend the slope. You start up the rails, and they start moving really damn fast in the uphill direction, opposite to the direction the coaster is traveling. I think everyone agrees that, unless the wheels get stuck, the coaster is going to continue traveling down the hill regardless of how fast the rails are moving in the other direction. Replace the coaster with a plane, and the force of gravity with the force of the engines, and you have exactly the same scenario.

All I can say is no wonder our collective a$$es are getting kicked in high school math by just about every other country. Any first year physics high school student should be able to look at the question, think about it for a second, and say "uh, of course it will take off??? I'm not sure why you think there's a question..."

I *KNEW* this was going to happen. See what you get when you cross an infinate slope crossover with speed-of-light electromagnetic propagation? *TIME INVERSION* Al joined before PWK was *BORN* just to be the first guy in the queue. What some guys will do...