Absurdly inane BBC article

[DDE]

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160713-could-this-be-the-first-nuclear-powered-airliner

Aside from multiple nuclear physics errors like this

Quote

Not only would you need a “closed loop system” – a reactor that reuses the waste fuel...

There's this

Quote

Nuclear fusion-powered aircraft might be just too difficult to pull off in the next century. Much more likely, says Weeks, will be forms of hybrid power; for instance, propeller that help generate energy to be stored on board and used to help the aircraft take off.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

[evileye.x]

That plane looks Kerbal

[p1t1o]

Its what happens when an artist tried to do science. All he has done is create an imaginative "fantasy" aircraft, and then like all of us did when we were drawing spaceships at the age of 8, come up with some fantastic details about it, "Its gonna have a nuclear reactor and an ice cream machine and beds with TVs and a sofa and vending machines and like it will be silver all over and it will have machine guns AND missiles and it will make a noise like CCCHRHHRCRHCHRHRHCCRHAAAAHAHRCH!!"

[Kerbart]

9 minutes ago, p1t1o said:

Its what happens when an artist tried to do science. All he has done is create an imaginative "fantasy" aircraft, and then like all of us did when we were drawing spaceships at the age of 8, come up with some fantastic details about it, "Its gonna have a nuclear reactor and an ice cream machine and beds with TVs and a sofa and vending machines and like it will be silver all over and it will have machine guns AND missiles and it will make a noise like CCCHRHHRCRHCHRHRHCCRHAAAAHAHRCH!!"

I think you’re putting too much value in the word “artist” here. The words in the article are written by a journalist, a notorious source for turning even the words of people like Stephen Hawking into straight gibberish. When I visit the “artist” site I see something that makes it hard to believe the dude is a real graphic designer, but rather someone who just enjoys making 3d models of futuristic airplanes; and the journalist fell for it after doing his obligatory 3 minutes of research.

[p1t1o]

It is listed on the BBC website section called "BBC Future". I clicked the "What is BBC Future?" button and saw, get this:

Our mission statement is simple:

"Making you smarter every day."

 

Hopefully, not all their articles are as badly sourced. But science reporting in mainstream media has always been very patchy.

[PB666]

Well lets do at least a little bit of analysis.

1. Concorde design is 50 to 60 years old, it could be, should have been i improved upon.

2. I think when someone says 'based upon fusion power' and they are not talking about a nuclear bomb, then we just nod the head and smile. Again when they argue the technology is 7-13 years off, just nod your head and smile, there will not be a productive reactor in their lifetime and not a chance it could be factored to fit in a commercial airframe so its just a dream, let them. 

3. The beeb, which is my primary news source, but not for science, does a reasonably decent job compared to say all of the major American news organizations. They tend to go a bit overboard on the limey stuff and all that on about lorries, peake and bloodhounds.  We cant exactly ask the British brodc. C. not to be Brittas. Buts lets imagine if all our science news came from Fox news, including news about climate change, evolution all that stuff?

 

[kerbiloid]

Just now, p1t1o said:

Its what happens when an artist tried to do science.

Spoiler

Quote

Nuclear reactors could theoretically stay in the air for months at a time

With passengers.

[p1t1o]

3 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

And that is what happens when a scientist tries to do art

 

[tater]

Reporters are not terribly smart as a group. Not at any news outlet. To think that they are only bad at science, but fine at business or political issues is pretty comical. They are also all biased (which should come as an uncontroversial statement of fact, as they are all humans).

[PB666]

3 minutes ago, tater said:

Reporters are not terribly smart as a group. Not at any news outlet. To think that they are only bad at science, but fine at business or political issues is pretty comical. They are also all biased (which should come as an uncontroversial statement of fact, as they are all humans).

That's not fair, reporters are intelligent. The problem is that if you study 20 diverse subjects a day, you will lack a focused or in depth knowledge in any group. 

Lets tke an example here. Suppose you farm all science and spacecraft and post here. That limited subject area is actually huge, you could not intelligibly handle it. So you filter, for example i left the video about human evolution on the feed, 5 seconds of play, thats enough,mits garbage, alt-backspace escape. 

You have to filter the topic area if you want to sound intelligent about the topics you do report on. One of the science reporters for Science magazine i interacted with in a forum, i learned that reporters often go to confetance to get a feel on the mood of a proffesion. But the problem is that conferances are often filled with unpublished information, and in some of the popular feilds its where the bigshots go to speculate (or are asked to spevulate by reporters). So these often miss the direction of the feild. We had a thing one time, we were contacted by a reporter after a conferance about what a speaker said, as i was one of the 'organizers' I watched all of the conferances at least in part, and this particular speakers topic was interesting but not paricularly relevant or important. They were waiting for us to publish the meeting abstracts and transcripts, which seemed odd.. What happened is that someone had reported the conferancee for fraud, but because he had not published he had no story, so the reporter (foriegn) had to try to get us to publish so that the reporter could have a story. I kind of scratched my head, because conferances are places of ideas not particularly fountains of professed knowledge. When you read a Science writer article on a human evolution you would be convinced that this is the state of knowledge, at best it general represents no more that half, the popular one, of the feild. At best you might have some snaps of slides, but lacking all the interesting details. 

 

[linkxsc]

Well the shape of the craft is futureistic. And though it might be lacking in lift. Isnt wholly an impossible design.

Descriptions tied to it however.

 

Much more believeable than any nuclear aircraft. Would a a nuchlear powered container ship or something.

[DDE]

1 minute ago, linkxsc said:

Well the shape of the craft is futureistic. And though it might be lacking in lift. Isnt wholly an impossible design.

Descriptions tied to it however.

 

Much more believeable than any nuclear aircraft. Would a a nuchlear powered container ship or something.

Nuclear-powered lighter-aboard/container icebreaker-class ship? Done. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sevmorput

[linkxsc]

1 minute ago, DDE said:

Nuclear-powered lighter-aboard/container icebreaker-class ship? Done. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sevmorput

Wow I am honestly impressed that they have done that already.

[tater]

1 hour ago, PB666 said:

That's not fair, reporters are intelligent. The problem is that if you study 20 diverse subjects a day, you will lack a focused or in depth knowledge in any group. 

Lets tke an example here. Suppose you farm all science and spacecraft and post here. That limited subject area is actually huge, you could not intelligibly handle it. So you filter, for example i left the video about human evolution on the feed, 5 seconds of play, thats enough,mits garbage, alt-backspace escape. 

You have to filter the topic area if you want to sound intelligent about the topics you do report on. One of the science reporters for Science magazine i interacted with in a forum, i learned that reporters often go to confetance to get a feel on the mood of a proffesion. But the problem is that conferances are often filled with unpublished information, and in some of the popular feilds its where the bigshots go to speculate (or are asked to spevulate by reporters). So these often miss the direction of the feild. We had a thing one time, we were contacted by a reporter after a conferance about what a speaker said, as i was one of the 'organizers' I watched all of the conferances at least in part, and this particular speakers topic was interesting but not paricularly relevant or important. They were waiting for us to publish the meeting abstracts and transcripts, which seemed odd.. What happened is that someone had reported the conferancee for fraud, but because he had not published he had no story, so the reporter (foriegn) had to try to get us to publish so that the reporter could have a story. I kind of scratched my head, because conferances are places of ideas not particularly fountains of professed knowledge. When you read a Science writer article on a human evolution you would be convinced that this is the state of knowledge, at best it general represents no more that half, the popular one, of the feild. At best you might have some snaps of slides, but lacking all the interesting details. 

 

I know many people who have been interviewed for articles, and they are almost always unhappy with the result. The reporters for the most part really don't get it. There is a famous anecdote attributed to Murray Gell-Mann, that he was interviewed for a major US newspaper (the NYT, I think), and he talked to the reporter for over an hour. The article that resulted got his work very precisely wrong, literally 180 degrees from what he had said in the interview. Gell-Mann then says that he was appalled, then flipped to the business page and believed everything he read, knowing how utterly wrong the science reporting was. My wife reacts the same way to virtually 100% of medical reporting (she's a surgeon). A friend who is an attorney has similar observations about legal reporting (that a lot of it is gravely flawed).

I have a relative who is an international reporter with a large outlet... and he'll text me questions sometimes to try and understand something he is reporting on, or someone he works with is reporting on. Some of the science questions I could pass to my children, and they could answer them.

Not all reporting is terrible, but a substantial amount is bad enough that short of researching whatever it is you are reading about in the news to check the veracity of it, I assume it's wrong. I use the headlines as guides for things to look up myself---sort of like when my father in law forwards emails from some other old guy about stuff that I quickly find out snopes debunked years ago

 

Edited July 14, 2016 by tater

[KSK]

3 hours ago, p1t1o said:

Its what happens when an artist tried to do science. All he has done is create an imaginative "fantasy" aircraft, and then like all of us did when we were drawing spaceships at the age of 8, come up with some fantastic details about it, "Its gonna have a nuclear reactor and an ice cream machine and beds with TVs and a sofa and vending machines and like it will be silver all over and it will have machine guns AND missiles and it will make a noise like CCCHRHHRCRHCHRHRHCCRHAAAAHAHRCH!!"

Oh deities. All you missed out are the invisible bullets, the force fields (subtype - invincible) and the bit which Batman jumps out of to pwn everything. Otherwise you could be channeling my 8 year old nephew.

[DDE]

3 hours ago, p1t1o said:

Its gonna have a nuclear reactor and an ice cream machine and beds with TVs and a sofa and vending machines and like it will be silver all over

Have you ever sold a spacecraft to the Queen of Naboo?

6 minutes ago, KSK said:

Oh deities. All you missed out are the invisible bullets, the force fields (subtype - invincible) and the bit which Batman jumps out of to pwn everything. Otherwise you could be channeling my 8 year old nephew.

Well, it's still missing blackjack and hookers.

[SinBad]

Wow, quite an article.

Corrections i noticed:

Fusion has no waste: Some fusion reactions are aneutronic, meaning they dont emit neutrons (the bad radiation) but these require not only less common fuels, but also far higher plasma tempuratures and so heavier containment methods. But that said, all fusion reactions have a un-fusable end product. By definition, this is waste.

Fission is big, heavy, dirty and dangerous: thorium, nuff said.

The future of rapid air transport is fusion: no, not quite. We have somewhere else to go first, REL A2

Huge passenger planes could be VTOL: never happen. Sorry. Its just such an inefficient method of lifting big things. I dont care what kind of energy density you get from your power plant. The energy budget you have will always be more economicaly utilised providing thrust for an aerodymic lift platform, rather than a thrusting lift platform. Even if its only 1% more expensive to VTOL, business still wont use it because that percent adds up over a few hundred flights.

I stopped reading after that.

[Kinglet]

Looks like the SR-2 Normandy had a baby with a commercial airliner.

Edited July 14, 2016 by Kinglet

[KSK]

3 hours ago, DDE said:

Have you ever sold a spacecraft to the Queen of Naboo?

Well, it's still missing blackjack and hookers.

I think that's the Daddy version.   He's old for his age but not that old.

[Ten Key]

4 hours ago, tater said:

The article that resulted got his work very precisely wrong, literally 180 degrees from what he had said in the interview. Gell-Mann then says that he was appalled, then flipped to the business page and believed everything he read, knowing how utterly wrong the science reporting was. My wife reacts the same way to virtually 100% of medical reporting (she's a surgeon). A friend who is an attorney has similar observations about legal reporting (that a lot of it is gravely flawed).

I can remember being very little, and after having caught my mother in a less-than-graceful lie it came out that Santa Claus was, in fact, not real. And I have a very vivid memory of my brain forcibly "connecting the dots". . .the Easter Bunny wasn't real either, nor the Tooth Fairy, nor. . .

Many years later, I can remember reading through a newspaper and having this exact same moment all over again. The article was on a subject I knew about through work, and while it was just as well written as the rest of the paper, it was wrong, horribly, terrifyingly wrong in almost every detail. And I remember looking at all of the other articles and thinking to myself, Oh my God. . .

[PB666]

1 hour ago, KSK said:

I think that's the Daddy version.   He's old for his age but not that old.

And for the mother Barbarella's ship.

[monstah]

9 hours ago, evileye.x said:

That plane looks Kerbal

 

5 hours ago, KSK said:

Oh deities. All you missed out are the invisible bullets, the force fields (subtype - invincible) and the bit which Batman jumps out of to pwn everything. Otherwise you could be channeling my 8 year old nephew.

 

5 hours ago, DDE said:

Have you ever sold a spacecraft to the Queen of Naboo?

Well, it's still missing blackjack and hookers.

 

45 minutes ago, PB666 said:

And for the mother Barbarella's ship.

Hilarious thread is hilarious. Thanks, y'all.

[DDE]

2 hours ago, monstah said:

Hilarious thread is hilarious. Thanks, y'all.

Mainstream media tries to science again. Results predictable.

I mean, it's pretty much the same people who a) say VASIMR is worthwhile and b) call it a warp drive.

[cubinator]

I think they are shirking from thermodynamics, which is not a good thing when you're trying to convince people of a purely theoretical aircraft that is "fifty years away" and "cannot be made with today's technology". 

Edited July 15, 2016 by cubinator

[kerbiloid]

10 hours ago, SinBad said:

Fusion has no waste:

Only a pure one. As many fusion designs also include a fission contour, it can produce even more waste than a pure fission.