Ames-Dryden AD-1 Oblique Wing

The Ames-Dryden (AD)-1 was a research aircraft designed to investigate the concept of an oblique (or pivoting) wing. The oblique wing could be rotated on its center pivot so that it could be set at its most efficient angle for the speed at which the airplane was flying.

The oblique wing was the brainchild of NASA aeronautical engineer Robert T. Jones, whose analytical and wind tunnel studies at the NASA Ames Research Center, Moffet Field, California, indicated that an oblique wing, supersonic transport might achieve twice the fuel economy of an aircraft sporting more conventional wings.

Also called the “scissors” wing, it was an offshoot of the variable-sweep-wing concept, which was first investigated with the X-5 research airplanes during the early 1950’s. Variable-sweep wings allow an aircraft to take advantage of the lift and handling qualities of a straight wing during the comparatively slow flight of takeoffs and landings, and the reduced drag and the better efficiency of swept-back wings during high speeds and cruise speeds. Variable-sweep wings are common on many high performance aircraft, including the F-14, F-111 and B-1.

The oblique wing on the AD-1 pivoted about the fuselage, remaining perpendicular to it during slow flight and swinging to angles of up to 60 degrees as aircraft speed increased.

The swing wing concept was first evaluated by a small, propeller-driven, remotely-piloted research vehicle (RPRV) flown at Dryden in 1976. These early techniques for gathering data about the oblique wing aircraft were applied to the twin turbojet, piloted AD-1, which was flown from 1979 to 1982.

Research pilots at the Dryden Flight Research Center, Edwards, California, flew the little plane a total of 79 times. Although the oblique wing is still considered a viable concept for large transports, the unpleasant flying characteristics of the AD-1 at extreme wing-sweep angles may have discouraged aircraft designers from adopting this configuration.

(Text & Image via NASA)

Lamborghini Jalpa

via www.carspotting.de

Lamborghini Jalpa

The Lamborghini Jalpa (Spanish pronunciation: [ˈxalpa]) was a sports car produced by the Italian automaker Lamborghini from 1981 to 1988. The Jalpa was a development of the earlier Silhouette. The Jalpa was intended to fill a role as a more “affordable” Lamborghini, being much less expensive than the Countach. Instead of the big car’s V12, the Jalpa was fitted with a transversely-mounted 3.5 litre V8 that developed 255 hp (190 kW). The bodywork was designed and built by Bertone.

The name Jalpa came from a famous breed of fighting bulls, Ferruccio Lamborghini having a liking for bulls and being a Taurus he gave most Lamborghini cars bullfighting-related names.

Compared to the Countach, the Jalpa was much easier to drive, having better visibility and being more tractable in heavy traffic and at slow speeds. At night, however, there were many distracting internal reflections (a common curse of the Italian low-volume car).

Image via www.seriouswheels.com/text via Wikipedia

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Isolator

Isolator is a small menu bar application that helps you concentrate. When you’re working on a document, and don’t want to be distracted, turn on Isolator. It will cover up your desktop and all the icons on it, as well as the windows of all your other applications, so you can concentrate on the task in hand.

Isolator is designed to stay out of your way, and so it isn’t loaded with flashy features. However, it is customizable so you can get it to do exactly what you want.

Options include:

• Hide the Dock when you activate Isolator (10.5/10.6 only)
• Customize the background window (including semi-transparency and blur)
• ‘Hide’ background windows, as well as covering them up (they’re just covered up by default)
• Customize the shortcut key (normally shift-command-i)
• Disable the menubar icon
• Left-clicking the menubar icon can activate Isolator
• Automatically launch Isolator when you log in

Get Isolator! For Mac OS X 10.5 and 10.6, the current stable version is is 4.4. For Mac OS X 10.4, the current stable version is 4.0, or you can try 4.5beta.

Install Isolator by mounting the disk image and dragging Isolator to the Applications folder. Isolator is freeware

(via Isolator)