Monday, August 12, 2013

Elon Musk Explains the Hyperloop

www.spacex.com/hyperloop

www.teslamotors.com/blog/hyperloop

Design Hyperloop Alpha (PDF)

Revealed: Elon Musk Explains the Hyperloop, His 800 MPH Pneumatic Tube That Could Revolutionize Transportation - Businessweek

details @ Gizmodo




SpaceX founder Elon Musk unveils plans for Hyperloop

The Hyperloop Transportation System consists of a capsule that can carry 28 passengers, steel tubes that will carry the capsule in two directions and a propulsion system, which will travel on a custom route. In Musk's example, the ideal route between Los Angeles and San Francisco is along California's I-5. Traveling at 760 miles per hour, Hyperloop would be able to carry 840 passengers per hour.

Musk believes the best way of creating a faster mode of transport is to design a special environment for vehicles to travel.

The design would create a low pressure system inside of the tubes, to create an atmosphere with less dense air -- having one-sixth the pressure of the atmosphere of Mars. Hyperloop's capsules would be supported using a compressed air reservoir and aerodynamic lift.

An electric air compressor fan mounted in the front of a passenger capsule would transfer high pressure air from the front to the rear of the vehicle, relieving air pressure and create a low friction suspension system.

Hyperloop Physics Questions and Answers @ Wired

This Is the Hyperloop, Elon Musk’s Fantastical Vision of Mass Transit @ Wired

Facebook Graph Search

Facebook Graph Search - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Facebook Graph Search is a semantic search engine that was introduced by Facebook in March 2013. It is designed to give answers to user natural language queries rather than a list of links.[1] The Graph Search feature combines the big data acquired from its over one billion users and external data into a search engine providing user-specific search results."

The feature was developed under former Google employees Lars Rasmussen and Tom Stocky. Lars also co-created Google Maps (and Google Wave) before.

Examples:
  • “Friends who Like Star Wars and Harry Potter”
  • For setting up a potential date, “Who are single men in San Francisco and are from India”
  • For employee recruiting, “NASA employees who are friends with people at Facebook”
  • For browsing photos or planning travel, “photos of my friends taken at National Parks”

The Making of Facebook’s Graph Search @ IEEE Spectrum
Engineers who built Facebook’s Graph Search tell the inside story of how they made Zuckerberg’s dream come true