Flexible Wings Are Hard to Make!

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How hard can it be to make a flexible wing flap for an airplane? Almost all aircraft today use rigid wings with rigid landing flaps. They work, but they waste fuel. German engineers embarked on a mission to reduce kerosene consumption by 6%: "integrating flexible landing devices into aircraft wings is one step towards that target," a news item from Fraunhofer says. They've named the project SARISTU, for Smart Intelligent Aircraft Structures.

Birds are way ahead of them:

While birds are able to position their feathers to suit the airflow, aircraft wing components have so far only been rigid. As the name suggests, landing flaps at the trailing edge of the wing are extended for landing. This flap, too, is rigid, its movement being limited to rotation around an axis. This is set to change in the SARISTU project. "Landing flaps should one day be able to adjust to the air flowand so enhance the aerodynamics of the aircraft," explains Martin Schüller, researcher at the Fraunhofer Institute for Electronic Nano Systems ENAS in Chemnitz. (Emphasis added.)

What are some of the challenges in building a flexible wing?

1. Knowing where to flex: The flap can't be flexible all over, or it would be hard to control. The designers made "five hard and three soft zones, enclosed within a silicon skin cover extending over the top."
2. Finding stretchy skin: When the soft zone moves, the skin of the aircraft has to stretch with it. "The mechanism that allows the landing flap to change shape can only function if the skin of the landing flap can be stretched as it moves, aproblem tackled by researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Technology and Advanced Materials IFAM in Bremen."
3. Covering the air gap: "Any gap between the flap and the fixed aircraft wingwould cancel out any positive effect," the article notes. "This led us to develop an elastic connecting element, and this work already covers everything from thechemical makeup to the process technology and manufacture of the component," an engineer says.
4. Designing the material to tolerances: "The mechanism sits underneath the soft zones, the areas that are most distended. While the novel design is noteworthy, it is the material itself that stands out, since the flexible parts are made of elastomeric foam that retain their elasticity even at temperatures ranging from minus 55 to 80 degrees Celsius."

No feathers, but it's a start. The team showed off their prototype at the ILA Berlin Air Show in May. Apparently it was not quite ready for takeoff:

When the prototype takes off for the first time it will benefit from a development known as SARISTU, a deformable wing which is currently the subject of intensive research by Fraunhofer Gesellschaft. In future the landing flaps will be designed to adapt in flight to the air flow conditions, thereby always ensuring the best possible aerodynamics.

We celebrate this advance, but you know where we're going. Birds had it all figured out long ago: the right shape, the right material, the control of airflow, and much more. As Dr. Timothy Standish says in the film Flight: The Genius of Birds, "Feathers do a number of jobs remarkably well." They are individually controllable, they flex, they insulate, they save on weight, and they can handle the temperature requirements of avian flight. That's just a partial list achievements in powered flight that surpass anything man has yet designed.

If the world's top engineers are struggling to get three soft zones to flex on a landing flap, why would anyone think birds achieved far better performance by blind, unguided processes? "I believe intelligent design is the best explanation for avian flight," Standish states at the film's conclusion, "because it's the best explanation for every other kind of flight we see."

He draws the logical inference: "They're engineering marvels. They're works of art. We know where engineered things come from. We know where works of art come from. So why would we attribute a bird to anything other than intelligence or mind?"

Evolution Made Everything?

 

Dear friends:

Here is a short short skit to illustrate a dialogue between an atheist, a theist 
( thiests are those who believe that God exists) and an enquirer. Interesting to read?

[On stage, three people: ‘theist’, ‘first atheist’ and ‘second atheist’ engaged in an argument. Enter left ‘enquirer’ wearing a duffle coat and a puzzled expression].

Enquirer:

Excuse me interrupting, but can you tell me who made everything?

Theist:

Yes; God made everything.

First atheist:

Oh? So who made God?

Second atheist:

We made God.

Theist:

Then who made us?

First atheist:

Evolution made us.

Theist:

Who made evolution?

Second atheist:

It’s part of everything; ‘everything’ made evolution.

Enquirer:

Excuse me interrupting … but who made everything? Oh, never mind.

[Enquirer exits the way he came in, wearing an even more puzzled expression].

For more, click the following link.

http://whomadegod.org/book/sooty-and-the-universe/

Church Is Full of Hypocrites!

Dear friends:

Perhaps you have often complained that church is full of hypocrites, so you don't want to go there.

Indeed, human nature is a fallen nature.  We are all prone to hypocrisy and serving ourselves most of times. Only when God intervenes our lives, through the power of the Holy Spirit, we find ourselves being changed.  At the very least, the scales fall from our eyes and we can be honest with ourselves and confess our hypocrisy.

However, “The Church is a hospital for sinners, not a museum for saints.” So be patient with Christians who are still under constructions since God hasn't finished His work with us yet.

A friend has just told me about this book "unChristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks About Christianity and Why It Matters". it uncovered overwhelmingly negative views of evangelicals and born-again Christians, especially among young generations. In some ways these views are warranted, in some ways they are not, but Christians do well to take them as a wake-up call for the sake of those God wants to save and mature...w

...There may be a silver lining here. The charge of hypocrisy offers a handy starting point for turning around negative perceptions and explaining grace. Pastor and author Tim Keller admits that we Christians actually are often hypocritical and need to be humble about it. Unrepentant hypocrites don’t admit mistakes, so we immediately challenge a perception by owning up to it.

But the other unavoidable fact is that non-Christians assume we are trying to live like Jesus to get into heaven, like the good-works motivation of other religions and cults. So, when they find out we’re not perfect people, they critique us as hypocrites. In contrast, an old saying captures the biblical worldview: “The Church is a hospital for sinners, not a museum for saints.” Unbelievers simply cannot understand this; we have to be patient with that, says Keller.

You could respond to the accusation of hypocrisy like this: “I have a relationship with Christ not because I’m good but precisely because I am not good. He rescued me from myself and the ruin I was causing. But He’s changing me. I’m still a mess, but I’m God’s mess.”

In an age of Internet image-making and advertising, young outsiders are cynical about finding anybody who’s genuine. Christians need to genuinely repent of hypocrisy. Meanwhile, we can explain that grace means our imperfections are covered by God during the process of spiritual transformation. Maybe outsiders will opt for grace once they see more of it.

(For the whole article, click the link below.)

unChristian: Is Christianity's Image Hurting Christ's Image?

4 Principles to examine Ancient Documents

 

Dear friends:

These are very useful 4 simple principles we can apply to determine ancient historical reliability; these simple principles are offered by a cold case detective J. Warner Wallace.

...Historical challenges are often complicated, nuanced and detailed, and while it is nearly impossible to remember all the data related to every objection, there are four overarching principles of witness reliability appropriate to the task. These are the same four principles I’ve offered as a template in Cold Case Christianity. I used this template to evaluate the Gospels when I was an unbelieving skeptic, and these four principles will help you assess any challenge offered against the Gospel accounts:

Principle One: Make Sure the Witnesses Were Present in the First Place

There are times in cold case investigations when a witness emerges with a story, even though he or she was not involved in the case when it occurred. Sometimes a person such as this is motivated by a desire to become “famous”, sometimes by a desire to harm the defendant or help the victim. It’s my job as an investigator to make sure the witness was truly present (and in a position to see anything) before the witness takes the stand in front of a jury. When it comes to the Gospel accounts, we have to ask a similar question: Were the gospels written early enough to have been written by true eyewitnesses? If the accounts were written and circulated early, the possibility of an errant or deceptive inclusion is greatly reduced. Early authorship allows the accounts to be fact-checked by those who were present and could expose the accounts as a lie. The gospels are the earliest ancient accounts describing the life of Jesus and the historical events surrounding His life. This must be considered when evaluating the gospels against any ancient account that follows them.

Principle Two: Try to Find Some Corroboration for the Claims of the Witnesses

Jurors are encouraged to evaluate witnesses in a trial on the basis of any evidence offered to verify or corroborate their testimony. Sometimes witness testimony can be corroborated with physical evidence, sometimes with the direct testimony of another witness. In either case, the witness becomes more reliable as different lines of corroborative evidence begin to support his or her testimony. In a similar way, the Gospel accounts can be evaluated on the basis of their corroboration. I wrote an entire chapter in Cold Case Christianity examining the “external” corroboration of archaeology and ancient non-Christian sources, and the “internal” corroboration between Gospel accounts (what I call, “unintentional eyewitness support”), the accurate referencing of regional 1^st Century proper names, the correct description of governmental structure, the familiar description of geography and location, and the reasonable use of language.

Principle Three: Examine the Consistency and Accuracy of the Witnesses

If a witness has changed his or her story over time, there’s little reason to trust any version of that story along the way. Changes of this nature are often the result of an effort to deceive. As we assess the transmission of any ancient narrative, it’s important to determine whether or not the account has been altered over time. The Chain of Custody related to the document’s transmission is incredibly important. Do we have ancient copies of the document we can compare to one another or ancient references to the documents we can examine for content? The gospels are perhaps the best attested and collected ancient documents in history, and they are referenced early by church leaders such as Ignatius, Polycarp and Clement who attest to their content. Skeptics, when attacking the historical narratives of the gospels, typically rely on ancient records not nearly as well attested. The writings of Josephus, for example, were very poorly collected and referenced over time. There are no ancient copies of Josephus’ work prior to the 11^th century, so we are unable to compare ancient Josephan texts to know if the documents have been changed over time. This is not the case when it comes to the gospels. We have thousands of copies dating over three times closer to the actual events than Josephus.

Principle Four: Examine the Presence of Bias on the Part of the Witnesses

The last area of consideration when it comes to evaluating witnesses is the issue of bias. It’s often argued the Gospels should not be trusted because they were written by Christians who loved Jesus and wanted to make a case for his Deity (whether true or not). But there’s a difference between bias prior to an experience and conviction following an experience. It can hardly be argued that the Gospel authors had a bias prior to their involvement with Jesus. In fact, the gospels fairly present the skepticism and slow understanding of the disciples as they sat under Jesus. We cannot fault the Gospel authors for their later conviction related to Jesus if they truly saw what they recorded in the Gospels, particularly the Resurrection. Bias comes down to motive, and motive always comes down to three driving desires: financial greed, sexual/relational lust, and the pursuit of power. Absent any of these driving motivations, ancient accounts ought to be received as unbiased.

Every time I encounter an historical objection related to the Gospels, I expect there to be a wealth of information on both sides of the issue; skeptics will have written volumes and Christian apologists will have responded in kind. How is anyone to know which side of the equation to trust? I typically use the four principles I’ve just described to evaluate both the objection and the response. Which side is referencing the account that was written earliest, is best corroborated, has been best documented over time and is least biased?...

- See more at: http://coldcasechristianity.com/2013/unbelievable-four-simple-principles-to-determine-ancient-historical-reliability/#sthash.IOSKQoga.dpuf