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Issue 8 – March – April 2008 |
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Also at www.zupt.com |
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INERTIAL NEWS |
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In this issue of Zest:
Inertial, Seismic, Survey and Other NEWS
A short History of tar (tar?)…
Quaternions Underground Mines Underwater Metrology
MEMS & NANO etc etc…
Good Spring!
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OIL, GAS & SEISMIC NEWS• See your Seismic project on Google Earth with GPSeismic™, or with our kml examples:
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• Graphically Cool Site of the Month …
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INERTIAL TIPS
We saw in a previous issue how to create a kml file of a line joining points. Here is an even smaller file that will show only one point on Google Earth… cut and paste this following text into a text file (opened in Notepad for example), then save it and change the extension from .txt to .kml…
If you have Google Earth installed, it will start the program automatically and display the point at the location of these coordinates.
One remark: these coordinates are the WGS84 longitude and latitude in decimal degrees, with a correct sign…
<kml xmlns="http://www.zupt.com"> <Placemark> <name>See you here @ noon tomorrow!</name> <Point> <coordinates> -95.516892,29.942467,0 </coordinates> </Point> </Placemark> </kml>
UNDERWATER METROLOGY
Underwater Hotel Launched in Dubai. Construction Will Borrow from Submarine Construction, Offshore Oil/Gas Installations.
GLOSSARY: “Quaternion”. In 1843, the Irish mathematician William R. Hamilton was looking for ways of extending complex numbers (which can be viewed as points on a 2-dimensional plane) to higher spatial dimensions. He could not do so for 3 dimensions, and in fact it was later shown that it is impossible. Eventually Hamilton tried 4 dimensions and created quaternions. Hamilton also described a quaternion as an ordered four-element multiple of real numbers, and described the first element as the 'scalar' part, and the remaining three as the 'vector' part. Today, the quaternions are in use by computer graphics, control theory, signal processing and orbital mechanics, mainly for representing rotations/orientations. For example, it is common for spacecraft inertial systems to be commanded in terms of quaternions, which are also used to telemeter their current attitude. The rationale is that combining many quaternion transformations is more numerically stable than combining many matrix transformations.
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A SHORT HISTORY OF TAR / ASPHALT etc… • Asphalt occurs naturally in both asphalt lakes and in rock asphalt (a mixture of sand, limestone and asphalt). It is a form of petroleum. Over time the words tar, asphalt and bitumen came to mean the same thing. The ancient Mesopotamians used it to waterproof temple baths and water tanks. Asphalt was available naturally in this land (now Iraq), in Persia (Iran) and in most of the Middle East. The Persian word for asphalt is mumiya. Asphalt was used by ancient Egyptians to embalm mummies. According to Herodotus, asphalt was employed in the construction of the walls and towers of Babylon. • The Phoenicians were famously great navigators, their successful trips all the way to the British isles could be accomplished because they caulked the seams of their merchant ships with asphalt.
In the days of the Pharaohs, Egyptians used the material as mortar for rocks laid along the banks of the Nile to prevent erosion, and the infant Moses' basket was waterproofed with asphalt. • in 625 B.C. The first recorded use of asphalt as a road-building material was made in Babylon. The ancient Greeks were also familiar with asphalt. The Romans used it to seal their baths, reservoirs and aqueducts. • Statuettes of household deities were cast with this material in ancient Japan The earliest known oil wells were drilled in China in 347 CE or earlier. They had depths of up to about 800 feet (240 m) and were drilled using bits attached to bamboo poles. The oil was burned to evaporate brine and produce salt. In the 8th century, the streets of the newly constructed city of Baghdad were paved with tar. In the 9th century, oil fields were exploited in the area around modern Baku, Azerbaijan, to produce naphtha. These fields were described by the geographer Masudi in the 10th century, and by Marco Polo in the 13th century. Petroleum was distilled by Persian chemist al-Razi in the 9th century, producing chemicals such as kerosene in the al-ambiq (alembic). • in the 1600s, the account of a visit of a Franciscan, Joseph de la Roche d'Allion, to the oil springs of New York was published in Sagard's Histoire du Canada. A Russian traveller, Peter Kalm, in his work on America published in 1748 showed on a map the oil springs of Pennsylvania. Tar sands were mined from 1745 in Merkwiller-Pechelbronn, Alsace (France) under the direction of Louis Pierre Ancillon de la Sablonnière, by special appointment of Louis XV. The Pechelbronn oil field was the birth place of the Schlumberger company. • In the early 1800s the Scott John McAdam, used broken stone joined to form a hard surface to build a Scottish turnpike. Later, to reduce dust and maintenance, builders used hot tar to bond the broken stones together, producing "tarmacadam" pavements (tarmac). The first commercial oil well drilled in North America was in Oil Springs, Ontario, Canada in 1858. The industry grew through the 1800s, driven by the demand for kerosene and oil lamps. Lamp oil until then came from whale blubber. • 1870 Belgian chemist Edward J. De Smedt laid the first true asphalt pavement in the U.S. in Newark, N.J. De Smedt also paved Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. • Bitumen was also used in early photographic technology. It was most notably used by French scientist Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in the first picture ever taken (1826). The bitumen used in his experiments were smeared on pewter plates and then exposed to light, thus making a black and white image.
Today thin bitumen plates are sometimes used by computer enthusiasts for silencing computer cases or noisy computer parts such as the hard drive. Canada and Venezuela together have tar sands reserves approximately equal to the world's total reserves of conventional crude oil. |
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UNDERGROUND MINES
• Carlson Mining 2008 is out!
Four programs make up Carlson Mining 2008. They are: These Carlson Mining 2008 programs are unique applications that allow the user to perform mine engineering and geology, while running entirely inside AutoCAD
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