Today I Learned:
1) ...the actual difference between a turbojet, a turboprop, and a turbofan. A turbojet is pretty much just as I described in yesterday's post. A turboprop is basically a turbojet where the burned fuel powers a propeller instead of directly producing thrust (though it does also produce some thrust). A turbofan is somewhere between the two -- it spends more of its burnt fuel directly producing thrust than a turboprop, but gets more of its thrust from its propellers than a turbojet.
What I don't understand is why a turboprop would ever be efficient. Why isn't it always better to turn hot air directly into thrust via a rocket-like mechanism than to use it to turn a propeller?
2) The reason we "turn on" or "turn off" electronic equipment is because old electronic equipment used turnable knobs to regulate power.
3) In a stochastic chemical reaction network satisfying detailed balance (roughly meaning that all of the reactions in the network are reversible and is balanced by the reverse process exactly at equilibrium) at steady state, the (probabalistic) number of each species in the network is Poisson-distributed. Why would this be?
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