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If anyone's interested in CCD astrophotography, my dad is somewhat of an expert on the subject: http://www.ghg.net/akelly

Unless you take a couple of rubber/elastic bands with you, I guess. But try to explain THAT to your superiors...

Bungee ties. Or, more formally, a Payload Equipment Restraint System. Astronauts are used to the idea of retasking mission equipment. Now, explaining the unusual recreational reading material in your personal effects for that mission... that might be hard to explain.

I was fortunate to work with some of the guys who developed CLIPS, a very nice forward-chaining rule engine that can be applied to a surprisingly wide variety of projects. Several variants of it have appeared in the intervening years. There is an actively-developed and fine successor to it, Jess.

this guy's pictures:

He lives just outside of Houston, Texas.

X

I used to work in Clips and I heard it was similar to Lisp, but having never worked in Lisp, I don't know to what extent.

Based on the other posts, the syntax looks similar. While the prefix operators were a pain, the language was pretty cool. I'd consider using it again if the need ever arose.

Has anyone heard of Clips? If so, how much different is it from Lisp?

"CLIPS: A Tool for Building Expert Systems"
http://www.ghg.net/clips/CLIPS.html

http://www.ghg.net/clips/CLIPS.html It's C based, mature, multi platformed and easy to interface to (if you can code in C). Currently it has interfaces to Python, PHP and Java.

I am surprised nobody said anything about CLIPS... http://www.ghg.net/clips/CLIPS.html

If the problem is complex, then this may be the right annswer...

As for ground-based telescopes, any space-based instrument has access to the continuous range of wavelengths, whereas ground-based telescopes (even with adaptive optics) are limited by the absorption and scattering in the atmosphere in the UV and infrared. They also don't have to deal with sky glow, which restricts both how long you can take an exposure for -- eventually the background will saturate your detector -- and also the contrast between the thing you're trying to detect and the background (think picking out a small light on a white background against on a dark background).

This is also why Earth-based telescopes are put on mountains -- to get above as much of the atmosphere as possible. Adaptive optics can improve the "seeing" (blurring caused by turbulence) and, coupled with large-diameter mirrors possible on ground-based telescopes, it will improve the resolution, but it can't deal with the other effects,

I wish they really would cancel it!

That was my first thought, too, upon seeing this Slashdot post.

The shuttle is damn expensive to operate, as this guy points out.

The single biggest problem is, IMNSHO, is that the shuttle was designed three decades ago, and is still a first-generation vehicle. Sure, there have been upgrades, but there is one simple fact: We could build a better system right now.

We have experience. We have new technology. We have a long list of "lessons learned" from the shuttle. We have new partners in space exploration.

With these assets in mind, we could presumably devise a new reusable launch vehicle, hopefully one that reduces cost to less $1500 per kilogram to operate.

Wish I had more time to think about this, but unfortunately, Linear Algebra awaits...

I tried submitting a story on SpaceX a couple of weeks ago, but it was sadly rejected. Here's the text of the submission, along with some other interesting info:

Spaceflight Now has an article on SpaceX, a low-cost space launch company started by PayPal co-founder Elon Musk (he is no longer with PayPal). The article describes SpaceX's small-size Falcon I rocket, scheduled to launch a military imaging satellite on its maiden flight in March, and their medium-size Falcon V rocket, scheduled to lift a prototype Bigelow inflatable space habitat next year. Interestingly, the Falcon V has enough capacity to lift a Gemini-style capsule with 5-6 people to orbit. Both rockets have per-pound launch costs approximately one-fifth that of comparable rockets. Long-term plans call for evolving the basic design to heavy-lift and super-heavy lift rockets, assuming SpaceX survives its legal battles with defense giants like Northrup Grumman. Musk believes that ultimately a launch cost of '$500 per pound or less is very achievable' (compared to $10,000 per pound for the Space Shuttle). Elon Musk is a member of the Mars Society, and started SpaceX after he realized that current launch costs would be a large barrier to his plans for a philanthropic mission to put an experimental greenhouse with food crops on Mars.

This radio interview with Elon Musk from 2001 is pretty neat, and has some information I haven't seen elsewhere.

I googled 'OBD II' a while back and found these:

http://www.obd-2.com/
http://www.ghg.net/dharrison/obdscan.html
http://www.obdii.com/ubb/Forum1/HTML/000359.html
http://www.andywhittaker.com/ecu/obdii_software.ht m
http://www.elmelectronics.com/obdindex.html
http://www.dynahud.com/default.asp

They should get you started...

"NASA - get a mission people care about that can be realistically funded, or sign over the next twenty years to Burt Rhutan and company."

That's easier said than done. Why should science be subject to the whims of the masses? The general public has never been able to determine which scientific research is important. And of course, realistic funding is completely subjective, and quite complex.

Scaled Composites? They're air guys for the most part, not space. And they might not even have the right stuff. As one Scaled employee told me, "The America's Space Prize seems to be too small award for too large a project." Asking Scaled to handle a large scale vehicle development project is like asking your resident teenage hacker to handle the networking infrastructure for a 500 node corporate computer network. The kid might be able to build a great low-cost PC quickly, but throw him a large project and he'll just buckle under the stress and seriously compromise the project due to a lack of experience and cockiness. Rutan alone being made NASA Administrator would be quite different though from signing "over the next twenty years to Burt Rhutan [sic] and company".

And be advised, you shouldn't get too enamored of celebrity engineers. The engineers you never hear about on CNN/Slashdot (both have about the same aerospace news quality) are probably a more impressive bunch than you think.

Yes you can. I've saved about $500 in the last year using this.
Diagnosed an intermittent misfire, a weird overheating problem, and checked out a potential used car buy.

There are several other versions around, from $88 to over $500. However, you still need basic troubleshooting skills.

After fifty years of effort, it's clear that chemically-powered launchers are a dead end.

No, it's not clear at all.

Although I'd like to see an alternative way to escape the gravity well (a space-elevator is less plausible than magnetic rail-launchers, but whatever...), there is no established engineering reason that traditional launches need to cost so much. The reason is only economics, because the price come from the labor of the experts who build the things. Orbital launches are still rare enough to be more like a custom-purchase industry than a mass produced one. The economy-of-scale that would come from launching 50x as frequently would certainly bring on competitive efficiency reducing the prices to $500/lb, or even better.

Read here for a detailed discussion of all the still-unexplored ways that chemical launch motors could be cheapened.

This makes IRV highly impractical as well as being technically inferior to just about every other system.

I live in Australia. We use IRV. I can assure IRV is neither "highly impractical" nor "technically inferior". The chances of the anomaly you describe for IRV occurring are statistically tiny for a large number of voters.

IRV is easy count. Condorcet is hard to count - with a more voters than will fit in you average class room it requires a computer. This makes manual auditing is difficult. It also means he IRV can be used everywhere and Condorcet can't - it can only be used where the necessary computing power and telecommunication infrastructure is in place. This is one reason why Australians uses IRV - we were using it back when there weren't any computers around.

As for whether Condorcet is technically better than IRV - well that depends on whether you prefer a 2 party system as opposed to being governed by a coalition of minority parties. I think the two party system isn't so bad - it ensures whoever is elected actually gets to govern, as opposed to spending most of their time squabbling with the other minorities. Since IRV does favour large parties, I prefer it to Condorcet. As a side effect of favouring of "centralist" parties, Condorcet gives rise to the situation that if you have three choices, A, B and C, with A receiving the most votes, then B, then C, it is entirely possible C will win. I find that odd. It happens when most of A voters prefer C to B, and most of B voters prefer to C to A. Condorcet chooses the compromise, IRV forces the choice.

The ElectionMethods.org site is just a lobby group for Condorcet. Look here for a more balanced view of the various voting systems.

If your WebPlayer was integrated with your car's computer, then I'm impressed. If not, your example is sufficiently behind the curve to have fallen off the table in the mean time.

OBD II is the key feature that converges yesterday's non-integrated mobile computer with today's integrated and interactive monitoring, communication and entertainment system.

Pathfinder software archive

CLIPS

: A Tool for Building Expert Systems. Maintained by Gary Riley.
fuzzyCLIPS

Some other NASA soft:
COBWEB/3 (ptolemy.arc.nasa.gov) ?
AUTOCLASS AutoClass is an unsupervised Bayesian classification system for independent data.
PRODIGY cs.cmu.edu Integrated Planning and Learning System

This was originally developed while he (Gary Riley) worked for NASA at the Johnson Space Cener. It was available in source form since before I started working with it in 1993.

Actually, JESS is nothing more than a knock-off of the CLIPS expert system, that was developed at NASA. You can obtain the complete system source code for CLIPS right here:

CLIPS Expert System

As for your tax dollars, forget it - you'll never see them again if they go into SNL. It's sad to see NASA build a great system and released it for free, then see Sandia copy it (how imaginative) and try to sell you a license for it.

-- ac at work

What? How does Flamebait like this get marked positive?

It's funny that the Democratic party is historically more pro-Slavery compared to the Republican party... but I guess that if you don't like history, you get the schools and mass media to revise it until "history" is in your party's favor...

And I agree, I'd love to ban soft money. Let's all bitch about the party of "big business"... So what if Democrats are more dependant on (unregulated) Soft Money contributions than Republicans (Democrats: 61% of their overall funds in soft money, up from 47 percent two years ago. Republicans: 43% of their funds in soft money, increase of 8%).

Since the start of our american congress in 1789, congress has always been paid for participating. You will also find that even the Ancient Democracies had salaries ... the example you are thinking of is the Carthaginian model, which was an oligarchy... the rich became senators, because only they could afford to serve for no pay, which shut out the poor from serving in government. Even Aristotle recognized the flaw in this method of governing. I would say then that paying our congressment is definitely the correct method in equalizing who can participate in government.

I would argue that it is not the money that is the problem in our governments, instead the problem is with (1) the philosophies and (2) the beaurocracies of those involved. I have a problem with people who have no regard for other people's money, and do not have the personal restraint when it comes to spending it. This philosophy of socialism has morphed our government into asset reallocation, something the creators of the system never approved of. On top of that, there is so much redundancy, waste, and unaccountability... but we know that already.

Here is some information about the possibility of mini-series by SCI FI Channel and old news (1998) about Ed Neumeier (Starship Troopers) planning to make a movie.

I know I'm a day late (and probably a dollar short) on this, but I thought a note from someone who is familiar with the subject matter in the report might be of value.

Personally, I think its a rather shoddy bit of work.

First off, and most importantly to the Slashdot crowd, last I checked MODSAF was not OpenSource, by the OSI defintion. See section 5: "No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups". MODSAF is freely available to anyone working on a DoD job, but so is just about any other DoD-bankrolled software ever written.

Secondly, he actually did a study and found that using translators to automaticly turn Fortran into C, is a bad idea (created unmaintainable crap that ran slower). I suppose there may be some PHBs out there who need to hear this, but for the rest of us...DUH!

Thirdly, he kept talking about C++ like its the paragon of OO-ness, and implicitly calling Ada a non-OO language. Both horribly wrong. The only bright spot I saw here was the use of Java for a new IOS. Java's actually a really good fit for an IOS (Instructor/Operator Station), as they are all about GUIs and network communications. I just hope the component library they used isn't "disappeared" by Sun on them. These Sims need to be maintained for decades.

I think the subject of OSS in the military is a really good topic. But MODSAF is not an example. Instead, look at Gnat (GPL), CLIPS (public domain), and RTEMS (Modified GPL). All were originally sponsored by the DoD, but now have lots of users outside the military and commercial companies supporting them. The DoD should be doing more such projects.

I'm not sure what caused the artifacts in these photos, but it does appear that things have been dicey on previous re-entries.

At the risk of running OT, I highly doubt this is the end of project prometheus, although it is an excellent argument against it: just doesn't seem safe to fire up rockets full of nukes anymore.

The solution is obvious: don't allow any nuclear material launched into space to ever return.

To be fair, I am amazed as what passes for pizza in most places in Italy as well. There's been quite some activity in recent times to preserve the "true" pizza against bastardisation. For example, there's a standard and its certification mark. Efforts are going on to make it a national and European standard (if that hasn't happened yet). This way, a consumer knows what to expect when seeing a protected name. Same is happening with a lot of traditional food in Europe - at least the Union is giving some tangible benefits in return.

I don't know about the rest of the US, but if you ever end up in the Twin Cities, I have found a place in St. Paul that is certified (there are just two or three hundred in the world and most of them are of course in Naples, Italy). There is more background available online about pizza.

The other big offender is mozzarella. True mozzarella is made from water buffalo milk, has a porcelaine white colour and tastes nothing like the tennis shoe gum with the same name found in the US or the cheap imitation from cow milk sold even in most of Italy.

And don't get me started with so-called parmesan, which has little do with the real parmigiano reggiano...

a little sniffing around yields this ODBScan Protocol Interface

They also sell the interface hardware and software for
There are also numerous places to download free OBD demos.

I've heard good things about CLIPS, for expert-system authoring. It's another one of those NASA projects. Another approach might be to read a usenet group on expert systems and see what ppl are talking about; while not the best approach, it's a decent indicator of popularity.

http://www.ghg.net/clips/CLIPS.html

It doesn't matter how much any random asteriod is worth if you can't get to it.

The cost of launching a payload is the bottleneck for all forms of space exploration, manned or unmanned. Check here for an interesting read about launch costs. I don't agree with everything the author says, but he raises some salient points.

Asteriod mining, missions to Mars and the outer planets, a return to the Moon - all these are wonderful ideas, but until the cost of a ride to orbit comes down, it's all academic.

... sometimes do the same, i.e., a motorized filter wheel placed in front of the CCD. No realtime acquisition, but very good for static/very slow subjects (i.e., microscope and telescope images). This because single CCDs are more precise/sensitive than 3CCD cameras.

With this technique you may also select other primary colours (i.e., CMY), and filter strange colour combinations.

You may find some picture of such weels for example at http://www.ghg.net/cshaw/filter.htm (applied to telescope observation).