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I just ran across this that would certainly explain a couple things:


The Question We are deeply indebted to you if you can help us in obtaining two representative images about: 1)the real image (picture) of a "black hole" (photographed) 2)the most distant part of the Universe ever photographed.

The Answer 1) There are no "real" pictures of a black hole. This is because black holes themselves do not emit of reflect any light (that's why they are called black holes), and they are too small and too far away to be imaged. There are images of binary star systems consisting of one normal star and one black hole, and of the central regions of Galaxies that are believed to contain black holes. There are some examples of the latter, taken with the Hubble Space Telescope, at: http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answer s/970318d.html

But these pictures don't actually show a black hole, you need to study the motion of stars to infer that there must be a black hole.

2) Again, you may want to look at some Hubble pictures (with explanations): http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answer s/970318d.html

These are some of the most distant galaxies ever photographed; although some quasars are believed to be more distant, they make boring photographs (they just look like a point of light).

Best wishes,

Koji Mukai


(no, this isn't my work, I just found it on a Google Search)

I was under the impression that you could also determine the magnitude of the charge, but I'm not sure. I imagine it might be very difficult to determine the charge if the accretion disk radiaties so much. But a black hole certainly has a magnetic field. This Astronomy Picture of the Day had some interesting links about magnetism in an astronomical context.

Astronomers suspect that most black holes are produced when massive stars (at least 8-10 times the Sun's mass) reach the end of their lifecycle. This is a so-called "stellar black hole." Stellar black holes are the remains of dead stars several times heavier than the Sun, compressed to a diameter of a few miles or less. Supermassive black holes have masses comparable to those of a typical galaxy. These masses range anywhere from a million to 100 billion of our Suns. Supermassive black holes tend to be in the centers of galaxies, creating what are called Active Galactic Nuclei (AGNs). They may have formed in the early universe from giant gas clouds or from the collapse of clusters of immense numbers of stars. Lastly, the field of black holes, formerly dominated by heavyweights packing the gravitational punch of a billion Suns and lightweights just a few times heavier than our Sun, has another contender, the middleweight black holes, weighing in at 100 to 10,000 Suns.

Astronomers suspect that most black holes are produced when massive stars (at least 8-10 times the Sun's mass) reach the end of their lifecycle. This is a so-called "stellar black hole." Stellar black holes are the remains of dead stars several times heavier than the Sun, compressed to a diameter of a few miles or less. Supermassive black holes have masses comparable to those of a typical galaxy. These masses range anywhere from a million to 100 billion of our Suns. Supermassive black holes tend to be in the centers of galaxies, creating what are called Active Galactic Nuclei (AGNs). They may have formed in the early universe from giant gas clouds or from the collapse of clusters of immense numbers of stars. Lastly, the field of black holes, formerly dominated by heavyweights packing the gravitational punch of a billion Suns and lightweights just a few times heavier than our Sun, has another contender, the middleweight black holes, weighing in at 100 to 10,000 Suns.

Astronomers suspect that most black holes are produced when massive stars (at least 8-10 times the Sun's mass) reach the end of their lifecycle. This is a so-called "stellar black hole." Stellar black holes are the remains of dead stars several times heavier than the Sun, compressed to a diameter of a few miles or less. Supermassive black holes have masses comparable to those of a typical galaxy. These masses range anywhere from a million to 100 billion of our Suns. Supermassive black holes tend to be in the centers of galaxies, creating what are called Active Galactic Nuclei (AGNs). They may have formed in the early universe from giant gas clouds or from the collapse of clusters of immense numbers of stars. Lastly, the field of black holes, formerly dominated by heavyweights packing the gravitational punch of a billion Suns and lightweights just a few times heavier than our Sun, has another contender, the middleweight black holes, weighing in at 100 to 10,000 Suns.

Astronomers suspect that most black holes are produced when massive stars (at least 8-10 times the Sun's mass) reach the end of their lifecycle. This is a so-called "stellar black hole." Stellar black holes are the remains of dead stars several times heavier than the Sun, compressed to a diameter of a few miles or less. Supermassive black holes have masses comparable to those of a typical galaxy. These masses range anywhere from a million to 100 billion of our Suns. Supermassive black holes tend to be in the centers of galaxies, creating what are called Active Galactic Nuclei (AGNs). They may have formed in the early universe from giant gas clouds or from the collapse of clusters of immense numbers of stars. Lastly, the field of black holes, formerly dominated by heavyweights packing the gravitational punch of a billion Suns and lightweights just a few times heavier than our Sun, has another contender, the middleweight black holes, weighing in at 100 to 10,000 Suns.

Whatever happened to the theory of supermassive black holes? These black holes, at the centre of each galaxy are supposed to be millions of times heavier than the sun.

So what's so great about a black hole only 14 times as heavy as the sun (which is also further away than the centre of our galaxy)?

There is also Helios, a high altitude unmanned aircraft powered by solar and fuel cell and designed to stay in flight for days or months. Could be used as an "atmospheric satelite."

We have only discovered 80 stars that have planets orbiting them, Alpha Centauri is not one of those 80.

Furthermore, of the 80 discovered, only this one happens to have the planet in such an orbit that it passes directly between the star and Earth. There's nowhere else to look, yet.

(see the NASA article for more info)

Xephem (a planetarium and analysis program for linux) is very cool because it can both pull the sky from your LX200 telescope or by replacing the telescope driver with a perl script, it can download part of the sky from an online database, after which you can do realtime image processing on it.

It can also match stars in the sky to stars in the database. So far I have only been able to pull down large segments of the sky at once, but as soon as I can clear the disk space I'll be trying some other pieces of software to try and download smaller pieces of the sky. Starry Night also downloads DSS (Digital Sky Survey) images I believe.

NASA Skyview service
Multimission Archive
StarView
Software for different platforms (or check freshmeat.net)
Serious scientific platforms/data
Skyview (available at IPAC) is available as linux binary and installs quickly at 10mb. It lets you do image analysis with text commands. I have not used it a lot myself.
AstroWeb

I, for one (and mostly all), cannot wait for NASA's next space telescope, the Next Generation Space Telescope (NGST), to take flight. This telescope will answer many questions we currently have. Unfortunately, this will not take place until 2009, but it's still nice to think about :)

"When the color of the light was analyzed by STIS, the telltale "fingerprint" of sodium was detected."

I'm no chemistry or space exploration expert, so can someone please answer this for me: Do they mean Na+ or actual elemental sodium? I wouldn't expet to find water or anything that would sustain carbon-based life on a planet whose atmosphere had significant amounts of elemental sodium.

Could you possibly have chosen a more incoherent and factually incorrect submission for posting? The atmosphere is not mostly sodium as "b-side.org" seemingly just guessed. The reason sodium was measured is because it is relatively easy to detect. NASA has a more informative story.

This fucking insightful post was brought to you by the letter F, and fucking Tourette's Syndrome.

Love,
Anonymous Fucking Coward

Well, Mr. Clarke did not concieve of the space elevator. In the acknowledgements from The Fountains of Paradise, he attributes the idea to a Leningrad engineer, Y.N. Artsutanov (Komsomolskaya Pravada, 31 July 1960) who named the device a "Heaveanly funicular," envisioning it to life no less than twelve thousand tons per day to a synchronous orbit. Clarke may have popularized the idea a bit, however.

In Imperial Earth, Clarke used the idea of a VLA. (very large array, many satellite dishes acting as one) Though the book was released in 1976, and it is probably that the VLA was alrady under construction at this time.

Clarke did indeed publish a paper on the theory of communication satellites in 1945, hence the 'Clarke Orbit' for satellites. In Prelude to Space, written just two years later, "[Prelude to Space] was probably the first work of fiction in which the idea of comsats was advocated." (Prelude to Mars, 1965) Also in that book, Clarke used the idea of a launch track for a rocket, which NASA has considered for use. The spacecraft in this book consisted of two parts, one that would, once put in space, would stay there, and the second that was a transport vehicle from the Earth's surface to its partner in orbit. The idea of multi-part spacecraft has been used, albeit not in the exact same way, from the lunar missions to the space shuttle and the ISS.

Then, of course, there's 2001. Ideas used here include videophones, voice print identification, and charge cards (see the videophone scene). There's also the use of 'space food' - the liquid food packets on the Pan Am flight. Also on Discovery 1, HAL played one of the first games of man vs. computer chess. (Deep Blue eat your heart out)

As for so many of the other ideas, they're not science fact quite yet. Don't forget, nothing is impossible until it's possible.

because of a massive write-in campaign from Star Trek fans. Look here for more info.

what would a virtual blackhole look like rendered in OpenGL ?

Already done (minus the OpenGL):

Star Trek : The Next Generation Technical Manual

While this book may be the inverse (or reverse?) of what you're looking for, it is extremely interesting, and will surely help you a lot from a research standpoint for your project. It is basically a detailed description of every technical aspect of the ST:TNG universe, which includes many convergences between science fact and science fiction.

Also don't forget to note the name of the first space shuttle ever: The Enterprise.

If you want facts, as opposed to fiction, see the current NASA launch forecast.

Let's have that little LEGO robot (covered here) duke it out with NASA's space droid a'la BattleBots!
Any bets on the winner?

The density of its mass and the distance to that mass varies as you move around Earth's surface. The effect on gravity is small and has mostly to do with the internal structure of Earth and to some extent with its topography.

It's one thing to launch an 11m rocket some 5000ft, it's quite another to build a functioning spacecraft!

At the very minimum it would have to carry a ton of payload; most probably quite a bit more. To get an idea of the kinds of equipment involved, this link on the Delta II provides a good overview of the kind of sheer power and equipment needed to put even a relatively small 5 ton payload into space.

Even the new X-34 being developed by NASA for cheaper space-flight still estimates a $500'000 cost per launch, and that's not even including the construction costs!

That an amateur could attempt this at all is ridiculous, let alone be the first non-governmental outfit to achieve this. You have to wonder what's going on in this guy's head.

This was Astronomy Picture of the Day last week.

Plenty of depth/background available from there, as always!

One of the reasons why I gave up flying and sold my plane was because of so many pilots who simply did not know how to look out the window. Or how to properly enter the airport traffic pattern. So many morons in the air, and let me tell you from both a pilot perspective and an air traffic control perspective (yes, I've done both), too many pilots depend on their computer gadgets to get from point A to point B.

Here's some perspective: Check out the NTSB aircraft accident site. Follow the links for monthly synopses. If you read enough of the accident reports (I've read many of them), you'll discover navigation is the least of the problems facing pilots today. Most pilots die for one of two reasons: They run out of fuel, or they fly into weather they aren't equipped or trained to handle.

NASA has been at the forefront of the Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS), and for that I commend them. But you're sadly mistaken, Timmy, if you believe we'll see general aviation become as simple and safe as "driving your car," as you put it. There are way too many other obstacles GA pilots face than how to get from Madison to Detroit. You do your readers a disservice by pretending navigation is the biggest problem us pilots face in the world.

I don't know about you, Timmy, but I think I'd much rather have a parachute recovery system for my small plane than a new nav system: The parachute will be far more useful to me when I'm involved in a midair collision with a pilot who's busy starting at his new cockpit computer rather than looking out the cockpit window.

there should be no distinguishable difference between midnight and 4am.

...and a HUGE difference between 4am and 5 am. Man, take a look at this guy's link, or just look at the tiny left graph on this image for the east coast. The graph is VERY pointy, it's a 5am +/- 1h thing, NOT uniform overnight!

It'll take your city or any latitude/longitude pair and give you an estimate. For my area, 1am shows about 0/hour and 4am is at over 3,000/hour.

For some absolutely gorgeous photographs of past Leonid showers, see the Leonid Multi-instrument Aircraft Campaign.

-The One God of Smilies =)

I'd have to disagree. I work at JSC, bldg 30 to be exact. No one here talks about "the sunset of manned space travel." Actually, I'd say the general consensus is that the ISS serves as research and an intermediate step in the mission to Mars.

No new astronauts? They don't have a new class every year, so just because there's not a 2001 class does not mean they're not selecting.

Mir 2? I hardly think so. Why don't you give Culbertson a call next month after he gets back and ask him if he thinks it's anything like Mir. Sure, they've cut the hab module and crew return vehicle, which severely limits the capabilities (from crew of 7 to 3), but I wouldn't be surprised to see those return after completion.

Not sure about not being able to just hop on the Internet. Check this out:

IP In Space FAQ

Sounds like NASA is already thinking about how its folks will be able to hop on IRC when they get bored or send email to the family.

-bbh

Sure, if you consider December, 1972 to be "the late 70s".

Seriously, though, with each passing year we learn more. Technology advances as does our understanding of what the trip will take. Every year that passes, the trip becomes easier to embark upon. I doubt very much that man will resist the temptation to explore the solar system for ever.

I fear I am only serving to feed a troll, but what is it that you think? That since it's been 30 years, we'll never visit another world again? Why? Or do you believe that it was all an elaborate hoax? That NASA never sent men to the moon?

If you're not a simple troll, I'd love to hear your line of reasoning.

Sure, if you consider December, 1972 to be "the late 70s".

Seriously, though, with each passing year we learn more. Technology advances as does our understanding of what the trip will take. Every year that passes, the trip becomes easier to embark upon. I doubt very much that man will resist the temptation to explore the solar system for ever.

I fear I am only serving to feed a troll, but what is it that you think? That since it's been 30 years, we'll never visit another world again? Why? Or do you believe that it was all an elaborate hoax? That NASA never sent men to the moon?

If you're not a simple troll, I'd love to hear your line of reasoning.

The one I saw, intended for eventual use in cell phones, was basically what looked like a sandwich of plexiglass and some spongy material. Two wires ran off from the sponge to connect to the contacts for a small fan. You'd take a bottle of methanol, squirt it on the sponge, and the fan would start to spin, slowly at first, and building up in speed as the cell heated up to optimum temperature (which I think was around 50-60 degrees celsius).

Cell phones make a good first application for this kind of technology (as opposed to cars) because the price/performance ratio is high (cell phones are expensive for the amount of power they use) and the performance/weight is relatively low (you don't need a really big stack to drive cell phone). If the fuel-cell cell phone (or even just a widget to replace the battery) costs ten times as much, but lasts ten times as long, is fully "rechargeable" with a one-minute application of methanol (which could come in sealed, disposable plastic tubes, or you could fill it the same way you fill a butane lighter), and has no "memory" problems, then you've got a real winner. People will pay $1000 for a cell phone (they did when the StarTAC first came out).

A car that costs ten times as much doesn't work, because that puts even a cheapie car into six figures. You have to get the price-performance ratio of fuel cells way way down before they become useful for cars. However, for cars, methanol distribution may not be a big problem - some researchers are working on gasoline-driven fuel cells. Not as clean as methanol (which exhausts CO_2 and H_2O), but cleaner than combustion, and the distribution infrastructure is already in place. There's still a price/performance problem, because gasoline-powered fuel cells effectively have a full chemistry lab built in, with three or four stages to go through before the actual power production. They also operate at much higher temperatures.

Direct Methanol Fuel Cells are nifty because they're solid-state. A catalyst (platinum, I think) drives the methanol/oxygen -> power/water/carbon dioxide reaction. They do have problems with supporting rapid changes in electrical draw, however. Typically this is handled by putting them in series with a capacitor. The capacitor can soak up rapid increases in demand, while the cell itself adjusts.

The one I saw, intended for eventual use in cell phones, was basically what looked like a sandwich of plexiglass and some spongy material. Two wires ran off from the sponge to connect to the contacts for a small fan. You'd take a bottle of methanol, squirt it on the sponge, and the fan would start to spin, slowly at first, and building up in speed as the cell heated up to optimum temperature (which I think was around 50-60 degrees celsius).

Cell phones make a good first application for this kind of technology (as opposed to cars) because the price/performance ratio is high (cell phones are expensive for the amount of power they use) and the performance/weight is relatively low (you don't need a really big stack to drive cell phone). If the fuel-cell cell phone (or even just a widget to replace the battery) costs ten times as much, but lasts ten times as long, is fully "rechargeable" with a one-minute application of methanol (which could come in sealed, disposable plastic tubes, or you could fill it the same way you fill a butane lighter), and has no "memory" problems, then you've got a real winner. People will pay $1000 for a cell phone (they did when the StarTAC first came out).

A car that costs ten times as much doesn't work, because that puts even a cheapie car into six figures. You have to get the price-performance ratio of fuel cells way way down before they become useful for cars. However, for cars, methanol distribution may not be a big problem - some researchers are working on gasoline-driven fuel cells. Not as clean as methanol (which exhausts CO_2 and H_2O), but cleaner than combustion, and the distribution infrastructure is already in place. There's still a price/performance problem, because gasoline-powered fuel cells effectively have a full chemistry lab built in, with three or four stages to go through before the actual power production. They also operate at much higher temperatures.

Direct Methanol Fuel Cells are nifty because they're solid-state. A catalyst (platinum, I think) drives the methanol/oxygen -> power/water/carbon dioxide reaction. They do have problems with supporting rapid changes in electrical draw, however. Typically this is handled by putting them in series with a capacitor. The capacitor can soak up rapid increases in demand, while the cell itself adjusts.

The one I saw, intended for eventual use in cell phones, was basically what looked like a sandwich of plexiglass and some spongy material. Two wires ran off from the sponge to connect to the contacts for a small fan. You'd take a bottle of methanol, squirt it on the sponge, and the fan would start to spin, slowly at first, and building up in speed as the cell heated up to optimum temperature (which I think was around 50-60 degrees celsius).

Cell phones make a good first application for this kind of technology (as opposed to cars) because the price/performance ratio is high (cell phones are expensive for the amount of power they use) and the performance/weight is relatively low (you don't need a really big stack to drive cell phone). If the fuel-cell cell phone (or even just a widget to replace the battery) costs ten times as much, but lasts ten times as long, is fully "rechargeable" with a one-minute application of methanol (which could come in sealed, disposable plastic tubes, or you could fill it the same way you fill a butane lighter), and has no "memory" problems, then you've got a real winner. People will pay $1000 for a cell phone (they did when the StarTAC first came out).

A car that costs ten times as much doesn't work, because that puts even a cheapie car into six figures. You have to get the price-performance ratio of fuel cells way way down before they become useful for cars. However, for cars, methanol distribution may not be a big problem - some researchers are working on gasoline-driven fuel cells. Not as clean as methanol (which exhausts CO_2 and H_2O), but cleaner than combustion, and the distribution infrastructure is already in place. There's still a price/performance problem, because gasoline-powered fuel cells effectively have a full chemistry lab built in, with three or four stages to go through before the actual power production. They also operate at much higher temperatures.

Direct Methanol Fuel Cells are nifty because they're solid-state. A catalyst (platinum, I think) drives the methanol/oxygen -> power/water/carbon dioxide reaction. They do have problems with supporting rapid changes in electrical draw, however. Typically this is handled by putting them in series with a capacitor. The capacitor can soak up rapid increases in demand, while the cell itself adjusts.

The one I saw, intended for eventual use in cell phones, was basically what looked like a sandwich of plexiglass and some spongy material. Two wires ran off from the sponge to connect to the contacts for a small fan. You'd take a bottle of methanol, squirt it on the sponge, and the fan would start to spin, slowly at first, and building up in speed as the cell heated up to optimum temperature (which I think was around 50-60 degrees celsius).

Cell phones make a good first application for this kind of technology (as opposed to cars) because the price/performance ratio is high (cell phones are expensive for the amount of power they use) and the performance/weight is relatively low (you don't need a really big stack to drive cell phone). If the fuel-cell cell phone (or even just a widget to replace the battery) costs ten times as much, but lasts ten times as long, is fully "rechargeable" with a one-minute application of methanol (which could come in sealed, disposable plastic tubes, or you could fill it the same way you fill a butane lighter), and has no "memory" problems, then you've got a real winner. People will pay $1000 for a cell phone (they did when the StarTAC first came out).

A car that costs ten times as much doesn't work, because that puts even a cheapie car into six figures. You have to get the price-performance ratio of fuel cells way way down before they become useful for cars. However, for cars, methanol distribution may not be a big problem - some researchers are working on gasoline-driven fuel cells. Not as clean as methanol (which exhausts CO_2 and H_2O), but cleaner than combustion, and the distribution infrastructure is already in place. There's still a price/performance problem, because gasoline-powered fuel cells effectively have a full chemistry lab built in, with three or four stages to go through before the actual power production. They also operate at much higher temperatures.

Direct Methanol Fuel Cells are nifty because they're solid-state. A catalyst (platinum, I think) drives the methanol/oxygen -> power/water/carbon dioxide reaction. They do have problems with supporting rapid changes in electrical draw, however. Typically this is handled by putting them in series with a capacitor. The capacitor can soak up rapid increases in demand, while the cell itself adjusts.

If you believe that news is accurate...

BUT - in this case it was... I just read the Official Mishap Investigation Board Phase I Report... turns out that the problem was a small program called SM_FORCES that was to read a table of pound-second figures, while the table provided for the flight was in newton-second figures. Read the whole thing here.

--
Evan "Not too proud to admit when he's wrong"

I suspect that more resources are going to be needed. And a bit of terraforming to make it much more sustainable. You want to be able to have the thing last on it's own, sustain itself and grow.

This gets into things like altering the paths of comets so that they crash into Mars depositing all kinds of extra water into the place. But that raises all kinds of questions. For example there is this old debate on if the earth is being constantly pelted on by mini-comets. If this is happening on Earthe, what is going on at mars?

All kinds of things to talk about.

but as a taxpayer fed up with seeing my dollars flushed down NASAs ever increasing budget black hole

Interesting info Caid. I had underestimated how much storage it takes to run a scientific satellite.

However, the data rate for the satellite is "a dozen computer hard drives" per hour, which I estimated at 100-150 GB/hour, conservatively. That's 1.2-1.8 terabytes per day. 100 GB/day housekeeping/calibration is chump change, esp. considering you could throw some of it out as soon as you decide that nothing is wrong.

NASA has lots of satellite images on the web that are helpful in getting an idea of image size. Unfortunately many of the images themselves are offline due to server renovations until Nov. 27, but there's this one. This is a 13 MB lossless TIFF image of Los Angeles. Pretty poor resolution for spy satellite purposes. But let's say that we can double the resolution and quadruple the file size. This means we could double the resolution four times and the resulting image would be less than a gigabyte. The data capture rate for this satellite would allow for ~100 high-resolution land shots per hour, even factoring in the whole instrumentation/HK dealie.

Like I said before, I know this isn't a spy satellite. If it were, though, it'd make a damn good one!

Interesting info Caid. I had underestimated how much storage it takes to run a scientific satellite.

However, the data rate for the satellite is "a dozen computer hard drives" per hour, which I estimated at 100-150 GB/hour, conservatively. That's 1.2-1.8 terabytes per day. 100 GB/day housekeeping/calibration is chump change, esp. considering you could throw some of it out as soon as you decide that nothing is wrong.

NASA has lots of satellite images on the web that are helpful in getting an idea of image size. Unfortunately many of the images themselves are offline due to server renovations until Nov. 27, but there's this one. This is a 13 MB lossless TIFF image of Los Angeles. Pretty poor resolution for spy satellite purposes. But let's say that we can double the resolution and quadruple the file size. This means we could double the resolution four times and the resulting image would be less than a gigabyte. The data capture rate for this satellite would allow for ~100 high-resolution land shots per hour, even factoring in the whole instrumentation/HK dealie.

Like I said before, I know this isn't a spy satellite. If it were, though, it'd make a damn good one!

Slashback with more on cheap satellites, the relative speeds
of threads under Linux and two strains of Windows, a skeptical response to the
idea that crowds of people are retreating to dial-up access, and some
tantalizing hints at products killed along with the HP calculator division.

Lies, Damn Lies, Statistics, Benchmarks, Etc. Writing with a
followup to the Slashdot post titled, "Who
Has Faster Pipes? Linux, Win2000, WinXP Compared" Splinton had this to say: "In this
article, Ed
Bradford compares semaphores, mutexes and window's critical sections.
Pthreads look good, but Win2Ks critical sections are twice as fast again!"

The computing equivalent of Area 51? A short while back HP
closed its calculator division. Many have thought HP's calculator department was
unprofitable. This was not the case. Many have thought they had no innovation.
This was not the case. Turns out that management had 4% workforce to kill and
they were part of the cut.

This article
explains more. It turns out they had designed several Linux based PDA's ready
to produce that were killed by management. Sounds interesting? Go check it
out.

The real trick to keeping costs down is to do the job with as small a team as
possible in the minimum time possible. Rather than employing a large team of
specialists, HETE's scientific investigators did much of the engineering and
technical work. A small, carefully selected engineering team filled in the
knowledge gaps."

Quitting isn't easy, and why bother

Lies, Damn Lies, Statistics, Benchmarks, Etc.
Writing with a followup to the Slashdot post titled,

"Who Has Faster Pipes? Linux, Win2000, WinXP Compared"
Splinton had this to say: "In

this article, Ed Bradford compares semaphores, mutexes and window's
critical sections. Pthreads look good, but Win2Ks critical sections are
twice as fast again!"

The computing equivalent of Area 51? A short while
back HP closed its calculator division. Many have thought HP's
calculator department was unprofitable. This was not the case. Many have
thought they had no innovation. This was not the case. Turns out that
management had 4% workforce to kill and they were part of the cut.

This article
explains more. It turns out they had designed several Linux based
PDA's ready to produce that were killed by management. Sounds
interesting? Go check it out.

The biggest expense was the 12 gross of Estes D engines ...
Satellite Designer writes: "The topic of low cost satellites
having been mooted here recently, I though I'd alert readers to another
such project. The HETE-2
satellite recently

located a cosmic gamma-ray burst precisely enough that (with a lot
of help from friends) an afterglow was detected, identifying its source.
HETE-2 cost $26 million, only 1/3 of what a "small" scientific satellite
normally costs.

A lot of commercial "off the shelf" technology went into HETE. Nothing
from Radio Shack, but there are quite a few parts from Digi-Key onboard.
You can't save money by using cheap parts (but you *can* save money by
using easily obtainable parts), and you can't achieve reliability by
using expensive parts (but you *can* help reliability by using the parts
best suited for your application). The radical thing about HETE's parts
selection was that it considered parts in the application context (as
one would do in a normal engineering process), rather than restricting
selection to a QPL assembled to meet irrelevant requirements.

The real trick to keeping costs down is to do the job with as small a
team as possible in the minimum time possible. Rather than employing a
large team of specialists, HETE's scientific investigators did much of
the engineering and technical work. A small, carefully selected
engineering team filled in the knowledge gaps."

Quitting isn't easy, and why bother?
dmarsh writes: "This
new
article from C|Net seems to be a
total contradiction to last week's

"Dump Broadband, Dig Out Your Modem!" thread's article. I guess the
important difference being that this one is backed up by an actual
survey by the National Cable and Telecommunications Association."

Goes to show, in a large group of people you can probably find at
least some who fit nearly any premise. As always, question the source ;)

<

Light Emitting Pictures On Standard Inkjet Printer

This concludes my karma whoring for the day =)

Does that mean it can go visit Laika?

That 1Metre/day is the movement of the whole ice chunk over lubricated ground. That sort of movement is not likely to affect the detector that much... More important is the warping of the ice block against itself which is more likely to be in the range of inches or feet /year (as an analogy: I may be walking at 5MPH, but my backbone is relatively stable relative to itself [unless I get hit by a car going 60MPH, in which case, all bets are off])

As noted at one Nasa glacial site,

Ice streams-large river-like currents of ice flowing through the ice sheets at speeds one to two orders of magnitude faster than the general ice flow-greatly increase the potential swiftness of ice-sheet collapse by rapidly transporting ice from the interior of the ice sheet to the margin.

Hold onto that thought, 'cause I'm about to blow a Mack truck-sized hole in it.

Do a google search on Alfred Wegener, and you'll see a guy who got his ass kicked all over the place for proposing a theory that contradicted scientific understanding at the time. And was harassed as vigorously as any religious heretic. Want more? Here's the frigging link.

Through the hoop, nothin' but net.

Do yourself a favor and check out Science's reaction to Darwin and doubters of Global Warning. Shocking behaviour all around, if you ask me.

Oh, not much really.

I'm sure some searching would reveal some details though.

Oh, not much really.

I'm sure some searching would reveal some details though.

Oh, not much really.

I'm sure some searching would reveal some details though.