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Where I work, everything that gets stored on the hard drives at work is immediately considered For Official Use Only and most companies that do business with DoD or other Government agencies have very strict rules on information storage (classification notwithstanding). If a web-based Office Suite were to succeed, there would have to be major security for it to be considered for use by most of the US Government and it's many (many) contractors. It's possible, but whoever tried to implement this idea would have to keep in mind that lots of big-name companies are tied by these restrictions.

If one could develop a web-based office suite that met the needs of DoD/Dod contractors, then I think a lot of them might go for that idea. It would allow a military unit in Iraq and a command post at Ft. Bragg to view/edit their files without having to worry about transmitting them back and forth; likewise for contractors who have to travel all over the country. I know some contractors who travel 100+ days/year, so having a central repository of files would be excellent for them. I think if the security needs can be met, web-based office might just work. It'll be interesting to see if anyone can actually implement it though.

If it comes to that, the true question may be "Are Earth and Jupiter both planets?"

There is historical precedent for deciding something that was considered a planet not to be one. The asteroid Ceres was considered a Planet for about fifty years, until it became obvious that it was merely the largest member of a numerous class of smaller bodies. So, it might well be that we will end up with the period from 1930 to the present being another such period, and Pluto merely considered one of the largest/nearest of whatever they call the Trans-Neptunian Objects. (I suspect they won't keep that name, if only because Pluto occasisonally nudges a bit closer than Neptune.)

But while we're reconsidering the classification of planets, a more general look at the solar system might be in order... which leaves some uncomfortable other facts. Leaving Pluto to its TNO status, and even leaving the Asteroid category to its prior doom, the remaining planets fall into two groups: the rocks (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars) and clouds (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune). And to make matters worse, Jupiter and Saturn each have a moon (Ganymede and Titan) larger than Mercury, and similar in geologic(?) composition to the inner rocks. It may be that some of Jupiter's moons should be put into the same conceptual category as the inner rocks while we're doing one of these renamings.

Perhaps only one of the two groups ought "rightly" be called planets, and the other given a new name. Or perhaps the two planet categories should be given distinct names (rocks and clouds), and a notation made that some rocks orbit clouds. Perhaps some reconsideration should be given as to whether all asteroids should be in the asteroid category, while we're redrawing dividing lines — Ceres is a respectable paperweight. Perhaps the Earth-Moon system will end up recognized as a double rock-planet system, or only end as a rock-planet with a bigass asteroid orbiting it. Or perhaps I should shut up and let the astronomers think about this for another Uranian year. =)

Yup.

And I rather suspect that HARMs are not limited to air defense radar systems...

And discover the following:

Does the Navy train its dolphins for offensive warfare, including attacks on ships and human swimmers or divers?
No. The Navy does not now train, nor has it ever trained, its marine mammals to harm or injure humans in any fashion or to carry weapons to destroy ships. A popular movie in 1973 ("The Day of the Dolphin") and a number of charges and claims by animal rights organizations have resulted in theories and sometimes actual beliefs that Navy dolphins are assigned attack missions. This is absolutely false. Since dolphins cannot discern the difference between enemy and friendly vessels, or enemy and friendly divers and swimmers, it would not be wise to give that kind of decision authority to an animal. The animals are trained to detect, locate, and mark all mines or all swimmers in an area of interest or concern, and are not trained to distinguish between what we would refer to as good or bad. That decision is always left to humans.

Does the Navy ask the dolphins and sea lions to do dangerous things?
The dolphins locate and mark the location of sea mines which are designed to be set off by large ships, not aquatic animals. In the swimmer detection program, dolphins and sea lions move so quickly and with such accuracy that human swimmers in dark or murky waters are located and marked before they know what has happened. Once the marking has been completed, the animals are removed from the area before mines are disarmed or swimmers are apprehended by trained security forces. Marine mammals are actually in more danger from sharks, and wild marine mammals are put in much more danger by people who feed them (which is why it is illegal).

Why have there been so many rumors about the NMMP over the years?
Several decades of classification of the program's true missions of mine-hunting and swimmer defense, led to media speculation and animal activist charges of dolphins used as offensive weapons, speculation and charges that could not be countered with facts due to that classification. Additionally, fantasy is often times more interesting than reality. With declassification of the missions of the program in the early 1990s, the Navy has repeatedly and openly discussed those missions, but rumors are not easily forgotten, and there are those who continue to actively promote them.

In response to charges that the program abused the animals, the presidentially appointed Marine Mammal Commission investigated the program in 1988 and 1990. The Commission reported that the allegations were not only false, but that the Navy's care of its marine mammals was "exemplary."


Then, of course, we'd realize this guy was a kook, and that Slashdot is recycling stories that Art Bell wouldn't cover. Certainly makes you think twice about the journalistic integrity of the Guardian, though.

The US Navy refers to its dolphin units as "Marine Mammal Systems", and documents the purpose of each unit. Individual units are trained for mine hunting, force protection, and object recovery.

Assuming that these dolphins are not part of a separate program, presumably the loose mammals are part of Marine Mammal System Mark VI. Note that the Navy Marine Mammal Program FAQ includes the following item:

Does the Navy train its dolphins for offensive warfare, including attacks on ships and human swimmers or divers?
No. The Navy does not now train, nor has it ever trained, its marine mammals to harm or injure humans in any fashion or to carry weapons to destroy ships. A popular movie in 1973 ("The Day of the Dolphin") and a number of charges and claims by animal rights organizations have resulted in theories and sometimes actual beliefs that Navy dolphins are assigned attack missions. This is absolutely false. Since dolphins cannot discern the difference between enemy and friendly vessels, or enemy and friendly divers and swimmers, it would not be wise to give that kind of decision authority to an animal. The animals are trained to detect, locate, and mark all mines or all swimmers in an area of interest or concern, and are not trained to distinguish between what we would refer to as good or bad. That decision is always left to humans.

I find trace references to the fact that the former anti-swimmer system (the Shallow Water Intruder Detection System) was supplanted by something new involving dolphins. In the old system, a sea lion would swim up to an unknown frogman with an open-jawed clamp attached to a line attached to its nose, ram into the frogman, and then signal the handler -- the frogman would essentially become "handcuffed" to the line, easy to reel in.

The US Navy refers to its dolphin units as "Marine Mammal Systems", and documents the purpose of each unit. Individual units are trained for mine hunting, force protection, and object recovery.

Assuming that these dolphins are not part of a separate program, presumably the loose mammals are part of Marine Mammal System Mark VI. Note that the Navy Marine Mammal Program FAQ includes the following item:

Does the Navy train its dolphins for offensive warfare, including attacks on ships and human swimmers or divers?
No. The Navy does not now train, nor has it ever trained, its marine mammals to harm or injure humans in any fashion or to carry weapons to destroy ships. A popular movie in 1973 ("The Day of the Dolphin") and a number of charges and claims by animal rights organizations have resulted in theories and sometimes actual beliefs that Navy dolphins are assigned attack missions. This is absolutely false. Since dolphins cannot discern the difference between enemy and friendly vessels, or enemy and friendly divers and swimmers, it would not be wise to give that kind of decision authority to an animal. The animals are trained to detect, locate, and mark all mines or all swimmers in an area of interest or concern, and are not trained to distinguish between what we would refer to as good or bad. That decision is always left to humans.

I find trace references to the fact that the former anti-swimmer system (the Shallow Water Intruder Detection System) was supplanted by something new involving dolphins. In the old system, a sea lion would swim up to an unknown frogman with an open-jawed clamp attached to a line attached to its nose, ram into the frogman, and then signal the handler -- the frogman would essentially become "handcuffed" to the line, easy to reel in.

The US Navy refers to its dolphin units as "Marine Mammal Systems", and documents the purpose of each unit. Individual units are trained for mine hunting, force protection, and object recovery.

Assuming that these dolphins are not part of a separate program, presumably the loose mammals are part of Marine Mammal System Mark VI. Note that the Navy Marine Mammal Program FAQ includes the following item:

Does the Navy train its dolphins for offensive warfare, including attacks on ships and human swimmers or divers?
No. The Navy does not now train, nor has it ever trained, its marine mammals to harm or injure humans in any fashion or to carry weapons to destroy ships. A popular movie in 1973 ("The Day of the Dolphin") and a number of charges and claims by animal rights organizations have resulted in theories and sometimes actual beliefs that Navy dolphins are assigned attack missions. This is absolutely false. Since dolphins cannot discern the difference between enemy and friendly vessels, or enemy and friendly divers and swimmers, it would not be wise to give that kind of decision authority to an animal. The animals are trained to detect, locate, and mark all mines or all swimmers in an area of interest or concern, and are not trained to distinguish between what we would refer to as good or bad. That decision is always left to humans.

I find trace references to the fact that the former anti-swimmer system (the Shallow Water Intruder Detection System) was supplanted by something new involving dolphins. In the old system, a sea lion would swim up to an unknown frogman with an open-jawed clamp attached to a line attached to its nose, ram into the frogman, and then signal the handler -- the frogman would essentially become "handcuffed" to the line, easy to reel in.

The US Navy refers to its dolphin units as "Marine Mammal Systems", and documents the purpose of each unit. Individual units are trained for mine hunting, force protection, and object recovery.

Assuming that these dolphins are not part of a separate program, presumably the loose mammals are part of Marine Mammal System Mark VI. Note that the Navy Marine Mammal Program FAQ includes the following item:

Does the Navy train its dolphins for offensive warfare, including attacks on ships and human swimmers or divers?
No. The Navy does not now train, nor has it ever trained, its marine mammals to harm or injure humans in any fashion or to carry weapons to destroy ships. A popular movie in 1973 ("The Day of the Dolphin") and a number of charges and claims by animal rights organizations have resulted in theories and sometimes actual beliefs that Navy dolphins are assigned attack missions. This is absolutely false. Since dolphins cannot discern the difference between enemy and friendly vessels, or enemy and friendly divers and swimmers, it would not be wise to give that kind of decision authority to an animal. The animals are trained to detect, locate, and mark all mines or all swimmers in an area of interest or concern, and are not trained to distinguish between what we would refer to as good or bad. That decision is always left to humans.

I find trace references to the fact that the former anti-swimmer system (the Shallow Water Intruder Detection System) was supplanted by something new involving dolphins. In the old system, a sea lion would swim up to an unknown frogman with an open-jawed clamp attached to a line attached to its nose, ram into the frogman, and then signal the handler -- the frogman would essentially become "handcuffed" to the line, easy to reel in.

My god, what a kook this Sheridan guy is...

Marine biologists were baffled but Leo Sheridan proposed the only explanation that has not yet been dismissed. "I am convinced that these were dolphins trained by the US Navy and that something went badly wrong,

I am convinced it was done by aliens hiding on the Canary islands... can't dismiss that either. See, it's easy to say something is the result of some secret project: Since all the evidence you would need to prove your case is secret, of course you can't provide any evidence.

In fact it was 1989 when the U.S. Navy began its classified Cetacean Intelligence Mission.

Well, if you trot over to the program's official web page, you can see they have been training toothed whales since 1962. And once again, how does he know the specifics of something supposedly top secret (but with an official web page, of course)? Maybe it began in 1987, and it's even more advanced!

Speculation is fun, but when you do it too much and for too long you simply start seeing patterns that aren't really there. You start believing anything that fits your pattern, even when far simpler explanations fit equally well. Occam's Razor goes out the window. I wonder what Sheridan thinks of the movie A Beautiful Mind.

There have been stories about the marine mammal program before, and regular fights with animal rights groups. It is no longer classified though, so anyone can go find out plenty of information at the project's official website. You can also check out their FAQ. It pretty clearly states that dolphins and sea lions are only used for marking and tagging, and that they are not used offensively since they can't really distinguish friendly forces and foes. It seems some people still refuse to give up on speculation however.

Anyway, I seriously doubt that dolphins are being used with poison darts, since the Navy seems to prefer using sea lions now (They don't need storage pools, work better in tight areas like harbors and piers, and tolerate more varying temperatures). And even if there *were* poison dart weilding dolphins, why on earth would they be left armed while at a training facility during a storm?

There have been stories about the marine mammal program before, and regular fights with animal rights groups. It is no longer classified though, so anyone can go find out plenty of information at the project's official website. You can also check out their FAQ. It pretty clearly states that dolphins and sea lions are only used for marking and tagging, and that they are not used offensively since they can't really distinguish friendly forces and foes. It seems some people still refuse to give up on speculation however.

Anyway, I seriously doubt that dolphins are being used with poison darts, since the Navy seems to prefer using sea lions now (They don't need storage pools, work better in tight areas like harbors and piers, and tolerate more varying temperatures). And even if there *were* poison dart weilding dolphins, why on earth would they be left armed while at a training facility during a storm?

I'll be dammed! - do these people have any imagination at all - or maybe I have an overactive imagination!

Its looks like C3PO

If the robot is realy designed by a military electronics company, then it will be quite immune to EMP and radiation. There are many robots in use in the military and there are sentries armed with shotguns in Iraq even. See this: http://www.spawar.navy.mil/robots/land/robart/hist ory.html

In a similar vein. The navy has had the CIWS radar and FLIR guided Gatling guns for quite a long time. They have completely automated tracking and fire control.

Here's how the pros do it. This is from

http://www.mediacen.navy.mil/pubs/allhands/jan00/p g48.htm

Phalanx Close-In Weapons System (CIWS) The Phalanx CIWS combines a 20mm Gatling gun with search and tracking radar to provide surface ships with terminal defense against anti-ship missiles. The system underwent operational tests and evaluation on board USS Bigelow (DD 942) in 1977 and went into production in 1978 with the first systems installed aboard USS Coral Sea (CV 43) in 1980. The original versions used rounds made from depleted uranium that have since been replaced by tungsten rounds. Caliber: 20mm/53 Rate of Fire: 1,000-3,000 rounds/min. Muzzle Velocity: 3,650 ft./sec Range: 6,000 yds. Manufacturer: Hughes Missile Systems Company

Twelve of those carry the Polaris D5 missile, and the remaining four carry the Polaris C4 missile.

Small nitpick - the Ohio-class submarines don't carry Polaris missiles; they carry Trident missiles.

They have 368,000 active duty personnel, 142,000 reservists, and 177,000 civilians. Total: 687000. With standards allowances for safety and growth, you DO need to plan for well over 1 million accounts.

I have beed to a few spas, and I wouldn't classify GITMO as equal to even the most run down and dirtiest spas out there. Now if they were being held at Diego Garcia, that would be a different story.

If you consider ... leap-seconds (the slowing down of the Earth) ... If the earth were indeed billions (or even a million) years old, it would be spinning so fast that nothing would be able to survive on it ...

• deposition
• cementation and sometime metamorphosis
• uplift and tilting
• erosion
• deposition (again)
• cementation (of new layer)

why not use a SecurdID Tag/Code with your cell phone and get Kerberos version installed on the cell phones. this way it wouldnt be 100% fraudproof(but then again is anything in life guaranteed?).

It mentioned SecureID but i wonder if they have heard of Kerberos We have this at work.. you type in your username and password. after the password you use a 4-digit pin number, which gives you a 6 digit key(sometimes referred to as a ticket) to type in at the prompt. If you are really serious about security you could set a time limit on the ticket, lets say 5 or 10 mins, then even if a hacker was trying to hi-jack your ticket it would take more than 5 or 10 mins..but after that the ticket would have expired.

maybe i should email him and ask him about that, but i am sure they all know about this.

https://infosec.navy.mil/

Get the stigs for you computer, and your DoD compliant. Sounds easy, it is not. But your computer will be locked down to the security needs that you will be expected to comply to.

The best info I've found so far is actually a do-it-yourself exercise... there's a space-travel simulator that you can use to try to figure out how to get to mars, along with some helper apps that do some math for you.

In terms of starting, basic data... you can ignore the effects of the MRO on the two planets, since it's so small. But the positions of the two planets can be gotten from here. To understand the coordinates used, study here.

I'd like to find some decent open-source apps to visualize the orbits in 3D... at least a static diagram, if not an animation.

From long standing experience trying to deal with other government agencies (most notably the Naval Historical Center, http://www.history.navy.mil/) I can attest that many agencies really do not want to deal with any form of electronic communication and will be far more responsive to written communication delivered via snail mail. They will also pay far more attention to your letter if you write it yourself IN YOUR OWN WORDS as whenever they get another copy of a standardized letter it just goes on the pile with the thought "oh, here's another one of these". I'm writing; you should to!

It's not, and the person who wrote it is a jackass:

Studies done by the U.S. Department of Transportation show that we trim the entire country's electricity usage by about one percent EACH DAY with Daylight Saving Time.

Hey, if we extend it to go year-round, we can save an extra 160%! Also:

Daylight Saving Time saves lives and prevents traffic injuries. The earlier Daylight Saving Time allowed more people to travel home from work and school in daylight, which is much safer than darkness. And except for the months of November through February, Daylight Saving Time does not increase the morning hazard for those going to school and work.

That person who wrote that is a damn liar. According to the US Navy (who take this whole time thing quite seriously), sunrise on November 3, 2007 at my house will be at 7:05AM CST, or 8:05AM CDT. In other words, I'm at work and the kids are in school before the sun ever rises. It won't be as bad when it goes into effect that spring (6:49/7:49 instead of 6:11/7:11 under the old plan), but that's still obnoxious. The poor kids in Fargo, ND have it even worse.

What they really mean is "the majority of the people who would be ready to lynch us for pulling this boneheaded maneuver will be only slightly inconvenienced". Miamians gets light 35 minutes earlier (within their timezone) than us northerners, so I'm sure this seems a lot more reasonable to the AARP crowd who're most likely to vote.

But what actually happened is that there's been no general war along this border for an unusually long 35 years, and it now seems the Pakistanis and Indians are realizing they will just have to uneasily get along, as the Soviets and Americans did during the Cold War, since each now has the capacity to obliterate the other.

Pakistan has been supporting terrorism in Kashmir for the past 17 years. They used weapons supplied by the US and China to arm terrorists. Indians generally don't care about Pakistan, but the Pakistani government needs Kashmir as part of Pakistan to justify its own existence.

As for the general war, the proxy war fought with terrorists and the Kargil invasion negate that theory. It just didn't escalate to all out war.

http://www.ccc.nps.navy.mil/research/kargil/index. asp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kargil
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/war/k argil-99.htm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/387702 .stm
http://terrorism.freeservers.com/kargil.html

If you haven't noticed, they also installed a MISSE (Materials International Space Station Experiment) on the ISS which contains a few new types of solar cells. It's supposed to be up there for a year, seeing which one is more efficient. http://web.usna.navy.mil/~bruninga/pcsat2.html

Will they omit the part of the movie where the highly trained scientist/engineer's job is shipped off to India? Or will they just cut to the chase and produce the movies themselves in Bollywood?

Your comment is humorous, but the phenomenon is real in defense procurement.

More specifically, that is an APRS packet containing telemetry ... the APRS network primarily operates on 144.390 MHz. It's a tactical network of stations that send and repeat location-aware information. Primarily, amateur radio operators use it for regional mapping of other APRS stations and weather data.

The original PCSat is an APRS satellite ... ie: it relays APRS packets to a wider area. The ISS has amateur radio equipment on board and it also was an APRS "digipeater". Sometimes the ISS astronauts get on the radio and make voice contacts ... yet another reason to get your own amateur radio license. Now that PCSat2 is installed on the ISS, I believe the ISS equipment will no longer digipeat APRS packets, but I'm not 100% sure on that.

APRS was invented by Bob Bruninga, WB4APR, the same guy that built PCSat and PCSat2 at the Naval Labratory.

Mr. Bruninga maintains an APRS page at: http://web.usna.navy.mil/~bruninga/aprs.html. (Most of the actual APRS specification is documented within the APRSdos package.)

There is a good Linux APRS application called Xastir ... www.xastir.org.

"Brass monkey"

Urban legend. Many phrases like that are.

---

I'm not worried about the use of DRM. I'm worried about the abuse.

http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/

On a historical basis and from what all subsequent time keeping systems have been based upon, is precisely the observations at Greenwich. GMT is still measured, and is partially responsible for determining when a leap second should be issued or not.

The problem with GMT is that the length of a second can vary, and current physical measurements of time require a much more precise definition of a second. This is the #1 reason for moving to UTC. BTW, I love this definition from the USNO website on time systems:

Julian Day Number is a count of days elapsed since Greenwich mean noon on 1 January 4713 B.C., Julian proleptic calendar. The Julian Date is the Julian day number followed by the fraction of the day elapsed since the preceding noon.

What about atomic clocks in the year 4713 B.C.? And why that date in particular? (There is a good reason, but it just seems a little weird.) What is awsome is that the information can even be calculated back that far so accurately.

By far the best resource I've ever seen concerning time and navigation is: http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/

This has everything you mentioned above, plus some very current research, the role of the USNO in the GPS satellite constellation, and even the history of timekeeping in the USA. On the whole an excellent resource to look at if you want to know more about time.

Whenever I setup a new system, I usually drop by their "what time is it" to set the clocks on systems (especially if I don't want to download or enable a nettime client). It will get you the correct time +/- 30 seconds with the web interface, which is as good or better than most casual users really care to get it anyway. Usually far more accurate than most people's watches as well.

True, which is why I didn't bring up Leap Seconds.

"If you want to go to work an hour earlier, just go to work an hour earlier."

Except there's a whole trickle-down effect from the federal agencies that observe things like daylight saving time. It's a lot like federal holidays; sure, you can be open for business, but the more your business relies on, say, transactions at the Federal Reserve, the less work you're going to be doing for that hour between when you open and when the Federal Reserve opens. So far as commerce relies on groups of people coming together, the only way you can effectivley do something like this is all or none, otherwise the concept of standards becomes meaningless.

"Noon should always be when the sun is directly over my time-zone."

I'm surprised there isn't some sort of "bad atronomy" page on this.

First off, time zones are not defined by two meridians. They start off that way, but then they move with respect to political boundaries in an attempt to keep states (or at least counties) synchronized. Otherwise Airzona would be split right down the middle (Arizona goes from about 109 W to 114 W, and the line "should" be at 112.5 W)

Secondly, the length of time between two consecutive noons is never 86,400 seconds. The reason we developed mechanical timekeepers and then ultimately defined our length of time on something that has nothing to do with astronomy is that the sun is inconsistant. The earth's orbit is not circular, the earth's speed in that orbit is not constant, and the result is that, over regular 86.4 ks cycles, the sun traces a figure-eight over the course of a year.

On 2005 October 30, when the US and the EU both go back to standard time zone, the sun will be directly over New Orleans (almost exactly 90 degrees west of Greenwich) at about 11:44 AM Central Standard Time. On Groundhog's Day next year, after racing past perihelion, "noon" will be 12:14 PM.

"Change the start time instead of the clocks"

That would defeat the purpose of having a standard schedule to begin with. People and other businesses need to plan around when you intend to operate, and a system where everybody's schedule drifts from time to time leads to confusion at best. It's better to change the standard frame of reference than to try to alter behavior within that frame of reference.

If anything, what you're proposing more resembles the "logic" of setting your personal alarm clock ten mintues later than Daylight Saving Time. Both examples involve deviating from an accepted standard.

"Do it gradually, the way available light changes gradually."

First, if you're going to do it based on fractions of hours, why bother having time zones of integer hour differences to begin with? Why bother with time zones at all?

Secondly, the amount of daylight during a day and the change of that amount between two consecutive days varies with latitude, not longitude. Just because you are able to describe the change as "gradual" in Arizona does not mean it is "gradual" in New York or Oregon. Daylight Saving Time makes less sense the closer you are to the Equator because there is less change in sunlight over the course of the year (how the Equator got its name), which is why Hawaii, in the tropics, doesn't follow it. However, even without leaving the contiguous 48, we can look at the Car Talk brothers in Massachusetts and their half-joking suggestion of going ahead two hours because, even with Daylight Saving Time, the sun was still rising at 5 AM EDT (a/k/a 4 AM EST).

According to the US Naval Observatory sunrise in Boston on 2005 June 21 was 5:08 EDT (4:08 EST), with the sun being above the horizon for about 15.5 hours for that day.

" That way you don't fuck up people's sleep cycles either."

Not changing clocks seems to

Some interesting articles I found looking up friendly fire:

Reader's Companion to Military History
World War 2 Friendly fire
Amicide (Study by US Military)
CBC Article on friendly fire in Iraq

You raise a good point that there are far too many friendly fire incidents in our military. I would venture to say it is due to overworking the individual soldier and not a lack of competence. Also friendly fire has been around for a long time and will never fully disappear, it is a fact of war.

My grammar is crap and if someone were to look over even this post I'm sure I've made a few glaring mistakes, but I do find it humorous to open your comment with "your" when "you're" is more appropriate.

>I dunno, "astronomy hack" seems more like plumbing
>your yard for liquid nitrogen using existing
>sprinkler system pipe, or turning a Mattel Barbie
>Photo Designer into a functioning spectrograph.

Very funny!

And, it also leads to an idea: a test equipment or laboratory hacks collection. We've all heard about or witnessed the occasional ingenuous non-standard lab trick. Collecting a bunch of anecdotal stories of real lab hacks could make for an entertaining read. It's no stupider than a lot of other collections out there.

Would I buy it in the form of a book? No. Probably not. But if it were an online collection it might be worth a few chuckles. While we're at it, why not a full franchise: cryogenic hacks, optics hacks, frequency domain hacks, etc. }8^)

On a more serious note, I agree that this book title seems misleading. Even someone who knows nothing about optical astronomy like me has run across a few *real* hacks, like the webcam astronomy folks (http://www.usno.navy.mil/pao/QuickCamAstro.shtml and others), or the many mirror-grinders out there turning plate glass into instruments. A few minutes with google turned up dozens of other examples (http://www.britastro.org/iandi/articles.htm, http://www.atmsite.org/date.html, etc.) A

real astro hack book could be interesting. Shame this isn't one.

Yes, just make DST *the* time year-round, like pretending you live in the next time zone over.

Nobody has to change their clocks, and everybody gets to sleep in an extra hour.

Actually, by the timezone map, Alaska has already done that (but their daylight hours are messed up from being so far north). Hawaii straddles the hour line, so they are basically on half saving time all the time, depending on which island they are on.

It can't be that bad. The people in western china have to deal with the official time being 2-3 hours off sun time.

The galactica uses old fashioned phones with wires quite on purpose as a low tech but highly effective answer to technological warfare. It's much much harder to jam/intercept/alter a signal that runs through a shielded wire than one that transmits via radio wave. I bet if you go look at a modern navy vessel it will also use hard wired communications onboard ship.

Very true; the hard wired communications on current US Navy ships don't even require broadcast power:
http://www.dcfp.navy.mil/equip/dcc/spphone.htm
Having used these, they work rather well. You can't jam them, you can't detect their use remotely, and as a bonus since they don't give off radio waves they won't set off any detonators ( wires connected to detonators can act as antenna... and if they get enough current... ).

APRS could be your new best friend.

A common formula for approximating the evolution of delta-T over time is 31 * Cy^2, where Cy is expressed in centuries.

The formulae are to some extent empirical as well as being approximations. The evolution of delta-t is also extremely 'noisy', and is far from a good fit with any of the formulae.

For the last few years it's been at around 64 seconds (see data in here), which comes to about 3 or 4 seconds less for the present time than some recent formulae were predicting even only a few years ago, and last time I checked nobody had a really good explanation. So it's a bit optimistic to extrapolate over 1000 years!

-wb-

Hmm... are you referring to the V22 Osprey?

not that interesting or difficult to figure out.

switching to map view reveals streat names. performing a google search with the parameters "Observatory Lane Washington DC" results in a hit for the US Naval Observatory home page.

http://www.usno.navy.mil/

It seems they even have directions to their location on their site, as well as several maps more detailed than googles, therefore I'm confused about why it is obscured in the satellite imagery more than what it is.

Maybe it wasn't a mistake, since astrology has everything to do with the position of the planets relative to each other and to constellations.

Due to the precession of the equinoxes, the table of dates and zodaical constellations that astrologers use is around 2000 years out of date.

linky.

Of course, most astrologers don't care. But those who do care claim that it is the orientation of planets with respect to the earth's orbit around the sun and the earth's axial tilt that mystically influence events, and that the orientation of the planets with respect to the stars is actually not that important after all.

>You only get a few minutes before the satellite disappears below the horizon again, but it's still cool.
You can also use a store-and-forward system (like SMTP) to send messages to a Digipeater on the ISS or a ham satellite and have them picked up later by someone halfway around the world, without worrying about the view horizon. A friend of mine did this with a two-meter handitalkie and an antenna stuck on an ironing board.

The >10 MeV proton event began on January 16 at 0210 UTC following the X2.6 flare late on the 15th. The peak flux following this flare was 365 pfu at 16/1840 UTC. The >10 MeV protons decayed to 117 pfu by midday on January 17 when a stronger injection of protons occurred following the X3.8 flare and CME. This new infusion began at 17/1240 UTC and peaked with 5040 pfu at 17/1750 UTC. The event decayed to about 19 pfu early on January 20 when yet another proton flare occurred. The X7 flare and CME that occurred on January 20 produced the hardest and most energetic proton event of Cycle 23. The >10 MeV protons peaked at 1860 pfu at 20/0810 UTC. The >100 MeV protons peaked at 652 pfu at 20/0710 UTC, which was the highest &gt100 MeV proton flux level observed since 1989 October (680 pfu). The >10 MeV proton event finally ended at 22/1755 UTC.

ftp://ares.nrl.navy.mil/pub/lasco/halo/20050115b

The >10 MeV proton event began on January 16 at 0210 UTC following the X2.6 flare late on the 15th. The peak flux following this flare was 365 pfu at 16/1840 UTC. The >10 MeV protons decayed to 117 pfu by midday on January 17 when a stronger injection of protons occurred following the X3.8 flare and CME. This new infusion began at 17/1240 UTC and peaked with 5040 pfu at 17/1750 UTC. The event decayed to about 19 pfu early on January 20 when yet another proton flare occurred. The X7 flare and CME that occurred on January 20 produced the hardest and most energetic proton event of Cycle 23. The >10 MeV protons peaked at 1860 pfu at 20/0810 UTC. The >100 MeV protons peaked at 652 pfu at 20/0710 UTC, which was the highest &gt100 MeV proton flux level observed since 1989 October (680 pfu). The >10 MeV proton event finally ended at 22/1755 UTC.

ftp://ares.nrl.navy.mil/pub/lasco/halo/20050115b

• One, called PSK31, uses less bandwidth than a morse code signal (31Hz), and uses a computer soundcard to audio encoding and decoding. You can read more about it here. You can talk around the world with 5 Watts on HF (high frequency, 14.070 MHz, in this case). There are other, similar, digital modes available for keyboard-to-keyboard communications (synchronous, non face-to-face) that have different radio propagation and bandwidth characteristics, as well as image transmissions modes that work on HF, which propagates world-wide, and you can read about those in the PDF presentation above as well.
• The other, APRS , uses VHF and UFH (usually 144.39 MHz in the US), and because of the shorter range, uses a store-and-forward packet technology. This mechanism is more like SMS in that it is asynchronous, non-face-to-face, and in that it uses a network of repeaters and packet forwarding systems, and message lengths are limited.
  
  There used to be a wider ham packet network, back before the ARPANet became the Internet; this piggybacks on the technology and uses it for short message, position reporting, and weather reporting. Check out APRSWorld.net for open-source software for the network side of this. (The radio side is already taken care of in the Linux kernel, and in various Windows packages. There is also a client program called XASTIR.

According to the Navy it's "NAVSTA GTMO", capitalized. So "GTMO" is correct, "gitmo" as the pronunctiation of GTMO is correct, but "GITMO" is wrong.

Now, who pissed in my Cheerios?

Honest question: Why does the US have NASA? The US Army, Arforce and Navy all have their own space programs, so what is the point of NASA?

Because without NASA there would be no civilian space effort. When was the last time the armed forces launched a human in space? They have no plans to either.

One footnote though is the Clementine mission, jointly funded by the military and NASA. This mission was wildly successful and cheap!

The USN has has an Automatic Carrier Landing System for years now, and I've seen references to a GPS-enabled Joint Precision Approach Landing System to replace it -- they've tested it by having an F/A-18 land aboard USS Theodore Roosevelt with it. Apparently the novelty here is that the British are developing a system of their own.