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I like this one. Every human alive or that has ever lived is framed in this photo, except for one.

You have presented zero evidence to the contrary of my claims.
You need evidence for common sense? Wow ...

https://ocean.si.edu/ecosystem...
https://www.leisurepro.com/blo...

Initially the Wrights used a weight-driven catapult

Wrong. Not on the Flyer I in 1903. They started to use the catapult from September 1904 on when they tried the Flyer II on Huffman prairie. They did this to compensate for the weaker wind inland; the wind in the dunes of NC was strong enough on most days to launch their aircraft without help.

On a side note I always wondered if the feds tracked where all the mail was going

The USPS has been taking a picture of every piece of mail that passes through it for a decades. In some ways this should not be surprising - most mail sorting is automated, using machine vision to read the address labels (either hand-written, or barcode). In fact, the USPS was a strong investor in optical character recognition decades ago, because they recognized they could get much greater throughput this way. Previously, each letter would go past a human worker that would read the address and type in the ZIP code with a specialized keyboard.

More recently, the USPS has started retaining these images for a period of time. This has, for instance, been helpful in law enforcement - see the recent case of Cesar Sayoc. But I don't know how long the images are kept for, or what other legitimate uses there may be for it.

“I'm a IT professional who cut his teeth on Windows 3.11. Everyone has their issues with how windows work, but you have to admit he along with Bill Gates had a huge influence on the tech industry.”

I'm a IT professional who cut his teeth on VAX/VMX, DECwindows, Novell Netware and the original Mac and in my professional opinion Win3.11 was a toy. It may be news to you but computing didn't start with Windows 3.11 and the huge influence you speak of is that everyone thinks it's normal for your computer to get compromised by opening an email attachment or clicking on a malicous URL.

And in the original Gates Allen partnership, Gates did of course diddle him out of a fair share, 64% to 36% cause he (Gates) did ‘most of the work on BASIC’. Not that Gates did write BASIC from scratch, as it was a clone of a version he acquired from a DECUS User Group and enhanced quite a bit.

"I would love to see museums that haven't been devastated do something of this nature as an insurance policy. Just think if could log into say, 2nd life and virtually tour the Louvre ..."

Mission accomplished

Louvre
http://www.louvre.fr/en/visite...

Guggenheim
http://www.guggenheim.org/new-...

National Gallery of Arts
http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions...

British Museum
http://www.britishmuseum.org/w...

Smithsonian
http://www.mnh.si.edu/panorama...

The Met
https://www.google.com/cultura...

and so on

It was an HP calculator which rode along on the Space Shuttle.

https://airandspace.si.edu/col...

Heat isn't the only problem coral is facing either. More CO2 in the ocean means higher acidity levels. Agricultural and other land runoff also damages coral. Basically they are getting hit from all sides by humanity.

Even though the ocean is immense, enough carbon dioxide can have a major impact. In the past 200 years alone, ocean water has become 30 percent more acidic—faster than any known change in ocean chemistry in the last 50 million years...
At its core, the issue of ocean acidification is simple chemistry. There are two important things to remember about what happens when carbon dioxide dissolves in seawater. First, the pH of seawater water gets lower as it becomes more acidic. Second, this process binds up carbonate ions and makes them less abundant—ions that corals, oysters, mussels, and many other shelled organisms need to build shells and skeletons.

Well documented by 25 years of AIMS research on the Reef, the increased sediment and nutrient loads to coastal waters:

      * smother coral reef organisms due to the settling of suspended sediment
      * reduce light availability for coral and seagrass photosynthesis due to increased turbidity
      * favour the growth of macroalgae at the expense of corals due to high nutrient availability.

More recent work on contaminants such as agricultural pesticides has demonstrated that several reef foundation species are highly sensitive to acute exposure of herbicides. The potential build-up of contaminants can weaken the health and resilience of corals and other organisms, making them more susceptible to disease outbreaks or climate impacts.

This island is a active volcano. Last eruption happened in 50 BCE according to research (that might change if better research is done in the future). That just means its fire and eruption days are not over. The volcano is just dormant at the moment and how long that is going to last is impossible to know.

I don't think many people are going to notice if an eruption is going to happen. The Bouvet Island is so remote that nobody is going to notice an eruption on the Island, not even a large eruption since there are no major flight routes passing over the island.

Volcano related information, https://volcano.si.edu/volcano...

Since the Bouvet island doesn't contain anything or anyone I don't have anything else to say about it. There is also close to 100% radio silence on the island since next ground based transmitter is far away. The only radio signals that can be detected might be either SW or up in the Ku band (maybe not). I am not sure about C band coverage in this part of the world.

http://americanhistory.si.edu/...

With all of the knowledge and know how of the past, why did it take 50 or 60 years for access to space to drop for once?

Because getting to space is technologically hard. It takes a while for economies of scale to build up enough to really make a big difference.

It took about that long for air travel to become reasonably affordable. Heck even today an estimated 80% of the world population has never flown. When I was born less than half of the US population had never set foot inside an aircraft. The term jet set originated from the fact that until the 1960s-70s air travel was too expensive for anyone but the very wealthy.

In the beginning you are building infrastructure, but after that is done, you should be using it for its intended purpose, not as some lifelong gravy train of project contracts.

Well bear in mind that we took a 30 year wrong turn with the shuttle which delayed a lot of that infrastructure. We're just now digging out of the hole from that.

Well, Zvezda's structural frame apparently dates back to 1985. That's a rather venerable age for a life support module in space, I'd think.

https://volcano.si.edu/volcano...

The article couldn't be bothered to actually include any of the photos taken from the plane, but I think you can find one of them here.

I recall reading some time ago that Mt Erebus had a unique type of low silicate lava

An anorthoclase phonolite in the lava lake, which is pretty uncommon. But phonolites themselves are less uncommon - I've scrambled over phonolite lava flows in Tenerife (porphyritic with orthoclase crystals, not anorthoclase ; meh!) myself. Beautiful "entrail pahoehoe" structures (looks like the guts falling out of a cow being butchered) on a 200-odd meter frozen lava fall. The flow was before written history on the island IIRC, but is probably only little over a millennium old. Phonolite is itself associated with mantle plumes, but the association is not exact - it can be formed in other environments.

Your reply suggests to me that relative to the continent above it, the plume is moving toward Mt Erebus. Does that make sense?

Without a far more detailed seismic network than is plausible in Antarctica (to establish that there is a deep magma source, and that it is a plume with a central conduit from extremely deep in the mantle as opposed to a more complex structure such as the EAR (which contains at least one plume as a minor component)), I'd be very hesitant to accept that there is a plume anywhere near Antarctica. While the idea of mantle plumes is interesting and would explain some things, it's much much harder to generate the evidence needed to to demonstrate that this example is a mantle plume originating near the core-mantle boundary, and staying in a fixed location relative to the moving mantle above it. That's only been well demonstrated for the Hawaiian plume and the Icelandic one, TTBOMK, and both of them can only be seismically demonstrated to a depth of less than a thousand kilometres - which is not what the text books say a plume is meant to be.

The whole "plume" story is attractive. But the proposed mechanisms for driving one are not convincing, the evidence is less than convincing, and the link between the proposed (unconvincing) mechanism and the observed rock types at surface is pretty weak too. I'm less than convinced by the whole story, and a lot of other geologists are too.

I know geologists are notorious for being picky and disputative about evidence. That's because it's damned hard to see more than about a half a millimetre (500 micrometres) into rock. Which makes seeing what is happening a thousand or two kilometres down a little hard.

Part of the "story" of mantle plumes is the proposal that they originate at the core-mantle boundary (+/- a hundred km or so - the thickness of the atmosphere) for whatever reasons, rise buoyantly vertically to the base of the lithosphere (undeviated by the convection currents over the 2500km of it's ascent), there producing a rather wide variety of undersaturated and/or peralkaline magmas. It's also a critical part of the dogma that the source regions don't move with time and they aren't displaced by the magma flow currents as the continents move above them. Which is a couple of bits of impossibility or implausibility too much for me, even after I've had my breakfast. And despite being asked, for decades, the "plume dogmatists" still haven't really produced a good answer to these questions. I remember reading about the theory, and these disputes with it, when I was a teenage school student in the late 1970s, when plate tectonics was fresh and new. Hell, I've asked questions like this after lectures by Dan "sea-floor spreading" MacKenzie about the history of plate tectonics, and he hasn't heard convincing answers either.

Those quibbles over the existence of plumes at all don't change the fact that if there were an identifiable plume in the area, it'd be making at most a couple of cm/year in any direction relative to the crust. We haven't been observing long enough and we don't have enough data on eruption distribution (in space or in time) in the puta

Actually, to find carbon dioxide levels higher than today you have to look back to the Miocene epoch, about 5.2 million years ago. There were not humans around then.

Homo Sapiens had not evolved yet but our Orrorin Tugenensis ancestors were alive and well.
http://humanorigins.si.edu/evi...

Its likely Homo Sapiens could survive as well. We are quite adaptable, as habitation in nearly every climate zone on the planet demonstrates. And now add modern technology.

Now I'm not arguing returning to the climate of that epoch is advisable but lets not pretend its some sort of death sentence for Homo Sapiens. It would be a painful transition given the rapid onset of the changes but quite survivable as an adaptable intelligent species that is not locked into a particular environment niche.

Was looking it up and saw that the USA owned the last remaining part of it. https://airandspace.si.edu/mul...
Any idea on how we got it?

Traditional wings were traditionally modeled as creating a circulation or series of vortexes around the wing imposed on the general airflow, just as if rotating cylinders were creating the lift.
So, yes, the general aerodynamics of this is not much different than that of traditional wings, just the method of creating circulation.

The science behind it is iffy, at best right now.

Actually, the science is pretty well understood. Even the engineering is pretty well understood. The biggest issues with hyperloop are the scale and the cargo.

There've been pretty impressive systems of "pneumatic tubes" that have been built for sending things around. Of course, those tubes were fairly small and they carried inanimate objects. Now we want to make them travel much further and be much bigger and carry people at high speeds, so there's bunches of issues there that need to be figured out.

And who wants to be stuck up there for five days?

Burt Rutan and Jeana Yeager, for two. https://airandspace.si.edu/col...

The first piece of experiment hardware selected for flight was a remote controlled mechanical arm. Formally known as the Soil Mechanics Surface Sampler (SMSS), this arm consisted of a simple tubular aluminum pantograph with a 13-centimeter long, five-centimeter wide scoop attached to the end. One electric motor on the SMSS allowed the pantograph to extend outwards from 58 to 150 centimeters while another opened and closed the door on the scoop. A third motor allowed movement through 112 of azimuth while a fourth provided 42 of motion in elevation. Used in conjunction with Surveyor’s slow-scan television camera, the SMSS would be operated remotely in near-real time by an operator on the Earth to provide information on the mechanical properties of the lunar soil up to a depth of half a meter. The SMSS would give scientists their first chance to touch the surface of the Moon.

The robotic arms on the shuttle and space station are also remotely controlled by humans.

Waldos are robots.

Homo Sapiens have been around between 100,000-200,000 years. We still have that new species smell about us.

http://humanorigins.si.edu/evi...

Just sayin'

> Yes yes I know about C and C++. That's like saying you can ride on a Ford Model T instead of nice Mercedes.

Hey! C++ isn't a Model T.

It's one of these!

To be fair though, RFCs aren't software. If I write an RFC defining how software to teleport beer should work that is one thing, but actually writing the software and making it work is another matter.

I look at RFCs kind of like patents. They formally describe methods, behaviors, research, or innovations of something related to the internet. They let everyone know of an idea so that everyone implementing that idea has a basis for things to work together. And they allow people to build upon those ideas in creating derivative works.

If you look at RFC561 there is even a sample email message. Shiva Ayyadurai might have created the first full and complete email system as we know it today, but he didn't create the concept of email. Even the Smithsonian National Museum of American History says as much:

Exchanging messages through computer systems, what most people call âoeemail,â predates the work of Ayyadurai. However, the museum found that Ayyaduraiâ(TM)s materials served as signposts to several stories about the American experience.

But there's a difference between having an idea and actually building something.

The USPTO would differ with you on that idea.

Who wants electricity in their home? It's a deadly killer! My house has been safely connected to the city tar gas plant for the last 120 years and my Welsbach mantle lamps are running just fine, thank you. B-P

For those interested, here's a two minute mini-history of the perils of installing electricity.

Thousands of years from now, when archaeologists are digging up our remains and examining the bone-structure, they are going to identify the remains as male or female by the subtle differences unique to each and identify the person as 'male' or 'female' based on their physiology.

Gender is not a social construct. Mental illness on the other hand is.

http://anthropology.si.edu/wri...

http://forensicoutreach.com/li...

You are ignoring the revenue side of things. Those batteries can earn capacity revenue, which will help finance this. This will be at the expense of capacity revenue that was going to old, dirty coal units. Further profitability can be gained by buying cheap load off peak, storing it in the batteries, then selling the more expensive load back to the market on peak. The price differential makes this a good value.

Once there is a critical mass of storage, the load curve will start flattening due to this load shifting. The amount of generation infrastructure that is needed solely to handle the highest parts of the load curve will no longer be needed. That is a massive amount of savings.

It's obvious you don't know much about the industry and just don't like this idea. Educate yourself.

Perhaps you should read what you link.

This are not "natural fluxes" this is the ordinary CO2 cycle.

Imagine for a moment, that rather than CO2 driving temperature, that temperature drives CO2

That is actually what is happening, on top of that. More CO2, more heat. More heat, even more CO2 and water vapour and MH4.

Oh, as for ocean pH neutralization, even if you burnt every molecule of petroleum on this planet, and shoved the CO2 directly into the oceans, you wouldn't change the pH appreciably
Plain wrong. We already have server problems due to ocean acidifying.
http://ocean.si.edu/ocean-acid...

the oceans are *literally* a world wide reservoir that outweighs any amount of CO2 we could conceivably throw at it.
Plain wrong. The newspapers are full with problems due to ocean acidifying.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

No idea why you are to dumb to google and spread nonsense instead.

I fucking hate sites that cause cookie storms.

I got hit by one today, at Chandra Observatory, of all places.

Set your cookies to request always and prepare for > 30 of them: http://chandra.si.edu/photo/20...

However, it doesn't seem like this solution of Mozilla's is a great one if one were to take the new default into consideration.

But it's why I'm still on v39.0 - can't keep up to all the changes

My cheeky comment was more to open a discussion on one aspect that always troubled me - the founders talked a good game, but they certainly didn't walk it. This well known violation seems at odds with their ideals.

I'll leave this and this here for you.

Further reading if desired. (those are the first 4 links in my search [5th link] - I didn't know why it would hurt either, so I Google'd it.).

How much does your $100 million satellite cost per-unit if you build five of them, instead? If a launch also costs $100 million, you might not bother, but if a launch costs $1million, would it be worth it to build enough to have a reasonable chance of success across several launches?

Depends on the nature of the satellite, I would think. Like the mirrors for space telescopes are ridiculously expensive high-precision work where building a spare just in case is out of the question.

What is not known by many, is that there is another, and rather flawless Hubble Telescope mirror made by Eastman Kodak.

http://airandspace.si.edu/coll...

It's an interesting subject. I could have found the problem with the Perkin Elmer mirror withan led and a 5 dollar home made tester. It was a shameful thing that the good mirror is sitting in a museum on earth, while the flawed one has cost so many millions to fix.

The Slashdot summary removed the "micro" symbol, so it should have been 80um x 115um.

It should also be emphasized that it was the smallest ink jet printed picture, because some of these are probably smaller.

Yes. There have been for many, many years. Many military aircraft used them, including the SR-71. Computer-aided celestial navigation is a long-solved problem.

The atmosphere is currently gaining only about half of what we pump into it. How do we account for the missing CO2? We find some of that missing CO2 in the oceans. Measurements indicate that oceans are acidifying. That means the oceans are currently absorbing CO2. You are right that this may not continue to be the case in the future. Oceans could become a net source of CO2 rather than a net sync. - http://ocean.si.edu/sites/defa...

If you fill the batteries in the low-price off-peak hours (admittedly not useful for solar except on weekends) and sell the energy during peak hours you can make a profit. Pumped storage facilities do just this. Unfortunately the good locations are mostly taken. Once batteries are cheap enough it will be profitable for them to use this method as well. That is, no renewable source is even needed, just fill the batteries from the wholesale market at night, sell during peak.

Adding extra storage capacity would also be a benefit to grid reliability because it can act as a reserve in case of unit outages (and doesn't have the supply issues that natural gas peakers sometimes have, especially in the winter). Long term, if you keep adding storage capacity to act as reserves, this works to reduce the maximum generation capacity needed by enabling you to effectively flatten the load curve by offsetting additional load above some baseline with stored energy.

At some point battery prices will drop low enough that state utility commissions will allow utilities to recover their costs for investing in the batteries. Utilities will buy them and include the cost + their standard markup into the distribution rate base. I don't know what that price point for commissions or wholesale storage companies would be, so this seems like an interesting topic to look into.

having said that, WHY isnt there a breakdown, line item, for all costs that our government spends?

There is, but you're clearly too lazy to look for it and almost certainly too lazy to actually read through it.

http://www.si.edu/content/pdf/...

That took all of 5 seconds on Google. That's FY2013 but it's hard to imagine anything significant changed for FY2014.

Reports similar to this are available for just about every government agency. The budget omnibus that congress passes is a matter of public record as is the requests that each government agency submits (which the budget omnibus is based on).

Of course they aren't going to just mail these reports to you on a subscription basis - you actually have to get off your ass and find them or... god forbid... ask for them!
=Smidge=

Ya...no direct evidence...except for:
-Fossils
-DNA, aka the universal genetic code
-Common traits and stages of life across species
-antibiotic/herbicide/pesticide resistance in bacteria plants
-ability to change the characteristics of living things through breeding
-long term evolutionary experiments, such as Lenski's E Coli experiment

http://www.scientificamerican....
http://humanorigins.si.edu/evi...
http://www.motherjones.com/pol...
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
http://myxo.css.msu.edu/ecoli/

No, Odyssey was a different device that came later. I'm talking about The Brown Box.

Really? You don't believe in acid rain damage? So who's been f*ing up statues? Is it evil environmentalists? Are they also the ones rigging the pH meters? Did they fake the science about how SO2 oxidizes to SO3 and then hygroscropically forms H2SO4 droplets? Damn them!

What about ozone don't you believe? That humans were extensively emitting CFCs? That CFCs have been measured in the stratosphere via sounding rockets, balloons, and aircraft? That CFCs at the levels measured demonstrably catalytically destroy ozone, and that it's a rather simple lab experiment to prove it? That ozone was on a demonstrably measurable decline and UV demonstrably measured on the rise? That the decline has significantly tapered off and even started to reverse a little since there was a crackdown on CFCs? Or, contrarily, do you accept all that but think that UV is harmless to humans?

Peak oil and peak food are not sciences. They're common in the popular press, in books, etc (and nowadays on blogs and forums), but have received rather limited review in scientific journals. Don't get me wrong, there have been some, but compared to other fields rather little, and the results have been mixed to say the least.

I read recently that the half life of DNA is a few hundred years. No matter how many flies trapped in amber we find, we will never be able to recover enough dinosaur DNA to make Jurassic Park happen.

Not quite. Half life is really not a particularly useful descriptor of how DNA degrades since it is not an 'all or nothing' sort of thing. We're getting better at sequencing DNA from organism tens of thousands of years old. Probably won't be able to get much beyond that, but it is possible than an exceptionally well preserved specimen could be found pushing the date back.

It looks like it is flexible wing without hinges. I thought that they started testing that a while ago on the F-111.

Oh, you mean wing warping? Now where have I see this before?

According to Manuel De Landa: http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/me...
"Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation. Certain standardizations, say, of electric outlet designs or of data-structures traveling through the Internet, may actually turn out to promote heterogenization at another level, in terms of the appliances that may be designed around the standard outlet, or of the services that a common data-structure may make possible. On the other hand, the mere presence of increased heterogeneity is no guarantee that a better state for society has been achieved. After all, the territory occupied by former Yugoslavia is more heterogeneous now than it was ten years ago, but the lack of uniformity at one level simply hides an increase of homogeneity at the level of the warring ethnic communities. But even if we managed to promote not only heterogeneity, but diversity articulated into a meshwork, that still would not be a perfect solution. After all, meshworks grow by drift and they may drift to places where we do not want to go. The goal-directedness of hierarchies is the kind of property that we may desire to keep at least for certain institutions. Hence, demonizing centralization and glorifying decentralization as the solution to all our problems would be wrong. An open and experimental attitude towards the question of different hybrids and mixtures is what the complexity of reality itself seems to call for. "

So, for example, if some centrally planned bureaucracy (say the USA in the 1930s) decides to have a nation-wide arts program, then you might see a lot of creativity there.
http://americanart.si.edu/exhi...
"In 1934, Americans grappled with an economic situation that feels all too familiar today. Against the backdrop of the Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's administration created the Public Works of Art Project--the first federal government program to support the arts nationally. Federal officials in the 1930s understood how essential art was to sustaining America's spirit. Artists from across the United States who participated in the program, which lasted only six months from mid-December 1933 to June 1934, were encouraged to depict "the American Scene." The Public Works of Art Project not only paid artists to embellish public buildings, but also provided them with a sense of pride in serving their country. They painted regional, recognizable subjects--ranging from portraits to cityscapes and images of city life to landscapes and depictions of rural life--that reminded the public of quintessential American values such as hard work, community and optimism."

Or about photography:
http://www.livinghistoryfarm.o...

Or other ways:
http://newdeal.feri.org/nchs/l...
"Activity in the arts was one aspect of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Established in April 1935 and directed by Harry Hopkins, its purpose was to provide socially useful work for the unemployed. WPA programs included the construction of public buildings such as schools, hospitals and courthouses; highways; recreational facilities such as athletic fields and parks and playgrounds; and conservation facilities such as fish hatcheries and bird sanctuaries. In addition four WPA arts projects ("Federal One") were established. "Federal One" not only provided work for artists, writers, musicians, and actors but nurtured young men and women who were embarking on a career in the arts during the Great Depression. Writers and artists such as Ralph Ellison and J

Is there a way to see if his immune system has developed something that could be useful to innoculate others? Thought go back to the first innoculations. http://amhistory.si.edu/polio/... - maybe this is the guy that hosts the solution? Adaptive immunity is very useful.

Not all cameras need electronics, so any device that tries to make current digital cameras not take a picture can be subverted. You can record images on silver nitrate (i.e. film) with a purely mechanical camera. If you take time to learn it, you can even learn appropriate settings to use without using a photo meter of any kind. When you are in the darkroom developing the images, you can shorten or lengthen the time if your exposure was a bit off. The execution of murderess Ruth Snyder was captured with the aid of a miniature plate camera custom-strapped to the ankle of Tom Howard, a Chicago Tribune photographer working in cooperation with the Tribune-owned New York Daily News. http://historywired.si.edu/obj...

[Sails] weren't much good from New York to California

On the contrary; sailing around Cape Horn was the fastest way, at least until the Transcontinental Railroad got built.

Orville and Wilbur Wright ran a bicycle shop.

The Wrights were machinists who built and sold bicycles of their own --- recognizably --- modern design. Original St. Clair bicycle [1898]

In their view, dynamic control in three dimensions was essential to successful heavier-than-air flight. It's an insight that would come naturally to a cyclist.

Kilauea discharges between 8,000 and 30,000 metric tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere each day. That is a single volcano. Roughly 20 volcanoes are erupting at any given time. That would mean that between 160,000 and 600,000 metric tonnes of CO2 are being put into the atmosphere by volcanoes every single day.

Global emissions of carbon dioxide by people in a recent year totaled over 30 gigatonnes (or 30 Gt), That is roughly 82,000 metric tones per day from humans. That is between one half and one seventh the amount put out by volcanoes. While the GPAC overstates the amount, he is not as wrong as you are.

Sources:
http://www.volcano.si.edu/faq.cfm#q3
http://hvo.wr.usgs.gov/volcanowatch/archive/2007/07_02_15.html
http://www.globalccsinstitute.com/insights/authors/derektaylor/2011/11/11/how-much-carbon-dioxide

(long story short: shattering a holy statue, or decapitating buddah is going to piss some people off).

Of sure, but it's OK to show off Abe Lincoln's hollowed out head...
http://3d.si.edu/explorer?modelid=27
even after his discisive intervention at the Battle of the Smithsonian... on the other hand he left Ben Stiller alive so now I'm conflicted...

Okay, it's even more awesome.

On the downloads page you can download the models in various forms - point cloud, mesh, and so on. Different formats, depending on the method used to get the model data (cat scan, laser scan, photographic, &c).

They mention in the about page that it would take 247 years of work 24/7 to capture the entire collection.

We could hire 247 people and get the entire collection online in 3 years (8 hour shifts). At $50,000 per person, that's about $13 million per year(*). Compare to the cost of the Obamacare website currently estimated at around $100 million and it has to be redone.

They've obviously shown "proof of concept" for getting the job done. Can we somehow just give them the money to complete it? Maybe a petition on "We the People"?

(*) Back-of-the-envelope calculation doesn't include cost of scanning equipment or materials, but note that there are a *lot* of museums in this country. We could invest in the infrastructure once and keep 300 people employed for decades putting this great stuff online.