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Check out the University of BC's Public Knowledge Project's Open Journal Systems. I've heard good things about it. It runs on PHP and MySQL, and should be pretty easy to setup. They have a demonstration online you can take a look at.

Check out the University of BC's Public Knowledge Project's Open Journal Systems. I've heard good things about it. It runs on PHP and MySQL, and should be pretty easy to setup. They have a demonstration online you can take a look at.

Yes, I know, there are quite a few differences, but it reminded me of this program which I spent a lot of time playing with when I was a kid hanging out in my dad's office at BBN.

That's right. I used the value of the eath's diameter for its radius. Substituting half of the value in my original calculations, I come up with: 11.294 KM/s.

Also, remember that I used an upper bounds; I said that an object would fall "less than 10 meters" in 1 second, since at the end of the second it would be going 9.8 m/s^2, so even if it acccelerated constantly at the greatest speed it will reach, it will only go less than 10 meters.

More precisely, this value is:
distance = initial distance + initial velocity * time + 1/2 g times time squared.

So, d = 1/2 (9.8), or 4.9. I guess if I'd had a better conceptual understanding, I would have realized initially that after 1 second, the total displacement is just half the acceleration, since I have enough calculus to know that the derivative of a quadratic is just twice linear, and at this point we start at 0, so the graph isn't translated at all.

Anyway, if instead of 0.01 for 10 meters, I add 0.0049 KM to the original 12756 KM (now 12756/2), my answer becomes: 7.905 KM/s.

In other words, almost precisely your "8.3 km/sec or thereabouts".

So, I had just two problems.
1. I used the diameter of the Earth for its radius.
2. I did not look up the simple formula to get a more precise value than my upper bounds, and did not have the conceptual framework to quickly realize that calculation isn't necessary.

Actually, I wonder now whether my answer isn't more correct than your 8.3 km/sec...I seem to be using more precise numbers, because you're using 7000 km, whereas 12756/2 is actually 6378 KM. (And the former number comes from NASA).
Actually, now that I think about it, when I put in 14000 for 12756 in my calculations, my answer is 8.282.
In other words: Our methods produce an equally correct result.

I do wonder though why you say something like "not a bad way to do the calculation, without access to calculus." I'm in calculus 1 now, and it might be helpful if you told me what in calculus would have helped me carry out the calculations.

-Robert.

PS. It occurs to me that "7.905 KM/s" is a number I arrived at using NASA's very precise "The diameter of the Earth at the equator is 12,756 kilometers (km)" [good, apparently, to 5 significant digits] and the accepted number 9.8 m/s for g, on average.

Googling "7.905 KM/s" returns two links, the second of which says:
" See if you can show that the orbital velocity at the Earth's surface (i.e. the speed required for a frictionless train moving through an Equatorial tunnel to be in free fall all the way around the Earth) is 7.905km/s."
This page is in the webspace of Jess Brewer, who appears to be a serious researcher at the University of British Columbia.

Googling /sec instead of /s, I get a page at Purdue University reading "Thus for Earth,
vc = 7.9 km/sec (~ 5 miles/second)
(to achieve a circular orbit about the Earth)" and another (cache) by a different professor carrying out the same calculations.
Both professors are physicists.
Searching "7.90 km/s" (ie with one fewer sigfig) returns "v_cir = [ G M_E/ R_E]^{1/2} = 7.90 km s^{-1} " here. This is also an academic site.
Rounding to 7.91 returns no relavant matches, but 7.9 (as many sig. fig.s as we had from g ~ 9.8) returns too many for me to look through. Adding "orbit" I find this page says "Remember: near earth orbital velocity is 7.9 km/s." Sounds authoritative.

So you see, my calculations are quite correct. :)

That's right. I used the value of the eath's diameter for its radius. Substituting half of the value in my original calculations, I come up with: 11.294 KM/s.

Also, remember that I used an upper bounds; I said that an object would fall "less than 10 meters" in 1 second, since at the end of the second it would be going 9.8 m/s^2, so even if it acccelerated constantly at the greatest speed it will reach, it will only go less than 10 meters.

More precisely, this value is:
distance = initial distance + initial velocity * time + 1/2 g times time squared.

So, d = 1/2 (9.8), or 4.9. I guess if I'd had a better conceptual understanding, I would have realized initially that after 1 second, the total displacement is just half the acceleration, since I have enough calculus to know that the derivative of a quadratic is just twice linear, and at this point we start at 0, so the graph isn't translated at all.

Anyway, if instead of 0.01 for 10 meters, I add 0.0049 KM to the original 12756 KM (now 12756/2), my answer becomes: 7.905 KM/s.

In other words, almost precisely your "8.3 km/sec or thereabouts".

So, I had just two problems.
1. I used the diameter of the Earth for its radius.
2. I did not look up the simple formula to get a more precise value than my upper bounds, and did not have the conceptual framework to quickly realize that calculation isn't necessary.

Actually, I wonder now whether my answer isn't more correct than your 8.3 km/sec...I seem to be using more precise numbers, because you're using 7000 km, whereas 12756/2 is actually 6378 KM. (And the former number comes from NASA).
Actually, now that I think about it, when I put in 14000 for 12756 in my calculations, my answer is 8.282.
In other words: Our methods produce an equally correct result.

I do wonder though why you say something like "not a bad way to do the calculation, without access to calculus." I'm in calculus 1 now, and it might be helpful if you told me what in calculus would have helped me carry out the calculations.

-Robert.

PS. It occurs to me that "7.905 KM/s" is a number I arrived at using NASA's very precise "The diameter of the Earth at the equator is 12,756 kilometers (km)" [good, apparently, to 5 significant digits] and the accepted number 9.8 m/s for g, on average.

Googling "7.905 KM/s" returns two links, the second of which says:
" See if you can show that the orbital velocity at the Earth's surface (i.e. the speed required for a frictionless train moving through an Equatorial tunnel to be in free fall all the way around the Earth) is 7.905km/s."
This page is in the webspace of Jess Brewer, who appears to be a serious researcher at the University of British Columbia.

Googling /sec instead of /s, I get a page at Purdue University reading "Thus for Earth,
vc = 7.9 km/sec (~ 5 miles/second)
(to achieve a circular orbit about the Earth)" and another (cache) by a different professor carrying out the same calculations.
Both professors are physicists.
Searching "7.90 km/s" (ie with one fewer sigfig) returns "v_cir = [ G M_E/ R_E]^{1/2} = 7.90 km s^{-1} " here. This is also an academic site.
Rounding to 7.91 returns no relavant matches, but 7.9 (as many sig. fig.s as we had from g ~ 9.8) returns too many for me to look through. Adding "orbit" I find this page says "Remember: near earth orbital velocity is 7.9 km/s." Sounds authoritative.

So you see, my calculations are quite correct. :)

#1, Google and see if someone else has already worked on the algorithm. "Nothing new under the sun".

#2, if that gives you no results, post the code or at least pseudo-code so we can comment. Not "I have a new miracle development that could be revolutionary; please comment on it with no clue as to exactly what it is or how it works."

#3, talk to a CS professor. You should know plenty of them.

And the obligatory link - http://www.cs.ubc.ca/spider/harrison/Java/sorting- demo.html.

It's not about spying or ICBM's or anything, the key factor here is, believe it or not, agriculture. I know other patriotic Indians have problems accepting this, but India is still largely an agriculture-based economy, with the population especially concentrated in rural areas. With the exploding population creating pressure on food resources, the Indian Council of Agricultural Research actively involves itself in creating better yielding food varieties .

Students of Indian history would have heard about the green revolution that created self-sustainence in food; a crucial post-independence achievement considering food scarcity situations such as the 1943 Bengal Famine (the one on which Amartya Sen did economic research and won the 1998 Nobel Prize for Economics).

Now with satellite technology, ICAR can identify which land areas are suitable for which crops and therefore goad farmers into growing those varieties (remember that India is a sub-continent; you have all sorts of terrain, from deserts to plains to plateaus to, of course, mountains.

So accurately knowing which crop goes best where is critical information for the hungry masses (over-cliched, but it's true). Methinks that this will be the biggest use, followed closely by telecommunications and satellite television AND then by urban planning (Mumbai will have 24.7 million people by 2005).

PS:- Note that I'm not saying that satellite technology wont be used for other purposes; I definitely want India to use cutting-edge technology against a couple of motherfuckers, but talking only about that would be misleading.

Actually, "fundamentally", a widget builder and a compiler are the same thing. You're taking a narrow view of code generation, though. Widget building is only one reason to generate code, and one that I agree doesn't seem to be done well in Java at the moment.

In general, a compiler is a program which accepts statements in a source language and outputs statements in a target language. All widget builders have some source language; some quite explicitly have a special-purpose text-based language, but even environments that don't have this, store their GUI layouts in some kind of data structure. They're nevertheless translating a source language, it just may not be human readable (or if you like, the GUI layout itself is the source language).

In some cases, these GUI description languages are interpreted rather than compiled. A good example of an interpreted GUI description language is HTML. I'm just mentioning this to try to un-narrow the scope of the discussion, because when I say "code generation", I don't mean "generating Java code from widget layout descriptions". That's just one small, narrow application of code generation, and not a good one on which to base your opinions about code generation.

Now I can address this:

however for now any code generation in Java is bad and is usually the reason for slowness in a modern Java application.

You're wrong, but it's probably because of how narrowly you're viewing code generation. In fact, regarding performance, code generation can often improve performance, when it's used as an alternative to doing things dynamically at runtime using reflection.

One particular area where your "it's all bad" theory doesn't hold up is where you do the generation yourself, rather than relying on some kind of general-purpose generator. That allows you to control for performance issues.

As I mentioned, Java programs necessarily include a lot of boilerplate code, and it's quite easy to abstract this out to a higher-level meta-definition language. Books have been written about this, for example, Program Generators with XML and Java.

For a trivial example, think of defining a bunch of bean-style properties on a class - what do you gain by writing that boilerplate code by hand? The answer is nothing, except a lot of unnecessarily verbose code.

For somewhat less trivial examples, try this paper on Explicit Programming . One example given in that paper is of a nine-line program that generates a 100-line class which includes standard implementations (chosen by the developer, not the tool) of five different patterns.

I'm not suggesting that people rush out and begin using experimental academic tools in their everyday work. But it's quite easy to write code to generate code, actually. Once you find yourself with a few thousand lines of code that were generated from a meta-description that's a couple hundred lines long, you might start seeing my point. That's exactly what I do with persistent objects, to name one application I use - having chosen a persistent object mechanism, I generate code to manage persistence from a meta-description of the object structures and relationships.

And in fact, you can use this approach to generate your own GUI code, too, the way you want it.

Perhaps in 10 years I will recind my comment about code generators in Java.

Or, you could start using them yourself now, and get a 10-year jump on the rest of the industry...

BTW, you mentioned Emacs earlier, so there's a slight possibility you have some familiarity and perhaps appreciation for Lisp. Well, developers who use Lisp and Scheme don't necessarily do code generation per se, but they use macros, which give them similar capabilities built right into the language. Java has nothing that powerful, but nothing stops you from providing a similar capability for yourself.

Basic physics, assuming constant acceleration (approximately correct for a rocket): v(t) = v(0) + aT

We know v(0) = 0 m/s, v(t) = Mach 5 = 1700 m/s, and T = 15 seconds. So let's find the acceleration. A little Algebra shows us:

a = ( v(t) - v(0) ) / T

a = ( 1700 m/s ) / 15 s = 113 m/s^2

Which is about 12Gs, twelve times the force of gravity on earth. Much more than the several G's of the Space Shuttle. More than a human can stand for more than a few seconds before passing out.

Resources:

• Basic Physics
• SI Unit Conversions

and here is a page full of Langlands' work.
This page looks particularly relevant.

and here is a page full of Langlands' work.
This page looks particularly relevant.

Would the same thing help jets fly faster/quieter? The way I see it is that if the jet moves through the air easier, less kinetic energy is wasted making a sonic boom.

And now, for your viewing pleasure... some really cool images! (that last one's a big + slow, but worth it)

Ali

As my father (who actually moved to Paris in 1967 to be near the then most powerful computer available to him) used to say, "if you're not doing molecular integrals, you're not computing".

I learned my computational physics at the feet of Matt Choptuik , who is apparently just about the world's leading expert on computational relativity. He is a great advocate of Fortran, and libraries like LAPAK for linear algebra. he also however, preaches the gospel of making machine readable output which you then analyse with some other software. I for example,do simulations in loading of DNA for capillary electrophorsis. This requires solving the Navier-Stokes equation dC/dt=k*dC/dx with charge conservation and chemical equilibrium going on. My code just spits out big files of numbers, which I stick into Matlab and make animated plots of the time evolution of the system. Fortran has killer libraries for this stuff, and it's fast and can be run on whatever platform is lying around. Matt's crew uses open source graphics tools to look at their data, and like command line stuff like gnuplot. That lets them potentially run the program and then the graphic analysis all from the same shell script. Killer.

I think people get upset about fortran because they're thinking of trying complicated stuff. Don't sweat it, it's only about the differential equations.

Robin

Gravitational lensing has been observed; here are some photos.

Since at $5/burn is steep enough that anyone who doesn't already have a burner would probably come out ahead buying their own (about 20-30 disks worth should pay for it)

That's $5 Australian, between $3 and $2.50 US per burn. ($1 Aus this morning was 57c US, but it's been less than 55c US for most of last year). But since according to here CD writers in Oz are only about $125 Aus, then you're right.

Aspect-Oriented Programming
Subject-Oriented Programming
Hyperspaces
Conceptual Modules

I've been told this on several occasions by people who -are- well up on card security. The PIN is certainly stored on the card in some applications.

The PIN is obviously -not- stored plaintext, but as a DES encrypted number somehow. This may not be true for all systems but if you look halfway down here or here
You will get the general idea.

On the other hand, other sites tell you differently.

This Pollpoll refutes the data.

Here is a poll of the subject

Here is a poll supporting the data.

From: sethable@my-dejanews.com

Subject: [Eva][FanFic] Shinji's first time

Shinji Smokes Crack for the First Time

Shinji looks at the white substance in the ziplock baggie with a mixture of trepidation and anticipation.

"What is it?" he asks Rei.

"It's 97% pure Brazillian crack." she says. "It will bring you in sync with your EVA."

Shinji doesn't want to look like a wimp in front of Rei, so he takes a deep breath, and smokes the whole bag!

"aaaaAH.uhggg...Ah-ah-ah!!! Aaaaaah... Oh yeah, that's the stuff."

"Oh Shinji, you're my hero!" says Rei. "Let me be your crack ho!"

"Whateva, biatch." says Shinji, eyes glazed, head bopping to Wu-Tang.

THE END

based on true story.

from here

I hated that show for what it did to me. Those last couple of eposides - what a complete let-down!

Ok, now I gave a try at Jasper, a sample jpeg2k encoder. But I think I've done something wrong: $ ./jasper --input ~/test.jpg --output ~/test.jp2 --input-format jpg --output-format jp2 --verbose JasPer Transcoder (Version 1.500.4). Copyright (c) 1999-2000 Image Power, Inc. and the University of British Columbia. Copyright (c) 2001-2002 Michael David Adams. All rights reserved. For more information about this software, please visit the following web sites/pages: http://www.ece.ubc.ca/~mdadams/jasper http://www.imagepower.com To be added to the (moderated) JasPer software announcements mailing list, send an email to: jasper-announce-subscribe@yahoogroups.com To be added to the (unmoderated) JasPer software discussion mailing list, send an email to: jasper-discussion-subscribe@yahoogroups.com Please send any bug reports to: mdadams@ieee.org warning: color model apparently not RGB decoding time = 1.960000 encoding time = 13.530000 $ ls -la test.jp? -rw-r--r-- 1 foobar users 1815731 Apr 7 23:15 test.jp2 -rw-r--r-- 1 foobar users 1118155 Apr 7 23:14 test.jpg any clues?

You might want to ask Tom Lane, head of the Independent JPEG Group, for his opinion.

It seems that adding jpeg2000 support would get us involved in a legal mess. If you look at appendix L of the jpeg2000 draft, there are 22 companies who believe that implementing the spec may require use of their patents. From http://www.jpeg.org/CDs15444.htm :

Particular attention is drawn to the use within the standard of selected technology or algorithms which are claimed to be protected by national and/or international patents. In the case of technology submitted for consideration by JPEG for incorporation in Part 1 of the standard, the JPEG committee believes that the individual organisations concerned will make available licences to use this intellectual property, on a royalty- and fee-free basis, under specified conditions which may apply only to conforming implementations of the standard. These conditions are available on application to the organisations concerned, which are listed in an Annex to the document.

It is of course still possible that other organisations or individuals may claim intellectual property rights that affect implementation of the standard, and any implementors are urged to carry out their own searches and investigations in this area. The JPEG committee requests any organisations or individuals claiming (or being aware of claims) that any of the committee drafts available for download here infringes other intellectual property rights to provide information and/or evidence to substantiate their claim to the JPEG Convener in the first instance.

Moving on to more practical considerations, there is one open (sort of) C implementation of the jpeg2000 standard that I'm aware of, Jasper:

http://www.ece.ubc.ca/~mdadams/jasper/

The licensing terms are specified in this document:

http://www.ece.ubc.ca/~mdadams/jasper/LICENSE-1.00 0

While I'm not a lawyer, the impression I get is that once ISO officially publishes part 5 of the jpeg200 standard we're free to use the library as we like.

You might want to ask Tom Lane, head of the Independent JPEG Group, for his opinion.

It seems that adding jpeg2000 support would get us involved in a legal mess. If you look at appendix L of the jpeg2000 draft, there are 22 companies who believe that implementing the spec may require use of their patents. From http://www.jpeg.org/CDs15444.htm :

Particular attention is drawn to the use within the standard of selected technology or algorithms which are claimed to be protected by national and/or international patents. In the case of technology submitted for consideration by JPEG for incorporation in Part 1 of the standard, the JPEG committee believes that the individual organisations concerned will make available licences to use this intellectual property, on a royalty- and fee-free basis, under specified conditions which may apply only to conforming implementations of the standard. These conditions are available on application to the organisations concerned, which are listed in an Annex to the document.

It is of course still possible that other organisations or individuals may claim intellectual property rights that affect implementation of the standard, and any implementors are urged to carry out their own searches and investigations in this area. The JPEG committee requests any organisations or individuals claiming (or being aware of claims) that any of the committee drafts available for download here infringes other intellectual property rights to provide information and/or evidence to substantiate their claim to the JPEG Convener in the first instance.

Moving on to more practical considerations, there is one open (sort of) C implementation of the jpeg2000 standard that I'm aware of, Jasper:

http://www.ece.ubc.ca/~mdadams/jasper/

The licensing terms are specified in this document:

http://www.ece.ubc.ca/~mdadams/jasper/LICENSE-1.00 0

While I'm not a lawyer, the impression I get is that once ISO officially publishes part 5 of the jpeg200 standard we're free to use the library as we like.

If you feel adventurous you can try and duplicate what this guy is doing:

http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~tbeamish/digitalturntable.ht ml

They are using AlsaPlayer (shameless plug :) for doing sound output and scratching. I'm currently working on a software only scratchin system, much like TerminatorX.

Incidentally, I just heard a rumour that FinalScratch is indeed using some parts of AlsaPlayer, the plugin system. Wonder if that's true.

-adnans

I just went to a presentation from my local LUG about this very thing. It was by the IT guy from the local university (ubc) who did exactly that. They have a mix of Solaris and Linux and Windows and he setup a unified ldap thing so that they could get rid of NIS.

He promised to put the details up here in a week or so. In the meantime, get openLDAP and the pam modules from padl.com

He said that all the schemas are there in the source, and that this is the way of the future.

A lot of universities don't have caches - trying to cache web content for the (approx) 9000 students in UBC's dorms would be a nightmare, and if those caches included 600-700 meg files, resources would be taxed.

A lot of universities (larger ones anyway) tend to have their own file mirrors, and if not, they are often connected to larger universities which do, sometimes over private academic networks.

A HREF="ftp://ftp.crc.ca/">ftp.crc.ca, for example, my personal favourite Debian mirror, is connected to the CA*Net III, as are all major universities in Canada. This gives a friend at the University of New Brunswick the ability to max out his network card pulling down ISOs, Debian packages, and anything else, over an ultra-fast network link that costs the school absolutely nothing.

Perhaps more universities could benefit from building thier own such networks between each other. This is, after all, how the Internet got started, why not start again?

--Dan

The Press Release" was dated 20 Nov 2001 but MOST will not be launched until Oct 2002. My post was accepted in Nov but was delayed in posting due to a bug in the database which showed its date as 31 Dec 1968. I emailed Hemos and he fixed it Christmas eve.

The Canadian Space Agency describes MOST as a next generation microsatellite that will be the world's smallest astronomical space telescope, capable of measuring the ages of stars in our galaxy and perhaps even unlocking mysteries of the universe itself.. You are probally reffering to SCISAT1 on which will be the MAESTRO instrument (Measurements of Aerosol Extinction in the Stratosphere and Troposphere Retrieved by Occultation). SCISAT1 is due for launch in Dec 2002. There are other projects here.

The Press Release" was dated 20 Nov 2001 but MOST will not be launched until Oct 2002. My post was accepted in Nov but was delayed in posting due to a bug in the database which showed its date as 31 Dec 1968. I emailed Hemos and he fixed it Christmas eve.

The Canadian Space Agency describes MOST as a next generation microsatellite that will be the world's smallest astronomical space telescope, capable of measuring the ages of stars in our galaxy and perhaps even unlocking mysteries of the universe itself.. You are probally reffering to SCISAT1 on which will be the MAESTRO instrument (Measurements of Aerosol Extinction in the Stratosphere and Troposphere Retrieved by Occultation). SCISAT1 is due for launch in Dec 2002. There are other projects here.

I take umbrage that you would say my comments are misleading. From Oxford dictionary: humble >adjective (humbler, humblest) 1 having or showing a modest or low estimate of one's own importance. 2 of low rank. 3 of modest pretensions or dimensions.

The MOST as described in the project proposal - STELLAR SEISMOLOGY FROM SPACE is a 15 cm optical telescope with a broadband photometer. While the Hubble is larger (2.4m telescope) it has a number of instruments such as the Wide Field Planetary Camera with a role of trying to investigate the age of the universe.

So it is literally true that the MOST is a more humble version of the Hubble as they are both space telescopes trying to investigate the age of the universe.

As for your second comment, one of the MOST's team leaders was on a CBC radio science show and he said that in addition to the images available through the web site(like hubble), an unprecedented amount of time will be allocated to amateur observer projects through a public outreach programme. He also said that the project could last for over ten years. Now it is hard to say exactly how many astronomers(professional, amatuer, casual) will use data from MOST but it is safe to say that many will and the Canadian Space Agency will be getting good value from its $12 million(cdn) investment.

I take umbrage that you would say my comments are misleading. From Oxford dictionary: humble >adjective (humbler, humblest) 1 having or showing a modest or low estimate of one's own importance. 2 of low rank. 3 of modest pretensions or dimensions.

The MOST as described in the project proposal - STELLAR SEISMOLOGY FROM SPACE is a 15 cm optical telescope with a broadband photometer. While the Hubble is larger (2.4m telescope) it has a number of instruments such as the Wide Field Planetary Camera with a role of trying to investigate the age of the universe.

So it is literally true that the MOST is a more humble version of the Hubble as they are both space telescopes trying to investigate the age of the universe.

As for your second comment, one of the MOST's team leaders was on a CBC radio science show and he said that in addition to the images available through the web site(like hubble), an unprecedented amount of time will be allocated to amateur observer projects through a public outreach programme. He also said that the project could last for over ten years. Now it is hard to say exactly how many astronomers(professional, amatuer, casual) will use data from MOST but it is safe to say that many will and the Canadian Space Agency will be getting good value from its $12 million(cdn) investment.

First off, the MOST (Microgravity and Oscillations of Stars) telescope is not "a more humble version of Hubble". The Hubble space telescope is a more-or-less general purpose intrument. By contrast, MOST has a narrow focus: to make photometric measurements of tiny stellar oscillations. This is something that Hubble may not actually be properly equipped to do, and even if it is, its science mission is much more generic, and no observer could get so much HST time for a such a narrow-focus subject as MOST's.

Secondly, there are not "millions of astronomers" in the world! (at least not professional astronomers...) There are a few thousands at most...

One of the team leaders was on a CBC radio science show. He said that while the $3 billion Hubble was designed to be good at many different observation tasks, the MOST will be great in only a few limited tasks. It would be, as noted in the proposal STELLAR SEISMOLOGY FROM SPACE , ironic if an optical telescope only 15 cm across, armed only with a broadband photometer and with a budget of only about Cdn$12M, could probe the cores of stars and set a limit on the age of the Universe thus shedding new light on a fundamental question in cosmology.

He also said that an unprecedented amount of time will be allocated to amateur observer projects through a public outreach programme.

After MOST achieves its primary scientific goals, we plan to give the Canadian public a chance to make observations with this unique space observatory. In conjunction with the RASC (Royal Astronomical Society of Canada), an Amateur Observers' Contest will be held. Amateur astronomers and students will be able to submit observing proposals for MOST, with the technical support of Canadian astronomers.

The MOST Project also plans to spread information about our project and its science through the Pacific Space Centre in Vancouver, B.C.

One of the team leaders was on a CBC radio science show. He said that while the $3 billion Hubble was designed to be good at many different observation tasks, the MOST will be great in only a few limited tasks. It would be, as noted in the proposal STELLAR SEISMOLOGY FROM SPACE , ironic if an optical telescope only 15 cm across, armed only with a broadband photometer and with a budget of only about Cdn$12M, could probe the cores of stars and set a limit on the age of the Universe thus shedding new light on a fundamental question in cosmology.

He also said that an unprecedented amount of time will be allocated to amateur observer projects through a public outreach programme.

After MOST achieves its primary scientific goals, we plan to give the Canadian public a chance to make observations with this unique space observatory. In conjunction with the RASC (Royal Astronomical Society of Canada), an Amateur Observers' Contest will be held. Amateur astronomers and students will be able to submit observing proposals for MOST, with the technical support of Canadian astronomers.

The MOST Project also plans to spread information about our project and its science through the Pacific Space Centre in Vancouver, B.C.

Only so long as we do not get the equivalent of the Holy Grail in Outer Space. Although that could be fun in itself.

first off. i wouldn't consider a LED any less dangerous than a laser. yes, a laser will generally generate a higher powered and more focused beam, but the "dangerous" lasers used in telecomm very often will not exceed 5 to 10dBm.

5mW = 6.99dBm. i wouldn't trust looking at anything with +dbm fairly concentrated source... would you?

on that note, there's lots of info on laser safety at google

a nice pretty chart courtesy of waterloo pointing out what's at risk: your retina, your colour vision, night vision, and skin burns. it's skin burns that are unlikely at such low levels, not eye dammage.

here's an abstract from a ubc page:
"Laser light in the visible to near infrared spectrum (i.e., 400 - 1400 nm) can cause damage to the retina resulting in scotoma (blind spot in the fovea). This wave band is also know as the "retinal hazard region"."

STORY TIME:
i had a co-worker that used to tell me not to worry about the 1500nm range, as "it's only the 1310nm range that you have to be worried about, sheesh." i was nutorious for turning off the laser every time was changing connections.

i probably had a over a mil worth of devices and test equipment on my bench. had a nice automated test (LabView) running. 5dBm Tx laser (MZ pumped up to 10gig internal modulation - yeah baby!), a few km (miles, whatever) of fiber, variable attenuator (VOA), and a nice 10gig Rx (APD).

so anyways, the freeking comm cables (HPIB) controlling the VOA went skitzoid or something. the VOA reset to ZERO attenuation. only a few seconds later, and the APD was fried. (currents jumped from low double/tripple digits to four digits. in mA. so yes, that's amps.)

my stomach sank as i saw the bit error rate (on the BERT) go to 100%. several grand. poof. gone... just like that.

THE POINT OF THE STORY:
i got the idea pretty quick that even components designed to handle that stuff get very cranky very quickly. let alone your eyes. you've only got 1 chance with 'em... don't muck it up.

SIDENOTES:
- from then on in my very short distance tests had a 12dB fixed optical attenuator (less than $20?) instead of relying on a VOA (probably a few grand).
- oh... and i stuck to what i was supposed to be testing: over a few hundred km instead of a few km. heh heh hah... oops.

Although the URL you gave referring to the .edu TLD may work, the correct URL for UBC is actually www.ubc.ca.

The .edu alias is there for idiots who can't work out that the University of British Columbia is not in the US.

Then there are the mining methods. Everybody's favorite part of a mining operation has never been attempted in space and it is not clear if the explosives used in our atmosphere will work in a vacuum (emulsions and gels will volatilize and disappear, ANFO can't be mixed due to the lack of diesel in orbit, etc...). We need to start really small in orbit to create this infrastructure to provide us mining types with enough gear to properly break rocks

Another example of how far we need to go, consider that terrestrial rock drills won't work in space. All drills require a flushing medium to lubricate the bit and flush out rock chips. We use air, water, and drilling mud for that application here on Earth, but all these either won't work or are too valuable to waste in blowing crap out of a hole. The article made reference to research into drilling methods for space, but remember that we are really starting over from scratch. What we do on Earth won't work in space.

Then there is the whole issue of mineral processing the ores into useful concentrates and metals (I'm ignoring mining for volatiles). Concentration by flotation and leaching simply won't work, pyrometallurgy will be tough to control, and dry gravity methods need artifical gravity.

We'll get there, and we will mine the asteroids. I just don't think it will happen commercially in my lifetime.

-AD

Then there are the mining methods. Everybody's favorite part of a mining operation has never been attempted in space and it is not clear if the explosives used in our atmosphere will work in a vacuum (emulsions and gels will volatilize and disappear, ANFO can't be mixed due to the lack of diesel in orbit, etc...). We need to start really small in orbit to create this infrastructure to provide us mining types with enough gear to properly break rocks

Another example of how far we need to go, consider that terrestrial rock drills won't work in space. All drills require a flushing medium to lubricate the bit and flush out rock chips. We use air, water, and drilling mud for that application here on Earth, but all these either won't work or are too valuable to waste in blowing crap out of a hole. The article made reference to research into drilling methods for space, but remember that we are really starting over from scratch. What we do on Earth won't work in space.

Then there is the whole issue of mineral processing the ores into useful concentrates and metals (I'm ignoring mining for volatiles). Concentration by flotation and leaching simply won't work, pyrometallurgy will be tough to control, and dry gravity methods need artifical gravity.

We'll get there, and we will mine the asteroids. I just don't think it will happen commercially in my lifetime.

-AD

Then there are the mining methods. Everybody's favorite part of a mining operation has never been attempted in space and it is not clear if the explosives used in our atmosphere will work in a vacuum (emulsions and gels will volatilize and disappear, ANFO can't be mixed due to the lack of diesel in orbit, etc...). We need to start really small in orbit to create this infrastructure to provide us mining types with enough gear to properly break rocks

Another example of how far we need to go, consider that terrestrial rock drills won't work in space. All drills require a flushing medium to lubricate the bit and flush out rock chips. We use air, water, and drilling mud for that application here on Earth, but all these either won't work or are too valuable to waste in blowing crap out of a hole. The article made reference to research into drilling methods for space, but remember that we are really starting over from scratch. What we do on Earth won't work in space.

Then there is the whole issue of mineral processing the ores into useful concentrates and metals (I'm ignoring mining for volatiles). Concentration by flotation and leaching simply won't work, pyrometallurgy will be tough to control, and dry gravity methods need artifical gravity.

We'll get there, and we will mine the asteroids. I just don't think it will happen commercially in my lifetime.

-AD

Then there are the mining methods. Everybody's favorite part of a mining operation has never been attempted in space and it is not clear if the explosives used in our atmosphere will work in a vacuum (emulsions and gels will volatilize and disappear, ANFO can't be mixed due to the lack of diesel in orbit, etc...). We need to start really small in orbit to create this infrastructure to provide us mining types with enough gear to properly break rocks

Another example of how far we need to go, consider that terrestrial rock drills won't work in space. All drills require a flushing medium to lubricate the bit and flush out rock chips. We use air, water, and drilling mud for that application here on Earth, but all these either won't work or are too valuable to waste in blowing crap out of a hole. The article made reference to research into drilling methods for space, but remember that we are really starting over from scratch. What we do on Earth won't work in space.

Then there is the whole issue of mineral processing the ores into useful concentrates and metals (I'm ignoring mining for volatiles). Concentration by flotation and leaching simply won't work, pyrometallurgy will be tough to control, and dry gravity methods need artifical gravity.

We'll get there, and we will mine the asteroids. I just don't think it will happen commercially in my lifetime.

-AD

Then there are the mining methods. Everybody's favorite part of a mining operation has never been attempted in space and it is not clear if the explosives used in our atmosphere will work in a vacuum (emulsions and gels will volatilize and disappear, ANFO can't be mixed due to the lack of diesel in orbit, etc...). We need to start really small in orbit to create this infrastructure to provide us mining types with enough gear to properly break rocks

Another example of how far we need to go, consider that terrestrial rock drills won't work in space. All drills require a flushing medium to lubricate the bit and flush out rock chips. We use air, water, and drilling mud for that application here on Earth, but all these either won't work or are too valuable to waste in blowing crap out of a hole. The article made reference to research into drilling methods for space, but remember that we are really starting over from scratch. What we do on Earth won't work in space.

Then there is the whole issue of mineral processing the ores into useful concentrates and metals (I'm ignoring mining for volatiles). Concentration by flotation and leaching simply won't work, pyrometallurgy will be tough to control, and dry gravity methods need artifical gravity.

We'll get there, and we will mine the asteroids. I just don't think it will happen commercially in my lifetime.

-AD

Then there are the mining methods. Everybody's favorite part of a mining operation has never been attempted in space and it is not clear if the explosives used in our atmosphere will work in a vacuum (emulsions and gels will volatilize and disappear, ANFO can't be mixed due to the lack of diesel in orbit, etc...). We need to start really small in orbit to create this infrastructure to provide us mining types with enough gear to properly break rocks

Another example of how far we need to go, consider that terrestrial rock drills won't work in space. All drills require a flushing medium to lubricate the bit and flush out rock chips. We use air, water, and drilling mud for that application here on Earth, but all these either won't work or are too valuable to waste in blowing crap out of a hole. The article made reference to research into drilling methods for space, but remember that we are really starting over from scratch. What we do on Earth won't work in space.

Then there is the whole issue of mineral processing the ores into useful concentrates and metals (I'm ignoring mining for volatiles). Concentration by flotation and leaching simply won't work, pyrometallurgy will be tough to control, and dry gravity methods need artifical gravity.

We'll get there, and we will mine the asteroids. I just don't think it will happen commercially in my lifetime.

-AD

Then there are the mining methods. Everybody's favorite part of a mining operation has never been attempted in space and it is not clear if the explosives used in our atmosphere will work in a vacuum (emulsions and gels will volatilize and disappear, ANFO can't be mixed due to the lack of diesel in orbit, etc...). We need to start really small in orbit to create this infrastructure to provide us mining types with enough gear to properly break rocks

Another example of how far we need to go, consider that terrestrial rock drills won't work in space. All drills require a flushing medium to lubricate the bit and flush out rock chips. We use air, water, and drilling mud for that application here on Earth, but all these either won't work or are too valuable to waste in blowing crap out of a hole. The article made reference to research into drilling methods for space, but remember that we are really starting over from scratch. What we do on Earth won't work in space.

Then there is the whole issue of mineral processing the ores into useful concentrates and metals (I'm ignoring mining for volatiles). Concentration by flotation and leaching simply won't work, pyrometallurgy will be tough to control, and dry gravity methods need artifical gravity.

We'll get there, and we will mine the asteroids. I just don't think it will happen commercially in my lifetime.

-AD

Then there are the mining methods. Everybody's favorite part of a mining operation has never been attempted in space and it is not clear if the explosives used in our atmosphere will work in a vacuum (emulsions and gels will volatilize and disappear, ANFO can't be mixed due to the lack of diesel in orbit, etc...). We need to start really small in orbit to create this infrastructure to provide us mining types with enough gear to properly break rocks

Another example of how far we need to go, consider that terrestrial rock drills won't work in space. All drills require a flushing medium to lubricate the bit and flush out rock chips. We use air, water, and drilling mud for that application here on Earth, but all these either won't work or are too valuable to waste in blowing crap out of a hole. The article made reference to research into drilling methods for space, but remember that we are really starting over from scratch. What we do on Earth won't work in space.

Then there is the whole issue of mineral processing the ores into useful concentrates and metals (I'm ignoring mining for volatiles). Concentration by flotation and leaching simply won't work, pyrometallurgy will be tough to control, and dry gravity methods need artifical gravity.

We'll get there, and we will mine the asteroids. I just don't think it will happen commercially in my lifetime.

-AD

Hey, underpaidISPtech here.

I have only 3 years experience with computers, use Linux, FreeBSD, amd am pretty familiar with
all versions of Windows. I run a small website that implements a streaming audio service, and my server is the host for this company.

I have *no* A+, Network+, MCSE (though I'm studying the win2k course) CCNA, Novell, or any certs at all. I have the opportunity to take this course (I was told by the Program Head that I am overqualified), but money is tight (I make CDN$12/hr).

I am stuck doing lousy helldesk in this shit economy, work the graveyard shift at a stupid company, and cannot afford to pay the ~$15,000 CDN to get certs at the colleges here (www.ubc.ca, www.bcit.ca, www.cdic.ca). And to top it all off, no one will touch me without certs. Some courses are full-time and I would qualify for a student loan, but most are part-time and I would not qualify for a loan.

So what the hell is a guy supposed to do? I'm 26 yrs old, how the hell am I supposed to get a challenging, well-paid job when the most overrated and useless cert (MSCE) is the first thing that employers check for?

You seem to have been around for a while, what do you suggest? Bite the bullet and swim in debt? What cert would you recommend above all else?

If you ever visit Vancouver, go to Wreck Beach - it's the only topless beach in North America (so I'm told), and it's even on/near the UBC campus.

Just a little something to remind you of home. =;>

--Dan

The effect of gravitational lensing depends on our alignment to the source. In a perfect or near perfect alignment (the case here), we see many rings and arcs. Slightly off we see arclets, followed by weak distortions. The closer to perfect alignment the better, as the magnification effect is stronger and rings, arcs, and mulitple images allow the calulation of mass and distance to both the source and the lensed matter.

You can find better explanations and animated examples by searching a bit on google.

Xerox has had this going for a while. It's been demoed at retail stores (flexible hanging banners with changing messages).

Here's a list of on-line electronic paper resources gathered less than a year ago by Shawn Hellenius.

If I were American, I'd be thinking about emigration at this point.

Traditionally we Canadians love needling Americans like a younger sibling needles their big sibling, but in all honesty, anyone who wants to settle down north of the 49th will be welcomed with open arms.

After all, it's not the first time.