Slashdot Mirror

Situated atop an extended mast, SSI will provide images at a height two meters above the ground, roughly the height of a tall person. SSI simulates the human eye with its two optical lens system that will give three-dimensional views of the arctic plains. The instrument will also simulate the resolution of human eyesight using a charged-coupled device that produces high density 1024 x 1024 pixel images. But SSI exceeds the capabilities of the human eye by using optical and infrared filters, allowing multispectral imaging at 12 wavelengths of geological interest and atmospheric interest.

My Nikon D50 captures some of the UV and IR as well. That's the other reason everyone uses a UV filter on their lenses (the first being, it's a cheap way to protect the camera lens that might well be worth more than the camera). With a special filter, I can take IR pictures with my Nikon. Even your eyes pick up a bit of the UV -- if you look at a blacklight bulb, it's hard to focus on -- the lenses in your eyes focus visible light and don't do as good a job on the UV.

Even more entertaining, she's a lot of people's worst nightmare:

• The Muslim extremists are horrified that a woman is accomplishing so much...and not having to walk 10 paces behind the Soyuz on the way to orbit.
• The Christian extremists are horrified that a woman is accomplsihing so much...and not having to walk 10 paces behind the Soyuz on the way to orbit.
• The Iranians are horrified because it's showing their people what the West and a modern lifestyle can provide.
• George Allen is terrified he'll forget and refer to her as "Macaca".
• The American loonies -- how long until the paranoid "They shouldn't allow Muslims on the space station" screaming starts?
• Slashdot readers are horrified because she's a beautiful, intelligent woman who wouldn't go out with them, if they could even get the courage to ask her out in the first place.
• I'm horrified because I blogged about Ms. Ansari going 4 days ago and never thought to submit it to Slashdot.

Godspeed Anoushe Ansari. I hope you have a great time.

Having blogged for several years, I've come to wish I'd started out and remained anonymous. While I might be willing to expose my own mistakes and foibles, the things I say can unintentionally hurt those I love. As someone who is active in my church, there are certain topics I dare not go near, and other topics I wonder if I'm just asking for trouble. The "Deb Series," while possibly some of my best writing, also caused problems.

I've watched bloggers get serious grief from families, co-workers and other communities they belong to because of what they write. The lessons are painful to watch.

In my own case, in the real world, I've trashed my career multiple times for things like accademic integrity and standing up for a co-worker who's being sexually harassed. I've lost friends for saying the truth, and God help me, it's made me a bit of a coward. I've been burned; I don't like it. I'm willing to be burned again, but it's going to have to be a serious fight. On some issues, I've backed down.

I hate that, but if I don't protect myself, I won't do anyone any good.

There's a book out right now, "Orbit by John J. Nance that speaks of a man alone on a doomed and communicationless 3 hour orbital tour. The man is free to write the truth because he believes he is going to die and the laptop will not be recovered for decades. He doesn't have to worry about what people will think. He also doesn't know there's a one-way connection to Earth, and billions of people are reading his every word.

I wish I could blog like that. I'm not sure why I haven't just scrapped my current blog and started anew, except that I doubt it would stay anonymous very long.

Anonymity provides a freedom that is both precious and necessary for freedom to flourish. Perhaps anonymity will be crushed beneath an over-reaching government. The loss may not be apparent initially, but in the long term, it will be devastating.

Freedom of speech often needs the freedom to be anonymous.

The woman learned to rotate the plate. But knowing the cake was still there did not enable her to percieve the cake. Now, I'm going on Minsky's "Society of Mind" here, but think of the brain as being a bundle of subroutines, and subroutines pass information to each other. A segment of the mind invoved with perceiving "left" died in the woman. Even though she was intelligent and could learn to cope with this damage, she could not gain back all of what she lost. I suppose a damaged driver is the closest example on a computer. I've had situations where the computer knew the printer was there, knew the inks were there, but it lost the ability to print blue. For computers, updating the driver is enough to repair the problem. We can't update "drivers" in the human brain, and some of them are hard-wired in.

The mind is a bizarre creation. We think of ourselves as logical and able to adapt, but anyone with a brain injury or depression understands that our brains lie to us at the best of times, and when something goes wrong, the mind can be downright treacherous.

The pattern continues as the number of dimensions increases. Gravity keeps getting weaker the more dimensions there are, because there's more to cover as distance increases.

I tried to create a simple explanation of why gravity gets weaker as dimensions increase. You can read it at UnSpace.

The pictures are a little crude, but I think they show the basic concept.

Reptile husbandry is incredibly difficult. Enticing animals to eat in the first place is often tricky, and their environmental requirements can be surprisingly complex. Finding out that undiscovered infections cause problems wouldn't surprise me.

For our pet birds, we've just found out that a treatment for giardia stops feather plucking and mutilation in the lovebirds -- even though the birds do not show up in lab tests as having a giardia infection. The thought is that the values the labs look for is designed for humans, and avian species may be affected at much lower levels.

I've blogged a peliminary report of our findings at UnSpace.

The drug does not stop plucking in cockatiels, african greys, and mitred conures.

(BTW: We switched from keeping reptiles to keeping birds because of the difficulty in keeping the reptiles healthy.)

Not at all.

The rovers are astonishing in what they can do, but a human would dramatically outpace them. What it might take a rover an entire day to do, a human could do in a 30-45 seconds.