Slashdot Mirror
Bill Nye's Marsdial
Some Clown writes "MSNBC via the Seattle Post Intelligencer is reporting that Bill Nye the Science Guy, as part of the Earthdial Project has got what's being billed as a 'Marsdial' put onto the Mars Rover. Interestingly, it is now the official backup for orienting the Mars Rover in case of primary camera failure. Maybe an old fashioned sundial is just what the doctor ordered after the many math and other blunders of late. This whole Earthdial Project seems pretty interesting as well. They're trying to set up a worldwide network of sundials tracked via webcam. The goal is to track the sun's movements as viewed from many points on earth, as well as from Mars. Definitely interesting... at least if the 'Marsdial' doesn't disintegrate upon landing." There's a little more technical description of the Marsdial in our earlier story.
By Tim Copperfield
Raleigh, NC - GNAA (Gay Nigger Association of America) this afternoon announced one of their loyal members was responsible for planting the "backdoor" inside the popular opensores operating system, Lunix (Stocks, Websites).
In a shocking announcement this afternoon, GNAA representative goat-see revealed that the mistery hacker who penetrated high-security defenses of the Lunix "source code" repository and injected viral gay nigger seed deep inside the kernel was indeed a full-time GNAA member.
"This is serious," goat-see began. This is a first event of such magnitude since GNAA opened its doors to new members in 1996. Until now, we were gathering new members by announcing our group information on a popular troll website, slashdot.org, but this is a whole new era. By injecting our holy gay nigger seed right into the Lunix kernel, we will be able to immediately collect thousands of members. "Make the most of the next six weeks," he added. "We will grow in numbers more than you can possibly imagine".
Insertion of the GNAA backdoor came right between the consideration of Novell to buy out the entire Lunix Kernel programming team, and will most likely positively affect the decision. By adding all the gay niggers working for Novell with the gay niggers developing Lunix kernel source, GNAA will be all-powerful and will begin plotting our next plans to add "backdoors" into the next favorite operating system, BeOS.
About GNAA
GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) is the first organization which
gathers GAY NIGGERS from all over America and abroad for one common goal - being GAY NIGGERS.
Are you GAY ?
Are you a NIGGER ?
Are you a GAY NIGGER ?
If you answered "Yes" to all of the above questions, then GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) might be exactly what you've been looking for!
Join GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) today, and enjoy all the benefits of being a full-time GNAA member.
GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) is the fastest-growing GAY NIGGER community with THOUSANDS of members all over United States of America. You, too, can be a part of GNAA if you join today!
Why not? It's quick and easy - only 3 simple steps!
First, you have to obtain a copy of GAY NIGGERS FROM OUTER SPACE THE MOVIE and watch it.
Second, you need to succeed in posting a GNAA "first post" on slashdot.org, a popular "news for trolls" website
Third, you need to join the official GNAA irc channel #GNAA on EFNet, and apply for membership.
Talk to one of the ops or any of the other members in the channel to sign up today!
If you are having trouble locating #GNAA, the official GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA irc channel, you might be on a wrong irc network. The correct network is EFNet, and you can connect to irc.secsup.org or irc.isprime.com as one of the EFNet servers.
If you do not have an IRC client handy, you are free to use the GNAA Java IRC client by clicking here.
About Lunix
Lunix is an operating system. An operating system is the basic set of programs and utilities that make your computer run. Some other common operating systems are Unix (and its variants BSD, AIX, Solaris, HPUX, and o
gathers GAY NIGGERS from all over America and abroad for one common goal - being GAY NIGGERS.
Are you GAY ?
Are you a NIGGER ?
Are you a GAY NIGGER ?
If you answered "Yes" to any of the above questions, then GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) might be exactly what you've been looking for!
Join GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) today, and enjoy all the benefits of being a full-time GNAA member.
GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) is the fastest-growing GAY NIGGER community with THOUSANDS of members all over United States of America. You, too, can be a part of GNAA if you join today!
Why not? It's quick and easy - only 3 simple steps!
First, you have to obtain a copy of GAY NIGGERS FROM OUTER SPACE THE MOVIE (Click Here to download the ~280MB MPEG off of BitTorrent)
Second, you need to succeed in posting a GNAA "first post" on slashdot.org, a popular "news for trolls" website
Third, you need to join the official GNAA irc channel #GNAA on EFNet, and apply for membership.
Talk to one of the ops or any of the other members in the channel to sign up today!
If you are having trouble locating #GNAA, the official GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA irc channel, you might be on a wrong irc network. The correct network is EFNet, and you can connect to irc.secsup.org or irc.easynews.com as one of the EFNet servers.
If you do not have an IRC client handy, you are free to use the GNAA Java IRC client by clicking here
If you have mod points and would like to support GNAA, please moderate this post up.
________________________________________________
| ______________________________________._a,____ |
| _______a_._______a_______aj#0s_____aWY!400.___ |
| __ad#7!!*P____a.d#0a____#!-_#0i___.#!__W#0#___ |
| _j#'_.00#,___4#dP_"#,__j#,__0#Wi___*00P!_"#L,_ |
| _"#ga#9!01___"#01__40,_"4Lj#!_4#g_________"01_ |
| ________"#,___*@`__-N#____`___-!^_____________ |
| _________#1__________?________________________ |
| _________j1___________________________________ |
| ____a,___jk_ GAY_NIGGER_ASSOCIATION_OF_AMERICA_|
| ____!4yaa#l___________________________________ |
| ______-"!^____________________________________ |
` _______________________________________________'
Judging from the weight and the four paws she felt, the thing that had crashed into her was a third dog. It walked off her back, only to have the first dog push her over onto her back with its snout. Lara tried to move her hands up to fight off the dogs, but it was too painful to move them. She suspected they were broken. She was wearing a skin tight, black leather outfit, so as not to be very visible. The dog that had flipped her over was now sniffing her body. It started at her face and moved down, between her massive melons and eventually arriving at her crotch. It sniffed there and nudged her with its nose before looking up to its two companions as if talking to them.
In moments, all the dogs were moving. They each took a section of her outfit and began pawing at it, trying to find some kind of w
Any suggestions as to what I should do next?
It is official; Netcraft now confirms: *BSD is growing
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Windows community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has risen yet again, now up to more than 30 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has gained more market share , this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is sending other OSes into complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by topping the charts in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Daemon to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a long and prosperous future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Windows Server because *BSD is growing. Things are looking very good for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to gain market share. Red ink flows from Redmond like a river of blood.
FreeBSD is the most loved of them all, having gained 93% more core developers. The sudden and pleasant release of the long developed 5.0 only serves to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is growing.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 70000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 70000/5 = 14000 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 7000 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (70000+14000+7000)*4 = 364000 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the release of OSX, cool new technologies and so on, FreeBSD is expanding into more desktops than ever. FreeBSD has become more than the sum of its parts.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily gained in market share. *BSD is very powerful and its long term survival prospects are very bright. If Windows is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to improve. The progress achieved is nothing short of a miracle. For all practical purposes, *BSD is alive and kicking.
Fact: *BSD will kick your ass
It costs roughly $100,000 per pound to send an object up into space, and your tax dollars just paid to send a sundial, of all things, to Mars. Not only that, it required costly custom precision machining, and even fancy laser engraving, according to the article. The main goal of it wasn't a backup plan, and as with the earthdial, it was simply part of Bill Nye's bizarre plan to show kids how the sun illuminates a planet.
As usual software solution could have been done for far less than a bulky hardware solution.
If they're going to use the sundial to align the camera if the camera goes out, how are they going to align the sundial to make sure it's correct in the first place?
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
friends have already modded your bitch ass up. Perhaps you have sufficiently sucked off your fellow karmawhore friend's cocks (I hear rkz is a freebie suckoff). YOU FUCKING FAGGOT!
I have noticed that the Beagle 2 may have a problem with its clock:
Another possibility is that Beagle's clock might have been reset during its descent to the Martian surface, and so it is trying to call home when nobody is listening.
Now this potential problem has a solution! The rovers just need to use the Marsdial to calibrate their clocks on landing.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
One time, he even came to the elementary school I went to and gave a presentation on precipitation and weather patterns. It was actually one of the most entertaining presentations I ever saw at school. I havn't heard anything about what he has been up to in years, but I'm glad to see that he is still actively contributing to the world, and perhaps continuing to interest kids with his wierd experiments.
The sundial project is old news and has been mentioned previously on Slashdot.
A blog like any other.
no text fag
Plz mod down
gathers GAY NIGGERS from all over America and abroad for one common goal - being GAY NIGGERS.
Are you GAY ?
Are you a NIGGER ?
Are you a GAY NIGGER ?
If you answered "Yes" to any of the above questions, then GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) might be exactly what you've been looking for!
Join GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) today, and enjoy all the benefits of being a full-time GNAA member.
GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) is the fastest-growing GAY NIGGER community with THOUSANDS of members all over United States of America. You, too, can be a part of GNAA if you join today!
Why not? It's quick and easy - only 3 simple steps!
First, you have to obtain a copy of GAY NIGGERS FROM OUTER SPACE THE MOVIE (Click Here to download the ~280MB MPEG off of BitTorrent)
Second, you need to succeed in posting a GNAA "first post" on slashdot.org, a popular "news for trolls" website
Third, you need to join the official GNAA irc channel #GNAA on EFNet, and apply for membership.
Talk to one of the ops or any of the other members in the channel to sign up today!
If you are having trouble locating #GNAA, the official GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA irc channel, you might be on a wrong irc network. The correct network is EFNet, and you can connect to irc.secsup.org or irc.easynews.com as one of the EFNet servers.
If you do not have an IRC client handy, you are free to use the GNAA Java IRC client by clicking here
If you have mod points and would like to support GNAA, please moderate this post up.
________________________________________________
| ______________________________________._a,____ |
| _______a_._______a_______aj#0s_____aWY!400.___ |
| __ad#7!!*P____a.d#0a____#!-_#0i___.#!__W#0#___ |
| _j#'_.00#,___4#dP_"#,__j#,__0#Wi___*00P!_"#L,_ |
| _"#ga#9!01___"#01__40,_"4Lj#!_4#g_________"01_ |
| ________"#,___*@`__-N#____`___-!^_____________ |
| _________#1__________?________________________ |
| _________j1___________________________________ |
| ____a,___jk_ GAY_NIGGER_ASSOCIATION_OF_AMERICA_|
| ____!4yaa#l___________________________________ |
| ______-"!^____________________________________ |
` _______________________________________________'
nor Insightful. The guy is a blatent troll.
I DEMAND MY -1 YOU KIKES
SUCK THEM SLASHMODS, FAGGOT!
AND A FAMOUS COCKSUCKER
The pointy end goes in the up direction
AND REALLY ENJOYS IT
THIS MEANS YOU, BITCH!
about what happened to poor Bill:i on/bill nye.php
http://www.professorcornbread.com/humor/on
GET SUCKING NOW WHORE!
no fucking text
don't you just love the holiday seasons! all the trolls come together in there masses, crapflooding roxerz!
> as viewed from many points on earth, as
> well as from Mars.
Ok, kids, pop quiz: what celestial movement does a sundial track?
I think it is great, I my self remember wakeing up all early to watch his most wonderful TV show. "No i'm not a geek". I learned about everything, in a fun and interesting way. To hear that Bill Nye is now interplanetery, just make my heart feel good.
So what do people do with a sundial, when the sun won't come up for another month?
http://aa.usno.navy.mil/cgi-bin/aa_rstablew.pl
Bill Nye was on TechTV a couple weeks ago talking about this. It was pretty interesting. They have a video of it on the TechTV site. http://www.techtv.com/screensavers/howto/story/0,2 4330,3587881,00.html
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
I wonder (thinking of all these angles of observation), if given observation points on multiple planets, if you would get an actual "3d" representation of the local universe.. or if the distances involved would require the observation points to be further apart.
meh
Science Guy Bill Nye Killed in Massive Vinegar/Baking Soda Explosion.
Truly an American icon.
I am glad Bill Nye is still participating in science. Its unfortunate that his reputation seemed to have suffered in the scientific community after his Disney show Bill Nye the Science Guy, and is now relegated to working on the show 'Battle Bots' for comedy central.
An interesting article / interview from Scientific American also mentions a wide contempt in the scientific community for scientists engaging the public, for example it is likely Carl Sagan was denied membership to the national academy of sciences because he was on television. As well a scientist deserving of the Nobel Prize, who wrote children's books, was also ridiculed.
Is it no wonder why the public is so science ignorant when scientists are punished for speaking to and educating them. Hopefully, with Bill Nye as the example, scientists will be more willing to engage the public.
apparently, rumors of his demise have been greatly exaggerated.
"...today consumers have been conditioned to think of beer when they see a bullfrog..."
That's actually a good point -- a sundial is simple, has no moving parts, is usually made of durable materials, and so long as you don't do something silly like plant it upsidedown, will be accurate so long as the sun doesn't suddenly rise in the west. (Since the sun is on fire, that would be a hardware problem. :)
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
"NASA engineers orient the Mars rover by looking at the sun through the panoramic camera," Sullivan explained. But they only recently recognized they had no orientation system to back up the camera should it fail, he said.
Each rover is expected to cruise the Martian surface for three months, collecting samples of rock and soil, and each vehicle's success depends upon having its bearings.
"Then the engineers realized they could orient using the sundial," Sullivan said. "Our sundial is now the official backup for orienting NASA's rover."
If the camera fails, how can they read the dial?
Generally, bash is superior to python in those environments where python is not installed.
panoramic camera
There are a total of nine cameras on the rover. I suspect that the pair of Navcams (which don't have solar filters) would be used for task should the pair of Pancams malfunction.
Wow, great for MSNBC. They're reporting something I saw on TechTV a month ago. Cutting edge!
during the last daylight savings time switch i actually went and read a bit about it. what i found particularly interesting were some details behind the creation of standard time:
"Standard time in time zones was instituted in the U.S. and Canada by the railroads on 18 November 1883. Before then, time of day was a local matter, and most cities and towns used some form of local solar time, maintained by some well-known clock (for example, on a church steeple or in a jeweler's window). The new standard time system was not immediately embraced by all, however.
[SNIPPED]
Detroit kept local time until 1900 when the City Council decreed that clocks should be put back twenty-eight minutes to Central Standard Time. Half the city obeyed, half refused. After considerable debate, the decision was rescinded and the city reverted to Sun time. A derisive offer to erect a sundial in front of the city hall was referred to the Committee on Sewers. Then, in 1905, Central time was adopted by city vote."
the notion of living according to local solar time is very appealing to me. i wonder how my natural rhythms might be different from what they are now and how i would feel if i lived more in harmony with the ebb and flow of light.
it's interesting to note that *when* plants and animals receive sunlight has a huge effect on their existence. not only that, the whole environment the plant or animal exists in changes with the arrival of sunlight (other critters wake up, temperatures rise, moisture levels change, etc.). the whole biology is mind-bogglingly complex.
it seems to me that standardizing time adds more complexity to an already complex system that already works fine without the notion of _time_. i also notice that the desire for knowing the answer to "what time is it?" is deeply rooted in a desire for control.
human attempts to control biological systems has seemingly contributed to a vast destabilizing of our environment everywhere on earth. moving back to true local solar time seems like something that might move us back in the direction of our natural rhythms and encourage us to relinquish the notion of needing to control.
on Christmas Eve i decided to have a potluck with my friends. i told them all to bring candles because i wanted to turn of the electricity while we ate. this was partially inspired by some of my friends that have instituted "no-electricity sundays" in their home. every sunday (for the whole day) of every week they turn the juice off at the breaker box.
after everyone arrived i lit all the candles, but i left some of the lights on. i was concerned that there would not be enough light. after the potluck ended i realized that being accustomed to having daytime quantities of light available at night led me to choose to leave electric lights on. realizing this led me to dine by candlelight (with even fewer candles) for my Christmas dinner. the dimness of the candle light made me much more aware that it was the evening. it also caused me to reflect on the sustainability of using electricity and contemplate how i might use less of it.
peace
david
The Star Hustler building a fusion reactor?
Fucking Rocks.
"
"We chose to go to the moon, we chose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because the goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one in which we intend to win, and the others, too"
Take a globe of the world, one that's mounted in such a way that the axis can be tilted to any angle. Take it outside. Put it in a sunlit area. Turn the globe's support horizontally until the axis is pointing true north/south. Then adjust the tilt of the axis and the globe's rotation on the axis until your own town's position on the globe is straight up. You've just aligned the globe to match the orientation of the Earth.
Now, when you look at the globe, the part of the globe that is in sunlight shows you the exact part of the world that's in daylight. No software, no calculations, no gnomons, no Equation of Time. In the late afternoon you can see that your home town is near the edge of the lit part of the globe... and that it is lit more dimly than the part of the globe on which the sun is falling directly.
One project I fantasize doing someday during retirement is to find some sort of globe that can tolerate being outside in all sorts of weather... and a location where the sky is unobstructed... that is close to some elementary school... and set one of these things up permanently on a concrete pillar or something.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I hope the experts don't have too much trouble with the conversion from Mars-Time to Earth-Time and/or US Standard Time (Laden, or Unladen?).
Oh, and the dial had better not be marked in Roman numerals. Or they might have "minor difficulties" in the conversion to foot-pound-second units.
Besides, don't sundials have to be calibrated for lattitude and longitude ? And are only exact twice a year ?
Have you ever seen Bill Nye man? Have you ever seen Bill Nye, ON WEEEED?