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NASA's Spirit Rover Crew Are 'Slaves To Mars'
Quirk writes "The Telegraph has a bit on the challenge faced by the 280 team members who have had to leave Earth time behind and attune their circadian clock to the Mars solar day or 'sol'. '...the team's wake-up times and meal times two weeks after the landing will have shifted by nine hours.'"
That explains things. I think I've been attuned to Mars time for a while now.
After all, it's not like my caffeine addiction could be affecting me.
One thing a lot of people don't realize is that the communication lag between mars and earth is over 30 minutes. Imagine trying to play quake with that kind of lag.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
Well yeah, strictly speaking it's off topic but I think it's also insightful. I believe scientific pursuit has to address whatever it feels interesting and is, in perspective, useful for the advancement of technic and pure knowledge. On the other hand, obtuse media coverage that is to scientific information like a circus show compared to a naturalistic report betrays profound callousness. I don't think anyone would be as excited driving through a desert road yet overnight everyone has become an eso-geologist... I'd prefer mass media to cover without pietism how the global community is/should fight to grab Africa out of the middle ages (and leave the Mars Explorations to good scientific journals, Nature, SciAm or Nat Geo for the beautiful imagery)... Now mod me down to -1
Mi domando chi à il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio - Altan
Actually, those kids aren't slaves. They're happy to have the work.
Funny thing is, you'd rather they starve than get to work for a living.
And as to the "slave wages" they are paid, this shows serious ignorance-- when you ignore cost of living adjustments and currency adjustments, you make it look like they are getting paid less than they need to survive.
The reason sweatshops are popular is that they offer a BETTER DEAL than the employment alternatives.
But american liberals, determined to make everyone in the world starve, just can't stand the idea-- they'd rather those people be unemployed because minimum wage is $20,000 a year than have them chose for themselves whats best for them.
Liberalism is anti-human rights.
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23
Not quite like Vonnegut predicted...
Wil
wiki
1 AU / c = 8.31675359 minutes.
Yours is a common argument amongst us westerners... it also has some logic within but our own success as a society debunks it. You see, here in Italy higher education and research are kept in very low consideration; many young people prefer to drop out of school to work in the "Made in Italy" industry. Apparently they seem to have a good deal with the wages earned they can afford uber cell phones, ridiculously aftermarketed cars, D. Beckham sportswear and sat TV football and disco club... They are being screwed and after a decade or so this logic is showing it's shortsightedness as the patrimony erodes. Today, our economy is more or less at a developing country's mercy, competing with underpaid (compared to our standards) labour, basically producing low tech gadgetry with little intrinsic value. We don't cultivate a competitive advantage, the whole world is catching up and will sooner or later leave us in the cold. What point am I trying to make? Well, while we are more or less conciously forfeigting our chances to keep the pace these kids sweating their lives in ratholes aren't getting their fair chance. There's no chance a country will improve if it coerces it's human resources into poor margin jobs; we are the living proof. So while those illiterate kids are pretty happy not to starve (but then wouldn't they be much happier if they had a school to attend or a childhood to play) they also suffer because their condition will likely never change in their lifetime and won't have enough income to bootstrap their descendancy's emancipation. For all practical purpouses they are medieval serfs... that's not nice and is cruel on our part to benefit from it.
Mi domando chi à il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio - Altan
I use copious amounts of coffee to off set lag, but if I'm faced with serious enduring lag I meditate ( I use a magic square with 64 squares and a number of relationships... I tried transendental meditation but it just didn't do it for me... the idea behind meditation is to engage the mind on all levels )Best wishes to the NASA crew... I'd be curious to know if there's a prefered way they deal with lag.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
Al contrare.
Libterarians encourage such practices. Just look at the party platform.
http://www.lp.org/
Libertarian != liberals
Liberals are leftist whackjobs
That "Barsoom" you peasant!
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Julie Townsend copes by wearing two watches: one on her left wrist set to Earth time, a second, specially modified, on her right running on Mars time.
:: Watches lineup! I want a Mars Watch!
"There are some things I only know in Mars time," said Townsend, a mission avionics engineer.
Time to write another note to the folks at ThinkGeek: please add the Mars Watch to your Gadgets
And please, be sure to have it modelled by Ms. Townsend. For me, she's a great role model for my daughters. For the rest of Slashdot: she's a girl geek! Cool!
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
They are being screwed and after a decade or so this logic is showing it's shortsightedness as the patrimony erodes. Today, our economy is more or less at a developing country's mercy, competing with underpaid (compared to our standards) labour, basically producing low tech gadgetry with little intrinsic value.
Wealth breeds complacency, but as long as they get what they want out of life, why worry? Once it doesn't work anymore, their children will start taking education more seriously again because they'll realize that they have to.
I can understand when Americans whine about this sort of thing because they don't have the historical perspective, but Italy, in particular, has been through many cycles of this over the millennia, and Italians should really know better than to worry about it.
have had to leave Earth time behind and attune their circadian clock to the Mars solar day or 'sol'
Now why in gods name did they name the martian day AND the Sun the same damn thing?
...whereas libertarians are simply unqualified whackjobs, right?
Further, I can't be "hungry," "tired," "sad," or "lonely"... think of the famine victims, the sufferes of sleep-deprivation torture, the survivors of the Iran earthquake, and the bubble-boys of the world. I can't be "tall," or "strong, or "smart," because of Shaq, Mister Universe and Stephen Hawking (also sometimes known as Mister Universe).
*********
It seems to me that the last thing we should be doing is erasing the other meanings of a word like slave... look how your post has illustrated the difference between metaphorical slavery and real slavery, thus bringing attention to slavery that might otherwise have been missed. In a sense, The Telegraph and you have conspired in community service. Bully for you. Without metaphorical slaves, it could never have happened.
...to correct for severe time differentials across "150 Federation planets, spread across 8000 light-years" (according to Jean-Luc).
No rovers have landed on mars. The infidel dogs have failed to land on our planet. Our patriots have shot the infidel spacecraft from our skies. If you want to see the wreckage, I will take you there in ONE HOUR!
No weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men.-Ronald Reagan
I worked as a shiftworker for the last 11 months. These were 12 hour shifts, 7am-7pm or 7pm-7am, 2 days followed by two nights followed by 4 days off. To work my sleep best I'd sleep 7 times every 8 days or effectively increase my days by about 3.5 hours per day. I got out of that job recently but have found that my circadian rhythm hasn't returned to normal yet (It's 3am here atm)
What time are the spankings? I've yet to see them on cspan. Perhaps they occur after the press conference.
This "story" is on the radio, too. All I can say is if you have more than the half mind that journo's have you can figure out there is nothing, NOTHING about time on Mars that has jack shit to do with what shift would be worked on Earth. If this "story" appealed to your imagination, you need to start thinking more.
Historical perspective... yeah, bah... I'm not that shure about our historical perspective. Between the collapse of the roman empire and Italy's unification under the Savoia throne in the late '800 Italy has been the playground of local lords, foreign rulers and bickering nobility. No, against all efforts of our postfascist educational system to convice us of the contrary, Italy has stagnated for centuries. Even the industrial revolution took off late because of our campanilistic fragmentation. We never had a strong middle class and fascism came just in time to trounce any chance to develop one. After the war we sort of dedicated ourselves to survival and had some decent growth but the diffused cultural attitude shifted from "Reds Vs. Blue" class conflict to "Screw and when you're caught or screwed, whine" individualism. Only until recently nationalistic pride was deemed fascist (but we do have racist/secessionist party leaders in the government) but anyone save the most rabid reactionary is deemed a commie (can anyone beleive that over here government officials claim "The Economist" is sold out to the commies); industry reps routinely call names at anyone resisting the idea of legalizing sweatshops, most of our population can't care less because they never grew up as "middle-class" but jumped straight out of indigence into consumerism. Even what should be the "enlightened elite" only cares for the quick buck and literally sank all our major industries: IC, Chem, Metal. All that's left is media but it's not very healthy as one Mogul is conditioning it's development to his private convenience... the only developing industry over here is call-centres: low wage, cheap pseudo-butlery... do you really think we know better? ;-(
Mi domando chi à il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio - Altan
As an engineer, I can very well understand that many of these people are living Mars Sols voluntarily; If I were one such a rover team, I would.
But exactly how voluntary is this? Or even legal? In the Netherlands, labour law (in Dutch, I'm afraid, articles 4.7:1 and 5.8) states that one cannot be forced to perform more than 28 night-shifts in 13 consequetive weeks under normal circumstances. Under special circumstances, I which work cannot reasonably be performed during normal working hours (which would be the case for the NASA workers here), the limit is 35 nights.
(If you work for a Dutch employer who wishes to force you to do this anyway, you get support from the unions, and the employer cannot even fire you without getting a "firing permission" from a judge, and he's not likely to get it for that reason).
Do US employers have any rights whatsoever? Note, I'm not trolling here: I've heard some stories from friends, who went to work in the US, that were particularly hairraising to say the very least...
Support a Europe-related section on Slashdot!
I'm just a slave to the funky beat.
specifically: http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=91632& cid=7884415
They're not really adjusting their body clocks. The human body clock is aready set to 25 hours on average, same as the Martian day. They're just not resetting their body clock to adjust to Earth time.
I'm telling you, if you buy into this evolution stuff, you have to conclude that humans originated on Mars. Why else would we be trying so hard to get back?
The more important question is, why were we sent here anyway? What'd we do wrong? Is Earth the Australia of the solar system?
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Jesus, its like you're channeling the little red book.
Please go learn some economics. Austrian economics is consistant with history, while socialist economists are always going around trying to justify why history doesn't fit their theories.
According to you, the USSR was a paradise!
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23
What? Please tell me where am I rooting for the little red book. Nowhere am I condemning capitalism, actually I'm complaining that our lousy condition was caused by the lack of a strong middle class! Italian capitalism is limp, that's a fact and any economic commentator worth it's salt will agree with this statement. It doesn't depend on capitalism per se but it just happened because we never had a true, solid and modern market economy (neither for goods, nor stock) but rather a familistic, credit driven and state investment supported caste system. That our industrial powerhorses have been slaughtered in the past 20 years is another fact; Gardini for Chem, De Benedetti for Electronics and Computer are two easy picks (FIAT...). Cuccia's Mediobanca kept a stranglehold on business for 40 years while Milan's stock exchange is still the "Parco Buoi" that it was 20 years ago. Huge wallops of money were wasted in politically manoevered investments doping whole parts of our national industrial growth. :-) but who wouldn't... he's a bad joke come true.
That Italy rapidly grew into consumerism without restraint is another fact and today we don't have a culturally strong middle class but a large social segment with lots of money to spend and no clue.
Yes I do lean on the leftish side but I'm NOT a red, I just happen to hate Berlusconi
Mi domando chi à il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio - Altan
...let LA County hear about this, they may claim racial discrimination.
There are no tiger attacks in my area and it's all because this rock I'm holding keeps the tigers away.