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NASA Eyes Cash Prizes Of Its Own
joeldg writes "Wired is reporting that NASA is considering offering cash prizes for space innovation.
'Lembeck said NASA would consider offering $10 million to $30 million in prizes to encourage private investors to develop space vehicles. Such prizes appear compatible with the vision for space exploration released last week by a White House commission that studied President Bush's plan to send Americans back to the moon and possibly to Mars.'"
wtf??
Whoever locates this guy, shoot him.
Anyone seen my jagged little pill?
By Jorge Luis Borges "By this art you may contemplate the variation of the 23 letters..." - The Anatomy of Melancholy, part 2, sect. II, mem. IV -- The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings. From any of the hexagons one can see, interminably, the upper and lower floors. The distribution of the galleries is invariable. Twenty shelves, five long shelves per side, cover all the sides except two; their height, which is the distance from floor to ceiling, scarcely exceeds that of a normal bookcase. One of the free sides leads to a narrow hallway which opens onto another gallery, identical to the first and to all the rest. To the left and right of the hallway there are two very small closets. In the first, one may sleep standing up; in the other, satisfy one's fecal necessities, Also through here passes a spiral stairway, which sinks abysmally and soars upwards to remote distances. In the hallway there is a mirror which faithfully duplicates all appearances. Men usually infer from this mirror that the Library is not infinite (if it really were, why this illusory duplication?); I prefer to dream that its polished surfaces represent and promise the infinite... Light is provided by some spherical fruit which bear the name of lamps. There are two, transversally placed, in each hexagon. The light they emit is insufficient, incessent. Like most men of the Library, I have travelled in my youth; I have wandered in searh of a book, perhaps a catalogue of catalogues; now that my eyes can hardly decipher what I write, I am preparing to die just a few leagues from the hexagon in which I was born. Once I am dead, there will be no lack of pious hands to throw me over the railing; my grave will be the fathomless air; my body will sink endlessly and decay and dissolve in the wind generated by the fall, which is infinite. I say that the Library is unending. The idealists argue that the hexagonal rooms are a necessary form of absolute space or, at least, of our intuition of space. They reason that a triangular or pentagonal room is inconceivable. (The mystics claim that their ecstasy reveals to them a circular chamber containing a great circular book, whose spine is continuous and which follows the complete circle of the walls; but their testimony is suspect; their words, obscure. This cyclical book is God.) Let it suffice now for me to repeat the classic dictum: The library is a sphere whose exact center is any one of its hexagons and whose circumference is inaccessible. There are five shelves for each of the hexagon's walls; each shelf contains thirty-five books of uniform format; each book is of four hundred and ten pages; each page, of fourty lines, each line, some eighty letters which are black in color. There are also letters on the spine of each book; these lettersdo not indicate or prefigure what the pages will say. I know that this incoherence at one time seemed mysterious. Before summarizing the solution (whose discovery, in spite of its tragic proportions, is perhaps the capital fact of history) I wish to recall a few axioms. First: The Library exists ab aeterno. This truth, whose immeditate corrolory is the future eternity of the world, cannot be placed in doubht by any reasonable mind. Man, the imperfect librarian, may be the product of chance or of malevolent demiurgi; the universe, with its elegant endowment of shelves, of enigmatical volumes of inexhaustible stairways for the traveler and latrines for the seated librarian, can only be the work of a god. To percieve the distance between the divine and the human, it is enough to compare these crude wavering symbols which my fallible hand scrawls on the cover of a book, whith the organic letters inside: punctual, delicate, perfectly black, inimitably symmetrical. Second: The orthographical symbols are twenty-five in number. This finding made it possible, three hundred years ago, to formulate a general theory of the Library and to so
Cue useless AC posts with no real point.
I will mail a shiny new nickel to whoever can tell me what show and episode the following is from(which is related to a name in the article, as both Lembecks are prominent scientists who dole out rewards, just in different countries):
"Lembeck is staying! Lembeck is staying!"
Yeah, it's a karma burn, but well worth getting the message out.
By Jorge Luis Borges
"By this art you may contemplate
the variation of the 23 letters..."
- The Anatomy of Melancholy, part 2, sect. II, mem. IV
--
The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings. From any of the hexagons one can see, interminably, the upper and lower floors. The distribution of the galleries is invariable. Twenty shelves, five long shelves per side, cover all the sides except two; their height, which is the distance from floor to ceiling, scarcely exceeds that of a normal bookcase. One of the free sides leads to a narrow hallway which opens onto another gallery, identical to the first and to all the rest. To the left and right of the hallway there are two very small closets. In the first, one may sleep standing up; in the other, satisfy one's fecal necessities, Also through here passes a spiral stairway, which sinks abysmally and soars upwards to remote distances. In the hallway there is a mirror which faithfully duplicates all appearances. Men usually infer from this mirror that the Library is not infinite (if it really were, why this illusory duplication?); I prefer to dream that its polished surfaces represent and promise the infinite... Light is provided by some spherical fruit which bear the name of lamps. There are two, transversally placed, in each hexagon. The light they emit is insufficient, incessent.
Like most men of the Library, I have travelled in my youth; I have wandered in searh of a book, perhaps a catalogue of catalogues; now that my eyes can hardly decipher what I write, I am preparing to die just a few leagues from the hexagon in which I was born. Once I am dead, there will be no lack of pious hands to throw me over the railing; my grave will be the fathomless air; my body will sink endlessly and decay and dissolve in the wind generated by the fall, which is infinite. I say that the Library is unending. The idealists argue that the hexagonal rooms are a necessary form of absolute space or, at least, of our intuition of space. They reason that a triangular or pentagonal room is inconceivable. (The mystics claim that their ecstasy reveals to them a circular chamber containing a great circular book, whose spine is continuous and which follows the complete circle of the walls; but their testimony is suspect; their words, obscure. This cyclical book is God.) Let it suffice now for me to repeat the classic dictum: The library is a sphere whose exact center is any one of its hexagons and whose circumference is inaccessible.
There are five shelves for each of the hexagon's walls; each shelf contains thirty-five books of uniform format; each book is of four hundred and ten pages; each page, of fourty lines, each line, some eighty letters which are black in color. There are also letters on the spine of each book; these lettersdo not indicate or prefigure what the pages will say. I know that this incoherence at one time seemed mysterious. Before summarizing the solution (whose discovery, in spite of its tragic proportions, is perhaps the capital fact of history) I wish to recall a few axioms.
First: The Library exists ab aeterno. This truth, whose immeditate corrolory is the future eternity of the world, cannot be placed in doubht by any reasonable mind. Man, the imperfect librarian, may be the product of chance or of malevolent demiurgi; the universe, with its elegant endowment of shelves, of enigmatical volumes of inexhaustible stairways for the traveler and latrines for the seated librarian, can only be the work of a god. To percieve the distance between the divine and the human, it is enough to compare these crude wavering symbols which my fallible hand scrawls on the cover of a book, whith the organic letters inside: punctual, delicate, perfectly black, inimitably symmetrical.
Second: The orthographical symbols are twenty-five in number. This finding made it possible, three hundred years ago, to
Well, its been modded down from insightful to troll. Slashdot mod point holder, I salute you.
you can't privatize education. the law says that every person in the US has the right to an education in the least restrictive environment. a private institution does not need to follow these laws.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Try decoding this from base64 and playing it as an mp3.
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Let's sit around offering measly rewards so some rich nutter can get his rocks off (bearly) blasting into space, instead of pooling our resources to eradicate world hunger, fix the shody environment, promote sustainable living, or indeed travel the solar system (screw mars).
If any alien race is watching us, they're surely having a grand old time watching us scrap for unsutainable resources, obsess ourselves with personal status and basically flush the only planet we have down the toilet.
No disrespect to Rutan et al., but does the x-prize really matter? So rich old guys can waste just as much money as the government, whoopty fricken doo.
It's truely time for us to get our act together a little more before we get all star-struck, IMO.
The only time our species ever gets around to utilizing our true potential is to kill each other. That's a sad state of affairs. We don't deserve to leave this planet until we can correct that.