Same here (or similar)... I knew enough to write the first version of the newspaper website I created, but after that we hired some "real" IT guys and they took it from there.
As for how I learned... When I was in about 8th or 9th grade, around 1976 or 77, we had a "unit" in our math class involving pre-punched IBM cards which we used to form BASIC programs which would be batch-jobbed at the local university on their HP1000. The following year, we got a DEC-Writer and an ADS Terminal in the math dept. office, and were thus introduced to "interactive" computing. These were running on 300BAUD modems via the office phone lines, so we would sometimes "prank" each other by picking up an extension phone on the same line and talking into the receiver.;-)
It wasn't long before we found the computer lab at the university, and started randomly taking a seat and punching out some cards to feed to the computer. Somehow the grunts behind the window never figured out that we weren't actually "college" students, and had no right to be there. We also noticed that the university had a lot more ADS terminals, which were preferable because you didn't have to wait for results on a dot-matrix printer.
Soon after that, Apple-II's started hitting the market, and then IBM PC's a couple of years later. But I didn't actually get a PC until the mid-80's, and didn't get back into programming for a while after that. Eventually I found a book on assembly language that really "spoke" to me. I learned a lot from that book, and went on to devour more books about C, C++, etc.. Some years later, I read more books about HTML, SGML, LaTeX, etc... and then came Python, PHP, and Java... and along the way there were also books about TCL, SVG, XML, and other similar buzzwords. (Oddly though, I never learned PERL or EMACS... they both just looked too deliberately masochistic...;-)
I never actually wrote much code, unless I had to. But I knew enough to know how to look up whatever I needed, and that was enough to get the job done.
Somewhere in there, around 1995, I started using GNU/Linux. And like many of my brethren, I devoted countless hours toward trying to get the damn video drivers to work with X-windows. Grrrr! (You young whippersnappers don't know how good you've got it these days...;-)
Honestly, after all that, I can't claim to know much about "computer science"... for example, I can't tell you the difference between a shell sort algorithm and a quick sort. But I know how to look that up if I need it, and I'm confident in being able to "kludge" it together somehow. But in my current position, I'm much more likely to be "riding herd" over other programmers, rather than writing the code myself. So I reckon I have a pretty good background for that. I can read code; I can speak the jargon; and I can visualize various ways to implement a project. From there, it's mostly people skills...
Although I've never specialized in CS, it has been a constant "distraction" and companion for many years. And it has given me many opportunities. I suspect that puts me in good company on this forum.
Is there some other way to use this instrument in it's hobbled state? Lunar mapping? Asteroid hunting? Etc...?? Would be nice to salvage the hardware, even if the primary mission is toasted.
Yes, that's in line with the numbers I've seen. If your goal is to convert solar radiation into electricity, you're much better off with off-the-shelf PV cells. But a more intriguing effort is underway to create a nano-scale matrix that can split water much more efficiently, offering the potential to produce liquid fuel directly.
Taiwan Gold Medal on tap. Nothing special, really, but cheap and quite drinkable. And being locally produced, it's quite fresh, especially from the keg.
Beer is certainly "stuff that matters." And the fact that condensation transfers heat to the surface of the glass may be "news" to some folks. But the number of "nerds" who didn't already know this must be quite small.
OTOH, it's an excuse to talk about beer. Matter of fact, I'm having one right now.;-)
I should add that this is not the same as what Iron Age farmers practiced. If they had used these techniques, then the Sahara would not have turned into a desert in the first place.
Here's a video that explains how this process works. And another one that shows another method for desert recovery.
Growing more crops is just a necessary marketing feature. If they could make more money by selling products that grow less food, they would do that instead.
So now we've got rockets that run Linux... I'm shocked, shocked! that no one has stooped low enough to say this yet, so let me be the first to stoop...
Can you imagine having a Beowulf Cluster of THESE?!
And thus you show that you missed my point entirely. When you pass a universal standard on new car sales, you effectively guarantee a market for alternative fuels, and that's when your neighborhood gas station decides to put in a 100% methanol pump, because they know that at least all new car sales will be flex-fuel.
You can talk all day about how many cars are available with a flex-fuel option, but until it's the standard, there won't be widespread adoption among fuel vendors. That is the key element that makes it possible to "flip" the market and destroy the monopoly of oil.
We (the USA) currently spend about $400bn/yr on oil imports. We have plenty of "extra" space to grow the necessary non-food crops for this purpose. Anyone who is interested in reducing our economic losses would be well advised to start with this obvious trade imbalance.
AFAIK, currently some cars are flex-fuel, but not all, and on many it's optional (plus, not all can handle methanol). If I were buying a car today, I'd certainly go with a fully flex-capable one (since I can't afford a Tesla). Last time I checked, the bulk price of methanol was about $1.50/gal, and as you note, it can be made "at home" from a wide variety of feedstocks... yard waste, for example.
The jump from ethanol to methanol is important because it takes fuel out of competition with food. Ethanol (at the moment) is hard to make from anything that doesn't contain starch or sugar, whereas methanol can be made from sawdust, or just about anything almost.
We should implement an open-fuel standard, requiring all new cars to be flex-fuel capable. That would break the monopoly of oil as a transportation fuel, bringing real competition for the first time in a century. More importantly, fully flex-fuel vehicles can run on methanol just as well as ethanol (or any mix of these and/or gasoline). Thus, fuel crops would not have to compete with food crops for agricultural resources, since methanol can be made from any type of biomass. This would also have the added benefit of boosting ag markets in developing countries and making them -- the whole world really -- less dependent on petroleum.
Close. Running an experiment like that would indeed require several people to have no brains.
Now you're just being silly. You list all the unknowns and cite this as a reason NOT to do the experiment. Isn't that what basic research is supposed to be about in the first place? If they'd spent the last few years on ISS finding answers to those questions, I would have nothing to whine about. Instead, this whole line of research has hardly been touched by NASA. That seems like a glaring omission to me, especially when microgravity health effects are so crucial to the success of long-duration flights.
The notion of centrifugal "simulated gravity" has been around for a long time, but NASA has almost completely ignored it. Why? Seems like a much more simple and "elegant" solution to the problem than tinkering with cellular processes. (Besides, who ever said that mouse experiments would induce headlines?)
In any case, the question remains... whither ISS? Within a few years there will be cheaper options available. ISS is the single most expensive object ever created by humans. Are we really getting our money's worth?
So it's no different from any other government research?
Hm... yes and no. As/. readers, we get a steady trickle of "gee-whiz" news from various kinds of research, much of it government funded. But when was the last time you saw a story even on this site about a new discovery from ISS? Judging by the topic listing it's been quite a while.
I get your point that research can be useful and worthwhile even if it doesn't make headlines. I just think they could be doing more. (And part of the reason might be that the ISS costs so much just to keep flying that they don't have enough money left to take on more ambitious projects.) For example, after all these years we still don't have any experiments to see whether centrifugal "simulated gravity" would be helpful in mitigating the health effects of long-duration flights. Not even with mice! That would seem like a no-brainer.
Don't get me wrong, I'm glad we have the ISS. I just wish we were doing more with it.
I wonder what the future of ISS will be, when Bigelow and others are making space less expensive and more accessible. I haven't heard of too many "earth shattering" breakthroughs from the ISS program, and lately all the excitement has been in the private sector. (Sarah Brightman doesn't have anything to worry about, she'll just have to wait a couple more years and then get a much cheaper ride.) On the one hand, cheaper access to space will make it cheaper to maintain the ISS, but OTOH they may soon be outshone by private sector efforts.
I'm beginning to see the ISS in a similar light to the Shuttle... more time wasted in LEO, when we should be going places.
I agree that "fixing" or "precipitating" the atmosphere is the most promising avenue, but from what I've read, nobody has yet come up with a plausible scheme to make this happen. Doesn't mean it's impossible of course, but at the moment it makes Mars look much more promising.
Your points are all valid, I just don't think any of them are show-stoppers for Mars colonization. The only question mark, as you rightly point out, is whether or not.38g is enough for humans to be healthy over the long term. We don't have any solid data on that. But this will likely change in the next few years as research is done with mice and later humans in centrifugal apparatus. My gut feeling is that we'll be able to adapt, though over time the Martian population will diverge genetically from Terrans.
As for Martian mines running dry, well, I guess they'll just continue prospecting, as we do here on Earth. But at least in the early days of colonization, most of what we'll need will be within easy reach. Easier than asteroid mining? Neither one of us really knows the answer to that question. But in general we collectively know a lot more about planet mining than asteroid mining.
Gotta run, sorry... a customer just walked into the shop...
I agree with your point, but I still don't think we'll ever "colonize" Venus, at least not with floating cities. The only scenario for Venus that makes sense to me is more along the lines of the arctic regions of Earth. I could see, for example, a floating science research facility, analogous to McMurdo Station in Antarctica. Perhaps there could also be some resource-mining facilities, analogous to the drilling rigs in the North Sea, extracting raw materials for rocket fuel, etc., and "pipelining" them to market with a space tether or something similar.
And, over the long term, there might be a couple of floating hotels or resorts on Venus, for those space tourists who can afford the trip and want to see the Venusian sunrise. But the long-term prospects for terraforming Venus are vanishingly remote. Unless we could somehow transport half of its atmosphere to Mars, thus killing two birds with one stone, there isn't much hope for "living" on Venus.
you can't actually use all that land surface without building structures that practically cover the entire land surface
That's true for Venus, but not for Mars. The long-term goal is terraforming, which will take a few centuries to complete, but at least for Mars there are several plausible ways to do it. (For Venus, not so much.)
As for "very bad weather" damaging the buildings... we've had multiple rovers on Mars for several years, and so far the weather has not done much damage to any of them. Aside from the occasional dust storm coating their solar panels, they have mostly out-performed their design expectations by a long way.
Space colonies are a good idea too, and no doubt that route will also be taken by whoever wants to pursue it. But there are certain advantages to a planet. For example, you don't have to go out and lasso another asteroid every time you need more resources. Just dig the hole a little deeper or wider... there's a whole planet beneath your feet. Also, you don't have to worry about centrifugal/artificial gravity, that just comes free with the territory. As for being "stuck" in a gravity well... um... you do realize that we're all stuck in a gravity well right now..? Eeek!
The goal of Mars One is to colonize the planet, so they really don't care about the gravity well thing.
Who needs Home Depot when you've got a 3D printer? All the chemical resources are there to make a variety of materials, including plastic, cement, glass, various metals, fuel, etc..
Who needs a magnetosphere when you've got tons of regolith laying around to use as radiation shielding? As for the atmosphere, there is one on Mars, it's just not very thick. Nonetheless, it contains all the elements you need to manufacture earth-normal air for your habitat.
Slashdot Mirror
Same here (or similar)... I knew enough to write the first version of the newspaper website I created, but after that we hired some "real" IT guys and they took it from there.
As for how I learned... When I was in about 8th or 9th grade, around 1976 or 77, we had a "unit" in our math class involving pre-punched IBM cards which we used to form BASIC programs which would be batch-jobbed at the local university on their HP1000. The following year, we got a DEC-Writer and an ADS Terminal in the math dept. office, and were thus introduced to "interactive" computing. These were running on 300BAUD modems via the office phone lines, so we would sometimes "prank" each other by picking up an extension phone on the same line and talking into the receiver. ;-)
It wasn't long before we found the computer lab at the university, and started randomly taking a seat and punching out some cards to feed to the computer. Somehow the grunts behind the window never figured out that we weren't actually "college" students, and had no right to be there. We also noticed that the university had a lot more ADS terminals, which were preferable because you didn't have to wait for results on a dot-matrix printer.
Soon after that, Apple-II's started hitting the market, and then IBM PC's a couple of years later. But I didn't actually get a PC until the mid-80's, and didn't get back into programming for a while after that. Eventually I found a book on assembly language that really "spoke" to me. I learned a lot from that book, and went on to devour more books about C, C++, etc.. Some years later, I read more books about HTML, SGML, LaTeX, etc... and then came Python, PHP, and Java... and along the way there were also books about TCL, SVG, XML, and other similar buzzwords. (Oddly though, I never learned PERL or EMACS... they both just looked too deliberately masochistic...;-)
I never actually wrote much code, unless I had to. But I knew enough to know how to look up whatever I needed, and that was enough to get the job done.
Somewhere in there, around 1995, I started using GNU/Linux. And like many of my brethren, I devoted countless hours toward trying to get the damn video drivers to work with X-windows. Grrrr! (You young whippersnappers don't know how good you've got it these days...;-)
Honestly, after all that, I can't claim to know much about "computer science"... for example, I can't tell you the difference between a shell sort algorithm and a quick sort. But I know how to look that up if I need it, and I'm confident in being able to "kludge" it together somehow. But in my current position, I'm much more likely to be "riding herd" over other programmers, rather than writing the code myself. So I reckon I have a pretty good background for that. I can read code; I can speak the jargon; and I can visualize various ways to implement a project. From there, it's mostly people skills...
Although I've never specialized in CS, it has been a constant "distraction" and companion for many years. And it has given me many opportunities. I suspect that puts me in good company on this forum.
When are they going to do some experiments with centrifugal simulated gravity?
Is there some other way to use this instrument in it's hobbled state? Lunar mapping? Asteroid hunting? Etc...?? Would be nice to salvage the hardware, even if the primary mission is toasted.
Yes, that's in line with the numbers I've seen. If your goal is to convert solar radiation into electricity, you're much better off with off-the-shelf PV cells. But a more intriguing effort is underway to create a nano-scale matrix that can split water much more efficiently, offering the potential to produce liquid fuel directly.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2pUD3N-SPI
Taiwan Gold Medal on tap. Nothing special, really, but cheap and quite drinkable. And being locally produced, it's quite fresh, especially from the keg.
Beer is certainly "stuff that matters." And the fact that condensation transfers heat to the surface of the glass may be "news" to some folks. But the number of "nerds" who didn't already know this must be quite small.
OTOH, it's an excuse to talk about beer. Matter of fact, I'm having one right now. ;-)
Cheers!
So now Bitcoin becomes the province of "big iron" players like the gubmint and TBTF banksters. Great.
I should add that this is not the same as what Iron Age farmers practiced. If they had used these techniques, then the Sahara would not have turned into a desert in the first place.
Here's a video that explains how this process works. And another one that shows another method for desert recovery.
Fertilizer helps, but we'd rather not use that in a high enough degree to make it viable.
What Europe "needs" if it wants to increase production and/or land use is holistic/organic methods, such as intensive managed grazing, pasture cropping, and permaculture design. This would have multiple beneficial knock-on effects...
1. Increase production.
2. Decrease chemical inputs.
3. Decrease fuel and capital costs.
4. Mitigate flood/drought cycles.
5. Increase carbon sequestration.
6. Increase biomass and biodiversity.
7. Decrease the need for veterinary pharamceuticals.
8. Replenish eroded topsoil.
Google a bit on "Joel Salatin", "Geoff Lawton" and "Allan Savory" for some excellent videos on this subject.
No, the focus is precisely on increasing profits for Monsanto, ADM, and Ciba-Geigy.
Sell herbicide resistant seed -> sell herbicide -> $$$
Growing more crops is just a necessary marketing feature. If they could make more money by selling products that grow less food, they would do that instead.
Here ya go...
So now we've got rockets that run Linux... I'm shocked, shocked! that no one has stooped low enough to say this yet, so let me be the first to stoop...
Can you imagine having a Beowulf Cluster of THESE?!
diesels are already multifuel vehicles
And thus you show that you missed my point entirely. When you pass a universal standard on new car sales, you effectively guarantee a market for alternative fuels, and that's when your neighborhood gas station decides to put in a 100% methanol pump, because they know that at least all new car sales will be flex-fuel.
You can talk all day about how many cars are available with a flex-fuel option, but until it's the standard, there won't be widespread adoption among fuel vendors. That is the key element that makes it possible to "flip" the market and destroy the monopoly of oil.
We (the USA) currently spend about $400bn/yr on oil imports. We have plenty of "extra" space to grow the necessary non-food crops for this purpose. Anyone who is interested in reducing our economic losses would be well advised to start with this obvious trade imbalance.
AFAIK, currently some cars are flex-fuel, but not all, and on many it's optional (plus, not all can handle methanol). If I were buying a car today, I'd certainly go with a fully flex-capable one (since I can't afford a Tesla). Last time I checked, the bulk price of methanol was about $1.50/gal, and as you note, it can be made "at home" from a wide variety of feedstocks... yard waste, for example.
The jump from ethanol to methanol is important because it takes fuel out of competition with food. Ethanol (at the moment) is hard to make from anything that doesn't contain starch or sugar, whereas methanol can be made from sawdust, or just about anything almost.
We should implement an open-fuel standard, requiring all new cars to be flex-fuel capable. That would break the monopoly of oil as a transportation fuel, bringing real competition for the first time in a century. More importantly, fully flex-fuel vehicles can run on methanol just as well as ethanol (or any mix of these and/or gasoline). Thus, fuel crops would not have to compete with food crops for agricultural resources, since methanol can be made from any type of biomass. This would also have the added benefit of boosting ag markets in developing countries and making them -- the whole world really -- less dependent on petroleum.
Thom Hartmann has been talking about this for several years already. I'm not sure why this is suddenly in the news again, but I'm glad it is.
Close. Running an experiment like that would indeed require several people to have no brains.
Now you're just being silly. You list all the unknowns and cite this as a reason NOT to do the experiment. Isn't that what basic research is supposed to be about in the first place? If they'd spent the last few years on ISS finding answers to those questions, I would have nothing to whine about. Instead, this whole line of research has hardly been touched by NASA. That seems like a glaring omission to me, especially when microgravity health effects are so crucial to the success of long-duration flights.
The notion of centrifugal "simulated gravity" has been around for a long time, but NASA has almost completely ignored it. Why? Seems like a much more simple and "elegant" solution to the problem than tinkering with cellular processes. (Besides, who ever said that mouse experiments would induce headlines?)
In any case, the question remains... whither ISS? Within a few years there will be cheaper options available. ISS is the single most expensive object ever created by humans. Are we really getting our money's worth?
So it's no different from any other government research?
Hm... yes and no. As /. readers, we get a steady trickle of "gee-whiz" news from various kinds of research, much of it government funded. But when was the last time you saw a story even on this site about a new discovery from ISS? Judging by the topic listing it's been quite a while.
I get your point that research can be useful and worthwhile even if it doesn't make headlines. I just think they could be doing more. (And part of the reason might be that the ISS costs so much just to keep flying that they don't have enough money left to take on more ambitious projects.) For example, after all these years we still don't have any experiments to see whether centrifugal "simulated gravity" would be helpful in mitigating the health effects of long-duration flights. Not even with mice! That would seem like a no-brainer.
Don't get me wrong, I'm glad we have the ISS. I just wish we were doing more with it.
I wonder what the future of ISS will be, when Bigelow and others are making space less expensive and more accessible. I haven't heard of too many "earth shattering" breakthroughs from the ISS program, and lately all the excitement has been in the private sector. (Sarah Brightman doesn't have anything to worry about, she'll just have to wait a couple more years and then get a much cheaper ride.) On the one hand, cheaper access to space will make it cheaper to maintain the ISS, but OTOH they may soon be outshone by private sector efforts.
I'm beginning to see the ISS in a similar light to the Shuttle... more time wasted in LEO, when we should be going places.
* You can be at the wrong place at the wrong time and still have done nothing wrong
This, among others on your list, would comprise about 90% of the plot lines in Hitchcock films.
I agree that "fixing" or "precipitating" the atmosphere is the most promising avenue, but from what I've read, nobody has yet come up with a plausible scheme to make this happen. Doesn't mean it's impossible of course, but at the moment it makes Mars look much more promising.
Your points are all valid, I just don't think any of them are show-stoppers for Mars colonization. The only question mark, as you rightly point out, is whether or not .38g is enough for humans to be healthy over the long term. We don't have any solid data on that. But this will likely change in the next few years as research is done with mice and later humans in centrifugal apparatus. My gut feeling is that we'll be able to adapt, though over time the Martian population will diverge genetically from Terrans.
As for Martian mines running dry, well, I guess they'll just continue prospecting, as we do here on Earth. But at least in the early days of colonization, most of what we'll need will be within easy reach. Easier than asteroid mining? Neither one of us really knows the answer to that question. But in general we collectively know a lot more about planet mining than asteroid mining.
Gotta run, sorry... a customer just walked into the shop...
I agree with your point, but I still don't think we'll ever "colonize" Venus, at least not with floating cities. The only scenario for Venus that makes sense to me is more along the lines of the arctic regions of Earth. I could see, for example, a floating science research facility, analogous to McMurdo Station in Antarctica. Perhaps there could also be some resource-mining facilities, analogous to the drilling rigs in the North Sea, extracting raw materials for rocket fuel, etc., and "pipelining" them to market with a space tether or something similar.
And, over the long term, there might be a couple of floating hotels or resorts on Venus, for those space tourists who can afford the trip and want to see the Venusian sunrise. But the long-term prospects for terraforming Venus are vanishingly remote. Unless we could somehow transport half of its atmosphere to Mars, thus killing two birds with one stone, there isn't much hope for "living" on Venus.
you can't actually use all that land surface without building structures that practically cover the entire land surface
That's true for Venus, but not for Mars. The long-term goal is terraforming, which will take a few centuries to complete, but at least for Mars there are several plausible ways to do it. (For Venus, not so much.)
As for "very bad weather" damaging the buildings... we've had multiple rovers on Mars for several years, and so far the weather has not done much damage to any of them. Aside from the occasional dust storm coating their solar panels, they have mostly out-performed their design expectations by a long way.
Space colonies are a good idea too, and no doubt that route will also be taken by whoever wants to pursue it. But there are certain advantages to a planet. For example, you don't have to go out and lasso another asteroid every time you need more resources. Just dig the hole a little deeper or wider... there's a whole planet beneath your feet. Also, you don't have to worry about centrifugal/artificial gravity, that just comes free with the territory. As for being "stuck" in a gravity well... um... you do realize that we're all stuck in a gravity well right now..? Eeek!
The goal of Mars One is to colonize the planet, so they really don't care about the gravity well thing.
Who needs Home Depot when you've got a 3D printer? All the chemical resources are there to make a variety of materials, including plastic, cement, glass, various metals, fuel, etc..
Who needs a magnetosphere when you've got tons of regolith laying around to use as radiation shielding? As for the atmosphere, there is one on Mars, it's just not very thick. Nonetheless, it contains all the elements you need to manufacture earth-normal air for your habitat.