Minor point: the airmen who were shot down and had the crap beaten out of them by the Saddam military during the 91 war were British. (Flying Tornados, in treetop-level bombing raids on heavily defended Iraqi airbases, so they were lucky to get out alive in the first place. Quite a few weren't so lucky.)
Funny you should mention that. Have you seen the film of an early attempt at a rotary winged aircraft? A tethered bedstead affair, with a chap on what looked like a dining chair strapped in the middle of it all wearing a top hat. He opens the throttle and soars up, up and away! until the ten foot extension limit of the tethers, which immediately brought the craft's ascent to a halt. Alas, the fearless aviator, not having thought of strapping himself to the airframe, continued on his upward movement...
Hopefully someone will find it on YouTube & post a link..?
Forty quid, FWIW. I bt'd it, decided I liked it enough to plonk down real money, and as I'm single, mortgage wife & kids-less in my late 30s, I can fork out forty quid for the boxset more or less on a whim. Arpeggi / Weird Fish is worth the cost of admission alone. Seriously, sit down and listen to that one track three or four times, mebbe give it a day or two to fester in your subconscious, come back to it. Now tell me that's not godlike genius.
There aren't many other bands I'd shell out for like that, though I did buy a wacked-out small-run CD of J Spaceman (of Spiritualized) noodling on the guitar for 40 mins (and I mean noodling with a capital NOOD) for £12, but that's more by way of tithe for the enormous pleasure he's given me over the last 20 years.
Actually, the rover software has been updated several times since launch, most recently four or five months ago. They've added new features like "go and touch" (a development of the previous "touch and go".) TnG means they park by a rock, make sure it's in range of the arm, then they can uplink a sequence saying "get the arm out, study the rock with the Mossbauer / micro-imager / RAT / etc, then put it away and drive 35 metres on heading 182 degrees". It used to take a day or so of fine adjustments after the rovers arrived at a rock the team wanted to study before they were able to instruct it to get the arm out and start working on it. "Go and Touch" means they can tell the rover to drive to the rock 35 metres away on heading 182, then get it into range of the arm, then deploy the arm and start studying it. There's also visidom, improved image-detection code that makes the rover able to make longer drives into uncharted areas before stopping to call back home - it's more autonomous. This is a big deal when you're only doing one uplink sequence per sol.
As the chances of Oppy still being in a condition for long drives across the landscape after it's done with Victoria Crater are slim, it doesn't seem likely visidom will get much use on the MERs. I'm sure the libs will be reused in future though...
Anecdote: my aunt read Pure & Applied Mathematics with Computing at Imperial College, London -- (one of the most prestigious science & technology universities in the world, up there with MIT, Oxbridge, Caltech etc.) This was in the late 1960s and she was of course one of very few women on her course (or indeed at Imperial!)
She then emigrated to the remote end of Ireland, where for 30 years or so she taught IT and computing a the local RTC (Regional Tech College.) She was telling me fairly recently that the level of casual sexism, and the air of intimidation and of it being a male domain meant that whereas 10 or 15 years ago there were actually more women/girls on the courses than men, it was now overwhelmingly male dominated. Of course she's done what she can to push that back and keep it open to women but... she's just retired.
I used to think the same thing, but guess what? I'm driving a brand new Mitsubishi Eclipse right now
[...]
loans on new vehicles tend to have much better interest rates than loans on used vehicles, so you're not giving as much of your money away to some bank as you pay off your car
See, there's your problem right there. You're using someone else's money to buy the car, so it's not actually yours, is it - until you've repaid the loan.
I got into debt once - it was hell (actually, it was my 20s) but no more, no sir. I don't own my house but then neither do any of my neighbours, they just think they do...
Strange but true. The ninth ward (and other badly hit areas) flooded to a depth of 9, 12, 16 feet in places and higher.
An anecdote -- which is not data. (And I just googled and couldn't find a cite for this, though ISTR it was in the LA Times that I read this.) Post-Katrina regulations for rebuilding in those areas mandate a three foot elevated foundation pile, ie the ground floor must be at least three feet above ground level.
This regulation is being cited - apparently credibly - as one factor, amongst many, that is inhibiting rebuilding and resettlement of the worst hit areas.
I'm not a civil engineer, but I get to read the "New Civil Engineer" and it's often fascinating stuff. Coastal management in the UK is now about "managed withdrawal" -- reflooding low-lying and reclaimed marsh areas, and allowing eroding coastlines to continue eroding rather than trying to protect them with seawalls, dikes and other traditional flood defences. This is a big, big, big deal: for starters, property owners who have just found that their area is now being effectively abandoned to the sea will not be getting any insurance or compensation.
I'm glad my house is on top of a hill, 200' above (but only half a mile from) the nearest river. On my daily commute I pass extensive modern housing estates built on what are obviously flood plains (this is in the Severn Valley in the west of the UK.) We're all doomed...
Are you kidding? Our Congress is investigating why google has made a change in its maps? And they're fishing for someone to start a political brawl with?
Don't we have... I don't know, something related to government services that they should be doing? Or, if it's going to be related to business, related to business that has a significant impact on consumers? Or poverty? Or taxes? Or services? Or the debt? We (as a nation) have a nine trillion dollar credit card debt, and we're worried about whether google's mapping decision was something we can get into a political scuffle about?
You seem to have a naively simplistic idea of how government, the state, congress, and the political system function - and what their function is. Surely this is something most of us figure out fairly early on... around the time you first start notice politicians are making statements that affect your life, but that (a) what they say has little to do with what they do, (b) what they do has little to do with the reality of people's everyday lives, and (c) every elected politician in Washington has an income far, far above the average... you realise that what politicians say doesn't map directly to reality. You try on different models for a while - they're lying because they're right wing! No, wait, they're lying because they're leftwing! No, wait,... they're lying because they're evil fucks! Well, no, they can't all be pure evil & corrupt... it's almost as if it's not as easy as saying "here's the problem and here's the answer", getting yourself elected, then trying to get the answer implemented?
Bread and circuses, dear heart. Bread and circuses.
If you think I am saying that CO2 isn't a greenhouse gas, or that it can't contribute to global warming, you misunderstand. What I *am* saying is that, at this point in time, claiming that CO2 concentration is the sole reason for global warming is irresponsible and presumptuous.
I look forward to your paper in Nature explaining which climate forcings Chart SPM-2 (p4 of the PDF) has missed out, or miscalculated. Perhaps you contest the errorbars?
Arbitrarily deciding that a position someone present can't be valid solely on the basis of their political beliefs is an inadequate substitute for the scientific method. Tell that to David Icke!
My understanding of the state of global warming science is, I think, pretty good for a layperson. I freely admit that 10-5 years ago I threw around flame and ill-informed argument in the so-called "global warming debate". At that point someone quoted some Science or Nature papers back at me, and I realised that I needed to learn more about the science. Well, it turns out that the science is far more complicated than I imagined. My expectations about future climate change haven't changed that much (though I now know that the North Atlantic thermo-haline circulation (the NAO, usually called "gulf stream") is actually quite unlikely to shut down, in the next century or so anyway.) My understanding of/why/ the IPCC scenarios predict the outcomes they do is much better, however. And yes, there are areas of genuine uncertainty; there are still parts of the climate system that are poorly understood, or for which historical data is patchy. However, the pseudo-science and professional "sceptic" types haven't changed one whit, and they're still peddling the same tired old crap about solar radiative inputs or arguing about the fit of particular charts using deliberately manipulative subsets of the data, or the wrong units (radians and degrees, anyone? =) To that extent, I think this bloke and the rest of them are actively dangerous to humanity and the rest of the planet.
However, I hope it goes without saying that I condemn and reject utterly and without hesitation any sort of intimidation, threats or violence against people just because they profoundly misunderstand a chunk of science, regardless of it's significance. If we were to go around killing off that portion the species that don't grasp how science works at this particular point in history, we would have a very small population left (with a terrible gender imbalance.) Violence is bad, just as the truth is good.
If the science is right, as I think it is, this will gradually come to be accepted by the world. There will always people who assert some sort of supernatural causation, or who never hear the truth, or can't or won't understand; that's the way we are; but I do think we have a good chance of actually getting in front of the avalanche, putting our collective backs to it and greatly reducing the impact. Did you know that from 2010, all new power-stations in the EU will produce zero carbon emissions? Just as a f'rinstance. Just one straw in the wind, but never underestimate the power of a large number of people moving in the same direction at once.... (or the power of natural selection or the invisible hand of the market;)
...painful to read this mish-mash of half-truths and inaccuracies...
Yes, D* has been used "live" for the first time.
However, both rovers received a fresh load of mission s/w a couple of months back which enables a variety of fabulous new functions, including "go and touch" (as opposed to the original "touch and go") - go and touch enables the drive planners to instruct the rovers "move 12.4 metres forwards, turn 30* left, forward 70cm, approach the rock in front of you, deploy the IDD (robot arm holding a variety of instruments, spectrometer, close up camera, the RAT (grinder) and brush, etc; deploy the Mossbauer spectrometer, take reading in situ for 18 hours".
It also enables them to build their own route maps. One problem is that on featureless plains, it needs landmarks to assess how far it's travelled -- thus the newly developed "drunken sailor" manouever, designed to make clearly visible tracks that can be used to triangulate the on-board navcom. thing.
Yes, yes, yes, but don't distract me with these pettyfogging facts. The joy and euphoria I felt when I got over the lip of the curve and realised that I had the simple, simple key to parsing obfsucated C sig one-liners like yours just can't ever be found in PHP. Yes, PHP might make it easy to do the easy things, but there'll never be a PHP one-liner sig, because there's no joy in Perl.
Slashdot Mirror
Minor point: the airmen who were shot down and had the crap beaten out of them by the Saddam military during the 91 war were British. (Flying Tornados, in treetop-level bombing raids on heavily defended Iraqi airbases, so they were lucky to get out alive in the first place. Quite a few weren't so lucky.)
Hopefully someone will find it on YouTube & post a link..?
Lamely replying to my own post, Honeybee logo in situ, Planetary Society article quoting Steve Squyres, the PI, on how cool that is :)
Actually, most of the robotics comes from New York's own Honeybee Robotics. You can still see their logo on the side of the RAT in some shots.
There aren't many other bands I'd shell out for like that, though I did buy a wacked-out small-run CD of J Spaceman (of Spiritualized) noodling on the guitar for 40 mins (and I mean noodling with a capital NOOD) for £12, but that's more by way of tithe for the enormous pleasure he's given me over the last 20 years.
Minor niggle, but I think that probably having recorded one of the all-time classic albums of the last 30 years got them a bit more PR than 'Creep'.
Yeah, I can really see the American legal system prosecuting Dubya, winning, and him getting the electric chair. Very likely. hu-huh.
Yes, but presumably not for very long.
Less amusingly, that's presumably part of the basic reasoning of a suicide bomber.
As the chances of Oppy still being in a condition for long drives across the landscape after it's done with Victoria Crater are slim, it doesn't seem likely visidom will get much use on the MERs. I'm sure the libs will be reused in future though...
Easy. Just send 'em over to us down here in Gloucestershire. They'll be up on blocks & covered buried in empty White Lightning bottles before you can say "Mossbauer Spectrometer".
Welcome to Armchair World.
I'm not worthy!
She then emigrated to the remote end of Ireland, where for 30 years or so she taught IT and computing a the local RTC (Regional Tech College.) She was telling me fairly recently that the level of casual sexism, and the air of intimidation and of it being a male domain meant that whereas 10 or 15 years ago there were actually more women/girls on the courses than men, it was now overwhelmingly male dominated. Of course she's done what she can to push that back and keep it open to women but... she's just retired.
See, there's your problem right there. You're using someone else's money to buy the car, so it's not actually yours, is it - until you've repaid the loan.
I got into debt once - it was hell (actually, it was my 20s) but no more, no sir. I don't own my house but then neither do any of my neighbours, they just think they do...
I drive a gen 6 Celica (only the 1.8l admittedly) & get >40mpg. And I don't drive like Miss Marple either...
An anecdote -- which is not data. (And I just googled and couldn't find a cite for this, though ISTR it was in the LA Times that I read this.) Post-Katrina regulations for rebuilding in those areas mandate a three foot elevated foundation pile, ie the ground floor must be at least three feet above ground level.
This regulation is being cited - apparently credibly - as one factor, amongst many, that is inhibiting rebuilding and resettlement of the worst hit areas.
I'm not a civil engineer, but I get to read the "New Civil Engineer" and it's often fascinating stuff. Coastal management in the UK is now about "managed withdrawal" -- reflooding low-lying and reclaimed marsh areas, and allowing eroding coastlines to continue eroding rather than trying to protect them with seawalls, dikes and other traditional flood defences. This is a big, big, big deal: for starters, property owners who have just found that their area is now being effectively abandoned to the sea will not be getting any insurance or compensation.
I'm glad my house is on top of a hill, 200' above (but only half a mile from) the nearest river. On my daily commute I pass extensive modern housing estates built on what are obviously flood plains (this is in the Severn Valley in the west of the UK.) We're all doomed...
Don't we have... I don't know, something related to government services that they should be doing? Or, if it's going to be related to business, related to business that has a significant impact on consumers? Or poverty? Or taxes? Or services? Or the debt? We (as a nation) have a nine trillion dollar credit card debt, and we're worried about whether google's mapping decision was something we can get into a political scuffle about?
You seem to have a naively simplistic idea of how government, the state, congress, and the political system function - and what their function is. Surely this is something most of us figure out fairly early on... around the time you first start notice politicians are making statements that affect your life, but that (a) what they say has little to do with what they do, (b) what they do has little to do with the reality of people's everyday lives, and (c) every elected politician in Washington has an income far, far above the average... you realise that what politicians say doesn't map directly to reality. You try on different models for a while - they're lying because they're right wing! No, wait, they're lying because they're leftwing! No, wait,... they're lying because they're evil fucks! Well, no, they can't all be pure evil & corrupt... it's almost as if it's not as easy as saying "here's the problem and here's the answer", getting yourself elected, then trying to get the answer implemented?
Bread and circuses, dear heart. Bread and circuses.
I look forward to your paper in Nature explaining which climate forcings Chart SPM-2 (p4 of the PDF) has missed out, or miscalculated. Perhaps you contest the errorbars?
Please show your working.
However, I hope it goes without saying that I condemn and reject utterly and without hesitation any sort of intimidation, threats or violence against people just because they profoundly misunderstand a chunk of science, regardless of it's significance. If we were to go around killing off that portion the species that don't grasp how science works at this particular point in history, we would have a very small population left (with a terrible gender imbalance.) Violence is bad, just as the truth is good.
If the science is right, as I think it is, this will gradually come to be accepted by the world. There will always people who assert some sort of supernatural causation, or who never hear the truth, or can't or won't understand; that's the way we are; but I do think we have a good chance of actually getting in front of the avalanche, putting our collective backs to it and greatly reducing the impact. Did you know that from 2010, all new power-stations in the EU will produce zero carbon emissions? Just as a f'rinstance. Just one straw in the wind, but never underestimate the power of a large number of people moving in the same direction at once.... (or the power of natural selection or the invisible hand of the market ;)
foreach (reverse (keys( %{$_} ){ ...
Yes, D* has been used "live" for the first time.
However, both rovers received a fresh load of mission s/w a couple of months back which enables a variety of fabulous new functions, including "go and touch" (as opposed to the original "touch and go") - go and touch enables the drive planners to instruct the rovers "move 12.4 metres forwards, turn 30* left, forward 70cm, approach the rock in front of you, deploy the IDD (robot arm holding a variety of instruments, spectrometer, close up camera, the RAT (grinder) and brush, etc; deploy the Mossbauer spectrometer, take reading in situ for 18 hours".
It also enables them to build their own route maps. One problem is that on featureless plains, it needs landmarks to assess how far it's travelled -- thus the newly developed "drunken sailor" manouever, designed to make clearly visible tracks that can be used to triangulate the on-board navcom. thing.
You are lost in a twisty maze of APIs, all alike. It is dark. You are likely to be hit on the head by a chair thrown by a Grue.
Yes, yes, yes, but don't distract me with these pettyfogging facts. The joy and euphoria I felt when I got over the lip of the curve and realised that I had the simple, simple key to parsing obfsucated C sig one-liners like yours just can't ever be found in PHP. Yes, PHP might make it easy to do the easy things, but there'll never be a PHP one-liner sig, because there's no joy in Perl.