... I'd use a radiotelescope to identify the wavelengths that the satellite was transmitting, then use the same radiotelescope to send a lot of noise in the same band back at the satellite. Since ground-based radios have essentially infinite power, one could overwhelm any transmission from the satellite with junk signal, reflecting off the
satellite itself.
Since satellites generally use a few watts to a few tens of watts, and generally use low-gain antennae, it wouldn't take more than a couple of hundred reflected watts to do the job. Say a hundred kilowatts of transmission at the ground.
The chilling implication here: you can only really jam satellites that use low-gain antennae -- e.g. comsats and "cheap" satellites. Anyone who anticipates this type of jamming for a point-to-point communicating bird can just use a high gain antenna to send all their transmitted power straight to the ground station.
Another way around, especially for a comlink bird or something that can't use a beam to punch through the noise, would be to use "stealth" planar-panel technology on the satellite. If the satellite presents a flat face to the Earth, the jamming signal will be coherently reflected and probably won't affect the transmission much (except for an unlucky receiver who is in the reflected beam).
So, er, this is probably good for knocking out comsats and academic satellites -- but foreign spy satellites will probably be pretty hardened against it before too long from now.
Note: I'm not a military space insider -- just an astrophysicist. These ideas occurred to me in about 30 seconds, so you can bet anyone with his/her own space program already thought of 'em too.
Actually, my "high and mighty throne" is the law of the land. It's not illegal for folks to use public venues in an unbalanced way. But there are specific rules about how the airwaves should be used. The rules are there for a good reason: using, say, the Red Rocks Amphitheatre for a political rally doesn't affect everyone in the greater Denver area. Using Channel 7 for the same reason does.
The concerts were not making use of scarce airwave bandwidth, and were not subject to the FCC rule of equal time for opposing candidates.
This is not about freedom of speech, it's about using the scarce airwaves in a responsible manner.
If Sinclair chose to run its mocku^H^H^H^H^Hdocumentary in theaters, on the Internet, in newspapers, or on giant rotating signs on blimps, that would be OK. But by trying to abuse the airwave rights that we the people gave them, they are doing something that is not OK.
On the other side of the coin, Michael Moore publishing 9/11 in theaters is OK, but on TV two weeks before the election would not be.
On the milled edge of the coin, Sinclair could redeem themselves by running the Swift Boat Vets documentary back-to-back with Fahrenheit 9/11. Now that's fair and balanced journalism...
Check out the rear-camera video feed grabs available from several different sites (my fave is http://www.isbushwired.com). There's definitely a small rectangular object under there, along with a wire or something snaking up to his right shoulder.
That's a good point -- except that the pictures from the rear camera definitely show a rectangular box shape under his jacket.
If you haven't seen the frames yet, check out this site, which features frame captures from the FOX news feed.
There was a rear camera mounted on the stage (it's described in the MOU between the candidates). The FOX images are available from a number of sources, with slight positional differences -- so I don't think that we're looking at the work of a "lone photoshopper" here.
As a 2001 Prius owner, I have to clarify. The "B" gear lets you accelerate just fine. It does two things: (1) offset the "zero point" of the thrust/drag control, so that just taking your foot off the gas makes the car slow down (simulating a regular car); (2) allow the engine to act as a mechanical brake on the drivetrain (normally, the gasoline engine is only allowed to act as a mechanical power source, being effectively declutched when not in use).
You can drive all day in "B" if you want. You'll just get crappier mileage (in town, about 30-35 rather than 50-55).
whoops -- I mistyped the comparison with the Sun. That should read "The surface of the golf ball would appear 10^11 times brighter than sunlight". The surface of the golf ball would "only" be 2 million times brighter than the surface of the Sun.
Hmmm... "sit on the floor sizzling like a drop of water on a griddle" conjures up positively, er, gentle images.
But you have to think about what's doing the holding up. In this case, it wouldn't be steam, it would be radiation pressure keeping the atmosphere from rushing in and annihilating. The actual momentum carried by gamma ray photons from the annihilation would deflect air molecules out of the way to prevent a rapid inrush.
You can calculate how much power that is per square centimeter of "exposed" antimatter. Each photon carries a certain amount of momentum, momentum per unit time is force. So to sustain a certain pressure a certain number of photons have to be absorbed by the air per square centimeter.
The momentum carried by a photon is just E/c, where E is its energy and c is the speed of light. So to hold out 15 psi (10 Newtons per cm^2), you have to transmit 10^9 Newton-meters/second of power through that square centimeter.
So a golf ball of antimatter, sitting in the atmosphere, would emit about 4*pi*10^9 Watts, or about 10^10 Watts. The surface of the golf ball would be 10^11 times brighter than the surface of the Sun -- though of course most of that radiation would be in the form of gamma rays.
If the golf ball massed about 5 grams, it would release 5x10^15 Joules in total, so it would indeed last a long time -- but you wouldn't want to classify it as a gentle sizzle...
You could do much better by applying more pressure to the golf ball. Putting it in the imploding shock wave of a thermonuclear bomb trigger could increase the output by something like eight orders of magnitude if you got lucky enough (it scales linearly with pressure).
Clinton probably lied under oath, and Bush lied after being allowed to refuse to go under oath.
No, actually, Clinton didn't lie under oath. He asked for, and got, a precise definition of what was being asked. The acts that were performed didn't meet that definition.
Sleazy, yes. Lying, no. On the other hand, the question was an irrelevant (to the case) aside in a cooked-up affair that was designed to humiliate and discredit Clinton. Upon discovery, the case dried up and blew away.
Nah, you've got the emphasis all wrong. These guys are demonstrating that existing technology is sufficient to open a new niche. Hybrid rockets have been in serious use (by the amateur community) for a little over a decade, and are a very important development for safety.
The big problem with liquid-fueled rockets is that they blow up so damned easily. You have to mix two (often cryogenic) fuels rapidly and efficiently, and ignite them rapidly and steadily enough that no pooling or major vortex shedding occurs in the engine (BOOM). You have to pump those liquids into the engine against the pressure of combustion; just the mechanical power required to do so is a major problem for existing rockets (e.g. the Space Shuttle Main Engines, which use insanely expensive turbopumps that still require overhauls after every flight).
Rubber/Nitrous hybrid engines may have lower specific impulse than LOX/H2 engines, but they have the added advantage that it's pretty hard to make one explode. The combustion occurs on a well-defined surface (the surface of the rubber) and you can throttle the engine easily by controlling the flow of oxidizer. Rutan's insight in the SS1 design was that controllability, simplicity, and safety are more important than sheer power.
When you start treating spaceflight as a routine event, rather than an expensive stunt, then having the most power possible isn't as important as having reliable, low-maintenance, safe engine components. You might as well complain that Ford isn't getting 1,800 HP out of its 6-liter Explorer engines -- after all, drag racers achieve more than 300 HP/liter, why shouldn't your family bulgemobile?
I first noticed 'em on Tatooine when the droids are wandering around the desert about 10 minutes in. C3PO is surrounded by a greenish haze that flickers in and out. The artificial "twilight" when R2D2 is rolling down the Jawa canyon is somewhat disconcerting. The rocks on the ground have severely out-of-gamut highlights; they look like fiberglass props with lights inside. Not bad, making real rocks look fake.
... from becoming President without the `consent' of the rest of the nation.
quoth the parent:
For the sake of discussion, I will ignore the fact that the current USA system actually increases the power of high-population areas, and instead use the simplifying interpretation that rural states get a small advantage.
You're missing the point. The high-population areas do indeed have more power than the small areas -- but they have slightly less power per unit person, which is how it should be.
If you think of the poll as a kind of discriminator device (it is), reducing a nearly-floating-point number to a single bit via sum-and-threshold, then the electoral college clamps the output from any one geographical region. There's no practical difference between, say, a 51% majority and a 98% majority in New York City or in Los Angeles. That makes it harder for those places to dominate the election. Consider a candidate who enjoys a 98% majority in San Frangiego and Boswash, but only obtains 35% of the vote in the rest of the country (pretty dismal). In a straight-sum system, that candidate might win based on the popular vote and stress the country. Those disgruntled states might even try to secede, if the pattern repeated long enough.
The electoral system tilts the game in favor of moderately broad support bases. You can't win the presidency without support from a much broader geographical base than would be required under the straight-sum system.
If it's true that US dollars spent abroad never come back to the US, why would anyone abroad perceive dollars to have any value at all?
This is a really interesting question, and one that we should all be asking ourselves. Why the hell is the dollar so strong? Our increasing trade deficit, skills deficit, and now labor deficit are all symptoms of a too-strong dollar: if the dollar weren't too strong, then it wouldn't make sense to export all of our production and some of our service to a foreign land.
In Adam Smith's ideal economic world, the invisible hand of the market would lower the value of the dollar until the deficits disappeared.
The latest round of outsourcing, the ubiquity of chinese doodads, and the sickness of our manufacturing sectors are all symptoms of that invisible hand trying to restore the market: because of the strong dollar, it makes sense to export as much production as possible. This is mercantilism in reverse.
Something is holding up the dollar artificially. One may certainly argue about what that thing is. Some say that it is foreign confidence in our eternally booming economy, which may be -- but our economy has been booming because we've been steadily exporting most of it! Astute observers will note that petroleum is traded in U.S. dollars, so anyone wanting energy has to get some dollars first. The world energy economy is large enough that it could prop up the dollar.
It hasn't been big in the press, but the UN/Iraq oil-for-food program traded oil in Euros, making Iraq the only middle-eastern country that didn't use dollars.
Repeat after me: Bush did not create the economic crisis we're currently recovering from, he dealt with it swiftly and boldly. Repeat again: Bush did not create the terrorist crisis we're in, he dealt with it as no one else would do.
Rather than encouraging sheeplike behavior, why not consider the evidence for and against the proposition that Bush's buddies may be baddies; and the evidence for and against the proposition that Dick Cheney has huge conflicts of interest.
Unfortunately, most people don't bother -- like you, they simply parrot their party lines again and again.
It is a pretty well-established fact that most of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudis, and I'm too lazy to check but ISTR that none of them were actually Iraqi.
It is also pretty well-established that the administration actively distorted intelligence that was being fed to them. The question of who, exactly, lied is somewhat academic -- the whole team seems to be making questionable decisions.
It's telling that many of the recurrent scandals about the admistration and its members could be cured by even a small amount of honest talk (of the sort that we were promised in the last election).
As for Cheney -- well, if he were innocent of conflict-of-interest, why didn't he divest from Halliburton and resign from the board? At the very best, that shows poor judgement -- on a par with (to pick a random example) philandering in the Oval Office.
The reports that the re-entry vehicle was seen to be tumbling rather than spinning properly makes me wonder if sloppy thinking about rigid body kinematics came into play yet again? Spinning objects often behave in tricky, counterintuitive ways, and even in a mission of this scale it would not be too surprising to find that the spacecraft tumbled when the engineers intended it to spin smoothly.
If true, it would not be the first time -- by a long shot -- that the strange behavior of spinning objects caused trouble for a spacecraft. Some of the early three-axis-stabilized satellites were made into inadvertent spinners after their launch stabilization spin made them flip upside down (so that their de-spin rockets made them go faster instead of slowing them down!). SOHO was nearly lost in 1998, in part because rotational precession rotated the craft so that the solar panels were in long-term twilight.
Here's hoping there's something left for the team to analyze. Three years in space plus ten years of planning and lobbying is a long time to wait.
The "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" are an organization devoted to slander, with a name straight from Orwell's 1984. None of their claims about Kerry's service have turned out to be true. One of their "signatories" even came forward to say that his name had been appropriated without his permission or even knowledge.
While "Fahrenheit 9/11" may have presented the facts in a biased way, he appears not to have made them up out of whole cloth. That is an important difference.
No, actually, that's a "five-paragraph theme", a tiny subset of essays. It is the most basic nontrivial (i.e. not-just-one-paragraph) persuasive essay form.
Comparing the five-paragraph essay form to all essay writing is like comparing "do-sol-mi-do" to all music. In either case, you must generally master the simple form before you can dive into the more complex and interesting stuff.
... otherwise, you wouldn't know how to break them.
I'm serious. Learning a basic structure and slavishly adhering to it is a major part of learning how to do anything. Once you master the structure, you can dissect the reasons behind it and launch off in more creative directions -- but without first learning the structure, you're just another monkey playing with a typewriter.
As I type this, I'm taking a break from writing a proposal to get research funding from NASA. NASA science proposals are extremely rigidly structured documents, that serve a complex bundle of specific purposes. But within that structure, there is considerable room for latitude and -- dare I say it? -- even art.
Considering proposals as an art form is not completely out to lunch: peer review panels determine funding based not on how good an idea is, but on how well they are convinced by the proposal that the idea is good. I tell my students that the most helpful class I took for my science career was journalism, because of the writing and persuasion skills.
Poor to good proposals may be classified by how much they deviate from the standard. Good to very good proposals pretty much exactly meet the written (and some unwritten) forms of the medium. Excellent proposals break many of the structural rules, but for specific reasons that help the argument being made, and anticipate and address potential concerns that the reader might have on first reading.
Based on my reading of several hundred proposals over the years, it appears pretty much impossible to write an excellent proposal (complete with helpful deviations from the standard form of the medium) without first mastering the art of the good proposal (that slavishly adheres to the standards).
Just because they aren't selling it today, doesn't mean that they never will.
Not that I would encourage copyright violation, but the issues are more complex than that. These re-issues of old games (including the PS2 stuff, the TV plug-in boxes, yadda yadda) are, no doubt, inspired by the thriving emulation scene.
It's entirely possible that, if not for the swift kick in the pants to industry delivered by MAME and the like, these games would still be languishing in a corporate basement somewhere.
No, actually, publishing in a peer-reviewed journal should not prevent the researcher from being able to publish the results other ways too. For example, wouldn't it be great if you could have access to all the UV spectra (or whatever) of a group whose work you're trying to duplicate?
I know you're being sarcastic, but that reminded me of the reactor I used to work at -- the Reed Reactor Facility. It was a TRIGA, designed by General Atomic in the late 1960s (and the console technology showed it -- imagine a bulletproof pinball machine...). TRIGAs were designed to be virtually indestructible. Many of them were used in "pulse mode", where the reactor was actually sent prompt-critical by blowing the rods out of the core with compressed air!
The fuel had such a strong prompt-negative temperature coefficient that the reaction would shut itself down to "reasonable" (few-tens-of-megawatt) levels in a millisecond or two. Then the rods would fall back into the core (timescale: a few hundred milliseconds).
My point: GA really do know how to design safe reactors.
(Background: nuclear reactors operate in a so-called "critical" state, where exactly enough neutrons are produced by nuclear reactions to balance those lost by escape or absorption. In a working reactor, about 0.7% of those neutrons come from spontaneous decay of fission products; they're called "delayed" neutrons, because you have to wait for the fission product to decay over the next few seconds before the neutron comes out. Those few delayed neutrons make all the difference, because the time scale for fission-and-moderation is measured in microseconds. The other 99.3% of the neutrons are called "prompt", and you usually want to make sure you don't make a prompt-critical assembly, unless you're in the business of making nuclear weapons. Blowing the rods instantaneously out of a reactor core is one of the more dangerous things you can do with it, unless the core was designed specifically for that use.)
Yup -- this stuff came up a few days ago here on slashdot. The conclusion came entirely from the mass of uranium, neglecting the cost of extraction.
Fly ash would be a good place to look for uranium.
You could actually get considerably more (like 100 times more) energy from the uranium in the coal, provided that you were willing to breed it: after `burning' the fuel in the reactor, pull it out and extract the plutonium, then use it again. Nuclear fuel isn't gone when it's used up -- it's just full of neutron-absorbing waste products. Chemically extract the waste and you can re-use the fissionables over and over (about 100x).
Slashdot Mirror
Since satellites generally use a few watts to a few tens of watts, and generally use low-gain antennae, it wouldn't take more than a couple of hundred reflected watts to do the job. Say a hundred kilowatts of transmission at the ground.
The chilling implication here: you can only really jam satellites that use low-gain antennae -- e.g. comsats and "cheap" satellites. Anyone who anticipates this type of jamming for a point-to-point communicating bird can just use a high gain antenna to send all their transmitted power straight to the ground station. Another way around, especially for a comlink bird or something that can't use a beam to punch through the noise, would be to use "stealth" planar-panel technology on the satellite. If the satellite presents a flat face to the Earth, the jamming signal will be coherently reflected and probably won't affect the transmission much (except for an unlucky receiver who is in the reflected beam).
So, er, this is probably good for knocking out comsats and academic satellites -- but foreign spy satellites will probably be pretty hardened against it before too long from now.
Note: I'm not a military space insider -- just an astrophysicist. These ideas occurred to me in about 30 seconds, so you can bet anyone with his/her own space program already thought of 'em too.
If you don't like it, change the law.
Hmmm... It's quite common for large organizations to give money to both major parties. That's called "hedging your bet".
This is not about freedom of speech, it's about using the scarce airwaves in a responsible manner.
If Sinclair chose to run its mocku^H^H^H^H^Hdocumentary in theaters, on the Internet, in newspapers, or on giant rotating signs on blimps, that would be OK. But by trying to abuse the airwave rights that we the people gave them, they are doing something that is not OK.
On the other side of the coin, Michael Moore publishing 9/11 in theaters is OK, but on TV two weeks before the election would not be.
On the milled edge of the coin, Sinclair could redeem themselves by running the Swift Boat Vets documentary back-to-back with Fahrenheit 9/11. Now that's fair and balanced journalism...
Check out the rear-camera video feed grabs available from several different sites (my fave is http://www.isbushwired.com). There's definitely a small rectangular object under there, along with a wire or something snaking up to his right shoulder.
If you haven't seen the frames yet, check out this site, which features frame captures from the FOX news feed.
There was a rear camera mounted on the stage (it's described in the MOU between the candidates). The FOX images are available from a number of sources, with slight positional differences -- so I don't think that we're looking at the work of a "lone photoshopper" here.
As a 2001 Prius owner, I have to clarify. The "B" gear lets you accelerate just fine. It does two things: (1) offset the "zero point" of the thrust/drag control, so that just taking your foot off the gas makes the car slow down (simulating a regular car); (2) allow the engine to act as a mechanical brake on the drivetrain (normally, the gasoline engine is only allowed to act as a mechanical power source, being effectively declutched when not in use).
You can drive all day in "B" if you want. You'll just get crappier mileage (in town, about 30-35 rather than 50-55).
whoops -- I mistyped the comparison with the Sun. That should read "The surface of the golf ball would appear 10^11 times brighter than sunlight". The surface of the golf ball would "only" be 2 million times brighter than the surface of the Sun.
But you have to think about what's doing the holding up. In this case, it wouldn't be steam, it would be radiation pressure keeping the atmosphere from rushing in and annihilating. The actual momentum carried by gamma ray photons from the annihilation would deflect air molecules out of the way to prevent a rapid inrush.
You can calculate how much power that is per square centimeter of "exposed" antimatter.
Each photon carries a certain amount of momentum, momentum per unit time is force. So to sustain a certain pressure a certain number of photons have to be absorbed by the air per square centimeter.
The momentum carried by a photon is just E/c, where E is its energy and c is the speed of light. So to hold out 15 psi (10 Newtons per cm^2), you have to transmit 10^9 Newton-meters/second of power through that square centimeter.
So a golf ball of antimatter, sitting in the atmosphere, would emit about 4*pi*10^9 Watts, or about 10^10 Watts. The surface of the golf ball would be 10^11 times brighter than the surface of the Sun -- though of course most of that radiation would be in the form of gamma rays.
If the golf ball massed about 5 grams, it would
release 5x10^15 Joules in total, so it would indeed last a long time -- but you wouldn't want to classify it as a gentle sizzle...
You could do much better by applying more pressure to the golf ball. Putting it in the imploding shock wave of a thermonuclear bomb trigger could increase the output by something like eight orders of magnitude if you got lucky enough (it scales linearly with pressure).
No, actually, Clinton didn't lie under oath. He asked for, and got, a precise definition of what was being asked. The acts that were performed didn't meet that definition.
Sleazy, yes. Lying, no. On the other hand, the question was an irrelevant (to the case) aside in a cooked-up affair that was designed to humiliate and discredit Clinton. Upon discovery, the case dried up and blew away.
The big problem with liquid-fueled rockets is that they blow up so damned easily. You have to mix two (often cryogenic) fuels rapidly and efficiently, and ignite them rapidly and steadily enough that no pooling or major vortex shedding occurs in the engine (BOOM). You have to pump those liquids into the engine against the pressure of combustion; just the mechanical power required to do so is a major problem for existing rockets (e.g. the Space Shuttle Main Engines, which use insanely expensive turbopumps that still require overhauls after every flight).
Rubber/Nitrous hybrid engines may have lower specific impulse than LOX/H2 engines, but they have the added advantage that it's pretty hard to make one explode. The combustion occurs on a well-defined surface (the surface of the rubber) and you can throttle the engine easily by controlling the flow of oxidizer. Rutan's insight in the SS1 design was that controllability, simplicity, and safety are more important than sheer power.
When you start treating spaceflight as a routine event, rather than an expensive stunt, then having the most power possible isn't as important as having reliable, low-maintenance, safe engine components. You might as well complain that Ford isn't getting 1,800 HP out of its 6-liter Explorer engines -- after all, drag racers achieve more than 300 HP/liter, why shouldn't your family bulgemobile?
I first noticed 'em on Tatooine when the droids are wandering around the desert about 10 minutes in. C3PO is surrounded by a greenish haze that flickers in and out. The artificial "twilight" when R2D2 is rolling down the Jawa canyon is somewhat disconcerting. The rocks on the ground have severely out-of-gamut highlights; they look like fiberglass props with lights inside. Not bad, making real rocks look fake.
quoth the parent:
You're missing the point. The high-population areas do indeed have more power than the small areas -- but they have slightly less power per unit person, which is how it should be.
If you think of the poll as a kind of discriminator device (it is), reducing a nearly-floating-point number to a single bit via sum-and-threshold, then the electoral college clamps the output from any one geographical region. There's no practical difference between, say, a 51% majority and a 98% majority in New York City or in Los Angeles. That makes it harder for those places to dominate the election. Consider a candidate who enjoys a 98% majority in San Frangiego and Boswash, but only obtains 35% of the vote in the rest of the country (pretty dismal). In a straight-sum system, that candidate might win based on the popular vote and stress the country. Those disgruntled states might even try to secede, if the pattern repeated long enough.
The electoral system tilts the game in favor of moderately broad support bases. You can't win the presidency without support from a much broader geographical base than would be required under the straight-sum system.
Hmmmm.... so it can only be mission critical if it's part of a critical mission?
This is a really interesting question, and one that we should all be asking ourselves. Why the hell is the dollar so strong? Our increasing trade deficit, skills deficit, and now labor deficit are all symptoms of a too-strong dollar: if the dollar weren't too strong, then it wouldn't make sense to export all of our production and some of our service to a foreign land.
In Adam Smith's ideal economic world, the invisible hand of the market would lower the value of the dollar until the deficits disappeared.
The latest round of outsourcing, the ubiquity of chinese doodads, and the sickness of our manufacturing sectors are all symptoms of that invisible hand trying to restore the market: because of the strong dollar, it makes sense to export as much production as possible. This is mercantilism
in reverse.
Something is holding up the dollar artificially. One may certainly argue about what that thing is.
Some say that it is foreign confidence in our eternally booming economy, which may be -- but our economy has been booming because we've been steadily exporting most of it! Astute observers will note that petroleum is traded in U.S. dollars, so anyone wanting energy has to get some dollars first. The world energy economy is large enough that it could prop up the dollar.
It hasn't been big in the press, but the UN/Iraq oil-for-food program traded oil in Euros, making Iraq the only middle-eastern country that didn't use dollars.
Rather than encouraging sheeplike behavior, why not consider the evidence for and against the proposition that Bush's buddies may be baddies; and the evidence for and against the proposition that Dick Cheney has huge conflicts of interest.
Unfortunately, most people don't bother -- like you, they simply parrot their party lines again and again.
It is a pretty well-established fact that most of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudis, and I'm too lazy to check but ISTR that none of them were actually Iraqi.
It is also pretty well-established that the administration actively distorted intelligence that was being fed to them. The question of who, exactly, lied is somewhat academic -- the whole team seems to be making questionable decisions.
It's telling that many of the recurrent scandals about the admistration and its members could be cured by even a small amount of honest talk (of the sort that we were promised in the last election).
As for Cheney -- well, if he were innocent of conflict-of-interest, why didn't he divest from Halliburton and resign from the board? At the very best, that shows poor judgement -- on a par with (to pick a random example) philandering in the Oval Office.
If true, it would not be the first time -- by a long shot -- that the strange behavior of spinning objects caused trouble for a spacecraft. Some of the early three-axis-stabilized satellites were made into inadvertent spinners after their launch stabilization spin made them flip upside down (so that their de-spin rockets made them go faster instead of slowing them down!). SOHO was nearly lost in 1998, in part because rotational precession rotated the craft so that the solar panels were in long-term twilight.
Here's hoping there's something left for the team to analyze. Three years in space plus ten years of planning and lobbying is a long time to wait.
While "Fahrenheit 9/11" may have presented the facts in a biased way, he appears not to have made them up out of whole cloth. That is an important difference.
Comparing the five-paragraph essay form to all essay writing is like comparing "do-sol-mi-do" to all music. In either case, you must generally master the simple form before you can dive into the more complex and interesting stuff.
I'm serious. Learning a basic structure and slavishly adhering to it is a major part of learning how to do anything. Once you master the structure, you can dissect the reasons behind it and launch off in more creative directions -- but without first learning the structure, you're just another monkey playing with a typewriter.
As I type this, I'm taking a break from writing a proposal to get research funding from NASA. NASA science proposals are extremely rigidly structured documents, that serve a complex bundle of specific purposes. But within that structure, there is considerable room for latitude and -- dare I say it? -- even art.
Considering proposals as an art form is not completely out to lunch: peer review panels determine funding based not on how good an idea is, but on how well they are convinced by the proposal that the idea is good. I tell my students that the most helpful class I took for my science career was journalism, because of the writing and persuasion skills.
Poor to good proposals may be classified by how much they deviate from the standard. Good to very good proposals pretty much exactly meet the written (and some unwritten) forms of the medium. Excellent proposals break many of the structural rules, but for specific reasons that help the argument being made, and anticipate and address potential concerns that the reader might have on first reading.
Based on my reading of several hundred proposals over the years, it appears pretty much impossible to write an excellent proposal (complete with helpful deviations from the standard form of the medium) without first mastering the art of the good proposal (that slavishly adheres to the standards).
I think that this is true of most writing forms.
Not that I would encourage copyright violation, but the issues are more complex than that. These re-issues of old games (including the PS2 stuff, the TV plug-in boxes, yadda yadda) are, no doubt, inspired by the thriving emulation scene.
It's entirely possible that, if not for the swift kick in the pants to industry delivered by MAME and the like, these games would still be languishing in a corporate basement somewhere.
No, actually, publishing in a peer-reviewed journal should not prevent the researcher from being able to publish the results other ways too. For example, wouldn't it be great if you could have access to all the UV spectra (or whatever) of a group whose work you're trying to duplicate?
You paid for the research, you should have access to it.
My point: GA really do know how to design safe reactors.
(Background: nuclear reactors operate in a so-called "critical" state, where exactly enough neutrons are produced by nuclear reactions to balance those lost by escape or absorption. In a working reactor, about 0.7% of those neutrons come from spontaneous decay of fission products; they're called "delayed" neutrons, because you have to wait for the fission product to decay over the next few seconds before the neutron comes out. Those few delayed neutrons make all the difference, because the time scale for fission-and-moderation is measured in microseconds. The other 99.3% of the neutrons are called "prompt", and you usually want to make sure you don't make a prompt-critical assembly, unless you're in the business of making nuclear weapons. Blowing the rods instantaneously out of a reactor core is one of the more dangerous things you can do with it, unless the core was designed specifically for that use.)
Fly ash would be a good place to look for uranium.
You could actually get considerably more (like 100 times more) energy from the uranium in the coal, provided that you were willing to breed it: after `burning' the fuel in the reactor, pull it out and extract the plutonium, then use it again. Nuclear fuel isn't gone when it's used up -- it's just full of neutron-absorbing waste products. Chemically extract the waste and you can re-use the fissionables over and over (about 100x).