The scaled.com website has several high-resolution photos of the SpaceShipOne and the launch vehicle. They all look pretty real, except that the red rocket nozzle is pretty clearly pasted on in photoshop.
The 3/4 front view that's posted in the article appears to have a real "not-for-flight" mockup nozzle, but the shape and color are different than the rear-view photos. The rocket nozzles in the rear-view shots have clear cut-and-paste artifacts around them.
It's arguably OK to have a mockup nozzle -- it's a longstanding convention that red "not-for-flight" mockup parts get put on during construction and design, and there's no reason to have the real rocket motor on the device for an aerodynamic flight test. But photoshopping a more realistic nozzle is not OK.
Having seemingly-ludicrous amounts of CPU power available allows all kinds of tasks that you might not think of.
I'm a bit of a special case -- I'm a solar physicist, and a fair amount of my work consists of analysing image and spectral data from solar telescopes. My dual Athlon machine with 4GB of RAM is nothing special these days -- but allows me to do incredible analysis tasks interactively. Machine vision, huge wave-propagation studies, numerical magnetohydrodynamic modeling -- there are a huge number of techniques I can use that would be inaccessible without the fast processors. Ludicrously overpowered CPUs let me do more interesting science, faster.
More everyday applications (that might actually pay for the development of the chips): home studios with real-time noise-gate removal and bizarre sound-morphing effects; better TiVO effects (identifying commercials!); better user agent software; real-time grammar checkers that work; and immersive, 3-D rendered pr0n.
The problem is that the genii is out of the bottle. The whole idea behind large monetary penalties is that they're supposed be an approximately linear deterrent: double the amount of money something will cost you, and double the deterrence. But at some point large penalties cease to be an additional deterrent. Law alone simply isn't the right tool to influence behavior at that level.
File trading is so easy and so desirable on the small scale, that it's impossible to deter it using the courts. You can't haul in everyone who trades files -- so you have to increase the deterrence by really walloping the few that you can. The problem is that there's little difference (to a student) between having to pay 97,000 dollars, or 97,000,000 dollars. Upping the ante by another factor of a million, to 97,000,000,000,000 dollars, isn't any more of a deterrent -- at that point it devolves to abstract numbers.
Another millieu that shows the same kind of saturation deterrence is the drug war (spit). It's easy, cheap, and desirable enough for many folks to smoke pot, that the courts literally could not handle them all. Stiffer penalties don't work so well, because the penalties are already so unreasonably stiff that they don't affect most peoples' risk assessment.
When this phenomenon occurs in photography, it's called "reciprocity failure" normally, each additional photon hitting a piece of film exposes the film the same amount, regardless of the actual intensity -- so you can photograph a dim object, with a longer exposure time. But for very long exposure times, that picture breaks down: the partially-exposed silver halide grains repair themselves in between photon strikes, so exposing film to a weak light source for a very long time doesn't have the effect you'd expect. It makes sense to think of file trading and the drug war as examples of deterrence reciprocity failure.
The day is slowing down because of tidal drag from the Moon. Tides stretch the Earth along the Earth-Moon line; the Earth's rotation drags the axis of stretch around (about 45 degrees away from the Earth-Moon line, if I remember right). The asymmetrical shape pulls the Moon forward a little in its orbit, and the equal-and-opposite reaction (remember Newton's 3rd law?) slows down the Earth's spin by the same amount.
The Moon was certainly closer at one time -- Robin Canup, who works down the hall from me, has done some fabulous simulations of the formation of the Moon (thought to be from a giant impact of two planetoids; the larger fragment evolved into the Earth, while the smaller one became the Moon). She claims that Moon must have formed right around the Roche limit (the distance at which it would just barely not be pulled apart by tides). If that's so, then it would have had an orbital period of about 6 hours. Meanwhile, the Earth would have been rotating faster yet.
The ongoing tidal drag is evident in the "leap seconds" that some international committee periodically adds to atomic time to get coordinated universal time. The leap seconds are becoming more frequent, because (surprise) the day is slowing down a microscopic but measurable amount compared to its speed in 1951. (One leap second per three years corresponds to a proportional change of only 1 in 10^8 [100,000,000], so no wisecracks about sleeping in late, please!
I've used IDL a lot and found that it's great for getting the wrong answer in a hurry. The designers didn't spent a lot of time thinking about special cases, so (for example) the built-in interpolation includes unavoidable off-by-one pixel errors. By default, all FOR loops break after 32767 iterations. Structures try (and fail) to be like perl hashes. If you write two double-precision variables to a file and then read them in again (using the default I/O format), you get an egregiously wrong answer. The symbol table combines the worst of global and local lookup: array names collide with global functions, and there's no way to isolate modules (so big projects inevitably produce collisions).
It's possible to get work done with IDL (zillions of scientists use it), but it's a tragic waste of brainspace to keep all the extra exceptions and pitfalls in mind. Writing robust code in IDL is like kicking a whale carcass across a mined Afghani battlefield.
Oh, and the license to use it costs about as much as your workstation. I'll take PDL, NumPy, or Matlab any day over IDL.
I've advocated here before, so was going to refrain from posting -- but since sleepingsquirrel posted...:-)
PDL is great for numerical work and data analysis. I use it to reduce image sequence data and to simulate the "small-scale" dynamo on the surface of the Sun (the domain of a typical simulation is about 30,000 km across).
The array slicing and indexing operators are the most powerful I've come across. There are several graphics output packages, including a Tcl-based interface, PGPLOT, PLPLOT, and OpenGL. I use mostly the PGPLOT interface because of its extreme device independence, but the others have advantages too. As sleepingsquirrel pointed out, you get all of the goodness of perl/CPAN too -- PDL is just a set of modules that you use in perl scripts, so you can readily use all the database-horking, XML-parsing, Morse-code-spewing CPAN modules that you've come to know and love.
PDL doesn't do analytical math parsing at all. It wasn't clear from the original question whether CEHT is looking for an analytical resolver or a numerical package.
It's a little bit of a pain to get PDL all installed right (you need to get several packages from several places), but hopefully the next release will mitigate that by including a "complete" package with most of the external libraries as well as the actual PDL module set.
I received one of their disks in the mail, and tried to install it on my vmware virtual machine. It installed fine but wouldn't run: the installed program always quit with a C++ runtime error.
After several go-rounds with Intuit, I finally just asked them to refund my registration fee.
I wonder if the problem is that vmware's virtual BIOS won't allow you to scrozzle the boot sector?
(VMware is a great product, BTW -- it's a sort of meta-OS that lets you run multiple virtual machines inside one piece of hardware. I used it to host the International Nethack Tournament this year -- very convenient.)
... and there have certainly been "UFO's" sighted in some of the images, in the strict sense of "unidentified flying objects".
Most of them are attributable to dust thrown off by the spacecraft itself -- e.g. one of the instruments would close its door, and then another instrument would see loads of moving specks.
Other streaks (like the one at the top of the linked page in the article) are often attributable to cosmic rays (often deliberately mistyped as "comic rays" by my cow orkers) or ionizing radiation from the Sun itself.
The LASCO wide-angle coronal camera often sees stuff moving in strange directions -- most of that is sungrazing comets from the Kreutz family of comets.
I work at the Southwest Research Institute now, and my coworker Dan Durda has done an extensive search through thousands of LASCO images for moving objects that don't fit the pattern of the sungrazing comets -- because he's interested in "vulcanoid asteroids", asteroids inside Mercury's orbit. He didn't find any, but I'm sure that any alien spacecraft jetting through the field of view would have tripped his algorithm.
It's certainly possible that these guys have found something new, but remember that "UFO" doesn't necessarily mean "alien spaceship".
Interestingly enough, SOHO itself registered as a false positive (caught by humans, fortunately) for the earthbound SETI algorithms. It's a strongish radio source that doesn't fit their earth-satellite pattern, since it's sitting at the Earth-Sun Lagrange point.
I've looked at numpy briefly. I believe that, starting from scratch, it might be easier to learn -- perl is a write-only language at first.
PDL has really excellent dimensional manipulation and slicing; and the PGPLOT output is very nice. For me, the main advantage over python is that, well, it's just perl -- so you have access to the whole CPAN library for (e.g.) database I/O, units conversion, uu{en|de}coding, and whatnot.
It's a matter of preference. The PDL extensions are fully vectorized -- the perl engine sees a vector PDL object as just an opaque object with extensive operator overloading, so in addition to scalars, lists, hashes, and refs you also have PDLs.
Interesting you should point that out, Joe. PDL appears to have the most penetration in stellar astronomy, but at least one solar physics group at CU has installed it recently.
It's probably not worthwhile to try to replace the bulk of the analysis software that already exists with PDL -- but on the other hand, I've in general had better luck working in PDL than trying to get third-party freeware to work in (e.g.) IDL.
Perl really has come a long way from its scripting roots -- by itself, it's useful for "small to midsize" computing tasks (says the documentation) but the value of "midsize" keeps shifting to larger and larger things.
Perl Data Language (http://pdl.perl.org)
is a set of C and FORTRAN bindings that make perl
into a complete vectorized scientific-computing
language that's useful for big tasks like inverting 1000x1000 matrices or fluid-dynamic simulation, but that can also be used interactively
to work with image and spectral data.
That's neat because interactive data analysis is a pretty small niche market with a few proprietary
(and, IMHO, seriously broken) languages dominating. With PDL, I can give fresh science data to high school students, straight from the
spacecraft. Their L337 gaming machines are plenty
powerful enough to run the tools they need, and
perl is pretty much universal.
Red Hat 8.0 *IS* ``easy for the masses''
on
Ark Linux
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I don't know why the hell I'm even typing this -- it's doomed to get buried in the avalanche of other posts and never get seen...
I have installed and am using Red Hat 8.0. It was
very easy to install, and is very easy to use. It was more than four mouse clicks, but their installer is really smooth. If you just want a quick, easy install you click one of four or five radio buttons for the type of machine you want (server, workstation, etc.); but you can also switch all the packages independently.
The OS seems to come pretty well secured by default; and of course there are the requisite "control panel" windows (which actually work!) and OpenOffice links. The terminal is buried waaaay down in the menu structure -- a bit disconcerting at first. But most of the little apps that we all know and love are available in the pull-up red hat menu already.
They've eliminated the notion of window manager from the basic graphic OS install -- there's no reference to it at all. You can switch window managers, but you have to know unix to do it. That, IMHO, is a Good decision.
It seems to me that Ark Linux is a tempest in a teapot -- Red Hat already did all the work; these guys can't possibly be doing much more than smoothing over the install and putting a different theme on the desktop.
I thought about the axis stuff -- but, like us, P10 is orbiting the Sun while its axis is fixed in space and hence cannot always point at the Sun and/or Earth without correction from rocket engines. Of course, by now it's pretty close to its hyperbolic asymptote; maybe they aligned the spin axis with the asymptote, in which case the Y. effect would fade gaster than 1/r^2 as the axis came into alignment with the sun.
But, yeah, you're right that Y. should have stopped pushing by now -- it would only work farther in.
The force could be caused by the Yarkovsky Effect, a weak lateral force on spinning bodies in the solar system. It's being studied by planetary scientists as a way that asteroids can move around the solar system. The idea is that the sunlit side of the asteroid (or, in this case, spacecraft) gets warm and its properties change; then it rotates to the sunset side, yielding an asymmetry to the thermal profile of the body. (for example, here on Earth it's almost always coldest just before dawn).
If the asteroid (or spacecraft) isn't too old, it outgasses, and the outgassing rate depends strongly on temperature, forming a weak natural rocket engine. Even for refractory materials (or old asteroids that have outgassed all that they are going to) the photon pressure from the warm side can have a significant effect over millions of years.
I haven't done the calculation myself, but I've discussed it over cocktails with Bill Bottke, a leading asteroid scientist, and he seemed to think it was a plausible explanation for the Pioneer 10 orbital drift. P10 is a spinner.
Google Viewer doesn't work on Opera
on
Google's new toys
·
· Score: 2
I just get a big old mess of characters all over the screen. (Opera 6.03 for Linux)
*sigh*. I woulda thought that Google, of all companies, would've worked to make sure their stuff worked on the alternative browsers.
I operated an instrument aboard the SOHO spacecraft for four years; during that time I fielded innumerable emails and discussions from crackpots who were convinced, variously, that comets were crashing into the Earth, that aliens were here, that SOHO was in fact a spy satellite, and that the sun was going to blow up.
The common thread was that NASA must be hiding something. In particular, writing from a nascom.nasa.gov email address, I was an "insider" and therefore not to be trusted -- if you're involved with NASA, these people will latch on to anything you say that seems to support them, but dismiss even the clearest, most well-documented rebuttals. After all, you're working for the government, of course you'd say that.:-P
Give me a break! Those people at Goddard were working their arses off just to keep the damned spacecraft working and the data flowing -- there was no time (or inclination or, most probably ability) to keep a giant dark secret about aliens or whatever.
Ditto the lunar journeys. Feh.
The Russians are, collectively, the best reason not to believe the Apollo revisionists -- if we really didn't send men on those spacecraft, the Russians had the technology to find out. They would've screamed bloody murder. Besides, why bother to fake Apollo 13?
I have two Logitech wireless mice: one at work, one at home. I spend comparable amounts of time logged in both places (*sigh*). The one at home is a mechanical mouse, the one at work is an optical mouse.
My optical mouse has been through five sets of AA batteries in the amount of time it took my mechanical mouse to finish off one set of AAAs.
And you can't use rechargables, because these bad boys need the full 1.7 volts from those Alkaline cells -- the 1.3 from NiCd just won't cut it.
Actually, the tower won't generate electricity
by magnetic induction in the way that the tether did. The reason is that it rotates at the same speed as the Earth -- and as the Earth's magnetic field. No field lines get cut. That's why all those "free energy from magnets" nuts are, well, just nuts. The tether generated a nice voltage, but only because it was whizzing through the field pretty rapidly in LEO.
There would be electromagnetic induction due to the space environment outside the magnetopause (the boundary of Earth's magnetic domain; outside that, the Sun's field dominates), but that's a much smaller effect (because the field is so much weaker out there than just over the surface of the planet).
Interestingly enough, the M$ word rebuttal
on the ISC site contains some strings that the author probably didn't intend to publish. In particular, the name of Peter Passell, archconservative economist, and the name "Milken Institute" -- home of the Junk Bond King himself -- who did time in federal prison for his own shady business practices in the 1980s.
If only he were using an open-source format for his letters....
I worked at NASA/GSFC from 1995-1999, doing solar physics and operating an instrument on board SOHO.
When I started looking for a more permanent, 100% science position, I got offered a ``hard money'' civil service position at Goddard.
``Hard money'' is the career goal of most young scientists, regardless of field. Those two words mean that your salary is paid regardless of what you do. A traditional way to get hard money is to work through the university system and become a tenured professor somewhere. The other main way is to become a civil servant at a government research lab. Once you're in, you're in. As a scientist, you're essentially bulletproof: it's very hard to fire a civil servant, especially one with as nebulous a set of responsibilities as a scientist carries.
But there are drawbacks too. With the security of a government job come responsibilities ranging from the trivial (such as not being allowed to eat the free doughnuts at a meeting) to the ludicrous (I went to a meeting held at the 1998 eclipse site on the island of Guadaloupe. My civil service friends were required to book hotels 25 miles away to save a few bucks a night -- but then they discovered that their hotel was on another island!) to the onerous (e.g. it's difficult to travel, get equipment, or hire help).
I ended up taking a ``soft money'' position at a nonprofit research institute. The downside is that I have to find sources of income (grants) to support myself. The upside is that when I want a book, I buy it; when there's a meeting I should attend, I go to it; and if I have an idea for a new instrument or analysis technique, I can just implement it. Management is very supportive.
Civil service is great -- but on the other hand, the people who are most attracted to it are the people who value security above opportunity. That fosters a CYA culture and makes it difficult to get things done (such as science). Although tenure and absolute job security in principal make it possible to explore unpopular-but-important ideas (and many civil servants are very productive!), they also make it possible to relax into a not-very-productive rut.
The entrepreneurial spirit of soft-money research labs, ironically, makes it easier to have (some kinds of) bold ideas, simply because you have to do something to keep yourself going. That small-but-significant frisson of worry about the future keeps people on their toes and thinking creatively. Ordinary entrepreneurs must get it in spades.
Slashdot Mirror
The 3/4 front view that's posted in the article appears to have a real "not-for-flight" mockup nozzle, but the shape and color are different than the rear-view photos. The rocket nozzles in the rear-view shots have clear cut-and-paste artifacts around them.
It's arguably OK to have a mockup nozzle -- it's a longstanding convention that red "not-for-flight" mockup parts get put on during construction and design, and there's no reason to have the real rocket motor on the device for an aerodynamic flight test. But photoshopping a more realistic nozzle is not OK.
Burt, burt, burt -- don't blow it like that!
No kidding. I write magnetoconvection simulations in perl for cryin' out loud...
I'm a bit of a special case -- I'm a solar physicist, and a fair amount of my work consists of analysing image and spectral data from solar telescopes. My dual Athlon machine with 4GB of RAM is nothing special these days -- but allows me to do incredible analysis tasks interactively. Machine vision, huge wave-propagation studies, numerical magnetohydrodynamic modeling -- there are a huge number of techniques I can use that would be inaccessible without the fast processors.
Ludicrously overpowered CPUs let me do more interesting science, faster.
More everyday applications (that might actually pay for the development of the chips): home studios with real-time noise-gate removal and bizarre sound-morphing effects; better TiVO effects (identifying commercials!); better user agent software; real-time grammar checkers that work; and immersive, 3-D rendered pr0n.
>You got your big cheese, I got my #|.
You got your octothorpe stroke?
Huh? How is UNIX more fascist than Windows?
File trading is so easy and so desirable on the small scale, that it's impossible to deter it using the courts. You can't haul in everyone who trades files -- so you have to increase the deterrence by really walloping the few that you can. The problem is that there's little difference (to a student) between having to pay 97,000 dollars, or 97,000,000 dollars. Upping the ante by another factor of a million, to 97,000,000,000,000 dollars, isn't any more of a deterrent -- at that point it devolves to abstract numbers.
Another millieu that shows the same kind of saturation deterrence is the drug war (spit). It's easy, cheap, and desirable enough for many folks to smoke pot, that the courts literally could not handle them all. Stiffer penalties don't work so well, because the penalties are already so unreasonably stiff that they don't affect most peoples' risk assessment.
When this phenomenon occurs in photography, it's called "reciprocity failure" normally, each additional photon hitting a piece of film exposes the film the same amount, regardless of the actual intensity -- so you can photograph a dim object, with a longer exposure time. But for very long exposure times, that picture breaks down: the partially-exposed silver halide grains repair themselves in between photon strikes, so exposing film to a weak light source for a very long time doesn't have the effect you'd expect. It makes sense to think of file trading and the drug war as examples of deterrence reciprocity failure.
The day is slowing down because of tidal drag from the Moon. Tides stretch the Earth along the Earth-Moon line; the Earth's rotation drags the axis of stretch around (about 45 degrees away from the Earth-Moon line, if I remember right). The asymmetrical shape pulls the Moon forward a little in its orbit, and the equal-and-opposite reaction (remember Newton's 3rd law?) slows down the Earth's spin by the same amount.
The Moon was certainly closer at one time -- Robin Canup, who works down the hall from me, has done some fabulous simulations of the formation of the Moon (thought to be from a giant impact of two planetoids; the larger fragment evolved into the Earth, while the smaller one became the Moon). She claims that Moon must have formed right around the Roche limit (the distance at which it would just barely not be pulled apart by tides). If that's so, then it would have had an orbital period of about 6 hours. Meanwhile, the Earth would have been rotating faster yet.
The ongoing tidal drag is evident in the "leap seconds" that some international committee periodically adds to atomic time to get coordinated universal time. The leap seconds are becoming more frequent, because (surprise) the day is slowing down a microscopic but measurable amount compared to its speed in 1951. (One leap second per three years corresponds to a proportional change of only 1 in 10^8 [100,000,000], so no wisecracks about sleeping in late, please!
I've used IDL a lot and found that it's great for getting the wrong answer in a hurry. The designers didn't spent a lot of time thinking about special cases, so (for example) the built-in interpolation includes unavoidable off-by-one pixel errors. By default, all FOR loops break after 32767 iterations. Structures try (and fail) to be like perl hashes. If you write two double-precision variables to a file and then read them in again (using the default I/O format), you get an egregiously wrong answer. The symbol table combines the worst of global and local lookup: array names collide with global functions, and there's no way to isolate modules (so big projects inevitably produce collisions).
It's possible to get work done with IDL (zillions of scientists use it), but it's a tragic waste of brainspace to keep all the extra exceptions and pitfalls in mind. Writing robust code in IDL is like kicking a whale carcass across a mined Afghani battlefield.
Oh, and the license to use it costs about as much as your workstation. I'll take PDL, NumPy, or Matlab any day over IDL.
PDL is great for numerical work and data analysis. I use it to reduce image sequence data and to simulate the "small-scale" dynamo on the surface of the Sun (the domain of a typical simulation is about 30,000 km across).
The array slicing and indexing operators are the most powerful I've come across. There are several graphics output packages, including a Tcl-based interface, PGPLOT, PLPLOT, and OpenGL. I use mostly the PGPLOT interface because of its extreme device independence, but the others have advantages too. As sleepingsquirrel pointed out, you get all of the goodness of perl/CPAN too -- PDL is just a set of modules that you use in perl scripts, so you can readily use all the database-horking, XML-parsing, Morse-code-spewing CPAN modules that you've come to know and love.
PDL doesn't do analytical math parsing at all. It wasn't clear from the original question whether CEHT is looking for an analytical resolver or a numerical package.
It's a little bit of a pain to get PDL all installed right (you need to get several packages from several places), but hopefully the next release will mitigate that by including a "complete" package with most of the external libraries as well as the actual PDL module set.
I wonder if the problem is that vmware's virtual BIOS won't allow you to scrozzle the boot sector?
(VMware is a great product, BTW -- it's a sort of meta-OS that lets you run multiple virtual machines inside one piece of hardware. I used it to host the International Nethack Tournament this year -- very convenient.)
Most of them are attributable to dust thrown off by the spacecraft itself -- e.g. one of the instruments would close its door, and then another instrument would see loads of moving specks.
Other streaks (like the one at the top of the linked page in the article) are often attributable to cosmic rays (often deliberately mistyped as "comic rays" by my cow orkers) or ionizing radiation from the Sun itself.
The LASCO wide-angle coronal camera often sees stuff moving in strange directions -- most of that is sungrazing comets from the Kreutz family of comets.
I work at the Southwest Research Institute now, and my coworker Dan Durda has done an extensive search through thousands of LASCO images for moving objects that don't fit the pattern of the sungrazing comets -- because he's interested in "vulcanoid asteroids", asteroids inside Mercury's orbit. He didn't find any, but I'm sure that any alien spacecraft jetting through the field of view would have tripped his algorithm.
It's certainly possible that these guys have found something new, but remember that "UFO" doesn't necessarily mean "alien spaceship".
Interestingly enough, SOHO itself registered as a false positive (caught by humans, fortunately) for the earthbound SETI algorithms. It's a strongish radio source that doesn't fit their earth-satellite pattern, since it's sitting at the Earth-Sun Lagrange point.
PDL has really excellent dimensional manipulation and slicing; and the PGPLOT output is very nice. For me, the main advantage over python is that, well, it's just perl -- so you have access to the whole CPAN library for (e.g.) database I/O, units conversion, uu{en|de}coding, and whatnot.
K certainly looks interesting, tho'.
It's probably not worthwhile to try to replace the bulk of the analysis software that already exists with PDL -- but on the other hand, I've in general had better luck working in PDL than trying to get third-party freeware to work in (e.g.) IDL.
Perl Data Language (http://pdl.perl.org) is a set of C and FORTRAN bindings that make perl into a complete vectorized scientific-computing language that's useful for big tasks like inverting 1000x1000 matrices or fluid-dynamic simulation, but that can also be used interactively to work with image and spectral data.
That's neat because interactive data analysis is a pretty small niche market with a few proprietary (and, IMHO, seriously broken) languages dominating. With PDL, I can give fresh science data to high school students, straight from the spacecraft. Their L337 gaming machines are plenty powerful enough to run the tools they need, and perl is pretty much universal.
I have installed and am using Red Hat 8.0. It was very easy to install, and is very easy to use. It was more than four mouse clicks, but their installer is really smooth. If you just want a quick, easy install you click one of four or five radio buttons for the type of machine you want (server, workstation, etc.); but you can also switch all the packages independently.
The OS seems to come pretty well secured by default; and of course there are the requisite "control panel" windows (which actually work!) and OpenOffice links. The terminal is buried waaaay down in the menu structure -- a bit disconcerting at first. But most of the little apps that we all know and love are available in the pull-up red hat menu already.
They've eliminated the notion of window manager from the basic graphic OS install -- there's no reference to it at all. You can switch window managers, but you have to know unix to do it. That, IMHO, is a Good decision.
It seems to me that Ark Linux is a tempest in a teapot -- Red Hat already did all the work; these guys can't possibly be doing much more than smoothing over the install and putting a different theme on the desktop.
But, yeah, you're right that Y. should have stopped pushing by now -- it would only work farther in.
If the asteroid (or spacecraft) isn't too old, it outgasses, and the outgassing rate depends strongly on temperature, forming a weak natural rocket engine. Even for refractory materials (or old asteroids that have outgassed all that they are going to) the photon pressure from the warm side can have a significant effect over millions of years.
I haven't done the calculation myself, but I've discussed it over cocktails with Bill Bottke, a leading asteroid scientist, and he seemed to think it was a plausible explanation for the Pioneer 10 orbital drift. P10 is a spinner.
I just get a big old mess of characters all over the screen. (Opera 6.03 for Linux)
*sigh*. I woulda thought that Google, of all companies, would've worked to make sure their stuff worked on the alternative browsers.
I operated an instrument aboard the SOHO spacecraft for four years; during that time I fielded innumerable emails and discussions from crackpots who were convinced, variously, that comets were crashing into the Earth, that aliens were here, that SOHO was in fact a spy satellite, and that the sun was going to blow up.
The common thread was that NASA must be hiding something. In particular, writing from a nascom.nasa.gov email address, I was an "insider" and therefore not to be trusted -- if you're involved with NASA, these people will latch on to anything you say that seems to support them, but dismiss even the clearest, most well-documented rebuttals. After all, you're working for the government, of course you'd say that. :-P
Give me a break! Those people at Goddard were working their arses off just to keep the damned spacecraft working and the data flowing -- there was no time (or inclination or, most probably ability) to keep a giant dark secret about aliens or whatever.
Ditto the lunar journeys. Feh.
The Russians are, collectively, the best reason not to believe the Apollo revisionists -- if we really didn't send men on those spacecraft, the Russians had the technology to find out. They would've screamed bloody murder. Besides, why bother to fake Apollo 13?
... like there's no tomorrow.
I have two Logitech wireless mice: one at work, one at home. I spend comparable amounts of time logged in both places (*sigh*). The one at home is a mechanical mouse, the one at work is an optical mouse.
My optical mouse has been through five sets of AA batteries in the amount of time it took my mechanical mouse to finish off one set of AAAs.
And you can't use rechargables, because these bad boys need the full 1.7 volts from those Alkaline cells -- the 1.3 from NiCd just won't cut it.
That's just nasty.
There would be electromagnetic induction due to the space environment outside the magnetopause (the boundary of Earth's magnetic domain; outside that, the Sun's field dominates), but that's a much smaller effect (because the field is so much weaker out there than just over the surface of the planet).
... and so should yours, if you're worried about this stuff. Go here and send them a hundred dollars. You'll be glad you did.
If only he were using an open-source format for his letters....
``Hard money'' is the career goal of most young scientists, regardless of field. Those two words mean that your salary is paid regardless of what you do. A traditional way to get hard money is to work through the university system and become a tenured professor somewhere. The other main way is to become a civil servant at a government research lab. Once you're in, you're in. As a scientist, you're essentially bulletproof: it's very hard to fire a civil servant, especially one with as nebulous a set of responsibilities as a scientist carries.
But there are drawbacks too. With the security of a government job come responsibilities ranging from the trivial (such as not being allowed to eat the free doughnuts at a meeting) to the ludicrous (I went to a meeting held at the 1998 eclipse site on the island of Guadaloupe. My civil service friends were required to book hotels 25 miles away to save a few bucks a night -- but then they discovered that their hotel was on another island!) to the onerous (e.g. it's difficult to travel, get equipment, or hire help).
I ended up taking a ``soft money'' position at a nonprofit research institute. The downside is that I have to find sources of income (grants) to support myself. The upside is that when I want a book, I buy it; when there's a meeting I should attend, I go to it; and if I have an idea for a new instrument or analysis technique, I can just implement it. Management is very supportive.
Civil service is great -- but on the other hand, the people who are most attracted to it are the people who value security above opportunity. That fosters a CYA culture and makes it difficult to get things done (such as science). Although tenure and absolute job security in principal make it possible to explore unpopular-but-important ideas (and many civil servants are very productive!), they also make it possible to relax into a not-very-productive rut.
The entrepreneurial spirit of soft-money research labs, ironically, makes it easier to have (some kinds of) bold ideas, simply because you have to do something to keep yourself going. That small-but-significant frisson of worry about the future keeps people on their toes and thinking creatively. Ordinary entrepreneurs must get it in spades.