I was not trying to say the Nasa should drop into every stinking latest and greatest fad. But suffice to say that Civilian and Military aviation have developed a long way since the early 1970's. Now you want to talk about 2 industries where a mistake will cost billions of dollars!
In both industries old equipment is constantly being retrofitted with new technology as parts stop becomming available. Look at the B-52. The design has been flying since the 50's. They carry nuclear weopons. They have to operate on a budget. When a new bomb comes out, or they need a plane to do recon instead of bomb, they design the new technology into the existing spaces.
To be fair, the Space Shuttle has had a lot of improvements over time. I recall they are in the process of overhauling the computers and installing glass cockpits. But to read the review board's report, it sounds like a lot of the talent has been run out of the organization. And now it seems that a lot of the contractors are doing the same.
This is getting to be a rather interesting thread. I must conceed that your citations are for more pertinant to the matter at hand than mine.
Even by biblical standards, odd stuff was afoot following the flood. So can we agree to summarize all of the facts of the matter as this: It is a miracle that the human race survived whatever was going on.
Bear in mind that, according to the Bible, the average lifespan in this time period was something like 900 years, and therefore I would extend the age of fertility accordingly.
That's bull:
Gensis 25:7 Altogether, Abraham lived a hundred and seventy-five years.
Numbers (multiple) - References to "All men between thirty and fifty.
Joshua 5:6 - The Israelites had moved about in the desert forty years until all the men who were of military age when they left Egypt had died, since they had not obeyed the LORD .
2 Samuel 19:32 - Now Barzillai was a very old man, eighty years of age.
2 Chronicals 24:15 - Now Jehoiada was old and full of years, and he died at the age of a hundred and thirty
The only man to live 800 years was Adam.
Now ask me, if women had extended fertility why does the bible in Genesis 18:11 state:
Gensis 18:11 Abraham and Sarah were already old and well advanced in years, and Sarah was past the age of childbearing.
So yes, there was a limit to fertility. Outside of Kings and other notable figures, Isrealite rarely lived past 40 (Joshua 5:6). And that was the men mind you, until recently the leading cause of death for women was childbirth.
That begs the question of course: rounding up really dirt old parts and verifying that they work is a very labor intensive process.
Now ask yourself: are the running a museum or a space program? I realize a board requires thousands of dollars worth of labor to re-design and certify. But we are spending BILLIONS on the project every year. If that money is not going into R&D, where is it going?
While you are at it, where did the notion of a Virgin Birth come from. Go back to the Gospel. The only notes (where mentioned) about Jesus' beginnings was that his mother became Pregant our of wedlock. The "Holy Spirit" could have been anything from pathenogesis to Joseph being particularly randy one night. His reaction was shame and embarrasment, recall, not jealosy.
Also note the Bible refers to Christ being rejected by his brothers and sisters.
And yes I have read the whole thing all the way through. The circumstances of Christ's birth are mentioned in only 1 gospel, another mentions his being visited by Kings as a child, and the other 2 start off with him as an adult. I don't remember which ones, but it's bugging me enough to go digging for it...
Thank you, it was the Masai I was thinking about. I just was too lazy to google around and find it. I've got a mind that remembers really off the wall facts, and can call them up on demand. Details... well, they don't seem to store quite as well.
For my part, I react rather violently to a protein generated by dust mites, and my immune system is not too fond of mold and mildew either. Wherever my ancestors came from, they must not have kept a lot of food in the fridge, and if the stayed indoors must have kept the place spotless. Which is odd, because most of my family is from Ireland, which is rainy and damp, where you are stuck inside a lot in an environment that is a breeding ground for mildew.
Ever population has a magic number that determine the minimum number of individuals required to maintain its existance. For birds this number is about 4,000. We witnessed one population recently dip below the magic number and cease to exist: the Carrier Pidgeon. There were some pretty heroic attempts on the part of humans to get the population back on its feet, but all for naught.
Giving the benefit of the doubt that the bible simply didn't count women, you have 9 breeding pairs. (Noah, his wife, 8 sons, 8 wives.) Now, a woman can carry 1 child at a time, about every other year in primative conditions. (It's not until recently that we've become well nourished enough to have back-to-back pregancies.)
Going for the benefit of the doubt again, we will assume that all of the women start off this breed-a-thon at around 14 or so, with fertility tailing off around 36. 36-14=22=11
Each woman can effectively have about 11 pregancies, about 1/3 of them will not go to term, and another 1/3 will die before age 5. Rounding up, we effectively have each woman bringing about 4 kids into the world before her body wears out.
If you think I'm being pessimistic with these numbers, they did not have pre-natal care, vitamins, or even a steady food supply. I'm just working with rough estimates based on what goes on in the third world, which is about the best guess for what conditions would be like following the complete distruction of the Earth. (And I'm not even factoring in death during labor.)
We are going to estimate that the population can quadruple in size every generation. By that estimate... damn. You actualy have about 38 million people after 400 years.
But this estimate is completely bunk. If you look through historical estimates, until the 19th century humans NEVER even doubled in size within a generation. Our growth rate before shows a doubling about avery 1000 years or so. Mind you that is taking into account disease, wars and disasters,
So whatever happened, you need a much larger population than 8, or even 2. There are more than 8 different genes controlling eye color. The chances that 8 individuals in the same family all had type AB+ blood, as well as O- blood is also unlikely.
The "Mitochondrial Eve" theory is a mathematical extraction. Frankly I use the same sort of estimates to show that throwing a light switch would generated in infinite amount of current, for an infantesimally small fraction of a second immediately after it's thrown. Our number systems are terrible about handling beginning and endings.
Which is probably why the big guy simply started by stating THIS is on. THIS is off, and was content to just flip on and off for the first day.
I'm really curious about why digesting milk is such a big deal? Until the 20th century we had absolutely no way of storing milk long enough to consume it.
Before that it was either right out of the cow, or in the form of cheese where the lactose is nicely broken down by fermentation.
Like all points, there are exceptions. I do recall one culture in Africa subsists on a food product made by mixing the blood of the cattle with the milk. But they are nomads who maintain too small a cattle population to afford to kill one on a regular basis.
Think about it. We build structures and pile food in there to draw the mice for them to eat!
We have all seen cat owners. Every house has a little shrine for the kitty cat. They reserve the best seats in the house and the better windows for the cat. And all for what? So the cat can ignore our existance except when it needs to be petted, or just mess with our minds.
Just look in the Bible. (I'm a secularist myself, but the old testimate is an entertaining folk tale.) How many Son's did Abraham have? You have Lot who had a lot of kids by his daughters. I mean incest, polygamy on a mass scale, all the makings of a really shallow gene pool.
Then you have Kings from other cultures who would spread their seed wide and far. You see the same behavior in rock stars and sports figures today. How many kids did Jim Morrison sire? How about Wilt Chamberlin? Hell even Ben Franklin got around. In every cult what happens? The cult leader fucks all the groupies.
Women are drawn to success. Men are drawn to breed with healthy women. In less enlightened times someone Enronized our Gene pool by being really successful and not being dumb enough to die young before they spread.
I realize that all of these traits are probably dormant in all mammals, and were simply re-expressed in humans through mutation. The enlarged forehead of humans is actually a common feature of infant apes, our forehead simply doesn't receed during maturity. (Though you wouldn't know it looking at the behavior of some people.)
But there is a big problem. We somehow successfully mutated several major features in our Genome in the blink of an eye. To boot, we did it with a relatively small gene pool. Granted, the two could aggrivate each other.
Something REALLY wierd happend at some point in our developmental past. In the absence of any records, fossils, or talking ghosts just about any answer is good.
Perhaps humans haven't always lived here. Think about it, most cultures have an Atlantis-like legend, and a Flood/Migration legend.
Could it be possible that we are the decendents from a crashed spacecraft? Maybe I played Homeworld too often, but doesn't it seem funny that we are the only primates that can:
Swim
Choke to death on food (Apes and monkeys can breathe and drink at the same time.)
Lose our Virginity.
Cry
(A great site that goes into more detail is: Here.)
At times we have more anatomically in common with a Seal than an ape. Not enough to make me buy a tinfoil cap, but precisely how does an otherwise aquatic creature "evolve" on an Savanna, and then ddevelop their first civilization in the middle of a desert?
One other bit of information to help lock it all down: all of this took place in Montgomery County, PA. Sometimes cross referencing contracts by county is helpful.
I do know for a fact that the Hatboro-Horsham High School was built by a Contractor that normally builds prisons. My minimal googleing and pouring through local newpapers has produced the name of the Vitetta Organization who have designed several Suburban Philadelphia Schools and a few Libraries. A quick search for the Vitetta Group show an architecture firm that designed a lot of suburban Philadelphian correctional facilities.
The rest of the research I leave to you. For an entertaining read, check out the lawsuit between the General Contractor that built the Hatboro-Horsham High School and the township.
For the record, I grep up in the neighboring township of Upper Moreland. The utter gloom of HH's new (as of 1990) building was a local legend.
I used 2 of them over the course of a year to bring WIFI to my apartment, 2 blocks away from the office. (This was using a pair of aftermarket directional antennas mind you.)
My X-terminal really gums up a wifi connection, if the connection is working at all.
Diagnosing Wifi is voodoo some days. The funny part is 9 times out of 10 it's my damn card. (I don't suspect the Linux drivers, because windows with the same card is every bit as bad.) I more or less stay in patch cable range if possible. Wireless is a great frill if it works.
The Linksys Access points (an undoubtedly many others) have external antennal mounts. The factory antennas are designed to give you a fairly even sphere of coverage.
Now, antennas of various design can give you different shapes. If you are trying to fill an area that is all roughly on the same elevation, use a Higher gain (aroung 8-10db) omnidirectional antenna. If you are setting an access point up in one corner of the property, buy a directional antenna to fill in only the areas you are trying to cover.
In this way you are effectively boosting the output of the equipment without introducing extra noise, or bringing the FCC to your door.
The hard part is interfacing the access point to the external antennas. The back of my linksys's have a reverse-TNC connector. Most aftermarket antennas use the ham-radio style N-type connectors. After a bit of scouring I found an outfit that actually sells the pigtail I needed.
The antennas were from an outfit in Canada called "Superpass". They have a great website with the radiation patterns, but their market is someone buying a messload at a time. I forget where I got the pigtail, but I could probably find it again if asked.
Think about it in terms of a house. A blueprint for it goes much further than a good cut on a piece of lumber-- or a good clean cut on a whole pile of lumber for that matter.
Living in a 100 year old house let me tell you: a Blueprint in not nearly as useful as As-Built drawings. The original "Blueprint" was 3 rooms stacked atop one another connected by a staircase. Later, they added a back of the house, moved the kitchen from the basement. Some houses in this "Expanded Trinity" style have the kitchen on the second floor, others (like mine) have the Kitchen on the first floor.
They are perfectly functional, indeed, standing 100 years in our day in age is a feat. What kept them up was craftsmanship. The stairs are winding, but they are all original. (I've had to tighten a few with this new technology on building: a screw.) The floors are solid wood, I just sanded them and varnished them.
Architecturally this house is a mess. Structurally, and practically, it works perfectly. Indeed this very style is copied across several thousand houses in Philadelphia. Now, my choice of furnature is limited. The bedroom door is 20 inches wide, and the stairs are winding and rather steep. But we have another modern technology: Ikea. Buy it disassembled.
Contrast this to the "McMansion" phenominon. Some friends of mine recently purchased a new house. Architecturally it was nearly perfect. However, it was a) built poorly, and b) constructed on unstable soil. What isn't cracking is falling off or moulding.
(I must have been born to write parables, Jeeze.) I have another friend who purchased a refurbished house, of solid (simple) design, and well constructed. Hell, the rennovator even ran Cat-5 to every corner of the house. There are no real downsides, he actually paid less than the "Brand New", and got solid construction.
Is it fancy? No. Just 2 floors with a finished basement.
And somewhere there in there is a lesson, but I have to run off for lunch.
My step father is enjoying a rent free existance courtesy of the State of Pennsylvania presently, so I've actually seen a few Penetenturies from the inside.
My first impression of the waiting room was "Damn, this is just like home room." Lots of long corridors with sealed windows, all meeting at critical nodes. That same cinder-block construction, with the same linolium floor. One visiting room had the same sort of chairs and tables I'd used in middle school. Another had a visiting room that looked just like the faculty lounge.
Think about it, how many of you remember the absolutely terrible traffic flow of your schools? How everyone seemed to have to pile through one particular intersection. It makes sense for a prison, but I think a lot of times they just cut and paste for schools.
There is also a whole lot of really cool video equipment and automatic doors. If you ever get the chance to visit a prison (and I mean VISIT, not STAY) I highly suggest it for all geeks.
If you want 2 buildings to campare: Hatboro Horsham High School, and the Montgomery County Correctional Facility. The overall layout may be different, but the details...
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People are the hole. Think about it, what do you call someone who cuts you off in traffic? Asshole.
In both industries old equipment is constantly being retrofitted with new technology as parts stop becomming available. Look at the B-52. The design has been flying since the 50's. They carry nuclear weopons. They have to operate on a budget. When a new bomb comes out, or they need a plane to do recon instead of bomb, they design the new technology into the existing spaces.
To be fair, the Space Shuttle has had a lot of improvements over time. I recall they are in the process of overhauling the computers and installing glass cockpits. But to read the review board's report, it sounds like a lot of the talent has been run out of the organization. And now it seems that a lot of the contractors are doing the same.
Even by biblical standards, odd stuff was afoot following the flood. So can we agree to summarize all of the facts of the matter as this: It is a miracle that the human race survived whatever was going on.
That's bull:
The only man to live 800 years was Adam.
Now ask me, if women had extended fertility why does the bible in Genesis 18:11 state:
Gensis 18:11 Abraham and Sarah were already old and well advanced in years, and Sarah was past the age of childbearing.
So yes, there was a limit to fertility. Outside of Kings and other notable figures, Isrealite rarely lived past 40 (Joshua 5:6). And that was the men mind you, until recently the leading cause of death for women was childbirth.
Cool. Do I get the coffee can exhaust too? And does the sound system strip paint off of wood at it's lowest setting?
Now ask yourself: are the running a museum or a space program? I realize a board requires thousands of dollars worth of labor to re-design and certify. But we are spending BILLIONS on the project every year. If that money is not going into R&D, where is it going?
While you are at it, where did the notion of a Virgin Birth come from. Go back to the Gospel. The only notes (where mentioned) about Jesus' beginnings was that his mother became Pregant our of wedlock. The "Holy Spirit" could have been anything from pathenogesis to Joseph being particularly randy one night. His reaction was shame and embarrasment, recall, not jealosy.
Also note the Bible refers to Christ being rejected by his brothers and sisters.
And yes I have read the whole thing all the way through. The circumstances of Christ's birth are mentioned in only 1 gospel, another mentions his being visited by Kings as a child, and the other 2 start off with him as an adult. I don't remember which ones, but it's bugging me enough to go digging for it...
For my part, I react rather violently to a protein generated by dust mites, and my immune system is not too fond of mold and mildew either. Wherever my ancestors came from, they must not have kept a lot of food in the fridge, and if the stayed indoors must have kept the place spotless. Which is odd, because most of my family is from Ireland, which is rainy and damp, where you are stuck inside a lot in an environment that is a breeding ground for mildew.
Go figure.
Ever population has a magic number that determine the minimum number of individuals required to maintain its existance. For birds this number is about 4,000. We witnessed one population recently dip below the magic number and cease to exist: the Carrier Pidgeon. There were some pretty heroic attempts on the part of humans to get the population back on its feet, but all for naught.
Giving the benefit of the doubt that the bible simply didn't count women, you have 9 breeding pairs. (Noah, his wife, 8 sons, 8 wives.) Now, a woman can carry 1 child at a time, about every other year in primative conditions. (It's not until recently that we've become well nourished enough to have back-to-back pregancies.)
Going for the benefit of the doubt again, we will assume that all of the women start off this breed-a-thon at around 14 or so, with fertility tailing off around 36. 36-14=22=11
Each woman can effectively have about 11 pregancies, about 1/3 of them will not go to term, and another 1/3 will die before age 5. Rounding up, we effectively have each woman bringing about 4 kids into the world before her body wears out.
If you think I'm being pessimistic with these numbers, they did not have pre-natal care, vitamins, or even a steady food supply. I'm just working with rough estimates based on what goes on in the third world, which is about the best guess for what conditions would be like following the complete distruction of the Earth. (And I'm not even factoring in death during labor.)
We are going to estimate that the population can quadruple in size every generation. By that estimate... damn. You actualy have about 38 million people after 400 years.
But this estimate is completely bunk. If you look through historical estimates, until the 19th century humans NEVER even doubled in size within a generation. Our growth rate before shows a doubling about avery 1000 years or so. Mind you that is taking into account disease, wars and disasters,
So whatever happened, you need a much larger population than 8, or even 2. There are more than 8 different genes controlling eye color. The chances that 8 individuals in the same family all had type AB+ blood, as well as O- blood is also unlikely.
The "Mitochondrial Eve" theory is a mathematical extraction. Frankly I use the same sort of estimates to show that throwing a light switch would generated in infinite amount of current, for an infantesimally small fraction of a second immediately after it's thrown. Our number systems are terrible about handling beginning and endings.
Which is probably why the big guy simply started by stating THIS is on. THIS is off, and was content to just flip on and off for the first day.
Before that it was either right out of the cow, or in the form of cheese where the lactose is nicely broken down by fermentation.
Like all points, there are exceptions. I do recall one culture in Africa subsists on a food product made by mixing the blood of the cattle with the milk. But they are nomads who maintain too small a cattle population to afford to kill one on a regular basis.
Think about it. We build structures and pile food in there to draw the mice for them to eat!
We have all seen cat owners. Every house has a little shrine for the kitty cat. They reserve the best seats in the house and the better windows for the cat. And all for what? So the cat can ignore our existance except when it needs to be petted, or just mess with our minds.
Lassi: Woof Woof
Timmy: Ug, what Lassie? Mass extinction coming.
Lassi: Woof Woof
Timmy: Ug, If me survive me eat Lobster and mate many times.
Lassi: Ruff, Woof, Woof
Timmy: Oh, nevermind, Oggg being chased by tiger. Me gettem beer and watchum show.
Hmmm. And we are all decended from that bastard. Way to go Great^45 Grandpa!
Then you have Kings from other cultures who would spread their seed wide and far. You see the same behavior in rock stars and sports figures today. How many kids did Jim Morrison sire? How about Wilt Chamberlin? Hell even Ben Franklin got around. In every cult what happens? The cult leader fucks all the groupies.
Women are drawn to success. Men are drawn to breed with healthy women. In less enlightened times someone Enronized our Gene pool by being really successful and not being dumb enough to die young before they spread.
I realize that all of these traits are probably dormant in all mammals, and were simply re-expressed in humans through mutation. The enlarged forehead of humans is actually a common feature of infant apes, our forehead simply doesn't receed during maturity. (Though you wouldn't know it looking at the behavior of some people.)
But there is a big problem. We somehow successfully mutated several major features in our Genome in the blink of an eye. To boot, we did it with a relatively small gene pool. Granted, the two could aggrivate each other.
Something REALLY wierd happend at some point in our developmental past. In the absence of any records, fossils, or talking ghosts just about any answer is good.
Chimps, Gorillas, Monkeys, et. all do not have Hymen. Hymen are rare amoung land-dwelling mammals. The feature IS common in aquatic mammals.
Could it be possible that we are the decendents from a crashed spacecraft? Maybe I played Homeworld too often, but doesn't it seem funny that we are the only primates that can:
(A great site that goes into more detail is: Here.)
At times we have more anatomically in common with a Seal than an ape. Not enough to make me buy a tinfoil cap, but precisely how does an otherwise aquatic creature "evolve" on an Savanna, and then ddevelop their first civilization in the middle of a desert?
One other bit of information to help lock it all down: all of this took place in Montgomery County, PA. Sometimes cross referencing contracts by county is helpful.
The rest of the research I leave to you. For an entertaining read, check out the lawsuit between the General Contractor that built the Hatboro-Horsham High School and the township.
For the record, I grep up in the neighboring township of Upper Moreland. The utter gloom of HH's new (as of 1990) building was a local legend.
I used 2 of them over the course of a year to bring WIFI to my apartment, 2 blocks away from the office. (This was using a pair of aftermarket directional antennas mind you.)
Diagnosing Wifi is voodoo some days. The funny part is 9 times out of 10 it's my damn card. (I don't suspect the Linux drivers, because windows with the same card is every bit as bad.) I more or less stay in patch cable range if possible. Wireless is a great frill if it works.
Now, antennas of various design can give you different shapes. If you are trying to fill an area that is all roughly on the same elevation, use a Higher gain (aroung 8-10db) omnidirectional antenna. If you are setting an access point up in one corner of the property, buy a directional antenna to fill in only the areas you are trying to cover.
In this way you are effectively boosting the output of the equipment without introducing extra noise, or bringing the FCC to your door.
The hard part is interfacing the access point to the external antennas. The back of my linksys's have a reverse-TNC connector. Most aftermarket antennas use the ham-radio style N-type connectors. After a bit of scouring I found an outfit that actually sells the pigtail I needed.
The antennas were from an outfit in Canada called "Superpass". They have a great website with the radiation patterns, but their market is someone buying a messload at a time. I forget where I got the pigtail, but I could probably find it again if asked.
Living in a 100 year old house let me tell you: a Blueprint in not nearly as useful as As-Built drawings. The original "Blueprint" was 3 rooms stacked atop one another connected by a staircase. Later, they added a back of the house, moved the kitchen from the basement. Some houses in this "Expanded Trinity" style have the kitchen on the second floor, others (like mine) have the Kitchen on the first floor.
They are perfectly functional, indeed, standing 100 years in our day in age is a feat. What kept them up was craftsmanship. The stairs are winding, but they are all original. (I've had to tighten a few with this new technology on building: a screw.) The floors are solid wood, I just sanded them and varnished them.
Architecturally this house is a mess. Structurally, and practically, it works perfectly. Indeed this very style is copied across several thousand houses in Philadelphia. Now, my choice of furnature is limited. The bedroom door is 20 inches wide, and the stairs are winding and rather steep. But we have another modern technology: Ikea. Buy it disassembled.
Contrast this to the "McMansion" phenominon. Some friends of mine recently purchased a new house. Architecturally it was nearly perfect. However, it was a) built poorly, and b) constructed on unstable soil. What isn't cracking is falling off or moulding.
(I must have been born to write parables, Jeeze.) I have another friend who purchased a refurbished house, of solid (simple) design, and well constructed. Hell, the rennovator even ran Cat-5 to every corner of the house. There are no real downsides, he actually paid less than the "Brand New", and got solid construction.
Is it fancy? No. Just 2 floors with a finished basement.
And somewhere there in there is a lesson, but I have to run off for lunch.
Why hasn't anyone posted the obligitory:
In Soviet Russia, the Computer Use YOU!
Oh wait, because they'd be modded down into the stone age. That's right.
My first impression of the waiting room was "Damn, this is just like home room." Lots of long corridors with sealed windows, all meeting at critical nodes. That same cinder-block construction, with the same linolium floor. One visiting room had the same sort of chairs and tables I'd used in middle school. Another had a visiting room that looked just like the faculty lounge.
Think about it, how many of you remember the absolutely terrible traffic flow of your schools? How everyone seemed to have to pile through one particular intersection. It makes sense for a prison, but I think a lot of times they just cut and paste for schools.
There is also a whole lot of really cool video equipment and automatic doors. If you ever get the chance to visit a prison (and I mean VISIT, not STAY) I highly suggest it for all geeks.
If you want 2 buildings to campare: Hatboro Horsham High School, and the Montgomery County Correctional Facility. The overall layout may be different, but the details...