Re:Tumbleweeds and other sight gags
on
Planet Simpson
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· Score: 1
Boy, I say, boy! I totally agree, he was always one of my favourite characters from the WB cartoons. I like to think that the hyperchicken lawyer in Futurama is partly an homage to Foghorn Leghorn
My favourite was the Soviet Mars 3, the lander component of which was the first spacecraft to land (as oppose to crash) on Mars. It supposedly started sending back video transmissions which mysteriously ceased after 20 seconds. Ooooh, spooky!
Oh, and I hadn't heard this before: apparently it carried a rover! A little less sophisticated than the modern version...
By that logic, the First World War would never have happened. Germany was the world's second biggest biggest exporter in 1913 and growing, and its biggest customers were all the countries it went to war with in 1914-8. That's why I'm never convinced by the argument that countries that trade a lot have too much to lose by going to war, or that they'd only acquire a pile of rubble if they won, so they won't bother. It's not always that rational a decision. (One thing that made Germany overreact in 1914 was their fear of Einkreisung - encirclement - by the Entente Cordiale powers. One thing that China worries about today is containment by the US and friends. Hmmm...)
Having said that, I think you are right that Taiwan is more useful to the Chinese leaders as an enemy. But they may not be able to control the forces of nationalism, once unleashed.
Mad props to Eratosthenes and all that, but I don't think he did quite prove it. He assumed that the Sun was distant, so that rays from it were parallel. But an alternative explanation of his observations could be that the Earth is flat, and the Sun very close. That would explain the different length shadows.
And before you ask, no, I do not think this actually is the case!
What are you referring to? Sounds like a garbled reference to an explanation for "Tutankhamun's curse" but there's nothing to explain: there's no evidence that opening the tomb caused any deaths. Or are you talking about something else?
The first one is simply a selection effect - nobody (well, nobody sensible) assumes that all ET life must be intelligent. But since we are talking about talking to ETs, the intelligent ones are the ones we are interested in here. You can't talk to a bacterium.
The second one is just a guesstimate, based on the assumed average lifetime of a civilisation. Say it's about a million years. We've only been around, say, 100 years (as a radio-communicating civilisation, anyway). So if were to make contact with a random ET civilisation, what are the chances that it is younger than us? Very slim: it's much more likely to be much older than us. Of course, there are a host of assumptions built in to this. Civilisations might not last a century or two into the radio era. They might advance rapidly into other forms of communications, or encounter a technological singularity. Or they might evolve technologically mich slower than we do, or even stagnate after a certain point. But anyway, that's the thinking behind this assumption.
To pick only the most obvious example, behavior is strongly influenced by the presence of corticosteriods and catecholamines in the blood. Change the blood composition of those substances, and behavior will change. These substances aren't produced in the brain. They're produced in the adrenal glands, above the kidneys, and carried to the brain in the bloodstream.
Sorry, I meant to reply to this ages ago. Briefly, this doesn't prove that consciousness is not located in the brain, rather the opposite - because unless I'm mistaken, the production of those chemicals does not affect your behavious until they enter your brain. This is exactly what you would expect if consciousness was in the brain and nowhere else.
Synecdoche can operate the other way too. I'd still be "me" without my arm, eyes, liver, kidneys, heart, etc (if only for a short time perhaps, unless suitable replacements could be found...) but I wouldn't be me without my brain.
You're so right about Alastair Reynolds. I've bought all his books so far, and at the end I feel let down because the characters are not plausible or there's some huge hole in the plot. He's so close to being a great writer, but he's been close for about 5 novels now. By contrast, I've been rereading Greg Egan's novels recently and I'm impressed with the improvement in his writing skills over that time (Teranesia was beautifully written and very moving, although it had far less "wow!" factor than his previous books). But Reynolds seems stuck at the same level as his first novel.
Unfortunately, Egan is the one who's been taking a break - his last novel was published in 2002, and there's no sign that he is working on a new one.
But OK, biology was not my strongest subject in high school. So could you please remind me which organ your motivations and decisions originate in? I thought it was the brain, but perhaps I'm mistaken.
My understanding was that in fact these "experiments" were very poorly designed and were basically scientifically worthless. Although I can't find any documentation of this (but here's a book about the issue), and anyway I think it was in relation to the hypothermia experiments only.
If using logic in a slashdot post and having the ability to read and respond to the other persons points somehow makes me a troll, then I'm proud to be called one.
Oh, I'm sorry, I thought we were talking about reality, not science fiction. There is no such thing as a "repair robot". You want to save mass and money, and yet here you are saying they should develop some incredibly costly, massive and complicated robot able to fix all the varied problems that can crop up, presumably carrying a store of spare parts too. Oh, not to mention the repair robot for the repair robot. Hmm. Here's a better idea: build the space probe so that it is less likely to fail in the first place, and use all that mass you've saved for more science. Brilliant!
AND for heavens sakes put flashable ROM on everything.
They've been able to reprogram these things for decades now - at least since Pioneer 10 and 11.
Why is it I have to solve all the problems of the Universe??
This is my point. Why do you think you can? Everything you have come up with is either already being done, or there are good reasons why they aren't. Yet you think you're some genius who can come along without knowing anything about the field and tell the professional engineers what exactly they are doing wrong.
So you're saying that reliability can not be built into integration and miniaturization?
Come on!
I am not saying that at all. I am saying it is a long, costly process making such components ready for use in space missions. You can't just slap together off the shelf components and expect it to reliably operate in space. Just because you find this hard to understand does mean it isn't so.
"Titan IV is the biggest expendable launcher the US has. What exactly is the problem with using this?"
Nothing if you don't care about every milligram.
WTF? Titan IV is a BIG rocket. It can carry MORE stuff into space than smaller rockets. That means the probes it sends can carry MORE stuff. More science packages, more redundant systems. More room for your imaginary repair robot.
It has MORE milligrams this way. Now, I will ask again: how EXACTLY is this a bad thing?
Are you speaking hypothetically that it will be better in the future?
Cause if you are, that's my point exactly, if they diverge away from RS232 jackets in probes of the past.
I'm speaking about right now, or are you going to claim your PC is doing more useful work than Cassini? Can it operate for 8 years in the depths of space without any critical failures? I didn't think so. I'm also speaking about the future, but my point is this is already normal procedure. It's not as if the guys at JPL are reading this and going "omfg! qualico is so rite y r we stil using rs232???? he is so l33+!!!!!!!1" RS232 will be abandoned when there is a reliable, well-understood replacement that can do the same job. And for all I know, already has been. (Cassini was launched 8 years ago, so it began construction over 10 years ago, and was probably designed closer to 15 years ago. So we're talking early 1990s, maybe even late 1980s.)
That Huygens mission cost almost 1$ per km.
If we want more useful missions, we need to get that cost under control or you can forget about sending anything human into the future.
Like I said, the technology will improve, but - why do I have to keep saying this? - it will lag behind your desktop tech for very good reasons. Get over it.
There is little in that long post which attempts to refute what I said, nor do you give any evidence for your original claim. Do you stand by it or not?
I didn't wave my masters (which, btw, was a full-time research degree, not a matter of a few evening classes) around to make you feel inferior. I mentioned it here because it's relevant to the discussion at hand - it shows that I have some experience in the astronomy world, so I have some basis for my statements. You don't, yet you quite confidently make claims about astronomers and their motivations for wanting to keep Hubble operating.
I know when someone is baiting me on purpose
I'm not baiting you. You said something that was wrong. I told you why. How is that baiting?
the Hubble accomplished it's real mission, it got people interested again
Er, no, its real mission is to explore the Universe in ways not possible from the ground. Which it has done amazingly well. (The discovery that the expansion of the Universe is actually accelerating - aka dark energy - being only one example.) Which is why astronomers want to keep it operating until a replacement can be built. (And the JWST is only a partial replacement.)
You'd also realize that with all this new interest it will be easy for them to get the money to build you a shiny new toy to play with, and that my friend is what I'm looking forward to.
With that space ops degree you're getting, surely you realise just how long it would take to fund, design, build and launch a similar space telescope. Hubble took well over a decade. JWST the better part of one.
If they just keep nursing all the old programs along what am I ever going to get out of this Space Ops degree I'm wasting all my time on?
So astronomers are selfish for wanting to hang on to Hubble, but it's ok for you to want to ditch it because you want a job one day?
You have no idea what you are talking about. Nobody can "loose their place in line" because Hubble time is allocated in yearly cycles: time for the 2005-6 cycle hasn't been allocated yet. So it's not like it's all booked out to 2012 or whenever, and those astronomers who have been given time have a vested interest in keeping Hubble alive, whereas everybody else doesn't care.
I don't know what kind of bizarro world you live in, where Hubble time is some kind of status symbol that rich, lazy fatcats have a monopoly on and use to lord it over the rest of us poor slobs, but back in the real world most Hubble time is awarded on a basis of merit, and anyone can get it if they have a good enough proposal.
Disclaimer: I have a master's degree in astrophysics and actually know people who apply for and get Hubble time. So I am unfortunately constrained in this discussion by actually knowing something about the subject.
Dell can send a service engineer out to fix their products if they fail. JPL can't. See the problem?
Reliability is more important than speed or even mass.
Yes. They had some failures as it was. How does that equate to making it sensible to use bleeding edge technology that may be even less reliable?
They strapped the thing to a converted ballistic missile for crying out loud.
WTF? Do you think it had the coordinates for Moscow still programmed into it or something? Titan IV is the biggest expendable launcher the US has. What exactly is the problem with using this?
My point is, if we are going to do this again, let's evolve the technology and get more bang for our buck using more integration and miniaturization.
And my point is, duh, they already do that. I don't know why you think they don't. If they were building Cassini today it would have more up to date technology. It's just never going to be as l33+ as your water-cooled Athlon 64 box crammed full of nice shiny bleeding edge tech. But I'll tell you what, it will run for far longer and much more reliably, and will be far more useful. So don't knock it.
No, the point is, you don't seem to realise that space probe designers aren't already concerned with saving every miligram, when in fact they are. Some random slashdot user coming along and saying "hey guys, why don't you use smaller components" is not going to revolutionise spacecraft design, because it's so incredibly obvious that it's not worth mentioning.
There's no doubt that it would be much harder. But if remaining "true" to the spirit of the Silmarillion and satisfying the hardcore Tolkien fans means making some monster epic that's 30 hours long with dozens of major characters coming and going over a span of however many thousand years it is, trying to explain the creation of the universe and who all the Valar are and the destruction of Numenor and the difference between the Sindar and the Noldor and the creation of the Silmarils and the forging of the rings of power and Luthien and Beren and the rise and fall of Morgoth and the rise and fall of Sauron and the rise and fall of the Witchking of Angmar and
what Earendil liked for breakfast, it will never be made, and if it were, it would never make a profit, because your average non-Tolkien geek filmgoer will not watch it. It has to be cut down to size (probably even a trilogy is too much - it was a reasonable bet for LOTR, but unlike LOTR the Silmarillion is not one of the world's best loved books, virtually nobody has read it). So you have two approaches. Strip the story back to the bare plot points, so that it is basically a documentary, with little character development. Or focus on one part, eg Beren and Luthien, and tell it well. There's no doubt in my mind that the second approach would be far more commercially viable and thus more likely to get made.
It's a moot point, of course, because The Hobbit would be easier to adapt and film than any Silmarillion project, and even that's over the development horizon...
The the ones screaming the loudest in the science community are the ones that either have a guarenteed time slot for the Hubble or are awaiting their turn and haven't gotten it yet. A new probe would potentially disrupt their cozy little situation and force them to compete for the opportunity to use the new probe or loose their place in line.
Thanks, I wasn't aware of this proposal. A QSO is a quasi-stellar object, also known as a quasar. Very luminous, very distant, very old. The wide field wouldn't really be 17 times faster (unless you were doing a mosaic of images), but it lets you study a bigger area of sky, useful for some applications.
I've met Colin Norman, the PI on this. He's a smart cookie so I'm sure this has been well thought through. Whether it will ever fly (metaphorically and literally!) is another matter.
Slashdot Mirror
Boy, I say, boy! I totally agree, he was always one of my favourite characters from the WB cartoons. I like to think that the hyperchicken lawyer in Futurama is partly an homage to Foghorn Leghorn
Does the "CS" in your nick stand for "Computer Science"? Just wondering ...
What? Simulated bee batter? I'm not sure what that is, but it sounds vaguely disturbing ...
Oh, and I hadn't heard this before: apparently it carried a rover! A little less sophisticated than the modern version ...
Having said that, I think you are right that Taiwan is more useful to the Chinese leaders as an enemy. But they may not be able to control the forces of nationalism, once unleashed.
And before you ask, no, I do not think this actually is the case!
Ooh yeah, black hole optics, that's where it's at man! Molecular optics is kid stuff in comparison.
As it happens, another solar sail is due to be launched in less than a month - Cosmos 1. Hopefully this one will get to do its thing!
What are you referring to? Sounds like a garbled reference to an explanation for "Tutankhamun's curse" but there's nothing to explain: there's no evidence that opening the tomb caused any deaths. Or are you talking about something else?
The second one is just a guesstimate, based on the assumed average lifetime of a civilisation. Say it's about a million years. We've only been around, say, 100 years (as a radio-communicating civilisation, anyway). So if were to make contact with a random ET civilisation, what are the chances that it is younger than us? Very slim: it's much more likely to be much older than us. Of course, there are a host of assumptions built in to this. Civilisations might not last a century or two into the radio era. They might advance rapidly into other forms of communications, or encounter a technological singularity. Or they might evolve technologically mich slower than we do, or even stagnate after a certain point. But anyway, that's the thinking behind this assumption.
Sorry, I meant to reply to this ages ago. Briefly, this doesn't prove that consciousness is not located in the brain, rather the opposite - because unless I'm mistaken, the production of those chemicals does not affect your behavious until they enter your brain. This is exactly what you would expect if consciousness was in the brain and nowhere else.
Synecdoche can operate the other way too. I'd still be "me" without my arm, eyes, liver, kidneys, heart, etc (if only for a short time perhaps, unless suitable replacements could be found ...) but I wouldn't be me without my brain.
Unfortunately, Egan is the one who's been taking a break - his last novel was published in 2002, and there's no sign that he is working on a new one.
But OK, biology was not my strongest subject in high school. So could you please remind me which organ your motivations and decisions originate in? I thought it was the brain, but perhaps I'm mistaken.
Surely, if there's one object that is legitimate to anthropomorphize, it's the human brain ...
April 9, 1940, was when Germany invaded Denmark and Norway. May 7, 1945, was when Germany surrendered to the Allies.
My understanding was that in fact these "experiments" were very poorly designed and were basically scientifically worthless. Although I can't find any documentation of this (but here's a book about the issue), and anyway I think it was in relation to the hypothermia experiments only.
If using logic in a slashdot post and having the ability to read and respond to the other persons points somehow makes me a troll, then I'm proud to be called one.
Oh, I'm sorry, I thought we were talking about reality, not science fiction. There is no such thing as a "repair robot". You want to save mass and money, and yet here you are saying they should develop some incredibly costly, massive and complicated robot able to fix all the varied problems that can crop up, presumably carrying a store of spare parts too. Oh, not to mention the repair robot for the repair robot. Hmm. Here's a better idea: build the space probe so that it is less likely to fail in the first place, and use all that mass you've saved for more science. Brilliant!
AND for heavens sakes put flashable ROM on everything.
They've been able to reprogram these things for decades now - at least since Pioneer 10 and 11.
Why is it I have to solve all the problems of the Universe??
This is my point. Why do you think you can? Everything you have come up with is either already being done, or there are good reasons why they aren't. Yet you think you're some genius who can come along without knowing anything about the field and tell the professional engineers what exactly they are doing wrong.
So you're saying that reliability can not be built into integration and miniaturization? Come on!
I am not saying that at all. I am saying it is a long, costly process making such components ready for use in space missions. You can't just slap together off the shelf components and expect it to reliably operate in space. Just because you find this hard to understand does mean it isn't so.
"Titan IV is the biggest expendable launcher the US has. What exactly is the problem with using this?"
Nothing if you don't care about every milligram.
WTF? Titan IV is a BIG rocket. It can carry MORE stuff into space than smaller rockets. That means the probes it sends can carry MORE stuff. More science packages, more redundant systems. More room for your imaginary repair robot.
It has MORE milligrams this way. Now, I will ask again: how EXACTLY is this a bad thing?
Are you speaking hypothetically that it will be better in the future? Cause if you are, that's my point exactly, if they diverge away from RS232 jackets in probes of the past.
I'm speaking about right now, or are you going to claim your PC is doing more useful work than Cassini? Can it operate for 8 years in the depths of space without any critical failures? I didn't think so. I'm also speaking about the future, but my point is this is already normal procedure. It's not as if the guys at JPL are reading this and going "omfg! qualico is so rite y r we stil using rs232???? he is so l33+!!!!!!!1" RS232 will be abandoned when there is a reliable, well-understood replacement that can do the same job. And for all I know, already has been. (Cassini was launched 8 years ago, so it began construction over 10 years ago, and was probably designed closer to 15 years ago. So we're talking early 1990s, maybe even late 1980s.)
That Huygens mission cost almost 1$ per km. If we want more useful missions, we need to get that cost under control or you can forget about sending anything human into the future.
Like I said, the technology will improve, but - why do I have to keep saying this? - it will lag behind your desktop tech for very good reasons. Get over it.
I didn't wave my masters (which, btw, was a full-time research degree, not a matter of a few evening classes) around to make you feel inferior. I mentioned it here because it's relevant to the discussion at hand - it shows that I have some experience in the astronomy world, so I have some basis for my statements. You don't, yet you quite confidently make claims about astronomers and their motivations for wanting to keep Hubble operating.
I know when someone is baiting me on purpose
I'm not baiting you. You said something that was wrong. I told you why. How is that baiting?
the Hubble accomplished it's real mission, it got people interested again
Er, no, its real mission is to explore the Universe in ways not possible from the ground. Which it has done amazingly well. (The discovery that the expansion of the Universe is actually accelerating - aka dark energy - being only one example.) Which is why astronomers want to keep it operating until a replacement can be built. (And the JWST is only a partial replacement.)
You'd also realize that with all this new interest it will be easy for them to get the money to build you a shiny new toy to play with, and that my friend is what I'm looking forward to.
With that space ops degree you're getting, surely you realise just how long it would take to fund, design, build and launch a similar space telescope. Hubble took well over a decade. JWST the better part of one.
If they just keep nursing all the old programs along what am I ever going to get out of this Space Ops degree I'm wasting all my time on?
So astronomers are selfish for wanting to hang on to Hubble, but it's ok for you to want to ditch it because you want a job one day?
I don't know what kind of bizarro world you live in, where Hubble time is some kind of status symbol that rich, lazy fatcats have a monopoly on and use to lord it over the rest of us poor slobs, but back in the real world most Hubble time is awarded on a basis of merit, and anyone can get it if they have a good enough proposal.
Disclaimer: I have a master's degree in astrophysics and actually know people who apply for and get Hubble time. So I am unfortunately constrained in this discussion by actually knowing something about the subject.
Yes. They had some failures as it was. How does that equate to making it sensible to use bleeding edge technology that may be even less reliable?
They strapped the thing to a converted ballistic missile for crying out loud.
WTF? Do you think it had the coordinates for Moscow still programmed into it or something? Titan IV is the biggest expendable launcher the US has. What exactly is the problem with using this?
My point is, if we are going to do this again, let's evolve the technology and get more bang for our buck using more integration and miniaturization.
And my point is, duh, they already do that. I don't know why you think they don't. If they were building Cassini today it would have more up to date technology. It's just never going to be as l33+ as your water-cooled Athlon 64 box crammed full of nice shiny bleeding edge tech. But I'll tell you what, it will run for far longer and much more reliably, and will be far more useful. So don't knock it.
No, the point is, you don't seem to realise that space probe designers aren't already concerned with saving every miligram, when in fact they are. Some random slashdot user coming along and saying "hey guys, why don't you use smaller components" is not going to revolutionise spacecraft design, because it's so incredibly obvious that it's not worth mentioning.
It's a moot point, of course, because The Hobbit would be easier to adapt and film than any Silmarillion project, and even that's over the development horizon ...
Don't be an idiot.
I've met Colin Norman, the PI on this. He's a smart cookie so I'm sure this has been well thought through. Whether it will ever fly (metaphorically and literally!) is another matter.