Interesting. I wonder what the acceleration of surrounding galaxies looks like.
On a universe homogeneous except for this hole, surrounding galaxies would be accelerating away, since there's more mass nearby on the side away from the hole.
If on he other hand, there's a lot of stars darkened by civilizations (so as not to say dark matter) then the surrounding galaxies would have gravity from all directions and wouldn't be accelerating.
Another possibility would be too look at this hole in infrared, if at all possible. Thermodynamics would imply some energy would be radiated as heat after using all he available energy. (Or would this fold into the microwave background?)
Could you post a link to a paper on this Electric Universe? Preferably in a peer reviewed journal. The few things I can find are trying to sell some book...
I looked up "Electric Universe" on google and found some very pretty, crackpot looking age ("The Electric Universe is a holistic answer to myopia* -that narrowing of vision which naturally accompanies the fragmentation of knowledge and learning"???), some books and a band. In fact all the pages seem to try to sell you on the book (except for the band's)
Nothing in the couple of places I've looked...
There isn't even a wikipedia page on this theory. I can't believe an "almost accepted" thoery has so little following in the sciences.
Do you have a link to a web page that doesn't look like it's trying to sell you something? Something for scientists/engineers rather than lay people?
Seriously, doesn't 'trade' mean an 'exchange' of goods and services? Obviously, the exchange is not happening, just a transfer of currency. Hence trade deficit.
What do you mean with that, I thought the only way to have a trade deficit was to buy more from abroad than locally. So if we have a trade deficit it doesn't seem like we are having a problem affording stuff. Well, no. The only way to have a trade deficit is to buy abroad more than you sell abroad. (By definition). It's ok not to buy anything locally if you also sell enough abroad to make up for it.
As it is, the US is draining its bank account (international reserves, citizen's bank accounts through taxes, corporate bank accounts and just plain citizen's money).
It might be interesting to put this in perspective. Does anyone know the total amount of international reserves/circulating money/assets in the US? Is $38.6 Billion a large chunk or just noise? It would make a lot of difference in the predictions of doom and gloom in this discussion.
Why is this funny? If its sister ship manages to win the Lunar Lander competition, they could probably sell parts of this to the spaceflight crowd. Not very expensive, but it could still be a bit of memorabilia. I'd like a piece:)
If armadillo eventually manages to do something historic, you can bet this ship will eventually end up in a museum display somewhere. Maybe on their HQ or research facility, but somewhere...
Foreigners in the US are not eligible for financial aid. Period. If you want to go to a state university you have to pay for it too. Much like someone from out of state has to pay, but it's higher for foreigners.
Graduate students can get fellowships from universities, usually funded from an NSF grant or such, but this isn't for free, they have to do top-notch research to keep those grants. It is in the best interest of universities to get the best people worldwide, though it is a lot easier to recruit americans anyway. In my field (Computer Science) you don't see many americans going for PhDs so you get a lot of foreigners.
Been there, done that. Could I have stayed in the states for as long as you choose to keep me and where you want me to work? Again, What are you talking about?
I probably could've stayed to work where I could find a job, but I would've had to go through the whole H-1b process. Given that I have a PhD in CS, it might be slightly easier, but it's still not taking up an american job, or being a slave as you say.
The technological challenge in the development of photovoltaic materials is to develop a system that works efficiently in the visible range. That depends on your application. Residential solar power might not be affected as much by this improvement, but space applications are.
Satellites dont have an ozone layer filtering UV light. They even get light in the UVC range (you know those UVA+UVB sunscreens? there's no UVC sunscreen except for NASA) so the 60% improvement is probably a big number, I'd have to calculate it. Making satellites with smaller panels with a thin film of particles is probably cost effective right away, given current launch costs. Additionally, the article mentions this decreases heating as well, which is probably a good thing in direct sunlight.
Any rocket scientists out there care to comment?
Also note that this is improvement is orthogonal to any improvement in visible light absorption. In fact, future improvements in visible light would translate into an improvement in UV with this method.
Or maybe you are thinking of "sex" as the old in-out and nothing else. Young children do get caught sneaking a peek at dirty magazines or playing sexual games even though they aren't technically having sex. Yes, I was talking about the old in-and-out. Children will get caught sneaking a peek and so on, but I bet more out of curiosity than an actual desire to experience sex. Even what you'd consider sexual games many children will not realize it's sexual, but just curiosity.
You don't get actual dating and interaction between sexes until puberty (YMMV of course, it was like this in my case).
Granted, you don't need to shield them from the facts. Any schoolchild who grows up in a farm will know about sex from an early age, but mostly in a mechanical way. But that's very different from watching porn all day, which is something children won't even do as much as play "violent" games and sports.
But as I said, YMMV. The point is that you can't argue that sex-play is as ingrained as violent-play. And this violent-play behavior is what the original judge's comment was referencing.
(And notice I'm talking about prepubescent children, teenagers are a lot more complicated)
"'Sex has always been and remains a central interest of humankind and a recurrent, even obsessive theme of culture both high and low [...] To shield children right up to the age of 18 from exposure to sexual descriptions and images would not only be quixotic, but deforming; it would leave them unequipped to cope with the world as we know it.'" Well, first of all, children aren't interested in sex until their teens, which is much different from playing cowboys and indians since young. Even when children play mommy-and-daddy games, it's more about family than about sex. This is reflected in fairy tales and children's literature as well.
So, would you consider shielding kids from portrayals of sex (while keeping romance and marriage) until the age of, say, 15 to be ok? And isn't this what's mostly done with current ratings schemes? Some sexual content is allowed under parent supervision, for example. More explicit nudity and pure sex movies (porn) would then be restricted to, say, 18 and over, right?
Not that I agree that violence should get a free pass while sex is so reviled, but you can't use this quote for your argument against that.
Maybe I'm missing something here... Does Vista prevent you from installing temperature monitors?
I mentioned it because last week I had a problem with the power supply fan at work and decided to download a monitoring program just in case. It took about 10 minutes to find and install one and you can clearly see the temperature changing when it goes from idle to 100%.
So, how is downloading and installing an app more complicated than setting up a VM, reinstalling vista under the VM, set up networking and sound and then checking the processor usage?
Mind you, that method will get you better data, and help you debug if it's a hardware problem or what, but for a first quick approximation, it's just not worth the hassle.
Yeah, but a steam engine works by steam created by boiling normal water with an external power source and using the pressure. This works by burning H2O2 which ends up producing steam and then this high-pressure steam is used. It's not external combustion. It's closer to an internal combustion engine, actually.
I wouldn't call this a rocket, but it does seem to mix rocket engines (for high pressure gas generation) with steam engines (for harnessing high pressure gas). The closest thing I can think of is a car's air bag, quickly creating high pressure gas but not using that for propulsion. Or maybe a car's engine pushing against the pistons.
I guess the nomenclature is the hardest part about this article.
Technically, the article just say that the original owner asked if he "wanted it", not if he wanted it for free.
Maybe this guy paid a fair price for the article, and then some more for the modification. I guess what I want to say is that we don't know whether the original owner did get his money's worth.
Maybe having this personalized article is more important to him than a few hundred dollars and he went through it with some consideration.
Besides, when he tires of it, the next guy can saw off his face and put in his own.
One thing the blurb doesn't make clear is that this is not a workstation CPU. It's designed for embedded systems and system on a chip applications. They mention video compression as an example.
If you look at their block diagram this looks more like an FPGA-on-drugs than a CPU.
The individual blocks are probably programmed with GCC, since it should be trivial to port it to a MIPS-like architecture. I wonder if the interconnect uses a VHDL type language or if they rely on their weird cache to build efficient shared memory.
Either way, it looks like you have to keep in mind the architecture while designing your software. I doubt they can build a compiler that can manage the division of labor.
Unlike a typical multicore design you wouldn't use this to parallelize a multithreaded application or a multiprocess workload. The center processors will have a very different latency characteristic than the edge ones, and you want the parts that interact with the network to be on the points adjacent to the controllers, for example.
So it should work great for an especially designed system, but not so great as a general purpose CPU
I can't believe startups haven't figured out that incompatible chips aren't what the market wants. They're either going to sell directly to "supercomputer" makers or just crash and burn.
They'll probably market running Java as a strong point.
Any ad that tends to blink, scroll, move, clash, interrupt the content, etc. is burdensome. Google text ads are the answer to this.
Not necessarily the only answer. I remember the first time I saw an AnimeFu ad on slashdot. I actually stared at it for a moment to see what it was going to do because, get this, IT DIDN'T MOVE. This was a few years ago, and the sheer novelty of seeing an ad that loaded quickly and was just there was just cool enough I went through to the site.
At that time I had a habit of scrolling down to avoid having the top banner ad flashing in my field of view, and right-clicking to remove the other annoying ads which is why I noticed. I now have use Adblock, but I still do these with ads that get through and start flashing around, or just to remove space-wasting columns that sites seem to love.
So, my solution would be to put up ads that work like ads in the real world. Ones that are just there and become part of the environment, rather than trying to push something in your face. As you say, make it not burdensome and people will tolerate it. It doesn't have to be just text.
Which is why they are not relying on calculations. They actually grabbed some tiles, gouged them in the exact same form from the measurements taken in orbit and then put them in a hot wind tunnel (The Arcjet facility) to check what will actually happen see here And: here (with pictures).
The tests at Arc Jet used a set of tiles, with identical damage drilled on to a test article. This was then put through the heat of a simulated re-entry, to test how the damaged area performed, along with the gathering of thermal data.
'The Arc Jet test using the damaged test article was completed, initial assessment did not identify structural burn through,' noted one encouraging memo, with data showing that the heating remained 50 degrees below the baseline requirement for the underlying structure.
And those articles are from the preliminary results. They were supposed to do an additional test with the repaired tile.
Slashdot Mirror
A +3 post that just links to another post in the same article? Did your friends have mod points today or something?
Interesting. I wonder what the acceleration of surrounding galaxies looks like.
On a universe homogeneous except for this hole, surrounding galaxies would be accelerating away, since there's more mass nearby on the side away from the hole.
If on he other hand, there's a lot of stars darkened by civilizations (so as not to say dark matter) then the surrounding galaxies would have gravity from all directions and wouldn't be accelerating.
Another possibility would be too look at this hole in infrared, if at all possible. Thermodynamics would imply some energy would be radiated as heat after using all he available energy. (Or would this fold into the microwave background?)
Could you post a link to a paper on this Electric Universe? Preferably in a peer reviewed journal. The few things I can find are trying to sell some book...
No really, I am curious.
I looked up "Electric Universe" on google and found some very pretty, crackpot looking age ("The Electric Universe is a holistic answer to myopia* -that narrowing of vision which naturally accompanies the fragmentation of knowledge and learning"???), some books and a band. In fact all the pages seem to try to sell you on the book (except for the band's)
Nothing in the couple of places I've looked...
There isn't even a wikipedia page on this theory. I can't believe an "almost accepted" thoery has so little following in the sciences.
Do you have a link to a web page that doesn't look like it's trying to sell you something? Something for scientists/engineers rather than lay people?
As it is, the US is draining its bank account (international reserves, citizen's bank accounts through taxes, corporate bank accounts and just plain citizen's money).
It might be interesting to put this in perspective. Does anyone know the total amount of international reserves/circulating money/assets in the US? Is $38.6 Billion a large chunk or just noise? It would make a lot of difference in the predictions of doom and gloom in this discussion.
Any macroeconomists in the house?
Why is this funny? If its sister ship manages to win the Lunar Lander competition, they could probably sell parts of this to the spaceflight crowd. Not very expensive, but it could still be a bit of memorabilia. I'd like a piece :)
If armadillo eventually manages to do something historic, you can bet this ship will eventually end up in a museum display somewhere. Maybe on their HQ or research facility, but somewhere...
Use the new discussion system (D2?) and click on the title of the comment. It collapses and hides all its descendants.
Works for me.
Or if you want the short version see here
Excuse me but, WTF are you talking about?
Foreigners in the US are not eligible for financial aid. Period. If you want to go to a state university you have to pay for it too. Much like someone from out of state has to pay, but it's higher for foreigners.
Graduate students can get fellowships from universities, usually funded from an NSF grant or such, but this isn't for free, they have to do top-notch research to keep those grants. It is in the best interest of universities to get the best people worldwide, though it is a lot easier to recruit americans anyway. In my field (Computer Science) you don't see many americans going for PhDs so you get a lot of foreigners.
Been there, done that. Could I have stayed in the states for as long as you choose to keep me and where you want me to work? Again, What are you talking about?
I probably could've stayed to work where I could find a job, but I would've had to go through the whole H-1b process. Given that I have a PhD in CS, it might be slightly easier, but it's still not taking up an american job, or being a slave as you say.
Satellites dont have an ozone layer filtering UV light. They even get light in the UVC range (you know those UVA+UVB sunscreens? there's no UVC sunscreen except for NASA) so the 60% improvement is probably a big number, I'd have to calculate it. Making satellites with smaller panels with a thin film of particles is probably cost effective right away, given current launch costs. Additionally, the article mentions this decreases heating as well, which is probably a good thing in direct sunlight.
Any rocket scientists out there care to comment?
Also note that this is improvement is orthogonal to any improvement in visible light absorption. In fact, future improvements in visible light would translate into an improvement in UV with this method.
You don't get actual dating and interaction between sexes until puberty (YMMV of course, it was like this in my case).
Granted, you don't need to shield them from the facts. Any schoolchild who grows up in a farm will know about sex from an early age, but mostly in a mechanical way. But that's very different from watching porn all day, which is something children won't even do as much as play "violent" games and sports.
But as I said, YMMV. The point is that you can't argue that sex-play is as ingrained as violent-play. And this violent-play behavior is what the original judge's comment was referencing.
(And notice I'm talking about prepubescent children, teenagers are a lot more complicated)
So, would you consider shielding kids from portrayals of sex (while keeping romance and marriage) until the age of, say, 15 to be ok? And isn't this what's mostly done with current ratings schemes? Some sexual content is allowed under parent supervision, for example. More explicit nudity and pure sex movies (porn) would then be restricted to, say, 18 and over, right?
Not that I agree that violence should get a free pass while sex is so reviled, but you can't use this quote for your argument against that.
Maybe I'm missing something here... Does Vista prevent you from installing temperature monitors?
I mentioned it because last week I had a problem with the power supply fan at work and decided to download a monitoring program just in case. It took about 10 minutes to find and install one and you can clearly see the temperature changing when it goes from idle to 100%.
So, how is downloading and installing an app more complicated than setting up a VM, reinstalling vista under the VM, set up networking and sound and then checking the processor usage?
Mind you, that method will get you better data, and help you debug if it's a hardware problem or what, but for a first quick approximation, it's just not worth the hassle.
It would be interesting to run a CPU temperature monitoring app. Pegging the processor will heat up the CPU, you can't lie about that.
"My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my internet, prepare to die".
Yeah, but a steam engine works by steam created by boiling normal water with an external power source and using the pressure. This works by burning H2O2 which ends up producing steam and then this high-pressure steam is used. It's not external combustion. It's closer to an internal combustion engine, actually.
I wouldn't call this a rocket, but it does seem to mix rocket engines (for high pressure gas generation) with steam engines (for harnessing high pressure gas). The closest thing I can think of is a car's air bag, quickly creating high pressure gas but not using that for propulsion. Or maybe a car's engine pushing against the pistons.
I guess the nomenclature is the hardest part about this article.
I first read that as Rocket-Propelled Bionic Arm and thought, what's this? Mazinger Z?
Then I read it again and, it's not much better. Off to RTFA...
Technically, the article just say that the original owner asked if he "wanted it", not if he wanted it for free.
Maybe this guy paid a fair price for the article, and then some more for the modification. I guess what I want to say is that we don't know whether the original owner did get his money's worth.
Maybe having this personalized article is more important to him than a few hundred dollars and he went through it with some consideration.
Besides, when he tires of it, the next guy can saw off his face and put in his own.
One thing the blurb doesn't make clear is that this is not a workstation CPU. It's designed for embedded systems and system on a chip applications. They mention video compression as an example.
If you look at their block diagram this looks more like an FPGA-on-drugs than a CPU.
The individual blocks are probably programmed with GCC, since it should be trivial to port it to a MIPS-like architecture. I wonder if the interconnect uses a VHDL type language or if they rely on their weird cache to build efficient shared memory.
Either way, it looks like you have to keep in mind the architecture while designing your software. I doubt they can build a compiler that can manage the division of labor.
Unlike a typical multicore design you wouldn't use this to parallelize a multithreaded application or a multiprocess workload. The center processors will have a very different latency characteristic than the edge ones, and you want the parts that interact with the network to be on the points adjacent to the controllers, for example.
So it should work great for an especially designed system, but not so great as a general purpose CPU
I can't believe startups haven't figured out that incompatible chips aren't what the market wants. They're either going to sell directly to "supercomputer" makers or just crash and burn.
They'll probably market running Java as a strong point.
(Then again, does it run Linux?)
It's a replica, not the original. There's no sacred artifact in here.
Granted, personalizing it like that is a little strange, but it's not like he's destroying something other people would want.
Any ad that tends to blink, scroll, move, clash, interrupt the content, etc. is burdensome. Google text ads are the answer to this.
Not necessarily the only answer. I remember the first time I saw an AnimeFu ad on slashdot. I actually stared at it for a moment to see what it was going to do because, get this, IT DIDN'T MOVE. This was a few years ago, and the sheer novelty of seeing an ad that loaded quickly and was just there was just cool enough I went through to the site.
At that time I had a habit of scrolling down to avoid having the top banner ad flashing in my field of view, and right-clicking to remove the other annoying ads which is why I noticed. I now have use Adblock, but I still do these with ads that get through and start flashing around, or just to remove space-wasting columns that sites seem to love.
So, my solution would be to put up ads that work like ads in the real world. Ones that are just there and become part of the environment, rather than trying to push something in your face. As you say, make it not burdensome and people will tolerate it. It doesn't have to be just text.
Which is why they are not relying on calculations. They actually grabbed some tiles, gouged them in the exact same form from the measurements taken in orbit and then put them in a hot wind tunnel (The Arcjet facility) to check what will actually happen
see here
And:
here (with pictures).
The tests at Arc Jet used a set of tiles, with identical damage drilled on to a test article. This was then put through the heat of a simulated re-entry, to test how the damaged area performed, along with the gathering of thermal data.
'The Arc Jet test using the damaged test article was completed, initial assessment did not identify structural burn through,' noted one encouraging memo, with data showing that the heating remained 50 degrees below the baseline requirement for the underlying structure.
And those articles are from the preliminary results. They were supposed to do an additional test with the repaired tile.