Besides, even if they did bring it back, it would be extremely radioactive biohazard, having spent 7-8 years in a very high radiation environment. Besides, they have no way of landing it on Earth. Picking it up with the shuttle would kill the astronauts.
They can't collide because they will not be anywhere near each other. They will just take measurements from their positions and report the data. Two observation points are better than one in this particular experiment. And besides NASA couldn't crash them even if they wanted -- you see, space is big and spacecraft are very small...
Some of them do. I have seen some cockroaches fly, but I guess it depends which species of cockroach it is. The ones I saw were in the tropics, in the Indian Ocean.
It IS true that we have >100 million rods and cones. The fact that we can't tell between shades of green as well as we can tell between shades of blue or red is because of the relative sensitivity of the eye to different wavelengths. Also we are more sensitive to contrast than to intensity. This is the reason that you can differentiate between 65K and 16.7M color displays. With 65K the colors of neighboring pixels are not close enough sometimes so the contrast is a little bigger, but that makes a big difference to the eye.
I've seen the same exact quote before, and I think that the time you can withstand in vacuum without irreversible bodily damage is much less than two minutes, but is still sizable. Probably about 30 sec, or less. I think, but I'm not sure that your heart will stop pretty quickly after your blood starts boiling, just like divers who come up quickly to the surface and the nitrogen in their blood starts forming bubbles...
You would suffocate above 10 miles up or so. Most people need oxygen masks even when climbing mount Everest (about 5-6 miles high?). Above that there are many other things that would kill you, including temperature, intense radiation, low pressure, plasma, whatever. Also, if pressure drops, temperature *decreases* if you hold volume constant because pV = nRT. Ideal gas law. Your blood will start boiling because the vapor pressure will be so low at high altitudes that it would pretty much boil no matter what the temperature was. (as an aside, it's really weird when you get something at the right temp. and pressure and it is in solid, liquid and gaseous states at the same time, very cool). Also, air pressure drops off by a factor of e (natural log base) every 4-5 miles or so on average (not constant though). This is called the atmospheric scale height.
The Moon has a dark side with respect to Earth only. Otherwise it has a day, which is about 28 Earth days long. The day on Mars is longer than Earth's by something like half an hour.
If your CPU was raising the temp. of your room that much it would probably be running to hot to work at all.
When I run SETI@Home for a while my CPU gets so hot that I can't even touch the heatsink without getting a blister. It's a P2-233 from the old kind (I think Deschutes or whatever), I hear those are the hottest Pentiums.
It's horrible. I can tell that a TV is on (without looking at it) even when I'm like 50 feet away. It's the stupid noise. Anyway they say you stop hearing those high frequencies after around age 25-30.
I've seen a gutted (but working) analog autopilot that was used in fighter planes like 50 years ago. It's all mechanical gyros and electrical circuits, but no electronics. Since there is no processing involved, the response of the autopilot is instantaneous as compared to a computer which would need a few milliseconds to process data. However nowadays they just use three nanomachined accelerometers that give feedback to a CPU and the whole setup is much lighter. I also heard from someone working at Sandia that they recently made an actual nanomachine gyro that worked in the same way as the big analog autopilot I saw. Still I think it is pretty amazing, this analog autopilot looked much more complicated than a simple solid state processor...
Spaceships are made of aluminum or titanium and such. Steel is too heavy (density 7.85 g/cm3) and iridium has a higher density than gold IIRC about 20 g/cm3. Means that if a spacecraft were made of iridium it would weigh 5 times the amount it would weigh if it were made from aluminum. This would increase launch costs enormously and you would need a Saturn V just to launch a small commsat.
Windows Explorer is the most massively useful file manager you can get. Especially the NT version. But only people who have to work with a lot of files all the time appreciate it. Having said that, I still use the DOS window sometimes when it is more convenient.
I think the Sieve of Erathostenes (sp?)factoring algorithm was invented at least 2000 years ago, but I'm not sure if it is the same algorithm as you are referring to.
skip lists are not the only data structure that allows logarithmic time addition and lookup, so they are not *that* important. Besides, they were developed in the early 90's (here at my Uni. btw) and have yet to prove themselves useful.
Are any of these algorithms related to things like compression algorithms (MP3, Zip, LZW, etc.), encryption algorithms (DES, RSA, Blowfish, etc.) or search algorithms (like the one Google uses, for instance)?
Not really. They are much more important than that. Essential for putting man on the Moon, solving air flows to optimize the shape of a jet fighter, protein folding calculations, you know, this kind of stuff. These algorithms made it possible to solve large equations back in the 60's (imagine the processing power back then...)
So what if it reached its pinnacle in 1957? Gauss used a version of FFT in 1805 and modern FFT was published in the 60's. The fact that some algorithm is old, doesn't mean it's bad or slow. I'd bet that most of these 10 algortihms were first introduced before 1970.
2. Documents: For 90% of the documents that most people in an office environment use/create/read, etc., they're probably not using any of the 'advanced' features that would normally break compatibility. It's the other 10% who've got all the macros, templates, graphs, OLE links, and undocumented file format features that will have trouble.
Or you can look at it this way: Out of every 10 documents a person has, one will be incompatible. I know that this is probably not exactly right because all documents for a single person are likely to have the same general features, but if matters stood this way I would not switch. I think that (nongeek) people would seriously consider switching if 100% of their documents were converted correctly. FYI I use Star Office and have had no problem saving in Word2000 format, but I think the spreadsheet Star comes with sucks the big one.
For full 3D tracking you would need three cameras which are non collinear and not lying on one plane. With two you can probably make good approximations if they are well targeted at the area of interest.
Because they can't aim exactly. Debris will fall along a line thousands of miles long, along the descending node of the orbit of the satellite (crossing the equator going from above Hawaii to South America). This is equivalent of having debris all the way from Redmond to Miami.
Actually they should be because the Compton observatory is as large as a bus and when falling down it will break up into many large pieces. It should be a really cool sight... Imagine a bus falling from the sky at about 5000 mph... I think Compton weighs about 15 tons, which is more like 4 busses. The Iridiums are much smaller and will be done one by one, so one Iridium crash would not be as spectacular.
Slashdot Mirror
It doesn't have enough fuel to get back to Earth.
Besides, even if they did bring it back, it would be extremely radioactive biohazard, having spent 7-8 years in a very high radiation environment. Besides, they have no way of landing it on Earth. Picking it up with the shuttle would kill the astronauts.
They can't collide because they will not be anywhere near each other. They will just take measurements from their positions and report the data. Two observation points are better than one in this particular experiment. And besides NASA couldn't crash them even if they wanted -- you see, space is big and spacecraft are very small...
Some of them do. I have seen some cockroaches fly, but I guess it depends which species of cockroach it is. The ones I saw were in the tropics, in the Indian Ocean.
It IS true that we have >100 million rods and cones. The fact that we can't tell between shades of green as well as we can tell between shades of blue or red is because of the relative sensitivity of the eye to different wavelengths. Also we are more sensitive to contrast than to intensity. This is the reason that you can differentiate between 65K and 16.7M color displays. With 65K the colors of neighboring pixels are not close enough sometimes so the contrast is a little bigger, but that makes a big difference to the eye.
I've seen the same exact quote before, and I think that the time you can withstand in vacuum without irreversible bodily damage is much less than two minutes, but is still sizable. Probably about 30 sec, or less. I think, but I'm not sure that your heart will stop pretty quickly after your blood starts boiling, just like divers who come up quickly to the surface and the nitrogen in their blood starts forming bubbles...
You would suffocate above 10 miles up or so. Most people need oxygen masks even when climbing mount Everest (about 5-6 miles high?). Above that there are many other things that would kill you, including temperature, intense radiation, low pressure, plasma, whatever.
Also, if pressure drops, temperature *decreases* if you hold volume constant because pV = nRT. Ideal gas law. Your blood will start boiling because the vapor pressure will be so low at high altitudes that it would pretty much boil no matter what the temperature was. (as an aside, it's really weird when you get something at the right temp. and pressure and it is in solid, liquid and gaseous states at the same time, very cool). Also, air pressure drops off by a factor of e (natural log base) every 4-5 miles or so on average (not constant though). This is called the atmospheric scale height.
pad the start of some input data with truly random garbage that wont compress well and bingo
Random garbage would compress very well actually. Probably about 50%.
The Moon has a dark side with respect to Earth only. Otherwise it has a day, which is about 28 Earth days long. The day on Mars is longer than Earth's by something like half an hour.
Lake Superior is not the largest lake on Earth. Caspian Sea is (granted, it is a saltwater lake, but it IS a lake by definition of lake).
If your CPU was raising the temp. of your room that much it would probably be running to hot to work at all.
When I run SETI@Home for a while my CPU gets so hot that I can't even touch the heatsink without getting a blister. It's a P2-233 from the old kind (I think Deschutes or whatever), I hear those are the hottest Pentiums.
It's horrible. I can tell that a TV is on (without looking at it) even when I'm like 50 feet away. It's the stupid noise. Anyway they say you stop hearing those high frequencies after around age 25-30.
I've seen a gutted (but working) analog autopilot that was used in fighter planes like 50 years ago. It's all mechanical gyros and electrical circuits, but no electronics. Since there is no processing involved, the response of the autopilot is instantaneous as compared to a computer which would need a few milliseconds to process data. However nowadays they just use three nanomachined accelerometers that give feedback to a CPU and the whole setup is much lighter. I also heard from someone working at Sandia that they recently made an actual nanomachine gyro that worked in the same way as the big analog autopilot I saw. Still I think it is pretty amazing, this analog autopilot looked much more complicated than a simple solid state processor...
Spaceships are made of aluminum or titanium and such. Steel is too heavy (density 7.85 g/cm3) and iridium has a higher density than gold IIRC about 20 g/cm3. Means that if a spacecraft were made of iridium it would weigh 5 times the amount it would weigh if it were made from aluminum. This would increase launch costs enormously and you would need a Saturn V just to launch a small commsat.
It costs 500 million to launch a space shuttle. This guy is paying 20 million. Do your own math.
Windows Explorer is the most massively useful file manager you can get. Especially the NT version. But only people who have to work with a lot of files all the time appreciate it. Having said that, I still use the DOS window sometimes when it is more convenient.
I think the Sieve of Erathostenes (sp?)factoring algorithm was invented at least 2000 years ago, but I'm not sure if it is the same algorithm as you are referring to.
skip lists are not the only data structure that allows logarithmic time addition and lookup, so they are not *that* important. Besides, they were developed in the early 90's (here at my Uni. btw) and have yet to prove themselves useful.
bilinear interpolation is not an algorithm. It is just taking three proportional averages.
Are any of these algorithms related to things like compression algorithms (MP3, Zip, LZW, etc.), encryption algorithms (DES, RSA, Blowfish, etc.) or search algorithms (like the one Google uses, for instance)?
Not really. They are much more important than that. Essential for putting man on the Moon, solving air flows to optimize the shape of a jet fighter, protein folding calculations, you know, this kind of stuff. These algorithms made it possible to solve large equations back in the 60's (imagine the processing power back then...)
So what if it reached its pinnacle in 1957? Gauss used a version of FFT in 1805 and modern FFT was published in the 60's. The fact that some algorithm is old, doesn't mean it's bad or slow. I'd bet that most of these 10 algortihms were first introduced before 1970.
2. Documents: For 90% of the documents that most people in an office environment use/create/read, etc., they're probably not using any of the 'advanced' features that would normally break compatibility. It's the other 10% who've got all the macros, templates, graphs, OLE links, and undocumented file format features that will have trouble.
Or you can look at it this way: Out of every 10 documents a person has, one will be incompatible. I know that this is probably not exactly right because all documents for a single person are likely to have the same general features, but if matters stood this way I would not switch. I think that (nongeek) people would seriously consider switching if 100% of their documents were converted correctly.
FYI I use Star Office and have had no problem saving in Word2000 format, but I think the spreadsheet Star comes with sucks the big one.
Actually three cams would always lie on a plane in 3D space, but they are still enough. Of course more cams (at least 4) would be better.
For full 3D tracking you would need three cameras which are non collinear and not lying on one plane. With two you can probably make good approximations if they are well targeted at the area of interest.
Because they can't aim exactly. Debris will fall along a line thousands of miles long, along the descending node of the orbit of the satellite (crossing the equator going from above Hawaii to South America). This is equivalent of having debris all the way from Redmond to Miami.
Actually they should be because the Compton observatory is as large as a bus and when falling down it will break up into many large pieces. It should be a really cool sight... Imagine a bus falling from the sky at about 5000 mph... I think Compton weighs about 15 tons, which is more like 4 busses. The Iridiums are much smaller and will be done one by one, so one Iridium crash would not be as spectacular.