This feels like the result of Moore's Law winding down. Intel used to differentiate based on transistors, computations, energy use, but now the best they seem to do in world where rates aren't skyrocketing is to say they make their chips / boards without using "blood minerals". Could also just be them responding to the pricing pressure that conflict and the dominance of certain countries like China has caused in the rare earth metals market. Don't buy those because they're bad (and they jack our costs)
In many ways, these equations are almost worse than useless. For years, the Drake Eq. gave everyone the impression there were 1 or 2 other planets in the whole universe that could support life, and reinforced the whole contingent for which space exploration is never a "cost effective" endeavor. Then we found out "oh, wait, all our guesses were wildly pessemistic." They get filled with extrapolated numbers about a place we've only begun to tip-toe into and then make dire predictions.
Some are also just wrong. For example, he uses 4.5 km/s delta-V but that doesn't even cover the maxima for Liquid Fuel Rockets (7 to 9 km/s). If you start to approach tech like Electrostatic or Hall Effect (Ion) Thrusters you get up into numbers more like 50-100 km/s, which would probably multiply his 10 number by a bit (most of the Oort Cloud becomes available over time).
There's just so much fuzziness here its hard to find the use in it.
A portion of the problem is that the quantity of news which is reported by "outlets" has dramatically increased in our modern era. We are flooded with a perpetual onslaught of new information from every corner of creation. And honestly, most of it isn't worth checking. What is worth checking? Stories that will ruin your reputation. Stories that might go viral and cripple your ability to report further. Know what's not? "5 Things you Need to Know about Cheese Curd" "How men need to step up their role in feminism" "The top 10 bimbos of 2013" That is 90% of the "news" we now get (and what % of stats are made up?)
Yes they can, and yes they do. Front running (or things that look suspiciously like it) happen constantly on the electronic exchanges. Flash trading is a form of trading in which certain market participants are allowed to see incoming orders to buy or sell securities very slightly earlier than the general market participants, typically 30 milliseconds, in exchange for a fee. This feature was introduced to allow participants like market makers the opportunity to meet or improve on the National best bid and offer price to ensure incoming orders were matched at the most advantageous prices according to Regulation NMS. What this then leads to is millisecond front running where the traders see your order, adjust theirs to take best advantage of it, and by the time yours goes in, a portion of the profit has been leeched out. The Securities and Exchange Commission proposed banning the practice as part of regulatory reforms in the wake of the Financial crisis of 2007–2010, but the proposals have not been implemented.
Linked is the average tuition rise over the last five years for all 50 states. In most cases, the rise is 20-30%. In the extreme upper end, the rise is nearly 80% (I'm looking at you Arizona...). http://www.cbpp.org/images/cms/3-19-13sfp-f3.jpg This clearly outpaces cost of living growth over the last five years.
The next link is the growth in administrative costs for one example, the University of California system, which has massively ballooned over the last several decades. http://californiareview.net/2011/08/24/graph-of-uc-administrative-growth/ This is not an isolated phenomenon. While professor salaries and direct education expenses have stayed relatively flat over the last few decades (or tracked inflation in some cases), the number of, and salaries provided to, administrative positions have dramatically increased across the board at most institutions (public or private).
For further example, look at total compensation for the top university executives across the US from 2011-2012. We are compensating many university execs in excess of $500,000 a year (some over $2 mil). http://old.post-gazette.com/images5/20130513presidential_pay691.png At many state schools, with limited external funding, and tuition rise limited by law, we're still paying execs $3-400,000. What value do these people add that is worth $300,000 - $2 million?
They should have been. When I was in college I rarely took notes, because taking notes is also distracting.
Similar. I generally preferred classes where they provided a notes handout at the end of the class (for those who attend) and just had people listen and interact. For those that didn't, I normally brought my recorder and would just transcribe later (digital or by hand) so that I could just relax, listen, and participate while I was there.
Quite a lot of our techniques for refining metals require vast quantities of water and oxygen, and gravity.
Then why aren't we developing refining systems that don't? The answer's in the title. If ever there was a space tech development that would pay off on Earth.
You're trading one for the other. Politicians don't want to do it, as they're beholden to their constituents. Businesses don't want to do it, as they're either behold to shareholders, or would rather deliver the minimum service that will still make a profit. Anecdotal evidence of "kind" companies doesn't disprove that the majority are still AT&T's and Comcast's who are less than benevolent.
You don't need internet to survive, not going to argue. However, in the modern world, to be a competetive, contributing member of society, you do need internet to be on a leveled field of competetition. Most services are transitioning to a model where it is far easier and far less costly to you to gain their benefit with internet access.
For example, other utilities.
I pay my water, sewer, electricity, and gas over the internet. I don't have to, but it vastly reduces the opportunity cost in time to me. However, people without internet are not given this choice. They Must stand in line for upwards of an hour in under-staffed cattle corals to hand someone a $50 check. That is an hour they had to take off work or that they could have been spending on themselves. Multiply that by the array of gov't services which are moving to primarily internet based access, and the opportunity cost to individuals without internet is vast. And this doesn't even touch those services which are nearly, or utterly, inaccessible without internet. Those are simply lost.
The internet is a common good, like roads, which is not necessary for survival, but which should be a universal benefit to all of society
Use this combo for a majority of my on-the-go meetings, email, note taking, document creation, and light duty spreadsheet work. 90% of what normal business folks need. How do they even hope to compete with this price / value proposition and with the reviled Win8 interface? They've lost before they started.
God help you if you try to buy it for home. When you find one movie out of the lot, where the experience was good, or you liked the plot... You bring it home, and every time you want to watch, you're forced to sit through 15 minutes of unskippable ads. W.T.F.?
The days when a back-of-the envelope calculation is enough are long gone (and probably never existed int he real world anyway).
Very much disagree on the lack of back-of-the-envelope calculations. von Braun and co. solved some of the hardest problems of Satern V development with paper napkins. I use quick calculations and engineering judgement all the time, and hire folks who are good at them too. In fact, we often spend far too much effort doing excessive studies when a few minutes of napkin math would give you the 80% answer. However, being able to figure out brain teasers and being able to quickly perform sound engineering judgements in a real work environment are two very different things.
Watch the NSA now influence the beltway for a pseudo-tax on Utah that happens to recoup the cost of the power. There is no point in taxing the federal government when you operate inside that government.
Internet may give you a skewed audience, but there's nothing saying you couldn't just create a large base set of pilots, show all the pilots during a set of "Preview Weeks!" at the beginning of the year, or over the summer, and then pick up those ones that poll well or reasonably for the fall semester.
Does anyone pay attention when a robot goes to the bottom of a trench on the ocean? This is the same argument against manned spaceflight and its equally foolish. Humans identify with the shared experience of other humans, and are tribally interested in what happens to them. If we want to fire people up about exploration, we need to do that exploring with humans.
Uses a similar methodology (SVD, which was the highest scoring method in isolation) to correlate Likes with Traits, whereas Netflix used prior movie Likes to correlate with future movie Likes. Effectively, Netflix's competition was probably correlating with a hidden indicator or personality subtype set which corresponded strongly to likes of particular movies.
It is highly likely that were they to apply the winning method from the Netflix competition (SVD paired with a weighted set of other indicators) that they would probably show even higher correlation and predictive power for personality subtypes.
Engineers and engineering companies frequently fall into the trap that a product must be "good" before it can go anywhere. Often leads to an endless cycle of perfection without actual release.
The OP seems to be in this mode. They could instead release a quick, simple version of their work, make it functional, and then iteratively build toward the ideal "good" as needed. Has the bonus of making product marketing happy too, as they get an early look and can say whether that was what they wanted in the first place.
Or, you could choose to not do that at all, and fly like everybody's favorite, SpaceX, for a reasonable cost. This is often the problem with programs like this. They feel they need to fiddle with and optimize working designs. It works and its better than what we have. Fly it.
As a note, the 1kW/m2 is the total incident energy for a surface perpendicular to the Sun's rays at sea level on a clear day. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insolation Currently, the most efficient "research" solar cells are: 44% efficient per this chart: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/52/PVeff(rev121015b).jpg As such, we're even worse off then your helpful calculation shows. With current energy needs for flight, we simply aren't there for any large scale system.
Relevant XKCD - http://xkcd.com/893/ "The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space--each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision."
And if we never think about those problems, and try to push the engineering in those areas, then it will stay that way forever. Interstellar travel has a number of sub-problems for which there aren't good Earth research motivations or sources. Until you try to push those boundaries and fail, you'll never make it anywhere.
This is the simplest case, but its conceivable to have stability with a star orbiting farther out as well. In the case like this one, you could maintain accretion disk formation with much larger star separations as long as the separations weren't so large that they cleared all the material, or introduced significant eddies / disturbances in the disk. To a point, simulations have actually shown that a little bit of this stirring helps. Solar orbit distances are also often vast compared to planetary orbit distances, so the other extreme can occur, where there can be an extensive internal band of stability between two distant companions; thereby allowing inner planets to form around each star. Hierarchical star systems of 3, 4, 5, ect.. stars would also potentially produce stable planets as long as they had large gaps between the centers of mass and outer orbit paths of each sub-system. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_star#Hierarchical_systems for visualization of the hierarchical relationships.
You CAN program without math. You shouldn't want to. Not understanding higher level math cripples your ability to work on hard / interesting problems, which are the only real problems left. This aludes to a mentality of "what is the least I can do to get by?" which is an immediate turn-off to hiring. Most people can grind out glue code, or marginal UIs [1], but the pool of programers that can is huge. As a competitive advantage, you should always aim to push your skillset out beyond all of your other peers.
For your chosen field, the above course groups are of prime interest. LA is critical for graphical programming, optimization programs (pathfinding for example), or solving large, matrixable datasets (pixelized display fields). Graph Theory also plays heavily in optimization, pathfinding, information flow, decision making, and procedural programming (L-trees, fractal growth, ect..). It also plays heavily with LA. Finally, Calc. is necessary if you ever want to figure out how fast things are happening (trajectories, computational flowfields), for computing numerous types of gradient style lighting effects, or for figuring out how much of something you have (total resource accumulation, ballistics/object movement with time, ect...). In the case of calculus, you may not actually write integrals or differentials, but it is critical that you understand what they're doing, and how they are approximated.
Note [1]: Good UI creation is hard. But that requires almost as much study in human factors and interface design as the math side does
Gene Wolfe is easily the best sci-fi writer from a technical perspective. There is no comparison. Unfortunately, the depth of his books and their technical complexity also make them difficult for some newcomers to approach. His Solar Cycle (New Sun, Long Sun, Short Sun) series' have entire sets of supplementary books devoted to trying to identify all the hidden meaning, subtle lies, and even Easter eggs of his creations. His devotion to unreliable narrators is a device that is highly under-utilized by other authors, and makes every book into a brilliant maze of layered stories and selective truths. It is almost a bonus that he also writes masterful prose that sweeps you away and breathes life into grim days near the end of time, where humankind spins down the last windings of the spring.
Slashdot Mirror
This feels like the result of Moore's Law winding down. Intel used to differentiate based on transistors, computations, energy use, but now the best they seem to do in world where rates aren't skyrocketing is to say they make their chips / boards without using "blood minerals". Could also just be them responding to the pricing pressure that conflict and the dominance of certain countries like China has caused in the rare earth metals market. Don't buy those because they're bad (and they jack our costs)
In many ways, these equations are almost worse than useless. For years, the Drake Eq. gave everyone the impression there were 1 or 2 other planets in the whole universe that could support life, and reinforced the whole contingent for which space exploration is never a "cost effective" endeavor. Then we found out "oh, wait, all our guesses were wildly pessemistic." They get filled with extrapolated numbers about a place we've only begun to tip-toe into and then make dire predictions.
Some are also just wrong. For example, he uses 4.5 km/s delta-V but that doesn't even cover the maxima for Liquid Fuel Rockets (7 to 9 km/s). If you start to approach tech like Electrostatic or Hall Effect (Ion) Thrusters you get up into numbers more like 50-100 km/s, which would probably multiply his 10 number by a bit (most of the Oort Cloud becomes available over time).
There's just so much fuzziness here its hard to find the use in it.
A portion of the problem is that the quantity of news which is reported by "outlets" has dramatically increased in our modern era. We are flooded with a perpetual onslaught of new information from every corner of creation. And honestly, most of it isn't worth checking. What is worth checking? Stories that will ruin your reputation. Stories that might go viral and cripple your ability to report further. Know what's not? "5 Things you Need to Know about Cheese Curd" "How men need to step up their role in feminism" "The top 10 bimbos of 2013" That is 90% of the "news" we now get (and what % of stats are made up?)
Yes they can, and yes they do. Front running (or things that look suspiciously like it) happen constantly on the electronic exchanges. Flash trading is a form of trading in which certain market participants are allowed to see incoming orders to buy or sell securities very slightly earlier than the general market participants, typically 30 milliseconds, in exchange for a fee. This feature was introduced to allow participants like market makers the opportunity to meet or improve on the National best bid and offer price to ensure incoming orders were matched at the most advantageous prices according to Regulation NMS. What this then leads to is millisecond front running where the traders see your order, adjust theirs to take best advantage of it, and by the time yours goes in, a portion of the profit has been leeched out. The Securities and Exchange Commission proposed banning the practice as part of regulatory reforms in the wake of the Financial crisis of 2007–2010, but the proposals have not been implemented.
Linked is the average tuition rise over the last five years for all 50 states. In most cases, the rise is 20-30%. In the extreme upper end, the rise is nearly 80% (I'm looking at you Arizona...). http://www.cbpp.org/images/cms/3-19-13sfp-f3.jpg This clearly outpaces cost of living growth over the last five years.
The next link is the growth in administrative costs for one example, the University of California system, which has massively ballooned over the last several decades. http://californiareview.net/2011/08/24/graph-of-uc-administrative-growth/ This is not an isolated phenomenon. While professor salaries and direct education expenses have stayed relatively flat over the last few decades (or tracked inflation in some cases), the number of, and salaries provided to, administrative positions have dramatically increased across the board at most institutions (public or private).
For further example, look at total compensation for the top university executives across the US from 2011-2012. We are compensating many university execs in excess of $500,000 a year (some over $2 mil). http://old.post-gazette.com/images5/20130513presidential_pay691.png At many state schools, with limited external funding, and tuition rise limited by law, we're still paying execs $3-400,000. What value do these people add that is worth $300,000 - $2 million?
They should have been. When I was in college I rarely took notes, because taking notes is also distracting.
Similar. I generally preferred classes where they provided a notes handout at the end of the class (for those who attend) and just had people listen and interact. For those that didn't, I normally brought my recorder and would just transcribe later (digital or by hand) so that I could just relax, listen, and participate while I was there.
Quite a lot of our techniques for refining metals require vast quantities of water and oxygen, and gravity.
Then why aren't we developing refining systems that don't? The answer's in the title. If ever there was a space tech development that would pay off on Earth.
You're trading one for the other. Politicians don't want to do it, as they're beholden to their constituents. Businesses don't want to do it, as they're either behold to shareholders, or would rather deliver the minimum service that will still make a profit. Anecdotal evidence of "kind" companies doesn't disprove that the majority are still AT&T's and Comcast's who are less than benevolent.
You don't need internet to survive, not going to argue. However, in the modern world, to be a competetive, contributing member of society, you do need internet to be on a leveled field of competetition. Most services are transitioning to a model where it is far easier and far less costly to you to gain their benefit with internet access.
For example, other utilities.
I pay my water, sewer, electricity, and gas over the internet. I don't have to, but it vastly reduces the opportunity cost in time to me. However, people without internet are not given this choice. They Must stand in line for upwards of an hour in under-staffed cattle corals to hand someone a $50 check. That is an hour they had to take off work or that they could have been spending on themselves. Multiply that by the array of gov't services which are moving to primarily internet based access, and the opportunity cost to individuals without internet is vast. And this doesn't even touch those services which are nearly, or utterly, inaccessible without internet. Those are simply lost.
The internet is a common good, like roads, which is not necessary for survival, but which should be a universal benefit to all of society
Use this combo for a majority of my on-the-go meetings, email, note taking, document creation, and light duty spreadsheet work. 90% of what normal business folks need. How do they even hope to compete with this price / value proposition and with the reviled Win8 interface? They've lost before they started.
God help you if you try to buy it for home. When you find one movie out of the lot, where the experience was good, or you liked the plot... You bring it home, and every time you want to watch, you're forced to sit through 15 minutes of unskippable ads. W.T.F.?
Is it a wonder everyone pirates?
The days when a back-of-the envelope calculation is enough are long gone (and probably never existed int he real world anyway).
Very much disagree on the lack of back-of-the-envelope calculations. von Braun and co. solved some of the hardest problems of Satern V development with paper napkins. I use quick calculations and engineering judgement all the time, and hire folks who are good at them too. In fact, we often spend far too much effort doing excessive studies when a few minutes of napkin math would give you the 80% answer. However, being able to figure out brain teasers and being able to quickly perform sound engineering judgements in a real work environment are two very different things.
More details than just the story can be found in the supporting info of the publication, which includes pictures of the test setup and the resulting spectrograms. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/06/12/1221464110/suppl/DCSupplemental
Watch the NSA now influence the beltway for a pseudo-tax on Utah that happens to recoup the cost of the power. There is no point in taxing the federal government when you operate inside that government.
Internet may give you a skewed audience, but there's nothing saying you couldn't just create a large base set of pilots, show all the pilots during a set of "Preview Weeks!" at the beginning of the year, or over the summer, and then pick up those ones that poll well or reasonably for the fall semester.
Does anyone pay attention when a robot goes to the bottom of a trench on the ocean? This is the same argument against manned spaceflight and its equally foolish. Humans identify with the shared experience of other humans, and are tribally interested in what happens to them. If we want to fire people up about exploration, we need to do that exploring with humans.
Uses a similar methodology (SVD, which was the highest scoring method in isolation) to correlate Likes with Traits, whereas Netflix used prior movie Likes to correlate with future movie Likes. Effectively, Netflix's competition was probably correlating with a hidden indicator or personality subtype set which corresponded strongly to likes of particular movies.
It is highly likely that were they to apply the winning method from the Netflix competition (SVD paired with a weighted set of other indicators) that they would probably show even higher correlation and predictive power for personality subtypes.
Engineers and engineering companies frequently fall into the trap that a product must be "good" before it can go anywhere. Often leads to an endless cycle of perfection without actual release.
The OP seems to be in this mode. They could instead release a quick, simple version of their work, make it functional, and then iteratively build toward the ideal "good" as needed. Has the bonus of making product marketing happy too, as they get an early look and can say whether that was what they wanted in the first place.
Or, you could choose to not do that at all, and fly like everybody's favorite, SpaceX, for a reasonable cost. This is often the problem with programs like this. They feel they need to fiddle with and optimize working designs. It works and its better than what we have. Fly it.
As a note, the 1kW/m2 is the total incident energy for a surface perpendicular to the Sun's rays at sea level on a clear day. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insolation Currently, the most efficient "research" solar cells are: 44% efficient per this chart: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/52/PVeff(rev121015b).jpg As such, we're even worse off then your helpful calculation shows. With current energy needs for flight, we simply aren't there for any large scale system.
Relevant XKCD - http://xkcd.com/893/ "The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space--each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision."
And if we never think about those problems, and try to push the engineering in those areas, then it will stay that way forever. Interstellar travel has a number of sub-problems for which there aren't good Earth research motivations or sources. Until you try to push those boundaries and fail, you'll never make it anywhere.
This is the simplest case, but its conceivable to have stability with a star orbiting farther out as well. In the case like this one, you could maintain accretion disk formation with much larger star separations as long as the separations weren't so large that they cleared all the material, or introduced significant eddies / disturbances in the disk. To a point, simulations have actually shown that a little bit of this stirring helps. Solar orbit distances are also often vast compared to planetary orbit distances, so the other extreme can occur, where there can be an extensive internal band of stability between two distant companions; thereby allowing inner planets to form around each star. Hierarchical star systems of 3, 4, 5, ect.. stars would also potentially produce stable planets as long as they had large gaps between the centers of mass and outer orbit paths of each sub-system. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_star#Hierarchical_systems for visualization of the hierarchical relationships.
You CAN program without math. You shouldn't want to. Not understanding higher level math cripples your ability to work on hard / interesting problems, which are the only real problems left. This aludes to a mentality of "what is the least I can do to get by?" which is an immediate turn-off to hiring. Most people can grind out glue code, or marginal UIs [1], but the pool of programers that can is huge. As a competitive advantage, you should always aim to push your skillset out beyond all of your other peers.
For your chosen field, the above course groups are of prime interest. LA is critical for graphical programming, optimization programs (pathfinding for example), or solving large, matrixable datasets (pixelized display fields). Graph Theory also plays heavily in optimization, pathfinding, information flow, decision making, and procedural programming (L-trees, fractal growth, ect..). It also plays heavily with LA. Finally, Calc. is necessary if you ever want to figure out how fast things are happening (trajectories, computational flowfields), for computing numerous types of gradient style lighting effects, or for figuring out how much of something you have (total resource accumulation, ballistics/object movement with time, ect...). In the case of calculus, you may not actually write integrals or differentials, but it is critical that you understand what they're doing, and how they are approximated.
Note [1]: Good UI creation is hard. But that requires almost as much study in human factors and interface design as the math side does
Disclosure: My day job is at NASA, so I'm biased
Gene Wolfe is easily the best sci-fi writer from a technical perspective. There is no comparison. Unfortunately, the depth of his books and their technical complexity also make them difficult for some newcomers to approach. His Solar Cycle (New Sun, Long Sun, Short Sun) series' have entire sets of supplementary books devoted to trying to identify all the hidden meaning, subtle lies, and even Easter eggs of his creations. His devotion to unreliable narrators is a device that is highly under-utilized by other authors, and makes every book into a brilliant maze of layered stories and selective truths. It is almost a bonus that he also writes masterful prose that sweeps you away and breathes life into grim days near the end of time, where humankind spins down the last windings of the spring.