Or of course computational physics and similar (eg., protein folding simulations)...you REALLY can't program in that field without having a solid grasp of the underlying mathematics.
The point of the study is to make sure that people don't explode when the procedure is performed, or for something similarly unpleasant to happen--it's a Phase I study, not a real effectiveness trial.
There is much better use for 30M such as spending it on education, which is broken rather than Internet which isn't not so broken.
That's not the point of the NSF. Besides, as this link http://nsf.gov/pubs/2010/nsf10001/toc.jsp to their FY 2009 report shows, they already spend almost a billion dollars a year on education. Or over 30 times the value of this award. I really don't think you can claim that canceling this award and giving the money to the DoEdu (or even shifting it to the education side of NSF) would be better value for the money.
If you needed to radiation-harden these laptops, you'd need to radiation-harden the astronauts, too. The protection of the Van Allen belts and the structure of the ISS itself should provide adequate coverage without any special measures.
Mr. Reichert...is a she:)
But I agree that Time Ships is a very good novel, not only because it more develops the characters, but it also incorporates more modern thought than Wells could and manages to tie in several of his writings. It's really quite an impressive achievement.
Really? From where I'm sitting there's plenty of hard sci-fi coming out. Alastair Reynolds was mentioned earlier, but there's also eg. Charlie Stross; even his 'fantasy' stories tend to have more than a little science kicking around them, and he writes perfectly good diamond-hard. I'm hardly in tune with the community, either, so there are likely a lot more authors than those two if you're willing to do some digging. Now, I understand if near-future and not-space opera-type stuff is not your cup of tea, but the Heinlein-type of future doesn't seem terribly likely nowadays, unfortunately.
Really, I'm more concerned with the really, really optimistic planning and schedules. They thought they'd have been able to do it faster than Apollo, for a lot less money, which seems extremely doubtful to me.
That study was both very optimistic and highly aggressive on schedules. Considering that it shared lineage with the (cancelled) X-38 program, I'm not wildly optimistic about it's likelihood of success.
And the Russians always felt they didn't have enough money! If some of the horror stories I've heard are true, they really, really didn't, either. Besides, about half the period I covered was "Freedom" not ISS, and there politics was the thing (constant, constant, constant cost-cutting). I agree with you that building the station was a learning process, and to me it said, "Don't build things that you need on short notice (eg., interplanetary spaceships) in space out of a bunch of fiddly bits without a MUCH more mature infrastructure. Cost-cutters, launch delays, and accidents will eat your lunch."
I read the Executive Summary when that came out, and will read the full report, which actually looks pretty interesting from my brief skims, when I have time, and just wanted to chime in that the overall direction looks really good. The Moon-First/extended shuttle/station or a (hypothetical) Flexible Path/extended shuttle/station would be pretty much ideal from my standpoint, giving NASA something interesting to do but minimizing the flight gap. Of course, there's a long history at NASA of having 'good-looking' reports that just collected dust, and Norman Augustine and Sally Ride sure know about that, but hopefully this will get a good reception.
Sure, we've just got lots of experience with building the Station--and it was a nightmare. Remember, the station largely derives from Freedom studies started as early as 1982. Conceptually, it's almost 30 years old. Even a lot of the hardware is 20+. There were huge overruns, and several major delays due to the Shuttle failing. Doing that with a Mars craft is not an option.
Economies of scale work both ways--sure, cheap, reliable, low-lift boosters are great, but there are important technical simplifications that you can make by launching everything in just one or two gos--not having to store cryogens in orbit, minimal assembly, more robust craft design--you can build your lunar lander or whatever in one big piece, and assemble it on Earth in carefully controlled, well-understood conditions, rather than in a dangerous, poorly-defined environment, for example--which might very well outweigh the benefits of low-ish launch costs. I'm also skeptical of any NASA effort to reduce launch costs directly. After all, the Shuttle was supposed to massively reduce launch costs, and look where that ended up. Now, they do support COTS, which may very well reduce launch costs some, but they aren't bending metal themselves.
I love the way they conflate "the space program" with "human space flight".
You do realize they're called the "Review of US HUMAN SPACEFLIGHT Plans Committee"...right?
Outsourcing launches of humans to low earth orbit to the private commercial sector sounds like a fine idea, even though they've never done it before.
Yeah, why haven't they done it before? Oh right, there's never been a private organization that could! *eyerolls* Of course, maybe if you consider that they actually recommend doing that as a backup/potential future replacement for NASA LEO launches, not just outsourcing everything...
Even better would be outsourcing the task of deciding if any particular task in LEO is best served by launching a human, because maybe there is a good reason they've never done it before.
Oh yeah, like never having had the money! Face it, there really isn't a lot of knowledge about the appropriate and useful level of human involvement in space activities. Between high costs and not actually doing a whole lot with astronauts, we just can't say whether most tasks are best done by robots or people.
I think the break is just too long. A month-long break would be reasonable, but much longer and it gets harder and harder to remember the stuff you were taught last year, especially in more advanced or technical courses (mathematics, for instance). A break isn't unreasonable; the length is. Not that you necessarily need to lengthen the school year to fix that--just rearranging school schedules could have much the same effect with no net change (eg., break for August, April, and December. You have about the same total amount of time off (even after factoring in things like Thanksgiving, Labor Day, etc.), but no super-long breaks.
Besides, how many kids really get any educational benefit from doing things over the summer? I really doubt many kids actually get jobs, go to camp (or at least get anything out of camp), or anything of the like during the summer. Instead, they probably just stay at home watching TV or playing video games all day. That doesn't really help their education or ability to get a job in the future at all.
Well, since there's really nothing better for them to be doing (Classes? forget it, it is a break from SCHOOL after all--the schools ain't teaching them. Work? Please, loads of these kids are probably too young to work anyways--and besides, who's going to hire them in this economy? etc.), why SHOULDN'T they treat it as a three-month vacation? I agree it's ridiculous and hurts education (hell, I'm in college right now and having a 2 1/2 month hole in the middle of the year is painful--it's hard to remember how to solve differential equations when you haven't done it for a quarter of the year!), and it should be changed, no doubt, but the current situation is a logical outgrowth of that fact.
There is, though, a big stupid bird with two flapping wings. A left wing and a right wing. It's name is politics.
And we should simply cut off it's food supply.
The problem is, its food is people...unless you propose to kill off everyone on the planet but yourself, politics ain't going away.
Except I'm not paying attention to the ads *anyways*. I filter out the ads anyways, why not install something that filters them out before they can even bother me? Besides, Noscript also protects against attempted scripting-based browser exploits. Adblock, not Noscript, is the one that blocks most ads.
I have to take some exception to your statement about swine flu. Swine flu indeed is predicted to have a fatality rate not much greater than ordinary flu...however, as it is a novel strain of flu, no one around except for those like yourself who have already been infected are immune to it. So, the rate of infection is predicted to be much higher, and thus there are many more deaths predicted. And of course there's always the example of the 1918 flu, which initially appeared in a mild, 'ordinary' version...then came back in fall as a much more virulent and deadly form.
It took until 1607 until a colony in the Americas survived for more than a year. Oh, and only barely. 500 colonists landed in 1607, 60 greeted a supply boat in 1610.
That's patently untrue. There were Spanish colonies as early as the 1520s, and massive Spanish and Portuguese settlements by the 1600s. While you can argue that the Spanish in many cases simply leached off of native cities and settlements, the Portuguese in Brazil were in a situation much more like the English colonies.
If you google 'space support polls' you get quite a few on the first page. Most of them claim that there 'is continued strong support in the US for manned space exploration' and such not.
Do you know anything about the process that led to the space shuttle? Yes NASA solicited design bids--many design bids. Not just from the usual suspects (Boeing, Rockwell, Lockheed, North American, etc., etc.) but also from surprising sources such as Chrysler (they had a neat SSTO design). NASA, contrary to your suppositions, does not do everything in house. In fact, even the launches are technically operated by ULA, a joint effort by Lockheed Martin and Boeing.
Yeah, the IA only does public domain (pre-1923) books. But since this also applies to translations (!) and the majority of the world's books have been published since 1923...
It might be true that the humanities departments cost more to run than the science departments, but science departments usually also get some funding from the federal government and private business via grants and research funding, which the humanities do not, at least to the same extent. In any event, colleges are not (usually) businesses, so they are not and should not be concerned with turning a profit.
Many SF fans prefer such an interpretation - because it makes SF glittery and shiny and oh so much different from the plot devices of every other genre. It's a little ray of sunshine into the nerd ghetto, a little beacon of hope.
It's also bullshit.
Their aren't many other genres based around the idea of the writer (uncharitably speaking) making shit up about the future...it's not surprising that SF would do relatively well in total number of correct 'predictions'.
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Or of course computational physics and similar (eg., protein folding simulations)...you REALLY can't program in that field without having a solid grasp of the underlying mathematics.
The point of the study is to make sure that people don't explode when the procedure is performed, or for something similarly unpleasant to happen--it's a Phase I study, not a real effectiveness trial.
That's not the point of the NSF. Besides, as this link http://nsf.gov/pubs/2010/nsf10001/toc.jsp to their FY 2009 report shows, they already spend almost a billion dollars a year on education. Or over 30 times the value of this award. I really don't think you can claim that canceling this award and giving the money to the DoEdu (or even shifting it to the education side of NSF) would be better value for the money.
If you needed to radiation-harden these laptops, you'd need to radiation-harden the astronauts, too. The protection of the Van Allen belts and the structure of the ISS itself should provide adequate coverage without any special measures.
Nope, they use the TDRS satellites, which themselves are a partially-military program, to communicate with the ground.
Mr. Reichert...is a she :)
But I agree that Time Ships is a very good novel, not only because it more develops the characters, but it also incorporates more modern thought than Wells could and manages to tie in several of his writings. It's really quite an impressive achievement.
Really? From where I'm sitting there's plenty of hard sci-fi coming out. Alastair Reynolds was mentioned earlier, but there's also eg. Charlie Stross; even his 'fantasy' stories tend to have more than a little science kicking around them, and he writes perfectly good diamond-hard. I'm hardly in tune with the community, either, so there are likely a lot more authors than those two if you're willing to do some digging. Now, I understand if near-future and not-space opera-type stuff is not your cup of tea, but the Heinlein-type of future doesn't seem terribly likely nowadays, unfortunately.
Really, I'm more concerned with the really, really optimistic planning and schedules. They thought they'd have been able to do it faster than Apollo, for a lot less money, which seems extremely doubtful to me.
That study was both very optimistic and highly aggressive on schedules. Considering that it shared lineage with the (cancelled) X-38 program, I'm not wildly optimistic about it's likelihood of success.
"Karmic Koala" is just the code/theme name for the release. Like how Mac OS releases are called things like "Panther" or "Snow Leopard".
And the Russians always felt they didn't have enough money! If some of the horror stories I've heard are true, they really, really didn't, either. Besides, about half the period I covered was "Freedom" not ISS, and there politics was the thing (constant, constant, constant cost-cutting). I agree with you that building the station was a learning process, and to me it said, "Don't build things that you need on short notice (eg., interplanetary spaceships) in space out of a bunch of fiddly bits without a MUCH more mature infrastructure. Cost-cutters, launch delays, and accidents will eat your lunch."
I read the Executive Summary when that came out, and will read the full report, which actually looks pretty interesting from my brief skims, when I have time, and just wanted to chime in that the overall direction looks really good. The Moon-First/extended shuttle/station or a (hypothetical) Flexible Path/extended shuttle/station would be pretty much ideal from my standpoint, giving NASA something interesting to do but minimizing the flight gap. Of course, there's a long history at NASA of having 'good-looking' reports that just collected dust, and Norman Augustine and Sally Ride sure know about that, but hopefully this will get a good reception.
Sure, we've just got lots of experience with building the Station--and it was a nightmare. Remember, the station largely derives from Freedom studies started as early as 1982. Conceptually, it's almost 30 years old. Even a lot of the hardware is 20+. There were huge overruns, and several major delays due to the Shuttle failing. Doing that with a Mars craft is not an option.
Economies of scale work both ways--sure, cheap, reliable, low-lift boosters are great, but there are important technical simplifications that you can make by launching everything in just one or two gos--not having to store cryogens in orbit, minimal assembly, more robust craft design--you can build your lunar lander or whatever in one big piece, and assemble it on Earth in carefully controlled, well-understood conditions, rather than in a dangerous, poorly-defined environment, for example--which might very well outweigh the benefits of low-ish launch costs. I'm also skeptical of any NASA effort to reduce launch costs directly. After all, the Shuttle was supposed to massively reduce launch costs, and look where that ended up. Now, they do support COTS, which may very well reduce launch costs some, but they aren't bending metal themselves.
You do realize they're called the "Review of US HUMAN SPACEFLIGHT Plans Committee"...right?
Yeah, why haven't they done it before? Oh right, there's never been a private organization that could! *eyerolls* Of course, maybe if you consider that they actually recommend doing that as a backup/potential future replacement for NASA LEO launches, not just outsourcing everything...
Oh yeah, like never having had the money! Face it, there really isn't a lot of knowledge about the appropriate and useful level of human involvement in space activities. Between high costs and not actually doing a whole lot with astronauts, we just can't say whether most tasks are best done by robots or people.
I think the break is just too long. A month-long break would be reasonable, but much longer and it gets harder and harder to remember the stuff you were taught last year, especially in more advanced or technical courses (mathematics, for instance). A break isn't unreasonable; the length is. Not that you necessarily need to lengthen the school year to fix that--just rearranging school schedules could have much the same effect with no net change (eg., break for August, April, and December. You have about the same total amount of time off (even after factoring in things like Thanksgiving, Labor Day, etc.), but no super-long breaks. Besides, how many kids really get any educational benefit from doing things over the summer? I really doubt many kids actually get jobs, go to camp (or at least get anything out of camp), or anything of the like during the summer. Instead, they probably just stay at home watching TV or playing video games all day. That doesn't really help their education or ability to get a job in the future at all.
Well, since there's really nothing better for them to be doing (Classes? forget it, it is a break from SCHOOL after all--the schools ain't teaching them. Work? Please, loads of these kids are probably too young to work anyways--and besides, who's going to hire them in this economy? etc.), why SHOULDN'T they treat it as a three-month vacation? I agree it's ridiculous and hurts education (hell, I'm in college right now and having a 2 1/2 month hole in the middle of the year is painful--it's hard to remember how to solve differential equations when you haven't done it for a quarter of the year!), and it should be changed, no doubt, but the current situation is a logical outgrowth of that fact.
The problem is, its food is people...unless you propose to kill off everyone on the planet but yourself, politics ain't going away.
Except I'm not paying attention to the ads *anyways*. I filter out the ads anyways, why not install something that filters them out before they can even bother me? Besides, Noscript also protects against attempted scripting-based browser exploits. Adblock, not Noscript, is the one that blocks most ads.
I have to take some exception to your statement about swine flu. Swine flu indeed is predicted to have a fatality rate not much greater than ordinary flu...however, as it is a novel strain of flu, no one around except for those like yourself who have already been infected are immune to it. So, the rate of infection is predicted to be much higher, and thus there are many more deaths predicted. And of course there's always the example of the 1918 flu, which initially appeared in a mild, 'ordinary' version...then came back in fall as a much more virulent and deadly form.
That's patently untrue. There were Spanish colonies as early as the 1520s, and massive Spanish and Portuguese settlements by the 1600s. While you can argue that the Spanish in many cases simply leached off of native cities and settlements, the Portuguese in Brazil were in a situation much more like the English colonies.
If you google 'space support polls' you get quite a few on the first page. Most of them claim that there 'is continued strong support in the US for manned space exploration' and such not.
Do you know anything about the process that led to the space shuttle? Yes NASA solicited design bids--many design bids. Not just from the usual suspects (Boeing, Rockwell, Lockheed, North American, etc., etc.) but also from surprising sources such as Chrysler (they had a neat SSTO design). NASA, contrary to your suppositions, does not do everything in house. In fact, even the launches are technically operated by ULA, a joint effort by Lockheed Martin and Boeing.
Yeah, the IA only does public domain (pre-1923) books. But since this also applies to translations (!) and the majority of the world's books have been published since 1923...
It might be true that the humanities departments cost more to run than the science departments, but science departments usually also get some funding from the federal government and private business via grants and research funding, which the humanities do not, at least to the same extent. In any event, colleges are not (usually) businesses, so they are not and should not be concerned with turning a profit.
Their aren't many other genres based around the idea of the writer (uncharitably speaking) making shit up about the future...it's not surprising that SF would do relatively well in total number of correct 'predictions'.