Several years after that, the fourth stage contest could be for someone to actually send a man on a trajectory to hit Mars. Fifth stage could be an economical way to retrieve small bits of spacecraft and human body parts from the surface of Mars.
I'm not using them to justify the "entire" program. I picked one accomplishment out of many to highlight.
With the exception of studying the effect of microgravity on humans themselves, I can't think of a single science program using the Shuttle that couldn't have been done better, cheaper, and more reliably with unmanned rockets. That includes HST, which was only put in low-earth orbit to give the Shuttle something to do. (See, for example, this paper). The Air Force realized this long ago with respect to military payloads, and quit using the Shuttle early on, and NASA has abandoned the idea of a serviceable telescope in low-earth orbit when launching the Webb, which will be at L2.
The shuttle as originally envisaged in the 70's would have been fully reusable and capable of reaching geostationary orbit. That would have been worth the time and effort. What we have was a waste of money, doing a job that is done better (and far cheaper) by Soyuz. The ISS is even worse. The effects of microgravity on people were studied to death by the Russians on MIR. The ISS hasn't really done much of any new science at all, which is tragic when you consider all of the actual cutting-edge space science that could have been done with the ISS budget.
Do you honestly believe that the whole shuttle and ISS program is nothing more than a PR campaign?
Pretty much. The science return for the expense has been incredibly low. We have been "exploring" low-earth orbit for forty years now. There's not much more to find.
That's extremely unfair. The shuttle hasn't lived up to it's original billing (cheap, reusable) or flown as many flights as was envisioned but to claim it's nothing more than a giant PR program is rather dismissive of everything that it has accomplished. No shuttle == no hubble repair mission == no hubble for the last 15 years.
Shuttle operations in the 1990's cost about $3 billion per year. The cost at launch of the HST was about $1.5 billion. Shuttle HST repair missions were spectacular PR, but they were ridiculously cost-ineffective if you are using them to justify the existence of the entire program. For the price of shuttle operations, we could (very conservatively speaking) have launched 40 HSTs between 1990 and 2010.
Speaking as a chemist, could you explain what exactly this means? Up until this very moment I have been under the misguided notion that the nucleus of an atom was orbited by electrons within groups called "shells", and these worked very similarly to satellites around a planet.
So, could you in any way explain how we get from "think of it as a planet with many moons" to this or more importantly, what gives orbitals this shape?
It's because the Schrodinger equation is a Laplacian, and the hydrogen atom is a spherically symmetric problem. The natural basis for the Laplacian in spherical coordinates is spherical harmonics. The shape you are seeing is the characteristic shape of different spherical harmonics, corresponding to the angular momentum of the electron.
The problem is the submitter and editor thought folks at slashdot would know what "inert" means. Obviously, you and a few others didn't..."Inert" has absolutely nothing whatever to do with radioactivity, even though radioactive materials may or may not be inert.
Chemically inert would have been perfectly clear. The word "inert" has a broader meaning in common usage than this narrow technical definition, being a synonym for inactive.
But you do get extra points for being snotty and pedantic.
Jeez, what a terrible article, and an equally terrible summary. Both make it sound like the bacteria make the metals nonradioactive, which of course is absurd. (Nuclear bacteria?) The bacteria just make the metals insoluble. They're still radioactive.
Shit, every elite athelete has a "rare medical or genetic advantage". Are we going to start disqualifying people because they are unusually talented? That'll sure make sports fun.
[blockquote]
Actually, a bicycle is not gyroscopically balanced. The angular momentum in the bicycle wheel is tiny compared to the overall mass and moment of inertia of bicycle and the rider. It's actually the rider's own sense of balance (whether the hands are on the handle or not) that keeps the bicycle standing, and which is why you have to learn to ride one.
[/blockquote]
Bicycles do have intrinsic stability: think about the fact that a bike moving fast enough will roll straight and upright with no rider! But you are right that gyroscopic stability is a small component. It's mostly trail that creates dynamic stability in a bike.
Forget the E bomb... How about we get a couple of guys with a pickup and a couple of hundred bucks of steel pipe from Home Depot... they drive around flinging the pipes into transformer substations....
The SRBs are damn awesome, actually. Reliable, reusable, it's no wonder they'd want to integrate them into the new designs. Why reinvent the rocket when you've got perfectly good, well documented, extensively tested model right there?
Except when they leak and cause an explosion killing everybody aboard. Or when they have such serious vibration problems that crew cabins have to be mounted on elaborate and expensive isolation systems.
Solid boosters might be damn awesome for unmanned launches, but I think there are a lot of people who seriously question NASA's choice to use them to launch the Orion crew capsule. It seems pretty clear that they're doing it because it's cheap, not because it's the technically best solution. That's exactly the attitude that made a lemon out of the Shuttle.
As a consumer, I'm not really sure what the advantage to me is having to switch from getting gasoline or water in gallons and quarts, rather than in liters. Regardless of the unit of measure, the more important number, the $, is going to be the same.
I prefer imperial units for lots of everyday tasks like cooking. Imperial units are much closer to a binary-based system, which is very convenient for human beings. Two cups in a pint. Two pints in a quart. An ounce of water weighs about an ounce. A pint of water weighs about a pound. Human beings are very good at halving or doubling things by eyeball, but we're lousy at dividing into tenths.
But if you're building a fucking spaceship, use SI units for Christ's sake.
Maybe they should be re-thinking their plan to use 30-year-old technology on their flagship 21st Century project. Really: what does it say about the technical competence of NASA that they admit to being unable to use SI units, even though they would like to?
Bozeman, Montana is now requiring all applicants for city jobs to furnish Internet account information for 'background checking.'
Montana is crazy about background checks. For example, faculty job applicants at University of Montana must agree to a background check even to interview for a job (http://www.umt.edu/jobs/FAC/apfe.html).
Simple put: you are wrong.
The course agreement for most universities attributes the copyright from any works you create during your studies to the unversity. They own it.
I would love to see that tested in court with respect to a creative work generated entirely by a student as a part of their coursework, and given away for free. Typically those kind of clauses are only applied in cases where university- or grant-funded work is commercially licensed.
Even if the university could claim copyright (a dubious notion), such publishing by the student still does not fall within SJSU's definition of academic misconduct. So the student wasn't cheating, and you can't threaten his course grade over the issue.
Simply put: professors do not own their students' coursework. If a student writes a short story as an assignment for a creative writing class, can the professor prohibit the student from later publishing it? To call that academic misconduct would be absurd on the face of it. Now, what is different about computer code?
Kudos to SJSU for backing the student on this. Beeson is clearly out of line, and I hope that students will make a big stink if he tries to insert some idiotic no-publish clause in future assignments.
Fortran has tons of libraries specialized to whatever scientific field you are working in, and is unavoidable in high energy physics especially.
Hopefully not forever, since CERN standardized on C++ for the Large Hadron Collider in the 1990s, although they have enormous amounts of legacy FORTRAN code.
Personally, I think FORTRAN should be taken out and shot. Godawful unmaintainable code is the norm , and there is nothing you can do in FORTRAN that you can't do in a cleaner environment like C++. People only still use FORTRAN because they are used to it, and it will not go away until all the old fucks die.
String theory was originally conceived as a theory for QCD, and only later was it applied to quantum gravity. Here (http://physics.aps.org/articles/v1/10) is an article which explains the new results with a little historical context.
Slashdot Mirror
This is pretty much what Paul Davies and Lawrence Krauss have already been arguing for.
I wonder if they're volunteering to go first.
Word. WD-40 is a water displacer, and a pretty good solvent. You use it for removing lubricant.
Tri-Flow is godlike.
...they've come up with something that makes you look even dorkier than you would look riding a Segway.
With the exception of studying the effect of microgravity on humans themselves, I can't think of a single science program using the Shuttle that couldn't have been done better, cheaper, and more reliably with unmanned rockets. That includes HST, which was only put in low-earth orbit to give the Shuttle something to do. (See, for example, this paper). The Air Force realized this long ago with respect to military payloads, and quit using the Shuttle early on, and NASA has abandoned the idea of a serviceable telescope in low-earth orbit when launching the Webb, which will be at L2.
The shuttle as originally envisaged in the 70's would have been fully reusable and capable of reaching geostationary orbit. That would have been worth the time and effort. What we have was a waste of money, doing a job that is done better (and far cheaper) by Soyuz. The ISS is even worse. The effects of microgravity on people were studied to death by the Russians on MIR. The ISS hasn't really done much of any new science at all, which is tragic when you consider all of the actual cutting-edge space science that could have been done with the ISS budget.
Pretty much. The science return for the expense has been incredibly low. We have been "exploring" low-earth orbit for forty years now. There's not much more to find.
Shuttle operations in the 1990's cost about $3 billion per year. The cost at launch of the HST was about $1.5 billion. Shuttle HST repair missions were spectacular PR, but they were ridiculously cost-ineffective if you are using them to justify the existence of the entire program. For the price of shuttle operations, we could (very conservatively speaking) have launched 40 HSTs between 1990 and 2010.
Here you go. (The Planck data in this picture is simulated.)
Fucking excellent.
You're thinking of the Bohr model.
It's because the Schrodinger equation is a Laplacian, and the hydrogen atom is a spherically symmetric problem. The natural basis for the Laplacian in spherical coordinates is spherical harmonics. The shape you are seeing is the characteristic shape of different spherical harmonics, corresponding to the angular momentum of the electron.
Chemically inert would have been perfectly clear. The word "inert" has a broader meaning in common usage than this narrow technical definition, being a synonym for inactive.
But you do get extra points for being snotty and pedantic.
Jeez, what a terrible article, and an equally terrible summary. Both make it sound like the bacteria make the metals nonradioactive, which of course is absurd. (Nuclear bacteria?) The bacteria just make the metals insoluble. They're still radioactive.
Geeks should be equally worried about indium, of which China is the main producer. So much for those cheap LCDs...
Shit, every elite athelete has a "rare medical or genetic advantage". Are we going to start disqualifying people because they are unusually talented? That'll sure make sports fun.
Quite correct. My mistake.
Um, except for Venus, Uranus and Pluto anyway. If you count Pluto as a planet.
[blockquote] Actually, a bicycle is not gyroscopically balanced. The angular momentum in the bicycle wheel is tiny compared to the overall mass and moment of inertia of bicycle and the rider. It's actually the rider's own sense of balance (whether the hands are on the handle or not) that keeps the bicycle standing, and which is why you have to learn to ride one. [/blockquote] Bicycles do have intrinsic stability: think about the fact that a bike moving fast enough will roll straight and upright with no rider! But you are right that gyroscopic stability is a small component. It's mostly trail that creates dynamic stability in a bike.
Try some mylar balloons.
Windows on a submarine sound like a pretty bad idea to me...
Except when they leak and cause an explosion killing everybody aboard. Or when they have such serious vibration problems that crew cabins have to be mounted on elaborate and expensive isolation systems.
Solid boosters might be damn awesome for unmanned launches, but I think there are a lot of people who seriously question NASA's choice to use them to launch the Orion crew capsule. It seems pretty clear that they're doing it because it's cheap, not because it's the technically best solution. That's exactly the attitude that made a lemon out of the Shuttle.
I prefer imperial units for lots of everyday tasks like cooking. Imperial units are much closer to a binary-based system, which is very convenient for human beings. Two cups in a pint. Two pints in a quart. An ounce of water weighs about an ounce. A pint of water weighs about a pound. Human beings are very good at halving or doubling things by eyeball, but we're lousy at dividing into tenths.
But if you're building a fucking spaceship, use SI units for Christ's sake.
Maybe they should be re-thinking their plan to use 30-year-old technology on their flagship 21st Century project. Really: what does it say about the technical competence of NASA that they admit to being unable to use SI units, even though they would like to?
Montana is crazy about background checks. For example, faculty job applicants at University of Montana must agree to a background check even to interview for a job (http://www.umt.edu/jobs/FAC/apfe.html).
Only in Montana can one buy a handgun with no more than a driver's license (http://crime.about.com/od/gunlawsbystate/a/gunlaws_mt.htm), but must go through a full background check to give a talk at the university.
I would love to see that tested in court with respect to a creative work generated entirely by a student as a part of their coursework, and given away for free. Typically those kind of clauses are only applied in cases where university- or grant-funded work is commercially licensed.
Even if the university could claim copyright (a dubious notion), such publishing by the student still does not fall within SJSU's definition of academic misconduct. So the student wasn't cheating, and you can't threaten his course grade over the issue.
Simply put: professors do not own their students' coursework. If a student writes a short story as an assignment for a creative writing class, can the professor prohibit the student from later publishing it? To call that academic misconduct would be absurd on the face of it. Now, what is different about computer code?
Kudos to SJSU for backing the student on this. Beeson is clearly out of line, and I hope that students will make a big stink if he tries to insert some idiotic no-publish clause in future assignments.
Hopefully not forever, since CERN standardized on C++ for the Large Hadron Collider in the 1990s, although they have enormous amounts of legacy FORTRAN code.
Personally, I think FORTRAN should be taken out and shot. Godawful unmaintainable code is the norm , and there is nothing you can do in FORTRAN that you can't do in a cleaner environment like C++. People only still use FORTRAN because they are used to it, and it will not go away until all the old fucks die.
String theory was originally conceived as a theory for QCD, and only later was it applied to quantum gravity. Here (http://physics.aps.org/articles/v1/10) is an article which explains the new results with a little historical context.