That isn't as clear a picture as the image you found would indicate. Research found by that search show the hot spot tracks for the Yellowstone WY and Newberry OR calderas appear to trace back to a common unexplained origin around the Owhyee Plateau on the OR/NV border.
Also note that even the meanest volcano can't produce enough pressure to cause shatter cones in rocks. If the pros confirm them, it would mean the only possible causes are an impact or a nuke.
An example of a confirmed impact crater which is elliptical is the Sudbury Crater in Ontario, Canada. There are plenty of others. It would just mean that the impactor arrived at a steeper angle than those at circular craters.
"Stalking the Wily Shatter Cone: A Critical Guide for Impact Crater Hunters", Bevan M. French (Smithsonian Institution), Impact Field Studies Group newsletter, Winter 2005, online at http://web.eps.utk.edu/ifsg_files/newsletter/Winte r_2005.pdf
You have to be careful not to assume that any conical rock is a shatter cone. It's something that the shock wave places in the rock at large and small scales. It's like a fractal in that the pattern exists within the pattern at any scales you can observe.
This definitely increases the threat from eminent domain. But it still isn't something a local government can take too lightly. Residents who are facing losing their homes now have to consider a recall campaign against the local elected officials who favor such an action. I know that's what I'd do if I was in their situation.
There are other approaches to this problem...
Enact state laws - by ballot measure if your state allows it, or by legislation
You can also put a measure on the ballot to amend a local government's charter (or whatever they call it in your state) to restrict them from doing this.
The thought of that possibility in my area occurred to me 5 years ago when
the proposal came up to extend the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) line to San Jose. Part of the line would be built 500 feet from my house. I've been to many of the public meetings about it (including one yesterday) to keep an eye on them. I have a domain and web site sitting ready if we need to mobilize the neighborhood for a defense.
But they seem to be well-behaved in this case. They aren't proposing removing any housing. The once-proposed Hostetter Station would have been a block from my house and a threat to the neighborhood. I let them know about that. It was dropped from the plan because there's nowhere to build the station without demolishing lots of houses and 2Wire's corporate headquarters. Some businesses seem to be in bad spots and they intend to pay for them relocate. The biggest problem is for FedEx, who has a building near the San Jose Airport where they want to put the Santa Clara BART station and a people-mover to the airport. That should be interesting to watch...
So I don't know if I've had an effect. But I've been watching so they can't take me by surprise. If you have anything like that in your area, you should do that too. If you have to fight back, you can have a lot more effect earlier in the process.
See the announcement at TubeRat Aerospace. They have a video of mission control during the landing. And there's a new space prize for the first team who lands a probe at the same place and transmits back data from a crypto token on it.
Hat Creek Radio Observatory in NE California
on
New and Improved SETI
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· Score: 2, Informative
The new radio observatory that the article mentions in California is located at UC Berkeley's Hat Creek Radio Observatory. That's in far-northeastern California southeast of the town of Burney and north of Lassen Volcanic National Park.
Trivia: the Hat Creek Valley where the observatory is located was already known to many Northern Californians for being inundated by muflows from the May 20, 1915 eruption of nearby Mount Lassen. Anyone who has climbed Lassen has looked down from the peak on the path of the Hat Creek and Lost Creek mudflows.
I ran it backwards in 3-month intervals looking for times that 2004 MN4 has last been near Earth. By this data, there was a very near pass by Earth around April 16-19, 1967.
So I looked through a catalog of lunar launches. The NASA lunar probe Surveyor 3 was launched April 17, 1967.
This alone is not sufficient to prove that 2004 MN4 is a booster from Surveyor 3. (Logic still dictates that the scenario of 2004 MN4 being a threatening asteroid is still a possibility on the table.) But with a coincidence as shown in these numbers, Surveyor 3 must be considered in any investigation into 2004 MN4.
One thing seems odd about this to me... If a 420m-wide asteroid is in an orbit that crosses Earth's orbit twice a year, ranging from near Venus' orbit at perigee to just past Earth's at apogee, why wasn't 2004 MN4 noticed by astronomers at least 20-30 years ago?
Does anyone remember the concern in Sept 2002 when an object dubbed "J002E3" was initially believed to be an Earth-crossing asteroid or previously-unknown moon was discovered? [ref: Slashdot, Planetary Society, CNN] It turned out to be the Apollo 12 3rd stage rocket body. The mistake was made because an object as bright as it was, if as reflective as a rock, would have been huge. But it wasn't a dark rock - it was a shiny metal cylinder. It had been re-captured into Earth orbit after decades in solar orbit.
Probably every lunar probe and manned mission has sent a rocket booster into solar orbit as space junk. While probabilities of a 2004 MN4 collision in the future are computed, astronomers with the proper data should also try to project it back to see where it was during the Apollo era. Check if it may have come from Earth.
Actually, I'm pretty sure astronomers are already projecting 2004 MN4's orbit back in time to see if there were any other observations of the object before. So this is something else for them to check.
Being from California, this doesn't come as much of a surprise. It's stating the obvious to say people prefer environments that they're comfortable in. That would explain why people who claim to be terrified-of-earthquakes-and-prefer-tornadoes keep moving here.
BTW, the article does not address what the climate is outdoors. So forget about using this as a justification for your boss to let you telecommute from Florida, as the story-poster suggested.
The article just looks at effects of indoor temperatures on workers who do brainless keyboarding for an insurance company in Orlando. It would be interesting and undoubtedly different results to find what environments people prefer for coding and other jobs that require thinking. For example, some coders perfer lower light settings. And I'd be inclined to believe each individual's own preference on such things is most likely to be what works best for themselves.
Fedora users can simply install it from an RPM but that won't be recorded on Firefox's download counter.
I made my own RPM based on Mr Chung's directions for an earlier version of Firefox, before he posted his 1.0PR RPM on the FedoraNews site. So my one download counted for multiple machines. But now your download wouldn't be counted if you just install his RPM.
It isn't a really significant issue. But since people were questioning multiple downloads, the real issue there is whether uncounted downloads offset multiple downloads. There's no sure way to know. But the two do in effect cancel each other out.
I'd say it isn't anything to worry about. The download counter is probably a very good indicator of Firefox's popularity.
Let's clear up a few things. Yes, the Internet was in use in 1989. We had been calling it "Internet" since 1986. Before that, it was a US government experiment called ARPANet, which was not open to civilians except for government sponsored research. But after 1986-7, the experiment was over, and the public Internet was begun. Years of experimentation was still needed before the public would begin to embrace the technology. At the time, we couldn't imagine the general public would ever understand the concept of a computer network. Though we sometimes talked about projections of Moore's Law growth of the Net, which indicated it had to happen eventually. We wondered if that would be the end of Moore's Law, or if the public could actually use the Internet.
Back then, if you used the Internet, it was all a text-based interface. You'd log in to other machines by telnet. File transfers were by FTP. IRC was established in 1988 but not well known until the 1990's. (I ported IRC to HP/UX, sent the patches to the author, and didn't touch it again for over a decade because it looked addictive.) HTTP (the protocol of the web) wasn't invented until 1990.
I was a Computer Science student at California State University, Chico at the time. I think it was a great time to be studying Computer Science and networking.
By 1989, the Internet was already an international network spanning the US and all its Cold War allies (western Europe, Japan, Australia, etc.), with hundreds of thousands of users. The vast majority of users at the time were at large corporations, educational institutions and government/military sites. Direct access from residences was not yet common, though there were already some at the time. A lot of e-mail at the time was still transported in batch mode via UUCP over 1200-2400 baud phone modems, using the Internet only as a backbone along a multi-hop e-mail forwarding path.
The Internet has always had some decentralization by design - it was designed by the US military to be decentralized so that there was no center of the network for an enemy to attack. Even after it went into civilian use, that was enough for it to "stay up" through the 1989 quake even though some sites went down.
In 1989, San Francisco wasn't the center of the Internet or the quake - San Jose/Silicon Valley was. The World Series at Candlestick Park, the Bay Bridge collapse and the I-880 Cypress Freeway collapse that most of you saw on TV were all 80-100 miles from the epicenter, which was in the mountains spanning a 35-mile segment of the San Andreas fault between San Jose, Santa Cruz and Watsonville.
However, many phone switches in the region crashed when SF's phone switches went off-line. Most of the phone outages were just due to too many people picking up their phones to make phone calls at the same time after the quake, which happens after every quake.
Even so, many direct-connected Internet sites took as long as a few days to get back online. So as far as disasters go, it was comparable to Florida's hurricanes.
Anyway, so that's a bit of the history. It was a well-documented quake so there's a lot of history to look up if you want to. Some of our younger readers were too young to be aware of it at the time, or not even born yet. The 15th anniversary of the quake will be next month on October 17. Those of us who were in or near the area still remember where we were at 5:04PM, or shortly thereafter when we first heard about it. I was just far enough away in Chico that I didn't feel it. (My parents lived in San Jose at the time and I had been here for both of the 5.1/5.8 pre-shocks, so I was very interested.) But others in Chico either felt it (in tall buildings), saw chandeliers sway or saw swimming pools start sloshing. Many in the US learned about it quickly because of the World Series (baseball) - it was San Francisco vs Oakland and the game was just about to begin. Live news coverage had just begun and all the satellite uplinks were already reserved and live when the quake hit so the media couldn't have been more prepared to cover a major quake. So you'll find a lot of info about it out there.
not any more (was: also subject to flooding)
on
Where's Alviso?
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· Score: 1
They've finished the levees. That was one of the "promises" that the City of San Jose made to Alviso in exchange for annexing it in the 1970's. The promise remained broken for two decades until Silicon Valley construction made its way far enough into North San Jose to the edge of Alviso.
Now with the flood control projects completed, there is more construction occurring in Alviso. Lots of new condos. And they just finished a new power plant there.
San Jose also bought out the Cargill salt evaporator ponds adjacent to Alviso, jumping in on part of the state deal buying up most of those ponds in San Francisco Bay. Perhaps San Jose is making long-term plans to revive the Alviso Marina? Just a hunch. But for now the levees around the salt ponds make great bicycle paths that take you to the southern tip of San Francisco Bay.
I posted some links and info at
http://lightning.thunder.net/
after getting pestered by enough kids trying to do research for school work who kept writing to the webmaster address for this domain.
Just a rule of thumb - any object which is launched at less than 17,000 mph will not achieve orbit, and will fall back to the ground. But even on a suborbital flight, the faster it goes, the farther away it can land.
The reason for this is because an orbit is where your rate of escape from the Earth equals your rate of fall. So anything which is in orbit effectively falls in an endless circle around the world.
This is true of any object in space - larger objects have stronger gravity which increases the rate of fall, requiring faster speeds to orbit them. i.e the Earth takes a year to orbit the Sun, by definition, but covers enormous distance in that time. But orbits can be slower around smaller objects like Mars or the Moon.
So even in orbit you haven't escaped gravity. You'd have to go about 25,000 mph to escape the Earth's gravity, which would just put you in orbit around the Sun. So gravity is always a factor.
Anyway, back to the subject of the CSXT launch...
The press release said that CSXT's rocket will go 4000 mph, better than any previous amateur launch. So since that's less than 17,000 mph, it's a suborbital launch and it will fall back to the ground. It'll land less than 30 miles away from the launch site.
I'll be part of the search team who goes to retrieve it.
Amateur would be more precisely described as not getting paid for your time. BTW, unpaid doesn't mean unprofessional.
But you've got the right point that this launch is especially significant in that there was no government funding for development or operations. So if it succeeds (as we all hope it will) then it'll be the first suborbital space launch without funding from any government in the history of the world.
I talked with some of CSXT's Avionics Team about what would happen when this went up on Slashdot. And here it is. We figured it's inevitable that some people will try to show up even though it's short notice and a really inhospitable location.
Bear in mind that the launch site is far away from populated areas on purpose. Over there in the deep desert, that presents a survival issue for anyone who comes unprepared. There is no city infrastructure that most people are used to - it's a wilderness. If you wander off and get lost and stuck, you may survive for days but not be discovered for weeks. That's why you should take this seriously.
Cell phones do not work out there. It's well over an hour's drive from the nearest cell site. Amateur Radio and satellite phones are the only reliable communications out there. If you don't have those, don't wander away from the paved roads and the launch site.
So if I haven't scared you away yet, here's some info that hopefully will help you survive out there.
Remember that in the desert, bring your own drinking water - and lots of it.
I have a web page about the Black Rock Desert. I have a page with a minimal camping checklist. Even if you're planning to stay in a motel, bring enough camping gear to survive overnight and wait for a rescue if you get stuck. (Overnight temperatures are usually in the 20's and 30's this time of year.) But don't go wandering off where no one knows to look for you.
And lastly, see our page about "How to avoid needing a rescue at Black Rock", which we wrote after participating in many rescues of stranded people out there.
No one is ever left aboard without a lifeboat
on
ISS May Have A Leak
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· Score: 5, Informative
You could say that this procedure is the Titanic's contribution to space travel. No one is ever left aboard without a lifeboat, not even for a few minutes.
They plan around the lifeboat capacity. Even when they used to move the Soyuz between docking ports on Mir (i.e. to free up the only port that a shuttle orbiter could use) everyone had to go aboard the Soyuz for the maneuver, just in case they couldn't re-dock. If they couldn't, they'd abandon the station until another crew could be launched to re-man it.
Of course, they've always able to re-dock so far. There hasn't yet been an unscheduled abandonment of a space station.
The Soyuz-TMA spacecraft serving as the current lifeboat is the one that Foale and Kaleri were launched in. But a Soyuz has a finite shelf-life. Occasionally Russia launches a short-duration crew to bring up a new Soyuz (with fresh batteries and other supplies) and take back the old one. That's just part of sustaining the long-duration mission and its crew.
ISS has more docking ports so they don't have to juggle them like they did on Mir. (And there are no scheduled shuttle orbiter arrivals before late this year anyway.) But if they had to move the Soyuz for any reason, it would still be the same thing - all aboard and leave no one behind.
This is a procedure NASA learned from the Russians, among many things they learned from each other. Remember, when they started working together on the Shuttle-Mir dockings in the mid- to late 90's, NASA had the experience with big shuttle orbiters, but no long-duration platforms. Russia had the experience with space stations, but wasn't able to bring as much cargo up, and almost nothing (in comparison) back down. Each had what the other needed so that worked pretty well, besides all the symbolism it made for the end of the Cold War.
So, what are they going to do now? My guess is the first thing will be to close all the hatches to try to isolate and identify the module (or docking port between modules) with the leak. They have a finite supply of gas with which to repressurize the station - so this can't go forever without becoming a danger of shutting off a module. In a worst case scenario (which can't be ruled out yet but also isn't likely yet either), they'd have to abandon the station and take the Soyuz on re-entry back to Earth. So they have to look for it and try to fix it ASAP.
At any given time, if Foale is forced to make a life-and-death decision as commander, even he could initiate abandonment of the station. He was aboard Mir when the Progress collision occurred in June 1997. They had to close the hatch to the Spektr module (where all of Foale's on-orbit personal belongings were), losing that module and the power from its solar panels. He's seen worse than this. But I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't sleep well tonight.
Linus owns the trademark on Linux. That's a result of the 1996-1997 trademark dispute when a scammer fraudulently registered the trademark and lost against a community backlash when he tried threatening companies that used Linux. (See the
Linux history
page at linuxpicnic.org for more info.)
Sound familiar?
Ever since the trademark was assigned to Linus in the aftermath of that event, he has not withheld use of the trademarked name Linux from anyone referring to the Open Source OS. However, it is within his rights to do so.
Q: How do you get a small fortune from SCO?
A: Sink a large fortune into it.
It really looks like BayStar has a "buy high, sell low" strategy. They've just sunk into SCO an amount equal to 1/5 of SCO's hyper-inflated market capitalization. And this is in the same week that market analysts identified SCOX stock as having potential downside risks of the stock going to zero if they don't win in court. (We knew that, but it's important to note that analysts are catching on too.) The market is easily capable of wiping out large portions of their investment on the first report of bad news from any of the courtrooms SCO will be entering.
To all of us who can see how inevitable SCO's failure in court is, events like this will make it interesting to watch when SCO collapses like a Ponzi scheme.
If you'll be at the Linux Picnic, please RSVP so that we can estimate how much food to bring.
As the posting says, there is no fee to attend. The costs of this year's picnic have been picked up by Oracle.
And a bit of trivia: the Sunnyvale Baylands Park where the picnic is held is also one of the sites where filming took place for Revolution OS. For anyone who's interested, we can show you the boardwalk area where the interviews with Michael Tiemann of Cygnus (now CTO of RedHat) took place.
Slashdot Mirror
That isn't as clear a picture as the image you found would indicate. Research found by that search show the hot spot tracks for the Yellowstone WY and Newberry OR calderas appear to trace back to a common unexplained origin around the Owhyee Plateau on the OR/NV border.
Also note that even the meanest volcano can't produce enough pressure to cause shatter cones in rocks. If the pros confirm them, it would mean the only possible causes are an impact or a nuke.
An example of a confirmed impact crater which is elliptical is the Sudbury Crater in Ontario, Canada. There are plenty of others. It would just mean that the impactor arrived at a steeper angle than those at circular craters.
- "Traces of Catastrophe: A Handbook of Shock-Metamorphic Effects in Terrestrial Meteorite Impact Structures", Bevan M. French (Smithsonian Institution), http://www.lpi.usra.edu/publications/books/CB-954
/ CB-954.intro.html
- "Stalking the Wily Shatter Cone: A Critical Guide for Impact Crater Hunters", Bevan M. French (Smithsonian Institution), Impact Field Studies Group newsletter, Winter 2005, online at http://web.eps.utk.edu/ifsg_files/newsletter/Wint
e r_2005.pdf
- "Shatter cones: Branched, rapid fractures formed by shock impact", Amir Sagy, Jay Fineberg, Zeev Reches, JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH, VOL.
109 2004, online at http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2004/2004JB00301
6 .shtml (for a fee), http://www.whoi.edu/science/GG/geodynamics/2005/im ages2005/sagy04_JGR.pdf, http://earthquakes.ou.edu/reches/Publications/Sagy _JGR.pdf, and others
You have to be careful not to assume that any conical rock is a shatter cone. It's something that the shock wave places in the rock at large and small scales. It's like a fractal in that the pattern exists within the pattern at any scales you can observe.There are other approaches to this problem...
- Enact state laws - by ballot measure if your state allows it, or by legislation
- You can also put a measure on the ballot to amend a local government's charter (or whatever they call it in your state) to restrict them from doing this.
The thought of that possibility in my area occurred to me 5 years ago when the proposal came up to extend the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) line to San Jose. Part of the line would be built 500 feet from my house. I've been to many of the public meetings about it (including one yesterday) to keep an eye on them. I have a domain and web site sitting ready if we need to mobilize the neighborhood for a defense.But they seem to be well-behaved in this case. They aren't proposing removing any housing. The once-proposed Hostetter Station would have been a block from my house and a threat to the neighborhood. I let them know about that. It was dropped from the plan because there's nowhere to build the station without demolishing lots of houses and 2Wire's corporate headquarters. Some businesses seem to be in bad spots and they intend to pay for them relocate. The biggest problem is for FedEx, who has a building near the San Jose Airport where they want to put the Santa Clara BART station and a people-mover to the airport. That should be interesting to watch...
So I don't know if I've had an effect. But I've been watching so they can't take me by surprise. If you have anything like that in your area, you should do that too. If you have to fight back, you can have a lot more effect earlier in the process.
See the announcement at TubeRat Aerospace. They have a video of mission control during the landing. And there's a new space prize for the first team who lands a probe at the same place and transmits back data from a crypto token on it.
Some links about the site...
- Topographic Mapping at the SETI Radio Telescope Observatory (UC Berkeley)
- Topographic map of site (Topozone.com)
- "The big idea in SETI: Think small" (MSNBC, Feb 8, 2004)
Trivia: the Hat Creek Valley where the observatory is located was already known to many Northern Californians for being inundated by muflows from the May 20, 1915 eruption of nearby Mount Lassen. Anyone who has climbed Lassen has looked down from the peak on the path of the Hat Creek and Lost Creek mudflows.I posted this on my personal web site at http://www.kluft.com/~ikluft/opinions/2004mn4-surv eyor3.html . If there are any updates, I'll put them there.
I found an online tool to compute estimated positions of the 2004 MN4 asteroid according to the known estimates of its orbit. See http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/db?name=2004+MN4 .
I ran it backwards in 3-month intervals looking for times that 2004 MN4 has last been near Earth. By this data, there was a very near pass by Earth around April 16-19, 1967.
So I looked through a catalog of lunar launches. The NASA lunar probe Surveyor 3 was launched April 17, 1967.
This alone is not sufficient to prove that 2004 MN4 is a booster from Surveyor 3. (Logic still dictates that the scenario of 2004 MN4 being a threatening asteroid is still a possibility on the table.) But with a coincidence as shown in these numbers, Surveyor 3 must be considered in any investigation into 2004 MN4.
Does anyone remember the concern in Sept 2002 when an object dubbed "J002E3" was initially believed to be an Earth-crossing asteroid or previously-unknown moon was discovered? [ref: Slashdot, Planetary Society, CNN] It turned out to be the Apollo 12 3rd stage rocket body. The mistake was made because an object as bright as it was, if as reflective as a rock, would have been huge. But it wasn't a dark rock - it was a shiny metal cylinder. It had been re-captured into Earth orbit after decades in solar orbit.
Probably every lunar probe and manned mission has sent a rocket booster into solar orbit as space junk. While probabilities of a 2004 MN4 collision in the future are computed, astronomers with the proper data should also try to project it back to see where it was during the Apollo era. Check if it may have come from Earth.
Actually, I'm pretty sure astronomers are already projecting 2004 MN4's orbit back in time to see if there were any other observations of the object before. So this is something else for them to check.
Being from California, this doesn't come as much of a surprise. It's stating the obvious to say people prefer environments that they're comfortable in. That would explain why people who claim to be terrified-of-earthquakes-and-prefer-tornadoes keep moving here.
BTW, the article does not address what the climate is outdoors. So forget about using this as a justification for your boss to let you telecommute from Florida, as the story-poster suggested.
The article just looks at effects of indoor temperatures on workers who do brainless keyboarding for an insurance company in Orlando. It would be interesting and undoubtedly different results to find what environments people prefer for coding and other jobs that require thinking. For example, some coders perfer lower light settings. And I'd be inclined to believe each individual's own preference on such things is most likely to be what works best for themselves.
I made my own RPM based on Mr Chung's directions for an earlier version of Firefox, before he posted his 1.0PR RPM on the FedoraNews site. So my one download counted for multiple machines. But now your download wouldn't be counted if you just install his RPM.
It isn't a really significant issue. But since people were questioning multiple downloads, the real issue there is whether uncounted downloads offset multiple downloads. There's no sure way to know. But the two do in effect cancel each other out.
I'd say it isn't anything to worry about. The download counter is probably a very good indicator of Firefox's popularity.
Back then, if you used the Internet, it was all a text-based interface. You'd log in to other machines by telnet. File transfers were by FTP. IRC was established in 1988 but not well known until the 1990's. (I ported IRC to HP/UX, sent the patches to the author, and didn't touch it again for over a decade because it looked addictive.) HTTP (the protocol of the web) wasn't invented until 1990.
I was a Computer Science student at California State University, Chico at the time. I think it was a great time to be studying Computer Science and networking.
By 1989, the Internet was already an international network spanning the US and all its Cold War allies (western Europe, Japan, Australia, etc.), with hundreds of thousands of users. The vast majority of users at the time were at large corporations, educational institutions and government/military sites. Direct access from residences was not yet common, though there were already some at the time. A lot of e-mail at the time was still transported in batch mode via UUCP over 1200-2400 baud phone modems, using the Internet only as a backbone along a multi-hop e-mail forwarding path.
The Internet has always had some decentralization by design - it was designed by the US military to be decentralized so that there was no center of the network for an enemy to attack. Even after it went into civilian use, that was enough for it to "stay up" through the 1989 quake even though some sites went down.
In 1989, San Francisco wasn't the center of the Internet or the quake - San Jose/Silicon Valley was. The World Series at Candlestick Park, the Bay Bridge collapse and the I-880 Cypress Freeway collapse that most of you saw on TV were all 80-100 miles from the epicenter, which was in the mountains spanning a 35-mile segment of the San Andreas fault between San Jose, Santa Cruz and Watsonville.
However, many phone switches in the region crashed when SF's phone switches went off-line. Most of the phone outages were just due to too many people picking up their phones to make phone calls at the same time after the quake, which happens after every quake.
Even so, many direct-connected Internet sites took as long as a few days to get back online. So as far as disasters go, it was comparable to Florida's hurricanes.
Anyway, so that's a bit of the history. It was a well-documented quake so there's a lot of history to look up if you want to. Some of our younger readers were too young to be aware of it at the time, or not even born yet. The 15th anniversary of the quake will be next month on October 17. Those of us who were in or near the area still remember where we were at 5:04PM, or shortly thereafter when we first heard about it. I was just far enough away in Chico that I didn't feel it. (My parents lived in San Jose at the time and I had been here for both of the 5.1/5.8 pre-shocks, so I was very interested.) But others in Chico either felt it (in tall buildings), saw chandeliers sway or saw swimming pools start sloshing. Many in the US learned about it quickly because of the World Series (baseball) - it was San Francisco vs Oakland and the game was just about to begin. Live news coverage had just begun and all the satellite uplinks were already reserved and live when the quake hit so the media couldn't have been more prepared to cover a major quake. So you'll find a lot of info about it out there.
Now with the flood control projects completed, there is more construction occurring in Alviso. Lots of new condos. And they just finished a new power plant there.
San Jose also bought out the Cargill salt evaporator ponds adjacent to Alviso, jumping in on part of the state deal buying up most of those ponds in San Francisco Bay. Perhaps San Jose is making long-term plans to revive the Alviso Marina? Just a hunch. But for now the levees around the salt ponds make great bicycle paths that take you to the southern tip of San Francisco Bay.
Quick summary:
I posted some links and info at http://lightning.thunder.net/ after getting pestered by enough kids trying to do research for school work who kept writing to the webmaster address for this domain.
The reason for this is because an orbit is where your rate of escape from the Earth equals your rate of fall. So anything which is in orbit effectively falls in an endless circle around the world.
This is true of any object in space - larger objects have stronger gravity which increases the rate of fall, requiring faster speeds to orbit them. i.e the Earth takes a year to orbit the Sun, by definition, but covers enormous distance in that time. But orbits can be slower around smaller objects like Mars or the Moon.
So even in orbit you haven't escaped gravity. You'd have to go about 25,000 mph to escape the Earth's gravity, which would just put you in orbit around the Sun. So gravity is always a factor.
Anyway, back to the subject of the CSXT launch... The press release said that CSXT's rocket will go 4000 mph, better than any previous amateur launch. So since that's less than 17,000 mph, it's a suborbital launch and it will fall back to the ground. It'll land less than 30 miles away from the launch site.
I'll be part of the search team who goes to retrieve it.
But you've got the right point that this launch is especially significant in that there was no government funding for development or operations. So if it succeeds (as we all hope it will) then it'll be the first suborbital space launch without funding from any government in the history of the world.
Let's go make history!
Bear in mind that the launch site is far away from populated areas on purpose. Over there in the deep desert, that presents a survival issue for anyone who comes unprepared. There is no city infrastructure that most people are used to - it's a wilderness. If you wander off and get lost and stuck, you may survive for days but not be discovered for weeks. That's why you should take this seriously.
Cell phones do not work out there. It's well over an hour's drive from the nearest cell site. Amateur Radio and satellite phones are the only reliable communications out there. If you don't have those, don't wander away from the paved roads and the launch site.
So if I haven't scared you away yet, here's some info that hopefully will help you survive out there. Remember that in the desert, bring your own drinking water - and lots of it. I have a web page about the Black Rock Desert. I have a page with a minimal camping checklist. Even if you're planning to stay in a motel, bring enough camping gear to survive overnight and wait for a rescue if you get stuck. (Overnight temperatures are usually in the 20's and 30's this time of year.) But don't go wandering off where no one knows to look for you. And lastly, see our page about "How to avoid needing a rescue at Black Rock", which we wrote after participating in many rescues of stranded people out there.
I'm going to be out there with the Stratofox Aerospace Tracking & Recovery Team. We consider it an enormous privilege that CSXT has invited us to assist at their launch.
They plan around the lifeboat capacity. Even when they used to move the Soyuz between docking ports on Mir (i.e. to free up the only port that a shuttle orbiter could use) everyone had to go aboard the Soyuz for the maneuver, just in case they couldn't re-dock. If they couldn't, they'd abandon the station until another crew could be launched to re-man it.
Of course, they've always able to re-dock so far. There hasn't yet been an unscheduled abandonment of a space station.
The Soyuz-TMA spacecraft serving as the current lifeboat is the one that Foale and Kaleri were launched in. But a Soyuz has a finite shelf-life. Occasionally Russia launches a short-duration crew to bring up a new Soyuz (with fresh batteries and other supplies) and take back the old one. That's just part of sustaining the long-duration mission and its crew.
ISS has more docking ports so they don't have to juggle them like they did on Mir. (And there are no scheduled shuttle orbiter arrivals before late this year anyway.) But if they had to move the Soyuz for any reason, it would still be the same thing - all aboard and leave no one behind.
This is a procedure NASA learned from the Russians, among many things they learned from each other. Remember, when they started working together on the Shuttle-Mir dockings in the mid- to late 90's, NASA had the experience with big shuttle orbiters, but no long-duration platforms. Russia had the experience with space stations, but wasn't able to bring as much cargo up, and almost nothing (in comparison) back down. Each had what the other needed so that worked pretty well, besides all the symbolism it made for the end of the Cold War.
So, what are they going to do now? My guess is the first thing will be to close all the hatches to try to isolate and identify the module (or docking port between modules) with the leak. They have a finite supply of gas with which to repressurize the station - so this can't go forever without becoming a danger of shutting off a module. In a worst case scenario (which can't be ruled out yet but also isn't likely yet either), they'd have to abandon the station and take the Soyuz on re-entry back to Earth. So they have to look for it and try to fix it ASAP.
At any given time, if Foale is forced to make a life-and-death decision as commander, even he could initiate abandonment of the station. He was aboard Mir when the Progress collision occurred in June 1997. They had to close the hatch to the Spektr module (where all of Foale's on-orbit personal belongings were), losing that module and the power from its solar panels. He's seen worse than this. But I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't sleep well tonight.
Sound familiar?
Ever since the trademark was assigned to Linus in the aftermath of that event, he has not withheld use of the trademarked name Linux from anyone referring to the Open Source OS. However, it is within his rights to do so.
Even SCO's legal disclaimers page acknowledges Linus as the owner the Linux trademark.
I think legal harassment of Open Source volunteers is a valid criteria to revoke permissions to use the Linux trademark.
To all of us who can see how inevitable SCO's failure in court is, events like this will make it interesting to watch when SCO collapses like a Ponzi scheme.
However, get used to it. In English any word can be verbed. :-)
As the posting says, there is no fee to attend. The costs of this year's picnic have been picked up by Oracle.
And a bit of trivia: the Sunnyvale Baylands Park where the picnic is held is also one of the sites where filming took place for Revolution OS. For anyone who's interested, we can show you the boardwalk area where the interviews with Michael Tiemann of Cygnus (now CTO of RedHat) took place.
Please RSVP if you can attend so we can estimate the amount of food needed.
I heard that NBC took some of the video for national distribution. But they have no way to know which local affiliates will choose to air it.