This is absolutely true. I think most people don't quite realize how drastic the NASA reorganization is. The cuts to the projects mentioned above are already having a huge impact on the astrophysics community. Once Hubble, Chandra, and Spitzer (the three remaining Great Observatories) are dead, it will be a long time before any of the successors are launched under the current plan. in addition, with the cuts to the SMEX and Mid-Ex programs, the technology needed for those successors won't yet exist when the time comes.
So we're faced with this situation: a whole generation of scientists and engineers who cut their teeth on Hubble, Chandra, etc. will all move on to other things. Time passes. Congress finally decides to fund more space-based astronomy, but nobody knows how to make it happen any longer.
This is the exact same situation we are currently facing if we want to again send people to the Moon. We knew how to do it in the 60s/70s, but all the people who made it happen are long gone and we'll have to reinvent the wheel.
As far as gay marriage goes, Bush and Kerry have the same (stated) view. Both are opposed to gay marriage but favor some form of civil unions/legal protection for homosexual couples. (Well, Bush has flip-flopped on civil unions, but that was the last I read). Kerry suffered in this regard by being from Massachusetts, the home to the only legal gay marriages in the U.S. Also, Bush would bring up his opposition to gay marriage continually during the campaign, implying that his belief is different from Kerry's.
The abortion question is a big difference between their beliefs, but most practicing Catholics are a bit less concerned about abortion than, say, fundamentalist protestants. Otherwise, why would abortion be lagal in European countries where Catholics hold a strong majority?
By the way, Catholics are also supposed to be opposed to birth control, but nobody is talking about Bush's abstinence-only education programs as a major factor in the election. Every sperm is sacred.
When I was in high school (many years ago), we made a functional trombone out of PVC pipe with a funnel for the bell. The beauty of the trombone is that anyone can make a slide out of pipes (with an inner tube that just barely fits within the outer tube) but it's hard to make valves! The mouthpiece was the metal end of a garden hose. It sounded fantastic though ended up keyed in 'A'.
I also made the ubiquitous bass. Plywood body, 2x4 neck, weedwacker cord for 3 strings, but I had to use picture hanging wire for the E string. I couldn't get the weedwacker cord to tune that low without getting rattly. I used 2" eyebolts for the tuners. It sounded great, though you needed the strings on there for about a week before it would stay in tune for more than about 2 minutes.
For the cheap percussion, we made drums out of a set of tupperware mounted in a plywood stand. The cymbals were made of metal pie plates.
Since all of us were in the jazz band, we played a jazz improv for our chosen music piece. Won first place, though this was in Georgia, so make of that what you will.:-)
Sure I could add the "I've seen the BSOD on airport flight notice boards", but instead I thought I'd share my favorite linux crash story.
I was on an American Airlines flight from Boston to London a couple of years ago. The plane was an Airbus 330 and each seat (even in cattle class) was equipped with a personal entertainment system with dozens of films, TV channels, games, etc. Given that you could choose to watch any movie/tv channel you wanted and pause, ffw, and so on, I became suspicious that the thing seemed a lot like a TiVO. Sure enough, my entertainment system became unresponsive and, after a minute or two, rebooted itself. There, on the 5" LCD in the seatback in front of me, was our favorite Penguin! Unfortunately, it rebooted too quickly for me to catch any of the specs.:-(
Sadly, the Boston to London route now uses Boeing 777s and it's back to the film loops. So much for progress...
The color mapping for the Cas A image was chosen strictly to make it a pretty picture and, as the previous poster mentioned, following the historical convention of using heat colors for X-ray images.
One of the Chandra scientists (Norbert Schulz) has assembled a color image of Cas A where each color represents a different spetral region. It's a gorgeous image and the colors are actually significant, but it was unfortunately not ready in time for the press conference. I'm going to try to make a similar image next week if I have time.
Sadly, chandra.harvard.edu (the machine) is only an ultra1, but it appears to have survived the onslaught so far. The number of hits is outrageous compared to what it's used to, though.
For those of you that care, I just thought I'd let you know that all of the Chandra data analysis software is being developed on Sun/Solaris machines and ported to redhat and slackware. I've tested (and demo'd) the linux ports, and they're coming along nicely. It's definitely a step in the right direction to have this software available for linux boxes. All of this software is in the public domain, and covered with a license similar to the GPL, with the expected NASA spin on it.
It's been amazing to watch the transition in the past few years at AAS (American Astronomical Society) and other professional meetings - now everyone has laptops running linux and loaded with their favorite analysis software.
I was shocked to see so many Chandra-related folks posting on/. Obviously y'all don't work in calibration or data systems, huh?:)
BTW, if any of you folks can show me how to get IRAF to build properly on LinuxPPC, reply to this!
This topic has really gotten me thinking about how distributed computing can apply to astronomical data analysis. Unfortunately, as someone mentioned above, actual astronomical observations can require some massaging by hand, so distributed analysis is less than straight-forward. This is the case with WIRE, for instance.
However, numerical simulations could be pretty easy to distribute. My current simulations of starburst galaxies take about 10 hours to crunch on a quad processor (296Mhz x 4) ultra w/ half a gig of ram. I'd like to run, say, a million of these per galaxy I'm studying, but this is entirely unfeasable with the computing resources I have available to me.
I've already started talking with my advisor about distributed computing for our simulations. The seti folks really have the right idea here. I'm surprised nobody else in the astronomical community has taken advantage of this yet....
I know Derek (the scientist in question) pretty well. I'll pass the distributed suggestion along to him. However, the last poster was right - it's large ammounts of data and relatively simple computations. I'm sure he could think of some good distributed projects if others are interested, though.
This is actually something I'd never considerred. I've got very processor-intensive simulations of starburst galaxies which would make a great distributed project.....
I'm shocked! In a forum such as this, I only saw one mention of Pi, the indie film about a genius on the edge of insanity who studies number theory with the absolute belief that anything - including the stock market - can be predicted.
FWIW, I feel a bit more comfortable admitting that BtVS is my fav tv show after seeing such strong support on/.
Slashdot Mirror
Sadly, we won't be entirely rid of Tucker: even if he doesn't land the MSNBC job, he'll still have this.
So we're faced with this situation: a whole generation of scientists and engineers who cut their teeth on Hubble, Chandra, etc. will all move on to other things. Time passes. Congress finally decides to fund more space-based astronomy, but nobody knows how to make it happen any longer.
This is the exact same situation we are currently facing if we want to again send people to the Moon. We knew how to do it in the 60s/70s, but all the people who made it happen are long gone and we'll have to reinvent the wheel.
As far as gay marriage goes, Bush and Kerry have the same (stated) view. Both are opposed to gay marriage but favor some form of civil unions/legal protection for homosexual couples. (Well, Bush has flip-flopped on civil unions, but that was the last I read). Kerry suffered in this regard by being from Massachusetts, the home to the only legal gay marriages in the U.S. Also, Bush would bring up his opposition to gay marriage continually during the campaign, implying that his belief is different from Kerry's.
The abortion question is a big difference between their beliefs, but most practicing Catholics are a bit less concerned about abortion than, say, fundamentalist protestants. Otherwise, why would abortion be lagal in European countries where Catholics hold a strong majority?
By the way, Catholics are also supposed to be opposed to birth control, but nobody is talking about Bush's abstinence-only education programs as a major factor in the election. Every sperm is sacred.
When I was in high school (many years ago), we made a functional trombone out of PVC pipe with a funnel for the bell. The beauty of the trombone is that anyone can make a slide out of pipes (with an inner tube that just barely fits within the outer tube) but it's hard to make valves! The mouthpiece was the metal end of a garden hose. It sounded fantastic though ended up keyed in 'A'.
:-)
I also made the ubiquitous bass. Plywood body, 2x4 neck, weedwacker cord for 3 strings, but I had to use picture hanging wire for the E string. I couldn't get the weedwacker cord to tune that low without getting rattly. I used 2" eyebolts for the tuners. It sounded great, though you needed the strings on there for about a week before it would stay in tune for more than about 2 minutes.
For the cheap percussion, we made drums out of a set of tupperware mounted in a plywood stand. The cymbals were made of metal pie plates.
Since all of us were in the jazz band, we played a jazz improv for our chosen music piece. Won first place, though this was in Georgia, so make of that what you will.
Sure I could add the "I've seen the BSOD on airport flight notice boards", but instead I thought I'd share my favorite linux crash story.
:-(
I was on an American Airlines flight from Boston to London a couple of years ago. The plane was an Airbus 330 and each seat (even in cattle class) was equipped with a personal entertainment system with dozens of films, TV channels, games, etc. Given that you could choose to watch any movie/tv channel you wanted and pause, ffw, and so on, I became suspicious that the thing seemed a lot like a TiVO. Sure enough, my entertainment system became unresponsive and, after a minute or two, rebooted itself. There, on the 5" LCD in the seatback in front of me, was our favorite Penguin! Unfortunately, it rebooted too quickly for me to catch any of the specs.
Sadly, the Boston to London route now uses Boeing 777s and it's back to the film loops. So much for progress...
The color mapping for the Cas A image was chosen strictly to make it a pretty picture and, as the previous poster mentioned, following the historical convention of using heat colors for X-ray images.
One of the Chandra scientists (Norbert Schulz) has assembled a color image of Cas A where each color represents a different spetral region. It's a gorgeous image and the colors are actually significant, but it was unfortunately not ready in time for the press conference. I'm going to try to make a similar image next week if I have time.
-zeno
Sadly, chandra.harvard.edu (the machine) is only an ultra1, but it appears to have survived the onslaught so far. The number of hits is outrageous compared to what it's used to, though.
-zeno
For those of you that care, I just thought I'd let you know that all of the Chandra data analysis software is being developed on Sun/Solaris machines and ported to redhat and slackware. I've tested (and demo'd) the linux ports, and they're coming along nicely. It's definitely a step in the right direction to have this software available for linux boxes. All of this software is in the public domain, and covered with a license similar to the GPL, with the expected NASA spin on it.
/. Obviously y'all don't work in calibration or data systems, huh? :)
It's been amazing to watch the transition in the past few years at AAS (American Astronomical Society) and other professional meetings - now everyone has laptops running linux and loaded with their favorite analysis software.
I was shocked to see so many Chandra-related folks posting on
BTW, if any of you folks can show me how to get IRAF to build properly on LinuxPPC, reply to this!
-zeno
This topic has really gotten me thinking about how distributed computing can apply to astronomical data analysis. Unfortunately, as someone mentioned above, actual astronomical observations can require some massaging by hand, so distributed analysis is less than straight-forward. This is the case with WIRE, for instance.
However, numerical simulations could be pretty easy to distribute. My current simulations of starburst galaxies take about 10 hours to crunch on a quad processor (296Mhz x 4) ultra w/ half a gig of ram. I'd like to run, say, a million of these per galaxy I'm studying, but this is entirely unfeasable with the computing resources I have available to me.
I've already started talking with my advisor about distributed computing for our simulations. The seti folks really have the right idea here. I'm surprised nobody else in the astronomical community has taken advantage of this yet....
-zeno
I know Derek (the scientist in question) pretty well. I'll pass the distributed suggestion along to him. However, the last poster was right - it's large ammounts of data and relatively simple computations. I'm sure he could think of some good distributed projects if others are interested, though.
This is actually something I'd never considerred. I've got very processor-intensive simulations of starburst galaxies which would make a great distributed project.....
-zeno
For the most part, I agree with your post. However, I would like take issue with one thing you said at the very beginning:
"Anything that isn't Christian is pagan, including such non-witchy faiths as Buddhism and Confucianism."
As an athiest with zen buddhist inclinations, I don't believe Buddhists are pagans. To quote websters, a pagan is:
1) a follower of a polytheistic religion (as in ancient Rome)
2) one who has little or no religion and who delights in sensual pleasures and material goods : an irreligious or hedonistic person
Buddhism certainly doesn't qualify as definition 1, nor does it meet the second half of 2. In fact, Buddhism is the opposite of this.
Anyhoo, I just wanted to clarify that a bit. The rest of your post is thorough and well thought out.
-zeno
I'm shocked! In a forum such as this, I only saw one mention of Pi, the indie film about a genius on the edge of insanity who studies number theory with the absolute belief that anything - including the stock market - can be predicted.
/.
FWIW, I feel a bit more comfortable admitting that BtVS is my fav tv show after seeing such strong support on
--zeno