Chance that global warming will have a real impact on the earth in the next 10 years: 1:1.
Much like impacts of past climate change events. Some species die, others thrive, humans will change as needed and as they have in the past. This further cheapened an already cheapened award and is a smack in the face to those who did risk life/limb/fortune.
Good street lights don't contribute that much to light pollution. Bad street lights do. And just not street lights, but all forms of outdoor lighting, from outlandish gas stations that are brighter then operating rooms to car lots.
Those maps were put together a number of years ago now and haven't been updated. Not to mention the value of actually correlating on-the-ground observed data with the remote sensing/satellite data that was used to create the maps.
In years past, I was involved in two separate USG programs, one being from an intel agency, that filtered and re-distro'ed commercial (and overseas) news. They not only paid the sources a fee, but one of programs then resold the filtered news to the public. The fee for the public resale also included a re-distro fee. To make it more fun, the public resale fee was at a different rate then the internal distro. I knew a person who was involved in the settlement of the rights; she had all sorts of stories of small non-US news sources demanding vast sums for the distro of a small article.
Clearly thou don't understand just how pissed off conservatives are at W.
At this time, conservatives are more pissed at W then the libs and more wary of what he'll do next. If you doubt that I'm saying then you need to listen to talk radio to understand just how much conservatives rebelled against W on the immigration bill and followed by an under current rage over his flip flop on global warming.
If that bill comes back next week with stronger border control, it will be interesting to watch what happens, but because most of those who rebelled are very skeptical, I don't think they will roll over that easy.
What does that have to do with your Fascist article? Those things will only happen in the US if there is a group to support those steps. At this point, W (or Congress) doesn't have the support of ANYONE. And don't count on the military to blindly go along either.
They always have, at least since the early 1990's. A lot of the reason for the current US tax code system to exist is to support the tax prep. industry. Any move to a flat or sales tax system would destroy the industry. The industry lobbies our congress critters hard to avoid this.
Duh. ISS has been a disaster from day one and should have never been built, at least once it was watered down from Regean's original vision (where it was a stepping stone to human exploration of the solar system).
NASA shouldn't be about ISS, but about exploring. Exploring circles around Earth is quite wasteful and could just as likely be done by the private sector. Hell, at least, they'd be able to do something with the resulting products.
I'll second this. I haven't counted connections, but just watching my very small server's log, it is apparent most of the connections coming from my backup exchange is spam, which nicely removes one layer of my defense.
I see what you are saying now... IMHO, not much here... Congress critters all the time tell us what to think. AMS might even get some USG money, but then so does about everyone else in this country.
You don't even need to RTFA to know it's beyond most of our equipment.
I can step on to my back porch, well inside the glow of the Washington DC mega-plex and less then a mile from a overly-lit Honda dealer and record the brightness of 7th magnitude stars with a 20 year old pair of 10x50 binoculars. I hit 13.3 regularly with a 12-inch reflector about 30 foot from a (shielded) street light.
The hardware described isn't all that uncommon. All you geeks need to get out from in front your Wii's and visit a star party put on by a local astronomy club. You'll see SCT's from 8 to 14-incher's quite often. People sink this kind of money into hobbies all the time. The guy across the street picked up a pair of Jet-ski's for $15k. Another guy on the street has $20k into a camper.
Combine this with the Christian side of the Repub. party that seems to be somewhat anti-technology, and you have a great recipe for exploration.
I'd like to think if Iraq hadn't come up, much of that money, or at least some of it would have been directed to space exploration and even first generation settlement. Most on/. won't agree, but if you want to blame someone for Iraq, it's not Bush, it's Bin Laden - MHO. The Dem's would have never done given that $$$ to space in the first place, it would have only gone to support their dependent groups under the false pretense we should fix all problems on Earth before anything more than lip service.
The proof on Bush's side is the appointment of Mike Griffin. I'll predict a '08 Dem president will quickly force Griffin out of the job. If the reader doesn't understand why you need to RTFM on the guy. He's the most pro-humans in space Admin in more than a generation. A Dem administration will put other issues before his quals for the job.
While the Christian element of the Rep party appears to be anti-technology, they are for the use of God given resources for the benefit of Mankind (the driving force of our settlement of North America). In addition, you have the Rep. habit of funding large industry (especially sans the war). Given a chance the enviro's on the Dem side will argue Mars should not be exploited and destroyed by mankind.
All this generation has heard about is global warming and how good we are at screwing up Earth. Al Gore has always been inwardly focused and the rest of politics and the old media has followed along. Al's only use for the space program was to put a camera up that did nothing but look at Earth.
In my equal years, even after the Apollo program, space politics and the media was outwardly focused.
I wonder what solution Al has in mind for the Sun going into it's red giant phase.
Or even if we find out we'll be clobbered by a comet in three weeks.
If human kind wants to survive, it needs space exploration followed by space settlement. Our only hope is a future generation will get interested by the idea of settlement. It won't be mind, or the IPOD's. I doubt it will be my kid's either.
The guy's presidency is trashed, his agenda is trashed, his "party" is trashed, NYT's played a major role in ensuring a major defeat of US foreign policy that will haunt us for years and you folks just can't let it go. He's bargaining with the Dems to raise taxes, raise the min. wage, let millions of illegal aliens brush their law breaking under the rug and finally cut and run from Iraq and you guys STILL can't let it go.
All the flap about muzzling over global warming is hype, as anyone with a tiny bit of knowledge of how Public Affairs works knows. And now this.
If the WH was really censoring the NYT's, there have been plenty of recent articles outing classified information that they would have censored, if not just to save the lives and blood they cost.
Bush is kill on the side of the road and you guys are now officially the vultures chewing on the dead meat. Hope it tastes good.
In the hurricane example, a local news reporter clips out quotes legit a news source from the PR supplied video and wraps her own stuff around it.
This isn't any different then what happens every day in newspapers when reporters lift quotes from company press releases. If the reporter is worth a shit, they will add their own sources to it, but not their own spin. In some cases, this might be the only way to access a national level source who is difficult to reach, let alone film, especially with limit travel budget. But many, with the power in hand, will add their own spin. The lie occurs when the reporter does this, but doesn't disclose their own (or stations/newspapers) agenda.
You can piss on Rush, Sean H., and the air america talkers all you want, but they fully disclose their agenda. The old main stream media hasn't realized this yet.
This date/time format is embedded in a huge amount of hardware, software and standards documents. It's also used for things like countdown clocks and MET (mission elapsed time) clocks.
Sure will make it difficult to go to Mars, eh? Sigh.
I remember your list and remember chatting/talking to you. I was co-sysop of a US Govt BBS, FedWorld. At our peak, we had about 200 lines, running a custom version of MBBS. My my, times have changed, eh? but chat rooms haven't!
Spent four years on the flight deck of a carrier in the early '80's and watched many a 14 cat and trap and took a lot of pix of them (included busted ones). My favorite 14 shot.
But what I remember is the excitment of the senior officers and mission planners because the 14 had long legs compared to the old F-4. That means it carried more fuel and could fly longer without refueling. The F-4 could fly something like 5 minutes on afterburner. They were like sysadmins with a hot new box, coming up with ways to use those legs.
Funny though, the replacement F-18 is famous for short legs as well. Haven't heard that complaint about the F-35.
Not the first time. The US brought home millions of documents from Germany and Japan at the end of WWII. Truman set up the "Publication Board" in 1947 with the aim of making the documents and the technology in them available to US business as a way of transferring that technology to the US economy.
Today, the PB has become the National Technical Information Service. These days, NTIS collects S&T information from US agencies and makes it available. They charge a fee since they don't get tax payer's monies and are mandated by Congress to be self-supporting.
It's been a while since I've checked, but I suspect you can still get some of the original collection stuff, either from them or the Library of Congress. This included some medical research data collected in the concentration camps.
Of course transparency is an obstactle, but seeing limits ground-based observation even when you build on mountain tops.
The pros are more and more often beating atmospheric seeing with technology. Look at the resolution the 8-meter ESO scopes in Chile are getting, not to mention WYIN and other new generation pro scopes - they are routinely putting the post WWII generation of large scopes to shame, especially at longer wavelengths. Amateurs have mastered technology to combat atmospheric seeing - that's exactly what is going on when you take a 500 avi images of a planet with a C-8 and a simple webcam and stack and process them to create a planetary image that blows away any photograph of that same planet taken by the 200-inch Hale telescope in the 1970s or earlier.
will happily look into it, instead of just dismissing the notion outright.
Who's dismissing it outright? Here are two drawings of Mars, 17 years apart, same telescope, even the same eyepieces:
Similar detail (my sketching ability certainly has improved!) under similar conditions. If I dig through my log books, bet I can find a couple of dozen similar examples. If there was a mid-term reduction in the quality of seeing conditions, I just think I would have recorded it and I haven't. Even I had recorded something, I'd still have to be skeptical that aircraft emissions were the cause when there are so many other variables that need to be factored out.
IMHO, using the stars in the Trap. as a test on a winter night isn't exactly a great baseline to use over a long period of time... seeing conditions are usually worse in the winter and being 15 miles out of town really isn't a factor when it coming to splitting bright double stars. A winter frontal system moving through almost always messes up the seeing for several days. Might be a different story if you had long term measurements of these stars taken over several years during late summer/fall mornings when the atmosphere has been more stable in regard to temp. differences.
If seeing were the true limiting factor, you nor I would not be driving out to the country and the pros would not be building on remote mountain tops. Of course transparency is an issue for many types of observations.
Back to seeing. Both professional and amateur literature over the past 15 years have shown that most seeing issues affecting telecopes are usually within the telescope. Take a look at the recent large pro scopes with opening enclosures, active cooling during the day and superlight weight structures to reduce thermo mass. Look at how many amateurs are using fans to work (mirror) boundry layer issues and opimtizing designs to maxiumize air flow around the primary mirrors.
I don't know where you live, but I've been making detailed drawings of Mars since 1988, submitting them to ALPO, from several different states in the Midwest and East coast of the US, all the while making careful notes of seeing conditions and just haven't recorded any decrease in seeing conditions over all, specially one that could somehow be linked to emissions from aircraft.
Like to think as amateur astronomers, we're using science to make whatever case we need to make (like in light pollution where the impact is very well documented). If you are right, hope tomorrow you start to collect the hard data needed to really make the case that aircraft emissions are impacting seeing conditions. Armed with hard data, you'd have a hell of story for S&T. Until then, IMHO, it is pockycock - not science.
I think much of this is poppy cock. Light pollution was suppose to make ground based observing useless a decade ago.
I've been a very active and skilled observer of the night sky for over twenty years. Just recently I looked over my observing logs from 15 years ago and noted I was out observing about the same number of nights and seeing roughly the same detail through the telescope that I'm seeing today.
If the conditions are such for clear skies, then the moisture from contrails aren't a problem because the water vapor doesn't stay in the atmosphere anyway. If it's bordline, sure the moisture is there to some what, but if that's the case, it's likely there naturally anyway.
And besides, the BBC is the last news source I'd trust when it comes to anything about climate change. Their agenda is so clear it might as well be printed on the reporter's forehead.
And if any of you are amateur astronomers, you probably didn't need this article to tell you about this problem. 'Seeing' has become progressively worse over the past 10 years, at least in the States.
And beside, no offense intended, but if you really knew about visual (and imaging) astronomy, you'd use the right terms. 'Seeing' is the measurement of how steady the air is. Transparency is the term that is used to describe how clear the sky is.
Slashdot Mirror
Chance that global warming will have a real impact on the earth in the next 10 years: 1:1. Much like impacts of past climate change events. Some species die, others thrive, humans will change as needed and as they have in the past. This further cheapened an already cheapened award and is a smack in the face to those who did risk life/limb/fortune.
Nice advantage of having a communist thug dictator government! Assuming you don't mind the starving masses.
Good street lights don't contribute that much to light pollution. Bad street lights do. And just not street lights, but all forms of outdoor lighting, from outlandish gas stations that are brighter then operating rooms to car lots.
Those maps were put together a number of years ago now and haven't been updated. Not to mention the value of actually correlating on-the-ground observed data with the remote sensing/satellite data that was used to create the maps.
In years past, I was involved in two separate USG programs, one being from an intel agency, that filtered and re-distro'ed commercial (and overseas) news. They not only paid the sources a fee, but one of programs then resold the filtered news to the public. The fee for the public resale also included a re-distro fee. To make it more fun, the public resale fee was at a different rate then the internal distro. I knew a person who was involved in the settlement of the rights; she had all sorts of stories of small non-US news sources demanding vast sums for the distro of a small article.
Clearly thou don't understand just how pissed off conservatives are at W. At this time, conservatives are more pissed at W then the libs and more wary of what he'll do next. If you doubt that I'm saying then you need to listen to talk radio to understand just how much conservatives rebelled against W on the immigration bill and followed by an under current rage over his flip flop on global warming. If that bill comes back next week with stronger border control, it will be interesting to watch what happens, but because most of those who rebelled are very skeptical, I don't think they will roll over that easy. What does that have to do with your Fascist article? Those things will only happen in the US if there is a group to support those steps. At this point, W (or Congress) doesn't have the support of ANYONE. And don't count on the military to blindly go along either.
They always have, at least since the early 1990's. A lot of the reason for the current US tax code system to exist is to support the tax prep. industry. Any move to a flat or sales tax system would destroy the industry. The industry lobbies our congress critters hard to avoid this.
Duh. ISS has been a disaster from day one and should have never been built, at least once it was watered down from Regean's original vision (where it was a stepping stone to human exploration of the solar system). NASA shouldn't be about ISS, but about exploring. Exploring circles around Earth is quite wasteful and could just as likely be done by the private sector. Hell, at least, they'd be able to do something with the resulting products.
I'll second this. I haven't counted connections, but just watching my very small server's log, it is apparent most of the connections coming from my backup exchange is spam, which nicely removes one layer of my defense.
I see what you are saying now... IMHO, not much here... Congress critters all the time tell us what to think. AMS might even get some USG money, but then so does about everyone else in this country.
Huh? The weather channel is a private company. AMS is a non-profit organization of Mets. Government where?
Mod the parent up. So true. Generally, NASA should not be an operational agency. There are differing skill and mind sets involved.
I can step on to my back porch, well inside the glow of the Washington DC mega-plex and less then a mile from a overly-lit Honda dealer and record the brightness of 7th magnitude stars with a 20 year old pair of 10x50 binoculars. I hit 13.3 regularly with a 12-inch reflector about 30 foot from a (shielded) street light.
The hardware described isn't all that uncommon. All you geeks need to get out from in front your Wii's and visit a star party put on by a local astronomy club. You'll see SCT's from 8 to 14-incher's quite often. People sink this kind of money into hobbies all the time. The guy across the street picked up a pair of Jet-ski's for $15k. Another guy on the street has $20k into a camper.
I'd like to think if Iraq hadn't come up, much of that money, or at least some of it would have been directed to space exploration and even first generation settlement. Most on /. won't agree, but if you want to blame someone for Iraq, it's not Bush, it's Bin Laden - MHO. The Dem's would have never done given that $$$ to space in the first place, it would have only gone to support their dependent groups under the false pretense we should fix all problems on Earth before anything more than lip service.
The proof on Bush's side is the appointment of Mike Griffin. I'll predict a '08 Dem president will quickly force Griffin out of the job. If the reader doesn't understand why you need to RTFM on the guy. He's the most pro-humans in space Admin in more than a generation. A Dem administration will put other issues before his quals for the job.
While the Christian element of the Rep party appears to be anti-technology, they are for the use of God given resources for the benefit of Mankind (the driving force of our settlement of North America). In addition, you have the Rep. habit of funding large industry (especially sans the war). Given a chance the enviro's on the Dem side will argue Mars should not be exploited and destroyed by mankind.
In my equal years, even after the Apollo program, space politics and the media was outwardly focused.
I wonder what solution Al has in mind for the Sun going into it's red giant phase.
Or even if we find out we'll be clobbered by a comet in three weeks.
If human kind wants to survive, it needs space exploration followed by space settlement. Our only hope is a future generation will get interested by the idea of settlement. It won't be mind, or the IPOD's. I doubt it will be my kid's either.
All the flap about muzzling over global warming is hype, as anyone with a tiny bit of knowledge of how Public Affairs works knows. And now this.
If the WH was really censoring the NYT's, there have been plenty of recent articles outing classified information that they would have censored, if not just to save the lives and blood they cost.
Bush is kill on the side of the road and you guys are now officially the vultures chewing on the dead meat. Hope it tastes good.
Merry Christmas.
This isn't any different then what happens every day in newspapers when reporters lift quotes from company press releases. If the reporter is worth a shit, they will add their own sources to it, but not their own spin. In some cases, this might be the only way to access a national level source who is difficult to reach, let alone film, especially with limit travel budget. But many, with the power in hand, will add their own spin. The lie occurs when the reporter does this, but doesn't disclose their own (or stations/newspapers) agenda.
You can piss on Rush, Sean H., and the air america talkers all you want, but they fully disclose their agenda. The old main stream media hasn't realized this yet.
This date/time format is embedded in a huge amount of hardware, software and standards documents. It's also used for things like countdown clocks and MET (mission elapsed time) clocks.
Sure will make it difficult to go to Mars, eh? Sigh.
I remember your list and remember chatting/talking to you. I was co-sysop of a US Govt BBS, FedWorld. At our peak, we had about 200 lines, running a custom version of MBBS. My my, times have changed, eh? but chat rooms haven't!
But what I remember is the excitment of the senior officers and mission planners because the 14 had long legs compared to the old F-4. That means it carried more fuel and could fly longer without refueling. The F-4 could fly something like 5 minutes on afterburner. They were like sysadmins with a hot new box, coming up with ways to use those legs.
Funny though, the replacement F-18 is famous for short legs as well. Haven't heard that complaint about the F-35.
Anytime baby.
"Line item Veto"
Yeah, the party not in power always hates the idea.
Today, the PB has become the National Technical Information Service. These days, NTIS collects S&T information from US agencies and makes it available. They charge a fee since they don't get tax payer's monies and are mandated by Congress to be self-supporting.
It's been a while since I've checked, but I suspect you can still get some of the original collection stuff, either from them or the Library of Congress. This included some medical research data collected in the concentration camps.
The pros are more and more often beating atmospheric seeing with technology. Look at the resolution the 8-meter ESO scopes in Chile are getting, not to mention WYIN and other new generation pro scopes - they are routinely putting the post WWII generation of large scopes to shame, especially at longer wavelengths. Amateurs have mastered technology to combat atmospheric seeing - that's exactly what is going on when you take a 500 avi images of a planet with a C-8 and a simple webcam and stack and process them to create a planetary image that blows away any photograph of that same planet taken by the 200-inch Hale telescope in the 1970s or earlier.
will happily look into it, instead of just dismissing the notion outright.
Who's dismissing it outright? Here are two drawings of Mars, 17 years apart, same telescope, even the same eyepieces:
1988
2005
Similar detail (my sketching ability certainly has improved!) under similar conditions. If I dig through my log books, bet I can find a couple of dozen similar examples. If there was a mid-term reduction in the quality of seeing conditions, I just think I would have recorded it and I haven't. Even I had recorded something, I'd still have to be skeptical that aircraft emissions were the cause when there are so many other variables that need to be factored out.
Hope you manage to get out and see the sky!
If seeing were the true limiting factor, you nor I would not be driving out to the country and the pros would not be building on remote mountain tops. Of course transparency is an issue for many types of observations.
Back to seeing. Both professional and amateur literature over the past 15 years have shown that most seeing issues affecting telecopes are usually within the telescope. Take a look at the recent large pro scopes with opening enclosures, active cooling during the day and superlight weight structures to reduce thermo mass. Look at how many amateurs are using fans to work (mirror) boundry layer issues and opimtizing designs to maxiumize air flow around the primary mirrors.
I don't know where you live, but I've been making detailed drawings of Mars since 1988, submitting them to ALPO, from several different states in the Midwest and East coast of the US, all the while making careful notes of seeing conditions and just haven't recorded any decrease in seeing conditions over all, specially one that could somehow be linked to emissions from aircraft.
Like to think as amateur astronomers, we're using science to make whatever case we need to make (like in light pollution where the impact is very well documented). If you are right, hope tomorrow you start to collect the hard data needed to really make the case that aircraft emissions are impacting seeing conditions. Armed with hard data, you'd have a hell of story for S&T. Until then, IMHO, it is pockycock - not science.
I've been a very active and skilled observer of the night sky for over twenty years. Just recently I looked over my observing logs from 15 years ago and noted I was out observing about the same number of nights and seeing roughly the same detail through the telescope that I'm seeing today.
If the conditions are such for clear skies, then the moisture from contrails aren't a problem because the water vapor doesn't stay in the atmosphere anyway. If it's bordline, sure the moisture is there to some what, but if that's the case, it's likely there naturally anyway.
And besides, the BBC is the last news source I'd trust when it comes to anything about climate change. Their agenda is so clear it might as well be printed on the reporter's forehead.
And if any of you are amateur astronomers, you probably didn't need this article to tell you about this problem. 'Seeing' has become progressively worse over the past 10 years, at least in the States.
And beside, no offense intended, but if you really knew about visual (and imaging) astronomy, you'd use the right terms. 'Seeing' is the measurement of how steady the air is. Transparency is the term that is used to describe how clear the sky is.