Time is measured in sexagesimal fractions for the same reason that longitude is - they are both representations of angles.
TAI (also on the chopping block) and other interval timescales are appropriately represented as an open-ended count of seconds since some defining epoch.
UTC, as a type of Universal Time, that is time-of-day, represents the (mean) angle of the Sun in the sky.
Clocks report time-of-day, Universal Time, UTC - because vast numbers of human activities are diurnal. A sexagesimal representation is appropriate.
Chronometers - a different kind of timepiece - report precise intervals. A numerical count is appropriate.
The problem arises in converting between one and the other while making overly-simplistic assumptions about the interface design and underlying project requirements.
Snark on slashdot is business as usual. Being skeptical of the phrase "fusion reactor" tossed around lightly in the press is nothing to feel bad about. Why the writer wasn't more careful in phrasing the article to begin with is a more revealing question. Calling a fusor a fusion reactor misses the whole point of what a fusion reactor would be should one ever exist.
Why no skepticism here, though, about the description of this purported "Little Man Tate" school:
We're to believe 1) that a significant population of PROFOUNDLY Gifted (emphasis in the original) kids exists in Reno, a city of just 200,000, and 2) that for some reason such populations don't exist in your own city or state for your local University to turn into mutant leaders of tomorrow? This is just charter school hyperbole and "Mismeasure of Man" crap about standardized testing. The school has been around for five years. What are the Reno odds that it will still be around after another five?
Regarding the science fair skepticism ("Daddy must have done it"), I might suggest that you seek out your local science fair with your own local population of regular old students. Annual judging day never fails to make me feel good about the future even given a general dearth of sources of neutrons irradiating the hall.
Um - your subject is backwards (and rather upside down). It is precisely in humanity's lofty aspirations that space travel has value. It is trivial to demonstrate that space travel cannot solve our population problems. However - solve the latter at home and the former comes back into play.
There are indeed "infinite ways to improve upon what commodities do exist" - it's called evolution. The industrial revolution wasn't principally about commodities, it was about the means of production.
This permits overlaying various sky surveys at different wavelengths, not just a single picture of the sky.
The web client is very nice, but the Windows client is something else again. (This is a Microsoft Research project.) You should see it on a planetarium dome.
FITS is the ubiquitous data format in astronomy, see http://fits.gsfc.nasa.gov/ - it has idiosyncrasies from arising originally in the 1970's, but is extremely portable and forgiving of a wide range of host operating systems and development environments. The specification has also been published in the refereed astronomical literature, making it suitable for very long term (even in astronomical terms) archival storage. Hence the interest of the Vatican in using this for their manuscripts. Recent data compression work is quite state of the art (if I do say so myself), and would be applicable to other scientific image or table formats, including your homebrew format.
Regarding FITS (Flexible Image Transport System), if this is used in significant ways in medical imaging, the astronomical FITS user community would love to know about it and collaborate.
Regarding rice-compressed FITS, I (and undoubtedly my coauthors) would be beyond fascinated to learn of either medical imaging use cases or compression tools for this purpose. Alternately, any FITS-based medical imaging applications should be aware of the astronomical data compression work accessible through http://heasarc.nasa.gov/fitsio/fpack (hopefully I'm not slashdotting myself:-)
Another field planning to use FITS is digital manuscript archiving per the Vatican ( http://bit.ly/aagZxN ).
Regarding the topic of this thread, the comments here emphasize that the real issue is standardizing on data formats. The richer the community (and none are richer than health and medicine), the richer the software ecosystem.
Publishing physical books and e-books are two different things. The market niches are complementary. If a company like Borders goes bankrupt it's because they've failed to comprehend the complete mix of markets they compete in, not because one part of the business cannibalized another.
There are reasons to be skeptical that paper books will become extinct any time soon. The great strengths of e-books are also their weaknesses - in particular the book is only as permanent as the battery in the e-book reader, and the reader is a fragile device. A fat paperback can even be ripped in half down the spine to improve portability without harming the reading "experience". Textbooks? Artbooks? Etc.
The success of the physical book business is only loosely tied to the satisfaction of the readers. It is much more tightly connected to the profitability of the publishing workflow. As soon as Amazon, etc., solved the mail order scalability problem - an issue related to physical books, not e-books - physical book stores quaked. Really, the readers are more product than customer here - their loyalty traded back and forth between vendors vying for their business.
The next step in dismantling the publishing industry is the printing workflow itself. Send a PDF to lulu.com and you can immediately order a very nice paperback with a single copy price of $5.77 (depending on page count, etc.) Chop a couple of bucks off of that for an order of a few hundred.
I note exactly one comment out of more than a hundred that not only appears to question the "butterfly net in space" meme, but bothered to track down the likely project:
http://www.timog.com/brb/jaxa-plans-to-clean-up-space-debris-with-hi-tech-net
As the picture shows (perhaps there are Japanese sources with real details), the idea is to send a tether to dock with a specific satellite at its end-of-life. Both tether and satellite would then de-orbit. This is really a substitute for building end-of-life capabilities into the original satellite....or maybe 1 out of 100 is a good batting average for slashdot.
The entire lifespan of massive stars is sped up. In the few tens of millions of years encompassing the period from the birth of Betelgeuse to its death, not only would life have had no time to evolve, but planets might never have formed (at least, not suitable planets).
Crewcuts don't make them bad guys, and warrants don't make them good guys. Big Brother (yours, mine or ours) is "sharing" in vast amounts of data without warrants. Now is the time for your tears...
But the crossdressing time traveler had the great benefit of reading this trenchant thread on/. while in grade school. S/he is reading this message right now while looking forward to the finale of Project Runway tonight. Oh the horror of the fashion choices that await her in the future in the past!
Alexander the Great solved the same problem with the Gordian Knot in the 4th century BCE. Smash the scanner. The modern improvement would be to disable it less flamboyantly and enjoy the theatrical performances of the assistant principle and custodial supervisor standing around scratching their heads.
What if we put the shades into a geo stationary orbit hovering only over the deepest parts of the ocean.
As somebody else pointed out, that's not how GEOstationary orbits work. They are stationary with respect to the Earth, not the Sun moving across the sky. Rather, the notion is to place sunshades in orbits around the Earth-Sun L1 point (Lagrange worked out these specific solutions to the three-body problem) where the teeter-totter gravity of each body balances out. Google "Roger Angel".
Also, the atmosphere is well mixed, such that cooling the air over one place cools it everywhere. You might be able to enhance cooling in latitude bands relative to the six Hadley cells (3 north, 3 south). This could be handy for tweaking the North Atlantic Drift that keeps Europe happy and habitable. Of course, global warming is expected to affect the Hadley circulation itself, but as long as the equator remains warmer than the poles, the air that goes up must come down generating an odd number of cells. An interesting notion whether we could tweak the shading asymmetrically to result in differing numbers of cells north and south.
Whether we should pursue such a project is doubtful, but it would be good to work out the details before we find that we must pursue such a project.
A mathematical amusement causes people confusion and consternation. It's like asking someone why they appear reversed left-to-right in a mirror, but not top-to-bottom, and saying there's an inconsistency in the foundation of physics.
Mirrors reverse front-to-back, not left-to-right. This flips parity ("handedness"), but the rays still trace straight lines at the top, bottom, and sides.
Invisibility is an ancient notion and tampering with video as old as the Lumière brothers. What is new here is the trend toward placing these capabilities closer and closer to the camera. Combine such effects with the face detection algorithm that is already in your phone's camera and the original picture can remove or replace individuals from the scene of the crime. "Ground truth" will be ever more difficult to establish.
Read "Double Fold" by Nicholson Baker:
http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/b/baker-fold.html
Digitization need not be destructive, but often has been. Digital records fill a different need than physical records and the quixotic pursuit of permanency benefits from retaining both in diverse formats and at numerous locations.
Judging from the article and "50 Posts" web site, this group's definition of "Cyborg" is broad enough to be equivalent to Richard Dawkins' notion of the "Extended Phenotype" ( http://amzn.to/cbSmTo or many online hits ). Or perhaps to a second order recursion of the EP. The reach of our genes extends outside our somatic selves to the mechanisms we build with our tool-wielding hands. These mechanisms (perhaps themselves crypto-biological) are then candidates for tinkering within our soma - a prosthetic hand, for instance.
You don't describe what is being monitored, or what sorts of response actions might be taken. The design will vary depending on the answers.
A lot of the replies assume staffing by low level employees. The staff of the control rooms at CERN or at astronomical telescopes will be almost exclusively PhDs. The staff for a military installation will be very diverse and span many levels of responsibility, while the staff for a call center may only have two levels - the person in charge and everybody else.
Design for second order effects. How rapidly will the technologies in the room evolve? How often will the business functions expand (or contract)?
Design for maintenance. It should be possible to update one station at a time without unduly disturbing the other humans or machines in the room. Whatever the lighting - how much trouble will it be to change bulbs and tubes? Who cleans and on what schedule?
How will the transition be handled to the new facility? Will it be possible to overlap operations with whatever facility is currently being used? Think about building two control centers in geographically diverse locations and switching primary control back-and-forth, daily, weekly, or monthly. Then the ability to switch one completely off will be automatically developed and maintained. What is the potential cost or liability of a sustained outage? Is it more or less than the cost of building and staffing two centers?
You say 24/7. What does this mean? Is this one locale that works 24 hours like police or fire? Or is this a control room for operations scattered through multiple timezones?
Don't forget clocks. 12 hour or 24 hour? Multiple locations with multiple daylight saving policies? Who will set the clocks? Don't assume that radio controlled clocks can be set and forgotten - they will mess up even worse with each DST change. If your control monitors operations in both the northern and southern hemispheres DST will move in opposite seasonal directions.
Think about business functions that are not automated. How much will continue to require paper shuffling? Will there be printers and photocopiers, staplers and punches? Where will these be stationed? Who stocks the paper?
Multiple language requirements?
Static information? Wall maps? Reference books?
Branding? Big shiny logo prominently placed?
Rotating artwork displays can refresh the room with little expense.
By all means worry about getting the infrastructure right, especially soundproofing, lighting, air conditioning, and "life support" in general, but the ultimate success of the venture will depend on whether you comprehend the actual workflow(s) and how they will need to evolve.
Consider that each object (in low Earth orbit) is in a separate orbit. Each pair of orbits crosses twice on opposite sides of the Earth. The eccentricity of each orbit causes the object to traverse a range of altitudes, defining the subset of all the LEO objects that are possible collision risks at any given time. The risk for two particular objects colliding is low, but each object has many other opportunities as it crosses thousands of other orbital tracks each time it circles the Earth. Then integrate over all the objects. The probability is a nested summation - integrated over time.
For example, assume there are about one hundred spacecraft (active and defunct) occupying a particular semimajor axis "zone". Each satellite orbits once every 90 minutes, ie, 16 orbits/day. Each satellite crosses the orbit of another about 200 times in that 90 minutes. Usually the other spacecraft is somewhere else entirely, but there are a lot of opportunities.
Establish a "comfort radius" - say, one kilometer. If Le Petit Prince is sitting on a satellite, he will get very nervous if another spacecraft zooms through this keyhole at 10 km/s. A typical low Earth orbit is about 42,000 of these comfort units long. So the odds (ignoring altitude for the moment) of finding a spacecraft within the same part of the orbit - during each passage - is 1/42,000. Multiply by the 200 opportunities makes this 1/210 (0.5%) per orbit or about 7.5%/day/spacecraft. There are 100 spacecraft in this zone, so that amounts to about 4 close encounters per day (divide in half since it takes two to tango) in which some spacecraft passes directly above or below another by a few kilometers.
Accounting for altitude requires a bit more physics (inverse square law and all that), but basically amounts to a similar argument of dividing the altitude range traversed by each satellite into comfort zones. The odds of passing through the keyhole drop, but not dramatically - and the orbit crossings keep piling up about a hundred thousand per day per altitude range. With each close encounter, the odds of an impact are basically very simple. What is the volume of a typical spacecraft divided by the 1 km^3 volume? (The second spacecraft either will or won't be occupying the same volume at the moment of closest approach.) Satellites can be surprisingly large - Hubble is about the size of a schoolbus - but figure a Volkswagen van or at least a Beetle.
Bear in mind that this is just one particular altitude range, the same thing is happening at different altitudes. Some spacecraft are in highly elliptical orbits and cross through several such zones. In short, what seems to be a three dimensional problem is really one dimensional. After the spacecraft collision a couple of years ago some of us were scribbling on a blackboard. A physical model would be needed to get the precise answers, but a ball park figure is that we can expect the apparently astronomically rare event of two LEO spacecraft colliding to happen about once per decade (in the absence of active station keeping). Then account for all the debris, not just complete spacecraft.
Slashdot Mirror
Time is measured in sexagesimal fractions for the same reason that longitude is - they are both representations of angles.
TAI (also on the chopping block) and other interval timescales are appropriately represented as an open-ended count of seconds since some defining epoch.
UTC, as a type of Universal Time, that is time-of-day, represents the (mean) angle of the Sun in the sky.
Clocks report time-of-day, Universal Time, UTC - because vast numbers of human activities are diurnal. A sexagesimal representation is appropriate.
Chronometers - a different kind of timepiece - report precise intervals. A numerical count is appropriate.
The problem arises in converting between one and the other while making overly-simplistic assumptions about the interface design and underlying project requirements.
Astrophysics has as tightly constructed empirical investigations as any laboratory science. See for example, http://www.cambridge.org/gb/knowledge/isbn/item2326793/
That you find astrophysics unpersuasive is itself unpersuasive.
Snark on slashdot is business as usual. Being skeptical of the phrase "fusion reactor" tossed around lightly in the press is nothing to feel bad about. Why the writer wasn't more careful in phrasing the article to begin with is a more revealing question. Calling a fusor a fusion reactor misses the whole point of what a fusion reactor would be should one ever exist.
Why no skepticism here, though, about the description of this purported "Little Man Tate" school:
http://www.davidsonacademy.unr.edu/
We're to believe 1) that a significant population of PROFOUNDLY Gifted (emphasis in the original) kids exists in Reno, a city of just 200,000, and 2) that for some reason such populations don't exist in your own city or state for your local University to turn into mutant leaders of tomorrow? This is just charter school hyperbole and "Mismeasure of Man" crap about standardized testing. The school has been around for five years. What are the Reno odds that it will still be around after another five?
Regarding the science fair skepticism ("Daddy must have done it"), I might suggest that you seek out your local science fair with your own local population of regular old students. Annual judging day never fails to make me feel good about the future even given a general dearth of sources of neutrons irradiating the hall.
Um - your subject is backwards (and rather upside down). It is precisely in humanity's lofty aspirations that space travel has value. It is trivial to demonstrate that space travel cannot solve our population problems. However - solve the latter at home and the former comes back into play. There are indeed "infinite ways to improve upon what commodities do exist" - it's called evolution. The industrial revolution wasn't principally about commodities, it was about the means of production.
The Big Picture should also be mentioned:
http://bigpicture.caltech.edu/
and in porcelain form:
http://www.griffithobs.org/exhibits/bbigpicture.html
Others have also made the point that really cool astronomy projects are within the reach of "citizen scientists" with a modest budget.
Very neat little project!
Once you build a digital image archive of the sky, various whole sky browsers become possible. The gold standard for such is WorldWide Telescope:
http://worldwidetelescope.org/
This permits overlaying various sky surveys at different wavelengths, not just a single picture of the sky.
The web client is very nice, but the Windows client is something else again. (This is a Microsoft Research project.) You should see it on a planetarium dome.
Google has another:
http://www.google.com/sky/ ...as well as an Google Earth based client to install.
FITS is the ubiquitous data format in astronomy, see http://fits.gsfc.nasa.gov/ - it has idiosyncrasies from arising originally in the 1970's, but is extremely portable and forgiving of a wide range of host operating systems and development environments. The specification has also been published in the refereed astronomical literature, making it suitable for very long term (even in astronomical terms) archival storage. Hence the interest of the Vatican in using this for their manuscripts. Recent data compression work is quite state of the art (if I do say so myself), and would be applicable to other scientific image or table formats, including your homebrew format.
Regarding FITS (Flexible Image Transport System), if this is used in significant ways in medical imaging, the astronomical FITS user community would love to know about it and collaborate. Regarding rice-compressed FITS, I (and undoubtedly my coauthors) would be beyond fascinated to learn of either medical imaging use cases or compression tools for this purpose. Alternately, any FITS-based medical imaging applications should be aware of the astronomical data compression work accessible through http://heasarc.nasa.gov/fitsio/fpack (hopefully I'm not slashdotting myself :-)
Another field planning to use FITS is digital manuscript archiving per the Vatican ( http://bit.ly/aagZxN ).
Regarding the topic of this thread, the comments here emphasize that the real issue is standardizing on data formats. The richer the community (and none are richer than health and medicine), the richer the software ecosystem.
Publishing physical books and e-books are two different things. The market niches are complementary. If a company like Borders goes bankrupt it's because they've failed to comprehend the complete mix of markets they compete in, not because one part of the business cannibalized another.
There are reasons to be skeptical that paper books will become extinct any time soon. The great strengths of e-books are also their weaknesses - in particular the book is only as permanent as the battery in the e-book reader, and the reader is a fragile device. A fat paperback can even be ripped in half down the spine to improve portability without harming the reading "experience". Textbooks? Artbooks? Etc.
The success of the physical book business is only loosely tied to the satisfaction of the readers. It is much more tightly connected to the profitability of the publishing workflow. As soon as Amazon, etc., solved the mail order scalability problem - an issue related to physical books, not e-books - physical book stores quaked. Really, the readers are more product than customer here - their loyalty traded back and forth between vendors vying for their business.
The next step in dismantling the publishing industry is the printing workflow itself. Send a PDF to lulu.com and you can immediately order a very nice paperback with a single copy price of $5.77 (depending on page count, etc.) Chop a couple of bucks off of that for an order of a few hundred.
Don't forget the layered protocols: http://www.cis.udel.edu/~mills/ipin.html
I note exactly one comment out of more than a hundred that not only appears to question the "butterfly net in space" meme, but bothered to track down the likely project: http://www.timog.com/brb/jaxa-plans-to-clean-up-space-debris-with-hi-tech-net As the picture shows (perhaps there are Japanese sources with real details), the idea is to send a tether to dock with a specific satellite at its end-of-life. Both tether and satellite would then de-orbit. This is really a substitute for building end-of-life capabilities into the original satellite. ...or maybe 1 out of 100 is a good batting average for slashdot.
The entire lifespan of massive stars is sped up. In the few tens of millions of years encompassing the period from the birth of Betelgeuse to its death, not only would life have had no time to evolve, but planets might never have formed (at least, not suitable planets).
Crewcuts don't make them bad guys, and warrants don't make them good guys. Big Brother (yours, mine or ours) is "sharing" in vast amounts of data without warrants. Now is the time for your tears...
At that price point there are important features missing...
But the crossdressing time traveler had the great benefit of reading this trenchant thread on /. while in grade school. S/he is reading this message right now while looking forward to the finale of Project Runway tonight. Oh the horror of the fashion choices that await her in the future in the past!
Alexander the Great solved the same problem with the Gordian Knot in the 4th century BCE. Smash the scanner. The modern improvement would be to disable it less flamboyantly and enjoy the theatrical performances of the assistant principle and custodial supervisor standing around scratching their heads.
Your lap has ethernet?
What if we put the shades into a geo stationary orbit hovering only over the deepest parts of the ocean.
As somebody else pointed out, that's not how GEOstationary orbits work. They are stationary with respect to the Earth, not the Sun moving across the sky. Rather, the notion is to place sunshades in orbits around the Earth-Sun L1 point (Lagrange worked out these specific solutions to the three-body problem) where the teeter-totter gravity of each body balances out. Google "Roger Angel".
Also, the atmosphere is well mixed, such that cooling the air over one place cools it everywhere. You might be able to enhance cooling in latitude bands relative to the six Hadley cells (3 north, 3 south). This could be handy for tweaking the North Atlantic Drift that keeps Europe happy and habitable. Of course, global warming is expected to affect the Hadley circulation itself, but as long as the equator remains warmer than the poles, the air that goes up must come down generating an odd number of cells. An interesting notion whether we could tweak the shading asymmetrically to result in differing numbers of cells north and south.
Whether we should pursue such a project is doubtful, but it would be good to work out the details before we find that we must pursue such a project.
A mathematical amusement causes people confusion and consternation. It's like asking someone why they appear reversed left-to-right in a mirror, but not top-to-bottom, and saying there's an inconsistency in the foundation of physics.
Mirrors reverse front-to-back, not left-to-right. This flips parity ("handedness"), but the rays still trace straight lines at the top, bottom, and sides.
Invisibility is an ancient notion and tampering with video as old as the Lumière brothers. What is new here is the trend toward placing these capabilities closer and closer to the camera. Combine such effects with the face detection algorithm that is already in your phone's camera and the original picture can remove or replace individuals from the scene of the crime. "Ground truth" will be ever more difficult to establish.
Read "Double Fold" by Nicholson Baker: http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/b/baker-fold.html Digitization need not be destructive, but often has been. Digital records fill a different need than physical records and the quixotic pursuit of permanency benefits from retaining both in diverse formats and at numerous locations.
Judging from the article and "50 Posts" web site, this group's definition of "Cyborg" is broad enough to be equivalent to Richard Dawkins' notion of the "Extended Phenotype" ( http://amzn.to/cbSmTo or many online hits ). Or perhaps to a second order recursion of the EP. The reach of our genes extends outside our somatic selves to the mechanisms we build with our tool-wielding hands. These mechanisms (perhaps themselves crypto-biological) are then candidates for tinkering within our soma - a prosthetic hand, for instance.
For another take, read Andrew Pickering's "The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future" ( http://bit.ly/bTFrqb )
Consider that each object (in low Earth orbit) is in a separate orbit. Each pair of orbits crosses twice on opposite sides of the Earth. The eccentricity of each orbit causes the object to traverse a range of altitudes, defining the subset of all the LEO objects that are possible collision risks at any given time. The risk for two particular objects colliding is low, but each object has many other opportunities as it crosses thousands of other orbital tracks each time it circles the Earth. Then integrate over all the objects. The probability is a nested summation - integrated over time.
For example, assume there are about one hundred spacecraft (active and defunct) occupying a particular semimajor axis "zone". Each satellite orbits once every 90 minutes, ie, 16 orbits/day. Each satellite crosses the orbit of another about 200 times in that 90 minutes. Usually the other spacecraft is somewhere else entirely, but there are a lot of opportunities.
Establish a "comfort radius" - say, one kilometer. If Le Petit Prince is sitting on a satellite, he will get very nervous if another spacecraft zooms through this keyhole at 10 km/s. A typical low Earth orbit is about 42,000 of these comfort units long. So the odds (ignoring altitude for the moment) of finding a spacecraft within the same part of the orbit - during each passage - is 1/42,000. Multiply by the 200 opportunities makes this 1/210 (0.5%) per orbit or about 7.5%/day/spacecraft. There are 100 spacecraft in this zone, so that amounts to about 4 close encounters per day (divide in half since it takes two to tango) in which some spacecraft passes directly above or below another by a few kilometers.
Accounting for altitude requires a bit more physics (inverse square law and all that), but basically amounts to a similar argument of dividing the altitude range traversed by each satellite into comfort zones. The odds of passing through the keyhole drop, but not dramatically - and the orbit crossings keep piling up about a hundred thousand per day per altitude range. With each close encounter, the odds of an impact are basically very simple. What is the volume of a typical spacecraft divided by the 1 km^3 volume? (The second spacecraft either will or won't be occupying the same volume at the moment of closest approach.) Satellites can be surprisingly large - Hubble is about the size of a schoolbus - but figure a Volkswagen van or at least a Beetle.
Bear in mind that this is just one particular altitude range, the same thing is happening at different altitudes. Some spacecraft are in highly elliptical orbits and cross through several such zones. In short, what seems to be a three dimensional problem is really one dimensional. After the spacecraft collision a couple of years ago some of us were scribbling on a blackboard. A physical model would be needed to get the precise answers, but a ball park figure is that we can expect the apparently astronomically rare event of two LEO spacecraft colliding to happen about once per decade (in the absence of active station keeping). Then account for all the debris, not just complete spacecraft.