And because everyone in the department has access to Matlab, you can give them your m-file and they can run it. Which you can't necessarily do with python, SciPy, etc.
I don't necessarily think Matlab is the best for everything, but it's the lingua franca of analysis and simulation around here. If you want to interact with other people, you have to use it. Else you'll live a lonely and short career.
I also want to point out that the radiation was measured at 1000 mSv/hr because that's where the meters they were carrying pegged, and given that that's unhealthy in short order, they sensibly bugged out, and no one's gone back in to make a better measurement. No one knows how high the radiation levels are.
Well, to be fair the reactors were built to withstand an 8.5 (or so) earthquake and it was hit by a 9.0
To be fair, the 9.0 was 150 miles away at the epicenter. Fukushima was no more hit by a 9.0 than Tokyo was.
if the company running the plant has been stupid then they certainly need to pay the price, and hopefully the next gen to be built will all learn massive amounts
Yes, because that's worked out so well with the financial industry, the oil industry, the mining industry, and those who choose to start land wars in Asia. They've all learned from their lessons, and we'll never see repeats of that again.
We certainly ought to rely on the good faith of those who can privatize the profits and socialize the risks.
Well, first, he didn't get shot, he got hit in the head with a brick. And second, have you listened to him lately? Pretty sure he would agree with me. And third, sure pick one event from the last millenium to make your point. I'll see your Denny '92 and raise you Theo van Gogh 2004 to prove that Amsterdam is not safe to walk around in.
I can't imagine Sacramento as being a place where you need to worry a whole lot about being shot at, but LA, Detroit, cities like that, yes.
Bull. The homicide rate in LA is the lowest its been in decades (300 last year total, and you have to figure 200 of those were wives/husbands/family disputes. Out of how many millions of people?). And it was never bad enough that you had to worry about it. Ditto with NYC. It's nicer now than it used to be, but it was never someplace where I walked around at night worrying about getting shot.
They are. They're learning that it's good to have cozy relationships with the regulators, and learning how to manipulate the news. "Whoops, sorry, the radioactivity levels reported were only 100,000 times greater than allowed, not 10,000,000, as initially reported!
They're going ahead because Congress hasn't passed a budget for 2011 yet, so under CR, they keep getting the funding profile they had last year. The government, i.e., you and me, are still paying for it. And when we stop, they'll stop.
Absolutely, and for someone new to writing and/or short of capital, the only reasonable way to afford editing, marketing, and so forth is to go with a publisher
Speaking from experience, "editing" these days consists of arguing with a newly-minted English Lit contractor with no background in the field you are writing about (I'm talking about tech books, not fiction), and "marketing" consists of "If you are going to this conference anyway, why don't you set up a booth and sign your books there." Or flog it on Facebook yourself.
Not to say that editing and marketing aren't useful, but I could have hired the postdoc myself, and she and I both would have done better on the deal without the publisher taking a cut, and I don't exactly need the publisher to tell me to flog the book on social media.
Because otherwise they'd have to completely redesign OCO-2 to fit in another fairing, and it wouldn't launch in 2013 and it wouldn't be cheap. OCO-2 is basically OCO with minor changes, to keep the cost down and the launch in the near future. There's no way it would be launching in two years if it was a complete redesign for another launch vehicle.
FWIW, I've heard that Orbital did a redesign of the fairing after the last failure. They thought they had found the fault and fixed it, and had apparently gone through the reviews and convinced all their customers that they had fixed it. Guess not.
Conspiracy theories abound. I've heard Republicans and aliens. Neither want any independent observations of their terraforming of the planet.
I guess Toyota doesn't see fit to put the same gas gauge in their trucks as they do in their Lexus's. Although they do have the same engine. The Toyota truck gas gauge is well-known, to both my local mechanic, and to truck forums, to be unreliable and unrepeatable.
You say "easy to get right", but my personal experience with several Toyotas, two Hondas, and a slew of Chevy and Ford trucks and cars suggests otherwise. The Porsche's I've driven seem to be good, and you say Lexus works, but if you have to go up to relatively high-dollar cars to get good gas gauges, perhaps the problem is endemic?
I am just speaking to my personal experience here. Perhaps I've just had a string of bad luck with only 1 of 15-20 cars having a fuel gauge that'd I'd trust to not leave me stranded below the quarter-tank marker.
Well, heck, my truck does this, though it doesn't have a fancy-schmancy 25 mile warning. Also the truck before it. And the Honda Civic before that. And the truck before that. And... you get the picture.
All gas gauges suck. They're completely unreliable. I don't trust any of them. I've always reset the trip odometer with every refuel and refill when it gets up to (tank size - safety margin) x miminum mpg.
You probably could have walked a mile or two along the highway and been at a farmhouse. Most of that country is cotton farms, with a house just about every section.
I'm surprised someone didn't stop to help, or that you couldn't wave a pickup down. It's not as though it's really deserted around there. If you were really out in West Texas, say out around Marfa, you might be in trouble if you ran out of gas. Marfa might not really qualify as lonesome anymore. Those stretches do run long sections without gas stations or houses though, and it pays to fill up when you can.
Caltech/JPL employees don't work on the shuttle. No one was objecting to clearances for anyone who needs one. The objection was to an open-ended background check for jobs that don't deal with sensitive data or need a clearance. The folks who do that had to get clearance anyway. The Soops just pretty much said that if you get paid by the government in any way, shape, or form, even twice removed, the government has the right, nay the duty, to investigate your background. For instance, JPL employees are not government employees: they work for Caltech (once-removed). And JPL contractors don't work for JPL, they get paid by their contracting firm (twice-removed).
Again, JPL employees typically don't deal with classified or sensitive data; most NASA data and inventions are required by law to be released to the public eventually (pick up a copy of NASA Tech Briefs sometime). This will propagate; the DOE doesn't have to do this now, but they will. As will the DOT and DOEducation, and every other government organization and contractor. How many of you will be free from this? How many of your jobs depend on government money at some stage?
Not in the headline is Scalia's concurring opinion, where he comes right out and says that there is no right to informational privacy. Good luck with that too.
You do have to account for human emotions. If you expect the police to be perfect inhuman robots that never react emotionally, then you are an idiot. So if someone punches a cop in the face and the cop hauls off and punches them, that has to be considered.
That only works one way. If I react emotionally to a cop, I'm going to jail for a long time, and that's the best I can hope for. Nothing will be considered. Worst case, the thin blue line arranges for me to be beat either by cop or by inmates at the holding cell.
So why is it that you only cut slack to the cop, who is trained, armed, and paid to be professional, and not to the citizen, who is none of those things, and will not get the benefit of the doubt?
You can say the ISPs are getting enough and they should not be allowed any more profits. Unfortunately, that way likes the Soviet-style command economy. You aren't going to be able to tell anyone they don't deserve any more profits.
Except that in many places, the ISPs were given their monopolies through Soviet-style, oh, wait, American-style wheeling and dealing. They were subsidized by taxes, given eminent domain powers, allowed to tear up public streets to route their infrastructure, and given sweetheart deals with no competition and little oversight.
And now you're going to complain that we want to restrict their profits and command their economy, to demand that they treat all packets equally? That's the deal that they made, or should have, in return for their government-granted monopoly powers. Can't have it both ways.
Or open up the publically-subsidized network structure to every ISP with no restrictions. If you want a free market, allow a free market. But if that's not going to happen, and it isn't, then it isn't unfair to demand net neutrality and restrict profits on government granted monopolies.
When I grew up, you rarely if EVER heard of shit like this going on.
Come on. Get real. When I grew up, kids that I knew regularly did this kind of shit. Every xmas. And my dad told me about the shit that his friends did, and the shit that grandpa's friends did. You never heard of a outhouse getting put on the courthouse lawn, or a nativity scene ending up on top of a flagpole? Not us, we were all saints. But if you thinkk this kind of stuff didn't go on 50, 75, and 100 years ago, you are kidding yourself. I saw it happen in small town BFE and big town suburbia. People are the same all over, and for all of history.
The argument that one unavoidably gets more radiation on the flight is actually an argument against the additional unnecessary and completely avoidable radiation from the scanner. Radiation damage is cumulative. One should try to minimize it when at all possible.
Profiling works for the Israelis because they have about 1/70 the number of passengers as the US, and about 1/50th the number of major airports. Can you imagine having a detailed 15 minute conversation with each of the 250k passengers going through LAX on a busy day? If the two-minute "enhanced patdown" is going to slow things down, imagine what a 15 minute interview would do, and how many people you'd have to hire and train (something we have not been willing to do with the current TSA), and how much you'd have to expand the terminals just to keep the current throughput the same.
On the other hand, the additional cost of a ticket due to the additional highly trained personnel hired and construction would likely put air travel beyond the means of most of us, so we'd all be driving anyway.
In the 17th century, you paid for your own steerage ticket.
In the 21st century, you ask whole nations to spend significant fractions of their GDP to send a few dead-enders on a one-way mission from which they will not return filthy rich. Or at all.
This is such a lame argument. If the paper is sooooo baaadd, let it be published and then any one finding fault can reference it and refute it. That is the way of science.
No, it isn't. If journals published every baaadd paper that came their way, they'd go out of business in newsprint costs. Decisions have to be made. Peer review, like it or hate it, is the accepted method of figuring out what gets published.
You want to publish your baaadd idea, or your good idea, you have to get it through peer review. That is the way of science. Any working scientist could tell you that.
You can argue whether peer review is the best method for deciding what gets published, but that's a different/. story. I'd argue that it's the worst possible method, except for every other method that's been tried.
Slashdot Mirror
And because everyone in the department has access to Matlab, you can give them your m-file and they can run it. Which you can't necessarily do with python, SciPy, etc.
I don't necessarily think Matlab is the best for everything, but it's the lingua franca of analysis and simulation around here. If you want to interact with other people, you have to use it. Else you'll live a lonely and short career.
which are the same experiment, only bigger and more expensive
No, they're not.
And no, they're not.
Well, maybe bigger. Maybe. But not a patch on more expensive.
I also want to point out that the radiation was measured at 1000 mSv/hr because that's where the meters they were carrying pegged, and given that that's unhealthy in short order, they sensibly bugged out, and no one's gone back in to make a better measurement. No one knows how high the radiation levels are.
Well, to be fair the reactors were built to withstand an 8.5 (or so) earthquake and it was hit by a 9.0
To be fair, the 9.0 was 150 miles away at the epicenter. Fukushima was no more hit by a 9.0 than Tokyo was.
if the company running the plant has been stupid then they certainly need to pay the price, and hopefully the next gen to be built will all learn massive amounts
Yes, because that's worked out so well with the financial industry, the oil industry, the mining industry, and those who choose to start land wars in Asia. They've all learned from their lessons, and we'll never see repeats of that again.
We certainly ought to rely on the good faith of those who can privatize the profits and socialize the risks.
Well, first, he didn't get shot, he got hit in the head with a brick. And second, have you listened to him lately? Pretty sure he would agree with me. And third, sure pick one event from the last millenium to make your point. I'll see your Denny '92 and raise you Theo van Gogh 2004 to prove that Amsterdam is not safe to walk around in.
Sheesh.
I can't imagine Sacramento as being a place where you need to worry a whole lot about being shot at, but LA, Detroit, cities like that, yes.
Bull. The homicide rate in LA is the lowest its been in decades (300 last year total, and you have to figure 200 of those were wives/husbands/family disputes. Out of how many millions of people?). And it was never bad enough that you had to worry about it. Ditto with NYC. It's nicer now than it used to be, but it was never someplace where I walked around at night worrying about getting shot.
They are. They're learning that it's good to have cozy relationships with the regulators, and learning how to manipulate the news. "Whoops, sorry, the radioactivity levels reported were only 100,000 times greater than allowed, not 10,000,000, as initially reported!
if you feel like driving past a checkpoint is a risk you dont want to take
Every interaction with a cop is a risk I don't want to take. The upside is small, and the downside is huge.
They're going ahead because Congress hasn't passed a budget for 2011 yet, so under CR, they keep getting the funding profile they had last year. The government, i.e., you and me, are still paying for it. And when we stop, they'll stop.
Absolutely, and for someone new to writing and/or short of capital, the only reasonable way to afford editing, marketing, and so forth is to go with a publisher
Speaking from experience, "editing" these days consists of arguing with a newly-minted English Lit contractor with no background in the field you are writing about (I'm talking about tech books, not fiction), and "marketing" consists of "If you are going to this conference anyway, why don't you set up a booth and sign your books there." Or flog it on Facebook yourself.
Not to say that editing and marketing aren't useful, but I could have hired the postdoc myself, and she and I both would have done better on the deal without the publisher taking a cut, and I don't exactly need the publisher to tell me to flog the book on social media.
everything you can do with a tablet, you can do with a laptop, while the reverse is not true.
Watch a movie in coach when the person in front of you reclines?
As opposed to the current situation, in which the populous states like California and New York are irrelevant.
Because otherwise they'd have to completely redesign OCO-2 to fit in another fairing, and it wouldn't launch in 2013 and it wouldn't be cheap. OCO-2 is basically OCO with minor changes, to keep the cost down and the launch in the near future. There's no way it would be launching in two years if it was a complete redesign for another launch vehicle.
FWIW, I've heard that Orbital did a redesign of the fairing after the last failure. They thought they had found the fault and fixed it, and had apparently gone through the reviews and convinced all their customers that they had fixed it. Guess not.
Conspiracy theories abound. I've heard Republicans and aliens. Neither want any independent observations of their terraforming of the planet.
I guess Toyota doesn't see fit to put the same gas gauge in their trucks as they do in their Lexus's. Although they do have the same engine. The Toyota truck gas gauge is well-known, to both my local mechanic, and to truck forums, to be unreliable and unrepeatable.
You say "easy to get right", but my personal experience with several Toyotas, two Hondas, and a slew of Chevy and Ford trucks and cars suggests otherwise. The Porsche's I've driven seem to be good, and you say Lexus works, but if you have to go up to relatively high-dollar cars to get good gas gauges, perhaps the problem is endemic?
I am just speaking to my personal experience here. Perhaps I've just had a string of bad luck with only 1 of 15-20 cars having a fuel gauge that'd I'd trust to not leave me stranded below the quarter-tank marker.
Well, heck, my truck does this, though it doesn't have a fancy-schmancy 25 mile warning. Also the truck before it. And the Honda Civic before that. And the truck before that. And... you get the picture.
All gas gauges suck. They're completely unreliable. I don't trust any of them. I've always reset the trip odometer with every refuel and refill when it gets up to (tank size - safety margin) x miminum mpg.
You probably could have walked a mile or two along the highway and been at a farmhouse. Most of that country is cotton farms, with a house just about every section.
I'm surprised someone didn't stop to help, or that you couldn't wave a pickup down. It's not as though it's really deserted around there. If you were really out in West Texas, say out around Marfa, you might be in trouble if you ran out of gas. Marfa might not really qualify as lonesome anymore. Those stretches do run long sections without gas stations or houses though, and it pays to fill up when you can.
Caltech/JPL employees don't work on the shuttle. No one was objecting to clearances for anyone who needs one. The objection was to an open-ended background check for jobs that don't deal with sensitive data or need a clearance. The folks who do that had to get clearance anyway. The Soops just pretty much said that if you get paid by the government in any way, shape, or form, even twice removed, the government has the right, nay the duty, to investigate your background. For instance, JPL employees are not government employees: they work for Caltech (once-removed). And JPL contractors don't work for JPL, they get paid by their contracting firm (twice-removed).
Again, JPL employees typically don't deal with classified or sensitive data; most NASA data and inventions are required by law to be released to the public eventually (pick up a copy of NASA Tech Briefs sometime). This will propagate; the DOE doesn't have to do this now, but they will. As will the DOT and DOEducation, and every other government organization and contractor. How many of you will be free from this? How many of your jobs depend on government money at some stage?
Not in the headline is Scalia's concurring opinion, where he comes right out and says that there is no right to informational privacy. Good luck with that too.
Adios, Fourth Amendment.
You do have to account for human emotions. If you expect the police to be perfect inhuman robots that never react emotionally, then you are an idiot. So if someone punches a cop in the face and the cop hauls off and punches them, that has to be considered.
That only works one way. If I react emotionally to a cop, I'm going to jail for a long time, and that's the best I can hope for. Nothing will be considered. Worst case, the thin blue line arranges for me to be beat either by cop or by inmates at the holding cell.
So why is it that you only cut slack to the cop, who is trained, armed, and paid to be professional, and not to the citizen, who is none of those things, and will not get the benefit of the doubt?
You can say the ISPs are getting enough and they should not be allowed any more profits. Unfortunately, that way likes the Soviet-style command economy. You aren't going to be able to tell anyone they don't deserve any more profits.
Except that in many places, the ISPs were given their monopolies through Soviet-style, oh, wait, American-style wheeling and dealing. They were subsidized by taxes, given eminent domain powers, allowed to tear up public streets to route their infrastructure, and given sweetheart deals with no competition and little oversight.
And now you're going to complain that we want to restrict their profits and command their economy, to demand that they treat all packets equally? That's the deal that they made, or should have, in return for their government-granted monopoly powers. Can't have it both ways.
Or open up the publically-subsidized network structure to every ISP with no restrictions. If you want a free market, allow a free market. But if that's not going to happen, and it isn't, then it isn't unfair to demand net neutrality and restrict profits on government granted monopolies.
When I grew up, you rarely if EVER heard of shit like this going on.
Come on. Get real. When I grew up, kids that I knew regularly did this kind of shit. Every xmas. And my dad told me about the shit that his friends did, and the shit that grandpa's friends did. You never heard of a outhouse getting put on the courthouse lawn, or a nativity scene ending up on top of a flagpole? Not us, we were all saints. But if you thinkk this kind of stuff didn't go on 50, 75, and 100 years ago, you are kidding yourself. I saw it happen in small town BFE and big town suburbia. People are the same all over, and for all of history.
The argument that one unavoidably gets more radiation on the flight is actually an argument against the additional unnecessary and completely avoidable radiation from the scanner. Radiation damage is cumulative. One should try to minimize it when at all possible.
Profiling works for the Israelis because they have about 1/70 the number of passengers as the US, and about 1/50th the number of major airports. Can you imagine having a detailed 15 minute conversation with each of the 250k passengers going through LAX on a busy day? If the two-minute "enhanced patdown" is going to slow things down, imagine what a 15 minute interview would do, and how many people you'd have to hire and train (something we have not been willing to do with the current TSA), and how much you'd have to expand the terminals just to keep the current throughput the same.
On the other hand, the additional cost of a ticket due to the additional highly trained personnel hired and construction would likely put air travel beyond the means of most of us, so we'd all be driving anyway.
See Bruce Schneier's blog on this subject.
In the 17th century, you paid for your own steerage ticket.
In the 21st century, you ask whole nations to spend significant fractions of their GDP to send a few dead-enders on a one-way mission from which they will not return filthy rich. Or at all.
It doesn't matter. Even if it's freely available, I'm not allowed to tell you about it, or point you at a reference. Thus sayeth the ITAR/EAR rules.
This is such a lame argument. If the paper is sooooo baaadd, let it be published and then any one finding fault can reference it and refute it. That is the way of science.
No, it isn't. If journals published every baaadd paper that came their way, they'd go out of business in newsprint costs. Decisions have to be made. Peer review, like it or hate it, is the accepted method of figuring out what gets published.
You want to publish your baaadd idea, or your good idea, you have to get it through peer review. That is the way of science. Any working scientist could tell you that.
You can argue whether peer review is the best method for deciding what gets published, but that's a different /. story. I'd argue that it's the worst possible method, except for every other method that's been tried.