The point of literature is to help the reader/viewer answer "What does it mean to be human?" Convetional fiction does it by showing us what it means to be some other human, in some other circumstance. Historical fiction does it by showing us what it was to be human in some other time. Science fiction does it by showing us things that are not humans or by showing us humans in situations we've never been in before. By that measure, it doesn't really need ubertech, though it clearly helps. <pompous intellectual mode off>
Re:Space telescopes are obsolete
on
Hope for Hubble
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Blockquoth the poster:
It looks awfully silly when you've spent millions on putting a tool way up in orbit when it becomes a toy in less than twelve months.
Yes, and that would be a great point, if it were any way true. The images by Hubble have not been matched by Earth-based telescopes. Adaptive optics is a great tool and deserves all the kudos being thrown its way -- but it's a best-guess correction to atmospheric distortions. Once in, those distortions cannot be completely eliminated. Hubble isn't destined to be the best forever, but for the short term -- until James Webb goes up or the superscopes that are currently being talked about are actually built -- it's still the tops.
And beyond that, it does have value as an icon.
Re:It's not obsolete, it's just politics
on
Hope for Hubble
·
· Score: 1
Blockquoth the poster:
The scaredy-cats in DC don't want to risk fixing it with the military space shuttle
Um, you do know that The West Wing is fiction, right?
Yeah, I hate it when people adopt misleading terms simply to steer an argument.
Like "intellectual" property for legal proscriptions on actions instead of actual property. Like "digital rights management" for software designed to retrict my rights. Like "piracy" for copyright infringement.
I don't believe in unilateral disarmament. And Fair Use also exists in common law -- which is entirely valid, despite your slippery attempt to restrict disucssion to "statutorily defined rights".
I'd also remind people, without getting too hyperbolic, that this republic was founded after a revolution whose goal was to secure common-law, extra-statutorial rights...
However, UPN has decided to air both 'Terra Prime' and 'These Are The Voyages...' on the same day, Friday the 13th of May, in an effort to still make a special event out of the show's end."
Hmmm. It couldn't be to piggy-back on all the sci fi buzz that will be happening the week before the debut of Episode III, could it?
why would a film about animals living in a harsh environment be controversial?
One imagines that the film mentions how the chemosynthetics evolved (gasp!) to make use of the available resources. But that wouldn't matter:
Don't Creationists have enough room in their ontology for animals now?
Not for animals living way at the bottom of the big inaccessible ocean. After all, if they're so hard to reach, how could Adam have named them? It stands to reason he couldn't have, and so the Bible "proves" they don't exist.
What's weirder is that IMAX theaters normally are *in* science museums. You'd think that the Fundies wouldn't set foot in such "ungodly" places
Fundamentalists no more need to go to a museum to protest it, than they have to attend a mainstream film before denouncing it. They're not looking for a rational engagement using such trite things as facts; they're going for a visceral reaction based on hot-button emotionalism. Thiongs like facts and experience just slow down their game.
Of course, if this had been a story about an IMAX theatre choosing not to show a vid that discussed creationism there would be dancing and 200 comments on how awesome it is. But no one ever accused/. readers of being particularly enlightened on this issue.
OK, I'll play the Big Bad Scientist and call Bullshit on your implied equivalence between the theory of evolution and the desperate hand-waving of creationists. Mod me down for flamebait but isn't about time we stop pretending that these are just two flavors of truth and you have the option of picking one or the other. IMAX theaters in science museums shouldn't show creationism, as it's not science. Commercial IMAX owners can make ther own decisions; it's just sad that they choose to knuckle under.
Though it's more of a card game than a boardgame, I'm surprised no one has mentioned the classic Nuclear War published by Flying Buffalo. It's relatively simple, pretty fast paced and just a little bit crazy. When you add in the expansions Nuclear Escalation, Nuclear Proliferation, and Weapons of Mass Destruction, you can have untold hours of fun blowing up the world. And it's easy to add your own cards if you want more zaniness.
Once the mistake was realized, they could easily accomodate it through other calibration techniques. I think the parent article is trying to raise a sandstorm in an otherwise rarefied atmosphere.
It's not the size of the error or the relative ease of fixing it. It's that the wrong part was installed and no one figured it out until somethng like two years. It completely slipped through QA. This time, it was a minor thing and easy to fix. Other times, it led to the loss of the probe. I think that in a stressful environment like space, attention to QA would be a good thing.
OK, so Post-Its are out. (I suspect they were being suggested facetiously.) Does that really exhaust the ingenuity of the space program? How about keeping them in separate boxes and making sure only one was ever out at any given time?
The point is, these researchers knew that the spectrometers were measurably different -- that's why they had to be calibrated at all. They knew that it was important that spectrometer A went in probe A and not in probe B. Yet they somehow made a bone-headed mistake that wouldn't be acceptable of a first year grad student.
Look, these rovers have been tremendously successful. It's a wonderful mission and JPL has done, as usual, a great job. That doesn't make this any less of a screw-up. And just because you dodged a bullet, doesn't mean the gun wasn't fired.
I'm wondering why it's so important to have differing configurations for the sensors in the first place.
As a science teacher, I weep. For any instrument, it's important to perform calibration: to check the instrument against known samples, values, whatever, so that you can take the unique response of the instrument and convert it into a believable interpretation of the data. Every instrument has its own peculiarities, resulting from the (essentially unknowable) history of the construction of the instrument. Most of these features are entirely unimportant, if you know about them. So you run calibrations and figure out how to correct for the individual features.
NASA did its job here, in that the instruments were calibrated. Yay. Then they mixed up the instruments and installed package A into rover B, meaning the calibrations were in fact wrong. Luckily they keep all the raw data, so they can simply run it through the correct calibration filter now. Double yay.
But for all those saying "This is a small thing.": Wrong. They mixed up an entire package. Didn't it occur to anyone to actually, you know, label the two? Or to in fact make sure they weren't in the same lab at the same time? Or if that proved impossible, to keep track of which was which? Or to -- oh, I don't know -- check which package they were installing?
Excusing this as "just a minor thing" is akin to minimizng a case where you fall asleep while driving and are awakened by the rumble strips on the side of the road. Sure, you fell asleep. But you woke up and no one was hurt. No harm, no foul, right?
A minor screw up on its own, it still speaks volumes about NASA's continuing inability to cross all the t's and dot all the i's. And it's a pretty close relative to the error that cost us Mars Observer.
But it's not their property... I've paid for it. Or are you arguing that the store is their property and so they can do anything they want? That isn't quite true, either. I'm pretty sure they can't tell me to empty my wallet for their inspection, or take off my clothes.
ecause all the music industry has rights to their content, there is nothing to "give you*"
Semantically true yet semantically null... interesting. The GPP was not talking about "give" as in "give away" -- he/she meant, they want to exchange less and to charge more... which is, itself, a pretty null statement of capitalism.
If the GPP's point is, the music industry will not go this way on its own, he/she was right. Of course if the new model provided more beneift for them, they'll follow it. Depsite what the most rabid slashdotters say, the music industry has no particular interest in screwing over its customers. It just has a high profit motive and is willing to screw over its customers if that leads to (perceived) maximal beneift of the company.
But contrary to the rantings of the most rabid corporatists who also lurk on Slashdot, the music industry is not interested in merely "protecting its rights". It most certainly does want the balance of the copyright bargain to swing irrevocably toward the producer/publisher and away from the user/customer. Again, it's only natural... just don't go handing them haloes.
In taking an (excellent) economics course in college, I was assigned the de rigeur "follow a handful of stocks and explain their motion" project. We did it for, I believe, 12 weeks. I faithfully followed some financial stocks day to day and produced weeekly summaries, diligently comparing movement in the stocks to events in the financial and wider worlds.
At the end of the paper I wrote, I had a disturbing flash of honesty and commented that, while I had successfully drawn connections between every movment and some event, I had no faith in my explanations. The world is too big and the connections between any event and my stocks was so tenuous, that I suspected random chance. Moreover, because there were so many events in the world on any given day -- some positive and some negative -- that one could always find something that moved the data "the right way".
This project sounds awfully similar to me.
BTW, the prof noted my reservations and commented (paraphrased) "That's what you were intended to learn from this exercise all along.":)
Getting 75 people to maybe see something in your data isn't "peer review". With 6 billion people in this world, finding 75 who agree on something is really no major accomplishment. I'm with the GPP -- show me the published study in Nature or Science or Phys Rev -- really, just about any reliable journal.
They look for events that they think might cause a spike (if the proposed effect is real), and then see if a spike occurred coincidentally.
But here's the problem: Starting from a "major event" and working backwards, you will always find a major spike... so long as you look far enough. Major spikes are a natural and entirely unpredictive feature of the random distribution they're using. Here, they've got two fuzzy criteria -- What is a "major event"? How far in advance? -- and a field of random numbers. And much like the canals of Mars, it seems likely that in the random data they are seeing something they want to see. Human beings are excellent pattern matchers; we see patterns even when they're not there.
Yeah, but none of that gives any indication why this should be patentable. Does it really meet the condition of a useful invention? Or is it just another attempt to fence off as much intellectual space as possible in the hopes that some of it might become useful later?
UPN Entertainment president Dawn Ostroff said. "We'd like to thank Rick Berman, Brannon Braga and an incredibly talented cast for creating an engaging, new dimension to the Star Trek universe on UPN...
... we just wish they hadn't beat this once-vibrant phenomenon so thoroughly into the ground. I mean, come on -- would one new idea have killed them?"
Could we all endeavor to remember that "FUD" is an acronym for "fear, uncertainty, and doubt" and not simply a synonym for "lying". There is little of the usual Microsoft "end of the world" blather here; it's just deceptive marketing.
Slashdot Mirror
The point of literature is to help the reader/viewer answer "What does it mean to be human?" Convetional fiction does it by showing us what it means to be some other human, in some other circumstance. Historical fiction does it by showing us what it was to be human in some other time. Science fiction does it by showing us things that are not humans or by showing us humans in situations we've never been in before. By that measure, it doesn't really need ubertech, though it clearly helps.
<pompous intellectual mode off>
Yes, and that would be a great point, if it were any way true. The images by Hubble have not been matched by Earth-based telescopes. Adaptive optics is a great tool and deserves all the kudos being thrown its way -- but it's a best-guess correction to atmospheric distortions. Once in, those distortions cannot be completely eliminated. Hubble isn't destined to be the best forever, but for the short term -- until James Webb goes up or the superscopes that are currently being talked about are actually built -- it's still the tops.
And beyond that, it does have value as an icon.
Um, you do know that The West Wing is fiction, right?
Yeah, I hate it when people adopt misleading terms simply to steer an argument.
Like "intellectual" property for legal proscriptions on actions instead of actual property.
Like "digital rights management" for software designed to retrict my rights.
Like "piracy" for copyright infringement.
I don't believe in unilateral disarmament. And Fair Use also exists in common law -- which is entirely valid, despite your slippery attempt to restrict disucssion to "statutorily defined rights".
I'd also remind people, without getting too hyperbolic, that this republic was founded after a revolution whose goal was to secure common-law, extra-statutorial rights...
Hmmm. It couldn't be to piggy-back on all the sci fi buzz that will be happening the week before the debut of Episode III, could it?
One imagines that the film mentions how the chemosynthetics evolved (gasp!) to make use of the available resources. But that wouldn't matter:
Not for animals living way at the bottom of the big inaccessible ocean. After all, if they're so hard to reach, how could Adam have named them? It stands to reason he couldn't have, and so the Bible "proves" they don't exist.
Fundamentalists no more need to go to a museum to protest it, than they have to attend a mainstream film before denouncing it. They're not looking for a rational engagement using such trite things as facts; they're going for a visceral reaction based on hot-button emotionalism. Thiongs like facts and experience just slow down their game.
OK, I'll play the Big Bad Scientist and call Bullshit on your implied equivalence between the theory of evolution and the desperate hand-waving of creationists.
Mod me down for flamebait but isn't about time we stop pretending that these are just two flavors of truth and you have the option of picking one or the other. IMAX theaters in science museums shouldn't show creationism, as it's not science. Commercial IMAX owners can make ther own decisions; it's just sad that they choose to knuckle under.
That's when it gets annoying? No wonder we're losing this fight...
This is the guy who wrote DeCSS a few years back. My guess is, he already has his lawyer on speed dial...
Q: "So how can you get a whole bunch of dumb small things doing something smart?"
:)
Isn't that essentially what sociology is about?
Though it's more of a card game than a boardgame, I'm surprised no one has mentioned the classic Nuclear War published by Flying Buffalo. It's relatively simple, pretty fast paced and just a little bit crazy. When you add in the expansions Nuclear Escalation, Nuclear Proliferation, and Weapons of Mass Destruction, you can have untold hours of fun blowing up the world. And it's easy to add your own cards if you want more zaniness.
It's not the size of the error or the relative ease of fixing it. It's that the wrong part was installed and no one figured it out until somethng like two years. It completely slipped through QA. This time, it was a minor thing and easy to fix. Other times, it led to the loss of the probe. I think that in a stressful environment like space, attention to QA would be a good thing.
Dodging the bullet doesn't make the gun not fire.
OK, so Post-Its are out. (I suspect they were being suggested facetiously.) Does that really exhaust the ingenuity of the space program? How about keeping them in separate boxes and making sure only one was ever out at any given time?
The point is, these researchers knew that the spectrometers were measurably different -- that's why they had to be calibrated at all. They knew that it was important that spectrometer A went in probe A and not in probe B. Yet they somehow made a bone-headed mistake that wouldn't be acceptable of a first year grad student.
Look, these rovers have been tremendously successful. It's a wonderful mission and JPL has done, as usual, a great job. That doesn't make this any less of a screw-up. And just because you dodged a bullet, doesn't mean the gun wasn't fired.
This was sloppy and they got lucky.
As a science teacher, I weep. For any instrument, it's important to perform calibration: to check the instrument against known samples, values, whatever, so that you can take the unique response of the instrument and convert it into a believable interpretation of the data. Every instrument has its own peculiarities, resulting from the (essentially unknowable) history of the construction of the instrument. Most of these features are entirely unimportant, if you know about them. So you run calibrations and figure out how to correct for the individual features.
NASA did its job here, in that the instruments were calibrated. Yay. Then they mixed up the instruments and installed package A into rover B, meaning the calibrations were in fact wrong. Luckily they keep all the raw data, so they can simply run it through the correct calibration filter now. Double yay.
But for all those saying "This is a small thing.": Wrong. They mixed up an entire package. Didn't it occur to anyone to actually, you know, label the two? Or to in fact make sure they weren't in the same lab at the same time? Or if that proved impossible, to keep track of which was which? Or to -- oh, I don't know -- check which package they were installing?
Excusing this as "just a minor thing" is akin to minimizng a case where you fall asleep while driving and are awakened by the rumble strips on the side of the road. Sure, you fell asleep. But you woke up and no one was hurt. No harm, no foul, right?
A minor screw up on its own, it still speaks volumes about NASA's continuing inability to cross all the t's and dot all the i's. And it's a pretty close relative to the error that cost us Mars Observer.
Nah. They never want a paper trail. Makes it too hard to rewrite the past...
But it's not their property... I've paid for it.
Or are you arguing that the store is their property and so they can do anything they want? That isn't quite true, either. I'm pretty sure they can't tell me to empty my wallet for their inspection, or take off my clothes.
Semantically true yet semantically null... interesting. The GPP was not talking about "give" as in "give away" -- he/she meant, they want to exchange less and to charge more... which is, itself, a pretty null statement of capitalism.
If the GPP's point is, the music industry will not go this way on its own, he/she was right. Of course if the new model provided more beneift for them, they'll follow it. Depsite what the most rabid slashdotters say, the music industry has no particular interest in screwing over its customers. It just has a high profit motive and is willing to screw over its customers if that leads to (perceived) maximal beneift of the company.
But contrary to the rantings of the most rabid corporatists who also lurk on Slashdot, the music industry is not interested in merely "protecting its rights". It most certainly does want the balance of the copyright bargain to swing irrevocably toward the producer/publisher and away from the user/customer. Again, it's only natural... just don't go handing them haloes.
In taking an (excellent) economics course in college, I was assigned the de rigeur "follow a handful of stocks and explain their motion" project. We did it for, I believe, 12 weeks. I faithfully followed some financial stocks day to day and produced weeekly summaries, diligently comparing movement in the stocks to events in the financial and wider worlds.
:)
At the end of the paper I wrote, I had a disturbing flash of honesty and commented that, while I had successfully drawn connections between every movment and some event, I had no faith in my explanations. The world is too big and the connections between any event and my stocks was so tenuous, that I suspected random chance. Moreover, because there were so many events in the world on any given day -- some positive and some negative -- that one could always find something that moved the data "the right way".
This project sounds awfully similar to me.
BTW, the prof noted my reservations and commented (paraphrased) "That's what you were intended to learn from this exercise all along."
Getting 75 people to maybe see something in your data isn't "peer review". With 6 billion people in this world, finding 75 who agree on something is really no major accomplishment. I'm with the GPP -- show me the published study in Nature or Science or Phys Rev -- really, just about any reliable journal.
But here's the problem: Starting from a "major event" and working backwards, you will always find a major spike... so long as you look far enough. Major spikes are a natural and entirely unpredictive feature of the random distribution they're using. Here, they've got two fuzzy criteria -- What is a "major event"? How far in advance? -- and a field of random numbers. And much like the canals of Mars, it seems likely that in the random data they are seeing something they want to see. Human beings are excellent pattern matchers; we see patterns even when they're not there.
Yeah, but none of that gives any indication why this should be patentable. Does it really meet the condition of a useful invention? Or is it just another attempt to fence off as much intellectual space as possible in the hopes that some of it might become useful later?
Could we all endeavor to remember that "FUD" is an acronym for "fear, uncertainty, and doubt" and not simply a synonym for "lying". There is little of the usual Microsoft "end of the world" blather here; it's just deceptive marketing.
In other words, business as usual.
Well, you should probably reserve comment until you see how well or poorly his father drives...