Because in a democracy it is the general citizenry who make the ultimate decisions, and because in this democracy much of the citizenry's information comes from the media such as movies. (That BTW itself is a scandal.)
I don't care if the physics is wrong, if it's wrong for a reason. It's the casually-wrong things -- the things clearly wrong because the even the writer doesn't understand -- that really ticks me off.
Remember that people will be making decisions on what to fund and what to prohibit. Do you want them making those decisions based on poor science they've picked up in the movies? How are they supposed to know it's bad scince? Well, one way (simply enough) is to tell them -- which is what these sites and courses do.
Can John McClane just wrap a hose and leaps to the side of the building when it explodes? (Die Hard) Impossible. The hose wouldn't be able to hold the acceleration due to gravity
Blockquoth the BBC site:
By looking at the film shot by shot, we estimate that he falls about 35 floors,
Very impressive, since it the building is only 32 or 33 floors high (indicated several times in the movie). It also implies 105 m of fire hose, which is itself ludicrous. However, the fall is "really" only a few floors (say, 4, if you take the building to be 34 floors and he ends up back on floor 30), his final speed would have been 16 m/s rather than the 46 m/s the BBC got.
Does it matter? Well, it turns out that the BBC thinks "head shear" would have killed McClane, because his "severity index" was 3018, way above the fatal number (about 1000). But their speed is high by a factor of about 3, and the speed appears in that equation raised to the 2.5 power. So his "real" idex would be about 16 times lower, or 190.
But interestingly, this is only about half of the index required to knock you out. So actually, using numbers more consistent with the film, you find that not only does McClane survive the fall, he is not knocked out!
All of the stress arguments also depend on this bad speed, but since they concluded he'd survive the overly-strong stop, he's OK at the lower speed too.
BTW, I don't know how elastic firehose is, but they neglected its retarding effect as he fell, too.
For me nothing will ever beat the feeling of actually having the paper in my hands.
That's perfectly fine. But the generation has already been born that will not share your preference. It's a matter of what's available when you grow up. My teachers' teachers wrote everything by long hand, including final versions of thngs. My teachers used the typewriter for final versions but composed in longhand. I write everything in a word processor first time through but still prefer hardcopy for reading. My students will soon be comfortable composing and reading electronically.
The process of getting your key, unlocking the door, opening the door and putting the key away probably uses a hundred different muscles, concentration to hit the keyhole and millions of nerve impulses and stored memory patterns. It's just that you don't think about it. The process of getting your key, unlocking the door, opening the door and putting the key away probably uses a hundred different muscles, concentration to hit the keyhole and millions of nerve impulses and stored memory patterns. It's just that you don't think about it.
No, it's just that the action is the same for every door. You don't have to learn 50 different ways to unlock the door...
China posesses no interest in weapons war with other country. Except for Tibet state and persistent Taiwan problem.
But it does have one thing that is driving China's expansion - an insatiable thirst for oil and gas.
And this inevitably leads to volatility, radicalism, and unilateral foreign adventurism -- as so ably proved by the current administration of the US... Of course they're worried about China. They see too much of themselves in it.
Re:Talking about insanely short-sighted...
on
Weapons in Space
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· Score: 1
Blockquoth the poster:
It did shorten the war in the Pacific, but by how long?... you can ask the question 'was it worth it?'
It shortened the war by at least four to six months. Despite what is bandied about today, there is absolutely zero indication that the Japanese High Command was about to surrender, even with the announcement by the USSR that it would enter the war against Japan. One cannot dismiss the two million soldiers in Manchuria, athwart the Russians' line of attack, nor the sizable home defense force.
A blockade might -- might -- have ended the war without an invasion, but that would take time. Worse, the longer the war dragged on, the more involved the Russians would get. If they reached a point where they invaded northern Japan, then we could have very easily ended up with a partitioned Japan the way we did with Germany. I wonder what the victims of four decades of East German oppression would say about the human cost of war?
I've done a lot of reading on the end of the war and seen things from many angles. I really think that a full consideration of the facts and circumstances indicate that the dropping of the bomb saved more lives -- American and Japanese -- than it cost.
Inefficent military bureaucracy? I don't know where you heard this from, but in the military if something needs to get done, it gets done.
Hmmm. When World War II broke out, the US had discovered that, while its tactics with torpedos were more or less sound, they came to naught -- because the actual torpedos had this nasty habit of breaking apart on impact, rather than (say) exploding. It took two years (and who knows how many lives) to get that problem fixed.
The general rule seems, to my reading of history, to be that the military tends to be effective but not necessarily cost-efficient. Or put another way: Throw enough money at any technological problem and it will be solved. People tend to be freer with the gobs of money if they think it's related to national security.
Airlines still hold onto the "no cell phone inside" because this is far easier than differenciate old and new aircraft models, and I suppose this is far easier than convince insurance or the other passenger.
The tin-foil hat part of my brain wonders if airlines are afraid that someone'll be on the phone when, say, an engine falls off or the pilot commits some tragic error. The bad PR could cost millions...
When I was a grad student there, we had a running joke that nobody could get an astrophysics degree without selling at least a piece of their soul to Francis Everett, the chief booster for this project.
I was there when a rogue group suggested that, in the intervening four decades, technology had advanced enough to do the frame-dragging experiment with a laser-coordinated satellite net for half the cost.
We also circulated the "fact" that the GP-B launch date slipped by about 1.05 days per day. A friend defined it as a new universal constant for project overruns...:)
There are several critical gaps in the engineering details of the Moon/Mars plan, that would be akin to that Far Side comic with the "and then a miracle happens" bit as the final step in a large chalkboard calculation.
That was actually Syd Harris, not the Far Side. Harris is an excellent acerbic commentator on the culture of science.
The lowest bidder (usually) got the contract, but then, whatever they could charge Uncle Sam with a straight face (unforeseen delays, cost overruns, etc) the US paid without comment.
That's why I recommend "second lowest bidder" -- the job goes to the company that has the second-lowest bid. Crazy? I don't think so. Companies have a genuine interest in getting the bid down, because an outrageously high bid won't win. But they no longer have an incentive to shave every corner and substitute shoddy work, because if they do that too well, they don't get the contract, either.
OK, so the guy is asking for an obscene amount of money for the product. Who cares? This is America, buddy, and he's just following the market. If the Sheriff's office doesn't want to pay, they can tell him to go jump in a lake, hire another designer, and this time make sure to keep control.
But criminal charges here? That seems way out of line. The guy did put in three years of work and some money (including the nefarious registration of the domain). He volunteered it, so he has no claim for back compensation. But he's entirely within rights to ask whatever he wants -- even $300K -- for his future services. If to make it worth his while, he needs that much money as "back pay" -- well, that's what the market exists to correct.
Even if all the sinister motives ascribed to the guy are true, at worst he's a sleaze -- not a criminal. This is an abuse of power by the Sheriff's Office.
Whedon has also stated that no one hates Alien 4 more than he does. He had other people dictating what he was supposed to write.
The IMDb has an interesting trivia point about this, on the entry for Angel:
In the episode "Fredless", when talking about the Aliens series, a character says, "He's always had a thing for those 'Aliens' movies. Except for that last one they made - I think he dozed off." Series creator Joss Whedon wrote the script for Alien: Resurrection (1997), although it was heavily rewritten.
Now if the USA had honoured previous commitments to keep space non-militarised
I had the opportunity a few years back to tour the Space Command facilities. One of us asked our guide, an Air Force major, about the militarization of space and what the heck could we be thinking? His answer stayed with me because it seems dead-on and it appeared to be the consensus of the officers present:
Near-Earth orbit is already a territory of great economic and strategic value.
The value of near-Earth space will increase inexorably.
As assets deployed in space increase in number and value, it becomes more tempting to a hostile power to disrupt near-Earth orbit and operations therein.
Overwhelmingly the nation with the most assets and most value in space is the United States. Therefore, it is likely that the United States will be the target of attempts to disrupt near-Earth space.
It seems inevitable that someone will make such an attempt in the not-distant future.
The US has a vested interest in not yielding that territory to a hostile power.
Actually, he said it more succinctly:
Someone is going to militarize space. The United States will not be the first to launch a space-based weapon -- but the very next day, we sure as hell will be the second.
the problem for the US is that its traditional allies are starting to look more and more like strategic adversaries every day
I guess I should be happy that the word was "adversary" and not "enemy" -- but it shocks me how many of my compatriots seem ready to abandon the Western alliance just because the Europeans had a difference of opinon with us. My God, look at what history usually produces and how closely aligned the nations of Western Europe and North America are, and you'll be more careful before flinging around accusations of adversarial intent.
According to the headlines, only about a million emails will be sent, and only to "close friends."
Funny. You'd sort of think all of their "close friends" already know that they're running... This will be used to drum up new contributions. It's political spam, pure and simple.
Though it's true that mass spam creates a nuissance on the part of the receiver, laws that inhibit speech need to allow an alternative method of expression. A blanket spam ban would offer no alternatives.
Um, how about, say, candidate web sites? Those are workable alternatives to spam. Why does "expression" have to include the right to invade my space?
I can't imagine the Supreme Court upholding a law that restricts people's right to political expression, the heart of what the framers intenced to protect, based on the reasoning that people find deleting the messages annoying.
I agree completely. This is totally analogous to the decisions wherein the Court said that political activists can come uninvited into my home and staple campaign posters to all my walls... Oh, wait...
It's a false dichtomy. Why should I have to accept either?
BTW, spam has a real-world cost, too. Burrning all those electrons ain't free, after all. (And how much nasty environmental stuff has been done to make the bigger hard drives required to store and forward all this crap?)
Another task involves rolling the shuttle and viewing it from the ISS as it approaches. There is currently no inspection concept that would work for a Hubble mission, violating the CAIB requirements for flight.
Um, Hubble is a telescope. Why could it be inspected using that?
And I'd like an answer from someone who doesn't think that ground-based telescopes do as good a job as the Space Telescope in viewing frequencies (IR, UV) to which the atmosphere is opaque.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see why this is intrinsically so bad
Because in a democracy it is the general citizenry who make the ultimate decisions, and because in this democracy much of the citizenry's information comes from the media such as movies. (That BTW itself is a scandal.)
I don't care if the physics is wrong, if it's wrong for a reason. It's the casually-wrong things -- the things clearly wrong because the even the writer doesn't understand -- that really ticks me off.
Remember that people will be making decisions on what to fund and what to prohibit. Do you want them making those decisions based on poor science they've picked up in the movies? How are they supposed to know it's bad scince? Well, one way (simply enough) is to tell them -- which is what these sites and courses do.
Blockquoth the BBC site:
Very impressive, since it the building is only 32 or 33 floors high (indicated several times in the movie). It also implies 105 m of fire hose, which is itself ludicrous. However, the fall is "really" only a few floors (say, 4, if you take the building to be 34 floors and he ends up back on floor 30), his final speed would have been 16 m/s rather than the 46 m/s the BBC got.
Does it matter? Well, it turns out that the BBC thinks "head shear" would have killed McClane, because his "severity index" was 3018, way above the fatal number (about 1000). But their speed is high by a factor of about 3, and the speed appears in that equation raised to the 2.5 power. So his "real" idex would be about 16 times lower, or 190.
But interestingly, this is only about half of the index required to knock you out. So actually, using numbers more consistent with the film, you find that not only does McClane survive the fall, he is not knocked out!
All of the stress arguments also depend on this bad speed, but since they concluded he'd survive the overly-strong stop, he's OK at the lower speed too.
BTW, I don't know how elastic firehose is, but they neglected its retarding effect as he fell, too.
That's perfectly fine. But the generation has already been born that will not share your preference. It's a matter of what's available when you grow up. My teachers' teachers wrote everything by long hand, including final versions of thngs. My teachers used the typewriter for final versions but composed in longhand. I write everything in a word processor first time through but still prefer hardcopy for reading. My students will soon be comfortable composing and reading electronically.
My question is, what's next?
No, it's just that the action is the same for every door. You don't have to learn 50 different ways to unlock the door...
Greetings, Program!
... is the thought that the Russian space agency even has $15M to spend on "back pay".
Too! many! exclamation! points! makes! any! argument! look! silly! not! emphatic!
And this inevitably leads to volatility, radicalism, and unilateral foreign adventurism -- as so ably proved by the current administration of the US... Of course they're worried about China. They see too much of themselves in it.
It shortened the war by at least four to six months. Despite what is bandied about today, there is absolutely zero indication that the Japanese High Command was about to surrender, even with the announcement by the USSR that it would enter the war against Japan. One cannot dismiss the two million soldiers in Manchuria, athwart the Russians' line of attack, nor the sizable home defense force.
A blockade might -- might -- have ended the war without an invasion, but that would take time. Worse, the longer the war dragged on, the more involved the Russians would get. If they reached a point where they invaded northern Japan, then we could have very easily ended up with a partitioned Japan the way we did with Germany. I wonder what the victims of four decades of East German oppression would say about the human cost of war?
I've done a lot of reading on the end of the war and seen things from many angles. I really think that a full consideration of the facts and circumstances indicate that the dropping of the bomb saved more lives -- American and Japanese -- than it cost.
Hmmm. When World War II broke out, the US had discovered that, while its tactics with torpedos were more or less sound, they came to naught -- because the actual torpedos had this nasty habit of breaking apart on impact, rather than (say) exploding. It took two years (and who knows how many lives) to get that problem fixed.
The general rule seems, to my reading of history, to be that the military tends to be effective but not necessarily cost-efficient. Or put another way: Throw enough money at any technological problem and it will be solved. People tend to be freer with the gobs of money if they think it's related to national security.
The tin-foil hat part of my brain wonders if airlines are afraid that someone'll be on the phone when, say, an engine falls off or the pilot commits some tragic error. The bad PR could cost millions...
... the project that ate Stanford.
:)
When I was a grad student there, we had a running joke that nobody could get an astrophysics degree without selling at least a piece of their soul to Francis Everett, the chief booster for this project.
I was there when a rogue group suggested that, in the intervening four decades, technology had advanced enough to do the frame-dragging experiment with a laser-coordinated satellite net for half the cost.
We also circulated the "fact" that the GP-B launch date slipped by about 1.05 days per day. A friend defined it as a new universal constant for project overruns...
I think it's fair to compare "Typical" installations -- regardless of what's in them -- since that is what most users see.
That was actually Syd Harris, not the Far Side. Harris is an excellent acerbic commentator on the culture of science.
That's why I recommend "second lowest bidder" -- the job goes to the company that has the second-lowest bid. Crazy? I don't think so. Companies have a genuine interest in getting the bid down, because an outrageously high bid won't win. But they no longer have an incentive to shave every corner and substitute shoddy work, because if they do that too well, they don't get the contract, either.
OK, so the guy is asking for an obscene amount of money for the product. Who cares? This is America, buddy, and he's just following the market. If the Sheriff's office doesn't want to pay, they can tell him to go jump in a lake, hire another designer, and this time make sure to keep control.
But criminal charges here? That seems way out of line. The guy did put in three years of work and some money (including the nefarious registration of the domain). He volunteered it, so he has no claim for back compensation. But he's entirely within rights to ask whatever he wants -- even $300K -- for his future services. If to make it worth his while, he needs that much money as "back pay" -- well, that's what the market exists to correct.
Even if all the sinister motives ascribed to the guy are true, at worst he's a sleaze -- not a criminal. This is an abuse of power by the Sheriff's Office.
The IMDb has an interesting trivia point about this, on the entry for Angel
I had the opportunity a few years back to tour the Space Command facilities. One of us asked our guide, an Air Force major, about the militarization of space and what the heck could we be thinking? His answer stayed with me because it seems dead-on and it appeared to be the consensus of the officers present:
Near-Earth orbit is already a territory of great economic and strategic value.
The value of near-Earth space will increase inexorably.
As assets deployed in space increase in number and value, it becomes more tempting to a hostile power to disrupt near-Earth orbit and operations therein.
Overwhelmingly the nation with the most assets and most value in space is the United States. Therefore, it is likely that the United States will be the target of attempts to disrupt near-Earth space.
It seems inevitable that someone will make such an attempt in the not-distant future.
The US has a vested interest in not yielding that territory to a hostile power.
Actually, he said it more succinctly:
I guess I should be happy that the word was "adversary" and not "enemy" -- but it shocks me how many of my compatriots seem ready to abandon the Western alliance just because the Europeans had a difference of opinon with us. My God, look at what history usually produces and how closely aligned the nations of Western Europe and North America are, and you'll be more careful before flinging around accusations of adversarial intent.
Funny. You'd sort of think all of their "close friends" already know that they're running... This will be used to drum up new contributions. It's political spam, pure and simple.
Um, how about, say, candidate web sites? Those are workable alternatives to spam. Why does "expression" have to include the right to invade my space?
I agree completely. This is totally analogous to the decisions wherein the Court said that political activists can come uninvited into my home and staple campaign posters to all my walls...
Oh, wait...
It's a false dichtomy. Why should I have to accept either?
BTW, spam has a real-world cost, too. Burrning all those electrons ain't free, after all. (And how much nasty environmental stuff has been done to make the bigger hard drives required to store and forward all this crap?)
Um, Hubble is a telescope. Why could it be inspected using that?
And I'd like an answer from someone who doesn't think that ground-based telescopes do as good a job as the Space Telescope in viewing frequencies (IR, UV) to which the atmosphere is opaque.