MP3s of Hawking are at
M.C. Hawking's Crib [http://www.mchawking.com]
including tracks from "A Brief History of Rhyme" and singles such as "Why Won't Jesse Helms Just Hurry Up And Die? "
-53C is the global average, rather than the equatorial average. Mars gets as warm as 27 C. The pressure is also dependent on the altitude, just as it is on Earth, and Valles Marinaris is 7 km deep.
The highest pressure is up to about 9 millibars, well above the 6 millibars of the triple point of water.
(See the nine planets for a handy reference).
In low-lying equatorial regions, you can temporarily get conditions that support liquid water.
A better solution for pretty boots would be to print "Installing whizzomatic driver v 3.14" when the driver starts to install, then after the installation is complete, printing "\r_________\r" to erase the line and go back to the start.
This way, the message is only on the screen for the duration of the time the installation is running. If it hangs, you have a mea culpa sitting there. If it doesn't hang, but the next thing does, the whizzomatic is absolved.
According to the NY Times, they are sharecropping Narnia by having other authors write books in the Narnia universe.
However, they are toning down the Christian elements to cater to today's readers.
"We'll need to be able to give emphatic assurances that no attempt will be made to correlate the stories to Christian imagery/theology."
Now I'm as Godless as the next guy, but I can't help but think that this would be slightly contrary to C. S. Lewis's original vision for his series. I think I can speak for everyone in wishing the publisher a painful eternity in the fires that burn but do not consume.
Both devices consist of rare earth or ceramic magnets and plastic braces which hold magnets onto the fingers of the user. The inventor explained that the fingers and toes are the negative (-) and positive (+) terminals of your body.
Since you probably designed your rings for Americans (who are negative ground) your devices will cause the rapid aging and death of positive-ground British people. Was that intentional or is it just a serendipitous benefit?
The 1.2 Million signatures required to launch a shuttle are NOT a good thing.
In one case, there were three signatures saying that a work platform had been removed from the shuttle bay. And yet when the shuttle was lifted to vertical, the platform was still in the cargo bay and it dropped to the aft end and caused damage. Diffusion of responsibility is not a good thing--when everyone is to blame, no one is to blame.
Re:Twenty Points To Whomever Finds DeCSS in DNA
on
Bioinformatics
·
· Score: 1
what the odds are of finding one of these sequences in the billions of combinations currently being sequenced?
Assume 16-32 billion base pairs have been sequenced so far. Each base pair represents 2 bits (4 possiblities: ATCG). So we have about 2^36 bits. Assuming that everything is statistically independent (it's not), that means that a random sequence 36 bits long is likely to have been found. Anything much longer, and chances become vanishing small.
There are no DECSS codes that I know of that will fit in 36 bits, so this monkeys and typewriters approach is unlikely to have generated any DVD software.
However, the human genome has produced systems capable of playing DVDs, indirectly, so all that evolution hasn't been completely wasted.
But you could encode DeCSS in a retrovirus and put it into your genome artificially. Or you could put it into a rhinovirus and infect some DCMA executives. Then sue them for distributing the code whenever they sneeze.
Under the rule of thumb mentioned, you wouldn't need 400 feet per second since air drag gets you once you're down to, say 50 nm. Call it 320 feet per second, or 10 g-seconds. If your rocket pack has a specific impulse of 250 seconds, then 15 pounds of rocket can de-orbit 375 pounds of ballsy/desparate astronaut, life support, heat shield, chute, etc.
One proposal presented to NASA included a line something like 'An emergency space rescue system does not have to be any safer than bailing out of a malfunctioning fighter plane.' Needless to say, NASA objected to such a statement (how can you even think of doing something that's not 100% safe?). An Air Force station would presumably have more realistic safety requirements than NASA.
About a decade ago, people started to realize that Cheap Access To Space (CATS, meaning a cost of ~$100/kg or less, including profit) could be reasonably achieved with current technology used to develop a Single Stage To Orbit (SSTO) vehicle.
The trick to making it cheap was to use existing technologies, far from the bleeding edge and accepting some loss in absolute performance, and small launch teams to fly often. A dozen people launching once a day would be reasonable. This is in direct contrast to The NASA Way of developing high technology to squeeze out the maximum theoretically possible performance for rockets that take tens of thousands of people to launch every month or so.
A prototype vehicle, the DC-X, was built by McDonnell Douglas Aerospace. It flew several times, demonstrating such techniques as vertical take-off and landing, rapid turnaround and operations with a small launch crew. It was highly successful, and Congress was impressed and allocated more money to continue development.
Unfortunately, the money never got there. It turns out that BMDO (Ballistic Missile Defense Organization--Star Wars) was developing the DC-X because they had use for getting into space cheaply. This was 1994, Clinton was now in office, and anything that helps Star Wars was inherently evil. The money was choked off by 'the unknown staffer'.
Renegade forces at NASA managed to rescue the DC-X program briefly. But it was a flight test program, things happen, and eventually the test vehicle toppled over on landing (landing gear problem) and burned. That's why you always make two or more flight test objects if you can afford it.
But the demonstration project was so visibly successful that NASA announced a competition to build the next step X-vehicle, the X-33. This would be a single stage vehicle that would not necessarily get all the way to orbit, but would reach certain performance levels (mach numbers, etc.) while demonstrating the technologies needed. It was explicitly stated in the announcement that achieving the goal with the lowest technology risk, staying within the state of the art as far as possible, would be favored.
McDonnell Douglas proposed a follow-on to their DC-X vehicle, using achievable technology. The contract went to LockMart, at a ceremony where Al Gore (remember him?) praised all the technology developments that their version would require.
The LockMart X-33 had quite a few technology requirements that were hard. One of them was developing the large composite cryogenic tanks required for the high-performance (but bulky, low temperature) liquid hydrogen they would use. When people questioned their ability to make the tanks, LockMart said, effectively, 'We can't say--wink wink--that we have ever made tanks like these, but--wink wink--we are a defense contractor with experience in various classified projects.'
They were lying only by implication of course, but the tanks they tried to build delaminated due to shoddy workmanship and their apparent lack of experience with building large composite cryogenic tanks.
To cut a long story short, they were 3 years and about a billion dollars away from high-mach number flight when they won the contract in 1996. Five years and about a billion later, they claim to be within 2 years and a bunch more government handouts to being able to possibly fly at a much lower speed, maybe achieving some of the requirements.
LockMart is raking in the bucks with their current high cost expedable rockets. Some cynics have suggested that they have no interest in developing a vehicle that will cut launch costs by one or two orders of magnitude.
Sometimes, it's best to just cut your losses. Ever hear of the space station (estimated in 1982 to be completed by 1990 for $8 billion)?
no evidence that the dolphins can understand it at all. Like parrots.
Actually, at least one parrot can understand human speech and answer questions. You show him something red and wood, and ask what color it is, he answers (red) or what it's made of, and he answers 'wood'. He is not just 'Clever Hans'ing it.
The choice is not between a bunch of 'FBC' missions and a bunch of Battlestar Galactica class missions.
The choice is between several FBC missions a year, vs. one Galactica per decade.
NASA would not have spent the billions of dollars a Galileo type probe costs in order to explore an insignificant asteroid. And they certainly wouldn't have been receptive to a scientist saying, "Hey! let's land this baby on an asteroid and see what happens."
From what I was able to extract from the abstract, they have a 95% confidence level requirement, and they checked a variety of possible causes:
'Other sources of electromagnetic radiation such as high-voltage lines, electrical machines, complex electrical environments, visual display terminals, or radar units were not associated with uveal melanoma.'
So, they checked at least half a dozen different possible factors. Each time they sliced the data a different way, and only once did they get a probability less than 1/20. Naively, you would expect them to get this result about one time in three if there is no real effect. It wouldn't surprise me if there are two other studies, testing other sets of patients or other random diseases, that found no correlation and did not get into the tabloids.
It is a simple example of lunchmeat statistics-- No matter how you slice it, it's still baloney.
This article in the
RISKS digest
has a typosquatting case from 1994: The 1-800-OPERATER scam.
The very earliest case I now of is a guy who was jealous of his brother's success. So he set up his own town and put signs on the road pointing the other direction, leading to Reme.
If people don't know what acceleration is, it is necessary to define it.
If people know what acceleration is, they also know that the definition given is slightly inaccurate. (Acceleration is the derivative of velocity, not speed. You can travel at a constant speed in a circle and still have high acceleration, which is about what these stars are actually doing.)
So people who know that they don't know appreciate the definition.
People who know that they know ignore the simplification of the newsmedia definition.
The only people who complain are those who don't know that they don't know.
Slashdot Mirror
MP3s of Hawking are at
M.C. Hawking's Crib [http://www.mchawking.com]
including tracks from "A Brief History of Rhyme" and singles such as "Why Won't Jesse Helms Just Hurry Up And Die? "
According to someone I know on the project, they might have a launch opportunity for Triana if they send the shuttle up to recover UARS.
-53C is the global average, rather than the equatorial average. Mars gets as warm as 27 C. The pressure is also dependent on the altitude, just as it is on Earth, and Valles Marinaris is 7 km deep. The highest pressure is up to about 9 millibars, well above the 6 millibars of the triple point of water. (See the nine planets for a handy reference).
In low-lying equatorial regions, you can temporarily get conditions that support liquid water.
This way, the message is only on the screen for the duration of the time the installation is running. If it hangs, you have a mea culpa sitting there. If it doesn't hang, but the next thing does, the whizzomatic is absolved.
However, they are toning down the Christian elements to cater to today's readers.
Now I'm as Godless as the next guy, but I can't help but think that this would be slightly contrary to C. S. Lewis's original vision for his series. I think I can speak for everyone in wishing the publisher a painful eternity in the fires that burn but do not consume.
We would have used it for Swift instead of the previous generation's RAD6000 If it had been available earlier.
The 1.2 Million signatures required to launch a shuttle are NOT a good thing.
In one case, there were three signatures saying that a work platform had been removed from the shuttle bay. And yet when the shuttle was lifted to vertical, the platform was still in the cargo bay and it dropped to the aft end and caused damage. Diffusion of responsibility is not a good thing--when everyone is to blame, no one is to blame.
Assume 16-32 billion base pairs have been sequenced so far. Each base pair represents 2 bits (4 possiblities: ATCG). So we have about 2^36 bits. Assuming that everything is statistically independent (it's not), that means that a random sequence 36 bits long is likely to have been found. Anything much longer, and chances become vanishing small.
There are no DECSS codes that I know of that will fit in 36 bits, so this monkeys and typewriters approach is unlikely to have generated any DVD software.
However, the human genome has produced systems capable of playing DVDs, indirectly, so all that evolution hasn't been completely wasted.
But you could encode DeCSS in a retrovirus and put it into your genome artificially. Or you could put it into a rhinovirus and infect some DCMA executives. Then sue them for distributing the code whenever they sneeze.
And in the case of tethers, 'This is not NASA' typically means 'This works'.
e.g., the Small Expendable Deployment Systems (SEDS) which is a dirt-cheap (by aerospace standards) system that has flown successfully several times.
Under the rule of thumb mentioned, you wouldn't need 400 feet per second since air drag gets you once you're down to, say 50 nm. Call it 320 feet per second, or 10 g-seconds. If your rocket pack has a specific impulse of 250 seconds, then 15 pounds of rocket can de-orbit 375 pounds of ballsy/desparate astronaut, life support, heat shield, chute, etc.
One proposal presented to NASA included a line something like 'An emergency space rescue system does not have to be any safer than bailing out of a malfunctioning fighter plane.' Needless to say, NASA objected to such a statement (how can you even think of doing something that's not 100% safe?). An Air Force station would presumably have more realistic safety requirements than NASA.
The trick to making it cheap was to use existing technologies, far from the bleeding edge and accepting some loss in absolute performance, and small launch teams to fly often. A dozen people launching once a day would be reasonable. This is in direct contrast to The NASA Way of developing high technology to squeeze out the maximum theoretically possible performance for rockets that take tens of thousands of people to launch every month or so.
A prototype vehicle, the DC-X, was built by McDonnell Douglas Aerospace. It flew several times, demonstrating such techniques as vertical take-off and landing, rapid turnaround and operations with a small launch crew. It was highly successful, and Congress was impressed and allocated more money to continue development.
Unfortunately, the money never got there. It turns out that BMDO (Ballistic Missile Defense Organization--Star Wars) was developing the DC-X because they had use for getting into space cheaply. This was 1994, Clinton was now in office, and anything that helps Star Wars was inherently evil. The money was choked off by 'the unknown staffer'.
Renegade forces at NASA managed to rescue the DC-X program briefly. But it was a flight test program, things happen, and eventually the test vehicle toppled over on landing (landing gear problem) and burned. That's why you always make two or more flight test objects if you can afford it.
But the demonstration project was so visibly successful that NASA announced a competition to build the next step X-vehicle, the X-33. This would be a single stage vehicle that would not necessarily get all the way to orbit, but would reach certain performance levels (mach numbers, etc.) while demonstrating the technologies needed. It was explicitly stated in the announcement that achieving the goal with the lowest technology risk, staying within the state of the art as far as possible, would be favored.
McDonnell Douglas proposed a follow-on to their DC-X vehicle, using achievable technology. The contract went to LockMart, at a ceremony where Al Gore (remember him?) praised all the technology developments that their version would require.
The LockMart X-33 had quite a few technology requirements that were hard. One of them was developing the large composite cryogenic tanks required for the high-performance (but bulky, low temperature) liquid hydrogen they would use. When people questioned their ability to make the tanks, LockMart said, effectively, 'We can't say--wink wink--that we have ever made tanks like these, but--wink wink--we are a defense contractor with experience in various classified projects.'
They were lying only by implication of course, but the tanks they tried to build delaminated due to shoddy workmanship and their apparent lack of experience with building large composite cryogenic tanks.
To cut a long story short, they were 3 years and about a billion dollars away from high-mach number flight when they won the contract in 1996. Five years and about a billion later, they claim to be within 2 years and a bunch more government handouts to being able to possibly fly at a much lower speed, maybe achieving some of the requirements.
LockMart is raking in the bucks with their current high cost expedable rockets. Some cynics have suggested that they have no interest in developing a vehicle that will cut launch costs by one or two orders of magnitude.
Sometimes, it's best to just cut your losses. Ever hear of the space station (estimated in 1982 to be completed by 1990 for $8 billion)?
Actually, at least one parrot can understand human speech and answer questions. You show him something red and wood, and ask what color it is, he answers (red) or what it's made of, and he answers 'wood'. He is not just 'Clever Hans'ing it.
See the previous discussion on Slashdot and other links such as the Alex project home page.
The choice is not between a bunch of 'FBC' missions and a bunch of Battlestar Galactica class missions. The choice is between several FBC missions a year, vs. one Galactica per decade.
NASA would not have spent the billions of dollars a Galileo type probe costs in order to explore an insignificant asteroid. And they certainly wouldn't have been receptive to a scientist saying, "Hey! let's land this baby on an asteroid and see what happens."
From what I was able to extract from the abstract, they have a 95% confidence level requirement, and they checked a variety of possible causes:
So, they checked at least half a dozen different possible factors. Each time they sliced the data a different way, and only once did they get a probability less than 1/20. Naively, you would expect them to get this result about one time in three if there is no real effect. It wouldn't surprise me if there are two other studies, testing other sets of patients or other random diseases, that found no correlation and did not get into the tabloids.It is a simple example of lunchmeat statistics-- No matter how you slice it, it's still baloney.
The very earliest case I now of is a guy who was jealous of his brother's success. So he set up his own town and put signs on the road pointing the other direction, leading to Reme.
If people know what acceleration is, they also know that the definition given is slightly inaccurate. (Acceleration is the derivative of velocity, not speed. You can travel at a constant speed in a circle and still have high acceleration, which is about what these stars are actually doing.)
So people who know that they don't know appreciate the definition.
People who know that they know ignore the simplification of the newsmedia definition.
The only people who complain are those who don't know that they don't know.