Actually, there's merit in that thought, but not for the heating system. Cars are generally heated via waste heat from the engine. The energy cost there is essentially the fan needed to blow the air. Compared to the AC unit, that's loose change.
That said, a hotter car in cooler weather *does* mean that the engine starts out warmer and so it spends less time in that really harsh, nasty zone where the lubricants are all viscous and the car has to work harder. My car has a instantaneous mileage meter and I can tell you that when the car starts out, the mileage is worse and in colder weather it's much worse. So a darker car in a cooler climate should, at least during daylight, lead to more fuel efficiency.
(Yes, my car is a dark blue. The problem with heating doesn't affect me almost at all since I basically refuse to use the AC except in cases where the heat is unbearable to me or any passenger. For me, that point has yet to come up, so I've used the AC twice in the past three years --- all due to passengers' discomfort. Realistically, instead of trying to legislate this with technical fixes, I suspect people need to just lay off the minor comforts a bit; even turning the set-point on the AC up a few degrees would help enormously.)
I can't speak to every school district in the country, only to the one where I went to school. (That was 15 years ago, no less, so everything may have changed.) I suspect this is similar everywhere, though: I dropped off my Exederin (I've been getting migraines since I was 8) with the school nurse every year and if I needed the pain-killers, I went down to the office. So there are options.
Of course, you can wonder whether it's really reasonable that we're not allowing teens to carry their own OTC drugs. (The school district's response was: we don't know what drugs are really in those bottles. Then again, they never actually tested my Exederin.)
While I won't debate the merits of the shows as gauged by individual preferences, they still have Eureka. (I'm told new episodes start airing something after BSG ends.) Eureka has apparently done better in popularity than BSG, so I gather it's likely to be their new flagship show.
No disagreement here, although one must recognize that there are often cases that exist on the borderlands. Pluto is one such, although a good chunk of that is historical. (A bad reason to classify something, in my book. But astronomy is also filled with crappy systems and nomenclatures due to history. Exhibit A being the magnitude system and B being the stellar classes.)
The Catholic Church doesn't take entire Bible literally. Compared to American Christianity as a whole, the Church is pretty centrist for the most part.
It never included Pluto until it was discovered under a century ago. So now you're arguing that we shouldn't count Pluto? (Or Uranus and Neptune, I guess.)
There weren't nine originally, you see. There were five: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. So you're not making a lot of historical sense here in your historical argument.
You know that that's a pretty lame argument, right? No one "owns" a word (unless maybe it's trademarked). But if you want to talk about who originated the term... it was early Greek astronomers. So it seems like if anyone should be defining it, it's their intellectual descendents who use the term on a daily basis.
Neptune once the time gets right and Neptune gets to close it will just Suck up Pluto and not the other way around.
The problem with Pluto isn't so much Neptune (which, as someone already noted, will never encounter Pluto anyway thanks to their carefully time resonance) but the multitudes of other Pluto-like objects in the Edgeworth-Kuiper belt. At that point, either you're adding dozens of new "planets" to our solar system or you need to recognize that Pluto isn't an outlier like we generally think of planets being. It's part of a family of objects.
Someone on the Bad Astronomer's blog quantified it well: the ratio of Pluto's mass to the rest of the EKB is quite small compared to the ratio of any of the planets relative to the rest of the material in their part of the solar system. I hope that that would replace the less reasonable definition that the IAU adopted, although I think that this is what they were getting at.
Wait, what? The Moon is 1/81 the mass of Earth. I'm pretty sure that a 10% figure would be an upper limit on moon mass since there are no moons in the solar system that I can think of that are bigger than that. (Charon is, as I recall, around 9% of Pluto's mass... although I might be remembering the stat a tiny bit wrong.)
Actually, I didn't get my number from Wikpedia, but I can't recall where I heard it. (Maybe ultimately it goes back to Wikipedia? Dunno.) Still, a fair point. 16% it is (include CPB), although it doesn't change the point any. The amount paid directly by listeners is well in excess of this.
31% listener pledges, memberships, etc. As the GP points out, tax-deducatable donations are just a special kind of government funding.
Surely you can see that this is nonsense? Money I spend on a charitable donation does not reduce my taxes (therefore government income) by the same dollar amount. If it did, I'd pay my taxes to my favorite non-profits and screw the government. Heck, I'd bet most people don't even BOTHER to itemize their deductions to make the individual donations count. It's not worth the effort for the average taxpayer.
(Wikipedia claims universities, some of which are subsidized by government)
This is just plain stretching to the point of silliness. I can't speak to all universities, but I know the state university in Colorado is funded less than 10% by the state government.
NPR is only funded about 2% by the government. (And I believe most of that is bidded on, not just handed to them.) So yes, it is more "listener-supported" than "taxpayer-funded". And I don't think you understand what "non-profit" means, either. Where it gets the money is irrelevant, it's what it does with it that matters.
It wasn't just MPL that did it. There have been a string of Mars failures -- in addition to other, lower-profile failures -- that have shown that the "faster, better, cheaper" mantra is rather optimistic. Bigger missions with more eyes and more checks in place are more resilient to failures and more capable of bouncing back when something goes wrong, which needs to be factored into the budgeting calculus.
What happened is you can only have two of the three (to be glib about it). In reality, faster, cheaper, better works better for some missions than others. The Mars program seemed well-suited to that mantra (which was never really NASA policy as much as Golden's slogan for the public), but large, flagship-classes missions are *not* fast or cheap by their nature. They can do things than small, cheap missions can't, though.
Remember, "faster, cheaper, better" brought us the Mars failures as well as the successes. It'd be a real drag for a similar disaster to befall the Europa mission after years getting there.
A big chunk of any probe is power, communications/control, and thrust.
Designing these is not, as far as I know, a large piece of the cost at all. So why would standardizing them be useful?
Why send a mission to view in infrared and visible perfectly when you can send 4 probes for less money, each with a different pretty good sensors.
I dispute this claim. The bulk of the cost of any spacecraft isn't in designing the chassis, the communications, or propulsion. It's in instruments, personnel, and fuel needed to send it. More spacecraft need more fuel rather than less and are almost certainly more expensive to send. Sure, it lowers the total risk, but it's not less costly.
I already addressed launch cost assuming it won't scale. Spacecraft operation will scale with mass-production.
No, you didn't. You asserted that you could launch 4 spacecraft for the price of one with the same load-out. That's just not true, in general. One spacecraft with all of the same instruments will almost certainly be less massive than four spacecraft, each with its own separate systems. Additionally, you aren't reducing the risk with a single, mass launch since launch is the most dangerous time for a spacecraft. And in any case, a mass launch would really only make much sense if you're sending all the smaller craft to the same destination since different craft have different launch windows.
Standardization of comm and thrust mean you can have a common control room.
They already have one. I've been there. (You can visit, too.) And the protocol for communicating the data to the scientists (and from the scientists back to JPL) is also standardized across missions. This has nothing to do with your proposal, though.
I'm sorry, but a lot of things in the world don't scale well to mass-production. Even if we build a dozen examples of a given small spacecraft, I doubt we'd save any costs apart from design expenses. Interplanetary spacecraft in the current era of exploration just seems to be one of the things that doesn't work well with mass-production. Don't you think Lockheed or another aerospace company would be all over that if it would work?
Sure, but all of your arguments also apply to any other atmosphere we dick around with: the processes involved may not be conducive to creating a habitable atmosphere for the long term. Earth is more active, biologically and geologically, but we also know that our ideal atmosphere is somewhere near something of a metastable (or better) state and we don't even know that such a thing exists for Mars or Titan.
And while I agree that I'd rather muck about with Mars's atmosphere (planetary protection be damned), if Earth's atmosphere were truly on the ropes, a lot of my qualms would evaporate pretty fast.
1) Technology keeps moving forward. A standard platform would be obsolete and holding the program *back* within 5-10 years. (As it is, spacecraft use technology that always seems outdated.)
2) Most re-visiting missions require unique platforms to really cover the scientific goals. What works for Mars doesn't necessarily work for Saturn's rings, for example. Mariner/Pioneer/Voyager avoided this because they were survey missions: we didn't know what we were going to find, so we weren't in a good position to optimize them much.
3) In the end, a huge fraction (the bulk, I think) comes from fuel and the man-power to operate the spacecraft, not to build it. That's doesn't scale with mass-production.
Er, what? First off all, we're talking orbiters (or better) here, so you have to stop. Leaving orbit of Jupiter to head to Saturn takes a lot more fuel than just flying straight by. Plus, the instrument load-out would need to be different for both moons, eliminating a lot of the point of sending a dedicated probe.
Also, at the present moment, Jupiter and Saturn are farther from each other than either is from the Earth. Of course, distances aren't really a good measure for this sort of thing to begin with.
Either I'm missing your point or you're missing mine.
Sure, it'd be hard to turn the clock back on our atmosphere. I'm not saying it would be harder than, say, messing the atmosphere up. That wasn't my point. My point is that it'd be easier to fix OUR atmosphere (which has all the right basic components in roughly the right amounts and is in a pretty good place relative to the Sun to sustain us) than to terraform, say, Mars or Titan.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, there's merit in that thought, but not for the heating system. Cars are generally heated via waste heat from the engine. The energy cost there is essentially the fan needed to blow the air. Compared to the AC unit, that's loose change.
That said, a hotter car in cooler weather *does* mean that the engine starts out warmer and so it spends less time in that really harsh, nasty zone where the lubricants are all viscous and the car has to work harder. My car has a instantaneous mileage meter and I can tell you that when the car starts out, the mileage is worse and in colder weather it's much worse. So a darker car in a cooler climate should, at least during daylight, lead to more fuel efficiency.
(Yes, my car is a dark blue. The problem with heating doesn't affect me almost at all since I basically refuse to use the AC except in cases where the heat is unbearable to me or any passenger. For me, that point has yet to come up, so I've used the AC twice in the past three years --- all due to passengers' discomfort. Realistically, instead of trying to legislate this with technical fixes, I suspect people need to just lay off the minor comforts a bit; even turning the set-point on the AC up a few degrees would help enormously.)
I can't speak to every school district in the country, only to the one where I went to school. (That was 15 years ago, no less, so everything may have changed.) I suspect this is similar everywhere, though: I dropped off my Exederin (I've been getting migraines since I was 8) with the school nurse every year and if I needed the pain-killers, I went down to the office. So there are options.
Of course, you can wonder whether it's really reasonable that we're not allowing teens to carry their own OTC drugs. (The school district's response was: we don't know what drugs are really in those bottles. Then again, they never actually tested my Exederin.)
... It was me first day with th' hook?
While I won't debate the merits of the shows as gauged by individual preferences, they still have Eureka. (I'm told new episodes start airing something after BSG ends.) Eureka has apparently done better in popularity than BSG, so I gather it's likely to be their new flagship show.
Hesiod was Greek. The things he was interested in doing to their asses were probably not platonic.
Right, I know: I'm done.
No disagreement here, although one must recognize that there are often cases that exist on the borderlands. Pluto is one such, although a good chunk of that is historical. (A bad reason to classify something, in my book. But astronomy is also filled with crappy systems and nomenclatures due to history. Exhibit A being the magnitude system and B being the stellar classes.)
What are you trying to say?
The Catholic Church doesn't take entire Bible literally. Compared to American Christianity as a whole, the Church is pretty centrist for the most part.
It never included Pluto until it was discovered under a century ago. So now you're arguing that we shouldn't count Pluto? (Or Uranus and Neptune, I guess.)
There weren't nine originally, you see. There were five: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. So you're not making a lot of historical sense here in your historical argument.
You know that that's a pretty lame argument, right? No one "owns" a word (unless maybe it's trademarked). But if you want to talk about who originated the term... it was early Greek astronomers. So it seems like if anyone should be defining it, it's their intellectual descendents who use the term on a daily basis.
Neptune once the time gets right and Neptune gets to close it will just Suck up Pluto and not the other way around.
The problem with Pluto isn't so much Neptune (which, as someone already noted, will never encounter Pluto anyway thanks to their carefully time resonance) but the multitudes of other Pluto-like objects in the Edgeworth-Kuiper belt. At that point, either you're adding dozens of new "planets" to our solar system or you need to recognize that Pluto isn't an outlier like we generally think of planets being. It's part of a family of objects.
Someone on the Bad Astronomer's blog quantified it well: the ratio of Pluto's mass to the rest of the EKB is quite small compared to the ratio of any of the planets relative to the rest of the material in their part of the solar system. I hope that that would replace the less reasonable definition that the IAU adopted, although I think that this is what they were getting at.
It's actually better than that, even. The G ring is made up of dust particles, so the size ratio is even more in favor of the new moonlet.
Well, you'd leave out "rocky" since none of Saturn's moons that I can think of really meet that criterion.
in the wrong direction
I assume you you mean that it spins in the wrong direction (like Venus and Uranus)? It definitely orbits in a prograde sense.
In fact, it's called a "moonlet" in the original press-release: http://ciclops.org/view/5493/Tiny_Moonlet_Within_G_Ring_Arc
(Not sure why NASA's story linked in the summary doesn't use that title.)
Except that we call some of the smaller moons (including this one) moonlets as well.
Wait, what? The Moon is 1/81 the mass of Earth. I'm pretty sure that a 10% figure would be an upper limit on moon mass since there are no moons in the solar system that I can think of that are bigger than that. (Charon is, as I recall, around 9% of Pluto's mass... although I might be remembering the stat a tiny bit wrong.)
Actually, I didn't get my number from Wikpedia, but I can't recall where I heard it. (Maybe ultimately it goes back to Wikipedia? Dunno.) Still, a fair point. 16% it is (include CPB), although it doesn't change the point any. The amount paid directly by listeners is well in excess of this.
31% listener pledges, memberships, etc. As the GP points out, tax-deducatable donations are just a special kind of government funding.
Surely you can see that this is nonsense? Money I spend on a charitable donation does not reduce my taxes (therefore government income) by the same dollar amount. If it did, I'd pay my taxes to my favorite non-profits and screw the government. Heck, I'd bet most people don't even BOTHER to itemize their deductions to make the individual donations count. It's not worth the effort for the average taxpayer.
(Wikipedia claims universities, some of which are subsidized by government)
This is just plain stretching to the point of silliness. I can't speak to all universities, but I know the state university in Colorado is funded less than 10% by the state government.
NPR is only funded about 2% by the government. (And I believe most of that is bidded on, not just handed to them.) So yes, it is more "listener-supported" than "taxpayer-funded". And I don't think you understand what "non-profit" means, either. Where it gets the money is irrelevant, it's what it does with it that matters.
It wasn't just MPL that did it. There have been a string of Mars failures -- in addition to other, lower-profile failures -- that have shown that the "faster, better, cheaper" mantra is rather optimistic. Bigger missions with more eyes and more checks in place are more resilient to failures and more capable of bouncing back when something goes wrong, which needs to be factored into the budgeting calculus.
What ever happened to "faster, better, cheaper"??
What happened is you can only have two of the three (to be glib about it). In reality, faster, cheaper, better works better for some missions than others. The Mars program seemed well-suited to that mantra (which was never really NASA policy as much as Golden's slogan for the public), but large, flagship-classes missions are *not* fast or cheap by their nature. They can do things than small, cheap missions can't, though.
Remember, "faster, cheaper, better" brought us the Mars failures as well as the successes. It'd be a real drag for a similar disaster to befall the Europa mission after years getting there.
A big chunk of any probe is power, communications/control, and thrust.
Designing these is not, as far as I know, a large piece of the cost at all. So why would standardizing them be useful?
Why send a mission to view in infrared and visible perfectly when you can send 4 probes for less money, each with a different pretty good sensors.
I dispute this claim. The bulk of the cost of any spacecraft isn't in designing the chassis, the communications, or propulsion. It's in instruments, personnel, and fuel needed to send it. More spacecraft need more fuel rather than less and are almost certainly more expensive to send. Sure, it lowers the total risk, but it's not less costly.
I already addressed launch cost assuming it won't scale. Spacecraft operation will scale with mass-production.
No, you didn't. You asserted that you could launch 4 spacecraft for the price of one with the same load-out. That's just not true, in general. One spacecraft with all of the same instruments will almost certainly be less massive than four spacecraft, each with its own separate systems. Additionally, you aren't reducing the risk with a single, mass launch since launch is the most dangerous time for a spacecraft. And in any case, a mass launch would really only make much sense if you're sending all the smaller craft to the same destination since different craft have different launch windows.
Standardization of comm and thrust mean you can have a common control room.
They already have one. I've been there. (You can visit, too.) And the protocol for communicating the data to the scientists (and from the scientists back to JPL) is also standardized across missions. This has nothing to do with your proposal, though.
I'm sorry, but a lot of things in the world don't scale well to mass-production. Even if we build a dozen examples of a given small spacecraft, I doubt we'd save any costs apart from design expenses. Interplanetary spacecraft in the current era of exploration just seems to be one of the things that doesn't work well with mass-production. Don't you think Lockheed or another aerospace company would be all over that if it would work?
Sure, but all of your arguments also apply to any other atmosphere we dick around with: the processes involved may not be conducive to creating a habitable atmosphere for the long term. Earth is more active, biologically and geologically, but we also know that our ideal atmosphere is somewhere near something of a metastable (or better) state and we don't even know that such a thing exists for Mars or Titan.
And while I agree that I'd rather muck about with Mars's atmosphere (planetary protection be damned), if Earth's atmosphere were truly on the ropes, a lot of my qualms would evaporate pretty fast.
A few problems with that:
1) Technology keeps moving forward. A standard platform would be obsolete and holding the program *back* within 5-10 years. (As it is, spacecraft use technology that always seems outdated.)
2) Most re-visiting missions require unique platforms to really cover the scientific goals. What works for Mars doesn't necessarily work for Saturn's rings, for example. Mariner/Pioneer/Voyager avoided this because they were survey missions: we didn't know what we were going to find, so we weren't in a good position to optimize them much.
3) In the end, a huge fraction (the bulk, I think) comes from fuel and the man-power to operate the spacecraft, not to build it. That's doesn't scale with mass-production.
Er, what? First off all, we're talking orbiters (or better) here, so you have to stop. Leaving orbit of Jupiter to head to Saturn takes a lot more fuel than just flying straight by. Plus, the instrument load-out would need to be different for both moons, eliminating a lot of the point of sending a dedicated probe.
Also, at the present moment, Jupiter and Saturn are farther from each other than either is from the Earth. Of course, distances aren't really a good measure for this sort of thing to begin with.
Either I'm missing your point or you're missing mine.
Sure, it'd be hard to turn the clock back on our atmosphere. I'm not saying it would be harder than, say, messing the atmosphere up. That wasn't my point. My point is that it'd be easier to fix OUR atmosphere (which has all the right basic components in roughly the right amounts and is in a pretty good place relative to the Sun to sustain us) than to terraform, say, Mars or Titan.