I'm trying to think of an elegant way to BOTH hit a comet with a slug of metal and then to land a rover on it shortly therafter. So far, I can't think of a good way to do it. The high energy of comets makes it easy to slam things into them at high velocity, but tough to rendezvous with.
"At least triple Congressional salaries and beef up the pension"? They already get ridiculously cushy pensions as it is -- FOR LIFE -- and get more than enough from their lobbyists etc. Who the hell needs two homes anyway? I do just fine with my single one at 1000 sq. ft. We really need to go back to true citizen-legislators.
They're not supposed to be getting any cash for personal use from lobbyists. I can't quote you chapter and verse from the USC, but I'm pretty sure that's illegal.
And yes, you need two homes. You have to be a resident of your congressional district, in which you spend a fair bit of time when not in session. Decent housing in D.C. is very expensive and hard to find. So, if you want citizen legislators for limited terms(I do), and you want good ones, pay them like you're serious. 160 K$/year is lower middle class in D.C. and surrounds, and would make it difficult for the bulk of our talent pool to interrupt their careers to take the job.
Throwing money at problems doesn't work. It just turns it into a more expensive problem,like the space station, which by my reckoning has cost at least $60 billion dollars (arguably more like $80 billion) and does diddly-squat. In the case in question, the problem is internal NASA politics and culture, which is highly resistant to change, often self-righteously so. This is why most of what NASA really gets done is executed by non-NASA entitites: JPL (run by Cal Tech), APL (run by Johns Hopkins), and various university groups, non-profits and consortia.
The other problem with NASA is a problem everywhere: pork barrel politics. Once money starts going down a hole, it keeps going down there because the congress critters need it to. Here's a summary of my idea to get rid of it:
At least triple Congressional salaries and beef up the pension to make the job attractive to a wider talent base. You can't keep two homes, one of them in D.C., for any less than $350,000/year, and current slary for most is $162,100/yr. This small investment would pay off in spades - Ithink we should value our legislators at least as miuch as our college basketball coaches.
Let each state determine that state's method of electing or appointing and unseating senators. I think the ideal would be a lifetime appointment by the governor with legislative approval and with recall by a 2/3 vote of the legislature.
Representatives still elected directly, but limited to a single 6 year term. Stagger the elections so discontent with a particular party's policies can be felt every two years.
Require each congressperson to sign their earmarks.
There certainly a lot more skepticism about business plans this time. Google's stock may well be overvalued, but they are making money. What's missing this time is all the startups with pure vapor concepts and the VCs who worry that they will be the ones who "don't get it." This threat of a social stigma representing missed opportunity is the new Killer Rabbit. Maybe people even know that the vast majority of internet startup investments are going to be money thrown down a hole.
Well, to be fair, most of the IDers are Old Earth. As time goes on, the Young Earthers are becoming more and more of a fringe movement (thouggh their numbers are still uncomfortably large, IIRC).
Agreed. That is exactly how macro -evolution happens. Sometimes it moves faster or slower depending on selection pressure from environomental change, sexual selection, predator/prey arms races, etc. There really isn't any controversy about this. "Suddenly" usually means in a few hundred thousand generations or so. No one has provided evidence for single-generation macro-evolutional leaps, or "saltation." This is because embryology and the later development of the phenotype has to be brought along with the migration of the genome. Think of a species as a small blob in gene space. Most of the paths these blobs can move through gene space are unfeasible becuas the phenoype would be sharply selected against. As time progresses, that blob may stay where it is, or grow, or divide or migrate through some fairly narrow paths to another place. IF the blob shrinks too msall, the species goes extinct, as species are wont to do.
See D. Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea for a useful metaphor: the Library of Mendel.
It's not clear to me what you're arguing here, but it sounds like just another "God of the Gaps" argument, whcih even many Christians reject explicitly: "science can't yet explain X, so we turn to religion to explain it." Then,as the gaps narrow, your God gets smaller and less important. Eventually, the gaps close altogether.
Human and social behavior are complex and have a complex and fascinating history. It will take a long time to find all the evidence and make sense of it, but there has been substantial progress for more than a century. As we advance further, will the little god who dwells within the Great Mystery of Human Existence then be evicted? I think so.
Even if I accepted that ID is falsifiable - which I don't - that is a specious argument at best. Astrology is falsifiable, but hasn't been anything close to a science for millenia. Astrology is not taught as science, because it isn't, and because its claims have been falsified going back to St. Augustine.
Science is hard. The ID cargo cult doesn't much care for that reality, so makes up a fantasy that isn't hard and supports their unexamined dogma.
You're probably thinking of JPL's PKB Express, which was cancelled. New Horizons started cutting metal in earnest around 2003, which is when they had their CDR. Most of their flight avionics was completed in 2004, wich is also when most of their flight software saw it first release. Long lead time isn't the reason they didn't use an ion engine. The reason is that given the current state of ion engine technology, it would be a bad idea - especially when they had a mission design that closed with a relatively low risk ELV.
Ion engines are great for some missions, but have two major drawbacks - they require lots of power, and they provide very low thrust with consequent long trip times. When you're flying to Pluto, an RTG is your only real power option, and you get about 200 Watts and dropping. Using multiple RTGs wasn't an option for several good reasons. Bottom line - you need to get to Pluto fast if you want to have any power to do science there.
Fripp has been an unabashed Powerbook user for a few years now. However, he has a number of ties to folks in Seattle and some current and former MS employees.
I haven't had Mod points in more than a year in spite of Excellent karma, and frequent meta-modding doesn't seem to help. I'm blacklisted for reasons that escape me.
Well, it wouldn't have been hard to write the Genesis account to include consistent answers to such questions - if that were the concern of the those writers. It wasn't. They were reworking existing mythology, not writing a history. Nagging little qeustions about who Cain's wife was were of no importance. Thye were passing along a tradition, not embellishing on it.
So, I don't like to get into those kinds of things. The simple explanation is that Cain is a mythic figure and there was a substantial neolithic population to choose from just beofre the dawn of civilization. Waht Genesis is really about is the human loss of innocence and its aftermath.
Not the Army, but the Air Force, and really the NRO, whom the Air Force is working for in the spysat biz.
Second, they never did it. The Vandenberg site was a boondoggle and work on the Shuttle facility was scrapped after Challenger. I was living in L.A. in the early 80s and REALLY looking forward to shuttle flights out of Vandenberg. SLIC-6 at Vandenberg is now an ELV facility, and the Air Force has EELV, which handles their requirements.
Agree, however, that the shuttle was trying to please too many people in order to get funded. That, and they jumped from drawing board to operational fleet of 5 orbiters without a true demonstrator or X-rocket. The Shuttle Main Engine is an impressive technical achievement, but is costly to reuse. The original vision of routine spaceflight at $100/kg was never remotely achieved.
But there are good reasons to think that mtDNA has been under positive selection recently in human prehistory. Most notable among these reasons is the fact that human mtDNA violates every test of neutrality.
What in the phenotype do propose is being selected?
Could this be a case of sexual selection? Is it possible that human males found Neanderthal females unappealing?
You don't understand what an atheist is. An atheist is someone who denies the literal existence of any theistic deity, classing said entities with Leprechauns, the Boogy Man, and Bigfoot. Santa Claus has a slightly higher status, since some of us lie to our children about that.
Both your lives mean nothing in the end because after you die, you cease to exist in all forms.
As for your multiple non-sequiturs about meaning and purpose, I'm not going to debate anything so poorly thought out. The fallacies are so tangled up together I can't distinguish them. What is the argument, exactly? Make it plain. I've come across things that ARE hard for me to grasp, but this doesn't qualify.
Who said that atheists don't believe in a spiritual life? You can have spirituality aplenty without a deity or anything supernatural at all. As the old Zen master said - if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!
I personally have plenty of reasons to live (I'm leaving in 10 minutes to go pick one of them up from preschool) without a supernatural invisible friend or a fantasy (nighmarishly dull) afterlife. They're my reasons, not someone else's, and not delusions.
There has been some discussion of doing this, but you need two things:
A balloon at high altitude, above nearly all the clouds and with a view of a large area of the Earth.
A tethered ballon that doesn't float away with the jet stream
The problem has always been the weight of the tether. New materials are likely to make that problem go away. Then communications balloons are a great idea.
I sense that Hoagland, as people tend to do, largely believes his own bullshit. Still, he knows it's bullshit. His talent is for handling large amounts of cognitive dissonance.
This article implies a non-sequitur conclusion - that since Spacecship 1 didn't go into orbit, it's not possible to do it better or ceahper than NASA has done with the Shuttle. Yes, it will cost much more than $26M to develop SS3, but I can't see how anyone could have built a "reusable" vehicle less efficiently. BAsed on blindly optimistic and untested assumptions (wich many knew were spurious), NASA went from drawing board to operational system in one jump, so we are stuck with 1970s technology and massive per-flight costs that devastate the NASA budget year after year.
the shuttle has been for some time (15+ years) now been known to be a massive failure. It came nowhere near its putative objective to provide cheap, routine space transport. It is neither cheap nor routine, and so has not found a market.
Let's compare apples and apples - could NASA have built and flown SpaceshipOne for $25M? No. They would still be working on it and would spend that much on paper studies easily. Is spaceship 1 and orbital craft? No. Is it possible to do much, much beter than NASA has done with the shuttle? Yes. Is machinery as complicated as the SSME at all necessary for cheap, reliable space transport? No.
Rutan has several things working for him: he has a small, talented team. He has few or no political constraints. Theirs is a low-ceremony culture (NASA thinks in terms of paper reviews). SC are masters at materials and airframe design, and they are very good and experienced at flight test - both strategy and tactics. I'm optimistic that they (or someone following after them) can take spaceflight to the next level - routine space tourism.
Space Elevators are probably necessary for the next cost plateau, but they are realistically 30 years away. Routine Virgin Galactic flights are probably 4-5 years away.
Re:Old news is no news. :-(
on
Defeating Captcha
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The blurb leads one to believe that there's a new script kiddie tool in the wild.
I doubt it. I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he's just trying to make sure what he's doing is responsible by releassing the code. And what he's doing at this site is mainly pointing out the weaknesses in some common captchas.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm trying to think of an elegant way to BOTH hit a comet with a slug of metal and then to land a rover on it shortly therafter. So far, I can't think of a good way to do it. The high energy of comets makes it easy to slam things into them at high velocity, but tough to rendezvous with.
You can't get anything like a decent house in a safe neighborhood for $100kish in D.C. Not even double that.
We're not talking mansions. A middlin' size townhouse in good condition in a nice part of D.C. could easily run you $600K.
They're not supposed to be getting any cash for personal use from lobbyists. I can't quote you chapter and verse from the USC, but I'm pretty sure that's illegal.
And yes, you need two homes. You have to be a resident of your congressional district, in which you spend a fair bit of time when not in session. Decent housing in D.C. is very expensive and hard to find. So, if you want citizen legislators for limited terms(I do), and you want good ones, pay them like you're serious. 160 K$/year is lower middle class in D.C. and surrounds, and would make it difficult for the bulk of our talent pool to interrupt their careers to take the job.
Throwing money at problems doesn't work. It just turns it into a more expensive problem,like the space station, which by my reckoning has cost at least $60 billion dollars (arguably more like $80 billion) and does diddly-squat. In the case in question, the problem is internal NASA politics and culture, which is highly resistant to change, often self-righteously so. This is why most of what NASA really gets done is executed by non-NASA entitites: JPL (run by Cal Tech), APL (run by Johns Hopkins), and various university groups, non-profits and consortia.
The other problem with NASA is a problem everywhere: pork barrel politics. Once money starts going down a hole, it keeps going down there because the congress critters need it to. Here's a summary of my idea to get rid of it:
There certainly a lot more skepticism about business plans this time. Google's stock may well be overvalued, but they are making money. What's missing this time is all the startups with pure vapor concepts and the VCs who worry that they will be the ones who "don't get it." This threat of a social stigma representing missed opportunity is the new Killer Rabbit. Maybe people even know that the vast majority of internet startup investments are going to be money thrown down a hole.
http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc/astrology.htm l
Well, to be fair, most of the IDers are Old Earth. As time goes on, the Young Earthers are becoming more and more of a fringe movement (thouggh their numbers are still uncomfortably large, IIRC).
Agreed. That is exactly how macro -evolution happens. Sometimes it moves faster or slower depending on selection pressure from environomental change, sexual selection, predator/prey arms races, etc. There really isn't any controversy about this. "Suddenly" usually means in a few hundred thousand generations or so. No one has provided evidence for single-generation macro-evolutional leaps, or "saltation." This is because embryology and the later development of the phenotype has to be brought along with the migration of the genome. Think of a species as a small blob in gene space. Most of the paths these blobs can move through gene space are unfeasible becuas the phenoype would be sharply selected against. As time progresses, that blob may stay where it is, or grow, or divide or migrate through some fairly narrow paths to another place. IF the blob shrinks too msall, the species goes extinct, as species are wont to do.
See D. Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea for a useful metaphor: the Library of Mendel.
It's not clear to me what you're arguing here, but it sounds like just another "God of the Gaps" argument, whcih even many Christians reject explicitly: "science can't yet explain X, so we turn to religion to explain it." Then,as the gaps narrow, your God gets smaller and less important. Eventually, the gaps close altogether.
Human and social behavior are complex and have a complex and fascinating history. It will take a long time to find all the evidence and make sense of it, but there has been substantial progress for more than a century. As we advance further, will the little god who dwells within the Great Mystery of Human Existence then be evicted? I think so.
Even if I accepted that ID is falsifiable - which I don't - that is a specious argument at best. Astrology is falsifiable, but hasn't been anything close to a science for millenia. Astrology is not taught as science, because it isn't, and because its claims have been falsified going back to St. Augustine.
Science is hard. The ID cargo cult doesn't much care for that reality, so makes up a fantasy that isn't hard and supports their unexamined dogma.
You're probably thinking of JPL's PKB Express, which was cancelled. New Horizons started cutting metal in earnest around 2003, which is when they had their CDR. Most of their flight avionics was completed in 2004, wich is also when most of their flight software saw it first release. Long lead time isn't the reason they didn't use an ion engine. The reason is that given the current state of ion engine technology, it would be a bad idea - especially when they had a mission design that closed with a relatively low risk ELV.
Ion engines are great for some missions, but have two major drawbacks - they require lots of power, and they provide very low thrust with consequent long trip times. When you're flying to Pluto, an RTG is your only real power option, and you get about 200 Watts and dropping. Using multiple RTGs wasn't an option for several good reasons. Bottom line - you need to get to Pluto fast if you want to have any power to do science there.
Fripp has been an unabashed Powerbook user for a few years now. However, he has a number of ties to folks in Seattle and some current and former MS employees.
I haven't had Mod points in more than a year in spite of Excellent karma, and frequent meta-modding doesn't seem to help. I'm blacklisted for reasons that escape me.
Well, it wouldn't have been hard to write the Genesis account to include consistent answers to such questions - if that were the concern of the those writers. It wasn't. They were reworking existing mythology, not writing a history. Nagging little qeustions about who Cain's wife was were of no importance. Thye were passing along a tradition, not embellishing on it.
So, I don't like to get into those kinds of things. The simple explanation is that Cain is a mythic figure and there was a substantial neolithic population to choose from just beofre the dawn of civilization. Waht Genesis is really about is the human loss of innocence and its aftermath.
Not the Army, but the Air Force, and really the NRO, whom the Air Force is working for in the spysat biz.
Second, they never did it. The Vandenberg site was a boondoggle and work on the Shuttle facility was scrapped after Challenger. I was living in L.A. in the early 80s and REALLY looking forward to shuttle flights out of Vandenberg. SLIC-6 at Vandenberg is now an ELV facility, and the Air Force has EELV, which handles their requirements.
Agree, however, that the shuttle was trying to please too many people in order to get funded. That, and they jumped from drawing board to operational fleet of 5 orbiters without a true demonstrator or X-rocket. The Shuttle Main Engine is an impressive technical achievement, but is costly to reuse. The original vision of routine spaceflight at $100/kg was never remotely achieved.
What in the phenotype do propose is being selected?
Could this be a case of sexual selection? Is it possible that human males found Neanderthal females unappealing?
You don't understand what an atheist is. An atheist is someone who denies the literal existence of any theistic deity, classing said entities with Leprechauns, the Boogy Man, and Bigfoot. Santa Claus has a slightly higher status, since some of us lie to our children about that.
As for your multiple non-sequiturs about meaning and purpose, I'm not going to debate anything so poorly thought out. The fallacies are so tangled up together I can't distinguish them. What is the argument, exactly? Make it plain. I've come across things that ARE hard for me to grasp, but this doesn't qualify.
Who said that atheists don't believe in a spiritual life? You can have spirituality aplenty without a deity or anything supernatural at all. As the old Zen master said - if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!
I personally have plenty of reasons to live (I'm leaving in 10 minutes to go pick one of them up from preschool) without a supernatural invisible friend or a fantasy (nighmarishly dull) afterlife. They're my reasons, not someone else's, and not delusions.
There has been some discussion of doing this, but you need two things:
The problem has always been the weight of the tether. New materials are likely to make that problem go away. Then communications balloons are a great idea.
I sense that Hoagland, as people tend to do, largely believes his own bullshit. Still, he knows it's bullshit. His talent is for handling large amounts of cognitive dissonance.
This article implies a non-sequitur conclusion - that since Spacecship 1 didn't go into orbit, it's not possible to do it better or ceahper than NASA has done with the Shuttle. Yes, it will cost much more than $26M to develop SS3, but I can't see how anyone could have built a "reusable" vehicle less efficiently. BAsed on blindly optimistic and untested assumptions (wich many knew were spurious), NASA went from drawing board to operational system in one jump, so we are stuck with 1970s technology and massive per-flight costs that devastate the NASA budget year after year.
the shuttle has been for some time (15+ years) now been known to be a massive failure. It came nowhere near its putative objective to provide cheap, routine space transport. It is neither cheap nor routine, and so has not found a market.
Let's compare apples and apples - could NASA have built and flown SpaceshipOne for $25M? No. They would still be working on it and would spend that much on paper studies easily. Is spaceship 1 and orbital craft? No. Is it possible to do much, much beter than NASA has done with the shuttle? Yes. Is machinery as complicated as the SSME at all necessary for cheap, reliable space transport? No.
Rutan has several things working for him: he has a small, talented team. He has few or no political constraints. Theirs is a low-ceremony culture (NASA thinks in terms of paper reviews). SC are masters at materials and airframe design, and they are very good and experienced at flight test - both strategy and tactics. I'm optimistic that they (or someone following after them) can take spaceflight to the next level - routine space tourism.
Space Elevators are probably necessary for the next cost plateau, but they are realistically 30 years away. Routine Virgin Galactic flights are probably 4-5 years away.
I doubt it. I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he's just trying to make sure what he's doing is responsible by releassing the code. And what he's doing at this site is mainly pointing out the weaknesses in some common captchas.
Adrian Belew summed it up quite nicely:
Dennett has made a strong case that determinism is a non-issue for Free Will. I refer you to Freedom Evolves.