I don't think you really understand how NASA works. Private industry already designs and builds basically everything they do - NASA doesn't have manufacturing capabilities. The thing that kills them is cost-plus contracting and the fact that they have to make engineering decisions not based on technical merit, but based on what will appease congress.
Not to mention, by the time SLS block II happens (if ever) SpaceX will likely have been flying on their giant methane-based Raptor engine for years. We're talking 100 tons+ to MARS, forget LEO.
I agree with you that NASA is a worthy recipient of our tax dollars, but as long as congress keeps mandating that they design rockets based on how many people they can employ in how many districts, we're never going to get out of LEO again. This money would be better spent on commercial crew type programs, with a commercial-off-the-shelf model rather than the chronically over-schedule and over-budget cost plus approach.
sure, the project is expensive but people need to understand there are immense differences between NASA's vehicle and the others. Not to mention all three companies are standing on the shoulders of a giant, NASA, and their projects are all dwarfed by what nasa is attempting to create.
SpaceX: hopefully delivering the CST-100 version 2, but honestly hasnt contributed a whole lot other than a sexy brand to the effort. CST100 was delivered by Boeing.
What the hell? SpaceX has the Dragon (and Dragon 2), not the CST100. SpaceX has had several successful, on-schedule, on-budget flights of the Dragon for cargo (including safe reentry) which has demonstrated the functionality of many subsystems that will be used in the manned version. The Dragon 2 has potential to be the safest manned capsule of the bunch - it can abort at literally any point in the launch profile, land with pinpoint accuracy, and has a strong enough heatshield for a return from Mars. Not to mention the Falcon 9 is the only rocket out there that can suffer an engine failure and still make mission. They have another rocket in development, again using many proven systems with which they have flight heritage, which will have more capability than any other existing rocket - Falcon Heavy. It has comparable capabilities to SLS Block I and is scheduled to fly 2 years sooner. Crossfeed capabilities will improve the capacity even more.
Boeing: not sexy, just practical. a design ripoff of many other NASA firsts, it is restricted to suborbital and cannot carry cargo.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I would say not sexy or practical, given that all they've demonstrated is a mockup and word is there are some serious technical issues with wind tunnel testing, etc. There's a good chance the CST100 won't survive the commercial crew downselect in August, and there's no indication that Boeing cares much about this.
Sierra Nevada: building what nasa did 30 years ago, this is designed for cargo and people. it is strictly suborbital. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Entirely wrong. This is an orbital craft - did you not see the dozens of marketing pictures of this docking with the ISS? This is a neat little craft with some significant development and test milestones already checked off - successful flights of a complete engineering model, engine tests, and reviews. They also have a launch scheduled for 2015, which they are financing on their own dime to demonstrate capability and earn at least some initial flight heritage. This has a unique capability, too, with the ability to abort during almost any time in the flight and land on runways all around the world.
NASA SLS: cargo, crew, suborbital, and interplanetary transport system. SLS is to be capable of lifting astronauts and hardware to near-Earth destinations such as asteroids, the Moon, Mars, and most of the Earth's Lagrangian points. SLS may also support trips to the International Space Station, if necessary. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
This is a paper rocket at this stage in the game. I can make a powerpoint presentation about a system that will go to Mars and back tomorrow - doesn't mean I can deliver. Sure, this rocket COULD be developed, and all of these exciting missions COULD happen, if we doubled NASA's budget - as it is, they don't even have the funding to properly develop and test the first article, much less finance an extended campaign of missions. Every dollar spent on this would go 5 times as far developing commercial crew capability, but it wouldn't funnel money to Alabama to build obsolete and failure-prone SRBs, so congress (and therefore NASA) will never drop it if they can help it.
We'll have to agree to disagree, I suppose. I am not familiar with the organization, they are apparently a podcast done by the women on IGN's staff, where they discuss games from a female perspective. That does not sound remotely sexual to me. The visual scheme on their homepage is a boxing glove and some stylized text. This is a podcast aimed at women - I don't think there's any reason to believe they are using sexual innuendo to titillate their target audience.
If anything, the fact that you feel the term is sexualized kind of supports their point - it is difficult for females to participate in this industry as equals.
I used to hold an attitude very much like yours, but I took some tests on this site
Congratulations, you've just been push-polled. Those tests aren't built to discover bias, they're built to convince you that you are biased.
Except that they showed I held no bias with race. Why don't you actually try it, and see if you can find a flaw with their methodology? Researchers need a good tool to study bias, and AFAIK this is a pretty highly regarded one. It's published by the psych dept. at Harvard FFS - I don't know what you WOULD consider a good test for bias.
They aren't complaining about being sexualized, as far as I can tell. They are complaining about being harassed. And the fact that some men get their rocks off on violence between women doesn't make the concept inherently sexual. The first page of google hits on that term include a film about a woman boxer and a women's martial arts academy.
I tend to agree with you, in general. However, I do think it is disingenuous to name a company "Girlfight" in a clear attempt to cash in on their sexuality, then contribute to an article complaining about it.
I don't think there's anything overtly sexual about "Girlfight". If you had a company named "Manfight" you wouldn't think of it as sexual. Plus, even if it is somehow intended to have sexual connotations - that doesn't in any way justify harassment. That's essentially the same as blaming a rape victim for dressing provocatively.
It's a very fair and objective measurement of your basic, gut reactions to things. I always assumed that I held no bias against black people - that turned out to be mostly true. I also felt like I had no bias against women in science/tech. Turned out that I was pretty wrong.
The fact is, things are not currently equal between men and women. Women are physically weaker, it's a simple fact, which means that they live in a constant state of heightened awareness compared to men. When was the last time you asked another guy to walk with you out to your car at night? Women are acutely aware of that physical power imbalance and rearrange their lives to try to avoid vulnerable situations. And we as a culture are perfectly fine with that and expect them to accommodate this violent reality - any time there's a rape story people instantly ask if she was dressed provocatively, or drinking, or in the wrong part of town, etc. It doesn't really matter where the hell I am, or how much I drink, or who I'm with, I'm pretty much never worried that I'm going to get in a compromising situation and get raped for it.
Have you ever had to work in a department where everybody else is a woman? Take that environment, where even if people aren't purposely excluding you they regularly talk about periods and tampons and things that you are fundamentally unable to relate to. Now imagine that every single one of those co-workers is physically more powerful than you are - whether that coworker is confrontational or not. Oh, and your supervisor, their supervisor, and on and on up to the top are all not your gender. On top of it, make it so that everywhere else in the industry is the same way, any person answering a topic online, most of the authorities in the field - 90%+ are the opposite gender to you. An unknown but nonzero percentage of those people believe you to be inferior immediately, regardless of your performance. To top it off make sure to embed lots of industry humor and institutional inertia that is subtly or not-so-subtly catered to people of the opposite sex (does that get your panties in a twist? Man up).
Things are not fucking equal, and your diatribe demonstrates that you either have put very little thought into how the experience of others might differ from your own, or you are willfully ignorant. If you opened your eyes, you'd see that being a straight white male confers way more advantages than any other demographic enjoys and means that you honestly never have to think about a huge swath of problems that are daily realities for everybody else. Pretending that bias doesn't exist doesn't make it so. Women aren't really asking for much - just the ability to participate in an industry on equal terms, and since things are ALREADY INEQUAL, an extra level of protection wouldn't be unreasonable. But to be fair, that little bit of hasty generalization is entirely unjust, how dare they speculate about our motivations and privilege...
The budget is driven by non-defense spending - entitlements - which consume nearly every dollar in Federal Revenue that DC receives.
When you say entitlement, it evokes a bunch of money-grubbing welfare queens who have more and more children to increase their federal benefit. The truth is that the largest portion of the budget (24%) is social security, which isn't a government handout - it is funded by working taxpayers who have paid into the system for their whole lives.
Things that might be considered entitlements, or uncompensated financial assistance to the unemployed, disabled, etc. make up only about 12% of the budget, not the 2/3 you disingenuously claim. Source: http://www.cbpp.org/cms/?fa=vi...
What I'm confused about is why it isn't an "entitlement" when we give massive cost-plus contracts to defense contractors with no requirement that they actually produce products that perform as promised (JSF, or any number of botched projects with no accountability). Or force our nation to give them handouts to build overpriced, technically inferior products (SLS) when free market competition offers far superior options (Commercial crew). The point isn't just that the military budget is massive (though it is), it's that much of the spending is propping up useless programs, developing technically complex boondoggles to fight enemies that don't exist. We're getting the worst of both worlds, the bureaucracy and inefficiency of government with the greed and short-sightedness of industry.
Granted, I don't have much experience with R, but Python has some notable benefits - it is very well established and you can find tools to do just about anything. It is fast and easy to develop, and very easy to learn thanks to the readability and plentiful resources online. I imagine you'll have an easy time finding people with python experience, as well.
I haven't used it for any "big data" tasks, but for a number of small, interactive data analysis utilities it has been really enjoyable to work with. One standout tool for me has been pyqtgraph, which is lightning fast and creates some really impressive interactive visualizations. It's also got some pretty incredible features out of the box - arbitrary user-definable ROIs, instantly change any plot to a log-log, or even do a Fast Fourier transform with just a right click. If I sound like a fanboi, I kind of am - after trying to deal with the agony of 3D data manipulation in matplotlib (python's matlab package), it's a whole different world.
Others have said it, but I'll repeat: This video format sucks compared to the usual slashdot interview approach. I usually look forward to Slashdot Q&A's because there's an opportunity to have your exact question answered by someone, and so it gives lots of us who comment the next best thing to direct correspondence, assuming that your question is worthwhile enough to get upmodded.
This video, in contrast, is annoying to parse. Yes, there's the transcript, but I don't see him answering my specific questions, and it is a pain to read through a bunch of general and less articulate speech-to-text rather than getting a concise and direct response.
I could've forgiven you using this format if you still actually read him the questions that were written and voted on by us, but it seems like instead Tim decided to shit on that so he could have a Google hangout and feel important.
Note: I thought it was obvious reading digital output as analog (or merely hooking together input to output on two sensitive instruments) is always going to cause a lot of artifacts and distortion. You don't chain 2 microscopes together and expect to get twice the magnification with no problems...
Maybe my description wasn't clear. These were two oscilloscopes, reading from the same source in parallel. One scope was looking at a high resolution, set to trigger on anything above noise, but with something like a 1V maximum amplitude (hence clipping at 1V). The second was set to trigger at anything over 1V, and had a much larger view window, so there was no data lost to clipping.
The motivation here was to get detail data while simultaneously making sure to capture the full amplitude of big signals. Neither scope had an appreciable impact on the signal of the other. Once I figured out the problem, which was that there was not in fact a 1:1 correspondence between clipping on scope 1 and triggers on scope 2, a good-enough algorithm was stupidly simple - just check if the signal reached its maximum for >3 consecutive samples, and it performed about as well as a human would.
I think the overall point he's making is that visualizing an algorithm's behavior can offer us better insight, faster, vs. just looking at our code and our error logs. I'm sure there are ubermensch programmers out there that never have their programs exhibit unexpected behavior, and always understand exactly why a test fails, but I'm not one of them.
I encountered this firsthand when I spent a couple of days trying to write a simple algorithm to detect clipping on an oscilloscope output. We had a secondary scope set up to trigger at the clipping level for the first, and so my target was to find as many clipping events as triggers on the second scope. My first several attempts failed, and I never got a direct match no matter what I was doing. Finally, I spent an hour or so coding up a visualization that would show the waveforms and pinpoint exactly where the program thought it detected clipping, and it became immediately clear to me that my initial assumption for my test was invalid - there were many times that the backup scope triggered without clipping on the first, and that clipping happened on the first without a corresponding trigger on the backup scope. It turned out that this was because of big transients showing up while the first scope was rearming, and vice versa - but without actually looking at the data and behavior of the program I would have kept wasting time thinking my algorithm was broken.
Of course, that's a unique situation, but I think the point still stands that our brains have a very powerful capacity to process visual information, and that sometimes an hour or two to slap together a visualization can pay for itself pretty quickly. Once you get familiar with the tools to make these kinds of visualizations, it can become very straightforward to develop one for your specific use case.
How would you respond to critics that believe that as soon as the Mayday PAC raises a substantial amount of money, all the other PAC's, along with the commercial media (who are the main beneficients of political spending) will jointly work together against the Mayday PAC and overwhelm it with superior resources?
Why do you believe that forming a PAC to elect reform-minded candidates is more promising than Wolf PAC's method, of bypassing the typical political process and trying to call an Article V Convention for the purpose of limiting the influence that money has over our political process?
What kind of accountability exists with the Mayday PAC to ensure that representatives elected due to this funding actually follow through on promises of campaign finance reform?
And honestly - if we could get a nanocellulose 3D printer going - now *that* could be a killer use for the technology. On Mars most stuff is going to be an extremely limited-run, and how much weight could you shave by only shipping the non-plastic parts of things from Earth. Sure it will probably be a lot weaker than it could be, but nanocellulose is insanely strong to begin with, and you can always sculpt axe handles and wall panels by hand, maybe even do sand-mold casting.
I toured Lockheed Martin's facility in Colorado Springs a while back - they have a system they developed (and tested!) that can extract hydrogen and oxygen from lunar regolith. One main byproduct was fairly pure titanium dioxide, and they had proposals in place to extend the system to make cast titanium parts. If you have enough energy, anything is possible - imagine if you could use 3D printing and laser sintering to build custom titanium parts, while getting water and fuel as well. It's technology like this that will make it feasible to open new frontiers. Although as you mentioned, you need something substantial, like a nuclear powerplant, to make this work. Energy makes or breaks the entire thing.
This is not really about the existence of bad compiler optimization - it is about a tool called Stack that can be used to detect this, which is known as "unstable" code, and has been used to find lots of vulnerabilities already.
Gee, I guess the engineers at NASA don't know about radiation levels at Jupiter. Lucky for them you posted about it on the internets. I'll forward them your post so they aren't left in the dark.
Actually, OP is completely correct. I just sat in on a series of NASA talks on cubesats (NEPP, look it up) - they have huge problems with radiation and reliability because there isn't the budget for the testing and qualification that happens with typical satellites. Translation: 30% failure rate in benign environments. For reference, we're talking about systems that are (mostly) good up to 1-4 krads of ionizing dose, while projections I've seen for the Europa environment are ~ 2 Mrads. Or 2000 krads, if your metric is rusty. So we're talking about as much as 3 orders of magnitude more dose, with a system architecture that already experiences horrendous failure rates.
I don't know anything about Draper systems, but unless they've included mass budget for some serious shielding (look up JUNO and the "vault" they used for their electronics) there's no way this thing will last long enough to do useful science, if it even survives the trip there. It's entirely possible that this entire thing is the brainchild of a couple of postdocs who took some classes on spacecraft architectures but no nothing about how rad-hard electronic systems are actually developed.
Now, it's certainly possible that this project would be in a different class of cubesat, and they might be able to afford real, rad-hard components with Mrad range dose tolerance, but even so, Jupiter is one of the harshest radiation environments in the solar system, and satellites with traditional, expensive development cycles still have mission lifetimes of several months, tops. The only real way I could see them being successful is with rad-hard components and an extremely short mission profile - show up, dump the chipsats, and beam back some data as fast as possible before your electronics go insane and melt.
I haven't forgotten that at all. However you seem to have forgotten that quite a bit of SpaceX's funding comes from NASA these days. They aren't doing what they are doing as a charity. There is no direct profit motive or compelling business case to be made for a Mars trip. It's pure research and expensive research at that. It's not at all inconceivable that the price tag for a Mars mission might be well over $1 Trillion. Even if you drop that by an order of magnitude or more it's still a ludicrous amount of money. You are NOT going to crowd source a project with a price tag that big. There either has to be a profit motive or there has to be one or more motivated nation states involved when you get to that sort of expense. We're not talking about a Kickstarter campaign here.
Some of the money is from NASA's commercial crew, etc, but that is a few launches a year. Have you actually looked at SpaceX's launch manifest? They are booked solid through 2017 or so, with a variety of customers. They have set a target to capture 50% of the launch market for Falcon 9 class vehicles and they are well on their way to doing so. What's more, the lower costs they are providing are bringing a lot of previously unprofitable business models out of the woodwork, which become viable as soon as launch costs head downwards. Google's whole Teledesic v2 initiative is enabled by this, and that's hundreds of satellites. Lower costs are changing things, and we can't make the old assumptions any more.
LEO is nowhere close to halfway to Mars, literally or figuratively. Thinking that just getting to LEO means you're mostly there is naive.
My initial statement was in terms of delta v. LEO from Kennedy Space Center takes ~10 km/s of delta v. Mars from LEO is ~ 5 km/s. So, indeed, you are about 2/3rds of the way to Mars capture once you have reached LEO, in terms of the propulsion required. There are other difficulties, but we know fairly well how to keep humans alive in space for long durations thanks to the ISS (on the scale of many months which will be required for a Mars transfer), and there's good reason to believe that transferring from space to Mars will be less difficult for the body than space to Earth.
With respect to the radiation risk, I will copy something I posted in another reply:
This is a solvable problem. The serious danger to life (as in, kill you before you get to Mars) comes from unpredictable solar activity, and you handle that by storing your fuel, water, and other significant mass behind you (pointed towards the sun). The remainder of the threat comes from galactic cosmic radiation, and this is a predictable, low-level dose. We don't understand the impact of these long term low dose rates very well though... the projected cancer risk depends on the veracity of the Linear No Threshold model, and we've got good reasons to believe that this isn't telling the whole story. It very well might be the case that low levels of background radiation don't have a detectable impact on cancer rates. The fact that Colorado experiences higher constant radiation due to uranium in the soil and lower atmospheric shielding means that the residents experience more radiation than the rest of the US, yet Colorado's average lifespan is longer.
So, GCR might have an impact, it might not. Even assuming that LNT is accurate, though, the risk is still potentially tolerable. Suppose it doubles your cancer risk - there's still a good chance that heart disease is still the dominant factor in your lifespan, not to mention the considerable risk of launch and reentry. We shouldn't make radiation more of an issue than is warranted - if you've got a 1% chance of dying on launch/reentry, it doesn't make sense to call off a mission because it gives you a.5% chance of dying in the next 20 years from cancer. You're inconsistently allowing one type of risk and disallowing another.
Also, on the 95% figure, let's do some order of magnitude estimates. If we assume they can get the rocket expense to approach 0 through reusability (big assumption) then that makes the launch cost $600/kg. Let's round up to $1000/kg because you aren't going to reach zero and to give us a bit of margin. If you then assume that the average person is about 50 kg, and let's say you need 10 times that weight in supplies and vehicle to get one person to Mars, then you have 500kg X $1000/kg = $500,000 for a trip to Mars. Which is, I believe, precisely the figure that Musk has quoted as the target price for a ticket.
There's nothing that makes this impossible, and indeed, we'd expect (if he sends 100 people per trip, as described on the MCT) that costs can be made lower as they gain more expertise, etc.
It's also interesting to see that the recurring costs of the ISS are $3 billion/year to host 6 people with supplies provided on expensive rockets from Earth. If we assume the same reduction in living costs (2 orders of magnitude) based on lower launch costs and the possibility of in-situ resource utilization, we get $5 million per year, per person for the first stages of the colony. This is outside of the realm of a normal person, but a downright steal for a government that wants to support an explorer, or for a rich person who wants to live in the most exotic place imaginable. The real question is when the price to host a person on Mars could get matched by their economic output on Mars...
In 2009, there were 8,274 people who reported an annual income over $10 mil/year in the US. Let's say, after including all the other rich in the world, we can get 1% that many interested and willing to pay to live on another planet - that would be 80 people who could financially sustain themselves (maybe) in the first years of a Mars colony existing, for $400 mil/year.
I know I got kind of off on a tangent there. There are a lot of assumptions involved and so there's nothing authoritative about this, but still, I don't think we have to plan on anything impossible happening to imagine a small, sustainable colony being developed. Fun times.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think you really understand how NASA works. Private industry already designs and builds basically everything they do - NASA doesn't have manufacturing capabilities. The thing that kills them is cost-plus contracting and the fact that they have to make engineering decisions not based on technical merit, but based on what will appease congress.
Not to mention, by the time SLS block II happens (if ever) SpaceX will likely have been flying on their giant methane-based Raptor engine for years. We're talking 100 tons+ to MARS, forget LEO.
I agree with you that NASA is a worthy recipient of our tax dollars, but as long as congress keeps mandating that they design rockets based on how many people they can employ in how many districts, we're never going to get out of LEO again. This money would be better spent on commercial crew type programs, with a commercial-off-the-shelf model rather than the chronically over-schedule and over-budget cost plus approach.
sure, the project is expensive but people need to understand there are immense differences between NASA's vehicle and the others. Not to mention all three companies are standing on the shoulders of a giant, NASA, and their projects are all dwarfed by what nasa is attempting to create.
SpaceX: hopefully delivering the CST-100 version 2, but honestly hasnt contributed a whole lot other than a sexy brand to the effort. CST100 was delivered by Boeing.
What the hell? SpaceX has the Dragon (and Dragon 2), not the CST100. SpaceX has had several successful, on-schedule, on-budget flights of the Dragon for cargo (including safe reentry) which has demonstrated the functionality of many subsystems that will be used in the manned version. The Dragon 2 has potential to be the safest manned capsule of the bunch - it can abort at literally any point in the launch profile, land with pinpoint accuracy, and has a strong enough heatshield for a return from Mars. Not to mention the Falcon 9 is the only rocket out there that can suffer an engine failure and still make mission. They have another rocket in development, again using many proven systems with which they have flight heritage, which will have more capability than any other existing rocket - Falcon Heavy. It has comparable capabilities to SLS Block I and is scheduled to fly 2 years sooner. Crossfeed capabilities will improve the capacity even more.
Boeing: not sexy, just practical. a design ripoff of many other NASA firsts, it is restricted to suborbital and cannot carry cargo. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I would say not sexy or practical, given that all they've demonstrated is a mockup and word is there are some serious technical issues with wind tunnel testing, etc. There's a good chance the CST100 won't survive the commercial crew downselect in August, and there's no indication that Boeing cares much about this.
Sierra Nevada: building what nasa did 30 years ago, this is designed for cargo and people. it is strictly suborbital. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Entirely wrong. This is an orbital craft - did you not see the dozens of marketing pictures of this docking with the ISS? This is a neat little craft with some significant development and test milestones already checked off - successful flights of a complete engineering model, engine tests, and reviews. They also have a launch scheduled for 2015, which they are financing on their own dime to demonstrate capability and earn at least some initial flight heritage. This has a unique capability, too, with the ability to abort during almost any time in the flight and land on runways all around the world.
NASA SLS: cargo, crew, suborbital, and interplanetary transport system. SLS is to be capable of lifting astronauts and hardware to near-Earth destinations such as asteroids, the Moon, Mars, and most of the Earth's Lagrangian points. SLS may also support trips to the International Space Station, if necessary. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
This is a paper rocket at this stage in the game. I can make a powerpoint presentation about a system that will go to Mars and back tomorrow - doesn't mean I can deliver. Sure, this rocket COULD be developed, and all of these exciting missions COULD happen, if we doubled NASA's budget - as it is, they don't even have the funding to properly develop and test the first article, much less finance an extended campaign of missions. Every dollar spent on this would go 5 times as far developing commercial crew capability, but it wouldn't funnel money to Alabama to build obsolete and failure-prone SRBs, so congress (and therefore NASA) will never drop it if they can help it.
Well, that is kind of an impossibility for a self-test, yes? No pleasing you guys.
We'll have to agree to disagree, I suppose. I am not familiar with the organization, they are apparently a podcast done by the women on IGN's staff, where they discuss games from a female perspective. That does not sound remotely sexual to me. The visual scheme on their homepage is a boxing glove and some stylized text. This is a podcast aimed at women - I don't think there's any reason to believe they are using sexual innuendo to titillate their target audience.
If anything, the fact that you feel the term is sexualized kind of supports their point - it is difficult for females to participate in this industry as equals.
Congratulations, you've just been push-polled. Those tests aren't built to discover bias, they're built to convince you that you are biased.
Except that they showed I held no bias with race. Why don't you actually try it, and see if you can find a flaw with their methodology? Researchers need a good tool to study bias, and AFAIK this is a pretty highly regarded one. It's published by the psych dept. at Harvard FFS - I don't know what you WOULD consider a good test for bias.
They aren't complaining about being sexualized, as far as I can tell. They are complaining about being harassed. And the fact that some men get their rocks off on violence between women doesn't make the concept inherently sexual. The first page of google hits on that term include a film about a woman boxer and a women's martial arts academy.
I tend to agree with you, in general. However, I do think it is disingenuous to name a company "Girlfight" in a clear attempt to cash in on their sexuality, then contribute to an article complaining about it.
I don't think there's anything overtly sexual about "Girlfight". If you had a company named "Manfight" you wouldn't think of it as sexual. Plus, even if it is somehow intended to have sexual connotations - that doesn't in any way justify harassment. That's essentially the same as blaming a rape victim for dressing provocatively.
Have you ever actually tried to examine your own biases? Because it sure sounds like you are refusing to admit the possibility that they exist.
I used to hold an attitude very much like yours, but I took some tests on this site: https://implicit.harvard.edu/i...
It's a very fair and objective measurement of your basic, gut reactions to things. I always assumed that I held no bias against black people - that turned out to be mostly true. I also felt like I had no bias against women in science/tech. Turned out that I was pretty wrong.
The fact is, things are not currently equal between men and women. Women are physically weaker, it's a simple fact, which means that they live in a constant state of heightened awareness compared to men. When was the last time you asked another guy to walk with you out to your car at night? Women are acutely aware of that physical power imbalance and rearrange their lives to try to avoid vulnerable situations. And we as a culture are perfectly fine with that and expect them to accommodate this violent reality - any time there's a rape story people instantly ask if she was dressed provocatively, or drinking, or in the wrong part of town, etc. It doesn't really matter where the hell I am, or how much I drink, or who I'm with, I'm pretty much never worried that I'm going to get in a compromising situation and get raped for it.
Have you ever had to work in a department where everybody else is a woman? Take that environment, where even if people aren't purposely excluding you they regularly talk about periods and tampons and things that you are fundamentally unable to relate to. Now imagine that every single one of those co-workers is physically more powerful than you are - whether that coworker is confrontational or not. Oh, and your supervisor, their supervisor, and on and on up to the top are all not your gender. On top of it, make it so that everywhere else in the industry is the same way, any person answering a topic online, most of the authorities in the field - 90%+ are the opposite gender to you. An unknown but nonzero percentage of those people believe you to be inferior immediately, regardless of your performance. To top it off make sure to embed lots of industry humor and institutional inertia that is subtly or not-so-subtly catered to people of the opposite sex (does that get your panties in a twist? Man up).
Things are not fucking equal, and your diatribe demonstrates that you either have put very little thought into how the experience of others might differ from your own, or you are willfully ignorant. If you opened your eyes, you'd see that being a straight white male confers way more advantages than any other demographic enjoys and means that you honestly never have to think about a huge swath of problems that are daily realities for everybody else. Pretending that bias doesn't exist doesn't make it so. Women aren't really asking for much - just the ability to participate in an industry on equal terms, and since things are ALREADY INEQUAL, an extra level of protection wouldn't be unreasonable. But to be fair, that little bit of hasty generalization is entirely unjust, how dare they speculate about our motivations and privilege...
The budget is driven by non-defense spending - entitlements - which consume nearly every dollar in Federal Revenue that DC receives.
When you say entitlement, it evokes a bunch of money-grubbing welfare queens who have more and more children to increase their federal benefit. The truth is that the largest portion of the budget (24%) is social security, which isn't a government handout - it is funded by working taxpayers who have paid into the system for their whole lives.
Things that might be considered entitlements, or uncompensated financial assistance to the unemployed, disabled, etc. make up only about 12% of the budget, not the 2/3 you disingenuously claim. Source: http://www.cbpp.org/cms/?fa=vi...
What I'm confused about is why it isn't an "entitlement" when we give massive cost-plus contracts to defense contractors with no requirement that they actually produce products that perform as promised (JSF, or any number of botched projects with no accountability). Or force our nation to give them handouts to build overpriced, technically inferior products (SLS) when free market competition offers far superior options (Commercial crew). The point isn't just that the military budget is massive (though it is), it's that much of the spending is propping up useless programs, developing technically complex boondoggles to fight enemies that don't exist. We're getting the worst of both worlds, the bureaucracy and inefficiency of government with the greed and short-sightedness of industry.
Granted, I don't have much experience with R, but Python has some notable benefits - it is very well established and you can find tools to do just about anything. It is fast and easy to develop, and very easy to learn thanks to the readability and plentiful resources online. I imagine you'll have an easy time finding people with python experience, as well.
I haven't used it for any "big data" tasks, but for a number of small, interactive data analysis utilities it has been really enjoyable to work with. One standout tool for me has been pyqtgraph, which is lightning fast and creates some really impressive interactive visualizations. It's also got some pretty incredible features out of the box - arbitrary user-definable ROIs, instantly change any plot to a log-log, or even do a Fast Fourier transform with just a right click. If I sound like a fanboi, I kind of am - after trying to deal with the agony of 3D data manipulation in matplotlib (python's matlab package), it's a whole different world.
Others have said it, but I'll repeat: This video format sucks compared to the usual slashdot interview approach. I usually look forward to Slashdot Q&A's because there's an opportunity to have your exact question answered by someone, and so it gives lots of us who comment the next best thing to direct correspondence, assuming that your question is worthwhile enough to get upmodded.
This video, in contrast, is annoying to parse. Yes, there's the transcript, but I don't see him answering my specific questions, and it is a pain to read through a bunch of general and less articulate speech-to-text rather than getting a concise and direct response.
I could've forgiven you using this format if you still actually read him the questions that were written and voted on by us, but it seems like instead Tim decided to shit on that so he could have a Google hangout and feel important.
Note: I thought it was obvious reading digital output as analog (or merely hooking together input to output on two sensitive instruments) is always going to cause a lot of artifacts and distortion. You don't chain 2 microscopes together and expect to get twice the magnification with no problems...
Maybe my description wasn't clear. These were two oscilloscopes, reading from the same source in parallel. One scope was looking at a high resolution, set to trigger on anything above noise, but with something like a 1V maximum amplitude (hence clipping at 1V). The second was set to trigger at anything over 1V, and had a much larger view window, so there was no data lost to clipping.
The motivation here was to get detail data while simultaneously making sure to capture the full amplitude of big signals. Neither scope had an appreciable impact on the signal of the other. Once I figured out the problem, which was that there was not in fact a 1:1 correspondence between clipping on scope 1 and triggers on scope 2, a good-enough algorithm was stupidly simple - just check if the signal reached its maximum for >3 consecutive samples, and it performed about as well as a human would.
I think the overall point he's making is that visualizing an algorithm's behavior can offer us better insight, faster, vs. just looking at our code and our error logs. I'm sure there are ubermensch programmers out there that never have their programs exhibit unexpected behavior, and always understand exactly why a test fails, but I'm not one of them.
I encountered this firsthand when I spent a couple of days trying to write a simple algorithm to detect clipping on an oscilloscope output. We had a secondary scope set up to trigger at the clipping level for the first, and so my target was to find as many clipping events as triggers on the second scope. My first several attempts failed, and I never got a direct match no matter what I was doing. Finally, I spent an hour or so coding up a visualization that would show the waveforms and pinpoint exactly where the program thought it detected clipping, and it became immediately clear to me that my initial assumption for my test was invalid - there were many times that the backup scope triggered without clipping on the first, and that clipping happened on the first without a corresponding trigger on the backup scope. It turned out that this was because of big transients showing up while the first scope was rearming, and vice versa - but without actually looking at the data and behavior of the program I would have kept wasting time thinking my algorithm was broken.
Of course, that's a unique situation, but I think the point still stands that our brains have a very powerful capacity to process visual information, and that sometimes an hour or two to slap together a visualization can pay for itself pretty quickly. Once you get familiar with the tools to make these kinds of visualizations, it can become very straightforward to develop one for your specific use case.
Interesting, thanks for that. Learned something new.
How would you respond to critics that believe that as soon as the Mayday PAC raises a substantial amount of money, all the other PAC's, along with the commercial media (who are the main beneficients of political spending) will jointly work together against the Mayday PAC and overwhelm it with superior resources?
Why do you believe that forming a PAC to elect reform-minded candidates is more promising than Wolf PAC's method, of bypassing the typical political process and trying to call an Article V Convention for the purpose of limiting the influence that money has over our political process?
What kind of accountability exists with the Mayday PAC to ensure that representatives elected due to this funding actually follow through on promises of campaign finance reform?
And honestly - if we could get a nanocellulose 3D printer going - now *that* could be a killer use for the technology. On Mars most stuff is going to be an extremely limited-run, and how much weight could you shave by only shipping the non-plastic parts of things from Earth. Sure it will probably be a lot weaker than it could be, but nanocellulose is insanely strong to begin with, and you can always sculpt axe handles and wall panels by hand, maybe even do sand-mold casting.
I toured Lockheed Martin's facility in Colorado Springs a while back - they have a system they developed (and tested!) that can extract hydrogen and oxygen from lunar regolith. One main byproduct was fairly pure titanium dioxide, and they had proposals in place to extend the system to make cast titanium parts. If you have enough energy, anything is possible - imagine if you could use 3D printing and laser sintering to build custom titanium parts, while getting water and fuel as well. It's technology like this that will make it feasible to open new frontiers. Although as you mentioned, you need something substantial, like a nuclear powerplant, to make this work. Energy makes or breaks the entire thing.
This is not really about the existence of bad compiler optimization - it is about a tool called Stack that can be used to detect this, which is known as "unstable" code, and has been used to find lots of vulnerabilities already.
Gee, I guess the engineers at NASA don't know about radiation levels at Jupiter. Lucky for them you posted about it on the internets. I'll forward them your post so they aren't left in the dark.
Actually, OP is completely correct. I just sat in on a series of NASA talks on cubesats (NEPP, look it up) - they have huge problems with radiation and reliability because there isn't the budget for the testing and qualification that happens with typical satellites. Translation: 30% failure rate in benign environments. For reference, we're talking about systems that are (mostly) good up to 1-4 krads of ionizing dose, while projections I've seen for the Europa environment are ~ 2 Mrads. Or 2000 krads, if your metric is rusty. So we're talking about as much as 3 orders of magnitude more dose, with a system architecture that already experiences horrendous failure rates.
I don't know anything about Draper systems, but unless they've included mass budget for some serious shielding (look up JUNO and the "vault" they used for their electronics) there's no way this thing will last long enough to do useful science, if it even survives the trip there. It's entirely possible that this entire thing is the brainchild of a couple of postdocs who took some classes on spacecraft architectures but no nothing about how rad-hard electronic systems are actually developed.
Now, it's certainly possible that this project would be in a different class of cubesat, and they might be able to afford real, rad-hard components with Mrad range dose tolerance, but even so, Jupiter is one of the harshest radiation environments in the solar system, and satellites with traditional, expensive development cycles still have mission lifetimes of several months, tops. The only real way I could see them being successful is with rad-hard components and an extremely short mission profile - show up, dump the chipsats, and beam back some data as fast as possible before your electronics go insane and melt.
...it's not like you're not going to replace your blood with 90% isopropyl alcohol. ;)
Challenge accepted. *grabs bourbon*
I haven't forgotten that at all. However you seem to have forgotten that quite a bit of SpaceX's funding comes from NASA these days. They aren't doing what they are doing as a charity. There is no direct profit motive or compelling business case to be made for a Mars trip. It's pure research and expensive research at that. It's not at all inconceivable that the price tag for a Mars mission might be well over $1 Trillion. Even if you drop that by an order of magnitude or more it's still a ludicrous amount of money. You are NOT going to crowd source a project with a price tag that big. There either has to be a profit motive or there has to be one or more motivated nation states involved when you get to that sort of expense. We're not talking about a Kickstarter campaign here.
Some of the money is from NASA's commercial crew, etc, but that is a few launches a year. Have you actually looked at SpaceX's launch manifest? They are booked solid through 2017 or so, with a variety of customers. They have set a target to capture 50% of the launch market for Falcon 9 class vehicles and they are well on their way to doing so. What's more, the lower costs they are providing are bringing a lot of previously unprofitable business models out of the woodwork, which become viable as soon as launch costs head downwards. Google's whole Teledesic v2 initiative is enabled by this, and that's hundreds of satellites. Lower costs are changing things, and we can't make the old assumptions any more.
LEO is nowhere close to halfway to Mars, literally or figuratively. Thinking that just getting to LEO means you're mostly there is naive.
My initial statement was in terms of delta v. LEO from Kennedy Space Center takes ~10 km/s of delta v. Mars from LEO is ~ 5 km/s. So, indeed, you are about 2/3rds of the way to Mars capture once you have reached LEO, in terms of the propulsion required. There are other difficulties, but we know fairly well how to keep humans alive in space for long durations thanks to the ISS (on the scale of many months which will be required for a Mars transfer), and there's good reason to believe that transferring from space to Mars will be less difficult for the body than space to Earth.
With respect to the radiation risk, I will copy something I posted in another reply:
This is a solvable problem. The serious danger to life (as in, kill you before you get to Mars) comes from unpredictable solar activity, and you handle that by storing your fuel, water, and other significant mass behind you (pointed towards the sun). The remainder of the threat comes from galactic cosmic radiation, and this is a predictable, low-level dose. We don't understand the impact of these long term low dose rates very well though... the projected cancer risk depends on the veracity of the Linear No Threshold model, and we've got good reasons to believe that this isn't telling the whole story. It very well might be the case that low levels of background radiation don't have a detectable impact on cancer rates. The fact that Colorado experiences higher constant radiation due to uranium in the soil and lower atmospheric shielding means that the residents experience more radiation than the rest of the US, yet Colorado's average lifespan is longer.
.5% chance of dying in the next 20 years from cancer. You're inconsistently allowing one type of risk and disallowing another.
So, GCR might have an impact, it might not. Even assuming that LNT is accurate, though, the risk is still potentially tolerable. Suppose it doubles your cancer risk - there's still a good chance that heart disease is still the dominant factor in your lifespan, not to mention the considerable risk of launch and reentry. We shouldn't make radiation more of an issue than is warranted - if you've got a 1% chance of dying on launch/reentry, it doesn't make sense to call off a mission because it gives you a
One suggestion I've se
Also, on the 95% figure, let's do some order of magnitude estimates. If we assume they can get the rocket expense to approach 0 through reusability (big assumption) then that makes the launch cost $600/kg. Let's round up to $1000/kg because you aren't going to reach zero and to give us a bit of margin. If you then assume that the average person is about 50 kg, and let's say you need 10 times that weight in supplies and vehicle to get one person to Mars, then you have 500kg X $1000/kg = $500,000 for a trip to Mars. Which is, I believe, precisely the figure that Musk has quoted as the target price for a ticket.
There's nothing that makes this impossible, and indeed, we'd expect (if he sends 100 people per trip, as described on the MCT) that costs can be made lower as they gain more expertise, etc.
It's also interesting to see that the recurring costs of the ISS are $3 billion/year to host 6 people with supplies provided on expensive rockets from Earth. If we assume the same reduction in living costs (2 orders of magnitude) based on lower launch costs and the possibility of in-situ resource utilization, we get $5 million per year, per person for the first stages of the colony. This is outside of the realm of a normal person, but a downright steal for a government that wants to support an explorer, or for a rich person who wants to live in the most exotic place imaginable. The real question is when the price to host a person on Mars could get matched by their economic output on Mars...
In 2009, there were 8,274 people who reported an annual income over $10 mil/year in the US. Let's say, after including all the other rich in the world, we can get 1% that many interested and willing to pay to live on another planet - that would be 80 people who could financially sustain themselves (maybe) in the first years of a Mars colony existing, for $400 mil/year.
I know I got kind of off on a tangent there. There are a lot of assumptions involved and so there's nothing authoritative about this, but still, I don't think we have to plan on anything impossible happening to imagine a small, sustainable colony being developed. Fun times.