I'd like to point out that there are large numbers of untrained people engaging in largely unsupervised DIY Bio that is FAR more advanced than anything done in any professional laboratory.
Further, this activity has resulted in the release of extremelydangerousorganisms being released into the wild.
Oh. Wait. This is Slashdot. No worries about anyone here doing that.
I currently do chemistry work that I report on paper to get entered by others or tell verbally to someone by phone. I think I've sent three emails at work so far this year.
By this measure I am of no value and a temp who does data entry is a national treasure. (That may be true, but it doesn't follow from this analysis.)
Guess I'll have to start responding to those weekly email tag fests of "who is going to bring what to the Friday pot-luck lunch". It may up my stats, but it'll probably add to my waistline.
No, it's not unamerican of you to oppose concentration of wealth and power. Actually, that's a very common sentiment in at least the earlier anti-nuclear movement.
It's a viewpoint that can be reasonably talked about. I just don't think it is very convincing when the consequences of it are fully explored. I also think it won't sell well with the public.
I'd very much like to argue the points for and against nuclear power on that basis. Instead, it gets caught up in arguments that will more easily work for public consumption.
Instead, we get Amory Lovins saying in his talks that we don't need anymore power plants of any hind, and thus nuclear is unneeded. At least he was honest enough on one occasion to admit that he felt that any cheap clean source of power would be a massive disaster as it would allow mankind to destroy nature even more.
We get the portrayal of the plutonium produced in a light water power reactor as being a major proliferation risk (go read up on the need for isotopic purity of a Pu bomb core to prevent early criticality).
We get statements on just how radiologically deadly Pu is when the observed rate of known exposures doesn't show the massive increases in lung cancer predicted. We get statements saying saying that standard reactor waste needs to be stored for tens of thousands of years, when in fact the highly radioactive portions decay much faster, etc, etc, lather rinse repeat.
And then, those who point these things out are labeled as brainwashed and industry shills by the very people using these arguments rather than the harder to sell real ones.
On balance, I've seen more intellectual honesty when arguing with Christian fundamentalists (and that's saying something).
Dr. Landis implies that Andrew Higgins didn't say the quoted item.
In fact, it's easily found in the link given.
In the linked text, Higgins gives a hyperlink back to a previous letter which was in The Space Review which contains that very quote and in the context Oberg said.
Landis snipes at Oberg for poor journalism, but apparently can't follow a bloody hyperlink. Why, even Cowboy Neal could do that and on a bad day to boot.
Secondly, Landis is an expert in solar cells and solid state devices. He apparently also works on elements of spacecraft electrical power systems, lander design and operation and writes articles on a variety of subjects. Impressive, but not directly in the area.
On the other hand, Andrew Higgins is a principle investigator and an expert in the behavior of materials under extreme hypersonic conditions and computer simulation of the same. His work on materials and combustion in hypersonic ram accelerators leaves him very well equipped to comment on the dynamics of reentry and the behavior of spacecraft materials and fuels under such extreme conditions.
Landis seems to be using the very sloppy and misleading tactics that he accuses Oberg of. Pot. Kettle. Black.
(Mild disclaimer. Andy Higgins is a friend going back to undergrad days (and believe me, it's been a while). I was mildly nettled that Landis invokes the name of an old friend and then becomes selectively blind when Andy gave the link to the very quoted item in the letter that Landis read.)
It's not just here on slashdot. I've seen it in the comments section of a number of news sites. The themes and phrasing of the posts are similar too. I think we're seeing a bit of "perception management" going on.
Oh, I wouldn't mod you down. Everyone's entitled to an opinion, no matter how silly.
I think you'll find a lot of actors with kinda bizarro political views on all sides of the spectrum. And a good number of them are quite politically active.
I'm old enough to remember some people saying such sentiments about John Wayne when he died. I'm sure some people on the other side of the political spectrum will say similar things about Jane Fonda, or Streisand when they die.
In short: They're pooterheads.
These are actors. Yes, they've been politically active. Lots of people are. But unlike Reagan or Schwarzenegger they've not run for political office.
Yes, you may disagree with them. But, Isn't singing and strumming happy tunes to their death a bit much?
To blatantly steal a quote from Sergeant Hulka in Stripes "Lighten up, Francis."
At the time, Sagan was pretty up front about his reasons for supporting a manned mission to Mars, and the international political aspect was a quite strong portion of it.
There's nothing new or surprising about many of the motivations behind space exploration, manned or unmanned, being politically driven. JFK's push for the moon was based in international and internal politics rather than just science and engineering motivations.
In the 80s, the USSR had the Energia heavy launch vehicle that might have been useful, but it's largely gone the way of the Saturn 5. With the joint missions on the ISS, the long duration mission experience has equalized to a large extent.
The geopolitical landscape has changed drastically since the 80s as well. Many of the driving forces that were behind a joint Mars mission with the Soviets would be more applicable with the Chinese now.
Various space advocacy groups have been backing different visons of what type of exploration should be done for quite a long time.
Planetary Society has been pushing Mars rather than return to the moon since at least the late 80s.
At least part of that position was stated to be that a manned Mars mission could be a cooperative effort between the US and the Soviet Union. i.e. A political goal. That's an aspect that doesn't apply quite so much now.
Also, at that time, the Planetary Society was a lot less keen on manned missions than robotic ones. Friedman, Murry and Sagan (the notable founders) were all veterans of the highly successful unmanned planetary probe missions. They tended to view the manned program as a very expensive method that tended to take money away from the robotic probes.
Others disagreed with this viewpoint. The National Space Society, for example, (also populated with former astronauts and space scientists though no one as much of a household name as Sagan) tended to take a more pro manned space viewpoint.
I find it interesting that some years back when Newt Gingrich advocated giving laptops to poor children, he was ridiculed by many.
The cynic in me suspects that some of those who ridiculed the idea at the time now think the OLPC is a fandamtastic idea. I guess who the messenger is determines how good the idea is.
Personally, I think the OLPC is a good idea, but that they ought to openly sell them in wealthy countries and use the profit to subsidize other less well off places. Hey, I'd like to have one to mess around with.
And, of course, the buy one-give one promotion was at a time when I didn't have the extra cash. It's ended now that I could do it.
We did it in 1993 in a junior level physics lab class at the University of New Mexico.
John Panitz was the prof teaching it, and I was his TA for the class. We took them through basic metal forming, vacuum technology, glass blowing, molding a plastic, etc.
The tubes were a bit different, as the students modified them during the semester and they needed to be opened repeatedly. We used Torr Seal to mold a base for them and used an o-ring seal between it and the glass envelope (we kept them attached to a running rough pump to keep them evacuated out enough to work). They started out as diodes, they added a grid to make them triodes. We had them do I-V curves on them and then they built amplifiers with them. They weren't nearly as elegant as the ones shown in the video, but they worked. The forming techniques we used were pretty similar, though we didn't use all the custom jigs.
Finally, they each deposited a phosphor screen on a metal disk that they had machined. They gutted the triodes and put the disk into the envelope along with some of the remaining electrodes to act as emission points. They then put a high voltage between the phosphor disk and the electrodes and demonstrated field emission.
I still think it was one of the best undergrad physics lab courses I've ever seen. The students had enough skills to be immediately useful in real lab work after it was done.
So, if someone were to say at the end of a submission on NASA's current foibles:
"Bill Clinton was directly involved in the appointment of people who were in NASA at the time of drinking before flight incidents and still there at the time of the attempted sabotage of an ISS flight computer."
And I questioned that perhaps, maybe, just possibly it was included as a largely non sequitor slam against the Clinton administration, then I would be signaling that I didn't care about NASA's troubles and only cared for protecting the honor of the previous administration?
It's understandable in a way. It costs a lot to set up the labs and facilities needed for some specialized skills. Engineering tends to have a lot of those types of courses.
Having someone teach a class that's just chalk board and talking is a lot cheaper. especially if you can have a slave... I mean grad student, teach it.
Apparently part of the system that makes these memories hard to get rid of is the release of epinephrin and related neurotransmitters that then tend to reinforce the connection of the emotion with the memory. When recalled, the emotional linking with the memory is more vulnerable, and it needs to be strengthened again. (At least that's my poor explanation of my poor understanding of some of the current thinking of why a beta adrenergic blocker like propranolol would aid in reducing emotional response to memories over time.)
In any case, this is still a long long way from being a therapy.
I think Vernor Vinge called it a localizer a number of years back.
Not sure what Drexler et al were calling the idea in the late 80s, but they were talking about much the same thing as well as general assemblers and such things as utility fog that could do the same thing.
People have been working on ubi-comp for a long time.
I'm sure you'll get a lot of comment from those feeling morally superior.
I wonder if they'll bitch as much about those who grow tobacco/hops, program automation computers used in cigarette factories and brewers/distillers. Statistically, they lead to far more deaths than you ever will have.
But, leave it to slashdot to see only black and white and be blind to shades of grey. Especially when it's gives a chance to feel self righteous.
That's it exactly (If you can say exactly about an approximation).
When you have something more complicated than a lone atom, the QM calculations for the orbitals quickly become a problem. The Hartree-Fock method is a common approximation method that gives a "good enough" answer in a lot of situations.
The second point is something a lot of people miss. A small difference in a molecule can make all the difference in the world. Heck, you don't have to get fancy for an example. Chlorine is a toxic gas, sodium is a highly reactive metal that can explode when you toss water on it. Put them together and you get table salt.
Slashdot Mirror
I prefer non-fucking bastards. That way they get weeded out of the gene pool.
Now your wife won't just suspect what you've been thinking about her younger sister. She'll know it for sure.
I'd like to point out that there are large numbers of untrained people engaging in largely unsupervised DIY Bio that is FAR more advanced than anything done in any professional laboratory.
Further, this activity has resulted in the release of extremely dangerous organisms being released into the wild.
Oh. Wait. This is Slashdot. No worries about anyone here doing that.
I currently do chemistry work that I report on paper to get entered by others or tell verbally to someone by phone. I think I've sent three emails at work so far this year.
By this measure I am of no value and a temp who does data entry is a national treasure. (That may be true, but it doesn't follow from this analysis.)
Guess I'll have to start responding to those weekly email tag fests of "who is going to bring what to the Friday pot-luck lunch". It may up my stats, but it'll probably add to my waistline.
The guy from the SSC was probably mentioning magnetic quadrupoles which are an assembly of electromagnets used to confine the beam.
The SSC certainly didn't use magnetic monopoles in its design.
No, it's not unamerican of you to oppose concentration of wealth and power. Actually, that's a very common sentiment in at least the earlier anti-nuclear movement.
It's a viewpoint that can be reasonably talked about. I just don't think it is very convincing when the consequences of it are fully explored. I also think it won't sell well with the public.
I'd very much like to argue the points for and against nuclear power on that basis. Instead, it gets caught up in arguments that will more easily work for public consumption.
Instead, we get Amory Lovins saying in his talks that we don't need anymore power plants of any hind, and thus nuclear is unneeded. At least he was honest enough on one occasion to admit that he felt that any cheap clean source of power would be a massive disaster as it would allow mankind to destroy nature even more.
We get the portrayal of the plutonium produced in a light water power reactor as being a major proliferation risk (go read up on the need for isotopic purity of a Pu bomb core to prevent early criticality).
We get statements on just how radiologically deadly Pu is when the observed rate of known exposures doesn't show the massive increases in lung cancer predicted. We get statements saying saying that standard reactor waste needs to be stored for tens of thousands of years, when in fact the highly radioactive portions decay much faster, etc, etc, lather rinse repeat.
And then, those who point these things out are labeled as brainwashed and industry shills by the very people using these arguments rather than the harder to sell real ones.
On balance, I've seen more intellectual honesty when arguing with Christian fundamentalists (and that's saying something).
Dr. Landis implies that Andrew Higgins didn't say the quoted item.
In fact, it's easily found in the link given.
In the linked text, Higgins gives a hyperlink back to a previous letter which was in The Space Review which contains that very quote and in the context Oberg said.
Landis snipes at Oberg for poor journalism, but apparently can't follow a bloody hyperlink. Why, even Cowboy Neal could do that and on a bad day to boot.
Secondly, Landis is an expert in solar cells and solid state devices. He apparently also works on elements of spacecraft electrical power systems, lander design and operation and writes articles on a variety of subjects. Impressive, but not directly in the area.
On the other hand, Andrew Higgins is a principle investigator and an expert in the behavior of materials under extreme hypersonic conditions and computer simulation of the same. His work on materials and combustion in hypersonic ram accelerators leaves him very well equipped to comment on the dynamics of reentry and the behavior of spacecraft materials and fuels under such extreme conditions.
Landis seems to be using the very sloppy and misleading tactics that he accuses Oberg of. Pot. Kettle. Black.
(Mild disclaimer. Andy Higgins is a friend going back to undergrad days (and believe me, it's been a while). I was mildly nettled that Landis invokes the name of an old friend and then becomes selectively blind when Andy gave the link to the very quoted item in the letter that Landis read.)
It's not just here on slashdot. I've seen it in the comments section of a number of news sites. The themes and phrasing of the posts are similar too. I think we're seeing a bit of "perception management" going on.
"It's not easy being green."
Imagine if they randomly chose the location of one of the 740th Missile Squadron's ICBM launch sites near Minot Air Force Base.
Would they be surprised to see people show up with guns and cameras to take picture of them?
Oh, I wouldn't mod you down. Everyone's entitled to an opinion, no matter how silly.
I think you'll find a lot of actors with kinda bizarro political views on all sides of the spectrum. And a good number of them are quite politically active.
I'm old enough to remember some people saying such sentiments about John Wayne when he died. I'm sure some people on the other side of the political spectrum will say similar things about Jane Fonda, or Streisand when they die.
In short: They're pooterheads.
These are actors. Yes, they've been politically active. Lots of people are. But unlike Reagan or Schwarzenegger they've not run for political office.
Yes, you may disagree with them. But, Isn't singing and strumming happy tunes to their death a bit much?
To blatantly steal a quote from Sergeant Hulka in Stripes "Lighten up, Francis."
At the time, Sagan was pretty up front about his reasons for supporting a manned mission to Mars, and the international political aspect was a quite strong portion of it.
There's nothing new or surprising about many of the motivations behind space exploration, manned or unmanned, being politically driven. JFK's push for the moon was based in international and internal politics rather than just science and engineering motivations.
In the 80s, the USSR had the Energia heavy launch vehicle that might have been useful, but it's largely gone the way of the Saturn 5. With the joint missions on the ISS, the long duration mission experience has equalized to a large extent.
The geopolitical landscape has changed drastically since the 80s as well. Many of the driving forces that were behind a joint Mars mission with the Soviets would be more applicable with the Chinese now.
Various space advocacy groups have been backing different visons of what type of exploration should be done for quite a long time.
Planetary Society has been pushing Mars rather than return to the moon since at least the late 80s.
At least part of that position was stated to be that a manned Mars mission could be a cooperative effort between the US and the Soviet Union. i.e. A political goal. That's an aspect that doesn't apply quite so much now.
Also, at that time, the Planetary Society was a lot less keen on manned missions than robotic ones. Friedman, Murry and Sagan (the notable founders) were all veterans of the highly successful unmanned planetary probe missions. They tended to view the manned program as a very expensive method that tended to take money away from the robotic probes.
Others disagreed with this viewpoint. The National Space Society, for example, (also populated with former astronauts and space scientists though no one as much of a household name as Sagan) tended to take a more pro manned space viewpoint.
I find it interesting that some years back when Newt Gingrich advocated giving laptops to poor children, he was ridiculed by many.
The cynic in me suspects that some of those who ridiculed the idea at the time now think the OLPC is a fandamtastic idea. I guess who the messenger is determines how good the idea is.
Personally, I think the OLPC is a good idea, but that they ought to openly sell them in wealthy countries and use the profit to subsidize other less well off places. Hey, I'd like to have one to mess around with.
And, of course, the buy one-give one promotion was at a time when I didn't have the extra cash. It's ended now that I could do it.
They make a good metal source for casting small aluminum parts.
We did it in 1993 in a junior level physics lab class at the University of New Mexico.
John Panitz was the prof teaching it, and I was his TA for the class. We took them through basic metal forming, vacuum technology, glass blowing, molding a plastic, etc.
The tubes were a bit different, as the students modified them during the semester and they needed to be opened repeatedly. We used Torr Seal to mold a base for them and used an o-ring seal between it and the glass envelope (we kept them attached to a running rough pump to keep them evacuated out enough to work). They started out as diodes, they added a grid to make them triodes. We had them do I-V curves on them and then they built amplifiers with them. They weren't nearly as elegant as the ones shown in the video, but they worked. The forming techniques we used were pretty similar, though we didn't use all the custom jigs.
Finally, they each deposited a phosphor screen on a metal disk that they had machined. They gutted the triodes and put the disk into the envelope along with some of the remaining electrodes to act as emission points. They then put a high voltage between the phosphor disk and the electrodes and demonstrated field emission.
I still think it was one of the best undergrad physics lab courses I've ever seen. The students had enough skills to be immediately useful in real lab work after it was done.
Oddly enough, I know a couple of those...
So, if someone were to say at the end of a submission on NASA's current foibles:
"Bill Clinton was directly involved in the appointment of people who were in NASA at the time of drinking before flight incidents and still there at the time of the attempted sabotage of an ISS flight computer."
And I questioned that perhaps, maybe, just possibly it was included as a largely non sequitor slam against the Clinton administration, then I would be signaling that I didn't care about NASA's troubles and only cared for protecting the honor of the previous administration?
Huh? What Molniya* orbit are you on?
(* highly eccentric)
It's understandable in a way. It costs a lot to set up the labs and facilities needed for some specialized skills. Engineering tends to have a lot of those types of courses.
Having someone teach a class that's just chalk board and talking is a lot cheaper. especially if you can have a slave... I mean grad student, teach it.
That's not so far fetched as it seems.
Apparently part of the system that makes these memories hard to get rid of is the release of epinephrin and related neurotransmitters that then tend to reinforce the connection of the emotion with the memory. When recalled, the emotional linking with the memory is more vulnerable, and it needs to be strengthened again. (At least that's my poor explanation of my poor understanding of some of the current thinking of why a beta adrenergic blocker like propranolol would aid in reducing emotional response to memories over time.)
In any case, this is still a long long way from being a therapy.
I think Vernor Vinge called it a localizer a number of years back.
Not sure what Drexler et al were calling the idea in the late 80s, but they were talking about much the same thing as well as general assemblers and such things as utility fog that could do the same thing.
People have been working on ubi-comp for a long time.
And he's named Al Goldstein?
As in Al Goldstein?
Must be one heck of a date...
I wonder if I'm the only one who noticed that the character you're nickname is taken from, Kokkor Hekkus, was called "The Killing Machine".
I'm sure you'll get a lot of comment from those feeling morally superior.
I wonder if they'll bitch as much about those who grow tobacco/hops, program automation computers used in cigarette factories and brewers/distillers. Statistically, they lead to far more deaths than you ever will have.
But, leave it to slashdot to see only black and white and be blind to shades of grey. Especially when it's gives a chance to feel self righteous.
That's it exactly (If you can say exactly about an approximation).
When you have something more complicated than a lone atom, the QM calculations for the orbitals quickly become a problem. The Hartree-Fock method is a common approximation method that gives a "good enough" answer in a lot of situations.
The second point is something a lot of people miss. A small difference in a molecule can make all the difference in the world. Heck, you don't have to get fancy for an example. Chlorine is a toxic gas, sodium is a highly reactive metal that can explode when you toss water on it. Put them together and you get table salt.