I don't think anyone seriously contemplating relativistic or FTL travel expects to be physically accelerated to such speeds. After all, if stationary interstellar hydrogen is effectively hitting you at teravolt levels, it means that every particle in your body (and the ship) has actually been accelerated to velocities equivalent to the particles in the LHC beam. Not bloody likely. We need warp drive, subspace, wormholes, or something else to solve the problem, not ridiculous conventional acceleration.
With a small scope, your best bet is low magnification so you get good brightness. If you can get sufficient brightness, the Pleiades are magnificent. The stars are jewel colors! The Andromeda galaxy is a pretty good target as well, as is Jupiter. Saturn is a much smaller image than Jupiter due to distance, and you won't be able to magnify it enough to see colors with a small scope. In general, try the low-number M objects. They are low numbers because they were the first to be catalogs, hence in general low-hanging fruit as it were.
Also, something amateurs often overlook is using binoculars for astronomy. The image-stabilized ones are particularly excellent for hand-held use. Once again, light-gathering power is the goal, not magnification.
Jungledisk is a nice front-end to Amazon S3 for which I pay around $1 a month. The transfer fees for S3 are irrelevant over time, and I end up paying around $15 a month to back up my entire personal dataset from 3 different machines. I can get to any of my stuff from anywhere if needed, and the incremental backup system keeps things current with no overt action from me. I include my personal mp3 collection (big), digital photos, and everything else I care about. I spend a lot more than $15 a month on soda, so the $15 seems like a bargain to me.
There may be cheaper solutions out there, but why bother? This one is plenty cheap enough, and works great for me.
I have set up three households with over-the-air DTV now. The first was with amplified 'rabbit-ears', and was marginally successful. The next two were with the RCA 'smart' antenna that auto-tunes to the target channel when used with a compatible converter box (I used Tivax units). They both work wonderfully. All three were indoor installations in suburban Tampa, FL. Bye, bye, Brighthouse!
The paper printout had better be tied verifiably to the voting machine, too. Else, I vote one way, then go away and reprint my own 'receipt' with a different vote as a basis, then call up the media and say 'look - it doesn't verify!' to attack the process. The machine itself would have to have an embedded secret key and sign the vote too - that couldn't be spoofed so easily.
My last home system was build to be quiet. As such, it has low-speed fans which 'tuned' to keep things cool under normal use. I ran the UD 'protein folding' distributed app at first, but noticed a 10-degree C bump in CPU temperature when it ran vs. normal use without it running. So the trade off for me was noise - the fans had to run faster when the distributed app was running, making the system noticibly louder.
The 'nemesis' bad guy was totally unconvincing and had no depth, and hence I vote that this episode tanked because there was no emotional connection with the audience. Perhaps the original plot was better, but the final meme-bleached version felt totally contrived.
Mark, I think you captured the essence of the issue perfectly. It is the relationships (or politics) that count, always.
I was once driving a project and encountering a lot of 'political' flack that just seemed so petty. It rapidly got to the point where I realized the technical aspects of the project were doomed for political reasons, so I changed my own goal: to build better relationships with everyone on the team. It was amazing how that change of tactics affected the project! It ended up getting done better than I could have hoped (technically), for all the 'wrong' reasons. And I actually made some long-term friends in the process.
Slashdot Mirror
I always liked Knuth's choice quote from John von Neumann on the subject:
"Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin."
- Michael
I don't think anyone seriously contemplating relativistic or FTL travel expects to be physically accelerated to such speeds. After all, if stationary interstellar hydrogen is effectively hitting you at teravolt levels, it means that every particle in your body (and the ship) has actually been accelerated to velocities equivalent to the particles in the LHC beam. Not bloody likely. We need warp drive, subspace, wormholes, or something else to solve the problem, not ridiculous conventional acceleration.
- Michael
With a small scope, your best bet is low magnification so you get good brightness. If you can get sufficient brightness, the Pleiades are magnificent. The stars are jewel colors! The Andromeda galaxy is a pretty good target as well, as is Jupiter. Saturn is a much smaller image than Jupiter due to distance, and you won't be able to magnify it enough to see colors with a small scope. In general, try the low-number M objects. They are low numbers because they were the first to be catalogs, hence in general low-hanging fruit as it were.
Also, something amateurs often overlook is using binoculars for astronomy. The image-stabilized ones are particularly excellent for hand-held use. Once again, light-gathering power is the goal, not magnification.
- Michael
Jungledisk is a nice front-end to Amazon S3 for which I pay around $1 a month. The transfer fees for S3 are irrelevant over time, and I end up paying around $15 a month to back up my entire personal dataset from 3 different machines. I can get to any of my stuff from anywhere if needed, and the incremental backup system keeps things current with no overt action from me. I include my personal mp3 collection (big), digital photos, and everything else I care about. I spend a lot more than $15 a month on soda, so the $15 seems like a bargain to me.
There may be cheaper solutions out there, but why bother? This one is plenty cheap enough, and works great for me.
I have set up three households with over-the-air DTV now. The first was with amplified 'rabbit-ears', and was marginally successful. The next two were with the RCA 'smart' antenna that auto-tunes to the target channel when used with a compatible converter box (I used Tivax units). They both work wonderfully. All three were indoor installations in suburban Tampa, FL. Bye, bye, Brighthouse!
- Michael
The paper printout had better be tied verifiably to the voting machine, too. Else, I vote one way, then go away and reprint my own 'receipt' with a different vote as a basis, then call up the media and say 'look - it doesn't verify!' to attack the process. The machine itself would have to have an embedded secret key and sign the vote too - that couldn't be spoofed so easily.
My last home system was build to be quiet. As such, it has low-speed fans which 'tuned' to keep things cool under normal use. I ran the UD 'protein folding' distributed app at first, but noticed a 10-degree C bump in CPU temperature when it ran vs. normal use without it running. So the trade off for me was noise - the fans had to run faster when the distributed app was running, making the system noticibly louder.
- Michael
The 'nemesis' bad guy was totally unconvincing and had no depth, and hence I vote that this episode tanked because there was no emotional connection with the audience. Perhaps the original plot was better, but the final meme-bleached version felt totally contrived.
Special effects won't save an awful plot.
Mark, I think you captured the essence of the issue perfectly. It is the relationships (or politics) that count, always.
I was once driving a project and encountering a lot of 'political' flack that just seemed so petty. It rapidly got to the point where I realized the technical aspects of the project were doomed for political reasons, so I changed my own goal: to build better relationships with everyone on the team. It was amazing how that change of tactics affected the project! It ended up getting done better than I could have hoped (technically), for all the 'wrong' reasons. And I actually made some long-term friends in the process.
- Michael