Have you read the site? Sheesh. Methinks this guy needs to keep at least one of the poor speak-and-spells in its original state... and make use of it...
From "schematic.htm":
This mod has 3 controls; on/off, course tune and fine tune.
Many of the glitched sounds that the speakandXs make are atleast referencial to its original use
What if Honda developed a larger version of their hybrid powertrain, and gave you an avalanche-sized SUV that got 38 miles per gallon? I suspect that's five years away at most.
If GWB annexed Iraq and started sucking out all the oil for US use, that would just tank the prices of oil and lower the demand for Texas oil.
t0qer's argument is correct, though, just not formulated quite accurately. It's not support for Texan oil. There really isn't any more Texan oil. What oil the US produces is mostly offshore or Alaskan, but even so it's small fraction of what we use.
Bush isn't trying to support pumping of oil; imported crude goes straight into the US petrochemical industry. Many of the refineries are in Texas, but even where they aren't, GWB is a friend of the industry. It's where he made his millions, and it's all he knows.
It's not simple selfishness and wanting to pad his wallet. It's just that that industry is where he grew up. He's conditioned to think of it as central to US wealth and prosperity, the driver of the economy. In his mind, whatever is good for the oil companies is good for every American. He really honestly believes he's doing the right thing for all of us by suppressing alternative technologies and making war with Iraq.
Bush is not smart and worldly enough to see the bigger picture, or to take the long view.
Getting the Iraqi oil fields under a friendly regime means the US has more *control* over oil prices and fewer "bad guys" to worry about messing up the economics for his favorite companies.
It isn't GWB holding up electric cars in some oil conspiracy, it's the population as a whole - who collectively don't seem all that interested in alternative fuel vehicles or higher fuel usage vehicles.
Yes and no. US consumers don't want a wimpy EV1, for the most part. They want the bulk, power, and capacity of an SUV. Thus, the consumer is to blame.
But... The government spends many billions on petroleum research, exploration, and foreign policy to support the petroleum economy. The cost of just the first war with Iraq and the subsequent decade-long airspace occupation is estimated in the back hall of congress to be in the range of $100 to $200 billion. Billions more are spent every year to subsidize activities (research and exlporation) that benefit the oil companies. I've seen figures (can't find them right now) that estimate you pay $5 to $8 per gallon of gas in income taxes to support petroleum... so that you can think you're filling for $1.79/gallon. (based on the cost of drilling, wars, local goverment concessions to bring industry to the area, etc.)
Now... if over the last fifteen years the government had spent that same half a trillion dollars on electric, fuel cell, and hybrid vehicle research, don't you think we'd already have big powerful SUVs that don't depend on oil? We'd have a cleaner country, consumers just as happy, and fewer foreign policy messes. What if we'd been doing that since 1920? Shouldn't we start now so we're not asking the same question again in 2040?
Designers will have no choice but to stick to open standards instead of writing to one specific browser.
Yeah, whatever. Designers have clients. Clients make demands. You see:
Client: I think our front page should have flashing news scroller, a slide show, and dancing girls that follow the mouse!
Me: Trust me, you really don't want that. It will make your page slow to load, and incompatible with numerous browsers. I could do it in Flash, but that would cost a lot.
Client: But the dancing girls are so cute! We'd sell more widgets! Don't use flash; I hate downloading plugins.
Me: I feel a great need to pop a clue in your a**, but I really need the money.
Client: Don't forget to make it play "Achy Breaky Heart"!
with all the stories I've seen about being unable to retrieve data from just 15 yrs ago (because the format is unreadable, not because the media deteriorated) I'm convinced that archiving data using a chisel and a rock is the best way to go.
Oh yeah, and when Microsoft standardizes us all on MS Alphabet 2.0, then where will you be?
You can't just run a rock through an open-source translation tool, you know.
You guys are SO nice! Calling his answer "brief" is tactful. How about terse, concise, laconic, dismissive, flippant, hasty, or good old rude? (I have more suggestions, more profane.)
Oh give the man a break. Take a look at the questions the slashdotters asked him... I cringed every time I read one, trying to imagine him having to deal with this stuff again.
(Question 1) Gee Mr. Shatner, what do you think about the fact that you have a reputation as a bad actor?
Star trek parodies, the legendary kiss, the SNL sketch - how many times do you think he's had to go through this? Most of the slashdot questions sounded like guys in that SNL sketch, for chrissake! And you expect deep, thought-out answers to this cruft?
If that was the way fandom approached me for decade on decade, I think I'd try to milk it for all it was worth, too. Otherwise it couldn't possibly be worth it.
Take a look at any list of the top grossing movies of all time. Here's one from July 2002:
1: Titanic 2: Star Wars (*) 3: E.T (*) 4: Star Wars I: The Phantom menace (*) 5: Spider-Man 6: Jurassic Park (*) 7: Forrest Gump 8: Harry Potter I 9: Lord of the Rings I 10: The Lion King
Four of the top ten are sci-fi, and three more are fantasy or comics, sharing much of the same demographic. If you'd looked just a year ago, instead of the newer movies you'd see two more Star Wars movies, Terminator 2, and Independence Day.
I've seen survey results that over 2/3 of americans consider themselves fans of "Star Trek". This is a TV franchise that has been going on for what, 36 years now? On it's fifth show, with weekly viewerships still in the tens of millions? And which has spawned 10 movies? Can any other show anywhere make claims like that?
On the whole people LOVE visual Sci-fi. Fewer people read it, but in the film/video worlds it's a genre with a great deal of pull for most Americans.
To all you liberals, grow up and start taking responsibility for your life, and make others take responsibility for theirs.
Self-responsibility is not a liberal vs. conservative issue; it is better characterized as an authoritarian vs. libertarian issue.
Liberals with an authoritarian bent would have the government outlaw "dangerous" things like offensive/hateful/politically incorrect language, games that "promote" racism, etc. Conservatives with an authoritarian bent would outlaw "dangerous" things like homosexuality, games that "promote" immorality or drug use, violence and sexuality on television, etc.
OTOH, someone with libertarian tendencies, whether they were otherwise conservative or liberal, would prefer the government stay out of people's lives. I.E., a libertarian believes people should take responsibility for themselves. They wouldn't outlaw "unsafe" games.
You bring up drugs, GHB in particular, and complain that the government prohibits "safer replacements for alcohol and antidepressants". Ignoring for the moment any debate over the merits of that particular drug, those who would prefer legalized drugs of any sort are strongly libertarian. Many are liberal, as well.
Those who "ask the government to protect them from themselves" aren't "liberal". They're authoritarian, and include just as many conservatives as liberals.
I'm actually quite surprised to see you blaming the outlawing of GHB on liberals- the most vocal proponents of harsh drug laws, generally, are conservative authoritarians.
You, it seems, do not really know who your enemies are. I consider myself quite liberal, but I agree with you that people should take more responsibility for themselves.
If you want to see some other videos taken by this camera, visit our RocketCam Gallery. They're not of the shuttle, but they're pretty inspiring nonetheless.
Genuinely I think you can say that the FARC is a terrorist organization because they have been responsible for military attacks on civilian targets.... And you might even imply, by extension, that the US government is a terrorist organization since they back the columbian government.
I'm not arguing whether or not the attacks linked above were justified, simply that they were in fact civilian targets. If that's your only criterion, your analysis applies to the US government as much as anyone. No need to split hairs after all.
"Policymakers should not make rigid intellectual property licensing choices a precondition for eligibility for procurement"
Which reads: "The more times we say it, the more you'll begin believe us that an open-source license like the GPL that allows nearly any activity with software, from selling it to duplicating it to re-engineering it, is somehow more 'rigid' than our own locked-down, restrictive license policies. Once you believe that our IP licenses imply freedom, we've got ya."
... what the deal is with region coding? I have never understood why the MPAA thinks it is so important to prevent me from viewing japanese or european DVD's. Why do they give a rat's ass?
I suppose it must, somehow, be a way of protecting their profits. But how? It's not like they make more money if I go buy a second, japanese DVD player so I can play japanese DVDs -- Sony or someone makes the extra dough, not hollywood.
All it means is that if I'm travelling overseas I can't pick up discs of local films and have any expectation of watching them when I get home. And I can't buy and watch discs of foreign-local films over the internet; if there's no US release I'm screwed and can't watch the movie. This means.... wait for it.... fewer discs sold. Sooo... how does this make sense?
This variant of D-VHS, D-Theater, includes an encrpytion, to stop the pre-recorded movies from being copied (much like CSS was supposed to do with DVD's)
Kewl! So where can i download the DeD-Theater code? Can I get it on a t-shirt?
Less than 10% can mean anything from 0% to 10%. It's shorter and more precise to state that it's 9% the weight of steel
Since it's a structure and not a pure material, it's not precisely amenable to such analysis. As they say in the company website, the weight ratio of a pure steel tube to a PYRAmatrix strut depends on the size and shape of the strut in question. Apparently the structure is more efficient and thus has a better weight savings over steel at larger diameters.
So you could say something like "it's 9% the weight of a steel strut 200mm in diameter with a load limit of 2000kg", but you couldn't give a single figure for all cases.
Furthermore, they apparently make this stuff out of more than one different material; I saw both glass and carbon fiber product listed on the site. It's safe to assume that different materials will result in different properties relative to steel in the final product.
So specifying a range like "less than 10%" is probably a perfectly valid generalization, as long as it's true for the majority of applications.
but interestingly only 20 or 22 are found in life. And only the levorotary form at the amine carbon is found.
At the risk of nitpicking, significantly more than 20 or 22 amino acids are found in life, just not as building blocks of proteins. Take for example dopamine, which is an amino acid not used in proteins in any known organism, but a rather common neurotransmitter in most animals.
Asteroid mining: no strip mining, no environmental concerns. Nickel-iron asteroids have a very high percentage of metals (common and valuable) in their composition, and they're solid - it's not like following that narrow vein of material through the Earth's crust. You can break apart and smelt the entire asteroid. Abundant solar power, 24 hours a day, to power clean furnaces.
It may be hard to get stuff into space, but it's pretty easy to get stuff *down*.
Assorted calculations show that the market value of the metals in a single smallish nickel-iron asteroid is on the order of a trillion dollars.
Still think there's no reason for it? It's further away than tourism, but ultimately it may have a much bigger market potential.
I have to say I disagree that the logistics are unreasonable. We made it to the moon 33 years ago - a third of a century - before we even had modern computers. Getting to and from mars is simply a matter of scale... it takes longer and takes more thrust to get back off the surface. But that doesn't remotely mean it can't be done. The distance is phenomenal, yes, but in space distance just becomes time. Possibly the biggest logistical problem is medicine... in the apollo program there was a maximum return time of about 4 days... if someone gets sick you can get them home to go to a doctor. For Mars, that's not an option because you're 6 months away with limited opportunities for orbital transition. But there are a *lot* of people working on this very problem, even while NASA hasn't yet made concrete plans for a mars mission.
Take a look at some of the plans invented by groups outside of NASA, most notably Robert Zubrin's Mars Direct concept. I'll spare you going into detail but this plan has so many fail-safes it's ridiculous. The entire thing uses more-or-less existing technology.
Meanwhile, there are two experiments already running to study the difficulties of having people live isolated on Mars for an extended mission (many months until the next launch window floats around). Check out the Mars Arctic Research Station and the Mars Desert Research Station (site temporarily down?). All this research and work is already being done, independantly of NASA. (usually marssociety.org is a great reference... at the moment it seems to be undergoing maintenance or something. Bad timing.)
Technologically, it can be done; I think there's little question about that. As for the policital will and the money, that's a different issue. But maybe this bill shows that there is some interest after all.
Personally, I put my money on commercialization of space being the primary driving force in the next 20 years. The profit motives and the opportunities of space tourism and potentially near-earth asteroid mining will outstrip anything the US government will deliver in the near future.
Of course 6 film would have been the appropriate way to do it to get the best rendition of the books onto film. JRRT originally planned on releasing all six books as separate volumes, with the appendices in a seventh. His publisher insisted on the three-volume format.
That said, it would of course have never flown in a business or cultural sense. Six is too long a series to plan in either financial or marketing senses, and the public is now utterly used to the three volumes and their names. Besides, "the Fellowship", "The Two Towers", and "The Return..." make much better film names than "The ring goes south" et. al.
As a perfectionist and a hardcore fan I do have my quibbles, but I think on the whole Jackson did a fine job.
Few people here seem to understand the crucial issue. A couple do, but their posts haven't been modded up... here's another try.
You don't build a magrail to give your spacecraft orbital velocity. Of course that's silly, for the reasons given above. You use it to give you some small PART of your velocity. This is extremely beneficial.
The crucial insight is that each bit of fuel you use for some stage of the flight needs to be lifted be even more fuel in the previous stage. Think backwards from orbit and it will make sense.
Say you have a 100-kilo satellite you want to accelerate at a constant rate for some period of time. For the last second of your flight, you need to burn, say, 10 kilos of fuel. That means the second before that, you need enough fuel to accelerate 110 kilos, 100 Kg of spacecraft plus the 10 Kg of fuel you'll need in the next second. So you'll need 11 kilos of fuel for the second-to-last second of acceleration. The second before that, you need 12.1 kilos. and before that, about 15 kilos. If you know anything about exponentials, you can then imagine how much fuel you need for the FIRST few seconds of the flight.
(This is not actually quite how spacecraft usually work, but it illustrates the general point nicely)
Over 90% of the fuel you are carrying is used just to lift the rest of the fuel that is burned later on, and a huge fraction of it is burned in just the first few seconds. And of course each kilo of fuel you carry requires a larger spacecraft to hold it, which in turn weighs more, which in turn requires even more fuel. So, if you can use a 10km or 100km rail to get your first few seconds of acceleration, you save a huge amount of fuel. This means a smaller spacecraft, which in turn means even LESS fuel carried.
The power burned by the railgun/mass driver/maglev whatever may actually be more expensive in raw form than rocket fuel (i.e. kerosene, in Russian rockets, which is less expensive per joule than electricity. US rockets use liquid hydrogen, which costs a bundle because you have to use vast amounts of electricity to cool it.), but it doesn't exponentially increase in magnitude as you head down the rail, because it's transmitted through wires rather than carried as mass in the spacecraft. Every second, you only need the same amount of electricity you used the previous second.
The same is true of chemical-powered ram and shock cannons, where fuel filling a cylindrical pipe is combusted behind the accelerating spacecraft travelling through the pipe. (not recommended for human payloads).
Furthermore, if your spacecraft has wings, this may give you yet another benefit. The shuttle has wings, but launches straight up, meaning for the ascent they are just dead weight requiring a huge, exponentially-scaled mass of fuel to lift. But on an almost-horizontal launching system, the wings can provide lift, and thereby actually be useful on the ascent stage. This of course is made easier if the vehicle already has significant velocity before it even lights its engines.
This whole system may not be a panacea; I'm skeptical too. But it probably is worth looking into, because it may help and doesn't require any technologies that don't yet exist. (unlike skyhooks/beanstalks or other strangenesses)
Dennis Tito was the first Paying Tourist Civilian in space. NASA has been sending civilians to space for two decades on the space shuttle. To pick, as an example, a name you might remember... Christa McAuliffe was a schoolteacher. She was neither the first nor last civilian, but was the only civilian casualty of the space program.
Of course, you could look at in another way... NASA is technically a civilian bureau, and many of the career astronauts do not hold military rank.
What the site said is that Feeney will be the first Canadian civilian in space.
It's nice to have some books that are either simply inspirational, or introduce interesting topics without being dry programming manuals.
Here are some popular accounts of computer-related sciences that are very nice accessible introductions.
Chaos - James Gleick
Artificial Life - Steven Levy
Mind Children - Hans Moravec
The Emperor's New Mind - Roger Penrose
The Society of Mind- Marvin Minsky
Nano: The emerging science of nanotechnology - Ed Regis
And some more specific texts that I use in my field:
Neural Networks for Pattern Recognition - Christopher Bishop. Simply the best introduction to neural networks ever written; requires a good math background though.
Neural Smithing - Russell Reed and Robert Marks
Robot Vision - Berthold Korn
And I'd second all the people who mentioned Applied Cryptography and GEB.
Slashdot Mirror
From "schematic.htm":
And so on..
What if Honda developed a larger version of their hybrid powertrain, and gave you an avalanche-sized SUV that got 38 miles per gallon? I suspect that's five years away at most.
If GWB annexed Iraq and started sucking out all the oil for US use, that would just tank the prices of oil and lower the demand for Texas oil.
... so that you can think you're filling for $1.79/gallon. (based on the cost of drilling, wars, local goverment concessions to bring industry to the area, etc.)
t0qer's argument is correct, though, just not formulated quite accurately. It's not support for Texan oil. There really isn't any more Texan oil. What oil the US produces is mostly offshore or Alaskan, but even so it's small fraction of what we use.
Bush isn't trying to support pumping of oil; imported crude goes straight into the US petrochemical industry. Many of the refineries are in Texas, but even where they aren't, GWB is a friend of the industry. It's where he made his millions, and it's all he knows.
It's not simple selfishness and wanting to pad his wallet. It's just that that industry is where he grew up. He's conditioned to think of it as central to US wealth and prosperity, the driver of the economy. In his mind, whatever is good for the oil companies is good for every American. He really honestly believes he's doing the right thing for all of us by suppressing alternative technologies and making war with Iraq.
Bush is not smart and worldly enough to see the bigger picture, or to take the long view.
Getting the Iraqi oil fields under a friendly regime means the US has more *control* over oil prices and fewer "bad guys" to worry about messing up the economics for his favorite companies.
It isn't GWB holding up electric cars in some oil conspiracy, it's the population as a whole - who collectively don't seem all that interested in alternative fuel vehicles or higher fuel usage vehicles.
Yes and no. US consumers don't want a wimpy EV1, for the most part. They want the bulk, power, and capacity of an SUV. Thus, the consumer is to blame.
But... The government spends many billions on petroleum research, exploration, and foreign policy to support the petroleum economy. The cost of just the first war with Iraq and the subsequent decade-long airspace occupation is estimated in the back hall of congress to be in the range of $100 to $200 billion. Billions more are spent every year to subsidize activities (research and exlporation) that benefit the oil companies. I've seen figures (can't find them right now) that estimate you pay $5 to $8 per gallon of gas in income taxes to support petroleum
Now... if over the last fifteen years the government had spent that same half a trillion dollars on electric, fuel cell, and hybrid vehicle research, don't you think we'd already have big powerful SUVs that don't depend on oil? We'd have a cleaner country, consumers just as happy, and fewer foreign policy messes. What if we'd been doing that since 1920? Shouldn't we start now so we're not asking the same question again in 2040?
Designers will have no choice but to stick to open standards instead of writing to one specific browser.
Yeah, whatever. Designers have clients. Clients make demands. You see:
Client: I think our front page should have flashing news scroller, a slide show, and dancing girls that follow the mouse!
Me: Trust me, you really don't want that. It will make your page slow to load, and incompatible with numerous browsers. I could do it in Flash, but that would cost a lot.
Client: But the dancing girls are so cute! We'd sell more widgets! Don't use flash; I hate downloading plugins.
Me: I feel a great need to pop a clue in your a**, but I really need the money.
Client: Don't forget to make it play "Achy Breaky Heart"!
Me: Grr!
with all the stories I've seen about being unable to retrieve data from just 15 yrs ago (because the format is unreadable, not because the media deteriorated) I'm convinced that archiving data using a chisel and a rock is the best way to go.
Oh yeah, and when Microsoft standardizes us all on MS Alphabet 2.0, then where will you be?
You can't just run a rock through an open-source translation tool, you know.
Commuting to work at seven G doesn't sound like a party to me...
What timing... it turns out I have moderator access today.
Should I mod this thread down to try to save my server?
Evan Dorn,
Ecliptic Enterprises Webmaster
p.s. Thanks a bunch, Dan.
You guys are SO nice! Calling his answer "brief" is tactful. How about terse, concise, laconic, dismissive, flippant, hasty, or good old rude? (I have more suggestions, more profane.)
... I cringed every time I read one, trying to imagine him having to deal with this stuff again.
Oh give the man a break. Take a look at the questions the slashdotters asked him
(Question 1) Gee Mr. Shatner, what do you think about the fact that you have a reputation as a bad actor?
Star trek parodies, the legendary kiss, the SNL sketch - how many times do you think he's had to go through this? Most of the slashdot questions sounded like guys in that SNL sketch, for chrissake! And you expect deep, thought-out answers to this cruft?
If that was the way fandom approached me for decade on decade, I think I'd try to milk it for all it was worth, too. Otherwise it couldn't possibly be worth it.
Low sci-fi appeal?
Are you nuts?
Take a look at any list of the top grossing movies of all time. Here's one from July 2002:
1: Titanic
2: Star Wars (*)
3: E.T (*)
4: Star Wars I: The Phantom menace (*)
5: Spider-Man
6: Jurassic Park (*)
7: Forrest Gump
8: Harry Potter I
9: Lord of the Rings I
10: The Lion King
Four of the top ten are sci-fi, and three more are fantasy or comics, sharing much of the same demographic. If you'd looked just a year ago, instead of the newer movies you'd see two more Star Wars movies, Terminator 2, and Independence Day.
I've seen survey results that over 2/3 of americans consider themselves fans of "Star Trek". This is a TV franchise that has been going on for what, 36 years now? On it's fifth show, with weekly viewerships still in the tens of millions? And which has spawned 10 movies? Can any other show anywhere make claims like that?
On the whole people LOVE visual Sci-fi. Fewer people read it, but in the film/video worlds it's a genre with a great deal of pull for most Americans.
-Evan
To all you liberals, grow up and start taking responsibility for your life, and make others take responsibility for theirs.
Self-responsibility is not a liberal vs. conservative issue; it is better characterized as an authoritarian vs. libertarian issue.
Liberals with an authoritarian bent would have the government outlaw "dangerous" things like offensive/hateful/politically incorrect language, games that "promote" racism, etc. Conservatives with an authoritarian bent would outlaw "dangerous" things like homosexuality, games that "promote" immorality or drug use, violence and sexuality on television, etc.
OTOH, someone with libertarian tendencies, whether they were otherwise conservative or liberal, would prefer the government stay out of people's lives. I.E., a libertarian believes people should take responsibility for themselves. They wouldn't outlaw "unsafe" games.
You bring up drugs, GHB in particular, and complain that the government prohibits "safer replacements for alcohol and antidepressants". Ignoring for the moment any debate over the merits of that particular drug, those who would prefer legalized drugs of any sort are strongly libertarian. Many are liberal, as well.
Those who "ask the government to protect them from themselves" aren't "liberal". They're authoritarian, and include just as many conservatives as liberals.
I'm actually quite surprised to see you blaming the outlawing of GHB on liberals- the most vocal proponents of harsh drug laws, generally, are conservative authoritarians.
You, it seems, do not really know who your enemies are. I consider myself quite liberal, but I agree with you that people should take more responsibility for themselves.
If you want to see some other videos taken by this camera, visit our RocketCam Gallery. They're not of the shuttle, but they're pretty inspiring nonetheless.
Genuinely I think you can say that the FARC is a terrorist organization because they have been responsible for military attacks on civilian targets. ... And you might even imply, by extension, that the US government is a terrorist organization since they back the columbian government.
"By extension", heck. The US Government
has
repeatedly
bombed
civilian
targets.
I'm not arguing whether or not the attacks linked above were justified, simply that they were in fact civilian targets. If that's your only criterion, your analysis applies to the US government as much as anyone. No need to split hairs after all.
Another one of their principles:
"Policymakers should not make rigid intellectual property licensing choices a precondition for eligibility for procurement"
Which reads: "The more times we say it, the more you'll begin believe us that an open-source license like the GPL that allows nearly any activity with software, from selling it to duplicating it to re-engineering it, is somehow more 'rigid' than our own locked-down, restrictive license policies. Once you believe that our IP licenses imply freedom, we've got ya."
... what the deal is with region coding? I have never understood why the MPAA thinks it is so important to prevent me from viewing japanese or european DVD's. Why do they give a rat's ass?
I suppose it must, somehow, be a way of protecting their profits. But how? It's not like they make more money if I go buy a second, japanese DVD player so I can play japanese DVDs -- Sony or someone makes the extra dough, not hollywood.
All it means is that if I'm travelling overseas I can't pick up discs of local films and have any expectation of watching them when I get home. And I can't buy and watch discs of foreign-local films over the internet; if there's no US release I'm screwed and can't watch the movie. This means.... wait for it.... fewer discs sold. Sooo... how does this make sense?
My EE advisor in college was fond of saying:
... once."
"Any diode can be light-emitting
This variant of D-VHS, D-Theater, includes an encrpytion, to stop the pre-recorded movies from being copied (much like CSS was supposed to do with DVD's)
Kewl! So where can i download the DeD-Theater code? Can I get it on a t-shirt?
:-)
Less than 10% can mean anything from 0% to 10%. It's shorter and more precise to state that it's 9% the weight of steel
Since it's a structure and not a pure material, it's not precisely amenable to such analysis. As they say in the company website, the weight ratio of a pure steel tube to a PYRAmatrix strut depends on the size and shape of the strut in question. Apparently the structure is more efficient and thus has a better weight savings over steel at larger diameters.
So you could say something like "it's 9% the weight of a steel strut 200mm in diameter with a load limit of 2000kg", but you couldn't give a single figure for all cases.
Furthermore, they apparently make this stuff out of more than one different material; I saw both glass and carbon fiber product listed on the site. It's safe to assume that different materials will result in different properties relative to steel in the final product.
So specifying a range like "less than 10%" is probably a perfectly valid generalization, as long as it's true for the majority of applications.
At the risk of nitpicking, significantly more than 20 or 22 amino acids are found in life, just not as building blocks of proteins. Take for example dopamine, which is an amino acid not used in proteins in any known organism, but a rather common neurotransmitter in most animals.
Asteroid mining: no strip mining, no environmental concerns. Nickel-iron asteroids have a very high percentage of metals (common and valuable) in their composition, and they're solid - it's not like following that narrow vein of material through the Earth's crust. You can break apart and smelt the entire asteroid. Abundant solar power, 24 hours a day, to power clean furnaces.
It may be hard to get stuff into space, but it's pretty easy to get stuff *down*.
Assorted calculations show that the market value of the metals in a single smallish nickel-iron asteroid is on the order of a trillion dollars.
Still think there's no reason for it? It's further away than tourism, but ultimately it may have a much bigger market potential.
I have to say I disagree that the logistics are unreasonable. We made it to the moon 33 years ago - a third of a century - before we even had modern computers. Getting to and from mars is simply a matter of scale... it takes longer and takes more thrust to get back off the surface. But that doesn't remotely mean it can't be done. The distance is phenomenal, yes, but in space distance just becomes time. Possibly the biggest logistical problem is medicine ... in the apollo program there was a maximum return time of about 4 days... if someone gets sick you can get them home to go to a doctor. For Mars, that's not an option because you're 6 months away with limited opportunities for orbital transition. But there are a *lot* of people working on this very problem, even while NASA hasn't yet made concrete plans for a mars mission.
Take a look at some of the plans invented by groups outside of NASA, most notably Robert Zubrin's Mars Direct concept. I'll spare you going into detail but this plan has so many fail-safes it's ridiculous. The entire thing uses more-or-less existing technology.
Meanwhile, there are two experiments already running to study the difficulties of having people live isolated on Mars for an extended mission (many months until the next launch window floats around). Check out the Mars Arctic Research Station and the Mars Desert Research Station (site temporarily down?). All this research and work is already being done, independantly of NASA. (usually marssociety.org is a great reference... at the moment it seems to be undergoing maintenance or something. Bad timing.)
Technologically, it can be done; I think there's little question about that. As for the policital will and the money, that's a different issue. But maybe this bill shows that there is some interest after all.
Personally, I put my money on commercialization of space being the primary driving force in the next 20 years. The profit motives and the opportunities of space tourism and potentially near-earth asteroid mining will outstrip anything the US government will deliver in the near future.
"Rotate the pod please, Hal..."
... I could see your lips moving ...
Dave
-Ev
Of course 6 film would have been the appropriate way to do it to get the best rendition of the books onto film. JRRT originally planned on releasing all six books as separate volumes, with the appendices in a seventh. His publisher insisted on the three-volume format.
That said, it would of course have never flown in a business or cultural sense. Six is too long a series to plan in either financial or marketing senses, and the public is now utterly used to the three volumes and their names. Besides, "the Fellowship", "The Two Towers", and "The Return..." make much better film names than "The ring goes south" et. al.
As a perfectionist and a hardcore fan I do have my quibbles, but I think on the whole Jackson did a fine job.
Few people here seem to understand the crucial issue. A couple do, but their posts haven't been modded up... here's another try.
You don't build a magrail to give your spacecraft orbital velocity. Of course that's silly, for the reasons given above. You use it to give you some small PART of your velocity. This is extremely beneficial.
The crucial insight is that each bit of fuel you use for some stage of the flight needs to be lifted be even more fuel in the previous stage. Think backwards from orbit and it will make sense.
Say you have a 100-kilo satellite you want to accelerate at a constant rate for some period of time. For the last second of your flight, you need to burn, say, 10 kilos of fuel. That means the second before that, you need enough fuel to accelerate 110 kilos, 100 Kg of spacecraft plus the 10 Kg of fuel you'll need in the next second. So you'll need 11 kilos of fuel for the second-to-last second of acceleration. The second before that, you need 12.1 kilos. and before that, about 15 kilos. If you know anything about exponentials, you can then imagine how much fuel you need for the FIRST few seconds of the flight.
(This is not actually quite how spacecraft usually work, but it illustrates the general point nicely)
Over 90% of the fuel you are carrying is used just to lift the rest of the fuel that is burned later on, and a huge fraction of it is burned in just the first few seconds. And of course each kilo of fuel you carry requires a larger spacecraft to hold it, which in turn weighs more, which in turn requires even more fuel. So, if you can use a 10km or 100km rail to get your first few seconds of acceleration, you save a huge amount of fuel. This means a smaller spacecraft, which in turn means even LESS fuel carried.
The power burned by the railgun/mass driver/maglev whatever may actually be more expensive in raw form than rocket fuel (i.e. kerosene, in Russian rockets, which is less expensive per joule than electricity. US rockets use liquid hydrogen, which costs a bundle because you have to use vast amounts of electricity to cool it.), but it doesn't exponentially increase in magnitude as you head down the rail, because it's transmitted through wires rather than carried as mass in the spacecraft. Every second, you only need the same amount of electricity you used the previous second.
The same is true of chemical-powered ram and shock cannons, where fuel filling a cylindrical pipe is combusted behind the accelerating spacecraft travelling through the pipe. (not recommended for human payloads).
Furthermore, if your spacecraft has wings, this may give you yet another benefit. The shuttle has wings, but launches straight up, meaning for the ascent they are just dead weight requiring a huge, exponentially-scaled mass of fuel to lift. But on an almost-horizontal launching system, the wings can provide lift, and thereby actually be useful on the ascent stage. This of course is made easier if the vehicle already has significant velocity before it even lights its engines.
This whole system may not be a panacea; I'm skeptical too. But it probably is worth looking into, because it may help and doesn't require any technologies that don't yet exist. (unlike skyhooks/beanstalks or other strangenesses)
Of course, you could look at in another way ... NASA is technically a civilian bureau, and many of the career astronauts do not hold military rank.
What the site said is that Feeney will be the first Canadian civilian in space.
Here are some popular accounts of computer-related sciences that are very nice accessible introductions.
And some more specific texts that I use in my field:
And I'd second all the people who mentioned Applied Cryptography and GEB.