The USSR chose the location for the Baikonur Cosmodrome for the same reason the USA chose the location for the Kennedy Space Center... it's flat and it's about as close to the equator as you can get while still being within your territory. Had they known that it would end up in another country (Kazakhstan), they would have put it at a southernmost point within the boundaries of Russia. The closer you are to the equator, the more efficient your launches are.
The orbit of the ISS was chosen based on the latitude of Baikonur. In that respect, the Cape Breton latitude is OK, in that it matches Baikonur, and therefore matches ISS. To claim that this is a good latitude for launches that do anything other than match LEO stuff launched from Baikonur is overstating it.
Also, the TFA says
"Nova Scotia has signed a "team agreement" to provide 300 acres of land -- and perhaps even some funding -- for a massive orbital launch facility."
They provided some land rights, nothing more. No money, no personnel, no new roads or other infrastructure. This is pretty vaporous.
1) My loans aren't gaining interest now, the federal government is handling that for me. 2) I want options when I graduate to move to where I need to or whatever. I don't want to live in my parents' basement till I am 35.
The fee charged for Subsidized and Unsubsidized Loans was 4 percent of the amount borrowed before July 1, 2006. Beginning with loans for which the first disbursement of principal is made on or after February 8, 2006, and before July 1, 2007, the origination fee charged to Direct Stafford Loan borrowers is 3 percent. The loan fee is subtracted proportionately from each loan disbursement.
So, you took out a loan for $10,000, and had to pay 3% for doing so, which leaves you with $9,700 to put in some investment. If you don't make at least a 7% ROI in the first year, you will have less money than you started with, since your loan origination fee + inflation will eat away at the money.
Assuming you find some no-fee magical investment that makes you a whopping inflation-adjusted 12% ROI every year for the four years you are in college (which would be a bull market to rival the 1990's), that gives you $15,263. After you pay back the original $10,000, you'll have a gain of $5,263, minus all the taxes you paid, since interest is capital gains taxable. So, you'll end up with around $4200 from your magical investment. If you live in the real world, where ROI on a good investment is more like 5%, you'll end up making around $1400.
In contrast, if you got a part-time job flipping burgers for 10 hours a week at $7/hr, that's a total salary earnings of $14,560 over four years, around $12,000 after taxes. Oh, wait, I forgot, you're a savvy investor, right? You'll be putting your earinging straight into the bank, earning an inflation-adjusted 2% interest on that money in a money market account, so you'll actually have $15,002.
One more thing... if you want to "have options" when you graduate, four years of actual work experience, *any* work experience, will serve you a lot better than four years of playing X-box while the clock ticks on your borrowed money. Just knowing that you've learned how to show up for work on time will be a big plus for most employers when they make a hiring decision after your interview.
Not to sound like a cantakerous old grouch, but if you want to have money, security and a future, go get a job. Any job will do for starters.
The president was NEVER supposed to be elected by popular vote. The Framers hated that idea to the core.
The framers of the constitution, for all that they believed in democracy, didn't really trust it to the extent that we do today, since no one really had any experience with running an entire country on democratic principles. The biggest lesson they took away from the ancient Greek polis and the Roman republic was how susceptible it was to being taken over by a charismatic leader and turned back into a monarchy.
The Electoral College was a mechanism put in place to prevent the rise of populist demagogues, on the assumption that the elected officials at the state levels would be less likely to be swept up in mob psychology furor to throw over the democratic structures in order to put a hero on the throne.
Nicely said. I'm a microbiologist, and the lack of understanding of how science works is pretty painful, even (especially?) on Slashdot.
OK, so I am willing to accept that the equipment is finicky and the process only works 0.1% of the time, even in the hands of the original researcher. That puts the burden on that original researcher to be very explicit in explaining how to do it (if he wants other people to replicate the results so he can be famous) or to be very close-mouthed (if *doesn't* want replication so he can patent everything and get rich... in which case, he shouldn't have said anything in the first place).
The first attempts to clone mammals had around 480 failures for every success, a 0.2% success rate. Assuming random distribution, that means that there would probably be another success with another 346 attemps [0.998^346 = 50%]. So, if 20 other researchers each try it 18 times, somebody will report something promising... if it's real. In fact, that's exactly what happened. As more people tried it, the techniques improved and the success rate went up.
A lot of people tried to replicate this bubble fusion, looking for any kind of verification. I've not heard any reports of success, even partial success.
Not only are the distances vast, the times are vast too.
There is actually another star about to go nova that is only half the distance of RS Ophiuchi. Nobody talks about it, though, because no astronomer wants to waste time on a half-vast star.
I recall Thinking Machines Corp. that used a biological model of stoichastic data linking to allow its supercomputers to grow in complexity. The idea was to built a super-duper-extra powerful parallel computer modelled on the human brain, give the machine lots raw data, and it would deduce probable connections. Given that a=b and b=c, it would deduce that a=c. The more it "thought", the more sophisticated (and presumeably useful) its internal data models would grow.
The company was kept alive by DARPA contracts in the 1980's and '90s, and withered when the government money ran out. Following Chapter 11, Sun bought the hardware side, and Oracle eventually bought the software side, developing it for datat mining.
While this certainly worked to some extent, the instability and sheer unpredictable nature of using such a stochastic algorithm made it impossible to use in a mission-critical setting.
...which is why the interview process is *so* important when you are hiring a new engineer. Background checks and calling references are only part of the evaluation process. Even if his specs look great on paper, you have got to be able to see how they are actually implemented.
So basically, if you want more Americans to go into science, make it suck less.
How typical of a physicist (or former physicist) to operate under the basic assumption that "science" means "particle physics". Just because particle physicists can't leave for a better job somewhere else, that doesn't mean all scientists are so limited.
Therefore 1 g of palladium can absorb 0.006728 g of hydrogen. This is around 150:1, much, much worse than the 1:1 W/W ratio used in the parent calculation. This means that instead of every car needing $250,000 worth of hydrogen-saturated palladium to equal 20 gallons of gasoline, it's more like $37,500,000 worth.
Thanks, Anonymous Coward! You're good for something after all!
Assuming a slurry of these spheres would be a wildly optimistic 50% glass, 25% hydrogen, 25% palladium by weight, that means the energy equivalent of 1 gallon of gasoline (~36,800 Watt*hrs) would require that around 1 kilogram of hydrogen. 1 kilogram of palladium is 35.2 oz, or $12,179.
US cars can hold anywhere from 10 to 30 gallons of gas, or the equivalent of $121,790 to $365,376 worth of palladium to get the same energy density.
A quarter of a million dollars worth of palladium.
In fact, even though most of the other people at this party are also drunk, I am by far the drunkest (although the guys who just showed up are doing their best to catch up by sucking it down hard).
If we all keep drinking, we will all get even more drunk, and we will eventually get into a fight when the keg runs low, fall down the stairs or otherwise hurt each other and probably trash this apartment.
If we all agree to stop drinking right now, we will all still be quite drunk for quite some time.
Even if we all agree to moderate our drinking to just maintain the buzz at its current level, I don't believe those guys when they say that they'll stop drinking if I do. They'll probably wait for me to stop, then keep hitting the keg when I'm not looking.
There's only so much beer in the keg, so even if we all slow down our consumption, it will eventually run out.
If somebody's going to get the beer, I want it to be me. I want mine while it lasts.
When my old Palm m515 died lsat year, my employer was willing to pay for a replacement PDA. They would not have paid for a smartphone with PDA functionality. So, instead of buying a Treo, I bought a Tungsten. Next time around, in a couple of years, if not sooner, a smartphone may be my only option.
What exactly am I comparing myself to? I'm one of the oldest servers in this restaurant, but that's just because I haven't finished my dissertaion yet. If older than who? And what am I supposed to review?
Is this just something one has to cope with in order to climb the corporate ladder?
When you are just an IT guy, speaking with other IT guys, you can say, "Alice is lazy." or "Bob is a selfish asshat." or "Charlie is overworked." without any fear of reprisal. Who cares what you think?
Once you become a suit, however, you can't say things like that to your fellow suits (at least not in public) because when Alice, Bob or Charlie gets fired, doesn't get a promotion, files a greivance, or feels their bonus is too small, your comments will be held against you. So, Alice becomes "externally motivated". Bob becomes "independent and self-reliant". Charlie becomes "a key asset". Who the heck talks like this? More importantly, who the heck would *want* to talk like this?
Why, other suits, of course. Suits want to be able to communicate with each other, but not necessarily communicate with non-suits. So, they use a thousand words of double talk to avoid answering a simple question, because if they were to give a real, informative answer, it would get them in trouble. What do you say when any answer, including dead silence or "No comment." would cause wild rumors in the department and mass defections, or cause your stock to dip, or make the IT guys revolt, or otherwise tie your hands at some point in the future? Why, you use a weighted cost benefit analysis strategy to rationalize the ROI for all the relevant options, and leverage those key insights into a forward looking strategy for addressing the primary mission tasks in a teamwork-based approach.
And while everyone is trying to figure out what you just said, you slip out the side door.
When your words carry more weight, you use them more carefully.
NASA has a page that you might find of interest. It's entitiled, "Solar wind blows some of Earth's atmosphere into space". The point of the article is that when the atmosphere is made to extend above the Earth's magnetic field, the net result is loss of atmosphere.
You're correct in observing that the atmosphere doesn't extend above the magnetic field... anymore. That part of the atmosphere which used to, is gone now.
Too much atmosphere and the planet cooks in a runaway greenhouse. Too little atmosphere and it dries out. The height of the magnetic field determines the setpoint for atmospheric density. Unless you have some mechanism to drag part of the atmosphere above it, the planet cooks.
The moon's gravity is strong enough to be felt at the Earth's surface even today. It's pretty weak, but it's still strong enough to lift up the water in the oceans, causing the tides you see every day. For that matter, the sun's gravity lifts the oceans, too.
You don't have to have the moon pull all of the gases off the planet's surface, just act in a tidal action to loft them somewhat. 2.5 billion years ago, the moon was closer and the atmosphere was thicker. When the lunar tidal forces acted on the atmosphere, it expanded fractionally, and a small fraction of the uppermost atmosphere was ionized and blown away by the solar wind. Lather, rinse, repeat for 2.5 billion years and you have the atmophere we enjoy today.
Slashdot Mirror
Just remember that when you leave, shut the door, baby.
formerly of the U. of Chicago
Woo hoo! Go Maroons!
The orbit of the ISS was chosen based on the latitude of Baikonur. In that respect, the Cape Breton latitude is OK, in that it matches Baikonur, and therefore matches ISS. To claim that this is a good latitude for launches that do anything other than match LEO stuff launched from Baikonur is overstating it.
Also, the TFA says
They provided some land rights, nothing more. No money, no personnel, no new roads or other infrastructure. This is pretty vaporous.
because you can't send out information before you observe it.
Clearly, you are new to Slashdot.
2) I want options when I graduate to move to where I need to or whatever. I don't want to live in my parents' basement till I am 35.
Interest isn't the only cost of borrowing money. From the Federal Student Finacial Aid website:
So, you took out a loan for $10,000, and had to pay 3% for doing so, which leaves you with $9,700 to put in some investment. If you don't make at least a 7% ROI in the first year, you will have less money than you started with, since your loan origination fee + inflation will eat away at the money.
Assuming you find some no-fee magical investment that makes you a whopping inflation-adjusted 12% ROI every year for the four years you are in college (which would be a bull market to rival the 1990's), that gives you $15,263. After you pay back the original $10,000, you'll have a gain of $5,263, minus all the taxes you paid, since interest is capital gains taxable. So, you'll end up with around $4200 from your magical investment. If you live in the real world, where ROI on a good investment is more like 5%, you'll end up making around $1400.
In contrast, if you got a part-time job flipping burgers for 10 hours a week at $7/hr, that's a total salary earnings of $14,560 over four years, around $12,000 after taxes. Oh, wait, I forgot, you're a savvy investor, right? You'll be putting your earinging straight into the bank, earning an inflation-adjusted 2% interest on that money in a money market account, so you'll actually have $15,002.
One more thing... if you want to "have options" when you graduate, four years of actual work experience, *any* work experience, will serve you a lot better than four years of playing X-box while the clock ticks on your borrowed money. Just knowing that you've learned how to show up for work on time will be a big plus for most employers when they make a hiring decision after your interview.
Not to sound like a cantakerous old grouch, but if you want to have money, security and a future, go get a job. Any job will do for starters.
The president was NEVER supposed to be elected by popular vote. The Framers hated that idea to the core.
The framers of the constitution, for all that they believed in democracy, didn't really trust it to the extent that we do today, since no one really had any experience with running an entire country on democratic principles. The biggest lesson they took away from the ancient Greek polis and the Roman republic was how susceptible it was to being taken over by a charismatic leader and turned back into a monarchy.
The Electoral College was a mechanism put in place to prevent the rise of populist demagogues, on the assumption that the elected officials at the state levels would be less likely to be swept up in mob psychology furor to throw over the democratic structures in order to put a hero on the throne.
Nicely said. I'm a microbiologist, and the lack of understanding of how science works is pretty painful, even (especially?) on Slashdot.
OK, so I am willing to accept that the equipment is finicky and the process only works 0.1% of the time, even in the hands of the original researcher. That puts the burden on that original researcher to be very explicit in explaining how to do it (if he wants other people to replicate the results so he can be famous) or to be very close-mouthed (if *doesn't* want replication so he can patent everything and get rich... in which case, he shouldn't have said anything in the first place).
The first attempts to clone mammals had around 480 failures for every success, a 0.2% success rate. Assuming random distribution, that means that there would probably be another success with another 346 attemps [0.998^346 = 50%]. So, if 20 other researchers each try it 18 times, somebody will report something promising... if it's real. In fact, that's exactly what happened. As more people tried it, the techniques improved and the success rate went up.
A lot of people tried to replicate this bubble fusion, looking for any kind of verification. I've not heard any reports of success, even partial success.
Not only are the distances vast, the times are vast too.
There is actually another star about to go nova that is only half the distance of RS Ophiuchi. Nobody talks about it, though, because no astronomer wants to waste time on a half-vast star.
I recall Thinking Machines Corp. that used a biological model of stoichastic data linking to allow its supercomputers to grow in complexity. The idea was to built a super-duper-extra powerful parallel computer modelled on the human brain, give the machine lots raw data, and it would deduce probable connections. Given that a=b and b=c, it would deduce that a=c. The more it "thought", the more sophisticated (and presumeably useful) its internal data models would grow.
The company was kept alive by DARPA contracts in the 1980's and '90s, and withered when the government money ran out. Following Chapter 11, Sun bought the hardware side, and Oracle eventually bought the software side, developing it for datat mining.
While this certainly worked to some extent, the instability and sheer unpredictable nature of using such a stochastic algorithm made it impossible to use in a mission-critical setting.
...which is why the interview process is *so* important when you are hiring a new engineer. Background checks and calling references are only part of the evaluation process. Even if his specs look great on paper, you have got to be able to see how they are actually implemented.
Maybe I'm wrong, I'm a better ones-and-zeros-smith than a wrodsmith.
Raelly? I never wuold have geussed.
So basically, if you want more Americans to go into science, make it suck less.
How typical of a physicist (or former physicist) to operate under the basic assumption that "science" means "particle physics". Just because particle physicists can't leave for a better job somewhere else, that doesn't mean all scientists are so limited.
Warmest Regards,
A Microbiologist
Bring on the singularity weapons and matter-energy conversion beams, I say!
You've got to research Applied Gravitonics first.
At a V/V ratio of 1:900, every cm3 of palladium can absorb 900 cm3 of hydrogen.
Density of palladium? 12.023 g/cm3
Density of hydrogen? 0.08988 g/L = 0.00008988g/cm3.
Therefore 1 g of palladium can absorb 0.006728 g of hydrogen. This is around 150:1, much, much worse than the 1:1 W/W ratio used in the parent calculation. This means that instead of every car needing $250,000 worth of hydrogen-saturated palladium to equal 20 gallons of gasoline, it's more like $37,500,000 worth.
Thanks, Anonymous Coward! You're good for something after all!
$346US/oz, as of 8:35am EDT, May 23, 2006.
Assuming a slurry of these spheres would be a wildly optimistic 50% glass, 25% hydrogen, 25% palladium by weight, that means the energy equivalent of 1 gallon of gasoline (~36,800 Watt*hrs) would require that around 1 kilogram of hydrogen. 1 kilogram of palladium is 35.2 oz, or $12,179.
US cars can hold anywhere from 10 to 30 gallons of gas, or the equivalent of $121,790 to $365,376 worth of palladium to get the same energy density.
A quarter of a million dollars worth of palladium.
In every single car on the road.
Wow, that is close, only 243,860,592.36 volkwagen Bug Top Speed years away!
Or, to use the more common units, 243,860.6 Kill-a-bugs, or 0.24 Tear-a-bugs.
I read that as Anal Grafts and thought, "God above, if that's how you implant RFID, then why would anyone do it?"
I started drinking when this party first started.
At first, I was just a little tipsy.
Now, I am quite drunk.
In fact, even though most of the other people at this party are also drunk, I am by far the drunkest (although the guys who just showed up are doing their best to catch up by sucking it down hard).
If we all keep drinking, we will all get even more drunk, and we will eventually get into a fight when the keg runs low, fall down the stairs or otherwise hurt each other and probably trash this apartment.
If we all agree to stop drinking right now, we will all still be quite drunk for quite some time.
Even if we all agree to moderate our drinking to just maintain the buzz at its current level, I don't believe those guys when they say that they'll stop drinking if I do. They'll probably wait for me to stop, then keep hitting the keg when I'm not looking.
There's only so much beer in the keg, so even if we all slow down our consumption, it will eventually run out.
If somebody's going to get the beer, I want it to be me. I want mine while it lasts.
Therefore...
Where's my mug?
When my old Palm m515 died lsat year, my employer was willing to pay for a replacement PDA. They would not have paid for a smartphone with PDA functionality. So, instead of buying a Treo, I bought a Tungsten. Next time around, in a couple of years, if not sooner, a smartphone may be my only option.
whether Kirk is better than Piccard
His name is spelled Picard, son. Jeez, talk about asking for a flamewar...
Dilbert: "Would you say this a diverse workplace?"
Dogbert: "Sure. Di longer you verk here, diverse it gets."
What exactly am I comparing myself to? I'm one of the oldest servers in this restaurant, but that's just because I haven't finished my dissertaion yet. If older than who? And what am I supposed to review?
Is this just something one has to cope with in order to climb the corporate ladder?
When you are just an IT guy, speaking with other IT guys, you can say, "Alice is lazy." or "Bob is a selfish asshat." or "Charlie is overworked." without any fear of reprisal. Who cares what you think?
Once you become a suit, however, you can't say things like that to your fellow suits (at least not in public) because when Alice, Bob or Charlie gets fired, doesn't get a promotion, files a greivance, or feels their bonus is too small, your comments will be held against you. So, Alice becomes "externally motivated". Bob becomes "independent and self-reliant". Charlie becomes "a key asset". Who the heck talks like this? More importantly, who the heck would *want* to talk like this?
Why, other suits, of course. Suits want to be able to communicate with each other, but not necessarily communicate with non-suits. So, they use a thousand words of double talk to avoid answering a simple question, because if they were to give a real, informative answer, it would get them in trouble. What do you say when any answer, including dead silence or "No comment." would cause wild rumors in the department and mass defections, or cause your stock to dip, or make the IT guys revolt, or otherwise tie your hands at some point in the future? Why, you use a weighted cost benefit analysis strategy to rationalize the ROI for all the relevant options, and leverage those key insights into a forward looking strategy for addressing the primary mission tasks in a teamwork-based approach.
And while everyone is trying to figure out what you just said, you slip out the side door.
When your words carry more weight, you use them more carefully.
NASA has a page that you might find of interest. It's entitiled, "Solar wind blows some of Earth's atmosphere into space". The point of the article is that when the atmosphere is made to extend above the Earth's magnetic field, the net result is loss of atmosphere.
You're correct in observing that the atmosphere doesn't extend above the magnetic field... anymore. That part of the atmosphere which used to, is gone now.
Too much atmosphere and the planet cooks in a runaway greenhouse. Too little atmosphere and it dries out. The height of the magnetic field determines the setpoint for atmospheric density. Unless you have some mechanism to drag part of the atmosphere above it, the planet cooks.
The moon's gravity is strong enough to be felt at the Earth's surface even today. It's pretty weak, but it's still strong enough to lift up the water in the oceans, causing the tides you see every day. For that matter, the sun's gravity lifts the oceans, too.
You don't have to have the moon pull all of the gases off the planet's surface, just act in a tidal action to loft them somewhat. 2.5 billion years ago, the moon was closer and the atmosphere was thicker. When the lunar tidal forces acted on the atmosphere, it expanded fractionally, and a small fraction of the uppermost atmosphere was ionized and blown away by the solar wind. Lather, rinse, repeat for 2.5 billion years and you have the atmophere we enjoy today.