Re:Wow, this is just the Wrongness Thread.
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ST:TMP Fixer Upper
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1. In the original pilot, Roddenberry tried making the space shots silent. They were boring. But add a little "whoosh!" as a starship goes by and it suddenly feels right. J.M. Strazynski (sp?) had the same realization for Babylon 5. Some dramatic license should be taken, at the producer's discretion, if the show is improved.
2. The original series never showed a banking turn. This became standard with Star Trek: The Wrath of Kahn when the director wanted everything to reflect a nautical theme. Even after that, The Next Generation series usually showed the Enterprise only traveling in straight lines and sometimes had it pivoting in place to change direction. Hmmm. Does that make it science fiction to you?
3. A billion humanoid races. Well, more like a hundred or so shown. And a few dozen non-humanoid races, too. The Melkotians, Horta, Denevan Parasites, Dikirunium Cloud Creature, Tholians, Excalbians, Day of the Dove Entity, Gorn, Lights of Zetar, V'Ger, Species 8472, Conspiracy Parasites, Home Soil Lifeforms, Nanites, Edoans, Caitians, Sheliak, and Armus spring to mind. Not bad for the budget constraints of television and the lack of non-humanoid SAG members. How about entities that can disguise themselves as humanoids? Organians, Metrons, and Q add to the list.
4. I see, so because you can't conceive of a way to design a transporter without receiver, Trek can't be considered science fiction. You know, I can't think of how a civilization can build a transparent hull that can withstand any physical force, so I guess that rules Larry Niven's Known Space stories out too! (General Products' Hulls?) The point is that SF often has underlying technology that can seem like magic. Our inability to reverse-engineer the concept shouldn't invalidate examples from the genre.
I just can't agree with your reasoning. They're arguments against the veneer. Look at the stories. Look at some of the writers, too. Theodore Sturgeon, David Gerrold, Harlan Ellison, Larry Niven. Admittedly, what goes on in Voyager is pretty damned weak, but the rest of the franchise has a solid foundation of SF on which to tell engaging tales of human drama.
Sure, this is Slashdot. But that article wasn't written for Slashdot, and I doubt the writer and editer even suspected it would wind up here. I thought the article made perfect sense. Better sense than a few (but not all) of the lame efforts at explaining it.
Yeah, yeah, that won't be the first time I've heard some tin-plated despot with delusions of godhood making those kinds of noises. Cry havoc, dear Norton, and let slip the dogs of war! Just wake me when you're done.
And don't try to bribe me to shut up with any of your funny-money. I know where you get your crayons.
With all due respect, I wonder how even 120 people could contract fatal cancers. I guess, if someone used a linear, no-threshold model of radioactivity's effects and applied it to the entire population of the world. But realistically, the biggest danger from those RTGs was if one re-entered and hit you on the head. It wouldn't be pretty, but it wouldn't be cancer, either.
I remember how the media really pushed the controversy in the days leading up to Cassini's launch. CBS had footage of this one poor girl (she may have been around 14), crying in absolute terror as Cassini launched because she honestly believed all life on the planet was about to end. That was the product of the scare-mongering that people pushed. I wonder how many people worked themselves into genuine stress-induced problems because of the alarmist hand-wringing by the anti-nuke crowd.
Well, it isn't a stupid question, but your friend is wrong. Hubble has imaged various planets in our solar system repeatedly, but it can't point at objects too close to the sun for the reasons you cite.
In fact, Hubble recorded some great pictures of Shoemaker-Levy's plunge into Jupiter several years ago. Here:
Hubble Images of Jupiter and a Comet
Simple, I have a need for a PDA that can monitor (using Bluetooth or something similar) home automation and security. I don't want to be caught by surprise by a burglar while playing Minesweeper because the security program couldn't get my attention while my game was running.
I use a Psion these days. It has a multitasking OS. While I'm playing games or writing reports, Agenda (my scheduler, not the new PDA) can break through and announce that something is due. Can PalmOS do that? (Sincere question, I don't know.)
Quite possibly, this could be used to generate images based on sensor inputs, using the collected data to manipulate models in real time and then output it for rendering simultaneously. Weather data could be handled this way, or synthetic newscasters like the ones ZDTV has been tinkering with.
Jeez...now ya went and made me feel like a jerk. It's good to see you're so open-minded after all! Now, if I can learn to stop lambasting anyone who looks at me funny, maybe we'll be close to having a perfect world!
It looks like we're close to agreeing on the principles, but we both approach the looney idea with different assumptions. Clearly, Reiffel's statements were either a little odd or badly transcribed -- see the reference to hitting the dark side of the Moon (which I'm convinced is supposed to mean a "New Moon"). Until we know the details of A119, we can just keep speculating on what Reiffel's comments mean and how the project might accomplish them.
Similarly, I think the politics are a big grey area too. Maybe the US and Soviets would have gotten caught up in a dangerous game of blowing bigger bombs on more distant targets. On the other hand, the Soviets didn't do this with a manned Moon landing -- when the US got there first, the Kremlin turned around and said, "We never meant to go there anyway!" A brilliant and cost effective way to get out of that competition. Possibly, Kruschev would have simply responded to a US lunar nuke by saying, "We would never detonate a nuclear device in such a prestine, peaceful environment!" Aborting the whole thing there and laying a nice, caviar omelette on Uncle Sam's face.
Frankly, I'm glad the demonstration never happened, even if I think the nutty idea was kind of charming in a "duck and cover" way.
As far as the size of the plutonium cores on the RTGs, I know that Cassini was the largest at 72 kilograms, but I don't think it was that big a leap over other satellites and probes. Mikio Kaku and others argued against Cassini for precisely this reason, that the space program was on a slippery slope and would keep putting more and more up until something went wrong. Kaku also overestimated the damage from a plutonium release and ignored the fact that Cassini's core was of a proven design that wouldn't pulverize and release powdered, inhalible plutonium. The Cassini protests left a bad taste in my mouth about nuclear protesters -- hence one of my wrong assumptions about you. I don't have firm figures about the size of other cores on hand, but if I find them, I'll post them for review and comment.
Niven, eh? Yep, I'm fond of he and Pournelle, too. I prefer the harder sf to most of the fantasy that gets sold as science fiction, with a preference for the high-tech space-oriented stories. The recent trend towards virtual reality and cyberpunk strike me as being a little too solopsistic and depressing most of the time.
I owe you an apology about the bad spelling, too. Frankly, there are some very bright people who have a poor command of just which letters are supposed to go where, and although such sloppiness sometimes indicates a sloppy mind, that isn't always the case. Pointing out the obvious errors was just an easy way to try to weight the debate to my side, and that's always a cheap shot and bad form! I hate it when I see other people do it; you'd think I'd have the sense to refrain from it myself.
Has anyone else experienced trouble getting into Slashdot? I have no difficulty getting in from work, but whenever I try from home, I get nothing but time-outs. IE just sits and twiddles it's thumbs without any messages (surprise!), but lynx, which gets in fine on any of the other andover.net sites, comes back with "Alert! Unable to connect to remote host."
Have any ISPs been banned from slashdot's servers? I'm coming in through relaypoint.net myself.
What's wrong, son, did I not espouse a sufficiently PC fear of nukuler teknology to satisfy somebody's agenda? Or was I too quick to satirize some of JD's very commonplace but still misplaced misconceptions? Or maybe, with those classes and janitorial experience at Ames under your belt (I'm josh'n ya, boy!) you think I was somehow treading on your turf? You're standing on the wrong side of that degree to be getting in my face over this stuff...and you don't seem to have been paying attention in class. Now about your 'rebuttal' -- let's tango:
"As for the miscaculation[sic] of the position of large celestial objects, actaully[sic] small solar-system objects, ask NASA what the current record for on target hits is." It's pretty good. Discounting hardware failures, NASA almost always puts things where they want them. As I've said, the math has been available for centuries. Even the screw-up with Mars Lander still hit the target, albeit a little too steeply, and at a much greater range and with more variables involved than in getting to the Moon. "The Moon is big, but not so big when you consider it is farther away than you think, and moving at a good clip." Farther away than I think, eh? I'm an amateur astronomer, friend, and you can rely on me to give you a pretty good estimate on it's distance. The Moon has an average distance of around 385,000 km from Earth, although that will vary from perigee to apogee. It has an orbital period of just over 27.3 days and from this we can (after adjusting for eccentricity) calculate an orbital speed of about 1 km/sec. This is fixed, PK, it isn't going to appreciably speed up or slow down, at least not during the life of a missile headed for it's surface, so that 1 km/s isn't enough to make the problem any harder.
"For the chances to it coming back to the Earth if it missed the Moon, this is almost 100 percent. To keep the rocket from having to carry 100 times the fuel, or arrive at the Moon in 2-3 years, they would launch in into a trajectory that that takes advantage of the Earth's orbit." WHAT? You're describing Hohmann Transfer Orbit used for an _interplanetary_ mission, PK, one in which two different orbits must be matched. The trip from the Earth to the Moon (with apologies to Msr. Verne -- see below) is much simpler, since the Moon essentially revolves around the Earth (okay, they have a common center of mass around which both revolve, but for our purposes, the simplification is sufficient). You then go on to say, "This would unfortunetly make a miss orbit back to the Earth. " Um, no. Actually, I'll concede that it is _possible_ it could come back to Earth, but it is by no means a sure thing. Here are some possibilities:
1) It could miss the mark but still hit the moon some place else.
2) Given that the moon has a Hill Sphere (that's the point where the Moon's gravitational influence outweighs that of all other objects in the universe) of around 38,000km, there's a fairly good chance that a near miss would trap the missile in a bound orbit around the moon.
3) If it was launched at more than around 11,000m/s (not at all unreasonable), anything other than a near miss would mean the missile keeps going and going and going (11,182m/s is Earth's escape velocity).
4) It could pick up enough speed from lunar gravity to reach escape velocity.
5) It could be flung into a stable orbit around the Earth.
6) It could be flung into a stable, complicated orbit around the Earth and Moon (I forget what this is called, but there are lots of natural objects in this orbit).
7) It could hit the Earth...there, ya happy?
"As for dissabling the explosive, I would personally hope it would still detonate. A large nuke is bad, but the gamma would be quickly gone and other than first kill, we would only have to worry about fallout and residual radiation. If the warhead instead burns up in re-entry, then you would have a large west-east cload of plutonium in the upper atmosphere along the equator, just where the gulf stream, el nino, and all the biggies are. There'd be a good chance of tremendious killoff from inhaled plutonium, with centuries for it to filter out of the atmosphere." Check your history, boy. In fact, since 1961 there have been numerous reentries of satellites carrying a plutonium payload used for power. Remember Apollo 13? Some of its experiments were powered by RTGs using plutonium. What do you think happened to them after Tom Hanks and Co. got safely home? If you guessed anything other than slamming into our Big Blue Marble at 20,000km/hr you're wrong.
In fact, let's ignore just the return of plutonium-powered vehicles...let's look at nukes themselves! No fission or fusion process convert's 100% of the core into energy. Most of the core get's smashed and released as particulate matter. Between 1945 and 1970, tons of plutonium were released into the atmosphere through this very process. Now, I admit I might be mistaken, but the last time I looked out my window, there were still people walking around, birds chirping, and other inconvenient contradictions to your "rebuttal".
The fact is, you've bought into a very popular urban legend about the "toxicity of plutonium" and the damage it would cause "if you released a grapefruit-sized ball of it into the atmosphere." That last little lie is complements of Helen Caldicott and one Karl Grossman who loves to work his readers into an unjustified hysteria. If you want another point of view, consider Ilya Taytslin's Truth About Plutonium. It's nicely referenced with plenty of supporting commentary.
"P4 - Most of this paragraph is rebutted above [Hah!]. But please recall, an explosion visable[sic] on the Moon from the Earth would be the same if reversed; Visible on the Earth from the Moon. Nasty."What? Would you kindly go back and _read_ the original article before you flame me? Those Wacky Guys were talking about something at least as large as the one "used on Hiroshima at the end of World War II." Now that bomb was around 20KT. Where JD got his 250MT figure, I have no idea -- I don't think anyone detonated anything bigger than 60MT since Hiroshima. But for the sake of argument, let's be generous and make the sucker ten times more powerful than Hiroshima. 200KT. It would be plenty visible on the Moon from the Earth. Especially if the lunar phase was new (what I believe the author meant instead of "the dark side"). Especially through a telescope.
P5 - What a frigin euro-american centric view of the world. Draw a 100 mile radius circle on the Earth...[yadda yadda]"Excuse me...why such a large circle? See above. Try a two-mile circle and draw it randomly on the globe. You might hit something inhabited with it, but you're more likely to miss everyone.
"P6 - For figuring the 'fallout escape velocity' a lot would have eventually rained down on Earth, remember you only have to put a piece of fallout into an orbit around the Moon...[blah blah]"Alright, I was going to write something caustic here, but I'm not quite clear on what you're saying so I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. My point was that there are no weapons, even in today's arsenals, that could shatter and blow up the Moon as per JD's original rant. Now, if you agree with that statement and were just nitpicking about smaller debris raining down on the Earth after the blast, then sure, I'll let you go. But I will point out that the much more energy is released every time a big meteorite hits a planet than even the largest of our H-bombs. And in all those impacts, not very much makes it down here to ol' terra firma in a form that would hurt anyone. Once in a while, sure. But I'd sooner worry about Shoemaker-Levy 9 than an A-bomb on the Moon. (On the other hand, if you seriously thought JD's statement had merit, then please change your majors before you graduate...the humanities might be your better choice!)
P7 - As for contamination of planets, it doesn't take much plutonium suspended in an atmosphere to render it contaminated."Um...it looks like AC already beat me to most of my refutation of this statement. Except I'd go on to point out that if you take the radioactivity of a one tonne mass of plutonium and distributed it evenly across the planet (an engineering feat right there!), the resulting radioactivity would be substantially less than the background radiation found in nature. I don't know if you get out much, but if you don't you should know that most planets are pretty big with an awful lot of surface area. That has disasterous consequences for proclamations of doom.
Look, PhilosopherKing, I don't want to get in a flamewar, but I'm on reasonably firm ground here. If you want to discuss the math and physics, then that would be fun. On the other hand, if you keep posting snotty remarks about "Midvale School for the Gifted", I will continue to be happy to respond in kind.
Truce? (Oh! I almost forgot! Since you're an SF buff, check out Jules Verne's "From the Earth to the Moon". It was written somewhere in the 1860s and eerily forecasts the Apollo program right down to the size and mass of the capsule, the number of people on board, the launch site (Florida), and the time the trip takes. Verne did the math and understood the problems well enough to come up with solutions that seem precognitive today!)
I'd have no problem with that...plutonium puts out mostly alpha radiation. Pick it up with your hands --- the first layer of skin (which is dead anyway) will block it. I'd be reluctant to put all the pieces in one bucket, however. (Say, did anyone else just see a blue flash?)
Y'know, I was considering adding a qualifier to that statement about how it would suck if New York got clobbered. But I decided that wasn't the best path to better kharma.
Well, Jd, your first paragraph was right on the money. There were some spectacular failures with the rocket program prior to Explorer actually getting off the pad...and into space.
But aside from that, some of your other speculations just don't work. In the 1950s, most of the Soviet strategic forces were based on bombers, not missiles. If the US had tried this "lunar-nuker" they might have been rather public about it prior to launch. Even if the Soviets had panicked, there would have been plenty of time for them to realize Moscow hadn't been nuked and to turn back. Considering all the other things going on at the height of the cold war, a nuke to the moon would have been much less destabilizing than some of the other nonsense NATO and Warsaw Pact enjoyed!
It's really unlikely anyone would have miscalculated the position of the moon. Astronomers have been doing it for hundreds of years, and it's a big, close target. Even if the missile somehow went astray and missed the moon, the chances of it actually coming back at the Earth are really small. But even if it did come back at us, any damage that took out a self-destruct mechanism would almost certainly disable the explosive. Nukes are very delicate, precise mechanisms. A small amount of damage would likely interfere with the precise timing necessary to force critical mass. So if some space junk hit the rocket hard enough to knock out a self-destruct, it probably disabled the nuke.
But even if the explosive was still intact, it would still have to survive re-entry. The force of hitting the atmosphere would probably destroy the thing more effectively than a self-destruct. And if it didn't, the impact would probably cause the thing to explode at the fringe of space anyway.
But even if it did make it to the surface, most of the planet is covered by oceans, meaning the warhead would detonate far away from people. But if it did hit the ground, then it would still probably hit somewhere remote, and again not hurt anyone (no one has yet made a continent-busting explosive). But I guess if it did go through all of that and still explode over New York, then that would suck.
The size of the warhead miscalculated and blows up the moon?! Sorry, even a matter-antimatter warhead wouldn't even do that! The energy released would have to be enough to cause all the pieces of the moon to reach lunar escape velocity (otherwise the pieces would just reclump and the moon would continue along with different surface features). And these guys figuring out the yield of a nuke have been doing it pretty accurately ever since Trinity.
Of course, if the plan had gone ahead and worked (doubtful, since I gather this was more just a pie in the sky idea, not very seriously considered), you're right, the Soviets would have tried to do the same thing. And it would have gone back and forth a few times. But "contacontaminating all solid planets in the solar system with a thick layer of uranium 235 and plutonium"?! Where is all this material going to come from? Tell me you just had your tongue planted somewhere in your cheek!
More than likely, this would have gone back and forth a few times until one side had a mishap (probably the Soviets, but the US slipped up too), at which point both sides would slap their foreheads and reconsider. Or the nuclear test ban treaties would have gotten in the way. It would have been one of those weird quirks in history, like the nuclear artillary shell or the Pluto nuclear cruise missile. Played with and then abandoned. It's even possible that this goofy contest could have accelerated our space program by encouraging bigger rockets earlier.
HAL9000, your message was just fine. Exactly in the spirit I intended mine originally. But boy, do I have alot to respond to!
Advantage Abuse: I believe you're correct in this regard, but wolves apparently do kill for sport. Sheepherders claim that wolves who break into sheep corrals will move from animal to animal, killing each before moving on, without any intent to eat more than one. My point, however, is that no herbivore gets a hearing of its rights by any carnivore. In that sense, the lion certainly "owns" the zebras in its territory. Even if that means just picking one off at a time. Humans alone will look up from a dead bird and toss their bb gun away (sometimes).
Nature's Competition Over: It might have sounded like that, but I don't think so at all. We have to accept that, in all chance, something bigger and smarter will come along to displace us. But we are still the winners so far. If we are careless with our power, we're much more likely to wind up hurting ourselves in the end. My attitude is compassion towards other life, but my justification is enlightened self-interest.
Vegan Propaganda: Oh, I recognize the trouble any minority has getting it's word out. Try being an Amiga user on these boards! But even if Vegans weren't the minority, they'd use exactly the same dismissive techniques the meat and dairy industries use...that's the way large groups tend to operate. The internet helps to break through that, and I imagine it has been helpful to all organizations who are considered "fringe" by the majority.
Compassion: Well, the idea that we are at least compassionate towards the cute animals gives, I think, humans a rung up on the moral high-ground ladder. But the mere existence of people like yourself proves that that empathy goes quite a bit farther, eh? Certainly not in all humans, but a heckuva lot of 'em! We sure are good at making a mess of things, but we'll eventually stop and look at what we've done, and the harm to other species and say, "Gee, we ought to clean this up..." No dam beaver ever looked at its dam dam and gave a dam.
Private Farms: Yep! You've caught me on that one. I read your message and went, "Whoops! I missed that!" There are a number of dairies in my area, all privately owned and very pleasant to visit...when the wind goes the right way. One of my aunts is a chicken rancher (what a wierd image), and my uncle maintains a huge farm that gets into a bit of everything. I've never seen anything especially cruel on any of them.
Now I have heard about the way veals...I mean...calves are raised. At least some of them. I admit it is pretty hard to justify that kind of cruelty. But I do wonder if the calves are even aware of their situation. Sure, they might know they can't move very far, but if that is the limit of their experience, are they suffering because of it? Frankly, I don't know the answer, but to play devil's advocate (as well as to support my continued consumption of veal), I will submit that the calves are blissfully ignorant of the better life they'd have outside of their cages. And that even if they can neither turn around nor lay down they still don't know any better and so are content until they are slaughtered. (Ick...does evil wash off?)
Getting Back On Topic: Sure technology can make the nutrition available from an omnivorous diet available to vegetarians. Soon they'll probably be able to do that without even killing anything from animalia. That is kind of the point behind my veal-vats question. If we can clone just the part that's good with a marsala wine sauce and it tastes the same and has the same nutritional value, but no animal has died to stock the veal vat (just get a tissue sample from ol' Bess), is this a meat that could then be eaten without remorse by a vegetarian? Frankly, I'd feel much better about it.
Humans as a species are little kids looking up from the dead bird. We generally do empathize with other living things -- that's why there are groups like PETA and Greenpeace. But I think we're doing more harm than good to ourselves and other animals if we just say right now, "That's it! No more animals for research or food!" We aren't mature enough, technologically or scientifically to do that just yet. In a few decades, though, there might be almost no reason to do so. At that time, I think we'll have grown up enough to toss away the gun. And go home for a big, tasty steak! (Cloned steak, of course.)
But Hal, isn't it completely natural for any species to exploit all advantages it has over other species in its environment? A beaver does not own the trees it cuts down and drags over to block a stream. A lion doesn't own the zebra or antelope it eats. We have the benefit of intelligence and fine manipulation, and we've become tool users with a knack for out-competing every other animal out there. By nature's own laws, we won, and they are ours to own.
Furthermore, propaganda from the meat and dairy industries notwithstanding (and tell me vegetarians don't do the same), we have sort of evolved as omnivores. We eat plants and meat. That you haven't suffered any deleterious effects from your diet after only three years is great, and I hope you continue to enjoy good health, but I have a friend who recently had to drop the strict vegetarian lifestyle after ten years because it had caused her digestive and neurological damage. I doubt all will suffer the same effects, but some will...because we aren't herbivores.
As dangerous as humans can be to other species in their environment, humans are also the only ones to act compassionately towards the animals they threaten. Wolves and dolphins don't decide to give up the meat in their diet because it isn't fair to the creatures they consume. But some people do. I agree that we shouldn't treat animals cruely. If for no other reason than it would reflect badly on us. However, having been on my share of dairy farms and chicken ranches, it doesn't look like those animals have it so bad. They're fed, sheltered from bad weather (usually), protected from other predators, and have the benefits of a balanced diet and veternary care. Slaughter is usually quick and intended to be painless...a far cry from the death a wild herbivore suffers at the claws and fangs of carnivores.
Mind you, I'm not trying to attack your lifestyle. I remember the first time as a kid when I played "Put the Chicken Back Together" with a bucket of the Colonel's Original Recipe. To this day I can't stand to eat chicken off the bone. But I do recognize that as a species we eat meat.
To try to guide this away from seeming to be an attack, would you be willing to eat meat if it were genetically cloned tissue that never even grew on a complete organism? Cloned veal or chicken filets?
Actually, Naasking, that ear wasn't honestly growing, it was sculpted out of a substrate and implanted. The substrate functioned as a scaffolding for living cells to form on and replace. It had nothing to do with genetic engineering or cloning. When all was said and done, it was just an advanced, and somewhat macabre, version of plastic surgery.
And the accuracy record of professional journalists is...? Considering the biased, shallow, error-ridden, and uninformed drek I see on T.V. and read in the newspapers every day, I value the "here's the source, now let's all comment" mentality of Slashdot a helluva lot more.
Given that much is still being learned in the field of herpetology in general, and chameleons specifically, a reference from 1913 is virtually a dinosaur. Current opinion is that the creatures don't change color to suit their background, but to absorb heat, indicate health and mood, and to express territorialism. Chameleons (and anoles and to a lesser extent iguanids) have special color-changing cells called chromatophores. In some species, the range of colors they produce is extraordinary (like panther chameleons), others are limited to only subtle variations on a general theme.
I don't see where they necessarily have to do it as a data and resource fork arrangement like Mac uses, although considering these fellows come from that platform, I guess that is the most likely outcome.
It should be possible to build a minimal expert system that recognizes file types based on cues taken from the files themselves. The Amiga, running Directory Opus, had this ability, and could even be taught new file types on the fly by the user.
Yes! A standard set of GUI protocols that would form a set of minimum tools a user can expect to find on all graphical interfaces. It wouldn't have to be as comprehensive as anything found in Gnome or KDE.
Maybe AC's point is for an "out of the box" standard that is intended to make Linux more useful to newbies, but could be replaced easily later on as the user got more experienced.
Slashdot Mirror
1. In the original pilot, Roddenberry tried making the space shots silent. They were boring. But add a little "whoosh!" as a starship goes by and it suddenly feels right. J.M. Strazynski (sp?) had the same realization for Babylon 5. Some dramatic license should be taken, at the producer's discretion, if the show is improved. 2. The original series never showed a banking turn. This became standard with Star Trek: The Wrath of Kahn when the director wanted everything to reflect a nautical theme. Even after that, The Next Generation series usually showed the Enterprise only traveling in straight lines and sometimes had it pivoting in place to change direction. Hmmm. Does that make it science fiction to you? 3. A billion humanoid races. Well, more like a hundred or so shown. And a few dozen non-humanoid races, too. The Melkotians, Horta, Denevan Parasites, Dikirunium Cloud Creature, Tholians, Excalbians, Day of the Dove Entity, Gorn, Lights of Zetar, V'Ger, Species 8472, Conspiracy Parasites, Home Soil Lifeforms, Nanites, Edoans, Caitians, Sheliak, and Armus spring to mind. Not bad for the budget constraints of television and the lack of non-humanoid SAG members. How about entities that can disguise themselves as humanoids? Organians, Metrons, and Q add to the list. 4. I see, so because you can't conceive of a way to design a transporter without receiver, Trek can't be considered science fiction. You know, I can't think of how a civilization can build a transparent hull that can withstand any physical force, so I guess that rules Larry Niven's Known Space stories out too! (General Products' Hulls?) The point is that SF often has underlying technology that can seem like magic. Our inability to reverse-engineer the concept shouldn't invalidate examples from the genre. I just can't agree with your reasoning. They're arguments against the veneer. Look at the stories. Look at some of the writers, too. Theodore Sturgeon, David Gerrold, Harlan Ellison, Larry Niven. Admittedly, what goes on in Voyager is pretty damned weak, but the rest of the franchise has a solid foundation of SF on which to tell engaging tales of human drama.
Sure, this is Slashdot. But that article wasn't written for Slashdot, and I doubt the writer and editer even suspected it would wind up here. I thought the article made perfect sense. Better sense than a few (but not all) of the lame efforts at explaining it.
And don't try to bribe me to shut up with any of your funny-money. I know where you get your crayons.
With all due respect, I wonder how even 120 people could contract fatal cancers. I guess, if someone used a linear, no-threshold model of radioactivity's effects and applied it to the entire population of the world. But realistically, the biggest danger from those RTGs was if one re-entered and hit you on the head. It wouldn't be pretty, but it wouldn't be cancer, either.
I remember how the media really pushed the controversy in the days leading up to Cassini's launch. CBS had footage of this one poor girl (she may have been around 14), crying in absolute terror as Cassini launched because she honestly believed all life on the planet was about to end. That was the product of the scare-mongering that people pushed. I wonder how many people worked themselves into genuine stress-induced problems because of the alarmist hand-wringing by the anti-nuke crowd.
But in this guy's mind, that telescope is probably made by NASA and is rigged to show a false image.
Clever people, those NASA spooks!
In fact, Hubble recorded some great pictures of Shoemaker-Levy's plunge into Jupiter several years ago. Here: Hubble Images of Jupiter and a Comet
Simple, I have a need for a PDA that can monitor (using Bluetooth or something similar) home automation and security. I don't want to be caught by surprise by a burglar while playing Minesweeper because the security program couldn't get my attention while my game was running. I use a Psion these days. It has a multitasking OS. While I'm playing games or writing reports, Agenda (my scheduler, not the new PDA) can break through and announce that something is due. Can PalmOS do that? (Sincere question, I don't know.)
But Enoch Root, if what you said was true, wouldn't journalistic non-integrity demand that Slashdot ignore Moody's article in the first place?
Quite possibly, this could be used to generate images based on sensor inputs, using the collected data to manipulate models in real time and then output it for rendering simultaneously. Weather data could be handled this way, or synthetic newscasters like the ones ZDTV has been tinkering with.
It looks like we're close to agreeing on the principles, but we both approach the looney idea with different assumptions. Clearly, Reiffel's statements were either a little odd or badly transcribed -- see the reference to hitting the dark side of the Moon (which I'm convinced is supposed to mean a "New Moon"). Until we know the details of A119, we can just keep speculating on what Reiffel's comments mean and how the project might accomplish them.
Similarly, I think the politics are a big grey area too. Maybe the US and Soviets would have gotten caught up in a dangerous game of blowing bigger bombs on more distant targets. On the other hand, the Soviets didn't do this with a manned Moon landing -- when the US got there first, the Kremlin turned around and said, "We never meant to go there anyway!" A brilliant and cost effective way to get out of that competition. Possibly, Kruschev would have simply responded to a US lunar nuke by saying, "We would never detonate a nuclear device in such a prestine, peaceful environment!" Aborting the whole thing there and laying a nice, caviar omelette on Uncle Sam's face.
Frankly, I'm glad the demonstration never happened, even if I think the nutty idea was kind of charming in a "duck and cover" way.
As far as the size of the plutonium cores on the RTGs, I know that Cassini was the largest at 72 kilograms, but I don't think it was that big a leap over other satellites and probes. Mikio Kaku and others argued against Cassini for precisely this reason, that the space program was on a slippery slope and would keep putting more and more up until something went wrong. Kaku also overestimated the damage from a plutonium release and ignored the fact that Cassini's core was of a proven design that wouldn't pulverize and release powdered, inhalible plutonium. The Cassini protests left a bad taste in my mouth about nuclear protesters -- hence one of my wrong assumptions about you. I don't have firm figures about the size of other cores on hand, but if I find them, I'll post them for review and comment.
Niven, eh? Yep, I'm fond of he and Pournelle, too. I prefer the harder sf to most of the fantasy that gets sold as science fiction, with a preference for the high-tech space-oriented stories. The recent trend towards virtual reality and cyberpunk strike me as being a little too solopsistic and depressing most of the time.
I owe you an apology about the bad spelling, too. Frankly, there are some very bright people who have a poor command of just which letters are supposed to go where, and although such sloppiness sometimes indicates a sloppy mind, that isn't always the case. Pointing out the obvious errors was just an easy way to try to weight the debate to my side, and that's always a cheap shot and bad form! I hate it when I see other people do it; you'd think I'd have the sense to refrain from it myself.
Good luck on the studies!
Have any ISPs been banned from slashdot's servers? I'm coming in through relaypoint.net myself.
What's wrong, son, did I not espouse a sufficiently PC fear of nukuler teknology to satisfy somebody's agenda? Or was I too quick to satirize some of JD's very commonplace but still misplaced misconceptions? Or maybe, with those classes and janitorial experience at Ames under your belt (I'm josh'n ya, boy!) you think I was somehow treading on your turf? You're standing on the wrong side of that degree to be getting in my face over this stuff...and you don't seem to have been paying attention in class. Now about your 'rebuttal' -- let's tango:
"As for the miscaculation[sic] of the position of large celestial objects, actaully[sic] small solar-system objects, ask NASA what the current record for on target hits is." It's pretty good. Discounting hardware failures, NASA almost always puts things where they want them. As I've said, the math has been available for centuries. Even the screw-up with Mars Lander still hit the target, albeit a little too steeply, and at a much greater range and with more variables involved than in getting to the Moon. "The Moon is big, but not so big when you consider it is farther away than you think, and moving at a good clip." Farther away than I think, eh? I'm an amateur astronomer, friend, and you can rely on me to give you a pretty good estimate on it's distance. The Moon has an average distance of around 385,000 km from Earth, although that will vary from perigee to apogee. It has an orbital period of just over 27.3 days and from this we can (after adjusting for eccentricity) calculate an orbital speed of about 1 km/sec. This is fixed, PK, it isn't going to appreciably speed up or slow down, at least not during the life of a missile headed for it's surface, so that 1 km/s isn't enough to make the problem any harder.
"For the chances to it coming back to the Earth if it missed the Moon, this is almost 100 percent. To keep the rocket from having to carry 100 times the fuel, or arrive at the Moon in 2-3 years, they would launch in into a trajectory that that takes advantage of the Earth's orbit." WHAT? You're describing Hohmann Transfer Orbit used for an _interplanetary_ mission, PK, one in which two different orbits must be matched. The trip from the Earth to the Moon (with apologies to Msr. Verne -- see below) is much simpler, since the Moon essentially revolves around the Earth (okay, they have a common center of mass around which both revolve, but for our purposes, the simplification is sufficient). You then go on to say, "This would unfortunetly make a miss orbit back to the Earth. " Um, no. Actually, I'll concede that it is _possible_ it could come back to Earth, but it is by no means a sure thing. Here are some possibilities:
"As for dissabling the explosive, I would personally hope it would still detonate. A large nuke is bad, but the gamma would be quickly gone and other than first kill, we would only have to worry about fallout and residual radiation. If the warhead instead burns up in re-entry, then you would have a large west-east cload of plutonium in the upper atmosphere along the equator, just where the gulf stream, el nino, and all the biggies are. There'd be a good chance of tremendious killoff from inhaled plutonium, with centuries for it to filter out of the atmosphere." Check your history, boy. In fact, since 1961 there have been numerous reentries of satellites carrying a plutonium payload used for power. Remember Apollo 13? Some of its experiments were powered by RTGs using plutonium. What do you think happened to them after Tom Hanks and Co. got safely home? If you guessed anything other than slamming into our Big Blue Marble at 20,000km/hr you're wrong.
In fact, let's ignore just the return of plutonium-powered vehicles...let's look at nukes themselves! No fission or fusion process convert's 100% of the core into energy. Most of the core get's smashed and released as particulate matter. Between 1945 and 1970, tons of plutonium were released into the atmosphere through this very process. Now, I admit I might be mistaken, but the last time I looked out my window, there were still people walking around, birds chirping, and other inconvenient contradictions to your "rebuttal".
The fact is, you've bought into a very popular urban legend about the "toxicity of plutonium" and the damage it would cause "if you released a grapefruit-sized ball of it into the atmosphere." That last little lie is complements of Helen Caldicott and one Karl Grossman who loves to work his readers into an unjustified hysteria. If you want another point of view, consider Ilya Taytslin's Truth About Plutonium. It's nicely referenced with plenty of supporting commentary.
"P4 - Most of this paragraph is rebutted above [Hah!]. But please recall, an explosion visable[sic] on the Moon from the Earth would be the same if reversed; Visible on the Earth from the Moon. Nasty."What? Would you kindly go back and _read_ the original article before you flame me? Those Wacky Guys were talking about something at least as large as the one "used on Hiroshima at the end of World War II." Now that bomb was around 20KT. Where JD got his 250MT figure, I have no idea -- I don't think anyone detonated anything bigger than 60MT since Hiroshima. But for the sake of argument, let's be generous and make the sucker ten times more powerful than Hiroshima. 200KT. It would be plenty visible on the Moon from the Earth. Especially if the lunar phase was new (what I believe the author meant instead of "the dark side"). Especially through a telescope.
P5 - What a frigin euro-american centric view of the world. Draw a 100 mile radius circle on the Earth...[yadda yadda]"Excuse me...why such a large circle? See above. Try a two-mile circle and draw it randomly on the globe. You might hit something inhabited with it, but you're more likely to miss everyone.
"P6 - For figuring the 'fallout escape velocity' a lot would have eventually rained down on Earth, remember you only have to put a piece of fallout into an orbit around the Moon...[blah blah]"Alright, I was going to write something caustic here, but I'm not quite clear on what you're saying so I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. My point was that there are no weapons, even in today's arsenals, that could shatter and blow up the Moon as per JD's original rant. Now, if you agree with that statement and were just nitpicking about smaller debris raining down on the Earth after the blast, then sure, I'll let you go. But I will point out that the much more energy is released every time a big meteorite hits a planet than even the largest of our H-bombs. And in all those impacts, not very much makes it down here to ol' terra firma in a form that would hurt anyone. Once in a while, sure. But I'd sooner worry about Shoemaker-Levy 9 than an A-bomb on the Moon.
(On the other hand, if you seriously thought JD's statement had merit, then please change your majors before you graduate...the humanities might be your better choice!)
P7 - As for contamination of planets, it doesn't take much plutonium suspended in an atmosphere to render it contaminated."Um...it looks like AC already beat me to most of my refutation of this statement. Except I'd go on to point out that if you take the radioactivity of a one tonne mass of plutonium and distributed it evenly across the planet (an engineering feat right there!), the resulting radioactivity would be substantially less than the background radiation found in nature. I don't know if you get out much, but if you don't you should know that most planets are pretty big with an awful lot of surface area. That has disasterous consequences for proclamations of doom.
Look, PhilosopherKing, I don't want to get in a flamewar, but I'm on reasonably firm ground here. If you want to discuss the math and physics, then that would be fun. On the other hand, if you keep posting snotty remarks about "Midvale School for the Gifted", I will continue to be happy to respond in kind.
Truce? (Oh! I almost forgot! Since you're an SF buff, check out Jules Verne's "From the Earth to the Moon". It was written somewhere in the 1860s and eerily forecasts the Apollo program right down to the size and mass of the capsule, the number of people on board, the launch site (Florida), and the time the trip takes. Verne did the math and understood the problems well enough to come up with solutions that seem precognitive today!)
I'd have no problem with that...plutonium puts out mostly alpha radiation. Pick it up with your hands --- the first layer of skin (which is dead anyway) will block it. I'd be reluctant to put all the pieces in one bucket, however. (Say, did anyone else just see a blue flash?)
Y'know, I was considering adding a qualifier to that statement about how it would suck if New York got clobbered. But I decided that wasn't the best path to better kharma.
But aside from that, some of your other speculations just don't work. In the 1950s, most of the Soviet strategic forces were based on bombers, not missiles. If the US had tried this "lunar-nuker" they might have been rather public about it prior to launch. Even if the Soviets had panicked, there would have been plenty of time for them to realize Moscow hadn't been nuked and to turn back. Considering all the other things going on at the height of the cold war, a nuke to the moon would have been much less destabilizing than some of the other nonsense NATO and Warsaw Pact enjoyed!
It's really unlikely anyone would have miscalculated the position of the moon. Astronomers have been doing it for hundreds of years, and it's a big, close target. Even if the missile somehow went astray and missed the moon, the chances of it actually coming back at the Earth are really small. But even if it did come back at us, any damage that took out a self-destruct mechanism would almost certainly disable the explosive. Nukes are very delicate, precise mechanisms. A small amount of damage would likely interfere with the precise timing necessary to force critical mass. So if some space junk hit the rocket hard enough to knock out a self-destruct, it probably disabled the nuke.
But even if the explosive was still intact, it would still have to survive re-entry. The force of hitting the atmosphere would probably destroy the thing more effectively than a self-destruct. And if it didn't, the impact would probably cause the thing to explode at the fringe of space anyway.
But even if it did make it to the surface, most of the planet is covered by oceans, meaning the warhead would detonate far away from people. But if it did hit the ground, then it would still probably hit somewhere remote, and again not hurt anyone (no one has yet made a continent-busting explosive). But I guess if it did go through all of that and still explode over New York, then that would suck.
The size of the warhead miscalculated and blows up the moon?! Sorry, even a matter-antimatter warhead wouldn't even do that! The energy released would have to be enough to cause all the pieces of the moon to reach lunar escape velocity (otherwise the pieces would just reclump and the moon would continue along with different surface features). And these guys figuring out the yield of a nuke have been doing it pretty accurately ever since Trinity.
Of course, if the plan had gone ahead and worked (doubtful, since I gather this was more just a pie in the sky idea, not very seriously considered), you're right, the Soviets would have tried to do the same thing. And it would have gone back and forth a few times. But "contacontaminating all solid planets in the solar system with a thick layer of uranium 235 and plutonium"?! Where is all this material going to come from? Tell me you just had your tongue planted somewhere in your cheek!
More than likely, this would have gone back and forth a few times until one side had a mishap (probably the Soviets, but the US slipped up too), at which point both sides would slap their foreheads and reconsider. Or the nuclear test ban treaties would have gotten in the way. It would have been one of those weird quirks in history, like the nuclear artillary shell or the Pluto nuclear cruise missile. Played with and then abandoned. It's even possible that this goofy contest could have accelerated our space program by encouraging bigger rockets earlier.
But if the display has high enough resolution, you could print two vertical pages side-by-side and get be better able to reference other information.
IMAX comes to mind.
Advantage Abuse:
I believe you're correct in this regard, but wolves apparently do kill for sport. Sheepherders claim that wolves who break into sheep corrals will move from animal to animal, killing each before moving on, without any intent to eat more than one. My point, however, is that no herbivore gets a hearing of its rights by any carnivore. In that sense, the lion certainly "owns" the zebras in its territory. Even if that means just picking one off at a time. Humans alone will look up from a dead bird and toss their bb gun away (sometimes).
Nature's Competition Over:
It might have sounded like that, but I don't think so at all. We have to accept that, in all chance, something bigger and smarter will come along to displace us. But we are still the winners so far. If we are careless with our power, we're much more likely to wind up hurting ourselves in the end. My attitude is compassion towards other life, but my justification is enlightened self-interest.
Vegan Propaganda:
Oh, I recognize the trouble any minority has getting it's word out. Try being an Amiga user on these boards! But even if Vegans weren't the minority, they'd use exactly the same dismissive techniques the meat and dairy industries use...that's the way large groups tend to operate. The internet helps to break through that, and I imagine it has been helpful to all organizations who are considered "fringe" by the majority.
Compassion:
Well, the idea that we are at least compassionate towards the cute animals gives, I think, humans a rung up on the moral high-ground ladder. But the mere existence of people like yourself proves that that empathy goes quite a bit farther, eh? Certainly not in all humans, but a heckuva lot of 'em! We sure are good at making a mess of things, but we'll eventually stop and look at what we've done, and the harm to other species and say, "Gee, we ought to clean this up..." No dam beaver ever looked at its dam dam and gave a dam.
Private Farms:
Yep! You've caught me on that one. I read your message and went, "Whoops! I missed that!" There are a number of dairies in my area, all privately owned and very pleasant to visit...when the wind goes the right way. One of my aunts is a chicken rancher (what a wierd image), and my uncle maintains a huge farm that gets into a bit of everything. I've never seen anything especially cruel on any of them.
Now I have heard about the way veals...I mean...calves are raised. At least some of them. I admit it is pretty hard to justify that kind of cruelty. But I do wonder if the calves are even aware of their situation. Sure, they might know they can't move very far, but if that is the limit of their experience, are they suffering because of it? Frankly, I don't know the answer, but to play devil's advocate (as well as to support my continued consumption of veal), I will submit that the calves are blissfully ignorant of the better life they'd have outside of their cages. And that even if they can neither turn around nor lay down they still don't know any better and so are content until they are slaughtered. (Ick...does evil wash off?)
Getting Back On Topic:
Sure technology can make the nutrition available from an omnivorous diet available to vegetarians. Soon they'll probably be able to do that without even killing anything from animalia. That is kind of the point behind my veal-vats question. If we can clone just the part that's good with a marsala wine sauce and it tastes the same and has the same nutritional value, but no animal has died to stock the veal vat (just get a tissue sample from ol' Bess), is this a meat that could then be eaten without remorse by a vegetarian? Frankly, I'd feel much better about it.
Humans as a species are little kids looking up from the dead bird. We generally do empathize with other living things -- that's why there are groups like PETA and Greenpeace. But I think we're doing more harm than good to ourselves and other animals if we just say right now, "That's it! No more animals for research or food!" We aren't mature enough, technologically or scientifically to do that just yet. In a few decades, though, there might be almost no reason to do so. At that time, I think we'll have grown up enough to toss away the gun. And go home for a big, tasty steak! (Cloned steak, of course.)
Furthermore, propaganda from the meat and dairy industries notwithstanding (and tell me vegetarians don't do the same), we have sort of evolved as omnivores. We eat plants and meat. That you haven't suffered any deleterious effects from your diet after only three years is great, and I hope you continue to enjoy good health, but I have a friend who recently had to drop the strict vegetarian lifestyle after ten years because it had caused her digestive and neurological damage. I doubt all will suffer the same effects, but some will...because we aren't herbivores.
As dangerous as humans can be to other species in their environment, humans are also the only ones to act compassionately towards the animals they threaten. Wolves and dolphins don't decide to give up the meat in their diet because it isn't fair to the creatures they consume. But some people do. I agree that we shouldn't treat animals cruely. If for no other reason than it would reflect badly on us. However, having been on my share of dairy farms and chicken ranches, it doesn't look like those animals have it so bad. They're fed, sheltered from bad weather (usually), protected from other predators, and have the benefits of a balanced diet and veternary care. Slaughter is usually quick and intended to be painless...a far cry from the death a wild herbivore suffers at the claws and fangs of carnivores.
Mind you, I'm not trying to attack your lifestyle. I remember the first time as a kid when I played "Put the Chicken Back Together" with a bucket of the Colonel's Original Recipe. To this day I can't stand to eat chicken off the bone. But I do recognize that as a species we eat meat.
To try to guide this away from seeming to be an attack, would you be willing to eat meat if it were genetically cloned tissue that never even grew on a complete organism? Cloned veal or chicken filets?
Actually, Naasking, that ear wasn't honestly growing, it was sculpted out of a substrate and implanted. The substrate functioned as a scaffolding for living cells to form on and replace. It had nothing to do with genetic engineering or cloning. When all was said and done, it was just an advanced, and somewhat macabre, version of plastic surgery.
(Did I just feed an energy creature?)
Given that much is still being learned in the field of herpetology in general, and chameleons specifically, a reference from 1913 is virtually a dinosaur. Current opinion is that the creatures don't change color to suit their background, but to absorb heat, indicate health and mood, and to express territorialism. Chameleons (and anoles and to a lesser extent iguanids) have special color-changing cells called chromatophores. In some species, the range of colors they produce is extraordinary (like panther chameleons), others are limited to only subtle variations on a general theme.
It should be possible to build a minimal expert system that recognizes file types based on cues taken from the files themselves. The Amiga, running Directory Opus, had this ability, and could even be taught new file types on the fly by the user.
Yes! A standard set of GUI protocols that would form a set of minimum tools a user can expect to find on all graphical interfaces. It wouldn't have to be as comprehensive as anything found in Gnome or KDE.
Maybe AC's point is for an "out of the box" standard that is intended to make Linux more useful to newbies, but could be replaced easily later on as the user got more experienced.