I didn't see the episode, but your description is just wrong. If you take a bearing from three known positions, what are you doing with those bearings? Creating a triangle from those 3 positions you took a bearing of? That doesn't tell you anything.
It's not wrong, you just misunderstood me.
Triangulation in order to find a radio source involves taking a bearing with a directional antenna tuned to the signal you're trying to find (which you don't know where it is) from 2 known positions. The point where the lines cross is where the source is (exactly, not within a small triangle).
I was a signal intelligence analyst in the army. The place where those two lines cross is NEVER exactly where those two lines cross. That's why you need to do a third "cut" from a third position. In a perfect universe, that third line would intersect exactly where the other two cross, giving you a perfect fix. In reality, that third line will be somewhere to one side or the other of the intersection of the first two.The three lines form a (hopefully) tiny triangle. Your fix is within this triangle. This is probably where you misunderstood wme. This small triangle is not where the process of triangulation gets its name. You are correct in that basic triangulation involves the signal bearing from two know points forming a triangle with the target, but a military man (as the character is purported to be*) with any training in radio direction finding will always take a minimum of three DF shots (four or five is better, six is usually overkill) before declaring a positive fix on a stationary target.
* The character is supposedly former "Republican Guard", but his back story has him torturing dissidents-- the sole province of the Mukhabarrat. This is like confusing the US Army with the FBI-- it's just fucking stupid. THe writers for the show are the worst kind of stupid: idiots that think they know what they're talking about and are so sure of themselves they never check their "facts".
If I recall correctly, they only had 3 devices that they used to triangulate the source, and Sayid was with the third one. He wasn't at some other location.
You are probably right, but either way, it still bears no resemblance at all to the actual process of triangulation. Triangulation is taking a bearing from three known points on a map with a directional antenna on a radio receiver and drawing lines from those points along those bearings. They form a small triangle where they cross. The target is within that triangle. That weird crap they were doing on the show didn't even make an iota of sense.
It would be nice if someone would do this for all computer related things. You can't just zoom in on an already fuzzy picture and sharpen it perfectly! etc...
Why limit to computers? How about relatively simple technologies like radio, or jet engines? For example, it drove me bugshit when a character on that fine piece of TV work that is "Lost" said he needed three people standing out in the boonies with some weird contraptions for him to stand in a fourth location with a handheld radio in order to perform a "triangulation" of an incoming radio signal. WTF? Didn't the scriptwriters even look up what "triangulation" means before they tried to use it as a plot device? And then there's the pilot episode with the jet engine. Yes, a jet engine upside down on the beach still running after the crash made for a very scary noise, and having it explode in a huge fireball when some dude got sucked in was impressive, but they might as well have had a 50' clown catching people in a giant popcorn bag for all the plausibility it had.
Honestly, I can suspend disbelief enough to let it slide when TV/movie writers gloss over a few peripheral technical details; but when they employ patently absurd ignorant interpretations of easily researched technology as the linchpin of that episode's story, there's no good excuse. Having worked around script writers, though, I understand why this is: most of them are fools.
So? When you do something like Union Carbide did, you have a responsibility. If you get bought out by some other company (Dow in this case) they just bought that responsibility. They should not be allowed to wash their hands of the whole mess just by selling the plant and then selling the company.
News flash, genius. First, Union Carbide sold their interest in the plant five years before the merger, so Dow was never involved in any of this purported "hand-washing". Second, the now-combined company hasn't attempted to abdicate its responsibility for the after-effects of the incident-- they continue to work towards mitigating the damage to this day.
See, this is where the whole Star Wars bit breaks down for me. If a Jedi gave in to the Dark Side, why wouldn't he open a corner store an sell all the light sabers he could build.
Same reason Stradavarius didn't just "give in" and make big bucks cranking out masterwork violins. It's a non-trivial undertaking and besides, a lightsaber isn't likely to be seen as better than a cheap, mass-produced blaster by anyone other than a serious collector or martial artist.
Luke picks up and turns on the lightsaber that Obi Wan gave him upon first meeting him, with Obi Wan telling him that it was his father's. Luke has no problem turning it on and using it. Can this mean that it shows Obi Wan that he has the power of "the force"? It definitely shows that Luke needs no training in order to get it to work.
You don't need to be a Jedi to use a lightsaber, only to build one. See Ep V, where Han Solo uses Lukes lightsaber to cut open the tauntaun.
And the difference is... what? A slogain coined by a different PR firm?
The difference is, the slogan was coined by Dow Chemical PR monkeys, and the Bhopal incident involved Union Carbide. The implication of the original poster was that the slogan was disingenious because of the the Bhopal incident. This implication is absurd because Bhopal and the slogan had fuck-all to do with one another until fifteen years later. It's like complaining that the US of A claims to guarantee religious freedom when the Spanish missionaries in the 1600's were forcibly converting indians in California to catholicism-- the two have fuck-all to do with one another. Cripes, I can't believe I have to spell this out for people. in 1984, Dow didn't gas Bhopal: Union Carbide did! The fact that Dow and Union Carbide merged a decade and a half later is fucking irrelevant!
Huh? No "what if" about it. US military did occupy Japan. Their willingness, ability, and intent to do so was already a foregone conclusion by war's end.
They surrendered before occupation: the war was won.
If you want to split technical hairs like that, then partial occupation had already been achieved by then on Okinawa. The presence of a large US ground force which was steamrolling towards Tokyo was certainly not an insignificant detail in the pacific theater.
Really, the original point was whether a war can be won by simply bombing without ground forces. It has never worked like that any time in history, so it seems to me that those claiming otherwise are the ones using a crystal ball.
World War II - pacific theater. Somehow seems germane to the discussion.
The US military occupied Japan from August 1945 until some time in 1952. The fact that the Japanese agreed beforehand to not shoot at them is largely irrelevant. Infantrymen, armed with rifles, stood around for seven years in Japan making sure that they didn't change their mind.
They have nuclear weapons and long-range missiles. That's all the really matters in this day and age. Infantry is nice and all, but no longer the deciding factor in winning a war.
Hogwash. In order to win a war, you need to have men on the ground pointing guns at the enemy's government officials. No way to do that with just nukes. You cannot name a single war which was won without occupying infantry.
China is expected to have 34 million subscribers, compared to 39 million in the United States.
So, we measure broadband penetration by percentage of total population when we compare the US to Korea, but for China we just look at the straight population numbers? Well so long as the US lools bad, right?
Dow Chemical's motto is "Living. Improved Daily". Unless you're one of 15,000-30,000 people in Bhopal, India, of course.
Nice troll. Inflamatory, and correct only by a tenuous strand of tortured logic. It was Union Carbide who gassed Bhopal, which didn't merge with Dow until 1999, a full fifteen years after the incident, and five years after Union Carbide sold its 51% interest in the Bhopal facility.
Their PDF archives have gone back to 1851 for quite a while now. This shows that your second point is entirely moot -- you've never considered subscribing, or else you would know this...
RTFA, dumbass: "one idea being floated is an annual fee of $49.99 for unlimited access to anything in the last year." The fifty bucks wouldn't give you access to the entire archive back to 1851.
I hate the MPAA/RIAA as much as anyone, but I wish this letter had had more meat in it....The first part is ok, I just wish there were more of it. It's not like the recording industry's history doesn't have enough hypocricy to fill several articles.
You have unrealistic expectations from that type of forum. The problem is, he wasn't writing an article, it was a letter to the editor. Letters that are article length either don't get published or get edited down to two or three short paragraphs. He did the best one could expect within those limitations.
Re:I Don't Want To Admit It ... But It's True
on
No Need For Trek Anymore
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Homer is great because he captured Greek culture and managed to pass down to posterity a story that express the goals, hopes and dreams of that culture. The Illiad is the closest the Greeks have to a Bible, and it is brilliant.
And don't forget the Odyssey. Have you ever seen a "military guy gets revenge on his enemies and slays them all single-handedly" scene in a movie that came anywhere near the one at the end of The Odyssey? Man, when he strings that bow and those jackass suitors realize it's him and then find out all the doors are locked? Fantastic!
I knew exactly what I was doing. The point is, no one else did. It was purely anonymous performance art.
I have been able to use it all by myself.. and I KNOW I wasn't moving it...
That's why I said "a group of people". If you get more than 3 people on a Ouija board, chances are one of them is going to be a "pusher".
Although now i must strongly warn anyone who considers doing the same to never do so, if you don't already believe in good and evil you sure will and fast...
(shrug) Everything everywhere is connected. You don't need a Ouija board to see it. It's just one of a myriad of ways people have contrived to get their minds to focus on something without thinking about it. I think it goes without saying that, whatever method you use, you definitely open yourself up to undesirable entities. Dunno if I'd use the word "evil" myself so much as "needy" or "hungry", but it's all a matter of interpretation, I reckon...
I play an alternate personality on a message board other than slashdot, and do what some people would refer to as trolling, but I and at least several others who don't know my true identity, think it's a form of performance art/humour. Many people find my routine funny, and although I should be irritating in how I portray myself, I give enough clues than I'm not as dumb as I come across, and that is humourous to people.
John Titor is a performance comic/troll, which sounds to me like an interesting guy/group of people to know.
Yep, I understand the "Titor urge" well. People are willing to believe the darndest things, so long as they are "told with a straight face". The classic example is the Ouija board. There are two kinds of people when it comes to using a Ouija board as a group: the people saying "look! it's spelling something!", and the one guy who's gently pushing the pointer around and saying "I'm not pushing it!" like everyone else. I've always been the guy pushing the pointer around, myself...
It's unfortunate but if you choose to negotiate with kidnappers (and thereby encourage more kidnapping) and further don't tell someone who's subject to daily suicide car bombs that you're going to be speeding down a road that is infamous for daily suicide car bombs, is it any surprise this happened?
I think this falls under the same category as the famous Deep Thoughts by Jack Handy:
"I think a good gift for the President would be a chocolate revolver. And since he's so busy, you'd probably have to run up to him real quick and hand it to him."
It was a joke. You see, I riffed off his misspelling of "dimension" bearing a similarity to the word "dementia". Now that I've had to explain the joke, it's totally ruined. Thanks.
Scientists make mistakes, too. They're not perfect. And my point was that no matter how much science or math they know, they might need a creative mind's help.
Scientists ARE creative-- that was my point. None of those things you listed would have been prevented by more creativity. They were errors, plain and simple. Even creative people make mistakes.
I wonder why the soil is caking on the wheels? I would think that even ultra fine sand wouldn't do that unless there was some form of moisture.
Try playing with some ultra-fine powder, like flour, powdered clay, or wood ash. It tends to "cake up" when compressed also when dry. Same thing.
Actually it's not a bad idea at all. I mean, kids play with their remote-controlled toys and sometimes they have to flip them over. If this happens with a toy, what tell us it won't happen to the Mars Rover? After all, didn't DaVinci used his creativity to design the precursors of today's modern inventions, like the helicopter, or the glider?
So yes, why not play with more toys and watch more robot battles to get ideas?
Bah! Don't be daft. Every ounce of weght is another [x] amount of milliamps those drive motors will draw. And not only would it require the arm and its driving mechanism, but it would require significant structural reinforcement to keep parts from bending, cracking, and/or breaking off when the whole vehicle's weight is put on them. In a year of driving these things around they haven't yet required a "flipper arm". Keep in mind that the "planned" length of the missions was 92 days and we're now approaching four times that. Besides, do you really think the NASA/JPL guys are so dense as not have thought of such a thing? We saw a similar stream of posts saying "those dumb NASA scientists should have used [some hair-brained scheme]" when the issue of dust on the solar panels came up! Honestly, it almost seems as if people look at the Mars Climate Orbiter crash and conclude that, on the basis of a dumb mathematical error, everyone in NASA is a fool and doesn't think creatively. News flash! This just in: They're not stupid, your idea isn't as great as you think it is!
Slashdot Mirror
It's not wrong, you just misunderstood me.
Triangulation in order to find a radio source involves taking a bearing with a directional antenna tuned to the signal you're trying to find (which you don't know where it is) from 2 known positions. The point where the lines cross is where the source is (exactly, not within a small triangle).
I was a signal intelligence analyst in the army. The place where those two lines cross is NEVER exactly where those two lines cross. That's why you need to do a third "cut" from a third position. In a perfect universe, that third line would intersect exactly where the other two cross, giving you a perfect fix. In reality, that third line will be somewhere to one side or the other of the intersection of the first two.The three lines form a (hopefully) tiny triangle. Your fix is within this triangle. This is probably where you misunderstood wme. This small triangle is not where the process of triangulation gets its name. You are correct in that basic triangulation involves the signal bearing from two know points forming a triangle with the target, but a military man (as the character is purported to be*) with any training in radio direction finding will always take a minimum of three DF shots (four or five is better, six is usually overkill) before declaring a positive fix on a stationary target.
* The character is supposedly former "Republican Guard", but his back story has him torturing dissidents-- the sole province of the Mukhabarrat. This is like confusing the US Army with the FBI-- it's just fucking stupid. THe writers for the show are the worst kind of stupid: idiots that think they know what they're talking about and are so sure of themselves they never check their "facts".
Dude, I hope you understand how funny this phrase truly is in the context you used it. Thanks for the laugh :-)
Heh. Yeah, the image sprang fully formed into my mind as I was typing. Just one of those inspired moments, I guess.
You are probably right, but either way, it still bears no resemblance at all to the actual process of triangulation. Triangulation is taking a bearing from three known points on a map with a directional antenna on a radio receiver and drawing lines from those points along those bearings. They form a small triangle where they cross. The target is within that triangle. That weird crap they were doing on the show didn't even make an iota of sense.
Why limit to computers? How about relatively simple technologies like radio, or jet engines? For example, it drove me bugshit when a character on that fine piece of TV work that is "Lost" said he needed three people standing out in the boonies with some weird contraptions for him to stand in a fourth location with a handheld radio in order to perform a "triangulation" of an incoming radio signal. WTF? Didn't the scriptwriters even look up what "triangulation" means before they tried to use it as a plot device? And then there's the pilot episode with the jet engine. Yes, a jet engine upside down on the beach still running after the crash made for a very scary noise, and having it explode in a huge fireball when some dude got sucked in was impressive, but they might as well have had a 50' clown catching people in a giant popcorn bag for all the plausibility it had.
Honestly, I can suspend disbelief enough to let it slide when TV/movie writers gloss over a few peripheral technical details; but when they employ patently absurd ignorant interpretations of easily researched technology as the linchpin of that episode's story, there's no good excuse. Having worked around script writers, though, I understand why this is: most of them are fools.
News flash, genius. First, Union Carbide sold their interest in the plant five years before the merger, so Dow was never involved in any of this purported "hand-washing". Second, the now-combined company hasn't attempted to abdicate its responsibility for the after-effects of the incident-- they continue to work towards mitigating the damage to this day.
Same reason Stradavarius didn't just "give in" and make big bucks cranking out masterwork violins. It's a non-trivial undertaking and besides, a lightsaber isn't likely to be seen as better than a cheap, mass-produced blaster by anyone other than a serious collector or martial artist.
We are so lame.
You don't need to be a Jedi to use a lightsaber, only to build one. See Ep V, where Han Solo uses Lukes lightsaber to cut open the tauntaun.
The difference is, the slogan was coined by Dow Chemical PR monkeys, and the Bhopal incident involved Union Carbide. The implication of the original poster was that the slogan was disingenious because of the the Bhopal incident. This implication is absurd because Bhopal and the slogan had fuck-all to do with one another until fifteen years later. It's like complaining that the US of A claims to guarantee religious freedom when the Spanish missionaries in the 1600's were forcibly converting indians in California to catholicism-- the two have fuck-all to do with one another. Cripes, I can't believe I have to spell this out for people. in 1984, Dow didn't gas Bhopal: Union Carbide did! The fact that Dow and Union Carbide merged a decade and a half later is fucking irrelevant!
Huh? No "what if" about it. US military did occupy Japan. Their willingness, ability, and intent to do so was already a foregone conclusion by war's end. They surrendered before occupation: the war was won.
If you want to split technical hairs like that, then partial occupation had already been achieved by then on Okinawa. The presence of a large US ground force which was steamrolling towards Tokyo was certainly not an insignificant detail in the pacific theater.
Really, the original point was whether a war can be won by simply bombing without ground forces. It has never worked like that any time in history, so it seems to me that those claiming otherwise are the ones using a crystal ball.
The US military occupied Japan from August 1945 until some time in 1952. The fact that the Japanese agreed beforehand to not shoot at them is largely irrelevant. Infantrymen, armed with rifles, stood around for seven years in Japan making sure that they didn't change their mind.
Hogwash. In order to win a war, you need to have men on the ground pointing guns at the enemy's government officials. No way to do that with just nukes. You cannot name a single war which was won without occupying infantry.
So, we measure broadband penetration by percentage of total population when we compare the US to Korea, but for China we just look at the straight population numbers? Well so long as the US lools bad, right?
Nice troll. Inflamatory, and correct only by a tenuous strand of tortured logic. It was Union Carbide who gassed Bhopal, which didn't merge with Dow until 1999, a full fifteen years after the incident, and five years after Union Carbide sold its 51% interest in the Bhopal facility.
RTFA, dumbass: "one idea being floated is an annual fee of $49.99 for unlimited access to anything in the last year." The fifty bucks wouldn't give you access to the entire archive back to 1851.
You have unrealistic expectations from that type of forum. The problem is, he wasn't writing an article, it was a letter to the editor. Letters that are article length either don't get published or get edited down to two or three short paragraphs. He did the best one could expect within those limitations.
And don't forget the Odyssey. Have you ever seen a "military guy gets revenge on his enemies and slays them all single-handedly" scene in a movie that came anywhere near the one at the end of The Odyssey? Man, when he strings that bow and those jackass suitors realize it's him and then find out all the doors are locked? Fantastic!
"Your Agonizer, please"
Seems like you didn't know what you were doing...
I knew exactly what I was doing. The point is, no one else did. It was purely anonymous performance art.
I have been able to use it all by myself.. and I KNOW I wasn't moving it...
That's why I said "a group of people". If you get more than 3 people on a Ouija board, chances are one of them is going to be a "pusher".
Although now i must strongly warn anyone who considers doing the same to never do so, if you don't already believe in good and evil you sure will and fast...
(shrug) Everything everywhere is connected. You don't need a Ouija board to see it. It's just one of a myriad of ways people have contrived to get their minds to focus on something without thinking about it. I think it goes without saying that, whatever method you use, you definitely open yourself up to undesirable entities. Dunno if I'd use the word "evil" myself so much as "needy" or "hungry", but it's all a matter of interpretation, I reckon...
Yep, I understand the "Titor urge" well. People are willing to believe the darndest things, so long as they are "told with a straight face". The classic example is the Ouija board. There are two kinds of people when it comes to using a Ouija board as a group: the people saying "look! it's spelling something!", and the one guy who's gently pushing the pointer around and saying "I'm not pushing it!" like everyone else. I've always been the guy pushing the pointer around, myself...
I think this falls under the same category as the famous Deep Thoughts by Jack Handy:
"I think a good gift for the President would be a chocolate revolver. And since he's so busy, you'd probably have to run up to him real quick and hand it to him."
It was a joke. You see, I riffed off his misspelling of "dimension" bearing a similarity to the word "dementia". Now that I've had to explain the joke, it's totally ruined. Thanks.
You spelled "dementia" wrong.
Scientists ARE creative-- that was my point. None of those things you listed would have been prevented by more creativity. They were errors, plain and simple. Even creative people make mistakes.
I wonder why the soil is caking on the wheels? I would think that even ultra fine sand wouldn't do that unless there was some form of moisture. Try playing with some ultra-fine powder, like flour, powdered clay, or wood ash. It tends to "cake up" when compressed also when dry. Same thing.
Bah! Don't be daft. Every ounce of weght is another [x] amount of milliamps those drive motors will draw. And not only would it require the arm and its driving mechanism, but it would require significant structural reinforcement to keep parts from bending, cracking, and/or breaking off when the whole vehicle's weight is put on them. In a year of driving these things around they haven't yet required a "flipper arm". Keep in mind that the "planned" length of the missions was 92 days and we're now approaching four times that. Besides, do you really think the NASA/JPL guys are so dense as not have thought of such a thing? We saw a similar stream of posts saying "those dumb NASA scientists should have used [some hair-brained scheme]" when the issue of dust on the solar panels came up! Honestly, it almost seems as if people look at the Mars Climate Orbiter crash and conclude that, on the basis of a dumb mathematical error, everyone in NASA is a fool and doesn't think creatively. News flash! This just in: They're not stupid, your idea isn't as great as you think it is!