Well, we know that you're not an astrophysicist.:-P
Do a little reading on Pluto, and you should understand. There's a huge debate about the whole "is it a planet, is it not a planet, it's just too small, but then what is a continent", etc.
That's one theory that's been suggested, but there are many more. While the RTG explanation seems most likely, many scientists hold to the idea that the RTG doesn't produce *enough* thrust to cause the anomaly.
Direct supporting evidence for any theory as to how the huge blocks were moved is sparse at best. To date, no text or relief (chiseled drawings) have been found describing how the Great Pyramids were built. Most Egyptologists agree that the wheel had not yet been invented, and the first recording of large blocks being moved with wheels is dated about 750 B.C.-some 2000 years after the Great Pyramid was built. The first wheeled transportation was introduced until the Middle Kingdom when the Hyksos brought chariots to Egypt between 2040 and 1786 B.C.
There may still be argument over this as the wheel was invented about 3000 B.C. However, Egypt was supposedly quite late in getting wheel technology.
The "mystery of the pyramids" if you must know, is how they got the blocks in place. While there's a lot of hyperbole stating that "we can't even lift that much weight today!" (Yes, yes we can.) the truth of the matter is that we just can't figure out how they moved 3 ton blocks without the invention of the wheel.
One of the more interesting suggestions was that they used kites to lift the blocks, but my own feeling is that the historical record is simply incomplete on the technology they possessed.
Let me be the first to say, that is some excellent information, and is far more informative than the original story. Please wrangle Slashdot into posting a story if you hear any more.
10. You only refer to the ninth planet as "Pluto-Charon" 9. You constantly correct everyone that Pluto-Charon is sometimes the eighth planet. 8. You've throttled someone for joking about "The Borg" when you mentioned Wolf 359. 7. You are of the opinion that there are only 8 planets in the solar system. 6. You get booted out of the family reunion for constantly correcting "scientific" conversations. 5. You think that the slowdown of the Pioneer Space Probe is a more important mystery than the Pyramids. 4. The last JPL probe burst at least 10 of your pet theories. 3. You punched Neil Armstrong for "contaminating" the moon with human presence. 2. You passed out before Neil's return punch landed.
And the number one way to tell you're an astrophysicist is...
1. You hold your breath in awe as a probe sends back data on inky blackness.
Thank you, thank you! I'll be here all week! (Ok, ok. So the rest of the gags all sprung out of the number one "joke". Try not to groan too much.):-P
Better. You can go and play them yourself. It's usually something like, "Find the fourth numeric digit in a string passed" or "create an implementation of data transform XYZ." Nothing too tremendously difficult, so you have to be a fast typer with excellent accuracy. Producing a low number of runtime bugs significantly helps as well.
*sigh* This contest is put on by a company known as "TopCoder". TopCoder is an online Java Applet that allows contestants to compete against each other on a time to solution. Results are automatically checked through a set of Unit tests. As long as your program can produce the correct output for a given type of input, it will be considered correct.
Sun, IBM, and many others have sponsored TopCoder competitions in the past. They have since backed off of them. I'm not certain as to the reasons, but TopCoder has received a LOT of criticism. The problem with their approach is that it only proves that the coder can think and type fast. It does nothing to address teamwork, cleanliness of code, design capabilities, engineering ability, or many other areas that are critical to a real world programming job. These contests can be a fun way to compete with your peers, but my guess is that a lot of companies have found that placing too much empahsis on the results is a good way to get burned.
I assume they meant that the body of the camera, or the support, or the photographer/cameraman always block some part of the total sphere of vision.
I already thought about that. If you place the rig *on* the cameraman, you'll get 180 degrees with only a minor latitudal split. They can then apply their software two the results of the two cameras to seamlessly stitch the images together (correcting the perspective to allow for the 1-1.5 feet the cameraman takes up) making it seem as if the cameraman never existed.
They then got busy and fixed a bucketload of bugs which resulted in 5.2, at which point they realised that even a bug-free version of StarOffice 5 was a total disaster, and started the OpenOffice project.
Indeed. The first job of the OOo team was to break out the applications from that hideous "Integrated Desktop" interface. Now it seems like a bad memory, but I remember it being THE biggest failing point of StarOffice.
You have to realize that, not withstanding Articles 35 and 41, any right of speech, publication, or suggestions of criticisms on state organ must be made with the premise to protect the unity of the state.
No, I don't understand. The first amendment of the US Constitution was freedom of speech and freedom of press. This extended all the way into government affairs, with early Supreme Court cases ensuring that even views that would harm "the unity of state" could not be supressed. The second amendment of the US Constitution is the right to bear arms. The purpose of this was not only for common defense, but also to ensure that tyranny could never reign in the United States. The founding fathers understood that power corrupts, so to combat this they made certain that the populace was ALWAYS only a trigger pull away from overthrowing its government.
To this day, every citizen of the United States is allowed to carry weapons unless he has been convicted of a violent crime. If you know what you're doing, you can even obtain licenses to carry military grade hardware.
The freedoms of the people MUST be cherished by the US government, or it will find itself demolished from the inside. China has no checks and balances. If the government says it is so, it is so. The government would have you believe otherwise, but their actions (Great Firewall, Censoring of the Press, Jailing of Religeous Believers, etc.) speak far louder. Tell me, is this the tolerance and human rights that the Chinese government speaks of? The UN doesn't think so.
If I'm not mistaken, that would be Chindi you're thinking of. I don't think he focused quite as much on the travel part in Omega or Deep Six.
Personally, I find McDevitt to be kind of boring after awhile. His books tend to roam around a lot, dryly describing tons of events. It's amusing in small doses, but can get trying. FWIW, I think his best work was Infinity Beach. It's unrelated to the Hutch series (where alien contact is still something of a mystery), and still contains his drawn out writing style. However, the mystery he has wrapped up in the book is intriguing and will keep you reading just to find out how it all untangles.:-)
They explained the "how" in the article. Basically, the panning of the lense attempts to capture as much of the scene as possible. The final video is then put through video analysis software that uses motion prediction to stitch the future and past of everything visible based on the few clips it acquired.
To put this in perspective, if you're panning through an aquarium, you'll see the fish swimming on as if nothing was wrong. However, while the camera isn't looking, a fish may get scared and dart off. Since that event wasn't captured, the software will show you the fish contining to swim in the final video.
Unfortunately, things might get a little weird with more dynamic scenes. Consider taking video of a theme park like Six Flags Great America. Let's say during panning you capture a roller coaster as it's decending, but fail to capture anything after that. I don't know how complex their software is, but there's a high probability that it would show the coaster going right through the track and into the ground. Something like that would quickly spoil the illusion that the camera is truly 360 degree.
I knew I'd seen this technology somewhere, so I went digging. Here's a story that discusses IPIX using two fisheye lenses back to back.
NetCam is a development of the original iPIX bubble camera, a unit that featured a pair of cameras with fish eye lenses in a single housing the size of a standard SLR camera. What was so special about the iPIX bubble camera was the fact those CCDs and lenses were facing away from each other.
Maybe I'm missing something, but the article doesn't explain why they don't simply place two cameras back to back, then use their software to splice the result and apply the correct perspective. All they say about it is that "it's against the laws of physics to take a 360 degree photo. That just seems odd.
Star office used to be a free as in beer, binary only application.
Correction. StarOffice was a commercial product that was intended as an alternative office suite. Sometime around the 5.x versions StarDivision began giving the office suite away to home users as a method of druming up consumer and business awareness. This gained them kudos from places like Lockergnome who were always on the lookout for cool new stuff. Shortly thereafter, Sun Microsystems acquired StarDivision and made StarOffice a free download. After the initial "cool factor" died down from that, Sun split the OOo and StarOffice projects.
1. StarOffice has better MS Office support (I assume thanks to the Sun/MS Deal) 2. StarOffice has a nicer GUI that Sun has not backported into OOo 3. Sun provides corporate support for StarOffice. You're on your own for OOo. 4. Extra bundled stuff like fonts, clipart, and templates. Nice if you do a lot of office documents, but not critical or irreplacible.
Me, I'll wait for OpenOffice.org 2.0. BTW, when is that, anyway?
When it's done. They've released betas of it as OOo 1.9.x, so you can go grab a copy whenever you feel like it.
Excellent post! My hat goes off to you, sir. You've been a most informative source.:-)
So basically what it comes down to, is that it takes so long to get a government bird in the air, that by the time it actually flies it's old tech to the commercial world. Which jibes with what the article states. It's tempting to jump into the "it's pretty sad when you have years to upgrade a sat before it even flies" mode, but the government does make choices that are intended to increase the chance of success. Not chasing new technology as soon as it becomes available is one of those choices.:-)
I didn't realize that, especially since the new sat seems to have other atennas similar to the NAVSTAR. Thanks for the info! Learn something new everyday.:-) (Mods, please mod parent up "informative".)
Once, it was the military who led the way and consumer devices followed; now, it's the other way round, and in fact the military/space people have big problems with obsolescence
It's still quite advanced equipment, though. Sure, we're not talking about gigahertz processors and multi-gigabyte memory architectures. Instead, we're talking about old Sparcs, Pentiums, and MIPS from days gone by. That's still pretty advanced stuff. And when it comes to the batteries, LiON batteries were actually developed for space use. As for the propulsion, arcjets and ion engines are new technologies that have proven themselves in real satellite usage.
So yes, some stuff is behind the commercial market. But there's still plenty of highly advanced techology that's been rated for space use.:-)
But if you have a spacecraft performing the same mission, odds are it's going to have a similar configuration. The thing that makes them look most similar is the navigation signal antenna array (the "Willy Wonka Chocolate Factory").
Fair enough. I was actually looking at the general shape of the craft, and also was influenced by the story which suggests that the new sats are simply updates of the old ones. On further inspection, it does appear that the two sats are quite a bit different.
Speaking of which, I am wondering what the heck those things on the antenna array are. (Assuming for a moment that they aren't coverings for classified equipment or even just "neat" coverings for publicity photos.) The more squat ones are reminicent of capacitors, but I'm not certain why you'd put them outside of the chassis (i.e. fully exposed) as opposed to inside. The candy-cane style ones look like they're just coverings for antennas. Any ideas?
Found a better link. Car manufacturers refer to the process as "Exhaust Gas Recirculation (EGR)". Probably because they don't think of the tailpipe as a "flue".;-)
Slashdot Mirror
I'm just venting my frustration that so many people (some of them even post here) beleive that there is some grand mystery to the Pyramids.
:-)
People also think we didn't land on the moon, and that the alien autopsy was a government cover-up. Don't let them get under your skin.
Well, we know that you're not an astrophysicist. :-P
Do a little reading on Pluto, and you should understand. There's a huge debate about the whole "is it a planet, is it not a planet, it's just too small, but then what is a continent", etc.
Good one!
That's one theory that's been suggested, but there are many more. While the RTG explanation seems most likely, many scientists hold to the idea that the RTG doesn't produce *enough* thrust to cause the anomaly.
There may still be argument over this as the wheel was invented about 3000 B.C. However, Egypt was supposedly quite late in getting wheel technology.
Dude. It's a joke. Relax.
The "mystery of the pyramids" if you must know, is how they got the blocks in place. While there's a lot of hyperbole stating that "we can't even lift that much weight today!" (Yes, yes we can.) the truth of the matter is that we just can't figure out how they moved 3 ton blocks without the invention of the wheel.
One of the more interesting suggestions was that they used kites to lift the blocks, but my own feeling is that the historical record is simply incomplete on the technology they possessed.
Let me be the first to say, that is some excellent information, and is far more informative than the original story. Please wrangle Slashdot into posting a story if you hear any more.
My attempt at humor. (Stand back.)
:-P
You might be an astrophysicist if:
10. You only refer to the ninth planet as "Pluto-Charon"
9. You constantly correct everyone that Pluto-Charon is sometimes the eighth planet.
8. You've throttled someone for joking about "The Borg" when you mentioned Wolf 359.
7. You are of the opinion that there are only 8 planets in the solar system.
6. You get booted out of the family reunion for constantly correcting "scientific" conversations.
5. You think that the slowdown of the Pioneer Space Probe is a more important mystery than the Pyramids.
4. The last JPL probe burst at least 10 of your pet theories.
3. You punched Neil Armstrong for "contaminating" the moon with human presence.
2. You passed out before Neil's return punch landed.
And the number one way to tell you're an astrophysicist is...
1. You hold your breath in awe as a probe sends back data on inky blackness.
Thank you, thank you! I'll be here all week! (Ok, ok. So the rest of the gags all sprung out of the number one "joke". Try not to groan too much.)
Better. You can go and play them yourself. It's usually something like, "Find the fourth numeric digit in a string passed" or "create an implementation of data transform XYZ." Nothing too tremendously difficult, so you have to be a fast typer with excellent accuracy. Producing a low number of runtime bugs significantly helps as well.
Its kinda scary that we are going from stone->metal->whatever->industrial->information.
d ->steel->industrial->space->information
:-P
stone->brass->iron->roman->dark->middle->enlighte
I probably left something out. Anyone else like to take a crack?
*sigh* This contest is put on by a company known as "TopCoder". TopCoder is an online Java Applet that allows contestants to compete against each other on a time to solution. Results are automatically checked through a set of Unit tests. As long as your program can produce the correct output for a given type of input, it will be considered correct.
Sun, IBM, and many others have sponsored TopCoder competitions in the past. They have since backed off of them. I'm not certain as to the reasons, but TopCoder has received a LOT of criticism. The problem with their approach is that it only proves that the coder can think and type fast. It does nothing to address teamwork, cleanliness of code, design capabilities, engineering ability, or many other areas that are critical to a real world programming job. These contests can be a fun way to compete with your peers, but my guess is that a lot of companies have found that placing too much empahsis on the results is a good way to get burned.
I assume they meant that the body of the camera, or the support, or the photographer/cameraman always block some part of the total sphere of vision.
I already thought about that. If you place the rig *on* the cameraman, you'll get 180 degrees with only a minor latitudal split. They can then apply their software two the results of the two cameras to seamlessly stitch the images together (correcting the perspective to allow for the 1-1.5 feet the cameraman takes up) making it seem as if the cameraman never existed.
They then got busy and fixed a bucketload of bugs which resulted in 5.2, at which point they realised that even a bug-free version of StarOffice 5 was a total disaster, and started the OpenOffice project.
Indeed. The first job of the OOo team was to break out the applications from that hideous "Integrated Desktop" interface. Now it seems like a bad memory, but I remember it being THE biggest failing point of StarOffice.
You have to realize that, not withstanding Articles 35 and 41, any right of speech, publication, or suggestions of criticisms on state organ must be made with the premise to protect the unity of the state.
No, I don't understand. The first amendment of the US Constitution was freedom of speech and freedom of press. This extended all the way into government affairs, with early Supreme Court cases ensuring that even views that would harm "the unity of state" could not be supressed. The second amendment of the US Constitution is the right to bear arms. The purpose of this was not only for common defense, but also to ensure that tyranny could never reign in the United States. The founding fathers understood that power corrupts, so to combat this they made certain that the populace was ALWAYS only a trigger pull away from overthrowing its government.
To this day, every citizen of the United States is allowed to carry weapons unless he has been convicted of a violent crime. If you know what you're doing, you can even obtain licenses to carry military grade hardware.
The freedoms of the people MUST be cherished by the US government, or it will find itself demolished from the inside. China has no checks and balances. If the government says it is so, it is so. The government would have you believe otherwise, but their actions (Great Firewall, Censoring of the Press, Jailing of Religeous Believers, etc.) speak far louder. Tell me, is this the tolerance and human rights that the Chinese government speaks of? The UN doesn't think so.
If I'm not mistaken, that would be Chindi you're thinking of. I don't think he focused quite as much on the travel part in Omega or Deep Six.
:-)
Personally, I find McDevitt to be kind of boring after awhile. His books tend to roam around a lot, dryly describing tons of events. It's amusing in small doses, but can get trying. FWIW, I think his best work was Infinity Beach. It's unrelated to the Hutch series (where alien contact is still something of a mystery), and still contains his drawn out writing style. However, the mystery he has wrapped up in the book is intriguing and will keep you reading just to find out how it all untangles.
They explained the "how" in the article. Basically, the panning of the lense attempts to capture as much of the scene as possible. The final video is then put through video analysis software that uses motion prediction to stitch the future and past of everything visible based on the few clips it acquired.
:-)
To put this in perspective, if you're panning through an aquarium, you'll see the fish swimming on as if nothing was wrong. However, while the camera isn't looking, a fish may get scared and dart off. Since that event wasn't captured, the software will show you the fish contining to swim in the final video.
Unfortunately, things might get a little weird with more dynamic scenes. Consider taking video of a theme park like Six Flags Great America. Let's say during panning you capture a roller coaster as it's decending, but fail to capture anything after that. I don't know how complex their software is, but there's a high probability that it would show the coaster going right through the track and into the ground. Something like that would quickly spoil the illusion that the camera is truly 360 degree.
Make sense?
(Emphasis mine.)
Maybe I'm missing something, but the article doesn't explain why they don't simply place two cameras back to back, then use their software to splice the result and apply the correct perspective. All they say about it is that "it's against the laws of physics to take a 360 degree photo. That just seems odd.
Star office used to be a free as in beer, binary only application.
Correction. StarOffice was a commercial product that was intended as an alternative office suite. Sometime around the 5.x versions StarDivision began giving the office suite away to home users as a method of druming up consumer and business awareness. This gained them kudos from places like Lockergnome who were always on the lookout for cool new stuff. Shortly thereafter, Sun Microsystems acquired StarDivision and made StarOffice a free download. After the initial "cool factor" died down from that, Sun split the OOo and StarOffice projects.
The differences basically amount to:
1. StarOffice has better MS Office support (I assume thanks to the Sun/MS Deal)
2. StarOffice has a nicer GUI that Sun has not backported into OOo
3. Sun provides corporate support for StarOffice. You're on your own for OOo.
4. Extra bundled stuff like fonts, clipart, and templates. Nice if you do a lot of office documents, but not critical or irreplacible.
Me, I'll wait for OpenOffice.org 2.0. BTW, when is that, anyway?
When it's done. They've released betas of it as OOo 1.9.x, so you can go grab a copy whenever you feel like it.
Excellent post! My hat goes off to you, sir. You've been a most informative source. :-)
:-)
So basically what it comes down to, is that it takes so long to get a government bird in the air, that by the time it actually flies it's old tech to the commercial world. Which jibes with what the article states. It's tempting to jump into the "it's pretty sad when you have years to upgrade a sat before it even flies" mode, but the government does make choices that are intended to increase the chance of success. Not chasing new technology as soon as it becomes available is one of those choices.
I didn't realize that, especially since the new sat seems to have other atennas similar to the NAVSTAR. Thanks for the info! Learn something new everyday. :-) (Mods, please mod parent up "informative".)
Once, it was the military who led the way and consumer devices followed; now, it's the other way round, and in fact the military/space people have big problems with obsolescence
:-)
It's still quite advanced equipment, though. Sure, we're not talking about gigahertz processors and multi-gigabyte memory architectures. Instead, we're talking about old Sparcs, Pentiums, and MIPS from days gone by. That's still pretty advanced stuff. And when it comes to the batteries, LiON batteries were actually developed for space use. As for the propulsion, arcjets and ion engines are new technologies that have proven themselves in real satellite usage.
So yes, some stuff is behind the commercial market. But there's still plenty of highly advanced techology that's been rated for space use.
But if you have a spacecraft performing the same mission, odds are it's going to have a similar configuration. The thing that makes them look most similar is the navigation signal antenna array (the "Willy Wonka Chocolate Factory").
Fair enough. I was actually looking at the general shape of the craft, and also was influenced by the story which suggests that the new sats are simply updates of the old ones. On further inspection, it does appear that the two sats are quite a bit different.
Speaking of which, I am wondering what the heck those things on the antenna array are. (Assuming for a moment that they aren't coverings for classified equipment or even just "neat" coverings for publicity photos.) The more squat ones are reminicent of capacitors, but I'm not certain why you'd put them outside of the chassis (i.e. fully exposed) as opposed to inside. The candy-cane style ones look like they're just coverings for antennas. Any ideas?
Found a better link. Car manufacturers refer to the process as "Exhaust Gas Recirculation (EGR)". Probably because they don't think of the tailpipe as a "flue". ;-)