most importantly, be within the reach of students (which leaves out Stern-Gerlach or Michelson-Morley)
Strange, but I did the Michelson-Morley in the 70s as a physics undergrad at as a part of junior physics lab at Rice U. We used lasers and found that, despite the Lensman books, the aether had not appeared to fill up the cosmos.
I recently used one of these for a week on a temporary assignment at work. The unit I used had a Celeron III @ 1.33 GHz, 256 Mb, 30 gig HD, CD-RW, Floppy, PCMCIA slot, USB and Firewire ports, & ethernet connection. It's basically a laptop design on a stand. It worked well enough, although the color scheme of Windows XP was a little hard to distinguish in bad lighting and took some tweaks. One annoyance is that the fan runs only if the chassis gets hot and starts and stops - which was disconcerting in a bullpen with 25 or so of them. I'd not buy one for the house, but for business, they are handy - pull it out of the box, plug in the mouse/keyboard/net connection, boot, clone a standard load off the server, and you are good to go.
Since its inception, the Planetary Society has advocated the exploration of Mars with the ultimate goal of sending humans to the Red Planet
Having been a member of the PS for over 10 years starting at it's founding, I can say they are engaging in some rewriting of history. They were actively against human exploration activities (including a Mars misssion) happening in our lifetimes. For a while, Sagan pushed a joint mission with the XSSR, but it was strictly a political move, based on his antipathy toward US policy with respect to the USSR under Reagan. Their opposition to human missions was one of the reasons I dropped my membership. Maybe they have changed their tune to some degree in recent years, but they were singing a different song while Sagan was alive.
Where NASA was asking for our opinion on where to go in space? Well, the results are in. Lo and behold, we all want to go to Mars.
The poll, alas, was only about robotic exploration priorities. The Planetary Society is dedicated to promoting robotic exploration off the planet and is mildly biased against such projects as the ISS and human exploration of Mars and the Moon. To support human exploration, join the National Space Society.
Note: I support the use of robots as precursors to sending the scientists and colonists. Both programs have merit, and provide me with a paycheck in the private sector.
Or is the Book Review going to turn into
here is the latest above average book we have reviewed
Some periodicals don't want to print negative reviews. One editor at a local paper said she had limited space and more reviews (and books to review) than she could fit, so she just printed the positive reviews. Her attitude is that it is better to promote the good authors than warn against the bad.
I think she may be right. Remember Sturgeon's law: 95% of anything is crap. Finding the pearls is a more difficult task and more valuable service.
Why do they use cryogenic hydrogen on the space shuttle, instead of gasoline or diesel fuel? Bingo. Energy density.
Um. No. Per unit mass H2 is near the top in energy density. Per unit volume, liquid H2 is a loser to most hydrocarbons. The Space Shuttle uses H2/O2 for high ISP, not energy density. Current NASA research and industry practice for new launchers is to use a hydrocarbon such as RP-1 jet fuel for the first stage - you get a smaller first stage with lower drag due to a smaller cross section. (And higher thrust, which gets you out of the dense air faster. Example - the Saturn V - Lox/RP-1 first stage, H2/Lox upper stage.)
The major problem with hydrogen as a fuel for non-industrial applications is that it is not nearly as dense as hydrocarbons. Despite lots of research, nobody has found a good way to store H2 for consumer use.
In order to have a useable car with H2 fuel cells, you would need to have either a cryogenic system for liquid H2 or tanks of highly compressed H2 gas in your car. To me, given the frequency of auto crashes, this would result in accidents that are much more hazardous than they are now. Refueling your car would require handling materials much more hazardous than gasoline on a routine basis. Can Aunt Minnie handle cryo fluid transfers or deal with high pressure gas couplings? I didn't think so.
As for using H2 in existing pipelines, the stoppers used to be the fact that H2 will seep out of cracks that natural gas won't (creating an explosion/fire hazard) and H2 tends to make metals more brittle over time as it invades cracks in the metals.
It still seems that using microwave transmission from orbit is the best solution at the present time. It is efficient, has a way to use the existing electrical grid, and can't be directly used as a weapon. Now if we can just get the cost to orbit down to reasonable levels......
This was examined in the 70s under DOE/NASA grants when I was in college and some of my professors were involved.
It could cause atmospheric problems, heating etc.
Not a real problem with the frequencies under consideration.
What if a plane flies through the beam, would it's electronics get mucked up?
Again, not likely at the frequencies and power density under consideration, but planes might avoid the area.
The reciever station would be massive anyway
The "rectenna" would look more like a bunch of coarse screens rather than a big solid disc. Significant light would pass through and you could have pasture/crops under it.
It would be better to give every house a solar roof
Well, you have to maintain and clean solar roofs which will mean accidents, injuries, and deaths. Solar roofs don't produce much power in large parts of the US due to weather. You have to have batteries to store the energy. In addition, solar systems in orbit can be much more efficient as they get more energy per unit area, especially in ultraviolet, which solar cells like to convert.
The major impediments to doing this are the cost to orbit, and the risk-adverse nature of most corporations with lots of $$$. If the government would do some pilot work, it might be feasible. Large scale deployment would also reduce use of fossil fuels for power generation and cut back on greenhouse gas emissions. No nasty radioactives to dispose of either.
This will also avoid the problems of the orbiting solar arrays regularly being hit of the collection of space junk that we have deposited in orbit over the years.
This is not a real problem in geosynchronous orbit - very little debris is in those orbits.
I met Fred Hoyle while getting my BA in Physics & Astronomy at Rice in the mid-70s. He came to speak on Newton and give some smaller talks to student, IIRC. After his speech (which was open to the public), there was a reception and Q&A session. Two things at the Q&A stick in my mind: the first was when an adult asked Prof. Hoyle about the whole "Chariots of the Gods" thing, which was very hot at the time. (This was a book that asserted that aliens had visited the earth in the past and were responsible for the pyramids in Egypt & MesoAmerica, among other things.) I could tell that the questioner was a true believer type. A quick cloud of annoyance passed over Hoyle's face, as he was undoubtedly getting asked about this all the time. He quickly and politely dismissed VonDaniken's book as "rubbish". A few questions later, a 10 to 12 year old boy asked him about Stonehenge: was it an alien landing site or something? This time there was no annoyance, and the teacher aspect of his personality came to the fore. He patiently explained to the child what was known about Stonehenge, how the seasons were very important to ancient farmers, and how we shouldn't assume that the people back then were stupid because they didn't have our technology, etc. At this point the Q&A was ended and Prof. Hoyle made sure to talk to the boy and encourage him to think about the world and to keep asking questions. Good advice to all of us. He'll be missed.
That is, the system must be able to observe it's OWN thoughts not only what is happening outside. It must be able to react and change it's thoughts by it's own thinking.
This is one of the goals of CYC. My understanding of the internals of the inference engine is that a major effort was made to get introspective functions working to look at what it knows, what changes have been wrought by new knowledge added from outside, and attempt to generalize the new connections and inferences. Lenat's early work was on an automated mathematics system (AM) that would use axioms and knowledge of what is "interesting" in math to try to prove theorems. It was later generalized to other domains in a program called Eurisko.
As a side note, some of the "common sense" that CYC embodies is in things like world physics -when carrying a cup, it goes open end up so that the contents don't spill. It is also amusing that the CYC team used newspapers to build the knowledge base and found that tabloids, the more lurid the better, were a prime source of "white space".
CYC: "Why shouldn't I think Elvis is hanging out at Burger King?"
IMHO, they should gut the shuttles and redo them in modern technology - cut the weight of the shuttles (The glass cockpit was a start).. But they still have those N+1 redudant hugeass computers on board - and lots and lots of copper wiring.
The computers have been upgraded already to be smaller, faster and have more memory. There are a number of shuttle upgrades in the pipeline and that may get funded. They include replacing a lot of the wiring with fiber, new OMS engines that use non-toxic propellants, better fuel cells, replacing the hydraulics with electro-mechanical systems, an additional computer to do better diagnostics, etc. All of this is dependant on budget and schedule - you can't pull more than one Orbiter off-line at a time and they can't be off-line for too long as the ISS needs 5-6 flights per year and there are a few science missions sprinkled in there.
Exactly what upgrades to do depends on Congress paying for it and for how long the Shuttle system will be flying - so you can see if the cost is worth it.
The ISS computers that have been crashing (the MDMs) don't use Windows. The MDMs and other embedded computer systems are based on Intel 386 chips. If they have a kernel, it is probably VxWorks or other commercial RTOS. AFAIK, the only ISS computers that use Windows are some of the laptops, however, some use the Intel version of Solaris.
Why 386 chips? Because they have been tested and been found to be relatively radiation tolerant. More current chips are likely to be subject to more radiation-induced faults due to smaller transistor size.
The availability of an inexpensive, radiation tolerant CPU is a big win for space researchers. Right now there are darn few radiation-tolerant parts available for use in space applications due to decreased demand from the military. The International Space Station is using Intel 386s for embedded CPUs, as they are simple enough to be relatively rad-hard. More modern CPUs, such as in the laptops used on the ISS and Shuttle have about one lockup/day due to radiation.
The design requirements for software controlled systems in space are so stringent that to do anything sophisticated requires incredible redundancy, cross checks among the systems, and increased design complexity, all of which significantly drives up design costs (and causes all kinds of debugging problems). Tell me three times is not enough, you have to tell three controllers three times, three different ways and then they need to cross check. This could be a big step forward for software geeks in space.
There are a couple of key players to write to in Texas. First, write to your state rep and senator. Write to the chairs of the committees that have the bill (see the links others have posted), letting them know that you have written to your rep/senator and vice versa. you should also contact the Governor and the State Attorney General. The AG in Texas is a sort of consumer ombudsman position, as well as the state's civil lawyer.
I started lobbying my rep. last October. Since he is an electrical engineer and software developer, I thought that he might be a key player in the debate. From what he has told me, he was being consulted by other reps for his opinion. He is very, very concerned about UCITA and feels it is a bad law. So, write a polite letter expressing your opposition, don't flame the proponents, and if you have a business you might do it on letterhead in your business persona.
A friend (Hi, Graham!) uses this as a.sig:
Looking at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots representing towns and villages on a map. Why, I ask myself, shouldn't the shining dots of the sky be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France? Vincent van Gogh
My first real job out of college was with a small startup doing a turnkey system for medical labs on PDP-11s. I was an Astronomy BA with a couple of coding classes (FORTRAN, APL and PL/I) under my belt and a couple of summers working in the DP shop (COBOL, RPG II, and PL/I) of a Fortune 500 company as an operator and programmer. I'd read a few classic books on programming and software engineering. In other words, I knew enough to be dangerous.
I joined a team of 4 other programmers that were under tight deadlines to rewrite a medium-sized database and reporting system. Despite the time pressure, the lead programmer/architect made me do a several month long apprenticeship under him, where all my code was reviewed by him before released. All the programmers that joined the company, no matter their experience level, had to do one also. It made me a better programmer, and it had the side effect of forcing a common style on the entire programming staff, easing maintenance. As programming is essentially a craft, an apprenticeship is a good way to learn from a master. Just make sure you apprentice from a master and not a poseur.
It was reported a long time ago that three ideas for ST series were tested with focus groups:
- a series set in the early days of the Federation, a.k.a. TOS Prequel - Digging Up the Past
- a series about an elite group of undercover operatives that work in trouble spots, a.k.a. Mission: Impossible clone
- a series about the academy, a.k.a Starfleet Academy, 90210
IMHO, only the first has long term potential.
I was watching the HDTV feed and not only did we have different announcers, but we saw somewhat different ads. RCA had an ad for HDTV, set at a golf tourney that ran about 10 times. Apparently, they forgot that if someone was watching the HDTV feed, they already own one! Idiots.
A couple of literary treatments about transitions from scarcity economics to a world of plenty:
- "Manna" by Lee Correy (Penname of G. Harry Stine). The story of a small country in Africa that realizes that the nearly infinte energy and matter in sapce makes scarcity economics obsolete. The old guard tries to retaliate. The writing is average, but some intersesting ideas are kicked around.
- "The Complete Venus Equilateral" by George O. Smith has several short stories about the development of a matter duplicator and the effects on socitey. Written in the 40s, they feature lots of big vacuum tubes, but the social commentary is still relevant.
Looking back, there were three teachers that shaped my career as a software engineer, each in a different way. One taught me write well, one sharpened my problem solving skills, and one taught me the pragmatics of software building.
In high school, my 11th grade English teacher, Marty Green, taught me to write well. For the first several weeks of our advanced placement class she made us write an essay on one of several topics and turn it in. It was given back the next day, with incisive and practical criticism. Unlike previous teachers, she didn't try to force her style and voice onto our writing - her only concern was that the writing be correct and clear. Once almost all the class could write an acceptable essay, we dived into literature and the rest of the expected curriculum. Being able to write a well structured essay served me well in college (astronomy/sociology major) and has been a great help in my current position as a systems engineer and systems architect.
At Rice University, my Mathematical Physics professor, the late Bud Rorschach, demanded hard work and made dynamics and electrodynamics come alive. Our weekly recitation sections were my first exposure to peer review, as we were called on to present solutions to our homework at the chalkboard for comments from him and the others in the section an exhausting and exhilarating experience.
Finally, at my first software job, all of the new hires were given an apprenticeship under the chief programmer, Kent Frazier. I learned more about how to write well structured programs and how to attack programming problems in one month than I had in several college courses. Kent had started programming in the 50s and wrote a variant OS for one of the mainframes, which was distributed by a user group. (He didn't realize that it was impossible for an individual to write an OS themselves, so he was able to do it.) He then spent time at IBM working in OS development and moved to EDS as a networking and optimization guru. All without any college.
I owe each of them a great debt, which I have tried to pay forward.
So, I wonder, are WE transmitting a repeating signal at 1450 Mhz or near it?
Yes, there have been signals sent out on the hydrogen bands from various radio telescopes, mostly as part of a PR campaign for SETI research. Some of the signals have been sent to stars that are close (as stars go) and some to other galaxies.
There is some concern as to who might answer such a transmission. Would the Vulcans come by for a drink as in Star Trek, would the Babylon 5 Vorlons stop by for some new DNA samples, or would Damon Knight's Kanamits show up?
I'm not an actor, but I play one on TV. - Me
Re:But who gets to teach history? And about genera
on
'Thirteen Days'
·
· Score: 1
I agree about the portrayal of generals, tho. When did Hollywood come to hate them so? And does anybody know if they are that bad.
I think a good proportion of the "hate" for generals can be traced to a couple of things: First, while Hollywood is actually a brutal, authoritarian system, they think of themselves as this cozy, egalitarian, cuddly artist's colony that rejects the chain of command and obedience to orders that characterizes military life. (My brothers, who are "in the business", will attest that those at the bottom of the food chain are serfs at best. If your name doesn't appear in the opening credits, you are a faceless cog - subject to ruthless exploitation like something out of the AFL-CIO's worst portrait of Capitalist Greed.) Second, in the aftermath of the blacklist of the 50s and 60s, a counter reaction set in. A lot of Hollywood was sympathetic to the stated goals of the USSR, if not to the regime then. Some of the military, like the outspoken Curtis LeMay, was very supportive of the goals of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee hearings. Remember, the US had taken a licking in Korea, tension in Europe was still high, Indochina was flaring up, Marxist revolutionaries were stirring in Latin America, etc. Those hearings destroyed a lot of lives in Hollywood. That resentment about the resulting blacklist persists today, even though the fall of the USSR has provided adequate documentation from the KGB files that the US Communist Party was under direct orders from the Kermlin and that there were attempts to infiltrate the media and other institutions of the free countries in the West. (IIRC, LeMay was the model for the general plotting a military coup in the film Seven Days in May, much as Henry Kissinger was the model for the title character of Dr. Strangelove.
As for the attitudes of generals today, I find that most ex-military acquaintences of mine are very reluctant to endorse quick military action. Perhaps Kennedy's desire to avoid a war with the USSR was colored by his experiences in WWII. I know that my father and uncle, who served then, are disgusted with the half-baked missions the military has been given since the Gulf War. Maybe if President Clinton had served in the Army, he'd have been more cautious.
The referenced article does have one other paragraph that may be that IT is about:
Another project, to be unveiled in the next year, will necessitate building "the largest company in New Hampshire," Kamen says with characteristic bravura. He's shy about details, except to say it involves a consumer device unrelated to health care and will require $100 million in financing. Among the investors: Kleiner Perkins.
Slashdot Mirror
Strange, but I did the Michelson-Morley in the 70s as a physics undergrad at as a part of junior physics lab at Rice U. We used lasers and found that, despite the Lensman books, the aether had not appeared to fill up the cosmos.
At times like these I miss Gharlane.
I recently used one of these for a week on a temporary assignment at work. The unit I used had a Celeron III @ 1.33 GHz, 256 Mb, 30 gig HD, CD-RW, Floppy, PCMCIA slot, USB and Firewire ports, & ethernet connection. It's basically a laptop design on a stand. It worked well enough, although the color scheme of Windows XP was a little hard to distinguish in bad lighting and took some tweaks. One annoyance is that the fan runs only if the chassis gets hot and starts and stops - which was disconcerting in a bullpen with 25 or so of them. I'd not buy one for the house, but for business, they are handy - pull it out of the box, plug in the mouse/keyboard/net connection, boot, clone a standard load off the server, and you are good to go.
Since its inception, the Planetary Society has advocated the exploration of Mars with the ultimate goal of sending humans to the Red Planet
Having been a member of the PS for over 10 years starting at it's founding, I can say they are engaging in some rewriting of history. They were actively against human exploration activities (including a Mars misssion) happening in our lifetimes. For a while, Sagan pushed a joint mission with the XSSR, but it was strictly a political move, based on his antipathy toward US policy with respect to the USSR under Reagan. Their opposition to human missions was one of the reasons I dropped my membership. Maybe they have changed their tune to some degree in recent years, but they were singing a different song while Sagan was alive.
Where NASA was asking for our opinion on where to go in space? Well, the results are in. Lo and behold, we all want to go to Mars.
The poll, alas, was only about robotic exploration priorities. The Planetary Society is dedicated to promoting robotic exploration off the planet and is mildly biased against such projects as the ISS and human exploration of Mars and the Moon. To support human exploration, join the National Space Society.
Note: I support the use of robots as precursors to sending the scientists and colonists. Both programs have merit, and provide me with a paycheck in the private sector.
Some periodicals don't want to print negative reviews. One editor at a local paper said she had limited space and more reviews (and books to review) than she could fit, so she just printed the positive reviews. Her attitude is that it is better to promote the good authors than warn against the bad.
I think she may be right. Remember Sturgeon's law: 95% of anything is crap. Finding the pearls is a more difficult task and more valuable service.
Um. No. Per unit mass H2 is near the top in energy density. Per unit volume, liquid H2 is a loser to most hydrocarbons. The Space Shuttle uses H2/O2 for high ISP, not energy density. Current NASA research and industry practice for new launchers is to use a hydrocarbon such as RP-1 jet fuel for the first stage - you get a smaller first stage with lower drag due to a smaller cross section. (And higher thrust, which gets you out of the dense air faster. Example - the Saturn V - Lox/RP-1 first stage, H2/Lox upper stage.)
In order to have a useable car with H2 fuel cells, you would need to have either a cryogenic system for liquid H2 or tanks of highly compressed H2 gas in your car. To me, given the frequency of auto crashes, this would result in accidents that are much more hazardous than they are now. Refueling your car would require handling materials much more hazardous than gasoline on a routine basis. Can Aunt Minnie handle cryo fluid transfers or deal with high pressure gas couplings? I didn't think so.
As for using H2 in existing pipelines, the stoppers used to be the fact that H2 will seep out of cracks that natural gas won't (creating an explosion/fire hazard) and H2 tends to make metals more brittle over time as it invades cracks in the metals.
It still seems that using microwave transmission from orbit is the best solution at the present time. It is efficient, has a way to use the existing electrical grid, and can't be directly used as a weapon. Now if we can just get the cost to orbit down to reasonable levels ......
This was examined in the 70s under DOE/NASA grants when I was in college and some of my professors were involved.
It could cause atmospheric problems, heating etc.
Not a real problem with the frequencies under consideration.
What if a plane flies through the beam, would it's electronics get mucked up?
Again, not likely at the frequencies and power density under consideration, but planes might avoid the area.
The reciever station would be massive anyway
The "rectenna" would look more like a bunch of coarse screens rather than a big solid disc. Significant light would pass through and you could have pasture/crops under it.
It would be better to give every house a solar roof
Well, you have to maintain and clean solar roofs which will mean accidents, injuries, and deaths. Solar roofs don't produce much power in large parts of the US due to weather. You have to have batteries to store the energy. In addition, solar systems in orbit can be much more efficient as they get more energy per unit area, especially in ultraviolet, which solar cells like to convert.
The major impediments to doing this are the cost to orbit, and the risk-adverse nature of most corporations with lots of $$$. If the government would do some pilot work, it might be feasible. Large scale deployment would also reduce use of fossil fuels for power generation and cut back on greenhouse gas emissions. No nasty radioactives to dispose of either.
This is not a real problem in geosynchronous orbit - very little debris is in those orbits.
I met Fred Hoyle while getting my BA in Physics & Astronomy at Rice in the mid-70s. He came to speak on Newton and give some smaller talks to student, IIRC. After his speech (which was open to the public), there was a reception and Q&A session. Two things at the Q&A stick in my mind: the first was when an adult asked Prof. Hoyle about the whole "Chariots of the Gods" thing, which was very hot at the time. (This was a book that asserted that aliens had visited the earth in the past and were responsible for the pyramids in Egypt & MesoAmerica, among other things.) I could tell that the questioner was a true believer type. A quick cloud of annoyance passed over Hoyle's face, as he was undoubtedly getting asked about this all the time. He quickly and politely dismissed VonDaniken's book as "rubbish". A few questions later, a 10 to 12 year old boy asked him about Stonehenge: was it an alien landing site or something? This time there was no annoyance, and the teacher aspect of his personality came to the fore. He patiently explained to the child what was known about Stonehenge, how the seasons were very important to ancient farmers, and how we shouldn't assume that the people back then were stupid because they didn't have our technology, etc. At this point the Q&A was ended and Prof. Hoyle made sure to talk to the boy and encourage him to think about the world and to keep asking questions. Good advice to all of us. He'll be missed.
As a side note, some of the "common sense" that CYC embodies is in things like world physics -when carrying a cup, it goes open end up so that the contents don't spill. It is also amusing that the CYC team used newspapers to build the knowledge base and found that tabloids, the more lurid the better, were a prime source of "white space".
CYC: "Why shouldn't I think Elvis is hanging out at Burger King?"
Researcher: "Well, ......"
Remember that at most places it is company policy that: All your email are belong to us.
Exactly what upgrades to do depends on Congress paying for it and for how long the Shuttle system will be flying - so you can see if the cost is worth it.
The ISS computers that have been crashing (the MDMs) don't use Windows. The MDMs and other embedded computer systems are based on Intel 386 chips. If they have a kernel, it is probably VxWorks or other commercial RTOS. AFAIK, the only ISS computers that use Windows are some of the laptops, however, some use the Intel version of Solaris.
Why 386 chips? Because they have been tested and been found to be relatively radiation tolerant. More current chips are likely to be subject to more radiation-induced faults due to smaller transistor size.
The availability of an inexpensive, radiation tolerant CPU is a big win for space researchers. Right now there are darn few radiation-tolerant parts available for use in space applications due to decreased demand from the military. The International Space Station is using Intel 386s for embedded CPUs, as they are simple enough to be relatively rad-hard. More modern CPUs, such as in the laptops used on the ISS and Shuttle have about one lockup/day due to radiation.
The design requirements for software controlled systems in space are so stringent that to do anything sophisticated requires incredible redundancy, cross checks among the systems, and increased design complexity, all of which significantly drives up design costs (and causes all kinds of debugging problems). Tell me three times is not enough, you have to tell three controllers three times, three different ways and then they need to cross check. This could be a big step forward for software geeks in space.
There are a couple of key players to write to in Texas. First, write to your state rep and senator. Write to the chairs of the committees that have the bill (see the links others have posted), letting them know that you have written to your rep/senator and vice versa. you should also contact the Governor and the State Attorney General. The AG in Texas is a sort of consumer ombudsman position, as well as the state's civil lawyer.
I started lobbying my rep. last October. Since he is an electrical engineer and software developer, I thought that he might be a key player in the debate. From what he has told me, he was being consulted by other reps for his opinion. He is very, very concerned about UCITA and feels it is a bad law. So, write a polite letter expressing your opposition, don't flame the proponents, and if you have a business you might do it on letterhead in your business persona.
A friend (Hi, Graham!) uses this as a .sig:
Looking at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots representing towns and villages on a map. Why, I ask myself, shouldn't the shining dots of the sky be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France? Vincent van Gogh
My first real job out of college was with a small startup doing a turnkey system for medical labs on PDP-11s. I was an Astronomy BA with a couple of coding classes (FORTRAN, APL and PL/I) under my belt and a couple of summers working in the DP shop (COBOL, RPG II, and PL/I) of a Fortune 500 company as an operator and programmer. I'd read a few classic books on programming and software engineering. In other words, I knew enough to be dangerous.
I joined a team of 4 other programmers that were under tight deadlines to rewrite a medium-sized database and reporting system. Despite the time pressure, the lead programmer/architect made me do a several month long apprenticeship under him, where all my code was reviewed by him before released. All the programmers that joined the company, no matter their experience level, had to do one also. It made me a better programmer, and it had the side effect of forcing a common style on the entire programming staff, easing maintenance. As programming is essentially a craft, an apprenticeship is a good way to learn from a master. Just make sure you apprentice from a master and not a poseur.
It was reported a long time ago that three ideas for ST series were tested with focus groups:
- a series set in the early days of the Federation, a.k.a. TOS Prequel - Digging Up the Past
- a series about an elite group of undercover operatives that work in trouble spots, a.k.a. Mission: Impossible clone
- a series about the academy, a.k.a Starfleet Academy, 90210
IMHO, only the first has long term potential.
I was watching the HDTV feed and not only did we have different announcers, but we saw somewhat different ads. RCA had an ad for HDTV, set at a golf tourney that ran about 10 times. Apparently, they forgot that if someone was watching the HDTV feed, they already own one! Idiots.
A couple of literary treatments about transitions from scarcity economics to a world of plenty:
- "Manna" by Lee Correy (Penname of G. Harry Stine). The story of a small country in Africa that realizes that the nearly infinte energy and matter in sapce makes scarcity economics obsolete. The old guard tries to retaliate. The writing is average, but some intersesting ideas are kicked around.
- "The Complete Venus Equilateral" by George O. Smith has several short stories about the development of a matter duplicator and the effects on socitey. Written in the 40s, they feature lots of big vacuum tubes, but the social commentary is still relevant.
Looking back, there were three teachers that shaped my career as a software engineer, each in a different way. One taught me write well, one sharpened my problem solving skills, and one taught me the pragmatics of software building.
In high school, my 11th grade English teacher, Marty Green, taught me to write well. For the first several weeks of our advanced placement class she made us write an essay on one of several topics and turn it in. It was given back the next day, with incisive and practical criticism. Unlike previous teachers, she didn't try to force her style and voice onto our writing - her only concern was that the writing be correct and clear. Once almost all the class could write an acceptable essay, we dived into literature and the rest of the expected curriculum. Being able to write a well structured essay served me well in college (astronomy/sociology major) and has been a great help in my current position as a systems engineer and systems architect.
At Rice University, my Mathematical Physics professor, the late Bud Rorschach, demanded hard work and made dynamics and electrodynamics come alive. Our weekly recitation sections were my first exposure to peer review, as we were called on to present solutions to our homework at the chalkboard for comments from him and the others in the section an exhausting and exhilarating experience.
Finally, at my first software job, all of the new hires were given an apprenticeship under the chief programmer, Kent Frazier. I learned more about how to write well structured programs and how to attack programming problems in one month than I had in several college courses. Kent had started programming in the 50s and wrote a variant OS for one of the mainframes, which was distributed by a user group. (He didn't realize that it was impossible for an individual to write an OS themselves, so he was able to do it.) He then spent time at IBM working in OS development and moved to EDS as a networking and optimization guru. All without any college.
I owe each of them a great debt, which I have tried to pay forward.
There is some concern as to who might answer such a transmission. Would the Vulcans come by for a drink as in Star Trek, would the Babylon 5 Vorlons stop by for some new DNA samples, or would Damon Knight's Kanamits show up?
I'm not an actor, but I play one on TV. - Me
I think a good proportion of the "hate" for generals can be traced to a couple of things: First, while Hollywood is actually a brutal, authoritarian system, they think of themselves as this cozy, egalitarian, cuddly artist's colony that rejects the chain of command and obedience to orders that characterizes military life. (My brothers, who are "in the business", will attest that those at the bottom of the food chain are serfs at best. If your name doesn't appear in the opening credits, you are a faceless cog - subject to ruthless exploitation like something out of the AFL-CIO's worst portrait of Capitalist Greed.) Second, in the aftermath of the blacklist of the 50s and 60s, a counter reaction set in. A lot of Hollywood was sympathetic to the stated goals of the USSR, if not to the regime then. Some of the military, like the outspoken Curtis LeMay, was very supportive of the goals of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee hearings. Remember, the US had taken a licking in Korea, tension in Europe was still high, Indochina was flaring up, Marxist revolutionaries were stirring in Latin America, etc. Those hearings destroyed a lot of lives in Hollywood. That resentment about the resulting blacklist persists today, even though the fall of the USSR has provided adequate documentation from the KGB files that the US Communist Party was under direct orders from the Kermlin and that there were attempts to infiltrate the media and other institutions of the free countries in the West. (IIRC, LeMay was the model for the general plotting a military coup in the film Seven Days in May, much as Henry Kissinger was the model for the title character of Dr. Strangelove.
As for the attitudes of generals today, I find that most ex-military acquaintences of mine are very reluctant to endorse quick military action. Perhaps Kennedy's desire to avoid a war with the USSR was colored by his experiences in WWII. I know that my father and uncle, who served then, are disgusted with the half-baked missions the military has been given since the Gulf War. Maybe if President Clinton had served in the Army, he'd have been more cautious.
It looks as if the Stirling engine is not IT.