China, as a major partner in TMT, has a sincere interest in seeing the project get built. Best of all, the Greens who are really behind this have no input to Chinese policy. Native objections could not have been crucial in stopping the TMT, because the site was in a designated telescope reserve inside a large environmental preserve on the mountain that has been run by University of Hawaii since the Sixties. The TMT would have been just the latest of many instruments built in the reserve. The Green campaign against TMT has been identical to their long but unsuccessful attempt to kill off the astronomy "industry" here in Arizona (http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-94-010-0049-9_6#page-1).
Additionally, China would love an opportunity to get a jump on a nation that it perceives being in decline, and would probably increase its commitment to the project. The Qinghai Plateau is in a poor part of the country that, unlike Hawaii, does not get much tourism because of its remoteness. The natives are going to love those construction and maintenance jobs.
There are not many places on Earth where a telescope of this size can go. Hawaii was chosen because of the near-ideal weather at high altitude, and a low Northern Hemisphere latitude, which would make the Thirty Meter Telescope an ideal companion to the European E-ELT now being built in Chile. So with Hawaii now out of the picture, where could we put it now?
How about the Qinghai Plateau of Tibet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibetan_Plateau)? This is even higher than Maunakea, though the weather will not be as favorable and the latitude is somewhat too far north.
A legitimate concern about smart meters could be privacy. Because a smart meter can take multiple readings during a day, rather than one manual reading a month, it gives the utility a lot of information about users' personal habits. In fact, smart meters are part of Smart Grid, a utility initiative to incorporate medium-scale renewables into their systems. The idea is that if a utility is going to have to deal with generated inputs that change minute by minute, it needs to have the same fine-scale information about its loads.
The next step in Smart Grid is going to evoke national controversy: a smart meter that can selectively turn on and off each user's major appliances. If renewables are ever going to be a major element of the power grid, this next generation of smart meters will have to be deployed. When we lobby for small renewable sources, this is a consequence that most of us did not anticipate.
Meanwhile, the New Jersey ombudsman's objection is at least to a plausible scenario. The hippie-chich objection is to something purely imaginary.
"I now live in New Jersey, and our so-called 'ratepayer advocate' is rabidly anti-smart meter because she doesn't want to permit any increase in utility bills, even to pay for infrastructure investment. It took Hurricane Sandy to convince her to allow some infrastructure improvements that PSEG had been asking for a long time, but still no smart meters."
In my town, the hippie chick lobby is against smart meters because the ones we use in Arizona report in using the cellular data system. This is "radiation" in their view, and will cause everyone to grow extra toes or something. I have had one for two years, and I'm still waiting for my superpowers.
Putting up signs declaring a gun-free zone does not in fact establish a zone safe from guns. I would like to see legislation requiring that gun-free zones have airport-style security perimeters. THEN people might feel a little safer in them.
I have a buddy who is an old-school radio ham, the kind who builds his own equipment and needs a huge tower to work the low frequencies that the service started out with a century ago.
Whenever he moves to the edge of a new town, his modus operandi is the same: he puts up the tower first, leaving all his gear crated.
After several weeks of complaints rolling in about impotence and dead pets, he invites the neighbors over to show them the crated, unpowered rig. Then he hams away in peace.
There is a similar story from the early Fifties of a town which handled the startup of its new water fluoridation plant in the same way.
In California, modified babies would have to be labeled so that the anti-science woo sorority, and their mangina husbands, could refuse to let their "natural" kids play with them.
The Space Treaty was prompted by the moon race. Smaller countries didn't want to have to stand by while the mighty US and the all-powerful Soviet Union divide up sovereignty of space objects and shut everyone out.
Today the Soviet Union has disappeared completely and US manned programs have been sidetracked by anti-science fears. Time to stand by and watch China occupy the nearby bodies. Will it cooperate with or compete with the various private initiatives?
Green wackos believe that the whole idea of exploiting space resources is a space nutter fantasy that will never happen, so what are they worrying about? This "angry reaction from overseas" is the voice of one law professor who is incensed at the idea that some place exists, however potential and distant, that Greenpeace cannot control.
He is in any case wrong on the law. The Space Treaty forbids Earthy governments from extending their sovereignty into space. It does not prevent private organizations from settling, establishing local law, and exploiting resources.
Folks, put a copy of this post in your Evernote so that if some relative at the dinner table brings up Islam or Black Lives Matter, you can whip out your smartphone and deflect the conversation before everybody starts screaming and throwing turkey at each other.
In the last year, all metals prices have plummeted. Around here, the incidence of illegal aliens lighting themselves up trying to pull live wires out of the ground has dropped off drastically.
Tyson's subtext is that he somehow doesn't trust non-governmental organizations to conduct themselves in space according to his NPR vision of the proper role of Washington.
Because the technology for manned exploration is in such an early stage of development, we can't sit here and plan how it might develop over the rest of the century. Since NASA has a good track record on automated science, we can assume that it will direct more generations of scientific probes, but we have no confidence that it can plan risky manned missions. Let the adventuring sector do what it finds itself capable of.
"Churchill's famous quote applies 100%: 'Engineers should be on tap, not on top'."
Churchill didn't live to see century in which a government of lawyers is being eclipsed by a government of engineers. That's why Shanghai has the first commercial maglev, not New York.
" Survey data indicates engineering faculty at universities are far more likely to be conservative than people with other degrees, and far more likely to be religious"
The statistic associating engineers with terrorism has been around for a while, but this explanation is a new one. This means that Texas ought to be a hotbed of terrorist activity.
Slashdot Mirror
China, as a major partner in TMT, has a sincere interest in seeing the project get built. Best of all, the Greens who are really behind this have no input to Chinese policy. Native objections could not have been crucial in stopping the TMT, because the site was in a designated telescope reserve inside a large environmental preserve on the mountain that has been run by University of Hawaii since the Sixties. The TMT would have been just the latest of many instruments built in the reserve. The Green campaign against TMT has been identical to their long but unsuccessful attempt to kill off the astronomy "industry" here in Arizona (http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-94-010-0049-9_6#page-1).
Additionally, China would love an opportunity to get a jump on a nation that it perceives being in decline, and would probably increase its commitment to the project. The Qinghai Plateau is in a poor part of the country that, unlike Hawaii, does not get much tourism because of its remoteness. The natives are going to love those construction and maintenance jobs.
There are not many places on Earth where a telescope of this size can go. Hawaii was chosen because of the near-ideal weather at high altitude, and a low Northern Hemisphere latitude, which would make the Thirty Meter Telescope an ideal companion to the European E-ELT now being built in Chile. So with Hawaii now out of the picture, where could we put it now?
How about the Qinghai Plateau of Tibet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibetan_Plateau)? This is even higher than Maunakea, though the weather will not be as favorable and the latitude is somewhat too far north.
A legitimate concern about smart meters could be privacy. Because a smart meter can take multiple readings during a day, rather than one manual reading a month, it gives the utility a lot of information about users' personal habits. In fact, smart meters are part of Smart Grid, a utility initiative to incorporate medium-scale renewables into their systems. The idea is that if a utility is going to have to deal with generated inputs that change minute by minute, it needs to have the same fine-scale information about its loads.
The next step in Smart Grid is going to evoke national controversy: a smart meter that can selectively turn on and off each user's major appliances. If renewables are ever going to be a major element of the power grid, this next generation of smart meters will have to be deployed. When we lobby for small renewable sources, this is a consequence that most of us did not anticipate.
Meanwhile, the New Jersey ombudsman's objection is at least to a plausible scenario. The hippie-chich objection is to something purely imaginary.
"I now live in New Jersey, and our so-called 'ratepayer advocate' is rabidly anti-smart meter because she doesn't want to permit any increase in utility bills, even to pay for infrastructure investment. It took Hurricane Sandy to convince her to allow some infrastructure improvements that PSEG had been asking for a long time, but still no smart meters."
In my town, the hippie chick lobby is against smart meters because the ones we use in Arizona report in using the cellular data system. This is "radiation" in their view, and will cause everyone to grow extra toes or something. I have had one for two years, and I'm still waiting for my superpowers.
"But we now know that it was Syed Farook, his brother, and a female companion that they're still trying to sort out."
Obviously, fundamentalist Republicans mistaking the facility for a women's clinic.
Putting up signs declaring a gun-free zone does not in fact establish a zone safe from guns. I would like to see legislation requiring that gun-free zones have airport-style security perimeters. THEN people might feel a little safer in them.
I have a buddy who is an old-school radio ham, the kind who builds his own equipment and needs a huge tower to work the low frequencies that the service started out with a century ago.
Whenever he moves to the edge of a new town, his modus operandi is the same: he puts up the tower first, leaving all his gear crated.
After several weeks of complaints rolling in about impotence and dead pets, he invites the neighbors over to show them the crated, unpowered rig. Then he hams away in peace.
There is a similar story from the early Fifties of a town which handled the startup of its new water fluoridation plant in the same way.
The National Radio Quiet Zone in WV is to protect the Green Bank radio telescope, and has nothing to do with Nonexistent WiFi Allergy Syndrome.
The Big Switchover will occur when, and only when, we can get SSDs to fail read-only.
Wasn't the first programmable automaton, and the target of the original Luddite movement of 1811, the Jacquard loom?
In California, modified babies would have to be labeled so that the anti-science woo sorority, and their mangina husbands, could refuse to let their "natural" kids play with them.
"Most environmental concern is BASED on the findings of science,"
If that were true, climate scientists would be suing to open up Yucca Mountain.
Just wait until pharma company disclaimers and car rental contracts are given single Unicode characters of their own.
The Space Treaty was prompted by the moon race. Smaller countries didn't want to have to stand by while the mighty US and the all-powerful Soviet Union divide up sovereignty of space objects and shut everyone out.
Today the Soviet Union has disappeared completely and US manned programs have been sidetracked by anti-science fears. Time to stand by and watch China occupy the nearby bodies. Will it cooperate with or compete with the various private initiatives?
"The big question is who gets to decide about this? A couple of bored, space nutter billionaires or some law professor somewhere?"
Whichever of these parties has the money and the initiative to go out there, assay some asteroids, and start mining.
Green wackos believe that the whole idea of exploiting space resources is a space nutter fantasy that will never happen, so what are they worrying about? This "angry reaction from overseas" is the voice of one law professor who is incensed at the idea that some place exists, however potential and distant, that Greenpeace cannot control.
He is in any case wrong on the law. The Space Treaty forbids Earthy governments from extending their sovereignty into space. It does not prevent private organizations from settling, establishing local law, and exploiting resources.
I'm not a Micrisoft fan, but "Hooking the poor on malaria drugs"? Yeah, like Jonas Salk hooked us on polio vaccine.
"Thanksgiving trivia for the day: "
Folks, put a copy of this post in your Evernote so that if some relative at the dinner table brings up Islam or Black Lives Matter, you can whip out your smartphone and deflect the conversation before everybody starts screaming and throwing turkey at each other.
Wouldn't the Bill Gates of India be Satya Nadella?
In the last year, all metals prices have plummeted. Around here, the incidence of illegal aliens lighting themselves up trying to pull live wires out of the ground has dropped off drastically.
Tyson's subtext is that he somehow doesn't trust non-governmental organizations to conduct themselves in space according to his NPR vision of the proper role of Washington.
Because the technology for manned exploration is in such an early stage of development, we can't sit here and plan how it might develop over the rest of the century. Since NASA has a good track record on automated science, we can assume that it will direct more generations of scientific probes, but we have no confidence that it can plan risky manned missions. Let the adventuring sector do what it finds itself capable of.
Left wing terrorists come from the liberal arts side.
Yes, BUT: left-wing terrorists, the ones who burn labs and rip up agricultural test plots, are not religious.
"Churchill's famous quote applies 100%: 'Engineers should be on tap, not on top'."
Churchill didn't live to see century in which a government of lawyers is being eclipsed by a government of engineers. That's why Shanghai has the first commercial maglev, not New York.
Mod parent up!
" Survey data indicates engineering faculty at universities are far more likely to be conservative than people with other degrees, and far more likely to be religious"
The statistic associating engineers with terrorism has been around for a while, but this explanation is a new one. This means that Texas ought to be a hotbed of terrorist activity.