So? That's like noting Phineas and Ferb or Strawberry Shortcake covered it. Despite the hype surrounding them, the Mythbusters are not scientists and scientific accuracy and facts always take a backseat to a big boom or other entertainment.
Since the science in question proceeded even when he was alive and objecting to it.... Neither model (changing minds or dying) would seem to be applicable. Or, to put it another way, you've left out at least one option.
But wouldn't long life allow people like Albert Einstein to accomplish more and try new things?
Einstein isn't such a good example - his scientific output dropped essentially to zero after the late 30's because he refused to accept quantum mechanics. He spent the last decades of his life trying to find an alternate explanation, despite mounting experimental evidence that he was wrong.
Actually this is incredibly hard, no matter how you put it. Humans, and I mean every one in the species, are by nature social creatures. We all, not crave, but need attention, approval to some degree. Pulling off stuff like that but resisting the urge to stamp your name on it, or even a nickname is quite incredible.
Not really. Humans are called "social creatures" not just because we crave individual attention and social interaction. "Social creatures" are also those who form societies [tribes|clans|gangs|etc...] and there's also a tendency to submerge one's identity into that society. This is often forgotten in today's individualistic ("me, me, me") society where we're often trying (consciously or no) to suppress that primal instinct.
The habit of taking an action and attributing that action to your [tribe|clan|gang|etc...] is a very, very old one. There's also a deep primal instinctive desire to belong, and proving that one belongs by taking part in a [tribe|clan|gang|etc...] approved activity without claiming individual credit is equally old.
That no visible leaders have emerged is incredible, but that the masses behave as [tribe|clan|gang|etc...] members have long done is not.
for precision astronomical work I think the loss of contrast and sharpness may limit its usefulness
That's only a problem for that subset of astronomical work that requires precise pretty pictures - for the rest (such as taking spectrograms), not so much.
In honor of it being a slashdot car story, instead of providing the official slashdot car analogy, I'll provide the slashdot computer analogy to the story. "Its like 3-d printing a computer case, and then having the media report the entire computer was printed, circuit boards and all".
Except the circuit board is a major functional component of a computer. What was printed was more like the decorative bezel on the front of the case... all the weight and stress bearing components being of more conventional manufacture.
also the stereotype of 3-d printed stuff being weak seems to be finally going away....
You may not realize it, but racers aren't street cars - racers have frames that carry all the weight/stress.thrust and roll cages that protect the driver. The shell is pretty much decorative.
Many knowledgeable about the Apollo program seem to agree with you as Shepard's crew was pretty weak overall. (Though to be fair 'weak' by astronaut standards is still ferociously competent by day-to-day standards.)
It should be noted those you might consider "Tesla nutters" really have nothing to do with the foundation setting up the museum other than donating money. The actual foundation board consists of among others physicists and a retired teacher/librarian.
Being a physicist or a retired teacher/librarian is in no way inconsistent with being a "Tesla nutter".
Tesla was actually quite famous in his day. His fame might have fallen by the time he died, but Time magazine did feature him in its cover.
Indeed. And it's not so much that his fame has fallen, as the geeks of today have been somewhat mislead by a series of books written by various Tesla acolytes. Since the bias of those accounts ("up the lone inventor, down the evil corporation") largely fits the bias of the modern geek, they have been accepted pretty much uncritically.
Indeed. Deke was doing everything in his power to ensure that one of the Seven landed on the Moon. That's why Cooper, despite being on management's sh*tlist, was penciled in for Apollo 13. That's why as soon as Shepard returned to flight status he was assigned the next possible command slot (despite his lack of flight experience), taking Cooper's slot.
(Note to pedants who don't know as much as they think they do: Yes, Alan Shepard was originally slated to fly Apollo 13 - but management overrode Slayton and swapped the 13 and 14 crews so Sheperd had more time to train.)
No, I didn't disagree, I corrected your errors and muddled thinking. There's a difference.
Right. NASA makes sure that the final contingency is to be flexible by using an expert at the point of crisis to think up a response on the spot, and you maintain that it used a fragile process.
Since I didn't call anything a fragile plan... this is either a lack of treading comprehension or more of your muddled thinking. The only place I even remotely alluded to fragility was to point out that what you called fragile was in fact their primary methodology.
I even specifically mentioned they did plan for incidents. Nowhere does it say in my post that a robust plan means only relying on flexible response by local experts.
Yes, you specifically mentioned that they did plan for incidents - and dismissed it as a 'fragile' process. (Nowhere did you acknowledge the role of the planning and training in NASA operations. You completely missed the layers involved.) Then you made two contradictory claims about men in the loop - one stating (incorrectly) that they were the process, and another stating they were the final contingency. (And both implying that the controllers used nothing but ad hoc procedures.)
I was 11. I remember that the nation's focus was on the space program, and this was quite a while before I really became aware of politics.
If you were young enough that you weren't aware of politics, how were you old enough to know with such certainty what the nation's focus was? I suspect you've simply absorbed the legends that have come to surround the Apollo program and confused them with your own experiences.
Notice how the moon program wasn't halted when the other party got into power, just because the idea came from the other political side?
That's because by the time the other party came to power (with Nixon's election in 1968), the Apollo program had already been gutted during the budget battles of 1965 and '66. The Apollo program coasted into the landing running on inertia and fumes.
A project like this could unite the US again
Except, it didn't unite the country in the first place.
One thing I really got out of that movie was how NASA originally wanted to have the astronauts as ballast, giving them little or no ability to pilot the craft. Neil Armstrong was one of the astronauts who protested, and forced NASA to outfit the capsules with pilot controls.
Among the many errors in that movie is this one - Neil Armstrong had nothing to do with that decision. That came from the Mercury Seven.
If you look at the Gemini capsules, they actually do resemble airplane cockpits if looked at from the right perspective.
And that cockpit was largely designed by Gus Grissom (as was much of Gemini's design overall).
I think it was Armstrong's ability to "stay calm" in times of crisis in the two instances you mentioned was the reason why he was chosen as mission commander on Apollo 11.
He was assigned to be mission commander of the Apollo 11 crew because that was his position in the rotation after serving as backup commander on the Apollo 8 crew. When he was assigned to the Apollo 8 backup crew nobody knew that 11 would be the landing mission. Had there been a serious problem on 8, 9, or 10 - 11 would have been another test or dress rehearsal.
A process is fragile if it attempts to solve a crisis by planning ahead for all contingencies.
The problem with your robust/fragile thesis is that NASA's primary methodology was the one you call fragile.
A robust process assumes something unforeseen will go wrong, and concentrate on making sure that there are adequate resources to respond in an ad-hoc manner. NASA's processes in the Apollo project relied on a robust response: when anything went wrong, a highly qualified person was on the spot to think of a response and execute it.
Which is precisely what NASA didn't do. They spent months creating a set of mission rules that spelled out what to do in the case of a wide variety of casualties and circumstances. They then fine tuned those rules in the process of training controllers and astronauts to respond reflexively when they encountered a change of circumstances, a casualty or problem, or any other deviation from the current flight plan. (I say current because each mission had a whole raft of plans... for an earth orbit mission in case they couldn't execute TLI, for a lunar orbit mission in the even of a LM problem, etc...)
Sure they planned for incidents, but the final contingency plan was to have smart people with high stress tolerance to provide incident response 'on the ground'.
You're correct - that was the final contingency plan. Executed only if no other option existed. That is why their process was so robust - because there were layers to the plan.
Please, do correct me if I'm wrong; but I was under the impression that the overwhelming majority of the cost of doing space work was in launching the things
You're wrong. Launch costs rarely, if ever dominate.
Name anyone that accomplished anything greater in the last 200+ years?
Jonas Salk, who eliminated polio. Louis Pasteur, who discovered germs. John Snow who proved that cholera spread via contaminated water and thus strengthened the case for public sanitation immeasurably... And just missing your 200 year deadline, Edward Jenner who introduced and championed vaccination.
In just one field of human endeavor (medical science), these are people who caused change.
As important as the moon landing is historically, Neil Armstrong was just a cog - the guy standing in the right place at the right time to be picked to pilot the mission.
The problem with current impulse technologies is that they will never get you even outside the solar system before you die of old age. (Look at the 40 years or so it has taken voyagers 1 and 2 to simply HIT the heliopause! Those things are about the size of a tall garbage can. Imagine how long something the size of a colony ship would take, at max thrust!)
That depends on the maximum thrust of the colony vessel in proportion to it's size, not on it's absolute size.
The balance of your reply is equally scientifically illiterate.
From what BitInstance has said it either works by simply converting your BTC into USD or some other currency when you deposit the BTC to the address on the card, or they've done some clever thing where they convert the appropriate amoun of the BTC balance associated with the card it as you make a transaction. (depositing the currency to the actual account associated with the card just in time for the payment to go through) Credit is never offered.
Which leads to the question... where does the USD (or Euro, or whatever) come from?
Of course, this is why they don't really need much help from Mastercard: the technology powering the card is already common for branded payment cards like those ones you can get to give as gifts
Yes... and no. Yes, the computer technology for transferring around digits that represent dollars is common. But this card isn't transferring around dollars - it's transferring around BTC and then paying out dollars. It's that exchange that makes it different from a gift/payment card. The organization backing the card has to have a deep well of real world currencies available to pay out when you use the card, and a ready means of exchanging the BTC it keeps for more real world currencies to keep the system primed and running. That implies the existence of an active exchange somewhere to sell those BTC to someone who want to trade real world currencies for them.
One example of government hostility against alternative currencies I think is no better illustrated than in the case of Bernard von NotHaus.
The problem with your theory - is that it relies on pretending the the many legal alternative currencies that exist free of "government hostility" simply don't exist. The reality is, so long as your alternative currency complies with the law - you'll have no problems. Liberty Dollars didn't comply with the law.
Is this a valid concern? Should I, as an intelligent adult, claim that something will never be of value simply because no one uses it right now?
No. But as a soi-disant "intelligent adult" one should recognize the difference between something that no one is using now, and something that no one (or at least very few) has any compelling reason to use. Telephones, fax machines, and the internet all provided new and useful ways of doing things - which exactly utterly unlike Bitcoin.
Slashdot Mirror
So? That's like noting Phineas and Ferb or Strawberry Shortcake covered it. Despite the hype surrounding them, the Mythbusters are not scientists and scientific accuracy and facts always take a backseat to a big boom or other entertainment.
Since the science in question proceeded even when he was alive and objecting to it.... Neither model (changing minds or dying) would seem to be applicable. Or, to put it another way, you've left out at least one option.
The difference between the young scientist and the aged Einstein - is that the young scientist was right. The aged Einstein wasn't.
You not only can't spell science, but your grasp of it, and of logic, and of writing, is equally bad.
Einstein isn't such a good example - his scientific output dropped essentially to zero after the late 30's because he refused to accept quantum mechanics. He spent the last decades of his life trying to find an alternate explanation, despite mounting experimental evidence that he was wrong.
Not really. Humans are called "social creatures" not just because we crave individual attention and social interaction. "Social creatures" are also those who form societies [tribes|clans|gangs|etc...] and there's also a tendency to submerge one's identity into that society. This is often forgotten in today's individualistic ("me, me, me") society where we're often trying (consciously or no) to suppress that primal instinct.
The habit of taking an action and attributing that action to your [tribe|clan|gang|etc...] is a very, very old one. There's also a deep primal instinctive desire to belong, and proving that one belongs by taking part in a [tribe|clan|gang|etc...] approved activity without claiming individual credit is equally old.
That no visible leaders have emerged is incredible, but that the masses behave as [tribe|clan|gang|etc...] members have long done is not.
That's only a problem for that subset of astronomical work that requires precise pretty pictures - for the rest (such as taking spectrograms), not so much.
Except the circuit board is a major functional component of a computer. What was printed was more like the decorative bezel on the front of the case... all the weight and stress bearing components being of more conventional manufacture.
You may not realize it, but racers aren't street cars - racers have frames that carry all the weight/stress.thrust and roll cages that protect the driver. The shell is pretty much decorative.
Actually it was (IIRC) 15, 18, and 20 that were cancelled.
Many knowledgeable about the Apollo program seem to agree with you as Shepard's crew was pretty weak overall. (Though to be fair 'weak' by astronaut standards is still ferociously competent by day-to-day standards.)
Being a physicist or a retired teacher/librarian is in no way inconsistent with being a "Tesla nutter".
Indeed. And it's not so much that his fame has fallen, as the geeks of today have been somewhat mislead by a series of books written by various Tesla acolytes. Since the bias of those accounts ("up the lone inventor, down the evil corporation") largely fits the bias of the modern geek, they have been accepted pretty much uncritically.
Indeed. Deke was doing everything in his power to ensure that one of the Seven landed on the Moon. That's why Cooper, despite being on management's sh*tlist, was penciled in for Apollo 13. That's why as soon as Shepard returned to flight status he was assigned the next possible command slot (despite his lack of flight experience), taking Cooper's slot.
(Note to pedants who don't know as much as they think they do: Yes, Alan Shepard was originally slated to fly Apollo 13 - but management overrode Slayton and swapped the 13 and 14 crews so Sheperd had more time to train.)
No, I didn't disagree, I corrected your errors and muddled thinking. There's a difference.
Since I didn't call anything a fragile plan... this is either a lack of treading comprehension or more of your muddled thinking. The only place I even remotely alluded to fragility was to point out that what you called fragile was in fact their primary methodology.
Yes, you specifically mentioned that they did plan for incidents - and dismissed it as a 'fragile' process. (Nowhere did you acknowledge the role of the planning and training in NASA operations. You completely missed the layers involved.) Then you made two contradictory claims about men in the loop - one stating (incorrectly) that they were the process, and another stating they were the final contingency. (And both implying that the controllers used nothing but ad hoc procedures.)
If you were young enough that you weren't aware of politics, how were you old enough to know with such certainty what the nation's focus was? I suspect you've simply absorbed the legends that have come to surround the Apollo program and confused them with your own experiences.
That's because by the time the other party came to power (with Nixon's election in 1968), the Apollo program had already been gutted during the budget battles of 1965 and '66. The Apollo program coasted into the landing running on inertia and fumes.
Except, it didn't unite the country in the first place.
Among the many errors in that movie is this one - Neil Armstrong had nothing to do with that decision. That came from the Mercury Seven.
And that cockpit was largely designed by Gus Grissom (as was much of Gemini's design overall).
He was assigned to be mission commander of the Apollo 11 crew because that was his position in the rotation after serving as backup commander on the Apollo 8 crew. When he was assigned to the Apollo 8 backup crew nobody knew that 11 would be the landing mission. Had there been a serious problem on 8, 9, or 10 - 11 would have been another test or dress rehearsal.
The problem with your robust/fragile thesis is that NASA's primary methodology was the one you call fragile.
Which is precisely what NASA didn't do. They spent months creating a set of mission rules that spelled out what to do in the case of a wide variety of casualties and circumstances. They then fine tuned those rules in the process of training controllers and astronauts to respond reflexively when they encountered a change of circumstances, a casualty or problem, or any other deviation from the current flight plan. (I say current because each mission had a whole raft of plans... for an earth orbit mission in case they couldn't execute TLI, for a lunar orbit mission in the even of a LM problem, etc...)
You're correct - that was the final contingency plan. Executed only if no other option existed. That is why their process was so robust - because there were layers to the plan.
You're wrong. Launch costs rarely, if ever dominate.
Jonas Salk, who eliminated polio. Louis Pasteur, who discovered germs. John Snow who proved that cholera spread via contaminated water and thus strengthened the case for public sanitation immeasurably... And just missing your 200 year deadline, Edward Jenner who introduced and championed vaccination.
In just one field of human endeavor (medical science), these are people who caused change.
As important as the moon landing is historically, Neil Armstrong was just a cog - the guy standing in the right place at the right time to be picked to pilot the mission.
Just to be clear here - TFA is referring to digital files, not books. My books will survive me quite handily, even if my digital files do not.
That depends on the maximum thrust of the colony vessel in proportion to it's size, not on it's absolute size.
The balance of your reply is equally scientifically illiterate.
Which leads to the question... where does the USD (or Euro, or whatever) come from?
Yes... and no. Yes, the computer technology for transferring around digits that represent dollars is common. But this card isn't transferring around dollars - it's transferring around BTC and then paying out dollars. It's that exchange that makes it different from a gift/payment card. The organization backing the card has to have a deep well of real world currencies available to pay out when you use the card, and a ready means of exchanging the BTC it keeps for more real world currencies to keep the system primed and running. That implies the existence of an active exchange somewhere to sell those BTC to someone who want to trade real world currencies for them.
The problem with your theory - is that it relies on pretending the the many legal alternative currencies that exist free of "government hostility" simply don't exist. The reality is, so long as your alternative currency complies with the law - you'll have no problems. Liberty Dollars didn't comply with the law.
No. But as a soi-disant "intelligent adult" one should recognize the difference between something that no one is using now, and something that no one (or at least very few) has any compelling reason to use. Telephones, fax machines, and the internet all provided new and useful ways of doing things - which exactly utterly unlike Bitcoin.