I think you hit the nail on the head when it comes to 'nerds' and their inability to interact with women... 'Nerds' never grow up and never stop thinking of women solely as a source of sexual gratification - which is why you advise finding women with self esteem problems.
Chandrayaan's camera only has a resolution of 5M - a LEM descent stage barely fills a pixel. One more anonymous dot among many, neither ammunition for or against conspiracy nutters.
Anyhow, if you bother to read TFA you'll find they had a much more prosaic purpose - to compare the readings from their instruments to the known regolith and rock at the landing sites in order to check their calibration.
Unless this policy is applied throughout the country, the city of Mumbai getting rid of unsecured wifi access points will not solve much. A terrorist can take a 3 hour bus ride to Pune to get unsecured wifi access.
Excellent! Now what used to take a terrorist planner a few moments takes him 6 hours (round trip), making his life that much more difficult. From a security point of view, that's a win.
That's what many folks here don't seem to understand; the idea isn't to stop the terrorist cold, but to make his task incrementally more difficult. If he has to walk into a coffee shop and buy a coffee on a regular basis, that means he has to show up someplace where he might be seen - and remembered. If they have to rig their own network, that means they have to put forward the effort (and suffer any failures) and that the network is susceptible to detection. Etc. etc...
Since most of the important modifications for Air Force One have to do with armor, EMP shielding, extra fuel storage, etc., why not start with a military plane that's already got some of these features by design, and just retrofit it with couches and stuff?
Because the military aircraft that have all those features by design are fighters and bombers - both noticeably lacking in room to refit passenger facilities. (Not to mention room for all the communications gear, etc. required by the President.)
Seriously, control theory goes back long before Apollo, and long before NASA. Back to the turn of the century and before. Apollo broke no new ground there. Nothing in it's electronics was significantly advanced over rockets that NASA was flying for other programs or that the military was flying. (Heck, the guidance system for the CSM and LEM was based on the guidance system for the Polaris A1 SLBM.)
they were hostile to selling to any agency other than national ministries of education or something similar, because dealing with smaller lots and smaller entities drives up per-unit costs.
Which tells me their logistical pipeline was hopelessly fucked up - because it was stuck in one mode and incapable of switching. If you're buying them [from the manufacturer] by the gross lot, it shouldn't drive up per unit costs significantly to sell a dozen to school in Louisiana while selling a thousand to a national ministry in Africa. Doubly so given how cheap they would be to ship to Louisiana and how expensive to ship to Africa.
Now, I don't believe computers are all that great in the classroom, but if they wanted economies of scale, it would make more sense to sell to the rich, gadget-happy country first to build up production and also legitimacy in the eyes of 3rd worlders.
That's something that I never understood. Their business plan depended on economies of scale, yet they refused to sell it to people who wanted to buy them, and had the cash.
One of the key problems with the whole OLPC project is that at then end of the day, ideology trumped every other concern. The OLPC was intended for third worlders, and to third worlders it would go. Reality was, to Negroponte and Co., merely a niggling and insignificant detail.
NASA can send Humans to Mars right now, or start working on it now with full NASA manned budget on that instead of ISS and the Space Shuttle, and we could have the first Humans on Mars within 4 years from now.
No, we wouldn't have humans on the Martian surface - we'd have dead humans somewhere in solar orbit because we wouldn't have had time to test all the equipment even minimally. One of the things we've discovered via Mir and the ISS is just how damn hard it is to make equipment that will last that long with minimal maintenance.
For just one example - consider the problems with O2 generation that ISS has had.
It'd be a 2.5 year at least live Mars reality show, in HDTV cause more bandwidth will be available using a bunch of faster satellite links, just that is worth many billions in advertising revenues.
Hardly - considering that 90% of the show would consist of the astronauts floating around in the craft on the way to and from Mars, or wandering around on the surface picking up rocks.
Consider how many science shows on TV show the crew of an ocean research vessel day after repetitive day... Consider how many of them show an archeologist spending two weeks excavating a single cubic meter... Consider how many of them a geologist spending weeks collecting rocks in or around a few square miles...
Of course climate scientists support geoengineering... Big Climactic Science Projects means a high demand for their services and excellent prospects for continued employment.
Although there's not much in the way of writing from earlier than 5,000 years or so ago, there is overwhelming cumulative evidence, IMO, that the culture of that time originated from many thousands, probably many tens of thousands of years earlier. One large part of the evidence is the knowledge of astronomy at that time, and astronomical cycles on the scale of thousands of years.
Which is utter horseshit. You don't have to have records through the entire cycle to measure the length of a cycle - all you need is the ability to measure the rate of change and a bit of simple mathematics. (For example, we know the earth's poles precess at such a rate that it requires 28,500 years to complete a cycle - even though astronomical records only go back something like 5,000 years.) It's also horseshit because if the culture existed earlier than currently believed - where are the artifacts?
I think it's interesting to contrast the investigations of engineering and aerospace failures with financial failures. Will the ultimate causes of the GFC (global financial crisis) be nearly as well investigated as this accident that claimed 7 lives and a few billion in vehicle?
Almost certainly the crisis will be well investigated - but the problem is that in economics, things are rarely so black and white. Even today, the causes of the Great Depression are only well understood only on the superficial level for example.
Unlike the Challenger explosion, the Columbia was intact after the initial problem arose and yet Nasa management refused to allow staff to gather data that would show whether or not the foam impact had caused any damage.
Because the engineers own reports showed the impact location and probable damage would not be significant. Other reports from other engineers supported the position that even had the impact been on the RCC, the RCC was strong enough to take the impact.
For the life of me, I don't understand why the managers who turned down requests to take a look at Columbia's heat shield weren't charged with criminal negligence.
If they ever do, then the engineers who refused the managers request to provide a justification for taking those images should be right beside the managers in the dock. Right behind them should be the engineers who studied the impact and pronounced it to be not significant. Right behind them should be the engineers who studied the ongoing tile dings and pronounced them insignificant. Right behind *them* should be the RCC engineers who make statements about the RCC's strength without having ever actually tested it....
Which is actually astonishing to me - UO has had so many "here, hold my beer and watch this" moments, I'm surprised it continues to survive and thrive.
Me? I finally abandoned Moonglow for Paragon City and have never looked back.
Bottom line, even if they knew the cabin depressurized, they didn't have time to take even the first and most basic corrective step in their training before passing out. You'd think it'd be instinct.
You'd think it would be instinct - but there is a flaw in the astronauts training... The report discusses this, but I suspect the implications will fly right past most laymen.
The flaw can be basically summarized as follows;
They are trained in the event of an emergency to close their visors - but emergency training is done separately from operational training.
Operational training conditions them to keep their visors up and their gloves off because when the suits are fully buttoned up they interfere with crew communication and restrict their ability to operate the equipment.
Because emergency and operational training were performed separately, in simulators designed specifically for each purpose, the subtle difference between what they were trained to do and what they were conditioned to do wasn't caught.
It was assumed that they would perform properly in an emergency because they had been trained extensively on what to do in an emergency - but NASA never performed any training scenarios that transitioned from emergency operations to emergency survival. The main reason for this, which does make some sense to one who has been there (having done this kind of training), is that you don't need to practice dying - it doesn't accomplish anything positive, can be damaging to morale and crew cohesion, and consumes valuable and scarce training resources.
Disclaimer: I'm not an astronaut, but I don't count myself a layman because I am a former submariner. I've done countless operational and casualty drills both as a crewman and as an instructor at a training facility. We spent a lot of time making sure we didn't start getting into what we called 'negative training', one facet of which is the difference between training and conditioning I discuss above. (And its a remarkably easy trap to fall into.)
The claim that the initial "depressurization" would make the crew "incapacitated within seconds" relies on the common perception that exposure to the vacuum of space makes your face explode. That's not the case, as has been explained over and over -- you can't breathe (" respiration ceased after the depressurization" in the report), but not breathing hasn't been the criteria for "death" since the Middle Ages.
Actually, you should read the report before commenting. The report goes into considerable detail as to why they considered it likely the crew was incapacitated in a fairly short time - and 'their faces exploded because of exposure to vacuum' is noticeably absent from the scenario.
I mean this thing exploded, or better yet disintegrated how many hundreds (thousands) of meters in the sky, scattered its debris all over BFE, and yet they can still piece together enough information to deduce who was unbuckled, who wasn't wearing gloves, and who didn't have their visors down.
They knew all that mostly from a video of the re-entry taken seconds before the shuttle disintegrated. They didn't piece it together from the wreckage (apart from finding the video tape in the wreckage).
Actually, if you read the report (as I just spent the entire afternoon reading), you'll find that they *did* piece it together from the wreckage, because they *had* to. The [onboard] video ends just after Entry Interface - 15 minutes *before* Loss Of Signal, which was in turn 46 seconds before the Columbia broke up. (And it would be another 35 seconds before the crew compartment broke up.) Lots of time for gloves to be locked in place, buckles to be tightened down, visors to be closed and locked...
That's just the problem - we 'sold' space like hell back in 1960's... But in the real world, science and exploration is boring, boring, fucking boooooooooooooooring! And pretty soon the public caught onto the ruse.
Endless months of crossing the prairie stopping every day or so to sample the local fauna... Endless weeks of circling the ocean, fighting boredom and seasickness while the fathometer pings, stopping every couple of days to take a deep water and bottom sample... Endless days circling in orbit operating laboratory equipment without a stop... Endless hours on the lunar surface, stopping every couple of hours to take an hour or two to document and collect a sample of rock...
No drama, no life and death, just the same old shit day in and day out.
It's fucking hard to sex that up - it's even harder the 27th time.
All of the manned missions to the Moon took place in a relatively small area on the near-side. As far as I can tell from the press spiel in the link, M3's mission is to survey the entire surface of the Moon.
All of the manned landing missions surveyed only a small area of the surface, true. But people often forget that the missions included a manned orbiting component - a component that conducted an extensive survey of the entire lunar surface. They carried magnetometers, photographic survey cameras, and a variety of other sensors. Analysis of their trajectory gave information on the gravitational field. (In addition to the variety of unmanned probes flown.)
At present there is very little data of any sort regarding the far-side of the Moon. Information on the magnetic and gravitational fields is of particular interest because of its importance for orbital prediction, determination, and manipulation.
Except for the detailed information of a few sites on the front side due to landers (manned and unmanned) - we know just as much about the backside as the front, as it was overflown by the same unmanned probes and manned missions.
Yes, look at Switzerland - a small country with a high population density. Then look at the US and see how many Switzerland's you can drop into very low population density areas between the high population areas.
Then you'll see why long distance passenger rail has never worked well in America.
The population distribution in most of the US is simply not geared toward passenger rail except possibly at the local level (i.e., subway/light rail). This isn't Europe, and you can't necessarily repeat the same things that work in Europe and expect them to work here also.
That's only because the current US landscape has been shaped by the government building lots of highways that only encourage the use of the auto over the train, and thus lead to the sprawl we have today.
Bullshit. Highways shaped only the relatively local landscape, which the grandparent properly points out is served by light rail and subways. What TFA is talking about is medium and long distance intercity rail - and as the grandparent point out, the population of most of the US is simply distributed very badly for that type of transportation, and that distribution predates highways.
Amtrak will never make a profit - passenger rail in the US has never been profitable. The railroads kept passenger service around because it was considered loss leader advertising for their freight services.
We used to have a massive rail infrastructure in the USA. The neo-con revolution killed it when Reagan made the point of gutting social infrastructure.
Here in the real world, the railroads died in the 40's and 50's when faced with the triple problem of a) rebuilding infrastructure worn out in WWI, b) increasing competition from cars and trucks, and c) the costs of switching from the [hideously] expensive to operate steam locomotive to the much [much] cheaper diesel.
Even so, 90% of the now vanished portions of the rail infrastructure were dedicated to freight - serving plants now closed with the production sent overseas. And on top of that, the passenger rail system was always a loss leader for the railroads - an advertisement for their freight services. One of the first big industrial bailouts in the US was when the government bought the passenger lines, mostly due to public nostalgia, and welded them into Amtrack.
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I think you hit the nail on the head when it comes to 'nerds' and their inability to interact with women... 'Nerds' never grow up and never stop thinking of women solely as a source of sexual gratification - which is why you advise finding women with self esteem problems.
Chandrayaan's camera only has a resolution of 5M - a LEM descent stage barely fills a pixel. One more anonymous dot among many, neither ammunition for or against conspiracy nutters.
Anyhow, if you bother to read TFA you'll find they had a much more prosaic purpose - to compare the readings from their instruments to the known regolith and rock at the landing sites in order to check their calibration.
Excellent! Now what used to take a terrorist planner a few moments takes him 6 hours (round trip), making his life that much more difficult. From a security point of view, that's a win.
That's what many folks here don't seem to understand; the idea isn't to stop the terrorist cold, but to make his task incrementally more difficult. If he has to walk into a coffee shop and buy a coffee on a regular basis, that means he has to show up someplace where he might be seen - and remembered. If they have to rig their own network, that means they have to put forward the effort (and suffer any failures) and that the network is susceptible to detection. Etc. etc...
Because the military aircraft that have all those features by design are fighters and bombers - both noticeably lacking in room to refit passenger facilities. (Not to mention room for all the communications gear, etc. required by the President.)
They don't have all of the old planes, SAM-970 is here in Seattle at the Boeing Museum of Flight. (The Wikipedia article is incorrect, as SAM-970 was one of the 707's used by Ike - the first jet Air Force One, not under Kennedy as the article implies.)
ROTFLMAO.
Seriously, control theory goes back long before Apollo, and long before NASA. Back to the turn of the century and before. Apollo broke no new ground there. Nothing in it's electronics was significantly advanced over rockets that NASA was flying for other programs or that the military was flying. (Heck, the guidance system for the CSM and LEM was based on the guidance system for the Polaris A1 SLBM.)
Which tells me their logistical pipeline was hopelessly fucked up - because it was stuck in one mode and incapable of switching. If you're buying them [from the manufacturer] by the gross lot, it shouldn't drive up per unit costs significantly to sell a dozen to school in Louisiana while selling a thousand to a national ministry in Africa. Doubly so given how cheap they would be to ship to Louisiana and how expensive to ship to Africa.
One of the key problems with the whole OLPC project is that at then end of the day, ideology trumped every other concern. The OLPC was intended for third worlders, and to third worlders it would go. Reality was, to Negroponte and Co., merely a niggling and insignificant detail.
No, we wouldn't have humans on the Martian surface - we'd have dead humans somewhere in solar orbit because we wouldn't have had time to test all the equipment even minimally. One of the things we've discovered via Mir and the ISS is just how damn hard it is to make equipment that will last that long with minimal maintenance.
For just one example - consider the problems with O2 generation that ISS has had.
Hardly - considering that 90% of the show would consist of the astronauts floating around in the craft on the way to and from Mars, or wandering around on the surface picking up rocks.
Consider how many science shows on TV show the crew of an ocean research vessel day after repetitive day... Consider how many of them show an archeologist spending two weeks excavating a single cubic meter... Consider how many of them a geologist spending weeks collecting rocks in or around a few square miles...
Hardly the stuff of exciting TV.
Of course climate scientists support geoengineering... Big Climactic Science Projects means a high demand for their services and excellent prospects for continued employment.
Which is utter horseshit. You don't have to have records through the entire cycle to measure the length of a cycle - all you need is the ability to measure the rate of change and a bit of simple mathematics. (For example, we know the earth's poles precess at such a rate that it requires 28,500 years to complete a cycle - even though astronomical records only go back something like 5,000 years.) It's also horseshit because if the culture existed earlier than currently believed - where are the artifacts?
Almost certainly the crisis will be well investigated - but the problem is that in economics, things are rarely so black and white. Even today, the causes of the Great Depression are only well understood only on the superficial level for example.
Because the engineers own reports showed the impact location and probable damage would not be significant. Other reports from other engineers supported the position that even had the impact been on the RCC, the RCC was strong enough to take the impact.
If they ever do, then the engineers who refused the managers request to provide a justification for taking those images should be right beside the managers in the dock. Right behind them should be the engineers who studied the impact and pronounced it to be not significant. Right behind them should be the engineers who studied the ongoing tile dings and pronounced them insignificant. Right behind *them* should be the RCC engineers who make statements about the RCC's strength without having ever actually tested it....
Which is actually astonishing to me - UO has had so many "here, hold my beer and watch this" moments, I'm surprised it continues to survive and thrive.
Me? I finally abandoned Moonglow for Paragon City and have never looked back.
You'd think it would be instinct - but there is a flaw in the astronauts training... The report discusses this, but I suspect the implications will fly right past most laymen.
The flaw can be basically summarized as follows;
Because emergency and operational training were performed separately, in simulators designed specifically for each purpose, the subtle difference between what they were trained to do and what they were conditioned to do wasn't caught.
It was assumed that they would perform properly in an emergency because they had been trained extensively on what to do in an emergency - but NASA never performed any training scenarios that transitioned from emergency operations to emergency survival. The main reason for this, which does make some sense to one who has been there (having done this kind of training), is that you don't need to practice dying - it doesn't accomplish anything positive, can be damaging to morale and crew cohesion, and consumes valuable and scarce training resources.
Disclaimer: I'm not an astronaut, but I don't count myself a layman because I am a former submariner. I've done countless operational and casualty drills both as a crewman and as an instructor at a training facility. We spent a lot of time making sure we didn't start getting into what we called 'negative training', one facet of which is the difference between training and conditioning I discuss above. (And its a remarkably easy trap to fall into.)
Actually, you should read the report before commenting. The report goes into considerable detail as to why they considered it likely the crew was incapacitated in a fairly short time - and 'their faces exploded because of exposure to vacuum' is noticeably absent from the scenario.
Actually, if you read the report (as I just spent the entire afternoon reading), you'll find that they *did* piece it together from the wreckage, because they *had* to. The [onboard] video ends just after Entry Interface - 15 minutes *before* Loss Of Signal, which was in turn 46 seconds before the Columbia broke up. (And it would be another 35 seconds before the crew compartment broke up.) Lots of time for gloves to be locked in place, buckles to be tightened down, visors to be closed and locked...
That's just the problem - we 'sold' space like hell back in 1960's... But in the real world, science and exploration is boring, boring, fucking boooooooooooooooring! And pretty soon the public caught onto the ruse.
Endless months of crossing the prairie stopping every day or so to sample the local fauna... Endless weeks of circling the ocean, fighting boredom and seasickness while the fathometer pings, stopping every couple of days to take a deep water and bottom sample... Endless days circling in orbit operating laboratory equipment without a stop... Endless hours on the lunar surface, stopping every couple of hours to take an hour or two to document and collect a sample of rock...
No drama, no life and death, just the same old shit day in and day out.
It's fucking hard to sex that up - it's even harder the 27th time.
All of the manned landing missions surveyed only a small area of the surface, true. But people often forget that the missions included a manned orbiting component - a component that conducted an extensive survey of the entire lunar surface. They carried magnetometers, photographic survey cameras, and a variety of other sensors. Analysis of their trajectory gave information on the gravitational field. (In addition to the variety of unmanned probes flown.)
Except for the detailed information of a few sites on the front side due to landers (manned and unmanned) - we know just as much about the backside as the front, as it was overflown by the same unmanned probes and manned missions.
Yes, look at Switzerland - a small country with a high population density. Then look at the US and see how many Switzerland's you can drop into very low population density areas between the high population areas.
Then you'll see why long distance passenger rail has never worked well in America.
Bullshit. Highways shaped only the relatively local landscape, which the grandparent properly points out is served by light rail and subways. What TFA is talking about is medium and long distance intercity rail - and as the grandparent point out, the population of most of the US is simply distributed very badly for that type of transportation, and that distribution predates highways.
Amtrak will never make a profit - passenger rail in the US has never been profitable. The railroads kept passenger service around because it was considered loss leader advertising for their freight services.
Here in the real world, the railroads died in the 40's and 50's when faced with the triple problem of a) rebuilding infrastructure worn out in WWI, b) increasing competition from cars and trucks, and c) the costs of switching from the [hideously] expensive to operate steam locomotive to the much [much] cheaper diesel.
Even so, 90% of the now vanished portions of the rail infrastructure were dedicated to freight - serving plants now closed with the production sent overseas. And on top of that, the passenger rail system was always a loss leader for the railroads - an advertisement for their freight services. One of the first big industrial bailouts in the US was when the government bought the passenger lines, mostly due to public nostalgia, and welded them into Amtrack.
You must have cornered the market on tinfoil in order to create that hat.
For certain large and variable meanings of the word 'believable' sure.