It's not that they delete things that aren't notable, it's that the criteria are so... unevenly applied.
Not only unevenly applied - but sometimes unevenly applied by fiat. There was, and may still be (I haven't looked) a policy in place that essentially stated "articles on topics and individuals that have appeared on the front page of CNN.com or other major news sources are to regarded as notable by default". Why? "Because regardless of their actual notability, people tend to perform Google searches on those topics or individuals and retaining those articles increases the visibility of the Wikipedia".
I think the issue at hand, is that the people who actively contribute, are running out of things to write about. There is a TON more that can go into wiki, but the "experts" or... people who even CARE about those subjects, are not the type who care about writing up articles about it.
Or they've been run off of Wikipedia altogether. Wikipedia rewards playing the political game and the ability to be there day in and day out far, far more than it does expertise.
The problem we need to solve for is... how to get the rest of the world to open up about their knowledge so that we can share from it.
That would require a ground up revamp of the Wikipedia political system to avoid rewarding those with time on their hands and an ability to game the system and to reward those with knowledge they wish to share.
We're certainly not going to rely on a very fragile orbiting setup which is a sitting duck to anyone with a decent missile/launch vehicle.
Nope.
These things will be high up - in GSO, which takes it right out of the range of any ICBM based launcher. Unless you can figure out how to pack propulsion, power, guidance, and a Dangerous Payload into a five to ten pounds or so... (And no, the classic 'handful of sand' or 'paint chip' or 'styrofoam cup' won't cut it here - the interception geometry is different from that with orbital debris in LEO. Not to mention these things are Very Big - and hitting the very few, and very small, critical targets in the array is going to be Very Hard.) Guidance and control are going to be major headaches.
A major spacefaring nation might be able to carry it off with a few years R&D - but the launches aren't going to be stealthy and whodunit is going to be very obvious.
This quasi-airplane/quasi-automobile is one of those dammed ideas that simply will not die. Some damm fool reinvents this bastardization every five-ten years or so, then economic and engineering reality sets in and the company folds away never to be heard of again.
It's a cool idea, but I still remember being all excited about Biosphere 2 when I was a kid, and it turned out to be a colossal failure.
Biosphere II wasn't so much of a failure as it was a 'no test'. Despite the gleaming claims they made about being a closed enviroment, only lip service was paid towards it in the actual design and construction. Far more money was spent on hewing to enviromental mantras and meeting the philosophic/aesthetic goals of the project than on even quasi serious engineering. (CIP: The 'lungs' had to be added, at great cost, fairly late in the construction because it didn't occur to any of the enviromental gurus that a closed building of that size would have significant pressure changes as the temperatures changed.)
Like Sydney Opera House, Biosphere II was designed by an artist - and then the design was handed over to engineers to make work. As a result, much time and money was spent ensuring the 'rainforest' had rain, the 'ocean pool' had tides, and that the high humidity levels required inside by enviromentalists didn't corrode the whole structure into junk.
On top of that - they leapt/extrapolated too far from their mockup and existing engineering. (By a couple of orders of magnitude.) Then they leapt right into the full bore lock-in without doing any significant commissioning and baseline testing.
The Japanese had already offered to surrender (though not unconditionally) to the Russians.
I keep hearing this repeated, but it doesn't become true as a result. A few Japanese, without the knowledge of the Goverment or authority to negotiate had discussed the possibility of surrender to the Russians with the Russians. The Goverment, or at least that part with the authority to so negotiate was unaware of any such discussions with the Russians. Tojo and the War Cabinet, who had the authority to make such agreements, not only had not made such and agreement - they were utterly unaware that the farcial negotiations for surrender had even taken place.
Keeping in mind it was only build from mostly wood and some aluminium, I must say it's interesting that the booster rockets haven't ripped it apart through the start, so from my point of view I consider the construction itself as usable for further designs.
The structure failed, so no - it's not useable for future designs. Not without significant redesign anyhow.
I think I can also come up with a possible solution why the construction collapsed. The thrusters aren't to be blamed for this.
It's the X-shaped twin wing, which is the problem in here, with the increasing velocity the wind forces between the twin wings pushed them into opposite directions, resulting in an alteration of the flightvector as you can see in the video, and when it collapsed, the wings acted like long arms which applied huge torque onto the vessels body, and so breaking it apart.
I've tried to parse this multiple times, and I simply cannot get it make sense. Now, I am not an aerodynamics expert by any means, but the 'pushed in opposite directions' effect you describe is something that simply can't happen AFAICT. Unless there is a serious asymmetry between the wings, or a fairly stiff breeze blowing - the effects of the wings are symmetrical. Nor was it traveling fast enough for serious aerodynamic effects to build up - it began yawing almost as soon as it began moving.
Now, I am something of a rocket scientist, and watching the video it appears pretty clear they had a serious asymmetry of some sort in the rocket units. (It could have been thrust, ignition timing, or physical misalignment.[1]) The effect of even the slightest asymmetry would have been multiplied by the (fairly large by rocketry standards) lever arm between the rocket units and the centerline of the craft.
[1] Giving the team the benefit of the doubt and assuming there wasn't a significant physical asymmetry between the wings or a bad CG/CP. They'd have to be really incompetent to manage that.
It does not take that long to take care of a house.
Actually, yes it does. (Or did back in day before todays appliances, cleaners, etc... etc...)
If a homemaker's time was 100% occupied by chores, there would be no game shows or soap operas (that may sound sexist but think about it before flaming).
I've done more than just thought about it. I've actually studied it. Those shows were aimed at a very wide demographic, includes housewives who would take a brief break, houswives who did very little housework, housewives who could afford to pay someone else to do their housework, etc... etc...
Part of being a homemaker is being there for the children.
That's taken as a given today, that was not the case in years past. One interesting data point: In my collection of such materials I have a series of newsletters from a cake decorating club in the 1950's. The vast majority of them (over 75%) describe cakes for holidays, entertaining, and impressing the boss when he comes over for dinner. (Really - they describe it exactly like that!) The balance are mostly on doing cakes for charity sales and church suppers. Children's birthday cakes make up less than 5% of the content. You see the same pattern when you examine women's magazines, etiquette books, etc... etc...
Then comes the 80's and the pattern (very abrubtly) shifts to what is essentially a complete reversal of the earlier one. (And the stereotype of the 'soccer mom' and the parents too frazzled from taking their kids to multiple activities emerge nearly overnight.) Shortly after, minivans appear on the market with advertising stressing how many kids they can carry....
Seriously, I'm not making this stuff up. Once you study the primary source materials you can see the slow shift in societal attitudes and expectations towards a more 'child centric' one starting in the thirties, and a sudden explosion in the 80's when 'quality time' became a buzzword solution to societies ills in general and 'latchkey kids' in specific.
So I have actually experienced this. I promise you that I haven't read that in a cookbook. And it is not a "myth".
It doesn't matter one tiny bit what your mother did to/with you. She's one individual among millions.
The business part only applies to a quite small, and upper class, part of the society.
Actually, no. It applies to explosively expanding middle class from the early 20th century onwards. (Hint: why do you think 'dinner with the boss' was a staple of sitcoms from very early on?)
Except that the grandparent meant that just being around the parent, working or not, IS quality time.
The grandparent is welcome to misuse standard terms in whatever manner he desires. I prefer to to use their standard meanings.
'Quality time' has, ever since the term was coined, been applied exclusively to time spent by the parents interacting in games, reading, discussions, watching TV together, hobbies, etc... etc... (I.E. participating together in pleasurable nonwork activities.) Telling little Sally to go clean up her room and little Johhny to get that yard mowed hardly qualifies.
That said, the question of how you start and attract talent to an open source project... I'm not professor on the history of open source, but the most successful projects I've seen are ones where a coder or small group of coders put out an alpha of their project and it was playing with the alpha and seeing the possibilities in it that got people excited enough to come on board and start pushing things forward.
Just out of curiosity - how many of those sucessful projects were ones near-and-dear to geek hearts, and how many were grey flannel workaday programs? What little looking I've done shows that attention (and programmers) flow to the former, while the latter languish. (And the latter also tend to require knowledge outside of the geeks core competencies.)
Why do we always have to go to "It's light! It's strong! This will clearly help prevent foreigners from killing our troops!"?
Because many of these materials are difficult to make, or extremely expensive, or not suited for all uses, or 'all of the above'. It normally takes many years, if at all, for exotic materials to enter the consumer market. When they do, it is typically on high end/luxury stuff first (where price is less of an object) and only later trickles down to the shelves of your local big box retailer.
Look at composites for example - despite having been around since the 1960's, you still won't find much made of it down at your local Wal-mart. There simply aren't that many uses that justify the expense and difficulty of manufacture.
In the old days, only one parent worked, meaning LOT'S of quality time.
Back in the day when only one parent worked out of the home, the other parent generally spent an equal amount of hours working in the home. (Cooking, cleaning, etc...) They had no, or very little, time for 'quality time'.
n the old days, parents(at least the mother) were expected to TOTALLY sacrifice themselves.
At no time prior to the present was this ever true. Period.
If the wife was expected to sacrifice herself for anyone - it was the husband. Look at old cookbooks for example, they aren't filled with foods for children and childrens parties. They are filled with food for entertaining and impressing - with the distinct subtext that it was social and/or business superiors who were the targets, with friends a distant second target. It was all about status, and children were supposed to be seen and not heard.
Either, you are extremely young, or you have grown up in some former soviet state or similar.
You missed an option. 'Or you are someone who has actually read on and studied the issue and is aware of the truth and prefers it spouting myths'.
You do realise it used to be 'normal' to only have one working parent (usually father) with the mother at home doing parenting things such as disciplining children for misbehaviour, showing them how to be productive (chores) and educating by reading them stories right? Or were you born yesterday?
You do realize that what you state is largely a myth, not a fact? back in the day when only one working parent was common (actually a briefer era than many realize), Mom was busy with cooking and cleaning and other chores. I wasn't born yesterday, but I did spend part of yesterday (and many part of many days before it) reading actual books and research on what life used to be like (a sideline into my research on cooking in America) - rather than parroting myths.
During my early school years, my parents and others quite often volunteered to help at school by taking kids our of class and reading to them or helping them with basic arithmetic. It used to be common, but these days mothers are earning that second income.
It many have been common at your school - but it wasn't any thing resembling common anywhere at anytime. Mother, or fathers, with that much spare time were very much the exception.
Re:Been there, done that
on
The New Moon Race
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
There isn't an element on Earth that would be economical to mine on the Moon. Not one. Not without a price drop in space acess a couple of orders of magnitude above and beyond the most fevered dreams of the most lunatic space enthusiast.
China is sending a probe to the moon for the same reason it (just barely) has a manned space program; because sending stuff to the Moon is what Great Nations Do - and China badly wants to be seen as a Great Nation.
Even further proof of this? As LBJ's political influence lessened and his attention shifted to other matters than building a monument to Jack Kennedy (to prove his own legitimacy I suspect), guess what happened to Apollo's budget... It got cut.
Does it really take 13 freaking years to dig up the notes from Apollo program, dust off/refresh the equipment and relaunch?
Pretty much, yes. There is not only no equipment to dust off/refresh, there are no places building the parts needed to build the equipment we don't have in the first place. We are pretty much starting from a clean sheet of paper and a blank plot of ground.
Did we take such a big step back?
It's not such a really big step back for two reasons;
First, Apollo took much longer than most people think - some parts of it were started as much as six years before Kennedy's speech, though as basic research programs without specific applications. Apollo (the moon version) was only possible at all because the trade studies had already been largely done on Apollo (the general purpose earth orbiter version) and hardware design and development (not research) was already well underway. This is why the pacing item to the landing was the LM - which had to be started essentially from scratch. (The CSM was already well underway, as were the F1 engines.)
Second, because this time (nominally) we aren't devoting such a large fraction of the federal budget to the project. The Apollo era motto was 'waste anything but time', todays motto is 'waste anything but money'. (Even though they aren't doing too well at that.)
I have a six-year-old in second grade and a four-year-old in kindergarten. The teachers are using the same boring techniques that didn't work when I was in school and are boring the crap out of my second grader.
They worked on the majority of people for decades/centuries. That suggests the problem lies not in the methods.
It is unfortunate that the teaching system (of which my wife is a part) is stuck in a 19th century methodology of teaching the masses to act in unison. It is as if they're preparing these kids for the rote factory jobs of yesterday instead of the knowledge-critical jobs of today.
Aw, horseshit. School back in the 19th century wasn't to prepare kids for factory jobs, it was the kids who didn't go to school and get an education who ended up in the factory. On top of which, the majority of jobs (even today) are largely rote. ('Knowledge based' is a meaningless buzzword.)
Slashdot Mirror
Certainly the implication is there, but the article and the summary presuppose it as a fact. Facts and implications are not the same thing.
The linked article does not support the sensationalist nonsense presented in the summary.
OTOH, I routinely see articles that state "currently x" where x is 2006 or even older.
Not only unevenly applied - but sometimes unevenly applied by fiat. There was, and may still be (I haven't looked) a policy in place that essentially stated "articles on topics and individuals that have appeared on the front page of CNN.com or other major news sources are to regarded as notable by default". Why? "Because regardless of their actual notability, people tend to perform Google searches on those topics or individuals and retaining those articles increases the visibility of the Wikipedia".
Or they've been run off of Wikipedia altogether. Wikipedia rewards playing the political game and the ability to be there day in and day out far, far more than it does expertise.
That would require a ground up revamp of the Wikipedia political system to avoid rewarding those with time on their hands and an ability to game the system and to reward those with knowledge they wish to share.
Nope.
These things will be high up - in GSO, which takes it right out of the range of any ICBM based launcher. Unless you can figure out how to pack propulsion, power, guidance, and a Dangerous Payload into a five to ten pounds or so... (And no, the classic 'handful of sand' or 'paint chip' or 'styrofoam cup' won't cut it here - the interception geometry is different from that with orbital debris in LEO. Not to mention these things are Very Big - and hitting the very few, and very small, critical targets in the array is going to be Very Hard.) Guidance and control are going to be major headaches.
A major spacefaring nation might be able to carry it off with a few years R&D - but the launches aren't going to be stealthy and whodunit is going to be very obvious.
Nah. I don't generally get excited about internet memes.
Ah yes, when all else fails pull out the buzzwords and wave them around.
This quasi-airplane/quasi-automobile is one of those dammed ideas that simply will not die. Some damm fool reinvents this bastardization every five-ten years or so, then economic and engineering reality sets in and the company folds away never to be heard of again.
IIRC the DoD didn't shift from CONEX boxen to standard shipping containers until the 90's. It's the latter that is the key innovation.
Biosphere II wasn't so much of a failure as it was a 'no test'. Despite the gleaming claims they made about being a closed enviroment, only lip service was paid towards it in the actual design and construction. Far more money was spent on hewing to enviromental mantras and meeting the philosophic/aesthetic goals of the project than on even quasi serious engineering. (CIP: The 'lungs' had to be added, at great cost, fairly late in the construction because it didn't occur to any of the enviromental gurus that a closed building of that size would have significant pressure changes as the temperatures changed.)
Like Sydney Opera House, Biosphere II was designed by an artist - and then the design was handed over to engineers to make work. As a result, much time and money was spent ensuring the 'rainforest' had rain, the 'ocean pool' had tides, and that the high humidity levels required inside by enviromentalists didn't corrode the whole structure into junk.
On top of that - they leapt/extrapolated too far from their mockup and existing engineering. (By a couple of orders of magnitude.) Then they leapt right into the full bore lock-in without doing any significant commissioning and baseline testing.
I keep hearing this repeated, but it doesn't become true as a result. A few Japanese, without the knowledge of the Goverment or authority to negotiate had discussed the possibility of surrender to the Russians with the Russians. The Goverment, or at least that part with the authority to so negotiate was unaware of any such discussions with the Russians. Tojo and the War Cabinet, who had the authority to make such agreements, not only had not made such and agreement - they were utterly unaware that the farcial negotiations for surrender had even taken place.
The structure failed, so no - it's not useable for future designs. Not without significant redesign anyhow.
I've tried to parse this multiple times, and I simply cannot get it make sense. Now, I am not an aerodynamics expert by any means, but the 'pushed in opposite directions' effect you describe is something that simply can't happen AFAICT. Unless there is a serious asymmetry between the wings, or a fairly stiff breeze blowing - the effects of the wings are symmetrical. Nor was it traveling fast enough for serious aerodynamic effects to build up - it began yawing almost as soon as it began moving.
Now, I am something of a rocket scientist, and watching the video it appears pretty clear they had a serious asymmetry of some sort in the rocket units. (It could have been thrust, ignition timing, or physical misalignment.[1]) The effect of even the slightest asymmetry would have been multiplied by the (fairly large by rocketry standards) lever arm between the rocket units and the centerline of the craft.
[1] Giving the team the benefit of the doubt and assuming there wasn't a significant physical asymmetry between the wings or a bad CG/CP. They'd have to be really incompetent to manage that.
Actually, yes it does. (Or did back in day before todays appliances, cleaners, etc... etc...)
I've done more than just thought about it. I've actually studied it. Those shows were aimed at a very wide demographic, includes housewives who would take a brief break, houswives who did very little housework, housewives who could afford to pay someone else to do their housework, etc... etc...
That's taken as a given today, that was not the case in years past. One interesting data point: In my collection of such materials I have a series of newsletters from a cake decorating club in the 1950's. The vast majority of them (over 75%) describe cakes for holidays, entertaining, and impressing the boss when he comes over for dinner. (Really - they describe it exactly like that!) The balance are mostly on doing cakes for charity sales and church suppers. Children's birthday cakes make up less than 5% of the content. You see the same pattern when you examine women's magazines, etiquette books, etc... etc...
Then comes the 80's and the pattern (very abrubtly) shifts to what is essentially a complete reversal of the earlier one. (And the stereotype of the 'soccer mom' and the parents too frazzled from taking their kids to multiple activities emerge nearly overnight.) Shortly after, minivans appear on the market with advertising stressing how many kids they can carry....
Seriously, I'm not making this stuff up. Once you study the primary source materials you can see the slow shift in societal attitudes and expectations towards a more 'child centric' one starting in the thirties, and a sudden explosion in the 80's when 'quality time' became a buzzword solution to societies ills in general and 'latchkey kids' in specific.
It doesn't matter one tiny bit what your mother did to/with you. She's one individual among millions.
Actually, no. It applies to explosively expanding middle class from the early 20th century onwards. (Hint: why do you think 'dinner with the boss' was a staple of sitcoms from very early on?)
The grandparent is welcome to misuse standard terms in whatever manner he desires. I prefer to to use their standard meanings.
'Quality time' has, ever since the term was coined, been applied exclusively to time spent by the parents interacting in games, reading, discussions, watching TV together, hobbies, etc... etc... (I.E. participating together in pleasurable nonwork activities.) Telling little Sally to go clean up her room and little Johhny to get that yard mowed hardly qualifies.
That's very amusing - because you keep placing anecdotes into evidence, while I'm reporting from years of studying actual research.
Just out of curiosity - how many of those sucessful projects were ones near-and-dear to geek hearts, and how many were grey flannel workaday programs? What little looking I've done shows that attention (and programmers) flow to the former, while the latter languish. (And the latter also tend to require knowledge outside of the geeks core competencies.)
Because many of these materials are difficult to make, or extremely expensive, or not suited for all uses, or 'all of the above'. It normally takes many years, if at all, for exotic materials to enter the consumer market. When they do, it is typically on high end/luxury stuff first (where price is less of an object) and only later trickles down to the shelves of your local big box retailer.
Look at composites for example - despite having been around since the 1960's, you still won't find much made of it down at your local Wal-mart. There simply aren't that many uses that justify the expense and difficulty of manufacture.
Back in the day when only one parent worked out of the home, the other parent generally spent an equal amount of hours working in the home. (Cooking, cleaning, etc...) They had no, or very little, time for 'quality time'.
At no time prior to the present was this ever true. Period.
If the wife was expected to sacrifice herself for anyone - it was the husband. Look at old cookbooks for example, they aren't filled with foods for children and childrens parties. They are filled with food for entertaining and impressing - with the distinct subtext that it was social and/or business superiors who were the targets, with friends a distant second target. It was all about status, and children were supposed to be seen and not heard.
You missed an option. 'Or you are someone who has actually read on and studied the issue and is aware of the truth and prefers it spouting myths'.
You do realize that what you state is largely a myth, not a fact? back in the day when only one working parent was common (actually a briefer era than many realize), Mom was busy with cooking and cleaning and other chores. I wasn't born yesterday, but I did spend part of yesterday (and many part of many days before it) reading actual books and research on what life used to be like (a sideline into my research on cooking in America) - rather than parroting myths.
It many have been common at your school - but it wasn't any thing resembling common anywhere at anytime. Mother, or fathers, with that much spare time were very much the exception.
There isn't an element on Earth that would be economical to mine on the Moon. Not one. Not without a price drop in space acess a couple of orders of magnitude above and beyond the most fevered dreams of the most lunatic space enthusiast.
China is sending a probe to the moon for the same reason it (just barely) has a manned space program; because sending stuff to the Moon is what Great Nations Do - and China badly wants to be seen as a Great Nation.
Even further proof of this? As LBJ's political influence lessened and his attention shifted to other matters than building a monument to Jack Kennedy (to prove his own legitimacy I suspect), guess what happened to Apollo's budget... It got cut.
It's not such a really big step back for two reasons;
First, Apollo took much longer than most people think - some parts of it were started as much as six years before Kennedy's speech, though as basic research programs without specific applications. Apollo (the moon version) was only possible at all because the trade studies had already been largely done on Apollo (the general purpose earth orbiter version) and hardware design and development (not research) was already well underway. This is why the pacing item to the landing was the LM - which had to be started essentially from scratch. (The CSM was already well underway, as were the F1 engines.)
Second, because this time (nominally) we aren't devoting such a large fraction of the federal budget to the project. The Apollo era motto was 'waste anything but time', todays motto is 'waste anything but money'. (Even though they aren't doing too well at that.)
They worked on the majority of people for decades/centuries. That suggests the problem lies not in the methods.
Aw, horseshit. School back in the 19th century wasn't to prepare kids for factory jobs, it was the kids who didn't go to school and get an education who ended up in the factory. On top of which, the majority of jobs (even today) are largely rote. ('Knowledge based' is a meaningless buzzword.)