Or in other words, believing in science others have painstakingly proven for you is not an automatic cure for ignorance.
This. And an awful lot of the people I know who claim to be "literate in science"... really aren't. They're cargo cultists who can repeat things they've heard somewhere, but have no real grasp of the import of, connections between, or the broader meaning of those soundbites/memes. In my book, that does not meet any useful or reasonable definition of "literate".
Its not as simple as "want to put" a wizard in as an explanation
To folks like the OP, yeah, it is. Because making it as simple as possible allows him to denigrate the believers thereof and to place himself on a higher plane of existence.
That's what a lot of the sneering and snarky comments in this discussion really are.
Well, not exactly. But certainly if you proposed having a computer onboard in 1961, the first reaction would be: The B52 is big but it's not that big!
That wouldn't be the first reaction of anyone with a clue - by 1961 there were already small computers in production. (For use in missile guidance systems if nothing else. This picture shows the Polaris A-1 (1960) guidance on the right, the unit includes both the inertial assembly *and* the guidance computer.)
Thank someone else's R&D for the fact you can buy a (nearly) chemically inert, non-ferrous, non-sparking hammer for a pittance.
Probably the USN - who was buying chemically inert, non-ferrous, non-sparking hammers for use inside of shipboard ammunition and powder magazines and around various other kinds of ordinance decades before MRI systems became commonplace.
It delayed things 5 WHOLE YEARS! GASP. Yes, I realize that the/. crowd is heavily biased to young males, but guys, it is to the point the average college student doesn't graduate in 5 years.
It's not so much that it's biased towards young males, it's that it's heavily biased towards people who have the attention span of the MTV generation and who don't really grasp delayed gratification. They grew up with instant availability of anything digital via the internet, and if it's a physical thing it's available quickly because two day shipping is now the norm.
That's a generalization of course, and there are exceptions... But I'm fifty and many people that I've met that are under about thirty five or so don't readily grasp timescales longer than a week or two. They know that such things exist, but they don't really think on that timescale.
I've got bottles of booze that I haven't had a drink out of older than that, and projects sitting on my workbench longer than that. One of my dad's HOBBY projects took 3 hours a night, every night for 8 years..
Indeed. I just made tentative travel plans for 2015 (high school reunion) and solid plans for 2016 (SSBN crew reunion)... Some of us from high school are already pondering as far out as 2021 (our 40th anniversary). I'm halfway through my six year plan to re-make my workshop. I just started a five year long project experimenting aging vodka with toasted and charred chips of various woods, and I just set down a batch of my custom whisky blend aimed at being ready for for the holiday season. Etc... etc...
The only one I'd call at ALL significant is the 30 years
Set against the scale of human history, thirty years is nothing. Five years is less than nothing.
That was my thought... my Dell Venue 8 (the 'droid) versions beat this HP POS seven ways from Sunday - and only cost $179 from Amazon. Not quite twice the money for easily ten times the machine.
Otherwise, the result is not surprising and in line with several legal initiatives in USA, targeting the "ex-GF revenge" sites.
Not quite true. While both the "revenge porn" laws and the German ruling hinge on consent, they're otherwise very different. Those initiatives target publication of the pictures based on intent (to shame, humiliate, or degrade), this ruling targets possession of the pictures based on content (nudity).
How is this news? SiC semiconductors including Schottky diodes, JFETs and MOSFETs have been commercially available since 2008. My first design to use SiC JFETs and diodes was in solar power inverter developed back in 2009 (and yes the RDSon and revers recovery times are indeed exceptional).
"Commercially available with the specs you need for a solar power inverter" does not necessarily equate to "commercially available with the specs Toyota needs".
Driving is a skill, and like any skill it needs to be practiced often to stop going rusty...
Indeed. When I was in the Navy (SSBN crewman), driving safety training (read: the same silly-ass films we saw in high school) was mandatory for all hands the last two weeks of patrol. Why? Because (drunk or sober) 80% of all accidents (fatal and non) involving SSBN crewmen behind the wheel occurred during the first two weeks back in home port.
I'm in violent agreement with you on your central point - engineers should take a stand. My point however is that while "established" version of the Challenger accident leaves the impression that they tried to take a stand - that impression is false. It hews too much to the stereotype of the saintly engineer and slimy management and covers up the failures of the engineers in question.
Their stand on the night of the 27th/28th was too little, too late. The time to take a stand was back in the 70's when the joint design (known to be flawed even then) was introduced, or when the Shuttle started flying and the primary o-ring repeatedly failed in flight.Then management might have listened to them when they brought up their concerns about temperature and the engineers would have a valid reason to claim they were the injured party when (if) management over-rode them. But they didn't. They accepted the continuing failure of a primary system, and thus were to some degree complicit in the accident.
Disclaimer - as a former submariner, I actually lived for weeks on end in an environment that demanded two layers of protection, and we did not treat routine failure of a primary layer as acceptable. That gives me a somewhat different point of view than most Slashdotters, who have no experience with such things.
Exactly. The Thiokol engineers knew that the air temperature at the launch pad was below the lower range operating temperature of the O Rings which was 40 degrees (or 50 degrees for the system as a whole). The O rings themselves were certified down to 40 degrees but the engineers were bullied by management who wanted proof that the system would fail rather than the other way around and then when the engineers couldn't prove that it would fail they were overruled.
Sure it sounds bad - when you only tell the self serving half of the story that has made rounds in the cargo cult community.
The other half of the story is that the SRB's had been suffering from joint rotation and the consequent blow-by for years. For both management and engineers it had become an 'expected failure', and since the backup O-ring had never failed everyone thought it was safe to fly. Everyone, including the engineers that were developing a fix (which is why one was ready so fast - it had been in development for several years by that point) thought it was safe to continue to fly. Which is the whole point of Tufte's criticism of the engineering presentations prior to the accident - the engineers not only completely failed to realize the worst damage was actually well within normal temperature range, they completely missed the role of temperature entirely.
"Prove it will fail" was management's subtle way of asking "Why are you changing your story?".
The story of the loss of the Challenger is much more complicated than simply "stupid managers, saintly engineers", and there's a lot of blame to spread around all parties.
âoeFor better or worse,â said Steven A. Edwards, a policy analyst at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, âoethe practice of science in the 21st century is becoming shaped less by national priorities or by peer-review groups and more by the particular preferences of individuals with huge amounts of money.â
Coz, like, science has never relied on rich benefactors before. Hint: Before government-funded science it was rich benefactors that provided residence, food and money for artisans and scientists.
Really, what is the government but a very rich benefactor? In the same vein, shaping science to "national priorities" isn't so different from shaping it to "private priorities". Fame, pork, and profit... or fame and profit, the difference in motivations and goals seems miniscule from where I sit. (Keeping in mind that profit to the government isn't necessarily cash. It could be a better way to preserve food so your armies don't have to forage, or smaller nuclear weapons.) Even with the government in the driver's seat and paying the bills, not everyone got funded. Don't bring up basic science, both private and government benefactors pay for what supports their goals - and that's as true for Bell Labs as it is for Fermilab.
Underwater robotics is all about advancing the state of the art. A machine that lived six years was reaching obsolescence.
In the eyes of folks who build underwater robots, that may be true. For folks who use underwater robots to accomplish a task, it's all about accomplishing that task. State of the art, obsolescent, obsolete, they simply don't care so long as it works and accomplishes what they ask of it.
I'm sure that the boys in the back room will have fun building its successor.
I'm sure the boys in the back room will have fun. The men who pay the bills, and the men who planned on using the existing one next week (month, year, however long it takes to replace the lost one) won't be having nearly as much fun.
The idea of the military preparing for mass numbers of "zombies" (civilians) rising up and assaulting them is not very settling.
*sigh* The military is not preparing for any such thing, the tinfoil worn by many survivalists has worn off on you. The military is conducting a _training exercise_, in which commanders and their staff practice taking high level planning/guidance (CONOP 8888 in this case) and transforming it into plans, taskings, and orders.
There are not many situations in which this kind of training would be necessary except for a civilian uprising, save for some of the aspects of dealing with an defending from assault with limited resources, a breakdown of communications & no backup.
You're reading way too much into this. This is a paper exercise for a staff training course. Exercise writers get bored too, and they come up with all kinds of outrageous/silly things.
Manufacturing auto batteries should be a low-margin business. They're a commodity. Others can enter the business. Over time, margins will decrease. There's not much brand value. (Who made the battery in your phone?)
Just because you don't know who makes the battery in your phone doesn't mean the brand is recognized by the folks who specced the battery and wrote the contracts. Brand matters at all levels.
Whats baffling is that Bond manager Jeffrey Gundlach thinks hes a better judge of investment than a many-times-over millionaire who has launched 3 wildly successful businesses-- paypal, Tesla, SpaceX.
You're either a time traveler from the future, or a drooling clueless fanboy - as Musk has built precisely one successful business, PayPal. Tesla is still deep in debt, with uncertain future prospects for getting out. (They're the iPhone of electric cars - they've got the luxury market, it's not clear they'll ever get into the mass market where the real money is.) SpaceX is on the thin edge, and without their government contracts would be on even thinner ice.
I don't know why Jeffrey Gundlach is, but see no a priori reason to assume he *isn't* as smart, or smarter, than Elon Musk.
I can't speak to other countries, but in the US the seller is responsible for collecting and paying the taxes - and paying (pseudo) anonymously via BTC doesn't undo any of that as the seller still has an electronic record of the amount of the sale.
Last year's failure occurred immediately - it was clear there was a major issue with one of the first stage engines from ignition.
Not to anyone with any actual knowledge of rocketry - to them it was clear there was a major problem with the guidance and control systems. (Which in fact turned out to be the case.)
Slashdot Mirror
This. And an awful lot of the people I know who claim to be "literate in science"... really aren't. They're cargo cultists who can repeat things they've heard somewhere, but have no real grasp of the import of, connections between, or the broader meaning of those soundbites/memes. In my book, that does not meet any useful or reasonable definition of "literate".
To folks like the OP, yeah, it is. Because making it as simple as possible allows him to denigrate the believers thereof and to place himself on a higher plane of existence.
That's what a lot of the sneering and snarky comments in this discussion really are.
But interestingly enough... no matter how much smoke you blow, you failed to answer the question.
That wouldn't be the first reaction of anyone with a clue - by 1961 there were already small computers in production. (For use in missile guidance systems if nothing else. This picture shows the Polaris A-1 (1960) guidance on the right, the unit includes both the inertial assembly *and* the guidance computer.)
Probably the USN - who was buying chemically inert, non-ferrous, non-sparking hammers for use inside of shipboard ammunition and powder magazines and around various other kinds of ordinance decades before MRI systems became commonplace.
So why is Chelsea Clinton's opinion any more important than the flavor-of-the-month reality TV star(let)?
It's not so much that it's biased towards young males, it's that it's heavily biased towards people who have the attention span of the MTV generation and who don't really grasp delayed gratification. They grew up with instant availability of anything digital via the internet, and if it's a physical thing it's available quickly because two day shipping is now the norm.
That's a generalization of course, and there are exceptions... But I'm fifty and many people that I've met that are under about thirty five or so don't readily grasp timescales longer than a week or two. They know that such things exist, but they don't really think on that timescale.
Indeed. I just made tentative travel plans for 2015 (high school reunion) and solid plans for 2016 (SSBN crew reunion)... Some of us from high school are already pondering as far out as 2021 (our 40th anniversary). I'm halfway through my six year plan to re-make my workshop. I just started a five year long project experimenting aging vodka with toasted and charred chips of various woods, and I just set down a batch of my custom whisky blend aimed at being ready for for the holiday season. Etc... etc...
Set against the scale of human history, thirty years is nothing. Five years is less than nothing.
That was my thought... my Dell Venue 8 (the 'droid) versions beat this HP POS seven ways from Sunday - and only cost $179 from Amazon. Not quite twice the money for easily ten times the machine.
"[T]here is more than plenty of evidence to suspect that what happened at Mt. Gox may have been an inside job."
Or, in other words, evidence to suspect what pretty much everyone has suspected all along.
Not quite true. While both the "revenge porn" laws and the German ruling hinge on consent, they're otherwise very different. Those initiatives target publication of the pictures based on intent (to shame, humiliate, or degrade), this ruling targets possession of the pictures based on content (nudity).
Pretty much everything.
"Commercially available with the specs you need for a solar power inverter" does not necessarily equate to "commercially available with the specs Toyota needs".
Indeed. When I was in the Navy (SSBN crewman), driving safety training (read: the same silly-ass films we saw in high school) was mandatory for all hands the last two weeks of patrol. Why? Because (drunk or sober) 80% of all accidents (fatal and non) involving SSBN crewmen behind the wheel occurred during the first two weeks back in home port.
I'm in violent agreement with you on your central point - engineers should take a stand. My point however is that while "established" version of the Challenger accident leaves the impression that they tried to take a stand - that impression is false. It hews too much to the stereotype of the saintly engineer and slimy management and covers up the failures of the engineers in question.
Their stand on the night of the 27th/28th was too little, too late. The time to take a stand was back in the 70's when the joint design (known to be flawed even then) was introduced, or when the Shuttle started flying and the primary o-ring repeatedly failed in flight.Then management might have listened to them when they brought up their concerns about temperature and the engineers would have a valid reason to claim they were the injured party when (if) management over-rode them. But they didn't. They accepted the continuing failure of a primary system, and thus were to some degree complicit in the accident.
Disclaimer - as a former submariner, I actually lived for weeks on end in an environment that demanded two layers of protection, and we did not treat routine failure of a primary layer as acceptable. That gives me a somewhat different point of view than most Slashdotters, who have no experience with such things.
Sure it sounds bad - when you only tell the self serving half of the story that has made rounds in the cargo cult community.
The other half of the story is that the SRB's had been suffering from joint rotation and the consequent blow-by for years. For both management and engineers it had become an 'expected failure', and since the backup O-ring had never failed everyone thought it was safe to fly. Everyone, including the engineers that were developing a fix (which is why one was ready so fast - it had been in development for several years by that point) thought it was safe to continue to fly. Which is the whole point of Tufte's criticism of the engineering presentations prior to the accident - the engineers not only completely failed to realize the worst damage was actually well within normal temperature range, they completely missed the role of temperature entirely.
"Prove it will fail" was management's subtle way of asking "Why are you changing your story?".
The story of the loss of the Challenger is much more complicated than simply "stupid managers, saintly engineers", and there's a lot of blame to spread around all parties.
Really, what is the government but a very rich benefactor? In the same vein, shaping science to "national priorities" isn't so different from shaping it to "private priorities". Fame, pork, and profit... or fame and profit, the difference in motivations and goals seems miniscule from where I sit. (Keeping in mind that profit to the government isn't necessarily cash. It could be a better way to preserve food so your armies don't have to forage, or smaller nuclear weapons.) Even with the government in the driver's seat and paying the bills, not everyone got funded. Don't bring up basic science, both private and government benefactors pay for what supports their goals - and that's as true for Bell Labs as it is for Fermilab.
In the eyes of folks who build underwater robots, that may be true. For folks who use underwater robots to accomplish a task, it's all about accomplishing that task. State of the art, obsolescent, obsolete, they simply don't care so long as it works and accomplishes what they ask of it.
I'm sure the boys in the back room will have fun. The men who pay the bills, and the men who planned on using the existing one next week (month, year, however long it takes to replace the lost one) won't be having nearly as much fun.
Are you a moron, or just stupid? The fares cover the parts that aren't subsidized.
Your bias is noted. (Hint: Pulling assumptions out of your ass is not "balanced", it's "biased".)
*sigh* The military is not preparing for any such thing, the tinfoil worn by many survivalists has worn off on you. The military is conducting a _training exercise_, in which commanders and their staff practice taking high level planning/guidance (CONOP 8888 in this case) and transforming it into plans, taskings, and orders.
You're reading way too much into this. This is a paper exercise for a staff training course. Exercise writers get bored too, and they come up with all kinds of outrageous/silly things.
Just because you don't know who makes the battery in your phone doesn't mean the brand is recognized by the folks who specced the battery and wrote the contracts. Brand matters at all levels.
You're either a time traveler from the future, or a drooling clueless fanboy - as Musk has built precisely one successful business, PayPal. Tesla is still deep in debt, with uncertain future prospects for getting out. (They're the iPhone of electric cars - they've got the luxury market, it's not clear they'll ever get into the mass market where the real money is.) SpaceX is on the thin edge, and without their government contracts would be on even thinner ice.
I don't know why Jeffrey Gundlach is, but see no a priori reason to assume he *isn't* as smart, or smarter, than Elon Musk.
The state may want that, but neither the seller nor the buyer is for the most part in no way obligated (morally or legally) in the US to provide that.
I can't speak to other countries, but in the US the seller is responsible for collecting and paying the taxes - and paying (pseudo) anonymously via BTC doesn't undo any of that as the seller still has an electronic record of the amount of the sale.
Not to anyone with any actual knowledge of rocketry - to them it was clear there was a major problem with the guidance and control systems. (Which in fact turned out to be the case.)