Remember Super Mario Bros? Running along, scanning left to right for obstacles, so you could time your jumps? I remember after one 18 hour marathon, I decided to relax and read the latest Robotech book. After a few minutes of reading, my mind trailed off on a tangent, but my eyes kept scanning the text. (This actually happens alot when I read a book which excites my imagination.) Soon I realized I wasn't simply scanning the text, but my eyes were darting from capital letters, over half-height letters, and arcing between words, as if it were a level in super mario. At first I was amused, then alarmed. The problem disappated over a few days. According to my neurologist (I had an aneurysm near a ganglia in my back, so I had to have regular checkups to make sure the bleeding didn't cause any nerve damage), long hours of repetitive motion will reprogram nerve clusters. Scanning text, like walking or breathing, is an automatic function which is controlled by a feedback loop so that, unconciously, it adapts to changing conditions. This is whey repetitive motion injuries can be so severe - you can literally undo years of programming in a few short days.
Unlike much of the jibbering masses here, I have actually done this. I left school disgusted with some changes in North Carolina's statewide Community College System which erased nearly half my credits. I didn't want to go to a community college, take classes a second time, and pay more money, and I couldn't afford to continue at the University level. My boss came along and offered me a fat wad of cash, and off the private sector I went. Ten years later, after a short stint in the army (emphasis on 'short' and emphasis on 'stint'), I decided that I would go no further in life than I had been without an education, and that I wanted to try a different vector. So without adeiu.
3) I'd like to hear from people who've done this, i.e. quit their jobs and gone back to get a higher engineering degree. What problems did you face and what advice do you have?
There is a huge learning curve for subjects since you've likely purged the 'useless' data which formed the prerequisites for some of the classes you'll be taking. Plan on hours of studying at least for the first few months, as your brain recycles information.
You'll also be surrounded by youngin's. For more advanced classes it won't be too bad, because the kids that made it that far are more mature and focused, but be prepared to be annoyed by flippant young kids who haven't learned things like sacrifice yet. The flipside of this is that you should not discount your younger classmates. We have a tendency to acquiesce to seniority, but in the classroom even the teacher learns new things at times. My equal in my Calc class is a girl who is 11 years younger than me. And hot. Which is distracting too. Either way, it is to your benefit to adopt an egalitarian outlook while on campus.
Can anyone honestly say that todays top of the line computer is not enough (in practical terms)? Computer development usually lags behind software, but we have reached the point in the last three years where processors outpace the demands of software. The top of the line consumer level computer today (say, an Alienware ALX?) is roughly equivalent to a few hundred Pentium 133's from just a decade ago. Most apps today claim to run on hardware as slow as a PII-233, and most games will run on a 1 Ghz Athlon with 512 mb of RAM.
Concurrency is just another buzzword. What we are going to find now that we've hit a glass ceiling on processor clockss is that we need to look at how our needs are changing. You don't need a super fast processor to run a PVR, play MP3's, run your cars engine, or to manage your to-do list. Any decent computer nerd can automate his entire house with an old windows machine. In terms of using computers to improve the standard of living, keep us entertained, and to advance civilization, we're nowhere near the limits just because we topped out on absolute processor clock speed. There are still factors which determine a processors power, and more importantly the processor itself is only one small part of the overall computing devices which we utilize.
In the future, as our needs grow and change, so will the manner in which we implement technology. I'm willing to bet that 20 years from now nobody will care how fast their computer's clock can cycle.
There's always this wierd assumption around Slashdot that NASA is a bunch of idiots, and that they don't know more than a bunch of random people on the internet when it comes to....whether to measure something in inches or centimeters perhaps? No, if you actually read the majority of posts here, the overall sentiment is that NASA is the idiot, and there are alot of talented engineers who could do better in private industry instead of working for an arm of big government.
During the apollo program, they experimented with a wide range of materials. They found the best overall material was - get this shit - CORK. What every office worker posts notes to. After the initial layer of charcoal formed, cork sheilding could withstand over 900 degrees of heat. Unsatisfied with this approach, further research found that by grinding the cork up into a find powder, then encasing it in high temperature silica glass beads, they could construct a heat sheild which was still lighter than shuttle tiles, capable of enduring 2,700 degrees of heat, and cost far less to manufacture. This is the sheild used on the Opportunity and Spirit rovers.
So why isn't cork used on the space shuttle. Well, how would you like to tell your fellow engineers that your space ship has an arm made in canada and the bottom is lined with cork.
Nobody I know - including the redneck parts-swapping greasemonkeys - calls it "freon". They either refer to it as it's R (R-12, R-134) or by its brand name (freeze 12). Hell, freon hasn't been used in years, with CFC's replacing it in the 60's for non-commercial applications, and ammonia in industrial uses.
Not including the two to two and a half hours it takes for the mother ship to climb to release altitude, and the flight itself takes more along the lines of a half hour to descend. Still faster than anything short of the concorde, but you'll still have to wait eight hours for your luggage - SS2 is designed for you and enough oxygen to keep you pink on the ride.
You're Right, for all the Wrong Reasons
on
US to Pay to go to ISS
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· Score: 1, Flamebait
The US should realize that we can't count on other countries. For anything. Take Russia for instance. We underwrite their space program by funding their portion of the ISS. Then, we pay for their Cosmonaut training. We foot the bill for tracking, logistical support, and rescue standby everytime they drop a capsule back down on Siberia.
Neither can we count on people like you to actually do your homework. What you fail to realise is that this is part of Russia putting the squeeze on to extort more money out of the US to build more spacecraft. Russia, meanwhile, is staring down the cash-spicket knowing it'll be shut off any second now because the Russian military can neither confirm nor deny it transferred missile technology to Iran.
And make no mistake, it's not simply the hundreds of millions that are going into the Baikonur Cosmodrome, but the potentially billions more that will be lost on sales of RSV Energiya products and booster sales when the US embargoes Russian space products. So kick back and giggle with glee that someone else is trying to shaft the US, but before you bliss out on schadenfreude, you might want to get a clue. Russia isn't doing us a favor. They're stiffing us like an immigrant taxi driver.
This is a neat tool for the amature scientist who can't afford hundred-thousand-dollar high speed cameras for doing research. Unfortunately, it is just hack, and the constantly shifting/rolling perspective makes it impractical for research. The builders might consider stacking the camera units so that the lens apertures are closer to the centerline, since a cm or two in focal length won't distort the resultant video as much as a few degrees of divergence.
Another thought which would make this both competitive in image quality and economical is if the CMOS imagers - which are actually only a few millimeters in size - were etched onto a single piece of silicon in a phased array. Then, instead of being a few centimeters divergent, they'd be a millimeter. A few oildrop lenses, and the whole array might be the size of the palm of your hand, coming out to less than a degree at a meter or two.
No no, they shattered. Being that they were already crystallized (regular atomic structure), its not inconceivable that with the right superglue and hours of patient attention, one couldn't be put back together. Now, being partially digested by Rygel, I had some qualms with that scene.
The redheads dead, died in a nuke attack on the Eidelon temple on Arnesk. The blue chick 'died' years ago, but being a 9th Level Pa'ua has its merits. Look for Zhaan to rise just as soon as Revlon develops blue paint that doesn't cause kidney and liver damage. The gray chick? Don't even think about tapping that ass, because when D'Argo comes back (#1 of Sci Fi - if you don't see a body chopped into little peices, they're not dead), he'll cleave your ass in two.
The series was put into syndication before SciFi was even a channel. USA Networks bought syndication rights from MGM. When Showtime cancelled, USA's parent company bought the rights, and Sci Fi begain airing episodes. Until a few years ago, you could still see very old reruns of SG1 on USA. Even now, Sci Fi and USA share rerun and syndication on some shows, including Xena, Hercules, Andromeda, and Beastmaster. They both are owned by the same parent company.
They'll beat this horse until its dead. Then they'll beat it until it is a frothy pink and blue foam. Then, they'll bottle it and try to sell it to us again. Sci Fi KILLS good sci-fi. They kept playing musical airdates with Farscape, then dropped it because the ratings could no longer justify the expense. They did the same to Lexx, but the writers there pulled a trump card on SciFi and brought the story arc to completion before SciFi could utter the words "cancelled". Before too long, SciFi will be nothing but low cost creature features and cheap space alien horror flicks. Oh shit...too late.
You know, I get more sci-fi on the other 78 channels on my box in a given day than I get in two days of SciFi.
Granted, SG1 is played out, and I think it is truly time for a graceful transition either into a new mission and new cast, or into oblivion. But the mythology is still rich with variation. I'm actually impressed with what I've seen on Stargate Atlantis. As far as small screen sci fi, its the best we have going right now.
You're bitching because some obscure website which is overly fascinated with obscure technologies also happens to throw in the occasional obscure pop culture reference to an obscure science fiction show?
They're already seen Fission. I say we give it to the french. If something catastrophic happens, nobody will feel bad about it. Well. Except the French.
The oil/automotive industry and "Bush's EPA" do not publish scientific journals, which goes immediately to the heart of the parent posters assertion that most journals won't even give dissenting opinion the time of day. Anyone who has been around 'scientists' knows that its not about the science. Its about the politics and the money.
Slashdot Mirror
Remember Super Mario Bros? Running along, scanning left to right for obstacles, so you could time your jumps? I remember after one 18 hour marathon, I decided to relax and read the latest Robotech book. After a few minutes of reading, my mind trailed off on a tangent, but my eyes kept scanning the text. (This actually happens alot when I read a book which excites my imagination.) Soon I realized I wasn't simply scanning the text, but my eyes were darting from capital letters, over half-height letters, and arcing between words, as if it were a level in super mario. At first I was amused, then alarmed. The problem disappated over a few days. According to my neurologist (I had an aneurysm near a ganglia in my back, so I had to have regular checkups to make sure the bleeding didn't cause any nerve damage), long hours of repetitive motion will reprogram nerve clusters. Scanning text, like walking or breathing, is an automatic function which is controlled by a feedback loop so that, unconciously, it adapts to changing conditions. This is whey repetitive motion injuries can be so severe - you can literally undo years of programming in a few short days.
There is a huge learning curve for subjects since you've likely purged the 'useless' data which formed the prerequisites for some of the classes you'll be taking. Plan on hours of studying at least for the first few months, as your brain recycles information.
You'll also be surrounded by youngin's. For more advanced classes it won't be too bad, because the kids that made it that far are more mature and focused, but be prepared to be annoyed by flippant young kids who haven't learned things like sacrifice yet. The flipside of this is that you should not discount your younger classmates. We have a tendency to acquiesce to seniority, but in the classroom even the teacher learns new things at times. My equal in my Calc class is a girl who is 11 years younger than me. And hot. Which is distracting too. Either way, it is to your benefit to adopt an egalitarian outlook while on campus.
Can anyone honestly say that todays top of the line computer is not enough (in practical terms)? Computer development usually lags behind software, but we have reached the point in the last three years where processors outpace the demands of software. The top of the line consumer level computer today (say, an Alienware ALX?) is roughly equivalent to a few hundred Pentium 133's from just a decade ago. Most apps today claim to run on hardware as slow as a PII-233, and most games will run on a 1 Ghz Athlon with 512 mb of RAM.
Concurrency is just another buzzword. What we are going to find now that we've hit a glass ceiling on processor clockss is that we need to look at how our needs are changing. You don't need a super fast processor to run a PVR, play MP3's, run your cars engine, or to manage your to-do list. Any decent computer nerd can automate his entire house with an old windows machine. In terms of using computers to improve the standard of living, keep us entertained, and to advance civilization, we're nowhere near the limits just because we topped out on absolute processor clock speed. There are still factors which determine a processors power, and more importantly the processor itself is only one small part of the overall computing devices which we utilize.
In the future, as our needs grow and change, so will the manner in which we implement technology. I'm willing to bet that 20 years from now nobody will care how fast their computer's clock can cycle.
Egad...I meant compound. That just blew the credibility on my A in chemistry last semester.
They're made up of beauracrats and government employees. "Civilians" work in the "private sector".
There's always this wierd assumption around Slashdot that NASA is a bunch of idiots, and that they don't know more than a bunch of random people on the internet when it comes to ....whether to measure something in inches or centimeters perhaps? No, if you actually read the majority of posts here, the overall sentiment is that NASA is the idiot, and there are alot of talented engineers who could do better in private industry instead of working for an arm of big government.
During the apollo program, they experimented with a wide range of materials. They found the best overall material was - get this shit - CORK. What every office worker posts notes to. After the initial layer of charcoal formed, cork sheilding could withstand over 900 degrees of heat. Unsatisfied with this approach, further research found that by grinding the cork up into a find powder, then encasing it in high temperature silica glass beads, they could construct a heat sheild which was still lighter than shuttle tiles, capable of enduring 2,700 degrees of heat, and cost far less to manufacture. This is the sheild used on the Opportunity and Spirit rovers.
So why isn't cork used on the space shuttle. Well, how would you like to tell your fellow engineers that your space ship has an arm made in canada and the bottom is lined with cork.
Civilians have put more into space in the last two years than nasa has in the last five. Eat that.
Nobody I know - including the redneck parts-swapping greasemonkeys - calls it "freon". They either refer to it as it's R (R-12, R-134) or by its brand name (freeze 12). Hell, freon hasn't been used in years, with CFC's replacing it in the 60's for non-commercial applications, and ammonia in industrial uses.
Me: "Spelling Nazi's. I hate Spelling Nazi's. "
You: "Gruppenfuhrer, get that cars license plate number. We're gonna kill that son of a bitch."
Not including the two to two and a half hours it takes for the mother ship to climb to release altitude, and the flight itself takes more along the lines of a half hour to descend. Still faster than anything short of the concorde, but you'll still have to wait eight hours for your luggage - SS2 is designed for you and enough oxygen to keep you pink on the ride.
The US should realize that we can't count on other countries. For anything. Take Russia for instance. We underwrite their space program by funding their portion of the ISS. Then, we pay for their Cosmonaut training. We foot the bill for tracking, logistical support, and rescue standby everytime they drop a capsule back down on Siberia.
Neither can we count on people like you to actually do your homework. What you fail to realise is that this is part of Russia putting the squeeze on to extort more money out of the US to build more spacecraft. Russia, meanwhile, is staring down the cash-spicket knowing it'll be shut off any second now because the Russian military can neither confirm nor deny it transferred missile technology to Iran.
And make no mistake, it's not simply the hundreds of millions that are going into the Baikonur Cosmodrome, but the potentially billions more that will be lost on sales of RSV Energiya products and booster sales when the US embargoes Russian space products. So kick back and giggle with glee that someone else is trying to shaft the US, but before you bliss out on schadenfreude, you might want to get a clue. Russia isn't doing us a favor. They're stiffing us like an immigrant taxi driver.
This is a neat tool for the amature scientist who can't afford hundred-thousand-dollar high speed cameras for doing research. Unfortunately, it is just hack, and the constantly shifting/rolling perspective makes it impractical for research. The builders might consider stacking the camera units so that the lens apertures are closer to the centerline, since a cm or two in focal length won't distort the resultant video as much as a few degrees of divergence.
Another thought which would make this both competitive in image quality and economical is if the CMOS imagers - which are actually only a few millimeters in size - were etched onto a single piece of silicon in a phased array. Then, instead of being a few centimeters divergent, they'd be a millimeter. A few oildrop lenses, and the whole array might be the size of the palm of your hand, coming out to less than a degree at a meter or two.
No no, they shattered. Being that they were already crystallized (regular atomic structure), its not inconceivable that with the right superglue and hours of patient attention, one couldn't be put back together. Now, being partially digested by Rygel, I had some qualms with that scene.
I hear Kemper used a 12 sided die, and the rules specifically call for a 4 sided die when promoting your Delvian's in their Pa'ua.
: )
The redheads dead, died in a nuke attack on the Eidelon temple on Arnesk. The blue chick 'died' years ago, but being a 9th Level Pa'ua has its merits. Look for Zhaan to rise just as soon as Revlon develops blue paint that doesn't cause kidney and liver damage. The gray chick? Don't even think about tapping that ass, because when D'Argo comes back (#1 of Sci Fi - if you don't see a body chopped into little peices, they're not dead), he'll cleave your ass in two.
The series was put into syndication before SciFi was even a channel. USA Networks bought syndication rights from MGM. When Showtime cancelled, USA's parent company bought the rights, and Sci Fi begain airing episodes. Until a few years ago, you could still see very old reruns of SG1 on USA. Even now, Sci Fi and USA share rerun and syndication on some shows, including Xena, Hercules, Andromeda, and Beastmaster. They both are owned by the same parent company.
Commander John Crichton was not in the USAF. He was a scientist working on an IASA project. Think Pete Siebold with TierOne/SpaceShipOne.
In this last year, he has had three projects
GI Joe: Valor vs Venom
Miracle
Meltdown
They'll beat this horse until its dead. Then they'll beat it until it is a frothy pink and blue foam. Then, they'll bottle it and try to sell it to us again. Sci Fi KILLS good sci-fi. They kept playing musical airdates with Farscape, then dropped it because the ratings could no longer justify the expense. They did the same to Lexx, but the writers there pulled a trump card on SciFi and brought the story arc to completion before SciFi could utter the words "cancelled". Before too long, SciFi will be nothing but low cost creature features and cheap space alien horror flicks. Oh shit...too late.
You know, I get more sci-fi on the other 78 channels on my box in a given day than I get in two days of SciFi.
Granted, SG1 is played out, and I think it is truly time for a graceful transition either into a new mission and new cast, or into oblivion. But the mythology is still rich with variation. I'm actually impressed with what I've seen on Stargate Atlantis. As far as small screen sci fi, its the best we have going right now.
You're bitching because some obscure website which is overly fascinated with obscure technologies also happens to throw in the occasional obscure pop culture reference to an obscure science fiction show?
Maybe you'd be happier over at news.com.com.
They're already seen Fission. I say we give it to the french. If something catastrophic happens, nobody will feel bad about it. Well. Except the French.
..."meme".
The oil/automotive industry and "Bush's EPA" do not publish scientific journals, which goes immediately to the heart of the parent posters assertion that most journals won't even give dissenting opinion the time of day. Anyone who has been around 'scientists' knows that its not about the science. Its about the politics and the money.