As part of the pseudo-environmentalist lead scare campaign against nuclear power you always hear about things that will supposedly be radioactive for ONE MILLION years (thank you Dr. Evil).
Well, those ONE MILLION year radioactive elements won't power an RTG because they decay so slowly that the rate of heat production would hardly be measurable even with sensitive test equipment. You could use a lump of that stuff as a paper weight and as long as you didn't eat/drink/breath it then you would never have any negative health effects from it.
The real issue with radioactive material is from materials like cesium and strontium that are pretty radioactive and have mid-range half-lives of ~30 years or so. Not a real issue for long-term storage since they will be pretty much gone in 1000 years, but not something you want spread around the environment ala Chernobyl, which, BTW, is coming up on its first half-life anniversary for the nastier elements.
This not quite right. A half life of 1 million years is only ~10000 times longer than Pu-238, which glows red hot in air. So to measure heat production you could simply use a large quantity of long lived isotope, (say 100x as much) and insulate it better, such as by enclosing in Dewar flask.
Of course, for a space mission you'd want to minimize the weight.
A moveable panel, panel applets, desktop launchers, user control of virtual desktops, menu alternatives that would remove the need for the overview -- all of these could be added easily as options.
Options ?? You mean one cannot move the panel right now ? What were they thinking ?
I think it is safe to assume that they purposely bricked the rover (or test rover) before the mission. And made sure it played out as the GP stated. And that they did this many different ways.
Ideally - yes. In practice, they have limited funds and lots of deadlines.
If they had lots of time to debug it, there would be no need to upload new software.
Calling Stalin's government "Jewish" is a bit weird. I have really no idea as to what the ethnic background of the Soviet leaders, but they definitely weren't religiously Jewish. AFAIK, they were from a mixture of backgrounds, though I doubt that there were many Ukrainians among them.
Here's the basic story of the Great Depression, which is very similar to the story of the more recent financial crisis.
1. Times were good in the 1920's on Wall St. People could and did make good money trading stocks.
[..]
5. End result: Crash. And when one business crashes, their stock, which was considered good, is now worthless, so businesses holding their stock also crash, so it cascades through the system leaving things worse than if the Crimson Permanent Assurance had hit them.
Replace "stocks" with "mortgage backed securities", fast forward 70 years or so, and the same thing happened. It happens any time that a con man can successfully make worthless pieces of paper look like representations of valuable property. And yes, it could conceivably happen that the pieces of paper that say "One Dollar" on them will also become worthless - if it does, you want to have land and a team of people who will help you defend it.
It happens more frequently ! dot.com bubble of 2000, LTCM collapse, 1980s collapse, etc. Roughly every 5-7 years, with some collapses being larger than others.
Well we could, yeah... but what for? Other than bragging rights and planting the flag?
Mining for Helium-3 for the also underfunded, and therefor non-existent, fusion projects.
A smaller gravity well launchpad for said robotic probes.
The technological breakthroughs that would come with trying to sustain life long term in a harsh unforgiving environment.
I recently heard a very interesting presentation by a scientist working on fusion where he had shown the historical investment in fusion research and made a very good point that instead of saying "fusion is 25 years away" one should really be saying "fusion is $80 billion away".
Apparently this number has consistently come up in reviews of fusion programs, but the funding was being whittled away year after year.
You want your mirror large in order to resolve small angles and small objects. The smallest angle you can resolve is lambda/D where lambda is the wavelength of light you are using (400nm for near-UV blue) and D is the diameter of your mirror or lens.
So suppose you have satellite in 100km orbit around the moon with a 2.4meter aperture (like Hubble) using 400nm light. Then the smallest angle you can resolve is 0.034 arcseconds and you cannot resolve features smaller than 16mm. If you use red light (600nm) then you cannot resolve features smaller than an inch.
You are oversimplifying things. Yes, slow moving charged particles (such as electrons or Helium nuclei) can be easily shielded. However, fast moving particles are much harder to shield against as they create showers of new particles (of lower energy) upon collision.
The spectrum of these particles extends way up - scientists are busily observing particles with energies on EeV scale (roughly what a moving golfball has), though these are quite rare.
Neutral particles, like gamma rays, can only be shielded by a bulk material - the penetration depth depends on density.
In summary - being in space is kinda like being on a battlefield - if your general did not screw up the chance of being hit by an artillery shell is quite small. But this does not mean it cannot happen.
One other way to look at this is that if you try to maximize some function describing performance this decreases the uncertainty in function value (as the first derivative is 0) at the cost of increasing uncertainty in function parameters (i.e. everything else).
And unlike share price risk is good deal harder to quantify..
Pretty sure the article was auto-generated by a buzzwordifier:
Panguite (IMA 2010-057), (Ti4+,Sc,Al,Mg,Zr,Ca)1.8O3, is a new titania, occurring as fine-grained crystals with Ti-rich davisite in an ultra-refractory inclusion within an amoeboid olivine inclusion from the Allende CV3 carbonaceous chondrite.
Doesn't mainstream PC tech use the least abusive field-related babble when compared to medicine and legalese?
For once we have a line of scientific discussion and you are complaining ?
While this is also true, the current system is completely unsustainable unless the funding basically increases exponentially, which is never going to happen. The problem is that for each faculty (each lab), you typically have ~4 postdocs and ~4 PhD students at a time... so after 5 years, you've gone from needing 1 faculty position to 5. If they each get jobs, after another 5 years you're up to 25 positions... unless funding (and, equally as importantly, university positions/space) is going to increase exponentially, it eventually falls apart.
It's exactly the same training problem as other fields (law, medicine) in that you're constantly training more people than there are current positions... except that in those fields if you really can't find a position, you can go open your own practice. In biomedicine, that's nearly impossible - any serious research lab is going to require a significant amount of funding and resources that you basically can't get outside the university/grant system, and it's very difficult to do a biomedical startup without having a prototype already existing (since it's biology, and the failure rate is high simply because we don't understand enough about most systems yet to know what will work and what won't without actually testing it).
There is a flaw in your argument - the population of United States is growing much more slowly. So at some point everyone will be trained. Wouldn't that be nice ?
Why don't they call a 'radiation detector' by its name? It's a Geiger Counter. Way to make a name for something fall out of common usage...
There is not much description in the article, but I don't think it is a Geiger tube, as that requires high voltages and is fairly bulky. This is probably some sort of silicon detector.
And what he has is flawed as well. For example, he marked R as having issue with big data which is quite wrong - I routinely analyze multi-GB datasets in memory, and my databases go into TB.
Dude. That's not what people mean when they say big data. HP and Dell will both quite happily sell you machines with 2TB of main memory, and SGI will go to 16TB, and anything which can fit in memory on a single machine without custom hardware isn't big data. It's only big data once you get up to a few hundred terabytes.
Heh ! I am sure I can use R on such hardware, as long as I have access to it;)
I think the difference is when you use file formats that are flatter than databases and certain GUIs. In those cases, rather than taking the data as it needs it, it attempts to load all of it into memory and can max out the memory allowed to the process in 32 bit systems. But even then, there are ways around that through smart planning, variable use, and multiple data files for different variables so not all are in memory at once (of course databases implements all three at once internally).
This only happens if you issue a call like read.table("mytable.txt") - you can read the file piece by piece if you want to. Granted, this requires some work (unlike SAS), but in return you can do loops;)
Keep in mind that Universities, one of the biggest centers of innovation (often government funded), tend to have massive patent portfolios. They license them out to companies and that in turn funds more fundamental research^W^W^W bigger stadium. So if we killed the system completely we would also have to restructure how basic research is done... which would probably be a good, thing.. just pointing out that corporations are not the only ones utilizing this system.
Slashdot Mirror
And, if so, wouldn't it be easier to install Linux ?
As part of the pseudo-environmentalist lead scare campaign against nuclear power you always hear about things that will supposedly be radioactive for ONE MILLION years (thank you Dr. Evil).
Well, those ONE MILLION year radioactive elements won't power an RTG because they decay so slowly that the rate of heat production would hardly be measurable even with sensitive test equipment. You could use a lump of that stuff as a paper weight and as long as you didn't eat/drink/breath it then you would never have any negative health effects from it.
The real issue with radioactive material is from materials like cesium and strontium that are pretty radioactive and have mid-range half-lives of ~30 years or so. Not a real issue for long-term storage since they will be pretty much gone in 1000 years, but not something you want spread around the environment ala Chernobyl, which, BTW, is coming up on its first half-life anniversary for the nastier elements.
This not quite right. A half life of 1 million years is only ~10000 times longer than Pu-238, which glows red hot in air. So to measure heat production you could simply use a large quantity of long lived isotope, (say 100x as much) and insulate it better, such as by enclosing in Dewar flask.
Of course, for a space mission you'd want to minimize the weight.
Is a big button on the panel that says "DO NOT PANIC" and makes it work like Gnome 2.
FTFY
A moveable panel, panel applets, desktop launchers, user control of virtual desktops, menu alternatives that would remove the need for the overview -- all of these could be added easily as options.
Options ?? You mean one cannot move the panel right now ? What were they thinking ?
I think it is safe to assume that they purposely bricked the rover (or test rover) before the mission. And made sure it played out as the GP stated. And that they did this many different ways.
Ideally - yes. In practice, they have limited funds and lots of deadlines.
If they had lots of time to debug it, there would be no need to upload new software.
Calling Stalin's government "Jewish" is a bit weird. I have really no idea as to what the ethnic background of the Soviet leaders, but they definitely weren't religiously Jewish. AFAIK, they were from a mixture of backgrounds, though I doubt that there were many Ukrainians among them.
In fact, Stalin was strongly antisemitic..
Here's the basic story of the Great Depression, which is very similar to the story of the more recent financial crisis. 1. Times were good in the 1920's on Wall St. People could and did make good money trading stocks. [..] 5. End result: Crash. And when one business crashes, their stock, which was considered good, is now worthless, so businesses holding their stock also crash, so it cascades through the system leaving things worse than if the Crimson Permanent Assurance had hit them.
Replace "stocks" with "mortgage backed securities", fast forward 70 years or so, and the same thing happened. It happens any time that a con man can successfully make worthless pieces of paper look like representations of valuable property. And yes, it could conceivably happen that the pieces of paper that say "One Dollar" on them will also become worthless - if it does, you want to have land and a team of people who will help you defend it.
It happens more frequently ! dot.com bubble of 2000, LTCM collapse, 1980s collapse, etc. Roughly every 5-7 years, with some collapses being larger than others.
This is really just our economy's analog of Chinese ghost cities.
Well we could, yeah... but what for? Other than bragging rights and planting the flag?
Mining for Helium-3 for the also underfunded, and therefor non-existent, fusion projects.
A smaller gravity well launchpad for said robotic probes.
The technological breakthroughs that would come with trying to sustain life long term in a harsh unforgiving environment.
I recently heard a very interesting presentation by a scientist working on fusion where he had shown the historical investment in fusion research and made a very good point that instead of saying "fusion is 25 years away" one should really be saying "fusion is $80 billion away".
Apparently this number has consistently come up in reviews of fusion programs, but the funding was being whittled away year after year.
So suppose you have satellite in 100km orbit around the moon with a 2.4meter aperture (like Hubble) using 400nm light. Then the smallest angle you can resolve is 0.034 arcseconds and you cannot resolve features smaller than 16mm. If you use red light (600nm) then you cannot resolve features smaller than an inch.
The spectrum of these particles extends way up - scientists are busily observing particles with energies on EeV scale (roughly what a moving golfball has), though these are quite rare.
Neutral particles, like gamma rays, can only be shielded by a bulk material - the penetration depth depends on density.
Lastly, we have we have direct visual observation of cosmic rays by astronauts on Apollo missions and ISS.
In summary - being in space is kinda like being on a battlefield - if your general did not screw up the chance of being hit by an artillery shell is quite small. But this does not mean it cannot happen.
One other way to look at this is that if you try to maximize some function describing performance this decreases the uncertainty in function value (as the first derivative is 0) at the cost of increasing uncertainty in function parameters (i.e. everything else).
And unlike share price risk is good deal harder to quantify..
Another similar history lesson: demise of the Westinghouse company
Try Alt-F2 ;)
Hint =2+3 starts a calculator that knows units and other extras
All *.gsfc.nasa.gov sites I tried to access are down - Fermi data, some catalogs, etc.
Do you even know who Mark Cuban is?
I looked up his entry on Wikipedia, which is why I mentioned batch files and not Visual Basic ;)
Pretty sure the article was auto-generated by a buzzwordifier:
Panguite (IMA 2010-057), (Ti4+,Sc,Al,Mg,Zr,Ca)1.8O3, is a new titania, occurring as fine-grained crystals with Ti-rich davisite in an ultra-refractory inclusion within an amoeboid olivine inclusion from the Allende CV3 carbonaceous chondrite.
Doesn't mainstream PC tech use the least abusive field-related babble when compared to medicine and legalese?
For once we have a line of scientific discussion and you are complaining ?
This is insulting to hackers.
What do you expect ? The guy says he "wrote software for 8 years". This probably means Quick Basic and batch files.
define 'normal' ? Memory access was GPU-like retarded. It reminded me of the cell....
What do you mean ? The instruction set manual gives not hints of this. It even has a scatter/gather instruction.
It will make it possible to execute 10^18 instructions per second.
While this is also true, the current system is completely unsustainable unless the funding basically increases exponentially, which is never going to happen. The problem is that for each faculty (each lab), you typically have ~4 postdocs and ~4 PhD students at a time... so after 5 years, you've gone from needing 1 faculty position to 5. If they each get jobs, after another 5 years you're up to 25 positions... unless funding (and, equally as importantly, university positions/space) is going to increase exponentially, it eventually falls apart.
It's exactly the same training problem as other fields (law, medicine) in that you're constantly training more people than there are current positions... except that in those fields if you really can't find a position, you can go open your own practice. In biomedicine, that's nearly impossible - any serious research lab is going to require a significant amount of funding and resources that you basically can't get outside the university/grant system, and it's very difficult to do a biomedical startup without having a prototype already existing (since it's biology, and the failure rate is high simply because we don't understand enough about most systems yet to know what will work and what won't without actually testing it).
There is a flaw in your argument - the population of United States is growing much more slowly. So at some point everyone will be trained. Wouldn't that be nice ?
Why don't they call a 'radiation detector' by its name? It's a Geiger Counter. Way to make a name for something fall out of common usage...
There is not much description in the article, but I don't think it is a Geiger tube, as that requires high voltages and is fairly bulky. This is probably some sort of silicon detector.
And what he has is flawed as well. For example, he marked R as having issue with big data which is quite wrong - I routinely analyze multi-GB datasets in memory, and my databases go into TB.
Dude. That's not what people mean when they say big data. HP and Dell will both quite happily sell you machines with 2TB of main memory, and SGI will go to 16TB, and anything which can fit in memory on a single machine without custom hardware isn't big data. It's only big data once you get up to a few hundred terabytes.
Heh ! I am sure I can use R on such hardware, as long as I have access to it ;)
I think the difference is when you use file formats that are flatter than databases and certain GUIs. In those cases, rather than taking the data as it needs it, it attempts to load all of it into memory and can max out the memory allowed to the process in 32 bit systems. But even then, there are ways around that through smart planning, variable use, and multiple data files for different variables so not all are in memory at once (of course databases implements all three at once internally).
This only happens if you issue a call like read.table("mytable.txt") - you can read the file piece by piece if you want to. Granted, this requires some work (unlike SAS), but in return you can do loops ;)
Didn't know about this one - thanks !
Keep in mind that Universities, one of the biggest centers of innovation (often government funded), tend to have massive patent portfolios. They license them out to companies and that in turn funds more fundamental research^W^W^W bigger stadium. So if we killed the system completely we would also have to restructure how basic research is done... which would probably be a good, thing.. just pointing out that corporations are not the only ones utilizing this system.
FTFY. Sorry..