From my reading of this, the 747's are designed to take out the missles on the way up during the "boost phase", a far easier targeting problem to solve than during the free-flight phase which occurs after the warhead has separated from the rocket and is hidden in a sea of decoys and countermeasures. During the boost phase the rocket is a huge target (take your pick: radar, infrared, etc.) the only problem is the very narrow time window. This means you have to be close to the launch site to have a prayer of taking it out. This is possible if the threat comes from island countries like North Korea, but not for launch sites protected by hundreds of miles of enemy territory.
It looks to me like the 747 is designed to deal with the getting close enough problem but as others in this thread have mentioned, how do you get a 747 close enough without making all passenger 747's "clear and present dangers" to the "rogue" nation who would be crazy enough to launch a nuclear missle at the US.
But don't get me started on the rogue nation fallacy. Can anyone give even one example of a similarly irrational act ever undertaken by such a nation (Iran, North Korea, Iraq, or whoever else is tabbed presently). They may not have the same values, but why would they launch an easily tracked missle at the US when it would be far easier to smuggle in one across one of the borders?
I had this problem as well. I installed the plugin, and didn't seem to be aware that it was installed. However, after a reboot, it seemed to work fine. I'm still waiting for this "reboot for full installation" feature from Linux. Maybe in the 2.4 kernel?
Recently, SETI@HOME has received much attention for their distributed project, which allows non-astronomers to participate in the search for ET. Can you think of any other astronomy projects that could benefit from this approach utilizing the data from these new telescopes?
I have been a big fan of Google since they first came out and have been consistently impressed, not only for the quality of results but for their clean interface. I hope they keep it that way.
My favorite searches: Out of curiosity, I typed in Onion, and the top site was "The Onion- America's finest news source". My all time favorite happened the other day when I was searching for information of the statistics program "R". I typed in R, and the R FAQ was number 4 on the list! Rock on guys!
"He looks like he got in a fight with the 70's and got his ass kicked" -Sherman Alexie
It looks like the Slashdot effect has begun already. No luck with the ftp site, which is o.k. because it's always annoying to sort out which files are really necessary. The Helix-Code guys have done a great job repackaging the installation process, but it's only available on a few distributions so far.
After loading up Helix-Code, I get the message:
"Temporarily off-line for Gnome 1.2. Please try again around 9 A.M. EDT".
I see a trend here. Last year pictures of a North Korean missle launch site were commissioned and taken by a private satellite, revealing a rather unimpressive facility not nearly matching the threat advertised by the Pentagon. Then it was pictures of Area 51 by a Russian satellite released to the public. Now we have the GPS degradation turned off.
Let's be honest here. It was only a matter of time. The longer restrictions were in place, the more likely it is that private or non-U.S. satellites would walk right on by, rendering the degradation irrelevant. Just like the restrictions on what satellite pictures U.S. satellites are allowed to take, they become pointless as more private and foreign instruments proliferate.
This is a good thing, IMO. It's becoming harder for governments to hide information from their citizens. When you read some of the now released transcripts on how the CIA manipulated the media in Iran and Vietnam and countless other hotspots how can you not have positive feelings on these developments.
I would like to nominate David Brin for a Slashdot interview, given all of the recent transparency and privacy stories that have come up lately.
I, for one, think mozilla is not as far away as some are suggesting. Lately I have, almost unconsciously, been loading up mozilla more often than netscape 4.7. It's as fast or faster and the gecko rendering engine allows me to get some content before a page is fully loaded. At work with windows it crashes *much* less often; I almost never boot up netscape there. I've seen supposedly production programs that are buggier than mozilla.
Try a nightly build! They are constantly improving.
I seem to remember an article in the New York Times a few weeks ago on some images this satellite took of the North Koreanmissle base (responsible for the launch of a wayward test launch that was sighted formerly sighted over Japan,) under private direction. What seemed a simple diversion became a coup d'etat, as the US had formerly played up the importance and dangerousness of this missle site as "severe." The pictures, which were anlyzed by the American Federation of Scientists (?), revealed a launch base so dilapidated, it was missing only a giant rubber band with which to complete missions; point being: when the information and capabilities reside solely in the hands of the few and powerful, the interpretation is solely theirs also. For too long we have been reliant on the propaganda offered to play up American social fears to the monetary benefit of big government. Next stop, perhaps more pertinent? Nuclear test sites in India and Pakistan might be worth a penny.
This is a funny read! Perhaps it should be offered up with the humor icon.
My favorite bits:
"72% (of Americans) would oppose government regulations that would result in higher prices."
"A similar majority (59%)say that increase (sic) regulation and litigation will have a negative effect on high technology industry's ability to innovate and bring new products to the marketplace."
Shocking!
In an unrelated survey released today 98% of Americans agreed that rape is "A bad thing".
I don't agree with the premise that closed source commercial products have innovative GUI's. Compare the GUI of Word to WordPerfect and you'll notice almost no difference between the two. To make a blanket generalization, I think the average open source user is much more open to new interface ideas. I think that if success and marketshare are the only concerns, writers of OS software might be advised to copy the GUI's of closed source programs as closely as possible, change the names of a few of the buttons, add some color and send it out. Isn't that what MSFT did with IE, after all?
I hate to be this cynical, but, for the average user, the barrier to trying something new seems to be pretty low.
Despite its apparent unbound speculation, I can't help but be suprised at how much this article is rooted in a short sighted anthropocentric world model. There is an obvious alternative to computers and humans becoming ever more entwined, namely that humans and computers will diverge, and rapidly.
Assuming computers ever do become as intelligent, and achieve "consciousness" (whatever that means), what possible use are they going to have for us? All of these Kurzweil's ideas are rooted in the naive view that these new machine intelligences, having reached and superceded human limits, would not give a damn about their own desires and continue to selflessly serve their ever slower and more dense creators. How much more likely is it that we would instead be left to the past, our day in the sun over.
Much as I admire Asimov's robot speculations, I think stories like the latest Robin Williams vehicle where a robot embarks on a 200 year journey to become more human are ludicrous. Why bother when you can upgrade beyond all that nonsense!? (With all due respect, because I realize they are stories, after all).
Alas, I think a "Matrix" scenario is more likely than the speculations of Kurzweil.
Picture comparisons of the face on Mars as seen by Viking and the Mars Surveyor can be found referenced on their main page (I'm too lazy to look up the URL, but it's easy to find with google). I also found the smiley face in there somewhere.
The pseudo three dimensional Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter maps are an amazing diversion if you have the time to check them out. A great success to balance a few of the failures.
A more substantial and well argued discussion on one of these "bugs", Deinococcus radiodurans, appeared in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago (sorry, no reference). The article reported on the full genetic sequencing of this rather amazing creature. The researchers were trying to find out how this bacteria could repair its chromosomes after they were blasted into hundreds of pieces by over 1.5 million rads of radiation (500 rads is lethal for humans). Though it wasn't mentioned in the Times article, I remember joking to my wife about space-bugs. It's a pretty obvious speculation, and I doubt if the researchers mentioned in Wired were the first to present this thought. It's pretty strange: here are bacteria that seem perfectly evolved for space travel! Why would this ability have evolved on earth, when no environment here comes close to requiring this amount of radiation resistance? The researchers in the Times (my feeling is that this is probably the majority view among researchers) suggest that the same qualities required to survive extreme radiation would be useful to survive extreme dessication which would be useful in an earthly environment. The surprising radiation resistance is just a unintended consequence.
For the curious, I found a graphical view of the sequence of Deinoccocus Radiodurans.
Any evidence of stories being squelched?
on
AOL Nation
·
· Score: 2
I have to admit the continuuing towards larger and larger media conglomerates concerns me, though I would like to see some specific evidence showing homogenization of news. Are there documented examples of stories being ignored or squelched? Echelon comes to mind. Any others? A counter argument proposed by NPR last night suggested that, since these companies were *so* large and spread out, they were forced to be diverse and open in coverage of news.
I have a number of friends and family who use (shudder) Hotmail and have asked about alternatives. I have a feeling services of this ilk are all pretty much the same, but if anyone has any suggestions to pass along, they would be appreciated.
A common thread in discussions like this one seems to be that the grand old institutionalized scientists have a vested interest in protecting the status quo and the sanctity of the theories they have built their careers around. And along comes some upstart threatening to tear down their favorite paradigms. While there is some rigidity that naturally comes when working under a particular worldview for so long, I don't think the perception of crusty scientists unwilling to accept new ideas is true at all.
I saw a lecture not too long ago in which a Los Alamos physicist presented some work they had done with the Pioneer spacecraft now on the outskirts of the Solar System. Basically they were pinging it with radio signals, waiting for the return and thus measureing the spacecrafts acceleration and trying to match it with the gravitational acceleration due to the sun, other planets, etc. They found a systematic error that could not be accounted for. His conclusion: it's probably something prosaic that they hadn't thought of yet. In the followup question and answer many possible solutions were proposed, all of which had been checked out and discarded as possibilities. I made an interesting sociological observation. Every scientist in the room was hoping the solution to this dilemma was new physics. This despite the fact that General Relativity is one of the most tested and established theories out there. Of course maybe Mr. Mills has explained these results in his papers.
It's great to see the Earth Observing System shifting into gear, particularly after such a long history of compromises and budget cuts. It's worth a search through the archives of
Bob Park's WN page at the American Physical Society (suggested keywords: eos earth observing space station) to see how often the budget of the EOS has been threatened, and occasionally gutted to make up for overruns in the International Space Station account. The launching of Terra (assuming it has lifted off) is bittersweet, though definitely a step in the right direction. I only wish solid science was regarded with even half the importance as good PR in congress. Maybe we would be farther along in understanding global warming and other serious concerns.
Adding a sense of urgency to these missions, the NY Times has an
article today claiming 1999 will join 1998 as the one of the two hottest years on record.
It is quite interesting how this long and rancourous debate over the Hubble constant highlights the still non-zero tendency of ideology to intrude into science. For many years their were two main camps of astronomers working on this problem. One camp invariably found a value of around 50 km/s/Mpc while the other group always seemed to come up with 100 km/s/Mpc. The real howler was in the uncertainties which were usually quoted as +/- 5 or so. It doesn't take a supergenius to realize that something was not quite right here. Thankfully, this somewhat embarrassing rift in astronomy history appears to be closing due to the featured work of a third group headed by Wendy Freedman. Eventually science self-corrects for ideology, and therein lies the secret for its progress.
Probably the most amusing aspect of this history is that for all these years the number quoted in the textbooks was usually 75km/s/Mpc. Not because a large number of measurements yielded this value, but because it represented a compromise between the 50 and 100 camps. Turns out that number wasn't far off after all!
At the risk of overgeneralizing from my limited experience, I think we can expect to see this "creep" accelerate to a sprint, at least in some places.
I work in a modestly sized Astronomy department and have noticed an increasing Linux buzz around the donut pile. Not that everybody isn't already running Linux on their boxes at home, but it is increasingly seen as an attractive alternative to Sun and HP workstations in the office. I wonder if workstations for scientists will soon disappear in favor of PC's running Linux. The image reduction software packages have all been ported, and everyone is completely comfortable with UNIX, so their really is no barrier to the transition. Particularly when, as one professor told me, you can easily buy 5 completely decked out PC/Linux systems for the cost of a workstation. How hard is that computation?
Slashdot Mirror
From my reading of this, the 747's are designed to take out the missles on the way up during the "boost phase", a far easier targeting problem to solve than during the free-flight phase which occurs after the warhead has separated from the rocket and is hidden in a sea of decoys and countermeasures. During the boost phase the rocket is a huge target (take your pick: radar, infrared, etc.) the only problem is the very narrow time window. This means you have to be close to the launch site to have a prayer of taking it out. This is possible if the threat comes from island countries like North Korea, but not for launch sites protected by hundreds of miles of enemy territory.
It looks to me like the 747 is designed to deal with the getting close enough problem but as others in this thread have mentioned, how do you get a 747 close enough without making all passenger 747's "clear and present dangers" to the "rogue" nation who would be crazy enough to launch a nuclear missle at the US.
But don't get me started on the rogue nation fallacy. Can anyone give even one example of a similarly irrational act ever undertaken by such a nation (Iran, North Korea, Iraq, or whoever else is tabbed presently). They may not have the same values, but why would they launch an easily tracked missle at the US when it would be far easier to smuggle in one across one of the borders?
I had this problem as well. I installed the plugin, and didn't seem to be aware that it was installed. However, after a reboot, it seemed to work fine. I'm still waiting for this "reboot for full installation" feature from Linux. Maybe in the 2.4 kernel?
Recently, SETI@HOME has received much attention for their distributed project, which allows non-astronomers to participate in the search for ET. Can you think of any other astronomy projects that could benefit from this approach utilizing the data from these new telescopes?
I have been a big fan of Google since they first came out and have been consistently impressed, not only for the quality of results but for their clean interface. I hope they keep it that way.
My favorite searches: Out of curiosity, I typed in Onion, and the top site was "The Onion- America's finest news source". My all time favorite happened the other day when I was searching for information of the statistics program "R". I typed in R, and the R FAQ was number 4 on the list! Rock on guys!
"He looks like he got in a fight with the 70's and got his ass kicked"
-Sherman Alexie
It looks like the Slashdot effect has begun already. No luck with the ftp site, which is o.k. because it's always annoying to sort out which files are really necessary. The Helix-Code guys have done a great job repackaging the installation process, but it's only available on a few distributions so far.
After loading up Helix-Code, I get the message:
"Temporarily off-line for Gnome 1.2. Please try again around 9 A.M. EDT".
Guess I'll go make some coffee.
When I say "Darling, guess what! Kernel 2.2.15 was just released hours ago and here we are still running 2.2.14!"
How many people have upgraded software on the sole basis that the new version includes Hungarian support (Besides the Hungarians out there)?
I see a trend here. Last year pictures of a North Korean missle launch site were commissioned and taken by a private satellite, revealing a rather unimpressive facility not nearly matching the threat advertised by the Pentagon. Then it was pictures of Area 51 by a Russian satellite released to the public. Now we have the GPS degradation turned off.
Let's be honest here. It was only a matter of time. The longer restrictions were in place, the more likely it is that private or non-U.S. satellites would walk right on by, rendering the degradation irrelevant. Just like the restrictions on what satellite pictures U.S. satellites are allowed to take, they become pointless as more private and foreign instruments proliferate.
This is a good thing, IMO. It's becoming harder for governments to hide information from their citizens. When you read some of the now released transcripts on how the CIA manipulated the media in Iran and Vietnam and countless other hotspots how can you not have positive feelings on these developments.
I would like to nominate David Brin for a Slashdot interview, given all of the recent transparency and privacy stories that have come up lately.
I, for one, think mozilla is not as far away as some are suggesting. Lately I have, almost unconsciously, been loading up mozilla more often than netscape 4.7. It's as fast or faster and the gecko rendering engine allows me to get some content before a page is fully loaded. At work with windows it crashes *much* less often; I almost never boot up netscape there. I've seen supposedly production programs that are buggier than mozilla.
Try a nightly build! They are constantly improving.
I seem to remember an article in the New York Times a few weeks ago on some images this satellite took of the North Koreanmissle base (responsible for the launch of a wayward test launch that was sighted formerly sighted over Japan,) under private direction. What seemed a simple diversion became a coup d'etat, as the US had formerly played up the importance and dangerousness of this missle site as "severe." The pictures, which were anlyzed by the American Federation of Scientists (?), revealed a launch base so dilapidated, it was missing only a giant rubber band with which to complete missions; point being: when the information and capabilities reside solely in the hands of the few and powerful, the interpretation is solely theirs also. For too long we have been reliant on the propaganda offered to play up American social fears to the monetary benefit of big government. Next stop, perhaps more pertinent? Nuclear test sites in India and Pakistan might be worth a penny.
This is a funny read! Perhaps it should be offered up with the humor icon.
My favorite bits:
"72% (of Americans) would oppose government regulations that would result in higher prices."
"A similar majority (59%)say that increase (sic) regulation and litigation will have a negative effect on high technology industry's ability to innovate and bring new products to the marketplace."
Shocking!
In an unrelated survey released today 98% of Americans agreed that rape is "A bad thing".
At least try to disguise the propaganda a little.
I don't agree with the premise that closed source commercial products have innovative GUI's. Compare the GUI of Word to WordPerfect and you'll notice almost no difference between the two. To make a blanket generalization, I think the average open source user is much more open to new interface ideas. I think that if success and marketshare are the only concerns, writers of OS software might be advised to copy the GUI's of closed source programs as closely as possible, change the names of a few of the buttons, add some color and send it out. Isn't that what MSFT did with IE, after all?
I hate to be this cynical, but, for the average user, the barrier to trying something new seems to be pretty low.
Despite its apparent unbound speculation, I can't help but be suprised at how much this article is rooted in a short sighted anthropocentric world model. There is an obvious alternative to computers and humans becoming ever more entwined, namely that humans and computers will diverge, and rapidly.
Assuming computers ever do become as intelligent, and achieve "consciousness" (whatever that means), what possible use are they going to have for us? All of these Kurzweil's ideas are rooted in the naive view that these new machine intelligences, having reached and superceded human limits, would not give a damn about their own desires and continue to selflessly serve their ever slower and more dense creators. How much more likely is it that we would instead be left to the past, our day in the sun over.
Much as I admire Asimov's robot speculations, I think stories like the latest Robin Williams vehicle where a robot embarks on a 200 year journey to become more human are ludicrous. Why bother when you can upgrade beyond all that nonsense!? (With all due respect, because I realize they are stories, after all).
Alas, I think a "Matrix" scenario is more likely than the speculations of Kurzweil.
Mmmmmmm..... Arcane technical settings
Picture comparisons of the face on Mars as seen by Viking and the Mars Surveyor can be found referenced on their main page (I'm too lazy to look up the URL, but it's easy to find with google). I also found the smiley face in there somewhere.
The pseudo three dimensional Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter maps are an amazing diversion if you have the time to check them out. A great success to balance a few of the failures.
If it's not too late to jump in, I think my favorite moment comes in the Bart discovers a comet episode:
Pricipal Skinner:
"Ah, science... All the joy of sitting still, writing down numbers and paying attention"
I use that one all the time.
First, a caveat. I'm no biologist.
A more substantial and well argued discussion on one of these "bugs", Deinococcus radiodurans, appeared in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago (sorry, no reference). The article reported on the full genetic sequencing of this rather amazing creature. The researchers were trying to find out how this bacteria could repair its chromosomes after they were blasted into hundreds of pieces by over 1.5 million rads of radiation
(500 rads is lethal for humans). Though it wasn't mentioned in the Times article, I remember joking to my wife about space-bugs. It's a pretty obvious speculation, and I doubt if the researchers mentioned in Wired were the first to present this thought. It's pretty strange: here are bacteria that seem perfectly evolved for space travel! Why would this ability have evolved on earth, when no environment here comes close to requiring this amount of radiation resistance? The researchers in the Times (my feeling is that this is probably the majority view among researchers) suggest that the same qualities required to survive extreme radiation would be useful to survive extreme dessication which would be useful in an earthly environment. The surprising radiation resistance is just a unintended consequence.
For the curious, I found a graphical view of the sequence of Deinoccocus Radiodurans.
I have to admit the continuuing towards larger and larger media conglomerates concerns me, though I would like to see some specific evidence showing homogenization of news. Are there documented examples of stories being ignored or squelched? Echelon comes to mind. Any others? A counter argument proposed by NPR last night suggested that, since these companies were *so* large and spread out, they were forced to be diverse and open in coverage of news.
I have a number of friends and family who use (shudder) Hotmail and have asked about alternatives. I have a feeling services of this ilk are all pretty much the same, but if anyone has any suggestions to pass along, they would be appreciated.
A common thread in discussions like this one seems to be that the grand old institutionalized scientists have a vested interest in protecting the status quo and the sanctity of the theories they have built their careers around. And along comes some upstart threatening to tear down their favorite paradigms. While there is some rigidity that naturally comes when working under a particular worldview for so long, I don't think the perception of crusty scientists unwilling to accept new ideas is true at all.
I saw a lecture not too long ago in which a Los Alamos physicist presented some work they had done with the Pioneer spacecraft now on the outskirts of the Solar System. Basically they were pinging it with radio signals, waiting for the return and thus measureing the spacecrafts acceleration and trying to match it with the gravitational acceleration due to the sun, other planets, etc. They found a systematic error that could not be accounted for. His conclusion: it's probably something prosaic that they hadn't thought of yet. In the followup question and answer many possible solutions were proposed, all of which had been checked out and discarded as possibilities. I made an interesting sociological observation. Every scientist in the room was hoping the solution to this dilemma was new physics. This despite the fact that General Relativity is one of the most tested and established theories out there. Of course maybe Mr. Mills has explained these results in his papers.
Bob Park's WN page at the American Physical Society (suggested keywords: eos earth observing space station) to see how often the budget of the EOS has been threatened, and occasionally gutted to make up for overruns in the International Space Station account. The launching of Terra (assuming it has lifted off) is bittersweet, though definitely a step in the right direction. I only wish solid science was regarded with even half the importance as good PR in congress. Maybe we would be farther along in understanding global warming and other serious concerns.
Adding a sense of urgency to these missions, the NY Times has an
article today claiming 1999 will join 1998 as the one of the two hottest years on record.
It is quite interesting how this long and rancourous debate over the Hubble constant highlights the still non-zero tendency of ideology to intrude into science. For many years their were two main camps of astronomers working on this problem. One camp invariably found a value of around 50 km/s/Mpc while the other group always seemed to come up with 100 km/s/Mpc. The real howler was in the uncertainties which were usually quoted as +/- 5 or so. It doesn't take a supergenius to realize that something was not quite right here. Thankfully, this somewhat embarrassing rift in astronomy history appears to be closing due to the featured work of a third group headed by Wendy Freedman. Eventually science self-corrects for ideology, and therein lies the secret for its progress.
Probably the most amusing aspect of this history is that for all these years the number quoted in the textbooks was usually 75km/s/Mpc. Not because a large number of measurements yielded this value, but because it represented a compromise between the 50 and 100 camps. Turns out that number wasn't far off after all!
At the risk of overgeneralizing from my limited
experience, I think we can expect to see this "creep" accelerate to a sprint, at least in some places.
I work in a modestly sized Astronomy department and have noticed an increasing Linux buzz around the donut pile. Not that everybody isn't already running Linux on their boxes at home, but it is increasingly seen as an attractive alternative to Sun and HP workstations in the office. I wonder if workstations for scientists will soon disappear in favor of PC's running Linux. The image reduction software packages have all been ported, and everyone is completely comfortable with UNIX, so their really is no barrier to the transition. Particularly when, as one professor told me, you can easily buy 5 completely decked out PC/Linux systems for the cost of a workstation. How hard is that computation?