When can we get started on all of the million or so projects that somebody would call "progress", but not such that they'd choose to pay for it?
Well, the CA high-speed rail project is being funded as it is built -- though some is funded by bonds, there's no "blank check" or unlimited deficit spending. So I'm not sure the above comment is really relevant.
HSR safety document. AFAIK, true grade separation isn't fully funded. The quad gates described in the PDF are said to reduce "collisions" 98%, but I'm inferring that as vehicle collisions. They don't look like they would do much for pedestrians.
Fair enough: "In the Central Valley, where trains will be capable of running at speeds in excess of 200 miles per hour, the high-speed rail system is being built fully grade separated." But in the denser regions (which have more people, albeit lower running speeds) it looks like grade separation will not be complete, at least in the regions with blended service. I find that pretty disappointing -- but thanks for pointing it out.
Amtrak and buses take 7+ hours to make the trip that high-speed rail will do in 3.
As for airports: the planes pollute more, the trains are more comfortable, and the train stations are located where people are (in downtowns) instead of on the outskirts of town.
Your "gut feeling" that this project is a debacle does not make it so.
In fact, years of studies by many different groups that all suggest the project will be feasible and useful might incline one toward the opposite conclusion.
Because Amtrak is a corporate welfare basket case that will never come close to justifying itself economically.
... except for the Northeast Corridor, which shows that high speeds and large populations make it economically effective -- just as California will.
We have aircraft now.
When San Francisco and Los Angeles build airports in their downtown cores, come back and talk to us. The trip times will be comparable and the rail journey will be more comfortable by far.
If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.
... and this writer goes "off the rails" yet again
Certainly, few people drove on the first five miles of controlled-access highway --- but the fully built-out Interstate system is used by many millions. To describe the entire project as only the Central Valley segment is foolish at best and malevolent at worst.
It's not the worst idea --- but the track is exceedingly curvy, speeds could never be very high, and in the end it wouldn't be much cheaper (if at all) than building a new line. Plus the large (if often ignored!) population centers in the Central Valley would be entirely bypassed by a coastal route, relegating them even more to backwater status. Further more the coastal route is anyway owned and mainly run my freight rail, who would fight to the death against any encroachment. The current HSR project builds an entirely separate and publicly-owned right-of-way with no grade crossings, for maximum speed, access to population centers, and ultimate public benefit.
The above post suggests that money should instead be spend on Bay Area or Southern California transit projects, but this is a false dichotomy (trichotomy?) -- the public benefits from spending money on all three of these areas (North, South, and HSR to connect them). In the North: BART is extending south from Fremont to San Jose (coming end of 2017!), Caltrain is electrifying to boost capacity and speed, giving frequent, fully electrified, and high-capacity transit all around the Bay. In the South, Los Angeles Metro now has more miles of public rail transport than any other region: lines are being build through downtown, to the airport, through the heart of the Wilshire corridor, and to East LA and the San Gabriel Valley. High speed rail will tie these two great regions even closer together, compensate for our overcrowded highways and airports, and benefit the entire state.
The above post suggests that "Grade separation is key" --- the project described will be entirely grade-separated, reducing pedestrian deaths, drivers' waiting time at crossings, and boosting the system's speed.
The above post suggests that California won't match Amtrak's Eastern corridor which has "curvey rights-of-way," --- but the project described here is acquiring property to build long, straight segments to achieve much higher speed's than the Eastern Acela trains.
The above post suggests we build Hyperloop instead --- but this invokes a technology completely untested at these scales, wheras the project described here uses proven technology.
Finally, the above post suggests an "electrified self-driving autobahn".... at which point I lost any remaining faith in the writer's ability for rational thought.
I am shocked that by LA Times writer Ralph Vartabedian's article on the supposed risk and overruns to California's ongoing high-speed rail (HSR) effort. Vartabedian is a known opponent of HSR whose every article drips with antagonism against this project, as a quick review of his past articles will clearly show. Anyone who reads the purported analysis (in fact a single Powerpoint file, taken out of context) will quickly see that the article's claims are not justified -- for example, a *possible* $3B overrun (really less, since this compares against obsolete estimates) does not equal a 50% budget problem for a project of this size. The entire state stands to benefit immensely from this project, which will connect BART, Caltrain, and VTA users in the North with Metro, Metrolink, and Amtrak users in the South --- and connect both to the isolated, ignored, economically-depressed Central Valley. Californians, and all who believe in progress, should embrace this transformative project and reject the uniformed mudslinging by the Vartabedians of the world.
Small, red dwarf stars are "that way" merely because they have lower mass. So there's nothing systematically different about the amount of heavy elements in them, relative to Sun-like stars. In fact, our study said nothing at all about the likelihood of these planets to host life -- our knowledge of the requirements for that are slim enough, and our understanding of these new planets still too shallow, to say anything definitively about life on these planets.
Also, so far there is no clear sign that the occurrence of planetary systems around these small, red stars correlates with the heavy element fraction of the star -- but it's a field of active research that our team is looking into.
Indeed -- but what we didn't know about planets back in the MoO era could fill a lot of modern exoplanet textbooks. Nonetheless, I'm sure all my hours of MoO-playing as a child (and after) helped contribute to me writing this big paper.
Good question! Atmospheric scientists aren't actually sure yet whether brown dwarfs should have "bands" like we see on Jupiter and other Solar system gas giants (this was discussed at a meeting in Washington, D.C. Jan 2014) -- and our mapping data wasn't quite sensitive enough to definitively answer that question. (We're less sensitive to axisymmetric features than we are to longitudinal variations). The vertical "stretching" of the map's features toward the poles is an unavoidable artifact of our analysis technique. Cloud patterns may be less elongated than they appear!
Hubble has better resolution at visible wavelengths, but remember we're seeing the planet's thermal radiation and not reflected (visible) light -- so the planet is over 10 times fainter in the visible than at at infrared wavelengths (Figure 6 in the paper). Hubble can also see into the infrared, but because it is smaller than the largest ground-based telescopes Hubble does not offer the best resolution in the infrared.
From Sen. Feinstein (D-CA): "Currently, S. 773 is awaiting action in the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation and is currently undergoing some major revisions." If this information is still current, anyone concerned with this issue should contact the appropriate members of the committee.
Many professional-style maps in the USA -- e.g. quad sheets, parcel/tract maps, etc. -- will have survey markers indicated. Ideally these would be set benchmark disks with longitude/latitude noted. Many maps also mark boundaries of townships, sections, and half- and quarter-sections, locations of which should be available from the local municipal authorities.
These sort of well-defined points are probably your best bet for empirical location, but if your maps are 100 years old the coordinates may not be precise enough for digital overlays. In the end, you may well be forced to manually align your maps with something more modern.
Why not let your students choose some/all of the targets, subject to final vetting (or pre-screening) by you? In this way they gain a feeling of ownership over the process and generally become more invested in the subject matter. You could even point them to Stellarium for free home planetarium software to plan their observations.
Whatever you decide to observe, your students will get more out of it if they are actively involved -- i.e., no passive observing. If you have several nights, you could look at Jupiter each night and have them sketch the arrangement of the moons (c.f. Galilei 1610). If you have a solar filter, you could do the same thing with sunspots (if any are visible). Venus, Mars, or Saturn's rings may be attractive targets, depending on what you want to do with the observations.
Finally, there are additional astronomy education resources at the Astronomy Education Review, a free online journal.
The name of the telescope is the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), as is made clear here on AMEC's page. The main public page for the project is here. In addition to AMEC, the company mentioned in the article, TMT is also a collaboration of the University of California, CalTech, and many others.
Any hardware uses software...
on
Taming the Web
·
· Score: 1
In particular, I have a problem with section 3 of the article, which states at one point that
"it's also possible to build such controls into hardware itself, and there are technical means available today to make hardware controls so difficult to crack that it will not be practical to even try."
It seems that the author makes a critical error at this point: true, any electronic system can have hardware that has been designed to prevent copyright infringement; for example, a hard drive designed to allow only MP3-like music files from a certain region to be played. But even if something like this eventually comes to pass, it seems obvious that "Myth #3" will come into play again: someone would inevitably code up a program designed to convert from one type of file to the other, in effect removing any extant copy protection.
Ultimately, the Internet is designed to transfer data. This alone ensures the continued existence of file-swapping programs. Unless the nature of the Web changes drastically, information (and hence files of _any_ sort) can and _will_ be transfered by people.
The fact that the link to the third page of the article does not work does nothing to raise my opinion of the article;)
Slashdot Mirror
My go-to list, in priority order:
Web Browser: Vivaldi, Firefox, Chrome
Email Client: Thunderbird!
Terminal: Terminal, xterm
IDE: meh
File manager: any
Basic Text Editor: emacs, vi
IRC/Messaging Client: meh
PDF Reader: evince, okular
Office Suite: LibreOffice!
Calendar: Thunderbird/Lightning
Video Player: VLC
Music Player: VLC
Photo Viewer: meh
Screen recording: meh
LAX is right on the coast, as far from the city center as one can get. It's a half-hour ride through traffic to downtown.
SFO is way down in the southern extremity of San Francisco. It's a half-hour BART ride to downtown.
SJC has much smaller capacity than those, but I'll grant that it's closer to downtown.
SAN and SNA won't be reached by high-speed rail in the first phase;
When can we get started on all of the million or so projects that somebody would call "progress", but not such that they'd choose to pay for it?
Well, the CA high-speed rail project is being funded as it is built -- though some is funded by bonds, there's no "blank check" or unlimited deficit spending. So I'm not sure the above comment is really relevant.
HSR safety document. AFAIK, true grade separation isn't fully funded. The quad gates described in the PDF are said to reduce "collisions" 98%, but I'm inferring that as vehicle collisions. They don't look like they would do much for pedestrians.
Fair enough: "In the Central Valley, where trains will be capable of running at speeds in excess of 200 miles per hour, the high-speed rail system is being built fully grade separated." But in the denser regions (which have more people, albeit lower running speeds) it looks like grade separation will not be complete, at least in the regions with blended service. I find that pretty disappointing -- but thanks for pointing it out.
+1 to parent, if I could.
Amtrak and buses take 7+ hours to make the trip that high-speed rail will do in 3.
As for airports: the planes pollute more, the trains are more comfortable, and the train stations are located where people are (in downtowns) instead of on the outskirts of town.
Your "gut feeling" that this project is a debacle does not make it so.
In fact, years of studies by many different groups that all suggest the project will be feasible and useful might incline one toward the opposite conclusion.
Because Amtrak is a corporate welfare basket case that will never come close to justifying itself economically.
... except for the Northeast Corridor, which shows that high speeds and large populations make it economically effective -- just as California will.
We have aircraft now.
When San Francisco and Los Angeles build airports in their downtown cores, come back and talk to us. The trip times will be comparable and the rail journey will be more comfortable by far.
If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.
... and this writer goes "off the rails" yet again
Certainly, few people drove on the first five miles of controlled-access highway --- but the fully built-out Interstate system is used by many millions. To describe the entire project as only the Central Valley segment is foolish at best and malevolent at worst.
It's not the worst idea --- but the track is exceedingly curvy, speeds could never be very high, and in the end it wouldn't be much cheaper (if at all) than building a new line. Plus the large (if often ignored!) population centers in the Central Valley would be entirely bypassed by a coastal route, relegating them even more to backwater status. Further more the coastal route is anyway owned and mainly run my freight rail, who would fight to the death against any encroachment. The current HSR project builds an entirely separate and publicly-owned right-of-way with no grade crossings, for maximum speed, access to population centers, and ultimate public benefit.
The above post suggests that money should instead be spend on Bay Area or Southern California transit projects, but this is a false dichotomy (trichotomy?) -- the public benefits from spending money on all three of these areas (North, South, and HSR to connect them). In the North: BART is extending south from Fremont to San Jose (coming end of 2017!), Caltrain is electrifying to boost capacity and speed, giving frequent, fully electrified, and high-capacity transit all around the Bay. In the South, Los Angeles Metro now has more miles of public rail transport than any other region: lines are being build through downtown, to the airport, through the heart of the Wilshire corridor, and to East LA and the San Gabriel Valley. High speed rail will tie these two great regions even closer together, compensate for our overcrowded highways and airports, and benefit the entire state.
The above post suggests that "Grade separation is key" --- the project described will be entirely grade-separated, reducing pedestrian deaths, drivers' waiting time at crossings, and boosting the system's speed.
The above post suggests that California won't match Amtrak's Eastern corridor which has "curvey rights-of-way," --- but the project described here is acquiring property to build long, straight segments to achieve much higher speed's than the Eastern Acela trains.
The above post suggests we build Hyperloop instead --- but this invokes a technology completely untested at these scales, wheras the project described here uses proven technology.
Finally, the above post suggests an "electrified self-driving autobahn" .... at which point I lost any remaining faith in the writer's ability for rational thought.
I am shocked that by LA Times writer Ralph Vartabedian's article on the supposed risk and overruns to California's ongoing high-speed rail (HSR) effort. Vartabedian is a known opponent of HSR whose every article drips with antagonism against this project, as a quick review of his past articles will clearly show. Anyone who reads the purported analysis (in fact a single Powerpoint file, taken out of context) will quickly see that the article's claims are not justified -- for example, a *possible* $3B overrun (really less, since this compares against obsolete estimates) does not equal a 50% budget problem for a project of this size. The entire state stands to benefit immensely from this project, which will connect BART, Caltrain, and VTA users in the North with Metro, Metrolink, and Amtrak users in the South --- and connect both to the isolated, ignored, economically-depressed Central Valley. Californians, and all who believe in progress, should embrace this transformative project and reject the uniformed mudslinging by the Vartabedians of the world.
Small, red dwarf stars are "that way" merely because they have lower mass. So there's nothing systematically different about the amount of heavy elements in them, relative to Sun-like stars. In fact, our study said nothing at all about the likelihood of these planets to host life -- our knowledge of the requirements for that are slim enough, and our understanding of these new planets still too shallow, to say anything definitively about life on these planets.
Also, so far there is no clear sign that the occurrence of planetary systems around these small, red stars correlates with the heavy element fraction of the star -- but it's a field of active research that our team is looking into.
Indeed -- but what we didn't know about planets back in the MoO era could fill a lot of modern exoplanet textbooks. Nonetheless, I'm sure all my hours of MoO-playing as a child (and after) helped contribute to me writing this big paper.
The flat (Mercator-projected) map of Luhman 16B is available here for download. Feel free to import it into whatever program or game you prefer!
Good question! Atmospheric scientists aren't actually sure yet whether brown dwarfs should have "bands" like we see on Jupiter and other Solar system gas giants (this was discussed at a meeting in Washington, D.C. Jan 2014) -- and our mapping data wasn't quite sensitive enough to definitively answer that question. (We're less sensitive to axisymmetric features than we are to longitudinal variations). The vertical "stretching" of the map's features toward the poles is an unavoidable artifact of our analysis technique. Cloud patterns may be less elongated than they appear!
Hubble has better resolution at visible wavelengths, but remember we're seeing the planet's thermal radiation and not reflected (visible) light -- so the planet is over 10 times fainter in the visible than at at infrared wavelengths (Figure 6 in the paper). Hubble can also see into the infrared, but because it is smaller than the largest ground-based telescopes Hubble does not offer the best resolution in the infrared.
A 50% success rate means all their predictive tools are no better than flipping a coin; the only difference is their method has kept them employed.
From Sen. Feinstein (D-CA): "Currently, S. 773 is awaiting action in the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation and is currently undergoing some major revisions." If this information is still current, anyone concerned with this issue should contact the appropriate members of the committee.
What type of maps are these?
Many professional-style maps in the USA -- e.g. quad sheets, parcel/tract maps, etc. -- will have survey markers indicated. Ideally these would be set benchmark disks with longitude/latitude noted. Many maps also mark boundaries of townships, sections, and half- and quarter-sections, locations of which should be available from the local municipal authorities.
These sort of well-defined points are probably your best bet for empirical location, but if your maps are 100 years old the coordinates may not be precise enough for digital overlays. In the end, you may well be forced to manually align your maps with something more modern.
Why not let your students choose some/all of the targets, subject to final vetting (or pre-screening) by you? In this way they gain a feeling of ownership over the process and generally become more invested in the subject matter. You could even point them to Stellarium for free home planetarium software to plan their observations.
Whatever you decide to observe, your students will get more out of it if they are actively involved -- i.e., no passive observing. If you have several nights, you could look at Jupiter each night and have them sketch the arrangement of the moons (c.f. Galilei 1610). If you have a solar filter, you could do the same thing with sunspots (if any are visible). Venus, Mars, or Saturn's rings may be attractive targets, depending on what you want to do with the observations.
Finally, there are additional astronomy education resources at the Astronomy Education Review, a free online journal.
The name of the telescope is the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), as is made clear here on AMEC's page. The main public page for the project is here. In addition to AMEC, the company mentioned in the article, TMT is also a collaboration of the University of California, CalTech, and many others.
In particular, I have a problem with section 3 of the article, which states at one point that
;)
"it's also possible to build such controls into hardware itself, and there are technical means available today to make hardware controls so difficult to crack that it will not be practical to even try."
It seems that the author makes a critical error at this point: true, any electronic system can have hardware that has been designed to prevent copyright infringement; for example, a hard drive designed to allow only MP3-like music files from a certain region to be played. But even if something like this eventually comes to pass, it seems obvious that "Myth #3" will come into play again: someone would inevitably code up a program designed to convert from one type of file to the other, in effect removing any extant copy protection.
Ultimately, the Internet is designed to transfer data. This alone ensures the continued existence of file-swapping programs. Unless the nature of the Web changes drastically, information (and hence files of _any_ sort) can and _will_ be transfered by people.
The fact that the link to the third page of the article does not work does nothing to raise my opinion of the article