An important difference between a jump from a balloon and
bailing out from an incoming spacecraft is that the balloonist's
airspeed when they bail out would be pretty close to zero, not some
multiple of the speed of sound.
...the first four orbital shuttle flights (STS1-STS4) which only comprised two crew, pilot & co-pilot, the shuttle was fitted with a pair of Martin-Baker ejector seats...
The Soviet Buran shuttles had ejection seats for four crew.
Another slashdot reader mentioned
the ejection system of the F-111. So I looked it up.
The crew of the F-111 didn't have separate ejection seats.
The whole crew compartment gets ejected. IIRC a crew compartment
ejection seat was considered for the shuttle.
Question: If the shuttle was built for the USAF, not for NASA,
would the extra money for a capsule ejection system have seemed
worthwhile?
Mind you, even a whole capsule ejection system would only have
worked at certain altitudes and speeds. But it would have been
much more likely to save lives than the egress pole that was
added after the Challenger disaster.
(I am listening to a NASA press conference as I type this.
The spokesperson answered a question about flight data recorders.
The shuttle doesn't have a hardened "black box".)
How many shuttles have there been you ask? This was the 107th shuttle launch.
I strongly recommend looking at Richard Feynman's account of serving on the committee to investigate the Challenger crash.
He describes being shocked at how the figure one crash in 100,000
launches was floating around, with no justification behind it.
When he talked with actual engineers, they had realistic views of
the reliability of their particular sub-systems.
Anyhow, the real figure was expect one disaster every one hundred launches or so.
So two disasters within the first 107 launches is withing the
predicted envelope.
I feel sure all the astronauts are aware of this figure. If they
were doing their homework they would have to have learned this.
I feel sorry for their friends and family, but they too should
have been aware of the gamble the astronauts were choosing to make.
As others have pointed out "bailing out" at 200,000 feet is unprecedetned. There have been attempts to use high-altitude balloons
to set records for free-fall. IIRC the record was from about 115,000
feet. Roberta Bondar, one of the senior Canadian astronauts, interviewed on Canadian TV this morning, pointed out that the
bailout procedure was intended to be used at 40,000 feet, or
below, and at subsonic speed. The oxygen tanks attached to
those Orange pressure suits held 9 minutes of oxygen, when
she had her training in 1992.
She outlined the bailout procedure.
[1] Explosive bolts blow out the hatch. The hatch blows out at, IIRC,
sixty miles per hour. The shuttle has to be below a certain speed threshold, or the hatch will not clear the shuttles wing.
[2] Then another explosive charge shoots a pole out the hatch. This pole is intended for the astronauts to hook up to, like a world war two paratrooper. The plan is that this pole may allow the astronauts to
slide out of the shuttle's slipstream, and out of danger of striking the shuttle's wing. Note: this requires the shuttle to be flying in a stable orientation, at relatively slow speed.
[3] The astronauts have to unhook their seatbelts, walk over to that pole, and hook their static lines to the escape pole, and then jump out.
Bondar estimated it would take at least one minute to complete these steps.
When you were a kid, did you ever roll down the window of the car, and stick a piece of paper out the window, while mom or dad were driving down the freeway? Did you notice how the turbulence whipped it around? I read a book about the Air-India bombing. The authors described how all the corpses had all their bones broken in multiple places. Even at speeds of only hundreds of miles per hour sticking one's limbs into the slip-stream causes the same kind of whipping motion.
I experienced some real anxiety, when I opened up my mailbox, and
saw sixty odd "undeliverable" messages. But it turned out it was
all addressed to a userid I hadn't used in almost six years.
That ISP kindly agreed to keep forwarding my old email.
This was useful for the first year or so. From then on all it got me was the occasional SPAM.
Then the SPAM grew more frequent. And, more recently, I started getting SPAM addressed to me under the name Joan.
Then, in late November of last year I got the same flood of undeliverable messages bmooney describes.
I found it very surprising how many ISPs could not detect that the messages were SPAM. Most ISPs didn't bounce back enough to submit a report to http://spamcop.net. But some did. And I reported those.
Altogether I got about 600 warnings and error messages.
At first I was getting about fifty or so a day. But then they slowed to a trickle.
I can't understand what advantage there is for a SPAM artist to forge a real address as the author of their SPAM.
I suspect that the arrival of SPAM addressed to "Joan" marked the beginning of SPAM artists using this userid. The forged userid was accompanied by dozens of made up names. I suspect that one SPAM artist mistakenly harvested the forged name Joan from a previous
SPAM campaign.
One of the other respondents to bmooney's article has reported their userid too has been forged into SPAM, and they estimated 150K messages went out. I was curious how many messages went out under my old userid. How would one make a reliable estimate, based on the number
of undeliverables?
My SPAM artist was trying to sell penis enlargement.
I too only received a single reply from a live human being, who
couldn't tell that the message was SPAM, and replying was useless.
I got a couple of dozen messages from people who had set up autoresponders, because they were on vacation.
Did anyone consider sending a L.E.M. to this site?
Would there have been any trace of this explosion
that Borman could have found in a weekend's hiking?
Unless you happen to be Al Gore...in which case, YOU are the one responsible!
This is one of the two memes about the internet that really bugs me.
If you are going to criticize someone, criticize them for what they
actually said, not for what their critics say they said, for crying
out loud.
Gore never claimed to have "invented" the internet. During a CNN
interview he said
"During my service in the United States Congress I took the initiative in creating the Internet."
So, who did create the internet? Well Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn
were the guys who lead the development of TCP/IP, so their opinion
should carry some weight.
I imagine that if Gore had been writing, rather than speaking off
the cuff, he may have prefaced the word "initiative", and said,
"legislative initiative" or "political initiative". And if Cerf
and Kahn are to be believed, this would be a very fair assessment
of his role.
I didn't know of his efforts, prior to reading this article.
Reading it earned him my respect.
Particularly when you consider what George W. Bush
was doing during this time. When was dubya a drunk and a coke-head?
The other meme that bugs me is that "the internet was designed to
survive a nuclear war." You don't believe that one too, do you crawdaddy?
The only way that medical problems such as cancer will be cured is by medical research. If medical research companies are not able to recover their investment, then the research will stop. They are in the business to make money, and are trying to make money in a very honorable way, helping to fight major medical issues.
Don't pharmaceutical companies have a terrible reputation for dishonesty? Here is a link to a story about
Apotex. Short version? Pharmaceutical firms routinely get
researchers to sign documents allowing the firm to gag them, if they
discover information about the drug that would be bad for business.
The lead researcher, in this case, Dr Nancy Olivieri, discovered there
was a very harmful side-effect of the drug in question, and wrote
letters to the parents of her young experimental subjects. And Apotex
went ballistic, and tried to ruin her career.
This is not an isolated case. This kind of thing happens all the time.
Usually you don't hear about it because the researchers fold.
... Our Moon, meanwhile, is very unusual in the Solar System for its great size relative to its planet -- about 25% IIRC...
The moon's diameter is about 25% of the Earth's diameter, but it is the relative difference in diameter that counts for Gravity. The moon is a bit more than 1% of the Earth's mass -- partly because the moon is less
dense than the Earth, but mainly because the volume goes up with the cube of the dimensions.
Pluto and its satellite Charon are also relatively close in size.
Earlier in this thread someone suggested rules, like the self-referential rule that planets had to be Pluto sized or larger.
When I
was a kid Pluto was described as being larger than Mercury. So even Pluto isn't Pluto sized.
Yes, it certainly would. Now if they had said, "the world's largest
fearsome carnivore..." Blue whales can grow as large as 120
tons, according to
this site. (Compared to this beast's measly 50 tons.)
I prefer to think of my "back" button as working like a paper book. I generally don't flip pages "up" when going to a previous page, so the "back" terminology is friendly to me.
In 1981 I had the unpleasant duty of trying to teach Arts students
a little bit of BASIC programming. One of my students was the elderly
wife of an elderly Professor. She was a dogged student and lovely
person. (Most of my students couldn't have cared less if they
learned anything, so long as they figured out how to get a good mark.)
Anyhow, one day, she came up, after class to scold me.
"Mr Swan, I have been paying attention in class, and I think I
understand what you mean by input and output. And
I feel I must tell you I think you have explained it in a very
confusing way. It seems to me that when we open a file for "input" it means we want to take something out of
it! And when we open a file for "output"
it means we want to put something into it! So why don't we
call input input and output output?"
I tried to explain to her why it made more innate sense to follow the conventional interpretations of input and output -- with a total lack of success.
On my way home that day I decided I owed her an apology. Not for introducing the confusing conventional interpretation, but for claiming it had any merit beyond being the accepted, convention.
I decided it didn't. There are a lot of interpretations whose only
merit is that they are conventional, that only seem natural
because they are the established ways we are familiar with.
Jacob Bronowski wrote that the word "revolution" did not have
any implication of overturning the established order until after the
publication of Copernicus's work.
The interpretation of the back button is another example of a
convention that only seems natural through familiarity.
That's when the hacker can easily install hidden, tune-up kits (found at tuneupkit.org).
There is no such URL. There is a pctuneupkit.org.
In spite of the.org HLD it sounds like a commercial product.
In fact it sounds fishy -- too good to be true. The amazing tune up
is accomplished "without loading any software, or changing any
of your computer's settings."
Older readers will remember that the original IBM-ATs came with
a key on the front panel - a round key, similar to that on kryptonite
bike locks. Locking the key was supposed to turn off the keyboard and
mouse. Presumably, you would lock your computer before you went to
the washroom, to prevent trespassing and corporate espionage.
Anyhow, the clones also came with a key. But most of them were
merely cosmetic. Some were cast, not milled, and had only a single
tooth.
Hmmm. Presumably the guy who found the manuscript will get
to attach a longish foreword to it, if it is out of copyright,
and collect royalties based on that.
If Mickey Mouse is still protected by copyright, why wouldn't
Tolkien's writing about Beowulf?
Am I the only person who has entertained the idea this
might be a forgery?
I did read Beowulf, about thirty years ago, when I was a teenager.
I didn't know that the 13th Warrior was an interpretation of
Beowulf, prior to going in to see it. Having Beowulf's name
pronounced as "Bow-Way" kept me from figuring it out for a while.
But, I did recognize it as Beowulf, by the time they got to
Hrothgar's hall.
What didn't I like? Why wasn't the mother-goddess priestess
as, um, voluptous, as the alarming
"Venus"sculptures that Beowulf's
thanes came across? For those who don't know, or who missed this,
Beowulf's party came across several small carvings, of women with
thighs, bosoms, and waists so curved, that they were almost
spherical. Cro-magnon people, the anatomically modern inhabitants
of Europe contemporary with the Neanderthals, the guys who did the
cave paintings, did carve these sculptures. Anthropologists call
them "venus" sculptures. When I read about them, a long time ago,
the writer said that some scholars contended they were cult objects,
that the Cro-magnon's worshipped a big-bellied fertility goddess.
But the writer said some scholars contended that the sculptures
were merely prehistoric pr0n.
So, why wasn't the mother-goddess priestess as voluptuous as the
venus sculptures? It would seem to me that this would be an
occupational requirement.
How did I come to read Beowulf as a teenager? I read a delightful pulp science fiction novel when I was a very young
teenager, entitled 'The Ship that sailed the Time Stream'. It was
one half of an Ace Double. The hero is an ensign, in the USN, who
commands a very small sailing ship that the Navy has put at the
disposal of a pair of Civilian oceanographers. I will spare you
the charming, but far-fetched machinations the author uses to
transform this Ketch into a time machine. The first stop is
Iceland, about 1000 AD. And our hero (originally a history major)
can understand the Norse, because he read a copy of Beowulf with
the original and the translation on facing pages.
My local librarian got me a copy of Beowulf with the original
and translation on facing pages.
Guess, what? This was not sufficient to learn to speak pre-Norman
English.
The Arpanet was built with multiple redundant paths to withstand normal, mundane disasters, like fires, local power outages, construction backhoes digging up communications cables, not nuclear attack.
Yet you hear well-educated people, who should know better, repeat this nonsense all the time. I guess it makes too good a story.
Yes, I can see Richard didn't actually say it could survive a nuclear attack, merely that it was touted as being able to survive. But this meme is so annoying it bugs me when people even hint it is true.
This really bugs me. There is another, more flattering, picture of
the cdlu's g.f. linked on the cdlu's.plan page, pointed to by the
original article. But there is nothing wrong with this picture.
I think cdlu's project is interesting. And it bugs me that
we repay his generosity for sharing it by criticizing his g.f.
I look at this picture and see a nice, wholesome, normal, attractive
young woman. She looks happy.
I think anyone who can't look at a trim, healthy, wholesome, young
woman and acknowledge that she is attractive is going to face a lot
of disappointments. News at eleven: glamourous celebrity gals,
spend a lot of time and energy looking glamourous. Most normal
women don't have time for that. Glamourous celebrity gals only
bother going to that trouble when they are going to be on camera.
When they are off-duty they don't look any different than the
girl next door.So, lay off.
There are other Tunguska theories. One theory explaining the Tunguska explosion is that it was due to the
release and subsequent explosion of a very large, high pressure, deposit of natural gas.
Proponents of this theory describe how near the very center of the explosion the trees were unburnt. They say that the gas squirted out from the underground deposit under such high pressure, over a number of days, that an ice dome formed around the hole -- just like your can of canned air gets cold. This ice protected the most central trees.
The explosion is said to be right over a natural gas field. The region of Siberia has
huge natural gas reserves.
No, I am not trying to argue with you. And I don't think a single nuke would do much to divert or demolish anything large. Maybe a single nuke wouldn't even make much of a dent on a Tunguska sized asteroid. Think of it as a thought experiment. Maybe I should have said "I almost wish NASA had permission to take a nuke aboard NEAR"?
But, what captures the public's imagination about asteroid research?
Diverting the very infrequent destructive asteroids.
What is the smallest, least massive nuke in the US arsenal? Was it the one designed to be fired from 155mm cannon? Would studying the effect of blowing up one of these relatively small devices provide useful info as to the structural integrity of the asteroid?
Would it have value even if the research value was dubious, because it would capture the public's imagination? Do people like to see stuff "blow up real good"?
You can't test a nuclear weapon in space - there are treaties that regulate this sort of thing, and they say space has to stay demilitarized. That means no nukes
I think it is more accurate to say there were treaties in place that prevented nuclear charges in space. Hasn't George Bush announced his intention to abrogate those treaties in the last year or so?
Google to the rescue. According to this
article after dropping a lot of hints he made his intention to take the US out of the ABM treaty on December 31st 2001.
Reagan's SDI proponents were asked whether their nuclear pumped X-ray lasers weren't a violation of the nukes in space portion of the ABM
treaty. In an example of "spin doctoring" at its most blatant, they
used to respond, "that would only be true if you take a strict interpretation of the treaty".
Of course a bilateral treaty is not like a marraige contract. There is no higher authority
to whom you can appeal if you think the other side is cheating.
With a bilateral treaty, if the other party doesn't trust you, doesn't trust that you are complying with the interpretation of the treaty you
both agreed to when you signed it, if they don't trust your new re-interpretation of the treaty, the treaty is over.
And it doesn't really matter if there were a no nukes in space clause in the non-proliferation treaty. Other clauses in the non-proliferation treaty have been routinely violated.
The non-proliferation treaty prohibited both
"horizontal proliferation"
and
"vertical proliferation".
Horizontal proliferation was defined as nations which had no nuclear weapons at the time the treaty was signed
acquiring their first weapons. Vertical proliferation was defined as the nations which already had nuclear weapons increasing the size of
their nuclear arsenals. Of course The USA, the USSR and China all
significantly increased the size of their nuclear arsenals in complete
abrogation of the treaty.
I believe the treaty also obliged the nuclear nations to give the
non-nuclear
nations the benefits from the peaceful applications of nuclear energy.
However its not like asteroids are particularly convenient to get to or anything. Right now there are a few spacecraft out there photographing asteroid & asteroid-like objects with plans to impact into one to see what happens, another to dig into one and further plans to bring back some material.
Well, if we are really going to test our ability to divert potentially earth-striking asteroids, why shouldn't our test asteroid be reasonably hard to get to?
Even when the Earth strikers are too close for comfortable, they will still be hard to rendevous with. Won't their velocity relative to the Earth be greater than the Earth's escape velocity?
And, if we are going to allow the decades, centuries or millenia necessary to divert the asteroid from collision, we will need to rendevous when it is at least as distant as the several alarms we had this summer.
All of this is very basic science and none of it is particularly focused on how to deflect or break up an asteroid. That would come much later, decades considering the slow rate of progress in this area. The programs cost lots of money, the transit times are long, there's not much particular urgency and budgets are (relatively) small.
Now I regret NASA didn't get permission to put a nuke aboard Near.
Re:A submarine is... a big, long, phallus joke?
on
Book on NR-1
·
· Score: 2
I long metal tube filled with semen... I mean seamen!
And how can you tell that Santa Claus is really a potent male fertility symbol?
Well, what else can you think of that keeps sliding up and down long, dark, warm, hidden vertical passages, leaving presents at the bottom?
(No, I didn't make this up, I heard author
Margaret Visser say this in a TV interview.)
(Yeah, I know this is off-topic, but what the heck, I have a few extra karma points.)
Oh yeah, Bruce, thanks for your
terrific contributions in the open source movement.
Figured for the $10 special promotion, what the hell, and it would be nice to have PKZIP that could handle Windows long file names. Also assumed it would have the same feature set as PKZIP for DOS, and their promo literature certainly sounded like it would.
Then maybe you should take a look at
http://www.arjsoft.com/?
I see some other correspondents have already mentioned arj.
When I needed to distribute some software, in 1992,
I looked into the various choices out there. PKZIP
was more popular. But ARJ seemed to have a better
feature set. It offered better compression. It supported
multi-volume archives, which PKZIP did not at that time.
It was free for home use, but I was happy to pay
the shareware fee.
The guy who developed it has continued to update it.
There is something else, called win-arj, don't be confused, this is not what you want.
I downloaded it a few years ago, and was very disappointed.
Someone seems to have gotten permission to wrap
the command line arj with a GUI interface.
It seemed to me that, in order to wrap a pointy-clicky
interface around the command line ARJ they had to leave out most of the features that made it useful for me.
I still find ARJ very useful. The old MS-DOS era version had a feature where you could tell it to make multivolume archives to fit any size of floppy, but you could tell it to use all the remaining space on the floppies. You could also tell it to try its best to make multivolume archives that don't split files between two archives.
Well, the recent versions support long names, and they will build multi-volume archives of any size. I find building multi-volume archives where each volume is the size of a CDR extremely useful.
Slashdot Mirror
A French balloonist plans to freefall from 130,000 feet later this year.
An important difference between a jump from a balloon and bailing out from an incoming spacecraft is that the balloonist's airspeed when they bail out would be pretty close to zero, not some multiple of the speed of sound.
News reports say it was Columbia's 28th mission.
The Soviet Buran shuttles had ejection seats for four crew.
Another slashdot reader mentioned the ejection system of the F-111 . So I looked it up. The crew of the F-111 didn't have separate ejection seats. The whole crew compartment gets ejected. IIRC a crew compartment ejection seat was considered for the shuttle.
Question: If the shuttle was built for the USAF, not for NASA, would the extra money for a capsule ejection system have seemed worthwhile?
Mind you, even a whole capsule ejection system would only have worked at certain altitudes and speeds. But it would have been much more likely to save lives than the egress pole that was added after the Challenger disaster.
(I am listening to a NASA press conference as I type this. The spokesperson answered a question about flight data recorders. The shuttle doesn't have a hardened "black box".)
I strongly recommend looking at Richard Feynman's account of serving on the committee to investigate the Challenger crash.
He describes being shocked at how the figure one crash in 100,000 launches was floating around, with no justification behind it. When he talked with actual engineers, they had realistic views of the reliability of their particular sub-systems.
Anyhow, the real figure was expect one disaster every one hundred launches or so.
So two disasters within the first 107 launches is withing the predicted envelope.
I feel sure all the astronauts are aware of this figure. If they were doing their homework they would have to have learned this. I feel sorry for their friends and family, but they too should have been aware of the gamble the astronauts were choosing to make.
She outlined the bailout procedure.
[1] Explosive bolts blow out the hatch. The hatch blows out at, IIRC, sixty miles per hour. The shuttle has to be below a certain speed threshold, or the hatch will not clear the shuttles wing.
[2] Then another explosive charge shoots a pole out the hatch. This pole is intended for the astronauts to hook up to, like a world war two paratrooper. The plan is that this pole may allow the astronauts to slide out of the shuttle's slipstream, and out of danger of striking the shuttle's wing. Note: this requires the shuttle to be flying in a stable orientation, at relatively slow speed.
[3] The astronauts have to unhook their seatbelts, walk over to that pole, and hook their static lines to the escape pole, and then jump out.
Bondar estimated it would take at least one minute to complete these steps.
When you were a kid, did you ever roll down the window of the car, and stick a piece of paper out the window, while mom or dad were driving down the freeway? Did you notice how the turbulence whipped it around? I read a book about the Air-India bombing. The authors described how all the corpses had all their bones broken in multiple places. Even at speeds of only hundreds of miles per hour sticking one's limbs into the slip-stream causes the same kind of whipping motion.
I experienced some real anxiety, when I opened up my mailbox, and saw sixty odd "undeliverable" messages. But it turned out it was all addressed to a userid I hadn't used in almost six years. That ISP kindly agreed to keep forwarding my old email. This was useful for the first year or so. From then on all it got me was the occasional SPAM.
Then the SPAM grew more frequent. And, more recently, I started getting SPAM addressed to me under the name Joan.
Then, in late November of last year I got the same flood of undeliverable messages bmooney describes.
I found it very surprising how many ISPs could not detect that the messages were SPAM. Most ISPs didn't bounce back enough to submit a report to http://spamcop.net. But some did. And I reported those. Altogether I got about 600 warnings and error messages.
At first I was getting about fifty or so a day. But then they slowed to a trickle.
I can't understand what advantage there is for a SPAM artist to forge a real address as the author of their SPAM.
I suspect that the arrival of SPAM addressed to "Joan" marked the beginning of SPAM artists using this userid. The forged userid was accompanied by dozens of made up names. I suspect that one SPAM artist mistakenly harvested the forged name Joan from a previous SPAM campaign.
One of the other respondents to bmooney's article has reported their userid too has been forged into SPAM, and they estimated 150K messages went out. I was curious how many messages went out under my old userid. How would one make a reliable estimate, based on the number of undeliverables?
My SPAM artist was trying to sell penis enlargement.
I too only received a single reply from a live human being, who couldn't tell that the message was SPAM, and replying was useless. I got a couple of dozen messages from people who had set up autoresponders, because they were on vacation.
Did anyone consider sending a L.E.M. to this site? Would there have been any trace of this explosion that Borman could have found in a weekend's hiking?
This is one of the two memes about the internet that really bugs me. If you are going to criticize someone, criticize them for what they actually said, not for what their critics say they said, for crying out loud.
Gore never claimed to have "invented" the internet. During a CNN interview he said "During my service in the United States Congress I took the initiative in creating the Internet."
So, who did create the internet? Well Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn were the guys who lead the development of TCP/IP, so their opinion should carry some weight.
And this is what they had to say about it.
I imagine that if Gore had been writing, rather than speaking off the cuff, he may have prefaced the word "initiative", and said, "legislative initiative" or "political initiative". And if Cerf and Kahn are to be believed, this would be a very fair assessment of his role.
I didn't know of his efforts, prior to reading this article. Reading it earned him my respect.
Particularly when you consider what George W. Bush was doing during this time. When was dubya a drunk and a coke-head?
The other meme that bugs me is that "the internet was designed to survive a nuclear war." You don't believe that one too, do you crawdaddy?
I am going to go off-topic in this last paragraph, and suggest slashdot readers take a look at the portion of Douglas Jones's homage to the punch card devoted to analyzing the questionable voting machines used in Florida./a?
Don't pharmaceutical companies have a terrible reputation for dishonesty? Here is a link to a story about Apotex . Short version? Pharmaceutical firms routinely get researchers to sign documents allowing the firm to gag them, if they discover information about the drug that would be bad for business. The lead researcher, in this case, Dr Nancy Olivieri, discovered there was a very harmful side-effect of the drug in question, and wrote letters to the parents of her young experimental subjects. And Apotex went ballistic, and tried to ruin her career.
This is not an isolated case. This kind of thing happens all the time. Usually you don't hear about it because the researchers fold.
It is called triboluminescence. Mechanical stress causes some crystals to spark. Some hard candy can be seen to do this.
The moon's diameter is about 25% of the Earth's diameter, but it is the relative difference in diameter that counts for Gravity. The moon is a bit more than 1% of the Earth's mass -- partly because the moon is less dense than the Earth, but mainly because the volume goes up with the cube of the dimensions.
Pluto and its satellite Charon are also relatively close in size.
Earlier in this thread someone suggested rules, like the self-referential rule that planets had to be Pluto sized or larger. When I was a kid Pluto was described as being larger than Mercury. So even Pluto isn't Pluto sized.
Yes, it certainly would. Now if they had said, "the world's largest fearsome carnivore..." Blue whales can grow as large as 120 tons, according to this site. (Compared to this beast's measly 50 tons.)
In 1981 I had the unpleasant duty of trying to teach Arts students a little bit of BASIC programming. One of my students was the elderly wife of an elderly Professor. She was a dogged student and lovely person. (Most of my students couldn't have cared less if they learned anything, so long as they figured out how to get a good mark.) Anyhow, one day, she came up, after class to scold me.
"Mr Swan, I have been paying attention in class, and I think I understand what you mean by input and output. And I feel I must tell you I think you have explained it in a very confusing way. It seems to me that when we open a file for "input" it means we want to take something out of it! And when we open a file for "output" it means we want to put something into it! So why don't we call input input and output output?"
I tried to explain to her why it made more innate sense to follow the conventional interpretations of input and output -- with a total lack of success.
On my way home that day I decided I owed her an apology. Not for introducing the confusing conventional interpretation, but for claiming it had any merit beyond being the accepted, convention.
I decided it didn't. There are a lot of interpretations whose only merit is that they are conventional, that only seem natural because they are the established ways we are familiar with.
Jacob Bronowski wrote that the word "revolution" did not have any implication of overturning the established order until after the publication of Copernicus's work.
The interpretation of the back button is another example of a convention that only seems natural through familiarity.
There is no such URL. There is a pctuneupkit.org. .org HLD it sounds like a commercial product.
In spite of the
In fact it sounds fishy -- too good to be true. The amazing tune up is accomplished "without loading any software, or changing any of your computer's settings."
Anyhow, the clones also came with a key. But most of them were merely cosmetic. Some were cast, not milled, and had only a single tooth.
Hmmm. Presumably the guy who found the manuscript will get to attach a longish foreword to it, if it is out of copyright, and collect royalties based on that.
If Mickey Mouse is still protected by copyright, why wouldn't Tolkien's writing about Beowulf?
Am I the only person who has entertained the idea this might be a forgery?
I didn't know that the 13th Warrior was an interpretation of Beowulf, prior to going in to see it. Having Beowulf's name pronounced as "Bow-Way" kept me from figuring it out for a while.
But, I did recognize it as Beowulf, by the time they got to Hrothgar's hall.
What didn't I like? Why wasn't the mother-goddess priestess as, um, voluptous, as the alarming "Venus" sculptures that Beowulf's thanes came across? For those who don't know, or who missed this, Beowulf's party came across several small carvings, of women with thighs, bosoms, and waists so curved, that they were almost spherical. Cro-magnon people, the anatomically modern inhabitants of Europe contemporary with the Neanderthals, the guys who did the cave paintings, did carve these sculptures. Anthropologists call them "venus" sculptures. When I read about them, a long time ago, the writer said that some scholars contended they were cult objects, that the Cro-magnon's worshipped a big-bellied fertility goddess. But the writer said some scholars contended that the sculptures were merely prehistoric pr0n.
So, why wasn't the mother-goddess priestess as voluptuous as the venus sculptures? It would seem to me that this would be an occupational requirement.
How did I come to read Beowulf as a teenager? I read a delightful pulp science fiction novel when I was a very young teenager, entitled 'The Ship that sailed the Time Stream'. It was one half of an Ace Double. The hero is an ensign, in the USN, who commands a very small sailing ship that the Navy has put at the disposal of a pair of Civilian oceanographers. I will spare you the charming, but far-fetched machinations the author uses to transform this Ketch into a time machine. The first stop is Iceland, about 1000 AD. And our hero (originally a history major) can understand the Norse, because he read a copy of Beowulf with the original and the translation on facing pages.
My local librarian got me a copy of Beowulf with the original and translation on facing pages.
Guess, what? This was not sufficient to learn to speak pre-Norman English.
Few memes bug me more than this one.
The internet is not designed to survive a nuclear attack.
The Arpanet was not designed to survive a nuclear attack.
Read Where the wizards stay up late: the origins of the internet for confirmation.
The Arpanet was built with multiple redundant paths to withstand normal, mundane disasters, like fires, local power outages, construction backhoes digging up communications cables, not nuclear attack.
Yet you hear well-educated people, who should know better, repeat this nonsense all the time. I guess it makes too good a story.
Yes, I can see Richard didn't actually say it could survive a nuclear attack, merely that it was touted as being able to survive. But this meme is so annoying it bugs me when people even hint it is true.
I look at this picture and see a nice, wholesome, normal, attractive young woman. She looks happy. I think anyone who can't look at a trim, healthy, wholesome, young woman and acknowledge that she is attractive is going to face a lot of disappointments. News at eleven: glamourous celebrity gals, spend a lot of time and energy looking glamourous. Most normal women don't have time for that. Glamourous celebrity gals only bother going to that trouble when they are going to be on camera. When they are off-duty they don't look any different than the girl next door.So, lay off.
So lay off.
Proponents of this theory describe how near the very center of the explosion the trees were unburnt. They say that the gas squirted out from the underground deposit under such high pressure, over a number of days, that an ice dome formed around the hole -- just like your can of canned air gets cold. This ice protected the most central trees.
The explosion is said to be right over a natural gas field. The region of Siberia has huge natural gas reserves .
But, what captures the public's imagination about asteroid research? Diverting the very infrequent destructive asteroids.
What is the smallest, least massive nuke in the US arsenal? Was it the one designed to be fired from 155mm cannon? Would studying the effect of blowing up one of these relatively small devices provide useful info as to the structural integrity of the asteroid?
Would it have value even if the research value was dubious, because it would capture the public's imagination? Do people like to see stuff "blow up real good"?
I think it is more accurate to say there were treaties in place that prevented nuclear charges in space. Hasn't George Bush announced his intention to abrogate those treaties in the last year or so?
Google to the rescue. According to this article after dropping a lot of hints he made his intention to take the US out of the ABM treaty on December 31st 2001.
Reagan's SDI proponents were asked whether their nuclear pumped X-ray lasers weren't a violation of the nukes in space portion of the ABM treaty. In an example of "spin doctoring" at its most blatant, they used to respond, "that would only be true if you take a strict interpretation of the treaty".
Of course a bilateral treaty is not like a marraige contract. There is no higher authority to whom you can appeal if you think the other side is cheating. With a bilateral treaty, if the other party doesn't trust you, doesn't trust that you are complying with the interpretation of the treaty you both agreed to when you signed it, if they don't trust your new re-interpretation of the treaty, the treaty is over.
And it doesn't really matter if there were a no nukes in space clause in the non-proliferation treaty. Other clauses in the non-proliferation treaty have been routinely violated. The non-proliferation treaty prohibited both "horizontal proliferation" and "vertical proliferation" . Horizontal proliferation was defined as nations which had no nuclear weapons at the time the treaty was signed acquiring their first weapons. Vertical proliferation was defined as the nations which already had nuclear weapons increasing the size of their nuclear arsenals. Of course The USA, the USSR and China all significantly increased the size of their nuclear arsenals in complete abrogation of the treaty.
I believe the treaty also obliged the nuclear nations to give the non-nuclear nations the benefits from the peaceful applications of nuclear energy.
Well, if we are really going to test our ability to divert potentially earth-striking asteroids, why shouldn't our test asteroid be reasonably hard to get to? Even when the Earth strikers are too close for comfortable, they will still be hard to rendevous with. Won't their velocity relative to the Earth be greater than the Earth's escape velocity?
And, if we are going to allow the decades, centuries or millenia necessary to divert the asteroid from collision, we will need to rendevous when it is at least as distant as the several alarms we had this summer.
Now I regret NASA didn't get permission to put a nuke aboard Near.
And how can you tell that Santa Claus is really a potent male fertility symbol?
Well, what else can you think of that keeps sliding up and down long, dark, warm, hidden vertical passages, leaving presents at the bottom?
(No, I didn't make this up, I heard author Margaret Visser say this in a TV interview.)
(Yeah, I know this is off-topic, but what the heck, I have a few extra karma points.)
Oh yeah, Bruce, thanks for your terrific contributions in the open source movement.
Then maybe you should take a look at http://www.arjsoft.com/ ? I see some other correspondents have already mentioned arj. When I needed to distribute some software, in 1992, I looked into the various choices out there. PKZIP was more popular. But ARJ seemed to have a better feature set. It offered better compression. It supported multi-volume archives, which PKZIP did not at that time. It was free for home use, but I was happy to pay the shareware fee.
The guy who developed it has continued to update it. There is something else, called win-arj, don't be confused, this is not what you want. I downloaded it a few years ago, and was very disappointed. Someone seems to have gotten permission to wrap the command line arj with a GUI interface. It seemed to me that, in order to wrap a pointy-clicky interface around the command line ARJ they had to leave out most of the features that made it useful for me.
I still find ARJ very useful. The old MS-DOS era version had a feature where you could tell it to make multivolume archives to fit any size of floppy, but you could tell it to use all the remaining space on the floppies. You could also tell it to try its best to make multivolume archives that don't split files between two archives.
Well, the recent versions support long names, and they will build multi-volume archives of any size. I find building multi-volume archives where each volume is the size of a CDR extremely useful.