Or how about Leo Szilard who has always been a hero of mine. He had his
bag packed, ready to leave when Hitler was elected. He stood up
to Groves, Roosevelt, Stimson and Byrnes.
That reminds me, does anyone know why
Takedown
was never released? I read that it had Mitnick smash
Tsutomu Shimomura with the lid of a garbage can, in a back
alley, when, IRL, they had never physically met.
EvanED, netringer and I have all read Feynman's autobiographical
books, "Surely you are joking Mr Feynman", and "What do you care
what other people think." And I am sure I speak for the other
two that the rest of you should pick these books up, if you haven't
done so already.
Those two books were written by Feynman's young protege Ralph
Lieghton. There is a third book about a plan Feynman and Leighton
had to go to Tuva. This one was published after Feynman's death
under Leighton's name. And I'd recommend it too.
I don't care if Feynman was maneuvered by General Kutnya. This
doesn't undermine my sense of his courage and character. Rather
that he could realize and acknowledge that Kutnya did drop some
broad hints adds to my sense of his character.
I still think DeNiro would be well served to see if a good script
could be written around Feynman for him. I spent some time
yesterday casting this movie. I'd cast someone with humour and
gravitas for Kutnya. I'd cast someone good for Leighton too.
Leonardo da Vinci is an artist whose work was so interesting
that he remains famous today. How did artists like da Vinci
support themselves?
It was a different time, with a different kind of economy.
And guys like Leonardo, or later, Mozart, sought out sponsors,
patrons.
This tradition continues today. Richard Stallman and Tim Berners-Lee
being two receipients of the
MacArthur "genius" fellowships.
Our modern understanding of intellectual property
is merely a convention. It is not a natural law.
Having said all that I find I agree with dpilgrim that his photographer
was making a poor choice about how to adapt to the introduction of
new technology.
There are lots of tasks which were once the province of highly-skilled
craftsmen. People who have had their rice bowl broken by technology have my sympathy. But they are best served by adapting.
It has been pointed out that many satellites couldn't benefit all that much by being rescued, and put back into orbit, if their solar panels, batteries, etc, were also worn out. It has been pointed out that these
satellites weren't designed to have their batteries supplemented by
an external source.
Okay. Hindsight is 20-20. But clearly future satellites should have
the facility to get electricity from an external source.
I think it would take less force/momentum/energy/whatever to give it a kick in the opposite direction and let it burn up in the earth's atmosphere.
I think you should review how geostationary satellites work. Geostationary satellites orbit at 35,787 kilometers above mean sea level.
Mir, Spacelab, and thousands, or tens of thousands, of other satellites we put in low Earth orbit have burned up as their orbits degraded.
There is a big difference between LEO and GEO. There is no cutoff between where the Earth's atmosphere ends and the vacuum of space begins. Friction with the tenuous remaints of the atmosphere do cause
the orbits of satellites at 100 km to degrade within years or decades.
Friction at 36,000 will be a lot less. But even if it was as great, that disposal burnup would still be tens of millenium away.
If a geostationary satellite had enough fuel to change its orbit so it skims the atmosphere, so it burns up, it could use that fuel to remain in orbit
for ages longer. When it is short of fuel, using the remaining fuel to kick it up just a touch would be plenty to keep it from being a danger to satellites that still had fuel.
In my opinion it really deserved to make it to the front page.
Tunguska was important.
This summer's slashdot had dozens of articles about asteroids
that might crash into the Earth. I am sure the theory that the
Tunguska explosion was the result of an asteroid impact coloured
every one of those discussions.
Yeah, I submitted this story, and it was rejected.
Films don't always fuck things up. In Infinity Mathew Broderick plays Richard Feynman when he was young.
I'd happily pay to see De Niro playing an older Feynman. Did Feynman's role on the Challenger investigation have
sufficient heroic elements? The poor guy was living with cancer during
the investigation.
Is dry ice possible at the extreme pressure of the deep sea floor?
I know, sofar acknowledged he/she really meant Methane hyrdrate ice,
not dry ice. Still, I was curious. I found this page, which has
an account of experimenting with liquid CO2 at depth.
At that pressure CO2 is liquid, and denser than water.
The clathrate
the article mentions is a kind of slush of water ice with something
else dissolved in it. So the methane hydrate we discussed is a clathrate too.
Or a ferret. When I was a kid I remember reading how they had a
ferret trained to run through the tube for a very long linear
accelerator. The ferret trailed a messenger cord they used to
yank through cleaning machinery.
They considered building a robot to do it, but the
ferret was cheaper, and the scientists grew very fond of it,
eventually deciding it needed a mate.
Couldn't the database even be used to find organ donor matches?
Yes, maybe a DNA database could be used to find potential donors.
I am willing to have my organs used, if I die of natural causes,
and some of them are still useful. But I would prefer the
potential receipients only learned that I was a match after
I died. Why can't they do the organ typing after we die?
Are't there car theives out there who you can you commission
to rip off a particular model of car nowadays? You want a well
maintained 67 Mustang convertible, like Steve McQueen drove in
Bullitt? They can get it for you.
"That Ryan Stortz? The kid is a geek. He doesn't drink. Not only
is his liver a perfect match for yours, but it is as clean as
a baby's butt. Put five grand in my Swiss bank account, and he
will have an "accident" before the week is out."
Leo Szilard, the fellow who first realized the possibility of the
"chain reaction" which made possible atomic energy and atomic weapons,
tried to organize a moratorium on atomic research prior to the
outbreak of war. Szilard was Jewish. He was foresightful, and
realized how truly terrible Hitler's rule would be. He fled
Germany in 1933, the day after Hitler was elected.
I imagine he was deeply conflicted. He was a key person in
getting the Manhattan project started. Groves, the general
in charge, didn't trust Szilard. IIRC Szilard had felt, or hoped,
that atomic weapons would be demonstrated first, on uninhabited
targets. And that their horrific destructive power would be
sufficient to induce surrender.
It bugs me to have you call him stupid.
Szilard wrote some science fiction stories to explore the guilt
he felt over his participation on the bomb.
See particularly "My trial as a War Criminal".
...Forget which ones, though. Anyone remember names?
You are probably thinking of Leo Szilard.
Here is another brief biography. Szilard gave
up Physics after the war.
Szilard's circulated a petition
a couple of weeks before the bomb was dropped on Japan, urging
the President not to drop it on Japanese cities.
69 of his Manhattan project colleagues chose to sign it with him. The link to the petition above lists the co-signers. The only other name I recognized was Eugene Wigner.
Wigner, Teller and Szilard -- three Hungarian emigres -- went to Einstein to get him to write Roosevelt the
letter credited with getting the the Manhattan Project created.
I have read that Einstein dictated the letter to his old friend Szilard. I have read that Szilard drafted the letter, and brought it for Einstein's signature.
Perhaps I exaggerated. Five years worth of episodes is what producers aim for. That many episodes allow reruns to be shown every weekday.
I was afraid of this -- the Osborne 2 effect
on
AMD Delays Hammer
·
· Score: 2
Two weeks ago, there was a thread on the AMD 2700+.
Several slashdotters were suggesting we hold of on
purchasing an AMD processor until the K8 was released.
I suggested that if we weren't careful, AMD might suffer
in the same way Osborne Computer's sales slumped when they announced
the Osborne 2.
If too many people hold off purchasing an AMD now, because they want to wait for the newest, whiz-bang thing, then the possibility exists that AMD will not be able to finance the development of the K8 on time, or even that AMD will go bust.
Peter Neumann, the editor of the RISKS digest, and an
experts on voting technology himself, added the following
comment to a discussion of the chad problem in Florida
during the last Presidential election.
The really sad thing is that many of the same punch-card machines were apparently also implicated in the 1988 Florida Senate race.
Buddy Mackay lost a close election to Connie Mack, in which there was
a drop-off of 210,000 votes relative to the Presidential race in the
same four counties. A lot of people must have been asleep at the wheel.
In another
comment in this thread I cite definitive proof that the
hanging chad problem was due to a known, predictable artifact of
the voting machines. So, was the problem merely "stupid people"
as cscx suggests? Or were the inability of some Democratic political
appointees exploited by the cunning of shrewder or better informed
Republican political appointees?
When world-wide attention was focussed on the hanging chad problem
the Republicans outcry rang false with me. Florida Republicans kept
saying "But Democrats also sat on the committee that approved the ballots! Democrats also reviewed the voting machines! Democrats also
signed off on the voting procedures!"
Slashdot readers will remember the worldwide attention was focussed
on "hanging chad". Certain Florida counties used automated voting machines that where voters punched out holes in hollerith cards to select their candidates. Gores votes were wildly underrepresented in these counties.
Well, eleven months ago
Douglas Jones
submitted an article to the RISKS digest
pointing to an longer online article that explained in detail how
all the spoiled Gore votes arose. It turns out the debacle was completely predictable. It was due to a known artifact of those particular voting machines. One which had caused a scandalous shortfall in those same counties, in a Senate election in 1988.
Briefly, Jones disassembled an example of the votomatic machines in question. He found that there was a structural bar behind the slots through which the chads were to be poked. Jones's investigation proved that candidates whose holes were to be punched over those bars were practically guaranteed to jam. Whoever designed the ballots laid them out so Gore's chads were directly over that bar.
Slashdot editor Michael's comment on voting reliability and
trustworthiness strikes me as naive. Don't worship the
technologoical fix!
Michael addresses providing an audit trail for the vote casting
and tabulation software.
This is not as important as providing an audit trail of the
actual votes cast.
Hey, mod this guy up. This post contains some new and interesting thoughts.
Yes, the technobabble aspect really bugged me too. "Assume a synchronous orbit above the South Pole." Sheesh.
Now I am going to repeat some stuff I pointed out in an earlier
Star Trek thread.
Nicholas Meyer saved Star Trek. The original star trek series was
cancelled -- early -- with only 79 episodes in the can. Roddenbery had blown his wad producing Star Trek: The Motionless Picture, which, at $35,000,000 in 1979 dollars was a very expensive bomb. Meyer directed ST:twok for just $11,000,000. Not only was it the best ST movie. But it was the cheapest, and the most lucrative.
Meyer wrote ST: The Voyage Home and ST: The Undiscovered Country, and
directed ST:tuc.
Like Michael Crighton Meyer didn't go to film school, he went to Medical school.
Oh yeah, ST:twok is my favourite ST movie.
And Galaxy Quest is my second favourite.
Re:http://www.geocities.com/microplanet333/
on
Is This Moon Three?
·
· Score: 2
That is funny. I used the google cache to find the page where Yeung talks about his NEA too.
And I concluded the BBC had got it wrong, because when I read
that page I got the impression he had found a different NEA.
After you posted the text I read it again.
No mention of j002e2 (or j002e3).
The object he found was designated 2002BJ2. With an aphelion of 3.4 and a period of 1071 days, it is definitely not orbiting the Earth.
There is something fishy about this story. How come
Bill Yeung, the guy who the BBC credit
as discovering this third moon doesn't mention the discovery on his web-page?
Yeah, well the center of gravity of the Earth -Luna system is about 100 miles below terrestrial sea level. Both bodies revolve around that point.
And the moon recedes from the Earth five inches a year. So, if the moon has receded far enough that the center of gravity no longer lies beneath the Earth's surface does the moon graduate from being a satellite to being a planet? That is a crappy definition of moon IMO.
So viewsonic can make 200 dot per inch 4000x2000 pixel 17 inch displays?
How putting some 200 dot per inch displays on our PDAs, which
currently have crappy 320x200 displays. With 200 dots per inch
we could get PDAs with 800x600 displays. Okay, maybe I would need
to get glasses to read them.
Heck, give me on of those and you
call me "four eyes".
Slashdot Mirror
Or how about Leo Szilard who has always been a hero of mine. He had his bag packed, ready to leave when Hitler was elected. He stood up to Groves, Roosevelt, Stimson and Byrnes.
That reminds me, does anyone know why Takedown was never released? I read that it had Mitnick smash Tsutomu Shimomura with the lid of a garbage can, in a back alley, when, IRL, they had never physically met.
Those two books were written by Feynman's young protege Ralph Lieghton. There is a third book about a plan Feynman and Leighton had to go to Tuva. This one was published after Feynman's death under Leighton's name. And I'd recommend it too.
I don't care if Feynman was maneuvered by General Kutnya. This doesn't undermine my sense of his courage and character. Rather that he could realize and acknowledge that Kutnya did drop some broad hints adds to my sense of his character.
I still think DeNiro would be well served to see if a good script could be written around Feynman for him. I spent some time yesterday casting this movie. I'd cast someone with humour and gravitas for Kutnya. I'd cast someone good for Leighton too.
It was a different time, with a different kind of economy. And guys like Leonardo, or later, Mozart, sought out sponsors, patrons.
This tradition continues today. Richard Stallman and Tim Berners-Lee being two receipients of the MacArthur "genius" fellowships .
Our modern understanding of intellectual property is merely a convention. It is not a natural law.
Having said all that I find I agree with dpilgrim that his photographer was making a poor choice about how to adapt to the introduction of new technology.
There are lots of tasks which were once the province of highly-skilled craftsmen. People who have had their rice bowl broken by technology have my sympathy. But they are best served by adapting.
Okay. Hindsight is 20-20. But clearly future satellites should have the facility to get electricity from an external source.
Mir, Spacelab, and thousands, or tens of thousands, of other satellites we put in low Earth orbit have burned up as their orbits degraded.
There is a big difference between LEO and GEO. There is no cutoff between where the Earth's atmosphere ends and the vacuum of space begins. Friction with the tenuous remaints of the atmosphere do cause the orbits of satellites at 100 km to degrade within years or decades. Friction at 36,000 will be a lot less. But even if it was as great, that disposal burnup would still be tens of millenium away.
If a geostationary satellite had enough fuel to change its orbit so it skims the atmosphere, so it burns up, it could use that fuel to remain in orbit for ages longer. When it is short of fuel, using the remaining fuel to kick it up just a touch would be plenty to keep it from being a danger to satellites that still had fuel.
Well spacedaily had an article about another theory about the Tunguska explosion . It presented some interesting evidence that the explosion was due to a massive release of an enormous high pressure reservoit of natural gas.
In my opinion it really deserved to make it to the front page. Tunguska was important. This summer's slashdot had dozens of articles about asteroids that might crash into the Earth. I am sure the theory that the Tunguska explosion was the result of an asteroid impact coloured every one of those discussions.
Yeah, I submitted this story, and it was rejected.
I'd happily pay to see De Niro playing an older Feynman. Did Feynman's role on the Challenger investigation have sufficient heroic elements? The poor guy was living with cancer during the investigation.
The clathrate the article mentions is a kind of slush of water ice with something else dissolved in it. So the methane hydrate we discussed is a clathrate too.
They considered building a robot to do it, but the ferret was cheaper, and the scientists grew very fond of it, eventually deciding it needed a mate.
I am not sure if you are joking.
Pure hydrogen is, I believe, much more costly than crude oil. So this does not seem to be a win to me.
Yes, maybe a DNA database could be used to find potential donors.
I am willing to have my organs used, if I die of natural causes, and some of them are still useful. But I would prefer the potential receipients only learned that I was a match after I died. Why can't they do the organ typing after we die?
Are't there car theives out there who you can you commission to rip off a particular model of car nowadays? You want a well maintained 67 Mustang convertible, like Steve McQueen drove in Bullitt ? They can get it for you.
"That Ryan Stortz? The kid is a geek. He doesn't drink. Not only is his liver a perfect match for yours, but it is as clean as a baby's butt. Put five grand in my Swiss bank account, and he will have an "accident" before the week is out."
I imagine he was deeply conflicted. He was a key person in getting the Manhattan project started. Groves, the general in charge, didn't trust Szilard. IIRC Szilard had felt, or hoped, that atomic weapons would be demonstrated first, on uninhabited targets. And that their horrific destructive power would be sufficient to induce surrender.
It bugs me to have you call him stupid.
Szilard wrote some science fiction stories to explore the guilt he felt over his participation on the bomb. See particularly "My trial as a War Criminal".
You are probably thinking of Leo Szilard . Here is another brief biography . Szilard gave up Physics after the war.
Szilard's circulated a petition a couple of weeks before the bomb was dropped on Japan, urging the President not to drop it on Japanese cities. 69 of his Manhattan project colleagues chose to sign it with him. The link to the petition above lists the co-signers. The only other name I recognized was Eugene Wigner.
Wigner, Teller and Szilard -- three Hungarian emigres -- went to Einstein to get him to write Roosevelt the letter credited with getting the the Manhattan Project created. I have read that Einstein dictated the letter to his old friend Szilard. I have read that Szilard drafted the letter, and brought it for Einstein's signature.
Perhaps I exaggerated. Five years worth of episodes is what producers aim for. That many episodes allow reruns to be shown every weekday.
Hold on. Do me a favour. Take a look at this site.
Then can you tell me if you think using your 23rd Century space drive to hover over the south pole meets this definition of "orbit"?
Or you can use this definition . or this one , or this one , or this one , or this one .
In another comment in this thread I cite definitive proof that the hanging chad problem was due to a known, predictable artifact of the voting machines. So, was the problem merely "stupid people" as cscx suggests? Or were the inability of some Democratic political appointees exploited by the cunning of shrewder or better informed Republican political appointees?
When world-wide attention was focussed on the hanging chad problem the Republicans outcry rang false with me. Florida Republicans kept saying "But Democrats also sat on the committee that approved the ballots! Democrats also reviewed the voting machines! Democrats also signed off on the voting procedures!"
Well, eleven months ago Douglas Jones submitted an article to the RISKS digest pointing to an longer online article that explained in detail how all the spoiled Gore votes arose . It turns out the debacle was completely predictable. It was due to a known artifact of those particular voting machines. One which had caused a scandalous shortfall in those same counties, in a Senate election in 1988.
Briefly, Jones disassembled an example of the votomatic machines in question. He found that there was a structural bar behind the slots through which the chads were to be poked. Jones's investigation proved that candidates whose holes were to be punched over those bars were practically guaranteed to jam. Whoever designed the ballots laid them out so Gore's chads were directly over that bar.
Slashdot editor Michael's comment on voting reliability and trustworthiness strikes me as naive. Don't worship the technologoical fix! Michael addresses providing an audit trail for the vote casting and tabulation software. This is not as important as providing an audit trail of the actual votes cast.
Yes, the technobabble aspect really bugged me too. "Assume a synchronous orbit above the South Pole." Sheesh.
Now I am going to repeat some stuff I pointed out in an earlier Star Trek thread.
Nicholas Meyer saved Star Trek. The original star trek series was cancelled -- early -- with only 79 episodes in the can. Roddenbery had blown his wad producing Star Trek: The Motionless Picture, which, at $35,000,000 in 1979 dollars was a very expensive bomb. Meyer directed ST:twok for just $11,000,000 . Not only was it the best ST movie. But it was the cheapest, and the most lucrative.
Meyer wrote ST: The Voyage Home and ST: The Undiscovered Country, and directed ST:tuc.
Like Michael Crighton Meyer didn't go to film school, he went to Medical school.
Oh yeah, ST:twok is my favourite ST movie. And Galaxy Quest is my second favourite.
After you posted the text I read it again. No mention of j002e2 (or j002e3). The object he found was designated 2002BJ2 . With an aphelion of 3.4 and a period of 1071 days, it is definitely not orbiting the Earth.
There is something fishy about this story. How come Bill Yeung, the guy who the BBC credit as discovering this third moon doesn't mention the discovery on his web-page?
And the moon recedes from the Earth five inches a year. So, if the moon has receded far enough that the center of gravity no longer lies beneath the Earth's surface does the moon graduate from being a satellite to being a planet? That is a crappy definition of moon IMO.
Heck, give me on of those and you call me "four eyes".