Ooh! under the keyboard - cool, I'll have to try that. Really, I gave up long ago with trying to keep track of my passwords at work since they change every 90 days. Now I just keep a file named PassWords.txt on my computer virtual desktop and remember my login password. Of course that is just for work. At home I get to manage my own password policies and do not have this problem.
Actually, it is a whole lot easier to get people to Mars if you never plan to bring then back. There is a much simpler set of technologies required and you have to throw a lot less mass to the planet if you don't have to have the send the fuel to return to Earth. Also, there are a lot of gung-ho types out there that would be happy to volunteer for a one-way mission. Even so, I thin the MIT study has over looked a few of the obstacles in arrivng at the conclusion that it could be done by 2020. Not the least of which is the lack of funds. The most massive thing we have landed safely on Mars was under 1000Kg! We do not currently know how to deliver 20 or 30 metric tonnes to the surface yet alone with G-forces that would allow the payload to include humans. If we want to go to Mars, we had better forget about the Moon - that is just an uneccessary diversion.
I agree. Let 'em enter into a pissing contest. I'll stay dry on the sidelines. Maybe if they both get hurt financially this sort of thing won't happen again.
You would think that in this day and age someone would have figured out a way to power a wireless mouse/trackball by harvesting the energy in moving the mouse/ball. Personally, I use a Logitech wireless marble with OS X and am quite happy with the batterylife I get out of my single 1800 mAh AA NiMH battery. And I didn't have to upgrate to Tiger in order to take advantage of all the buttons and programability (check the link in the article and read the fine print for the Mighty Mouse).
Logistically, it is a nightmare the way it is. Operation of space-based assets is a particular problem. Many of them need millisecond (if not microsecond) clock accuracy for pointing and position information. These usually feed data into custom software that can be quite old. In some cases the systems are old enough that the source code may not exist. Workarounds are a pain to implement. It should be pretty safe to assume that adding a leap hour 500 years from now won't have these problems.
Yeah, me too! Too bad the imagery is over ten years old. Well at least I can see what the house that used to be here looked like before we burned it down. Nice try anyway.
Very true. This is all about the speed and efficiency of the interface. Morse is faster both because of the proficiency of that particular operator and because of the efficiency of the interface (namely two buttons/paddles vs a bunch of buttons not optimally laid out on a tini phone). In the end though I submit that just talking in to the phone in the first place is the most efficient and would meet all of the improvements suggested in the article (voice recognition/command already exists on some phones). Taking this one step further, developing a direct brain to device electrical interface is probably the ultimate goal.
When I spoke with him this past Friday, it was pretty clear that he supports getting beyond the Shuttle as quickly as is practical. He definitly knows that he works for the president and has to respond to the directions of congress via the funding they provide. If you do not like the way things are headed, vote in 2006 and 2008 based upon the candidate's vision - not Griffin's.
I had the chance to talk with Griffen this past Friday. He is just the breath of fresh air NASA needs. I'm looking forward to what he is going to do with NASA in the comming years.
Forget the Ramjet, I think you meant Scramjet ala the X-43.
As for Nuclear power, the problem is getting a nuclear power source that does not have tremendous shielding mass requirements. Something that produces gamma radiation only would be best (like positron/electron reactors). There are a few out there, but they need a lot of development. The real key to cost effective space access is not to have to launch all of your fuel (reaction mass - f=ma) just the energy (m*v*v/2).
You must realize that this is a political topic and not a scientific one. Yes, the NAS is on record as having firm support for keeping Hubble going. But in politics, the questions and answers are frequently posed and crafted to allow them to be taken out of context and misused. What was NAS asked - if they like Hubble? Or were they asked, if given a fixed amount of money, how would spend it? Were they asked to choose between one big thing and a bunch of little stuff (with the latter doing much more science, but not returning the pretty pictures)? You can think Hubble is fabulous and still think the money is best spent elsewhere. If you think Washington cares only about only the wonderful science that is about to be lost/postponed and not about the hundreds of millions that will be spent at/by GSFC (also in MD) you may want to think again. It should also be obvious that Griffin works for the president, he said so. He also knows he will have to work with the congress to make things happen. Both have agendas and are required to provide support for him to be effective. If spending $500M in MD paves the way for tens of billions to be spent elsewhere, maybe the administration will think it is a good deal and he will be seen as someone who can work the system to get things accomplished. All I really wanted to point out is that there is a lot more in orbit and being considered for termination than Hubble. In the politcal arena, arguments are frequently won by whoever gets to pose the question.
Saving Hubble will cost at least $500 million. That money could be used to keep all of the other spacecraft that are being considered for termination operating for a few years. There is a more capable replacement, the JWST, on the way in 2011. The only reason they are revisiting the Hubble decision is to appease Senator Mikulski of MD. Oh yeah, Griffin came from APL which is also in MD. You connect the dots.
No, the cost is in designing and building a system that is safe for humans. The so called manned-rating makes things very close to ten times more expensive as compared to hardware that does not get close to an astronaut. Besides the mountain of paperwork, the hardware itself has to meet completely different requirements.
The autonomy of spacecraft varies over a wide range. It is one thing to build a robot that has been told where to go, harder to build one that has to figure out what is what and where it should go, and challenging to build one that can do that and service something like Hubble. It has been said that it is cheaper just to build a new copy of Hubble and launch it then it would be to build the robotic servicing mission hard/soft ware. The real question is not the cost, but which enables the future. We have already built a Hubble. It would be a huge savings if we could get the "man" out of the requirements. Afterall none of the A's in NASA stand for astronaut!
Well it is not just IR only, but I did not see any obvious mention of full coverage of the visible region (only out to 600nm). Telescopes in this size range (6.5m) are pretty good at looking at objects really far away, but only if they can see through all the dust in the galaxy. That is why they concentrated on the IR region. It is also why they are going to put it in orbit around the Sun-Earth L2 point (thanks for the correction). We just did a study for a 25m aperture telescope, a canditate successor to the JWST, also placed at the SE-L2 point. The very first result we found was how easy it is to keep things very cold. Having your optics remain at very cold temperatures is essential when looking in the mid and far IR. Pretty pitcures and marketing to the masses aside, this is afterall about the science. The pictures you see from Hubble based on visible wavelengths have been processed and enhanced to the point that they do not represent what the eye might see. I believe that the IR imagery from JWST will be just as astounding, perhaps even more so when you consider it will show us things that the eye cannot.
If you realize that a shuttle mission to Hubble is basically going to be a dedicated mission and that the cost of a launch (depending upon how you amortize the RTF costs) is of the order of $1B plus training and the cost of the stuff you want to replace (yes, I know most of that already exists), you begin to consider whether that money might be better spent on a replacement. Perhaps we should consider putting the Hubble replacement instruments to use in the JWST!
Umm... now for a clue. The next scope has already been justified. It is the James Webb Telescope. It is huge and will be orbited around the Earth-Moon L2 point. The last schedule I saw had it launching in 2010 (But I hope someone can provide more recent info). The Hubble has been wonderful. Its replacement is on the way. We can live with a 2 or 3 year gap. The universe will wait.... And NASA needs the money for other stuff. Now if we could only get Babs Mikulski (Senator from Md) to stop forcing NASA to spend its money where she wants it, maybe we can do a few other amazing/needed things with NASA funding.
Yes, but they are leaving a 6 year gap between the last two episodes so they can revive the show or spin off a new one. Its new and its called fractal TV! Same stuff self replicated on all time scales.
Well, besides the comments I have already made above, controlling CFC emissions is basically a done deal. It happened and is working. The ozone layer is responding to the CFC reductions as expected. Sounds like the AC is just another troll. The second part of your message needs to have a common definition of what climate change is, specifically what the time scale is. Yes climate changes naturally and continually, Yes volcanoes do produce measurable transient effects. It is difficult to determine what change is natural and what is being forced anthropogenically. Part of the difficulty is the desire to detect the induced part early, before it gets too big to correct. The other is that the climate system is a complex and fine balancing act between massive sources and sinks with numerous feedback paths. While is does require quite a bit more study before we can reliably identify cause and effect, we do know enough to want to be careful about how we impact the system. The folks who wish to advocate that we can merrily consume and exhaust into our atmosphere and oceans without worry will take that press release, wave it around, and claim the scientists support their viewpoint. What do I think of the spin? Spin is everything when a subject like this may get 10 seconds of exposure in a persons life. Most will never see, understand, or care about the details. They'll remember the spin put on the story and form an opinion if they need to. Most will jump in the SUV, drive to the grocery store, buy a couple of quarts of California strawberries, and not think much about it.
I too have lots of problems with this press release. I would not have told the story this way and unfortunately I was not asked to assist in the formulation of the release. The real problem with the release is the mention that we need to be careful attributing cause and effect between ozone losses and chlorine increases because scientists frequently ignore the solar production of NOx. It was too brief a statement and it left out some important caveats (most of which you caught in your original post). Unfortunately it allowed the press a point to misinterpret and draw a false link to an unrelated but more topical story, that of the current arctic ozone hole. You knew enough to keep them separate, but most people do not work in atmospheric sciences and probably read that article drawing the conclusion that all ozone losses may just be due to solar storms. It is sloppy uninformed journalism both on the part of the original press release and the follow-up story linking it to the ozone hole. Two steps forward, one step back. Anyway, to answer your question, yes the effects of NOx on ozone in the middle and upper stratosphere are generally short lived and more importantly they are completely transient leaving almost no residual effect. That is in complete contrast to the effects of chlorine which because of the very long lifetime of CFC's can only be considered trasient on the time scale of centuries (not months). To further confuse things, the ozone hole phenomenon is predominantly a transient event (polar spring) eventhough it requires chlorine to occur. You are right that it is too complicated to be presented correctly in a dumbed-down press release. It may have been best left to the scientific journals.
True, but with CFC's it was expected that the developed nations would phase things out more agressively because they could absorb the cost and had the infrastructure to support the change. This is something that the developing nations could not do in the short term. In fact this is what happened. The US and most of Europe switched over to using HCFC's very quickly. The same scenario was proposed and adopted for methylbromide. Why it was set aside just recently can be argued probably in much the same way one could argue about the rationale for not limiting CO2 emissions. While the impact of CO2 on climate may not be fully understood, that is not the case for the impact of BrOx on ozone. We know it is the wrong thing to do.
As a coauthor of that paper, I must agree that the press release was dumbed down quite a bit. Unfortunately, it has to be that way in order to get any widespread attention by the media. So be it. The problem I have with the/. article here is that the submitter tries to tie the changes at high altitude seen last year to the current problem over northern Europe which is caused by the formation of a significant ozone hole over the Arctic. These are completely different phenomena and unrelated. On the subject of chlorine, the amounts of chlorine are coming down and ozone is indeed responding as expected (google search on newchurch ozone for the paper and press release - I was a coauthor on that one as well). Depending upon how old you are and how quickly methane increases over the next few decades, you will probably live to see ozone recover to very near its historical norm. The thing that alarms me most at this point in time is the use of methylbromide. Most of the world is curtailing its use. The US was beginning to until compliance was set aside by the current administration. Bromine has a much larger impact on ozone than does either NOx or ClOx. Its use in the US is in large part due to the strawberry industry.
This is a very interesting thing to test. I have a firewall and can test this, but many others do not. I would imagine that most folks could modify a hosts file to achieve the same effect if they knew what hosts were being contacted and if they were not using numerical ip addresses. Does anyone know what Quicken/Intuit hosts are being contacted during the transaction download process?
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Ooh! under the keyboard - cool, I'll have to try that. Really, I gave up long ago with trying to keep track of my passwords at work since they change every 90 days. Now I just keep a file named PassWords.txt on my computer virtual desktop and remember my login password. Of course that is just for work. At home I get to manage my own password policies and do not have this problem.
Actually, it is a whole lot easier to get people to Mars if you never plan to bring then back. There is a much simpler set of technologies required and you have to throw a lot less mass to the planet if you don't have to have the send the fuel to return to Earth. Also, there are a lot of gung-ho types out there that would be happy to volunteer for a one-way mission. Even so, I thin the MIT study has over looked a few of the obstacles in arrivng at the conclusion that it could be done by 2020. Not the least of which is the lack of funds. The most massive thing we have landed safely on Mars was under 1000Kg! We do not currently know how to deliver 20 or 30 metric tonnes to the surface yet alone with G-forces that would allow the payload to include humans. If we want to go to Mars, we had better forget about the Moon - that is just an uneccessary diversion.
News will be made when they nolonger encrypt the white balance information in their RAW format. Wake me up then.
I agree. Let 'em enter into a pissing contest. I'll stay dry on the sidelines. Maybe if they both get hurt financially this sort of thing won't happen again.
You would think that in this day and age someone would have figured out a way to power a wireless mouse/trackball by harvesting the energy in moving the mouse/ball. Personally, I use a Logitech wireless marble with OS X and am quite happy with the batterylife I get out of my single 1800 mAh AA NiMH battery. And I didn't have to upgrate to Tiger in order to take advantage of all the buttons and programability (check the link in the article and read the fine print for the Mighty Mouse).
Logistically, it is a nightmare the way it is. Operation of space-based assets is a particular problem. Many of them need millisecond (if not microsecond) clock accuracy for pointing and position information. These usually feed data into custom software that can be quite old. In some cases the systems are old enough that the source code may not exist. Workarounds are a pain to implement. It should be pretty safe to assume that adding a leap hour 500 years from now won't have these problems.
Yeah, me too! Too bad the imagery is over ten years old. Well at least I can see what the house that used to be here looked like before we burned it down. Nice try anyway.
Very true. This is all about the speed and efficiency of the interface. Morse is faster both because of the proficiency of that particular operator and because of the efficiency of the interface (namely two buttons/paddles vs a bunch of buttons not optimally laid out on a tini phone). In the end though I submit that just talking in to the phone in the first place is the most efficient and would meet all of the improvements suggested in the article (voice recognition/command already exists on some phones). Taking this one step further, developing a direct brain to device electrical interface is probably the ultimate goal.
Enjoy,
When I spoke with him this past Friday, it was pretty clear that he supports getting beyond the Shuttle as quickly as is practical. He definitly knows that he works for the president and has to respond to the directions of congress via the funding they provide. If you do not like the way things are headed, vote in 2006 and 2008 based upon the candidate's vision - not Griffin's.
Oops, That was Griffin, not Griffen.
How about antimatter - as in positron/electron or other more interesting positron-based fission reactions?
I had the chance to talk with Griffen this past Friday. He is just the breath of fresh air NASA needs. I'm looking forward to what he is going to do with NASA in the comming years.
Forget the Ramjet, I think you meant Scramjet ala the X-43.
As for Nuclear power, the problem is getting a nuclear power source that does not have tremendous shielding mass requirements. Something that produces gamma radiation only would be best (like positron/electron reactors). There are a few out there, but they need a lot of development. The real key to cost effective space access is not to have to launch all of your fuel (reaction mass - f=ma) just the energy (m*v*v/2).
You must realize that this is a political topic and not a scientific one. Yes, the NAS is on record as having firm support for keeping Hubble going. But in politics, the questions and answers are frequently posed and crafted to allow them to be taken out of context and misused. What was NAS asked - if they like Hubble? Or were they asked, if given a fixed amount of money, how would spend it? Were they asked to choose between one big thing and a bunch of little stuff (with the latter doing much more science, but not returning the pretty pictures)? You can think Hubble is fabulous and still think the money is best spent elsewhere. If you think Washington cares only about only the wonderful science that is about to be lost/postponed and not about the hundreds of millions that will be spent at/by GSFC (also in MD) you may want to think again. It should also be obvious that Griffin works for the president, he said so. He also knows he will have to work with the congress to make things happen. Both have agendas and are required to provide support for him to be effective. If spending $500M in MD paves the way for tens of billions to be spent elsewhere, maybe the administration will think it is a good deal and he will be seen as someone who can work the system to get things accomplished. All I really wanted to point out is that there is a lot more in orbit and being considered for termination than Hubble. In the politcal arena, arguments are frequently won by whoever gets to pose the question.
Saving Hubble will cost at least $500 million. That money could be used to keep all of the other spacecraft that are being considered for termination operating for a few years. There is a more capable replacement, the JWST, on the way in 2011. The only reason they are revisiting the Hubble decision is to appease Senator Mikulski of MD. Oh yeah, Griffin came from APL which is also in MD. You connect the dots.
No, the cost is in designing and building a system that is safe for humans. The so called manned-rating makes things very close to ten times more expensive as compared to hardware that does not get close to an astronaut. Besides the mountain of paperwork, the hardware itself has to meet completely different requirements.
The autonomy of spacecraft varies over a wide range. It is one thing to build a robot that has been told where to go, harder to build one that has to figure out what is what and where it should go, and challenging to build one that can do that and service something like Hubble. It has been said that it is cheaper just to build a new copy of Hubble and launch it then it would be to build the robotic servicing mission hard/soft ware. The real question is not the cost, but which enables the future. We have already built a Hubble. It would be a huge savings if we could get the "man" out of the requirements. Afterall none of the A's in NASA stand for astronaut!
Well it is not just IR only, but I did not see any obvious mention of full coverage of the visible region (only out to 600nm). Telescopes in this size range (6.5m) are pretty good at looking at objects really far away, but only if they can see through all the dust in the galaxy. That is why they concentrated on the IR region. It is also why they are going to put it in orbit around the Sun-Earth L2 point (thanks for the correction). We just did a study for a 25m aperture telescope, a canditate successor to the JWST, also placed at the SE-L2 point. The very first result we found was how easy it is to keep things very cold. Having your optics remain at very cold temperatures is essential when looking in the mid and far IR. Pretty pitcures and marketing to the masses aside, this is afterall about the science. The pictures you see from Hubble based on visible wavelengths have been processed and enhanced to the point that they do not represent what the eye might see. I believe that the IR imagery from JWST will be just as astounding, perhaps even more so when you consider it will show us things that the eye cannot.
If you realize that a shuttle mission to Hubble is basically going to be a dedicated mission and that the cost of a launch (depending upon how you amortize the RTF costs) is of the order of $1B plus training and the cost of the stuff you want to replace (yes, I know most of that already exists), you begin to consider whether that money might be better spent on a replacement. Perhaps we should consider putting the Hubble replacement instruments to use in the JWST!
Oh, I should have put this link into my first reply. JWST is scheduled for launch in 2011.
Umm... now for a clue. The next scope has already been justified. It is the James Webb Telescope. It is huge and will be orbited around the Earth-Moon L2 point. The last schedule I saw had it launching in 2010 (But I hope someone can provide more recent info). The Hubble has been wonderful. Its replacement is on the way. We can live with a 2 or 3 year gap. The universe will wait. ... And NASA needs the money for other stuff. Now if we could only get Babs Mikulski (Senator from Md) to stop forcing NASA to spend its money where she wants it, maybe we can do a few other amazing/needed things with NASA funding.
Yes, but they are leaving a 6 year gap between the last two episodes so they can revive the show or spin off a new one. Its new and its called fractal TV! Same stuff self replicated on all time scales.
It is called convection. Good, open, free air flow combined with a suitably shaped and oriented heat exchanger should work.
Personally, I just bought the Mac Mini. It has a fan, but I can't hear it over the ticking of the clock I have on the wall. It is very quiet.
Well, besides the comments I have already made above, controlling CFC emissions is basically a done deal. It happened and is working. The ozone layer is responding to the CFC reductions as expected. Sounds like the AC is just another troll. The second part of your message needs to have a common definition of what climate change is, specifically what the time scale is. Yes climate changes naturally and continually, Yes volcanoes do produce measurable transient effects. It is difficult to determine what change is natural and what is being forced anthropogenically. Part of the difficulty is the desire to detect the induced part early, before it gets too big to correct. The other is that the climate system is a complex and fine balancing act between massive sources and sinks with numerous feedback paths. While is does require quite a bit more study before we can reliably identify cause and effect, we do know enough to want to be careful about how we impact the system. The folks who wish to advocate that we can merrily consume and exhaust into our atmosphere and oceans without worry will take that press release, wave it around, and claim the scientists support their viewpoint. What do I think of the spin? Spin is everything when a subject like this may get 10 seconds of exposure in a persons life. Most will never see, understand, or care about the details. They'll remember the spin put on the story and form an opinion if they need to. Most will jump in the SUV, drive to the grocery store, buy a couple of quarts of California strawberries, and not think much about it.
I too have lots of problems with this press release. I would not have told the story this way and unfortunately I was not asked to assist in the formulation of the release. The real problem with the release is the mention that we need to be careful attributing cause and effect between ozone losses and chlorine increases because scientists frequently ignore the solar production of NOx. It was too brief a statement and it left out some important caveats (most of which you caught in your original post). Unfortunately it allowed the press a point to misinterpret and draw a false link to an unrelated but more topical story, that of the current arctic ozone hole. You knew enough to keep them separate, but most people do not work in atmospheric sciences and probably read that article drawing the conclusion that all ozone losses may just be due to solar storms. It is sloppy uninformed journalism both on the part of the original press release and the follow-up story linking it to the ozone hole. Two steps forward, one step back. Anyway, to answer your question, yes the effects of NOx on ozone in the middle and upper stratosphere are generally short lived and more importantly they are completely transient leaving almost no residual effect. That is in complete contrast to the effects of chlorine which because of the very long lifetime of CFC's can only be considered trasient on the time scale of centuries (not months). To further confuse things, the ozone hole phenomenon is predominantly a transient event (polar spring) eventhough it requires chlorine to occur. You are right that it is too complicated to be presented correctly in a dumbed-down press release. It may have been best left to the scientific journals.
True, but with CFC's it was expected that the developed nations would phase things out more agressively because they could absorb the cost and had the infrastructure to support the change. This is something that the developing nations could not do in the short term. In fact this is what happened. The US and most of Europe switched over to using HCFC's very quickly. The same scenario was proposed and adopted for methylbromide. Why it was set aside just recently can be argued probably in much the same way one could argue about the rationale for not limiting CO2 emissions. While the impact of CO2 on climate may not be fully understood, that is not the case for the impact of BrOx on ozone. We know it is the wrong thing to do.
As a coauthor of that paper, I must agree that the press release was dumbed down quite a bit. Unfortunately, it has to be that way in order to get any widespread attention by the media. So be it. The problem I have with the /. article here is that the submitter tries to tie the changes at high altitude seen last year to the current problem over northern Europe which is caused by the formation of a significant ozone hole over the Arctic. These are completely different phenomena and unrelated. On the subject of chlorine, the amounts of chlorine are coming down and ozone is indeed responding as expected (google search on newchurch ozone for the paper and press release - I was a coauthor on that one as well). Depending upon how old you are and how quickly methane increases over the next few decades, you will probably live to see ozone recover to very near its historical norm. The thing that alarms me most at this point in time is the use of methylbromide. Most of the world is curtailing its use. The US was beginning to until compliance was set aside by the current administration. Bromine has a much larger impact on ozone than does either NOx or ClOx. Its use in the US is in large part due to the strawberry industry.
Enjoy,
This is a very interesting thing to test. I have a firewall and can test this, but many others do not. I would imagine that most folks could modify a hosts file to achieve the same effect if they knew what hosts were being contacted and if they were not using numerical ip addresses. Does anyone know what Quicken/Intuit hosts are being contacted during the transaction download process?