> First, actually, the public has been behind a larger space budget for many years
Uhm, where the fuck do you get this idea? Public opinion polls about NASA's budget have always been pretty much on the 'undecided' end, and increasing NASA's budget has never had overwhelming support except for in the 60's. Besides, what people say in an opinion poll is not indicative of what they actually want. When it comes time to actually vote for their representatives, the tendency has been to vote against representatives who want to expand the space program, except for in 'space districts' like in Florida. But please, continue with your reality distortion, it will really help you figure out what went wrong.
> A replacement should have been started far earlier than that. Failure to do so was just plain poor, short-sighted planning.
No. Plenty of people called for a replacement, and many even had working designs. NASA couldn't fund them because its budget was limited and all of it was spent on the shuttle and NASA. Again, you fail to understand my point.
If you actually read my point 2, I specifically used the word 'the same' i.e. a crash development program alongside the shuttle. Reading comprehension sometimes comes in handy.
Whoa, slow down there. You suddenly jumped from a discussion about space hardware to fucking federal budget planning and bank bailouts. One thing at a time.
The shuttle was a huge boondoggle that cost $1bn (a conservative estimate) to send up astronauts in an aging, unreliable death trap that had completely blown up on 2 out of 131 missions. Don't get me wrong; it was a great piece of hardware for its time, and the engineers who designed it in the 70's should be commended. Especially, the shuttle main engines are a fine example of the quality of American engineering. But there was no justification in keeping the shuttle. Cancelling it was a wise and prudent decision, probably the best decision in the space program since 1969. Just for reference, all of SpaceX's achievements to date have been done with less money than a single shuttle launch.
Of course with the shuttle out of the picture, there was the question of what to use to send astronauts up there. You could either 1) double NASA's budget and ask it to crash-design (excuse the pun) a new manned vehicle in a couple of years. Too costly and risky. 2) Pour money into private companies to do the same. The public would never go for it, and it would also be too risky. 3) Cancel the shuttle program and divert the leftover funds to private companies to design a new manned vehicle, and in the meanwhile send up astronauts (as part of ISS obligations) with Russian rockets. That's the most reasonable choice, and exactly what they did. Has the US government made a lot of bad decisions with regard to space? Absolutely; a LOT of bad decisions. But cancelling the shuttle and piggybacking on Russia wasn't one of them.
Is it true that the US did not develop manned flight capability when it should have? Absolutely, but that was directly BECAUSE of the shuttle program. The shuttle siphoned off all manned space travel funds, leaving nothing to develop a new vehicle. The shuttle HAD to be cancelled to start developing new manned spaceflight ability. If you want to start pointing fingers, fine, but point them at the people who greenlighted the shuttle in the 70's, not the politicians who made the wise decision to cancel it in the 2000's.
The US isn't "relying" on anyone for space exploration. The US has plenty of its own rockets. It's merely relying on Russia for launching astronauts as an interim solution until the ISS project ends or a commercial company comes up with a manned vehicle.
When it would cost you $1000 to buy a car, and your neighbor lets you rent his car for $10/day, and you only need a car for a few days, it would be a good idea to use his car. And if he has the tendency of being treacherous, well, then you can buy your own car if he misbehaves. And if he misbehaves really badly, then you can go and pick a fight with him. But as long as he behaves, what's the problem?
Your attitude is similar to the people who hole themselves up, buy a thousand guns, and never emerge from their house because they think everyone is out to get them. In the real world, international cooperation happens all the time, even between enemies (which the US and Russia aren't, at least not at the level of the cold war anymore). it's not just that international cooperation is good. It's that international cooperation is _necessary_ to actually get stuff done. Cooperating with Russia and other countries allows the ISS project to spread risk and costs around in an optimal way, with the subtext being that if any nation doesn't hold up its share of the deal, the deal is null.
I'm not surprised that they aren't getting government funding; the word 'fusion' has basically become tainted and no one wants to go near it. Except maybe for projects that have useful spinoffs like the NIF (which is being mainly used for nuclear weapons research at the moment) or projects that have a long enough research history that there is reasonable confidence they will work (like ITER). But it's really through no fault of the fusion researchers; it's just that fusion turned out to be a much harder problem than anyone guessed.
I don't think they ever claimed it's a magic bullet solution for everything, but the claim that it does not produce pollution is true. They plan to use an aneutronic reaction (p-B11) which will produce virtually zero nuclear waste.
> The problem with their approach is that there's little science behind it.
Then it's time to produce some science behind it. That's what this project is about. Most everyone I've talked to agreed that we simply don't know if DPF will work or not.
Actually, it would. This isn't intended to be a power generator, just a physics demonstrator. People have been really hesitant to fund DPF because it uses plasma instabilities and there hasn't been much research on the detailed dynamics of these instabilities. They are really hard to model and hard to simulate on the computer. We know very little about them. This project aims to fix that.
The idea hinges around the creation of a 'plasmoid' and its rapid implosion. Critics agree that the plasmoid can be produced; they disagree that the plasmoid is really being compressed to the densities and energies that the DPF proponents claim. So the DPF people need this $200k to fund a proof-of-concept that would (hopefully) prove the naysayers wrong. And if it doesn't, we haven't lost much, it's useful science that is literally going where no one has gone before. Previous DPF experiments managed to produce some really tantalizing data (demonstrating something like 100x better confinement than other technologies) but the results were contentious and not everyone agrees with them, so further experimentation is needed.
it kind of makes me sad that DPF fusion energy hasn't even be able to reach half its measly $200,000 goal on indiegogo: https://www.indiegogo.com/proj...
And of course the inevitable stories of how depressed and lonely he had become, and how he had become paranoid and anti-social and started doing drugs, before he decided to take his own life. And the media would be all over that shit.
You haven't read his manifesto. Read it (read all of it, not just the innocent beginning). Saying he was a psychopath is probably underestimating his illness.
We humans have a tendency to project and to see a little bit of ourselves in others. It's nice that you try to make this guy closer to yourself, to perhaps understand him better. But it's misleading. He had nothing in common with the majority of people. He was totally insane. I agree with the NPD classification, and propose that his case actually be used as a reference scale for future NPD diagnoses.
If you really think you're like him, or share character aspects with him at all, you're either dangerously insane and need to be locked up immediately, or you haven't read his manifesto and have only seen the bullshit media portrayals of him (who also haven't read his manifesto).
He was 100% batshit boogaloo insane, totally out if it in any shape, dimension, or form; wackiness level up to 11. He seriously talks about castrating all men and locking all women up in concentration camps and starving them to death, with himself acting as Ruler of Earth. This isn't an angry spur-of-the-moment keyboard-mashing rant. It's 140 pages long. He types this all out in coherent sentences. He spent a lot of time on it. He is convinced that he is the only person fit to rule the planet.
He blew thousands of dollars on the lottery, in certainty he would win, because he was so awesome and stuff, and greatness was his destiny. And when the reality of the world and his treatment at the hands of men and women didn't agree with his obviously God-given (himself-given?) Greatness, it was the people who were at fault and had to be destroyed. He repeats this on basically every page, for crying out loud.
What's sad is that the so-called 'journalists' 'read' his manifesto and instead of asking themselves what the truth was, they decided to only hear what they wanted to hear. They only focused on the misogyny aspect of his writings, when in fact he repeatedly gives away the real cause: intense narcissism (the most intense I've ever seen in a person, far beyond what I thought possible) coupled with intense sociopathy, all wrapped up in a nice crisp crust of spoiled upbringing and self-pity as a personal identity.
> every forum I read is a cesspool full of these guys.
Fixed that for you. The internet brings out the worst in people, 'nerdly' or not. Do you have ANY evidence that shows that misogynistic behavior is more abundant in nerd/geek circles?
> Nothing in the article was trying to paint all men with any sort of brush.
Did you even read the article? He paints all nerds with the same brush numerous times. It's even in the article summary:
"What the fuck is wrong with us?" - Emphasis on us. Not 'some of us'. Us.
"we live in an entitlement culture where guys think they need to be having sex with girls in order to be happy and fulfilled."
"It’s because other people’s bodies and other people’s love are not something that can be taken [...] we need to get that."
Look, I understand his bigger point that women have the right to choose who to have sex with. I 100% agree with that. But when his article clearly and specifically (and repeatedly) targets 'male nerds', I can't blame male nerds for thinking that they have been specifically targeted and thus feeling they need to defend themselves.
What you're missing is a sense of scale. There are likely hundreds of billions of planets in the galaxy. If you want to make the parallel to human history, the land mass of a single planet would be about equivalent to the area of 1/10 of a soccer field in comparison to the entire landmass of the Earth.
the idea is that if there's a solar system out there where a civilization exists which is sending signals between planets (kind of like we're doing on a limited scale with the Mars orbiters and rovers), it's likely that the signals between the planets are highly focused in a single direction, and so the ideal time to listen would be when the planets are lined up with respect to Earth.
Since we have no idea what kind of signals they are using (radio is the most popular method for our civilization but lasers are also good communications devices) the search would sweep over as much EM spectrum as it could. It's a really clever idea that would definitely pick up interplanetary communications, IF we can recognize the signals as such. As it stands, noise - and the fact that sufficiently advanced communications could be indistinguishable from white noise - limit our ability to do that.
But anyway, I like the idea because it doesn't presume that they are sending interstellar communications (which requires a high level of advancement), sending incredibly powerful bursts of omnidirectional signals (which requires some unknown reason since it's a pointless thing to do) or specifically aiming their signals at us (which requires a high level of self-importance on our part). If there are civilizations with the same level of advancement as us, we'll find them.
> Conversely, if you're getting defensive, maybe you should examine your behavior and make sure you're not part of the problem.
Getting defensive is not indicative of any wrongdoing. People naturally get defensive when you accuse them of crimes they didn't commit. Sure, people who have played the game know that that's wrong and that they should 'play it cool', but people who aren't as savvy will easily take the bait and go on the defensive.
The difference is that those groups aren't as self-blaming as nerds are, and they aren't so quick to take the bait. It's like if you gathered a bunch of guys in a room and shouted "misogynist!" and the nerd amongst them said, "I'm sorry!" even though he didn't really do anything.
Sorry. While I love humans, my not-so-humble opinion is that we're nowhere near the level of human reliability needed for a car that could be under manual control.
But seriously, if self-driving cars could be demonstrated to be safe, I'd prefer NOT to have humans behind the wheel, with their poor reaction times, willingness to get drunk, and tendency to play with their cellphones. Getting killed in a car accident is one of the leading causes of death (especially in certain age brackets). Everyone accepts this as 'normal', but why the fuck should we?
Thank you. Let me also add that "Coal burns, pollutes, and then is done with" is the most irresponsible and stupid thing I've heard all week. Coal not only produces huge amounts of highly radioactive waste, it spews it all into the atmosphere instead of a controlled waste facility. And coal produces huge amounts of heavy metals. This is all besides the fact that it has 3x the carbon emissions of oil and gas.
If done right, nuclear is really our only option for cheap, clean, safe energy. Btw, I'm a millenial too, and no, not all of us are retarded.
A tender suggestion: perhaps you should consider learning Matlab (not mathlab) and/or Gnu octave (a similar language to Matlab, but open source); if nothing else they would give you an idea of what's possible in technical computing (e.g. virtually automatic parallelization of code if you write stuff correctly). For most problems there's no need to get knee-deep in OS parallelization primitives hell.
> It is good for handling matricies of identical types of element doing the same thing on each entry.
Actually, that's MATLAB. Julia does not give matrices any special treatment - it has a type system that is rich enough that you can define an entire matrix domain-specific-language inside it (which is exactly what they did - Julia's matrix operations are defined entirely in Julia itself, yet are still blazing fast because they call external libraries). http://julia.readthedocs.org/e...
Plus, whereas MATLAB kind of forces you to do vector operations, in Julia you can do it either way. You can do it the C way if you like, or the MATLAB way. The 'right' way depends on what you want to achieve (code clarity, performance, etc.)
The benefit of this is that you can define a language for dealing with data (similar to R) inside Julia. That's what the DataFrames.jl package provides.
I'm sorry if my post sounded like a commercial, it's just that I've done a lot of research on D-wave's hardware and it's really impressive what such a small team managed to pull off. At least they're doing something.
Slashdot Mirror
> First, actually, the public has been behind a larger space budget for many years
Uhm, where the fuck do you get this idea? Public opinion polls about NASA's budget have always been pretty much on the 'undecided' end, and increasing NASA's budget has never had overwhelming support except for in the 60's. Besides, what people say in an opinion poll is not indicative of what they actually want. When it comes time to actually vote for their representatives, the tendency has been to vote against representatives who want to expand the space program, except for in 'space districts' like in Florida. But please, continue with your reality distortion, it will really help you figure out what went wrong.
> A replacement should have been started far earlier than that. Failure to do so was just plain poor, short-sighted planning.
No. Plenty of people called for a replacement, and many even had working designs. NASA couldn't fund them because its budget was limited and all of it was spent on the shuttle and NASA. Again, you fail to understand my point.
If you actually read my point 2, I specifically used the word 'the same' i.e. a crash development program alongside the shuttle. Reading comprehension sometimes comes in handy.
Whoa, slow down there. You suddenly jumped from a discussion about space hardware to fucking federal budget planning and bank bailouts. One thing at a time.
The shuttle was a huge boondoggle that cost $1bn (a conservative estimate) to send up astronauts in an aging, unreliable death trap that had completely blown up on 2 out of 131 missions. Don't get me wrong; it was a great piece of hardware for its time, and the engineers who designed it in the 70's should be commended. Especially, the shuttle main engines are a fine example of the quality of American engineering. But there was no justification in keeping the shuttle. Cancelling it was a wise and prudent decision, probably the best decision in the space program since 1969. Just for reference, all of SpaceX's achievements to date have been done with less money than a single shuttle launch.
Of course with the shuttle out of the picture, there was the question of what to use to send astronauts up there. You could either 1) double NASA's budget and ask it to crash-design (excuse the pun) a new manned vehicle in a couple of years. Too costly and risky. 2) Pour money into private companies to do the same. The public would never go for it, and it would also be too risky. 3) Cancel the shuttle program and divert the leftover funds to private companies to design a new manned vehicle, and in the meanwhile send up astronauts (as part of ISS obligations) with Russian rockets. That's the most reasonable choice, and exactly what they did. Has the US government made a lot of bad decisions with regard to space? Absolutely; a LOT of bad decisions. But cancelling the shuttle and piggybacking on Russia wasn't one of them.
Is it true that the US did not develop manned flight capability when it should have? Absolutely, but that was directly BECAUSE of the shuttle program. The shuttle siphoned off all manned space travel funds, leaving nothing to develop a new vehicle. The shuttle HAD to be cancelled to start developing new manned spaceflight ability. If you want to start pointing fingers, fine, but point them at the people who greenlighted the shuttle in the 70's, not the politicians who made the wise decision to cancel it in the 2000's.
The US isn't "relying" on anyone for space exploration. The US has plenty of its own rockets. It's merely relying on Russia for launching astronauts as an interim solution until the ISS project ends or a commercial company comes up with a manned vehicle.
When it would cost you $1000 to buy a car, and your neighbor lets you rent his car for $10/day, and you only need a car for a few days, it would be a good idea to use his car. And if he has the tendency of being treacherous, well, then you can buy your own car if he misbehaves. And if he misbehaves really badly, then you can go and pick a fight with him. But as long as he behaves, what's the problem?
Your attitude is similar to the people who hole themselves up, buy a thousand guns, and never emerge from their house because they think everyone is out to get them. In the real world, international cooperation happens all the time, even between enemies (which the US and Russia aren't, at least not at the level of the cold war anymore). it's not just that international cooperation is good. It's that international cooperation is _necessary_ to actually get stuff done. Cooperating with Russia and other countries allows the ISS project to spread risk and costs around in an optimal way, with the subtext being that if any nation doesn't hold up its share of the deal, the deal is null.
I'm not surprised that they aren't getting government funding; the word 'fusion' has basically become tainted and no one wants to go near it. Except maybe for projects that have useful spinoffs like the NIF (which is being mainly used for nuclear weapons research at the moment) or projects that have a long enough research history that there is reasonable confidence they will work (like ITER). But it's really through no fault of the fusion researchers; it's just that fusion turned out to be a much harder problem than anyone guessed.
I don't think they ever claimed it's a magic bullet solution for everything, but the claim that it does not produce pollution is true. They plan to use an aneutronic reaction (p-B11) which will produce virtually zero nuclear waste.
All signals degrade over distance. Not sure exactly what you're asking?
> The problem with their approach is that there's little science behind it.
Then it's time to produce some science behind it. That's what this project is about. Most everyone I've talked to agreed that we simply don't know if DPF will work or not.
Actually, it would. This isn't intended to be a power generator, just a physics demonstrator. People have been really hesitant to fund DPF because it uses plasma instabilities and there hasn't been much research on the detailed dynamics of these instabilities. They are really hard to model and hard to simulate on the computer. We know very little about them. This project aims to fix that.
The idea hinges around the creation of a 'plasmoid' and its rapid implosion. Critics agree that the plasmoid can be produced; they disagree that the plasmoid is really being compressed to the densities and energies that the DPF proponents claim. So the DPF people need this $200k to fund a proof-of-concept that would (hopefully) prove the naysayers wrong. And if it doesn't, we haven't lost much, it's useful science that is literally going where no one has gone before. Previous DPF experiments managed to produce some really tantalizing data (demonstrating something like 100x better confinement than other technologies) but the results were contentious and not everyone agrees with them, so further experimentation is needed.
it kind of makes me sad that DPF fusion energy hasn't even be able to reach half its measly $200,000 goal on indiegogo: https://www.indiegogo.com/proj...
Why are our priorities so back-asswards.
And of course the inevitable stories of how depressed and lonely he had become, and how he had become paranoid and anti-social and started doing drugs, before he decided to take his own life. And the media would be all over that shit.
You haven't read his manifesto. Read it (read all of it, not just the innocent beginning). Saying he was a psychopath is probably underestimating his illness.
We humans have a tendency to project and to see a little bit of ourselves in others. It's nice that you try to make this guy closer to yourself, to perhaps understand him better. But it's misleading. He had nothing in common with the majority of people. He was totally insane. I agree with the NPD classification, and propose that his case actually be used as a reference scale for future NPD diagnoses.
If you really think you're like him, or share character aspects with him at all, you're either dangerously insane and need to be locked up immediately, or you haven't read his manifesto and have only seen the bullshit media portrayals of him (who also haven't read his manifesto).
He was 100% batshit boogaloo insane, totally out if it in any shape, dimension, or form; wackiness level up to 11. He seriously talks about castrating all men and locking all women up in concentration camps and starving them to death, with himself acting as Ruler of Earth. This isn't an angry spur-of-the-moment keyboard-mashing rant. It's 140 pages long. He types this all out in coherent sentences. He spent a lot of time on it. He is convinced that he is the only person fit to rule the planet.
He blew thousands of dollars on the lottery, in certainty he would win, because he was so awesome and stuff, and greatness was his destiny. And when the reality of the world and his treatment at the hands of men and women didn't agree with his obviously God-given (himself-given?) Greatness, it was the people who were at fault and had to be destroyed. He repeats this on basically every page, for crying out loud.
What's sad is that the so-called 'journalists' 'read' his manifesto and instead of asking themselves what the truth was, they decided to only hear what they wanted to hear. They only focused on the misogyny aspect of his writings, when in fact he repeatedly gives away the real cause: intense narcissism (the most intense I've ever seen in a person, far beyond what I thought possible) coupled with intense sociopathy, all wrapped up in a nice crisp crust of spoiled upbringing and self-pity as a personal identity.
> every forum I read is a cesspool full of these guys.
Fixed that for you. The internet brings out the worst in people, 'nerdly' or not. Do you have ANY evidence that shows that misogynistic behavior is more abundant in nerd/geek circles?
> Nothing in the article was trying to paint all men with any sort of brush.
Did you even read the article? He paints all nerds with the same brush numerous times. It's even in the article summary:
"What the fuck is wrong with us?" - Emphasis on us. Not 'some of us'. Us.
"we live in an entitlement culture where guys think they need to be having sex with girls in order to be happy and fulfilled."
"It’s because other people’s bodies and other people’s love are not something that can be taken [...] we need to get that."
Look, I understand his bigger point that women have the right to choose who to have sex with. I 100% agree with that. But when his article clearly and specifically (and repeatedly) targets 'male nerds', I can't blame male nerds for thinking that they have been specifically targeted and thus feeling they need to defend themselves.
What you're missing is a sense of scale. There are likely hundreds of billions of planets in the galaxy. If you want to make the parallel to human history, the land mass of a single planet would be about equivalent to the area of 1/10 of a soccer field in comparison to the entire landmass of the Earth.
the idea is that if there's a solar system out there where a civilization exists which is sending signals between planets (kind of like we're doing on a limited scale with the Mars orbiters and rovers), it's likely that the signals between the planets are highly focused in a single direction, and so the ideal time to listen would be when the planets are lined up with respect to Earth.
Since we have no idea what kind of signals they are using (radio is the most popular method for our civilization but lasers are also good communications devices) the search would sweep over as much EM spectrum as it could. It's a really clever idea that would definitely pick up interplanetary communications, IF we can recognize the signals as such. As it stands, noise - and the fact that sufficiently advanced communications could be indistinguishable from white noise - limit our ability to do that.
But anyway, I like the idea because it doesn't presume that they are sending interstellar communications (which requires a high level of advancement), sending incredibly powerful bursts of omnidirectional signals (which requires some unknown reason since it's a pointless thing to do) or specifically aiming their signals at us (which requires a high level of self-importance on our part). If there are civilizations with the same level of advancement as us, we'll find them.
> Conversely, if you're getting defensive, maybe you should examine your behavior and make sure you're not part of the problem.
Getting defensive is not indicative of any wrongdoing. People naturally get defensive when you accuse them of crimes they didn't commit. Sure, people who have played the game know that that's wrong and that they should 'play it cool', but people who aren't as savvy will easily take the bait and go on the defensive.
The difference is that those groups aren't as self-blaming as nerds are, and they aren't so quick to take the bait. It's like if you gathered a bunch of guys in a room and shouted "misogynist!" and the nerd amongst them said, "I'm sorry!" even though he didn't really do anything.
> Generally speaking, I have found the bigger problems tend to go with the more macho types though.
I agree with this, it's just that those groups aren't self-blaming like nerds like OP are.
This. I love how he extrapolates from himself to every other 'nerd' in a single breath. "Everyone is guilty until proven innocent, because I say so!"
Sorry. While I love humans, my not-so-humble opinion is that we're nowhere near the level of human reliability needed for a car that could be under manual control.
But seriously, if self-driving cars could be demonstrated to be safe, I'd prefer NOT to have humans behind the wheel, with their poor reaction times, willingness to get drunk, and tendency to play with their cellphones. Getting killed in a car accident is one of the leading causes of death (especially in certain age brackets). Everyone accepts this as 'normal', but why the fuck should we?
Thank you. Let me also add that "Coal burns, pollutes, and then is done with" is the most irresponsible and stupid thing I've heard all week. Coal not only produces huge amounts of highly radioactive waste, it spews it all into the atmosphere instead of a controlled waste facility. And coal produces huge amounts of heavy metals. This is all besides the fact that it has 3x the carbon emissions of oil and gas.
If done right, nuclear is really our only option for cheap, clean, safe energy. Btw, I'm a millenial too, and no, not all of us are retarded.
It's usually their employers and myriad agents and publicists who realize that, actually.
...and other times it's simply just having a nice ass and having the good fortune of being thrust into the spotlight.
A tender suggestion: perhaps you should consider learning Matlab (not mathlab) and/or Gnu octave (a similar language to Matlab, but open source); if nothing else they would give you an idea of what's possible in technical computing (e.g. virtually automatic parallelization of code if you write stuff correctly). For most problems there's no need to get knee-deep in OS parallelization primitives hell.
> It is good for handling matricies of identical types of element doing the same thing on each entry.
Actually, that's MATLAB. Julia does not give matrices any special treatment - it has a type system that is rich enough that you can define an entire matrix domain-specific-language inside it (which is exactly what they did - Julia's matrix operations are defined entirely in Julia itself, yet are still blazing fast because they call external libraries). http://julia.readthedocs.org/e...
Plus, whereas MATLAB kind of forces you to do vector operations, in Julia you can do it either way. You can do it the C way if you like, or the MATLAB way. The 'right' way depends on what you want to achieve (code clarity, performance, etc.)
The benefit of this is that you can define a language for dealing with data (similar to R) inside Julia. That's what the DataFrames.jl package provides.
I'm sorry if my post sounded like a commercial, it's just that I've done a lot of research on D-wave's hardware and it's really impressive what such a small team managed to pull off. At least they're doing something.