As a far better article over at PopSci notes, the team includes a variety of physicists and engineers, only two of whom have done anything in the nuclear field.
While Richard Garwin did design the first proof-of-concept H-bomb way back in 1951, he spent most of his career at IBM, and held a symposium after the first Gulf War on how to close all those burning oil wells in Kuwait.
And although Tom Hunter has a couple degrees in nuclear engineering and is (until he retires in July) director of Sandia National Lab, his strengths appear to be more in the area of managing "big science" these days.
George Cooper, Alexander Slocum and Jonathan I Katz, though? Not nuke guys.
Others have pointed out that the Hubble deep fields don't include galaxy clusters. I'll add that the Subaru/XMM-Newton Deep Survey doesn't go quite as deep as Hubble (Hubble goes to around magnitude 29, SXDS only to magnitude 28)... but it covers an area of sky 1,000 times larger than Hubble's deep field.
I'd love to see JWST. I used to work in astronomy at one of the universities involved in developing the CCD sensors for NIRCam and was around the prototype camera they built with the first few chips off Rockwell's fab, for testing on the terrestrial telescope I operated, but it's just not the same as seeing something that's going into space.
(Incidentally, that prototype camera was built around 2003ish. They wanted to be sure the chips worked well before launching.)
Simply, things that are so far away / moving away from us so fast that their light is doppler-shifted into the infrared.
Larger mirror than Hubble (or other previous infrared space telescopes, like Spitzer) means it can gather the light faster than them, or if it exposes for the same length as them, can see fainter objects.
And being in orbit means it doesn't have to worry about which infrared frequencies can make it through the atmosphere.
Palm has a lot of talented employees, a lot of IP, and a lot of faithful users.
If you say so. However, the "lot of IP" Palm has doesn't appear to have kept its "faithful users" around and attracted new ones enough for the company to remain in business by itself.
In other words, the evidence contradicts your hypothesis.
Does my memory fail me, or is HP the company that couldn't even do a decent job of selling iPods, the handheld-electronics equivalent of crack-covered pancakes?
Apple has long discouraged domestic resellers from discounting its products, which is why you'll rarely see anyone selling them at more than a 5% discount within the US. (You will, though, see other deal-sweeteners, such as expanded RAM or a free printer thrown in.) Some early articles I read on today's news indicated that the online shops in Japan may have been marking things down too much for Apple's tastes - if that was the case, this wouldn't surprise me at all; it'd just be Apple applying the same sort of policy it applies domestically to overseas resellers.
Interestingly, there's a "Your Rights Online" story active on Slashdot right now about a Supreme Court case involving "the ability of resellers to offer legitimate, non-pirated versions of copyrighted goods, manufactured in foreign nations, to US consumers at prices that undercut those charged by the copyright holders."
If landlines can't be installed in Africa because it is not safe, then installing a wireless network is NOT dealing with this safety issue. It doesn't matter wheter you attribute the taming of the west to train, the postal service or the telegraph. The building of these networks and the need to protect this network protected the lands around it.
Very interesting point. In Uganda, I would say the issue isn't one of safety at all - it's one of the safest and friendliest countries I've ever been to - but of cost, and of the absence of sanctioned utility monopolies. (In the case of customs or the postal service, I suspect plain old corruption is to blame.) Anywhere in the US, and most places in Europe, the landlines are there because some organization has gotten the government's blessing (and support) to run phone lines everywhere, and since the phone line is going to go right past your house anyway, you may as well hook up to it.
This has not happened in many "least-developed countries" (a category to which Uganda belonged in the very recent past). Why? Well, what little money the government has is usually going to other higher-priority infrastructure projects, like roadways and electricity. And honestly, I can't be sure it's entirely a bad thing that by the time Uganda got around to developing, landlines and snail mail were largely passé.
But I certainly agree that in-country production, beyond the agricultural sector (Ugandans are certainly not going to starve!) is negligible. The 5-year plan talks about building more self-sustaining domestic production, and there are mineral or oil resources waiting to be exploited, so hopefully they can stop being a "cargo cult."
Although if we are comparing that to the iPad option, it's still not really a selling point, as you'd be pretty unlikely to leave a nice shiny toy like an iPad sitting unattended in a car.
Yeah, this. You'll probably take the iPad with you. Some built-in seatback entertainment system, you might not be able to take with you even if you wanted to for whatever reason.
Life expectancy is an aggregate, of course, and you can drag it down real fast with childhood, neonatal and maternal mortality. Sure, I know Ugandans whose kids died young, and I know ones whose kids died as young adults, and I know of people who died in their 50s or 60s, but I also know ones who are 70+ and have heard of them living to 90 or more. And of course, among the Indians, who tend to be moderately well-off, the numbers may be different. The richest man in the country, Sudhir Ruparelia (you can google him) is a hotelier who was a teenager when they were ejected; I'd put him in perhaps his late 50s now, and certainly he can afford the best medical care.
By the way, I've nothing against Uganda's Indians or Mr. Ruparelia; I've stayed at his flagship property before and my fiancée is well-acquainted with his people as well. Had the Brits handled things differently 100 years ago, perhaps the kind of perverse logic Amin espoused would never have arisen, but what's done is done.
I've been there several times, and Uganda - like most former colonies in Africa - isn't so much fucked up as it was fucked over. Faced with the lack of a middle-class (since of course they didn't want to stoop to being middle class, nor did they want any of the Africans to rise to that status) the British empire imported Indians by the score. Post-independence, there was all kinds of unrest, eventually culminating with Idi Amin kicking out all the Indians, which of course failed to solve anything because it wasn't like the locals were ready to take over their jobs or anything. Cue another 10-15 years of unrest, a couple coups, Museveni lets the Indians back in, they go right back to business and become more wealthy and powerful than ever, and aside from lingering problems with transboundary rebel groups in the far northwest near the borders with Sudan and Congo, the place has actually been relatively peaceful and stable for 25 years.
Unfortunately, given the history 1960-1985, development was starting from a pretty bad position - but it's been developing crazy-fast. The African Union's NEPAD (New Partnership for Africa's Development) project has been pushing good governance, anti-corruption, computers in schools and all that stuff, and Uganda's national planning authority just released a 5-year development plan, written by development professionals without consulting the parliament (which the parliament are pissed about, hehe!), and emphasizing electrification, high-tech industry, mass transit, and a bunch of other good ideas.
Of course, Uganda's still less developed than anywhere in the US except for maybe some back-woods hillbilly shack - my fiancée helped with editing the 5-year plan, and her apartment, just a few km from downtown Kampala, is at the end of a dirt lane, off another dirt lane, off a dirt road, off a paved road. And it's more surprising if the power stays on all day than if it doesn't.
The good news, though, is that thanks to some development aid partners (like Norway), it's being given development options other than "get as much oil as possible and build your economy around it" (a.k.a. the US-China model). Norway is huge on hydropower, and Uganda has a lot of potential in that area. Straddling the equator, there's plenty of solar potential too. So there's hope, at least, to preserve some of the environment, which of course is being exploited through eco-tourism.
As far as getting goods to Uganda, though... sheez, this is dead on. Never, ever try to mail anything there. I don't know whether it's customs or the postal service that's corrupt, but it's like mailing things into a black hole. I think one or two postcards I sent might have made it through. Even Express Mail doesn't get any respect. If you want to get anything to anyone, it's FedEx/DHL or bust.
The goods sold in stores have pretty much been shipped overland from Mombasa (in a barroom, drinking gin *weeps for Warren*). Former UK colony, so they're all UK-spec electrically. In '05 or '06, a clock-radio you'd pay $19 for at WalMart cost $100 due to all that shipping. Thankfully, things have gotten a little better now, but an unlocked iPhone 3G S is still $1200+. Oh, yes, there are iPhones. There's an Apple authorized reseller right downtown in Kampala, although there's an unhealthy lag for them to actually get each new revision of things in-stock. Some of the bigger regional supermarkets even carry US brands.
But credit cards... yeah, they're a novelty over there. Ugandans hardly use credit. A young man will bust his ass to get through school, then work like crazy and live on almost nothing, until he saves up enough cash to buy land and build enough of his dream house to live in. They're insanely hard-working. So basically you either meet people who have nothing (because they're working and saving) or you meet guys who are 25 and already have a large house, nice car, etc. Not so much in-between. And not on credit.
The Google translation clearly shows that Koneiden tultua laskuun koneet tarkastettiin ja moottoreiden imuaukoissa havaittiin perunajauhomaista vulkaanista tuhkapölyä means Machines after the decline in machinery and engines are inspected inlet was observed from potato flour, volcanic ash and dust. They should try it again without the potato flour.;)
Since I once upon a time actually used OS/2 at the office (MCI, Iowa City, 1993-1994) I briefly considered going over there and camping out for the release, but unfortunately I have to work all those days. But I'm sure there are plenty of OS/2 users who have free time in their calendar due to unemployment, retirement or commitment to mental hospitals...
Maybe instead of trying to force previous-generation "development" (for non-developers, of course - hey, why aren't they whining about the iPad's lack of support for ColdFusion while they're at it?) products onto a next-generation platform, I'd like to see Adobe spend their time developing versions of their core creative apps for it (and, for that matter, ditching a codebase with 20 years of cruft on it, and making versions that will run on modern 64-bit hardware with a modern UNIX OS.)
This approach - getting your own development house in order - would get them a lot more of my money, and I wouldn't hate every upgrade I had to make.:)
The UK's Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC - note similarity to STFU) decided not long ago, in its infinite wisdom, that UKIRT - the UK's national infrared telescope, and the 2nd-largest telescope in the world devoted to infrared astronomy - didn't actually need to keep getting any funding. This latest chunk of interesting/meaningful science or "stuff that matters" shows how myopic that kind of move is.
(And I'm not just saying that because I once observed on UKIRT...)
Slashdot Mirror
As a far better article over at PopSci notes, the team includes a variety of physicists and engineers, only two of whom have done anything in the nuclear field.
While Richard Garwin did design the first proof-of-concept H-bomb way back in 1951, he spent most of his career at IBM, and held a symposium after the first Gulf War on how to close all those burning oil wells in Kuwait.
And although Tom Hunter has a couple degrees in nuclear engineering and is (until he retires in July) director of Sandia National Lab, his strengths appear to be more in the area of managing "big science" these days.
George Cooper, Alexander Slocum and Jonathan I Katz, though? Not nuke guys.
Hmmm, that'd be news to me, and to various people I know.
If she means to say that a tablet would be better for the bathroom than a laptop, though, she might have a point...
Others have pointed out that the Hubble deep fields don't include galaxy clusters. I'll add that the Subaru/XMM-Newton Deep Survey doesn't go quite as deep as Hubble (Hubble goes to around magnitude 29, SXDS only to magnitude 28)... but it covers an area of sky 1,000 times larger than Hubble's deep field.
I wonder if it can be modded to drift..
We* prefer to think of it as "slewing."
*Subaru telescope operator, but wasn't working those nights - just got checked out on MOIRCS last month.
I'd love to see JWST. I used to work in astronomy at one of the universities involved in developing the CCD sensors for NIRCam and was around the prototype camera they built with the first few chips off Rockwell's fab, for testing on the terrestrial telescope I operated, but it's just not the same as seeing something that's going into space.
(Incidentally, that prototype camera was built around 2003ish. They wanted to be sure the chips worked well before launching.)
Simply, things that are so far away / moving away from us so fast that their light is doppler-shifted into the infrared.
Larger mirror than Hubble (or other previous infrared space telescopes, like Spitzer) means it can gather the light faster than them, or if it exposes for the same length as them, can see fainter objects.
And being in orbit means it doesn't have to worry about which infrared frequencies can make it through the atmosphere.
Palm has a lot of talented employees, a lot of IP, and a lot of faithful users.
If you say so. However, the "lot of IP" Palm has doesn't appear to have kept its "faithful users" around and attracted new ones enough for the company to remain in business by itself.
In other words, the evidence contradicts your hypothesis.
Does my memory fail me, or is HP the company that couldn't even do a decent job of selling iPods, the handheld-electronics equivalent of crack-covered pancakes?
Apple has long discouraged domestic resellers from discounting its products, which is why you'll rarely see anyone selling them at more than a 5% discount within the US. (You will, though, see other deal-sweeteners, such as expanded RAM or a free printer thrown in.) Some early articles I read on today's news indicated that the online shops in Japan may have been marking things down too much for Apple's tastes - if that was the case, this wouldn't surprise me at all; it'd just be Apple applying the same sort of policy it applies domestically to overseas resellers.
Interestingly, there's a "Your Rights Online" story active on Slashdot right now about a Supreme Court case involving "the ability of resellers to offer legitimate, non-pirated versions of copyrighted goods, manufactured in foreign nations, to US consumers at prices that undercut those charged by the copyright holders."
Shoe on the other foot?
...overseas discount web retailers have suddenly stopped selling products from a US company which is known for not liking to be undercut. :)
If landlines can't be installed in Africa because it is not safe, then installing a wireless network is NOT dealing with this safety issue. It doesn't matter wheter you attribute the taming of the west to train, the postal service or the telegraph. The building of these networks and the need to protect this network protected the lands around it.
Very interesting point. In Uganda, I would say the issue isn't one of safety at all - it's one of the safest and friendliest countries I've ever been to - but of cost, and of the absence of sanctioned utility monopolies. (In the case of customs or the postal service, I suspect plain old corruption is to blame.) Anywhere in the US, and most places in Europe, the landlines are there because some organization has gotten the government's blessing (and support) to run phone lines everywhere, and since the phone line is going to go right past your house anyway, you may as well hook up to it.
This has not happened in many "least-developed countries" (a category to which Uganda belonged in the very recent past). Why? Well, what little money the government has is usually going to other higher-priority infrastructure projects, like roadways and electricity. And honestly, I can't be sure it's entirely a bad thing that by the time Uganda got around to developing, landlines and snail mail were largely passé.
But I certainly agree that in-country production, beyond the agricultural sector (Ugandans are certainly not going to starve!) is negligible. The 5-year plan talks about building more self-sustaining domestic production, and there are mineral or oil resources waiting to be exploited, so hopefully they can stop being a "cargo cult."
Although if we are comparing that to the iPad option, it's still not really a selling point, as you'd be pretty unlikely to leave a nice shiny toy like an iPad sitting unattended in a car.
Yeah, this. You'll probably take the iPad with you. Some built-in seatback entertainment system, you might not be able to take with you even if you wanted to for whatever reason.
Life expectancy is an aggregate, of course, and you can drag it down real fast with childhood, neonatal and maternal mortality. Sure, I know Ugandans whose kids died young, and I know ones whose kids died as young adults, and I know of people who died in their 50s or 60s, but I also know ones who are 70+ and have heard of them living to 90 or more. And of course, among the Indians, who tend to be moderately well-off, the numbers may be different. The richest man in the country, Sudhir Ruparelia (you can google him) is a hotelier who was a teenager when they were ejected; I'd put him in perhaps his late 50s now, and certainly he can afford the best medical care.
By the way, I've nothing against Uganda's Indians or Mr. Ruparelia; I've stayed at his flagship property before and my fiancée is well-acquainted with his people as well. Had the Brits handled things differently 100 years ago, perhaps the kind of perverse logic Amin espoused would never have arisen, but what's done is done.
I've been there several times, and Uganda - like most former colonies in Africa - isn't so much fucked up as it was fucked over. Faced with the lack of a middle-class (since of course they didn't want to stoop to being middle class, nor did they want any of the Africans to rise to that status) the British empire imported Indians by the score. Post-independence, there was all kinds of unrest, eventually culminating with Idi Amin kicking out all the Indians, which of course failed to solve anything because it wasn't like the locals were ready to take over their jobs or anything. Cue another 10-15 years of unrest, a couple coups, Museveni lets the Indians back in, they go right back to business and become more wealthy and powerful than ever, and aside from lingering problems with transboundary rebel groups in the far northwest near the borders with Sudan and Congo, the place has actually been relatively peaceful and stable for 25 years.
Unfortunately, given the history 1960-1985, development was starting from a pretty bad position - but it's been developing crazy-fast. The African Union's NEPAD (New Partnership for Africa's Development) project has been pushing good governance, anti-corruption, computers in schools and all that stuff, and Uganda's national planning authority just released a 5-year development plan, written by development professionals without consulting the parliament (which the parliament are pissed about, hehe!), and emphasizing electrification, high-tech industry, mass transit, and a bunch of other good ideas.
Of course, Uganda's still less developed than anywhere in the US except for maybe some back-woods hillbilly shack - my fiancée helped with editing the 5-year plan, and her apartment, just a few km from downtown Kampala, is at the end of a dirt lane, off another dirt lane, off a dirt road, off a paved road. And it's more surprising if the power stays on all day than if it doesn't.
The good news, though, is that thanks to some development aid partners (like Norway), it's being given development options other than "get as much oil as possible and build your economy around it" (a.k.a. the US-China model). Norway is huge on hydropower, and Uganda has a lot of potential in that area. Straddling the equator, there's plenty of solar potential too. So there's hope, at least, to preserve some of the environment, which of course is being exploited through eco-tourism.
As far as getting goods to Uganda, though... sheez, this is dead on. Never, ever try to mail anything there. I don't know whether it's customs or the postal service that's corrupt, but it's like mailing things into a black hole. I think one or two postcards I sent might have made it through. Even Express Mail doesn't get any respect. If you want to get anything to anyone, it's FedEx/DHL or bust.
The goods sold in stores have pretty much been shipped overland from Mombasa (in a barroom, drinking gin *weeps for Warren*). Former UK colony, so they're all UK-spec electrically. In '05 or '06, a clock-radio you'd pay $19 for at WalMart cost $100 due to all that shipping. Thankfully, things have gotten a little better now, but an unlocked iPhone 3G S is still $1200+. Oh, yes, there are iPhones. There's an Apple authorized reseller right downtown in Kampala, although there's an unhealthy lag for them to actually get each new revision of things in-stock. Some of the bigger regional supermarkets even carry US brands.
But credit cards... yeah, they're a novelty over there. Ugandans hardly use credit. A young man will bust his ass to get through school, then work like crazy and live on almost nothing, until he saves up enough cash to buy land and build enough of his dream house to live in. They're insanely hard-working. So basically you either meet people who have nothing (because they're working and saving) or you meet guys who are 25 and already have a large house, nice car, etc. Not so much in-between. And not on credit.
4 years ago, you could walk aroun
The Google translation clearly shows that Koneiden tultua laskuun koneet tarkastettiin ja moottoreiden imuaukoissa havaittiin perunajauhomaista vulkaanista tuhkapölyä means Machines after the decline in machinery and engines are inspected inlet was observed from potato flour, volcanic ash and dust. They should try it again without the potato flour. ;)
Since I once upon a time actually used OS/2 at the office (MCI, Iowa City, 1993-1994) I briefly considered going over there and camping out for the release, but unfortunately I have to work all those days. But I'm sure there are plenty of OS/2 users who have free time in their calendar due to unemployment, retirement or commitment to mental hospitals...
The Cars.com article mentions some of the advantages of ICE, including being weather-tested to work from -5 to 160 degrees F (-20 to 71 C)
Great! Glad to know the ridiculously expensive option allows the little tikes to enjoy their Disney fare while dying of hypothermia or heatstroke.
I was going to suggest 37.42194, -122.08412, so they could get a bite to eat.
Maybe instead of trying to force previous-generation "development" (for non-developers, of course - hey, why aren't they whining about the iPad's lack of support for ColdFusion while they're at it?) products onto a next-generation platform, I'd like to see Adobe spend their time developing versions of their core creative apps for it (and, for that matter, ditching a codebase with 20 years of cruft on it, and making versions that will run on modern 64-bit hardware with a modern UNIX OS.)
This approach - getting your own development house in order - would get them a lot more of my money, and I wouldn't hate every upgrade I had to make. :)
On British TV, there have been some Brainiac shows about science and history that I dare say are more engaging than any typical American curriculum.
Unagi is a key ingredient in Unagi Pai, which I think is the yummiest cookie made with ground-up eel bones in the whole world. :)
The UK's Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC - note similarity to STFU) decided not long ago, in its infinite wisdom, that UKIRT - the UK's national infrared telescope, and the 2nd-largest telescope in the world devoted to infrared astronomy - didn't actually need to keep getting any funding. This latest chunk of interesting/meaningful science or "stuff that matters" shows how myopic that kind of move is.
(And I'm not just saying that because I once observed on UKIRT...)
Would that be the <EH HREF...> ... </EH> tags?
Apple is having a hugely harmful effect on competition and the open web.
...by pushing Acid/Acid2/Acid3 and other standards compliance, open-sourcing WebKit, open-sourcing GrandCentralDispatch, supporting HTML5, and... huh?
RIP, Warren.