Slashdot UIDs are somewhere over 1.27 million now... even if there are fewer than 500,000 active users, I'd chip in $100 toward buying a Space Shuttle...
Android suffers from the fact they don't control the hardware, so the quality of the experience depends as much on the device manufacturers as the work Google does.
Totally. The Android phone T-Mobile is selling is kinda under-specced. One of my bosses at a MS-centric organization got one (because it's cooler than the Windows Mobile phones he had before, which he never talked smack about until he got the Android... and yet, very importantly for him, it is not from Apple, who he hates for reasons I don't know). MS-centric organizations of course have Exchange servers, and his Android can't do jack with ours (except Outlook Web Access, maybe)... funny, those of us who have iPhones find that they work fine with the Exchange server. And for whatever reason (under-speccing, I think) his Android can't run Google Earth yet, while the iPhones can...
OPTIC is not exactly a new camera, nor was it purpose-built for this. It's about four years old, and was the prototype camera for John Tonry's OTCCD (Orthogonal Transfer CCD) chips, which are now better known as the chips inside Pan-STARRS' gigapixel camera, I think. The OTCCDs have some in-chip guiding capabilities, which are kinda neat. If I recall, OPTIC spends half the year at (but not always on) the UH 2.2-meter (where I'm an operator) and half the year at WIYN.
Because OPTIC works somewhat differently than our other cameras, it doesn't exactly have a whole lot of users. John Johnson came up with the idea of using it to do light curves of transiting planets, and it turned out to work pretty well, to the point that he and his collaborators (including a couple summer REU students from the mainland) were able to get the first full-transit light curves of some particular planets.
(*involved as in, I was operating the scope that night in August and got to see those light curves in "real time." Fortunately, being thanked at the end of a scientific paper preprint earns me geek cred with my 9-year-old.;)
Gore spoke at the UN climate change conference today. I missed it, but colleagues who were there said that he didn't talk about being a layman. Of course, he was speaking to politicians and policymakers, not a room full of scientists. I guess he's smart enough to change his tone depending on whether he's in a room of people he knows know more than he does.;)
Well, I asked around and the Scientific and Technical Committee is meeting Februray 9-20 at the UN's Vienna International Center in Austria. I don't know which of those days the NEO working group will meet, but I'm trying to see if I can somehow be in the area (or at least in Europe) around that time (which isn't exactly a trivial thing, since I live on the other side of the planet).
Actually getting in might also be non-trivial, now that I think of it... but if I make it all the way to Vienna, I'm pretty sure they'll let me in.;)
I've actually seen Bodman speak at an energy conference, and I don't remember him saying "nuke-u-lar" at least. On the down side, he then introduced the President, who of course did.;)
But I'm just a bottom-of-the-totem-pole data-taking grunt, almost never seen in person on Chu Road (yeah - win a Nobel while working at the Lab and they name a stretch of pavement after you!) so several layers of bureaucracy shield me from folks like Director Chu or Secretary Bodman. They presumably don't even know I exist, and I have no problems with that.
the current Secretary of Energy, Sam Bodman, was a professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT. As a chemical engineer, his work had much to do with the practical side of energy technology. He's done a good job during the last four years.
I agree; Bodman is no dummy. But practically speaking, he's spent very little time working in science, and almost all of that before 1970. From 1971-2004, he was working in finance - heck, he did a stint as Deputy Secretary of the Treasury! It's good to be well-rounded and all that, of course...
He also has a Nobel prize and has become a moral authority on climate change and energy
I saw Al Gore speak less than 2 hours ago (at Polska Akademii Nauk, introducing a presentation by Wieslaw Maslowski, an expert on the arctic ice cap) and during his remarks, he repeatedly pointed out that although he's worked to improve his understanding of things, he is a layman. Yes, he has a Nobel prize - but it's the Peace prize, not one in the sciences. That makes him a moral authority, but not a scientific authority, as he isn't a scientist.
There is no doubt in my mind that he's a brilliant politician and policy guy, and great at raising public awareness, but I'm sure all the scientists at the numerous Department of Energy labs will be happier with Chu in charge.
Okay, I poked around a bit... looks like the Working Group on Near-Earth Objects (mentioned in the BBC piece) isn't (as I had initially thought) the IAU WGNEO, but an occasionally-convened body under the Scientific and Technical Subcommittee of the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space.
Evidently UN HQ in NY has hosted a couple lil' conferences on the subject of NEOs in the past decade or so. Dunno whether this next gig in February will be there, or in Vienna, but I'm gonna start asking around. Might be an interesting thing to check out.
I don't think this is going to be the UN General Assembly.
I doubt it'll even be the UN Security Council.
I'd half expect it to be the UN Office of Outer Space Affairs, which handles the treaty on the peaceable use of outer space, and does things that are actually useful, like maintaining the registry of what's been launched and is whizzing around up there... but this sort of thing is a bit different than what UNOOSA has been doing.
My Christmas-vacation homework will thus be: 1. Ask friend at UNOOSA whether they're involved, and 2. Ask Dave Tholen (Apophis discoverer) whether he knows anything. Optionally: 3. Report back.
It's by no means guaranteed. A lot of companies take what they think is the safe way out by hiring people whose papers are in order. Of course, the fact that someone has a degree, or has an MCSE, or whatever, is no guarantee that they know jack. (Especially in the case of MCSEs.;)
If you don't have a degree, though, you're going to have to offer them something else - like quantifiable hands-on experience with the OS, demonstrable skill, and, ideally, freakishly inhuman quick-learner stuff.
I've been there; I've done that; I've said things like "Give me the AOS/VS manual and the Fortran 77 manual, and I'll be up to speed in a couple days" and delivered. It's not a career path for the faint of heart, nor, I suspect, for the sane.
By the way, this also applies to other fields - in my case, astronomy, environmental policy and foreign affairs. The PhDs know I'm not a PhD, but they generally figure I must just have a Master's.;)
(Applying for grad school soon, in hopes of fixing that.)
For those wondering why the Department of Energy is building a space telescope rather than focussing on nuclear things, the Department of Energy funds the SLAC Linear Accelerator centre at Stanford and it's people at that centre who have designed SNAP
Uh... not to fan the flames of any Bay-Area turf wars, but that team is led by people from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and University of Califoria at Berkeley. Yes, there are a couple Stanford people who work on things like electronics and pointing, but they're a small fraction of the whole project.
You were close, though: the Department of Energy funds Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.:)
Actually DOE has always been deeply involved in high energy (particle physics) research. They fund a number of accelerators, including Fermilab. Its not clear that any of that research would lead to usable energy sources either.
Good so far.
You can see the Dark Energy research as the intersection of high energy physics (DOE) and cosmology (NASA).
Yes, but don't forget that DOE has its own cosmologists, too. The DOE end of JDEM is being handled by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which has quite a bit of stuff going on in cosmology, mostly under its physics division.
Hardware and software upkeep? Uh, a tiny bit, but really mostly dealing with wetware. I'm operating the telescope, and as a former sysadmin, rather prefer to not have root on the boxen (sudo, where needed, will suffice). Server users usually don't (although they should!) question whether your racks are properly aligned with the stars.
They just don't have one of these cameras, they have four.
Uh, no. They have one telescope with one camera on it. The system on Haleakala is the prototype, called PS-1.
The original plan was to build a final system with 4 scopes and 4 cameras, PS-4. Probably on Mauna Kea. Probably where the UH 2.2-meter (which I operate) is now. But they have to go through permitting and everything.
Yup! Scientists - particularly those in space science - long ago realized that Hawaii was a good political analog for anywhere really far away of volcanic origin, like other bodies in space.
The Brits snicker to this day about how they persuaded their government to build the UK Infrared Telescope (UKIRT) out here, more or less guaranteeing themselves twice-a-year trips to Hawaii.
Of course, the last several years it's been easier than ever, with a president in office who just might believe you if you say "yes, sir, Hawaii is very much like the moon."
If she has aptitude for math, science and engineering, she probably has, in broader terms, aptitude for logic, reasoning and (maybe) critical thinking.
Those general things are going to give her an edge in just about any job that requires any kind of thinking. So she can choose just about any path, as far as I can see - her intellect will be useful even outside of math, science or engineering.
(I'm saying this as a frustratingly rational "quick learner" who scored well, though not perfectly, on the SAT, then proceeded to drop out of college after 1 semester, and has gone on to do cool stuff in computing, music journalism, writing, photography, astronomy and international affairs.)
My daughter's at school in the UK, so I bought one, sat through the delays and more delays (told her that there was a "late Christmas present" coming, but I wasn't quite sure when) then FedEx'ed it over to her. FedEx alone cost close to half the "value" of the thing - and then the UK bastards wanted her to pay customs duty too. Teach me to ship it in the original box, I guess...
...I'm just getting over the flu now. Sucks to be an early adopter.
I was actually a little skeptical, until I saw that my state is one of the 4 they highlighted, despite being somewhere you wouldn't expect to find a lot of "wintertime illnesses"
I use the iPhone's "Alarm" ringtone (at max volume) as an alarm clock. I don't dare set it as the sound for anything incoming, because then it might happen when I'm around other people, and it tends to make everyone else in the room jump and look panicky.
(It's an "Alarm" tone of the sort you might hear at your local nuke plant if cooling fails. Good stuff.)
Slashdot Mirror
And your other choices for multi-passenger, multi-ton payload carrying orbiters would be...
There's gotta be a "CowboyNeal" choice, right? Or "pie" maybe? (Oops wrong site)
Slashdot UIDs are somewhere over 1.27 million now... even if there are fewer than 500,000 active users, I'd chip in $100 toward buying a Space Shuttle...
Android suffers from the fact they don't control the hardware, so the quality of the experience depends as much on the device manufacturers as the work Google does.
Totally. The Android phone T-Mobile is selling is kinda under-specced. One of my bosses at a MS-centric organization got one (because it's cooler than the Windows Mobile phones he had before, which he never talked smack about until he got the Android... and yet, very importantly for him, it is not from Apple, who he hates for reasons I don't know). MS-centric organizations of course have Exchange servers, and his Android can't do jack with ours (except Outlook Web Access, maybe)... funny, those of us who have iPhones find that they work fine with the Exchange server. And for whatever reason (under-speccing, I think) his Android can't run Google Earth yet, while the iPhones can...
OPTIC is not exactly a new camera, nor was it purpose-built for this. It's about four years old, and was the prototype camera for John Tonry's OTCCD (Orthogonal Transfer CCD) chips, which are now better known as the chips inside Pan-STARRS' gigapixel camera, I think. The OTCCDs have some in-chip guiding capabilities, which are kinda neat. If I recall, OPTIC spends half the year at (but not always on) the UH 2.2-meter (where I'm an operator) and half the year at WIYN.
Because OPTIC works somewhat differently than our other cameras, it doesn't exactly have a whole lot of users. John Johnson came up with the idea of using it to do light curves of transiting planets, and it turned out to work pretty well, to the point that he and his collaborators (including a couple summer REU students from the mainland) were able to get the first full-transit light curves of some particular planets.
(*involved as in, I was operating the scope that night in August and got to see those light curves in "real time." Fortunately, being thanked at the end of a scientific paper preprint earns me geek cred with my 9-year-old. ;)
Gore spoke at the UN climate change conference today. I missed it, but colleagues who were there said that he didn't talk about being a layman. Of course, he was speaking to politicians and policymakers, not a room full of scientists. I guess he's smart enough to change his tone depending on whether he's in a room of people he knows know more than he does. ;)
Well, I asked around and the Scientific and Technical Committee is meeting Februray 9-20 at the UN's Vienna International Center in Austria. I don't know which of those days the NEO working group will meet, but I'm trying to see if I can somehow be in the area (or at least in Europe) around that time (which isn't exactly a trivial thing, since I live on the other side of the planet).
Actually getting in might also be non-trivial, now that I think of it... but if I make it all the way to Vienna, I'm pretty sure they'll let me in. ;)
I've actually seen Bodman speak at an energy conference, and I don't remember him saying "nuke-u-lar" at least. On the down side, he then introduced the President, who of course did. ;)
But I'm just a bottom-of-the-totem-pole data-taking grunt, almost never seen in person on Chu Road (yeah - win a Nobel while working at the Lab and they name a stretch of pavement after you!) so several layers of bureaucracy shield me from folks like Director Chu or Secretary Bodman. They presumably don't even know I exist, and I have no problems with that.
the current Secretary of Energy, Sam Bodman, was a professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT. As a chemical engineer, his work had much to do with the practical side of energy technology. He's done a good job during the last four years.
I agree; Bodman is no dummy. But practically speaking, he's spent very little time working in science, and almost all of that before 1970. From 1971-2004, he was working in finance - heck, he did a stint as Deputy Secretary of the Treasury! It's good to be well-rounded and all that, of course...
He also has a Nobel prize and has become a moral authority on climate change and energy
I saw Al Gore speak less than 2 hours ago (at Polska Akademii Nauk, introducing a presentation by Wieslaw Maslowski, an expert on the arctic ice cap) and during his remarks, he repeatedly pointed out that although he's worked to improve his understanding of things, he is a layman. Yes, he has a Nobel prize - but it's the Peace prize, not one in the sciences. That makes him a moral authority, but not a scientific authority, as he isn't a scientist.
There is no doubt in my mind that he's a brilliant politician and policy guy, and great at raising public awareness, but I'm sure all the scientists at the numerous Department of Energy labs will be happier with Chu in charge.
Okay, I poked around a bit... looks like the Working Group on Near-Earth Objects (mentioned in the BBC piece) isn't (as I had initially thought) the IAU WGNEO, but an occasionally-convened body under the Scientific and Technical Subcommittee of the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space.
Evidently UN HQ in NY has hosted a couple lil' conferences on the subject of NEOs in the past decade or so. Dunno whether this next gig in February will be there, or in Vienna, but I'm gonna start asking around. Might be an interesting thing to check out.
I don't think this is going to be the UN General Assembly.
I doubt it'll even be the UN Security Council.
I'd half expect it to be the UN Office of Outer Space Affairs, which handles the treaty on the peaceable use of outer space, and does things that are actually useful, like maintaining the registry of what's been launched and is whizzing around up there... but this sort of thing is a bit different than what UNOOSA has been doing.
My Christmas-vacation homework will thus be:
1. Ask friend at UNOOSA whether they're involved, and
2. Ask Dave Tholen (Apophis discoverer) whether he knows anything.
Optionally:
3. Report back.
It's by no means guaranteed. A lot of companies take what they think is the safe way out by hiring people whose papers are in order. Of course, the fact that someone has a degree, or has an MCSE, or whatever, is no guarantee that they know jack. (Especially in the case of MCSEs. ;)
If you don't have a degree, though, you're going to have to offer them something else - like quantifiable hands-on experience with the OS, demonstrable skill, and, ideally, freakishly inhuman quick-learner stuff.
I've been there; I've done that; I've said things like "Give me the AOS/VS manual and the Fortran 77 manual, and I'll be up to speed in a couple days" and delivered. It's not a career path for the faint of heart, nor, I suspect, for the sane.
By the way, this also applies to other fields - in my case, astronomy, environmental policy and foreign affairs. The PhDs know I'm not a PhD, but they generally figure I must just have a Master's. ;)
(Applying for grad school soon, in hopes of fixing that.)
For those wondering why the Department of Energy is building a space telescope rather than focussing on nuclear things, the Department of Energy funds the SLAC Linear Accelerator centre at Stanford and it's people at that centre who have designed SNAP
Uh... not to fan the flames of any Bay-Area turf wars, but that team is led by people from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and University of Califoria at Berkeley. Yes, there are a couple Stanford people who work on things like electronics and pointing, but they're a small fraction of the whole project.
You were close, though: the Department of Energy funds Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. :)
Actually DOE has always been deeply involved in high energy (particle physics) research. They fund a number of accelerators, including Fermilab. Its not clear that any of that research would lead to usable energy sources either.
Good so far.
You can see the Dark Energy research as the intersection of high energy physics (DOE) and cosmology (NASA).
Yes, but don't forget that DOE has its own cosmologists, too. The DOE end of JDEM is being handled by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which has quite a bit of stuff going on in cosmology, mostly under its physics division.
(I do some work with one of the collaborations based there.)
Hardware and software upkeep? Uh, a tiny bit, but really mostly dealing with wetware. I'm operating the telescope, and as a former sysadmin, rather prefer to not have root on the boxen (sudo, where needed, will suffice). Server users usually don't (although they should!) question whether your racks are properly aligned with the stars.
They just don't have one of these cameras, they have four.
Uh, no. They have one telescope with one camera on it. The system on Haleakala is the prototype, called PS-1.
The original plan was to build a final system with 4 scopes and 4 cameras, PS-4. Probably on Mauna Kea. Probably where the UH 2.2-meter (which I operate) is now. But they have to go through permitting and everything.
That depends how large of an enclosure you have. They're not trying to give the moon an atmosphere, this is strictly for an indoor moon base.
Yup! Scientists - particularly those in space science - long ago realized that Hawaii was a good political analog for anywhere really far away of volcanic origin, like other bodies in space.
The Brits snicker to this day about how they persuaded their government to build the UK Infrared Telescope (UKIRT) out here, more or less guaranteeing themselves twice-a-year trips to Hawaii.
Of course, the last several years it's been easier than ever, with a president in office who just might believe you if you say "yes, sir, Hawaii is very much like the moon."
This is the camp I'm in. I don't need more single-function gizmos piling up in my life.
If she has aptitude for math, science and engineering, she probably has, in broader terms, aptitude for logic, reasoning and (maybe) critical thinking.
Those general things are going to give her an edge in just about any job that requires any kind of thinking. So she can choose just about any path, as far as I can see - her intellect will be useful even outside of math, science or engineering.
(I'm saying this as a frustratingly rational "quick learner" who scored well, though not perfectly, on the SAT, then proceeded to drop out of college after 1 semester, and has gone on to do cool stuff in computing, music journalism, writing, photography, astronomy and international affairs.)
My daughter's at school in the UK, so I bought one, sat through the delays and more delays (told her that there was a "late Christmas present" coming, but I wasn't quite sure when) then FedEx'ed it over to her. FedEx alone cost close to half the "value" of the thing - and then the UK bastards wanted her to pay customs duty too. Teach me to ship it in the original box, I guess...
...I'm just getting over the flu now. Sucks to be an early adopter.
I was actually a little skeptical, until I saw that my state is one of the 4 they highlighted, despite being somewhere you wouldn't expect to find a lot of "wintertime illnesses"
I use the iPhone's "Alarm" ringtone (at max volume) as an alarm clock. I don't dare set it as the sound for anything incoming, because then it might happen when I'm around other people, and it tends to make everyone else in the room jump and look panicky.
(It's an "Alarm" tone of the sort you might hear at your local nuke plant if cooling fails. Good stuff.)
Kernel != OS ...and the AC was enlightened.
I hear there's a company that sells laptops with a BSD OS and decent support... named after some kind of fruit or something.