On the other hand, in a warzone, maybe there is more camaraderie?
In my case, at least, that was my experience. Back in 2006, I spent 3 months bouncing around Iraq and Afghanistan fixing and upgrading satcoms gear for PAO shops all over the place. It really was an excellent experience for me, as the soldiers and marines I worked with really did seem to appreciate my presence. On more than a few occasions, I got invited out to unit barbecues etc... (and yes, I always made sure to bring something to the party, even if it was just a case of coke from the PX). The real key is that I was more or less immersed with the troops, living with them, and eating with them. I wasn't working for one of the big contracting firms, so I was living in the transient tents just like they were.
As someone who's been over there a number of times, my advice is to invest in some good clothing for there. As crazy as it seems, the best way to beat the heat in the desert is to cover up. Long, loose pants made from lightweight fabric and similar for shirts (along with silk-weight polypro undershirts) will keep you significantly more comfortable than your typical cotton t-shirt. Also, a good wide-brimmed boonie hat is worth it.
Basically, the idea is to keep the sun off your skin, the air flowing, and wick the sweat away from your skin.
The US Naval Observatory in Washington DC is worth a visit. It is one of the oldest official scientific establishments in the United States, and is home to he DoD's time keeping and positioning systems, including the master clocks for the GPS constellation. Note that you'll have to register for visiting fairly far in advance, as the site is also the home of the Vice President.
But the really big difference is that the design of a LFTR is much less expensive and less dangerous.
Eh? The heavy water design used by India (Derived from the CANDU technology we sold them) is a comparatively simple and safe design. It doesn't require any heavy machining (as the majority of the reactor operates at low pressure) and is an inherently stable design. Managing hot, corrosive liquids that have to be kept molten once the reactor is started up, is just asking for trouble, and horridly complicated. In effect, once you turn it on you can never turn it off again until you shutter it.
By then Bigelow will probably have his space hotel operating with SpaceX flying tourists there on a regular basis. Maybe NASA will buy one.
Given the choice, I'd ride a Soyuz before a Falcon9. Soyuz has 724 (725 with the one out o Korou) successful launches out of a total of 745 attempts. It's a solid, proven design. At this point, falcon 9 has 2 launches.
The failure to have one safe launch *does* mean that a launch vehicle is unsafe, so there's that.
Pretty much any launch vehicle is unsafe, by definition. You're sitting on top of (literally) tons of highly flammable fuel, along with similarly large amounts of liquid oxygen. There is nothing about this that is "safe" by conventional standards. Even after you've safely survived the combustion of all that fuel, you are then in one of the most hostile environments known to man. Elevated radiation levels, lack of gravity causing your bones and muscles to waste away, and a hard vacuum on the other side of a rather thin piece of aluminum and/or glass. In short, human spaceflight is inherently dangerous, yet we still do it, and quite rightly so.
Of the existing launch vehicles, the Soyuz design is the single most successful and reliable launcher ever designed and operated. Since 1973, there have been 745 launches of the Soyuz-U design with 724 successful launches (with most of the failures in the early days). The soviets, and subsequently the russians, have made continuous improvements and refinements to the design of this rocket, leading to the closest thing we have to a routine launch system. As one astronaut I've worked with said, "You can take a Soyuz, pick it up in the middle with a crane, shake it, then stick it on the pad and launch it in the middle of a blizzard, and it will still make it to orbit."
Given the choice of Shuttle, Soyuz, Falcon 9, or some other launch system, I would always take the Soyuz.
Sure, so then those of us that did not benefit from the schooling that the loans garnered will also have to pay for them. Thats such an awesome idea that I have come up with a similar idea.. I think I might mug you in the dark of night and take your cash and valuables.
On average, that person you paid for is going to wind up paying significantly more in tax than you ever will. Post secondary education is one of the single best investments a government can make in it own citizens. On a purely financial basis, it pays for itself many times over in increased tax revenue, never mind the social benefits of having a more educated population.
Children are taught to write in cursive, wich is a torture to most, for years. Handwriting is an obsolete skill they will never use in their lives. This time would be much better spent by teaching them typing that they will need every day.
I don't know what planet you live on, but neat, legible handwriting is still absolutely required in nearly any industry. Case in point, a friend of mine ordered some copper walled cavity filters for VHF radio repeater. He specified that the cavities were to be made from 1.0mm wall thickness tubing. Unfortunately the guy who took the order couldn't write worth crap, and the machinist who built the unit read that as 10mm wall thickness.
As an Engineer myself, most of my work is done on computers, but my note taking and what not is still done in long-hand. Under our corporate rules, we have to do this, and sign/date the pages as we go. The whole point is that these notebooks can then be legally used as evidence should there be any patent dispute or the like. A signed, and dated page from an Engineer's notebook is much better evidence of prior art than some computer file you dug up.
They certainly do. One lady in my former workplace got a brand new 23" CRT monitor (bloody heavy and not missing CRTs of that size!) but when me and a co-worker installed it the picture was wonky at the top. We figured--new monitor, CRT, needs to warm up--but after a day or two it was still bad. Tried another--same thing.
In Ontario, they had a portable MRI machine in a big rig that they'd haul from hospital to hospital. My friend was working in Hospital, and would dread every time it came. As soon as they'd power up the magnets, he'd get a whole raft of complaints because every monitor in the hospital would go wonky.
Outages are common, and can be caused by anything from the town's electrical generators going down to the nature of the satellite's orbit.
The one that everyone forgets about is the twice-yearly series of sun outages. For about a week, some time close to each of the equinoxes, the geometry works out such that the sun passes directly behind the satellite (from the point of view of a dish on the ground). The sun, of course, being a giant nuclear reactor in the sky, produces a hell of a lot of RF energy, and easily drowns out the satellite it's passing behind.
A few years ago, I had a maritime tracking antenna up and going, and when the sun outage happened, it decided that the sun was a much juicier target than the satellite, and merrily tracked it for several hours until someone finally reset it.
you also have to have people on the ground capable of doing this. I supply internet access to 17 remote communities through F2, and there's no way in hell anyone on the ground in these communities would be able to successfully repoint the satellite dish. We just have to wait for Telesat to get things back up and running. The current estimate is 1700 Pacific time.
Comfort is not a function of the plane but of the number of seats the airlines cram in. So, hands up anyone who thinks that, in a Dreamliner, as opposed to any other plane, you will actually be able to reach your economy class seat without advanced contortionism.
This all depends on the airline. Air Canada, for example, runs a 32" seat pitch on most of their aircraft, with a minimum pitch of 31". TBH, I'm 6'2" and fly some 120,000 miles a year. About the only aircraft I really have trouble with is CRJ-100s and the other tiny puddle jumpers. (That said, I love turboprops).
There are some things that can't be done via telepresence. Like it or not, business almost always boils down to personal connections. This is especially true outside of North America. In Europe and Asia, it can take years to build a relationship between a vendor and customer to the point where the customer will be willing to spend significant amounts of money. However, once you've built that relationship, you'll need to do a lot to lose that business.
By the same token, telepresence doesn't let you turn a wrench or otherwise get your hands onto equipment. Not everything has a command line or a web interface, and even those that do occasionally fail.
If you're going to get me a Reliant, I'd prefer it be prepended with USS. (What kind of name is Reliant, anyway? reliant upon a massive service infrastructure)
Then I started watching the ISS itself - the play of light and reflections on the equipment that is visible, and have to ask (someone knowledgeable, please) if the motions of the solar panels while in earth shadow are really necessary? It just seems uneconomical electrically and mechanically to allow such movements.
They keep moving because it's the easiest to thing to do. They need to re-position the panels so they're face-on to the sun as it rises on the next orbit. The simplest thing to do is just to continually track the sun, even if the earth is in the way; that way it's just one slow, continuous motion. That said, they can also go into "night flyer" mode where the station turns the panels edge-on to the direction of travel to reduce drag, when in the dark. The tradeoff is this puts more strain on the control-moment gyros that keep the station stable.
Are Christians required to be judgmental assholes?
No, and it pains me every time I hear stories like that. It truely saddens me that people would abuse the term "Christian" as such. I'm Lutheran, and one of the most common discussion that comes up around the coffee pot (coffee hour after the service is the third sacrament you know!) is "reclaiming the C word" and how to make the world realize you can be an honest, caring, liberal minded person and still be a Christian.
As Martin Luther wrote, "Sin boldly, but love God even more boldly." It is our duty to reach out and help those who need help, be it give a sandwich to the homeless guy or just be there for someone in a lot of pain, or to welcome the gay couple into our service and home because their parents kicked them out.
*Real* space exploration these days is performed by robots. Humans have the wrong senses, the wrong body form, and needs that are very difficult to satisfy in space. But we're very good at building and directing robots, and getting better very fast.
Let's be honest, a trained geologist with a quad-bike type vehicle could have done all the work that the MERs have done in the course of their mission within a couple of days. I'm not trying to discount the work that the rovers and their controllers here on earth have done, but you simply can not equate their capabilities with what a living, breathing human could do in the same location. MSL (assuming the somewhat rube goldberg-esq landing system works) will be an amazing machine, and well worth the investment, but again the machine has no on board intuition or observational skills.
On the other hand, I'm a realist. The only reason why humans will ever set foot on Mars (or any other celestial body) is because some government decides that it is politically expedient for their citizens (or allies) to do so. Why did the USA go to the moon? not because it was hard, not because of the science, but to beat the Russians. The thing is, the only thing you can really do when you get there is good, hard science.
Also, a violation of General Order #1 over there (The "No Fun" order). Among other things, General Order 1 prohibits booze, porn, and males in female quarters, and females in male quarters. Ostensibly this is to be understanding to the local Muslim population, yet they serve obscene amounts of bacon in the DFACs. Of these, the only one that I have seen religiously enforced is the ban on booze. The males/females in each others quarters is solved by putting cots in the mortar shelters, or other random places.
Nonsense... In my previous job, I worked with several excellent Engineering types from NASA. Aside from the backroom guys who build the equipment that flies, the Astronauts themselves are very much Engineers. Mario Runco, for example, was responsible for the design and testing of the large window that exists on the Destiny lab.
Problem is that if you bring that quantity back to earth, you'll depress the prices to the point where it isn't worth going out to get them. Even with a 10 fold reduction in launch costs, such as what SpaceX gives us, there aren't any elements or materials in existence and of sufficient value to mine in space and return to earth. The only possible exception is Helium-3, but that assumes we can develop He3 fusion any time soon.
Even if you were to find an asteroid made from pure platinum, by the time you bring sufficient quantities home to pay for your mission you'll have depressed the platinum prices to the point where it wasn't worth going to get it in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
On the other hand, in a warzone, maybe there is more camaraderie?
In my case, at least, that was my experience. Back in 2006, I spent 3 months bouncing around Iraq and Afghanistan fixing and upgrading satcoms gear for PAO shops all over the place. It really was an excellent experience for me, as the soldiers and marines I worked with really did seem to appreciate my presence. On more than a few occasions, I got invited out to unit barbecues etc... (and yes, I always made sure to bring something to the party, even if it was just a case of coke from the PX). The real key is that I was more or less immersed with the troops, living with them, and eating with them. I wasn't working for one of the big contracting firms, so I was living in the transient tents just like they were.
As someone who's been over there a number of times, my advice is to invest in some good clothing for there. As crazy as it seems, the best way to beat the heat in the desert is to cover up. Long, loose pants made from lightweight fabric and similar for shirts (along with silk-weight polypro undershirts) will keep you significantly more comfortable than your typical cotton t-shirt. Also, a good wide-brimmed boonie hat is worth it.
Basically, the idea is to keep the sun off your skin, the air flowing, and wick the sweat away from your skin.
I certainly didn't expect the Spanish Inquisition.
Even though I do believe that Darwin was right, I'd still walk out on a Dawkins lecture. The man is a horse's ass.
The US Naval Observatory in Washington DC is worth a visit. It is one of the oldest official scientific establishments in the United States, and is home to he DoD's time keeping and positioning systems, including the master clocks for the GPS constellation. Note that you'll have to register for visiting fairly far in advance, as the site is also the home of the Vice President.
Mmm.. Periair... Now where's Megamaid?
But the really big difference is that the design of a LFTR is much less expensive and less dangerous.
Eh? The heavy water design used by India (Derived from the CANDU technology we sold them) is a comparatively simple and safe design. It doesn't require any heavy machining (as the majority of the reactor operates at low pressure) and is an inherently stable design. Managing hot, corrosive liquids that have to be kept molten once the reactor is started up, is just asking for trouble, and horridly complicated. In effect, once you turn it on you can never turn it off again until you shutter it.
By then Bigelow will probably have his space hotel operating with SpaceX flying tourists there on a regular basis. Maybe NASA will buy one.
Given the choice, I'd ride a Soyuz before a Falcon9. Soyuz has 724 (725 with the one out o Korou) successful launches out of a total of 745 attempts. It's a solid, proven design. At this point, falcon 9 has 2 launches.
The failure to have one safe launch *does* mean that a launch vehicle is unsafe, so there's that.
Pretty much any launch vehicle is unsafe, by definition. You're sitting on top of (literally) tons of highly flammable fuel, along with similarly large amounts of liquid oxygen. There is nothing about this that is "safe" by conventional standards. Even after you've safely survived the combustion of all that fuel, you are then in one of the most hostile environments known to man. Elevated radiation levels, lack of gravity causing your bones and muscles to waste away, and a hard vacuum on the other side of a rather thin piece of aluminum and/or glass. In short, human spaceflight is inherently dangerous, yet we still do it, and quite rightly so.
Of the existing launch vehicles, the Soyuz design is the single most successful and reliable launcher ever designed and operated. Since 1973, there have been 745 launches of the Soyuz-U design with 724 successful launches (with most of the failures in the early days). The soviets, and subsequently the russians, have made continuous improvements and refinements to the design of this rocket, leading to the closest thing we have to a routine launch system. As one astronaut I've worked with said, "You can take a Soyuz, pick it up in the middle with a crane, shake it, then stick it on the pad and launch it in the middle of a blizzard, and it will still make it to orbit."
Given the choice of Shuttle, Soyuz, Falcon 9, or some other launch system, I would always take the Soyuz.
Sure, so then those of us that did not benefit from the schooling that the loans garnered will also have to pay for them. Thats such an awesome idea that I have come up with a similar idea.. I think I might mug you in the dark of night and take your cash and valuables.
On average, that person you paid for is going to wind up paying significantly more in tax than you ever will. Post secondary education is one of the single best investments a government can make in it own citizens. On a purely financial basis, it pays for itself many times over in increased tax revenue, never mind the social benefits of having a more educated population.
Children are taught to write in cursive, wich is a torture to most, for years. Handwriting is an obsolete skill they will never use in their lives. This time would be much better spent by teaching them typing that they will need every day.
I don't know what planet you live on, but neat, legible handwriting is still absolutely required in nearly any industry. Case in point, a friend of mine ordered some copper walled cavity filters for VHF radio repeater. He specified that the cavities were to be made from 1.0mm wall thickness tubing. Unfortunately the guy who took the order couldn't write worth crap, and the machinist who built the unit read that as 10mm wall thickness.
As an Engineer myself, most of my work is done on computers, but my note taking and what not is still done in long-hand. Under our corporate rules, we have to do this, and sign/date the pages as we go. The whole point is that these notebooks can then be legally used as evidence should there be any patent dispute or the like. A signed, and dated page from an Engineer's notebook is much better evidence of prior art than some computer file you dug up.
They certainly do. One lady in my former workplace got a brand new 23" CRT monitor (bloody heavy and not missing CRTs of that size!) but when me and a co-worker installed it the picture was wonky at the top. We figured--new monitor, CRT, needs to warm up--but after a day or two it was still bad. Tried another--same thing.
In Ontario, they had a portable MRI machine in a big rig that they'd haul from hospital to hospital. My friend was working in Hospital, and would dread every time it came. As soon as they'd power up the magnets, he'd get a whole raft of complaints because every monitor in the hospital would go wonky.
Outages are common, and can be caused by anything from the town's electrical generators going down to the nature of the satellite's orbit.
The one that everyone forgets about is the twice-yearly series of sun outages. For about a week, some time close to each of the equinoxes, the geometry works out such that the sun passes directly behind the satellite (from the point of view of a dish on the ground). The sun, of course, being a giant nuclear reactor in the sky, produces a hell of a lot of RF energy, and easily drowns out the satellite it's passing behind.
A few years ago, I had a maritime tracking antenna up and going, and when the sun outage happened, it decided that the sun was a much juicier target than the satellite, and merrily tracked it for several hours until someone finally reset it.
you also have to have people on the ground capable of doing this. I supply internet access to 17 remote communities through F2, and there's no way in hell anyone on the ground in these communities would be able to successfully repoint the satellite dish. We just have to wait for Telesat to get things back up and running. The current estimate is 1700 Pacific time.
Comfort is not a function of the plane but of the number of seats the airlines cram in. So, hands up anyone who thinks that, in a Dreamliner, as opposed to any other plane, you will actually be able to reach your economy class seat without advanced contortionism.
This all depends on the airline. Air Canada, for example, runs a 32" seat pitch on most of their aircraft, with a minimum pitch of 31". TBH, I'm 6'2" and fly some 120,000 miles a year. About the only aircraft I really have trouble with is CRJ-100s and the other tiny puddle jumpers. (That said, I love turboprops).
There are some things that can't be done via telepresence. Like it or not, business almost always boils down to personal connections. This is especially true outside of North America. In Europe and Asia, it can take years to build a relationship between a vendor and customer to the point where the customer will be willing to spend significant amounts of money. However, once you've built that relationship, you'll need to do a lot to lose that business.
By the same token, telepresence doesn't let you turn a wrench or otherwise get your hands onto equipment. Not everything has a command line or a web interface, and even those that do occasionally fail.
If you're going to get me a Reliant, I'd prefer it be prepended with USS. (What kind of name is Reliant, anyway? reliant upon a massive service infrastructure)
But is there Dijon Catsup in the trunk?
Then I started watching the ISS itself - the play of light and reflections on the equipment that is visible, and have to ask (someone knowledgeable, please) if the motions of the solar panels while in earth shadow are really necessary? It just seems uneconomical electrically and mechanically to allow such movements.
They keep moving because it's the easiest to thing to do. They need to re-position the panels so they're face-on to the sun as it rises on the next orbit. The simplest thing to do is just to continually track the sun, even if the earth is in the way; that way it's just one slow, continuous motion. That said, they can also go into "night flyer" mode where the station turns the panels edge-on to the direction of travel to reduce drag, when in the dark. The tradeoff is this puts more strain on the control-moment gyros that keep the station stable.
Last year, summer was on a Tuesday wasn't it? At last it was up in Lotus Land...
Are Christians required to be judgmental assholes?
No, and it pains me every time I hear stories like that. It truely saddens me that people would abuse the term "Christian" as such. I'm Lutheran, and one of the most common discussion that comes up around the coffee pot (coffee hour after the service is the third sacrament you know!) is "reclaiming the C word" and how to make the world realize you can be an honest, caring, liberal minded person and still be a Christian.
As Martin Luther wrote, "Sin boldly, but love God even more boldly." It is our duty to reach out and help those who need help, be it give a sandwich to the homeless guy or just be there for someone in a lot of pain, or to welcome the gay couple into our service and home because their parents kicked them out.
Making them privateers [wikipedia.org] outside the bound of their letters of marque, then? I say... hang them.
Might be hard to find a yardarm on their building though...
*Real* space exploration these days is performed by robots. Humans have the wrong senses, the wrong body form, and needs that are very difficult to satisfy in space. But we're very good at building and directing robots, and getting better very fast.
Let's be honest, a trained geologist with a quad-bike type vehicle could have done all the work that the MERs have done in the course of their mission within a couple of days. I'm not trying to discount the work that the rovers and their controllers here on earth have done, but you simply can not equate their capabilities with what a living, breathing human could do in the same location. MSL (assuming the somewhat rube goldberg-esq landing system works) will be an amazing machine, and well worth the investment, but again the machine has no on board intuition or observational skills.
On the other hand, I'm a realist. The only reason why humans will ever set foot on Mars (or any other celestial body) is because some government decides that it is politically expedient for their citizens (or allies) to do so. Why did the USA go to the moon? not because it was hard, not because of the science, but to beat the Russians. The thing is, the only thing you can really do when you get there is good, hard science.
Also, a violation of General Order #1 over there (The "No Fun" order). Among other things, General Order 1 prohibits booze, porn, and males in female quarters, and females in male quarters. Ostensibly this is to be understanding to the local Muslim population, yet they serve obscene amounts of bacon in the DFACs. Of these, the only one that I have seen religiously enforced is the ban on booze. The males/females in each others quarters is solved by putting cots in the mortar shelters, or other random places.
Nonsense... In my previous job, I worked with several excellent Engineering types from NASA. Aside from the backroom guys who build the equipment that flies, the Astronauts themselves are very much Engineers. Mario Runco, for example, was responsible for the design and testing of the large window that exists on the Destiny lab.
Problem is that if you bring that quantity back to earth, you'll depress the prices to the point where it isn't worth going out to get them. Even with a 10 fold reduction in launch costs, such as what SpaceX gives us, there aren't any elements or materials in existence and of sufficient value to mine in space and return to earth. The only possible exception is Helium-3, but that assumes we can develop He3 fusion any time soon.
Even if you were to find an asteroid made from pure platinum, by the time you bring sufficient quantities home to pay for your mission you'll have depressed the platinum prices to the point where it wasn't worth going to get it in the first place.