The space station has cost a huge pile of money and has provided little more than a presence in space.
Isn't that enough?
Not if you grew up believing all the 1960s-70s "Space Age" propaganda, and thought 2001 and Star Trek were documentaries, no.
The problem is that "a presence in space" isn't really any more useful to humankind than "a presence on Mount Everest". It's a nice thing for an elite class of adventure recreation enthusiasts to compare bragging rights about, sure. To the extent that it's a cool thing just because it's cool, and we're all okay with paying billions of dollars just for a few dozen people to experience moments of coolness, it's okay. Amortised over the whole global population, it's not much to pay for a bit of light entertainment.
But it's not going to lead to a glorious future of excitement and exploration. There's no currently physically foreseeable path from "a dozen astronauts in a sealed can in LEO" to the 50s vision of "thousands of Earthlike planets awaiting colonists with shovels and dreams". If we colonise the solar system - and that's a huge, mind-boggling 'if', making turning the Gobi Desert into a shopping mall look like building a new patio -- it will be the robots who go first.
And once the robots are there, which they are now, there's not much reason for humans to follow. It won't be to get away from repressive regimes - space colonies where a single leak means death for everyone will be far more repressive and conformist than nuclear submarines. It won't be to protect the survival of the species - any disaster you can imagine which would devastate Earth and leave fragile space cans alive, would be more easily dodged by building a few armoured bunkers on Earth. It won't be to solve overpopulation - you can only fit a few dozen people through the launch funnel at once, and ironically there's actually less space, in the sense of farmable land, in space than on Earth.
At least, there's no plausible path from here to the 50s space-future vision given currently extrapolatable human physiology and society. If we radically re-engineer ourselves? Maybe. But then, the Earth would also have changed unimaginably as a consequence, so all our reasons would be different.
The bottom line is that there's just no there there in space. Star Trek isn't real, there is no warp drive, and there are no habitable planets out there. We're stuck with this one for the forseeable future, so unless we want to die by the billions, we should think about making our culture sustainable.
or using what's done in most metric countries, namely use 250ml or 500ml ?
Right, we * have what's called a "metric cup", which is defined as 250 mils. Simple.
Soft drink cans are 300 mils, a "pint" bottle is 600 mils, what used to be "a pound" of butter is 500 grams. But we tend to buy our milk in litre bottles at the supermarket anyway. It's more than a pint, but it's still a good human size, and oh my goodness how much easier it is to not have to do weird conversions in your head all day. You just get on with life and free up whole chunks of your brain for important stuff, like putting captions on cats.
By comparison to anywhere else in reachable space, Earth is not only not a rock, it's a six-star Hilton where everyone gets the Rock Star Suite and 72 virgins.
You're welcome to trade anywhere on "this rock" for any of the hells out there. Want to breathe some hot sulphuric acid? I hear Venus is nice this time of year. Lethal doses of radiation? The moons of Jupiter await your landing. Carbon dioxide frost and instant depressurisation? Mars is just the ticket.
Space is not what you saw on Star Trek. There are no actual Vulcans out there.
People routinely live in Earth-side environments that would kill an unprotected person in seconds to minutes. But they don't have a problem with that environment because they live in habitats, not the raw environment.
And yet the Gobi Desert is still somehow not filled with modular inflatable shopping malls.
Yes, we can put habitats into inhospitable environments. Given an infinite budget and supply chain, that's relatively easy.
then we have better things to worry about. Such as elevating everyone from poverty.
How does creating a tiny outpost of highly specialised military-scientific personnel -- doing nothing much of consequence for science, either -- translate into elevating anyone else from poverty?
It would be different if manned spaceflight actually directly benefited the general population of Earth. But it doesn't. The purpose of manned spaceflight is to develop the technologies and expertise required to support manned spaceflight. That's all it does. It's a self-justifying expense item which doesn't, in the end, deliver a huge amount of value, other than a vague emotional sense of satisfaction, much like mountain climbing. Are there a few tiny spinoffs? Sure. Would those spinoffs also exist if the money was spent on, say, airships or submarines rather than space? Quite probably. (The oxygen reclamation systems used in Apollo originally came from submarines, for instance. Lots of money was spent on adapating those to space conditions. Does that engineering translate directly to ground conditions? No, not really.)
Manned spaceflight was worth it during the Cold War as a propaganda vehicle. Now that that war's over, is it still worth it?
While bringing in diversity IS good, it requires segregation to create that diversity. Given how small the earth now is, getting people far enough away that regular travel is impractical, is an investment in humanities future.
An interesting idea. However, that's in direct opposition to the reality of space colonisation: getting to the "self-sufficient colony" stage will require, first, two things: one, developing self-sufficient biospheres here on Earth (you could try to alpha-test them in space, but you'd have to be prepared to let lots of astronauts die messily when their life support malfunctions), and two, developing a regular transport network from Earth to space (because even with the best Earthside testing, your colonies are not actually going to be practically 100% self-sufficient for decades if not centuries).
Once you've got a regular transport grid going, you've got exactly the same diversity problems as you had to start with. Any virus, war, mass hysteria or anything else that could conceivably take out all of Earth will be just as likely to spread through all of the colonised solar system, and you're back to "all eggs in one basket" just with the basket being bigger, and the parts of it out in space being a lot more fragile than the ones on Earth.
Basically, thinking of space colonisation as preparation for Earthside disaster makes about as much sense as practicing tightrope walking in preparation for a boxing match. Yes, it's difficult, yes it requires lots of specialised skill to pull of, yes only the best can do it. But those skills are specialised, they don't actually transfer to what you need to know in order to survive outside of that environment.
If you want to survive Earthside disasters, prepare for them. That means spending on public healthcare, education, green technologies, all the non-sexy boring things which make life survivable and robust.
Human colonization of space is a great way to research and prove such technologies.
No, it's an extremely inefficient and expensive way to research and prove such technologies, because you're limited to what you can launch into space first. The only thing that space provides is an extremely hostile environment; there are no actual resources out there other than sunlight and rock, which we also have plenty of on Earth.
A great way to research self contained biospheres would be to set up research stations in Antarctica, the Gobi desert, the Sahara, the middle of Australia, and the bottom of mine shafts in Nevada.
Greed that says using our resources to take what others have or wasting those resources for entertainment are more important than the spread of the species.
Yes, we'll certainly improve our chances of survival by spreading our species into that welcoming, friendly vacuum in which not even bacteria survive. Wait. Scratch that, reverse it.
it teaches you General Relativity and the math you need to understand it.
No, it really doesn't. It thinks it's teaching you, but if you're like me, you walk away still utterly confused about the basics of the maths, such as, "what actually IS a tensor"? The cute little utterly irrelevant diagrams didn't help either.
If you started out already understanding differential geometry, ie what tensor maths and Reimann curvature were, then you might have a chance, but then you've probably learned 90% of what GR is already - I mean, what is differential geometry used for otherwise?
There are actually a couple of books on "differential geometry for engineers" about non-spacetime applications of the maths, which might be a much better place to start. Or not. I'll get back to you once I understand the tensor transformation law and find someone to give me a straight, non-recursive definition of "covariance".
If its just a hobby I don't understand why you would want to know the in-depth details since you probably wont be playing with equations most of the time.
On the contrary, if it's a hobby he's probably interested in reading and playing with the various speculative equations for warp drive and time travel - for example, the Alcubierre Drive, or Kip Thorne's wormholes. Which has nothing to do with everyday physics, but everything to do with science fiction worldbuilding and geeky entertainment. Certainly that's what I would do if I understood enough of GR to get to the "test the equations" stage.
Speaking of which, what always amaze me is that Maxwell's equations, written half a century before Einstein's special relativity, are actually fully compatible with it.
That's not really a coincidence, since relativity was designed from the ground up to explain results in electromagnetics. If it didn't match Maxwell's equations Einstein would have simply modified it until it did.
Start with the one about travelling at the speed of light, and what you would see as you approached C
Um, see, when I try to do that, I immediately think like this: "Okay, I'm travelling at C, that means I'm a photon. What do I see of the rest of the world? Well, according to relativity the world must contract to zero time, which means I experience leaving the sun, bouncing off a mirror, and being absorbed by a black cat all at the same time. Wait, if it's all happening at once, how come the mirror comes before the cat?" And then I go "wait, that doesn't make sense at all."
Maybe my brain is just wired strangely, but I've never found any of Einstein's thought experiments particularly enlightening. He came up with a lot of them, especially when he was struggling with pre-1915 General Relativity, and many of them contradict each other. They might be useful tools to stimulate further enquiry, but they're not necessarily authoritative.
For example, I've read his famous SR "lightning on a train" thought experiment several times and each time I go "but, but, you have to take into account the propagation speed of the light! What if you did this with sound?" And the whole thing falls apart, for me.
How shall we defend ourselves? All of that is irrelevant
Not really. If you asked Amazon piranhas a few thousand years ago how they planned to defend themselves against the first human visitors, their answer would probably be "Bite them, like everything else".
what about the san Andreas fault going off and makeing CA split off from the rest of the usa?
That's why FEMA keeps Superman on the payroll!
Now, the much more likely scenario of Superman going Zod and installing a puppet President while he creates a utopian mutant state - that's why FEMA keeps _Batman_ on the payroll.
If Batman goes rogue? Well, there's this guy down in Special Forces with purple hair and a big grin, very good with wetwork...
That's pretty much my reaction about folks who are rabidly against Scientology. I don't get it.
Oh, so young.
Internet "information must be free" activists' hatred of Scientology dates back to the early days of the Web - mid-1990s, when Usenet was still a thing and you could still use the word "cypherpunk" without irony. The Scientology organisation was extremely litigatious and aggressively used copyright law to attempt to shut down whistleblower sites such as xenu.net. They had tons of money, no love for freedom of information, and more focus on image control than the then-in-power Clinton administration, Worse, they attempted to hack Usenet itself. This was a red rag to the cypher-punks bull and wham, CoS became Enemy #1. This was long before the death of Napster when the RIAA moved into that position, you have to realise. (Do today's young folks even know who Napster were?)
Fast-forward to the more recent Anonymous protests and yeah, I dunno why *that* crowd with their mayfly attention span suddenly woke up and discovered CoS as their three-minute hate of the week. Frankly I don't really think the legitimate anti-CoS protesters like xenu.net really need Anonymous' brand of "help".
But CoS were perhaps the first organisation to really attempt to "declare war on the Internet". Back before the Apple-Google dupooly realised that you could lock down the Net and have people gladly pay to give up their freedoms. So there are long memories.
I fully expect "the best funded [whatever] of [any world government]" to always look rather primitive and poorly implemented compared to anything I could whip up in five minutes with what I have lying around the house.
Right, I'm sure you have a full thermonuclear arsenal in your basement. Governments are good at some things, that's how come they get to stay "the government" and not, eg, "the former regime which just got toppled by some guy in a T-shirt and a popgun".
So, why are both ICMP and IP considered to be in layer 3?
Because the Internet protocols are not in fact part of the OSI model, despite lots of teaching materials claiming this. The neat little OSI layer diagrams you see with all the layers filled in are mostly retcons invented long after OSI was dead.
The actual Internet protocol suite is not part of the OSI model but the 4-layer Internet model (Link, Internet, Transport, Application). Link is like OSI layers 1 and 2, Internet is like OSI Layer 3, Transport is like OSI Layer 4, Application is like OSI Layer 7, but there is no actual Internet equivalent of OSI's layers 5 and 6. Pretty much everything above 4 runs at Layer 7.
In the Internet model, it makes perfect sense for DHCP, IP and ICMP and routing protocols like RIP and OSPF to be at the Internetworking level because they are both protocols dealing with datagram transmission between interconnecting disparate packet-switched services, while TCP and UDP are in the Transport layer because they make dealing with raw datagrams somewhat more pleasant.
It would perhaps be sensible to invent a whole new layer model now that we have a lot more protocols. HTTP, for instance, should be a layer of its own, since so many things are now tunnelled over it. That would be sensible, though, so good luck.
Slashdot Mirror
The space station has cost a huge pile of money and has provided little more than a presence in space.
Isn't that enough?
Not if you grew up believing all the 1960s-70s "Space Age" propaganda, and thought 2001 and Star Trek were documentaries, no.
The problem is that "a presence in space" isn't really any more useful to humankind than "a presence on Mount Everest". It's a nice thing for an elite class of adventure recreation enthusiasts to compare bragging rights about, sure. To the extent that it's a cool thing just because it's cool, and we're all okay with paying billions of dollars just for a few dozen people to experience moments of coolness, it's okay. Amortised over the whole global population, it's not much to pay for a bit of light entertainment.
But it's not going to lead to a glorious future of excitement and exploration. There's no currently physically foreseeable path from "a dozen astronauts in a sealed can in LEO" to the 50s vision of "thousands of Earthlike planets awaiting colonists with shovels and dreams". If we colonise the solar system - and that's a huge, mind-boggling 'if', making turning the Gobi Desert into a shopping mall look like building a new patio -- it will be the robots who go first.
And once the robots are there, which they are now, there's not much reason for humans to follow. It won't be to get away from repressive regimes - space colonies where a single leak means death for everyone will be far more repressive and conformist than nuclear submarines. It won't be to protect the survival of the species - any disaster you can imagine which would devastate Earth and leave fragile space cans alive, would be more easily dodged by building a few armoured bunkers on Earth. It won't be to solve overpopulation - you can only fit a few dozen people through the launch funnel at once, and ironically there's actually less space, in the sense of farmable land, in space than on Earth.
At least, there's no plausible path from here to the 50s space-future vision given currently extrapolatable human physiology and society. If we radically re-engineer ourselves? Maybe. But then, the Earth would also have changed unimaginably as a consequence, so all our reasons would be different.
The bottom line is that there's just no there there in space. Star Trek isn't real, there is no warp drive, and there are no habitable planets out there. We're stuck with this one for the forseeable future, so unless we want to die by the billions, we should think about making our culture sustainable.
Well, yes, if you say "1/3 of a meter" where you meant "333 milliliters", I'm sure there would be some confusion.
Nonsense! You're looking at the guy who drank the Kessel Rum in twelve parsecs.
or using what's done in most metric countries, namely use 250ml or 500ml ?
Right, we * have what's called a "metric cup", which is defined as 250 mils. Simple.
Soft drink cans are 300 mils, a "pint" bottle is 600 mils, what used to be "a pound" of butter is 500 grams. But we tend to buy our milk in litre bottles at the supermarket anyway. It's more than a pint, but it's still a good human size, and oh my goodness how much easier it is to not have to do weird conversions in your head all day. You just get on with life and free up whole chunks of your brain for important stuff, like putting captions on cats.
Powers of ten for the win.
* New Zealand
War time, etc.
Does everyone know what time it is?
It's Wardy Doody time!
That's right kids! And who are we gonna invade today?
Libya! Yay!
Why was your keyboard crying?
Because he looked at the floor and he knew it needed sweeping.
Modem handshake noise is no longer widely recognised.
Ming nong TZZZNNNAARRRRRRRRRRKKKK...
democracies don't survive long when the People realize they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury.
*blinks*
We can? So how come our popularly-elected governments are all cutting social funding, then?
#3, getting the hell off this rock
By comparison to anywhere else in reachable space, Earth is not only not a rock, it's a six-star Hilton where everyone gets the Rock Star Suite and 72 virgins.
You're welcome to trade anywhere on "this rock" for any of the hells out there. Want to breathe some hot sulphuric acid? I hear Venus is nice this time of year. Lethal doses of radiation? The moons of Jupiter await your landing. Carbon dioxide frost and instant depressurisation? Mars is just the ticket.
Space is not what you saw on Star Trek. There are no actual Vulcans out there.
People routinely live in Earth-side environments that would kill an unprotected person in seconds to minutes. But they don't have a problem with that environment because they live in habitats, not the raw environment.
And yet the Gobi Desert is still somehow not filled with modular inflatable shopping malls.
Yes, we can put habitats into inhospitable environments. Given an infinite budget and supply chain, that's relatively easy.
What is hard is making it pay.
then we have better things to worry about. Such as elevating everyone from poverty.
How does creating a tiny outpost of highly specialised military-scientific personnel -- doing nothing much of consequence for science, either -- translate into elevating anyone else from poverty?
It would be different if manned spaceflight actually directly benefited the general population of Earth. But it doesn't. The purpose of manned spaceflight is to develop the technologies and expertise required to support manned spaceflight. That's all it does. It's a self-justifying expense item which doesn't, in the end, deliver a huge amount of value, other than a vague emotional sense of satisfaction, much like mountain climbing. Are there a few tiny spinoffs? Sure. Would those spinoffs also exist if the money was spent on, say, airships or submarines rather than space? Quite probably. (The oxygen reclamation systems used in Apollo originally came from submarines, for instance. Lots of money was spent on adapating those to space conditions. Does that engineering translate directly to ground conditions? No, not really.)
Manned spaceflight was worth it during the Cold War as a propaganda vehicle. Now that that war's over, is it still worth it?
While bringing in diversity IS good, it requires segregation to create that diversity. Given how small the earth now is, getting people far enough away that regular travel is impractical, is an investment in humanities future.
An interesting idea. However, that's in direct opposition to the reality of space colonisation: getting to the "self-sufficient colony" stage will require, first, two things: one, developing self-sufficient biospheres here on Earth (you could try to alpha-test them in space, but you'd have to be prepared to let lots of astronauts die messily when their life support malfunctions), and two, developing a regular transport network from Earth to space (because even with the best Earthside testing, your colonies are not actually going to be practically 100% self-sufficient for decades if not centuries).
Once you've got a regular transport grid going, you've got exactly the same diversity problems as you had to start with. Any virus, war, mass hysteria or anything else that could conceivably take out all of Earth will be just as likely to spread through all of the colonised solar system, and you're back to "all eggs in one basket" just with the basket being bigger, and the parts of it out in space being a lot more fragile than the ones on Earth.
Basically, thinking of space colonisation as preparation for Earthside disaster makes about as much sense as practicing tightrope walking in preparation for a boxing match. Yes, it's difficult, yes it requires lots of specialised skill to pull of, yes only the best can do it. But those skills are specialised, they don't actually transfer to what you need to know in order to survive outside of that environment.
If you want to survive Earthside disasters, prepare for them. That means spending on public healthcare, education, green technologies, all the non-sexy boring things which make life survivable and robust.
Human colonization of space is a great way to research and prove such technologies.
No, it's an extremely inefficient and expensive way to research and prove such technologies, because you're limited to what you can launch into space first. The only thing that space provides is an extremely hostile environment; there are no actual resources out there other than sunlight and rock, which we also have plenty of on Earth.
A great way to research self contained biospheres would be to set up research stations in Antarctica, the Gobi desert, the Sahara, the middle of Australia, and the bottom of mine shafts in Nevada.
If you somehow find a way to survive in space, you can just apply those same technologies to earth and will be save for any disaster imaginable.
+++ this, a million. Common sense is your friend.
The nasty little truth? Manned "civilian" spaceflight always was a thin PR skin over the real paying reason for space, which was ICBMs and military spy/comms satellites. It was reported in 2007 that the bulk of NASA's TDRSS network traffic is primarily military.
Space is not what we were told it was.
Greed that says using our resources to take what others have or wasting those resources for entertainment are more important than the spread of the species.
Yes, we'll certainly improve our chances of survival by spreading our species into that welcoming, friendly vacuum in which not even bacteria survive. Wait. Scratch that, reverse it.
I'm not the only one to point this out.
it teaches you General Relativity and the math you need to understand it.
No, it really doesn't. It thinks it's teaching you, but if you're like me, you walk away still utterly confused about the basics of the maths, such as, "what actually IS a tensor"? The cute little utterly irrelevant diagrams didn't help either.
If you started out already understanding differential geometry, ie what tensor maths and Reimann curvature were, then you might have a chance, but then you've probably learned 90% of what GR is already - I mean, what is differential geometry used for otherwise?
There are actually a couple of books on "differential geometry for engineers" about non-spacetime applications of the maths, which might be a much better place to start. Or not. I'll get back to you once I understand the tensor transformation law and find someone to give me a straight, non-recursive definition of "covariance".
If its just a hobby I don't understand why you would want to know the in-depth details since you probably wont be playing with equations most of the time.
On the contrary, if it's a hobby he's probably interested in reading and playing with the various speculative equations for warp drive and time travel - for example, the Alcubierre Drive, or Kip Thorne's wormholes. Which has nothing to do with everyday physics, but everything to do with science fiction worldbuilding and geeky entertainment. Certainly that's what I would do if I understood enough of GR to get to the "test the equations" stage.
Speaking of which, what always amaze me is that Maxwell's equations, written half a century before Einstein's special relativity, are actually fully compatible with it.
That's not really a coincidence, since relativity was designed from the ground up to explain results in electromagnetics. If it didn't match Maxwell's equations Einstein would have simply modified it until it did.
Start with the one about travelling at the speed of light, and what you would see as you approached C
Um, see, when I try to do that, I immediately think like this: "Okay, I'm travelling at C, that means I'm a photon. What do I see of the rest of the world? Well, according to relativity the world must contract to zero time, which means I experience leaving the sun, bouncing off a mirror, and being absorbed by a black cat all at the same time. Wait, if it's all happening at once, how come the mirror comes before the cat?" And then I go "wait, that doesn't make sense at all."
Maybe my brain is just wired strangely, but I've never found any of Einstein's thought experiments particularly enlightening. He came up with a lot of them, especially when he was struggling with pre-1915 General Relativity, and many of them contradict each other. They might be useful tools to stimulate further enquiry, but they're not necessarily authoritative.
For example, I've read his famous SR "lightning on a train" thought experiment several times and each time I go "but, but, you have to take into account the propagation speed of the light! What if you did this with sound?" And the whole thing falls apart, for me.
Which is why I like people like Oleg Jefimenko, who do seem to have thought a little more deeply about potential causes of the Lorentz contraction, and not just taking it as an axiom.
How shall we defend ourselves? All of that is irrelevant
Not really. If you asked Amazon piranhas a few thousand years ago how they planned to defend themselves against the first human visitors, their answer would probably be "Bite them, like everything else".
Sometimes simple solutions work the best.
A mentalist is a great person to hire for security, because they know how people think and behave.
Plus, they're mental as anything.
what about the san Andreas fault going off and makeing CA split off from the rest of the usa?
That's why FEMA keeps Superman on the payroll!
Now, the much more likely scenario of Superman going Zod and installing a puppet President while he creates a utopian mutant state - that's why FEMA keeps _Batman_ on the payroll.
If Batman goes rogue? Well, there's this guy down in Special Forces with purple hair and a big grin, very good with wetwork...
That's pretty much my reaction about folks who are rabidly against Scientology. I don't get it.
Oh, so young.
Internet "information must be free" activists' hatred of Scientology dates back to the early days of the Web - mid-1990s, when Usenet was still a thing and you could still use the word "cypherpunk" without irony. The Scientology organisation was extremely litigatious and aggressively used copyright law to attempt to shut down whistleblower sites such as xenu.net. They had tons of money, no love for freedom of information, and more focus on image control than the then-in-power Clinton administration, Worse, they attempted to hack Usenet itself. This was a red rag to the cypher-punks bull and wham, CoS became Enemy #1. This was long before the death of Napster when the RIAA moved into that position, you have to realise. (Do today's young folks even know who Napster were?)
Fast-forward to the more recent Anonymous protests and yeah, I dunno why *that* crowd with their mayfly attention span suddenly woke up and discovered CoS as their three-minute hate of the week. Frankly I don't really think the legitimate anti-CoS protesters like xenu.net really need Anonymous' brand of "help".
But CoS were perhaps the first organisation to really attempt to "declare war on the Internet". Back before the Apple-Google dupooly realised that you could lock down the Net and have people gladly pay to give up their freedoms. So there are long memories.
Does that history lesson help give some context?
I fully expect "the best funded [whatever] of [any world government]" to always look rather primitive and poorly implemented compared to anything I could whip up in five minutes with what I have lying around the house.
Right, I'm sure you have a full thermonuclear arsenal in your basement. Governments are good at some things, that's how come they get to stay "the government" and not, eg, "the former regime which just got toppled by some guy in a T-shirt and a popgun".
Don't worry, it's just this kid called "Joshua".
So, why are both ICMP and IP considered to be in layer 3?
Because the Internet protocols are not in fact part of the OSI model, despite lots of teaching materials claiming this. The neat little OSI layer diagrams you see with all the layers filled in are mostly retcons invented long after OSI was dead.
The actual Internet protocol suite is not part of the OSI model but the 4-layer Internet model (Link, Internet, Transport, Application). Link is like OSI layers 1 and 2, Internet is like OSI Layer 3, Transport is like OSI Layer 4, Application is like OSI Layer 7, but there is no actual Internet equivalent of OSI's layers 5 and 6. Pretty much everything above 4 runs at Layer 7.
In the Internet model, it makes perfect sense for DHCP, IP and ICMP and routing protocols like RIP and OSPF to be at the Internetworking level because they are both protocols dealing with datagram transmission between interconnecting disparate packet-switched services, while TCP and UDP are in the Transport layer because they make dealing with raw datagrams somewhat more pleasant.
It would perhaps be sensible to invent a whole new layer model now that we have a lot more protocols. HTTP, for instance, should be a layer of its own, since so many things are now tunnelled over it. That would be sensible, though, so good luck.