The current one can be called the Colaninno Minimum. "Around 2006, solar physicist Robin Colaninno described the current minima as both extended and unusual, both similar to the Maunder Minimum (in that it's longer than usual in the Cycle) but also being quite different (in that it won't be the exact same length, nor have the same climate effect)."
http://www.science20.com/daytime_astronomer/sunspots_colaninno_minimum_and_pascals_wager
Meteorite fragments! Thought-provoking, and under $20. I love walking into a classroom, putting one in a kid's hands to pass around, and asking them what they think it is. That they are common blows their minds. At the risk of mentioning my own column, I go into in depth here:
http://www.science20.com/daytime_astronomer/gifts_sky
Nintendo is releasing the DSi 3D next year, and people say they aren't innovating? I think they're smart. A new console, a new gameboy, a new console, a new gameboy. So we're always buying a new Nintendo thing but we don't feel overtapped, or like we have to choose between which to get.
Kristian von Bengtson and Peter Madsen of Copenhagen Suborbital. Not only are they building a homemade rocket to get to space, but Madsen already built a submarine just to commute to work.
The Mythbuster guys, because they are paid well to blow things up on tv. Plus Kari Byron, just because.
Also, everyone that does underwater caving (most dangerous sport/adventure around), wingsuit builders, etc.
I think DIY has become the 'organic' of this decade, a term overused. Now people call it DIY if you do anything remotely clever. "DIY bagel heating using a toaster!".
And there are the "more DIY than thou" arguments. One person chided me that using PCB fabricators wasn't DIY because I didn't swirl my own templates in an acid bath (at satellite diaries)... I had to point out I was making a DIY satellite, not a DIY PCB. Besides, I asked him if he'd actually smelted the copper ore for his boards, because if not, you know, it's not really DIY.
That said, I love the DIY movement. It's as if Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin had a (legal) lovechildmovementlaunch.
This may come as a shock, but the summary isn't *gasp* fully accurate. Scanners are allowed at the library sale they say forbids it. It's actually rather interesting-- the early "member's only" hour forbids scanners, then they let scanners in during the open sale hours. So it's a nice compromise between "let people browse" and "let the book sellers make a profit", they're just giving first crack to readers, then a fair shake to sellers afterwards. Neat compromise, that.
Okay, now I'm jealous. I used to think I was DIY for building my own satellite (Project Calliope), but... man, I'm using someone else's rocket instead of building my own. I feel so old fashioned. The Copenhagen group are totally awesome!
Turns out (citation needed) sound continuity is more important than video. People will put up with choppy or lossy video, as long as the soundtrack remains relatively coherent. But if the sound is dropping out or breaking up, they stop watching.
Which, if you think about it, is why we put up with crappy internet videos that speed along, but get frustrated when it's constantly buffering.
I ran into bizarre web parroting-- a site took an article about my DIY satellite from "Wired", and (best guess) ran it through an English->Chinese translator then back to Chinese->English. So we end up with sentence-by-sentence content stealing, but with its own working, e.g.:
"Once deployed, they can put out enough power to be picked up on the ground by a hand-held amateur radio receiver." [from Wired]
"Once deployed, they can put out enough energy to be picked up on the belligerent by the hand-held pledge airwave receiver." [from Tubesat Gerber]
Or this bit
"Once the bastion of NASA and commercial satellite services, space has now become the final frontier for the do-it-yourselfer next door." [Wired]
"Once a bastion of NASA as well as blurb heavenly body services, space has right away turn the final limit for a do-it-yourselfer subsequent doorway." [Tubesat Gerber]
That's me, the blurb heavenly body service belligerent receiver!
I worry about "Chicken Little" syndrome with space weather alerts. "GPS will die, sending airplanes crashing and sinking boats. Cell phones will fail, stranding travelers and resulting in people in remote areas dying due to exposure. Worse of all, our TV may go out for a few hours."
Science is rigorous, slow, based on data and challenge. This means politically it's horrible, and the media overstates it. So we have to balance warning with overhyping and risking people tune us out. Solution? Unknown.
If you want to go the mad scientist route, build a satellite in your basement. It's about the same cost as buying a motorcycle ($8K including launch) and, as far as mid-life crises go, a lot cooler. I'm doing it ( http://projectcalliope.com/ ), and blogging about how it goes at http://scientificblogging.com/satellite_diaries
You get to learn neat stuff about electronics, Arduino-level programming, and HAM radio.
It's worth it just for when people ask what I do for fun...
So I was working at a large defense company, and they had been dinged by the gov't for high-level management fraud. So part of the penalty was all employees that weren't managers had to take a mandatory Ethics class, run by... the managers.
Add in that the class included a Dilbert Ethics Game-- an actual, licensed Dilbert[TM] board game with little Dilbert characters and cartoons in it, where you had to move around and then answer ethics questions.
Oh, and it turns out you could win the game without correctly answering the questions, as my team figured out victory was based on position on the board, not score. And the only team that could have beat us took the high road, and when faced with one ethic question said "We know you want to hear answer A, but really, we would do answer B, as would any reasonable person."
I interviewed 4 random astronomers at an AAS meeting to ask 'why did you become an astronomer', and the answer was either "saw cool space stuff as a kid and was inspired" or "got to learn a bit of astronomy in high school and loved it". So she's right at the age for deciding. Unlike most majors, I think most astronomers choose their path early. (In February the podcast will be up at "365 Days of Astronomy", btw).
The poster has an odd grasp of K12 education. Teachers never give away lesson plans. They hoard them, because their plans are their life's blood and their job security. Even teachers who mentor don't give out 'ready made' lesson plans.
So what these for-pay sites do is free up content that would otherwise be locked up. They give an incentive for teachers to cross that 'thin chalk line' and share.
And to answer 'who owns lessons developed for public school', the answer is the creator, not the school. Teachers are not hired as writers or curriculum developers, but as on-site instructors. The curricula are a by-product. If schools expect to own all the material their teachers develop, they need to negotiate that right-- and increase teacher pay.
AI already has successes. But, as an AI researcher friend of mine points out, once they succeed it's no longer 'AI'. Things like packet routing, used to be AI. Path-finding, as in games, or route-finding, as with GPS: solved. So yes, AI will never arrive, because AI is always 'other than the AI we already have.'
That's a $100,000/year salary (approximate, assuming small annual cost-of-living raises). This suggests it wasn't a front line or customer handling job, since they tend to actually get managed and have performance reviews. And it likely wasn't a VP or upper management job, since they tend to have to put in face time to keep where they are.
So, anyone know how i can get into middle management?
I wrote up some notes from a NASA lunch meeting on this, titled (not too originally, I admit) 'The Petabyte Problem'. It's at http://www.scientificblogging.com/daytime_astronomer/petabyte_problem. It's not just a question of thinking on the 'Internet scale', but about massive data handling in general.
What makes it different from previous eras (where MB was big, where GB was big) is that, before, the storage was expensive, yes, but bandwidth wasn't as much of a trouble for transmitting, if even locally. You could store MBs or GBs on tape, ship it, and extract the data rapidly-- bus and LAN speeds were high. Now, with PB, there's so much data that even if you ship a rack of TB drives and hook it up locally, you can't run a program on it in reasonable time. Particularly for browsing or inquiries.
So we're having to rely much more on metadata or abstractions to sort out which data we can then process further.
The art looks dark, yes, but then, the famous "Fantasia" segment of Mickey as the Sorcerer's Apprentice was plenty dark, too. So they're keeping the right spirit, I think. Mickey isn't always hearts and violets. Sometimes he's a cunning tactical schemer, and sometimes he's a pure force of chaos... who always means well.
>Furthermore the vehicle will only come with one Vehicle Access License (VAL) for the purchaser (primary driver). Additional VALs must be purchased for each additional driver.
Isn't this what auto insurance already does? You have to buy per-driver per-car, with extra fees if you want to use different cars?
As a scientist, I run into the mental block many people have that 'science is hard', which means anything scienc-y I say is treated like it's in another language. For example, I wrote my family and friends:
It's pretty much just me, with some friends helping with different parts of it, and a couple of sponsors helping cover costs (hopefully). I'll be the first to admit it's unusual, but I've always wanted to be part of the space race.
And I received one particular reply of:
Hi-in English what does this actually mean??Sounds, well , different
The answer in English is, "I'm launching a satellite for fun, to make music from space." That's really it. No deep analysis or technobabble needed.
The solution, I think, is hamsters. Everything is easy to understand if there's a cute animal. Had I said "I'm launching a hamster into space", everyone would say "cool!" or "weird!", but at least they'd get it.
Re:Wondrous -- but you still want to smack that id
on
The Magicians
·
· Score: 1
>Where the characters in most fantasy books are heroic, larger than life, the sort of people we wish we could be, these magicians are not: the characters are too close to plain old humanity, flawed, contradictory, foolish and foolhardy, to stand in as idealized versions of ourselves.
Reminds me of "District 9", which several friends panned due to the main character being too 'unsympathetic'. If they wanted an action movie, they could track supporting character Christopher's arc. Whereas the point of '9' seemed to be that the main character was an ordinary, flawed person stuck in an action scenario.
That kind of thing may ruin the escapism value, but it makes for a great story.
"And since revealing his identity (and getting an unofficial thumbs-up from Nintendo as "fans who want to spread the word of Layton"), DiLuigi has decided to return to the role he originated at TopHatProfessor,"
Slashdot Mirror
The current one can be called the Colaninno Minimum. "Around 2006, solar physicist Robin Colaninno described the current minima as both extended and unusual, both similar to the Maunder Minimum (in that it's longer than usual in the Cycle) but also being quite different (in that it won't be the exact same length, nor have the same climate effect)." http://www.science20.com/daytime_astronomer/sunspots_colaninno_minimum_and_pascals_wager
Meteorite fragments! Thought-provoking, and under $20. I love walking into a classroom, putting one in a kid's hands to pass around, and asking them what they think it is. That they are common blows their minds. At the risk of mentioning my own column, I go into in depth here: http://www.science20.com/daytime_astronomer/gifts_sky
Nintendo is releasing the DSi 3D next year, and people say they aren't innovating? I think they're smart. A new console, a new gameboy, a new console, a new gameboy. So we're always buying a new Nintendo thing but we don't feel overtapped, or like we have to choose between which to get.
Kristian von Bengtson and Peter Madsen of Copenhagen Suborbital. Not only are they building a homemade rocket to get to space, but Madsen already built a submarine just to commute to work. The Mythbuster guys, because they are paid well to blow things up on tv. Plus Kari Byron, just because. Also, everyone that does underwater caving (most dangerous sport/adventure around), wingsuit builders, etc.
I think DIY has become the 'organic' of this decade, a term overused. Now people call it DIY if you do anything remotely clever. "DIY bagel heating using a toaster!".
And there are the "more DIY than thou" arguments. One person chided me that using PCB fabricators wasn't DIY because I didn't swirl my own templates in an acid bath (at satellite diaries)... I had to point out I was making a DIY satellite, not a DIY PCB. Besides, I asked him if he'd actually smelted the copper ore for his boards, because if not, you know, it's not really DIY.
That said, I love the DIY movement. It's as if Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin had a (legal) lovechildmovementlaunch.
(And that last word is DIY, I made it myself!)
This may come as a shock, but the summary isn't *gasp* fully accurate. Scanners are allowed at the library sale they say forbids it. It's actually rather interesting-- the early "member's only" hour forbids scanners, then they let scanners in during the open sale hours. So it's a nice compromise between "let people browse" and "let the book sellers make a profit", they're just giving first crack to readers, then a fair shake to sellers afterwards. Neat compromise, that.
Okay, now I'm jealous. I used to think I was DIY for building my own satellite (Project Calliope), but... man, I'm using someone else's rocket instead of building my own. I feel so old fashioned. The Copenhagen group are totally awesome!
Turns out (citation needed) sound continuity is more important than video. People will put up with choppy or lossy video, as long as the soundtrack remains relatively coherent. But if the sound is dropping out or breaking up, they stop watching.
Which, if you think about it, is why we put up with crappy internet videos that speed along, but get frustrated when it's constantly buffering.
I ran into bizarre web parroting-- a site took an article about my DIY satellite from "Wired", and (best guess) ran it through an English->Chinese translator then back to Chinese->English. So we end up with sentence-by-sentence content stealing, but with its own working, e.g.:
"Once deployed, they can put out enough power to be picked up on the ground by a hand-held amateur radio receiver." [from Wired]
"Once deployed, they can put out enough energy to be picked up on the belligerent by the hand-held pledge airwave receiver." [from Tubesat Gerber]
Or this bit
"Once the bastion of NASA and commercial satellite services, space has now become the final frontier for the do-it-yourselfer next door." [Wired]
"Once a bastion of NASA as well as blurb heavenly body services, space has right away turn the final limit for a do-it-yourselfer subsequent doorway." [Tubesat Gerber]
That's me, the blurb heavenly body service belligerent receiver!
A.
http://projectcalliope.com/ "Music from Space, Launching 2011"
I worry about "Chicken Little" syndrome with space weather alerts. "GPS will die, sending airplanes crashing and sinking boats. Cell phones will fail, stranding travelers and resulting in people in remote areas dying due to exposure. Worse of all, our TV may go out for a few hours."
Jay Reich from the Dept. of Commerce talked about 'overwarning' versus 'need for science', covered at http://www.scientificblogging.com/daytime_astronomer/why_sky_falling_space_weather_communications but here's the summary:
Science is rigorous, slow, based on data and challenge. This means politically it's horrible, and the media overstates it. So we have to balance warning with overhyping and risking people tune us out. Solution? Unknown.
If you want to go the mad scientist route, build a satellite in your basement. It's about the same cost as buying a motorcycle ($8K including launch) and, as far as mid-life crises go, a lot cooler. I'm doing it ( http://projectcalliope.com/ ), and blogging about how it goes at http://scientificblogging.com/satellite_diaries
You get to learn neat stuff about electronics, Arduino-level programming, and HAM radio.
It's worth it just for when people ask what I do for fun...
This is why I personally only launch eco-friendly and organic all-wood satellites. :)
Why is it suddenly NASA's job to monitor global warming? Why not create an agency with that job
I'll ask 'eem, but I don' think he'll be very keen... we've already got one (NOAA), you see!
I did a podcast that really only gets rolling when my subject, a veternarian, gets on a roll about why science and scientists at Antarctica are totally awesome: http://365daysofastronomy.org/2010/01/15/january-15th-go-higher-or-go-to-antarctica/
Made me want to go there.
So I was working at a large defense company, and they had been dinged by the gov't for high-level management fraud. So part of the penalty was all employees that weren't managers had to take a mandatory Ethics class, run by... the managers.
Add in that the class included a Dilbert Ethics Game-- an actual, licensed Dilbert[TM] board game with little Dilbert characters and cartoons in it, where you had to move around and then answer ethics questions.
Oh, and it turns out you could win the game without correctly answering the questions, as my team figured out victory was based on position on the board, not score. And the only team that could have beat us took the high road, and when faced with one ethic question said "We know you want to hear answer A, but really, we would do answer B, as would any reasonable person."
I'm still not sure what lessons we learned.
I interviewed 4 random astronomers at an AAS meeting to ask 'why did you become an astronomer', and the answer was either "saw cool space stuff as a kid and was inspired" or "got to learn a bit of astronomy in high school and loved it". So she's right at the age for deciding. Unlike most majors, I think most astronomers choose their path early. (In February the podcast will be up at "365 Days of Astronomy", btw).
Sandy
http://projectcalliope.com/ "Music from Space"
The poster has an odd grasp of K12 education. Teachers never give away lesson plans. They hoard them, because their plans are their life's blood and their job security. Even teachers who mentor don't give out 'ready made' lesson plans.
So what these for-pay sites do is free up content that would otherwise be locked up. They give an incentive for teachers to cross that 'thin chalk line' and share.
And to answer 'who owns lessons developed for public school', the answer is the creator, not the school. Teachers are not hired as writers or curriculum developers, but as on-site instructors. The curricula are a by-product. If schools expect to own all the material their teachers develop, they need to negotiate that right-- and increase teacher pay.
AI already has successes. But, as an AI researcher friend of mine points out, once they succeed it's no longer 'AI'. Things like packet routing, used to be AI. Path-finding, as in games, or route-finding, as with GPS: solved. So yes, AI will never arrive, because AI is always 'other than the AI we already have.'
That's a $100,000/year salary (approximate, assuming small annual cost-of-living raises). This suggests it wasn't a front line or customer handling job, since they tend to actually get managed and have performance reviews. And it likely wasn't a VP or upper management job, since they tend to have to put in face time to keep where they are.
So, anyone know how i can get into middle management?
I wrote up some notes from a NASA lunch meeting on this, titled (not too originally, I admit) 'The Petabyte Problem'. It's at
http://www.scientificblogging.com/daytime_astronomer/petabyte_problem. It's not just a question of thinking on the 'Internet scale', but about massive data handling in general.
What makes it different from previous eras (where MB was big, where GB was big) is that, before, the storage was expensive, yes, but bandwidth wasn't as much of a trouble for transmitting, if even locally. You could store MBs or GBs on tape, ship it, and extract the data rapidly-- bus and LAN speeds were high. Now, with PB, there's so much data that even if you ship a rack of TB drives and hook it up locally, you can't run a program on it in reasonable time. Particularly for browsing or inquiries.
So we're having to rely much more on metadata or abstractions to sort out which data we can then process further.
The art looks dark, yes, but then, the famous "Fantasia" segment of Mickey as the Sorcerer's Apprentice was plenty dark, too. So they're keeping the right spirit, I think. Mickey isn't always hearts and violets. Sometimes he's a cunning tactical schemer, and sometimes he's a pure force of chaos... who always means well.
Me
blogging at http://scientificblogging.com/sky_day/
>Furthermore the vehicle will only come with one Vehicle Access License (VAL) for the purchaser (primary driver). Additional VALs must be purchased for each additional driver.
Isn't this what auto insurance already does? You have to buy per-driver per-car, with extra fees if you want to use different cars?
As a scientist, I run into the mental block many people have that 'science is hard', which means anything scienc-y I say is treated like it's in another language. For example, I wrote my family and friends:
I'm launching a satellite for fun, to make music from space. It's called Project Calliope, and I'm writing about it up at: http://scientificblogging.com/satellite_diaries/feed
It's pretty much just me, with some friends helping with different parts of it, and a couple of sponsors helping cover costs (hopefully). I'll be the first to admit it's unusual, but I've always wanted to be part of the space race.
And I received one particular reply of:
Hi-in English what does this actually mean??Sounds, well , different
The answer in English is, "I'm launching a satellite for fun, to make music from space." That's really it. No deep analysis or technobabble needed.
The solution, I think, is hamsters. Everything is easy to understand if there's a cute animal. Had I said "I'm launching a hamster into space", everyone would say "cool!" or "weird!", but at least they'd get it.
>Where the characters in most fantasy books are heroic, larger than life, the sort of people we wish we could be, these magicians are not: the characters are too close to plain old humanity, flawed, contradictory, foolish and foolhardy, to stand in as idealized versions of ourselves.
Reminds me of "District 9", which several friends panned due to the main character being too 'unsympathetic'. If they wanted an action movie, they could track supporting character Christopher's arc. Whereas the point of '9' seemed to be that the main character was an ordinary, flawed person stuck in an action scenario.
That kind of thing may ruin the escapism value, but it makes for a great story.
From TFA:
"And since revealing his identity (and getting an unofficial thumbs-up from Nintendo as "fans who want to spread the word of Layton"), DiLuigi has decided to return to the role he originated at TopHatProfessor,"
Yay sanity!