He's the dude you need to Make It Right.
One place he built on TV (the New Orleans/Hurricane Katrina place) had a geothermal HVAC system, so it's possible.
Of course, when the Slashdot boys see what a hunk of beefcake he is...
Soon they will also be people who only remember when Fermat's Last Theorem was a solved problem, not one of the great mysteries told to young kids interested in mathematics.
The problem might be solved, but there still is a lingering mystery. Did Fermat have a proof by elementary methods? Does such a proof exist? But I suppose that since there is A proof, the impetus to find another one is mostly gone.
I remember the sensation when they proved the 4 Colour Theorem, and the skepticism at how it was proved.
I also remember the sensation when they proved Fermat's Last Theorem. It's definitely a 20th Century proof,
using tools and concepts that were not available to Fermat. I usually assume that Fermat's "proof" was more an artifact
of different standards for mathematical proofs, and was not something we would recognize as a proof today. I'd love
to be proven wrong...
The 70's brought two major innovations in fuel economy...
You forgot number 3: fuel injection. The first really modern fuel injection systems
came out in the late 1960s, like VW Type 3s with Bosch D-Jetronic fuel
injection (I had one), but didn't really catch on until the 1970s.
So try driving one. Then you will know. Modern diesels can be very fast indeed.
My van (a Mitsubishi L300 Delica) has a 2.5 litre turbocharged diesel engine. By North American standards it's severely underpowered,
with straight line performance like
an old air-cooled VW Beetle. It does what it needs to do: it cruises nicely on the highway, and has
all the acceleration it needs for freeway on-ramps and city traffic.
Back when we were a much larger company we used car names.
My first Sun box was model-t, which was an accurate description. My next
box, a much sexier Sun machine, was twingo. When I set up a box that was a little different
(the first Linux box in our department) I named it after a different car, tatra.
My current development box is monaro - a little crude, but very fast. Our new server is the
fastest car our sysadmin and I could think of, veyron. It replaced kenny, which really did die one day.
So why not hack the thing so it sends what you want it to send? Somewhere innocuous, somewhere whimsical, or just random locations. You could have fun with this.
"Yes, I really was at the North Pole yesterday. And in Paris the day before. Isn't air travel great!"
Any law that makes every citizen of the country a criminal is pointless and unenforceable.
I'm always amazed at the industry spokespeople, and often wonder what planet they are from, because they
certainly aren't from the same planet I'm from.
It's not just copyright. We have a concerted lobbying campaign going on by the car dealers
claiming that privately imported vehicles are the enemy of all that is free and right and holy
and will cause the end of civilization as we know it,
even though the sales of such vehicles are much smaller than, say, Lexus. They have a particular bee in their
collective
bonnet about right-hand drive vehicles, since these are the most obvious imports.
I jailbroke my iPod Touch last week, and am now thinking what I might do with the results.
Personally, I agree to disagree with Apple on this one. I think the world would be a better place if Apple
would lighten up a bit. I think the world is already a better place, thanks to Apple's technology. They
provide developer access to anybody who asks nicely and gives them a little bit of money. Jailbreaking
just gives a little bit more access.
Since the "security" is so easily broken, does it really matter? Is it still security?
It wasn't just the Soviet Union listening in. Ham radio folks listened in too. Check QST for reception reports for Apollo 10 onwards.
I think it's interesting to compare how well we can fake it now (Apollo 13, From the Earth to the Moon, etc.) with real Apollo footage.
Even today, we can't get it quite right.
...laura who has been comparing LRO pictures with the pictures taken by the astronauts
One of the Big Decisions of Project Apollo was the choice of Lunar Orbit
Rendezvous, because it had the best chance of getting to the Moon by the end of
the decade. Direct Ascent wasn't feasible, and Earth Orbit Rendezvous, while safe
and easy to get right, would take too long to develop.
Once Apollo 11 had landed and the race to the Moon had been won, a properly-funded
NASA could have developed other space technologies. Stuff developed for EOR would have wider application,
to go to Mars, the Lagrange points, and more. The Apollo hardware, while ingenious and
effective, was a dead end. It proved a point, but it had no future.
That same properly-funded NASA would still have a need for an Earth-to-orbit shuttle.
As part of a larger, coordinated plan, they would have come up with something quite
different from the antiques that are straining their guts out and just-barely-failing to
blow up on each launch. They would have been able to refine and rethink the design,
and would have gone through several generations by now.
Actually what the germans would have done instead of trying to bomb bletchley (which they likely could have done using the knickebein , X-beam or Y-beam bombing system depending on date) was to change their encryption systems to something more secure.
This is was one of the issues the allies had with ULTRA and MAGIC decrypts: what do you do with it? It's so hot that if the
enemy suspected, for a second, that their system had been compromised, they would change it, and
you'd be back to square one.
Apparently many lower-rank Germans suspected Enigma had been cracked, but the upper echelons
refused to hear of it.
I remember that one, Captain Slow maxing out a Veyron. Great fun. The range at top speed reminds
me of the London to Oslo film (still one of their best, IMHO), where Jeremy noted that his McLaren Mercedes would only go 19 minutes
flat out on a tank of gas. I've only ever maxed out an Opel Corsa and a Fiat Marea. In France, curiously: the traffic in Germany
is so heavy that top speed and lack of speed limits rarely matters.
They described it as a "Concorde moment", the fastest road car that has ever been made,
or probably ever will be made. They also had a good laugh that Jeremy Clarkson is now the slowest Top Gear presenter,
after Richard Hammond in the jet car and James May in the Veyron.
The latest James May program (James May on the Moon) included him riding along in a Pontiac GTO
(i.e. Monaro) as a chase planes while landing a U2. Then he went for a ride in a U2, the closest
he could get to actually going in to space.
This may be the biggest commercial satellite, but 40 years ago we sent space craft weighing a lot more
than this to the Moon. The Apollo LM, alone, had a mass of fifteen tonnes. They
lobbed the CSM (30 tonnes) to the Moon too.
That was with 1960s technology, though with lots of money to spend.
My response to you is the same one I give to U.S. folks who thinks of moving to Canada
for many of the same reasons you've talked about.
You fucked it up. You fix it.
I've sometimes wondered what it would be like to work and work in other countries. Unlike some of the other people
posting here, I view language as an opportunity, not as a barrier. I wouldn't mind getting to know France better,
but am not sure how I could swing it (space stuff in French Guyana?). I think Germany is a great place to visit - everything works - but I think
it would drive me crazy if I tried to live there. I've spent time in Costa Rica with telescopes, but a country with no native
engineering or industrial heritage is not for me.
As a Canadian, Australia bordered on anti-climax when i went there
in 2002: at times it felt like I hadn't gone anywhere. I've heard this from others, and am expecting this
when I go to New Zealand next July, en route to the Cook Islands for the eclipse.
I have a number of reprints of old books, like The Western Avernus, memoirs of a construction worker on the Canadian Pacific Railway. It was published in 1887, and the copyright has long since expired. The reprint, from 2005, claims
copyright, even though the original author (long since dead) had nothing to do with it, nor,
as far as I can tell, did his estate or descendants.
Countries have changed, with varying success. You can do it if you want to.
Canada sort of changed, but has slipped back a bit. However, our road signs are in kilometers, our weather forecasts are in degrees Celsius, we sell liquids by the litre, and few people under the age of 50 have any issue with this. I was in elementary school when we changed our weather forecasts (I'm 47), and I find U.S. weather forecasts and road signs and such meaningless unless I translate them to proper units.
While the price per kilo is the legal one, supermarkets here still routinely advertise prices per pound. I order stuff by the kilo, on general principles. You cannot buy metric lumber in Canada, though we make it for export. Nor can you buy metric-size paper. I have a package of A4 paper (bought last time I was in England) that I use for testing printer drivers and things. When people ask me how tall I am I tell them 185 cm (I'm tall, which is why people ask...) and unless they're European or Australian they stare at me like I'm an alien.
Australia and New Zealand changed in the 1960s and seem to have been a bit more committed to it.
We've made bigger changes in the past. British Columbia drove on the left, the correct and proper side, until 1922. Then we changed to driving on the wrong side of the road. Most people don't know this.
Joking aside, this sounds like a wonderful project, both on the astronomy side and on
the technology side. I can't wait to see what they find out with it.
DTV is the classic forced update of a technology that had worked just fine for decades.
They can talk all they like about picture quality (true, if you have a good signal), but the truth is they
are forcing the sale of a lot of new hardware, and are
making it easier for broadcasters to control what people do with the signals
they receive. It's all about control and money. Isn't everything?
Here in Canada the deadline is 31 August 2011. There are a few digital transmitters on the
air in major cities. Here in Vancouver I get CBC, CTV and Global on digital, plus KVOS (independent)
and KBCB (home shopping - ugh!) from Bellingham, Washington. Set-top ATSC converters are not
available here, so I bought one at Radio Shack in Portland last fall and hooked it up to my trusty
multi-system TV.
Even dumbed down to 480i NTSC, the picture quality is better than DVD. The CBC HD signal shows
what digital can do: being less heavily compressed it's better than what you
get on cable. None of the other local channels have gone digital yet.
KVOS and KBCB pulled the NTSC plug in February. Their old analogue channels have been dead air ever since.
The Canadian broadcasters are dragging their heels,
pleading poverty and the end of civilization as
we know it. Nothing new there.
The cable companies have the general populace snowed in to believing that you
must have cable to get any TV at all. Nothing new there, either.
Slashdot Mirror
He's the dude you need to Make It Right. One place he built on TV (the New Orleans/Hurricane Katrina place) had a geothermal HVAC system, so it's possible.
Of course, when the Slashdot boys see what a hunk of beefcake he is...
...laura
Soon they will also be people who only remember when Fermat's Last Theorem was a solved problem, not one of the great mysteries told to young kids interested in mathematics.
The problem might be solved, but there still is a lingering mystery. Did Fermat have a proof by elementary methods? Does such a proof exist? But I suppose that since there is A proof, the impetus to find another one is mostly gone.
I remember the sensation when they proved the 4 Colour Theorem, and the skepticism at how it was proved.
I also remember the sensation when they proved Fermat's Last Theorem. It's definitely a 20th Century proof, using tools and concepts that were not available to Fermat. I usually assume that Fermat's "proof" was more an artifact of different standards for mathematical proofs, and was not something we would recognize as a proof today. I'd love to be proven wrong...
...laura
The 70's brought two major innovations in fuel economy...
You forgot number 3: fuel injection. The first really modern fuel injection systems came out in the late 1960s, like VW Type 3s with Bosch D-Jetronic fuel injection (I had one), but didn't really catch on until the 1970s.
...laura
So try driving one. Then you will know. Modern diesels can be very fast indeed.
My van (a Mitsubishi L300 Delica) has a 2.5 litre turbocharged diesel engine. By North American standards it's severely underpowered, with straight line performance like an old air-cooled VW Beetle. It does what it needs to do: it cruises nicely on the highway, and has all the acceleration it needs for freeway on-ramps and city traffic.
...laura
Back when we were a much larger company we used car names.
My first Sun box was model-t, which was an accurate description. My next box, a much sexier Sun machine, was twingo. When I set up a box that was a little different (the first Linux box in our department) I named it after a different car, tatra.
My current development box is monaro - a little crude, but very fast. Our new server is the fastest car our sysadmin and I could think of, veyron. It replaced kenny, which really did die one day.
...laura
So why not hack the thing so it sends what you want it to send? Somewhere innocuous, somewhere whimsical, or just random locations. You could have fun with this.
"Yes, I really was at the North Pole yesterday. And in Paris the day before. Isn't air travel great!"
...laura
Any law that makes every citizen of the country a criminal is pointless and unenforceable.
I'm always amazed at the industry spokespeople, and often wonder what planet they are from, because they certainly aren't from the same planet I'm from.
It's not just copyright. We have a concerted lobbying campaign going on by the car dealers claiming that privately imported vehicles are the enemy of all that is free and right and holy and will cause the end of civilization as we know it, even though the sales of such vehicles are much smaller than, say, Lexus. They have a particular bee in their collective bonnet about right-hand drive vehicles, since these are the most obvious imports.
...laura
It's yet another of those stupid "slideshow" articles. That's enough to put anybody off.
...laura
I jailbroke my iPod Touch last week, and am now thinking what I might do with the results.
Personally, I agree to disagree with Apple on this one. I think the world would be a better place if Apple would lighten up a bit. I think the world is already a better place, thanks to Apple's technology. They provide developer access to anybody who asks nicely and gives them a little bit of money. Jailbreaking just gives a little bit more access.
Since the "security" is so easily broken, does it really matter? Is it still security?
...laura
It wasn't just the Soviet Union listening in. Ham radio folks listened in too. Check QST for reception reports for Apollo 10 onwards.
I think it's interesting to compare how well we can fake it now (Apollo 13, From the Earth to the Moon, etc.) with real Apollo footage. Even today, we can't get it quite right.
...laura who has been comparing LRO pictures with the pictures taken by the astronauts
One of the Big Decisions of Project Apollo was the choice of Lunar Orbit Rendezvous, because it had the best chance of getting to the Moon by the end of the decade. Direct Ascent wasn't feasible, and Earth Orbit Rendezvous, while safe and easy to get right, would take too long to develop.
Once Apollo 11 had landed and the race to the Moon had been won, a properly-funded NASA could have developed other space technologies. Stuff developed for EOR would have wider application, to go to Mars, the Lagrange points, and more. The Apollo hardware, while ingenious and effective, was a dead end. It proved a point, but it had no future.
That same properly-funded NASA would still have a need for an Earth-to-orbit shuttle. As part of a larger, coordinated plan, they would have come up with something quite different from the antiques that are straining their guts out and just-barely-failing to blow up on each launch. They would have been able to refine and rethink the design, and would have gone through several generations by now.
...laura
Actually what the germans would have done instead of trying to bomb bletchley (which they likely could have done using the knickebein , X-beam or Y-beam bombing system depending on date) was to change their encryption systems to something more secure.
This is was one of the issues the allies had with ULTRA and MAGIC decrypts: what do you do with it? It's so hot that if the enemy suspected, for a second, that their system had been compromised, they would change it, and you'd be back to square one.
Apparently many lower-rank Germans suspected Enigma had been cracked, but the upper echelons refused to hear of it.
...laura
I remember that one, Captain Slow maxing out a Veyron. Great fun. The range at top speed reminds me of the London to Oslo film (still one of their best, IMHO), where Jeremy noted that his McLaren Mercedes would only go 19 minutes flat out on a tank of gas. I've only ever maxed out an Opel Corsa and a Fiat Marea. In France, curiously: the traffic in Germany is so heavy that top speed and lack of speed limits rarely matters.
They described it as a "Concorde moment", the fastest road car that has ever been made, or probably ever will be made. They also had a good laugh that Jeremy Clarkson is now the slowest Top Gear presenter, after Richard Hammond in the jet car and James May in the Veyron.
The latest James May program (James May on the Moon) included him riding along in a Pontiac GTO (i.e. Monaro) as a chase planes while landing a U2. Then he went for a ride in a U2, the closest he could get to actually going in to space.
...laura
This may be the biggest commercial satellite, but 40 years ago we sent space craft weighing a lot more than this to the Moon. The Apollo LM, alone, had a mass of fifteen tonnes. They lobbed the CSM (30 tonnes) to the Moon too.
That was with 1960s technology, though with lots of money to spend.
...laura
"We need new physics!"
...laura
Remember Kari Byron's debut on Mythbusters?
My response to you is the same one I give to U.S. folks who thinks of moving to Canada for many of the same reasons you've talked about.
You fucked it up. You fix it.
I've sometimes wondered what it would be like to work and work in other countries. Unlike some of the other people posting here, I view language as an opportunity, not as a barrier. I wouldn't mind getting to know France better, but am not sure how I could swing it (space stuff in French Guyana?). I think Germany is a great place to visit - everything works - but I think it would drive me crazy if I tried to live there. I've spent time in Costa Rica with telescopes, but a country with no native engineering or industrial heritage is not for me.
As a Canadian, Australia bordered on anti-climax when i went there in 2002: at times it felt like I hadn't gone anywhere. I've heard this from others, and am expecting this when I go to New Zealand next July, en route to the Cook Islands for the eclipse.
...laura
I have a number of reprints of old books, like The Western Avernus, memoirs of a construction worker on the Canadian Pacific Railway. It was published in 1887, and the copyright has long since expired. The reprint, from 2005, claims copyright, even though the original author (long since dead) had nothing to do with it, nor, as far as I can tell, did his estate or descendants.
What, exactly, are Cosimo Classics copyrighting?
...laura
Countries have changed, with varying success. You can do it if you want to.
Canada sort of changed, but has slipped back a bit. However, our road signs are in kilometers, our weather forecasts are in degrees Celsius, we sell liquids by the litre, and few people under the age of 50 have any issue with this. I was in elementary school when we changed our weather forecasts (I'm 47), and I find U.S. weather forecasts and road signs and such meaningless unless I translate them to proper units.
While the price per kilo is the legal one, supermarkets here still routinely advertise prices per pound. I order stuff by the kilo, on general principles. You cannot buy metric lumber in Canada, though we make it for export. Nor can you buy metric-size paper. I have a package of A4 paper (bought last time I was in England) that I use for testing printer drivers and things. When people ask me how tall I am I tell them 185 cm (I'm tall, which is why people ask...) and unless they're European or Australian they stare at me like I'm an alien.
Australia and New Zealand changed in the 1960s and seem to have been a bit more committed to it.
We've made bigger changes in the past. British Columbia drove on the left, the correct and proper side, until 1922. Then we changed to driving on the wrong side of the road. Most people don't know this.
...laura
Sounds like the old joke about the agnostic dyslexic insomniac.
Who used to lie awake at night wondering if there really was a Dog.
...laura
But does it run Linux?
Joking aside, this sounds like a wonderful project, both on the astronomy side and on the technology side. I can't wait to see what they find out with it.
...laura
DTV is the classic forced update of a technology that had worked just fine for decades.
They can talk all they like about picture quality (true, if you have a good signal), but the truth is they are forcing the sale of a lot of new hardware, and are making it easier for broadcasters to control what people do with the signals they receive. It's all about control and money. Isn't everything?
...laura
Here in Canada the deadline is 31 August 2011. There are a few digital transmitters on the air in major cities. Here in Vancouver I get CBC, CTV and Global on digital, plus KVOS (independent) and KBCB (home shopping - ugh!) from Bellingham, Washington. Set-top ATSC converters are not available here, so I bought one at Radio Shack in Portland last fall and hooked it up to my trusty multi-system TV.
Even dumbed down to 480i NTSC, the picture quality is better than DVD. The CBC HD signal shows what digital can do: being less heavily compressed it's better than what you get on cable. None of the other local channels have gone digital yet.
KVOS and KBCB pulled the NTSC plug in February. Their old analogue channels have been dead air ever since.
The Canadian broadcasters are dragging their heels, pleading poverty and the end of civilization as we know it. Nothing new there.
The cable companies have the general populace snowed in to believing that you must have cable to get any TV at all. Nothing new there, either.
...laura
Can you really see Windows 7 running more than 1 app in 1 GB anyway?
No, I can't see it either.
...laura
After all, democracy doesn't really work anyway...
Democracy is a fine system, for beginners.
...laura