That's a bit of a mis-statement. The UCS
is an independent group of scientists with a range of societal concerns including nuclear proliferation and disarmament, and yes, environmental problems.
But you ignored the fact that the 20 Nobel Laureats that CO-SIGNED the document are not all UCS people.
It's not just "some random lobby group"; they wrote something, and a bunch of other scientists agreed enough to co-sign.
0) Remember there is a difference between CO2 mass and carbon. The 6 Gtons is carbon. Much of the mass in your calculation (which is too high by a factor of 10 btw - consult e.g. a diving handbook)
is in oxygen.
1) There is a difference between the GROSS carbon production by the biosphere, and the NET production. In general the biosphere "produces" something like 100 Gton carbon a year, BUT it also absorbs that same amount in growing things. The carbon emissions from fossil fuels is IN ADDITION to the normal processes; it has the effect of disturbing the equilibrium, because it doesn't get absorbed. You have to understand that if the full 100 Gton/yr of carbon went into the atmosphere and wasn't absorbed, the Earth would look like Venus very quickly.
Current, undisputed, data show that atmospheric CO2 levels have doubled in the past 100 years . Isotopic analysis of the C (i.e. C-12 vs C-14 levels) show that virtually all of this carbon comes from fossil fuels (the C-14 has decayed, so the carbon has been buried for a LONG time).
The best I could find on Google is that CO2 emissions from industrial processes account for about 30 million tons. This sounds reasonable to me, anyone have a better figure?
Uh, try 6-7 Billion tons of carbon released globally each year here and here .
You must not be a scientist, or are perhaps a poorly trained one. The word "evolution" subsumes both a process and the observable data to support it.
No. The word "evolution" merely means "change with time", which is an observational FACT, clear in stratigraphic records. "Evolution", or what some people call "that monkey-to-man thing", is a theory, in the same sense that Gravity is a theory. That is to say, a coherent mechinaism that explains the observed facts and makes testable predictions.
After all, I can't see beyond the horizon, so given the available data, it is a FACT the world is flat!:)
Actually, you're the one who's not a very good scientist. The fact that there IS a horizon proves that the Earth IS NOT flat! Think about it!
A physicist might be hyper-brilliant in their field, but that no more qualifies her or him to adjudicate the *use* of nuclear weapons, for example, than the pin-setter at the local bowling alley.
I could not disagree more strongly with that statement. First of all, the physicist is much more likely to understand the impact such a weapon might have, purely because they have a better grasp of the energies and processes involved. A physicist knows the difference between a kilton and a megaton - your average bowler's eyes would glaze over talking about it. A physicist will know, or be able to calculate, if you are talking about destroying a city block, or a city.
Second, someone who has demonstrated an intellectual capacity beyond the average (sometimes very far beyond the average) may actually just happen to be smarter than the average. I don't know about you, but I'd rather have smart people in charge. Maybe that makes you insecure, but so be it.
So, getting back on topic; a bunch of smart, well-educated people have opinions that differ from those of the president - and apparently also you. These guys are generally acknowledged to be masters of their fields, and they are saying that the president is screwing up badly in areas where they are experts. You're going with the bozo. I'd rather put my money with the smart guys.
If it were a bunch of doctors who disagreed with the president on the best way to operate on your heart, who would you go with?
Dismissing them as "academics" merely betrays your ignorance and anti-intellectual attitude.
People who speak different languages, *think differently*.
To be blunt: No they don't.
As someone who is fluent in three languages, I'd have to say that yes, they do. I sometimes sub-vocalize in different languages when I'm trying to things through. However, I don't think it's an absolute law; it's just that certain concepts are easier in some languages than others.
Try translating "ombudsman" from Swedish. Oh wait, in English it's "ombudsman"... why?
Simply put, different languages make it harder or easier to express certain concepts, and I suspect that it follows that those who speak only one language will have their thought patterns affected by this.
There is a much better example of how language affects thought, and one that I have yet to see a linguist mention: mathematics. Take general relativity and tensor algebra. Einstein spent most of the time between his publishing Special relativity and General simply learning a new mathematical language, one that was better suited to expressing the concepts in his theory. The same sort of thing happened in the development of quantum mechanics (bra-kets anyone?) or even calculus (differential notation).
Language may only be a tool for expressing an underlying thought, but as the saying goes "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."
The idea is that other languages embody higher-order logics that we haven't yet discovered in western cultures.
What, pray tell, is meant by "higher order logic"? I know - we haven't discovered it yet. But according to the linked article Sanskrit, or Panini's Grammar (isn't that a kind of sandwich?) or whatever is somehow superior to western languages. Unfortunately, I was unable to actually understand what exactly his point was.
Perhaps you could give an example? I'm not trying to be cute, I just honestly don't see the point and I'm hoping some smart/. geek can explain it to me in simple words.
My favorite is the "Mobius Wall"; our hero looks around this wall and sees a tail. He puts a stick of dynamite under it, then too late realizes it's his own...:) A great demonstration of non-Euclidean geometry.
The rest of the Wyle E. Coyote ones are just as good. 'Though I don't think he handles momentum in a physically accurate way, he does have an engineers' appreciation for Murphy and His Laws...
I am personally involved with some experiments conducted in ISS, and I know there is a lot of important research going on there.
Please, can you list it? I'm honestly very curious as to what is being done on the station; there is not much reported in the litterature that I can find, so I'd like to hear first-hand...
the Hubble PR department publishes in the 'West Hawaii today' and 'Mercury News'. ISS results are generally published in peer reviewed journals like 'Cell' and 'Nature'.
Bullshit. HST is among the most productive astronomical facilities ever, measured in publication and citation count ( analysed here). HST data is typically used in more than 150 peer-reviewed papers a year. These are papers in journals such as Astrophysical Journal, Science, and of course Nature. A simple seach of the Science archives show 68 original research publications with "Hubble Space Telescope" in the text since 1995. A similar search for "International Space Station" returns ZERO hits. A search of the Nature website returns an interesting article: " Biologists recommend scrapping NASA's research on crystals" (Nature394, 213 (16 Jul 1998)) that starts out: "A panel of US biologists has called for an end to protein crystallography experiments in space -- one of the highest-profile research activities..."
The fact that the general public is fairly deluged by pretty HST pictures is in addition to the fact that the astronomical community is using HST very actively; it's not an artefact of some PR department.
Don't get me wrong - I think manned spaceflight, and the space station are good things, and should be funded. But let's be honest here; HST blows ISS out of space when it comes to publications and scientific impact.
As a top IT executive for a fortune 50, I spend a lot of time on global conference calls.
Apparently you spend a lot of time on Slashdot as well... Shouldn't you be out in your LearJet plotting capitalist oppression of the masses rather than slumming it with us prole geeks?
Seriously though, I think this is an issue where people need to calm the fsck down, on both sides. I've had concerts ruined by insensitive jerks that though that they could use their phones right in the middle of a performance. People paid money for that performance, so they should be entitled to a silent audience. On the other hand, I have a friend who - as a doctor - is frequently on call. It would be bad if his beeper or cell phone was jammed at a critical moment.
Perhaps this would be the time for a technical solution; have cell-phones automatically be set to "vibrate" mode by a signal emitted in movie theaters and concert halls. Or have a signal that causes every cell phone to ring and set it off before the performance, reminding people to turn the damned things off.
Combine that with legalized lynching of people who carry on conversations as a opposed to just leaving the room when they are called, and we might solve this.
Geostationary orbit satellites only last about 10-15 years before the satellites run out of fuel. I don't know if a Martian equivalent would need more or less fuel due to the lower gravity.
Likely somewhat less. Geostationary comsats spend much of their fuel counteracting the effects of the Moon, which tends to pull them out of place. There is no moon around Mars that's large enough to cause problems. On the other hand, Mars os far enough away that it take s bunch of fuel just to get there.
By the way, the GPS network does NOT use geostationary staellites - they are in "half-Geo" orbits; the problem with getting the equivalent of a GPS network around Mars is that you'd need ~24 satellites. The GPS net is a big constellation.
From the economists' point of view, Hubble was a disaster in this respect: a huge amount of money was spent sending the shuttle to service the telescope (a shuttle launch costs c. $500 million).
That's why economists are idiots. You may recall that when Hubble was first launched it had a mirror problem that could only be fixed by astronauts going up there and changing out some stuff. Launching a new HST would have cost at least $1 billion, and probably more given that there wasn't a spare sitting on the ground.
Also, given orbital decay and equipment degradation, there is no way HST would have lasted anywhere near as long as it has without regular maintenance trips. Each such trip costs $300-500 million depending on how you count, and gives you pretty much a new HST (instrument changes). There is NO WAY you could get the same bang for your buck by designing, building and launching expendable spacecraft at the same cost and rate.
Another "Great Observatory" called CGRO was launched around the same time, and it reentered long ago - it was never maintained.
Fact is, the HST servicing missions have actually been a worthwhile investment.
Not quite - we paid for one of their modules, the other they paid for. Of course, with their economy being a shambles they had trouble getting the money on time, so there were delays. But remember, we had delays too, and money was no excuse. Boeing did some pretty wacky shit, including inadvertently throwing away a $50 million O2 tank that they had to go rooting through a garbage dump for...
It would have been cheaper and faster to build the Russian contributions ourselves.
That is simply not true. 1) we had no design heritage or operational experience with station hardware that had actually flown (Skylab was a one-shot deal so there was no regenerative life support, for instance). They had 30 years of it.
2) Experience with the hardware we actually did build shows that it would have been ridiculously expensive, and likely late. The U.S. Node 1 cost $700 million and was late; and it doesn't actually contain anything. The Russian service module is a self-contained space station, and it cost $200 million.
The trouble with ISS is that it has no real mission. If we really needed an experimental platform in LEO, why did we let Skylab fall?
Its mission is that it's necessary for a sustained human presence in space - both for research and as an assembly point/stepping stone for further missions. If you reject the idea of human space flight, then yes, it doesn't have a mission. Skylab fell for the reason I've been lamenting: Congress and the people just never really cared enough to actually fund space at the required level.
They push manned flight even when it kills real science.
What do you mean by "real" science? The kind of science you happen to do, right? Look, ISS shouldn't take all the blame for the death of MTPE. Congress could and should have funded both at a reasonable level... Besides, in case you havene't noticed, the current Prez has gutted MTPE/EOS/SEC as well as the Station. I doubt he likes research into global warming...
It's their lack of conservatism that blows up shuttles.
No, it's the lack of competence that blows up Shuttles. It doesn't matter how conservative you are, if you are too stupid/lazy/ignorant/poor/inexperienced/rushed to properly analyse a problem like a foam impact, you will have bad things happen. Conversely, smart, well-funded and motivated people can pull off some pretty daring things. Take Apollo and lunar orbit rendezvous. That's a very risky approach, where the astronauts can potentially be stranded if it doesn't work. But we did it and it worked...
The idea that suddenly after Challenger it was too dangerous to refuel in LEO is idiotic. Either it was too dangerous to begin with, or it wasn't. What actually happened was that the perceived risk threshold changed, and suddenly it was no longer considered acceptable to do. In other words, we lost our cojones as an agency.
Under political and financial pressure, NASA systematically puts its own objectives ahead of safety.
That's not only insulting, it shows you don't understand the situation. There is a tradeoff between safety and goals; to put safety ahead of everything means you just don't fly. After all, sitting on the launch pad is safer than actually lighting the damned thing. I might have agreed with the statement that "under pressure, NASA took risks that were too big", but I don't even really agree with that. NASA didn't knowingly say "There is a 1:10 chance that the foam will cause a disaster. Do we feel lucky?". Mission managers just missed entirely the danger. That's incompetence and/or bad luck, not recklessness.
It seems to be fashionable to complain about the space station these days, but the fact is that the current mess in U.S. spaceflight has more to do with funding priorities than any details of the space station design or implementation. IF Congress had been willing to spend a reasonable amount of money up front, so that a number of painful design compromises had been avoided, then we'd have a working, useful Shuttle/Station infrastructure right now. I'm talking about things like the decision to go with solid boosters on the Shuttle, or the decision to abandon Skylab. Remember, after Apollo, NASA saw it's budget drop by 80% and stay there.
Space development is a big bootstrap problem, and the only way to get a virtuous cycle of development and payoff going is to prime the pump with lots of cash. What happened was that funding levels stayed at a level below "critical mass", but have been maintained long enough that it still adds up to a lot of money. Unfortunatly it's been frittered away in a long string of abortive, wasted efforts (Skylab, Freedom, NASP, X-33, X-34, SLI, OSP, etc etc.) If they had just STUCK with any one of those long enough to actually make it work, instead of abandoning it as soon as the first development challenge came along, MAYBE we'd actually be somewhere by now...
As for the decision to work with the Russians on ISS; if we hadn't done that there wouldn't BE a space station. We'd still be on the ground. Notice how the Russians currently supply: the core module, propulsive attitude control, orbit maintenance, life support functions (O2, CO2 removal, water, food, sleep locations), crew transport, the EVA equipment being used, a major part of the power, basic telecom, and some other things. The U.S. supplies: a mostly unused lab module (complete with air leak), some power, a $700 million connector node, high data-rate comm and a lot of paperwork requirements.
As for NASA's progressively more and more conservative attitude; that spells the death knell for actually doing anything. If you can't transfer fuel in space because it might be danegrous, then you won't actually ever go anywhere beyond LEO or maybe the Moon (in limited cases). Captain Obvious says: space has risks. You have to just learn how to deal with them, not just sit back and decree you won't ever run them. At least not if you want to actually accomplish something... duh.
The primary difference between acts of war and acts terrorism is the target. When al Qaeda destroyed the Twin Towers, that was terrorism. When they crashed into the Pentagon, that was war.
The distinction is trickier than that, however. When the U.S. carpet-bombed Munich and Tokyo with incendiaries in WWII the primary target was civilians. Does that make it terrorism? Or is it acceptable to target civilans in time of war? In that case, since Osama has declared "religious war" against the U.S. (and we've declared war on him in return), is it legitimate for him to target U.S. civilians? What about "collateral damage"? The U.S. has killed more than a few civilans (including some of Khadaffis children) as an unavoidable consequence of targetting more legitimate military (and leadership) targets. Is it OK to kill civilans because they were too close to a legitimate target and you lack the accuracy to ensure their safety...? Couldn't bin Laden then say he just wanted to bring down strategically important infrastructure (the WTC) and those killed were just in the wrong place at the wrong time?
Terrorism is the specific targetting of civilians for the purpose of inspiring fear.
As opposed to what, killing them? It's ok to kill civilians as long as they weren't afraid at the end?
Look, we can draw all sorts of distinction between moral and immoral killing, but for any thinking person it's just a quagmire of "moral relativism".
In the end the dead are all dead. Do you think they would have cared if they were killed "legitimately"? Would you care if your child was dead?
This reminds me of a quote (sorry, I've forgotten who to attribute it to), which I've paraphrased to "the State is defined by its claim to a monopoly on killing".
Fascinating discussion. I have to agree with Zeinfeld, this sounds like a fairy tale. In fact, it sounds a lot like the plot of a book I read about 15 years ago (I've forgotten the name, but it was some French guy I think). Anyway, the story was partly about some Soviet computer chick who discovered that a bunch of her computers had a trojan in them (turns out the trojan could be activated when a certain value was entered in as the temperature at a remote (Western) weather monitoring station. (Outlandish I know - it was a pretty crappy book.) In any case, the basic idea was that the West started by trojaning all the computers, but then the KGB decided to use the same thing so they could exert internal control.
My point is just that not only is the Safire story total B.S., it was probably lifted more-or-less wholesale from an old French spy-thriller.
Ironic, don't you think?
Something about having to report the condition of control rods and water levels directly to the Federal Government makes me doubt exactly how safe this stuff actually is.
It shouldn't. It should make you understand just how incredibly tightly reguated the nuclear industry is, especially compared to other industries. Which is just fine - I wish that some of the independent power generators in Ohio had been required to disclose how little reactive power (used to keep transmission grids stable ) they were generating on the day of the recent blackout (that would likely have allowed operators to avoid the blackout, by the way). But that's another story.
Machine's break, people mess up, things get neglected, overlooked and forgotten. [...] We have never suffered the worst case. Chernobyl did not even begin to approach it.
Yes, nuclear reactors are sophisticated and will sooner or later fail at some level. However, I think you overestimate the consequences of a worst-case scenario - while it would be bad, and expensive, it is nowhere near the apocalyptic proportions some people think. First of all, Chernobyl was pretty much the worst-possible event (a large, high-burnup power reactor near a population center suffers a complete containment failure together with a fire that lofts much of the radioactive inventory). It can't get much worse than that, even if somebody nuked a plant directly. And we're still here- it didn't end the world, or even life (or agriculture!) in the Ukraine.
Now for casualties, estimates vary hugely - but the fact of the matter is that the only statistically reliable increase in cancer is in thyroid disease (and that could have been prevented if they had just given people iodine tablets. Stupid fscking Soviet bureaucratic inertia prevented it. Sad.). People have definitely looked for leukemias, birth defects and other cancers, but there have not been verifiable increases in cancer rates. Granted, epidemiological studies are difficult in the area for many reasons, and I would be willing to believe that there have been excess deaths and much suffering and misery. But it is hard to disentangle the effects of Soviet-era environmental destruction, economic collapse, and radiation. The upshot is that the worst-case nuclear accident, while certainly horrible, is not as Biblical as you seem to think.
As industrial accidents go, it is certainly up there with Bhopal; but I'm not sure it compares with the yearly death toll from pollution from coal-burning plants.
Fusion is certainly the long-term preferable solution, no contest. But fission is actually a good near-term solution. The biggest problem is the irrational fear even otherwise rational people have of it. That being said, I will say this - nuclear power can be acceptably safe, if it is well-regulated and well-funded. It is however more susceptible to failure if it's put in the hands of irresponsible profiteers. People of the sort that ran Enron into the ground. "Deregulation" IS a problem inasmuch as it lets people like that get their greedly little hands on nuke plants. I think the comparison with the power grid is apt and should serve as a warning. Basically, control was taken from power engineers and given to Wharton MBA's who don't know sh-t about physics. The results were perfectly predictable...
No matter what that guy says, the are NOT going to tow HST to the Space Station, for reasons of simple physics. HST is in a 28 deg inclination orbit, ISS is in a 57 deg orbit. The change in velocity ("delta-V") required for such a plane change is of the same order as the delta-V required to get into orbit in the first place (something like 3 km/s). That would require a very, very large rocket by the standards of current on-orbit maneuvering systems, and probably cost as much as simply building another HST and putting it in the right orbit in the first place.
You might see them reboost HST into a high orbit, but it's NOT going to ISS.
you should be able to stitch the image exactly(most errors in stitching software comes when you didn't shoot the images perfectly overlapping, or at different angles, or you took a step forward/back, etc.)
The camera on the rover is on a rotating mount on a mast. Because it is a stereo camera (i.e. two cameras side-by-side), the rotation axis doesn't go down the middle of the camera. That's why you get stitching errors in large panoramas.
Oh well, it's late and I have some free time and karma to blow, so here goes:
Say what you want about the 9/11 hijackers, they were (tactically) smart, and they had physical courage.
Linux on the desktop (or more specifically, on my laptop) is a pain in the ass to install and maintain. Windows really is better for those who just want to use a computer, as opposed to play around with one.
Leaving it to the free market is not always the best policy.
There is too much public religion in America.
Europeans are soft in the head when it comes to things like GM foods, nuclear power, animal testing, cell-phone radiation and science funding.
Americans are soft in the head when it comes to things like therapeutic cloning, drug policy and healthcare policy.
Slashdot Mirror
But you ignored the fact that the 20 Nobel Laureats that CO-SIGNED the document are not all UCS people. It's not just "some random lobby group"; they wrote something, and a bunch of other scientists agreed enough to co-sign.
0) Remember there is a difference between CO2 mass and carbon. The 6 Gtons is carbon. Much of the mass in your calculation (which is too high by a factor of 10 btw - consult e.g. a diving handbook) is in oxygen.
1) There is a difference between the GROSS carbon production by the biosphere, and the NET production. In general the biosphere "produces" something like 100 Gton carbon a year, BUT it also absorbs that same amount in growing things. The carbon emissions from fossil fuels is IN ADDITION to the normal processes; it has the effect of disturbing the equilibrium, because it doesn't get absorbed. You have to understand that if the full 100 Gton/yr of carbon went into the atmosphere and wasn't absorbed, the Earth would look like Venus very quickly.
Current, undisputed, data show that atmospheric CO2 levels have doubled in the past 100 years . Isotopic analysis of the C (i.e. C-12 vs C-14 levels) show that virtually all of this carbon comes from fossil fuels (the C-14 has decayed, so the carbon has been buried for a LONG time).
Uh, try 6-7 Billion tons of carbon released globally each year here and here .
For the love of whatever you call holy, go and learn some fscking thermodynamics and statistical mechanics.
Point being that you CAN predict ensemble behavior such as climate.
No. The word "evolution" merely means "change with time", which is an observational FACT, clear in stratigraphic records. "Evolution", or what some people call "that monkey-to-man thing", is a theory, in the same sense that Gravity is a theory. That is to say, a coherent mechinaism that explains the observed facts and makes testable predictions.
After all, I can't see beyond the horizon, so given the available data, it is a FACT the world is flat! :)
Actually, you're the one who's not a very good scientist. The fact that there IS a horizon proves that the Earth IS NOT flat! Think about it!
I could not disagree more strongly with that statement. First of all, the physicist is much more likely to understand the impact such a weapon might have, purely because they have a better grasp of the energies and processes involved. A physicist knows the difference between a kilton and a megaton - your average bowler's eyes would glaze over talking about it. A physicist will know, or be able to calculate, if you are talking about destroying a city block, or a city.
Second, someone who has demonstrated an intellectual capacity beyond the average (sometimes very far beyond the average) may actually just happen to be smarter than the average. I don't know about you, but I'd rather have smart people in charge. Maybe that makes you insecure, but so be it.
So, getting back on topic; a bunch of smart, well-educated people have opinions that differ from those of the president - and apparently also you. These guys are generally acknowledged to be masters of their fields, and they are saying that the president is screwing up badly in areas where they are experts. You're going with the bozo. I'd rather put my money with the smart guys. If it were a bunch of doctors who disagreed with the president on the best way to operate on your heart, who would you go with?
Dismissing them as "academics" merely betrays your ignorance and anti-intellectual attitude.
To be blunt: No they don't.
As someone who is fluent in three languages, I'd have to say that yes, they do. I sometimes sub-vocalize in different languages when I'm trying to things through. However, I don't think it's an absolute law; it's just that certain concepts are easier in some languages than others. Try translating "ombudsman" from Swedish. Oh wait, in English it's "ombudsman"... why?
Simply put, different languages make it harder or easier to express certain concepts, and I suspect that it follows that those who speak only one language will have their thought patterns affected by this.
There is a much better example of how language affects thought, and one that I have yet to see a linguist mention: mathematics. Take general relativity and tensor algebra. Einstein spent most of the time between his publishing Special relativity and General simply learning a new mathematical language, one that was better suited to expressing the concepts in his theory. The same sort of thing happened in the development of quantum mechanics (bra-kets anyone?) or even calculus (differential notation).
Language may only be a tool for expressing an underlying thought, but as the saying goes "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."
What, pray tell, is meant by "higher order logic"? I know - we haven't discovered it yet. But according to the linked article Sanskrit, or Panini's Grammar (isn't that a kind of sandwich?) or whatever is somehow superior to western languages. Unfortunately, I was unable to actually understand what exactly his point was.
Perhaps you could give an example? I'm not trying to be cute, I just honestly don't see the point and I'm hoping some smart /. geek can explain it to me in simple words.
The rest of the Wyle E. Coyote ones are just as good. 'Though I don't think he handles momentum in a physically accurate way, he does have an engineers' appreciation for Murphy and His Laws...
Please, can you list it? I'm honestly very curious as to what is being done on the station; there is not much reported in the litterature that I can find, so I'd like to hear first-hand...
Bullshit. HST is among the most productive astronomical facilities ever, measured in publication and citation count ( analysed here). HST data is typically used in more than 150 peer-reviewed papers a year. These are papers in journals such as Astrophysical Journal, Science, and of course Nature. A simple seach of the Science archives show 68 original research publications with "Hubble Space Telescope" in the text since 1995. A similar search for "International Space Station" returns ZERO hits. A search of the Nature website returns an interesting article: " Biologists recommend scrapping NASA's research on crystals" (Nature394, 213 (16 Jul 1998)) that starts out: "A panel of US biologists has called for an end to protein crystallography experiments in space -- one of the highest-profile research activities..."
The fact that the general public is fairly deluged by pretty HST pictures is in addition to the fact that the astronomical community is using HST very actively; it's not an artefact of some PR department.
Don't get me wrong - I think manned spaceflight, and the space station are good things, and should be funded. But let's be honest here; HST blows ISS out of space when it comes to publications and scientific impact.
Apparently you spend a lot of time on Slashdot as well... Shouldn't you be out in your LearJet plotting capitalist oppression of the masses rather than slumming it with us prole geeks?
Seriously though, I think this is an issue where people need to calm the fsck down, on both sides. I've had concerts ruined by insensitive jerks that though that they could use their phones right in the middle of a performance. People paid money for that performance, so they should be entitled to a silent audience. On the other hand, I have a friend who - as a doctor - is frequently on call. It would be bad if his beeper or cell phone was jammed at a critical moment.
Perhaps this would be the time for a technical solution; have cell-phones automatically be set to "vibrate" mode by a signal emitted in movie theaters and concert halls. Or have a signal that causes every cell phone to ring and set it off before the performance, reminding people to turn the damned things off.
Combine that with legalized lynching of people who carry on conversations as a opposed to just leaving the room when they are called, and we might solve this.
Likely somewhat less. Geostationary comsats spend much of their fuel counteracting the effects of the Moon, which tends to pull them out of place. There is no moon around Mars that's large enough to cause problems. On the other hand, Mars os far enough away that it take s bunch of fuel just to get there.
By the way, the GPS network does NOT use geostationary staellites - they are in "half-Geo" orbits; the problem with getting the equivalent of a GPS network around Mars is that you'd need ~24 satellites. The GPS net is a big constellation.
That's why economists are idiots. You may recall that when Hubble was first launched it had a mirror problem that could only be fixed by astronauts going up there and changing out some stuff. Launching a new HST would have cost at least $1 billion, and probably more given that there wasn't a spare sitting on the ground.
Also, given orbital decay and equipment degradation, there is no way HST would have lasted anywhere near as long as it has without regular maintenance trips. Each such trip costs $300-500 million depending on how you count, and gives you pretty much a new HST (instrument changes). There is NO WAY you could get the same bang for your buck by designing, building and launching expendable spacecraft at the same cost and rate.
Another "Great Observatory" called CGRO was launched around the same time, and it reentered long ago - it was never maintained.
Fact is, the HST servicing missions have actually been a worthwhile investment.
Not quite - we paid for one of their modules, the other they paid for. Of course, with their economy being a shambles they had trouble getting the money on time, so there were delays. But remember, we had delays too, and money was no excuse. Boeing did some pretty wacky shit, including inadvertently throwing away a $50 million O2 tank that they had to go rooting through a garbage dump for...
It would have been cheaper and faster to build the Russian contributions ourselves.
That is simply not true. 1) we had no design heritage or operational experience with station hardware that had actually flown (Skylab was a one-shot deal so there was no regenerative life support, for instance). They had 30 years of it. 2) Experience with the hardware we actually did build shows that it would have been ridiculously expensive, and likely late. The U.S. Node 1 cost $700 million and was late; and it doesn't actually contain anything. The Russian service module is a self-contained space station, and it cost $200 million.
The trouble with ISS is that it has no real mission. If we really needed an experimental platform in LEO, why did we let Skylab fall?
Its mission is that it's necessary for a sustained human presence in space - both for research and as an assembly point/stepping stone for further missions. If you reject the idea of human space flight, then yes, it doesn't have a mission. Skylab fell for the reason I've been lamenting: Congress and the people just never really cared enough to actually fund space at the required level.
They push manned flight even when it kills real science.
What do you mean by "real" science? The kind of science you happen to do, right? Look, ISS shouldn't take all the blame for the death of MTPE. Congress could and should have funded both at a reasonable level... Besides, in case you havene't noticed, the current Prez has gutted MTPE /EOS/SEC as well as the Station. I doubt he likes research into global warming...
No, it's the lack of competence that blows up Shuttles. It doesn't matter how conservative you are, if you are too stupid/lazy/ignorant/poor/inexperienced/rushed to properly analyse a problem like a foam impact, you will have bad things happen. Conversely, smart, well-funded and motivated people can pull off some pretty daring things. Take Apollo and lunar orbit rendezvous. That's a very risky approach, where the astronauts can potentially be stranded if it doesn't work. But we did it and it worked...
The idea that suddenly after Challenger it was too dangerous to refuel in LEO is idiotic. Either it was too dangerous to begin with, or it wasn't. What actually happened was that the perceived risk threshold changed, and suddenly it was no longer considered acceptable to do. In other words, we lost our cojones as an agency.
Under political and financial pressure, NASA systematically puts its own objectives ahead of safety.
That's not only insulting, it shows you don't understand the situation. There is a tradeoff between safety and goals; to put safety ahead of everything means you just don't fly. After all, sitting on the launch pad is safer than actually lighting the damned thing. I might have agreed with the statement that "under pressure, NASA took risks that were too big", but I don't even really agree with that. NASA didn't knowingly say "There is a 1:10 chance that the foam will cause a disaster. Do we feel lucky?". Mission managers just missed entirely the danger. That's incompetence and/or bad luck, not recklessness.
Space development is a big bootstrap problem, and the only way to get a virtuous cycle of development and payoff going is to prime the pump with lots of cash. What happened was that funding levels stayed at a level below "critical mass", but have been maintained long enough that it still adds up to a lot of money. Unfortunatly it's been frittered away in a long string of abortive, wasted efforts (Skylab, Freedom, NASP, X-33, X-34, SLI, OSP, etc etc.) If they had just STUCK with any one of those long enough to actually make it work, instead of abandoning it as soon as the first development challenge came along, MAYBE we'd actually be somewhere by now...
As for the decision to work with the Russians on ISS; if we hadn't done that there wouldn't BE a space station. We'd still be on the ground. Notice how the Russians currently supply: the core module, propulsive attitude control, orbit maintenance, life support functions (O2, CO2 removal, water, food, sleep locations), crew transport, the EVA equipment being used, a major part of the power, basic telecom, and some other things. The U.S. supplies: a mostly unused lab module (complete with air leak), some power, a $700 million connector node, high data-rate comm and a lot of paperwork requirements.
As for NASA's progressively more and more conservative attitude; that spells the death knell for actually doing anything. If you can't transfer fuel in space because it might be danegrous, then you won't actually ever go anywhere beyond LEO or maybe the Moon (in limited cases). Captain Obvious says: space has risks. You have to just learn how to deal with them, not just sit back and decree you won't ever run them. At least not if you want to actually accomplish something... duh.
The distinction is trickier than that, however. When the U.S. carpet-bombed Munich and Tokyo with incendiaries in WWII the primary target was civilians. Does that make it terrorism? Or is it acceptable to target civilans in time of war? In that case, since Osama has declared "religious war" against the U.S. (and we've declared war on him in return), is it legitimate for him to target U.S. civilians? What about "collateral damage"? The U.S. has killed more than a few civilans (including some of Khadaffis children) as an unavoidable consequence of targetting more legitimate military (and leadership) targets. Is it OK to kill civilans because they were too close to a legitimate target and you lack the accuracy to ensure their safety...? Couldn't bin Laden then say he just wanted to bring down strategically important infrastructure (the WTC) and those killed were just in the wrong place at the wrong time?
Terrorism is the specific targetting of civilians for the purpose of inspiring fear.
As opposed to what, killing them? It's ok to kill civilians as long as they weren't afraid at the end?
Look, we can draw all sorts of distinction between moral and immoral killing, but for any thinking person it's just a quagmire of "moral relativism". In the end the dead are all dead. Do you think they would have cared if they were killed "legitimately"? Would you care if your child was dead?
This reminds me of a quote (sorry, I've forgotten who to attribute it to), which I've paraphrased to "the State is defined by its claim to a monopoly on killing".
My point is just that not only is the Safire story total B.S., it was probably lifted more-or-less wholesale from an old French spy-thriller. Ironic, don't you think?
It shouldn't. It should make you understand just how incredibly tightly reguated the nuclear industry is, especially compared to other industries. Which is just fine - I wish that some of the independent power generators in Ohio had been required to disclose how little reactive power (used to keep transmission grids stable ) they were generating on the day of the recent blackout (that would likely have allowed operators to avoid the blackout, by the way). But that's another story.
Machine's break, people mess up, things get neglected, overlooked and forgotten. [...] We have never suffered the worst case. Chernobyl did not even begin to approach it.
Yes, nuclear reactors are sophisticated and will sooner or later fail at some level. However, I think you overestimate the consequences of a worst-case scenario - while it would be bad, and expensive, it is nowhere near the apocalyptic proportions some people think. First of all, Chernobyl was pretty much the worst-possible event (a large, high-burnup power reactor near a population center suffers a complete containment failure together with a fire that lofts much of the radioactive inventory). It can't get much worse than that, even if somebody nuked a plant directly. And we're still here- it didn't end the world, or even life (or agriculture!) in the Ukraine.
Now for casualties, estimates vary hugely - but the fact of the matter is that the only statistically reliable increase in cancer is in thyroid disease (and that could have been prevented if they had just given people iodine tablets. Stupid fscking Soviet bureaucratic inertia prevented it. Sad.). People have definitely looked for leukemias, birth defects and other cancers, but there have not been verifiable increases in cancer rates. Granted, epidemiological studies are difficult in the area for many reasons, and I would be willing to believe that there have been excess deaths and much suffering and misery. But it is hard to disentangle the effects of Soviet-era environmental destruction, economic collapse, and radiation. The upshot is that the worst-case nuclear accident, while certainly horrible, is not as Biblical as you seem to think. As industrial accidents go, it is certainly up there with Bhopal; but I'm not sure it compares with the yearly death toll from pollution from coal-burning plants.
Fusion is certainly the long-term preferable solution, no contest. But fission is actually a good near-term solution. The biggest problem is the irrational fear even otherwise rational people have of it. That being said, I will say this - nuclear power can be acceptably safe, if it is well-regulated and well-funded. It is however more susceptible to failure if it's put in the hands of irresponsible profiteers. People of the sort that ran Enron into the ground. "Deregulation" IS a problem inasmuch as it lets people like that get their greedly little hands on nuke plants. I think the comparison with the power grid is apt and should serve as a warning. Basically, control was taken from power engineers and given to Wharton MBA's who don't know sh-t about physics. The results were perfectly predictable...
You might see them reboost HST into a high orbit, but it's NOT going to ISS.
The camera on the rover is on a rotating mount on a mast. Because it is a stereo camera (i.e. two cameras side-by-side), the rotation axis doesn't go down the middle of the camera. That's why you get stitching errors in large panoramas.