But many types of video processing DO scale very nicely, as racks and racks of SGI machines proved years ago ("rendering farm" is a beautiful name for computers...). The "flow of time" argument against scaling, which is basically an argument against easy parallelization, works for some things but not others.
Even when the analysis or manipulation of one frame depends heavily on those before it, most video (or audio) work is broken nicely into scenes (or tracks/movements) which can be easily scaled - damn near linearly.
Financial markets work similarly. Yes, there is a very important interdependence, sequentially significant, but only between certain transactions. There may need to be "traffic cops" that don't scale linearly, but other parts of the transactions will scale nicely.
In the limit, nothing that we do will scale efficiently forever (to extremely large OR small), but video processing and financial systems are two examples which seem to scale quite well.
Any car with hydrogen power is going to have highly compressed hydrogen gas onboard. There are efforts at storing it other ways, but to my knowledge nobody uses them in cars at the moment, as they would be frickin huge. Whether the hydrogen is ultimately burned in a fuel cell or an ICE (using some of the compression energy as well) shouldn't make much of a difference to the safety of the fuel storage. Just like with a gasoline car, most of the danger is in the tank, not what kind of engine is up front.
I sure hope not. Can you imagine what the electric bill would be if the insulation was that poor? And of course just a short distance away would have to be a HUGE heat output from condensers or heat pipes taking all that heat away. My guess is that a high-res thermal imaging satellite could see the heat from the HVAC above, but never the cold areas below around the accelerator itself.
Of COURSE!!! And penguins, who wear tuxedos comprised of millions of Maxwell's demons that, like your imagined polar bears, actually take heat from their surroundings while maintaining a much higher temperature...
Oh, and there are trolls that do similar things, but can do so over amazingly long distances using advanced technologies. They are, though, a type of parasite, depending on other relatively un-advanced creatures to feed them negative entropy.
There was a paper a few years ago by a guy at or previously at NASA (I'm being lazy tonight and not looking it up, but I'd be happy to find it if you like) which rather convincingly showed that if we used a shuttle on the schedule ORIGINALLY planned for it (several launches per month rather than per year) it would have been cost effective.
I'm not sure if your statement that we're much closer to reliability and "cheapness" is meant to imply that the shuttle has helped in this respect, or not; we could argue whether it has helped give only motivation if not otherwise contributed directly to practical experience in reliable and inexpensive launches. In either case, it has been a very expensive (per launch) platform because it didn't work out as planned, and we have hopefully (!!) learned something about how the government needs to plan for things...
That said, my impression is that there is no such possible thing as a cheap, reliable, NON-commercial launch. Whether we achieve such a thing commercially is up to SpaceX and SpaceX alone, in the short term.
You might be right that this planet is a fluke, but I see absolutely no reason to imagine it is. A fluke is not just the first in a series but something unexpected or unlikely, and this is absolutely neither. Care to elaborate on your pessimism, or are you just trolling?
While your three boxes are neat and tidy, there is one box you've left out that everyone in a representative democracy is supposedly guaranteed above all others - the soap box.
This one is most important here, since the jury hasn't yet been formed, there is nothing in the legislative pipeline that will likely reform copyright if some person or persons is elected, and of course killing people or threatening to do so is way out of line in this case.
Basically what is happening seems to be a conflict between:
1) somebody's right to limit others' free speech involved in suing (in front of a jury eventually?) to protect their claimed legal copyright to limit others' free speech, and
assuming North Korea didn't include an auto-destroy mechanism onboard
If they did, they better hope it worked better the the rest of the mission. Turns out, it IS rocket science! Who'da thunkit?
I was thinking that might be the only part that DID work... which would have to be kinda mixed news to the engineer in charge of that subsystem.
Then again, I also wonder if they would even have a destruct-mechanism. If it has to be enabled remotely, what are the chances that someone's jamming or "educated-guess" control interference signals might set it off?
If, by active, you include old volcanoes which are slowly subsiding into the ocean crust, and will never erupt again, then yes, ALL of the Hawaiian "mountains" are still active volcanoes. By reasonable interpretations, however, 2-5 Hawaiian volcanoes are active, several are dormant, and several (many, counting atolls all the way to Midway, and many more counting seamounts all the way to Alaska) are extinct.
What exactly does it mean to be a "deeper" active volcano anyway? If the only molten rock is deep enough that it will NEVER reach the surface, and will simply cool where it lays, then I wouldn't call that an active volcano.
Read the article. This magma chamber is NOT apparently basaltic, and has much in common with magmas that produce granite. 67% silica content - which is very uncommon to see in anything on the surface here in Hawaii.
That said, the important thing isn't probably going to be understanding how volcanoes in other parts of the world work, but just in how this volcano works. That won't get as much funding as studying "how continents originally formed" or other highly derived hypotheses that this site might generate, so the geologists are focusing on what sounds good to people OTHER than Hawaiians (who are generally against messin' with da aina anyway).
They're also doing all this ISRU testing to make water from the soil underfoot, or at the least get oxygen out of it to breathe. If there was liquid water, or even water ice near the surface, this would all be totally redundant.
I'm not a geologist, but I wonder if the term "volcanic ash" is used appropriately here. What you see in the pictures from the Hawaii test site is most certainly tephra, or material rather violently ejected from a volcano. For these tests NASA isn't interested in pahoehoe or a'a lava flows, which are altogether too "rocky" and not composed of the sharp sand-like fragments (of all different sizes, but mostly very small) that are similar to those that dominate the moon (and much of Mars).
Some of the confusion arises because shield volcanoes like here in Hawaii normally do have effusive (as opposed to explosive) eruptions, resulting in flows of pahoehoe or a'a. But as the source of magma is "pinched off" by the moving crust over the hot spot, a new volcano forms and the older one changes its eruption style. In the last gasps, you have eruptions which are of cooler magma, with more explosions and way less of the smooth flowing rivers of lava (and lava fountains) you see on footage from Kilauea and Mauna Loa recent eruptions. Don't forget, every Hawaiian island has at least one volcano of its very own, so we have a few to choose from to get the right lunar or Martian analog site. (Hawaii Island, the Big Island which hosted this test, has 5 volcanoes, three of which are currently active or have been active in the recent past.)
So no, we're not talking about eroded rocks here in Hawaii, which is good because on the moon things don't really erode - they get blown apart by impacts and squeezed up from underneath in molten form. In Hawaii, the impacts are substituted by explosive eruption, but as you said the chemistry of the rocks/tephra is quite similar. As someone else pointed out, having eroded material is exactly what NASA *doesn't* want, hence nice young Hawaiian tephra being better than older mainland-US tephra.
How do they know where the water is from? Because of previous lab tests, regolith simulant sample checks before and after processing (using the same spectrometers that flew on the Mars Exploration Rovers, among others), and hopefully because of sound engineering from the outset.
I agree that nowhere on Earth is a great analog to Lunar climate/weather, but the point is to put these prototypes into a dusty, windy environment, drive the sample-delivering rovers around, etc. For this test in Hawaii they needed to put electric blankets on some components because of hard frosts at night... they'll change that system before flying it!
The point isn't photo-ops and vendor networking, although these things happen. The point is to do real science on Earth in preparation of doing real science on the moon and Mars.
I, however, was at the test to meet people and have my photo taken with cool equipment. That's the benefit of being a slave^d^w I mean an undergrad intern (and living in Hawaii).
The two oxygen/water producing setups tested out here weren't exactly of the "let's scale up and terraform!! w00t!!!" type...
In fact, they are more likely to be refined and *reduced* in size, to be able to go to the moon sometime in the next 10-15 years, and put out enough gas (stored under compression, or liquified) to support a crew of 4-6 humans for several months.
Nothing about giant pressure domes or atmosphere-building just yet... this stuff is way more practical than that.
Remember that not too many 80 year olds are still sexually reproducing, though. If left-handedness is fine until the age 33, that's about the average life expectancy of most of our ancestors.
Wouldn't it make sense for somebody to be hired to ensure the information on the Wiki is correct? As any encyclopaedia would have teams of researchers and proof-readers, shouldn't that apply to the "community" version as well?
In other words, why is an encyclopaedia so expensive? Is it because of all the work that went into compiling the information, or is it to print twenty thousand (or whatever) pages worth of books? If it's the former, then okay, Wikipedia has no chance of being a major influence, because researchers and specialists that require pay are unlikely to devote many hours to something free that might undercut the pay they get from their day jobs.
If, on the other hand, it's really about the printing and distribution costs, than why isn't there some big money being donated to the project to pay for researchers and contributors to add data? If I wanted to donate money to education, would it be better to buy one school a set of books, or to buy someone's time to make that information available to all schoools? I think the answer is clear. But then, that's maybe because I don't really have any money to give.
I have a great suggestion for you (bad attitudes about 1994 aside): Play Quake. As is Quake 1.
I just re-visited that old favorite along with the Tenebrae project - and let me tell you, if you've got the hardware to run Doom3 already, then Tenebrae Quake is a must-play.
For those of you who don't know what it is, check it out (at sourceforge). It makes Quake look better than Doom3.
This sounds like a mis-transcribed instruction to your secretary, Viola Wuthers... or perhaps you're just using voice-recognition software... or perhaps it's an obscure joke about MS being full of violists...
In any case, the French word you're looking for is "voila", or loosely translated, "there".
(fin)
Re:Sounds perfect for Florida...
on
Space-Age Houses
·
· Score: 1
It's true, of course - ultra-light fiber composites make great kites - but also wouldn't be as likely to break on the way down.
Plus, if they're made for space I'm sure they're air-tight and would float. The whole gulf could be full of Florida retirees floating around in their space-homes, randomly re-arranging every time a tropical storm comes through!
Is Redhat 7.3 going to make it easy to install X on my Geforce4? If not, is there ANY current distro that I can actually install by myself (Doesn't hold my hand but won't require me to remember VI commands to boot into X) that will *automatically* set up my X server?
My concern isn't driver support, but just having something better than the standard XF86Config that does nothing more than confuse the configuration file into having NO idea how to boot X on my machine, and confuse me beyond my simple understanding of Linux config'ing.
Anybody have Hed Rat 7.3 on a Geforce machine? Anything to make the process real easy? I kinda hope not, since I just downloaded 7.2 yesterday...
Slashdot Mirror
Don't forget about "metallic" hydrogen... so anything above OR below helium? Silly astronomers.
But many types of video processing DO scale very nicely, as racks and racks of SGI machines proved years ago ("rendering farm" is a beautiful name for computers...). The "flow of time" argument against scaling, which is basically an argument against easy parallelization, works for some things but not others.
Even when the analysis or manipulation of one frame depends heavily on those before it, most video (or audio) work is broken nicely into scenes (or tracks/movements) which can be easily scaled - damn near linearly.
Financial markets work similarly. Yes, there is a very important interdependence, sequentially significant, but only between certain transactions. There may need to be "traffic cops" that don't scale linearly, but other parts of the transactions will scale nicely.
In the limit, nothing that we do will scale efficiently forever (to extremely large OR small), but video processing and financial systems are two examples which seem to scale quite well.
Any car with hydrogen power is going to have highly compressed hydrogen gas onboard. There are efforts at storing it other ways, but to my knowledge nobody uses them in cars at the moment, as they would be frickin huge. Whether the hydrogen is ultimately burned in a fuel cell or an ICE (using some of the compression energy as well) shouldn't make much of a difference to the safety of the fuel storage. Just like with a gasoline car, most of the danger is in the tank, not what kind of engine is up front.
I sure hope not. Can you imagine what the electric bill would be if the insulation was that poor? And of course just a short distance away would have to be a HUGE heat output from condensers or heat pipes taking all that heat away. My guess is that a high-res thermal imaging satellite could see the heat from the HVAC above, but never the cold areas below around the accelerator itself.
Of COURSE!!! And penguins, who wear tuxedos comprised of millions of Maxwell's demons that, like your imagined polar bears, actually take heat from their surroundings while maintaining a much higher temperature...
Oh, and there are trolls that do similar things, but can do so over amazingly long distances using advanced technologies. They are, though, a type of parasite, depending on other relatively un-advanced creatures to feed them negative entropy.
There was a paper a few years ago by a guy at or previously at NASA (I'm being lazy tonight and not looking it up, but I'd be happy to find it if you like) which rather convincingly showed that if we used a shuttle on the schedule ORIGINALLY planned for it (several launches per month rather than per year) it would have been cost effective.
I'm not sure if your statement that we're much closer to reliability and "cheapness" is meant to imply that the shuttle has helped in this respect, or not; we could argue whether it has helped give only motivation if not otherwise contributed directly to practical experience in reliable and inexpensive launches. In either case, it has been a very expensive (per launch) platform because it didn't work out as planned, and we have hopefully (!!) learned something about how the government needs to plan for things...
That said, my impression is that there is no such possible thing as a cheap, reliable, NON-commercial launch. Whether we achieve such a thing commercially is up to SpaceX and SpaceX alone, in the short term.
You might be right that this planet is a fluke, but I see absolutely no reason to imagine it is. A fluke is not just the first in a series but something unexpected or unlikely, and this is absolutely neither. Care to elaborate on your pessimism, or are you just trolling?
I'd bet money that we've moved more stuff down than up - here are things that could go either way that have way more impact than buildings:
- Roadway cuts/causeway building
- Dams and reservoirs
- Coal and other mining, both deep and mountain clearing
- ???
On average I would have to guess these things almost balance out, but my money's with gravity on this one.
While your three boxes are neat and tidy, there is one box you've left out that everyone in a representative democracy is supposedly guaranteed above all others - the soap box.
This one is most important here, since the jury hasn't yet been formed, there is nothing in the legislative pipeline that will likely reform copyright if some person or persons is elected, and of course killing people or threatening to do so is way out of line in this case.
Basically what is happening seems to be a conflict between:
1) somebody's right to limit others' free speech involved in suing (in front of a jury eventually?) to protect their claimed legal copyright to limit others' free speech, and
2)free speech itself.
assuming North Korea didn't include an auto-destroy mechanism onboard
If they did, they better hope it worked better the the rest of the mission.
Turns out, it IS rocket science! Who'da thunkit?
I was thinking that might be the only part that DID work... which would have to be kinda mixed news to the engineer in charge of that subsystem.
Then again, I also wonder if they would even have a destruct-mechanism. If it has to be enabled remotely, what are the chances that someone's jamming or "educated-guess" control interference signals might set it off?
Define active.
If, by active, you include old volcanoes which are slowly subsiding into the ocean crust, and will never erupt again, then yes, ALL of the Hawaiian "mountains" are still active volcanoes. By reasonable interpretations, however, 2-5 Hawaiian volcanoes are active, several are dormant, and several (many, counting atolls all the way to Midway, and many more counting seamounts all the way to Alaska) are extinct.
What exactly does it mean to be a "deeper" active volcano anyway? If the only molten rock is deep enough that it will NEVER reach the surface, and will simply cool where it lays, then I wouldn't call that an active volcano.
Read the article. This magma chamber is NOT apparently basaltic, and has much in common with magmas that produce granite. 67% silica content - which is very uncommon to see in anything on the surface here in Hawaii.
That said, the important thing isn't probably going to be understanding how volcanoes in other parts of the world work, but just in how this volcano works. That won't get as much funding as studying "how continents originally formed" or other highly derived hypotheses that this site might generate, so the geologists are focusing on what sounds good to people OTHER than Hawaiians (who are generally against messin' with da aina anyway).
-L
They're also doing all this ISRU testing to make water from the soil underfoot, or at the least get oxygen out of it to breathe. If there was liquid water, or even water ice near the surface, this would all be totally redundant.
-L
I'm not a geologist, but I wonder if the term "volcanic ash" is used appropriately here. What you see in the pictures from the Hawaii test site is most certainly tephra, or material rather violently ejected from a volcano. For these tests NASA isn't interested in pahoehoe or a'a lava flows, which are altogether too "rocky" and not composed of the sharp sand-like fragments (of all different sizes, but mostly very small) that are similar to those that dominate the moon (and much of Mars).
Some of the confusion arises because shield volcanoes like here in Hawaii normally do have effusive (as opposed to explosive) eruptions, resulting in flows of pahoehoe or a'a. But as the source of magma is "pinched off" by the moving crust over the hot spot, a new volcano forms and the older one changes its eruption style. In the last gasps, you have eruptions which are of cooler magma, with more explosions and way less of the smooth flowing rivers of lava (and lava fountains) you see on footage from Kilauea and Mauna Loa recent eruptions. Don't forget, every Hawaiian island has at least one volcano of its very own, so we have a few to choose from to get the right lunar or Martian analog site. (Hawaii Island, the Big Island which hosted this test, has 5 volcanoes, three of which are currently active or have been active in the recent past.)
So no, we're not talking about eroded rocks here in Hawaii, which is good because on the moon things don't really erode - they get blown apart by impacts and squeezed up from underneath in molten form. In Hawaii, the impacts are substituted by explosive eruption, but as you said the chemistry of the rocks/tephra is quite similar. As someone else pointed out, having eroded material is exactly what NASA *doesn't* want, hence nice young Hawaiian tephra being better than older mainland-US tephra.
-L
How do they know where the water is from? Because of previous lab tests, regolith simulant sample checks before and after processing (using the same spectrometers that flew on the Mars Exploration Rovers, among others), and hopefully because of sound engineering from the outset.
I agree that nowhere on Earth is a great analog to Lunar climate/weather, but the point is to put these prototypes into a dusty, windy environment, drive the sample-delivering rovers around, etc. For this test in Hawaii they needed to put electric blankets on some components because of hard frosts at night... they'll change that system before flying it!
The point isn't photo-ops and vendor networking, although these things happen. The point is to do real science on Earth in preparation of doing real science on the moon and Mars.
I, however, was at the test to meet people and have my photo taken with cool equipment. That's the benefit of being a slave^d^w I mean an undergrad intern (and living in Hawaii).
-L
The two oxygen/water producing setups tested out here weren't exactly of the "let's scale up and terraform!! w00t!!!" type...
In fact, they are more likely to be refined and *reduced* in size, to be able to go to the moon sometime in the next 10-15 years, and put out enough gas (stored under compression, or liquified) to support a crew of 4-6 humans for several months.
Nothing about giant pressure domes or atmosphere-building just yet... this stuff is way more practical than that.
-L
Remember that not too many 80 year olds are still sexually reproducing, though. If left-handedness is fine until the age 33, that's about the average life expectancy of most of our ancestors.
Wouldn't it make sense for somebody to be hired to ensure the information on the Wiki is correct? As any encyclopaedia would have teams of researchers and proof-readers, shouldn't that apply to the "community" version as well?
In other words, why is an encyclopaedia so expensive? Is it because of all the work that went into compiling the information, or is it to print twenty thousand (or whatever) pages worth of books? If it's the former, then okay, Wikipedia has no chance of being a major influence, because researchers and specialists that require pay are unlikely to devote many hours to something free that might undercut the pay they get from their day jobs.
If, on the other hand, it's really about the printing and distribution costs, than why isn't there some big money being donated to the project to pay for researchers and contributors to add data? If I wanted to donate money to education, would it be better to buy one school a set of books, or to buy someone's time to make that information available to all schoools? I think the answer is clear. But then, that's maybe because I don't really have any money to give.
- Luke
I just re-visited that old favorite along with the Tenebrae project - and let me tell you, if you've got the hardware to run Doom3 already, then Tenebrae Quake is a must-play.
For those of you who don't know what it is, check it out (at sourceforge). It makes Quake look better than Doom3.
- Luke
"and viola, Microsoft can't sue for infringement"
(begin spelling police)
This sounds like a mis-transcribed instruction to your secretary, Viola Wuthers... or perhaps you're just using voice-recognition software... or perhaps it's an obscure joke about MS being full of violists...
In any case, the French word you're looking for is "voila", or loosely translated, "there".
(fin)
It's true, of course - ultra-light fiber composites make great kites - but also wouldn't be as likely to break on the way down. Plus, if they're made for space I'm sure they're air-tight and would float. The whole gulf could be full of Florida retirees floating around in their space-homes, randomly re-arranging every time a tropical storm comes through!
Is Redhat 7.3 going to make it easy to install X on my Geforce4? If not, is there ANY current distro that I can actually install by myself (Doesn't hold my hand but won't require me to remember VI commands to boot into X) that will *automatically* set up my X server? My concern isn't driver support, but just having something better than the standard XF86Config that does nothing more than confuse the configuration file into having NO idea how to boot X on my machine, and confuse me beyond my simple understanding of Linux config'ing. Anybody have Hed Rat 7.3 on a Geforce machine? Anything to make the process real easy? I kinda hope not, since I just downloaded 7.2 yesterday...