I note they were getting altitude from the GPS, and had some trouble with it. The way we usually do it is grab a cheap absolute pressure sensor, like from Sensym. Atmo pressure is roughly exponential with a scale height of about 7 km, so an estimate of your altitude is -7 km x ln(pressure / 1 atm).
Better yet, get two, one with a 1 atm full-scale and a second with something like 0.01 atm full-scale to give better accuracy when you're way up there.
Let's put it this way. Yahoo will be providing 1) a piece of software that's a media player/playlist/tunes organizer, and 2) a music download service. The piece of software will play mp3s, and will happily transfer them to your portable. The download service gives you WMA files, with DRM. The software will not convert these to mp3.
Well, there's an issue. The story (I've read it) is full of personal info -- e.g. addresses and phone numbers of PJ and various family members -- so it's not really kosher to have it lying around.
I suppose somebody could make a redacted version with that stuff removed, but there wouldn't be anything left. The article is just a recitation of this personal info and an attempt to insinuate vague negative things about PJ as if they were supported by the personal info, which they aren't.
Not so bad, groklaw just takes a couple tries and the article comes through.
In marked contrast, the sys-con.com servers all seem to be completely off the air. Of course, that might not be the slashdot effect, they might have taken them down while they clean house...
Along with the parent, I don't know where you get the idea that "informed" people think Hubble should be terminated. But here is a reason why Hubble should not be terminated. Hubble's two main niches are 1) UV and 2) high resolution in visible, UV, and near IR. Although JWST is touted by NASA's PR department as a "replacement" for the HST, it in fact does not do #1 at all. (JWST will do a lot of other interesting things -- I'm just pointing out that the idea of it acting as a replacement for HST has no basis in fact.) There is no planned mission to take over UV work from HST. Except for the little bit of wavelength space of UV that makes it through the atmosphere, UV astronomy will end with Hubble for the forseeable future. So there is significant benefit in keeping the thing going.
Another point is that there are two shiny new instruments for HST, the COS and the WFC3, built at a cost to the taxpayer of around $200M, that will be worthless if they never get installed on Hubble.
I guess I can't resist giving this a serious answer. The one plausible radiation hazard from CRTs is x-rays. The electron beam is typically 10-20 kilovolts, which means it has the potential to produce 10-20 Kev x-rays. This made the original color TVs a serious health hazard. Since then, improvements in the phosphor have made it possible to decrease both the beam energy and the beam current; and I believe they've put more lead in the glass. I don't hear anybody saying there's an x-ray hazard from modern TVs and monitors, as you did decades ago. But that would be the concern.
About the 60 Hz and 10-100 KHz sweep and the dot clock and all of that -- professional fear mongers bring this stuff up all the time, but there is neither any plausible mechanism nor any experimental evidence of any danger from this stuff. In particular, for a photon to carry enough energy to damage DNA it needs to be at least in the shorter UV -- this is the mechanism by which UV, x-rays, and gamma rays cause cancer.
No. There is an unfortunate tendency to compare every telescope to Hubble, whether the comparison makes sense or not. Hubble has two major specialties, UV astronomy and high resolution, and a minor specialty, near IR astronomy. LBT will not compete in the UV department -- it can't be done through the atmosphere. It is quite possible that LBT will do better than Hubble at high-resolution IR work -- but that isn't the main thing Hubble does.
A requirement on all observing proposals to Hubble is that the observation can't be done by any ground based telescope. This is so we don't waste the expensive telescope time on something that can be done by the chearper telescopes. So when LBT starts operation, there may be some observations that would have been done on Hubble going to LBT instead. But certainly not all of them.
In any case, the way things are going at NASA HQ, it'll be lucky if Hubble is still operating by the time LBT starts observing with both mirrors.
You're not going to get anywhere near 0 C that way. An evaporation cooler can't get below the dew point. Check your favorite weather page for your current local dewpoint. In most places on Earth, on a warm summer day it'll be way above freezing.
"Lightning rod"
on
Red Hat Recap
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· Score: 5, Insightful
From reading a few of Daniel Lyons' recent articles, it is apparent that Forbes is taking pointers from AM talk radio. If, like Rush Limbaugh, you make a lot of outrageous statements and then back them up with flimsy arguments, you get a lot of attention -- a lot more than if you had said something reasonable. And so your site gets slashdotted, and if you're Forbes, that means you make a fortune from your advertisers. In the media, this is called having someone who acts like a "lightning rod". Perhaps this approach is familiar to those on slashdot, where it is called "flamebait".
Although Linux and open source in general are favorite Daniel Lyons topics, he recently published two incoherent rants trashing Sun. But it's likely he gets a bigger response out of trashing open source, so he'll probably return to that.
So if you like this kind of trash talk, fine, but if you don't, just do what you do with Rush: stop listening.
I need to correct one small piece of this -- although the NASA PR department persists in calling JWST the replacement for HST, there is no scientific sense to this. HST's reasons for existence are UV astronomy and high resolution, with a lesser role in the very near IR. JWST is an IR telescope. Ground based telescopes may eventually catch up with HST on resolution (though people have been saying this for years), but when HST is gone, UV astronomy is over. There is no planned mission by any country that I know of that replaces it in that capacity.
If you liked this article, you might also like Comment on "Where is the Planck time?" which argues that Lieu and Hillman made a booboo to the tune of 15 orders of magnitude, and as a result this HST observation has no bearing on the validity of quantum gravity theories.
You missed the part where he said "in astronomy." In astronomy, a lot of wrong things are true. In this case, when astronomers say "baryons" they mean "baryonic matter" i.e. atoms, molecules, ions, etc. which includes the electrons. Of course, in baryonic matter the electrons make up something like 0.02% of the mass, so it's hardly worth quibbling about.
I see a lot of posts here comparing the relative merits of different spam filters, based on how little spam gets through. The thing I worry about a lot more with spam filters is how much of my non-spam mail gets blocked. And yes, I've had this happen with every spam filtering mechanism some sysadmin has inflicted on me. This is the main reason I like spam filtering at the user level, not the ISP or system level -- at least you have some control over the imperfections.
Notice to potential adopters: before you look into GNUCash you should know that it is Linux only.
Nearly but not quite true. gnucash.org has binary distros for Solaris and Irix. Gnucash requires Gnome 2, so you'd have a shot at getting it going anyplace Gnome 2 has been ported.
Since I've been in the position of peer reviewing similar journals, I have some sympathy for people who let through results that are obviously wrong. Here's why: with a result that's based on an experiment, nobody expects the reviewer to go repeat the experiment. If somebody writes a paper that clearly describes an experiment, says they checked everything they should have checked and made all the calculations they should have, and comes up with a "surprising" result, it'll get published. And if you think about it, this is how it should be. If other people repeat the experiment and get the same answer, then it's right. And if everybody else gets a different answer, then we all know the original author is an ass.
I don't fault the journal for publishing this trash, but I certainly fault NASA for funding it.
A Hubble set of instruments called Fine Guidance Sensors (FGSs), which are also used to point and stabilize the free-flying observatory...
But it would really be more accurate to say that they are the pointing sensors, which here are being used as an instrument. This is the really cool thing about this measurement, it was done with Hubble's star guiders, not the astronomical instruments.
When the NASDAQ falls through the floor and hundreds of companies go out of business, and thousands of people are laid off, maybe then you'll realize the govt. has no business telling people how to do business. It didn't work in the Soviet Union and it won't work here.
OK. Now that is breathtakingly naive. It is one of the most essential roles of government to set the rules under which business is done. To make the simplest example, if you sign a contract with a company, that contract is only useful because you both know that the government will enforce it for you. Now suppose we didn't have those pesky government rules about contracts -- how would you do business? The answer is, you couldn't.
Since you bring up the Soviet Union, perhaps you've noticed that since the USSR is gone Russia has not exactly seen an economic boom. And the reason is that the government is failing to enforce business law, and the resulting anarchy is enriching a few crooks but generally sending the economy into a shambles.
So although the more mindless conservatives like to talk about government regulation like it's the plague, the fact is that business absolutely relies on it. The tricky part is, they have to be the right rules.
What has the Department of Commerce ever done for the average American?
What have the Romans done for us, apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order...
The Department of Commerce runs NOAA, which is where all the weather info comes from. And NIST, which has done far more to keep America at the technological forefront than JPL dreams about. Among other things.
Good Lord. Did you guys actually read this article? Excuse me, it's not an article, it's a press release, and a particularly self-aggrandizing one. It does *not* say that JPL is going to do anything new, it just announces the formation of a new bureaucracy to go on doing what it's been doing. What is the news here?
One well-known and affordable existing technology for controlling malaria is the use of DDT to kill the mosquitos. Of course, this has the downside of thinning eggshells of birds of prey, which are high on the foodchain, to the point where the eggs can't survive to the point of hatching. So this leads to the thorny question, do we want to save some birds of prey from extinction, or save the lives of third world people? Current policy is, save the birds.
Slashdot Mirror
I note they were getting altitude from the GPS, and had some trouble with it. The way we usually do it is grab a cheap absolute pressure sensor, like from Sensym. Atmo pressure is roughly exponential with a scale height of about 7 km, so an estimate of your altitude is -7 km x ln(pressure / 1 atm). Better yet, get two, one with a 1 atm full-scale and a second with something like 0.01 atm full-scale to give better accuracy when you're way up there.
Let's put it this way. Yahoo will be providing 1) a piece of software that's a media player/playlist/tunes organizer, and 2) a music download service. The piece of software will play mp3s, and will happily transfer them to your portable. The download service gives you WMA files, with DRM. The software will not convert these to mp3.
I suppose somebody could make a redacted version with that stuff removed, but there wouldn't be anything left. The article is just a recitation of this personal info and an attempt to insinuate vague negative things about PJ as if they were supported by the personal info, which they aren't.
In marked contrast, the sys-con.com servers all seem to be completely off the air. Of course, that might not be the slashdot effect, they might have taken them down while they clean house...
Another point is that there are two shiny new instruments for HST, the COS and the WFC3, built at a cost to the taxpayer of around $200M, that will be worthless if they never get installed on Hubble.
About the 60 Hz and 10-100 KHz sweep and the dot clock and all of that -- professional fear mongers bring this stuff up all the time, but there is neither any plausible mechanism nor any experimental evidence of any danger from this stuff. In particular, for a photon to carry enough energy to damage DNA it needs to be at least in the shorter UV -- this is the mechanism by which UV, x-rays, and gamma rays cause cancer.
A requirement on all observing proposals to Hubble is that the observation can't be done by any ground based telescope. This is so we don't waste the expensive telescope time on something that can be done by the chearper telescopes. So when LBT starts operation, there may be some observations that would have been done on Hubble going to LBT instead. But certainly not all of them.
In any case, the way things are going at NASA HQ, it'll be lucky if Hubble is still operating by the time LBT starts observing with both mirrors.
You're not going to get anywhere near 0 C that way. An evaporation cooler can't get below the dew point. Check your favorite weather page for your current local dewpoint. In most places on Earth, on a warm summer day it'll be way above freezing.
Although Linux and open source in general are favorite Daniel Lyons topics, he recently published two incoherent rants trashing Sun. But it's likely he gets a bigger response out of trashing open source, so he'll probably return to that.
So if you like this kind of trash talk, fine, but if you don't, just do what you do with Rush: stop listening.
I'd be interested in knowning what resources the moon is known to have that would be useful to this project.
I need to correct one small piece of this -- although the NASA PR department persists in calling JWST the replacement for HST, there is no scientific sense to this. HST's reasons for existence are UV astronomy and high resolution, with a lesser role in the very near IR. JWST is an IR telescope. Ground based telescopes may eventually catch up with HST on resolution (though people have been saying this for years), but when HST is gone, UV astronomy is over. There is no planned mission by any country that I know of that replaces it in that capacity.
The cooler is for NICMOS. This picture was taken with ACS, a different instrument.
If you liked this article, you might also like Comment on "Where is the Planck time?" which argues that Lieu and Hillman made a booboo to the tune of 15 orders of magnitude, and as a result this HST observation has no bearing on the validity of quantum gravity theories.
You missed the part where he said "in astronomy." In astronomy, a lot of wrong things are true. In this case, when astronomers say "baryons" they mean "baryonic matter" i.e. atoms, molecules, ions, etc. which includes the electrons. Of course, in baryonic matter the electrons make up something like 0.02% of the mass, so it's hardly worth quibbling about.
What in the world is this story doing in the science section?
I see a lot of posts here comparing the relative merits of different spam filters, based on how little spam gets through. The thing I worry about a lot more with spam filters is how much of my non-spam mail gets blocked. And yes, I've had this happen with every spam filtering mechanism some sysadmin has inflicted on me. This is the main reason I like spam filtering at the user level, not the ISP or system level -- at least you have some control over the imperfections.
Oops, I'm an idiot. Gnucash requires Gnome 1.4, not Gnome 2.
Nearly but not quite true. gnucash.org has binary distros for Solaris and Irix. Gnucash requires Gnome 2, so you'd have a shot at getting it going anyplace Gnome 2 has been ported.
I don't fault the journal for publishing this trash, but I certainly fault NASA for funding it.
OK. Now that is breathtakingly naive. It is one of the most essential roles of government to set the rules under which business is done. To make the simplest example, if you sign a contract with a company, that contract is only useful because you both know that the government will enforce it for you. Now suppose we didn't have those pesky government rules about contracts -- how would you do business? The answer is, you couldn't.
Since you bring up the Soviet Union, perhaps you've noticed that since the USSR is gone Russia has not exactly seen an economic boom. And the reason is that the government is failing to enforce business law, and the resulting anarchy is enriching a few crooks but generally sending the economy into a shambles.
So although the more mindless conservatives like to talk about government regulation like it's the plague, the fact is that business absolutely relies on it. The tricky part is, they have to be the right rules.
Method I've always used is to just cut up the damn onions and not obsess about the effect they have on my eyes. Works great.
What has the Department of Commerce ever done for the average American? What have the Romans done for us, apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order ...
The Department of Commerce runs NOAA, which is where all the weather info comes from. And NIST, which has done far more to keep America at the technological forefront than JPL dreams about. Among other things.
Good Lord. Did you guys actually read this article? Excuse me, it's not an article, it's a press release, and a particularly self-aggrandizing one. It does *not* say that JPL is going to do anything new, it just announces the formation of a new bureaucracy to go on doing what it's been doing. What is the news here?
One well-known and affordable existing technology for controlling malaria is the use of DDT to kill the mosquitos. Of course, this has the downside of thinning eggshells of birds of prey, which are high on the foodchain, to the point where the eggs can't survive to the point of hatching. So this leads to the thorny question, do we want to save some birds of prey from extinction, or save the lives of third world people? Current policy is, save the birds.