I'm a pretty good computer mechanic; been doing it since the 80s. A couple days ago I had a customer call me - her mouse cursor wasn't moving. She had a wireless mouse, and my first thought - after running her thru the procedure for wireless connection - was that her wireless mouse receiver had failed.
I went over there and after some diagnostics found out that I was right. At the same time, I noted that she had a virus infestation - something she wouldn't have had the expertise to notice (excessive network traffic). So what should have been ten bucks + parts for replacing her wireless receiver ended up being a fifty dollar virus removal (installed Firefox and adblock for her, too, that should hopefully mitigate any future problems.)
So... by your analogy, I would be that mechanic telling her he noticed other problems with her vehicle in the course of a routine oil change.
Foot surgery: Funny you should mention that. A few weeks ago I sprained an ankle very badly - maybe the fifth or sixth time in twenty years I've done so - badly enough that I suspected it might be fractured. I went to the hospital to get x-rays of the ankle, because while a sprained ankle might heal in a week or so, a fracture won't, and I rely on my feet for a living.
After the examination they found that I had a bone spur growing on my foot that, if it wasn't removed, might cause me a lot more problems in the future. The surgery is next week and I wish I'd found it a lot sooner, as it would have been easier to remove.
The fact that people who study things for a living that I don't MIGHT JUST KNOW WHAT THEY ARE TALKING ABOUT... need I say more?
Because despite centuries of advances in science our educational systems still lag well behind our ability to comprehend reality. I have no evidence for it, but I suspect it's because most people still think with their glands and not with their grey matter;)
There is no doubt that parts of the world are getting warmer, but the warming is not global. I am not saying that the warming does not cause problems. Obviously it does. Obviously we should be trying to understand it better. I am saying that the problems are grossly exaggerated.They take away money and attention from other problems that are more urgent and more important, such as poverty and infectious disease and public education and public health, and the preservation of living creatures on land and in the oceans, not to mention easy problems such as the timely construction of adequate dikes around the city of New Orleans.
While I agree with him that those are important problems - particularly infectious disease - I disagree with him that those problems are *more important* than something which has the potential to wipe out civilization.
(I'll give him the infectious disease in that respect - although we have survived global pandemics before - although global warming also has the potential to *increase* the danger of infectious disease, by shifting the ecosystems that certain diseases thrive in.)
Dyson is a very talented and brilliant physicist, but he is not a climatologist nor does he come close to approaching the amount of expertise across various related fields that contribute to our understanding of what's happening today.
Everyone who feels they have something to contribute in this debate should read the article I link to below from which those quotes were taken. Read it *thoroughly* and then go and find out for yourself what many other people in the fields he addresses think about the issue. You'll find that, for example, a majority of scientists disagree with his analysis of biological carbon sequestration, and unlike Dyson, they have data to back up their peer reviewed publications.
This quote is particularly illuminating:
When I listen to the public debates about climate change, I am impressed by the enormous gaps in our knowledge, the sparseness of our observations and the superficiality of our theories. Many of the basic processes of planetary ecology are poorly understood. They must be better understood before we can reach an accurate diagnosis of the present condition of our planet. When we are trying to take care of a planet, just as when we are taking care of a human patient, diseases must be diagnosed before they can be cured. We need to observe and measure what is going on in the biosphere, rather than relying on computer models.
In which he is saying we need more data. So essentially he is saying the same thing that nearly all the climatologists and everyone else involved are saying - WE NEED MORE DATA. More funding, more equipment, more science and less hype. More funding! Dyson is a "global warming heretic" yet he's saying the same thing most of the scientists involved in the research get 'accused' of asking for?
Keep in mind that all of our science and knowledge to date could very well be *understating* the potential problems, as well. Which if you look at predictions from only a few years ago of arctic melting and permafrost CO2/methane release, you'll find that the scientists doing those predictions then were actually being *optimistic*.
The desire to profit off of potential misfortune or calamity is at least as old as human civilization.
While what you said above may be true, it doesn't have anything to do with whether or not global warming is really happening. It does point out just how ignorant and greedy people can be.
Doesn't matter what partisan stripe they are, and you know that.
There are too many people living high on the hog in your state, and that's the fundamental problem.
Deal with it. Please. Those of us on the close side of the eastern rockies are sick and tired of taking your rich refugees in. We don't have room for them and it's frakking up our lives.
There's not very many places left in the US where one can live a life somewhat unecumbered by the bullshit that money brings, whether or not it's from the east or west coast. I hate to say it this way, but I'd be all for independent sovereign status for the west coast. At least it would give some of us the ability to restrict immigration. Perhaps.:)
I live in a small town on the SD/WY border. Nice place, good people. But we're being invaded by people who have the attitudes that you and I hate so much and as has happened so many times all over the US in the last few decades, it is destroying what we value so much about our life here.
I know I'm in my forties and perhaps far above the median slashdotters age (not enough data) but when I was growing up, and even now, we call it "common sense."
Apparently we don't have teachers who are allowed to teach it anymore.
For that matter ban limos altogether. Limos have to be in the top five most wasteful vehicles.
For that matter, let's start requiring that public officials use public transport.
That might have a real effect on carbon emissions. Might even cut down on the arrogance amongst our elected officials, as well. (Hey, I can be optimistic, right?)
I wasn't arguing against sheltering in the Soyuz. I was just pointing out that the Soyuz isn't this indestructible bomb shelter of a spacecraft like the poster I was replying to seemed to think it is.
I realize that. But we're still talking about at least an order of magnitude difference in size; squared if we're talking about radar cross sections.
In any case, at this point we'll just have to wait and see if NASA publishes more solid data. As of a couple hours ago I'd not seen anything official on the news section of their website.
I wonder if they've been able to keep tracking this object? Like you said in your other reply, they would tend to concentrate on immediate threats to ISS, which would explain why this one was detected so late.
I don't imagine that the AF is eager to show just how good their radars are, either. But if we take this threat seriously, sooner or later they are going to have to start releasing the data to the world at large in order that others can assess threats to orbital assets.
Except that these debris clouds are often kilometers in diameter, and aerogel is expensive. It runs about $5 per square foot just for the relatively thin stuff used to insulate jackets or refrigerators. One would have to use something considerably thicker to stop objects larger than dust particles moving at thousands of miles per hour relative to your garbage collector.
Also, a simple cylinder would not suffice. You'd have to have a disk of the stuff, probably at least half a km or so in diameter - and even with that might have to make multiple passes thru the cloud. You have to have a large surface area for it to be even marginally effective, the larger the surface area, the less fuel you expend in your passes (although you expend much more fuel getting the structure up there in the first place).
In addition, larger pieces of debris will have enough kinetic energy to simply put holes in your collector or structurally disrupt it.
Unless/until we can manufacture aerogel cheaply in ginormous quantities, and figure out some way to deploy it in orbit in larger structures that *can also be deorbited*, aerogel isn't a solution.
Now if we can figure out how to create large electromagnetic mesh structures similar to what would be needed to build interstellar ramjets, that might be something that may work, most debris has at least some metallic component. But we'd also need large power plants to drive the EM fields - fission at a minimum, good luck with that, considering the paranoia surrounding launching nuclear powered satellites - and we'd have to figure out how to deploy those structures as well.
For the time being we're better off focusing on ways to minimize the amount of junk we put up there in the future and hardening craft against small impacts (aerogel-armored hulls and redundant onboard systems.) For stuff about a cm or larger in size we're simply screwed.
"The total number of discovered and monitored pieces with a diameter of more than 10 centimeters is approaching 14,000. Something like 950 of them are functioning satellites from different countries.
The number of bodies up to 10 centimeters in size has reached 200,000 to 250,000; between 0.1 centimeter and 1 centimeter, 70 million to 80 million; and a few microns or less, on the order of 1013-1014*. But these last figures are only estimates, because such particles are beyond the observational powers of telescopes and radars and cannot be catalogued."
* I presume they meant 10^13 to 10^14
Now it's possible that the military or NASA has radar that can track much smaller objects, but I find it unlikely that such wouldn't be at least common, findable knowledge - that's one to two orders of magnitude smaller.
Also, if the number estimates quoted are correct, then it's likely that objects close to a cm in size pass close to the station fairly frequently without being noticed. The volume of LEO is pretty large, but 7x10^7 is a pretty large number as well.
I'd love to get more data, but the only place it seems to be available is at www.space-track.org, and they require a somewhat rigorous registration process (due to national security issues). Sigh.
Considering the size/mass and velocity of this object - and I agree it'd be nice to have more info:) - I doubt the orientation would have made much difference.
The other modules would have absorbed some of the kinetic energy - perhaps all of it if the object , whatever it was, was fragile enough to have disintegrated when it hit them. But if it was a very solid piece - like, say, a fuel pump - it probably would go completely thru them, too.
Even with the modules on either side that still leaves a lot of open sky:(
It *will* happen, eventually. That satellite that was impacted recently had a lot smaller cross-section than ISS does. I'm actually rather surprised that the ISS hasn't been holed by something smaller yet.
Another thing is that not all cities or towns have local businesses that collect the waste oil - we don't here, the closest collection business is fifty miles away. Factor in the extra fuel burned and pollution created in transporting that used veg oil to collection centers in petro burning trucks, and there's even more of a fuel/environmental savings.
This is an excellent example of how keeping your recycling as local as possible is a win-win.
Now we need to promote local food production more... my small (~10k pop) city just spent about five million last year on a "water park" - this after over 11 years of drought - that would have been much better spent on the community gardens and greenhouses that a lot of people around here have been asking for for many years...
Interesting; the size that space.com quotes seems too small - from what I've read the minimum size of debris they can track in LEO is about ten cm.
As I noted in another post USA Today's article puts the size at about five inches, which seems more plausible.
The size difference may not seem important to some, but it's a pretty big difference at those speeds, the difference between a (likely patchable) hole in the ISS and probable complete destruction of a module.
According to an article I just read*, that piece of junk was estimated to be about five inches in diameter and traveling at a relative velocity (to the ISS) of about 22,000 mph. That's almost ten kilometers a second**.
If that had hit the Soyuz, it would have went in one side and out the other likely without even slowing down much, vaporizing a significant chunk of the hull - think white-hot metal shrapnel and shredded astronauts.
Look at what happens to an armored tank when a depleted uranium shell hits it at a much slower velocity. At the velocities we're talking about here, even a pebble can cause a lot of destruction; a five inch piece of debris likely weighing at least a kg has an effect like a large artillery shell. Remember the flake of paint that put an inch diameter pit into the shuttle's windshield all those years ago?
The only effective armor against something like this is a meter or so of rock.
Exactly, that's the whole point. If I want to build a custom system with only the apps and support libraries on it that I need - like in mobile applications - I can with one flavor or another of linux.
With Windows you have to tear stuff out to get there, or buy a custom built proprietary solution. With linux you can build it from the ground up and include what you want to or in-house customize the rest.
That's going to ultimately be the thing that kills Windows - that it can't be customized from ground zero for your application without at a minimum extra licensing, more likely expensive proprietary customization, if that's even possible.
With the varied types of hardware coming out that's damned important.
Ubuntu has a pretty clean installation, there's not much in there - short of maybe a few games that don't take up much space - that any user won't want.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll bite.
I'm a pretty good computer mechanic; been doing it since the 80s. A couple days ago I had a customer call me - her mouse cursor wasn't moving. She had a wireless mouse, and my first thought - after running her thru the procedure for wireless connection - was that her wireless mouse receiver had failed.
I went over there and after some diagnostics found out that I was right. At the same time, I noted that she had a virus infestation - something she wouldn't have had the expertise to notice (excessive network traffic). So what should have been ten bucks + parts for replacing her wireless receiver ended up being a fifty dollar virus removal (installed Firefox and adblock for her, too, that should hopefully mitigate any future problems.)
So ... by your analogy, I would be that mechanic telling her he noticed other problems with her vehicle in the course of a routine oil change.
Foot surgery: Funny you should mention that. A few weeks ago I sprained an ankle very badly - maybe the fifth or sixth time in twenty years I've done so - badly enough that I suspected it might be fractured. I went to the hospital to get x-rays of the ankle, because while a sprained ankle might heal in a week or so, a fracture won't, and I rely on my feet for a living.
After the examination they found that I had a bone spur growing on my foot that, if it wasn't removed, might cause me a lot more problems in the future. The surgery is next week and I wish I'd found it a lot sooner, as it would have been easier to remove.
The fact that people who study things for a living that I don't MIGHT JUST KNOW WHAT THEY ARE TALKING ABOUT... need I say more?
SB
Because despite centuries of advances in science our educational systems still lag well behind our ability to comprehend reality. I have no evidence for it, but I suspect it's because most people still think with their glands and not with their grey matter ;)
SB
What is being talked about there is regional climate, not global. Your example is irrelevant to the discussion.
SB
He says*:
There is no doubt that parts of the world are getting warmer, but the warming is not global. I am not saying that the warming does not cause problems. Obviously it does. Obviously we should be trying to understand it better. I am saying that the problems are grossly exaggerated.They take away money and attention from other problems that are more urgent and more important, such as poverty and infectious disease and public education and public health, and the preservation of living creatures on land and in the oceans, not to mention easy problems such as the timely construction of adequate dikes around the city of New Orleans.
While I agree with him that those are important problems - particularly infectious disease - I disagree with him that those problems are *more important* than something which has the potential to wipe out civilization.
(I'll give him the infectious disease in that respect - although we have survived global pandemics before - although global warming also has the potential to *increase* the danger of infectious disease, by shifting the ecosystems that certain diseases thrive in.)
Dyson is a very talented and brilliant physicist, but he is not a climatologist nor does he come close to approaching the amount of expertise across various related fields that contribute to our understanding of what's happening today.
Everyone who feels they have something to contribute in this debate should read the article I link to below from which those quotes were taken. Read it *thoroughly* and then go and find out for yourself what many other people in the fields he addresses think about the issue. You'll find that, for example, a majority of scientists disagree with his analysis of biological carbon sequestration, and unlike Dyson, they have data to back up their peer reviewed publications.
This quote is particularly illuminating:
When I listen to the public debates about climate change, I am impressed by the enormous gaps in our knowledge, the sparseness of our observations and the superficiality of our theories. Many of the basic processes of planetary ecology are poorly understood. They must be better understood before we can reach an accurate diagnosis of the present condition of our planet. When we are trying to take care of a planet, just as when we are taking care of a human patient, diseases must be diagnosed before they can be cured. We need to observe and measure what is going on in the biosphere, rather than relying on computer models.
In which he is saying we need more data. So essentially he is saying the same thing that nearly all the climatologists and everyone else involved are saying - WE NEED MORE DATA. More funding, more equipment, more science and less hype. More funding! Dyson is a "global warming heretic" yet he's saying the same thing most of the scientists involved in the research get 'accused' of asking for?
Keep in mind that all of our science and knowledge to date could very well be *understating* the potential problems, as well. Which if you look at predictions from only a few years ago of arctic melting and permafrost CO2/methane release, you'll find that the scientists doing those predictions then were actually being *optimistic*.
*http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dysonf07/dysonf07_index.html
SB
There are plenty of economists who predicted the housing and financial crash.
SB
No, but you should at least be a chemist to be able to publish proof in a peer reviewed journal.
SB
The desire to profit off of potential misfortune or calamity is at least as old as human civilization.
While what you said above may be true, it doesn't have anything to do with whether or not global warming is really happening. It does point out just how ignorant and greedy people can be.
SB
Doesn't matter what partisan stripe they are, and you know that.
There are too many people living high on the hog in your state, and that's the fundamental problem.
Deal with it. Please. Those of us on the close side of the eastern rockies are sick and tired of taking your rich refugees in. We don't have room for them and it's frakking up our lives.
There's not very many places left in the US where one can live a life somewhat unecumbered by the bullshit that money brings, whether or not it's from the east or west coast. I hate to say it this way, but I'd be all for independent sovereign status for the west coast. At least it would give some of us the ability to restrict immigration. Perhaps. :)
I live in a small town on the SD/WY border. Nice place, good people. But we're being invaded by people who have the attitudes that you and I hate so much and as has happened so many times all over the US in the last few decades, it is destroying what we value so much about our life here.
Shoot them at the border, please :)
SB
You might make a good start by shooting all those bastards and finding people who have a basic science education :)
And quit exporting them to where I live. We really don't want any more of your moderately rich bastards to come here and frak up our cost of living.
Especially their ideas about real estate.
Just sayin' ;)
SB
I know I'm in my forties and perhaps far above the median slashdotters age (not enough data) but when I was growing up, and even now, we call it "common sense."
Apparently we don't have teachers who are allowed to teach it anymore.
(Chorus: No Shit.)
SB
There's no such thing as a "dumb law".
There is such thing as ignorant legislators.
SB
Ban black limousines.
For that matter ban limos altogether. Limos have to be in the top five most wasteful vehicles.
For that matter, let's start requiring that public officials use public transport.
That might have a real effect on carbon emissions. Might even cut down on the arrogance amongst our elected officials, as well. (Hey, I can be optimistic, right?)
SB
I wasn't arguing against sheltering in the Soyuz. I was just pointing out that the Soyuz isn't this indestructible bomb shelter of a spacecraft like the poster I was replying to seemed to think it is.
SB
I realize that. But we're still talking about at least an order of magnitude difference in size; squared if we're talking about radar cross sections.
In any case, at this point we'll just have to wait and see if NASA publishes more solid data. As of a couple hours ago I'd not seen anything official on the news section of their website.
I wonder if they've been able to keep tracking this object? Like you said in your other reply, they would tend to concentrate on immediate threats to ISS, which would explain why this one was detected so late.
I don't imagine that the AF is eager to show just how good their radars are, either. But if we take this threat seriously, sooner or later they are going to have to start releasing the data to the world at large in order that others can assess threats to orbital assets.
SB
22000 mph is "almost" ten km/s. Doesn't matter how the original figure was derived.
Oh, and you are a pedantic idiot. Go find something useful to do.
SB
Thanks for that. I'm not a physicist but I'm fairly well versed with quantum theory, however the relationship was still confusing.
Yours is the clearest "plain language" explanation I've seen. :)
SB
Except that these debris clouds are often kilometers in diameter, and aerogel is expensive. It runs about $5 per square foot just for the relatively thin stuff used to insulate jackets or refrigerators. One would have to use something considerably thicker to stop objects larger than dust particles moving at thousands of miles per hour relative to your garbage collector.
Also, a simple cylinder would not suffice. You'd have to have a disk of the stuff, probably at least half a km or so in diameter - and even with that might have to make multiple passes thru the cloud. You have to have a large surface area for it to be even marginally effective, the larger the surface area, the less fuel you expend in your passes (although you expend much more fuel getting the structure up there in the first place).
In addition, larger pieces of debris will have enough kinetic energy to simply put holes in your collector or structurally disrupt it.
Unless/until we can manufacture aerogel cheaply in ginormous quantities, and figure out some way to deploy it in orbit in larger structures that *can also be deorbited*, aerogel isn't a solution.
Now if we can figure out how to create large electromagnetic mesh structures similar to what would be needed to build interstellar ramjets, that might be something that may work, most debris has at least some metallic component. But we'd also need large power plants to drive the EM fields - fission at a minimum, good luck with that, considering the paranoia surrounding launching nuclear powered satellites - and we'd have to figure out how to deploy those structures as well.
For the time being we're better off focusing on ways to minimize the amount of junk we put up there in the future and hardening craft against small impacts (aerogel-armored hulls and redundant onboard systems.) For stuff about a cm or larger in size we're simply screwed.
SB
That's the lowest possible figure, assuming the two shared nearly the same orbit.
SB
Here's the most recent info I can find (Feb 2009) FWIW:
From: http://www.spacemart.com/reports/The_Problem_Of_Space_Junk_999.html
Quote:
"The total number of discovered and monitored pieces with a diameter of more than 10 centimeters is approaching 14,000. Something like 950 of them are functioning satellites from different countries.
The number of bodies up to 10 centimeters in size has reached 200,000 to 250,000; between 0.1 centimeter and 1 centimeter, 70 million to 80 million; and a few microns or less, on the order of 1013-1014*. But these last figures are only estimates, because such particles are beyond the observational powers of telescopes and radars and cannot be catalogued."
* I presume they meant 10^13 to 10^14
Now it's possible that the military or NASA has radar that can track much smaller objects, but I find it unlikely that such wouldn't be at least common, findable knowledge - that's one to two orders of magnitude smaller.
Also, if the number estimates quoted are correct, then it's likely that objects close to a cm in size pass close to the station fairly frequently without being noticed. The volume of LEO is pretty large, but 7x10^7 is a pretty large number as well.
I'd love to get more data, but the only place it seems to be available is at www.space-track.org, and they require a somewhat rigorous registration process (due to national security issues). Sigh.
SB
Considering the size/mass and velocity of this object - and I agree it'd be nice to have more info :) - I doubt the orientation would have made much difference.
The other modules would have absorbed some of the kinetic energy - perhaps all of it if the object , whatever it was, was fragile enough to have disintegrated when it hit them. But if it was a very solid piece - like, say, a fuel pump - it probably would go completely thru them, too.
Even with the modules on either side that still leaves a lot of open sky :(
It *will* happen, eventually. That satellite that was impacted recently had a lot smaller cross-section than ISS does. I'm actually rather surprised that the ISS hasn't been holed by something smaller yet.
Cheers,
SB
Another thing is that not all cities or towns have local businesses that collect the waste oil - we don't here, the closest collection business is fifty miles away. Factor in the extra fuel burned and pollution created in transporting that used veg oil to collection centers in petro burning trucks, and there's even more of a fuel/environmental savings.
This is an excellent example of how keeping your recycling as local as possible is a win-win.
Now we need to promote local food production more... my small (~10k pop) city just spent about five million last year on a "water park" - this after over 11 years of drought - that would have been much better spent on the community gardens and greenhouses that a lot of people around here have been asking for for many years...
SB
Interesting; the size that space.com quotes seems too small - from what I've read the minimum size of debris they can track in LEO is about ten cm.
As I noted in another post USA Today's article puts the size at about five inches, which seems more plausible.
The size difference may not seem important to some, but it's a pretty big difference at those speeds, the difference between a (likely patchable) hole in the ISS and probable complete destruction of a module.
SB
According to an article I just read*, that piece of junk was estimated to be about five inches in diameter and traveling at a relative velocity (to the ISS) of about 22,000 mph. That's almost ten kilometers a second**.
If that had hit the Soyuz, it would have went in one side and out the other likely without even slowing down much, vaporizing a significant chunk of the hull - think white-hot metal shrapnel and shredded astronauts.
Look at what happens to an armored tank when a depleted uranium shell hits it at a much slower velocity. At the velocities we're talking about here, even a pebble can cause a lot of destruction; a five inch piece of debris likely weighing at least a kg has an effect like a large artillery shell. Remember the flake of paint that put an inch diameter pit into the shuttle's windshield all those years ago?
The only effective armor against something like this is a meter or so of rock.
* http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/space/2009-03-12-space-station_N.htm
**Google: 22000 mph in meters per second = 9834.88 meters per second.
SB
Exactly, that's the whole point. If I want to build a custom system with only the apps and support libraries on it that I need - like in mobile applications - I can with one flavor or another of linux.
With Windows you have to tear stuff out to get there, or buy a custom built proprietary solution. With linux you can build it from the ground up and include what you want to or in-house customize the rest.
That's going to ultimately be the thing that kills Windows - that it can't be customized from ground zero for your application without at a minimum extra licensing, more likely expensive proprietary customization, if that's even possible.
With the varied types of hardware coming out that's damned important.
SB
What "garbage apps" did you want to uninstall?
Ubuntu has a pretty clean installation, there's not much in there - short of maybe a few games that don't take up much space - that any user won't want.
Care to name some? Or are you just trolling?
SB