Human's are built to assume that the entity they are talking with understands them. Ever since I first saw Eliza in action (where people would have "meaningful" interactions with a program that was not much more than a stimulus-response box) I realized that the Turing test was really meaningless.
To put it another way, if IBM wanted to put the money into the Turing test that they put into chess, there would be a very good Turing tester, but no more understanding or consciousness than Deep Blue has understanding or consciousness of chess.
Since there is great uncertainty in the mass of this object (albedo ? density ? who knows!) is anyone interested in a pool for the crater size ? I say that there will be one and my bet is for 3 meters.
Because it is energetically tough to get to Mercury they are trying to get into with as little fuel expenditure as possible, to send as much payload as possible. Since there is no atmosphere, aerobraking is not possible, and thus they are using gravity assists to help reduce the orbital insertion delta-v to a manageable number. Each flyby speeds up the spacecraft a little, to better match Mercury's orbital velocity, and they decided on 3 of these to get the performance they wanted. There is a synodic period (the orbital beat period) between each such opportunity, so it takes a while to complete three flyby gravity assists.
Looking at the Nexrad there, and also from Edwards AFB, "My" storm clearly did not extend that far, and there doesn't seem to be much bad weather around Mammoth Lakes that day (although 1 hour time steps is pretty coarse for thunderstorms).
Thanks for that. I had always wondered about this, and now it seems clear that the storm I was in was not involved in the Fossett crash.
Yeah, I looked at the map, and it is fairly far, but this was clearly some sort of front, and they can certainly extend for a few hundred miles. BTW, I was in the Halloran springs area.
It's just that "very bad storm" and "pilot lost in light plane" could be coincidence but it sure did stick in my head.
Is there an archive of the weather radar on-line ? It should be possible to see what the weather was like where the plane was found.
The day Steve Fossett was lost I was driving from San Francisco to Las Vegas by way of Barstow. Just after Barstow we entered one of those huge desert storm systems, a line of thunderheads stretching North and South, and all of a sudden it rained so hard and the wind blew so hard that it was hard controlling the car, even when we slowed to 20 MPH. Soon after we left the storm, I heard about the disappearance of Steve Fossett on the radio.
I have been convinced ever since that moment that that storm killed him. I cannot see how a light aircraft could have flown through it, and yet it came up pretty suddenly. Looking at the map, I might still be right.
I strongly suspect that the computer was used to look at the photos, which means it downloaded them, which means that it had classified information on it, so of course they seized it.
Friction is not a basic concept - it has to do with the behavior of large number of atoms. It is thus basically a thermodynamic concept - ordered motion gets converted into heat via turbulence.
So, there can be fluid friction, even fluid-fluid friction (a useful concept in meteorology) and when the fluids are supersonic, shock effects become important. There is no reason you can't call that friction too.
In modeling real systems, you can almost never estimate friction from first principles. In many real systems, friction is a "bucket" for a host of complicated small scale effects that get lumped into some large "frictional" drag or heating model, typically depending on some power of the fluid velocity, which is exactly how supersonic friction is handled (at least to first order). So, putting shock effects into the friction bucket is a useful concept, which means it is good physics.
The kinetic energy of your (or an airplane's) motion gets converted into friction through turbulence and shock effects. Heat is just the velocity of atoms bouncing off each other, and the sound speed depends on the velocity of those atoms, and thus on the temperature.
In an ideal gas, the absolute temperature is a measure of the energy, and thus is a constant times the square of the rms gas velocity. By the same consideration, for an idea gas, the speed of sound is (a constant) times the rms particle velocity. (That constant is the square root of the (adiabatic index/3), or about 0.7 for a monatomic gas.)
So, you are correct. Speeds much slower than the speed of sound will generally be associated with small amounts of heating, which may be negligible compared to other effects, such as cooling caused by the air flow, while speeds much higher than the sound speed will generally involve heating to something much above the ambient temperature. (Generally, of course, airplanes are designed not to convert all of their kinetic energy into turbulence, but during re-entry, that is done pretty effectively.)
The real gases in air are very non-ideal in the temperatures and pressures in re-entry so this simple theory is not realistic for speeds much above Mach 3 or so. It turns out that an engineer's rule of thumb is that the temperature in K is roughly equal to the speed in meters / sec, based on more realistic models of specific heat in the ionized plasma formed at these high speeds.
This was a 16 ton, 30 meter long habitable spacecraft, used to carry supplies. The idea that there is no further use for it than to deorbit garbage is crazy. Did they offer it to any private groups (or even to the Chinese) ? If we really want to become a spacefaring civilization, we have to stop thinking in terms of billion dollar garbage runs, and start thinking in terms of what can we do with what we have.
They're at the Poles. Winter is coming. It does snow there, they will see more. There will eventually be CO2 condensation as well, but IIRC that's after the Lander goes to sleep.
Second, they showed that if there been a full statewide recount of all counties, Al Gore would have received more votes than Bush.
It is true that that is not what Al Gore's campaign was asking for, but there it is.
And that is before you get into the whole voter list mess, which undoubtedly rejected thousands of legitimate Democratic voters, but was not a recount issue.
Slashdot Mirror
Human's are built to assume that the entity they are talking with understands them. Ever since I first saw Eliza in action (where people would have "meaningful" interactions with a program that was not much more than a stimulus-response box) I realized that the Turing test was really meaningless.
To put it another way, if IBM wanted to put the money into the Turing test that they put into chess, there would be a very good Turing tester, but no more understanding or consciousness than Deep Blue has understanding or consciousness of chess.
Here are some in fields I follow :
In astrophysics, almost all new papers appear first in Arxiv.
In planetary physics, some but by no means all papers appear in Arxiv.
In geophysics, basically no papers appear in Arxiv.
I don't know why there are these differences, but there it is.
It's not going to collide so fix the title. It's going to burn up in our atmosphere becoming a meteor...
after it collides with the Earth (or at least its atmosphere).
No. The tractor idea (it's not a beam, for pete's sake) would take months to test. We have about... 1 hour.
...in the cavernous depths of space, yet we can't find Bin Laden on out own small planet?
It's always hard to find things in clutter - I have the same problem with my desk.
If he was alone in deep space, we could find him too.
Since there is great uncertainty in the mass of this object (albedo ? density ? who knows!) is anyone interested in a pool for the crater size ? I say that there will be one and my bet is for 3 meters.
Is one hour from now.
Any slashdotters in Sudan ?
sorry - "speeds up" should be "slows down," above.
Because it is energetically tough to get to Mercury they are trying to get into with as little fuel expenditure as possible, to send as much payload as possible. Since there is no atmosphere, aerobraking is not possible, and thus they are using gravity assists to help reduce the orbital insertion delta-v to a manageable number. Each flyby speeds up the spacecraft a little, to better match Mercury's orbital velocity, and they decided on 3 of these to get the performance they wanted. There is a synodic period (the orbital beat period) between each such opportunity, so it takes a while to complete three flyby gravity assists.
The mission FAQ has more information on this.
The stock manipulation possibilities here are pretty big, as is the lawsuit potential.
Republican or democrat ?
Looking at the Nexrad there, and also from Edwards AFB, "My" storm clearly did not extend that far, and there doesn't seem to be much bad weather around Mammoth Lakes that day (although 1 hour time steps is pretty coarse for thunderstorms).
Thanks for that. I had always wondered about this, and now it seems clear that the storm I was in was not involved in the Fossett crash.
But, it is on TV !
No. I composed it on a text editor, which is why all of the line feeds, but I don't know why not for that line.
Yeah, I looked at the map, and it is fairly far, but this was clearly some sort of front, and they can certainly extend for a few hundred miles. BTW, I was in the Halloran springs area.
It's just that "very bad storm" and "pilot lost in light plane" could be coincidence but it sure did stick in my head.
Is there an archive of the weather radar on-line ? It should be possible to see what the weather was like where the plane was found.
The day Steve Fossett was lost I was driving from San Francisco
to Las Vegas by way of Barstow. Just after Barstow we entered one of those huge desert storm systems, a line of thunderheads
stretching North and South, and all of a sudden it rained so hard
and the wind blew so hard that it was hard controlling the car,
even when we slowed to 20 MPH. Soon after we left the storm, I
heard about the disappearance of Steve Fossett on the radio.
I have been convinced ever since that moment that that storm
killed him. I cannot see how a light aircraft could have flown
through it, and yet it came up pretty suddenly. Looking at the
map, I might still be right.
I strongly suspect that the computer was used to look at the photos, which means it downloaded them, which means that it had classified information on it, so of course they seized it.
I hope he had an offsite backup.
Sorry, I am going to call BS on this.
Friction is not a basic concept - it has to do with the behavior of large number of atoms. It is thus basically a thermodynamic concept - ordered motion gets converted into heat via turbulence.
So, there can be fluid friction, even fluid-fluid friction (a useful concept in meteorology) and when the fluids are supersonic, shock effects become important. There is no reason you can't call that friction too.
In modeling real systems, you can almost never estimate friction from first principles. In many real systems, friction is a "bucket" for a host of complicated small scale effects that get lumped into some large "frictional" drag or heating model, typically depending on some power of the fluid velocity, which is exactly how supersonic friction is handled (at least to first order). So, putting shock effects into the friction bucket is a useful concept, which means it is good physics.
Here is a simple way to think about it -
The kinetic energy of your (or an airplane's) motion gets converted into friction through turbulence and shock effects. Heat is just the velocity of atoms bouncing off each other, and the sound speed depends on the velocity of those atoms, and thus on the temperature.
In an ideal gas, the absolute temperature is a measure of the energy, and thus is a constant times the square of the rms gas velocity. By the same consideration, for an idea gas, the speed of sound is (a constant) times the rms particle velocity. (That constant is the square root of the (adiabatic index /3), or about 0.7 for a monatomic gas.)
So, you are correct. Speeds much slower than the speed of sound will generally be associated with small amounts of heating, which may be negligible compared to other effects, such as cooling caused by the air flow, while speeds much higher than the sound speed will generally involve heating to something much above the ambient temperature. (Generally, of course, airplanes are designed not to convert all of their kinetic energy into turbulence, but during re-entry, that is done pretty effectively.)
The real gases in air are very non-ideal in the temperatures and pressures in re-entry so this simple theory is not realistic for speeds much above Mach 3 or so. It turns out that an engineer's rule of thumb is that the temperature in K is roughly equal to the speed in meters / sec, based on more realistic models of specific heat in the ionized plasma formed at these high speeds.
... there is now talk of developing an upgraded ATV which would include a re-entry module, and make ATV into a complete manned spaceflight system.
There is pretty serious talk - they put together a model they showed off in Berlin.
They would be crazy not to pursue this.
This was a 16 ton, 30 meter long habitable spacecraft, used to carry supplies. The idea that there is no further use for it than to deorbit garbage is crazy. Did they offer it to any private groups (or even to the Chinese) ? If we really want to become a spacefaring civilization, we have to stop thinking in terms of billion dollar garbage runs, and start thinking in terms of what can we do with what we have.
They're at the Poles. Winter is coming. It does snow there, they will see more. There will eventually be CO2 condensation as well, but IIRC that's after the Lander goes to sleep.
The level of insanity rises each time. You think it can't be topped, but it is.
First, they weren't official recounts.
Second, they showed that if there been a full statewide recount of all counties, Al Gore would have received more votes than Bush.
It is true that that is not what Al Gore's campaign was asking for, but there it is.
And that is before you get into the whole voter list mess, which undoubtedly rejected thousands of legitimate Democratic voters, but was not a recount issue.
there were only 9 votes that counted, and switching 1 would have done it.