B5, Blake's 7 - none of them comes close to the level of existentialism Firefly displayed in under a dozen eps. Firefly was just about the shortest run of a SF series EVER. It's not fair AT ALL to compare Firefly to a series like ST or B5 or B7 that went on for years or in the case of ST, for decades. Firefly existed for under 90 days in late 2002 and was broadcast out of order, etc etc etc. It shone like a Type 1a supernova - bright and fast. I just about die when I think of what Firefly could have become with seven seasons or 35 years.
Go back and look at JUST THE FIRST ELEVEN EPS of each of those series and then tell me they were better than Firefly....you can't.
I wish with all my heart they had made "Better Days" as a movie and "Serenity" as the comic. Firefly was the very best SF show ever on TV. To have short-circuited its comeback as they did with making the movie so very harsh was IMHO a wasted chance at a relaunch. Fot those of you that haven't yet gotten what all of the fuss is about, hey, Christmas is coming, get the DVD as a present to someone else and give it one more try. Firefly is the American Western mythos of the past presented in a Space-Age future. We need to remember the vibes it resonates on now more than ever.
I attended one of these so-called "parties" long ago as a Manned Flight Awareness honoree for work I did on Space Station. Think of it as extremely cheap, sub-minimum wage payment for overtime.
Please take the time to send a copy of this Slashdot article to the two Florida Senators and KSC district Representative in Congress, perhaps sharing your thoughts:
Senator Bill Nelson (D- FL) 202-224-5274 202-228-2183
Brilliant, brilliant ending. I had the same viewer reactions everybody else did - but that's what you're SUPPOSED to feel for thirty seconds as a viewer. The ending itself has to last on forever upon endless reflection after those thirty seconds are over as being a worthy finale.
The key, of course, is the cat - the final animal used to define Tony in a symbolic sense. (Hey, you don't think it was just coincidence that there was the sound of ducks off camera when waste was dumped into their pond water when Tony "got it" in a bone-dry desert a few episodes back, do ya?) This was no normal cat - Tony theorizes it can sense dead things behind walls. That's about as oblique a reference as you can get for the ultimate in existentialism, namely Schrodinger's Cat.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schrodinger's_cat
So now Tony lives on forever in a storybook quantum instant where all possible outcomes exist, both alive and dead simultaneously, and the viewer never gets to look in the box and see (or by looking, determine absolutely) Tony's ultimate outcome.
Brilliant, brilliant ending, Mr. Chase. Kudos to you.
Read the article. Discovering planets via the transit method (eclipse dimming of the star) is rare. Around 80% are instead discovered using the so called wobble method, which measures changes in starlight doppler shift.
Re:Here's What They'll Find Inside...
on
Caves on Mars?
·
· Score: 1
Then, turning about the corner of a wall-like outcropping of granite, we came upon a smooth area of two or three acres before the base of the towering pile of ice and rock that had baffled us for days, and before us beheld the dark and cavernous mouth of a cave.
From this repelling portal the horrid stench was emanating, and as Thuvan Dihn espied the place he halted with an exclamation of profound astonishment.
"By all my ancestors!" he ejaculated. "That I should have lived to witness the reality of the fabled Carrion Caves! If these indeed be they, we have found a way beyond the ice-barrier.
"The ancient chronicles of the first historians of Barsoom--so ancient that we have for ages considered them mythology--record the passing of the yellow men from the ravages of the green hordes that overran Barsoom as the drying up of the great oceans drove the dominant races from their strongholds.
"They tell of the wanderings of the remnants of this once powerful race, harassed at every step, until at last they found a way through the ice-barrier of the north to a fertile valley at the pole.
"At the opening to the subterranean passage that led to their haven of refuge a mighty battle was fought in which the yellow men were victorious, and within the caves that gave ingress to their new home they piled the bodies of the dead, both yellow and green, that the stench might warn away their enemies from further pursuit.
"And ever since that long-gone day have the dead of this fabled land been carried to the Carrion Caves, that in death and decay they might serve their country and warn away invading enemies. Here, too, is brought, so the fable runs, all the waste stuff of the nation--everything that is subject to rot, and that can add to the foul stench that assails our nostrils.
"And death lurks at every step among rotting dead, for here the fierce apts lair, adding to the putrid accumulation with the fragments of their own prey which they cannot devour. It is a horrid avenue to our goal, but it is the only one."
Here's What They'll Find Inside...
on
Caves on Mars?
·
· Score: 3, Funny
OF COURSE there's caves on the Red Planet. Doesn't anybody read Chapter 8 of The Warlord of Mars anymore?.
If you look carefully you can tell the splice of the two photos is not quite right. The east - west roads that mark the north and south boundries of the Complex aren't aligned. Yet there is a pipe bundle that matches perfectly across the two photos in the middle at a particular building. I would say that who ever spliced this matched the pipe bundle because it is a perfect set of parallel lines to use in the merge of the two photos. However, I note with interest that the splice is almost exactly along the Exclusion Area boundary between the less secure east end of the plant and the MUCH more secure west end of the plant. Who knows how old or modified the summertime west end photo is, it's been decades since I was at Y-12. Indeed, somebody knew what they were doing when they put this little corner of Google Maps together.
Well, I've changed my mind again. They ARE blocking out details specifically on the Alpha buildings. Parts of the summertime photo on the left is indeed available at the highest zoom, so it's NOT that the summer time photo splice on the left is at a lower res than the fall time photo splice on the right...
I just went to the Google map for the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant in Oak Ridge where I used to work many years ago. Beautiful close up photos of the several hundred buildings in the Complex, amazing detail of the parking lots and the roofs and the fences. At max zoom, I scrolled to the building housing my first office there...my second office there....the cafeteria...the security booth where I went into the Exclusion Area (the highest secured area where the bomb grade uranium is)...down the road...huh. When you get to the building where the enriched uranium is (was?) machined and the scrap uranium reprocessed, you get a notice saying no zoom data for this area. You've got to back up into the sky a few hundred feet.
Somebody knows what they're doing. They're only blocking the zoom on SPECIFIC CRITICAL BUILDINGS at Y-12 instead of all of them.
Something like this was proposed in the David Gerrold novels of his Dingilliad series. The sum total of human knowledge was constantly being shot around the solar system on a laser beam that bounced off of various retroreflectors on the different planets. If you waited some finite amount of time (an hour or so) for the next pass of Item X, anything you wanted could be siphoned off of the stream by setting up a telescope receiver and picking up part of the "spillover" laser beam that hit your colony location but missed the retroreflector. This dynamic "storage medium" was used at the time of the story instead of a "static medium" like physically immobile hard drives or memory chips.
As I recall, Gerrold presented some mumbo-jumbo that said the storage capacity of such an arrangement - a billions-of-miles-long laser beam - was truly enormous. Sounded like a pretty good idea. Anybody think it would really work - and better yet, be practical?
Perhaps you can answer (or speculate about) a question I've always wondered about concerning BECs. Say you create a BEC from radioactive atoms and you keep it cooled down for several half-lives of whatever element isotope you've used. What happens? Does being in a BEC halt radioactive decay? Does radioactive decay affect a BEC during its existence? Will the decay products pop out when the BEC warms?
You are so on target with the last paragraph of your comment. Light water reactors are an insane tachnology, historically the only reason they made it into commercial power reactors is because the companies that made submarine reactors wanted to go commerical with their military technology and so basically recreated a pressure dome to duplicate submarine conditions on dry land. Crazy. Pebble bed makes SO much more sense...
Use of UF6 is the MLIS process, championed by Los Alamos. Use of atomic vapor is the AVLIS process, championed by Livermore. You would not believe the endless arguments that ensued during the 1980s over which was better. AVLIS won.
That's what I get for skimming without my glasses on so early in the morning, and for reading this Slashdot article right after an article on Arnie. My subconscious at work....or snoozing.
I'm one of the "500 scientists" who worked on the ""failed" US efforts in the early 1980s, and I'd take this whole report with a grain of salt. First of all, just how far the US got with our effort is classified and having the media calling it a "failure" doesn't mean that we never accomplished in our labs 20 years ago what these Austrians did in theirs last month. The US lab effort was HUGE and not just aimed at uranium enrichment. There was a seperate program for seperating plutonium isotopes via laser enrichment to fine-tune and further miniturize nuclear weapons to an amazingly small package. These were the Reagan Star Wars years, after all.
However, it's a LONG way from lab benchtop enrichment experiments to a functioning enrichment plant. And once you get to that functioning enrichment plant, there's the question of whether or not it was economically justifiable to build in the first place. This is where the American effort "failed" - even on paper, it never made sense to pursue this technology because it was just too expensive. Sure, you need thousands of high-precision centrifuges to run an enrichment cascade. This was still cheaper than building a laser enrichment plant.
The designs for a uranium laser enrichment plant ON AN INDUSTRIAL SCALE are not for the fainthearted. YOu've got to have the uranium in a gaseous state. That means heating it so hot that not only do you have a pool of molten uranium, but it's BOILING. The laser is going through the HOT uranium "steam". The only material that can stand up to these temperatures is pure graphite. The design becomes like a series of rain gutters on a house that carries "more enriched" and "less enriched" streams of molten uranium back for reboiling. Somehow you've got to figure out a way of putting optical ports into this hellhole to fire the laser beams in. The laser beams themselves are a weird wavelength (green) and takes some really expensive gear to generate at all, much less with intense enough power to penetrate deeply into a fog of molten uranium. Doing all of this cheaply? Good luck.
And in the background overshadowing enrichment plant economics was and is the fact that nuclear power plants are still just too expensive a way to generate electricity (primarily due to regulatory costs) compared to coal and natural gas turbine plants. The expected boom in nuclear power plant construction forcast in the 1970s and early 1980s never materialized, mainly due to Thre Mile Island and Chernobyl, and so the need for new-fangled enrichment technology as a support industry never materialized with it either.
Right now the cheapest way to come up with fuel for a nuclear power plant is not laser enrichment or even centrifuge enrichment. It's diluting old Russian warheads, all 30,000 of them, down from 93% enriched uranium back to 3% uranium. This, along with all those Russian brides American men now have access to, are the REAL spoils of winning the Cold War.
Slashdot Mirror
B5, Blake's 7 - none of them comes close to the level of existentialism Firefly displayed in under a dozen eps. Firefly was just about the shortest run of a SF series EVER. It's not fair AT ALL to compare Firefly to a series like ST or B5 or B7 that went on for years or in the case of ST, for decades. Firefly existed for under 90 days in late 2002 and was broadcast out of order, etc etc etc. It shone like a Type 1a supernova - bright and fast. I just about die when I think of what Firefly could have become with seven seasons or 35 years. Go back and look at JUST THE FIRST ELEVEN EPS of each of those series and then tell me they were better than Firefly....you can't.
I wish with all my heart they had made "Better Days" as a movie and "Serenity" as the comic. Firefly was the very best SF show ever on TV. To have short-circuited its comeback as they did with making the movie so very harsh was IMHO a wasted chance at a relaunch. Fot those of you that haven't yet gotten what all of the fuss is about, hey, Christmas is coming, get the DVD as a present to someone else and give it one more try. Firefly is the American Western mythos of the past presented in a Space-Age future. We need to remember the vibes it resonates on now more than ever.
Um, as long as we're getting the facts straight here, Challenger exploded in 1986, not 1987.
I attended one of these so-called "parties" long ago as a Manned Flight Awareness honoree for work I did on Space Station. Think of it as extremely cheap, sub-minimum wage payment for overtime.
Senator Bill Nelson (D- FL) 202-224-5274 202-228-2183
http://billnelson.senate.gov/contact/email.cfm
Senator Mel Martinez (R- FL) 202-224-3041 202-228-5171
http://martinez.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAc tion=ContactInformation.ContactForm
Representative Tom Feeney (R - 24) 202-225-2706 202-226-6299
http://www.house.gov/writerep/ (use ZIP CODE 32899).
Brilliant, brilliant ending. I had the same viewer reactions everybody else did - but that's what you're SUPPOSED to feel for thirty seconds as a viewer. The ending itself has to last on forever upon endless reflection after those thirty seconds are over as being a worthy finale. The key, of course, is the cat - the final animal used to define Tony in a symbolic sense. (Hey, you don't think it was just coincidence that there was the sound of ducks off camera when waste was dumped into their pond water when Tony "got it" in a bone-dry desert a few episodes back, do ya?) This was no normal cat - Tony theorizes it can sense dead things behind walls. That's about as oblique a reference as you can get for the ultimate in existentialism, namely Schrodinger's Cat. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schrodinger's_cat So now Tony lives on forever in a storybook quantum instant where all possible outcomes exist, both alive and dead simultaneously, and the viewer never gets to look in the box and see (or by looking, determine absolutely) Tony's ultimate outcome. Brilliant, brilliant ending, Mr. Chase. Kudos to you.
Read the article. Discovering planets via the transit method (eclipse dimming of the star) is rare. Around 80% are instead discovered using the so called wobble method, which measures changes in starlight doppler shift.
Then, turning about the corner of a wall-like outcropping of granite, we came upon a smooth area of two or three acres before the base of the towering pile of ice and rock that had baffled us for days, and before us beheld the dark and cavernous mouth of a cave. From this repelling portal the horrid stench was emanating, and as Thuvan Dihn espied the place he halted with an exclamation of profound astonishment. "By all my ancestors!" he ejaculated. "That I should have lived to witness the reality of the fabled Carrion Caves! If these indeed be they, we have found a way beyond the ice-barrier. "The ancient chronicles of the first historians of Barsoom--so ancient that we have for ages considered them mythology--record the passing of the yellow men from the ravages of the green hordes that overran Barsoom as the drying up of the great oceans drove the dominant races from their strongholds. "They tell of the wanderings of the remnants of this once powerful race, harassed at every step, until at last they found a way through the ice-barrier of the north to a fertile valley at the pole. "At the opening to the subterranean passage that led to their haven of refuge a mighty battle was fought in which the yellow men were victorious, and within the caves that gave ingress to their new home they piled the bodies of the dead, both yellow and green, that the stench might warn away their enemies from further pursuit. "And ever since that long-gone day have the dead of this fabled land been carried to the Carrion Caves, that in death and decay they might serve their country and warn away invading enemies. Here, too, is brought, so the fable runs, all the waste stuff of the nation--everything that is subject to rot, and that can add to the foul stench that assails our nostrils. "And death lurks at every step among rotting dead, for here the fierce apts lair, adding to the putrid accumulation with the fragments of their own prey which they cannot devour. It is a horrid avenue to our goal, but it is the only one."
OF COURSE there's caves on the Red Planet. Doesn't anybody read Chapter 8 of The Warlord of Mars anymore?.
What he said. Double amen.
If you look carefully you can tell the splice of the two photos is not quite right. The east - west roads that mark the north and south boundries of the Complex aren't aligned. Yet there is a pipe bundle that matches perfectly across the two photos in the middle at a particular building. I would say that who ever spliced this matched the pipe bundle because it is a perfect set of parallel lines to use in the merge of the two photos. However, I note with interest that the splice is almost exactly along the Exclusion Area boundary between the less secure east end of the plant and the MUCH more secure west end of the plant. Who knows how old or modified the summertime west end photo is, it's been decades since I was at Y-12. Indeed, somebody knew what they were doing when they put this little corner of Google Maps together.
Well, I've changed my mind again. They ARE blocking out details specifically on the Alpha buildings. Parts of the summertime photo on the left is indeed available at the highest zoom, so it's NOT that the summer time photo splice on the left is at a lower res than the fall time photo splice on the right...
Or maybe not. You can tell that this area is merged photos, the left side shot in summer, the right in fall. You can still get to the next-to-highest-level of zoom on the left hand side... http://www.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=Y-12&sll=37 .0625,-95.677068&sspn=112.895714,107.226562&ie=UTF 8&z=16&ll=35.985525,-84.259365&spn=0.0079,0.013025 &t=k&om=1&iwloc=A
I just went to the Google map for the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant in Oak Ridge where I used to work many years ago. Beautiful close up photos of the several hundred buildings in the Complex, amazing detail of the parking lots and the roofs and the fences. At max zoom, I scrolled to the building housing my first office there...my second office there....the cafeteria...the security booth where I went into the Exclusion Area (the highest secured area where the bomb grade uranium is)...down the road...huh. When you get to the building where the enriched uranium is (was?) machined and the scrap uranium reprocessed, you get a notice saying no zoom data for this area. You've got to back up into the sky a few hundred feet. Somebody knows what they're doing. They're only blocking the zoom on SPECIFIC CRITICAL BUILDINGS at Y-12 instead of all of them.
Why not? Because. Because why? Ummmm.....
Me. Them. You. Us. Fight. Me.
Big bang, little strings, forty two.
As I recall, Gerrold presented some mumbo-jumbo that said the storage capacity of such an arrangement - a billions-of-miles-long laser beam - was truly enormous. Sounded like a pretty good idea. Anybody think it would really work - and better yet, be practical?
Perhaps you can answer (or speculate about) a question I've always wondered about concerning BECs. Say you create a BEC from radioactive atoms and you keep it cooled down for several half-lives of whatever element isotope you've used. What happens? Does being in a BEC halt radioactive decay? Does radioactive decay affect a BEC during its existence? Will the decay products pop out when the BEC warms?
You are so on target with the last paragraph of your comment. Light water reactors are an insane tachnology, historically the only reason they made it into commercial power reactors is because the companies that made submarine reactors wanted to go commerical with their military technology and so basically recreated a pressure dome to duplicate submarine conditions on dry land. Crazy. Pebble bed makes SO much more sense...
Use of UF6 is the MLIS process, championed by Los Alamos. Use of atomic vapor is the AVLIS process, championed by Livermore. You would not believe the endless arguments that ensued during the 1980s over which was better. AVLIS won.
That's what I get for skimming without my glasses on so early in the morning, and for reading this Slashdot article right after an article on Arnie. My subconscious at work....or snoozing.
Oops. My bad.
However, it's a LONG way from lab benchtop enrichment experiments to a functioning enrichment plant. And once you get to that functioning enrichment plant, there's the question of whether or not it was economically justifiable to build in the first place. This is where the American effort "failed" - even on paper, it never made sense to pursue this technology because it was just too expensive. Sure, you need thousands of high-precision centrifuges to run an enrichment cascade. This was still cheaper than building a laser enrichment plant.
The designs for a uranium laser enrichment plant ON AN INDUSTRIAL SCALE are not for the fainthearted. YOu've got to have the uranium in a gaseous state. That means heating it so hot that not only do you have a pool of molten uranium, but it's BOILING. The laser is going through the HOT uranium "steam". The only material that can stand up to these temperatures is pure graphite. The design becomes like a series of rain gutters on a house that carries "more enriched" and "less enriched" streams of molten uranium back for reboiling. Somehow you've got to figure out a way of putting optical ports into this hellhole to fire the laser beams in. The laser beams themselves are a weird wavelength (green) and takes some really expensive gear to generate at all, much less with intense enough power to penetrate deeply into a fog of molten uranium. Doing all of this cheaply? Good luck.
And in the background overshadowing enrichment plant economics was and is the fact that nuclear power plants are still just too expensive a way to generate electricity (primarily due to regulatory costs) compared to coal and natural gas turbine plants. The expected boom in nuclear power plant construction forcast in the 1970s and early 1980s never materialized, mainly due to Thre Mile Island and Chernobyl, and so the need for new-fangled enrichment technology as a support industry never materialized with it either.
Right now the cheapest way to come up with fuel for a nuclear power plant is not laser enrichment or even centrifuge enrichment. It's diluting old Russian warheads, all 30,000 of them, down from 93% enriched uranium back to 3% uranium. This, along with all those Russian brides American men now have access to, are the REAL spoils of winning the Cold War.
This will be a great new way for Slashdot users to dig for what others find interesting!