Maybe they found one of the first versions of a bra with a modern design, but already some Roman mosaics showed women wearing two-piece clothing, which isn't so different from a modern day bikini.
Because your laziness of saving 2 seconds would easily cost you more than 10% in efficiency. That would be like filling your car with gasoline and not giving a shit that you spill large amounts of fuel just because you are to lazy to properly connect the hose. WIth both fuel and electricity prices remaining high for the forseable future, efficiency will count till the last percent.
No-one says that this is not science as usual, this is the typical type of error which you make every now, which on occasion wastes a few weeks of your time. As for the real reason of his resignations I can only speculate. My guess it has to do with the decision to publish the unexpected result so early, only to retract it two months later. It makes them look a bit like amateurs. Couldn't they have kept it internally for another 2 months while double-checking everything? But it must have been hard to have foreseen the public hype that resulted. Do note, finally, that the guy just gave up his position as spokesman of the Opera experiment, it is not like he was forced to resign his professorship or so.
Memory usage is not a problem for python. If you are using big data-structures, you would typically store them in multi-dimensional arrays defined in Numpy/Scipy. Internally, they use the same type of arrays as in C or Fortran, in all the usual data formats (ints, doubles,...). There obviously will be a little bit of overhead space needed to store its data-type, array dimensions etc, but this is a fixed amount that is negligible for large arrays. Also the computation speed is for many problems not an issue. If you can formulate your problem as vector-algebra, all the computational intensive algorithms (matrix inversion, FFT,...) use Fortran or LAPACK under the hood.
I am not sure about Rapidshare and others, but I think that Dropbox has not a lot to fear. I guess most people (including myself) only use it primarily as a backup service or to synchronize stuff between computers, occasionally to share things with friends and even rarer to share things with the general population (using the Public folder). Of course this could be used to share movies with friends, but this is not much different than sharing them via USB stick. Using it to share illegal stuff with the general public could be done (it has been tried in the past), but this is easily detected and people caught are likely expelled from the service. This can not be done for anonymous services like Megaupload or Rapidshare. Dropbox is thus largely used for innocent activity (as seen by the RIAA/MPAA), while in case of Megaupload it was the contrary (mostly illegal stuff and the occasional innocent use).
Another example: Ryanair (Europe's lowest cost and most profitable airline) boss O'Leary started his own taxi company, which provides services exclusively to himself, so that he can use the taxi lanes to zoom past traffic towards work.
Anyone else having problems viewing the EPOXi webpage? It brings my Firefox to a halt and almost crashes my laptop. Nice way to design your website, embedding more than 70 big images that are just scaled. It shouldn't exactly be rocket-science to make some thumbnails!:)
I understood that they had to call it OO.org instead of simply OO because they do not own the trademark on that name, at least not in every country. The Dutch homepage of OOo has a disclaimer on their page, saying that there is already a local company with that name. From what I understood they are far from being a trademark troll: they predate OOo, own the trademark in the BeNeLux and actually appear to be some open-source-friendly consultancy bureau. I am not sure about the status in other countries. Anyhow, Sun did a bad job choosing the name OO, but at least as a brand-name it sucked a lot less than LibreOffice.
That is probably not the same kind of formation flying as TFA was talking about. At 690 km altitude, the A-train has an orbital velocity of 7.5 km/s, so the minimum separation of 15 seconds translates to more than 100 km of mutual distance. Although this is not really trivial to do and would probably require some daily adjustments of the orbits, it is more like 'flying several satellites in the same orbit', totally controlled from the ground. The missions I was mentioning operate within 1 km of each other and should fly with relative position accuracy of better than 1 mm, based on local sensors and active feedback using small thrusters that can actuate with a force of milli or even micro-Newtons.
If causing autism for some children were a side effect of vaccination (for which no evidence exists), the benefits of vaccination still outweigh the damage by a lot. Let my friends Penn and Teller explain it in a bit more graphic way...
The article unfortunately contains almost no information, except for the fact that ESA wants to do formation flying and is developing some testbed. This is not news, since ESA has been studying missions involving satellites flying in close formation for more than 10 years: for example the Darwin mission, which would have flown some telescopes at a few hundred meters to do optical aperture synthesis for detecting extra-solar planets (mission appears to be shelved right now) and XEUS which is a 'standard' 100 meter long x-ray telescope, but instead of physically connecting lens and focal plain it consists of 2 spacecraft that are virtually connected by a system that measures the mutual positions.
I had the pleasure of getting a tour on the JPL campus a few years ago, which to me seemed like a place where they build nothing else than super-cool over-engineered testbeds just for fun. I probably saw some early version of this testbed. They had a large hall with a smooth floor over which the 'satellites' could slide on air-bearings (3 degrees of freedom), on which a vertical piston was mounted (1 DOF) and finally an over-sized ball-air-bearing for the remaining 2 tilt DOFs. This provides a platform that can move freely in all degrees of freedom, which would carry a satellite-simulator consisting of small air-jets and a shitload of sensors to do the 'formation flying'. Very impressive, even if it was not operational at the time. If ESA would be starting now with their testbed, they would trail NASA by at least 5 years. Lets hope they have been doing something in the meantime.
Wrong guess. It was my ancestors that first spotted and mapped Australia, but saw that it was such a godforsaken place that they happily left it for the Brits.
While they're at it, could those EU guys please teach the Ozzies how to properly pronounce the different types of grapes. While I was down there, it took me a while to understand that kepsev (pronounced with nasal Texan accent) means Cabernet Sauvignon...
Correct me if I am wrong, but I doubt that tidal forces play any role at all for Juno. Tidal forces are caused by the difference of gravity over the extend of an object, which is only significant for planets and moons which have sizes on the order of thousands of kilometers, compared to satellites with a diameter of 10 meters. According to the last formula found here, the tidal force is roughly a fraction (diameter / orbit height) of the gravitational force itself. A satellite of 10 meters orbiting at the same height above Jupiter as Io (known for its tidal induces volcanoes), will thus experience just a few millionths of the force experienced by Io.
The forum mentions a movie about the Evoluon that shows a few seconds of the machine. Start watching at 7:00. They also cite some article in a Dutch newspaper that says one of the machines has been spotted in Quebec (might be the exhibition mentioned by the OP). Finally, someone claims that around 1980 they had such a machine on display at the faculty of Medical Biological Physics (?) at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam, in the corridor where the lab courses where taught.
I disagree very strongly with Octave being a better alternative. Octave is just an open source matlab clone, so if all you want is to run your old scripts with only minor modifications and without paying anyone, octave might be the way to go. Other than that, plotting in Octave sucks pretty hard, you basically have to learn Gnuplot from scratch. Even matlab itself is not a star in plotting, after 15+ years you still have to be a guru to get publication-style plots, but it is already miles better than octave.
Python+Numpy+Scipy+Matplotlib, however, does not try to be a clone, but it tries to become something better than Matlab. As a start, Python is a real OO programming language by itself with an enormous toolbox that is ready to do everything from easy string manipulation to whole web-frameworks in a very elegant way. Matlab was built for doing linear algebra and using it to do any real programming just feels awkward, I guess octave is similar in that sense. The matrix stuff was bolted onto python later with Numpy, so it is missing a tiny bit of specialized syntax found in matlab/octave, but other than that you can do exactly the same in both languages. Numpy even has some cool stuff like singleton expansion by default, which is not found in matlab. The big advantage Matlab still has over python is in the toolboxes, but this will change in the next few years as Scipy matures. The plotting done with Matplotlib, finally, works very well and is already better than matlab on some points, like making anti-aliased plots without any effort.
It might not be around as long as FITS, but isn't DjVu more suited for the digitization of manuscripts? If I understand it correctly, DjVu was designed for this job, while FITS was designed for astronomical data, not exactly the same. Not that I am an expert...
Here in Italy, they tend to always ask for your social security number (when you buy a sim-card or request an ADSL line) or ask for ID (when visiting an internet bar), so for simple peasants like you and me, the police/intelligence agency/Berlusconi should be able to get your personal details with a simple database lookup. I assume that 'Ndrangheta bosses, however, should have enough connections to get all the connections they want using a fake IDs. I also believe that as a mafia boss, you cannot count on any privacy law for not being triangulated, so I guess that was the case here.
If I understand it correctly, Dragon should not be docking automatically to the station. Instead, it will simply fly to and hover at some distance next to the station, from were it can be picked up and docked using the robotic arm. This will still require very strict rating of its control system, but the requirements on position accuracy should not be as strict as with docking. I guess the main advantage of this is that you don't need a complicated docking mechanism like the Russian ball-and-stick system, but just the passive side of a common berthing mechanism. Disadvantage is obviously that you need a working robot arm to dock and (more critical in case of emergency) undock.
You might be right that super-massive black holes emit at frequencies that are even too low for LISA, for which the pulsar timing would help. Neutron star binaries, however, should emit up to a few hundred Hz, so they should be detectable with ground-based detectors. This leaves the normal black holes for LISA, so these three different methods nicely complement each other.
If your detector is sensitive enough to observe lots of galaxies at the same time, you will be able to observe a few at the final stage of the inspiral. The system looses energy due to gravitational waves, thus the distance between the two objects will decrease and the rotation frequency will increase up to the point that they merge. It is this final stage that we want to detect, which the gravitational waves are sent with higher frequency and intensity.
They do give a merger rate per galaxy in the introduction of the article. If you combine that with a density of galaxies and the sensitivity of your detector, this should give you a rate of observable events. In the final paragraph they confirm my suspicion that this coalescing SMBHs are LISA's business and that their observations should give an upper limit to the detection rate. I don't know if this is good or bad news, that depends on the earlier predictions.
Great, the collision of these things is exactly the kind of event we need for detecting gravitational waves. These kind of 'inspirals' emit very distinct pattern, which can be retrieved very efficiently from the noise with matched filter banks. The higher the mass, the lower the frequency of this 'chirped' signal, so it is probable that these colliding super-massive black-holes cannot be detected with the ground-based kilometer long observatories, which are measuring right now. This is probably more something for the space-based LISA mission, which can probe much lower frequencies since it has a base-line of millions of kilometers.
Probably the best small-scale example of how violent this event would have been is given by the flooding of an open-air mine in Malaysia. The rocks separating the mine from the sea became unstable and collapsed, filling the whole thing in minute or so: video!
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe they found one of the first versions of a bra with a modern design, but already some Roman mosaics showed women wearing two-piece clothing, which isn't so different from a modern day bikini.
Because your laziness of saving 2 seconds would easily cost you more than 10% in efficiency. That would be like filling your car with gasoline and not giving a shit that you spill large amounts of fuel just because you are to lazy to properly connect the hose. WIth both fuel and electricity prices remaining high for the forseable future, efficiency will count till the last percent.
No-one says that this is not science as usual, this is the typical type of error which you make every now, which on occasion wastes a few weeks of your time. As for the real reason of his resignations I can only speculate. My guess it has to do with the decision to publish the unexpected result so early, only to retract it two months later. It makes them look a bit like amateurs. Couldn't they have kept it internally for another 2 months while double-checking everything? But it must have been hard to have foreseen the public hype that resulted. Do note, finally, that the guy just gave up his position as spokesman of the Opera experiment, it is not like he was forced to resign his professorship or so.
Memory usage is not a problem for python. If you are using big data-structures, you would typically store them in multi-dimensional arrays defined in Numpy/Scipy. Internally, they use the same type of arrays as in C or Fortran, in all the usual data formats (ints, doubles, ...). There obviously will be a little bit of overhead space needed to store its data-type, array dimensions etc, but this is a fixed amount that is negligible for large arrays. Also the computation speed is for many problems not an issue. If you can formulate your problem as vector-algebra, all the computational intensive algorithms (matrix inversion, FFT, ...) use Fortran or LAPACK under the hood.
I am not sure about Rapidshare and others, but I think that Dropbox has not a lot to fear. I guess most people (including myself) only use it primarily as a backup service or to synchronize stuff between computers, occasionally to share things with friends and even rarer to share things with the general population (using the Public folder). Of course this could be used to share movies with friends, but this is not much different than sharing them via USB stick. Using it to share illegal stuff with the general public could be done (it has been tried in the past), but this is easily detected and people caught are likely expelled from the service. This can not be done for anonymous services like Megaupload or Rapidshare. Dropbox is thus largely used for innocent activity (as seen by the RIAA/MPAA), while in case of Megaupload it was the contrary (mostly illegal stuff and the occasional innocent use).
Ryanair's boss Michael O'Leary is known for this kind of brainfarts. He knows the press will talk about it for days, so it is all free publicity. He gives a rats ass about the image of the company, since its image is that they are cheap. More of his brilliant ideas: paying for toilets, flying without co-pilot and having a flight attended land it in case of trouble and airplanes with standing room only. They run some provoking advertisements too, like giving the finger to their competitors, or giving holiday suggestions for Berlusconi (he finally resigned a few hours ago!).
Another example: Ryanair (Europe's lowest cost and most profitable airline) boss O'Leary started his own taxi company, which provides services exclusively to himself, so that he can use the taxi lanes to zoom past traffic towards work.
Anyone else having problems viewing the EPOXi webpage? It brings my Firefox to a halt and almost crashes my laptop. Nice way to design your website, embedding more than 70 big images that are just scaled. It shouldn't exactly be rocket-science to make some thumbnails! :)
I understood that they had to call it OO.org instead of simply OO because they do not own the trademark on that name, at least not in every country. The Dutch homepage of OOo has a disclaimer on their page, saying that there is already a local company with that name. From what I understood they are far from being a trademark troll: they predate OOo, own the trademark in the BeNeLux and actually appear to be some open-source-friendly consultancy bureau. I am not sure about the status in other countries. Anyhow, Sun did a bad job choosing the name OO, but at least as a brand-name it sucked a lot less than LibreOffice.
That is probably not the same kind of formation flying as TFA was talking about. At 690 km altitude, the A-train has an orbital velocity of 7.5 km/s, so the minimum separation of 15 seconds translates to more than 100 km of mutual distance. Although this is not really trivial to do and would probably require some daily adjustments of the orbits, it is more like 'flying several satellites in the same orbit', totally controlled from the ground. The missions I was mentioning operate within 1 km of each other and should fly with relative position accuracy of better than 1 mm, based on local sensors and active feedback using small thrusters that can actuate with a force of milli or even micro-Newtons.
If causing autism for some children were a side effect of vaccination (for which no evidence exists), the benefits of vaccination still outweigh the damage by a lot. Let my friends Penn and Teller explain it in a bit more graphic way ...
The article unfortunately contains almost no information, except for the fact that ESA wants to do formation flying and is developing some testbed. This is not news, since ESA has been studying missions involving satellites flying in close formation for more than 10 years: for example the Darwin mission, which would have flown some telescopes at a few hundred meters to do optical aperture synthesis for detecting extra-solar planets (mission appears to be shelved right now) and XEUS which is a 'standard' 100 meter long x-ray telescope, but instead of physically connecting lens and focal plain it consists of 2 spacecraft that are virtually connected by a system that measures the mutual positions.
I had the pleasure of getting a tour on the JPL campus a few years ago, which to me seemed like a place where they build nothing else than super-cool over-engineered testbeds just for fun. I probably saw some early version of this testbed. They had a large hall with a smooth floor over which the 'satellites' could slide on air-bearings (3 degrees of freedom), on which a vertical piston was mounted (1 DOF) and finally an over-sized ball-air-bearing for the remaining 2 tilt DOFs. This provides a platform that can move freely in all degrees of freedom, which would carry a satellite-simulator consisting of small air-jets and a shitload of sensors to do the 'formation flying'. Very impressive, even if it was not operational at the time. If ESA would be starting now with their testbed, they would trail NASA by at least 5 years. Lets hope they have been doing something in the meantime.
P.S. I bet you're a Pom.
Wrong guess. It was my ancestors that first spotted and mapped Australia, but saw that it was such a godforsaken place that they happily left it for the Brits.
While they're at it, could those EU guys please teach the Ozzies how to properly pronounce the different types of grapes. While I was down there, it took me a while to understand that kepsev (pronounced with nasal Texan accent) means Cabernet Sauvignon ...
Correct me if I am wrong, but I doubt that tidal forces play any role at all for Juno. Tidal forces are caused by the difference of gravity over the extend of an object, which is only significant for planets and moons which have sizes on the order of thousands of kilometers, compared to satellites with a diameter of 10 meters. According to the last formula found here, the tidal force is roughly a fraction (diameter / orbit height) of the gravitational force itself. A satellite of 10 meters orbiting at the same height above Jupiter as Io (known for its tidal induces volcanoes), will thus experience just a few millionths of the force experienced by Io.
The forum mentions a movie about the Evoluon that shows a few seconds of the machine. Start watching at 7:00. They also cite some article in a Dutch newspaper that says one of the machines has been spotted in Quebec (might be the exhibition mentioned by the OP). Finally, someone claims that around 1980 they had such a machine on display at the faculty of Medical Biological Physics (?) at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam, in the corridor where the lab courses where taught.
I disagree very strongly with Octave being a better alternative. Octave is just an open source matlab clone, so if all you want is to run your old scripts with only minor modifications and without paying anyone, octave might be the way to go. Other than that, plotting in Octave sucks pretty hard, you basically have to learn Gnuplot from scratch. Even matlab itself is not a star in plotting, after 15+ years you still have to be a guru to get publication-style plots, but it is already miles better than octave. Python+Numpy+Scipy+Matplotlib, however, does not try to be a clone, but it tries to become something better than Matlab. As a start, Python is a real OO programming language by itself with an enormous toolbox that is ready to do everything from easy string manipulation to whole web-frameworks in a very elegant way. Matlab was built for doing linear algebra and using it to do any real programming just feels awkward, I guess octave is similar in that sense. The matrix stuff was bolted onto python later with Numpy, so it is missing a tiny bit of specialized syntax found in matlab/octave, but other than that you can do exactly the same in both languages. Numpy even has some cool stuff like singleton expansion by default, which is not found in matlab. The big advantage Matlab still has over python is in the toolboxes, but this will change in the next few years as Scipy matures. The plotting done with Matplotlib, finally, works very well and is already better than matlab on some points, like making anti-aliased plots without any effort.
It might not be around as long as FITS, but isn't DjVu more suited for the digitization of manuscripts? If I understand it correctly, DjVu was designed for this job, while FITS was designed for astronomical data, not exactly the same. Not that I am an expert ...
Here in Italy, they tend to always ask for your social security number (when you buy a sim-card or request an ADSL line) or ask for ID (when visiting an internet bar), so for simple peasants like you and me, the police/intelligence agency/Berlusconi should be able to get your personal details with a simple database lookup. I assume that 'Ndrangheta bosses, however, should have enough connections to get all the connections they want using a fake IDs. I also believe that as a mafia boss, you cannot count on any privacy law for not being triangulated, so I guess that was the case here.
If I understand it correctly, Dragon should not be docking automatically to the station. Instead, it will simply fly to and hover at some distance next to the station, from were it can be picked up and docked using the robotic arm. This will still require very strict rating of its control system, but the requirements on position accuracy should not be as strict as with docking. I guess the main advantage of this is that you don't need a complicated docking mechanism like the Russian ball-and-stick system, but just the passive side of a common berthing mechanism. Disadvantage is obviously that you need a working robot arm to dock and (more critical in case of emergency) undock.
You might be right that super-massive black holes emit at frequencies that are even too low for LISA, for which the pulsar timing would help. Neutron star binaries, however, should emit up to a few hundred Hz, so they should be detectable with ground-based detectors. This leaves the normal black holes for LISA, so these three different methods nicely complement each other.
If your detector is sensitive enough to observe lots of galaxies at the same time, you will be able to observe a few at the final stage of the inspiral. The system looses energy due to gravitational waves, thus the distance between the two objects will decrease and the rotation frequency will increase up to the point that they merge. It is this final stage that we want to detect, which the gravitational waves are sent with higher frequency and intensity.
They do give a merger rate per galaxy in the introduction of the article. If you combine that with a density of galaxies and the sensitivity of your detector, this should give you a rate of observable events. In the final paragraph they confirm my suspicion that this coalescing SMBHs are LISA's business and that their observations should give an upper limit to the detection rate. I don't know if this is good or bad news, that depends on the earlier predictions.
Great, the collision of these things is exactly the kind of event we need for detecting gravitational waves. These kind of 'inspirals' emit very distinct pattern, which can be retrieved very efficiently from the noise with matched filter banks. The higher the mass, the lower the frequency of this 'chirped' signal, so it is probable that these colliding super-massive black-holes cannot be detected with the ground-based kilometer long observatories, which are measuring right now. This is probably more something for the space-based LISA mission, which can probe much lower frequencies since it has a base-line of millions of kilometers.
Probably the best small-scale example of how violent this event would have been is given by the flooding of an open-air mine in Malaysia. The rocks separating the mine from the sea became unstable and collapsed, filling the whole thing in minute or so: video!