This article in Spacedaily does a good job of explaining why Bush's costs are both too much and too little to do what he wants. I love the quote:
This is what John Pike means when he says that the budget "won't even pay for the artwork."
(Pike is exaggerating the situation by a factor of about 2. I am not aware of any single NASA program costing more than about $3B that produced only artist's concepts. X-30/NASP cost about $7.5B in current dollars, and part of one X-30 fuel tank was actually fabricated.)
If $3B can manage to pay off consultants to think deep thoughts about a project and an artist to draw up a rendering then $1T isn't really that much in the world of gov't finance, high payed consultants and contractors used to dealing with the military where any price goes. It would be interesting to see what an X-Prize sized budget passed 100km orbit would look like.
...While we are in no danger this time, it is good to know NASA's LINEAR guys are on the job, for when that Death Star-sized object pays us a visit.
The heading doesn't say the current 100 ft object is Death Star-sized. It says the author is glad LINEAR will be on the job for the time when one that large comes by.
Well, if they give us 10-20 years' warning (which is not at all absurd, given that these rocks are not under power and thus utterly predictable) we can mount an expedition to deflect the thing, crush it to small pieces that shouldn't cause serious trouble, or just mine it out of existence.
Hmm, except that this one was detected Monday. 3 days notice isn't enough to do anything. Larger ones should be detected earlier but how much earlier?
2) No. Big bang is still the best bet and universe definitely appears to be finite (which doesn't mean there is a boundary or edge, just that it doesn't go on forever).
3) Yes, space curves back on itself. That is the only way to have a boundless finite universe.
I remember the slatted headrests -- pretty sure they were in the '76, '81 and '82 Volvos but even in 240s I think they disappeared in the late models. They had covers you could remove. The slats were so you could see them while doing shoulder checks but they would allow pass-thru as well. Sadly, they have long left the Volvos at least as sold in north america. Solid, mostly leather covered, headrests are what you get now though the advanced whiplash protection sounds good.
Overall, people hate maintenance. They don't want to check the fluids in their car, they don't want to clean out the lint trap in the dryer, they certainly don't want to replace the furnace filter and humidifier pad. Hackers and hotrodders aside, most don't want to open their computer cases or car hoods. They want to turn them on and use them. Not just women, most everyone but modders really would like something they can just use out of the box forever.
Manufacturers of course, would like one-day throw-away tablet PCs to read the newspaper and disposable cars (if they haven't provided them to us already). But people would like something that lasts a long time and doesn't require them to own any tools or roll up their sleeves if possible.
I'm a man and wore a ponytail for about 8 years or so and I can say that it did get in the way a little when putting my head against the headrest -- a topknot worked fine but doesn't suit me most of the time... Most cars don't put your head close enough to the headrest that this matters (or that they actually prevent whiplash) but in cars like Volvos where they are close, it does matter.
This assumes that we are using current techniques to farm the corn and ferment and distill it. If the farm machinery can use biodiesel instead of fossil diesel then that part is taken out. If the the still can be heated using solar heating (direct solar heating, not using inefficient solar cells), some use of wind, etc. then it may be possible to make the equation go positive for us.
As long as the input is fossil fuels or ethanol or hydrogen (perpetual motion machine, anyone?), efficiency means we'll come out behind. As plants learned long ago, you need outside input of power for it to be worthwhile which is why some researchers are looking at bacterial catylists among other things to split out the hydrogen from water. Plants left hydrogen behind a long time ago so perhaps we're going down a dead end.
It is not considered a miracle but it is considered amazing. It is hard enough to debug things sitting on your desk, harder to debug someone else's problem over the phone and worse from orbit but imagine debugging a problem with 10 minutes of light delay! And there is only one computer on that rover so they were using the buggy computer to recover; not an easy task. In the end it turned out to be flawed file management code in the flash memory; the daily TODO list was kept in flash and it couldn't find it so it panicked and booted over and over, like a home computer with corrupted config/startup files. Not an easy thing to debug from millions of miles away.
Why is there no possibility of a manned mission to L2? Some people at least are thinking about it. Why not have a station out there? Relatively stable orbit anyways.
Safety may be the main reason but it was always risky to do work in space. Perhaps we understand the risk better now and have rethought our risk:reward ratio. Comments on other points:
The Hubble wasn't state of the art when it was launched. Nothing launched is state of the art; by the time it is designed and built with space-hardened parts, it is already out of date, not to mention the actual delay involved in launching and on-orbit activation.
Hubble was flawed when it was launched. Luckily there was a servicing mission or it would have been a practically useless telescope, though today we have deconvolution software which goes a long way toward correcting this and other optical flaws, whether or not you know how it is flawed or camera is moving, etc.
While adaptive optics can compensate for the atmosphere in some ways it cannot compensate in all ways; there are limitations and more limitations, even of multi-conjugate AO. Telescopes in orbit or on the Moon will always have some advantages.
Beagle distracted them for a while but it looks like they've gotten to Spirit now. Landing Opportunity on the other side of the planet was a masterstroke. Let's hope they only have a limited supply of space-probe destroyers and it takes them a while to get over there...
Some say we should worry more about incoming asteroids wiping out all life on earth which would mean we should establish human colonies on the Moon, Mars and elsewhere to hedge our bets against such an occurance (could return to repopulate the planet after a time). Others say earth is heading for environmental disaster and the solution might be to leave it for lifeless places and artificial environments where we can do no harm. Others yet want us to think about overpopulation which could be solved by spreading out to other planets and while others say that sociopolitical causes are the main of hunger today, there is a limit to the number of people that can live here.
Why did people come to the New World, not just in Columbus' time but earlier from Asia? Why did they send their canoes to Pacific islands? The time will come that our reasons will match theirs. Today the reasons are not yet there and the will is only shared by a few but the reasons will likely become more apparent and the population more willing with time.
It's like tires. When you have a blow-out, it is easy to see but a slow leak may go undetected for weeks until it overheats on that long trim to the relatives place for the holidays.
dust removal -- static charge?
on
Spirit Rolls on Mars
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I wonder if there might be some way to build up a charge to clean them off? Shaking or tilting probably wouldn't work -- look at the crap that gets stuck on your car over time and it doesn't come off at over 100km/h.
I've read that some sort of solar panel wipers or brushes wouldn't work as they'd scratch the surface, allowing less light to reach it.
The plastic film idea reminds me of the removable visor strips racecar drivers have on their helmets. Sounds like a good one. Patent? Boo, hiss;-)
The Mars Polar Lander most likely crashed in 1998 so I think it was wise of them to be cautious and realistic about their chances this time. They sent two to improve their chances of getting one down. They went with stuff that worked in 1996 on Pathfinder, airbags, instead of lander legs which proved troublesome. More importantly, they included telemetry on the way down which is more expensive but which means you aren't left with such a guessing game if there is a failure. You at least have a clue how far it got, unlike the Beagle which hasn't been heard from since it left its mother craft; we have no idea whether its chute opened or if it was eaten by a space-probe eating monster. I applaud NASA for being more careful this time and for putting the equivalent of some printfs in there to make sure it wasn't going to slip away quietly this year.
A British pilot forced by bad weather to abandon her attempt to fly around the world over both poles said today that an Australian aviator stranded at a research station on the Antarctic coast could use fuel she had stored there.
The offer by Polly Vacher ended a diplomatic spat between Australia and its two closest allies, the United States and New Zealand, who had refused to refuel Jon Johanson's homemade plane.
How do we know these guys aren't just making this all up???
I seriously suggest you take a course on the philosophy of science. Not ethics of science, that's interesting but not the same. I took it out of interest and it ended up being the most important course I took. The philosophy of science teaches you how we can know if we know what we know, how we can know it and why we can know it works better than junk like Astrology. Having to disprove astrology is harder than it sounds.
If you don't think you need a course guided by a professor (guidance is advised), check out these references. In the end you'll find that we cannot say for certain that we know anything but that we exist (existentialism, see a lexicon.
VGA under DOS Re:Ah... those were the days :-)
on
Video Card History
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· Score: 1
[*] The original 16-bit color mode of the EGA cards and VGA cards must have been designed by somebody who was high on crack. You can't get at the pixel memory without setting up a bewildering array of registers that control mandatory and mostly non-useful logic operations on your bits. The memory is accessed as 4 independent planes, so you have to unnaturally slice every pixel up into individual bits and have a PhD in boolean logic to get them on the screen as you intended. It easily could take a newbie a whole day of reading manuals and hacking before they could get a single white dot on the screen.
Ah, yes. I remember it well. When I first wrote a VGA device driver for the Coherent operating system (Mark Williams Company's inexpensive UNIX knockoff that was killed by free Linux) as a prelude to porting the Bell Labs MGR Windowing system, I was jumping for joy when I saw monochrome outlines of halloween ghosts on the streen. Silly little white ghost outlines on the screen and I felt an immense sense of triumph. Monochrome was the easy part of course, just one plane. What a horrible video mode.
Of course, in a way it wasn't the graphics card's fault that it was so horrible to access its memory. Comes down to the "640K ought to be enough for anybody." Bill Gates quote. With only 1MB of accessible address space, where do you put the video buffer? Later cards would overlay their buffer in extended memory and with some motherboards, that RAM was lost from use, not remappable elsewhere.
I don't know if it was the actual cause (certainly might have been) but buying them seemed to distract the company for long enough for NVidia to take over.
My first accelerated gaming card was a Quantum 3D Obsidian 100SB which was a
funny sort of Voodoo1.5 pass-through card (never saw another one). I also had a
horrible Virge3D card which was slow for everything, STB card, Cirrus Logic, Trident, you name it. I still run a Voodoo3 in m
y 200MMX system but haven't played a game on that one in AGES...
Anyone remember the 3DLabs Permedia cards? They never worked right for games (had missing geometry and texture for unsupported nodes)
but were one of the first and fastest serious accelerated OpenGL boards. They still appear to be in business but they are still professionally oriented, not game oriented.
On the one hand it's great that Michael is doing something many of us only dream of but if the engineers' worries come true then he might be able to take part in disasters on the ISS just like he did on Mir. Says it didn't put him off long-term space travel though and still wants to go to Mars. Good for him!
Turns out the Chinese actually got rocketry help from the same guy, Von Braun, that got the US and USSR started. Was in the US Army too, before being sent back to China for being called a communist. See this article as posted here in the Toronto Star.
Slashdot Mirror
This article in Spacedaily does a good job of explaining why Bush's costs are both too much and too little to do what he wants. I love the quote:
If $3B can manage to pay off consultants to think deep thoughts about a project and an artist to draw up a rendering then $1T isn't really that much in the world of gov't finance, high payed consultants and contractors used to dealing with the military where any price goes. It would be interesting to see what an X-Prize sized budget passed 100km orbit would look like.
The heading doesn't say the current 100 ft object is Death Star-sized. It says the author is glad LINEAR will be on the job for the time when one that large comes by.
Hmm, except that this one was detected Monday. 3 days notice isn't enough to do anything. Larger ones should be detected earlier but how much earlier?
1) quite possibly. Jury is still out.
2) No. Big bang is still the best bet and universe definitely appears to be finite (which doesn't mean there is a boundary or edge, just that it doesn't go on forever).
3) Yes, space curves back on itself. That is the only way to have a boundless finite universe.
References:
Physics 110 cosmology FAQ
No Edge, No Centre
Will better images ever show the edge of the universe?
How old is the universe? Finite or infinite? Have an edge?
I remember the slatted headrests -- pretty sure they were in the '76, '81 and '82 Volvos but even in 240s I think they disappeared in the late models. They had covers you could remove. The slats were so you could see them while doing shoulder checks but they would allow pass-thru as well. Sadly, they have long left the Volvos at least as sold in north america. Solid, mostly leather covered, headrests are what you get now though the advanced whiplash protection sounds good.
Kids are crawling, walking, talking, oozing mess machines so parents could sure use washable seat covers. Vinyl seats were good for some things!
Overall, people hate maintenance. They don't want to check the fluids in their car, they don't want to clean out the lint trap in the dryer, they certainly don't want to replace the furnace filter and humidifier pad. Hackers and hotrodders aside, most don't want to open their computer cases or car hoods. They want to turn them on and use them. Not just women, most everyone but modders really would like something they can just use out of the box forever.
Manufacturers of course, would like one-day throw-away tablet PCs to read the newspaper and disposable cars (if they haven't provided them to us already). But people would like something that lasts a long time and doesn't require them to own any tools or roll up their sleeves if possible.
I'm a man and wore a ponytail for about 8 years or so and I can say that it did get in the way a little when putting my head against the headrest -- a topknot worked fine but doesn't suit me most of the time... Most cars don't put your head close enough to the headrest that this matters (or that they actually prevent whiplash) but in cars like Volvos where they are close, it does matter.
This assumes that we are using current techniques to farm the corn and ferment and distill it. If the farm machinery can use biodiesel instead of fossil diesel then that part is taken out. If the the still can be heated using solar heating (direct solar heating, not using inefficient solar cells), some use of wind, etc. then it may be possible to make the equation go positive for us.
As long as the input is fossil fuels or ethanol or hydrogen (perpetual motion machine, anyone?), efficiency means we'll come out behind. As plants learned long ago, you need outside input of power for it to be worthwhile which is why some researchers are looking at bacterial catylists among other things to split out the hydrogen from water. Plants left hydrogen behind a long time ago so perhaps we're going down a dead end.
It is not considered a miracle but it is considered amazing. It is hard enough to debug things sitting on your desk, harder to debug someone else's problem over the phone and worse from orbit but imagine debugging a problem with 10 minutes of light delay! And there is only one computer on that rover so they were using the buggy computer to recover; not an easy task. In the end it turned out to be flawed file management code in the flash memory; the daily TODO list was kept in flash and it couldn't find it so it panicked and booted over and over, like a home computer with corrupted config/startup files. Not an easy thing to debug from millions of miles away.
Why is there no possibility of a manned mission to L2? Some people at least are thinking about it. Why not have a station out there? Relatively stable orbit anyways.
Safety may be the main reason but it was always risky to do work in space. Perhaps we understand the risk better now and have rethought our risk:reward ratio. Comments on other points:
The Hubble wasn't state of the art when it was launched. Nothing launched is state of the art; by the time it is designed and built with space-hardened parts, it is already out of date, not to mention the actual delay involved in launching and on-orbit activation.
Hubble was flawed when it was launched. Luckily there was a servicing mission or it would have been a practically useless telescope, though today we have deconvolution software which goes a long way toward correcting this and other optical flaws, whether or not you know how it is flawed or camera is moving, etc.
While adaptive optics can compensate for the atmosphere in some ways it cannot compensate in all ways; there are limitations and more limitations, even of multi-conjugate AO. Telescopes in orbit or on the Moon will always have some advantages.
Ugly bags of mostly water!
Beagle distracted them for a while but it looks like they've gotten to Spirit now. Landing Opportunity on the other side of the planet was a masterstroke. Let's hope they only have a limited supply of space-probe destroyers and it takes them a while to get over there...
Some say we should worry more about incoming asteroids wiping out all life on earth which would mean we should establish human colonies on the Moon, Mars and elsewhere to hedge our bets against such an occurance (could return to repopulate the planet after a time). Others say earth is heading for environmental disaster and the solution might be to leave it for lifeless places and artificial environments where we can do no harm. Others yet want us to think about overpopulation which could be solved by spreading out to other planets and while others say that sociopolitical causes are the main of hunger today, there is a limit to the number of people that can live here.
Why did people come to the New World, not just in Columbus' time but earlier from Asia? Why did they send their canoes to Pacific islands? The time will come that our reasons will match theirs. Today the reasons are not yet there and the will is only shared by a few but the reasons will likely become more apparent and the population more willing with time.
When the cargo ship crashed into Mir while testing automated docking routines, Michael Foale's ears popped from the falling air pressure. Leaks are much easier to find with rushing air and popping ears.
It's like tires. When you have a blow-out, it is easy to see but a slow leak may go undetected for weeks until it overheats on that long trim to the relatives place for the holidays.
I wonder if there might be some way to build up a charge to clean them off? Shaking or tilting probably wouldn't work -- look at the crap that gets stuck on your car over time and it doesn't come off at over 100km/h.
I've read that some sort of solar panel wipers or brushes wouldn't work as they'd scratch the surface, allowing less light to reach it.
The plastic film idea reminds me of the removable visor strips racecar drivers have on their helmets. Sounds like a good one. Patent? Boo, hiss ;-)
Well, Canadians also spell it with a 'u' so there are some of us on the left side of the 'pond' who spell it colour.
The Mars Polar Lander most likely crashed in 1998 so I think it was wise of them to be cautious and realistic about their chances this time. They sent two to improve their chances of getting one down. They went with stuff that worked in 1996 on Pathfinder, airbags, instead of lander legs which proved troublesome. More importantly, they included telemetry on the way down which is more expensive but which means you aren't left with such a guessing game if there is a failure. You at least have a clue how far it got, unlike the Beagle which hasn't been heard from since it left its mother craft; we have no idea whether its chute opened or if it was eaten by a space-probe eating monster. I applaud NASA for being more careful this time and for putting the equivalent of some printfs in there to make sure it wasn't going to slip away quietly this year.
See this Toronto Star article for the conclusion to this story:
I seriously suggest you take a course on the philosophy of science. Not ethics of science, that's interesting but not the same. I took it out of interest and it ended up being the most important course I took. The philosophy of science teaches you how we can know if we know what we know, how we can know it and why we can know it works better than junk like Astrology. Having to disprove astrology is harder than it sounds.
If you don't think you need a course guided by a professor (guidance is advised), check out these references. In the end you'll find that we cannot say for certain that we know anything but that we exist (existentialism, see a lexicon.
Ah, yes. I remember it well. When I first wrote a VGA device driver for the Coherent operating system (Mark Williams Company's inexpensive UNIX knockoff that was killed by free Linux) as a prelude to porting the Bell Labs MGR Windowing system, I was jumping for joy when I saw monochrome outlines of halloween ghosts on the streen. Silly little white ghost outlines on the screen and I felt an immense sense of triumph. Monochrome was the easy part of course, just one plane. What a horrible video mode.
Of course, in a way it wasn't the graphics card's fault that it was so horrible to access its memory. Comes down to the "640K ought to be enough for anybody." Bill Gates quote. With only 1MB of accessible address space, where do you put the video buffer? Later cards would overlay their buffer in extended memory and with some motherboards, that RAM was lost from use, not remappable elsewhere.
I don't know if it was the actual cause (certainly might have been) but buying them seemed to distract the company for long enough for NVidia to take over.
My first accelerated gaming card was a Quantum 3D Obsidian 100SB which was a funny sort of Voodoo1.5 pass-through card (never saw another one). I also had a horrible Virge3D card which was slow for everything, STB card, Cirrus Logic, Trident, you name it. I still run a Voodoo3 in m y 200MMX system but haven't played a game on that one in AGES...
Anyone remember the 3DLabs Permedia cards? They never worked right for games (had missing geometry and texture for unsupported nodes) but were one of the first and fastest serious accelerated OpenGL boards. They still appear to be in business but they are still professionally oriented, not game oriented.
On the one hand it's great that Michael is doing something many of us only dream of but if the engineers' worries come true then he might be able to take part in disasters on the ISS just like he did on Mir. Says it didn't put him off long-term space travel though and still wants to go to Mars. Good for him!
Turns out the Chinese actually got rocketry help from the same guy, Von Braun, that got the US and USSR started. Was in the US Army too, before being sent back to China for being called a communist. See this article as posted here in the Toronto Star.