Usually specific impulse is given in units of seconds, but this is an archaic convention - it's really velocity (they divide by the acceleration of gravity at ea level to get seconds).
Thank you for that simple but insightful bit of information. I regret I have no moderation points to give you.
I've never really understood "rocket science" even though I still remember the mechanics and physics I learned in college. Is there a good website that explains the calculations, and especially any more unobvious terms such as "seconds of specific impulse"?
The original tagline joke was "How do you accelerate a Macintosh?" and of course had the same answer.
Windows 3.x was floating on MS-DOS at the time, and Windows was started by typing win at the DOS prompt. I often said at the time: "I keep typing win but I keep losing..."
Isn't it about time Slashdot started asking its reviewers if they have any affiliation with the product they are touting?
I'm sure I read in the FAQ or somewhere that that's what WE (those who post comments) are for, to uncover all these good facts affecting the ethical issues in stories. The editor(s) accept stories mainly on their sense of them being "interesting" as well as providing a "balanced diet" of stories for the day. There's no promise that the food isn't poisoned...
But this gives me a chance to ask a Windows question...
I think you'll find that there is more to being a scientist than publishing a good paper.
I perhaps agree, but I have the impression that "publishing good papers" is the key to a scientist having a good career.
Aren't papers the main output of scientists, similar to the tagline "A Mathematician is a device which converts coffee into theorems"?
I really want to believe that "there is more to being a scientist than publishing a good paper" but I'm having a hard time thinking of what that "more" is. Rightly or wrongly, research and academia encourage this with their "publish or perish" attitude.
ISTR in the last few days banner ads that just say something like "URL not found" - I forget if it was on slashdot or where, but I was thinking how bandwidth was saved by not sending me a banner pic I don't care about.
Heart rate monitors have become essential for training in endurance atheletic events, as the pulse rate tells almost exactly how hard the heart and the rest of the body are working. Does this turbine have a tachometer?
Seriously, I wonder how this thing varies blood flow with varying body activity. After R'ingTFA, I see that it's meant to assist a weak heart, not replace it, so now I wonder why there's no pulse unless the weak heart is virtually dead.
Obviously (if you RTFA) these are meant for people who are expected to die soon from heart failure and have little or no other hope. But I still wonder if it varies blood flow speed with varying activity, and this would appear to be a concern with any artificial heart or similar device. Just standing takes more energy than sitting. The article says nothing about that.
I don't think there's anything that directly depends on a pulse, but the pulse causes the blood pressure to rise and fall, increasing and decreasing the pressure in the arteries (and much less so in the veins), and this variation in pressure might do something (either positive or negative) that a constant (short-term) blood pressure doesn't.
I need to write my Patent Rant (the short-short version is patents are just trading cards that large companies collect so they have enough IP that they can cross-license rather than ending up in the embarrasing situation of having to pay royalties for infringing on a competitor's patent), but about Microsoft specifically:
This looks like a publicity campaign to associate Microsoft with inventiveness
"Inventiveness" sounds a lot like "innovation," which has been a Microsoft buzzword for many years. I recall Bill Gates using the word several times, perhaps from the speech when he plugged in a USB scanner into a running machine, causing Win98 to crash.
There was an NPR interview about three years ago with a few young, 20-something Microsoft employees. They all said how Microsoft was such a wonderfully innovative comoany, and how happy they were to be a part of a company that innovates so much... I swear I could SEE the glassy-eyed zombies talking on the radio [chanting "Innovate... innovate... innovate...]. NOBODY talks in such glowing terms about an employer unless...
Microsoft isn't just a large "innovative" company, it is quite probably a cult (I say that in the negative, pejorative sense), and should be listed here along with Amway under "Para-Religious Movements": http://religiousmovements.lib.virginia.edu/profile s/listalpha.htm
The hell of it is that (according to Clark Howard), cell phones are still rather expensive items, and what they "sell" the phones for doesn't even cover their cost - the remaining phone cost is payed for out of the monthy service fees. "Selling" the phone at under-cost prices along with the service undermines what people think they should sell for, and they think they're getting a "good deal" when they buy the phone through "this" service provider.
I agree, selling the phone separate from the service would offer more choices for consumers, but goes against what the providers' marketing plans. Phone companies were forced to provide number portability by the US Congress passing a law, and that may be what it takes to make the phones separate from the services.
You see all these people working on these satellites wearing protective clothing, not to protect the people but to protect the equipment.
Often it's to protect both the people and the equipment from each other. You may recall the "bad day" a year or rwo ago when a 200 million dollar sattelite under construction fell over (because someone took the platform mounting bolts to use in another project without documenting the removal, and later when they tilted the platform...). Some of the pictures I saw showed yellow tape around it to keep people out, as there was fear that some of the sealed gases would leak from damaged tanks.
False dichotomy. One could opt not to put any flag there.
I'm hopeful that (more) future spacecraft will have bold company logos on them instead of national flags. THAT would get rid of this silly flag debate.:)
Isn't pride one of the seven deadly sins?
Yes, but not everyone has Christian beliefs or has a negative view of pride in one's accomplishments.
I shoulda previewed and done plain old text so my formatting would have stayed, but also it's CMI (Computer Memories, Inc), not CNI, which made spinning platters for IBM AT's that sometimes stored data...
This would perhaps be good for an Ask Slashdot question, but it fits here. I'd rather have a more reliable drive than a drive with a longer warranty.
My only drive failure in the last decades was a Maxtor 60gig. Fortunately, drives don't fail often, but that also prevents one from getting a good statistical 'feel' for what brands are more reliable than others.
Is there a site with reliability/failure data on drives? I haven't kept up with PC mags and scuttlebutt this century - The last I remember hearing something about hard drive reliability (or rather lack thereof) was CNI in IBM AT's.
Not really, but I was a member in Lilburn, GA for a year, where six recumbent bikes have these touchscreen net terminals by NetPulse. They of course weren't good by any standard, but were usable enough to read slashdot and most anything online except.pdf documents.
As I understand it, no, one doesn't. I've heard, on a bookselling forum, of ASCAP and/or BMI lawyers going around to indepedent (and presumably chain) bookstores doing the same get-a-license-or-pay-a-fine thing. One solution (not neccesarily mentioned by the lawyers) was to change to the classical station.
You must be getting ringtones off "pirate" sites. I understood that you can buy ringtones from your phone service provider's website (and that they were making substantial money off this), and it includes royalties that are paid to the RIAA, which then goes to pay for the creative efforts of... lawyers.
Reminds me of the policemen who used a collander and a copy machine (with a "preset message" on the window) on a suspect, pretending these items were a lie detector. When they asked "Did you do the crime" the suspect said "NO" and one cop pushed the [copy] button and the machine spat out a sheet of paper that said "He's lying." The suspect immediately confessed.
For some reason, copying and pasting your URL wasn't working, but this link works: http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/graphics/Aad 4_sm.jpg Seeing that there are two people apparently cleaning up around an incredibly large human torso skeleton (one person is standing next to the skull, which by proportion would be about six feet in diameter), I would say that either the photo is fake or the human skeleton is fake (as in not a real skeleton, but manufactured for the photo).
This link: http://www.r50rd.co.uk/research/internal/v2i/engin/ was floating around a few newsgroups last year, showing videos of a robot with fairly amazing capabilities. Here's the Usenet discussion (comp.robotics.misc, "Robot built from a Mini Cooper?") where I first saw it:
As I (posting as "Ben Bradley" [should I go ahead and put my real name in my profile now?]) say in my posts, the videos appeared quite impressive at first viewing, but were easy enough to see the problems and deconstruct upon repeated viewings with a critical eye.
The point being that these algorithms for detecting fakes may indeed work well, but I don't see them as being a monumental thing that "We Are Now Able To Detect Faked Photographs" but rather an incremental thing, that uses a computer to verify what we can already find out with a little probing and [knowledgable!] common sense.
... the Sigularity being transhumanism's (Vinge's?) word for the time when a man-made AI entity exceeds the intelligence of any human. As unlikely as I think THAT is, it seems more likely that the first "alien" intelligence we meet will be one we create rather than one from outer space... or from deep in the ocean or in the Earth's core or wheverever an alleged ETI thing is hanging out.
If it were inside the Earth, it would be an ITI (Infra-Terrestial Intelligence), wouldn't it?
Slashdot Mirror
How are you going to emulate a 5.25 inch drive to read old disks?
You can fold over an old 8-inch floppy disk and shove it into a modern 5 1/4" drive, but it still won't read it.
Usually specific impulse is given in units of seconds, but this is an archaic convention - it's really velocity (they divide by the acceleration of gravity at ea level to get seconds).
Thank you for that simple but insightful bit of information. I regret I have no moderation points to give you.
I've never really understood "rocket science" even though I still remember the mechanics and physics I learned in college. Is there a good website that explains the calculations, and especially any more unobvious terms such as "seconds of specific impulse"?
"How do you accelerate a Windows computer?"
"At 9.8 meters per second."
The original tagline joke was "How do you accelerate a Macintosh?" and of course had the same answer.
Windows 3.x was floating on MS-DOS at the time, and Windows was started by typing win at the DOS prompt. I often said at the time:
"I keep typing win but I keep losing..."
Isn't it about time Slashdot started asking its reviewers if they have any affiliation with the product they are touting?
I'm sure I read in the FAQ or somewhere that that's what WE (those who post comments) are for, to uncover all these good facts affecting the ethical issues in stories. The editor(s) accept stories mainly on their sense of them being "interesting" as well as providing a "balanced diet" of stories for the day. There's no promise that the food isn't poisoned...
But this gives me a chance to ask a Windows question...
I think you'll find that there is more to being a scientist than publishing a good paper.
I perhaps agree, but I have the impression that "publishing good papers" is the key to a scientist having a good career.
Aren't papers the main output of scientists, similar to the tagline "A Mathematician is a device which converts coffee into theorems"?
I really want to believe that "there is more to being a scientist than publishing a good paper" but I'm having a hard time thinking of what that "more" is. Rightly or wrongly, research and academia encourage this with their "publish or perish" attitude.
ISTR in the last few days banner ads that just say something like "URL not found" - I forget if it was on slashdot or where, but I was thinking how bandwidth was saved by not sending me a banner pic I don't care about.
Heart rate monitors have become essential for training in endurance atheletic events, as the pulse rate tells almost exactly how hard the heart and the rest of the body are working. Does this turbine have a tachometer?
Seriously, I wonder how this thing varies blood flow with varying body activity. After R'ingTFA, I see that it's meant to assist a weak heart, not replace it, so now I wonder why there's no pulse unless the weak heart is virtually dead.
Obviously (if you RTFA) these are meant for people who are expected to die soon from heart failure and have little or no other hope. But I still wonder if it varies blood flow speed with varying activity, and this would appear to be a concern with any artificial heart or similar device. Just standing takes more energy than sitting. The article says nothing about that.
I don't think there's anything that directly depends on a pulse, but the pulse causes the blood pressure to rise and fall, increasing and decreasing the pressure in the arteries (and much less so in the veins), and this variation in pressure might do something (either positive or negative) that a constant (short-term) blood pressure doesn't.
I need to write my Patent Rant (the short-short version is patents are just trading cards that large companies collect so they have enough IP that they can cross-license rather than ending up in the embarrasing situation of having to pay royalties for infringing on a competitor's patent), but about Microsoft specifically:
... innovate ... innovate ...]. NOBODY talks in such glowing terms about an employer unless ...
e s/listalpha.htm
This looks like a publicity campaign to associate Microsoft with inventiveness
"Inventiveness" sounds a lot like "innovation," which has been a Microsoft buzzword for many years. I recall Bill Gates using the word several times, perhaps from the speech when he plugged in a USB scanner into a running machine, causing Win98 to crash.
There was an NPR interview about three years ago with a few young, 20-something Microsoft employees. They all said how Microsoft was such a wonderfully innovative comoany, and how happy they were to be a part of a company that innovates so much... I swear I could SEE the glassy-eyed zombies talking on the radio [chanting "Innovate
Microsoft isn't just a large "innovative" company, it is quite probably a cult (I say that in the negative, pejorative sense), and should be listed here along with Amway under "Para-Religious Movements":
http://religiousmovements.lib.virginia.edu/profil
How's that for radical discussion on Slashdot?
The hell of it is that (according to Clark Howard), cell phones are still rather expensive items, and what they "sell" the phones for doesn't even cover their cost - the remaining phone cost is payed for out of the monthy service fees. "Selling" the phone at under-cost prices along with the service undermines what people think they should sell for, and they think they're getting a "good deal" when they buy the phone through "this" service provider.
I agree, selling the phone separate from the service would offer more choices for consumers, but goes against what the providers' marketing plans. Phone companies were forced to provide number portability by the US Congress passing a law, and that may be what it takes to make the phones separate from the services.
You see all these people working on these satellites wearing protective clothing, not to protect the people but to protect the equipment.
Often it's to protect both the people and the equipment from each other. You may recall the "bad day" a year or rwo ago when a 200 million dollar sattelite under construction fell over (because someone took the platform mounting bolts to use in another project without documenting the removal, and later when they tilted the platform...). Some of the pictures I saw showed yellow tape around it to keep people out, as there was fear that some of the sealed gases would leak from damaged tanks.
False dichotomy. One could opt not to put any flag there.
:)
I'm hopeful that (more) future spacecraft will have bold company logos on them instead of national flags. THAT would get rid of this silly flag debate.
Isn't pride one of the seven deadly sins?
Yes, but not everyone has Christian beliefs or has a negative view of pride in one's accomplishments.
If you have 25,000 disk drives, one of them fails every five hours.
Replace "disk drives" with "vacuum tubes" and this could easily describe mainframe computers from about 40 to 50 years ago!
I shoulda previewed and done plain old text so my formatting would have stayed, but also it's CMI (Computer Memories, Inc), not CNI, which made spinning platters for IBM AT's that sometimes stored data...
This would perhaps be good for an Ask Slashdot question, but it fits here. I'd rather have a more reliable drive than a drive with a longer warranty. My only drive failure in the last decades was a Maxtor 60gig. Fortunately, drives don't fail often, but that also prevents one from getting a good statistical 'feel' for what brands are more reliable than others. Is there a site with reliability/failure data on drives? I haven't kept up with PC mags and scuttlebutt this century - The last I remember hearing something about hard drive reliability (or rather lack thereof) was CNI in IBM AT's.
Not really, but I was a member in Lilburn, GA for a year, where six recumbent bikes have these touchscreen net terminals by NetPulse. They of course weren't good by any standard, but were usable enough to read slashdot and most anything online except .pdf documents.
... to get your IP address.
As I understand it, no, one doesn't. I've heard, on a bookselling forum, of ASCAP and/or BMI lawyers going around to indepedent (and presumably chain) bookstores doing the same get-a-license-or-pay-a-fine thing. One solution (not neccesarily mentioned by the lawyers) was to change to the classical station.
You must be getting ringtones off "pirate" sites. I understood that you can buy ringtones from your phone service provider's website (and that they were making substantial money off this), and it includes royalties that are paid to the RIAA, which then goes to pay for the creative efforts of ... lawyers.
Reminds me of the policemen who used a collander and a copy machine (with a "preset message" on the window) on a suspect, pretending these items were a lie detector. When they asked "Did you do the crime" the suspect said "NO" and one cop pushed the [copy] button and the machine spat out a sheet of paper that said "He's lying." The suspect immediately confessed.
For some reason, copying and pasting your URL wasn't working, but this link works:d 4_sm.jpg
http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/graphics/Aa
Seeing that there are two people apparently cleaning up around an incredibly large human torso skeleton (one person is standing next to the skull, which by proportion would be about six feet in diameter), I would say that either the photo is fake or the human skeleton is fake (as in not a real skeleton, but manufactured for the photo).
This link: http://www.r50rd.co.uk/research/internal/v2i/engin / was floating around a few newsgroups last year, showing videos of a robot with fairly amazing capabilities. Here's the Usenet discussion (comp.robotics.misc, "Robot built from a Mini Cooper?") where I first saw it:
8 &c2coff=1&threadm=14f6fe8.0403090913.81e3f13%40pos ting.google.com&rnum=1&prev=/groups%3Fq%3Dmini%2Bc ooper%2B%2522Is%2Bthis%2Bfor%2Breal%2522%26hl%3Den %26lr%3D%26ie%3DUTF-8%26selm%3D14f6fe8.0403090913. 81e3f13%2540posting.google.com%26rnum%3D1
7 &tid=159
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-
As I (posting as "Ben Bradley" [should I go ahead and put my real name in my profile now?]) say in my posts, the videos appeared quite impressive at first viewing, but were easy enough to see the problems and deconstruct upon repeated viewings with a critical eye.
A search of earlier stories shows Slashdotters spotted the video's fakeries as well: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/03/09/22222
The point being that these algorithms for detecting fakes may indeed work well, but I don't see them as being a monumental thing that "We Are Now Able To Detect Faked Photographs" but rather an incremental thing, that uses a computer to verify what we can already find out with a little probing and [knowledgable!] common sense.
Very.
All you need is money.
They will ALLOW contact when they feel we are ready for it, or we force the issue by spreading out into space.
Well, then. Let's force the issue.
... the Sigularity being transhumanism's (Vinge's?) word for the time when a man-made AI entity exceeds the intelligence of any human. As unlikely as I think THAT is, it seems more likely that the first "alien" intelligence we meet will be one we create rather than one from outer space... or from deep in the ocean or in the Earth's core or wheverever an alleged ETI thing is hanging out.
If it were inside the Earth, it would be an ITI (Infra-Terrestial Intelligence), wouldn't it?