Interesting thought. The problem is (for now) that astronauts experience such rapid atrophying of muscles and damage to bones that they can't even stand up, let alone drive a paraglider or equivalent.
My question becomes, how near are we to having an RPV, let alone autonomous vehicle that can handle its own landings? Once we've got that, then the astronaut can just be a passenger in the pod while happy little solenoids drive the wing.
On the other hand, we could get Thinkgeek to develop a super-Bawls mixed with amphetimines and they'll be so hyped up they'll be strong enough to run the lines themselves.
All joking aside, I'm not sure that you're that far off base. Five more years of Moore's law with concurrent materials advancement and we're there.
Small, slow, ion-engine craft robots go out and bring asteroids back. When asteroids get near earth, the robots ferry the rocks to the station and use the remaining velocity to swing back out for the next round.
Robots are small, cheap, and built by the hundreds, designed to work by the same navigational rules as a school of fish so that the processing power of each is minimal and stable.
Metals processing is done initially on a small scale with a solar furnace melting the rock to plasma and shooting it past a set of magnets none too different from those in your CRT. The magnets separate the elements by mass and charge as decribed here.
Maybe in some cases, we should go to the rocks, as described here instead of bringing the rocks to us.
He bit, you bit, I bit, and little by little we eat away at the problem, neh?
Wasn't teflon developed to protect tubes used to process uranium?
Why, I'm so glad you asked. Teflon was first created by mistake by a researcher studying flourocarbon variants. The goal was fluids for refrigeration systems, not teflon. After a series of tests he found a strange waxy mass in the chamber. That was teflon.
It is worth noting that this is a perfect example of the sort of free-form experimentation allowed to proceed in an unplanned direction that NASA has proven so very bad at pursuing.
I just had a thought. Didn't Columbia have a building/program at the Canberra astronomy facility?
I wonder if their possible sudden need to spend time and money on that has any effect on their available budget for BS II.
The losing team could then vote one guy out of the biosphere.
I dunno. From what I've read about life in BS II when it's being run as a pseudo-closed system (constant stench, ever-less healthy and varied environment and diet, roaches and other bugs crawling on *everything*, clothes that never get truly clean, cohabitants who get more annoying all the time, petty regulations, constant noise, etc.), I'ld think that the losers would be voted to *stay in* the environment.
But then again, now that I look back at what I just wrote, the same description applies to most college dorms and I think that plenty of us would go back to that again if we had the excuse.
That's it! BioSphere Frat House! Replace half the plants with palm trees, mango trees, etc., get a bunch of random frat boys from next year's Spring Break crowd to sign up (while drunk, of course), stock the place with beer, porn, and only one bathroom. Tell 'em that they have to catch and roast suckling pigs for their protein, give them two outfits each while having an endless succession of sorority girls and swimsuit models hanging out and working right on the other side of the wall and lock 'em in.
See ya in a year, boys.
I hereby nominate the brothers of Zeta Beta Tau. Heh, heh, heh.
Hell, yes, there was tons of sloppy thinking and distorted claims when the original crew of sleazy whackos was running the joint.
Try to move past that.
Think of BSII as being like the performance car built for a drug dealer, captured, and sold off by the police. Do you then only use it to drive around at 30MPH because the original intent was sleazy/foolish or do you say, "I'm so lucky to have gotten this wonderful hunk of machinery and without having had to pay the outrageous cost of building it"?
Okay, so it has a sordid past. Bummer. Hallmark f*cking cards started out as mail fraud. 3M started out as a combination stock swindle/dud mining company. It's well past time to move the hell on from origins, start removing/replacing the more egregiously bad structural aspects, and find a productive use for what is still an astounding collection of resources.
As for the original purpose, the folks running the place now may be eager to suck it up to the "respectable" science establishment, but that is the only reason to deny the original intent of (admittedly, among other things) learning how to build a self-sustaining system.
The place was built in large part at the detailed instruction of a bunch of cultists not far above the Raelians on the rationality or honesty scale and these days Columbia, NASA, et al are eager to deny/downplay the origins of the place. Not to mention those aspects of the original plan that they consider "not real science"
As for ongoing work, well, yeah, "due to a lack of funding". Duh. Check the Biosphere site and you'll see that quite a lot more was going on quite recently. Something like fifteen colleges/univ/institutes had ongoing projects as of less then a year ago.
Personally, I think that part of this is a last-ditch attempt to get more money out of Bass and the local government. But mostly, I think it's a case of both genuine issues of less money at Columbia (though, funny, as somebody living within walking distance of their campus, I can say that they certainly *seem* to have plenty of money for things like construction when they *feel* like it) and a desire to wash their hands of something that clashes with the conservative, narrow-minded approach to research that has always hampered so much of academia. (Not that I have any personal bitterness about this at all, with almost everybody on both sides of my family in my parent's generation having gotten science PhDs, been disillusioned and seen enough academic bull sh*t to ensure that none of us in my generation (me and siblings/cousins) have chosen to continue that particular "family business".)
Face it folks, the first continuing program to research and be willing to publish about lunar/other planet colony engineering was done by a local chapter (Portland, OR) of L5 not because they were so stunningly brilliant (thought they were certainly very cool, smart, and dedicated) but because anybody in "legitimate" academia who publishes about such stuff takes their slim chances of tenure anywhere and chucks 'em out the door.
Look at what has happened to the Bass program at Yale. They took his twenty million, promised to back it up and tie it into their academic community, and are now waffling around trying to find excuses to keep the money but route around the mandate that came with it.
The short form: it's up to us DIY'ers. Good thing that techies make so much money. (or, in some cases, used to.)
Not that I should be succumbing to the temptation to get involved in such a silly gedankenexperiment, but . .. Imaging So, first of all, IIRC, LCDs of the sort this window uses work by having the charge change the liquid crystal's polarization. If polarization is synced with the separate sheet of polarizing material it is clear, if not, then it goes opaque. So let's say the user puts on polarized contacts. Left one way, right the other, and the sheet of polarized material is removed. Then you have a "phosphor" layer in the back (OLEDs?) and a layer of this stuff in the front. The two layers are synced so that the image is refreshed at 60Hz, with two images per set. Left, right, left, right. That is then matched with the front layer which is switching polarization at 60Hz as well. Horizontal, vertical. Horizontal, vertical. So there's your 3-D.
Now let's say that the user(s) is/are being tracked by the environment (little transponders in clothes like the ones used for motion capture). Concept Sound is ideally generated by having speaker elements built into the surfaces, with the surfaces broken up into a grid so that a sound can genuinely move from one place to another. The whole mess is wired up and driven as a phased array, where volume and frequency mix are set for each coordinate separately. Let's say a one foot grid unit, giving an "audio resolution" of one "pixel" per square foot. (Okay, so I'm working with English units instead of metric - shoot me.) Approach One could probably get away with reduced sound resolution in the floor and ceiling. And if we're going to talk about near-present tech setups then I'ld say make the floor of "environment module" tiles of about one foot square (assuming that the user(s) wear shoes) with each module having, in addition to a speaker driver, a thermoelectric unit to make panels able to get slightly colder or hotter, a low-freq. (say 10Hz to 200Hz) vibration generator, and an ability to skew slightly. Breakdown So, what is our gear for each tile? (Keep in mind that we're talking about buying enough gear for over four hundred tiles, so assume Jameco small wholesale order prices.) * cheap bass speaker- $2 * thermoelectric unit - $15 * cheap mid-range/tweeter speaker set - $4 * four heavy load, fine control solenoids (for skew) - 10 x 4 = $40
(Remember that solenoid travel is about one to three millimeters, max, while cycle time can be as slow as a tenth of a second.) * center post - $1 * ball joint for connection between center post and tile - $2
We can afford to use cheap delrin or whatever parts and just lubricate the hell out of them. Deflection is dinky, stress is all compressive, and maximum load (assuming jumping around) is what, a momentary seven or eight hundred pounds? * underlying frame of assorted wood, glue, nails - $6 * masonite or ply tile panel - $0.5 * doped and painted fabric flooring surface - $0.5
(Probably scotch-guarded or equiv. if left painted, not my problem if turned to imaging surface) * hunk o' cheap metal for placement between thermoelectric panel and tile underlayment - $0.1
(surely these would be bought surplus somewhere) * wiring harness, connectors, and assembly - $8
Hey, we're assuming graduate student labor here.
Then add, say, three thousand dollars for laying in the underlying framework that the whole thing sits on (let's say a grid of 2 x 6es).
So, what's the damage? About eighty bucks per tile. For a twenty by twenty foot chamber that means four hundred tiles with, say, twenty backups for a total cost of about thirty six thousand dollars. Less then many frats spend on a holiday float. Less then a big college party. If I were in charge we'ld be buying everything at surplus (perhaps here.) and could probably bring the whole floor in for fifteen to twenty thousand. Add about ten thousand for mistakes and development costs. Electrical Power usage per tile should be about five watts[1], all of which could be run at six or nine volts (so gotta use BIG gauge wire to deal with resistance issues), for a total running load of two thousand watts (and maybe a hundred more to drive hidden fans in the walls and ceiling[2]). Let's add another couple hundred bucks for a big ol' stepdown transformer to give us all those amps of six/nine volt current. Computation As for processing drain, well, assume thirty audio signals that just get routed around the room like sprites in an old video game. Bass/vibration and temp could each easily be one sixteen bit value. If somebody gets slick, all four solenoids could probably be one value as well, but let's assume one per solenoid. Think of it as a color video image of twenty by sixty pixels with a refresh of fifty times a second or less and it becomes obvious that the only real problem is converting that data to signals on four THOUSAND (common ground for the solenoids) wires.
Okay, now given all of this, let's say that the ceiling has no solenoids and a resolution of one tile per two square feet. The walls have no solenoids either but a one foot tile resolution. Then only have thermoelectric on one panel in ten (since heat moves mostly vertically so the implications of localized wall temps are only notable if you get really close).
So a sim handling everything but video would be using less processing power then a single PC running Doom and the whole system up to now adds up to about eighty thousand dollars.
So, what is the imaging cost? I dunno. Not my yob. I'm, after all a mech guy at heart. Final&Notes I just thought that I'ld take a few minutes to clarify what it is we're talking about here.
[1] Even more then most of this, this number has lots of handwaving in it. I suspect that solenoid usage will be weird in some way that I don't know enough to predict.
[2] Fans pushing in bits of breeze should make all sorts of weather/motion.etc. effects more convincing. Low-bandwidth, high touch. Maybe add one of those spiffy new aroma generators in each one. (I could mention stuff like aerosolized THC but I won't. Ooops! Too late, I did.)
Well, I stand by my earlier points (after all, so many others are happy to argue them for me), but looking again, I retract my final "I'm curious . .." flame. I'm (obviously) in a profoundly pissy mood today and I allowed my venom to outreach my reason.
Sorry.
Rustin
Well, that's the problem innit? There's just no reason to have hundreds of shuttles. Hell, we got 4 and they want to fly'em less, even tho' it saves little or no money. AFA tourism goes, is there really a market? A very small one, capable of paying the kind of $ it takes nowadays. Definitely not the kind of critical mass you need.
This, on a grander scale, is the same argument that happens a thousand times a year about bus routes. "We only do one unpredictable run every three hours or so in dirty, busses and nobody rides it so obviously a.)
there is no demand and b.) cost per passenger is huge".
If, as NASA does, you run a system at very low capacity (admittedly, in this case, under massive Congressional and contractors pressure), then only the most desperate will use it and cost per unit delivered will *ahem* soar. If, on the other hand, you scale up AND OPEN TO THE MARKET'S DEMANDS then costs go down, not just from linear economies of scale (like part prices going down) but from the sorts of exploring other options that happens when you're receptive to the customer who says "Is there any chance you could use X Widget to make my satellite take up less room in the bay and thereby charge me a lower rate?"
Do you really think that the tourism market is small? Do you have any idea how much people pay for the chance to go on, say, cruises to Antarctica, let alone how rabidly they need to limit visitors due to constant demand exceeding tolerance of the ecosystems? We have a huge worldwide affluent class (yup, when you rape the middle class, that's what happens) be it Saudi/Pakistani princes (of which there are thousands), Russian mafiosi, Japanese/Hong Kong/Chinese rich kids (still more around then you'ld think), the beneficiaries of all the money stolen from Enron/Adelphia/etc., and even those who got their money legitimately such as the lords of Silicon Valley and the young media moguls around the world. They're rich, they're bored (trust me, I've had to work with quite a few of them), and they show their power to their friends/competitors by doing/getting the coolest things. It's as old as the patrons of Rome, well documented (from Veblen to Edith Wharton), and a reliable money source.
If the cost could be brought down to, say, two mil to start, and keep dropping from there, the only risk would be NASA's legendary ham-handedness at being cool.
Of course, personally, I'm a lot more interested in geek stuff, but tourism was the comment so tourism is what I'm addressin'
Declare proceeds from space exploration and space exploitation free from taxes for 20 years (think land grants during the Westward expansion of the United States.) Everyone will throw money into space, some as a tax dodge, some as legit ventures now that they can drum up investment . ..
I *like* it. It might actually work and it's the sort of the thing that Shrub II's friends would back simply to ensure their own payoffs.
Gotta be better then just cutting taxes on dividends, let alone another ill-managed NASA fiasco. Maybe we would even see another attempt at a Beal Aerospace-scale venture. Would sure make a great tax shelter for Texas Enron booty.
I'm curious, did you *read* my first post or just scan for keywords?
What I said was that when the sorts of organizations he recommends go in and do the sorts of "brush clearing" they recommend, they are reliably LYING and consistently get caught using it as an excuse to cut new access roads, strip out salable lumber, and generally *ahem* lay the groundwork for future, even more destructive activities. Here's a sample of what *my* two minute Google search turned up on the topic.
The comments about CEI's funding (which *you* called "bribes" and, when I proved to be right, chose to pretend you had never cared about) were a side point.
And, as I said, I am starting from having gone over the subject more then once with actual environmental scientists including, if you really want to get snitty with me, my own father who has an actual doctorate in biology (UC Berkeley, postdoc w/ the Smithsonian) as well as years of field experience as an environmental scientist and credentials as a former California state regulator. And oh, by the way, particular expertise in destructive implications of clearing of forest areas and loss of biodiversity (though his later work was in Hawai'i with the mangroves). Actually I could do a "My Cousin Vinnie" here and bring in all of my uncles and other family members in the field as well as my friends who've done such work and my own work with things like plant viability in hostile environments, but , after all, you evidently know how to do a Google search so I'll leave that as an excercise for the (evidently none-too-swift) student.
In other words, real world experience has shown that clearing understory is a mixed blessing at best and that it has been used as a stalking horse for getting lumbering companies access to wilderness. Access that they then abuse and try to cover up.
I've checked the issue out and have been following the subject for years. I'm curious, how much did YOU know about it before you dropped in your misleading little reference?
That's all you're getting from me and this will be my last post in this thread.
Rustin
Okay, since this is slashdot, I'll start with CEI Blasts Open Source Software. Just to put it in local context.
Also, you are right, I was wrong and I should have done the research. I ASSUMED that, as usual, a right-wing group was putting forward a PR flack and, as always true with assuming more then once, I made an ass of me and only me. Nonetheless, instead they front with a geologist (hmmm, that's relevant-NOT!) who then calls such a background one in "the natural sciences". Yeah, sure, pull the other one.
But, as for CEI and how they are funded (were they "bribed"?), let's move on to this, which shows that since 1985 the CEI has been funded almost entirely by large polluting corporations and folks like Scaife, Olin, and McKenna on the very hard right. These are the folks that people like Gingrich had to ask to moderate their public statements because they were too hard-line right wing for *him*.
Now, as for funding, CEI has gotten funding from (among others):
* Amoco Foundation, Inc.
* Coca-Cola Company
* CSX Corporation
* Ford Motor Company Fund
* Philip Morris Companies, Inc.
* Pfizer Inc.
* Precision Valve Corporation
* Sarah Scaife Foundation
* Texaco, Inc.
* Texaco Foundation
* American Petroleum Institute
* ARCO Foundation
* Burlington Northern Railroad Co.
* Cigna Corporation
* Detroit Farming Inc.
* Dow Chemical
* EBCO Corp.
* General Motors
Now, I could write this all up for you, but I believe that this report does just fine, starting out with "CEI calls itself 'a non-profit, non-partisan research and advocacy institute dedicated to the principles of free enterprise and limited government.' . ..In fact, it is an ideologically-driven, well-funded front for corporations opposed to safety and environmental regulations that affect the way they do business."
Ok, again, from the top. These are CHILDREN. They learn well, have access to Windows in other places (read the article, Stan), and are somewhere between five and eighteen years from the job market.
In other words, what you're saying is the equivalent of "these kids aren't learning DOS 4.0 so they'll be utterly crippled when they try and get jobs using Windows 98".
Oh, and by the way, as somebody with about a decade in corporate IT, who has helped out in quite a few schools, and who has taught remedial computer skills classes for middle-aged unemployables, I can tell you that the amount of time that it takes to learn one OS if one is truly comfortable in another (please note that Curran at this school made a point of teaching that) is measured in weeks at most.
And I can also tell you from hard experience with hundreds of users that the biggest obstacle to learning how to use a given OS is crashing/failure. Put a user in front of a machine that is out of date and keeps crashing and they will blame first themselves, then the OS, then you, the teacher. All of these translate into resentment and all of them will create long-term barriers to use. So if this guy says that his system saves tons of money and thereby cuts seriously down on crashes then that right there will make the kids more computer-capable.
I'll try and say this over in small words to help you out.
1.) Linux today and Windoze today both are very different from whatever these kids will need to know when they graduate.
2.) These kids are nowhere near the job market.
3.) It gets easier every year to teach people to switch OSes.
and 4.) An approach that let the school buy and maintain better computers will right there help these kids on the way to being good with computers. All computers.
There. Was that so hard?
I swear, one of these days . . .
Rustin
Re:More interesting story than I had expected
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Maine School & Linux
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· Score: 0
Hm... speaking of shibboleths, I wonder how many posts it will take before someone seriously handwrings about it being a "Christian" academy adopting Linux...;-)
Yeah, that did catch my eye. Especially since, when you add up their many references on their site to "The Lord" and their evident ineligibility for funding (which, while Maine may be broke, only happens with federal funding if the school does things like racially discriminate), they are right-wing Christian of the New Right crowd that founded their schools primarily to keep their children from being "contaminated" by being exposed to things like other cultures. (Let alone information on safe sex.)
Yeah, they look to be seriously over in the Falwell camp.
To which I say, cool, how better to bring them out of the dark ages then to expose their students to underlying systems, reasoning skills, and a platform whose community is built on principles of openness, cooperation, and tolerance?
Linux will set them free.
Kinda like the so-called "Nation of Islam" schools that teach their kids to read up on their history and then have their smartest kids do just that, discover what a crock of sh*t they've been fed all these years, and walk out.
Looks mighty good to me.
Rustin
Re:Parent is not polite, but not wrong
on
Maine School & Linux
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Oh, please.
"Business students"???????"
Yeah, all those twelve-year-olds leaving GHCA to join the job market will suffer greatly.
At worst, all that this will mean is an awkward year of adjustment when they first get to college, though even there, a solid knowledge of Linux will, in fact, give them other edges including better odds of getting junior IT work (such as helping out in the labs for work-study or managing some department's local server problems) during college. Hmmmm, other kids trying to get jobs as waiters, these kids already qualified for minor sysadmin work; sounds like a win-win to me.
I love how the Redmond-damaged always pull that one out when somebody suggests anything but Windoze. Especially in a case like this where the article points out that most of their students already use Win. at home. If you'ld read it you would know that.
So, I'm curious, 0x0d0a, should I put you down as sloppy, bigoted, or foolish?
And you actually believe an interview from Fox, where their only expert is somebody from something called the "Competitive Enterprise Institute"?
Evidently I have to be the one to break this to you, but This man is not a scientist!
These are industry flacks. People who are PAID by big corporations to put out stuff like "The costs of Kyoto" or to go on television representing the auto industry about why we should be buying more SUVs.
Just because somebody says it doesn't make it true.
Oh, and by the way, as somebody who *has* talked extensively with actual scientists (with PhDs and field experience and everything, woohoo), that whole "just clearing this timber for the good of society" stuff is utter bullshit.
There are any number of good ways to reduce fire damage. Allowing companies like Weyerhauser to go in and lumber the place is not one of them. Not only do they consistently get caught taking out more trees then they claimed they would (thereby creating the sorts of empty spots and monocultures that seriously damage the forest and in fact INCREASE the risk of fire) but they do it in ways that damage the soil's ability to retain moisture. I could give you a dozen other reasons why but you're big boys and girls, you know perfectly well how to use Google should you so choose.
I'm gonna keep hittin' it 'til folks get a clue. Facts, people. From sources that you have checked out. Not "I read it somewhere". Facts.
Grrrrrrr
-Rustin
Well, as somebody who has done long pro-mac parts posts of every one of these threds, I've got to say, yeah, I've wondered about that myself. I've been looking for a good place online to buy empty Mac cases since 1996 and I have yet to find *one*. Very odd. And I do, by now suspect that this is yet another case [sic] of the Rabid Lawyers Of The Mighty Steve (RLOTMS, coming soon on videocassette and DVD) going after folks doing perfectly innocent stuff.
I do know that the techs as a major New York Mac place used to have *piles* of bevels sitting around and weren't allowed to sell them. A friend of mine got enough to build a computer case covered in pretty blue tiles but his supply had to, shall we say, exit through the back door.
Sometimes being a serious Mac person is like being in love with an amazing woman who alternates periods of entrancing brilliance, weeks of beautiful lucidity, and occasional psychotic fits during which she is convinced that the space aliens are about to get her and can only be calmed down by being allowed to throw things at occasional passers by. You live for the good days, and make your peace with occasional afternoons spent running after complete strangers and explaining that you're very sorry and yes, you will pay for the cost of their new lambswool coat and no, she's not always like this.
*sigh*
Bleeding six colors since 1984 (first mac bought August '84 model 0001),
Rustin
BTW, a friend of mine (formerly in low places) called to remind me. Evidently bodies of this sort in general are referred to by the obvious term, "floaters" while the spring crop is referred to as "poppers".
Ahh, little bitty factoids to brighten your day,
Rustin
You don't live around here, do you?
Keep in mind, this is the city where the mayor refused to publish either the full budget or the directory of municipal employees, got sued, lost, *still* didn't disclose, and then got re-elected.
Remember, most of the scary federal goverment coverups (Watergate, Koreagate, Iran/Contra, etc.) have been organized and run by moonlighting New York lawyers.
Welcome to the big city.
-Rustin
I should think that a more prudent way of handling this project would have been to map all of the ships, catalogue them, survey them individually (with divers, remote subs, or the like), and only then proclaim a successful project. At the same time, you could publish the maps without a problem.
Hokay wid' me, boss. You jest biddy-baddle on out an' pick up the thirty to fifty billion dollars it would take to do that and I'll wait right here. Oh, and by the way, be sure you pick up a plan for handling the comprehensive shut down of a major river for ten years or more and your plan for tracking down that many qualifed divers and what you'll do for your Environmental Impact Statement and how you'll explain this all to the many archeologists who have long since concluded that the most responsible way to handle large bodies of artifacts is to leave much of the area pristine for analysis by technique we haven't thought of yet.
Some people just have no idea of the implications of the things that come out of their mouths. Talk first, think later, huh? -Rustin
Since when have we cared about Jersey? You people actually thought you could get Ellis Island back (after, btw, New York paid the bill for restoring it).
Okay, you out-of-towners are starting to get on my nerves.
Let's get this out of the way once and for all. First of all, the only extensively documented case of this kind of thing was with the Irish gangs over in Hell's Kitchen. They had a guy on their crew who was trained (in prison, yet) as a butcher, so when they killed somebody, they would have this guy come in and chop up the body. Then they would take the parts to Ward's Island (where the East River meets the Harlem at the northern tip of Manhattan) and drop the body bits into the stream right by a water treatment plant. This would ensure that what littel was left got ripped up and washed way out to sea. Keep in mind that this would not work as well these days as now the population density of Roosevelt Island (in the middle of the East River at about Midtown) is much higher and people spend more time by the water.
Yes, people are killed and dumped in the river. This is frequent enough that every spring the NYPD divers prepare for the annual "crop" of bodies that have swollen up over the winter and pop to the surface as the weather warms up.
The primary variable is how well the large cavities like the lungs and intestines have been punctured. If you do the job "right" and make sure that those are open to the water (and the body weighted down), the gases will tend to bubble out and the body stay submerged. Of course, with DNA testing all bets are off as one floating bit of tissue can be enough; *if* spotted.
Keep in mind that, contrary to popular misconception, there is quite a lot of sealife around NYC (I used to collect seashells half a block from 23rd street) so if a body is down long enough, it will be GONE.
Why the East River and not the Hudson? The East has historically been closer to more nasty bits like the Lower East Side and the docks in Brooklyn and Queens. However, given the Mafia action along the old port facilities and institutional sites (Javits anybody?), each side has most likely seen its share of activity.
There. Now can we get back to arguing about salvage?
Rustin
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting thought. The problem is (for now) that astronauts experience such rapid atrophying of muscles and damage to bones that they can't even stand up, let alone drive a paraglider or equivalent.
My question becomes, how near are we to having an RPV, let alone autonomous vehicle that can handle its own landings? Once we've got that, then the astronaut can just be a passenger in the pod while happy little solenoids drive the wing.
On the other hand, we could get Thinkgeek to develop a super-Bawls mixed with amphetimines and they'll be so hyped up they'll be strong enough to run the lines themselves.
All joking aside, I'm not sure that you're that far off base. Five more years of Moore's law with concurrent materials advancement and we're there.
Rustin
Small, slow, ion-engine craft robots go out and bring asteroids back. When asteroids get near earth, the robots ferry the rocks to the station and use the remaining velocity to swing back out for the next round.
Robots are small, cheap, and built by the hundreds, designed to work by the same navigational rules as a school of fish so that the processing power of each is minimal and stable.
Metals processing is done initially on a small scale with a solar furnace melting the rock to plasma and shooting it past a set of magnets none too different from those in your CRT. The magnets separate the elements by mass and charge as decribed here.
Maybe in some cases, we should go to the rocks, as described here instead of bringing the rocks to us.
He bit, you bit, I bit, and little by little we eat away at the problem, neh?
Rustin
Wasn't teflon developed to protect tubes used to process uranium?
Why, I'm so glad you asked. Teflon was first created by mistake by a researcher studying flourocarbon variants. The goal was fluids for refrigeration systems, not teflon. After a series of tests he found a strange waxy mass in the chamber. That was teflon.
It is worth noting that this is a perfect example of the sort of free-form experimentation allowed to proceed in an unplanned direction that NASA has proven so very bad at pursuing.
Rustin
imagine a cluster of books about Beowolf.
I just had a thought. Didn't Columbia have a building/program at the Canberra astronomy facility?
I wonder if their possible sudden need to spend time and money on that has any effect on their available budget for BS II.
Just wondering,
Rustin
The losing team could then vote one guy out of the biosphere.
I dunno. From what I've read about life in BS II when it's being run as a pseudo-closed system (constant stench, ever-less healthy and varied environment and diet, roaches and other bugs crawling on *everything*, clothes that never get truly clean, cohabitants who get more annoying all the time, petty regulations, constant noise, etc.), I'ld think that the losers would be voted to *stay in* the environment.
But then again, now that I look back at what I just wrote, the same description applies to most college dorms and I think that plenty of us would go back to that again if we had the excuse.
That's it! BioSphere Frat House! Replace half the plants with palm trees, mango trees, etc., get a bunch of random frat boys from next year's Spring Break crowd to sign up (while drunk, of course), stock the place with beer, porn, and only one bathroom. Tell 'em that they have to catch and roast suckling pigs for their protein, give them two outfits each while having an endless succession of sorority girls and swimsuit models hanging out and working right on the other side of the wall and lock 'em in.
See ya in a year, boys.
I hereby nominate the brothers of Zeta Beta Tau. Heh, heh, heh.
Rustin
Mea culpa. I will do my best to remember in the future.
Rustin
Hell, yes, there was tons of sloppy thinking and distorted claims when the original crew of sleazy whackos was running the joint.
.
Try to move past that.
Think of BSII as being like the performance car built for a drug dealer, captured, and sold off by the police. Do you then only use it to drive around at 30MPH because the original intent was sleazy/foolish or do you say, "I'm so lucky to have gotten this wonderful hunk of machinery and without having had to pay the outrageous cost of building it"?
Okay, so it has a sordid past. Bummer. Hallmark f*cking cards started out as mail fraud. 3M started out as a combination stock swindle/dud mining company. It's well past time to move the hell on from origins, start removing/replacing the more egregiously bad structural aspects, and find a productive use for what is still an astounding collection of resources.
Goddamned small-brained, opinion-driven, half-assed . . .
Rustin
As for the original purpose, the folks running the place now may be eager to suck it up to the "respectable" science establishment, but that is the only reason to deny the original intent of (admittedly, among other things) learning how to build a self-sustaining system.
The place was built in large part at the detailed instruction of a bunch of cultists not far above the Raelians on the rationality or honesty scale and these days Columbia, NASA, et al are eager to deny/downplay the origins of the place. Not to mention those aspects of the original plan that they consider "not real science"
As for ongoing work, well, yeah, "due to a lack of funding". Duh. Check the Biosphere site and you'll see that quite a lot more was going on quite recently. Something like fifteen colleges/univ/institutes had ongoing projects as of less then a year ago.
Personally, I think that part of this is a last-ditch attempt to get more money out of Bass and the local government. But mostly, I think it's a case of both genuine issues of less money at Columbia (though, funny, as somebody living within walking distance of their campus, I can say that they certainly *seem* to have plenty of money for things like construction when they *feel* like it) and a desire to wash their hands of something that clashes with the conservative, narrow-minded approach to research that has always hampered so much of academia. (Not that I have any personal bitterness about this at all, with almost everybody on both sides of my family in my parent's generation having gotten science PhDs, been disillusioned and seen enough academic bull sh*t to ensure that none of us in my generation (me and siblings/cousins) have chosen to continue that particular "family business".)
Face it folks, the first continuing program to research and be willing to publish about lunar/other planet colony engineering was done by a local chapter (Portland, OR) of L5 not because they were so stunningly brilliant (thought they were certainly very cool, smart, and dedicated) but because anybody in "legitimate" academia who publishes about such stuff takes their slim chances of tenure anywhere and chucks 'em out the door.
Look at what has happened to the Bass program at Yale. They took his twenty million, promised to back it up and tie it into their academic community, and are now waffling around trying to find excuses to keep the money but route around the mandate that came with it.
The short form: it's up to us DIY'ers. Good thing that techies make so much money. (or, in some cases, used to.)
Rustin
Not that I should be succumbing to the temptation to get involved in such a silly gedankenexperiment, but . . .
Imaging So, first of all, IIRC, LCDs of the sort this window uses work by having the charge change the liquid crystal's polarization. If polarization is synced with the separate sheet of polarizing material it is clear, if not, then it goes opaque. So let's say the user puts on polarized contacts. Left one way, right the other, and the sheet of polarized material is removed. Then you have a "phosphor" layer in the back (OLEDs?) and a layer of this stuff in the front. The two layers are synced so that the image is refreshed at 60Hz, with two images per set. Left, right, left, right. That is then matched with the front layer which is switching polarization at 60Hz as well. Horizontal, vertical. Horizontal, vertical. So there's your 3-D.
Now let's say that the user(s) is/are being tracked by the environment (little transponders in clothes like the ones used for motion capture).
Concept Sound is ideally generated by having speaker elements built into the surfaces, with the surfaces broken up into a grid so that a sound can genuinely move from one place to another. The whole mess is wired up and driven as a phased array, where volume and frequency mix are set for each coordinate separately. Let's say a one foot grid unit, giving an "audio resolution" of one "pixel" per square foot. (Okay, so I'm working with English units instead of metric - shoot me.)
Approach One could probably get away with reduced sound resolution in the floor and ceiling. And if we're going to talk about near-present tech setups then I'ld say make the floor of "environment module" tiles of about one foot square (assuming that the user(s) wear shoes) with each module having, in addition to a speaker driver, a thermoelectric unit to make panels able to get slightly colder or hotter, a low-freq. (say 10Hz to 200Hz) vibration generator, and an ability to skew slightly.
Breakdown So, what is our gear for each tile? (Keep in mind that we're talking about buying enough gear for over four hundred tiles, so assume Jameco small wholesale order prices.)
* cheap bass speaker- $2
* thermoelectric unit - $15
* cheap mid-range/tweeter speaker set - $4
* four heavy load, fine control solenoids (for skew) - 10 x 4 = $40
(Remember that solenoid travel is about one to three millimeters, max, while cycle time can be as slow as a tenth of a second.)
* center post - $1
* ball joint for connection between center post and tile - $2
We can afford to use cheap delrin or whatever parts and just lubricate the hell out of them. Deflection is dinky, stress is all compressive, and maximum load (assuming jumping around) is what, a momentary seven or eight hundred pounds?
* underlying frame of assorted wood, glue, nails - $6
* masonite or ply tile panel - $0.5
* doped and painted fabric flooring surface - $0.5
(Probably scotch-guarded or equiv. if left painted, not my problem if turned to imaging surface)
* hunk o' cheap metal for placement between thermoelectric panel and tile underlayment - $0.1
(surely these would be bought surplus somewhere)
* wiring harness, connectors, and assembly - $8
Hey, we're assuming graduate student labor here.
Then add, say, three thousand dollars for laying in the underlying framework that the whole thing sits on (let's say a grid of 2 x 6es).
So, what's the damage? About eighty bucks per tile. For a twenty by twenty foot chamber that means four hundred tiles with, say, twenty backups for a total cost of about thirty six thousand dollars. Less then many frats spend on a holiday float. Less then a big college party. If I were in charge we'ld be buying everything at surplus (perhaps here.) and could probably bring the whole floor in for fifteen to twenty thousand. Add about ten thousand for mistakes and development costs.
Electrical Power usage per tile should be about five watts[1], all of which could be run at six or nine volts (so gotta use BIG gauge wire to deal with resistance issues), for a total running load of two thousand watts (and maybe a hundred more to drive hidden fans in the walls and ceiling[2]). Let's add another couple hundred bucks for a big ol' stepdown transformer to give us all those amps of six/nine volt current.
Computation As for processing drain, well, assume thirty audio signals that just get routed around the room like sprites in an old video game. Bass/vibration and temp could each easily be one sixteen bit value. If somebody gets slick, all four solenoids could probably be one value as well, but let's assume one per solenoid. Think of it as a color video image of twenty by sixty pixels with a refresh of fifty times a second or less and it becomes obvious that the only real problem is converting that data to signals on four THOUSAND (common ground for the solenoids) wires.
Okay, now given all of this, let's say that the ceiling has no solenoids and a resolution of one tile per two square feet. The walls have no solenoids either but a one foot tile resolution. Then only have thermoelectric on one panel in ten (since heat moves mostly vertically so the implications of localized wall temps are only notable if you get really close).
So a sim handling everything but video would be using less processing power then a single PC running Doom and the whole system up to now adds up to about eighty thousand dollars. So, what is the imaging cost? I dunno. Not my yob. I'm, after all a mech guy at heart.
Final&Notes I just thought that I'ld take a few minutes to clarify what it is we're talking about here.
[1] Even more then most of this, this number has lots of handwaving in it. I suspect that solenoid usage will be weird in some way that I don't know enough to predict.
[2] Fans pushing in bits of breeze should make all sorts of weather/motion.etc. effects more convincing. Low-bandwidth, high touch. Maybe add one of those spiffy new aroma generators in each one. (I could mention stuff like aerosolized THC but I won't. Ooops! Too late, I did.)
-Rustin
Well, I stand by my earlier points (after all, so many others are happy to argue them for me), but looking again, I retract my final "I'm curious . . ." flame. I'm (obviously) in a profoundly pissy mood today and I allowed my venom to outreach my reason.
Sorry.
Rustin
Well, that's the problem innit? There's just no reason to have hundreds of shuttles. Hell, we got 4 and they want to fly'em less, even tho' it saves little or no money. AFA tourism goes, is there really a market? A very small one, capable of paying the kind of $ it takes nowadays. Definitely not the kind of critical mass you need.
This, on a grander scale, is the same argument that happens a thousand times a year about bus routes. "We only do one unpredictable run every three hours or so in dirty, busses and nobody rides it so obviously a.) there is no demand and b.) cost per passenger is huge".
If, as NASA does, you run a system at very low capacity (admittedly, in this case, under massive Congressional and contractors pressure), then only the most desperate will use it and cost per unit delivered will *ahem* soar.
If, on the other hand, you scale up AND OPEN TO THE MARKET'S DEMANDS then costs go down, not just from linear economies of scale (like part prices going down) but from the sorts of exploring other options that happens when you're receptive to the customer who says "Is there any chance you could use X Widget to make my satellite take up less room in the bay and thereby charge me a lower rate?"
Do you really think that the tourism market is small? Do you have any idea how much people pay for the chance to go on, say, cruises to Antarctica, let alone how rabidly they need to limit visitors due to constant demand exceeding tolerance of the ecosystems? We have a huge worldwide affluent class (yup, when you rape the middle class, that's what happens) be it Saudi/Pakistani princes (of which there are thousands), Russian mafiosi, Japanese/Hong Kong/Chinese rich kids (still more around then you'ld think), the beneficiaries of all the money stolen from Enron/Adelphia/etc., and even those who got their money legitimately such as the lords of Silicon Valley and the young media moguls around the world. They're rich, they're bored (trust me, I've had to work with quite a few of them), and they show their power to their friends/competitors by doing/getting the coolest things. It's as old as the patrons of Rome, well documented (from Veblen to Edith Wharton), and a reliable money source.
If the cost could be brought down to, say, two mil to start, and keep dropping from there, the only risk would be NASA's legendary ham-handedness at being cool.
Of course, personally, I'm a lot more interested in geek stuff, but tourism was the comment so tourism is what I'm addressin'
Rustin
Declare proceeds from space exploration and space exploitation free from taxes for 20 years (think land grants during the Westward expansion of the United States.) Everyone will throw money into space, some as a tax dodge, some as legit ventures now that they can drum up investment . . .
I *like* it. It might actually work and it's the sort of the thing that Shrub II's friends would back simply to ensure their own payoffs.
Gotta be better then just cutting taxes on dividends, let alone another ill-managed NASA fiasco. Maybe we would even see another attempt at a Beal Aerospace-scale venture. Would sure make a great tax shelter for Texas Enron booty.
Here's hoping,
Rustin
I'm curious, did you *read* my first post or just scan for keywords?
What I said was that when the sorts of organizations he recommends go in and do the sorts of "brush clearing" they recommend, they are reliably LYING and consistently get caught using it as an excuse to cut new access roads, strip out salable lumber, and generally *ahem* lay the groundwork for future, even more destructive activities.
Here's a sample of what *my* two minute Google search turned up on the topic.
The comments about CEI's funding (which *you* called "bribes" and, when I proved to be right, chose to pretend you had never cared about) were a side point.
And, as I said, I am starting from having gone over the subject more then once with actual environmental scientists including, if you really want to get snitty with me, my own father who has an actual doctorate in biology (UC Berkeley, postdoc w/ the Smithsonian) as well as years of field experience as an environmental scientist and credentials as a former California state regulator. And oh, by the way, particular expertise in destructive implications of clearing of forest areas and loss of biodiversity (though his later work was in Hawai'i with the mangroves). Actually I could do a "My Cousin Vinnie" here and bring in all of my uncles and other family members in the field as well as my friends who've done such work and my own work with things like plant viability in hostile environments, but , after all, you evidently know how to do a Google search so I'll leave that as an excercise for the (evidently none-too-swift) student.
In other words, real world experience has shown that clearing understory is a mixed blessing at best and that it has been used as a stalking horse for getting lumbering companies access to wilderness. Access that they then abuse and try to cover up.
I've checked the issue out and have been following the subject for years. I'm curious, how much did YOU know about it before you dropped in your misleading little reference?
That's all you're getting from me and this will be my last post in this thread.
Rustin
Okay, since this is slashdot, I'll start with CEI Blasts Open Source Software. Just to put it in local context. .In fact, it is an ideologically-driven, well-funded front for corporations opposed to safety and environmental regulations that affect the way they do business."
Also, you are right, I was wrong and I should have done the research. I ASSUMED that, as usual, a right-wing group was putting forward a PR flack and, as always true with assuming more then once, I made an ass of me and only me. Nonetheless, instead they front with a geologist (hmmm, that's relevant-NOT!) who then calls such a background one in "the natural sciences". Yeah, sure, pull the other one.
But, as for CEI and how they are funded (were they "bribed"?), let's move on to this, which shows that since 1985 the CEI has been funded almost entirely by large polluting corporations and folks like Scaife, Olin, and McKenna on the very hard right. These are the folks that people like Gingrich had to ask to moderate their public statements because they were too hard-line right wing for *him*.
Now, as for funding, CEI has gotten funding from (among others):
* Amoco Foundation, Inc.
* Coca-Cola Company
* CSX Corporation
* Ford Motor Company Fund
* Philip Morris Companies, Inc.
* Pfizer Inc.
* Precision Valve Corporation
* Sarah Scaife Foundation
* Texaco, Inc.
* Texaco Foundation * American Petroleum Institute
* ARCO Foundation
* Burlington Northern Railroad Co.
* Cigna Corporation
* Detroit Farming Inc.
* Dow Chemical
* EBCO Corp.
* General Motors
Now, I could write this all up for you, but I believe that this report does just fine, starting out with "CEI calls itself 'a non-profit, non-partisan research and advocacy institute dedicated to the principles of free enterprise and limited government.' . .
As I said, industry flacks.
Rustin
Stanley Feinbaum, dimwit.
Ok, again, from the top. These are CHILDREN. They learn well, have access to Windows in other places (read the article, Stan), and are somewhere between five and eighteen years from the job market.
In other words, what you're saying is the equivalent of "these kids aren't learning DOS 4.0 so they'll be utterly crippled when they try and get jobs using Windows 98".
Oh, and by the way, as somebody with about a decade in corporate IT, who has helped out in quite a few schools, and who has taught remedial computer skills classes for middle-aged unemployables, I can tell you that the amount of time that it takes to learn one OS if one is truly comfortable in another (please note that Curran at this school made a point of teaching that) is measured in weeks at most.
And I can also tell you from hard experience with hundreds of users that the biggest obstacle to learning how to use a given OS is crashing/failure. Put a user in front of a machine that is out of date and keeps crashing and they will blame first themselves, then the OS, then you, the teacher. All of these translate into resentment and all of them will create long-term barriers to use. So if this guy says that his system saves tons of money and thereby cuts seriously down on crashes then that right there will make the kids more computer-capable.
I'll try and say this over in small words to help you out.
1.) Linux today and Windoze today both are very different from whatever these kids will need to know when they graduate.
2.) These kids are nowhere near the job market.
3.) It gets easier every year to teach people to switch OSes.
and 4.) An approach that let the school buy and maintain better computers will right there help these kids on the way to being good with computers. All computers.
There. Was that so hard?
I swear, one of these days . . .
Rustin
Hm... speaking of shibboleths, I wonder how many posts it will take before someone seriously handwrings about it being a "Christian" academy adopting Linux... ;-)
Yeah, that did catch my eye. Especially since, when you add up their many references on their site to "The Lord" and their evident ineligibility for funding (which, while Maine may be broke, only happens with federal funding if the school does things like racially discriminate), they are right-wing Christian of the New Right crowd that founded their schools primarily to keep their children from being "contaminated" by being exposed to things like other cultures. (Let alone information on safe sex.)
Yeah, they look to be seriously over in the Falwell camp.
To which I say, cool, how better to bring them out of the dark ages then to expose their students to underlying systems, reasoning skills, and a platform whose community is built on principles of openness, cooperation, and tolerance?
Linux will set them free.
Kinda like the so-called "Nation of Islam" schools that teach their kids to read up on their history and then have their smartest kids do just that, discover what a crock of sh*t they've been fed all these years, and walk out.
Looks mighty good to me.
Rustin
Oh, please.
"Business students"???????"
Yeah, all those twelve-year-olds leaving GHCA to join the job market will suffer greatly.
At worst, all that this will mean is an awkward year of adjustment when they first get to college, though even there, a solid knowledge of Linux will, in fact, give them other edges including better odds of getting junior IT work (such as helping out in the labs for work-study or managing some department's local server problems) during college. Hmmmm, other kids trying to get jobs as waiters, these kids already qualified for minor sysadmin work; sounds like a win-win to me.
I love how the Redmond-damaged always pull that one out when somebody suggests anything but Windoze. Especially in a case like this where the article points out that most of their students already use Win. at home. If you'ld read it you would know that.
So, I'm curious, 0x0d0a, should I put you down as sloppy, bigoted, or foolish?
Doggone brain washed, narrowminded, lazy-brained, sad-assed . . . .
-Rustin
And you actually believe an interview from Fox, where their only expert is somebody from something called the "Competitive Enterprise Institute"?
Evidently I have to be the one to break this to you, but This man is not a scientist!
These are industry flacks. People who are PAID by big corporations to put out stuff like "The costs of Kyoto" or to go on television representing the auto industry about why we should be buying more SUVs.
Just because somebody says it doesn't make it true.
Oh, and by the way, as somebody who *has* talked extensively with actual scientists (with PhDs and field experience and everything, woohoo), that whole "just clearing this timber for the good of society" stuff is utter bullshit.
There are any number of good ways to reduce fire damage. Allowing companies like Weyerhauser to go in and lumber the place is not one of them. Not only do they consistently get caught taking out more trees then they claimed they would (thereby creating the sorts of empty spots and monocultures that seriously damage the forest and in fact INCREASE the risk of fire) but they do it in ways that damage the soil's ability to retain moisture. I could give you a dozen other reasons why but you're big boys and girls, you know perfectly well how to use Google should you so choose.
I'm gonna keep hittin' it 'til folks get a clue.
Facts, people. From sources that you have checked out. Not "I read it somewhere". Facts.
Grrrrrrr
-Rustin
Well, as somebody who has done long pro-mac parts posts of every one of these threds, I've got to say, yeah, I've wondered about that myself. I've been looking for a good place online to buy empty Mac cases since 1996 and I have yet to find *one*. Very odd. And I do, by now suspect that this is yet another case [sic] of the Rabid Lawyers Of The Mighty Steve (RLOTMS, coming soon on videocassette and DVD) going after folks doing perfectly innocent stuff.
I do know that the techs as a major New York Mac place used to have *piles* of bevels sitting around and weren't allowed to sell them. A friend of mine got enough to build a computer case covered in pretty blue tiles but his supply had to, shall we say, exit through the back door.
Sometimes being a serious Mac person is like being in love with an amazing woman who alternates periods of entrancing brilliance, weeks of beautiful lucidity, and occasional psychotic fits during which she is convinced that the space aliens are about to get her and can only be calmed down by being allowed to throw things at occasional passers by. You live for the good days, and make your peace with occasional afternoons spent running after complete strangers and explaining that you're very sorry and yes, you will pay for the cost of their new lambswool coat and no, she's not always like this.
*sigh*
Bleeding six colors since 1984 (first mac bought August '84 model 0001),
Rustin
BTW, a friend of mine (formerly in low places) called to remind me. Evidently bodies of this sort in general are referred to by the obvious term, "floaters" while the spring crop is referred to as "poppers".
Ahh, little bitty factoids to brighten your day,
Rustin
You don't live around here, do you?
Keep in mind, this is the city where the mayor refused to publish either the full budget or the directory of municipal employees, got sued, lost, *still* didn't disclose, and then got re-elected.
Remember, most of the scary federal goverment coverups (Watergate, Koreagate, Iran/Contra, etc.) have been organized and run by moonlighting New York lawyers.
Welcome to the big city.
-Rustin
I should think that a more prudent way of handling this project would have been to map all of the ships, catalogue them, survey them individually (with divers, remote subs, or the like), and only then proclaim a successful project. At the same time, you could publish the maps without a problem.
Hokay wid' me, boss. You jest biddy-baddle on out an' pick up the thirty to fifty billion dollars it would take to do that and I'll wait right here.
Oh, and by the way, be sure you pick up a plan for handling the comprehensive shut down of a major river for ten years or more and your plan for tracking down that many qualifed divers and what you'll do for your Environmental Impact Statement and how you'll explain this all to the many archeologists who have long since concluded that the most responsible way to handle large bodies of artifacts is to leave much of the area pristine for analysis by technique we haven't thought of yet.
Some people just have no idea of the implications of the things that come out of their mouths. Talk first, think later, huh?
-Rustin
Since when have we cared about Jersey? You people actually thought you could get Ellis Island back (after, btw, New York paid the bill for restoring it).
Jersey. Yeah, right.
Fourth generation New Yorker,
-Rustin
Okay, you out-of-towners are starting to get on my nerves.
Let's get this out of the way once and for all.
First of all, the only extensively documented case of this kind of thing was with the Irish gangs over in Hell's Kitchen. They had a guy on their crew who was trained (in prison, yet) as a butcher, so when they killed somebody, they would have this guy come in and chop up the body. Then they would take the parts to Ward's Island (where the East River meets the Harlem at the northern tip of Manhattan) and drop the body bits into the stream right by a water treatment plant. This would ensure that what littel was left got ripped up and washed way out to sea. Keep in mind that this would not work as well these days as now the population density of Roosevelt Island (in the middle of the East River at about Midtown) is much higher and people spend more time by the water.
Yes, people are killed and dumped in the river. This is frequent enough that every spring the NYPD divers prepare for the annual "crop" of bodies that have swollen up over the winter and pop to the surface as the weather warms up.
The primary variable is how well the large cavities like the lungs and intestines have been punctured. If you do the job "right" and make sure that those are open to the water (and the body weighted down), the gases will tend to bubble out and the body stay submerged. Of course, with DNA testing all bets are off as one floating bit of tissue can be enough; *if* spotted.
Keep in mind that, contrary to popular misconception, there is quite a lot of sealife around NYC (I used to collect seashells half a block from 23rd street) so if a body is down long enough, it will be GONE.
Why the East River and not the Hudson? The East has historically been closer to more nasty bits like the Lower East Side and the docks in Brooklyn and Queens. However, given the Mafia action along the old port facilities and institutional sites (Javits anybody?), each side has most likely seen its share of activity.
There. Now can we get back to arguing about salvage?
Rustin