Nevermind, this is more evidence the Alex Jones crowd blows things out of proportion.
Sir, please award yourself 100 Internets for recovering from your kneejerk.
I, too, was almost willing to believe Obama handed INTERPOL diplomatic immunity, and thought "gee, that sounds important enough that I should read the article!" and discovered that it was quite clearly nothing like diplomatic immunity.
Now, thanks to a really (and a good chance deliberately) shitty and misleading summary, a lot of people now think INTERPOL can break into their house and butt-rape their dog and nobody can do anything.
It would mean that, if that's actually what happened. I suggest reading the article misleadingly linked as "granted INTERPOL full diplomatic immunity", since it will inform you that this is definitely NOT what happened.
How fucking classic is it that the submitter linked the words "granted INTERPOL full diplomatic immunity" to an article that explicitly states in caps and everything that this is NOT a granting of diplomatic immunity?
According to the article titled "Just What Did President Obama's Executive Order regarding INTERPOL Do?", what it didn't do is grant diplomatic immunity, and what it did do is grant a limited amount of immunity mostly related to taxes and document seizure. The idea seems to be to to allow international organizations like Red Cross, IAEA, IMF, and now INTERPOL to do their work without participating nations worrying that the U.S. will spy on them by reading these organization's records.
Now I'm not sure I like granting a police force any more immunity of any kind, but that's a hell of a lot less than diplomatic immunity and not as hard to revoke. Maybe other countries were getting concerned about the U.S.'s nosiness and this will enhance international cooperation. I'm not sure how I feel about it, but I do know the summary was classic bullshit.
But most of all, explain what causes the observed effects of hypothetical "dark matter" and "dark energy". My young children are smart enough to know that the dark matter story sounds like total and utter bull. The story goes like this: "We see something that looks like it causes things to move, but we don't know what it is, and we can't see it, or measure it, create it, or understand it at all. These unobservable matter blobs (and energy) may be 95% of everything we observe! We see something we can't explain, so we're calling it 'dark matter' and moving on with the old story that has worked for a while and still gets us grant funding." Why no one with a brain is calling out this story for its absurdity is astounding.
Because people with brains -- or at least those with brains and a bit of particle physics knowledge -- know that the idea of a type of matter that has mass but does not interact electromagnetically and is thus extremely hard to detect is not that outlandish. We already know of one such particle, the neutrino. A more massive neutrino-like particle is a prime candidate for dark matter, and is predicted by theory outside of dark matter. And while it's still highly speculative, there are teams out there right now who believe they are on the trail of detecting this particle.
In other words, they are doing exactly what you think they should be doing, and working on the problem. But surprisingly, doing actual useful work in this area requires more education than your children, or you for that matter, possess. Sorry!
The most dangerous hubris in science is the refusal to accept that we're far more ignorant about our physical environment than most would like to admit.
Stand in front of a mirror, look yourself directly in the eye, and say that fifty times.
All the things you point out, like what dark matter actually is, are holes in physics knowledge that physicists readily admit too. At least to the extent that you accurately describe the holes, rather than your gut feeling about what sounds too weird to be true. So who is showing hubris again?
Oh good point. I'd forgotten that the chance for Phoenix to rise from its ashes so to speak hadn't come to pass yet. Sorry for prematurely assuming its demise. Here's hoping, then!
Some floppies will survive, purely by accident, and it will be, enough.
Yeah, and those floppies will contain X-Files Mulder/Smoking Man slash-fic, and they'll know everything they need to know about our times: Best left forgotten.
Where I was coming from is that other people are seriously suggesting some kind of panel-cleaning device -- which on its face isn't ridiculous, though the occasional suggestion that NASA never even thought of it kinda is. So I took your comment as giving a humorous specific example of the serious general concept. I've been known to mix humor and seriousness myself from time to time (though never before driving or operating heavy machinery).
Yeah I knew the suggestion was a joke, but I was responding to the not-necessarily-joking sentiment behind it of why not have a method of cleaning the panels. And not in a particularly dark manner I thought.
Couldn't they have programmed some kind of self-cleaning cycle so these robots can fix themselves after sandstorms? The mission cost of a few extra actuators and a bottle of Windex seems pretty minimal versus robot death because of a particularly nasty storm.
Well, NASA considered that themselves, and their cost-benefit analysis said it wasn't worth it.
And that was back before they knew that the Martian wind would blow strongly enough to do a decent job of cleaning the panels on its own, and thus had estimated that in 90 days the panels would be covered in too much dust for the rover to operate.
"A few extra actuators and a bottle of Windex", snarkiness aside, is easier to say than to actually engineer without compromising other parts of the mission.
And now that we know that the Martian wind does blow, and as a result the rovers lasted for a good six years, then I have to say with hindsight that neglecting any sort of cleaning mechanism and the associated weight cost was unequivocally the correct choice.
As a recycled plot, "Avatar" did pretty well. It was compelling on a brute emotional level, and if you bothered to consider that it was condemning everything that made it possible it was actually rather sarcastic.
What, you mean technology, and the funds necessary to create it? It condemned neither. The human heroes in the movie used some of the most sophisticated and expensive technology around. It was the science team that were the champions of everything good in humanity. It was the money man who ignored the science team who was the villain. The thing the movie condemned was nothing more than greed at the expense of basic humanity. Sigourney Weaver's science team is proof that technology is not the enemy in this movie.
And it's actually Sigourney Weaver's science team that to me adds the most to the Dances With Wolves/Fern Gully/etc mythos that the movie is recycling. This is the first movie of its type that I'm aware of where there are people who understand, respect, and ultimately even fight for the "alien" culture, without actually adopting that culture itself. Grace never abandons her own culture, or her own belief in science. She doesn't buy into the Na'vi's spiritual nature-worship, even when she verifies that it has a biological basis she respects it from a scientific, not spiritual, basis.
So it's does do pretty well for a recycled plot, but I think in part because of this new twist. It's not about culture vs culture. You don't have to reject your own beliefs and adopt another's to realize that people who will kill to take what they want are wrong.
I though they did not use electric heaters on the rovers but used radioactive heating and aerogel insulation..
You are correct that they do have a radioisotope heater and aerogel insulation, but they do use electrical heating as well to augment the base level created by the radioisotope heater. Without electrical power, it most likely won't have enough heat to survive winter.
The unobtanium is the movie's MacGuffin -- the thing that makes the plot happen, but whose nature is ultimately irrelevant other than that people want it. "Unobtanium" is an engineer's humorous way of referring to a material with desirable properties that either simply doesn't exist, or is so expensive/difficult to obtain that it's infeasible to actually use for what you want.
So when the slimy corporate drone -- who I couldn't help but equate with Paul Riser's character Burke from Aliens, only with more power and the military on his side -- says they're trying to find the "unobtanium" with zero explanation of what it is, and knowing that there's no way they're going to succeed in getting it, well, I saw it as an obvious joke between the director and the audience. And I laughed. What better name for the unobtainable MacGuffin?
I don't understand why geeks are getting their panties in a bunch over a geek joke.
Though while on the one hand not describing its properties enhances its unobtanium-ness, on the other hand it would have been nice to have a throw-away line about it being a superconductor in the movie. It would have made various things in the movie, like the floating mountains, the "vortex" with its problematic "flux", the reference to the moon's powerful magnetic field, and the field-line like formations near the spirit tree come together. Instead it was only after seeing the movie and hearing someone mention that part of the back-story that it all clicked.
It should noted that they were designed to work no matter what for their initial 90 day mission and that running beyond that was expected.
Very true. 90 days was a "guaranteed" lifetime for doing the cost-benefit analysis for the mission. Obviously to guarantee 90 days, the rover would have to be designed to last much longer than that.
It should also be noted that the 90 day lifetime was based on how long they thought it would take before the Martian dust covered the solar panels and the rover died. Various cleaning mechanisms were considered, but ultimately weren't considered worth it. That the Martian wind happens to be enough to do an adequate job of blowing dust off the panels by itself was an unexpected but happy surprise, and is the reason the rovers lasted past 90 days.
Of course, running 6+ years is quite an accomplishment.
Indeed. It's a testament not just to the engineering team who designed the rovers, but to the operations team that has kept it going.
Also, while only obvious in hindsight, and even though it is what will ultimately kill the rover, not including a cleaning mechanism was the right call.
Lastly, I find it amazing that even sitting on what may be its final resting spot, in its final days, on its last leg (or rather wheel, at least on one side), it is still doing remarkable science. There is so much to learn about Mars that is literally right below the surface.
I can't wait for the Mars Science Laboratory. Also, I'm really hoping they take Lore Sjoberg's suggestion to heart and make one of MSL's missions to run over Spirit/Opportunity, monster-truck style. But if they can't fit that in to the mission parameters, I'll understand.
Does it need continuous power to stay capable of operating?
Yes. It requires some nominal amount of power for heating to avoid freezing and damaging components. This is what happened to the Phoenix lander (as anticipated in that case). With the panels covered in dust, plus the additional cold and lack of sunlight during the winter, Spirit is unlikely to survive the winter unless something changes.
I think you are under the assumption that we know the orbits of all of the material in our solar system...
No, I'm not under that assumption. I'm very much assuming that we cannot track everything. And I'm well aware that small errors introduced by those bodies, and errors in our measurements, can add up to big numbers over time. However the point is that in non-chaotic systems, the error in the result is proportional to the error in measurement. We can be pretty sure there are no extremely massive unknown bodies out there (their gravity would make them known), which leaves only much weaker sources of gravity, which can only have so much of an effect in the time scale we're talking about here (before 2036). An effect that is accounted for in the error bars on the estimated trajectory from which we calculate the odds that it's real path will hit us.
Add up those orbits over a century or so, and the system will look very chaotic (if you're tracking only the "known" stuff).
No, it would not look chaotic at all. Assuming we've been watching the body the whole time, it'll look like our predicted path, modified slightly by an unknown body. After the first couple passes, our model would account for this and we'd be predicting the path even more accurately. There would still be error bars, but they'd be much smaller.
Whereas in a truly chaotic system, the error in the result is not proportional to the error in measurement. The tiniest error can result in arbitrarily different results. That's why it's impossible to make more than short term weather predictions. Because the weather is chaotic in a mathematical sense. Orbits are not.
I can see how it's mechanically like the Streisand Effect -- try to silence something, end up drawing more attention to it. But the reason for the suppression isn't that the thing being taken down is embarrassing or otherwise damaging to them, so the consequence seems... inconsequential.
I also doubt it's deliberate. They probably just don't care. More people downloading the movie from torrent sites is less important than them throwing their legal weight around. The only downside is how we feel about them for doing the take down. Which is the "corporations are jerk-asses" effect, not the Streisand Effect.:P
I get what your saying but...c'mon. Artists shouldn't have to ask permission to do their work.
Unless their work is a derivative work of someone else's work, then they probably should. And I mean, it's not like we're talking about some light-gray area like a two second sample of a song, or a story that is clearly directly inspired (read: ripping off) another. It's a movie about the Legend of Zelda.
Maybe in my perfect world they wouldn't need permission, but also in that world it would be polite to ask. In this world, not asking is kinda, well, lacking in foresight. Unless the mentality was "it's easier to ask forgiveness than permission". And maybe that was true; Nintendo might have said "no" from the get-go and the film never would have existed. But forgiveness would be even less likely, so this outcome is hardly surprising.
Fanfic authors do their stuff without asking permission, but they're generally aware that this means they're on thin ice and are basically counting on being too insignificant a target for anyone to care about. As soon as you start thinking of adapting your fanfic to the big screen, then some alarm bells should be going off.
In the meantime, the creators of this should rename their word to the Legend of Velda, to avoid the legal hassles.
Sure. Blinken can search for the Thigh-Master Sword to rescue Drama Queen Velda from the evil but eccentrically effeminate Sha-mon.
Would a Zelda parody be as popular? Maybe. Would a homemade sword-and-sorcery movie unrelated to Zelda at all be as popular? Probably not. Which is why I don't think "Artists shouldn't have to ask permission to do their work" shows the proper understanding and respect for the debt they owe to the creators of the source material they're working from.
Heh. If it makes you feel any better, orbital dynamics are easier to figure out than the weather since they're pretty much non-chaotic. The error mostly comes from error in measurements of its position over time, so the longer we watch it the more accurate we get, until we get forecasts like a 1-in-300,000 chance of catastrophic meteor impact in 26 years. A bit better than weather prediction, eh? By the time any interceptor actually got close, we'd know the actual trajectory very well. If we were really sure by then it wouldn't hit earth, then we could take as much time as we wanted on the asteroid-diversion mission.
If in the unlikely event that it looked like it probably would hit earth, at least there'd be something up there to try diverting it.:p
Well if you believe they can calculate the odds of it hitting earth based on its current estimated path, then surely they can calculate how to modify the trajectory so as to reduce the odds.
On the other hand, I agree that since it already sounds incredibly unlikely that it will hit us, screwing with it sounds like a silly idea.
On the other, other hand I would rather have someone out there treating the problem of meteor impact like it is real and developing a plan to address it. For a plan to have a high chance of success relative to the consequences of an asteroid that we think has a high chance of hitting us (two very different values of "high"), I think it would take a long time to develop and test. As in quite a bit more time than between now and 2036. As the date approaches, and in the case that further study suggests the asteroid is even less likely to hit us, maybe we can do some proof-of-concept tests like actually intercepting the meteor or other important steps to be ready for when we're really in danger.
On the last hand, which I now realize is my right foot, the main reason I don't want to rely on any last-minute ad-hoc plan to save the earth from a planet killer is because, succeed or fail, any universe in which the movie Armageddon plays out in reality is one that I can't go on living in.
It is a modern phenomenon that such guilt is felt by people that are completely unconnected to slavery.
So if the technology haves want to slum it with the have-nots, it shouldn't be any big surprise that they embrace an ideology that makes themselves the criminal and thus flagellating themselves thereby redeeming themselves.
But for it to be SELF-flagellation, they must therefore associate themselves with the ones being flagellated, the ones portrayed as criminals. That's funny because I sure don't see myself in the antagonists in the movie. Why should I? Because they're mostly white? The ones who are redeemed are not the criminals in the first place. I associate with them, not the ones ho put greed above human life.
That you associate the portrayal of, say, the genocide of an indigenous people for the sake of greed as a bad thing with "white guilt" is quite telling, I think. I suppose you don't think the humans remaining on Pandora should do anything to help the Navi recover from the damage wrought by other humans, because doing so would just be more examples of self-flagellation over something they didn't do.
You must really hate Dances With Wolves. After all, the atrocity portrayed there really happened, and there's no way anyone could point that out without trying to make you, personally, feel responsible. So therefore we must not pass any value judgment at all, while also avoiding the evil of non-judgmental multiculturalism. Cus that's not dissonant.
You could easily make the jump from the trailers and the basic but apt summary of "Dances With Space Wolves" to the conclusion that the movie is anti- technology, Western society, white people, or all the other silly things people are saying.
There's no way you could think the movie is anti-tehcnology if you've seen the movie and payed any attention to Sigourney Weaver's character. Grace, despite being a hard-ass, is unreservedly one of the good guys, and it is through her knowledge of science that she does her good. Grace was the one who figured out the biological basis for what Jake still largely thought of as the Navi's hokey spiritual beliefs. It's only because of amazing genetics and other sciences that the Avatar program, and thus the opportunity to interact peacefully with the Navi, even exists.
How can you say it's an anti-technology movie where one of the main protagonists is a scientist who never rejects science nor has a reason to, and whose technology is critical for saving the day?! The movie is named after a type of technology; does the movie portray it as good or bad? It's not a trick question, though it might be hard to answer for those who haven't seen it.
Yeah, one of the most fascinating yet at the same time depressing concepts in relativistic physics is the "light cone", whose volume represents all possible positions in space-time that you could occupy. Ever. If it is outside your light cone, it is outside your feasible future. You can't even communicate with someone outside your light cone.
Believe me, there's a big part of me that hopes Einstein is wrong, too.
Though I'm not sure I'm ready for him being wrong about the whole causality thing...;)
Slashdot Mirror
Nevermind, this is more evidence the Alex Jones crowd blows things out of proportion.
Sir, please award yourself 100 Internets for recovering from your kneejerk.
I, too, was almost willing to believe Obama handed INTERPOL diplomatic immunity, and thought "gee, that sounds important enough that I should read the article!" and discovered that it was quite clearly nothing like diplomatic immunity.
Now, thanks to a really (and a good chance deliberately) shitty and misleading summary, a lot of people now think INTERPOL can break into their house and butt-rape their dog and nobody can do anything.
It would mean that, if that's actually what happened. I suggest reading the article misleadingly linked as "granted INTERPOL full diplomatic immunity", since it will inform you that this is definitely NOT what happened.
How fucking classic is it that the submitter linked the words "granted INTERPOL full diplomatic immunity" to an article that explicitly states in caps and everything that this is NOT a granting of diplomatic immunity?
According to the article titled "Just What Did President Obama's Executive Order regarding INTERPOL Do?", what it didn't do is grant diplomatic immunity, and what it did do is grant a limited amount of immunity mostly related to taxes and document seizure. The idea seems to be to to allow international organizations like Red Cross, IAEA, IMF, and now INTERPOL to do their work without participating nations worrying that the U.S. will spy on them by reading these organization's records.
Now I'm not sure I like granting a police force any more immunity of any kind, but that's a hell of a lot less than diplomatic immunity and not as hard to revoke. Maybe other countries were getting concerned about the U.S.'s nosiness and this will enhance international cooperation. I'm not sure how I feel about it, but I do know the summary was classic bullshit.
But most of all, explain what causes the observed effects of hypothetical "dark matter" and "dark energy". My young children are smart enough to know that the dark matter story sounds like total and utter bull. The story goes like this: "We see something that looks like it causes things to move, but we don't know what it is, and we can't see it, or measure it, create it, or understand it at all. These unobservable matter blobs (and energy) may be 95% of everything we observe! We see something we can't explain, so we're calling it 'dark matter' and moving on with the old story that has worked for a while and still gets us grant funding." Why no one with a brain is calling out this story for its absurdity is astounding.
Because people with brains -- or at least those with brains and a bit of particle physics knowledge -- know that the idea of a type of matter that has mass but does not interact electromagnetically and is thus extremely hard to detect is not that outlandish. We already know of one such particle, the neutrino. A more massive neutrino-like particle is a prime candidate for dark matter, and is predicted by theory outside of dark matter. And while it's still highly speculative, there are teams out there right now who believe they are on the trail of detecting this particle.
In other words, they are doing exactly what you think they should be doing, and working on the problem. But surprisingly, doing actual useful work in this area requires more education than your children, or you for that matter, possess. Sorry!
The most dangerous hubris in science is the refusal to accept that we're far more ignorant about our physical environment than most would like to admit.
Stand in front of a mirror, look yourself directly in the eye, and say that fifty times.
All the things you point out, like what dark matter actually is, are holes in physics knowledge that physicists readily admit too. At least to the extent that you accurately describe the holes, rather than your gut feeling about what sounds too weird to be true. So who is showing hubris again?
Oh good point. I'd forgotten that the chance for Phoenix to rise from its ashes so to speak hadn't come to pass yet. Sorry for prematurely assuming its demise. Here's hoping, then!
Some floppies will survive, purely by accident, and it will be, enough.
Yeah, and those floppies will contain X-Files Mulder/Smoking Man slash-fic, and they'll know everything they need to know about our times: Best left forgotten.
Where I was coming from is that other people are seriously suggesting some kind of panel-cleaning device -- which on its face isn't ridiculous, though the occasional suggestion that NASA never even thought of it kinda is. So I took your comment as giving a humorous specific example of the serious general concept. I've been known to mix humor and seriousness myself from time to time (though never before driving or operating heavy machinery).
Humor for its own sake is cool too. :)
Yeah I knew the suggestion was a joke, but I was responding to the not-necessarily-joking sentiment behind it of why not have a method of cleaning the panels. And not in a particularly dark manner I thought.
Well it's hardly a surprise they had problems. Who eats kerfuffles on a launchpad?!
Couldn't they have programmed some kind of self-cleaning cycle so these robots can fix themselves after sandstorms? The mission cost of a few extra actuators and a bottle of Windex seems pretty minimal versus robot death because of a particularly nasty storm.
Well, NASA considered that themselves, and their cost-benefit analysis said it wasn't worth it.
And that was back before they knew that the Martian wind would blow strongly enough to do a decent job of cleaning the panels on its own, and thus had estimated that in 90 days the panels would be covered in too much dust for the rover to operate.
"A few extra actuators and a bottle of Windex", snarkiness aside, is easier to say than to actually engineer without compromising other parts of the mission.
And now that we know that the Martian wind does blow, and as a result the rovers lasted for a good six years, then I have to say with hindsight that neglecting any sort of cleaning mechanism and the associated weight cost was unequivocally the correct choice.
As a recycled plot, "Avatar" did pretty well. It was compelling on a brute emotional level, and if you bothered to consider that it was condemning everything that made it possible it was actually rather sarcastic.
What, you mean technology, and the funds necessary to create it? It condemned neither. The human heroes in the movie used some of the most sophisticated and expensive technology around. It was the science team that were the champions of everything good in humanity. It was the money man who ignored the science team who was the villain. The thing the movie condemned was nothing more than greed at the expense of basic humanity. Sigourney Weaver's science team is proof that technology is not the enemy in this movie.
And it's actually Sigourney Weaver's science team that to me adds the most to the Dances With Wolves/Fern Gully/etc mythos that the movie is recycling. This is the first movie of its type that I'm aware of where there are people who understand, respect, and ultimately even fight for the "alien" culture, without actually adopting that culture itself. Grace never abandons her own culture, or her own belief in science. She doesn't buy into the Na'vi's spiritual nature-worship, even when she verifies that it has a biological basis she respects it from a scientific, not spiritual, basis.
So it's does do pretty well for a recycled plot, but I think in part because of this new twist. It's not about culture vs culture. You don't have to reject your own beliefs and adopt another's to realize that people who will kill to take what they want are wrong.
I though they did not use electric heaters on the rovers but used radioactive heating and aerogel insulation..
You are correct that they do have a radioisotope heater and aerogel insulation, but they do use electrical heating as well to augment the base level created by the radioisotope heater. Without electrical power, it most likely won't have enough heat to survive winter.
Why?
The unobtanium is the movie's MacGuffin -- the thing that makes the plot happen, but whose nature is ultimately irrelevant other than that people want it. "Unobtanium" is an engineer's humorous way of referring to a material with desirable properties that either simply doesn't exist, or is so expensive/difficult to obtain that it's infeasible to actually use for what you want.
So when the slimy corporate drone -- who I couldn't help but equate with Paul Riser's character Burke from Aliens, only with more power and the military on his side -- says they're trying to find the "unobtanium" with zero explanation of what it is, and knowing that there's no way they're going to succeed in getting it, well, I saw it as an obvious joke between the director and the audience. And I laughed. What better name for the unobtainable MacGuffin?
I don't understand why geeks are getting their panties in a bunch over a geek joke.
Though while on the one hand not describing its properties enhances its unobtanium-ness, on the other hand it would have been nice to have a throw-away line about it being a superconductor in the movie. It would have made various things in the movie, like the floating mountains, the "vortex" with its problematic "flux", the reference to the moon's powerful magnetic field, and the field-line like formations near the spirit tree come together. Instead it was only after seeing the movie and hearing someone mention that part of the back-story that it all clicked.
It should noted that they were designed to work no matter what for their initial 90 day mission and that running beyond that was expected.
Very true. 90 days was a "guaranteed" lifetime for doing the cost-benefit analysis for the mission. Obviously to guarantee 90 days, the rover would have to be designed to last much longer than that.
It should also be noted that the 90 day lifetime was based on how long they thought it would take before the Martian dust covered the solar panels and the rover died. Various cleaning mechanisms were considered, but ultimately weren't considered worth it. That the Martian wind happens to be enough to do an adequate job of blowing dust off the panels by itself was an unexpected but happy surprise, and is the reason the rovers lasted past 90 days.
Of course, running 6+ years is quite an accomplishment.
Indeed. It's a testament not just to the engineering team who designed the rovers, but to the operations team that has kept it going.
Also, while only obvious in hindsight, and even though it is what will ultimately kill the rover, not including a cleaning mechanism was the right call.
Lastly, I find it amazing that even sitting on what may be its final resting spot, in its final days, on its last leg (or rather wheel, at least on one side), it is still doing remarkable science. There is so much to learn about Mars that is literally right below the surface.
I can't wait for the Mars Science Laboratory. Also, I'm really hoping they take Lore Sjoberg's suggestion to heart and make one of MSL's missions to run over Spirit/Opportunity, monster-truck style. But if they can't fit that in to the mission parameters, I'll understand.
Does it need continuous power to stay capable of operating?
Yes. It requires some nominal amount of power for heating to avoid freezing and damaging components. This is what happened to the Phoenix lander (as anticipated in that case). With the panels covered in dust, plus the additional cold and lack of sunlight during the winter, Spirit is unlikely to survive the winter unless something changes.
Oh, a sarcasm-detecting element. That's real useful.
I think you are under the assumption that we know the orbits of all of the material in our solar system...
No, I'm not under that assumption. I'm very much assuming that we cannot track everything. And I'm well aware that small errors introduced by those bodies, and errors in our measurements, can add up to big numbers over time. However the point is that in non-chaotic systems, the error in the result is proportional to the error in measurement. We can be pretty sure there are no extremely massive unknown bodies out there (their gravity would make them known), which leaves only much weaker sources of gravity, which can only have so much of an effect in the time scale we're talking about here (before 2036). An effect that is accounted for in the error bars on the estimated trajectory from which we calculate the odds that it's real path will hit us.
Add up those orbits over a century or so, and the system will look very chaotic (if you're tracking only the "known" stuff).
No, it would not look chaotic at all. Assuming we've been watching the body the whole time, it'll look like our predicted path, modified slightly by an unknown body. After the first couple passes, our model would account for this and we'd be predicting the path even more accurately. There would still be error bars, but they'd be much smaller.
Whereas in a truly chaotic system, the error in the result is not proportional to the error in measurement. The tiniest error can result in arbitrarily different results. That's why it's impossible to make more than short term weather predictions. Because the weather is chaotic in a mathematical sense. Orbits are not.
I can see how it's mechanically like the Streisand Effect -- try to silence something, end up drawing more attention to it. But the reason for the suppression isn't that the thing being taken down is embarrassing or otherwise damaging to them, so the consequence seems... inconsequential.
I also doubt it's deliberate. They probably just don't care. More people downloading the movie from torrent sites is less important than them throwing their legal weight around. The only downside is how we feel about them for doing the take down. Which is the "corporations are jerk-asses" effect, not the Streisand Effect. :P
I get what your saying but...c'mon. Artists shouldn't have to ask permission to do their work.
Unless their work is a derivative work of someone else's work, then they probably should. And I mean, it's not like we're talking about some light-gray area like a two second sample of a song, or a story that is clearly directly inspired (read: ripping off) another. It's a movie about the Legend of Zelda.
Maybe in my perfect world they wouldn't need permission, but also in that world it would be polite to ask. In this world, not asking is kinda, well, lacking in foresight. Unless the mentality was "it's easier to ask forgiveness than permission". And maybe that was true; Nintendo might have said "no" from the get-go and the film never would have existed. But forgiveness would be even less likely, so this outcome is hardly surprising.
Fanfic authors do their stuff without asking permission, but they're generally aware that this means they're on thin ice and are basically counting on being too insignificant a target for anyone to care about. As soon as you start thinking of adapting your fanfic to the big screen, then some alarm bells should be going off.
In the meantime, the creators of this should rename their word to the Legend of Velda, to avoid the legal
hassles.
Sure. Blinken can search for the Thigh-Master Sword to rescue Drama Queen Velda from the evil but eccentrically effeminate Sha-mon.
Would a Zelda parody be as popular? Maybe. Would a homemade sword-and-sorcery movie unrelated to Zelda at all be as popular? Probably not. Which is why I don't think "Artists shouldn't have to ask permission to do their work" shows the proper understanding and respect for the debt they owe to the creators of the source material they're working from.
Heh. If it makes you feel any better, orbital dynamics are easier to figure out than the weather since they're pretty much non-chaotic. The error mostly comes from error in measurements of its position over time, so the longer we watch it the more accurate we get, until we get forecasts like a 1-in-300,000 chance of catastrophic meteor impact in 26 years. A bit better than weather prediction, eh? By the time any interceptor actually got close, we'd know the actual trajectory very well. If we were really sure by then it wouldn't hit earth, then we could take as much time as we wanted on the asteroid-diversion mission.
If in the unlikely event that it looked like it probably would hit earth, at least there'd be something up there to try diverting it. :p
Well if you believe they can calculate the odds of it hitting earth based on its current estimated path, then surely they can calculate how to modify the trajectory so as to reduce the odds.
On the other hand, I agree that since it already sounds incredibly unlikely that it will hit us, screwing with it sounds like a silly idea.
On the other, other hand I would rather have someone out there treating the problem of meteor impact like it is real and developing a plan to address it. For a plan to have a high chance of success relative to the consequences of an asteroid that we think has a high chance of hitting us (two very different values of "high"), I think it would take a long time to develop and test. As in quite a bit more time than between now and 2036. As the date approaches, and in the case that further study suggests the asteroid is even less likely to hit us, maybe we can do some proof-of-concept tests like actually intercepting the meteor or other important steps to be ready for when we're really in danger.
On the last hand, which I now realize is my right foot, the main reason I don't want to rely on any last-minute ad-hoc plan to save the earth from a planet killer is because, succeed or fail, any universe in which the movie Armageddon plays out in reality is one that I can't go on living in.
It is a modern phenomenon that such guilt is felt by people that are completely unconnected to slavery.
So if the technology haves want to slum it with the have-nots, it shouldn't be any big surprise that they embrace an ideology that makes themselves the criminal and thus flagellating themselves thereby redeeming themselves.
But for it to be SELF-flagellation, they must therefore associate themselves with the ones being flagellated, the ones portrayed as criminals. That's funny because I sure don't see myself in the antagonists in the movie. Why should I? Because they're mostly white? The ones who are redeemed are not the criminals in the first place. I associate with them, not the ones ho put greed above human life.
That you associate the portrayal of, say, the genocide of an indigenous people for the sake of greed as a bad thing with "white guilt" is quite telling, I think. I suppose you don't think the humans remaining on Pandora should do anything to help the Navi recover from the damage wrought by other humans, because doing so would just be more examples of self-flagellation over something they didn't do.
You must really hate Dances With Wolves. After all, the atrocity portrayed there really happened, and there's no way anyone could point that out without trying to make you, personally, feel responsible. So therefore we must not pass any value judgment at all, while also avoiding the evil of non-judgmental multiculturalism. Cus that's not dissonant.
You could easily make the jump from the trailers and the basic but apt summary of "Dances With Space Wolves" to the conclusion that the movie is anti- technology, Western society, white people, or all the other silly things people are saying.
There's no way you could think the movie is anti-tehcnology if you've seen the movie and payed any attention to Sigourney Weaver's character. Grace, despite being a hard-ass, is unreservedly one of the good guys, and it is through her knowledge of science that she does her good. Grace was the one who figured out the biological basis for what Jake still largely thought of as the Navi's hokey spiritual beliefs. It's only because of amazing genetics and other sciences that the Avatar program, and thus the opportunity to interact peacefully with the Navi, even exists.
How can you say it's an anti-technology movie where one of the main protagonists is a scientist who never rejects science nor has a reason to, and whose technology is critical for saving the day?! The movie is named after a type of technology; does the movie portray it as good or bad? It's not a trick question, though it might be hard to answer for those who haven't seen it.
"Skipper, I thought you said this was only a three hour tour."
"I'm sure it appears to be, from some reference frame."
"Fuck you, Professor."
Yeah, one of the most fascinating yet at the same time depressing concepts in relativistic physics is the "light cone", whose volume represents all possible positions in space-time that you could occupy. Ever. If it is outside your light cone, it is outside your feasible future. You can't even communicate with someone outside your light cone.
Believe me, there's a big part of me that hopes Einstein is wrong, too.
Though I'm not sure I'm ready for him being wrong about the whole causality thing... ;)