Don't fear too much for humanity. It was probably the moderator doing the use-informative-because-funny-doesn't-give-karma thing. As if I give a flying fuck about karma (or like my bad jokes need to be encouraged) but hey whatever.
Yeah, that was tongue-in-cheek you realize... or not. But yes, it was tongue in cheek, in response to all the arm-chair engineers going "der did they think of something to brush the dust off?!" and saying that yeah, I think I'll go out on a limb and guess that *fucking NASA* is capable of thinking of such things, and figuring out whether they would really work.
But you know, I'm sure NASA appreciates you defending them.;)
There is a thin atmosphere on Mars. It may be enough for a very small air compressor to build up enough pressure to simply blow the dust particles off the panel. We're not talking about moving anything large. Just a small burst to clear the panel.
Yeah of course there's an atmosphere, thus the wind. The problem is that it being so thin means you actually need a larger, stronger blast than you would otherwise since the gust will just dissipate that much faster. So you need a bigger air tank and it needs to be thicker to hold higher pressure. And the compressor motor is going to weigh more and draw more juice -- you can't slowly and gently compress air, the compressor has to exert enough force to overcome the air pressure. Then you need a way to direct the air over the solar panel. And then you have to make sure than you aren't effectively sand-blasting the panel.
The problem with a brush or wiper is that the moving parts would be exposed to the dust which would most likely result in them breaking. If all that was exposed was a nozzle which the burst of air would come from it would be less prone to breaking.
I'm not saying the other arm-chair solutions don't have problems. Frankly, the fact that NASA decided it wasn't worth doing any of them tells me what the experts think. I could be wrong, but personally I've always thought that an air compressor was the least cost effective (in a mission tradeoff sense, not necessarily dollars) idea.
(like with iPhone switching portrait/lansdcape mode)
One of my first experiences with an iPhone was a coworker trying to show me a picture of their son. They'd taken the picture with a different camera, held sideways, so it showed up sideways on the screen. So he rotated the phone. And the iPhone obliged by rotating the picture 90 degrees so that his kid was still sideways.
(*) Yes, the law can be manipulated by stupid pedantry, but pedantry involving of laws and legal rulings, not stupid pseudo-logical bullshit up-their-own-arse arguments involving sub-intellectual drivel about the free will of animate and inanimate objects, etc.
That was all implied when you said "pedantic Slashdot argument" but thanks for clarifying all the same.:)
Instead of using you and Vinny, what if I rigged up a shotgun (with a hair trigger, of course), through a pulley, to the cat's collar? At the time an intended victim was in front of the shotgun, I call the cat, and it shoots. I don't think there's a jury in the world that would go for the "Oh no, the cat did it." defense.
Yeah and that defense also didn't work when it was the opposite case where the cat rigged a shotgun up to me. Our legal system's bias towards cats is total bullshit!
Which is how long they estimated it would take for the rovers' solar panels to be covered in too much dust for the rover to function. Dust is why the mission was scoped at 90 days. They didn't know that the Martian wind would be of any use whatsoever in cleaning off the panels.
Yet even though dust is what was limiting the scope of the mission, NASA still decided not to put on a brush, wiper, or (sorry but lol) air compressor. Given there's enough obvious tradeoffs in mass/space/power use for anything you add, I'll give NASA the benefit of the doubt and assume they actually calculated the tradeoffs and said "not worth it".
So yes, the rovers were conservatively estimated to last 3 months. I'm sure the scientists on the mission expected that they would last longer, but 3 months was a good benchmark that provided a good amount of science for a reasonable cost.
My understanding is that they estimated a 90 day lifespan because that's how long they calculated it would take before too much dust accumulated on the solar panels for the rovers to function.
They didn't know (might have suspected, but certainly did not know) that the Martian wind would be substantial enough to actually clean off the panels. When it did it was a pleasant surprise, and this surprise is the whole reason the rovers lasted so long past the original estime. The rest of the equipment survived -- more or less -- because it already had to be pretty robust to ensure it lasted for the original 90 day mission.
This story is tagged "metricplease", but they didn't have the metric system in the mesozoic era. Sheesh.
They almost did!
In SE Asia they found a fossilized homo erectus, and in its hand it was holding a stone rod which was divided by carved grooves into ten equal sections, which were each then subdivided by smaller grooves into ten sections. Embedded in the specimen's skull was another rod, which was divided into twelve sections, with sixteen subdivisions.
Thus we have evidence of the oldest known metric vs imperial argument, and its resolution. While anthropologists do not know the identity of the assailant who doomed the entire pleistocene to imperial measurements, it is assumed they were an early form of Yankee.
Add this trillion dollars to Bush's trillion dollars, and the inescapable conclusion is that payment will be large, painful, and unlubed.
Now I don't know where you get that idea, seeing as the stimulus bill specifically allocated $3 billion to providing Americans with lube. You should be getting a coupon soon redeemable for a jar of Vaseline or KY jelly (your preference since the gov will not be wearing a condom latex or otherwise).
Just wait until I loose my synthetically engineered spelling-nazi bacterii...
The sad thing is that "bacterii" is almost less of a gross bastardization than "virii". Because even if you incorrectly assumed that virus would follow the "replace us with i to form the plural" rule, that would be viri with one 'i'. There is no reason or rule in English that would suggest "and then add an extra 'i' for no reason".
Bacteria may not even end in "us", but at least when you pluralize it as "bacterii" you aren't adding extra letters for no reason.
The only word in English (afik) whose plural ends with double-i is "radii", and that's because the singular word "radius" already has an 'i' just before the 'us'.
Thus why virii is so obnoxious to me. But I feel better now.
Maybe it's because I already knew he was a politician, and knew he was in bed with the media companies, that this isn't very "disillusioning" to me. I never thought of him as perfect, or "the messiah", or anything like that. He's a politician (*spit*), and a flawed man, and I never agreed with all his ideas and certainly never believed he'd live up to all of his promises anyway. And yet, that's exactly why I voted for him, because actual "ideal" candidates who would never go back on a promise (i.e. never compromise) would never get elected and would never get anything done. All I wanted was reasonable, practical levels of change that would actually happen.
Because of that, one month in and I can look at everything he's done, good and bad, and say it's going even better than I could have expected. Obama sides with the RIAA? Yeah, there's 10 demerits. Obama orders Gitmo closed? That's plus one thousand merits. Sorry, those are my priorities, and I question the self-proclaimed open-eyed realism and pragmatism of the nay-sayers who seem to react with "Oh he's done one thing I don't like? Well Hope and Change was bullshit!" It's as if you're implying that you wanted or expected perfection and when *gasp* it doesn't happen it justifies some kind of "everyone is equally bad (by not being perfect)" mentality.
The stimulus package is an interesting case since it involves flaws on many angles. Even the Republican Congressmen had to admit that Obama reached out to them more than has been done in the past, and they did get some of their requests into the bill (like more of those "welfare checks"). Yet it wasn't Obama who made the House Republicans vote along a strict party line. Yeah he could have kept trying to mollify them after that, but bipartisanship is a two way street. Or three way, since the congressional Democrats also have to play ball and it was Pelosi who decided to flex her party's congressional muscle and keep the Republicans from really influencing the bill. I have to wonder if she really thinks her party can keep riding the bump in approval ratings they got from Obama's election, while simultaneously stymieing his efforts to bridge the aisle. Maybe once they're back down in the teens they'll wake up.
So yeah, I wonder who's going to be more disillusioned? Me, who is getting even better than I expected so far and would be ecstatic if it continued for another 47 months? Or you, if the "train wreck" you predict never occurs?
* Flying Spaghetti Monster
* Invisible Pink Unicorn
* Zeus
* Celestial Tea Kettle
* Reincarnation
* The Matrix
* Thor
* The Turtle and The Elephant
* Xenu
* Many other things
Yeah, and they're all in Heaven with God. Duh. Personally I'm looking forward to hooking up with Thor and Leonardo for a kung fu battle in the Matrix.
This whole conversation is talking about "life... but not as we know it." I don't think your mind is quite open enough.
Yeah but not "Life... as defined as vaguely as possible and analogizing non-life behaviors to living behaviors".
Frankly, I don't understand how you can readily believe a sperm cell and an egg can create life (which is itself a slow combustion, see above) but a stream of photons from a magnifying glass and a piece of paper don't count.
An egg is not just slow combustion. Oxidation reactions are merely one of many reactions used by the egg to organize the structures it needs to continue living and to reproduce, etc. An egg doesn't just burn things, it burns things as an essential step in creating structure. It organizes itself and decreases entropy in a sustainable way.
A fire is nothing but the heat and light resulting from the release of chemical energy. Chemical energy that is not used for anything but to produce heat and light, both gone in an instant. Just because a human being, wonderful symbolic thinkers that we are, can look at an emission of heat and light and see one entity that we can call "a fire", and as further reactions occur, the location of the heat and light changes ergo the fire "moved", and when you splash water down the middle then there's two (smaller) fires so if you think life should be defined by puns you can say they "reproduced". But that's all in the human mind. None of those things are actually happening. All that's happening is entropy is being increased as energy is released from chemical bonds.
Frankly I don't see how you could fail to see how a cell counts as life but fire doesn't.
Besides, without getting into religious creationism / evolution debates, you have a chicken/egg problem here.
Yeah, well, religious or not if you understand evolution then the answer to that question is simple: A proto-chicken laid an egg that had the right mutation or combination of genes from other members of the proto-chicken population that made the embryo in the egg what we would call a modern chicken. Ergo, the chicken egg came first.
I'm certain there was a ton of gray area in the early days when what was formerly just a self-organizing reaction developed into what we would call life. This isn't a big problem unless you're dead set on drawing sharp lines with "alive" on one side and "not alive" on the other. What environmental requirements were there for a non-living soup of chemicals to begin to organize itself into the essence of life? I have no idea. I do know that "stuff was on fire" is definitely not sufficient on its own, and certainly does not count as life itself.
Wasn't that a clear cut case of laissez-faire capitalism to the rescue? Did some government body force IBM to open their platform?
Well, in a way... when IBM lost their copyright infringement lawsuit against Compaq for reverse-engineering and clean-room-reimplementing the IBM BIOS. That's not so much a government body saying "You must open your platform" as "you can't stop others from opening your platform for you as long as they abide by the law."
You better believe IBM didn't want anyone else to be able to make compatible hardware. But there was a huge financial incentive for anyone interested in making clones to make compatible hardware, and the law just happened to be on their side. I actually shudder to think what would have happened if the legal environment then had been like it is now.
So it kinda is still a bad example. IBM was forced against their will to open their platform, but this was actually a result of a weakness in the anti-laissez-faire monopoly granted by copyright law.
The problem in this case, is that just about nobody has an incentive to make compatible chargers. At least not phone makers. Why, when they can charge extra for proprietary cables? I really couldn't say if there's any patent or copyright related protection makers of these proprietary chargers could claim, but it isn't clear it would matter either way.
Slashdot Mirror
I noticed that too, gave me a chuckle. :)
Don't fear too much for humanity. It was probably the moderator doing the use-informative-because-funny-doesn't-give-karma thing. As if I give a flying fuck about karma (or like my bad jokes need to be encouraged) but hey whatever.
Yeah, that was tongue-in-cheek you realize... or not. But yes, it was tongue in cheek, in response to all the arm-chair engineers going "der did they think of something to brush the dust off?!" and saying that yeah, I think I'll go out on a limb and guess that *fucking NASA* is capable of thinking of such things, and figuring out whether they would really work.
But you know, I'm sure NASA appreciates you defending them. ;)
There is a thin atmosphere on Mars. It may be enough for a very small air compressor to build up enough pressure to simply blow the dust particles off the panel. We're not talking about moving anything large. Just a small burst to clear the panel.
Yeah of course there's an atmosphere, thus the wind. The problem is that it being so thin means you actually need a larger, stronger blast than you would otherwise since the gust will just dissipate that much faster. So you need a bigger air tank and it needs to be thicker to hold higher pressure. And the compressor motor is going to weigh more and draw more juice -- you can't slowly and gently compress air, the compressor has to exert enough force to overcome the air pressure. Then you need a way to direct the air over the solar panel. And then you have to make sure than you aren't effectively sand-blasting the panel.
The problem with a brush or wiper is that the moving parts would be exposed to the dust which would most likely result in them breaking. If all that was exposed was a nozzle which the burst of air would come from it would be less prone to breaking.
I'm not saying the other arm-chair solutions don't have problems. Frankly, the fact that NASA decided it wasn't worth doing any of them tells me what the experts think. I could be wrong, but personally I've always thought that an air compressor was the least cost effective (in a mission tradeoff sense, not necessarily dollars) idea.
Exactly.
You didn't understand my original post then.
No and lol no.
(like with iPhone switching portrait/lansdcape mode)
One of my first experiences with an iPhone was a coworker trying to show me a picture of their son. They'd taken the picture with a different camera, held sideways, so it showed up sideways on the screen. So he rotated the phone. And the iPhone obliged by rotating the picture 90 degrees so that his kid was still sideways.
Needless to say, I was deeply impressed. ;)
Yeah... no.
Cus Mars != Moon.
For your first order comparison, just think of the difference in distance to the source of power...
Only on Slashdot can a post asking how many sites a post can be modded "+3 Interesting" on be modded "+3 Interesting".
Thank you for responding to the first half of my post with a simplified version of the second half of my post. That was very informative.
(*) Yes, the law can be manipulated by stupid pedantry, but pedantry involving of laws and legal rulings, not stupid pseudo-logical bullshit up-their-own-arse arguments involving sub-intellectual drivel about the free will of animate and inanimate objects, etc.
That was all implied when you said "pedantic Slashdot argument" but thanks for clarifying all the same. :)
Instead of using you and Vinny, what if I rigged up a shotgun (with a hair trigger, of course), through a pulley, to the cat's collar? At the time an intended victim was in front of the shotgun, I call the cat, and it shoots. I don't think there's a jury in the world that would go for the "Oh no, the cat did it." defense.
Yeah and that defense also didn't work when it was the opposite case where the cat rigged a shotgun up to me. Our legal system's bias towards cats is total bullshit!
90 days.
Which is how long they estimated it would take for the rovers' solar panels to be covered in too much dust for the rover to function. Dust is why the mission was scoped at 90 days. They didn't know that the Martian wind would be of any use whatsoever in cleaning off the panels.
Yet even though dust is what was limiting the scope of the mission, NASA still decided not to put on a brush, wiper, or (sorry but lol) air compressor. Given there's enough obvious tradeoffs in mass/space/power use for anything you add, I'll give NASA the benefit of the doubt and assume they actually calculated the tradeoffs and said "not worth it".
So yes, the rovers were conservatively estimated to last 3 months. I'm sure the scientists on the mission expected that they would last longer, but 3 months was a good benchmark that provided a good amount of science for a reasonable cost.
My understanding is that they estimated a 90 day lifespan because that's how long they calculated it would take before too much dust accumulated on the solar panels for the rovers to function.
They didn't know (might have suspected, but certainly did not know) that the Martian wind would be substantial enough to actually clean off the panels. When it did it was a pleasant surprise, and this surprise is the whole reason the rovers lasted so long past the original estime. The rest of the equipment survived -- more or less -- because it already had to be pretty robust to ensure it lasted for the original 90 day mission.
The museum also has a huge collection of sabre-tooth tigers - who thought all the stuck prey would be an easy catch....
Stupid, stupid cat creatures!
This story is tagged "metricplease", but they didn't have the metric system in the mesozoic era. Sheesh.
They almost did!
In SE Asia they found a fossilized homo erectus, and in its hand it was holding a stone rod which was divided by carved grooves into ten equal sections, which were each then subdivided by smaller grooves into ten sections. Embedded in the specimen's skull was another rod, which was divided into twelve sections, with sixteen subdivisions.
Thus we have evidence of the oldest known metric vs imperial argument, and its resolution. While anthropologists do not know the identity of the assailant who doomed the entire pleistocene to imperial measurements, it is assumed they were an early form of Yankee.
Add this trillion dollars to Bush's trillion dollars, and the inescapable conclusion is that payment will be large, painful, and unlubed.
Now I don't know where you get that idea, seeing as the stimulus bill specifically allocated $3 billion to providing Americans with lube. You should be getting a coupon soon redeemable for a jar of Vaseline or KY jelly (your preference since the gov will not be wearing a condom latex or otherwise).
Just wait until I loose my synthetically engineered spelling-nazi bacterii...
The sad thing is that "bacterii" is almost less of a gross bastardization than "virii". Because even if you incorrectly assumed that virus would follow the "replace us with i to form the plural" rule, that would be viri with one 'i'. There is no reason or rule in English that would suggest "and then add an extra 'i' for no reason".
Bacteria may not even end in "us", but at least when you pluralize it as "bacterii" you aren't adding extra letters for no reason.
The only word in English (afik) whose plural ends with double-i is "radii", and that's because the singular word "radius" already has an 'i' just before the 'us'.
Thus why virii is so obnoxious to me. But I feel better now.
Maybe it's because I already knew he was a politician, and knew he was in bed with the media companies, that this isn't very "disillusioning" to me. I never thought of him as perfect, or "the messiah", or anything like that. He's a politician (*spit*), and a flawed man, and I never agreed with all his ideas and certainly never believed he'd live up to all of his promises anyway. And yet, that's exactly why I voted for him, because actual "ideal" candidates who would never go back on a promise (i.e. never compromise) would never get elected and would never get anything done. All I wanted was reasonable, practical levels of change that would actually happen.
Because of that, one month in and I can look at everything he's done, good and bad, and say it's going even better than I could have expected. Obama sides with the RIAA? Yeah, there's 10 demerits. Obama orders Gitmo closed? That's plus one thousand merits. Sorry, those are my priorities, and I question the self-proclaimed open-eyed realism and pragmatism of the nay-sayers who seem to react with "Oh he's done one thing I don't like? Well Hope and Change was bullshit!" It's as if you're implying that you wanted or expected perfection and when *gasp* it doesn't happen it justifies some kind of "everyone is equally bad (by not being perfect)" mentality.
The stimulus package is an interesting case since it involves flaws on many angles. Even the Republican Congressmen had to admit that Obama reached out to them more than has been done in the past, and they did get some of their requests into the bill (like more of those "welfare checks"). Yet it wasn't Obama who made the House Republicans vote along a strict party line. Yeah he could have kept trying to mollify them after that, but bipartisanship is a two way street. Or three way, since the congressional Democrats also have to play ball and it was Pelosi who decided to flex her party's congressional muscle and keep the Republicans from really influencing the bill. I have to wonder if she really thinks her party can keep riding the bump in approval ratings they got from Obama's election, while simultaneously stymieing his efforts to bridge the aisle. Maybe once they're back down in the teens they'll wake up.
So yeah, I wonder who's going to be more disillusioned? Me, who is getting even better than I expected so far and would be ecstatic if it continued for another 47 months? Or you, if the "train wreck" you predict never occurs?
Yeah, and they're all in Heaven with God. Duh. Personally I'm looking forward to hooking up with Thor and Leonardo for a kung fu battle in the Matrix.
On the other hand, Newton tried to cover up the Calculus, just so he could have the edge over other natural philosophers.
Geeze, the British will really do anything to avoid visiting the dentist, won't they?
This whole conversation is talking about "life... but not as we know it." I don't think your mind is quite open enough.
Yeah but not "Life... as defined as vaguely as possible and analogizing non-life behaviors to living behaviors".
Frankly, I don't understand how you can readily believe a sperm cell and an egg can create life (which is itself a slow combustion, see above) but a stream of photons from a magnifying glass and a piece of paper don't count.
An egg is not just slow combustion. Oxidation reactions are merely one of many reactions used by the egg to organize the structures it needs to continue living and to reproduce, etc. An egg doesn't just burn things, it burns things as an essential step in creating structure. It organizes itself and decreases entropy in a sustainable way.
A fire is nothing but the heat and light resulting from the release of chemical energy. Chemical energy that is not used for anything but to produce heat and light, both gone in an instant. Just because a human being, wonderful symbolic thinkers that we are, can look at an emission of heat and light and see one entity that we can call "a fire", and as further reactions occur, the location of the heat and light changes ergo the fire "moved", and when you splash water down the middle then there's two (smaller) fires so if you think life should be defined by puns you can say they "reproduced". But that's all in the human mind. None of those things are actually happening. All that's happening is entropy is being increased as energy is released from chemical bonds.
Frankly I don't see how you could fail to see how a cell counts as life but fire doesn't.
Besides, without getting into religious creationism / evolution debates, you have a chicken/egg problem here.
Yeah, well, religious or not if you understand evolution then the answer to that question is simple: A proto-chicken laid an egg that had the right mutation or combination of genes from other members of the proto-chicken population that made the embryo in the egg what we would call a modern chicken. Ergo, the chicken egg came first.
I'm certain there was a ton of gray area in the early days when what was formerly just a self-organizing reaction developed into what we would call life. This isn't a big problem unless you're dead set on drawing sharp lines with "alive" on one side and "not alive" on the other. What environmental requirements were there for a non-living soup of chemicals to begin to organize itself into the essence of life? I have no idea. I do know that "stuff was on fire" is definitely not sufficient on its own, and certainly does not count as life itself.
Wasn't that a clear cut case of laissez-faire capitalism to the rescue? Did some government body force IBM to open their platform?
Well, in a way... when IBM lost their copyright infringement lawsuit against Compaq for reverse-engineering and clean-room-reimplementing the IBM BIOS. That's not so much a government body saying "You must open your platform" as "you can't stop others from opening your platform for you as long as they abide by the law."
You better believe IBM didn't want anyone else to be able to make compatible hardware. But there was a huge financial incentive for anyone interested in making clones to make compatible hardware, and the law just happened to be on their side. I actually shudder to think what would have happened if the legal environment then had been like it is now.
So it kinda is still a bad example. IBM was forced against their will to open their platform, but this was actually a result of a weakness in the anti-laissez-faire monopoly granted by copyright law.
The problem in this case, is that just about nobody has an incentive to make compatible chargers. At least not phone makers. Why, when they can charge extra for proprietary cables? I really couldn't say if there's any patent or copyright related protection makers of these proprietary chargers could claim, but it isn't clear it would matter either way.
I find it hard to find an ice-cream dish with sufficient room for one nuclear missile submarine, let alone two.
You can in a root beer float, but then that defeats the purpose of the submarines.