No, the article is not describing a barred spiral galaxy. A barred spiral is one where there is a strong bar of stars across the galactic core (and extending well beyond it), and then "normal" spiral arms extend outward (mostly) from the two ends of the bar. The Milkyway is indeed thought to be a barred spiral.
What the article is describing is a spiral galaxy where the spiral arms themselves are straight in parts. And yes these have been observed (as shown in TFA where the Pinwheel galaxy is pictured, notice the lack of a central bar), but no it was not as far as I know theorized that the Milkyway had such a structure until now. Thus, news.
Sorry, I don't get your meaning. Are you saying you think they're low-balling the number of asteroids that pass within a lunar distance to earth? Or high-balling? Because otherwise, it's kind of a given that if passing within a lunar distance is a daily event, that passing much closer would be much-squared less frequent.
*Sitting in my lavish study with the window overlooking the hedge maze, idly browsing Slashdot while sipping expensive brandy*
The extraordinarily rich dumped their life savings into what was, essentially, a giant penis waving contest.
*Monocle pops out of eye*
Great Scott! That's it!
*Picks up the phone and hits speed dial #1*
Benson! Be a good chap and cancel the space exploration initiative. I know, it was very exciting, but it won't be necessary anymore. I've found a much more direct way to accomplish the same thing! Instead, I want you to redirect all the funding to constructing a tremendous waving phallus! I mean tremendous like the Burj Khalif, only thicker! No, not a merely phallic tower, I mean as close to an actual phallus as possible. And it has to wave back and forth while still remaining proudly erect in testament to my manhood. You see now? Good. Yes, of course it needs testicles! You're not much of a man with one but not the other, right? What's that, Benson? Ah, I'm not sure. Let's let the architect decide if that would make it look too Jewish. Good. Then get to it, and do keep it quiet as much as possible. You know as soon as my peers hear of this idea, they'll start making plans for even bigger ones, so mine must at least be the first to be finished and waving in their faces! Thank you, Benson.
*Hangs up the phone*
Ah, thank you Slashdot. To think I was going to waste all that money on a moon base! How silly that would have been!
Hey look, another AC who completely fails to understand what I'm talking about. I'm not complaining about it having a gas range extender and thus being a hybrid, moron. I'm complaining about it not actually being a series hybrid, the real innovation the Volt was supposed to bring.
Electrics -- hybrids in general, really -- are vastly superior in this situation.
Maybe you saw a few years ago footage of people fleeing Houston prior to Hurricane Frances, and people in gas cars out of gas in the traffic jam on I-10, while Priuses cruised along on the shoulder. It's because they don't burn power idling, so stop-and-go traffic is not as bad a case for them.
but for arguments sake, we'll say the generator can only maintain 55mph
How that is not seen as a feature by EVERYBODY is completely beyond me. In the Nissan Leaf, your option would be... oh wait, you don't have any, pull over and find the nearest power outlet, and wait for an hour or 2.
The actual feature you're describing is a gasoline range extender, which indeed is one of the basic features promised by the Volt over 'pure' EVs like the Leaf. And indeed, everyone sees that as a feature.
If the ICE-alternator-motor path cannot provide enough power to maintain highway speeds, then this is an engineering decision to maintain aforementioned gas-range-extension feature, and not actually a new feature. More like just an unfortunate compromise that had to be made. In which case, oh well, such is engineering, but that doesn't mean the downside doesn't exist. It doesn't make this a new feature. It makes it the same feature only with negative trade-offs to make it work.
Anyway, in a Leaf, your actual option would be to drive another 110-160 miles. The overall range of the Volt is much higher than the Leaf, but the pure electric range of the Leaf is much higher than the Volt. Another trade-off.
Not to defend FF14, but it's worth remembering that a few months after WoW was released, Penny Arcade famously rescinded their game-of-the-year award as protest against the terrible lag and glitches, so it's not like you even had a smooth experience with the biggest MMO in the world.
That's actually a big part of the problem with competing with WoW. At the time of its launch, yeah it was buggy and the servers were overloaded and this only got worse each week before the "maintenance" reboots so playing on a Monday was awful etc etc. Now it's a well polished machine with minimal technical problems. Anyone looking to play a new MMO today is going to be comparing it to WoW of today, not of five years ago. Which is rough for anyone hoping to repeat what Blizzard did -- release a nice but buggy MMO and then fix it up over time. They don't have that time anymore.
Then you can stop worrying about asteroids from space - can't do anything about them anyway.
Of course we can do something about asteroids from space! It's actually quite simple conceptually, and quite feasible technologically, to prevent a catastrophic asteroid impact, if and only if you detect them sufficiently far -- as in years -- in advance. A spacecraft of reasonable mass equipped with ion engines for long-term station keeping could act as a gravity tractor and pull the asteroid out of the impact trajectory. It doesn't take a whole lot of acceleration today to prevent an impact in five or ten years.
So you should be worrying, and asking your politicians what they are doing to make sure we can detect planet-killer asteroids sufficiently far in advance. We need more funding for searching and tracking of asteroids, and some test missions to work the kinks out of the process of actually moving asteroids so we're ready if we find an potential danger without sufficient time for an R&D phase.
We're starting to fund the search/tracking part, though still inadequately for the magnitude of the problem (as in the amount of space and potential objects). Only the Russians AFAIK are doing anything about actually trying to implement the solution to actually preventing a catastrophic impact. More funding pls thx!
It needs at minimum two gears since there are two power sources, so I'd say yeah.
If it really is just there for highway speeds with a depleted battery, it may end up not being a big deal at all in terms of efficiency and weight. Frankly at this point I'm waiting for the real car to come out before making a judgment. Fortunately I'm not in the market for a new car any time soon so I can afford to wait and see how everything plays out.:)
My understanding was that the wasteful $400 hammers/toilet seats, were actually funding for the 'undisclosed' portions of the budget.
That's what Seinfeld's Dad said in Independence Day, but I doubt it is true. All they have to do to fund the undisclosed portions of the budget is to move money from the disclosed portions to the undisclosed while telling everyone they spent it on the disclosed; I mean that's basically what's happening in the ID conspiracy theory, is it not?
The super-expensive items the government buys fall into two categories. First is truly special-purpose limited-run items which as always cost much more than general purpose mass-produced items. Second is misguided attempts at cost savings by specifying government purchasing requirements so precisely that only a single product matches, but then the makers of that product change the formula so it no longer matches and to satisfy the requirement it basically becomes a special-purpose item. On example I saw in an expose on the subject was a simple detergent that at the time of the requirement's creation was both adequate and the cheapest solution. But since the industry moved faster than the speed of government bureaucracy, this basically meant the government was paying to keep the old equipment running to produce the old detergent. Poof, suddenly instead of being the cheapest option it's 10x more expensive than anything else.
I also find it disingenuous to run the Volt around with drained batteries so you can see its "true" MPG (whatever your definition of "true" is with this sort of test). That's like saying a hard-top convertible sucks because I wanted to see how it performed in the rain but purposely left the hard top in the garage. The whole point of the Volt is using 100% electric power for most people's daily commutes.
Completely agreed.
If my commute is 37 miles round-trip, then the Volt gives me infinite MPG, which makes no sense because the electricity does have a cost to it. This just highlights how inadequate MPG is as an efficiency measurement.
Well the EPA uses an MPG-equivalent for pure electric vehicles that does account for the fact that electricity has a cost. So while you'd actually be getting infinite MPG (or zero GPM as I think makes more sense), you wouldn't actually get an infinite MPG rating. It is hardly perfect, but it does at least give a number that does account for real energy usage while also being in the same terms people are used to and thus easier to compare. The sticker is also going to give Miles-perf-kilowatt-hour when in pure EV mode.
"Owns a controlling stake" is synonymous with "owns" in the context of publicly traded companies, just as "buying 51% or more of the voting stock of the company" is synonymous with "buying the company".
If they made it so that the gas engine could completely run the car, rather than simply maintaining highway speeds when the battery is empty as TFAs state, then that's a further reduction in the Volt's advantages. It means the Volt would require a full-blown ICE drive train and transmission and the ICE would be required to run across a wide range of sub-optimal RPMs. At that point, I'd rather have a vehicle that just optimally shares power at all times between the electric and gas engines, like traditional hybrids only with bigger batteries.
If instead this feature is designed solely to maintain highways speeds when the battery is empty, then while still not the imagined ideal, it would mean that the transmission and ICE could still be optimized for a narrow RPM range and thus be lighter and more efficient. However it would also mean that the feature you describe would not exist, as it would not be able to provide enough torque to move the car at low speeds.
The problem the buff books (and a few online outlets parroting their stance) have with the newly-announced ability of the Volt to supplement power with mechanical energy directly from the on-board 1.4-liter four-cylinder, is that it's no longer purely electric power driving the wheels.
This is a distinction without a difference. You can burn gasoline to spin a generator to charge the batteries to power the electric motors, or you can partially skip the middle man and send some of that gas-generated power straight to the wheels. Either way, gas is burned to turn the wheels.
Okay, I think that's a fair point, but in my view it does make a difference. It means the Volt has to have a transmission, which means extra weight and maintenance issues, and all the complexity of an ICE-based drivetrain. It means the Volt's ICE may have to run over a range of RPMs rather than solely running at an optimal RPM.
So while I'm in tentative agreement that this isn't necessarily a lie, and that the Volt can still look appealing versus other hybrid options, it still makes a difference and reduces some of the advantages the Volt had.
The problem with my definition is that it was deliberately non-rigorous and intended only to convey the gist of the concept. Better definitions exist and are readily available. It sounds, though, like what you and Lord Ender want is a precise definition where a line of zero thickness can be drawn between AI and not-AI. Such a definition does not exist. What constitutes AI is indeed somewhat vague. However, imprecise is not the same as useless.
Just like they will not punt a multi-million dollar telescope into orbit without testing the primary mirror? And they'd never shoot a $327 million Orbiter to mars without checking the math to make sure the units add up, right?
Face it, space agencies are run by people and governments. They are at least as prone to mistakes and financially driven shortcuts as any other element of human society.
Screwing up a unit conversion is not the same as making a high-level decision to incorporate unpredictable software. They will use software that is well-tested and well-behaved. They may also screw up the testing and miss an important case, causing a failure in the AI later. They will not choose something which is by design more prone to such failures. That would be akin to them using a planar mirror instead of a parabolic mirror, or deliberately mixing SI and Imperial units without conversions.
This describes every nontrivial piece of software.
No, it doesn't, unless you play semantics with "decisions" and "actions" in ways that were not intended. Read up on AI on WP or any AI textbook (Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach by Russel and Norvig for example) for a better description that may satisfy your need for a better definition.
Your definition is even more meaningless. Like facial recognition, "game playing" is (was) one form of AI -- but now computers beat humans at games like chess.
Computers beat humans at chess using AI. That the AI is good enough to sometimes beat Grand Masters (though not ubiquitously since the human players have adapted) does not magically make it not AI. AI doesn't become not-AI when the computer is able to usefully accomplish it. Expert Systems are AI even though they are fantastically successful in many applications.
I assure you that your professor never intended to imply that difficulty was the defining characteristic of AI in the context of actual computer science.
Me, I think it's pretty rational to be alarmed by things with the highest probability of killing me or someone I love, or things with a very low probability of killing me, everyone I know and love, and possibly the entire human species.
In the latter category asteroid impacts would be less alarming than the Cuban Missile Crisis, but I think my level of concern is commensurate with that reality.
Slashdot Mirror
BadAnalogyGuy long ago morphed into simply BadPostGuy.
No, the article is not describing a barred spiral galaxy. A barred spiral is one where there is a strong bar of stars across the galactic core (and extending well beyond it), and then "normal" spiral arms extend outward (mostly) from the two ends of the bar. The Milkyway is indeed thought to be a barred spiral.
What the article is describing is a spiral galaxy where the spiral arms themselves are straight in parts. And yes these have been observed (as shown in TFA where the Pinwheel galaxy is pictured, notice the lack of a central bar), but no it was not as far as I know theorized that the Milkyway had such a structure until now. Thus, news.
Fair enough.
Sorry, I don't get your meaning. Are you saying you think they're low-balling the number of asteroids that pass within a lunar distance to earth? Or high-balling? Because otherwise, it's kind of a given that if passing within a lunar distance is a daily event, that passing much closer would be much-squared less frequent.
*Sitting in my lavish study with the window overlooking the hedge maze, idly browsing Slashdot while sipping expensive brandy*
The extraordinarily rich dumped their life savings into what was, essentially, a giant penis waving contest.
*Monocle pops out of eye*
Great Scott! That's it!
*Picks up the phone and hits speed dial #1*
Benson! Be a good chap and cancel the space exploration initiative. I know, it was very exciting, but it won't be necessary anymore. I've found a much more direct way to accomplish the same thing! Instead, I want you to redirect all the funding to constructing a tremendous waving phallus! I mean tremendous like the Burj Khalif, only thicker! No, not a merely phallic tower, I mean as close to an actual phallus as possible. And it has to wave back and forth while still remaining proudly erect in testament to my manhood. You see now? Good. Yes, of course it needs testicles! You're not much of a man with one but not the other, right? What's that, Benson? Ah, I'm not sure. Let's let the architect decide if that would make it look too Jewish. Good. Then get to it, and do keep it quiet as much as possible. You know as soon as my peers hear of this idea, they'll start making plans for even bigger ones, so mine must at least be the first to be finished and waving in their faces! Thank you, Benson.
*Hangs up the phone*
Ah, thank you Slashdot. To think I was going to waste all that money on a moon base! How silly that would have been!
Just being nitpicky. Are you counting Skylab and ASTP as Apollo missions? Those used a Saturn 1B as well.
Why would you infer that, since they never said only Apollo missions used Saturn 1B rockets?
Are you *really* unable to tell the difference, and understand why the latter isn't worth worrying about?
Obviously I'm able to tell the difference, having explained it. And obviously you're unable understand why the latter is worth some degree of concern.
Your risk assessment only includes the probability of an outcome and not the cost of that outcome, and thus you fail risk assessment.
Hey look, another AC who completely fails to understand what I'm talking about. I'm not complaining about it having a gas range extender and thus being a hybrid, moron. I'm complaining about it not actually being a series hybrid, the real innovation the Volt was supposed to bring.
Electrics -- hybrids in general, really -- are vastly superior in this situation.
Maybe you saw a few years ago footage of people fleeing Houston prior to Hurricane Frances, and people in gas cars out of gas in the traffic jam on I-10, while Priuses cruised along on the shoulder. It's because they don't burn power idling, so stop-and-go traffic is not as bad a case for them.
but for arguments sake, we'll say the generator can only maintain 55mph
How that is not seen as a feature by EVERYBODY is completely beyond me. In the Nissan Leaf, your option would be... oh wait, you don't have any, pull over and find the nearest power outlet, and wait for an hour or 2.
The actual feature you're describing is a gasoline range extender, which indeed is one of the basic features promised by the Volt over 'pure' EVs like the Leaf. And indeed, everyone sees that as a feature.
If the ICE-alternator-motor path cannot provide enough power to maintain highway speeds, then this is an engineering decision to maintain aforementioned gas-range-extension feature, and not actually a new feature. More like just an unfortunate compromise that had to be made. In which case, oh well, such is engineering, but that doesn't mean the downside doesn't exist. It doesn't make this a new feature. It makes it the same feature only with negative trade-offs to make it work.
Anyway, in a Leaf, your actual option would be to drive another 110-160 miles. The overall range of the Volt is much higher than the Leaf, but the pure electric range of the Leaf is much higher than the Volt. Another trade-off.
Not to defend FF14, but it's worth remembering that a few months after WoW was released, Penny Arcade famously rescinded their game-of-the-year award as protest against the terrible lag and glitches, so it's not like you even had a smooth experience with the biggest MMO in the world.
That's actually a big part of the problem with competing with WoW. At the time of its launch, yeah it was buggy and the servers were overloaded and this only got worse each week before the "maintenance" reboots so playing on a Monday was awful etc etc. Now it's a well polished machine with minimal technical problems. Anyone looking to play a new MMO today is going to be comparing it to WoW of today, not of five years ago. Which is rough for anyone hoping to repeat what Blizzard did -- release a nice but buggy MMO and then fix it up over time. They don't have that time anymore.
You're thinking of Judd Hirsch from Taxi
Oh duh, you're right. I was picturing the right guy; why did I think he was Seinfeld's Dad?
You're right; I should have just stuck with "buying a controlling share".
Then you can stop worrying about asteroids from space - can't do anything about them anyway.
Of course we can do something about asteroids from space! It's actually quite simple conceptually, and quite feasible technologically, to prevent a catastrophic asteroid impact, if and only if you detect them sufficiently far -- as in years -- in advance. A spacecraft of reasonable mass equipped with ion engines for long-term station keeping could act as a gravity tractor and pull the asteroid out of the impact trajectory. It doesn't take a whole lot of acceleration today to prevent an impact in five or ten years.
So you should be worrying, and asking your politicians what they are doing to make sure we can detect planet-killer asteroids sufficiently far in advance. We need more funding for searching and tracking of asteroids, and some test missions to work the kinks out of the process of actually moving asteroids so we're ready if we find an potential danger without sufficient time for an R&D phase.
We're starting to fund the search/tracking part, though still inadequately for the magnitude of the problem (as in the amount of space and potential objects). Only the Russians AFAIK are doing anything about actually trying to implement the solution to actually preventing a catastrophic impact. More funding pls thx!
It needs at minimum two gears since there are two power sources, so I'd say yeah.
If it really is just there for highway speeds with a depleted battery, it may end up not being a big deal at all in terms of efficiency and weight. Frankly at this point I'm waiting for the real car to come out before making a judgment. Fortunately I'm not in the market for a new car any time soon so I can afford to wait and see how everything plays out. :)
My understanding was that the wasteful $400 hammers/toilet seats, were actually funding for the 'undisclosed' portions of the budget.
That's what Seinfeld's Dad said in Independence Day, but I doubt it is true. All they have to do to fund the undisclosed portions of the budget is to move money from the disclosed portions to the undisclosed while telling everyone they spent it on the disclosed; I mean that's basically what's happening in the ID conspiracy theory, is it not?
The super-expensive items the government buys fall into two categories. First is truly special-purpose limited-run items which as always cost much more than general purpose mass-produced items. Second is misguided attempts at cost savings by specifying government purchasing requirements so precisely that only a single product matches, but then the makers of that product change the formula so it no longer matches and to satisfy the requirement it basically becomes a special-purpose item. On example I saw in an expose on the subject was a simple detergent that at the time of the requirement's creation was both adequate and the cheapest solution. But since the industry moved faster than the speed of government bureaucracy, this basically meant the government was paying to keep the old equipment running to produce the old detergent. Poof, suddenly instead of being the cheapest option it's 10x more expensive than anything else.
Truth is stupider than fiction. :)
I also find it disingenuous to run the Volt around with drained batteries so you can see its "true" MPG (whatever your definition of "true" is with this sort of test). That's like saying a hard-top convertible sucks because I wanted to see how it performed in the rain but purposely left the hard top in the garage. The whole point of the Volt is using 100% electric power for most people's daily commutes.
Completely agreed.
If my commute is 37 miles round-trip, then the Volt gives me infinite MPG, which makes no sense because the electricity does have a cost to it. This just highlights how inadequate MPG is as an efficiency measurement.
Well the EPA uses an MPG-equivalent for pure electric vehicles that does account for the fact that electricity has a cost. So while you'd actually be getting infinite MPG (or zero GPM as I think makes more sense), you wouldn't actually get an infinite MPG rating. It is hardly perfect, but it does at least give a number that does account for real energy usage while also being in the same terms people are used to and thus easier to compare. The sticker is also going to give Miles-perf-kilowatt-hour when in pure EV mode.
but all people can do is scream "You Lie!" and "Government Motors!", because they think they're being clever.
If that's all you see, when replying to a post that is doing neither, then you have issues.
"Owns a controlling stake" is synonymous with "owns" in the context of publicly traded companies, just as "buying 51% or more of the voting stock of the company" is synonymous with "buying the company".
If they made it so that the gas engine could completely run the car, rather than simply maintaining highway speeds when the battery is empty as TFAs state, then that's a further reduction in the Volt's advantages. It means the Volt would require a full-blown ICE drive train and transmission and the ICE would be required to run across a wide range of sub-optimal RPMs. At that point, I'd rather have a vehicle that just optimally shares power at all times between the electric and gas engines, like traditional hybrids only with bigger batteries.
If instead this feature is designed solely to maintain highways speeds when the battery is empty, then while still not the imagined ideal, it would mean that the transmission and ICE could still be optimized for a narrow RPM range and thus be lighter and more efficient. However it would also mean that the feature you describe would not exist, as it would not be able to provide enough torque to move the car at low speeds.
From the car connection blog:
Okay, I think that's a fair point, but in my view it does make a difference. It means the Volt has to have a transmission, which means extra weight and maintenance issues, and all the complexity of an ICE-based drivetrain. It means the Volt's ICE may have to run over a range of RPMs rather than solely running at an optimal RPM.
So while I'm in tentative agreement that this isn't necessarily a lie, and that the Volt can still look appealing versus other hybrid options, it still makes a difference and reduces some of the advantages the Volt had.
The problem with my definition is that it was deliberately non-rigorous and intended only to convey the gist of the concept. Better definitions exist and are readily available. It sounds, though, like what you and Lord Ender want is a precise definition where a line of zero thickness can be drawn between AI and not-AI. Such a definition does not exist. What constitutes AI is indeed somewhat vague. However, imprecise is not the same as useless.
Just like they will not punt a multi-million dollar telescope into orbit without testing the primary mirror? And they'd never shoot a $327 million Orbiter to mars without checking the math to make sure the units add up, right?
Face it, space agencies are run by people and governments. They are at least as prone to mistakes and financially driven shortcuts as any other element of human society.
Screwing up a unit conversion is not the same as making a high-level decision to incorporate unpredictable software. They will use software that is well-tested and well-behaved. They may also screw up the testing and miss an important case, causing a failure in the AI later. They will not choose something which is by design more prone to such failures. That would be akin to them using a planar mirror instead of a parabolic mirror, or deliberately mixing SI and Imperial units without conversions.
This describes every nontrivial piece of software.
No, it doesn't, unless you play semantics with "decisions" and "actions" in ways that were not intended. Read up on AI on WP or any AI textbook (Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach by Russel and Norvig for example) for a better description that may satisfy your need for a better definition.
Your definition is even more meaningless. Like facial recognition, "game playing" is (was) one form of AI -- but now computers beat humans at games like chess.
Computers beat humans at chess using AI. That the AI is good enough to sometimes beat Grand Masters (though not ubiquitously since the human players have adapted) does not magically make it not AI. AI doesn't become not-AI when the computer is able to usefully accomplish it. Expert Systems are AI even though they are fantastically successful in many applications.
I assure you that your professor never intended to imply that difficulty was the defining characteristic of AI in the context of actual computer science.
Sure if all you care about is yourself.
Me, I think it's pretty rational to be alarmed by things with the highest probability of killing me or someone I love, or things with a very low probability of killing me, everyone I know and love, and possibly the entire human species.
In the latter category asteroid impacts would be less alarming than the Cuban Missile Crisis, but I think my level of concern is commensurate with that reality.