leaving a truly minuscule probability that you'd ever see a launch failure due to this problem, assuming that one engine failure will not cause failures in additional engines.
Which is probably not a good assumption, but I think we have some decent evidence that the correlation between failures of multiple engines is not extremely high.
Gotta say, I'm impressed. And the best part is that a tolerable failure like this one gives them the best chance to identify and fix it -- because one they get more data from a rocket that continued to exist than catastrophically fail and two it won't impact their business model much -- and thus further reduce the risk in the future.
Why would a tiny object -- possibly made of plastic -- that fell off the rover be expected to produce visible deformation of the soil? If, as seems the 'obvious' choice given the timing of its discovery, it came from the scoop or other parts of CHIMRA, then it would have only been a few inches above the surface when it fell.
So for this object to remain dust free after falling of Curiosity, it must be internal component
It could just be something that flaked off the outside of Curiosity, and landed with the dust-free side up.
While the timing makes a part of the arm, specifically CHIMRA, seem most likely, they haven't done more than just scoop so internal parts of CHIMRA haven't been subjected to any new abrasion, and any already loose parts of the internals would have likely been shaken out when they tested the vibration/cleaning mechanisms earlier. It still could be, though.
I found this ChemCam image in the raw image archive. It does look like a jagged shaving of... something.
While this could just be because the ChemCam telescope/imager has the highest resolution of anything on the mast (and they don't want to move the arm now), it might also mean that they plan to zap the object with the laser and measure its composition.
Yeah, it's almost like they're a troll spouting unsubstantiated FUD.
I love that their "proof" of SpaceX covering up a failure is that their defamation suit against the person claiming this was the case was settled out of court.
So if a successful flight can have either no engines or one engine fail the probability is 77.6% + 20.0% = 97.6%
SpaceX has said that they deliberately turn off 2 engines during flight, and a successful launch could therefore suffer 2 engine failures of this nature.
I don't understand why you don't believe men when they say there is little discrimination
Same reason I don't believe white people when they say there is little discrimination against blacks or hispanics.
First, because I'm not blind so I know there is.
Second, because not being the target of it, not being sensitive to it, and wanting to believe that everything they have is due solely to meritocracy, means their opinion on the non-existence of oppression of peoples who aren't them is basically meaningless.
Reminds me of a similar study where they sent out identical resumes, with two random changes 1) names that "sounded" white vs black and (Dan vs Jamal) and 2) felony conviction status.
You can probably guess which resumes got the most and least callbacks. The sad part is who got the second most. "White" convicts. Yeah.
I'm sure I have always misunderstood this, but why does the fact that an explanation is the simplest of the ones available mean it is likely to be correct?
It doesn't.
It does mean the simpler explanation should be preferred in the absence of any method of distinguishing, or absent any extra explanatory power by the more complicated explanation.
In this case, water explains the composition of these rocks perfectly well. Other explanations could at best hope to explain such sediments as well as water, but would also create many more mysteries. We could conceivably find evidence of a non-water liquid carrier but in the absence of such water just makes more sense. We have a lot of evidence for water on Mars (including finding actual water ice in the present). So positing some other source of sedimentation just to arrive at a result equivalent to that of the obvious that Mars once had flowing water is, according to Occam, unjustified.
Doesn't mean we can't/won't keep an eye out for signs that the simplest explanation isn't actually the best. But right now it is.
Nope haven't read it, but the reasoning is certainly a matter of science versus science given the expected budgets.
The reason the budget is what it is, and we have to make such constrained decisions (obviously there would always be some science-versus-science trade off) is because of our relative priorities of science, welfare, war, etc.
So it's not unreasonable to discuss that. I know when I look at something like JWST vs other projects that can't be pursued if we continue with JWST, what bothers me most is how little money NASA is getting, not the exact tradeoffs in how they spend that money.
John Grotzinger sounded a lot more open to the possibility of there being preserved organics in these rocks than in that quote, but noted that the presence of water over long periods could have also oxidized the organics into CO2.
In response to Emily Lakdawalla's question specifically about whether they regretted driving on from this site without using other instruments, John said that having found several such outcrops so far makes them confident that they'll encounter more on the way to or at Glenelg (which promises to have other choices for materials to take samples from, too). And that if it turns out that they don't get any such opportunity, they can return to this site on the way back from Glenelg toward Mount Sharp (which is the significance of the name being a palindrome -- they'll pass it coming and going).
1) They certainly did get a ChemCam measurement of at least a couple of the sedimentary outcrops -- definitely the Goulburn Scour at the landing site, and probably the Link outcrop. In the Raw Image archive it shows shots from the Cam part of ChemCam around the time they would have been departing Link, and those are used for context of what ChemCam is shooting. They've been shooting quite a bit of things with the laser, since it's "cheap".
2) ChemCam isn't designed to find organics -- it does elemental spectroscopy, and any organics would be destroyed by the laser. And it's really best for giving you an idea of the predominant elements in a sample. John Grotzinger called it "qualitative", at least in comparison to the other instruments. Previous measurements of Goulburn showed composition consistent with the Martian basalt they see everywhere. So ChemCam measurements really don't add anything to the conclusion that water formed these sediments.
To really determine if there are organics in the soil, they'll need SAM and Chemin. Those will come into play once they start using Curiosity's sample collection capabilities, which will be exercised soon at Glenelg (possibly before, but definitely during the months at Glenelg).
I don't see how there's any relevant difference at all between a desktop and a touch-screen tablet interface. Just use the same interface for both and everything will be fine./Unity developer
I think it's more like complaining that the alarm clock in the room didn't go off after you unplugged the phone, and them explaining how even though one might think an alarm clock doesn't need a phone connection, automatically updating the time on the clock does require the phone connection, and while sure one could theoretically have designed the alarm to function normally in the absence of a phone connection only minus the features the connection enables rather than disable it completely, but they didn't do it that way and so here we are.
I don't really mind the online requirement of D3 -- mostly because I'm not trying to play it so much that it matters if I can't those times I'm not connected. I have other games.
But the complaint is still valid because one does not normally associate single-player non-AH activities with requiring an internet connection, it is perfectly possible to design a game such that this is the case, and so the decision to do it differently can be questioned.
But but but... how can you communicate with the guy who SAW YOU?!
You don't have to. The mere fact that they witness (or rather 'are hypothetically capable of witnessing') that you arrived someplace before you left according to their reference frame violates causality, and with a couple such instances allows for causal paradoxes. They don't have to be able to tell you that you violated causality for it to happen.
And the information of your departure and arrival can propagate to them at the speed of light That's no problem either.
Yeah, if that's what they were doing, I'd say this is great. I think it'd be great for us engineers to take a short class in marketing, or business accounting, or sales.
But for goodness sake, don't take my "Super Abbreviated Marketing 101" project and make it the basis of our next ad campaign!
Indeed. The other possibility -- that the universe is causal (as we understand it, as in 'cause A must precede effect B in time', and that FTL is okay as long as it doesn't allow causality violations (quantum entanglement, universal expansion) also has fascinating implications imo.
I have often thought of the ternary/trinary architecture with the positive/negative/off or a no charge, half charge, full charge type of breakdown.
That makes the circuits much harder to design.
For traces that are short enough that you can just treat them as capacitive/resistive loads rather than transmission lines, the nice thing about a binary circuit is that you just drive the output towards one of the two voltage rails. Driving it harder just gives you the result you want faster, or drive it slower if that's okay.
With a 3-rail circuit there would be plenty of situations where driving too fast towards the middle rail would result in reading '0' or '2' when you wanted to read '1', or where transitioning from 0 to 2 could result in a circuit reading a 1.
These issues can come up with binary circuits (e.g. not meeting hold time requirements for a flip-flop, and metastable states), but are easier to deal with.
Trinary computers have been built -- in the USSR I believe -- and I don't know what circuit issues they ran into specifically. But I think there's a reason it was just a blip in the history of computing. The hypothetical 50% increase in information density is more than offset by increased circuit complexity and reduced speed.
I love the way you crafted this slam without actually specifying what you consider to be "modern culture", other than that you agree with the xkcd fans that Lady Gaga doesn't qualify. All the reward, none of the risk. Excellent.
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leaving a truly minuscule probability that you'd ever see a launch failure due to this problem, assuming that one engine failure will not cause failures in additional engines.
Which is probably not a good assumption, but I think we have some decent evidence that the correlation between failures of multiple engines is not extremely high.
Gotta say, I'm impressed. And the best part is that a tolerable failure like this one gives them the best chance to identify and fix it -- because one they get more data from a rocket that continued to exist than catastrophically fail and two it won't impact their business model much -- and thus further reduce the risk in the future.
Why would a tiny object -- possibly made of plastic -- that fell off the rover be expected to produce visible deformation of the soil? If, as seems the 'obvious' choice given the timing of its discovery, it came from the scoop or other parts of CHIMRA, then it would have only been a few inches above the surface when it fell.
Do you think the bacteria would have time to evolve to be able to spread beyond the corpse before their initial food supply was depleted?
Seems like they'd evolve to more efficiently eat the whale, and then be screwed when it was gone.
So for this object to remain dust free after falling of Curiosity, it must be internal component
It could just be something that flaked off the outside of Curiosity, and landed with the dust-free side up.
While the timing makes a part of the arm, specifically CHIMRA, seem most likely, they haven't done more than just scoop so internal parts of CHIMRA haven't been subjected to any new abrasion, and any already loose parts of the internals would have likely been shaken out when they tested the vibration/cleaning mechanisms earlier. It still could be, though.
I found this ChemCam image in the raw image archive. It does look like a jagged shaving of... something.
While this could just be because the ChemCam telescope/imager has the highest resolution of anything on the mast (and they don't want to move the arm now), it might also mean that they plan to zap the object with the laser and measure its composition.
flying death trap? That's a bit harsh isn't it.
Yeah, it's almost like they're a troll spouting unsubstantiated FUD.
I love that their "proof" of SpaceX covering up a failure is that their defamation suit against the person claiming this was the case was settled out of court.
So if a successful flight can have either no engines or one engine fail the probability is 77.6% + 20.0% = 97.6%
SpaceX has said that they deliberately turn off 2 engines during flight, and a successful launch could therefore suffer 2 engine failures of this nature.
I don't understand why you don't believe men when they say there is little discrimination
Same reason I don't believe white people when they say there is little discrimination against blacks or hispanics.
First, because I'm not blind so I know there is.
Second, because not being the target of it, not being sensitive to it, and wanting to believe that everything they have is due solely to meritocracy, means their opinion on the non-existence of oppression of peoples who aren't them is basically meaningless.
Reminds me of a similar study where they sent out identical resumes, with two random changes 1) names that "sounded" white vs black and (Dan vs Jamal) and 2) felony conviction status.
You can probably guess which resumes got the most and least callbacks. The sad part is who got the second most. "White" convicts. Yeah.
I'm sure I have always misunderstood this, but why does the fact that an explanation is the simplest of the ones available mean it is likely to be correct?
It doesn't.
It does mean the simpler explanation should be preferred in the absence of any method of distinguishing, or absent any extra explanatory power by the more complicated explanation.
In this case, water explains the composition of these rocks perfectly well. Other explanations could at best hope to explain such sediments as well as water, but would also create many more mysteries. We could conceivably find evidence of a non-water liquid carrier but in the absence of such water just makes more sense. We have a lot of evidence for water on Mars (including finding actual water ice in the present). So positing some other source of sedimentation just to arrive at a result equivalent to that of the obvious that Mars once had flowing water is, according to Occam, unjustified.
Doesn't mean we can't/won't keep an eye out for signs that the simplest explanation isn't actually the best. But right now it is.
Nope haven't read it, but the reasoning is certainly a matter of science versus science given the expected budgets.
The reason the budget is what it is, and we have to make such constrained decisions (obviously there would always be some science-versus-science trade off) is because of our relative priorities of science, welfare, war, etc.
So it's not unreasonable to discuss that. I know when I look at something like JWST vs other projects that can't be pursued if we continue with JWST, what bothers me most is how little money NASA is getting, not the exact tradeoffs in how they spend that money.
OK, I know I'm being a bit of a pedant ... but it's listening, it's already silent. ;-)
No it isn't, because it's telling us what it hears.
If it goes silent, we won't know what it is listening to.
Wat?
Oh, and a couple relevant things I learned watching the news conference:
John Grotzinger sounded a lot more open to the possibility of there being preserved organics in these rocks than in that quote, but noted that the presence of water over long periods could have also oxidized the organics into CO2.
In response to Emily Lakdawalla's question specifically about whether they regretted driving on from this site without using other instruments, John said that having found several such outcrops so far makes them confident that they'll encounter more on the way to or at Glenelg (which promises to have other choices for materials to take samples from, too). And that if it turns out that they don't get any such opportunity, they can return to this site on the way back from Glenelg toward Mount Sharp (which is the significance of the name being a palindrome -- they'll pass it coming and going).
They didn't, they moved right along.
Well, a couple things to realize:
1) They certainly did get a ChemCam measurement of at least a couple of the sedimentary outcrops -- definitely the Goulburn Scour at the landing site, and probably the Link outcrop. In the Raw Image archive it shows shots from the Cam part of ChemCam around the time they would have been departing Link, and those are used for context of what ChemCam is shooting. They've been shooting quite a bit of things with the laser, since it's "cheap".
2) ChemCam isn't designed to find organics -- it does elemental spectroscopy, and any organics would be destroyed by the laser. And it's really best for giving you an idea of the predominant elements in a sample. John Grotzinger called it "qualitative", at least in comparison to the other instruments. Previous measurements of Goulburn showed composition consistent with the Martian basalt they see everywhere. So ChemCam measurements really don't add anything to the conclusion that water formed these sediments.
To really determine if there are organics in the soil, they'll need SAM and Chemin. Those will come into play once they start using Curiosity's sample collection capabilities, which will be exercised soon at Glenelg (possibly before, but definitely during the months at Glenelg).
I don't see how there's any relevant difference at all between a desktop and a touch-screen tablet interface. Just use the same interface for both and everything will be fine. /Unity developer
I think it's more like complaining that the alarm clock in the room didn't go off after you unplugged the phone, and them explaining how even though one might think an alarm clock doesn't need a phone connection, automatically updating the time on the clock does require the phone connection, and while sure one could theoretically have designed the alarm to function normally in the absence of a phone connection only minus the features the connection enables rather than disable it completely, but they didn't do it that way and so here we are.
I don't really mind the online requirement of D3 -- mostly because I'm not trying to play it so much that it matters if I can't those times I'm not connected. I have other games.
But the complaint is still valid because one does not normally associate single-player non-AH activities with requiring an internet connection, it is perfectly possible to design a game such that this is the case, and so the decision to do it differently can be questioned.
But but but... how can you communicate with the guy who SAW YOU?!
You don't have to. The mere fact that they witness (or rather 'are hypothetically capable of witnessing') that you arrived someplace before you left according to their reference frame violates causality, and with a couple such instances allows for causal paradoxes. They don't have to be able to tell you that you violated causality for it to happen.
And the information of your departure and arrival can propagate to them at the speed of light That's no problem either.
Ah, so saying "bit" was a typo. Okay. Anyway, you only need one transistor to make a linear amplifier.
Yeah, if that's what they were doing, I'd say this is great. I think it'd be great for us engineers to take a short class in marketing, or business accounting, or sales.
But for goodness sake, don't take my "Super Abbreviated Marketing 101" project and make it the basis of our next ad campaign!
Indeed. The other possibility -- that the universe is causal (as we understand it, as in 'cause A must precede effect B in time', and that FTL is okay as long as it doesn't allow causality violations (quantum entanglement, universal expansion) also has fascinating implications imo.
Yeah, that just ruined the joke. ;)
I have often thought of the ternary/trinary architecture with the positive/negative/off or a no charge, half charge, full charge type of breakdown.
That makes the circuits much harder to design.
For traces that are short enough that you can just treat them as capacitive/resistive loads rather than transmission lines, the nice thing about a binary circuit is that you just drive the output towards one of the two voltage rails. Driving it harder just gives you the result you want faster, or drive it slower if that's okay.
With a 3-rail circuit there would be plenty of situations where driving too fast towards the middle rail would result in reading '0' or '2' when you wanted to read '1', or where transitioning from 0 to 2 could result in a circuit reading a 1.
These issues can come up with binary circuits (e.g. not meeting hold time requirements for a flip-flop, and metastable states), but are easier to deal with.
Trinary computers have been built -- in the USSR I believe -- and I don't know what circuit issues they ran into specifically. But I think there's a reason it was just a blip in the history of computing. The hypothetical 50% increase in information density is more than offset by increased circuit complexity and reduced speed.
A single vaccuum tube is an amplifier.
So's a single transistor.
Both become "bits" only when you choose to interpret their outputs as binary.
I love the way you crafted this slam without actually specifying what you consider to be "modern culture", other than that you agree with the xkcd fans that Lady Gaga doesn't qualify. All the reward, none of the risk. Excellent.