...the viscosity of the (very expensive) damping fluid can be controlled by the application of a magnetic field. <Buzzword warning> Nanotech stuff, I believe </buzzword>
I don't think it's quite what you'd call nanotech. More of a non-newtonian fluid with iron filings suspended in it, or some refined version of that. I remember first hearing about
stuff like that maybe 15 years ago or so.
So is this scientific "proof" that liberals tend to be more compassionate but also more cowardly?
No....
Correct. Note that the study referenced is only preliminary. Most of the article is sheer speculation of the consequences if there turns out to be a correlation between amygdala activity and politial orientation.
I would also point out that this idea is directly contradicted by another study that found a strong corellation between incidence of nightmares and membership in the Republican party. Of course this study was also preliminary (and I haven't seen any updates on it yet).
I may not like Bush, but I'm not voting anything-but-bush, because that implies that a banana tree could run the country better. and if you believe that, you are a fucking sheep.
Ok then, how about this: a banana tree could run the country just as well as the current administration. He pretty much just sits there like one, it seems, and lets all his handlers -- er, cabinet -- make the real decisions. And of course each member has his own agenda and doesn't really see the big picture, and we've seen where that's led.
Here's a little tidbit from the 9/11 report (I'm regurgitating from memory of a Salon.com article, so corrections welcome): before 9/11, when informed of the fact that there were some 70 ongoing FBI investigations into Al-Qaeda activities (investigations initiated under Clinton), he responded with the equivalent of "Oh, that's nice. What's for dinner?". Clinton, on the other hand, was nearly obsessed with the problem, at least since the Millenium airport-bombing attempt. He held weekly meetings where he forced the FBI and CIA guys to tell them everything relevant, thus circumventing the "wall" between the two agencies.
In other words (my interpretation): Clinton left the intelligence mechanisms set up to work well under strong leadership; under Bush, they were left on autopilot, and it all just drifted along until you-know-what happened. Bush has said he would have "moved Heaven and Earth" to stop the attack, if only he knew exactly when/where/what would happen. It's not too reassuring to me to know that it would have required such a precise find from one of those pre-existing investigations to have gotten Bush to lift a finger to do something about it.
Hot objects, like car seats, do not normally give off a lot of IR radiant heat, exceptions being glowing-hot type of stuff...
Radiative heat from everyday objects is in fact significant. I don't have any numbers on me, but just try observing it in your daily life -- if you hold your hand close to a warm (or cold) object, without touching it, you can start to feel the temperature difference if you pay enough attention. I remember one time back in high school, someone sitting down next to me in class who had been running to the classroom -- I could immediately feel the heat blasting off this guy (it was a hot day, so this surpassed the comfort threshold; that's why I noticed).
Anyways, sure, keeping the air from exchanging is important to keeping the heat from getting sucked out, if you want to see the greenhouse effect happen. But radiative heat loss would still keep greenhouses/cars from getting as hot as they do if glass didn't absorb any IR. Now you'd have to do experiments to see how big that effect is relative to the air-trapping itself, but it's certainly non-zero.
Don't mess up Wikipedia...
That page is not exactly a thing of beauty. The reference cited to support the idea that the greenhouse effect is a "misnomer" for actual greenhouses doesn't exactly look authoritative (and its validity is questioned in the page's discussion logs already). Also, the page needs to start off by talking about the effect in the abstract, not just as applied to planetary atmospherics.
Don't worry -- I'm not going to go charging in and turn it all upside-down. I will study the change logs and discussions, and will look for good-quality references to cite. If I don't have time to do it right, I won't do anything.
With a complementary treatment to the glass or interlayer, EPG technologies can also significantly reduce interior heat build-up by rejecting up to 55 percent of infrared (IR) light. According to glass industry testing, EPG with IR-reflective treatment can initially reduce the temperature in a vehicle sitting out in the sun by up to 40 degrees Fahrenheit or 22 degrees Centigrade. That can reduce the amount of energy used by the air conditioner, not to mention reducing the discomfort of getting into a car with a hot steering wheel or seats.
(emphasis mine)
This makes me a bit suspicious -- "initially"? Sounds like it may simply delay the heating. i.e. after N minutes, the cabin temperature is 40F cooler than it would be with normal glass. But in N+X minutes, it may catch up, and will have made no difference.
That makes sense, I think, because it will initially be reflecting off a good deal of the energy that's pouring in (and the key word is reflecting, not absorbing, by the way), but over time the greenhouse effect will still kick in -- and probably harder than with regular glass. That is, if it reflects IR in the other direction too (i.e. back inward), then it may actually trap heat better than regular glass, which only absorbs a certain percentage of the IR. This glass would probably absorb the same percentage, and reflect back another portion. In steady-state, this could counteract the benefits of there being less energy gettting in per unit time.
The "greenhouse effect" -- trapping energy due to something that lets through visible but not IR wavelengths -- is certainly real, whether it's a matter of the composition of the atmosphere, or having an enclosed space with a lot of glass exposed to the sun.
The matter of whether it's an enclosed airspace only affects whether the effect gets cut off or not. If you had a window open in a greenhouse, then air can circulate through and bleed the heat away, bringing the interior closer to the ambient temperature. Cutting off the air circulation removes this interference, allowing the greenhouse effect to truly take hold. The interior temperature can then get a good deal hotter than even a patch of ground directly exposed to the sun would be.
I need to see about correcting that Wikipedia entry...
n Tokyo, law requires large buildings to have roof gardens to prevent the roofs from getting so hot. Plants will use that energy to grow, instead of letting that energy hit concrete, metal, etc and become heat. Its estimated that tokyo would be 10 degrees hotter on average without the roof gardens.
Hmm. It certainly would make the interior of the building cooler by not letting the sunlight strike it directly, thereby reducing air-conditioning costs quite a bit. Due to the surface area, the air would carry the heat away from the leaves before they could re-radiate into the building.
But in terms of the overall city environment, I don't know -- leaves are quite dark, in fact, and will likely absorb more radiation than if you simply painted the roof white. So while the building itself would be cooler, the overall effect might be an increase in air temperatures (relative to having a white roof).
Of course, using plants makes the city a hell of a lot nicer in a lot of other ways.
Just because some greenhouses use air-trapping as a dominant effect doesn't mean that this applies to rooms and cars -- or all greenhouses, for that matter.
Example: if you get in a car that's been roasting in the sun, just opening the window and exchanging the air doesn't instantly make it cool -- the dashboard, seats, ceiling etc. are still radiating a hell of a lot of IR. If you closed the window after just a short time, you'd find the interior rising back to the full temperature a good deal more quickly than it originally took when the car started off cool.
Radiative heating is a lot more significant than most people seem to understand.
Note that normal glass blocks IR already. The only way this new material would help cool anything is if it allowed transmission of IR where glass does not (think greenhouse effect).
Applying this to glass would render it completely useless.
...greenhouses work by allowing the infrared light in which hits the material in the greenhouse which in turn conducts the heat to the air. This air is small in volume...
While this is certainly a factor, you (and the article you link to) totally ignore the fact that air, like all hot things, radiates heat away as IR. If you were to surround the earth in glass, its atmosphere would get quite a bit hotter, despite the larger mass, because it can't radiate the heat away as efficiently anymore. The upper layers of the atmosphere are cooler not just because they're further from the conductive heating from the ground, but also because they can more easily radiate their own heat out to space.
That is why excess "greenhouse gasses" released into the atmosphere are causing global warming -- they absorb IR more efficiently than the atmosphere's other components, preventing lower-altitude air (and the ground) from radiating heat away as easily. (Actually, they still radiate, but it gets caught, and 50% radiated back down again.)
I was under the impression that glass already relfected a substantial amount of infrared light - isn't that how greenhouses work? Visible light passes through the glass, is absorbed by things inside the greenhouse and re-emitted as infrared, which is reflected by the glass and thus trapped inside the greenhouse.
Correct, except that (I think) glass pretty much just absorbs infrared; the amount reflected is probably trivial, as it is for visible light.
So yes, everything inside the greenhouse (or car, etc.) gets energy from the visible light, plus the re-emitted IR from the glass. The interior itself then re-emits IR, which is also absorbed and re-emitted by the glass. The glass will emit in both directions equally, but it's at a higher temperature than it might otherwise be, because it's essentially being "lit" from both directions (in IR). The interior will be at the same temperature, so you end up with a higher temperature inside than outside.
Obviously I've misunderstood, otherwise this breakthrough wouldn't be worth writing about...
The article -- and 80% of the posts here, sad to say -- are obviously written by folks who don't understand the process. But I think there's a bit of value in the product, in that it will lessen the greenhouse effect when the temperature of the glass is below the 84F threshold. i.e. it can still help keep the house cool (in some cicumstances), but for exactly the opposite reson.
Hmm...let's see, they were captured after firing at our troops in a frickin' combat zone.
Example: a couple months back, after that truck driver guy escaped from the when he heard a U.S. convoy going by, troops returned to the area to see if they could find his hostage-takers. They couldn't find anyone obvious, so they detained two guys working in a field nearby. Applying even a little bit of logic, there's a good chance these two were in fact innocent. But where are they now? Did they get sent to Abu Ghrabe? Have their families heard from them since?
Also note that quite a few of those interred at Gitmo have been released, after it was determined that they were totally innocent.
These people are being interrogated to determine whether they're innocent. If torture techniques are used in this activity, we are violating fundamental human rights. Even if you don't think you need a justice system, surely you can see this is wrong. By the way, it also confirms everything the real terrorists want to believe about us.
Treating terrorism as a matter for the criminal-justice system is suicidal. We tried doing that prior to 9/11, and look what it got us.
So abandoning all concept of human rights is the answer? Sweeping up innocents into this interrment-and-torture process is ok? Again, this is not what America is supposed to be about. You need to go review what the Founding Fathers were fighting for.
Those "victims" (and the thugs detained at Gitmo) don't open-carry their weapons and they don't so much as acknowledge the laws of war.
You exhibit a fundamental lack of understanding of the basics of justice.
You assume that the individuals detained are already known guilty. In fact, these are speculative detentions. Sure, many are probably criminals/terrorists. But if there's a chance of even one of them being an innocent person, are you willing to risk being responsible for torturing/killing him or her in such a prison environment, just because we want to think of all of them as thugs? What if it was you, or your spouse, or your child, who was "accidentally" detained in such a prison?
You don't understand some of the most basic ideas the U.S. was founded upon. You are, basically, un-American.
Water should be pretty common near stars as Hydrogen is the fuel which runs them. When combined with oxygen pulled near the star by gravitation, you find yourself with water. The difficulty is in finding it in liquid form. Planets and planetoids near a star will have their water blown or boiled away. This water will then travel toward the outer system. If no large body exists in the star's "temperate zone", then the water will continue on. If it hits a body outside of the "temperate zone", it will remain as ice.
This is a cute theory, but I don't think it's right.
One definite error: you talk about oxygen being "pulled near the star by gravitation", yet once it combines with H2 to make water, it *then* gets blown out? Despite the fact that H20 molecules are heavier than the isolated oxygen atoms?
I also strongly doubt that it's the material blown off of an inner planet that supplies an outer planet -- why would the water etc. ever have collected on the inner planet in the first place, if the heat is too high for it to stay there?
But your fundamental idea is right (at least, agrees with what I've learned) -- it's the sun's heat that is responsible for the inner planets being rocky w/ little to no gas, leaving the outer planets with the ice and gases. But this was mostly from the solar system's formation.
Near the forming star, the heat was too great to allow any particles of the light elements to form, and any preexisting ones from the nebula were "boiled" into gases. These isolated atoms thus did not participate much in planetary formation, as the heavier elements went ahead and stuck together, forming larger & larger particles that could then start coalescing by gravity. Any ligher atoms/molecules would just keep bouncing off. Even when you had planetoids w/ significant gravity, they would themselves have been too hot to allow any significant amounts of gases to remain trapped at their surfaces.
Also note that the sun itself was also considerably hotter than today, as it was releasing not just nuclear energy but also the sheer kinetic energy of all the infalling material -- this is called the "Hayashi" phase of the star's development, if I remember correctly.
So by the time the inner planets (and the sun) cooled enough to allow them to sustain atmospheres, all those gases would have been blown out of the inner solar system by the solar wind.
Incidentally, that does leave a mystery as to where the atmospheres that Venus/Earth/Mars do have actually came from. Perhaps they did in fact trap enough with them as they formed. But the other possibility is that infalling comets from the outer regions supplied the material. I don't know if one theory or the other is more favored among astrophysicists nowadays.
...video camera resolution stinks...He's shooting a movie, as in maybe he wants to show it on a big screen...
No, he's doing a first-attempt amateur "short film" project, which means most likely he'll be distributing it on DVD or over the web -- the latter case most likely being even lower resolution.
Now if you're talking about quality of image, well, that's what his entire question was: what camera is going to give the best results? What are all the dimensions he has to watch for?
I was just warning him not to fall into the "megapixels" trap if he chooses to purchase a consumer video camera.
"Get as low res as you can"???? What, webcam? 7-11 security cam?
You start as high-quality as you can...
If you had read my post carefully, you'd see that I was talking specifically about # of pixels, and in consumer video cameras. That's the entirety of the scope of my advice. Within that realm, higher "resolution" == lower quality. That was my point.
You seem to have been responding to some fictictious version of my post that you have in your head. You can rant more at this person if you want, but just stop pretending that it's me you're talking to.
B) res does matter. You shoot with a shitty camera, and no amount of color correction or digital post-production is going to change the fact that it looks like you shot it with a shitty camera. You can always subtract information for video, DVD, or HDTV, you can always compress it,
I think you're talking about cameras in a price range way above what the guy wants -- note he said:
...I'd like to start doing some A/V work on the side as I attempt to make the transition to a new career.
So we're probably talking 2k or less -- i.e. consumer space. Any consumer video camera that has "higher resolution" as a selling point is only actually going to make use of the extra pixels to take stills, or for digital zoom. As I said, the video from such cameras will have more noise problems as a result, because it's making do with less light per sensing element. Even though, when not in digital-zoom mode, the camera will be averaging those smaller original pixels to make the lower-res images it actually records, it's still going to be worse than if you started with bigger sensing elements that had less noise susceptibility to begin with.
So the real answer is: get as big a lens as you can, with as low res as you can, and if you're looking at zoom, look at the optical zoom only.
Unfortunately, the cameras that are good in these areas are going to tend to be the older cameras, so they'll be hard to find. Or maybe that's fortunate, since they'd likely be cheaper.:)
Though the rental idea is worth considering, if you'll be able to do all the shooting within a tight time window.
And yes, the lighting is extremely important -- just as important as the camera. It can make or break a film, as my brother found out on one project. If you have a friend who knows his lighting really well, get as much help from him/her as you can. Or take some classes, if possible.
Oh, and I think I need to address this:
If you're talking about regular tv resolution, than you're a fucking idiot and don't know shit about filmmaking.
So those Blair Witch guys were fucking idiots, huh?
Like every geek I want the best resolution available...
No you don't!
The higher the resolution, the less light you get
per pixel for a given lens size -- this results in higher noise levels when you're in relatively low-light situations (e.g. indoors).
Why would you need higher resolution in a video camera, anyways? Sure there's HDTV, but if you're talking about regular TV resolution, there's absolutely no point. If you want to take stills, get a separate digital still camera; don't compromise your video.
The demand for [SUN] training is ever so slowly and painfully rising, about as fast as SUN's fortunes are now. But the heyday of the late '90s is long gone.
Seems like there should be demand for Linux training nowadays -- is your company diversifying into those areas? Seems like a natural transition, as most of it would be the same...:)
Slashdot Mirror
Karl Rove. Or rather, the anonymous armies of volunteers he commands.
I don't think it's quite what you'd call nanotech. More of a non-newtonian fluid with iron filings suspended in it, or some refined version of that. I remember first hearing about stuff like that maybe 15 years ago or so.
How is your son doing now?
Correct. Note that the study referenced is only preliminary. Most of the article is sheer speculation of the consequences if there turns out to be a correlation between amygdala activity and politial orientation.
I would also point out that this idea is directly contradicted by another study that found a strong corellation between incidence of nightmares and membership in the Republican party. Of course this study was also preliminary (and I haven't seen any updates on it yet).
Ok then, how about this: a banana tree could run the country just as well as the current administration. He pretty much just sits there like one, it seems, and lets all his handlers -- er, cabinet -- make the real decisions. And of course each member has his own agenda and doesn't really see the big picture, and we've seen where that's led.
Here's a little tidbit from the 9/11 report (I'm regurgitating from memory of a Salon.com article, so corrections welcome): before 9/11, when informed of the fact that there were some 70 ongoing FBI investigations into Al-Qaeda activities (investigations initiated under Clinton), he responded with the equivalent of "Oh, that's nice. What's for dinner?". Clinton, on the other hand, was nearly obsessed with the problem, at least since the Millenium airport-bombing attempt. He held weekly meetings where he forced the FBI and CIA guys to tell them everything relevant, thus circumventing the "wall" between the two agencies.
In other words (my interpretation): Clinton left the intelligence mechanisms set up to work well under strong leadership; under Bush, they were left on autopilot, and it all just drifted along until you-know-what happened. Bush has said he would have "moved Heaven and Earth" to stop the attack, if only he knew exactly when/where/what would happen. It's not too reassuring to me to know that it would have required such a precise find from one of those pre-existing investigations to have gotten Bush to lift a finger to do something about it.
Radiative heat from everyday objects is in fact significant. I don't have any numbers on me, but just try observing it in your daily life -- if you hold your hand close to a warm (or cold) object, without touching it, you can start to feel the temperature difference if you pay enough attention. I remember one time back in high school, someone sitting down next to me in class who had been running to the classroom -- I could immediately feel the heat blasting off this guy (it was a hot day, so this surpassed the comfort threshold; that's why I noticed).
Anyways, sure, keeping the air from exchanging is important to keeping the heat from getting sucked out, if you want to see the greenhouse effect happen. But radiative heat loss would still keep greenhouses/cars from getting as hot as they do if glass didn't absorb any IR. Now you'd have to do experiments to see how big that effect is relative to the air-trapping itself, but it's certainly non-zero.
Don't mess up Wikipedia...
That page is not exactly a thing of beauty. The reference cited to support the idea that the greenhouse effect is a "misnomer" for actual greenhouses doesn't exactly look authoritative (and its validity is questioned in the page's discussion logs already). Also, the page needs to start off by talking about the effect in the abstract, not just as applied to planetary atmospherics.
Don't worry -- I'm not going to go charging in and turn it all upside-down. I will study the change logs and discussions, and will look for good-quality references to cite. If I don't have time to do it right, I won't do anything.
This makes me a bit suspicious -- "initially"? Sounds like it may simply delay the heating. i.e. after N minutes, the cabin temperature is 40F cooler than it would be with normal glass. But in N+X minutes, it may catch up, and will have made no difference.
That makes sense, I think, because it will initially be reflecting off a good deal of the energy that's pouring in (and the key word is reflecting, not absorbing, by the way), but over time the greenhouse effect will still kick in -- and probably harder than with regular glass. That is, if it reflects IR in the other direction too (i.e. back inward), then it may actually trap heat better than regular glass, which only absorbs a certain percentage of the IR. This glass would probably absorb the same percentage, and reflect back another portion. In steady-state, this could counteract the benefits of there being less energy gettting in per unit time.
Ah, yes, of course - the AC's themselves will generate quite a bit of heat. Thanks!
The "greenhouse effect" -- trapping energy due to something that lets through visible but not IR wavelengths -- is certainly real, whether it's a matter of the composition of the atmosphere, or having an enclosed space with a lot of glass exposed to the sun.
The matter of whether it's an enclosed airspace only affects whether the effect gets cut off or not. If you had a window open in a greenhouse, then air can circulate through and bleed the heat away, bringing the interior closer to the ambient temperature. Cutting off the air circulation removes this interference, allowing the greenhouse effect to truly take hold. The interior temperature can then get a good deal hotter than even a patch of ground directly exposed to the sun would be.
I need to see about correcting that Wikipedia entry...
Hmm. It certainly would make the interior of the building cooler by not letting the sunlight strike it directly, thereby reducing air-conditioning costs quite a bit. Due to the surface area, the air would carry the heat away from the leaves before they could re-radiate into the building.
But in terms of the overall city environment, I don't know -- leaves are quite dark, in fact, and will likely absorb more radiation than if you simply painted the roof white. So while the building itself would be cooler, the overall effect might be an increase in air temperatures (relative to having a white roof).
Of course, using plants makes the city a hell of a lot nicer in a lot of other ways.
Example: if you get in a car that's been roasting in the sun, just opening the window and exchanging the air doesn't instantly make it cool -- the dashboard, seats, ceiling etc. are still radiating a hell of a lot of IR. If you closed the window after just a short time, you'd find the interior rising back to the full temperature a good deal more quickly than it originally took when the car started off cool.
Radiative heating is a lot more significant than most people seem to understand.
Applying this to glass would render it completely useless.
While this is certainly a factor, you (and the article you link to) totally ignore the fact that air, like all hot things, radiates heat away as IR. If you were to surround the earth in glass, its atmosphere would get quite a bit hotter, despite the larger mass, because it can't radiate the heat away as efficiently anymore. The upper layers of the atmosphere are cooler not just because they're further from the conductive heating from the ground, but also because they can more easily radiate their own heat out to space.
That is why excess "greenhouse gasses" released into the atmosphere are causing global warming -- they absorb IR more efficiently than the atmosphere's other components, preventing lower-altitude air (and the ground) from radiating heat away as easily. (Actually, they still radiate, but it gets caught, and 50% radiated back down again.)
Correct, except that (I think) glass pretty much just absorbs infrared; the amount reflected is probably trivial, as it is for visible light.
So yes, everything inside the greenhouse (or car, etc.) gets energy from the visible light, plus the re-emitted IR from the glass. The interior itself then re-emits IR, which is also absorbed and re-emitted by the glass. The glass will emit in both directions equally, but it's at a higher temperature than it might otherwise be, because it's essentially being "lit" from both directions (in IR). The interior will be at the same temperature, so you end up with a higher temperature inside than outside.
Obviously I've misunderstood, otherwise this breakthrough wouldn't be worth writing about...
The article -- and 80% of the posts here, sad to say -- are obviously written by folks who don't understand the process. But I think there's a bit of value in the product, in that it will lessen the greenhouse effect when the temperature of the glass is below the 84F threshold. i.e. it can still help keep the house cool (in some cicumstances), but for exactly the opposite reson.
Example: a couple months back, after that truck driver guy escaped from the when he heard a U.S. convoy going by, troops returned to the area to see if they could find his hostage-takers. They couldn't find anyone obvious, so they detained two guys working in a field nearby. Applying even a little bit of logic, there's a good chance these two were in fact innocent. But where are they now? Did they get sent to Abu Ghrabe? Have their families heard from them since?
Also note that quite a few of those interred at Gitmo have been released, after it was determined that they were totally innocent.
These people are being interrogated to determine whether they're innocent. If torture techniques are used in this activity, we are violating fundamental human rights. Even if you don't think you need a justice system, surely you can see this is wrong. By the way, it also confirms everything the real terrorists want to believe about us.
Treating terrorism as a matter for the criminal-justice system is suicidal. We tried doing that prior to 9/11, and look what it got us.
So abandoning all concept of human rights is the answer? Sweeping up innocents into this interrment-and-torture process is ok? Again, this is not what America is supposed to be about. You need to go review what the Founding Fathers were fighting for.
You exhibit a fundamental lack of understanding of the basics of justice.
You assume that the individuals detained are already known guilty. In fact, these are speculative detentions. Sure, many are probably criminals/terrorists. But if there's a chance of even one of them being an innocent person, are you willing to risk being responsible for torturing/killing him or her in such a prison environment, just because we want to think of all of them as thugs? What if it was you, or your spouse, or your child, who was "accidentally" detained in such a prison?
You don't understand some of the most basic ideas the U.S. was founded upon. You are, basically, un-American.
This is a cute theory, but I don't think it's right.
One definite error: you talk about oxygen being "pulled near the star by gravitation", yet once it combines with H2 to make water, it *then* gets blown out? Despite the fact that H20 molecules are heavier than the isolated oxygen atoms?
I also strongly doubt that it's the material blown off of an inner planet that supplies an outer planet -- why would the water etc. ever have collected on the inner planet in the first place, if the heat is too high for it to stay there?
But your fundamental idea is right (at least, agrees with what I've learned) -- it's the sun's heat that is responsible for the inner planets being rocky w/ little to no gas, leaving the outer planets with the ice and gases. But this was mostly from the solar system's formation.
Near the forming star, the heat was too great to allow any particles of the light elements to form, and any preexisting ones from the nebula were "boiled" into gases. These isolated atoms thus did not participate much in planetary formation, as the heavier elements went ahead and stuck together, forming larger & larger particles that could then start coalescing by gravity. Any ligher atoms/molecules would just keep bouncing off. Even when you had planetoids w/ significant gravity, they would themselves have been too hot to allow any significant amounts of gases to remain trapped at their surfaces.
Also note that the sun itself was also considerably hotter than today, as it was releasing not just nuclear energy but also the sheer kinetic energy of all the infalling material -- this is called the "Hayashi" phase of the star's development, if I remember correctly.
So by the time the inner planets (and the sun) cooled enough to allow them to sustain atmospheres, all those gases would have been blown out of the inner solar system by the solar wind.
Incidentally, that does leave a mystery as to where the atmospheres that Venus/Earth/Mars do have actually came from. Perhaps they did in fact trap enough with them as they formed. But the other possibility is that infalling comets from the outer regions supplied the material. I don't know if one theory or the other is more favored among astrophysicists nowadays.
No, he's doing a first-attempt amateur "short film" project, which means most likely he'll be distributing it on DVD or over the web -- the latter case most likely being even lower resolution.
Now if you're talking about quality of image, well, that's what his entire question was: what camera is going to give the best results? What are all the dimensions he has to watch for?
I was just warning him not to fall into the "megapixels" trap if he chooses to purchase a consumer video camera.
If you had read my post carefully, you'd see that I was talking specifically about # of pixels, and in consumer video cameras. That's the entirety of the scope of my advice. Within that realm, higher "resolution" == lower quality. That was my point.
You seem to have been responding to some fictictious version of my post that you have in your head. You can rant more at this person if you want, but just stop pretending that it's me you're talking to.
I think you're talking about cameras in a price range way above what the guy wants -- note he said:
So we're probably talking 2k or less -- i.e. consumer space. Any consumer video camera that has "higher resolution" as a selling point is only actually going to make use of the extra pixels to take stills, or for digital zoom. As I said, the video from such cameras will have more noise problems as a result, because it's making do with less light per sensing element. Even though, when not in digital-zoom mode, the camera will be averaging those smaller original pixels to make the lower-res images it actually records, it's still going to be worse than if you started with bigger sensing elements that had less noise susceptibility to begin with.So the real answer is: get as big a lens as you can, with as low res as you can, and if you're looking at zoom, look at the optical zoom only.
Unfortunately, the cameras that are good in these areas are going to tend to be the older cameras, so they'll be hard to find. Or maybe that's fortunate, since they'd likely be cheaper. :)
Though the rental idea is worth considering, if you'll be able to do all the shooting within a tight time window.
And yes, the lighting is extremely important -- just as important as the camera. It can make or break a film, as my brother found out on one project. If you have a friend who knows his lighting really well, get as much help from him/her as you can. Or take some classes, if possible.
Oh, and I think I need to address this:
If you're talking about regular tv resolution, than you're a fucking idiot and don't know shit about filmmaking.
So those Blair Witch guys were fucking idiots, huh?
No you don't!
The higher the resolution, the less light you get per pixel for a given lens size -- this results in higher noise levels when you're in relatively low-light situations (e.g. indoors).
Why would you need higher resolution in a video camera, anyways? Sure there's HDTV, but if you're talking about regular TV resolution, there's absolutely no point. If you want to take stills, get a separate digital still camera; don't compromise your video.
Seems like there should be demand for Linux training nowadays -- is your company diversifying into those areas? Seems like a natural transition, as most of it would be the same... :)