The dirt sticking to the wheels of Sojourner (Pathfinder) was discussed at great lengths on a board I read (bit of a crazy board full of the insane for the most part, but there are decent threads from time to time), a bunch of people yelling "it's mud, Mars is wet!" when in reality Soujourner had spun it's wheels in the dirt and essentially "dug" in the dirt... Well, that and the "dirt" is largely magnetite which is inherently magnetic.
Flash forward to today and we've got the "magic carpet", and dirt sticking to Spirit's wheels, sans digging - very interesting, and by the sounds of it also very unexpected. It will be great to find out what's making it stick, and just "how Mars works" in general.
Did I ever mention how glad I am humanity has another rover on an alien world?:)
And there are a huge number of occasions where I've discussed TV shows with my friends, when I go out for beers with one of them we invariably end up playing "Simpsons Trivia", trying to think of questions the other peson can't answer (we're both big fans).
I guess in that respect it's Books:1, TV:1. A dead heat.
seem to think that there is a finite amount of thinking they are born with, and are being very careful not to use it all up. This group is unconserned with expanding their own horizons
Every time there's a major boxing match on, I go round to my best friend's dad's house with my friend and his brother to watch it, we're in the UK so the fights don't normally air here until the early hours of Sunday morning (like 4am) so we go round on Saturday night for beers first (their parents split up when they were really young, and they stayed with their mum most of their lives - so it's always nice to go round and catch up with his dad).
Anyway... I think it was the night of the Lewis/Tyson fight, we were all sitting around listening to music comfortably drunk at around 2am, just waiting for the fight to come on and chatting, I like to think I'm pretty smart, as is my friend, but his brother definitely falls in the category you defined in your post, and blessed us with one of the best, and dumbest quotes ever...
My friend put on a Starsailor CD, and his brother had never heard them before, and having his inhibitions (and motor functions) substantially reduced by the alcohol he started enthusing over how much he likes listening to new music, telling us "I've been trying to listen to as much different music as I can lately, I'm getting fed up of listening to the same old stuff so I've been listening to as wide a variety as possible"
To which his dad prompted, "Oh yeah? Broadening your horizons?"
Fantastically, his response was "No, I've never heard of them, are they good?"
I've always wondered...Why do we feel like all life *needs* water? Who's to say the martians don't live on nitrogen or uranium or plaine old red rocks? Or that they don't thrive on some yet undiscovered stuff.
Because (as far as we know) all life is carbon based - carbon being the only element we know of capable of forming complex bonds between molecules...
I neglected to mention, there's also the possibility of salts in the water, if it's salty, it wouldn't need to get up to zro to melt, and it would have a larger window before succumbing to the low atmospheric pressure and boiling off.
Well, I'm not sure, say water melts at 0C on Mars, but due to the low atmospheric pressure it boils off at 2 - if it stays at 1C all day long then wouldn't the water be in a liquid state all day?
(I'm not being cheeky with this response - it's a genuine question, I have my assumptions, but I'm no physicist:D)
It's below freezing on the surface (no atmosphere to retain heat). Not to mention that whole thin atmosphere thing doesn't provide enough pressure to prevent liquid water from boiling away anyway.
Actually, I think you're wrong on both points here, in Gusev, during the daytime, it's warmer on the surface than it is where I live right now, and the rivers here still flow, my cat's water bowl doesn't freeze over, and it rains regularly. Once you get a few feet off the surface it's a different story, but the temperature is certainly capable of sustaining liquid water.
As for the low atmospheric pressure, the triple-point of water is 6.1mbar, and Mars' surface atmospheric pressure varies between 3-10 (or thereabouts) - Gusev, being a crater in the lowlands is probably at the high end of that scale, and comfortably above the triple point of water.
I could be wrong of course, but let's see over the next few days what comes back from spirit (I'm not saying we'll find water, just that we may very well find conditions where water *could* exist in a liquid state)
That's misinformed, that's the temperature ~1m above the surface, the surface temperature does indeed rise above zero, and I believe has been since before Spirit landed
Liquid water can indeed exist on the Martian surface - fleetingly admittedly, it would boil off at a very very low temperature, but there would certianly be a window between the point the ice melts, and the water boils.
Last I heard they'd found bound water, and the surface was a lot hotter than they expected it to be. In the last image release I notice they show a graph of the temperature (presumably up near the Pancam) at ~1m above the surface - the great thing about Mars' atmosphere is how quickly it get's cold the higher you get - i.e. very. Like, your feet could be warm and your head would be a solid block of ice.
The kinda cool thing is the TES data shows a current temperature map at surface level - you notice at Gusev Crater (where spirit is, about 15S, 185W - so basically around halfway down the right edge of the picture) the temperature is somewhere around 0C, +/-10 degrees or so.
The *really* cool thing is, when they were getting ready to make the rover stand up and strut its stuff, they went through extra checks and testing on Earth because the landing site was a lot warmer than they expected - there's every chance that it's above 0 there, in fact, there's every chance that (on the surface at least) Spirit is enjoying much better weather than I am right now.
It's common knowledge that Mars' equator regularly gets up into the positive numbers, even up above 20c, the only real question as to the feasibility of liquid water in these regions is whether there is any ice left there to melt, or if it is all up at the poles (or underground). Due to the low triple point of water on Mars, and the theory that it's just coming out of an ice-age, there's every chance there is no liquid left around there to melt, but there's certainly a chance there is.
Fortunately, we have a rover up there that will be able to tell us for sure in a few days:)
Holger's site is down just now, he originally posted it here though (same image is linked in that thread, which you still won't see - slashdotted).
Actually, a few of us chat on the SlashNet IRC server Holger included (he's in the chat just now actually - he's the guy who's webserver is now on fire thx to that link:)
Come talk to us, it'll be fun! irc.slashnet.org - #anomalies
Then, with more and more languages, especially ones with VMs, you get further and further away from the hardware. The end result: you lose performance. It does more and more for you, but at the expense of real optimizations, the kind that only you can do.
I don't really agree with this, look at it from a high-level API stance for starters, I'd much rather write some DirectX or OpenGL than write the assembly code necessary to cover my bases with all the 3d hardware out there - with no guarantee my 3d code would work on future hardware. The good old days of calling a BIOS interrupt to put your display into 13h and writing direct to the video memory at (320*y)+x are dead and buried, unfortunately (I'll admit those were fun times:D)
The above is a somewhat extreme example of how low-level code can be not only inefficient (unless you're *seriously* hard-core) but utterly pointless due to the inordinate amount of time it would take to write said code. It's an extreme example, but it translates almost directly to today's processors - being the complicated beasts they are. You look at things a good optimising compiler will just do for you completely transparently, like branch prediction, mmx, 3dnow, and a host of others (recently, and notably, hyperthreading for instance)...
If you think you can do a better job of writing low-level code than these compilers can do of optimising your high-level, you're either still living in the early 90s, or you're one hell of a programmer.
"The unusually large number of comments received...has made it difficult to remove all street addresses, telephone numbers and e-mail addresses from the comments for posting on our Internet Web site in a timely manner"
That's a deeply troubling quote right there, are they removing all this info from the received mail by hand?!?
I could write a PHP script which just says hello to a pop3 server, pulls down each email, runs a couple of eregi_replace()s on the body (to strp out email addresses and phone numbers) and pumps it into a database... in about 20 minutes. With another 5 to set up the cron job and test it and hey, it's a working solution! - sure, people with an autosignature containing their postal address is going to be a little more complex but not excessively so.
Your tax dollars at work ladies and gentlemen... It sounds to me like your hard-earned cash is employing at least one person to sit at a desk hitting send/receive, copy and paste the body of each email they get into a frontend and then manually remove the email addresses, phone numbers, and postal addresses.
Everyone I know who uses The Gimp (and I know quiet a few) massively prefers the Gimp's non-MDI approach, as do I.
I thought it ugly and cumbersome for the first few days after I started using it, but I wouldn't go back to an MDI image processing application now if you paid me, if I used Windows 3.1 maybe, but in this day and age I have a lot of stuff open, and I work between apps and windows, often while having information, chats and email open in others, should I sacrifice massive portions of my display to an image processing application when, let's face it, all I *need* of it onscreen is the image? Of course not.
Having an application eat space on my screen damages my productivity because I have to switch between windows or just plain old move them out of the way. After all, I don't have a desk for my phone, a seperate desk for my computer, another desk for my paperwork and another desk for my mouse, that would be pretty crazy. So imagine IE, media player, Outlook, Word, [windows] Explorer and whatever other apps you use all used their own MDI interfaces... Do you think your life would be easier then? Or do you (deep down) just tolerate the imposition that is PhotoShop's MDI because you're so used to it?
I actually wrote quite a long response to this, then thought of this more concise and to the point one after:
The difference between PhotoShop and The Gimp is like the difference between MS Office and OpenOffice... If OO was 100% compatible with MS Office's filetypes. Namely: One is very expensive, the other is free.
There's not a lot you could do in Photoshop but not in the Gimp, OTOH, there's quite a lot you can do in The Gimp that you can't do in PhotoShop.
Install it, play with it, see how you get on - the worst that can happen is you lose a few hours trying out something new and find you don't like it, the best that can happen is you save hundreds (or possibly thousands) of dollars on future purchases/upgrades.
(I'm a huge fan of The Gimp, both in Linux and Windows, but am trying not to be too "Gimp rocks, Photoshop sucks!" in this post - both are great packages, but one has very obvious advantages (the most important to me being that it doesn't use MDI - I hate being trapped in Photoshop's all-encompassing top-level window))
So basically, we're not allowed to point out what we do well, even though everyone can point out all our failings?
That wasn't the original poster's concern at all. There is a world of difference between pride and arrogance and if you genuinely see "Wooo, USA:1 - ESA:0" as people being proud of their accomplishments (rather than ignorant, arrogant, childish pricks, revelling in the failure of a mission that could have benefited all of mankind) then I pity you.
WWII finished them off. Now they don't even fight their own battles anymore.
Umm, I'm assuming you're talking about Vietnam there, if so I'd suggest you read up on the conflict leading up to America's not-very-heroic-and-highly-embarassing involvement.
That's not what that dig was about though, was it? Your problem is presumably not that France won't fight their own battles, but rather that they won't fight *yours*.
1) Boot Knoppix cd
2) Open root shell
3) Type "kpx-hdinstall" (or whatever the command is)
4) ???
5) Many happy time!
Being Debian based and having a working (although slightly broken - some of the mirrors on the most recent release are hosed) apt-get you just need to "apt-get update", "apt-get dist-upgrade", "apt-get synaptic" and you've got a fully fledged, up-to-the-minute distro installed with a nifty little package manager (and "alien" for RPM's of course - which I think is nice because I needed to take off lesstif and add openmotif yesterday)
It's functional, overwhelmingly so considering what it is, and I don't see any reason why, (when I get around to building a "real" Linux box) I should put something like Mandrake or Fedora on, sure the load screen is nice in Fedora (and the atrpms apt clone is dead sexy - or was in RH9 at least) and urpmi is something I'll miss... I'm not sure how much though, compared to apt.
The problem is it's a Live-CD first and foremost, and as such has a lot of junk people don't need (or want) from a distro (like OpenOffice, the NES emulator, TV stuff, blah blah blah) - We live in an age of broadband, if someone were to cut that stuff out of the Knoppix CD, leaving just a barebones distro with KDE/Gnome and a graphical package manager, with the kernel source and necessary libraries included too it would be the best distro out there bar none IMHO.
Let's face it, why on Earth did we have to download all three discs of Mandrake 9.1 - the 3rd being the "Internationalisation" (or whatever) CD *which was the one with the kernel source on it* when all we want is a base install with a decent package manager?
That is what we want, right? Isn't that one of the reasons people bitch so much about Microsoft? For bundling a bunch of junk like media player and IE into Windows?
A *really good* base installation CD with a decent package manager that satisfies its own dependencies is what the world needs more than anything right now - I have broadband, I can handle waiting for the packages I want to download while I'm setting up my OS the way I want it, but I don't want to wait for over a gig and a half to download (and spend the time burning 3 CDs) before I can even *start* installing my system.
So yeah, </rant>, a basic install CD with kernel sources is what the Linux world really needs, and so far, from what I've seen, Knoppix is the closest thing we've got.
NASA posted an image gallery? The battle is set now The might of a slashdotting vs the awsome power of NASA's servers who will win? compulsively refresh their page to find out
Excellent idea! Well... it would be if the taxes you pay didn't fund that site's bandwidth.
Slashdot Mirror
The dirt sticking to the wheels of Sojourner (Pathfinder) was discussed at great lengths on a board I read (bit of a crazy board full of the insane for the most part, but there are decent threads from time to time), a bunch of people yelling "it's mud, Mars is wet!" when in reality Soujourner had spun it's wheels in the dirt and essentially "dug" in the dirt... Well, that and the "dirt" is largely magnetite which is inherently magnetic.
:)
Flash forward to today and we've got the "magic carpet", and dirt sticking to Spirit's wheels, sans digging - very interesting, and by the sounds of it also very unexpected. It will be great to find out what's making it stick, and just "how Mars works" in general.
Did I ever mention how glad I am humanity has another rover on an alien world?
And there are a huge number of occasions where I've discussed TV shows with my friends, when I go out for beers with one of them we invariably end up playing "Simpsons Trivia", trying to think of questions the other peson can't answer (we're both big fans).
I guess in that respect it's Books:1, TV:1. A dead heat.
Anyway... I think it was the night of the Lewis/Tyson fight, we were all sitting around listening to music comfortably drunk at around 2am, just waiting for the fight to come on and chatting, I like to think I'm pretty smart, as is my friend, but his brother definitely falls in the category you defined in your post, and blessed us with one of the best, and dumbest quotes ever...
My friend put on a Starsailor CD, and his brother had never heard them before, and having his inhibitions (and motor functions) substantially reduced by the alcohol he started enthusing over how much he likes listening to new music, telling us "I've been trying to listen to as much different music as I can lately, I'm getting fed up of listening to the same old stuff so I've been listening to as wide a variety as possible"
To which his dad prompted, "Oh yeah? Broadening your horizons?"
Fantastically, his response was "No, I've never heard of them, are they good?"
Oh how we lolled.
...or you could just install Knoppix, or one of the various derivatives of Knoppix.
Put the CD in, wait for it to boot into KDE, open a shell
"root"
"kpx-hdinstall"
Click a few buttons, do some fdisking and bingo - you've got a debian system in about ten minutes.
"reboot -n"
(wait, open shell)
"apt-get update"
"apt-get dist-upgrade"
That's another 2 minutes there, and after it's done downloading your new Debian system is bang up-to-date.
space.com is really good too
(that's the concise answer anyway
I neglected to mention, there's also the possibility of salts in the water, if it's salty, it wouldn't need to get up to zro to melt, and it would have a larger window before succumbing to the low atmospheric pressure and boiling off.
Well, I'm not sure, say water melts at 0C on Mars, but due to the low atmospheric pressure it boils off at 2 - if it stays at 1C all day long then wouldn't the water be in a liquid state all day?
:D)
(I'm not being cheeky with this response - it's a genuine question, I have my assumptions, but I'm no physicist
Oops, had a few beers, I didn't mean low triple point, I meant comfortably high atmospheric pressure at the surface (especially in craters)
As for the low atmospheric pressure, the triple-point of water is 6.1mbar, and Mars' surface atmospheric pressure varies between 3-10 (or thereabouts) - Gusev, being a crater in the lowlands is probably at the high end of that scale, and comfortably above the triple point of water.
I could be wrong of course, but let's see over the next few days what comes back from spirit (I'm not saying we'll find water, just that we may very well find conditions where water *could* exist in a liquid state)
That's misinformed, that's the temperature ~1m above the surface, the surface temperature does indeed rise above zero, and I believe has been since before Spirit landed
Real surface temp graph
Liquid water can indeed exist on the Martian surface - fleetingly admittedly, it would boil off at a very very low temperature, but there would certianly be a window between the point the ice melts, and the water boils.
Last I heard they'd found bound water, and the surface was a lot hotter than they expected it to be. In the last image release I notice they show a graph of the temperature (presumably up near the Pancam) at ~1m above the surface - the great thing about Mars' atmosphere is how quickly it get's cold the higher you get - i.e. very. Like, your feet could be warm and your head would be a solid block of ice.
:)
The kinda cool thing is the TES data shows a current temperature map at surface level - you notice at Gusev Crater (where spirit is, about 15S, 185W - so basically around halfway down the right edge of the picture) the temperature is somewhere around 0C, +/-10 degrees or so.
The *really* cool thing is, when they were getting ready to make the rover stand up and strut its stuff, they went through extra checks and testing on Earth because the landing site was a lot warmer than they expected - there's every chance that it's above 0 there, in fact, there's every chance that (on the surface at least) Spirit is enjoying much better weather than I am right now.
It's common knowledge that Mars' equator regularly gets up into the positive numbers, even up above 20c, the only real question as to the feasibility of liquid water in these regions is whether there is any ice left there to melt, or if it is all up at the poles (or underground). Due to the low triple point of water on Mars, and the theory that it's just coming out of an ice-age, there's every chance there is no liquid left around there to melt, but there's certainly a chance there is.
Fortunately, we have a rover up there that will be able to tell us for sure in a few days
Holger's site is down just now, he originally posted it here though (same image is linked in that thread, which you still won't see - slashdotted).
:)
Actually, a few of us chat on the SlashNet IRC server Holger included (he's in the chat just now actually - he's the guy who's webserver is now on fire thx to that link
Come talk to us, it'll be fun! irc.slashnet.org - #anomalies
I don't really agree with this, look at it from a high-level API stance for starters, I'd much rather write some DirectX or OpenGL than write the assembly code necessary to cover my bases with all the 3d hardware out there - with no guarantee my 3d code would work on future hardware. The good old days of calling a BIOS interrupt to put your display into 13h and writing direct to the video memory at (320*y)+x are dead and buried, unfortunately (I'll admit those were fun times
The above is a somewhat extreme example of how low-level code can be not only inefficient (unless you're *seriously* hard-core) but utterly pointless due to the inordinate amount of time it would take to write said code. It's an extreme example, but it translates almost directly to today's processors - being the complicated beasts they are. You look at things a good optimising compiler will just do for you completely transparently, like branch prediction, mmx, 3dnow, and a host of others (recently, and notably, hyperthreading for instance)...
If you think you can do a better job of writing low-level code than these compilers can do of optimising your high-level, you're either still living in the early 90s, or you're one hell of a programmer.
That's a deeply troubling quote right there, are they removing all this info from the received mail by hand?!?
I could write a PHP script which just says hello to a pop3 server, pulls down each email, runs a couple of eregi_replace()s on the body (to strp out email addresses and phone numbers) and pumps it into a database... in about 20 minutes. With another 5 to set up the cron job and test it and hey, it's a working solution! - sure, people with an autosignature containing their postal address is going to be a little more complex but not excessively so.
Your tax dollars at work ladies and gentlemen... It sounds to me like your hard-earned cash is employing at least one person to sit at a desk hitting send/receive, copy and paste the body of each email they get into a frontend and then manually remove the email addresses, phone numbers, and postal addresses.
Seems a little wasteful, doesn't it?
Everyone I know who uses The Gimp (and I know quiet a few) massively prefers the Gimp's non-MDI approach, as do I.
I thought it ugly and cumbersome for the first few days after I started using it, but I wouldn't go back to an MDI image processing application now if you paid me, if I used Windows 3.1 maybe, but in this day and age I have a lot of stuff open, and I work between apps and windows, often while having information, chats and email open in others, should I sacrifice massive portions of my display to an image processing application when, let's face it, all I *need* of it onscreen is the image? Of course not.
Having an application eat space on my screen damages my productivity because I have to switch between windows or just plain old move them out of the way. After all, I don't have a desk for my phone, a seperate desk for my computer, another desk for my paperwork and another desk for my mouse, that would be pretty crazy. So imagine IE, media player, Outlook, Word, [windows] Explorer and whatever other apps you use all used their own MDI interfaces... Do you think your life would be easier then? Or do you (deep down) just tolerate the imposition that is PhotoShop's MDI because you're so used to it?
I actually wrote quite a long response to this, then thought of this more concise and to the point one after:
The difference between PhotoShop and The Gimp is like the difference between MS Office and OpenOffice... If OO was 100% compatible with MS Office's filetypes. Namely: One is very expensive, the other is free.
There's not a lot you could do in Photoshop but not in the Gimp, OTOH, there's quite a lot you can do in The Gimp that you can't do in PhotoShop.
Install it, play with it, see how you get on - the worst that can happen is you lose a few hours trying out something new and find you don't like it, the best that can happen is you save hundreds (or possibly thousands) of dollars on future purchases/upgrades.
(I'm a huge fan of The Gimp, both in Linux and Windows, but am trying not to be too "Gimp rocks, Photoshop sucks!" in this post - both are great packages, but one has very obvious advantages (the most important to me being that it doesn't use MDI - I hate being trapped in Photoshop's all-encompassing top-level window))
That's not what that dig was about though, was it? Your problem is presumably not that France won't fight their own battles, but rather that they won't fight *yours*.
It's extremely useful as a "real" distro too.
:D
1) Boot Knoppix cd
2) Open root shell
3) Type "kpx-hdinstall" (or whatever the command is)
4) ???
5) Many happy time!
Being Debian based and having a working (although slightly broken - some of the mirrors on the most recent release are hosed) apt-get you just need to "apt-get update", "apt-get dist-upgrade", "apt-get synaptic" and you've got a fully fledged, up-to-the-minute distro installed with a nifty little package manager (and "alien" for RPM's of course - which I think is nice because I needed to take off lesstif and add openmotif yesterday)
It's functional, overwhelmingly so considering what it is, and I don't see any reason why, (when I get around to building a "real" Linux box) I should put something like Mandrake or Fedora on, sure the load screen is nice in Fedora (and the atrpms apt clone is dead sexy - or was in RH9 at least) and urpmi is something I'll miss... I'm not sure how much though, compared to apt.
The problem is it's a Live-CD first and foremost, and as such has a lot of junk people don't need (or want) from a distro (like OpenOffice, the NES emulator, TV stuff, blah blah blah) - We live in an age of broadband, if someone were to cut that stuff out of the Knoppix CD, leaving just a barebones distro with KDE/Gnome and a graphical package manager, with the kernel source and necessary libraries included too it would be the best distro out there bar none IMHO.
Let's face it, why on Earth did we have to download all three discs of Mandrake 9.1 - the 3rd being the "Internationalisation" (or whatever) CD *which was the one with the kernel source on it* when all we want is a base install with a decent package manager?
That is what we want, right? Isn't that one of the reasons people bitch so much about Microsoft? For bundling a bunch of junk like media player and IE into Windows?
A *really good* base installation CD with a decent package manager that satisfies its own dependencies is what the world needs more than anything right now - I have broadband, I can handle waiting for the packages I want to download while I'm setting up my OS the way I want it, but I don't want to wait for over a gig and a half to download (and spend the time burning 3 CDs) before I can even *start* installing my system.
So yeah, </rant>, a basic install CD with kernel sources is what the Linux world really needs, and so far, from what I've seen, Knoppix is the closest thing we've got.
I kinda feel like making one myself now