I don't know if she meant tigers or lions or what. Personally, I hope they get ligers. They're my favorite animal.
Actually, a Liger is in many ways a sad, pathetic creature, bred solely for human amusement.
The folks at Turpentine Creek, a big cat refuge near Eureka Springs, Arkansas, have a retired circus Liger named Jade. His story on the site is pretty cool, but when you visit in person, they'll tell you about the problems he has "fitting in". Lions and tigers just don't socialize together -- they communicate in very different ways. Jade is trapped between the world of a lion's roar and a tiger's "chuff", and doesn't seem to be understood or accepted by either. He tries to answer back to the lions and tigers around him, but it just doesn't work out.
Ooh, cougars. When our family visited Turpentine Creek, a tiger and big cat sanctuary near Eureka Springs, *all* the big cats looked at my 8-year-old son like a housecat looks at a catnip mouse. But the cougars... they looked at him like a barn cat looks at a *real* mouse. No playful chasing along the fence for them -- they crouch, slink, and prepare to pounce. He caused one minor fight among the cougars, when one cougar in a stealthy slink ran into another cougar, who was also considering making a meal of my son.
He loved the place, by the way, though he much prefered the tigers' semi-playful chasing to the cougars' dead-serious stalking. The Bed & Breakfast stay is the best way to visit -- $100 a night is cheap for a B&B, and where else do you get woken up in the morning to lions roaring?
Perhaps there is a business opportunity for WISPs, more lucrative than I thought, for wireless internet provider business in the outlying rural-esque areas surrounding the metroplex. Maybe I should think of investing in it.
Please sir, may I have some broadband? rural new mexico
You don't have to be very rural to wish for broadband. The nearest broadband of any sort is 10 miles away, even though I'm less than a half hour from Dallas.
I started to wonder why this development was happening in Australia instead of here... then I remembered that 1) Australia has even more empty space than we do and 2) US telcos are a bunch of greedy bastards, and the limited rural market won't add enough to the bottom line.
Je l'ai expliqué un peu dans le journal. Voici le citation complet:
Pour que tout soit consommé, pour que je me sente moins seul, il me restait à souhaiter qu'il y ait beaucoup de spectateurs le jour de mon exécution et qu'ils m'accueillent avec des cris de haine.
Rough translation: As it all came to an end, as I could feel I was no longer alone, there was nothing left but to hope for a horde of spectators for my execution day, and that they would welcome me with cries of hatred.
C'est Slashdot, n'est-ce pas?
By the way, I may not have accurately expressed Camus' existentialist prose very well, but I think it's better than Babelfish, which translated "pour que je me sente moins seul" as "so that I smell myself less only".
The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.
Additionally, a 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request. Apache/2.0.48 (Linux/SuSE) Server at www.io2technology.com Port 80
Fraser Cain writes "Scientists at the University of Maryland think that large quantities of artificial meat (link: http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/artificial _meat_grown.html) could be produced to supply the world with animal-free meat products, like chickenless nuggets. This is based on experiments for NASA (link: http://archives.cnn.com/2002/TECH/space/03/22/fish .food/index.html), that created small amounts of fish protein cultured from single cells. According to the researchers, larger quantities could be grown in thin sheets and then stacked up to create thickness. Of course, they need to figure out a way to exercise it to make it taste like regular meat."
From TFA: The location to produce the fleet of rocket planes is very likely to be Mojave, California. ?That?s where we expect to be in production,? Whitehorn said, although the takeoff site of Virgin Galactic?s public space trips is a different matter.... ?We are already in discussion with a number of states in the United States,? Whitehorn said
When they say "a number of states", I think the number is close to 1. Texas has laws on the books establishing "Spaceport Development Corporations" with the authority to levy taxes, and the three locations that have established these SDCs all have big advantages over anyplace else in the US:
* One is in the middle of nowhere, for early testing (which might include Things Blowing Up).
* One is an hour away from Houston, for when suborbital and orbital commercial flights become routine.
* One is not-too-far away and offers launching above water, for flights after "experimental" but before "routine".
For further reference, this Houston Chronicle article name-drops about everyone remotely involved in a private space project, from Amazon's Jeff Bezos to Carmack to Armadillo/Id Guy John Carmack.
In previous discussions about a mission to Mars, the suggestion often comes up about a one-way trip -- one or more explorers who make the trip with no intention of coming back. Pioneers, really, rather than explorers.
This poor guy, who keeps getting tapped for "hey, ya think you can spend another year or so in zero-g, tovarisch?" is probably having it worse and worse when he comes back to Terra. How much of his "stamina" is due to some freak of biology, and how much comes straight from a Soviet-era "We invented it first, and better!" mindset?
If he's starting to feel those months in space when he's back on Earth, maybe Krikalev might want to take it easy in his retirement. Like, about 62% easier? Although medical facilities on Mars might be a bit lacking, even by Soviet standards.
My first thought was, "When their rich uncle gets out of the poor farm." But I've actually been considering a used laptop from RetroBox -- they dispose of corporate assets and have laptops starting under $50 -- though you'll have to get over $100 before you can get anything over 300 MHz and 128 MB.
Of course, all you bargain hunters will now swoop in and grab them... where's that "back" button?
I wonder then, how about a system where editors can flag the spam and other junk posts as "filter out". These posts would then only appear on a separate page ("Filtered posts" or some such), linked to from the main review. This eliminates outright censorship, since the original spam/junk posts are still accessible (and if you suspect they're removing all the negative reviews you can check), and keeps the relevant content on top.
Great minds think alike -- I acutally did implement such a system on the radio station message board! Slashdot was my inspiration, but I knew that Slashcode would have been too robust (besides, I didn't have that level of control on the server). So I just added a field to the messages table with a value from 1 (admin messages) to 7 (stuff nobody would want to read), and did all the moderation myself. The default viewing level was 4, so casual visitors saw the discussion but not the crap.
It worked pretty well until the station went to a professional web design company (who were able to provide graphx that I could have never put together). This was shortly after a rather heated debate over "business" vs. "censorship", so they dropped the board altogether.
By the way, the message board admin at woot.com is a guy named "galloping cow". You wouldn't be related, are you, "quacking duck"?
I've been on both sides. I ran the message board for a (small-signal) radio station for a while, and fought with management over posts about competing stations. Hint: don't admin a board unless you and the management are completely clear on such issues! Especially if you have something of an emotional investment in the subject.
But sometimes it just gets out of hand. The message boards for Woot.com are full of spam postings, whining, and just plain crap. But they pride themselves on their free-wheeling tolerance for criticism, so they tend to not censor *anything*. It makes the board nearly useless for its intended purpose of reading the kudos and flames about a product.
The best compromise would be have a clear policy about what will be deleted, and stick to it. That way, you can field complaints from management for letting opposing viewpoints through, and you can also get flamed by whiners wanting to crapflood. If you're catching hell from both sides, you know you're doing something right.
Roland already has a very nice and probably very profitable job finding interesting articles and posting them to Slashdot.
Now that he can profit from the difficult situation on the shuttle, there's no telling what he'll do next! Buy out OSDN perhaps, so we can have Rollin' PigPile All The Time!... oh, wait, we already have that. My bad.
I remember in a Slashdot story a while back about tetrachromats, the idea was floated that humans might someday, using genetic engineering or gene therapy, be given the ability to see in wavelengths previously available only to scientists (and, of course, to Geordi). I think it would be amazingly cool to acquire the ability to see previously hidden details -- of birds, flowers, boobies -- even if it did come at the expense of properly interpreting certain traffic signals.
If it's a one way trip, it shouldn't be too hard to send the additional shielding material to Mars on a seperate craft before hand. It's not like someone's going to steal it if it sits there for a few months before being assembled.
Thanks, I was hoping that someone would point out that unmanned missions can forward-position critical materials and supplies long before humans set foot in the joint.
But your casual comment, "It's not like someone's going to steal it," has me rethinking the plan, especially in light of the ongoing problem of Martian vandalism! Imagine the distress when you land at your equipment drop site, and find that the rovers have all had their tires slashed.
Again, I'm reminded of stories of voyages of discovery from 200 years ago. The crew sailing with Captain James Cook actually fared better than most, according to Wikipedia:
At that point in the voyage, Cook had lost no men to scurvy, a remarkable and unheard-of achievement in 18th century sea-faring. He forced his men to eat such foods as citrus fruits and sauerkraut -- under punishment of flogging if they did not comply -- although no one yet understood why these foods prevented scurvy. Unfortunately, he sailed on for Batavia, the capital of the Dutch East Indies, to put in for repairs. Batavia was known for its outbreaks of malaria, and, before they returned home in 1771, many in Cook's crew would succumb to the disease, including the Tahitian Tupaia, Banks's secretary Herman Spöring, astronomer Charles Green, and the illustrator Sydney Parkinson.
Would it be that much worse to be afflicted with cancer in the 2000's than with malaria in the 1700s? At least we have morphine now.
The suggestion that brain ailments might afflict spacefaring explorers strikes a familiar chord as well:
Cook returned to Hawaii in 1779. On February 14 at Kealakekua Bay, some Hawaiians stole one of Cook's small boats. Normally, as thefts were quite common in Tahiti and the other islands, he would have taken hostages until the stolen articles were returned. However, his stomach ailment and increasingly irrational behaviour led to an altercation with a large crowd of Hawaiians gathered on the beach. In the ensuing skirmish, shots were fired at the Hawaiians and Cook was speared to death.
Another factor to keep in mind is the motivation of the sailors. For one thing, conditions at home didn't offer much better chance at longevity. But perhaps more importantly, Captain Cook believed in the medicinal value of large quantities of beer:
The custom of allowing British seamen the regular use of fermented liquor is an old one. Ale was a standard article of the sea ration as early as the fourteenth century. By the late eighteenth century, beer was considered to be at once a food (a staple beverage and essential part of the sea diet), a luxury (helping to ameliorate the hardship and irregularity of sea life) and a medicine (conducive to health at sea).
It sounds like we won't be exploring Mars until we have a population of would-be explorers that is 1) worse off here than in space, 2) led by a captain with a penchant for the lash, and 3) drunk off their arse.
"How do you distinguish - discriminate - between damage which is critical and damage which is inconsequential?" asked Dr. David Wolf, an astronaut who spent four months aboard the Russian space station Mir. "We could be faced with very difficult decisions, in part because of all this additional information that we will be presented with."
I guess someone who spent time on Mir could be considered something of an expert on impact damage to spacecraft, though I'd like to hear what Michael Foale would have to say.
There are always vultures there. I went on a tour of the facilities a while back and there were vultures all over the place especially flying around the VAB. I asked some employees there about this and they say the vultures get great thermals there because of the huge building.
NASA believes the bird struck by Discovery's fuel tank was a buzzard. These large birds can have a wing span of more than six feet and the average weight of a full-grown bird is 6.5 lbs.
"It was in the wrong place at the wrong time," a Kennedy Space Center spokesperson said.
NASA has long assumed that the noisy launch pad environment at the time of main engine ignition would cause bird to fly away from the launching shuttle.
Workers had not located the carcass of the bird but not all areas of the launch complex had been searched.
Subscribers of our Spaceflight Now Plus service can see a video clip of the bird strike here.
The incident is one of several NASA is studying from yesterday's launch, along with the chipped nose gear door tile and external tank debris-shedding event.
I saw that too, in the section describing how IE behaves badly with overflowing <div>s. Thank goodness that's the *only* part that's visible. If there were one thing I'd have surgically removed from my memory...
More likely some company will sell the tickets for 15/pop and pocket any profits above the 50 mil.
I might be willing to concede the profits to a company, if they can provide an appropriate level of trust. Otherwise, you're looking at the Russian Mafia, I mean Government, as the return address on your lottery ticket. That doesn't inspire my confidence.
On the other hand, I'd probably still buy the ticket even so. A one in a million chance, times a one in two chance that my $10 would go to Boris & Natasha, still gives me one in two million odds for a trip to the moon! Sweeet.
Sounds like some of the effects from the soundtrack to Forbidden Planet!
Interesting comparison. Louis and Bebe Barron were the first to create a completely electronic film score, for Forbidden Planet. According to a piece I heard on NPR (text overview and audio here), the sounds created were truly one-of-a-kind. So much so, that they could only *be* created once -- one way of generating a distinct sound was to build an electronic device that was designed to overload itself, with the eerie sounds generated as a side effect of its self-destruction!
Saturn's "radio sources moving up and down along magnetic field lines" don't actually sound all that far removed from the Barrons' work.
Slashdot Mirror
Our top story: 1995 was ten years ago! Also, 2+2=4. Details at 11.
Of course, I read this as "Details at 0x03".
I don't know if she meant tigers or lions or what. Personally, I hope they get ligers. They're my favorite animal.
Actually, a Liger is in many ways a sad, pathetic creature, bred solely for human amusement.
The folks at Turpentine Creek, a big cat refuge near Eureka Springs, Arkansas, have a retired circus Liger named Jade. His story on the site is pretty cool, but when you visit in person, they'll tell you about the problems he has "fitting in". Lions and tigers just don't socialize together -- they communicate in very different ways. Jade is trapped between the world of a lion's roar and a tiger's "chuff", and doesn't seem to be understood or accepted by either. He tries to answer back to the lions and tigers around him, but it just doesn't work out.
But yeah, he does look pretty cool.
Ooh, cougars. When our family visited Turpentine Creek, a tiger and big cat sanctuary near Eureka Springs, *all* the big cats looked at my 8-year-old son like a housecat looks at a catnip mouse. But the cougars... they looked at him like a barn cat looks at a *real* mouse. No playful chasing along the fence for them -- they crouch, slink, and prepare to pounce. He caused one minor fight among the cougars, when one cougar in a stealthy slink ran into another cougar, who was also considering making a meal of my son.
He loved the place, by the way, though he much prefered the tigers' semi-playful chasing to the cougars' dead-serious stalking. The Bed & Breakfast stay is the best way to visit -- $100 a night is cheap for a B&B, and where else do you get woken up in the morning to lions roaring?
Perhaps there is a business opportunity for WISPs, more lucrative than I thought, for wireless internet provider business in the outlying rural-esque areas surrounding the metroplex. Maybe I should think of investing in it.
Yes. You should. Now. Please!
There's no southern sky for 10 miles?
"of any sort" might not be the phrase you're looking for.
You're right... let's call it, "any sort less than less than $50 a month" (alternate link here).
Please sir, may I have some broadband?
rural new mexico
You don't have to be very rural to wish for broadband. The nearest broadband of any sort is 10 miles away, even though I'm less than a half hour from Dallas.
I started to wonder why this development was happening in Australia instead of here... then I remembered that 1) Australia has even more empty space than we do and 2) US telcos are a bunch of greedy bastards, and the limited rural market won't add enough to the bottom line.
Excusez moi, mais que fait-il vos moyens de sig?
Je l'ai expliqué un peu dans le journal. Voici le citation complet:
Pour que tout soit consommé, pour que je me sente moins seul, il me restait à souhaiter qu'il y ait beaucoup de spectateurs le jour de mon exécution et qu'ils m'accueillent avec des cris de haine.
Rough translation: As it all came to an end, as I could feel I was no longer alone, there was nothing left but to hope for a horde of spectators for my execution day, and that they would welcome me with cries of hatred.
C'est Slashdot, n'est-ce pas?
By the way, I may not have accurately expressed Camus' existentialist prose very well, but I think it's better than Babelfish, which translated "pour que je me sente moins seul" as "so that I smell myself less only".
I still have to cross my eyes to see it, though.
Service Temporarily Unavailable
The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.
Additionally, a 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
Apache/2.0.48 (Linux/SuSE) Server at www.io2technology.com Port 80
For the benefit of my fellow Slashdotters, here is a place to whine about dupe articles. To wit:
0 6/1737228&tid=191&tid=14
l _meat_grown.html) could be produced to supply the world with animal-free meat products, like chickenless nuggets. This is based on experiments for NASA (link: http://archives.cnn.com/2002/TECH/space/03/22/fish .food/index.html), that created small amounts of fish protein cultured from single cells. According to the researchers, larger quantities could be grown in thin sheets and then stacked up to create thickness. Of course, they need to figure out a way to exercise it to make it taste like regular meat."
Large Scale Production of Artificial Meat
Posted by timothy on Wed Jul 06, '05 02:27 PM
from the vat-meat-cometh dept.
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/
Fraser Cain writes "Scientists at the University of Maryland think that large quantities of artificial meat (link: http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/artificia
Foo: ...name-drops about everyone remotely involved in a private space project, from Amazon's Jeff Bezos to Carmack to Armadillo/Id Guy John Carmack.
Bar: So if one's John Carmack, who's the other Carmack?
Um... that would be his third cousin twice removed, Typo "Brainfart" Carmack.
(As near as I can remember -- I've slept since then -- I meant to reference Scaled Composites' Burt Rutan. Sorry!)
From TFA: ... ?We are already in discussion with a number of states in the United States,? Whitehorn said
The location to produce the fleet of rocket planes is very likely to be Mojave, California. ?That?s where we expect to be in production,? Whitehorn said, although the takeoff site of Virgin Galactic?s public space trips is a different matter.
When they say "a number of states", I think the number is close to 1. Texas has laws on the books establishing "Spaceport Development Corporations" with the authority to levy taxes, and the three locations that have established these SDCs all have big advantages over anyplace else in the US:
* One is in the middle of nowhere, for early testing (which might include Things Blowing Up).
* One is an hour away from Houston, for when suborbital and orbital commercial flights become routine.
* One is not-too-far away and offers launching above water, for flights after "experimental" but before "routine".
For further reference, this Houston Chronicle article name-drops about everyone remotely involved in a private space project, from Amazon's Jeff Bezos to Carmack to Armadillo/Id Guy John Carmack.
In previous discussions about a mission to Mars, the suggestion often comes up about a one-way trip -- one or more explorers who make the trip with no intention of coming back. Pioneers, really, rather than explorers.
This poor guy, who keeps getting tapped for "hey, ya think you can spend another year or so in zero-g, tovarisch?" is probably having it worse and worse when he comes back to Terra. How much of his "stamina" is due to some freak of biology, and how much comes straight from a Soviet-era "We invented it first, and better!" mindset?
If he's starting to feel those months in space when he's back on Earth, maybe Krikalev might want to take it easy in his retirement. Like, about 62% easier? Although medical facilities on Mars might be a bit lacking, even by Soviet standards.
My first thought was, "When their rich uncle gets out of the poor farm." But I've actually been considering a used laptop from RetroBox -- they dispose of corporate assets and have laptops starting under $50 -- though you'll have to get over $100 before you can get anything over 300 MHz and 128 MB.
Of course, all you bargain hunters will now swoop in and grab them... where's that "back" button?
no, 110 film is still too widely available. it must be a Disc camera...
Ah, the good old days. Surf this link and turn on some Def Leppard, Foreigner, or Wham.
I wonder then, how about a system where editors can flag the spam and other junk posts as "filter out". These posts would then only appear on a separate page ("Filtered posts" or some such), linked to from the main review. This eliminates outright censorship, since the original spam/junk posts are still accessible (and if you suspect they're removing all the negative reviews you can check), and keeps the relevant content on top.
Great minds think alike -- I acutally did implement such a system on the radio station message board! Slashdot was my inspiration, but I knew that Slashcode would have been too robust (besides, I didn't have that level of control on the server). So I just added a field to the messages table with a value from 1 (admin messages) to 7 (stuff nobody would want to read), and did all the moderation myself. The default viewing level was 4, so casual visitors saw the discussion but not the crap.
It worked pretty well until the station went to a professional web design company (who were able to provide graphx that I could have never put together). This was shortly after a rather heated debate over "business" vs. "censorship", so they dropped the board altogether.
By the way, the message board admin at woot.com is a guy named "galloping cow". You wouldn't be related, are you, "quacking duck"?
I've been on both sides. I ran the message board for a (small-signal) radio station for a while, and fought with management over posts about competing stations. Hint: don't admin a board unless you and the management are completely clear on such issues! Especially if you have something of an emotional investment in the subject.
But sometimes it just gets out of hand. The message boards for Woot.com are full of spam postings, whining, and just plain crap. But they pride themselves on their free-wheeling tolerance for criticism, so they tend to not censor *anything*. It makes the board nearly useless for its intended purpose of reading the kudos and flames about a product.
The best compromise would be have a clear policy about what will be deleted, and stick to it. That way, you can field complaints from management for letting opposing viewpoints through, and you can also get flamed by whiners wanting to crapflood. If you're catching hell from both sides, you know you're doing something right.
Roland already has a very nice and probably very profitable job finding interesting articles and posting them to Slashdot.
... oh, wait, we already have that. My bad.
Now that he can profit from the difficult situation on the shuttle, there's no telling what he'll do next! Buy out OSDN perhaps, so we can have Rollin' PigPile All The Time!
I remember in a Slashdot story a while back about tetrachromats, the idea was floated that humans might someday, using genetic engineering or gene therapy, be given the ability to see in wavelengths previously available only to scientists (and, of course, to Geordi). I think it would be amazingly cool to acquire the ability to see previously hidden details -- of birds, flowers, boobies -- even if it did come at the expense of properly interpreting certain traffic signals.
If it's a one way trip, it shouldn't be too hard to send the additional shielding material to Mars on a seperate craft before hand. It's not like someone's going to steal it if it sits there for a few months before being assembled.
Thanks, I was hoping that someone would point out that unmanned missions can forward-position critical materials and supplies long before humans set foot in the joint.
But your casual comment, "It's not like someone's going to steal it," has me rethinking the plan, especially in light of the ongoing problem of Martian vandalism! Imagine the distress when you land at your equipment drop site, and find that the rovers have all had their tires slashed.
Again, I'm reminded of stories of voyages of discovery from 200 years ago. The crew sailing with Captain James Cook actually fared better than most, according to Wikipedia:
At that point in the voyage, Cook had lost no men to scurvy, a remarkable and unheard-of achievement in 18th century sea-faring. He forced his men to eat such foods as citrus fruits and sauerkraut -- under punishment of flogging if they did not comply -- although no one yet understood why these foods prevented scurvy. Unfortunately, he sailed on for Batavia, the capital of the Dutch East Indies, to put in for repairs. Batavia was known for its outbreaks of malaria, and, before they returned home in 1771, many in Cook's crew would succumb to the disease, including the Tahitian Tupaia, Banks's secretary Herman Spöring, astronomer Charles Green, and the illustrator Sydney Parkinson.
Would it be that much worse to be afflicted with cancer in the 2000's than with malaria in the 1700s? At least we have morphine now.
The suggestion that brain ailments might afflict spacefaring explorers strikes a familiar chord as well:
Cook returned to Hawaii in 1779. On February 14 at Kealakekua Bay, some Hawaiians stole one of Cook's small boats. Normally, as thefts were quite common in Tahiti and the other islands, he would have taken hostages until the stolen articles were returned. However, his stomach ailment and increasingly irrational behaviour led to an altercation with a large crowd of Hawaiians gathered on the beach. In the ensuing skirmish, shots were fired at the Hawaiians and Cook was speared to death.
Another factor to keep in mind is the motivation of the sailors. For one thing, conditions at home didn't offer much better chance at longevity. But perhaps more importantly, Captain Cook believed in the medicinal value of large quantities of beer:
The custom of allowing British seamen the regular use of fermented liquor is an old one. Ale was a standard article of the sea ration as early as the fourteenth century. By the late eighteenth century, beer was considered to be at once a food (a staple beverage and essential part of the sea diet), a luxury (helping to ameliorate the hardship and irregularity of sea life) and a medicine (conducive to health at sea).
It sounds like we won't be exploring Mars until we have a population of would-be explorers that is 1) worse off here than in space, 2) led by a captain with a penchant for the lash, and 3) drunk off their arse.
"How do you distinguish - discriminate - between damage which is critical and damage which is inconsequential?" asked Dr. David Wolf, an astronaut who spent four months aboard the Russian space station Mir. "We could be faced with very difficult decisions, in part because of all this additional information that we will be presented with."
I guess someone who spent time on Mir could be considered something of an expert on impact damage to spacecraft, though I'd like to hear what Michael Foale would have to say.
There are always vultures there. I went on a tour of the facilities a while back and there were vultures all over the place especially flying around the VAB. I asked some employees there about this and they say the vultures get great thermals there because of the huge building.
This just in, courtesy of Spaceflight Now. Note for the unitiated: buzzard == vulture
1810 GMT (2:10 p.m. EDT)
NASA believes the bird struck by Discovery's fuel tank was a buzzard. These large birds can have a wing span of more than six feet and the average weight of a full-grown bird is 6.5 lbs.
"It was in the wrong place at the wrong time," a Kennedy Space Center spokesperson said.
NASA has long assumed that the noisy launch pad environment at the time of main engine ignition would cause bird to fly away from the launching shuttle.
Workers had not located the carcass of the bird but not all areas of the launch complex had been searched.
Images of the strike are available here.
Subscribers of our Spaceflight Now Plus service can see a video clip of the bird strike here.
The incident is one of several NASA is studying from yesterday's launch, along with the chipped nose gear door tile and external tank debris-shedding event.
The part that is visible is "http://goat"
I saw that too, in the section describing how IE behaves badly with overflowing <div>s. Thank goodness that's the *only* part that's visible. If there were one thing I'd have surgically removed from my memory...
More likely some company will sell the tickets for 15/pop and pocket any profits above the 50 mil.
I might be willing to concede the profits to a company, if they can provide an appropriate level of trust. Otherwise, you're looking at the Russian Mafia, I mean Government, as the return address on your lottery ticket. That doesn't inspire my confidence.
On the other hand, I'd probably still buy the ticket even so. A one in a million chance, times a one in two chance that my $10 would go to Boris & Natasha, still gives me one in two million odds for a trip to the moon! Sweeet.
Sounds like some of the effects from the soundtrack to Forbidden Planet!
Interesting comparison. Louis and Bebe Barron were the first to create a completely electronic film score, for Forbidden Planet. According to a piece I heard on NPR (text overview and audio here), the sounds created were truly one-of-a-kind. So much so, that they could only *be* created once -- one way of generating a distinct sound was to build an electronic device that was designed to overload itself, with the eerie sounds generated as a side effect of its self-destruction!
Saturn's "radio sources moving up and down along magnetic field lines" don't actually sound all that far removed from the Barrons' work.