we don't want plutonium-powered reactors on an exploding rocket
Back up a bit, who's the "we"?
I recall seeing testing footage for the RTG in the Cassini probe, among other things the tests involved a large artillery gun and a steel wall a few feet thick. Cassini was particularly controversial because it made a 'sling shot' flyby of earth at a much greater speed than escape velocity. From the tests I saw in the doco decades ago the worst thing that could possibly happen with an RTG is that it falls from the sky directly onto someone's head. Far from being anti-nuke, I'm actually interested the idea of "pebble bed" reactors (materials research is what's needed there). I'm also in favour of "full life cycle" nuclear power as practised in some parts of the EU. I don't know of a -science based- environmentalist/hippie/greenie who thinks otherwise. I've held these views since the early 90's, I'm not alone either, James Lovelock and some other influential greenies expressed similar opinions in the early 2000's
I speak to you today as a scientist and as the originator of Gaia Theory, the earth's system science which describes a self regulating planet which keeps its temperature and its chemical composition always favourable for life. I care deeply about the natural world, but as a scientist I consider that the earth has now reached a state profoundly dangerous to all of us and to our civilisation. And this view is shared by scientists around the world. Unfortunately, governments, especially in Europe, appear to listen less to scientists than they do to Green political parties and to Green lobbies. Now, I am a green myself, so I know that these greens are well intentioned, but they understand people a lot better than they understand the earth, and consequently they recommend inappropriate remedies and action.Lovelock 2005.
Disclaimer: According to my parents I became a Hippie back in 1976. Like any other social group, "Hippies" in general are reasonable people if you stop insulting them and feeding them on bullshit.
I don't think you realise just how indestructible a nuclear battery is, the one on Cassini was designed to withstand a crash that might have occurred on it's slingshot flyby of earth (fortunately we didn't get to test that claim). Testing is done by firing the battery from an artillery gun directly into a solid steel wall several feet thick. What happened to Antares would have merely burnt the paint off the outside a nuclear battery. Basically the only way to get hurt by one of them is to be unlucky enough to be hit on the head with it.
Like the GP, I was also surprised to hear that a probe so far from Earth was solar powered, I wouldn't have thought there was enough light that far out even without the shadows. Sure it's an assumption but it's not baseless, previous deep space probes such as Cassini, pioneer, and voyager are all nuclear powered. Aside from that, who pissd in your fruit loops?
What you can eat, or drink, smoke (liberals), who you have sex with (conservatives).
The last lot to increase taxes on my smokes here in Oz were the right wing jesus freaks currently in power, $4/pack = ~20% increase. I'm a left wing smoker (both kinds), have been for ~40yrs, I started back in the 70's when the Marlborough Man was still cool and you could smoke anywhere except places that were likely to explode after striking a match.
I don't care about your history or my karma, I have taken your OP at face value. - No "we" don't need (blind) faith, your self-confessed need for it is merely a consequence of your lackluster search for evidence.
"one of the only impediments to decreasing solar electricity prices are fees proposed [edit: and imposed] by utilities on customers who install solar and take advantage of net metering, or the ability to sell excess power back to utilities."
"His sample set is flawed" - Agreed, but that is not the argument most commenters are using, as I have pointed out elsewhere his sample sizes are definitely NOT "too small to give meaningful results". Weak confidence levels and "meaningless" are two very different things, one is useless, the other provides a low resolution picture of the real distribution.
Considering this is really really basic statistics I'd say anybody we want on Slashdot is already very familiar with these things.
So why are half the comments incorrectly claiming that the sample size is too small to give meaningful results? Yes the samples he has give a weak confidence level and he points that out, but that is an entirely different thing to "meaningless".
Disclaimer: Majored in Comp Sci and Operations Research (logistics to americans). That doesn't make me a statistician but it does mean I can recognise a valid statistical argument when I see one.
The sample sizes he used are not a problem from a statistical POV. He has two small samples so he can legitimately use the central limit theorem to find the mean. He also has more than the minimum sample size of 32 required to calculate variance and confidence levels. The only thing likely to show significant improvement with a larger sample sizes is the confidence level, since he admits his confidence is weak I don't see a problem.
In my experience the "peak" doesn't matter much, the best strategy is to go out for half an hour or so over the next few days when Leo is visible in the sky, after midnight local time is always preferable since the meteors will be hitting the atmosphere square on.
I've lost count of the number of Leonids I've seen since I saw my first (and best) leonid shower in the late 60's (17 thru my bedroom windows in about an hour). Saw a nice slow moving green one last night from my hotel balcony in Broome, completely accidental, it was only after I spotted it that I remembered what the date was. Having said that, the easily accessible dark sky here in Oz does give me an unfair advantage.
That's too general to be useful, yes life is a process not a thing, but it's a process that has a particular set of properties, we don't have a universal definition of life but one thing that all definitions agree is required is self-replication. However self-replication alone is not sufficient to define life since crystal growth has the property of self-replication but few people believe animals are a form of protein crystal that spontaneously replicates.
Maths is an axiomatic system, it is accurate by definition. The universe is not axiomatic therefore if there are inaccuracies in it's mathematical description they are a fundamental property of the universe itself, not maths.
Given enough time every point in our existing universe will expand into a universe of it's own, currently we think those universes will be empty. Personally I don't think it's possible to have a physical "nothing", there is always something even if just a 'quantum fluctuation'.
The current law is broken, there is no need for the law to require YT to give away the personal info of either side to anyone other than a judge - but your answer is "fuck the little guy"?
Which particular religion? There are lots of different types of muslims just as there are lots of different types of Christians, within each sect there are different races, white, black, mediterranean, Persian, Arab, SE Asian, etc. This is what currently happening in Iraq, ISIS broke off from the Sunni's and is now fighting Sunni, Shia and Kurds, they all hate each other almost as much as they hate ISIS.
Aside from that, following strict apostate rules has nothing to do with race, there is nothing in your genes that makes you a muslim therefore hating a muslim just for being a muslim is bigoted and ignorant, but it's not racist.
Slashdot Mirror
we don't want plutonium-powered reactors on an exploding rocket
Back up a bit, who's the "we"?
I recall seeing testing footage for the RTG in the Cassini probe, among other things the tests involved a large artillery gun and a steel wall a few feet thick. Cassini was particularly controversial because it made a 'sling shot' flyby of earth at a much greater speed than escape velocity. From the tests I saw in the doco decades ago the worst thing that could possibly happen with an RTG is that it falls from the sky directly onto someone's head. Far from being anti-nuke, I'm actually interested the idea of "pebble bed" reactors (materials research is what's needed there). I'm also in favour of "full life cycle" nuclear power as practised in some parts of the EU. I don't know of a -science based- environmentalist/hippie/greenie who thinks otherwise. I've held these views since the early 90's, I'm not alone either, James Lovelock and some other influential greenies expressed similar opinions in the early 2000's
I speak to you today as a scientist and as the originator of Gaia Theory, the earth's system science which describes a self regulating planet which keeps its temperature and its chemical composition always favourable for life. I care deeply about the natural world, but as a scientist I consider that the earth has now reached a state profoundly dangerous to all of us and to our civilisation. And this view is shared by scientists around the world. Unfortunately, governments, especially in Europe, appear to listen less to scientists than they do to Green political parties and to Green lobbies. Now, I am a green myself, so I know that these greens are well intentioned, but they understand people a lot better than they understand the earth, and consequently they recommend inappropriate remedies and action. Lovelock 2005.
Disclaimer: According to my parents I became a Hippie back in 1976. Like any other social group, "Hippies" in general are reasonable people if you stop insulting them and feeding them on bullshit.
I don't think you realise just how indestructible a nuclear battery is, the one on Cassini was designed to withstand a crash that might have occurred on it's slingshot flyby of earth (fortunately we didn't get to test that claim). Testing is done by firing the battery from an artillery gun directly into a solid steel wall several feet thick. What happened to Antares would have merely burnt the paint off the outside a nuclear battery. Basically the only way to get hurt by one of them is to be unlucky enough to be hit on the head with it.
Like the GP, I was also surprised to hear that a probe so far from Earth was solar powered, I wouldn't have thought there was enough light that far out even without the shadows. Sure it's an assumption but it's not baseless, previous deep space probes such as Cassini, pioneer, and voyager are all nuclear powered. Aside from that, who pissd in your fruit loops?
There's also an expectation of "common business practice".
This is the comment section of slashdot, WTF has the article got to do with anything?
What you can eat, or drink, smoke (liberals), who you have sex with (conservatives).
The last lot to increase taxes on my smokes here in Oz were the right wing jesus freaks currently in power, $4/pack = ~20% increase. I'm a left wing smoker (both kinds), have been for ~40yrs, I started back in the 70's when the Marlborough Man was still cool and you could smoke anywhere except places that were likely to explode after striking a match.
-Engage Scottish Accent -
Just one ping! We don't want to be mobbed by hungry seals.
He also forced farmers to devote a certain percentage of their land to growing hemp for the navy.
I don't care about your history or my karma, I have taken your OP at face value. - No "we" don't need (blind) faith, your self-confessed need for it is merely a consequence of your lackluster search for evidence.
"one of the only impediments to decreasing solar electricity prices are fees proposed [edit: and imposed] by utilities on customers who install solar and take advantage of net metering, or the ability to sell excess power back to utilities."
"His sample set is flawed" - Agreed, but that is not the argument most commenters are using, as I have pointed out elsewhere his sample sizes are definitely NOT "too small to give meaningful results". Weak confidence levels and "meaningless" are two very different things, one is useless, the other provides a low resolution picture of the real distribution.
Considering this is really really basic statistics I'd say anybody we want on Slashdot is already very familiar with these things.
So why are half the comments incorrectly claiming that the sample size is too small to give meaningful results? Yes the samples he has give a weak confidence level and he points that out, but that is an entirely different thing to "meaningless".
Disclaimer: Majored in Comp Sci and Operations Research (logistics to americans). That doesn't make me a statistician but it does mean I can recognise a valid statistical argument when I see one.
The sample sizes he used are not a problem from a statistical POV. He has two small samples so he can legitimately use the central limit theorem to find the mean. He also has more than the minimum sample size of 32 required to calculate variance and confidence levels. The only thing likely to show significant improvement with a larger sample sizes is the confidence level, since he admits his confidence is weak I don't see a problem.
Superstition seems to come from a human insistence that things are better when they're a mystery than when they're solved and understood.
"It's more interesting not knowing" - Feynman.
In my experience the "peak" doesn't matter much, the best strategy is to go out for half an hour or so over the next few days when Leo is visible in the sky, after midnight local time is always preferable since the meteors will be hitting the atmosphere square on.
I've lost count of the number of Leonids I've seen since I saw my first (and best) leonid shower in the late 60's (17 thru my bedroom windows in about an hour). Saw a nice slow moving green one last night from my hotel balcony in Broome, completely accidental, it was only after I spotted it that I remembered what the date was. Having said that, the easily accessible dark sky here in Oz does give me an unfair advantage.
Climate models comes with a responsability.
But it's ok for people like Inhofe and the GP to deliberately misrepresent what the models say, right?
That's too general to be useful, yes life is a process not a thing, but it's a process that has a particular set of properties, we don't have a universal definition of life but one thing that all definitions agree is required is self-replication. However self-replication alone is not sufficient to define life since crystal growth has the property of self-replication but few people believe animals are a form of protein crystal that spontaneously replicates.
Maths is an axiomatic system, it is accurate by definition. The universe is not axiomatic therefore if there are inaccuracies in it's mathematical description they are a fundamental property of the universe itself, not maths.
Given enough time every point in our existing universe will expand into a universe of it's own, currently we think those universes will be empty. Personally I don't think it's possible to have a physical "nothing", there is always something even if just a 'quantum fluctuation'.
Fornication.
The current law is broken, there is no need for the law to require YT to give away the personal info of either side to anyone other than a judge - but your answer is "fuck the little guy"?
Your spacebar is evil.
Which particular religion? There are lots of different types of muslims just as there are lots of different types of Christians, within each sect there are different races, white, black, mediterranean, Persian, Arab, SE Asian, etc. This is what currently happening in Iraq, ISIS broke off from the Sunni's and is now fighting Sunni, Shia and Kurds, they all hate each other almost as much as they hate ISIS.
Aside from that, following strict apostate rules has nothing to do with race, there is nothing in your genes that makes you a muslim therefore hating a muslim just for being a muslim is bigoted and ignorant, but it's not racist.
Fishing is distinctly intrastate commerce (if commerce at all!)
They are talking about a commercial fishing operation, not two blokes in a tinny.