Although it is highly(?) unlikely that this is, in fact, the result of a quantum black hole, there was one thing in the article that caught my eye. They said that it was a "funnel shaped lake". If they mean a funnel pointing downward into the earth then doesn't that sound like the result of a small, extremely dense, gravitationally attracting object going through (and coming out, hopefully, on the other side of the planet?).
On the other hand they say that the lake was shallow so what they probably mean by funnel shaped is what it looks like from the air, pointing downhill.
Anyway, I really really doubt it but it is fun to consider.
In Arthur C. Clarke's book "The City and the Stars" later re-released as 'Against the fall of Night", it mentions a slidewalk which was a solid in one dimension but a liquid in the other two. That way, you could walk onto the middle portion and be carried along by the "current" while standing. Still what do expect from a civilization a billion or two years in the future?
Grew up on his science fiction and fact books; "The Promise of Space" was seminal to my interest in space. Unfortunately his (alleged) personal discretions have cast a serious shadow over his legacy.
Why don't you just call people what they want to be called? Just because you think it's okay to call someone Oriental (or Yellow, or slant-eyed or whatever) doesn't mean it's right. (By the way, do you really think skin color "Yellow" is the same from Northern China to southern Thailand?) Why do you get to decide? Divine providence? American arrogance?
I don't agree on some of the names people in Asia call whites but I guess by your reasoning it's okay.
Wouldn't it be great if this was found to be an artifact from a Type II civilization? It would be an immediate and overwhelming proof that there is super-intelligent life out there.
Type I - civilizations capable of harnessing the energy of a planetary body, Type II - civilizations capable of harnessing the energy of a star, Type III - civilizations capable of harnessing the energy of an entire galaxy. We are a Type I civilization.
don't know who this Anonymous Coward is (duh) but he/she has a point. As is evident by the name change Jobs is very serious about growing the company beyond just the mac. Maybe way beyond (music/telecommunications/media).
This idea was already proposed by (at least) Jaron Lanier of Virtual Reality fame. In 1999 The New York TImes asked for submissions by various tech-notables and others to design a "time capsule" that would be filled on Jan 1 2000 and opened (hopefully not before then) on Jan 1 3000. I believe the winner would see the design actually built.
Anyway Mr. Lanier proposed only party tongue-in-cheek that they encode the data in the most indestuctrable, pervasive, consipcuous organism around (at least in New York): Cockroaches. When one considers their extreme adaptability, resistance to pesticides, traps, radiation, predators etc. and the large size of their genmoe to carry data, it might be even be better than bacteria (you might have a lot of microscopic strains to look through before finding the right one, maybe the cockroaches could engineered to have a distinctive visual marking... but I digress.
By the way, this proposal did not win the contest, in the end the editors decided on a beautiful, scultural object prominently located (at the grand entrance to the Musuem of Natuarl History?). Their reasoning was that such an object, being of obvious value in more ways than one, would be continuously maintained and "remembered" so that it would not fall into disrepair or oblvious. Of course this presumes there is no sort of civilzational collapse, whereas the only thing that could wipe out the cockroaches would have taken us out as well.
The New York Times Magazine millenial issue which is where this and the other ideas are presented is a great read. Find a copy and encode it into your neurons.
Re: Not just RED, also too low for Digital Cinema
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Enter The 2160p HDTV
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· Score: 2, Informative
The Westinghouse monitor is also, unfortunately, just a little too low for digital mastering/cinema applications. With the current paradigm being "master at 4K distribute at 2K" the monitor does not have the resolution for the mastering phase (4K = 4096x2160). That doesn't even begin to talk about the pixel bit depth, color space, gamma, etc. Also when the paradigm changes to "master at 4K distribute at 4K", then the film industry will really want 4K monitors for proofing.
Since it is very close to the required resolution perhaps the original manufacturer could be induced to increase the resolution slightly. Then perhaps Westinghouse could use closely spaced LED backlights that are individually driven so that the display could produce high dynamic range (HDR) images (very high contrast ratios). Add the appropriate color/gamma controls to match the digital cinema color space standard and NOW you've got a display!
Then again with all this I'm sure it will be NOT CHEAP.
I'm not sure I understand this correctly; from the quote (in the article which I DID read) it seems like the metric of success is who they are including. Shouldn't the metric of success for a simulator be how well they are training the astronauts or, for an educational learning tool, how well they are introducing concepts to their students?
Please don't tell me that this project is mainly driven by the desire to include as many different organizations together. This sounds like trying to have the space shuttle being built in as many congressional districts as possible to spread the pork around.
I originally came up with this idea thinking that robots should carry it out but it could also be performed by a manned mission.
Novel method for changing orbit of small planetary body (asteroid/comet).
Abstract: Using a tethered "sling" to release pieces of a small planetary body, a small (inexpensive) payload delivered to a body rotating at a sufficient rate can effectively convert the body's rotational energy into directed kinetic energy. The tether, which may be attached to said body via cables or netting, can also generate power for its own operations, obviating a need for a large power source. Since only a small fraction of the mass is to released at any one time, problems such as excessive accelration, breakup of body etc. will be avoided. In addition to changing the velocity of the asteroid/comet (for diversion from earth impact or placing the asteroid into a more accessible orbit for mining), the ejected material may be useful on its own as mined material or even as a space based weapon system (hurling relatively massive hunks of rock at satellites will be quite effective).
Main text: Previous proposals for changing the orbital path of a small planetary body have included delivering an explosive charge to said body (typically nuclear) for impact on or near it, moving the body directly through the use of ion drives or mass accelerators or even gravitional attraction by a sufficiently large spacecraft, changing the albedo of the body (or increasing/decreasing the amount of light/solar wind) or even utilizing the outgassing of volatiles on suitable bodies (like comets) by placing it inside a giant "bag" with a directed opening. These ideas unfortantely suffer from various problems such as possibility of fracturing said body or high costs due to large spacecraft or energy sources being sent over interplanetary distances. Still the consequences of a major impact or dire enough so to warrant the consideration of these ideas.
My idea, which I am releasing into the public domain, would be to convert the rotational energy of the small planetary body into directed kinetic energy sufficient to "push" the body on a different orbital path. If done early enough (years? decades?) this small diversion could prevent the body from impacting the earth. The advantage to using my scheme would be that the spacecraft sent to the object could be reasonably small although it would require a mechanism for securely attaching a long (kilometers?) tether to the asteroid via cables or, in the case of a very fragmented body, perhaps a large net. The cable would be conducting and may even be self extending using static charges or pressurized gas. Small robots would be used for both moving material up and down the cable as well as mining the body for material to be cast into space.
The main design consideration would be the length of the tether (or possibly tower), it must extend beyond the "geo"-sync distance defined by the rotational speed of the body and its gravitational attraction. For some objects no doubt this would require a tether to be impractically long, however recent probes have determined that many(?) bodies rotate fast enough for a tether to be of practical length. ("Practical length" is in reference to NASA experiments in LEO where tethers were extended or attempted to be extended distance of up to tens of kilometers). (Another major impediment would be if the body were tumbling, possibly in a chaotic fashion. I do not know if a tether/tower could be constructed in that scenario). The tether would have a few other important characteristics. It should allow for small robots to travel up and down its length by means of a gripping mechanism (preferably simultaneously on two "sides") and should be conducting. This would allow for the robots to both receive power for their "climb" and to generate power once they've passed the "geo"-sync height. The tether would be kept taught by means of a counterweight placed beyond the "geo"-sync height, presumably at the end of the tether.
This guy just copied my post from a few days ago! (http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=20689 8&cid=16870614) and posted it as his (or her) own. Whoever you are, please give proper attribution! And while you're at it you should include all of my post including my link to a previous post! http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=171538&cid=142 87818
For all of you slashdot readers who have plenty of time on your hands, here is an excellent book on why going to the asteroids should be one of, if not THE, priorities of the manned space program. Although I haven't read it since I was young(er) I still remember it fondly as being one of my great inspirations for space travel. The ease of getting there (it is energetically easier to get to a Near Earth Orbit asteroid than going to the moon!), the resources available there (iron asteroids = lots of metals, icy asteroids/comets = water and volatiles, carbonaceous = building materials) and the potential for discovery/experience in deep space travel are covered in this fascinating book. It made a compelling case, without resort to more speculative ideas such as orbital habitats a la L-5, for why this is our logical next step after the moon.
Of course the book was written before Luiz Alvarez proposed that asteroids likely were responsible for mass extinctions. However since that justification for travelling to the asteroids has been discussed endlessly I don't think the omission hurts this book.
If you can find this book (I'm sure it's been out of print for decades) and have the time to read it, please do, It will help restore the feeling of endless possibilities that some of us had about space travel when we were young.
"Islands in Space: The Challenge of the Planetoids" Donald Cox and Dandridge Cole
I've gotta be the first to say this: So with the two naked presenters (presumably male and female adults, I haven't seen the show), exactly how are they going to show human reproduction?
I believe that the 180B light years is just a MINIMUM, that is the universe could actually be much much larger. The 180B lyrs. would the minimum size that would be allowable under our current measurements (for example the cosmic background radiation) that dictate how much the universe grew as a result of "inflation". It it were smaller than that, we would start to see "reflections" of ourselves as the light in the universe would have gone all the way around like in a hall of mirrors (and we could see the earth of a long time ago!).
To illustrate how big the universe could be there was, I think, an interesting article (set of articles?) in Scientific American that described the various ways in which we would could have a "parallel (viewable) universe" to our own. One was the idea that the whole universe was so huge that if you went far enough you could find an exact same configuration of all of the particles that we can see in our own viewable (~30B lyr wide) universe.
Of course this would mean that the actual universe would be so unbelievably gigantic that 180B lyr. would be an unimaginably tiny speck within it!
Prostitution is illegal in Vietnam although I've never seen a foreigner being arrested/prosecuted. Recreational drugs is DEFINITELY not permitted, that'll get you in prison for sure. Finally private armies are ludictrous when the country is a police state, all power remains with the government (not the people, or constitution for that matter), even the local mafia/gangsters exist solely at the grace of the authorities (and they don't do much anyway, there was a bust where a bunch of them were just rounded up and summarily executed).
No if that's what you're into, Cambodia is the place to go except I don't know if prostitution is officially sanctioned (there is an active campaign against child prostitution thank god). Singapore(!) surprisingly has legal prostitution (probably to give gum chewing addicts something to do).
sorry don't keep a blog (don't know how to and don't think I'd have enough to say really). not even smart enough to completely figure out how to your add*;)
I haven't travelled (yet) into the countryside but I hopefully will soon. Vietnam is pretty open but I was told not to go around videotaping things outside of the major cities.
Traffic is pretty insane but the first time you take a motorbike ride it is exhilarating. You'll feel like a dog sticking its head out of a car window. After that you'll want a helmet (although the number of injury accidents in the city is quite low, I've never seen one).
If you're a military historian make sure you go to the war remnants museum. Aside from showing the war from the North Vietnamese point of view it is a pretty disturbing picture of the costs of war.
Sorry it doesn't always all cancel out. As economists like to say, there may be "significant barriers to entry". For an extreme example the millions of very poor but bright Indians who can't come to America even though they'd be happy with a fraction of the going rate. Why? Because of immigration laws. Another example would be a required certification of a degree you job requires.
Likewise another factor is the fact that infomation isn't perfect. In order to have an efficient marketplace every participant has to have "perfect" information of what the supply and demand is. I think some economist(s) won a Nobel Prize for their idea that information isn't always perfect (and were able to incorporate it into their models).
So beat the system. Don't just go with the flow, make your information more perfect than the next guy and take advantage of something overlooked. Can you say insider information (in a good way;). Or use the barriers to entry to your advantage; go somewhere it is easy for you but hard for others (I don't mean that just in terms of location, think about your skills).
Well that's the time here as I post this. Anyway, it's very interesting living in Ho Chi Min (rated the #12th best major city in the world to live in and the best in Asia)*. I've got to say that, in a country that has a per capita GDP less than a tenth that of the United States a dollar goes a long way.
The key is how to make it. If you can make it by working for a major foreign corporation here (read: oil company) and get a Western salary, you will live like a king. Unfortunately local opportunities to make that kind of money are otherwise almost nil. Even if you can speak Vietnamese you will find that even a very high salary here (doing a job like coding) in not much relative to the U.S. Also you may find yourself thought of being overqualified; I do very high end media and some people here told me they were afraid to contact me after seeing my CV because they thought I'd charge a fortune.
While you can make a good living here teaching English I doubt that would appeal to the skilled professionals that make up Slashdot's readers. No, the best job is one in which you can work "at the end of a wire", that is live here but work for some U.S. company via the internet. The internet infrastructure is just sufficient to do that (which is one reason why I can't live in Cambodia). Internet telephony here is good (at least from my location). If your job is portable so you don't have to physically see your clients more than once or twice a year then this might "work" for you!
By the way, the cost of living here is not going to be one-tenth that of the U.S. unless you live like a native. Instead if you insist on all the perks of the U.S. it's probably about half the U.S. cost of living (more if you want a car!). On the other hand, wealth is relative; compared to the natives you WILL be very rich and will be treated as such. That has its own perks.;)
* this recent study (which, to my travelled eyes cannot possibly be true) was based on a bunch of factors including how much (or little) the average person "impacted the environment". Since Vietnamese people are still very poor they don't impact the environment very much which led to a inflated score. Still Ho Chi Minh City has its charms; zero violent crime (it's a police state), pace of life (you can actually meet people and develop friendships), scale of the city (more like one giant neighborhood than a forest of skyscrapers). But act soon, things are changing fast and in 5 years it'll be unrecognizable. In that case you'll:
Miss Saigon.
much harder than you think
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Halving Half Lives
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Unfortunately it is much worse than just getting it into LEO or even Geo sync. First you need to put it on an escape trajectory to get it out of earth's gravity well. The problem then is it's floating around in a near Earth orbit (like those pesky asteroids we keep worrying about). After a few years/decades/millenia it could find its way back down. To really get rid of it by dropping it in the sun will require you to cancel out its orbital velocity relative to the sun, 66,000mph! You could reduce that somewhat by complicated slingshot trajectories but then if you don't get it quite right it could come right back at you. Of course dropping it into Jupiter's atmosphere (or Venus for that matter) would probably be sufficient. Just do it the easy way and put it on the moon! (www.space1999.net).
Wow something that blows away all T-cells in your body for good leaving the victims alive but consuming huge amounts of health care just to stay remain alive. I didn't RTFA but if this is something that can be put into drinking water, we're all in trouble. I hope I don't get super negative Karma for posting this.
I wish to draw the slashdot crowd's attention to what is one of S. Lem's most incredible short stories from the collection "Imaginary Magnitude". Picking up on a particularly insightful comment made by another post that S. Lem had a real sense of the "alienness" of aliens (ex. FIASCO); in the story "Golem XIV" he takes this further by depicting a superintelligent machine far beyond our reasoning ability that gives lectures to mankind. S. Lem manages to convincingly PUT HIMSELF IN THE POSITION OF A SUPERINTELLIGENT BEING talkiing down to us mere humans and examines ideas such as the subjugation of the sense of self to pure intellect as well as the next steps in Man's cognitive evolution. He then discusses the possibility that this may be but a few small steps in the climb to cosmic intelligences...
An extremely thought provoking story it reminds me of the comment in Time magazine that S. Lem "is the best writer, in any language, of science fiction in the 20th century".
The level of his discourse is so far above that of other writers that I hardly consider them in the same breath. He never considered science fiction as being just adventure stories set in the future but rather as an avenue to explore new worlds of thought.
Actually while the resolution of HD (1920x1080) is very good compared to the current DCI standard of 2048x1080 there are a number of other issues to consider. As you already mentioned the black levels of home systems can leave something to be desired, also the color gamut is significantly redeuced. The "black chip"s used in the TI cinema projectors give a standardized, calibrated broad color space. More importantly is the temporal artifacts caused from converting a 24fps progressive scan movie (presumably shot on 35mm film) to a 30fps interlaced HD signal. This process introduces the artifacts we are all familar with from watching movies on TV. While admittedly the "film look" we associate with being in a movie theater is actually a result of a lower image quality experience, it does add to the experience. (the 60fps rate of the 1280x720 standard has a different feel, like that of the old Showscan film system).
Soon, of course, the new 4K projectors will be out (see post on cinema in Norway).
the oft quoted 3000-4000 pixel count is done under perfect conditions using a pristine negative with a million dollar telecine. In the theater you are usually watching a fourth generation print that has accumulated dust and scratches. Audience testing showed that even the first generation of digital projectors (1280x1024 using an anamorphic projector lens) was preferable to the ordinary release print. In addition the digital projectors are designed to be as close to the "analog" ones as possible. They typically work with a digital "head" bolted onto a standard projector light housing. Power supplies and audio connections (from the server) remain the same.
Now the current generation of projectors are 2048x1080. Soon they will go to 4K. It is telling that IMAX known for its ultra large format films (70mm 15perf) is actively considering digital, in no small part due to the extremely high print costs $20K-$40K. If they consider digital good enough, that's saying something.
Slashdot Mirror
Although it is highly(?) unlikely that this is, in fact, the result of a quantum black hole, there was one thing in the article that caught my eye. They said that it was a "funnel shaped lake". If they mean a funnel pointing downward into the earth then doesn't that sound like the result of a small, extremely dense, gravitationally attracting object going through (and coming out, hopefully, on the other side of the planet?).
On the other hand they say that the lake was shallow so what they probably mean by funnel shaped is what it looks like from the air, pointing downhill.
Anyway, I really really doubt it but it is fun to consider.
In Arthur C. Clarke's book "The City and the Stars" later re-released as 'Against the fall of Night", it mentions a slidewalk which was a solid in one dimension but a liquid in the other two. That way, you could walk onto the middle portion and be carried along by the "current" while standing. Still what do expect from a civilization a billion or two years in the future?
Grew up on his science fiction and fact books; "The Promise of Space" was seminal to my interest in space. Unfortunately his (alleged) personal discretions have cast a serious shadow over his legacy.
Why don't you just call people what they want to be called? Just because you think it's okay to call someone Oriental (or Yellow, or slant-eyed or whatever) doesn't mean it's right. (By the way, do you really think skin color "Yellow" is the same from Northern China to southern Thailand?) Why do you get to decide? Divine providence? American arrogance?
I don't agree on some of the names people in Asia call whites but I guess by your reasoning it's okay.
Wouldn't it be great if this was found to be an artifact from a Type II civilization? It would be an immediate and overwhelming proof that there is super-intelligent life out there.
Type I - civilizations capable of harnessing the energy of a planetary body, Type II - civilizations capable of harnessing the energy of a star, Type III - civilizations capable of harnessing the energy of an entire galaxy. We are a Type I civilization.
don't know who this Anonymous Coward is (duh) but he/she has a point. As is evident by the name change Jobs is very serious about growing the company beyond just the mac. Maybe way beyond (music/telecommunications/media).
This idea was already proposed by (at least) Jaron Lanier of Virtual Reality fame. In 1999 The New York TImes asked for submissions by various tech-notables and others to design a "time capsule" that would be filled on Jan 1 2000 and opened (hopefully not before then) on Jan 1 3000. I believe the winner would see the design actually built.
Anyway Mr. Lanier proposed only party tongue-in-cheek that they encode the data in the most indestuctrable, pervasive, consipcuous organism around (at least in New York): Cockroaches. When one considers their extreme adaptability, resistance to pesticides, traps, radiation, predators etc. and the large size of their genmoe to carry data, it might be even be better than bacteria (you might have a lot of microscopic strains to look through before finding the right one, maybe the cockroaches could engineered to have a distinctive visual marking... but I digress.
By the way, this proposal did not win the contest, in the end the editors decided on a beautiful, scultural object prominently located (at the grand entrance to the Musuem of Natuarl History?). Their reasoning was that such an object, being of obvious value in more ways than one, would be continuously maintained and "remembered" so that it would not fall into disrepair or oblvious. Of course this presumes there is no sort of civilzational collapse, whereas the only thing that could wipe out the cockroaches would have taken us out as well.
The New York Times Magazine millenial issue which is where this and the other ideas are presented is a great read. Find a copy and encode it into your neurons.
The Westinghouse monitor is also, unfortunately, just a little too low for digital mastering/cinema applications. With the current paradigm being "master at 4K distribute at 2K" the monitor does not have the resolution for the mastering phase (4K = 4096x2160). That doesn't even begin to talk about the pixel bit depth, color space, gamma, etc. Also when the paradigm changes to "master at 4K distribute at 4K", then the film industry will really want 4K monitors for proofing.
Since it is very close to the required resolution perhaps the original manufacturer could be induced to increase the resolution slightly. Then perhaps Westinghouse could use closely spaced LED backlights that are individually driven so that the display could produce high dynamic range (HDR) images (very high contrast ratios). Add the appropriate color/gamma controls to match the digital cinema color space standard and NOW you've got a display!
Then again with all this I'm sure it will be NOT CHEAP.
I'm not sure I understand this correctly; from the quote (in the article which I DID read) it seems like the metric of success is who they are including. Shouldn't the metric of success for a simulator be how well they are training the astronauts or, for an educational learning tool, how well they are introducing concepts to their students?
Please don't tell me that this project is mainly driven by the desire to include as many different organizations together. This sounds like trying to have the space shuttle being built in as many congressional districts as possible to spread the pork around.
I originally came up with this idea thinking that robots should carry it out but it could also be performed by a manned mission.
Novel method for changing orbit of small planetary body (asteroid/comet).
Abstract: Using a tethered "sling" to release pieces of a small planetary body, a small (inexpensive) payload delivered to a body rotating at a sufficient rate can effectively convert the body's rotational energy into directed kinetic energy. The tether, which may be attached to said body via cables or netting, can also generate power for its own operations, obviating a need for a large power source. Since only a small fraction of the mass is to released at any one time, problems such as excessive accelration, breakup of body etc. will be avoided. In addition to changing the velocity of the asteroid/comet (for diversion from earth impact or placing the asteroid into a more accessible orbit for mining), the ejected material may be useful on its own as mined material or even as a space based weapon system (hurling relatively massive hunks of rock at satellites will be quite effective).
Main text: Previous proposals for changing the orbital path of a small planetary body have included delivering an explosive charge to said body (typically nuclear) for impact on or near it, moving the body directly through the use of ion drives or mass accelerators or even gravitional attraction by a sufficiently large spacecraft, changing the albedo of the body (or increasing/decreasing the amount of light/solar wind) or even utilizing the outgassing of volatiles on suitable bodies (like comets) by placing it inside a giant "bag" with a directed opening. These ideas unfortantely suffer from various problems such as possibility of fracturing said body or high costs due to large spacecraft or energy sources being sent over interplanetary distances. Still the consequences of a major impact or dire enough so to warrant the consideration of these ideas.
My idea, which I am releasing into the public domain, would be to convert the rotational energy of the small planetary body into directed kinetic energy sufficient to "push" the body on a different orbital path. If done early enough (years? decades?) this small diversion could prevent the body from impacting the earth. The advantage to using my scheme would be that the spacecraft sent to the object could be reasonably small although it would require a mechanism for securely attaching a long (kilometers?) tether to the asteroid via cables or, in the case of a very fragmented body, perhaps a large net. The cable would be conducting and may even be self extending using static charges or pressurized gas. Small robots would be used for both moving material up and down the cable as well as mining the body for material to be cast into space.
The main design consideration would be the length of the tether (or possibly tower), it must extend beyond the "geo"-sync distance defined by the rotational speed of the body and its gravitational attraction. For some objects no doubt this would require a tether to be impractically long, however recent probes have determined that many(?) bodies rotate fast enough for a tether to be of practical length. ("Practical length" is in reference to NASA experiments in LEO where tethers were extended or attempted to be extended distance of up to tens of kilometers). (Another major impediment would be if the body were tumbling, possibly in a chaotic fashion. I do not know if a tether/tower could be constructed in that scenario). The tether would have a few other important characteristics. It should allow for small robots to travel up and down its length by means of a gripping mechanism (preferably simultaneously on two "sides") and should be conducting. This would allow for the robots to both receive power for their "climb" and to generate power once they've passed the "geo"-sync height. The tether would be kept taught by means of a counterweight placed beyond the "geo"-sync height, presumably at the end of the tether.
The implementat
I don't know how the space got into my link from my previous post. Please use this link. http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=206898 &cid=16870614
This guy just copied my post from a few days ago! (http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=20689 8&cid=16870614) and posted it as his (or her) own. Whoever you are, please give proper attribution! And while you're at it you should include all of my post including my link to a previous post! http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=171538&cid=142 87818
- Wisebabo
For all of you slashdot readers who have plenty of time on your hands, here is an excellent book on why going to the asteroids should be one of, if not THE, priorities of the manned space program. Although I haven't read it since I was young(er) I still remember it fondly as being one of my great inspirations for space travel. The ease of getting there (it is energetically easier to get to a Near Earth Orbit asteroid than going to the moon!), the resources available there (iron asteroids = lots of metals, icy asteroids/comets = water and volatiles, carbonaceous = building materials) and the potential for discovery/experience in deep space travel are covered in this fascinating book. It made a compelling case, without resort to more speculative ideas such as orbital habitats a la L-5, for why this is our logical next step after the moon.
2 87818
Of course the book was written before Luiz Alvarez proposed that asteroids likely were responsible for mass extinctions. However since that justification for travelling to the asteroids has been discussed endlessly I don't think the omission hurts this book.
If you can find this book (I'm sure it's been out of print for decades) and have the time to read it, please do, It will help restore the feeling of endless possibilities that some of us had about space travel when we were young.
"Islands in Space: The Challenge of the Planetoids" Donald Cox and Dandridge Cole
By the way, if you've read this far, you might want to check out my previous musings on asteroids - http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=171538&cid=14
Well at least we don't taste like Spam
I've gotta be the first to say this: So with the two naked presenters (presumably male and female adults, I haven't seen the show), exactly how are they going to show human reproduction?
I believe that the 180B light years is just a MINIMUM, that is the universe could actually be much much larger. The 180B lyrs. would the minimum size that would be allowable under our current measurements (for example the cosmic background radiation) that dictate how much the universe grew as a result of "inflation". It it were smaller than that, we would start to see "reflections" of ourselves as the light in the universe would have gone all the way around like in a hall of mirrors (and we could see the earth of a long time ago!).
To illustrate how big the universe could be there was, I think, an interesting article (set of articles?) in Scientific American that described the various ways in which we would could have a "parallel (viewable) universe" to our own. One was the idea that the whole universe was so huge that if you went far enough you could find an exact same configuration of all of the particles that we can see in our own viewable (~30B lyr wide) universe.
Of course this would mean that the actual universe would be so unbelievably gigantic that 180B lyr. would be an unimaginably tiny speck within it!
Prostitution is illegal in Vietnam although I've never seen a foreigner being arrested/prosecuted. Recreational drugs is DEFINITELY not permitted, that'll get you in prison for sure. Finally private armies are ludictrous when the country is a police state, all power remains with the government (not the people, or constitution for that matter), even the local mafia/gangsters exist solely at the grace of the authorities (and they don't do much anyway, there was a bust where a bunch of them were just rounded up and summarily executed).
No if that's what you're into, Cambodia is the place to go except I don't know if prostitution is officially sanctioned (there is an active campaign against child prostitution thank god). Singapore(!) surprisingly has legal prostitution (probably to give gum chewing addicts something to do).
sorry don't keep a blog (don't know how to and don't think I'd have enough to say really). not even smart enough to completely figure out how to your add* ;)
I haven't travelled (yet) into the countryside but I hopefully will soon. Vietnam is pretty open but I was told not to go around videotaping things outside of the major cities.
Traffic is pretty insane but the first time you take a motorbike ride it is exhilarating. You'll feel like a dog sticking its head out of a car window. After that you'll want a helmet (although the number of injury accidents in the city is quite low, I've never seen one).
If you're a military historian make sure you go to the war remnants museum. Aside from showing the war from the North Vietnamese point of view it is a pretty disturbing picture of the costs of war.
Sorry it doesn't always all cancel out. As economists like to say, there may be "significant barriers to entry". For an extreme example the millions of very poor but bright Indians who can't come to America even though they'd be happy with a fraction of the going rate. Why? Because of immigration laws. Another example would be a required certification of a degree you job requires.
;). Or use the barriers to entry to your advantage; go somewhere it is easy for you but hard for others (I don't mean that just in terms of location, think about your skills).
Likewise another factor is the fact that infomation isn't perfect. In order to have an efficient marketplace every participant has to have "perfect" information of what the supply and demand is. I think some economist(s) won a Nobel Prize for their idea that information isn't always perfect (and were able to incorporate it into their models).
So beat the system. Don't just go with the flow, make your information more perfect than the next guy and take advantage of something overlooked. Can you say insider information (in a good way
Good Morning Vietnam!
;)
Well that's the time here as I post this. Anyway, it's very interesting living in Ho Chi Min (rated the #12th best major city in the world to live in and the best in Asia)*. I've got to say that, in a country that has a per capita GDP less than a tenth that of the United States a dollar goes a long way.
The key is how to make it. If you can make it by working for a major foreign corporation here (read: oil company) and get a Western salary, you will live like a king. Unfortunately local opportunities to make that kind of money are otherwise almost nil. Even if you can speak Vietnamese you will find that even a very high salary here (doing a job like coding) in not much relative to the U.S. Also you may find yourself thought of being overqualified; I do very high end media and some people here told me they were afraid to contact me after seeing my CV because they thought I'd charge a fortune.
While you can make a good living here teaching English I doubt that would appeal to the skilled professionals that make up Slashdot's readers. No, the best job is one in which you can work "at the end of a wire", that is live here but work for some U.S. company via the internet. The internet infrastructure is just sufficient to do that (which is one reason why I can't live in Cambodia). Internet telephony here is good (at least from my location). If your job is portable so you don't have to physically see your clients more than once or twice a year then this might "work" for you!
By the way, the cost of living here is not going to be one-tenth that of the U.S. unless you live like a native. Instead if you insist on all the perks of the U.S. it's probably about half the U.S. cost of living (more if you want a car!). On the other hand, wealth is relative; compared to the natives you WILL be very rich and will be treated as such. That has its own perks.
* this recent study (which, to my travelled eyes cannot possibly be true) was based on a bunch of factors including how much (or little) the average person "impacted the environment". Since Vietnamese people are still very poor they don't impact the environment very much which led to a inflated score. Still Ho Chi Minh City has its charms; zero violent crime (it's a police state), pace of life (you can actually meet people and develop friendships), scale of the city (more like one giant neighborhood than a forest of skyscrapers). But act soon, things are changing fast and in 5 years it'll be unrecognizable. In that case you'll:
Miss Saigon.
Unfortunately it is much worse than just getting it into LEO or even Geo sync. First you need to put it on an escape trajectory to get it out of earth's gravity well. The problem then is it's floating around in a near Earth orbit (like those pesky asteroids we keep worrying about). After a few years/decades/millenia it could find its way back down.
To really get rid of it by dropping it in the sun will require you to cancel out its orbital velocity relative to the sun, 66,000mph! You could reduce that somewhat by complicated slingshot trajectories but then if you don't get it quite right it could come right back at you. Of course dropping it into Jupiter's atmosphere (or Venus for that matter) would probably be sufficient.
Just do it the easy way and put it on the moon! (www.space1999.net).
Wow something that blows away all T-cells in your body for good leaving the victims alive but consuming huge amounts of health care just to stay remain alive.
I didn't RTFA but if this is something that can be put into drinking water, we're all in trouble. I hope I don't get super negative Karma for posting this.
I wish to draw the slashdot crowd's attention to what is one of S. Lem's most incredible short stories from the collection "Imaginary Magnitude". Picking up on a particularly insightful comment made by another post that S. Lem had a real sense of the "alienness" of aliens (ex. FIASCO); in the story "Golem XIV" he takes this further by depicting a superintelligent machine far beyond our reasoning ability that gives lectures to mankind. S. Lem manages to convincingly PUT HIMSELF IN THE POSITION OF A SUPERINTELLIGENT BEING talkiing down to us mere humans and examines ideas such as the subjugation of the sense of self to pure intellect as well as the next steps in Man's cognitive evolution. He then discusses the possibility that this may be but a few small steps in the climb to cosmic intelligences...
An extremely thought provoking story it reminds me of the comment in Time magazine that S. Lem "is the best writer, in any language, of science fiction in the 20th century".
The level of his discourse is so far above that of other writers that I hardly consider them in the same breath. He never considered science fiction as being just adventure stories set in the future but rather as an avenue to explore new worlds of thought.
May he rest in peace.
Actually while the resolution of HD (1920x1080) is very good compared to the current DCI standard of 2048x1080 there are a number of other issues to consider. As you already mentioned the black levels of home systems can leave something to be desired, also the color gamut is significantly redeuced. The "black chip"s used in the TI cinema projectors give a standardized, calibrated broad color space. More importantly is the temporal artifacts caused from converting a 24fps progressive scan movie (presumably shot on 35mm film) to a 30fps interlaced HD signal. This process introduces the artifacts we are all familar with from watching movies on TV. While admittedly the "film look" we associate with being in a movie theater is actually a result of a lower image quality experience, it does add to the experience. (the 60fps rate of the 1280x720 standard has a different feel, like that of the old Showscan film system).
Soon, of course, the new 4K projectors will be out (see post on cinema in Norway).
There is no current solution to farting though.
the oft quoted 3000-4000 pixel count is done under perfect conditions using a pristine negative with a million dollar telecine. In the theater you are usually watching a fourth generation print that has accumulated dust and scratches. Audience testing showed that even the first generation of digital projectors (1280x1024 using an anamorphic projector lens) was preferable to the ordinary release print. In addition the digital projectors are designed to be as close to the "analog" ones as possible. They typically work with a digital "head" bolted onto a standard projector light housing. Power supplies and audio connections (from the server) remain the same.
Now the current generation of projectors are 2048x1080. Soon they will go to 4K. It is telling that IMAX known for its ultra large format films (70mm 15perf) is actively considering digital, in no small part due to the extremely high print costs $20K-$40K. If they consider digital good enough, that's saying something.