Someone better tell WHOI, they have 97 dives planned for 2005 and 19 dives left this year! At the end of the first link, there's a reference to an Alvin "overhaul", not retirement, overhaul.
Submersibles don't "crap out", without loss of life and international news. They may need to work out some bugs, and there will be a testing period of several months to a year, but this thing will be at least as overdesigned as the space shuttles... Ok, bad example, but you get my drift.
Presumably, Alvin will be used for a few more years, as eliminating the research platform for most deep sea oceanography is going to leave a gaping hole. At some point the tender ship, the Atlantis (III:-) ), will need to be pulled out of service to refit for a new sub, or a new tender ship built from scratch.
What I wonder is, does WHOI get the new one?
BTW, for anyone who hasn't seen it, this guy knows more than the rest of us put together.
I worked last fall (Austral Spring) at McMurdo Station. Satellite coverage there was fine, though ~1200 people could clog the uplink pretty well after work. We also had good phone service, all routed through eastern Washington state.
I believe I was told that McMurdo, at ~77S, could hit many of the equatorial and inclined orbit satellites, but South Pole Station had to wait for something to venture farther south of the equator to get a good shot. On the other hand, with no trees and GPS satellites all converging overhead on polar orbits, we had awesome GPS reception, routinely 9-10 satellites in range.
Finally, yes, I read/. there and through a 50km wireless link from a field camp at the base of the Dry Valleys. I'd bet someone has read it from the camp near the top of Mt. Erebus.
This is, as everyon has pointed out, a meaningless exercise.
In Cozumel, I was charged ~$6 hour on the beachfront street where all the fat American cruise ship passengers got drunk, and $1.50 an hour 6 blocks away where the wealthier locals shopped. The gradient was truly awe inspiring. One could escape 99% of the tourists by walking about 500 meters.
Not, mind you, that anything in Cozumel could be considered untouristy.
1 liter is the standard duty free size. You can't usually find it on US shelves, but it's available in all duty free shops world-wide, or as many as I've visited. Yep, sounds like a shipping error!
My fairly extensive experience with US liquor stores is that standard sizes are 750ml and 1.5l... along with a number of miscellaneous psuedo-imperial/english sizes I won't go into
I retain the right, however, to pour any bad American megabrew over the head of the next person who maintains that 12 fl. oz. is a pint!
There are, in fact, people out there who are not trying for Art Wolfe or Galen Rowell (sp?) on every photo. We want a decent representation of what we saw, and we want to see it right now, without pulling out the slide projector and dimming the room, or printing a 16x20. These are people who buy disposable cameras and print their film at Long's Drugs.
I used to shoot exclusively slide film. My slides of Laos, New Zealand and Europe are moldering in a box somewhere until I get the time and equipment to scan them. I haven't looked at them since I got back and sorted them, laboriously, with a slide projector, over about a month.
My digital pictures of Antarctica, the Californian Sierra Nevada, and New Zealand (round two) are in my hard drive. I look at them almost every day; friends and family see the web page whenever they want. Given my computer screen is 1.3 megapixel, my 5 megapixel camera was overkill. Yeah, the Antarctic ice isn't as white as I remembered it, but the penguins are still cute and the marine life still pretty (took a Canon digital housing... it flooded... [mod:irrelevvant]). And I challenge ANY slide projector to provide the necessary lumens to accurately render any image of an ice sheet on a sunny day with black penguins in the foreground. Even my eyes really couldn't handle that much light without serious squinting and GOOD shades.
Digital is a medium, just like slides; it has it's strengths and weaknesses, just like slides. If people want to take memories rather than art, they still would be better off not cutting off Millie's legs or shooting the family picture into a setting sun.
I worked a college summer job with a helicopter fire-fighting group in WA state; we had a single UH-1B with a pilot, a support-truck driver and me, nominally supervisor, but basically gofer.
Helicopters serve a variety of uses. One of our main jobs was elevator service. Some areas we worked in had fires extending up 2-3000 feet of steep hillside without trails in thick brush. We also hauled our share of heat-strokes, turned ankles, and other medical types.
However, the comment about helicopter water-carrying capacity is fairly accurate. In general, helicopters have much faster turn-around time and much greater accuracy for cooling hotspots, but are useless for a big running fire. Then again, almost NOTHING we can do actually stops a running fire. A change of weather, running out of fuel, and winter are the best bets.
We carried 12'x12'x4' collapsible tanks with a trash pump. The helicopter could get to a fire well ahead of trucks, I'd chainsaw a clearing next to a stream, set up the tank, and we'd be dipping water inside half an hour while the trucks were still grinding up logging roads to get to the fire. Our waterholes were any stream or lake in the area. In some cases, I'd have the deck chair out next to a stream watching the helicopter drop 250 gallons on leading edge hotspots every two minutes, just long enough to dip, lift 500', drop and dive back down.
As a side note, it gives you a good jolt to drive a truck loaded with 750 gallons of jet fuel down a road lined by burning trees. It's not actually all that flammable, fortunately. The 100 gallon side-mounted gas tanks were probably a bigger risk.
Which is only one of the ways you can screw yourself up with this... I better make sure it ain't 4/1... nope, ok. Wow, this is really bad!!!
As a diver, this seems an oddly horrible idea. You need some sort of rate-controller on the scuba tank, as the purpose of a regulator is to provide air on demand, and there would be no inhalation pressure to draw from the tank. I KNOW I suck more air than most divers (my tank empties faster), so what happens if the rate controller is set wrong... I slowly asphyxiate. Oh yeah, and if you dive too fast, your air volume decreases.
Then there's the depth control, I don't see gauges handy anywhere... Hmm, ok, some vague and badly spelled reference to a safety buoy, that makes more sense.
So basically, you drive this at 2.5 knots on some sort of safety tether that keeps you from doing anything itneresting... No thanks, I'd rather snorkel. I suspect I can beat 2.5 knots snorkelling anyhow.
As a postdoc on a trail of post-docs, I think it's safe to say that almost any professor or scientist seen in the national media will be faced with such accusations from his academic peers.
Not to say the detractors are right or wrong, but the problem, IMHO, really comes from a basic process:
the media is rarely willing or able to portray scientific problems in their true complexity, leading to:
any scientist who does speak to the media is often misquoted or portrayed as a hero, in order to "simplify" or "clarify", thus:
the popular scientist quickly earns equal marks of disdain ("the damned fool said WHAT?!") and envy ("yeah, I coulda done that.").
Unfortunately, "research merit" is decided when Joe Sixpack watches CBS and tells his congressman that he thinks that there scientist is cool. Your "research merit" is driven at least as much by Congress as by your personal belief in the quality of the work.
Try growisofs and dvd+rw tools. Works like a charm with an HP dvd200i. Dunno about other writers though, and it's really just a somewhat kludgy command line front-end to mkisofs.
Cron jobs, wget, mplayer and streamripper pointed at your streaming radio station.
I grab copies of my favorite radio shows, or just grab a few hours of music off any one station. Streamripper's ability to separate title tracks falls apart slightly at the beginning of the song, but it'll numerically order them.
Thus, any show, just about any format, can be sucked off a stream and stored for your listening convenience. And I'll stuff them onto a flash or hard disk player and haul them home. I'd guess someone else can figure out how to timeshift an mp3, I'm sure it's in here somewhere.
First let me say, Kudos to all thos with mass-storage support. It's about phreaking time! Otherwise:
1) I'm still partial to these from Iriver (note firmware upgrade to mass-storage device). With either one:
I have my files, radio and music when I travel.
I can schlep new MP3's from the home server.
I can pull some tricks with a loopback device and filesystem in a file to get ext3 support.
2) Have a 10GB Archos; I use about 1/10th of its space on average. Streamripping NPR and Radio Paradise, and the occasional CD from a fairly hefty collection of MP3's. Otherwise it's a brick. Sure, you can get bigger... hey, if I carry around my desktop and a UPS I'll have ~300GB, dual monitors and DVD playback ability. I win.
3) CD, yes, neat, want one; but not too carry around. It's too damned big. The biggest iRivers are close to CD in MB and you're not schlepping media left and right.
1) The words you were looking for are "sentence" and "conjunctions".
2) The ellipsis is unnecessary.
3) The second sentence is, in fact, a disaster from beginning to end.
"Try using a Beowulf-style cluster for a CFD problem, and watch as all computation grinds to a halt as your processors and interconnects devote all their capacity to inter-node coherency and synchronization."
B...S...; we use a small Beowulf (16 dual 1 GHz PIII boards with a fast ethernet backplane from PSSC) for oceanic numerical modeling and the problem scaled almost perfectly with number of processors.
Our models are 3-dimensional, but sudivision and message passing takes place only in the horizontal two-D direction. And message passing only needs to account for the boundary nodes.
Ease of use is a bit of a larger issue, however. For convenience sake I usually end up running at home on the dual Athlon and then doing big runs and batch jobs on the Beowulf.
Why Apple is not ready for Prime time
on
The Law and P2P
·
· Score: 1
Apple's a marginal step on a long road to decent service. This is just a conscience-pleasing sop for the moneyed nerd, not a true solution to the problem of massive overpricing of music.
Only useful for those who own an Apple, and eventually Window$, and have an iPod and iTunes. BLATANT integration.
If they'd just release MP3's, this problem would have been solved up front. Note that this is not a deal-breaker: download song, burn CD, rip CD... done.
$0.99 per song is too much. CD's cost ~$15 these days, and contain ~15 songs. The cost of purchase, download, transfer and burn time, plus media easily makes up the difference in price. Add depreciation in hardware (that "cheap" Apple hardware) necessary to join this service. Suddenly a dollar per song ain't cheap.
Get with it. Try $0.50 per song (effectively half-price and close to used CD store price) in decent rate mp3 format. Anyone that wants high fidelity buys the CD, the rest of us lowlife P2P scum actually feel like paying for what we can get for free.
And, in final analysis, the cost to the industry of running this service is minimal beyond storage and bandwidth. Certainly less than burning and distributing CD's.
redhat:~>gtk-gnutella &
Re:Dragged kicking and screaming...
on
The Law and P2P
·
· Score: 1
Yes, and why not grab those diary entries whil we're in there, and sell the information gathered to the RIAA, MPAA, Direct Marketing Associations and GlobalMarketing.org while we're at it.
Nothing against pay download, mind you. I just want it to be easy, cheap and Linux compatible! And I want fries with that.
Signal strength is a function of the SQUARE of distance. A cell phone 100 meters away on a runway is 1/10000 as strong as a cell phone sitting one meter above the control circuits of the airplane. A plane at 1000 meters (~3000') would experience the same effect from ONE cell phone in the cabin as ONE MILLION people on the ground. So yes, a plane flying low over a city might experience problems.
I believe two of the early Blackhawk helicopters were believed to have been brought down by the proximity of communications towers or high voltage lines (no, not contact therewith!).
Hmmm... two business model questions:
If a movie is in demand, why do they preferentially give it to people who will take the longest to return it?
And, since frequent renters presumably have a full queue, they save no money on mailing costs; I know I'll get SOMETHING, just maybe not what's first on my list.
It is not clear to me this is a well thought out policy. It's the anti-frequent-flyer program; if you never fly our airline, we'll give you a free flight and an upgrade!
Lufthansa and Quantas owe me big!
Slashdot Mirror
Presumably, Alvin will be used for a few more years, as eliminating the research platform for most deep sea oceanography is going to leave a gaping hole. At some point the tender ship, the Atlantis (III :-) ), will need to be pulled out of service to refit for a new sub, or a new tender ship built from scratch.
What I wonder is, does WHOI get the new one?
BTW, for anyone who hasn't seen it, this guy knows more than the rest of us put together.
I believe I was told that McMurdo, at ~77S, could hit many of the equatorial and inclined orbit satellites, but South Pole Station had to wait for something to venture farther south of the equator to get a good shot. On the other hand, with no trees and GPS satellites all converging overhead on polar orbits, we had awesome GPS reception, routinely 9-10 satellites in range.
Finally, yes, I read /. there and through a 50km wireless link from a field camp at the base of the Dry Valleys. I'd bet someone has read it from the camp near the top of Mt. Erebus.
In Cozumel, I was charged ~$6 hour on the beachfront street where all the fat American cruise ship passengers got drunk, and $1.50 an hour 6 blocks away where the wealthier locals shopped. The gradient was truly awe inspiring. One could escape 99% of the tourists by walking about 500 meters.
Not, mind you, that anything in Cozumel could be considered untouristy.
My fairly extensive experience with US liquor stores is that standard sizes are 750ml and 1.5l... along with a number of miscellaneous psuedo-imperial/english sizes I won't go into
I retain the right, however, to pour any bad American megabrew over the head of the next person who maintains that 12 fl. oz. is a pint!
There are, in fact, people out there who are not trying for Art Wolfe or Galen Rowell (sp?) on every photo. We want a decent representation of what we saw, and we want to see it right now, without pulling out the slide projector and dimming the room, or printing a 16x20. These are people who buy disposable cameras and print their film at Long's Drugs.
I used to shoot exclusively slide film. My slides of Laos, New Zealand and Europe are moldering in a box somewhere until I get the time and equipment to scan them. I haven't looked at them since I got back and sorted them, laboriously, with a slide projector, over about a month.
My digital pictures of Antarctica, the Californian Sierra Nevada, and New Zealand (round two) are in my hard drive. I look at them almost every day; friends and family see the web page whenever they want. Given my computer screen is 1.3 megapixel, my 5 megapixel camera was overkill. Yeah, the Antarctic ice isn't as white as I remembered it, but the penguins are still cute and the marine life still pretty (took a Canon digital housing... it flooded... [mod:irrelevvant]). And I challenge ANY slide projector to provide the necessary lumens to accurately render any image of an ice sheet on a sunny day with black penguins in the foreground. Even my eyes really couldn't handle that much light without serious squinting and GOOD shades.
Digital is a medium, just like slides; it has it's strengths and weaknesses, just like slides. If people want to take memories rather than art, they still would be better off not cutting off Millie's legs or shooting the family picture into a setting sun.
Helicopters serve a variety of uses. One of our main jobs was elevator service. Some areas we worked in had fires extending up 2-3000 feet of steep hillside without trails in thick brush. We also hauled our share of heat-strokes, turned ankles, and other medical types.
However, the comment about helicopter water-carrying capacity is fairly accurate. In general, helicopters have much faster turn-around time and much greater accuracy for cooling hotspots, but are useless for a big running fire. Then again, almost NOTHING we can do actually stops a running fire. A change of weather, running out of fuel, and winter are the best bets.
We carried 12'x12'x4' collapsible tanks with a trash pump. The helicopter could get to a fire well ahead of trucks, I'd chainsaw a clearing next to a stream, set up the tank, and we'd be dipping water inside half an hour while the trucks were still grinding up logging roads to get to the fire. Our waterholes were any stream or lake in the area. In some cases, I'd have the deck chair out next to a stream watching the helicopter drop 250 gallons on leading edge hotspots every two minutes, just long enough to dip, lift 500', drop and dive back down.
As a side note, it gives you a good jolt to drive a truck loaded with 750 gallons of jet fuel down a road lined by burning trees. It's not actually all that flammable, fortunately. The 100 gallon side-mounted gas tanks were probably a bigger risk.
As a diver, this seems an oddly horrible idea. You need some sort of rate-controller on the scuba tank, as the purpose of a regulator is to provide air on demand, and there would be no inhalation pressure to draw from the tank. I KNOW I suck more air than most divers (my tank empties faster), so what happens if the rate controller is set wrong... I slowly asphyxiate. Oh yeah, and if you dive too fast, your air volume decreases.
Then there's the depth control, I don't see gauges handy anywhere... Hmm, ok, some vague and badly spelled reference to a safety buoy, that makes more sense.
So basically, you drive this at 2.5 knots on some sort of safety tether that keeps you from doing anything itneresting... No thanks, I'd rather snorkel. I suspect I can beat 2.5 knots snorkelling anyhow.
Not to say the detractors are right or wrong, but the problem, IMHO, really comes from a basic process:
- the media is rarely willing or able to portray scientific problems in their true complexity, leading to:
- any scientist who does speak to the media is often misquoted or portrayed as a hero, in order to "simplify" or "clarify", thus:
- the popular scientist quickly earns equal marks of disdain ("the damned fool said WHAT?!") and envy ("yeah, I coulda done that.").
Unfortunately, "research merit" is decided when Joe Sixpack watches CBS and tells his congressman that he thinks that there scientist is cool. Your "research merit" is driven at least as much by Congress as by your personal belief in the quality of the work.Not GUI, though.
I grab copies of my favorite radio shows, or just grab a few hours of music off any one station. Streamripper's ability to separate title tracks falls apart slightly at the beginning of the song, but it'll numerically order them.
Thus, any show, just about any format, can be sucked off a stream and stored for your listening convenience. And I'll stuff them onto a flash or hard disk player and haul them home. I'd guess someone else can figure out how to timeshift an mp3, I'm sure it's in here somewhere.
1) I'm still partial to these from Iriver (note firmware upgrade to mass-storage device). With either one:
- I have my files, radio and music when I travel.
- I can schlep new MP3's from the home server.
- I can pull some tricks with a loopback device and filesystem in a file to get ext3 support.
2) Have a 10GB Archos; I use about 1/10th of its space on average. Streamripping NPR and Radio Paradise, and the occasional CD from a fairly hefty collection of MP3's. Otherwise it's a brick. Sure, you can get bigger... hey, if I carry around my desktop and a UPS I'll have ~300GB, dual monitors and DVD playback ability. I win.3) CD, yes, neat, want one; but not too carry around. It's too damned big. The biggest iRivers are close to CD in MB and you're not schlepping media left and right.
2) The ellipsis is unnecessary.
3) The second sentence is, in fact, a disaster from beginning to end.
Physician, heal thyself.
B...S...; we use a small Beowulf (16 dual 1 GHz PIII boards with a fast ethernet backplane from PSSC) for oceanic numerical modeling and the problem scaled almost perfectly with number of processors.
Our models are 3-dimensional, but sudivision and message passing takes place only in the horizontal two-D direction. And message passing only needs to account for the boundary nodes.
Ease of use is a bit of a larger issue, however. For convenience sake I usually end up running at home on the dual Athlon and then doing big runs and batch jobs on the Beowulf.
- Only useful for those who own an Apple, and eventually Window$, and have an iPod and iTunes. BLATANT integration.
- If they'd just release MP3's, this problem would have been solved up front. Note that this is not a deal-breaker: download song, burn CD, rip CD... done.
- $0.99 per song is too much. CD's cost ~$15 these days, and contain ~15 songs. The cost of purchase, download, transfer and burn time, plus media easily makes up the difference in price. Add depreciation in hardware (that "cheap" Apple hardware) necessary to join this service. Suddenly a dollar per song ain't cheap.
Get with it. Try $0.50 per song (effectively half-price and close to used CD store price) in decent rate mp3 format. Anyone that wants high fidelity buys the CD, the rest of us lowlife P2P scum actually feel like paying for what we can get for free.And, in final analysis, the cost to the industry of running this service is minimal beyond storage and bandwidth. Certainly less than burning and distributing CD's.
Yes, and why not grab those diary entries whil we're in there, and sell the information gathered to the RIAA, MPAA, Direct Marketing Associations and GlobalMarketing.org while we're at it. Nothing against pay download, mind you. I just want it to be easy, cheap and Linux compatible! And I want fries with that.
I've been signed up for about 5 years and have never received ANYTHING from the NY Times. Some companies are somewhat reputable.
I believe two of the early Blackhawk helicopters were believed to have been brought down by the proximity of communications towers or high voltage lines (no, not contact therewith!).
Another article on the same subject at the New York Times [Registration required].
Hmmm... two business model questions: If a movie is in demand, why do they preferentially give it to people who will take the longest to return it? And, since frequent renters presumably have a full queue, they save no money on mailing costs; I know I'll get SOMETHING, just maybe not what's first on my list. It is not clear to me this is a well thought out policy. It's the anti-frequent-flyer program; if you never fly our airline, we'll give you a free flight and an upgrade! Lufthansa and Quantas owe me big!
Yet another NY times article about the endless battle against Spam.