I'm English (which technically makes me European, to the chagrin of many of my countrymen).
One of my housemates (who is Northern Irish) is a fervent believer in a literal seven days creation. I didn't discover this until I'd shared a house with him for a while - it came up in conversation with another housemate.
Now, I'm a Christian. I believe in a more metaphorical interpretation of Genesis. But no one laughed at him. I respect his strength of belief, even though I personally don't believe that's how it happened.
I realise your comment was rather off-the-cuff, but thought it was worth pointing out that it isn't just the US where people have these 'preposterous' beliefs.:-)
Radio won't die. We need that for when we're driving to work at stupid-o-clock in the morning. I think the slightly-cliquey-yet-gently-familiar breakfast show is firmly ingrained into our western way of life now.
I certainly don't know what would happen if I tried to drive into work without Radio Two - I think it's a toss up between crashing and arriving completely insane.
Well, where I come from, we don't use no spatulas to toss pancakes... (Although some more cautious people do slip them out of the pan onto a plate, then drop them back in upside down.) English pancakes are so wide and thin that a spatula's likely to just tear them. Instead you have to use the showing-off-method.
First you make a circular movement with the pan to ensure that the pancake hasn't stuck and overcome static friction.
Then you tilt the end of the pan down slightly and make a short, sharp inward movement, to get the pancake sliding outwards.
Then you sharply flick the pan up, so that the pancake goes between one and two feet in the air (more if you're feeling cocky) and also spins enough that it lands in the pan the other way up.
I'll be very impressed if they invent a machine which can repeatably toss pancakes. There are an awful lot of variables, which he seems to ignore. But then he is a physicist, not an engineer.;-)
Lt Col Virgil Grissom USAF, Lt Col Edward White USAF and Lt Cdr Roger Chaffee USN. All died, as a previous poster stated, in the Apollo 1 fire in 1967. Apollo 1
On the friendly fire issue - no, not yet. The Canadian casualties (Canada's first combat losses since Korea) were in Afghanistan. Friendly Fire in the Afgan Campaign
In Iraq the US has only yet managed to kill American, French, British and Turkish personnel.
Operation Provide Comfort
There wouldn't be any effect on the Earth's orbit around the Sun.
Both Earth and Moon orbit around their barycentre (the shared centre of gravity of the pair), and it is the barycentre that follows a smooth eliptical orbit around the sun.
As an aside, since the Earth is so much more massive than the moon (by a factor of 80), the barycentre is actually pretty close to the centre of the Earth anyway, but Pluto and Charon are similar enough in mass that the barycentre exists in space between them and they both orbit around it.
By moving mass from the Moon to the Earth, the total mass of the Earth-Moon system remains constant. The path of the barycentre would then remain unchanged. What would alter (if enough mass were moved) is the position of the Earth and Moon relative to the barycentre, and thus the apparent orbit of the Moon around the Earth would change.
Back when I was at school, my family used to pass telemarketers off to my little brother (who was about ten). That was even more fun than just letting the phone hang.
He could keep them talking for ages, in the way that only an interested and precocious ten year old can, and I guess they'd been told never to be rude to clients, because they very rarely hung up on him. They'd keep on trying to work the conversation around to trying to sell him windows, and he'd keep on talking off on random tangents.
He had fun, and listening in on one side of the conversation was usually pretty entertaining.
It's quite refreshing to see somebody argue that line.
"We're going to kill you because you made us look like fools and we don't want anyone else to" is a reason I could believe a Major Western Power (TM) would adhere to. (I personally don't think it's a good enough reason, but at least it's honest.)
What I find rather difficult to swallow is the rhetoric I just heard Bush spouting on the radio about how we're going to fight a war for the sake of peace.
Yes, it's very expensive to loft stuff into earth orbit, and even more expensive to get it to cislunar space. But unless we can find our raw materials on the moon, we're still going to have to lift the same mass out of earth's gravity. In fact, we'll have to lift more, to allow for manufacturing waste, mistakes, spares and so on.
Plus we'll have to loft the manufacturing equipment itself, which is likely to be very heavy (even more so once you include the power supply, comms gear for remote control, material handling gear, etc). Even if you can mine all your raw materials right there on the moon (so add mining gear, smelting and refining apparatus and so on), you're going to have to launch thousands of probes before you start to make a weight saving.
So all in all, it seems best to do the work on earth, where we can take our time making sure that we loft the absolute minimum weight we can get away with.
Of course, once we have a manned station on Titan...:-)
I bought course textbooks in my first year. Then I noticed that my college had a library.
For some reason, only arts students ever seemed to use the college library - all the scientists would use the main university one. Which meant there was nearly always a free copy of every engineering textbook.
I shudder when I think of how much money that realisation must have saved me.
I'm not an electronics engineer, so perhaps my understanding is flawed here, but:
Isn't the problem here just that the signal is very weak?
Radio telescopes like the ones DSN use use a very large reflector dish to catch more of the radiated energy. Distributed (or synthetic) arrays, like the VLA, or military JSTARS radar can increase the angular resolution of their gathered data by using a longer baseline, but simply increasing the baseline without increasing antenna area won't help you pick up a weak signal.
If I have missed something obvious, have pity upon a poor spanner-wielder.
Most of the electronics, anyway. The scientific payloads were variously turned off one by one to save power, but the SNAPs are still generating, and if they could get even a partial DSN lock, the navigation system and high-gain transceiver must be working.
Umm...call me a pedant (and an off-topic pedant at that!) but I think you'll find that Boromir was the brother of Faramir. They were both sons of Denethor II, who was the ruling Steward of Gondor at the start of the LotR story.
(This refers to the previous poster's sig, in case you have sigs turned off and think I'm just gibbering.)
I find reviews of new-and-shiny hardware more and more depressing these days, as they only serve to remind me how far behind the curve my PC is falling.
It seems such a short time ago that TNT2 was a chipset to be proud of... [sigh]
Slashdot Mirror
I'm English (which technically makes me European, to the chagrin of many of my countrymen).
:-)
One of my housemates (who is Northern Irish) is a fervent believer in a literal seven days creation. I didn't discover this until I'd shared a house with him for a while - it came up in conversation with another housemate.
Now, I'm a Christian. I believe in a more metaphorical interpretation of Genesis. But no one laughed at him. I respect his strength of belief, even though I personally don't believe that's how it happened.
I realise your comment was rather off-the-cuff, but thought it was worth pointing out that it isn't just the US where people have these 'preposterous' beliefs.
Radio won't die. We need that for when we're driving to work at stupid-o-clock in the morning. I think the slightly-cliquey-yet-gently-familiar breakfast show is firmly ingrained into our western way of life now.
I certainly don't know what would happen if I tried to drive into work without Radio Two - I think it's a toss up between crashing and arriving completely insane.
Well, where I come from, we don't use no spatulas to toss pancakes... (Although some more cautious people do slip them out of the pan onto a plate, then drop them back in upside down.) English pancakes are so wide and thin that a spatula's likely to just tear them. Instead you have to use the showing-off-method.
;-)
First you make a circular movement with the pan to ensure that the pancake hasn't stuck and overcome static friction.
Then you tilt the end of the pan down slightly and make a short, sharp inward movement, to get the pancake sliding outwards.
Then you sharply flick the pan up, so that the pancake goes between one and two feet in the air (more if you're feeling cocky) and also spins enough that it lands in the pan the other way up.
I'll be very impressed if they invent a machine which can repeatably toss pancakes. There are an awful lot of variables, which he seems to ignore. But then he is a physicist, not an engineer.
Lt Col Virgil Grissom USAF, Lt Col Edward White USAF and Lt Cdr Roger Chaffee USN. All died, as a previous poster stated, in the Apollo 1 fire in 1967. Apollo 1
On the friendly fire issue - no, not yet. The Canadian casualties (Canada's first combat losses since Korea) were in Afghanistan. Friendly Fire in the Afgan Campaign
In Iraq the US has only yet managed to kill American, French, British and Turkish personnel. Operation Provide Comfort
There wouldn't be any effect on the Earth's orbit around the Sun.
Both Earth and Moon orbit around their barycentre (the shared centre of gravity of the pair), and it is the barycentre that follows a smooth eliptical orbit around the sun.
As an aside, since the Earth is so much more massive than the moon (by a factor of 80), the barycentre is actually pretty close to the centre of the Earth anyway, but Pluto and Charon are similar enough in mass that the barycentre exists in space between them and they both orbit around it.
By moving mass from the Moon to the Earth, the total mass of the Earth-Moon system remains constant. The path of the barycentre would then remain unchanged. What would alter (if enough mass were moved) is the position of the Earth and Moon relative to the barycentre, and thus the apparent orbit of the Moon around the Earth would change.
Back when I was at school, my family used to pass telemarketers off to my little brother (who was about ten). That was even more fun than just letting the phone hang.
He could keep them talking for ages, in the way that only an interested and precocious ten year old can, and I guess they'd been told never to be rude to clients, because they very rarely hung up on him. They'd keep on trying to work the conversation around to trying to sell him windows, and he'd keep on talking off on random tangents.
He had fun, and listening in on one side of the conversation was usually pretty entertaining.
It's quite refreshing to see somebody argue that line.
"We're going to kill you because you made us look like fools and we don't want anyone else to" is a reason I could believe a Major Western Power (TM) would adhere to. (I personally don't think it's a good enough reason, but at least it's honest.)
What I find rather difficult to swallow is the rhetoric I just heard Bush spouting on the radio about how we're going to fight a war for the sake of peace.
Thankyou, sir.
[Incidentally, what's a pinhead country?]
Assuming that wasn't a troll:
:-)
Yes, it's very expensive to loft stuff into earth orbit, and even more expensive to get it to cislunar space. But unless we can find our raw materials on the moon, we're still going to have to lift the same mass out of earth's gravity. In fact, we'll have to lift more, to allow for manufacturing waste, mistakes, spares and so on.
Plus we'll have to loft the manufacturing equipment itself, which is likely to be very heavy (even more so once you include the power supply, comms gear for remote control, material handling gear, etc). Even if you can mine all your raw materials right there on the moon (so add mining gear, smelting and refining apparatus and so on), you're going to have to launch thousands of probes before you start to make a weight saving.
So all in all, it seems best to do the work on earth, where we can take our time making sure that we loft the absolute minimum weight we can get away with.
Of course, once we have a manned station on Titan...
First reference that sprang to hand
Unless you're a British general in the first world war, in which case a lot of people get hurt by your optimism.
Do you mean the war of 1812?
Your weekly beer bill would be the same as your weekly laundry bill?
Now, that's a college with a cheap bar!
I bought course textbooks in my first year. Then I noticed that my college had a library.
For some reason, only arts students ever seemed to use the college library - all the scientists would use the main university one. Which meant there was nearly always a free copy of every engineering textbook.
I shudder when I think of how much money that realisation must have saved me.
I'm not an electronics engineer, so perhaps my understanding is flawed here, but:
Isn't the problem here just that the signal is very weak?
Radio telescopes like the ones DSN use use a very large reflector dish to catch more of the radiated energy. Distributed (or synthetic) arrays, like the VLA, or military JSTARS radar can increase the angular resolution of their gathered data by using a longer baseline, but simply increasing the baseline without increasing antenna area won't help you pick up a weak signal.
If I have missed something obvious, have pity upon a poor spanner-wielder.
Most of the electronics, anyway. The scientific payloads were variously turned off one by one to save power, but the SNAPs are still generating, and if they could get even a partial DSN lock, the navigation system and high-gain transceiver must be working.
If we're forming a Disaster Area cover band, I volunteer to play the Bass Detonator. That always struck me as a fun instrument to learn.
Agreed, it wasn't simpler than a regular heatsink and fan arrangement.
I suspect he meant 'simpler than a forced convection cooler' though.
(This refers to the previous poster's sig, in case you have sigs turned off and think I'm just gibbering.)
It seems such a short time ago that TNT2 was a chipset to be proud of... [sigh]