"Why don't they make more movies with space realism?"
"Damn, that *space realism movie* had some minor/moderate inaccuracies... I was really disappointed [that they didn't spend 500 million on production cost to really film he whole movie in microgravity]."
For space sake... there seems to be no way to please certain people.
If you are a NASA, space-science, space-exploration supporter: There is a time to be scientifically brutal and honest, and a time to sell cars (to borrow the phrase from Steven Spielberg, among others). When something like Gravity gets made, spend 95+% of time lauding the good aspects of the film... less time preening your own scientific ego about how much you know about space.
What is the basis for asserting a 600 day travel time... because it seems way too early to possibly assert a travel time without a launch window, a spacecraft/payload design specification, and a suitable launch vehicle.
The current, relatively small, Juno mission to Jupiter is going to take 5 years to get to Jupiter. http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/juno/spacecraft/index.html#.UjqKkj_lcyY
Galileo took about as long...
How do they plan to get orders of magnitude more payload to Jupiter 3X faster than Juno?
In addition to the significant radiation problem (pointed out already).
The spacecraft changes from something the size of a small car for a robotic mission to something much more massive to support human life for the 6+ year trip to Europa.
We simply don't have the "technology <--> budget" combo to do a manned mission to Europa within the first half of this century. We need major game-changing tech breakthroughs to carry out a human mission even to Mars, let alone the Jovian planets.
A a robotic landing mission to Europa is technically feasible right now given a sufficient budget. We don't have all the technology properly glued together: but we can navigate a 'mother ship' spacecraft to Jupiter, can maneuver the craft to make numerous precision passes of Europa, we have autonomous vehicle control theory and codes which can improved upon and readied for a Europa landing, and we can design and fabricate the spacecraft. There are some serious challenges, of course, and success is not guaranteed, but it is doable.
We keep on talking this way about accepting risk, not accepting risk... when it is really more about spending money intelligently. NASA/RFSA/ESA/ et al. accept 'intelligent' risk on big missions all the time (mars landings are crazy hard).
NASA's job is to DO it, not 'try' it. (Yoda: "there is no try...") Sure, government can give some company money to try to do something, and when that company screws up they can pay their lobbying department overtime to smooth things over with Congress.
(Think about it... you don't pay 50 million to build damns which *might* hold water. -OR- Car manufacturers have been designing and making cars, continuously innovating and integrating new technology, for over 70 years... they still don't always integrate new tech seamlessly and frequently have to issue recalls.)
NASA generally can't issue recalls once the mission is off the launch pad... if you launch a flawed entry-decent-landing vehicle towards Mars it just crashes when it gets there (and that has happened). The best route for fundamentally new missions is to go for maximum mission assurance... it costs more but you almost always get the accomplishment you are after. It would be one thing if, for instance, NASA's track record was not so good... but it is pretty damn good.
This policy is also followed by Russia, ESA, JAXA. And this policy and systematic, organizational means by which this is achieve has had extremely positive cascading effects in numerous aspects which we often take for granted (commerical aerospace, medical device, etc.).
Sir/madam... you are entirely misjudging the landscape of Aerospace technology and Space Exploration.
The fact is that SpaceX is indeed quite awesome (as are numerous other aerospace companies). SpaceX in particular as of late. they are learning and succeeding at an incredible rate and are taking some new ideas and putting them into action. But they have not yet done anything from a mission prospective that wasn't already done over 40 years ago (launch into LEO, dock with something, return stuff to planet surface.... Russian Aerospace and NASA wrote the book on how to do that 40 years ago). SpaceX doesn't have a legacy of any successful missions that have pushed the boundaries of space exploration.
NASA, RFSA, ESA, and other government funded space exploration centers have an incredible track record of pushing the limits in space exploration: these organizations have executed amazing, high-risk, missions with a remarkable track record of success. Shuttle program, ISS, Hubble, Messenger, Cassini, MRO, Curiosity, Planck, etc.... the list goes on and on.
People talk about JWST in negative terms now... but I believe the folks on the JWST project are going to get it 'perfect' and JWST is going to be a crowning achievement for mankind.
To the OP.... Math is sort of the language of science and provided much of the logical foundation of computer science, programming languages, compilers, etc. Advanced maths can be challenging to learn especially when it is not taught well (which is increasingly becoming the case these days).
Two comments:
With regards to differential equations, don't stress out in short term... you may not run into too many Diff Eq or integral in your CS degree undergrad.
In the long term, having a solid understanding of advanced mathematics and some physics (optics, E&M, mechanics) will open doors in your career and will enable you to teach yourself new technology. So do yourself a favor, summer is coming up... keep working at the DiffEq's, Fourier series, etc. a little bit here and there over the summer. Maybe even consider getting a minor in Physics?
Yeah, quickly read up on JPSS... that is not a freaking simple system that any ole contractor could simply pull out of their rear end given some government cash:
A bigger problem with our budget on these things is our incessant need to put state-of-the-art, never-flown, technology on the JPSS. Also, the requirement to sub contract just systematically kills NASA's ability to stay on budget... the overhead costs and near infinite opportunity for miscommunication also causes some serious problems. But that is cost of enriching private pockets with taxpayer money...
BUT, future going forward... launching "build-to-print" satellites of the same design would be cheap.
That 1.5 billion includes quite a bit of development cost, no doubt... cost that would be carried by the taxpayers no matter what. The cost of the launch and operation is no where near 1.5B per satellite (and falling with SpaceX's continued progress).
The government simply needs efficient grouping of duties and expertise... giving NASA and NRO responsibility for all government satellite development and operation (unclassified / classified respectively) is the logical decision.
PlanetIQ cannot design a better planetary study / weather satellite than NASA... and NASA/NOAA would end up having to do so much hand-holding (at significant cost) to make sure PlanetIQ didn't totally blow it.
Some good options above... i have a few extra bookmarks!
Most of the big aerospace and automotive *big equipment* industries use either NX or CATIA. NX used to be called Unigraphics, among other things. Haven't used Catia but NX is fast and quite powerful. Creo, once Pro/E, is sorta in this ball park but I understand it is sorta buggy and lacks some features... but that is hearsay. The key thing that differentiates these packages is high level CAM, PDM and simulation-based design integration. NX and CATIA are very expensive but the money is easily made back in time saved in a high-through put design to manufacture environment (GM, Boeing, SpaceX...)... for instance, Siemens makes NX and also makes awesome CNC equipment and CNC control system hardware (computers, PLC's, servo controllers, etc.) SO... your CAD--> CNC setup becomes almost effortless and you can get great 'manufacturability' feedback information in real time while you are designing parts and assembllies. If money is no object, NX is awesome... but certainly gross overkill for the individual.
Solidworks (from the same company as CATIA), SolidEdge (from same place as NX), SpaceClaim, and Inventor are all high quality solidmodelers with some good advanced features. I have used Solidworks for a couple of projects and like it well enough... really, they all get the job done and have very similiar feature sets. Solidedge used to blow the others out of the water but that is less the case these days, or possibly not at all. For the individual or small shop, Something like Solidworks or Inventor is all you need.
Right now, if you are a student, I believe you can download/register/install an academic version of Inventor for free (along with pretty much everything Autodesk makes...which is a lot). At least that used to the be the case. SolidEdge has a free trial/academic version that used to last one year.
CAM software is also real expensive but a lot of the 3D printer and hobbyist CNC's have integrate or cheap CAM packages that work well enough.
If you are not a student, the only option under 2000 USD is Alibre which I hear is not bad... or go with something funky or opensource.
Miguel is not wrong... the lack of sufficient standards amongst distro's was and still is a major stumbling block in individual user adoption and still gives linux that 'slightly unkept feeling about it'. After a while even really intelligent people can get tired of tinkering with unix/linux and just want something to work out of the box. OSX just works and has most of what linux can offer to the individual user, and often times with a muc,. much better user/programmer experience.
For Big Data, the 'new' big iron (read clouding computing)... linux is great. If you are a company the monetized internet traffic, performs big computations, etc., and can fund people to make linux do your laundry, then linux is 99% upside... pretty much no downside because you'd already have to code most of your own shit no matter what platform you selected.
It really isn't quite the same case with linux as it was unix in the 80's, but there are some similarities... particularly for the companies attempting top [obtaining] profit from linux. Back in the 80's, IBM, HP, Dec, SGI, etc. never agreed to standardize API's and figured they could carve up the market betweenst themselves... along comes DOS, windows, with it's cheaper price and working GUI, with half decent documented API's... and Unix went out to pasture. And then, as now, l/unix developers pretended like the lack of standardization was not a problem... well it was then, it is now. Difference is, linux is free so people are relatively happy to live with it. Far too simple a history, I know... and Linux does not have to be relevant to a majority user based (it is general open source and not for profit).
Note: I would term myself a linux and programming dabbler at best. I dabbled with Gentoo, linux from scratch as my more 'hard core' distro quite some time ago and then kinda dropped out of the user base... i dabble with a bit of C and python from time to time now. In the past 10+ years, User experience on linux has seen little improvement, in my opinion... linux is still just as cool and fun to tinker with as it ever was, though. So don't take this as bashing. Use of 'bash' intended... the world needs a lot more bash, or was it hash?
First things first... how does a singularity, i.e. a 0-D object, have 'spin'? Author please explain how you can attribute spin to a black hole. I think something got mixed up in the message of what the NuStar scientists actually figured out and what got reported here.
From simple classical arguments, it is not surprising that, from conservation of angular momentum, matter traveling into the black hole could reach 'observed' angular speeds up to the speed of light. Very cool that we have moreorless observed this angular velocity limit.
What i find most tragic about this news and the comments is how many people entirely misconstrue the supposed debate between faith/philosophy and science when, in fact, there is almost no common ground between the two... they deal with very different aspects of the universe and our experience of it in our brief lives.
A few postulates to consider (some humour intended herein):
1) Numerous books of the Bible are written poetically and as allegory... Genesis and Revelations are the two most obviously allegorical books of the bible and is not an accident the first and last books are allegorical in nature (it kinda sets the tone for the entire compiled scripture). Some how a lot of Christians 'bishops/pastors/etc." didn't get the memo at some point and started interpreting the whole bible literally. Comical to say the least
2) Many (most) Christians worldwide do not believe the world is only 6000-10000 years old... so don't lump them all into one group. AS it often happens in human existence, the dumbest people are often the loudest people. Throughout christian history, lots of leaders said lots of dumb things (that are not intrinsically support by the Bible by the way)... to go crazy and throw away an entire body of philosophy/faith because a few or even many people say some silly things is just not very scientific... yes, scientists, I'm holding the standard of being a good science and maintaining some objectivity even when it is something you really don't like. As a PhD scientist, I have heard a lot of scientist say dumb things at conferences, even read incredibly dumb things in peer-reviewed journals (which means the reviewers were dumb too). I have said some incredibly dumb things too! We seem to only remember the great scientists and forget that for every Einstein there were and still are hundreds of reasonably bright people saying and doing things that ranging anywhere from unimportant to just ole dumb. This is still the case today... less than one percent of the worlds population is responsible for over 98% of the world technological advancement. So lets not pretend like science has never made mistakes and is somehow pristine and perfect... it is not. Hundreds of years from now scientists are going to talk about how dumb we were to stick with quantum mechanics, the standard model, blah blah, for so damn long when there were (and have been for some time) some huge problems with the theories... and at the same time, we as a society really are not funding and encouraging enough totally revolutionary, outside the box, thinking.
3) The universe is here with lots of mass and energy (more than anyone can possibly conceptualize) and yet, from our meager scientific observations, mass can be neither created or destroyed... so we have some explaining to do. Right now, Science does not have all the answers In fact, there are a lot of fundamental "how and why" type of questions to which science doesn't have the foggiest notion of an answer and can't even conceive an experiment to develop an answer. So, being intellectually honest for a moment, one can hardly fault someone for looking to the existential for answers. i would in fact argue to 'believe' that science will one day answer all the burning questions of why and how the universe/existence came about requires a "leap of faith" (the very thing religion is ridiculed for). Seriously, despite incredible technological advancement in the past 2000 years, science is not any closer to figuring out why we are here in the first place and what this existence/universe is all about. But that is okay, it is NOT sciences' job to figure out why we are here or even necessarily why physical laws are the way they are.
4) Atheism is a philosophy/belief/faith and it is not the only philosophy/faith of "Science"... there is no systematic scientific proof in favor of any stance on the existence/non-existence of a supreme being or the supernatural. No logically perfect argument can be construed for or against... just drop it. Realize that reach of
Exactly... whenever we talk about the effects of any chemical on the human system, genetic diversity must be taken into account.
Chemicals in any substance absorbed into the body has an effect based upon the 'endocrinology' of the individual (whether it be consumed food, a chemical spilled on the skin, dope smoked, etc.). Allergies are a perfect example here, natural tolerance for alcohol... and so on.
I know people who have smoked pot for over 10 years and are rocket scientist smart & 100% able... I know of cases where patients *think* even just a few months of light pot smoking has caused sustained (possibly permanent) and significant loss of mental capability, particularly memory function.
The key thing here is that individuals are informed with some of the baseline science and the potential risks... help young people make informed decisions.
Ultimately, executives at companies like Microsoft keep their jobs by making the stock prices 'go up'.
Acknowledging that Google is an upcoming major competitor in the business software market does not do Microsoft any sort of good as far as stock price goes so what should we expect them to say? "Yeah... Google's constantly improving software suite and low prices are already a cause for concern at Microsoft and we foresee that our proverbial ass will be handed to us in this market segment in the years to come." Never going to hear that out of Redmond, ever.
If we stop and think about it, our present 'course' regarding human nutrition is incredibly stupid. On one side, here we believe evolution and natural selection, and the influence of genetic diversity and specificity of human health... and yet we just throw this all out the window when it comes to nutrition (and other aspects of human health).
The human physiology evolved, and the GI tract developed, to east certain foods (handle certain groups of fats, proteins, etc.) and use bacteria to help with digestion and aspects of protection from 'bad' bacteria. And now we are taking antibiotics orally, sterilizing so much of our food. When are modifying foods into 'food-like' chemicals and swallowing them regularly. I mean, I'm a PhD chemical engineer... if I just mixed up some vegetable oils, ran some reactions on those oils, poured them into a cup and said, "here, drink this..." Would you? Hell fucking no! I wouldn't drink it myself! Well, we are generally allowing large food conglomerates to do exactly this... we have no idea on the long term human health effects of consumption of modified oils and so many other processed and synthesized foods.
Every single food we eat has a pharmacological effect on our body and triggers hormone responses such as insulin release, etc. (don't believe me, just ask someone with a severe food allergy); we need our healthy GI track bacteria. What science has been done generally supports that GI track bacterial flora population 'health' is very,very important for overall health. "Good bacteria' break down simple sugars (so we absorb them all), fight 'bad' bacteria that can release toxins/enzymes into our GI track, blah blah blah... lot of reasons.
It is good that this gaining momentum because a lot of doctors don't know shit about this unless their medical school made them learn it and a lot of us regular people just don't have the inclination, time, or necessary background education to really study in this area. For now... I recommend everyone try to do some reading in the area of basic human biochemistry and the biochemistry/microbiology of the GI track and food digestion. Frankly I need to do more myself. I did a lot of reading a couple years ago when I got really sick, and had all kinds GI tract and allergic issues for a while... learned some of what I noted above and lot more. I'm pretty much all better now... but, honestly, my primary doctor didn't have clue what was wrong... figured out a lot of it on my own, did see a specialist who was 'mildly' helpful, and sort fixed myself.
oh yeah... Merry Christmas / Happy Holidays / Happy New Year everyone!
It is actually more than just a brand of Amphotericin-B. *Again, I'm not a medical doctor... just providing info & opinions* Standard Amphotericin-B is nick-named 'Ampho-terrible' because of its nasty side effects (high liver and kidney toxicity in acute doses); upon injection / IV adminstration, Ampho-B is filtered out of blood stream rather quickly and so the efficacy of the drug is lowered and it's adverse effects against filtering organs of the body increased.
In Ambisome, Ampho-B is encapsulated in a phospholipid bi-layer vesicle, effectively an engineered cholesterol nanoparticle, which gives the drug more of a time release behavior in the bloodstream and significantly reduced filtration rate [in liver and kidneys]... so long story short: the Ambisome formula works much better than Amphotericin-B straight and the severity of adverse effects is much, much lower. That much is clinically proven. There are other lipid encapsulated formulations of Amphotericin-B (Ambisome competitors)... don't know about those formulations, but they probably also work better than Ampho-B straight.
So... that explains a lot. My opinion of the FDA still stands (discussion for another time)... but I was trying to imagine how the FDA could screw up so royally. Well, they didn't... complete oversight on my part.
This then begs some additional questions: "How are compounding pharmacies regulated and why are they allowed to sell cross state without being inspected/regulated by the FDA?" I can't help but also ask, "why are non-FDA regulated facilities allowed to produce injectables?" They are numerous FDA regulated generic parenteral (injectables) manufacturing facilities all over the US and Canada that... this whole scenario just does not compute. Compounding chemists preping parenterals without complete sterility assurance (via rigorous validation and QC testing) is pretty much a disaster, like the very one we are discussing, waiting to happen; I think the doctors ought to know better, as well.
I used to work in the Pharma/biotech industry... among other things, I served on teams responsible for all facets of drug sterility (equipment cleaning and sterilization, cleanroom design/operation/cleaning, aseptic filling and personnel aseptic technique). My comments:
This is first foremost NECC's fault... prison time may be coming for some folks at NECC. There is the outside chance that this was just a horribly bad stroke of luck, but it is highly atypical to have fungus in your cleanroom one day out of blue and then it suddenly gets into your sterile filling operation; it has to get in through a vector which is way out of tolerance (contamination of sterile water-for-injection system, horribly failed equipment or vial sterilization processes, fungus in the air-handlers for the filling suite, leaks in the HEPA filters, etc. In a proper pharma manufacturing facility, there are almost ridiculous levels and layers of engineering and quality control testing protection to ensure that substandard product can never get on the door (expensive, to be sure... but absolutely worth it!). NECC manufacturing practices were likely horribly sub-par, cutting corners to save money, and if this was the case... some folks at NECC are in big, big trouble
BUT... one of the FDA's jobs is to make sure that drug manufacturing facilities are fully capable and have rigorous systems in place to effectively ensure that stuff like this doesn't happen (and it pretty much never should). My experience with FDA in my past Pharma career left me with zero trust of the FDA's ability to fulfill their duty to the public: they understaffed with qualified scientists to scrutinize clinical trial data and investigate and regulate manufacturing facilities.
Last, in the case of a severe fungal infection (you or someone you know), ask your doctor about Ambisome (a IV drug for treating severe fungal infections). I'm not a doctor, so that's all I'm going to say lest I give anyone false or misleading information. I happen to know about Ambisome because I used to work for the company that makes it; and I mention Ambisome because I don't think many doctors know about it... at least that used to be the case.
I think he miscasts the argument between science and religion. In my opinion, science and religion have little to say to another. The real realm for discussion is between religion and philosophy, which some may argue are one and the same. (As a brief disclaimer, I am a christian and also a PhD scientist).
As amazing as science is, as amazing as our discoveries have been (and will continue to be)... there are fundamental philosophical questions which science cannot answer for me today... and I argue science is not designed to answer. Example questions: "Why am I here? Is there a purpose to this arbitrary existence?" "Is this existence unique?" I could go on and on...
Science deals with mechanism... the physical description of our universe past, present, and future.
Science is not designed to answer the question, "why are we here?"... the notion that science could formulate an answer implies that a valid, testable hypothesis could be formed, the test(s) devised/executed and data recorded, and finally a report written stating the observations with proposed scientific model and conclusions. Some may argue that the questions is unimportant but therein we enter a philosophical debate and that is where the debate about religion ought to remain... in the realm of philosophy.
This is all being said.... religion deserves much of the criticism and scrutiny it has received. But we should be careful not to paint everyone with the same brush, so to speak.
AFAIK...sgi didn't say there was sysV code in XFS...they said some small code snippets were in their distro that bore similarity to sysV code. SCO warped that to mean XFS contains sysV code...but sysV code does have a journaling file system implementation and all the older BSD liscense unix code contains the same basic file system code as sysV. So SCO already has really thin case on that basis alone.
Then there is the issue of whether or not the snippets were basic structures that fall under the general mathematical/algorithmic method category (because those methods are not patentable or copyright-able in the first place).
Slashdot Mirror
"Why don't they make more movies with space realism?"
"Damn, that *space realism movie* had some minor/moderate inaccuracies... I was really disappointed [that they didn't spend 500 million on production cost to really film he whole movie in microgravity]."
For space sake... there seems to be no way to please certain people.
If you are a NASA, space-science, space-exploration supporter: There is a time to be scientifically brutal and honest, and a time to sell cars (to borrow the phrase from Steven Spielberg, among others). When something like Gravity gets made, spend 95+% of time lauding the good aspects of the film... less time preening your own scientific ego about how much you know about space.
If I understood that my management was clearly trying to squeeze 50 hours of work out me for 40 hours of pay.... then I'd find another job.
There are good companies/organizations out there that treat their employees right.
What is the basis for asserting a 600 day travel time... because it seems way too early to possibly assert a travel time without a launch window, a spacecraft/payload design specification, and a suitable launch vehicle.
The current, relatively small, Juno mission to Jupiter is going to take 5 years to get to Jupiter.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/juno/spacecraft/index.html#.UjqKkj_lcyY
Galileo took about as long...
How do they plan to get orders of magnitude more payload to Jupiter 3X faster than Juno?
In addition to the significant radiation problem (pointed out already).
The spacecraft changes from something the size of a small car for a robotic mission to something much more massive to support human life for the 6+ year trip to Europa.
We simply don't have the "technology <--> budget" combo to do a manned mission to Europa within the first half of this century. We need major game-changing tech breakthroughs to carry out a human mission even to Mars, let alone the Jovian planets.
A a robotic landing mission to Europa is technically feasible right now given a sufficient budget. We don't have all the technology properly glued together: but we can navigate a 'mother ship' spacecraft to Jupiter, can maneuver the craft to make numerous precision passes of Europa, we have autonomous vehicle control theory and codes which can improved upon and readied for a Europa landing, and we can design and fabricate the spacecraft. There are some serious challenges, of course, and success is not guaranteed, but it is doable.
We keep on talking this way about accepting risk, not accepting risk... when it is really more about spending money intelligently. NASA/RFSA/ESA/ et al. accept 'intelligent' risk on big missions all the time (mars landings are crazy hard).
NASA's job is to DO it, not 'try' it. (Yoda: "there is no try...") Sure, government can give some company money to try to do something, and when that company screws up they can pay their lobbying department overtime to smooth things over with Congress.
(Think about it... you don't pay 50 million to build damns which *might* hold water. -OR- Car manufacturers have been designing and making cars, continuously innovating and integrating new technology, for over 70 years... they still don't always integrate new tech seamlessly and frequently have to issue recalls.)
NASA generally can't issue recalls once the mission is off the launch pad... if you launch a flawed entry-decent-landing vehicle towards Mars it just crashes when it gets there (and that has happened). The best route for fundamentally new missions is to go for maximum mission assurance... it costs more but you almost always get the accomplishment you are after. It would be one thing if, for instance, NASA's track record was not so good... but it is pretty damn good.
This policy is also followed by Russia, ESA, JAXA. And this policy and systematic, organizational means by which this is achieve has had extremely positive cascading effects in numerous aspects which we often take for granted (commerical aerospace, medical device, etc.).
Yeah cause landing a 1 ton robot on Mars with a sky-crane shows NASA has absolutely zero balls
Sir/madam... you are entirely misjudging the landscape of Aerospace technology and Space Exploration.
The fact is that SpaceX is indeed quite awesome (as are numerous other aerospace companies). SpaceX in particular as of late. they are learning and succeeding at an incredible rate and are taking some new ideas and putting them into action. But they have not yet done anything from a mission prospective that wasn't already done over 40 years ago (launch into LEO, dock with something, return stuff to planet surface.... Russian Aerospace and NASA wrote the book on how to do that 40 years ago). SpaceX doesn't have a legacy of any successful missions that have pushed the boundaries of space exploration.
NASA, RFSA, ESA, and other government funded space exploration centers have an incredible track record of pushing the limits in space exploration: these organizations have executed amazing, high-risk, missions with a remarkable track record of success.
Shuttle program, ISS, Hubble, Messenger, Cassini, MRO, Curiosity, Planck, etc.... the list goes on and on.
People talk about JWST in negative terms now... but I believe the folks on the JWST project are going to get it 'perfect' and JWST is going to be a crowning achievement for mankind.
To the OP.... Math is sort of the language of science and provided much of the logical foundation of computer science, programming languages, compilers, etc.
Advanced maths can be challenging to learn especially when it is not taught well (which is increasingly becoming the case these days).
Two comments:
With regards to differential equations, don't stress out in short term... you may not run into too many Diff Eq or integral in your CS degree undergrad.
In the long term, having a solid understanding of advanced mathematics and some physics (optics, E&M, mechanics) will open doors in your career and will enable you to teach yourself new technology. So do yourself a favor, summer is coming up... keep working at the DiffEq's, Fourier series, etc. a little bit here and there over the summer. Maybe even consider getting a minor in Physics?
Best of luck
Yeah, quickly read up on JPSS... that is not a freaking simple system that any ole contractor could simply pull out of their rear end given some government cash:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Polar_Satellite_System_%28JPSS%29
A bigger problem with our budget on these things is our incessant need to put state-of-the-art, never-flown, technology on the JPSS. Also, the requirement to sub contract just systematically kills NASA's ability to stay on budget... the overhead costs and near infinite opportunity for miscommunication also causes some serious problems. But that is cost of enriching private pockets with taxpayer money...
BUT, future going forward... launching "build-to-print" satellites of the same design would be cheap.
The figure seems highly dubious to me...
That 1.5 billion includes quite a bit of development cost, no doubt... cost that would be carried by the taxpayers no matter what. The cost of the launch and operation is no where near 1.5B per satellite (and falling with SpaceX's continued progress).
The government simply needs efficient grouping of duties and expertise... giving NASA and NRO responsibility for all government satellite development and operation (unclassified / classified respectively) is the logical decision.
PlanetIQ cannot design a better planetary study / weather satellite than NASA... and NASA/NOAA would end up having to do so much hand-holding (at significant cost) to make sure PlanetIQ didn't totally blow it.
Some good options above... i have a few extra bookmarks!
Most of the big aerospace and automotive *big equipment* industries use either NX or CATIA. NX used to be called Unigraphics, among other things. Haven't used Catia but NX is fast and quite powerful. Creo, once Pro/E, is sorta in this ball park but I understand it is sorta buggy and lacks some features... but that is hearsay. The key thing that differentiates these packages is high level CAM, PDM and simulation-based design integration. NX and CATIA are very expensive but the money is easily made back in time saved in a high-through put design to manufacture environment (GM, Boeing, SpaceX...)... for instance, Siemens makes NX and also makes awesome CNC equipment and CNC control system hardware (computers, PLC's, servo controllers, etc.) SO... your CAD--> CNC setup becomes almost effortless and you can get great 'manufacturability' feedback information in real time while you are designing parts and assembllies. If money is no object, NX is awesome... but certainly gross overkill for the individual.
Solidworks (from the same company as CATIA), SolidEdge (from same place as NX), SpaceClaim, and Inventor are all high quality solidmodelers with some good advanced features. I have used Solidworks for a couple of projects and like it well enough... really, they all get the job done and have very similiar feature sets. Solidedge used to blow the others out of the water but that is less the case these days, or possibly not at all. For the individual or small shop, Something like Solidworks or Inventor is all you need.
Right now, if you are a student, I believe you can download/register/install an academic version of Inventor for free (along with pretty much everything Autodesk makes...which is a lot). At least that used to the be the case. SolidEdge has a free trial/academic version that used to last one year.
CAM software is also real expensive but a lot of the 3D printer and hobbyist CNC's have integrate or cheap CAM packages that work well enough.
If you are not a student, the only option under 2000 USD is Alibre which I hear is not bad... or go with something funky or opensource.
Miguel is not wrong... the lack of sufficient standards amongst distro's was and still is a major stumbling block in individual user adoption and still gives linux that 'slightly unkept feeling about it'. After a while even really intelligent people can get tired of tinkering with unix/linux and just want something to work out of the box. OSX just works and has most of what linux can offer to the individual user, and often times with a muc,. much better user/programmer experience.
For Big Data, the 'new' big iron (read clouding computing)... linux is great. If you are a company the monetized internet traffic, performs big computations, etc., and can fund people to make linux do your laundry, then linux is 99% upside... pretty much no downside because you'd already have to code most of your own shit no matter what platform you selected.
It really isn't quite the same case with linux as it was unix in the 80's, but there are some similarities... particularly for the companies attempting top [obtaining] profit from linux. Back in the 80's, IBM, HP, Dec, SGI, etc. never agreed to standardize API's and figured they could carve up the market betweenst themselves... along comes DOS, windows, with it's cheaper price and working GUI, with half decent documented API's... and Unix went out to pasture. And then, as now, l/unix developers pretended like the lack of standardization was not a problem... well it was then, it is now. Difference is, linux is free so people are relatively happy to live with it. Far too simple a history, I know... and Linux does not have to be relevant to a majority user based (it is general open source and not for profit).
Note: I would term myself a linux and programming dabbler at best. I dabbled with Gentoo, linux from scratch as my more 'hard core' distro quite some time ago and then kinda dropped out of the user base... i dabble with a bit of C and python from time to time now. In the past 10+ years, User experience on linux has seen little improvement, in my opinion... linux is still just as cool and fun to tinker with as it ever was, though. So don't take this as bashing. Use of 'bash' intended... the world needs a lot more bash, or was it hash?
First things first... how does a singularity, i.e. a 0-D object, have 'spin'? Author please explain how you can attribute spin to a black hole. I think something got mixed up in the message of what the NuStar scientists actually figured out and what got reported here.
From simple classical arguments, it is not surprising that, from conservation of angular momentum, matter traveling into the black hole could reach 'observed' angular speeds up to the speed of light. Very cool that we have moreorless observed this angular velocity limit.
What i find most tragic about this news and the comments is how many people entirely misconstrue the supposed debate between faith/philosophy and science when, in fact, there is almost no common ground between the two... they deal with very different aspects of the universe and our experience of it in our brief lives.
A few postulates to consider (some humour intended herein):
1) Numerous books of the Bible are written poetically and as allegory... Genesis and Revelations are the two most obviously allegorical books of the bible and is not an accident the first and last books are allegorical in nature (it kinda sets the tone for the entire compiled scripture). Some how a lot of Christians 'bishops/pastors/etc." didn't get the memo at some point and started interpreting the whole bible literally. Comical to say the least
2) Many (most) Christians worldwide do not believe the world is only 6000-10000 years old... so don't lump them all into one group. AS it often happens in human existence, the dumbest people are often the loudest people. Throughout christian history, lots of leaders said lots of dumb things (that are not intrinsically support by the Bible by the way)... to go crazy and throw away an entire body of philosophy/faith because a few or even many people say some silly things is just not very scientific... yes, scientists, I'm holding the standard of being a good science and maintaining some objectivity even when it is something you really don't like. As a PhD scientist, I have heard a lot of scientist say dumb things at conferences, even read incredibly dumb things in peer-reviewed journals (which means the reviewers were dumb too). I have said some incredibly dumb things too! We seem to only remember the great scientists and forget that for every Einstein there were and still are hundreds of reasonably bright people saying and doing things that ranging anywhere from unimportant to just ole dumb. This is still the case today... less than one percent of the worlds population is responsible for over 98% of the world technological advancement. So lets not pretend like science has never made mistakes and is somehow pristine and perfect... it is not. Hundreds of years from now scientists are going to talk about how dumb we were to stick with quantum mechanics, the standard model, blah blah, for so damn long when there were (and have been for some time) some huge problems with the theories... and at the same time, we as a society really are not funding and encouraging enough totally revolutionary, outside the box, thinking.
3) The universe is here with lots of mass and energy (more than anyone can possibly conceptualize) and yet, from our meager scientific observations, mass can be neither created or destroyed... so we have some explaining to do. Right now, Science does not have all the answers In fact, there are a lot of fundamental "how and why" type of questions to which science doesn't have the foggiest notion of an answer and can't even conceive an experiment to develop an answer. So, being intellectually honest for a moment, one can hardly fault someone for looking to the existential for answers. i would in fact argue to 'believe' that science will one day answer all the burning questions of why and how the universe/existence came about requires a "leap of faith" (the very thing religion is ridiculed for). Seriously, despite incredible technological advancement in the past 2000 years, science is not any closer to figuring out why we are here in the first place and what this existence/universe is all about. But that is okay, it is NOT sciences' job to figure out why we are here or even necessarily why physical laws are the way they are.
4) Atheism is a philosophy/belief/faith and it is not the only philosophy/faith of "Science"... there is no systematic scientific proof in favor of any stance on the existence/non-existence of a supreme being or the supernatural. No logically perfect argument can be construed for or against... just drop it. Realize that reach of
Exactly... whenever we talk about the effects of any chemical on the human system, genetic diversity must be taken into account. Chemicals in any substance absorbed into the body has an effect based upon the 'endocrinology' of the individual (whether it be consumed food, a chemical spilled on the skin, dope smoked, etc.). Allergies are a perfect example here, natural tolerance for alcohol... and so on. I know people who have smoked pot for over 10 years and are rocket scientist smart & 100% able... I know of cases where patients *think* even just a few months of light pot smoking has caused sustained (possibly permanent) and significant loss of mental capability, particularly memory function. The key thing here is that individuals are informed with some of the baseline science and the potential risks... help young people make informed decisions.
Ultimately, executives at companies like Microsoft keep their jobs by making the stock prices 'go up'. Acknowledging that Google is an upcoming major competitor in the business software market does not do Microsoft any sort of good as far as stock price goes so what should we expect them to say? "Yeah... Google's constantly improving software suite and low prices are already a cause for concern at Microsoft and we foresee that our proverbial ass will be handed to us in this market segment in the years to come." Never going to hear that out of Redmond, ever.
Someone had to spend time emailing, calling, and skyping to interview for job? I think I might cry...
If we stop and think about it, our present 'course' regarding human nutrition is incredibly stupid. On one side, here we believe evolution and natural selection, and the influence of genetic diversity and specificity of human health... and yet we just throw this all out the window when it comes to nutrition (and other aspects of human health). The human physiology evolved, and the GI tract developed, to east certain foods (handle certain groups of fats, proteins, etc.) and use bacteria to help with digestion and aspects of protection from 'bad' bacteria. And now we are taking antibiotics orally, sterilizing so much of our food. When are modifying foods into 'food-like' chemicals and swallowing them regularly. I mean, I'm a PhD chemical engineer... if I just mixed up some vegetable oils, ran some reactions on those oils, poured them into a cup and said, "here, drink this..." Would you? Hell fucking no! I wouldn't drink it myself! Well, we are generally allowing large food conglomerates to do exactly this... we have no idea on the long term human health effects of consumption of modified oils and so many other processed and synthesized foods. Every single food we eat has a pharmacological effect on our body and triggers hormone responses such as insulin release, etc. (don't believe me, just ask someone with a severe food allergy); we need our healthy GI track bacteria. What science has been done generally supports that GI track bacterial flora population 'health' is very ,very important for overall health. "Good bacteria' break down simple sugars (so we absorb them all), fight 'bad' bacteria that can release toxins/enzymes into our GI track, blah blah blah... lot of reasons.
It is good that this gaining momentum because a lot of doctors don't know shit about this unless their medical school made them learn it and a lot of us regular people just don't have the inclination, time, or necessary background education to really study in this area. For now... I recommend everyone try to do some reading in the area of basic human biochemistry and the biochemistry/microbiology of the GI track and food digestion. Frankly I need to do more myself. I did a lot of reading a couple years ago when I got really sick, and had all kinds GI tract and allergic issues for a while... learned some of what I noted above and lot more. I'm pretty much all better now... but, honestly, my primary doctor didn't have clue what was wrong... figured out a lot of it on my own, did see a specialist who was 'mildly' helpful, and sort fixed myself.
oh yeah... Merry Christmas / Happy Holidays / Happy New Year everyone!
It is actually more than just a brand of Amphotericin-B. *Again, I'm not a medical doctor... just providing info & opinions* Standard Amphotericin-B is nick-named 'Ampho-terrible' because of its nasty side effects (high liver and kidney toxicity in acute doses); upon injection / IV adminstration, Ampho-B is filtered out of blood stream rather quickly and so the efficacy of the drug is lowered and it's adverse effects against filtering organs of the body increased. In Ambisome, Ampho-B is encapsulated in a phospholipid bi-layer vesicle, effectively an engineered cholesterol nanoparticle, which gives the drug more of a time release behavior in the bloodstream and significantly reduced filtration rate [in liver and kidneys]... so long story short: the Ambisome formula works much better than Amphotericin-B straight and the severity of adverse effects is much, much lower. That much is clinically proven. There are other lipid encapsulated formulations of Amphotericin-B (Ambisome competitors)... don't know about those formulations, but they probably also work better than Ampho-B straight.
So... that explains a lot. My opinion of the FDA still stands (discussion for another time)... but I was trying to imagine how the FDA could screw up so royally. Well, they didn't... complete oversight on my part. This then begs some additional questions: "How are compounding pharmacies regulated and why are they allowed to sell cross state without being inspected/regulated by the FDA?" I can't help but also ask, "why are non-FDA regulated facilities allowed to produce injectables?" They are numerous FDA regulated generic parenteral (injectables) manufacturing facilities all over the US and Canada that... this whole scenario just does not compute. Compounding chemists preping parenterals without complete sterility assurance (via rigorous validation and QC testing) is pretty much a disaster, like the very one we are discussing, waiting to happen; I think the doctors ought to know better, as well.
I used to work in the Pharma/biotech industry... among other things, I served on teams responsible for all facets of drug sterility (equipment cleaning and sterilization, cleanroom design/operation/cleaning, aseptic filling and personnel aseptic technique). My comments: This is first foremost NECC's fault... prison time may be coming for some folks at NECC. There is the outside chance that this was just a horribly bad stroke of luck, but it is highly atypical to have fungus in your cleanroom one day out of blue and then it suddenly gets into your sterile filling operation; it has to get in through a vector which is way out of tolerance (contamination of sterile water-for-injection system, horribly failed equipment or vial sterilization processes, fungus in the air-handlers for the filling suite, leaks in the HEPA filters, etc. In a proper pharma manufacturing facility, there are almost ridiculous levels and layers of engineering and quality control testing protection to ensure that substandard product can never get on the door (expensive, to be sure... but absolutely worth it!). NECC manufacturing practices were likely horribly sub-par, cutting corners to save money, and if this was the case... some folks at NECC are in big, big trouble BUT... one of the FDA's jobs is to make sure that drug manufacturing facilities are fully capable and have rigorous systems in place to effectively ensure that stuff like this doesn't happen (and it pretty much never should). My experience with FDA in my past Pharma career left me with zero trust of the FDA's ability to fulfill their duty to the public: they understaffed with qualified scientists to scrutinize clinical trial data and investigate and regulate manufacturing facilities. Last, in the case of a severe fungal infection (you or someone you know), ask your doctor about Ambisome (a IV drug for treating severe fungal infections). I'm not a doctor, so that's all I'm going to say lest I give anyone false or misleading information. I happen to know about Ambisome because I used to work for the company that makes it; and I mention Ambisome because I don't think many doctors know about it... at least that used to be the case.
I think he miscasts the argument between science and religion. In my opinion, science and religion have little to say to another. The real realm for discussion is between religion and philosophy, which some may argue are one and the same. (As a brief disclaimer, I am a christian and also a PhD scientist). As amazing as science is, as amazing as our discoveries have been (and will continue to be)... there are fundamental philosophical questions which science cannot answer for me today... and I argue science is not designed to answer. Example questions: "Why am I here? Is there a purpose to this arbitrary existence?" "Is this existence unique?" I could go on and on... Science deals with mechanism... the physical description of our universe past, present, and future. Science is not designed to answer the question, "why are we here?"... the notion that science could formulate an answer implies that a valid, testable hypothesis could be formed, the test(s) devised/executed and data recorded, and finally a report written stating the observations with proposed scientific model and conclusions. Some may argue that the questions is unimportant but therein we enter a philosophical debate and that is where the debate about religion ought to remain... in the realm of philosophy. This is all being said.... religion deserves much of the criticism and scrutiny it has received. But we should be careful not to paint everyone with the same brush, so to speak.
AFAIK...sgi didn't say there was sysV code in XFS...they said some small code snippets were in their distro that bore similarity to sysV code. SCO warped that to mean XFS contains sysV code...but sysV code does have a journaling file system implementation and all the older BSD liscense unix code contains the same basic file system code as sysV. So SCO already has really thin case on that basis alone. Then there is the issue of whether or not the snippets were basic structures that fall under the general mathematical/algorithmic method category (because those methods are not patentable or copyright-able in the first place).