That's brilliant. "I know virtually nothing, but at least he's not a Republican, so yay!"
For what it's worth, he's a Kansas Democrat. Most of them are probably more conservative than the Republicans of California and New England, especially given the district he represented. He was elected in the 4th Congressional District, which contains Wichita (a conservative industrial town) and lots of rural farmland, and very few liberal bastions like college towns.
...can be found at the USDA website. It's a little dated, but it has an interesting excerpt:
Under Glickman's leadership, USDA has restructured and modernized its enormous, decentralized field office structure, helping cut administrative and overhead costs by about
$4 billion. He also has taken a strong, personal interest in civil rights. The Department has recently reviewed its civil rights practices for the first time and has dramatically improved its commitment to fairness and equality, in both treatment of its employees and execution of its programs. At Glickman's direction, the Department settled one of the largest civil rights class action suits filed against the U.S. Government.
Unfortunately, I didn't get interested in local politics until nearly the end of his term in office, so I can't say too much about his political leanings...
It's a bit harder to accelerate to 17000 MPH than to 3000 MPH (the peak velocity of Spaceship One, according to CNN). You also have to liberally coat the thing with heat insulation, though I could probably be convinced that they're solving that problem with new composite materials.
Of course, it'd be nice if someone actually demonstrated that these composites existed. All I ask is for one chemist who works in that general field to give a rough estimate of the percentage weight savings we're likely to see with new materials over, say, the Space Shuttle's insulation system.
Oh, and the reason I invoked decade is because the parent post specifically said "in ten years", not from any particular knowledge or assumed knowledge on my part. I'm just trying to get across to people, with limited success, that orbital spaceflight is hard and all the suborbital teams don't appear to have even started dealing with the issues that make it hard.
RE: Competition. I wasn't trying to invoke the whole government-agencies-don't-compete argument. What I was saying is that nobody, at all, has been working on suborbital manned flight. As such, the parameter space of solutions had plenty of room for Burt Rutan to stroll in and grab the first bright idea that caught his fancy. Good luck doing that with orbital flight.
RE: Cheap vs cheaper. I won't disagree that private enterprise will probably do the job more efficiently. In fact, I never even tried to say that. What I did say is that it's going to take either a lot longer than a decade or a lot more than than the hundreds of millions of dollars a lot of people are saying.
And just to clarify, the argument hinges on two points:
1) Other than space elevators (which have their own issues), I haven't heard any new ideas on how to even put objects into orbit without expensive conventional launch systems, much less bring them back safely. The suborbital solutions are not easily scaleable to meet the problem because there are constraints you simply cannot bypass:
-You have to achieve a perpendicular velocity of ~17000 MPH, requiring rapid acceleration and lots of fuel/reaction mass.
-You have to decelerate at the end in order to come back. If you let the atmosphere do most of the work, you have to carry a lot of heat shielding. If you do it in space and then reenter atmosphere at a leisurely few thousand MPH, you have to carry a lot more reaction mass.
2) A lot of smart people have been working on the problems in #1 for a while now, and they don't have a solution yet. Thus, it's unrealistic to expect someone from private enterprise to stroll in with a magic solution.
At this point, I think it's pretty safe to assume that anybody who reads Slashdot knows at least the basic history of the Apollo program. As such, there's really no reason for anyone to continually add footnotes about it, and so it's equally safe to assume anyone who harps on the lack of said footnotes is only doing so to try to score cheap debate points.
Also, I disagree with the assumption that future orbital flights will be substantially cheaper just because launches with Spaceship One were cheaper. No major space program has ever had a reason to compete in this niche (manned reuseable suborbital vehicles), so the field was still wide open for someone to come in with a good idea. By contrast, there have been a lot of people exploring options for cheap reuseable orbital flight with no results, so someone coming into the field from private industry will need either an equal investment of sweat equity or an extremely unconventional bright idea that all the experts would have missed.
That's funny, I seem to recall Apollo costing a bit more than the millions of dollars that the original poster implied we could achieve. I suppose you just happen to have a spare 10 billion in VC that someone can invest in disposable launchers and disposable capsules?
(And yes, I realize you're just creatively ignoring the context of my post so you can make a smartass comment. If that's the best way you can find to fish for funny mod points, perhaps you should just stick with your natural strength: "Overrated".)
Get into orbit, that is. If you crunch the numbers, you find that you need approximately 30 times as much kinetic energy to achieve orbit as you just need to go up 100 km. This requires a far more powerful launcher than for suborbital flights.
By the time you factor in extended life support and the heat shielding needed to survive reentry, orbital flight becomes a much thornier problem that almost certainly won't be solved in a decade.
The astronomy preprint server, Astro-ph, demonstrates both the best and worst attributes of free distribution. Since it's free, good authors can post everything they want (papers, conference proceedings, the random excellent thought that doesn't justify a letter or paper). However, you also get a lot of crackpots posting their papers on how there's actually a neutron star at the center of the Sun or the universe is 114 billion years old and contracting. For the non-experts in a specific subfield, journals are a good tool for separating the experts from the crackpots.
Example: Last year, someone published a paper on the "Big Rip" scenario, speculating that if the cosmological dark energy has such and such a form, then the acceleration will continue and eventually rip apart every bound system, even atoms. Sounds crackpot, right? However, if it appears in a peer-reviewed journal, you can be sure that at least someone with the proper credentials agrees with him.
The challenge is too hard to expect success in the near future. If they keep the same race format, these robots have to average 30 mph through undeveloped desert terrain in order to finish within the time limit. If the desert is anything like the ones I've been in, I'm not sure that I could do it without running into a mountain.
From what I know of the race course, these vehicles have to average 30 mph going cross-country through the desert. If it's anything like the terrain around the Tucson area, I'm not sure that I could average that without piling straight into a saguaro.
The change of potential energy in going up 100 km (the X-Prize limit) is going to be approximately m*g*h = m*(980 cm/s^2)*(1E7 cm) ~ [m * 1E10] ergs.
The amount of kinetic energy needed to kick into orbit once you're there is m*G*M_E/R_E = m*(6.67E-8)*(6E27 grams)/(6.5E8 cm) = [m * 6E11] ergs.
Thus, the ratio of energies is approximately 1:60. Since you'll be doing a lot of that extra accelerating for orbital trajectory in atmosphere, it'll probably be an undetermined amount more to account for air friction.
Interestingly enough, if the spaceship completely stops relative to the Earth at 100 km, then by the time it's dropped back down to 20 (neglecting air friction in between), it'll only have a velocity of 1.3E5 cm/s ~ 3000 mph. The air friction is going to be a lot less than for orbital craft that enter atmosphere at something like 17,000 mph.
Barring math errors, of course. It's amazing how easy it is to lose decimal places when you didn't sleep the night before...
"When they told us that, several of the gamers said, 'Well, you're doomed then. Without some degree of accountability, you're going to have problems.'"
That's not the only issue. Most readable MMOG-related websites maintain a contingent of flame-happy antibodies to kill any infectious stupidity, and those that don't slide rapidly into sycophancy. I really can't see your average busybody soccer mom taking well to being told to die in a car fire, especially not under the auspices of the federal government.
Trust me, I'm normally one of the most vocal opponents of protectionism. However, beyond a point, you simply have to drop ideology and adopt a more pragmatic position. The loss of so many jobs overseas without a new industry to replace them (and right now there really isn't one) will seriously weaken our country.
And regarding the analogy - a better one would be to consider import of raw materials. The government has a long history of imposing tariffs on foreign sources of raw materials when they threaten the health of our domestic industries. Well, right now companies are "importing" the tech support services of foreign employees and are undercutting the domestic supply, and I'm willing to suspend my anti-protectionism leanings and support some manpower tariffs in the name of stabilizing our economy until there's another industry to transition all the extra workers into.
*shrug* As I said, I don't like it when the government interferes in the economy. I just don't see a better option in the near future.
"People don't understand what a great opportunity offshoring is for US companies. Apart from huge savings, it allows US companies to concentrate on their core competencies and the people (in the US) can move on to higher paying, more creative, more value generating jobs."
...
You see, that doesn't quite work when it's the high-paying jobs going overseas. The only jobs that can't are those that require physical presence, and I can only see so many ways to creatively remove a clog from a toilet.
The point would be to fuse He3, not He4. The big bottleneck in hydrogen fusion via the PP chain is in p+p -> D. We can bypass that by just fusing He3+p -> He4, which is the last step in the primary PP chain.
Personally, I'm very leery of the prospect. It strikes me as an incredibly bad idea to tie our energy production industry to something that can only be mined off-planet, especially since we can support hydrogen-based fusion (using tritium and deuterium) using domestic resources.
Would He3 fusion be technically easier to implement? Yes. However, my opinion is that the tradeoff isn't worth it.
Speaking as an experimental scientist, all this is just so much intellectual self-pleasure. Call me old fashioned, but I still like to shave with Occam's Razor on occasion. Postulating that our existence is a simulation inside of another reality strikes me as being a lot more complex than just saying we're in reality. It may be true. However, it'll take a mighty good payoff to make me put any money on it.
Show me some proof that this is a simulation, then we can talk. Until then, I really wish these people would do something useful, like creating more porn websites.
This'll sound cheesy, but the new DS9 books...
on
A Good Summer Read?
·
· Score: 1
...are actually very well-written (with a couple of exceptions). The plotlines are on par with episodes from the sixth and seventh seasons, and I mostly like the new characters they brought in. In rough order of occurance, they are:
The Lives of Dax
Millenium (Three books)
Avatar (Two books)
Section 31: Abyss
Gateways #4: Demons of Air and Darkness
Gateways #7: Horn and Ivory
Mission: Gamma (Four books)
Rising Son
The Left Hand of Destiny (Two books)
Unity
Deep reading it isn't, but it's a pleasant diversion from the heavier stuff ("The Life and Death of Planet Earth", "Nietzsche's Mirror", and the hit new thriller "IAU Colloquium 176: The Impact of Large-Scale Surveys on Pulsating Star Research").
...always get their panties in a twist over anything prefixed with "Nuclear"? It's not like any other major source of energy is particularly healthy.
If anyone can find a copy of it online, there's an excellent article from the Dec 8, 1978 issue of Science that provides some perspective. Someone cranked the numbers for the concentration of uranium in coal and America's yearly consumption, and (if I remember it correctly) they found that the trace levels of uranium were actually high enough that we'd have gotten more energy from using it in a fission reactor than from burning the coal. That means that it'd be far more than the amount of uranium consumed in reactors each year, and it's all just going straight into the atmosphere.
We keep the article posted in our undergraduate physics lab, just in case people start complaining about the weak little sources we use for radioactivity-based experiments.
...to see the complaint about BG: Dark Alliance. I only played the PC versions of the Baldur's Gate series, and I thought that most of the female characters were pretty balanced. Branwen, Jaheira, Nalia, and Dynaheir were all excellent examples of "strong" women.
Of course, looking back over the NPC list, it appears an unusually high number of female characters in BG1 were thieves. Maybe the author had something with that stereotype after all...
Slashdot Mirror
For what it's worth, he's a Kansas Democrat. Most of them are probably more conservative than the Republicans of California and New England, especially given the district he represented. He was elected in the 4th Congressional District, which contains Wichita (a conservative industrial town) and lots of rural farmland, and very few liberal bastions like college towns.
Under Glickman's leadership, USDA has restructured and modernized its enormous, decentralized field office structure, helping cut administrative and overhead costs by about $4 billion. He also has taken a strong, personal interest in civil rights. The Department has recently reviewed its civil rights practices for the first time and has dramatically improved its commitment to fairness and equality, in both treatment of its employees and execution of its programs. At Glickman's direction, the Department settled one of the largest civil rights class action suits filed against the U.S. Government.
Unfortunately, I didn't get interested in local politics until nearly the end of his term in office, so I can't say too much about his political leanings...
Of course, it'd be nice if someone actually demonstrated that these composites existed. All I ask is for one chemist who works in that general field to give a rough estimate of the percentage weight savings we're likely to see with new materials over, say, the Space Shuttle's insulation system.
Oh, and the reason I invoked decade is because the parent post specifically said "in ten years", not from any particular knowledge or assumed knowledge on my part. I'm just trying to get across to people, with limited success, that orbital spaceflight is hard and all the suborbital teams don't appear to have even started dealing with the issues that make it hard.
RE: Competition. I wasn't trying to invoke the whole government-agencies-don't-compete argument. What I was saying is that nobody, at all, has been working on suborbital manned flight. As such, the parameter space of solutions had plenty of room for Burt Rutan to stroll in and grab the first bright idea that caught his fancy. Good luck doing that with orbital flight.
RE: Cheap vs cheaper. I won't disagree that private enterprise will probably do the job more efficiently. In fact, I never even tried to say that. What I did say is that it's going to take either a lot longer than a decade or a lot more than than the hundreds of millions of dollars a lot of people are saying.
And just to clarify, the argument hinges on two points:
1) Other than space elevators (which have their own issues), I haven't heard any new ideas on how to even put objects into orbit without expensive conventional launch systems, much less bring them back safely. The suborbital solutions are not easily scaleable to meet the problem because there are constraints you simply cannot bypass:
-You have to achieve a perpendicular velocity of ~17000 MPH, requiring rapid acceleration and lots of fuel/reaction mass.
-You have to decelerate at the end in order to come back. If you let the atmosphere do most of the work, you have to carry a lot of heat shielding. If you do it in space and then reenter atmosphere at a leisurely few thousand MPH, you have to carry a lot more reaction mass.
2) A lot of smart people have been working on the problems in #1 for a while now, and they don't have a solution yet. Thus, it's unrealistic to expect someone from private enterprise to stroll in with a magic solution.
At this point, I think it's pretty safe to assume that anybody who reads Slashdot knows at least the basic history of the Apollo program. As such, there's really no reason for anyone to continually add footnotes about it, and so it's equally safe to assume anyone who harps on the lack of said footnotes is only doing so to try to score cheap debate points.
Also, I disagree with the assumption that future orbital flights will be substantially cheaper just because launches with Spaceship One were cheaper. No major space program has ever had a reason to compete in this niche (manned reuseable suborbital vehicles), so the field was still wide open for someone to come in with a good idea. By contrast, there have been a lot of people exploring options for cheap reuseable orbital flight with no results, so someone coming into the field from private industry will need either an equal investment of sweat equity or an extremely unconventional bright idea that all the experts would have missed.
(And yes, I realize you're just creatively ignoring the context of my post so you can make a smartass comment. If that's the best way you can find to fish for funny mod points, perhaps you should just stick with your natural strength: "Overrated".)
By the time you factor in extended life support and the heat shielding needed to survive reentry, orbital flight becomes a much thornier problem that almost certainly won't be solved in a decade.
Example: Last year, someone published a paper on the "Big Rip" scenario, speculating that if the cosmological dark energy has such and such a form, then the acceleration will continue and eventually rip apart every bound system, even atoms. Sounds crackpot, right? However, if it appears in a peer-reviewed journal, you can be sure that at least someone with the proper credentials agrees with him.
The challenge is too hard to expect success in the near future. If they keep the same race format, these robots have to average 30 mph through undeveloped desert terrain in order to finish within the time limit. If the desert is anything like the ones I've been in, I'm not sure that I could do it without running into a mountain.
That's a pity. I wanted to add a "First Post" scrolling LED message...
From what I know of the race course, these vehicles have to average 30 mph going cross-country through the desert. If it's anything like the terrain around the Tucson area, I'm not sure that I could average that without piling straight into a saguaro.
And there we go, so the real factor is approximately 1:30. Thus, 1:25 is a lot more consistent with an Intro Physics reality than 1:12.
Heh. Virial theorem? I wasn't going to do anything requiring so much thought.
The change of potential energy in going up 100 km (the X-Prize limit) is going to be approximately m*g*h = m*(980 cm/s^2)*(1E7 cm) ~ [m * 1E10] ergs.
The amount of kinetic energy needed to kick into orbit once you're there is m*G*M_E/R_E = m*(6.67E-8)*(6E27 grams)/(6.5E8 cm) = [m * 6E11] ergs.
Thus, the ratio of energies is approximately 1:60. Since you'll be doing a lot of that extra accelerating for orbital trajectory in atmosphere, it'll probably be an undetermined amount more to account for air friction.
Interestingly enough, if the spaceship completely stops relative to the Earth at 100 km, then by the time it's dropped back down to 20 (neglecting air friction in between), it'll only have a velocity of 1.3E5 cm/s ~ 3000 mph. The air friction is going to be a lot less than for orbital craft that enter atmosphere at something like 17,000 mph.
Barring math errors, of course. It's amazing how easy it is to lose decimal places when you didn't sleep the night before...
"When they told us that, several of the gamers said, 'Well, you're doomed then. Without some degree of accountability, you're going to have problems.'"
That's not the only issue. Most readable MMOG-related websites maintain a contingent of flame-happy antibodies to kill any infectious stupidity, and those that don't slide rapidly into sycophancy. I really can't see your average busybody soccer mom taking well to being told to die in a car fire, especially not under the auspices of the federal government.
Trust me, I'm normally one of the most vocal opponents of protectionism. However, beyond a point, you simply have to drop ideology and adopt a more pragmatic position. The loss of so many jobs overseas without a new industry to replace them (and right now there really isn't one) will seriously weaken our country.
And regarding the analogy - a better one would be to consider import of raw materials. The government has a long history of imposing tariffs on foreign sources of raw materials when they threaten the health of our domestic industries. Well, right now companies are "importing" the tech support services of foreign employees and are undercutting the domestic supply, and I'm willing to suspend my anti-protectionism leanings and support some manpower tariffs in the name of stabilizing our economy until there's another industry to transition all the extra workers into.
*shrug* As I said, I don't like it when the government interferes in the economy. I just don't see a better option in the near future.
"People don't understand what a great opportunity offshoring is for US companies. Apart from huge savings, it allows US companies to concentrate on their core competencies and the people (in the US) can move on to higher paying, more creative, more value generating jobs."
...
You see, that doesn't quite work when it's the high-paying jobs going overseas. The only jobs that can't are those that require physical presence, and I can only see so many ways to creatively remove a clog from a toilet.
The point would be to fuse He3, not He4. The big bottleneck in hydrogen fusion via the PP chain is in p+p -> D. We can bypass that by just fusing He3+p -> He4, which is the last step in the primary PP chain.
Personally, I'm very leery of the prospect. It strikes me as an incredibly bad idea to tie our energy production industry to something that can only be mined off-planet, especially since we can support hydrogen-based fusion (using tritium and deuterium) using domestic resources.
Would He3 fusion be technically easier to implement? Yes. However, my opinion is that the tradeoff isn't worth it.
Speaking as an experimental scientist, all this is just so much intellectual self-pleasure. Call me old fashioned, but I still like to shave with Occam's Razor on occasion. Postulating that our existence is a simulation inside of another reality strikes me as being a lot more complex than just saying we're in reality. It may be true. However, it'll take a mighty good payoff to make me put any money on it.
Show me some proof that this is a simulation, then we can talk. Until then, I really wish these people would do something useful, like creating more porn websites.
The Lives of Dax
Millenium (Three books)
Avatar (Two books)
Section 31: Abyss
Gateways #4: Demons of Air and Darkness
Gateways #7: Horn and Ivory
Mission: Gamma (Four books)
Rising Son
The Left Hand of Destiny (Two books)
Unity
Deep reading it isn't, but it's a pleasant diversion from the heavier stuff ("The Life and Death of Planet Earth", "Nietzsche's Mirror", and the hit new thriller "IAU Colloquium 176: The Impact of Large-Scale Surveys on Pulsating Star Research").
If anyone can find a copy of it online, there's an excellent article from the Dec 8, 1978 issue of Science that provides some perspective. Someone cranked the numbers for the concentration of uranium in coal and America's yearly consumption, and (if I remember it correctly) they found that the trace levels of uranium were actually high enough that we'd have gotten more energy from using it in a fission reactor than from burning the coal. That means that it'd be far more than the amount of uranium consumed in reactors each year, and it's all just going straight into the atmosphere.
We keep the article posted in our undergraduate physics lab, just in case people start complaining about the weak little sources we use for radioactivity-based experiments.
Of course, looking back over the NPC list, it appears an unusually high number of female characters in BG1 were thieves. Maybe the author had something with that stereotype after all...