I think it is wrong to be putting the argument of Mars first vs. Moon first on the table, and something I think Robert Zubrin misses when he tries to push for such a program. It presumes a zero-sum game that we can only afford to do one or the other but not both.
I agree that heroes need to be around and that going some place new is indeed useful. NASA needs to adopt more clearly Gene Roddenberry's quote from Star Trek of "boldly going where nobody has gone before" and doing something unique and original. All this said, I can note several very good reasons for going back to the Moon which will be very useful in a whole bunch of ways.
First and foremost, the Moon is for use relatively close and will remain for several millions to billions of years quite close to us as well. It isn't really going anywhere in terms of moving away from the Earth (measured in inches per year?). Even with chemical rockets using Apollo type of rockets, we can get to the Moon in just a couple of days. That means if there is a disaster of some kind and logistical resupply or some other sort of thing happens, it is much easier to get to the Moon than it is to get to Mars or some other place in the Solar System.
Also, unlike Mars, much of the rest of the Solar System that needs to be explored is much more like the Moon than almost anything else we will encounter. Certainly technology used to extract resources on the surface of the Moon can be applied to mining asteroids and other locations around the Solar System, as will the spacecraft that can be used for landing on the surface of the Moon too. Mars is a huge rock stuck at the bottom of a deep gravity well... and that causes many of the difficulties that have been encountered in terms of trying to get there. The gravity well of the Moon isn't nearly so deep and there isn't a pesky atmosphere to mess with both landings and lift-off.
If the point of going somewhere is to perform a "flags and footprints" type mission, both going to the Moon and Mars are both equally bad. There is so much to do there that staying for a weekend camping trip is sort of pointless. The next time we as a species go to any other body in the solar system, it should be with the intent to settle, to make a permanent home there. Yeah, that may not be something that the initial missions may be able to accomplish, but that should be and must be a long-term goal.
For those that argue why would we go to the Moon or Mars when Antarctica is uninhabited... I'd say that those claiming Antarctica is uninhabited haven't been there or haven't heard about cities that are already on that continent... and to note the legal climate of Antarctica is hostile to doing anything like permanent settlements as well. The issues involved with going to any place in the solar system are mainly political and not technical right now. It is the resolve to be willing to do these challenging things of going into space and physically reaching out across the cosmos, or at least be willing to let those who may have these dreams to do that to at least try it out themselves.
You would learn more about Mars by putting a human on its surface for 5 hours than has been learned by all previous missions combined. Indeed, I would argue that by sending up Dr. Harrison Schmitt on Apollo 17, that more real science was performed on that mission and more valuable samples collected and analyzed than the rest of the NASA missions to space previously combined both robotic and manned. Our knowledge about the Moon certainly improved significantly as a result of the Apollo missions, and having people there to poke at it in a more direct fashion made a significant difference over what robotic probes could have done otherwise.
My argument about the robotic probes to Mars is that we are running out of the low hanging fruit that is easy to pick off with robots in terms of basic discoveries on Mars. Had manned spacecraft gone to Mars prior to the Mariner missions with the knowledge that we had back in the 1960's for what conditions were like on Mars, it would have been an utter disaster. Many of the planetary scientists were surprised at how many craters were on the surface of Mars when Mariner 4 made its initial photo survey of the planet, and other discoveries that have been made since certainly have been useful. Still, there reaches a point that there are diminishing returns and it will be not only useful but even required to have somebody with a brain on the surface there to make some of the real discoveries that have to happen. Somebody who has the time to actually ponder what is going on and being able to react more directly with the environment on Mars.
The current director of the Mars Rover program (Spirit and Opportunity) has been on record as saying he wishes that he had a couple of astronauts to help out with his program, and that there would be a few things he would have them do explicitly to help improve his project that he simply can't do right now because they aren't there. Robots have their place and certainly should be used... but to suggest that robots should be used exclusively is also just as silly.
As for useful artificial intelligence research with real applications, that day is already here. Expert systems, machine translation of speech, and predictive models using neural networks have all been applied successfully and are being used on a commercial basis. Indeed one of the leading applications of "artificial" neural networks is with predictive models used in financial markets. That is a little scary if you think about it, but it is a current application.
All this said, if you can find any software that is genuine "artificial intelligence" in terms of some computer that is self-aware and able to think even on the level better than an earthworm, I will personally eat the source code of the entire program printed onto A4 paper... double spaced at 14 point type on a single side of the page and with comments. We are so incredibly far from being able to understand what intelligence actually is that we really don't even know the right questions to ask in the first place. I really don't expect a major breakthrough any time in the 21st century or even later for that matter.
All this said, there have been some useful things that have come out of the investigation of the concepts of artificial intelligence, and it is those things which are useful. Just don't get caught up with the hype that real AI is just around the corner. I expect practical and cheap nuclear fusion reactors well before that happens, along with human settlement of other planets first.
Only because it was in the national interests of the USA to let the Soviet Union put people into orbit first. Yes, I'll admit there were technical issues too, but by letting the Soviet Union get into space first.... both with Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin... it established the principle that overflight of a country with orbital spacecraft did not require visas, passports, or even permission of the country you were orbiting over. Since Soviet equipment and cosmonauts passed over America without the permission of the U.S. government, the USA was free to do the same thing to the Soviet Union.
There was actually a satellite ready to put up into orbit prepared by none other than Werner Von Braun prior to Sputnik (he had previously put a V-2 into space while working for Hitler), but his project was put on hold... presumably for this reason although it was not officially given that excuse. It was an issue, however, discussed under the Eisenhower administration when spaceflight strategies were being developed for the first time.
It is hard to say how many "firsts" done by the Soviet space program were permitted to happen simply to establish precedence for international space law, but it seems likely that some of it was deliberate.
Natural disaster or man-made disaster? Because other than an asteroid hitting the planet, there isn't a natural disaster that would wipe out all life on this planet.
There certainly are man-made disasters that could wipe out human civilization or set us back a thousand years or so in terms of technological progress. It has happened in the past and undoubtedly it will happen in the future as well.
As for natural disasters.... a couple of super-volcanoes (aka like the Yellowstone caldera) erupting would certainly make life very uncomfortable for most of mankind. That is something that we know has happened in the past and certainly will happen in the not too distant future (from a geological perspective). Does that fit the criteria of at least one more natural disaster besides an asteroid hitting us?
And FYI, we are nowhere near the cability to colonize another planet. Not now, nor within 100 years.
Most of what we need to know about colonizing another planet is already well known, and what we don't know is something that we pretty much won't know until it is tried.
100 years is a pretty long period of time, and based on what I've seen and those who are involved, I would put a permanent human colony on Mars within the next 100 years. How close to that 100 year mark can be debated and it won't be easy, but there certainly are plenty of people willing to give it a try and are certainly working toward that goal.
But hey tell the poor shrimper in New Orleans we need to spend Billions on NASA so that someday we can land a man on mars meanwhile we can't do a damn thing to stop BP's Oil spill from killing his shrimping bed.
Yeah good priorities....
That may be the most intelligent thing from your post. I'm not convinced that the billions being spent on NASA is necessarily a good thing either, or the most productive use of that money, and certainly a government agency is perhaps the last place to spend money in an efficient manner.
If there was some reason to put together a crash program for a settlement that absolutely required having people on Mars in a fairly short period of time when money is no object.... making it a government program to make that happen might make some sense. I just don't see that kind of urgency.
On the other hand, if spaceflight costs come down in any significant manner (and I believe that they will), I think it will take an organized and deliberate effort to keep people from going to Mars by blatantly grounding all flights leaving the Earth and perhaps even shooting rockets out of the sky with military equipment. Low-earth orbit is already half-way for getting to Mars (in terms of energy needed to get there), and several private citizens have already done that on their own dime.
For myself, I'd rather see a robust enough economy going so that I can afford to go to Mars and that shrimper in the Gulf of Mexico can afford a lawyer to sue the pants off of BP or other oil extraction companies who mess up their fishing grounds. If folks are going to be headed to Mars, I would rather it not be on a government paycheck.
I wouldn't say that any kind of spaceflight to Mars is easy at all, and in fact the sizes of probes going to Mars has been steadily increasing to the point that sending a manned mission may not really be all that more of a stretch either.
Mars certainly has all of the raw elements for basic survival on its surface, including fairly substantial quantities of water, oxygen, CO2, and even Nitrogen. Basically, all of the raw materials needed to live are already there, and the main problem is trying to come up with a method of turning that into stuff needed for living. In essence, some sort of human settlement would have to happen including food production and some basic manufacturing capabilities. Once all that is built, sending additional people to Mars is by comparison relatively trivial.
Yes, this is a chicken-or-egg problem where neither the chicken nor the egg have been made yet and you can't decide which to do first.
I'll also point out that based upon current technology, we are very nearly at the extreme limit anyway for can be done via robotic missions on Mars. Yes, some additional areas of Mars can be explored and probed, but it will be diminishing returns compared to what a trained geologist and chemist could do if they were physically on the surface and had the ability to create new machines and equipment based on discoveries made while there.
My argument here is that the "awesome amount of data" that you think would be coming from Mars with an increased tempo for robotic exploration really wouldn't be more than perhaps an order of magnitude more than comes right now from Mars as it is... at least without having some people physically there to be involved with the exploration process.
That's funny, if we send humans to Mars that could be all the time they have to spend. Robots just need sunlight, we humans need much more logistical support. Robots also just need one way tickets.
One of the problems with getting to Mars is that any attempt to get there is also going to require an extended stay... of about a year or more. Indeed establishing a permanent base right at the beginning might not be a bad idea all things considered.
Try as you might, it is quite difficult to bring an entire mineral lab to the surface of Mars in one simple shot, and there are serious plans to try and at least get a "round trip" to happen even for robotic missions to Mars. The hope is that somehow a rock sample from Mars can be done with a complete lab here on the Earth with technicians that have to... *gasp*... actually touch the rock and manually manipulate the thing.
I'm not saying that robotic missions should be abandoned, and there certainly is a place for them, but to exclude manned exploration of space completely is also not going to happen either. We are very near the limit of what remote sensing can be done on Mars at this point, and there have even been discussions of perhaps setting up something on Phobos or Deimos to have astronauts "tele-operate" probes on the surface of Mars and some other interesting combinations of both human and robotic spaceflight. The theory is that the quarter second delay from Phobos to Mars is preferable in many situations than the sometimes several hour delay for communications between Mars and the Earth. Landing and take-off from Phobos is by comparison trivial even compared to the Earth's Moon... and we already know how to get that accomplished.
The Arizona law is not about border enforcement, but rather if the law enforcement agencies in Arizona have identified somebody as having violated the law, they need to act and have that law enforced even if it happens to be a federal law. Do you think that if a local police agency saw a money counterfeiting operation, that they should say "I sure hope you don't get caught by the feds", or that perhaps they ought to act and help enforce those anti-counterfeiting laws? It sort of is the job of a law enforcement agency to, I don't know, actually enforce laws they know are being violated?
It isn't like an Arizona police department can detain and imprison people for immigrations violations, but they can certainly inform the federal government that a law is being broken and hold them just like any citizen can do before the "proper authorities" arrive. The question then arises as to if it is proper to ignore that laws are being broken when a formal complaint about a law being broken is being made by a state agency to the federal government. Something really seems screwed up there if a federal immigration officer refuses to cooperate in that situation.
Some communities have gone to the complete opposite extreme on immigration laws to the point they are prohibiting their officers from even communicating any information about immigration status to the federal government at all. That to me is just as wrong and perhaps even worse.
Yeah, I know there is more to the Arizona law than simply this viewpoint, but the basic premise that a state officer asking to have federal laws actually enforced shouldn't be too over the top. As long as you accept this basic premise, the rest is debating about how active those state officers ought to be about doing that kind of enforcement. There certainly is a problem if the citizens of a state get so worked up that they get their state legislature to become more active in a law enforcement activity that ought to be a federal enforcement issue, and the blame falls on the federal government here instead of Arizona for screwing up so awfully in the lack of enforcement of existing laws.
The problem isn't the security of the communications medium, but rather the public access laws that require all forms of electronic communications coming from elected representatives (on the federal level) to be archived and published unless it represents a national security issue covered by an official state secret.
Surprisingly, a hand-written note isn't covered by this law. Go figure.
Keep in mind that the 435 members of the U.S. House of Representatives is a number that is set up by ordinary law and can be changed at any time. For myself, I'd rather see an enlargement of the House to encourage more local representation and to fix some of the problems perceived with the electoral college as well (electoral votes are based on the number of representatives allocated to each state). The original intent for the framers of the U.S. Constitution was to keep the number at roughly one representative for about every 30 thousand to 50 thousand citizens.
As for how a legislative body with over 4k members would function, that is something that can be debated too. Then again, if you look at how many staff members are involved with running congress, there are well over 4k people running around on Capitol Hill at any given moment and in fact most of the major decision making is being done by the staff members as well.
I don't think anyone in the US congress votes "99.999%" with one of the parties, given that the parties don't vote as one very often anyway.
Lately they have been voting along party lines. Not 100% of the time and not for every vote, but it does tend to happen where a vast majority (80%+ for each party) of the members of that party vote a certain way for many votes cast in congress. Just sit down and watch C-Span for awhile and you will usually see several votes where you can clearly tell what party is the one pushing forward the idea.
I would say at least one vote is like this every day while Congress is in session... usually several votes. I guess that doesn't count as "very often"?
Like the American system of selecting representatives, MPs in Britain are selected by geographical district. The reason the Liberal Democrats lost seats is because their support geographically was diminished. They may have had more voters overall, but those voters were more concentrated in fewer districts than had been the case earlier.
If a party wants to really be in control, they have to have widespread support from several areas of the country and not something merely to an isolated area. For example, if nearly all of the voters in the greater metropolitan London area all voted for a single party and the rest of the country voted differently, split between several different parties, such a block of voters would represent a substantial part of the country in absolute votes but would certainly not show up in terms of the number of MPs elected.
That sounds like a pretty fair system where it encourages those who would try to run the country to consider problems for the country as a whole and not to just a few places where the voters are concentrated.
As I don't consider the electoral college to be a problem at all, other than the presumption that each state must have a "winner take all" approach to allocating the electoral votes (something not even listed in the constitution and therefore can be changed by statute or individual states acting unilaterally). The last state to try and make a change was Colorado, which I think had a pretty good concept of a proportional allocation of electoral votes.
I think the turn-off was that Ralph Nader would have earned an electoral vote under that system on the year it was presented to the Colorado voters, and the two major parties closed ranks to keep an upstart from spoiling their fun. It had earlier been endorsed by both parties (at different times... depending on who got the advantage for the change when the question was asked).
If several of the larger states in America had proportional voting with the electoral college, America would also have to be worrying about coalition governments or in that case a coalition president taking over the White House. It actually would empower the minority parties where groups like the Libertarians or the Constitutional party could step in and swing their support for one of the major parties and actually decide the outcome of the election in a significant manner, or throw the election to the U.S. House of Representatives.... something the Democrats didn't want to try after the 2000 election as they were quite certain they were going to lose in that forum.
As for the Senate, it serves an important role too, and helps to protect the interests of the smaller states. That is precisely what it was designed to do in the first place, so again, what is the problem? Of course I think it was a mistake to have direct election of the senators as well, but that is a separate issue.
Considering that Gimp is a photo manipulation and editing tool, and CMYK is a colorspace, what sort of flamewar could there be?
If you are talking about Gimp vs. Photoshop or CMYK vs. RGBA, that is something else entirely. Besides, CMYK is not even a true 4-dimensional color space, but rather has a 4th channel that can be legitimately derived from the other three without really adding in additional information. The "K" or black part of that color space is to make the printing process cheaper, and to give better definition to black parts of an image in a physical printing process due to limits of typical inks used to produce colors.
An analogous color space used in the electronic sign business is the RGBW color space, where a "white" channel is added to a display to fill in highlights and to increase apparent pixel depth.
Admittedly one of the problems here is that adding a fourth channel would require a 4-dimensional color space to fully utilize that extra channel. To really utilize this sort of new feature would require a whole new image recording system.
One of the problems facing would-be extensions of the color gamut like adding another color is in part an unlearning of what it means to make a color. In reality, a given color that you see from an object is made up of an entire spectrum from near infrared to ultraviolet (UV-A, to define a "color"), and is a wave function of all possible frequencies along that spectrum.
Somewhere along the way some crude but generally effective simplifications of this philosophy have resulted in things like the YUV and RBG systems, but it should be noted those are 3-dimensional color spaces. Note that the word "dimension" is not in reference to lengths here, but rather representations of the color. Each dimension is merely one more piece of information to display that color.
So whenever you use a 3-dimensional color space, you are reproducing that color spectrum wave function by only selecting three frequencies out of the whole spectrum with which to "broadcast" that information... and you are discarding quite a bit of additional information along the way. This is why color reproduction is quite difficult, and never really gets it "right" in most cases. Try as you might, no possible method of reproducing a color where the information has been discarded can be recreated. Heck, that is basic information theory here too.
Some may counter that a human eye perceives only three colors anyway. Well, that isn't quite true, as there are people with sensitivity to more than three colors (tetra-chromaticity) and of course people who only perceive effectively two or even one color ("color blindness"). Even with all that, not all people perceive the same colors either in the same way, so what may look "good" to one person may look "awful" to somebody else. What it all boils down to is that to really do a proper representation of the color, it really is vitally important to completely and accurately reproduce that entire wave function which represents all possible frequencies.
Think of it more this way, perhaps. Imagine if you were listening to some music, but the recording medium only reproduced the songs with three frequencies for playback. It would be some rather boring music. BTW, it is possible to "sample" light in the same manner that sound is sampled to give a more accurate reproduction of a color, but that would be an insane amount of data as the sampling frequency would have to be on the same order as the frequency of the light.... actually a higher rate of sampling to be precise.
One of the really nice things about light from an incandescent light bulb is that it is spread out over nearly the entire frequency spectrum. Traditional film projectors take advantage of that fact and when color film is shown in front of that light bulb, the frequency spread of various color layers on the film tend to smooth out with each other and generate that continuous spectrum. It still isn't perfect and color film still has only three channels (usually) but at least an attempt to re-create that whole frequency spectrum is there. Also note that different film manufacturers have a frequency response that is sometimes different, which is why some film manufacturers are preferred over others and certainly impacts the film making process in some subtle but interesting ways.
For LCD screens and worse yet for LED systems, the frequency curve isn't nearly so good. If you would look at it with a diffraction grating or prism that separates the colors out, you would see some sharp lines rather than a continuous spectrum. That is where the real problem lies with LCD panels and why color accuracy is not very good. Certainly adding a yellow line to that curve would generally help to smooth out that spectrum or at least add some more visual information, even if that color information isn't being directly recorded by the storage medium.
It is certainly possible that some northerly areas might benefit from longer growing seasons. On the other hand, the temperate areas that currently enjoy a near optimal climate, and that produce much of the world's food would be expected to suffer. So a country like Greenland might benefit, while the US would probably lose big. Since agriculture cannot shift from one region to another that rapidly, countries that currentl import large quantities of foods like grain may experience massive starvation.
I completely disagree with you on this sentiment, and note that some of the most productive agricultural areas on the planet can be near the equator, and certainly in tropical and semi-tropical areas. Yes, diets might have to change as well as farming practices as climates shift in one way or another, but in terms of calories per acre produced in a year and other similar kinds of factors of food production, there is no reasonable way to suggest even in tropical areas or for that matter even in the USA that a general warming trend would be bad for food production.
So what if the corn belt shifts to Montana/North Dakota/Minnesota/Canadian Prairie Provinces? That would put citrus farming into Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama instead. Heck, for the USA and Canada, a slight warming might even result in an increase in grain production.I really don't see where the down side of this is at, even for a country like the USA. Some farmers would certainly be stupid and go bankrupt if they kept farming as their great-grandfathers had done earlier, but that just implies that they need to adapt like the rest of us to a changing environment. That is what a brain can be used for.
You know, that is part of it. I don't like the people or the political actions that those who support it are putting forth.
It is mostly the degree of AGW and not necessarily that it doesn't exist. The die hard supporters want to dismiss all other factors in climate change, as if the man-made component is the only factor at all. Yes, that is perhaps the one component we as a civilization can control most easily, but even then there are limits to what we can do.
You, sir, must either immediately retract that statement, or let it be know that you are a complete fucking idiot who has disqualified himself from any political, scientific, or philosophic discussion.
I think your own reply speaks for itself and deserves only a reply that you have buried yourself in your own argument.
I don't have any hope that this will be solved. Humanity is just too stupid to get together and do anything right. Too bad I have children, they will suffer the consequences.
I have a bit more faith in humanity for a number of reasons, and I think that most of these problems will eventually be solved.... in part because they are being solved. When I hear people complain about how awful pollution is right now, they don't have a clue how bad it has been in the past or what steps have been done in the past century to clean things up.
More significantly, those who look at the Earth as a closed system and that the edge of the known universe is only as high as you can reach into the sky with your bare hand is really missing out on how big this universe actually is and how much energy and resources we as a species can tap into. The universe is huge. It is so mind bogglingly huge that even places we can get to with current technology within human timescales is vast with hundreds of worlds that we have yet to have explored to any degree at all. Yes, I'm talking about space exploration, and noting that the resources of even a small asteroid can provide more metals and minerals than all of the mining activity of the entirety of the human species for all of history.
I certainly am not worried about "running out of stuff" as a limiting factor, but I do believe we need to be able to get off this rock that we call "The Earth" and move on as a species. For those of humanity that remain on the Earth after others have gone on to other places in the Solar System and elsewhere, humanity as a whole will be much richer in so many ways as a result of that extra-terrestrial activity that we will also be able to perhaps finally solve some of these critical problems on the Earth as well.
I have hope for the future that is almost without bound. Yes, there may be some temporary "ouches" along the way and some excesses of government and people that need to be corrected, but on the whole I have faith in and trust that our children will figure out how to make a comfortable life for themselves and indeed be able to learn from our mistakes.... perhaps only to make mistakes of their own.
Historical records exist of agriculture practices in several areas of Europe for crops that simply won't grow in those areas because it is too cold to grow them there now. Things like widespread vineyards in England and the growing seasons in Greenland with its rather substantial population based on medieval European farming practices.
Yes, I'll admit that may have been caused from an unusually strong Gulf Stream or some other mechanism, but it was a rather sustained and prolonged warming period that impacted climates and not just a few storms. You have got to identify the source of that heat in some way and put it into the model, and I'd even argue so far as that the burden of proof rests with those who claim it was merely a local phenomena.
Furthermore, it seems to suggest that the Earth can warm up several degrees and actually be beneficial for mankind in terms of increased growing seasons for many areas and increased food production in general. It sort of begs the question.... what are we worried about even if the global environment is warming up?
Again, I'm not necessarily saying we need to go out of our way to deliberately cause pollution, but more science clearly is needed, and not some sort of bible bashing on the concepts.
Define "mainstream opinions" as a term and perhaps I can respond here. I'll admit that there are idiots and quacks from multiple extremes on this topic, but I will point out clearly that there have been "activists" and other sorts of folks who have been proponents of AGW that have indeed advocated the mass genocide of the human species. This is more a continuum of opinion ranging from merely zero population growth advocates to something resembling the eugenics movement of the 1930's, but they do use the viewpoint that mankind shouldn't be on this planet in one form or another.
BTW, in regards to carbon sequestration, my concern isn't that dumping it into the atmosphere is necessarily a good thing, but rather that the science behind what the long term consequences of putting it elsewhere hasn't really been done, and that it really doesn't deal with the issues involved with treating carbon in the form of CO2 as a pollutant. Burying the carbon underground in the form of a gas isn't necessarily going to help the global environment in the long run, and I am suggesting it may even backfire when you measure on time scales of thousands of years instead of mere decades.
It just seems as though similar kinds of projects in the past to "deal with" pollution have resulted in long term problems that eventually had to be addressed. All I'm suggesting here is that pressing the panic button and demanding that a power plant put into place some sort of sequestration technique without knowing the long term consequences of such an action isn't really helping anybody out. There is also no proof that such a sequestration is necessarily less harmful than simply leaving that CO2 in the atmosphere, where larger scale global processes might just work to "scrub" that CO2 and turn it into plant matter or something else more useful.
Who do you think is going to get the bulk of this "green money"?
As a matter of fact, the largest benefactor of carbon tax credits is going to be Warren Buffet. I guess that charity case is somebody who needs to double or triple his wealth at the expense of poor working class schmucks like myself that will find a near doubling of my tax burden as a result of this political change. Oh, the senators who are promoting this carbon tax credit system and carbon sequestration programs are also going to become independently wealthy in their own right too. Call it a bribe, a "speaking fee", or "campaign contribution", but these guys are certainly raking in the dough from their support for the AGW hypothesis.
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I think it is wrong to be putting the argument of Mars first vs. Moon first on the table, and something I think Robert Zubrin misses when he tries to push for such a program. It presumes a zero-sum game that we can only afford to do one or the other but not both.
I agree that heroes need to be around and that going some place new is indeed useful. NASA needs to adopt more clearly Gene Roddenberry's quote from Star Trek of "boldly going where nobody has gone before" and doing something unique and original. All this said, I can note several very good reasons for going back to the Moon which will be very useful in a whole bunch of ways.
First and foremost, the Moon is for use relatively close and will remain for several millions to billions of years quite close to us as well. It isn't really going anywhere in terms of moving away from the Earth (measured in inches per year?). Even with chemical rockets using Apollo type of rockets, we can get to the Moon in just a couple of days. That means if there is a disaster of some kind and logistical resupply or some other sort of thing happens, it is much easier to get to the Moon than it is to get to Mars or some other place in the Solar System.
Also, unlike Mars, much of the rest of the Solar System that needs to be explored is much more like the Moon than almost anything else we will encounter. Certainly technology used to extract resources on the surface of the Moon can be applied to mining asteroids and other locations around the Solar System, as will the spacecraft that can be used for landing on the surface of the Moon too. Mars is a huge rock stuck at the bottom of a deep gravity well... and that causes many of the difficulties that have been encountered in terms of trying to get there. The gravity well of the Moon isn't nearly so deep and there isn't a pesky atmosphere to mess with both landings and lift-off.
If the point of going somewhere is to perform a "flags and footprints" type mission, both going to the Moon and Mars are both equally bad. There is so much to do there that staying for a weekend camping trip is sort of pointless. The next time we as a species go to any other body in the solar system, it should be with the intent to settle, to make a permanent home there. Yeah, that may not be something that the initial missions may be able to accomplish, but that should be and must be a long-term goal.
For those that argue why would we go to the Moon or Mars when Antarctica is uninhabited... I'd say that those claiming Antarctica is uninhabited haven't been there or haven't heard about cities that are already on that continent... and to note the legal climate of Antarctica is hostile to doing anything like permanent settlements as well. The issues involved with going to any place in the solar system are mainly political and not technical right now. It is the resolve to be willing to do these challenging things of going into space and physically reaching out across the cosmos, or at least be willing to let those who may have these dreams to do that to at least try it out themselves.
You would learn more about Mars by putting a human on its surface for 5 hours than has been learned by all previous missions combined. Indeed, I would argue that by sending up Dr. Harrison Schmitt on Apollo 17, that more real science was performed on that mission and more valuable samples collected and analyzed than the rest of the NASA missions to space previously combined both robotic and manned. Our knowledge about the Moon certainly improved significantly as a result of the Apollo missions, and having people there to poke at it in a more direct fashion made a significant difference over what robotic probes could have done otherwise.
My argument about the robotic probes to Mars is that we are running out of the low hanging fruit that is easy to pick off with robots in terms of basic discoveries on Mars. Had manned spacecraft gone to Mars prior to the Mariner missions with the knowledge that we had back in the 1960's for what conditions were like on Mars, it would have been an utter disaster. Many of the planetary scientists were surprised at how many craters were on the surface of Mars when Mariner 4 made its initial photo survey of the planet, and other discoveries that have been made since certainly have been useful. Still, there reaches a point that there are diminishing returns and it will be not only useful but even required to have somebody with a brain on the surface there to make some of the real discoveries that have to happen. Somebody who has the time to actually ponder what is going on and being able to react more directly with the environment on Mars.
The current director of the Mars Rover program (Spirit and Opportunity) has been on record as saying he wishes that he had a couple of astronauts to help out with his program, and that there would be a few things he would have them do explicitly to help improve his project that he simply can't do right now because they aren't there. Robots have their place and certainly should be used... but to suggest that robots should be used exclusively is also just as silly.
As for useful artificial intelligence research with real applications, that day is already here. Expert systems, machine translation of speech, and predictive models using neural networks have all been applied successfully and are being used on a commercial basis. Indeed one of the leading applications of "artificial" neural networks is with predictive models used in financial markets. That is a little scary if you think about it, but it is a current application.
All this said, if you can find any software that is genuine "artificial intelligence" in terms of some computer that is self-aware and able to think even on the level better than an earthworm, I will personally eat the source code of the entire program printed onto A4 paper... double spaced at 14 point type on a single side of the page and with comments. We are so incredibly far from being able to understand what intelligence actually is that we really don't even know the right questions to ask in the first place. I really don't expect a major breakthrough any time in the 21st century or even later for that matter.
All this said, there have been some useful things that have come out of the investigation of the concepts of artificial intelligence, and it is those things which are useful. Just don't get caught up with the hype that real AI is just around the corner. I expect practical and cheap nuclear fusion reactors well before that happens, along with human settlement of other planets first.
Only because it was in the national interests of the USA to let the Soviet Union put people into orbit first. Yes, I'll admit there were technical issues too, but by letting the Soviet Union get into space first.... both with Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin... it established the principle that overflight of a country with orbital spacecraft did not require visas, passports, or even permission of the country you were orbiting over. Since Soviet equipment and cosmonauts passed over America without the permission of the U.S. government, the USA was free to do the same thing to the Soviet Union.
There was actually a satellite ready to put up into orbit prepared by none other than Werner Von Braun prior to Sputnik (he had previously put a V-2 into space while working for Hitler), but his project was put on hold... presumably for this reason although it was not officially given that excuse. It was an issue, however, discussed under the Eisenhower administration when spaceflight strategies were being developed for the first time.
It is hard to say how many "firsts" done by the Soviet space program were permitted to happen simply to establish precedence for international space law, but it seems likely that some of it was deliberate.
What Kool Aid have you been drinking?
Natural disaster or man-made disaster? Because other than an asteroid hitting the planet, there isn't a natural disaster that would wipe out all life on this planet.
There certainly are man-made disasters that could wipe out human civilization or set us back a thousand years or so in terms of technological progress. It has happened in the past and undoubtedly it will happen in the future as well.
As for natural disasters.... a couple of super-volcanoes (aka like the Yellowstone caldera) erupting would certainly make life very uncomfortable for most of mankind. That is something that we know has happened in the past and certainly will happen in the not too distant future (from a geological perspective). Does that fit the criteria of at least one more natural disaster besides an asteroid hitting us?
And FYI, we are nowhere near the cability to colonize another planet. Not now, nor within 100 years.
Most of what we need to know about colonizing another planet is already well known, and what we don't know is something that we pretty much won't know until it is tried.
100 years is a pretty long period of time, and based on what I've seen and those who are involved, I would put a permanent human colony on Mars within the next 100 years. How close to that 100 year mark can be debated and it won't be easy, but there certainly are plenty of people willing to give it a try and are certainly working toward that goal.
But hey tell the poor shrimper in New Orleans we need to spend Billions on NASA so that someday we can land a man on mars meanwhile we can't do a damn thing to stop BP's Oil spill from killing his shrimping bed.
Yeah good priorities....
That may be the most intelligent thing from your post. I'm not convinced that the billions being spent on NASA is necessarily a good thing either, or the most productive use of that money, and certainly a government agency is perhaps the last place to spend money in an efficient manner.
If there was some reason to put together a crash program for a settlement that absolutely required having people on Mars in a fairly short period of time when money is no object.... making it a government program to make that happen might make some sense. I just don't see that kind of urgency.
On the other hand, if spaceflight costs come down in any significant manner (and I believe that they will), I think it will take an organized and deliberate effort to keep people from going to Mars by blatantly grounding all flights leaving the Earth and perhaps even shooting rockets out of the sky with military equipment. Low-earth orbit is already half-way for getting to Mars (in terms of energy needed to get there), and several private citizens have already done that on their own dime.
For myself, I'd rather see a robust enough economy going so that I can afford to go to Mars and that shrimper in the Gulf of Mexico can afford a lawyer to sue the pants off of BP or other oil extraction companies who mess up their fishing grounds. If folks are going to be headed to Mars, I would rather it not be on a government paycheck.
I wouldn't say that any kind of spaceflight to Mars is easy at all, and in fact the sizes of probes going to Mars has been steadily increasing to the point that sending a manned mission may not really be all that more of a stretch either.
Mars certainly has all of the raw elements for basic survival on its surface, including fairly substantial quantities of water, oxygen, CO2, and even Nitrogen. Basically, all of the raw materials needed to live are already there, and the main problem is trying to come up with a method of turning that into stuff needed for living. In essence, some sort of human settlement would have to happen including food production and some basic manufacturing capabilities. Once all that is built, sending additional people to Mars is by comparison relatively trivial.
Yes, this is a chicken-or-egg problem where neither the chicken nor the egg have been made yet and you can't decide which to do first.
I'll also point out that based upon current technology, we are very nearly at the extreme limit anyway for can be done via robotic missions on Mars. Yes, some additional areas of Mars can be explored and probed, but it will be diminishing returns compared to what a trained geologist and chemist could do if they were physically on the surface and had the ability to create new machines and equipment based on discoveries made while there.
My argument here is that the "awesome amount of data" that you think would be coming from Mars with an increased tempo for robotic exploration really wouldn't be more than perhaps an order of magnitude more than comes right now from Mars as it is... at least without having some people physically there to be involved with the exploration process.
That's funny, if we send humans to Mars that could be all the time they have to spend. Robots just need sunlight, we humans need much more logistical support. Robots also just need one way tickets.
One of the problems with getting to Mars is that any attempt to get there is also going to require an extended stay... of about a year or more. Indeed establishing a permanent base right at the beginning might not be a bad idea all things considered.
Try as you might, it is quite difficult to bring an entire mineral lab to the surface of Mars in one simple shot, and there are serious plans to try and at least get a "round trip" to happen even for robotic missions to Mars. The hope is that somehow a rock sample from Mars can be done with a complete lab here on the Earth with technicians that have to... *gasp*... actually touch the rock and manually manipulate the thing.
I'm not saying that robotic missions should be abandoned, and there certainly is a place for them, but to exclude manned exploration of space completely is also not going to happen either. We are very near the limit of what remote sensing can be done on Mars at this point, and there have even been discussions of perhaps setting up something on Phobos or Deimos to have astronauts "tele-operate" probes on the surface of Mars and some other interesting combinations of both human and robotic spaceflight. The theory is that the quarter second delay from Phobos to Mars is preferable in many situations than the sometimes several hour delay for communications between Mars and the Earth. Landing and take-off from Phobos is by comparison trivial even compared to the Earth's Moon... and we already know how to get that accomplished.
So, why are you trying deliberately to mod yourself down... other than this is a pointless thread at this point?
GIMP is GPL'd. If it doesn't meet your needs.... write the plug-in. Problem solved!
We're still cleaning up messes from the Carter administration and in a couple cases the Hoover administration. Like he said, get over it.
The Arizona law is not about border enforcement, but rather if the law enforcement agencies in Arizona have identified somebody as having violated the law, they need to act and have that law enforced even if it happens to be a federal law. Do you think that if a local police agency saw a money counterfeiting operation, that they should say "I sure hope you don't get caught by the feds", or that perhaps they ought to act and help enforce those anti-counterfeiting laws? It sort of is the job of a law enforcement agency to, I don't know, actually enforce laws they know are being violated?
It isn't like an Arizona police department can detain and imprison people for immigrations violations, but they can certainly inform the federal government that a law is being broken and hold them just like any citizen can do before the "proper authorities" arrive. The question then arises as to if it is proper to ignore that laws are being broken when a formal complaint about a law being broken is being made by a state agency to the federal government. Something really seems screwed up there if a federal immigration officer refuses to cooperate in that situation.
Some communities have gone to the complete opposite extreme on immigration laws to the point they are prohibiting their officers from even communicating any information about immigration status to the federal government at all. That to me is just as wrong and perhaps even worse.
Yeah, I know there is more to the Arizona law than simply this viewpoint, but the basic premise that a state officer asking to have federal laws actually enforced shouldn't be too over the top. As long as you accept this basic premise, the rest is debating about how active those state officers ought to be about doing that kind of enforcement. There certainly is a problem if the citizens of a state get so worked up that they get their state legislature to become more active in a law enforcement activity that ought to be a federal enforcement issue, and the blame falls on the federal government here instead of Arizona for screwing up so awfully in the lack of enforcement of existing laws.
The problem isn't the security of the communications medium, but rather the public access laws that require all forms of electronic communications coming from elected representatives (on the federal level) to be archived and published unless it represents a national security issue covered by an official state secret.
Surprisingly, a hand-written note isn't covered by this law. Go figure.
Keep in mind that the 435 members of the U.S. House of Representatives is a number that is set up by ordinary law and can be changed at any time. For myself, I'd rather see an enlargement of the House to encourage more local representation and to fix some of the problems perceived with the electoral college as well (electoral votes are based on the number of representatives allocated to each state). The original intent for the framers of the U.S. Constitution was to keep the number at roughly one representative for about every 30 thousand to 50 thousand citizens.
As for how a legislative body with over 4k members would function, that is something that can be debated too. Then again, if you look at how many staff members are involved with running congress, there are well over 4k people running around on Capitol Hill at any given moment and in fact most of the major decision making is being done by the staff members as well.
I don't think anyone in the US congress votes "99.999%" with one of the parties, given that the parties don't vote as one very often anyway.
Lately they have been voting along party lines. Not 100% of the time and not for every vote, but it does tend to happen where a vast majority (80%+ for each party) of the members of that party vote a certain way for many votes cast in congress. Just sit down and watch C-Span for awhile and you will usually see several votes where you can clearly tell what party is the one pushing forward the idea.
I would say at least one vote is like this every day while Congress is in session... usually several votes. I guess that doesn't count as "very often"?
Like the American system of selecting representatives, MPs in Britain are selected by geographical district. The reason the Liberal Democrats lost seats is because their support geographically was diminished. They may have had more voters overall, but those voters were more concentrated in fewer districts than had been the case earlier.
If a party wants to really be in control, they have to have widespread support from several areas of the country and not something merely to an isolated area. For example, if nearly all of the voters in the greater metropolitan London area all voted for a single party and the rest of the country voted differently, split between several different parties, such a block of voters would represent a substantial part of the country in absolute votes but would certainly not show up in terms of the number of MPs elected.
That sounds like a pretty fair system where it encourages those who would try to run the country to consider problems for the country as a whole and not to just a few places where the voters are concentrated.
As I don't consider the electoral college to be a problem at all, other than the presumption that each state must have a "winner take all" approach to allocating the electoral votes (something not even listed in the constitution and therefore can be changed by statute or individual states acting unilaterally). The last state to try and make a change was Colorado, which I think had a pretty good concept of a proportional allocation of electoral votes.
I think the turn-off was that Ralph Nader would have earned an electoral vote under that system on the year it was presented to the Colorado voters, and the two major parties closed ranks to keep an upstart from spoiling their fun. It had earlier been endorsed by both parties (at different times... depending on who got the advantage for the change when the question was asked).
If several of the larger states in America had proportional voting with the electoral college, America would also have to be worrying about coalition governments or in that case a coalition president taking over the White House. It actually would empower the minority parties where groups like the Libertarians or the Constitutional party could step in and swing their support for one of the major parties and actually decide the outcome of the election in a significant manner, or throw the election to the U.S. House of Representatives.... something the Democrats didn't want to try after the 2000 election as they were quite certain they were going to lose in that forum.
As for the Senate, it serves an important role too, and helps to protect the interests of the smaller states. That is precisely what it was designed to do in the first place, so again, what is the problem? Of course I think it was a mistake to have direct election of the senators as well, but that is a separate issue.
Considering that Gimp is a photo manipulation and editing tool, and CMYK is a colorspace, what sort of flamewar could there be?
If you are talking about Gimp vs. Photoshop or CMYK vs. RGBA, that is something else entirely. Besides, CMYK is not even a true 4-dimensional color space, but rather has a 4th channel that can be legitimately derived from the other three without really adding in additional information. The "K" or black part of that color space is to make the printing process cheaper, and to give better definition to black parts of an image in a physical printing process due to limits of typical inks used to produce colors.
An analogous color space used in the electronic sign business is the RGBW color space, where a "white" channel is added to a display to fill in highlights and to increase apparent pixel depth.
Admittedly one of the problems here is that adding a fourth channel would require a 4-dimensional color space to fully utilize that extra channel. To really utilize this sort of new feature would require a whole new image recording system.
One of the problems facing would-be extensions of the color gamut like adding another color is in part an unlearning of what it means to make a color. In reality, a given color that you see from an object is made up of an entire spectrum from near infrared to ultraviolet (UV-A, to define a "color"), and is a wave function of all possible frequencies along that spectrum.
Somewhere along the way some crude but generally effective simplifications of this philosophy have resulted in things like the YUV and RBG systems, but it should be noted those are 3-dimensional color spaces. Note that the word "dimension" is not in reference to lengths here, but rather representations of the color. Each dimension is merely one more piece of information to display that color.
So whenever you use a 3-dimensional color space, you are reproducing that color spectrum wave function by only selecting three frequencies out of the whole spectrum with which to "broadcast" that information... and you are discarding quite a bit of additional information along the way. This is why color reproduction is quite difficult, and never really gets it "right" in most cases. Try as you might, no possible method of reproducing a color where the information has been discarded can be recreated. Heck, that is basic information theory here too.
Some may counter that a human eye perceives only three colors anyway. Well, that isn't quite true, as there are people with sensitivity to more than three colors (tetra-chromaticity) and of course people who only perceive effectively two or even one color ("color blindness"). Even with all that, not all people perceive the same colors either in the same way, so what may look "good" to one person may look "awful" to somebody else. What it all boils down to is that to really do a proper representation of the color, it really is vitally important to completely and accurately reproduce that entire wave function which represents all possible frequencies.
Think of it more this way, perhaps. Imagine if you were listening to some music, but the recording medium only reproduced the songs with three frequencies for playback. It would be some rather boring music. BTW, it is possible to "sample" light in the same manner that sound is sampled to give a more accurate reproduction of a color, but that would be an insane amount of data as the sampling frequency would have to be on the same order as the frequency of the light.... actually a higher rate of sampling to be precise.
One of the really nice things about light from an incandescent light bulb is that it is spread out over nearly the entire frequency spectrum. Traditional film projectors take advantage of that fact and when color film is shown in front of that light bulb, the frequency spread of various color layers on the film tend to smooth out with each other and generate that continuous spectrum. It still isn't perfect and color film still has only three channels (usually) but at least an attempt to re-create that whole frequency spectrum is there. Also note that different film manufacturers have a frequency response that is sometimes different, which is why some film manufacturers are preferred over others and certainly impacts the film making process in some subtle but interesting ways.
For LCD screens and worse yet for LED systems, the frequency curve isn't nearly so good. If you would look at it with a diffraction grating or prism that separates the colors out, you would see some sharp lines rather than a continuous spectrum. That is where the real problem lies with LCD panels and why color accuracy is not very good. Certainly adding a yellow line to that curve would generally help to smooth out that spectrum or at least add some more visual information, even if that color information isn't being directly recorded by the storage medium.
It is certainly possible that some northerly areas might benefit from longer growing seasons. On the other hand, the temperate areas that currently enjoy a near optimal climate, and that produce much of the world's food would be expected to suffer. So a country like Greenland might benefit, while the US would probably lose big. Since agriculture cannot shift from one region to another that rapidly, countries that currentl import large quantities of foods like grain may experience massive starvation.
I completely disagree with you on this sentiment, and note that some of the most productive agricultural areas on the planet can be near the equator, and certainly in tropical and semi-tropical areas. Yes, diets might have to change as well as farming practices as climates shift in one way or another, but in terms of calories per acre produced in a year and other similar kinds of factors of food production, there is no reasonable way to suggest even in tropical areas or for that matter even in the USA that a general warming trend would be bad for food production.
So what if the corn belt shifts to Montana/North Dakota/Minnesota/Canadian Prairie Provinces? That would put citrus farming into Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama instead. Heck, for the USA and Canada, a slight warming might even result in an increase in grain production.I really don't see where the down side of this is at, even for a country like the USA. Some farmers would certainly be stupid and go bankrupt if they kept farming as their great-grandfathers had done earlier, but that just implies that they need to adapt like the rest of us to a changing environment. That is what a brain can be used for.
You know, that is part of it. I don't like the people or the political actions that those who support it are putting forth.
It is mostly the degree of AGW and not necessarily that it doesn't exist. The die hard supporters want to dismiss all other factors in climate change, as if the man-made component is the only factor at all. Yes, that is perhaps the one component we as a civilization can control most easily, but even then there are limits to what we can do.
You, sir, must either immediately retract that statement, or let it be know that you are a complete fucking idiot who has disqualified himself from any political, scientific, or philosophic discussion.
I think your own reply speaks for itself and deserves only a reply that you have buried yourself in your own argument.
I don't have any hope that this will be solved. Humanity is just too stupid to get together and do anything right. Too bad I have children, they will suffer the consequences.
I have a bit more faith in humanity for a number of reasons, and I think that most of these problems will eventually be solved.... in part because they are being solved. When I hear people complain about how awful pollution is right now, they don't have a clue how bad it has been in the past or what steps have been done in the past century to clean things up.
More significantly, those who look at the Earth as a closed system and that the edge of the known universe is only as high as you can reach into the sky with your bare hand is really missing out on how big this universe actually is and how much energy and resources we as a species can tap into. The universe is huge. It is so mind bogglingly huge that even places we can get to with current technology within human timescales is vast with hundreds of worlds that we have yet to have explored to any degree at all. Yes, I'm talking about space exploration, and noting that the resources of even a small asteroid can provide more metals and minerals than all of the mining activity of the entirety of the human species for all of history.
I certainly am not worried about "running out of stuff" as a limiting factor, but I do believe we need to be able to get off this rock that we call "The Earth" and move on as a species. For those of humanity that remain on the Earth after others have gone on to other places in the Solar System and elsewhere, humanity as a whole will be much richer in so many ways as a result of that extra-terrestrial activity that we will also be able to perhaps finally solve some of these critical problems on the Earth as well.
I have hope for the future that is almost without bound. Yes, there may be some temporary "ouches" along the way and some excesses of government and people that need to be corrected, but on the whole I have faith in and trust that our children will figure out how to make a comfortable life for themselves and indeed be able to learn from our mistakes.... perhaps only to make mistakes of their own.
Historical records exist of agriculture practices in several areas of Europe for crops that simply won't grow in those areas because it is too cold to grow them there now. Things like widespread vineyards in England and the growing seasons in Greenland with its rather substantial population based on medieval European farming practices.
Yes, I'll admit that may have been caused from an unusually strong Gulf Stream or some other mechanism, but it was a rather sustained and prolonged warming period that impacted climates and not just a few storms. You have got to identify the source of that heat in some way and put it into the model, and I'd even argue so far as that the burden of proof rests with those who claim it was merely a local phenomena.
Furthermore, it seems to suggest that the Earth can warm up several degrees and actually be beneficial for mankind in terms of increased growing seasons for many areas and increased food production in general. It sort of begs the question.... what are we worried about even if the global environment is warming up?
Again, I'm not necessarily saying we need to go out of our way to deliberately cause pollution, but more science clearly is needed, and not some sort of bible bashing on the concepts.
Define "mainstream opinions" as a term and perhaps I can respond here. I'll admit that there are idiots and quacks from multiple extremes on this topic, but I will point out clearly that there have been "activists" and other sorts of folks who have been proponents of AGW that have indeed advocated the mass genocide of the human species. This is more a continuum of opinion ranging from merely zero population growth advocates to something resembling the eugenics movement of the 1930's, but they do use the viewpoint that mankind shouldn't be on this planet in one form or another.
BTW, in regards to carbon sequestration, my concern isn't that dumping it into the atmosphere is necessarily a good thing, but rather that the science behind what the long term consequences of putting it elsewhere hasn't really been done, and that it really doesn't deal with the issues involved with treating carbon in the form of CO2 as a pollutant. Burying the carbon underground in the form of a gas isn't necessarily going to help the global environment in the long run, and I am suggesting it may even backfire when you measure on time scales of thousands of years instead of mere decades.
It just seems as though similar kinds of projects in the past to "deal with" pollution have resulted in long term problems that eventually had to be addressed. All I'm suggesting here is that pressing the panic button and demanding that a power plant put into place some sort of sequestration technique without knowing the long term consequences of such an action isn't really helping anybody out. There is also no proof that such a sequestration is necessarily less harmful than simply leaving that CO2 in the atmosphere, where larger scale global processes might just work to "scrub" that CO2 and turn it into plant matter or something else more useful.
Who do you think is going to get the bulk of this "green money"?
As a matter of fact, the largest benefactor of carbon tax credits is going to be Warren Buffet. I guess that charity case is somebody who needs to double or triple his wealth at the expense of poor working class schmucks like myself that will find a near doubling of my tax burden as a result of this political change. Oh, the senators who are promoting this carbon tax credit system and carbon sequestration programs are also going to become independently wealthy in their own right too. Call it a bribe, a "speaking fee", or "campaign contribution", but these guys are certainly raking in the dough from their support for the AGW hypothesis.