Coast-to-Coast AM? Formerly known as the Art Bell Show? Mitnick has legitimate complaints against the Justice Department, which is far too sane for that show. What's he going to talk about? How the government implanted secret tracking chips in his brain while they were holding him?
There's a rising interest in Lovecraft, driven partially by S. T. Joshi's scholarship, and new editions of his works are being released now that Arkham House is losing some copyrights and licensing others (not to mention releasing those horrid posthumous Derleth "collaborations.") The brick and mortar Barnes & Nobel in my local mall (Hartford, CT area) usually has a respectable selection on the shelves, as did the one in my parents' hometown (southern NH), and the Borders where I went to college (central MA), and all were willing to order for me when the books weren't on the shelf. I have more trouble finding works, say, Roger Zelazny on the shelf than I do Lovecraft.
(If you haven't picked up Del Rey's "The Road to Madness," you might want to consider it. It collects a lot of Lovecraft's lesser-known pieces.)
"I want a game where I can get in a shouting match with a character in the game - real Gene Hackman or Al Pacino business is what I'm talking about here."
Are you certain you want to lose arguments to video game characters? They'll have scriptwriters. You won't.
I can't load the article, since the site is already on its knees from the slashdotting. If he really feels all that guilty, I guess he can consider it penance.
I like that OS X is simple and sleek and useable. Linux-style tinkering is fun, but I don't want to be forced to do it. I'm just a hobbyist, so often the learning curve is so steep as to be frustrating. And I'm not in college anymore, so I can't just stick my head into the hallway and get tech support, either. I have a shiny new harddrive waiting for an OS, on which I plan to install a Linux distro, but my lovely iBook is going to stay my primary computer. I don't understand why I should feel guilty...is it that Apple isn't releasing the source to OS X? Aren't they under the BSD license, making it okay?
(Mini-Ask-Slashdot: Any distro recommendations for a new user lacking a background in this stuff? I'm leaning toward Knoppix, because it's fun to say. Knoppix. Knoppix. Knoppix.)
I was suggesting that plasma could be formed on the skin of very fast aircraft, perhaps being triggered by static in an atmosphere that is a) already very hot, and b)electrically charged.
That's certainly not how I read it. You seemed to me to be equating ions with plasma. My apologies for the misinterpretation.
On that same vein, plasma cutters utelize a pilot arc to ionize gas. It's not that far of a jump to say that an aircraft generating a few hundred Amps of static electricity could cause gas to ionize in the same way. For a point of referance, a modern plasma cutter can create about 20k F temperatures on standard 40 Amp 140 volts.... That's a mere 5600 watts, compared to what work the atmosphere is doing to slow down a space shuttle it's miniscule.
Assuming the fuselage has picked up a charge, what would generate a discharge on the aircraft? There's no path to ground. An arc from wingtip to body, assuming uneven distribution of charge? Arc to the surrounding atmosphere, maybe? That would certainly ionize the air along the path, but...what of it? Planes are often struck by lightning, and continue to fly afterwards, since the current flows through the fuselage. If a discharge blew a tile off the leading edge of the shuttle's wing, then it could cause a failure like that of the Columbia...but I'm unconvinced that such a discharge is likely to occur.
Now that I'm at home where I have access to my aero textbooks, I looked up the hypersonic flow regime, and the primary problem is radiative heat transfer. No mention of electrical discharge.
Parent poster is operating under a series of faulty assumptions and applying some bad reasoning.
When you've got an object traveling very vast what happens? What happens when you move your feet across the carpet? Static electricity. What is static? Electrons stripped from one object to another.
Static charge accumulates when loosely-held valance electrons transfer from less to more electonegative atoms. (Electronegativity is a measure of an atom's tendency to attract electrons.) It is analagous but not identical to dissociation, which occurs in plasma formation. Dissociation is the complete stripping of electrons from the nucleus, even the tightly-held inner shell electrons, which do not transfer when you shock someone by scuffing your feet on the rug. Dissociation, especially of diatomic gases such as O2 and N2, the major components of the atmosphere, requires immense amounts of energy. N2, for example, dissociates around 9000K (~16,000 deg F). For comparison, graphite vaporizes at about 6000K (~10,000 deg F).
Static can be a huge problem in pipes that move large amounts of non-polar fluids. Guess what most gasses in the upper atmosphere are? Non-polar fluids. So, there is your ionized high velocity, high temperature gas. Plasma.
I don't know alot about the shuttle's design, but I'd guess that if you talked with some NASA aerospace engineers they'd confirm this phenomenon. It's got to be a factor with all very fast aircraft.
Static charge is not plasma. Plasma requires complete ionization, and static doesn't even come close.
Static is not a problem insofar as flight mechanics are concerned. It may be a factor for avionics, as much as it is for any electrical system, but that is outside my area of experience.
I can never think of anything sufficiently scathing to say when somebody busts out a generalization like the OP. He had a decent point, too, so it's a pity it got lost behind the idiocy.
My parents live out in the boonies of New England and have satellite internet (not DirecWay.) Latency problems, already pretty noticeable (those damn' radio waves sure drag their feet getting out and back), get worse with bad weather, and forget about connecting to anything in heavy rain or snow, especially if snow accumulates in the dish. I imagine the snow thing could be a problem for Taco out there in Michigan.
Other posters don't seem to have problems with DirecTV and weather, so maybe it's just my parents' service. Taco, if you're going to go with it, make sure the dish is somewhere you can reach it with a broomhandle or something to knock some of the snow and icicles off (and preferably make sure you have several children to send out to do it for you.)
Also, birds built a nest in the neighbors' dish. Don't know if it affected their service, though.
I can be cynical all by myself. I don't need your help. *sigh* How about this...Windows-esque forced "upgrades" to each new console generation. "Dear PS5 Owner: We're sending the deactivation code to all your games, since the PS5 games license is being revoked in favor of our new PS6. We're sure you'll like the new versions of our classic games better. Because you've been such a good customer, we're giving you a 10% discount e-voucher, good at our online storefront. Thank you for gaming with Sony!"
I don't want to be forced into a cycle of buying new hardware every few years. Come to think of it...I'm so bad at anything requiring timing or eye-hand coordination that I'll *still* be trying to beat SMB3 when I'm 50. Ha! Joke's on them! I'll never upgrade again!
What about used games? There are a lot of games I wouldn't pay $50 for, but might try if I saw in the used bin. I know it doesn't generate any revenue for the studios, but if they're going to claim that they care about their customers, they have to acknowledge that used games are a part of the market. High school kids, for example, can't afford all the new releases.
And what about games for old or discontinued systems? (I loves me some Dreamcast.) How would you manage to resell games for an out-of-date system if they're all stored on the console itself?
Besides, having a physical medium lets me hurl something across the room when I realize what utter crap the game I just bought is.
...and it's a press release, so there's not much actual information in there. Apparently, a chain of small quakes tends to precede larger ones, but I want to know whether the team has a model of why this is so. Matching patterns is the place to start, but saying "there's going be a quake between 5 and 6 on the Richter scale inside this 1000 mile radius within 9 months" is like saying "there's going to be a blizzard that drops between 6 and 12 inches of snow on New England this winter." You can get either of those predictions by watching long enough, but they don't have real value to people in the affected area. I hope the UCLA team is not working solely from observation, but has built or is working toward building a physical model that they can refine as they get more data.
I'd much rather see a kid playing with blocks or lego than with most of the electronic toys nowadays. For one thing, they're far quieter...
My mother encouraged us to play with Legos because she thought it was better and more "family-oriented" than television. This lasted until the next Christmas, when my brother and I received 4 or 5 big Lego sets apiece, and within and hour were banished to our rooms when playing with them. There aren't a lot of household sounds louder than a bin of Legos being dumped out onto the floor and rifled through (except maybe the sound of Dad stepping on a stray 2x2).
TI likes to sell its calculators as (among other things) data collectors. The USB interface would presumably be used as an easier way to upload to the computer. Think high school physics classes.
Hmm, didn't even think of the uses in labs. TI ought to get together with NI (makers of LabVIEW), and release a school DAQ package. (Of course, in my day, we ran physics labs with a piece of string and a ruler, and we liked it that way! Sometimes we got a stopwatch, and once, when we were really good, the teacher let us use an Apple II! Kids today are soft!)
Oh, and yeah, a high school student would be allowed to use one. I was still in high school when the TI-89 came out; I was allowed to use one (although maybe not on calculus tests - its been a while). I was allowed to use it on the AP Calculus test, strangely enough.
In class, we couldn't use anything that could handle symbolic differentiation/integration, hence my wondering. I don't remember about the AP test; I didn't pay attention to which calculators weren't allowed because my mighty 85 was okay for everything. I hope the rules change to disallow the 86 and higher on the AP. Really, I'd like to see less use of calculators in math classes, period. It's a disservice to students that the calculators do the work for them. You don't learn the Tao of calculus punching numbers. I'm not just being crotchety because I didn't have a calculator that cool--understanding the way math works is so much more necessary for learning to think than getting the right answers is, even if it's the other way around for grades and placement testing.
For physics and chemistry, though, you can take my 85 and its unit conversion functions away from me when you pry it out of my cold, dead hands.
I don't think I'll be upgrading from my trusty TI-85. It has been dropped, kicked, and occasionally drop-kicked regularly for the past 10 years and still works perfectly. (I guess this is a plug for the 85...do they even still make it?) I have a 93 which mostly sits in a drawer. Whenever I've considered using it, I've realized that I'd be better served by a computer with a math package--bigger display, easier input, more flexible software, faster processing. So, what is the point of a 15 mHz calculator, or a USB-capable one? You don't need something like that in high school (would a student even be allowed to use one?), and you have better resources in college and in the working world.
Bet you could write some great games for these uber-calculators, though (there were already good games available for the 83/85/86/89 when I was in high school.) Which would have been all the reason I would have needed to get one, had they existed back when I needed something to keep me awake through AP Calc.
The company I work for, while incorporated in the US (for tax benefits and defense contracts, y'know), has the bulk of its employees in Bangalore. I, fortunately, have not had to work with the Bangalore office, since my work export control, meaning that foreign nationals can't work on it without special permission from the State Department. My coworkers on civilian projects, however, dread having to work with India. I'm not certain how much of it can be blamed on the Indian engineers themselves, and how much is the fault of poor communication, but all I ever hear about Bangalore is how often work needs to be sent back to be redone, and how inconvenient the time difference is.
Do the company savings on salary and benefits make up for having to redraw a set of design prints five or six times? I don't know. I do know it runs the American engineers ragged and frustrates our customers when there's a schedule delay. The interface between the US and India is the real rough spot, I think. I know that purely internal work in both countries goes smoothly, but not being able to use our huge labor pool in India is hurting the American side of the business. Maybe I'm able to look at things dispassionately because my job isn't going overseas, but I *want* international outsourcing to work...and it's a rough start for my company. We need to overcome language and cultural barriers (any American who thinks Indian English and American English are the same dialect has never spoken to an Indian) and establish some actual communication between the continents, instead of throwing a set of design requirements into the ether and expecting the Magic Overseas Engineers to sprinkle some pixie dust and suddenly have a working set of engineering drawings.
Is it different for IT work? I don't think coming up with design requirements for a program and then implementing them is a fundamentally different process than for a jet engine....I had a point when I started writing this.
On the other hand, the broken English of the company newsletter is occasionally hilarious.
I, Robot is largely a series of short stories centering around logic puzzles...Susan Calvin and Powell and Donovan figuring out what's wrong with robots by reasoning from the Three Laws. The only story in the book with a real human element is Robbie, and the robot in that one can't even talk. I think the only relation this movie is going to bear to an Asimov work is the title. That's not necessarily a bad thing. (And then I remember Bicentennial Man. Well, kind of, because it was utterly forgettable.) Anyway, much as I like his books, I don't think any of them would transfer well to the screen. Too much brain, not enough gut.
Also, how will the satellite "catch" its targets?You can't just step on the accelerator to catch up to something, because increasing your orbital velocity increases your altitude. To go "up", you have to accelerate forward, to go "down", you have to accelerate backward, and I still don't fully understand what happens when you accelerate in some direction outside your orbital path!
You sum the vectors of the current velocity and the delta v (that is, change in velocity caused by thrust), and the new vector shows what the spacecraft will be doing after a burn. They don't have to be orthagonal. (This is for conventional propulsion, which uses quick bursts of thrust, instead of the continual thrust of an ion engine. The same fundamental relationship applies to constant thrust trajectories, but the math for ion engines is nastier, and ties up fast computers for many hours.)
The thing to remember is, more velocity = more energy = higher orbit. Cancelling velocity by applying a velocity vector antiparallel to a spacecraft's current vector (tangent to the orbital path at any given instant) will decrease the KE of the spacecraft, moving it to a lower-energy orbit, and vice versa. That is the most efficient way to apply thrust, but sometimes the positioning of the engines is such that the thrust has both parallel and orthagonal components, and the orthagonal component is essentially wasted, not contributing to the useful delta v.
So to catch something in orbit, you study the orbit of the satellite you want to catch. Then, you plan to apply the thrust so that your orbit and its orbit will intersect at some point in the future. This is how spacecraft get to places like Mars. The mission designers take into account the motion of Earth and Mars around the Sun, then aim the craft at that specific point in empty space where Mars will be when the spacecraft makes it out to that distance from the Sun.
When you apply thrust outside the orbital path in that pesky third dimension that I didn't mention earlier, it results in an inclination change, that is, a change in the angle of the orbital path with respect to the equator. An orbit at 0 deg is in the same plane as the equator. An orbit at 5 deg is "tipped." Plane changes are expensive in terms of fuel, and it's usually best to do them during launch, at the lowest possible altitude.
All this is facinating, but boy, does it make my head spin...
Hee. Was that an orbit joke? Anyway, now you know how I feel about programming more complicated than FORTRAN DO loops.
Hmmm... figuring out the optimal set of manuveurs to catch a set of debris objects that are all in different orbits would be very tricky.
I'm picturing it towing a huge red horsehoe magnet on a string, with all kinds of dead satellites stuck to it.
Really, while it's nice in concept to talk about cleaning up Earth orbit, the real danger is from the bits we can't even find, never mind capture, like paint chips. Sure, they only mass a few grams, but get a few grams travelling at a few km/s in one direction, and a spacecraft travelling a few km/s in the other, then do the math to find out the total kinetic energy of the system. (Hint: KE = 0.5 * m * v^2) Fortunately, space is big, but we're still doing our best to clutter it up, especially in LEO.
What we need is a satellite with a really big version of one of those pool skimmer thingies.
I really like Speakeasy, but it can be a pain getting the local telco to allow them to hook up your service. Verizon jerked me around for almost a month before I got my Speakeasy DSL when I was in college. Some companies won't let Speakeasy use their lines at all, like SBC in my area. Common carriers hate being edged out by contract carriers.
Ooh! Someone else has heard of De Profundis! Truly the most Lovecraftian game out there. My college graduation present from one of my correspondants was a fountain pen, the better to chronicle my descent into madness. I haven't decided quite how it's going to happen yet.
Imagine you're, oh, 10, maybe 11 years old. Your mom bought you a copy of Podkayne of Mars (the Baen choose-the-ending version), which you've just finished reading. You go to the local library to look up more books by this "Heinlein" guy, and find a shelf full. Which do you pick? The huge trade paperpack with a lush illustration on the cover, of course. It happens to be Number of the Beast, and it's only the second Heinlein book you've ever read, and it's so much better than the Star Trek paperbacks you've been reading that it permanently warps your mind.
Objectively, rereading NotB now, I can realize that it's just plain not up to spec, but I have happy childhood memories about it. Ditto for I Will Fear No Evil. (It's kinda like He-Man that way.)
Then perhaps the training needs to be changed to include visual inspections. Looking over a wing should be far easier than repairing a satellite. An exterior examination during every mission does not seem unreasonable for our highly trained space travelers. If a tethered astronaut makes a navigation mistake, what's the problem?
It's certainly possible, and NASA may even be thinking about it. But every EVA raises the overall risk and cost of the mission. Even if it's something NASA eventually goes with, it's not as simple and straightforward a solution as the OP implied. And repairs in space are tricky, to say the least. If a spacewalk did find damage, there's a good chance that there would be nothing the astronauts could do about it. One of the points I remember being raised during the Columbia investigation was that, even if the damage to the tiles had been detected, the crew was still dead--they would just have known about their fate in advance, which I find to be immensely creepy.
In referring to LotR, I was speaking not of the books, but of the movies, which, in addition to being a fairly-faithful, well-realized version of the story, also have "blockbuster" written all over them. Sure, Jackson was working from great source material, but he was also shooting a big-budget movie trilogy. And that's what's gone mainstream, not the original Tolkien.
Sorry I didn't make that clear; I was relying on parallelism with the Matrix reference.
The origins (and the circumstances/motivation under which they were written) of these disparate trilogies are completely different and no self-respecting nerd would lump them together.
Oh, get out.;P I read The Silmarillion before I read Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit, and loved it. Can I have my Nerd Card back now?
As a proud nerd, I feel it's my obligation to point this out. LOTR is an icon of nerd'ness, but the Matrix is today's FX flavor of the week.
I always figured the writers of The Matrix had just played a bunch of CP2020 or Shadowrun before starting on the script. The main characters are so Solos/Street Samurai in the Matrix scenes, and so Deckers outside. That's pretty nerdy.
Slashdot Mirror
Coast-to-Coast AM? Formerly known as the Art Bell Show? Mitnick has legitimate complaints against the Justice Department, which is far too sane for that show. What's he going to talk about? How the government implanted secret tracking chips in his brain while they were holding him?
That would be hilarious.
-Carolyn
It sounds like a euphemism for something obscene. I bet it's illegal in Texas.
-Carolyn
There's a rising interest in Lovecraft, driven partially by S. T. Joshi's scholarship, and new editions of his works are being released now that Arkham House is losing some copyrights and licensing others (not to mention releasing those horrid posthumous Derleth "collaborations.") The brick and mortar Barnes & Nobel in my local mall (Hartford, CT area) usually has a respectable selection on the shelves, as did the one in my parents' hometown (southern NH), and the Borders where I went to college (central MA), and all were willing to order for me when the books weren't on the shelf. I have more trouble finding works, say, Roger Zelazny on the shelf than I do Lovecraft.
(If you haven't picked up Del Rey's "The Road to Madness," you might want to consider it. It collects a lot of Lovecraft's lesser-known pieces.)
-Carolyn
"I want a game where I can get in a shouting match with a character in the game - real Gene Hackman or Al Pacino business is what I'm talking about here."
Are you certain you want to lose arguments to video game characters? They'll have scriptwriters. You won't.
-Carolyn
I can't load the article, since the site is already on its knees from the slashdotting. If he really feels all that guilty, I guess he can consider it penance.
I like that OS X is simple and sleek and useable. Linux-style tinkering is fun, but I don't want to be forced to do it. I'm just a hobbyist, so often the learning curve is so steep as to be frustrating. And I'm not in college anymore, so I can't just stick my head into the hallway and get tech support, either. I have a shiny new harddrive waiting for an OS, on which I plan to install a Linux distro, but my lovely iBook is going to stay my primary computer. I don't understand why I should feel guilty...is it that Apple isn't releasing the source to OS X? Aren't they under the BSD license, making it okay?
(Mini-Ask-Slashdot: Any distro recommendations for a new user lacking a background in this stuff? I'm leaning toward Knoppix, because it's fun to say. Knoppix. Knoppix. Knoppix.)
-Carolyn
I was suggesting that plasma could be formed on the skin of very fast aircraft, perhaps being triggered by static in an atmosphere that is a) already very hot, and b)electrically charged.
That's certainly not how I read it. You seemed to me to be equating ions with plasma. My apologies for the misinterpretation.
On that same vein, plasma cutters utelize a pilot arc to ionize gas. It's not that far of a jump to say that an aircraft generating a few hundred Amps of static electricity could cause gas to ionize in the same way. For a point of referance, a modern plasma cutter can create about 20k F temperatures on standard 40 Amp 140 volts.... That's a mere 5600 watts, compared to what work the atmosphere is doing to slow down a space shuttle it's miniscule.
Assuming the fuselage has picked up a charge, what would generate a discharge on the aircraft? There's no path to ground. An arc from wingtip to body, assuming uneven distribution of charge? Arc to the surrounding atmosphere, maybe? That would certainly ionize the air along the path, but...what of it? Planes are often struck by lightning, and continue to fly afterwards, since the current flows through the fuselage. If a discharge blew a tile off the leading edge of the shuttle's wing, then it could cause a failure like that of the Columbia...but I'm unconvinced that such a discharge is likely to occur.
Now that I'm at home where I have access to my aero textbooks, I looked up the hypersonic flow regime, and the primary problem is radiative heat transfer. No mention of electrical discharge.
-Carolyn
Parent poster is operating under a series of faulty assumptions and applying some bad reasoning.
When you've got an object traveling very vast what happens? What happens when you move your feet across the carpet? Static electricity. What is static? Electrons stripped from one object to another.
Static charge accumulates when loosely-held valance electrons transfer from less to more electonegative atoms. (Electronegativity is a measure of an atom's tendency to attract electrons.) It is analagous but not identical to dissociation, which occurs in plasma formation. Dissociation is the complete stripping of electrons from the nucleus, even the tightly-held inner shell electrons, which do not transfer when you shock someone by scuffing your feet on the rug. Dissociation, especially of diatomic gases such as O2 and N2, the major components of the atmosphere, requires immense amounts of energy. N2, for example, dissociates around 9000K (~16,000 deg F). For comparison, graphite vaporizes at about 6000K (~10,000 deg F).
Static can be a huge problem in pipes that move large amounts of non-polar fluids. Guess what most gasses in the upper atmosphere are? Non-polar fluids. So, there is your ionized high velocity, high temperature gas. Plasma.
I don't know alot about the shuttle's design, but I'd guess that if you talked with some NASA aerospace engineers they'd confirm this phenomenon. It's got to be a factor with all very fast aircraft.
Static charge is not plasma. Plasma requires complete ionization, and static doesn't even come close.
Static is not a problem insofar as flight mechanics are concerned. It may be a factor for avionics, as much as it is for any electrical system, but that is outside my area of experience.
-Carolyn
I can never think of anything sufficiently scathing to say when somebody busts out a generalization like the OP. He had a decent point, too, so it's a pity it got lost behind the idiocy.
-Carolyn
My parents live out in the boonies of New England and have satellite internet (not DirecWay.) Latency problems, already pretty noticeable (those damn' radio waves sure drag their feet getting out and back), get worse with bad weather, and forget about connecting to anything in heavy rain or snow, especially if snow accumulates in the dish. I imagine the snow thing could be a problem for Taco out there in Michigan.
Other posters don't seem to have problems with DirecTV and weather, so maybe it's just my parents' service. Taco, if you're going to go with it, make sure the dish is somewhere you can reach it with a broomhandle or something to knock some of the snow and icicles off (and preferably make sure you have several children to send out to do it for you.)
Also, birds built a nest in the neighbors' dish. Don't know if it affected their service, though.
-Carolyn
I can be cynical all by myself. I don't need your help. *sigh* How about this...Windows-esque forced "upgrades" to each new console generation. "Dear PS5 Owner: We're sending the deactivation code to all your games, since the PS5 games license is being revoked in favor of our new PS6. We're sure you'll like the new versions of our classic games better. Because you've been such a good customer, we're giving you a 10% discount e-voucher, good at our online storefront. Thank you for gaming with Sony!"
I don't want to be forced into a cycle of buying new hardware every few years. Come to think of it...I'm so bad at anything requiring timing or eye-hand coordination that I'll *still* be trying to beat SMB3 when I'm 50. Ha! Joke's on them! I'll never upgrade again!
-Carolyn
What about used games? There are a lot of games I wouldn't pay $50 for, but might try if I saw in the used bin. I know it doesn't generate any revenue for the studios, but if they're going to claim that they care about their customers, they have to acknowledge that used games are a part of the market. High school kids, for example, can't afford all the new releases.
And what about games for old or discontinued systems? (I loves me some Dreamcast.) How would you manage to resell games for an out-of-date system if they're all stored on the console itself?
Besides, having a physical medium lets me hurl something across the room when I realize what utter crap the game I just bought is.
-Carolyn
...and it's a press release, so there's not much actual information in there. Apparently, a chain of small quakes tends to precede larger ones, but I want to know whether the team has a model of why this is so. Matching patterns is the place to start, but saying "there's going be a quake between 5 and 6 on the Richter scale inside this 1000 mile radius within 9 months" is like saying "there's going to be a blizzard that drops between 6 and 12 inches of snow on New England this winter." You can get either of those predictions by watching long enough, but they don't have real value to people in the affected area. I hope the UCLA team is not working solely from observation, but has built or is working toward building a physical model that they can refine as they get more data.
-Carolyn
I'd much rather see a kid playing with blocks or lego than with most of the electronic toys nowadays. For one thing, they're far quieter...
My mother encouraged us to play with Legos because she thought it was better and more "family-oriented" than television. This lasted until the next Christmas, when my brother and I received 4 or 5 big Lego sets apiece, and within and hour were banished to our rooms when playing with them. There aren't a lot of household sounds louder than a bin of Legos being dumped out onto the floor and rifled through (except maybe the sound of Dad stepping on a stray 2x2).
-Carolyn
TI likes to sell its calculators as (among other things) data collectors. The USB interface would presumably be used as an easier way to upload to the computer. Think high school physics classes.
Hmm, didn't even think of the uses in labs. TI ought to get together with NI (makers of LabVIEW), and release a school DAQ package. (Of course, in my day, we ran physics labs with a piece of string and a ruler, and we liked it that way! Sometimes we got a stopwatch, and once, when we were really good, the teacher let us use an Apple II! Kids today are soft!)
Oh, and yeah, a high school student would be allowed to use one. I was still in high school when the TI-89 came out; I was allowed to use one (although maybe not on calculus tests - its been a while). I was allowed to use it on the AP Calculus test, strangely enough.
In class, we couldn't use anything that could handle symbolic differentiation/integration, hence my wondering. I don't remember about the AP test; I didn't pay attention to which calculators weren't allowed because my mighty 85 was okay for everything. I hope the rules change to disallow the 86 and higher on the AP. Really, I'd like to see less use of calculators in math classes, period. It's a disservice to students that the calculators do the work for them. You don't learn the Tao of calculus punching numbers. I'm not just being crotchety because I didn't have a calculator that cool--understanding the way math works is so much more necessary for learning to think than getting the right answers is, even if it's the other way around for grades and placement testing.
For physics and chemistry, though, you can take my 85 and its unit conversion functions away from me when you pry it out of my cold, dead hands.
-Carolyn
I don't think I'll be upgrading from my trusty TI-85. It has been dropped, kicked, and occasionally drop-kicked regularly for the past 10 years and still works perfectly. (I guess this is a plug for the 85...do they even still make it?) I have a 93 which mostly sits in a drawer. Whenever I've considered using it, I've realized that I'd be better served by a computer with a math package--bigger display, easier input, more flexible software, faster processing. So, what is the point of a 15 mHz calculator, or a USB-capable one? You don't need something like that in high school (would a student even be allowed to use one?), and you have better resources in college and in the working world.
Bet you could write some great games for these uber-calculators, though (there were already good games available for the 83/85/86/89 when I was in high school.) Which would have been all the reason I would have needed to get one, had they existed back when I needed something to keep me awake through AP Calc.
-Carolyn
The company I work for, while incorporated in the US (for tax benefits and defense contracts, y'know), has the bulk of its employees in Bangalore. I, fortunately, have not had to work with the Bangalore office, since my work export control, meaning that foreign nationals can't work on it without special permission from the State Department. My coworkers on civilian projects, however, dread having to work with India. I'm not certain how much of it can be blamed on the Indian engineers themselves, and how much is the fault of poor communication, but all I ever hear about Bangalore is how often work needs to be sent back to be redone, and how inconvenient the time difference is.
...I had a point when I started writing this.
Do the company savings on salary and benefits make up for having to redraw a set of design prints five or six times? I don't know. I do know it runs the American engineers ragged and frustrates our customers when there's a schedule delay. The interface between the US and India is the real rough spot, I think. I know that purely internal work in both countries goes smoothly, but not being able to use our huge labor pool in India is hurting the American side of the business. Maybe I'm able to look at things dispassionately because my job isn't going overseas, but I *want* international outsourcing to work...and it's a rough start for my company. We need to overcome language and cultural barriers (any American who thinks Indian English and American English are the same dialect has never spoken to an Indian) and establish some actual communication between the continents, instead of throwing a set of design requirements into the ether and expecting the Magic Overseas Engineers to sprinkle some pixie dust and suddenly have a working set of engineering drawings.
Is it different for IT work? I don't think coming up with design requirements for a program and then implementing them is a fundamentally different process than for a jet engine.
On the other hand, the broken English of the company newsletter is occasionally hilarious.
-Carolyn
I, Robot is largely a series of short stories centering around logic puzzles...Susan Calvin and Powell and Donovan figuring out what's wrong with robots by reasoning from the Three Laws. The only story in the book with a real human element is Robbie, and the robot in that one can't even talk. I think the only relation this movie is going to bear to an Asimov work is the title. That's not necessarily a bad thing. (And then I remember Bicentennial Man. Well, kind of, because it was utterly forgettable.) Anyway, much as I like his books, I don't think any of them would transfer well to the screen. Too much brain, not enough gut.
-Carolyn
Also, how will the satellite "catch" its targets?You can't just step on the accelerator to catch up to something, because increasing your orbital velocity increases your altitude. To go "up", you have to accelerate forward, to go "down", you have to accelerate backward, and I still don't fully understand what happens when you accelerate in some direction outside your orbital path!
You sum the vectors of the current velocity and the delta v (that is, change in velocity caused by thrust), and the new vector shows what the spacecraft will be doing after a burn. They don't have to be orthagonal. (This is for conventional propulsion, which uses quick bursts of thrust, instead of the continual thrust of an ion engine. The same fundamental relationship applies to constant thrust trajectories, but the math for ion engines is nastier, and ties up fast computers for many hours.)
The thing to remember is, more velocity = more energy = higher orbit. Cancelling velocity by applying a velocity vector antiparallel to a spacecraft's current vector (tangent to the orbital path at any given instant) will decrease the KE of the spacecraft, moving it to a lower-energy orbit, and vice versa. That is the most efficient way to apply thrust, but sometimes the positioning of the engines is such that the thrust has both parallel and orthagonal components, and the orthagonal component is essentially wasted, not contributing to the useful delta v.
So to catch something in orbit, you study the orbit of the satellite you want to catch. Then, you plan to apply the thrust so that your orbit and its orbit will intersect at some point in the future. This is how spacecraft get to places like Mars. The mission designers take into account the motion of Earth and Mars around the Sun, then aim the craft at that specific point in empty space where Mars will be when the spacecraft makes it out to that distance from the Sun.
When you apply thrust outside the orbital path in that pesky third dimension that I didn't mention earlier, it results in an inclination change, that is, a change in the angle of the orbital path with respect to the equator. An orbit at 0 deg is in the same plane as the equator. An orbit at 5 deg is "tipped." Plane changes are expensive in terms of fuel, and it's usually best to do them during launch, at the lowest possible altitude.
All this is facinating, but boy, does it make my head spin...
Hee. Was that an orbit joke? Anyway, now you know how I feel about programming more complicated than FORTRAN DO loops.
-Carolyn
I doubt very much that there is a significant amount of iron/steel in a typical satelite.
;P
Oh, so you boggle at that, but not at the image of an AlNiCo horseshoe magnet the size of a Greyhound bus? Neener.
(You're right, though. S'all about the Ti, baby.)
-Carolyn
Hmmm... figuring out the optimal set of manuveurs to catch a set of debris objects that are all in different orbits would be very tricky.
I'm picturing it towing a huge red horsehoe magnet on a string, with all kinds of dead satellites stuck to it.
Really, while it's nice in concept to talk about cleaning up Earth orbit, the real danger is from the bits we can't even find, never mind capture, like paint chips. Sure, they only mass a few grams, but get a few grams travelling at a few km/s in one direction, and a spacecraft travelling a few km/s in the other, then do the math to find out the total kinetic energy of the system. (Hint: KE = 0.5 * m * v^2) Fortunately, space is big, but we're still doing our best to clutter it up, especially in LEO.
What we need is a satellite with a really big version of one of those pool skimmer thingies.
-Carolyn
I really like Speakeasy, but it can be a pain getting the local telco to allow them to hook up your service. Verizon jerked me around for almost a month before I got my Speakeasy DSL when I was in college. Some companies won't let Speakeasy use their lines at all, like SBC in my area. Common carriers hate being edged out by contract carriers.
-Carolyn
Ooh! Someone else has heard of De Profundis! Truly the most Lovecraftian game out there. My college graduation present from one of my correspondants was a fountain pen, the better to chronicle my descent into madness. I haven't decided quite how it's going to happen yet.
Also...Eyrie? I know those guys.
-Carolyn
Imagine you're, oh, 10, maybe 11 years old. Your mom bought you a copy of Podkayne of Mars (the Baen choose-the-ending version), which you've just finished reading. You go to the local library to look up more books by this "Heinlein" guy, and find a shelf full. Which do you pick? The huge trade paperpack with a lush illustration on the cover, of course. It happens to be Number of the Beast, and it's only the second Heinlein book you've ever read, and it's so much better than the Star Trek paperbacks you've been reading that it permanently warps your mind.
Objectively, rereading NotB now, I can realize that it's just plain not up to spec, but I have happy childhood memories about it. Ditto for I Will Fear No Evil. (It's kinda like He-Man that way.)
-Carolyn
Then perhaps the training needs to be changed to include visual inspections. Looking over a wing should be far easier than repairing a satellite. An exterior examination during every mission does not seem unreasonable for our highly trained space travelers. If a tethered astronaut makes a navigation mistake, what's the problem?
It's certainly possible, and NASA may even be thinking about it. But every EVA raises the overall risk and cost of the mission. Even if it's something NASA eventually goes with, it's not as simple and straightforward a solution as the OP implied. And repairs in space are tricky, to say the least. If a spacewalk did find damage, there's a good chance that there would be nothing the astronauts could do about it. One of the points I remember being raised during the Columbia investigation was that, even if the damage to the tiles had been detected, the crew was still dead--they would just have known about their fate in advance, which I find to be immensely creepy.
-Carolyn
In referring to LotR, I was speaking not of the books, but of the movies, which, in addition to being a fairly-faithful, well-realized version of the story, also have "blockbuster" written all over them. Sure, Jackson was working from great source material, but he was also shooting a big-budget movie trilogy. And that's what's gone mainstream, not the original Tolkien.
;P I read The Silmarillion before I read Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit, and loved it. Can I have my Nerd Card back now?
Sorry I didn't make that clear; I was relying on parallelism with the Matrix reference.
The origins (and the circumstances/motivation under which they were written) of these disparate trilogies are completely different and no self-respecting nerd would lump them together.
Oh, get out.
As a proud nerd, I feel it's my obligation to point this out. LOTR is an icon of nerd'ness, but the Matrix is today's FX flavor of the week.
I always figured the writers of The Matrix had just played a bunch of CP2020 or Shadowrun before starting on the script. The main characters are so Solos/Street Samurai in the Matrix scenes, and so Deckers outside. That's pretty nerdy.
Or maybe I'm just projecting.
-Carolyn