It's also worth noting that Francis Crick wished to give Rosalind Franklin greater credit, but didn't due to the personality conflicts between Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin:
Moreover, she became great close friends with Watson and with Crick. But sheâ(TM)s unlikelyâ"if in fact she felt they had stolen her discovery. She must have known that they were using her data because there were no other dataâ"her data are acknowledged in Crickâ(TM)s paper. And again, in the second paper he published in Nature a month later. What prevented Crick from giving a much fairer acknowledgment to Rosalind Franklin in the original Nature paper, which he wished to do, was that he to negotiate this with Wilkins.
So in his original draft is, he says, "We thank Rosalind Franklin for her beautiful uh photo of DNA," which makes quite clear that this was what he was relying on. Now, at Wilkinsâ(TM) suggestion he crossed out the phrase "beautiful photo." So it was not an adequate acknowledgment but it was a very different story than stealing her discovery, which is the way it has been portrayed.
Elkin: Nicholas, you are absolutely right. There was an earlier, more accurate acknowledgment. It wasnâ(TM)t to Franklin, it was to Wilkins and Franklin and it did say "very beautiful photographs" which only meant Franklinâ(TM)s. And Wilkins was the one who crossed it out. There are actually six drafts. Very interesting to see that.
And also to see how weak, false, even the first two or three were, before Wilkins got it to decimate it more compared to the draft they wrote about the first model, where they very very clearly acknowledged Franklin.
I really hate when people take that "Why build one when you can build two for twice the price" quote from the film adaptation of Contact and try to be clever by quoting it as if it had any bearing on reality. In the real world, the per-unit cost of building multiples of the same thing in parallel costs considerably less than building a one-off.
Although I'm hopeful about the concept, I'm suspicious until the full text of the bill is released. Considering the proponents of the bill, I wouldn't be surprised if this ends up being a thinly-veiled way to protect particular pork projects, worded in such a way that it could only be used to keep projects like SLS from being cancelled while being of limited applicability to other NASA projects. After all, after the Falcon Heavy starts launching, locking SLS into a multi-year procurement contract is probably going to be the only way to keep money funneling towards SLS contractors.
Also, from what I've been able to read online so far, NASA (along with the DOD and Coast Guard) already have some multi-year procurement capability, bit can't use it where there's significant technical risk. With NASA technical risk usually means cost-plus contracts, and cost-plus contracts combined with multi-year procurement is potentially very bad, depending on how the bill is worded.
Sometimes NASA needs the flexibility to cancel contracts though, especially when a project goes drastically overbudget or is realized to be a bad investment. If this bill had been passed a few years ago, NASA would quite likely still be wasting a large chunk of its budget trying to get the Ares 1 rocket ready to launch in ~2014.
Right-wing stupidity is strong today. Must be something in the water supply.
Just to be clear, you do realize that it's predominantly the right-wingers in Congress who've been most opposed to NASA's commercial crew program, and the left-wingers who've been in favor of it?
For anybody who wants to read the actual interview article with Bolden instead of just relying on MarkWhittington's distorted Yahoo summary, you can find the interview here:
The submission and at least one of the linked articles are just silly "OMG CHINA" rabble-rousing in an attempt to justify the diversion of NASA resources from commercial providers like SpaceX towards giant white elephants like the SLS heavy-lift rocket (and the legacy contractors behind it). I've yet to see any evidence that China's supposed plans for a heavy-lift rocket are anything more than sketches from dreamy engineers, without any actual funding behind them; if anything other non-existent heavy-lift rockets like SpaceX's Falcon XX have more progress behind them.
If anything, indications so far suggest that China's space exploration plans involve the more sensible approach of assembling exploration modules in space, instead of building rarely-used mega-rockets that launch everything up at once.
Yup, the head of the House Appropriations CJS subcommittee in charge of NASA, Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va) actually attached a clause to NASA's funding bill last year that explicitly prohibits any NASA collaboration with China. Of course, this was the same Rep. Wolf who raised a media ruckus back in 1995 when he demanded that the Clinton administration investigate claims that human fetuses were being sold in China as a health food.
That's some pretty impressive fearmongering on the part of the Environment Texas group, but if you read the actual letter from the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department you'll see their supposed "objections" are actually fairly minor concerns and recommendations that they'd like SpaceX to address. If anything they're as concerned or more concerned about litter from the up to 10,000 spectators that might go to see launches than they are about the complex itself.
Environment Texas also pointed out the risk the project poses to the south Texas economy. According to a 2011 Texas A&M study, nature tourism generates about $300 million a year in the Rio Grande Valley, created 4,407 full- and part-time jobs and $2.6 million in sales taxes and $7.26 million in hotel taxes. The Rio Grande Valley has been named the number two destination in North America for birdwatching and attracts visitors from all over the world to view almost 500 species of bird.
It isn't apparent from this snippet, but the Rio Grande Valley isn't some tiny valley that will be entirely dominated by SpaceX moving there. The Rio Grande Valley is actually a gigantic area composed of 4 entire counties and over 20,000 square miles. SpaceX is interested in a plot of land on the edge of that valley that occupies much less than a square mile, and will be firing its rockets (powered by oxygen and kerosene) out over the ocean.
Brownsville itself is super excited about SpaceX potentially moving there, and I suspect few if any of the people involved with this "Environment Texas" group actually live in Brownsville.
"This weekâ(TM)s successful launch and delivery of logistics supplies to the International Space Station by a U.S. commercial space company reminds us that where the entrepreneurial interests of the private sector are aligned with NASAâ(TM)s mission to explore, America wins. Falcon 9â(TM)s maiden flight to ISS â" and the other commercial space launches that lie ahead â" represent the dawn of a new era in space exploration. Nearly 43 years after we first walked on the moon, we have taken another step in demonstrating continued American leadership in space."
SpaceX intends to replace NASA in the "Moving stuff into space" department, AFAIK. I have never heard that SpaceX has any interest in building and running science probes to Pluto, or gamma ray telescopes or climate monitoring satellites
That said, SpaceX is actually collaborating with NASA Ames to potentially Dragon as a low-cost means of delivering science payloads to Mars:
Their first step is to mine water and air and other materials to sell to NASA in orbit..
Actually, from their website, their first step is to create a fleet of assembly-line space-based telescopes, which will start launching in 18-24 months. In addition to scouting for asteroids, the telescopes will be licensed/sold for both astronomical and ground observation for a few million each. Over time they'll be producing incrementally-upgraded versions with the capability to chase down asteroids, survey other locations in the solar system, and eventually perform sample return missions. Even if the company never reaches the point of asteroid mining, their Arkyd series of telescopes/probes looks like a big (and potentially profitable) game-changer for planetary exploration and orbital monitoring.
Coincidentally, it looks like Planetary Resources (a new company backed by several well-known billionaires) is going to formally announce tomorrow their plans to launch 2-5 orbital telescopes in the next 18-24 months. The primary of the telescopes will be to look for near-Earth asteroids to mine, although this will of course also be useful for detecting potentially-dangerous asteroids. They also plan on selling orbital telescopes at a cost of a few million dollars each, which is cheap enough that you could probably get a decent planetary protection effort going on Kickstarter.;)
Jorge actually explained this at our screening's Q/A. They are all actual graduate students. In fact, I am not sure exactly who wasn't a grad student but the vast majority of the film including camera operators, editors, sound etc are all grad students.
Yup, if I recall correctly all of the PhD student characters were actually played by Caltech PhD students, except for the 'Nameless Grad Student' who was played by a Caltech undergrad. I actually had a minor speaking/dancing role in the film myself.:)
I was pretty surprised by the low number as well, but it's possible that they're currently only planning on doing equatorial and low-inclination launches from there. Polar and high-inclination launches will probably still be from Vandenberg AFB and Cape Canaveral. I suppose it's also potentially easier to get a permit for a lower flight rate for now, and then ask for a separate permit for the increased flight rate at a later date.
Execution is a legal killing carried out by a government as in the case of capital punishment. The victim was brutally murdered, not executed (executions are by the way illegal in the EU).
Execution-style murder, also known as Chicago-style murder, and execution-style killing are news media buzzwords applied to various acts of criminal murder where the perpetrator kills at close range a conscious victim who is under the complete physical control of the assailant and who has been left with no course of resistance or escape.
His plan sounds a lot like Robert Zubrin's Mars Direct plan detailed in The Case for Mars
Robert Zubrin actually had a piece in the Wall Street Journal last year where he described how to adapt his Mars Direct plan to use SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rockets.
Nothing in this plan is beyond our current technology, and the costs would not be excessive. Falcon-9 Heavy launches are priced at about $100 million each, and Dragons are cheaper. With this approach, we could send expeditions to Mars at half the cost to launch a Space Shuttle flight.
This 60 Minutes piece on SpaceX from last weekend shows videos of Dragon capsules under construction at 4:50, video of the exterior of the capsule they returned from orbit at 10:08, and video of the interior at 10:50.
Speaking for myself, my boardgame nights' male/female ratio is very close to 50/50.
Similar results here. I occasionally host board game nights, mostly made up of PhD students at a well-known tech school, and my most recent one had 5 women and 3 men. Of course most of our gamers are also dancers, which explains part of the gender ratio.;)
Slashdot Mirror
It's also worth noting that Francis Crick wished to give Rosalind Franklin greater credit, but didn't due to the personality conflicts between Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin:
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2010/11/03/rosalind-franklin-and-dna-how-wronged-was-she/
Moreover, she became great close friends with Watson and with Crick. But sheâ(TM)s unlikelyâ"if in fact she felt they had stolen her discovery. She must have known that they were using her data because there were no other dataâ"her data are acknowledged in Crickâ(TM)s paper. And again, in the second paper he published in Nature a month later. What prevented Crick from giving a much fairer acknowledgment to Rosalind Franklin in the original Nature paper, which he wished to do, was that he to negotiate this with Wilkins.
So in his original draft is, he says, "We thank Rosalind Franklin for her beautiful uh photo of DNA," which makes quite clear that this was what he was relying on. Now, at Wilkinsâ(TM) suggestion he crossed out the phrase "beautiful photo." So it was not an adequate acknowledgment but it was a very different story than stealing her discovery, which is the way it has been portrayed.
Elkin: Nicholas, you are absolutely right. There was an earlier, more accurate acknowledgment. It wasnâ(TM)t to Franklin, it was to Wilkins and Franklin and it did say "very beautiful photographs" which only meant Franklinâ(TM)s. And Wilkins was the one who crossed it out. There are actually six drafts. Very interesting to see that.
And also to see how weak, false, even the first two or three were, before Wilkins got it to decimate it more compared to the draft they wrote about the first model, where they very very clearly acknowledged Franklin.
I really hate when people take that "Why build one when you can build two for twice the price" quote from the film adaptation of Contact and try to be clever by quoting it as if it had any bearing on reality. In the real world, the per-unit cost of building multiples of the same thing in parallel costs considerably less than building a one-off.
A simpler solution is to verify if the image has slightly alterations over time, or to require that the person to blink or do any other thing.
Android 4.1 (Jellybean) has a "liveness check" which requires an eyeblink to unlock:
http://www.androidpolice.com/2012/06/29/jelly-beans-face-unlock-asks-you-to-blink-for-the-camera-locks-out-after-several-failed-attempts/
Although I'm hopeful about the concept, I'm suspicious until the full text of the bill is released. Considering the proponents of the bill, I wouldn't be surprised if this ends up being a thinly-veiled way to protect particular pork projects, worded in such a way that it could only be used to keep projects like SLS from being cancelled while being of limited applicability to other NASA projects. After all, after the Falcon Heavy starts launching, locking SLS into a multi-year procurement contract is probably going to be the only way to keep money funneling towards SLS contractors.
Also, from what I've been able to read online so far, NASA (along with the DOD and Coast Guard) already have some multi-year procurement capability, bit can't use it where there's significant technical risk. With NASA technical risk usually means cost-plus contracts, and cost-plus contracts combined with multi-year procurement is potentially very bad, depending on how the bill is worded.
Sometimes NASA needs the flexibility to cancel contracts though, especially when a project goes drastically overbudget or is realized to be a bad investment. If this bill had been passed a few years ago, NASA would quite likely still be wasting a large chunk of its budget trying to get the Ares 1 rocket ready to launch in ~2014.
Right-wing stupidity is strong today. Must be something in the water supply.
Just to be clear, you do realize that it's predominantly the right-wingers in Congress who've been most opposed to NASA's commercial crew program, and the left-wingers who've been in favor of it?
For anybody who wants to read the actual interview article with Bolden instead of just relying on MarkWhittington's distorted Yahoo summary, you can find the interview here:
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/space/story/2012-08-01/NASA-mars-rover/56656270/1
Really? When was the last time a random crazy killed more than 5 people with something other than a gun?
6th victim, driver in Dutch parade attack die
The submission and at least one of the linked articles are just silly "OMG CHINA" rabble-rousing in an attempt to justify the diversion of NASA resources from commercial providers like SpaceX towards giant white elephants like the SLS heavy-lift rocket (and the legacy contractors behind it). I've yet to see any evidence that China's supposed plans for a heavy-lift rocket are anything more than sketches from dreamy engineers, without any actual funding behind them; if anything other non-existent heavy-lift rockets like SpaceX's Falcon XX have more progress behind them.
If anything, indications so far suggest that China's space exploration plans involve the more sensible approach of assembling exploration modules in space, instead of building rarely-used mega-rockets that launch everything up at once.
Yup, the head of the House Appropriations CJS subcommittee in charge of NASA, Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va) actually attached a clause to NASA's funding bill last year that explicitly prohibits any NASA collaboration with China. Of course, this was the same Rep. Wolf who raised a media ruckus back in 1995 when he demanded that the Clinton administration investigate claims that human fetuses were being sold in China as a health food.
That's some pretty impressive fearmongering on the part of the Environment Texas group, but if you read the actual letter from the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department you'll see their supposed "objections" are actually fairly minor concerns and recommendations that they'd like SpaceX to address. If anything they're as concerned or more concerned about litter from the up to 10,000 spectators that might go to see launches than they are about the complex itself.
Environment Texas also pointed out the risk the project poses to the south Texas economy. According to a 2011 Texas A&M study, nature tourism generates about $300 million a year in the Rio Grande Valley, created 4,407 full- and part-time jobs and $2.6 million in sales taxes and $7.26 million in hotel taxes. The Rio Grande Valley has been named the number two destination in North America for birdwatching and attracts visitors from all over the world to view almost 500 species of bird.
It isn't apparent from this snippet, but the Rio Grande Valley isn't some tiny valley that will be entirely dominated by SpaceX moving there. The Rio Grande Valley is actually a gigantic area composed of 4 entire counties and over 20,000 square miles. SpaceX is interested in a plot of land on the edge of that valley that occupies much less than a square mile, and will be firing its rockets (powered by oxygen and kerosene) out over the ocean.
Brownsville itself is super excited about SpaceX potentially moving there, and I suspect few if any of the people involved with this "Environment Texas" group actually live in Brownsville.
Modeling isn't a instrument, its closer to guessing.
"All models are wrong, but some are useful. -- George E. P. Box
I thought this comment from Buzz Aldrin was pretty cool:
http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/05/25/11881043-space-milestone-sparks-high-praise?lite
"This weekâ(TM)s successful launch and delivery of logistics supplies to the International Space Station by a U.S. commercial space company reminds us that where the entrepreneurial interests of the private sector are aligned with NASAâ(TM)s mission to explore, America wins. Falcon 9â(TM)s maiden flight to ISS â" and the other commercial space launches that lie ahead â" represent the dawn of a new era in space exploration. Nearly 43 years after we first walked on the moon, we have taken another step in demonstrating continued American leadership in space."
SpaceX intends to replace NASA in the "Moving stuff into space" department, AFAIK. I have never heard that SpaceX has any interest in building and running science probes to Pluto, or gamma ray telescopes or climate monitoring satellites
That said, SpaceX is actually collaborating with NASA Ames to potentially Dragon as a low-cost means of delivering science payloads to Mars:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Dragon_mission
Giant leap toward the future of manned space flight? Did they invent space rockets or space ships?
Henry Ford didn't invent the automobile, he just made it cost-effective.
Their first step is to mine water and air and other materials to sell to NASA in orbit..
Actually, from their website, their first step is to create a fleet of assembly-line space-based telescopes, which will start launching in 18-24 months. In addition to scouting for asteroids, the telescopes will be licensed/sold for both astronomical and ground observation for a few million each. Over time they'll be producing incrementally-upgraded versions with the capability to chase down asteroids, survey other locations in the solar system, and eventually perform sample return missions. Even if the company never reaches the point of asteroid mining, their Arkyd series of telescopes/probes looks like a big (and potentially profitable) game-changer for planetary exploration and orbital monitoring.
Coincidentally, it looks like Planetary Resources (a new company backed by several well-known billionaires) is going to formally announce tomorrow their plans to launch 2-5 orbital telescopes in the next 18-24 months. The primary of the telescopes will be to look for near-Earth asteroids to mine, although this will of course also be useful for detecting potentially-dangerous asteroids. They also plan on selling orbital telescopes at a cost of a few million dollars each, which is cheap enough that you could probably get a decent planetary protection effort going on Kickstarter. ;)
http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/04/23/11339522-billionaire-backed-asteroid-mining-venture-starts-with-space-telescopes
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/04/planetary-resources-asteroid-mining/
Jorge actually explained this at our screening's Q/A. They are all actual graduate students. In fact, I am not sure exactly who wasn't a grad student but the vast majority of the film including camera operators, editors, sound etc are all grad students.
Yup, if I recall correctly all of the PhD student characters were actually played by Caltech PhD students, except for the 'Nameless Grad Student' who was played by a Caltech undergrad. I actually had a minor speaking/dancing role in the film myself. :)
I was pretty surprised by the low number as well, but it's possible that they're currently only planning on doing equatorial and low-inclination launches from there. Polar and high-inclination launches will probably still be from Vandenberg AFB and Cape Canaveral. I suppose it's also potentially easier to get a permit for a lower flight rate for now, and then ask for a separate permit for the increased flight rate at a later date.
Execution is a legal killing carried out by a government as in the case of capital punishment. The victim was brutally murdered, not executed (executions are by the way illegal in the EU).
I believe the common term is "execution-style murder".
Execution-style murder, also known as Chicago-style murder, and execution-style killing are news media buzzwords applied to various acts of criminal murder where the perpetrator kills at close range a conscious victim who is under the complete physical control of the assailant and who has been left with no course of resistance or escape.
His plan sounds a lot like Robert Zubrin's Mars Direct plan detailed in The Case for Mars
Robert Zubrin actually had a piece in the Wall Street Journal last year where he described how to adapt his Mars Direct plan to use SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rockets.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703730804576317493923993056.html
Nothing in this plan is beyond our current technology, and the costs would not be excessive. Falcon-9 Heavy launches are priced at about $100 million each, and Dragons are cheaper. With this approach, we could send expeditions to Mars at half the cost to launch a Space Shuttle flight.
This 60 Minutes piece on SpaceX from last weekend shows videos of Dragon capsules under construction at 4:50, video of the exterior of the capsule they returned from orbit at 10:08, and video of the interior at 10:50.
Speaking for myself, my boardgame nights' male/female ratio is very close to 50/50.
Similar results here. I occasionally host board game nights, mostly made up of PhD students at a well-known tech school, and my most recent one had 5 women and 3 men. Of course most of our gamers are also dancers, which explains part of the gender ratio. ;)
Also, to your knowledge, how many males claimed to get laid, and of those how many were verifiable (to any extent)?
Hint: The fact that you're asking this question is possibly a part of the explanation for why women tend to not attend your board game events.