> First, he argues: 'We find an intelligent civilization and there's no way in creation we can communicate with them because they're so alien to us. We can't talk to dolphins now. In which case, we'll never know.'
On that note, there's actually an on-going project as CMU's Language Technologies Institute to create technology to allow us to communicate with dolphins.
> They are attempting to start their 'space business' by putting 20 or 30 people in space at a time, when they should really start out slow for safety's sake. What's going to happen if these companies rush to put massive numbers of people in space, forgetting about safety and we have another Challenger or Columbia, but this time with civilians, and more of them? The industry really needs to slow down, or else we are in for a terrible tragedy.
As far as I've seen so far, none of the X Prize contestants are planning on carrying anywhere near 20-30 people. Indeed, I believe the plan is to stick with one person at a time (or unmanned, in the case of Armadillo Aerospace), scaling up to the three required for the X Prize when they're confident in the hardware.
So with something like the Concorde, I can certainly see why a short flight time would be good -- you want to get from point A to point B quickly. With these vehicles, though, the launches and landings are in the same place.
I would actually think that one would be more interested in having longer flight times, rather than shorter.
The article listed the following prize categories:
1. Fastest turn-around time
2. Maximum number of passengers carried in one flight
3. Total number of passengers carried during the entire X Prize Cup event
4. Maximum altitude attained
5. Fastest flight time from take-off to landing
Overall I think this is an excellent idea, but some of the prize categories seem to be... interesting choices. Take for example number 2, "Maximum number of passengers carried in one flight." I instantly have a mental image of dozens of people being packed like sardines into a spacecraft, and the horrible tragedy and PR fiasco which would occur if something went wrong. Having a category like that really doesn't seem like a hot idea.
There's also number 5, "Fastest flight time from take-off to landing." Is this really that interesting a problem? I can't see any connection to potential commercial applications. It seems like it would be more a measure of how much acceleration the human occupants could tolerate than anything else.
I've personally found blogs to be an invaluable tool for keeping in contact with my friends, and let them know about interesting events and organize get-togethers. This will be even more useful after our impending graduation, allowing us to keep up with each others' lives while being scattered across the country.
> Greenhouse gases are far easier to deal with than radioactive waste. Gases like carbon dioxide can be offset by things like trees. Nothing can offset radioactivity, you are stuck with it for millennia.
I actually wasn't thinking about greenhouse gases at all, but now that you mention it, that's another environmental hazard that you don't have to worry about with nuclear power. I was actually thinking about the radioactive isotypes which occur naturally in coal and get released into the atmosphere when it's burned. The radiation released by coal power tends to be a good bit more than that released by nuclear power.
> Nuclear security is not as strong as you might think.
Read my sentence carefully: "Nuclear power makes a tempting terrorist target: blowing up a power station or waste transportation vehicle can easily irradiate millions of people."
Here's a nice piece, which discusses the exaggerated danger of an attack on a nuclear power plant; it's by a conservative think tank (eww!), but the logic is sound. Even if an attack were successful, it wouldn't do all that much damage. It sounds grim, but from a terrorist's perspective there are far easier ways of killing large numbers of people.
When waste is being transported, the radioactive material is already in a fairly stabilized/contained state, and an attack really wouldn't do too much to disperse it.
I actually like dams too. The thing is, they often do things like screw up wetlands and mess around with fish like salmon which have to navigate the river.
> Uranium needs to be mined, transported and processed, which requires considerable amounts of energy and destroys ecosystems.
So like coal, except with a much better cost/benefit ratio.
> Once used, nuclear waste needs to be stored. this waste has a half life of thousands of years, and it needs to be put in a place where it cannot harm anyone or anything for this period of time. Obviously we cannot plan that far ahead. Nuclear waste needs to be transported for processing (often through urban areas), and it is usually stored on-site.
Would you rather the wastes and radiation be dispersed through the atmosphere, like we have with our other fuel sources? Personally, I prefer having waste concentrated in a small container.
> Nuclear power makes a tempting terrorist target: blowing up a power station or waste transportation vehicle can easily irradiate millions of people.
Reactor facilities are strongly reinforced, making them awfully hard to blow up.
> Nuclear power stations cannot be decommissioned easily. It is cheaper to keep a station running, meaning that many old, inefficient and potentially dangerous reactors are still operational.
True, nuclear power is the only power source which explicitly factors in the cost of decommissioning and waste management, rather than implicitly leaving the financial and environmental costs to others. Could you point out some of these dangerous reactors you mentioned?
As it stands, nuclear power is the most cost effective and environmentally safe energy source that we have. It's too bad we have such an irrational fear of anything with the word "nuclear" in it.
As another person who has done research with AI and computer vision, I agree with you somewhat. We're nowhere near having an autonomous system with capabilities anywhere close to what a human, or even a very small insect, can perform.
However, AIs in space only have to perform very specific tasks. These sorts of tasks are things which AIs are already capable of, or could be made capable of with a little more effort. Here's what I could think of off-hand:
space navigation: This is the sort of thing an AI excels at. I think it's actually already been used on Deep Space 1.
surface exploration: If humans on the ground can periodically give high-level goals and destinations, the rest can be handled by a reactive or behavior-based system. After Sojourner's primary and secondary missions were over, it was switched over to a behavior-based control system (developed by Rodney Brooks' lab, I think), and autonomously wandered around the surface.
space construction: This hasn't really been done yet, although many vision problems can be alleviated by the fact that you have complete control over the materials used. Special parts can be given special colors, and one might be able to assume that all prior pieces have been accurately placed by a robot.
As noted on the web page, there's the Centennial Challenges program is organizing a workshop in Washington DC on June 15-16. You can register online (please, authentic registrations only!). This sounds like an excellent opportunity to help shape history.
Here's the blurb from the web site: To kickoff Centennial Challenges, NASA's new program of prize contests, NASA will host a workshop on June 15-16 in Washington, DC. The purpose of the workshop is to:
1. Gather ideas for Challenges,
2. Develop rules for specific Challenges and gauge competitor interest in various potential Challenges, and
3. Promote competitor teaming.
This workshop will be a key input into Centennial Challenges planning, helping to determine what specific Challenge competitions NASA announces in 2004 and 2005 and the rules of those competitions. All potential Centennial Challenge competitors, including interested members of industry, academia, students, and the general public, are invited to attend.
I figured I should probably also post a link to where you can order prints of the Spirit drawing. This makes me feel a little less bad about potentially slashdotting the artist's server.
For those who haven't seen it already, Spirit and Opportunity have LiveJournals. Spirit is a moody goth girl, while Opportunity is a perky teeny-bopper. I know I'll certainly miss them (or at least Spirit) when they're gone.
Many of the previous posters have cited the importance of math in areas like graphics, databases, etc. I heartily agree. Allow me to cite another example: computational neuroscience.
So I'm in general incredibly interested in various combinations of brain and CS studies, so last year I audited a course on computational neuroscience. This was a course which dealt with understanding neural systems from a computational perspective.
Unfortunately, my math skills are somewhat sub-par for a CS major. I somehow managed to get a 5 on the AP Calc exam, but forgot everything afterwards. This ended up hurting me significantly in the course. Although I could understand the neuroscience concepts, whenever we started with analysis my head started swimming. Modeling things like ion channels require some pretty hardcore understanding of differential equations, which I understood next to nothing about. I learned a bunch of neat facts, but without a strong mathematical background, I wasn't able to fully comprehend what was going on.
There are many other examples of my poor math knowledge causing me pain. As it stands, I'm going to be joining a PhD program to study neuro/CS stuff in the fall. Since I'm going to need to have a good grasp of things like differential equations, I'm going to be spending a lot of quality time with calculus books this summer. Being in a position like this sucks -- I really recommend learning math, regardless of what you want to do. It's amazing how often math comes up, and how much the symbolic processing skills math teaches you helps in other areas.
I totally agree with you about cognitive science. I'm finishing up degrees in comp sci and cog sci right now, and cog sci has been an amazing field to study. I've actually been so fascinated by it that after graduation I'm heading off to do a PhD in Computation & Neural Systems.
Cog sci is also probably the best possible major in terms of having neat stories to tell at parties. People just love hearing about things like the attentional study with the gorilla suit, or "the man who mistook his wife for a hat."
Lets say a spacecraft explodes. In one case you have to replace some robots and have a minor hit to PR. In the other case, you hold funerals and have an unrecoverable PR disaster.
Also, if you a room full of people on Earth, they can easily go home. The same isn't quite true in space.
Below is the text of an email I got from savethehubble.org. I agree with it completely. While I'm in general a big fan of robotic technologies and exploration, it really frustrates me that we've become a country full of risk-averse cowards, unwilling to further our knowledge if it involves even a chance of sacrifice. Never mind the fact that those who would actually be risking their lives are completely willing to take that chance. In any case, if politics keeps us from sending up a manned repair mission, I hope we'll be able to send up a robotic one.
April 24th is National Astronomy Day, and a good time to make waves on Hubble's behalf.
No logic can support the notion that while the Space Shuttle is safe enough for multiple flights to the Space Station over the next decade, it is not safe enough for even one flight to Hubble. It is disingenuous to announce bold plans for a risky manned flight to Mars while at the same time retreating from a flight to Hubble just a few hundred miles away. NASA's leadership should either defend the risk of the loss of life as justifiable given the overall benefits to mankind, or it should retreat from manned missions altogether. We can ill afford to spend another decade funding manned projects such as the Space Station and the trip to Mars, only to have them shelved when NASA realizes it has no appetite for the inherent risk. If the shuttle can not be made safe enough at any cost, then abandon it and the Space Station, and spend more resources developing a robotic solution to fix Hubble, and to launch future scientific missions. The impact of Hubble on society and the enlightening new discovery of water on Mars make it clear that for the foreseeable future there is much more to be gained, in terms of science and political capital, from robotic initiatives (Hubble is an optical robot after all) than from projects that require NASA to make the environment safe enough for a man. Let's get back to manned flights when either we as a people have decided to accept the inevitable loss of life, or at such time as we have designed a space ship that is capable of traveling at near the speed of light. Only then will the benefits outweigh the risks.
There's quite a bit of interesting stuff on this topic, dealing with consciousness from a neurobiological perspective, in Caltech professor Christof Koch's book, "The Quest for Consciousness".
The motion induced blindness demo on the website is incredibly freaky, where little yellow dots blink in and out of your consciousness as you're staring at them.
Slashdot Mirror
> First, he argues: 'We find an intelligent civilization and there's no way in creation we can communicate with them because they're so alien to us. We can't talk to dolphins now. In which case, we'll never know.'
On that note, there's actually an on-going project as CMU's Language Technologies Institute to create technology to allow us to communicate with dolphins.
> They are attempting to start their 'space business' by putting 20 or 30 people in space at a time, when they should really start out slow for safety's sake. What's going to happen if these companies rush to put massive numbers of people in space, forgetting about safety and we have another Challenger or Columbia, but this time with civilians, and more of them? The industry really needs to slow down, or else we are in for a terrible tragedy.
As far as I've seen so far, none of the X Prize contestants are planning on carrying anywhere near 20-30 people. Indeed, I believe the plan is to stick with one person at a time (or unmanned, in the case of Armadillo Aerospace), scaling up to the three required for the X Prize when they're confident in the hardware.
Wow, somebody got the smack-down...
On a rather off-topic note, I checked out EckBox, the project you mentioned in your sig. That's incredibly cool! You should post some screenshots.
So with something like the Concorde, I can certainly see why a short flight time would be good -- you want to get from point A to point B quickly. With these vehicles, though, the launches and landings are in the same place.
I would actually think that one would be more interested in having longer flight times, rather than shorter.
The article listed the following prize categories:
1. Fastest turn-around time
2. Maximum number of passengers carried in one flight
3. Total number of passengers carried during the entire X Prize Cup event
4. Maximum altitude attained
5. Fastest flight time from take-off to landing
Overall I think this is an excellent idea, but some of the prize categories seem to be... interesting choices. Take for example number 2, "Maximum number of passengers carried in one flight." I instantly have a mental image of dozens of people being packed like sardines into a spacecraft, and the horrible tragedy and PR fiasco which would occur if something went wrong. Having a category like that really doesn't seem like a hot idea.
There's also number 5, "Fastest flight time from take-off to landing." Is this really that interesting a problem? I can't see any connection to potential commercial applications. It seems like it would be more a measure of how much acceleration the human occupants could tolerate than anything else.
Any bets on how long it will take for this information to be added to the Ansari X Prize Wikipedia node?
I've personally found blogs to be an invaluable tool for keeping in contact with my friends, and let them know about interesting events and organize get-togethers. This will be even more useful after our impending graduation, allowing us to keep up with each others' lives while being scattered across the country.
I personally find that to be useful, but YMMV.
> Greenhouse gases are far easier to deal with than radioactive waste. Gases like carbon dioxide can be offset by things like trees. Nothing can offset radioactivity, you are stuck with it for millennia.
I actually wasn't thinking about greenhouse gases at all, but now that you mention it, that's another environmental hazard that you don't have to worry about with nuclear power. I was actually thinking about the radioactive isotypes which occur naturally in coal and get released into the atmosphere when it's burned. The radiation released by coal power tends to be a good bit more than that released by nuclear power.
> Nuclear security is not as strong as you might think.
Read my sentence carefully: "Nuclear power makes a tempting terrorist target: blowing up a power station or waste transportation vehicle can easily irradiate millions of people."
Here's a nice piece, which discusses the exaggerated danger of an attack on a nuclear power plant; it's by a conservative think tank (eww!), but the logic is sound. Even if an attack were successful, it wouldn't do all that much damage. It sounds grim, but from a terrorist's perspective there are far easier ways of killing large numbers of people.
When waste is being transported, the radioactive material is already in a fairly stabilized/contained state, and an attack really wouldn't do too much to disperse it.
I actually like dams too. The thing is, they often do things like screw up wetlands and mess around with fish like salmon which have to navigate the river.
> Uranium needs to be mined, transported and processed, which requires considerable amounts of energy and destroys ecosystems.
So like coal, except with a much better cost/benefit ratio.
> Once used, nuclear waste needs to be stored. this waste has a half life of thousands of years, and it needs to be put in a place where it cannot harm anyone or anything for this period of time. Obviously we cannot plan that far ahead. Nuclear waste needs to be transported for processing (often through urban areas), and it is usually stored on-site.
Would you rather the wastes and radiation be dispersed through the atmosphere, like we have with our other fuel sources? Personally, I prefer having waste concentrated in a small container.
> Nuclear power makes a tempting terrorist target: blowing up a power station or waste transportation vehicle can easily irradiate millions of people.
Reactor facilities are strongly reinforced, making them awfully hard to blow up.
> Nuclear power stations cannot be decommissioned easily. It is cheaper to keep a station running, meaning that many old, inefficient and potentially dangerous reactors are still operational.
True, nuclear power is the only power source which explicitly factors in the cost of decommissioning and waste management, rather than implicitly leaving the financial and environmental costs to others. Could you point out some of these dangerous reactors you mentioned?
As it stands, nuclear power is the most cost effective and environmentally safe energy source that we have. It's too bad we have such an irrational fear of anything with the word "nuclear" in it.
As another person who has done research with AI and computer vision, I agree with you somewhat. We're nowhere near having an autonomous system with capabilities anywhere close to what a human, or even a very small insect, can perform.
However, AIs in space only have to perform very specific tasks. These sorts of tasks are things which AIs are already capable of, or could be made capable of with a little more effort. Here's what I could think of off-hand:
space navigation: This is the sort of thing an AI excels at. I think it's actually already been used on Deep Space 1.
surface exploration: If humans on the ground can periodically give high-level goals and destinations, the rest can be handled by a reactive or behavior-based system. After Sojourner's primary and secondary missions were over, it was switched over to a behavior-based control system (developed by Rodney Brooks' lab, I think), and autonomously wandered around the surface.
space construction: This hasn't really been done yet, although many vision problems can be alleviated by the fact that you have complete control over the materials used. Special parts can be given special colors, and one might be able to assume that all prior pieces have been accurately placed by a robot.
By the way, nice face detection work.
As noted on the web page, there's the Centennial Challenges program is organizing a workshop in Washington DC on June 15-16. You can register online (please, authentic registrations only!). This sounds like an excellent opportunity to help shape history.
Here's the blurb from the web site:
To kickoff Centennial Challenges, NASA's new program of prize contests, NASA will host a workshop on June 15-16 in Washington, DC. The purpose of the workshop is to:
1. Gather ideas for Challenges,
2. Develop rules for specific Challenges and gauge competitor interest in various potential Challenges, and
3. Promote competitor teaming.
This workshop will be a key input into Centennial Challenges planning, helping to determine what specific Challenge competitions NASA announces in 2004 and 2005 and the rules of those competitions. All potential Centennial Challenge competitors, including interested members of industry, academia, students, and the general public, are invited to attend.
I figured I should probably also post a link to where you can order prints of the Spirit drawing. This makes me feel a little less bad about potentially slashdotting the artist's server.
For those who haven't seen it already, Spirit and Opportunity have LiveJournals. Spirit is a moody goth girl, while Opportunity is a perky teeny-bopper. I know I'll certainly miss them (or at least Spirit) when they're gone.
In other news, Spirit is really cute.
Here's a picture of her with Scaled Composites' SpaceShipOne.
Even better: the Diet Mug Root Beer Ansari X Prize Competition or the Szechuan Dynasty Ansari X Prize Competition.
Many of the previous posters have cited the importance of math in areas like graphics, databases, etc. I heartily agree. Allow me to cite another example: computational neuroscience.
So I'm in general incredibly interested in various combinations of brain and CS studies, so last year I audited a course on computational neuroscience. This was a course which dealt with understanding neural systems from a computational perspective.
Unfortunately, my math skills are somewhat sub-par for a CS major. I somehow managed to get a 5 on the AP Calc exam, but forgot everything afterwards. This ended up hurting me significantly in the course. Although I could understand the neuroscience concepts, whenever we started with analysis my head started swimming. Modeling things like ion channels require some pretty hardcore understanding of differential equations, which I understood next to nothing about. I learned a bunch of neat facts, but without a strong mathematical background, I wasn't able to fully comprehend what was going on.
There are many other examples of my poor math knowledge causing me pain. As it stands, I'm going to be joining a PhD program to study neuro/CS stuff in the fall. Since I'm going to need to have a good grasp of things like differential equations, I'm going to be spending a lot of quality time with calculus books this summer. Being in a position like this sucks -- I really recommend learning math, regardless of what you want to do. It's amazing how often math comes up, and how much the symbolic processing skills math teaches you helps in other areas.
I totally agree with you about cognitive science. I'm finishing up degrees in comp sci and cog sci right now, and cog sci has been an amazing field to study. I've actually been so fascinated by it that after graduation I'm heading off to do a PhD in Computation & Neural Systems.
Cog sci is also probably the best possible major in terms of having neat stories to tell at parties. People just love hearing about things like the attentional study with the gorilla suit, or "the man who mistook his wife for a hat."
Lets say a spacecraft explodes. In one case you have to replace some robots and have a minor hit to PR. In the other case, you hold funerals and have an unrecoverable PR disaster.
Also, if you a room full of people on Earth, they can easily go home. The same isn't quite true in space.
Below is the text of an email I got from savethehubble.org. I agree with it completely. While I'm in general a big fan of robotic technologies and exploration, it really frustrates me that we've become a country full of risk-averse cowards, unwilling to further our knowledge if it involves even a chance of sacrifice. Never mind the fact that those who would actually be risking their lives are completely willing to take that chance. In any case, if politics keeps us from sending up a manned repair mission, I hope we'll be able to send up a robotic one.
April 24th is National Astronomy Day, and a good time to make waves on Hubble's behalf.
No logic can support the notion that while the Space Shuttle is safe enough for multiple flights to the Space Station over the next decade, it is not safe enough for even one flight to Hubble. It is disingenuous to announce bold plans for a risky manned flight to Mars while at the same time retreating from a flight to Hubble just a few hundred miles away. NASA's leadership should either defend the risk of the loss of life as justifiable given the overall benefits to mankind, or it should retreat from manned missions altogether. We can ill afford to spend another decade funding manned projects such as the Space Station and the trip to Mars, only to have them shelved when NASA realizes it has no appetite for the inherent risk. If the shuttle can not be made safe enough at any cost, then abandon it and the Space Station, and spend more resources developing a robotic solution to fix Hubble, and to launch future scientific missions. The impact of Hubble on society and the enlightening new discovery of water on Mars make it clear that for the foreseeable future there is much more to be gained, in terms of science and political capital, from robotic initiatives (Hubble is an optical robot after all) than from projects that require NASA to make the environment safe enough for a man. Let's get back to manned flights when either we as a people have decided to accept the inevitable loss of life, or at such time as we have designed a space ship that is capable of traveling at near the speed of light. Only then will the benefits outweigh the risks.
There's quite a bit of interesting stuff on this topic, dealing with consciousness from a neurobiological perspective, in Caltech professor Christof Koch's book, "The Quest for Consciousness".
The motion induced blindness demo on the website is incredibly freaky, where little yellow dots blink in and out of your consciousness as you're staring at them.
Synroc looks like one possibility, although it still needs development.
The wikipedia node on radioactive waste has some more interesting information.
If you can find a game "backup" on some retro gaming site, it installs and runs nicely in the dosbox emulator.
s/remember/remembers
By the way, I also found a cool gamespot article about "Groundbreaking games from computer history," one of which is Stunt Island.