Despite being a pretty hardcore private space proponent, I'm rather skeptical about this. I could be wrong, but it seems that all Claramunt has is a design and backing from an anonymous funding source. Meanwhile, Bigelow Aerospace has a couple of working prototypes in orbit right now, and by 2012 plans to lease entire orbital facilities for $88 million/year (or $18 million for an 2-month stay).
Also, I'm guessing the cited figure of "$4 million for a three-day stay" doesn't include the cost of getting to orbit in the first place. For a Soyuz flight, that's at least $20 million per person.
Cool, thanks for the link, although I think I need rather more space than they offer. I'm hoping to do something like keeping an entire home directory in SVN:
Right. The slashdot summary is faulty: What's new isn't the stellerator design itself, but a new coil configuration for a stellerator. The new configuration "generating an external magnetic field designed to prevent the plasma from deteriorating", although I'm not familiar enough with stellerators to know how much of a problem this was in previous designs.
> they will probably combine that with armadillo or new shepard.
Quite possible. Now that I think about it, a VTOL approach like Armadillo's or New Shephard's would be ideal for a Mars lander which could also be used to relaunch crew. It's too bad neither company has done anything with methane propulsion, which they'd probably want to take advantage of in-situ resources on Mars. Perhaps they'd license tech from XCOR?
At the time being, this doesn't seem to be a standalone storage service (the summary was kind of ambiguous about this), but rather a way to upgrade the space you have on additional Google services (gmail, Picasa, etc.). In any case, I'd really love it if they eventually came out with a storage service that you could use as a CVS/SVN repository.
I'm going to guess Elon Musk (of SpaceX). They have yet to make orbit, but test flight #2 was very, very close -- and it's obvious they know what to fix. They already have a heavier launcher and manned capsule well under way, with NASA contracts to demonstrate ISS flights. I'm guessing it'll probably be SpaceX in a collaboration with Bigelow Aerospace. I could envision them using a SpaceX launch vehicle and Dragon capsule to get a crew up to orbit, where a Bigelow habitat module in a cycling orbit between the Earth and Mars would be waiting for them. Once the transit habitat arrived at Mars, they could land near an already-emplaced Bigelow ground habitat. Bigelow is already working on ways to get their self-expanding habitats to burrow into the ground and use the dirt as insulation:
The 2005 Grand Challenge course had narrow roads cut out of the side of mountains, with no guard rails. The vehicles that finished all made it through there, even the huge military truck from Oskosh.
Yup, I was actually at the 2005 challenge, and remember that little mountain pass. I remember talking with people about how it was a really good thing that the mountain pass was near the end of the course, because otherwise some of the vehicles which had gotten knocked out earlier in the race probably would've ended up tumbling down it.
This smacks to me of Google trying to figure out a way to appear journalistic without actually having to engage in journalism. What are you considering journalism? Google is collecting facts... is that journalism?
If they feel it so necessary to invite commentary from those actually involved in a story, then why do they not simply hire journalists to interact with such people? Why would they need a journalist, when all they want is volunteered verbatim quotes from the people involved?
If their goal is simply to invite public commentary on news items, why do they not simply build a Slashcode server, or some other group discussion system that can achieve the same end? Well, because they're not interested in public commentary (at the moment), they're interested in responses from people involved in the news itself.
> In other words, even if someone can prove their identity as the subject of a story, it doesn't necessarily mean they'll feel compelled to tell the truth in their comments.
That's what other commenters are for. If someone is bullshitting, somebody else can call them on it and make them look like a fool.
For a while I've been hoping that they would do something similar and allow comments (and maybe blog references) through Google Scholar, their search engine for academic publications. It would be great to have a way for the research community to publically share thoughts on a publication besides the high-latency/low-throughout channel of the actual journal. PLoS One and Nature Precedings are starting to do this for work published by them, but having a commenting function built into Google Scholar would allow comments on anything the search engine indexes. Just a minor feature this could have a huge impact on academic research.
more to the point, what is to stop me from "selling" my free versions when the band gets popular? What if I give them away? Actually, I think that would be a pretty cool effect of the market. One could perform speculative purchases about which bands/songs would become popular in the future, providing a market-based signal to others and potentially accelerating a group's rise to popularity.
You know, from reading that list of authors, I get the feeling that your definition of "hard sci-fi" has less to do with scientific accuracy and more with who you like enough to suspend your disbelief of their glaring inaccuracies and silly fantasies. Actually, I put the list together by picking out some names from here:
It'll be interesting to see how easy it will be for individuals to construct something similar at home. If it ends up being easy to construct at home, I wonder if we'll start seeing weapon/gun-control advocates start trying to campaign to make LEDs illegal or something like that. They've already made personal ownership of tasers illegal in many places.
Remember that for a while the press was referring to the pellet guns as "less-lethal weapons"? Can we go back to using that term? Because I'd like for us to keep that in mind before some cop decides to stick this in the face of some suspect with a condition for five minutes just to teach them a lesson.
Weapons manufacturers and police departments have been using the terms "less-than-lethal" and "less-lethal" as standard practice for a while now.
For me, Ron Paul is actually a close second to my natural favorite. I do like him, despite major differences. For one, I wonder what he'd want to do about our infrastructure, which is an issue made more visible by Katrina and the recent bridge collapse in Minnesota.
I'm sure he'd argue (rightfully) that all of those things are state matters.
Seriously. Were it not for willing suspension of disbelief, the entire genre of sci-fi would not even be viable. What's scientifically accurate about sci-fi universes like Star Trek, Star Wars, Stargate, B5, or even Eureka? Nothing. The point is, who cares? Sci-fi is about the story, not about the science. Those are all space operas, which, depending on who you're talking to, are either a subgenre of sci-fi or not sci-fi at all. Gibson writes a lot of hard science fiction, along with authors like David Brin, Charles Stross, Vernor Vinge, and (to an extent) Arthur C. Clarke. In hard sci-fi most of the emphasis is on the scientific details/accuracy, with the story often just being a path the author takes you through their scientifically rigorous vision.
Lets make a similar math book for all the boys who aren't interested in math. It should feature GI Joe's using math to kill each other, aliens, and anything gross or violent. For the older boys lets throw in some soft core porn to get their eyes on the page (males are after all more visual, right?).
Hey, when I was in the book store the other day I came across Kaplan-brand Warcraft graphic novels with SAT vocab words and definitions inside.
Your logical fallacy is "Al qaeda videos have been edited"... perhaps it should be stated as "Videos, from a person (apparently) who claims that they are part of Al qaeda, appear to have been edited, according to someone else"
Unless somebody did a very good job of finding a al-Zawahiri impersonator, I think we can assume that at least the part of the video containing him is from Al Qaeda.
Some of you might already know this, but slashdot-favorite Natalie Portman (birth name Natalie Hershlag) in 2002 was apparently co-author on a paper in the research journal NeuroImage, stemming from some research she did when she was an undergrad at Harvard. The paper is titled Frontal Lobe Activation during Object Permanence: Data from Near-Infrared Spectroscopy. Here's the abstract:
The ability to create and hold a mental schema of an object is one of the milestones in cognitive development. Developmental scientists have named the behavioral manifestation of this competence object permanence. Convergent evidence indicates that frontal lobe maturation plays a critical role in the display of object permanence, but methodological and ethical constrains have made it difficult to collect neurophysiological evidence from awake, behaving infants. Near-infrared spectroscopy provides a noninvasive assessment of changes in oxy- and deoxyhemoglobin and total hemoglobin concentration within a prescribed region. The evidence described in this report reveals that the emergence of object permanence is related to an increase in hemoglobin concentration in frontal cortex. Also, a few choice Natalie Portman quotes:
* "I loved school so much that most of my classmates considered me a dork."
* "Smart women love smart men more than smart men love smart women."
* "I'm going to college. I don't care if it ruins my career. I'd rather be smart than a movie star. "
As an engineer that designs industrial equipment, all of which involves paying incredible detail to the small things in order to protect the user from injury or loss of life, I am very amazed to hear that the US Army would use control protocols and algorithms that are so flaky that the robots are described as "going crazy" when they misbehave.
Erm, it's just a phrase. These things are basically just fancy remote controlled vehicles. Just because someone says there's a kill switch present in case things "go crazy" doesn't mean that craziness is expected.
In the interest of elevating the level of discussion about this research (hah!), below is the original research article and abstract. The article itself probably needs an institutional subscription to access:
ABSTRACT--How well one retains new information depends on how actively it is processed during learning. Active attempts to retrieve information from memory result in more learning than passive observation of the same information (the generation effect). Here, we present evidence for the generation effect in monkeys. Subjects were trained to respond to five-item lists of photographs in a particular order. On some lists, they could request "hints" to guide their behavior; on others, they had to generate the correct order from memory. Training with hints resulted in high levels of initial performance, but accuracy dropped precipitously when the hints were removed on the criterion test. Training without hints led to relatively poor initial performance, but accuracy increased steadily and remained high on the criterion test.
Slashdot Mirror
> Yes, but who's going to pay to enter an inflatable when he could get inside the real thing for the same price?
Huh? What do you mean by "real thing"?
Despite being a pretty hardcore private space proponent, I'm rather skeptical about this. I could be wrong, but it seems that all Claramunt has is a design and backing from an anonymous funding source. Meanwhile, Bigelow Aerospace has a couple of working prototypes in orbit right now, and by 2012 plans to lease entire orbital facilities for $88 million/year (or $18 million for an 2-month stay).
Also, I'm guessing the cited figure of "$4 million for a three-day stay" doesn't include the cost of getting to orbit in the first place. For a Soyuz flight, that's at least $20 million per person.
Cool, thanks for the link, although I think I need rather more space than they offer. I'm hoping to do something like keeping an entire home directory in SVN:
http://kitenet.net/~joey/svnhome/
Right. The slashdot summary is faulty: What's new isn't the stellerator design itself, but a new coil configuration for a stellerator. The new configuration "generating an external magnetic field designed to prevent the plasma from deteriorating", although I'm not familiar enough with stellerators to know how much of a problem this was in previous designs.
> they will probably combine that with armadillo or new shepard.
Quite possible. Now that I think about it, a VTOL approach like Armadillo's or New Shephard's would be ideal for a Mars lander which could also be used to relaunch crew. It's too bad neither company has done anything with methane propulsion, which they'd probably want to take advantage of in-situ resources on Mars. Perhaps they'd license tech from XCOR?
The Forbes article didn't link to it, so here's the official announcement from Google:
- to-get-more-storage.html
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/08/simple-way
Also, here's the link for actually purchasing the additional space:
https://www.google.com/accounts/PurchaseStorage
At the time being, this doesn't seem to be a standalone storage service (the summary was kind of ambiguous about this), but rather a way to upgrade the space you have on additional Google services (gmail, Picasa, etc.). In any case, I'd really love it if they eventually came out with a storage service that you could use as a CVS/SVN repository.
http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2007/02/22
The 2005 Grand Challenge course had narrow roads cut out of the side of mountains, with no guard rails. The vehicles that finished all made it through there, even the huge military truck from Oskosh.
Yup, I was actually at the 2005 challenge, and remember that little mountain pass. I remember talking with people about how it was a really good thing that the mountain pass was near the end of the course, because otherwise some of the vehicles which had gotten knocked out earlier in the race probably would've ended up tumbling down it.
I bet these autonomous vehicles perform really well in the mountains, yes...
I imagine they'd perform pretty well along supply routes, which is the application they're currently targeted towards.
Has anybody found a way yet to actually search for the comments which have been posted so far?
> In other words, even if someone can prove their identity as the subject of a story, it doesn't necessarily mean they'll feel compelled to tell the truth in their comments.
That's what other commenters are for. If someone is bullshitting, somebody else can call them on it and make them look like a fool.
For a while I've been hoping that they would do something similar and allow comments (and maybe blog references) through Google Scholar, their search engine for academic publications. It would be great to have a way for the research community to publically share thoughts on a publication besides the high-latency/low-throughout channel of the actual journal. PLoS One and Nature Precedings are starting to do this for work published by them, but having a commenting function built into Google Scholar would allow comments on anything the search engine indexes. Just a minor feature this could have a huge impact on academic research.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_science_fiction
> Since when did Eureka or Stargate become space operas?'
;)
Oh, woops. I really should've said "mostly".
It'll be interesting to see how easy it will be for individuals to construct something similar at home. If it ends up being easy to construct at home, I wonder if we'll start seeing weapon/gun-control advocates start trying to campaign to make LEDs illegal or something like that. They've already made personal ownership of tasers illegal in many places.
Remember that for a while the press was referring to the pellet guns as "less-lethal weapons"? Can we go back to using that term? Because I'd like for us to keep that in mind before some cop decides to stick this in the face of some suspect with a condition for five minutes just to teach them a lesson.
Weapons manufacturers and police departments have been using the terms "less-than-lethal" and "less-lethal" as standard practice for a while now.
For me, Ron Paul is actually a close second to my natural favorite. I do like him, despite major differences. For one, I wonder what he'd want to do about our infrastructure, which is an issue made more visible by Katrina and the recent bridge collapse in Minnesota.
I'm sure he'd argue (rightfully) that all of those things are state matters.
Lets make a similar math book for all the boys who aren't interested in math. It should feature GI Joe's using math to kill each other, aliens, and anything gross or violent. For the older boys lets throw in some soft core porn to get their eyes on the page (males are after all more visual, right?).
Hey, when I was in the book store the other day I came across Kaplan-brand Warcraft graphic novels with SAT vocab words and definitions inside.
Your logical fallacy is "Al qaeda videos have been edited"... perhaps it should be stated as "Videos, from a person (apparently) who claims that they are part of Al qaeda, appear to have been edited, according to someone else"
Unless somebody did a very good job of finding a al-Zawahiri impersonator, I think we can assume that at least the part of the video containing him is from Al Qaeda.
Developmental scientists have named the behavioral manifestation of this competence object permanence.
Convergent evidence indicates that frontal lobe maturation plays a critical role in the display of
object permanence, but methodological and ethical constrains have made it difficult to collect neurophysiological
evidence from awake, behaving infants. Near-infrared spectroscopy provides a noninvasive assessment
of changes in oxy- and deoxyhemoglobin and total hemoglobin concentration within a prescribed
region. The evidence described in this report reveals that the emergence of object permanence is related to
an increase in hemoglobin concentration in frontal cortex. Also, a few choice Natalie Portman quotes:
* "I loved school so much that most of my classmates considered me a dork."
* "Smart women love smart men more than smart men love smart women."
* "I'm going to college. I don't care if it ruins my career. I'd rather be smart than a movie star. "
As an engineer that designs industrial equipment, all of which involves paying incredible detail to the small things in order to protect the user from injury or loss of life, I am very amazed to hear that the US Army would use control protocols and algorithms that are so flaky that the robots are described as "going crazy" when they misbehave.
Erm, it's just a phrase. These things are basically just fancy remote controlled vehicles. Just because someone says there's a kill switch present in case things "go crazy" doesn't mean that craziness is expected.
http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/
Nate Kornell, Herbert S. Terrace
ABSTRACT--How well one retains new information depends on how actively it is processed during learning. Active attempts to retrieve information from memory result in more learning than passive observation of the same information (the generation effect). Here, we present evidence for the generation effect in monkeys. Subjects were trained to respond to five-item lists of photographs in a particular order. On some lists, they could request "hints" to guide their behavior; on others, they had to generate the correct order from memory. Training with hints resulted in high levels of initial performance, but accuracy dropped precipitously when the hints were removed on the criterion test. Training without hints led to relatively poor initial performance, but accuracy increased steadily and remained high on the criterion test.