I dug around a little and found the following abstract detailing an older version of Buzz Aldrin's work. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find a free link to the actual paper...
A promising new human Mars exploration approach based on the use of an Earth-Mars Cycling Interplanetary Transportation System is described. In this approach, a cycling vehicle acts as a permanently emplaced transportation element that continuously cycles between the Earth and Mars using gravity assist with minimal course adjustment on each cycle eliminating the need to repeat the large and expensive injection propellant requirement of traditionally conceived Mars vehicles and missions. With the implementation of a two Cycler system, one Cycler would always be going to Mars while the other is returning to Earth. When in the vicinity of the Earth or Mars, the Cyclers release or are intercepted by smaller aerobraking "taxis" that ferry people and supplies to and from the surface. Alternatively, in the Semi-Cycler Concept, the Cycler vehicles themselves would use aerobraking and gravity assist to orbit about the Earth or Mars for a period before returning. In this way, unmanned cargo flights to Mars could use the minimum energy, long trip time trajectories while crewed flights could use the shorter flight time, longer stay time options. Both concepts are addressed in the paper, and the results of preliminary flight mechanics analyses are presented. In addition, a transportation plan is presented based upon a logical extension of existing space assets augmented by new vehicles providing a reusable transportation capability.
Due to the political fallout of people's children dying the military replaces humans with small, cheap, modular killing machines and just gives thousands of "Military" personell control of one and lets them run around slaughtering people with no risk to themselves.
The military already has small killing machines which can be deployed from an aerial platform -- they're called "bombs".
seriously, when's the last time you and your virtual friends got together and said "Hey, let's go wiki a road! The one to my house is inefficient, and I have a plan. By a magical confluence of pornography and EverQuest, we can more efficiently collect taxes and move hundreds of tons of pavement and dirt!"
Not quite.
I personally suspect that if the Internet replaces aspects of government, it'll be by facilitating assurance contracts between individuals. Sites like fundable.org and PledgeBank are some early implementations, allowing people to more effectively pool resources in pursuit of a common goal.
Couple good internet-based implementations of assurance contract brokerages with prediction markets and/or decision markets, and I suspect the results should be pretty formidable. Such a system would likely be able to accomplish much of what is currently delegated to government.
Google will come up with GoogleRate, a neat application that will automatically search for, record, archive, and then verify all these claims and predictions that everyone makes.
You're probably joking, but back in September Google mentioned that they've set up a prediction market system to use within their company, for the purpose of forecasting things like product launch dates and "many other things of strategic importance". I wouldn't be surprised if this is a lead-in to creating a publically-open prediction market for more general events, sort of like the Foresight Exchange, Yahoo's Buzz Game, or TradeSports.
Of course, they'd probably add some sort of Google-specific twist to it, such as forecasting the number of news reports or blog write-ups on a particular keyword (i.e. its "importance" or "impact"), or the future PageRank of a particular site. They probably couldn't legally use real money directly, so perhaps they'd raffle prizes based on earnings, sort of like Yahoo's done.
I should probably add the disclaimer that I have a bit of an obsession with prediction markets. They're statistically the best way to predict the future, better than either opinion polls or individual experts.
Considering that Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace and Bezos's Blue Origin are both operating in Texas and are both developing suborbital reusable VTOL spacecraft, I wouldn't be surprised to see them engage in some sort of collaboration.
Carmack's been having hardware issues, but being Carmack, probably has top-notch software. I'm betting he would benefit greatly from collaborating with Blue Origin's rocket engineers, and Blue Origin would benefit from his programming godhood.
Bezos has apparently met with SpaceX's Elon Musk, who's built (and is preparing to launch) a private orbital rocket. Here's a quote from a recent press conference with Musk:
On Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos' space program Musk: "I met with Jeff Bezos a couple of times and had dinner. His motivations in doing Blue origin are identical to mine in forming spacex. There's a good chance we'll work collaboratively at some point."
--Update-- (presumably elaborating on motivations) Musk: The expansion of life on earth to other places is arguably the most important thing to happen to life on earth, if it happens. Life has the duty to expand. And we're the representatives of life with the ability to do so.
Frankly, I believe space exploration is far too important to be left to private companies.
I disagree. Air transporation and food production are also quite important, and yet we seem to be doing fine with them being handled by private industry. Of course, there's government interference in those industries, but whether or not such interference is necessary is an argument for another day.
You, like many others, also seem to be making an assumption that all private groups are also for-profit, which is false. Non-profit groups engage in research and exploration as well, and I hope we'll see them engage in more space exploration as launch prices decrease.
For example, AMSAT has launched a number of amateur radio satellites. The Planetary Society (attempted) to launch the first solar sail, funded by member donations. Elon Musk started up a self-funded project to put an experimental greenhouse on Mars, but decided it would be better for now to focus on reducing launch costs via his SpaceX company -- hopefully he'll pursue the greenhouse project again in the future.
If there was a privtely owned space station in orbit instead of the ISS, would they be doing science, or giving trips to rich tourists?
That depends on whoever owns the space station. If it's owned by Richard Branson, it'll probably be for tourism. If it's owned by the Howard Hughes Institute, they'll probably be doing medical research. In the past, Bigelow Aerospace has stated that they'll sell their space station modules to pretty much whoever for $100 million each, and they should be up and running in the next few years.
The only part im sad about is it seems Joss had plans for 2 more and if thats true then there must have been more plot to explore but now we'll never know
This reminds me of something which others here might find amusing... after having recently watched the Firefly episodes, the episode commentaries, and the movie, I somehow got the half-baked idea that Inara is a vampire, or a succubus, or some other sort of supernatural creature. Whedon's other shows, Buffy and Angel, are pretty obviously in the same universe, but there's nothing solid tying Firefly to that same universe... or is there?
The evidence I collected is pretty poor/circumstantial, but as a whole it's rather interesting to muse about, I think:
* In the "Out of Gas" episode, there's a scene where the doctor (Simon) and Inara are chatting about their inevitable demise. On the commentary the director of that episode mentions that there was a clue to something about Inara which didn't get expanded on in the show. During this scene the following dialog takes place:
Inara: I love this ship. I have from the first moment I saw it. Simon: I just don't want to die on it. Inara: I don't want to die at all.
I might be imagining things, but IMHO Inara sounds kind of sinister when she says that, as if she really doesn't plan on dying.
* I might be wrong on this, but I can't recall any time that Inara appears outside in the sun with exposed skin. The one time I recall her being outside was in "Trash," where she appears outside wearing a veil. (Now that I think about it though, there might be an exception in "Shindig" during the duel...)
* In the pilot, when Firefly passes by Reavers and everybody thinks they're about to die, Inara pulls out a little case which looks like a suicide kit. In the commentary the director says it's not a suicide kit, but actually a secret about Inara which would've been revealed later. It doesn't look like the sort of weapon you'd use to fight off Reavers, so perhaps it's something supernatural?
* In the commentary, one of the directors mentions how Inara was supposed to be played in a way which showed her as having more wisdom than someone her age to have, wisdom beyond her years. This could just mean that she's smart, but could also have other connotations.
* In Serenity, Inara fights using a weapon which rapidly switches between being a bow and a crossbow. The rapid switching is probably a blooper, but in any case, a bow/crossbow is a pretty anachronistic weapon, even for Firefly.
So yeah, the "evidence" I have is pretty fragmentary, and there's alternative explanations for just about all of it. It's pretty obvious though that Whedon had some sort of deep, dark secret in Inara's past that he didn't have a chance to reveal. What are your thoughts? Can anyone else think of things to support/refute this?
Schroedinbug is a term used in software programming to describe a computer bug that is not discovered, but shows up after somebody reads the source or uses the application in an unusual way. The program then stops working for everyone until the bug is fixed. Although this sounds rather impossible, some programs have carried latent schroedinbugs.
The quantum programming wikipedia article has a link to a rather neat paper by Simon Gay, titled Quantum Programming Languages: Survey and Bibliography. This seems to give a pretty good overview of current thinking regarding what sorts of programming languages would be appropriate for quantum computation. The abstract:
The field of quantum programming languages is developing rapidly and there is a surprisingly large literature. Research in this area includes the design of programming languages for quantum computing, the application of established semantic and logical techniques to the foundations of quantum mechanics, and the design of compilers for quantum programming languages. This article justfies the study of quantum programming languages, presents the basics of quantum computing, surveys the literature in quantum programming languages, and indicates directions for future research.
He has the bibliography, complete with paper links available here.
Yikes! Cobalt-60 is almost as bad as it gets. Cobalt 60 radiation dosages are almost twice as bad as the actual dosage of radiation one would get from the fallout of an actual atomic device which sort of begs the question of what they are doing with it? Are they modeling fallout? Or are they experimenting with dirty bombs? Lining the inside of atomic devices with heavy metals and other elements is a way to create much more radioactive bombs that have long lasting radiation effects.
According to this page and wikipedia, there's a number of non-military applications for Cobalt-60: "As a tracer for cobalt in chemical reactions, as a radioactive source for food irradiation, and as a radioactive source for laboratory use."
It's a little disconcerting that a "structural" problem would be found only 15 minutes before the launch. The only thing I can think of off hand that makes sense is something related to fueling the rocket.
Actually, the problem was in draining the rocket. From the official update page:
Due to high winds, we placed the countdown on hold and began draining the fuel tank. As we drained fuel from the 1st stage tank, a faulty pressurization valve caused a vacuum condition in the tank. This caused a fuel tank barrel section to deform and suck inward. It is important to note that the root cause is an electrical fault with a valve, not structural design.
Many of the comments here are condemning the article submitter for wanting to give to giving money to open-source projects, saying that he should instead give money to, say, starving orphans in Africa or South America. I think people would do well to read a recent op-ed in the NY Times (commentary in WorldChanging) by a former Peace Corps worker in Africa about why just dumping money in poor countries isn't such a good thing. Some quotes:
It seems to have been Africa's fate to become a theater of empty talk and public gestures. But the impression that Africa is fatally troubled and can be saved only by outside help - not to mention celebrities and charity concerts - is a destructive and misleading conceit. Those of us who committed ourselves to being Peace Corps teachers in rural Malawi more than 40 years ago are dismayed by what we see on our return visits and by all the news that has been reported recently from that unlucky, drought-stricken country. But we are more appalled by most of the proposed solutions.
I am not speaking of humanitarian aid, disaster relief, AIDS education or affordable drugs. Nor am I speaking of small-scale, closely watched efforts like the Malawi Children's Village. I am speaking of the "more money" platform: the notion that what Africa needs is more prestige projects, volunteer labor and debt relief. We should know better by now. I would not send private money to a charity, or foreign aid to a government, unless every dollar was accounted for - and this never happens. Dumping more money in the same old way is not only wasteful, but stupid and harmful; it is also ignoring some obvious points.
If Malawi is worse educated, more plagued by illness and bad services, poorer than it was when I lived and worked there in the early 60's, it is not for lack of outside help or donor money. Malawi has been the beneficiary of many thousands of foreign teachers, doctors and nurses, and large amounts of financial aid, and yet it has declined from a country with promise to a failed state....
When Malawi's minister of education was accused of stealing millions of dollars from the education budget in 2000, and the Zambian president was charged with stealing from the treasury, and Nigeria squandered its oil wealth, what happened? The simplifiers of Africa's problems kept calling for debt relief and more aid. I got a dusty reception lecturing at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation when I pointed out the successes of responsible policies in Botswana, compared with the kleptomania of its neighbors. Donors enable embezzlement by turning a blind eye to bad governance, rigged elections and the deeper reasons these countries are failing....
Bono, in his role as Mrs. Jellyby in a 10-gallon hat, not only believes that he has the solution to Africa's ills, he is also shouting so loud that other people seem to trust his answers. He traveled in 2002 to Africa with former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, urging debt forgiveness. He recently had lunch at the White House, where he expounded upon the "more money" platform and how African countries are uniquely futile.
But are they? Had Bono looked closely at Malawi he would have seen an earlier incarnation of his own Ireland. Both countries were characterized for centuries by famine, religious strife, infighting, unruly families, hubristic clan chiefs, malnutrition, failed crops, ancient orthodoxies, dental problems and fickle weather. Malawi had a similar sense of grievance, was also colonized by absentee British landlords and was priest-ridden, too....
Africa has no real shortage of capable people - or even of money. The patronizing attention of donors has done violence to Africa's belief in itself, but even in the absence of responsible leadership, Africans themselves have proven how resilient they can
Re:Give the right amount to the right places
on
Season's Givings?
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· Score: 1
My article is just about giving back to the virtual communities that helped you get where you are. That is, in addition to all the worthy causes out there. Don't think you know me just because you read two lines I put up on Slashdot.
Yeah, I'm not sure what's up with all the comments here condemning you because you discussed ways to give back to the open source community instead of starving orphans or whatever. I mean, all those things are good, but there's also merit in giving to people who do good work and create software which helps us in our day-to-day lives. Thanks for typing up the list.
All of my schooling has managed to avoid the 20th century...
Now that I think about it, I think I had about the same. I remember in my high school American history and world history courses, we'd quickly gloss over the 20th century in the last week or so of the class.
Now the fact that American history books as taught in our schools will only go into detail on the first two (non-American "bad guys") and gives only token treatment to slavery and usually don't mention the Native American genocide is an entirely different problem...
I don't know if my experience is representative, but throughout my public middle school and high school history/English courses, we spent -much- more time being taught about slavery and the plight of Native Americans than the holocaust and Stalin.
Anybody know of a good way to get perfectly repeatable accuracy to within... say 3-6 inches within a local area? (It doesn't have to have any bearing on actual location, so long as you can repeatably get within a couple inches of the same value at the same location every time you try.)
It wouldn't be cheap, but it looks like the NorthStar system from Evolution Robotics can do pretty accurate robot localization.
More or less, it will be like the people who hacked the Robosapiens etc. except that its a bit more expensive to hack into...
Not to nitpick, but I think this is actually cheaper than hacking a Robosapien. A Roomba Red costs $150, while one of the newer Robosapiens costs $230.
Does anyone know who is behind wikipediaclassaction.org?
It looks like the article is up for a deletion vote at the moment (some consider it non-encyclopedic), but there's actually a pretty good Wikipedia article on the Wikipedia class action suit. Here's the first few paragraphs:
WikipediaClassAction.org is a website that claims to represent people wishing to file a class action suit against the Wikimedia Foundation to hold the creators/founders of Wikipedia legally responsible for malicious postings made by contributors to Wikipedia that are claimed to have caused damages to other individuals and groups.
Allegedly started by the owners of QuakeAID, wikipediaclassaction.org (domain name registered on December 11, 2005 by Jennifer Monroe) refers to a 2005 incident involving John Seigenthaler Sr. who was identified by a Wikipedia article between May and September of 2005 as having been implicated in the John F. Kennedy assassination and the Robert F. Kennedy assassination.
The site claims to be "currently gathering complaints from the entire Internet community, including individuals, corporations, partnerships, etc., who believe that they have been defamed and or who have been or are the subject of anonymous and malicious postings to the popular online encyclopedia WikiPedia."
I should add that QuakeAID, the company behind the suit, is generally considered by many to be a fake/illegitimate charity. They seem to be upset that information about this illegitimacy is in their Wikipedia article, although people from the company have done quite a bit of editing on it.
Hackworth had been catapulted out of the rank-and-file and into Bespoke's elite ranks by his invention of the mediatronic chopstick. He'd been working in San Francisco at the time. The company was thinking hard about things Chinese, trying to one-up the Nipponese, who had already figured out a way to generate passable rice (five different varieties, yet!) direct from Feed, bypassing the whole paddy/coolie rat race, enabling two billion peasants to hang up their conical hats and get into some serious leisure time-- and don't think for one moment that the Nipponese didn't already have some suggestions for what they might do with it. Some genius at headquarters, stewing over Nippon's prohibitive lead in nanotechnological rice production, decided the only thing for it was to leapfrog them by mass-producing entire meals, from wonton all the way to digital interactive fortune cookies. Hackworth got the seemingly trivial job of programming the matter compiler to extrude chopsticks.
Now, doing this in plastic was idiotically simple-- polymers and nanotechnology went together like toothpaste and tubes. But Hackworth, who'd eaten his share of Chinese as a student, had never taken well to the plastic chopsticks, which were slick and treacherous in the blunt hands of a gwailo. Bamboo was better-- and not that much harder to program, if you just had a bit of imagination. Once he'd made that conceptual leap, it wasn't long before he came up with the idea of selling advertising space on the damn things, chopstick handles and Chinese columnar script being a perfect match. Before long he was presenting it to his superiors: eminently user-friendly bamboid chopsters with colorful advertising messages continuously scrolling up their handles in real time, like news headlines in Times Square. For that, Hackworth was kicked upstairs to Bespoke and across the Pacific to Atlantis/Shanghai. He saw these chopsticks everywhere now. To the Equity Lords, the idea had been worth billions; to Hackworth, another week's paycheck. That was the difference between the classes, right there. He wasn't doing that badly, compared to most other people in the world, but it still rankled him. He wanted more for Fiona. He wanted Fiona to grow up with some equity of her own. And not just a few pennies invested in common stocks, but a serious position in a major company.
Until countries decide that the central banks are evil nothing will change. This is something that has been a very big issue historically. Most great leaders were killed going against the Central Privately Held Banks. They have complete power and now want complete global control. Only a very, very, brave leader will fight the Central Bank. Here in the US, our late President Kennedy issues US Bank Notes in direct competition with the Federal Reserve. They day he was assasinated they revoked them.
And then, the Gnomes of Zurich, via the Multinational Oil Companies and the Fiendish Fluoridators, used Orbital Mind Control Lasers to destroy the Society for Creative Anarchism.
From the article: The satellite will be deployed from a rocket on a sub-orbital trajectory. This means scientists will have only 10 minutes of microgravity in which to perform their tests before the craft starts its descent back to Earth and eventually burns up in the atmosphere.
I find it interesting that this research is being done with a suborbital launcher. People often dismiss ventures like SpaceShipOne and Virgin Galactic because they aren't orbital, but perhaps the cost efficiencies of private ventures could help suborbital space research?
Does anyone have an idea of how much suborbital launches currently cost, and how this compares to Virgin Galactic's prices? Of course, one would likely need to add some sort of satellite deployment mechanism...
Slashdot Mirror
I dug around a little and found the following abstract detailing an older version of Buzz Aldrin's work. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find a free link to the actual paper...
Evolutionary space transportation plan for Mars cycling concepts
Aldrin, Buzz; Byrnes, Dennis; Jones, Ron; Davis, Hubert
AIAA Space 2001 Conference and Exposition
A promising new human Mars exploration approach based on the use of an Earth-Mars Cycling Interplanetary Transportation System is described. In this approach, a cycling vehicle acts as a permanently emplaced transportation element that continuously cycles between the Earth and Mars using gravity assist with minimal course adjustment on each cycle eliminating the need to repeat the large and expensive injection propellant requirement of traditionally conceived Mars vehicles and missions. With the implementation of a two Cycler system, one Cycler would always be going to Mars while the other is returning to Earth. When in the vicinity of the Earth or Mars, the Cyclers release or are intercepted by smaller aerobraking "taxis" that ferry people and supplies to and from the surface. Alternatively, in the Semi-Cycler Concept, the Cycler vehicles themselves would use aerobraking and gravity assist to orbit about the Earth or Mars for a period before returning. In this way, unmanned cargo flights to Mars could use the minimum energy, long trip time trajectories while crewed flights could use the shorter flight time, longer stay time options. Both concepts are addressed in the paper, and the results of preliminary flight mechanics analyses are presented. In addition, a transportation plan is presented based upon a logical extension of existing space assets augmented by new vehicles providing a reusable transportation capability.
Are there private companies working on machines to try to capture these items?
Yes.
Due to the political fallout of people's children dying the military replaces humans with small, cheap, modular killing machines and just gives thousands of "Military" personell control of one and lets them run around slaughtering people with no risk to themselves.
The military already has small killing machines which can be deployed from an aerial platform -- they're called "bombs".
seriously, when's the last time you and your virtual friends got together and said "Hey, let's go wiki a road! The one to my house is inefficient, and I have a plan. By a magical confluence of pornography and EverQuest, we can more efficiently collect taxes and move hundreds of tons of pavement and dirt!"
Not quite.
I personally suspect that if the Internet replaces aspects of government, it'll be by facilitating assurance contracts between individuals. Sites like fundable.org and PledgeBank are some early implementations, allowing people to more effectively pool resources in pursuit of a common goal.
Couple good internet-based implementations of assurance contract brokerages with prediction markets and/or decision markets, and I suspect the results should be pretty formidable. Such a system would likely be able to accomplish much of what is currently delegated to government.
And yet, strangely, in France and Germany, ecologists want to revert to coal plants to prevent nuclear pollution.
It's particularly strange when one considers that coal plants produce more nuclear pollution than nuclear plants. Link from my sig:
Coal combustion: Nuclear resource or danger?
Google will come up with GoogleRate, a neat application that will automatically search for, record, archive, and then verify all these claims and predictions that everyone makes.
You're probably joking, but back in September Google mentioned that they've set up a prediction market system to use within their company, for the purpose of forecasting things like product launch dates and "many other things of strategic importance". I wouldn't be surprised if this is a lead-in to creating a publically-open prediction market for more general events, sort of like the Foresight Exchange, Yahoo's Buzz Game, or TradeSports.
Of course, they'd probably add some sort of Google-specific twist to it, such as forecasting the number of news reports or blog write-ups on a particular keyword (i.e. its "importance" or "impact"), or the future PageRank of a particular site. They probably couldn't legally use real money directly, so perhaps they'd raffle prizes based on earnings, sort of like Yahoo's done.
I should probably add the disclaimer that I have a bit of an obsession with prediction markets. They're statistically the best way to predict the future, better than either opinion polls or individual experts.
I wonder if Jeff besoz is a fan of John Carmack.
e launch-conference.html
Considering that Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace and Bezos's Blue Origin are both operating in Texas and are both developing suborbital reusable VTOL spacecraft, I wouldn't be surprised to see them engage in some sort of collaboration.
Carmack's been having hardware issues, but being Carmack, probably has top-notch software. I'm betting he would benefit greatly from collaborating with Blue Origin's rocket engineers, and Blue Origin would benefit from his programming godhood.
Bezos has apparently met with SpaceX's Elon Musk, who's built (and is preparing to launch) a private orbital rocket. Here's a quote from a recent press conference with Musk:
http://michaelbelfiore.com/blog/2005/11/spacex-pr
On Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos' space program
Musk: "I met with Jeff Bezos a couple of times and had dinner. His motivations in doing Blue origin are identical to mine in forming spacex. There's a good chance we'll work collaboratively at some point."
--Update-- (presumably elaborating on motivations)
Musk: The expansion of life on earth to other places is arguably the most important thing to happen to life on earth, if it happens. Life has the duty to expand. And we're the representatives of life with the ability to do so.
Frankly, I believe space exploration is far too important to be left to private companies.
I disagree. Air transporation and food production are also quite important, and yet we seem to be doing fine with them being handled by private industry. Of course, there's government interference in those industries, but whether or not such interference is necessary is an argument for another day.
You, like many others, also seem to be making an assumption that all private groups are also for-profit, which is false. Non-profit groups engage in research and exploration as well, and I hope we'll see them engage in more space exploration as launch prices decrease.
For example, AMSAT has launched a number of amateur radio satellites. The Planetary Society (attempted) to launch the first solar sail, funded by member donations. Elon Musk started up a self-funded project to put an experimental greenhouse on Mars, but decided it would be better for now to focus on reducing launch costs via his SpaceX company -- hopefully he'll pursue the greenhouse project again in the future.
If there was a privtely owned space station in orbit instead of the ISS, would they be doing science, or giving trips to rich tourists?
That depends on whoever owns the space station. If it's owned by Richard Branson, it'll probably be for tourism. If it's owned by the Howard Hughes Institute, they'll probably be doing medical research. In the past, Bigelow Aerospace has stated that they'll sell their space station modules to pretty much whoever for $100 million each, and they should be up and running in the next few years.
The only part im sad about is it seems Joss had plans for 2 more and if thats true then there must have been more plot to explore but now we'll never know
This reminds me of something which others here might find amusing... after having recently watched the Firefly episodes, the episode commentaries, and the movie, I somehow got the half-baked idea that Inara is a vampire, or a succubus, or some other sort of supernatural creature. Whedon's other shows, Buffy and Angel, are pretty obviously in the same universe, but there's nothing solid tying Firefly to that same universe... or is there?
The evidence I collected is pretty poor/circumstantial, but as a whole it's rather interesting to muse about, I think:
* In the "Out of Gas" episode, there's a scene where the doctor (Simon) and Inara are chatting about their inevitable demise. On the commentary the director of that episode mentions that there was a clue to something about Inara which didn't get expanded on in the show. During this scene the following dialog takes place:
Inara: I love this ship. I have from the first moment I saw it.
Simon: I just don't want to die on it.
Inara: I don't want to die at all.
I might be imagining things, but IMHO Inara sounds kind of sinister when she says that, as if she really doesn't plan on dying.
* I might be wrong on this, but I can't recall any time that Inara appears outside in the sun with exposed skin. The one time I recall her being outside was in "Trash," where she appears outside wearing a veil. (Now that I think about it though, there might be an exception in "Shindig" during the duel...)
* In the pilot, when Firefly passes by Reavers and everybody thinks they're about to die, Inara pulls out a little case which looks like a suicide kit. In the commentary the director says it's not a suicide kit, but actually a secret about Inara which would've been revealed later. It doesn't look like the sort of weapon you'd use to fight off Reavers, so perhaps it's something supernatural?
* In the commentary, one of the directors mentions how Inara was supposed to be played in a way which showed her as having more wisdom than someone her age to have, wisdom beyond her years. This could just mean that she's smart, but could also have other connotations.
* In Serenity, Inara fights using a weapon which rapidly switches between being a bow and a crossbow. The rapid switching is probably a blooper, but in any case, a bow/crossbow is a pretty anachronistic weapon, even for Firefly.
So yeah, the "evidence" I have is pretty fragmentary, and there's alternative explanations for just about all of it. It's pretty obvious though that Whedon had some sort of deep, dark secret in Inara's past that he didn't have a chance to reveal. What are your thoughts? Can anyone else think of things to support/refute this?
I hope you wouldn't compile a quantum program on a quantum computer. Imagine bugs that aren't even in your source code...
Or a Schroedinbug!
Schroedinbug is a term used in software programming to describe a computer bug that is not discovered, but shows up after somebody reads the source or uses the application in an unusual way. The program then stops working for everyone until the bug is fixed. Although this sounds rather impossible, some programs have carried latent schroedinbugs.
You surely mean d4vid.
;)
Or Da5id.
The quantum programming wikipedia article has a link to a rather neat paper by Simon Gay, titled Quantum Programming Languages: Survey and Bibliography. This seems to give a pretty good overview of current thinking regarding what sorts of programming languages would be appropriate for quantum computation. The abstract:
The field of quantum programming languages is developing rapidly and there is a surprisingly large literature. Research in this area includes the design of programming languages for quantum computing, the application of established semantic and logical techniques to the foundations of quantum mechanics, and the design of compilers for quantum programming languages. This article justfies the study of quantum programming languages, presents the basics of quantum computing, surveys the literature in quantum programming languages, and indicates directions for future research.
He has the bibliography, complete with paper links available here.
Um... your welcome?
Yikes! Cobalt-60 is almost as bad as it gets. Cobalt 60 radiation dosages are almost twice as bad as the actual dosage of radiation one would get from the fallout of an actual atomic device which sort of begs the question of what they are doing with it? Are they modeling fallout? Or are they experimenting with dirty bombs? Lining the inside of atomic devices with heavy metals and other elements is a way to create much more radioactive bombs that have long lasting radiation effects.
According to this page and wikipedia, there's a number of non-military applications for Cobalt-60: "As a tracer for cobalt in chemical reactions, as a radioactive source for food irradiation, and as a radioactive source for laboratory use."
It's a little disconcerting that a "structural" problem would be found only 15 minutes before the launch. The only thing I can think of off hand that makes sense is something related to fueling the rocket.
Actually, the problem was in draining the rocket. From the official update page:
Due to high winds, we placed the countdown on hold and began draining the fuel tank. As we drained fuel from the 1st stage tank, a faulty pressurization valve caused a vacuum condition in the tank. This caused a fuel tank barrel section to deform and suck inward. It is important to note that the root cause is an electrical fault with a valve, not structural design.
Many of the comments here are condemning the article submitter for wanting to give to giving money to open-source projects, saying that he should instead give money to, say, starving orphans in Africa or South America. I think people would do well to read a recent op-ed in the NY Times (commentary in WorldChanging) by a former Peace Corps worker in Africa about why just dumping money in poor countries isn't such a good thing. Some quotes:
...
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It seems to have been Africa's fate to become a theater of empty talk and public gestures. But the impression that Africa is fatally troubled and can be saved only by outside help - not to mention celebrities and charity concerts - is a destructive and misleading conceit. Those of us who committed ourselves to being Peace Corps teachers in rural Malawi more than 40 years ago are dismayed by what we see on our return visits and by all the news that has been reported recently from that unlucky, drought-stricken country. But we are more appalled by most of the proposed solutions.
I am not speaking of humanitarian aid, disaster relief, AIDS education or affordable drugs. Nor am I speaking of small-scale, closely watched efforts like the Malawi Children's Village. I am speaking of the "more money" platform: the notion that what Africa needs is more prestige projects, volunteer labor and debt relief. We should know better by now. I would not send private money to a charity, or foreign aid to a government, unless every dollar was accounted for - and this never happens. Dumping more money in the same old way is not only wasteful, but stupid and harmful; it is also ignoring some obvious points.
If Malawi is worse educated, more plagued by illness and bad services, poorer than it was when I lived and worked there in the early 60's, it is not for lack of outside help or donor money. Malawi has been the beneficiary of many thousands of foreign teachers, doctors and nurses, and large amounts of financial aid, and yet it has declined from a country with promise to a failed state.
When Malawi's minister of education was accused of stealing millions of dollars from the education budget in 2000, and the Zambian president was charged with stealing from the treasury, and Nigeria squandered its oil wealth, what happened? The simplifiers of Africa's problems kept calling for debt relief and more aid. I got a dusty reception lecturing at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation when I pointed out the successes of responsible policies in Botswana, compared with the kleptomania of its neighbors. Donors enable embezzlement by turning a blind eye to bad governance, rigged elections and the deeper reasons these countries are failing.
Bono, in his role as Mrs. Jellyby in a 10-gallon hat, not only believes that he has the solution to Africa's ills, he is also shouting so loud that other people seem to trust his answers. He traveled in 2002 to Africa with former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, urging debt forgiveness. He recently had lunch at the White House, where he expounded upon the "more money" platform and how African countries are uniquely futile.
But are they? Had Bono looked closely at Malawi he would have seen an earlier incarnation of his own Ireland. Both countries were characterized for centuries by famine, religious strife, infighting, unruly families, hubristic clan chiefs, malnutrition, failed crops, ancient orthodoxies, dental problems and fickle weather. Malawi had a similar sense of grievance, was also colonized by absentee British landlords and was priest-ridden, too.
Africa has no real shortage of capable people - or even of money. The patronizing attention of donors has done violence to Africa's belief in itself, but even in the absence of responsible leadership, Africans themselves have proven how resilient they can
My article is just about giving back to the virtual communities that helped you get where you are. That is, in addition to all the worthy causes out there. Don't think you know me just because you read two lines I put up on Slashdot.
Yeah, I'm not sure what's up with all the comments here condemning you because you discussed ways to give back to the open source community instead of starving orphans or whatever. I mean, all those things are good, but there's also merit in giving to people who do good work and create software which helps us in our day-to-day lives. Thanks for typing up the list.
All of my schooling has managed to avoid the 20th century...
Now that I think about it, I think I had about the same. I remember in my high school American history and world history courses, we'd quickly gloss over the 20th century in the last week or so of the class.
Now the fact that American history books as taught in our schools will only go into detail on the first two (non-American "bad guys") and gives only token treatment to slavery and usually don't mention the Native American genocide is an entirely different problem...
I don't know if my experience is representative, but throughout my public middle school and high school history/English courses, we spent -much- more time being taught about slavery and the plight of Native Americans than the holocaust and Stalin.
Anybody know of a good way to get perfectly repeatable accuracy to within... say 3-6 inches within a local area? (It doesn't have to have any bearing on actual location, so long as you can repeatably get within a couple inches of the same value at the same location every time you try.)
It wouldn't be cheap, but it looks like the NorthStar system from Evolution Robotics can do pretty accurate robot localization.
More or less, it will be like the people who hacked the Robosapiens etc. except that its a bit more expensive to hack into...
Not to nitpick, but I think this is actually cheaper than hacking a Robosapien. A Roomba Red costs $150, while one of the newer Robosapiens costs $230.
Does anyone know who is behind wikipediaclassaction.org?
It looks like the article is up for a deletion vote at the moment (some consider it non-encyclopedic), but there's actually a pretty good Wikipedia article on the Wikipedia class action suit. Here's the first few paragraphs:
WikipediaClassAction.org is a website that claims to represent people wishing to file a class action suit against the Wikimedia Foundation to hold the creators/founders of Wikipedia legally responsible for malicious postings made by contributors to Wikipedia that are claimed to have caused damages to other individuals and groups.
Allegedly started by the owners of QuakeAID, wikipediaclassaction.org (domain name registered on December 11, 2005 by Jennifer Monroe) refers to a 2005 incident involving John Seigenthaler Sr. who was identified by a Wikipedia article between May and September of 2005 as having been implicated in the John F. Kennedy assassination and the Robert F. Kennedy assassination.
The site claims to be "currently gathering complaints from the entire Internet community, including individuals, corporations, partnerships, etc., who believe that they have been defamed and or who have been or are the subject of anonymous and malicious postings to the popular online encyclopedia WikiPedia."
I should add that QuakeAID, the company behind the suit, is generally considered by many to be a fake/illegitimate charity. They seem to be upset that information about this illegitimacy is in their Wikipedia article, although people from the company have done quite a bit of editing on it.
From Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age:
Hackworth had been catapulted out of the rank-and-file and into Bespoke's elite ranks by his invention of the mediatronic chopstick. He'd been working in San Francisco at the time. The company was thinking hard about things Chinese, trying to one-up the Nipponese, who had already figured out a way to generate passable rice (five different varieties, yet!) direct from Feed, bypassing the whole paddy/coolie rat race, enabling two billion peasants to hang up their conical hats and get into some serious leisure time-- and don't think for one moment that the Nipponese didn't already have some suggestions for what they might do with it. Some genius at headquarters, stewing over Nippon's prohibitive lead in nanotechnological rice production, decided the only thing for it was to leapfrog them by mass-producing entire meals, from wonton all the way to digital interactive fortune cookies. Hackworth got the seemingly trivial job of programming the matter compiler to extrude chopsticks.
Now, doing this in plastic was idiotically simple-- polymers and nanotechnology went together like toothpaste and tubes. But Hackworth, who'd eaten his share of Chinese as a student, had never taken well to the plastic chopsticks, which were slick and treacherous in the blunt hands of a gwailo. Bamboo was better-- and not that much harder to program, if you just had a bit of imagination. Once he'd made that conceptual leap, it wasn't long before he came up with the idea of selling advertising space on the damn things, chopstick handles and Chinese columnar script being a perfect match. Before long he was presenting it to his superiors: eminently user-friendly bamboid chopsters with colorful advertising messages continuously scrolling up their handles in real time, like news headlines in Times Square. For that, Hackworth was kicked upstairs to Bespoke and across the Pacific to Atlantis/Shanghai. He saw these chopsticks everywhere now. To the Equity Lords, the idea had been worth billions; to Hackworth, another week's paycheck. That was the difference between the classes, right there. He wasn't doing that badly, compared to most other people in the world, but it still rankled him. He wanted more for Fiona. He wanted Fiona to grow up with some equity of her own. And not just a few pennies invested in common stocks, but a serious position in a major company.
Until countries decide that the central banks are evil nothing will change. This is something that has been a very big issue historically. Most great leaders were killed going against the Central Privately Held Banks. They have complete power and now want complete global control. Only a very, very, brave leader will fight the Central Bank. Here in the US, our late President Kennedy issues US Bank Notes in direct competition with the Federal Reserve. They day he was assasinated they revoked them.
And then, the Gnomes of Zurich, via the Multinational Oil Companies and the Fiendish Fluoridators, used Orbital Mind Control Lasers to destroy the Society for Creative Anarchism.
Illuminati is such a great game.
From the article: The satellite will be deployed from a rocket on a sub-orbital trajectory. This means scientists will have only 10 minutes of microgravity in which to perform their tests before the craft starts its descent back to Earth and eventually burns up in the atmosphere.
I find it interesting that this research is being done with a suborbital launcher. People often dismiss ventures like SpaceShipOne and Virgin Galactic because they aren't orbital, but perhaps the cost efficiencies of private ventures could help suborbital space research?
Does anyone have an idea of how much suborbital launches currently cost, and how this compares to Virgin Galactic's prices? Of course, one would likely need to add some sort of satellite deployment mechanism...