SpaceX is actually in the middle of a court battle right now with Boeing & Lockheed to try to keep them from locking competitors out of the Air Force's $32 billion EELV launch program. From this Businessweek article:
The Defense Dept. may soon sign off on a Boeing-Lockheed joint venture that critics fear could lock up the Air Force's $32 billion heavy-payload launch program, known as Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicles (EELV), until 2011. That would freeze SpaceX and other entrepreneurs out of a huge chunk of the military market.
SpaceX is fighting hard to block the monopoly in the courts and at the Federal Trade Commission, which must approve the deal.... But SpaceX fears it may not get a chance to offer the government its bargain blastoffs. To block the Boeing-Lockheed Martin joint venture, the company is spending as much time in the courtroom as in the cleanroom. While SpaceX lost its first court challenge, the opposition apparently compelled the Air Force to back off its plan, laid out in an internal memo, to shut out everyone but the two giants for launches through 2011....
Even then, Boeing and Lockheed Martin will have a competitive edge: The Air Force is footing the bill for their infrastructure costs.
One example: NASA Selects ATK to be Prime Contractor for First Stage of Next Generation Crew Launch Vehicle. Reader note from the page: "What is even more interesting is this was released during Thanksgiving week, with a due date of Dec. 2. How is anyone supposed to do the research required for even a minimal response in 7 working days? Somehow this doesn't seem fair or realistic." (It should also be mentioned that the solicitation was pretty much tailored so that only ATK could qualify.)
Wouldn't lack of empathy be a symptom of autism rather than a cause?
If I recall correctly, part of the problem is that it's both. The lack of empathy causes a lack of social interaction, and the absence of social interaction means that empathic skills don't get developed. This results in a rather nasty feedback loop.
Does anybody remember the early 90s computer game SimAnt? Basically, you got to control an entire 2D ant colony. You didn't directly control all of the individual ants, but instead controlled a single ant which dropped pheremones on the ground, which other ants would follow. For example, you could leave a food pheremone trail leading to a food source, and as long as your fellow ants kept on finding food there, they would add their own pheremones on the trip back to sustain the trail.
It would have been handy to have a "no entry" pheremone in that game. Now that I think of it, SimAnt is a game which is just screaming to have an open-source remake. Somebody with more spare time than me should make such a remake, and add the newly discovered pheremone.:)
This kit has or had potential to hook kids into robotics, but IMHO they should emphasize extending a "video game" interface into real life peripherals (ie, doing something in a "video game" experience causes something in real life with Mindstorms something like augmented reality).
Actually, Lego did something similar to this with their Spybotics system. I never really tried it myself, but saw it demoed in stores. If I recall correctly, you used it to build a little vehicle with a processor simpler than the Mindstorms', which you used to perform various "covert missions." Unfortunately, it seemed like it was a little -too- simple, and you couldn't actually use the kit to build anything other than the intended vehicle.
A little while ago Wired had a story on a similar topic, in which a strain of mice was discovered which was able to regrow organs. From the Wired article (which has some neat pictures of regenerating mouse ears):
Mice discovered accidentally at the Wistar Institute in Pennsylvania have the seemingly miraculous ability to regenerate like a salamander, and even regrow vital organs.
Researchers systematically amputated digits and damaged various organs of the mice, including the heart, liver and brain, most of which grew back.
The results stunned scientists because if such regeneration is possible in this mammal, it might also be possible in humans.
The researchers also made a remarkable second discovery: When cells from the regenerative mice were injected into normal mice, the normal mice adopted the ability to regenerate. And when the special mice bred with normal mice, their offspring inherited souped-up regeneration capabilities....
Heber-Katz discovered the strain in 1998 accidentally while working with mice specially bred for studying autoimmune diseases.
She had pierced holes in the ears of the genetically altered mice to distinguish them from a control group, but they healed quickly with no scarring.
She and her colleagues wanted to find out what other parts of this strain of mice would grow back, so they snipped off the tip of a tail, severed a spinal cord, injured the optic nerve and damaged various internal organs....
The mice seem to exhibit regenerative capabilities similar to that of human fetuses in the first trimester, said Dr. Stephen Badylak, a surgery research professor and director of the Center for Pre-Clinical Tissue Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh's McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine.
"It offers us insight into a more fetal-like healing response, where scar tissue is minimal and regeneration is abundant," Badylak said. "It's a great model to examine healing mechanisms and use that information to see if we can stimulate the same thing to happen in people."
Heber-Katz said she will soon publish her results on digit regrowth in a peer-reviewed medical journal.
On-site liveblogging by Elon Musk's brother
on
SpaceX Launches Falcon 1
·
· Score: 2, Informative
An addendum to my earlier comment... it turns out that the brother of the SpaceX CEO is liveblogging from mission control:
At the moment, the LOX tanks have been filled, and they're on hold at T-minus 10 minutes while they refill Helium tanks and so forth. His blog has a number of photographs taken on the Pacific island they're launching from.
Is linking to a page about a launch which hasn't happened yet, in a language that most slashdotters can't even read, some kind of sick prank? In any case, as of now (0018 GMT, 4:18 PM PST), the launch has been delayed a couple of times today. The first delay was due to overcast skies (they were afraid of possibly generating a lightning strike with the rocket plumes), and the current delays are due to problems with their liquid oxygen fuel boiling off during the first delay.
They just got an extension on their launch window, and are still hoping to launch today (5pm PST at last report).
I've been eagerly awaiting this launch for the past couple of years. If it succeeds, it's going to change everything. Although their first rocket is relatively small, they're already working on much larger successors, all at a selling price which is a small fraction of their competitors'. Drastically cutting launch costs, increasing the launch rate, and enhancing space accessibility is crucial to SpaceX founder Elon Musk's long-term goal: helping humanity become a spacefaring civilization.
If it doesn't succeed, well, Musk has stated that he can afford up to three consecutive launch failures before calling it quits.
The summary makes it sound like it's over for the probe, which is far from the case. Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society has been keeping track of the latest details. According to her posts, although it will take several days to get the probe back into the proper position, they should be ready for another landing attempt sometime next week.
I completely agree. I watched the Firefly series over the past month, and watched Serenity this past week. It was simply amazing.
I have to say I am totally amazed that this show was canceled. They canned this in favor of what? More reality sludge? Yikes.
FOX certainly stacked the odds against it. From the wikipedia article:
Firefly was promoted as an action-comedy rather than the more serious character study it was intended to be. Episodes were occasionally preempted for sporting events, and episodes were not aired in storyline-chronological order as the creators had intended. Most notably, the two-hour episode "Serenity" was intended to be the pilot episode and therefore contained most of the character introductions and back-story. However, FOX decided that "Serenity" was not a suitable pilot, and so the second episode, "The Train Job", was rushed into production to become the pilot episode.
People won't die of old age, they'll die of some freak accident when they are 900 years old. There'll be no need for social security, because there will be no need to truly get 'old'.
Ideally, yes. However, I can guarantee you that constituents will be mightily unhappy about not getting social security money at a particular age.
rTMS is cool, but you can really only stimulate the surface of cortex, and the resolution is pretty crude -- several orders of magnitude above the single neuron level.
Yeah, the optical imaging research from Clay Reid's group is pretty darned cool. If I understand correctly though, don't the neurons tend to die off pretty quickly from being exposed to two-photon microscopy? It seems that'd make any sort of chronic recording pretty difficult.
What are your thoughts on using autonomously adjusting electrodes to deal with the problem of neurons shifting about? Granted, the current systems are rather bulky, but much more compact ones are under development.
This reminded me of the research by Quian Quiroga et al in which they performed single-neuron recordings from MTL (upstream of IT, if I recall correctly) in humans. In that study they found neurons which would respond selectively to particular objects, such as Jennifer Aniston, Halle Berry, and the Sydney Opera House. Here's the abstract:
It takes a fraction of a second to recognize a person or an object even when seen under strikingly different conditions. How such a robust, high-level representation is achieved by neurons in the human brain is still unclear. In monkeys, neurons in the upper stages of the ventral visual pathway respond to complex images such as faces and objects and show some degree of invariance to metric properties such as the stimulus size, position and viewing angle. We have previously shown that neurons in the human medial temporal lobe (MTL) fire selectively to images of faces, animals, objects or scenes. Here we report on a remarkable subset of MTL neurons that are selectively activated by strikingly different pictures of given individuals, landmarks or objects and in some cases even by letter strings with their names. These results suggest an invariant, sparse and explicit code, which might be important in the transformation of complex visual percepts into long-term and more abstract memories.
Slashdot Mirror
Level playing field. Any bets on that?
... But SpaceX fears it may not get a chance to offer the government its bargain blastoffs. To block the Boeing-Lockheed Martin joint venture, the company is spending as much time in the courtroom as in the cleanroom. While SpaceX lost its first court challenge, the opposition apparently compelled the Air Force to back off its plan, laid out in an internal memo, to shut out everyone but the two giants for launches through 2011. ...
SpaceX is actually in the middle of a court battle right now with Boeing & Lockheed to try to keep them from locking competitors out of the Air Force's $32 billion EELV launch program. From this Businessweek article:
The Defense Dept. may soon sign off on a Boeing-Lockheed joint venture that critics fear could lock up the Air Force's $32 billion heavy-payload launch program, known as Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicles (EELV), until 2011. That would freeze SpaceX and other entrepreneurs out of a huge chunk of the military market.
SpaceX is fighting hard to block the monopoly in the courts and at the Federal Trade Commission, which must approve the deal.
Even then, Boeing and Lockheed Martin will have a competitive edge: The Air Force is footing the bill for their infrastructure costs.
NASA has a way of bowing to pressure where they will say, "Oh, sure, we'll open it up to ____" and then making sure it won't happen behind the scenes.
Indeed. For some recent examples of this, just check out this posting from NASA Watch.
One example: NASA Selects ATK to be Prime Contractor for First Stage of Next Generation Crew Launch Vehicle. Reader note from the page: "What is even more interesting is this was released during Thanksgiving week, with a due date of Dec. 2. How is anyone supposed to do the research required for even a minimal response in 7 working days? Somehow this doesn't seem fair or realistic." (It should also be mentioned that the solicitation was pretty much tailored so that only ATK could qualify.)
Wouldn't lack of empathy be a symptom of autism rather than a cause?
If I recall correctly, part of the problem is that it's both. The lack of empathy causes a lack of social interaction, and the absence of social interaction means that empathic skills don't get developed. This results in a rather nasty feedback loop.
The parent was copied word-for-word from a comment on a story a few months ago on What interests high-school students?.
Well, there WAS a "warning" pheromone.
Oh wow, I totally forgot about that. It's been far too long since I last played... I really need to set aside some time to fire up DOSBox.
What are your thoughts on this proposal to replace patents with prediction exchanges?
Out of curiosity, where would the laws come from if there was no voting on them? Is your utopia some kind of autocracy?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-capitalism
http://mises.org/
http://www.lewrockwell.com/
Does anybody remember the early 90s computer game SimAnt? Basically, you got to control an entire 2D ant colony. You didn't directly control all of the individual ants, but instead controlled a single ant which dropped pheremones on the ground, which other ants would follow. For example, you could leave a food pheremone trail leading to a food source, and as long as your fellow ants kept on finding food there, they would add their own pheremones on the trip back to sustain the trail.
:)
It would have been handy to have a "no entry" pheremone in that game. Now that I think of it, SimAnt is a game which is just screaming to have an open-source remake. Somebody with more spare time than me should make such a remake, and add the newly discovered pheremone.
This kit has or had potential to hook kids into robotics, but IMHO they should emphasize extending a "video game" interface into real life peripherals (ie, doing something in a "video game" experience causes something in real life with Mindstorms something like augmented reality).
Actually, Lego did something similar to this with their Spybotics system. I never really tried it myself, but saw it demoed in stores. If I recall correctly, you used it to build a little vehicle with a processor simpler than the Mindstorms', which you used to perform various "covert missions." Unfortunately, it seemed like it was a little -too- simple, and you couldn't actually use the kit to build anything other than the intended vehicle.
A little while ago Wired had a story on a similar topic, in which a strain of mice was discovered which was able to regrow organs. From the Wired article (which has some neat pictures of regenerating mouse ears):
...
...
Mice discovered accidentally at the Wistar Institute in Pennsylvania have the seemingly miraculous ability to regenerate like a salamander, and even regrow vital organs.
Researchers systematically amputated digits and damaged various organs of the mice, including the heart, liver and brain, most of which grew back.
The results stunned scientists because if such regeneration is possible in this mammal, it might also be possible in humans.
The researchers also made a remarkable second discovery: When cells from the regenerative mice were injected into normal mice, the normal mice adopted the ability to regenerate. And when the special mice bred with normal mice, their offspring inherited souped-up regeneration capabilities.
Heber-Katz discovered the strain in 1998 accidentally while working with mice specially bred for studying autoimmune diseases.
She had pierced holes in the ears of the genetically altered mice to distinguish them from a control group, but they healed quickly with no scarring.
She and her colleagues wanted to find out what other parts of this strain of mice would grow back, so they snipped off the tip of a tail, severed a spinal cord, injured the optic nerve and damaged various internal organs.
The mice seem to exhibit regenerative capabilities similar to that of human fetuses in the first trimester, said Dr. Stephen Badylak, a surgery research professor and director of the Center for Pre-Clinical Tissue Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh's McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine.
"It offers us insight into a more fetal-like healing response, where scar tissue is minimal and regeneration is abundant," Badylak said. "It's a great model to examine healing mechanisms and use that information to see if we can stimulate the same thing to happen in people."
Heber-Katz said she will soon publish her results on digit regrowth in a peer-reviewed medical journal.
An addendum to my earlier comment... it turns out that the brother of the SpaceX CEO is liveblogging from mission control:
http://kwajrockets.blogspot.com/
At the moment, the LOX tanks have been filled, and they're on hold at T-minus 10 minutes while they refill Helium tanks and so forth. His blog has a number of photographs taken on the Pacific island they're launching from.
Is linking to a page about a launch which hasn't happened yet, in a language that most slashdotters can't even read, some kind of sick prank? In any case, as of now (0018 GMT, 4:18 PM PST), the launch has been delayed a couple of times today. The first delay was due to overcast skies (they were afraid of possibly generating a lightning strike with the rocket plumes), and the current delays are due to problems with their liquid oxygen fuel boiling off during the first delay.
Here are some good sources of up-to-the-minute coverage:
* Spaceflight Now's Falcon 1 Mission Status Center
* Liveblogging by Out of the Cradle
* Liveblogging by space reporter Michael Belfiore
* SpaceX's official launch info (good info, but not updated as often as other sources)
They just got an extension on their launch window, and are still hoping to launch today (5pm PST at last report).
I've been eagerly awaiting this launch for the past couple of years. If it succeeds, it's going to change everything. Although their first rocket is relatively small, they're already working on much larger successors, all at a selling price which is a small fraction of their competitors'. Drastically cutting launch costs, increasing the launch rate, and enhancing space accessibility is crucial to SpaceX founder Elon Musk's long-term goal: helping humanity become a spacefaring civilization.
If it doesn't succeed, well, Musk has stated that he can afford up to three consecutive launch failures before calling it quits.
The following have some more background info on what Elon Musk is trying to achieve with SpaceX:
* Hopes of Start-Up Rocket Company Are Riding on First Launch (LA Times)
* SpaceX wikipedia article
* Big Plans for SpaceX (The Space Review, discusses plans for human spaceflight and building world's largest rocket engine)
* Shooting the Moon (Discover Magazine)
*
The summary makes it sound like it's over for the probe, which is far from the case. Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society has been keeping track of the latest details. According to her posts, although it will take several days to get the probe back into the proper position, they should be ready for another landing attempt sometime next week.
Not to nit-pick, "The Day the Earth Stood Still" and "Serenity" should be listed between Star Wars episodes 6 & 3 on your list.
I completely agree. I watched the Firefly series over the past month, and watched Serenity this past week. It was simply amazing.
I have to say I am totally amazed that this show was canceled. They canned this in favor of what? More reality sludge? Yikes.
FOX certainly stacked the odds against it. From the wikipedia article:
Firefly was promoted as an action-comedy rather than the more serious character study it was intended to be. Episodes were occasionally preempted for sporting events, and episodes were not aired in storyline-chronological order as the creators had intended. Most notably, the two-hour episode "Serenity" was intended to be the pilot episode and therefore contained most of the character introductions and back-story. However, FOX decided that "Serenity" was not a suitable pilot, and so the second episode, "The Train Job", was rushed into production to become the pilot episode.
People won't die of old age, they'll die of some freak accident when they are 900 years old. There'll be no need for social security, because there will be no need to truly get 'old'.
Ideally, yes. However, I can guarantee you that constituents will be mightily unhappy about not getting social security money at a particular age.
Non-profits aren't private?
I don't trust private enterprise to take care of national parks and poverty.
Oh I don't know, the Boy Scouts seem to be doing a pretty good job with the land they own.
Other good examples of private organizations undertaking the same role as national parks are Ducks Unlimited and The Nature Conservancy.
rTMS is cool, but you can really only stimulate the surface of cortex, and the resolution is pretty crude -- several orders of magnitude above the single neuron level.
Yeah, the optical imaging research from Clay Reid's group is pretty darned cool. If I understand correctly though, don't the neurons tend to die off pretty quickly from being exposed to two-photon microscopy? It seems that'd make any sort of chronic recording pretty difficult.
What are your thoughts on using autonomously adjusting electrodes to deal with the problem of neurons shifting about? Granted, the current systems are rather bulky, but much more compact ones are under development.
This reminded me of the research by Quian Quiroga et al in which they performed single-neuron recordings from MTL (upstream of IT, if I recall correctly) in humans. In that study they found neurons which would respond selectively to particular objects, such as Jennifer Aniston, Halle Berry, and the Sydney Opera House. Here's the abstract:
R. Quian Quiroga, L. Reddy, G. Kreiman, C. Koch & I. Fried Invariant visual representation by single neurons in the humanbrain. Nature (2005) 435, 1102-1107
It takes a fraction of a second to recognize a person or an object even when seen under strikingly different conditions. How such a robust, high-level representation is achieved by neurons in the human brain is still unclear. In monkeys, neurons in the upper stages of the ventral visual pathway respond to complex images such as faces and objects and show some degree of invariance to metric properties such as the stimulus size, position and viewing angle. We have previously shown that neurons in the human medial temporal lobe (MTL) fire selectively to images of faces, animals, objects or scenes. Here we report on a remarkable subset of MTL neurons that are selectively activated by strikingly different pictures of given individuals, landmarks or objects and in some cases even by letter strings with their names. These results suggest an invariant, sparse and explicit code, which might be important in the transformation of complex visual percepts into long-term and more abstract memories.
When your decisions effect your real life (i.e. your income) it is no longer a game.
Sure, but one can enjoy things even if they aren't games.
And yet in five thousand years of recorded human history it never has.
n archo-capitalism_in_the_real_world
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-capitalism#A
Granted, there's certainly weaknesses in the examples of Medieval Iceland and Somalia.
cutting down on NASA's budget AND missions like this
Boolean logic: A & B is only true if A is true and B is true.