You want non-linear contrast stretching, so that the values of greatest interest are differentiated the best.
On that note, I'd like to mention that Matlab's adapthiseq (contrast-limited adaptive histogram equalization) totally rocks. It's rather nice for pre-processing before applying more sophisticated techniques.
In addition to the work at Cornell, there was also a Slashdot blurb I submitted a few months ago on RepRap. Perhaps we have self-replicating stories?:)
In all seriousness though, it looks like some progress has been made since then, so it's nice to see another article on this.
Except the Geneva Conventions forbid the use of mind-altering chemicals of any kind during interrogation. All interrogatees must be screen by medical personnel before even being able to be talked to by interrogators.
Do the Geneva Conventions forbid doing something to the interrogators themselves so that they "naturally" release excess oxytocin? One could imagine some sort of drug which results in excess oxytocin being released, or in the future, perhaps even genetic modification.
On a related note, an interesting study would be seeing if expert interrogators (and used car salesmen) release more oxytocin than the average.
If this is an attempt at making a sucker pill, well its a nice attempt and I'm sure a few people will buy the sucker pill and start trusting strangers. Myself, I won't trust anyone who hasnt earned it, and earning it isnt easy, takes time, effort, and a proven track record.
Good for you. However, quite a few people are eager to buy a product simply because it appears in advertisements with a celebrity they like.
Yeah, but when conventional bombing raids stop, people stop dying. The 'firecrackers', as you so blithely describe them, have far more long-lasting effect.
the world's space faring nations should join forces and build one common launch vehicle
I'm sorry, but that makes about as much sense as saying that the nations of the world should join together and build one common airplane. Design by committee generally doesn't work too well, especially if the design has to be made such that it siphons an appropriate amount of money into each of the involved countries.
They've made their choice: Fast and Good. The one they *don't* get, then, is cheap!
Ah, but with these sorts of things, doesn't "Good" typically mean "Full of features"? It seems that by going with simple they're trying to reduce the number of features. It seems quite possible to have something which is simple, cheap, and quickly developed.
Their cubes seem pretty cool... basically a physical variant of cellular automata. The Nature paper is neat but necessarily short. Here's an older paper with some more details:
Efstathios Mytilinaios, David Marcus, Mark Desnoyer and Hod Lipson, (2004)
Abstract: Self-replication is a process critical to natural and artificial life, but has been investigated to date mostly in simulation and in abstract systems. The near absence of physical demonstrations of self-replication is due primarily to the lack of a physical substrate in which self-replication can be implemented. This paper proposes a substrate composed of simple modular units, in which both simple and complex machines can construct and be constructed by other machines in the same substrate. A number of designs, both hand crafted and evolved, are proposed.
Indeed. Last I checked, humans and other animals couldn't self-replicate either, but needed to have raw materials preprocessed by things like plants first.
The submitter should RTFA. tSpace is not proposing a shuttle replacement. They have apparently ceeded that to Boeing or Lockmart. They are proposing a lunar transfer vehicle. They are trying to get in on the CEV bidding without going through the formal review process.
Huh? While it is true that t/Space has submitted a proposal for a CEV lunar transfer vehicle, these articles are about their CXV plans. The CXV, as an earth-to-LEO vehicle, is definitely what I'd consider a shuttle replacement, particularly in its potential role in ISS crew transfer.
A shuttle derived unmanned launcher could be easily developed from existing hardware and deliver 250,000 lbs to LEO.
I'm personally rather mixed on the possibility of shuttle-derived heavy-lift.
Why develop the same thing twice and compete, when you can cooperate?
Yeah, that international cooperation thing worked really well on the space station, didn't it?
Seriously, cooperation sounds really nice, but in reality all it means is that you have to deal with the red tape of two countries instead of one. Plus, the Kliper and CXV proposals are really quite different from each other; insights from both projects and which parts work best will make the following generation of spacecraft even better.
This might be a silly question, but if they do get the NASA contract and develop a 4-person capsule with a per-launch cost of $20 million, would they be allowed to also use the same capsule design for commercial uses, like space tourism? We've already seen a number of people eager to shell out $20 million for an orbital flight, so I can imagine that the number eager to spend $5 million for the same flight would be much higher.
If I understand correctly, it's mostly fixed costs, particularly the costs of paying the salaries of the standing army of ~20,000 employees. They're needed to maintain, n-tuple check, and fill out the paperwork for shuttle tiles, volatile fuels, and so on.
The B-2 is the most expensive plane built to date, costing approximately $2.2 billion USD per plane. [1] (http://www.fas.org/man/gao/gao94217.htm) Some writers have suggested that the huge program cost may actually include costs for other black projects that remain classified. The high per-unit cost may also be partially explained by the small number of planes produced coupled with a large research overhead in the B-2 program (see below).
The President of the United States was briefly granted this power in the Line Item Veto Act of 1996. It was used once before U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Hogan declared it unconstitutional on February 12, 1998. This ruling was subsequently affirmed on June 25, 1998 by a 6-3 decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in the case Clinton v. City of New York.
So a very tiny part of a relatively small-scale space mission went well. That's terrific.
I've personally been anxiously awaiting the Marsis deployment since last year. This "very tiny part" should hopefully settle the question of whether or not there are bodies of subterranean water currently on Mars. I don't know about you, but I consider the possibility of Martian aquifers quite exciting.
What was the biggest triumph of space exploration in the last ten years?
There's plenty of options:
* the first landing on an asteroid * the discovery of bodies of water in the past of Mars * the first privately-funded suborbital human spaceflight * the first landing on Titan * the first in-space test of an ion propulsion engine * the discovery of and first images of extrasolar planets * the discovery of a sub-surface ocean on Europa * the collection of dust samples from a comet * high resolution (10m) maps of the Martian surface
No, our highwater mark for the last ten years is a solar-powered toy car which rolled around for a few days on the surface of Mars. Pathetic.
And Einstein was a guy who thought about stuff for a while and wrote them down.
Slashdot Mirror
Here is some money that NASA could "invest" in another x-prize like compitition.
They already are.
NASA's Centennial Challenges Program
2005 Tether Challenge
2005 Beam Power Challenge
Slashdot article from a few months ago
Granted, it'd be nice to see them offer more money, but Congress is currently keeping them from awarding prizes larger than a certain amount.
You want non-linear contrast stretching, so that the values of greatest interest are differentiated the best.
On that note, I'd like to mention that Matlab's adapthiseq (contrast-limited adaptive histogram equalization) totally rocks. It's rather nice for pre-processing before applying more sophisticated techniques.
In addition to the work at Cornell, there was also a Slashdot blurb I submitted a few months ago on RepRap. Perhaps we have self-replicating stories? :)
In all seriousness though, it looks like some progress has been made since then, so it's nice to see another article on this.
In all seriousness, the interface used by Google Maps seems like it would be well-suited for dealing with astronomical imaging data.
Except the Geneva Conventions forbid the use of mind-altering chemicals of any kind during interrogation. All interrogatees must be screen by medical personnel before even being able to be talked to by interrogators.
Do the Geneva Conventions forbid doing something to the interrogators themselves so that they "naturally" release excess oxytocin? One could imagine some sort of drug which results in excess oxytocin being released, or in the future, perhaps even genetic modification.
On a related note, an interesting study would be seeing if expert interrogators (and used car salesmen) release more oxytocin than the average.
If this is an attempt at making a sucker pill, well its a nice attempt and I'm sure a few people will buy the sucker pill and start trusting strangers. Myself, I won't trust anyone who hasnt earned it, and earning it isnt easy, takes time, effort, and a proven track record.
Good for you. However, quite a few people are eager to buy a product simply because it appears in advertisements with a celebrity they like.
I have no problem with genuine exploration, but I have extreme difficulty in understanding what exploration the ISS was all about.
Replace "exploration" with "foreign relations and keeping Russian rocket scientists from going to hostile nations," and it'll make a lot more sense.
Yeah, but when conventional bombing raids stop, people stop dying. The 'firecrackers', as you so blithely describe them, have far more long-lasting effect.
But which kills more people overall?
First, imagine that you will be reincarnated as a random individual in a society.
Wouldn't you just keep on hitting the respawn button until you got a decent starting point?
the world's space faring nations should join forces and build one common launch vehicle
I'm sorry, but that makes about as much sense as saying that the nations of the world should join together and build one common airplane. Design by committee generally doesn't work too well, especially if the design has to be made such that it siphons an appropriate amount of money into each of the involved countries.
They've made their choice: Fast and Good. The one they *don't* get, then, is cheap!
Ah, but with these sorts of things, doesn't "Good" typically mean "Full of features"? It seems that by going with simple they're trying to reduce the number of features. It seems quite possible to have something which is simple, cheap, and quickly developed.
I just wanted to say that this is quite possibly the most informative slashdot thread ever. Thanks to you both, georgewilliamherbert and Rei.
Lab web page: Cornell Computational Synthesis Lab (CCSL)
Page on their self-replication research (coral cache)
Their cubes seem pretty cool... basically a physical variant of cellular automata. The Nature paper is neat but necessarily short. Here's an older paper with some more details:
Designed and Evolved Blueprints For Physical Self-Replicating Machines
Efstathios Mytilinaios, David Marcus, Mark Desnoyer and Hod Lipson, (2004)
Abstract: Self-replication is a process critical to natural and artificial life, but has been investigated to date mostly in simulation and in abstract systems. The near absence of physical demonstrations of self-replication is due primarily to the lack of a physical substrate in which self-replication can be implemented. This paper proposes a substrate composed of simple modular units, in which both simple and complex machines can construct and be constructed by other machines in the same substrate. A number of designs, both hand crafted and evolved, are proposed.
Why is this not self replication?
Indeed. Last I checked, humans and other animals couldn't self-replicate either, but needed to have raw materials preprocessed by things like plants first.
Personally, I suspect solar-power satellites won't be competitive until there's enough infrastructure to build them from in-space resources.
The submitter should RTFA. tSpace is not proposing a shuttle replacement. They have apparently ceeded that to Boeing or Lockmart. They are proposing a lunar transfer vehicle. They are trying to get in on the CEV bidding without going through the formal review process.
Huh? While it is true that t/Space has submitted a proposal for a CEV lunar transfer vehicle, these articles are about their CXV plans. The CXV, as an earth-to-LEO vehicle, is definitely what I'd consider a shuttle replacement, particularly in its potential role in ISS crew transfer.
A shuttle derived unmanned launcher could be easily developed from existing hardware and deliver 250,000 lbs to LEO.
I'm personally rather mixed on the possibility of shuttle-derived heavy-lift.
Why develop the same thing twice and compete, when you can cooperate?
Yeah, that international cooperation thing worked really well on the space station, didn't it?
Seriously, cooperation sounds really nice, but in reality all it means is that you have to deal with the red tape of two countries instead of one. Plus, the Kliper and CXV proposals are really quite different from each other; insights from both projects and which parts work best will make the following generation of spacecraft even better.
This might be a silly question, but if they do get the NASA contract and develop a 4-person capsule with a per-launch cost of $20 million, would they be allowed to also use the same capsule design for commercial uses, like space tourism? We've already seen a number of people eager to shell out $20 million for an orbital flight, so I can imagine that the number eager to spend $5 million for the same flight would be much higher.
Hmm... I wonder if this would be able to dock with a Bigelow inflatable habitat.
If I understand correctly, it's mostly fixed costs, particularly the costs of paying the salaries of the standing army of ~20,000 employees. They're needed to maintain, n-tuple check, and fill out the paperwork for shuttle tiles, volatile fuels, and so on.
do you have a refrence, or did you pull that out of your mother's peed-in-vagina?
Assuming you're referring to the stealth bomber:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B-2_Spirit
The B-2 is the most expensive plane built to date, costing approximately $2.2 billion USD per plane. [1] (http://www.fas.org/man/gao/gao94217.htm) Some writers have suggested that the huge program cost may actually include costs for other black projects that remain classified. The high per-unit cost may also be partially explained by the small number of planes produced coupled with a large research overhead in the B-2 program (see below).
And so Congress would have to write legislation compact and straightforward enough that it couldn't be changed into something unintended.
My understanding is that the President has the power to line item veto
Nope. That said, I'd be very much in favor of an amendment to allow for one.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line-item_veto
The President of the United States was briefly granted this power in the Line Item Veto Act of 1996. It was used once before U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Hogan declared it unconstitutional on February 12, 1998. This ruling was subsequently affirmed on June 25, 1998 by a 6-3 decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in the case Clinton v. City of New York.
That must be why other nations not so obsessed with shooting shit are so overrun by wildlife.
Yes sir, I can't even get to my fridge in the morning without tripping over several feral Kangaroos that have found their way into my house.
BBC: Kangaroo cull targets millions
CNN: Koalas overcrowded down under
Thanks for the correction. Do you happen to know then what was noteworthy about the ion thrusters on DS1?
So a very tiny part of a relatively small-scale space mission went well. That's terrific.
I've personally been anxiously awaiting the Marsis deployment since last year. This "very tiny part" should hopefully settle the question of whether or not there are bodies of subterranean water currently on Mars. I don't know about you, but I consider the possibility of Martian aquifers quite exciting.
What was the biggest triumph of space exploration in the last ten years?
There's plenty of options:
* the first landing on an asteroid
* the discovery of bodies of water in the past of Mars
* the first privately-funded suborbital human spaceflight
* the first landing on Titan
* the first in-space test of an ion propulsion engine
* the discovery of and first images of extrasolar planets
* the discovery of a sub-surface ocean on Europa
* the collection of dust samples from a comet
* high resolution (10m) maps of the Martian surface
No, our highwater mark for the last ten years is a solar-powered toy car which rolled around for a few days on the surface of Mars. Pathetic.
And Einstein was a guy who thought about stuff for a while and wrote them down.