Hm... I went through three rounds of rejected submission attempts earlier trying to submit this story, several hours before this version was posted. In any case, here's my version of the submission, which has many more links:
As for my own thoughts, I think Griffin is an excellent pick. I'm amazed that they were able to find somebody with as much technical expertise as him who also has such a large amount of experience with managing large organizations. According to the space.com article, Griffin can be expected to make maximum use of the emerging commercial spaceflight industry.
In the past he's also said the following, which I approve of highly: "What is needed is to retire the Shuttle Orbiter, and its expensive support infrastructure," Griffin wrote. "It simply does not serve the needs of exploration and it is too expensive, to logistically fragile, and insufficiently safe for continued use as a low Earth orbit transport vehicle."
In the past he's been highly in favor of the government constructing a new heavy-lift launch vehicle, which I somewhat disagree with. Such an endeavor could easily end up being a bottomless money pit. Hopefully SpaceX's low-cost launches in the coming months will help raise awareness of frequently-launched smaller vehicles.
If you've got $1250 to spend, there's the Zalman Totally No Noise Computer Case. It's reportedly "the world's first absolutely noiseless and fanless computer case," using heatpipes for passive cooling. It basically uses the entire case as a giant heatsink.
Not sure what you'd do about the hard drives, though.
But if it means losing the ability to do deep UV astronomy or anything else that Hubble I has proven to be very adept at, I don't think we should skimp out.
The parent poster didn't mention this, but the proposed Hubble Origins Probe would also add a brand new Japanese-built Very Wide Field Imager. According to their science info, on the proposed HOP "UV sensitivity reaches two magnitudes deeper than HST/STIS [original Hubble] and the number of backgrouns QSO's increases by a factor of 100 [no idea what a QSO is]." The new Very Wide Field Imager would have a 17-times-larger field of view, essentially allowing it to image 17 times as fast (I think).
Of course, I know jack about astronomy, so perhaps someone more knowledgeable than myself could check out the links and evaluate the proposal better. For whatever it's worth, their page says that "HOP offers all of the science a refurbished HST would provide in 2010, plus more."
Since much of the old design would be reused, the total program cost for all this (including launch) would be between $700 million and $1 billion, less than the cost of a robotic repair mission to Hubble. It also wouldn't require a shuttle launch, but could be launched on an Atlas 5 or Delta IV Heavy. Besides simply not knowing about the HOP, I'm really not sure why someone would want to repair Hubble instead of building a better one for less cost.
I'm curious to see if Kasparov will continue to be involved with Advanced Chess, a new form of chess which he introduced. Basically, in it a human and computer program compete as a team against other human-computer teams. This symbiosis is much stronger than either member alone, as humans and computers are better at different aspects of chess. It's thought that Advanced Chess tournaments may help further human-computer interaction.
Very neat stuff -- I'd been hoping that they'd do something like this for a while. I've gotten rid of the usual "Entertainment" and "Sports" categories, shrunk the "Health" and "Business" categories, and added categories for "Brain," "Robotic," and "Space."
Geeze, I can't believe I just read through this entire thread and haven't seen a single mention of what people (at least those who are US citizens) can actually do about this. Go here:
Type in your zip code. Look at the list of your elected officials. Call them or send them a paper letter (even better if you include a donation in it). I did it, and you can too. Believe it or not, congresspeople actually listen to their constituents.
That said, I hope in the future more and more science-related projects get handled by private groups, like the Planetary Society's Cosmos 1 launch of the first solar sail spacecraft next month. That way, instead of whining to congresscritters about using other people's money for projects we care about, we can just give the money ourselves. I'm sure the actual Voyager space program would be able to raise at least as much money as the Enterprise television show.
Re:Just think, won't be able to say this much long
on
Stars Have a Weight Limit
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
So show your support for the Hubble Origins Probe, which would cost less than a repair and image 20 times as fast.
Personally I think almost all the tags but funny and insightfull/interesting and informative should be eliminated.
Actually, I'd prefer that the negative mod options still be available, but that they require 2 mod points rather than 1 mod point. As it is right now, you have an awful lot of people simply modding down comments that they disagree with, even if the comment itself is interesting or insightful. If mod-downs cost twice as much, negative mods might not be quite as spontaneous, but obviously bad/trolling comments would still get modded down.
Basically, in the current system a provoking (but still interesting) comment is bound to get modded way down if a simple majority disagrees with it. If mod-downs cost twice as much, you'd need at least twice as many people disagreeing as agreeing.
Feed-forward from the input just creates instability. Early rocket pioneers found that out, which is why Goddard had an engine at the top, and von Braun had to develop complex gyro control systems.
I'm getting a little off-topic, but I think this is actually incorrect, though I don't understand why. From this page:
Goddard and Sachs loaded the rocket while Sachs lighted the torch and ignited the pyrotechnic igniter. Goddard controlled the valves. At first, when the combustion was started, the rocket would not rise because the thrust was lower than the weight of the rocket. Then, when it exceeded the weight and reached an estimated 18 lbs, the rocket first climbed a few inches then shot up but but was not that stable. (In addition to proving that liquid fuel rockets can fly, Goddard also realized that his "nose-drive" design was inherently unstable and in his rockets the motor was placed at the base of the rocket.)
One point which hasn't been made here yet is how the M Prizes are actually being awarded. These aren't one-time awards -- rather, a new cash award is given out each time the previous longevity record is broken, with the amount depending on how much the old record was beaten by.
The Longevity Prize is won whenever the world record lifespan for a mouse of the species most commonly used in scientific work, Mus musculus, is exceeded.
The amount won by a winner of PP is in proportion to the size of the fund at that time, but also in proportion to the margin by which the previous record is broken. The precise formula is:
Previous record: X days New record: X+Y days LP fund contains: $Z at noon GMT on day of death of record-breaker Winner receives: $Z x (Y/(X+Y))
Thus, hypothetically, if the new record is twice the previous one, the winner receives half the fund. If the new record is 10% more than the old one, the winner receives 1/11 of the fund. The fund can thus never be exhausted, and the incentive to break the new record remains intact indefinitely. (This is in contrast to a structure that specifies a particular mouse age whose first achiever gets the whole fund.) We believe that this is important, because the public attention will be best maintained if there is a steady stream of record-breaks, showing that scientists are taking progressively better control of the aging process.
The record-breaker will receive prize money every week from the point where they beat the previous record. The amount paid each week will be as if their mouse had just died; the total amount won so far by a living record-breaker will be prominently displayed on the web site.
Rejuvenation Prize (RP): details
The Rejuvenation Prize rewards successful late-onset interventions. There are many ways to structure a prize to achieve this goal. The Rejuvenation Prize has been instituted (in replacement of the Reversal Prize -- see above) so as to satisfy two additional shortcomings of the Longevity Prize: first, that it is of limited scientific value to focus on a single mouse (a statistical outlier), and second, that the most important goal is to promote the development of interventions to restore youthful physiology, not merely to extend life. Thus, the Rejuvenation Prize rules are as follows:
1) The Rejuvenation Prize is awarded not for an individual mouse but for a published study. The study must satisfy the following criteria:
- The treated and control groups must have been at least 20 mice each. - The intervention must have been begun at an age at least half of the eventual mean age at death of the longest-lived 10% of the CONTROL group. - The treated mice must have been assessed for at least five different markers that change significantly with age in the controls, and there must be a statistically significant reversal in the trajectory of those five markers in the treated mice at some (unrestricted) time after treatment began versus some (also unrestricted) time before it began. (It is OK if other markers do not show this.)
2) The record that a new prizewinner has to beat should be the mean age at death of the longest-lived 10% of the treated group.
Conveniently, the Rejuvenation Prize does not require the same rigorous validation procedures as the Longevity Prize, because the age involved is defined to be that reported in the publication of the study.
There's a huge demand for computational/quantitative folks in the biological sciences. Plus, the work you do there is freakin' cool (speaking as a theoretical neurobiologist).
You may find the following article in PLoS Biology interesting:
Richard Branson wouldn't hesitate to hire them, not just for their experience but also for the PR value it would have.
It seems that Branson already has, or at least will in the near future. From virgingalactic.com:
Every morning you could be ferried by helicopter to the training base and spaceport where you might undergo six days of medical preparation, G-Tolerance training, talking to space experts about how to get the most from your experience, fly the simulator and in the evenings dine with astronauts and guest speakers.
Oh, phew... I was worried that she might end up as NASA head, as some previous rumors had indicated. This would've been bad, as NASA is something I actually care about.
Most libertarians I know don't think NASA is somehow inherently bad -- there are far worse examples of federal money being wastefully expended. As for myself, I really like a lot of the things NASA has done, especially with the Mars Rovers and Cassini.
The problem many libertarians have with NASA is that they've completely destroyed the spaceflight market, so it isn't like anything remotely resembling a thriving free market. When NASA needs to get a person into space, they don't do it by simply buying a ticket from a rocket launch company which offers the best combination of reliability, quality, and cost. Such a solution would be highly favored by libertarians, as it would operate within the market and would help ensure a steady decrease in launch costs and an increase in reliability.
Rather, what NASA does is give a cost-plus contract to one of the aerospace giants (Boeing, Lockheed, etc.) to develop a launch vehicle. With a cost-plus contract the aerospace giant has absolutely no incentive to decrease launch costs or exercise any sort of fiscal restraint; it's actually quite the opposite, as the more money the contractor uses up the more money pads their pockets. The fact that the launch market has been so distorted by contracts like this prevents private spaceflight companies from effectively competing and keeps launch costs absurdly high.
The only reason a private space market is starting to emerge nowadays is because NASA has pretty much no interest or influence on the suborbital tourism market. This will allow market forces to actually come into effect.
Personally, what I'd like to see is for NASA to stop with cost-plus contracts and act as more of a customer within the market. Things like the Centennial Challenges are great, where companies are paid a flat amount based on results, rather than however much they say they need to develop a solution.
I'd like to take this opportunity to remind everyone about the Hubble Origins Probe, a proposal to replace Hubble with a cheaper and better (and, dare I say, faster) craft:
An international team led by Johns Hopkins University astronomers have proposed an alternative to sending a robotic or manned repair mission to the ailing Hubble Space Telescope. Their proposal is to build a new Hubble Origins Probe, reusing the Hubble design but using lighter and more cost-effective technologies. The probe would include instruments currently waiting to be installed on Hubble, as well as a Japanese-built imager which 'will allow scientists to map the heavens more than 20 times faster than even a refurbished Hubble Space Telescope could.' It would take an estimated 65 months and $1 billion to build and launch, approximately the same cost as a robotic service mission.
Here's the official web site, with slideshows and posters explaining the planned scientific instruments:
In my opinion the original Hubble is mostly valuable for sentimental/historical reasons. From a pure cost/benefit analysis, replacing it seems the best solution in pretty much every possible way.
It seems like simulations like these should parallelize nicely, and be ideal for a distributed computing project -- Epidemic@home, anyone? It'd be very interesting to watch running, and would help educate people about how diseases are spread. Of course, you'd probably also want to limit the amount of data conveyed to single users, to keep it from being too useful to "Bad People."
Links and research papers
on
Sim Epidemic
·
· Score: 4, Informative
First off, here's a link to the EpiSims site at Los Alamos National Labs. They have a neat (250 meg) video showing smallprox propagation, as well as several graphs.
Here's a link to the general web page at LANL for Dynamic Simulation Science, which also includes information on things like simulation of transportation networks.
The Mars Climate Orbiter's reaction wheels were kept within their linear (unsaturated) range through thruster firings in a procedure called Angular Momentum Desaturation (AMD). When an AMD event occurred, relevant spacecraft data was telemetered to the ground, processed, and placed into a file called the AMD file. The JPL operations navigation team used data derived from the AMD file to model the forces on the spacecraft resulting from these specific thruster firings. Modeling of these small forces is critical for accurately determining the spacecraft's trajectory. Immediately after the thruster firing, the velocity change (DeltaV) is computed using the firing time for each of the thrusters, and an impulse bit, which models each thruster's performance. The calculation of the thruster performance is carried out both on-board the spacecraft and on ground support computers. The AMD software installed on the spacecraft used metric units, newton seconds (Ns), for the impulse and was correct. The ground software reported the impulse bit to the AMD file in English units of pounds (force) seconds (lbfs), rather than the metric units required by the project's Software Interface Specification. Subsequent processing of the impulse bit values from the AMD file by the navigation software underestimated the effect of the thruster firings on the spacecraft trajectory by a factor of 4.45 (1 pound force = 4.45 newtons).
Not only that, but I think that in the case the parent poster mentioned in Tampa Florida they were trying to do identification based on distant security camera shots, rather than a close-up face-forward photo.
Yeah, in retrospect I probably should've posted it anon to prevent karma whoring. Honestly though, I'm betting that almost nobody would've seen the abstract if I hadn't posted it here.
Slashdot Mirror
Hm... I went through three rounds of rejected submission attempts earlier trying to submit this story, several hours before this version was posted. In any case, here's my version of the submission, which has many more links:
NASA Watch, New Scientist, and Space Ref report that Dr. Michael D. Griffin has been nominated as the next administrator of NASA, to replace Sean O'Keefe. As NASA head, Griffin will be tasked with implementing the Vision for Space Exploration. Griffin is currently head of the Space Department at the Applied Physics Laboratory at JHU, is president-elect of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and has a doctorate in aerospace engineering. He's noted for being passionate about space exploration and having strong management experience. His nomination has been praised by a number of groups, including the Planetary Society, the National Space Society, and House Science Committee Democrats and Republicans. In the past, Mike Griffin has testified to Congress on the future of human spaceflight, the vision for space exploration, and the danger of asteroid impacts. He was also rebuked in the early 90s for pointing out problems with the space station's review process.
As for my own thoughts, I think Griffin is an excellent pick. I'm amazed that they were able to find somebody with as much technical expertise as him who also has such a large amount of experience with managing large organizations. According to the space.com article, Griffin can be expected to make maximum use of the emerging commercial spaceflight industry.
In the past he's also said the following, which I approve of highly: "What is needed is to retire the Shuttle Orbiter, and its expensive support infrastructure," Griffin wrote. "It simply does not serve the needs of exploration and it is too expensive, to logistically fragile, and insufficiently safe for continued use as a low Earth orbit transport vehicle."
In the past he's been highly in favor of the government constructing a new heavy-lift launch vehicle, which I somewhat disagree with. Such an endeavor could easily end up being a bottomless money pit. Hopefully SpaceX's low-cost launches in the coming months will help raise awareness of frequently-launched smaller vehicles.
If you've got $1250 to spend, there's the Zalman Totally No Noise Computer Case. It's reportedly "the world's first absolutely noiseless and fanless computer case," using heatpipes for passive cooling. It basically uses the entire case as a giant heatsink.
Not sure what you'd do about the hard drives, though.
But if it means losing the ability to do deep UV astronomy or anything else that Hubble I has proven to be very adept at, I don't think we should skimp out.
The parent poster didn't mention this, but the proposed Hubble Origins Probe would also add a brand new Japanese-built Very Wide Field Imager. According to their science info, on the proposed HOP "UV sensitivity reaches two magnitudes deeper than HST/STIS [original Hubble] and the number of backgrouns QSO's increases by a factor of 100 [no idea what a QSO is]." The new Very Wide Field Imager would have a 17-times-larger field of view, essentially allowing it to image 17 times as fast (I think).
Of course, I know jack about astronomy, so perhaps someone more knowledgeable than myself could check out the links and evaluate the proposal better. For whatever it's worth, their page says that "HOP offers all of the science a refurbished HST would provide in 2010, plus more."
Since much of the old design would be reused, the total program cost for all this (including launch) would be between $700 million and $1 billion, less than the cost of a robotic repair mission to Hubble. It also wouldn't require a shuttle launch, but could be launched on an Atlas 5 or Delta IV Heavy. Besides simply not knowing about the HOP, I'm really not sure why someone would want to repair Hubble instead of building a better one for less cost.
http://www.pha.jhu.edu/hop/
The page has many more details regarding the actual science instruments and specifications.
I'm curious to see if Kasparov will continue to be involved with Advanced Chess, a new form of chess which he introduced. Basically, in it a human and computer program compete as a team against other human-computer teams. This symbiosis is much stronger than either member alone, as humans and computers are better at different aspects of chess. It's thought that Advanced Chess tournaments may help further human-computer interaction.
Very neat stuff -- I'd been hoping that they'd do something like this for a while. I've gotten rid of the usual "Entertainment" and "Sports" categories, shrunk the "Health" and "Business" categories, and added categories for "Brain," "Robotic," and "Space."
B yvQZAMmEJUEpDi1WIMLEpNTDVhATKeixMw8IJNbiz0oPym_JDP ZgAXmAAC6Eg4M
The result (as if anybody is interested):
http://news.google.com/news?ned=:ePkh8BM9E0KxIwNi
Geeze, I can't believe I just read through this entire thread and haven't seen a single mention of what people (at least those who are US citizens) can actually do about this. Go here:
http://www.congress.org/
Type in your zip code. Look at the list of your elected officials. Call them or send them a paper letter (even better if you include a donation in it). I did it, and you can too. Believe it or not, congresspeople actually listen to their constituents.
That said, I hope in the future more and more science-related projects get handled by private groups, like the Planetary Society's Cosmos 1 launch of the first solar sail spacecraft next month. That way, instead of whining to congresscritters about using other people's money for projects we care about, we can just give the money ourselves. I'm sure the actual Voyager space program would be able to raise at least as much money as the Enterprise television show.
So show your support for the Hubble Origins Probe, which would cost less than a repair and image 20 times as fast.
Personally I think almost all the tags but funny and insightfull/interesting and informative should be eliminated.
Actually, I'd prefer that the negative mod options still be available, but that they require 2 mod points rather than 1 mod point. As it is right now, you have an awful lot of people simply modding down comments that they disagree with, even if the comment itself is interesting or insightful. If mod-downs cost twice as much, negative mods might not be quite as spontaneous, but obviously bad/trolling comments would still get modded down.
Basically, in the current system a provoking (but still interesting) comment is bound to get modded way down if a simple majority disagrees with it. If mod-downs cost twice as much, you'd need at least twice as many people disagreeing as agreeing.
Try typing "define:" into google followed by whatever you're looking for.
r y e
For example:
http://www.google.com/search?q=define%3A+dictiona
http://www.google.com/search?q=define%3A+artichok
Feed-forward from the input just creates instability. Early rocket pioneers found that out, which is why Goddard had an engine at the top, and von Braun had to develop complex gyro control systems.
I'm getting a little off-topic, but I think this is actually incorrect, though I don't understand why. From this page:
Goddard and Sachs loaded the rocket while Sachs lighted the torch and ignited the pyrotechnic igniter. Goddard controlled the valves. At first, when the combustion was started, the rocket would not rise because the thrust was lower than the weight of the rocket. Then, when it exceeded the weight and reached an estimated 18 lbs, the rocket first climbed a few inches then shot up but but was not that stable. (In addition to proving that liquid fuel rockets can fly, Goddard also realized that his "nose-drive" design was inherently unstable and in his rockets the motor was placed at the base of the rocket.)
One point which hasn't been made here yet is how the M Prizes are actually being awarded. These aren't one-time awards -- rather, a new cash award is given out each time the previous longevity record is broken, with the amount depending on how much the old record was beaten by.
The details from this page:
Longevity Prize (LP): details
The Longevity Prize is won whenever the world record lifespan for a mouse of the species most commonly used in scientific work, Mus musculus, is exceeded.
The amount won by a winner of PP is in proportion to the size of the fund at that time, but also in proportion to the margin by which the previous record is broken. The precise formula is:
Previous record: X days
New record: X+Y days
LP fund contains: $Z at noon GMT on day of death of record-breaker
Winner receives: $Z x (Y/(X+Y))
Thus, hypothetically, if the new record is twice the previous one, the winner receives half the fund. If the new record is 10% more than the old one, the winner receives 1/11 of the fund. The fund can thus never be exhausted, and the incentive to break the new record remains intact indefinitely. (This is in contrast to a structure that specifies a particular mouse age whose first achiever gets the whole fund.) We believe that this is important, because the public attention will be best maintained if there is a steady stream of record-breaks, showing that scientists are taking progressively better control of the aging process.
The record-breaker will receive prize money every week from the point where they beat the previous record. The amount paid each week will be as if their mouse had just died; the total amount won so far by a living record-breaker will be prominently displayed on the web site.
Rejuvenation Prize (RP): details
The Rejuvenation Prize rewards successful late-onset interventions. There are many ways to structure a prize to achieve this goal. The Rejuvenation Prize has been instituted (in replacement of the Reversal Prize -- see above) so as to satisfy two additional shortcomings of the Longevity Prize: first, that it is of limited scientific value to focus on a single mouse (a statistical outlier), and second, that the most important goal is to promote the development of interventions to restore youthful physiology, not merely to extend life. Thus, the Rejuvenation Prize rules are as follows:
1) The Rejuvenation Prize is awarded not for an individual mouse but for a published study. The study must satisfy the following criteria:
- The treated and control groups must have been at least 20 mice each.
- The intervention must have been begun at an age at least half of the eventual mean age at death of the longest-lived 10% of the CONTROL group.
- The treated mice must have been assessed for at least five different markers that change significantly with age in the controls, and there must be a statistically significant reversal in the trajectory of those five markers in the treated mice at some (unrestricted) time after treatment began versus some (also unrestricted) time before it began. (It is OK if other markers do not show this.)
2) The record that a new prizewinner has to beat should be the mean age at death of the longest-lived 10% of the treated group.
Conveniently, the Rejuvenation Prize does not require the same rigorous validation procedures as the Longevity Prize, because the age involved is defined to be that reported in the publication of the study.
I assure you that finances are not the limiting factor in Rutan's operation.
There's a huge demand for computational/quantitative folks in the biological sciences. Plus, the work you do there is freakin' cool (speaking as a theoretical neurobiologist).
You may find the following article in PLoS Biology interesting:
Mathematics Is Biology's Next Microscope, Only Better; Biology Is Mathematics' Next Physics, Only Better
Richard Branson wouldn't hesitate to hire them, not just for their experience but also for the PR value it would have.
It seems that Branson already has, or at least will in the near future. From virgingalactic.com:
Every morning you could be ferried by helicopter to the training base and spaceport where you might undergo six days of medical preparation, G-Tolerance training, talking to space experts about how to get the most from your experience, fly the simulator and in the evenings dine with astronauts and guest speakers.
Oh, phew... I was worried that she might end up as NASA head, as some previous rumors had indicated. This would've been bad, as NASA is something I actually care about.
Have you ever flown on an airplane? Believe it or not, those are built, owned, and operated by private companies.
Most libertarians I know don't think NASA is somehow inherently bad -- there are far worse examples of federal money being wastefully expended. As for myself, I really like a lot of the things NASA has done, especially with the Mars Rovers and Cassini.
The problem many libertarians have with NASA is that they've completely destroyed the spaceflight market, so it isn't like anything remotely resembling a thriving free market. When NASA needs to get a person into space, they don't do it by simply buying a ticket from a rocket launch company which offers the best combination of reliability, quality, and cost. Such a solution would be highly favored by libertarians, as it would operate within the market and would help ensure a steady decrease in launch costs and an increase in reliability.
Rather, what NASA does is give a cost-plus contract to one of the aerospace giants (Boeing, Lockheed, etc.) to develop a launch vehicle. With a cost-plus contract the aerospace giant has absolutely no incentive to decrease launch costs or exercise any sort of fiscal restraint; it's actually quite the opposite, as the more money the contractor uses up the more money pads their pockets. The fact that the launch market has been so distorted by contracts like this prevents private spaceflight companies from effectively competing and keeps launch costs absurdly high.
The only reason a private space market is starting to emerge nowadays is because NASA has pretty much no interest or influence on the suborbital tourism market. This will allow market forces to actually come into effect.
Personally, what I'd like to see is for NASA to stop with cost-plus contracts and act as more of a customer within the market. Things like the Centennial Challenges are great, where companies are paid a flat amount based on results, rather than however much they say they need to develop a solution.
I'd like to take this opportunity to remind everyone about the Hubble Origins Probe, a proposal to replace Hubble with a cheaper and better (and, dare I say, faster) craft:
An international team led by Johns Hopkins University astronomers have proposed an alternative to sending a robotic or manned repair mission to the ailing Hubble Space Telescope. Their proposal is to build a new Hubble Origins Probe, reusing the Hubble design but using lighter and more cost-effective technologies. The probe would include instruments currently waiting to be installed on Hubble, as well as a Japanese-built imager which 'will allow scientists to map the heavens more than 20 times faster than even a refurbished Hubble Space Telescope could.' It would take an estimated 65 months and $1 billion to build and launch, approximately the same cost as a robotic service mission.
Here's the official web site, with slideshows and posters explaining the planned scientific instruments:
http://www.pha.jhu.edu/hop/
In my opinion the original Hubble is mostly valuable for sentimental/historical reasons. From a pure cost/benefit analysis, replacing it seems the best solution in pretty much every possible way.
It seems like simulations like these should parallelize nicely, and be ideal for a distributed computing project -- Epidemic@home, anyone? It'd be very interesting to watch running, and would help educate people about how diseases are spread. Of course, you'd probably also want to limit the amount of data conveyed to single users, to keep it from being too useful to "Bad People."
First off, here's a link to the EpiSims site at Los Alamos National Labs. They have a neat (250 meg) video showing smallprox propagation, as well as several graphs.
Here's a link to the general web page at LANL for Dynamic Simulation Science, which also includes information on things like simulation of transportation networks.
A google scholar search turns up a few interesting-looking research papers:
Structural and Algorithmic Aspects of Massive Social Networks (Eubank et al, 2004)
Understanding Large-Scale Social and Infrastructure Networks: ASimulation-Based Approach (Barrett et al)
BioWar: A City-Scale Multi-Agent Network Model of Weaponized Biological Attacks
It wasn't mixed up units; it was error accumulation from switching back and forth between the units.
# The_metric_mixup
Do you happen to have a source for that? Wikipedia says the following:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter
The Mars Climate Orbiter's reaction wheels were kept within their linear (unsaturated) range through thruster firings in a procedure called Angular Momentum Desaturation (AMD). When an AMD event occurred, relevant spacecraft data was telemetered to the ground, processed, and placed into a file called the AMD file. The JPL operations navigation team used data derived from the AMD file to model the forces on the spacecraft resulting from these specific thruster firings. Modeling of these small forces is critical for accurately determining the spacecraft's trajectory. Immediately after the thruster firing, the velocity change (DeltaV) is computed using the firing time for each of the thrusters, and an impulse bit, which models each thruster's performance. The calculation of the thruster performance is carried out both on-board the spacecraft and on ground support computers. The AMD software installed on the spacecraft used metric units, newton seconds (Ns), for the impulse and was correct. The ground software reported the impulse bit to the AMD file in English units of pounds (force) seconds (lbfs), rather than the metric units required by the project's Software Interface Specification. Subsequent processing of the impulse bit values from the AMD file by the navigation software underestimated the effect of the thruster firings on the spacecraft trajectory by a factor of 4.45 (1 pound force = 4.45 newtons).
So it was with some sympathetic relief that I noted that this particular scientist in the end received an earthly burial.
If you're referring to Eugene Shoemaker, his ashes were deposited on the moon in 1998 by the Lunar Prospector probe.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_burial
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Shoemaker
Not only that, but I think that in the case the parent poster mentioned in Tampa Florida they were trying to do identification based on distant security camera shots, rather than a close-up face-forward photo.
Yeah, in retrospect I probably should've posted it anon to prevent karma whoring. Honestly though, I'm betting that almost nobody would've seen the abstract if I hadn't posted it here.