Which is not a good-written book. It was written as a morality play and fails on almost all accounts. WTF the pilot is issued with a freaking blaster when a simple inspection of the "minimal-weight" ship (with an airlock and enough space for a writing table!) should be more than sufficient?
Besides, nobody designs systems with such insane safety margins. They are simply unworkable.
Hm? Brin's books are not particularly genocide-y. The "Uplift" books are downright funny, "Existence" is somewhat grim but it gets better.
You should try Stephen Baxter's "Manifold" series. In one book they _literally_ destroy the Universe (by forcing the vacuum into a lower energy state) - for a good reason, but still.
David Brin's books are in general not a light read, but not depressing either. Stephen Baxter's books often paint very depressing pictures of the world, but always carry at least some hope. Charles Stross and Neal Stephenson books are in general OK. Whom else is I am forgetting?
xUSSR countries use similar systems. I.e. you receive a bill, and then go online and pay it.
If you don't use computers then you can go to any bank and pay your bills there (essentially by doing a wire transfer), commercial banks might take a small fee for that and state-owned Sberbank is required to do this for free. I never understood the checks - you're writing a document authorizing somebody else to withdraw money from your account. Why not just do this directly?
Sure. Fuzzy logic deals with "vague" concepts like "cold" or "hot" (at what temperature exactly does a thing become "hot"?). Substitute "vague" with "non-formalizable" and you might be a little bit closer to correctness.
It sure does. Read about the "fuzzy logic" someday, for example.
If "rational thought" means "determining the right answer" then it's not always the right tool. Especially when, as a political scientist, you discover just how ill suited it is for the task of interpreting the ambivalent and self-contradictory people that together constitute... pretty much everyone.
So you're saying that the Pol"Sci" students are taught to spew loads of self-contradictory crap designed only to distract and misguide people?
Formal logic? It's actually very close to the high algebra - both of them are based on set theory. Only high algebra discusses various types of sets (like groups, rings, fields, etc.) and formal logic discusses the theories that are built upon these concepts.
They mentioned that a bit, in the Avengers movie, with Iron Man using his Arc Reactor tech to provide 100% clean power Stark Tower.
Yup, while the rest of the world continues to burn coal and gasoline.
It becomes a plot point later on, when Nick Fury talks about using the Tesseract to produce energy. Tony knows it's BS because "I'm pretty much the only name in clean energy right now." Basically saying that if they WERE just after clean energy for the world, they would have contacted him.
Another point: the Tesseract was used to engineer weapons that can be wielded by normal people and that are capable of taking down god-like beings. Which is thought to be reprehensible by the Avengers.
Also, in order to make a battalion of Iron Men (Iron Mans?) Tony would have to stop tinkering with it long enough to mass produce the thing. In just 3 movies, he's been through 7 different variants of the Armor, not counting War Machine...
And once he finally settles on a design, he's going to have to train a battalion of people to use them... and lets not forget cost
EXACTLY my point.
1) Army would just pick a variant and standardize on it. Having an inferior Iron Man suit is vastly superior to having no suite at all.
2) A team effort in developing Iron Men suits would likely speed things up.
3) Apparently, all the teamwork is forgotten. All the employees of Stark Corporation are just useless drones and know nothing about Iron Man suit and can't help in their development and training.
4) Cost would likely be manageable since Stark Co. with its resources can do it.
Not sure if I understand your last point, about science... especially in a post where you reference Avengers. A movie with several very nice scientists genuinely doing good deeds to benefit mankind (except the one who got mind controlled by an evil demi-god, but hey) Remember Tony's clean energy thing I mentioned earlier? How about Bruce Banner playing doctor in Calcutta, trying to cure some unnamed but rampant disease. Then, upon being recruited, putting his knowledge toward helping find the bad guy.
Exactly. That's just a variation of the same old "scientists play with dangerous forces and unleash some kind of disaster that only a superhero can deal with".
I don't. Superhero movies were bad enough the first time, but now they are re-using them! It's the ultimate sign of Hollywood's decay.
Besides, the superhero movies are _bad_ in themselves because they ed-emphasize everything that is good about humanity: pursuit of knowledge, science, teamwork, etc. For example, take the recent Avengers movie. It's a typical run-of-the-mill superhero movie - several superheroes (including the Iron Man) band together to save the humanity from strange invaders from the outer space. Could we instead see a movie about the technology beyond the Iron Man's suit being duplicated and mass-produced? After all, the Iron Man is roughly equal in power with the other superheroes in that movie so a battalion of them would have easily kicked invaders' asses.
Such a movie would inevitably have to deal with lots of interesting stuff: the effect on society, governmental structure, place of humanity in the universe, etc. There are superhero movies that attempt to do this, but they are few and far between ("Watchmen" being the only recent one).
Another example - science. In most superhero movies scientists are immoral and/or evil. They mostly do experiments on people (usually without consent of the test subjects) that later backfire. Alternatively, scientists along with their backers work on evil world domination schemes. And if a scientist is not evil, then he or she is most likely going to be exposed to their own experiment resulting in them gaining some superpower by accident. Is it such a wonder that science loses popularity in the USA?
It's not really antennae - they're fairly affordable now. It's the Doppler shift - normal terrestrial terminals (working with GEO satellites) can't cope with more than about 10m/s speed differential. So you simply physically can't use these services at sea.
Yeah, there are maritime satellite services but they are nicely segregated into "it's cheaper to buy your own airplane than to use satphone" category.
Nope. It's hotter than the last 1000 years. And it turns out that MWP was not actually that warm. The average summer temperatures were somewhat lesser than the current summer temperature, but the average WINTER temperature during the MWP were much lower than the current winter temperatures.
I've actually taught calculus. And you obviously should start learning some statistics. Your graph is simply statistically insignificant - it shows only noise. If you use a smoothed graph - you'll get rising temperatures. Try that graph: http://woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/mean:120/from:1960/to:2012
As you see, this graph shows that temperature most definitely has NOT stopped rising - the trend continues nicely. And your graph misses the last several hot years.
Let's get this out of the way, what I believe. The world has warmed quite a bit in the last few decades. While the rate of warming seems to have gone down in the last decade
It hasn't. We're warming faster than ever before, and we can actually now say that with a fair statistical significance.
And what is the Internet? The best definition I know is: "The largest equivalence class in the reflexive transitive symmetric closure of the relationship 'can be reached by an IP packet from'" by Seth Breidbart. Which is somewhat of a mouthful.
Well, it looks like that we've basically platoed on material development. And it's not like we have a lot to look forward to, we're actually about 15% from the theoretical limit for the H2/LOX rocket engine efficiency with recent rocket motors.
Anyway, spaceplanes would still require quite a lot of non-trivial engineering. Skylon spaceplane actually pushes the limits on thermal conductive materials and hydrogen embrittlement-resistant alloys (for their precooler). But ultimately yes, spaceplanes would allow to run engines at somewhat more relaxed modes.
"wide angle lenses due to their large depth of field" - that means they're focused at infinity. Technically they should be able to snap objects at infinity without blurring (in practice - not so much, because lenses are not perfect).
That's because real lenses are not perfect, they can't focus at infinity perfectly and over the whole wavelength band. So you inevitably get small amount of blurring. That's not a problem for CGI and not really a problem for live-action movies (you won't be able to notice the blurring because you rarely stare at the small unmoving objects for more than several seconds in movies).
No. If you focus at infinity then your lens the focal point at infinity (duh). That means ALL the objects (past the hyperfocal distance) will be in focus, but you might lose some details (they'll be too small to see). As usual, see Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperfocal_distance
How do you think mobile phones can make pictures when they don't have moving parts in their cameras?
OK, great, fine. But now you're at the edge of the atmosphere, now what?
You switch your air-breathing engines to pure rocket engine mode by turning on oxidizer supply. Since you've avoided carrying oxygen for what effectively is your first stage you have a VERY high overall specific impulse (probably more than 3000 seconds!) - there's no need for the second stage with its own engines. There's also no need for complex connectivity system for the second stage, no need for specialized return craft and so on.
It's actually within the realm of possibility to have a fully reusable spacecraft, more akin to airplanes than rockets. That would revolutionize the space travel.
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Which is not a good-written book. It was written as a morality play and fails on almost all accounts. WTF the pilot is issued with a freaking blaster when a simple inspection of the "minimal-weight" ship (with an airlock and enough space for a writing table!) should be more than sufficient?
Besides, nobody designs systems with such insane safety margins. They are simply unworkable.
Hm? Brin's books are not particularly genocide-y. The "Uplift" books are downright funny, "Existence" is somewhat grim but it gets better.
You should try Stephen Baxter's "Manifold" series. In one book they _literally_ destroy the Universe (by forcing the vacuum into a lower energy state) - for a good reason, but still.
Not all SF is depressing, far from it.
David Brin's books are in general not a light read, but not depressing either. Stephen Baxter's books often paint very depressing pictures of the world, but always carry at least some hope. Charles Stross and Neal Stephenson books are in general OK. Whom else is I am forgetting?
xUSSR countries use similar systems. I.e. you receive a bill, and then go online and pay it.
If you don't use computers then you can go to any bank and pay your bills there (essentially by doing a wire transfer), commercial banks might take a small fee for that and state-owned Sberbank is required to do this for free. I never understood the checks - you're writing a document authorizing somebody else to withdraw money from your account. Why not just do this directly?
Sure. Fuzzy logic deals with "vague" concepts like "cold" or "hot" (at what temperature exactly does a thing become "hot"?). Substitute "vague" with "non-formalizable" and you might be a little bit closer to correctness.
Mathematics has no room for vagueness"
It sure does. Read about the "fuzzy logic" someday, for example.
If "rational thought" means "determining the right answer" then it's not always the right tool. Especially when, as a political scientist, you discover just how ill suited it is for the task of interpreting the ambivalent and self-contradictory people that together constitute... pretty much everyone.
So you're saying that the Pol"Sci" students are taught to spew loads of self-contradictory crap designed only to distract and misguide people?
Formal logic? It's actually very close to the high algebra - both of them are based on set theory. Only high algebra discusses various types of sets (like groups, rings, fields, etc.) and formal logic discusses the theories that are built upon these concepts.
They mentioned that a bit, in the Avengers movie, with Iron Man using his Arc Reactor tech to provide 100% clean power Stark Tower.
Yup, while the rest of the world continues to burn coal and gasoline.
It becomes a plot point later on, when Nick Fury talks about using the Tesseract to produce energy. Tony knows it's BS because "I'm pretty much the only name in clean energy right now." Basically saying that if they WERE just after clean energy for the world, they would have contacted him.
Another point: the Tesseract was used to engineer weapons that can be wielded by normal people and that are capable of taking down god-like beings. Which is thought to be reprehensible by the Avengers.
Also, in order to make a battalion of Iron Men (Iron Mans?) Tony would have to stop tinkering with it long enough to mass produce the thing. In just 3 movies, he's been through 7 different variants of the Armor, not counting War Machine ...
And once he finally settles on a design, he's going to have to train a battalion of people to use them... and lets not forget cost
EXACTLY my point.
1) Army would just pick a variant and standardize on it. Having an inferior Iron Man suit is vastly superior to having no suite at all.
2) A team effort in developing Iron Men suits would likely speed things up.
3) Apparently, all the teamwork is forgotten. All the employees of Stark Corporation are just useless drones and know nothing about Iron Man suit and can't help in their development and training.
4) Cost would likely be manageable since Stark Co. with its resources can do it.
Not sure if I understand your last point, about science... especially in a post where you reference Avengers. A movie with several very nice scientists genuinely doing good deeds to benefit mankind (except the one who got mind controlled by an evil demi-god, but hey) Remember Tony's clean energy thing I mentioned earlier? How about Bruce Banner playing doctor in Calcutta, trying to cure some unnamed but rampant disease. Then, upon being recruited, putting his knowledge toward helping find the bad guy.
Exactly. That's just a variation of the same old "scientists play with dangerous forces and unleash some kind of disaster that only a superhero can deal with".
I like the superhero reboots.
I don't. Superhero movies were bad enough the first time, but now they are re-using them! It's the ultimate sign of Hollywood's decay.
Besides, the superhero movies are _bad_ in themselves because they ed-emphasize everything that is good about humanity: pursuit of knowledge, science, teamwork, etc. For example, take the recent Avengers movie. It's a typical run-of-the-mill superhero movie - several superheroes (including the Iron Man) band together to save the humanity from strange invaders from the outer space. Could we instead see a movie about the technology beyond the Iron Man's suit being duplicated and mass-produced? After all, the Iron Man is roughly equal in power with the other superheroes in that movie so a battalion of them would have easily kicked invaders' asses.
Such a movie would inevitably have to deal with lots of interesting stuff: the effect on society, governmental structure, place of humanity in the universe, etc. There are superhero movies that attempt to do this, but they are few and far between ("Watchmen" being the only recent one).
Another example - science. In most superhero movies scientists are immoral and/or evil. They mostly do experiments on people (usually without consent of the test subjects) that later backfire. Alternatively, scientists along with their backers work on evil world domination schemes. And if a scientist is not evil, then he or she is most likely going to be exposed to their own experiment resulting in them gaining some superpower by accident. Is it such a wonder that science loses popularity in the USA?
It's not really antennae - they're fairly affordable now. It's the Doppler shift - normal terrestrial terminals (working with GEO satellites) can't cope with more than about 10m/s speed differential. So you simply physically can't use these services at sea.
Yeah, there are maritime satellite services but they are nicely segregated into "it's cheaper to buy your own airplane than to use satphone" category.
Nope. It's hotter than the last 1000 years. And it turns out that MWP was not actually that warm. The average summer temperatures were somewhat lesser than the current summer temperature, but the average WINTER temperature during the MWP were much lower than the current winter temperatures.
I've actually taught calculus. And you obviously should start learning some statistics. Your graph is simply statistically insignificant - it shows only noise. If you use a smoothed graph - you'll get rising temperatures. Try that graph: http://woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/mean:120/from:1960/to:2012
As you see, this graph shows that temperature most definitely has NOT stopped rising - the trend continues nicely. And your graph misses the last several hot years.
Let's get this out of the way, what I believe. The world has warmed quite a bit in the last few decades. While the rate of warming seems to have gone down in the last decade
It hasn't. We're warming faster than ever before, and we can actually now say that with a fair statistical significance.
Have YOU actually read them? This particular quote has been discussed multiple times. In short, it doesn't mean what you think it means.
So is X.25 or analog phone network.
And what is the Internet? The best definition I know is: "The largest equivalence class in the reflexive transitive symmetric closure of the relationship 'can be reached by an IP packet from'" by Seth Breidbart. Which is somewhat of a mouthful.
Who can give a better definition?
Well, it looks like that we've basically platoed on material development. And it's not like we have a lot to look forward to, we're actually about 15% from the theoretical limit for the H2/LOX rocket engine efficiency with recent rocket motors.
Anyway, spaceplanes would still require quite a lot of non-trivial engineering. Skylon spaceplane actually pushes the limits on thermal conductive materials and hydrogen embrittlement-resistant alloys (for their precooler). But ultimately yes, spaceplanes would allow to run engines at somewhat more relaxed modes.
"wide angle lenses due to their large depth of field" - that means they're focused at infinity. Technically they should be able to snap objects at infinity without blurring (in practice - not so much, because lenses are not perfect).
That's because real lenses are not perfect, they can't focus at infinity perfectly and over the whole wavelength band. So you inevitably get small amount of blurring. That's not a problem for CGI and not really a problem for live-action movies (you won't be able to notice the blurring because you rarely stare at the small unmoving objects for more than several seconds in movies).
No. If you focus at infinity then your lens the focal point at infinity (duh). That means ALL the objects (past the hyperfocal distance) will be in focus, but you might lose some details (they'll be too small to see). As usual, see Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperfocal_distance
How do you think mobile phones can make pictures when they don't have moving parts in their cameras?
Hard numbers: 3D ticket sales fell 10%. Mostly because idiot directors stopped making sucky post-processed 3D films.
Meanwhile the popularity of 3D CGI films is growing with nice sales figures.
"Inception" is there, "Dark Knight" is there in top 20. Actually, all films that were published after 2008 and in the Top30 are in 3D.
OK, great, fine. But now you're at the edge of the atmosphere, now what?
You switch your air-breathing engines to pure rocket engine mode by turning on oxidizer supply. Since you've avoided carrying oxygen for what effectively is your first stage you have a VERY high overall specific impulse (probably more than 3000 seconds!) - there's no need for the second stage with its own engines. There's also no need for complex connectivity system for the second stage, no need for specialized return craft and so on.
It's actually within the realm of possibility to have a fully reusable spacecraft, more akin to airplanes than rockets. That would revolutionize the space travel.
Some of them are. I've watched "How to Train Your Dragon" in 2D (on my computer) several times - I really like music, pacing and scenery there.
No, _everything_ is in focus. Compare these two photos: http://www.great-landscape-photography.com/image-files/lake_louise_hyper1.jpg and http://www.great-landscape-photography.com/image-files/lake_louise_hyper2.jpg (courtesy of http://www.great-landscape-photography.com/hyperfocal.html ). The second one has its focus on infinity, so all objects are seen equally clear.