> Nobody really knows exactly how many colors we can see. The estimates range from > around 4 million to over 10 million, and it appears to vary widely between > different people.
Quite so. There are a few tetrachromats (4 different color receptors) who can presumably see one third more than us trichromats, and even we might see more than the oft quoted 4.5 million.
> I do tend to agree that billions of colors is a waste though.
Even the present 24 bit/16.7 million SVGA-level output out performs the most sensitive human visual system, including tetrachromats. Ducks, as quintachromats, *might* be able to see the full 16.7M. If so, they're not saying.
First I have to say "Space Advocates showed up on Slashdot today, and asked 'Who is The Space Show'?" It's not a frivolous question. I've been an advocate for 40 years and never heard of it before.
If the show and its owner were very well connected, they'd know that those who remain advocating space programs through the traditional channels are most often those scientists and such whose work depends on it or is planned to. Many of the rest of us have been abandoning advocacy of the corporate welfare system of NASA + BigAerospace for the more exciting private space start ups. Sure, the successful ones will end up as major aerospace players and/or sell out to bigger companies, but they'll make their early money and marks in history the old fashioned way. Even the US government has made success more likely for these start ups by making the Office of Space Transportation easy to work through, and even obtain assistance from when planning flights.
Bottom line, ((bi)partisan) politics hasn't favored us since about 1970, so we've quit waiting for that happy childhood to return. Keep your candidates. We'll be busy punching holes in the sky.
And it should be noted that the referenced source seems to imply, by tying the question to the present US elections, that space programs and advocacy exist only in the US. Very wrong. Another strike against The Space Show.
If "coding" can include processes implimented in hardware (very hard ware, such as gears) then the WW II Axis crypto machine Enigma and the Allies' SIGABA would qualify. The former was recently replicated, so we know it's design, ie. code, is still valid.
Of course, if the definition extends to machines of this nature, then Babbages' Difference Engine would probably win. It was designed to be hard coded to solve polynomial functions. It was recently (1991; London Science Museum) built as a working model, so the design/code is proven, but the design/code itself dates to 1822 and was first implimented in 1849. The London machine is still working, so it should qualify as long as hardware coding is included.
The summary and headline are perfect examples of bad 'science' writing, as has been discussed here not so long ago. The statement that NASA "is going to" is precise, but misleading. They are going to do as it says. But the statement implies that they are just now starting to do this, and haven't in the past. That is wrong. The RSO has always had the emergency flight termination ability and responsibility. When that kind of error is made on/., chalk it up to your average person doing reporting. When a professional media outlet does it, as in TFA, it's either extremely poor journalism, both in writing and in editorial, or it's hype, pure and simple. When the headline and/or summary have it, but the body of the article contradicts them and gives the straight facts, it's the latter. It's a damn shame they have to use hype to sell stuff. It'd be so much nicer if they used quality.
The human eye can discern around 4.5 million colors. Anything more than that requires instrumentation to detect. You can use it to prove you have a monitor capable of a billion colors, but you'll never see them.
The results are a Blinding Glimpse of the Obvious. Conflict between verbal and manual dexterity processing is a very well known and easily replicated phenomenon. I use it in every psych lab course. Not said here is that people with more left/right differentiation (right handed males, mostly) are more prone to this than those with less differentiated hemispheres (left handed males, most females, and so on).
However, supporting it with MRI is near to bogus. Activation as seen on MRI can be true 'activity' as in excitatory, inhibitory (far more important in that it pulls intended action out of the random background of spontaneous activity as well as selecting among the possible actions being preprocessed) or a combination of the two which results in a WTF answer to the question.
Worse yet, studying a phenomenon with two active behavioral components in a situation where no behavioral reaction is permitted (can't move in an MRI) cannot conclusively show the effect being claimed in TFA. It can theoretically show the tendency, but it cannot produce the behavior to correlate with the brain activity and so cannot show the two being linked. For that matter, if the processes that lead to the behaviors are triggered, but the person is stuck in an MRI, you'd pretty much have to expect a good deal of inhibitory activity as they expend effort to subdue that and stay still. Such effortful inhibition would produce MRI its own results, and they would have had this in their results.
... is that they're alien. Such is the phrase often mentioned by Benford, Niven and others. They're more acutely aware, as those who by trade imagine what aliens might be like, than are those such a SETI scientists. The latter keep themselves boxed in with the idea that what they're looking for will look enough like what they're used to, and so engage in scientific human-chauvinism. The error here is that there are so many others forms that life, and even intelligent life, may take that we wouldn't be able to recognize it with our present understanding. As an example, we take discovery of gas giant planets in other systems as a matter of course, and get excited about "Earth-like" discoveries, even though what's presented is hardly Earth-like. Yet we're finding that there is life in some unlikely places here on Earth, the so-called 'extremophiles', a fact that could be taken as suggesting that life could exist in the environments found on some of the 200 odd exoplanets already known. This applies to not just life in general, but also to that which would be considered "technological" or "advanced" if we could be conceive of these things in the myriad ways they might occur besides what we know from experience.
Consider: How much for how long of SETI has listened for interstellar communication on the "neutral hydrogen" frequency, when any portion or amount of the electromagnetic spectrum could be used along with various planar and circular polarizations, and amplitude and frequency modulations to multiplex vast amounts of information in a shorter burst? Signal analysis people consider these well, but SETI researchers restrict themselves to that which they imagine we would do. They end up not looking for alien life or civilizations, but rather other humans in the universe, something exceedingly unlikely.
Unless and until we lose this Earth-centric provincialism, we might detect life and even high technology out there, and never recognize it.
I described the effect which here is just beginning, in a recent post, and others indicated that Ubuntu was a likely candidate. When something is an underdog, people flock to it. When it then becomes "big" they start to turn on it. This is the first step: raising the question. People may react to that and stop believing it to be such a good thing, or if it continues to gain momentum, will become actively hostile. In the referenced posts, we talk about software. But I've seen the same reactions in people who were early adopters of some musical genres or musicians/bands who later became generally popular.
"It also eliminates the need to seize a computer itself, which typically involves disconnecting from a network, turning off the power and potentially losing data. Instead, the investigator CAN [emphsis added] scan for evidence on site."
Regardless of which, they will still disconnect and confiscate. They will follow the tenet "You don't let the murder keep the gun", ignoring the fact that they're depriving the (gun/computer) owner of ownership rights despite not having shown that the person and/or particular device was actually involved in any wrong doing. Remember Steve Jackson's G.U.R.P.S Cyberpunk vs. the Secret Service? There's been a great deal of progress in clone-imaging the machines since then, but they still confiscate. Making it even more unnecessary will not stop it, because law enforcement seek as much as possible to inflict punishment in its attempt to leverage a guilty verdict against the guilty. In the process they fuck the innocent over because their violation of ownership rights happens outside the venue of judicial oversight and remains allowed even when placed in that venue.
In cases where the programming and the computer were integral, the success of the machine also swings from the chin of the developer.
When St. Woz developed the Apple II, he also developed Integer BASIC, which loaded from disk (and earlier, from tape). Woz was a veritable Neanderthal of a hacker. As the Apple gained popularity, the (by then) slick faced Steve Jobs became more involved in decisions about included features. Woz contributed Applesoft BASIC to the Apple II Plus, but Jobs oversaw its inclusion in the machine as a ROM-based system. The source of that on-board code, and to the long, slow decline of the Apple II family can be easily attributed to another well known shiny-jaw simply by reading the top surface of the ROMs: "Copyright 1983, Microsoft Corp."
This is hardly the first time this happened. Charles Babbage conceived his Analytical Engine as a general purpose machine, programmable within itself. But it was Lady Ada Lovelace who conceptualized the programming language necessary. The the bare faced hardware hacking Babbage lived to be 80, but the equally bare faced programming language developer Lady Lovelace died at age 36.
Ada's software influence overcame Babbage's hardware leanings, even more so than Jobs' and Gates' overcame Woz's. Apple eventually managed to release a 16 bit version of the Apple II family a few years before the unrepentant shavers Jobs and his hired gun John Scully killed it off, and that machine still carried the Microsoft copyright on its ROMs. But Babbage never managed to build a working Analytical Engine, and 130+ years after his death neither has anyone else.
One cannot help but wonder whether UNIVAC under Remington*-Rand was ill-fated due to the participation of the beardless (though undeniably genius) author of COBOL, and its derivatives ARITH-MATIC, MATH-MATIC and FLOW-MATIC, Admiral Grace Hopper. Evidence to support this can be found in examining the expulsion of the previously invincible IBM from the computer market, thanks to the baby-faced Gates and Microsoft's OS development, and the associated BIOS developments, that allowed for the rise of generic "IBM PC Compatible" computers at IBM's expense. Even the term has become disused in favor of "Windows Capable". The present brouhaha over "Vista Compatible" is excluded here, as it appear to be more an oxymoron than an assertion.
That doesn't seem at first to have a lot to do with TFA, but it is what Weird Al Yankovic might write if he were a bit more computer oriented. He does, after all, have a moustache, and in "UHF" his hardware oriented chief engineer (and alien visitor) Philo had a beard. The movie itself wasn't a real success, but to the facially haired characters in the movie, U-62's success was what mattered. The appearance of success can be more important than the actual success, and can be jockeyed from the former to the latter, as the facially hairless Jobs and Gates can testify. Support from farther back in history will be forthcoming if the present attempt to build the Analytical Engine succeeeds, as did the 1991 successful build of Babbage's Difference Engine.
And THAT completes our moebius-strip history of computer technology and facial hair. This has been James' burp for LooseConnections.
* Conspiracy theorists take note: Was the failure of Remington-Rand UNIVAC a case of sabotage? After all, Remington electric shavers are responsible for decimating many a decent beard. Victor Kiam claimed "I liked the shaver so much, I bought the company." But did he buy it to shave his face, or to return the digitally beard-leaning company to its analog clean-shaven roots in Weapons of Personal Destruction, of not in fire arms, then at least in facial hair disfigurement? Inquiring chins want to know.
> Would you buy a Metallica online album despite their former views?
Hell, I'd buy it *because* of their prior stance. I'd do it to emphasize how wrong they were before, and how right they and others are in pursuing this marketing tactic.
I'd even buy one of their songs to support this, even though I don't like any of their songs.
Some of the "family" members won't be. They'll uncover the fact that there is no biological link to one or the other parent and/or siblings, even when divorce and remarriage is not involved. They'll find that some births occur outside the relationship otherwise thought to be what's general considered "legitimate". Bringing this fact to light will be a violation of the privacy of the suspect and/or family members, particularly since this fact will have nothing to do with the investigation. In order to pursue the case based on this evidence, they'll have to conduct this violation. If not prevented, it will provide precedent for similar violations that are not directly related to otherwise valid investigations.
Worse still is when the fact of "legitimacy" is then used to judge the person(s) in entirely separate venues, such as job related security background checks conducted on the otherwise innocent family members. Although society may change and the "legitimacy" question cease to matter as much as it used to, others will hang on longer and tighter, such as in this example, where the employers will view it more negatively than the population because they'll be looking for the potential problems, and pursue them on this basis "just in case".
Fast forward to today, and Ubuntu is making huge strides in usability and popularity, introducing Linux into more homes and onto more desks than any other Linux distribution yet released. Coincident with that is a rising hue and cry against it from many corners, for being too simplistic and taking options away form the users, for cutting too many corners, for making it easier to install proprietary software like Nvidia's drivers, and other such complaints. It gets derided as candy-coated Linux that coddles stupid people.
The future is now, and was not too long ago as well, I guess. You and the next respondent make pretty much the same observations. I disagree with you both only in terms of magnitude. RH and U(D) are indeed 'big' Linux distros, and RH is on the Big Board. And the effect I note is seen somewhat. But these are only biggest within the Linux community, and so far.
I'm think more along the lines of a distro that becomes so big that it rivals MacOS and the both are biting more and more into Microsoft's stranglehold. When people are picking up that distro who would not otherwise have been Linux users the effect will become as extreme as it is now with respect to MS's stuff. Yes, for all the problems with Win*, I think the complaints and negative attitudes towards it are out of proportion, for the reasons stated.
Still, point taken from both of you. It's started.
BTW, the concepts I present are not my own. They are right out of social psychology's most successful area: marketing. This effect is something marketoids have to work on constantly to overcome, or at least keep up with. This is why there's often 'upgrades' which are different from, incompatible with, but objectively no better than the previous version(s). Think planned obsolescence. Think Vista. The only real need for it was in MS's drive to maintain market superiority, not by producing a superior product, but by making their new product perceived as superior and their previous perceived as inferior. Again, the problems with Vista are real. That doesn't contradict the assertion. The amount of complaint vs. the amount of actual problems is the point. The effect becomes so powerful that people who don't even have the product, or do but don't have the problems, complain. And rather than fix the problem, the marketoids' response is the same: Yet Another (Non-)Upgrade.
An exercise for the reader is to note this effect in other venues. To start you off, an example -- way more complaints about the government party in power despite the fact that neither part is that much worse than any other. You can use The Daily Show with Jon Stewart as an objective score keeping system (objective scoring, not objective complaints). The other party(ies) get poked at too, but not in proportion with the pokes at the top party. And the pokes are pointed more at the top position (president) than they are at the majority party in congress, even though the congresscritters outnumber the president and each has their own problems, making their sum of complaints far greater.
There are plenty of examples of other companies that are behind the curve in some respect or another. In most cases people do the rational thing -- they vote with their feet. Er, fingers. So why is this a story? Because it's Google.
People tend to tip over the tallest ivory towers, and shorter ones get left alone. This tendency is so strong that people fail to recognize when they're complaining about something that's not only free, but intended to be a billboard for their host's advertising, something which in other situations would be the focus of their complaints.
Mark my prophecy: Someday some company is going to produce a desktop Linux so good that it's going to catch on and become if not a major competitor in the OS market, then at least the major distro of Linux. And they will suffer the same fate, becoming the punching bag of the Linux community, while lesser distros have no fewer problems and gather fewer complaints. And of those complaining, many will have obtained the free version of the distro. They will be out nothing, but will feel somehow justified because of the stature of their target, and will do so with gusto despite the fact that equally good distros are available to which they could switch. This irrationality will escape them, as it does the author of TFA.
The nature of the beast here is cognitive dissonance and perceived value. Biggest gets equated with best. Best carries the same weight as monetary investment, in that it's a perceived value, the association with the biggest name being the source of that. But when there is no actual investment the fact of the lack of actual investment fact starts to come to mind. The contradiction produces cognitive dissonance. To suppress that, the complaining becomes more vehement in this situation than in equally problematic situations with products or services of less perceived value garnering fewer complaints. So strong is this tendency that even when there is actual value in terms of money spent, the amount of complaints is out of proportion with the number of problems compared to other products or services that can even cost less or nothing.
Evidence to support the above assertion? Simple: it continues to occur even when those suffering from the contradiction are made aware of it. Even when told they are wearing Don Quixote's hat, they will still tilt at that largest windmill. Just watch.
Mathematics is a field with enormous breadth and depth. I think it highly implausible that given the two possibilities, all of the various areas fall under only one origin. Some math is created to explain observed phenomena, and so "found". Some is created in the purely theoretical sense and only later found to have real world application and so "made". To muddy the waters, in all cases I can think of, those things developed under one of these inevitably are found to have connection with other things developed under the other, meaning neither can lay claim to being the original source.
I tend to think that not all areas of math that were created theoretically find a real world connection, making these at least purely "made", with no natural frame of reference. However, it can't be said they will never have such a connection until the time constraint for the definition of "never" has been exhausted, "Which is, of course, impossible."
The main problem I have arguments in the subject of "found" vs. "made" is that both presume to say the human mind is sufficiently advanced enough to be able to recognize true connections with Platonic ideals, or to show that they do not or cannot exist in any sense. The human mind is not terribly advanced beyond the realm of other animals', and in any case is advanced only along the path it has evolved, where as an entirely different kind of mind might only be able to operate under one context or the other, may see no contradiction in holding to both simultaneously. or may hold to a similar but orthagonal set of assumptions that would create a third option, although we might never be able to grasp the thought processes involved; our brain wouldn't be able to think along lines it wasn't evolved to think along (the "the problem with aliens is, they're alien" axiom).
I do tend to think that the answer, if such exists, will be something like "both, and then some" because absolutist either/or thinking such as the argument presented usually ends up being found to be a naive viewpoint from underdeveloped minds. In any case, from what I can tell, the vast majority of makers and users of mathematics carry on marvelously without tripping themselves up on the question, because the making and using does not require an answer to the question in order for these to happen.
"Prediction" is not accurate because that implies an absolute. Clearly, this is somebody who never listens to weather predictions. I take it you're referring to "weather forecasts". Those are produced by NOAA/NWS as non-absolute data (probability of rain; range of temps between X and Y, etc.), not as specific points, although they frequently get reported as such.
TFA is about the first unsolicited commercial email. That became the definition of email that came to be called "spam" well after the first reference to the Monty Python sketch, which was brought up to describe massively multiple posts of advertising to usenet. It says at http://www.templetons.com/brad/spamterm.html that Joel Furr was first to call it spam, but I seem to remember someone else stating that it reminded them of "a Monty Python sketch -- spam, spam, spam, spam."
BTW, the Hormel people never had a problem with the use of the term. In part because it was free PR, but also because they were gracious good humored about it. They went as far as to offer their own selected graphic of a spam can that could be used as a link to their pages. The idea as floated to them was to have their permission to produce a 2-link bar that said "This is Spam" [Hormel link] "and this is spam" [link to page with definition of problematic usenet and email traffic]. I can confidently state their being gracious and good natured because I was the one that suggested the links idea to them, requested the graphic of their choice, and talked with them about their reactions to use of the term. In this respect, the second of the "Cultural References" at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_(Monty_Python) is incorrect, though the History section of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_(electronic) gets it right.
They later reacted a little differently when people insisted on using the capitalized name in their own software and anti-spam sites (such as Spam Arrest) and couldn't see their way clear to use the more generic, lower case term. People criticized them for doing so without bothering to consider that they were forced by trademark law to protect their mark (the capitalized word) no matter how much they disliked doing so, lest they lose trademark status. Sadly, few seem to remember that Hormel asked nicely at first that the lower case be used unless referring to their product. The assertion by Spam Arrest that "No company can claim trademark rights on a generic term" is wrong: a term when trademarked before it comes into common use (trademark status being awarded 40 years prior to this "common use") remains a trademark as long as the owner acts to (at least attempt to) prevent its use as a generic term. Such action kept "xerox" and "kleenex" from becoming an accepted generic terms for photocopying and facial tissue, while failure to do so allowed "aspirin" and "heroin" to become generic terms despite starting as brand names, both originally owned by Bayer AG. As a German company it was unable to protect the marks against generic use in the US, particularly during WW II. Although Hormel lost the court cases that resulted, they acted with a "reasonable attempt" to protect the ownership of the mark, and so didn't lose it.
BTW, TFA is not a novel article. CNET published one on its 25th anniversary in 2003. In that respect, TFA is repeated public posting of commercial (or at least commercially supported) information. TFA fits the original definition of spam. In any case, New Scientist loses points for copying the idea for the article.
Lance Armstrong, Sit Down: Dr. Sally Ride, the first female US astronaut in space, rode a bicycle across the Atlantic ocean. She did so in 15 minutes. This was done in 1983, aboard STS-7 on a stationary bike, as part of an experiment on exercise in zero g intended to reduce the problem of bone calcium loss during long missions. It stretches at least a couple definitions to the breaking point, but it's great to be able to say "rode a bicycle across the Atlantic ocean in 15 minutes". A free flight variant of this could be a bicycle race using vehicles with a human powered propeller, flying a course aboard a space station.
The High (Frontier) Jump: I came up with this when OMNI printed an article about the first Olympics in space, and requested ideas from readers. Take two medium sized asteroids and set them orbiting about each other. The jumper starts on one, and jumps into a prescribed 3 body orbit about the pair. Jumps include: Jump from A, orbiting B, and landing back on A as close as possible to the starting point; jump from A, slingshot around B, orbit around A counter to the original direction, and land on B; jump from A, ricochet off B without stopping and land back on A as close as possible to the original starting point. 'Free style' jumps of the jumpers' own device as also included. Although probably requiring attitude thruster assistance, gymnastic moves such as spinning and somersaults during the jumps add to the scores. Also, a jump using a heads up display projected on the inside of a helmet with the faceplate blacked over test the jumper's ability to work from data instead of seat-of-the-pants sight. A variant of this and the bicycle race above could be jumping from an asteroid for initial delta V, and negotiating a marked course using attitude control thrusters. Points are added according to landing speed and how little additional delta V is acquired during the 3 dimensional slalom involved (ie. steering so as not to add speed to the starting speed).
Earth Surfing: A danger to the Apollo flights was the possibility that due to the high Earth gravity acquired return speed, an too low a reentry angle would make them skip off the atmosphere and out into solar orbit. Make use of that. Starting from lunar orbit, perform a Earth-targeted burn with minimal in flight correction. The intention is to bounce off the atmosphere so as to lose the most velocity while still escaping Earth's gravity well (ie. coming as close as possible to reentry speed but still surfing the atmosphere back out into solar orbit). An element of danger enters when the burn might produce too steep a reentry angle causing the returnees to burn up on reentry rather than bounce. Even a well executed bounce will include significant heating, and shortening the heating time and reducing the amount would mean a more oblique surfing angle and so fewer points.
Synchronized Swimming: Now possible in 3 dimensions, instead of the usual 2 on the water's surface. The team performs on and within a huge globule of water floating freely in zero g. Besides the points acquired from performance itself, points are lost according to how much water is splashed away from the main globule during the exercise.
V-HALO Jump: In the Very High Altitude, Low Open Jump the astronaut athlete is given their exact orbital parameters, the location of a landing site, and placed in a reentry shielded single person module with a retrorocket built in. They get into the 'landing coffin', and at a time and with a delta V of their own calculation, perform their burn, reenter the atmosphere, and when their speed is low enough jump out and perform a free fall parachute jump. Points are gained for how low they open the chute and how close they land to the specified point. To make things interesting, rather than giving them a computer for calculating their burn time and duration, give them the technology used by the Soviet cosmonauts during the Apollo-Soyuz mission rendezvous: slide rule and stop watch.
The Charles Duke Lunar High Jump: When Charlie Duk
> as few as 2,000 humans, who were scattered in small, isolated groups.
2000 total, in small isolated groups? There was a whole lot of inbreeding going on. The groups wouldn't have survived long enough to get back together if they hadn't. Sure, we may think we're the bee's knees, but we, as a species, are sitting on the porch, playing banjo against the rest of the planet's more reasonable but food-chain inferior guitar playing.
"Prediction" is not accurate because that implies an absolute. The activity correlates with an increased probability of making a mistake. The study relies on statistics throughout, from the analysis of the fMRI data on, and so can only deal in probabilities.
An Israeli team found that an increase in degree of synchronization of midline frontal theta EEG varied inversely with the probability of making a mistake. Such theta synchronization occurs over spans of 10 to 30 seconds. They also found that when a response occurs during the rising or falling slope of the synchronized theta (as opposed to near a peak), the person was more likely to make a mistake. The latter probably is the source of the evoked potential called the Error Related Negativity; it is the brain preparing to notice the error. The former seems to indicate a lagging in attention, which is when errors are most likely to occur. The two are related, meaning the brain "knows" when it is starting to droop and is more likely to make a mistake, and tells itself to get ready to notice a mistake if it happens.
Ice in a vacuum sublimates incredibly fast (compared to dry air in earth pressures at below 0F). you need to have it protected by dirt, grunge or rock to keep it from sublimating. or even paint. I'm sure you're correct. Such impurities will likely be found in the source ice. Filter that out, freeze the water, and cover it with its own impurities.
Also, there are many forms of ice, about 18 it seems. Some ice polymorphs may be more resistant to vacuum exposure. Some of them appear to be downright polymerish. http://www.lsbu.ac.uk/water/phase.html
Already done: lunar expeditions using a separate lander and translunar go-and-return module which stays in lunar orbit (from his first novel, Prelude to Space, 1951). Probably not his idea originally, as Von Braun was working on his 'lunar flotilla' design by that time, which included separate crew-return vehicles.
Also come to pass: A 'civilian' wins a ticket to space (though from a game show, not a contest; Islands In The Sky, 1952). In 2005, Doug Ramsburg won a Virgin Galactic ticket in a contest sponsored by Volvo. Not a scientific development, but a social one, and Clarke's handling of those was just as forward thinking.
His idea for geosynch satellites was a good start, even though the original idea was floated by Oberth more than two decades earlier. But the idea, as expanding upon in his fiction, included human crews aboard the three stations performing other functions also. Most of that work is now done with automated satellites, but such stations could be staging areas for translunar and interplanetary flights. These could be largely automated, but probably not entirely, as crew preparation would probably occur there.
Using replenishable ablative shielding made of ice to protect the crew of high speed spacecraft from the bombardment of dust and radiation (Songs of Distant Earth) has always been one of my favorite hacks. So much the better if heavy water could be concentrated out from the source to make it more effective. Capturing cometary or other ice water material and melting it with solar energy for recasting on site would make raising it from the ground unnecessary.
I don't believe space elevators will ever make the cut. The amount of energy and engineering required are just too high. There are many other ways to space that would be easier, faster, and unless and until a space elevator could operate to near the break-even point if that even exists, cheaper. By the time an elevator could be built, we could already have mile-wide high altitude (100k ft.) balloon platforms operating as staging areas for ground-to-station and station-to-station shuttles, making global transportation as well as staging to orbit and beyond quite easy. Such a system could operate at the regularity of today's mass transportation systems. I don't dispute a space elevator's design or intent, I simply maintain that evolution of existing designs via technological improvements will be more efficient and make such a gargantuan feat unnecessary.
The H in HAL: It stands for "Heuristically" ("programmed ALgorithmic computer"). The human mind work largely using heuristics, which are fastest, best-guess rules of thumb producing a (usually) good-enough result. These are subject to the same sort of errors human minds are. But if one can be built, many operating in parallel can also, and many best guesses arrived at by consensus could out perform a single human. I believe this will prove to be at least one workable model for artificial intelligence (as in true novel problem solving, not simply fooling humans in conversation a la Turing). Fuzzy logic has lost its one time star status, but that serves as a good model for single stage heuristic processing. Many such in parallel, with a comparative 'executive process' would be the next step.
Oops, should have included this in my previous post.
> Private Efforts Fill Gaps In Earth's Asteroid Defenses [article title]
There are no "defenses". There is no program anywhere to protect Earth from a strike. There are government funded and private programs performing studies as to how it might be done, but that's all. The article is about search and/or cataloging projects, not defense projects.
> The bottom line is that government is moving slowly on cataloging NEOs
NASA's NEO program catalogs bodies as soon as the data comes available.
There are 7 programs besides NASA searching and/or cataloging (they're listed on JPL's site: http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/programs/ ). When one team gets data, they all share in it. The programs are only as slow as the data. As for US government, 5.5 of the 8 programs are US based (one in Italy, one in Japan, one joint US-Aussie).
> NASA has yet to allot funds to the project
The NASA NEO program is run from JPL. JPL is managed by Caltech for NASA. NASA pays JPL to do so. The 8 people in the NEO program appear to be all NASA employees, or at least from Caltech or other universities, paid by NASA (directly via payroll or JPL funding, or indirectly via funding to their parent university) to work there. There is no need to have funding dedicated explicitly to the program if existing funding is available to operate the office under other funding headings.
The government is perhaps not moving as fast as it could in data collection if it funded a dedicated telescopy program directly, but that doesn't imply the cataloging is slow.
The bottom line is that the article is correct in that private concerns are providing funding for or operating search and/or cataloging operations, but that's all. The assertions regarding cataloging being slow and lack of funding are unfounded.
Of course any government funded program will tell you there's a "lack" in terms of not enough (as opposed to an absence), because they'll get their funding cut if they don't show the need. The output from this program indicates it's operating its cataloging project at the speed necessary to keep up with the data.
Growing new muscle tissue is a waste of time, unless one solves the problem of regrowing nerve tissue, including getting it to reconnect at the severed spot as well as migrating through the new tissue to its intended connection target. Without nerve connection the muscle is useless and will atrophy. To see what happens, look at Stephen Hawking. His illness is MOTOR neuron disease, loss of nerves that operate muscles.
We *can* regrow neurons as we have natural stem cells that do so. The problem with either natural or induced growth is getting them to follow the path they're supposed to rather than grow into a tangled heap called a neuroma. Those can be more of a problem than no regrowth, as they can regrow nerve endings on the tangle, and so be extremely sensitive in the wrong place.
I had a damaged nerve in my foot excised. The end of the nerve grew a neuroma. If I ran, or even walked too hard, it was like stepping on a nail. Couldn't run, so couldn't fight. The Army put me out. Over the next 10 years the neuroma faded away. And the nerve regrew properly. I now have full feeling in the area served by that nerve. This is not the usual course of healing -- I was just damn lucky.
The military is willing to pay to have human tissue regrowth rather than lose the entire investment in a service member. They paid around $200,000 total for all my training. When I was capable again, I was too old. If I'd have been able to have this happen over the course of a year or so I could have been kept in and on medical leave, returning to service when finished.
My concern is that the military will effectively experiment on its service members by applying this technology to their healing before it's perfected. Someone still in service has a duty to try to continue, and they carry implied consent to take necessary medical treatment, by passing informed consent when pressure to accept treatment is applied. Refusing treatment can be taken as refusing to serve through one's contract. If the treatment were being offered through the Veterans Administration, fine. Through the military, I'd be wary until it's proven good enough for the civilian market.
Slashdot Mirror
> Nobody really knows exactly how many colors we can see. The estimates range from
> around 4 million to over 10 million, and it appears to vary widely between
> different people.
Quite so. There are a few tetrachromats (4 different color receptors) who can presumably see one third more than us trichromats, and even we might see more than the oft quoted 4.5 million.
> I do tend to agree that billions of colors is a waste though.
Even the present 24 bit/16.7 million SVGA-level output out performs the most sensitive human visual system, including tetrachromats. Ducks, as quintachromats, *might* be able to see the full 16.7M. If so, they're not saying.
First I have to say "Space Advocates showed up on Slashdot today, and asked 'Who is The Space Show'?" It's not a frivolous question. I've been an advocate for 40 years and never heard of it before.
If the show and its owner were very well connected, they'd know that those who remain advocating space programs through the traditional channels are most often those scientists and such whose work depends on it or is planned to. Many of the rest of us have been abandoning advocacy of the corporate welfare system of NASA + BigAerospace for the more exciting private space start ups. Sure, the successful ones will end up as major aerospace players and/or sell out to bigger companies, but they'll make their early money and marks in history the old fashioned way. Even the US government has made success more likely for these start ups by making the Office of Space Transportation easy to work through, and even obtain assistance from when planning flights.
Bottom line, ((bi)partisan) politics hasn't favored us since about 1970, so we've quit waiting for that happy childhood to return. Keep your candidates. We'll be busy punching holes in the sky.
And it should be noted that the referenced source seems to imply, by tying the question to the present US elections, that space programs and advocacy exist only in the US. Very wrong. Another strike against The Space Show.
If "coding" can include processes implimented in hardware (very hard ware, such as gears) then the WW II Axis crypto machine Enigma and the Allies' SIGABA would qualify. The former was recently replicated, so we know it's design, ie. code, is still valid.
Of course, if the definition extends to machines of this nature, then Babbages' Difference Engine would probably win. It was designed to be hard coded to solve polynomial functions. It was recently (1991; London Science Museum) built as a working model, so the design/code is proven, but the design/code itself dates to 1822 and was first implimented in 1849. The London machine is still working, so it should qualify as long as hardware coding is included.
The summary and headline are perfect examples of bad 'science' writing, as has been discussed here not so long ago. The statement that NASA "is going to" is precise, but misleading. They are going to do as it says. But the statement implies that they are just now starting to do this, and haven't in the past. That is wrong. The RSO has always had the emergency flight termination ability and responsibility. When that kind of error is made on /., chalk it up to your average person doing reporting. When a professional media outlet does it, as in TFA, it's either extremely poor journalism, both in writing and in editorial, or it's hype, pure and simple. When the headline and/or summary have it, but the body of the article contradicts them and gives the straight facts, it's the latter. It's a damn shame they have to use hype to sell stuff. It'd be so much nicer if they used quality.
The human eye can discern around 4.5 million colors. Anything more than that requires instrumentation to detect. You can use it to prove you have a monitor capable of a billion colors, but you'll never see them.
The results are a Blinding Glimpse of the Obvious. Conflict between verbal and manual dexterity processing is a very well known and easily replicated phenomenon. I use it in every psych lab course. Not said here is that people with more left/right differentiation (right handed males, mostly) are more prone to this than those with less differentiated hemispheres (left handed males, most females, and so on).
However, supporting it with MRI is near to bogus. Activation as seen on MRI can be true 'activity' as in excitatory, inhibitory (far more important in that it pulls intended action out of the random background of spontaneous activity as well as selecting among the possible actions being preprocessed) or a combination of the two which results in a WTF answer to the question.
Worse yet, studying a phenomenon with two active behavioral components in a situation where no behavioral reaction is permitted (can't move in an MRI) cannot conclusively show the effect being claimed in TFA. It can theoretically show the tendency, but it cannot produce the behavior to correlate with the brain activity and so cannot show the two being linked. For that matter, if the processes that lead to the behaviors are triggered, but the person is stuck in an MRI, you'd pretty much have to expect a good deal of inhibitory activity as they expend effort to subdue that and stay still. Such effortful inhibition would produce MRI its own results, and they would have had this in their results.
... is that they're alien. Such is the phrase often mentioned by Benford, Niven and others. They're more acutely aware, as those who by trade imagine what aliens might be like, than are those such a SETI scientists. The latter keep themselves boxed in with the idea that what they're looking for will look enough like what they're used to, and so engage in scientific human-chauvinism. The error here is that there are so many others forms that life, and even intelligent life, may take that we wouldn't be able to recognize it with our present understanding. As an example, we take discovery of gas giant planets in other systems as a matter of course, and get excited about "Earth-like" discoveries, even though what's presented is hardly Earth-like. Yet we're finding that there is life in some unlikely places here on Earth, the so-called 'extremophiles', a fact that could be taken as suggesting that life could exist in the environments found on some of the 200 odd exoplanets already known. This applies to not just life in general, but also to that which would be considered "technological" or "advanced" if we could be conceive of these things in the myriad ways they might occur besides what we know from experience.
Consider: How much for how long of SETI has listened for interstellar communication on the "neutral hydrogen" frequency, when any portion or amount of the electromagnetic spectrum could be used along with various planar and circular polarizations, and amplitude and frequency modulations to multiplex vast amounts of information in a shorter burst? Signal analysis people consider these well, but SETI researchers restrict themselves to that which they imagine we would do. They end up not looking for alien life or civilizations, but rather other humans in the universe, something exceedingly unlikely.
Unless and until we lose this Earth-centric provincialism, we might detect life and even high technology out there, and never recognize it.
I described the effect which here is just beginning, in a recent post, and others indicated that Ubuntu was a likely candidate. When something is an underdog, people flock to it. When it then becomes "big" they start to turn on it. This is the first step: raising the question. People may react to that and stop believing it to be such a good thing, or if it continues to gain momentum, will become actively hostile. In the referenced posts, we talk about software. But I've seen the same reactions in people who were early adopters of some musical genres or musicians/bands who later became generally popular.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=536064&cid=23216760
Love the puppy, kill the wolf, even though the entire world of "man's best friend" originates with them both.
"It also eliminates the need to seize a computer itself, which typically involves disconnecting from a network, turning off the power and potentially losing data. Instead, the investigator CAN [emphsis added] scan for evidence on site."
Regardless of which, they will still disconnect and confiscate. They will follow the tenet "You don't let the murder keep the gun", ignoring the fact that they're depriving the (gun/computer) owner of ownership rights despite not having shown that the person and/or particular device was actually involved in any wrong doing. Remember Steve Jackson's G.U.R.P.S Cyberpunk vs. the Secret Service? There's been a great deal of progress in clone-imaging the machines since then, but they still confiscate. Making it even more unnecessary will not stop it, because law enforcement seek as much as possible to inflict punishment in its attempt to leverage a guilty verdict against the guilty. In the process they fuck the innocent over because their violation of ownership rights happens outside the venue of judicial oversight and remains allowed even when placed in that venue.
In cases where the programming and the computer were integral, the success of the machine also swings from the chin of the developer.
/."
When St. Woz developed the Apple II, he also developed Integer BASIC, which loaded from disk (and earlier, from tape). Woz was a veritable Neanderthal of a hacker. As the Apple gained popularity, the (by then) slick faced Steve Jobs became more involved in decisions about included features. Woz contributed Applesoft BASIC to the Apple II Plus, but Jobs oversaw its inclusion in the machine as a ROM-based system. The source of that on-board code, and to the long, slow decline of the Apple II family can be easily attributed to another well known shiny-jaw simply by reading the top surface of the ROMs: "Copyright 1983, Microsoft Corp."
This is hardly the first time this happened. Charles Babbage conceived his Analytical Engine as a general purpose machine, programmable within itself. But it was Lady Ada Lovelace who conceptualized the programming language necessary. The the bare faced hardware hacking Babbage lived to be 80, but the equally bare faced programming language developer Lady Lovelace died at age 36.
Ada's software influence overcame Babbage's hardware leanings, even more so than Jobs' and Gates' overcame Woz's. Apple eventually managed to release a 16 bit version of the Apple II family a few years before the unrepentant shavers Jobs and his hired gun John Scully killed it off, and that machine still carried the Microsoft copyright on its ROMs. But Babbage never managed to build a working Analytical Engine, and 130+ years after his death neither has anyone else.
One cannot help but wonder whether UNIVAC under Remington*-Rand was ill-fated due to the participation of the beardless (though undeniably genius) author of COBOL, and its derivatives ARITH-MATIC, MATH-MATIC and FLOW-MATIC, Admiral Grace Hopper. Evidence to support this can be found in examining the expulsion of the previously invincible IBM from the computer market, thanks to the baby-faced Gates and Microsoft's OS development, and the associated BIOS developments, that allowed for the rise of generic "IBM PC Compatible" computers at IBM's expense. Even the term has become disused in favor of "Windows Capable". The present brouhaha over "Vista Compatible" is excluded here, as it appear to be more an oxymoron than an assertion.
To paraphrase John Prine:
"Blow up your PC,
Throw away your Windows,
Move to Linux,
Build you a
(That's 'home' not 'Slashdot')
http://www.oldielyrics.com/lyrics/john_prine/spanish_pipedream_blow_up_your_tv.html
That doesn't seem at first to have a lot to do with TFA, but it is what Weird Al Yankovic might write if he were a bit more computer oriented. He does, after all, have a moustache, and in "UHF" his hardware oriented chief engineer (and alien visitor) Philo had a beard. The movie itself wasn't a real success, but to the facially haired characters in the movie, U-62's success was what mattered. The appearance of success can be more important than the actual success, and can be jockeyed from the former to the latter, as the facially hairless Jobs and Gates can testify. Support from farther back in history will be forthcoming if the present attempt to build the Analytical Engine succeeeds, as did the 1991 successful build of Babbage's Difference Engine.
And THAT completes our moebius-strip history of computer technology and facial hair. This has been James' burp for LooseConnections.
* Conspiracy theorists take note: Was the failure of Remington-Rand UNIVAC a case of sabotage? After all, Remington electric shavers are responsible for decimating many a decent beard. Victor Kiam claimed "I liked the shaver so much, I bought the company." But did he buy it to shave his face, or to return the digitally beard-leaning company to its analog clean-shaven roots in Weapons of Personal Destruction, of not in fire arms, then at least in facial hair disfigurement? Inquiring chins want to know.
> Would you buy a Metallica online album despite their former views?
Hell, I'd buy it *because* of their prior stance. I'd do it to emphasize how wrong they were before, and how right they and others are in pursuing this marketing tactic.
I'd even buy one of their songs to support this, even though I don't like any of their songs.
Some of the "family" members won't be. They'll uncover the fact that there is no biological link to one or the other parent and/or siblings, even when divorce and remarriage is not involved. They'll find that some births occur outside the relationship otherwise thought to be what's general considered "legitimate". Bringing this fact to light will be a violation of the privacy of the suspect and/or family members, particularly since this fact will have nothing to do with the investigation. In order to pursue the case based on this evidence, they'll have to conduct this violation. If not prevented, it will provide precedent for similar violations that are not directly related to otherwise valid investigations.
Worse still is when the fact of "legitimacy" is then used to judge the person(s) in entirely separate venues, such as job related security background checks conducted on the otherwise innocent family members. Although society may change and the "legitimacy" question cease to matter as much as it used to, others will hang on longer and tighter, such as in this example, where the employers will view it more negatively than the population because they'll be looking for the potential problems, and pursue them on this basis "just in case".
The future is now, and was not too long ago as well, I guess. You and the next respondent make pretty much the same observations. I disagree with you both only in terms of magnitude. RH and U(D) are indeed 'big' Linux distros, and RH is on the Big Board. And the effect I note is seen somewhat. But these are only biggest within the Linux community, and so far.
I'm think more along the lines of a distro that becomes so big that it rivals MacOS and the both are biting more and more into Microsoft's stranglehold. When people are picking up that distro who would not otherwise have been Linux users the effect will become as extreme as it is now with respect to MS's stuff. Yes, for all the problems with Win*, I think the complaints and negative attitudes towards it are out of proportion, for the reasons stated.
Still, point taken from both of you. It's started.
BTW, the concepts I present are not my own. They are right out of social psychology's most successful area: marketing. This effect is something marketoids have to work on constantly to overcome, or at least keep up with. This is why there's often 'upgrades' which are different from, incompatible with, but objectively no better than the previous version(s). Think planned obsolescence. Think Vista. The only real need for it was in MS's drive to maintain market superiority, not by producing a superior product, but by making their new product perceived as superior and their previous perceived as inferior. Again, the problems with Vista are real. That doesn't contradict the assertion. The amount of complaint vs. the amount of actual problems is the point. The effect becomes so powerful that people who don't even have the product, or do but don't have the problems, complain. And rather than fix the problem, the marketoids' response is the same: Yet Another (Non-)Upgrade.
An exercise for the reader is to note this effect in other venues. To start you off, an example -- way more complaints about the government party in power despite the fact that neither part is that much worse than any other. You can use The Daily Show with Jon Stewart as an objective score keeping system (objective scoring, not objective complaints). The other party(ies) get poked at too, but not in proportion with the pokes at the top party. And the pokes are pointed more at the top position (president) than they are at the majority party in congress, even though the congresscritters outnumber the president and each has their own problems, making their sum of complaints far greater.
> Is Blogger destined to be a sideshow...?
Could well be. I'd demand a refund.
There are plenty of examples of other companies that are behind the curve in some respect or another. In most cases people do the rational thing -- they vote with their feet. Er, fingers. So why is this a story? Because it's Google.
People tend to tip over the tallest ivory towers, and shorter ones get left alone. This tendency is so strong that people fail to recognize when they're complaining about something that's not only free, but intended to be a billboard for their host's advertising, something which in other situations would be the focus of their complaints.
Mark my prophecy: Someday some company is going to produce a desktop Linux so good that it's going to catch on and become if not a major competitor in the OS market, then at least the major distro of Linux. And they will suffer the same fate, becoming the punching bag of the Linux community, while lesser distros have no fewer problems and gather fewer complaints. And of those complaining, many will have obtained the free version of the distro. They will be out nothing, but will feel somehow justified because of the stature of their target, and will do so with gusto despite the fact that equally good distros are available to which they could switch. This irrationality will escape them, as it does the author of TFA.
The nature of the beast here is cognitive dissonance and perceived value. Biggest gets equated with best. Best carries the same weight as monetary investment, in that it's a perceived value, the association with the biggest name being the source of that. But when there is no actual investment the fact of the lack of actual investment fact starts to come to mind. The contradiction produces cognitive dissonance. To suppress that, the complaining becomes more vehement in this situation than in equally problematic situations with products or services of less perceived value garnering fewer complaints. So strong is this tendency that even when there is actual value in terms of money spent, the amount of complaints is out of proportion with the number of problems compared to other products or services that can even cost less or nothing.
Evidence to support the above assertion? Simple: it continues to occur even when those suffering from the contradiction are made aware of it. Even when told they are wearing Don Quixote's hat, they will still tilt at that largest windmill. Just watch.
Mathematics is a field with enormous breadth and depth. I think it highly implausible that given the two possibilities, all of the various areas fall under only one origin. Some math is created to explain observed phenomena, and so "found". Some is created in the purely theoretical sense and only later found to have real world application and so "made". To muddy the waters, in all cases I can think of, those things developed under one of these inevitably are found to have connection with other things developed under the other, meaning neither can lay claim to being the original source.
I tend to think that not all areas of math that were created theoretically find a real world connection, making these at least purely "made", with no natural frame of reference. However, it can't be said they will never have such a connection until the time constraint for the definition of "never" has been exhausted, "Which is, of course, impossible."
The main problem I have arguments in the subject of "found" vs. "made" is that both presume to say the human mind is sufficiently advanced enough to be able to recognize true connections with Platonic ideals, or to show that they do not or cannot exist in any sense. The human mind is not terribly advanced beyond the realm of other animals', and in any case is advanced only along the path it has evolved, where as an entirely different kind of mind might only be able to operate under one context or the other, may see no contradiction in holding to both simultaneously. or may hold to a similar but orthagonal set of assumptions that would create a third option, although we might never be able to grasp the thought processes involved; our brain wouldn't be able to think along lines it wasn't evolved to think along (the "the problem with aliens is, they're alien" axiom).
I do tend to think that the answer, if such exists, will be something like "both, and then some" because absolutist either/or thinking such as the argument presented usually ends up being found to be a naive viewpoint from underdeveloped minds. In any case, from what I can tell, the vast majority of makers and users of mathematics carry on marvelously without tripping themselves up on the question, because the making and using does not require an answer to the question in order for these to happen.
TFA is about the first unsolicited commercial email. That became the definition of email that came to be called "spam" well after the first reference to the Monty Python sketch, which was brought up to describe massively multiple posts of advertising to usenet. It says at http://www.templetons.com/brad/spamterm.html that Joel Furr was first to call it spam, but I seem to remember someone else stating that it reminded them of "a Monty Python sketch -- spam, spam, spam, spam."
BTW, the Hormel people never had a problem with the use of the term. In part because it was free PR, but also because they were gracious good humored about it. They went as far as to offer their own selected graphic of a spam can that could be used as a link to their pages. The idea as floated to them was to have their permission to produce a 2-link bar that said "This is Spam" [Hormel link] "and this is spam" [link to page with definition of problematic usenet and email traffic]. I can confidently state their being gracious and good natured because I was the one that suggested the links idea to them, requested the graphic of their choice, and talked with them about their reactions to use of the term. In this respect, the second of the "Cultural References" at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_(Monty_Python) is incorrect, though the History section of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_(electronic) gets it right.
They later reacted a little differently when people insisted on using the capitalized name in their own software and anti-spam sites (such as Spam Arrest) and couldn't see their way clear to use the more generic, lower case term. People criticized them for doing so without bothering to consider that they were forced by trademark law to protect their mark (the capitalized word) no matter how much they disliked doing so, lest they lose trademark status. Sadly, few seem to remember that Hormel asked nicely at first that the lower case be used unless referring to their product. The assertion by Spam Arrest that "No company can claim trademark rights on a generic term" is wrong: a term when trademarked before it comes into common use (trademark status being awarded 40 years prior to this "common use") remains a trademark as long as the owner acts to (at least attempt to) prevent its use as a generic term. Such action kept "xerox" and "kleenex" from becoming an accepted generic terms for photocopying and facial tissue, while failure to do so allowed "aspirin" and "heroin" to become generic terms despite starting as brand names, both originally owned by Bayer AG. As a German company it was unable to protect the marks against generic use in the US, particularly during WW II. Although Hormel lost the court cases that resulted, they acted with a "reasonable attempt" to protect the ownership of the mark, and so didn't lose it.
BTW, TFA is not a novel article. CNET published one on its 25th anniversary in 2003. In that respect, TFA is repeated public posting of commercial (or at least commercially supported) information. TFA fits the original definition of spam. In any case, New Scientist loses points for copying the idea for the article.
Lance Armstrong, Sit Down: Dr. Sally Ride, the first female US astronaut in space, rode a bicycle across the Atlantic ocean. She did so in 15 minutes. This was done in 1983, aboard STS-7 on a stationary bike, as part of an experiment on exercise in zero g intended to reduce the problem of bone calcium loss during long missions. It stretches at least a couple definitions to the breaking point, but it's great to be able to say "rode a bicycle across the Atlantic ocean in 15 minutes". A free flight variant of this could be a bicycle race using vehicles with a human powered propeller, flying a course aboard a space station.
The High (Frontier) Jump: I came up with this when OMNI printed an article about the first Olympics in space, and requested ideas from readers. Take two medium sized asteroids and set them orbiting about each other. The jumper starts on one, and jumps into a prescribed 3 body orbit about the pair. Jumps include: Jump from A, orbiting B, and landing back on A as close as possible to the starting point; jump from A, slingshot around B, orbit around A counter to the original direction, and land on B; jump from A, ricochet off B without stopping and land back on A as close as possible to the original starting point. 'Free style' jumps of the jumpers' own device as also included. Although probably requiring attitude thruster assistance, gymnastic moves such as spinning and somersaults during the jumps add to the scores. Also, a jump using a heads up display projected on the inside of a helmet with the faceplate blacked over test the jumper's ability to work from data instead of seat-of-the-pants sight. A variant of this and the bicycle race above could be jumping from an asteroid for initial delta V, and negotiating a marked course using attitude control thrusters. Points are added according to landing speed and how little additional delta V is acquired during the 3 dimensional slalom involved (ie. steering so as not to add speed to the starting speed).
Earth Surfing: A danger to the Apollo flights was the possibility that due to the high Earth gravity acquired return speed, an too low a reentry angle would make them skip off the atmosphere and out into solar orbit. Make use of that. Starting from lunar orbit, perform a Earth-targeted burn with minimal in flight correction. The intention is to bounce off the atmosphere so as to lose the most velocity while still escaping Earth's gravity well (ie. coming as close as possible to reentry speed but still surfing the atmosphere back out into solar orbit). An element of danger enters when the burn might produce too steep a reentry angle causing the returnees to burn up on reentry rather than bounce. Even a well executed bounce will include significant heating, and shortening the heating time and reducing the amount would mean a more oblique surfing angle and so fewer points.
Synchronized Swimming: Now possible in 3 dimensions, instead of the usual 2 on the water's surface. The team performs on and within a huge globule of water floating freely in zero g. Besides the points acquired from performance itself, points are lost according to how much water is splashed away from the main globule during the exercise.
V-HALO Jump: In the Very High Altitude, Low Open Jump the astronaut athlete is given their exact orbital parameters, the location of a landing site, and placed in a reentry shielded single person module with a retrorocket built in. They get into the 'landing coffin', and at a time and with a delta V of their own calculation, perform their burn, reenter the atmosphere, and when their speed is low enough jump out and perform a free fall parachute jump. Points are gained for how low they open the chute and how close they land to the specified point. To make things interesting, rather than giving them a computer for calculating their burn time and duration, give them the technology used by the Soviet cosmonauts during the Apollo-Soyuz mission rendezvous: slide rule and stop watch.
The Charles Duke Lunar High Jump: When Charlie Duk
No wonder humans are such oddly behaving animals:
> as few as 2,000 humans, who were scattered in small, isolated groups.
2000 total, in small isolated groups? There was a whole lot of inbreeding going on. The groups wouldn't have survived long enough to get back together if they hadn't. Sure, we may think we're the bee's knees, but we, as a species, are sitting on the porch, playing banjo against the rest of the planet's more reasonable but food-chain inferior guitar playing.
"Prediction" is not accurate because that implies an absolute. The activity correlates with an increased probability of making a mistake. The study relies on statistics throughout, from the analysis of the fMRI data on, and so can only deal in probabilities.
An Israeli team found that an increase in degree of synchronization of midline frontal theta EEG varied inversely with the probability of making a mistake. Such theta synchronization occurs over spans of 10 to 30 seconds. They also found that when a response occurs during the rising or falling slope of the synchronized theta (as opposed to near a peak), the person was more likely to make a mistake. The latter probably is the source of the evoked potential called the Error Related Negativity; it is the brain preparing to notice the error. The former seems to indicate a lagging in attention, which is when errors are most likely to occur. The two are related, meaning the brain "knows" when it is starting to droop and is more likely to make a mistake, and tells itself to get ready to notice a mistake if it happens.
Also, there are many forms of ice, about 18 it seems. Some ice polymorphs may be more resistant to vacuum exposure. Some of them appear to be downright polymerish. http://www.lsbu.ac.uk/water/phase.html
"what other ideas of his will come to pass?"
Already done: lunar expeditions using a separate lander and translunar go-and-return module which stays in lunar orbit (from his first novel, Prelude to Space, 1951). Probably not his idea originally, as Von Braun was working on his 'lunar flotilla' design by that time, which included separate crew-return vehicles.
Also come to pass: A 'civilian' wins a ticket to space (though from a game show, not a contest; Islands In The Sky, 1952). In 2005, Doug Ramsburg won a Virgin Galactic ticket in a contest sponsored by Volvo. Not a scientific development, but a social one, and Clarke's handling of those was just as forward thinking.
His idea for geosynch satellites was a good start, even though the original idea was floated by Oberth more than two decades earlier. But the idea, as expanding upon in his fiction, included human crews aboard the three stations performing other functions also. Most of that work is now done with automated satellites, but such stations could be staging areas for translunar and interplanetary flights. These could be largely automated, but probably not entirely, as crew preparation would probably occur there.
Using replenishable ablative shielding made of ice to protect the crew of high speed spacecraft from the bombardment of dust and radiation (Songs of Distant Earth) has always been one of my favorite hacks. So much the better if heavy water could be concentrated out from the source to make it more effective. Capturing cometary or other ice water material and melting it with solar energy for recasting on site would make raising it from the ground unnecessary.
I don't believe space elevators will ever make the cut. The amount of energy and engineering required are just too high. There are many other ways to space that would be easier, faster, and unless and until a space elevator could operate to near the break-even point if that even exists, cheaper. By the time an elevator could be built, we could already have mile-wide high altitude (100k ft.) balloon platforms operating as staging areas for ground-to-station and station-to-station shuttles, making global transportation as well as staging to orbit and beyond quite easy. Such a system could operate at the regularity of today's mass transportation systems. I don't dispute a space elevator's design or intent, I simply maintain that evolution of existing designs via technological improvements will be more efficient and make such a gargantuan feat unnecessary.
The H in HAL: It stands for "Heuristically" ("programmed ALgorithmic computer"). The human mind work largely using heuristics, which are fastest, best-guess rules of thumb producing a (usually) good-enough result. These are subject to the same sort of errors human minds are. But if one can be built, many operating in parallel can also, and many best guesses arrived at by consensus could out perform a single human. I believe this will prove to be at least one workable model for artificial intelligence (as in true novel problem solving, not simply fooling humans in conversation a la Turing). Fuzzy logic has lost its one time star status, but that serves as a good model for single stage heuristic processing. Many such in parallel, with a comparative 'executive process' would be the next step.
Oops, should have included this in my previous post.
> Private Efforts Fill Gaps In Earth's Asteroid Defenses [article title]
There are no "defenses". There is no program anywhere to protect Earth from a strike. There are government funded and private programs performing studies as to how it might be done, but that's all. The article is about search and/or cataloging projects, not defense projects.
> The bottom line is that government is moving slowly on cataloging NEOs
NASA's NEO program catalogs bodies as soon as the data comes available.
There are 7 programs besides NASA searching and/or cataloging (they're listed on JPL's site: http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/programs/ ). When one team gets data, they all share in it. The programs are only as slow as the data. As for US government, 5.5 of the 8 programs are US based (one in Italy, one in Japan, one joint US-Aussie).
> NASA has yet to allot funds to the project
The NASA NEO program is run from JPL.
JPL is managed by Caltech for NASA.
NASA pays JPL to do so.
The 8 people in the NEO program appear to be all NASA employees, or at least from Caltech or other universities, paid by NASA (directly via payroll or JPL funding, or indirectly via funding to their parent university) to work there. There is no need to have funding dedicated explicitly to the program if existing funding is available to operate the office under other funding headings.
The government is perhaps not moving as fast as it could in data collection if it funded a dedicated telescopy program directly, but that doesn't imply the cataloging is slow.
The bottom line is that the article is correct in that private concerns are providing funding for or operating search and/or cataloging operations, but that's all. The assertions regarding cataloging being slow and lack of funding are unfounded.
Of course any government funded program will tell you there's a "lack" in terms of not enough (as opposed to an absence), because they'll get their funding cut if they don't show the need. The output from this program indicates it's operating its cataloging project at the speed necessary to keep up with the data.
Growing new muscle tissue is a waste of time, unless one solves the problem of regrowing nerve tissue, including getting it to reconnect at the severed spot as well as migrating through the new tissue to its intended connection target. Without nerve connection the muscle is useless and will atrophy. To see what happens, look at Stephen Hawking. His illness is MOTOR neuron disease, loss of nerves that operate muscles.
We *can* regrow neurons as we have natural stem cells that do so. The problem with either natural or induced growth is getting them to follow the path they're supposed to rather than grow into a tangled heap called a neuroma. Those can be more of a problem than no regrowth, as they can regrow nerve endings on the tangle, and so be extremely sensitive in the wrong place.
I had a damaged nerve in my foot excised. The end of the nerve grew a neuroma. If I ran, or even walked too hard, it was like stepping on a nail. Couldn't run, so couldn't fight. The Army put me out. Over the next 10 years the neuroma faded away. And the nerve regrew properly. I now have full feeling in the area served by that nerve. This is not the usual course of healing -- I was just damn lucky.
The military is willing to pay to have human tissue regrowth rather than lose the entire investment in a service member. They paid around $200,000 total for all my training. When I was capable again, I was too old. If I'd have been able to have this happen over the course of a year or so I could have been kept in and on medical leave, returning to service when finished.
My concern is that the military will effectively experiment on its service members by applying this technology to their healing before it's perfected. Someone still in service has a duty to try to continue, and they carry implied consent to take necessary medical treatment, by passing informed consent when pressure to accept treatment is applied. Refusing treatment can be taken as refusing to serve through one's contract. If the treatment were being offered through the Veterans Administration, fine. Through the military, I'd be wary until it's proven good enough for the civilian market.