I wonder what ever happened to it? The thing wearing that name now is OMNI without the scifi. I loved OMNI for what it was, and what it was was not Scientific American, and neither is this.
They can call it 2.0 all they want, but it's still the same web with the same handful of things people do, evolved to have more pretty widgets. Everything they mention here we did or could have done before, even pre-web.
I'm not buying it. I want my stuff peer reviewed, by qualified editors at the journals I submit to. I don't care what someone crawling in on a browser thinks. And I darn sure don't care what either of them thinks of it before I say it's ready to be looked at. Within my team, sure, we always have shared everything. At one time I was on a team using FIDOnet for communication and archiving. Same things being done, different ways to do it, and that's all just plain old history passing, not some revolutionary paradigm.
Oh, and before it was a "blog" it was a home page that someone didn't bother to break up into pieces and put onto other pages, as hyperlinking intended, and just kept adding on more and more stuff at the bottom. And we thought they were idiots.
So get your hands of my science, and stop sticking your silly little 2.0s all over it.
>...a set of rules that would clarify how a user can use P2P applications...
I don't need clarification. The answer is, as much as I want and in any way I see fit. And I damn sure don't need Comcast or any ISPs involved in any decisions I make as to what I see as fit.
This is a failed attempt at disguising their effort to legitimize themselves as arbiters. They only want their hand in it so they can yank out what they want. And it's a (piss poor) PR move attempting to sweep their present reputation as net.police under the rug.
If I hadn't had experience 5 years ago with Comcast that made me make the decision not to ever have anything to do with them, I'd make that decision now.
Yes, the ever-growing legend of the Avro Arrow. At this rate it's soon to be indistinguishable from Chuck Norris. Oh, and you left out the conspiracy theories. The operational details of the Arrow are not questioned. It is legend because of these, not in spite of them.
The conspiracy theory that RL206 escaped (as shown in the movie "The Arrow") from being cut up is easily countered by the photographs showing the cockpit and nose being cut away from the rest of the airframe. RL201 through 205 were also photographed in various stages of dismantlement. No other models ever left the construction line.
You know that plane is still classified and may or may not be in use or ready for use. I'm not sure details regarding the quantity and location of lox tanks are supposed to be well known. I've no doubt it's still classified, as are many much older and now irrelevant things; I know for a fact its true top speed and ceiling still are. I also have no doubt the plane is no longer in service, having been retired 10 years ago. NASA retains two of the original trainers, the only models still living, mostly for high altitude astronomy. All the others are accounted for and in museums. Maintaining and operating an otherwise barely supported craft would be very expensive. One can now get the better results from existing orbital observation craft than the SR-71 could ever produce.
Its reported speed of Mach 3.2 was based on an average speed over a course; that wasn't necessarily the top. A Major Brian Shul reports having sustained Mach 3.5 at 80k ft. And an ex-USAF security police enlisted reports having guarded on in Thailand, and the pilot wore astronaut's wings (USAF astronaut standard is 50 miles, or 264k ft.). The former wouldn't require the mod I described, but the latter would have. The pressure suit used would have allowed flight to this altitude. In fact it does and then some -- it is the suit worn during ascent of the Space Shuttle.
I spoke with a colleague at another SAC base, and he "wouldn't deny" having seen one or more with this mod, but wouldn't say more.
The Blackbird had no effective stealth capability, so if one were still flying it'd be easily seen on today's modern radar and IR devices. Space program/satellite fans would have reported seeing something fitting the profile. Although I can only surmise what the second LOX tank was for, I have no doubt that if I saw it again, and the second fill port weren't removed, I could ID it.
You need to know Stein's background to see what he's after. Although a conservative, he's also an exceedingly intelligent iconoclast aiming to reveal problem behavior where it's typically not admitted.
His purpose in Expelled is not to promote creationism, either in and of itself or in comparison to evolution. His intention is to point out that SOME OF the scientific community is participating in the same sort of hair-on-fire hysteria as the most vocal creationists. While the latter are widely know and fairly expected to employ this as a tactic, or just emotionalism, the scientific community "should" be above it, but isn't.
He rightly shows that the "evolution/creationist debate" isn't. He shows that it is instead a construct. Creationists claim it in order to put their ideas on equal footing with science, and science unwittingly helps them when some of its members react to what they expect rather than what's actually being said. His movie is a case study in precisely this, both within itself and as a social phenomenon, and you can bet your ass this is exactly what he intended.
It's easy to poke holes in the highly vocal creationists' stance, and quite popular to do so. It's more difficult to poke holes in their scientific counterparts, and supremely unpopular if you assume his intention is to promote creationism. Promoting creationism is his tool, exposing intellectual bigotry is his intention, and before the movie even premiers, he is succeeding admirably.
If one isn't convinced, consider the fact that he's targeting only those that overreact to the situation. For the most part both religious and scientific adherents (and those who hold to both) coexist and even discuss their viewpoints without any acrimony or "debate". They see no contradiction because the two thought systems are orthagonal -- entirely independent and incomparable. It's those in science who can't grasp this due to perceived peer pressure or fear that overreact and so unwittingly lend credence to that which they oppose by the sheer act of opposing it.
And keep in mind that although the movie pokes at one side, that doesn't mean he considers the other side to be right. He's going after the one target too few have the balls to attack. My money says that when it's died down, he'll make a statement that he has no intention of supporting creationism, only that he intended to do what I've described above.
The movie is a masterful piece of agitprop (agitating propoganda). It gets its targets to react wildly to it as though it were their traditional perceived enemy, while its true intent to show that those targets are themselves reacting wildly when they, as the supposed intellectuals, should be reacting with due consideration, if at all. And at this point it doesn't matter if the movie even comes out; it's already done exactly what Stein wants it to.
Also the SR-71 would have only just enough fuel to take off and revendevous with a jet tanker as soon as possible. A loaded B-52 certainly had to, but the SR-71 didn't necessarily have this profile. The only one I ever saw up close took off from our SAC base without a tanker going along. That's not to say there wasn't a tanker up there (there was another SAC base with tankers only 200 miles away).
More curious to me was the fact that the one we refueled had two LOX tanks, contrary to the manual's statement of only one. It had the normal one under the cockpit, and a second one in the airframe between the wings/engines. I surmise the second was a propulsion system oxidizer. The JP-7 fuel being a kerosene, the combination with LOX would have given it the propulsion profile of rocket motors being used from 1945 on. As a constantly afterburning ramjet at speed, the engines could have easily been adapted to do this.
And frankly I don't recall the one we loaded as having leaked, from hoses-on to taxi-out.
The Avro Arrow http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_arrow flight test models of 50 years ago had pretty much the same specs as the F22, and that was while being underpowered with Pratt & Whitney J75 (same motor as the SR-71 test models). Had the Mk II with Orenda Iriquois engines been built, the F22 still couldn't touch it. The later production SR-71 could marginally beat the production Arrow's expected specs (the SR-71 peak specs were higher, but getting up to them was problematic), but didn't carry weaponry while doing so. Of course there was no stealth technology 50 years ago, but neither were there many weapons that could touch the thing at speed and altitude.
No offense, but if you're about to graduate from high school, you haven't had enough experience to apply it to any comparisons offered here. So, take it as it comes. Trust that the instructor knows what they're doing, and no matter whether that's true or not, do your best to accomplish what's set before you in the way they say to. That's the best way to get a good grade, and they might actually know what they're doing (and as I said, you don't have the experience to be able to judge that). However the instructor approaches the subject, approach it the same way, and with enthusiasm. I can't say what your lab will be like, but I think following the above will give you the best chance to like the experience, and probably learn the most from it.
>... it is controversial that chaos will ever > contribute to science in any way.... there are > a lot of bad papers purporting to use chaos > theory.
From my own field:
Supporting your assertion -- A characterization of chaos is measuring the fractional (ie. 'fractal') dimensionality of the phenomenon. Someone estimated the dimension of the human cortex, with its convolutions embedded within convolutions. They plugged in numbers and got a result. But what's the point? What good does it do? There's no theory of even speculation as to what this might mean. It's doing 'sexy' but irrelevant science.
Contrary to your assertion -- EEG shows signs of being chaotic (self-similarity at different scales, dependence on initial conditions). Characterizing the dynamics (changing dimensionality) of the bioelectric field at different scales was compared with the same measure of synchronous firing of neural assemblies. The result significantly supported the hypothesis that EEG at different scales represented changes in neural synchrony/desynchrony at different scales. The synchrony concept is trivial, and well supported by electrophysiological measurement. This application showed that characterizing the signal as chaotic (and so too the deterministic phenomenon producing it) had some validity. The utility of the study applies to use of transcranial magnetic stimulation to force widespread synchronus firing, reducing the dimensionality, and forcing a state also having low D, that of people with depression taking antidepressants and showing benefit from them. It supports the hypothesis that TMS can treat depression. And it now does.
With respect to my field, you're mostly correct in your assertion. Most applications are quite obviously being done by people with little understanding of the concepts, and/or applied to things with little regard as to whether it makes sense to do so.
> Its controversial that [Lorenz] was the first.
Quite so. He did, however, investigate the nature of what he was seeing in a very creditable way. After noting the sensitivity to initial conditions, he reran one of his simulations from the middle, expecting it to finish out the run producing the same data. It didn't. And he took that to be a significant (in the practical sense) result, despite it being contrary to his expectations. Many researchers would bottom-drawer a dataset that contradicted their hypotheses. He recognized the probability that it would prove important. That takes some courage as a researcher, and he deserves credit for that at least.
- We were also told CD and DVD storage was long lived. While 30 years can be expected of a few of the highest grade disks http://club.cdfreaks.com/f33/taiyo-yuden-faq-178622/ 3 years is what most of them manage. Theoretical limits typically don't make it past manufacturers.
- It may indeed last 50 years, but will the equipment it's to be connected to? I've got the first 100MB drive to hit the market. It has lots of stuff on it I want to retrieve. It's a good thing I've kept the 18 year old Apple IIgs it's inside of operating.
Better implemented on solid state holographic storage, but still possible on disk, is the reverse processing of image to beams. (There's a SciAm article from 1995 or so on holographic storage, particularly solid state, that covers this).
Store lots of images on the disk. Illuminate it with a hologram of a target image. Out of each image comes copies of the original reference beams, at a strength proportional to the similarity of the stored image to the target image. Nearly instantaneous, simultaneous retrieval with correlation score built into the signal strength. Lost is the different angles that'd be had in a solid state device, so scanning the disk for reading all the beams and finding those of interest might take a bit longer. The entire US government fingerprint files could fit on one disk and the whole thing searched in seconds, as is often seen on TV. Using it for movie storage makes marketing sense, especially with the initial price tag of $18,000 and disks being $180. But leaving it at that would be a damn shame.
It would be pure st00pid to build a nuclear ground to orbit to ground space plane. Without sufficient shielding anything electronic aboard would have its circuits destroyed. With sufficient shielding it'd never get off the ground.
Forgive me, but that's spoken like someone who hasn't done the math. Go read the actual, y'know, article I linked to.
I've been doing my own propulsion, aerodynamics and flight profile math for years; I have a high powered rocketry license, and design and build my own.
I've read TFA. It doesn't do much math either. It just quotes someone else's figures, badly. I'm not going to bother checking up on all of them because I'm confident the writer has done the same with those that he's done with a few of the details given -- selective reproduction without checking them himself and showing that. As I will show, the author is almost certainly unable to do so.
If the design were as safe as stated, it should show the math that supports that, not just make the assertion and say someone else calculated it. If it did show that math it could be picked apart. Most important would be the calculations of specific impulse and the pressure required to reach it vs. the containment stated as making it safe as well as making the propulsion system robust enough to launch and land.
One case of math being "done" is the assertion "I mentioned that the exhaust of this nuclear spaceship shoots out at a whopping fast 30 kilometers per second. If you add this 30 kilometers per second to the 8.5 kilometers per second the whole rocket is moving while in orbit...". This shows the compete inability of the author to grasp the necessary concepts. You do not add orbital velocity and exhaust velocity to arrive at a new orbital or other trajectory velocity. You use Isp to calculate exhaust velocity (not by itself relevant) as well as delta V (relevant, requiring among other details vehicle and exhaust mass).
More problematic in TFA is the use of invalid and egregious comparisons attempting to justify the "safety" of the design by providing historical figures on deaths by various means, as if killing fewer with radiation sickness, cancer, etc. is acceptable just because more died from other things. That's not just wrong, it's sick.
If I want background details I don't go to some guy's blog, but rather to a site that the NASA historical office themselves recommend to others for this purpose: http://www.astronautix.com/ . Go there and look up the relevant launch vehicle family, NERVA. Every design was canceled in either the study phase or during development. The references provided tell why, and the reasons apply to the design here. The article stated as the primary reference (in NuclearSpace) is 404. Details in other material presented on the site shows this supposed pro-something outfit to have the same selective attention problem. For instance they say that NERVA design and development ended in 1973. DARPA's 'Timberwind' NERVA project was closed during development (not just design) in 1992. The fact that they (at least at one time) published TFA containing problems such as the velocity error noted above indicates they too are as qualified as the blog's author, ie. not very. I would ask that anyone making appeal to "the math" would themselves check it, as appealing to authorities that aren't leaves one open to guilt by voluntary association. I'll give NuclearSpace the benefit of the doubt and assume TFA is 404 because they caught the errors they originally let slip past.
If the design were built and it failed, making comparisons with automobile deaths would be useless. Making comparisons with Chernobyl would provide details, if not in scale, then at least in specific problems likely to occur.
It would be pure st00pid to build a nuclear ground to orbit to ground space plane. Without sufficient shielding anything electronic aboard would have its circuits destroyed. With sufficient shielding it'd never get off the ground.
In any case, a nuclear propulsion design was considered for a cruise missile platform for nuclear warhead delivery. The "Flying Crowbar" http://www.merkle.com/pluto/pluto.html was probably one of the all time worst designs for a weapon or a flying device. Even those parts not intended to be part of the weapons package were extremely deadly weapons as a by product of normal operation.
A NERVA type design for nuclear propulsion could be built and operated in orbit, possibly, though getting the fissionables up there would face much resistance. But something that'll fly in atmosphere going up or coming down? A break up at high altitude and Mach speeds (the mostly likely time it'd have problems other than launch) and it'd spread radioactive debris over a large area. The Challenger was spread over 480 square miles.
No, a nuclear design for this kind of flight profile should never happen. H2/O2, or possibly some of the newly developed (somewhat) stabilized boron propellants would do the job. A zero stage of dropped jet engines to get it up to > 50k ft. would make those propellants much more capable of doing the job.
The fault here is in the way they attempted to serve him, not that they were suing someone that was now homeless. They were after him before. From the comments below TFA:
"This is the second time this defendant has had his case dismissed without prejudice. The first time was as a joined set of Does after his identity information was revealed to the RIAA goons. The second time was just now here after a failure to serve him properly."
I think we can safely assume they were working with data generated when the guy did still live in the apartment and have a computer. Of course that remains to be shown, and perhaps they'll get the chance. I'm sure they don't hope to recover a settlement or judgement award, but they still have to act to protect the copyright if they believe it's been infringed.
> physicists are hailing the discovery of a new > type of superconductor... > as well as paving the way for practical magnetic > levitation and lossless transmission of energy.
Lossless transmission = 0 entropy
0 entropy (Isolated system? Transmission line, check. Not in equilibrium? Voltage gradient, check) = violation of the second law of thermodynamics: "The entropy of an isolated system not in equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value at equilibrium."
When others make claims of 0 entropy processes, they call it perpetual motion and dismiss the claimant as a crackpot. When physicists make the claim, they swoon like Victorian maidens and even get a Nobelist to stand on a chair wearing a lampshade. Perhaps they never meant it couldn't be done, it's just that they wanted to do it first.
Stripping HTML, besides being trivial, is a solved problem. For example, to have the Wikipedia Slashdot article read to you with all the HTML stripped out (requires lynx and festival, easily available from most distro repositories),
Stripping HTML, besides being trivial, is a solved problem. For example, to have the Wikipedia Slashdot article read to you with all the HTML stripped out (requires lynx and festival, easily available from most distro repositories),
Ah, yes, just lynx huttup colon slash slash en period wikipedia period org slash slashdot minus dump minus nolist bar festival minus minus titus. Why didn't I see that before? Because I can't see. Are you even paying attention to what the article is about?
To make things clear, it was 11 years ago that I tested the reader that gave me those results. I've no doubt many things work better now. But just not specifically to interface to software used by the blind.
In any case, my assertion stands. No matter how well things work or don't now, it'd be far better to solve the problem at the client than at the source. The former will work for much of the material available. There's no way most of the people or companies owning web pages are going to go back and patch things for each special needs group.
Greater than, quote, less than, semi-quote, have no more right to demand that others provide for their needs than I, comma, as a diabetic, comma, have a right to demand that sugar no longer be used, period, semi-quote, greater than, slash, quote, less than.
I got results like that when I tried to use a voice synthesizer to read HTML email. Note that it doesn't differentiate between reading the 'quote' inside the tags and the 'semi-quote' in the quoted text.
Good luck on trying to get everybody and his invisible pal to reformat all their web and email. Far more likely to succeed would be to entice browser and email client developers to produce smart HTML strippers (and Flash readers, etc.) to produce a text-only output for use in voice synthesizers, and/or develop voice synthesizer plug-ins that process the HTML etc. as proper inflections (for bold, underline, etc) or statements ("quote"/"unquote") to be spoken.
There's a relatively small but steady market for accessibility-related software. Much of what's produced is subsidized by tax money, of which there's a high user-per capita quotient. A developer might not sell as many of such programs, but with fewer users per dollar, that means less support downstream. And with only a few developers focusing on that market, they can each make some decent money. Of course open developers such as the Mozilla group could do the same, for the usual reasons.
To hook up with people in this area, visit with the accessibility people found at many public and university libraries (at some universities it's a separate department).
Another problem needing fixing is closed caption voice-to-text processing, to give the deaf (or the Deaf, the capitalization is an important distinction) the ability to watch the now ubiquitous videos on news site and such, without having to wear their eyes out trying to lipread the low rez/bandwidth video usually produced. Take in video, buffer for later use, read audio and produce closed captioning, and send output to a window with CC synced to and overlaying the previously buffered video.
Note to commercial developers: producing such things under tax-supported/non-profit/government agency label might not earn a lot of money, but what it does earn can be taken as tax-deductions, as can the "money" that goes into the inevitable (and admittedly high-per capita) support.
... how little it takes to divert an asteroid if done early enough. If the result in TFA is possible, so's the opposite -- that an asteroid can be knocked off a collision-bound trajectory with something far less than the suggested nuclear bombs and such.
As for ILuvRamen's comments above ("wrong wrong WRONG")
> None of the satellites we'll be using in 2029 when it passes are in space right now cuz the recommended lifespan of satellites is like 8-12 years or something.
That's the functional lifetime, how long it will be working. Anything orbiting 23,000 miles up may not stay in geosynch, but it's going to be way up there for centuries.
> Oh and if it hits a satellite, it can be deflected ANY direction depending on where it gets hit. Anyone ever played pool before?
Good analogy. Take a pool ball and roll it across the table. That's the asteroid. Put another one in front of it. Let them collide. No matter where it hits, the asteroid is going to slow down. Even if it's only a tiny bit, it'll slow, and orbit is far more sensitive to changes in speed than any lateral force. If the asteroid was most likely to pass by on the side away from the sun, slowing it would make it more likely.
> That alone puts it to about on in a trillion.... > Nasa and the german kid are kidding themselves if they think that either of their guesses is accurate.
The Near Earth Object site has the math on it used to calculate the different probabilities, unlike your baseless assertion. NASA and the German kid both obviously know something about orbital mechanics. Look at the formulae and see if you can tell where they went wrong. My guess is you can't.
> "As I say to my students 'if you had to have > brain surgery would you prefer someone who has > been through medical school, trained and > researched in the field, or the student next > to you who has read Wikipedia'?" So says Deakin > University associate professor of information > systems, Sharman Lichtenstein, who believes > Wikipedia, where anyone can edit a page entry, > is fostering a climate of blind trust among > people seeking information
As I say to my students "Question Authority", and trust in data. Lichtenstein relies on his position as IT professor to give his opinion credence (the logical fallacy 'Appeal to Authority'). Would you rather trust what someone, even a college professor in that field "believes" despite the fact that "experience has shown it can be wrong, incomplete, biased, or misleading", or in data objectively collected in order to test the hypothesis? In absence of the latter, one should examine the "opinion" with skepticism. Lack of data is not a reason to accept an expert opinion, rather it's a reason not to.
I damn sure wouldn't give a system supposed provide "to over 20 mostly rural towns in East-Central Vermont" a name based on the technical details like "cutting-edge, G-PON fiber-optic network". A tech-based name would be contrary to the nature of the community being served.
When a medium sized Appalachian town wanted to develop its own service, it named it its "Electronic Village". The fact that Virginia Tech is in that town didn't prevent them from naming it something that fit the town of Blacksburg. In fact, many at VT appreciate the fact of its locale, and they may have had a hand in naming it what they did for that reason.
In water ice, it is protons, not electrons, that move under voltage. Use pipes instead of wires, fill them with water and freeze. For gates etc. dope the water to give it differential response to voltage.
As with some of the others, there's no good reason to do this other than its neatism.
This racetrack instability is actually a well known problem with annular combustion chambers such as those used with the toroidal aerospike engine. One of the main virtues of vortex engines, like Orbital Technologies or the ultracentrifugal one invented by Roger Gregory and myself, is that the coriolis effect distorts the wave front sending it into the wall of the combustion chamber. In theory, at least, this should disrupt the resonance enough to prevent destructive standing waves.
Experiments have not been conducted to test this theory yet to the best of my knowledge. Pretty much any adaptation which broke the circularity of any of the problem designs would work, no? Graphite vanes, a la V2 steering, only farther up the bell. Grooves down the length of an aerospike. Injectors in the bell which shoot the fuel/oxidizer at alternating angles with pseudo-randomly (slightly) different pressures. Or even building in just enough pogo oscillation to disrupt it. Of course these are just hacks on the present designs, not new designs which address the problem. The hybrids I've seen have all had a pogo effect of sorts, farting their way up. Any idea if they suffer from this problem at all?
TFA has been adequately refuted, so I'll forego more on that. And despite the inflammatory nature of the title and claims here, it is unfortunately too correct too often.
I've been told by "superiors" to perform certain analyses because "everyone does", and they gave me references which supposedly showed these were proper. When I looked these up, the authors not only made no claims supporting their necessity, but both stated that the researcher should know enough about what they're doing to know what analyses to perform. I took my instructions to the statistics consultant for our department, and without showing him the references he made the same claims as both authors, contradicting the rationale given by those who gave me the instructions. I've seen many cases of psychologists performing statistical analyses based on their knowledge of how to use SPSS et al., rather than any fundamental grasp of the maths required by the design. Perhaps the most egregious error is their faith in fMRI analyses via statistical probability mapping, when the correction factor required by the 10^4 to 10^5 simultaneous T-tests makes any one result within the traditional collective p >.05 significance level to have an individual p value in the 10^-6 to 10^-9 range. That's a hell of a requirement for a single test, and very unlikely to actually exist. "Figure the odds" applies, and they don't seem to grasp that they don't grasp it.
On the other hand, some of us can apply such analyses as tensor calculus and Gabor transforms to dendritic electrical fields, showing where each of those are correct and where each fail, and can correctly apply nonlinear, N-dimensional statistical testing of time/frequency maps produced by continuous wavelet transform. But of those of us who can do these things, I know of none who learned of them, much less how, within the confines of a psychology department. (Well, except for the Gabor stuff, as used and taught by Karl Pribram, that being the only case I know of).
"Everything I Needed To Know I Learned At The Santa Fe Institute". No, not everything, but that'd make a hell of a book.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder what ever happened to it? The thing wearing that name now is OMNI without the scifi. I loved OMNI for what it was, and what it was was not Scientific American, and neither is this.
They can call it 2.0 all they want, but it's still the same web with the same handful of things people do, evolved to have more pretty widgets. Everything they mention here we did or could have done before, even pre-web.
I'm not buying it. I want my stuff peer reviewed, by qualified editors at the journals I submit to. I don't care what someone crawling in on a browser thinks. And I darn sure don't care what either of them thinks of it before I say it's ready to be looked at. Within my team, sure, we always have shared everything. At one time I was on a team using FIDOnet for communication and archiving. Same things being done, different ways to do it, and that's all just plain old history passing, not some revolutionary paradigm.
Oh, and before it was a "blog" it was a home page that someone didn't bother to break up into pieces and put onto other pages, as hyperlinking intended, and just kept adding on more and more stuff at the bottom. And we thought they were idiots.
So get your hands of my science, and stop sticking your silly little 2.0s all over it.
> ...a set of rules that would clarify how a user can use P2P applications...
I don't need clarification. The answer is, as much as I want and in any way I see fit. And I damn sure don't need Comcast or any ISPs involved in any decisions I make as to what I see as fit.
This is a failed attempt at disguising their effort to legitimize themselves as arbiters. They only want their hand in it so they can yank out what they want. And it's a (piss poor) PR move attempting to sweep their present reputation as net.police under the rug.
If I hadn't had experience 5 years ago with Comcast that made me make the decision not to ever have anything to do with them, I'd make that decision now.
The conspiracy theory that RL206 escaped (as shown in the movie "The Arrow") from being cut up is easily countered by the photographs showing the cockpit and nose being cut away from the rest of the airframe. RL201 through 205 were also photographed in various stages of dismantlement. No other models ever left the construction line.
Its reported speed of Mach 3.2 was based on an average speed over a course; that wasn't necessarily the top. A Major Brian Shul reports having sustained Mach 3.5 at 80k ft. And an ex-USAF security police enlisted reports having guarded on in Thailand, and the pilot wore astronaut's wings (USAF astronaut standard is 50 miles, or 264k ft.). The former wouldn't require the mod I described, but the latter would have. The pressure suit used would have allowed flight to this altitude. In fact it does and then some -- it is the suit worn during ascent of the Space Shuttle.
I spoke with a colleague at another SAC base, and he "wouldn't deny" having seen one or more with this mod, but wouldn't say more.
The Blackbird had no effective stealth capability, so if one were still flying it'd be easily seen on today's modern radar and IR devices. Space program/satellite fans would have reported seeing something fitting the profile. Although I can only surmise what the second LOX tank was for, I have no doubt that if I saw it again, and the second fill port weren't removed, I could ID it.
You need to know Stein's background to see what he's after. Although a conservative, he's also an exceedingly intelligent iconoclast aiming to reveal problem behavior where it's typically not admitted.
His purpose in Expelled is not to promote creationism, either in and of itself or in comparison to evolution. His intention is to point out that SOME OF the scientific community is participating in the same sort of hair-on-fire hysteria as the most vocal creationists. While the latter are widely know and fairly expected to employ this as a tactic, or just emotionalism, the scientific community "should" be above it, but isn't.
He rightly shows that the "evolution/creationist debate" isn't. He shows that it is instead a construct. Creationists claim it in order to put their ideas on equal footing with science, and science unwittingly helps them when some of its members react to what they expect rather than what's actually being said. His movie is a case study in precisely this, both within itself and as a social phenomenon, and you can bet your ass this is exactly what he intended.
It's easy to poke holes in the highly vocal creationists' stance, and quite popular to do so. It's more difficult to poke holes in their scientific counterparts, and supremely unpopular if you assume his intention is to promote creationism. Promoting creationism is his tool, exposing intellectual bigotry is his intention, and before the movie even premiers, he is succeeding admirably.
If one isn't convinced, consider the fact that he's targeting only those that overreact to the situation. For the most part both religious and scientific adherents (and those who hold to both) coexist and even discuss their viewpoints without any acrimony or "debate". They see no contradiction because the two thought systems are orthagonal -- entirely independent and incomparable. It's those in science who can't grasp this due to perceived peer pressure or fear that overreact and so unwittingly lend credence to that which they oppose by the sheer act of opposing it.
And keep in mind that although the movie pokes at one side, that doesn't mean he considers the other side to be right. He's going after the one target too few have the balls to attack. My money says that when it's died down, he'll make a statement that he has no intention of supporting creationism, only that he intended to do what I've described above.
The movie is a masterful piece of agitprop (agitating propoganda). It gets its targets to react wildly to it as though it were their traditional perceived enemy, while its true intent to show that those targets are themselves reacting wildly when they, as the supposed intellectuals, should be reacting with due consideration, if at all. And at this point it doesn't matter if the movie even comes out; it's already done exactly what Stein wants it to.
More curious to me was the fact that the one we refueled had two LOX tanks, contrary to the manual's statement of only one. It had the normal one under the cockpit, and a second one in the airframe between the wings/engines. I surmise the second was a propulsion system oxidizer. The JP-7 fuel being a kerosene, the combination with LOX would have given it the propulsion profile of rocket motors being used from 1945 on. As a constantly afterburning ramjet at speed, the engines could have easily been adapted to do this.
And frankly I don't recall the one we loaded as having leaked, from hoses-on to taxi-out.
The Avro Arrow http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_arrow flight test models of 50 years ago had pretty much the same specs as the F22, and that was while being underpowered with Pratt & Whitney J75 (same motor as the SR-71 test models). Had the Mk II with Orenda Iriquois engines been built, the F22 still couldn't touch it. The later production SR-71 could marginally beat the production Arrow's expected specs (the SR-71 peak specs were higher, but getting up to them was problematic), but didn't carry weaponry while doing so. Of course there was no stealth technology 50 years ago, but neither were there many weapons that could touch the thing at speed and altitude.
No offense, but if you're about to graduate from high school, you haven't had enough experience to apply it to any comparisons offered here. So, take it as it comes. Trust that the instructor knows what they're doing, and no matter whether that's true or not, do your best to accomplish what's set before you in the way they say to. That's the best way to get a good grade, and they might actually know what they're doing (and as I said, you don't have the experience to be able to judge that). However the instructor approaches the subject, approach it the same way, and with enthusiasm. I can't say what your lab will be like, but I think following the above will give you the best chance to like the experience, and probably learn the most from it.
> ... it is controversial that chaos will ever ... there are
> contribute to science in any way.
> a lot of bad papers purporting to use chaos
> theory.
From my own field:
Supporting your assertion -- A characterization of chaos is measuring the fractional (ie. 'fractal') dimensionality of the phenomenon. Someone estimated the dimension of the human cortex, with its convolutions embedded within convolutions. They plugged in numbers and got a result. But what's the point? What good does it do? There's no theory of even speculation as to what this might mean. It's doing 'sexy' but irrelevant science.
Contrary to your assertion -- EEG shows signs of being chaotic (self-similarity at different scales, dependence on initial conditions). Characterizing the dynamics (changing dimensionality) of the bioelectric field at different scales was compared with the same measure of synchronous firing of neural assemblies. The result significantly supported the hypothesis that EEG at different scales represented changes in neural synchrony/desynchrony at different scales. The synchrony concept is trivial, and well supported by electrophysiological measurement. This application showed that characterizing the signal as chaotic (and so too the deterministic phenomenon producing it) had some validity. The utility of the study applies to use of transcranial magnetic stimulation to force widespread synchronus firing, reducing the dimensionality, and forcing a state also having low D, that of people with depression taking antidepressants and showing benefit from them. It supports the hypothesis that TMS can treat depression. And it now does.
With respect to my field, you're mostly correct in your assertion. Most applications are quite obviously being done by people with little understanding of the concepts, and/or applied to things with little regard as to whether it makes sense to do so.
> Its controversial that [Lorenz] was the first.
Quite so. He did, however, investigate the nature of what he was seeing in a very creditable way. After noting the sensitivity to initial conditions, he reran one of his simulations from the middle, expecting it to finish out the run producing the same data. It didn't. And he took that to be a significant (in the practical sense) result, despite it being contrary to his expectations. Many researchers would bottom-drawer a dataset that contradicted their hypotheses. He recognized the probability that it would prove important. That takes some courage as a researcher, and he deserves credit for that at least.
- We were also told CD and DVD storage was long lived. While 30 years can be expected of a few of the highest grade disks http://club.cdfreaks.com/f33/taiyo-yuden-faq-178622/ 3 years is what most of them manage. Theoretical limits typically don't make it past manufacturers.
- It may indeed last 50 years, but will the equipment it's to be connected to? I've got the first 100MB drive to hit the market. It has lots of stuff on it I want to retrieve. It's a good thing I've kept the 18 year old Apple IIgs it's inside of operating.
Better implemented on solid state holographic storage, but still possible on disk, is the reverse processing of image to beams. (There's a SciAm article from 1995 or so on holographic storage, particularly solid state, that covers this).
Store lots of images on the disk. Illuminate it with a hologram of a target image. Out of each image comes copies of the original reference beams, at a strength proportional to the similarity of the stored image to the target image. Nearly instantaneous, simultaneous retrieval with correlation score built into the signal strength. Lost is the different angles that'd be had in a solid state device, so scanning the disk for reading all the beams and finding those of interest might take a bit longer. The entire US government fingerprint files could fit on one disk and the whole thing searched in seconds, as is often seen on TV. Using it for movie storage makes marketing sense, especially with the initial price tag of $18,000 and disks being $180. But leaving it at that would be a damn shame.
Death of the internet. Film at 11.
We're going to raise prices, so we need to justify it ahead of time. We'll do that by telling you it's for your own benefit. And you'll believe us.
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
MORE EXPENSIVE IS CHEAPER. REALLY. HONEST.
I've been doing my own propulsion, aerodynamics and flight profile math for years; I have a high powered rocketry license, and design and build my own.Forgive me, but that's spoken like someone who hasn't done the math. Go read the actual, y'know, article I linked to.
I've read TFA. It doesn't do much math either. It just quotes someone else's figures, badly. I'm not going to bother checking up on all of them because I'm confident the writer has done the same with those that he's done with a few of the details given -- selective reproduction without checking them himself and showing that. As I will show, the author is almost certainly unable to do so.
If the design were as safe as stated, it should show the math that supports that, not just make the assertion and say someone else calculated it. If it did show that math it could be picked apart. Most important would be the calculations of specific impulse and the pressure required to reach it vs. the containment stated as making it safe as well as making the propulsion system robust enough to launch and land.
One case of math being "done" is the assertion "I mentioned that the exhaust of this nuclear spaceship shoots out at a whopping fast 30 kilometers per second. If you add this 30 kilometers per second to the 8.5 kilometers per second the whole rocket is moving while in orbit...". This shows the compete inability of the author to grasp the necessary concepts. You do not add orbital velocity and exhaust velocity to arrive at a new orbital or other trajectory velocity. You use Isp to calculate exhaust velocity (not by itself relevant) as well as delta V (relevant, requiring among other details vehicle and exhaust mass).
More problematic in TFA is the use of invalid and egregious comparisons attempting to justify the "safety" of the design by providing historical figures on deaths by various means, as if killing fewer with radiation sickness, cancer, etc. is acceptable just because more died from other things. That's not just wrong, it's sick.
If I want background details I don't go to some guy's blog, but rather to a site that the NASA historical office themselves recommend to others for this purpose: http://www.astronautix.com/ . Go there and look up the relevant launch vehicle family, NERVA. Every design was canceled in either the study phase or during development. The references provided tell why, and the reasons apply to the design here. The article stated as the primary reference (in NuclearSpace) is 404. Details in other material presented on the site shows this supposed pro-something outfit to have the same selective attention problem. For instance they say that NERVA design and development ended in 1973. DARPA's 'Timberwind' NERVA project was closed during development (not just design) in 1992. The fact that they (at least at one time) published TFA containing problems such as the velocity error noted above indicates they too are as qualified as the blog's author, ie. not very. I would ask that anyone making appeal to "the math" would themselves check it, as appealing to authorities that aren't leaves one open to guilt by voluntary association. I'll give NuclearSpace the benefit of the doubt and assume TFA is 404 because they caught the errors they originally let slip past.
If the design were built and it failed, making comparisons with automobile deaths would be useless. Making comparisons with Chernobyl would provide details, if not in scale, then at least in specific problems likely to occur.
Update: The design is presently available as a "retro" kit from a kit manufacturer that specializes in such things, Semroc. http://rocketdungeon.blogspot.com/2008/04/lockmart-model-spaceplane-flown-at.html
Good to know L-M didn't need to put a lot of money into design development. They probably did, but they didn't need to.
It would be pure st00pid to build a nuclear ground to orbit to ground space plane. Without sufficient shielding anything electronic aboard would have its circuits destroyed. With sufficient shielding it'd never get off the ground.
In any case, a nuclear propulsion design was considered for a cruise missile platform for nuclear warhead delivery. The "Flying Crowbar" http://www.merkle.com/pluto/pluto.html was probably one of the all time worst designs for a weapon or a flying device. Even those parts not intended to be part of the weapons package were extremely deadly weapons as a by product of normal operation.
A NERVA type design for nuclear propulsion could be built and operated in orbit, possibly, though getting the fissionables up there would face much resistance. But something that'll fly in atmosphere going up or coming down? A break up at high altitude and Mach speeds (the mostly likely time it'd have problems other than launch) and it'd spread radioactive debris over a large area. The Challenger was spread over 480 square miles.
No, a nuclear design for this kind of flight profile should never happen. H2/O2, or possibly some of the newly developed (somewhat) stabilized boron propellants would do the job. A zero stage of dropped jet engines to get it up to > 50k ft. would make those propellants much more capable of doing the job.
In fact I think I built one years past. Probably the Centauri kit noted above.
The bird in TFA is probably not the one L-M will build (if they do). They have many other better designs for winged and/or lifting body spacecraft.
The fault here is in the way they attempted to serve him, not that they were suing someone that was now homeless. They were after him before. From the comments below TFA:
"This is the second time this defendant has had his case dismissed without prejudice. The first time was as a joined set of Does after his identity information was revealed to the RIAA goons. The second time was just now here after a failure to serve him properly."
I think we can safely assume they were working with data generated when the guy did still live in the apartment and have a computer. Of course that remains to be shown, and perhaps they'll get the chance. I'm sure they don't hope to recover a settlement or judgement award, but they still have to act to protect the copyright if they believe it's been infringed.
> physicists are hailing the discovery of a new
> type of superconductor...
> as well as paving the way for practical magnetic
> levitation and lossless transmission of energy.
Lossless transmission = 0 entropy
0 entropy (Isolated system? Transmission line, check. Not in equilibrium? Voltage gradient, check) = violation of the second law of thermodynamics: "The entropy of an isolated system not in equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value at equilibrium."
When others make claims of 0 entropy processes, they call it perpetual motion and dismiss the claimant as a crackpot. When physicists make the claim, they swoon like Victorian maidens and even get a Nobelist to stand on a chair wearing a lampshade. Perhaps they never meant it couldn't be done, it's just that they wanted to do it first.
I'm not saying they're wrong, about either the claim itself or to have this double standard. I find the latter to be a great example of science being done by humans instead of by the coldly objective scientists, following the 3 laws of reality robot-like, that people tend to imagine. The Golem marches on: http://books.google.com/books?id=t5wovH0l-bcC&dq=the+golem+science&pg=PP1&ots=9lGbEqBija&source=citation&sig=lV_sc9xnFKBjCZi6bIKMb-LdewU&hl=en&prev=http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rls=GGGL,GGGL:2006-18,GGGL:en&q=the+golem+science&btnG=Search&sa=X&oi=print&ct=result&cd=1&cad=bottom-3results
To make things clear, it was 11 years ago that I tested the reader that gave me those results. I've no doubt many things work better now. But just not specifically to interface to software used by the blind.
In any case, my assertion stands. No matter how well things work or don't now, it'd be far better to solve the problem at the client than at the source. The former will work for much of the material available. There's no way most of the people or companies owning web pages are going to go back and patch things for each special needs group.
Try reading some HTML as text:
Greater than, quote, less than, semi-quote, have no more right to demand that others provide for their needs than I, comma, as a diabetic, comma, have a right to demand that sugar no longer be used, period, semi-quote, greater than, slash, quote, less than.
I got results like that when I tried to use a voice synthesizer to read HTML email. Note that it doesn't differentiate between reading the 'quote' inside the tags and the 'semi-quote' in the quoted text.
Good luck on trying to get everybody and his invisible pal to reformat all their web and email. Far more likely to succeed would be to entice browser and email client developers to produce smart HTML strippers (and Flash readers, etc.) to produce a text-only output for use in voice synthesizers, and/or develop voice synthesizer plug-ins that process the HTML etc. as proper inflections (for bold, underline, etc) or statements ("quote"/"unquote") to be spoken.
There's a relatively small but steady market for accessibility-related software. Much of what's produced is subsidized by tax money, of which there's a high user-per capita quotient. A developer might not sell as many of such programs, but with fewer users per dollar, that means less support downstream. And with only a few developers focusing on that market, they can each make some decent money. Of course open developers such as the Mozilla group could do the same, for the usual reasons.
To hook up with people in this area, visit with the accessibility people found at many public and university libraries (at some universities it's a separate department).
Another problem needing fixing is closed caption voice-to-text processing, to give the deaf (or the Deaf, the capitalization is an important distinction) the ability to watch the now ubiquitous videos on news site and such, without having to wear their eyes out trying to lipread the low rez/bandwidth video usually produced. Take in video, buffer for later use, read audio and produce closed captioning, and send output to a window with CC synced to and overlaying the previously buffered video.
Note to commercial developers: producing such things under tax-supported/non-profit/government agency label might not earn a lot of money, but what it does earn can be taken as tax-deductions, as can the "money" that goes into the inevitable (and admittedly high-per capita) support.
... how little it takes to divert an asteroid if done early enough. If the result in TFA is possible, so's the opposite -- that an asteroid can be knocked off a collision-bound trajectory with something far less than the suggested nuclear bombs and such.
...
As for ILuvRamen's comments above ("wrong wrong WRONG")
> None of the satellites we'll be using in 2029 when it passes are in space right now cuz the recommended lifespan of satellites is like 8-12 years or something.
That's the functional lifetime, how long it will be working. Anything orbiting 23,000 miles up may not stay in geosynch, but it's going to be way up there for centuries.
> Oh and if it hits a satellite, it can be deflected ANY direction depending on where it gets hit. Anyone ever played pool before?
Good analogy. Take a pool ball and roll it across the table. That's the asteroid. Put another one in front of it. Let them collide. No matter where it hits, the asteroid is going to slow down. Even if it's only a tiny bit, it'll slow, and orbit is far more sensitive to changes in speed than any lateral force. If the asteroid was most likely to pass by on the side away from the sun, slowing it would make it more likely.
> That alone puts it to about on in a trillion.
> Nasa and the german kid are kidding themselves if they think that either of their guesses is accurate.
The Near Earth Object site has the math on it used to calculate the different probabilities, unlike your baseless assertion. NASA and the German kid both obviously know something about orbital mechanics. Look at the formulae and see if you can tell where they went wrong. My guess is you can't.
> "As I say to my students 'if you had to have
> brain surgery would you prefer someone who has
> been through medical school, trained and
> researched in the field, or the student next
> to you who has read Wikipedia'?" So says Deakin
> University associate professor of information
> systems, Sharman Lichtenstein, who believes
> Wikipedia, where anyone can edit a page entry,
> is fostering a climate of blind trust among
> people seeking information
As I say to my students "Question Authority", and trust in data. Lichtenstein relies on his position as IT professor to give his opinion credence (the logical fallacy 'Appeal to Authority'). Would you rather trust what someone, even a college professor in that field "believes" despite the fact that "experience has shown it can be wrong, incomplete, biased, or misleading", or in data objectively collected in order to test the hypothesis? In absence of the latter, one should examine the "opinion" with skepticism. Lack of data is not a reason to accept an expert opinion, rather it's a reason not to.
I damn sure wouldn't give a system supposed provide "to over 20 mostly rural towns in East-Central Vermont" a name based on the technical details like "cutting-edge, G-PON fiber-optic network". A tech-based name would be contrary to the nature of the community being served.
When a medium sized Appalachian town wanted to develop its own service, it named it its "Electronic Village". The fact that Virginia Tech is in that town didn't prevent them from naming it something that fit the town of Blacksburg. In fact, many at VT appreciate the fact of its locale, and they may have had a hand in naming it what they did for that reason.
Protonic processing using doped ice.
In water ice, it is protons, not electrons, that move under voltage. Use pipes instead of wires, fill them with water and freeze. For gates etc. dope the water to give it differential response to voltage.
As with some of the others, there's no good reason to do this other than its neatism.
Experiments have not been conducted to test this theory yet to the best of my knowledge. Pretty much any adaptation which broke the circularity of any of the problem designs would work, no? Graphite vanes, a la V2 steering, only farther up the bell. Grooves down the length of an aerospike. Injectors in the bell which shoot the fuel/oxidizer at alternating angles with pseudo-randomly (slightly) different pressures. Or even building in just enough pogo oscillation to disrupt it. Of course these are just hacks on the present designs, not new designs which address the problem. The hybrids I've seen have all had a pogo effect of sorts, farting their way up. Any idea if they suffer from this problem at all?
TFA has been adequately refuted, so I'll forego more on that. And despite the inflammatory nature of the title and claims here, it is unfortunately too correct too often.
.05 significance level to have an individual p value in the 10^-6 to 10^-9 range. That's a hell of a requirement for a single test, and very unlikely to actually exist. "Figure the odds" applies, and they don't seem to grasp that they don't grasp it.
I've been told by "superiors" to perform certain analyses because "everyone does", and they gave me references which supposedly showed these were proper. When I looked these up, the authors not only made no claims supporting their necessity, but both stated that the researcher should know enough about what they're doing to know what analyses to perform. I took my instructions to the statistics consultant for our department, and without showing him the references he made the same claims as both authors, contradicting the rationale given by those who gave me the instructions. I've seen many cases of psychologists performing statistical analyses based on their knowledge of how to use SPSS et al., rather than any fundamental grasp of the maths required by the design. Perhaps the most egregious error is their faith in fMRI analyses via statistical probability mapping, when the correction factor required by the 10^4 to 10^5 simultaneous T-tests makes any one result within the traditional collective p >
On the other hand, some of us can apply such analyses as tensor calculus and Gabor transforms to dendritic electrical fields, showing where each of those are correct and where each fail, and can correctly apply nonlinear, N-dimensional statistical testing of time/frequency maps produced by continuous wavelet transform. But of those of us who can do these things, I know of none who learned of them, much less how, within the confines of a psychology department. (Well, except for the Gabor stuff, as used and taught by Karl Pribram, that being the only case I know of).
"Everything I Needed To Know I Learned At The Santa Fe Institute". No, not everything, but that'd make a hell of a book.