Notice that the miniscule budgets for Opportunity and the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter have been zeroed-out by the White House for next fiscal year. For a savings of a whopping $25 million, 0.15% of the NASA budget. Funding is nominally restored in a supplemental budget appropriation, but there is no guarantee that the White House will even present the supplemental appropriation to Congress much less that the anti-science right-wingnuts in Congress will pass it.
Unlike that paradigm shift there wasn't an internationally organized monopoly on horses with the ability to send the armies of entire superpowers into the field to stamp out horse breeders who didn't belong to the monopoly and outlaw the manufacture of automobiles. This isn't 'business as usual', I can't think of a time in history when there was a similar situation except maybe for the Papal Wars in the late Dark Ages (which only affected a small, backwards subcontinent).
Then how do they get there? For that matter, how do they stay there? Any gravitational interaction strong enough to toss them out of the galactic disk should be easily observable, and any orbital path around the center of the galactic mass should bring them back into the disk fairly frequently.
Moh is less than half my age and 75% my weight, and can drink me under the table. He's been to Africa twice in the last ten years, Eritrea if I remember correctly.
54 wasn't bad for the time, but in no way unusual. The reason that the life expectancy was so low was the high rate of child mortality dragging the average down. Almost all of the increase in life expectancy over the last century is from the reduction of child mortality rates. Example: My parents-in-law in Peru had 13 children, 5 of whom died before 4 years of age. If my wife and her siblings all live to 80 years of age the average life expectancy of her family is only 50.15 years. Generally if a child managed to live to live through the teenage years they could expect to make it to their 50s.
My grandfather just celebrated his 95th birthday, and my co-worker said, "I hope I get to be that age some day!" I replied that I surely did **NOT** want to ever arrive at that age, and he looked at me befuddled.
I asked, "Do you know any 95 year-olds?" No, he didn't. "Think about his life. All his friends are dead. All his brothers and sisters are dead. His kids are in their 70s and due to die soon. He can't drive. He can't walk without a walker. His breakfast is made up of more pills by volume than toast. He can't see well, and his hearing is worse even when he wears his hearing aids. He hasn't been laid in 30 years and never will be again. Pain is a constant and has been for years. He hasn't had a drink of wine in over a decade. He hasn't been able to travel since 1997. What kind of life is that?"
Mohamed was rather quiet for quite some time after that.
Yes, earlier. My mistake. And Kashmir was right where the problems were centered at that point. Pakistan's central government doesn't have tight control over its nuclear weapons either, they're under the actual control of the general in charge of the region where they're deployed. Even more troubling.
It was Andy Warhol's work. I'd be more worried about damaging the disk drive than any of his "work". His main artistic talents lay in the field of self-promotion, at which he was truly a master. Pretty much everything else he ever did was crap.
I like the difference this demonstrates between this White House administration and the previous one, which first instructed NASA to "dispose of" old Mariner data and were so upset that NASA handed it over to the Planetary Society rather than shred it that they directly instructed NASA to destroy the still-unanalyzed Pioneer data later. (NASA administrators risked their jobs and pensions to get that data to the Planetary Society as well, with the result that today we have a likely solution to the 'Pioneer Anomaly'.) Obama ain't much, but he's better than what we had.
When I got into computing in the mid-'90s 'hacker' was synonymous with 'computer wizard'. Good or bad, didn't matter. Of course computing included a lot more hardware then than it does now, so the term was being extended to hardware hackers of various types, even including radio hams. Now Hollyweird has taken a perfectly good word and changed it to suit their dramatic needs.
The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program. And if we become extinct because we don't have a space program, it'll serve us right! - Larry Niven
You mean like our resounding success against primitive tribesmen armed with Kalashnikovs in Afghanistan? Fucking hell, we had to pull out of Iraq with our tail between our legs and you think we have a chance invading a country where military training is mandatory, where thousands of tons of weapons are in depots all over the country, which has never been successfully invaded since the time of the Mongol hordes, and which is armed with nuclear weapons.
Actually it is very well done, very factual and analytical, this was the material that the Pentagon planners used to draw up attacks on Moscow and Stalingrad. The Strategic Bombing Survey's report on Dresden was also of the same caliber.
Yeah, because our civilization is only capable of doing one thing at a time . ..
The impediment to feeding everyone while maintaining a viable ecosystem is not technological, it's political. Powerful people get that way and stay that way by ensuring that the overwhelming majority have nothing. The Pentagon budget for JUST LAST YEAR was larger than the inflation-adjusted cost of the entire decade of the Apollo program, and what do we have to show for all that expense? Nothing. In fact, less than nothing as the Pentagon manages to suck the world economy deeper into debt and further from freedom and peace.
If you want to eliminate the truly nasty byproducts of things like rare earths mining and chip fabrication move the process off-planet. For less money than the bottomless pit of the F-35 program a workable skyhook or space elevator could have been developed.
When Comet Shoemaker-Levy hit Jupiter astronomers estimated that it was a once in a century to once in a millennium event. Since that time, with our improved telescopes, we've seen evidence of half a dozen more similar impacts. When astronomers started observing the Moon for impacts they expected to see a noticeable strike every couple of years, instead they're seeing a couple every year. I think that estimates of the amount of junk floating around the solar system may be radically low.
Ubar (Iram), on the frankincense trail in the Middle East seems to have been either destroyed by or abandoned after a meteor strike in the area, possibly associated with the Wabar craters. The site is in what is generally referred to as the 'Empty Quarter'.
Its the aftermath of the A-bomb that was so gruesome.
No, it was the actual event that killed almost everyone, residual radiation killed relatively few compared to the initial blast. I highly recommend the US Army's Strategic Bombing Survey's work "THE ATOMIC BOMBINGS OF HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI" , the definitive work on the subject and about as horrible a read as you'll find.
The Eastern Mediterranean Event was a 12-20 kiloton explosion over the Mediterranean Sea in 2002. It occurred during a period of tension between India and Pakistan, and if it had arrived a few hours later and exploded over that region it would almost certainly have been interpreted as a nuclear attack.
Unless of course you think the more complex theory full of mysterious unobservable entities like dark matter is correct and better uses Occam's razor.
Well, yes. There is no evidence at all supporting the Electric Universe folderol and none of the predictions that it makes come true. For that matter, most of them are impossible. On the other hand, the current construct is internally consistent, can make predictions that work, and is supported by a couple of centuries of observation. So-called 'dark matter' and 'dark energy' simply mark the threshold where our current powers of observation fail, we need better equipment to explore that section of our universe. So yes, Occam's Razor would come down on the side of current cosmology.
I live in Seattle. If the hill where my house is located existed back in the Midwest there would be a ski resort on it (really), and the Park and Ride is on the top of the taller hill on the other side of the valley. I only have to walk a mile or so, but it's a good 20 minutes.
And most companies require you to invest your money in the Ponzi scheme if you want them to help fund your retirement in any way at all. My statistics professor, whose day job was an actuary for the insurance industry, said, "Insurance is a big casino, and the companies have made sure everyone is required to play. And the house will always win." I'd have to say the same about the stock market.
Slashdot Mirror
Notice that the miniscule budgets for Opportunity and the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter have been zeroed-out by the White House for next fiscal year. For a savings of a whopping $25 million, 0.15% of the NASA budget. Funding is nominally restored in a supplemental budget appropriation, but there is no guarantee that the White House will even present the supplemental appropriation to Congress much less that the anti-science right-wingnuts in Congress will pass it.
Unlike that paradigm shift there wasn't an internationally organized monopoly on horses with the ability to send the armies of entire superpowers into the field to stamp out horse breeders who didn't belong to the monopoly and outlaw the manufacture of automobiles. This isn't 'business as usual', I can't think of a time in history when there was a similar situation except maybe for the Papal Wars in the late Dark Ages (which only affected a small, backwards subcontinent).
Then how do they get there? For that matter, how do they stay there? Any gravitational interaction strong enough to toss them out of the galactic disk should be easily observable, and any orbital path around the center of the galactic mass should bring them back into the disk fairly frequently.
Moh is less than half my age and 75% my weight, and can drink me under the table. He's been to Africa twice in the last ten years, Eritrea if I remember correctly.
54 wasn't bad for the time, but in no way unusual. The reason that the life expectancy was so low was the high rate of child mortality dragging the average down. Almost all of the increase in life expectancy over the last century is from the reduction of child mortality rates. Example: My parents-in-law in Peru had 13 children, 5 of whom died before 4 years of age. If my wife and her siblings all live to 80 years of age the average life expectancy of her family is only 50.15 years. Generally if a child managed to live to live through the teenage years they could expect to make it to their 50s.
Sorry, pet peeve of mine.
Some of us know really old people. It's not much of a life.
My grandfather just celebrated his 95th birthday, and my co-worker said, "I hope I get to be that age some day!" I replied that I surely did **NOT** want to ever arrive at that age, and he looked at me befuddled.
I asked, "Do you know any 95 year-olds?" No, he didn't. "Think about his life. All his friends are dead. All his brothers and sisters are dead. His kids are in their 70s and due to die soon. He can't drive. He can't walk without a walker. His breakfast is made up of more pills by volume than toast. He can't see well, and his hearing is worse even when he wears his hearing aids. He hasn't been laid in 30 years and never will be again. Pain is a constant and has been for years. He hasn't had a drink of wine in over a decade. He hasn't been able to travel since 1997. What kind of life is that?"
Mohamed was rather quiet for quite some time after that.
Yes, earlier. My mistake. And Kashmir was right where the problems were centered at that point. Pakistan's central government doesn't have tight control over its nuclear weapons either, they're under the actual control of the general in charge of the region where they're deployed. Even more troubling.
It was Andy Warhol's work. I'd be more worried about damaging the disk drive than any of his "work". His main artistic talents lay in the field of self-promotion, at which he was truly a master. Pretty much everything else he ever did was crap.
I like the difference this demonstrates between this White House administration and the previous one, which first instructed NASA to "dispose of" old Mariner data and were so upset that NASA handed it over to the Planetary Society rather than shred it that they directly instructed NASA to destroy the still-unanalyzed Pioneer data later. (NASA administrators risked their jobs and pensions to get that data to the Planetary Society as well, with the result that today we have a likely solution to the 'Pioneer Anomaly'.) Obama ain't much, but he's better than what we had.
When I got into computing in the mid-'90s 'hacker' was synonymous with 'computer wizard'. Good or bad, didn't matter. Of course computing included a lot more hardware then than it does now, so the term was being extended to hardware hackers of various types, even including radio hams. Now Hollyweird has taken a perfectly good word and changed it to suit their dramatic needs.
The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program. And if we become extinct because we don't have a space program, it'll serve us right! - Larry Niven
You mean like our resounding success against primitive tribesmen armed with Kalashnikovs in Afghanistan? Fucking hell, we had to pull out of Iraq with our tail between our legs and you think we have a chance invading a country where military training is mandatory, where thousands of tons of weapons are in depots all over the country, which has never been successfully invaded since the time of the Mongol hordes, and which is armed with nuclear weapons.
You're a special kind of stupid, aren't you?
Actually it is very well done, very factual and analytical, this was the material that the Pentagon planners used to draw up attacks on Moscow and Stalingrad. The Strategic Bombing Survey's report on Dresden was also of the same caliber.
What laws wilI have to break to get sent there?
Yeah, because our civilization is only capable of doing one thing at a time . . .
The impediment to feeding everyone while maintaining a viable ecosystem is not technological, it's political. Powerful people get that way and stay that way by ensuring that the overwhelming majority have nothing. The Pentagon budget for JUST LAST YEAR was larger than the inflation-adjusted cost of the entire decade of the Apollo program, and what do we have to show for all that expense? Nothing. In fact, less than nothing as the Pentagon manages to suck the world economy deeper into debt and further from freedom and peace.
If you want to eliminate the truly nasty byproducts of things like rare earths mining and chip fabrication move the process off-planet. For less money than the bottomless pit of the F-35 program a workable skyhook or space elevator could have been developed.
NASA had nothing to do with this. Private organization. Kindly remove your head from your posterior and re-insert it into the sand.
When Comet Shoemaker-Levy hit Jupiter astronomers estimated that it was a once in a century to once in a millennium event. Since that time, with our improved telescopes, we've seen evidence of half a dozen more similar impacts. When astronomers started observing the Moon for impacts they expected to see a noticeable strike every couple of years, instead they're seeing a couple every year. I think that estimates of the amount of junk floating around the solar system may be radically low.
Ubar (Iram), on the frankincense trail in the Middle East seems to have been either destroyed by or abandoned after a meteor strike in the area, possibly associated with the Wabar craters. The site is in what is generally referred to as the 'Empty Quarter'.
Its the aftermath of the A-bomb that was so gruesome.
No, it was the actual event that killed almost everyone, residual radiation killed relatively few compared to the initial blast. I highly recommend the US Army's Strategic Bombing Survey's work "THE ATOMIC BOMBINGS OF HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI" , the definitive work on the subject and about as horrible a read as you'll find.
The Eastern Mediterranean Event was a 12-20 kiloton explosion over the Mediterranean Sea in 2002. It occurred during a period of tension between India and Pakistan, and if it had arrived a few hours later and exploded over that region it would almost certainly have been interpreted as a nuclear attack.
Unless of course you think the more complex theory full of mysterious unobservable entities like dark matter is correct and better uses Occam's razor.
Well, yes. There is no evidence at all supporting the Electric Universe folderol and none of the predictions that it makes come true. For that matter, most of them are impossible. On the other hand, the current construct is internally consistent, can make predictions that work, and is supported by a couple of centuries of observation. So-called 'dark matter' and 'dark energy' simply mark the threshold where our current powers of observation fail, we need better equipment to explore that section of our universe. So yes, Occam's Razor would come down on the side of current cosmology.
The hill, and then the other hill.
I live in Seattle. If the hill where my house is located existed back in the Midwest there would be a ski resort on it (really), and the Park and Ride is on the top of the taller hill on the other side of the valley. I only have to walk a mile or so, but it's a good 20 minutes.
And most companies require you to invest your money in the Ponzi scheme if you want them to help fund your retirement in any way at all. My statistics professor, whose day job was an actuary for the insurance industry, said, "Insurance is a big casino, and the companies have made sure everyone is required to play. And the house will always win." I'd have to say the same about the stock market.