Using methods similar to a medical CAT scan, a technique of "tomographic" image reconstruction will be used to produce [sharp] pictures
Yeah right, like the LBT will do a revolution around the object to image it from all sides, then reconstruct its internal 3D structure? When science journalists go bad, they really stink.
The Ansari X-Prize can be claimed only once, and only until the end of 2004.
The X-Prize Cup is a planned regular event - in essence an air show and competition for the suborbital space vehicles being developed in response to the X-Prize.
'scuse me? Within the last 3 months Mars Express resp. the MERs have found on Mars:
a) water ice in the south polar cap, previously thought to be dry ice only; b) traces of methane (!) in the atmosphere; c) conclusive evidence for a standing body of liquid water in the past.
All of which is raising the possibility of at least microbial life on Mars, fossil and/or present, which I find plenty exciting. I know it's not much by the entertainment standards of the MTV generation, but what did you expect - little green men taking us to their leader?
I for one find it remarkable that documents such as the Mars Express status report now routinely refer to "biological processes" as candidate explanation for observations without batting as much as an eyelash. And Mars Express hasn't even commenced its official science mission yet! Plenty to look forward to.
Do you have any idea of just how stupid you look promoting something like that as an actual, viable solution?
Do you have any idea how stupid *you* look misconstruing my gedankenexperiment as an actual proposal? Nobody's claiming that solar is a comprehensive solution to all the world's energy needs at this point. Your contention that solar energy density is too low to be of much use is just as ludicrous though.
Do you have any idea of the environmental impact of that? (Deserts are extremely fragile ecosystems)
If it could be done economically, I'd take the environmental impact of *shading* 150 square miles of desert any day over that of producing long-term radioactive waste for which (after 50 years of well-funded development!) still no safe permanent storage facility exists anywhere on this planet.
Why don't you look at how many KW a steel mill uses in an hour.
You're really hung up on steel production, but so be it - let's have a look then at Gary Works:
...the largest integrated steel plant in North America. Covering almost 4,000 acres... capacity to produce 7.7 million tons of raw steel annually... consumes more than 4.25 million kilowatt hours of electricity each day...
In the Southwest, 4000 acres (16M m2) would receive about 128G Wh of solar irradiation per year, or 350M Wh/day, which is 8% of the plant's energy consumption (4.25G Wh/day). In other words, given efficient and affordable photovoltaics, even one of the most intensely energy-consuming industries in existence could cover a significant percentage of its energy needs from the solar irradiation of the land it occupies alone. I call that not bad at all.
Cover about 150 square miles around the plant in 50% efficient photovoltaics, and the plant is 100% solar. If that sounds crazy, it's because the panels are too expensive, not because of the land use. You could power the entire U.S. steel production by photovoltaics, and still hide it in a remote corner of Nevada:
1997 U.S. raw steel production: 121M tons = 16 Gary Works area of Nevada: 110k square miles = 730 solar Gary Works remote corners of Nevada: all except Reno and Las Vegas
I'll say. At the last World Solar Challenge, the winner's *average* speed was close to 100 km/h (over 60 mph for imperialists), over a distance of 3000 km (183'732 furlongs).
Ain't gonna happen for the very simple fact there just isn't enough solar radiation hitting the surface of the planet.
I call bullshit. Average solar irradiation is in the range of 2-5 kWh/m2 per year in Europe, which happens to roughly equal a typical household's electricity consumption. This means that at, say, 10% overall efficiency (including storage losses) just 7 m2 of south-facing roof surface (including a sqrt(2) factor for roof slant) supply a household's worth of electricity. Replacing fossil fuels might triple the surface required, but still in all but the densest urban areas photovoltaic roof tiles alone could cover local energy needs.
And this is for Europe - in much of the U.S. solar irradiation is much higher and population/habitation density much lower, so your claim is absolutely ludicrous. Kindly refrain from misrepresenting your unfounded prejudices as fact.
We step outside and think: Man, that sun is hot, I'll bet there's a lot of energy there if we could just harness it.
Well and guess what, we're right. On a sunny summer day we get about 1 kW/m2 of solar irradiation, enough to power a hair dryer. Just how do you think sand, rocks, etc. can get too hot to walk on in the midday sun? The only real problems with photovoltaics are energy storage and the cost/efficiency tradeoff, and a low-cost high-efficiency solar cell would eliminate the latter.
The lady was Bright but not bright Took part in the next day's flight So soon two made the date And then four and then eight And her spouse got one hell of a fright!
Oh dear - utter rubbish from front to back. Let's see:
you have to give [software patents] some credit for building an industry
Software patents didn't exist when the US software industry was built.
open source me-too clones of commercial products
You got it backwards - the majority of today's commercial software was cloned from early open-source (often research) projects.
software that's revolutionary
Off the top of my head: the Web, Linux, MUDs, Bayesian spam filtering, etc. not revolutionary enough for you? All of European provenance.
Fraunhofer would be long dead
Fraunhofer *is* long dead, and for the Fraunhofer Society mp3 royalties are a nice windfall, nothing more. It's a large state-owned contract research organization fer chrissakes.
How good would a Lunar astronomy be? Having no atmosphere would seem to be a great bonus, and allthougth there **is** the problem of gravity on the lenses, this gravity is much less.
There is simply *no* advantage to putting an optical telescope on the moon as opposed to free-floating in space, and many many disadvantages:
1. down another gravity well, thus costlier to put there and harder to access for repairs 2. half the sky blocked by the ground 3. moon dust kicked up by human activity (such as setting up the telescope in the first place) fouls the lenses 4. vibrations caused e.g. by mining activity 5. huge temperature differentials caused by 14-day sols 6. (as you mentioned) gravity sagging the lenses 7. mechanical support structure required in gravity
Near-optical astronomy needs to go to the Langrange points, not the moon. Radio astronomy might have more of a case because it could use the moon's radio shadow, but in fact terrestrial radio astronomy can work around human radio emissions well enough, so the reasons to go off-earth in the first place are far less compelling for them than for the optical (not to mention UV) guys.
Fortunately there is a middle way between traditional academic publishers and author self-publication on the web: online academic journals run by the scientists themselves. A good example in my field is the Journal of Machine Learning Research which was formed when the entire editorial board resigned from the overpriced Machine Learning Journal. Online access is free, while a low-price is published to satisfy the legacy requirements of libraries, copyright law, tenure review committees, and the like. Speaking of copyright: in contrast to traditional publishers, authors do not have to sign away their copyright when they publish in JMLR.
The result? Three years after its inception, JMLR is the highest-impact journal in Artificial Intelligence. This is by no means an isolated case, but part of a sea change in academic publishing. More and more such journals are being setup, often in direct competition to overpriced conventional publications, and with support from academic libraries.
The "author pays" model is a last-ditch effort by traditional academic publishers to wring profits from scientific communication, an activity that in essence has always been free (as in -dom). Apparently they haven't noticed yet that all the scarcities that their business model depended on - from trees to typesetting to transport - have simply been removed by technology. Given the free volunteer labor that scientists routinely provide, and the existing host infrastructure at the institutions where they work, the cost of running an online scientific journal is, for all practical purposes, zero.
Ironically, cryptography and stenography are supposed to be terrorists' tools!
In other news, US troops storming a deserted Al Qaeda hideout in the Afghan mountains discovered suspicious notepads full of what an army spokesman described as 'cryptic stenography'. Looking into the matter, the Department of Homeland Security discovered an entire profession devoted to teaching stenography methods in the US. "We had no idea this was going on right under our noses," Tom Ridge declared in a hastily convened press conference. "We'll have these terrorist teachers round up and sent to Guantanamo faster than they can write 'uncle'".
as my Dad was tought in the '60s, the solution to pollution is dilution.
This philosophy may have worked well for the organic wastes of your grandfather, which when suitably diluted are nicely recycled by microbes. It is, however, precisely what keeps getting us into deep fscking shit with respect to all those long-lived chemicals whose nasty side-effects we always tend to discover a couple of years after we've "diluted" them all over the globe:
DDT -> birds die out CFCs -> ozone hole PCBs -> cancer phtalates -> little girls grow boobs etc. etc. ad nauseam
So do us all a favor and update your family's philosophies at least once a century.
Re:This is what is wrong with this idea.
on
ICANN Meets Annan
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
With all the problems that go on in the UN why are they a better choice then the US.
With all due respect, the main problem going on in the UN *is* the US. The UN aren't perfect, but in fact they're doing quite well, and would be doing great if they weren't undercut at every turn by US administrations who use UN-bashing to score cheap popularity points with their voters. (Something similar can be seen in Europe with respect to the EU: the national governments like to take credit for any positive effects while blaming the negatives on Brussels.)
whenever [unmanned probes] **may** have found something interesting we are told that only a **manned** mission can really confirm the facts.
We are told that by the same administrators who have to justify raping, pillaging, and plundering the budget for future unmanned space probes in order to divert funds barely adequate to conduct fig-leaf concept studies towards one anti-intellectual politician's "vision" that has more to do with his getting re-elected than any actual plans for space exploration. A *huge* grain of salt is called for here.
Phobos's orbit is slowly decaying, spiraling in towards Mars, so that Martian tidal forces may overcome the satellite's own gravity and break Phobos up into a ring like Saturn's, perhaps within 50 million years. Deimos may, like our Moon, be slowly spiraling outward.
I'd say your news of Phobos' imminent demise is greatly exaggerated. Before that happens we'll have used it as a counterweight for a Martian space elevator anyway.
The folks described in the Bass book are much more interesting people, doing much more interesting things.
I'll say - besides hacking roulette and pioneering wearable computing, these guys were also instrumental in formulating modern chaos theory. In the 90s some went on into stock market/exchange rate prediction.
Their first-generation roulette computers were strapped to the chest under loose clothing. What they didn't count on was the sweat caused by the stress of actual casino operation shorting out the electronics, causing (in at least one case) severe chest (hair) burns... hence the move into a shoe platform for release 2.
An entertaining read for sure. AFAIK it has been floating around Hollywood as a movie script for many years but has yet to be taken up. I had hoped to see it produced in the wake of the 70s/80s revival... sort of a "Blow" for geeks.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Using methods similar to a medical CAT scan, a technique of "tomographic" image reconstruction will be used to produce [sharp] pictures
Yeah right, like the LBT will do a revolution around the object to image it from all sides, then reconstruct its internal 3D structure? When science journalists go bad, they really stink.
The Ansari X-Prize can be claimed only once, and only until the end of 2004.
The X-Prize Cup is a planned regular event - in essence an air show and competition for the suborbital space vehicles being developed in response to the X-Prize.
since Mars hasn't proved all that exciting
'scuse me? Within the last 3 months Mars Express resp. the MERs have found on Mars:
a) water ice in the south polar cap, previously thought to be dry ice only;
b) traces of methane (!) in the atmosphere;
c) conclusive evidence for a standing body of liquid water in the past.
All of which is raising the possibility of at least microbial life on Mars, fossil and/or present, which I find plenty exciting. I know it's not much by the entertainment standards of the MTV generation, but what did you expect - little green men taking us to their leader?
I for one find it remarkable that documents such as the Mars Express status report now routinely refer to "biological processes" as candidate explanation for observations without batting as much as an eyelash. And Mars Express hasn't even commenced its official science mission yet! Plenty to look forward to.
Do you have any idea of just how stupid you look promoting something like that as an actual, viable solution?
Do you have any idea how stupid *you* look misconstruing my gedankenexperiment as an actual proposal? Nobody's claiming that solar is a comprehensive solution to all the world's energy needs at this point. Your contention that solar energy density is too low to be of much use is just as ludicrous though.
Do you have any idea of the environmental impact of that? (Deserts are extremely fragile ecosystems)
If it could be done economically, I'd take the environmental impact of *shading* 150 square miles of desert any day over that of producing long-term radioactive waste for which (after 50 years of well-funded development!) still no safe permanent storage facility exists anywhere on this planet.
Why don't you look at how many KW a steel mill uses in an hour.
You're really hung up on steel production, but so be it - let's have a look then at Gary Works:
In the Southwest, 4000 acres (16M m2) would receive about 128G Wh of solar irradiation per year, or 350M Wh/day, which is 8% of the plant's energy consumption (4.25G Wh/day). In other words, given efficient and affordable photovoltaics, even one of the most intensely energy-consuming industries in existence could cover a significant percentage of its energy needs from the solar irradiation of the land it occupies alone. I call that not bad at all.
Cover about 150 square miles around the plant in 50% efficient photovoltaics, and the plant is 100% solar. If that sounds crazy, it's because the panels are too expensive, not because of the land use. You could power the entire U.S. steel production by photovoltaics, and still hide it in a remote corner of Nevada:
1997 U.S. raw steel production: 121M tons = 16 Gary Works
area of Nevada: 110k square miles = 730 solar Gary Works
remote corners of Nevada: all except Reno and Las Vegas
faster than walking speed
I'll say. At the last World Solar Challenge, the winner's *average* speed was close to 100 km/h (over 60 mph for imperialists), over a distance of 3000 km (183'732 furlongs).
Ain't gonna happen for the very simple fact there just isn't enough solar radiation hitting the surface of the planet.
I call bullshit. Average solar irradiation is in the range of 2-5 kWh/m2 per year in Europe, which happens to roughly equal a typical household's electricity consumption. This means that at, say, 10% overall efficiency (including storage losses) just 7 m2 of south-facing roof surface (including a sqrt(2) factor for roof slant) supply a household's worth of electricity. Replacing fossil fuels might triple the surface required, but still in all but the densest urban areas photovoltaic roof tiles alone could cover local energy needs.
And this is for Europe - in much of the U.S. solar irradiation is much higher and population/habitation density much lower, so your claim is absolutely ludicrous. Kindly refrain from misrepresenting your unfounded prejudices as fact.
We step outside and think: Man, that sun is hot, I'll bet there's a lot of energy there if we could just harness it.
Well and guess what, we're right. On a sunny summer day we get about 1 kW/m2 of solar irradiation, enough to power a hair dryer. Just how do you think sand, rocks, etc. can get too hot to walk on in the midday sun? The only real problems with photovoltaics are energy storage and the cost/efficiency tradeoff, and a low-cost high-efficiency solar cell would eliminate the latter.
The lady was Bright but not bright
Took part in the next day's flight
So soon two made the date
And then four and then eight
And her spouse got one hell of a fright!
Oh dear - utter rubbish from front to back. Let's see:
you have to give [software patents] some credit for building an industry
Software patents didn't exist when the US software industry was built.
open source me-too clones of commercial products
You got it backwards - the majority of today's commercial software was cloned from early open-source (often research) projects.
software that's revolutionary
Off the top of my head: the Web, Linux, MUDs, Bayesian spam filtering, etc. not revolutionary enough for you? All of European provenance.
Fraunhofer would be long dead
Fraunhofer *is* long dead, and for the Fraunhofer Society mp3 royalties are a nice windfall, nothing more. It's a large state-owned contract research organization fer chrissakes.
If (Rand % 10 == 1)
Never, ever, test the LSBs of a congruential RNG! This should be
If (Rand/MAX_RAND < 0.1)
so that the MSBs are used. Sheesh. You work for Diebold, right?
How good would a Lunar astronomy be? Having no atmosphere would seem to be a great bonus, and allthougth there **is** the problem of gravity on the lenses, this gravity is much less.
There is simply *no* advantage to putting an optical telescope on the moon as opposed to free-floating in space, and many many disadvantages:
1. down another gravity well, thus costlier to put there and harder to access for repairs
2. half the sky blocked by the ground
3. moon dust kicked up by human activity (such as setting up the telescope in the first place) fouls the lenses
4. vibrations caused e.g. by mining activity
5. huge temperature differentials caused by 14-day sols
6. (as you mentioned) gravity sagging the lenses
7. mechanical support structure required in gravity
Near-optical astronomy needs to go to the Langrange points, not the moon. Radio astronomy might have more of a case because it could use the moon's radio shadow, but in fact terrestrial radio astronomy can work around human radio emissions well enough, so the reasons to go off-earth in the first place are far less compelling for them than for the optical (not to mention UV) guys.
Fortunately there is a middle way between traditional academic publishers and author self-publication on the web: online academic journals run by the scientists themselves. A good example in my field is the Journal of Machine Learning Research which was formed when the entire editorial board resigned from the overpriced Machine Learning Journal. Online access is free, while a low-price is published to satisfy the legacy requirements of libraries, copyright law, tenure review committees, and the like. Speaking of copyright: in contrast to traditional publishers, authors do not have to sign away their copyright when they publish in JMLR.
The result? Three years after its inception, JMLR is the highest-impact journal in Artificial Intelligence. This is by no means an isolated case, but part of a sea change in academic publishing. More and more such journals are being setup, often in direct competition to overpriced conventional publications, and with support from academic libraries.
The "author pays" model is a last-ditch effort by traditional academic publishers to wring profits from scientific communication, an activity that in essence has always been free (as in -dom). Apparently they haven't noticed yet that all the scarcities that their business model depended on - from trees to typesetting to transport - have simply been removed by technology. Given the free volunteer labor that scientists routinely provide, and the existing host infrastructure at the institutions where they work, the cost of running an online scientific journal is, for all practical purposes, zero.
or lower back pain :-)
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written by Paul Anka & Frank Sinatra
/. drivel, I'm changing my sig to:
Dang, there goes my Vicious/Rotten hypothesis.
To honour these new depths of pointless
Ironically, cryptography and stenography are supposed to be terrorists' tools!
In other news, US troops storming a deserted Al Qaeda hideout in the Afghan mountains discovered suspicious notepads full of what an army spokesman described as 'cryptic stenography'. Looking into the matter, the Department of Homeland Security discovered an entire profession devoted to teaching stenography methods in the US. "We had no idea this was going on right under our noses," Tom Ridge declared in a hastily convened press conference. "We'll have these terrorist teachers round up and sent to Guantanamo faster than they can write 'uncle'".
Steganography, people. Big diff.
I'll say... even got its own university!
There you go. Next!
as my Dad was tought in the '60s, the solution to pollution is dilution.
This philosophy may have worked well for the organic wastes of your grandfather, which when suitably diluted are nicely recycled by microbes. It is, however, precisely what keeps getting us into deep fscking shit with respect to all those long-lived chemicals whose nasty side-effects we always tend to discover a couple of years after we've "diluted" them all over the globe:
DDT -> birds die out
CFCs -> ozone hole
PCBs -> cancer
phtalates -> little girls grow boobs
etc. etc. ad nauseam
So do us all a favor and update your family's philosophies at least once a century.
With all the problems that go on in the UN why are they a better choice then the US.
With all due respect, the main problem going on in the UN *is* the US. The UN aren't perfect, but in fact they're doing quite well, and would be doing great if they weren't undercut at every turn by US administrations who use UN-bashing to score cheap popularity points with their voters. (Something similar can be seen in Europe with respect to the EU: the national governments like to take credit for any positive effects while blaming the negatives on Brussels.)
NASA planning a probe to go and study europa but this list doesn't seem to mention it.
:-)
I couldn't RTFA (/.ed) but JIMO includes a study of Europa. Europa lander/driller/submarine missions such as this are in the early conceptual stages.
would be cool for mars to attempt a venus rover despite the obvious challenges
Such as Mars not having intelligent life, much less space technology?
whenever [unmanned probes] **may** have found something interesting we are told that only a **manned** mission can really confirm the facts.
We are told that by the same administrators who have to justify raping, pillaging, and plundering the budget for future unmanned space probes in order to divert funds barely adequate to conduct fig-leaf concept studies towards one anti-intellectual politician's "vision" that has more to do with his getting re-elected than any actual plans for space exploration. A *huge* grain of salt is called for here.
From here:
Phobos's orbit is slowly decaying, spiraling in towards Mars, so that Martian tidal forces may overcome the satellite's own gravity and break Phobos up into a ring like Saturn's, perhaps within 50 million years. Deimos may, like our Moon, be slowly spiraling outward.
I'd say your news of Phobos' imminent demise is greatly exaggerated. Before that happens we'll have used it as a counterweight for a Martian space elevator anyway.
The folks described in the Bass book are much more interesting people, doing much more interesting things.
:-)
I'll say - besides hacking roulette and pioneering wearable computing, these guys were also instrumental in formulating modern chaos theory. In the 90s some went on into stock market/exchange rate prediction.
Their first-generation roulette computers were strapped to the chest under loose clothing. What they didn't count on was the sweat caused by the stress of actual casino operation shorting out the electronics, causing (in at least one case) severe chest (hair) burns... hence the move into a shoe platform for release 2.
An entertaining read for sure. AFAIK it has been floating around Hollywood as a movie script for many years but has yet to be taken up. I had hoped to see it produced in the wake of the 70s/80s revival... sort of a "Blow" for geeks.
Yeah, in the same way that family cars and race cars are damn similar.