Problem is, kilograms are properly a unit of mass, not weight (or force). Mars has about 3/8 the surface gravity of Earth (I think), so something that weighs (exerts a downward force of) 88 lbs on Earth weighs about 33 lbs on Mars. But it will still have a mass of about 40 kg.
Interesting question. From the article: The simplest gashopper could actually be quite light, as little as 50 kg (110 pounds). That's using Earth gravity conversions. The same 50 kg would weigh about 41 lbs on Mars.
But this little beast will use most of its propellant on forward motion, and acceleration relates to mass, not weight. Density of atmosphere will be the other factor, affecting the amount of lift the wings generate.
My grandmother used to hang aluminum pie pans on string over her vegetable garden to scare the birds. Now we use AOL CDs for the same thing. They're not as big, but a lot shinier.
We haven't received an AOL disk in the mail in a while, but just last week we got one embedded in the plastic bag holding our morning newspaper. "9.0 Optimized! 1099 Hours FREE!"
My boss does not have administrator access (he's the owner, I'm the geek), but he still gets tons of adware crap installed and running on his Win XP laptop. Trust me, you don't have to have administrator access to get hosed up.
Nobody at home, maybe. Commercial printers print with all kinds of ink. If a pamphlet, coupon, or package only needs a few colors in block graphics (no complex shadings), it's more practical to use exactly the colors of ink needed than to uce CYM. Color alignment is simpler, and you use less ink.
Q&D example off my shelves: Dove soap. The package is has only four colors, two for text, one for solid graphics, and one shaded. The printer used four colors: black, deep bluish-green, light bluish-green, and gold.
The hardback editions of The Neverending Story were also printed with a bluish-green ink.
Or think of green-lined ledger pages; you think a printer is going to go to the trouble to line up a cyan and a yellow run when he can do one green run and be done with it?
So it's entirely plausible that an ink manufacturer or a commercial printer had to abandon a particular variety of green ink as being too close to one of the government's protected shades.
Yes, but the inkjet's day is coming as well. Remember this story on printer forensics? Quote: "The technique currently focuses on laser printers but eventually will be expanded to inkjet printers."
It wasn't the glue; government statisticians have identified the bits most likely to be cut from magazines by freaks like you, and have convinced magazine publishers to embed RFID tags in the pages.
The glue's only effect was to kill off enough of your brain cells that you fell for the trick.
Re:speaking of pretty european women..
on
A New Elena Story
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· Score: 1
The linked page is apparently slashdotted, but the goddam popup ads still manage to load. Sometimes the internet really stinks.
Hmm, the link says it was 3 days ago... Don't tell me! I'll get it! Let's see, today's Wednesday, that means yesterday was Tuesday, then Monday, then-- Oh, yeah, that would have been Sunday!
Ok, I know I got the Sunday paper because it's still here on the couch, keeping the pizza grease off the cushions. Dilbert... Dilbert... Let's see, back page of the funnies, right below "Frank & Ernest"...
Nope, it's just not there anymore. I'm a slashdotter. Anything more than four hours old has been flushed from the stack.
While it's perfectly possible to parse natural language, it's an impossible problem to reliably extract meaning from it. This is because most meaning in a natural language sentence is not encoded -- it is infered by the hearer based on assumptions about the attitudes, knowledge and intentions of the speaker.
That's a good deal of what I meant by, "Thought patterns are learned and largely cultural," and "The system would have to be tailored to each. ..culture it would serve."
How may typing pool people have we put out of work...
I'm guessing that you didn't come from the typing pool...;-)
It never fails to amaze me how many typos show up in Slashdot, where so many users are in a line of work where a single dropped character can mean hours of hair-tearing frustration.
Maybe it's just that people skip the preview when they hear their boss coming up behind them...
Good Lord, that's the truth. Most people I know have no idea how restrictive English grammar is, and how much variation there can be with other languages. English speakers (at least the grammatical ones) are familiar with a handful of verb inflections -- singular vs. plural; present or past tense -- but Old English actually inflected the nouns of a sentence as well, to indicate the subject and the predicate. You could say either "Dick hit Jane" or "Jane hit Dick" and the noun inflection, not the word order, determined who actually got hit. I'm no linguist, but I believe there are contemporary languages with similar features.
That's a vast conceptual shift, that a person's name can be said differently according to whether he's the subject or the object of an action. How would "natural programming" be different to a person for whom word order is not significant, but individual word structure is? That's a complete shift from classic programming languages (although methods and attributes could be thought of as "noun inflection" in languages like Java or VB, you still can't just put your variable names anywhere you want in a statement).
There are no natural ways of thinking; thought patterns are learned and largely cultural. For "natural programming" to really work, the system would have to be tailored to each native language and culture it would serve. At least with FORTRAN you didn't have to worry that a programmer from Sweden and a programmer from Hong Kong will expect the plus sign to mean two different things.
Here it is. My kids are still fascinated by this (come to think of it, so am I). Just how fast can you make it go before the wheel flies right off or you get Carpal Tunnel Syndrome?
Give a toddler who is just learning to count a piece of chalk. Give yourself a piece of chalk. Ask if you and the toddler have the same amount of chalk. The toddler will say, "Yes."
Break your piece of chalk in two. Now ask if you and the toddler have the same amount of chalk. The toddler may go either way.
A comment I made just a few hours before this article posted mentioned moving the Moon into a geostationary orbit. This would eliminate lunar tides altogether; only solar tides, which are considerably smaller, would be left. To be sure, two sides of the Earth would experience very high stationary tides for a while (with corresponding low-low-low tides at 90-degree angles), until the Earth itself deformed sufficiently to cancel the effect, which probably wouldn't take more than a couple hundred thousand years.
In the form of ice caps, the mass of water doesn't move as much. Melting the ice caps would allow a greater mass of water to be shifted twice daily by the moon's tidal force.
Okay, I know earthly research has put the answer somewhere from 144 to 411 (thanks, AC), but they do not allow for just how long a tongue Eccentrica Gallumbits brings to each lick. (The issue of multiple tongues may be ignored, totalling the licks by each individual tongue.)
Just when I think the nerd community cannot surprise me any more, along comes something like this article. Not only is there a CAD system for building with LEGO, there are enough of them to justify a common graphic interface for them. Jeez Louise.
Perhaps the universe has a reason for giving us such lousy social skills. If we ever really worked together, turned all that creativity and ingenuity to a single purpose, we'd have already built the Earth Mark II by now (probably from LEGO), and uncovered the Ultimate Question: How many licks does it take to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop?
Check out the history of Alvin at the Woods Hole site and you'll see that concerns about fatigue in a 40-year-old pressure hull are misplaced. Alvin has been repeatedly overhauled, with pressure hull and other components replaced. The vehicle has undergone recertification by the U.S. Navy every few years, most recently in 2002. In fact, Alvin has gone deeper in recent years; until 1994 the DSV was only certified to 4000m, not the present 4500m.
However, the next Alvin will be larger (27 more cubic feet in the pressure sphere, adding about the volume of a good-sized coffin!) and have greater range, both horizontally and vertically. As "Rosco" pointed out above, operating two DSV's at once would be much more expensive. And frankly, any lesser facility than Woods Hole that can afford to operate a DSV would probably prefer to build their own.
Still, I'm sad to hear Alvin will be retired. Alvin was the first name I learned in deep-sea research as a child, as Jacques Cousteau was the first for shallower waters. A long and brilliant career, averaging (even with overhauls and most of one year stuck on the sea floor) better than a dive every four days for forty years.
Slashdot Mirror
Problem is, kilograms are properly a unit of mass, not weight (or force). Mars has about 3/8 the surface gravity of Earth (I think), so something that weighs (exerts a downward force of) 88 lbs on Earth weighs about 33 lbs on Mars. But it will still have a mass of about 40 kg.
Interesting question. From the article: The simplest gashopper could actually be quite light, as little as 50 kg (110 pounds). That's using Earth gravity conversions. The same 50 kg would weigh about 41 lbs on Mars.
But this little beast will use most of its propellant on forward motion, and acceleration relates to mass, not weight. Density of atmosphere will be the other factor, affecting the amount of lift the wings generate.My grandmother used to hang aluminum pie pans on string over her vegetable garden to scare the birds. Now we use AOL CDs for the same thing. They're not as big, but a lot shinier.
We haven't received an AOL disk in the mail in a while, but just last week we got one embedded in the plastic bag holding our morning newspaper. "9.0 Optimized! 1099 Hours FREE!"
My boss does not have administrator access (he's the owner, I'm the geek), but he still gets tons of adware crap installed and running on his Win XP laptop. Trust me, you don't have to have administrator access to get hosed up.
Nobody prints with green ink.
Nobody at home, maybe. Commercial printers print with all kinds of ink. If a pamphlet, coupon, or package only needs a few colors in block graphics (no complex shadings), it's more practical to use exactly the colors of ink needed than to uce CYM. Color alignment is simpler, and you use less ink.
Q&D example off my shelves: Dove soap. The package is has only four colors, two for text, one for solid graphics, and one shaded. The printer used four colors: black, deep bluish-green, light bluish-green, and gold.
The hardback editions of The Neverending Story were also printed with a bluish-green ink.
Or think of green-lined ledger pages; you think a printer is going to go to the trouble to line up a cyan and a yellow run when he can do one green run and be done with it?
So it's entirely plausible that an ink manufacturer or a commercial printer had to abandon a particular variety of green ink as being too close to one of the government's protected shades.
Yes, but the inkjet's day is coming as well. Remember this story on printer forensics? Quote: "The technique currently focuses on laser printers but eventually will be expanded to inkjet printers."
It wasn't the glue; government statisticians have identified the bits most likely to be cut from magazines by freaks like you, and have convinced magazine publishers to embed RFID tags in the pages.
The glue's only effect was to kill off enough of your brain cells that you fell for the trick.
The linked page is apparently slashdotted, but the goddam popup ads still manage to load. Sometimes the internet really stinks.
Anyone remember that Dilbert?
Hmm, the link says it was 3 days ago... Don't tell me! I'll get it! Let's see, today's Wednesday, that means yesterday was Tuesday, then Monday, then-- Oh, yeah, that would have been Sunday!
Ok, I know I got the Sunday paper because it's still here on the couch, keeping the pizza grease off the cushions. Dilbert... Dilbert... Let's see, back page of the funnies, right below "Frank & Ernest"...
Nope, it's just not there anymore. I'm a slashdotter. Anything more than four hours old has been flushed from the stack.While it's perfectly possible to parse natural language, it's an impossible problem to reliably extract meaning from it. This is because most meaning in a natural language sentence is not encoded -- it is infered by the hearer based on assumptions about the attitudes, knowledge and intentions of the speaker.
That's a good deal of what I meant by, "Thought patterns are learned and largely cultural," and "The system would have to be tailored to each. .How may typing pool people have we put out of work...
I'm guessing that you didn't come from the typing pool... ;-)
It never fails to amaze me how many typos show up in Slashdot, where so many users are in a line of work where a single dropped character can mean hours of hair-tearing frustration.
Maybe it's just that people skip the preview when they hear their boss coming up behind them...Good Lord, that's the truth. Most people I know have no idea how restrictive English grammar is, and how much variation there can be with other languages. English speakers (at least the grammatical ones) are familiar with a handful of verb inflections -- singular vs. plural; present or past tense -- but Old English actually inflected the nouns of a sentence as well, to indicate the subject and the predicate. You could say either "Dick hit Jane" or "Jane hit Dick" and the noun inflection, not the word order, determined who actually got hit. I'm no linguist, but I believe there are contemporary languages with similar features.
That's a vast conceptual shift, that a person's name can be said differently according to whether he's the subject or the object of an action. How would "natural programming" be different to a person for whom word order is not significant, but individual word structure is? That's a complete shift from classic programming languages (although methods and attributes could be thought of as "noun inflection" in languages like Java or VB, you still can't just put your variable names anywhere you want in a statement).
There are no natural ways of thinking; thought patterns are learned and largely cultural. For "natural programming" to really work, the system would have to be tailored to each native language and culture it would serve. At least with FORTRAN you didn't have to worry that a programmer from Sweden and a programmer from Hong Kong will expect the plus sign to mean two different things.Here it is. My kids are still fascinated by this (come to think of it, so am I). Just how fast can you make it go before the wheel flies right off or you get Carpal Tunnel Syndrome?
Here's the original image from NASA's collection of raw images. A related image is here.
So, has NASA posted any pictures of Winston Niles Rumfoord or his dog yet?
is one of the weirdest I've ever seen, another one that brings pi and e together.
n! = ((n/e)^n)*sqrt(2*pi*n)
It's only approximate, but it gets more accurate (relatively) as n increases.Give a toddler who is just learning to count a piece of chalk. Give yourself a piece of chalk. Ask if you and the toddler have the same amount of chalk. The toddler will say, "Yes."
Break your piece of chalk in two. Now ask if you and the toddler have the same amount of chalk. The toddler may go either way.A comment I made just a few hours before this article posted mentioned moving the Moon into a geostationary orbit. This would eliminate lunar tides altogether; only solar tides, which are considerably smaller, would be left. To be sure, two sides of the Earth would experience very high stationary tides for a while (with corresponding low-low-low tides at 90-degree angles), until the Earth itself deformed sufficiently to cancel the effect, which probably wouldn't take more than a couple hundred thousand years.
In the form of ice caps, the mass of water doesn't move as much. Melting the ice caps would allow a greater mass of water to be shifted twice daily by the moon's tidal force.
Okay, I know earthly research has put the answer somewhere from 144 to 411 (thanks, AC), but they do not allow for just how long a tongue Eccentrica Gallumbits brings to each lick. (The issue of multiple tongues may be ignored, totalling the licks by each individual tongue.)
Just when I think the nerd community cannot surprise me any more, along comes something like this article. Not only is there a CAD system for building with LEGO, there are enough of them to justify a common graphic interface for them. Jeez Louise.
Perhaps the universe has a reason for giving us such lousy social skills. If we ever really worked together, turned all that creativity and ingenuity to a single purpose, we'd have already built the Earth Mark II by now (probably from LEGO), and uncovered the Ultimate Question: How many licks does it take to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop?Check out the history of Alvin at the Woods Hole site and you'll see that concerns about fatigue in a 40-year-old pressure hull are misplaced. Alvin has been repeatedly overhauled, with pressure hull and other components replaced. The vehicle has undergone recertification by the U.S. Navy every few years, most recently in 2002. In fact, Alvin has gone deeper in recent years; until 1994 the DSV was only certified to 4000m, not the present 4500m.
However, the next Alvin will be larger (27 more cubic feet in the pressure sphere, adding about the volume of a good-sized coffin!) and have greater range, both horizontally and vertically. As "Rosco" pointed out above, operating two DSV's at once would be much more expensive. And frankly, any lesser facility than Woods Hole that can afford to operate a DSV would probably prefer to build their own.
Still, I'm sad to hear Alvin will be retired. Alvin was the first name I learned in deep-sea research as a child, as Jacques Cousteau was the first for shallower waters. A long and brilliant career, averaging (even with overhauls and most of one year stuck on the sea floor) better than a dive every four days for forty years.