Re:the solution is so anticlimactic.
on
Saving Huygens
·
· Score: 1
I want to see the whiplash at the end of the cable...
I started to answer this with something about being more worried about where they'll put the 186,000,000 miles of slack they'll have to take up as Earth and Saturn pass in their orbits, but then I realized this could go on for years. Introducing harmonic vibration in the cable so the Moon will miss it (not to mention the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, several quazilliad asteroids, Saturn's rings, and of course Saturn itself), shielding it against Earth's and Saturn's magnetospheres (and then grounding the shielding - instant new electrical supply!), the likelihood that NASA will have designed the cable port on Cassini upside down so that the probe has to be rolled over before we can plug it in - you get the idea.
Reminds me of a story about a town in west Texas (maybe Brownwood?) so dry that they got a bill through the Texas Legislature that if water was ever found on the Moon this town could try to build a pipeline to it.
Reminds me as well of when we spent nearly a week's lunches talking about the pros and cons of moving the Moon into a geostationary orbit. Permanent high (very high!) tides at two points on Earth, lunar eclipses once a night, solar eclipses once a day, very bright moonlight (but for only half the Earth) -
The question also arises as to why more women, who have this lower level of testosterone, are not in science, which is male-dominated, with only one in 40 science professors being a woman.
I am reminded of the Computer Science curriculum where I went to school long ago. There was one unofficial but absolute requirement: Every programming student had to take Social Dance, on the theory that programmers (nearly all male, in those days) were naturally antisocial.
I'm sure that long-term male discrimination has been a factor, but I also suspect (from my own experience) that there are relatively few women in hard science and technology because, while they and their male counterparts may be equally talented in analytical tasks, the women tend to be more socially capable. Research says male scientists tend to have fewer children; is this partly because they tend to have fewer successful marriages?
In simple terms, perhaps the women are more likely to have a real life.
Besides, this is likely a case of a scientist trying to speak in layman's terms to a reporter. Probably half the reporters that Mr Cutler has spoken to don't know a spectrum from a speculum.
If you're thinking "solar sail" (synchrotron sail?), then think of this: A light source 10 million times brighter than the Sun would still have to be about 440 km in diameter to have the same light output as the Sun. I doubt Canada is yet ready to build such a large installation.
If on the other hand you're thinking of an Angel's Pencil laser drive: IANA physicist, and I'm frankly over my head with this.
Re:the solution is so anticlimactic.
on
Saving Huygens
·
· Score: 3, Funny
I know what you mean. I was expecting something about reprogramming Cassini or Huygens or both. But then I read:
...the firmware could not be altered after launch.
What? A $300M mission, and there's no provision for firmware upgrades? Even my $40 wireless hub can get firmware upgrades. Oh, wait: "Do NOT upgrade firmware on any D-Link product over a wireless connection. Failure of the device may result. Use only hard-wired network connections."
So I guess they'd have had to run a billion-mile cable first. Line noise would be a bitch, wouldn't it?
Re:Doppler shifting radio waves?
on
Saving Huygens
·
· Score: 2, Informative
If you want to see a change in color of visible light (as with receding galaxies), yes. If you want a detectable change in radio frequency, no. Doppler radar can measure the speeds of clouds and rain, which are not only far sublight but far subsonic as well.
All it takes is one little perf in the membrane and that batch is contaminated, whats wrong with desalination of sea water for bringing water to the masses ?
Do you live in the U.S. or Canada? If so, there's a good chance you're already drinking water that went thru a ZeeWeed filter. The company that makes them is apparently based in Canada, and has municipal customers all over North America. According to their August 2004 financial report, they've recently added customers in Ontario, Alberta, Pennsylvania, Florida, Kentucky,
New Jersey, and Maryland.
You're not recognizing just how sensitive and sophisticated measurements and calculations of Earth's gravitational field have become. It's been well over a decade now since I read of how a satellite was used to create new and detailed maps of the ocean floor by measuring local variations in sea level; because rock is more dense than water, a seamount a mile below the ocean's surface creates a slight increase in the local gravitational pull, causing the ocean to hump up slightly above the mount.
The article doesn't say, but I would hope that the satellites were launched to orbit with Earth's rotation, so that frame dragging would accelerate them in their orbit, which would rule out atmospheric drag. I'd guess, though, that after 40+ years of satellite tracking such drag can probably be predicted to several significant digits, as can the gravitational effects of the Moon and Sun.
And, BTW, general relativity is a very physical theory. Last I heard, it's still the best explanation of why Mercury wobbles back and forth instead of being firmly tide-locked.
Don't forget Larry Niven's Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation, a suggestion that the universe may defend cause-and-effect quite violently. Attempting to change the past might lead to a sudden alteration of your present.
Bravo! Finally somebody who separates the causes of addictive and compulsive behavior from the behavior itself.
A compulsive personality can settle on almost anything as a target. I went through a period of about 10 years where I had to load a washing machine in a certain fashion, or I would get the jitters and have to pull the clothes back out. Weird and funny (even to me at the time), and completely unpredictable. A harmless enough compulsion, so I didn't try to fight it.
On the other hand, some of my compulsive eating habits are far from harmless. Too often my stress reaction has been to make a pan of mac-&-cheese then eat the whole thing. Now I only keep 2-3 boxes of mac-&-cheese in the pantry, because at that inventory level the fear of running completely out tends to balance the craving to eat it.
An RPG is a large easy target for compulsion radar-lock. A world with clear, well-defined (if sometimes hidden) rules, where your boss can't follow you, the IRS can't audit you, and your cat's litter-box doesn't smell. In itself the game is harmless (if not particularly beneficial to health or finances), but an inability to stop playing is a sign of a larger problem, just like binge eating (or self-starvation).
Just shutting off the game and going outdoors won't solve the underlying problem. A person who is attracted to that sort of retreat from the real world will likely continue to have problems with reality until he finds another target for his compulsions, or, in the worst case, finds his own version of the Texas Tower. The underlying problems must be addressed.
SS1 is doing exactly what it was designed to do. If the X Prize had been for successful orbit, SS1 would have been built differently. Remember, we're talking about a spacecraft not much bigger than the SUV that they use to tow it around the airport.
If SS1 had augured in, there'd have been plenty of coverage (at least until the next celebrity's wardrobe malfunction [would that require network uncoverage?]).
Government-sponsored space flight a third of a century ago:
- Was enormously more expensive (especially by the dollars of the 1960s);
- Was hideously dangerous;
- Nearly dropped dead after the Apollo flights;
- Did not provide a reusable spacecraft (in fact, they've only just recently recovered the one Mercury capsule they lost).
That said, I do wish that Burt Rutan had admitted more of the debt he owes to the research (however overpriced and inefficient it might have been) NASA has done over the decades. Instead, he put words in the mouths of NASA: We are screwed.
Point out to your manager, the one who hires hotshots straight out of school instead of proven workers with years of experience: Mike Melvill, the pilot who just made history, is sixty-three years old. In some businesses he would be just two years from mandatory retirement; at Scaled Composites, Mike Melvill is still the hotshot.
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I started to answer this with something about being more worried about where they'll put the 186,000,000 miles of slack they'll have to take up as Earth and Saturn pass in their orbits, but then I realized this could go on for years. Introducing harmonic vibration in the cable so the Moon will miss it (not to mention the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, several quazilliad asteroids, Saturn's rings, and of course Saturn itself), shielding it against Earth's and Saturn's magnetospheres (and then grounding the shielding - instant new electrical supply!), the likelihood that NASA will have designed the cable port on Cassini upside down so that the probe has to be rolled over before we can plug it in - you get the idea.
Reminds me of a story about a town in west Texas (maybe Brownwood?) so dry that they got a bill through the Texas Legislature that if water was ever found on the Moon this town could try to build a pipeline to it.
Reminds me as well of when we spent nearly a week's lunches talking about the pros and cons of moving the Moon into a geostationary orbit. Permanent high (very high!) tides at two points on Earth, lunar eclipses once a night, solar eclipses once a day, very bright moonlight (but for only half the Earth) -I am reminded of the Computer Science curriculum where I went to school long ago. There was one unofficial but absolute requirement: Every programming student had to take Social Dance, on the theory that programmers (nearly all male, in those days) were naturally antisocial.
I'm sure that long-term male discrimination has been a factor, but I also suspect (from my own experience) that there are relatively few women in hard science and technology because, while they and their male counterparts may be equally talented in analytical tasks, the women tend to be more socially capable. Research says male scientists tend to have fewer children; is this partly because they tend to have fewer successful marriages?
In simple terms, perhaps the women are more likely to have a real life.Besides, this is likely a case of a scientist trying to speak in layman's terms to a reporter. Probably half the reporters that Mr Cutler has spoken to don't know a spectrum from a speculum.
If you're thinking "solar sail" (synchrotron sail?), then think of this: A light source 10 million times brighter than the Sun would still have to be about 440 km in diameter to have the same light output as the Sun. I doubt Canada is yet ready to build such a large installation.
If on the other hand you're thinking of an Angel's Pencil laser drive: IANA physicist, and I'm frankly over my head with this.So I guess they'd have had to run a billion-mile cable first. Line noise would be a bitch, wouldn't it?
If you want to see a change in color of visible light (as with receding galaxies), yes. If you want a detectable change in radio frequency, no. Doppler radar can measure the speeds of clouds and rain, which are not only far sublight but far subsonic as well.
In his collection Convergent Series, Niven introduces the story in question with two lines:
This story has a catchy title. I stole it from a mathematics paper by Frank J. Tipler.Yes, here it would be: "60-nanometer granularity ensues."
can take 20 minutes longer. Great.
You're not recognizing just how sensitive and sophisticated measurements and calculations of Earth's gravitational field have become. It's been well over a decade now since I read of how a satellite was used to create new and detailed maps of the ocean floor by measuring local variations in sea level; because rock is more dense than water, a seamount a mile below the ocean's surface creates a slight increase in the local gravitational pull, causing the ocean to hump up slightly above the mount.
The article doesn't say, but I would hope that the satellites were launched to orbit with Earth's rotation, so that frame dragging would accelerate them in their orbit, which would rule out atmospheric drag. I'd guess, though, that after 40+ years of satellite tracking such drag can probably be predicted to several significant digits, as can the gravitational effects of the Moon and Sun.
And, BTW, general relativity is a very physical theory. Last I heard, it's still the best explanation of why Mercury wobbles back and forth instead of being firmly tide-locked.Don't forget Larry Niven's Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation, a suggestion that the universe may defend cause-and-effect quite violently. Attempting to change the past might lead to a sudden alteration of your present.
to UCSD, then youCSD.com should create a wide-angle campus photo with the library photoshopped out, and use that as their banner.
Bravo! Finally somebody who separates the causes of addictive and compulsive behavior from the behavior itself.
A compulsive personality can settle on almost anything as a target. I went through a period of about 10 years where I had to load a washing machine in a certain fashion, or I would get the jitters and have to pull the clothes back out. Weird and funny (even to me at the time), and completely unpredictable. A harmless enough compulsion, so I didn't try to fight it.
On the other hand, some of my compulsive eating habits are far from harmless. Too often my stress reaction has been to make a pan of mac-&-cheese then eat the whole thing. Now I only keep 2-3 boxes of mac-&-cheese in the pantry, because at that inventory level the fear of running completely out tends to balance the craving to eat it.
An RPG is a large easy target for compulsion radar-lock. A world with clear, well-defined (if sometimes hidden) rules, where your boss can't follow you, the IRS can't audit you, and your cat's litter-box doesn't smell. In itself the game is harmless (if not particularly beneficial to health or finances), but an inability to stop playing is a sign of a larger problem, just like binge eating (or self-starvation).
Just shutting off the game and going outdoors won't solve the underlying problem. A person who is attracted to that sort of retreat from the real world will likely continue to have problems with reality until he finds another target for his compulsions, or, in the worst case, finds his own version of the Texas Tower. The underlying problems must be addressed.Boy, I know what you mean. In college I was in a class with four other guys named Grax (and a girl named Graxe). What a confusion!
SS1 has no control thrusters.
Then how did Mike Melvill cancel the roll that SS1 went into last week?SS1 is doing exactly what it was designed to do. If the X Prize had been for successful orbit, SS1 would have been built differently. Remember, we're talking about a spacecraft not much bigger than the SUV that they use to tow it around the airport.
If SS1 had augured in, there'd have been plenty of coverage (at least until the next celebrity's wardrobe malfunction [would that require network uncoverage?]).
Government-sponsored space flight a third of a century ago:
- Was enormously more expensive (especially by the dollars of the 1960s);
- Was hideously dangerous;
- Nearly dropped dead after the Apollo flights;
- Did not provide a reusable spacecraft (in fact, they've only just recently recovered the one Mercury capsule they lost).
That said, I do wish that Burt Rutan had admitted more of the debt he owes to the research (however overpriced and inefficient it might have been) NASA has done over the decades. Instead, he put words in the mouths of NASA: We are screwed.
Point out to your manager, the one who hires hotshots straight out of school instead of proven workers with years of experience: Mike Melvill, the pilot who just made history, is sixty-three years old. In some businesses he would be just two years from mandatory retirement; at Scaled Composites, Mike Melvill is still the hotshot.
9% of worldwind-1_2.zip completed
And now I have 4 hours and 22 minutes remaining! You other people aren't cooperating...Ha! I finally got a download started!
Now, if everybody else will leave NASA alone for the next 4 hours and 11 minutes...Dude, that is a sadistic sig. It's been too long; I had to use Debug to read it.
Let Microsoft get the monopoly! If MS is controlling DRM technology, then it's sure to be completely insecure and easily hacked.
Still, I'm glad I've hung onto all my old LP's.
I'll take those 50:1 odds on transparent aluminum! Oh, wait, that was Monday. Darn.