Sure, there are going to be mishaps, but there didn't have to be. Having worked in the space industry and with some very expensive satellite equipment I can say that the number one concern is the health and safety of the people working on it and the number two concern is the health and safety of the instrument or satellite. I can't speak for all of the NASA institutions out there, but we have series of long checklists and procedures for when we work with the satellite. Another policy of ours is that if we will stop working with the satellite for a time, we have a procedure to put the satellite into a safe configuration and then another procedure to check everything before starting up again.
As far as cannabalization goes, we do cannabalize from other projects, but only after those other projects are done. Mishaps happen. Accidents happen. That's a part of life. But this particular incident didn't have to happen. This is why we have all the procedures we do. Not following procedures is one of the most serious mistakes that can be made. Following procedures was the very first thing drilled in my head when I first started doing that kind of work. Nine times out of ten, a "mishap" is the result of a very simple, easily caught mistake. A mistake that could have been prevented only by following a correct procedure.
Does anyone know where R really fits into the grand scheme of things? The only other language mentioned in the R FAQ was S... there were no comparisons with Octave or any commercial products like Matlab or IDL. So, what does R really do for you besides being another analysis and visualization project?
This doesn't make it any better, but R isn't the only language to have such weirdness. Here at work, we use IDL (Interactive Data Language) for our statistics and plotting and while there are ways to circumvent the DISPLAY problem, most of the time it's easiest to setup Xvfb and let IDL use that as the DISPLAY.
I don't know how R came into being, but IDL was originally designed as an ad hoc statistics and plotting tool. Because everyone was using it as an ad hoc tool, there was an assumption that everyone always had a display available. Unfortunately, that design flaw still exists in the language today. The implementation wasn't stupid back then, but fortunately IDL has new ways to handle graphics so that the display isn't involved. Maybe R had a similar history? Maybe not?
What?! No Dark Star? As the wiki says, "Four lonely, stoned hippy astronauts are adrift in space, have several adventures and find various ways to relieve their boredom." Classic. Just classic.
Re:Atlantis tragedy made economicly possible?...
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Soyuz To The Moon?
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· Score: 4, Informative
we lost a shuttle and crew due to old systems breaking down
Actually, the old systems have been pretty reliable. In the two shuttle disasters we've had, neither has been the result of equipment breaking down because of age. NASA took very good care of the shuttle, but the culprit of one disaster was a design flaw and the other disaster was caused by an accident. There's a big difference between a piece of foam damaging the leading edge of wing on take-off and a wing not working correctly because of lack of maintenance and care.
One problem my uncle kept running into was that his middle name was a single letter, E.* While many forms would ask for a middle intitial, there were some which would ask for an entire middle name. Almost always, he'd have to explain that his middle name was just 'E' because the person reading the form would assume that he accidentally wrote his middle initial instead of his entire name.
* He had the middle name 'E' because my grandfather wanted my uncle to be a Jr, but my grandfather didn't like his middle name, which began with an 'E'. So, he gave my uncle the 'E' of his middle name, but nothing else.
And none of the real problems with the shuttle are actually things failing because of age, it's either disaster creeping up on them or a continuing increase in maintenence costs.
Increase in maintenance costs is precisely because of age. As things get older, unexpected problems have a greater probability of showing up.
I agree that the shuttle disasters were not because of wear and tear on the vehicle. But, no matter the source of the disaster, it vastly weakened the argument that the shuttle was still safe.
It is rather sad that it took two accidents to see that they really did need a new space craft.
It didn't take the accidents for NASA to see that they needed new spacecraft. Many at NASA knew long ago that new spacecraft were needed. Some argued for new spacecraft, but they were opposed by those who said 1.) it'd cost too much and 2.) that since the old fleet was still functioning well, they could still be flown even though the age of the craft was past what they were originally designed. Many people thought new spacecraft were needed, but some thought it wasn't practical at the time especially since there had been very few major catastrophies.
My point is that many at NASA understood that new spacecraft were needed. The accidents didn't make them realize this. What the accidents did was take away the argument that the old equipment could still work well despite being older than what the original design specifications stated.
The "slingshot" maneuver is a pretty common with deep space missions. The reasoning behind it is to not only speed up the spacecraft, but also conserve fuel. Conserving fuel may be more important than you think. Fuel is heavy and the more you need, the heavier your spacecraft will be. The heavier your spacecraft, the more fuel you'll need to turn since you're trying to turn a heavier object. An easy way to gain speed without using much fuel is to use the gravity of the planets. Cassini flew by Venus twice and then Earth once picking up more and more speed each time until it went by Jupiter. It picked up some final additional speed from Jupiter's gravity and now a few years later, here we are at Saturn.
It's a common misconception that the plutonium would have caused catastrophe should the rocket have exploded. Had the rocket exploded on takeoff, the total land area infected would have been quite small. Only if you were present at the launch would you need to be concerned. If the rocket had gotten into the higher atmosphere before exploding, the plutonium would have dissapated to the point that it wouldn't have much of an effect. Even if the plutonium stayed concentrated, again it would have only affected a small area as in the case of exploding seconds after launch. In short, even if the worst had happened, it'd be localized and not something which would kill all life around us. I am much much much more concerned with the health risks of breathing in smog around JPL rather than worried about JPL's RTGs.
What you said is exactly the point I was attemping to make... Discourse is available to many people although it may be hard to find. Good discourse is hard to find precisely because the media is reporting on the extremes of the left and right. The extremes make for more exciting news and better ratings. Unfortunately, what's happening is that very few are trying to seek out the truth and talk about the issues because it seems to be the cool new thing to completely bash the other side rather than to debate the issues. To debate the issues requires study and doing your political homework, but it seems that people on the left are only regurgitating Michael Moore and CNN while people on the right call up Rush Limbaugh and Fox News.
My comments about the increase in polarization were more about the people who I talk to about politics and issues of the day. Years ago, we could talk and debate, but now these same people who I could debate with spew the venom and hate line that's so popular now. My original post was more a plea for civility. I don't want to seek out new friends or specifically seek out media that's in agreement with my views, but rather have my current friends and media willing to see both sides to a story. There's no denying that there will always be those at the extremes, but it seems to me that more people are at the extremes now.
For any administration there will be protests and there will be those that oppose the govenment. Has there ever been a time when a typical college campus wouldn't have protestors and anti-government movements of some sort? Has there ever been a time of war when there weren't anti-war protestors?
In my original post, I did not say that everything was rosy during the Reagan administrator, but rather that the hate and venom seemed to flow more freely during the following administrations. I was commenting on the *increase* of hate and venom, not that it didn't exist back then.
It used to be that people of differing opinions could agree to disagree. People could talk about the issues of day with civility and with respect for those with whom they were arguing. Now, the rules seemed to have changed. No longer is there room for intelligent and informed discussion, but only left-wing venom and right-wing drivel. The political landscape of the US is now extemely polarized and the sides keep getting more and more polarized as they fend off the parries of the other.
It seems that this polarization has been steadily increasing since Reagan left office. And now it has reached a point where the country is nearly evenly divided between conservative and liberal. The liberals who I know have become very much more liberal and the conseravtives much more conservative and each side believes that the other is idiotoic, distorts the facts, lies, and spews venom and vile for political gain. With these views being held by both sides, it's now impossible to even simply debate the issues. It's sad that we have reached such a point where "we" are right and "they" are wrong. I fear where our politcs are heading when there is unwillingness to listen to and a hatred of those with different views.
First, write everything down. Don't worry about organization at this point. Just get all of your thoughts down before you forget them. Next, determine the two or three keywords that categorize each tip and use those for the organizing things. Remember that things will fall into multiple categories. Use these categorizations to build up a comprehesive index into you tips. And there you have it.
The most important thing to remember is that you're writing this for someone else coming along, so tips need to be short and to the point and easily locatable. Basically, you're writing an O'Reilly "Cookbook" style document for your job.
I agree that having filtering software on the spacecraft rather than on the ground does not change anything for this particular project, but there are some situations where having such software would be very beneficial.
If your spacecraft has a limited bandwidth where you are forced to throw some data away, you will want some onboard processing to determine what's "interesting" or not so that you will have a better probability of getting better science data on the ground. Such software is also vital for spacecraft which have capabilities similiar to Deep Space 1'sautonav system. Imagine the possibilities of a spacecraft that can fly itself with very little ground interaction and able to automatically determine which instruments to use and when. Currently, deep space missions get planned out years and years in advance in order for the spacecraft to be completely utilized all the time. It would be nice to at least have an "autopilot" feature for not only attitude control but also automatically find opportunties when the instruments could be best utilized.
If you have a typical earth orbiting satellite with a high transfer rate, just return all of the data and do the processing on the ground. We have a number of large databases of satellite data just so we can do our own filtering and analysis on the data years and years after the fact. Some of our processing requires days or weeks to execute and sometimes we still don't know if the data is "interesting" or not. If we let the spacecraft determine everything, there will be things we miss. I'd prefer to use the flight software to only gather data and package it up rather than try to make fancy decisions for us. Of course, all of this also depends on the role of your data. Certain datasets will benefit from such advances. My data won't -- we need as much of it as we can get. But if we didn't have a large data rate, the best possible solution would then be to put some processing on the spacecraft to increase our odds on getting good data.
What does all this mean? It means that you need to do what's appropriate for your data and as always, your mileage may vary.
Glassy Metal article in Discover
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Amorphous Steel
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· Score: 2, Informative
Discover Magazine ran an interesting article on glassy metals back in their April issue, but to see the full article on-line you have to be a subscriber. However, if you can find someone who has a copy, it's a good read.
Anyone who's tired of overhyped, overplayed cookie cutter music should try listening to KCRW. Even though they are an NPR affliate, you'd only know it because of the news at the top of the hour. They play many different kinds of music and things you probably haven't heard. There are so many new artists to discover and new music to hear, and KCRW is one of the few places where you can do just that. It's good music.
For me the best kinds of games are those which combine escapism and require a good deal of thought. After a long, frustrating day it might feel good release that frustration with ripping off someone's head a la Mortal Kombot or fragging away in Quake or Unreal. However, those games tend to feed the negative emotions rather than alleviate them. This happens because I am still actively thinking of frustrations and annoyances rather than putting them out of my mind.
My preferred game are ones that I can escape into where I can forget the troubles of the day and engage my mind in something else. For me, a good adventure game fits the bill, but it all depends on what you can enjoy and immerse your mind in. Just don't immerse yourself so much that you forget to do little things, like eat or go to work.;-)
You're right. My spaceship never breaks the sound barrier because it travels in space where there are not enough particles to propogate a sound wave. Therefore, there is no sound barrier to break.
The biggest factor for how you'll do in such a position is not the technical aspect, but rather your personality and temperment. In order to have an efficient and well running system, you must lay down the ground rules and ensure that everyone follows them. This may require you to step on a few toes here and there. And there will be those who get pissed off at you for enforcing YOUR rules on THEIR project. At least that's how they see it. There will be those who think that CM is a waste of time and will put forth the minimal effort to conform. There will be those who ask you for unreasonable services time and time again. If you're okay dealing with the few oddballs and it doesn't bother you to say "No, you insensitive clod!" then you'll probably be just fine. Of course the majority of programmers under you will be reasonable and try to work with you.
The most important thing is to make a decision and not budge from it. If you try to please everyone all the time, you will have a very unhappy existence.
Whether you like it or not, English is the de facto standard of computer languages. While it would make sense to write programs in your native language, eventually you will reach the point where you need to work with others around the world.
While in college, I had to work with graduate students from India and China. We couldn't understand each other all the time, but we could read each other's code. I'm now in industry, but my company does work all over the world. It's pretty normal in my industry to have distributed project teams. With the advent of the internet, distributed projects have become more and more common. And we will probably see a rise in distributed companies, such as MySQL AB. A company like this couldn't exist if there weren't some sort of language standard.
Personally, I don't care what spoken language is decided on, but consider that the majority of developers in the world can speak English. Given that, it just makes sense to keep things in English as it will require the fewest number of people to have to learn a language.
There was an article from CIO Magazine earlier this month which dispells some of the myths surrounding open source from a CIO viewpoint. An interesting read.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, there are going to be mishaps, but there didn't have to be. Having worked in the space industry and with some very expensive satellite equipment I can say that the number one concern is the health and safety of the people working on it and the number two concern is the health and safety of the instrument or satellite. I can't speak for all of the NASA institutions out there, but we have series of long checklists and procedures for when we work with the satellite. Another policy of ours is that if we will stop working with the satellite for a time, we have a procedure to put the satellite into a safe configuration and then another procedure to check everything before starting up again.
As far as cannabalization goes, we do cannabalize from other projects, but only after those other projects are done. Mishaps happen. Accidents happen. That's a part of life. But this particular incident didn't have to happen. This is why we have all the procedures we do. Not following procedures is one of the most serious mistakes that can be made. Following procedures was the very first thing drilled in my head when I first started doing that kind of work. Nine times out of ten, a "mishap" is the result of a very simple, easily caught mistake. A mistake that could have been prevented only by following a correct procedure.
Does anyone know where R really fits into the grand scheme of things? The only other language mentioned in the R FAQ was S... there were no comparisons with Octave or any commercial products like Matlab or IDL. So, what does R really do for you besides being another analysis and visualization project?
This doesn't make it any better, but R isn't the only language to have such weirdness. Here at work, we use IDL (Interactive Data Language) for our statistics and plotting and while there are ways to circumvent the DISPLAY problem, most of the time it's easiest to setup Xvfb and let IDL use that as the DISPLAY.
I don't know how R came into being, but IDL was originally designed as an ad hoc statistics and plotting tool. Because everyone was using it as an ad hoc tool, there was an assumption that everyone always had a display available. Unfortunately, that design flaw still exists in the language today. The implementation wasn't stupid back then, but fortunately IDL has new ways to handle graphics so that the display isn't involved. Maybe R had a similar history? Maybe not?
What?! No Dark Star? As the wiki says, "Four lonely, stoned hippy astronauts are adrift in space, have several adventures and find various ways to relieve their boredom." Classic. Just classic.
we lost a shuttle and crew due to old systems breaking down
Actually, the old systems have been pretty reliable. In the two shuttle disasters we've had, neither has been the result of equipment breaking down because of age. NASA took very good care of the shuttle, but the culprit of one disaster was a design flaw and the other disaster was caused by an accident. There's a big difference between a piece of foam damaging the leading edge of wing on take-off and a wing not working correctly because of lack of maintenance and care.
For what it's worth, there was a similar inquiry not too long ago.
One problem my uncle kept running into was that his middle name was a single letter, E.* While many forms would ask for a middle intitial, there were some which would ask for an entire middle name. Almost always, he'd have to explain that his middle name was just 'E' because the person reading the form would assume that he accidentally wrote his middle initial instead of his entire name.
* He had the middle name 'E' because my grandfather wanted my uncle to be a Jr, but my grandfather didn't like his middle name, which began with an 'E'. So, he gave my uncle the 'E' of his middle name, but nothing else.
And none of the real problems with the shuttle are actually things failing because of age, it's either disaster creeping up on them or a continuing increase in maintenence costs.
Increase in maintenance costs is precisely because of age. As things get older, unexpected problems have a greater probability of showing up.
I agree that the shuttle disasters were not because of wear and tear on the vehicle. But, no matter the source of the disaster, it vastly weakened the argument that the shuttle was still safe.
It is rather sad that it took two accidents to see that they really did need a new space craft.
It didn't take the accidents for NASA to see that they needed new spacecraft. Many at NASA knew long ago that new spacecraft were needed. Some argued for new spacecraft, but they were opposed by those who said 1.) it'd cost too much and 2.) that since the old fleet was still functioning well, they could still be flown even though the age of the craft was past what they were originally designed. Many people thought new spacecraft were needed, but some thought it wasn't practical at the time especially since there had been very few major catastrophies.
My point is that many at NASA understood that new spacecraft were needed. The accidents didn't make them realize this. What the accidents did was take away the argument that the old equipment could still work well despite being older than what the original design specifications stated.
Routers in space will be the first steps towards an interplanetary internet. The folks at CCSDS (Consultive Committee for Space Data Systems) have been working on an interplanetary internet specification for a while now. Some additional technical details and other information is also available. Very interesting stuff.
The "slingshot" maneuver is a pretty common with deep space missions. The reasoning behind it is to not only speed up the spacecraft, but also conserve fuel. Conserving fuel may be more important than you think. Fuel is heavy and the more you need, the heavier your spacecraft will be. The heavier your spacecraft, the more fuel you'll need to turn since you're trying to turn a heavier object. An easy way to gain speed without using much fuel is to use the gravity of the planets. Cassini flew by Venus twice and then Earth once picking up more and more speed each time until it went by Jupiter. It picked up some final additional speed from Jupiter's gravity and now a few years later, here we are at Saturn.
It's a common misconception that the plutonium would have caused catastrophe should the rocket have exploded. Had the rocket exploded on takeoff, the total land area infected would have been quite small. Only if you were present at the launch would you need to be concerned. If the rocket had gotten into the higher atmosphere before exploding, the plutonium would have dissapated to the point that it wouldn't have much of an effect. Even if the plutonium stayed concentrated, again it would have only affected a small area as in the case of exploding seconds after launch. In short, even if the worst had happened, it'd be localized and not something which would kill all life around us. I am much much much more concerned with the health risks of breathing in smog around JPL rather than worried about JPL's RTGs.
What you said is exactly the point I was attemping to make... Discourse is available to many people although it may be hard to find. Good discourse is hard to find precisely because the media is reporting on the extremes of the left and right. The extremes make for more exciting news and better ratings. Unfortunately, what's happening is that very few are trying to seek out the truth and talk about the issues because it seems to be the cool new thing to completely bash the other side rather than to debate the issues. To debate the issues requires study and doing your political homework, but it seems that people on the left are only regurgitating Michael Moore and CNN while people on the right call up Rush Limbaugh and Fox News.
My comments about the increase in polarization were more about the people who I talk to about politics and issues of the day. Years ago, we could talk and debate, but now these same people who I could debate with spew the venom and hate line that's so popular now. My original post was more a plea for civility. I don't want to seek out new friends or specifically seek out media that's in agreement with my views, but rather have my current friends and media willing to see both sides to a story. There's no denying that there will always be those at the extremes, but it seems to me that more people are at the extremes now.
For any administration there will be protests and there will be those that oppose the govenment. Has there ever been a time when a typical college campus wouldn't have protestors and anti-government movements of some sort? Has there ever been a time of war when there weren't anti-war protestors?
In my original post, I did not say that everything was rosy during the Reagan administrator, but rather that the hate and venom seemed to flow more freely during the following administrations. I was commenting on the *increase* of hate and venom, not that it didn't exist back then.
It used to be that people of differing opinions could agree to disagree. People could talk about the issues of day with civility and with respect for those with whom they were arguing. Now, the rules seemed to have changed. No longer is there room for intelligent and informed discussion, but only left-wing venom and right-wing drivel. The political landscape of the US is now extemely polarized and the sides keep getting more and more polarized as they fend off the parries of the other.
It seems that this polarization has been steadily increasing since Reagan left office. And now it has reached a point where the country is nearly evenly divided between conservative and liberal. The liberals who I know have become very much more liberal and the conseravtives much more conservative and each side believes that the other is idiotoic, distorts the facts, lies, and spews venom and vile for political gain. With these views being held by both sides, it's now impossible to even simply debate the issues. It's sad that we have reached such a point where "we" are right and "they" are wrong. I fear where our politcs are heading when there is unwillingness to listen to and a hatred of those with different views.
First, write everything down. Don't worry about organization at this point. Just get all of your thoughts down before you forget them. Next, determine the two or three keywords that categorize each tip and use those for the organizing things. Remember that things will fall into multiple categories. Use these categorizations to build up a comprehesive index into you tips. And there you have it.
The most important thing to remember is that you're writing this for someone else coming along, so tips need to be short and to the point and easily locatable. Basically, you're writing an O'Reilly "Cookbook" style document for your job.
I agree that having filtering software on the spacecraft rather than on the ground does not change anything for this particular project, but there are some situations where having such software would be very beneficial.
If your spacecraft has a limited bandwidth where you are forced to throw some data away, you will want some onboard processing to determine what's "interesting" or not so that you will have a better probability of getting better science data on the ground. Such software is also vital for spacecraft which have capabilities similiar to Deep Space 1's autonav system. Imagine the possibilities of a spacecraft that can fly itself with very little ground interaction and able to automatically determine which instruments to use and when. Currently, deep space missions get planned out years and years in advance in order for the spacecraft to be completely utilized all the time. It would be nice to at least have an "autopilot" feature for not only attitude control but also automatically find opportunties when the instruments could be best utilized.
If you have a typical earth orbiting satellite with a high transfer rate, just return all of the data and do the processing on the ground. We have a number of large databases of satellite data just so we can do our own filtering and analysis on the data years and years after the fact. Some of our processing requires days or weeks to execute and sometimes we still don't know if the data is "interesting" or not. If we let the spacecraft determine everything, there will be things we miss. I'd prefer to use the flight software to only gather data and package it up rather than try to make fancy decisions for us. Of course, all of this also depends on the role of your data. Certain datasets will benefit from such advances. My data won't -- we need as much of it as we can get. But if we didn't have a large data rate, the best possible solution would then be to put some processing on the spacecraft to increase our odds on getting good data.
What does all this mean? It means that you need to do what's appropriate for your data and as always, your mileage may vary.
Discover Magazine ran an interesting article on glassy metals back in their April issue, but to see the full article on-line you have to be a subscriber. However, if you can find someone who has a copy, it's a good read.
Anyone who's tired of overhyped, overplayed cookie cutter music should try listening to KCRW. Even though they are an NPR affliate, you'd only know it because of the news at the top of the hour. They play many different kinds of music and things you probably haven't heard. There are so many new artists to discover and new music to hear, and KCRW is one of the few places where you can do just that. It's good music.
For me the best kinds of games are those which combine escapism and require a good deal of thought. After a long, frustrating day it might feel good release that frustration with ripping off someone's head a la Mortal Kombot or fragging away in Quake or Unreal. However, those games tend to feed the negative emotions rather than alleviate them. This happens because I am still actively thinking of frustrations and annoyances rather than putting them out of my mind.
;-)
My preferred game are ones that I can escape into where I can forget the troubles of the day and engage my mind in something else. For me, a good adventure game fits the bill, but it all depends on what you can enjoy and immerse your mind in. Just don't immerse yourself so much that you forget to do little things, like eat or go to work.
You're right. My spaceship never breaks the sound barrier because it travels in space where there are not enough particles to propogate a sound wave. Therefore, there is no sound barrier to break.
Chalk up another booming flight of the privately-backed SpaceShipOne
I don't know about everyone else, but I just hate it when my spaceship goes *boom*.
The biggest factor for how you'll do in such a position is not the technical aspect, but rather your personality and temperment. In order to have an efficient and well running system, you must lay down the ground rules and ensure that everyone follows them. This may require you to step on a few toes here and there. And there will be those who get pissed off at you for enforcing YOUR rules on THEIR project. At least that's how they see it. There will be those who think that CM is a waste of time and will put forth the minimal effort to conform. There will be those who ask you for unreasonable services time and time again. If you're okay dealing with the few oddballs and it doesn't bother you to say "No, you insensitive clod!" then you'll probably be just fine. Of course the majority of programmers under you will be reasonable and try to work with you.
The most important thing is to make a decision and not budge from it. If you try to please everyone all the time, you will have a very unhappy existence.
Whether you like it or not, English is the de facto standard of computer languages. While it would make sense to write programs in your native language, eventually you will reach the point where you need to work with others around the world.
While in college, I had to work with graduate students from India and China. We couldn't understand each other all the time, but we could read each other's code. I'm now in industry, but my company does work all over the world. It's pretty normal in my industry to have distributed project teams. With the advent of the internet, distributed projects have become more and more common. And we will probably see a rise in distributed companies, such as MySQL AB. A company like this couldn't exist if there weren't some sort of language standard.
Personally, I don't care what spoken language is decided on, but consider that the majority of developers in the world can speak English. Given that, it just makes sense to keep things in English as it will require the fewest number of people to have to learn a language.
This is my kind of garbage collection!
There was an article from CIO Magazine earlier this month which dispells some of the myths surrounding open source from a CIO viewpoint. An interesting read.