The first time, our extended family watched it. Between "Mr. Gun Safety," the replacement vampire, tombstones getting knocked over, and the general incoherence, everyone was in pain from laughing so hard. You know how it is when you laugh so hard, you have to leave the room so that you can breathe? Imagine what happens when everyone tries to leave the room!
I bought the DVD and watched it by myself. It was terrible. Not "funny" terrible. Just terrible.
Clearly, there's some critical number of people needed to watch this movie. When you get the right number, it's wonderful - like a real-life episode of MST3K.
For example, a daylight murder with a single bullet to the head is quite different from finding a decapitated and mutilated body in a ditch.
Yikes - I hope you don't write the church newsletter.
You're right. The church newsletter needs to be clear. The above example mixes elements of MO and signature. Signature is born of the fantasy life of the criminal - it's the sorts of things that don't need to be done to accomplish the crime.
An MO might be using a 22 to the back of the skull - simple, effective, and it's not likely to leave a lot of blood spatter. This demonstrates criminal sophistication and planning.
The MO of the body in the ditch would depend on the cause of death, but clearly the homicide is a case of overkill. One does not need to decapitate someone to kill them - severing the carotid arteries is sufficient, if a bit messy and more likely to create blood spatter and other forensic evidence. That would indicate a lack of sophistication. The mutilation and decapitation indicate rage and some of the fantasy aspects of the criminal, and are part of the signature. The presence of the body in the ditch might simply be convenience, but it suggests an attempt to further degrade the victim. Victimology might give us further insight into the criminal's thoughts. Is the victim the primary target, or is the victim standing in for someone else.
It's very similar to the "journal impact factor" which has been in use in medicine for years.
The similarity is what caught my eye. "Impact Factors" have had an interesting effect on medicine: fighting has increased for the "right" journal to publish an article in seems to have increased, tenure, salary, and position can be affected by ranking, and I suspect it's had undue influence on what is researched. As Niven would say, "Think of it as evolution in action." Evolution, unfortunately, has a nasty habit of getting caught in local minima or trapped by past choices.
If this type of ranking catches on, physics will experience similar effects - both good and bad.
BTW: I had a copy of a VH1 joke in the draft of this article, but I cut it out. I'm glad - it works far better as a department. Short and funny always beats a long setup.
I suppose he was angry because he thought I was going to save him... Well, he needn't have worried; his suicidal efforts/injuries absolutely crushed any skills I might have had to save him... it's a miracle he even survived the 1/4-mile ambulance ride.
You did your job and you did it well. The way I figure it, at least he was practice for the next trauma patient you had that needed your skills. He also died with someone giving their best to try to save him. He couldn't say that no one cared.
I left the name off. I figured that some would know what I was talking about, most wouldn't care, and there's a few folks 'round here that might use it to wind up on the 11 o'clock news doing a "perp walk."
I've got a copy of at least one strip with 30 sec. of asystole in between SVT and NSR. Finding it would be the trick. The one I wish I'd have kept was from the guy in fine v-fib. Arrest witnessed by physician who didn't know CPR, down 5 minutes, when I called "clear" his eyes bugged out, he sat up and tried to strangle me. Scared the folks I was with, but I was more concerned with keeping my thumbs off the little red buttons. He screamed "NO!" in my face. After we pried him off me, we shocked him and got him back. Fellow actually woke up in the hospital...with no memory of why he'd yelled "NO!" I've always wondered....
I never had anyone respond that way to Adenocard.
Unsedated cardioversion is a completely different story.
"Sir, you're not going to like me after I do this."
But if you're breathing, it's safe to assume that your heart is working. That's basic physiology.
And not quite true.
I've had several patients without a pulse continue talking to me for a while. Looking over at the monitor revealed non-pulse producing rhythms to go along with the lack of pulse.
Eventually, everyone went back to following standard physiology - one way or another. But those transients are memorable.
(It's worth noting that there's a standard pre-hospital med that would cause asystole (flat line) for about 30 sec. The patient would report "feeling funny." The only problem was that patients would get upset when they'd see the heart monitor go flatline. There was a simple solution to this - we put the monitor where the patient couldn't see it.)
Rob
Good, cause firefox has render problems on slashdot all the time (where as IE doesn't).
I rarely get this problem. It really seems that the source of the problem is the advertisements on Slashdot. Since I started using Adblock, the problems seem to be way less. Sometimes, if Adblock takes care of the ad in a strange way, I'll get the problem, but a simple reload makes it go away.
I feel sort of guilty about using Adblock on Slashdot. One of the prime reasons for getting a subscription is that you have to put up with less ads. I'm not putting up with any ads now....
Amateur Radio Enthusiasts do CW (morse) communications using moonbounce, not voice.
[Note for Non-Hams: SSB is "Single Sideband" (a form of voice communication) and CW is "Morse Code" (the old "di and dah.")]
A few years back, I'd set up my 2m SSB/CW unit with a high gain directional antenna and listen in on EME. Most of it was, as you point out, CW, but occasionally there'd be some voice in there as well. Occasionally, you'd even hear an SSB station communicate with a CW station. I don't know why copying the CW portion of a SSB/CW conversation is hard, but for me it's far more difficult than pure CW.
One of the options provided is to make one of your email accounts a catch-all account.... The question I have, is this a good idea or not?
I have one of my e-mail addresses configured to catch all the "bad" addresses as you are talking about. There is an extraordinary amount of crap that account gets every day. It really isn't worth it, especially if you have the admin and postmaster addresses dump to your primary mail account.
Has anybody who has seen the movie ALSO read the script that IASFM printed back in 1984?
I remember Harlan's script very fondly. In 2004, it wouldn't be made into a movie. The current movie is probably the best that one could hope for. Ok, yeah, that's sad.
Anyone remember the story where God decides to film the Apocalypse and Harlan Ellison writes the script? God asks for a rewrite, and the angels just don't want to pass this on to Harlan....
The article from back in March talked about Samir Mathur's approach to the "Information Problem" with black holes. He uses string theory to show that the information may always be available and may, in fact, affect the "Hawking radiation" (the radiation that comes from black holes which allows them to evaporate - guess who discovered it?).
Hawking seems to be taking a different approach that is not dependant upon any particular theory like strings. The approach is especially interesting because it involves uncertainty in the position of the event horizon.
Back in the early 70s, physicists noted a parallel between black holes and thermodynamics. One could assign a black hole "entropy" based on it's diameter. But since nothing could escape from a black hole, the black hole would have a "temperature" of absolute zero. This would result in a violation of thermodynamics. Most physicists were willing to accept this, but thanks to clues provided by the ability to extract energy from a rotating black hole, Hawking figured out that black holes did evaporate, which gave them a very low but non-zero "temperature." His basic analysis involved pair production near the event horizon - one particle would escape, one wouldn't, and the "invented" mass would need to be given up by the black hole. An alternative way of looking at the problem involved how the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle would make the exact location of the event horizon vary slightly.
Information theory has significant parallels with thermodynamics. One might argue that they are actually the same thing expressed differenntly, except that black holes have an "information temperature" of zero. This violates the equivalent law in information theory that black holes were thought to violate in thermodynamics.
Having learned from history, many folks thought that some way would be found to extract information from a black hole. Hawking made the bet against what he hoped was true. His thought was that, if he was wrong, at least he'd win something!
It's interesting that the solution to the information problem may actually involve the alternative path that solved the thermodynamic problems with black holes, and that the alternative way of looking at things (the string theory approach) involves the behavior of particles.
When physicists speak of "beauty" they are usually referring to some behavior that is symmetric. The solution to the information problem might be thought of as beautiful because of the symmetry with the solution to the thermodynamic problem.
" I remember in college when this study was brought up in a statistics class. No one brings a clearly dead cat to the vet."
Then your statistics class was flawed.
I'll grant that people are less likely to bring a dead cat to the vet. But that simply won't explain the data.
Trauma produces a spectrum of results, from "uninjured" to "dead." The curve is basically bell shaped, but as the forces involved increase the curve will skew toward "dead."
Let's divide the result of the cat impact up into 6 groups:
uninjured
minor injury
moderate injury
severe but survivable injury
eventually fatal
immediately fatal
We can assume that most dead cats and most uninjured cats are not brought to the vet. Still, the shape of the curve we see (i.e. brought into the vet) tells us about the shape of the curve we can't see. For short falls, there are many more of "eventually fatal" cases and far fewer (in proportion) of the others we see. In contrast, for the falls from a greater height, cats were far less likely to die if they made it to the vet at all. This implies that either a) greater falls give cats a chance to impliment a survival strategy or b) greater falls are less likely to kill the cat if the cat does not die instantly. "B" would be truly bizarre.
What we would expect to see based on the physics backs up the study as well. Cats have been repeatedly observed to go into a "drag" mode if given enough distance to fall. Terminal velocity for the "drag" mode would be far less than the terminal velocity of the non-drag mode. Cats entering "drag mode" have been observed to slow down - just as a parachutist going from "tumble" to "drag" mode slows down. This means that the cats slow down - if they don't get the chance to slow down, then they will be going faster than if they have enough time to fall. The "drag" position also allows the cat the most surface area to impact on. The force per unit of surface area is far less, whereas a cat that lands on it's feet has a far, far greater force per unit of surface area - something that's more likely to produce massive trauma damage.
And there's the final clue. Above a certain height, there's no significant change in the type and severity of trauma seen. Once the cat hits terminal velocity, additional altitude doesn't change outcome.
Cats reposition themselves to land on their feet because they can sense the change in velocity (dv/dt = acceleration). My professor stated this only works for small height values (less than 20 ft), otherwise, the acceleration due to gravity might result in an unpleasant aftermath.
Actually, it's the short falls that tend to kill cats. Cats (like skydivers) can assume a position that reduces the terminal velocity and presents the greatest surface area for impact, reducing the force per unit of surface area. It takes a while to rotate and get into the position, so if the fall is too short, the cat will land in an awkward position and is far more likely to die.
This is not to say that the cats that fell from a great height were uninjured - just that they were more likely to have non-fatal injuries.
Hormesis is the name of the effect where, at low enough doses, something will have a beneficial effect.
There are quite a few references on the web, with this one being a decent overview. It also goes into possible mechanisms of action. Another site that discusses "safe doses" of cancer-causing agents has a nice graph on the page that helps explain the concept.
I first learned about it back when I was taking "Radioactive Chemistry." We had to use a literal 10-ft. pole to move the one cobalt-60 source. We bought our uranium from the art department. It turns out that the one black pigment had an incredibly high concentration of depleted uranium that was easy to purify.
It's interesting how some people who have been exposed to radiation and all sorts of nasties which could potentially develop into cancer, never get it.
At the two Japanese nuclear bomb sites, there's an interesting effect. The further you go from ground zero, the less the probability of survivors have of getting cancer. At a particular distance from Ground Zero, you find that the survivors actually have less chance of getting cancer than the non-irradiated Japanese population. Even further out, the rate of cancer goes back to normal.
I missed that - thanks!
Using the new mass (rounding out to 400 kg gives us 1x10^-7 km/sec. The new velocity would make a slight improvement - 1.3*10^-7 km/sec or 1.3x10^-4 m/sec
It's still really small.
Assuming that the Hildalgo probe masses in at 25 kg (the same as Sancho - it might be less) and is moving at 10km/sec and assuming the asteroid has a density of 3g/cc (giving a mass of 4x10^10 kg, and if the probe is absorbed into the asteroid and no material is lost from the asteroid, then the change of velocity for the asteroid will be about 6x10^-9 km/sec.
For comparison, the asteroid probably has a velocity somewhere on the order of 5-10km/sec.
If the asteroid and probe hit head on with both having a velocity (relative to the sun) of 10km/sec, then you can double the change to 1.2x10^-8 km/sec
It's probably a good idea to check my work. Here's how I did the calculation:
Let m1 be the probe and m2 be the asteroid.
v(center of mass)=(m1*v1+m2*v2)/(m1+m2). v2=0 for this reference frame and m1+m2 essentially equals m2. Since we're in the reference frame of the asteroid being stationary, the combination of probe and asteroid will still have the same velocity for the center of mass.
It's definitively more exciting but I wonder if it's not too hard to make such a millions miles away 'bull's eye'. 500 m in diameter is pretty small at this distance...
With the ability to correct the flight enroute, it shouldn't be too difficult at all. When Cassini went into orbit around Saturn, the navigation was so precise that they did not need to do a corrective burn.
Still, if for some gosh-awful reason you can't hit a 500 m target, this is the perfect time to find out!
Here's a bunch of folks that will probably have fun looking to see what effect the collision might have: The folks on the Minor Planet Mailing List are really into tracking the orbits of these rocks. I wouldn't be surprised if their data is the stuff that narrows the error bars on this experiment!
Re:Waste - NOT!
on
GPS on Mars?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Sounds like a waste to me. I mean, are we really going to be sending that many more rovers before we start considering sending a human exploration team?
First, such a system would be helpful to a human exploration team. Second, most human mission proposals include sending supplies (or machines to manufacture those supplies) on ahead. Getting, those machines together and getting the humans to them would be helpful. Third, there's a lot of science that can be done by carefully mapping the orbits of the Mars Positioning System - it's a great way to find mascons and the like. Fourth, yeah, they probably will be sending a lot more rovers, including aerial drones that would really benefit from a GPS-like system.
The radios used by medical staff and the wireless phones carried by hospital staff on the internal phone network are all certified for medical use.
Trust me, the HTs carried by 1t Responders, EMTs, paramedics, Emergency Response physicians, police, and the occasional fire fighters and hazmat team members aren't. The output on those suckers is also a lot more than your average cell phone.
And at least in any ER I've ever hung out in, the cell phones are the same ones you get at the various kiosks in the local malls - probably because that's where they came from.
Now, the hospital paging systems...man, if anything was going to cause problems, it would be the transmitter for those bad boys. I don't know if it's that the systems haven't been kept up, but we're talking major splatter - enough to mess with the front end of my HT over quite a wide range of frequencies.
I wonder what you'd actually find if you monitored cell phone usage by staff in a hospital....
Slashdot Mirror
I've seen Plan 9 twice.
The first time, our extended family watched it. Between "Mr. Gun Safety," the replacement vampire, tombstones getting knocked over, and the general incoherence, everyone was in pain from laughing so hard. You know how it is when you laugh so hard, you have to leave the room so that you can breathe? Imagine what happens when everyone tries to leave the room!
I bought the DVD and watched it by myself. It was terrible. Not "funny" terrible. Just terrible.
Clearly, there's some critical number of people needed to watch this movie. When you get the right number, it's wonderful - like a real-life episode of MST3K.
Yikes - I hope you don't write the church newsletter.
You're right. The church newsletter needs to be clear. The above example mixes elements of MO and signature. Signature is born of the fantasy life of the criminal - it's the sorts of things that don't need to be done to accomplish the crime.
An MO might be using a 22 to the back of the skull - simple, effective, and it's not likely to leave a lot of blood spatter. This demonstrates criminal sophistication and planning.
The MO of the body in the ditch would depend on the cause of death, but clearly the homicide is a case of overkill. One does not need to decapitate someone to kill them - severing the carotid arteries is sufficient, if a bit messy and more likely to create blood spatter and other forensic evidence. That would indicate a lack of sophistication. The mutilation and decapitation indicate rage and some of the fantasy aspects of the criminal, and are part of the signature. The presence of the body in the ditch might simply be convenience, but it suggests an attempt to further degrade the victim. Victimology might give us further insight into the criminal's thoughts. Is the victim the primary target, or is the victim standing in for someone else.
A great book on this topic is the Crime Classification Manual. It covers this in depth.
Funny you should mention the church newsletter. I no longer write ours. Perhaps I wasn't clear enough.
Google is going to be spending a lot of money on lawyers, it would seem. This isn't the only problem they're facing.
The similarity is what caught my eye. "Impact Factors" have had an interesting effect on medicine: fighting has increased for the "right" journal to publish an article in seems to have increased, tenure, salary, and position can be affected by ranking, and I suspect it's had undue influence on what is researched. As Niven would say, "Think of it as evolution in action." Evolution, unfortunately, has a nasty habit of getting caught in local minima or trapped by past choices.
If this type of ranking catches on, physics will experience similar effects - both good and bad.
BTW: I had a copy of a VH1 joke in the draft of this article, but I cut it out. I'm glad - it works far better as a department. Short and funny always beats a long setup.
You did your job and you did it well. The way I figure it, at least he was practice for the next trauma patient you had that needed your skills. He also died with someone giving their best to try to save him. He couldn't say that no one cared.
Ya done good, kid. Be proud.
I'd consider that a positive karma modifier. When someone you try to help is that ungrateful, it ain't your problem.
I left the name off. I figured that some would know what I was talking about, most wouldn't care, and there's a few folks 'round here that might use it to wind up on the 11 o'clock news doing a "perp walk."
I've got a copy of at least one strip with 30 sec. of asystole in between SVT and NSR. Finding it would be the trick. The one I wish I'd have kept was from the guy in fine v-fib. Arrest witnessed by physician who didn't know CPR, down 5 minutes, when I called "clear" his eyes bugged out, he sat up and tried to strangle me. Scared the folks I was with, but I was more concerned with keeping my thumbs off the little red buttons. He screamed "NO!" in my face. After we pried him off me, we shocked him and got him back. Fellow actually woke up in the hospital...with no memory of why he'd yelled "NO!" I've always wondered....
I never had anyone respond that way to Adenocard.
Unsedated cardioversion is a completely different story.
"Sir, you're not going to like me after I do this."
"That's ok. I don't like you now."
But if you're breathing, it's safe to assume that your heart is working. That's basic physiology. And not quite true. I've had several patients without a pulse continue talking to me for a while. Looking over at the monitor revealed non-pulse producing rhythms to go along with the lack of pulse. Eventually, everyone went back to following standard physiology - one way or another. But those transients are memorable. (It's worth noting that there's a standard pre-hospital med that would cause asystole (flat line) for about 30 sec. The patient would report "feeling funny." The only problem was that patients would get upset when they'd see the heart monitor go flatline. There was a simple solution to this - we put the monitor where the patient couldn't see it.) Rob
I rarely get this problem. It really seems that the source of the problem is the advertisements on Slashdot. Since I started using Adblock, the problems seem to be way less. Sometimes, if Adblock takes care of the ad in a strange way, I'll get the problem, but a simple reload makes it go away.
I feel sort of guilty about using Adblock on Slashdot. One of the prime reasons for getting a subscription is that you have to put up with less ads. I'm not putting up with any ads now....
...before the first news article "Driver of Glaring Car Shot to Death"?
Amateur Radio Enthusiasts do CW (morse) communications using moonbounce, not voice. [Note for Non-Hams: SSB is "Single Sideband" (a form of voice communication) and CW is "Morse Code" (the old "di and dah.")] A few years back, I'd set up my 2m SSB/CW unit with a high gain directional antenna and listen in on EME. Most of it was, as you point out, CW, but occasionally there'd be some voice in there as well. Occasionally, you'd even hear an SSB station communicate with a CW station. I don't know why copying the CW portion of a SSB/CW conversation is hard, but for me it's far more difficult than pure CW.
Come on - how many others thought "Shostak? Is that some made-up alien name from a science fiction show on at 3 a.m. on a cable channel?"
Turns out it's an actual Terran name. Go figure.
I have one of my e-mail addresses configured to catch all the "bad" addresses as you are talking about. There is an extraordinary amount of crap that account gets every day. It really isn't worth it, especially if you have the admin and postmaster addresses dump to your primary mail account.
I remember Harlan's script very fondly. In 2004, it wouldn't be made into a movie. The current movie is probably the best that one could hope for. Ok, yeah, that's sad.
Anyone remember the story where God decides to film the Apocalypse and Harlan Ellison writes the script? God asks for a rewrite, and the angels just don't want to pass this on to Harlan....
The article from back in March talked about Samir Mathur's approach to the "Information Problem" with black holes. He uses string theory to show that the information may always be available and may, in fact, affect the "Hawking radiation" (the radiation that comes from black holes which allows them to evaporate - guess who discovered it?).
Hawking seems to be taking a different approach that is not dependant upon any particular theory like strings. The approach is especially interesting because it involves uncertainty in the position of the event horizon. Back in the early 70s, physicists noted a parallel between black holes and thermodynamics. One could assign a black hole "entropy" based on it's diameter. But since nothing could escape from a black hole, the black hole would have a "temperature" of absolute zero. This would result in a violation of thermodynamics. Most physicists were willing to accept this, but thanks to clues provided by the ability to extract energy from a rotating black hole, Hawking figured out that black holes did evaporate, which gave them a very low but non-zero "temperature." His basic analysis involved pair production near the event horizon - one particle would escape, one wouldn't, and the "invented" mass would need to be given up by the black hole. An alternative way of looking at the problem involved how the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle would make the exact location of the event horizon vary slightly.
Information theory has significant parallels with thermodynamics. One might argue that they are actually the same thing expressed differenntly, except that black holes have an "information temperature" of zero. This violates the equivalent law in information theory that black holes were thought to violate in thermodynamics.
Having learned from history, many folks thought that some way would be found to extract information from a black hole. Hawking made the bet against what he hoped was true. His thought was that, if he was wrong, at least he'd win something!
It's interesting that the solution to the information problem may actually involve the alternative path that solved the thermodynamic problems with black holes, and that the alternative way of looking at things (the string theory approach) involves the behavior of particles.
When physicists speak of "beauty" they are usually referring to some behavior that is symmetric. The solution to the information problem might be thought of as beautiful because of the symmetry with the solution to the thermodynamic problem.
Then your statistics class was flawed.
I'll grant that people are less likely to bring a dead cat to the vet. But that simply won't explain the data.
Trauma produces a spectrum of results, from "uninjured" to "dead." The curve is basically bell shaped, but as the forces involved increase the curve will skew toward "dead."
Let's divide the result of the cat impact up into 6 groups:
We can assume that most dead cats and most uninjured cats are not brought to the vet. Still, the shape of the curve we see (i.e. brought into the vet) tells us about the shape of the curve we can't see. For short falls, there are many more of "eventually fatal" cases and far fewer (in proportion) of the others we see. In contrast, for the falls from a greater height, cats were far less likely to die if they made it to the vet at all. This implies that either a) greater falls give cats a chance to impliment a survival strategy or b) greater falls are less likely to kill the cat if the cat does not die instantly. "B" would be truly bizarre.
What we would expect to see based on the physics backs up the study as well. Cats have been repeatedly observed to go into a "drag" mode if given enough distance to fall. Terminal velocity for the "drag" mode would be far less than the terminal velocity of the non-drag mode. Cats entering "drag mode" have been observed to slow down - just as a parachutist going from "tumble" to "drag" mode slows down. This means that the cats slow down - if they don't get the chance to slow down, then they will be going faster than if they have enough time to fall. The "drag" position also allows the cat the most surface area to impact on. The force per unit of surface area is far less, whereas a cat that lands on it's feet has a far, far greater force per unit of surface area - something that's more likely to produce massive trauma damage.
And there's the final clue. Above a certain height, there's no significant change in the type and severity of trauma seen. Once the cat hits terminal velocity, additional altitude doesn't change outcome.
Actually, it's the short falls that tend to kill cats. Cats (like skydivers) can assume a position that reduces the terminal velocity and presents the greatest surface area for impact, reducing the force per unit of surface area. It takes a while to rotate and get into the position, so if the fall is too short, the cat will land in an awkward position and is far more likely to die.
This is not to say that the cats that fell from a great height were uninjured - just that they were more likely to have non-fatal injuries.
The usual FUD is that the politicians would get all the citizens implanted with chips, and that they would be able to spy on our every movement.
Mexico has come up with the concept of implanting the politicians so that the citizens can spy on their every movement.
This is a definite improvement, if you ask me.
Hormesis is the name of the effect where, at low enough doses, something will have a beneficial effect.
There are quite a few references on the web, with this one being a decent overview. It also goes into possible mechanisms of action. Another site that discusses "safe doses" of cancer-causing agents has a nice graph on the page that helps explain the concept.
I first learned about it back when I was taking "Radioactive Chemistry." We had to use a literal 10-ft. pole to move the one cobalt-60 source. We bought our uranium from the art department. It turns out that the one black pigment had an incredibly high concentration of depleted uranium that was easy to purify.
At the two Japanese nuclear bomb sites, there's an interesting effect. The further you go from ground zero, the less the probability of survivors have of getting cancer. At a particular distance from Ground Zero, you find that the survivors actually have less chance of getting cancer than the non-irradiated Japanese population. Even further out, the rate of cancer goes back to normal.
I missed that - thanks! Using the new mass (rounding out to 400 kg gives us 1x10^-7 km/sec. The new velocity would make a slight improvement - 1.3*10^-7 km/sec or 1.3x10^-4 m/sec It's still really small.
Assuming that the Hildalgo probe masses in at 25 kg (the same as Sancho - it might be less) and is moving at 10km/sec and assuming the asteroid has a density of 3g/cc (giving a mass of 4x10^10 kg, and if the probe is absorbed into the asteroid and no material is lost from the asteroid, then the change of velocity for the asteroid will be about 6x10^-9 km/sec.
For comparison, the asteroid probably has a velocity somewhere on the order of 5-10km/sec.
If the asteroid and probe hit head on with both having a velocity (relative to the sun) of 10km/sec, then you can double the change to 1.2x10^-8 km/sec
It's probably a good idea to check my work. Here's how I did the calculation:
Let m1 be the probe and m2 be the asteroid.
v(center of mass)=(m1*v1+m2*v2)/(m1+m2). v2=0 for this reference frame and m1+m2 essentially equals m2. Since we're in the reference frame of the asteroid being stationary, the combination of probe and asteroid will still have the same velocity for the center of mass.
I hope I didn't botch this estimate....
With the ability to correct the flight enroute, it shouldn't be too difficult at all. When Cassini went into orbit around Saturn, the navigation was so precise that they did not need to do a corrective burn.
Still, if for some gosh-awful reason you can't hit a 500 m target, this is the perfect time to find out!
Here's a bunch of folks that will probably have fun looking to see what effect the collision might have: The folks on the Minor Planet Mailing List are really into tracking the orbits of these rocks. I wouldn't be surprised if their data is the stuff that narrows the error bars on this experiment!
First, such a system would be helpful to a human exploration team. Second, most human mission proposals include sending supplies (or machines to manufacture those supplies) on ahead. Getting, those machines together and getting the humans to them would be helpful. Third, there's a lot of science that can be done by carefully mapping the orbits of the Mars Positioning System - it's a great way to find mascons and the like. Fourth, yeah, they probably will be sending a lot more rovers, including aerial drones that would really benefit from a GPS-like system.
Trust me, the HTs carried by 1t Responders, EMTs, paramedics, Emergency Response physicians, police, and the occasional fire fighters and hazmat team members aren't. The output on those suckers is also a lot more than your average cell phone.
And at least in any ER I've ever hung out in, the cell phones are the same ones you get at the various kiosks in the local malls - probably because that's where they came from.
Now, the hospital paging systems...man, if anything was going to cause problems, it would be the transmitter for those bad boys. I don't know if it's that the systems haven't been kept up, but we're talking major splatter - enough to mess with the front end of my HT over quite a wide range of frequencies.
I wonder what you'd actually find if you monitored cell phone usage by staff in a hospital. ...