That's not quite the story. It wasn't an order that survived but the church. In Canticle for Leibowitz the Catholic church survived a nuclear holocaust and an ensuing uprising against all technology. While some clung to hope, most started destroying any technology they found in a desperate effort to prevent the same thing from ever happening again. Humanity would've been completely back in the stone age but for a Catholic engineer dedicating his life to preserving it. It's pretty much all lost anyway, and the book follows the course of humanity trying to re-achieve the modern world based on what he was able to rescue, long after he and everyone else who understood it was dead. It often presents situations that suppose how a person not familiar with a technology might react. For example, when some monks who had studied Leibowitz's documents figured out how to make a light bulb, one of their brothers was scandalized that they were messing with devilish powers, while others recognized that there was some impressive knowledge that had long been lost.
It's not a decidedly Catholic book, although the author was a member of the church and some issues like euthanasia and seperation of church and state enter into the story line. The Catholic chuch has maintained Apostolic succession for 2,000 years and is basically independent of political boundaries, so if any entity seems capable of enduring a nuclear war, the Catholic church is it, and it is a fitting structure for the plot to make use of.
The church did not exist in the book for the purpose of preserving the works. The church was there, as it was before the war, to try to understand and bring humanity closer to God. One order of the church was founded on the idea that preserving the technology of the past could aid in that, just like Mother Theresa's Sister's of Charity was founded for providing care to the poor.
A big tunnel filled with stuff that makes people sick hardly seems like something that could effectively inspire a religious devotion. At the very least, it would make a poor premise for a religion and an rather uninspiring reason to maintain an order. I think merely attempting to maintain the message that the stuff in the tunnel should be left alone (with further details for any potentially advanced civillization) is going to be the safest way to handle this.
Away from the fictional side of things, while I think some measures should be taken to make it clear that the waste is a hazard, I doubt it will be a problem. First of all, I don't believe a massive collapse of civillization and loss of scientific knowledge will happen. We're unaware of anything like that happening in our past (discounting myths like Atlantis). Secondly, this isn't going to be easily accessible. The Yucca Mountain proposal places the waste something like 1000 feet down. It's also all in a very hard and chemically stable ceramic form, encased in concrete and steel. It will be hard for anybody dumb to get to and get out of the tunnel. Finally, it would not be the first time mankind has discovered harmful things. Bubonic plague comes to mind as one thing we handled in our history.
I'd be willing to place money that the 986 billion years comes from the reporter, not the researcher. The researcher says he estimates the universe is actually at least 1 trillion years old, compared to the 14 billion year estimate for time since the big bang. The reporter was clever and figured out that meant the universe was at least 986 billion years older than everyone else thought, thereby proving that he is smart enough to competantly report on cosmology...
The reason this is worth reporting on (at least according to what I was able to decipher from our brilliant reporter on the subject), is not that the idea of prior universes is new (just a couple days ago I was reading about it in The Elegant Universe published in 1999, and I recall Stephen Hawking mentioning the idea in A Brief History of Time), but that he has created a model that shows a theoretically feasible transistion from the previous universe to this one that also might explain some of the puzzling observations we've made about our universe without resorting to dark energy.
I'm not going to try to deny that the Northwest hydroelectric dams have hurt the salmon populations, but they have survived for about 70 years since Bonneville, Grand Coulee, and the other big dams went up on the Columbia, while facing increasing commercial fishing. In fact I know a guy who was an engineer on one of the newer projects on a Columbia tributary (in the 80's I think...obviously there was more of an ecological focus then). While this is just offhand, he told me that fish runs actually increased after the dam and ladder were completed. Hydro is also a far more stable power source than wind, and it ramps very easily, allowing it to handle fluctuations in demand more easily than coal.
Wind power is only viable in some places it's true, but the impact on bird populations is generally minimal. Environmentalists like to point to a single incident in one valley in California where the populations of a handfull of species were decimated, but it's the exception rather than the rule. Also, those were older, smaller turbines that spin at the altitude birds of prey tend to fly at. The newer ones are much taller (often around 300 feet to the hub) and spin at lower RPM's, giving bird flying higher more time to avoid the blades.
Fusion is still expected to produce some radioactive by-products due to neutron bombardment of the reactor parts. Still, it sounds like a very promising option.
Ok, I think this is pretty impressive for an electric drive package (not the car itself...the gas Atom is definitely faster than this electric conversion), but to say it's the second fastest car in the world is ignorant. They compared it to two cars that are in the low 4 second times for 0-60 (actually, I'll bet it could only beat a Carrera GT on driver error). The Ferrari Enzo and McLaren F-1 both come come in on the order of half a second faster. This is just for "production cars." And as fun as the Atom looks to drive, you aren't going to beat either of those for top speed without complete aerodynamics package.
Regarding diesel locamotives. Another benefit of the electric propulsion in addition to smooth power transfer is significantly reduced mechanical complexity. Instead of a transmission and drivetrain running to each of the traction wheels (I believe there's usually 8-12 wheels seperated by up to 50 feet), you run the engine directly to the generator then run power cables to motors at each wheel. This allows these trains an added benefit in dealing with heat from braking. Under normal conditions trains brake by running the motors as generators. The power generated is dissipated out the radiator, I believe by eddy currents.
For that matter, one could fairly easily do the same thing to Half Life, Quake, Doom, and probably the Sims and Myst, too.
Regarding your circular saw analogy, you obviously haven't had to undergo an OSHA inspection. We've been asked to "fix" hazards not just to prevent people from getting hurt by being inattentive, but to prevent people from getting hurt by intentionally placing themselves in dangerous situations (ie, don't stick your fingers in the big spinning thing over there). The ERSB is not the only overzealous organization, but thanks anyways to Hillary Clinton and others for spearheading the effort to make them the leaders.
Something that will help us all like reducing the amount our fellow citizens in the Army need to expose themselves to the enemy? Or how about improving traffic safety by reducing stupid driver mistakes? Maybe allowing long haul truckers to reduce driving at less efficient speeds in order to minimize the cost of driver labor? That's just scratching the surface of what automated vehicle control might offer in the future.
And by the way, I'm almost positive DARPA funds a lot of energy research, too. Lastly, at this point, the world does not face a problem with food shortages. It is entirely in the distribution, with politics being the biggest factor.
Automated cars are something that is going to move at a really slow pace. They already are moving really slowly. It was probably 15 years ago that I first remember reading in Popular Mechanics about MIT (I think) instrumenting a big cargo van with the necessary sensors and computers to handle driving around a parking lot. They kept working on it year after year, improving their sensors and probably constantly rewriting their code, until maybe 6-7 years ago, they had it to the point where it all fit into a sedan, which they drove across the country (with a person in the driver's seat to take emergency control if necessary).
Since then, I've heard almost nothing about it. I think they're having trouble getting people interested in it. First of all, people are understandably reluctant to hand their life so directly over to a computer. Secondly, I imagine the auto industry is pretty nearly terrified of the liability. They have to be darn sure the computer isn't going to decide to run someone into a median at 70+ mph, and that an occupant can reliably take over when necessary. There are a lot of features on a car that can not fail absolutely. Your brakes are actuated by a vaccuum cylinder instead of a hydraulic valve so pressure is maintained in the event of a power loss, and even if the booster "runs out" of vaccuum, you can still mash down on the pedal and get some pressure from the master cylinder. I believe all power steering systems all still maintain a direct linkage for the same reasons. I've already heard stories of cruise controls going out of control and taking off at wide open throttle. I'm not sure what's been done about correcting that, but giving the computer control of steering, direction control, and braking adds new possibilities to slap a big lawsuit on the manufacturer.
Getting computer control into cars will take baby steps. I think this new Grand Challenge sounds like a good way to advance the technology (just look how fast the controls improved between 1 and 2), but we aren't going to see the first successes hit the road for years. I think Cadillac or somebody is developing a system that lets a computer perform a parallel park. That seems like a good start. I guess a bigger step would be allowing computer control on certain stretches of low accident rate highways (Wyoming seems like a good place).
Eventually, we could actually see fully automated driving be the norm, like in Minority Report (You were controlling the car!?!). The precision and "play by the rules" nature of automated control offers quite a bit of potential to reduce accidents. Of course, there are plenty of personal freedom concerns to address, too, but I'll leave that for others to talk about if they care to.
That shouldn't be funny, but I got a good chuckle out of it.
Makes us interpret the message more systematically? Shouldn't it then also improve our BS-detection, thereby having an adverse effect on 90% of the advertising out there? This would mean car commercials would be run at times when people aren't drinking coffee, otherwise more people would start to wonder how the Camry, Accord, Legacy, Stratus, and Taurus can all be the JD Power best in their class.
Also, I would tend to think that just being more alert would make us comprehend the commercial more effectively. And maybe instead of improving the way we interpret the message, it just puts us in a more agreeable mood.
Well shoot...don't the Israelites that Noah had an Ark of the Covenant, too.
For those who don't know, the Ark of the Convenant was the one built by Moses and the Israelites to hold the 10 Commandments and the priestly vestments. Noah's ark was a 300 cubit long boat that probably smelled really bad at the end of 120 days. I believe geneologies in the Bible suggest this would've been about 1500 years before Moses.
While nobody likes to have their theory debunked, not everyone is opposed to the idea, and I'm not sure who's theories this would really debunk. The article mentions some archaeologists give the idea some credence, but don't want this guy screwing around on the site because he isn't really a credited archaeologist and could mess up the site. I guess that could also be translated as they want to get a grant to study it themselves.
My first thought was this is so cool! Then it occurred to me that Europe did not develop large cultures needed to build stuff like this until the Greeks, and I think Bosnia was a very late bloomer. Who built it then? And how did it get covered with dirt? The article gives no clues, but some of the other articles indicate the man claiming the discovery thinks the people who built it were from Atlantis. Hmmm...
That was one of the best-written and most informative articles I've ever clicked to off of a slashdot discussion. A very good case study of the challenges and rewards of archeology.
It sounds like, although the labor force might not have been slaves, the system would have been somewhat similar to feudalism. Also, the article does not discuss the possibility of a hybrid work force of slaves and free workers, which I suspect would be just as possible.
Harvard's George Reisner found workers' graffiti early in the twentieth century that revealed that the pyramid builders were organized into labor units with names like "Friends of Khufu" or "Drunkards of Menkaure."
That interpretation of the names (I presume they would've been heiroglyphic) is pretty funny. They sound like modern band or football (soccer) team names.
I don't see why the design will be out of date. Very little will have changed at that point. The shuttle flew for 20 years, and ultimately its drawback was not an inability to keep up with technology (computer advances are irrelevant, NASA is able to handle them with reasonable effectiveness), but an unwise (in retrospect) architecture. Combining cargo and crew led to a high mass and high cost (although it was not entirely without advantages, since it added flexibility to do things like service the Hubble and carry spacehab modules). The side stack configuration led to the debris hazard. The winged landing increased the challenge of designing it to survive re-entry.
The cost will be lower. You don't have to launch 100,000+ pounds into orbit with the CEV every time you want to send a crew up. The first stage SRB is reusable. Development costs (see in my above post about the fixed per launch costs versus total costs on the shuttle) are reduced by using common components with the shuttle.
The safety comment is unsubstantiated. The SRB's suffered one failure in 114 launches (228 firings). The failure mode was identified, additional failsafes added, and the conditions leading up to the failure added to the big list of things not to do with this type of rocket. Furthermore, the CEV will sit above the SRB, not next to it where it takes the brunt of the force if something goes wrong. The CEV also will have a launch escape system that can very rapidly pull the capsule away from the rest of the rocket and parachute it to the ground, as opposed to hitting at several hundred miles per hour like Challenger did.
Ability to service the space station will be reduced, but not completely absent. Seperate crew and cargo launches are definitely possible to support the ISS. Microgravity science will, of course, take place on the ISS once reliable supply is re-established. That's what it was built for. The space shuttle only stayed up for 1-2 weeks at a time. The ISS offers a platform for really long-term science. The CEV, while not as versatile as the shuttle, offers the ability to be configured for lunar missions. I don't call that a dead end design.
It's also wrong to call the SpaceX dragon or the Silver Dart better vehicles than the CEV when not much is really known about either. I really admire SpaceX and think they deserve a big chunk of the COTS grant and stand a good chance of having a vehicle capable of serving the ISS in the next couple of years, but they have a long way to go. They haven't even orbited their first rocket yet. Obviously, it would be sheer folly for NASA to stick all their eggs in SpaceX's basket, when Elon is already almost 2 years behind his original schedule. I think the Silver Dart is even less of a bet. To the best of my knowledge, the current design is suborbital, and the Arrow rocket has only started engine testing in the last year, with almost no discussion of larger rockets to come.
Since apparently you hadn't heard, the space shuttle is being retired. Criticizing it changes nothing now. The future of manned spaceflight is not tied to the shuttle as you claim. For us Americans, it's currently tied to the CEV, which utilizes the best of both the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs with the best of and the lessons learned from the Space Shuttle program. Not to mention the space shuttle program had nothing to do with manned settlements on the moon or Mars. I think NASA envisioned continuing to have enough budget to operate extensive low orbit missions, in addition to manned exploration missions when the shuttle was conceived, which then is a failure of Congress and less directly us voters to provide them with the money needed.
Regarding costs, I've never seen a published comparison for operating the shuttle vs. launching Apollo missions in real dollars but according to Wikipedia, the Apollo program cost $25.4 billion ($135 billion in 2005 dollars) for 11 flights, including 6 landings. In comparison, the space shuttle program has used a total of $145 billion of NASA budget over the years, and has flown 114 missions. The average cost per mission then is $1.3 billion, but that includes R&D and construction of the shuttles and their facilities. Directly related costs per launch are quoted at only $55 million, meaning it would cost only that much to add another launch to the manifest, assuming no further problem mitigation needs to be performed. Yes, $1.3 billion is too much to justify the program, but when it was originally expected to launch 12-24 times per year (200-400 launches by now). I also want to point out that this "obvious mistake" was copied almost directly by the Russians with their Buran shuttle, which flew perfectly but was abandoned because of their limited resources, not because of the drawbacks (which we are now more keenly aware of) of a mixed cargo/crew vehicle in a side stack configuration.
My final point is that you incorrectly posit that the safety chief wanted to veto launching without the changes. He would've preferred the changes, but will apparently accept their omission since the major concern (the PAL ramp) was addressed. The decision to move forward was also endorsed by Griffin, who is a very accomplished engineer himself (a very different background than Keefe's, the former administrator). This is the way engineering works (in fact, life in general). You will never eliminate all the risks, so you figure out which ones can be addressed reasonably with your resources and you keep going.
That is pretty much correct. However, the higher density of ice also raises some problems. It is much harder and it the force is transferred to the shuttle over a smaller area. NASA is reasonably comfortable ignoring smaller pieces of foam because they are pulverized without causing damage if they contact the orbiter. The smaller area of contact means less skin area resisting the impact and the hardness of the ice raises the chances, for a given KE, of damaging the skin or the brittle thermal tiles. Now I don't know if the astronaut you interviewed specifically discussed ice or just relative velocity of foam chunks vs mass, and I won't claim to know more about the issue than her, but I suspect ice can easily attain enough speed difference to cause damage, so neither ice nor significant shedding can be ignored.
Two definite factors I can think of are (1) - it's more difficult to apply and to inspect and (2) - The structural volume of the tank would have to be larger, increasing the overall weight.
Two possible factors (I don't know enough about this, but I suspect they would cause problems) are (3) - The foam is porous. If fuel seeped into the foam, it would significantly reduce the insulating value of the foam allowing the fuel to heat up and boil off or ice to form on the outside of the tank as well as reduce the amount of fuel that could be used. (4) - The foam may react with the fuel, causing the enginges to burn inefficiently or even allowing the foam to explode in the liquid oxygen tank (similar to what happened on Apollo 13).
Correct. Foam pieces falling from the area in question (the ice ramp) have been observed to be too small to cause major concern, based on their calculations and testing, or will safely clear the orbiter (I forget which). They had been considering replacing the foam in this area with heaters. There has to be some sort of protection or else ice might build up. Ice hitting something at 500 mph is a lot worse than foam. I assume the combination of not wanting to add another active system (which can fail) and needing extra power supplied while sitting on the pad were contributors to this decision.
After the loss of Columbia, NASA removed a foam ramp from the tripod area that holds the external tank in place. This is where the piece that caused the damage came from. In Discovery's last flight (and I believe in some older launch videos), foam was also observed to come off the proturbence air load (PAL) ramp, which is another aerodynamic feature. This was also eliminated. Additionally, NASA is going to be flying a gentler flight profile on remaining missions (listed as "Low Q"). They lose a little bit of load capacity doing this, but the acceleration is lower and their speed is slower in the denser levels of the atmosphere.
Anything can qualify as web 2.0 if you can get a marketing professional to say it does. Read another 2 or 3 posts and you will find that web 2.0 is 60% news hype and justification by bloggers for having a blog (ie, because I get to be part of the next big thing), 39% marketing (we've re-engineered our portal to be web 2.0 compliant), and 1% a broad but somewhat misleading (in that it suggests there has been some sort of new specification or fresh technological development) term used to classify sites with a high degree of user interaction/contribution. Obviously, it only applies to new sites because the technology to allow user interaction didn't exist back when when Slashdot was founded, much less in the boom days of BBS...
And no, AJAX is not a requisite of being part of the intr'web 2. It just happens to be one of the poster children since it has only 4 letters, making it easy to remember.
No I'm not cynical. I'm just tired of people who didn't study in school, wear pants from the 70's, shoes from the 60's, and glasses from the 50's telling me that a bunch of 20 year old ideas are going to revolutionize the internet. Seriously, what is up with the 1950's plastic glasses? I can't wait until I start seeing short sleeved dress shirts with ties and pocket protectors.
Astronomers estimate there are on the order of 100 billion galaxies in the universe with an average of 100 billion stars each. That gives us roughly 10^22 stars (10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) stars in the universe. If somebody wrote an almanac with a one page article about each of those stars, it would be about 25 times as thick as the distance between Earth and Alpha Centauri.
The largest nuclear bombs detonated by humans have released an energy of approximately 400 quadrillion joules. This is about 20,000,000 times the energy expended by a Saturn V rocket, one of humanity's most impressive feats of engineering. In comparison, the time it takes our sun alone to generate the same amount of energy as that 100 megaton bomb is a single billionth of a second, almost long enough for a crew capsule propelled at top speed by that Saturn V to travel the thickness of a layer of saran-wrap!
Insignificant, yes, but the only life we know of with the ability to recognize that fact. When I think about God creating all this, awestruck doesn't even come close (hey, if people are going to keep getting modded up for flying spaghetti monster wisecracks, it seems fair to share my perspective, too).
I know I'm in the minority, but I didn't like the show. I admit, perhaps I just missed the big picture and all the cool action because it ran on Friday nights at 10 PM. I'm not the sort of person who schedules their Friday evenings around a TV show.
I guess I was expecting something more like the original series: a clear-cut good versus bad, shoot-em up with fun special effects and gratuitous Viper hot-rodding. The original didn't need attractive women or a religious subplot because it had shiny, badass robots, an evil overlord, and spacefighters with a "Turbo" button. Even the Millenium Falcon didn't have a turbo button. Instead, I watch 4-5 episodes and saw only one space fight (involving a single Cylon) and two shiny robots. The rest was the president complaining about how the vice president was a sneak and Adama acting afraid to exert any authority.
I can't really pin my finger down on what lost it for me. It wasn't (as I may seem to suggest above) the lack of action or character. Firefly wasn't as much about action either, and I only saw half a dozen episodes of it, but I loved it. I think the acting was solid and the characters decent. Maybe I'll have to catch the reruns from the beginning...assuming they're broadcast at reasonable hours.
I haven't bothered to read any of Dan Brown's books, but he's far from the only formula fiction author, although perhaps he takes it to the point of guaranteed boredom. Michael Crichton, who I find very engaging and entertaining and even pretty good on technical details if you keep in mind that he writes a form of sci-fi, also employs a level of formula not too different from your summary:
A group of the top experts in their field achieve a major breakthrough/discover something really cool. They bring in a guy or two with expertise in a related field to cover some of the miscellaneous details in advancing the project and serve as the story's protagonist, who then realizes they're ingoring/missing a really important detail and things are about to go to $h!7. Things go to $h!7, the lead expert's obsession with success gets in the way of fixing the problem but he gets killed in some ironic fashion, and the protagonist figures out the inherent problem just in time to save everybody's life/the world. There's usually an attractive and intelligent woman or two involved, but the protagonist never quite hits it off.
That pretty well fits Jurassic Park, Congo, Timeline, Sphere, Prey, and to a lesser degree State of Fear. I think he does a really good job of changing up the story though, to make the same plot interesting.
I pretty much agree with what you said, but I think I speak for any of us guy gamers when I say we'd much rather play a character with big forearms and chiseled abs than a pasty, skinny guy with glasses or a tubby, hairy guy with a mullet. We wanna look like tough sh!t when we kick @$$, but not unrealistic. By the same token, I think it's reasonably to suggest that female gamers want to play characters that are, while not blatantly inflated, more like Charlie's Angels or Alyx from HL2 than Rosie O'Donnel.
Deliberately making things (character attributes or otherwise) unbelievable just so they catch the eye detracts from the gaming experience for me. End bosses are kind of lame. Carrying 9 guns, while sometimes fun, seperates the story from reality one more level. These were two of the things I loved best about Halo: you carried a realistic weapons load and there was no giant megamonster with 12 rocket launchers at the end. Things did look good though, and that contributed to the fantasy without being gratuitous. Cortana wasn't exactly hideous, the guns and ships looked sweet, and the Warthog (puma) was far more graceful and buff looking than a Honda Element. Of course, people continue making games with the mega-deathray 10000 or chicks in dental floss bikinis sitting on the hoods of cars because these things catch the eye sitting on the shelf. And they usually suck, although I hear Tomb Raider broke the mold by actually being kind of fun, as did Unreal Tournament.
Then again, there's also really fun games that simply avoid needing to be believable like Mario Kart. A monkey driving a go cart....right.
A motorcycle is probably almost as safe as these little cars and a lot more fun. Granted the little tricycle has a safety cage and a seatbelt, but it has no where near as much mass or crumple zone as even a Geo Metro, which leaves it at a severe disadvantage versus other cars on the road. It could be tossed around and smashed up pretty easily, and if it does, things could get crushed around or intrude into the drivers compartment. I've heard of motorcyclists surviving some crazy accidents because they wear extra safety gear that car drivers don't, and their tendency to slide when down carries them clear of the accident and avoids subjecting the rider to extreme accelerations. I'd guess the trike would be safer in some situations, and a bike in others.
If I were buying something small like that, I'd definitely go for a bike. The tricycle tops out at low freeway speeds, and I wouldn't travel on a freeway in something that couldn't safely get up to speed to merge by the end of the entrance ramp or have any power to spare. A bike can also carry a passenger, and probably about the same amount of groceries with a big set of saddlebags. If I were really concerned about fuel economy and didn't need to travel on freeways, keeping in mind that some bikes exceed 50 mpg, I'd get a scooter and still maintain the ability to carry a passenger. Then again, I don't fancy myself being seen on a scooter anymore than I do in a Hummer.
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That's not quite the story. It wasn't an order that survived but the church. In Canticle for Leibowitz the Catholic church survived a nuclear holocaust and an ensuing uprising against all technology. While some clung to hope, most started destroying any technology they found in a desperate effort to prevent the same thing from ever happening again. Humanity would've been completely back in the stone age but for a Catholic engineer dedicating his life to preserving it. It's pretty much all lost anyway, and the book follows the course of humanity trying to re-achieve the modern world based on what he was able to rescue, long after he and everyone else who understood it was dead. It often presents situations that suppose how a person not familiar with a technology might react. For example, when some monks who had studied Leibowitz's documents figured out how to make a light bulb, one of their brothers was scandalized that they were messing with devilish powers, while others recognized that there was some impressive knowledge that had long been lost.
It's not a decidedly Catholic book, although the author was a member of the church and some issues like euthanasia and seperation of church and state enter into the story line. The Catholic chuch has maintained Apostolic succession for 2,000 years and is basically independent of political boundaries, so if any entity seems capable of enduring a nuclear war, the Catholic church is it, and it is a fitting structure for the plot to make use of.
The church did not exist in the book for the purpose of preserving the works. The church was there, as it was before the war, to try to understand and bring humanity closer to God. One order of the church was founded on the idea that preserving the technology of the past could aid in that, just like Mother Theresa's Sister's of Charity was founded for providing care to the poor.
A big tunnel filled with stuff that makes people sick hardly seems like something that could effectively inspire a religious devotion. At the very least, it would make a poor premise for a religion and an rather uninspiring reason to maintain an order. I think merely attempting to maintain the message that the stuff in the tunnel should be left alone (with further details for any potentially advanced civillization) is going to be the safest way to handle this.
Away from the fictional side of things, while I think some measures should be taken to make it clear that the waste is a hazard, I doubt it will be a problem. First of all, I don't believe a massive collapse of civillization and loss of scientific knowledge will happen. We're unaware of anything like that happening in our past (discounting myths like Atlantis). Secondly, this isn't going to be easily accessible. The Yucca Mountain proposal places the waste something like 1000 feet down. It's also all in a very hard and chemically stable ceramic form, encased in concrete and steel. It will be hard for anybody dumb to get to and get out of the tunnel. Finally, it would not be the first time mankind has discovered harmful things. Bubonic plague comes to mind as one thing we handled in our history.
I'd be willing to place money that the 986 billion years comes from the reporter, not the researcher. The researcher says he estimates the universe is actually at least 1 trillion years old, compared to the 14 billion year estimate for time since the big bang. The reporter was clever and figured out that meant the universe was at least 986 billion years older than everyone else thought, thereby proving that he is smart enough to competantly report on cosmology...
The reason this is worth reporting on (at least according to what I was able to decipher from our brilliant reporter on the subject), is not that the idea of prior universes is new (just a couple days ago I was reading about it in The Elegant Universe published in 1999, and I recall Stephen Hawking mentioning the idea in A Brief History of Time), but that he has created a model that shows a theoretically feasible transistion from the previous universe to this one that also might explain some of the puzzling observations we've made about our universe without resorting to dark energy.
I'm not going to try to deny that the Northwest hydroelectric dams have hurt the salmon populations, but they have survived for about 70 years since Bonneville, Grand Coulee, and the other big dams went up on the Columbia, while facing increasing commercial fishing. In fact I know a guy who was an engineer on one of the newer projects on a Columbia tributary (in the 80's I think...obviously there was more of an ecological focus then). While this is just offhand, he told me that fish runs actually increased after the dam and ladder were completed. Hydro is also a far more stable power source than wind, and it ramps very easily, allowing it to handle fluctuations in demand more easily than coal.
Wind power is only viable in some places it's true, but the impact on bird populations is generally minimal. Environmentalists like to point to a single incident in one valley in California where the populations of a handfull of species were decimated, but it's the exception rather than the rule. Also, those were older, smaller turbines that spin at the altitude birds of prey tend to fly at. The newer ones are much taller (often around 300 feet to the hub) and spin at lower RPM's, giving bird flying higher more time to avoid the blades.
Fusion is still expected to produce some radioactive by-products due to neutron bombardment of the reactor parts. Still, it sounds like a very promising option.
Ok, I think this is pretty impressive for an electric drive package (not the car itself...the gas Atom is definitely faster than this electric conversion), but to say it's the second fastest car in the world is ignorant. They compared it to two cars that are in the low 4 second times for 0-60 (actually, I'll bet it could only beat a Carrera GT on driver error). The Ferrari Enzo and McLaren F-1 both come come in on the order of half a second faster. This is just for "production cars." And as fun as the Atom looks to drive, you aren't going to beat either of those for top speed without complete aerodynamics package.
Regarding diesel locamotives. Another benefit of the electric propulsion in addition to smooth power transfer is significantly reduced mechanical complexity. Instead of a transmission and drivetrain running to each of the traction wheels (I believe there's usually 8-12 wheels seperated by up to 50 feet), you run the engine directly to the generator then run power cables to motors at each wheel. This allows these trains an added benefit in dealing with heat from braking. Under normal conditions trains brake by running the motors as generators. The power generated is dissipated out the radiator, I believe by eddy currents.
For that matter, one could fairly easily do the same thing to Half Life, Quake, Doom, and probably the Sims and Myst, too.
Regarding your circular saw analogy, you obviously haven't had to undergo an OSHA inspection. We've been asked to "fix" hazards not just to prevent people from getting hurt by being inattentive, but to prevent people from getting hurt by intentionally placing themselves in dangerous situations (ie, don't stick your fingers in the big spinning thing over there). The ERSB is not the only overzealous organization, but thanks anyways to Hillary Clinton and others for spearheading the effort to make them the leaders.
Where "reasonably practical" means slewing a 10 mile long particle accelerator to point at your target.
Something that will help us all like reducing the amount our fellow citizens in the Army need to expose themselves to the enemy? Or how about improving traffic safety by reducing stupid driver mistakes? Maybe allowing long haul truckers to reduce driving at less efficient speeds in order to minimize the cost of driver labor? That's just scratching the surface of what automated vehicle control might offer in the future.
And by the way, I'm almost positive DARPA funds a lot of energy research, too. Lastly, at this point, the world does not face a problem with food shortages. It is entirely in the distribution, with politics being the biggest factor.
Automated cars are something that is going to move at a really slow pace. They already are moving really slowly. It was probably 15 years ago that I first remember reading in Popular Mechanics about MIT (I think) instrumenting a big cargo van with the necessary sensors and computers to handle driving around a parking lot. They kept working on it year after year, improving their sensors and probably constantly rewriting their code, until maybe 6-7 years ago, they had it to the point where it all fit into a sedan, which they drove across the country (with a person in the driver's seat to take emergency control if necessary).
Since then, I've heard almost nothing about it. I think they're having trouble getting people interested in it. First of all, people are understandably reluctant to hand their life so directly over to a computer. Secondly, I imagine the auto industry is pretty nearly terrified of the liability. They have to be darn sure the computer isn't going to decide to run someone into a median at 70+ mph, and that an occupant can reliably take over when necessary. There are a lot of features on a car that can not fail absolutely. Your brakes are actuated by a vaccuum cylinder instead of a hydraulic valve so pressure is maintained in the event of a power loss, and even if the booster "runs out" of vaccuum, you can still mash down on the pedal and get some pressure from the master cylinder. I believe all power steering systems all still maintain a direct linkage for the same reasons. I've already heard stories of cruise controls going out of control and taking off at wide open throttle. I'm not sure what's been done about correcting that, but giving the computer control of steering, direction control, and braking adds new possibilities to slap a big lawsuit on the manufacturer.
Getting computer control into cars will take baby steps. I think this new Grand Challenge sounds like a good way to advance the technology (just look how fast the controls improved between 1 and 2), but we aren't going to see the first successes hit the road for years. I think Cadillac or somebody is developing a system that lets a computer perform a parallel park. That seems like a good start. I guess a bigger step would be allowing computer control on certain stretches of low accident rate highways (Wyoming seems like a good place).
Eventually, we could actually see fully automated driving be the norm, like in Minority Report (You were controlling the car!?!). The precision and "play by the rules" nature of automated control offers quite a bit of potential to reduce accidents. Of course, there are plenty of personal freedom concerns to address, too, but I'll leave that for others to talk about if they care to.
That shouldn't be funny, but I got a good chuckle out of it.
Makes us interpret the message more systematically? Shouldn't it then also improve our BS-detection, thereby having an adverse effect on 90% of the advertising out there? This would mean car commercials would be run at times when people aren't drinking coffee, otherwise more people would start to wonder how the Camry, Accord, Legacy, Stratus, and Taurus can all be the JD Power best in their class.
Also, I would tend to think that just being more alert would make us comprehend the commercial more effectively. And maybe instead of improving the way we interpret the message, it just puts us in a more agreeable mood.
Well shoot...don't the Israelites that Noah had an Ark of the Covenant, too.
For those who don't know, the Ark of the Convenant was the one built by Moses and the Israelites to hold the 10 Commandments and the priestly vestments. Noah's ark was a 300 cubit long boat that probably smelled really bad at the end of 120 days. I believe geneologies in the Bible suggest this would've been about 1500 years before Moses.
While nobody likes to have their theory debunked, not everyone is opposed to the idea, and I'm not sure who's theories this would really debunk. The article mentions some archaeologists give the idea some credence, but don't want this guy screwing around on the site because he isn't really a credited archaeologist and could mess up the site. I guess that could also be translated as they want to get a grant to study it themselves.
My first thought was this is so cool! Then it occurred to me that Europe did not develop large cultures needed to build stuff like this until the Greeks, and I think Bosnia was a very late bloomer. Who built it then? And how did it get covered with dirt? The article gives no clues, but some of the other articles indicate the man claiming the discovery thinks the people who built it were from Atlantis. Hmmm...
That was one of the best-written and most informative articles I've ever clicked to off of a slashdot discussion. A very good case study of the challenges and rewards of archeology.
It sounds like, although the labor force might not have been slaves, the system would have been somewhat similar to feudalism. Also, the article does not discuss the possibility of a hybrid work force of slaves and free workers, which I suspect would be just as possible.
That interpretation of the names (I presume they would've been heiroglyphic) is pretty funny. They sound like modern band or football (soccer) team names.
Bravo...I've wanted to say that basically ever since I started reading slashdot.
I don't see why the design will be out of date. Very little will have changed at that point. The shuttle flew for 20 years, and ultimately its drawback was not an inability to keep up with technology (computer advances are irrelevant, NASA is able to handle them with reasonable effectiveness), but an unwise (in retrospect) architecture. Combining cargo and crew led to a high mass and high cost (although it was not entirely without advantages, since it added flexibility to do things like service the Hubble and carry spacehab modules). The side stack configuration led to the debris hazard. The winged landing increased the challenge of designing it to survive re-entry.
The cost will be lower. You don't have to launch 100,000+ pounds into orbit with the CEV every time you want to send a crew up. The first stage SRB is reusable. Development costs (see in my above post about the fixed per launch costs versus total costs on the shuttle) are reduced by using common components with the shuttle.
The safety comment is unsubstantiated. The SRB's suffered one failure in 114 launches (228 firings). The failure mode was identified, additional failsafes added, and the conditions leading up to the failure added to the big list of things not to do with this type of rocket. Furthermore, the CEV will sit above the SRB, not next to it where it takes the brunt of the force if something goes wrong. The CEV also will have a launch escape system that can very rapidly pull the capsule away from the rest of the rocket and parachute it to the ground, as opposed to hitting at several hundred miles per hour like Challenger did.
Ability to service the space station will be reduced, but not completely absent. Seperate crew and cargo launches are definitely possible to support the ISS. Microgravity science will, of course, take place on the ISS once reliable supply is re-established. That's what it was built for. The space shuttle only stayed up for 1-2 weeks at a time. The ISS offers a platform for really long-term science. The CEV, while not as versatile as the shuttle, offers the ability to be configured for lunar missions. I don't call that a dead end design.
It's also wrong to call the SpaceX dragon or the Silver Dart better vehicles than the CEV when not much is really known about either. I really admire SpaceX and think they deserve a big chunk of the COTS grant and stand a good chance of having a vehicle capable of serving the ISS in the next couple of years, but they have a long way to go. They haven't even orbited their first rocket yet. Obviously, it would be sheer folly for NASA to stick all their eggs in SpaceX's basket, when Elon is already almost 2 years behind his original schedule. I think the Silver Dart is even less of a bet. To the best of my knowledge, the current design is suborbital, and the Arrow rocket has only started engine testing in the last year, with almost no discussion of larger rockets to come.
Since apparently you hadn't heard, the space shuttle is being retired. Criticizing it changes nothing now. The future of manned spaceflight is not tied to the shuttle as you claim. For us Americans, it's currently tied to the CEV, which utilizes the best of both the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs with the best of and the lessons learned from the Space Shuttle program. Not to mention the space shuttle program had nothing to do with manned settlements on the moon or Mars. I think NASA envisioned continuing to have enough budget to operate extensive low orbit missions, in addition to manned exploration missions when the shuttle was conceived, which then is a failure of Congress and less directly us voters to provide them with the money needed.
Regarding costs, I've never seen a published comparison for operating the shuttle vs. launching Apollo missions in real dollars but according to Wikipedia, the Apollo program cost $25.4 billion ($135 billion in 2005 dollars) for 11 flights, including 6 landings. In comparison, the space shuttle program has used a total of $145 billion of NASA budget over the years, and has flown 114 missions. The average cost per mission then is $1.3 billion, but that includes R&D and construction of the shuttles and their facilities. Directly related costs per launch are quoted at only $55 million, meaning it would cost only that much to add another launch to the manifest, assuming no further problem mitigation needs to be performed. Yes, $1.3 billion is too much to justify the program, but when it was originally expected to launch 12-24 times per year (200-400 launches by now). I also want to point out that this "obvious mistake" was copied almost directly by the Russians with their Buran shuttle, which flew perfectly but was abandoned because of their limited resources, not because of the drawbacks (which we are now more keenly aware of) of a mixed cargo/crew vehicle in a side stack configuration.
My final point is that you incorrectly posit that the safety chief wanted to veto launching without the changes. He would've preferred the changes, but will apparently accept their omission since the major concern (the PAL ramp) was addressed. The decision to move forward was also endorsed by Griffin, who is a very accomplished engineer himself (a very different background than Keefe's, the former administrator). This is the way engineering works (in fact, life in general). You will never eliminate all the risks, so you figure out which ones can be addressed reasonably with your resources and you keep going.
That is pretty much correct. However, the higher density of ice also raises some problems. It is much harder and it the force is transferred to the shuttle over a smaller area. NASA is reasonably comfortable ignoring smaller pieces of foam because they are pulverized without causing damage if they contact the orbiter. The smaller area of contact means less skin area resisting the impact and the hardness of the ice raises the chances, for a given KE, of damaging the skin or the brittle thermal tiles. Now I don't know if the astronaut you interviewed specifically discussed ice or just relative velocity of foam chunks vs mass, and I won't claim to know more about the issue than her, but I suspect ice can easily attain enough speed difference to cause damage, so neither ice nor significant shedding can be ignored.
One other problem with ice is the added weight.
Two definite factors I can think of are (1) - it's more difficult to apply and to inspect and (2) - The structural volume of the tank would have to be larger, increasing the overall weight.
Two possible factors (I don't know enough about this, but I suspect they would cause problems) are (3) - The foam is porous. If fuel seeped into the foam, it would significantly reduce the insulating value of the foam allowing the fuel to heat up and boil off or ice to form on the outside of the tank as well as reduce the amount of fuel that could be used. (4) - The foam may react with the fuel, causing the enginges to burn inefficiently or even allowing the foam to explode in the liquid oxygen tank (similar to what happened on Apollo 13).
Correct. Foam pieces falling from the area in question (the ice ramp) have been observed to be too small to cause major concern, based on their calculations and testing, or will safely clear the orbiter (I forget which). They had been considering replacing the foam in this area with heaters. There has to be some sort of protection or else ice might build up. Ice hitting something at 500 mph is a lot worse than foam. I assume the combination of not wanting to add another active system (which can fail) and needing extra power supplied while sitting on the pad were contributors to this decision.
After the loss of Columbia, NASA removed a foam ramp from the tripod area that holds the external tank in place. This is where the piece that caused the damage came from. In Discovery's last flight (and I believe in some older launch videos), foam was also observed to come off the proturbence air load (PAL) ramp, which is another aerodynamic feature. This was also eliminated. Additionally, NASA is going to be flying a gentler flight profile on remaining missions (listed as "Low Q"). They lose a little bit of load capacity doing this, but the acceleration is lower and their speed is slower in the denser levels of the atmosphere.
Anything can qualify as web 2.0 if you can get a marketing professional to say it does. Read another 2 or 3 posts and you will find that web 2.0 is 60% news hype and justification by bloggers for having a blog (ie, because I get to be part of the next big thing), 39% marketing (we've re-engineered our portal to be web 2.0 compliant), and 1% a broad but somewhat misleading (in that it suggests there has been some sort of new specification or fresh technological development) term used to classify sites with a high degree of user interaction/contribution. Obviously, it only applies to new sites because the technology to allow user interaction didn't exist back when when Slashdot was founded, much less in the boom days of BBS...
And no, AJAX is not a requisite of being part of the intr'web 2. It just happens to be one of the poster children since it has only 4 letters, making it easy to remember.
No I'm not cynical. I'm just tired of people who didn't study in school, wear pants from the 70's, shoes from the 60's, and glasses from the 50's telling me that a bunch of 20 year old ideas are going to revolutionize the internet. Seriously, what is up with the 1950's plastic glasses? I can't wait until I start seeing short sleeved dress shirts with ties and pocket protectors.
Astronomers estimate there are on the order of 100 billion galaxies in the universe with an average of 100 billion stars each. That gives us roughly 10^22 stars (10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) stars in the universe. If somebody wrote an almanac with a one page article about each of those stars, it would be about 25 times as thick as the distance between Earth and Alpha Centauri.
The largest nuclear bombs detonated by humans have released an energy of approximately 400 quadrillion joules. This is about 20,000,000 times the energy expended by a Saturn V rocket, one of humanity's most impressive feats of engineering. In comparison, the time it takes our sun alone to generate the same amount of energy as that 100 megaton bomb is a single billionth of a second, almost long enough for a crew capsule propelled at top speed by that Saturn V to travel the thickness of a layer of saran-wrap!
Insignificant, yes, but the only life we know of with the ability to recognize that fact. When I think about God creating all this, awestruck doesn't even come close (hey, if people are going to keep getting modded up for flying spaghetti monster wisecracks, it seems fair to share my perspective, too).
I know I'm in the minority, but I didn't like the show. I admit, perhaps I just missed the big picture and all the cool action because it ran on Friday nights at 10 PM. I'm not the sort of person who schedules their Friday evenings around a TV show.
I guess I was expecting something more like the original series: a clear-cut good versus bad, shoot-em up with fun special effects and gratuitous Viper hot-rodding. The original didn't need attractive women or a religious subplot because it had shiny, badass robots, an evil overlord, and spacefighters with a "Turbo" button. Even the Millenium Falcon didn't have a turbo button. Instead, I watch 4-5 episodes and saw only one space fight (involving a single Cylon) and two shiny robots. The rest was the president complaining about how the vice president was a sneak and Adama acting afraid to exert any authority.
I can't really pin my finger down on what lost it for me. It wasn't (as I may seem to suggest above) the lack of action or character. Firefly wasn't as much about action either, and I only saw half a dozen episodes of it, but I loved it. I think the acting was solid and the characters decent. Maybe I'll have to catch the reruns from the beginning...assuming they're broadcast at reasonable hours.
I haven't bothered to read any of Dan Brown's books, but he's far from the only formula fiction author, although perhaps he takes it to the point of guaranteed boredom. Michael Crichton, who I find very engaging and entertaining and even pretty good on technical details if you keep in mind that he writes a form of sci-fi, also employs a level of formula not too different from your summary:
A group of the top experts in their field achieve a major breakthrough/discover something really cool. They bring in a guy or two with expertise in a related field to cover some of the miscellaneous details in advancing the project and serve as the story's protagonist, who then realizes they're ingoring/missing a really important detail and things are about to go to $h!7. Things go to $h!7, the lead expert's obsession with success gets in the way of fixing the problem but he gets killed in some ironic fashion, and the protagonist figures out the inherent problem just in time to save everybody's life/the world. There's usually an attractive and intelligent woman or two involved, but the protagonist never quite hits it off.
That pretty well fits Jurassic Park, Congo, Timeline, Sphere, Prey, and to a lesser degree State of Fear. I think he does a really good job of changing up the story though, to make the same plot interesting.
I pretty much agree with what you said, but I think I speak for any of us guy gamers when I say we'd much rather play a character with big forearms and chiseled abs than a pasty, skinny guy with glasses or a tubby, hairy guy with a mullet. We wanna look like tough sh!t when we kick @$$, but not unrealistic. By the same token, I think it's reasonably to suggest that female gamers want to play characters that are, while not blatantly inflated, more like Charlie's Angels or Alyx from HL2 than Rosie O'Donnel.
Deliberately making things (character attributes or otherwise) unbelievable just so they catch the eye detracts from the gaming experience for me. End bosses are kind of lame. Carrying 9 guns, while sometimes fun, seperates the story from reality one more level. These were two of the things I loved best about Halo: you carried a realistic weapons load and there was no giant megamonster with 12 rocket launchers at the end. Things did look good though, and that contributed to the fantasy without being gratuitous. Cortana wasn't exactly hideous, the guns and ships looked sweet, and the Warthog (puma) was far more graceful and buff looking than a Honda Element. Of course, people continue making games with the mega-deathray 10000 or chicks in dental floss bikinis sitting on the hoods of cars because these things catch the eye sitting on the shelf. And they usually suck, although I hear Tomb Raider broke the mold by actually being kind of fun, as did Unreal Tournament.
Then again, there's also really fun games that simply avoid needing to be believable like Mario Kart. A monkey driving a go cart....right.
A motorcycle is probably almost as safe as these little cars and a lot more fun. Granted the little tricycle has a safety cage and a seatbelt, but it has no where near as much mass or crumple zone as even a Geo Metro, which leaves it at a severe disadvantage versus other cars on the road. It could be tossed around and smashed up pretty easily, and if it does, things could get crushed around or intrude into the drivers compartment. I've heard of motorcyclists surviving some crazy accidents because they wear extra safety gear that car drivers don't, and their tendency to slide when down carries them clear of the accident and avoids subjecting the rider to extreme accelerations. I'd guess the trike would be safer in some situations, and a bike in others.
If I were buying something small like that, I'd definitely go for a bike. The tricycle tops out at low freeway speeds, and I wouldn't travel on a freeway in something that couldn't safely get up to speed to merge by the end of the entrance ramp or have any power to spare. A bike can also carry a passenger, and probably about the same amount of groceries with a big set of saddlebags. If I were really concerned about fuel economy and didn't need to travel on freeways, keeping in mind that some bikes exceed 50 mpg, I'd get a scooter and still maintain the ability to carry a passenger. Then again, I don't fancy myself being seen on a scooter anymore than I do in a Hummer.