Actually, when it gets cold, clouds still form (try comparing cloudy days in the winter compared to in the summer). The driving factor in cloud formation is relative humidity, which is determined by air temperature, pressure, and moisture content. When the humidity reaches 100%, clouds form and nucleation may progress to the point of precipitation. When it's warmer, the vapor capacity of air increases, so there may be more water vapor in the atmosphere to serve as a greenhouse gas. The quirky part that makes me stop and go "wait a second professor nobody" when people who don't have the slightest idea about how control systems work start talking about feedback loops, is that the increase in vapor capacity for the 2/3 of a degree increase in temperature the earth has supposedly experience over the last 125 years is pretty small. Someday I'll actually sit down with a psychrometric chart and figure out the percent increase in water vapor mass at constant relative humidity for a given temperature increase, but no one's gotten me intrigued enough yet to actually do it.
Coming from an insider (which I think is fairly irrelevant compared to my strong conservative views...not to be confused with so-called neo-conservative views, which aren't really conservative at all), my feeling is that the American media has a very strong liberal bias, although perhaps less so than other many other nations. It looks like we're up against a difference of opinion about what makes a conservative versus a liberal. Unless we can resolve that, it's meaningless for us to attempt to label the media in a way that will genuinely give other people a better understanding of it.
Hehe...sorry, this just hit me. I'd say quality of life is a better reason to stay healthy than longevity, especially since 20 minutes a day, figuring an average 70 year life span, equates to devoting almost exactly one year of your life to exercise.
I just thought of this after remembering some claim I read that the average American woman spends over 2 years of her life (~45 min/day) in front of a mirror.
And it would be a really bad idea to do that Tabata thingy without first warming up and stretching.
I'm sorry, why can't a person be both a geek and healthy? Just give up 30 minutes of WoW, 3 times a week, and go run/ride/lift/stretch/something. And cut down on the grilled stuffed burritos and mountain dew. You'll be glad to have done it the next time you have to lug your gaming rig with the dual video cards, 12 cooling fans, and a 20 pound power supply to a LAN party.
For that matter, why can't a person be both an athlete and geeky? Think of plays as functions. Your selector class reads a variable passed by the QB/coach/point guard, then picks a function and executes the steps. Coaches spend enough time pounding plays into jocks heads, so someone might as well take pride in being good at learning them quickly and executing them properly. OOP. Object Oriented Playmaking. The only drawback is when endzone_dance() gets stuck in an endless do/while loop.
I recognize some people have truly crappy jobs and spend 12 hours a day in front of a monitor, but I'd be more than willing to bet that the vast majority of geeks have time to spare for exercising and healthy cooking if they're willing to re-arrange their priorities a little.
You're right though. I'm not seeing much of a story in this. Exercising and eating right makes you healthier. Doing brain work helps intellectual acuity.
These guys have a cause, darn it, and they're gonna fight for it! Never mind the fact that the overwhelming majority of them don't even know basic details about their cause like how much the earth has warmed over the past 125 years (2/3 of a degree) or how much the sea levels have risen (on the order of a millimeter a decade, +/- the same amount). The fact that 2005 was the warmest in 125 years (records happen, and we're talking fractions of a degree over the previous record) and the one with the most hurricanes is clear evidence that people driving to work are killing mother earth and we're all gonna die!
Actually, I haven't come across any studies indicating that solar output is increasing, but it is true that the Martian polar icecaps have been observed to shrink surprisingly over the last several decades. The fact that I haven't seen any such studies doesn't mean they don't exist. There is still a lot that we don't know about long-term solar weather. There also may be other factors affecting Earth and Mars independently. The most perplexing question is probably why does Earth go through very long term cycles of heating and cooling? The last major ice age ended long before human CO2 production became significant, yet the temperature difference during and after is estimated at 3-4 degrees (4-6 times as much as human activity has supposedly caused).
Disclaimer: I don't claim that global warming isn't happening, but the evidence is not very overwhelming and the statistical correlation to human activity is downright underwhelming. It's definitely a bandwagon that people like to jump on though, especially during the summer and severe storms or in areas affected by smog (which is particulates, not greenhouse gasses).
If someone had taken a poll 1000 years ago that found 93% of the people believed the earth was flat, it would not change the fact that the earth is round. Regardless of whether global warming is happening and whether human factors are the cause or a contributing factor or not, a poll does not affect the physical reality. The value of this poll (and I would think this would be obvious) is not in making a case for or against global warming, but determining if people are sympathetic to the proposed remedies. It would be silly for anyone to invoke the poll as evidence.
What happens when you divide your shoebox into three sections? Do the molecules in the air divide themselves evenly between two of the sections, but leave the third empty? I think you missed a few details from the article. I don't think this is incredibly revolutionary, but it is still interesting. The roaches seem to attempt to maintain large but evenly sized groups. Instead of the bugs all distributing evenly among the shelters or squeezing as many as would fit into one shelter then all the rest into the second, they struck a balance between group size and eveness.
It sounds to me like the course assumes you bring good ethics to it. It's not about learning ethics. It's for learning about security vulnerabilities by exploiting them. The idea is that the pupils then can go out and test their own networks or those of a client with what they learned, as a service. They title it ethical hacking because it is to be done with the permission of the victim in the interest of finding and subsequently eliminating potential security holes. If someone came to the class with ill intent, of course, they could use this knowledge unethically. This is probably why they require students show proof of gainful employment, although none of this is exactly top secret.
According to another poster somewhere in this discussion, the class isn't very advanced, and basically useless to anyone who already has a decent but more general training.
It is just about user initiated content and collaboration.
In that respect, has anything really changed in the last 10 years or so...or even going back to BBS? Collaboration and user-contributed content is not really new, but it is becoming more prevalent and refined, arguably due to the newer methods like wiki's. Additionally, for those who like to link application approaches like AJAX to the term Web 2.0, they ultimately don't change much more than the fluidity of the experience. I don't think we can escape the fact that the term "web 2.0" is nothing more than a way of marketing sites with unique features.
My biggest problem with the term is that it is entirely arbitrary. There was no formal revision to anything that led to the application of the term. While Mozilla can refer to adding a couple features and fixing bugs when labeling a release 1.5, and the W3C can point to new and deprecated elements in HTML 4, web 2.0 is just whatever people say it is. In fact, it seems most of the sites that people call a part of web 2.0 don't even meet "web 1.0" standards. Some of them come reasonably close to validating, but usually with a transitional DTD. HTML 4.0 Loose exists primarily as a bridge for sites that want to implement an update from HTML 3 to 4, not as a way to stick the HTML 4 label on sites that are intentionally written according to the HTML 3 specification.
For people who download a lot, these big bandwidth numbers matter, but not for people just browsing or even playing most online video games. A 100 kB webpage can theoretically load in half a second at 1.5 Mbps. It's a whopping 3/8 of a second faster at 6 Mbps.
Of course, you never really get your peak speed, but the improvement is still slight under most circumstances. In fact, I've noticed no real difference in ordinary browsing on 768 kbps Qwest DSL compared to 3 Mbps Comcast cable or even 45 Mbps on the T3 when I was in school...except the cable connection was pretty slow in the evenings when everyone else on the block was online using the same daisy-chained connection. As long as it's not dial-up, I'm pretty happy to shop based on price. And since the only options in my area are Qwe$t and Comca$t, I'm pretty happy to just check my email at work.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but does not the TPF also overlap somewhat the goals of the Kepler mission, also? If so, that would be another reason to favor JWST over TPF.
Also, I know that what happened at the very beginning of the universe (10^-33 seconds and earlier) is of critical interest to theoretical physicists. That was the only time when energy levels were high enough to create conditions predicted in their models. Understanding what happened in that incredibly brief instant that we're far short of recreating here on earth may be one of the keys to unifying quantum mechanics and relativity and developing a cohesive M-theory. Truly understanding why the fundemental particles behave the way they do and being able to predict their actions under certain conditions (you know, like maybe decaying to produce usable energy) certainly seems a lot less esoteric than knowing that there is a planet similar to earth 1000 light years away that would take somewhere on the order of 10 million years to reach at the speed of current rocket technology.
Every single word in Easterbrook's article contributes to my suspiscion that he is nothing more than an ignorant jester who likes to throw rocks at ordinarily quiet and productive beehives simply for the amusement of watching them get riled up. The worst part is that other ignorant people, instead of educating themselves and forming their own opinions, take his word as gold.
NASA can't help you when they discover hemetite rich spherules on Mars which dramatically change predictions of how water may have affected Martian mineral deposits, and you can only interpret that as dust. And when you look at a Mossbauer spectrometer graph showing relative quantities of various minerals that confirm on a local scale the broader observations of an orbiter and decide that NASA's cameras have really bad resolution compared to your $200 point and shoot, NASA can't help you there, either.
But don't think that this is any argument against human spaceflight either. Both robotic and human exploration have value. If robots were ultimately the greatest way to do things, we wouldn't still do most work or inspect things here on earth by hand. And human spaceflight with the goal of expanding human horizons is no more vain, especially when we know what's out there, than sailing a ship no bigger than a semi-truck around the Cape Horn, or from Scandinavia to Newfoundland, or even a balsa raft into the south Pacific without really knowing where you were heading.
Amen. People like this author bug me, so I'm going to rant for a bit.
For at least a decade, it's been clear that the space shuttle program is a clunker. Nonetheless, NASA's funding remains heavy on the shuttle and the space station, while usually slighting science.
Ok, so you missed out on the "Shuttle to Retire by 2010" headline by about 2 years. Also The fact that they are working under a mandate to develop a new crew vehicle and a new versatile heavy launch vehicle means nothing to the author. I'll ignore the international committment to the ISS involved here, because you did too, but this next quote is a doozy.
What's really going on is that NASA holds the taxpayers in contempt.
Yes, we all know that NASA hates taxpayers. "Hey all you people who pay our salaries...you suck! This isn't about learning new things or expanding human presence. It's about burning money...muahahaha."
As for the moon base, for three decades NASA has sent nothing to the moon, not even a robot probe.
You forgot about Clementine (NASA) and Smart-1 (ESA). Lemme make a comparison: Since the wrap up of the Apollo missions (the data of which is still being studied, to answer another paragraph from the article), there have been twice as many missions dedicated to studying the moon (not counting earth based observations/experiments or pre-apollo missions) as there have been to Mercury, Pluto, Uranus, and Neptune combined, ever. Plus, right now, during this supposedly sad time in exploration, missions to Pluto and Mercury are on their way, tripling the count!
The Webb telescope will look billions of light-years toward the edge of the observable universe... It is sure to produce spectacular images of very distant galaxies, plus knowledge of esoteric value--but is highly unlikely to discover anything that will matter to your life or mine...That the telescope mega-project is named for James Webb, a former NASA bureaucrat, rather than after some great explorer or thinker, says volumes about the agency.
Let's start with an argument illustrating how little you know about where science is now (trying to understand how the world works by exploring what happened 10^-33 seconds after the universe began...knowledge extremely useful in understanding and manipulating fundemental particles), and finish up with a show-stopping point about the project name. They then try to trump it's worth by comparing it to the delayed TPF, a mission which overlaps the Kepler Observatory in many aspects and looks for earth sized planets we don't expect to even be able to see directly for decades, and neither of these offer the same thing JWST does.
Almost all NASA findings since the moon program have come from automated probes such as Cassini
Wait a second, didn't you say we learned nothing from the moon trip except how to survive in space (a lesson which arguably has perhaps some value if we truly want to become spacefaring)? How is the moon a milestone in light of that statement? And are you saying all of these long-term microgravity experiments in genetics, fluid mechanics, combustion, biology, etc are almost worthless? What about engineering advances, like rockets designs still in use today?
Ok, I'm wasting too much time here, but further fallacious arguments the author makes or implies is that earth science can only happen from space (wow...just wow) and can only come from NASA projects, and that we're not spending enough learning how to deflect asteroids we don't even know are heading for our planet. That last one is easy for people to be concerned about, but the scale of all proposed methods compared to the probability of an impact makes for a really low benefit/cost ratio. Currently, NASA is focusing on cataloguing threats, rather than spending tons money on an umbrella that is full of holes for a place that goes thousands of years between rains.
At first I thought I was missing the joke, then I went back and checked the URL's. Either they've been hacked, or they thought they'd be funny and redirect to http://www.fbi.gov/?2006/03/29/google-page-creator -review/. Either that or I've been hacked.
While the other people responding to your post do raise some interesting points, I'm inclined to agree that the value of facebook seems inflated by its rapid rise. It sprung up faster than any competition, except MySpace in a slightly different form, could follow. I dare say it succeeded because it focused on its target group well, and it added features based on demand. In comparison, my impression is that other social networking sites that were developing at about the same time as facebook did not have clear target demographics (the school represents a very convenient market for this sort of thing), and they added features rather than users. Also, facebook was not really started as a revenue making site, so ads entered in as an accessory, rather than the main purpose of the site. I see lots of sites that exist to generate revenue first and provide content second, and lots that are the opposite. I know which give me a more satisfactory visit. I'm drifting away from my original point, but what I meant to say is that being the first does not guarantee they will always be the top.
On the flipside, it can be hard to compete directly with facebook. There's another site called yearbook.com. Genuine ripoff of facebook and myspace combined. Nobody bothers with it because it doesn't really offer anything the other two don't, and all their friends already use the other two. It's sort like instant messengers. Not too many people use Jabber. Everyone uses the one their friends use.
Dang these college kids and their really good but simple ideas. I bet I could handle a project like facebook, but of course, now its a tougher market, and I never thought of it anyways. "$750 million? No thank you my good sir. We can discuss this again when you're prepared to make a serious offer </british accent>
Actually the real reason (I think) to get excited about it is the fact that there is a link between primes and quantum mechanics
They discovered that if you compare a strip of zeros from Riemann's critical line to the experimentally recorded energy levels in the nucleus of a large atom like erbium, the 68th atom in the periodic table of elements, the two are uncannily similar.
Of course, this has apparently been known since 1972, so I guess just noting that 42 is the third moment is really the only news in the article. My question though, is it exactly 42 or is it approximately 42? There could be far reaching consequences for the world if the answer is an integer versus a fraction, or even an irrational number like pi or e. Don't ask me what those consequences are. I'm just being dramatic.
Yeah, but it's still cool that the tagging beta thingy tells you it's a dupe.
Re:Less challenges on the moon?
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US Plans Lunar Motel
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· Score: 2, Informative
To add to your response, not only is oxygen not required, it is downright bad for welding. If oxygen dissolves in the molten material, it causes voids and really bad corrosion (particularly for iron alloys). When using an oxy-acetylene torch, ideally oxygen doesn't touch the weld. Your flame should be as close to stoichiometric as possible, so that only CO2 and H20 vapor contact it.
While 0 G welding would present some difficulties (stuff flying out, and more importantly, all the dust that is typically generated), it can also have some advantages, too (orientation doesn't affect your puddle). The only disadvantage I can think of off the top of my head for welding in a vacuum is slower cooling, but perhaps not even that, depending on the apparent surfaces to radiate too.
I guess a lot of people probably think of welding as something along the lines of "heat stuff up, push it together, hope it sticks." It's much more scientific than that.
You have to love the fact that the first article linked doesn't mention the fact that his lab results have been rather hard to reproduce independently, or that his claims of excess energy are fairly widely rejected by other physicists.
That's not really the heart of my skepticism, though. He's been working on this with at best negligible success for what? 20 years? Suddenly there's going to be a commercially viable product in the next year when before it's been difficult to even measure the excess energy?
"News" for Nerds, Stuff that matters.
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US Plans Lunar Motel
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· Score: 5, Funny
Fortunately, the article isn't quite so silly, but I'm hard pressed to find a reason why this article should take up space on the front page. It's not news. It's a very vague and somewhat scattered compilation of miscellaneous details that have been discussed over the past couple of years, with a sprinkling cheesy analogies and meaningless opinions on top. This fits better in the category of "Tidbits for people who don't care. Stuff the BBC wrote about last year"
I just checked the SpaceX website, and their updates page more information about the failure. This is preliminary, and they can't speak officially until they've gotten some feedback from the government investigators they have to work with, so it doesn't seem worth a new article at the moment.
According to Musk, a fuel leak cause a fire at T+25, damaging the pneumatics and causing an engine shutdown at T+29. They haven't figured out the cause of the leak yet, but he says everything was going "picture perfect" until then. He also mentioned that the insulating blanket many people pointed out flapping in the onboard camera view does not seem to have played a role. There's a couple pictures of the rocket lifting off and looking beautiful except for that small flame coming from somewhere above the combustion chamber. It's too soon to say when the next launch will be.
Oh, and this quote is golden: "A friend of mine wrote to remind me that only 5 of the first 9 Pegasus launches succeeded; 3 of 5 for Ariane; 9 of 20 for Atlas; 9 of 21 for Soyuz; and 9 of 18 for Proton."
Boeing and Lockheed developed their rockets under contracts from the government, then commercialized them. SpaceX developed the rockets (granted most of their talent came from the big companies), then got the contracts. They paid their own money as they went along, as opposed to charging all their expenses to a contract. You are right though, the big deal is that the launch costs are 1/2 as much per pound. Their independent development is just fun trivia for fan-boys like me to rave about.
Their business model is somewhat different too, because they generally make as many of their parts as possible themselves instead of sub-contracting them. They also focus more on lean management and low-cost rather than performance.
Also, they are currently seeking funding from a NASA program to develop an privately run servicing capability to service the ISS. This is more in line with how Boeing and Lockheed do these things, as there less risk to their own money.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, when it gets cold, clouds still form (try comparing cloudy days in the winter compared to in the summer). The driving factor in cloud formation is relative humidity, which is determined by air temperature, pressure, and moisture content. When the humidity reaches 100%, clouds form and nucleation may progress to the point of precipitation. When it's warmer, the vapor capacity of air increases, so there may be more water vapor in the atmosphere to serve as a greenhouse gas. The quirky part that makes me stop and go "wait a second professor nobody" when people who don't have the slightest idea about how control systems work start talking about feedback loops, is that the increase in vapor capacity for the 2/3 of a degree increase in temperature the earth has supposedly experience over the last 125 years is pretty small. Someday I'll actually sit down with a psychrometric chart and figure out the percent increase in water vapor mass at constant relative humidity for a given temperature increase, but no one's gotten me intrigued enough yet to actually do it.
Coming from an insider (which I think is fairly irrelevant compared to my strong conservative views...not to be confused with so-called neo-conservative views, which aren't really conservative at all), my feeling is that the American media has a very strong liberal bias, although perhaps less so than other many other nations. It looks like we're up against a difference of opinion about what makes a conservative versus a liberal. Unless we can resolve that, it's meaningless for us to attempt to label the media in a way that will genuinely give other people a better understanding of it.
Hehe...sorry, this just hit me. I'd say quality of life is a better reason to stay healthy than longevity, especially since 20 minutes a day, figuring an average 70 year life span, equates to devoting almost exactly one year of your life to exercise.
I just thought of this after remembering some claim I read that the average American woman spends over 2 years of her life (~45 min/day) in front of a mirror.
And it would be a really bad idea to do that Tabata thingy without first warming up and stretching.
I'm sorry, why can't a person be both a geek and healthy? Just give up 30 minutes of WoW, 3 times a week, and go run/ride/lift/stretch/something. And cut down on the grilled stuffed burritos and mountain dew. You'll be glad to have done it the next time you have to lug your gaming rig with the dual video cards, 12 cooling fans, and a 20 pound power supply to a LAN party.
For that matter, why can't a person be both an athlete and geeky? Think of plays as functions. Your selector class reads a variable passed by the QB/coach/point guard, then picks a function and executes the steps. Coaches spend enough time pounding plays into jocks heads, so someone might as well take pride in being good at learning them quickly and executing them properly. OOP. Object Oriented Playmaking. The only drawback is when endzone_dance() gets stuck in an endless do/while loop.
I recognize some people have truly crappy jobs and spend 12 hours a day in front of a monitor, but I'd be more than willing to bet that the vast majority of geeks have time to spare for exercising and healthy cooking if they're willing to re-arrange their priorities a little.
You're right though. I'm not seeing much of a story in this. Exercising and eating right makes you healthier. Doing brain work helps intellectual acuity.
These guys have a cause, darn it, and they're gonna fight for it! Never mind the fact that the overwhelming majority of them don't even know basic details about their cause like how much the earth has warmed over the past 125 years (2/3 of a degree) or how much the sea levels have risen (on the order of a millimeter a decade, +/- the same amount). The fact that 2005 was the warmest in 125 years (records happen, and we're talking fractions of a degree over the previous record) and the one with the most hurricanes is clear evidence that people driving to work are killing mother earth and we're all gonna die! Actually, I haven't come across any studies indicating that solar output is increasing, but it is true that the Martian polar icecaps have been observed to shrink surprisingly over the last several decades. The fact that I haven't seen any such studies doesn't mean they don't exist. There is still a lot that we don't know about long-term solar weather. There also may be other factors affecting Earth and Mars independently. The most perplexing question is probably why does Earth go through very long term cycles of heating and cooling? The last major ice age ended long before human CO2 production became significant, yet the temperature difference during and after is estimated at 3-4 degrees (4-6 times as much as human activity has supposedly caused). Disclaimer: I don't claim that global warming isn't happening, but the evidence is not very overwhelming and the statistical correlation to human activity is downright underwhelming. It's definitely a bandwagon that people like to jump on though, especially during the summer and severe storms or in areas affected by smog (which is particulates, not greenhouse gasses).
If someone had taken a poll 1000 years ago that found 93% of the people believed the earth was flat, it would not change the fact that the earth is round. Regardless of whether global warming is happening and whether human factors are the cause or a contributing factor or not, a poll does not affect the physical reality. The value of this poll (and I would think this would be obvious) is not in making a case for or against global warming, but determining if people are sympathetic to the proposed remedies. It would be silly for anyone to invoke the poll as evidence.
What happens when you divide your shoebox into three sections? Do the molecules in the air divide themselves evenly between two of the sections, but leave the third empty? I think you missed a few details from the article. I don't think this is incredibly revolutionary, but it is still interesting. The roaches seem to attempt to maintain large but evenly sized groups. Instead of the bugs all distributing evenly among the shelters or squeezing as many as would fit into one shelter then all the rest into the second, they struck a balance between group size and eveness.
It sounds to me like the course assumes you bring good ethics to it. It's not about learning ethics. It's for learning about security vulnerabilities by exploiting them. The idea is that the pupils then can go out and test their own networks or those of a client with what they learned, as a service. They title it ethical hacking because it is to be done with the permission of the victim in the interest of finding and subsequently eliminating potential security holes. If someone came to the class with ill intent, of course, they could use this knowledge unethically. This is probably why they require students show proof of gainful employment, although none of this is exactly top secret.
According to another poster somewhere in this discussion, the class isn't very advanced, and basically useless to anyone who already has a decent but more general training.
Here we go again, spinning off on another set of puns. I really wonder how well these fastener jokes will hold together.
My biggest problem with the term is that it is entirely arbitrary. There was no formal revision to anything that led to the application of the term. While Mozilla can refer to adding a couple features and fixing bugs when labeling a release 1.5, and the W3C can point to new and deprecated elements in HTML 4, web 2.0 is just whatever people say it is. In fact, it seems most of the sites that people call a part of web 2.0 don't even meet "web 1.0" standards. Some of them come reasonably close to validating, but usually with a transitional DTD. HTML 4.0 Loose exists primarily as a bridge for sites that want to implement an update from HTML 3 to 4, not as a way to stick the HTML 4 label on sites that are intentionally written according to the HTML 3 specification.
Maybe I missed it, but did anyone see a power rating (at least estimated for a particular distance)? I somehow doubt it will power a Rainbow Bright.
For people who download a lot, these big bandwidth numbers matter, but not for people just browsing or even playing most online video games. A 100 kB webpage can theoretically load in half a second at 1.5 Mbps. It's a whopping 3/8 of a second faster at 6 Mbps.
Of course, you never really get your peak speed, but the improvement is still slight under most circumstances. In fact, I've noticed no real difference in ordinary browsing on 768 kbps Qwest DSL compared to 3 Mbps Comcast cable or even 45 Mbps on the T3 when I was in school...except the cable connection was pretty slow in the evenings when everyone else on the block was online using the same daisy-chained connection. As long as it's not dial-up, I'm pretty happy to shop based on price. And since the only options in my area are Qwe$t and Comca$t, I'm pretty happy to just check my email at work.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but does not the TPF also overlap somewhat the goals of the Kepler mission, also? If so, that would be another reason to favor JWST over TPF.
Also, I know that what happened at the very beginning of the universe (10^-33 seconds and earlier) is of critical interest to theoretical physicists. That was the only time when energy levels were high enough to create conditions predicted in their models. Understanding what happened in that incredibly brief instant that we're far short of recreating here on earth may be one of the keys to unifying quantum mechanics and relativity and developing a cohesive M-theory. Truly understanding why the fundemental particles behave the way they do and being able to predict their actions under certain conditions (you know, like maybe decaying to produce usable energy) certainly seems a lot less esoteric than knowing that there is a planet similar to earth 1000 light years away that would take somewhere on the order of 10 million years to reach at the speed of current rocket technology.
Every single word in Easterbrook's article contributes to my suspiscion that he is nothing more than an ignorant jester who likes to throw rocks at ordinarily quiet and productive beehives simply for the amusement of watching them get riled up. The worst part is that other ignorant people, instead of educating themselves and forming their own opinions, take his word as gold.
NASA can't help you when they discover hemetite rich spherules on Mars which dramatically change predictions of how water may have affected Martian mineral deposits, and you can only interpret that as dust. And when you look at a Mossbauer spectrometer graph showing relative quantities of various minerals that confirm on a local scale the broader observations of an orbiter and decide that NASA's cameras have really bad resolution compared to your $200 point and shoot, NASA can't help you there, either.
But don't think that this is any argument against human spaceflight either. Both robotic and human exploration have value. If robots were ultimately the greatest way to do things, we wouldn't still do most work or inspect things here on earth by hand. And human spaceflight with the goal of expanding human horizons is no more vain, especially when we know what's out there, than sailing a ship no bigger than a semi-truck around the Cape Horn, or from Scandinavia to Newfoundland, or even a balsa raft into the south Pacific without really knowing where you were heading.
Amen. People like this author bug me, so I'm going to rant for a bit.
Ok, so you missed out on the "Shuttle to Retire by 2010" headline by about 2 years. Also The fact that they are working under a mandate to develop a new crew vehicle and a new versatile heavy launch vehicle means nothing to the author. I'll ignore the international committment to the ISS involved here, because you did too, but this next quote is a doozy.
Yes, we all know that NASA hates taxpayers. "Hey all you people who pay our salaries...you suck! This isn't about learning new things or expanding human presence. It's about burning money...muahahaha."
You forgot about Clementine (NASA) and Smart-1 (ESA). Lemme make a comparison: Since the wrap up of the Apollo missions (the data of which is still being studied, to answer another paragraph from the article), there have been twice as many missions dedicated to studying the moon (not counting earth based observations/experiments or pre-apollo missions) as there have been to Mercury, Pluto, Uranus, and Neptune combined, ever. Plus, right now, during this supposedly sad time in exploration, missions to Pluto and Mercury are on their way, tripling the count!
Let's start with an argument illustrating how little you know about where science is now (trying to understand how the world works by exploring what happened 10^-33 seconds after the universe began...knowledge extremely useful in understanding and manipulating fundemental particles), and finish up with a show-stopping point about the project name. They then try to trump it's worth by comparing it to the delayed TPF, a mission which overlaps the Kepler Observatory in many aspects and looks for earth sized planets we don't expect to even be able to see directly for decades, and neither of these offer the same thing JWST does.
Wait a second, didn't you say we learned nothing from the moon trip except how to survive in space (a lesson which arguably has perhaps some value if we truly want to become spacefaring)? How is the moon a milestone in light of that statement? And are you saying all of these long-term microgravity experiments in genetics, fluid mechanics, combustion, biology, etc are almost worthless? What about engineering advances, like rockets designs still in use today?
Ok, I'm wasting too much time here, but further fallacious arguments the author makes or implies is that earth science can only happen from space (wow...just wow) and can only come from NASA projects, and that we're not spending enough learning how to deflect asteroids we don't even know are heading for our planet. That last one is easy for people to be concerned about, but the scale of all proposed methods compared to the probability of an impact makes for a really low benefit/cost ratio. Currently, NASA is focusing on cataloguing threats, rather than spending tons money on an umbrella that is full of holes for a place that goes thousands of years between rains.
At first I thought I was missing the joke, then I went back and checked the URL's. Either they've been hacked, or they thought they'd be funny and redirect to http://www.fbi.gov/?2006/03/29/google-page-creator -review/. Either that or I've been hacked.
While the other people responding to your post do raise some interesting points, I'm inclined to agree that the value of facebook seems inflated by its rapid rise. It sprung up faster than any competition, except MySpace in a slightly different form, could follow. I dare say it succeeded because it focused on its target group well, and it added features based on demand. In comparison, my impression is that other social networking sites that were developing at about the same time as facebook did not have clear target demographics (the school represents a very convenient market for this sort of thing), and they added features rather than users. Also, facebook was not really started as a revenue making site, so ads entered in as an accessory, rather than the main purpose of the site. I see lots of sites that exist to generate revenue first and provide content second, and lots that are the opposite. I know which give me a more satisfactory visit. I'm drifting away from my original point, but what I meant to say is that being the first does not guarantee they will always be the top.
On the flipside, it can be hard to compete directly with facebook. There's another site called yearbook.com. Genuine ripoff of facebook and myspace combined. Nobody bothers with it because it doesn't really offer anything the other two don't, and all their friends already use the other two. It's sort like instant messengers. Not too many people use Jabber. Everyone uses the one their friends use. Dang these college kids and their really good but simple ideas. I bet I could handle a project like facebook, but of course, now its a tougher market, and I never thought of it anyways. "$750 million? No thank you my good sir. We can discuss this again when you're prepared to make a serious offer </british accent>
Actually the real reason (I think) to get excited about it is the fact that there is a link between primes and quantum mechanics
Of course, this has apparently been known since 1972, so I guess just noting that 42 is the third moment is really the only news in the article. My question though, is it exactly 42 or is it approximately 42? There could be far reaching consequences for the world if the answer is an integer versus a fraction, or even an irrational number like pi or e. Don't ask me what those consequences are. I'm just being dramatic.
Yeah, but it's still cool that the tagging beta thingy tells you it's a dupe.
To add to your response, not only is oxygen not required, it is downright bad for welding. If oxygen dissolves in the molten material, it causes voids and really bad corrosion (particularly for iron alloys). When using an oxy-acetylene torch, ideally oxygen doesn't touch the weld. Your flame should be as close to stoichiometric as possible, so that only CO2 and H20 vapor contact it.
While 0 G welding would present some difficulties (stuff flying out, and more importantly, all the dust that is typically generated), it can also have some advantages, too (orientation doesn't affect your puddle). The only disadvantage I can think of off the top of my head for welding in a vacuum is slower cooling, but perhaps not even that, depending on the apparent surfaces to radiate too.
I guess a lot of people probably think of welding as something along the lines of "heat stuff up, push it together, hope it sticks." It's much more scientific than that.
You have to love the fact that the first article linked doesn't mention the fact that his lab results have been rather hard to reproduce independently, or that his claims of excess energy are fairly widely rejected by other physicists.
That's not really the heart of my skepticism, though. He's been working on this with at best negligible success for what? 20 years? Suddenly there's going to be a commercially viable product in the next year when before it's been difficult to even measure the excess energy?
Fortunately, the article isn't quite so silly, but I'm hard pressed to find a reason why this article should take up space on the front page. It's not news. It's a very vague and somewhat scattered compilation of miscellaneous details that have been discussed over the past couple of years, with a sprinkling cheesy analogies and meaningless opinions on top. This fits better in the category of "Tidbits for people who don't care. Stuff the BBC wrote about last year"
I just checked the SpaceX website, and their updates page more information about the failure. This is preliminary, and they can't speak officially until they've gotten some feedback from the government investigators they have to work with, so it doesn't seem worth a new article at the moment.
According to Musk, a fuel leak cause a fire at T+25, damaging the pneumatics and causing an engine shutdown at T+29. They haven't figured out the cause of the leak yet, but he says everything was going "picture perfect" until then. He also mentioned that the insulating blanket many people pointed out flapping in the onboard camera view does not seem to have played a role. There's a couple pictures of the rocket lifting off and looking beautiful except for that small flame coming from somewhere above the combustion chamber. It's too soon to say when the next launch will be.
Oh, and this quote is golden: "A friend of mine wrote to remind me that only 5 of the first 9 Pegasus launches succeeded; 3 of 5 for Ariane; 9 of 20 for Atlas; 9 of 21 for Soyuz; and 9 of 18 for Proton."
I believe you meant to say "The prophecy has been fulfilled."
Boeing and Lockheed developed their rockets under contracts from the government, then commercialized them. SpaceX developed the rockets (granted most of their talent came from the big companies), then got the contracts. They paid their own money as they went along, as opposed to charging all their expenses to a contract. You are right though, the big deal is that the launch costs are 1/2 as much per pound. Their independent development is just fun trivia for fan-boys like me to rave about. Their business model is somewhat different too, because they generally make as many of their parts as possible themselves instead of sub-contracting them. They also focus more on lean management and low-cost rather than performance. Also, they are currently seeking funding from a NASA program to develop an privately run servicing capability to service the ISS. This is more in line with how Boeing and Lockheed do these things, as there less risk to their own money.