Ok, time for another one of iamlucky13's little-known redneck nerd facts
Category: Cattle
Entry: 1097
Ranchers will commonly intentionally force feed a smooth magnet to calves. Because of it's weight, it will remain in the rumen or reticulum (the 1st and 2nd stomach compartments, respectively) for the life of the cow. Fields often have stray bits of metal small enough to be accidentally ingested while grazing, such as barb wire bits, fence staples, screws, etc. When stuck on the magnet, the pieces are effectively immobilized and prevented from damaging the stomach and possibly killing the cow. Eating a needle probably won't kill the cow, but after it dies of age (or bullets), you can retrieve the magnet and the needle.
I certainly won't cry when Clear Channel bites the dust. It seems (contrary to what I'd expect) that the smaller guys are able to operate more efficiently than Clear Channel affiliates, since they always have fewer commercials and local DJ's. More importantly, the non-clear channel stations have a far more diverse musical selection, and their DJ's spend less time talking than playing music and are much less annoying, sometimes even entertaining or (gasp) intelligent sounding. I was extremely disappointed when looking for a good station to listen on my commute to come across "The Nelson and Terry Morning Show" on Portland's 105.1. The old man voice impressions, fart noises, DJ's interrupting each other, and incessant cackling were a pitiful change from my favorite oldies station, which Entercom had demoted to the AM band.
As long as we're talking about coal and toxic contaminants, I want to add in another one I discovered when looking up information on disposal of compact flourescent bulbs. The EPA and most munincipalities allow private individuals to dispose of flourescent bulbs in ordinary trash despite containing mercury. The reason is the amount of mercury released when they're discarded and broken is offset by the amount of mercury contained in the coal needed to be burned to power an equivalent incandescent bulb.
We're talking about lava here. Lava kicks butt! Any excuse to talk about lava is worth it, including a measily 40 acre shelf of volcanic rock supporting a lava flow falling into the sea.
You make some good points about kookiness, but as far as comparing Jesus' crucifixion to space aliens in DC-8's, I want to point out something pretty obvious. We know there was a man named Jesus, to within a reasonable doubt, at least. Historians such as Josephus mentioned Him. Even if you doubt their reports, the fact is pretty clear that a group known as the Christians sprang up quite suddenly around 33 AD, all of whom talked quite a bit about a guy named Jesus, some even being willing to face persecution from the Romans because of their experience. On scientology's side, what do we have?
Pardon my straying further away from the volcano topic. Catholics believe that abortion is wrong, yet it is somehow evil for us to try to use political means to end the wrong. Is it at least ok to push for the appointment of judges who are against murder or do we have to "open-minded" there, as well? If people want us to shutup about abortion, they better start trying a lot harder to convince us that babies aren't people.
Personally, I don't think scientology is scary, but it does bother me a little bit that they're so secretive about it. And I definitely don't think Tom Cruise is an inherently bad person...more of a freaking crackerjack.
So this de Beauvoir guy get drunk and says something philosophical and quotable, and you're clever enough to extrapolate that to capitalism destroying the planet? Impressive.
I'm a little worried here about you exercising free speech. Accepting that principle as a basic human right seems like a pretty important victory. I'm gonna be pretty pissed when the sun goes nova just because you felt it necessary to state your opinion as fact on Slashdot.
Offtopic? So now the mods are taking Roland's side?
For all those who obviously don't know, Roland (I think the last name is actually Piquille or something like that) is famous on Slashdot for copying text from original sources directly onto his blog and submitting Slashdot articles to generate ad revenue without citing sources.
Hold on a second. I thought most of the Dell accessories like their TV's and printers were made by other manufacturer's with the Dell name stuck on them, or at best, to Dell specifications. Am I wrong? If not, they hardly deserve the listings.
I thought this was a guide that listed novel things I could make to give people as gifts, not a list of finished or almost finished products for others to add on to their projects. Talk about disappointed.
That's exactly what I was thinking. Regardless of whether or not this is a legitimate business and "Joseph" is really getting fired, this is completely and pretty explicitly illegal. BBB, not Blogger, is the first place, perhaps with the exception of Yahoo, he should have turned to. The things I was told were illegal and would get me fired for the time that I worked at Sears fell far short of what "Joseph" did.
Mr. Lopez told me that he was calling to apologize and that Mr. Philips was going to be terminated at a company board meeting later on this morning.
No way of telling right of whether or not this is BS. This priceritephoto sounds like a scam shop, or at the very best, a couple of guys trying to get ahead with extremely low margins. I'm not inclined to believe the latter because small companies like that don't have boards that can hold meetings. The fact that there's a long history of abuse leads me to think that Joseph Philips and Ed Lopez are either the same person, or partners in crime.
I'm not even sure about that much. I noticed feeling tired on days when I ate turkey sandwiches for lunch before anyone told me that it made you feel that way. Granted, I noticed this in my 12:45 statistics class, which was pretty dull, but that class was only two days a week, and I didn't have the problem the other 3 days of the week.
How about: Jump back 20 years in time and you'll see people circumventing the write protection on floppy disks the exact same way.
This is pretty clever and I have to wonder if the guy who thought it up was thinking of floppies when he tried it. My first guess was the tape covers the first data that contains the Sony crapware, but how do you also avoid covering the file table? I also wonder if this will make your CD drive rattle a little bit at 52X.
At $300 bucks for an X-box 360 and $60 per game, I'm suddenly thinking of scooping up a used X-box. The attraction of consoles for me is the social aspect of gaming with others you can talk to/insult directly. I might not get the latest and greatest in technology, but I prefer that kind of game on the PC (mouse + WASD is my controller preference). I'm sure I can pick up an X-box for less than $100 (I think EB is selling them refurbished and warrantied for that much) and most of the games have dropped to $20-30 and been reviewed thoroughly so I know what games to buy.
Of course if the 360 is backwards compatible with X-box games, that takes half the wind out of my sails.
It's being spent on Carribean vacations and boats for the top NASA administrators. Let's do some more math. ($75,000 / boat + $10,000 / vacation) x perhaps 50 administrators = $4.25 million. Hmmm, so even if it is a big embezzlement scheme, that doesn't account for much either. I didn't dig up your original post to see why it was modded down, but I don't doubt the knee-jerk reaction from sensitive nerds.
The senior engineers probably do make around $100,000. They're really sharp people. The top PhD scientists probably make even more. Being an expert in your field tends to make you valuable, and spending 7-8 years being dirt poor in school becoming an expert tends to ingrain a sense of deserving compensation. Still, that doesn't account for the $4.5 billion price tag. Even launch costs are only a couple hundred million.
The $4.5 billion tag includes a lot of research and development and a lot of subcontracting. R&D is expensive and subcontracting multiplies the number of people involved. While the Burj Dubai Tower is an ambitious project, it's real challenge is expanding existing technologies to fit a really big application. The JWST involves new controls and instruments that have to be prototyped and tested thoroughly. If you've ever contracted out for one-off precision parts, you'll find it's very expensive. For example, I just had a part made where the cost of having it machined, both due to the cost and hardness of the material I needed and the precision I desired, was over $300 each, for essentially a block with a planed surface and a couple holes in it. NASA deals with even more exotic materials and far higher tolerance, especially with the mirrors. My tolerances were 0.5 mm on that part. The mirrors deal with single microns. You don't send that out to the local machine shop. The mills that grind these things cost millions of dollars to build, and are probably custom built for such projects. I could start listing all sorts of parts that drive the cost up, but it gets redundant.
Is this cost unheard of? Nope. Hubble cost $2 billion initially. I think the two service missions added another billion. I'm not sure in this case, but NASA budgets typically also include operational costs. Someone else mentioned something about a change in budget structure so that the costs of running the space flight centers is now factored into the cost of the projects run from them so facilities aren't maintained unless they're actually producing something.
To be fair, it should be possible to build it for less. NASA has never been considered a model of efficiency (politics contributes largely to this). The fact of the matter is that they decided they needed this and no one else has offered a better price. If someone else seriously believes they can build it for $500 million and can convince NASA of that, they should do it. Heck, they should bid for $1 billion and walk away with a killer profit while saving the taxpayers $3.5 billion.
I didn't intend for the the original article to suggest that the JWST was the Hubble's direct replacement, but I didn't want to completely ignore the connection between the two. The outstanding scientific return of the Hubble led to the decision to continue building ambitious, high profile space observatories. In that sense, I suspose one might call it the Hubble's replacement, but you're absolutely right that the JWST is a distinct mission with its own capabilities. If it were as simple of a change as stepping up technology one generation, there would never have been the big fuss over whether or not to launch one more Hubble service mission.
Actually, NASA is hardly in a slump. They've shown a pretty good unmanned mission success over the last 4-5 years. The last major failure was the Mars Polar Lander, which was lost in 1999. Then of course there was the Genesis mission that failed to deploy it's parachute after successfully capturing solar wind particles. The sample was tainted, but not considered completely lost. In the meantime, they've launched the Spitzer, Cassini has arrived on station, Deep Impact smacked a comet, Voyager reached the termination shock, Galileo finished an excellent tour of Jupiter, Stardust is on it's way back to earth with a comet sample, Odyssey is orbiting Mars as planned, and the Reconnaissance Orbiter is halfway there. If you consider the past record, or even the trials of other nations (ESA losing the Beagle amd part of the data from Hguyens, Japan having trouble with Hayabusa and losing their Martian probe, Russia in the doldrums of a limited budget), the success rate lately has been outstanding. I hope this is a sign that we're finally getting the hang of it.
In addition to what other people have said: because the Sojourner rover lasted about 90 days before it collected too much dust and couldn't operate. It was only expected to last something like 2 weeks, at which time the batteries ran out and it had to trickle charge from it's undersized solar panel. I'm sure experience from the Viking missions and the Pathfinder lander was also used in setting the mission-success criteria.
I think it would probably be more like a couple of weeks, considering how many measurements and photos it's taken and how fast a person can work when their every move is being orchestrated over the radio by someone else. Still, it's a good point, plus there's input you can only get from a human being. For example, when Opportunity got stuck in a dune, the engineers spent three days trying to figure out things like how cohesive the sand was. A person (one) would have never gotten stuck and (two) would have simply said "it's like beachsand/flour/clay/the balls in the McDonalds Playplace."
And if you're interested in furthering manifest destiny (in a more polically correct form...there's no Indians on Mars), there's other things you can only learn by putting a man on Mars, like learning the long-term health concerns.
The probe has been in orbit around the asteroid for several days now. In this attempt to land, it got down to only 10 meters from the surface and was supposed to guide itself down on autopilot, fire a penetrator into the surface and capture debris kicked up from that action. Apparently somewhere right around that 10 meter mark, it either decided it was time to take off again and ascended, probably without taking the sample. Since communication has been spotty, they're not sure exactly how high it ascended to.
The plan has been to make two such landings, so they have enough fuel for another go around. If I remember correctly, they originally planned more, but the failure of their reaction wheels meant the landings had to be entirely directed by rocket firings. With the low gravity, I don't think damage from free-falling too fast is a problem, but bouncing back up and possibly getting turned upside down as a result might be.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, time for another one of iamlucky13's little-known redneck nerd facts
Category: Cattle
Entry: 1097
Ranchers will commonly intentionally force feed a smooth magnet to calves. Because of it's weight, it will remain in the rumen or reticulum (the 1st and 2nd stomach compartments, respectively) for the life of the cow. Fields often have stray bits of metal small enough to be accidentally ingested while grazing, such as barb wire bits, fence staples, screws, etc. When stuck on the magnet, the pieces are effectively immobilized and prevented from damaging the stomach and possibly killing the cow. Eating a needle probably won't kill the cow, but after it dies of age (or bullets), you can retrieve the magnet and the needle.
Now y'all know.
I certainly won't cry when Clear Channel bites the dust. It seems (contrary to what I'd expect) that the smaller guys are able to operate more efficiently than Clear Channel affiliates, since they always have fewer commercials and local DJ's. More importantly, the non-clear channel stations have a far more diverse musical selection, and their DJ's spend less time talking than playing music and are much less annoying, sometimes even entertaining or (gasp) intelligent sounding. I was extremely disappointed when looking for a good station to listen on my commute to come across "The Nelson and Terry Morning Show" on Portland's 105.1. The old man voice impressions, fart noises, DJ's interrupting each other, and incessant cackling were a pitiful change from my favorite oldies station, which Entercom had demoted to the AM band.
As long as we're talking about coal and toxic contaminants, I want to add in another one I discovered when looking up information on disposal of compact flourescent bulbs. The EPA and most munincipalities allow private individuals to dispose of flourescent bulbs in ordinary trash despite containing mercury. The reason is the amount of mercury released when they're discarded and broken is offset by the amount of mercury contained in the coal needed to be burned to power an equivalent incandescent bulb.
We're talking about lava here. Lava kicks butt! Any excuse to talk about lava is worth it, including a measily 40 acre shelf of volcanic rock supporting a lava flow falling into the sea.
I'm still alive and I live on the west coast. Draw your own conclusions about this collapse.
You make some good points about kookiness, but as far as comparing Jesus' crucifixion to space aliens in DC-8's, I want to point out something pretty obvious. We know there was a man named Jesus, to within a reasonable doubt, at least. Historians such as Josephus mentioned Him. Even if you doubt their reports, the fact is pretty clear that a group known as the Christians sprang up quite suddenly around 33 AD, all of whom talked quite a bit about a guy named Jesus, some even being willing to face persecution from the Romans because of their experience. On scientology's side, what do we have?
Pardon my straying further away from the volcano topic. Catholics believe that abortion is wrong, yet it is somehow evil for us to try to use political means to end the wrong. Is it at least ok to push for the appointment of judges who are against murder or do we have to "open-minded" there, as well? If people want us to shutup about abortion, they better start trying a lot harder to convince us that babies aren't people.
Personally, I don't think scientology is scary, but it does bother me a little bit that they're so secretive about it. And I definitely don't think Tom Cruise is an inherently bad person...more of a freaking crackerjack.
So this de Beauvoir guy get drunk and says something philosophical and quotable, and you're clever enough to extrapolate that to capitalism destroying the planet? Impressive.
I'm a little worried here about you exercising free speech. Accepting that principle as a basic human right seems like a pretty important victory. I'm gonna be pretty pissed when the sun goes nova just because you felt it necessary to state your opinion as fact on Slashdot.
Offtopic? So now the mods are taking Roland's side?
For all those who obviously don't know, Roland (I think the last name is actually Piquille or something like that) is famous on Slashdot for copying text from original sources directly onto his blog and submitting Slashdot articles to generate ad revenue without citing sources.
Hold on a second. I thought most of the Dell accessories like their TV's and printers were made by other manufacturer's with the Dell name stuck on them, or at best, to Dell specifications. Am I wrong? If not, they hardly deserve the listings.
I thought this was a guide that listed novel things I could make to give people as gifts, not a list of finished or almost finished products for others to add on to their projects. Talk about disappointed.
That's exactly what I was thinking. Regardless of whether or not this is a legitimate business and "Joseph" is really getting fired, this is completely and pretty explicitly illegal. BBB, not Blogger, is the first place, perhaps with the exception of Yahoo, he should have turned to. The things I was told were illegal and would get me fired for the time that I worked at Sears fell far short of what "Joseph" did.
Sorry I don't have mod points. That was pretty good!
Hey now! No need to be an internet character assassin.
I love the way his wikipedia article already includes a paragraph about his displeasure with Wikipedia.
I'm not even sure about that much. I noticed feeling tired on days when I ate turkey sandwiches for lunch before anyone told me that it made you feel that way. Granted, I noticed this in my 12:45 statistics class, which was pretty dull, but that class was only two days a week, and I didn't have the problem the other 3 days of the week.
How about: Jump back 20 years in time and you'll see people circumventing the write protection on floppy disks the exact same way.
This is pretty clever and I have to wonder if the guy who thought it up was thinking of floppies when he tried it. My first guess was the tape covers the first data that contains the Sony crapware, but how do you also avoid covering the file table? I also wonder if this will make your CD drive rattle a little bit at 52X.
At $300 bucks for an X-box 360 and $60 per game, I'm suddenly thinking of scooping up a used X-box. The attraction of consoles for me is the social aspect of gaming with others you can talk to/insult directly. I might not get the latest and greatest in technology, but I prefer that kind of game on the PC (mouse + WASD is my controller preference). I'm sure I can pick up an X-box for less than $100 (I think EB is selling them refurbished and warrantied for that much) and most of the games have dropped to $20-30 and been reviewed thoroughly so I know what games to buy.
Of course if the 360 is backwards compatible with X-box games, that takes half the wind out of my sails.
It's being spent on Carribean vacations and boats for the top NASA administrators. Let's do some more math. ($75,000 / boat + $10,000 / vacation) x perhaps 50 administrators = $4.25 million. Hmmm, so even if it is a big embezzlement scheme, that doesn't account for much either. I didn't dig up your original post to see why it was modded down, but I don't doubt the knee-jerk reaction from sensitive nerds.
The senior engineers probably do make around $100,000. They're really sharp people. The top PhD scientists probably make even more. Being an expert in your field tends to make you valuable, and spending 7-8 years being dirt poor in school becoming an expert tends to ingrain a sense of deserving compensation. Still, that doesn't account for the $4.5 billion price tag. Even launch costs are only a couple hundred million.
The $4.5 billion tag includes a lot of research and development and a lot of subcontracting. R&D is expensive and subcontracting multiplies the number of people involved. While the Burj Dubai Tower is an ambitious project, it's real challenge is expanding existing technologies to fit a really big application. The JWST involves new controls and instruments that have to be prototyped and tested thoroughly. If you've ever contracted out for one-off precision parts, you'll find it's very expensive. For example, I just had a part made where the cost of having it machined, both due to the cost and hardness of the material I needed and the precision I desired, was over $300 each, for essentially a block with a planed surface and a couple holes in it. NASA deals with even more exotic materials and far higher tolerance, especially with the mirrors. My tolerances were 0.5 mm on that part. The mirrors deal with single microns. You don't send that out to the local machine shop. The mills that grind these things cost millions of dollars to build, and are probably custom built for such projects. I could start listing all sorts of parts that drive the cost up, but it gets redundant.
Is this cost unheard of? Nope. Hubble cost $2 billion initially. I think the two service missions added another billion. I'm not sure in this case, but NASA budgets typically also include operational costs. Someone else mentioned something about a change in budget structure so that the costs of running the space flight centers is now factored into the cost of the projects run from them so facilities aren't maintained unless they're actually producing something.
To be fair, it should be possible to build it for less. NASA has never been considered a model of efficiency (politics contributes largely to this). The fact of the matter is that they decided they needed this and no one else has offered a better price. If someone else seriously believes they can build it for $500 million and can convince NASA of that, they should do it. Heck, they should bid for $1 billion and walk away with a killer profit while saving the taxpayers $3.5 billion.
I didn't intend for the the original article to suggest that the JWST was the Hubble's direct replacement, but I didn't want to completely ignore the connection between the two. The outstanding scientific return of the Hubble led to the decision to continue building ambitious, high profile space observatories. In that sense, I suspose one might call it the Hubble's replacement, but you're absolutely right that the JWST is a distinct mission with its own capabilities. If it were as simple of a change as stepping up technology one generation, there would never have been the big fuss over whether or not to launch one more Hubble service mission.
Actually, NASA is hardly in a slump. They've shown a pretty good unmanned mission success over the last 4-5 years. The last major failure was the Mars Polar Lander, which was lost in 1999. Then of course there was the Genesis mission that failed to deploy it's parachute after successfully capturing solar wind particles. The sample was tainted, but not considered completely lost. In the meantime, they've launched the Spitzer, Cassini has arrived on station, Deep Impact smacked a comet, Voyager reached the termination shock, Galileo finished an excellent tour of Jupiter, Stardust is on it's way back to earth with a comet sample, Odyssey is orbiting Mars as planned, and the Reconnaissance Orbiter is halfway there. If you consider the past record, or even the trials of other nations (ESA losing the Beagle amd part of the data from Hguyens, Japan having trouble with Hayabusa and losing their Martian probe, Russia in the doldrums of a limited budget), the success rate lately has been outstanding. I hope this is a sign that we're finally getting the hang of it.
In addition to what other people have said: because the Sojourner rover lasted about 90 days before it collected too much dust and couldn't operate. It was only expected to last something like 2 weeks, at which time the batteries ran out and it had to trickle charge from it's undersized solar panel. I'm sure experience from the Viking missions and the Pathfinder lander was also used in setting the mission-success criteria.
I think it would probably be more like a couple of weeks, considering how many measurements and photos it's taken and how fast a person can work when their every move is being orchestrated over the radio by someone else. Still, it's a good point, plus there's input you can only get from a human being. For example, when Opportunity got stuck in a dune, the engineers spent three days trying to figure out things like how cohesive the sand was. A person (one) would have never gotten stuck and (two) would have simply said "it's like beachsand/flour/clay/the balls in the McDonalds Playplace."
And if you're interested in furthering manifest destiny (in a more polically correct form...there's no Indians on Mars), there's other things you can only learn by putting a man on Mars, like learning the long-term health concerns.
The probe has been in orbit around the asteroid for several days now. In this attempt to land, it got down to only 10 meters from the surface and was supposed to guide itself down on autopilot, fire a penetrator into the surface and capture debris kicked up from that action. Apparently somewhere right around that 10 meter mark, it either decided it was time to take off again and ascended, probably without taking the sample. Since communication has been spotty, they're not sure exactly how high it ascended to.
The plan has been to make two such landings, so they have enough fuel for another go around. If I remember correctly, they originally planned more, but the failure of their reaction wheels meant the landings had to be entirely directed by rocket firings. With the low gravity, I don't think damage from free-falling too fast is a problem, but bouncing back up and possibly getting turned upside down as a result might be.
Smash it open and count the transistors
... - 2,367,194,217 - 2,367,194,218. Whew!br />
1 - 2 - 3 - 4 -
2,367,194,218? Wait a second, this is an AMD chip!
Oh man, as if having Sony on their asses wasn't enough, these guys are going to bring the wrath of Edison down on themselves!