My first thought was that if anybody had any sense, the insurance company would pay Boeing a license fee to use method described in the patent. Everybody wins:
SES gets use of their satellite.
The insurance company negotiates a license fee much lower than the loss-of-mission payout.
Boeing gets money back on the effort they spent designing the procedure.
Of course, it's not a given, and there's other factors to be taken into account. There is a small risk it won't work out. More pointedly, they will have to expend a good deal of stationkeeping fuel to salvage it, which will reduce the useful life of the satellite. The article says 4 years is expected. They were probably originally planning 10-20 years of use, so even if the patent didn't stand in the way, they might not be able to recoup all their costs in so short a time. The update at the end of the article suggests this is the case. And of course, this procedure takes months to accomplish, during which time they still won't have use of the satellite.
If you read the article you will also find out there is a legal game going on between SES and Boeing, because SES has an unrelated $50 million lawsuit against Boeing that is straining any possible negotiations.
Regarding the idea of patenting this, I'm personally not convinced patenting the lunar flyby salvage technique is as outrageous as it's being made out to be. They're not patenting gravity. They're patenting a method for a non-obvious utilization of gravity. Non-obvious enough that it took 30 years of launching and occasionally failing to properly orbit geo-synchronous satellites before all those brainy rocket scientists tried it. From "Method of exercising a cat with a laser pointing device" to "Method of using cross-flow filtration for separation of solids," there's absurd patents (even an abuse of the system) and legit patents. What is fundamentally different between Boeing's lunar flyby salvage patent and the latter example I gave? They both use gravity, and as far as I can tell don't patent a specific device. What about software algorithms? Is the LZW patent legitimate?
The space junk angle is apparently irrelevant. If SES doesn't find a buyer for the satellite or work out something with Boeing, they'll de-orbit the satellite. There's plenty of fuel onboard for that. Space junk would actually be a bigger deal if they did salvage it. Geosynchronous satellites don't normally have enough fuel to de-orbit at the end of their life. Instead they push up to a higher orbit that's out of the way and takes much less energy to get to.
For a black hole to be active, it needs stuff falling into it...gas, dust, stars if you're unlucky. The stuff heats up to an extraordinary temperature due to friction as it falls in. To be hazardous at our distance of 25,000 light-years from the galactic center, it has to be quite a bit of matter falling in for a harmful intensity of radiation.
Our galaxy's black hole, Sagittarius-A, is not considered active, although it does have some weak emissions, primarily at harmless infrared and radio wavelengths consistent with a very small accretion disc. The nearest star to the black hole is estimated to be about 70 times as far away from it as it would need to be for the gravitational forces to remove significant amounts of material from the star. It also has an orbital period of 15 years, so it would take a long time and a significant perturbance to fall significantly close. It doesn't seem likely at all that it would become active in the foreseeable future.
.But Perek says that may not be enough. "Previous proposals for a passive tether controlled from the ground do not seem stable to me," he told New Scientist.
Anders Jorgensen of the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology in Socorro, US, who has previously studied the problem, agrees that stability is a concern for space elevators. But he says the new paper does not provide a quantitative analysis of the issue, and is not convinced that thrusters would be needed to stabilize the cables.
Basically, the problem has been noted before this Perek guy's paper, but not studied in any detail. Perek reiterates and perhaps expands upon the concern, but doesn't do any analysis to establish the actual likelihood of a problem. It's basically an opinion.
Atmospheric oscillations should be extremely well damped by drag. Oscillations due to gravity from the sun and moon may be a greater concern, because there is no drag, although including conductive paths in the cable may allow the earth's magnetic field to suitably damp the oscillations.
An IEEE article on the topic discussed the related issue of harmonics. If these oscillations propogate through the cable at a rate that syncs up well with the rotation of the earth, gravity of either the moon or sun may amplify them. The tensile component can be tuned by adjusted the mass and tensile stiffness of the cable, and even better, the mass of the counterweight, allowing you to tune it by changing the tension, like an incredibly huge guitar string. The will also be a pendulum like motion due to the fact that the earth is on a tilted axis. This seems to be the concern discussed in the article.
I personally am not at all convinced that oscillation of the cable alone (waves) is a problem due to it's low density, but oscillation of the combined cable and counterweight (pendulum) may be. If so, thrusters on the counterweight are much simpler to attach and refuel than they would be at intermediate altitudes on the cable.
No, I buy almost all of my albums for $6-$7 per disc (counting shipping and handling). Admittedly, that's from BMG, which means the album choices are sometimes painfully limited, and apparently there's some link to Sony (hello rootkit) that's making me seriously rethink my practices.
But the main point is that no, obviously a CD does not need to cost $15.99, or else BMG wouldn't be able to sustain this practice. Of course, as a mail/internet vendor, their brick-and-mortar costs are tiny, but let's guess-timate some costs. Feel free to poke holes in my numbers:
A blank compact disc costs the average consumer less than $0.50. Record labels save by buying in bulk more directly from manufacturers. Producing the CD is handled almost entirely automatically. Small office-level automated CD burner/label printers cost about $1-2K and can crank out thousands of CD's. So machine costs are on the order of $0.50 per CD and ink cartridges cost perhaps as much per disc, but almost certainly the commercial versions are much more cost-effective. Still, we'll be generous and take these numbers. Jewel cases are another $0.25 each, and I'll guess $0.25 for artwork. Add in packaging labor at $30/hour (fully accounted) capable of packaging 300/hour (gotta get those back covers in the jewel case) and there's another $0.10.
So we're up to a very generous $2.10 for manufacturing.
Media mail costs $2.49 to mail individual discs to individual houses, but we're talking bulk shipping rates to bulk recipients. I think I'm being extremely generous in estimating $1 per item considering Staples can sell a similarly sized notebook for about that much, including all costs, not just shipping. Just for fun, they can have $1 profit. So it looks like $4.10 covers costs from manufacturing downward more than amply. Now lets look at costs upstream of the plant.
I'll suppose a 200:1 studio time/album length ratio, and a 50:1 engineering time/album length ratio at $100/hour each. That's $25,000 for a decent album. Let's pay a starving artist $5000 to spend a month to create the cover and booklet artwork.
It's long been claimed that most bands (the non-gold album types) make most of their money off of live shows, but hey, let's give each of four members $100,000 for creative awesomeness (or at least ability to fit the rock-pop mold) anyway. Their agent gets another $100,000. The marketing gurus say they'll be a small hit and predict 250,000 sales. So from our $530,000 creative costs we incur an additional markup of $2.12 per disc.
Holy money-grubs Batman! We've produced a hypothetical album from scratch to putting it in the consumer's shopping bag for a total cost of $6.22!
Surely we must have missed something? We've got $2.44 million (at $9.77/disc surplus) left over to spend on promotions and management costs and account as profit for an album that ultimately only sells to 0.08% of the US population.
Neither of them are cut yet, and as you can see in the article, the plan is still to keep Opportunity moving next year, and ceasing operations from Spirit doesn't necessarily mean it's out of the picture completely either. While driving would almost certainly cease, and communications resources would be limited, an automated, stationary program of observations may be feasible.
This is definitely sad, but I wouldn't call it sickening. The rovers have accomplished far more than probably anyone at JPL expected them to do in their not-quite-wildest dreams (wildest being to photograph either a Martian or a Starbucks coffee shop).
We've developed a habit of expecting space missions to continue until they either run out of fuel (in this case solar power) or something catastrophic breaks. The cost of doing that, however, has to be weighed against the money it takes away from other programs which might be able to produce more gain from that money. Late next year NASA will be launching the much more capable Mars Science Laboratory, a bigger, fancier, nuclear-powered rover, to Mars. Its budget is already extremely tight. Plus the Mars Phoenix Lander is already on its way there. NASA will likely have to forego a mission to Mars during the 2011 launch window due to limited funds.
While Spirit and Opportunity were designed to live past the 90 day "warranty" that the news articles all focus on, beyond 1 year seemed unlikely enough mission team hadn't even asked for funding that far out. They've been rolling for over 4 years now! My understanding is that's costs over $100 million extra (which NASA happily spent at the time), but as you run out new things to discover in each location, the value of redundant data gets increasingly hard to justify.
At some point you simply have to say, "it's been an outstanding run, but the money can be better spent elsewhere." Are we there yet? I don't know. I'm sure the rover team would say very loudly "No!" and I'm personally very inclined to agree, but Congress, the GAO, or higher ups in NASA apparently see it otherwise. If NASA opens the decision up to public comment, I know which way I'll be arguing.
As for which child to abandon on Mars' doorstep, Spirit has been slowed greatly by a dead drive motor, is currently in a poor energy situation due to dust coverage, and the rock abrasion tool is very worn. The solar panels are producing only a 1/3 of the nominal amount of juice per day, and just 60% more than what it theoretically takes to stay alive. Meanwhile, Opportunity is currently in a good position inside a giant, interesting crater, with a decent energy budget.
Meanwhile, here's a slice of what they've accomplished:
* 2,983 combined "rover-days" working on Mars (goal: 180)
* 19.2 km combined driving (goal: 1.2 km)
* Taken 210,000+ combined photographs
* Almost completely worn down the rock abrasion tools from use
* Countless hours of spectrometer readings
* Countless rocks and geological features examined in unprecedented detail
* Found strong evidence in multiple forms of past liquid water
* Inspired almost every space-nerd alive
This particular topic has been discussed at least once as an article on slashdot, and almost every energy related topic ultimately wanders onto mercury in fluorescent light bulbs.
However, here's the abbreviated facts (and I apologize I'm not going to go look up all the numbers again, but if you don't take my word for it, you can look the numbers up yourself):
A typical compact fluorescent light bulb has about 5 mg of mercury in it. All NEMA manufacturers voluntarily agreed to this a maximum. This is roughly as much as is contained in 50 cans of tuna. The FDA recommends consumers limit their intake of tuna to 1 serving per week, so that's about the same as a year's supply of tuna. So is this enough to be a health hazard? Not really.
First of all, the tuna contains the compound methylmercury, which is formed by bacterial action and bioaccumulates much more readily than elemental mercury. A greater portion of the latter passes through the body unretained. Secondly, you eat the tuna. Nobody eats a light bulb. Not to mention, the FDA recommendation is conservative, except in the case of children and pregnant women.
Generally, the lightbulbs don't get broken until disposal, and therefore completely contain the mercury, but if it does, it can safely be disposed of in the garbage. The EPA recommends that you not touch the pieces with your bare hands, so use a broom and put it in a bag. Most of that tiny amount of mercury is actually condensed on the phosphor that lines the bulb, and therefore fairly effectively immobilized, although it will slowly evaporate.
Is it an environmental hazard? Again, not really.
The EPA has calculated, based on the US's current power source mix, that the mercury contained in a CFL is more than offset by the power savings, which reduce the amount of mercury released into the atmosphere by burning coal. Additionally, don't forget that the mercury is trapped inside the bulb until broken. Even then it's at best a small concern. Most of the mercury in the environment is naturally occuring, although in specific areas industrial pollution has resulted in significantly elevated mercury levels.
Additionally, due precisely to disposal concerns, many CFL retailers have implemented recycling programs so you can drop off you dead CFL's and they will dispose of them properly. Not only that, but non-commercial users are actually allowed to dispose of fluorescent bulbs in the trash in most cities. Sound bad? The average US citizen produces about 4 pounds of landfill waste per day. Mix in half a dozen CFL's per year with the trash of an average household, and the amount of mercury ends up being about the same as natural occurs in the earth's crust.
Again, you don't have to believe me, but if you search around for the relevant information (natural abundance of mercury, trash produced per capita, USDA recommended limits on tuna intake, EPA datasheets on mercury and methylmercury, etc) you can verify everything I just wrote.
Theres this thing, im not sure you have much of it over the pond, its called science. There is know need/point in wasting money in some ego race to see who can touch mars first, but by exploring the universe we can expand our scientific knowledge.
That sounds good on the surface, but I reject the premise. Science for the point of science is worthless except as a form of intellectual entertainment (which itself is a purpose, however). We do science because we think we have something to gain from it. Maybe it's just intellectual satisfaction, but I like to think there's more to it than that.
Sure, there's ample science that works on important questions like understand the physical operation of the universe, allowing innovations like computers, telecommunications, and advanced energy production methods, or understanding life so that we can treat diseases and such.
But what is the benefit of knowing the average particle size of Saturn's rings, the composition of rocks on Mars, or the interior composition of the moon? Surely it's more than just an opportunity to let smart people fill up their brains on the public's nickel. That's a big part of why I think if there's a reason to do anything more than just look for near earth asteroids, study the sun, or perform other science with probable near-term benefits to mankind, there's a reason to send people out to do part of the work. We do benefit from an expanded precense in the universe, and even as clumsy as we are at living and traveling in space right now, we are laying the groundwork for future expansion.
Not to mention, there are still some tasks that robots don't even come remotely close to humans ability, such as manual dexterity and critical thinking.
It should be noted, it also has a mass spectrometer. While this can't identify whether a given particle is dust or ice, I believe it can determine the ratio, so while measuring density on the cosmic dust analyzer, they can make a good guess how much of it is water and how much is dust based on the results from the spectrometer.
And furthermore, Cassini will fly a mere 32 miles over the surface of Enceladeus. Considering the detail visible from 2600+ miles away on a pass several years ago, there should be a couple really great images result from this pass.
It's rather amazing to think that NASA can successfully fly this spacecraft within 32 miles of an object 300 miles in diameter, while moving at 32,000 mph in an elliptical orbit that carries it over 1 million miles away from Saturn at the extreme, with very limited manuevering fuel. Go Cassini!
Once again, we somehow end up having the same discussion...
First of all, you're wrong about the fatality rate. The soyuz has had 2 fatal missions in 98 flights (2%), killing 4 crewmembers (Soyuz 1 only carried a single crewman) out of 260 (1.5%). Only a serious miracle and herculean rescue effort kept Soyuz 23 from being fatal. It was a pair of small miracles that Soyuz 18a and Soyuz T-10-1 (which exploded on the pad 2 years after the first shuttle flight, contrary to your assertion) weren't fatal.
The shuttle has had two fatal missions out of 120 (1.7%), killing 14 out of 830 crewmembers (1.7%). The difference isn't even remotely statistically significant. And one would hope that as long as the Soyuz has been in operation they'd have ironed out the bugs...which they mostly have, but not entirely. A mission returning from the ISS several months ago had a navigation issue that resulted in them landing several hundred kilometers off target and experiencing higher than normal g-loads.
Secondly, the shuttle isn't quite directly comparable to Soyuz. It's a far more complex system (for reasons that admittedly are not entirely free from criticism) that provides a unique in-space work platform, cargo capability, landing precision, and down-mass capability. You can fit a fully fueled and loaded Soyuz TMA spacecraft with three crewmen in the shuttle's cargo bay, plus a moderate additional payload and the robotic arm, along with the 7 shuttle crewmen.
Third, we're all painfully aware of the particular delicacy of the shuttle's thermal protection system and it's exposure to launch debris. This isn't pure folley. Most of the risks of a side-stack configuration were known beforehand, and a design tradeoff was made. Furthermore, the shuttle is being retired in 2 years, making the criticisms largely moot in the present context.
So give criticising the shuttle every time an article on spaceflight comes up a rest.
Actually, Galileo was not imprisoned, he was placed under house arrest, and as far as I can tell, it was more like parole than a strict arrest. Probably the harsher part of his sentence was being required to make a public retraction of his views and banning his book.
And I've read a different account of the conflict: The book was published with Pope Urban VIII's approval, which is subtly different from an imprimatur, under the condition that it remain an academic discussion and not directly advocate heliocentrism. Urban VIII was interested in Galileo's ideas, but cautious about the social implications. Being stubborn, he basically ignored that condition because he knew he was right. Unfortunately, the book used some quotes from the Pope mockingly in the form of a "devil's advocate" sort of character, which became a point of public embarrassment for the pope.
HOWEVER, that right there was not the real issue. The pope himself did not pass the judgement on him. It was the board of inquisitors, who were emboldened and enabled by Galileo's fall from favor. The real root of the issue was also not that Galileo contradicted Church teaching, although that was the argument used by some of the Church leadership to suppress him.
The real issue was that Galileo was outright contradicting what almost everyone "knew" from experience to be true: The sun revolves around the earth. You didn't need an awkwardly worded Bible passage to make you think that. You could look outside and see that this was the case. They'd understood it that way their entire lives, and now this rich prick was trying to tell them that their entire view of the universe was wrong, because he went to school in Rome and had some fancy toy called a telescope! As you should be able to imagine, the knee-jerk reaction to that was much more severe than that created by claiming Vista is better than Debian on Slashdot.
That was how they saw it at least. Sure, there were people who knew better and were on Galileo's side. For example, Kepler showed the planets followed elliptical heliocentric orbits about 20 years before Galileo published his book (gasp! Not only was the earth not the center, but the orbits were a theologically imperfect shape. Heresy!). Yet he mostly escaped the controversy Galileo faced.
In fact, the issue had been gradually boiling up for about 100 years, since Copernicus first layed out strong evidence for heliocentrism. Galileo happened to be adamant enough about it to get caught in the crosshairs of the debate. The actions of the Church, then, followed the broad misunderstanding of society.
Galileo's opposition wasn't even just close-minded churchmen or uneducated peasants. There were plenty of well-educated persons who didn't believe him. Remember, we call geo-centrism the Ptolemic system because Ptolemy laid it out. We don't teach about Ptolemy schools because he was a moron we can laugh at; we do it because he was one of the brightest minds of his time. More contemporarily, Da Vinci, although he expressed some concerns about its imperfections, also appears to have accepted Ptolemy's geocentrism.
This has happened time and time again throughout history, although with varying societal responses: Roundness of the earth, Columbus and the new world (actually, Columbus was wrong and others were right, but he got lucky and found another continent), atomic theory of matter, Einstein's theories of relativity (quote from my great grandfather "Einstein is just another crackpot"), global warming, Coke vs Pepsi, etc.
And yet, everytime this topic comes up, dozens of slashdotters jump on the attack, pointing out the Church's error 300+ years after it stopped mattering.
Well first of all, he obviously said "A lot" hasn't changed, not all. The dust storms don't result in noticable changes to anything from a reasonable distance, certainly not from space. The recent storm that cut into the rovers solar power deposited a layer of dust not even thick enough to be opaque (fortunately), and for any natural objects, it's just dust that was already on them anyways. The dust is ultra-fine grit; nothing that catches the eye by itself.
The polar CO2 icecaps come and go with the seasons, but are basically the same year to year.
The dunes shift almost imperceptibly with the prevailing winds, but dunefields stay in the same approximate place.
I think once or twice a crater has been discovered that wasn't in an older image. Meteor impacts are extremely rare and have yet to be seen in the instant of occurrence on Mars.
Volcanic activity is completely non-existant on present-day Mars.
There's quite a bit of stuff continually happening on Mars, but compared to Earth it looks dead. In comparison to a dust storm or a shifting sand-dune, seeing an avalance consisting of thousands of tons or more of material, some it probably decent size pieces actually in motion on Mars is like Die Hard versus a 1920's silent film. Heck, avalances and landslides even on busy earth are among the more remarkable geological processes.
And seeing an event that lasts perhaps a few minutes on a planet that won't be completely mapped by MRO's HiRISE camera during it's entire time in operation is a really compelling hint that rapidly occuring events like this aren't entirely rare.
When someone pointed out this image yesterday, I just stared at it in amazement for several minutes. This ranks up there Io's volcanoes in coolness. Shoemaker-Levy 9 hitting Jupiter still ranks as solar system natural event of the century, in my book, however.
The walls of the reactor will heat up due to neutron collisions and radiative heat transfer. In ITER, this heat will be conducted to a water cooling system. Temperatures in the plasma will be millions of degrees. Temperatures at the first structural layer, the "blanket" will be somewhere around 1000 K, I believe. Definitely below the melting temperature of reasonable materials. The gigantic electromagnets keep the superhot plasma stable and away from the walls, as much to keep the plasma hot as to keep the walls "cold."
ITER, however, will not operate as a power plant. The cooling water will just dump heat through cooling towers. It's purely a research reactor to study the stability and sustainability of plasma's with Q > 1, and establish operational conditions for the next reactor, known as DEMO. Because it's not really intended to run for more than about 500 seconds at a shot, it's not economical to try to get useful amounts of electricity out of ITER, although adding a turbine in loop with the cooling system is not fundamentally out of the question.
DEMO will be designed for continuous or near-continuous operation. Depending how successful ITER is (and the International Fusion Materials Irradiation Facility, which will develop the appropriate materials for the high neutron flux in a fusion reactor), DEMO may be another intermediate research reactor to finalize a workable commercial design, or it may be the final prototype, with other commercial reactors starting construction about the same time. The plan is to use a similar cooling system, but connect a steam turbine to it.
Regarding the operational byproducts (primarily stable helium), there is a feature in the bottom of the reactor called a diverter. I'm not sure exactly how it works, but my understanding is the helium reaction product being heavier, it tends to the bottom of the plasma, where being on the periphery it cools more and falls out the vents or is magnetically guided out.
Moving away from your question, the article says the first commercial reactors will be built in the 2035 time frame. Oddly the ITER team doesn't think so. My understanding is 2035 is potentially feasible if they are able to build DEMO as an operational prototype rather than an additional research plant, but if they need to do further research with DEMO, it will be at least 10, probably more like 15 more years before commercial plants will be available.
Of course, all of this assumes the member countries follow through on their financial and in-kind committments in a timely manner. The US butchered our budget for ITER contributions for 2008. Not a good move on our part, IMO.
As a final note, the article makes a big deal about MIT's PSFC. This strikes me as slightly odd. I'm sure the work being done at MIT is valuable for understanding plasma stability, but in my opinion the Japanese JT-60 reactor, which holds the endurance record for a sustaining a 28 second plasma burn and achieving conditions which with a different fuel mix would have exceeded unity, or the Joint European Torus, which is currently the largest Tokamak in operation (and fuels the reaction by shooting frozen pellets of deuterium into the core 50 times per second...how cool is that?) are both much more exciting.
Back in the 60's or so they figured out the whole red giant phase of stellar evolution and realized the sun would expand to about the diameter of the earth's present orbit when it reached this point. It was a fascinating bit of trivia for Carl Sagan and the common folk to pass around that the sun would engulf the earth, but further investigation showed the sun would likely lose something like 30% of it's mass as heat from helium fusion blew away the outer layers (a process that looks really freaking cool from a distance). This would cause the earth, due to conservation of its orbital energy, to assume a much larger orbit...about as far out as Mars is today.
Therefore the popular notion was thought by many astronomers to be wrong. But in fact, nobody had ever done a really detailed model of the process until the subject of this article. It turns out, the professionals were wrong, and the common folk were correct, if only because we were a couple decades behind the times academically.
If you don't believe me, here's the archived wikipedia page for earth from last Friday. It's since been updated.
Perhaps I'm the one who's got it backwards, but I'm pretty sure what the article is saying is not that the Allied forces are tracking down the Taliban's cell signals, but that the Allied forces are using cell phones for their own communications, either between units or to get in touch with informants, spies, etc. It makes sense. Suppose Hashim down at the local market knows that Yousaf, who owns the fertilizer store, is a Taliban supplier. If you want Hashim to tell you whenever Yousaf makes a big sale of ammonium nitrate, you can either give him a $6,500 SINCGARS tactical radio that he'll need a couple hours training to use and if the wrong people knows he has they'll kill him for working with the invaders...or you can just get his phone number.
"Since the occupying forces stationed in Afghanistan usually at night use mobile phones for espionage to track down the mujahideen, the Islamic Emirate gave a three-day ultimatum to all mobile phone firms to switch off their phones from five in the afternoon until seven in the morning," Taliban spokesperson Qari Mohammad Yousuf told Reuters, ironically via mobile phone (and presumably during daylight).
Besides, it doesn't make sense for the Taliban to need the towers turned off. If they were looking to prevent anyone from tracking them (assuming we know which phones to track in the first place), all they have to do is turn their phones off as you said, or switch to airline mode, or if you want to be really certain, remove the battery. That way you don't piss off the service providers, you don't piss off the other Afghani's whom you're supposedly trying to "free," you don't expose yourself to risk by contacting the service providers who are supposedly in league with the infidels anyways, and you don't have to waste explosives blowing up more people.
But it's still kind of funny to hear the Taliban whining about cellphones. Just wait until they find out you can download Jessica Simpson music videos on VCast.
I thought it was obvious, but none of the posters so far seem to have picked up on it. This is a further test of the ballistic missile defense program we've been spending $$$ for the last decade. In particular, the SM-3 Aegis Missile Defense System. One of the bonuses is this will be testing the missile under less strictly defined conditions.
The program has been in the development and test phase since about 2000, and undergoing tests of increasing difficulty, but always under predefined conditions. The tests are also expensive to orchestrate, typically involving several naval vessels, and a lot of ground support from both the navy and contractors, a lot of documentation, and a target missile that itself probably costs several million dollars. Here they've got a target that won't behave as predictably and costs nothing (well sort of...It's a spy satellite that failed to reach the proper orbit). I'm not sure they even know when or where it will come down yet.
This isn't necessarily a good demonstration of our ability to shoot down satellites. The officially released specs say it has a maximum altitude of 160 km. Most satellites orbit higher than that. However, the actual performance is classified and probably somewhat greater.
It's also not something new. We tested anti-satellite weapons in the 80's, although those are now past their shelf life and the response time was slow. In the 60's we developed a system called Nike Zeus that had an altitude ceiling of about 300 km. It wasn't accurate enough to directly hit a ballistic missile or satellite to achieve a kinetic kill like the SM-3 does, but with a 40 kiloton nuclear warhead, that didn't much matter. It was never tested with a live warhead and it would have been messy to use (damages anything else nearby, terrible EM interference on the ground, etc), but it was something.
The Soviet Almuz space spy stations, which were disguised as the Salyut research stations the USSR was also launching at the time, had a much smaller primary objective than the Hubble. There is no way they could have matched the Hubble's angular resolution. That's just journalists looking for some handy example of another telescope in space.
Resolution is limited by distance from the object, objective or mirror size, and wavelength. At visible wavelengths, for a satellite in a 500 km orbit with a 2.4 m diameter primary mirror like the Hubble, the best resolution possible is about 6 inches. Diffraction prevents you from doing any better (consider the famous single-slit experiment for a simple example). This optical limit has been established and understood for over a century, and the same physics apply for NASA, the Russians, the Air Force, and even consumer digital cameras.
Because of this, even though the Air Force is extremely protective of all details about their spy satellites, even about what orbit they're in (although some nerdy spotters have done a good job of tracking them), we still can get a pretty good idea of their capabilities. Both the Hubble and the Keyhole spy satellites were built by Lockheed and transported from assembly to launch facilities in similar containers. That constrains their size to be pretty close to that of the Hubble. In fact, there's some decent speculation that the basic geometry of the Hubble was copied from the Keyholes, meaning they would also have 2.4 m diameter mirrors.
So we know they can't count fleas on your dog, since they can only distinguish between objects 6 inches apart. This isn't the same as actually identifying objects 6 inches across (no, they can't read license plates). Supposedly it's good enough to distinguish between men and women based on proportion (is that Pamela Anderson?). It might be possible to do very slightly better using computers to compare multiple images of the same target, but the practicallity would be limited.
They also can't look through your roof. Visible light doesn't go through roofs. I believe some far infrared does, but because of the longer wavelength, the resolution is probably somewhere on the order of the size of the house itself, and the signal would no doubt be lost amidst the heat of the house.
The 6" resolution is also only under ideal conditions. That means calm, clear skies (incidentally, the Soviets liked to build smokey factories next to their submarine and strategic bomber bases...go figure) and filming straight down. Because changing the orbit to go directly over a target means burning precious fuel, a lot of shots are made obliquely, increasing the effective distance to the target.
Incidentally, most of the imagery from the 60's and early 70's was declassified in 2002. This confirmed that the early satellites had a resolution of about 20 feet (enough to spot airplanes, perhaps identify ships) and later versions of Corona could resolve at about 7 feet (spot the movements of military units, mobile nuclear missile launchers, identify planes). The first satellites with 6 inch resolution or close to that probably launched in the late 70's with improvements since mainly in guidance, manueverability, and low light sensitivity rather than resolution. Being already able to resolve people, it's not cost effective to go bigger from space on those rare occassions that you need to, when typically you can send in a Predator drone or a special forces team for a fraction of the price.
By the way, the Federation of American Scientists has an online primer on reconnaissance imagery. It's pretty interesting and shows samples of photos at differing resolutions. It really illustrates just how good 6" is from a strategic analysis viewpoint. At that scale, a good analyst can even tell what kind of missiles are hanging from a parked fighter jet (The plane in the sample pictures is MiG-25. The missiles are probably AA-6 Acrids).
5% really isn't bad for something measured by forearm lengths yarded out along a length of rope. That's less than a knuckle-length per cubit.
I do first approximations all the time with much more than a 5% error (3.14 is a pain to multiply by in your head) and often even final work. Engineering is seldom an exact process. If I'm trying to figure out how many bricks I need to shore up a well, 5% error will get me really close, especially if I give myself a 10% margin.
As far as I know, the ancient Israelites did not have a tradition of mathematical rigor. 3:1 seems a pretty natural approximation.
So the argument you're making, assuming my case regarding the existance of God for the sake of the argument, is that man has out-evolved God?
If God didn't exist, you argument makes sense. Don't worry, I'm not going to try to draw you out into an argument over the existance of God on Slashdot but notice that your reply rather hinges on God not existing.
Back into the meat of the argument, however, the Church is hardly static. The Church is constantly facing and adapting to new conditions in the world, although sometimes with less alacrity than at others. From the molasses-slow relearning our world view (something the whole world went through, not just the Catholic Church) as geocentrism was discarded, through the fall and rise of major social entities like the Roman empire, modern Europe, the meeting of East and West (missionary work in Japan is a good example, IMO), etc. Doctrines haven't changed. Those are the parts we believe to be immutable...essential truths. More on that later. But many practices, social roles, biblical interpretations, etc. have. There's a reason woman are no longer expected to cover their hair, why priests now face the congregations instead of the rear altar, why it's no longer considered appropriate for cardinals to accept political authority from kings (and why we no longer have kings, for that matter), and why we no longer shy away from eating pork.
I mostly agree with you on the statement that humanity's success comes from the ability to use tools and adapt to new environments. I only add on that a further cause of success is the ability to form cohesive social structures, which I suppose is more a supporter of your two causes than an independent third reason.
However, fundamentalist religions are not inherently opposed to that (and I'm not sure the term "fundamentalist" applies well to the Catholic Church). Some are, yes, but most appreciate the prudent use of technology for all the benefits it brings. Note the headline of the article that sparked our discussion uses the phrase "some biotech." Pope Benedict spoke favorably of non-embryonic stem-cell research and other technologies that hold promise for improving the human condition with compromising the value of human life, as we Catholics believe embryonic stem-cell research does.
That takes us back to doctrines and immutable truths. Although I believe these two go hand in hand, secular society faces separately the questions of the existance of God and the existance of fundamental moral truths. Even if we're wrong about the existance of God, we may be right about morality, and those morals are not made invalid simply because Catholics hold them. I'm sure that's obvious as written, but in practice it's important that when non-Catholics react to statements like that of the Pope's, they don't simply say "Bah! It's the Catholics, I don't have to listen to them," but rather, "Is that right? Why or why not?"
I want to finish up by contending the evolution humanity has undergone in the last 5000 years is not as substantial in relation to morality as some would suggest. What differences are there? Probably somewhat increased cognitive ability, as there is survival pressure for the intelligent. Taller stature, lighter bone structure, the ability to digest more foods, etc. Which of these change the applicability of basic moral principles? Was murder acceptable at the dawn of society (was it ok for Cain to kill Able)? What about stealing, lying, corruption? Would abortion have been ok, had they known how to reliably perform it? Extending the same line of thought, was adultery, greed, or slander? What differences between human beings then and now made this so (assuming, of course, you don't contend they are and were then acceptable).
Anyway, thanks for your reply. I posted several other places in this discussion, and yours was by far the most thought-provoking and well-considered response I saw. It's a rather nice change from the mud-slinging that dominates religious discussions on Slashdot.
The issue wasn't just "some book" that said the earth was the center of the universe. Almost everybody was convinced that's what they were seeing when they looked up in the sky. It's pretty darn hard to take a glance and figure all that out for yourself. There's a reason it took all of humanity several thousand years to establish that fact. We're talking generations of really hardcore science nerds like Aristotle, Archymedes, and Da Vinci. Almost no one besides Galileo had seen what he had, and few even had the capacity to interpret that as a heliocentric system on their own, even if they did see it. It may seem simple to you or me, who have been taught it in increasingly thorough steps as long as we can remember, but you do disservice to their intellects by neglecting that point.
Galileo (who wasn't the first to suggest or even provide evidence of heliocentrism), happened to be the stubborn fool who got caught in the crosshairs of the debate over a dramatically shifting worldview. If you thought the bickering about whether Pluto is a planet was tiresome, just imagine trying to redefine the entire universe to a largely uneducated world. Heck, plenty of people were still claiming "turtles all the way down" into the 19th or 20th century.
The Church ended up involved largely as a matter of politics, which the Church was unfortunately overly involved in at the time. Galileo actually had a lot of support from the pope at the time until he (apparently accidentally) insulted Pope Urban in his book on the topic. At that point, their friendship ended and the vehemently geocentric half of society was able to sway the board of inquisitors in their favor. Over time the fallacy of geocentrism became increasingly obvious and quietly went away, although the protestants never tired of pointing out the Church's misstep. It only took 359 years for the apology to come out because most people simply saw it as a non-issue that scientific evidence had dealt with. John Paul II, however, wanted to address the lingering resentment. I might also mention that I just happened to read in the paper today that Australia's PM is issuing a formal apology for Australia's mistreatment of Aboriginees. In same tone as yours, do we really want this racist beauracracy clogging down the politics in Australia?
The Catholic Church's teaching on topics like artificial insemmination isn't some arbitrary whim. It's based on a very deeply founded theology of the creation and nature of human beings, and it's one that does not minimize the value of those who are sterile, for example. Obviously few non-Catholics genuinely understand the main points of the theology, but that does not change the reasoning behind it.
I am hardly able to see the Church as a solely medieval institution, as you put it, when it is in fact composed of hundreds of millions of modern day people, most of whom are quite capable of integrating history and the modern world in their lives. While we're at it, humanity is a pre-medieval institution. Where does that leave us?
You're right that this is a statement to re-inforce the church teaching on human life, but the issue is not whether a cloned human is a person with a soul, etc.
The issue is that a human being is given life by God. The way God intended that is through the pro-creative cooperation with a man and a woman. This stuff is dicussed fairly thoroughly and much more precisely than I can phrase it in Pope John XXIII's encyclical Humanae Vitae. You can get a brief outline of the points by looking up relevant entries in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (although both documents are limited in their technological aspects).
Cloning steps outside this form and attempts to create a human through primarily artificial means. The Church considers that an affront to human dignity, and sees in it not only an attempt to work around God's natural order, but a real danger of abusing the person thus created (harvesting organs, deliberately engineering traits to be exploited, etc). Also, the pope addressed the creation of human embryos, which the church maintains are human life, in an artificial manner especially if the purpose is to kill them for research.
Of course, one specific dangers is the creation of either inferior or defective humans, or hybrids. That would raise the question of humanity, baptism, etc as you mentioned rather directly, but goes beyond what Pope Benedict was discussing here, but as a start consider that the church regards the disabled the same as anyone else spiritually.
And please, please, everyone note that he did not condemn, and in fact encouraged stem cell research, on the conditions that it does not abuse human life. Also, he did not say anything along the lines of the scientific community should obey the church's every whim, but rather that the scientific community should not forget its consience, and that the church must try to help guide that conscience through rational discussion.
Unfortunately, the Libraries of Congress joke is irrelevant to measures in percent. It's proper use is for measures of data, although sometimes other equivalencies are formulated, like cost or volume, just as pound has similar uses for force, mass, or currency. Of course, you could extend that to the LOC and ratios, but you just end up with LOC's/LOC, which is rather silly compared to more obvious metrics like cubits/annual LOC heating energy (a measure of automotive efficiency commonly used in the pointless obfuscation industry).
The clumsy, oft-used (and almost always incorrectly used*) unit system you're looking for is "times." So 28% is 0.28 times the whole market or 0.72 times less than all of it. It's also approximately 0.8796 times 1/pi'th of the market. I'm sure you can immediately see how useful this unit system is for confusing the heck out of anyone you're talking to.
* The literal meaning of a statement like 20 times less is not 1/20th, but rather, -19. Hence it is nonsensical to say things like "the newest cellphones are 20 times lighter than the first models." You show me a product with a negative weight and I'll make you a rich person (and myself at the sametime, by cornering the entire world-wide space launch industry)! The proper way to say it is that they weigh 1/20th as much, or are 0.95 times or 95% lighter.
What Griffin was referring to in his letter was the fact that, for the first time since 1962, NASA had been given a clear objective and the authority (although not quite all the funds) to follow it. No hemming and hawing over various shuttle concepts and bouncing around between interest groups. No toying with space station ideas with only half an idea what they wanted to do with it.
The Vision for Space Exploration set a direction for developing a replacement for the shuttle, something that needed to happen since the Columbia Accident Investigation Board mandated the shuttle be retired in 2010. By stating an objective, although not Mars as some had hoped, it mandated certain capabilities early on for NASA to work with. However, it does not prevent the technology being developed now from being adapted for a Mars mission (the CEV is being designed with re-entry from a Mars trajectory in mind).
Believe it or not, there is a lot we don't know about the moon, and a lot we can do there. Moreover, neither Bush nor even the big NASA supporters in Congress have the political will to launch a push for Mars that has any chance of lasting beyond the next administration. I don't give Bush credit for figuring it out, but the smaller scope of a new moon initiative stands a good chance of being upheld by the next presidency and future congresses.
By the way, NASA is currently still thinking about using Orion and Ares for asteroid exploration to a very limited degree. The space society is proposing they forego the moon altogether and just play on the asteroids. I'm not sure I understand their reasoning behind that.
I'm way, way more excited about SpaceX than Scaled Composites/Virgin Galactic, but it's still cool to see them finally building hardware, even if it is low tech, pressure-fed rockets. It's also interesting to see how much different the actual SS2 and WK2 are from the concept art, which was basically just SSI et all built a little bit longer. I noticed WK2 is going with four smaller engines rather than two large engines, presumably for redundancy. And the wing and nose on SS2 are much different than we saw before, with apparently a fully upright pilot seating position (high windshield) and a low, rather than mid-mounted wing. As flightglobal noted, it looks a lot like the old Air Force Dynasoar concept.
On two slightly related notes, something that didn't get mentioned in the article is that OSHA is fining Scaled Composites for not providing sufficient training to the technicians killed in the H202 explosion a couple months ago. Just a little business tidbit. As expected, the accident was caused by improper handling. Also, if anyone wants to really see where SpaceX is at the moment, go to their website and read the latest update. There's a ton of fascinating information in there about the construction and testing.
The Ares 1 is beleagured only because Congress is consistently failing to provide the funding needed to meet the milestones set two years ago. I'm convinced the vibration issue mentioned last week is being overblown. Yes, it's a problem because they were counting on not modifying the casings structurally, but it's fixable without fundamental changes to the concept.
I doubt the Falcon 9 will actually launch in June as scheduled. Things always come up in big projects, as the Falcon 1 flights have shown, but I'm sure we'll see it go up this year, and hopefully the first commercial payloads for the Falcon 1, as well.
Risking coming across as a flame, the point here is that their notion of suppression was "agree with us or we'll suppress your life", a position Pope Benedict has (reportedly) implicitly defended, and which is the cause of the "we really don't you preaching your religion in our campus" reaction (which, let's face it, is a fair bit milder take on the whole suppression thing)
I'm glad you have that "reportedly" disclaimer in there, because otherwise you would be wrong.
Pope Benedict said or implied nothing of the sort. First of all, there was no threat to Galileo's life. He was placed under house arrest and ordered to recant his arguments for heliocentrism. Galileo's enemies were only able to accomplish this much after he inadvertantly but publicly embarrassed Pope Urban VIII, who had previously been very supportive of his work.
Second, if you will read the second link in the submission, you will see that the speech referred to did not defend the Church's treatment of Galileo. Rather, in a paper discussing the relationship between faith and science he turned to the obvious example of Galileo, particularly how it was distorted in the 19th century to make it look like a simple case of good Galileo vs the oppressive church (There really was much more going on and Galileo had many friends in the Church who defended him). During this passage, he quotes several opinions on the matter. One of them defends the decision of the Inquisition. He quoted it. He didn't accept it. In fact, he appears critical of that opinion and calls it "drastic."
Third, this speech was made just two years before Pope John Paul II's public apology for the Church's treatment of Galileo. If we're going to consider implied viewpoints, note that he was a close friend of John Paul II. Similarly, Benedict has said something to the effect of "ideologies of power can never erase truth." That sort of philosphy rather contradicts a justification of suppression.
As another poster stated, it's perplexing that this faculty member complained when Benedict arranged to come speak (on invitation), seemingly ignorant of the above, and then complained again when he cancelled. Professor Cini's position, in fact, was not merely that he didn't want him preaching religion on campus, but the ridiculous argument that allowing a religious leader on the campus was "an incredible violation of the university's autonomy."
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My first thought was that if anybody had any sense, the insurance company would pay Boeing a license fee to use method described in the patent. Everybody wins:
SES gets use of their satellite.
The insurance company negotiates a license fee much lower than the loss-of-mission payout.
Boeing gets money back on the effort they spent designing the procedure.
Of course, it's not a given, and there's other factors to be taken into account. There is a small risk it won't work out. More pointedly, they will have to expend a good deal of stationkeeping fuel to salvage it, which will reduce the useful life of the satellite. The article says 4 years is expected. They were probably originally planning 10-20 years of use, so even if the patent didn't stand in the way, they might not be able to recoup all their costs in so short a time. The update at the end of the article suggests this is the case. And of course, this procedure takes months to accomplish, during which time they still won't have use of the satellite.
If you read the article you will also find out there is a legal game going on between SES and Boeing, because SES has an unrelated $50 million lawsuit against Boeing that is straining any possible negotiations.
Regarding the idea of patenting this, I'm personally not convinced patenting the lunar flyby salvage technique is as outrageous as it's being made out to be. They're not patenting gravity. They're patenting a method for a non-obvious utilization of gravity. Non-obvious enough that it took 30 years of launching and occasionally failing to properly orbit geo-synchronous satellites before all those brainy rocket scientists tried it. From "Method of exercising a cat with a laser pointing device" to "Method of using cross-flow filtration for separation of solids," there's absurd patents (even an abuse of the system) and legit patents. What is fundamentally different between Boeing's lunar flyby salvage patent and the latter example I gave? They both use gravity, and as far as I can tell don't patent a specific device. What about software algorithms? Is the LZW patent legitimate? The space junk angle is apparently irrelevant. If SES doesn't find a buyer for the satellite or work out something with Boeing, they'll de-orbit the satellite. There's plenty of fuel onboard for that. Space junk would actually be a bigger deal if they did salvage it. Geosynchronous satellites don't normally have enough fuel to de-orbit at the end of their life. Instead they push up to a higher orbit that's out of the way and takes much less energy to get to.
For a black hole to be active, it needs stuff falling into it...gas, dust, stars if you're unlucky. The stuff heats up to an extraordinary temperature due to friction as it falls in. To be hazardous at our distance of 25,000 light-years from the galactic center, it has to be quite a bit of matter falling in for a harmful intensity of radiation.
Our galaxy's black hole, Sagittarius-A, is not considered active, although it does have some weak emissions, primarily at harmless infrared and radio wavelengths consistent with a very small accretion disc. The nearest star to the black hole is estimated to be about 70 times as far away from it as it would need to be for the gravitational forces to remove significant amounts of material from the star. It also has an orbital period of 15 years, so it would take a long time and a significant perturbance to fall significantly close. It doesn't seem likely at all that it would become active in the foreseeable future.
Basically, the problem has been noted before this Perek guy's paper, but not studied in any detail. Perek reiterates and perhaps expands upon the concern, but doesn't do any analysis to establish the actual likelihood of a problem. It's basically an opinion.
Atmospheric oscillations should be extremely well damped by drag. Oscillations due to gravity from the sun and moon may be a greater concern, because there is no drag, although including conductive paths in the cable may allow the earth's magnetic field to suitably damp the oscillations.
An IEEE article on the topic discussed the related issue of harmonics. If these oscillations propogate through the cable at a rate that syncs up well with the rotation of the earth, gravity of either the moon or sun may amplify them. The tensile component can be tuned by adjusted the mass and tensile stiffness of the cable, and even better, the mass of the counterweight, allowing you to tune it by changing the tension, like an incredibly huge guitar string. The will also be a pendulum like motion due to the fact that the earth is on a tilted axis. This seems to be the concern discussed in the article.
I personally am not at all convinced that oscillation of the cable alone (waves) is a problem due to it's low density, but oscillation of the combined cable and counterweight (pendulum) may be. If so, thrusters on the counterweight are much simpler to attach and refuel than they would be at intermediate altitudes on the cable.
No, I buy almost all of my albums for $6-$7 per disc (counting shipping and handling). Admittedly, that's from BMG, which means the album choices are sometimes painfully limited, and apparently there's some link to Sony (hello rootkit) that's making me seriously rethink my practices.
But the main point is that no, obviously a CD does not need to cost $15.99, or else BMG wouldn't be able to sustain this practice. Of course, as a mail/internet vendor, their brick-and-mortar costs are tiny, but let's guess-timate some costs. Feel free to poke holes in my numbers:
A blank compact disc costs the average consumer less than $0.50. Record labels save by buying in bulk more directly from manufacturers. Producing the CD is handled almost entirely automatically. Small office-level automated CD burner/label printers cost about $1-2K and can crank out thousands of CD's. So machine costs are on the order of $0.50 per CD and ink cartridges cost perhaps as much per disc, but almost certainly the commercial versions are much more cost-effective. Still, we'll be generous and take these numbers. Jewel cases are another $0.25 each, and I'll guess $0.25 for artwork. Add in packaging labor at $30/hour (fully accounted) capable of packaging 300/hour (gotta get those back covers in the jewel case) and there's another $0.10. So we're up to a very generous $2.10 for manufacturing.
Media mail costs $2.49 to mail individual discs to individual houses, but we're talking bulk shipping rates to bulk recipients. I think I'm being extremely generous in estimating $1 per item considering Staples can sell a similarly sized notebook for about that much, including all costs, not just shipping. Just for fun, they can have $1 profit. So it looks like $4.10 covers costs from manufacturing downward more than amply. Now lets look at costs upstream of the plant.
I'll suppose a 200:1 studio time/album length ratio, and a 50:1 engineering time/album length ratio at $100/hour each. That's $25,000 for a decent album. Let's pay a starving artist $5000 to spend a month to create the cover and booklet artwork.
It's long been claimed that most bands (the non-gold album types) make most of their money off of live shows, but hey, let's give each of four members $100,000 for creative awesomeness (or at least ability to fit the rock-pop mold) anyway. Their agent gets another $100,000. The marketing gurus say they'll be a small hit and predict 250,000 sales. So from our $530,000 creative costs we incur an additional markup of $2.12 per disc.
Holy money-grubs Batman! We've produced a hypothetical album from scratch to putting it in the consumer's shopping bag for a total cost of $6.22!
Surely we must have missed something? We've got $2.44 million (at $9.77/disc surplus) left over to spend on promotions and management costs and account as profit for an album that ultimately only sells to 0.08% of the US population.
Neither of them are cut yet, and as you can see in the article, the plan is still to keep Opportunity moving next year, and ceasing operations from Spirit doesn't necessarily mean it's out of the picture completely either. While driving would almost certainly cease, and communications resources would be limited, an automated, stationary program of observations may be feasible.
This is definitely sad, but I wouldn't call it sickening. The rovers have accomplished far more than probably anyone at JPL expected them to do in their not-quite-wildest dreams (wildest being to photograph either a Martian or a Starbucks coffee shop).
We've developed a habit of expecting space missions to continue until they either run out of fuel (in this case solar power) or something catastrophic breaks. The cost of doing that, however, has to be weighed against the money it takes away from other programs which might be able to produce more gain from that money. Late next year NASA will be launching the much more capable Mars Science Laboratory, a bigger, fancier, nuclear-powered rover, to Mars. Its budget is already extremely tight. Plus the Mars Phoenix Lander is already on its way there. NASA will likely have to forego a mission to Mars during the 2011 launch window due to limited funds.
While Spirit and Opportunity were designed to live past the 90 day "warranty" that the news articles all focus on, beyond 1 year seemed unlikely enough mission team hadn't even asked for funding that far out. They've been rolling for over 4 years now! My understanding is that's costs over $100 million extra (which NASA happily spent at the time), but as you run out new things to discover in each location, the value of redundant data gets increasingly hard to justify.
At some point you simply have to say, "it's been an outstanding run, but the money can be better spent elsewhere." Are we there yet? I don't know. I'm sure the rover team would say very loudly "No!" and I'm personally very inclined to agree, but Congress, the GAO, or higher ups in NASA apparently see it otherwise. If NASA opens the decision up to public comment, I know which way I'll be arguing.
As for which child to abandon on Mars' doorstep, Spirit has been slowed greatly by a dead drive motor, is currently in a poor energy situation due to dust coverage, and the rock abrasion tool is very worn. The solar panels are producing only a 1/3 of the nominal amount of juice per day, and just 60% more than what it theoretically takes to stay alive. Meanwhile, Opportunity is currently in a good position inside a giant, interesting crater, with a decent energy budget.
Meanwhile, here's a slice of what they've accomplished:
* 2,983 combined "rover-days" working on Mars (goal: 180) * 19.2 km combined driving (goal: 1.2 km) * Taken 210,000+ combined photographs * Almost completely worn down the rock abrasion tools from use * Countless hours of spectrometer readings * Countless rocks and geological features examined in unprecedented detail * Found strong evidence in multiple forms of past liquid water * Inspired almost every space-nerd alive
This particular topic has been discussed at least once as an article on slashdot, and almost every energy related topic ultimately wanders onto mercury in fluorescent light bulbs.
However, here's the abbreviated facts (and I apologize I'm not going to go look up all the numbers again, but if you don't take my word for it, you can look the numbers up yourself):
A typical compact fluorescent light bulb has about 5 mg of mercury in it. All NEMA manufacturers voluntarily agreed to this a maximum. This is roughly as much as is contained in 50 cans of tuna. The FDA recommends consumers limit their intake of tuna to 1 serving per week, so that's about the same as a year's supply of tuna. So is this enough to be a health hazard? Not really.
First of all, the tuna contains the compound methylmercury, which is formed by bacterial action and bioaccumulates much more readily than elemental mercury. A greater portion of the latter passes through the body unretained. Secondly, you eat the tuna. Nobody eats a light bulb. Not to mention, the FDA recommendation is conservative, except in the case of children and pregnant women.
Generally, the lightbulbs don't get broken until disposal, and therefore completely contain the mercury, but if it does, it can safely be disposed of in the garbage. The EPA recommends that you not touch the pieces with your bare hands, so use a broom and put it in a bag. Most of that tiny amount of mercury is actually condensed on the phosphor that lines the bulb, and therefore fairly effectively immobilized, although it will slowly evaporate.
Is it an environmental hazard? Again, not really.
The EPA has calculated, based on the US's current power source mix, that the mercury contained in a CFL is more than offset by the power savings, which reduce the amount of mercury released into the atmosphere by burning coal. Additionally, don't forget that the mercury is trapped inside the bulb until broken. Even then it's at best a small concern. Most of the mercury in the environment is naturally occuring, although in specific areas industrial pollution has resulted in significantly elevated mercury levels.
Additionally, due precisely to disposal concerns, many CFL retailers have implemented recycling programs so you can drop off you dead CFL's and they will dispose of them properly. Not only that, but non-commercial users are actually allowed to dispose of fluorescent bulbs in the trash in most cities. Sound bad? The average US citizen produces about 4 pounds of landfill waste per day. Mix in half a dozen CFL's per year with the trash of an average household, and the amount of mercury ends up being about the same as natural occurs in the earth's crust.
Again, you don't have to believe me, but if you search around for the relevant information (natural abundance of mercury, trash produced per capita, USDA recommended limits on tuna intake, EPA datasheets on mercury and methylmercury, etc) you can verify everything I just wrote.
That sounds good on the surface, but I reject the premise. Science for the point of science is worthless except as a form of intellectual entertainment (which itself is a purpose, however). We do science because we think we have something to gain from it. Maybe it's just intellectual satisfaction, but I like to think there's more to it than that.
Sure, there's ample science that works on important questions like understand the physical operation of the universe, allowing innovations like computers, telecommunications, and advanced energy production methods, or understanding life so that we can treat diseases and such.
But what is the benefit of knowing the average particle size of Saturn's rings, the composition of rocks on Mars, or the interior composition of the moon? Surely it's more than just an opportunity to let smart people fill up their brains on the public's nickel. That's a big part of why I think if there's a reason to do anything more than just look for near earth asteroids, study the sun, or perform other science with probable near-term benefits to mankind, there's a reason to send people out to do part of the work. We do benefit from an expanded precense in the universe, and even as clumsy as we are at living and traveling in space right now, we are laying the groundwork for future expansion.
Not to mention, there are still some tasks that robots don't even come remotely close to humans ability, such as manual dexterity and critical thinking.
It should be noted, it also has a mass spectrometer. While this can't identify whether a given particle is dust or ice, I believe it can determine the ratio, so while measuring density on the cosmic dust analyzer, they can make a good guess how much of it is water and how much is dust based on the results from the spectrometer.
And furthermore, Cassini will fly a mere 32 miles over the surface of Enceladeus. Considering the detail visible from 2600+ miles away on a pass several years ago, there should be a couple really great images result from this pass.
It's rather amazing to think that NASA can successfully fly this spacecraft within 32 miles of an object 300 miles in diameter, while moving at 32,000 mph in an elliptical orbit that carries it over 1 million miles away from Saturn at the extreme, with very limited manuevering fuel. Go Cassini!
Once again, we somehow end up having the same discussion...
First of all, you're wrong about the fatality rate. The soyuz has had 2 fatal missions in 98 flights (2%), killing 4 crewmembers (Soyuz 1 only carried a single crewman) out of 260 (1.5%). Only a serious miracle and herculean rescue effort kept Soyuz 23 from being fatal. It was a pair of small miracles that Soyuz 18a and Soyuz T-10-1 (which exploded on the pad 2 years after the first shuttle flight, contrary to your assertion) weren't fatal.
The shuttle has had two fatal missions out of 120 (1.7%), killing 14 out of 830 crewmembers (1.7%). The difference isn't even remotely statistically significant. And one would hope that as long as the Soyuz has been in operation they'd have ironed out the bugs...which they mostly have, but not entirely. A mission returning from the ISS several months ago had a navigation issue that resulted in them landing several hundred kilometers off target and experiencing higher than normal g-loads.
Secondly, the shuttle isn't quite directly comparable to Soyuz. It's a far more complex system (for reasons that admittedly are not entirely free from criticism) that provides a unique in-space work platform, cargo capability, landing precision, and down-mass capability. You can fit a fully fueled and loaded Soyuz TMA spacecraft with three crewmen in the shuttle's cargo bay, plus a moderate additional payload and the robotic arm, along with the 7 shuttle crewmen.
Third, we're all painfully aware of the particular delicacy of the shuttle's thermal protection system and it's exposure to launch debris. This isn't pure folley. Most of the risks of a side-stack configuration were known beforehand, and a design tradeoff was made. Furthermore, the shuttle is being retired in 2 years, making the criticisms largely moot in the present context.
So give criticising the shuttle every time an article on spaceflight comes up a rest.
Actually, Galileo was not imprisoned, he was placed under house arrest, and as far as I can tell, it was more like parole than a strict arrest. Probably the harsher part of his sentence was being required to make a public retraction of his views and banning his book.
And I've read a different account of the conflict: The book was published with Pope Urban VIII's approval, which is subtly different from an imprimatur, under the condition that it remain an academic discussion and not directly advocate heliocentrism. Urban VIII was interested in Galileo's ideas, but cautious about the social implications. Being stubborn, he basically ignored that condition because he knew he was right. Unfortunately, the book used some quotes from the Pope mockingly in the form of a "devil's advocate" sort of character, which became a point of public embarrassment for the pope.
HOWEVER, that right there was not the real issue. The pope himself did not pass the judgement on him. It was the board of inquisitors, who were emboldened and enabled by Galileo's fall from favor. The real root of the issue was also not that Galileo contradicted Church teaching, although that was the argument used by some of the Church leadership to suppress him.
The real issue was that Galileo was outright contradicting what almost everyone "knew" from experience to be true: The sun revolves around the earth. You didn't need an awkwardly worded Bible passage to make you think that. You could look outside and see that this was the case. They'd understood it that way their entire lives, and now this rich prick was trying to tell them that their entire view of the universe was wrong, because he went to school in Rome and had some fancy toy called a telescope! As you should be able to imagine, the knee-jerk reaction to that was much more severe than that created by claiming Vista is better than Debian on Slashdot.
That was how they saw it at least. Sure, there were people who knew better and were on Galileo's side. For example, Kepler showed the planets followed elliptical heliocentric orbits about 20 years before Galileo published his book (gasp! Not only was the earth not the center, but the orbits were a theologically imperfect shape. Heresy!). Yet he mostly escaped the controversy Galileo faced.
In fact, the issue had been gradually boiling up for about 100 years, since Copernicus first layed out strong evidence for heliocentrism. Galileo happened to be adamant enough about it to get caught in the crosshairs of the debate. The actions of the Church, then, followed the broad misunderstanding of society.
Galileo's opposition wasn't even just close-minded churchmen or uneducated peasants. There were plenty of well-educated persons who didn't believe him. Remember, we call geo-centrism the Ptolemic system because Ptolemy laid it out. We don't teach about Ptolemy schools because he was a moron we can laugh at; we do it because he was one of the brightest minds of his time. More contemporarily, Da Vinci, although he expressed some concerns about its imperfections, also appears to have accepted Ptolemy's geocentrism.
This has happened time and time again throughout history, although with varying societal responses: Roundness of the earth, Columbus and the new world (actually, Columbus was wrong and others were right, but he got lucky and found another continent), atomic theory of matter, Einstein's theories of relativity (quote from my great grandfather "Einstein is just another crackpot"), global warming, Coke vs Pepsi, etc.
And yet, everytime this topic comes up, dozens of slashdotters jump on the attack, pointing out the Church's error 300+ years after it stopped mattering.
Well first of all, he obviously said "A lot" hasn't changed, not all. The dust storms don't result in noticable changes to anything from a reasonable distance, certainly not from space. The recent storm that cut into the rovers solar power deposited a layer of dust not even thick enough to be opaque (fortunately), and for any natural objects, it's just dust that was already on them anyways. The dust is ultra-fine grit; nothing that catches the eye by itself.
The polar CO2 icecaps come and go with the seasons, but are basically the same year to year.
The dunes shift almost imperceptibly with the prevailing winds, but dunefields stay in the same approximate place.
I think once or twice a crater has been discovered that wasn't in an older image. Meteor impacts are extremely rare and have yet to be seen in the instant of occurrence on Mars.
Volcanic activity is completely non-existant on present-day Mars.
There's quite a bit of stuff continually happening on Mars, but compared to Earth it looks dead. In comparison to a dust storm or a shifting sand-dune, seeing an avalance consisting of thousands of tons or more of material, some it probably decent size pieces actually in motion on Mars is like Die Hard versus a 1920's silent film. Heck, avalances and landslides even on busy earth are among the more remarkable geological processes.
And seeing an event that lasts perhaps a few minutes on a planet that won't be completely mapped by MRO's HiRISE camera during it's entire time in operation is a really compelling hint that rapidly occuring events like this aren't entirely rare.
When someone pointed out this image yesterday, I just stared at it in amazement for several minutes. This ranks up there Io's volcanoes in coolness. Shoemaker-Levy 9 hitting Jupiter still ranks as solar system natural event of the century, in my book, however.
The walls of the reactor will heat up due to neutron collisions and radiative heat transfer. In ITER, this heat will be conducted to a water cooling system. Temperatures in the plasma will be millions of degrees. Temperatures at the first structural layer, the "blanket" will be somewhere around 1000 K, I believe. Definitely below the melting temperature of reasonable materials. The gigantic electromagnets keep the superhot plasma stable and away from the walls, as much to keep the plasma hot as to keep the walls "cold."
ITER, however, will not operate as a power plant. The cooling water will just dump heat through cooling towers. It's purely a research reactor to study the stability and sustainability of plasma's with Q > 1, and establish operational conditions for the next reactor, known as DEMO. Because it's not really intended to run for more than about 500 seconds at a shot, it's not economical to try to get useful amounts of electricity out of ITER, although adding a turbine in loop with the cooling system is not fundamentally out of the question.
DEMO will be designed for continuous or near-continuous operation. Depending how successful ITER is (and the International Fusion Materials Irradiation Facility, which will develop the appropriate materials for the high neutron flux in a fusion reactor), DEMO may be another intermediate research reactor to finalize a workable commercial design, or it may be the final prototype, with other commercial reactors starting construction about the same time. The plan is to use a similar cooling system, but connect a steam turbine to it.
Regarding the operational byproducts (primarily stable helium), there is a feature in the bottom of the reactor called a diverter. I'm not sure exactly how it works, but my understanding is the helium reaction product being heavier, it tends to the bottom of the plasma, where being on the periphery it cools more and falls out the vents or is magnetically guided out. Moving away from your question, the article says the first commercial reactors will be built in the 2035 time frame. Oddly the ITER team doesn't think so. My understanding is 2035 is potentially feasible if they are able to build DEMO as an operational prototype rather than an additional research plant, but if they need to do further research with DEMO, it will be at least 10, probably more like 15 more years before commercial plants will be available.
Of course, all of this assumes the member countries follow through on their financial and in-kind committments in a timely manner. The US butchered our budget for ITER contributions for 2008. Not a good move on our part, IMO.
As a final note, the article makes a big deal about MIT's PSFC. This strikes me as slightly odd. I'm sure the work being done at MIT is valuable for understanding plasma stability, but in my opinion the Japanese JT-60 reactor, which holds the endurance record for a sustaining a 28 second plasma burn and achieving conditions which with a different fuel mix would have exceeded unity, or the Joint European Torus, which is currently the largest Tokamak in operation (and fuels the reaction by shooting frozen pellets of deuterium into the core 50 times per second...how cool is that?) are both much more exciting.
Back in the 60's or so they figured out the whole red giant phase of stellar evolution and realized the sun would expand to about the diameter of the earth's present orbit when it reached this point. It was a fascinating bit of trivia for Carl Sagan and the common folk to pass around that the sun would engulf the earth, but further investigation showed the sun would likely lose something like 30% of it's mass as heat from helium fusion blew away the outer layers (a process that looks really freaking cool from a distance). This would cause the earth, due to conservation of its orbital energy, to assume a much larger orbit...about as far out as Mars is today.
Therefore the popular notion was thought by many astronomers to be wrong. But in fact, nobody had ever done a really detailed model of the process until the subject of this article. It turns out, the professionals were wrong, and the common folk were correct, if only because we were a couple decades behind the times academically.
If you don't believe me, here's the archived wikipedia page for earth from last Friday. It's since been updated.
Perhaps I'm the one who's got it backwards, but I'm pretty sure what the article is saying is not that the Allied forces are tracking down the Taliban's cell signals, but that the Allied forces are using cell phones for their own communications, either between units or to get in touch with informants, spies, etc. It makes sense. Suppose Hashim down at the local market knows that Yousaf, who owns the fertilizer store, is a Taliban supplier. If you want Hashim to tell you whenever Yousaf makes a big sale of ammonium nitrate, you can either give him a $6,500 SINCGARS tactical radio that he'll need a couple hours training to use and if the wrong people knows he has they'll kill him for working with the invaders...or you can just get his phone number.
Besides, it doesn't make sense for the Taliban to need the towers turned off. If they were looking to prevent anyone from tracking them (assuming we know which phones to track in the first place), all they have to do is turn their phones off as you said, or switch to airline mode, or if you want to be really certain, remove the battery. That way you don't piss off the service providers, you don't piss off the other Afghani's whom you're supposedly trying to "free," you don't expose yourself to risk by contacting the service providers who are supposedly in league with the infidels anyways, and you don't have to waste explosives blowing up more people.
But it's still kind of funny to hear the Taliban whining about cellphones. Just wait until they find out you can download Jessica Simpson music videos on VCast.
I thought it was obvious, but none of the posters so far seem to have picked up on it. This is a further test of the ballistic missile defense program we've been spending $$$ for the last decade. In particular, the SM-3 Aegis Missile Defense System. One of the bonuses is this will be testing the missile under less strictly defined conditions.
The program has been in the development and test phase since about 2000, and undergoing tests of increasing difficulty, but always under predefined conditions. The tests are also expensive to orchestrate, typically involving several naval vessels, and a lot of ground support from both the navy and contractors, a lot of documentation, and a target missile that itself probably costs several million dollars. Here they've got a target that won't behave as predictably and costs nothing (well sort of...It's a spy satellite that failed to reach the proper orbit). I'm not sure they even know when or where it will come down yet.
This isn't necessarily a good demonstration of our ability to shoot down satellites. The officially released specs say it has a maximum altitude of 160 km. Most satellites orbit higher than that. However, the actual performance is classified and probably somewhat greater.
It's also not something new. We tested anti-satellite weapons in the 80's, although those are now past their shelf life and the response time was slow. In the 60's we developed a system called Nike Zeus that had an altitude ceiling of about 300 km. It wasn't accurate enough to directly hit a ballistic missile or satellite to achieve a kinetic kill like the SM-3 does, but with a 40 kiloton nuclear warhead, that didn't much matter. It was never tested with a live warhead and it would have been messy to use (damages anything else nearby, terrible EM interference on the ground, etc), but it was something.
The Soviet Almuz space spy stations, which were disguised as the Salyut research stations the USSR was also launching at the time, had a much smaller primary objective than the Hubble. There is no way they could have matched the Hubble's angular resolution. That's just journalists looking for some handy example of another telescope in space.
Resolution is limited by distance from the object, objective or mirror size, and wavelength. At visible wavelengths, for a satellite in a 500 km orbit with a 2.4 m diameter primary mirror like the Hubble, the best resolution possible is about 6 inches. Diffraction prevents you from doing any better (consider the famous single-slit experiment for a simple example). This optical limit has been established and understood for over a century, and the same physics apply for NASA, the Russians, the Air Force, and even consumer digital cameras.
Because of this, even though the Air Force is extremely protective of all details about their spy satellites, even about what orbit they're in (although some nerdy spotters have done a good job of tracking them), we still can get a pretty good idea of their capabilities. Both the Hubble and the Keyhole spy satellites were built by Lockheed and transported from assembly to launch facilities in similar containers. That constrains their size to be pretty close to that of the Hubble. In fact, there's some decent speculation that the basic geometry of the Hubble was copied from the Keyholes, meaning they would also have 2.4 m diameter mirrors.
So we know they can't count fleas on your dog, since they can only distinguish between objects 6 inches apart. This isn't the same as actually identifying objects 6 inches across (no, they can't read license plates). Supposedly it's good enough to distinguish between men and women based on proportion (is that Pamela Anderson?). It might be possible to do very slightly better using computers to compare multiple images of the same target, but the practicallity would be limited.
They also can't look through your roof. Visible light doesn't go through roofs. I believe some far infrared does, but because of the longer wavelength, the resolution is probably somewhere on the order of the size of the house itself, and the signal would no doubt be lost amidst the heat of the house.
The 6" resolution is also only under ideal conditions. That means calm, clear skies (incidentally, the Soviets liked to build smokey factories next to their submarine and strategic bomber bases...go figure) and filming straight down. Because changing the orbit to go directly over a target means burning precious fuel, a lot of shots are made obliquely, increasing the effective distance to the target.
Incidentally, most of the imagery from the 60's and early 70's was declassified in 2002. This confirmed that the early satellites had a resolution of about 20 feet (enough to spot airplanes, perhaps identify ships) and later versions of Corona could resolve at about 7 feet (spot the movements of military units, mobile nuclear missile launchers, identify planes). The first satellites with 6 inch resolution or close to that probably launched in the late 70's with improvements since mainly in guidance, manueverability, and low light sensitivity rather than resolution. Being already able to resolve people, it's not cost effective to go bigger from space on those rare occassions that you need to, when typically you can send in a Predator drone or a special forces team for a fraction of the price.
By the way, the Federation of American Scientists has an online primer on reconnaissance imagery. It's pretty interesting and shows samples of photos at differing resolutions. It really illustrates just how good 6" is from a strategic analysis viewpoint. At that scale, a good analyst can even tell what kind of missiles are hanging from a parked fighter jet (The plane in the sample pictures is MiG-25. The missiles are probably AA-6 Acrids).
3.14 / 3 ~= 1.05
5% really isn't bad for something measured by forearm lengths yarded out along a length of rope. That's less than a knuckle-length per cubit.
I do first approximations all the time with much more than a 5% error (3.14 is a pain to multiply by in your head) and often even final work. Engineering is seldom an exact process. If I'm trying to figure out how many bricks I need to shore up a well, 5% error will get me really close, especially if I give myself a 10% margin.
As far as I know, the ancient Israelites did not have a tradition of mathematical rigor. 3:1 seems a pretty natural approximation.
So the argument you're making, assuming my case regarding the existance of God for the sake of the argument, is that man has out-evolved God?
If God didn't exist, you argument makes sense. Don't worry, I'm not going to try to draw you out into an argument over the existance of God on Slashdot but notice that your reply rather hinges on God not existing.
Back into the meat of the argument, however, the Church is hardly static. The Church is constantly facing and adapting to new conditions in the world, although sometimes with less alacrity than at others. From the molasses-slow relearning our world view (something the whole world went through, not just the Catholic Church) as geocentrism was discarded, through the fall and rise of major social entities like the Roman empire, modern Europe, the meeting of East and West (missionary work in Japan is a good example, IMO), etc. Doctrines haven't changed. Those are the parts we believe to be immutable...essential truths. More on that later. But many practices, social roles, biblical interpretations, etc. have. There's a reason woman are no longer expected to cover their hair, why priests now face the congregations instead of the rear altar, why it's no longer considered appropriate for cardinals to accept political authority from kings (and why we no longer have kings, for that matter), and why we no longer shy away from eating pork.
I mostly agree with you on the statement that humanity's success comes from the ability to use tools and adapt to new environments. I only add on that a further cause of success is the ability to form cohesive social structures, which I suppose is more a supporter of your two causes than an independent third reason.
However, fundamentalist religions are not inherently opposed to that (and I'm not sure the term "fundamentalist" applies well to the Catholic Church). Some are, yes, but most appreciate the prudent use of technology for all the benefits it brings. Note the headline of the article that sparked our discussion uses the phrase "some biotech." Pope Benedict spoke favorably of non-embryonic stem-cell research and other technologies that hold promise for improving the human condition with compromising the value of human life, as we Catholics believe embryonic stem-cell research does.
That takes us back to doctrines and immutable truths. Although I believe these two go hand in hand, secular society faces separately the questions of the existance of God and the existance of fundamental moral truths. Even if we're wrong about the existance of God, we may be right about morality, and those morals are not made invalid simply because Catholics hold them. I'm sure that's obvious as written, but in practice it's important that when non-Catholics react to statements like that of the Pope's, they don't simply say "Bah! It's the Catholics, I don't have to listen to them," but rather, "Is that right? Why or why not?"
I want to finish up by contending the evolution humanity has undergone in the last 5000 years is not as substantial in relation to morality as some would suggest. What differences are there? Probably somewhat increased cognitive ability, as there is survival pressure for the intelligent. Taller stature, lighter bone structure, the ability to digest more foods, etc. Which of these change the applicability of basic moral principles? Was murder acceptable at the dawn of society (was it ok for Cain to kill Able)? What about stealing, lying, corruption? Would abortion have been ok, had they known how to reliably perform it? Extending the same line of thought, was adultery, greed, or slander? What differences between human beings then and now made this so (assuming, of course, you don't contend they are and were then acceptable).
Anyway, thanks for your reply. I posted several other places in this discussion, and yours was by far the most thought-provoking and well-considered response I saw. It's a rather nice change from the mud-slinging that dominates religious discussions on Slashdot.
The issue wasn't just "some book" that said the earth was the center of the universe. Almost everybody was convinced that's what they were seeing when they looked up in the sky. It's pretty darn hard to take a glance and figure all that out for yourself. There's a reason it took all of humanity several thousand years to establish that fact. We're talking generations of really hardcore science nerds like Aristotle, Archymedes, and Da Vinci. Almost no one besides Galileo had seen what he had, and few even had the capacity to interpret that as a heliocentric system on their own, even if they did see it. It may seem simple to you or me, who have been taught it in increasingly thorough steps as long as we can remember, but you do disservice to their intellects by neglecting that point.
Galileo (who wasn't the first to suggest or even provide evidence of heliocentrism), happened to be the stubborn fool who got caught in the crosshairs of the debate over a dramatically shifting worldview. If you thought the bickering about whether Pluto is a planet was tiresome, just imagine trying to redefine the entire universe to a largely uneducated world. Heck, plenty of people were still claiming "turtles all the way down" into the 19th or 20th century.
The Church ended up involved largely as a matter of politics, which the Church was unfortunately overly involved in at the time. Galileo actually had a lot of support from the pope at the time until he (apparently accidentally) insulted Pope Urban in his book on the topic. At that point, their friendship ended and the vehemently geocentric half of society was able to sway the board of inquisitors in their favor. Over time the fallacy of geocentrism became increasingly obvious and quietly went away, although the protestants never tired of pointing out the Church's misstep. It only took 359 years for the apology to come out because most people simply saw it as a non-issue that scientific evidence had dealt with. John Paul II, however, wanted to address the lingering resentment. I might also mention that I just happened to read in the paper today that Australia's PM is issuing a formal apology for Australia's mistreatment of Aboriginees. In same tone as yours, do we really want this racist beauracracy clogging down the politics in Australia?
The Catholic Church's teaching on topics like artificial insemmination isn't some arbitrary whim. It's based on a very deeply founded theology of the creation and nature of human beings, and it's one that does not minimize the value of those who are sterile, for example. Obviously few non-Catholics genuinely understand the main points of the theology, but that does not change the reasoning behind it.
I am hardly able to see the Church as a solely medieval institution, as you put it, when it is in fact composed of hundreds of millions of modern day people, most of whom are quite capable of integrating history and the modern world in their lives. While we're at it, humanity is a pre-medieval institution. Where does that leave us?
You're right that this is a statement to re-inforce the church teaching on human life, but the issue is not whether a cloned human is a person with a soul, etc.
The issue is that a human being is given life by God. The way God intended that is through the pro-creative cooperation with a man and a woman. This stuff is dicussed fairly thoroughly and much more precisely than I can phrase it in Pope John XXIII's encyclical Humanae Vitae. You can get a brief outline of the points by looking up relevant entries in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (although both documents are limited in their technological aspects).
Cloning steps outside this form and attempts to create a human through primarily artificial means. The Church considers that an affront to human dignity, and sees in it not only an attempt to work around God's natural order, but a real danger of abusing the person thus created (harvesting organs, deliberately engineering traits to be exploited, etc). Also, the pope addressed the creation of human embryos, which the church maintains are human life, in an artificial manner especially if the purpose is to kill them for research.
Of course, one specific dangers is the creation of either inferior or defective humans, or hybrids. That would raise the question of humanity, baptism, etc as you mentioned rather directly, but goes beyond what Pope Benedict was discussing here, but as a start consider that the church regards the disabled the same as anyone else spiritually.
And please, please, everyone note that he did not condemn, and in fact encouraged stem cell research, on the conditions that it does not abuse human life. Also, he did not say anything along the lines of the scientific community should obey the church's every whim, but rather that the scientific community should not forget its consience, and that the church must try to help guide that conscience through rational discussion.
Unfortunately, the Libraries of Congress joke is irrelevant to measures in percent. It's proper use is for measures of data, although sometimes other equivalencies are formulated, like cost or volume, just as pound has similar uses for force, mass, or currency. Of course, you could extend that to the LOC and ratios, but you just end up with LOC's/LOC, which is rather silly compared to more obvious metrics like cubits/annual LOC heating energy (a measure of automotive efficiency commonly used in the pointless obfuscation industry).
The clumsy, oft-used (and almost always incorrectly used*) unit system you're looking for is "times." So 28% is 0.28 times the whole market or 0.72 times less than all of it. It's also approximately 0.8796 times 1/pi'th of the market. I'm sure you can immediately see how useful this unit system is for confusing the heck out of anyone you're talking to.
* The literal meaning of a statement like 20 times less is not 1/20th, but rather, -19. Hence it is nonsensical to say things like "the newest cellphones are 20 times lighter than the first models." You show me a product with a negative weight and I'll make you a rich person (and myself at the sametime, by cornering the entire world-wide space launch industry)! The proper way to say it is that they weigh 1/20th as much, or are 0.95 times or 95% lighter.
Not quite. That would be a dumbhead gene.
What they actually discovered is the "Dummesel" gene.
As in, "Du bist ein gross dummesel."
This concludes your German insult lesson for the day. Don't forget, next week we will be having a quiz on "Ihre mutter" jokes.
What Griffin was referring to in his letter was the fact that, for the first time since 1962, NASA had been given a clear objective and the authority (although not quite all the funds) to follow it. No hemming and hawing over various shuttle concepts and bouncing around between interest groups. No toying with space station ideas with only half an idea what they wanted to do with it.
The Vision for Space Exploration set a direction for developing a replacement for the shuttle, something that needed to happen since the Columbia Accident Investigation Board mandated the shuttle be retired in 2010. By stating an objective, although not Mars as some had hoped, it mandated certain capabilities early on for NASA to work with. However, it does not prevent the technology being developed now from being adapted for a Mars mission (the CEV is being designed with re-entry from a Mars trajectory in mind).
Believe it or not, there is a lot we don't know about the moon, and a lot we can do there. Moreover, neither Bush nor even the big NASA supporters in Congress have the political will to launch a push for Mars that has any chance of lasting beyond the next administration. I don't give Bush credit for figuring it out, but the smaller scope of a new moon initiative stands a good chance of being upheld by the next presidency and future congresses.
By the way, NASA is currently still thinking about using Orion and Ares for asteroid exploration to a very limited degree. The space society is proposing they forego the moon altogether and just play on the asteroids. I'm not sure I understand their reasoning behind that.
I'm way, way more excited about SpaceX than Scaled Composites/Virgin Galactic, but it's still cool to see them finally building hardware, even if it is low tech, pressure-fed rockets. It's also interesting to see how much different the actual SS2 and WK2 are from the concept art, which was basically just SSI et all built a little bit longer. I noticed WK2 is going with four smaller engines rather than two large engines, presumably for redundancy. And the wing and nose on SS2 are much different than we saw before, with apparently a fully upright pilot seating position (high windshield) and a low, rather than mid-mounted wing. As flightglobal noted, it looks a lot like the old Air Force Dynasoar concept.
On two slightly related notes, something that didn't get mentioned in the article is that OSHA is fining Scaled Composites for not providing sufficient training to the technicians killed in the H202 explosion a couple months ago. Just a little business tidbit. As expected, the accident was caused by improper handling. Also, if anyone wants to really see where SpaceX is at the moment, go to their website and read the latest update. There's a ton of fascinating information in there about the construction and testing.
The Ares 1 is beleagured only because Congress is consistently failing to provide the funding needed to meet the milestones set two years ago. I'm convinced the vibration issue mentioned last week is being overblown. Yes, it's a problem because they were counting on not modifying the casings structurally, but it's fixable without fundamental changes to the concept.
I doubt the Falcon 9 will actually launch in June as scheduled. Things always come up in big projects, as the Falcon 1 flights have shown, but I'm sure we'll see it go up this year, and hopefully the first commercial payloads for the Falcon 1, as well.
I'm glad you have that "reportedly" disclaimer in there, because otherwise you would be wrong.
Pope Benedict said or implied nothing of the sort. First of all, there was no threat to Galileo's life. He was placed under house arrest and ordered to recant his arguments for heliocentrism. Galileo's enemies were only able to accomplish this much after he inadvertantly but publicly embarrassed Pope Urban VIII, who had previously been very supportive of his work.
Second, if you will read the second link in the submission, you will see that the speech referred to did not defend the Church's treatment of Galileo. Rather, in a paper discussing the relationship between faith and science he turned to the obvious example of Galileo, particularly how it was distorted in the 19th century to make it look like a simple case of good Galileo vs the oppressive church (There really was much more going on and Galileo had many friends in the Church who defended him). During this passage, he quotes several opinions on the matter. One of them defends the decision of the Inquisition. He quoted it. He didn't accept it. In fact, he appears critical of that opinion and calls it "drastic."
Third, this speech was made just two years before Pope John Paul II's public apology for the Church's treatment of Galileo. If we're going to consider implied viewpoints, note that he was a close friend of John Paul II. Similarly, Benedict has said something to the effect of "ideologies of power can never erase truth." That sort of philosphy rather contradicts a justification of suppression.
As another poster stated, it's perplexing that this faculty member complained when Benedict arranged to come speak (on invitation), seemingly ignorant of the above, and then complained again when he cancelled. Professor Cini's position, in fact, was not merely that he didn't want him preaching religion on campus, but the ridiculous argument that allowing a religious leader on the campus was "an incredible violation of the university's autonomy."