I'm not quite sure why the LA Times is reporting this today, when the galaxy was discovered in 2000 and the preprint of the paper describing the age determination using Hubble data ( arXiv:1411.1674 ) appeared in the Arxiv in November.
Transportation across the Pacific is scarily cheap; it's about a thousand dollars for a container that holds about twenty tons, so five cents per shirt.
This is because it's done with a big boat, and boats are amazingly efficient; five thousand containers use about a fifty-megawatt engine for about two weeks, that's twenty kilowatt-weeks (a couple of tons) of fuel to take each container to China or back. You're adding the price of about a cup of super-cheap marine fuel per shirt per direction.
Remember that shipping wheat from Egypt to Rome was cost-effective with sailing ships two thousand years ago!
And human industry also emits significantly more SO2 than volcanoes; you don't get a Pinatubo every decade, and China alone emits two Pinatubos of SO2 annually.
The laser-tracking protocol is defined to run at 25 pulses a second; pulling them back and forward by tiny amounts, to take advantage of the electronics in the orbiter that are designed to measure tiny time differences in order to do the LIDAR altimetry, is a really nifty classic NASA hack.
But the press release did not make a good job of pointing out that NASA were working under that restriction. Obviously if you were trying to do laser communication you'd do something else; ESA have done 50Mbit/second laser communication from low-Earth orbit to geostationary and from geostationary back to Earth, with their Artemis satellite.
Yes, an SoC is a significantly bigger job than a pure CPU core. But Intel hasn't been producing pure CPU cores for a long time; an Ivy Bridge has a large GPU, a collection of video accelerators, two DDR3 controllers, a PCIe 3.0 interface, and quite a fancy power-management microcontroller. The die is less than 50% occupied by CPU cores.
Similarly, I built a two-socket Opteron machine out of ebay parts a few years ago; companies are really bad at realising the value in the components in equipment that they're getting rid of, so quad-core dual-socket Opteron processors that sold for four figures new were two for $99. A current similar effect is happening with the slower-speed Infiniband interconnects from decommissioned supercomputers; DDR Infiniband (20gbit/second and much lower latency than 10GbaseT ethernet) cards are pocket-money cheap on ebay.
I have a quad 6168 in my shed; I do very parallel number-theory jobs, and it's really very good at those.
But for my work each core offers less performance than one hyperthread of a current i7; my 48-core machine is comparable to about 20 cores of Ivy Bridge. For the cases where I'm not taking full advantage of the 6168's amazing memory and interconnect bandwidth (and I don't have enough of those to keep the machine busy), I'd be getting the same performance for half the price with five i7/3770K boxes; they'd take more space and a bit less electricity. I'm hoping the 6168 will keep working for several more years, but I can't see why its successor wouldn't be a pile of haswell+1 machines.
And how does your yield compare to an equal area being farmed competently by people working for Archers-Daniel-Midland?
I have a garden, it's probably the most expensive luxury item I own; it cost me about £40,000 on the price of the house compared to getting a similar-sized apartment with no garden in a similar area, say about £200 a month on the mortgage. It produces enough tomatoes for my purposes, and they are tasty tomatoes; but £200 a month buys from Tesco enough tomatoes for a hundred people's purposes.
If I remember rightly, India has a reasonable number of large cities; what is it that stops people with irredeemably awful prospects in Bihar from getting on a train and becoming people with irredeemably awful but less walled-in prospects in Delhi?
People with irredeemably awful prospects in Gansu have been getting on a train and turning into people with quite decent prospects in Shenzhen by the dozens of millions for the last twenty years.
If you want satellite images, you can write a cheque to DigitalGlobe without much difficulty, and spend money on training local imagery-analysts to be good at producing the information that your planners and developers need.
If you want your own satellite that you can task, you can write a cheque to Astrium who will build you one, and another cheque to get Starsem to launch it from Guyana.
You don't need to develop your own rocket to get the satellite goals; and the technology involved in actually building rockets has only one spin-off use on the ground. Admittedly, nuclear deterrence is a pretty awesome spin-off use if you've got Pakistan on your western border.
Alternatively, you've taken some smart programmers who could be working on designing better interfaces for web sites connected with the poverty-alleviation programme, and you've got them designing interfaces for the ISRO miscellaneous small item procurement internal website. You're taking people who could be working on complicated investment strategies allowing Grameen bank to do more good with its resources, and you're using their time to design low-thrust trajectories for Lunar injection. You're taking fluid-dynamicists who could be working on the feedstocks for the big dams in Kashmir, to get a few more megawatts out of the turbines with the same volume of water, and getting them to work on the manifolds for the turbines pumping high-pressure hydrazine.
The money doesn't go away, but it's no more use than if you were spending that much to train people to be chess grandmasters or marathon runners or professors of analytic number theory - experts in fields of self-referential inutility.
This strikes me as an almost perfectly cliched Japanese technical solution to a social problem: you cannot accept the loss of face that would be involved in telling your minion Mr Akusake to shut up indicating that you do not have the degree of control over Mr Akusake that your relative positions would indicate, or the unspeakable loss of status that would be implied if you told your minion Mr Akusake to shut up and he didn't, but you can point the shutting-up machine at him and cause him to shut up.
Loud people dominating conversations is undeniably an actual social problem, and this is an actual technical solution to it.
The Sandy-Bridge-E (X79) motherboards have eight RAM slots each of which can hold an 8G module, which gets your 64GB. Of course, Sandy-Bridge-E is a Xeon in the same way that Socket-1366 Nehalem was a Xeon.
There are real electronic-engineering problems with getting lots of RAM slots attached to a single memory controller - you have to run the memory more slowly than you would if there were less of it. Cisco have a chip which pretends to be a very large slow DDR3 module by connecting together four large fast DDR3 modules, but it's sold only in expensive Cisco servers.
There is already a prodigious amount of money going to cancer research, because marginally effective chemotherapy drugs can be sold for quite large sums of money and truly-effective chemotherapy drugs could be sold for ludicrous sums of money; it's not clear that there's that much marginal gain to be had from another five billion.
The US stopped funding the SSC, and the result was that the scientists went to Europe to work on the LHC there. If they stop funding space observatories, I will rejoice happily as a whole load of the best astronomers in the world come and move to European universities, and the best students make a habit of coming to European universities to work for them - and, since there aren't that many astrophysics jobs around even in Europe, they'll probably stay and set up startups in Europe. But it's not clear this will do anything terribly good for the United States.
There has been billions of dollars of research into drill bits over the twenty years since the Kola project stopped, drilling deep holes in rock under awkward conditions being more than somewhat useful for the oil industry - the mud-motors that Kola is described as pioneering are now reasonably routine. But whilst 400F is something that people deal with now, 600F is still quite a problem.
The drilling fluids probably will be fairly horrible, and simply getting electronics to work at those temperatures is hard (NASA have done some work in silicon-carbide-substrate semiconductors, since it would be fantastic to be able to run a robot on the surface of Venus, but I don't think they've met with much success).
6km is a deep hole, but not an enormously deep hole by the standards of the off-shore drilling industry; there are deeper holes drilled for oil production in the Gulf of Mexico and for gas production in Sakhalin and the Persian Gulf. The post-salt oil prospects in Brazil require 5km depth to get past the salt layer.
(annoyingly, oil-drillers appear to use 'depth' to describe the length of holes even when they are not pointing vertically downwards, and some of the things described as 'deepest' appear to be drilled mostly horizontally. Some articles also measure depths of oil deposits from the top rather than the bottom of the water)
However, 4km of water is rather deeper than it seems anyone's done oil-drilling to date; there are wells in 2800m water in the Gulf of Mexico (the one that exploded last year was in 1500m) but there doesn't seem to be anything much deeper.
Computer components are designed to be installed by untrained labourers who left their parents' farm in Hunan province last week to seek their fortune in the factories of Shenzhen. Connectors are keyed, connectors with different purposes are keyed differently, and almost everything has locking tabs so you don't knock things out unintentionally.
No; it's rape (since the consent was dependent on the payment); I believe someone in the UK has been convicted of rape for paying a prostitute with counterfeit money.
I've deliberately bought several Intel integrated-graphics motherboards; they display an 80x25 text mode fine as you install Debian, and my compute servers only have a monitor attached when they're failing to boot.
I wish Intel didn't oblige you to buy a super-SLI-gamer motherboard just to run a Core i7 CPU; I bought the chip for the main-memory bandwidth.
The UK government has acted against SHAC in the way that governments are good at: the people who committed the harassment will be in jail for some time.
I find it very difficult ever to justify confiscating servers, because of the huge other-nonoffending-use argument; I'd be entirely at ease with a court order requiring the cooperation of the sysadmin with the police in investigating the origin of the illegal posting while keeping the machine up, but taking the machine away seems a disproportionate impact on everything else hosted there.
You don't tend to demolish the building in which a murder was planned.
For those wondering why the Department of Energy is building a space telescope rather than focussing on nuclear things, the Department of Energy funds the SLAC Linear Accelerator centre at Stanford and it's people at that centre who have designed SNAP, a spacecraft that happens to fulfill exactly the requirements NASA put forth for JDEM.
The Dark Energy Mission is a wide-field high-resolution space telescope; a hundred million or so pixels of 0.2 arcsecond extent, and a five-foot main mirror. The idea's to survey most of the sky at about four times the resolution possible from Earth (adaptive optics, which are useful for very high-resolution imaging of very narrow fields from Earth, are not useful for these large fields).
There are two mission models: take pictures of galaxy clusters and work out the mass in them implied by the way the gravity of the foreground cluster distorts the light from background galaxies, and take pictures of lots of galaxies looking for supernovae.
It's perhaps not entirely accidental that this large-scale high-resolution survey work will produce very attractive images of the sky for outreach, a task at which the JWST replacement for Hubble, being aimed more at work in the infra-red and on the faintest and most distant objects, is not as superb as Hubble.
Processor hours are the right unit if you're trying to allocate usage of a large computer; in particular, they're the units in which compute power on large national clusters is requested in grants.
The calculation in this article was done at the LRZ in Munich, which consists of nineteen 512-core 1.6GHz Itanium systems; 3.5 million processor hours corresponds to using nine of those nineteen systems for a month.
What is Arecibo's credible competition in the radio-bucket field, and particularly in the radio-transmitting field for planetary radar?
You've listed a load of optical instruments, including ATST which is explicitly to study the Sun; the only radio one is the ATA whose area is about a sixth of Arecibo's and who can't benefit from elaborate ultra-low-noise receiver technology unless you want to build 350 dilution refrigerators to cool 350 copies of your instrument.
The Square Kilometer Array isn't built yet, and I can't think of a radio-telescope array which has comparable collecting area to Arecibo; LOFAR's not built yet and is running at lower frequencies anyway; Goldstone _can_ do planetary-radar stuff, but I get the impression Arecibo does it better.
I've argued the other side for some of the British funding withdrawals - there was someone adamant about keeping the UKIRT open to complete a survey, where the UKIRT is a poor survey instrument and the VLT Survey Telescope could do a better job and is already built - but Arecibo is much more credibly a unique facility.
Sadly, gravitational microlensing is an intrinsically one-shot kind of experiment; you can use it to sample the stellar population, but once the lensing event is over you have no chance of being able to study any particular system further. It's too far away, it's too faint, and for the next several thousand years the spectrum will be hopelessly contaminated with light from the background star that the foreground system with the planets is passing in front of as seen from Earth.
There are Internet cafes in the nine corners of the Earth, almost all of whom will burn the contents of your camera's memory cards to DVD, and all of whom will happily let you sit blogging or writing to your heart's content for some princely sum in local currency equivalent to eleven cents the hour. OK, you will be surrounded by local teenagers playing World of Warcraft and smoking like chimneys, but this is not hard to endure.
Bring Moleskine notebooks and a reasonable supply of pens; it's not worth lugging even an Eee up to Everest Base Camp just to take notes that you could take on paper with a pen.
I've done round-the-world, I do copious backpacking in Europe; I've a couple of inches of Moleskines on a shelf, and whilst from time to time I've wished for a flashlight, and occasionally I've had to figure out where to buy a 4GB compact-flash card in Belgrade, I've never felt that what I needed was a laptop.
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I'm not quite sure why the LA Times is reporting this today, when the galaxy was discovered in 2000 and the preprint of the paper describing the age determination using Hubble data ( arXiv:1411.1674 ) appeared in the Arxiv in November.
Transportation across the Pacific is scarily cheap; it's about a thousand dollars for a container that holds about twenty tons, so five cents per shirt.
This is because it's done with a big boat, and boats are amazingly efficient; five thousand containers use about a fifty-megawatt engine for about two weeks, that's twenty kilowatt-weeks (a couple of tons) of fuel to take each container to China or back. You're adding the price of about a cup of super-cheap marine fuel per shirt per direction.
Remember that shipping wheat from Egypt to Rome was cost-effective with sailing ships two thousand years ago!
And human industry also emits significantly more SO2 than volcanoes; you don't get a Pinatubo every decade, and China alone emits two Pinatubos of SO2 annually.
The laser-tracking protocol is defined to run at 25 pulses a second; pulling them back and forward by tiny amounts, to take advantage of the electronics in the orbiter that are designed to measure tiny time differences in order to do the LIDAR altimetry, is a really nifty classic NASA hack.
But the press release did not make a good job of pointing out that NASA were working under that restriction. Obviously if you were trying to do laser communication you'd do something else; ESA have done 50Mbit/second laser communication from low-Earth orbit to geostationary and from geostationary back to Earth, with their Artemis satellite.
Yes, an SoC is a significantly bigger job than a pure CPU core. But Intel hasn't been producing pure CPU cores for a long time; an Ivy Bridge has a large GPU, a collection of video accelerators, two DDR3 controllers, a PCIe 3.0 interface, and quite a fancy power-management microcontroller. The die is less than 50% occupied by CPU cores.
Similarly, I built a two-socket Opteron machine out of ebay parts a few years ago; companies are really bad at realising the value in the components in equipment that they're getting rid of, so quad-core dual-socket Opteron processors that sold for four figures new were two for $99. A current similar effect is happening with the slower-speed Infiniband interconnects from decommissioned supercomputers; DDR Infiniband (20gbit/second and much lower latency than 10GbaseT ethernet) cards are pocket-money cheap on ebay.
I have a quad 6168 in my shed; I do very parallel number-theory jobs, and it's really very good at those.
But for my work each core offers less performance than one hyperthread of a current i7; my 48-core machine is comparable to about 20 cores of Ivy Bridge. For the cases where I'm not taking full advantage of the 6168's amazing memory and interconnect bandwidth (and I don't have enough of those to keep the machine busy), I'd be getting the same performance for half the price with five i7/3770K boxes; they'd take more space and a bit less electricity. I'm hoping the 6168 will keep working for several more years, but I can't see why its successor wouldn't be a pile of haswell+1 machines.
And how does your yield compare to an equal area being farmed competently by people working for Archers-Daniel-Midland?
I have a garden, it's probably the most expensive luxury item I own; it cost me about £40,000 on the price of the house compared to getting a similar-sized apartment with no garden in a similar area, say about £200 a month on the mortgage. It produces enough tomatoes for my purposes, and they are tasty tomatoes; but £200 a month buys from Tesco enough tomatoes for a hundred people's purposes.
If I remember rightly, India has a reasonable number of large cities; what is it that stops people with irredeemably awful prospects in Bihar from getting on a train and becoming people with irredeemably awful but less walled-in prospects in Delhi?
People with irredeemably awful prospects in Gansu have been getting on a train and turning into people with quite decent prospects in Shenzhen by the dozens of millions for the last twenty years.
If you want satellite images, you can write a cheque to DigitalGlobe without much difficulty, and spend money on training local imagery-analysts to be good at producing the information that your planners and developers need.
If you want your own satellite that you can task, you can write a cheque to Astrium who will build you one, and another cheque to get Starsem to launch it from Guyana.
You don't need to develop your own rocket to get the satellite goals; and the technology involved in actually building rockets has only one spin-off use on the ground. Admittedly, nuclear deterrence is a pretty awesome spin-off use if you've got Pakistan on your western border.
Alternatively, you've taken some smart programmers who could be working on designing better interfaces for web sites connected with the poverty-alleviation programme, and you've got them designing interfaces for the ISRO miscellaneous small item procurement internal website. You're taking people who could be working on complicated investment strategies allowing Grameen bank to do more good with its resources, and you're using their time to design low-thrust trajectories for Lunar injection. You're taking fluid-dynamicists who could be working on the feedstocks for the big dams in Kashmir, to get a few more megawatts out of the turbines with the same volume of water, and getting them to work on the manifolds for the turbines pumping high-pressure hydrazine.
The money doesn't go away, but it's no more use than if you were spending that much to train people to be chess grandmasters or marathon runners or professors of analytic number theory - experts in fields of self-referential inutility.
This strikes me as an almost perfectly cliched Japanese technical solution to a social problem: you cannot accept the loss of face that would be involved in telling your minion Mr Akusake to shut up indicating that you do not have the degree of control over Mr Akusake that your relative positions would indicate, or the unspeakable loss of status that would be implied if you told your minion Mr Akusake to shut up and he didn't, but you can point the shutting-up machine at him and cause him to shut up.
Loud people dominating conversations is undeniably an actual social problem, and this is an actual technical solution to it.
The Sandy-Bridge-E (X79) motherboards have eight RAM slots each of which can hold an 8G module, which gets your 64GB. Of course, Sandy-Bridge-E is a Xeon in the same way that Socket-1366 Nehalem was a Xeon.
There are real electronic-engineering problems with getting lots of RAM slots attached to a single memory controller - you have to run the memory more slowly than you would if there were less of it. Cisco have a chip which pretends to be a very large slow DDR3 module by connecting together four large fast DDR3 modules, but it's sold only in expensive Cisco servers.
There is already a prodigious amount of money going to cancer research, because marginally effective chemotherapy drugs can be sold for quite large sums of money and truly-effective chemotherapy drugs could be sold for ludicrous sums of money; it's not clear that there's that much marginal gain to be had from another five billion.
The US stopped funding the SSC, and the result was that the scientists went to Europe to work on the LHC there. If they stop funding space observatories, I will rejoice happily as a whole load of the best astronomers in the world come and move to European universities, and the best students make a habit of coming to European universities to work for them - and, since there aren't that many astrophysics jobs around even in Europe, they'll probably stay and set up startups in Europe. But it's not clear this will do anything terribly good for the United States.
There has been billions of dollars of research into drill bits over the twenty years since the Kola project stopped, drilling deep holes in rock under awkward conditions being more than somewhat useful for the oil industry - the mud-motors that Kola is described as pioneering are now reasonably routine. But whilst 400F is something that people deal with now, 600F is still quite a problem.
The drilling fluids probably will be fairly horrible, and simply getting electronics to work at those temperatures is hard (NASA have done some work in silicon-carbide-substrate semiconductors, since it would be fantastic to be able to run a robot on the surface of Venus, but I don't think they've met with much success).
6km is a deep hole, but not an enormously deep hole by the standards of the off-shore drilling industry; there are deeper holes drilled for oil production in the Gulf of Mexico and for gas production in Sakhalin and the Persian Gulf. The post-salt oil prospects in Brazil require 5km depth to get past the salt layer.
(annoyingly, oil-drillers appear to use 'depth' to describe the length of holes even when they are not pointing vertically downwards, and some of the things described as 'deepest' appear to be drilled mostly horizontally. Some articles also measure depths of oil deposits from the top rather than the bottom of the water)
However, 4km of water is rather deeper than it seems anyone's done oil-drilling to date; there are wells in 2800m water in the Gulf of Mexico (the one that exploded last year was in 1500m) but there doesn't seem to be anything much deeper.
Computer components are designed to be installed by untrained labourers who left their parents' farm in Hunan province last week to seek their fortune in the factories of Shenzhen. Connectors are keyed, connectors with different purposes are keyed differently, and almost everything has locking tabs so you don't knock things out unintentionally.
No; it's rape (since the consent was dependent on the payment); I believe someone in the UK has been convicted of rape for paying a prostitute with counterfeit money.
I've deliberately bought several Intel integrated-graphics motherboards; they display an 80x25 text mode fine as you install Debian, and my compute servers only have a monitor attached when they're failing to boot.
I wish Intel didn't oblige you to buy a super-SLI-gamer motherboard just to run a Core i7 CPU; I bought the chip for the main-memory bandwidth.
The UK government has acted against SHAC in the way that governments are good at: the people who committed the harassment will be in jail for some time.
I find it very difficult ever to justify confiscating servers, because of the huge other-nonoffending-use argument; I'd be entirely at ease with a court order requiring the cooperation of the sysadmin with the police in investigating the origin of the illegal posting while keeping the machine up, but taking the machine away seems a disproportionate impact on everything else hosted there.
You don't tend to demolish the building in which a murder was planned.
For those wondering why the Department of Energy is building a space telescope rather than focussing on nuclear things, the Department of Energy funds the SLAC Linear Accelerator centre at Stanford and it's people at that centre who have designed SNAP, a spacecraft that happens to fulfill exactly the requirements NASA put forth for JDEM.
The Dark Energy Mission is a wide-field high-resolution space telescope; a hundred million or so pixels of 0.2 arcsecond extent, and a five-foot main mirror. The idea's to survey most of the sky at about four times the resolution possible from Earth (adaptive optics, which are useful for very high-resolution imaging of very narrow fields from Earth, are not useful for these large fields).
There are two mission models: take pictures of galaxy clusters and work out the mass in them implied by the way the gravity of the foreground cluster distorts the light from background galaxies, and take pictures of lots of galaxies looking for supernovae.
It's perhaps not entirely accidental that this large-scale high-resolution survey work will produce very attractive images of the sky for outreach, a task at which the JWST replacement for Hubble, being aimed more at work in the infra-red and on the faintest and most distant objects, is not as superb as Hubble.
Processor hours are the right unit if you're trying to allocate usage of a large computer; in particular, they're the units in which compute power on large national clusters is requested in grants.
The calculation in this article was done at the LRZ in Munich, which consists of nineteen 512-core 1.6GHz Itanium systems; 3.5 million processor hours corresponds to using nine of those nineteen systems for a month.
What is Arecibo's credible competition in the radio-bucket field, and particularly in the radio-transmitting field for planetary radar?
You've listed a load of optical instruments, including ATST which is explicitly to study the Sun; the only radio one is the ATA whose area is about a sixth of Arecibo's and who can't benefit from elaborate ultra-low-noise receiver technology unless you want to build 350 dilution refrigerators to cool 350 copies of your instrument.
The Square Kilometer Array isn't built yet, and I can't think of a radio-telescope array which has comparable collecting area to Arecibo; LOFAR's not built yet and is running at lower frequencies anyway; Goldstone _can_ do planetary-radar stuff, but I get the impression Arecibo does it better.
I've argued the other side for some of the British funding withdrawals - there was someone adamant about keeping the UKIRT open to complete a survey, where the UKIRT is a poor survey instrument and the VLT Survey Telescope could do a better job and is already built - but Arecibo is much more credibly a unique facility.
Sadly, gravitational microlensing is an intrinsically one-shot kind of experiment; you can use it to sample the stellar population, but once the lensing event is over you have no chance of being able to study any particular system further. It's too far away, it's too faint, and for the next several thousand years the spectrum will be hopelessly contaminated with light from the background star that the foreground system with the planets is passing in front of as seen from Earth.
I don't think you need a laptop.
There are Internet cafes in the nine corners of the Earth, almost all of whom will burn the contents of your camera's memory cards to DVD, and all of whom will happily let you sit blogging or writing to your heart's content for some princely sum in local currency equivalent to eleven cents the hour. OK, you will be surrounded by local teenagers playing World of Warcraft and smoking like chimneys, but this is not hard to endure.
Bring Moleskine notebooks and a reasonable supply of pens; it's not worth lugging even an Eee up to Everest Base Camp just to take notes that you could take on paper with a pen.
I've done round-the-world, I do copious backpacking in Europe; I've a couple of inches of Moleskines on a shelf, and whilst from time to time I've wished for a flashlight, and occasionally I've had to figure out where to buy a 4GB compact-flash card in Belgrade, I've never felt that what I needed was a laptop.