I prefer to work around 21C/70F. Any warmer than that and I'd be falling asleep.
Yeah, I was about to write the same thing and it's already at the top. If it's sunny and I'm outside, 77F is ok, but inside an office at that temp and I may as well unroll the thermarest.
In meetings it's especially true-- if it's any warmer than 70 it's really hard to stay awake.
That's pretty cool. They got a nice deal on a multiple sat launch on Eurockot-- the pictures of the multiple payload fitting look cool. They also didn't have to deal with NASA bureaucracy-- you can probably do something like that at a university in the US still, except for the launch (unless you can get non NASA money for launch). The air force microsat program has probably done comparable stuff, but I haven't really followed it much.
The moon isn't that great a place to build a telescope -- it isn't as stable a platform as being in space-- things hit it and shake it, and there's dust falling all over. You also have the problem of having to land everything gently as it drops into the moon's gravity well, which ends up costing you more energy. You're also in a varying thermal and solar environment, which is hard on equipment and decreases throughput.
Heliocentric orbits (e.g. earth trailing) or the Lagrange points (cue ZZ top) are nicer, more stable environments to put your space telescope into.
You could probably get the lunchbox to an orbit similar to Hubble for about $15M. Launches on Eurockot look pretty inexpensive, and China might be competitive, too. If you're lucky you might get the lunchbox to a decent orbit for almost nothing as a secondary payload on someone elses launch. It'd probably still cost more than $10M in management and paperwork in addition to the launch cost. There ain't no such thing as a free launch...
Do a little research into how grocery stores make money.
It's an extremely competitive business, because almost everything they are selling is a commodity (you can buy identical product down the street). The general shelves don't bring in much money per square foot (at least in product sales). They do get money by charging manufacturers for the prime locations-- an example of this is that I walked into my local large chain grocery store one day and the shelf that normally held all of the premium tuna now held.....premium SPAM! Yeah, the stuff by Hormel. My hand was halfway to the shelf before I saw it was Spam and leapt back in horror. Hormel probably forked over some big $$ for that space. It works the same with cereals, toilet paper, munchies, whatever.
The other place they make money is the point of purchase stands. They bring in substantially more per square foot than the general shelves.
Wasn't it IBM that had a TV commercial (for their business services) a few years ago that showed a manager and a stock clerk putting stuff on the shelves and the stock clerk asking why they were putting some low markup weird thing in a prominent place? The manager replied that people who bought the low markup thing all also bought some high markup fancy thing. The collaborative filtering that consumers provide (via grocery stores) to the producers is probably much more valuable than things like focus groups, and probably costs less to generate. They can track everything that sells and where the correlations are, so you don't get "ooh, that's neat" and then nobody ever buys it again. Why do you think club cards have such big savings sometimes? They really want to be able to correlate your behavior across all visits so that they can get better "people who buy x also buy y" data.
I finally went and RTFA, and I disagree that the blacksmith disappeared. The blacksmith became the machinist, and the machinist population is slowly decreasing, but is unlikely to go away.
Production machinists (who were in many cases still quite a skilled population) are being replaced by CNC machines, and the "machinists" now are the people who turn art into things that the machines can cut, set up the machines, diagnose their problems, etc. Eventually they may be replaced entirely by mechanical/manufacturing engineers, but the function will be much the same-- turn hunks of metal into useful stuff for people. They just do it in a higher tech environment.
The more blacksmith-like machinist is the toolmaker. These people are ever fewer in number, but are likely to never disappear entirely. Just like there is a small but steady need for technical glassblowers (to supply chemists) there will be a need for toolmakers/precision machinists in the foreseeable future.
Programming could be seen in a similar way-- the tools are improving drastically-- my dad started with toggle switches to set the bits, then moved to punch cards. By the time I was programming, the punchcard was all but dead, the microcomputer had just come on scene, and the mainframe was about to become a brontosaurus. Things were done with a command line. Now there are fancy IDEs for all sorts of languages, graphical languages and development tools, automated code generators, etc. It's still programming, just with different tools. The need for codemonkeys may decline, but it probably won't go away. There will be a market for them just like there still is for analog electrical engineers in the digital age. There won't be a need for people to hand produce boring code, but there will be clever things that need to be coded by hand, and probably lots of them.
Job prospects in tech things aren't what they were 6 years ago, where you could practically walk out of school and roll in money, but there are still tech jobs out there. And 30K in debts isn't chump change, but it's nothing like doctors and lawyers collect in debt, and loads of them don't wind up in the big $$ jobs.
The thing that most bothers me when I check out job web sites is that the only work that seems to stay in the US anymore is defense stuff that can't be offshored because of the need for cleared people. There needs to be some of that kind of work, but if the only thing produced in the US anymore is pizza delivery and weapons systems, we ought to be worried.
Now that I've studied for more than 4 years, I learn it is going to be useless.
College isn't a trade school, and you shouldn't treat it that way. The most important thing you learn in college is how to learn. In many, if not most, fields what you learn in college is outdated by the time you finish (if it wasn't when you started) but it does (or should) give you a strong background from which to learn other things. In graduate school you learn how to learn things that nobody knows yet.
As an example, an undergraduate physics degree from a pretty decent school will get you to about the mid-1950s as far as physics knowledge, with a few little tastes of stuff from the 70s(and maybe even the present, if you work in someone's lab). You can fake your way into a lot of engineering jobs from there, and if you go to graduate school, you catch up to maybe the 70s (or even 80s and 90s) in a lot of areas, and you take one small piece of physics right up to the present day and become a world expert on it, adding new knowledge at the leading edge. All the stuff you learn along the way provides important context and background knowledge, but the most important thing you learn is how to obtain new knowledge. If you need any of that stuff that you didn't have time to learn (because the field has gotten very large) you at least get the tools to go back and catch up quickly. Computer Engineering has to be much the same, if not more so, since things are changing even faster than in physics.
John Stewart would not launch into such a diatribe if the Crossfire folks were guests on his show -- its a different forum
An example of this is his interview with Bill O'Reilly on the Daily Show (available online at the comedy channel site). I've surfed through the O'Reilly show, but rarely stopped because he I always got the impression that he was being a jerk to his guests. Stewart poked at him a little bit, but in a very non-confrontational way, and seemed genuinely interested in hearing what the guy had to say. His follow up questions were actually relevant to what O'Reilly had said. He was interested to the point that when his audience started to make noise in response to a comment from O'Reilly, he gave them an annoyed sideways look and wave, like "leave him alone you guys, this is really interesting and I want to hear it". He showed real respect and empathy, even if he might disagree with the guy's politics.
If political "debate" shows were like this (people actually responding to what each other said), they might actually be worth watching. As it is, most of them seem like they talk at, over, and past each other and are often abusive to their guests.
I end up finding self-appointed pundits on message boards that are mostly dedicated to other topics much more interesting. You can calibrate the people, they generally respect each other because they have something in common that brought them there, and are more likely to actually respond coherently. They may or may not be full of BS, but at least you get a conversation.
The thing that really made it great was that he (the comedian/satirist) showed that he can switch modes and they (blowhard pundits) were incapable of being anything but blowhard pundits. They seemed to be expecting a combination of fluff and easy target, and he was a truly concerned citizen. The bald guy seemed to realized that it was better to keep his mouth shut and let bowtie hang himself.
Have to remember that I actually have a TV and cable long enough to actually watch the Daily show...
Yeah, I work at a pretty well known lab, and when people ask where I work/what I do, they get all excited. (once, on a ski lift I did get "Are you fscking with me?"). They can usually ask intelligent questions, and as long as I keep an eye out for the "glazed look" and can back off the detail long enough for them to digest things before continuing, they can keep up fairly well. They often know a lot of detail, and a lot about related things and current events in science. And these are regular people (on airplanes, sometimes in stores, ski lifts, etc). If it's presented as exciting and fun (which it often is) people will be interested.
A big part of the problem is the presentation of science when you learn it in school is a collection of "facts" and historical discoveries, without any real sense of the time and effort (decades and zillions of experiments) that go into the neatly summarized rules. Science is a long, often tedious (late nights searching for obscure noise sources), sometimes really exciting, process that is rarely accurately portrayed to non-scientists.
Little do people realize that a large part of "big science" is talking on the phone and responding to emails...
A few years back there were some physicists trying to get the TV world to put together a TV show about scientists, much like all the police and lawyer shows. One of the jokes in APS News was that they should call it NYPhD. Given the popularity of lawyer shows (I imagine work for most lawyers is quite dull) it's got to be possible to put together a dramatic show with a non-forensic, non-medical science backdrop.
My mom suggested a science geek version of "Cribs"-- I know a lot of scientists that have some weird projects at home, or things like a full machine shop in the living room.
Cro was a great science cartoon that nobody seems to have seen. It was about a Wooly Mammoth named Phil that was discovered frozen by a scientist who thawed him out and brought him to live with her and her adopted kid. In every episode, Phil would tell stories about Cro, the first Cro Magnon (his parents were Neandertals and his grandfather was an Australopithecus, and they all lived in a cave together) and his misadventures hanging out with the mammoths. The mammoths were the dominant species, and they had a sophisticated culture-- my favorite subtle joke was when they were trying to test relativity by swinging a mammoth like a tetherball while holding an hourglass to compare with an hourglass sitting on the ground (they didn't say anything at all why they were doing it). In every episode Cro would get into a situation where he would have to learn some physical principle (e.g. levers, bouyancy). It would be explained accurately (and non pedantically) and save Cro from certain death.
I walk to the librarian and pay the purchase price. She fires up a local print run on the library's new laser book printer
I keep seeing stuff about print-on-demand coming to bookstores some time in the not to distant future (but it never seems to get here). Using LC as a source for at least some books (public domain, out of print) would be a nice extension. UMI already prints copies of theses on demand-- if you want to order a copy of a PhD thesis, you give them a credit card number and they shoot you a freshly printed and perfect-bound copy of the thesis in the mail.
Nope. In the US the cars can and often do report all kinds of faults. My low end 1998 Saturn has only ever shown non-emissions related codes (and not very often). A complete (or nearly so) list of codes for GM cars is here http://www.capricess.com/technical/obd/obd2.htm . The list is specifically cadillac, but any cars with the same features are likely to share codes. It will even report if there's something wrong with the lumbar control switch on the seat. If you have OnStar and traction control they can probably call you and tell you one of your tires is underinflated. I'd be surprised if Ford and Daimler have much less information from their OBD systems.
Here are a bunch of the cruise control related codes: DTC P0565 Cruise Control On Signal Malfunction DTC P0566 Cruise Control Off Signal Malfunction DTC P0567 Cruise Control Resume Signal Malfunction DTC P0568 Cruise Control Set Signal Malfunction DTC P0569 Cruise Control Coast Signal Malfunction DTC P0570 Cruise Control Accel Signal Malfunction DTC P0571 Cruise Control Brake Switch Circuit DTC P0573 Cruise Control/Brake Switch A Circuit High DTC P0574 Vehicle Speed Too High - Cruise Control Disabled
A quick search also showed that OBD is relatively new to Europe, required on gasoline powered cars since about 2001, and on diesels since 2003.
If there's a fault in your car that the computer catches (and there are a lot to catch--they can often detect anomalous sensor readings when nothing is noticably wrong to the user) then it will be stored so it can be read out by the on-board diagnostic computer. I don't know what the rules in Europe are, but in the US ever car has a connector for an OBD II scanner, and you can pick up a relatively simple scanner for $100 or so (more expensive scanners can do a lot more than read out trouble codes). The trouble codes are stored through on/off cycles, and can be cleared either by a certain number of cycles with no fault detected, or actively by a mechanic with an OBD scanner. It't quite entertaining, and if you can afford to own or borrow one, you can at least double check on what the mechanics are telling you.
Probably the first thing anybody did was plug in the scanner and ask the car "What's up?" I'd imagine that any sensor fault that might cause a car to get in a funny control loop would set a code.
Re:Real bike is probably less hassle than e-bike
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The Prius had just come out at the time, and there weren't a lot of people with experience with it. The car I was driving was about 100 HP (though kind of heavy) and had a hard time on some of the roads around here (Southern CA) when loaded with bikes and gear. For short steep stuff it was clear that the hybrids would be fine, because the batteries give them instant power, but there are plenty of places around here where you're driving up a steep grade (paved) for 45 minutes or more.
I ended up with a Saturn wagon (the little one, not the LW) with a 125 HP engine. It does fine, though it was pretty much at its limit on some of the hills when we had 3 people+3 bikes (on top) +gear driving out to New Mexico. You could maintain speed, but if you had to slow down it would take forever to speed back up.
It's probably a bit better if you put the bikes on the back, but most rear racks can be pretty hard on bikes (they bang together), and they're not as good for leaving on all the time if you carry bikes a lot.
Next time I get a new car (probably 10 years or so) I'll probably end up with a hybrid.
Real bike is probably less hassle than e-bike
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I've been bike commuting for about 14 years now (yikes!) in three different cities, and the e-bike just seems like more hassle than a real bike. I see people using things like that to commute from the parking lot to their office, but it seems like more hassle than it's worth.
advantages of the e-bike: - extra boost when you're tired - slight improvement in cruising speed (at least until you get in shape) - high geek-factor
disadvantages: - more parts to maintain - heavy batteries (even light batteries weigh more than none) that you have to haul around with your legs when you get too far from home and the juice runs out. - if it drives the tire rather than the hub you'll go through tires a lot faster
I actually looked at electric vs. gasoline cars when I replaced my car several years ago. I decided that the electric car couldn't do anything for me that a regular bike didn't already do (shorter range, similar carrying capacity, it doesn't rain here so that doesn't matter). Hybrids made more sense, but for a reasonable fraction of my driving (hauling bikes up mountain roads) were way underpowered.
These days I actually find it much more hassle to drive a car to work (about 5 miles each way, total elevation gain on the asymmetric round trip about 900-1000 ft) than to pedal. I rode about 8 miles each way, with less elevation change, for about 5 years.
Whether you smell at work or not depends on a lot of variables. If it's dry out and your sweat evaporates fast, you generally won't smell bad if you shower before you leave home. If it's humid, a shower or even quick wash in the sink combined with anti-perspirant can keep you smelling fresh as springtime. And changing clothes is generally a good idea either way.
I'm forced to wonder if the same thing is happening in this administration. The second-tier staff are insulating the President from some of the evidence, because of his drive to attack Iraq.
It's sometimes referred to as "pumping sunshine", and it seems to be common in big bureaucracies-- nobody wants to report bad news upwards, no matter how bad it gets. If the boss doesn't (or can't) verify things directly occasionally, it goes on and on.
It may have been going on on both sides of the Iraq/WMD thing:
Scientist/Engineering Mgr reporting to Saddam: "We've demonstrated that we can produce this amount of U235 in this amount of time. We've also shown that the shaped charges for compressing the material to critical mass are working perfectly"
translated: we made some powerpoint charts to show you what you want to hear so we not only won't be killed, but can afford food for our families. We know we won't be found out, because there just isn't that kind of technical depth around here.
Staffer reporting to white house:"We know that they're trying to make WMDs and we have this order that they placed for 60,000 aluminum tubes that we think are for centrifuges"
translated:we got a copy of the Iraqi scientist's powerpoint slides, but we don't have any way to check if it BS. The aluminum tubes that they're ordering for small rockets will sound good if we say they're for a centrifuge farm. I better have good things to report so I don't get fired and can continue to feed my family
This kind of thing isn't unusual when there's a lot less at stake, so why shouldn't we expect it to happen when everyone is on edge/fearful in a toe-the-line-or-get-out organization (on both sides).
most of the cool bands out there that don't make too much money are subsidized by the teenieboppers who buy the pop junk
Most of the cool bands are paying for their production with their day jobs, or they're on a record label run by someone who just wants to hear good music and is happy breaking even or running at a small loss because the label owner also has a day job.
I used to record bands I liked for free, just so I could keep listening to them. I've loaned friends money (at no interest, pay back if/when you can) so they could record or distribute their stuff. If I see a band I like live, I generally buy their CDs from them right there, where they get the max return on it. There are plenty of bands where I'd happily fork over a couple hundred bucks for a live to two-track recording if that were the only way I'd get to continue listening to them (even if they were going to give copies for free to anyone who asked). I suspect there are a lot of other people who would do the same.
A lot of artists could produce quality music without support from the record labels.
The cost of decent digital recording equipment has been dropping rapidly for years. Way back when I was more actively involved in music, a cassette 4-track cost some $$ and though you could bounce tracks to get more out of it, the noise added every time would kill you pretty quickly. Now you can get a tolerable A/D converter for next to nothing, and various better ones in the hundreds of $ range. A limited version of Protools (gives you something like 8 tracks, only runs on archaic hardware) is available free to get you hooked (they're good pushers who understand addiction). Microphones still aren't cheap, but there're some pretty good ones reasonably priced. In a nutshell, you can do comparable recordings in your home to what you could in a lot of studios 20 years ago. I'll leave out the obligatory link to Steve Albini's "Problem with Music" essay, but suffice it to say the only people the majors help are themselves, and a very small number of artists at the top. The rest get screwed. And if you do a bit of poking on the web, you can find that rates for a good studio are getting pretty low-- Albini's studio is a real bargain, and I'm sure there are more like that. He's said some other stuff about not liking digital (entirely for non-technical reasons) that I agree with in some ways, but the strength of digital is that it brings the ability to record stuff without mega-hiss down the the price range of musicians with day jobs selling used records.
Commercial radio sucks these days anyway, and has a very narrow focus (selling your ears to advertisers). College radio is much better, and the distribution channels to that are free-- send a link to the music director so they can download your track to a CD and put it in the studio (or just park it on a hard drive in the studio). The net has made it so I can listen to college radio in the Bay Area, Ann Arbor, New Jersey, Boston, or nearly anywhere, while I sit at home in LA.
The only thing the majors really have is back catalog (as has been mentioned in other RIAA related discussions here). They own rights to a huge back catalog of material, and they want to milk it (again, many of the artists responsible for creating that back catalog will get almost nothing).
It's not unusual for satellites to die for unexplained reasons. Earth orbiters are pretty reliable lately-there have been a whole lot of them and the environment is reasonably well understood, but it's still a harsh place to make stuff work, and there are things that you can't predict that can take out a satellite. And given what a pain it is to recover them, or even send someone to take a look, it would be hard to ever know why your satellite quit working. If it's in a low enough orbit it might even come down pretty quickly after control is lost, not leaving a whole lot of evidence...
It's conceivable that you might notice from a ground telescope that some other satellite has moved into a nearly intersecting orbit, but I suspect that a lot of spy satellites (independent of who owns them) are in similar orbits to each other anyway.
And car tires are a couple atmospheres above the surrounding atmosphere.
Bicycle tires (at least for some of us) are 8 to 10 atmospheres above the surrounding atmosphere.
Staying inflated is probably not a problem for space modules-- they'll probably be made to inflate and rigidize (there are various technologies, some of which are reversible, some not).
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I prefer to work around 21C/70F. Any warmer than that and I'd be falling asleep.
Yeah, I was about to write the same thing and it's already at the top. If it's sunny and I'm outside, 77F is ok, but inside an office at that temp and I may as well unroll the thermarest.
In meetings it's especially true-- if it's any warmer than 70 it's really hard to stay awake.
That's pretty cool. They got a nice deal on a multiple sat launch on Eurockot-- the pictures of the multiple payload fitting look cool. They also didn't have to deal with NASA bureaucracy-- you can probably do something like that at a university in the US still, except for the launch (unless you can get non NASA money for launch). The air force microsat program has probably done comparable stuff, but I haven't really followed it much.
The moon isn't that great a place to build a telescope -- it isn't as stable a platform as being in space-- things hit it and shake it, and there's dust falling all over. You also have the problem of having to land everything gently as it drops into the moon's gravity well, which ends up costing you more energy. You're also in a varying thermal and solar environment, which is hard on equipment and decreases throughput.
Heliocentric orbits (e.g. earth trailing) or the Lagrange points (cue ZZ top) are nicer, more stable environments to put your space telescope into.
You could probably get the lunchbox to an orbit similar to Hubble for about $15M. Launches on Eurockot look pretty inexpensive, and China might be competitive, too. If you're lucky you might get the lunchbox to a decent orbit for almost nothing as a secondary payload on someone elses launch. It'd probably still cost more than $10M in management and paperwork in addition to the launch cost. There ain't no such thing as a free launch...
Do a little research into how grocery stores make money.
It's an extremely competitive business, because almost everything they are selling is a commodity (you can buy identical product down the street). The general shelves don't bring in much money per square foot (at least in product sales). They do get money by charging manufacturers for the prime locations-- an example of this is that I walked into my local large chain grocery store one day and the shelf that normally held all of the premium tuna now held.....premium SPAM! Yeah, the stuff by Hormel. My hand was halfway to the shelf before I saw it was Spam and leapt back in horror. Hormel probably forked over some big $$ for that space. It works the same with cereals, toilet paper, munchies, whatever.
The other place they make money is the point of purchase stands. They bring in substantially more per square foot than the general shelves.
Wasn't it IBM that had a TV commercial (for their business services) a few years ago that showed a manager and a stock clerk putting stuff on the shelves and the stock clerk asking why they were putting some low markup weird thing in a prominent place? The manager replied that people who bought the low markup thing all also bought some high markup fancy thing. The collaborative filtering that consumers provide (via grocery stores) to the producers is probably much more valuable than things like focus groups, and probably costs less to generate. They can track everything that sells and where the correlations are, so you don't get "ooh, that's neat" and then nobody ever buys it again. Why do you think club cards have such big savings sometimes? They really want to be able to correlate your behavior across all visits so that they can get better "people who buy x also buy y" data.
Everything with batteries has user replaceable batteries. Just the level of technical sophistication required of the user varies.
I finally went and RTFA, and I disagree that the blacksmith disappeared. The blacksmith became the machinist, and the machinist population is slowly decreasing, but is unlikely to go away.
Production machinists (who were in many cases still quite a skilled population) are being replaced by CNC machines, and the "machinists" now are the people who turn art into things that the machines can cut, set up the machines, diagnose their problems, etc. Eventually they may be replaced entirely by mechanical/manufacturing engineers, but the function will be much the same-- turn hunks of metal into useful stuff for people. They just do it in a higher tech environment.
The more blacksmith-like machinist is the toolmaker. These people are ever fewer in number, but are likely to never disappear entirely. Just like there is a small but steady need for technical glassblowers (to supply chemists) there will be a need for toolmakers/precision machinists in the foreseeable future.
Programming could be seen in a similar way-- the tools are improving drastically-- my dad started with toggle switches to set the bits, then moved to punch cards. By the time I was programming, the punchcard was all but dead, the microcomputer had just come on scene, and the mainframe was about to become a brontosaurus. Things were done with a command line. Now there are fancy IDEs for all sorts of languages, graphical languages and development tools, automated code generators, etc. It's still programming, just with different tools. The need for codemonkeys may decline, but it probably won't go away. There will be a market for them just like there still is for analog electrical engineers in the digital age. There won't be a need for people to hand produce boring code, but there will be clever things that need to be coded by hand, and probably lots of them.
Job prospects in tech things aren't what they were 6 years ago, where you could practically walk out of school and roll in money, but there are still tech jobs out there. And 30K in debts isn't chump change, but it's nothing like doctors and lawyers collect in debt, and loads of them don't wind up in the big $$ jobs.
The thing that most bothers me when I check out job web sites is that the only work that seems to stay in the US anymore is defense stuff that can't be offshored because of the need for cleared people. There needs to be some of that kind of work, but if the only thing produced in the US anymore is pizza delivery and weapons systems, we ought to be worried.
Now that I've studied for more than 4 years, I learn it is going to be useless.
College isn't a trade school, and you shouldn't treat it that way. The most important thing you learn in college is how to learn. In many, if not most, fields what you learn in college is outdated by the time you finish (if it wasn't when you started) but it does (or should) give you a strong background from which to learn other things. In graduate school you learn how to learn things that nobody knows yet.
As an example, an undergraduate physics degree from a pretty decent school will get you to about the mid-1950s as far as physics knowledge, with a few little tastes of stuff from the 70s(and maybe even the present, if you work in someone's lab). You can fake your way into a lot of engineering jobs from there, and if you go to graduate school, you catch up to maybe the 70s (or even 80s and 90s) in a lot of areas, and you take one small piece of physics right up to the present day and become a world expert on it, adding new knowledge at the leading edge. All the stuff you learn along the way provides important context and background knowledge, but the most important thing you learn is how to obtain new knowledge. If you need any of that stuff that you didn't have time to learn (because the field has gotten very large) you at least get the tools to go back and catch up quickly. Computer Engineering has to be much the same, if not more so, since things are changing even faster than in physics.
John Stewart would not launch into such a diatribe if the Crossfire folks were guests on his show -- its a different forum
An example of this is his interview with Bill O'Reilly on the Daily Show (available online at the comedy channel site). I've surfed through the O'Reilly show, but rarely stopped because he I always got the impression that he was being a jerk to his guests. Stewart poked at him a little bit, but in a very non-confrontational way, and seemed genuinely interested in hearing what the guy had to say. His follow up questions were actually relevant to what O'Reilly had said. He was interested to the point that when his audience started to make noise in response to a comment from O'Reilly, he gave them an annoyed sideways look and wave, like "leave him alone you guys, this is really interesting and I want to hear it". He showed real respect and empathy, even if he might disagree with the guy's politics.
If political "debate" shows were like this (people actually responding to what each other said), they might actually be worth watching. As it is, most of them seem like they talk at, over, and past each other and are often abusive to their guests.
I end up finding self-appointed pundits on message boards that are mostly dedicated to other topics much more interesting. You can calibrate the people, they generally respect each other because they have something in common that brought them there, and are more likely to actually respond coherently. They may or may not be full of BS, but at least you get a conversation.
The thing that really made it great was that he (the comedian/satirist) showed that he can switch modes and they (blowhard pundits) were incapable of being anything but blowhard pundits. They seemed to be expecting a combination of fluff and easy target, and he was a truly concerned citizen. The bald guy seemed to realized that it was better to keep his mouth shut and let bowtie hang himself.
Have to remember that I actually have a TV and cable long enough to actually watch the Daily show...
It was shown in the US (at least in Minneapolis).
It was suppported in part by the US National Science Foundation
Yeah, I work at a pretty well known lab, and when people ask where I work/what I do, they get all excited. (once, on a ski lift I did get "Are you fscking with me?"). They can usually ask intelligent questions, and as long as I keep an eye out for the "glazed look" and can back off the detail long enough for them to digest things before continuing, they can keep up fairly well. They often know a lot of detail, and a lot about related things and current events in science. And these are regular people (on airplanes, sometimes in stores, ski lifts, etc). If it's presented as exciting and fun (which it often is) people will be interested.
A big part of the problem is the presentation of science when you learn it in school is a collection of "facts" and historical discoveries, without any real sense of the time and effort (decades and zillions of experiments) that go into the neatly summarized rules. Science is a long, often tedious (late nights searching for obscure noise sources), sometimes really exciting, process that is rarely accurately portrayed to non-scientists.
Little do people realize that a large part of "big science" is talking on the phone and responding to emails...
A few years back there were some physicists trying to get the TV world to put together a TV show about scientists, much like all the police and lawyer shows. One of the jokes in APS News was that they should call it NYPhD. Given the popularity of lawyer shows (I imagine work for most lawyers is quite dull) it's got to be possible to put together a dramatic show with a non-forensic, non-medical science backdrop.
My mom suggested a science geek version of "Cribs"-- I know a lot of scientists that have some weird projects at home, or things like a full machine shop in the living room.
Cro was a great science cartoon that nobody seems to have seen. It was about a Wooly Mammoth named Phil that was discovered frozen by a scientist who thawed him out and brought him to live with her and her adopted kid. In every episode, Phil would tell stories about Cro, the first Cro Magnon (his parents were Neandertals and his grandfather was an Australopithecus, and they all lived in a cave together) and his misadventures hanging out with the mammoths. The mammoths were the dominant species, and they had a sophisticated culture-- my favorite subtle joke was when they were trying to test relativity by swinging a mammoth like a tetherball while holding an hourglass to compare with an hourglass sitting on the ground (they didn't say anything at all why they were doing it). In every episode Cro would get into a situation where he would have to learn some physical principle (e.g. levers, bouyancy). It would be explained accurately (and non pedantically) and save Cro from certain death.
I walk to the librarian and pay the purchase price. She fires up a local print run on the library's new laser book printer
I keep seeing stuff about print-on-demand coming to bookstores some time in the not to distant future (but it never seems to get here). Using LC as a source for at least some books (public domain, out of print) would be a nice extension. UMI already prints copies of theses on demand-- if you want to order a copy of a PhD thesis, you give them a credit card number and they shoot you a freshly printed and perfect-bound copy of the thesis in the mail.
Nope. In the US the cars can and often do report all kinds of faults. My low end 1998 Saturn has only ever shown non-emissions related codes (and not very often). A complete (or nearly so) list of codes for GM cars is here http://www.capricess.com/technical/obd/obd2.htm . The list is specifically cadillac, but any cars with the same features are likely to share codes. It will even report if there's something wrong with the lumbar control switch on the seat. If you have OnStar and traction control they can probably call you and tell you one of your tires is underinflated. I'd be surprised if Ford and Daimler have much less information from their OBD systems.
Here are a bunch of the cruise control related codes:
DTC P0565 Cruise Control On Signal Malfunction
DTC P0566 Cruise Control Off Signal Malfunction
DTC P0567 Cruise Control Resume Signal Malfunction
DTC P0568 Cruise Control Set Signal Malfunction
DTC P0569 Cruise Control Coast Signal Malfunction
DTC P0570 Cruise Control Accel Signal Malfunction
DTC P0571 Cruise Control Brake Switch Circuit
DTC P0573 Cruise Control/Brake Switch A Circuit High
DTC P0574 Vehicle Speed Too High - Cruise Control Disabled
A quick search also showed that OBD is relatively new to Europe, required on gasoline powered cars since about 2001, and on diesels since 2003.
If there's a fault in your car that the computer catches (and there are a lot to catch--they can often detect anomalous sensor readings when nothing is noticably wrong to the user) then it will be stored so it can be read out by the on-board diagnostic computer. I don't know what the rules in Europe are, but in the US ever car has a connector for an OBD II scanner, and you can pick up a relatively simple scanner for $100 or so (more expensive scanners can do a lot more than read out trouble codes). The trouble codes are stored through on/off cycles, and can be cleared either by a certain number of cycles with no fault detected, or actively by a mechanic with an OBD scanner. It't quite entertaining, and if you can afford to own or borrow one, you can at least double check on what the mechanics are telling you.
Probably the first thing anybody did was plug in the scanner and ask the car "What's up?" I'd imagine that any sensor fault that might cause a car to get in a funny control loop would set a code.
The Prius had just come out at the time, and there weren't a lot of people with experience with it. The car I was driving was about 100 HP (though kind of heavy) and had a hard time on some of the roads around here (Southern CA) when loaded with bikes and gear. For short steep stuff it was clear that the hybrids would be fine, because the batteries give them instant power, but there are plenty of places around here where you're driving up a steep grade (paved) for 45 minutes or more.
I ended up with a Saturn wagon (the little one, not the LW) with a 125 HP engine. It does fine, though it was pretty much at its limit on some of the hills when we had 3 people+3 bikes (on top) +gear driving out to New Mexico. You could maintain speed, but if you had to slow down it would take forever to speed back up.
It's probably a bit better if you put the bikes on the back, but most rear racks can be pretty hard on bikes (they bang together), and they're not as good for leaving on all the time if you carry bikes a lot.
Next time I get a new car (probably 10 years or so) I'll probably end up with a hybrid.
I've been bike commuting for about 14 years now (yikes!) in three different cities, and the e-bike just seems like more hassle than a real bike. I see people using things like that to commute from the parking lot to their office, but it seems like more hassle than it's worth.
advantages of the e-bike:
- extra boost when you're tired
- slight improvement in cruising speed (at least until you get in shape)
- high geek-factor
disadvantages:
- more parts to maintain
- heavy batteries (even light batteries weigh more than none) that you have to haul around with your legs when you get too far from home and the juice runs out.
- if it drives the tire rather than the hub you'll go through tires a lot faster
I actually looked at electric vs. gasoline cars when I replaced my car several years ago. I decided that the electric car couldn't do anything for me that a regular bike didn't already do (shorter range, similar carrying capacity, it doesn't rain here so that doesn't matter). Hybrids made more sense, but for a reasonable fraction of my driving (hauling bikes up mountain roads) were way underpowered.
These days I actually find it much more hassle to drive a car to work (about 5 miles each way, total elevation gain on the asymmetric round trip about 900-1000 ft) than to pedal. I rode about 8 miles each way, with less elevation change, for about 5 years.
Whether you smell at work or not depends on a lot of variables. If it's dry out and your sweat evaporates fast, you generally won't smell bad if you shower before you leave home. If it's humid, a shower or even quick wash in the sink combined with anti-perspirant can keep you smelling fresh as springtime. And changing clothes is generally a good idea either way.
I'm forced to wonder if the same thing is happening in this administration. The second-tier staff are insulating the President from some of the evidence, because of his drive to attack Iraq.
It's sometimes referred to as "pumping sunshine", and it seems to be common in big bureaucracies-- nobody wants to report bad news upwards, no matter how bad it gets. If the boss doesn't (or can't) verify things directly occasionally, it goes on and on.
It may have been going on on both sides of the Iraq/WMD thing:
Scientist/Engineering Mgr reporting to Saddam: "We've demonstrated that we can produce this amount of U235 in this amount of time. We've also shown that the shaped charges for compressing the material to critical mass are working perfectly"
translated: we made some powerpoint charts to show you what you want to hear so we not only won't be killed, but can afford food for our families. We know we won't be found out, because there just isn't that kind of technical depth around here.
Staffer reporting to white house:"We know that they're trying to make WMDs and we have this order that they placed for 60,000 aluminum tubes that we think are for centrifuges"
translated:we got a copy of the Iraqi scientist's powerpoint slides, but we don't have any way to check if it BS. The aluminum tubes that they're ordering for small rockets will sound good if we say they're for a centrifuge farm. I better have good things to report so I don't get fired and can continue to feed my family
This kind of thing isn't unusual when there's a lot less at stake, so why shouldn't we expect it to happen when everyone is on edge/fearful in a toe-the-line-or-get-out organization (on both sides).
most of the cool bands out there that don't make too much money are subsidized by the teenieboppers who buy the pop junk
Most of the cool bands are paying for their production with their day jobs, or they're on a record label run by someone who just wants to hear good music and is happy breaking even or running at a small loss because the label owner also has a day job.
I used to record bands I liked for free, just so I could keep listening to them. I've loaned friends money (at no interest, pay back if/when you can) so they could record or distribute their stuff. If I see a band I like live, I generally buy their CDs from them right there, where they get the max return on it. There are plenty of bands where I'd happily fork over a couple hundred bucks for a live to two-track recording if that were the only way I'd get to continue listening to them (even if they were going to give copies for free to anyone who asked). I suspect there are a lot of other people who would do the same.
A lot of artists could produce quality music without support from the record labels.
The cost of decent digital recording equipment has been dropping rapidly for years. Way back when I was more actively involved in music, a cassette 4-track cost some $$ and though you could bounce tracks to get more out of it, the noise added every time would kill you pretty quickly. Now you can get a tolerable A/D converter for next to nothing, and various better ones in the hundreds of $ range. A limited version of Protools (gives you something like 8 tracks, only runs on archaic hardware) is available free to get you hooked (they're good pushers who understand addiction). Microphones still aren't cheap, but there're some pretty good ones reasonably priced. In a nutshell, you can do comparable recordings in your home to what you could in a lot of studios 20 years ago. I'll leave out the obligatory link to Steve Albini's "Problem with Music" essay, but suffice it to say the only people the majors help are themselves, and a very small number of artists at the top. The rest get screwed. And if you do a bit of poking on the web, you can find that rates for a good studio are getting pretty low-- Albini's studio is a real bargain, and I'm sure there are more like that. He's said some other stuff about not liking digital (entirely for non-technical reasons) that I agree with in some ways, but the strength of digital is that it brings the ability to record stuff without mega-hiss down the the price range of musicians with day jobs selling used records.
Commercial radio sucks these days anyway, and has a very narrow focus (selling your ears to advertisers). College radio is much better, and the distribution channels to that are free-- send a link to the music director so they can download your track to a CD and put it in the studio (or just park it on a hard drive in the studio). The net has made it so I can listen to college radio in the Bay Area, Ann Arbor, New Jersey, Boston, or nearly anywhere, while I sit at home in LA.
The only thing the majors really have is back catalog (as has been mentioned in other RIAA related discussions here). They own rights to a huge back catalog of material, and they want to milk it (again, many of the artists responsible for creating that back catalog will get almost nothing).
It's not unusual for satellites to die for unexplained reasons. Earth orbiters are pretty reliable lately-there have been a whole lot of them and the environment is reasonably well understood, but it's still a harsh place to make stuff work, and there are things that you can't predict that can take out a satellite. And given what a pain it is to recover them, or even send someone to take a look, it would be hard to ever know why your satellite quit working. If it's in a low enough orbit it might even come down pretty quickly after control is lost, not leaving a whole lot of evidence...
It's conceivable that you might notice from a ground telescope that some other satellite has moved into a nearly intersecting orbit, but I suspect that a lot of spy satellites (independent of who owns them) are in similar orbits to each other anyway.
And car tires are a couple atmospheres above the surrounding atmosphere.
Bicycle tires (at least for some of us) are 8 to 10 atmospheres above the surrounding atmosphere.
Staying inflated is probably not a problem for space modules-- they'll probably be made to inflate and rigidize (there are various technologies, some of which are reversible, some not).