I didnt realize these plants generated power through human sacrifce. How does that work? I suppose that if you carve out someones heart and then Quetzaqual grants you a few gigajoules.
There were also diamond icebergs in Arthur C Clarkes 2061. Admittedly, a pretty mediocre book, both compared to 2001 and 2010 and to ADitS. And lets not forget F. Scott Fitzgeralds A diamond as big as the Ritz...
Well, the USAF X-47B just returned from 270+ days in (constantly changing) orbit, doing god knows what. And it also has some downmass capability. From the space enthusiast point of view, I would call that good news too.
Also, the X-43 is out of storage. For god knows what, but possibly to be fitted with a Merlin engine and flown underneath VG's White Knight II.
Fun things are happening in space flight. They are just not happening (mainly) at NASA any more.
*If* google fails, it won't be around one day and gone the next. In any case, there are other search engines that do a nearly as good a job as google, so we would still be able to do search. Migrating from Gmail would be slightly more complicated, but would still be doable, especially considering that all other free email providers would love to, and actively encourage and help anyone wanting to migrate. Generally, if google stumbles, there are plenty of others ready and willing to pick up the slack.
--
Far more worrying would to have a systemic failure of the entire 'free stuff & ads 'business model. If providing free search and/or email (and social networking) is no longer profitable, we are truly screwed. It is not that we would have to pay much for search and email (marginal costs are very small); but the net would probably balkanize (if search isn't free, why would content? And in this case, why link to your competitor's content?) and stovepipe. Using the Internet use would end up looking like using a mobile phone. Useful, no doubt. But a shadow of what its former self.
--
Sorry for the melodrama; but the current human architecture of the internet is very fortuitous, but was hardly inevitable. It emerged, largely unplanned, from a series of developments that could easily have happened elsehow. There are other ways of creating a world wide network, that would do almost all that the net does, but provide much more top-down control.
err... its only inverse-square if the energy is unfocused. Since we are talking about a *beam*, this is clearly not the case. The parallel is not exact, but we have known how to transmit EM radiation directionally for decades (what do you think all those parabolic dishes are for?), thereby avoiding inverse-square attenuation; the EM energy is 'beamed' to a receiving antenna, where it induces a current and hence transmits energy.
In this case, the trick is constructing a primary coil such that most of the magnetic flux lines that cross it also cross a secondary coil (i.e., it preserves most of the magnectic flux). A AC current on the primary will induce a current in the secondary, and the energy efficiency will be the ratio between the magnectic flux in both coils.
Interestingly, if you apply a DC current to one of these coils, you will end up with a very focused electromagnet. You could use it to manipulate a small permanent magnet far away from the coil (on the order of the AC transmission distance), for instance. This sort of remote, non invasive manipulation must have tons of application, from surgical (e.g., guiding a probe to a clogged artery), to military (defusing bombs), to whatever (safecracking anyone?)
Anyway, very cool stuff.
I'm sure there will be many interesting suggestions, but to me it would be preferable to focus on building simpler devices which the students design themselves, rather than something fancier that forces them to simply follow a blueprint (because they won't have the time/expertise to design it from scratch).
Of course, there will be a continuum between 'built from scratch' and 'paint by numbers'-type projects, with different levels of student involvement in its design, and you'll have to find your balance.
Yet more proof, as if any was needed, that pirates rule.
Shaolin Monks use lawyers to intimidate; Ninjas are intimidated by lawyers. Pirates, by definition, are not afraid of lawyers, and have no use for them except as ballast. QED.
The ISAS homepage is now
claiming
"Hayabusa is sure to have succeeded in asteroid sampling!
It found the Target Marker with 880,000 names."
This sounds a bit all-your-base-ish, so I don't know exactly what the second sentence means. In any case, good news! This mission reminds me of Apollo 13 or the Voyagers, with its brillian improvising. They really deserve to get the samples back.
The problem he gives as an example in the sample chapter can be solved without resorting to any trigonometric functions at al. Just use Pythagora's theorem a couple of times plus the fact that the sides of a isoceles triangle are equal. You then solve a 2nd degree equation and voila. This wouldn't have worked if the angle wasn't 45o, but then his method wouldn't have yielded a neat result either. My guess is that any problem that can be solved in closed form by his formalism can be as easily solved using run of the mill geometry.
Of course, his method may turn out to be more intuitive, but I'll reserve my judgment on that.
This new old concept of capsule-atop-rocket + heavy lift cargo rocket can be made reasonably cheap (though this being NASA one never knows) and safe, but it is a technological dead end. It is identical to what the russian used to build and crew Mir (with the soyuz-atop-proton and the energia for heavy cargo).
What it tells me is that
1 NASA considers the shuttle a failure
2 The american space program will focus on space science and planting flags in the Moon and Mars.
I think most people agree that #1 is true, as far as the shuttle is concerned; but I think the concept of reusable vehicles is part of the way forward. As for #2, its is really focusing on splash over substance. The key to building a real space infrastructure is getting to low earth orbit in a cheap and reliable way. Once you have easy access to LEO, you can build think in orbit, and getting anywhere is (comparatively) much easier. A simple reusable, single stage to orbit vehicle is in my view the best wat of doing it. Unfortunately NASA (and its political masters) is not interested in this sort of project anymore. Instead of striving for simplicity and incremental advances, it designs and builds enormously complicated and expensive monstruosities that try to do everything at the same time.
maybe our support of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip? we have given the Israeli's millions of dollars AND weapons and aircraft. what have we given the people whos land we took to give to them? several hundred thousand dollars and no protection from a military who has killed thousands of palistinian children.
think about it - if 10 or 20 years ago an american hellicopter came in and blew up your dad or your uncle or your brother or your friend you'd be pissed wouldn't you. Lucky for you, you're American. You will most likely never have to experience someone coming onto your soil and accidentally killing your friends and/or family because they had to shove their nose where it didnt belong. Unfortunately, this new "war on terror" in a nation that never once supported bin laden (in fact, bin laden HATED hussein) and who never once threatened or attacked any US citizen outside of their own country - is creating the next generation of terrorist. Look at the children you see in the news footage now - we are killing their big brothers, fathers and uncles, and because of it - your child may be stuck fighting them in the next war.
Except they didn't. None of the perpetrators of 9/11, Madrid or Bali had family members killed by americans. None of them were Iraqui, Afghani or Palestinian. This notion that people decide to become terrorist becouse a f16 killed they grandma is silly. The notion that if you do what the terrorist want they will go home and become model citizens is beyond silly. I don't recall any suicide bombings in Alabama in the 60s, or India in th 40s, or South Africa in the 80s. And there are lots of reasons why Israel should get out of the occupied territories, but being what the terrorists want is not one of them.
PASADENA, California (Reuters) -- Cosmos 1, the first solar sail-powered spacecraft, appears to be "alive" and sending signals to tracking stations but could be in a lower orbit than planned, said mission experts in California, late on Tuesday.
Telemetry data received by three tracking stations in the Pacific Ocean, Russia and the Czech Republic seemed to show that Cosmos 1 made it into orbit, mission staff at the Planetary Society said.
Mission controllers discovered after reviewing telemetry data from the stations that the craft had signaled its passage during what had been believed to be several hours of radio silence, said Planetary Society co-founder Bruce Murray.
"The good news is we have reason to believe it's alive and in orbit," Murray said. "The bad news is we don't know where it is."
If you were searching for information about a story, you probably WOULD want a cnn article over some random blog opinion piece that may or may not have any real facts
True, but in the Iraq exemple for instance Id like a view from a representative news source from, say, and Arab paper, an Iraqi paper and perhaps, say, a american soldiers blog taht mentions the incident first hand. Each of these sources would be identified automaticaly by google because they are each the most popular, and trusted acording to the criteria proposed by google, in a certain cluster of links. So, a random blog would never be high in the rank unless it was linked to by many other sources reporting the same event.
There are two main ways of ranking news (as well as websites and whatnot): Popularity or Quality. Popularity can be easily quantified, but with news you will probably end up with big and well known media source dominating the ranking. Regardless of what one thinks about CNN or BBC, they are not what I look for in googlenews (or I would just type www.cnn.com). I want news sources that I was anware of, to give me a fresh perspective.
Quality on the other hand is very hard to measure, and any definition will surely be controversial. The metrics they are proposing will also benefit large well knwown news sources.
What I would really like though is a rank that gave the widest possible perspective. Some algorithm that would take a news event and define some broad categories of news sources (say, on news on Iraq, conservative american media, liberal american, iraqi, arab, etc.). Then one or two representatives of each category would be displayed in the ranks, choosen among the cotegory by the metrics described in the article. The trick of course is to define the categories, but I think one could do that by looking at how different sources 'cluster' together. Sources in one country link overwhelmingly among themselves rather than abroad. Conservative news sources tend to cite and link to other conservatives, ditto for liberals or any other category. This is even more true for blogs, which wouldn't be much cited in the rank itself, but are a sort of glue that binds ideological and national categories together, and thus provide useful information to help classify the news source.
Ok, dont get a political flameware started. Quite frankly im pissed off with everything became a redstate bluestate thing. we're ALL americans, no matter what state we're from, and no matter our political affiliation. And where are the libertarian states?
No, we are not all american. Some of us are, like, from the rest of the world...
The upper classes, along with the middle classes and any other classes with a computer will pay $2 for a pirated copy of XP pro and be done with it. I have never seen a legal personal copy of Windows in here. M$s money is in business. Thw whole point of this lame edition XP thing is to prevent computers from coming with Linux preinstalled. If Windows is the only OS people are familiar with M$ is happy, piracy notwithstanding.
According to the above mentioned source 25% of Brazil's population are below the poverty line. In reality, it's much more (they are notorious for not keeping track of economical data or even just plain making stuff up).
O dear, are we? The 25% percent number refers to a very stingy definition of poverty (which should have come with abject appended). But these numbers are not made up. Where did you get that from?
Photo-ed and fingerprinted incoming American citizens in
response to America's change in visa policies.
Charged fairly hefty import tariffs for PCs to promote
local industry.
Promotes Brazilian music, and indirectly, interest in
Brazilian culture and tourism, via the encouragement of
free music downloads [I read this in a magazine, but
can't anything online confirming it. Can anyone help?]
The fingerprint thing was reciprocation for US visa policies. I think what annoys people the most is not the number of hoops they have to jump to get a visa, but that insufferable attitude US consular authorities have of treating visa-seekers as supplicants.
The former policy of outlawing the import of computer equipment if a made-in-Brazil one existed (Reserva de Mercado) is widely regarded as a massive failure. Today tariffs are high, but not as ridiculous as in the past. All components are still manufactured in Tawain, and the higher cost trickles down to the whole productive chain making the economy less competitve as a whole.
There has been an upsurge in interest in Brazilian culture in general. Some of it is due to the goverment, but most is not. The culture minister (Gilberto Gil, a major artist) recorded a song for Wired under a GPL licence, but this is was a one-off. He generaly supports music with less restriction on distribution, but AFAIK does not support wholesale free downloads. Here
is a (entirely legal) bittorrent link to the song (along with the rest of the CD)
It seems the publishing industry is behaving more sanely than the music industry. Technology is progressing, and change is inevitable. Its better that we accept it. But then again, sharing music could be more detrimental to CD sales, than viewing text on a computer screen would be to book sales.
The book industry is not trying to support an obsolete business model; people still want physical books, while most would be content with (legal) downloaded music. Also, I guess most people in the book industry actually like to read what they publish.
I am by no means a fan of GWB, but bodycount?! Millions (litteraly) died and are still dying in North Korea, and DR Congo, and Sudan. The problem is that half the world seems to care only when the dead are american, and the other half cares only when they were killed by americans.
(one of) The exciting thing(s) about dark matter/dark energy/Pioneer anomaly is that they smell like new fundamental physics. A bit like in the early 20th century, when people had everything pretty much figured out, except for a few nagging problems such as the UV catastrophe and Michelson-Moreley's failure to detect changes in the speed of light. Which of course led respectively to quantum theory and relativity.
We assume DM and DE are there because according to general relativity we need something to clump visimble matter, something to accelerate the universe today (and another something to accelerate the universe in the past if inflation is to be believed), and a bunch of something to make the universe (very nearly) flat. Postulating all these weird stuff is a bit contrived. Or we can heve some new physics.
This probably what the Wow aliens were trying to tell us...
PS: The 4neutron stuff and changing constant *are* new physics, if true. Right now they are just plain weird, IMHO.
Slashdot Mirror
I didnt realize these plants generated power through human sacrifce. How does that work? I suppose that if you carve out someones heart and then Quetzaqual grants you a few gigajoules.
Mind your manners, sir! This is Slashdot, not 4chan, we have standards here.
Who cares about this Jobs fellow? Cmdr Taco has resigned!!
There were also diamond icebergs in Arthur C Clarkes 2061. Admittedly, a pretty mediocre book, both compared to 2001 and 2010 and to ADitS. And lets not forget F. Scott Fitzgeralds A diamond as big as the Ritz...
Well, the USAF X-47B just returned from 270+ days in (constantly changing) orbit, doing god knows what. And it also has some downmass capability. From the space enthusiast point of view, I would call that good news too. Also, the X-43 is out of storage. For god knows what, but possibly to be fitted with a Merlin engine and flown underneath VG's White Knight II. Fun things are happening in space flight. They are just not happening (mainly) at NASA any more.
*If* google fails, it won't be around one day and gone the next. In any case, there are other search engines that do a nearly as good a job as google, so we would still be able to do search. Migrating from Gmail would be slightly more complicated, but would still be doable, especially considering that all other free email providers would love to, and actively encourage and help anyone wanting to migrate. Generally, if google stumbles, there are plenty of others ready and willing to pick up the slack. -- Far more worrying would to have a systemic failure of the entire 'free stuff & ads 'business model. If providing free search and/or email (and social networking) is no longer profitable, we are truly screwed. It is not that we would have to pay much for search and email (marginal costs are very small); but the net would probably balkanize (if search isn't free, why would content? And in this case, why link to your competitor's content?) and stovepipe. Using the Internet use would end up looking like using a mobile phone. Useful, no doubt. But a shadow of what its former self. -- Sorry for the melodrama; but the current human architecture of the internet is very fortuitous, but was hardly inevitable. It emerged, largely unplanned, from a series of developments that could easily have happened elsehow. There are other ways of creating a world wide network, that would do almost all that the net does, but provide much more top-down control.
err... its only inverse-square if the energy is unfocused. Since we are talking about a *beam*, this is clearly not the case. The parallel is not exact, but we have known how to transmit EM radiation directionally for decades (what do you think all those parabolic dishes are for?), thereby avoiding inverse-square attenuation; the EM energy is 'beamed' to a receiving antenna, where it induces a current and hence transmits energy. In this case, the trick is constructing a primary coil such that most of the magnetic flux lines that cross it also cross a secondary coil (i.e., it preserves most of the magnectic flux). A AC current on the primary will induce a current in the secondary, and the energy efficiency will be the ratio between the magnectic flux in both coils. Interestingly, if you apply a DC current to one of these coils, you will end up with a very focused electromagnet. You could use it to manipulate a small permanent magnet far away from the coil (on the order of the AC transmission distance), for instance. This sort of remote, non invasive manipulation must have tons of application, from surgical (e.g., guiding a probe to a clogged artery), to military (defusing bombs), to whatever (safecracking anyone?) Anyway, very cool stuff.
I'm sure there will be many interesting suggestions, but to me it would be preferable to focus on building simpler devices which the students design themselves, rather than something fancier that forces them to simply follow a blueprint (because they won't have the time/expertise to design it from scratch). Of course, there will be a continuum between 'built from scratch' and 'paint by numbers'-type projects, with different levels of student involvement in its design, and you'll have to find your balance.
Yet more proof, as if any was needed, that pirates rule. Shaolin Monks use lawyers to intimidate; Ninjas are intimidated by lawyers. Pirates, by definition, are not afraid of lawyers, and have no use for them except as ballast. QED.
The ISAS homepage is now claiming
"Hayabusa is sure to have succeeded in asteroid sampling! It found the Target Marker with 880,000 names."
This sounds a bit all-your-base-ish, so I don't know exactly what the second sentence means. In any case, good news! This mission reminds me of Apollo 13 or the Voyagers, with its brillian improvising. They really deserve to get the samples back.
The problem he gives as an example in the sample chapter can be solved without resorting to any trigonometric functions at al. Just use Pythagora's theorem a couple of times plus the fact that the sides of a isoceles triangle are equal. You then solve a 2nd degree equation and voila. This wouldn't have worked if the angle wasn't 45o, but then his method wouldn't have yielded a neat result either. My guess is that any problem that can be solved in closed form by his formalism can be as easily solved using run of the mill geometry.
Of course, his method may turn out to be more intuitive, but I'll reserve my judgment on that.
This new old concept of capsule-atop-rocket + heavy lift cargo rocket can be made reasonably cheap (though this being NASA one never knows) and safe, but it is a technological dead end. It is identical to what the russian used to build and crew Mir (with the soyuz-atop-proton and the energia for heavy cargo).
What it tells me is that 1 NASA considers the shuttle a failure 2 The american space program will focus on space science and planting flags in the Moon and Mars.
I think most people agree that #1 is true, as far as the shuttle is concerned; but I think the concept of reusable vehicles is part of the way forward. As for #2, its is really focusing on splash over substance. The key to building a real space infrastructure is getting to low earth orbit in a cheap and reliable way. Once you have easy access to LEO, you can build think in orbit, and getting anywhere is (comparatively) much easier. A simple reusable, single stage to orbit vehicle is in my view the best wat of doing it. Unfortunately NASA (and its political masters) is not interested in this sort of project anymore. Instead of striving for simplicity and incremental advances, it designs and builds enormously complicated and expensive monstruosities that try to do everything at the same time.
You should welcome your new Brazilian overlords!
The Moon is a cylinder!
The crowbar would of course come in handy in the workshop breaking in business.
True, but in the Iraq exemple for instance Id like a view from a representative news source from, say, and Arab paper, an Iraqi paper and perhaps, say, a american soldiers blog taht mentions the incident first hand. Each of these sources would be identified automaticaly by google because they are each the most popular, and trusted acording to the criteria proposed by google, in a certain cluster of links. So, a random blog would never be high in the rank unless it was linked to by many other sources reporting the same event.
Again, just my 2cents.
There are two main ways of ranking news (as well as websites and whatnot): Popularity or Quality. Popularity can be easily quantified, but with news you will probably end up with big and well known media source dominating the ranking. Regardless of what one thinks about CNN or BBC, they are not what I look for in googlenews (or I would just type www.cnn.com). I want news sources that I was anware of, to give me a fresh perspective.
Quality on the other hand is very hard to measure, and any definition will surely be controversial. The metrics they are proposing will also benefit large well knwown news sources.
What I would really like though is a rank that gave the widest possible perspective. Some algorithm that would take a news event and define some broad categories of news sources (say, on news on Iraq, conservative american media, liberal american, iraqi, arab, etc.). Then one or two representatives of each category would be displayed in the ranks, choosen among the cotegory by the metrics described in the article. The trick of course is to define the categories, but I think one could do that by looking at how different sources 'cluster' together. Sources in one country link overwhelmingly among themselves rather than abroad. Conservative news sources tend to cite and link to other conservatives, ditto for liberals or any other category. This is even more true for blogs, which wouldn't be much cited in the rank itself, but are a sort of glue that binds ideological and national categories together, and thus provide useful information to help classify the news source.
I hope I'm making sense here. Just my 2cents...
The former policy of outlawing the import of computer equipment if a made-in-Brazil one existed (Reserva de Mercado) is widely regarded as a massive failure. Today tariffs are high, but not as ridiculous as in the past. All components are still manufactured in Tawain, and the higher cost trickles down to the whole productive chain making the economy less competitve as a whole.
There has been an upsurge in interest in Brazilian culture in general. Some of it is due to the goverment, but most is not. The culture minister (Gilberto Gil, a major artist) recorded a song for Wired under a GPL licence, but this is was a one-off. He generaly supports music with less restriction on distribution, but AFAIK does not support wholesale free downloads. Here is a (entirely legal) bittorrent link to the song (along with the rest of the CD)
I am by no means a fan of GWB, but bodycount?! Millions (litteraly) died and are still dying in North Korea, and DR Congo, and Sudan. The problem is that half the world seems to care only when the dead are american, and the other half cares only when they were killed by americans.
(one of) The exciting thing(s) about dark matter/dark energy/Pioneer anomaly is that they smell like new fundamental physics. A bit like in the early 20th century, when people had everything pretty much figured out, except for a few nagging problems such as the UV catastrophe and Michelson-Moreley's failure to detect changes in the speed of light. Which of course led respectively to quantum theory and relativity.
We assume DM and DE are there because according to general relativity we need something to clump visimble matter, something to accelerate the universe today (and another something to accelerate the universe in the past if inflation is to be believed), and a bunch of something to make the universe (very nearly) flat. Postulating all these weird stuff is a bit contrived. Or we can heve some new physics.
This probably what the Wow aliens were trying to tell us...
PS: The 4neutron stuff and changing constant *are* new physics, if true. Right now they are just plain weird, IMHO.