You are of course correct: I had an order of magnitude mistake in recall, thinking about a transition from 20 to 200 tons after buildup, instead of 1,2 tons to 20 tons buildup.
Just to correct that one trope: NASA has not lost the plans for the Saturn V -- although many paper copies were destroyed, a complete set of blueprints exists on microfilm in Marshall.
The real problem is that the plans for the assembly lines have probably all vanished: all the custom jigs and other tooling created and built up for the Apollo program. It's one thing to note on blueprint that, say, a Saturn F-1 engine outer housing needs to be sintered to the cooling pipe network in one go, but how on Earth do you actually do that?
Because chemical rockets are a technological dead end for getting from Earth to orbit--they just aren't going to give much better performance in the future than they are today. How can we state this with any certainty? Two words: mass ratio. Fuel makes up most of the mass of any rocket at launch. Most of the rest goes on infrastructure -- engines, fuel tanks, guidance computers, etc, leaving a tiny percentage for passangers, payload etc. And there's no massive improvements left to be made in chemical rockets: we have the periodic table, we know we get the maximum theoretical bang by burning H and O, and it's just not enough to allow cheap access to space.
You could turn to nuclear power, but, generally speaking, nuclear propulsion inside the atmosphere is verboten.
So then you're left with either inventing totally new motive technology for rockets, or turning to something else, something that uses the gravity well to its advantage: something like the space elevator. Other contenders involve balloons and so on, but thess operate at the cusp of the atmosphere, or LEO at best -- a space elevator gets you all the way to geosynchronous orbit and way beyond.
The ribbon goes up as two full-length spools, which are bonded together as they are unspooled to create a single initial ribbon with a 20 ton lift capacity. 4 launchs are required because in addition to the spools, theres the rest of the the hardware--the descender rocket, the spool unreeler/counterweight station, and the LEO to GEO transfer engine.
Kim Stanely Robinson has a lot to answer for -- every time the space elevator comes up, people drag up the plot from the Mars books....
To (once again!) answer the objections raised by this scenerio: Unlike Mars, Earth has a nice thick atmosphere. The elevator ribbon has a very low mass per unit length (indeed, this is one of the characteristics that make the elevator physically possible, not just sci-fi). If the cable is severed, only the stuff below the breakpoint would fall to Earth, and execpt for the bottom few hundred miles, would burn up in the atmosphere. The remainder should fall into the sea, and again, because it's so light, any that did somehow hit land would cause any major problems.
For the initial elevator ribbon deployment, you're talking about 2 spools massing about 20 tons each, but once you've got the initial ribbon up, you use the cheap, cheap, elevator itself to build up the ribbon, so you're not paying typical launch costs for the whole thing.
To get the initial spools and associated hardware up to GEO, Brad Edwards calculates (if an MPD engine is used for the LEO to GEO transfer) that the launch cost could come downn to about $1 billion for 4 Atlas 5 launches -- about twice the cost of a single shuttle mission.
Good point -- you build it on the equator for starters: hurricanes don't cross the equator. Second, you pick the place with the most boring, unchanging, weather on Earth. Given platform technology can already hack conditions in the North Sea and Gulf of Mexico, you should be okay for the rest of time. Part of the reason for using a sea platform is so that you can move one end of the elevator cable around (although ribbon would be a better description) so as to dodge orbiting satellites, etc, so there's some flexibility built in.
Mod parent up! As a journalist myself I've always believed that equivocation is a poor subsitute for objectivity. There are many reasons for how it came about, but the current abdication of many news organizations of the responsibility to do their own spade work and not simply report what two feuding spokespeople said is appalling and corrodes democracies.
Most research money does not come from federal grants....The reason the drugs cost so much has absolutely nothing to do with the cost of marketing. It is almost entirely due to the cost of research and developmen
Care to back that statement up with some numbers? Because Marcia Angell, who was editor of The New England Journal of Medicine for twenty years, disagrees with you and agrees with the poster. She's just published The Truth About Drug Companies. The core thesis of this book is that Currently Americans spend a staggering $200 billion each year on prescription drugs. As Dr. Angell powerfully demonstrates, claims that high drug prices are necessary to fund research and development are unfounded: The truth is that drug companies funnel the bulk of their resources into the marketing of products of dubious benefit. Meanwhile, as profits soar, the companies brazenly use their wealth and power to push their agenda through Congress, the FDA, and academic medical centers...Drug companies, she shows, routinely rely on publicly funded institutions for their basic research; they rig clinical trials to make their products look better than they are; and they use their legions of lawyers to stretch out government-granted exclusive marketing rights for years. They also flood the market with copycat drugs that cost a lot more than the drugs they mimic but are no more effective.
In the past two years, we have started to see, for the first time, the beginnings of public resistance to rapacious pricing and other dubious practices of th e pharmaceutical industry. It is mainly because of this resistance that drug companies are now blanketing us with public relations messages. And the magic words, repeated over and over like an incantation, are research, innovation, and American. Research. Innovation. American. It makes a great story.
But while the rhetoric is stirring, it has very little to do with reality. First, research and development (R&D) is a relatively small part of the budgets of the big drug companies--dwarfed by their vast expenditures on marketing and administration, and smaller even than profits. In fact, year after year, for over two decades, this industry has been far and away the most profitable in the United States. (In 2003, for the first time, the industry lost its first-place position, coming in third, behind "mining, crude oil production," and "commercial banks.") The prices drug companies charge have little relationship to the costs of making the drugs and could be cut dramatically without coming anywhere close to threatening R&D.
Second, the pharmaceutical industry is not especially innovative. As hard as it is to believe, only a handful of truly important drugs have been brought to market in recent years, and they were mostly based on taxpayer-funded research at academic institutions, small biotechnology companies, or the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
and
At least a third of drugs marketed by the major drug companies are now licensed from universities or small biotech companies, and these tend to be the most innovative ones.
While I agree with your post overall, I'm not sure you've picked the best example here:
Sometimes even very smart people overlook small things that turn out to be important. Ask Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee about that if you see them.
To be fair, North American had been warning about the dangers of an oxygen environment for some time prior to the fire. North American also originally suggested that the hatch open outward, with an explosive bolt release for emergencies. NASA declined, making their own cost/benefit evaluation: a pure oxygen atmosphere was easier to deal with (no risk of accidental nitrogen asphyxiation for example) and had been handled safely since Mercury. Since Grisson lost the Liberty Bell due to a suspected explosive bolt malfunction, NASA also felt they were safer without such an emergency system, and a outward opening hatch on a pressurised vehicle is inherently riskier than an inward opening one.
It wasn't so much an oversight as a miscalculated risk: the root cause of the loss of Apollo One was a system failure induced by schedule pressure: with more time the cost/benefit trade-off balance would have shifted: NASA might have been willing to test Oxygen/Nitrogen life-support systems and North American's construction would probably have been less shoddy.
Actually the best thing to do is keep stum, start documenting everything and then leak the information. There's a good article, The Whistelblower's Dilemman written by one of my colleagues about dealing with this kind of siutation. Some excerpts:
Among the other mistakes Martin cites are that people don't collect enough evidence of the problem they're trying to expose, don't build support among colleagues and others, and don't wait for the right opportunity to come forward. "My advice to most people is, 'Don't do it--until you're done investigating, preparing an escape route, and weighing your options,'" he says.
That last piece of advice is especially important. "People think the right thing to do is just speaking out. But there are many different ways to do the right thing. It may be best to wait and collect more information. You also have to look at the consequences, for yourself, your family, your colleagues."
...
Because of the many bad things that happen to whistle-blowers, Dina Rasor likens the act to "setting your hair on fire for one glorious minute." She has two words of advice for would-be whistle-blowers: remain anonymous. "If there's any way to get the information out--through a nonprofit, or a trusted reporter, or a friend--without identifying yourself and having your fingerprints all over it, that's preferable to going public. Then the fraud becomes the issue, and not you."
There's also contact details for organizations that help whistleblowers too.
there's answers to my life, along with detailed analysis of myself!
Sorry for the pop psychology, but really, it comes from sincere empathy not any attempt be condescending or patronize you.
I'm so used to dealing with women as friends, it's hard to act in any other way.
Yeah, I've been there. If you're interested in someone, you do have to make it clear early on that you're interested in the other person romantically/sexually. All relationships tend to settle into a pattern before too long, and it can be hard to change out of that. It's exactly like when someone new starts in a workplace or class-- there's period where they're shiny and new and people haven't figured out how they're going to catagorize them yet. It's in that middle-ground between stranger and old-familiar that you have ask people out.
I've seen some incredibly boorish bullshit about how you should hit on an attractive woman within 3 seconds or so of first making eye contact, so don't go to that extreme. But it should be soon, at the end of your first or second social conversation. You won't really know much about this person yet, but that's the point of the date. If you spend all your time getting to know someone before raising the idea of romance you're a) going to miss that shiny new window of not-yet-being-lets-just-be-friends-guy and b) you're going to be lot less nervous because you'll have a lot less invested in the date (it hurts a lot less too to get turned down by someone who you've only recently met). If you wait till you already know that you really like the other person, you're of course going to be desperatly worried whether or not she'll be into you if you do get a date. Desperate worry==nervous freak out. Plus if you are really into someone, that deperate worry can come across as needy, or just plain desperate, and these are not attractive traits.
But if *you're* not sure whether or not you really connect with the other person yet, you're going to be much less worried about the date, plus failure here is OK, in fact *to be expected*. Very, very, very few people meet the love of their life on their first, second, or twentieth date. (think of all those dating montages in movies). You have a date, that mutual spark just isn't there, but you've both had a nice meal and hopefully some pleasant conversation and you both move right on with your lives -- and possibly start recommending each other to other single friends. A good first date is like the advice given for good job interviews: a good job interview is not just all about trying to make a good impression on a potential employer, it's just as much a chance for you to interview the company and see if you want to work there. And think about how many interviews most people go on before landing a job! I'm not saying that you should ask people out just for the sake of asking, but it doesn't hurt to be less invested intially. Think of these dates as practice dates. Learn what's good small talk and what isn't. For example, I soon learned (back in my dating days) not to use, say, my scale-model hobby as conversational fodder!
I have dramatic nervousness
That maybe physiological or just you've really ingrained that response in to you. In either case, if its severe enough to stop you from doing things you want to do, then its worth talking to a doctor about. Seriously. There are so many mild mental health things that can be very effectively managed or treated, but people only think of mental health in terms of catastrophic mental illness, where treatment is less effective or more invasive. It's like thinking that the only thing worth going to the casualty department about is massive organ failure...
Well, I only suggested therapy in the case that there was a real psychological problem, like social phobia. I agree though that looking closely at what other people are doing is very useful -- too many geeks think that learning social skills equates with being a sheep of some sort, or don't even realise that social skills can be learnt and developed, but instead stay stuck in the kind of life described by Patrick Kavanagh in his poem Inniskeen Road: July Evening
The bicycles go by in twos and threes - There's a dance in Billy Brennan's barn tonight, And there's the half-talk code of mysteries And the wink-and-elbow language of delight. Half-past eight and there is not a spot Upon a mile of road, no shadow thrown That might turn out a man or woman, not A footfall tapping secrecies of stone.
I have what every poet hates in spite Of all the solemn talk of contemplation. Oh, Alexander Selkirk knew the plight Of being king and government and nation. A road, a mile of kingdom. I am king Of banks and stones and every blooming thing.
First off, wierd, your Slashdot id is the closest to mine I've seen in a long time. 8xxxx rules!
Second, you at least have been able to breach the dating barrier (although, honestly, I'm not sure I'd refer to a liason which lasted only a week as a 'relationship.' Not that brief encounters can't be sincere, touching, and meaningful, just that there isn't enough time for them to develop into full-blown relationships) You may have issues (who doesn't?), but although the symptoms are similiar in nature, the difference in degree is large enough to suggest that something quite different is going on underneath. A 25 year-old who wants to date but hasn't in their life is in a significant amount of pain and the underlying cause (and probably a non-trivial amount of subsequent trauma) needs to be addressed before worrying about how to make connections. I'm not trying to minimise your situation either, just point out your problem seems to center around inter-personal issues, while the parent probably needs to focus on personal issues, at least for now.
I agree with your excellent advice, but from the parent's perspective that's step 100 and he or she's on step 0: there's something big going on, mentally, physically, or both, that's blocked him/her from dating before now and until he or she gets a handle on whatever it is, dating advice falls under the catagory of trying to teach someone to run while they're still having problems walking... They have to get themselves sorted out first.
Dude, ouch! You're obviously not thrilled about the situation, but it can be changed -- but it takes a lot of groundwork. If it's a psychological problem like chronic shyness, social phobia or generalised anxiety disorder, get thee to psychotherapist (preferably one that's into Cognitive Therapy instead of Freudian analysis). If you've got Generalized Nerd Syndrome (bad clothes, overweight, etc), get thee to a gym, book a starter session with a personal trainer and work out a realistic routine. Then find a department store that offers a 'personal shopper' service (it's like your very own 'Queer Eye for The Straight Guy') Ask for help with clothes and toiletries. It won't be cheap, but if you haven't been dating you should have some disposable income and you'll end up smelling nice with well fitting clothes that suit you, which makes a huge difference. If you're actually disfigured due to injury or disease get thee to a support group and start exploring options with them. Once you've laid the groundwork, consider something like eHarmony, Match.com or Nerve (meeting someone through a dating service has finally lost it stigma, at least on the coasts if not everywhere). Take it easy: you haven't had the opportunity to practise dating skills in the sandbox of adolesence, so resign yourself now to making screw-ups. Don't sweat about them, just learn from them. But the point is you actually have to start doing the spadework: self-awareness is great but only if you use it to chart a course to somewhere else. Set short-term concrete goals: i.e. "By the end of the week I will have made an appointment with a doctor/personal trainer..." not "I'll try get fit by Christmas," because Christmas will be here in the blink of a eye and you still won't be in shape. Remember, Do or Do Not, a Jedi does not try.
Well, in a sense, yes: the platform that allowed Linus to create a free Unix kernal was the IBM PC and its (stay with me here) clones... IBM, at least in part, created the programming entity known as Linus.
Every MetroCard *does* have a unique id, and if you used a credit or debit card to purchase it, the id and card # get stored in the MTA's database together.
This allows a number of things: if your monthly card gets lost or stolen, you can call the MTA up, give them your credit card number and they'll blacklist the missing card and send you a new one for the remaining days left on your Metrocard.
It's also been used by the NYPD for verifying alibis, when Metrocards found on suspects can be traced to specific stations at specific times. If you say "At the time, officer, I was commuting to work just like I do every day", and your card shows you actually using a completely different station than you normally use and which happens to be two blocks from the crime, well then Lucy, you got some 'splainin to do...
And indeed, disabled and elderly Metrocard users can update their cards electronically without having to visit a machine, but it's not generally available, for logistical rather than technological reasons.
a certain small country...I also read it in Diego Garcia
Suuure. So you're special forces or a spook then?
(For those who don't know, Diego Garcia is a small island in the Indian ocean whose entire indigenous population was forced to relocate in the 1960s and 1970s so the UK and US could blanket the place with an airfield and some serious electronic eavesdropping equipment. No-one not okayed by the Powers That Be is allowed to visit.)
Actually, it's one of my favorite anthologies of all time (which is ironic since apart from it and "The Postman", Brin's stuff leaves me cold and I love both of those books for their pitch perfect emotional impact). It's called the "River of Time": several of the stories inside are worth the cover price alone.
David Brin has a rather lovely little story in his collection "The River of Time." that tackles this: Human beings have been exploring the galaxy, but finding hardly any habitable worlds and no sign of anyone else to talk to. Then they find an artifact, which contains the coordinates of a bunch of other habitable planets. What's been happening is that the universe is still too young for there to be more than one space-faring race around at a time. So the first race to realise their predicament left artifacts with pointers on all its planets for the next race that would eventually come along, and so on. Also included is the coordinates of a particular black hole; when each species gets bored of kicking around with no one to talk to, it departs for a near-event horizon orbit around the black hole, where it waits, along with the other early races, for the galaxy to fill up with interesting people.
Slashdot Mirror
You are of course correct: I had an order of magnitude mistake in recall, thinking about a transition from 20 to 200 tons after buildup, instead of 1,2 tons to 20 tons buildup.
Just to correct that one trope: NASA has not lost the plans for the Saturn V -- although many paper copies were destroyed, a complete set of blueprints exists on microfilm in Marshall.
The real problem is that the plans for the assembly lines have probably all vanished: all the custom jigs and other tooling created and built up for the Apollo program. It's one thing to note on blueprint that, say, a Saturn F-1 engine outer housing needs to be sintered to the cooling pipe network in one go, but how on Earth do you actually do that?
Because chemical rockets are a technological dead end for getting from Earth to orbit--they just aren't going to give much better performance in the future than they are today. How can we state this with any certainty? Two words: mass ratio. Fuel makes up most of the mass of any rocket at launch. Most of the rest goes on infrastructure -- engines, fuel tanks, guidance computers, etc, leaving a tiny percentage for passangers, payload etc. And there's no massive improvements left to be made in chemical rockets: we have the periodic table, we know we get the maximum theoretical bang by burning H and O, and it's just not enough to allow cheap access to space.
You could turn to nuclear power, but, generally speaking, nuclear propulsion inside the atmosphere is verboten.
So then you're left with either inventing totally new motive technology for rockets, or turning to something else, something that uses the gravity well to its advantage: something like the space elevator. Other contenders involve balloons and so on, but thess operate at the cusp of the atmosphere, or LEO at best -- a space elevator gets you all the way to geosynchronous orbit and way beyond.
The ribbon goes up as two full-length spools, which are bonded together as they are unspooled to create a single initial ribbon with a 20 ton lift capacity. 4 launchs are required because in addition to the spools, theres the rest of the the hardware--the descender rocket, the spool unreeler/counterweight station, and the LEO to GEO transfer engine.
That was the number two location, but they decided to go with a patch of ocean a few hundred miles west of the Galapogos as number one.
Kim Stanely Robinson has a lot to answer for -- every time the space elevator comes up, people drag up the plot from the Mars books....
To (once again!) answer the objections raised by this scenerio: Unlike Mars, Earth has a nice thick atmosphere. The elevator ribbon has a very low mass per unit length (indeed, this is one of the characteristics that make the elevator physically possible, not just sci-fi). If the cable is severed, only the stuff below the breakpoint would fall to Earth, and execpt for the bottom few hundred miles, would burn up in the atmosphere. The remainder should fall into the sea, and again, because it's so light, any that did somehow hit land would cause any major problems.
For the initial elevator ribbon deployment, you're talking about 2 spools massing about 20 tons each, but once you've got the initial ribbon up, you use the cheap, cheap, elevator itself to build up the ribbon, so you're not paying typical launch costs for the whole thing.
To get the initial spools and associated hardware up to GEO, Brad Edwards calculates (if an MPD engine is used for the LEO to GEO transfer) that the launch cost could come downn to about $1 billion for 4 Atlas 5 launches -- about twice the cost of a single shuttle mission.
Good point -- you build it on the equator for starters: hurricanes don't cross the equator. Second, you pick the place with the most boring, unchanging, weather on Earth. Given platform technology can already hack conditions in the North Sea and Gulf of Mexico, you should be okay for the rest of time. Part of the reason for using a sea platform is so that you can move one end of the elevator cable around (although ribbon would be a better description) so as to dodge orbiting satellites, etc, so there's some flexibility built in.
Mod parent up! As a journalist myself I've always believed that equivocation is a poor subsitute for objectivity. There are many reasons for how it came about, but the current abdication of many news organizations of the responsibility to do their own spade work and not simply report what two feuding spokespeople said is appalling and corrodes democracies.
Most research money does not come from federal grants....The reason the drugs cost so much has absolutely nothing to do with the cost of marketing. It is almost entirely due to the cost of research and developmen
Care to back that statement up with some numbers? Because Marcia Angell, who was editor of The New England Journal of Medicine for twenty years, disagrees with you and agrees with the poster. She's just published The Truth About Drug Companies . The core thesis of this book is that Currently Americans spend a staggering $200 billion each year on prescription drugs. As Dr. Angell powerfully demonstrates, claims that high drug prices are necessary to fund research and development are unfounded: The truth is that drug companies funnel the bulk of their resources into the marketing of products of dubious benefit. Meanwhile, as profits soar, the companies brazenly use their wealth and power to push their agenda through Congress, the FDA, and academic medical centers...Drug companies, she shows, routinely rely on publicly funded institutions for their basic research; they rig clinical trials to make their products look better than they are; and they use their legions of lawyers to stretch out government-granted exclusive marketing rights for years. They also flood the market with copycat drugs that cost a lot more than the drugs they mimic but are no more effective.
If you're looking for more than the book blurb, The New York Review of Books has a footnooted, condensed version of the book's argument, noting:
In the past two years, we have started to see, for the first time, the beginnings of public resistance to rapacious pricing and other dubious practices of th e pharmaceutical industry. It is mainly because of this resistance that drug companies are now blanketing us with public relations messages. And the magic words, repeated over and over like an incantation, are research, innovation, and American. Research. Innovation. American. It makes a great story.
But while the rhetoric is stirring, it has very little to do with reality. First, research and development (R&D) is a relatively small part of the budgets of the big drug companies--dwarfed by their vast expenditures on marketing and administration, and smaller even than profits. In fact, year after year, for over two decades, this industry has been far and away the most profitable in the United States. (In 2003, for the first time, the industry lost its first-place position, coming in third, behind "mining, crude oil production," and "commercial banks.") The prices drug companies charge have little relationship to the costs of making the drugs and could be cut dramatically without coming anywhere close to threatening R&D.
Second, the pharmaceutical industry is not especially innovative. As hard as it is to believe, only a handful of truly important drugs have been brought to market in recent years, and they were mostly based on taxpayer-funded research at academic institutions, small biotechnology companies, or the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
and
At least a third of drugs marketed by the major drug companies are now licensed from universities or small biotech companies, and these tend to be the most innovative ones.
Cheers and good luck!
While I agree with your post overall, I'm not sure you've picked the best example here:
Sometimes even very smart people overlook small things that turn out to be important. Ask Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee about that if you see them.
To be fair, North American had been warning about the dangers of an oxygen environment for some time prior to the fire. North American also originally suggested that the hatch open outward, with an explosive bolt release for emergencies. NASA declined, making their own cost/benefit evaluation: a pure oxygen atmosphere was easier to deal with (no risk of accidental nitrogen asphyxiation for example) and had been handled safely since Mercury. Since Grisson lost the Liberty Bell due to a suspected explosive bolt malfunction, NASA also felt they were safer without such an emergency system, and a outward opening hatch on a pressurised vehicle is inherently riskier than an inward opening one.
It wasn't so much an oversight as a miscalculated risk: the root cause of the loss of Apollo One was a system failure induced by schedule pressure: with more time the cost/benefit trade-off balance would have shifted: NASA might have been willing to test Oxygen/Nitrogen life-support systems and North American's construction would probably have been less shoddy.
Actually the best thing to do is keep stum, start documenting everything and then leak the information. There's a good article, The Whistelblower's Dilemman written by one of my colleagues about dealing with this kind of siutation. Some excerpts:
...
Among the other mistakes Martin cites are that people don't collect enough evidence of the problem they're trying to expose, don't build support among colleagues and others, and don't wait for the right opportunity to come forward. "My advice to most people is, 'Don't do it--until you're done investigating, preparing an escape route, and weighing your options,'" he says.
That last piece of advice is especially important. "People think the right thing to do is just speaking out. But there are many different ways to do the right thing. It may be best to wait and collect more information. You also have to look at the consequences, for yourself, your family, your colleagues."
Because of the many bad things that happen to whistle-blowers, Dina Rasor likens the act to "setting your hair on fire for one glorious minute." She has two words of advice for would-be whistle-blowers: remain anonymous. "If there's any way to get the information out--through a nonprofit, or a trusted reporter, or a friend--without identifying yourself and having your fingerprints all over it, that's preferable to going public. Then the fraud becomes the issue, and not you."
There's also contact details for organizations that help whistleblowers too.
there's answers to my life, along with detailed analysis of myself!
Sorry for the pop psychology, but really, it comes from sincere empathy not any attempt be condescending or patronize you.
I'm so used to dealing with women as friends, it's hard to act in any other way.
Yeah, I've been there. If you're interested in someone, you do have to make it clear early on that you're interested in the other person romantically/sexually. All relationships tend to settle into a pattern before too long, and it can be hard to change out of that. It's exactly like when someone new starts in a workplace or class-- there's period where they're shiny and new and people haven't figured out how they're going to catagorize them yet. It's in that middle-ground between stranger and old-familiar that you have ask people out.
I've seen some incredibly boorish bullshit about how you should hit on an attractive woman within 3 seconds or so of first making eye contact, so don't go to that extreme. But it should be soon, at the end of your first or second social conversation. You won't really know much about this person yet, but that's the point of the date. If you spend all your time getting to know someone before raising the idea of romance you're a) going to miss that shiny new window of not-yet-being-lets-just-be-friends-guy and b) you're going to be lot less nervous because you'll have a lot less invested in the date (it hurts a lot less too to get turned down by someone who you've only recently met). If you wait till you already know that you really like the other person, you're of course going to be desperatly worried whether or not she'll be into you if you do get a date. Desperate worry==nervous freak out. Plus if you are really into someone, that deperate worry can come across as needy, or just plain desperate, and these are not attractive traits.
But if *you're* not sure whether or not you really connect with the other person yet, you're going to be much less worried about the date, plus failure here is OK, in fact *to be expected*. Very, very, very few people meet the love of their life on their first, second, or twentieth date. (think of all those dating montages in movies). You have a date, that mutual spark just isn't there, but you've both had a nice meal and hopefully some pleasant conversation and you both move right on with your lives -- and possibly start recommending each other to other single friends. A good first date is like the advice given for good job interviews: a good job interview is not just all about trying to make a good impression on a potential employer, it's just as much a chance for you to interview the company and see if you want to work there. And think about how many interviews most people go on before landing a job! I'm not saying that you should ask people out just for the sake of asking, but it doesn't hurt to be less invested intially. Think of these dates as practice dates. Learn what's good small talk and what isn't. For example, I soon learned (back in my dating days) not to use, say, my scale-model hobby as conversational fodder!
I have dramatic nervousness
That maybe physiological or just you've really ingrained that response in to you. In either case, if its severe enough to stop you from doing things you want to do, then its worth talking to a doctor about. Seriously. There are so many mild mental health things that can be very effectively managed or treated, but people only think of mental health in terms of catastrophic mental illness, where treatment is less effective or more invasive. It's like thinking that the only thing worth going to the casualty department about is massive organ failure...
Well, I only suggested therapy in the case that there was a real psychological problem, like social phobia. I agree though that looking closely at what other people are doing is very useful -- too many geeks think that learning social skills equates with being a sheep of some sort, or don't even realise that social skills can be learnt and developed, but instead stay stuck in the kind of life described by Patrick Kavanagh in his poem Inniskeen Road: July Evening
The bicycles go by in twos and threes -
There's a dance in Billy Brennan's barn tonight,
And there's the half-talk code of mysteries
And the wink-and-elbow language of delight.
Half-past eight and there is not a spot
Upon a mile of road, no shadow thrown
That might turn out a man or woman, not
A footfall tapping secrecies of stone.
I have what every poet hates in spite
Of all the solemn talk of contemplation.
Oh, Alexander Selkirk knew the plight
Of being king and government and nation.
A road, a mile of kingdom. I am king
Of banks and stones and every blooming thing.
First off, wierd, your Slashdot id is the closest to mine I've seen in a long time. 8xxxx rules!
Second, you at least have been able to breach the dating barrier (although, honestly, I'm not sure I'd refer to a liason which lasted only a week as a 'relationship.' Not that brief encounters can't be sincere, touching, and meaningful, just that there isn't enough time for them to develop into full-blown relationships) You may have issues (who doesn't?), but although the symptoms are similiar in nature, the difference in degree is large enough to suggest that something quite different is going on underneath. A 25 year-old who wants to date but hasn't in their life is in a significant amount of pain and the underlying cause (and probably a non-trivial amount of subsequent trauma) needs to be addressed before worrying about how to make connections. I'm not trying to minimise your situation either, just point out your problem seems to center around inter-personal issues, while the parent probably needs to focus on personal issues, at least for now.
I agree with your excellent advice, but from the parent's perspective that's step 100 and he or she's on step 0: there's something big going on, mentally, physically, or both, that's blocked him/her from dating before now and until he or she gets a handle on whatever it is, dating advice falls under the catagory of trying to teach someone to run while they're still having problems walking... They have to get themselves sorted out first.
Dude, ouch! You're obviously not thrilled about the situation, but it can be changed -- but it takes a lot of groundwork. If it's a psychological problem like chronic shyness, social phobia or generalised anxiety disorder, get thee to psychotherapist (preferably one that's into Cognitive Therapy instead of Freudian analysis). If you've got Generalized Nerd Syndrome (bad clothes, overweight, etc), get thee to a gym, book a starter session with a personal trainer and work out a realistic routine. Then find a department store that offers a 'personal shopper' service (it's like your very own 'Queer Eye for The Straight Guy') Ask for help with clothes and toiletries. It won't be cheap, but if you haven't been dating you should have some disposable income and you'll end up smelling nice with well fitting clothes that suit you, which makes a huge difference. If you're actually disfigured due to injury or disease get thee to a support group and start exploring options with them. Once you've laid the groundwork, consider something like eHarmony, Match.com or Nerve (meeting someone through a dating service has finally lost it stigma, at least on the coasts if not everywhere). Take it easy: you haven't had the opportunity to practise dating skills in the sandbox of adolesence, so resign yourself now to making screw-ups. Don't sweat about them, just learn from them. But the point is you actually have to start doing the spadework: self-awareness is great but only if you use it to chart a course to somewhere else. Set short-term concrete goals: i.e. "By the end of the week I will have made an appointment with a doctor/personal trainer..." not "I'll try get fit by Christmas," because Christmas will be here in the blink of a eye and you still won't be in shape. Remember, Do or Do Not, a Jedi does not try.
Well, in a sense, yes: the platform that allowed Linus to create a free Unix kernal was the IBM PC and its (stay with me here) clones... IBM, at least in part, created the programming entity known as Linus.
Every MetroCard *does* have a unique id, and if you used a credit or debit card to purchase it, the id and card # get stored in the MTA's database together.
This allows a number of things: if your monthly card gets lost or stolen, you can call the MTA up, give them your credit card number and they'll blacklist the missing card and send you a new one for the remaining days left on your Metrocard.
It's also been used by the NYPD for verifying alibis, when Metrocards found on suspects can be traced to specific stations at specific times. If you say "At the time, officer, I was commuting to work just like I do every day", and your card shows you actually using a completely different station than you normally use and which happens to be two blocks from the crime, well then Lucy, you got some 'splainin to do...
And indeed, disabled and elderly Metrocard users can update their cards electronically without having to visit a machine, but it's not generally available, for logistical rather than technological reasons.
Fair enough, and pretty impressive: Bamford's Body of Secrets certainly makes it sound like a fascinating place.
Maybe an enemy that he can steal sump pump technology from?
a certain small country...I also read it in Diego Garcia
Suuure. So you're special forces or a spook then?
(For those who don't know, Diego Garcia is a small island in the Indian ocean whose entire indigenous population was forced to relocate in the 1960s and 1970s so the UK and US could blanket the place with an airfield and some serious electronic eavesdropping equipment. No-one not okayed by the Powers That Be is allowed to visit.)
Actually, it's one of my favorite anthologies of all time (which is ironic since apart from it and "The Postman", Brin's stuff leaves me cold and I love both of those books for their pitch perfect emotional impact). It's called the "River of Time": several of the stories inside are worth the cover price alone.
David Brin has a rather lovely little story in his collection "The River of Time." that tackles this: Human beings have been exploring the galaxy, but finding hardly any habitable worlds and no sign of anyone else to talk to. Then they find an artifact, which contains the coordinates of a bunch of other habitable planets. What's been happening is that the universe is still too young for there to be more than one space-faring race around at a time. So the first race to realise their predicament left artifacts with pointers on all its planets for the next race that would eventually come along, and so on. Also included is the coordinates of a particular black hole; when each species gets bored of kicking around with no one to talk to, it departs for a near-event horizon orbit around the black hole, where it waits, along with the other early races, for the galaxy to fill up with interesting people.