The AGC technology would not have been developed for years, possibly decades, were it not for the Apollo program's extreme specifications, which made all other considerations, such as cost and normal engineering conservativeness, subordinate to the operational requirements. Nuclear missiles could get away with analogue components (close counts in nukes as well as hand grenades), not so spacecraft doing orbital rendezvous. And Earth orbiting spacecraft could have much of the heavy lifting done using mainframes on Earth connected to radar arrays. Not so when you're doing those manouvers on the far side of the moon.
Discounting the fundamental role of space exploration space in the AGC's development and demonstrated operation, is equivalent to saying that the V-2's role as a military weapon (albeit a relatively ineffective one) is irrelevant to its development or the crytopgraphics demands of Bletchly Park and its fellow institutions were irrelevant to the history of computers.
Yes, we can all construct alternative science fiction histories where rockets were developed in leaps and bounds without World War II, where digital computers didn't get their start with military funding for crypto and nuclear bomb simulations, and where ICs became mass market items Just Because, but it didn't actually happen that way. Space travel produced the AGC, which fathered Moore's Law, and that's the answer to the question you asked. Stop moving the goalposts post-hoc.
Now, you're establishing ridiculously narrow criteria for judging the value of the space program: the parent has ruled out all scientific knowledge (so we can't talk about the Genesis Rock brought back by Apollo 15, or the excellent solar observations made on Skylab, or the advances in astronomy due to Hubble, or the contributions of the Mars Rovers), and you've just ruled out spin-offs from technologies developed for the express purpose furthering the space program as well as those technologies themselves (bye bye integrated circuits, farewell satellites).
What you're looking for are things based on the results of pure scientific experiments conducted in space, but neither the science itself, or the technology used to conduct those experiments, is acceptable. Tricky. But not impossible.
Fine. Here's a cut and paste from the last time I answered this question on/., addressing the IC point:
*** Name one...
I'll bite: an embedded, real-time, mission critical, digital computer built with integrated circuits, used to navigate the CSM and land the LM, dubbed the Apollo Guidance Computer.
If you look at histories of Integrated Circuits, or Computers in general, you'll see that the Apollo Guidance Computer comes up again and again. The AGC is considered to have a made critical contribution to digital technology and laid the groundwork for the very computer you're using to read this.
Why?
1) Bleeding edge technology. While transitorized flight control systems had been used on missiles before, the AGC had two firsts: it was both digital and used integrated circuits, specifically a whole lot of NAND gates. Prior to this, flight computers used discrete components, and were analogue at heart. The AGC also pioneered the computational architectures used to support hard real-time operation, essential if you want to trust a microchip to control a chemical plant, or car brake system.
2) Establishing a market. The AGC's development poured a lot of money into a field that many manafacturers were not exactly clamoring to get into [see point 3]. In the early days, the AGC was responsible for purchasing something like 40% of the global IC output. This helped drive investment into making more complex ICs (early circuits only had a handful of components, and yields were appalling): in other words, the development of the AGC, driven by the demands of the space program's incredibly tight operational requirements, helped kickstart Moore's Law.
3) It made the IC acceptable. Modern techno types, raised on digital technology, forget how much suspicion there was about IC technology initially. One big reason was reliability: with discrete components, every component could be tested individually and operating characteristics established. With ICs, engineers were being asked to swallow little black boxes that they couldn't test in the same ways they had for decades. An entire profession felt threatened. People presenting IC technology were known to face angry crowds of engineers at conferences. When NASA pulled off the Apollo landings using an IC-based computer, it was the end of this dissent. In fact the AGC proved the general case of digital control technology: previously analogue technology was still seen as the gold standard.
4) Commercialization: The AGC moved the IC from an exotic military component to a civilian technology. In part this was due to providing a large market for IC technology itself, but also because NASA was a civilian agency it allowed the technology to be more easily disseminated. (both because of fewer restrictions on NASA workers and because NASA technology was more palatable than nuclear missile technology)
Good places to read about this are:
http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/vs-mit-apollo-gui da nce.html (which includes one of the excellent History of Computing articles from Dr. Dobbs)
Microchip by Jeffery Zygmont
A History of Modern Computing by Paul E. Cerruzi.
Calculating the money generated and saved by the ubiquity of digital control technology and the IC are left as an exercise to the reader.:)
Are you suggesting the Hubble hasn't advanced basic science? Because it has, in spades: thousands, if not tens of thousands, of peer-reviewed scientific articles reference the Hubble. Other orbiting telescopes have also generated significant and quantifiable advances in science.
But the advantage would be on our end, not theirs. Just as someone can simply say "RTFA!" followed by a one line explanation today, in the future, such eternal questions could be answered with "RTFF!" and a few words, instead of having to compose a complete response every bloody time.
That's become a standing joke, but don't let a quick laugh prevent you from learning the true lesson of that botch up: that management attitutudes can kill missions, and the mantra of cheaper, faster, better cut too deep into the bone: see James Oberg's great article on the subject.
The wheels of the space shuttle would collapse upon touchdown from the weight of the Hubble.
Nope: NASA originally intended to recover the HST and stick it in the Smithsonian, as the parent suggested, see the second to last paragraph in this story, for example.
The retrieval mission was cancelled for various reasons, but collapsing wheels wasn't one of them.
It was never designed to land with cargo still in the hold.
The shuttle has landed with cargo still in the hold numerous times, albeit not anything that massed as much as the HST. Indeed, so called the shuttle's large 'downmass' capability was one of its big sells, and is still something unique to it.
Tito paid twenty million for a ride on a Soyuz. I'm not sure if a Soyuz could even get into the orbit occupied by the HST, but in any case, the Soyuz does not have the capacity (little cargo room, no robot arm, etc) to effect HST repairs.
what good has the space program done for mankind? Anything other than.... knowledge?
*sigh* This question comes up every time space exploration comes up, and everytime it's answered. Really, there should be FAQ's for/. topics linked to every article, so every time someone posts a question asked and answered ad nausem, we can just point them to it.
Discounting scientific knowledge, we have, briefly and non-comprehensively:
1) Satellite monitoring, navigation and communications technology.
2) Mass produced integrated circuits.
3) Major contributions to the environmental movement.
OT, but I was thinking of getting a 9800 Pro, as its price has dropped into my sweet spot. How is it? Have you tried Celestia or Doom 3 with it? (These are the two apps I primarily have in mind for it). Any info much appreciated!
The fix in question (rearranging the Cassini-Huyens trajectory geometery at the time of descent to reduce Doppler shift) applied to both channels, since they're both attached to the one probe.
Disclaimer: I edited the IEEE Spectrum article on Smeds' discovery of the fault.
the mini-mac which lacks any sort of expansion slot.
I used to really care about expansion slots. A lot. But one day I realised, thanks to firewire and USB and PMCIA, that it had been years since I'd last bought any peripheral or upgrade, (bar a graphics card), that required me to pop something into an expansion slot. So now I don't care about exapnsion slots. At all.
There are disagreements at the very core of many fields.
Yes, but the reality is that the degree of concordance between scientists in the same field is going be extremely high for most of that's field's established corpus of knowledge (otherwise it would not be established, after all).
(Certainly, there's debate about the Sphinx. But the experts involved in that debate would agree that e.g.
The Sphinx exists. It has an established set of physical dimensions. It is made out such-and-such stone. It was not constructed prior to, say, 1 million BC, or, say, after 1900. It is located in Egypt. It was built by human beings. And so on. And yet, I'm sure if you Googled hard enough, you'd find web pages that disagreed with some or all of those statements. But I'll stick with the experts.)
Of course scientists disgree on many things: that's why they're paid to do research. But they agree on many, many things too. It is something of a problem in basic observer's bias: the most noticable things about science are going to to be the controversial things, while everything else fades into the background. It's exactly this observer's bias that has kept the intelligent design (read: creationism) lobby alive in the U.S. When people see the hue and cry raised the intelligent design lobby they figure something along the lines of "There's no smoke without fire." Debates are sometimes held, which further reinforce the ID's goals, i.e. two ID members face off against two scientists, giving the impresssion that the two sides are evenly matched. But if we were really going to represent the debate properly, there'd be 2 ID people at one podium and 200,000 scientists at the other. To focus on controversies and miss the agreed upon knowledge base is to miss the forest for the trees.
But it is exactly this established background that an encylopedia strives, at least in part, to explain. That all facts are only provisionally true is correct, but that insight permitted by relativism collapses into useless solipsism unless you acknowledge that there are degrees of truth, it is possible for one position to be more true than another, and some positions are so true they deserve to be called facts. To think otherwise is an interesting philisophy, but it runs counter the very notion of the scientific enterprise or even the very idea of an encylopedia in the first place: if nothing is truer than anything else, why bother to put any effort in the Wikipedia at all? Why not just randomly generate the entries?
As for invoking the notion that everyone should simply use their powers of critical thought and synthesize their own answers from a plenitude of sources including examination of learned debate, well, that's not practical in many cases for exactly the same reason that look up tables and gain schedules were invented in computer science. If the underlying premise of the Wikipedia is that I have to evaluate each article's truthfulness individually, well, that's exactly the reliability and credibility gap that Wikipedia's critics are complaining about.
Actually the fact Wikipedia can encompass both wel l is nice
I would say the reliability issues would indicate that this is not, sadly, currently the case. Wikipedia is the bees knees for the zeitgeist, but lacks with regard to established knowledge, especially established knowledge that requires expert understanding to convey accuratly to a broad audience.
If you happen to think the Encyclopedia Britannica has its head up its backside you can't fix it. Wikipedia you can.
I agree, and this potential is what makes the project interesting.
However, fixing things requires mindshare and timeshare. If everyone who points out the systematic failings in the current Wikipedia is either, at best, ignored as some poor luddite from the depths of the 20th century (when people exchanged knowledge on bits of dead trees, poor fools) or, at worst, shouted down, nothing will get get fixed because the consensus view (at least among the majority of current contributors) that nothing needs to be fixed will never be overturned.
The two most talked about articles lately regarding the Wikipedia are from a) an ex-editor of EB and b) a co-founder of Wikipedia. Both articles were thoughtful essays from experts that addressed and analysed, albeit from different directions, the same underlying problem: Wikipedia has a credibility and a reliability shortfall. I think it's unfair to dismiss this point of view as simply "flaming Wikipedia for innaccuracy."
In particular, given Sanger explicitly discussed the licensing of Wikipedia and how it allowed for a fork, he can hardly be accused of "missing the two most important single points about Wikipedia that no other encyclopedia has."
Alas, just because the licensing can allow Wikipedia to be fixed, doesn't mean that it will, or that, in the interim, Wikipedia deserves a free pass.
if you sat twenty scientists in a room and gave them one article an academic fight would break out with many subjects.
That's a straw man. It's all a matter of degree. Ask twenty physicists about an article regarding some fine point of string theory, you're going to get 20 answers, because string theory's new and shiny and no-one understands it properly and the maths and the empirical evidence are still coming up to speed. But ask them to comment on, say, an article on Maxwell's Laws and you're going to get a high, if not unanimous, degree of concordance.
Absolute nonbias is probably impossible, true. But that still doesn't mean everything is on a level playing field. Between bias and non-bias is a continuum, and even if the limits are asymptotically unreachable, it's neither ridiculous or a fools errand to demand articles from the non-biased end of the spectrum.
Remember UseNet FAQs? An awesome collection of knowledge, also theoretically forkable and open to all, but practically, very pro-expert.
Until the Wikipedia develops a mechanism for promoting expert viewpoint above that of others, it's credibility and reliability problems will remain, and it will never fulfil its potential.
ind it interesting that, at least in the studies I've read about this, that it affects mostly adults, and younger people are largely immune to it.
Hmm, first, which studies?
Secondly, and more to the point, "younger people are largely immune to it"so far. Youth implies a shorter exposure to the hazards of multitasking, not neccesarily a greater inherent resistance to it's ill effects.
In fact, Human Resource departments and therapists are seeing more and more people are burning out in their mid-twenties. Stress releated conditions, such as ulcers, hypertension, etc, normally seen in middle age, are becoming increasingly common in younger and younger individuals.
So you can't state "younger people are largely immune" until you have actually seen them grow older without ill effect, and the early evidence is not on your side.
suppose it's simply that older people, not being used to this mass of information
It's been decades since an average person could first easily recieve vastly more information in a day than they could ever process. (For an interesting historical sidetrip, look up the 19th century origins of the hypothysised medical condition "neurasthesia," attributed to the prevalance of the telegraph and telephone and how they sped up the pace of life. Even if neurasthesia is a bogus condition, it tells you something about how long information overload has been an issue.) Don't fall victim to an intellectual version of the same "immortality syndrome" that convinces teenagers they can engage in any reckless physical behavior they choose, because they, unlike all the old people, will never die.
It would be impossible to evacate the major cities on the east coast in 10 hours. NYC is probably the worst case scenerio for this: with the exception of The Bronx, the city's boroughs are connected to the mainland by a handful of bridges and tunnels[1].
With the wave heights involved with the Atlantic Collapse scenario, any building lower than six or seven stories is going to be completely underwater for at least 15 to 20 minutes. Even if you assumed that, say, all taller buildings would survive, for NYC alone, out of a population of 8 million, you're only talking about a carrying capacity in the low hundreds of thousands, or high tens of thousands. Many, if not most, of these survivors would then die of starvation or disease.
Then there's the fact that most of the east coast is flat: it's quite some driving before most people would get near a mountain, especially when the rising water is likely to be funnelled up densely populated corridors like the Hudson Valley.
Realistically, to evacuate the East Coast to safe ground, you'd need something on the order of, at least, 10 days, not hours. Even then, I'm not sure it could be done: a single city perhaps, not the entire coast.
[1] A nuclear power plant on Long Island close to NYC was closed in the 1980's when it was concluded that in the event of an accident, rapid safe evacuation of the city was impossible.
The Chinese didn't lease the Soyuz design: at one point they tried to purchase a Soyuz for reverse-engineering purposes, but the only thing the Russians were willing to supply for the price was a capsule stripped of almost all its systems.
While obviously Soyuz inspired, the Chinese design is home grown and features a number of design improvements over the Soyuz: it's larger, and most notably, the orbital module is, unlike the Soyuz OM, capable of independant flight.
There's a good article by James Oberg about it in IEEE Spectrum.
I went to SuperComputing2004 last month in Pittsburgh. Looking around, I was shocked at just how many of the laptops were PowerBooks.
I've seen the same shift in hard core tech circles: at MacHack a couple of years ago, I met a bunch of people clearly new to Macville: initially they'd just been looking for unix based laptop and had problems finding laptops that would play nice with linux and figured they'd get ibooks or powerbooks and just ignore the GUI (but then they got sucked in). More recently, when I visited JPL, OS X machines were definitely becoming the engineers machine of choice. I've also heard this from vendors of numerical software, that their technical user base cares much more about the availability of Mac versions of the software than it used to.
Besides, here on Earth, we already have more than half of the "planet-killers" mapped, and they're not a threat. We should have them completely plotted in the next decade, and if any pose a risk, you can be sure that programs will be put in place to deal with them in time. A gentle nudge, 15 years before expected impact, would be more than enough to cause it to miss us by a huge margin.
Which is all true for asteroids in nice regular, low eccentricity, orbits. But very much not true for a comet barreling in from the Oort cloud. You'd really only have a few years warning: and if it's trajectory put the line of sight from Earth to it in the same part of the sky as the sun, you might only get a few months warning. Even discounting this gloomy scenario, the time frame for asteroid threat warnings is likely to be on the order of decades, while for comets it's more like a year or two: a gentle nudge will not suffice.
I'll bite: an embedded, real-time, mission critical, digital computer built with integrated circuits, used to navigate the CSM and land the LM, dubbed the Apollo Guidance Computer.
If you look at histories of Integrated Circuits, or Computers in general, you'll see that the Apollo Guidance Computer comes up again and again. The AGC is considered to have a made critical contribution to digital technology and laid the groundwork for the very computer you're using to read this.
Why?
1) Bleeding edge technology. While transitorized flight control systems had been used on missiles before, the AGC had two firsts: it was both digital and used integrated circuits, specifically a whole lot of NAND gates. Prior to this, flight computers used discrete components, and were analogue at heart. The AGC also pioneered the computational architectures used to support hard real-time operation, essential if you want to trust a microchip to control a chemical plant, or car brake system.
2) Establishing a market. The AGC's development poured a lot of money into a field that many manafacturers were not exactly clamoring to get into [see point 3]. In the early days, the AGC was responsible for purchasing something like 40% of the global IC output. This helped drive investment into making more complex ICs (early circuits only had a handful of components, and yields were appalling): in other words, the development of the AGC, driven by the demands of the space program's incredibly tight operational requirements, helped kickstart Moore's Law.
3) It made the IC acceptable. Modern techno types, raised on digital technology, forget how much suspicion there was about IC technology initially. One big reason was reliability: with discrete components, every component could be tested individually and operating characteristics established. With ICs, engineers were being asked to swallow little black boxes that they couldn't test in the same ways they had for decades. An entire profession felt threatened. People presenting IC technology were known to face angry crowds of engineers at conferences. When NASA pulled off the Apollo landings using a digital computer, it was the end of this dissent. In fact the AGC proved the general case of digital control technology: previously analogue technology was still seen as the gold standard.
4) Commercialization: The AGC moved the IC from an exotic military component to a civilian technology. In part this was due to providing a large market for IC technology itself, but also because NASA was a civilian agency it allowed the technology to be more easily disseminated. (both because of fewer restrictions on NASA workers and because NASA technology was more palatable than nuclear missile technology)
Good places to read about this are:
http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/vs-mit-apollo-gui da nce.html (which includes one of the excellent History of Computing articles from Dr. Dobbs)
Microchip by Jeffery Zygmont
A History of Modern Computing by Paul E. Cerruzi.
Calculating the money generated and saved by the ubiquity of digital control technology and the IC are left as an exercise to the reader.:)
Slashdot Mirror
wha-? Sorry, that's not a response I can understand in the cultural context of a slashdot dicussion. You make something in head mine broken.
The AGC technology would not have been developed for years, possibly decades, were it not for the Apollo program's extreme specifications, which made all other considerations, such as cost and normal engineering conservativeness, subordinate to the operational requirements. Nuclear missiles could get away with analogue components (close counts in nukes as well as hand grenades), not so spacecraft doing orbital rendezvous. And Earth orbiting spacecraft could have much of the heavy lifting done using mainframes on Earth connected to radar arrays. Not so when you're doing those manouvers on the far side of the moon.
Discounting the fundamental role of space exploration space in the AGC's development and demonstrated operation, is equivalent to saying that the V-2's role as a military weapon (albeit a relatively ineffective one) is irrelevant to its development or the crytopgraphics demands of Bletchly Park and its fellow institutions were irrelevant to the history of computers.
Yes, we can all construct alternative science fiction histories where rockets were developed in leaps and bounds without World War II, where digital computers didn't get their start with military funding for crypto and nuclear bomb simulations, and where ICs became mass market items Just Because, but it didn't actually happen that way. Space travel produced the AGC, which fathered Moore's Law, and that's the answer to the question you asked. Stop moving the goalposts post-hoc.
Now, you're establishing ridiculously narrow criteria for judging the value of the space program: the parent has ruled out all scientific knowledge (so we can't talk about the Genesis Rock brought back by Apollo 15, or the excellent solar observations made on Skylab, or the advances in astronomy due to Hubble, or the contributions of the Mars Rovers), and you've just ruled out spin-offs from technologies developed for the express purpose furthering the space program as well as those technologies themselves (bye bye integrated circuits, farewell satellites).
What you're looking for are things based on the results of pure scientific experiments conducted in space, but neither the science itself, or the technology used to conduct those experiments, is acceptable. Tricky. But not impossible.
There's a smokestack pollution monitor, waste recycling/conversion technology, and a near infrared fire detector, for example. If you want more, there's always Google.
Fine. Here's a cut and paste from the last time I answered this question on /., addressing the IC point:
i da nce.html
:)
***
Name one...
I'll bite: an embedded, real-time, mission critical, digital computer built with integrated circuits, used to navigate the CSM and land the LM, dubbed the Apollo Guidance Computer.
If you look at histories of Integrated Circuits, or Computers in general, you'll see that the Apollo Guidance Computer comes up again and again. The AGC is considered to have a made critical contribution to digital technology and laid the groundwork for the very computer you're using to read this.
Why?
1) Bleeding edge technology. While transitorized flight control systems had been used on missiles before, the AGC had two firsts: it was both digital and used integrated circuits, specifically a whole lot of NAND gates. Prior to this, flight computers used discrete components, and were analogue at heart. The AGC also pioneered the computational architectures used to support hard real-time operation, essential if you want to trust a microchip to control a chemical plant, or car brake system.
2) Establishing a market. The AGC's development poured a lot of money into a field that many manafacturers were not exactly clamoring to get into [see point 3]. In the early days, the AGC was responsible for purchasing something like 40% of the global IC output. This helped drive investment into making more complex ICs (early circuits only had a handful of components, and yields were appalling): in other words, the development of the AGC, driven by the demands of the space program's incredibly tight operational requirements, helped kickstart Moore's Law.
3) It made the IC acceptable. Modern techno types, raised on digital technology, forget how much suspicion there was about IC technology initially. One big reason was reliability: with discrete components, every component could be tested individually and operating characteristics established. With ICs, engineers were being asked to swallow little black boxes that they couldn't test in the same ways they had for decades. An entire profession felt threatened. People presenting IC technology were known to face angry crowds of engineers at conferences. When NASA pulled off the Apollo landings using an IC-based computer, it was the end of this dissent. In fact the AGC proved the general case of digital control technology: previously analogue technology was still seen as the gold standard.
4) Commercialization: The AGC moved the IC from an exotic military component to a civilian technology. In part this was due to providing a large market for IC technology itself, but also because NASA was a civilian agency it allowed the technology to be more easily disseminated. (both because of fewer restrictions on NASA workers and because NASA technology was more palatable than nuclear missile technology)
Good places to read about this are:
http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/vs-mit-apollo-gu
(which includes one of the excellent History of Computing articles from Dr. Dobbs)
Microchip by Jeffery Zygmont
A History of Modern Computing by Paul E. Cerruzi.
Calculating the money generated and saved by the ubiquity of digital control technology and the IC are left as an exercise to the reader.
Are you suggesting the Hubble hasn't advanced basic science? Because it has, in spades: thousands, if not tens of thousands, of peer-reviewed scientific articles reference the Hubble. Other orbiting telescopes have also generated significant and quantifiable advances in science.
While NASA does have budget inflation issues, an "order of magnitude" (1-2 billion going to 10-20 billion) increase is a bit much.
I'd forgotten the size of the spacelab module, nice point.
Quite. :)
But the advantage would be on our end, not theirs. Just as someone can simply say "RTFA!" followed by a one line explanation today, in the future, such eternal questions could be answered with "RTFF!" and a few words, instead of having to compose a complete response every bloody time.
That's become a standing joke, but don't let a quick laugh prevent you from learning the true lesson of that botch up: that management attitutudes can kill missions, and the mantra of cheaper, faster, better cut too deep into the bone: see James Oberg's great article on the subject.
The wheels of the space shuttle would collapse upon touchdown from the weight of the Hubble.
Nope: NASA originally intended to recover the HST and stick it in the Smithsonian, as the parent suggested, see the second to last paragraph in this story, for example.
The retrieval mission was cancelled for various reasons, but collapsing wheels wasn't one of them.
It was never designed to land with cargo still in the hold.
The shuttle has landed with cargo still in the hold numerous times, albeit not anything that massed as much as the HST. Indeed, so called the shuttle's large 'downmass' capability was one of its big sells, and is still something unique to it.
Tito paid twenty million for a ride on a Soyuz. I'm not sure if a Soyuz could even get into the orbit occupied by the HST, but in any case, the Soyuz does not have the capacity (little cargo room, no robot arm, etc) to effect HST repairs.
what good has the space program done for mankind? Anything other than .... knowledge?
/. topics linked to every article, so every time someone posts a question asked and answered ad nausem, we can just point them to it.
*sigh* This question comes up every time space exploration comes up, and everytime it's answered. Really, there should be FAQ's for
Discounting scientific knowledge, we have, briefly and non-comprehensively:
1) Satellite monitoring, navigation and communications technology.
2) Mass produced integrated circuits.
3) Major contributions to the environmental movement.
4) Advanced management techniques.
Much thanks!
OT, but I was thinking of getting a 9800 Pro, as its price has dropped into my sweet spot. How is it? Have you tried Celestia or Doom 3 with it? (These are the two apps I primarily have in mind for it). Any info much appreciated!
The fix in question (rearranging the Cassini-Huyens trajectory geometery at the time of descent to reduce Doppler shift) applied to both channels, since they're both attached to the one probe.
Disclaimer: I edited the IEEE Spectrum article on Smeds' discovery of the fault.
the mini-mac which lacks any sort of expansion slot.
I used to really care about expansion slots. A lot. But one day I realised, thanks to firewire and USB and PMCIA, that it had been years since I'd last bought any peripheral or upgrade, (bar a graphics card), that required me to pop something into an expansion slot. So now I don't care about exapnsion slots. At all.
There are disagreements at the very core of many fields.
Yes, but the reality is that the degree of concordance between scientists in the same field is going be extremely high for most of that's field's established corpus of knowledge (otherwise it would not be established, after all).
(Certainly, there's debate about the Sphinx. But the experts involved in that debate would agree that e.g.
The Sphinx exists. It has an established set of physical dimensions. It is made out such-and-such stone. It was not constructed prior to, say, 1 million BC, or, say, after 1900. It is located in Egypt. It was built by human beings. And so on. And yet, I'm sure if you Googled hard enough, you'd find web pages that disagreed with some or all of those statements. But I'll stick with the experts.)
Of course scientists disgree on many things: that's why they're paid to do research. But they agree on many, many things too. It is something of a problem in basic observer's bias: the most noticable things about science are going to to be the controversial things, while everything else fades into the background. It's exactly this observer's bias that has kept the intelligent design (read: creationism) lobby alive in the U.S. When people see the hue and cry raised the intelligent design lobby they figure something along the lines of "There's no smoke without fire." Debates are sometimes held, which further reinforce the ID's goals, i.e. two ID members face off against two scientists, giving the impresssion that the two sides are evenly matched. But if we were really going to represent the debate properly, there'd be 2 ID people at one podium and 200,000 scientists at the other. To focus on controversies and miss the agreed upon knowledge base is to miss the forest for the trees.
But it is exactly this established background that an encylopedia strives, at least in part, to explain. That all facts are only provisionally true is correct, but that insight permitted by relativism collapses into useless solipsism unless you acknowledge that there are degrees of truth, it is possible for one position to be more true than another, and some positions are so true they deserve to be called facts. To think otherwise is an interesting philisophy, but it runs counter the very notion of the scientific enterprise or even the very idea of an encylopedia in the first place: if nothing is truer than anything else, why bother to put any effort in the Wikipedia at all? Why not just randomly generate the entries?
As for invoking the notion that everyone should simply use their powers of critical thought and synthesize their own answers from a plenitude of sources including examination of learned debate, well, that's not practical in many cases for exactly the same reason that look up tables and gain schedules were invented in computer science. If the underlying premise of the Wikipedia is that I have to evaluate each article's truthfulness individually, well, that's exactly the reliability and credibility gap that Wikipedia's critics are complaining about.
Actually the fact Wikipedia can encompass both wel l is nice
I would say the reliability issues would indicate that this is not, sadly, currently the case. Wikipedia is the bees knees for the zeitgeist, but lacks with regard to established knowledge, especially established knowledge that requires expert understanding to convey accuratly to a broad audience.
You are, of course, correct. I tip my hat to you, sir.
If you happen to think the Encyclopedia Britannica has its head up its backside you can't fix it. Wikipedia you can.
I agree, and this potential is what makes the project interesting.
However, fixing things requires mindshare and timeshare. If everyone who points out the systematic failings in the current Wikipedia is either, at best, ignored as some poor luddite from the depths of the 20th century (when people exchanged knowledge on bits of dead trees, poor fools) or, at worst, shouted down, nothing will get get fixed because the consensus view (at least among the majority of current contributors) that nothing needs to be fixed will never be overturned.
The two most talked about articles lately regarding the Wikipedia are from a) an ex-editor of EB and b) a co-founder of Wikipedia. Both articles were thoughtful essays from experts that addressed and analysed, albeit from different directions, the same underlying problem: Wikipedia has a credibility and a reliability shortfall. I think it's unfair to dismiss this point of view as simply "flaming Wikipedia for innaccuracy."
In particular, given Sanger explicitly discussed the licensing of Wikipedia and how it allowed for a fork, he can hardly be accused of "missing the two most important single points about Wikipedia that no other encyclopedia has."
Alas, just because the licensing can allow Wikipedia to be fixed, doesn't mean that it will, or that, in the interim, Wikipedia deserves a free pass.
if you sat twenty scientists in a room and gave them one article an academic fight would break out with many subjects.
That's a straw man. It's all a matter of degree. Ask twenty physicists about an article regarding some fine point of string theory, you're going to get 20 answers, because string theory's new and shiny and no-one understands it properly and the maths and the empirical evidence are still coming up to speed. But ask them to comment on, say, an article on Maxwell's Laws and you're going to get a high, if not unanimous, degree of concordance.
Absolute nonbias is probably impossible, true. But that still doesn't mean everything is on a level playing field. Between bias and non-bias is a continuum, and even if the limits are asymptotically unreachable, it's neither ridiculous or a fools errand to demand articles from the non-biased end of the spectrum.
Remember UseNet FAQs? An awesome collection of knowledge, also theoretically forkable and open to all, but practically, very pro-expert.
Until the Wikipedia develops a mechanism for promoting expert viewpoint above that of others, it's credibility and reliability problems will remain, and it will never fulfil its potential.
ind it interesting that, at least in the studies I've read about this, that it affects mostly adults, and younger people are largely immune to it.
Hmm, first, which studies?
Secondly, and more to the point, "younger people are largely immune to it" so far. Youth implies a shorter exposure to the hazards of multitasking, not neccesarily a greater inherent resistance to it's ill effects.
In fact, Human Resource departments and therapists are seeing more and more people are burning out in their mid-twenties. Stress releated conditions, such as ulcers, hypertension, etc, normally seen in middle age, are becoming increasingly common in younger and younger individuals.
So you can't state "younger people are largely immune" until you have actually seen them grow older without ill effect, and the early evidence is not on your side.
suppose it's simply that older people, not being used to this mass of information
It's been decades since an average person could first easily recieve vastly more information in a day than they could ever process. (For an interesting historical sidetrip, look up the 19th century origins of the hypothysised medical condition "neurasthesia," attributed to the prevalance of the telegraph and telephone and how they sped up the pace of life. Even if neurasthesia is a bogus condition, it tells you something about how long information overload has been an issue.) Don't fall victim to an intellectual version of the same "immortality syndrome" that convinces teenagers they can engage in any reckless physical behavior they choose, because they, unlike all the old people, will never die.
It would be impossible to evacate the major cities on the east coast in 10 hours. NYC is probably the worst case scenerio for this: with the exception of The Bronx, the city's boroughs are connected to the mainland by a handful of bridges and tunnels[1].
With the wave heights involved with the Atlantic Collapse scenario, any building lower than six or seven stories is going to be completely underwater for at least 15 to 20 minutes. Even if you assumed that, say, all taller buildings would survive, for NYC alone, out of a population of 8 million, you're only talking about a carrying capacity in the low hundreds of thousands, or high tens of thousands. Many, if not most, of these survivors would then die of starvation or disease.
Then there's the fact that most of the east coast is flat: it's quite some driving before most people would get near a mountain, especially when the rising water is likely to be funnelled up densely populated corridors like the Hudson Valley.
Realistically, to evacuate the East Coast to safe ground, you'd need something on the order of, at least, 10 days, not hours. Even then, I'm not sure it could be done: a single city perhaps, not the entire coast.
[1] A nuclear power plant on Long Island close to NYC was closed in the 1980's when it was concluded that in the event of an accident, rapid safe evacuation of the city was impossible.
The Chinese didn't lease the Soyuz design: at one point they tried to purchase a Soyuz for reverse-engineering purposes, but the only thing the Russians were willing to supply for the price was a capsule stripped of almost all its systems.
While obviously Soyuz inspired, the Chinese design is home grown and features a number of design improvements over the Soyuz: it's larger, and most notably, the orbital module is, unlike the Soyuz OM, capable of independant flight.
There's a good article by James Oberg about it in IEEE Spectrum.
I went to SuperComputing2004 last month in Pittsburgh. Looking around, I was shocked at just how many of the laptops were PowerBooks.
I've seen the same shift in hard core tech circles: at MacHack a couple of years ago, I met a bunch of people clearly new to Macville: initially they'd just been looking for unix based laptop and had problems finding laptops that would play nice with linux and figured they'd get ibooks or powerbooks and just ignore the GUI (but then they got sucked in). More recently, when I visited JPL, OS X machines were definitely becoming the engineers machine of choice. I've also heard this from vendors of numerical software, that their technical user base cares much more about the availability of Mac versions of the software than it used to.
Besides, here on Earth, we already have more than half of the "planet-killers" mapped, and they're not a threat. We should have them completely plotted in the next decade, and if any pose a risk, you can be sure that programs will be put in place to deal with them in time. A gentle nudge, 15 years before expected impact, would be more than enough to cause it to miss us by a huge margin.
Which is all true for asteroids in nice regular, low eccentricity, orbits. But very much not true for a comet barreling in from the Oort cloud. You'd really only have a few years warning: and if it's trajectory put the line of sight from Earth to it in the same part of the sky as the sun, you might only get a few months warning. Even discounting this gloomy scenario, the time frame for asteroid threat warnings is likely to be on the order of decades, while for comets it's more like a year or two: a gentle nudge will not suffice.
Name one...
i da nce.html
:)
I'll bite: an embedded, real-time, mission critical, digital computer built with integrated circuits, used to navigate the CSM and land the LM, dubbed the Apollo Guidance Computer.
If you look at histories of Integrated Circuits, or Computers in general, you'll see that the Apollo Guidance Computer comes up again and again. The AGC is considered to have a made critical contribution to digital technology and laid the groundwork for the very computer you're using to read this.
Why?
1) Bleeding edge technology. While transitorized flight control systems had been used on missiles before, the AGC had two firsts: it was both digital and used integrated circuits, specifically a whole lot of NAND gates. Prior to this, flight computers used discrete components, and were analogue at heart. The AGC also pioneered the computational architectures used to support hard real-time operation, essential if you want to trust a microchip to control a chemical plant, or car brake system.
2) Establishing a market. The AGC's development poured a lot of money into a field that many manafacturers were not exactly clamoring to get into [see point 3]. In the early days, the AGC was responsible for purchasing something like 40% of the global IC output. This helped drive investment into making more complex ICs (early circuits only had a handful of components, and yields were appalling): in other words, the development of the AGC, driven by the demands of the space program's incredibly tight operational requirements, helped kickstart Moore's Law.
3) It made the IC acceptable. Modern techno types, raised on digital technology, forget how much suspicion there was about IC technology initially. One big reason was reliability: with discrete components, every component could be tested individually and operating characteristics established. With ICs, engineers were being asked to swallow little black boxes that they couldn't test in the same ways they had for decades. An entire profession felt threatened. People presenting IC technology were known to face angry crowds of engineers at conferences. When NASA pulled off the Apollo landings using a digital computer, it was the end of this dissent. In fact the AGC proved the general case of digital control technology: previously analogue technology was still seen as the gold standard.
4) Commercialization: The AGC moved the IC from an exotic military component to a civilian technology. In part this was due to providing a large market for IC technology itself, but also because NASA was a civilian agency it allowed the technology to be more easily disseminated. (both because of fewer restrictions on NASA workers and because NASA technology was more palatable than nuclear missile technology)
Good places to read about this are:
http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/vs-mit-apollo-gu
(which includes one of the excellent History of Computing articles from Dr. Dobbs)
Microchip by Jeffery Zygmont
A History of Modern Computing by Paul E. Cerruzi.
Calculating the money generated and saved by the ubiquity of digital control technology and the IC are left as an exercise to the reader.