Ah - I started there in '97, back when VFR in an ATR allowed you in and out of EWR on 11/29 with impunity, and made the leap to the other side of the fence just at the end of '05 - I thought I was the only one here on/. - you might remember me, I used to build the lines in EWR from '03 - '05, with those purple surveys. Also liked to demonstrate that an EMB145 can, in fact, land on 11 and turn off on Uniform. Without backtaxiing. >:) - can't do that in a 73, I'm afraid. Drop a note in my v-file sometime - I'd love to hear how successfully you have been combining IT work with aviation, I'm trying to do the same.
Not too frequently - I don't fly the -800 and -900s as often as I like (they are in a higher pay category, so they tend to go fairly senior...), but the most common time we've gone up to FL410 is on the red-eyes back from the west coast. They are usually pretty lightly loaded, and so it's worth it to go up there. On the Carribean turns, which is what I do most of the time, we're usually too heavy to start, and it's a major pain to climb once you are on the Atlantic routes (HF radio + relayed clearances = PITA)... But it also might be that the pilots didn't announce step climbs later in the flight - so you may have been up to FL410 without knowing it! Since 9-11, a sense of humor, or for that matter, any communication from the cockpit beyond the absolute minimum has been... 'discouraged'. You know the signs in airports about not making jokes? That attitude seems to have permeated what used to be a pretty fun industry, at least in the States....
Yes, that occurs quite frequently in my experience in EWR - particularly on the FQM arrival in the evening. Just out of curiosity, whom do you fly for? I work for the folks with the golden meatball on the tail, and been based out of EWR for the last 10 years...
Just curious what you consider "the rest of the crap required in modern life"?
I carry my keys and my wallet. Maybe a pen. No phone, no pda, no laptop. My watch died last year and I haven't replaced it.
Oh, and I do linux kernel development for a living.
I'm an airline pilot - so, perhaps my stuff requirement is a bit higher than most - but, in general:
1 - The cell phone is an absolute necessity; I don't have a landline, as it's overpriced and would be underused. With my schedule shifting around so frequently, and the fact that I rarely am near a desk, it would be impossible to stay in touch without it.
2 - Laptop computer: my schedule is generally communicated to me via a brower-based communications system, schedule changes and requests have to be done through the same. I maintain a few small apps in Python, so I like to work with them on the road. I correspond by e-mail. I like working with my photos. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera - since I'm not home frequently, everything I wish to use a computer for.
3 - Wallet: I've reduced this to a money clip, so it doesn't tend to accumulate stuff
4 - Pen: you might have to write something down every now and then
5 - Notepad: 4 doesn't do much good without this
5 - Book: airlines = lots of waiting around. I don't like getting bored or sucked into watching TV.
6 - Watch: To show up places on time. They get picky about that where I work.
7 - Keys: So I don't have to break into my apartment or car on a regular basis.
8 - Backpack to carry the above.
'...but people familiar with the matter say a PC maker will announce plans to start manufacturing the machine later this year.'
Apple makes PCs, right?
Seriously, the day someone makes a computer about the size and weight of a real notebook will be great. Most of the computer notebooks that are in the comfortable reading range (12" screens plus) are just a little too heavy (3.5 lbs. plus). It doesn't sound like much, but when you carry it around all day, along with the rest of the crap required in modern life, it adds up.
I am not sure what you mean; an A320/319/321 has a higher service ceiling than all but the newest 737-700/800. And the difference between 39K and 41K isn't that big anyway.
Actually, the majority of the 737's flying around the US are the next-gen 737-700s, -800s, and -900s at this point. And the difference between FL390 and FL410 is quite substiantial when you are trying to avoid weather - if you are below the tropopause, most likely you will be caught in the blowoff from the tops and unable to see most wx out there, and so you'll be feeling your way around with radar. A two thousand foot difference can put you in the clear, and make it far easier to avoid them. This is why radar summary charts indicate the height of the tops as well as direction of movement and intensity.
Of course, in the real world, though, the service ceiling is not usually achieveable, particularly with the loads being as heavy as they are - there are not too many empty seats!
In fact, most pilots who have flown both will tell you the A320 is a much smoother ride in rough weather because the fly-by-wire responds so much faster to any unwanted movement than a non-FBW plane that just bounces around and with the auto pilot responding only to longer term deviations. (ie: the auto-pilot is happy as long as the course and altitude are OK, short pitch and roll changes aren't important) Having been a passenger way too many times on both, I have noticed the same.
What you just said contradicts itself - it the FBW a/p responds so much faster to unwanted movement, that will generally generate a much ROUGHER ride, because of the faster accelerations involved in precisely maintaining a course and altitude. Most autopilots have a degree of 'slop' built into them for this reason. The thing the Airbus FBW a/p has that you probably notice is that it's primarily a gee-limited envelope for manuevers vs. being a deviation limited envelope - meaning, the response of the autopilot is first limited by the accelerations that the aircraft would undergo. This tends to lead to a 'smooth' feeling ride, at the cost of allowing substaintial deviations from altitiudes and headings.
But if you're poking around the tops of thunderstorms, hopefully nobody else will be around, right?;)
If these geniuses really want to start suing over their lack of research on how things work, I suggest they go after the folks who make digital cameras and advertise them as 12 megapixels or what have you. In your typical digitial camera, each pixel does NOT record the intensities of three different colors, but only ONE. See this for a more detailed explanation, but in summary, each pixel has either an red, a green, or a blue filter over it, and the camera then 'reconstructs' what a given pixel should see in the other two colors based on what its neighbors see. This is rather a big deal with RAW files - the RAW format actually preserves the fact that each pixel really only sees one color, and allows you the photograhper to make some decisions about how the software blends the information.
The point is, a pixel is NOT used in at least two different fields (camera sensors, and LCD displays) as the ultimate unit of color display, so they are going to have a hard time arging this silliness in court. If you really care about the difference between spatial dithering, temporial dithering, etc., you should have known this before you bought a tool to help you work with it.
Actually, if you stop to think about it, randomness is not silly, nor is it rare - it can be invoked much in the same places that god can be; where the gaps are, in other words. Randomness is the name we assign to phenomena that we do not understand in detail, whether it is truly due to a lack of understanding (as in quantum physics) or due to the exceeding complexity/multiplicitiy of individual phenomena, which we individually understand, totaling up beyond our ability to track. I think it is safe to say it represents the present boundary of our comprehension. So, to imply that people who find randomness disturbing are equivalent to folks 'waiting for the theory of evolution [sic] to be replaced' is a bit unfair - people who find randomness disturbing and systematically go about trying to find patterns in it are called scientists. To acknowledge that there may be phenomena that are always beyond the randomness horizon is a understandable post-quantum physics reaction to Newton's (well, to be fair, Newton's philosopher fan-club) over-ambitious, all encompassing mechanist dream of the Universe - but let's not forget that the job of a scientist is to push back the frontier of randomness as much as possible. Quantum mechanics may be the farthest we can do that, but that's a very weak guess, one that can only be confirmed by trying to do so. Settling for randomness as an ultimate explanation is as satisfying as saying god did it.
You know, I think you have a great Monty Python skit right there - sadly, only/.ers would appreciate it. Where's a mod point for humor when you need one?
I argue the opposite. Faith is a weakness. Faith leads people to accept their conditions and pray that it will get better rather than act. Faith leads people to accept conditions that are unacceptable.
Faith keeps women from leaving abusive husbands because the hope they'll see the light. Faith keeps people from speaking out against the government because they hope their God will intervene. Faith keeps people from enjoying the only life they know they have because they hope that the words in a particular book are true.
Our best quality isn't our ability to blindly accept conditions as they are because they might change, but to recognize the flaws in our condition right now through research and figure out a way to change the stuff we can. In fact, the ability to drastically modify our environment is what makes us a technological species.
Perhaps you're using a different definition of "faith" than I am.
And faith also keeps you going when you rationally should give up hope, or when your rationality is overcome or undercut by powerful emotions. You have faith in rationality. Faith is more akin to an emotion, and rationality to a method of interpreting information. They are not really opposites, any more than rage is the opposite of a trial by jury. We associate them with opposite scenarios, but they are not strict antonyms.
But faith obviously must have survival value, otherwise it would have been weeded out by evolution quite some time ago. Perhaps when the world was a much more risky, unknown, isolated place, having faith allowed our progenitors to survive and succeed when the best, rational course of action in the face of the unknown was to call it a life and expire. Like many of the emotions we have, they were shaped in a very different environment than the typical human finds themselves in today. My personal suspicion is that faith is a highly useful, good thing to have, INDIVIDUALLY. It gives us the courage to try new things that we don't know that we can do, to face disease, death, selfishness, and all the evil in life and try to make the world a better place despite that. OTOH, when it starts becoming a group ritual, it seems to take on many of those negative aspects you mentioned; it tends to enforce existing power structures, allow one to suffer through circumstances rather than change them - to make it acceptable to be a victim, if I may sum up some of what you said.
Faith isn't going anywhere, any more than greed, lust, love, or curiosity are leaving the human condition. Figuring out how to accommodate it in society without it becoming a cancer like the American-style religious right is the challenge.
It was meant to be a play off the usual, "I, for one, welcome our xxx overlords" - and no, I am not an important part of the FOSS community, just appreciative of their efforts.
...am surprised that more FOSS advocates are not sounding the alarm about this one. Forget arguments about availability, backups, etc. - all of those are technical arguments, and time is on the side of those who argue that broadband is becoming ubiquitous, large companies have better backup systems than individuals ever will, etc.; it WILL be technically feasible; if not now, then in a few years. That's not really the problem.
It's ALL about control. For instance, Microsoft would love to make an OS that you rent rather than buy. Moving large portions of the software industry to a rental model is a software shop's wet dream, and Web Apps are a perfect way to introduce and enforce such a model. What happens when they have your data and the (proprietary) applications to read/write/process that data? Do you think the cost of software will go up or down with their increased leverage? "Okay, you don't want to pay anymore for using Enumerate(c)? That's fine, we'll send you your binary data files in a few months or so. Have fun getting the data out of them." You know how just about every EULA under the sun makes it clear that the software has, essentially, no guarantee as to performance? If web apps have the same lack of guarantee, what leverage do you have if you want to switch to a different software provider? It's the best form of lock-in yet devised.
Of course, people will argue that, 'Of course, we'll still keep local backups', or 'Our computers will not be THAT thin of a client'. Sure they will. Until the killer app comes out that there IS no local version of; Google is making tentative steps in that direction. That's the whole point of FOSS, particularly open document standards - so you, as a user of that data, have the leverage to pick and choose a different software provider, or write code yourself, or hire someone to do it from scratch, to access that data. I have little interest in contributing/participating in a software model that reduces the limited control I have today.
The Poincare Conjecture-Proved: The solution of a century-old mathematics problem turns out to be a bittersweet prize
TO MATHEMATICIANS, GRIGORI PERELMAN'S proof of the Poincare conjecture qualifies at least as the Breakthrough of the Decade. But it has taken them a good part of that decade to convince themselves that it was for real. In 2006, nearly 4 years after the Russian mathematician released the first of three papers outlining the proof, researchers finally reached a consensus that Perelman had solved one of the subject's most venerable problems. But the solution touched off a storm of controversy and drama that threatened to overshadow the brilliant work.
Perelman's proof has fundamentally altered two distinct branches of mathematics. First, it solved a problem that for more than a century was the indigestible seed at the core of topology, the mathematical study of abstract shape. Most mathematicians expect that the work will lead to a much broader result, a proof of the geometrization conjecture: essentially, a "periodic table" that brings clarity to the study of three-dimensional spaces, much as Mendeleev's table did for chemistry.
While bringing new results to topology, Perelman's work brought new techniques to geometry. It cemented the central role of geometric evolution equations, powerful machinery for transforming hard-to-work-with spaces into more-manageable ones. Earlier studies of such equations always ran into "singularities" at which the equations break down. Perelman dynamited that roadblock.
"This is the first time that mathematicians have been able to understand the structure of singularities and the development of such a complicated system," said Shing-Tung Yau of Harvard University at a lecture in Beijing this summer. "The methods developed... should shed light on many natural systems, such as the Navier-Stokes equation [of fluid dynamics] and the Einstein equation [of general relativity]."
Unruly spaces
Henri Poincare, who posed his problem in 1904, is generally regarded as the founded of topology, the first mathematician to clearly distinguish it from analysis (the branch of mathematics that evolved from calculus) and geometry. Topology is often described as "rubber-sheet geometry," because it deals with properties of surfaces that can undergo arbitrary amounts of stretching. Tearing and its opposite, sewing, are not allowed.
Our bodies, and most of the familiar objects they interact with, have three dimensions. Their surfaces, however, have only two. As far as topology is concerned, two-dimensional surfaces with no boundary (those that wrap around and close in on themselves, as our skin does) have essentially only one distinguishing feature: the number of holes in the surface. A surface with no holes is a sphere: a surface with one hole is a torus; and so on. A sphere can never be turned into a torus, or vice versa.
Three-dimensional objects with 2D surfaces, however, are just the beginning. For example, it is possible to define curved 3D spaces as boundaries of 4D objects. Human beings can only dimly visualize such spaces, but mathematicians can use symbolic notation to describe them and explore their properties. Poincare developed and ingenious tool called the "fundamental group," for detecting holes, twists, and other feature in spaces of any dimension. He conjectured that a 3D space cannot hide any interesting topology from the fundamental group. That is, a 3D space with a "trivial" fundamental group must be a hypersphere: the boundary of a ball in 4D space.
Although simple to state, Poincare's conjecture proved maddeningly difficult to prove. By the early 1980's, mathematicians had proved analogous statements for spaces of every dimension higher than three - but not for the original one that Poincare had pondered.
To make progress, topologists reached for a tool they had neglected: a way to specify distance. They se
He thinks that academia is littered with people who are more interested in promoting themselves than who are actually good at research, and this leads to a lot more politicing than researching, and the system is set up to promote that. This is the reason he is not interested in claiming prize money or prizes or other official recognition of his worth. I don't necessarily agree with that point of view, but perhaps it is worth considering if he has a legitimate gripe? There is a good article about him in the New Yorker Mag; here is the link and concluding paragraphs:
As for Yau, Perelman said, "I can't say I'm outraged. Other people do worse. Of course, there are many mathematicians who are more or less honest. But almost all of them are conformists. They are more or less honest, but they tolerate those who are not honest."
The prospect of being awarded a Fields Medal had forced him to make a complete break with his profession. "As long as I was not conspicuous, I had a choice," Perelman explained. "Either to make some ugly thing"--a fuss about the math community's lack of integrity--"or, if I didn't do this kind of thing, to be treated as a pet. Now, when I become a very conspicuous person, I cannot stay a pet and say nothing. That is why I had to quit." We asked Perelman whether, by refusing the Fields and withdrawing from his profession, he was eliminating any possibility of influencing the discipline. "I am not a politician!" he replied, angrily. Perelman would not say whether his objection to awards extended to the Clay Institute's million-dollar prize. "I'm not going to decide whether to accept the prize until it is offered," he said.
Mikhail Gromov, the Russian geometer, said that he understood Perelman's logic: "To do great work, you have to have a pure mind. You can think only about the mathematics. Everything else is human weakness. Accepting prizes is showing weakness." Others might view Perelman's refusal to accept a Fields as arrogant, Gromov said, but his principles are admirable. "The ideal scientist does science and cares about nothing else," he said. "He wants to live this ideal. Now, I don't think he really lives on this ideal plane. But he wants to."
The fidelity of simulators nowadays are excellent, especially the common airliners that keep getting cranked out. Knowing the "feel" of the big jets isn't nearly as important these days as learning proper cockpit managment.
And that is EXACTLY what simulators are the worst at doing. Proper cockpit management is impossible to get in a simulator, because something is always going wrong, because that's what you'll be tested on, and that's what you come to expect in a simulator. You go through engine failures RIGHT at v1, single engine approaches with a missed (because the weather mysteriously just got a little worse than the atis right at mins), etc., etc. In real life, you don't have engine failures every day - you have them once a career, if you are unlucky. These aren't the things killing people any more. Misunderstanding a landing clearance, setting up for the wrong approach, dealing with fast moving line of thunderstorms, and doing all this while you are TIRED or distracted or simply not expecting something does. Look up what the last ten commercial transport accidents have been about.
Just a few weeks ago, a 757 landed in EWR on a taxiway parellel to a runway. It vanished from the news quickly because no other airplanes happened to be on that taxiway. If there was, 200+ people would have been smoked, and you would still be hearing about it, along with all sorts of great ideas how to make sure it never happens again - but the crew happened to be lucky that day. There are actually quite a long list of reasons why it occured, which nobody had ever trained for before, because it was a unlikely set of circumstances. The F/O had been in the aircraft less than a year, and it was the Captain's first flight off IOE. Lack of experience in the aircraft, the REAL aircraft, definitely was a contributing factor there. Proper cockpit management is not an easy, programmatic thing, because it's all about trying to allow not only for the unexpected, but for your own, inevitable mistakes. The only way to get experience in making mistakes is to have lots of time to make them, in an environment where you are not expecting to make them. In other words, in day-to-day flying. I think that the fidelity of the simulators doesn't matter much where this kind of experience is concerned.
I don't believe this new rule would say that copilots don't need any flight experience. You'd still need to have a lot of real cockpit time. It's just that right now you need to have a whole lot of cockpit time, and that's prohibitively expensive even in a wealthy country like the USA. Allowing people to trade some of that for simulators may actually be an improvement - while you can learn all the basics in a single engine plane and that should certainly be done, spending more of your hours getting used to the controls and handling characteristics of a jumbo jet in a simulator might actually make for co-pilots who have a more valuable body of experience when they go on their first real commercial flight.
Problem is, the simulators that would have to be used would cost FAR more than renting a single-engine Cessna, and frankly a lot of time would be wasted. Simulators are already used to a very large extent in airline training - what this is proposing is the wholesale replacement of large amounts of actual flight time with much smaller amounts of simulator time - this is to save money, after all.
There are programs now where you can go from 0-time to 'qualified' airline pilot in about 2 years and with 1,500 hours of flight time where every hoop and checkride has been carefully optimized to maximize the passing rate and minimize the cost. These programs have usually been failures, in the sense that the pilots coming out of them have met every technical requirement and yet are terrible in the cockpit, making amateurish mistakes and having very poor judgement. Judgement tends to simply come with time in many different environments and where you are the PIC, with no backup or 'stop motion' button behind you. Let's just view this for what it is - a cost saving measure for airlines who don't want to pay for a qualified pilot - there are lots of unemployed ones in the world.
Oh - as for total cost, it's not much different than what you would pay to go to a good law school or medical school. It's just that most banks have the sense not to lend prospective airline pilots money since only 1 in 10 get to a job position where they would be likely to get the money to pay them back!;)
"You can't feel the wind bouncing you around"
You can't feel it on a big Airbus or Boing either (not at least on a distinguishable manner from that on the simulator).
This is quite untrue - a real wake encounter or a highly variable crosswind is completely different in the real thing than a simulator. Most simulators are limited by physics to a small fraction of a gee of acceleration, and because of the nature of how they are affixed to the ground, they simulate the sensation of yaw very badly.
"You can't feel the resistance in the stick to know that you must trim the aircraft"
You can't feel it on a big Airbus or Boing either, unless using force-feedback in exactly the same manner a simulator would do.
Wrong, at least in the case of a BoEing 737, 757, or 767. They use hydraulic feedback for roll and yaw, and actual control cabling for pitch.
"You can't look around out of the windows and scan for traffic"
You can hardly do it on a big Airbus or Boing either.
Yes, but when you do, it's pretty damned important, and scanning for traffic is a skill than is learned over time, and it's one where simulators simply do not have the visual resolution to accurately simulate it.
"Overall, it just isn't the same"
Overall, "flying" an Airbus 360 simulator is much much (as in orders of magnitud that much) "the real thing" than flying a real Cessna.
Since there is no such thing as an Airbus 360 aircraft, I suspect flying a simulator of one would be somewhat useless. And if the real Cessna you refer to is a Citation X, I'd say you really don't know much about aircraft.
"IMHO the safest way to train a pilot to fly large planes is the tried and true method of having them start on the smaller stuff, and then work their way up a step at a time to flying the big stuff."
I don't think anybody thinks otherwise. Probably hiring the pilot that were through all the process *and* had war-time fighter experience is even better but, you know, not everytime you can get the best you'd ask for. The point is if you can use simulators *more* without critically compromising security and in a more cost-effective fashion.
That's not really true - heavy transport mil flyers are considered to have the most relevant and useful experience. And the majority of time in airline training, most of the flight time is already in a sim. Frequently, the first flight in the actual aircraft a new F/O does is with a planeload of paying customers. But it's been found that the more training done in a sim, the longer the new F/O has to be in the IOE process - flying with a 'special' Captain, who is training them at the same time as they are flying the line. There are limits to what simulators can do. Not surprisingly, this process is being championed by third-world airlines who want to cut costs or don't pay good wages so they can't attract enough qualified applicants. They may not be the most impartial judges of what is safe and what is not.
...but all they'll be doing in the long run is teach other navies' that don't wish to be spied on to take out any fish that happens to wander too close - or better yet, just preemptively take out all large sealife so as not to interfere with our wargames. Animal rights activists will love that one.
OTOH, we might have a new way of tracking enemy submarines - look for the trail of dead fish floating on the surface...
(jerk is a derivative of acceleration, in turn a derivative of velocity, thence a
derivative of position)
It's been a few years since my physics days, but I'm pretty sure velocity is a derivative of acceleration, and position is a derivative of velocity.
Yep, it has been a few years since your physics days... or perhaps math days. The derivative of a function is a new function that (speaking like a physicist rather than a mathematician) expresses the instantaneous rate of change of the original function. Since average velocity = change in position/change in time, if you express position as a function x(t), you find the average velocity over an infintesimal time gap is the definition of a derivative:
Average v = x(t1)-x(t2)/(t1-t2) [i.e. the average velocity of an object between times t1 and t2 is the difference in position at those times, divided by gap in those times]
[Apply lim t1 - t2 -> 0]
Instantaneous v = lim t1 - t2 -> 0 of x(t1)-x(t2)/(t1-t2)
call t1 - t2 the traditionally labeled 'h'; now t1 = t2 + h
v = h -> 0 of x(t2+h) - x(t2)/h
replace t2 with just t and x with the more traditional letter for functions f, and...
v = lim h -> 0 of f(t + h) - f(t)/h
... which is the definition of the derivative of a function f at t. Essentially, the original inspiration for the derivative was resolving the problem of what instantaneous velocity meant - it took about 200 years before the precise definition of a derivative (along with the precise epsilon-delta definion of limits) as above was actually spelled out.
Perhaps you were thinking of the anti-derivatve function family....
For some reason, mathematicians don't spend much time dealing with these gross inadequacies (although let a physicist come up with some new descriptive language and they'll take an interest, as Dirac learned.) They may feel it isn't fruitful, or there may simply be no approach that isn't obviously, trivially, wrong. Or fruitful approaches may require major fixes to other parts of math, as the current one appears to do. But in any case it is a worthy goal, and I don't think this guy deserves quite the rough ride he is getting here.
Actually, they have - look up Hamilton's invention of quaternions, or the axiomatic basis of hyperreals. The problem with all of these alternative axiomatic foundations for number theory is that they trade-off one 'problem' for another. This appears to be another trade-off that eliminates undefined basic operations in exchange for functions possibly being discontinuous at infinity despite being continuous everywhere else, which plays hell with analysis of functions then. The generally accepted axioms for the reals and complex numbers is a compromise, but it seems to be the best one to date at yielding a useful number system that allows algebra and analysis without too much fuss, but at the cost of definite 'gotchas' scattered throughout.
...to chase away idiot teachers like this one. And they wonder why science scores are declining in England?
"Stowe School, the Buckinghamshire public school, also removed part of its wireless network after a teacher became ill. Michael Bevington, a classics teacher for 28 years at the school, said that he had such a violent reaction to the network that he was too ill to teach.
"I felt a steadily widening range of unpleasant effects whenever I was in the classroom," he said. "First came a thick headache, then pains throughout the body, sudden flushes, pressure behind the eyes, sudden skin pains and burning sensations, along with bouts of nausea. Over the weekend, away from the classroom, I felt completely normal.""
Thanks for the info - I never knew that Nikon made lenses with f/1.2, I had only seen 1.4's. The only two manufacturers than I know that have made f/1.0 lenses are Canon and Lecia - I like doing low/nautral light photography without a flash, and the extra stop makes a big difference; but it is so optically demanding to make a f/1.0 lens (and ISO 3200 is becoming quite usable) that nobody does any more. Cheers,
Is it a Nikkor, or another brand? As you might have guessed, I've been using Canon for a loooong time (my dad never quite got over it!), but I always paid some attention to Nikon, and I never recall seeing a Nikkor prime with a wider aperture than f/1.4 - could you give me a link or more info if I'm wrong? Thanks - I always like to learn more about what's out there.
"I spent $1200 on a 1.2 60mm prime. I have a giant blob of glass that weighs more than the camera."
"Wow, are you full of shit. N=f/D. f here is 60mm, so your f/1.2 lens would have an aperture of (shudder) 50 whole millimeters.
There's no reason an aperture of 50mm would necessitate a "giant blob of glass that weighs more than the camera." None. The f/1.8 50mm Nikon and the f/1.4 50mm Nikon are both excellent lenses. They're sharp across the entire aperture range, and very distortion-free. The 1.4 has the tiniest bit of barrel wide open, but it also has better bokeh than the 1.8 because it has more diaphragm blades.
$1200 on a 1.2 60mm? You're doing nothing here but showing off the size of your epeen. There's not even a 60mm prime out there that resembles a "giant blob of glass that weighs more than the camera." Telephotos will do that when you start getting down under f/3, but a 60mm prime? No fucking way."
You know, you are a bit obnoxious for someone who is wrong.
Let me introduce you to an old, discontinued lens: the Canon 50mm f/1.0; Weight: 985 g. That's over 2 pounds. That's a heavy lens. That's a giant blob of glass. As you so cleverly remembered, N=f/D, so the aperture of this lens would be the same 50 mm as you made a big fuss about above, yet it is a giant blob of massive glass. Since the target of the lens is not a mathematical point but a plane of significant area, as you increase the size of the aperture, you get increasingly non-linear effects the further away from the optical center you get, and this has to be compensated for by either more aspherical lens elements (expensive), more total elements (heavy, requiring more supporting metal to keep any flexing from occuring), or both. In addition, the weight of an individual lens tends to increase with the cube of it's diameter, so an increase from your 50 mm f/1.4 to his 60mm f/1.2 lens would be:
50/1.4 = 35.7 mm to 60/1.2 = 50.0 mm, 50/35.7 = a 40 % increase, which cubed gives you a x 2.7 increase in weight of the lens elements, all other factors remaining constant. That sounds pretty close.
And if you don't believe me, Canon just introduced a 50mm f/1.2 lens a week ago. Weight: 545 g. That's 1.2 pounds. That's still a heavy lens. 72 mm filter diameter. That's a fat lens. Canon 85 mm f/1.2. Weight: 1025 g. Filter diameter = 77 mm. You definitely notice the difference. The Canon 50 mm f/1.4 only weighs 290 g, and the f/1.8 variant only weighs 130 g (although that's because it has a plastic body as well).
From your other posts, you seem to be a Nikon man, which would explain why you don't know about lenses with f-stops wider than 1.4. I don't know of any 60mm f/1.2 prime lenses made either, but let the guy be happy - he sounds less full of shit than you just did.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah - I started there in '97, back when VFR in an ATR allowed you in and out of EWR on 11/29 with impunity, and made the leap to the other side of the fence just at the end of '05 - I thought I was the only one here on /. - you might remember me, I used to build the lines in EWR from '03 - '05, with those purple surveys. Also liked to demonstrate that an EMB145 can, in fact, land on 11 and turn off on Uniform. Without backtaxiing. >:) - can't do that in a 73, I'm afraid. Drop a note in my v-file sometime - I'd love to hear how successfully you have been combining IT work with aviation, I'm trying to do the same.
Cheers,
Not too frequently - I don't fly the -800 and -900s as often as I like (they are in a higher pay category, so they tend to go fairly senior...), but the most common time we've gone up to FL410 is on the red-eyes back from the west coast. They are usually pretty lightly loaded, and so it's worth it to go up there. On the Carribean turns, which is what I do most of the time, we're usually too heavy to start, and it's a major pain to climb once you are on the Atlantic routes (HF radio + relayed clearances = PITA)... But it also might be that the pilots didn't announce step climbs later in the flight - so you may have been up to FL410 without knowing it! Since 9-11, a sense of humor, or for that matter, any communication from the cockpit beyond the absolute minimum has been... 'discouraged'. You know the signs in airports about not making jokes? That attitude seems to have permeated what used to be a pretty fun industry, at least in the States....
Cheers,
Yes, that occurs quite frequently in my experience in EWR - particularly on the FQM arrival in the evening. Just out of curiosity, whom do you fly for? I work for the folks with the golden meatball on the tail, and been based out of EWR for the last 10 years...
I'm an airline pilot - so, perhaps my stuff requirement is a bit higher than most - but, in general:
1 - The cell phone is an absolute necessity; I don't have a landline, as it's overpriced and would be underused. With my schedule shifting around so frequently, and the fact that I rarely am near a desk, it would be impossible to stay in touch without it.
2 - Laptop computer: my schedule is generally communicated to me via a brower-based communications system, schedule changes and requests have to be done through the same. I maintain a few small apps in Python, so I like to work with them on the road. I correspond by e-mail. I like working with my photos. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera - since I'm not home frequently, everything I wish to use a computer for.
3 - Wallet: I've reduced this to a money clip, so it doesn't tend to accumulate stuff
4 - Pen: you might have to write something down every now and then
5 - Notepad: 4 doesn't do much good without this
5 - Book: airlines = lots of waiting around. I don't like getting bored or sucked into watching TV.
6 - Watch: To show up places on time. They get picky about that where I work.
7 - Keys: So I don't have to break into my apartment or car on a regular basis.
8 - Backpack to carry the above.
And this is when I am NOT going to work.
'...but people familiar with the matter say a PC maker will announce plans to start manufacturing the machine later this year.'
Apple makes PCs, right?
Seriously, the day someone makes a computer about the size and weight of a real notebook will be great. Most of the computer notebooks that are in the comfortable reading range (12" screens plus) are just a little too heavy (3.5 lbs. plus). It doesn't sound like much, but when you carry it around all day, along with the rest of the crap required in modern life, it adds up.
Actually, the majority of the 737's flying around the US are the next-gen 737-700s, -800s, and -900s at this point. And the difference between FL390 and FL410 is quite substiantial when you are trying to avoid weather - if you are below the tropopause, most likely you will be caught in the blowoff from the tops and unable to see most wx out there, and so you'll be feeling your way around with radar. A two thousand foot difference can put you in the clear, and make it far easier to avoid them. This is why radar summary charts indicate the height of the tops as well as direction of movement and intensity.
Of course, in the real world, though, the service ceiling is not usually achieveable, particularly with the loads being as heavy as they are - there are not too many empty seats!
What you just said contradicts itself - it the FBW a/p responds so much faster to unwanted movement, that will generally generate a much ROUGHER ride, because of the faster accelerations involved in precisely maintaining a course and altitude. Most autopilots have a degree of 'slop' built into them for this reason. The thing the Airbus FBW a/p has that you probably notice is that it's primarily a gee-limited envelope for manuevers vs. being a deviation limited envelope - meaning, the response of the autopilot is first limited by the accelerations that the aircraft would undergo. This tends to lead to a 'smooth' feeling ride, at the cost of allowing substaintial deviations from altitiudes and headings.
But if you're poking around the tops of thunderstorms, hopefully nobody else will be around, right? ;)
The point is, a pixel is NOT used in at least two different fields (camera sensors, and LCD displays) as the ultimate unit of color display, so they are going to have a hard time arging this silliness in court. If you really care about the difference between spatial dithering, temporial dithering, etc., you should have known this before you bought a tool to help you work with it.
Actually, if you stop to think about it, randomness is not silly, nor is it rare - it can be invoked much in the same places that god can be; where the gaps are, in other words. Randomness is the name we assign to phenomena that we do not understand in detail, whether it is truly due to a lack of understanding (as in quantum physics) or due to the exceeding complexity/multiplicitiy of individual phenomena, which we individually understand, totaling up beyond our ability to track. I think it is safe to say it represents the present boundary of our comprehension. So, to imply that people who find randomness disturbing are equivalent to folks 'waiting for the theory of evolution [sic] to be replaced' is a bit unfair - people who find randomness disturbing and systematically go about trying to find patterns in it are called scientists. To acknowledge that there may be phenomena that are always beyond the randomness horizon is a understandable post-quantum physics reaction to Newton's (well, to be fair, Newton's philosopher fan-club) over-ambitious, all encompassing mechanist dream of the Universe - but let's not forget that the job of a scientist is to push back the frontier of randomness as much as possible. Quantum mechanics may be the farthest we can do that, but that's a very weak guess, one that can only be confirmed by trying to do so. Settling for randomness as an ultimate explanation is as satisfying as saying god did it.
You know, I think you have a great Monty Python skit right there - sadly, only /.ers would appreciate it. Where's a mod point for humor when you need one?
Nicely done!
And faith also keeps you going when you rationally should give up hope, or when your rationality is overcome or undercut by powerful emotions. You have faith in rationality. Faith is more akin to an emotion, and rationality to a method of interpreting information. They are not really opposites, any more than rage is the opposite of a trial by jury. We associate them with opposite scenarios, but they are not strict antonyms.
But faith obviously must have survival value, otherwise it would have been weeded out by evolution quite some time ago. Perhaps when the world was a much more risky, unknown, isolated place, having faith allowed our progenitors to survive and succeed when the best, rational course of action in the face of the unknown was to call it a life and expire. Like many of the emotions we have, they were shaped in a very different environment than the typical human finds themselves in today. My personal suspicion is that faith is a highly useful, good thing to have, INDIVIDUALLY. It gives us the courage to try new things that we don't know that we can do, to face disease, death, selfishness, and all the evil in life and try to make the world a better place despite that. OTOH, when it starts becoming a group ritual, it seems to take on many of those negative aspects you mentioned; it tends to enforce existing power structures, allow one to suffer through circumstances rather than change them - to make it acceptable to be a victim, if I may sum up some of what you said.
Faith isn't going anywhere, any more than greed, lust, love, or curiosity are leaving the human condition. Figuring out how to accommodate it in society without it becoming a cancer like the American-style religious right is the challenge.
It was meant to be a play off the usual, "I, for one, welcome our xxx overlords" - and no, I am not an important part of the FOSS community, just appreciative of their efforts.
It's ALL about control. For instance, Microsoft would love to make an OS that you rent rather than buy. Moving large portions of the software industry to a rental model is a software shop's wet dream, and Web Apps are a perfect way to introduce and enforce such a model. What happens when they have your data and the (proprietary) applications to read/write/process that data? Do you think the cost of software will go up or down with their increased leverage? "Okay, you don't want to pay anymore for using Enumerate(c)? That's fine, we'll send you your binary data files in a few months or so. Have fun getting the data out of them." You know how just about every EULA under the sun makes it clear that the software has, essentially, no guarantee as to performance? If web apps have the same lack of guarantee, what leverage do you have if you want to switch to a different software provider? It's the best form of lock-in yet devised.
Of course, people will argue that, 'Of course, we'll still keep local backups', or 'Our computers will not be THAT thin of a client'. Sure they will. Until the killer app comes out that there IS no local version of; Google is making tentative steps in that direction. That's the whole point of FOSS, particularly open document standards - so you, as a user of that data, have the leverage to pick and choose a different software provider, or write code yourself, or hire someone to do it from scratch, to access that data. I have little interest in contributing/participating in a software model that reduces the limited control I have today.
TO MATHEMATICIANS, GRIGORI PERELMAN'S proof of the Poincare conjecture qualifies at least as the Breakthrough of the Decade. But it has taken them a good part of that decade to convince themselves that it was for real. In 2006, nearly 4 years after the Russian mathematician released the first of three papers outlining the proof, researchers finally reached a consensus that Perelman had solved one of the subject's most venerable problems. But the solution touched off a storm of controversy and drama that threatened to overshadow the brilliant work.
Perelman's proof has fundamentally altered two distinct branches of mathematics. First, it solved a problem that for more than a century was the indigestible seed at the core of topology, the mathematical study of abstract shape. Most mathematicians expect that the work will lead to a much broader result, a proof of the geometrization conjecture: essentially, a "periodic table" that brings clarity to the study of three-dimensional spaces, much as Mendeleev's table did for chemistry.
While bringing new results to topology, Perelman's work brought new techniques to geometry. It cemented the central role of geometric evolution equations, powerful machinery for transforming hard-to-work-with spaces into more-manageable ones. Earlier studies of such equations always ran into "singularities" at which the equations break down. Perelman dynamited that roadblock.
"This is the first time that mathematicians have been able to understand the structure of singularities and the development of such a complicated system," said Shing-Tung Yau of Harvard University at a lecture in Beijing this summer. "The methods developed ... should shed light on many natural systems, such as the Navier-Stokes equation [of fluid dynamics] and the Einstein equation [of general relativity]."
Unruly spaces
Henri Poincare, who posed his problem in 1904, is generally regarded as the founded of topology, the first mathematician to clearly distinguish it from analysis (the branch of mathematics that evolved from calculus) and geometry. Topology is often described as "rubber-sheet geometry," because it deals with properties of surfaces that can undergo arbitrary amounts of stretching. Tearing and its opposite, sewing, are not allowed.
Our bodies, and most of the familiar objects they interact with, have three dimensions. Their surfaces, however, have only two. As far as topology is concerned, two-dimensional surfaces with no boundary (those that wrap around and close in on themselves, as our skin does) have essentially only one distinguishing feature: the number of holes in the surface. A surface with no holes is a sphere: a surface with one hole is a torus; and so on. A sphere can never be turned into a torus, or vice versa.
Three-dimensional objects with 2D surfaces, however, are just the beginning. For example, it is possible to define curved 3D spaces as boundaries of 4D objects. Human beings can only dimly visualize such spaces, but mathematicians can use symbolic notation to describe them and explore their properties. Poincare developed and ingenious tool called the "fundamental group," for detecting holes, twists, and other feature in spaces of any dimension. He conjectured that a 3D space cannot hide any interesting topology from the fundamental group. That is, a 3D space with a "trivial" fundamental group must be a hypersphere: the boundary of a ball in 4D space.
Although simple to state, Poincare's conjecture proved maddeningly difficult to prove. By the early 1980's, mathematicians had proved analogous statements for spaces of every dimension higher than three - but not for the original one that Poincare had pondered.
To make progress, topologists reached for a tool they had neglected: a way to specify distance. They se
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060 828fa_fact2
And that is EXACTLY what simulators are the worst at doing. Proper cockpit management is impossible to get in a simulator, because something is always going wrong, because that's what you'll be tested on, and that's what you come to expect in a simulator. You go through engine failures RIGHT at v1, single engine approaches with a missed (because the weather mysteriously just got a little worse than the atis right at mins), etc., etc. In real life, you don't have engine failures every day - you have them once a career, if you are unlucky. These aren't the things killing people any more. Misunderstanding a landing clearance, setting up for the wrong approach, dealing with fast moving line of thunderstorms, and doing all this while you are TIRED or distracted or simply not expecting something does. Look up what the last ten commercial transport accidents have been about.
Just a few weeks ago, a 757 landed in EWR on a taxiway parellel to a runway. It vanished from the news quickly because no other airplanes happened to be on that taxiway. If there was, 200+ people would have been smoked, and you would still be hearing about it, along with all sorts of great ideas how to make sure it never happens again - but the crew happened to be lucky that day. There are actually quite a long list of reasons why it occured, which nobody had ever trained for before, because it was a unlikely set of circumstances. The F/O had been in the aircraft less than a year, and it was the Captain's first flight off IOE. Lack of experience in the aircraft, the REAL aircraft, definitely was a contributing factor there. Proper cockpit management is not an easy, programmatic thing, because it's all about trying to allow not only for the unexpected, but for your own, inevitable mistakes. The only way to get experience in making mistakes is to have lots of time to make them, in an environment where you are not expecting to make them. In other words, in day-to-day flying. I think that the fidelity of the simulators doesn't matter much where this kind of experience is concerned.
Problem is, the simulators that would have to be used would cost FAR more than renting a single-engine Cessna, and frankly a lot of time would be wasted. Simulators are already used to a very large extent in airline training - what this is proposing is the wholesale replacement of large amounts of actual flight time with much smaller amounts of simulator time - this is to save money, after all.
There are programs now where you can go from 0-time to 'qualified' airline pilot in about 2 years and with 1,500 hours of flight time where every hoop and checkride has been carefully optimized to maximize the passing rate and minimize the cost. These programs have usually been failures, in the sense that the pilots coming out of them have met every technical requirement and yet are terrible in the cockpit, making amateurish mistakes and having very poor judgement. Judgement tends to simply come with time in many different environments and where you are the PIC, with no backup or 'stop motion' button behind you. Let's just view this for what it is - a cost saving measure for airlines who don't want to pay for a qualified pilot - there are lots of unemployed ones in the world.
Oh - as for total cost, it's not much different than what you would pay to go to a good law school or medical school. It's just that most banks have the sense not to lend prospective airline pilots money since only 1 in 10 get to a job position where they would be likely to get the money to pay them back! ;)
This is quite untrue - a real wake encounter or a highly variable crosswind is completely different in the real thing than a simulator. Most simulators are limited by physics to a small fraction of a gee of acceleration, and because of the nature of how they are affixed to the ground, they simulate the sensation of yaw very badly.
Wrong, at least in the case of a BoEing 737, 757, or 767. They use hydraulic feedback for roll and yaw, and actual control cabling for pitch.Yes, but when you do, it's pretty damned important, and scanning for traffic is a skill than is learned over time, and it's one where simulators simply do not have the visual resolution to accurately simulate it.
Since there is no such thing as an Airbus 360 aircraft, I suspect flying a simulator of one would be somewhat useless. And if the real Cessna you refer to is a Citation X, I'd say you really don't know much about aircraft.
That's not really true - heavy transport mil flyers are considered to have the most relevant and useful experience. And the majority of time in airline training, most of the flight time is already in a sim. Frequently, the first flight in the actual aircraft a new F/O does is with a planeload of paying customers. But it's been found that the more training done in a sim, the longer the new F/O has to be in the IOE process - flying with a 'special' Captain, who is training them at the same time as they are flying the line. There are limits to what simulators can do. Not surprisingly, this process is being championed by third-world airlines who want to cut costs or don't pay good wages so they can't attract enough qualified applicants. They may not be the most impartial judges of what is safe and what is not.
OTOH, we might have a new way of tracking enemy submarines - look for the trail of dead fish floating on the surface...
Yep, it has been a few years since your physics days... or perhaps math days. The derivative of a function is a new function that (speaking like a physicist rather than a mathematician) expresses the instantaneous rate of change of the original function. Since average velocity = change in position/change in time, if you express position as a function x(t), you find the average velocity over an infintesimal time gap is the definition of a derivative:
Average v = x(t1)-x(t2)/(t1-t2) [i.e. the average velocity of an object between times t1 and t2 is the difference in position at those times, divided by gap in those times]
[Apply lim t1 - t2 -> 0]
Instantaneous v = lim t1 - t2 -> 0 of x(t1)-x(t2)/(t1-t2)
call t1 - t2 the traditionally labeled 'h'; now t1 = t2 + h
v = h -> 0 of x(t2+h) - x(t2)/h
replace t2 with just t and x with the more traditional letter for functions f, and...
v = lim h -> 0 of f(t + h) - f(t)/h
Perhaps you were thinking of the anti-derivatve function family....
Actually, they have - look up Hamilton's invention of quaternions, or the axiomatic basis of hyperreals. The problem with all of these alternative axiomatic foundations for number theory is that they trade-off one 'problem' for another. This appears to be another trade-off that eliminates undefined basic operations in exchange for functions possibly being discontinuous at infinity despite being continuous everywhere else, which plays hell with analysis of functions then. The generally accepted axioms for the reals and complex numbers is a compromise, but it seems to be the best one to date at yielding a useful number system that allows algebra and analysis without too much fuss, but at the cost of definite 'gotchas' scattered throughout.
...to chase away idiot teachers like this one. And they wonder why science scores are declining in England?
"Stowe School, the Buckinghamshire public school, also removed part of its wireless network after a teacher became ill. Michael Bevington, a classics teacher for 28 years at the school, said that he had such a violent reaction to the network that he was too ill to teach.
"I felt a steadily widening range of unpleasant effects whenever I was in the classroom," he said. "First came a thick headache, then pains throughout the body, sudden flushes, pressure behind the eyes, sudden skin pains and burning sensations, along with bouts of nausea. Over the weekend, away from the classroom, I felt completely normal.""
Thanks for the info - I never knew that Nikon made lenses with f/1.2, I had only seen 1.4's. The only two manufacturers than I know that have made f/1.0 lenses are Canon and Lecia - I like doing low/nautral light photography without a flash, and the extra stop makes a big difference; but it is so optically demanding to make a f/1.0 lens (and ISO 3200 is becoming quite usable) that nobody does any more. Cheers,
Is it a Nikkor, or another brand? As you might have guessed, I've been using Canon for a loooong time (my dad never quite got over it!), but I always paid some attention to Nikon, and I never recall seeing a Nikkor prime with a wider aperture than f/1.4 - could you give me a link or more info if I'm wrong? Thanks - I always like to learn more about what's out there.
"I spent $1200 on a 1.2 60mm prime. I have a giant blob of glass that weighs more than the camera."
"Wow, are you full of shit. N=f/D. f here is 60mm, so your f/1.2 lens would have an aperture of (shudder) 50 whole millimeters.
There's no reason an aperture of 50mm would necessitate a "giant blob of glass that weighs more than the camera." None. The f/1.8 50mm Nikon and the f/1.4 50mm Nikon are both excellent lenses. They're sharp across the entire aperture range, and very distortion-free. The 1.4 has the tiniest bit of barrel wide open, but it also has better bokeh than the 1.8 because it has more diaphragm blades.
$1200 on a 1.2 60mm? You're doing nothing here but showing off the size of your epeen. There's not even a 60mm prime out there that resembles a "giant blob of glass that weighs more than the camera." Telephotos will do that when you start getting down under f/3, but a 60mm prime? No fucking way."
You know, you are a bit obnoxious for someone who is wrong.
Let me introduce you to an old, discontinued lens: the Canon 50mm f/1.0; Weight: 985 g. That's over 2 pounds. That's a heavy lens. That's a giant blob of glass. As you so cleverly remembered, N=f/D, so the aperture of this lens would be the same 50 mm as you made a big fuss about above, yet it is a giant blob of massive glass. Since the target of the lens is not a mathematical point but a plane of significant area, as you increase the size of the aperture, you get increasingly non-linear effects the further away from the optical center you get, and this has to be compensated for by either more aspherical lens elements (expensive), more total elements (heavy, requiring more supporting metal to keep any flexing from occuring), or both. In addition, the weight of an individual lens tends to increase with the cube of it's diameter, so an increase from your 50 mm f/1.4 to his 60mm f/1.2 lens would be:
50/1.4 = 35.7 mm to 60/1.2 = 50.0 mm, 50/35.7 = a 40 % increase, which cubed gives you a x 2.7 increase in weight of the lens elements, all other factors remaining constant. That sounds pretty close.
And if you don't believe me, Canon just introduced a 50mm f/1.2 lens a week ago. Weight: 545 g. That's 1.2 pounds. That's still a heavy lens. 72 mm filter diameter. That's a fat lens. Canon 85 mm f/1.2. Weight: 1025 g. Filter diameter = 77 mm. You definitely notice the difference. The Canon 50 mm f/1.4 only weighs 290 g, and the f/1.8 variant only weighs 130 g (although that's because it has a plastic body as well).
From your other posts, you seem to be a Nikon man, which would explain why you don't know about lenses with f-stops wider than 1.4. I don't know of any 60mm f/1.2 prime lenses made either, but let the guy be happy - he sounds less full of shit than you just did.
Anyone who says that they don't understand why people find science beautiful need to be directed to this photo for a clue.