This bullshit urban legend about the "low" infant mortality rate in the US has got to stop.
The reason the infant "mortality" rate in the US is low is because the US is one of the very few countries that tries to save the life of severely premature babies and babies with severe birth defects. Not surprisingly, quite a lot of these sad cases die, up to 80% in the case of severely premature babies. By contrast, most other countries don't even try to save those infants, and simply record them as late miscarriages or stillbirths. Since they're never "born" they can't "die," so they don't count in infant mortality statistics. Hey presto! A lower infant mortality rate than the US! Congratulatory headlines in any random self-hating US media outlet...
Here's a related fun fact: university hospitals often have higher death rates than community hospitals for grave disease, e.g. heart attacks, strokes. Is this because they're less competent? Some strange corruption where the richer and more prestigious hospital is screwing up because of its callous disregard for humanity, i.e. the kind of "logic" used to criticize the US infant mortality rate? Nope. It's just because the most serious cases prefer to go to university hospitals, or get transferred there from community hospitals, and because university hospitals often admit people for experimental therapies that usually don't work, whereas less sophisticated hospitals just send folks to hospice or home to die.
Whenever you compare statistics, it really needs to be apples to apples, and when the statistic is so politically-charged as a quality of life versus type of government measurement, you really need to ask some hard and detailed questions about the methodology. It's amazingly easy to lie with statistics.
I've dabbled in object segmentation and recognition, and it's a bitch unless you cheat, e.g. by restricting yourself to pre-assigned objects, making sure your objects are always in high-contrast good-lighting conditions, or accepting lots of false negatives or positives. So I'm kind of doubting it will replace the ol' eye-brain recognition system.
That said, I can see some useful related applications. Imagine a helicopter pilot doing search and rescue work. He sees something worth checking out -- say a tiny smoke plume -- and says "bingo." That's picked up by a computer, which is also monitoring his goggles, so it knows in what direction he's looking, and has done some very basic image analysis so it knows to ignore the canopy struts, Sun, shadows et cetera in the field of view. It then combines this with a GPS locator beacon and a good topo map, and instantly computes and records the exact location (latitude and longitude) of the sight of interest. Could save some lives.
Or imagine an emergency worker on the ground during a big fire. He sees a worrying flare-up. Wearing the goggles, he can just say "Looks like trouble over there!" and the goggles, plus associated GPS device and computer, can instantly transmit to headquarters precisely where there is, even if the guy observing doesn't know himself.
Give me a break. I suggest the European Parliament is about as truly influential in international trade affairs as would be any random twelvepack of supercaffeinated intense humorless baristas from the local java shop.
To the extent there is any actual organized power in international trade relationships -- I mean, power other than that collectively wielded in an unorganized, ad hoc way by various bilateral agreements between concerned nations -- it resides in the G8.
Just because people call themselves an important international body and stand around debating resolutions with long faces doesn't mean they have any actual influence. Indeed, the more they pontificate and grandstand the less actual power they have.
In a future in which there is some vast civilization among the asteroids, yes. But I think certainly within my lifetime, and that of my children, it will be far cheaper to bring along a little diamond dust than the tools, equipment, and fuel necessary to do a little mining along with whatever else you're doing.
It's not clear to me that diamond is all that useful, anyway. The best use of it I can imagine is for super high quality windows for optical, UV and IR instruments. But for that you need very pure diamond in nice shapes, which is probably much easier to make -- even in space -- by CVD deposition starting from a lump of graphite.
So more than one allotrope of one of the most common elements in the Universe, carbon, is present in interplanetary and interstellar space.
Well, duh. It would be shocking if there weren't any carbon in the form of diamond out there. That fact would take some serious explaining.
And, er, so what? Obviously no one will ever mine diamonds in outer space, inasmuch as the cost to transport miners to them and the mined diamonds back utterly dwarfs the value of the diamonds, or even the cost to manufacture them. Nor can I think of any interesting astrophysical theories that would be disproved by any particular interplanetary distribution of carbon allotropes.
One of the least interesting stories I've seen on/. in a while.
Well, yes, that would be true. But there are plenty of cases where I do understand the mechanism and it sure looks like it was "designed" (if it was) by an idiot, or someone with a weird sense of humor.
The prototypical example is the vertebrate eye. In our eyes, the entire optical sensor system faces backward, towards the inside of our head. Blood and nerves connect to the retina from the front, passing right across the face of this light-gathering instrument. It's kind of like having a CCD device in a telescope and running the cables that connect to the sensor in front of the CCD device. Seems kind of silly, no?
There are counter-arguments about why this is really actually brilliant, but they seem to me rather ad hockish and full of special pleading. Not very convincing.
I'm agnostic on the existence of a Designer, precisely because the evidence we have is all of this ambiguous, unconvincing type. Sure, it could be so brilliant I don't recognize its brilliance. But to believe that takes an act of faith, not reason.
Yeah. I don't find it creditable because decoys only work when bullets are more expensive than decoys. In this case viral particles are so "cheap" that I think they would overwhelm any such defensive mechanism.
I believe it is generally thought plausible, however, that the typical splicing that goes on to assemble a complete gene from all the exons, which requires at least some garbage DNA for the introns, is a viral defense. Basically it's sort of a genetic equivalent to using spread-spectrum in radio communications to cut through interference, in this case the genetic interference caused by the virii. Only if you know the secret decoder pattern does your message come through in the clear, otherwise it gets chopped to meaningless bits.
Who knows? If there's one general truth about biological systems, it's that they're an unbelievably hairy spaghetti-maze of jury-rigged weirdness, with at least five complicated mechanisms to get any one simple task done. How anyone thinks it generally represents proof of brilliant top-down divine engineering design is beyond me...
Sure, but retroviruses don't (on average) kill us before we can reproduce
Say what? That's a strange statement. First of all, it's true about all modern viruses and bacterial infections by definition, because we're a successful species, and any successful high-level species at this stage of the game has to be well-defended against bacteria and viral invaders. By analogy, you couldn't possibly introduce Windows 3.1 in today's environment without it being slaughtered immediately.
But what we're talking about is what things were like way back in the day, when complex animals first evolved, and the whole retroviral infection mechanism was just being tried out. At the beginning of the arms race, so to speak, before each side had armored up. In those days it's very likely retroviruses did kill many and many an individual before he could reproduce, until both sides evolved away from that mutually-assured-destruction scenario.
I think a better argument would be that humans and other much more complex animals are far more potentially vulnerable to viruses than corn plants, in the same way that Windows Vista has far more potential vulnerabilities than DOS 3.3.
A good defense against retroviruses would seem to be ruthlessly pruning out DNA that isn't functional, lest it be targeted by an invader. It's the molecular analog of the old security advice to turn off any RPC service you're not actually using.
I would have to say the results are a bit over-hyped at the moment
Isn't that pretty much the definition of anything called "nanotech" these days?
Hey! I've invented a clever nanotech material which, at room temperature, forms a convenient colorless, odorless, nontoxic liquid, storable indefinitely, and when the temperature is lowered sufficiently self-assembles into a strong, lightweight, clear polymeric solid made of molecular subunits interlocked in the same superstrong pattern as a diamond crystal. It's so safe it can be drunk! Conceivable applications include portable, battery-less, high-efficiency cooling or environmentally-friendly thermal-barrier building materials in northern climates. When applied as a thin coating, which is as easy as spraying on the liquid and lowering the temperature to the molecular self-assembly point, it forms an atomically-smooth hard surface with one of the lowest coefficients of friction measured, which means it could have all kinds of applications in energy-efficient "green" transportation.
Interested in investing? Send money now! Cash and checks only, please.
Missing something, that is. The problem, as someone pointed out above, is more likely that informants are phoning the Americans to tell them where the Taliban are, which information might be followed up with a Predator overflight and a missile up the ass.
The US military obviously doesn't need commercial cell-phones to communicate amongst themselves, and, while it's certainly possible in principle to find someone using a cell phone, it's a fair amount of work and he's got to be a pretty high-value target, as well as dumb enough to stick around in the same cell after calling. It's much cheaper and easier to pay off some mistreated or misunderstood underling -- there's always one -- to betray his masters by phoning in their whereabouts when they're up to something he knows the Americans would find interesting.
Never underestimate the cost-benefit ratio of "humint" versus "elint."
Any very fine mineral dust you inhale in large quantities -- and 5.0 grams per cubic meter is unbelievably dusty, like blowing a whole pack of chalk to smithereens in your office -- will cause the symptoms described in both the OSHA document and the more problematic document you cite from people who want to scare you into buying their (more expensive) "natural" products.
All particles with sharp edges, i.e. that come from minerals, irritate the delicate tissue lining your lungs if you inhale it. TiO2 is no different in this regard than, say, SiO2 -- plain old sand -- that you might inhale if you were around blasting or power sanding operations all day. (Google "silicosis.")
Furthermore, your lungs are built like lobster traps from the point of view of inhaled superfine particles: it's easy to get in, but very difficult to get out. This is why in the upper region of the respiratory tract, you have mucus that traps inhaled larger particles and cilia that beat constantly to flush them up and out, plus a cough reflex to expel the scum. But you can't have these things in the deep tissue of the lungs, because that surface area is needed for gas exchange.
So if you inhale very fine dust, it just stays in your lungs pretty much forever, jiggling around and rubbing on things, irritating them. Your body may decide to wall it off with scar tissue if it's irritating enough, which is the "fibrosis" mentioned. It's even possible if it's sufficiently irritating, like the very sharp particles of asbestos fibers, that it can stimulate lung cancer. For all we know, the only reason people get lung cancer in the large numbers they do is because, sooner or later, everyone's lungs fill up with irritating particles of all manner and description and the chronic irritation causes tumors. Unfortunately, the only way to eliminate the threat of inhaled fine dust completely is to never breathe without a heavy fine-filtering face mask.
Insofar as these clothes are concerned, the primary question would be: how is this very fine dust going to be generated? I mean, inhaling very fine silica (SiO2) dust is dangerous in exactly the same way, but you don't refuse to go to the beach or rock-climbing because you know the rock and sand has no reason to suddenly pulverize itself and become superfine dangerous dust. So how would fibers coated with TiO2 get pulverized and generate super fine dust? Don't say the motion of wearing the clothes, either, because you need much more force than this. Walking on the sand at the beach doesn't pulverize the sand particles and generated dangerous superfine silica dust, after all.
Quite right. I remember that transition. NN was about $28, I believe, which in today's dollars would be maybe $40 or so. They were forced to give it away for free when IE came out for free and started eating up their market share. In my observer's opinion, it was right about then that the quality of NN started plateauing.
Oh I dunno. How about just the fact that the software firm that made 98% of all desktops entered the market with their own browser which they (1) gave away for free and (2) bundled with their OS and (3) gave a few nonstandard tricks to, which everyone used (cf. that 98% of desktop), which made lots of stuff not quite Just Work(TM) unless you were using IE?
Without the ability to make a good profit margin on their only product, Netscape had no way to raise the cash required to really innovate. No doubt, superior management could have eked out more from what cash they did have, but a company that has to rely on gifted management and programmers who work 14 hours a day for mere glory is just not going to last, human nature being what it is.
On the main subject...if this were 1975 it would sound like you're arguing for the Space Shuttle. As it is...what are you arguing, e.g. for or against Constellation?
Boy I dunno. They're talking as if the cost of the vehicle for trans-lunar injection and lunar orbit insertion, not to mention the lunar descent vehicle, and the rover itself, are all minor pieces of the cost and can be funded from the loose change left over after you buy a Falcon.
That seems unrealistic. When JPL designs and builds rovers for NASA, they typically spend $100 million or so. I mean, when you design something that has to do stuff while being incredibly tiny to save on launch weight, it ends up being expensive, not cheap.
To be sure, they could cut a lot of corners NASA doesn't, but...then they might just end up like Beagle, i.e. having an expensive dud. There's a reason NASA specifies gold-plated everything on hardware that is a one-off design and can't be fixed if a small design oops means something goes wrong umpty million miles away.
I'm not saying I don't think someone brilliant couldn't do it for, say, $50 million or so. But $10 million seems totally unlikely to me. I mean, not when people are having trouble just getting to LEO for $10 million. $50 million for soft landing even a tiny vehicle on the Moon would be an engineering triumph anyway.
Hmmm, the Wikipedia article on the Pegasus XL says the typical launch cost is $30 million.
$40 million doesn't buy you a "massive" rocket any more. You need to multiply by 2 to 4 just for something that can park a few tons in LEO or geostationary orbit. And even that doesn't really qualify as a "massive" rocket by, say, Saturn V standards.
It's all about delta-V and mass fractions.
I don't think so. That was part of the thinking behind the Space Shuttle, why it was designed as a combination heavy-lift vehicle and 10-passenger space plane. You'll note that the current thinking is to go to smaller vehicles with a more frequent launch, which I think is your suggested mode anyway. But that points away from focussing on the mass fraction, since a multi-stage massive vehicle is definitely more economical on fuel and mass than several smaller vehicles.
In fact, what current trends suggest if anything is that it's vehicle complexity and reliability that matter more than anything, and being able to get a simple, robust vehicle off the ground repeatedly and on schedule, again and again, matter more than anything else in terms of keeping your per-launch costs down.
I think there is no way you can achieve lunar orbit for $10 million. First, lunar injection requires way more velocity than LEO or geostationary, and, second, you need to transport a space-restartable engine and its fuel to the Moon so you can brake when you get there. Finally, we're talking about a one-shot deal, as far as I know, so you can't amortize your development costs over many flights and there's no off-the-shelf existing hardware or technology that will let you avoid those costs.
Well, this sounds rather nitpicky. You can't define "suborbital" flight only in terms of velocity, either, or rocket sleds and railgun projectiles would qualify. Is it even interesting?
I suggest the natural understanding of "suborbital" flight is flight which goes very high, pretty much out of the atmosphere, but which isn't up to orbital velocity. By that definition the X-15 qualifies, and so does SS1. The SR-71 does not, and as an air-breather is really in an entirely different category.
Any IRBM or ICBM qualifies, including the V-2, of course, but since I was talking in the context of the X Prize, which specified manned flight, it's a very natural to exclude it. Manned orbital or suborbital flight is quite a different engineering challenge than unmanned flight.
In any event, I think if we were to play a game of "one of these things doesn't belong" with the set {Freedom 7,X-15,SR-71} then the correct one to drop would be the SR-71.
I don't think so. The payload of the Ariane 5 is 15,000 pounds. If your argument were true, then you should be able to launch 1 pound into geostationary orbit for 1/15000 of the cost of an Ariane 5 launch, or about $6700. Obviously you can't.
There's a basic cost to a launch that includes building a big thingy full of explosive fuel, maintaining a safe place to launch it, hiring all the trained people you need to oversee everything, filling in the government forms, paying for radar and radio operators and equipment to track it, and so on.
Adding more capacity, provided you've thought that out in advance, doesn't seem to add much to this basic cost. That is, apparently, why modern EELVs seem to come in "modular" form where you can add or subtract booster stages to change the payload. Sure, it costs a little more to do that, but apparently lots less than a whole separate launch.
For that reason any launch to orbit will cost at least $30-50 million, and the most expensive ride to orbit -- currently the Space Shuttle -- comes in at about $500 million. That is not all that large a range, and suggests launch costs are not totally dominated by the size of what's launched.
That isn't too surprising. The major cost of transporting something by wheeled vehicle is building the vehicle, buying the gas and road, et cetera. If it's a big rig truck you're using, it doesn't cost that much more to add another trailer to it, certainly much less than hiring another truck.
The electron cloud is a fuzzy region of probability, not a solid thing.
Ah, the evil remnants of a flawed basic chemistry and/or atomic physics class.
Just FYI -- not that it relates to this article -- this is wrong. So far as we know, an electron is a point particle, and the electrons in an atom aren't any different from a free electron. They are a collection of little points located at various definite positions. There's no "fuzziness" and they aren't "smeared out" in any sense at all. The "fuzzy cloud" you see drawn around atoms is just the probability distribution of where the electrons are. It's only fuzzy for the same reason a photo of a bridge at night shows the car headlights all smeared out: the image you've chosen to construct averages over some very fast motion in which you're not interested.
It's amazing to me how often people end up so often misunderstanding [x,p] = ih, and how often teachers misstate its implications. It's not that you can't pinpoint the position of an electron exactly. It's that if you do, it then has a very indeterminate momentum, and you now have no clue where it will be in a few moments.
No I don't think so. The X-15 reached an altitude of 67 miles, which is "suborbital" according to the X Prize criteria, and about as good as Scaled's SpaceShipOne achieved. The SR-71 never reached those altitudes, IIRC, although it set altitude records for horizontal flight (about 80,000 feet I believe). Since the SR-71 is air-breathing and the X-15 is not, this is not surprising.
The V-2 doesn't qualify at all, because it didn't carry passengers.
I probably should have mentioned the Soviets, except that I was talking about suborbital flight, which the Soviets didn't actually do, and more importantly I made no claim of exclusivity, that is, I didn't say only the USAF and NASA did it.
If you have to look at the keys to figure out which finger to press down, you're typing way, way, way too slowly to be getting serious work done. You might as well use a mouse and an on-screen keyboard, I'd think.
The X Prize and this competition differ from competitions early in the aviation era, to which they're routinely compared, in that they aren't for doing something no one's ever done before. Suborbital flight was achieved in the 1960s, both by NASA and by the Air Force with the X-15 program. Landing on the Moon and sending back photos was achieved by the Soviets and Americans in the mid 1960s.
What presumably is the point to these new prizes is not the achievement per se, which merely duplicates something done forty years ago, but the goal of doing so much more cheaply, and with the ability to do it much more routinely. Those are reasonable goals: after all, the principal failure of the Space Shuttle is that it can't be launched nearly as often and easily as it was supposed to be. If it had eventually been able to fly 20 times a year to LEO on a routine basis, which was what was promised in the 80s, and which would've brought its per-flight cost down to an extremely modest $60-100 million, we would be now hailing its unqualified success.
So I think the virtue of the X Prize was not its goal of suborbital flight per se, but the goal of suborbital flight with the same craft twice in a short period (a week, as I recall). Doing it rapidly is at least proof of concept evidence that you've found a way to do it cheaply and routinely. And I'm disappointed that this new competition doesn't seem to have that element. I'm not sure how it could. Maybe they would have been better off going for a similar X Prize competition for actual orbital flight, e.g. can you fly to orbit twice in the same week. That would be a real achievement.
I fear, however, that $30m isn't nearly enough to cover the budget for a lunar mission
It's a totally token amount. Merely launching a geostationary satellite on an Ariane 5 rocket costs over $100 million. Presumably if you compete seriously you're in it for the glory.
Yes it is, or rather "liberal" if you want to reach back to the original meaning of the word ("live and let live"), before the wretched collectivists stole it and turned its meaning upside down, 1984 style, so that now it tends to mean "having the Correct Nice Thoughts."
I don't think it's any harder to implement than any other Golden-Rule based philosophy. Just ask yourself every time you open your trap to propose that your fellow citizen be forced to do something he doesn't want to do: Am I OK if that same principle is applied to me? It's certainly a lot easier than working out the One True Moral Code on which everyone agrees, which you need if you want to apply the force of law to practically every private transaction.
You are encountering the most successful virus on the planet! Pity we can't yet engineer like that.
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This bullshit urban legend about the "low" infant mortality rate in the US has got to stop.
The reason the infant "mortality" rate in the US is low is because the US is one of the very few countries that tries to save the life of severely premature babies and babies with severe birth defects. Not surprisingly, quite a lot of these sad cases die, up to 80% in the case of severely premature babies. By contrast, most other countries don't even try to save those infants, and simply record them as late miscarriages or stillbirths. Since they're never "born" they can't "die," so they don't count in infant mortality statistics. Hey presto! A lower infant mortality rate than the US! Congratulatory headlines in any random self-hating US media outlet...
Here's a related fun fact: university hospitals often have higher death rates than community hospitals for grave disease, e.g. heart attacks, strokes. Is this because they're less competent? Some strange corruption where the richer and more prestigious hospital is screwing up because of its callous disregard for humanity, i.e. the kind of "logic" used to criticize the US infant mortality rate? Nope. It's just because the most serious cases prefer to go to university hospitals, or get transferred there from community hospitals, and because university hospitals often admit people for experimental therapies that usually don't work, whereas less sophisticated hospitals just send folks to hospice or home to die.
Whenever you compare statistics, it really needs to be apples to apples, and when the statistic is so politically-charged as a quality of life versus type of government measurement, you really need to ask some hard and detailed questions about the methodology. It's amazingly easy to lie with statistics.
I've dabbled in object segmentation and recognition, and it's a bitch unless you cheat, e.g. by restricting yourself to pre-assigned objects, making sure your objects are always in high-contrast good-lighting conditions, or accepting lots of false negatives or positives. So I'm kind of doubting it will replace the ol' eye-brain recognition system.
That said, I can see some useful related applications. Imagine a helicopter pilot doing search and rescue work. He sees something worth checking out -- say a tiny smoke plume -- and says "bingo." That's picked up by a computer, which is also monitoring his goggles, so it knows in what direction he's looking, and has done some very basic image analysis so it knows to ignore the canopy struts, Sun, shadows et cetera in the field of view. It then combines this with a GPS locator beacon and a good topo map, and instantly computes and records the exact location (latitude and longitude) of the sight of interest. Could save some lives.
Or imagine an emergency worker on the ground during a big fire. He sees a worrying flare-up. Wearing the goggles, he can just say "Looks like trouble over there!" and the goggles, plus associated GPS device and computer, can instantly transmit to headquarters precisely where there is, even if the guy observing doesn't know himself.
Give me a break. I suggest the European Parliament is about as truly influential in international trade affairs as would be any random twelvepack of supercaffeinated intense humorless baristas from the local java shop.
To the extent there is any actual organized power in international trade relationships -- I mean, power other than that collectively wielded in an unorganized, ad hoc way by various bilateral agreements between concerned nations -- it resides in the G8.
Just because people call themselves an important international body and stand around debating resolutions with long faces doesn't mean they have any actual influence. Indeed, the more they pontificate and grandstand the less actual power they have.
In a future in which there is some vast civilization among the asteroids, yes. But I think certainly within my lifetime, and that of my children, it will be far cheaper to bring along a little diamond dust than the tools, equipment, and fuel necessary to do a little mining along with whatever else you're doing.
It's not clear to me that diamond is all that useful, anyway. The best use of it I can imagine is for super high quality windows for optical, UV and IR instruments. But for that you need very pure diamond in nice shapes, which is probably much easier to make -- even in space -- by CVD deposition starting from a lump of graphite.
So more than one allotrope of one of the most common elements in the Universe, carbon, is present in interplanetary and interstellar space.
/. in a while.
Well, duh. It would be shocking if there weren't any carbon in the form of diamond out there. That fact would take some serious explaining.
And, er, so what? Obviously no one will ever mine diamonds in outer space, inasmuch as the cost to transport miners to them and the mined diamonds back utterly dwarfs the value of the diamonds, or even the cost to manufacture them. Nor can I think of any interesting astrophysical theories that would be disproved by any particular interplanetary distribution of carbon allotropes.
One of the least interesting stories I've seen on
Well, yes, that would be true. But there are plenty of cases where I do understand the mechanism and it sure looks like it was "designed" (if it was) by an idiot, or someone with a weird sense of humor.
The prototypical example is the vertebrate eye. In our eyes, the entire optical sensor system faces backward, towards the inside of our head. Blood and nerves connect to the retina from the front, passing right across the face of this light-gathering instrument. It's kind of like having a CCD device in a telescope and running the cables that connect to the sensor in front of the CCD device. Seems kind of silly, no?
There are counter-arguments about why this is really actually brilliant, but they seem to me rather ad hockish and full of special pleading. Not very convincing.
I'm agnostic on the existence of a Designer, precisely because the evidence we have is all of this ambiguous, unconvincing type. Sure, it could be so brilliant I don't recognize its brilliance. But to believe that takes an act of faith, not reason.
Yeah. I don't find it creditable because decoys only work when bullets are more expensive than decoys. In this case viral particles are so "cheap" that I think they would overwhelm any such defensive mechanism.
I believe it is generally thought plausible, however, that the typical splicing that goes on to assemble a complete gene from all the exons, which requires at least some garbage DNA for the introns, is a viral defense. Basically it's sort of a genetic equivalent to using spread-spectrum in radio communications to cut through interference, in this case the genetic interference caused by the virii. Only if you know the secret decoder pattern does your message come through in the clear, otherwise it gets chopped to meaningless bits.
Who knows? If there's one general truth about biological systems, it's that they're an unbelievably hairy spaghetti-maze of jury-rigged weirdness, with at least five complicated mechanisms to get any one simple task done. How anyone thinks it generally represents proof of brilliant top-down divine engineering design is beyond me...
Sure, but retroviruses don't (on average) kill us before we can reproduce
Say what? That's a strange statement. First of all, it's true about all modern viruses and bacterial infections by definition, because we're a successful species, and any successful high-level species at this stage of the game has to be well-defended against bacteria and viral invaders. By analogy, you couldn't possibly introduce Windows 3.1 in today's environment without it being slaughtered immediately.
But what we're talking about is what things were like way back in the day, when complex animals first evolved, and the whole retroviral infection mechanism was just being tried out. At the beginning of the arms race, so to speak, before each side had armored up. In those days it's very likely retroviruses did kill many and many an individual before he could reproduce, until both sides evolved away from that mutually-assured-destruction scenario.
I think a better argument would be that humans and other much more complex animals are far more potentially vulnerable to viruses than corn plants, in the same way that Windows Vista has far more potential vulnerabilities than DOS 3.3.
A good defense against retroviruses would seem to be ruthlessly pruning out DNA that isn't functional, lest it be targeted by an invader. It's the molecular analog of the old security advice to turn off any RPC service you're not actually using.
I would have to say the results are a bit over-hyped at the moment
Isn't that pretty much the definition of anything called "nanotech" these days?
Hey! I've invented a clever nanotech material which, at room temperature, forms a convenient colorless, odorless, nontoxic liquid, storable indefinitely, and when the temperature is lowered sufficiently self-assembles into a strong, lightweight, clear polymeric solid made of molecular subunits interlocked in the same superstrong pattern as a diamond crystal. It's so safe it can be drunk! Conceivable applications include portable, battery-less, high-efficiency cooling or environmentally-friendly thermal-barrier building materials in northern climates. When applied as a thin coating, which is as easy as spraying on the liquid and lowering the temperature to the molecular self-assembly point, it forms an atomically-smooth hard surface with one of the lowest coefficients of friction measured, which means it could have all kinds of applications in energy-efficient "green" transportation.
Interested in investing? Send money now! Cash and checks only, please.
Missing something, that is. The problem, as someone pointed out above, is more likely that informants are phoning the Americans to tell them where the Taliban are, which information might be followed up with a Predator overflight and a missile up the ass.
The US military obviously doesn't need commercial cell-phones to communicate amongst themselves, and, while it's certainly possible in principle to find someone using a cell phone, it's a fair amount of work and he's got to be a pretty high-value target, as well as dumb enough to stick around in the same cell after calling. It's much cheaper and easier to pay off some mistreated or misunderstood underling -- there's always one -- to betray his masters by phoning in their whereabouts when they're up to something he knows the Americans would find interesting.
Never underestimate the cost-benefit ratio of "humint" versus "elint."
Any very fine mineral dust you inhale in large quantities -- and 5.0 grams per cubic meter is unbelievably dusty, like blowing a whole pack of chalk to smithereens in your office -- will cause the symptoms described in both the OSHA document and the more problematic document you cite from people who want to scare you into buying their (more expensive) "natural" products.
All particles with sharp edges, i.e. that come from minerals, irritate the delicate tissue lining your lungs if you inhale it. TiO2 is no different in this regard than, say, SiO2 -- plain old sand -- that you might inhale if you were around blasting or power sanding operations all day. (Google "silicosis.")
Furthermore, your lungs are built like lobster traps from the point of view of inhaled superfine particles: it's easy to get in, but very difficult to get out. This is why in the upper region of the respiratory tract, you have mucus that traps inhaled larger particles and cilia that beat constantly to flush them up and out, plus a cough reflex to expel the scum. But you can't have these things in the deep tissue of the lungs, because that surface area is needed for gas exchange.
So if you inhale very fine dust, it just stays in your lungs pretty much forever, jiggling around and rubbing on things, irritating them. Your body may decide to wall it off with scar tissue if it's irritating enough, which is the "fibrosis" mentioned. It's even possible if it's sufficiently irritating, like the very sharp particles of asbestos fibers, that it can stimulate lung cancer. For all we know, the only reason people get lung cancer in the large numbers they do is because, sooner or later, everyone's lungs fill up with irritating particles of all manner and description and the chronic irritation causes tumors. Unfortunately, the only way to eliminate the threat of inhaled fine dust completely is to never breathe without a heavy fine-filtering face mask.
Insofar as these clothes are concerned, the primary question would be: how is this very fine dust going to be generated? I mean, inhaling very fine silica (SiO2) dust is dangerous in exactly the same way, but you don't refuse to go to the beach or rock-climbing because you know the rock and sand has no reason to suddenly pulverize itself and become superfine dangerous dust. So how would fibers coated with TiO2 get pulverized and generate super fine dust? Don't say the motion of wearing the clothes, either, because you need much more force than this. Walking on the sand at the beach doesn't pulverize the sand particles and generated dangerous superfine silica dust, after all.
Quite right. I remember that transition. NN was about $28, I believe, which in today's dollars would be maybe $40 or so. They were forced to give it away for free when IE came out for free and started eating up their market share. In my observer's opinion, it was right about then that the quality of NN started plateauing.
Oh I dunno. How about just the fact that the software firm that made 98% of all desktops entered the market with their own browser which they (1) gave away for free and (2) bundled with their OS and (3) gave a few nonstandard tricks to, which everyone used (cf. that 98% of desktop), which made lots of stuff not quite Just Work(TM) unless you were using IE?
Without the ability to make a good profit margin on their only product, Netscape had no way to raise the cash required to really innovate. No doubt, superior management could have eked out more from what cash they did have, but a company that has to rely on gifted management and programmers who work 14 hours a day for mere glory is just not going to last, human nature being what it is.
D'oh! Of course. Thanks for the correction.
On the main subject...if this were 1975 it would sound like you're arguing for the Space Shuttle. As it is...what are you arguing, e.g. for or against Constellation?
Yes, pretty much. There are some subtleties, of course, since you're working in the quantum regime.
Boy I dunno. They're talking as if the cost of the vehicle for trans-lunar injection and lunar orbit insertion, not to mention the lunar descent vehicle, and the rover itself, are all minor pieces of the cost and can be funded from the loose change left over after you buy a Falcon.
That seems unrealistic. When JPL designs and builds rovers for NASA, they typically spend $100 million or so. I mean, when you design something that has to do stuff while being incredibly tiny to save on launch weight, it ends up being expensive, not cheap.
To be sure, they could cut a lot of corners NASA doesn't, but...then they might just end up like Beagle, i.e. having an expensive dud. There's a reason NASA specifies gold-plated everything on hardware that is a one-off design and can't be fixed if a small design oops means something goes wrong umpty million miles away.
I'm not saying I don't think someone brilliant couldn't do it for, say, $50 million or so. But $10 million seems totally unlikely to me. I mean, not when people are having trouble just getting to LEO for $10 million. $50 million for soft landing even a tiny vehicle on the Moon would be an engineering triumph anyway.
Hmmm, the Wikipedia article on the Pegasus XL says the typical launch cost is $30 million.
$40 million doesn't buy you a "massive" rocket any more. You need to multiply by 2 to 4 just for something that can park a few tons in LEO or geostationary orbit. And even that doesn't really qualify as a "massive" rocket by, say, Saturn V standards.
It's all about delta-V and mass fractions.
I don't think so. That was part of the thinking behind the Space Shuttle, why it was designed as a combination heavy-lift vehicle and 10-passenger space plane. You'll note that the current thinking is to go to smaller vehicles with a more frequent launch, which I think is your suggested mode anyway. But that points away from focussing on the mass fraction, since a multi-stage massive vehicle is definitely more economical on fuel and mass than several smaller vehicles.
In fact, what current trends suggest if anything is that it's vehicle complexity and reliability that matter more than anything, and being able to get a simple, robust vehicle off the ground repeatedly and on schedule, again and again, matter more than anything else in terms of keeping your per-launch costs down.
I think there is no way you can achieve lunar orbit for $10 million. First, lunar injection requires way more velocity than LEO or geostationary, and, second, you need to transport a space-restartable engine and its fuel to the Moon so you can brake when you get there. Finally, we're talking about a one-shot deal, as far as I know, so you can't amortize your development costs over many flights and there's no off-the-shelf existing hardware or technology that will let you avoid those costs.
Well, this sounds rather nitpicky. You can't define "suborbital" flight only in terms of velocity, either, or rocket sleds and railgun projectiles would qualify. Is it even interesting?
I suggest the natural understanding of "suborbital" flight is flight which goes very high, pretty much out of the atmosphere, but which isn't up to orbital velocity. By that definition the X-15 qualifies, and so does SS1. The SR-71 does not, and as an air-breather is really in an entirely different category.
Any IRBM or ICBM qualifies, including the V-2, of course, but since I was talking in the context of the X Prize, which specified manned flight, it's a very natural to exclude it. Manned orbital or suborbital flight is quite a different engineering challenge than unmanned flight.
In any event, I think if we were to play a game of "one of these things doesn't belong" with the set {Freedom 7,X-15,SR-71} then the correct one to drop would be the SR-71.
I don't think so. The payload of the Ariane 5 is 15,000 pounds. If your argument were true, then you should be able to launch 1 pound into geostationary orbit for 1/15000 of the cost of an Ariane 5 launch, or about $6700. Obviously you can't.
There's a basic cost to a launch that includes building a big thingy full of explosive fuel, maintaining a safe place to launch it, hiring all the trained people you need to oversee everything, filling in the government forms, paying for radar and radio operators and equipment to track it, and so on.
Adding more capacity, provided you've thought that out in advance, doesn't seem to add much to this basic cost. That is, apparently, why modern EELVs seem to come in "modular" form where you can add or subtract booster stages to change the payload. Sure, it costs a little more to do that, but apparently lots less than a whole separate launch.
For that reason any launch to orbit will cost at least $30-50 million, and the most expensive ride to orbit -- currently the Space Shuttle -- comes in at about $500 million. That is not all that large a range, and suggests launch costs are not totally dominated by the size of what's launched.
That isn't too surprising. The major cost of transporting something by wheeled vehicle is building the vehicle, buying the gas and road, et cetera. If it's a big rig truck you're using, it doesn't cost that much more to add another trailer to it, certainly much less than hiring another truck.
The electron cloud is a fuzzy region of probability, not a solid thing.
Ah, the evil remnants of a flawed basic chemistry and/or atomic physics class.
Just FYI -- not that it relates to this article -- this is wrong. So far as we know, an electron is a point particle, and the electrons in an atom aren't any different from a free electron. They are a collection of little points located at various definite positions. There's no "fuzziness" and they aren't "smeared out" in any sense at all. The "fuzzy cloud" you see drawn around atoms is just the probability distribution of where the electrons are. It's only fuzzy for the same reason a photo of a bridge at night shows the car headlights all smeared out: the image you've chosen to construct averages over some very fast motion in which you're not interested.
It's amazing to me how often people end up so often misunderstanding [x,p] = ih, and how often teachers misstate its implications. It's not that you can't pinpoint the position of an electron exactly. It's that if you do, it then has a very indeterminate momentum, and you now have no clue where it will be in a few moments.
No I don't think so. The X-15 reached an altitude of 67 miles, which is "suborbital" according to the X Prize criteria, and about as good as Scaled's SpaceShipOne achieved. The SR-71 never reached those altitudes, IIRC, although it set altitude records for horizontal flight (about 80,000 feet I believe). Since the SR-71 is air-breathing and the X-15 is not, this is not surprising.
The V-2 doesn't qualify at all, because it didn't carry passengers.
I probably should have mentioned the Soviets, except that I was talking about suborbital flight, which the Soviets didn't actually do, and more importantly I made no claim of exclusivity, that is, I didn't say only the USAF and NASA did it.
If you have to look at the keys to figure out which finger to press down, you're typing way, way, way too slowly to be getting serious work done. You might as well use a mouse and an on-screen keyboard, I'd think.
The X Prize and this competition differ from competitions early in the aviation era, to which they're routinely compared, in that they aren't for doing something no one's ever done before. Suborbital flight was achieved in the 1960s, both by NASA and by the Air Force with the X-15 program. Landing on the Moon and sending back photos was achieved by the Soviets and Americans in the mid 1960s.
What presumably is the point to these new prizes is not the achievement per se, which merely duplicates something done forty years ago, but the goal of doing so much more cheaply, and with the ability to do it much more routinely. Those are reasonable goals: after all, the principal failure of the Space Shuttle is that it can't be launched nearly as often and easily as it was supposed to be. If it had eventually been able to fly 20 times a year to LEO on a routine basis, which was what was promised in the 80s, and which would've brought its per-flight cost down to an extremely modest $60-100 million, we would be now hailing its unqualified success.
So I think the virtue of the X Prize was not its goal of suborbital flight per se, but the goal of suborbital flight with the same craft twice in a short period (a week, as I recall). Doing it rapidly is at least proof of concept evidence that you've found a way to do it cheaply and routinely. And I'm disappointed that this new competition doesn't seem to have that element. I'm not sure how it could. Maybe they would have been better off going for a similar X Prize competition for actual orbital flight, e.g. can you fly to orbit twice in the same week. That would be a real achievement.
I fear, however, that $30m isn't nearly enough to cover the budget for a lunar mission
It's a totally token amount. Merely launching a geostationary satellite on an Ariane 5 rocket costs over $100 million. Presumably if you compete seriously you're in it for the glory.
Yes it is, or rather "liberal" if you want to reach back to the original meaning of the word ("live and let live"), before the wretched collectivists stole it and turned its meaning upside down, 1984 style, so that now it tends to mean "having the Correct Nice Thoughts."
I don't think it's any harder to implement than any other Golden-Rule based philosophy. Just ask yourself every time you open your trap to propose that your fellow citizen be forced to do something he doesn't want to do: Am I OK if that same principle is applied to me? It's certainly a lot easier than working out the One True Moral Code on which everyone agrees, which you need if you want to apply the force of law to practically every private transaction.
You are encountering the most successful virus on the planet! Pity we can't yet engineer like that.