The actual article seems to only say that one web site, titled "What really happened to the dinosaurs", appears in response to one particular search query, "What happened to the dinosaurs".
That's annoying and stupid... but it's not the same as the hyped headline "creationists manipulating results."
The problem is that there are tens of millions of children needing education.
A school teaching tens of children (that have been hand-selected to attend) may be heartwarming, but it's irrelevant by factors of millions. With sufficient resources, it's easy to teach ten or twenty students (especially if you're allowed to select which ones).
It's replicating that by a million times that's hard.
I notice she skipped addressing the questions dealing with the EV1.
Probably necessary, since there is not going to be much more she's likely to be able to add to the subject, but it would be worth hearing anything she did have to say.
I mean with all the technical miracles NASA pulled off on that mission, they somehow managed to underestimate the longevity of the mission by 45x.
To be fair, 90 days was not, in fact, the estimated lifetime of the mission. It was the design specification of the mission. That is, each of the subsystems was designed with the specification "design a system that will operate for a minimum of 90 (Martian) days, even under worst-case conditions."
Think of it as a 90-day warranty-- after 90 days, it wasn't expected to be dead, it was just out of warranty.
(and note that since the engineering specification was validated by testing the subsystems to either three times design life, or testing to design life under three-sigma worst-case conditions, it would have been very difficult to design for 4000 days...)
why Jeff Bezos is doing the same thing that SpaceX is already doing ?
They're not, New Shepard is a SUBorbital craft not an orbital one. I don't know if there are even any plans to make an orbital version...
From https://www.blueorigin.com/new... "We continue to be big fans of the vertical takeoff, vertical landing architecture. We chose VTVL because it’s scalable to very large size. We’re already designing New Shepard’s sibling, her Very Big Brother – an orbital launch vehicle"
Desalination is a plausible solution for water for consumer use--that is, urban and suburban locations.
It is not a very plausible solution for agricultural use-- too expensive.
Actually, there are a number of issues with desalination as it presently exists. The cost of plant construction and operations puts the cost of water supply at roughly triple that of traditional methods.
Exactly. That's why it's not a plausible solution for agricultural use. If your application is to take water and spray it on the ground, yes, it needs to be cheap.
For urban and suburban use-- well, given the rents, and the cost of housing, in San Diego (not even to mention San Francisco!)-- the cost of water just isn't a factor. You could triple it and not notice.
They also depend on fossil fuels and thus contribute to greenhouse gasses. They produce brine and boron contaminants that can not easily be disposed of on either land or sea without potentially significant impact of the wildlife exposed to them.
Bottled Water - Nestle's is buying municipal water at residential rates and selling it back at 100s of times the original cost.
Shut those 2 things down and water problem solved.
You are clueless.
Look, I hate Nestle and I think bottled water is stupid too, but the amount of water they bottle is trivial compared to the trillions of gallons of water shortage representing the drought. They could bottle a hundred times more water, or a thousand, and it still wouldn't make a lick of difference.
The problem is measured in trillions of gallons. It's not drinking water that's the problem here.
> Back when I was working on lasers for power beaming
Short or long haul? Down or up?
We looked at lasers for space-to-Earth power beaming, but it's less practical than you might think-- heat rejection gets to be a serious problem. Most of the practical applications were Earth-to-space or space-to-space power beaming.
Desalination is a plausible solution for water for consumer use--that is, urban and suburban locations.
It is not a very plausible solution for agricultural use-- too expensive. Do you realize that those people take the water and just dump it on the ground?
*(well, some of the suburban people just spray it on the ground, too. But they spray millions and millions of gallons on lawns. Sounds like a lot... but agriculture uses trillions of gallons.)
Water rights are complicated. Since the rule is, whoever grabbed it first owns the rights to the water, the people who own it aren't necessarily the ones who use it most responsibly. http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
Agriculture is 80% of California's water use (although only 1.5% of California's economy) The big problem is almonds. Who would have thought that such a niche foodstuff would drive agricultural water? https://www.bostonglobe.com/bu...
The idea of using lasers to de-orbit space debris has been around for a while. http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/... Back when I was working on lasers for power beaming, the idea was discussed as an alternate use for the ground-based lasers.
I hate that movie. I haven't seen it, but the advertising has put me off. The man is so important, but not once during any of the ads I saw for it, did they mention his name.
There are many possible reasons to not like the movie, but this isn't one of them. The movie itself doesn't in any way hide his name.
Yes, it seems way to early to evaluate the program. This is the very first report; basically it's saying "the program just started". Clicking through the links leads to this one: http://www.crainsnewyork.com/a... with more numbers in the summary:
The state agency responsible for economic development across New York says companies last year created 76 of the nearly 2,100 new jobs promised over five years in return for tax breaks under the Cuomo administration's Start-Up NY program.
The first annual report from the Department of Economic Development says 30 companies began operating in 2014 among 54 initially approved for the program.
According to the report, they made $1.7 million of some $91 million investments promised over five years as part of Start-Up NY. The program has established 356 tax-free zones at 62 colleges and universities that act as sponsors.
The agency says another 26 businesses have been approved so far this year, while 12 have withdrawn applications.
No holograms showed up. This is a pepper's ghost illusion apparently performed with a projector and semitransparent material.
Exactly. This is fake news. Holograms that can can be projected into and move through empty air do not exist except in science fiction. This "march" did not happen.
I read a lot of science fiction, but I do like to actually distinguish what is real and what is Star Trek.
How did this show up on slashdot, a site for self-proclaimed nerds, which is to say, people who actually care about real technology?
But, on the other hand, if we did send people to orbit Mars without landing...
...it would be a stupid waste of billions of dollars. Humans can't do anything from Mars orbit a machine
[can't do much better.]
Actually, right at the moment, that's not true-- humans are vastly more capable than robots. I'm quite supportive of robots, but a human geologist could do in a day what it takes the Mars rovers a month to do.
(specially a 2030s machine)
Ah, now that's the question. Robots are evolving much more quickly than humans. What will the machines be able to do in 2030?
The money you spend on a Mars orbit mission sets you up for landing on Mars by developing and testing a critical portion of the technology, the part that gets humans to Mars orbit and back.
Taking the first step gets you one step closer to Mars.
If you waited to take you first step until you were ready to run a marathon, you'd never stand up at all.
A system that tracks the whereabouts of every American (or at least, every one with a car), and saves the data for five years... This story needs the tag "what could possibly go wrong"?
There are a lot of different pieces required to go to Mars, land, and return. Some of these, like a habitat that humans can live in for the required transit to Mars and back, we have, or at least, we can make with only small modifications to what has been developed (the Space Station). Some of them, like landers and habitats and space suits for use on the Martian surface, we don't have. Every one of these pieces is a potential bottleneck for a human mission.
What you are basically saying is, we should delay Mars exploration with humans until we have all the pieces developed. The Planetary Society is saying, no, let's not delay, let's do a mission we can do now
The longest usage we have gotten out of a space suit on the moon is three eight-hour walks. The report from the Apollo missions was that the suits were trashed by that point (lunar dust is very abrasive)-- they would not have been usable for another use. Mars dust is not as abrasive as lunar dust, but it is much finer. A different problem. Do you want to send humans to Mars if you then have to tell them "oh, by the way, you'll be on the surface for 500 days, but you can only go outside three times. After that we're not sure your suits will still hold pressure, so stay inside."
Of course, we can develop and test suits for Mars. Developing and testing is something we're good at. But there are a hundred pieces that have to be developed and tested, and only so much budget.
So the question is, do we want to delay, until all the parts for landing and habitation and launching back from Mars have been developed and tested? Or do we go now, doing what we can with what we can do?
Really? You go all the damn way to Mars and then stay in the car when you get there?
Because going to the surface, living on the surface, and launching off the surface is really hard, and really expensive, and requires a lot of engineering and solving a lot of problems that we haven't yet solved. We don't know how to land something on Mars that's as large as a human habitat. This will take some work. Landing on Mars is going to be a very expensive mission.
But, on the other hand, if we did send people to orbit Mars without landing... that might be a very powerful incentive to try to get that technology made and actually land on the next mission.
Slashdot Mirror
The actual article seems to only say that one web site, titled "What really happened to the dinosaurs", appears in response to one particular search query, "What happened to the dinosaurs".
That's annoying and stupid... but it's not the same as the hyped headline "creationists manipulating results."
The problem is...
The problem is that there are tens of millions of children needing education.
A school teaching tens of children (that have been hand-selected to attend) may be heartwarming, but it's irrelevant by factors of millions. With sufficient resources, it's easy to teach ten or twenty students (especially if you're allowed to select which ones).
It's replicating that by a million times that's hard.
I notice she skipped addressing the questions dealing with the EV1.
Probably necessary, since there is not going to be much more she's likely to be able to add to the subject, but it would be worth hearing anything she did have to say.
I mean with all the technical miracles NASA pulled off on that mission, they somehow managed to underestimate the longevity of the mission by 45x.
To be fair, 90 days was not, in fact, the estimated lifetime of the mission. It was the design specification of the mission. That is, each of the subsystems was designed with the specification "design a system that will operate for a minimum of 90 (Martian) days, even under worst-case conditions."
Think of it as a 90-day warranty-- after 90 days, it wasn't expected to be dead, it was just out of warranty.
(and note that since the engineering specification was validated by testing the subsystems to either three times design life, or testing to design life under three-sigma worst-case conditions, it would have been very difficult to design for 4000 days...)
Three. Carmack did the same, but he backed out I believe.
Now revived as a kickstarter, Exos Aerospace
Four, Richard Branson, Virgin Galactic
Five, Paul Allen, Stratolaunch/Vulcan Aerospace
why Jeff Bezos is doing the same thing that SpaceX is already doing ?
They're not, New Shepard is a SUBorbital craft not an orbital one. I don't know if there are even any plans to make an orbital version...
From https://www.blueorigin.com/new...
"We continue to be big fans of the vertical takeoff, vertical landing architecture. We chose VTVL because it’s scalable to very large size. We’re already designing New Shepard’s sibling, her Very Big Brother – an orbital launch vehicle"
So: yes.
This infosys:
http://www.computerworld.com/a...
http://www.computerworld.com/a...
?
Desalination is a plausible solution for water for consumer use--that is, urban and suburban locations.
It is not a very plausible solution for agricultural use-- too expensive.
Actually, there are a number of issues with desalination as it presently exists. The cost of plant construction and operations puts the cost of water supply at roughly triple that of traditional methods.
Exactly. That's why it's not a plausible solution for agricultural use. If your application is to take water and spray it on the ground, yes, it needs to be cheap.
For urban and suburban use-- well, given the rents, and the cost of housing, in San Diego (not even to mention San Francisco!)-- the cost of water just isn't a factor. You could triple it and not notice.
They also depend on fossil fuels and thus contribute to greenhouse gasses. They produce brine and boron contaminants that can not easily be disposed of on either land or sea without potentially significant impact of the wildlife exposed to them.
Those are engineering problems.
The 2 "crops" that are taking the water:
Shut those 2 things down and water problem solved.
You are clueless.
Look, I hate Nestle and I think bottled water is stupid too, but the amount of water they bottle is trivial compared to the trillions of gallons of water shortage representing the drought. They could bottle a hundred times more water, or a thousand, and it still wouldn't make a lick of difference.
The problem is measured in trillions of gallons. It's not drinking water that's the problem here.
> Back when I was working on lasers for power beaming
Short or long haul? Down or up?
We looked at lasers for space-to-Earth power beaming, but it's less practical than you might think-- heat rejection gets to be a serious problem. Most of the practical applications were Earth-to-space or space-to-space power beaming.
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl...
http://proceedings.spiedigital...
http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...
http://arc.aiaa.org/doi/pdf/10...
http://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.js...
Desalination is a plausible solution for water for consumer use--that is, urban and suburban locations.
It is not a very plausible solution for agricultural use-- too expensive. Do you realize that those people take the water and just dump it on the ground?
*(well, some of the suburban people just spray it on the ground, too. But they spray millions and millions of gallons on lawns. Sounds like a lot... but agriculture uses trillions of gallons.)
Water rights are complicated. Since the rule is, whoever grabbed it first owns the rights to the water, the people who own it aren't necessarily the ones who use it most responsibly. http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
Agriculture is 80% of California's water use (although only 1.5% of California's economy) The big problem is almonds. Who would have thought that such a niche foodstuff would drive agricultural water? https://www.bostonglobe.com/bu...
Trillions? Yep: http://science.nasa.gov/scienc...
Guys, people plant in California because it's one of the most fertile soils in the USA.
Too bad it's a semi-arid climate-- that's to say, much of the time it's a desert.
The idea of using lasers to de-orbit space debris has been around for a while.
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/...
Back when I was working on lasers for power beaming, the idea was discussed as an alternate use for the ground-based lasers.
Not any more isolation than expeditions to Antarctica in the late 19th and early 20th century.
Wrong. Hobart is 7 days sail away. Sthn NZ is even closer.
Now. That's why I said " in the late 19th and early 20th century."
Back then, they would get frozen in, winter-over stuck in ice, and in the following summer, do the exploration.
Not any more isolation than expeditions to Antarctica in the late 19th and early 20th century.
I hate that movie. I haven't seen it, but the advertising has put me off. The man is so important, but not once during any of the ads I saw for it, did they mention his name.
There are many possible reasons to not like the movie, but this isn't one of them. The movie itself doesn't in any way hide his name.
This, for example http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/n... or this http://www.slate.com/blogs/bro...
might be reasonable excuses to not want to see the movie.
Yes, I've mentioned this before-- if there are bacteria on Mars, they will be extreme halophiles.
http://online.liebertpub.com/d...
http://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.js...
Yes, it seems way to early to evaluate the program. This is the very first report; basically it's saying "the program just started". Clicking through the links leads to this one: http://www.crainsnewyork.com/a...
with more numbers in the summary:
The state agency responsible for economic development across New York says companies last year created 76 of the nearly 2,100 new jobs promised over five years in return for tax breaks under the Cuomo administration's Start-Up NY program.
The first annual report from the Department of Economic Development says 30 companies began operating in 2014 among 54 initially approved for the program.
According to the report, they made $1.7 million of some $91 million investments promised over five years as part of Start-Up NY. The program has established 356 tax-free zones at 62 colleges and universities that act as sponsors.
The agency says another 26 businesses have been approved so far this year, while 12 have withdrawn applications.
No holograms showed up. This is a pepper's ghost illusion apparently performed with a projector and semitransparent material.
Exactly. This is fake news. Holograms that can can be projected into and move through empty air do not exist except in science fiction. This "march" did not happen.
I read a lot of science fiction, but I do like to actually distinguish what is real and what is Star Trek.
How did this show up on slashdot, a site for self-proclaimed nerds, which is to say, people who actually care about real technology?
But, assuming that he de-friended her, the message will just get stuck in the "other" folder. Might be years before he gets around to seeing it.
But, on the other hand, if we did send people to orbit Mars without landing...
...it would be a stupid waste of billions of dollars. Humans can't do anything from Mars orbit a machine
[can't do much better.]
Actually, right at the moment, that's not true-- humans are vastly more capable than robots. I'm quite supportive of robots, but a human geologist could do in a day what it takes the Mars rovers a month to do.
(specially a 2030s machine)
Ah, now that's the question. Robots are evolving much more quickly than humans. What will the machines be able to do in 2030?
(will they need us at all? for anything?)
The money you spend on a Mars orbit mission sets you up for landing on Mars by developing and testing a critical portion of the technology, the part that gets humans to Mars orbit and back.
Taking the first step gets you one step closer to Mars.
If you waited to take you first step until you were ready to run a marathon, you'd never stand up at all.
A system that tracks the whereabouts of every American (or at least, every one with a car), and saves the data for five years...
This story needs the tag "what could possibly go wrong"?
There are a lot of different pieces required to go to Mars, land, and return. Some of these, like a habitat that humans can live in for the required transit to Mars and back, we have, or at least, we can make with only small modifications to what has been developed (the Space Station). Some of them, like landers and habitats and space suits for use on the Martian surface, we don't have. Every one of these pieces is a potential bottleneck for a human mission.
What you are basically saying is, we should delay Mars exploration with humans until we have all the pieces developed. The Planetary Society is saying, no, let's not delay, let's do a mission we can do now
The longest usage we have gotten out of a space suit on the moon is three eight-hour walks. The report from the Apollo missions was that the suits were trashed by that point (lunar dust is very abrasive)-- they would not have been usable for another use. Mars dust is not as abrasive as lunar dust, but it is much finer. A different problem. Do you want to send humans to Mars if you then have to tell them "oh, by the way, you'll be on the surface for 500 days, but you can only go outside three times. After that we're not sure your suits will still hold pressure, so stay inside."
Of course, we can develop and test suits for Mars. Developing and testing is something we're good at. But there are a hundred pieces that have to be developed and tested, and only so much budget.
So the question is, do we want to delay, until all the parts for landing and habitation and launching back from Mars have been developed and tested? Or do we go now, doing what we can with what we can do?
Really? You go all the damn way to Mars and then stay in the car when you get there?
Because going to the surface, living on the surface, and launching off the surface is really hard, and really expensive, and requires a lot of engineering and solving a lot of problems that we haven't yet solved. We don't know how to land something on Mars that's as large as a human habitat. This will take some work. Landing on Mars is going to be a very expensive mission.
But, on the other hand, if we did send people to orbit Mars without landing... that might be a very powerful incentive to try to get that technology made and actually land on the next mission.