Re:We know other life exists
on
Lonely Planets
·
· Score: 1
The Drake Equation for determining if life exists elsewhere......is nothing more than a cute party conversation topic. It's fun to talk about but it means nothing, since we have no F'ING idea whatsoever what the values in it should be.
I swear, you can't say SETI and blink without someone saying "Drake equation."
Re:We know other life exists
on
Lonely Planets
·
· Score: 1
That's a nice equation. Unfortunately it's nearly complete guesswork.
I agree with the premise that there are a nearly infinite number of chances for life to start in the universe.
But the Drake equation is full of so many completely wild-assed guesses that it's only useful as a party conversation topic.
fl and fi are COMPLETE unknowns.
Making up an equation is all well and good, but it's not the same as "calculating the odds" when you can't put any kind of reasonable numbers in the equation.
I dunno, what did you do when you couldn't get 5.25" floppies anymore?
DVD+/- R/W drives are now WELL under $100 on sale pretty much every week, somewhere.
Both formats are readable in (nearly? all?) new drives.
What does it MATTER if one format dies. If you picked wrong, you're out the $50 it'll cost you to buy a new writer. Those with dual-format writers are out squat. You use up the rest of your media and move on. You'll still be able to read all your old stuff.
Sheesh. This is like people in the 70's wondering "But whatever will I DO whan I can't get leaded gasoline anymore?" You buy a new car, genius. The old model will be a POS by then anyway. There are a few people with nice museum pieces that need to take special care but for 99+% of the population it's a non-issue.
I have friends who have their own domains, and as an experiment, have set up email addresses and never used them for anything. They still get spammed. Spammers are using brute force and dictionary database generation.
You might be OK if you made your main email address something like a838Die8D8tf89s9disolg88t222@yourdomain.com. But nobody's ever going to email you, either.
Umm, wasn't this a commercial product a couple of years ago? That one allowed anyone to attach comments to a website, and they'd pop up when other people, running the same software, hit the website.
Kudos to the Romanian guys, though, if they can take some moldy old software, put in stealth install and remove the open database part, and get this yahoo to shovel out cash for it.
Lights left on at night in high rise buildings. Kills birds in the hundreds of thousands every year.
In addition, light pollution from coastal cities screws up nesting and migration patterns for all manner of birds and sea life.
And, has anyone done a study how many birds are killed by pollution from coal plants? It's not so easy, since they don't fall in a nice pile next to the plant.
Most people know not to try to use the "opt out" link in normal spam. But I bet most of them would go ahead and try to use it if they got a political spam, assuming either they'd honor it or ignore it.
So if I were a spammer (uck), I'd spend some time formatting a very official looking letter from some national committee with a nice "opt-out" link that would go straight into my "known good" database.
It'd be a dirt-cheap database-vetting move, and probably pretty effective.
Hell, it might even make it past a lot of spam filters; bayesians at least are probably so tuned to BS base64 and HTML-confused stuff that a plainly formatted mail might just sail right through.
Thanks, you saved me the trouble of getting all pedantic on the article.
BTW I didn't think it was combustion per se, but the fact that the energy is liberated within the device. If you carry raw fuel into a device and it turns the fuel into mechanical energy, then it's an engine. If you convert the raw fuel into an intermediate energy transmission media, conduct that into a device, and it converts that energy into mechanical energy, then it's a motor.
Therefore, the things you hook to boilers are steam MOTORS. The thing that runs a battery-powered toy car is a motor.
Perhaps currently the only engines are internal cumbustion, but you could imagine some other kind of engine; perhaps a device that could directly convert particles emitted from decaying radioactive material into motion would be an engine.
So am I. Apparently you don't know much about astrophotography imagers. All imaging chips are subject to thermal noise no matter what range they're trying to image. With a CCD or CMOS imaging chip at room temperature, you can't do much beyond 60 seconds exposure, and even that's getting pretty noisy. You need 5 minutes or more to image most astronomy stuff very well. At 5 minutes, a room temperature imaging chip will have been totally saturated by noise; all the electron wells will be totally emptied by thermal activity and there won't be any signal left; not even dark frame subtraction will do you any good.
In order to combat this, astronomy CCD cameras have built-in refrigeration to get the chips down to the -10*F range, optimally. At that point you can start to get decent long exposures. You still have noise but it's possible to subtract it out at that point by taking a dark frame.
I like On-Star for when my "check engine" light comes on, I press the button, they run a remote diagnostic on my engine's computer, and can tell me how serious the problem is and can call me a tow truck if needed.
Uh huh. So, the computer in EVERY car has a ton of diagnostic info in it, but the manufacturers have done work to keep you from getting that information out of the computer that you bought. Then you pay them a subscription fee to let them read the info out of the computer that you bought and speak it to you. Great.
It would cost the companies approximately ZERO DOLLARS AND ZERO CENTS to put in a mode to flash out trouble codes on a dash light. The trouble codes are all 4 digit codes. My 89 ford could do this; drop a paper clip across two wires under the hood, power up, the check engine light flashes the error codes. But nobody does this anymore.
They don't want you diagnosing the trouble, they want you to go to the dealer, or at least, to a mechanic that they hope bought a scanner that included some kickback to the manufacturer.
Admittedly, modern cars have a TON of info stored in their computers, and it wouldn't make sense to try to blink all that out on a light, but the major trouble codes could easily be done.
You can just go to the auto parts store and borrow their scanner; the local stores have loaner units. But it's irritating that they don't just give you the codes in the first place.
It's an amature astronomers dream come true(too much equipment to carry around besides the scope).
I don't think so, considering that in order to reach the sensitivity of a well-trained human eye with current astronomy cameras, you need both long exposures and ideally electrically-cooled imaging chips.
If you think you can hold your eye rock-steady for 30+ seconds per exposure, while the peltier cooler in your eye is dumping several watts of heat into your bloodstream trying to cool the imaging chip to reduce the thermal noise, then go ahead.
I've listened to/read several interviews with people who have received the latest prosthetics. While many of them are happy with them, I've not heard one of them say it was a good trade; they'd all rather have their original equipment.
I don't think so: The DC-DC board presents at one end a 12V 4.5A input, and at the other an ATX power connector and power for 3-4 peripherals (in my case, only one is used to power an IDE-CF adapter)
The only great problem I have is with 12V 5A power supplies - they're damn near impossible to find! (guys at Dick Smith say, "you mean.5 amps" and I sigh.)
This seems pretty clear to me; the DC-DC needs a 4.5A input, and he's looking for a 5 amp power supply to feed into it. The usual boneheads at a store wouldn't have much experience with a 5 amp, but plenty with a 500 milliamp supply (largish wall-wart would do that and be pretty common).
In Ann Arbor, MI, the recycling center has a dropoff spot for computers. I'm sad they have a "no scavenging" sign there, whenever I go there there's a mountain of machines, monitors, and laser printers on the heap. But it's a college town, if they let people pick it they'd have husks with no RAM/etc. I don't know what they do with them but at least as dropped off they could send them to a refitter that could use the RAM, drives, etc to build machines for the 3rd world, etc. Some machines may even be fast enough to give to local schools; businesses are starting to throw away machines close to 1GHz. Our company has been throwing away older enterprise-class laser printers like 5Si's even if they have not been having maintenance problems; a school could make good use of those. Hell, I wouldn't mind one except it'd take up half my computer area.
The only great problem I have is with 12V 5A power supplies - they're damn near impossible to find!
What are you talking about, they're easy to find! Go to any store that sells outdoors stuff, K-Mart would be fine, and pick up one of the power supplies used for powering electric coolers. They're pretty high efficiency 12VDC power supplies and can supply about 5+ amps.
If that doesn't work, try here: http://www.allelectronics.com/cgi-bin/categ ory.cgi ?category=480&item=PS-1244&type=store 12V 6A switching power supply, $26. I've bought a couple of them and they work fine.
I should mention that the 1200 baud modem was a late addition. The first modem was a 300 baud "dumb" modem from radio shack. I made it somewhat smart by adding the ability to detect a ring over the "Ring Indicator" line on the RS232 cable, and pick up and hang up the phone by raising/lowering the DTR line. Dialling was done by pulsing that line. This all had to be handled in software, of course.
My first machine was a TRS-80 model I, level II ROM, 4K, expanded to 16K with a 3rd party chip set. Eventually got the full kit, including to 85K floppy drives ($350 each, at dealer cost).
After a while I got going on customization. Eventually I had added lowercase, inverse video, and a built-in speaker/amp. Then I went nuts and switched to NEWDOS-80 (3rd party DOS). Then after adding a 3rd party double-density controller (a daughterboard that plugged into the 40 pin DIP socket vacated by pulling out the original controller) I was able to add a 360K (IBM-PC style) DSDD floppy drive. Then I put in 256K of bank-switched RAM and wrote my own drivers for it. This was used to cache messages in RAM for the BBS that I was running at the time. I was running a Prometheus Promodem; 1200 baud and it only cost me about $280.
All told I had about $2500 into it, and the specs were:
It was dedicated to being a BBS by then, but I had a TRS-80 model 4 to use for actual work.
My first printer was an ASR-33 teletype interfaced to the TRS-80 via the cassette port with an interface and power supply I built, and drivers I wrote hand coded in machine code. Practically shook the floor.
Maybe it's just the people I work with, but EVERYONE that I know will cringe whenever they look at code they wrote more than a few years ago. In fact, in a way saying that the code you wrote 10 years ago is great is to admit that you haven't learned anything in 10 years. Not something to be proud of. OK, for trivial stuff like tolower() maybe you would write it the same way as 10 years ago, but for nontrivial stuff, you should be able to do it better the more you learn.
Some of the most horrendous code I've written was when I was trying to be "cute." Sure, it's clever, but it's also unmaintainable, and difficult to see if it IS flawed. I think you have to spend a number of years as a programmer and suffer the curse of having to maintain the code you wrote years ago before you start writing really good stuff.
Sorry, the example they showed looked exactly like the thread view in OTHER mailers I've used.
After reading the first comment, I went into Outlook on my work machine (running Outlook 2000) and turned on what call a "conversation" view. I can safely say it's the most unusable thing I've ever seen anyone try to pass off as a "feature." What Outlook has isn't something I'd have even left in a released piece of software, personally. It's NOT what I would call a thread view.
Every mail reader I've used for several years will display messages like that. Admittedly, they've added more dancing clowns, but the view looks the same as in other readers. Looks to me like they're just fixing stuff that they never got around to implementing in Outlook in the first place. This is one of the reasons that I've always thought Outlook sucked so bad. If they put in thread view, it'll suck a little less bad.
These movies were paid for by NASA, which mean they were paid for by me, and all us taxpayers. How come they're in DRM'd formats? Even if they want to use WMV, fine, but give me an unprotected download link.
In the past I've borrowed the VHS from a NASA ambassador and encoded it myself, but why should I have to?
Yeah, but how many cubic inches to a pint? Gallon? How many slugs per pound at sea level on earth?
In SI, everything's a multiple of 10. I'm US born and raised, and the failure to convert to SI still bugs the hell out of me. I don't know why anyone would do work, particularly scientific work, in the half-assed imperial system. I used to hate it when the physics profs in college would insist that we work some problems in imperial units; what a pain in the ass.
one region of Martian terrain will be just as interesting as any other region
Uhh, no. I went to a talk a few months ago by a planetary scientist where she talked about site selection. There was a LOT of argument about it. Mission parameters (direct-to-Mars crash landing mode) limited touchdown sites to somewhere around the equator, but there was still a lot of choice.
The two sites look very interesting. One is a plain where there appears to be a lot of hematite, which we believe is formed primarily by iron in water. If there's really a bunch of it there, that indicates a hell of a lot of water in the past.
The other area is in a crater where the wall has been breached, it looks like by a river, and a whole lot of debris has been washed into the crater. This means that a hell of a lot of material from a wide area will have already been washed into the area for us to look at without having to travel very far.
All in all, I expect a really fun time the next few months.
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The Drake Equation for determining if life exists elsewhere... ...is nothing more than a cute party conversation topic. It's fun to talk about but it means nothing, since we have no F'ING idea whatsoever what the values in it should be.
I swear, you can't say SETI and blink without someone saying "Drake equation."
That's a nice equation. Unfortunately it's nearly complete guesswork.
I agree with the premise that there are a nearly infinite number of chances for life to start in the universe.
But the Drake equation is full of so many completely wild-assed guesses that it's only useful as a party conversation topic.
fl and fi are COMPLETE unknowns.
Making up an equation is all well and good, but it's not the same as "calculating the odds" when you can't put any kind of reasonable numbers in the equation.
There is a Mars sample return mission getting ready. They haven't done it yet because it's HARD.
I dunno, what did you do when you couldn't get 5.25" floppies anymore?
DVD+/- R/W drives are now WELL under $100 on sale pretty much every week, somewhere.
Both formats are readable in (nearly? all?) new drives.
What does it MATTER if one format dies. If you picked wrong, you're out the $50 it'll cost you to buy a new writer. Those with dual-format writers are out squat. You use up the rest of your media and move on. You'll still be able to read all your old stuff.
Sheesh. This is like people in the 70's wondering "But whatever will I DO whan I can't get leaded gasoline anymore?" You buy a new car, genius. The old model will be a POS by then anyway. There are a few people with nice museum pieces that need to take special care but for 99+% of the population it's a non-issue.
I have friends who have their own domains, and as an experiment, have set up email addresses and never used them for anything. They still get spammed. Spammers are using brute force and dictionary database generation.
You might be OK if you made your main email address something like a838Die8D8tf89s9disolg88t222@yourdomain.com. But nobody's ever going to email you, either.
Umm, wasn't this a commercial product a couple of years ago? That one allowed anyone to attach comments to a website, and they'd pop up when other people, running the same software, hit the website.
Kudos to the Romanian guys, though, if they can take some moldy old software, put in stealth install and remove the open database part, and get this yahoo to shovel out cash for it.
Well, OK, not kudos, but you know...
Lights left on at night in high rise buildings. Kills birds in the hundreds of thousands every year.
In addition, light pollution from coastal cities screws up nesting and migration patterns for all manner of birds and sea life.
And, has anyone done a study how many birds are killed by pollution from coal plants? It's not so easy, since they don't fall in a nice pile next to the plant.
"everything you 'know' is wrong" :-)
Please see: Snopes.com
Most people know not to try to use the "opt out" link in normal spam. But I bet most of them would go ahead and try to use it if they got a political spam, assuming either they'd honor it or ignore it.
So if I were a spammer (uck), I'd spend some time formatting a very official looking letter from some national committee with a nice "opt-out" link that would go straight into my "known good" database.
It'd be a dirt-cheap database-vetting move, and probably pretty effective.
Hell, it might even make it past a lot of spam filters; bayesians at least are probably so tuned to BS base64 and HTML-confused stuff that a plainly formatted mail might just sail right through.
Thanks, you saved me the trouble of getting all pedantic on the article.
BTW I didn't think it was combustion per se, but the fact that the energy is liberated within the device. If you carry raw fuel into a device and it turns the fuel into mechanical energy, then it's an engine. If you convert the raw fuel into an intermediate energy transmission media, conduct that into a device, and it converts that energy into mechanical energy, then it's a motor.
Therefore, the things you hook to boilers are steam MOTORS. The thing that runs a battery-powered toy car is a motor.
Perhaps currently the only engines are internal cumbustion, but you could imagine some other kind of engine; perhaps a device that could directly convert particles emitted from decaying radioactive material into motion would be an engine.
So am I. Apparently you don't know much about astrophotography imagers. All imaging chips are subject to thermal noise no matter what range they're trying to image. With a CCD or CMOS imaging chip at room temperature, you can't do much beyond 60 seconds exposure, and even that's getting pretty noisy. You need 5 minutes or more to image most astronomy stuff very well. At 5 minutes, a room temperature imaging chip will have been totally saturated by noise; all the electron wells will be totally emptied by thermal activity and there won't be any signal left; not even dark frame subtraction will do you any good.
In order to combat this, astronomy CCD cameras have built-in refrigeration to get the chips down to the -10*F range, optimally. At that point you can start to get decent long exposures. You still have noise but it's possible to subtract it out at that point by taking a dark frame.
And *I* am talking about visible light as well.
I like On-Star for when my "check engine" light comes on, I press the button, they run a remote diagnostic on my engine's computer, and can tell me how serious the problem is and can call me a tow truck if needed.
Uh huh. So, the computer in EVERY car has a ton of diagnostic info in it, but the manufacturers have done work to keep you from getting that information out of the computer that you bought. Then you pay them a subscription fee to let them read the info out of the computer that you bought and speak it to you. Great.
It would cost the companies approximately ZERO DOLLARS AND ZERO CENTS to put in a mode to flash out trouble codes on a dash light. The trouble codes are all 4 digit codes. My 89 ford could do this; drop a paper clip across two wires under the hood, power up, the check engine light flashes the error codes. But nobody does this anymore.
They don't want you diagnosing the trouble, they want you to go to the dealer, or at least, to a mechanic that they hope bought a scanner that included some kickback to the manufacturer.
Admittedly, modern cars have a TON of info stored in their computers, and it wouldn't make sense to try to blink all that out on a light, but the major trouble codes could easily be done.
You can just go to the auto parts store and borrow their scanner; the local stores have loaner units. But it's irritating that they don't just give you the codes in the first place.
The security guys can make lame-assed jokes. Try joking with them and see if you aren't up against a wall damn pronto. That's pretty unprofessional.
It's an amature astronomers dream come true(too much equipment to carry around besides the scope).
I don't think so, considering that in order to reach the sensitivity of a well-trained human eye with current astronomy cameras, you need both long exposures and ideally electrically-cooled imaging chips.
If you think you can hold your eye rock-steady for 30+ seconds per exposure, while the peltier cooler in your eye is dumping several watts of heat into your bloodstream trying to cool the imaging chip to reduce the thermal noise, then go ahead.
I've listened to/read several interviews with people who have received the latest prosthetics. While many of them are happy with them, I've not heard one of them say it was a good trade; they'd all rather have their original equipment.
I don't think so:
.5 amps" and I sigh.)
The DC-DC board presents at one end a 12V 4.5A input, and at the other an ATX power connector and power for 3-4 peripherals (in my case, only one is used to power an IDE-CF adapter)
The only great problem I have is with 12V 5A power supplies - they're damn near impossible to find! (guys at Dick Smith say, "you mean
This seems pretty clear to me; the DC-DC needs a 4.5A input, and he's looking for a 5 amp power supply to feed into it. The usual boneheads at a store wouldn't have much experience with a 5 amp, but plenty with a 500 milliamp supply (largish wall-wart would do that and be pretty common).
In Ann Arbor, MI, the recycling center has a dropoff spot for computers. I'm sad they have a "no scavenging" sign there, whenever I go there there's a mountain of machines, monitors, and laser printers on the heap. But it's a college town, if they let people pick it they'd have husks with no RAM/etc. I don't know what they do with them but at least as dropped off they could send them to a refitter that could use the RAM, drives, etc to build machines for the 3rd world, etc. Some machines may even be fast enough to give to local schools; businesses are starting to throw away machines close to 1GHz. Our company has been throwing away older enterprise-class laser printers like 5Si's even if they have not been having maintenance problems; a school could make good use of those. Hell, I wouldn't mind one except it'd take up half my computer area.
The only great problem I have is with 12V 5A power supplies - they're damn near impossible to find!
g ory.cgi ?category=480&item=PS-1244&type=store
What are you talking about, they're easy to find! Go to any store that sells outdoors stuff, K-Mart would be fine, and pick up one of the power supplies used for powering electric coolers. They're pretty high efficiency 12VDC power supplies and can supply about 5+ amps.
If that doesn't work, try here:
http://www.allelectronics.com/cgi-bin/cate
12V 6A switching power supply, $26. I've bought a couple of them and they work fine.
I should mention that the 1200 baud modem was a late addition. The first modem was a 300 baud "dumb" modem from radio shack. I made it somewhat smart by adding the ability to detect a ring over the "Ring Indicator" line on the RS232 cable, and pick up and hang up the phone by raising/lowering the DTR line. Dialling was done by pulsing that line. This all had to be handled in software, of course.
My first machine was a TRS-80 model I, level II ROM, 4K, expanded to 16K with a 3rd party chip set. Eventually got the full kit, including to 85K floppy drives ($350 each, at dealer cost).
After a while I got going on customization. Eventually I had added lowercase, inverse video, and a built-in speaker/amp. Then I went nuts and switched to NEWDOS-80 (3rd party DOS). Then after adding a 3rd party double-density controller (a daughterboard that plugged into the 40 pin DIP socket vacated by pulling out the original controller) I was able to add a 360K (IBM-PC style) DSDD floppy drive. Then I put in 256K of bank-switched RAM and wrote my own drivers for it. This was used to cache messages in RAM for the BBS that I was running at the time. I was running a Prometheus Promodem; 1200 baud and it only cost me about $280.
All told I had about $2500 into it, and the specs were:
- Z80 at 4 MHz (overclocked)
- 48+256K (not meg) RAM
- 1x 85K + 1x 360K floppy drive
- 64x16 b/w text display and/or 128x48 block graphics.
It was dedicated to being a BBS by then, but I had a TRS-80 model 4 to use for actual work.
My first printer was an ASR-33 teletype interfaced to the TRS-80 via the cassette port with an interface and power supply I built, and drivers I wrote hand coded in machine code. Practically shook the floor.
Maybe it's just the people I work with, but EVERYONE that I know will cringe whenever they look at code they wrote more than a few years ago.
In fact, in a way saying that the code you wrote 10 years ago is great is to admit that you haven't learned anything in 10 years. Not something to be proud of.
OK, for trivial stuff like tolower() maybe you would write it the same way as 10 years ago, but for nontrivial stuff, you should be able to do it better the more you learn.
Some of the most horrendous code I've written was when I was trying to be "cute." Sure, it's clever, but it's also unmaintainable, and difficult to see if it IS flawed. I think you have to spend a number of years as a programmer and suffer the curse of having to maintain the code you wrote years ago before you start writing really good stuff.
Sorry, the example they showed looked exactly like the thread view in OTHER mailers I've used.
After reading the first comment, I went into Outlook on my work machine (running Outlook 2000) and turned on what call a "conversation" view. I can safely say it's the most unusable thing I've ever seen anyone try to pass off as a "feature." What Outlook has isn't something I'd have even left in a released piece of software, personally. It's NOT what I would call a thread view.
Every mail reader I've used for several years will display messages like that. Admittedly, they've added more dancing clowns, but the view looks the same as in other readers.
Looks to me like they're just fixing stuff that they never got around to implementing in Outlook in the first place. This is one of the reasons that I've always thought Outlook sucked so bad. If they put in thread view, it'll suck a little less bad.
These movies were paid for by NASA, which mean they were paid for by me, and all us taxpayers. How come they're in DRM'd formats? Even if they want to use WMV, fine, but give me an unprotected download link.
In the past I've borrowed the VHS from a NASA ambassador and encoded it myself, but why should I have to?
Yeah, but how many cubic inches to a pint? Gallon? How many slugs per pound at sea level on earth?
In SI, everything's a multiple of 10. I'm US born and raised, and the failure to convert to SI still bugs the hell out of me. I don't know why anyone would do work, particularly scientific work, in the half-assed imperial system. I used to hate it when the physics profs in college would insist that we work some problems in imperial units; what a pain in the ass.
one region of Martian terrain will be just as interesting as any other region
Uhh, no. I went to a talk a few months ago by a planetary scientist where she talked about site selection. There was a LOT of argument about it. Mission parameters (direct-to-Mars crash landing mode) limited touchdown sites to somewhere around the equator, but there was still a lot of choice.
The two sites look very interesting. One is a plain where there appears to be a lot of hematite, which we believe is formed primarily by iron in water. If there's really a bunch of it there, that indicates a hell of a lot of water in the past.
The other area is in a crater where the wall has been breached, it looks like by a river, and a whole lot of debris has been washed into the crater. This means that a hell of a lot of material from a wide area will have already been washed into the area for us to look at without having to travel very far.
All in all, I expect a really fun time the next few months.