Because flu viruses are particularly prone to spread (especially if it hangs around until fall and winter), and if it spreads like a normal flu in a normal season, and the high fatality rate keep up, and the , then it could be devastating.
Obviously, there are a lot of ifs in that statement. I'd guess that the fatality rate is partially inflated due to poor conditions in Mexico, uncertainties in diagnoses, and other factors; even 1% is pretty scary though. Also, given the time of year, I'd imagine we'll have a good handle on it by the time it could get serious.
Given all of that, the government response of tracking it, stockpiling anti-virals, and other efforts make perfect sense. All the press conferences have been pretty clear on the point that it sounds worse than it is. If the publicity makes people wash their hands more and other common-sense methods to prevent spread, so much the better.
The only worrying part is the pork-export issues (fears which are completely unfounded from what I can tell), and general commerce limits during an already fragile economic situation. As far as the overwhelming news coverage... it could be worse, we could be hearing endless discussions of the first (arbitrary-time-period) of Obama's presidency instead. Its the news, pick and choose what you want to read.
While our intelligence, strength, speed, agility, resistance to disease and other useful traits are certainly a product of natural selection, it seems that the human ability for compassion, empathy and community is just as important an evolutionary trait.
Those with childhood diseases, or severe allergies, or even particularly bad near-sightedness can contribute a lot to society; in fact they often contribute more intellectually since their troubles prevent them from developing more physical skills. The elderly, while no longer providing any physical labor are valuable for their experience and knowledge. A healthy sense of responsible communal living allows all of the specialization and development that have given humans an evolutionary advantage. While these developed at a very local scale, that doesn't mean that the same values don't apply at a larger global scale. In other words, our compassion and humanity make us better adapted and we should make use of them.
That, and of course that the scariest thing about this particular flu strain is that it hits the young, strong, and adapted.
We don't really know the carrying capacity of the Earth, and at any rate allowing billions to die isn't a valid solution by any reasonable moral standard.
Continued growth with the current trends is the real problem, but even then there are much more humane solutions than allowing the horrors of history to continue to work their course. Raising the level of development in a region tends to cause a decrease in the birthrate, so much so that Europe is having the opposite problem, so continued efforts to develop poorer states (and, coincidentally, mitigate these kinds of pandemics) is the best way to keep populations under control.
It's because as Americans we have a knee-jerk reaction to fear anything that has government-controlled or socialist in the name. While I'd agree that all-out socialism isn't for us: we are a very large, diverse and divided country with a history of strong personal independence and small-government leanings, which I think is well suited to the Federalized system we're supposed to have.
However, in this case, its ridiculous, because the government-granted monopolies or duopolies don't even have to make a show of trying to provide the best service for the lowest cost, as a truly competitive company would, or doing their best for the people, as a government-run service would. Instead, we're stuck with two companies who don't even try to hide that they're ripping us off to benefit their shareholders.
Personally, the solution I'd prefer is to make the fiber and copper municipal or state property, since its infrastructure just as much as roads or sewers, and have it leased out to whichever companies seek it. Unfortunately some talking head would then talk about how we're "nationalizing" the lines, and we've got anti-socialist hysteria all over again.
No, but there is a passage that explicitly states "go forth and multiply," which can be interpreted without much stretching as "attempting not to have children is bad".
Of course, reinterpreting it in in terms of the limited carrying capacity of the planet and what is good for the survival of the human race as a whole, it doesn't seem like the best idea, but its not like its unreasonable to see where it comes from.
I'm guessing you're a Windows user. Flash Player for OS X or Linux tends to be much slower. I can be running on modern processors with plenty of memory, and while it doesn't usually stutter or skip (which is usually attributable to bad internet), it does use a lot of processor, heating the machine incredibly.
Of course, if you're designing a machine specifically to run flash, I'm guessing you can optimize it for Flash and not have the same issues.
In order to get really really fast ships, with some kind of propulsion that could get you up to 0.9 c. Typical rocket propulsion hits a law of diminishing returns limit at around 0.35 c... based on that, I tend to see very high subluminal speeds as not much different on the technological scale as the various types of superluminal travel. That is we can see ways where you can do it without breaking the laws of physics, but any actual, practical technology to do it is as yet unimaginable.
Actually, as I'm writing this, I'm thinking a light drive, where your propellant is photons may be capable of doing it (since you don't have to carry propellant), but it would require such huge power levels, you run into new technological hurdles. Admittedly, that is a much simpler than folding space-time into bubbles, but I wouldn't be surprised if there is a severely limiting factor there as well.
Of course, there's still plenty of interesting stuff to be done within the solar system. All that requires is long-term habitat design, radiation protection, very-low-loss recyclables, space-based fission reactors, and cheap orbital access. You know, easy stuff.
Eh, we're at the level of technology where we can stop a wide variety of Earth impactors, and where we're pretty good at tracking them now. Given another 20 years of development, I wouldn't be surprised if it becomes routine to move potential impactors into non-threatening orbits.
So as long as we maintain this level of technology, an assumption I'd say this whole argument hinges on, "if" is a more appropriate word. Of course, in the long-term, it's not hard to imagine a situation where we do lose that capability, so I'd still say its important to create sustainable off-world settlements.
Simple. If it takes longer than ~8 years to get benefits from an expensive project, it becomes much harder to get funding, at least in the US. Also, if development takes more than 8 years on something high-profile and expensive, there's a good chance you lose funding at the start of a new administration. Doing this would take longer to even get going. I'd venture a guess that in other countries there are similar election-cycle limited periods for project funding. In other words, we'd need a completely new structure for the way we conduct this kind of business, something thats better able to (forgive the phrase) stay the course as well as better able to see and understand very long term benefits.
Also, we have no data on maintaining systems that would last that long autonomously, so while you could theoretically make something capable of getting there and braking into orbit, its unlikely you could build it to have a reasonable expectation of success. That of course is a technical problem, so solutions are out there; the political problems are the ones that'll kill you.
Hmmm, if you smoothed out the data so that it was say, averaged over an hour, and force it to be continuous, could you get something going then. It wouldn't solve the stuck at a stoplight with no-one coming issue, but it could allow a smaller town to get a well-optimized system that adapts to changing patterns without having to have as many good traffic engineers on hand.
Anyway, I could be totally wrong. Most of my work is in vehicle control, so I tend to try and force every problem to fit within my toolbox.
While you're right that the sensor model is much easier than the parent post made it, I can think of a number of ways to improve the traffic flow, at least in poorly optimized places.
Even open-loop, simply timing them well can help a lot. Take for instance, driving home in a typical commuter fashion, where most of the traffic is going the same direction as you are. It makes sense to sequence the lights so that a person driving at the speed limit who starts when one light turns green will be able to pass the next few lights without having to stop. I realize a lot of places do this, but a lot of others don't.
A bit of a further-out solution would be to take that sensor, and generate an optimal control problem to maximize flow. Not a trivial problem, but I bet you could get something interesting working. Certainly not a full-on AI problem, just parameterize the flow density and flow rate and define a decent model and cost function, and run it through an NLP solver.
I'm pretty sure it means reducing the amount of net carbon you add to the climate system. Anything you breathe out or decay into is already in the system, with the natural balance of plant respiration to keep the overall levels even. The problem is when you release carbon thats been sequestered in fossil fuels for millions of years; thus the phrase 'Carbon Neutral'.
It's also the reason why biofuels make sense, even if the particular blend isn't much cleaner than a fossil fuel-based product, the biomass that goes into making it sequestered that carbon before re-releasing it, keeping the atmospheric balance at the level we're used to.
The music industry only gave Amazon and others permission to sell DRM-free products in order to break the hold Apple had on the download music business. For this reason, (as I've described other times here), I can't help but think that the best way to get a DRM-free e-book market is for Amazon to get a strong enough position, and for the marketshare compared to paper books to be significant enough, so that the publishers decide they have to make others competitive.
Of course, given my logic, the best way to support a DRM-free book market is to buy the Kindle and make it popular. Of course, I'd also guess it's probably already going that direction anyway, so if you wait a while it'll happen.
Actually, to extend on your analogy, he's no longer allowed to fill it up with gas from a particular company. He's free to get content from other places.
I'll grant you the state of the e-book market is such that its much more limiting in this case... but thats a larger problem that I don't think anyone has a good way to fix short of buying out publishers and changing their policies.
Unfortunately (not saying you're wrong), forcing the DRM issue by not purchasing things doesn't have a lot of leverage at this point. Given Amazon's music store I'd venture a guess that they'd prefer to go without DRM if the publishers let them. The publishers have little incentive to eliminate DRM even if no one buys DRM'd e-books, because to them it just says there's no market. The only way a large-scale boycott would work is if people at large stopped buying paper copies as well.
I think the best bet is for something similar to what happened in music to happen: Amazon or Sony (less likely) takes such a commanding lead that the publishers get scared of one company totally dominating their distribution, at which point DRM-free becomes the only way for them to reduce the power of Amazon on the market. Unfortunately I'm not sure theres much of a way for consumer choices to push this outcome, except for maybe supporting Amazon in dominating the market, which has an Orwellian quality I wouldn't want to advocate.
I'd also say that I've actually been very happy with Amazon's customer service regarding the Kindle, to the point where they even replaced a broken screen that really was my fault.
Ah, there's still a lot of FUD going around on that. You can actually plug the Kindle into a USB port and it mounts just like any other flash drive, and you can load readable formats like.mobi and.txt with no interaction with Amazon. For PDF files you'd be out of luck, but as yet, the PDF conversion was never good enough for use anyway, in my opinion.
His Kindle still works too, he just couldn't buy new things from. The only real loss is at most a month's worth of subscription. Certainly not the friendliest of policies, but its quite similar to losing a CostCo membership, or being banned from going into Home Depot.
He would still be free to find non-drm third party content, whether paid or free, and load them on his own. Nothing in the summary says it will brick the device.
This is being used for aerobraking and aerocapture, not entry/re-entry. The idea is that it flys through the upper reaches of the atmosphere to slow it down and send it into some kind of closed orbit about the target body. Not nearly as much of a heating issue, particularly if you're talking about Mars which has a much less dense atmosphere.
No real reason to use it for re-entry since a Viking-style Mach-2 chute, or one of the new-fangled Mach-3 chutes will do the job already.
There are still limits on the efficiencies inherent to the system (say for instance the Diesel Cycle) that are much easier to deal with at a power-plant than on a vehicle-based ICE. A combustion process is going to be more efficient if you can run it at higher temperatures, and dump that energy into a very low temperature heat sink, thinks which are much easier to do at larger scales.
It's certainly true that running the engine at constant load can improve efficiency, since in a hybrid you size the engine to handle cruise loads rather than max acceleration loads. However, they still can't reach the efficiencies of a properly designed power plant. Gas turbines, which really do work much better at their design load, are over-all less efficient and are used primarily for their power-to-weight advantages.
The main advantage of the on-board ICE is that it fits well with our already established infrastructure. With a hybrid on a long trip its very easy to stop for 5 or 10 minutes and refuel, rather than having to recharge a battery for a long time every 50 miles. Until a good electrical storage medium such as hydrogen, or very fast charging, high-capacity batteries are available, we'll be stuck with ICEs for any non-commuter vehicle.
While I agree with the analysis of Star Trek v. Star Wars, I'd argue BSG touches a lot of 'true sci-fi' topics, particularly the lines between machine and sentience, and the dangers associated with creating more and more intelligent machines.
Also I'd say its more than just a space opera because it explores the practical implications of multi-world society, and seems much more realistic than Star Wars in terms of social commentary and realism... although I realize that doesn't necessarily push it more into sci-fi rather than just being generally more substantial.
In my department, what I find isn't so much that the 3.9-4.0 types are harder to work with, but more that they're just plain incompetent. A smart person who's figuring out whats going on and learning the material in such a way that they actually know it, rather than memorizing it, usually ends up making a 3.5-3.7.. these are the kind of people who make good 'paper airplane' designers (I'm in aerospace). It also seems that the best practical engineers, those who have an instinctual understanding of how things are actually going to go together, often make only decent grades (~3.0).
Of course this may just be the way our department grades things, with some professors pushing memorizing facts rather than real understanding on exams. And of course these are all generalizations. But I would say that a company that takes GPAs with a grain of salt like that is probably a pretty good place to work. It seems that involvement in projects and practical experience along with decent classwork would be the best indicator of success.
Thank you. Just to add a few things to the non-backwoods-ness of Texas. Two major aerospace industry hubs in Houston and Dallas. One of the largest cultural festivals in Austin at South by Southwest. A large variety of different historical cultures, including Hispanics in the south, German and Czech settlers in central Texas and the hill country, and midwestern and southern US traditions. I'd consider "Texas Country" music a significant cultural contribution, even though its not really my taste; its quite different from (and better than) Nashville-style country.
The parent also completely ignores the agricultural background of Texas, which goes far beyond just farmers. Texas institutions are world leaders in terms of animal science and agricultural knowledge and research. TAMU has helped lead the way in animal cloning research, and the Vet school is one of the best in the country.
And, even in cases when correlation is not causation, there's still usually pertinent information.
Take, for instance, the classic case of pirates and global warming. Clearly, any logical person can see that a lack of piracy has no direct effect on releasing greenhouse gases. However, if one knew a lot about pirates, and nothing about global warming you could figure some of it out. Caribbean piracy was largely motivated by getting around the mercantilist policies of the European powers. However, the industrial revolution began ~1800, and this put an end to mercantilism, to be replaced by rampant laissez-faire capitalism, and thus the economic basis for Caribbean piracy ended (other factors like recent revolutions helped too).
You, as a piracy expert, know this, and after researching the many causes you hit upon the unfortunate fact that all of the factories and energy production involved in the industrial revolution tend to release lots of nasty stuff, and with enough research you learn that releasing the carbon in many of the fuels used can increase the heat retention of the planet.
So even though the correlation is not indicative of causation here, the correlation is relevant and can teach you new things, so long as you don't make blind assumptions. Just to expand on your point.
Yes, its possible, but the way it will be possible is through drastic reduction in launch costs that can get you far more aperture or the ability to get a JWST sized scope out to a 500 AU orbit for gravitational lensing. I have a lot of hope for that, I'm involved with organizations working to make it happen.
However, there really is no way to develop a new instrument capable of doing so without incredible infrastructure or discovering a brand new kind of physics that allows it. The developments of the past 20 years that make this possible are predictable, understandable, and linear. Adaptive optics is a natural development given increased computer processing, higher-sensitivity sensors are an easy assumption to make, and space telescopes have been posited for a long time. The real surprise was how many planets there were out there. Predicting what we can do now 20 or 30 years ago is more like predicting the pervasiveness of the internet... unknown to most people, but there for those in the know to see.
Unfortunately, while larger apertures in space are a given, that can only give you a reasonable expectation of 2-3 times the sensitivity. Sensor sensitivity is approaching its limit. Getting past the limits the paper lists isn't a matter of being particularly clever with current technology or predictable development, its on the same level as developing FTL travel. While I certainly believe and hope we'll find ways to do it eventually, its completely beyond the realm of practical engineering, and beyond what we can say "the next mission" will be.
And yes, I understand your point about we'll discover a better way to do it before we could get reasonable data this way, and I agree. However, its going to be expensive, and its unlikely we'll have the political will to get it going in the near future.
Using multiple mirrors is great for increasing your angular resolution, I know, its what my graduate thesis is about. Unfortunately, it's not nearly as good at increasing your light gathering capability. 6.5 meters is the size of the JWST, so if you wanted to improve your SNR by a factor of 10, you'd have to have 10 JWST's, and funding that is just not going to happen at this point, not without a drastic drop in cost of access to space.
The gravitational lensing concept that others suggested is valuable because it is actually collecting more photons, thus allowing you to detect smaller variations in the light with the same sized mirror. Without that, more aperture is the only way to go, and it has to be aperture area: sparse apertures with long baselines can only help if you're trying to resolve the planet directly, and from what I can tell, the photon flux from the planet directly is going to be so small it wouldn't give you anything.
Slashdot Mirror
Because flu viruses are particularly prone to spread (especially if it hangs around until fall and winter), and if it spreads like a normal flu in a normal season, and the high fatality rate keep up, and the , then it could be devastating.
Obviously, there are a lot of ifs in that statement. I'd guess that the fatality rate is partially inflated due to poor conditions in Mexico, uncertainties in diagnoses, and other factors; even 1% is pretty scary though. Also, given the time of year, I'd imagine we'll have a good handle on it by the time it could get serious.
Given all of that, the government response of tracking it, stockpiling anti-virals, and other efforts make perfect sense. All the press conferences have been pretty clear on the point that it sounds worse than it is. If the publicity makes people wash their hands more and other common-sense methods to prevent spread, so much the better.
The only worrying part is the pork-export issues (fears which are completely unfounded from what I can tell), and general commerce limits during an already fragile economic situation. As far as the overwhelming news coverage... it could be worse, we could be hearing endless discussions of the first (arbitrary-time-period) of Obama's presidency instead. Its the news, pick and choose what you want to read.
While our intelligence, strength, speed, agility, resistance to disease and other useful traits are certainly a product of natural selection, it seems that the human ability for compassion, empathy and community is just as important an evolutionary trait.
Those with childhood diseases, or severe allergies, or even particularly bad near-sightedness can contribute a lot to society; in fact they often contribute more intellectually since their troubles prevent them from developing more physical skills. The elderly, while no longer providing any physical labor are valuable for their experience and knowledge. A healthy sense of responsible communal living allows all of the specialization and development that have given humans an evolutionary advantage. While these developed at a very local scale, that doesn't mean that the same values don't apply at a larger global scale. In other words, our compassion and humanity make us better adapted and we should make use of them.
That, and of course that the scariest thing about this particular flu strain is that it hits the young, strong, and adapted.
We don't really know the carrying capacity of the Earth, and at any rate allowing billions to die isn't a valid solution by any reasonable moral standard.
Continued growth with the current trends is the real problem, but even then there are much more humane solutions than allowing the horrors of history to continue to work their course. Raising the level of development in a region tends to cause a decrease in the birthrate, so much so that Europe is having the opposite problem, so continued efforts to develop poorer states (and, coincidentally, mitigate these kinds of pandemics) is the best way to keep populations under control.
It's because as Americans we have a knee-jerk reaction to fear anything that has government-controlled or socialist in the name. While I'd agree that all-out socialism isn't for us: we are a very large, diverse and divided country with a history of strong personal independence and small-government leanings, which I think is well suited to the Federalized system we're supposed to have.
However, in this case, its ridiculous, because the government-granted monopolies or duopolies don't even have to make a show of trying to provide the best service for the lowest cost, as a truly competitive company would, or doing their best for the people, as a government-run service would. Instead, we're stuck with two companies who don't even try to hide that they're ripping us off to benefit their shareholders.
Personally, the solution I'd prefer is to make the fiber and copper municipal or state property, since its infrastructure just as much as roads or sewers, and have it leased out to whichever companies seek it. Unfortunately some talking head would then talk about how we're "nationalizing" the lines, and we've got anti-socialist hysteria all over again.
No, but there is a passage that explicitly states "go forth and multiply," which can be interpreted without much stretching as "attempting not to have children is bad".
Of course, reinterpreting it in in terms of the limited carrying capacity of the planet and what is good for the survival of the human race as a whole, it doesn't seem like the best idea, but its not like its unreasonable to see where it comes from.
I'm guessing you're a Windows user. Flash Player for OS X or Linux tends to be much slower. I can be running on modern processors with plenty of memory, and while it doesn't usually stutter or skip (which is usually attributable to bad internet), it does use a lot of processor, heating the machine incredibly.
Of course, if you're designing a machine specifically to run flash, I'm guessing you can optimize it for Flash and not have the same issues.
In order to get really really fast ships, with some kind of propulsion that could get you up to 0.9 c. Typical rocket propulsion hits a law of diminishing returns limit at around 0.35 c... based on that, I tend to see very high subluminal speeds as not much different on the technological scale as the various types of superluminal travel. That is we can see ways where you can do it without breaking the laws of physics, but any actual, practical technology to do it is as yet unimaginable.
Actually, as I'm writing this, I'm thinking a light drive, where your propellant is photons may be capable of doing it (since you don't have to carry propellant), but it would require such huge power levels, you run into new technological hurdles. Admittedly, that is a much simpler than folding space-time into bubbles, but I wouldn't be surprised if there is a severely limiting factor there as well.
Of course, there's still plenty of interesting stuff to be done within the solar system. All that requires is long-term habitat design, radiation protection, very-low-loss recyclables, space-based fission reactors, and cheap orbital access. You know, easy stuff.
Eh, we're at the level of technology where we can stop a wide variety of Earth impactors, and where we're pretty good at tracking them now. Given another 20 years of development, I wouldn't be surprised if it becomes routine to move potential impactors into non-threatening orbits.
So as long as we maintain this level of technology, an assumption I'd say this whole argument hinges on, "if" is a more appropriate word. Of course, in the long-term, it's not hard to imagine a situation where we do lose that capability, so I'd still say its important to create sustainable off-world settlements.
Simple. If it takes longer than ~8 years to get benefits from an expensive project, it becomes much harder to get funding, at least in the US. Also, if development takes more than 8 years on something high-profile and expensive, there's a good chance you lose funding at the start of a new administration. Doing this would take longer to even get going. I'd venture a guess that in other countries there are similar election-cycle limited periods for project funding. In other words, we'd need a completely new structure for the way we conduct this kind of business, something thats better able to (forgive the phrase) stay the course as well as better able to see and understand very long term benefits.
Also, we have no data on maintaining systems that would last that long autonomously, so while you could theoretically make something capable of getting there and braking into orbit, its unlikely you could build it to have a reasonable expectation of success. That of course is a technical problem, so solutions are out there; the political problems are the ones that'll kill you.
Hmmm, if you smoothed out the data so that it was say, averaged over an hour, and force it to be continuous, could you get something going then. It wouldn't solve the stuck at a stoplight with no-one coming issue, but it could allow a smaller town to get a well-optimized system that adapts to changing patterns without having to have as many good traffic engineers on hand.
Anyway, I could be totally wrong. Most of my work is in vehicle control, so I tend to try and force every problem to fit within my toolbox.
While you're right that the sensor model is much easier than the parent post made it, I can think of a number of ways to improve the traffic flow, at least in poorly optimized places.
Even open-loop, simply timing them well can help a lot. Take for instance, driving home in a typical commuter fashion, where most of the traffic is going the same direction as you are. It makes sense to sequence the lights so that a person driving at the speed limit who starts when one light turns green will be able to pass the next few lights without having to stop. I realize a lot of places do this, but a lot of others don't.
A bit of a further-out solution would be to take that sensor, and generate an optimal control problem to maximize flow. Not a trivial problem, but I bet you could get something interesting working. Certainly not a full-on AI problem, just parameterize the flow density and flow rate and define a decent model and cost function, and run it through an NLP solver.
I'm pretty sure it means reducing the amount of net carbon you add to the climate system. Anything you breathe out or decay into is already in the system, with the natural balance of plant respiration to keep the overall levels even. The problem is when you release carbon thats been sequestered in fossil fuels for millions of years; thus the phrase 'Carbon Neutral'.
It's also the reason why biofuels make sense, even if the particular blend isn't much cleaner than a fossil fuel-based product, the biomass that goes into making it sequestered that carbon before re-releasing it, keeping the atmospheric balance at the level we're used to.
The music industry only gave Amazon and others permission to sell DRM-free products in order to break the hold Apple had on the download music business. For this reason, (as I've described other times here), I can't help but think that the best way to get a DRM-free e-book market is for Amazon to get a strong enough position, and for the marketshare compared to paper books to be significant enough, so that the publishers decide they have to make others competitive.
Of course, given my logic, the best way to support a DRM-free book market is to buy the Kindle and make it popular. Of course, I'd also guess it's probably already going that direction anyway, so if you wait a while it'll happen.
Actually, to extend on your analogy, he's no longer allowed to fill it up with gas from a particular company. He's free to get content from other places.
I'll grant you the state of the e-book market is such that its much more limiting in this case... but thats a larger problem that I don't think anyone has a good way to fix short of buying out publishers and changing their policies.
Unfortunately (not saying you're wrong), forcing the DRM issue by not purchasing things doesn't have a lot of leverage at this point. Given Amazon's music store I'd venture a guess that they'd prefer to go without DRM if the publishers let them. The publishers have little incentive to eliminate DRM even if no one buys DRM'd e-books, because to them it just says there's no market. The only way a large-scale boycott would work is if people at large stopped buying paper copies as well.
I think the best bet is for something similar to what happened in music to happen: Amazon or Sony (less likely) takes such a commanding lead that the publishers get scared of one company totally dominating their distribution, at which point DRM-free becomes the only way for them to reduce the power of Amazon on the market. Unfortunately I'm not sure theres much of a way for consumer choices to push this outcome, except for maybe supporting Amazon in dominating the market, which has an Orwellian quality I wouldn't want to advocate.
I'd also say that I've actually been very happy with Amazon's customer service regarding the Kindle, to the point where they even replaced a broken screen that really was my fault.
Ah, there's still a lot of FUD going around on that. You can actually plug the Kindle into a USB port and it mounts just like any other flash drive, and you can load readable formats like .mobi and .txt with no interaction with Amazon. For PDF files you'd be out of luck, but as yet, the PDF conversion was never good enough for use anyway, in my opinion.
His Kindle still works too, he just couldn't buy new things from. The only real loss is at most a month's worth of subscription. Certainly not the friendliest of policies, but its quite similar to losing a CostCo membership, or being banned from going into Home Depot.
He would still be free to find non-drm third party content, whether paid or free, and load them on his own. Nothing in the summary says it will brick the device.
This is being used for aerobraking and aerocapture, not entry/re-entry. The idea is that it flys through the upper reaches of the atmosphere to slow it down and send it into some kind of closed orbit about the target body. Not nearly as much of a heating issue, particularly if you're talking about Mars which has a much less dense atmosphere.
No real reason to use it for re-entry since a Viking-style Mach-2 chute, or one of the new-fangled Mach-3 chutes will do the job already.
There are still limits on the efficiencies inherent to the system (say for instance the Diesel Cycle) that are much easier to deal with at a power-plant than on a vehicle-based ICE. A combustion process is going to be more efficient if you can run it at higher temperatures, and dump that energy into a very low temperature heat sink, thinks which are much easier to do at larger scales.
It's certainly true that running the engine at constant load can improve efficiency, since in a hybrid you size the engine to handle cruise loads rather than max acceleration loads. However, they still can't reach the efficiencies of a properly designed power plant. Gas turbines, which really do work much better at their design load, are over-all less efficient and are used primarily for their power-to-weight advantages.
The main advantage of the on-board ICE is that it fits well with our already established infrastructure. With a hybrid on a long trip its very easy to stop for 5 or 10 minutes and refuel, rather than having to recharge a battery for a long time every 50 miles. Until a good electrical storage medium such as hydrogen, or very fast charging, high-capacity batteries are available, we'll be stuck with ICEs for any non-commuter vehicle.
While I agree with the analysis of Star Trek v. Star Wars, I'd argue BSG touches a lot of 'true sci-fi' topics, particularly the lines between machine and sentience, and the dangers associated with creating more and more intelligent machines.
Also I'd say its more than just a space opera because it explores the practical implications of multi-world society, and seems much more realistic than Star Wars in terms of social commentary and realism... although I realize that doesn't necessarily push it more into sci-fi rather than just being generally more substantial.
In my department, what I find isn't so much that the 3.9-4.0 types are harder to work with, but more that they're just plain incompetent. A smart person who's figuring out whats going on and learning the material in such a way that they actually know it, rather than memorizing it, usually ends up making a 3.5-3.7.. these are the kind of people who make good 'paper airplane' designers (I'm in aerospace). It also seems that the best practical engineers, those who have an instinctual understanding of how things are actually going to go together, often make only decent grades (~3.0).
Of course this may just be the way our department grades things, with some professors pushing memorizing facts rather than real understanding on exams. And of course these are all generalizations. But I would say that a company that takes GPAs with a grain of salt like that is probably a pretty good place to work. It seems that involvement in projects and practical experience along with decent classwork would be the best indicator of success.
Thank you. Just to add a few things to the non-backwoods-ness of Texas. Two major aerospace industry hubs in Houston and Dallas. One of the largest cultural festivals in Austin at South by Southwest. A large variety of different historical cultures, including Hispanics in the south, German and Czech settlers in central Texas and the hill country, and midwestern and southern US traditions. I'd consider "Texas Country" music a significant cultural contribution, even though its not really my taste; its quite different from (and better than) Nashville-style country.
The parent also completely ignores the agricultural background of Texas, which goes far beyond just farmers. Texas institutions are world leaders in terms of animal science and agricultural knowledge and research. TAMU has helped lead the way in animal cloning research, and the Vet school is one of the best in the country.
That said, I really hope this doesn't pass.
And, even in cases when correlation is not causation, there's still usually pertinent information.
Take, for instance, the classic case of pirates and global warming. Clearly, any logical person can see that a lack of piracy has no direct effect on releasing greenhouse gases. However, if one knew a lot about pirates, and nothing about global warming you could figure some of it out. Caribbean piracy was largely motivated by getting around the mercantilist policies of the European powers. However, the industrial revolution began ~1800, and this put an end to mercantilism, to be replaced by rampant laissez-faire capitalism, and thus the economic basis for Caribbean piracy ended (other factors like recent revolutions helped too).
You, as a piracy expert, know this, and after researching the many causes you hit upon the unfortunate fact that all of the factories and energy production involved in the industrial revolution tend to release lots of nasty stuff, and with enough research you learn that releasing the carbon in many of the fuels used can increase the heat retention of the planet.
So even though the correlation is not indicative of causation here, the correlation is relevant and can teach you new things, so long as you don't make blind assumptions. Just to expand on your point.
Yes, its possible, but the way it will be possible is through drastic reduction in launch costs that can get you far more aperture or the ability to get a JWST sized scope out to a 500 AU orbit for gravitational lensing. I have a lot of hope for that, I'm involved with organizations working to make it happen.
However, there really is no way to develop a new instrument capable of doing so without incredible infrastructure or discovering a brand new kind of physics that allows it. The developments of the past 20 years that make this possible are predictable, understandable, and linear. Adaptive optics is a natural development given increased computer processing, higher-sensitivity sensors are an easy assumption to make, and space telescopes have been posited for a long time. The real surprise was how many planets there were out there. Predicting what we can do now 20 or 30 years ago is more like predicting the pervasiveness of the internet... unknown to most people, but there for those in the know to see.
Unfortunately, while larger apertures in space are a given, that can only give you a reasonable expectation of 2-3 times the sensitivity. Sensor sensitivity is approaching its limit. Getting past the limits the paper lists isn't a matter of being particularly clever with current technology or predictable development, its on the same level as developing FTL travel. While I certainly believe and hope we'll find ways to do it eventually, its completely beyond the realm of practical engineering, and beyond what we can say "the next mission" will be.
And yes, I understand your point about we'll discover a better way to do it before we could get reasonable data this way, and I agree. However, its going to be expensive, and its unlikely we'll have the political will to get it going in the near future.
Using multiple mirrors is great for increasing your angular resolution, I know, its what my graduate thesis is about. Unfortunately, it's not nearly as good at increasing your light gathering capability. 6.5 meters is the size of the JWST, so if you wanted to improve your SNR by a factor of 10, you'd have to have 10 JWST's, and funding that is just not going to happen at this point, not without a drastic drop in cost of access to space.
The gravitational lensing concept that others suggested is valuable because it is actually collecting more photons, thus allowing you to detect smaller variations in the light with the same sized mirror. Without that, more aperture is the only way to go, and it has to be aperture area: sparse apertures with long baselines can only help if you're trying to resolve the planet directly, and from what I can tell, the photon flux from the planet directly is going to be so small it wouldn't give you anything.