On the other hand, we're all sure that nobody every heard Bob Hope tell a dirty nursery rhyme. Can you imagine Bob Hope starting out his act by going "Hickory Dickory Dock, this chick was..."?
Why does everybody need the raw stream? There are still fanatics out there who listen to vinyl, and claim that digital does not outperform vinyl played through a vacuum tube.
Clearly digitizing a clean analog signal is going to be good enough.
I have a Pentium-133 motherboard. I have no idea what kind it is, just picked it up for $10 at Goodwill Computerworks here in Austin.
It works sweet.
BTW, any Linux box with a serial port will allow you to connect a VT-100. The Linux Kernel can handle that no problem. I've got a 486-33 Thinkpad running OS/2 and a term program set up as the console on the above described server.
When a student from poor country comes here and gets education to the PhD level, they spend all the unbound energy of their youth in OUR country, contributing to OUR economy, donating their intellectual discoveries to OUR body of knowlege, and participating in and enriching OUR culture.
And you want to refuse these little treasures admittance to the US? I'm not joking about this. Would you rather a young scientist make his mark on the world in contributions to Iran, or to make his mark on the world when he was studying here in the US?
The benefits we accrue from allowing foreign students into our country far outweigh any negatives.
In astronomy, the coolest research is in adaptive optics (do a Google search and you will be reading in fascination all day). Here it is in a nutshell, step by step:
1) The earth's atmosphere is turbulent. That turbulence causes the images of stars to dance around in telescopes, making the image all fuzzy. This is what causes the stars to twinkle when you look at them. Avoiding this problem is the big reason why the Hubble Space Telescope gets such amazing photos when it is much smaller than the largest telescopes on the Earth.
2) How to fix this problem without launching telescopes into space? Adaptive optics, of course. If you can flex a telescope mirror into exactly the right shape, you can compensate exactly for the distortion that turbulence introduces into the image, removing the majority of the noise from the signal. Suddenly the image becomes almost perfectly clear and steady, not fuzzy.
3) We know that stars look like points of light, even through the largest telescopes. When we receive a fuzzy image, a very fast computer figures out what shape a mirror would have to be to focus that fuzzy image back into a single point of light. That star is called a reference star. Any interesting objects close to that star are also therefore made clear.
4) Commands are sent to mechanical actuators on the back of a mirror that deform it to the correct shape to focus the reference star. This happens very quickly, so the resulting image is steady and sharp, despite all the turbulence in the atmosphere. Neat trick.
OK, so that's how it works.
You can do the same thing to submarines too, if you know what they sound like. The submarine's sound becomes the "reference star" in this case. When you receive the garbled signal, you might be able to correct it based on the sub's sound. If you apply that correction to the message as well, you might be able to hear the message.
This has a lot of problems, so practically it wouldn't work. For example, the easiest way to defeat the intercept is to change the noise that your sub makes, maybe with a random noisemaker. But that makes your sub less quiet. Also, the person trying to make the intercept would have to be listening to the sub before the message is sent, because once the message is sending, that would make the sub a random noise and you couldn't focus the sound. And, since the turbulence conditions change (I don't know how fast), over time your ability to focus the sound into a message would steadily degrade. The sending submarine would only have to figure out how fast the sea conditions are changing, and only start sending the good parts of the message after you've lost your ability to focus the sound.
Tiny apps in the computer
Make me happy, make me feel fine,
Tiny apps make my CPU run cooler
With a feeling that I'm gonna Love you 'til the end of time.
Some people have theorized that advanced civilizations might use black holes as a power source. Technological civilizations are always looking for something hotter to run their toys off of, and few things make as much heat as a massive black hole. Getting energy out of that much heat is easy, except for the problem of the huge gravity gradient and materials that can stand the temperature.
Insurance sets the value. If you don't have any clue what some unique artifact is worth, just buy a million bucks worth of insurance for it. If you lose it, you'll find that it was worth a million bucks.
Seriously, appraisers take a look at the thing. They take their best guess at what it's worth, what it could fetch at auction or sale, and they declare it to be that value.
Some total idiot moderated me flamebait (the mind boggles)
I am serious. NASA's webservers will NOT be able to keep up with the load, and the doppler plot will NOT be available to look at while the thing is entering orbit.
So, I post it again. Will some people set up some mirrors of the doppler plot to take the load off NASA's servers just a bit?
If past events are any indication, NASA's servers are going to get a hell of a lot more than a slashdotting tonight.
The doppler plot is the main thing that everyone will be looking at, and I bet it's going to be completely unavailable during the most interesting times.
He's outspoken against open source, but that's because he doesn't truly understand it. Many have tried to explain it to him, but he doesn't quite get it. If you do a google search on his name, you'll find reams of stuff.
Oh, and try not to laugh too hard at his hair. The man looks like he was a member of Abba.
Yes, you are correct. I posted the links to the robotic discovery telescopes and software, and forgot to point out that any scope capable of discovering an asteroid automatically is also capable of automatically performing followup observations for the purpose of determining and refining an orbit.
Automatic Asteroid Hunting
Off-the-shelf software can help your telescope and computer do all the work of looking for minor planets.
COMPUTERS IN ASTRONOMY | By Jeff Medkeff
The Geek Corps could help this guy out. Right now they work in Ghana helping companies implement modern IT solutions, etc. Why not send some geek teachers to Nepal to spend time with the kids, showing them how to install Linux and programs their computers in C++?
The asteroids are already detected, but their orbits are not well known. There's no need to send around bitmaps to compare for moving stars. That step is already completed. The article said that the number of known asteroids will double in the near future, and there are two problems.
1) There are not enough scopes to do followup observations. OK, you geeks. You want hackable hardware? How about you pick up a good Meade telescope with a laptop, CCD, appropriate cables and software, and set up your own asteroid discovery observatory. This is how these asteroids are currently found, regardless of the size of the telescope. A modest 11" scope can do excellent quality science without breaking the bank. You can use this equipment to do followup observations that are needed to track the object, calculate the orbit, and keep it from getting "lost".
2) A small distributed.net style project could possibly be used to do orbit calculations. Orbital mechanics, especially the type involving multiple objects, such as Jupiter, the Earth, and the Sun (maybe mars too) require a lot of horsepower. Running 60,000 asteroids through 100 years of orbit prediction might not require the same effort required to crack a 64-bit RSA key, but it's more than my Celery 300 can handle by itself.
1) The keyboard switching doesn't work at all.
2) The keyboard repeat rate is LOCKED at 10.2 CPS under Linux. You cannot change the keyboard repeat rate with Linux at all.
3) The technical support people NEVER returned any of my calls of e-mails. They didn't help me at all.
Their switch is broken, and they don't give a shit that I had problems with it.
Slashdot Mirror
Now see? THAT'S how to moderate. The post above was a flamebait, and it was moderated properly.
GOOD JOB! Here's a gold star for you.
On the other hand, we're all sure that nobody every heard Bob Hope tell a dirty nursery rhyme. Can you imagine Bob Hope starting out his act by going "Hickory Dickory Dock, this chick was..."?
He actually sounded HUMAN.
You're thinking of Brent Spiner.
Offtopic? The moderator who did this must not have finished first grade.
Fucking idiot.
Why does everybody need the raw stream? There are still fanatics out there who listen to vinyl, and claim that digital does not outperform vinyl played through a vacuum tube.
Clearly digitizing a clean analog signal is going to be good enough.
I have a Pentium-133 motherboard. I have no idea what kind it is, just picked it up for $10 at Goodwill Computerworks here in Austin.
It works sweet.
BTW, any Linux box with a serial port will allow you to connect a VT-100. The Linux Kernel can handle that no problem. I've got a 486-33 Thinkpad running OS/2 and a term program set up as the console on the above described server.
When a student from poor country comes here and gets education to the PhD level, they spend all the unbound energy of their youth in OUR country, contributing to OUR economy, donating their intellectual discoveries to OUR body of knowlege, and participating in and enriching OUR culture.
And you want to refuse these little treasures admittance to the US? I'm not joking about this. Would you rather a young scientist make his mark on the world in contributions to Iran, or to make his mark on the world when he was studying here in the US?
The benefits we accrue from allowing foreign students into our country far outweigh any negatives.
Brett opposes a very specific type of open source: the GNU Public License.
As someone else pointed out, he likes BSD a lot.
AND, his hair still is very funny looking. That much we are not confused about.
the rate is switched back to something like 28,800 bps. Pretty good rate for communicating across 100 million miles.
Ya, I once download a Red Hat CD over my modem. I hope NASA's using wget -c because I sure found it useful for that.
Theoretically, at least.
In astronomy, the coolest research is in adaptive optics (do a Google search and you will be reading in fascination all day). Here it is in a nutshell, step by step:
1) The earth's atmosphere is turbulent. That turbulence causes the images of stars to dance around in telescopes, making the image all fuzzy. This is what causes the stars to twinkle when you look at them. Avoiding this problem is the big reason why the Hubble Space Telescope gets such amazing photos when it is much smaller than the largest telescopes on the Earth.
2) How to fix this problem without launching telescopes into space? Adaptive optics, of course. If you can flex a telescope mirror into exactly the right shape, you can compensate exactly for the distortion that turbulence introduces into the image, removing the majority of the noise from the signal. Suddenly the image becomes almost perfectly clear and steady, not fuzzy.
3) We know that stars look like points of light, even through the largest telescopes. When we receive a fuzzy image, a very fast computer figures out what shape a mirror would have to be to focus that fuzzy image back into a single point of light. That star is called a reference star. Any interesting objects close to that star are also therefore made clear.
4) Commands are sent to mechanical actuators on the back of a mirror that deform it to the correct shape to focus the reference star. This happens very quickly, so the resulting image is steady and sharp, despite all the turbulence in the atmosphere. Neat trick.
OK, so that's how it works.
You can do the same thing to submarines too, if you know what they sound like. The submarine's sound becomes the "reference star" in this case. When you receive the garbled signal, you might be able to correct it based on the sub's sound. If you apply that correction to the message as well, you might be able to hear the message.
This has a lot of problems, so practically it wouldn't work. For example, the easiest way to defeat the intercept is to change the noise that your sub makes, maybe with a random noisemaker. But that makes your sub less quiet. Also, the person trying to make the intercept would have to be listening to the sub before the message is sent, because once the message is sending, that would make the sub a random noise and you couldn't focus the sound. And, since the turbulence conditions change (I don't know how fast), over time your ability to focus the sound into a message would steadily degrade. The sending submarine would only have to figure out how fast the sea conditions are changing, and only start sending the good parts of the message after you've lost your ability to focus the sound.
Tiny apps in the computer
Make me happy, make me feel fine,
Tiny apps make my CPU run cooler
With a feeling that I'm gonna Love you 'til the end of time.
Some people have theorized that advanced civilizations might use black holes as a power source. Technological civilizations are always looking for something hotter to run their toys off of, and few things make as much heat as a massive black hole. Getting energy out of that much heat is easy, except for the problem of the huge gravity gradient and materials that can stand the temperature.
Insurance sets the value. If you don't have any clue what some unique artifact is worth, just buy a million bucks worth of insurance for it. If you lose it, you'll find that it was worth a million bucks.
Seriously, appraisers take a look at the thing. They take their best guess at what it's worth, what it could fetch at auction or sale, and they declare it to be that value.
Get married. Your spouse will remember all those little things you would rather forget.
Some total idiot moderated me flamebait (the mind boggles)
I am serious. NASA's webservers will NOT be able to keep up with the load, and the doppler plot will NOT be available to look at while the thing is entering orbit.
So, I post it again. Will some people set up some mirrors of the doppler plot to take the load off NASA's servers just a bit?
If past events are any indication, NASA's servers are going to get a hell of a lot more than a slashdotting tonight.
The doppler plot is the main thing that everyone will be looking at, and I bet it's going to be completely unavailable during the most interesting times.
How about a few dozen mirrors to help NASA out?
I'm not sure why you did a search on "Carl Nasal" but that's the WRONG NAME.
The dude's name is Brett Glass. Search on that.
He's outspoken against open source, but that's because he doesn't truly understand it. Many have tried to explain it to him, but he doesn't quite get it. If you do a google search on his name, you'll find reams of stuff.
Oh, and try not to laugh too hard at his hair. The man looks like he was a member of Abba.
Yes, you are correct. I posted the links to the robotic discovery telescopes and software, and forgot to point out that any scope capable of discovering an asteroid automatically is also capable of automatically performing followup observations for the purpose of determining and refining an orbit.
Two can play their silly reindeer game.
There was an article in the August 2000 Sky and Telescope mag about Automated Asteroid Hunting.
Here's the blurb from the online index:
Automatic Asteroid Hunting
Off-the-shelf software can help your telescope and computer do all the work of looking for minor planets.
COMPUTERS IN ASTRONOMY | By Jeff Medkeff
Here are other links:
software for telescope control
more links to robotic scopes
Yes, check out www.geekcorps.org.
The Geek Corps could help this guy out. Right now they work in Ghana helping companies implement modern IT solutions, etc. Why not send some geek teachers to Nepal to spend time with the kids, showing them how to install Linux and programs their computers in C++?
The asteroids are already detected, but their orbits are not well known. There's no need to send around bitmaps to compare for moving stars. That step is already completed. The article said that the number of known asteroids will double in the near future, and there are two problems.
1) There are not enough scopes to do followup observations. OK, you geeks. You want hackable hardware? How about you pick up a good Meade telescope with a laptop, CCD, appropriate cables and software, and set up your own asteroid discovery observatory. This is how these asteroids are currently found, regardless of the size of the telescope. A modest 11" scope can do excellent quality science without breaking the bank. You can use this equipment to do followup observations that are needed to track the object, calculate the orbit, and keep it from getting "lost".
2) A small distributed.net style project could possibly be used to do orbit calculations. Orbital mechanics, especially the type involving multiple objects, such as Jupiter, the Earth, and the Sun (maybe mars too) require a lot of horsepower. Running 60,000 asteroids through 100 years of orbit prediction might not require the same effort required to crack a 64-bit RSA key, but it's more than my Celery 300 can handle by itself.
Stay away from it if your run Linux.
1) The keyboard switching doesn't work at all.
2) The keyboard repeat rate is LOCKED at 10.2 CPS under Linux. You cannot change the keyboard repeat rate with Linux at all.
3) The technical support people NEVER returned any of my calls of e-mails. They didn't help me at all.
Their switch is broken, and they don't give a shit that I had problems with it.