SpaceWeather.com has a "Flybys " website; enter your zip code (USA) or Lat/Long (Anyplace) to see a list of overflights of the ISS and a couple dozen other satellites that are bright enough to see.
The web site is free; they have an Android and iOS app for five bucks, I think, that sounds an alarm.
More than good enough. Although I can see how designing your own device and programming it yourself is more impressive than buying an app or navigating to a web site.
POLITICS: Woman who voted for every Austin, TX tax increase discovers that now she can’t afford to live there. “I have voted for every park, every library, all the school improvements, for light rail, for anything that will make this city better. But now I can’t afford to live here anymore. I’ll protest my appraisal notice, but that’s not enough. Someone needs to step in and address the big picture.”
Whenever "We the peepul" allow the government to "take care of us", we allow rapacious wolves to take over our lives. Democrap, Rinopublican, Socialist, "Green" - most political parties will promise you ANYTHING to get the power to jail you and steal everything that you have.
It might - just MIGHT - still be possible to roll it all back. Probably not, but I'm the eternal optimist. Vote Libertarian if possible, or Tea Party - and then roll THOSE crooks out of office at the next election. We don't want to "control government spending"; we want to abolish departments and sell their buildings. I want to revoke their pensions and jail a few. Cut all government salaries by a third - and then do it again the next year. We want to make Washington D.C. a ghost town. As it is, 9 of the ten highest income zip codes are in or next to the Beltway. Legend says that in ancient India, new rulers were weighed every year, to see if they had gotten fat at their subjects' expense. It ought to be illegal for a government official to own a luxury car or a boat or a swimming pool; those things mean they're making too much money.
I blame air conditioning. Washington D.C. used to be a fetid, barely inhabitable swamp. That's why Maryland and Virginia were willing to give it up. Air conditioning lets the parasites live in comfort. Ban air conditioning within 100 miles of DC, and just SEE how quickly the government shrinks!
Marketing people would much rather use the word "more" than the word "less", and bigger numbers rather than fractions. So in trying to say "uses one-eighth as much", it comes out as "saves 87% MORE than".
Humorist P.J. O'Rourke once wrote that English doesn't just take words from other languages; English chases other languages into dark alleys and mugs them for their words.
"Proven" is, perhaps, the wrong word. "Made to be practical", perhaps. A $5 radiometer from a craft store proves quite readily the idea that light has pressure. The trick will be, as with the nuclear fusion proposals that are perhaps twenty years in the future - and have been "20 years in the future" for thirty years now, to make it big enough and practical enough that we can extract usable amounts of energy from it.
There's nothing new about the idea of spacecraft being propelled by light pressure. There was an Arthur C. Clarke story published in "Boy's Life" in the early 60's about sunlight powered "sailing yachts" in a race from Earth orbit to the Moon. Or the Niven story "The Fourth Profession", in which an alien trading ship arrives at Earth, wanting humanity to build a launching laser to send the crew on the next leg of their journey.
And it's been 30 years since Niven & Pournelle published "Mote In God's Eye" in which an interstellar probe riding a the combined beam of battery of laser cannons arrive in human space.
So if actual human physicists are finally going to get around to proving the concept, so much the better!
There's this great tool called "Google". Or use DuckDuckGo. Or any search engine of your choice. You won't believe the results of my research, so do your own.
But this is somewhat far afield of the original "Should the unlicensed be allowed to 'drive' autonomous cars. No.
You also won't find any law prohibiting a child from nibbling his Pop-Tart into the shape of a gun, but a 6-yo was suspended from school for having a "weapon" - or anything which a mentally-disturbed teacher might think LOOKED like a gun. Yes, it happened.
ThisIsTrue.com is a weekly compilation of bizarre but true news stories; search for the "zero tolerance" ones.
But here are a few selections from a Google search for "parents arrested for leaving children alone".
Go ahead; leave your 10-yo child at home alone. When CPS takes your children and the cops arrest you for "child endangerment"- which HAS HAPPENED - your (true) argument that you can't find any law about it WILL NOT get your kids back or your bail reduced.
The problem is that the bureaucrats who are supposed to ADMINISTER the law often, with judicial connivance, are making up the law as they go along.
I wish it WERE "laugh out loud" funny about this. But read the newspapers; this is all too common. If you're not in the USA, you may have trouble believing this; I _DO_ live here, and I sometimes have trouble believing how far the nation has fallen, and how quickly. This is no longer the nation that I grew up in.
"Certified professionals" at child rearing tend to do a TERRIBLE job of it. The rarity of the exceptions are remarkable. Abuse and neglect are far more common in boarding schools and government child care facilities. "Child Protective Services" is almost Soviet-like in the inappropriateness of the name. When parents abuse a child, the courts get involved; when CPS abuses children by the dozen, it gets covered up by the government. Here in Sacramento, CA, CPS has been the target of several investigations concerning dead and "missing" children.
However, taking children out of the home and having them reared by "certified professionals" has always been de rigueur among communists, socialists, and leftists of every stripe, so I guess you've made your own position abundantly clear.
The government would jail you for leaving your child at home alone. If your autonomous vehicle is as safe as being at home, then the government should also prevent children from operating such a vehicle. Perhaps the child could be allowed to ride alone only if a parent or guardian programmed the destination....
Or perhaps we need to go back to the 1970's and allow children as much freedom and autonomy as I had when I was eight or ten, when my mother would tell me "Go out and play, and be back before dark."
I've lived in the Sacramento area for 25 years, and I think this would be a GREAT idea!
Another big plus; Sacramento itself has no nearby major fault lines. When large-ish earthquakes hit the Bay area, we get a mild shaking, without (so far!) any damage. In the 1989 Loma Prieta quake, it sloshed a little bit of water out of the jacuzzi, but no damage.
Weather: our winters are chilly and rainy - usually. This year it got fairly cold, and got very little rain. (California is mostly desert....). Summers are hot and bone-dry. About half of the evenings. we do get a "delta breeze", oceanic winds through the Golden Gate and right up the Sacramento River. Daytime highs in the high 90's/low 100s with nighttime temps in the high 60's/low 70's are not unusual.
Our "rush hour" lasts about an hour, where SF or LA have "rush hours" of 4-5 hours in the morning and 3-4 hours in the evening.
We already have a fairly large high-tech workforce; Intel in Folsom, HP in Roseville.
Plus, when Silicon Valley moves to Sacramento, I'll be able to sell my house at a huge profit and retire!
We know precious little about how evolution proceeded here, and we know nothing at all about how it might have proceeded elsewhere.
We can guess that it would be carbon based, because carbon has four covalent bonds and would have been formed sooner than silicon (with 4 bonds, but lower energies) would have. Beyond that, we'd need a few dozen D20 dice to calculate the odds.
But any real scientist knows that at some point, we have to admit WE DON'T KNOW how it might turn out. Wild-assed guesses aren't science, even if some people who claim to be scientists are sometimes wild-assed guessers.
It would probably be much less expensive to remedy a few degrees warmer - thus INCREASING the growing season in North America - than a few degrees COLDER, which might make a whole lot of people very hungry. AND cold. But neither is especially likely.
The warmist view is based almost entirely on computer models which cannot predict the present based on the past. I would be strongly opposed to betting a few trillion dollars worth of economic growth on a computer model's forecast for 20 years hence.
50 years ago, there were no "reputable" scientists who accepted either continental drift OR the out-of-this-world concept (literally!) that an astronomical impact might have caused the mass extinctions of 65 billion years ago. Both are now generally accepted. Earth scientists today are trying to explain the Younger Dryas as anything OTHER than an impact event.
I love Starcraft; both the original, and StarCraft II. I'm not all that GOOD at it, and now we know why; I'm on the high side of 60. I can still beat the computer, most of the time; I just can't beat the other players!:-)
You write: "We trust science because it is self correcting. If it stops being self correcting, or that self correction is delayed by say, 50 years, there is no reason to trust it."
I would go one step further; when it stops being self-correcting, it stops being "science".
You write: "...because it is next to impossible to remove all human bias from an experiment." My concern is not that the advocates for anthropogenic global warming (AGW) have tried insufficiently to remove bias, it is the near certainly that the so-called "scientists" have been busy INTRODUCING bias. Not satisfied with merely being wrong, I think they are actively lying.
One of the fundamental principles of experimental science is accurately publishing your methods and your data, to allow other researchers to perform the same or similar experiments and attain the same results. To the extent that methods and data are not shared, it isn't "science".
One other thing; "science" is NEVER EVER "settled". There is always new things to learn, now experiments to be performed, new interpretations to be examined. Once the "science is settled" and no further debate is allowed, it has devolved into a religion. And it is scary how closely the current strident denial of debate in the AGW realm has come to a hunt for heretics to be burned at the stake. Just last week, a "journalist" opined that climate change "deniers" should be imprisoned.
Hmmm. Are you SURE that "global cooling" and "The Coming Ice Age" weren't all the rage in the late '70's and early '80's? I sure remember a lot of headlines and magazine articles about that. I'm guessing that you weren't around to read those papers and magazines back then and that you get all your news from your iPhone now, but Siri can probably help you look up relevant articles.
WikiPedia may be the wrong thing to point to if you want "scientific journals".
Nor are the real "scientific" journals doing such a wonderful job, either. "Peer review" is a joke, and the track record of scientific journals retracting controversial articles is too long to put much faith in it. The mathematical models cannot predict the present by using inputs from the past. Contra Michael "Chicken Little" Mann, the "Medieval Warm Period _DID_ exist, and his own emails (leaked as part of the HadCRUT archive) prove that he was trying without success to explain it away. Kilimanjaro's snows have not receded. The glaciers in the Himalayas have not disappeared. Billions of people have not starved, nor has Australia been overrun with panicked Malaysians and Indonesians.
I got really suspicious when I saw that the same Socialist/World Government nostrums that Carl Sagan tried to prescribe for Global Cooling in the 1970s were being prescribed now for Global Warming.
My degree is in Physics; I always believe the actual facts. I haven't seen many, and most of them are on the "It's not a problem now, and may never be" side. And if we can only avoid collapsing the world economy with phony scare tactics, the world of 2060 will be rich enough to mitigate what minor effects there may be.
And if Siberia and northern Canada warm up a bit, there will be millions of acres of additional cropland that we can't use now. Maybe that would be a good thing.
Slashdot Mirror
SpaceWeather.com has a "Flybys " website; enter your zip code (USA) or Lat/Long (Anyplace) to see a list of overflights of the ISS and a couple dozen other satellites that are bright enough to see.
http://www.spaceweather.com/fl...
The web site is free; they have an Android and iOS app for five bucks, I think, that sounds an alarm.
More than good enough. Although I can see how designing your own device and programming it yourself is more impressive than buying an app or navigating to a web site.
Agree completely. Here's a classic example of how foolish, supposedly "well meaning" citizens screwed themselves....
http://www.mystatesman.com/new...
POLITICS: Woman who voted for every Austin, TX tax increase discovers that now she can’t afford to live there. “I have voted for every park, every library, all the school improvements, for light rail, for anything that will make this city better. But now I can’t afford to live here anymore. I’ll protest my appraisal notice, but that’s not enough. Someone needs to step in and address the big picture.”
Whenever "We the peepul" allow the government to "take care of us", we allow rapacious wolves to take over our lives. Democrap, Rinopublican, Socialist, "Green" - most political parties will promise you ANYTHING to get the power to jail you and steal everything that you have.
It might - just MIGHT - still be possible to roll it all back. Probably not, but I'm the eternal optimist. Vote Libertarian if possible, or Tea Party - and then roll THOSE crooks out of office at the next election. We don't want to "control government spending"; we want to abolish departments and sell their buildings. I want to revoke their pensions and jail a few. Cut all government salaries by a third - and then do it again the next year. We want to make Washington D.C. a ghost town. As it is, 9 of the ten highest income zip codes are in or next to the Beltway. Legend says that in ancient India, new rulers were weighed every year, to see if they had gotten fat at their subjects' expense. It ought to be illegal for a government official to own a luxury car or a boat or a swimming pool; those things mean they're making too much money.
I blame air conditioning. Washington D.C. used to be a fetid, barely inhabitable swamp. That's why Maryland and Virginia were willing to give it up. Air conditioning lets the parasites live in comfort. Ban air conditioning within 100 miles of DC, and just SEE how quickly the government shrinks!
I'll have to break out my copy of the book, but I'm pretty sure O'Rourke said it first.
Marketing people would much rather use the word "more" than the word "less", and bigger numbers rather than fractions. So in trying to say "uses one-eighth as much", it comes out as "saves 87% MORE than".
Humorist P.J. O'Rourke once wrote that English doesn't just take words from other languages; English chases other languages into dark alleys and mugs them for their words.
"Proven" is, perhaps, the wrong word. "Made to be practical", perhaps. A $5 radiometer from a craft store proves quite readily the idea that light has pressure. The trick will be, as with the nuclear fusion proposals that are perhaps twenty years in the future - and have been "20 years in the future" for thirty years now, to make it big enough and practical enough that we can extract usable amounts of energy from it.
There's nothing new about the idea of spacecraft being propelled by light pressure. There was an Arthur C. Clarke story published in "Boy's Life" in the early 60's about sunlight powered "sailing yachts" in a race from Earth orbit to the Moon. Or the Niven story "The Fourth Profession", in which an alien trading ship arrives at Earth, wanting humanity to build a launching laser to send the crew on the next leg of their journey.
And it's been 30 years since Niven & Pournelle published "Mote In God's Eye" in which an interstellar probe riding a the combined beam of battery of laser cannons arrive in human space.
So if actual human physicists are finally going to get around to proving the concept, so much the better!
There's this great tool called "Google". Or use DuckDuckGo. Or any search engine of your choice. You won't believe the results of my research, so do your own.
But this is somewhat far afield of the original "Should the unlicensed be allowed to 'drive' autonomous cars. No.
You also won't find any law prohibiting a child from nibbling his Pop-Tart into the shape of a gun, but a 6-yo was suspended from school for having a "weapon" - or anything which a mentally-disturbed teacher might think LOOKED like a gun. Yes, it happened.
ThisIsTrue.com is a weekly compilation of bizarre but true news stories; search for the "zero tolerance" ones.
But here are a few selections from a Google search for "parents arrested for leaving children alone".
http://stratford.patch.com/gro...
https://answers.yahoo.com/ques...
https://secure02.kidshealth.or...
http://www.lawandparents.co.uk...
Go ahead; leave your 10-yo child at home alone. When CPS takes your children and the cops arrest you for "child endangerment"- which HAS HAPPENED - your (true) argument that you can't find any law about it WILL NOT get your kids back or your bail reduced.
The problem is that the bureaucrats who are supposed to ADMINISTER the law often, with judicial connivance, are making up the law as they go along.
Sorry; he neglected the tag, and it was not obvious to me that sarcasm was his intent. If it was, I apologize - but the problem is far too real.
I wish it WERE "laugh out loud" funny about this. But read the newspapers; this is all too common. If you're not in the USA, you may have trouble believing this; I _DO_ live here, and I sometimes have trouble believing how far the nation has fallen, and how quickly. This is no longer the nation that I grew up in.
"Certified professionals" at child rearing tend to do a TERRIBLE job of it. The rarity of the exceptions are remarkable. Abuse and neglect are far more common in boarding schools and government child care facilities. "Child Protective Services" is almost Soviet-like in the inappropriateness of the name. When parents abuse a child, the courts get involved; when CPS abuses children by the dozen, it gets covered up by the government. Here in Sacramento, CA, CPS has been the target of several investigations concerning dead and "missing" children.
However, taking children out of the home and having them reared by "certified professionals" has always been de rigueur among communists, socialists, and leftists of every stripe, so I guess you've made your own position abundantly clear.
The government would jail you for leaving your child at home alone. If your autonomous vehicle is as safe as being at home, then the government should also prevent children from operating such a vehicle. Perhaps the child could be allowed to ride alone only if a parent or guardian programmed the destination....
Or perhaps we need to go back to the 1970's and allow children as much freedom and autonomy as I had when I was eight or ten, when my mother would tell me "Go out and play, and be back before dark."
I've lived in the Sacramento area for 25 years, and I think this would be a GREAT idea!
Another big plus; Sacramento itself has no nearby major fault lines. When large-ish earthquakes hit the Bay area, we get a mild shaking, without (so far!) any damage. In the 1989 Loma Prieta quake, it sloshed a little bit of water out of the jacuzzi, but no damage.
Weather: our winters are chilly and rainy - usually. This year it got fairly cold, and got very little rain. (California is mostly desert....). Summers are hot and bone-dry. About half of the evenings. we do get a "delta breeze", oceanic winds through the Golden Gate and right up the Sacramento River. Daytime highs in the high 90's/low 100s with nighttime temps in the high 60's/low 70's are not unusual.
Our "rush hour" lasts about an hour, where SF or LA have "rush hours" of 4-5 hours in the morning and 3-4 hours in the evening.
We already have a fairly large high-tech workforce; Intel in Folsom, HP in Roseville.
Plus, when Silicon Valley moves to Sacramento, I'll be able to sell my house at a huge profit and retire!
Come on down!
We know precious little about how evolution proceeded here, and we know nothing at all about how it might have proceeded elsewhere.
We can guess that it would be carbon based, because carbon has four covalent bonds and would have been formed sooner than silicon (with 4 bonds, but lower energies) would have. Beyond that, we'd need a few dozen D20 dice to calculate the odds.
But any real scientist knows that at some point, we have to admit WE DON'T KNOW how it might turn out. Wild-assed guesses aren't science, even if some people who claim to be scientists are sometimes wild-assed guessers.
It would probably be much less expensive to remedy a few degrees warmer - thus INCREASING the growing season in North America - than a few degrees COLDER, which might make a whole lot of people very hungry. AND cold. But neither is especially likely.
The warmist view is based almost entirely on computer models which cannot predict the present based on the past. I would be strongly opposed to betting a few trillion dollars worth of economic growth on a computer model's forecast for 20 years hence.
50 years ago, there were no "reputable" scientists who accepted either continental drift OR the out-of-this-world concept (literally!) that an astronomical impact might have caused the mass extinctions of 65 billion years ago. Both are now generally accepted. Earth scientists today are trying to explain the Younger Dryas as anything OTHER than an impact event.
I think it's just overwhelmed; I was able to get on the first time I tried, bu haven't been able to get the video since.
That would be me. Yup.
I love Starcraft; both the original, and StarCraft II. I'm not all that GOOD at it, and now we know why; I'm on the high side of 60. I can still beat the computer, most of the time; I just can't beat the other players! :-)
You write: "We trust science because it is self correcting. If it stops being self correcting, or that self correction is delayed by say, 50 years, there is no reason to trust it."
I would go one step further; when it stops being self-correcting, it stops being "science".
You write: "...because it is next to impossible to remove all human bias from an experiment." My concern is not that the advocates for anthropogenic global warming (AGW) have tried insufficiently to remove bias, it is the near certainly that the so-called "scientists" have been busy INTRODUCING bias. Not satisfied with merely being wrong, I think they are actively lying.
One of the fundamental principles of experimental science is accurately publishing your methods and your data, to allow other researchers to perform the same or similar experiments and attain the same results. To the extent that methods and data are not shared, it isn't "science".
One other thing; "science" is NEVER EVER "settled". There is always new things to learn, now experiments to be performed, new interpretations to be examined. Once the "science is settled" and no further debate is allowed, it has devolved into a religion. And it is scary how closely the current strident denial of debate in the AGW realm has come to a hunt for heretics to be burned at the stake. Just last week, a "journalist" opined that climate change "deniers" should be imprisoned.
'
Anthony Watts of WattsUpWithThat compiled an interesting list of "Global Cooling" references all through the 1970's.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/201...
I may be old, but my memory is still MOSTLY here.....
Hmmm. Are you SURE that "global cooling" and "The Coming Ice Age" weren't all the rage in the late '70's and early '80's? I sure remember a lot of headlines and magazine articles about that. I'm guessing that you weren't around to read those papers and magazines back then and that you get all your news from your iPhone now, but Siri can probably help you look up relevant articles.
WikiPedia may be the wrong thing to point to if you want "scientific journals".
Nor are the real "scientific" journals doing such a wonderful job, either. "Peer review" is a joke, and the track record of scientific journals retracting controversial articles is too long to put much faith in it. The mathematical models cannot predict the present by using inputs from the past. Contra Michael "Chicken Little" Mann, the "Medieval Warm Period _DID_ exist, and his own emails (leaked as part of the HadCRUT archive) prove that he was trying without success to explain it away. Kilimanjaro's snows have not receded. The glaciers in the Himalayas have not disappeared. Billions of people have not starved, nor has Australia been overrun with panicked Malaysians and Indonesians.
I got really suspicious when I saw that the same Socialist/World Government nostrums that Carl Sagan tried to prescribe for Global Cooling in the 1970s were being prescribed now for Global Warming.
My degree is in Physics; I always believe the actual facts. I haven't seen many, and most of them are on the "It's not a problem now, and may never be" side. And if we can only avoid collapsing the world economy with phony scare tactics, the world of 2060 will be rich enough to mitigate what minor effects there may be.
And if Siberia and northern Canada warm up a bit, there will be millions of acres of additional cropland that we can't use now. Maybe that would be a good thing.