Posts by DNTP 726 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Jan 2014
I put transparent tape over my camera. It gives me all the advantages of taping over the camera but still lets me do video chat without having to remove the tape. And as a bonus I can still see if the LED lights up or not.
Sometimes I randomly feel a vague sense of unease like something invisible is watching me, but I have a really low Wisdom score so I always fail that check.
I'm sure the majority of people here have, at some point in their educations, gotten a passing grade in a course despite failing an exam, or passed a test but missed at least one question, or gotten a satisfactory-or-above yearly review despite epoxying an annoying graduate student's office door shut over the weekend.
OK maybe that last one is a little situationally specific.
A few months ago I convinced my younger brother, who was just picking up the Go craze, to go for a walk in the woods because there might be "nature pokemon" there. Halfway through he says, "There are no pokemon here." This is actually an interesting statement because depending on your viewpoint, it can be either subjectively or absolutely true.
Eh let's just take the easy option and make people legally liable for any misuse of their IoT devices. I hear that's working out great for home wireless routers. If a kid these days is smart enough to get on Facebook he's smart enough to write his own security patches for the family light bulbs.
Now in true Sector General tradition, after hitting numerous dead ends the hero of the story will make a sudden correlation between two or three pieces of trivia revealed earlier in the story, and figure out that the extra radiation was coming from two radiation-eating life-forms with congenitally defective biological shielding sneaking off into the maintenance corridors to have sex.
I suspect (as a molecular geneticist) that the question is not exactly "life" or "DNA", but rather concerns the organic precursors to the complex compounds associated with simple life on Earth. Did these precursors arise terrestrially, perhaps catalyzed by planetary geochemical processes such as active volcanism and lightning discharges, or can they arise in protoplanetary bodies that lack long-term tectonic and atmospheric conditions? This information will likely be useful in the search for life on other planets- the more we understand how and where prerequisite chemical conditions originate, the better we will be able to focus our efforts towards likely candidate worlds.
You don't even have to be me to have seen this coming, and I saw it coming.
"Hey everyone, we're MedSec the short-sellers and we couldn't think of a better way to totally torpedo our credibility as security auditors that didn't involve selling babies on Ebay."
The real losers from this, of course, are the patients using the audited devices, since the issue of actual product fault (or not) seems to have fallen by the wayside.
I don't believe it was a payload engine misfire since the payload stage fell pretty much straight down and looked largely intact before it hit the pad and detonated (that's presumably the hydrazine contamination source that SpaceX referred to, since the Falcon9 itself runs off the kerosene derivative RP-1 and LOX).
Note the initial small fireball close to the top of the stage, the fireball expansion, and the burning streamers cascading down under the fireball. That's burning RP-1. I would speculate a leak in the fuel stage mixed with venting oxygen- at which point a tiny static charge would have been enough to set it off- and a flashback into the fuel tank, which ruptured into the larger fireball and streamers.
The brighter flash when the payload hits the pad seems to be the hydrazine/oxidizer tanks rupturing and the hypergolic contents suddenly finding themselves in massive contact. Probably a much faster reaction than the RP-1 tank rupture and combustion, but the sheer speed of detonation would tend to fling a lot of hydrazine away from the reaction size without oxidization, hence the contamination hazard.
Mainly I'm glad no one got killed. Satellites and rockets can be rebuilt.
"CEO impersonation" is going to maintain its utility as a criminal technique as long as business culture tolerates CEOs/directors/managers who pull rank to override their own company's security and IT policies (and then fire or demote anyone who tries enforce the policy).
NASA did not anticipate that the telescope would last long enough to make an orbital transfer like that a mission requirement. Also, it's not just a one-time maneuver- it would involve catching up to Earth, and then a re-transfer to the original orbit to avoid getting too close to Earth. Earth radiates heat, and heat affects the telescope. Also by the time such a maneuver would be required, the telescope would have depleted its He cooling system (which happened in 2008), worsening the heating effect. Finally, this would have to be done quickly, to make it worthwhile relative to the likelihood of the telescope reaching the end of life during the process.
A loss of objectivity for the MedSec security review team? Since they are shorting the stock of the company whose product safety they are reviewing, it's literally true that the worse their report is going to be, the more money they make. Instead of accepting their findings with a degree of impartiality, their target can simply say, "These safety reports are exaggerated due to a clear financial motive" and, whether or not this is true, use it to delay having to spend money on recalls or updates.
This is technically incorrect. In LEO, there is %92 as much gravity as on Earth's surface. However, even though there is nearly as much gravity, you can't drop a wrench because it has been pre-dropped. Everything in free-fall is already dropping as much as it can possibly drop, and cannot be dropped any further.
Can you spill a glass of water, while underwater?
One doesn't land on even a very large asteroid so much as one matches vector and velocity as close to it as possible, slowly drifts in under tiny gravitational forces, and then hopes not to bounce off hard enough to attain escape velocity.
Philae, the ESA Rosetta comet lander, made its landing at ~100cm/sec and attained a velocity of 38cm/sec on its first (unintentional) bounce, which was 86% of the velocity that would have unrecoverably launched it away from the comet's surface.
These are really gentle events.
In the long term, the benefit to human civilization of an improved Yarkovsky effect model will be worth a heck of a lot more than the $800 million price tag (Note that this is completely aside from all the other scientific gains that could be realized from the mission). It will enable more accurate long-term prediction/tracking of potentially dangerous asteroids, allowing astronomers to focus their efforts on actual threats and potentially carry out diversion missions as early as possible. Early is cheaper, as anyone who has ever sent out a Kerbal team to shift a Class E rock surely knows.
…that only a lawyer could make. Actually, the companies challenging Elm are not quite operating in good faith either, if they are deliberately filing on the last day of the 1-year deadline in order to draw the case out as long as possible to annoy Elm. Which is, I guess, legal in a narrow sense, although I seem to recall instances where doing so has drawn a censure from the judge. So it's understandable (in an extremely limited, absolutionist context) why a lawyer would be trying to run this technicality into the ground.
If this is like any other call center I've ever heard of, the quotas set by management are completely arbitrary, divorced from reality, and basically impossible for even the best worker to reliably meet.
If staff can't meet a metric like "answer 92% of calls within 10 seconds", that generally means that the company is understaffed, which is always true in call centers where management gets larger bonuses for keeping minimum staff on payroll. Then when the metric isn't met, they fire lots of random workers and hire new minimum wagers.
And then they wonder why people cheat the system!
According to internet sources, the S400-15 bi-propellent primary engine burns monomethyl hydrazine (MMH) as a fuel. (I call it 1-methyl hydrazine which is technically correct but stylistically inappropriate because hydrazine, the base, is not an organic compound). The oxidizer is probably nitrogen tetroxide, a proven combination used in other applications such as the Space Shuttle orbital maneuvering system.
The given vacuum specific impulse for the ExoMars TGO engine is 330 seconds, which is admirably efficient relative to the evolution of human spaceflight. For comparison, the Space Shuttle OMS operated at about 313-316 seconds (out of a theoretically possible 336), and there's no reason to assume the ESA and Airbus engineers aren't every bit as good as their American counterparts.
Except that the dark matter hypothesis makes physical assertions that could be eventually confirmed or rejected experimentally, leading to the refinement/acceptance/rejection of the model, and the God Intervention hypothesis doesn't?
We as a species used to believe that "God Intervention" was a perfectly good explanation for things like tides, sunrises, lightning, rainbows, why-are-all-these-animals-here, etc, until we discovered that the universe (as befits the creation of a god) is more like a fantastically intricate interlocking machine, than a set of construction bricks simply being moved around by a greater intelligence.
Too bad they didn't detect anything, it was a noble effort.
Seriously, though- nondetection does not imply that the experiment was uninformative (and therefore uesless). If a certain particle model predicted that a detectable event was highly probable within the 20-month period, then the negative result means that the scientists studying dark matter need to re-think either the detectability threshold of an interaction, or the validity of the model.
If the decision-makers are reasonably confident that they will get the booster back for re-use after each launch, then it should logically become cost-effective to build rockets that are more reliable and have greater mission flexibility than one-use-only designs, thus allowing previously uneconomical orbital projects.
This is the same reason why reusable shopping bags are both sturdier and more expensive than disposable ones, just… they don't explode as much?
Surely this would depend on many factors other than the planet's orbital period of 576 hours. The incredibly small distance between the planet and its dwarf star intuitively suggests to me that it is tidally locked, with one side being a light-blasted desert, and the other being a bleak, dark wasteland.
The existence and extent of "moderate" zones which would tend to support life as we think of it, would depend greatly on the existence of an atmospheric or fluidic medium to exchange heat, as well as various orbital factors such as eccentricity and inclination which would induce seasonality into the edges of the extreme zones.
"Redmond said one OneDriver had 75TB of files stored in its cloud"
They should give this guy a crown and put him on a throne because obviously he's the new king of porn.
Then burn the crown and throne to ashes because, uhh, that guy was touching them and now they are all sticky.
Looks more like a elementary school slipknot to me than a proper bowline or a noose. And if you want to pass your orientation interview and work in my lab, knowing how to tie a bowline is a requirement. Whereas things like nooses and "Fifty shades of gray knots" are more like a Never At Work deal...
Oh! I know what it looks like! A complete lack of professionalism.
That's a pretty low percentage, but your calculations do in fact suggest there's a million of the things out there, and a million of anything that's as bells as a magnetar has to be considered in some sense as "a lot".
Then again, given that we've only found 29 out of the million magnetars theoretically out there, suggests that we have only observed %0.0029 of the galaxy according to the magnetar metric, which means that in accordance with certain authorities, space is "frikkin big".
What we can all agree on is that as some of the densest, most magnetic matter out there, once we get our hands on one of these things and mine it, we are going to set up the most badass headphone company in the history of mankind.
I spent a college year working on a study about bumblebee foraging patterns in a fragmented woodland in the Northeast USA. They are fascinatingly capable creatures. Bumblebees can navigate across open areas, including roads, parking lots, and railway lines, to foraging locations learned on previous visits, within feet of highly productive plant populations, even to the extent of individual tagged bees learning to specialize on specific species of flowers over the course of their careers as pollinators.
I have also heard that coastal bumblebees will fly miles over open water to visit incredibly isolated plant populations on rocky islands, navigating via polarized sunlight or some similar mechanism.
For the record, I handled several hundred individual bees that year, mostly capturing specimens and gluing tags onto them, and received zero stings. Foraging Bombus are completely non-aggressive, and can even be handled gently in the field (although they are delicate, so it is not recommended). People without specific allergies should not be afraid to get close to read a tag or take a picture.
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