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Submission + - Astronauts defend Mount Marilyn (newscientist.com)

Submitted by dataspel
dataspel writes: Apollo astronauts William Anders and James Lovell would like to have their mountain back. During pre-flight planning, informal names were given to various features along the flight path, including Mount Marilyn, in honor of Lovell's wife, Marilyn. But the unromantic IAU has instead named it Mount Secchi. The astronauts have asked the IAU to restore their preferred name. So far, no response has been forthcoming.

Comment Re:Make it easier (Score 1) 562

by dataspel (#44790795) Attached to: 400 Million Chinese Cannot Speak Mandarin
Pinyin, or any other written romanization scheme will never work for Mandarin. The reason is simple.
There are not enough phonemes in Mandarin. Adding tones mitigates this a bit but not enough.
As a result, a typical Pinyin character representation can have many possible meanings.
Take a nice simple example like zhong1 (Middle as in Middle Kingdom or China). There are at least 14 different meanings for this pinyin word alone: http://www.yellowbridge.com/chinese/wordsearch.php?searchMode=P&dialect=M&word=zhong1&search=Go

Comment Re:To answer your question (Score 1) 274

by dataspel (#44664321) Attached to: Workers at Chile's ALMA Telescope Strike Over Working Conditions
Good points. You can still use this as a starting point for wages at less isolated observatories. Try contacting various amateur astronomical societies that are near the observatories for which you want to get numbers. Such groups usually have a few members that keep up with such things. And good luck!!

Comment Re:All he does is suggest "broad" change (Score 1) 302

by dataspel (#44649257) Attached to: Obama Seeks New System For Rating Colleges

While the population turns more resentful by the day from intrusive government meddling and spying, he fiddles with programs that really don't need more government intervention.

The population is doing nothing of the kind. Republicans resent him because they are the party out of power. Fringe leftists and libertarians resent him for their own reasons, but they are a vanishingly small fraction of the people. Most of the population either likes what he is doing, or don't care.

Comment Re:Students have to take some of the responsibilit (Score 1) 827

by dataspel (#44594381) Attached to: The College-Loan Scandal
California has 2 tiers. The UC schools are tier 1, and priced accordingly. The CSU schools, and there are a lot more of them, are highly affordable. A middle class family can easily send 1 child, or several, to community college, followed by 2 years of living at home and going to a public tier 2 school. Or if the kids don't want to live at home, they can get a job or join the military.

Comment Re:Cisco is a very unique company... (Score 1) 139

by dataspel (#44585597) Attached to: Cisco Slashes 4,000 Jobs

Cisco has managed to bribe enough politicians and spread enough FUD to keep Huawei out of the US

[Citation needed]

those markets figure that if someone is spying on them anyway, it might as well be the cheaper vendor.

Really???

The infrastructure divisions of Lucent, Nortel, Motorola, Nokia & Siemens have either disappeared completely or exist only in vestigial forms

Cisco won. - there, fixed that for ya

companies like Cisco and Juniper are stuffed full of people who are unemployable anywhere else.

Like any large high tech company, Cisco has a spectrum of talent, some good, some bad.

They have not really kept in touch with the basics of computer science and are mostly unable to make it through the interview processes of growing web-based companies.

You sound like a web developer. Well, not every high tech company exclusively needs web developers.

It is commonly heard within Cisco that the entire caste system of India has been replicated there.

I call BS on this.

Comment laptop and text editor (Score 1) 217

by dataspel (#44566003) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Best Software For Med-School Note-Taking?
Pen and paper is just not searchable enough. Use laptop and and a text editor, so you can search the text. I keep an online lab notebook, chock-full of how-tos, references, and other things I would otherwise have forgotten long ago. Going on 14 years now, it has been a lifesaver many times over. Would never give it up.

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