Comment Re:Compelling, but a mix still better... (Score 1) 399
What do you a call a guy with no arms and no legs in orbit?
no, really, I want to hear your punchlines...
no, really, I want to hear your punchlines...
NASA's HI-SEAS Project Results Suggests a Women-Only Mars Crew 399
globaljustin writes "Alan Drysdale, a systems analyst in advanced life support and a contractor with NASA concluded, "Small women haven't been demonstrated to be appreciably dumber than big women or big men, so there's no reason to choose larger people for a flight crew when it's brain power you want," says Drysdale. "The logical thing to do is to fly small women." Kate Greene, who wrote the linked article, took part in the first HI-SEAS experiment in Martian-style living, and has some compelling reasons for an all-women crew, energy efficiency chief among them: Week in and week out, the three female crew members expended less than half the calories of the three male crew members. Less than half! We were all exercising roughly the same amount—at least 45 minutes a day for five consecutive days a week—but our metabolic furnaces were calibrated in radically different ways. During one week, the most metabolically active male burned an average of 3,450 calories per day, while the least metabolically active female expended 1,475 calories per day. It was rare for a woman on crew to burn 2,000 calories in a day and common for male crew members to exceed 3,000. ...
The calorie requirements of an astronaut matter significantly when planning a mission. The more food a person needs to maintain her weight on a long space journey, the more food should launch with her. The more food launched, the heavier the payload. The heavier the payload, the more fuel required to blast it into orbit and beyond. The more fuel required, the heavier the rocket becomes, which it in turn requires more fuel to launch.
Comment Re:Eliminate the middle man (Score 1) 342
At the ice truck? ARE YOU INSANE?
That path leads to MADNESS!
Comment Typical Burning Man... (Score 1) 342
A lot of people that show up are not prepared and mooch off of everyone in the name of "community"
We would hide our resources and tell others "nope dont have any" on a lot of occasions and those we could tell were in real need and not just lazy potheads we would share.
Comment Re:The Windows Phone failed. (Score 1, Flamebait) 172
When poor people buy phones, they choose the free model. and all the windows phones are the free model as nobody in their right mind would intentionally pay the $399 premium phone price for one.
Comment Re:The Windows Phone failed. (Score 0, Flamebait) 172
IT will be, it will probably be as horrific as the LG, Motorola and Samsung crap.
If the Watch can not do 2-3 days on a charge , it is a complete and utter fail.
If the watch does not have an open API so apps can easily be written for it, it is a complete and utter fail.
And honestly, from what we have seen from Microsoft for mobile devices over the past 3 years, it will be a complete and utter fail.
Comment "Flaminia" is German for FIRE (Score 1) 275
Maybe it was a bad idea to name it the Flaminia.
Comment before unbuntu (Score 3, Interesting) 110
I was running Gentoo on my desktop and laptop to get the latest performance optimizations since most distros at the time were optimized for older processors. Ubuntu was really the first distro that was optimized out of the box for performance desktops. I don't miss debugging compilation issues with "emerge world".
Comment yeah, going with not creepy. (Score 2) 130
I actually like the idea - having been on an overnight flight landing on 9/11, I remember quite a few online contacts wanting to check I was OK. Of course, with Facebook a simple status update would have done the trick, no need for any special tool - and if I'd been offline, a friend could probably have posted that on my page on my behalf. (The gap between "can phone a friend" and "can get online" is pretty slim these days, too: much more so now than it was then.)
Comment Re:Divergence (Score 1) 154
Some of us have a problem when you post to Slashdot about it. If you could provide actual evidence, which you can't, or even say how it's falsifiable, I think it would go over better.
Of course, I don't care in the least what you or the entirety of Slashdot have "a problem with", as is appropriate, because it simply could not in any way factually matter.
That said, though, again, this is an issue of interpretation. Insofar as a given IC structure does not currently have, within the scope of science, a definitive explanation, it is -evidence-. No amount of equivocation around "of course we will determine the particular route to the transition" or "we've thoroughly politically smeared IC and ID, so don't bother bringing it up" or handwaving reasoning-by-analogy to other biological structures will alter this. If you want to make up you own notion of what "evidence" is, that's fine, but if we go by what evidence actually is, apparently improbable biological transitions are -each-, -individually-, evidence. They are evidence until they -all- are refuted.
I have been accused of setting unreasonable criteria for this, in that it is claimed that the current state of science does not allow for these to be exhaustively analyzed. Well... too bad. Difficulty of analysis does not enable redefinition of words.
And, likewise, that is the route to falsifiability. Explain all the transitions. Specifically.
Even then, you have a major issue in that at some point we have to address the unstated causal factors contained in the placeholder-word for the not actually present causal explanation that is the term "random".
You'd need to show the "random" mutations are "unknown quantum effect random" rather than "designer-directed random"--neither of these, likely, is falsifiable.
However, we can address that when the baseline criteria for falsification is reached. All the proposed IC structures explained. Yes, all of them. Specifically. At a resolution of the specific mutations and specific biochemistry transitions resulting therefrom. At that point, if you can meet the previous criteria, and show that the former is more plausible, in that as the effect of the Big Bang, that is, on the first and only "try" (insofar as we have evidence, feel free to forward a conjectural model and we'll do some epistemological comparisons), we end up with intelligent life rather than a mass of "spacetime goo", thus removing the strong flavor of teleology from empirical existence, I'll be personally satisfied.
In the interim, I'll assume forebearance enough (though, as noted, I don't care if it's not given, and given typical responses, it probably hypocritically won't be) to support my position on this question -indirectly- as, say, is considered perfectly acceptable for most pro-atheism writers today (Dawkins, Harris) etc., to combine broader inferential and worldview arguments into their exegesis along with the narrow, specific biological questions around evolution.
So, in that regard, here is peer-reviewed evidence of firsthand quantified eyewitness (e.g. empirical, the unusual circumstances being something I'm quite willing to argue) of the predictive accuracy of mainstream conceptualizations of a particular notion of that designer.
http://www.thelancet.com/journ....
http://profezie3m.altervista.o...
When and if you respond with an alternate possible interpretation of this evidence (as is the standard response), will it then cease to be evidence for my model, rather than at best (from your perspective) evidence for -both-?
No.
Of course, I don't care in the least what you or the entirety of Slashdot have "a problem with", as is appropriate, because it simply could not in any way factually matter.
That said, though, again, this is an issue of interpretation. Insofar as a given IC structure does not currently have, within the scope of science, a definitive explanation, it is -evidence-. No amount of equivocation around "of course we will determine the particular route to the transition" or "we've thoroughly politically smeared IC and ID, so don't bother bringing it up" or handwaving reasoning-by-analogy to other biological structures will alter this. If you want to make up you own notion of what "evidence" is, that's fine, but if we go by what evidence actually is, apparently improbable biological transitions are -each-, -individually-, evidence. They are evidence until they -all- are refuted.
I have been accused of setting unreasonable criteria for this, in that it is claimed that the current state of science does not allow for these to be exhaustively analyzed. Well... too bad. Difficulty of analysis does not enable redefinition of words.
And, likewise, that is the route to falsifiability. Explain all the transitions. Specifically.
Even then, you have a major issue in that at some point we have to address the unstated causal factors contained in the placeholder-word for the not actually present causal explanation that is the term "random".
You'd need to show the "random" mutations are "unknown quantum effect random" rather than "designer-directed random"--neither of these, likely, is falsifiable.
However, we can address that when the baseline criteria for falsification is reached. All the proposed IC structures explained. Yes, all of them. Specifically. At a resolution of the specific mutations and specific biochemistry transitions resulting therefrom. At that point, if you can meet the previous criteria, and show that the former is more plausible, in that as the effect of the Big Bang, that is, on the first and only "try" (insofar as we have evidence, feel free to forward a conjectural model and we'll do some epistemological comparisons), we end up with intelligent life rather than a mass of "spacetime goo", thus removing the strong flavor of teleology from empirical existence, I'll be personally satisfied.
In the interim, I'll assume forebearance enough (though, as noted, I don't care if it's not given, and given typical responses, it probably hypocritically won't be) to support my position on this question -indirectly- as, say, is considered perfectly acceptable for most pro-atheism writers today (Dawkins, Harris) etc., to combine broader inferential and worldview arguments into their exegesis along with the narrow, specific biological questions around evolution.
So, in that regard, here is peer-reviewed evidence of firsthand quantified eyewitness (e.g. empirical, the unusual circumstances being something I'm quite willing to argue) of the predictive accuracy of mainstream conceptualizations of a particular notion of that designer.
http://www.thelancet.com/journ....
http://profezie3m.altervista.o...
When and if you respond with an alternate possible interpretation of this evidence (as is the standard response), will it then cease to be evidence for my model, rather than at best (from your perspective) evidence for -both-?
No.
Comment Re:Divergence (Score 1) 154
This has nothing to do with what Occam's Razor says.
It continues to astonish me how consistently erroneous the understanding of this is on Slashdot, and how suddenly this mass-misperception of this statement of my fellow theist Occam has propagated.
I can only conjecture this is due to the mass-misdirection efforts of Dawkins et al.
Occam's Razor says nothing about probability. Occam's Razor says nothing about the validity of inferences from given observable phenomena. Occam's Razor says, and -only- says, that -all else being equal-, the simplest model for a given phenomena should be used -for its conceptual economy-. This is on the basis of methodological efficiency, not truth-value. Note: In no way whatsoever can "not true" or "less probably true" or "inferior" be derived from this. It is not the case that Occam's Razor says "simpler = truer".
Ever.
Comment Re:Engineers have no future. (Score 5, Insightful) 148
Agreed. A manager who says that turnover is not a problem is a manager that has no inkling of what engineers do, what exactly their company produces, or how badly they are in trouble when knowledge and experience walk out the door. Either that, or they're lying to your face.
There's that tipping point when the work gets harder, the code is even more rotted, the "process" is even more constricting, because they know something is wrong but they need to "measure" everything to figure out why. That's when people are running, not walking out the door.
There's that tipping point when the work gets harder, the code is even more rotted, the "process" is even more constricting, because they know something is wrong but they need to "measure" everything to figure out why. That's when people are running, not walking out the door.
Comment Re:Makes sense (Score 1) 77
But no depth to supply the fungus with the nutrition necessary for life.
Comment Both yes, but as Fusion-Fission hybrid (Score 4, Interesting) 218
What is really needed is a fusion/fission hybrid, which has been theorized for decades, but somehow never makes it past initial design phases. Gives a bridge to pure fusion, burns nuclear waste and/or thorium. Far fewer unknowns and engineering problems to overcome than pure fusion. What’s not to love?
Comment Re:Value (Score 1) 158
Like GM.. Add shiny plastic, crap leather and call it the "premium" version.
