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Comment Re:Needed: DIY education software (Score 1) 159

by 4181 (#30554566) Attached to: Skeptics Question OLPC's Focus With $75 Tablet

We also launched CIA ops to goad the Soviets to invade Afghanistan, ...

Can you refer me to any material on this?

From what I have read I seems that while some in the Carter administration hoped that the Soviets might get tangled up in Afghanistan, possibly giving them "their Vietnam," they were by no means pleased at the invasion, and the the U.S. Dept of Stale long thought that nothing much could be done about it, only hoping that the Soviets would stop there and not push on. Wasn't the post-invasion support for the mujahadeen pushed upon a reluctant CIA by congressional action?
Idle

Hand Written Clock 86

Posted by samzenpus from the up-to-the-minute dept.
a3buster writes "This clock does not actually have a man inside, but a flatscreen that plays a 24-hour loop of this video by the artist watching his own clock somewhere and painstakingly erasing and re-writing each minute. This video was taken at Design Miami during Art Basel Miami Beach 2009."
Space

Big Dipper "Star" Actually a Sextuplet System 88

Posted by kdawson from the toil-and-trouble dept.
Theosis sends word that an astronomer at the University of Rochester and his colleagues have made the surprise discovery that Alcor, one of the brightest stars in the Big Dipper, is actually two stars; and it is apparently gravitationally bound to the four-star Mizar system, making the whole group a sextuplet. This would make the Mizar-Alcor sextuplet the second-nearest such system known. The discovery is especially surprising because Alcor is one of the most studied stars in the sky. The Mizar-Alcor system has been involved in many "firsts" in the history of astronomy: "Benedetto Castelli, Galileo's protege and collaborator, first observed with a telescope that Mizar was not a single star in 1617, and Galileo observed it a week after hearing about this from Castelli, and noted it in his notebooks... Those two stars, called Mizar A and Mizar B, together with Alcor, in 1857 became the first binary stars ever photographed through a telescope. In 1890, Mizar A was discovered to itself be a binary, being the first binary to be discovered using spectroscopy. In 1908, spectroscopy revealed that Mizar B was also a pair of stars, making the group the first-known quintuple star system."

Comment Re:welleee (Score 1) 888

by 4181 (#30396836) Attached to: Best Way To Clear Your Name Online?

Now my favorite sport has hired a fucking Dog MURDER.

"Hot dogs! Get your hot dogs here!" (or is that only a baseball thing?)

Americans are so strange in the way they arbitrarily call certain species pets and other species food.
Image

NASA Tests Flying Airbag 118

Posted by samzenpus from the drop-the-cloud-anchor dept.
coondoggie writes "NASA is looking to reduce the deadly impact of helicopter crashes on their pilots and passengers with what the agency calls a high-tech honeycomb airbag known as a deployable energy absorber. So in order to test out its technology NASA dropped a small helicopter from a height of 35 feet to see whether its deployable energy absorber, made up of an expandable honeycomb cushion, could handle the stress. The test crash hit the ground at about 54MPH at a 33 degree angle, what NASA called a relatively severe helicopter crash."

Comment Re:A way to solve tsunamis problems on Earth ? (Score 1) 89

by 4181 (#30234482) Attached to: STEREO Satellites Spot Solar Flare Tsunami

I wonder if we had anything observing the opposite side of the Sun when this happened.

The project's orbital information page states that the two spacecraft are currently separated by 128 degrees. (They orbit about 0.05 AU inside and outside earth's orbit, so that their orbital periods are 346 and 388 days, and their separation changes by about 44 degrees annually.) The entire sun will be visible when they achieve 180 degrees separation in February 2011. With earth based observations, the full sun will continue to be visible another eight years. A few months of contact will be lost in 2015 as they pass behind the sun. (If only Ulysses was still operating, we could get some polar views as well. It should be silently making its next solar passes sometime around 2013-2014.)

STEREOs lunar gravitational slingshot (animated at the project's orbital simulation page) was very cool.

They are supposed to be searching for Trojan asteroids as they pass through Earth's L4 and L5 Lagrangian points, but I've not heard of any results yet.

Comment Re:498,438,559,990kg?? (Score 1) 174

by 4181 (#30181432) Attached to: How Heavy Is the Internet?

That's a very precise figure for something that's just a rough estimate!

Besides being both overly precise and essentially meaningless, there is no indication of how it was derived. They give a number of subtotals that sum to less than 5% of their total.

22,837,511,120 kg = 570,937,778 computers * 40 kg/computer [those are heavy boxen]
1,754,809,310 kg = 175,480,931 servers * 10 kg/server
87,000,000 kg = 15,000 km TAT-14 cable * 5.8 kg/m-of-cable
6,075,000 kg = 42,000,000 iPhones * approx 144.64 g/iPhone [the review they link to claims 133 g]
6,800,000 kg = 50,000,000 Blackberries * 136 g/Blackberry

24,692,195,430 kg sum
498,438,559,990 kg their total

The cable figure is only for the "TAT-14 cable that links the US to France, the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark and the UK", but they make no indication that they are scaling it up.

So, I wonder how they did arrive at their meaningless number.

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I tell them to turn to the study of mathematics, for it is only there that they might escape the lusts of the flesh. -- Thomas Mann, "The Magic Mountain"

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