Comment Yes. (Score 2) 749
You can be trained to hear the lossy compression artifacts. But trust me, you don't want to be. Once you can hear them, you can't unhear them.
Comment Not 180k -- it's 85k (Score 1) 342
RTFA. The mutation was ~85 kya. The popular article also gets this wrong in their title.
Comment Reflecting negatively? (Score 1) 628
There are plenty of ways to lambaste scientologists (with all of the ways graciously provided directly by them), but this? Yeah sure, the divorce of a Hollywood couple is so unusual, I can see how that would reflect negatively on any group associated with it.
Comment VTVM (Score 1) 197
Awesome. I still have my Heathkit Vacuum Tube Voltmeter. I need to dig it out and see if it still works ...
Comment 6 times (Score 1) 104
Actually MSL is about six times the mass of an MER rover.
Comment Poor Enrico Fermi ... (Score 1) 848
... is rolling his eyes in his grave. The guy who built the very first nuclear reactor on Earth (at least in the last two billion years or so) was an Italian-American physicist.
Comment Re:Ebay (Score 1) 503
People in the ISS staring back at Earth while a huge asteroid wipes off the planet killing off all mammals would probably say "yup... that's some nice ROI.. good investing".
And then they realize that they have all men up there on the current rotation
Comment Small world (Score 1) 712
It's a small world, but I wouldn't want to paint it.
-- Steven Wright
Comment Re:90 days? (Score 1) 147
Scott wrote:
I'm not saying we expected the rovers to drop dead at the stroke of midnight on sol 91, but even the wildest optimists on the project did not openly dare to hope that we'd even double that 90-sol lifetime.
Actually I was one of the wild optimists on the project, and before landing I predicted that (if they successfully landed and deployed, which was not a given), that they would survive up to solar conjunction in September 2004, or about eight months. More than double the warranty lifetime. I said "Opportunity might make it through conjunction a go a little longer, but I doubt it."
I recall that Jake Matijevic agreed with my calculation -- it was based on his "minimum watt-hours per sol" survival numbers at the time, which he has since improved on by a factor of two or more. But no one on the project predicted survival beyond conunction.
If someone told us five years, we would have laughed. "Impossible", we would have confidently replied
Comment Oops. That's Seven. (Score 1) 106
The author should have counted. Only seven were listed in the article. He/she left out Asteroid Rover/Sample Return (on page 7 of the announcement).
Submission + - iPhone Calendar bug -- What does your iPhone show? (apple.com)
dradler writes: "My iPhone, and many other iPhone's are showing both 1 am and 1 pm twice in the Calendar day view, with the second occurrence replacing 2 pm, which never shows. It seems highly likely that this bug is related to this morning's daylight savings time change.
What does your iPhone show in the Calendar day view?"
What does your iPhone show in the Calendar day view?"
