old_fortran - Slashdot User

Big Dipper "Star" Actually a Sextuplet System 88

Posted by kdawson on Friday December 11, 2009 @01:48PM 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."

Submission + - Dollhouse Canceled - As if we couldn't guess ... (hollywoodreporter.com)

Submitted by old_fortran on Thursday November 12, 2009 @12:23AM

old_fortran writes: Any show taken out of the lineup for "Sweeps Week" is likely on wavers, right?

Thanks to Digg, I can state that my expectations have finally been met. The Hollywood Reporter says "Dollhouse" is now toast, although they indicate that Fox will let Joss finish the 13 episodes planned for this season (no, I don't believe they will air them all either). Meanwhile, I gave up on that "big hit of this season"- ABC's FlashForward — after just 3 episodes, because it was taking so ***fracking*** long to get somewhere. And my son liked "V", but do we really need another retread show from two decades back? Doesn't anyone have any original ideas??

IMHO "Dollhouse" was entertaining and more original than the other SiFi shows on this year; but it was on FOX, so I was expecting this. At least I am hoping to see the rest of the season aired, although I will likely have to buy the DVD set to get everything again (just like "Firefly").

Now for an open statement to Joss — have you noticed that the major networks JUST CANNOT SEEM TO GET IT TOGETHER when it comes to your kind of show? Based on the experience of comparable (but apparently more popular) shows like "Mad Men", "Dexter", Six Feet Under", "The Sopranos", "United States of Tara", and so many others, the message is clear — find someone at HBO, Showtime, AMC, SyFy, or one of the other cable outlets and get them to sponsor 13 shows per season. Hey, FOX isn't going to do 20 anyway, so you might as well start with the right number to begin with — 10 to 13. It certainly seems that any SciFi oriented show that makes you do the minimal amount of thinking should just expect to wither and die / typically in the Friday Night Death Slot / if shown on network television. So just give the big networks a pass next time; fewer shows on a smaller network will still attract your core audience, which may prove more bankable when in a proper context from an advertising standpoint.

Of course, I know that this is likely not to be an isolated incident. "Fringe" producers — are you listening? Perhaps that one will last a while longer, but it's on Fox, so ...

And to think — FOX is owned by NewsCorp, which also wants to somehow charge for "internet content". Perhaps someone should reconsider implementing the "Executive Powder" solution earlier than the 31st century?

Old_Fortran

Comment Actuallty, they are stealing from Poul Anderson (Score 1) 829

by old_fortran on Monday October 05, 2009 @02:38PM (#29647819) Attached to: Stargate Universe

The basic concept - send out a starship on a very long voyage of discovery with a "transmat" / "teleporter" / "stargate" on it so you can beam in and out - I vaguely remembered when I watched the pilot. That concept is the basis for the book "The Enemy Stars", by Poul Anderson (copyright 1958), and the ship's name in the book was the "Southern Cross". (My fragile paperback copy says it cost $0.50US back in 1968 or so.) Would have been a nice tribute if this ship had been given the same name (since it originated on Earth, the Southern Cross constellation would have been visible to the ancients that launched it). Don't know about the intellectual property situation, however.

Yes, there are elements of BSG, SG-Atlantis, ST-Voyager (except this ship is heading outbound), and even ST-DS9 (since this is an alien ship that is somewhat trashed / remember the first episode of DS9?). At least this time the Colonel didn't die like he did in SG Atlantis 1-1, and leave the mission to the "young hotshot". Also, you know the rules of pilots - the B-list actor with a recognizable face gets the ax, right? Finally, the Senator would have been S-O-L once his pills ran out, so I think he made the smart move in saving his daughter's life.

The cast has promise, they appear to be reusing lots of SG1 concepts effectively, and it is at least newish (if you can ignore that ST-TNG episode when the "Traveler" took them to the edge of reality / the first "Wesley is **really** special episode). Hey, being 7 BILLION lightyears from Earth is a bit farther away than the Pegasus galaxy.

What else can I say? I liked what the SG Production Team did with Atlantis (died two years early in my opinion), and how the DVD movies wrapped up both the Ori and Baal story lines for SG1. It's not yet another teen vampire show, and I like the Eli character (again, his role shows their humor, using a game to find him - like "Last StarFighter" - then beaming him out of his own house to grab him).

So SGU production team - please steal as much as you can from "classic" SciFi; we will all be thankful.

Other random comments:
- B5 was great, mainly because of the people. What other US SciFi show lets people have drinks, sit around in their rooms, cry like they mean it, and try to live real lives? DS9 did a lot of the same things, but B5 still seems more likable (and I liked DS9; but I own B5). Still, as much as I liked B5, I can't see it continuing without G'Kar; it just wouldn't be the same.

- Sliders / more stealing from my favorite books; this time from Keith Laumer's "Imperium" stories (except his device was the size of a 1950's phone booth or bigger, not a handheld remote control).

- Everyone steals, so why not SGU? / remember the ST-Enterprise episode with the derelict timeship that was "bigger on the inside than the outside"? (Someone should have just said: Q. "What model is it? A. Type 40!")

- Dollhouse / I hate to say it, but as much as I enjoy the hell out of it, I just know Fox is going to kill it as soon as they can. Why can't they sell this kind of show to NewsCorp / SkyNET (perhaps they do, but it may not be enough). While it is still a fairly original show (relatively / not about space, time travel, or robots), it is likely too expensive for its own good (**cough** Farscape **cough**).

- Someone find Claudia Black and Ben Browder some new work. I suggest Robert Heinlein's "The Glory Road". Read it and see what I mean.

= = = = = = = = = =
dave | i-can-feel-my-mind-going ...

Comment Re:Even More Irritation (Score 1) 239

by old_fortran on Sunday March 15, 2009 @06:12PM (#27203365) Attached to: How Moore's Law Saved Us From the Gopher Web

in 1981 I joined a company that had "thicknet" running down the halls of the "experimental" zone in the IT building. We had at least 2 XEROX "Portrait Display" GUI workstations and a file server with an attached laser printer (all of which appeared to be used mainly to create decks of nicely formatted presentation foils; main value of this system IMHO).

I didn't see a Lisa on that site for at least a year, and my understanding of what happened then - at least as a customer - was the Lisa was a $10K version of what Xerox wanted us to pay $18K for per seat. Ironically, that company (and most others at that time in the Fortune 50) went instead with IBM PC's and XT's (which at up to $6K per seat fully configured were cheaper than either option, if obviously inferior in capability at that point in time).

I write this because one aspect of this thread has been to discuss multiple sources of things that came later. Are individuals the key, or are some outcomes inevitable? Raskin is claimed in the preceding entry to be the single source of both the Apple and PARC GUI evolution (.i.e., the "key individual"); but clearly both were interconnected, and PARC - at least to me - had a quasi-commercial product on the market before Apple. Just as the Macintosh was evolved from the Lisa, I would say the "big picture" view - networked Macintoshes connected to a shared postscript printer with file services - was being offered to the market by PARC prior to Apple's commercial delivery of it - my direct experience.

Perhaps Apple could have come up with all the same concepts w/o PARC getting there first from a production standpoint . But to me, BOTH were needed - XEROX with the corporate PoC, and Apple then making it a commercial reality (Lisa to Mac to the Mac family, etc.). This is the point here about the web as well. If Gopher had evolved to look more like the web, it wouldn't have been the Gopher from 1990, but something else derived from Gopher. To me classic Gopher "lost" because Mosaic (at least beta .7 and forward) was better - I and other tech-heads could use Gopher, but anyone (my wife and my children in my own case) could use Mosaic. I switched, along with everyone else; but Gopher had its in this story, as PARC did in the GUI PC story.

Apple eventually beat Xerox in this space in my opinion because they commercialized an advanced workstation concept at a mass-market level (i.e., taking the view of a "PC" vendor versus a "scientific workstation" or "office automation" vendor). I think we can all agree with that as a fact of history; but the foundation for the GUI-based PC and all the things that made it work link back decades. In short, this was not just based on the work and insights of one or two key people. Those people that were key to Apple's success - Jobs, Rankin, the Macintosh Development team, etc. - deserve the credit they have been given. Just don't tell me they weren't also standing on the shoulders of others.

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