Comment Paywall? (Score 1) 1
Acta Astronautice has the subject paper listed as "licensed under a Creative Commons " but wants $35 to read it.
Is there any way for us cheap bastards to read it?
Submission + - Is a Climate Disaster Inevitable?
HughPickens.com writes: Astrophysicist Adam Frank has an interesting article in the NYT postulating one answer to the Fermi paradox — that the human evolution into a globe-spanning industrial culture is forcing us through the narrow bottleneck of a sustainability crisis and that civilization inevitably leads to catastrophic planetary changes. According to Frank, our current sustainability crisis may be neither politically contingent nor unique, but a natural consequence of laws governing how planets and life of any kind, anywhere, must interact. Some excerpts:
The defining feature of a technological civilization is the capacity to intensively “harvest” energy. But the basic physics of energy, heat and work known as thermodynamics tell us that waste, or what we physicists call entropy, must be generated and dumped back into the environment in the process. Human civilization currently harvests around 100 billion megawatt hours of energy each year and dumps 36 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the planetary system, which is why the atmosphere is holding more heat and the oceans are acidifying.
All forms of intensive energy-harvesting will have feedbacks, even if some are more powerful than others. A study by scientists at the Max Planck Institute in Jena, Germany, found that extracting energy from wind power on a huge scale can cause its own global climate consequences. When it comes to building world-girdling civilizations, there are no planetary free lunches.
By studying these nearby planets, we’ve discovered general rules for both climate and climate change (PDF). These rules, based in physics and chemistry, must apply to any species, anywhere, taking up energy-harvesting and civilization-building in a big way. For example, any species climbing up the technological ladder by harvesting energy through combustion must alter the chemical makeup of its atmosphere to some degree. Combustion always produces chemical byproducts, and those byproducts can’t just disappear
Comment Re:Elon Musk gotta be very careful here ! (Score 1) 80
The ULA CEO, Tory Bruno, has already offered to help SpaceX fix their problems with landing boosters. Everybody is playing nice!
Submission + - The future of stars like ours, in visuals
StartsWithABang writes: When stars between about 40% and 800% the mass of our Sun run out of hydrogen fuel in their cores, they expand into a red giant phase, burning helium in their center. The intense stellar winds produced blow off the star’s outer layers, and when the core runs out of helium to burn, the central region contracts to a white dwarf, producing intense ultraviolet light that lights up the expelled gas and ions, often found in extremely rare ionization states: a planetary nebula. Here's the story of the Cat's Eye Nebula, one of the closest, most detailed planetary nebulae of all, as told (mostly) through pictures.
Submission + - Finding ET – we're gonna need a bigger dish (newscientist.com) 1
Z00L00K writes: The hunt for alien civilisations may need a rethink. A new paper argues that the signals we're listening for might not be the ones ET would choose.
Historically, SETI – the search for extraterrestrial intelligence – involves scanning the sky for radio signals that another civilization is deliberately sending. The simplest would be a constant blast in all directions, but in a narrow range of frequencies, similar to early radio broadcasts – like a constant hum that would tell a listener it is artificial. From light years away, we would not be able to get any other information – all we would be able to tell from Earth is that a signal was there and where it was coming from, not what it says.
Historically, SETI – the search for extraterrestrial intelligence – involves scanning the sky for radio signals that another civilization is deliberately sending. The simplest would be a constant blast in all directions, but in a narrow range of frequencies, similar to early radio broadcasts – like a constant hum that would tell a listener it is artificial. From light years away, we would not be able to get any other information – all we would be able to tell from Earth is that a signal was there and where it was coming from, not what it says.
Submission + - All in good clean fun! United Launch Alliance CEO pokes at SpaceX via Twitter (adweek.com)
braindrainbahrain writes: The new CEO of the United Launch Alliance, Tory Bruno shows his funny side as he pokes fun at his main competitor in the space launch business, SpaceX. So much so, that he got a mention, along with some of his twitter barbs, in Adweek, a publication not generally known for reporting on the aerospace industry.
Comment Re:Classroom participation (Score 1) 249
Author Susan Cain wrote about the current cult of the extroverted personality and how it excludes other personality types. She wrote a book about it that you may find interesting.
Comment Re:blu rays are cheaper than the movie (Score 1) 400
If they won't treat us as guests, at least treat us as paying customers, not just more eye balls they can sell to advertisers. Maybe all that advertising (not the movie previews) really has degraded the movie-going experience?
Comment Re:Advance to Go (Score 2) 155
A lot of people like monopoly, in spite of it being a terrible game. For those folk, the following video from this fellow Scott Nicholson could be mind opening
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
(skip the first two or so minutes of puppet show to get to the good parts)
Comment Television (Score 1) 71
Very cool hack! Back in my younger days, I met a lab technician who would impress the much younger engineers by displaying broadcast TV on an oscilloscope.
Comment Could I do that? (Score 1) 108
That question was asked by Bruce L. Gary and the answer is what he wrote in his free book: EXOPLANET OBSERVING
FOR AMATEURS
Submission + - The Schizophrenic Programmer Who Built an OS to Talk to God
rossgneumann writes: Terry Davis, a schizophrenic programmer, has spent 10 years building an operating system to talk to God. He’s done this work because God told him to. According to the TempleOS charter, it is "God’s official temple. Just like Solomon's temple, this is a community focal point where offerings are made and God's oracle is consulted." God also told Davis that 640x480, 16-color graphics "is a covenant like circumcision," making it easier for children to make drawings for God.
Submission + - Buzz Aldrin wants to help chineses to go to the moon 1
perplexing.reader writes: Buzz Aldrin is offering his help to China to help them on their own lunar landing program, he told to a group of brazilians journalists.
From the interview: "People can react in two ways. Or they say, 'he lost his mind and decided to help the enemy,' or say, 'he's doing as a private citizen what the US government should be doing.' I hope that most understand this second way ".
Original source in Portuguese http://mensageirosideral.blogf..., google translate https://translate.google.com/t...
From the interview: "People can react in two ways. Or they say, 'he lost his mind and decided to help the enemy,' or say, 'he's doing as a private citizen what the US government should be doing.' I hope that most understand this second way ".
Original source in Portuguese http://mensageirosideral.blogf..., google translate https://translate.google.com/t...
Researchers Say the Tech Worker Shortage Doesn't Really Exist 454
Beeftopia sends this excerpt from an article at BusinessWeek:
"There’s no evidence of any way, shape, or form that there’s a shortage in the conventional sense," says Hal Salzman, a professor of planning and public policy at Rutgers University. "They may not be able to find them at the price they want. But I’m not sure that qualifies as a shortage, any more than my not being able to find a half-priced TV." ... The real issue, say Salzman and others, is the industry’s desire for lower-wage, more-exploitable guest workers, not a lack of available American staff. "It seems pretty clear that the industry just wants lower-cost labor," Dean Baker, the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, wrote in an e-mail. A 2011 review (PDF) by the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that the H-1B visa program, which is what industry groups are lobbying to expand, had "fragmented and restricted" oversight that weakened its ostensible labor standards. "Many in the tech industry are using it for cheaper, indentured labor," says Rochester Institute of Technology public policy associate professor Ron Hira, an EPI research associate and co-author of the book Outsourcing America.
Submission + - Tech Companies Stoking Fears of Talent Shortage to Get Cheaper Labor?
theodp writes: Things subject to the Tinkerbell effect, explains Wikipedia, exist only so long as we believe in them. Need a real-life example? Well, while President Obama believed it was necessary to take executive action to expand the controversial OPT STEM visa work program (his wealthy dining companions are still hungry for something more), Businessweek is reporting that The Tech Worker Shortage Doesn't Really Exist. “There’s no evidence of any way, shape, or form that there’s a shortage in the conventional sense,” says Hal Salzman, a professor of planning and public policy at Rutgers. So, why then would Tech Companies Stoke Fears of a Talent Shortage? “It seems pretty clear that the industry just wants lower-cost labor,” argues Dean Baker, the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. “We don’t dispute the fact at all that Facebook and Microsoft would like to have more, cheaper workers,” adds Daniel Kuehn, a research associate at the Urban Institute. “But that doesn’t constitute a shortage.” Asked what evidence existed of a labor shortage, a spokesperson for Facebook e-mailed a one-sentence statement: “We look forward to hearing more specifics about the President’s plan and how it will impact the skills gap that threatens the competitiveness of the tech sector.”
