794239
submission
Tablizer writes:
The Phoenix Mars lander has been frustrated yet again by Mars' odd soil. The wet nature of the soil they are targeting appears to have made it get stuck in the scoop rather than drop into the oven. Past problems with similarly clumpy soil may have damaged the lander because the vibrator had to be used longer than designed, resulting in a short circuit.
722161
submission
Tablizer writes:
The so called "Pioneer Anomaly" is a slight acceleration of the now-defunct Pioneer probes that doesn't match gravity models, suggesting a mysterious force. Researchers have been subtracting out known forces, such as power-cell heat, to isolate the mysterious portion.
Pioneer Anomaly Project Director Slava Turyshev presented
preliminary results of the thermal modeling efforts at a meeting of the American Physical Society.
...The magnitude of the Pioneer Anomaly is so very tiny that it could conceivably result from the uneven radiation of heat from the spacecraft...Turyshev reported that the [heat] model can generate an acceleration that amounts to about 30% of the Anomaly for that distance [25AU] from the Sun.
495838
submission
Tablizer writes:
Paul Graham, the dot-com zillionare who created what is now Yahoo Stores, along with Robert Morris has finally released their revamped dialect of Lisp, called Arc. "Arc is designed above all for exploratory programming: the kind where you decide what to write by writing it. A good medium for exploratory programming is one that makes programs brief and malleable, so that's what we've aimed for. This is a medium for sketching software. It's not for everyone. In fact, Arc embodies just about every form of political incorrectness possible in a programming language.
388957
submission
Tablizer writes:
Science News describes a youtube sensation whereby Mobius transformations can be described simply as a linear projection through a sphere to a plane. The coolest transformation is the inversion, in which a rectangular image can be turned inside out. I'd like to see this transformation on actual images (but not goatse, please).
212645
submission
Tablizer writes:
According to Parade Magazine, Labor Secretary Elaine Chao says American employees are rude and have B.O., and this is allegedly why foreign workers are preferred. "U.S. employers say that many workers abroad simply have a better attitude toward work. 'American employees must be punctual, dress appropriately and have good personal hygiene,' says Chao. 'They need anger-management and conflict-resolution skills, and they have to be able to accept direction. Too many young people bristle when a supervisor asks them to do something.'" Do we need to reshape ourselves into compliant borg?
191839
submission
Tablizer writes:
The New Horizons probe caught the moon Io in the act of barfing into space. "This five-frame sequence of New Horizons images captures the giant plume from Io's Tvashtar volcano. Snapped by the probe's Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) as the spacecraft flew past Jupiter earlier this year, this first-ever "movie" of an Io plume clearly shows motion in the cloud of volcanic debris, which extends 330 kilometers (200 miles) above the moon's surface...The appearance and motion of the plume is remarkably similar to an ornamental fountain on Earth, replicated on a gigantic scale."
139957
submission
Tablizer writes:
Did the laws of physics think themselves into being? Observing may not only force quantum resolving of atomic particle features, but perhaps the universe's very laws themselves. Paul Davies states: "In that manner, what we must imagine is that the origin of the universe is an amalgam of realities, and only those realities that lead to observers who can resolve those ambiguities are going to be selected for. So the universe can engineer its own bio-friendliness, because the very observers who arise at a later stage are those who project out from the bio-friendly histories". (Sorry, no mention of cats)
11635
submission
Tablizer writes:
Sounds like a bad IT shop-talk joke, but tutoring has finally been outsourced to India. Now you can get that high-end education you always wanted so that you can compete successfully with 3rd-world labor to build perpetual outsourcing....I mean motions machines.
