All geniuses HAVE to have some mental instability, since stability is the enemy of creativity. If you're fully stable, you've no reason to invent for yourself new methods of working through a problem. If you're fully rational, a small discrepancy between theory and observation won't keep you awake at night until you damn well fix the theory. If you're fully functional, you're going to be too busy doing regular work and won't have time for creative thought.

Very, very few insane people are geniuses, although many will think of themselves as such.

The Earth travels slightly more than one degree of its orbit per day

Mea culpa - make that slightly less than one degree per day.

Agreed, but that's the peril of living in a world where everything is tightly-coupled and highly-integrated. People forget that you can mix-n-match, they look no further than using one system for everything. NoSQL does indeed have a purpose, and just like an F1 car, it is in a class of its own when used for that purpose. But I'd no more use Memcache as a substitute for NetCDF or Ingres than I would use an F1 car to go off-road sight-seeing.

The "old old boss" would be the CDF/NetCDF/HDF family of self-describing distributed storage solutions. They predate XML by a long way and are - I believe - the first true self-describing method of storing, indexing and searching data.

For the most part, they support network interconnections between instances, so you can have your virtual storage distributed over as many physical systems as you like. The users will never see the difference except in terms of speed. This gives you all the benefit of NoSQL's distributed model (which XML lacks) but with several decades more development in the database design.

But wait! There's more! If you order in the next gazillion years, you get OpENDAP absolutely free! (Which it is anyway.) OpENDAP will translate between any two data formats, so if one site wants to view the data as, say, a conventional database, another wants to look at it as a collection of spreadsheets and a third is expecting XML data, you'd have OpENDAP translate between client form and central repository form.

I have no objections to Mongo or Memcache, they're very powerful and are very useful, but we're still ultimately talking about technology everyone else has had since 1985, thanks be to NASA, and many NoSQL technologies are really just network-aware versions of the DBM/NDBM/BDB/GDBM/QDBM family which have existed since Unix began.

NoSQL definitely has a place - I would not want to try serving cached web data from HDF5 - and it's an important place. But that's just as true for Hierarchical Databases, Star Databases (aka "Data Warehouses"), "genuine" (ie: actually complies with Codd's rules) relational databases (SQL isn't truly relational in the Codd model, merely a subset), and so on.

It's time we got away from one-size-fits-all ideas, which violates the Unix ethos anyway, and get back to using best solutions for specific problems rather than passable solutions that fail at everything. These are all wonderful, highly specialized solutions to highly specific problem types. Treating them as such will always produce a better answer than force-fitting solutions into not-quite-failing with problems they aren't designed for.

Not just higher-power, but optical. There's other, more powerful, space telescopes being built* but none are in the visible or near-visible spectrum.

*Admittedly, the Congresscritters want them cancelled, but they are for now being built. Even if NASA got these two, I'd be worried that Congress would continue being "cent-wise and dollar-foolish", with the result of them either never being launched or being sold to the Russians. Where they might well be converted back into spy satellites.

The mirrors are the difficult part. Hubble was damaged at birth due to defective mirror production, the corrective lens helped but any thickening of a lens will reduce the light that gets through to some extent. The Newtonian reflector didn't use a front lens at all - which would be great in space where you've not got to worry about atmosphere and corrosion (although micrometeorites are a pain).

Once the Enterprise is built, though, we can just fly to the stars. Well, once someone invents the warp drive.

Agreed it's not reliable, but texts that old rarely are. It does, however, mean that "no observation" of an astronomical phenomenon becomes either "probably no observation" or "no usable observation". These sorts of records get pinned to actual astronomical events by a mix of confirmation bias and sheer number - record enough events and some are bound to have actually happened, record enough things that can be interpreted as events and some are bound to be interpreted that way because they coincide with actual events.

Some will have been actual observations of actual astronomical events, and it would be nice to imagine that 100% of those observed events that were real were recorded (although it's likely nowhere near that number), but the level of noise means that very little of what's recorded was an observed event.

You've also got to consider this "observable" part. High-energy radiation is required, but we've found plenty of non-visible sources of high-energy radiation. Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs) being the most significant. We've never had a GRB close enough to do much beyond screw with gamma-ray detectors, but I would imagine that a direct hit by a relatively nearby one would make for all kinds of interesting effects.

How far does "known events" take you? Do they mean "events that have historically caused the effect" or "events that physically could cause the effect"? My guess is the former.

don't you think it's a little demeaning to dismiss the heartfelt beliefs of major segments of today's human population as "mythology"?

Welcome to Slashdot. Please check your cultural baggage at the door.

We only allow sacred cows with names like "Mac" and "PC" and "Emacs" and "VI" in here - And even those, we'll still butcher and barbecue if it suits our whims.

If the supernova was behind or near the Sun, earthlings around 775 wouldn't have been able to detect it.

Nearby supernovae appear as one of the brightest objects in the sky for a few days to a week. The remnants remain visible for months, and then have a habit of leaving a nebula behind.

The Earth travels slightly more than one degree of its orbit per day; The Sun, as seen from the Earth, subtends half a degree of arc. In the absolute worst case, the sun couldn't completely "hide" a supernova for more than a single day; and half a week later, the supernova remnant would dominate the dusk (or dawn) as the brightest thing in the sky except possibly the moon.