Details are still sketchy at this point. Reports that the second moon was inhabited by a super-intelligent race using crystals to seal away an ancient evil, and was accessible from Earth via a "Big Whale," could not be substantiated.

Well said. I'll add that the suffix "poly" in this instance derives from the Greek and Latin "polium," meaning "shop," not the Greek "polus," meaning much or many.

The fact that the Shuttle was still flying in 2011 isn't just a testament to its longevity. It's a sad reminder that, at least for now, human spaceflight is at the mercy of the schizophrenia that is the American political process.

NASA has consistently brought together some of the finest minds in the world to do what the preceding finest minds thought was impossible. Then, because this is America, we take a bunch of mouth-breathers who probably got Cs and Ds in basic high school science courses and make them the bosses and the gatekeepers, the people who decide that it's more important to systematize the abuse of human rights at airports and buy the jokers at the Pentagon their newest murder toy than it is to push the frontiers of knowledge and ingenuity.

I'm putting my hope for the future of space exploration in private hands. Not because I fetishize the free market, or because I think government is evil, but because human spaceflight is way too important to be put in the hands of the American electorate, which is probably the stupidest and most poorly-informed decision-making body since the Athenian ekklesia.

Luxury!

With our ENIAC we used to have to wire control structures by hand on a plugboard, and when we got home our dads and our mums would kill us and dance about on our graves singing hallelujah.

is simply mental masturbation.

At first I thought you were just trolling, but then I realized: you're a three-digit Slashdot user, so I expect you're a leading expert on "mental masturbation."

Clearly you've never been to a bar in New Haven, or you'd know that's the rule rather than the exception.

Whatever, everyone knows Robert Bunsen plagiarized everything from his brother Honeydew. Beaker, you see, was his lover.

There's hardly any good reason to choose anything else over it, either.

Well, yes and no. Certainly in the space between the notebook computer and any but the mightiest supercomputers there's no reason at all not to go with x86. But in the mobile processor space, where ultra-low TDP is the order of the day, ARM has a big leg up on x64. Intel sold out their Xscale division (which was only ARM 5 anyway) and now they're losing this increasingly important segment of the market.

I'm not counting Intel out by a long shot in that race, but ARM is the new hotness for most geeks.

Supposedly the pebble-bed reactor type is also resistant to the type of damage suffered at the Fukushima plants, and it has the added bonus of not being encumbered by ex-Microsoft patent trolls. I remember reading that the Germans had been experimenting with the design but dropped it for political reasons.

See, if you read the _rest_ of Plato, you find that this is a very common trope for him. He distances himself from the truth of a statement by putting it at multiple layers of indirect speech. Also, the character doing the talking is quasi-fictional to begin with (Plato's Socrates is _not_ the historical Socrates).

The difference is that the Trojan War happened only a few hundred years before Homer's time -- a short enough span for some memory of the city to be preserved. According to Plato, Atlantis was destroyed by Athens some 6,500 years before his own day.

See, a lack of evidence leads _reasonable_ people to extreme skepticism. It is not an open invitation to invent a crackpot theory and then plug your ears while shouting "LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU."

Moreover, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. If you want to take Plato at his word you don't just get to point to a previously-undiscovered set of ruins somewhere in the Med and say "Atlantis!" You need to prove

a) that it was inhabited 8,000 years ago
b) that Athens was inhabited 8,000 years ago
c) That an apocalyptic war was fought between the two

because these are all parts of Plato's story.

You also don't get to say "the Egyptians told Solon/Plato/whoever" because archaeology proves that at the alleged time of this apocalyptic war the Egyptians (if you can call the Faiyum A culture "Egyptian" for any reason other than that the happened to leave near the Nile river delta) were still a Neolithic people with no system of writing.

Moreover, since all available evidence tells us that b) is not only not true but impossible, you're putting the cart before the horse trying to prove a) or c). If someone tells me, in earnest, that the CIA has been instructing him to kill the Pope by way of a radio embedded in his brain, nothing short of a CT scan showing me the radio and a bug detector showing signal origin at Langley is going to convince me that he's not insane. I don't start speculating on why the CIA would want the pope dead.

I realize that this type of reasoning from evidence rather than speculation is not the usual fare at the UFOlogy seminars and astrology club meetings you drag your knuckles to every night, but do pay attention, you might learn something.

[quote]there's no way to tell at which times[/quote]

[quote]we don't and won't ever know[/quote]

[quote]Likewise there is no way to tell[/quote]

Thanks so much for agreeing with me!

Yeah, and _they_ had records going back to 8,000 BCE that the aliens gave them. Unfortunately the data was all on NASA 1" tape, so the Egyptians couldn't read it until Plato cheerfully loaned them an Ampex machine...

This from a soon-Ph.D in Classics.

Atlantis was a story Plato made up in the course of a philosophical discussion. It goes no further back in the literary record unless you want to twist a couple mentions of "Atlas' island" in the earlier corpus like balloon animals.