deuxpi - Slashdot User

4-Billion-Pixel Panorama View From Curiosity Rover 101

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday March 28, 2013 @07:59PM from the take-a-look dept.

A reader points out that there is a great new panorama made from shots from the Curiosity Rover. "Sweep your gaze around Gale Crater on Mars, where NASA's Curiosity rover is currently exploring, with this 4-billion-pixel panorama stitched together from 295 images. ...The entire image stretches 90,000 by 45,000 pixels and uses pictures taken by the rover's two MastCams. The best way to enjoy it is to go into fullscreen mode and slowly soak up the scenery — from the distant high edges of the crater to the enormous and looming Mount Sharp, the rover's eventual destination."

Comment Re:A matter of price. (Score 1) 285

by deuxpi on Wednesday January 02, 2013 @06:42PM (#42455361) Attached to: Campaign To Remove Paper From Offices

What is cheaper for a company of 500 people? :
1) A foolproof RAID + backup system, + expenditure in dealing with replacements, loss and transfer of backups
2) stacks of paper

A company of 500 people already has an IT infrastructure. It's mostly a problem of culture adaptation mixed with the fact that most software replacements are complex and expensive tools.

Submission + - Origin of Neil Armstrong's 'One Small Step' Line Revealed (telegraph.co.uk)

Submitted by

SchrodingerZ

on Sunday December 30, 2012 @08:51PM

SchrodingerZ writes: "In an upcoming BBC Documentary, Dean Armstrong, the brother of astronaut Neil Armstrong, reveals when the world famous 'one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind' line originated. For years, people have argued over when Armstrong came up with the line, whether it was on the spot or planned years ahead. Also debated is whether Armstrong meant to include 'a' before man, making the indefinite article 'man', which alludes to mankind, into a singular, 'a man', himself. According to Dean Armstrong, the quote was shared to him over a board game, months before the mission began. He says, 'We started playing Risk and then he [Neil] slipped me a piece of paper and said 'read that’. I did. On that piece of paper there was 'That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind’. He says 'what do you think about that?’ I said 'fabulous’. He said 'I thought you might like that, but I wanted you to read it’. He then added: 'It was 'that is one small step for A man’'. Armstrong had always insisted that he had said 'a', that that it was lost in communication static. This new story however conflicts with what Neil told James Hansen for his biography, stating he came up with the quote on the lunar surface. More on the historic moon landing and the life of Neil Armstrong in the new documentary Neil Armstrong- First Man on the Moon, on BBC."

Submission + - The Power of a Hot Body 1

Submitted by

Hugh Pickens writes

on Sunday December 30, 2012 @06:10PM

Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Depending on the level of activity, the human body generates about 60 to 100 Watts of energy in the form of heat, about the same amount of heat given off by the average light bulb. Now Diane Ackerman writes in the NY Times that architects and builders are finding ways to capture this excess body heat on a scale large enough to warm homes and office buildings. At Stockholm’s busy hub, Central Station, engineers harness the body heat issuing from 250,000 railway travelers to warm the 13-story Kungsbrohuset office building about 100 yards away. First, the station’s ventilation system captures the commuters’ body heat, which it uses to warm water in underground tanks. From there, the hot water is pumped to Kungsbrohuset’s heating pipes, which ends up saving about 25 percent on energy bills. Kungsbrohuset’s design has other sustainable elements as well. The windows are angled to let sunlight flood in, but not heat in the summer. Fiber optics relay daylight from the roof to stairwells and other non-window spaces that in conventional buildings would cost money to heat. Constructing the new heating system, including installing the necessary pumps and laying the underground pipes, only cost the firm about $30,000, says Karl Sundholm, a project manager at Jernhusen, a Stockholm real estate company, and one of the creators of the system. "It pays for itself very quickly," Sundholm adds. "And for a large building expected to cost several hundred million kronor to build, that's not that much, especially since it will get 15% to 30% of its heat from the station.""

Comment Re:Makes sense... (Score 1) 410

by deuxpi on Friday August 19, 2011 @02:20PM (#37145918) Attached to: 13-Year-Old Uses Fibonacci Sequence For Solar Power Breakthrough

This experiment may be a case of having optimized for the capture of diffuse light. I think that the "natural" arrangement of solar panels would be only better if diffuse light was dominant over direct light. Multiple commenters have noted that trees were obscuring the flat array. We can presume that the location of the experiment had a limited amount of direct light. Also, a higher proportion of diffuse light during the morning and evening could explain the longer time periods of energy production.

If this hypothesis is revealed to be true, that could mean that this "natural" arrangement of solar panels may be optimal in situations where there is only indirect light available, such as interiors. Otherwise, I stay confident that the current knowledge about the placement of solar panel still holds.

Slashdot Top Deals