Re: balloon develops fear of heights
Or it got cold feet?
4245 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Apr 2007
The only reason this laptop still runs a windows version (8.1 + GWX Control Panel to keep Win 10 out) is that FireCapture (astro-imaging software) and AutoStakkert! 2.0 are windows only. The latter runs with varying degrees of success under WINE, but doing capture from planetary cameras under WINE seems risky. The Linux alternative oaCapture is not quite as mature, so I will work with windows until I find a Linux software suite that lets me mae these kinds of images
I am really baffled why anyone would want to bang on about the rounded corners bit. Functionality and general form-factor (easily hand-held/pocketable) make sense, but the rounded corners bit is already ancient. Clay tablets could be used to record things (OK, cuneiform rather than mp3), and certainly had rounded corners. Playback is a little cumbersome, granted, but the rounded corners bit is not the bit I would personally focus on when claiming novelty.
So would the dog be able to tell the difference between a bag full of assorted logic chips, cpus etc, and a working USB drive?
Did they train the dog on legacy storage devices (for "vintage porn"?) such as the old 8" floppy disk still somewhere in my office (granted, not much you can store in the way of smut on 128 kB and still store CP/M 2.0 on it).
Can it detect bubble memory? Magnetic tapes? Punched cards?
Enquiring minds need to know
As an aside, my estimate is that you would need 228 metric tonnes of punched cards to store a DVD (smut-filled or otherwise) full of data, so that might be a tad inefficient.
This sounds very similar to what astronomers experience when they look at the moon. One eye is exposed to a sunlit moonscape, the other is in relative darkness. When you turn away from the eyepiece, the eye that was just exposed to moonlight seems practically blind. The effect is especially strong when using large telescopes at relatively low magnification. It wears off, of course.
One minor point: tidal disruption (objects being ripped apart by a black hole) also occurs outside the event horizon (which is why we can observe it), due to the huge differential in gravitational pull between parts of an object closest to, and furthest from the black hole. It may well occur inside the event horizon, but we have no way of knowing it.
So how do you control a complex power network fully automatically, without connecting SCADA systems to the internet, at least indirectly? This is near impossible, especially considering there will be rapidly varying demand, wildly fluctuating supply from solar panels in various homes, wind turbines on various hills, and a host of power stations needing to adapt their output on the fly, and loads of smart meters trying to get the best deal on that energy market. Do you have people furiously tapping in commands and SCADA control stations all day and all night? However much you wish to isolate critical systems, these critical systems must get data from the real world to control their behaviour. Entering the data in real time can really only be done through some network connection.
I have no easy answer on the security side (security is hard, so pay for it), but a layered approach of some sort seems a likely way to go. I get that Lakhani is a salesman, but that in itself does not mean he is wrong.
Then count me out. I would have happily paid for a good piece of software (which PS certainly is) to own (OK, own the license), and upgrade when I feel the need. I do not like walking around, somewhere out of internet reach (try quite large bits of Uganda), and have my software tell me:
"Sorry, I can't do that for you Dave."
Because it cannot reach the Adobe servers to verify I have paid my subscription
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And I am not even called Dave.
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Mine is the one with the developer stains in it
Mutters retreating to the proper dark room to develop some proper prints
'I think the real answer where food in tins and cats are concerned, is that cats are telepathic and this is what they should have been testing, rather than whether gravity is affected by electromagnets. Our cat can be sound asleep in the most distant part of the house, and you only have to have the passing thought of "should I open the beef terrine or the fish in jelly for his next meal" and you find he has instantly teleported himself to his bowl and is making the special meow that means "give me my food now, and don't make those puny excuses about having to open the tin first"'
Alternatively, this is a quantum effect (all cats are Schrödinger cats, after all), and the cat tunnels to a convenient location, often right under your feet (convenient as in convenient for the cat), once the wave-function describing its brain has picked up the wave-function of the contents of the tin/whatever container the food is in. Maybe I could get some ERC funding for that
suppose I encrypt some message with a one-time pad, or just as a form of "conceptual art" pack a load of noise bits into a PNG file (probably more aesthetically pleasing than some things I have seen being passed of as art). I then send this through an end-to-end encrypted messenger app. If the FSB wants the author of the app to encrypt it, and noise comes out, wouldn't that land the author in a load of hot water?
Alternatively, I would expect Putin has the power to veto a law he doesn't like (cannot imagine him NOT having that power). He sets up some people with porridge for brains to put in an unreasonable amendment, so he can veto it and appear as at least one of the more reasonable people in Russia, with which we can do business.
OK, where is that tinfoil hat
Basically the more people we can get up in the upper reaches of the atmosphere, the closer we get to sending a FlatEarther up sufficiently high that they go 'Shit, there isn't a domelike firmament' and 'I can see a curve' and we quash those conspiracy nuts and literal scripture types back into to a tiny part of the internet where even birthers and 9/11 truthers laugh at them.
The problem is that flat-earthers simply won't believe their eyes, and claim it is just an optical illusion caused by the spherical nature of the lenses in their eyes. I have literally heard them use that argument. I was tempted to explain the difference between illusions and delusions, but ultimately found it a waste of time. None are so deaf as those who do not want to hear.
foisted upon some (senior) staff members here. These guys also want us to use "SMART" goals in our agreements with PhD students, as if you can design a conveyor belt for production of scientific papers. I swear I will come up with a backronym for DUMB one day. They also insist on a good PDCA cycle. They did not like my version:
Procrastinate
Dither
Clash
Abscond
Can't think why
Way too young indeed! I always thoroughly enjoyed his writing, and all the special projects he was involved in. My condolences to all his loved ones and colleagues. Will raise a glass of my best whisky this evening. I suggest the first new crazy balloon launched missile or plane be dubbed the "Lester Haines" in his honour, better still, name the SPB after him (assuming it will carry on his good work).
The Register speculates “aggressively leveraging” the vendor's capabilities conceivably covers things like yelling at various veeps, using lots of capital letters in e-mails, and sending copies of contracts off to lawyers.
You forgot big sticks with nails in it, and, if a BOFH is involved, "augmented" cattle prods.
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey release 12 has far more objects: 208,478,448 galaxies to be precise. It only contains spectra for 2,401,952 galaxies and 477,161 quasars, so DESI becomes particularly interesting because it captures spectra of so many objects.
Pointing an optical fibre directly at the sky is of course pointless, as the aperture is pathetically small. The trick is to get a big mirror (4 m in this case), which gathers a lot of photons, and use fibre optics to guide the light to (multiple) spectroscopes. The more usual trick is to use a slit, which captures spectra from a little stripe across the image plane. By using carefully placed fibre optics, the project (as I read it) wants to tap into more of the optical plane, to record spectra of far more objects simultaneously. The robots pick out the right bits of the image from which to obtain spectra. Sounds very interesting
Both can seem to have eternal (un)life. You might think they are long dead, and all that is left is dust along the wayside or in the courtroom as the case may be, but all it takes is a drop of blood (or money) in the right place, and...
LOOK WHO'S BACK!!
I really wonder when we will see a stake driven home properly
Many problems in image analysis (and physics) can be cast into sparse matrix form, so I will certainly take a look, especially for the gigapixel and terapixel images we are getting. I also wonder whether many graph-based methods could benefit, especially if the average number of edges per vertex is low. Many of those algorithms may well be suitable for this sparse-matrix architecture.
For my MSc thesis I worked on part of the design of an asteroseismometer, which used Doppler shifting of absorption lines in stellar spectra. In those days that approach produces a much stronger signal than a photometric approach (measuring the slight brightness fluctuations caused by the changes in temperature) used in the this study. Interesting to see the advances in precision in current instruments (I gather the data used were from the Keppler mission). Great work from those astroboffins
Good point about the coding skills. The danger of not needing good coding skills means that people with poor programming skills think they can do it. As I always tell my students coding means you can cast a logical solution to a problem into the correct syntax for a given language, programming means you can actually derive the logical solution to the problem in the first place. I suspect many more problems in code derive from sloppy thinking than from the odd syntax error.