ANH

I can't tell if you're parodying HN here. This is from someone's blog and is a personal reflection on his most important work of the past 10 years. Do you expect everyone to be an historian?

I did similar a few years back, but for Mars DEMs, also in PDS format. At first I despised it, but yes, there is a certain pragmatism to the format. And, yeah, the best way to figure out what was going on was to just look at the files themselves.

The thing that most annoyed me at the time was there wasn't a good open source JPEG2000 decoder I could use to slice up the imagery to go along with the DEMs. But that must have changed by now...

Having read about historical radio astronomy and practiced signals analysis, I think they were a little more sophisticated than that. The recording in this format was made for easy perusal by a human, say, the next morning. I think that was the case with this signal. No doubt they wanted to revisit that spot in the sky looking at intensity, frequency shifting (Doppler), bandwidth, modulation, etc. But they never saw it again.

Historical point of interest: the Big Ear telescope that recorded this was bulldozed to make way for a golf course.

I started here: http://reactfordesigners.com/labs/reactjs-introduction-for-p... (h/t tptacek).

And then I found the egghead.io videos particularly helpful. Nice bite-sized chunks, very focused: https://egghead.io/technologies/react

There are a number of free lessons. I found them useful enough to pay for a subscription. YMMV.

I do. The one I'm familiar with has large garden areas, trees for climbing/wandering around, uncultivated wilderness areas, etc. It's not a vast tract of land, but enough that it seems huge to a small person. Indoor time focuses on exploration of provocations set up by teachers, telling stories, singing, role-playing, etc.

Depends on what you mean by "school" (NB the quotes in the parent comment). There is a huge variance in options for working parents of a 2-3 year old. From cramped cinder block day care -- aka The Cacophonous Petri Dish; to private nanny; to "forest schools" where kids spend as much time as possible outside digging in the dirt, climbing tree stumps, and learning how to devise and engage in large projects together (yes, a group of 2.5 year olds is capable of this).

I don't think the parent comment was talking about toddler MIT.

Wikipedia links to that as a hoax in Stroustrup's entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bjarne_Stroustrup.

I might be wrong, but I believe the THREDDS server the article points to (by way of https://cds.nccs.nasa.gov/nex-gddp/) supports OPeNDAP, which means you can pull subsets of the data, i.e. if you've got a 40GB file, you could slice a tiny portion of that off for downloading.

I knew about Guided Access, but I forgot it allowed you to disable specific regions of the screen. Thanks for the reminder.

Nice. I'm going to put this in front of our resident toddler tonight.

Bit of feedback:

* I would have been willing to put down a couple of bucks up front just to try it out, even without the extras available in-app.

* How about "toddler resistant" mode that disables the sharing, feedback, social buttons? Kids tend to touch and drag all over the place, often seemingly at random. The less they end up in a strange place and are able to figure out the core interface, the better.

Of note, there is an Earth observation instrument, RapidScat, being carried in the Dragon's trunk, which will be (has been?) plucked off the capsule by operators on the ground. This one measures wind. Another, called CATS, will be similarly deployed on the outside of the ISS in December-ish; it will measure clouds and aerosols.

These are part of a collection of low-cost (well, lower than a full satellite) Earth observation instruments to take advantage of the external mount points on the ISS. NASA recently had a media briefing about this: http://www.nasa.gov/press/2014/september/nasa-hosts-media-br...

This comment explains why I saw so many bumper cushions. And it also explains why I never want to drive in a car again.

I think I'm a careful driver, and I (see other comment) recently drove into Manhattan from out of state. I almost killed several people. I don't live there, but my impression is that the expectations are so fine-tuned, that one small miscalculation and it's OH MY GOD MY LIFE IS CHANGED FOREVER.

Edit: Most of the close calls were straight on, no turn. Some son-of-a-bee-biscuit suddenly decides he needs to stop his car right in front of you for some important business, you end up in the middle of an intersection. In your eagerness to get you and your family out of harm's way, you inch around the car in front, and the pedestrian pops out of nowhere. They thought you weren't moving when suddenly you realize you need to get the heck out of the middle of Madison Ave and accelerate like a mofo so you don't get rear-ended by that bus.

I recently drove from my home near DC to Manhattan and back. Exiting the Lincoln Tunnel and heading north, my expectations of "normal" traffic behavior were shattered. I wondered why there aren't bodies littering the streets and hulking wrecks of naive visitors' cars abandoned, leaking, everywhere. It was truly mind-expanding. NYC pedestrian deaths are on the rise, says Google.

Meanwhile, I look out my window as I type this and see the suburban road adjacent to my group of homes being resurfaced. It's a beautiful expanse of asphalt they're laying down. It's smooooove, and fast. The neighborhood toddlers want to cross that road, and parents have trouble explaining to them that this road in sight of their homes is just too dangerous. We live in a town renowned for its planning and quality of life.

I don't really have a point, but something is obviously amiss.

FYI, here's a Namecheap page that should show domains pending verification: https://manage.www.namecheap.com/myaccount/WhoisContactsVeri...

You're forgetting the voice recognition. What if there's no barcode to scan? The Fire TV voice search is excellent -- I used it last night -- and if the Dash has similar tech then it might actually be a useful supplement to the apps.

Eh, looks pretty good to me. Our wants are diametrically opposed: Voice search (do care -- Apple TV search is painful), tech specs (non line-of-sight remote -- Apple TV is line-of-sight), games (eh, might be a nice diversion for a few minutes after an episode of Walking Dead), and I don't have an HBO subscription.

This is a kind of ridiculous article. It entirely ignores NASA's Earth Science work, which gets the largest allocation of science funding in the FY2014 budget (almost $2B).

Caveat: I work with a team of NASA & contractor Earth scientists. I think they'd all tell you they don't need to go search for a justification; justifications are self-evident. Here's one: Maintain the climate record.

Works great on a i7 Ubuntu 13.10 x64 machine under Chrome 31.

When 'tptacek is wrong, he's obnoxiously wrong, especially in his inability to believe in government misbehavior

For the record, this is incorrect. In past interactions he has stated his concerns over certain of NSA's "misbehavior".

I'm not saying I trust it to police itself. I'm trying to suggest that the environment in which NSA analysts work does have a (positive) material effect on their behavior. Non-systemic transgressions are not common. When Snowden said he was able to check Obama's email, that angle was lost.

Now, systemic problems are a different issue. But the article we're all talking about here is written by an analyst from his own perspective.

Folks have lost clearances and jobs. I don't know about prison time. But I do know the fear of these things happening is a motivating factor not to cross the line. But I'm just some guy...

If someone in the NSA abuses his powers, it is very likely that nobody will ever know.

You mean, besides his family, friends, and loved ones when he loses his job and potentially ends up in prison. You're underestimating the amount of training and internal oversight that occurs.

I'd rather intel analysts have some cognitive dissonance than have absolute certainty they are always justified in their actions.

Yeah, but I find it hard to believe they hadn't already included some amount of fire probability in their calculations. Isn't it possible their assumed probability is higher than the actual, since it was perhaps based on the track record of internal combustion cars? I'm out of my depth here. IANAAA - not an actuarial analyst, nor an automotive engineer.

Don't insurance companies have highly trained and highly paid actuaries? My understanding is they look at numbers, not headlines. I'm sure there is some sort of professional ethical standard they are expected to uphold.

There are a lot of contractors sitting on the sidelines, too, made to take leave or, if they don't have leave, they go without pay. In other words, the "man hours lost" is probably much higher.

The issues have been resolved, according to the NASA Ames Center Director: https://twitter.com/worden/status/376345117205876737

It's nice for once to see evolutionary algorithms being used for something completely impractical.*

*mostly tongue-in-cheek

Maybe you're overinterpreting the parent commenter, who makes a valid point. I read it as: This reminds us of our (increasing?) dependence on systems operated by opaque and fragile entities that, on top of it all, may have goals at odds with our own.