HN user
Yes. Previously this role was played by carbon nanotubes.
Even supposing we work out a way to manufacture graphene cheaply, it seems to me that there are lots of technical solutions to problems out there which remain undeveloped for lack of a viable financial model (or simply bad luck I suppose).
Indeed. I would say that in truth an astronaut's life and a bunch of money are incommensurable.
The value of the article lies in showing that if agencies pretend to assign a certain value to a human life then they can become less inconsistent. (And if in this case it serves Zubrin's laudable aim of getting to Mars now, so much the better.)
For Zubrin himself to be consistent, OFC, he should have tried to assign a value to, say, another decade of Hubble data. Omitting that was, as you say, sloppy.
BTW I find it quite shocking that neither the article nor the other comments so far consider the relevancy of the astronaut's opinion of what is an acceptable risk for him. It is, after all, his life, and he remains a taxpayer like everyone else.
I guess in the future where things like life extension and legal suicide are commonplace it will be considered strange to ignore a person's wishes in this way
Can we at least call them annoying?
I for one find it exasperating how much time DVDs (and CDs) spend spinning up and generally clicking about whilst for some reason simultaneously freezing the rest of the computer. I bet most HN readers know the reason, but, come on, we shouldn't have to be inconvenienced like this :-)
I haven't found an OS yet that reliably writes to DVDs. If I write a bunch of pictures to a DVD, I need to check afterwards that they're all present and correct. This can't just be down to my level of competence. It's a scandal.
Sometimes they spin at high revs so there's a virtual hair dryer in the background while I watch my videos. Or they go slooww and cannot be coaxed to copy my files in less than 103 minutes.
And they scratch quite easily too!
I wish we had something like those elegant crystals that Superman drops into slots to access the Kryptonian archive. Some kind of optical flash linkage ought to do the trick.
I'm not clear whether cold and excercise are capable of increasing the number or proportion of brown fat cells, or whether they just trigger activity in existing brown fat.
Just a couple of observations from a (mostly) computer-illiterate person:
The people who learnt to program computers in the 70s and 80s weren't taught at school by teachers, they taught themselves (maybe with help from friends).
The OSes of the 1980s were much simpler than MacOS/Linux/Windows. In particular most of them had a standard BASIC built in which was very easy to start using. One could just turn the computer on and immediately type in a program.
I've read reports that messing with the body's circadian rhythm is bad for the health of the aging brain. Presumably this is to do with the secretion of the hormone melatonin, which I understand is affected by light.
Whether natural light exposure can be simulated adequately by the computer monitor during waking hours and a blindfold during sleeping hours, or whether getting up at dawn is required, I would like to know -- anyone?
The ability to write well co-evolves with having stuff that you want to say. Students don't get to choose their topics or when to write: they are acting under coercion, and those few who are relatively motivated remain anxious about grades.
Hence student essays are boring, while students' blogs are (often) interesting.
OFC, if authority figures started reading those blogs and assigning grades to blog entries then the blogs would disappear. If the blogs were subsequently required to re-appear with deadlines etc then they would quickly become boring, just like the essays.
Saddest is that if a teacher understood this and confined herself to helping students with stuff that they actually wanted to do, and only when asked, then she would lose her job!