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
There is a simple reason why we can ignore what the astronaut wants: if any particular one is too risk-averse, there are many other similarly qualified ones that are less risk-averse and NASA can hire them instead.
Additionally, I would not be surprised at all if the average astronaut is willing to put up with much more risk than the government or general public is willing to put him or her in.
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.
The impression I got from the article was that cold triggered distinct brown fat deposits in particular places (neck, back, etc.) to burn fat (and sugar?) as a way to increase temperature. By contrast, the article implied that exercise turned “white” fat into “brown” fat, spread throughout the body rather than in particular isolated spots. It wasn’t clear what the purpose of this exercise-related brown fat was.
I'm just guessing as wildly as Doc Brown's hair, but it seems logical that the "white" fat is the storage form of fat, while the brown one is the kind that body uses to do actual useful stuff. Like in a gasoline engine -- the gas is stored in concentrated form, but it's diffused and mixed with air moments before the actual combustion, as that's more efficient.
So body creates the exercise-fat to have a ready source of energy required for physical activity (remember, while humans were evolving there were no exercise, only physical activity needed to survive).
Cold apparently activates the brown fat - causing it to burn fat and sugar. Exercise seems to release a hormone that causes white fat to convert to brown fat, but they don't seem to know why exercise causes this yet.
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.
> The people who learnt to program computers in the 70's and 80's ...
I agree, but that kind of programming is very different from the type of programming that will be useful to non programmer kids when they grow up. There is also google, stack overflow and a waltz of easily accessible information on how to do X in language Y that was not online then.
I am drawing a distinction between coding and programming. Let me explain - When I graduated from college in 1999 the career office was very assertive that I should use and describe my ability with the MS Office productivity suite. When and how it had become an important enough to include on my resume doesn't matter, it was an important skill to have for the types of jobs I was going to be applying for. So programming and programmers will always have to dive deep and be able to develop complex systems. I am using the word coding in the same context as what I started with: I worked in a laboratory and collected lots of scientific data. I learned how to automate the tedious parts of manipulating, formatting and emailing out the results to save my time and reduce the errors I made doing it manually. To me, this was a self taught journey to learning to code with vba and even back in the first half of the Aughts there were decent places to figure things our for VBA.
I think in the future, kids or prospective employees in general that are not programmers, being able to put "can write JavaScript and VBA to automate repetitive tasks" will not be required. But, the candidates who can will have a marketable skill that sets them apart from their peers even though they are both trying to get a job in Supply Chain or Regulatory Affairs.
And these days, JavaScript is very easy to get started with, fire up a modern browser, open up the console and type in your program on any web page. It's been a while since I worked with VBA but I assume it is discussed on stack overflow.
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).
It's still the truth these days. Of course, we don't have basic installed by default anymore. Instead, I have a desire to make video games and it took me several tries over my childhood until I started to program seriously at age 15.
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?
> 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?
Computer and electronics have been shown to damage melatonin secretion in the evening (all the blue light they emit), so it stands to reason that they could act like a light box in the morning.
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!
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).