You're absolutely right, my comment should have targeted the live launch, sorry.
Still, that covers about 20 (shaky cam) seconds of the launch before they switch to an animation (!) of the launch.
Which brings me back to my original gripe: The Ariane 5 is an old vehicle which doesn't have onboard cameras. Private rocket launch companies have eclipsed it. And I think The European Space Agency is not keeping up.
As to cameras on the JWST itself, it looks like they didn't attach any for a reason: https://www.space.com/james-webb-space-telescope-no-cameras-reason
Didn't know that...

Ein Arian Mustache

Like saying humans have white skin, or blue eyes, or blond hair isn't dehumanizing to non Arians? If you make a blanket statement about who's human that leaves out a group, you dehumanize them, intentionally or not. Simple. Saying humans have five fingers on their hand dehumanized anyone who doesn't. Saying the sky is blue during sunset just makes you moronic.

No, you don't get to change or erase the meaning of words because you disagree with proven, peer reviewed, long standing science. Sorry. Brain scans show physical differences between genders that don't always correspond to sex, but do correspond to gender.

>> ^Ariane:

>> ^Yogi:
>> ^EMPIRE:
now that house is over, I would love to see Hugh Laurie back in comedy for a bit.... (of fry and laurie)...

I was hoping first for a Travel Documentary in the vein of Fry in America. Just have them traveling about for a bit and chatting about their lives and meeting new people. Wouldn't it be funny watching to giant Englishman stomp around East Asia or somewhere cool? I think so, and it would be a nice little trip for Laurie after House, which had a decent enough ending in my view.
After that I demand some comedy though.

I don't know, it seems Michael Palin has already pretty much covered the world already.


He does a good job, but I honestly like travel programs that have a gimmick like motorcycles (Long Way Round) or Cars (Top Gear specials) and have more than one person. I get bored with one person, how people interact with eachother while on the road is much better and I can imagine Fry and Laurie would be amazing at it.

"Dresden Generating Station is the first privately financed nuclear power plant built in the United States. "
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dresden_Nuclear_Power_Plant

Research. It works, bitches.

>> ^Ariane:

Did Fukushima not teach you shills for the nuclear industry anything? Nuclear energy is far from clean or cheap. The cost of a nuclear power plant exceeds the cost of electricity it will produce which is why there has never been a privately financed nuclear plant EVER!

>> ^Ariane:

Did Fukushima not teach you shills for the nuclear industry anything? Nuclear energy is far from clean or cheap. The cost of a nuclear power plant exceeds the cost of electricity it will produce which is why there has never been a privately financed nuclear plant EVER!


Because fossil fuel generation has always been relatively cheap up till now...

This clinging to the whole 'nuclear bad' schtick with little evidence to back it up is just getting old. Anyone who knows anything about solar cell production knows that it not only has many harmful chemicals at the manufacturing end but the panels themselves are dangerous at their end of lifetime if not properly disposed of.

Can nuclear power be dangerous? Of course. Is it a viable alternative for base grid load if we want to eliminate fossil fuels? Currently, it's the only alternative. Renewables are no where close to ready to take over base load and fusion just hasn't happened yet. Pick your poison, but think quick...

http://www.renewableenergygeek.ca/solar-power/solar-panels-health-warning-hazzard/

>> ^Ariane:

Did Fukushima not teach you shills for the nuclear industry anything? Nuclear energy is far from clean or cheap. The cost of a nuclear power plant exceeds the cost of electricity it will produce which is why there has never been a privately financed nuclear plant EVER!


I know what you're trying to say, but when your opening gambit is calling people nuclear industry shills, you sound like a lunatic. I mean, i think it's fair to say that only a lunatic would think there are not just one but multiple nuclear shills dedicated to promoting nuclear power on the sift.

Renewable so far isn't enough, and the cost of nuclear power mostly comes from handling the fuel and waste it seems. So with nuclear we have to spend a lot of money (and some fossil fuels) to handle the materials. On the other hand with fossil fuels, we spend less but hurt the environment more. But then we need to consider how long we can go on burying or sinking radioactive material and/or rendering huge areas of our limited planet uninhabitable, we need another solution which is almost certainly fusion.

Fusion is an engineering problem right now. Perhaps a technology/cost problem especially during a recession. Anyone with any money left to put into hopeful energy tech has it in the form of oil (because that's going nowhere and we damn well need it) and why would they promote that?

>> ^Ariane:

Did Fukushima not teach you shills for the nuclear industry anything? Nuclear energy is far from clean or cheap. The cost of a nuclear power plant exceeds the cost of electricity it will produce which is why there has never been a privately financed nuclear plant EVER!


Yes, because wind and solar are ever so profitable aren't they. If you had a solar farm in Fukushima's place producing the same amount of power you'd have heavy metals seeping into the water supply across half of Japan. That doesn't even mention the fact that half of Japan, would have been permanently covered by those solar panels just to match the output of the Fukushima plant.

How many deaths are attributable to Fukushima by the way? Zero.

If you want to talk about long term health effects, please don't forget to add up the damage from burning thousands of tonnes of coal and dumping the smoke straight out into the air 24 hours a day 7 days a week. I know which poison I'd pick every single time.

That's right there is a lobby. They spend about $200,000 per year but typically less than that. They sure get their money's worth! It's not the mint but a factory in Greeneville, TN that makes the penny blanks. This factory generates pure profits of $1,000,000 per month but typically more. It is owned by a shadowy NY financial institution and protected by the steel worker's union for good measure. Fact: the penny is here to stay. Forever.

In reply to this comment by Ariane:
>> ^TheFreak:

There's no mention in this video of why the penny hasn't been abolished. There must be some lobby or special interest that benefits from this and prevents the mint from doing anything about it. It can't be as simple as merely doing away with the coin.

Actually there is a mention, when he said that pennies today are produced with 95% Zinc.

You guessed it. The Zinc producers of America are the principle force lobbying congress to continue to produce pennies. They even have a website: http://www.pennies.org/

@Ariane

If there were an infinite amount of monkeys sat down to work non-stop at one typewriter each, it would necessarily mean that every possible string of characters was being typed, and so in the time it would take a single monkey to type the number of characters in all of Shakespeare, one monkey (or an infinite number of monkeys, if you prefer) would have actually done it, by accident. As a corollary, every other past and future written work that is not longer than the complete works of Shakespeare would also be produced.

@Ariane, your math doesn't work. You are arbitrarily saying that the sequence we want occurs only once in any given set, but there's no reason to assume this. Think of flipping a coin, we want heads, we could flip it x times(where x is finite) and they could all be heads, or all be tails. Plus, once we say we're flipping the coin an infinite number of times instead, that demands that we get an infinite number of every possible outcome. So in your limit, when x is finite, you don't know what the numerator should be. But when x is infinite, the numerator should also be infinite, in which case the limit gives 1 (that is, 100%) instead of 0.

Actually I don't think the issue of representation is critical here. I think it's very easy to point out where Ariane went wrong:

"What are the odds that the random number generator would spit out the Shakespeare number? About 1 in infinity."

That's our intuition, but it's wrong. That's why this thought experiment is interesting. The likelihood is perhaps 1 in 10^10000000, but it is very much not "about 1 in infinity".


>> ^Sotto_Voce:

>> ^Ariane:
Pilkington is right. It would never happen. Lets just reduce this whole idea to mathematics. The complete works of Shakespeare can be translated to a number, by converting every character to ASCII, and ASCII to binary, so you end up with a really large binary number, which you can convert to decimal if you are so inclined.
So we have one number representing the complete works of Shakespeare. Then instead on Monkeys with typewriters, we have a random number generator, that can spit out any number from 1 to infinity. What are the odds that the random number generator would spit out the Shakespeare number? About 1 in infinity. Or for you calculus geeks, the limit of 1/x as x approaches infinity = 0.
So what happens if you ran the number generator an infinite number of times. Turns out infinity x infinity = infinity. Or again to be more exact aleph-naught times aleph-naught equals aleph-naught. So we are still at 0. What if we had an infinite number of number generators. That would be aleph-naught cubed, which is still equal to aleph-naught. Therefore, the odds are still zero.

You're using the wrong probability distribution. If we do what you suggest and convert each possible string of characters into a binary number, then the monkey experiment will not give us a uniform distribution over the binary numbers. It won't be like a random number generator. The monkey experiment gives us a uniform distribution over individual characters, and this does not translate into a uniform distribution over strings. As an example, consider the string "ee" vs. the string corresponding to Tolstoy's "War and Peace". Each of these corresponds to a single binary number, and if your random number generator analogy is right, then they should be equally likely. But obviously a monkey is far more likely to type "ee" than "War and Peace".

>> ^Ariane:

Pilkington is right. It would never happen. Lets just reduce this whole idea to mathematics. The complete works of Shakespeare can be translated to a number, by converting every character to ASCII, and ASCII to binary, so you end up with a really large binary number, which you can convert to decimal if you are so inclined.
So we have one number representing the complete works of Shakespeare. Then instead on Monkeys with typewriters, we have a random number generator, that can spit out any number from 1 to infinity. What are the odds that the random number generator would spit out the Shakespeare number? About 1 in infinity. Or for you calculus geeks, the limit of 1/x as x approaches infinity = 0.
So what happens if you ran the number generator an infinite number of times. Turns out infinity x infinity = infinity. Or again to be more exact aleph-naught times aleph-naught equals aleph-naught. So we are still at 0. What if we had an infinite number of number generators. That would be aleph-naught cubed, which is still equal to aleph-naught. Therefore, the odds are still zero.


You're using the wrong probability distribution. If we do what you suggest and convert each possible string of characters into a binary number, then the monkey experiment will not give us a uniform distribution over the binary numbers. It won't be like a random number generator. The monkey experiment gives us a uniform distribution over individual characters, and this does not translate into a uniform distribution over strings. As an example, consider the string "ee" vs. the string corresponding to Tolstoy's "War and Peace". Each of these corresponds to a single binary number, and if your random number generator analogy is right, then they should be equally likely. But obviously a monkey is far more likely to type "ee" than "War and Peace".

@Ariane, I disagree. The shakespeare number would be high, but it wouldn't be infinity. Likewise, the probability would be very small, but it wouldn't be zero. So given an infinite amount of time, the monkeys could indeed print out shakespeare. The time it takes may be more than the age of the universe, but it has a non-zero probability to happen.