"NASA's new rocket has been in development for over a decade, arguably it's a soft continuation from the Constellation program using the 5 segment boosters and Orion capsule that began development in 2005. It's been a slow, expensive ride with the contractors milking their cost plus contracts for their own benefit."
-Scott Manley

Makes it seem like NASA SLS is just providing jobs and not actually producing anything of value for each dollar spent. More telescopes, less rockets?

Nasa don't give them reasons to cut your budget or make politicians/public think you're less or unnecessary.

*promote the upcoming launch.

Talking to a conspiracy theorist about either the moon landing or the flat earth theory is exasperating. They discredit a scientific theory on the slightest technicality in your brief retelling of it, but if you baulk at their vague one-sentence alternative you're brainwashed.

You can tell them about the retroreflectors, or the satellite images we have of the landing site. You can tell them about sundials, the phases of the moon or constellations.

They don't care - anything can be faked and their definition of "proof" boils down to seeing it with their own naked eye.

It's totally impractical to take everyone up in a Red Bull balloon to see the curvature of the Earth for themselves. Presumably you'd have to take everyone up twice at two locations to show that the circular horizon is not an edge. Or kill two birds with one stone and take them to the moon landing site and back again because nothing less will suffice.

Because if I take them to the most advanced telescope in the world and focus it on the moon landing site - the image could be faked. You could show them how the telescope works, but each component could produce a faked output. The only way they would accept the telescope information is if they built it themselves from raw materials - oh you used a standard electronic device such as a basic motor? Illuminati dude, that thing can produce EM waves that fake the image. You're going to use a Macbook to read the USB output? Are you a shill?

Literally nothing is good enough but they are all, without exception, too fucking lazy to go and prove it to themselves from first principles.

Which is called "getting a degree in physics", where you are also taught to question every step, AKA being "brainwashed".

This is far too late a reply. My mind was on Venus, my heart was on Mars, and my nether regions were on the good planet Vaseline, in the Proctor & Gamble constellation.

I miss this place.

I miss you.

Think of me as a stiletto in your boot.

If threatened, I'll be a razor tongue that cuts without thinking.

Happy Drunken Irish Bastard Day - yes...my people can say that....

The people of Earth!

Ahhh ha ha ha ha!



xoxoxoxo

Awesome ship and a steal at only $150!!

Im actually reading that the next constellation density in research is 16,384 QAM...if you thought 1024 was crazy >.>

You are thinking about QAM, Quadrature Amplitude Modulation. Thats an interesting question because QAM essentially produces the same results that the prof talks about in this video. By using interesting ways to change the beat and phase of a single carrier, one can represent a whole array of numbers greater than just a 1 or a zero with a single pulse, case in point.

In QAM, lets just use the easy example of QAM, QPSK (4QAM), where there are 4 possible binary positions for any given 'carrier' signal at a known frequency.

By shifting both phase and amplitude, you can get a 0, 1, 2 or 3, where each position represents a power of 2, up to a total value of 16 unique numbers.

Rather than just a 0 or a 1, you can have 0 through to 15. However doing this requires both a timeslot, and a known carrier window.

The fastest the QAM transmitter can encode onto a carrier is limited by the nyquist rate, that is, less than half the frequency which the receiver can sample at its fastest rate (on the remote end). As you increase the speed of the encoding, you also increase the error rate, and introduce more noise into the base carrier signal, in turn, reducing your effective available bandwidth.

So it then becomes a balancing act, do I want to encode faster, or do I want to increase my constellation density? The obvious answer is the one we went with, increase in constellation density.

There are much more dense variants, I think the highest ive heard of was 1024 QAM, where a single carrier of 8MHz wide could represent 1024 bits (1,050,625 unique values for a given 'pulse' within a carrier).

I actually had a lot more typed out here, but the maths that goes into this gets very ugly, and you have to account for noise products that are introduced as you increase both your transmission speed, and your receiver sensitivty, thus lowering your SNR, reducing your effective bandwidth for a given QAM scheme.

So rather than bore you with the details, the Shannon Hartley theorem is the hard wired physical limitation.

Think of it as an asymptote, that QAM is one method of trying to milk the available space of.

You can send encoded pulses very fast, but you are limited by nyquist, and your receivers ability to determine noise from signal.

The faster you encode, the more noise, the less effective bandwidth....and so begins the ritule of increasing constellation density, and receivers that can decode them....etc....

There is also the aspect of having carriers too close to one another that you must consider. If you do not have enough of a dead band between your receivers cut off for top end, and the NEXT carrier alongs cutoff for deadband at its LOW end, you can induce what is known as a heterodyne. These are nasty, especially so when talking about fibre, as the wavelengths used can cause a WIDE BAND noise product that results in your effective RF noise floor to jump SUBSTANTIALLY, destroying your entire network in the process.

So not only can you not have a contiguous RF bandwidth of carriers, one directly after another...if you try and get them close, you end up ruining everyones day.

I am sure there will be newer more fancy ways to fill that spectrum with useable numbers, but I seriously doubt they will ever go faster than the limit I proposed earlier (unless they can get better SNR, again that was just a stab in the dark).

It gives you a good idea of how it works though.

If you want to read more on this, I suggest checking wikipedia for the following;

Shannon Hartley theorem.
Nyquist Rate
Quadrature Phase Shift Key
Quadrature Amplitude Modulation
Fibre Optic Communication Wavelengths
Stimulated Brillouin Scattering
Ebrium Doped Fibre Amplifiers

Too bad astrology has very little to do with constellations and more to do with tendencies and temperaments. This is why astrology is more of an oracular art than a science.

Thought you might like this. Just got back from a Constellation festival, feeling post-rocky!

http://videosift.com/video/Silver-Mt-Zion-North-American-Motor-Over-Smoldered-Field

Oh yea this theory has always been good stuff... actually the David Icke books are a good read for many different reasons...

David Icke Website
http://www.davidicke.com

"British author exposes the reptilian bloodline that rules the world."

"...human beings originated in a breeding program run by a race of reptilians called Anunnaki from the Draco constellation, and that what we call reality is just a holographic experience; the only reality is the realm of the Absolute"

For all his out-there theories he makes good points and gives food for thought:

"When you survey the world today ... when a child dies in this world of preventable disease every two seconds, when the economic system of this world must destroy the Earth simply for that system to survive; when you see all the wars, and when you see all the pain, and when you see all the suffering, is it a force of love and wisdom and tolerance that is in control of this planet?" -- david icke

Um, Bill Nye? Do you think that astrologers are really unaware of the precession of the equinoxes?

What do you think that whole "Age of Aquarius" thing was about?

As any basic introduction to astrology--heck, the Wikipedia entry on astrology--will tell you, there are two different ways of calculating the signs: tropical and sidereal. Under sidereal astrology, your sign is based on the actual constellation. Most people who think of themselves as a Sagitarrius really will be a Scorpio under sidereal astrology.

Tropical astrology, the most popular form of astrology in the West, is on the other hand based not on the positions of the constellations, but based on the position of the sun at the equinoxes and solstices. The signs are named after the constellations that were present in them back in the day, but it's not as if the equinoxes occur at different points in the year than they used to.

Whether or not you think astrology is bogus or not, it's probably a good idea to at least read the Wikipedia entry on a subject before you criticize it.

Thanks for the promote!

In reply to this comment by oritteropo:
*promote

Just because the universe might be eternal, does not mean that God is the automatic solution, nor the simplest explanation. That's just the one that makes sense to you. I would say that an eternal universe filled with rocks and gas is a little less complicated than an eternal, thinking, feeling, all-powerful being. But again, that's just my opinion. Those are large concepts, and the rules of physics, or even the seemingly bizarre rules of quantum mechanics do nothing to help explain them.

To me it is simply a probability argument. If you say that everything is equally unlikely, then if you strip away all other concerns, you just have the question..was the Universe deliberately created? The answer is either yes or no. You have evidence that perhaps there is design, which implies an intelligent (and powerful) creator. You have evidence that perhaps it could have happened by chance, by naturalistic processes. From there, you have to figure out what explanation best matches reality. You could ask, does something as wonderful as life and as amazing as the Universe just happen by itself? You could ask, am I just a bunch of atoms moving through space or is there something more to me than that?

Is an eternal God hard to grasp? Yes, but easier I think than something from nothing. If it is something from nothing we will always be ignorant of the initial conditions. If God created it, He will (presumably) educate us about the mystery of His existence. He promised this:

1 Corinthians 13:12

For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.

It is basically saying that God promises full disclosure when His Kingdom is established on Earth..

Occam's razor is simply a pragmatic way to find a solution, it does not prove anything, but just suggest what a likely answer might be. People use that argument about the complexity of universal laws all the time, but the fact of the matter is, we still don't understand 99.99999999% of the universe or how it works. We can see that if we "tweaked the dials", it would probably look much different than the universe we know, but there isn't a scientist out there in this world that could tell you with any certainty what would happen. Only that on a large scale, things might fall inward or burst outward faster, or that water might not congeal the same way.

Well, just in the initial conditions of the Universe, you have several values which just defy any naturalistic explanation. Even atheist scientists have to admit that a straight forward explanation indicates a designer:

Fred Hoyle, Astronomer said

"A commonsense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question."

This has major implications for scientific theories, because it isn't simply a matter of it being incredibly unlikely, it is also matter of contradicting the predictions of standard models. I think you'll enjoy this article:

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/hep-th/pdf/0208/0208013v3.pdf

Speaking of complexity, here's an exercise for your brain: Think about a mountain, on part of that mountain, pressure builds up, and a rock slide starts to fall. When it finally settles, the rocks, all the little pebbles and large boulders and particles of dust are arranged in just a certain way. Even though it's just a pile of rocks, it contains within it an inconceivable amount of complexity. Nowhere else in the entire universe, will there ever be a pile of rocks that have the exact specifications of this one. And even if it did, it wouldn't be composed of the same stone, And even if was, the elements that make up the stone wouldn't be arranged the same way. Nor would it be the exact same temperature, unless it was in the exact same relative position in the universe with an identical sun, with all the particles of gas and dust in between them arranged in exactly the same way.

In a way, the pile of rocks, when you think about it, is an impossibility. And yet it exists. There is no simple solution to explain it. An eternal creator, or the laws of physics? Either way, the true meaning is something that neither of us can comprehend. And to say that either one is "simpler" than the other is merely a statement of faith. Not fact.

Sure, taken by itself, such a thing is astonishing to behold. Divorced from its circumstances, it is perplexing to say the least. Yet, either explanation for the origin of this impossibility leads to a definitive conclusion. If it was naturalism, there is no meaning to it. It just happened that way and at best you can invent a meaning for it and decide to believe it. If it was created, however, it was created for a purpose. It has meaning because of that purpose; it is invested with meaning. In naturalism, you are practically looking at something alien. It is cold, dead, inexplicable, and doesn't care about you. Under creation, you are at the least staring this quote from Einstein dead in the face:

"I'm not an atheist, and I don't think I can call myself a pantheist. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws. Our limited minds grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations."

I go a step further because I believe God has revealed a bit about his Dewey Decimal System, but essentially, I am in staring at this in awe and wonder. I think those rocks are amazing and startling, but I also praise God for making them that way.

>> ^Ryjkyj:
We love you too. (but it's a rough, heathen love)
Just because the universe might be eternal, does not mean that God is the automatic solution, nor the simplest explanation. That's just the one that makes sense to you. I would say that an eternal universe filled with rocks and gas is a little less complicated than an eternal, thinking, feeling, all-powerful being. But again, that's just my opinion. Those are large concepts, and the rules of physics, or even the seemingly bizarre rules of quantum mechanics do nothing to help explain them.
Occam's razor is simply a pragmatic way to find a solution, it does not prove anything, but just suggest what a likely answer might be. People use that argument about the complexity of universal laws all the time, but the fact of the matter is, we still don't understand 99.99999999% of the universe or how it works. We can see that if we "tweaked the dials", it would probably look much different than the universe we know, but there isn't a scientist out there in this world that could tell you with any certainty what would happen. Only that on a large scale, things might fall inward or burst outward faster, or that water might not congeal the same way.
Point being, just because we can tell that the universe would be different, doesn't mean that it was designed. It just means that it is this way.
Speaking of complexity, here's an exercise for your brain: Think about a mountain, on part of that mountain, pressure builds up, and a rock slide starts to fall. When it finally settles, the rocks, all the little pebbles and large boulders and particles of dust are arranged in just a certain way. Even though it's just a pile of rocks, it contains within it an inconceivable amount of complexity. Nowhere else in the entire universe, will there ever be a pile of rocks that have the exact specifications of this one. And even if it did, it wouldn't be composed of the same stone, And even if was, the elements that make up the stone wouldn't be arranged the same way. Nor would it be the exact same temperature, unless it was in the exact same relative position in the universe with an identical sun, with all the particles of gas and dust in between them arranged in exactly the same way.
In a way, the pile of rocks, when you think about it, is an impossibility. And yet it exists. There is no simple solution to explain it. An eternal creator, or the laws of physics? Either way, the true meaning is something that neither of us can comprehend. And to say that either one is "simpler" than the other is merely a statement of faith. Not fact.

[redacted]

i think you've clearly missed the point of the various holy books. theyre not science books. theyre not history books. its no different than taking any philosophical or theological book, ancient or modern, and calling bullshit on account of it not mentioning some far off nebula as if that means anything as it pertains to philosophy and/or theology

"why not mention something like, 'god created the stars, including the sun'? then people would be like oh, all those points of light are just different versions of our sun" why not? because what the hell does that have to do with the philosophical nature of the scriptures?

again, you want it to be a science book but its not and why should it be?
>> ^Mcboinkens:

>> ^shimfish:
Err...except for all the times the bible mentions stars, which, of course, we used to actually see at night.
Were you expecting a postscript along the lines of "Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is."
>> ^Mcboinkens:
This is one of my biggest conflicts with religion. Not one mention of anything outside of the sun and the moon.


Errrrrr.......you clearly missed the point of my post. No mention of anything humans didn't already know about. If I created a full-fledged universe, I'd definitely hint at the fact that there were other things outside of the Earth, Moon, and points of light that are blatantly obvious. Also, it seems to differentiate between the Sun and stars. Why not mention something like, "God created the stars, including the Sun"? Then people would be like oh, all those points of light are just different versions of our Sun. "In 1600 A.D., Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake for heresy, for asserting that the Sun is a star, among other things. It wasn't until the mid-1800s, after the work of Galileo, Kepler, Huygens, Newton, and finally, Friedrich Bessel, that it[meaning the sun was a strar] could be proven. The distance to other stars was calculated, and it was found that stars were about as bright as the Sun, when you account for the difference in distance. Also, chemical composition and surface temperature could be determined, and this added further evidence."
It mentions Pleiades and Orion, both of which received there name prior to when the book of Job was written, so no credit there. Besides, those are just constellations.
Why would you not expect any sort of indication that space was bigger than we though? Why leave us in the dark? Why not reveal that the Earth is a globe and not a flatland, like it implies when it mentions the four corners?
"The Third Day
The first appearance of dry ground. The further cooling of the surface set in motion a process of natural contraction, uplifting and motion of the crust (the process continues today, called "plate tectonics"). The earth changed from a smooth one-level molten "cue ball" to a planet with an irregular surface with ocean basins and continental landmasses. With dry ground available, the first plants were made to grow in great abundance. (Genesis 1:9-13)
The Fourth Day
With the sky now clear, the sun, moon and stars were dependably visible. They were to "serve as signs to mark seasons and days and years." The sun marked the day (sunset to sunset), the moon the month (new moon to new moon), and the stars the seasons (constellations are seen in particular seasons e.g. "Orion" is visible in winter in the northern hemisphere, which is summer in the southern hemisphere). (Genesis 1:14-19)"
A mention of dirt, but not gas? It just bugs me that the only things mentioned were the things that were already known about.

[redacted]