MindMover
MindMover's JournalMars Rover Approaching Red Planet
Source: WSJ
NASA's Curiosity rover was flying under the influence of Martian gravity today, on course and on schedule, as the control room crew in Pasadena got ready for Sunday night's nail-biting landing.
At midmorning today, Curiosity was approaching Mars at 8,000 miles per hour, and is accelerating under the planet's gravity to an eventual speed of 13,200 mph. A heat shield and very-complicated landing system will slow it down to a virtual stop as it hovers with jet power, and the actual rover vehicle is lowered to the surface by three nylon tethers.
Scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory said today that a worrisome dust storm on the red planet was dissipating. "Mars is cooperating by providing good weather for landing,'' said the JPL's Ashwin Vasavada, deputy project scientist for the NASA effort.
A Martian dust storm would have been a serious problem for the one-ton, car-size rover that is billed by NASA and JPL as the most scientifically advanced robotic vehicle ever dispatched. The jet-powered descent vehicle cannot be steered away from its planned landing site, and NASA has one chance to land it.
Read more: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444320704577569281695184866.html
What is 67.9 miles high ... ?
During the Crash Course you will often encounter numbers that are expressed in trillions. How much is a trillion?
You know what? I’m not really sure myself.
A trillion is a very, very big number, and I think it would be worth spending a couple of minutes trying to get our arms around the concept.
First, a numerical review.
A thousand is a one with three zeros after it.
A million is a thousand times bigger than that and it’s a one with six zeros after it. At this level I can really get my mind around the difference between these two numbers. A million dollars in the bank is a very different
http://www.peakprosperity.com/crashcourse/chapter-11-how-much-trillion
NASA’s Mars Curiosity: 11 things you may not know (Interactive)
A multibillion dollar gamble, a most scary landing and possibly learning whether Mars once could have supported life — briefly, that’s what’s at stake in NASA’s Mars Curiosity mission, set to touch down early Monday. Mars is a difficult place to get to — only about a third of the 44 missions there have succeeded. Curiosity is the most ambitious and complex Mars mission ever conceived, writes Marc Kaufman, author of “First Contact: Scientific Breakthroughs in the Hunt for Life Beyond Earth.’’ Soon, we’ll know whether Curiosity’s creators were brilliant and farseeing — or reaching too far.
In this stripped-down economic time, the $2.5 billion mission could become the last of its kind if something goes wrong. Or it could send back such compelling information and pictures that the public demands more Mars exploration, and Congress and the White House have to respond. Before you bet, know that only six of more than a dozen spacecraft that have reached Mars actually landed successfully and completed their missions. All six were American. Will Curiosity be the seventh? (Left, Curiosity launches on Nov. 26 from Cape Canaveral.)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/nasas-mars-curiosity-11-things-you-may-not-know/2012/08/02/gJQA2VCYSX_gallery.html#photo=1
President Obama's Birthday Wish List
President Obama turns 51 Saturday, but the birthday gifts are already pouring in. Employment numbers released today showed larger-than-expected gains in the workforce, with 163,000 new jobs added in June. Economists were predicting that number to come in at around 95,000.
But it wasn't all iPhones and Bulls tickets for the president. He copped an ugly, oversized holiday sweater, too, in the form of an unemployment rate that ticked up one-tenth of a point, to 8.3 percent, prompting the Romney campaign to call the news a "hammer blow to struggling middle-class families."
So a mixed bag for the incumbent, who will for the fourth -- and possibly final -- time Saturday celebrate his birthday from the commander-in-chief's seat. If there's going to be a fifth such occasion, the president will need a few more goodies to fall in his lap in the next few months. With that in mind, we're taking a look ahead at what might be going through his head Saturday as he blows out the candles on the First Cake.
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/OTUS/president-obamas-birthday-list/story?id=16923344
Raging Bulls: How Wall Street Got Addicted to Light-Speed Trading
Wall Street used to bet on companies that build things. Now it just bets on technologies that make faster and faster trades.Editor’s note: One of the most interesting things about the catastrophe at Knight Capital Group—the trading firm that lost $440 million this week—is the speed of the collapse. News reports describe the bulk of the bad trades happening in less than an hour, a computer-driven descent that has the financial community once again asking if their pursuit of profit has lead to software agents that are fast, dumb, and out of control. We’re posting this story in advance of its publication in Wired’s September issue because it examines how Wall St. got to the point where flash failures come with increasing frequency, and how much farther traders seem willing to go in pursuit of ever-greater speed.
The 2012 New York Battle of the Quants, a two-day conference of algorithmic asset traders, took place in New York City at the end of March, just a few days after a group of researchers admitted they had made a mistake in an experiment that purported to overturn modern physics. The scientists had claimed to observe subatomic particles called neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light. But they were wrong; about six months later, they retracted their findings. And while “special relativity upheld” is the world’s most predictable headline, the news that neutrinos actually obey the laws of physics as currently understood marked the end of a brief and tantalizing dream for quants—the physicists, engineers, and mathematicians-turned-financiers who generate as much as 55 percent of all US stock trading. In the pursuit of market-beating returns, sending a signal at faster than light speed could provide the ultimate edge: a way to make trades in the past, the financial equivalent of betting on a horse race after it has been run.
“Between the time the first paper came out in September and last week, a guy in my shop had written two papers explaining how it could be true,” a graying former physicist said ruefully, sipping coffee near an oversize Keith Haring canvas that dominated the room at Christie’s auction house where the conference was held. “Of course, you’d need a particle accelerator to make it work.”
http://www.wired.com/business/2012/08/ff_wallstreet_trading/?
July's new jobs of 163K beats forecasts
The economy added 163,000 new jobs in July, a better-than-expected gain that sent stocks and bonds higher even as the nation's unemployment rate rate ticked up from 8.2% to 8.3%.
Economists said the report doesn't point to significant new momentum, even though forecasters surveyed by Factset had predicted 100,000 new jobs. July's results were only slightly better than the 151,000 monthly average for the year, or even the 133,000 monthly average since employment resumed growing in 2010.
http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/story/2012-08-03/jobs-july-main/56730980/1
"I could care less what they think" .... Harry Reid
Why Harry Reid keeps attacking Mitt RomneyJon Stewart called Harry Reid “a really, really terrible person” for his unsubstantiated allegation that Mitt Romney hadn’t paid taxes for 10 years. Mitch McConnell said it was “beneath the dignity” of the majority leader’s office to make such a charge.
And conservative commentators are calling on Reid to put his money where his mouth is and release his own tax returns.
But there’s one person who couldn’t care less: Harry Reid.
The ruthless Senate majority leader sees political gold in his attack on Romney — and he’s got the blessing from President Barack Obama’s campaign for the attack, even if he lacks evidence on Romney’s failure to pay taxes.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0812/79365.html
Astronomers hear 'death cry' of star shredded by black hole
A team of astronomers has detected the "death cry" of a star being devoured by a supermassive black hole. The black hole had been sitting quietly -- almost lying in wait, as it were -- until its gravity reached out and shredded a passing star, pulling the star into its death grip and causing it to emit a characteristic signal. "You can think of it as hearing the star scream as it gets devoured, if you like," said astronomer Jon Miller of the University of Michigan, lead author of a report appearing in Science Express.
The black hole, identified as Swift J1644+57, lies 3.9 billion light-years away in the constellation Draco. That name arises from its discovery on March 28, 2011, by NASA's Swift satellite, which searches the universe for gamma-ray bursts. At first, astronomers thought the signal was a common gamma-ray burst, but the gradual fade-out of the signal matched nothing that had ever been seen before from such a source. Closer observation of the object with the orbiting Suzaku and XMM-Newton X-ray telescopes ultimately revealed a faint, periodic signal that, Miller said, corresponds in frequency to an ultra-low D-sharp.
http://www.latimes.com/news/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-shredded-star-cry-20120803,0,2245446.story?
Does Cybercrime Really Cost $1 Trillion?
Gen. Keith Alexander is the director of the National Security Agency and oversees U.S. Cyber Command, which means he leads the government’s effort to protect America from cyberattacks. Due to the secretive nature of his job, he maintains a relatively low profile, so when he does speak, people listen closely. On July 9, Alexander addressed a crowded room at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., and though he started with a few jokes — his mother said he had a face for radio, behind every general is a stunned father-in-law — he soon got down to business.
Alexander warned that cyberattacks are causing "the greatest transfer of wealth in history," and he cited statistics from, among other sources, Symantec Corp. and McAfee Inc., which both sell software to protect computers from hackers. Crediting Symantec, he said the theft of intellectual property costs American companies $250 billion a year. He also mentioned a McAfee estimate that the global cost of cybercrime is $1 trillion. "That’s our future disappearing in front of us," he said, urging Congress to enact legislation to improve America’s cyberdefenses.
These estimates have been cited on many occasions by government officials, who portray them as evidence of the threat against America. They are hardly the only cyberstatistics used by officials, but they are recurring ones that get a lot of attention. In his first major cybersecurity speech in 2009, President Obama prominently referred to McAfee’s $1 trillion estimate. Sen. Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn., and Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, the main sponsors of the Cybersecurity Act of 2012 that is expected to be voted on this week, have also mentioned $1 trillion in cybercrime costs. Last week, arguing on the Senate floor in favor of putting their bill up for a vote, they both referenced the $250 billion estimate and repeated Alexander’s warning about the greatest transfer of wealth in history.
A handful of media stories, blog posts and academic studies have previously expressed skepticism about these attention-getting estimates, but this has not stopped an array of government officials and politicians from continuing to publicly cite them as authoritative. Now, an examination of their origins by ProPublica has found new grounds to question the data and methods used to generate these numbers, which McAfee and Symantec say they stand behind.
http://www.propublica.org/article/does-cybercrime-really-cost-1-trillion
================================================
Just saying that everytime I put on one of these overbloated security software sysems my computer gets nauseated and starts to vomit .... 
Profile Information
Member since: Sun Jul 31, 2011, 05:36 PMNumber of posts: 5,016
