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Post by GO30 on Oct 17, 2024 15:13:03 GMT 12
Off topic I know, so my apologies, but: Why are they trying to catch rockets? If they can get them to hover at the catch pad, or have enough control over them to catch them, why don't they just land them? As in, just fly them gently onto the ground? Isn't that what the do when they land on the moon? They have the control over the craft, etc. What am I missing? Men landed on the moon? You crazy conspiracy riddled dude you  * I believe it's about weight. If they can remove the gear needed to land on 'We Love you,welcome back' (the name of one of the barges) they get to replace that with payload. I saw some comment that suggested around 200kg could be saved, which at big bucks per kg to send shit into space that saving is worth a few bucks. Anything that flies has weight as a major enemy.
* - still struggling with that they did/they didn't bit after the argument that Bert dude put up, it was pretty bloody good.
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Post by Cantab on Oct 17, 2024 15:14:56 GMT 12
Its the boosters they are catching, possibly rest later on. If its only launching satelites no need to land eleswhere.
Whole point is to save weight, no landing gear to launch in first place. Massive increase in efficiency.
Some pretty cool stuff on twitter about the whole show.
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Post by eri on Oct 17, 2024 18:22:46 GMT 12
elon said he expects the booster to be refueled in 5?hrs and ready to boost again
amazing!
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Post by GO30 on Oct 18, 2024 9:17:46 GMT 12
Its the boosters they are catching, possibly rest later on. If its only launching satelites no need to land eleswhere. Whole point is to save weight, no landing gear to launch in first place. Massive increase in efficiency. Some pretty cool stuff on twitter about the whole show. Woops yes the boosters. Getting ahead of myself a bit there.
I've been doing a fair bit of 'space' vids lately and SpaceX easily leads that with some very cool shit. Just last week there was a good video on their grab verse landing options. The original idea was to grab the 1st stage but after realising that was a very big ask they changed focus to the boosters. The boosters will give them the data/methodology/whatever to then go for the 1st stage.
What's got me a little fizzy is Elon wants one of his new machines heading to Mars only next year, 2 or 3 close behind and them Boom, one loaded with humans. He is saying he wants to see humans up there before the end of the decade. Certainly can't knock the lad for his ambition.
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Post by harrytom on Oct 18, 2024 12:09:53 GMT 12
Its the boosters they are catching, possibly rest later on. If its only launching satelites no need to land eleswhere. Whole point is to save weight, no landing gear to launch in first place. Massive increase in efficiency. Some pretty cool stuff on twitter about the whole show. Woops yes the boosters. Getting ahead of myself a bit there.
I've been doing a fair bit of 'space' vids lately and SpaceX easily leads that with some very cool shit. Just last week there was a good video on their grab verse landing options. The original idea was to grab the 1st stage but after realising that was a very big ask they changed focus to the boosters. The boosters will give them the data/methodology/whatever to then go for the 1st stage.
What's got me a little fizzy is Elon wants one of his new machines heading to Mars only next year, 2 or 3 close behind and them Boom, one loaded with humans. He is saying he wants to see humans up there before the end of the decade. Certainly can't knock the lad for his ambition.
Wasnt there a woman who volunteered through nasa to do a mars trip,beiung one ay didnt worry her as has or had terminal cancer,about 3 maybe 4 yrs ago the idea was first mooted? |
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Post by GO30 on Oct 18, 2024 14:15:45 GMT 12
Apparently there are 1000's lined up for the first flight to Mars even though they know it's a one way only trip.
I'd be thinking the first couple of manned flights would have to be one way but also full of people with the clues to build a base and suss for water etc.
Not too sure someone who is terminally ill would fit that role but ya never know.
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Post by muzled on Oct 20, 2024 12:12:48 GMT 12
Latest TPU email...
CTRL+ALT+WOKE? Language Commission's blows $600k on custom te reo keyboards ⌨️⭐
Thanks to an insider tip-off at the Māori Language Commission, we've gone public revealing that at least $600,000 has been spent to develop customised Māori language keyboards.
The $600k was given straight to PB Tech to develop the keyboards. But here's the thing, PB Tech had been working on an identical project well before the Language Commission became involved (or offered a juicy cheque)!
This is a classic case of a government agency trying to jump aboard a private company's project to bask in the glory. PB Tech had already spotted a gap in the market.
PB Tech reckon there's potential big business in satisfying the bureaucrats who (like the Solicitor General) need Māori macrons on their keyboards to 'de-colonise' their computers.
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mihit
Junior Member
Posts: 70
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Post by mihit on Oct 20, 2024 12:34:29 GMT 12
Apparently windows doesn't do it, but every other operating system has a "compose key" so you can input most of the unicode characters.
So you can type in māori or lé french or whãtēvë® you like.
$600,000 "tax dollars" is pocket change for politicians.
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Post by muzled on Oct 20, 2024 16:42:51 GMT 12
$600,000 "tax dollars" is pocket change for politicians. And therein lies the problem. Years ago I heard the financial controller tell the CFO that he had the EOY books down to within $900 of balancing. The CFO looked at him and said - 'that's good John, whatever you can't balance I'll take out of your next pay', then walked off... Be nice if the numpties in govt treated our money like their own. |
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mihit
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Post by mihit on Oct 22, 2024 16:34:40 GMT 12
$600,000 "tax dollars" is pocket change for politicians. And therein lies the problem. Years ago I heard the financial controller tell the CFO that he had the EOY books down to within $900 of balancing. The CFO looked at him and said - 'that's good John, whatever you can't balance I'll take out of your next pay', then walked off... Be nice if the numpties in govt treated our money like their own. You can't seriously be suggesting that the government should be accountable for their actions, shirley. |
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Post by muzled on Oct 23, 2024 10:23:48 GMT 12
Is this the best one yet? A racist rock... Sounds like they should replace it with a panda bear. chancellor.wisc.edu/blog/what-a-rock-has-to-do-with-racism/What a rock has to do with racism By Greg Bump Posted on September 16, 2021 On August 6, the University of Wisconsin–Madison removed a 42-ton boulder formerly known as Chamberlin Rock from our main campus. This was not, as some have assumed, a knee-jerk decision. Rather, it came after more than a year of in-depth conversations with stakeholders from across the spectrum, engaging in the process of shared governance.
Members of the Wisconsin Black Student Union and Wunk Sheek (a Native American student organization) met with the Campus Planning Committee to present their point of view and the harm they described. That Committee also heard from members of the geology department, researchers, historians, campus leadership, the Ho Chunk tribe, and others. The Campus Planning Committee, after thoughtful deliberation, recommended moving the rock and I endorsed this action.
The process began in the summer of 2020. I listened as WBSU and Wunk Sheek members explained why they saw the rock as a symbol of anti-Blackness. I’m sure you remember that time. It was the first summer of COVID-19 and our campus community was bewildered, overwhelmed and in pain. On May 25, George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis, sparking a protest movement around the world. As chancellor, one of my responsibilities is to build a community that supports each student who studies here. We want to hear about students’ lived experience in the campus community. The students who came to me to ask for the removal of Chamberlin Rock were not performing. They were thoughtful. They were seeking change and interrogating the past and its impact on the present in their own daily lives. And they were brave. The process was a reasoned and deliberative one, viewing the question of the rock through different perspectives, experiences, and practicalities.
To assume they were doing this for other motives, as some have done, is to be something worse than cynical. It is to be uncurious. The rock, they said, had a negative impact on campus climate as African American students, on their own lives, and they asked us to remove it. Students knew of the rock’s association with a vile racial slur in the 1920s because the rock is part of the campus cultural landscape tour in which, as an effort to own and learn from the mistakes of the past, we acknowledge that history. The slur’s direct, documented association with the rock provided a compelling foundation for the proposed change. Some will tell you that a rock is just a rock. That to fear harm from an inanimate object is prescientific, irrational. But to be human is to imbue objects with meaning. It’s why we offer flowers when we mourn or love, why we all have keepsakes stowed away in our drawers and closets, and why people unknowingly begin to whisper when they approach the U.S. Constitution in the National Archives. To be sure, the rock is an innocent object, in which we invest meaning. This is a conversation about its symbolic associations, which have intense meaning to some and no meaning to others. When we made the decision to move the rock, we listened to those who saw a legacy of racism and present-day pain where others saw a mere rock. Our geologists wanted to preserve the rock. They saw a unique pre-Cambrian glacial erratic (a rock carried hundreds or thousands of miles in glaciers until it was left behind when the glacier melted) which they sent their students to study. As a result, we chose to relocate the boulder to university-owned land southeast of Madison, where it remains accessible for teaching purposes. By some estimates, the rock traveled to Wisconsin from Canada some two billion years ago. The forces that smoothed its edges, the landscape it traveled, are hard to know. But curiosity drives us to find out more and to understand its history and its intersection with our own. At UW–Madison, like many institutions, we are working to acknowledge the often painful history of racism and other forms of exclusion on campus. Three years ago, I commissioned a study of the history of groups associated with the Ku Klux Klan on campus. Based on that study’s recommendations, I funded a public history project to investigate and uncover the historical experiences of marginalized groups on campus, whose story is often not part of our traditional campus histories. I strongly believe that if we do not acknowledge both the good and the bad parts of our history, we cannot construct a better future. That’s why I took seriously the symbolic concerns associated with Chamberlin Rock.
It’s also important to note that the rock is not a well-known campus monument. If I had to guess, I would estimate that many of our students and alumni did not know there was something called “Chamberlin Rock” on campus prior to the recent publicity and, if asked, few could have told you where it was located. If one is going to move a campus object, you have to ask to whom it has meaning. While the rock has clear symbolic meaning for those students asking for its removal, for many other students the rock has had limited meaning. In the midst of all of this, few people have said anything about President Chamberlin, to whom the rock was dedicated. He is clearly unimplicated in any modern symbolic meaning placed on this rock. But President Chamberlin’s memory was important enough that people in the past created something by which to honor him, and that decision should be respected. Colleagues on campus have prepared a new plaque honoring President Chamberlin which will be placed in Weeks Hall, which houses the Geosciences Department, which was President Chamberlin’s home department. Creating a more inclusive environment in our universities and our society is a difficult task, but a critical one in our contentious, polarized times. Progress is made incrementally, with real ¬– not performative – change. Higher education is deeply invested in this process and UW–Madison is no exception. That’s why, at the same time we were discussing this symbol with students, we were also expanding a fundraising campaign to recruit and retain more diverse students and faculty. It’s named for Mabel Watson Raimey and William Smith Noland, the first Black woman and man to graduate from the university. We’ve already raised nearly $50 million. That’s just one example of the tangible actions we’re taking. Outsiders, such as those in the national media, don’t know our story or our history. They may not read deeply enough to see our decisions on this rock in the context of scores of other actions undertaken last summer. They may only think of a world-class research university where vitamin D enrichment was invented, the first embryonic stem cell line was developed. But we know that a committed campus community learns and grows together. We continue to be curious about our past and how it has shaped who we are. Chamberlin Rock is part of that history. Learn more about accessibility at UW–Madison. This site was built using the UW Theme | Privacy Notice | © 2024 Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. |
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Post by Cantab on Oct 25, 2024 9:37:31 GMT 12
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Post by chariot on Oct 27, 2024 9:52:12 GMT 12
Be careful what you wish for.
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Post by eri on Oct 27, 2024 10:29:00 GMT 12
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Post by muzled on Oct 29, 2024 8:47:52 GMT 12
Good lord Vic Uni sounds like a toxic swamp of woke'ism. breakingviewsnz.blogspot.com/2024/10/victoria-university-stands-up-for.html?m=1Victoria University stands up for academic freedom - with a few caveats Only a few days after the University of Auckland’s so-called academic freedom policy was rejected by the university’s Senate, Victoria University of Wellington’s own academic freedom policy has come to light. Victoria’s policy is likely a response to the government’s stated intention to make such policies a condition for government funding. But would Victoria’s policy really protect academic freedom? Or is this just one more sign that the universities can’t be trusted to put their own house in order? The policy has some positive aspects. Victoria pledges to ‘remain neutral on public matters,’ thus belatedly joining the many leading US institutions that have committed to institutional neutrality this past year. Victoria’s policy also explicitly says it will protect academics’ ability ‘to criticise this university,’ something that will be welcomed by the many academics who fear retribution from senior administrators for speaking their minds. The policy also ‘affirms the right to freedom of expression’ of staff members, students, and ‘visitors’ to the university – a welcome sign that Victoria wants to help end a recent rash of ‘deplatformings’ at universities across the English-speaking world. Here, though, there are a few caveats. Any talks or events held at Victoria should be ‘read in conjunction with the Campus Life Policy’ and bear in mind any ‘health and safety’ issues, whether the event is ‘consistent with the purposes and values of the University,’ whether it ‘furthers understanding,’ and whether ‘there would be an unreasonable risk of disseminating misinformation or disinformation.’
If Victoria’s position is that visitors should be free to say what they want as long as some people don’t think it’s an intentional or unintentional falsehood (‘misinformation or disinformation’), then the university obviously doesn’t understand the first thing about free speech. The caveats don’t just undermine the previous proclamation of academic freedom, they completely overturn it.
This is something of a pattern. Take, for example, the whole series of caveats to do with ‘health, safety,’ and ‘wellbeing.’ Along with its obligations to free speech, we are told, Victoria also ‘has a duty of care to its staff and students, and responsibilities for health, safety and wellbeing.’ And these duties, would you believe it, 'place limitations on academic freedom and freedom of expression.’
‘Health and safety obligations’ have a curious tendency to shut down certain types of speech. The notion that students need to be kept ‘safe’ from ideas has played a role in several recent violations of academic freedom in this country.
These include the deplatforming of Don Brash at Massey University in 2019 and Daphna Whitmore at AUT in 2022. It was also one of the reasons that Vice-Chancellor Nic Smith was forced to re-schedule (and re-programme) his panel on free speech at Victoria last year. The ‘health and safety’ caveats are not the only ones. Decisions about academic freedom, the policy declares, ‘should be made in the light of the relevant legal frameworks, this policy and other University policy documents, including but not limited, to the Staff Conduct Policy, the University values, and the principles of the Te Tiriti o Waitangi Statute.’ (Punctuation is as in the policy document.) What exactly the Treaty of Waitangi has to do with academic freedom isn’t spelled out, though the Treaty of Waitangi Statute that Victoria adopted in 2019 lists several key principles, including kāwanatanga, rite tahi, and whakaoranga. Sadly, it’s a different list to the one included as another series of caveats in the academic freedom policy. This one includes kaitiakitanga, manaakitanga, and akoranga, but not the three principles above. It’s good to see that Victoria is eager to help revitalise te reo Māori. But it might have been better to limit its employees and students’ fundamental speech rights with a briefer, less jumbled, and more readily-comprehensible list of principles. A final example of how this policy takes away with one hand what it claims to give with another comes when Victoria’s academics are encouraged ‘to act as public intellectuals and participate in public debate on topics that fall within their discipline and professional experience.’
But why shouldn’t academics comment on topics that fall outside their discipline and professional experience? Doesn’t everyone do that from time to time? And shouldn’t academics – whose speech rights are protected in the Education and Training Act – be more free to speak than the average citizen, not less? Victoria University’s academic freedom policy is just another sign that our universities are now dominated by people who either don’t understand free speech or are too cowardly to defend it. The government needs to move swiftly to take the matter out of the universities’ hands and introduce legislation that will help ensure that these public institutions are doing what we pay them to do.
James Kierstead is Senior Lecturer in Classics at Victoria University of Wellington. Dr Michael Johnston has held academic positions at Victoria University of Wellington for the past ten years. He holds a PhD in Cognitive Psychology from the University of Melbourne. |
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