71–80 of 102 posts
Until there was cheaper paper, old books made of papyrus or goat skin would be scraped or bleached and recycled. A Single page of goatskin might be months farmer wage. Especially if the book was from a no longer popular language or subject.
All jokes aside, I see your point, but applying it to the moon landing is a little far fetched.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"""It was inconvenient for this administration that climate data has clearly showed no warming for the past two decades. The American people have every right to be suspicious when NOAA alters data to get the politically correct results they want and then refuses to reveal how those decisions were made. NOAA needs to come clean about why they altered the data to get the results they needed to advance this administrati…
> NOAA provided Rep. Smith with all the data, methods, and explanation he requested but has refused to hand over the communications of its scientists, which it regards as protected. I'd better hope so.
Think Steve Jobs asking a VP to show his reasons for obfuscating the reasons for sales figures reported over a period and then adjusted.
VP: Sorry, that's confidential.
In this situation, I'm paying the administrator (that person that governmental agencies are accountable to) to make sure those agencies aren't obfuscating their own reasons.
I demand answers, whether those answers lead nowhere is inconsequential.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You have an agency that releases an update to its modeling capabilities, from which based on the update, a change is made to the forecast that eliminates a political hat upon which an argument is being made. If you release the model, the data, the before and after results, and all of the information, you do not know why and what prompted the change. Internal machinations what they are, the previous Michael Mann situa…
Meanwhile the globe is already 1C warmer than it was before industrialization as Lamar Smith faffs about with emails and is doing everything in his power to cast doubts on the fact that we need to do something about this, much less should already have implemented stronger emissions standards 30 years ago. We're already past the point of "too late," climate science is about damage control now while Smith pisses around…
Where do you get this? I ask because as far as I can tell we were told 20 years ago that it would be too late 10 years in the future (10 years ago for us) based on models that have clearly not panned out.
I'm sincere in asking.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Meanwhile the globe is already 1C warmer than it was before industrialization as Lamar Smith faffs about with emails and is doing everything in his power to cast doubts on the fact that we need to do something about this, much less should already have implemented stronger emissions standards 30 years ago. We're already past the point of "too late," climate science is about damage control now while Smith pisses around…
You mention the "it's already too late" meme. Where do you get this? I ask because as far as I can tell we were told 20 years ago that it would be too late 10 years in the future (10 years ago for us) based on models that have clearly not panned out. I'm sincere in asking.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCC_Fifth_Assessment_Report
"""The global surface temperature increase by the end of the 21st century is likely to exceed 1.5 °C relative to the 1850 to 1900 period for most scenarios, and is likely to exceed 2.0 °C for many scenarios"""
> I ask because as far as I can tell we were told 20 years ago that it would be too late 10 years in the future (10 years ago for us) based on models that have clearly not panned out.
Yes, it is unfortunate that science isn't perfect, but it's the best we have, and computer projections have only made it more reliable in recent years than it was in the 80s and 90s. I understand that changing the base of our entire economic system isn't easy, but it's becoming blindingly clear that it needs to happen to halt more disastrous changes. Deniers like Smith are preventing positive action on climate change from occurring, and side-shows like the NOAA investigation are a waste of both critical time and money.
If we had taken action twenty years ago, perhaps we wouldn't be having this conversation at all.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder if anyone other than NASA was picking up the direct broadcast from the Moon? I've got to imagine the Russians at least would be doing that.
Possibly but did they have state of the art 3-meters-a-second tape drives to store the signal on?
> We should have had a historian running around saying 'I don't care if you are ever going to use them -- we are going to keep them' The really couldn't figure out by themselves that they shouldn't throw away the visual evidence of one of the most important events in human history?
IIRC a large set of moon landing data was lost when somebody set the tapes down on a heater and left them there too long.
Not moon-landing related, but Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO), the very first group to use a Roland TR-808 drum machine, was unable to read the original masters because they were recording using a cutting-edge digital format for which there are no readers.
Preserving digital data for the long term is hard.
Disclaimer: Library and Info Sci degree with archives coursework.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In Apollo 13 the movie, there is a scene where the NASA representative is walking politicos on a tour: JIM LOVELL - I'm slated to be the commander of Apollo 14 sometime late next year. CONGRESSMAN - If there is an Apollo 14... Now, Jim, people in my state have been asking why we're continuing to fund this program - now that we've beaten the Russians to the Moon. [1] The chasm between what NASA wanted, pilots down, wa…
Why people blame politicians that accurately represent people's views? If you have a bigoted, stupid, awful politician who's popular without fraud or dishonest competition practices in general, may be you should blame education, may be the media, but the politician himself is just doing his job — representing the people. The bigoted, stupid, awful people.
It is true the main blame for our policies rests with those continuing to elect them. But those actually representing us and making the decisions are responsible also.
> We should have had a historian running around saying 'I don't care if you are ever going to use them -- we are going to keep them' The really couldn't figure out by themselves that they shouldn't throw away the visual evidence of one of the most important events in human history?
Documents don't usually preserve themselves. Paper lasts a long time if left in an attic or a closet but can be lost if the wrong person "cleans up". Electronic documents are much more fragile. Media decays or otherwise becomes unreadable. If data is saved in proprietary formats and the reader hardware or software is lost, then it's much the same as degaussing. IIRC a large set of moon landing data was lost when some…
About 5 years ago I helped a team migrate a bunch of data from ~30 year old 9-track tape reels. Obtaining and restoring hardware that was even capable of reading the reels was hard enough (we are talking spending thousands of dollars purchasing zero-warranty equipment from sketchy places on the 'net that had a few sitting in some dusty corner of their warehouse).
We also had to write our own software to read the tapes until an error occurred; reset the drive, retry reading from that spot again, and so on, and then concatenate all of the chucks together.
Most of the reels were eventually readable this way, but there still ended up being a not insignificant number that were given up on after several failed attempts.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You mention the "it's already too late" meme. Where do you get this? I ask because as far as I can tell we were told 20 years ago that it would be too late 10 years in the future (10 years ago for us) based on models that have clearly not panned out. I'm sincere in asking.
I skimmed the recent IPCC report and keep up with science news, mostly via Ars Technica. A good summary is at Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCC_Fifth_Assessment_Report """The global surface temperature increase by the end of the 21st century is likely to exceed 1.5 °C relative to the 1850 to 1900 period for most scenarios, and is likely to exceed 2.0 °C for many scenarios""" > I ask because as far as I ca…
China has brought their coal plants online and they use 4,361,427 thousand short tons of unfiltered or carbon captured coal to the United States carbon capturing EPA mandated 924,442 thousand short tons. Compare areas that have coal plants with those which do not in China versus America [3] and you can see that our nation has it under control and China does not. [1]
Are we honestly going to another country and tell them to quit developing?
Do we have the will to force them to give up their coal fired plants for nuclear energy (which from internal announcements is set to make up only 5% of their power structure), or natural gas? What does that will look like, money, political manipulation, force?
How can you say that computer projections are more reliable now than they were before? Hurricane projections, using state of the art modeling for a shortened horizon cannot say whether a hurricane in three days will bear west or east of Florida. The validation of the computer projections of today will not be evaluated for another fifteen years, all the while, every day you can continue on with that statement, essentially: "All of the previous models had errors, but today's model is perfect."
[1] http://www.eia.gov/beta/international/
[2] I do not have a picture that correctly does this justice, there are ones that are doctored by greenpeace and others where the plant is not running at capacity. So this is not a fair comparison.
Until there was cheaper paper, old books made of papyrus or goat skin would be scraped or bleached and recycled. A Single page of goatskin might be months farmer wage. Especially if the book was from a no longer popular language or subject.
So they recorded the moonlanding on goatskin? All jokes aside, I see your point, but applying it to the moon landing is a little far fetched.
> I see your point, but applying it to the moon landing is a little far fetched.
Not at all, in the 1970's those tapes easily cost a month's of an average workers wages. It would make perfect sense to re-use them to save a bit of money, especially if you were doing it at scale and didn't realize you were about to erase the master copies.
