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Keep Nation bragging and the political debate out. |
There will be a talk about the mars curiosity rover mission by Dr. Richard Kornfeld (one of the leading scientists of the so-called "entry, descent and landing team" of this mission) at my university this week (Nov. 30).
Here is some information about it: http://www.iris.ethz.ch/iris/series/series/ETH_RSC_lecture_kornfeld.pdf
I intend to attend as it also mentions that he will present some of the early scientific results of the mission... Let's see if we can lure him into disclosing something ;-)
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On November 26 2012 18:24 necmon wrote:There will be a talk about the mars curiosity rover mission by Dr. Richard Kornfeld (one of the leading scientists of the so-called "entry, descent and landing team" of this mission) at my university this week (Nov. 30). Here is some information about it: http://www.iris.ethz.ch/iris/series/series/ETH_RSC_lecture_kornfeld.pdfI intend to attend as it also mentions that he will present some of the early scientific results of the mission... Let's see if we can lure him into disclosing something ;-) Sigh, I've been trying to explain to all of you guys, but no one is even reading what I'm saying.
My father works at JPL, and actually was one of the lead programmers for the landing and descent for the MER rovers.
What I'm saying is, most JPL employees don't know jack shit. There's a difference between the engineers at JPL and the scientists. Dr. Kornfeld may be an expert in the creation of the rover, but he has absolutely no authority over the research it does.
I was on campus for an interview the day they announced the announcement. All the employees I was in contact with (many were pretty high level) had absolutely no idea of the announcement itself.
My guess is, only the researchers and the main manager and a few other people know just what it is right now.
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Anyhow, will still be interesting :-)
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When did NASA hire the diablo 3's marketing team ?
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The fuck? They knew the magnitude of the rumors going around, couldn't they have made sure to clarify the situation with something more than that stupid Wall-E tweet? And what was all that about something related to this that they were going to reveal at some geologist convention or whatever in early December?
Or maybe they're just backpeddling. Those tests revealed their find to be just plain birdshit stuck to the soil sample extractor, and now they're to embarrassed to admit it
In any case, fuck NASA.
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That's quite the mistake...
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Why didn't they amend the situation as soon as it blew up then lol. And why were there conferences and shit announced.
Weird.
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On November 30 2012 05:53 Duka08 wrote:Why didn't they amend the situation as soon as it blew up then lol. And why were there conferences and shit announced. Weird.
Where did it "blow up"? I think people don't really understand that this wasn't big news. There may have been buzz in online-communities, but as far as actual news organizations are concerned, not much was said.
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So what do we learn for the 349765:th time?
Popular science always exagerates, uses the most fantastic angle imaginable, and on occasions just makes stuff up.
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I really don't understand how some people can blame sciences about "false discoveries"...
It's all because of the media misunderstanding things, just like it was for the neutrino going faster than light. I have recently been to a conference made by those guys who worked on the experiment to measure neutrino velocity.
Something somewhat fun and weird happened at the end, is that all the professors in the room started to debate about the recent increasing interest media has shown towards science. And because the scientific timescale is much wider than the timescale of the media sphere, medias are releasing opinions or hypothesis of the early stages of the treatment of an experiment as if they were aknowledged facts.
The thing is it takes several months to "confirm" a scientific result, people must analyze stuff and then say they MIGHT have found something, then other people completely independant must analyze it again before saying what the previous guys might have found MIGHT really be something tangible. And then after a concensus we say that the discovery is accepted until proven false.
From the media point of view, you want to sell news, every week, every single day, you want to know right know. So reporters jump into the first stages of a scientific analysis and PULL WORDS OUT OF SCIENTISTS who must know start to be really carefull about what they say publicly.
This is a big and serious concern in the scientific world actually because everyone is used to freely share their ideas and hypothesis with their collegues, medias making scandals out of this starts to make some scientists think about being more secret about their researches.
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On November 30 2012 07:26 NicolBolas wrote:Show nested quote +On November 30 2012 05:53 Duka08 wrote:Why didn't they amend the situation as soon as it blew up then lol. And why were there conferences and shit announced. Weird. Where did it "blow up"? I think people don't really understand that this wasn't big news. There may have been buzz in online-communities, but as far as actual news organizations are concerned, not much was said. I'm not disagreeing about it not being as big as it sounded. But it did get quite a bit of online press...
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This is fucking stupid how does anybody need this? How does anybody benefit from this?
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On November 30 2012 10:51 TheWickedDuck wrote: This is fucking stupid how does anybody need this? How does anybody benefit from this?
your kids kids and their kids kids will....
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On November 30 2012 10:51 TheWickedDuck wrote: This is fucking stupid how does anybody need this? How does anybody benefit from this? The whole "trying to understand the universe better" thing has yielded a tangible result or two + Show Spoiler + in the past, you know.
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On November 30 2012 10:51 TheWickedDuck wrote: This is fucking stupid how does anybody need this? How does anybody benefit from this?
What "this" are we talking about? Human exploration? Are you really saying that human exploration is not beneficial?
Think of the technology needed to make Curiosity. The "out of the box" thinking needed to engineer it's descent. All of the tools needed to make it work. The special technology for its instruments and detectors.
Even if we discover nothing new about Mars, that alone is worth the effort.
If people with as little imagination as you were in charge of humanity, we'd still be hunter/gatherers. Why bother with all this "studying how plants reproduce" thing? It's not beneficial to anyone. It's not like someday you might learn how to deliberately plant plants so that they grow into edible food that we don't have to forage for, thus ensuring a stable society that we can use to build a real civilization rather than hunter/gatherer bands.
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So now NASA is backpedaling. How nice. It's either they have found nothing or they found something so big it's in the interest of US government to hide it.
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Too bad, but still going to the talk today, hehe
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deng...I guess I should put history book back in the book shelf then.
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