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Post by JayUtah on May 2, 2008 14:26:21 GMT -4
Crinkling means that each layer can touch its neighbors at only a few points and thus minimize the conduction of heat across layer boundaries.
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Post by nomuse on May 2, 2008 15:47:27 GMT -4
Ack. Makes sense when you mention it. And here I thought the main reason was to increase the radiative surface area.
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Post by Grand Lunar on May 3, 2008 7:03:57 GMT -4
That's what I had in mind too.
Well, live and learn!
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Post by JayUtah on May 3, 2008 12:54:55 GMT -4
One of the techniques of thermal design is to restrict heat conduction by reducing the surface area of the contact between two surfaces or components.
If you lay one fresh sheet of paper over the other, they come into contact over nearly their whole surface area. If you crumple both sheets and smooth them back out, one lays atop the other touching it only where the creases meet.
On the flip side, installing heat sinks on CPUs is something many of us have done. You use a thermal paste that fills in the microscopic surface features on the heat sink and circuit package and thus provides the maximum surface area through which CPU heat conducts to the sink.
For most of the LMs, Grumman's descent stage Mylar installers wrote their names in magic marker on the inside of the blankets for each spacecraft, knowing they'd likely survive protected on the lunar surface for quite some time. The individual sheets are actually rather delicate, so hand-crinkling was an art.
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Post by ka9q on May 10, 2008 6:06:15 GMT -4
That may be true for the color slides, but the post you referred to shows some of the 500 mm photography done by Apollo 15, which was on black-and-white negative stock. I've looked at some of that Apollo 15 B&W photography but not for those artifacts. (One can make a strong case that color film is wasted on the moon unless an astronaut or some piece of hardware is in the shot.) The dots that some UFO believer's website originally brought to my attention were on color slides from Apollo 14. He only showed them in the lunar sky, but I quickly confirmed that they were photo artifacts by finding many other examples that appear in front of nearby objects. I also found them in Apollo 15. At least some photos with those artifacts were taken in lunar orbit, though I didn't check to see if the magazine also went to the surface. I should do this to check my dust contamination theory. The dots shouldn't appear at all on magazines that weren't taken to the surface, and on those that were, the dots should only appear on or after the surface shots.
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Post by bigmarty53 on May 16, 2008 19:58:59 GMT -4
Gentlefolk: What amazes me about all of this---beyond the brain power, effort, macho-posturing, insults (and I admit I'm guilty there too), stupidity, knowledge, information and disinformation----that all of us put in to this, is the sheer WASTE OF TIME! And each side---true or false---is guilty of that "crime".
IMHO, the Moon landings were unquestionably real. This site goes a long way toward proving that. I'm 55, and used to get up with Frank McGee, Jules Bergman, et al, at three in the morning to watch Mercury and Gemini and Apollo. I lived through all of that. Scrapbooks, the whole deal.
In addition to the very reasonable, sane and scientific evidence on this site, I can tell some of the younger "dissidents", that I watched it all unfold, over about a decade. If that was a farce, it is the single most monumental, well orchestrated, Machiavellian, down right "lucky" fraud ever perpetuated in the history of mankind. Ask the widows of Ed White, Roger Chaffee, Gus Grissom, et al, if their husbands are really dead, and why.
I am astonished by the desire---some would say human desire, I think it's more Nationalistic/Narcissistic than that-----to tear apart and dissect, wrongly and for, in many instances, no better reason than a 10 minute claim to fame----what ought to be universally considered to be the greatest scientific achievement of Mankind. It's almost like that old TV game show---"Do you have the need for greed?" In this case, it's "Do you have the psychopathic personality or nationality for envy?"
Get over it! Even better, Rejoice in it! And stop wasting everyone's time with nonesense critiques that require others to respond.
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Post by ka9q on Jul 6, 2008 2:34:19 GMT -4
There is photography of stars during Apollo. Apollo 16 carried an ultraviolet camera to the lunar surface. It was set up in the shadow of the lunar module (i.e., near the ladder) and imaged quite a few stellar objects such as the Megellanic Clouds.
Not only does this show that stars could be seen from Apollo with the proper equipment, it proves that this equipment was operated above the earth's atmosphere. The atmosphere blocks UV, which is why the telescope was carried into space in the first place.
(One could reasonably ask why it had to be taken to the lunar surface since any site above the atmosphere would work. I presume it was because Apollo was the only available flight opportunity, and on the lunar surface it could "stare" at one spot in the sky longer than it could from either earth or lunar orbit.)
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Post by smdevivo on Jul 15, 2008 9:46:08 GMT -4
I have always found the time and effort that some people will put into debunking the moon shots incredibly fascinating.
Belief, faith and imagination (or the lack of) are interesting aspects of the human personality.
For instance:
Why is it that I can tell some people that a man walked on the moon nearly 40 years ago and they will instantly refuse to believe it?
Why is it that I can tell that same group of people that a man walked on water 2000 years ago… and they’re all over it?
Let’s face it, which is more plausible?
I have never seen a single photo or video of anyone walking on water… yet some just expect me to believe it happened.
Why are there no websites proclaiming that the “water-walk” was faked?
Just like with the Y2K bug (something I never believed was real), a little bit of logic is all it takes to determine the validity of the moon landings and walks.
NASA employed, at the time, directly and indirectly some 400,000 people. Now, if you wish to keep a secret let's face it, the smaller the group the better. How can you expect a group of people that large (even if the number was a 10th of the total) to keep a secret all these years. No deathbed confessions - nothing. It's human nature to spill the beans.
Plus, if you're going to fake something, you don't push your luck. You're going to do it once, wipe the sweat from your forehead and be glad you got away with it. You don't go back and try a 2nd, 3rd, let alone 6 more times to try to pull off the same hoax. Your odds of getting caught rise dramatically.
To me just these two points above are all that is required to prove the validity of the moon shots.
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Jason
Pluto
May all your hits be crits
Posts: 5,579
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Post by Jason on Jul 15, 2008 10:57:46 GMT -4
Why is it that I can tell that same group of people that a man walked on water 2000 years ago… and they’re all over it? Let’s face it, which is more plausible? Well, when the men who walked on water was the son of God and his closest friend and disciple... You think there aren't any websites trying to debunk Christianity? The time and effort that people put into tearing down the faith of others - something that is a great comfort to these other people and doing no real harm at all to them - is something that surprises me. But other than those nits your points are well-spoken.
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Post by Data Cable on Jul 15, 2008 11:29:29 GMT -4
Just like with the Y2K bug (something I never believed was real) Was it never real, or did all of the preparation put into updating code before 1/1/00 prevent it from being a serious problem?
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Post by PhantomWolf on Jul 15, 2008 16:31:30 GMT -4
Just like with the Y2K bug (something I never believed was real) Was it never real, or did all of the preparation put into updating code before 1/1/00 prevent it from being a serious problem? It depends what you mean when you say Y2K bug. If you mean that nuclear plants would have exploded, missiles fired by themselves, and planes would have been dropping out of the sky like some claimed, then it was nothing but a have. If you mean that everyone's home PC was going to fail if they didn't download a heap of patches to fix the issue, then it was nothing but a have (I still have a 286 that was never Y2K patched and it works fine, as does all the software on it). If you mean that certain generally one off software that was poorly coded in the first place and likely out of date running on ancient one of a kind systems might have produced warnings in an irregular manner or had the wrong date displayed, then that was certainly possible. The amount of money that was spent on Y2K readiness was really just a programmer's dream and for the most part un-necessary.
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Post by JayUtah on Jul 15, 2008 18:32:27 GMT -4
In the United States it was also a legislative fire drill. In a vain attempt to appear useful, certain lawmakers tried to issue legislation mandating a certain response to the problem, the premise to which largely overstated the threat. The legislative debate seemed impervious to the notion that existing liability already covered the effects, and so those responsible were already well-motivated to achieve, verify, and maintain correctness.
It all rather backfired when the "crisis centers" set up by these legislative efforts on Dec. 31, 1999 largely twiddled their thumbs when the dire predictions failed to materialize. Naturally the (ir)responsible lawmakers were quick to claim credit for the "smooth" transition; I'm sure the other jacket pocket contained the "I told you so" speech, just in case.
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Post by Jason Thompson on Jul 15, 2008 18:56:21 GMT -4
I could never work out why:
We were supposed to believe that someone who designed an operating system with a planned life of several years would have forgotten that the year 1999 was followed by the year 2000;
A computer system should actually have a problem with '00' as a representation of a date;
Such critical things as airliner autopilots and nuclear power stations systems would not be able to cope when my VCR, purchased in 1993, was able to cope with dates up to 2029!
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Post by JayUtah on Jul 15, 2008 19:33:38 GMT -4
The problem had less to do with operating systems and more to do with application programs and middleware such as database engines that skimped on the two century digits.
These applications were not expected to have a long lifespan and often had legitimate reasons for using storage sparingly. Embedded software applications are often memory-constrained by hardware design concerns. Commercial databases routinely add millions of records per day with dozens of embedded dates per record.
Not to say there wasn't a significant rate of stupidity or short-sightnedness, but not every omission of century data was the result of vogonity or laziness. Often it was a legitimate (albeit nominally wrong) design decision.
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Post by echnaton on Jul 16, 2008 11:25:11 GMT -4
A lot of financial services and retail companies were still using code that was initially developed in the seventies and early eighties. They did this because it was just cheaper to maintain and extend the code running on mainframes that worked rather than throw out working systems and replace them.
Think of a department store like Macy’s and how many retail items they have to maintain on their computers. Then imagine how often they have to add SKUs and adjust prices as seasons and styles change. Those companies used to have the largest database systems in the world. And it was mostly hand built in house because there were no commercial packages to do it when they started automating. Financial companies were also leaders in automation. Both brokerage and insurance companied had elaborate custom built systems.
Know one knows for sure what would have happened without the Y2K work, but I agree that it was overblown. As Jay says, it was many politicians trying to show they were in charge of something they had little control over, like gasoline prices today. My casual research view at the time was that the replacement of older systems for sound business reasons was a large contributor to the late nineties tech boom (and bust.) Many companies just decided Y2K was a good excuse to revamp their computer systems.
Advances in computing were making the expensive changes more reasonable and Y2K gave management cover from investors questioning the necessity of the large capital expenditures. There were a lot of companies that implemented SAP during this period to bring operations under a more unified scaleable information system that made expansion and acquisitions integration cheaper and quicker.
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