One of the things I’m still interested in, particularly for RPGs but partially for more mundane meeting transcription uses, is some kind of autostenography software. Insert sound, process speech, get text, but ideally with the ability to recognize and differentiate speakers. A tough problem for sure (even humans can have trouble with it) but I can imagine it being helpful, even if it just blocks things off by probability of which speaker this or that is.
So Newt Gingrich is either lying, stupid, or crazy when he talks about putting a base on the moon by 2020. The fact that he thinks commercial space will do this for some reason is something that got a coworker to scoff dismissively—said coworker has done research specifically into how the commercial contracts are going. Right now, their only motivation is to get NASA to give them money.
I’m strongly of the opinion that we SHOULD be putting people on places that are-not-Earth. Mars in particular. Asteroids, either in the vicinity of Earth or elsewhere. Our own moon, too, though I think it’s an appreciably harder place to be than elsewhere (damn dust!) I’ve just never been able to satisfactorily answer why.
There are long-term reasons, for sure. In grand terms of species survival, it’s advantageous to learn how to be multi-planet. There’s really no way to learn this except by doing it. It’s hard to find an organization to do this, though. It’d almost have to be governmental, and even those don’t seem to be taking long views nowadays.
So maybe you start out with some short term reason. I can only see it being science driven–in this instance, the next destination is almost certainly the moon, and so you do something there, probably a large construction project. Let’s say a far-side telescope array, which has been proposed many times before and has interesting implications, though your viewing is a bit limited by the 28-day-ish sidereal rotation. So you’ve got to ship some scientists and construction workers over that way. Lots of them, actually, and they’re going to be working long hours. They might end up needing support personnel. Before long, you can be talking about a colony, because you’ve put enough folks over there for long enough that they need services like doctors and dentists and barbers and cooks and all those people drive the need for even more services. All those people are also driving the need for launch services from Earth to the moon and back, presumably.
You just need some kind of seed that will grow. It’s how we’ve made ourselves work for a while now, especially once industry took hold. Farms got good enough to keep everyone fed and people could move away and do other things to get money, instead of just trying to survive and keep what homestead and land they had going for themselves and maybe their friends. Farming is almost where we’re at with ISS right now, I think, or maybe something like a fort–they’re not self-sustaining, but most of what they do right now is trying to sustain the station. They get some science done sometimes.
The military, though, those fuckers pulled it off. See the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan–the coalitions put up hugenormous city-bases with accompanying civilian infrastructure because they didn’t trust what was around them. Enormous contractor populations were employed at very, very good wages to compensate for the risk. All they needed was a reason: we gotta go fuckin kill some people. Bam, colony in a hostile land, having gas shipped to it for $1000/gallon. Sigh…
So I stumble across a link to a free (donation-supported, really) online linear algebra book. Linear algebra has been one of the most useful things I learned, even if I don’t remember it well. Before I finally took it, I had all kinds of trouble solving systems of equations–it was one of the things I hated most about electrical engineering, for example.
The book is available here:
A First Course in Linear Algebra (XHTML)
OpenVSP is now out under a NASA Open Source license. It’s a pretty cool thing that I think will be useful if I ever actually start working on the personal helicopter I’ve been mulling.
I’m wondering what the best way to keep track of tools like this is. A personal wiki, with tags or some other semantics saying “this is good for aircraft modeling?” I’ve got a ton of software programs that I’ve heard about and currently keep links to in a folder on my desktop called “Get to These.” Needless to say, I don’t actually look in that folder very often.
I’m awake later than I really need to be. Let’s start taking notes regarding the great experiment I want to undertake.
The idea is to be able to take any project, not simply from start to finish, but also from idea to historical document. We want to make the knowledge that is the project robust against personnel loss, and useful for transferring a project from one team to another, introducing a new team member to a project, or passing the knowledge on down generations or to a community at large.
They’re ambitious goals, for sure, but probably not impossible. It’s probably helpful to begin by trying to define what sorts of things constitute the knowledge of the project:
Thinking about those as things to be tracked, it’s clear already that some sort of version control is going to be a plus. There’s also probably going to be a good deal of things being linked to one another—a requirement might generate a task, which have statuses and team members fulfilling them.
To me, this starts to suggest something like a Semantic Wiki–a Wiki system has a lot of version control capability and will probably be evolved to be pretty easy to use, though the Semantic bits that could provide so much of the linking will almost certainly be big pains in the ass.
That suggests another thing: it’s likely that there is no way (short of AI) to make using such a project system anything other than hard work. If you really want quality results, someone (or many someones) is (are) probably going to have to take the responsibility of being project librarian(s). Obviously that scales with project complexity.
Some final thoughts, for me to take care of later:
The site is now up on Hostgator. I’m actually really surprised and pleased with how they work. Some other sites I know of got me worried that they’d Fisher Priced it up and made it too friendly to use. In fact, it’s exactly as friendly as I want it. EVERYTHING seems to be accessible. WordPress and Medawiki set up with single clicks and with random default passwords that were e-mailed to the account I’d told Hostgator to e-mail. DNS settings for my domain (which Hostgator doesn’t manage–I use joker.com–but they need to know about so that the right page gets served) are a single click away. So is the bit of server I have access to–one click and I’m looking at the file system on the server. Pretty sweet, and I recommend it.
I’ve been talking about how to do project management and knowledge transfer for a while now and want to run an experiment on that using this site. I already have some candidate projects starting up. This should be fun.