Newt

Our autonomous can drive down, load the 30cm goal, put it in the home base, and then knock out the stick (provided no one gets in our way). Incredibly, we have also had the robot hit the wall on accident, turn too much, and drive the loaded goal up the ramp by itself (which is neat, but not so great...). The code has some silly comments, but mostly it has been made by us all working at the same time, and thus there have been less occasions where questions were needed. The greater silliness comes from long-winded names, which sometimes seem to try to explain in one sentence (without spaces) exactly what the program should do and when to use it .

Hah! I will have to do that. Anyone interested in trading?

Our FTC competition is in less than a week, so we are trying to finish up our autonomous and general final tweaks today. So far we are able to get preloaded balls into a goal quite reliably and I am glad (but still nervous). At our last competition, there was a robot that was placed on the ramp backwards, and in its autonomous drove itself over the edge, crashing and damaging itself, while also removing itself from that game (the team fixed it up and was able to advance anyway). Sorry about the nintendo and other errors. I like some of the comments in your code 'EXPLAIIIIIN'. Hopefully all will go well for your FRC, and without annoying nintendos:).

It worked well with Poole. He woke up just fine after Hal set him up.

-33 Nearly a third of the way there. (lets switch to base 36:wink:).

Aqua: Yes, to the first point. Maybe to the second one: I am not confident that English is the best Lingua Franca, but as it is already, it would be simpler to tweak it than to replace it with some new language (even a simple one). This would probably consist of standardized spellings, punctuation. As regolith said, Accents cause more problems than grammar and vocabulary (there are some inconsistencies, y'all for instance, which is generally a regional term used in part of the US, but this is a minor challenge compared to trying to understand the accents of people from some areas). Thus, it migh be ideal to standardize pronunciation to reflect the spelling, as the other way would neccisarily result in many regional differences. Other areas could be changed to be more consistent as well, and there probably would need to be many proposed changes as some of them inevitably would not be accepted. @regolith: Attempts to change English have indeed not generally gone very far, but the international challenge is not the only issue, German, while being named the same as a state, is not unique to that state, and other Europeans countries have also worked with the changes, both in deciding and implementing them. On the other hand, Moldova has avoided some changes in the Romanain language (which it uses), by declaring that there is a distinct language of Moldovan. The main difficulty will probably arise from teaching reformed English, and I can imagine that at least in the US any reforms would be attacked as 'evil federal intervention in our buisness' (wishing to not get too politically fired up, I shall leave it there).

Hah! No! T'is I, Newt (not I-of-Newt, mind you). Itchono!

@Flamerboy. Interesting. Have you screenshots? That sounds like a comet!

Standard German is not directly analogous, by any means, to Basic English. The German Language has many words, much diversity and complexity, many of the reforms were in regard to spelling and consistency. Basic English, has a vocabulary of 850 words, including 18 verbs. I am not sure how many verbs are found in either English or German, but it is far more than 18, even far more than 850. Basic English's best use is to facilitate international communication on a relatively simple level, it might be extreme to compare it to Toki Pona, (120 words), but I believe that there are similarities between the two in their quickly approaching practical limits as to what exactly can be said. It is not that English reform is bad, it should just be taken differently, standard spelling to match with some consistent pronunciation rules, and other changes would be welcomed by me. But Basic English, is not the way to do it. We have been talking a bunch about German, and its reforms. Even the relatively minor and drawn out changes that occurred in that language have garnered no small amount of frustration from the public, people publishing alternate spellings to Duden, and otherwise disregarding these changes. Many of the reforms started during WWII really did not get that far (as the German government looking to implement them was busy building weapons), and parts of that reform centered on the removal of non-German originating forms of spelling. some reforms were attempted earlier still, in the early 20th century, but these too did not get too far, some changes were made, but despite the desire by many people to implement further still changes, there was not a really significant development before 1996. As for the other discussion, linguistics is science, and I do not think that we are just complaining, we are discussing language reform (which includes a dose of complaining, I agree).

978F95 (the color)

The ring will be on the center of the sat indeed, but I am not entirely sure what you mean by which axis, the cubesat, being a cube, lacks a clear front or back. The sat will be oriented to keep one face pointing at the Sun (for solar power) and the entire vehicle will spin (as making one part only spin is a mechanical nightmare), along the axis facing to the Sun. As for an update on general progress, we have found some software to find satellite's position, range, and other data, using parameters which NORAD makes available publicly, this way we do not have to set up our own complicated and expensive tracking stations, which would be a hassle. Moss experiments are going slowly, and we are trying to get materials and guidance from various sources, it is just somewhat drawn out. This has stalled a couple of areas of design around the moss storage area, but we are trying to work elsewhere until this area can advance. Much of that elsewhere is currently centered on a computer simulation environment, which we intend to use to put together the sat's attitude control software. As we build up the different parts of the control software, we will be able to subject the sat virtually to various problems and see if it can keep everything going smoothly and without bugs. This way we should have a fairly robust program that can maintain power, radio contact, and other systems, which would be bad to not have before launch.

Oh yes, Basic English. We could go that route, but we could go a bunch of other Auxiliary Language routes, too. Basic English is really not that easy for people who already speak English, as, while it shares some similarities, it has a lot of differences, and a speaker of both has to keep two languages, with very overlapping vocabularies (but with many differences and restrictions on one), and two grammars straight, so that full English does not spill over into Basic English dealings. There are heaps of other Auxiliary Languages that would also be simpler to learn for most people, in my opinion anyway. These include Esperanto, the Esperantidoj, Interlingua, Occidental, Volapuk, et cetera. Some are rather easy to learn if one puts effort into it. There is no particular, valid reason that makes Basic English better than any of these. We should employ, ideally, some language --not Basic English, for the above described reasons -- but some language that could take the role of Lingua Franca, but not let it be a national language, and probably we should not encourage its extensive use in everyday speech; if suddenly, everyone's home language becomes Toki Pona, it would take a matter of hours for serious differences to emerge between different groups, and before long there would be many different versions of language again, making there be a need to use the elusive standard Toki Pona for international communication. If all speak Toki Pona, but use it sparingly, to practice on occasion or to deal with a foreigner, changes will happen far less frequently, as the foreigners with whom it will be used will not pick up on regional developments, and there will be little opportunity for such mutations to occur, as people will speak it sparingly. If Toki Pona were a useful language for complicated discussion, that is.

US education is largely run by states; the central governments attempts to direct education is often met with resistance. Reminds me of French, with some words that have been entirely dropped in the spoken form, yet are retained in writing. This would probably work, if it could be effectively implemented. However, I remain skeptical that it could be. English is spoken as a primary language in several very large countries, and is spoken as the lingua franca in many international applications. It does not have a perfect alignment going from California to Scottland to Punjab, but it remains very similar, especially in writing. The last part is important because writing is how much communication is done, especially in formal contexts it is essential to have a common understanding of what is being said. If the Indian government demarcates its own English blend, with perhaps a base of Devanagari characters, and different word meanings/spellings in formal contexts, it will cause difficulties for Indian's to do business with the rest of the standard English writing world. German is more used than some languages, but not the user base of English, by any means, and as such it was a lot easier for the Germans to rework spellings and character usage, just as it was practical for the Romanians to switch alphabets, and to continue tweaking certain usages, than it would be for the USA/UK/Canada/Australia/India/bunch of other smaller nations to tweek English. There are to many people to have a consensus beyond that, that which we have works, and we should not mess it up.

Not, it will not be. My point is more that the thing still is useful, and it should preferable be used as long as it can be. We are at the point where it is impractical to maintain it, but we should continue to use it until that, too, is impractical.

Just because we have other telescopes, does not mean that Hubble is obsolete. It is incredible, the competition to get observing time with the thing, because it is far better than any Earth based telescope in its field, even if we had five Hubble like telescopes, there would be demand for their use. We should keep the thing up as long as it is more practical than putting up a newer better version.

3.846x10^26! (and that mark at the end there, my friends, is a factorial)

I feel so guilty whenever I use it, but how can I not use it; the stuff is everywhere.

Well, all natural languages have their idiosyncrasies (so do constructed ones), and these usually are somewhat buried with enough time (a favorite example of mine would be 'Camera'. In English, this means a thing with which to take pictures, coming from camera obscura, a Latin term for that which evolved into 'camera'. In some languages, Hindi and Romanian, camera still means what it originally meant in Latin -- room). This is largely what happened to English, which is certainly a hodgepodge mix of languages, using many rules and words from varied sources. Not all mix languages are so, messy, though, creole languages are often popular for looking at more standard ways of how languages form before the mess begins with later evolution. As for whether we should improve English (or our other languages), the question to me is more whether we can. Attempts have been made, some with success (ever wonder why the Americans spell color without a u?). But making significant directed changes is not a very simple task, our particular script, spelling system, it cetera, is so embedded in our world and our culture, that breaking off would be long and slow, and difficult, even if it is ultimately successful, and it would probably not be, as a consensus as to what to do will be difficult to reach, even before all of the practical hurdles are met. I will also make note of some constructed languages; some of us do indeed, still speak Esperanto (parolas iu alipersono tie cxi gxin?), but none of the 'auxlang's', as the simple, regular languages such as Esperanto are referred to as, have really any visible hope of achieving widespread public use in the near future. Some of these languages are on par with natural languages in possible expressions, and undoubtedly far simpler to learn than English, but they lack a large unified user base: not to many people learn such languages, and those who do, are met with a large selection of languages to choose between; there is no consensus as to which is best.

Battleship Potemkin

10/10 I have seen you loads of times, back from my old days of lurking. (I did not know you were no longer a mod, though)

I beleive that the thing is that you are putting energy somewhere it does not really matter where, but there has to be forece flowing into the virtual particles (if that is the case). Once they have been given that energy, they should not be able to simply vanish with it; energy must always come from, and go to somewhere, this is fairly (extrmemley) well proven and established. This is the case with your 'ocean of quantum whatevers' just as much as it is of the ocean of water particles. If the particles came from some seperate region, then they cannot cease to exist (although they do not need to be easily detectable). If that does not answer what you are meaning Mirrsen, I am not quite sure what you are getting at. And science is conventional -- it has to be. K^2 is (if I understand correctly) getting at the fact that really this fundamentally goes against common sense and precident. Energy does not come from nowhere, or everything we know about physics is fundamentally wrong. The principle of conservation of energy is very well understood to work, and cloaking something in a fancy spaceship engine does not avoid that main issue. There has to be something that that engine is imparting force to, or it does not work. You cannot burn a vaccum to heat your house (I am npt reffering to a vaccum cleaner, by the way). (if spelling issues abound, my apologies, strange spellcheck behavior said that half the words were wrong, then that all are right, and the keyboard is laggy. Argh)

I always thought it seemed, too militarized. Starfleet never was about war, or was not supposed to be, but all I have seen of this game (and I was very seriously looking into it for a while) makes me think that that is at the crux of the gameplay. Is this the case? That is why the only two games I have played in the last year or so (apart from games of my own creation) are KSP and Orbiter.

This is fairly interesting to see, I never knew so many of us here did multibooting. As for my computer situation, frustration with Suse is leading me to a complete wipe of the hardrive and reinstallation of...something else. Looking at going to Arch and keeping a more stable second OS in case anything goes wrong. (cross one off the Windows list)

As he walks inside, Stanley is struck by the sheer immensity of the room, and its near complete lack of adornment. He strolls around for some minutes, and eventually comes across a cat.

9/10. Korolev is a good name. The shuttle looks pretty good, but does not stand out as unique enough to warrant a 10/10.