I can't tell if you're parodying HN here. This is from someone's blog and is a personal reflection on his most important work of the past 10 years. Do you expect everyone to be an historian?
I expect an article titled "Ten years at Google" to talk about someone's experience at Google over the last 10 years, not a project that started in the last 5. If that's "being a historian", tell me why that's bad.
There's nothing bad about being a historian nor is there anything bad about writing about your most significant project in ten years. Both are aligned with the title.
I did similar a few years back, but for Mars DEMs, also in PDS format. At first I despised it, but yes, there is a certain pragmatism to the format. And, yeah, the best way to figure out what was going on was to just look at the files themselves.
The thing that most annoyed me at the time was there wasn't a good open source JPEG2000 decoder I could use to slice up the imagery to go along with the DEMs. But that must have changed by now...
Having read about historical radio astronomy and practiced signals analysis, I think they were a little more sophisticated than that. The recording in this format was made for easy perusal by a human, say, the next morning. I think that was the case with this signal. No doubt they wanted to revisit that spot in the sky looking at intensity, frequency shifting (Doppler), bandwidth, modulation, etc. But they never saw it again.
Historical point of interest: the Big Ear telescope that recorded this was bulldozed to make way for a golf course.
The Big Ear telescope "was larger than three football fields in size and equivalent in sensitivity to a circular dish 52.5 meters (175 feet) in diameter. The telescope consisted of a flat tiltable reflector measuring 340 feet long by 100 feet high (less when tilted), a fixed standing paraboloidal (curved) reflector which measured 360 feet long by 70 feet high, an aluminum-covered ground plane measuring 360 feet wide by 500 feet long, and two feed horns mounted on a movable assembly."
Depends on what you mean by "school" (NB the quotes in the parent comment). There is a huge variance in options for working parents of a 2-3 year old. From cramped cinder block day care -- aka The Cacophonous Petri Dish; to private nanny; to "forest schools" where kids spend as much time as possible outside digging in the dirt, climbing tree stumps, and learning how to devise and engage in large projects together (yes, a group of 2.5 year olds is capable of this).
I don't think the parent comment was talking about toddler MIT.
I do. The one I'm familiar with has large garden areas, trees for climbing/wandering around, uncultivated wilderness areas, etc. It's not a vast tract of land, but enough that it seems huge to a small person. Indoor time focuses on exploration of provocations set up by teachers, telling stories, singing, role-playing, etc.
I might be wrong, but I believe the THREDDS server the article points to (by way of https://cds.nccs.nasa.gov/nex-gddp/) supports OPeNDAP, which means you can pull subsets of the data, i.e. if you've got a 40GB file, you could slice a tiny portion of that off for downloading.
I work with the THREDDS team at Unidata. Though I still need to study this particular dataset, in general yes, the THREDDS server can do serverside subsetting of the data so that reasonably sized data is shipped over the wire.
Nice. I'm going to put this in front of our resident toddler tonight.
Bit of feedback:
* I would have been willing to put down a couple of bucks up front just to try it out, even without the extras available in-app.
* How about "toddler resistant" mode that disables the sharing, feedback, social buttons? Kids tend to touch and drag all over the place, often seemingly at random. The less they end up in a strange place and are able to figure out the core interface, the better.
Thanks for the feedback!
The monetization is hard to solve. Only thing you can do in the end is to try it out.
Thanks for the tip regarding the "toddler resistant" mode ! We'll consider that for a update.
1up that 'toddler resistant' mode; just got this for my girl's ipad, going to have lots of fun with it and it will be more fun if the music doesn't stop every five seconds because she hit the one button she wasn't supposed to hit again.
This is great. I laughed out loud when I discovered that notes you throw upward off the screen eventually come back down if you throw them straight up. Definitely getting my toddler to play with this.
I have two suggestions: one is a tool/mode that lets you remove a bunch of stuff quickly, and the other is a simple undo mechanism. Since there isn't much instruction, you need to explore by touching, and e.g. when you're testing to see if a three finger gesture does something, you tend to create a lot of unwanted notes and potentially accidentally remove stuff that you overwrite.
Oh man, I just discovered the magic of tapping on an unused instrument on the bottom. Build a sequence using no sax and then start wailing away on saxy bill. Wonderful.
For iPads able to run iOS 6+, you can activate "Guided Access" mode. Apps being run in this mode can have disabled hardware buttons and deactivate certain areas on-screen.
Once the global setting is enabled (Settings > General > Accessibility), triple-clicking the home button activates and deactivates the mode. There is a passcode, distinct from the unlock code, to exit "Guided Access."
I became familiar with this as part of an iPad kiosk project, and when my toddler discovered that iPads exist, it has been very valuable.
Of note, there is an Earth observation instrument, RapidScat, being carried in the Dragon's trunk, which will be (has been?) plucked off the capsule by operators on the ground. This one measures wind. Another, called CATS, will be similarly deployed on the outside of the ISS in December-ish; it will measure clouds and aerosols.
These are part of a collection of low-cost (well, lower than a full satellite) Earth observation instruments to take advantage of the external mount points on the ISS. NASA recently had a media briefing about this: http://www.nasa.gov/press/2014/september/nasa-hosts-media-br...
I think I'm a careful driver, and I (see other comment) recently drove into Manhattan from out of state. I almost killed several people. I don't live there, but my impression is that the expectations are so fine-tuned, that one small miscalculation and it's OH MY GOD MY LIFE IS CHANGED FOREVER.
Edit: Most of the close calls were straight on, no turn. Some son-of-a-bee-biscuit suddenly decides he needs to stop his car right in front of you for some important business, you end up in the middle of an intersection. In your eagerness to get you and your family out of harm's way, you inch around the car in front, and the pedestrian pops out of nowhere. They thought you weren't moving when suddenly you realize you need to get the heck out of the middle of Madison Ave and accelerate like a mofo so you don't get rear-ended by that bus.
The secret to driving in Manhattan is not worrying about the people behind you. The busses won't rear end you, and if anyone else does, big deal its low speed traffic anyway.
Traffic flow in Manhattan is geared around pedestrians and cabs (i.e. sudden stops). You just have to concentrate on what's in front of you and trust the guy behind you is doing the same.
