Same happened to me. I think I may have used the social media login via Google, which I'm guessing could get your email into the leak without any password being present.
That wasn't my experience. I got through the first 3 rounds in ESA's most recent astronaut selection, and near the end about half of the candidates were from a military or commercial flight background. The rest typically had significant research experience but almost all them had some kind of flight experience too (private license, parachuting, stunt flying, gliding, etc).
That´s cool!!, I knew I didn´t have a chance but I wanted to see how far I could go in the selection process (not very far, I was discarded before the first stage).
The requirments in the application form gave the sensation that they were looking for a scientist role over pilot. I suppose you still need somebody that has some piloting skills (spacial orientation, fast assesment and resolution of problems and all that), but is not the main astronaut function anymore.
I was a bit dissapointed about how much of an astronaut work life ( I mean the whole time she is working for the ESA not just the mission specific training and deployment) is around public relationship almost as somekind of scientific embassador for his country.
I am courious about your experiences during the exams. How did it go?, what kind of people did you meet?.I don´t recall the test order very well, the first one was theorical?, then medical then interview?.
I´ll wait till Elon has need of some bigger numbers (and the requirements are lowered or better still plumbeted). A Mars retirement could be cool!
We signed an NDA so I can't say too much, but the first interview was basically an IQ screening - a full day of computer based tests for maths, physics, memory, spatial orientation etc. The second interview was much more in depth, hands on and focused more on team work. Both were physically and mentally exhausting.
The people I met, particularly at the second interview were pretty remarkable: smart, driven but also friendly and down-to-earth. It was quite intimidating to spend 5 minutes talking to someone and find out they have a PhD in bio-informatics, a masters in computer science and oh, by the way, they fly acrobatics in their spare time.
Still the whole thing was great fun and I came away pretty impressed with the process (and off course the few who got selected at the end).
Awesome thanks! It could had been great to pass a couple of levels just for the experience, but my online registration looked very very empty compared to the curriculums that you mention. Did you prepare for the tests?, I don't recall if there was any kind of study list available.
I've seen something similar with a PNG file for user supplied profile image [1]. The image was a 10000x10000 all black PNG image which compresses to a pretty small file size.
Unless you validate the image dimensions as well as the file size it may cause problems, for instance when GD is used to try to resize it exhausted the memory limit.
You can do somewhat better if you host it on a server with gzip compression. Since the PNG has a max dictionary size for the compression, it doesn't optimally compress out all the redundancy. But because the left-over redundancy also forms a repeating pattern (since the black is the same all over the image), gzip shrinks it even further.
I got slightly better results even by doing this with a JPG image, probably because it's based on 8x8 blocks. I used the colour red, but I don't think that matters much.
Correction, looking back to my results, it seems the PNG was smaller after all: png32512.png.gz is 36,077 bytes (a 32000x32000 JPG gzips to about 41k). I forget how I came to the 32512x32512 limit, maybe it was by trial & error, the largest size a browser still opens (probably tested on Firefox and Opera, didn't use Chrome at the time).
I also asked some friends with powerful (lots of memory) computers to try out a webpage that would load this image many times, with unique GET parameters to prevent caching, but apart from loads of harddisk access and maxing the CPU for a bit until they closed the tab, nothing crashy happened (and of course I did inform them what could happen and told them to save any work).
Reliably crashing a browser on a sufficiently high-end (say, gaming) PC, I haven't been able to do it since at least 5 years or so. I might have done better if I'd own a high-end computer myself, of course :) I remember it used to be as easy as making a webpage with 200 full-page DIV layers stacked at 1% opacity :-P
Both FF and Chrome refuse to open the second one. IE does something weird. Both Opera and Safari figure out the size correctly, but don't display the image.
With Firefox (15.0.1) I get some really, really strange results with the second image.
When I opened it the first time, or everytime I press Ctrl+Shift+R it works, but it shows the URL, and a litte icon in the upper left corner: http://i.imgur.com/B7jFE.png
If I press F5 or Ctrl+R it doesnt work, just as you said.
I'm surprised that they seem to require course creators to build courses using HTML and Javascript, when most online learning environments focus on browser based course builders.
As someone who is currently forced to use Moodle to build courses, I honestly say I'd rather just build the thing with HTML and Javascript rather than a web-based interface.
Speaking of which, what tool would you suggest instead of Moodle?
Why not use your favoured programming tools, then include the appropriate metadata to talk to the Moodle database if that is what local admin want you to do?
When I was in Nottingham they installed an art installation called the Sky Mirror[1] in the center of town.
Somehow my PhD supervisor (who was a professor in astrophysics at the city's university) ended up get a consulting gig to calculate whether or not there was any danger of it focusing light and blinding anyone.
He ended up doing a media interview, where he explained that carefully placed shields would protect anyone at ground level from being at the focal point, but then he made an off-hand remark that "it might fry a few pigeons". Of course that turned out to be the only line that got repeated in the ensuing media frenzy[2].
I'm not sure that's what they had in mind when they hired him to consult for them, but we found it pretty funny.
I learnt something handy in BASH recently - operate-and-get-next (Ctrl-o). If you type:
$ echo one
one
$ echo two
two
$ echo three
three
Then up-arrow back to 'echo one'. Then press Ctrl-o instead of enter it will execute the command and display the following one in your history ('echo two' in this case).
Surprising that they would choose not to take a cut of sales, as it seems like a natural opportunity to earn some revenue. Then again it might make people more willing to get started and then find themselves needing the Pro features further down the line.
It is also technically far trickier to do all the payment processing and take cuts and make sure everyone is paid and happy. This way they can let Paypal/GC do all that work and focus on making a great product.
I'm not sure which clients would indicate they were browsing from Antarctica.
All the British stations use a satellite link to the British Antarctic Survey headquarters in Cambridge, UK. The link to the Antarctic is transparent to the outside world so all browsing down on the stations (and ships) appears to come from a Cambridge IP address. I'm sure many of the other Antarctic stations work the same way.
The VoIP phone system works the same way so you can ring the station using a "local" Cambridge number. This often lead to strange conversations when people dialled the wrong number and found out they had accidentally phoned the Antarctic.
That is an interesting issue, and one I've never considered before cause I just took the data from MaxMind for granted.
I work for Mozilla crunching numbers. There isn't any way I could share any IP addresses of course. If you pull down the data from MaxMind and do a search for AQ, you'll see a set of IP address ranges that are recorded as being located in Antarctica. We get a small amount of traffic from IP addresses in those ranges.
The sudden CO2 increase is consistent with the quantity of CO2 output from human sources.
It is not hard to understand what is happening. I work for the British Antarctic Survey and my girlfriend is an atmospheric chemist. Many of my friends are climate change or environmental scientists. Let me tell you there is as near to complete agreement about what is happening as it is possible to have in science.
Of course it is possible to find some people who disagree. It would be unhealthy if you couldn't. Science works because of debate.
The post is pretty awful, but what really got me was the claim that because 650 is a bigger number than 52 more people are sceptical than support the IPCC. That is laughable:
> Most would agree that they appear to be correlated.
Everyone agrees they're correlated. Not everyone notices the warming precedes the increases.
> I work for the British Antarctic Survey and my girlfriend is an atmospheric chemist. Many of my friends are climate change or environmental scientists. Let me tell you
You have to admit you and your associates have certain interests at stake...
I agree, in previous natural cycles it did. Increased temperatures (due to orbital effect) lead to increased CO2, which increased temperatures further, releasing more CO2. A positive feedback mechanism.
The problem is that man-made atmospheric CO2 has upset that natural balance (CO2 is now significantly higher than it has been in the last 400,000 years - see second graph). Will that increase global temperatures? Scientists think so, and there is some evidence it is already happening. If so, the results are likely to be very serious indeed. Should we wait to find out?
So you mean John Q. Public is as qualified to speak about science as people who spend several years of their life learning about all the necessary background in their field of study, and then spend the rest of their lives contributing original research in that field? Or are the latter merely charlatans and frauds?
That's the ultimate way of dismissing anything, just attack the very concept of credibility. It's downright idiotic to say there's no such thing as a scientist. That's like saying there's no such thing as a dentist.
Sure, there's some semantic considerations, and the word means different things to different people and may sometimes be used incorrectly, but there is a such thing as a scientist.
Knowing that someone is a dentist tells you little. They could be a good one or a bad one. They could have not practiced in a long time. It doesn't mean "dentist" is not a word. Scientist is a rather general one, but still means anyone to whom it is rightfully applied is many orders of magnitude more likely to have intelligent feedback on global warming than the general populace.
The term exists to delineate between a subset of the general populace and the rest. Just like dentist. Dentists are the subset of the population that you see when your tooth aches, and scientists (especially a few specializations) are the ones you ask when you want to know why the glaciers are melting.
When someone say scientists agree on global warming, its like saying dentists agree on the causes of cavities. It's useful because it's talking about people in the know who are more apt to make such conclusions.
That's why you apologists try to demean the term. If nobody is a scientist then nobody has any more valid opinion than yours.
> say scientists agree on global warming, its like saying dentists agree on the causes of cavities
Not even close. I really hope you can stop and think about this analogy and see how both the professional labels and the questions differ dramatically.
> If nobody is a scientist then nobody has any more valid opinion than yours
Nobody is a "scientist" because there's no such thing. There are etymologists and geologists and chemists and so on, just as there are plumbers and linguists, each qualified in their domains. As best I can tell all that unifies the "scientific professions" is that the paychecks are mostly from academia, because the work isn't commercially viable. That's not a slight at all, it's just to throw light on how ridiculous the distinction is. Any high IQ job involves problem solving and theory.
That's like saying "doctor" is a magic word. There are all sorts of doctors. Heart Surgeons, pediatricians, ER doctors. They all specialize in very different things.
But they all have a very strong base level of training in medicine. You could ask a psychiatrist about your back problem, and while he's clearly not an orthopedic surgeon, he can probably give you useful feedback. And if he put a little time into research, he could tell you a lot. That's because he's highly trained to do so.
It's the same with scientists. Sure someone with a PhD in physics might not be as knowledgeable about global warming as a geologist. But they're still pretty capable of figuring out, especially with a little effort. Their opinion is considerably more useful than a lay person, which is why people are fascinated with their thoughts on the topic of global warming.
To a certain extent I have to agree with you that doctor IS another magic word. It's a title of prestige that doesn't necessarily carry a lot of meaning.
> You could ask a psychiatrist about your back problem, and while he's clearly not an orthopedic surgeon, he can probably give you useful feedback.
This is flat out untrue. Most doctors do not know very much outside their specialties. Many do not even know the state of the art within their specialty. I have professional experience in dealing with this through the pharmaceutical industry. For a huge chunk of medical problems an intelligent person is going to do betterl consulting the CDMT and merck manuals than by going to a randomly picked doctor.
> PhD in physics ... geologist
What about a sociologist or a working industry economist? Plenty of modeling and stat experience. How about one of those high falutin research farmers? He's probably just as smart, too.
Again, who said anything about lay people? You're attacking a strawman.
I was making a little tangential one-off point and this whole discussion is in fact moot, because "scientists" do not in fact agree on the issue of global warming.
Few lay people understand what the merck manuals says. Understanding statistics is one of many basic requirements for understanding science and medicine that most people lack. Another is a basic understanding of logic etc.
