Comments on: Space Nerds Rejoice!

Space Nerds Rejoice!

ND¢ — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 13:26:26 -0800

Stardust@home. The Stardust spacecraft (discussed recently here) should land in Utah early Saturday, carrying in its hold a sprinkling of grains of interstellar dust. Researchers are seeking the public's help in pinpointing the submicroscopic bits of dust. Participants will sift through the hundreds of thousands of pictures of the roughly square-foot collector plate.

By: ND¢

ND¢ — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 13:33:17 -0800

This is similar to the Seti@home project, discussed here.

By: Faint of Butt

Faint of Butt — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 13:41:00 -0800

If I'm reading the article right, this really isn't much like SETI@home at all. SETI@home uses distributed computing, where each participant's machine automatically contributes a few cycles to effectively form a supercomputer. Stardust@home isn't automatic; it actually requires people to sit down and carefully inspect the images. In principle, they're similar uses of grassroots support to handle some of the grunt work of space research, but in practice they seem to be quite different.

By: Gator

Gator — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 13:45:13 -0800

When I saw the words "collector plate," I unfortunately thought of those limited edition collector's plates showing scenes from Gone With The Wind and Lassie and whatnot, that you get with your junk mail. Anyway, from the Stardust@Home site: "[Y]ou should search through focus movies as long as you're having fun doing it. ...We expect to start the search for interstellar dust in the Spring of 2006." I signed up. I bet by the time I hear from them, I'll have forgotten all about it. Whee!

By: delmoi

delmoi — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 14:01:29 -0800

Strange. Don't they have computers for this sort of thing?

By: nlindstrom

nlindstrom — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 14:17:25 -0800

Good god! Don't they realize that when the craft lands, it will do so in a small town, probably named Piedmont? And that the town doctor will pry open the collector on it, thereby unleashing a deadly virus, which will later be dubbed the Andromeda Strain after it kills the entire town's population? Won't someone think of the children! ;-)

By: RylandDotNet

RylandDotNet — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 14:42:32 -0800

Scientists never learn the lessons Hollywood has to teach us, and this will doom us all.

By: parallax7d

parallax7d — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 14:42:34 -0800

delmoi, obviously computers arent up to massive repetitive data analysing projects.

By: D.C.

D.C. — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 14:44:00 -0800

It's similar to the NASA clickworkers project, in which users cataloged craters on Mars.

By: Mr_Zero

Mr_Zero — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 15:07:43 -0800

Remember when Comet Fever struck Earth in 2006?

By: pieisexactlythree

pieisexactlythree — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 15:12:19 -0800

Scientists never learn the lessons Hollywood has to teach us, and this will doom us all. Dude, get a load of that Star Trek novelty font they used on the banner! NASA's learned a thing or two.

By: pieisexactlythree

pieisexactlythree — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 15:12:57 -0800

In the second link...

By: ND¢

ND¢ — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 15:27:52 -0800

By: brundlefly

brundlefly — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 15:35:19 -0800

nlindstrom, I'm thinking it'll be more this scenario.

By: spock

spock — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 15:56:13 -0800

Yep. NASA appears to have used the Deep Space Nine font which is commonly found on the web called "Bajorian" (sic)

By: Astro Zombie

Astro Zombie — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 16:01:45 -0800

And now the purple dusk of twilight time Steals across the meadows of my heart High up in the sky the little stars climb Always reminding me that we're apart

By: spaceviking

spaceviking — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 18:20:46 -0800

I believe that the actual identification of the dust tracks can't be done by computer very efficiently. Basically it involves viewing a movie of a microscope focusing through different depths in the aerogel, and a computer wouldn't be able to correctly identify the tracks in the movie. Either that, or they just don't have the money to pay a bunch of programmers to come up with a fancy program that would do it.

By: scodger

scodger — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 21:10:34 -0800

Hmmm this seems like a job for amazons mechanical turk if ever there was one. I doubt that sponge watching will be very fun for most people.

By: mediareport

mediareport — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 21:32:00 -0800

Btw, if anyone hasn't seen Andromeda Strain yet, it's a pretty neat movie. The early 70s techno-philia is so obvious in the first half hour it's kind of funny; the fonts, sounds and especially the way human characters are presented only in machine-mediated ways. And the long slow decontamination trip into the bowels of the research station wouldn't show up in a movie today; it seems interminable. See you on the other side of whatever evolutionary jump our species is about to make in combination with the comet dust heading our way...

By: Gator

Gator — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 21:40:00 -0800

That was a neat movie. The book's worth a read, too, if only to expose yourself to early Crichton so you can see how much he's improved over the years.

By: Astro Zombie

Astro Zombie — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 22:06:31 -0800

Best part of the move? The old wino who inists everything can be cured by drinking "squeeze" (sterno). And, in the case of deadly space virus fever, he was right.

By: nlindstrom

nlindstrom — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 09:11:58 -0800

My answering machine's message is a rip of the movie's soundtrack portion where the military guy calls on the secret phone, and is told "this is a recording. State your name, and your message, then hang up" -- complete with the background teletype noise. Very annoying and geeky, I know. ;-)