The Hubble Space Telescope is coming to its final stretch of operation and will be replaced with a telescope 10x as powerful placed over a million kilometers from the Earth! My roommate was sharing with me the many developments that are going on in the astronomical world which we aren’t informed about. It’s all really interesting and much of it has alot of important to our future! Anyways, here’s a clip of the new next generation telescope!
This was a very fascinating chain email I got. I’m not sure of the source for it but wanted to share it here:
Antares is the 15th brightest star in the sky.
It is more than 1000 light years away.
Now TRY to wrap your mind around this.........
This is a Hubble Telescope Ultra Deep Field Infrared View of countless
"ENTIRE" Galaxies Billions of Light-Years Away.
Below is a close up of one of the darkest regions of the photo above.
Humbling, isn’t it?
Now How Big Are You?
And how big are the things that upset you today?
Today marked the last day of final exams for me, ending with a bang! It’s sad to see the low quality teaching standards of many university professors and their teaching assistants. I haven’t seen any course with more mistakes in the course notes, mis-numbered assignment questions and general error in teaching material than that for which I wrote an exam for today.
Thinking that many of these students will be the engineers of tomorrow with little clear knowledge of the material they are learning is scary. I can say that a vast majority of my classmates simply don’t learn anything during the school term. They cram and cram before the final exams and if asked anything outside the scope of their assignment questions which they’ve memorized won’t be able to give you an answer.
To say the least I think there should be some quality checks for the courses. Assignment solutions should be legible and the teaching assistants should have a decent understanding of the course material. It’s just disappointing to finish the school term thinking that 4 out of the 5 courses you took were a complete was of time and money.
Another example of poor academic offerings is my distance education psychology course which had no course instruction for the entire length of the course. A mistake was made assigning a professor to the course and students were left with no instructor. No one was held responsible for this and who knows where our money went. Everything I learned was through the course materials which I could’ve done out of interest had I wanted to.
I don’t blame students for dropping out and going on to do what they believe is more important with their lives. A lot of useless time can be spent behind the bureaucracy of the education system. Both that valuable time and money for someone who knows what they want to do in their life can be used much more efficiently outside of the system.
Furthermore I believe the education system conforms people to become dependent on the system for motivation. Students have no metrics for their own lives besides the grades that there professors give them with at the end of the term.
At least another term is over and I can get back to what’s most important to me…sigh…
You don’t realize how big the oil/tanker business is until you see some of these figures. I caught this article in today’s Wall Street Journal. Here are some interesting excerpts:
“His units are in such demand he can charge major oil companies nearly $600,000 a day to use them. Similar rigs were earning about $70,000 a day just five years ago. With leasing rates like these, a vessel that cost half a billion dollars to build can pay for itself in as little as four years.”
“Larger than a football field, semis are floating vessels, supported by big pontoonlike structures submerged below the sea surface, that can operate in waters up to 10,000 feet deep. Dynamic positioning — a computer-controlled thruster system fed by data from satellites and transponders located on the seabed — keeps them in place directly above the oil well. The price tag for such a vessel is now around $655 million.”
This guy does business the way I’d like to do it, efficiently:
“Fredriksen and Troim move very fast,” says Odd Harald Hauge, a Norwegian journalist who has written two books on Mr. Fredriksen. “They do deals on napkins.”
“One of their most daring acquisitions was of, a big Norwegian driller, in January 2006. Noble Corp., a U.S. rival, had taken a 30% stake in the company, but Seadrill snapped up shares and eventually forced Noble to sell out. “We bought that in a taxi in Seoul,” says Mr. Fredriksen.”
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