Winner of NASA Glove Contest Named 92
eZtaR writes "The winner of NASA's $200k spacesuit glove contest has been found. He's an unemployed aerospace engineer, named Peter Homer, and claims to have bought most of the materials in local shops and on eBay."
Internal Nasa flamewar (Score:5, Funny)
This guy should have called his the emacs glove, it would have 7 hands a kitchen sink and be able to host multiple lifeforms.
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And come to think of it, the average kitchen gloves *do* host multiple lifeforms.
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Caption:
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Mod Parent Up (Score:1)
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Does any one else ... (Score:5, Insightful)
In all seriousness, I'm sure he'll end up with a good job out of this, which should be worth more to him and his family in the long run then the $200k prize.
Re:Does any one else ... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Does any one else ... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Age Discrimination? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Is he actually looking for employment in aerospace? From reading the article, it appears he left aerospace engineering after bouncing around to go into computer sales. It doesn't say he was forced out of aerospace or laid off - he's currently unemployed after being forced to resign as the director of a community service organization. More info here. [mainecoastnow.com]
I'm quite sure he could find a position if he wanted one (although he's going to need to get out of Maine). I spent
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And of course the massive (and steady) shrinkage of the aerospace industry over the past 10-15 years has nothing to do with it? TFA implies that he hasn't been an aerospace engineer in quite a while - in fact the job he's currently unemployed from is 'director of a community service organization', not 'aerospace engineer'. This cached page [72.14.253.104] from Google suggests he
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Because he's living in a place where the opportunities for aerospace engineers are virtually zero. I've been there -- it's beautiful, great place to raise children, wonderful place to live, but tough place to try to work if you're in a high-tech profession. He might be able to get more work down around Portland (IIRC National Semi has a big prototype fab right outside Portland, they might have something for him), but that's not exactly commuting distance.
Now, it mi
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As for NASA and the bureaucrats, outdoing them usually isn't that big a deal. Fortunately for the space pen (pump up ball point) it made for
Radio Shack (Score:5, Interesting)
I think it stifles innovation not to have places like that around. We went in there as kids and bought all kinds of stuff to build all kinds of stuff. I recall at one point we tried to attach a guidance system to our toy rockets. Now, this had immense practical ramifications since our ultimate purpose was to terrify Old Lady Mortinson's giant hound. Yes, I know, this wasn't horribly well thought out, but what I can say - we were nine. She had this huge beast that lounged about on her front porch until it spotted children. This thing's back was nearly as tall as we were. He had, in our opinion, the largest teeth ever seen on a dog, complete with world-class doggy breath and strings of drool. This wouldn't have been so bad except she lived across the street from the school.
We'd get out of school and have to wait for someone to pick us up. The hound would see all of us gathering and bestir himself. His first act was always to start baying. All this did was drive us to huddle together like a human bait ball. Well, the huge beast would gallop across the street and plow in to us. He'd have a lovely time chasing everyone around, tongue out, and huge paws throwing mud. We'd get in trouble for getting our school clothes dirty and we were convinced that the beast was out to eat one of us.
Anyway, we starting trying to come up with ways to defeat the beast. Since we knew we'd get in trouble for hurting it, that pretty much ruled out BB guns, pellet guns, and 22's that most of us already had (hey, we were country kids). That meant we had to be more creative. We'd go to the Radio Shack and spend hours pouring through the catalog and the shelves trying to come up with something to chase the beast off. We learned more about design from that ridiculous dog. Now, with no where to go, how are kids supposed to do that? Don't tell me that they can do it on line. It's not the same as holding the part in your hand to see how much it weighs or being able to really get a sense of it's size. These are abstract concepts that come hard to a nine year old kid.
2 cents,
Queen B.
Frys Electronics (Score:2)
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Not anymore. Being a geek is cool now.
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I was amazed. Then again, it was also the only place in this town that I could find a Cold Heat soldering iron.
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You shouldn't make fun of things that people don't choose.
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That's not funny. (Score:2)
How can you be so crass and shallow? This is a heartbreaking story.
My concern is how this award winning design engineer with 10 years of experience is unemployed. It is obvious that he did better than the industry and teams of competitors. There is something very wrong with the US aerospace industry.
This is bad for everyone. It's especially bad for those in the profession. They face the frustration of not getting things d
What is funny, according to you? (Score:2)
What a sense of humour you have.
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So a throwaway 'Homer' reference isn't funny, but blatant racism is?
Hmmm, I would not go so far as to call people who work for M$ a "race" so I don't know what you are talking about. M$ people are strange, but in theory they can still produce viable offspring when mated with other human beings.
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You actually have no clue at all, do you?
Homer Hickam, art hard (Score:1)
But will NASA's new spacecraft.... (Score:5, Funny)
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This might be bad... (Score:4, Funny)
Think they'll buy my old pokemon cards?
Re:This might be bad... (Score:4, Interesting)
The NY Times had an article on this a few years ago: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A
Spacewalk is hard on the... hands? (Score:5, Informative)
Spacewalks are hard on astronauts' hands
I know there is more to the sentence, but this clause made me chuckle. "Heh - they're doing it wrong."
I need more coffee...
PS Here is the link to the printer-friendly version, i.e. the article on one page [discovery.com].
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You should read the ALSJ [nasa.gov]. Astronauts who walked on the moon absolutely wrecked their fingers, mainly because the gloves had to be short and tight for better sensitivity which meant pressing their fingers hard into the end of the glove while doing heavy work.
The other factor is the difficulty of working against gas pressure to perform simple tasks like holding a tool.
I gotta call this guy (Score:5, Funny)
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Keep listening on that two way radio. Interesting that Heinleins personal life suppport system was almost exactly the same as the backup system on the Apollo suit. At one point the protagonist dismisses the idea of suits with the ability to absorb CO2 as being too advanced, but that is what actually flew, and the apollo suits had almost twice the time
OMG its from ebay!! (Score:1, Flamebait)
Upon viewing (Score:4, Funny)
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I thnik the contests need to be (Score:5, Insightful)
We need to recognize that individual accomplishment is still something to crow about. When schools turn to removing achievment rewards for fear of offending those who don't achieve to removing grades for the same reason we teach kids the wrong lesson. The winner of this competition was not only trying to help NASA but provide his child a valuable lesson. This is the type of stuff that needs to taught to kids in school today. Show them that one person can do what many cannot do, then explain to them the need for both individual and groups for accomplishing goals.
Many great advancements are the work of a single person, someone who thinks "outside the box". We have to remember that the village is made up of individuals and they are as important as the village.
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There are good reasons to think that Deci & Ryan have an axe to grind and that the research that they use is somewhat flawed. Gary Latham (now President-Elect of SIOP, and HIGHLY respected psyhochologist) writes about it in his 2007 book "Work Motivation". Essentially (and I am heavily condensing here), there are good reasons to believe that rewarding people does not undermine motivation the way Deci argues. One of the reasons is that this conclu
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To quote "The Simpsons":
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Here in the UK, the Royal Society of Chemistry ran a maths challenge to highlight the fact that Chinese teenagers were required to solve a university entrance paper containing harder questions than those used to bring the maths skills of first-year British undergraduates up to scratch. I won the competition, and tried to get the message across to the press that we needed to
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Was quite disappointed that none of the reports I saw showed the working for the number questions. I'd have expected no marks and to be failed on the test for just putting down the correct number, but I think there's a sorry disconnect between people who appreciate maths and people who report in the media.
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For my part, I put together a geometric proof for the first part (I suck at proofs!), and then did the second and third parts using three-dimensional vector maths (dot and cross product). That was mainly because I had a limited amount of time, and after you do enough computer graphics work that kind of maths gets hardwired into your brain. I showed my working though.
You should indeed get few (if any) marks for
well, obviously! (Score:5, Funny)
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wait! (Score:2)
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D`oh! (Score:1)
D`oh!
Link With Pictures (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:You know all those Sci-Fi books you've been rea (Score:5, Interesting)
However, one of these days I have a dream of someday actually doing some of the engineering that I spent six years learning about.
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Getting off the subject, most projects last from 6 months to 5 years max, upgrades, add-ons and such. Very few companies can afford to hold on too all their employes full time so it turns into contract work. Yes they always seem unemployed, but they get picked right back up as soon as the next contract start,
Yeah, flunking out of grad school in 1990 (Score:1)
Smell the Glove! (Score:2, Funny)
Both happy and sad... (Score:5, Insightful)
I think this guy might quite literally be a rocket scientist who ended up selling computers, then a community services manager, and then became unemployed. If America wants to be the forefront of technology, America needs to ask why does a guy have to buy something at EBay to build the next generation of technology?
Maybe America needs a few more role model "Homers".... instead of some Paris Hilton's who happens to be going to jail for 45 days or ended up shaving their head out of whim!
Simple Truth (Score:2, Insightful)
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Re:Both happy and sad... (Score:4, Insightful)
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It seems to me that the American inventors are not appreciated, whereas Paris Hilton her jail term is appreciated. Sad...
Heh (Score:4, Funny)
Is there any other kind?
*ducks*
(I get to say that, a good friend of mine is an unemployed aerospace engineer