Re: Regrettably not - Edit 1
Before modification by Joel at 15/02/2010 08:56:19 AM
I tell normal jokes too, and quick quips, but my personal ones or adaptations tend to be revolve around saying things that make a lot of sense when phrased right and are only viewed as absurd about 2-5 seconds after the punchline is delivered. If I'm telling the one about how I don't believe in pink unicorns, leprechauns, and eskimos it really loses all it's flavor if the subsequent delivery doesn't highlight the reasons why laughing at someone for not believing in eskimos is alternatively no more logical than not believing in pink unicorns and leprechauns. If the jokes delivery doesn't point out the fundamental flaw of 'everybody knows' while at the same time showing the abusrdity of viewing the other two as an absurdity it fails. The rational agnostic sort realizes that there sis nothing absurd about the idea of a horse with a pink coat and horn evolving somewhere, the sort who tend to believe in the supernatural, the absurdity of viewing one as entirely believable but the leprechaun as simple nonsense. Proper delivery takes well over a minute and like a lot of my quips it's designed to relax the audience and shake up their thinking if they're showing signs of mental rigidity. Spoils the whole thing when someone either just says 'I don't believe in pink unicorns, leprechauns, or eskimos' for the quick laugh and tends to be utterly dreadful and perverted of the point when they try to deliver the whole thing.
We're back to "when you know not whereof you speak, your mouth is best used for chewing. "
Yeah, that makes sense; I wasn't really sure what you had beyond the cupola and scope, but once you start adding computers and stuff the price mounts fast, especially if you throw in your own power source (come to that, most motorized SCTs are intended to run on car batteries, which typically entails a car, though it needn't. )
We had the whole package, telescope wired to the sky program on the computer, so you could just click object and it would rotate the telescope, but not the dome, for some reason the dome would only rotate maybe one time out of ten, had to press the manual control which was a serious pain since it wasn'treadily accessible. Regardless, this is why I'd guess the scope was 10-20k inspite of a 120k budget.
*nods* Makes sense.
Sounds like we're of a mind there; if I NEED the Nexstars computer, nice as it is, I probably need to NOT drop the cash for an 8+" SCT until I know wtf I'm doing. The Nexstars are NICE, don't get me wrong; the alignment process is almost idiot proof and very quick, and then it's basically point and click. But since I wanted one myself (someday... ) I remember the price on the old C-8 with and without computer VERY well:
Nioce things is how cheap computers have gotten, but I just don't like them. For one thing all that automation resulted in me forgeting half the astronomy I knew. For serious science, speed and accuracy say use computers, but otherwise? I just get this image of fifty years from now someone deciding to go fishing, heads down to the beach with their 'Seamaster 10000', sets it down, pushes a button, and proceeds to play video games while it shoots out laser and radars to locate a fish then deploys it's automatic harpoon, reels it in, and dumps it into a basket for you. 'I got a 5 footer today' says the person with a dubious claim of being a fisherman.
Indeed. The idea of someone spending thousands of dollars on something little more than an expensive toy or status symbol to them makes me want to kick something. Not my Firstscope 114, of course; that could mess up the collimation, but something.
I've never used it before, and if I'm going to experiment with it to learn the risks I'm not going to start with hundreds or thousands of dollars. I believe my mother finally did get her money back because she got buyer protection--but she spent a few months arguing with the seller, the post office AND EBay. For $20. It was so much fun it soured her on EBay for good; I prefer not to have the same experience with an order of magnitude or more money.
I just hear so many good things about it that I feel obliged to recommend it, but I've only used it a few times, usually with someone else's assistance. For just the sort of reasons you mentioned, I prefer to buy items in person, and failing that brand new from a fully established company. Buy a telescope online from celestron or meade, and you know it will arrive safe, or will be fairly easy to have returned and replaced. Same as buying things out of reputable catalogs like I do for seeds.
Right. It just really sucks Celestron no longer offers a computer free 8" SCT, because you know darned good and well the only reason is mark up.
Might be, but I'm not sure how weight bearing stacks up, and most things I've seen made out of fiberglass age badly, especially when exposed to the elements. There's plenty of 16th century antique furniture out there (all things considered but I don't know how much fiberglass stuff made today will be around in 2510.
but I don't know how much fiberglass stuff made today will be around in 2510.Not sure how long fiberglass kicks around, certainly seen it in decent shape after decades. I think it's one of those materials that sunlight screws up, which shouldn't be any issue for telescopes... but I actually meant to say carbon fiber not fiberglass, sorry Carbon fiber makes good tripods.
Carbon fiber makes good tripods.It would, you just have to be careful with it; carbon fiber is great for weight bearing, but not so good at withstanding impacts.
It does seem that way to me, but if you screw up one of those mirrors you've got an expensive piece of junk. Maybe some or all of the retailers (though most of them seem to be direct mail) offer replacement mirrors, but I'd want to be very sure of that, and that it wouldn't be thousands more, before I attempted something like that. I mean, think about it: If nearly all the precision equipment is the mirrors and the rest is basically just polished sheet metal, where would you expect most of the expense to lie?
Oh, it's all in the optics, unless I missed a piece I'd guess the whole housing probably runs around a hundred bucks. So, definetly would want to by optics with a warranty on them if one's around that offers that.
Yup, and warranties are alarmingly easy to void.
Yeah, I'm pretty much at home when on the computer, too, and when I'm not home the only NEED I have for one is to go online (which I don't really need anyway, I just enjoy it. )
I've grown increasingly spartan in my travel tendencies the last few years, basically as an extension of that concept. I used to pack everything but the kitchen sink.
In '95 and again in 2000 I went through a period where I seemed to move every six months to a year, so I got used to traveling light for simplicity (once I moved from Milwaukee to Ft. Worth by throwing everything in a couple bags and hopping a Greyhound for $27. ) The two lessons I learned were: 1) Travel light and 2) many things, especially books, can be conveniently stored and filed in boxes indefinitely.
I've still got a 286 myself; my dad got it for me for Christmas one year as an upgrade over my folks original (and I do mean ORIGINAL) PC. Took me forever to realize it had an internal hard drive (20 whole megs, man!) 
I used to sneer at people who couldn't write a decent batch file; I still know how to do it in DOS, but all the commands have been replaced by point and grunt (and pray Explorer doesn't decide to crash. )
I used to sneer at people who couldn't write a decent batch file; I still know how to do it in DOS, but all the commands have been replaced by point and grunt (and pray Explorer doesn't decide to crash. )>I never really made the jump from DOS to the other things. I skipped windows 3.x entirely and going from GW an Q Basic to V-Basic, well, I never got it down. C:\DOS, C:\DOS\RUN, RUN\DOS\RUN. Still funny, but other than the basic html scripts necessary to play with the font types and colors I never have gotten use dot nay of the modern gibberish, I feel proud just being able to configure my email to download directly into my mail program.
Still doing better than me. I don't TRUST the GUI; I never know what it's doing behind it's charismatic display, and miss the days when DOS did EXACTLY WHAT I TOLD IT TO AND NOTHING MORE! This despite the fact my dad setup that original PC so that it used the "extra" RAM we sprang for (a second 256k stick) as a virtual C drive, including a reminder on the boot disks jacket that anything unsaved in the C drive would disappear when the computer was deactivated. It greatly annoys me that I have to wait for Windows to do that now when I want to just hit the power switch and leave, just as it annoys me that Windows has all kinds of complicated architecture to do similar things for which I used to write three line batch files.
To be honest the only Bushnell telescope I've dealt with was our baby refractor that was STRICTLY a spotting scope. People would come in all the time, see the $100 pricetag and think they were set, and I'd have to tell them, "Yeah, if you just want to watch birds or your neighbors wife, that's the thing; if you want to do astronomy let me show you this 3" altazimuth reflector for about $50 more, or better yet this 4.5" equatorial reflector if it's not too steep. " It was still the cheap weak sister of what Celestron and Meade made. I've heard they make decent binoculars, but my impression is the same thing is true of telescopic sights as telescopes in general: You get what you pay for (if you know your stuff) and you're generally better off going with a specialist dedicated to performance than a generalist dedicated to volume sales.
I don't want to savage Bushnell too much, the main complaint I had was fairly specific, a lot of scopes are designed for huntings rifles but don't handle up well when mounted to military equipment, wasn't just them, a lot of our prefered optics might work on a m4 or m16 but would get damaged by the recoil and vibration of the heavier machineguns, some of the RFI stuff we got couldn't even function on the standard rifles. Lot of the stuff we got during the early years of the WoT was non-ideal, but then RFI (Rapid Field Issue) tends to result in that. They are certainly a well-known company and in this particular type of business reputations aren't acquired as fads, but as a result of years of producing high-quality goods, so I'm probably being unfair.
They seem more generalist than specialist, and your experiences seem to reflect that. Of course, a manufacturer that specializes in hunting scopes probably wouldn't do much better with a large automatic, and would lack the kind of volume capacity large militaries need. Meanwhile, I'm a little disturbed that "War of Terror" and "Wheel of Time" have the same acronym.
