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This is from the University of Arizona: http://seds.lpl.arizona.edu/nineplanets/nineplanet s/hypo.html#planetx

Planet X was theorized as a possible cause for large deviations in Uranus's orbit. The discovery of Pluto was directly related to this Planet X theory.

Actually, this newly found celestial body is not a planet at all, much less a "10th planet" ... It's just a Kuiper belt object, which happens to be rather large. Quaoar further strengthens the theory that Pluto is not a conventional planet but rather a Kuiper Belt object. "Quaoar definitely hurts the case for Pluto being a planet," said planetary scientist Mike Brown, co-discover of the new object. "If Pluto were discovered today, no one would even consider calling it a planet because it's clearly a Kuiper Belt object." While traditionally classified as a planet, Pluto is more likely is a Kuiper Belt object that was pushed into an erratic, Neptune-crossing orbit billions of years ago, according to astronomers and people with even remedial common sense. You can read up on Pluto here

Why wind up a radio when a much more reliable radio can easily be made out of junk parts that uses NO power source and the minimum of parts?

Whether or not it would be a better use of time, you can't use a general-purpose radio telescope for this sort of work. The best approach is a network of small optical telescopes like those run by Spacewatch. Since the data reduction process there is pretty straightforward, I doubt there'd be a need for an @home project.

The timing of this article seems impecable, since I am myself trying to learn about Bayesian Statistics.

I am a Computer Science student studying Computational Biology (more specifically, Sequence Alignments) and while I have a bit of background on Classical Statistics, I was (and still am) completely ignorant about Bayesian Statistics.

It is only now that I'm trying to learn about Hidden Markov Models and its applications to Sequence Alignment that Ifinally decided to learn the basic hypothesis about Bayesian Statistics and how it differs from the hypothesis made by the Classical Statistics.

During my searches for finding introductory material on Bayesian Statistics, I found this course page which has some nice introductory notes, including Bayesian Statistics.

I hope that other people find this resource as useful as I did.

This stuff is called Oobleck. The page also tells how to make Glurch (Nickelodeon Gak).

This stuff is called Oobleck. The page also tells how to make Glurch (Nickelodeon Gak).

I read somewhere that if you have a major computational problem ("major" meaning "I'm buying a big honkin' cluster that's going to hammer away at it for years") then the cheapest and fastest way to solve it is to figure out how long it would take a currently available setup to solve the problem, and sit back until at least half that time has elapsed before buying the hardware.

C. Gottbrath, J. Bailin, C. Meakin, T. Thompson and J. Charfman, "The Effects of Moore's Law and Slacking on Large Computations," manuscript, Astrophysics ePrint archive, 1999.

Interesting. I think I know where I got the mistaken impression. The standard stack layout for Alpha places the return address at the opposite end of the stack frame from x86. At least, thats what these two pages seem to say: [here] and [here].

Usually, the return address is one of the first things pushed by the callee. On x86, with PUSH/POP instructions, this means that the return address will be at a higher address than all the local variables. Alpha, on the other hand, seems to allocate a frame and then fill the frame from lower towards higher addresses. (This probably stems from using generic load/store instructions instead of special push/pop instructions.) Hence my confusion.

I realize upward growing stacks aren't a cure for buffer overflows. I was merely pointing out that differences in stack direction require different approaches.

Oh, and I did go look at extend_stack in the kernel source. Sure enough, the stack always grows downwards on Linux. Thanks for clearing up some confusion for me.

If it revolves around something, regardless of size, it's a satellite of whatever it revolves around. The planets are satellites of the sun; the moon is a satellite of the Earth. Use of the word "moon" to refer to a "satellite" of a body other than Earth is common usage.

Charon is a satellite of Pluto. Perhaps you're thinking of recent evidence that both Pluto and Charon were not formed by the proceses that formed the other planets, but are, instead, Kuiper Belt objects. The Kuiper Belt is a region of the Solar System beyond the orbit of Pluto that is believed to be the source many comets and other objects.

the gas giants are largely made of methane.

I'm doing some work designing a solar car for a certain unnamed university.

I've eliminated MIT and U of A as this unnamed university.

The last living mammoths have been dated to 4100 years ago on an island offshore Siberia. This a few centuries AFTER the pyramids of Egypt were constructed.

196, 295, 394, 493, 592, 689, 691, 788, 790, 879, 887, 978, 986, 1495, 1497, 1585, 1587, 1675, 1677, 1765, 1767, 1855, 1857, 1945, 1947, 1997, 2494, 2496, 2584, 2586, 2674, 2676, 2764, 2766, 2854, 2856, 2944, 2946, 2996

There are several links you could use to find this out. here is one.
"The Moon" is Earth's sattelite's common name, but Luna is perfectly appropriate. So with The Sun and "Sol".
The Earth is also called Terra, but it's much less common to see that anywhere.

1. They meant the Icon programming language, see here

2. There are such things as graphical/icon programming languages. (After all, isn't that what a flowchart is?) The may make the most sense in simulations, where each box can be a type of transform, and you can connect them together in (presumably) interesting ways. Here's one link that might be interesting. Or not.

What gave you that idea?

I dunno what gave him that idea, but I thought it was a well-known fact.

According to the first link, the thermal conductivity of copper (in W/cm-K) is 3.937. Room-temperature diamond: 6.299. And an isotopically pure room-temperature diamond: 50. The last link claims a conductivity of 2000 W/cm-K for CVD diamond and talks about using it to cool stuff.

So I guess the more interesting question is where you got the idea that diamonds wouldn't work well for cooling.

turning a VAX into a keg dispenser with webmonitoring
or maybe just a bar or how about a fridge

The long running question of whether Pluto is a planet or not was solved a few years ago. Pluto is just a big asteroid from the Kuiper-belt or the Oort cloud. As for its status, it is still a planet for tradition's sake. At least this was the decision of astronomers at their annual meeting in 1999.

...the world's only supersonic passenger jet, Concorde

The Tupolev TU-144 was the another supersonic passenger jet. Build by the Ruissians to compete with the Concorde, it was pulled out of service after an embarrising crash at the Paris Air Show in 1973.

fact is that.
1) it's a story. live with it.
2) it actually *might* be possible -- let's go wild and screw around here: because frankly, everything we do not have data on COULD be possible, right?

it is *possible* that large-scale controlled fusion is not possible without a significant amount of fine grain control -- and the fine-ness of the grain is down to plank's level. since the human brain is a direct reflection of the spacetime quantum ripples, humans are therefore needed to make sure everything keeps running; in essense we are like battery terminals, except regulating the huge fusion reactor down below.

ANYWAY... side note: even crap we know for a fact is bs can still make a good story. read Issac Asimov's "The Gods Themselves". in a Sci-Fi convention that he attended, some guy was talking about Plutonium with atomic weight of 196 or some such non-sense. (Pu usually have atomic weights around 244, FYI) -- Asimov was so pissed at the stupidity and said: you are sooo dumb, but to show how damn smart i am, i am going to write a story around Pu/196! -- the moral of the story is that even bs makes a good story.

now - i admit i was making a failed attempt at humor -- but i really intended to point out the false sense of security my post's parent had about the issue, without spending the time disceting everything there.

basic argument goes something like this:

1) without some kind of AI, these robots are useless
2) the AI will have, or need to eventually have genetic algorithms incorporated to be actually effective in battles
3) the moment the genetic algorithm takes off, you are tinkering with evolution -- and with evolution you can not keep Asimov's 3 laws of robotics rooted in their programming
4) and bad things will happen.

anyway; moot point; M$ will have us all for lunch before any robots can. sigh...

• Dan Goldin, NASA Admin, mentions this as a future goal for NASA
• Use of this tech for SETI
• Use of Light-sails to put a telescope at this distance

Now if we would all set up our satellite dishes to point in the same direction, link them through the internet and call it Broadband Integrated Network Of Common Use Large Array Radio Scopes.

A little less silly, but you might be amused to know that the Large Binocular Telescope is currently under construction.

[TMB]

:)

References for your amusement:

• link to ADS abstract, Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 31, p.1504
• full image of the presented poster :)

:)

References for your amusement:

• link to ADS abstract, Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 31, p.1504
• full image of the presented poster :)

:)

References for your amusement:

• link to ADS abstract, Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 31, p.1504
• full image of the presented poster :)

What about Pluto and Charon? Aren't they closer in size to each other than Earth and the Moon?

Yes; check out Nine Planets (look at Earth, The Moon, Pluto and Charon). Here are the diameters:

__________ Diameter
Pluto _____ 2274 km
Charon ____ 1172 km
Earth ____ 12756 km
The Moon __ 3476 km

This is a diameter ratio of about 1/2 for Charon/Pluto and 1/4 for Moon/Earth.

VaxWars has an insteresting story about that very thing. Rather humerous read. After you read that, I reccomend you check out the VaxBar for another good laugh.

--MonMotha

Recently as well, a binary Kuiper Belt Object was found (in addition to Pluto and Charon, though, I mean). The remarkable ubiquity of double-asteroids and KBOs in our solar system is trying to tell us something about the formation and evolution of planetary systems, and we're working on what that is. I personally suspect that, eventually, a binary extrasolar planet will be found (probably in transit), making this sort of thing even more exciting.

It only cost about a billion dollars to get that one bit of information!

Now I can dust off that old VAX in my livingroom and figure out how to load CP/M on it for my eStore!

No, man, throw it in your kitchen and make it a VaxBar.

"Bally's limits would still allow for plenty of planets out there, but it could also mean there are far fewer than some researchers have expected. 'Either planetary systems form very fast,' Bally said, 'or we will find planet development to be rare. Something like 5 percent of stars will have planets.'"

Well, the number of planets in our galaxy is 200-400 million by current estimates.
5 percent of 200 million gives us 10 million planetary systems as a floor figure. For our galaxy. And there are billions of galaxies. So don't get your panties in a bunch quite yet, folks.

What is the possibility that an ELE sized asteroid (facts) hits the earth during your lifetime (75 years). If you could win $42 000 000 000 in a lottery at such rate, would you bet? ;))

Ofcourse they try to do precautions for everything they can think of. Many of you must have some experience on IT risk management, and you know the calculus - if avoidable mass destruction is on other side, then a few million dollars on other side is not bad risk management.

Actually, I believe the MMT is experimenting with a deformable secondary.

Yep.

Heck, some of the folks at Arizona briefly had a telescope with a deformable primary running, just to prove the concept. ('course, it had a two centimeter aperture - I never said it was a *big* primary. ;-)

Yeah, that was fun to see... of course, they had to strap it to the side of the 21" teaching telescope for pointing. :-)=

[TMB]

NoMoreNicksLeft:It's like chopping up a Model T, or 50's Tbird, and using the pieces of sheet metal to patch your AMC Gremlin.

Actually, this is more like building a hotrod from a Model T wreck when the veteran enthusiasts has given up on it.

O.K, an SE/30 in working order is still a cool machine, but it isn't really unique. If you really want to barf, check out http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/~vance/www/vaxbar.html . . .

Plus, I downloaded OpenBSD 3.0 to try it. I like it, and will now buy the 3.1 disks, but for now at least Theo knows nothing of me or my two boxes or the others on the network, so we are not counted in the "7000."

Given that any freely downloaded OS will have un-reported users, and few if any reported users are not actually using it (unlike Window$, where I know at least two licenses that are unused, because I posses them) the numbers reported will always be low. This is true for *BSD, Linux, AtheOS, whatever.

You damage your case by not citing your source for Theo's statement -- I'm sure he's sold more than 7000 CD sets. Oh, and please provide the address of Anonymous Coward's Slashdot weblog, so we can check your other sources ;-)

With virtual memory hardware, you can write an operating system that simulates non-volatile main memory, using hard disk as a backing store. What you get is a Persistent Operating System. You don't need a file system. Instead, you store data structures in main memory, and they persist forever, surviving reboots.

Doug Moen.

My alma mater's student radio station, KAMP, is only available via webcast last I heard (due to some pretty pro-corporation FCC regulations), so I have to wonder how these sorts of RIAA shenanigans will affect student radio.

People seem to think that competition will somehow magically select the best product or company. To steal an idea from memetics, the only thing competition does is select the product or company who is best at competing.

Finally, let's not judge Teoma until it's completed. The page has changed at least cosmetically since I first visited it this morning; who knows what's going on underneath. Maybe it'll even stop sucking my ass once it's out of beta ;)

The problem is the stretch that I had to apply to bring out the tail without making the coma just a blob. Here's a stretch that brings out the tail better.

Comets are one of the coolest things to observe in the sky because they CHANGE like every night!

Comets are one of the coolest things to observe in the sky because they CHANGE like every night!

Comets are one of the coolest things to observe in the sky because they CHANGE like every night!

The US has been using Echelon to conduct economic warfare against the EU, and the Swedish government weren't too happy when Novell sold them a 'secure encryption' system for confidential use within their government only to find 40-bits out of each 80-bit key escrowed with the NSA. We all know about Microsoft collaboration. The attacks on the EU haven't just hit home in Germany and Sweden but also many other EU countries. France, upon the evidence presented to them on Echelon, did a 180-degree turn on their encryption policy and went from a ban on all encryption to an immediate allowance of strong encryption for anyone for any use. I think we may well see a government push towards open source in the EU except for the UK. The UK hosts many of the spy stations used against our EU neighbours, and in return the USA throws us a few intelligence scraps when they feel like it.

Back on topic, it's interesting to see Bush throwing up the threat of foriegn nuclear weapons as the next excuse to distract attention from his domestic failure. Does he think his pathetic scare stories will drag us back to our Cold War paranoia? Will we then give him a free hand to attack the first on his long list of peeves, Iraq?

And finally can people please stop referring to Pakinstan as a "nuclear superpower" unless they provide evidence the rest of us don't know about. The last report on Pakistan nuclear testing I saw said that their "nuclear bomb" test was the equivalent destructive power of a large lump of TNT and seismologist have shown their tests yielded nothing like their government claims.

Phillip.

Even MORE interesting is THIS image from the press kit that shows not only lots of water at the south pole but a significant concentration around the north pole and best of all - three or four EQUATORIAL (read warm) spots that seem fairly wet. Oaises, anyone? We just found our landing sites...

Even MORE interesting is THIS image from the press kit that shows not only lots of water at the south pole but a significant concentration around the north pole and best of all - three or four EQUATORIAL (read warm) spots that seem fairly wet. Oaises, anyone? We just found our landing sites...

http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/~vance/www/vaxbar.html

the worlds first PC-case/Bar fridge.

Dude, it's a little late for that. It's been a while since /. ran the story (look it up yourself) but one of the best is VAXBar

Someday i hope to get back to the network-controlled drink mixing machine (yes it will have /dev/vodka) but that's on the back burner for a bit.

On the more serious side, i think if you did want to mix computing and beverages, you'd do better using the heat from your cpu for keeping your coffee warm, not putting extra load on your cooling system (and god forbid warming up your beer when you run a big job)

Genes contain introns and exons. The introns are discarded, but the exons can discarded or included in the final protein. So for one gene we can code two similar, but functionally different proteins.

e.g. (numbers correspond to exons)

gene: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5
protein 1: 1 - 2 - 4 - 5
protein 2: 2 - 3 - 4 - 5

So in this case exon 1 and exon 3 could be different domains that completely change the functionality of the protein.

Another phenomenon that can happen from this is that the reading frame can be shifted from the splicing (if exon_length % 3 != 0) event and you get a completely different protein. This is usually found in organisms with smaller genomes.

More info available here.

There is actually a database dedicated to this phenonmena here.

Note: I am a crystallography and I admit to knowing very little about genetics, so take this at its face value

While you did find references to the modern insect sometimes called a water scorpion, it is not at all what is being referred to here. Water scorpion is an alternative name for sea scorpion, both common names for the eurypterids. One type of them also happens to be the state fossil of New York. While we probably can't say with real certainty just how nasty they might have been, I'd certainly be cautious around any 2 meter long, predatory arthropod.