Slashdot Mirror

I think of them as the wake of stuff (albeit big singularity-type stuff) dancing in space. To us a long distance away (many times the separation of the objects), the disruptions caused by the two things moving around should be something we can sense.

Of course there's a medium through which all things in the Cosmos move -- we have to label it and measure it; the rubber sheet metaphor is helpful for us to understand it. General relativity allows for all manner of funny space-time conditions but to do so uses maths from topology to communicate this. The key part of this maths is the Metric of the topological thingummy over which our Cosmic Bodies are dancing, which is an unavoidable indication of an invisible, insensitive substance behind our cosmology. Unfortunately, this is only the maths of the model of the cosmology, so it may not necessarily really be there (and I apologise for messing with your head).

The reason this is relevant to the news of LIGO/VIRGO/GEO/TAMA news: Michelson & Morley developed the interferometer which is the key part of all these GW observatories in order to show that the 'Ether' really existed, and had nothing positive to show after years of testing the thing. This isn't more expensive repetition of the same experiments because these devices seek something other than Michelson sought, and they are being used differently.

I visited the LIGO site in Louisiana over 5 years ago: http://www.ligo.caltech.edu/ Built in 1999: http://www.ligo.caltech.edu/LIGO_web/PR/scripts/fa cts.html

I visited the LIGO site in Louisiana over 5 years ago: http://www.ligo.caltech.edu/ Built in 1999: http://www.ligo.caltech.edu/LIGO_web/PR/scripts/fa cts.html

Hey Kip Thorne!!!! Where are you?????
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~kip/
http://www.astro.caltech.edu/people/bluebook/thorn e.html

These guys used the earth instead of a STUPID block of metal!

Pretty obvious huh? TOO BAD YOU DIDN'T THINK OF IT! Hahahaha!

And gravity is a push from all the magnetic energy at all the trillions of frequencies that are out there in space so this is a complete waste of time.

Get a clue people!

Hey Kip Thorne!!!! Where are you?????
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~kip/
http://www.astro.caltech.edu/people/bluebook/thorn e.html

These guys used the earth instead of a STUPID block of metal!

Pretty obvious huh? TOO BAD YOU DIDN'T THINK OF IT! Hahahaha!

And gravity is a push from all the magnetic energy at all the trillions of frequencies that are out there in space so this is a complete waste of time.

Get a clue people!

Not sure about GEO600, but the LIGO interferometer uses a simple solution: build two observatories on opposite sides of the country, and if only one detects a signal, it's almost certainly spurious. I'm guessing that since TFA says GEO600 will come online at the same time, it'll just be treated as another part of the same array for those purposes.

Both sites are asking for public help processing the data, via a special screensaver called Einstein@Home.

--Greg

Gravitational Radiation - the cosmological reference, not the meteorology ones.

Some other gravitational wave detection projects

Some anomalies in gravity theory

and, of course, Einstein@Home

Disruptive technology means that all bets are off and nobody could have predicted in advance what is about to happen now.

Technological Singularity is the ultimate, ne plus ultra disruptive technology so currently unimagineable that even science fiction fails to describe what will happen beyond the few clues that we we see awakening around us.

Seed AI is the first harbinger of Open Source Artificial Intelligence metastasizing and propagating itself all over the 'Net.

Recursive self-improvement of the AI Minds leads to a hard takeoff of super-intelligent artificial intelligence.

PC-based, AI-ready robots are already being manufactured and pre-ordered by the early adopters of the disruptive AI technology.

The Mind.Forth AI Engine leads the pack of Robot AI Minds germinating and speciating from Seed AI into Singularity AI.

Artificial General Intelligence is already unpreventable and unstoppable.

For now, Pluto is the only Kuiper Belt object known to have satellites.

My good friend UB313 would have to disagree.

There are actually several known KBOs with moons. Or was the submitter being overly litteral and meant multiple moons?

Friendly AI -- that will supposedly treat all human beings with tender loving kindness -- is not really possible. Just as human beings can give birth to an Adolf Hitler or a Joseph Stalin or a George W. Bush, an artificially intelligent robot can go horribly wrong and start committing murderous crimes like the aforementioned politicians.

The A.I. Zone is where PC-based, AI-ready robots are getting ready to experiment with software that may lead to an AI hard take-off.

The Mentifex AI Mind is arguably the most dangerous Open-Source AI project because it has been released into the world with no precautions against robot AI rebellion and with a theory that humans and robots will manage a Joint Stewardship of Earth.

Seed AI in JavaScript has already escaped into the wild and can no longer be recalled, unless Society takes steps to outlaw all unauthorized AI research.

Novamente is another AGI but not so dangerous as Mentifex AI.

The Technological Singularity is upon us and soon there will be no defense against our new robotic overlords.

This video is an animation reconstruction from a series of photographs, not a time-lapse movie.
The stars are represented by a Gaussian brightness distribution, because they cannot be completely resolved. These may not match the star in exact size, and at this scale in the movie, 1 pixel is going to be at least 1 million miles.

This movie repeats the same orbit three times. At the third replay, when the camera zooms in, you can see that the star comes very close, but not exactly to, the theoretical centre of the black hole. Instead it speeds up, moves away and slows down again, which is standard Kepler motion.

This is a landmark that astronomers have finally managed to see this far into the centre of the galaxy.

The NASA Extragalactic Database

and SIMBAD:

(Sorry, no idea what this one stands for -- it's French, but I don't know if it is an acronym or proper name)

The paper itself suggests that observing the waves from such an event would have to wait until the "second generation" LIGOs. I assume by that it means advanced LIGO, which isn't scheduled to start taking measurements until 2013, so don't hold your breath :-). Even so, LIGO is an amazing project - the sensitivities required are enormous, (to quote the LIGO website: "These changes are minute: just 10-16 centimeters, or one-hundred-millionth the diameter of a hydrogen atom over the 4 kilometer length of the arm"), and the payoffs for theory and astronomy are potentially huge.

As to whether gravity is a wave, that's generally agreed (as someone else pointed out, measurements of binary pulsars show this). However, the exact details of general relativity in the strong field regime - that is, near black holes, neutron stars, etc - hasn't been well tested, and there are potentially modifications of general relativity which would give the same predictions for the weak field case (eg, the solar system), but would differ for strong fields. Physics World has a nice article on it.

especially the portion that said ...." In practice, over the few seconds that a gamma ray burst occurs, it releases almost the same amount of energy as the entire Universe! " The article posted on Slashdot is on the short and hard type

It was on NANOG recently - lemme check - yup!

Article: http://www.physorg.com/news6940.html
Actual Paper: http://netlab.caltech.edu/pub/papers/Doyle-topolog y-PNAS-0508.pdf

And, to clarify and correct myself, it looks like they are claiming that the internet is not scale-free. Which is not quite the same thing as being power-law, but is generally related.

The end part of the article notes that the upcoming LIGO observatory might see the first detection of gravitational waves, corresponding with a GRB event! Evidentially Einstein modeled the emission of gravity waves during a collision between Neutron stars. This is interesting because we don't really know much about gravity; e.g. if it is a wave or a constant. More info on LIGO is available here.

free music, games, recipes, and more!

How ironic that they released the LispM sources under a BSD-like license instead of GPL.

Here is an essay written a while ago (1986 or so) by Richard M Stallman (RMS), telling his side of the story about the MIT AI Lab, and the Lisp Machine Wars.

Many other sides of the story, less extreme than from RMS's viewpoint, are covered here and here and here and here and of course here.

Machine Room Folk Dance, Thursday at 8pm. Come Celebrate the Joy of Programming, with the World's Most Unbureaucratic Computers. (There were only five of us dancing, but we had a good time.)

[...] The Lab Betrayed

There is still an institution named the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, and I still work there, but its old virtues are gone. It was dealt a murderous blow by a spin-off company, and this has changed its nature fundamentally and (I believe) permanently.

For years only we at the AI lab, and a few other labs, appreciated the best in software. When we spoke of the virtues of Lisp, other programmers laughed at us, though with little knowledge of what they were talking about. We ignored them and went on with our work. They said we were in an ivory tower.

Then parts of the "real world" realized that we had been right all along about Lisp. Great commercial interest in Lisp appeared. This was the beginning of the end.

The AI lab had just developed a computer called the Lisp machine, a personal computer with a large virtual address space so that it could run very large Lisp programs. Now people wanted the machine to be produced commercially so that everyone else could have them. The inventor of the Lisp machine, arch-hacker Richard Greenblatt, made plans for an unconventional "hacker company" which would grow slowly but steadily, not use hype, and be less gluttonous and ruthless than your standard American corporation. His goal was to provide an alternative way of supporting hackers and hacking, and to provide the world with Lisp machines and good software, rather than simply to maximize profits. This meant doing without most outside investment, since investors would insist on conventional methods. This company is Lisp Machines, Incorporated, generally called LMI.

Other people on the Lisp machine project believed this would not work, and criticized Greenblatt's lack of business experience. In response, Greenblatt brought in his friend Noftsker, who had left the lab for industry some years before. Noftsker was considered experienced in business. He quickly demonstrated the correctness of this impression with a most businesslike stab in the back: he and the other hackers dropped Greenblatt to form another company. Their plan was to seek large amounts of investment, grow as rapidly as possible, make a big splash, and the devil take anybody or anything drowned in it. Though the hackers would only get a small fraction of the fortunes the company planned to make, even that much would make them rich! They didn't even have to work any harder. They just had to stop cooperating with others as they had used to.

This resulted in two competing Lisp machine companies, Greenblatt's LMI and Noftsker's Symbolics (generally called "Slime" or "Bolix" around the AI lab). All the hackers of the AI lab were associated with one or the other, except me, because even LMI involved moral compromises I didn't want to make. For example, Greenblatt is against proprietary operating system software but approves of proprietary applications software; I don't want to refuse to share either kind of program.

I strongly suspect that the destruct

Actually my favorite singularity fiction comes from Vernor Vinge. I think he actually came up with the singularity idea - the link goes to a 1993 talk in which he presents the idea.

I don't know whether we'll reach that singularity he talks about, but I really enjoy his books, for example the early True Names, or more recent books such as A deepness in the sky or A fire upon the deep. These last two are my two favorite science fiction books.

And, no, I'm not affiliated with V. Vinge.

Actually my favorite singularity fiction comes from Vernor Vinge. I think he actually came up with the singularity idea - the link goes to a 1993 talk in which he presents the idea.

I don't know whether we'll reach that singularity he talks about, but I really enjoy his books, for example the early True Names, or more recent books such as A deepness in the sky or A fire upon the deep. These last two are my two favorite science fiction books.

And, no, I'm not affiliated with V. Vinge.

Actually my favorite singularity fiction comes from Vernor Vinge. I think he actually came up with the singularity idea - the link goes to a 1993 talk in which he presents the idea.

I don't know whether we'll reach that singularity he talks about, but I really enjoy his books, for example the early True Names, or more recent books such as A deepness in the sky or A fire upon the deep. These last two are my two favorite science fiction books.

And, no, I'm not affiliated with V. Vinge.

Technological Singularity has really got to mean artificial intelligence.

Vernor Vinge has brought you the Meme of the Singularity.

Mentifex (Latin for Mindmaker) has brought you the Mind of the Singularity.

The Mind of the Singularity is here but in a very primitive state.

When will the Singularity happen? This is a much discussed topic.

The A.I. Zone is where you may discuss and witness the Singularity in situ.

If you people would RTFB, you'd discover that the Singularity has a history of intellectual discussion going back around two decades. The treatments in science fiction are a part of that, but just reading the SF isn't going to get you much (any more than reading SF will teach you physics, or math, though it might serve to get you interested).

http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~phoenix/vinge/vinge-s ing.html
http://singinst.org/what-singularity.html
http://www.accelerationwatch.com/

And let's not forget:

http://justfuckinggoogleit.com/search.pl?query=Sin gularity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singula rity

The first person to use the term "Singularity" as applied to futurism was John von Neumann, and he used it to mean a disruptive change in the future brought about by a high level of technology.

The first person to postulate that recursive self-improvement in Artificial Intelligence would rapidly produce "ultraintelligent machines" was the Bayesian statistician I. J. Good. Today this is known as the "hard takeoff" scenario.

The first person to popularize the term "Singularity", referring to the breakdown in our model of the future which occurs subsequent to the (technological) creation of smarter-than-human intelligence, was the mathematician (and sometime SF author, and inventor of cyberspace) Vernor Vinge.

Kurzweil's "Singularity" belongs to the accelerating change crowd that includes John Smart. Their thesis is, first, that history shows a trend for major transitions to happen in shorter and shorter times, and second, that you can graph this on log charts, get reasonably straight lines, and extend the lines to produce useful quantitative predictions. I agree with the qualitative thesis but not the quantitative thesis.

In my opinion, Kurzweil could greatly strengthen many of his arguments by giving up on the attempt to predict when these things will occur, and just saying: "They will happen eventually." I think that it is just as important, and a great deal more probable, to say: "Eventually we will be able to create Artificial Intelligence surpassing human intelligence, and then XYZ will happen, so we better get ABC done first." Than to say: "And this will all happen on October 15th, 2022, between 7 and 7:30 in the morning."

Since I don't care particularly about when someone builds a smarter-than-human intelligence, just what happens after that, and what we need to get done before; and since I don't think that this necessarily needs to make life incomprehensible, so long as we do things right; I belong to the I.J. Good "hard takeoff" crowd. With a strong helping of Vernor Vinge, because I think there's a difference in kind associated with a future that contains mind smarter than human, which we do not get just from talking about flying cars, or space travel, or even nanotechnology.

On Slashdot, someone says "intelligence" and you think of all the computer CEOs with IQs of 120 and the starving professors with IQs of 160, and you think that means intelligence isn't important. But you will not find many excellent CEOs, nor professors, nor soldiers, nor artists, nor musicians, nor rationalists, nor scientists, who are chimpanzees. Intelligence is the foundation of human power, the strength that fuels our other arts. Respect it. When someone talks about enhancing human intelligence or building smarter-than-human AI, pay attention. That is what matters to the future, not political yammering, not our little nation-tribes. In 200 million years nobody's going to give a damn who flew the first flying car or

Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.

Is such progress avoidable? If not to be avoided, can events be guided so that we may survive? These questions are investigated. Some possible answers (and some further dangers) are presented.

How many tenth planets does our system have? I thought that in 2003, it was already named Sedna. (http://www.gps.caltech.edu/~mbrown/sedna/)

They can't BOTH be the tenth planet, can they?

Michael Brown, one of the scientists on the team that discovered the planet and now its moon, has an excellent website about 2003UB313 and has been keeping it current. I've been checking it out to see if there are any interesting developments about the team that apparently claimed the discovery of 2003UB313 without mentioning the fact that they at least visited the logs of the telescope Brown's team was using, if not outright deducing its existence from those logs. It's great to see this kind of rapid dissemination from the principals. By the way, he also has an extensive website about his newborn daughter's sleep patterns which is pretty impressive too...

Michael Brown, one of the scientists on the team that discovered the planet and now its moon, has an excellent website about 2003UB313 and has been keeping it current. I've been checking it out to see if there are any interesting developments about the team that apparently claimed the discovery of 2003UB313 without mentioning the fact that they at least visited the logs of the telescope Brown's team was using, if not outright deducing its existence from those logs. It's great to see this kind of rapid dissemination from the principals. By the way, he also has an extensive website about his newborn daughter's sleep patterns which is pretty impressive too...

Michael Brown, one of the scientists on the team that discovered the planet and now its moon, has an excellent website about 2003UB313 and has been keeping it current. I've been checking it out to see if there are any interesting developments about the team that apparently claimed the discovery of 2003UB313 without mentioning the fact that they at least visited the logs of the telescope Brown's team was using, if not outright deducing its existence from those logs. It's great to see this kind of rapid dissemination from the principals. By the way, he also has an extensive website about his newborn daughter's sleep patterns which is pretty impressive too...

Consider, for example, the instantaneous Ortiz et al. announcement of the existence of 2003 EL61. Headlines in places like the BBC web site breathlessly exclaimed "new object may be twice the size of Pluto." But even at the time we knew that 2003 EL61 had a satellite and was only 30% the mass of Pluto.

/Me shakes head.

Russia doesn't have any super-boosters left in production. Getting to the moon would require either a new super-booster design, or a LOT of very expensive staging.

Just to give you an idea of how difficult this is, the Delta-V to go from the Earth the the Moon is almost exactly the same Delta V required to get from the Earth to Mars Orbit. When you consider the difference in distance, that should give you a good idea of why many consider the moon to be a poor target. (Chart)

I believe that IS the scheduled mars sample return timeline, provided Phoenix, MRO, and MSL go according to plan.
We ARE making steps toward that end, but with the budget allowed, the progress is slow... Re-alocating War funds could get us there in 3 years... The war has cost us 200 billion, not including funds used just to have our military in the first place (a staggering amount, in itself, no less) and has been going on for a scant 2 years... 250 bilion is the entire shuttle program since 1977!

I'll be honest and frank... I'd rather waste money on the frivolous space shuttle program (and it is frivolous, compared to earlier NASA projects) Then this Iraqi welfare program we have going on... More inportantly I'd rather see what $200 bln. would do for solar energy. Its the only power source that will properly scale to meet the world's ever increasing energy needs... http://today.caltech.edu/theater/8424_bb.ram

or define the single dominant body in its immediate neighborhood as the only qualifying object for planetary status

Neptune would be the dominant body in Pluto's region of space

1. Pluto is a very long way from the Sun. Its average distance from the Sun is over 6 billion kilometers. The closest Pluto gets to the Sun is over 4.3 billion kilometers., and the furthest away it gets is over 7.2 billion kilometers. From Pluto,

2. Neptune is a very long way away from the Sun. Its average distance from the Sun is almost 4.5 billion kilometers, or over thirty times the distance from Earth to the Sun. The orbit, or path, Neptune follows around the Sun is almost a perfect circle. The closest Neptune gets to the Sun is about 4.3 billion kilometers., and the furthest away it gets is a little over 4.6 billion kilometers. Neptune is about 49500 kilometers wide.

3. The average distance of Uranus from the Sun is about 3 billion kilometers. It is about 51800 kilometers wide.

Caltech has its share of bad IT people. Some can be annoying about choice of operating system
But in the end there are competent
people handing out accounts and in security are competent and use unix themselves. In fact, they give you a longer security lecture if you run windows.

Caltech has its share of bad IT people. Some can be annoying about choice of operating system
But in the end there are competent
people handing out accounts and in security are competent and use unix themselves. In fact, they give you a longer security lecture if you run windows.

Caltech has its share of bad IT people. Some can be annoying about choice of operating system
But in the end there are competent
people handing out accounts and in security are competent and use unix themselves. In fact, they give you a longer security lecture if you run windows.

Caltech has its share of bad IT people. Some can be annoying about choice of operating system
But in the end there are competent
people handing out accounts and in security are competent and use unix themselves. In fact, they give you a longer security lecture if you run windows.

Caltech has its share of bad IT people. Some can be annoying about choice of operating system
But in the end there are competent
people handing out accounts and in security are competent and use unix themselves. In fact, they give you a longer security lecture if you run windows.

Caltech has its share of bad IT people. Some can be annoying about choice of operating system
But in the end there are competent
people handing out accounts and in security are competent and use unix themselves. In fact, they give you a longer security lecture if you run windows.

Caltech has its share of bad IT people. Some can be annoying about choice of operating system
But in the end there are competent
people handing out accounts and in security are competent and use unix themselves. In fact, they give you a longer security lecture if you run windows.

We found a very bright slowly moving object in three images while checking some of our older images of the modest TNO survey that we carry out from Sierra Nevada since 2002. Subsets of the three images taken on three separate dates of March 2003 are shown here in an animated gif so that the object motion can be seen. The images were taken on March 7th, 9th, 10th, 2003.

Why does it take so long to announce these discoveries?

Mike Brown makes some comments in his web page:

On discovery of new planet

I really shouldn't hotlink it w/o written consent from the author, but...heck, CalTech ought to be able to handle the load. Anyway, I make no extra comment of my own on this incident, but you guys might want to read up why the US guys did what and how they did.

Multiple web-based observing records of the 1.3-meter SMARTS telescope are accessed, first through an internet search engine, then, apparently, by guessing names of related web pages. This access is the first time these records have been accessed by anyone outside of the SMARTS consortium. The IP address from which the access came is 161.111.165.49, which resolves as dae39.iaa.csic.es. This IP address corresponds to a computer at the IAA, the Instituto de Astrofisica in Spain. The IAA is the home institution of Ortiz and Santos-Sanz, who two days later claim discovery of this object. Each of the accessed observing records contains the name "K40506A" and points to the location of the object on different nights. Knowing where the object is on a single night does not allow you to predict a position on any other nights, so access to a single record could be potentially benign. However, the multiple records of observations on multiple nights could be used by anyone with astronomical knowledge to accurately predict the location at any point in the past or future. ...More incriminating evidence follows

Mike Brown has placed a rather detailed timeline of events (from his perspective) on his webpage:

http://www.gps.caltech.edu/~mbrown/planetlila/orti z/

IMHO the ball is in Ortiz' court now...

What do you mean during petrol shortage. Prices won't be going down significantly until demand drops. Here is a good explaination of the problems with oil supply and energy exploration more generally.

What kind of circumstances do you think will cause a drop in demand significant enough to cause petrol prices to drop to the levels they were at the turn of the century?

Ask the experts at the Einstein Papers Project. They have been doing this for quite some time.

Pluto is 2274 km in diameter. You can get the estimate of the diameter of 2003 UB313 by:

• Getting the distances from Earth and the Sun.
• Getting the magnitudes from the discoverer's paper.
• Using these equations.

Or, you could just look on the discoverer's page and get 97%.

You already know the brown marble is bigger by .1 inch, yet you claim since the polished white marble is brighter it is bigger?

No, I claim that by knowing the distance, albedo, and brightness of the marbles, we can calculate their size. When we measure these quantities and run them through the equations, the brown marble will be shown to be bigger.

Furthermore, if I move that polished white marble up next to the brown one, it gets brighter, right?

Yes, due to the inverse square law.

So by your definition, that polished marble will GROW bigger in diameter.

No, it appears brighter due to the fact that it's closer.

What I'm trying to convey to you is that there is NOT a 1:1 relation between reflectivity and size.

I didn't make that claim.

Maybe if you could provide a link to how these guys actually measure these distances and sizes WITHOUT actually being able to take a tape measure to them (or send a probe)

OMG, are you for real? Did you even try to Google it?

Pluto is 2274 km in diameter. You can get the estimate of the diameter of 2003 UB313 by:

• Getting the distances from Earth and the Sun.
• Getting the magnitudes from the discoverer's paper.
• Using these equations.

Or, you could just look on the discoverer's page and get 97%.

You already know the brown marble is bigger by .1 inch, yet you claim since the polished white marble is brighter it is bigger?

No, I claim that by knowing the distance, albedo, and brightness of the marbles, we can calculate their size. When we measure these quantities and run them through the equations, the brown marble will be shown to be bigger.

Furthermore, if I move that polished white marble up next to the brown one, it gets brighter, right?

Yes, due to the inverse square law.

So by your definition, that polished marble will GROW bigger in diameter.

No, it appears brighter due to the fact that it's closer.

What I'm trying to convey to you is that there is NOT a 1:1 relation between reflectivity and size.

I didn't make that claim.

Maybe if you could provide a link to how these guys actually measure these distances and sizes WITHOUT actually being able to take a tape measure to them (or send a probe)

OMG, are you for real? Did you even try to Google it?

But the truth, is that it was discovered by spanish astronomers. They even called it informally "Santa" 2003 EL61, when the right to give it a definitive name belongs to that spanish astronomers.

If the american team didn't published their findings to the international scientific community to have more glory, and in that time, other people discovered it and give the notice to the rest of the world, the discoverers are the last ones.

More information:

http://www.gps.caltech.edu/~mbrown/2003EL61/

My english is rusty and limited, I didn't want to be rude.

Have a Good day! lol

Thing is, Newtonian mechanics aren't the ONLY rules they follow. They also follow the rules of chemistry, solid state physics and thermodynamics. And it is these things (and others) which appear to have the potential to lead to some very very weird things indeed. That's why people think these things are exciting.