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Due to the end of the exponential growth of academia in the 1970s:
    http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html

Three people who talk about education:
    http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
    http://www.holtgws.com/

From the first, Dr. David Goodstein:
"""
      We must find a radically different social structure to organize research and education in science after The Big Crunch. That is not meant to be an exhortation. It is meant simply to be a statement of a fact known to be true with mathematical certainty, if science is to survive at all. The new structure will come about by evolution rather than design, because, for one thing, neither I nor anyone else has the faintest idea of what it will turn out to be, and for another, even if we did know where we are going to end up, we scientists have never been very good at guiding our own destiny. Only this much is sure: the era of exponential expansion will be replaced by an era of constraint. Because it will be unplanned, the transition is likely to be messy and painful for the participants. In fact, as we have seen, it already is. Ignoring the pain for the moment, however, I would like to look ahead and speculate on some conditions that must be met if science is to have a future as well as a past.
      It seems to me that there are two essential and clearly linked conditions to consider. One is that there must be a broad political consensus that pure research in basic science is a common good that must be supported from the public purse. The second is that the mining and sorting operation I've described must be discarded and replaced by genuine education in science, not just for the scientific elite, but for all the citizens who must form that broad political consensus.
"""
   

The formula: N(>E) = k(E + 1)^-a

N is impacts per second
E is the impact energy in in GeV
k is ~5,000 particles per steradian per square meter per second
a is about 1.6.

So the ground your feet occupy get a dozen or so such collisions per day, and so on.

"The Big Crunch" by David Goodstein, Vice Provost, Caltech
      http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
"I would like to propose a different and more illuminating metaphor for American science education. It is more like a mining and sorting operation, designed to cast aside most of the mass of common human debris, but at the same time to discover and rescue diamonds in the rough, that are capable of being cleaned and cut and polished into glittering gems, just like us, the existing scientists. It takes only a little reflection to see how much more this model accounts for than the pipeline does. It accounts for exponential growth, since it takes scientists to identify prospective scientists. It accounts for the very real problem that women and minorities are woefully underrepresented among the scientists, because it is hard for us, white, male scientists to perceive that once they are cleaned and cut and polished, they will look like us. It accounts for the fact that science education is for the most part a dreary business, a burden to student and teacher alike at all levels of American education, until the magic moment when a teacher recognizes a potential peer, at which point it becomes exhilarating and successful. Above all, it resolves the paradox of Scientific Elites and Scientific Illiterates. It explains why we have the best scientists and the most poorly educated students in the world. It is because our entire system of education is designed to produce precisely that result."

See also:
"[p2p-research] College Daze links"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-October/005379.html

Gentoo is great if you want to learn a whole lot about Linux fast, because you're going to have to know to get it working.

Inside I see that Bill is a mechanic of the "photographic mind" school. Everything lying around everywhere. Wrenches, screwdrivers, old parts, old motorcycles, new parts, new motorcycles, sales literature, inner tubes, all scattered so thickly and clutteredly you can't even see the workbenches under them. I couldn't work in conditions like this but that's just because I'm not a photographic-mind mechanic. Bill can probably turn around and put his hand on any tool in this mess without having to think about where it is. I've seen mechanics like that. Drive you crazy to watch them, but they get the job done just as well and sometimes faster. Move one tool three inches to the left though, and he'll have to spend days looking for it.

Bill arrives with a grin about something. Sure, he's got some jets for my machine and knows right where they are. I'll have to wait a second though. He's got to close a deal out in back on some Harley parts. I go with him out in a shed in back and see he is selling a whole Harley machine in used parts, except for the frame, which the customer already has. He is selling them all for $125. Not a bad price at all.

Coming back I comment, "He'll know something about motorcycles before he gets those together."

Bill laughs. "And that's the best way to learn, too."

from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig.

Author's Note

What follows is based on actual occurrences. Although much has been changed for rhetorical purposes, it must be regarded in its essence as fact. However, it should in no way be associated with that great body of factual information relating to orthodox Zen Buddhist practice. It's not very factual on motorcycles, either.

"On the way out the door I deposit any mail I have to be sent out via the U.S. Postal Service and drop the kids off at the public school."

I should have caught that as a problem too. Someday, public schools may be much more like public libraries open to anyone to use than day prisons for children of working parents, but until then, consider:

"Links about alternative peer-oriented education"
http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Education

"The Underground History of American Education" by 1991 NYS Teacher of
the Year John Taylor Gatto
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm

"The Seven Lesson Schoolteacher" also by John Taylor Gatto
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt

"State Controlled Consciousness" also by John Taylor Gatto
http://www.the-open-boat.com/Gatto.html

"The Big Crunch" by David Goodstein, Vice Provost, Caltech
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html

"Disciplined Minds" by Jeff Schmidt
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/

"What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream" by Noam Chomsky
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199710--.htm

"University Secrets:Your Guide to Surviving a College Education" by Robert D. Honigman
http://web.archive.org/web/20060707100524/www.universitysecrets.com/us.htm

"In Defense of Childhood: Protecting Kids' Inner Wildness " by Chris
Mercogliano, who spent thirty-five years teaching at the Albany Free School
http://www.chrismercogliano.com/childhood.htm

"Teach Your Own" by John Holt (and other books)
http://www.holtgws.com/

"The Teenage Liberation Handbook" by Grace Llewellyn (and other books)
http://gracellewellyn.com/

"The Emergence of Compulsory Schooling and ... Resistance" By Matt Hern
http://web.archive.org/web/20071014123355/http://www.social-ecology.org/article.php?story=20031028151034651

"Sustainable Education" by Jerry Mintz
http://www.greenmoneyjournal.com/article.mpl?articleid=195&newsletterid=1

"Federated Learning Communities"
http://www.ericdigests.org/2000-1/learning.html
http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/ilc/models.html

"The Three Boxes of Life and How to Get Out of Them: An Introduction to
Life/Work Planning" by Richard N. Bolles (also writes "What Color is Your
Parachute")
http://www.amazon.com/Three-Boxes-Life-How-Them/dp/0913668583

General related:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies_My_Teacher_Told_Me

http://www.hss.caltech.edu/~camerer/Ec101/JudgementUncertainty.pdf

Tversky, A. & Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Science, 185, 1124-1130

CC.

Go to all this trouble and yet not even set your camera right. What sort of grade would that get at MIT?

I suppose then that MIT students don't make mistakes?

There is a picture [upper right-hand column] linked from the original article: http://spitzer.caltech.edu/news/966-ssc2009-19-NASA-Space-Telescope-Discovers-Largest-Ring-Around-Saturn

Woops. I mean this article: http://spitzer.caltech.edu/news/966-ssc2009-19-NASA-Space-Telescope-Discovers-Largest-Ring-Around-Saturn

Here is the original article on Spitzer's site: http://spitzer.caltech.edu/news/964-ssc2009-18-NASA-s-Spitzer-Spots-Clump-of-Swirling-Planetary-Material

This article provides much more detail. The "Interplanetary Transport Network" article at Wikipedia contains references and links to more, if that isn't good enough.

Here's an article on this that is a bit more technical.

DarrenBaker, a gravity wave is not a change in the gravitational constant; it is a deformation of the space-time fabric itself. So it doesn't change the gravitational (attractive) force between masses but simply moves the "fabric" on which they lie.

Imagine a stretchy, rubber fabric that you pull/push or move upward/downward from one side such that a wave propagates through. Then two masses lying on this fabric, link ping pong balls that you would stick on, would move closer/further apart. That's basically the effect that people are trying to measure. Of course, if these "test" objects are perfect in such that they're infinitely small, everything behaves in a trivial way. The catch is when your object is not "perfect" anymore and possesses some finite size. This seems to be concept that you worry about and you are right. Because of it's finite size, the object itself would change size. However, it does not matter at all because this change is not significant. Here's why:

The amplitude of a gravity wave is express in a weird unit expressing the ratio of the spatial compression in one direction to the stretching in the orthogonal direction (see the nice animation here). A typical gravity wave would have an amplitude of 10^-20., which basically mean that any object would change size by this fraction. So this is practically undetectable unless you consider something really big like the "arms" of the LIGO gravity wave detectors or this pulsar timing array. The other thing to take into account is the fact that what you are trying to detect acts like a wave. Waves that this pulsar array is after have frequencies of nanohertz, or wavelengths of 3*10^17 meters (this is about 32 light-year!). For LIGO, frequencies are the order of 1 hertz, so 300 000 km. Hence if your object, the pulsar for the pulsar array, or the mirror/detector for LIGO is much smaller that the wavelength that you attempt to detect, it really doesn't have any effect on what you are trying to measure.

I'm shocked by the amount of ignorance in the comments here about schooling and the reason for alternatives. I can only think the "Stockholm Syndrome" is in play. With that said, I did not understand these issue when I was in school, either, and I resisted accepting them even when they were pointed out once or twice back then.

Some links:

"John Taylor Gatto - State Controlled Consciousness"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ogCc8ObiwQ

http://www.school-survival.net/
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/200909/why-don-t-students-school-well-duhhhh
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/18s.htm
http://homeschooling.gomilpitas.com/
http://www.greenmoneyjournal.com/article.mpl?articleid=195&newsletterid=1
http://web.archive.org/web/20071014123355/http://www.social-ecology.org/article.php?story=20031028151034651
http://www.chrismercogliano.com/freeschool.htm
http://www.holtgws.com/faqabouthomescho.html

My writings:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/the-war-play-dilemma.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html

From:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling
"""
During this time, the American educational professionals Raymond and Dorothy
Moore began to research the academic validity of the rapidly growing Early
Childhood Education movement. This research included independent studies by
other researchers and a review of over 8,000 studies bearing on Early
Childhood Education and the physical and mental development of children.
They asserted that formal schooling before ages 8-12 not only lacked the
anticipated effectiveness, but was actually harmful to children. The Moores
began to publish their view that formal schooling was damaging young
children academically, socially, mentally, and even physiologically. They
presented evidence that childhood problems such as juvenile delinquency,
nearsightedness, increased enrollment of students in special education
classes, and behavioral problems were the result of increasingly earlier
enrollment of students.[9] The Moores cited studies demonstrating that
orphans who were given surrogate mothers were measurably more intelligent,
with superior long term effects - even though the mothers were mentally
retarded teenagers - and that illiterate tribal mothers in Africa produced
children who were socially and emotionally more advanced than typical
western children, by western standards of measurement.[9]
Their primary assertion was that the bonds and emotional development made
at home with parents during these years produced critical long term results
that were cut short by enro

I think you miss the point. Even a small 0.5-meter telescope in space is a SMEX-class NASA mission and costs well over 100 million bucks. If you can do some of the same science with a *comparably small* ground-based telescope, you win. By a lot.

Similarly, your 5-meter (or larger) telescope on the ground would be competing with SOFIA and Herschel and JWST for many applications. Those are all billion dollar class projects.

If you really want to compare a 10-meter telescope on the ground to a half-meter telescope in space, feel free... the costs start to get pretty similar. But the comparison in terms of scientific capability is not usually valid.

And by *usually*, I mean that there are some capabilities that can only be done in space. Ground facilities will never compete in those genres. But when you *can* do something from the ground, by all means you should do so.

BTW, these folks would be bemused by your comment that a half-meter telescope would be "uselessly small".

Actually, forecast prediction has increased dramatically in the last 10 years based on the data from satellites nearer the Sun such as ACE and SOHO. Based on the solar information, ground-based and near Earth measurements have provided scientists (and engineers) the ability to combat potential events that could damage satellites (such as communication or GPS) or ground electrical systems. Based on observations of the Sun, we can give a forecast of as much as 3 days in advance with reasonable accuracy. Unexpected events do happen but overall, forecasting space weather is much easier than local tropospheric weather.

• Multiscale networking, robustness, and rigor, by John Doyle, a simplified discussion of his own research area
• Patterns in Network Architecture, a book by John Day on new paradigms for network architecture

Bullshit.

Russian society is absolutely compatible with the Western model, and Western model is slowly being built. It _will_ take time, of course. Probably decades, but not generations. I'm certain of that.

For example, read this: http://www.hss.caltech.edu/~jlr/events/Icons%20versus%20Contracts.pdf
If you read Russian try this: http://www.kommersant.ru/doc.aspx?DocsID=1208915

With most probes they're pretty compact, small thruster bursts will do a lot.

How do you tack a solar sail though?

http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~diedrich/solarsails/intro/tacking.html

It can't work like a sailboat does... steering partly into the wind, or changing the sail angle to alter the thrust exerted. There's no resistive force to work against, so it just kind of goes where it is taken.

However, tacking with the solar sail is still possible.

This fellow, Paul Rothemund, may have developed this technique before Technische Universitaet Muenchen: http://www.dna.caltech.edu/~pwkr/

Here's a TED speech on it. Gives a more detailed idea of how it's meant to be used for construction: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yn1snjEtk54

Surprised this hasn't been mentioned. Especially since they're trying to credit T.U.M. with the technique.

There's a nice bit of software called PUFF that was written at Caltech. It is available as an MS-DOS binary, which you can run on XP or Mac through DOSBox. Also, on the PUFF website they report that the source code comes with the program, and some have had success in compiling it for Linux. Unfortunately, you can't buy the software directly. Some textbooks come packaged with it, though. I can recommend the Rutledge book as a nice overview of lab electronics.

There's a nice bit of software called PUFF that was written at Caltech. It is available as an MS-DOS binary, which you can run on XP or Mac through DOSBox. Also, on the PUFF website they report that the source code comes with the program, and some have had success in compiling it for Linux. Unfortunately, you can't buy the software directly. Some textbooks come packaged with it, though. I can recommend the Rutledge book as a nice overview of lab electronics.

The WikiScanner reveals the NPG have been busy vandalising Wikipedia themselves!

There's juvenile vandalism from them here and here.

They have also posted notices on pages that use low resolution images of their owned paintings, obscuring the encyclopedic content. This type of vandalism was done to at least articles related to images of the resolution 494x600, 494x600, 500x726, 494x600, ?, 322x250, 137x200, ?, 203x255 and 408x562.

So much for the low resolution image agreement!

Now, that is a very inflammatory subject title, so let me explain what I mean.

I was glad to see a previous comment referencing John Taylor Gatto. I do not see Gatto's name in the PDF document. Neither do I see John Holt's name. The fact is, the purpose of "schooling" (which is not the same as "education", and you would expect a mathematician to be more precise in a use of terms) is precisely to do what the mathematician decries at the end: "And there you have it. A complete prescription for permanently disabling young minds-- a proven cure for curiosity. What have they done to mathematics! There is such breathtaking depth and heartbreaking beauty in this ancient art form. How ironic that people dismiss mathematics as the antithesis of creativity. They are missing out on an art form older than any book, more profound than any poem, and more abstract than any abstract. And it is school that has done this! What a sad endless cycle of innocent teachers inflicting damage upon innocent students. We could all be having so much more fun."

Education in the USA will not improve until people like this mathematician accept that what he said is the intentional purpose of schooling in all subjects for almost all children. See things like:
    "The 7-Lesson Schoolteacher" by John Taylor Gatto, NYS Teacher of the Year
    http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
or:
    "The Big Crunch" by Dr. David Goodstein, Vice Provost Caltech
    http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
or:
    "Growing Without Schooling" about John Holt's work, including failed attempts to reform schools
    http://www.holtgws.com/

At this point, it is people like Paul Lockhart who are the problem. People who think school is about education, when it is about socialization in a certain way intended for the most part to produce compliant workers, obedient soldiers, and mindless consumers. School is for fish. Curriculums are race tracks. And "class rooms" are literally to build social classes through selective breeding by genetics. Those are the origins of all those terms, at least according to Gatto, and, again, you would expect a mathematician to be precise about the origins and use of terminology.

With all that said, of course Paul Lockhart is right about how to improve mathematics education. But, it will never work within a Prussian-derived school system with no interest in truly educating children, despite every person who works at a school calling themselves an educator, and despite the truth that most of the people in schools might be fine educators if given the chance and a few years of untraining of their bad habits.
    "The Emergence of Compulsory Schooling and ... Resistance"
    http://web.archive.org/web/20071014123355/http://www.social-ecology.org/article.php?story=20031028151034651

Anyway, sorry to be so harsh on you, Paul. Read "Disciplined Minds" and start building a social network to help you and them and others break out of the prison around you:
    "Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System That Shapes Their Lives"
    http://www.disciplined-minds.com/

The good news is, you have already taken the first step of getting out of the prison others have forced you to build for yourself.

Actually, it's unclear whether the Earth-Moon L2 is within the moon's cone of "radio silence". And anyway, L2 is unstable and requires constant station keeping. The moon is a big hunk of rock. Part of the attraction is that you can set up large arrays on the surface and they don't ever drift apart from each other or have any need of constant course correction to keep them a known distance apart. Plus, the lunar far side is also blocked from the Sun for two solid weeks at a time, which also eliminates another big source of radio noise.

Here's some dudes at Caltech laying out the arguments: http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~yukimoon/RALF/

Your suggestion sounds like a variation of this physicists suggestion:
"The Big Crunch"
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html

But there are a few deeper issues. Goodstein, for example, talks about general elitist issues in education.

Another I add is another interpretation of what it means as you suggest that the number of physicists exceeded "demand" (in a classical economics sense), since is that not just another way of saying the number of physicists exceeded what those with money were willing to pay for? And most of the problems the world faces (like starvation or river blindness or pollution or human rights issues) are not of urgent interest to many of those with serious money, who are often busy amusing themselves to death?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death
Or alternatively fighting to stay financially obese. Or alternatively, want do do good, but are so locked into a narrow competitive mindset they think the world will be saved by spreading competitive capitalism everywhere, like Iraq? This a broad failure of morality and ethics in our society, cultivated in part by a cult of consumerism linked to a malfunctioning industrial control system.

Here is the reason that everyone who wants to study physics in this potentially abundant world can not:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Triple_Revolution
http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
"The fundamental problem posed by the cybernation revolution in the U.S. is that it invalidates the general mechanism so far employed to undergird people's rights as consumers. Up to this time economic resources have been distributed on the basis of contributions to production, with machines and men competing for employment on somewhat equal terms. In the developing cybernated system, potentially unlimited output can be achieved by systems of machines which will require little cooperation from human beings. As machines take over production from men, they absorb an increasing proportion of resources while the men who are displaced become dependent on minimal and unrelated government measures--unemployment insurance, social security, welfare payments. These measures are less and less able to disguise a historic paradox: That a substantial proportion of the population is subsisting on minimal incomes, often below the poverty line, at a time when sufficient productive potential is available to supply the needs of everyone in the U.S. The existence of this paradox is denied or ignored by conventional economic analysis. ... The industrial system was designed to produce an ever-increasing quantity of goods as efficiently as possible, and it was assumed that the distribution of the power to purchase these goods would occur almost automatically. The continuance of the income-through jobs link as the only major mechanism for distributing effective demand--for granting the right to consume--now acts as the main brake on the almost unlimited capacity of a cybernated productive system."

We need to transition in general to a post-scarcity society moving beyond rationing the basics (perhaps a guaranteed basic income like social security for everyone would be a start). Right now, the post-scarcity technologies physicists and engineers (and even poets and novelists) have provided us with (like biotech, nuclear tech, nanotech, robotics, AI, advertising, the internet, and so on) are being wielded by people preoccupied with a scarcity worldview. That is a terribly dangerous situation, that people have the power to create and destroy so rapidly and so extensively, but many with that power do not see there are other options to

According to the article "the astronomers determined that the galaxy UGC 3789 is 160 million light-years from Earth". This translates to 49 Mpc. According to NED, the velocity (in the Cosmic Microwave Background frame) is 3385 km/s.

Therefore this measurement of the Hubble parameter is then 3385/49 = 69 km/s/Mpc.

(Unfortunately the article does not quote an uncertainty on the 49 Mpc measurement. Because of peculiar velocities, I would estimate that there is at least a 300 km/s uncertainty on the 3385 km/s velocity. )

From:
    http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
"""
The crises that face science are not limited to jobs and research funds. Those are bad enough, but they are just the beginning. Under stress from those problems, other parts of the scientific enterprise have started showing signs of distress. One of the most essential is the matter of honesty and ethical behavior among scientists.

The public and the scientific community have both been shocked in recent years by an increasing number of cases of fraud committed by scientists. There is little doubt that the perpetrators in these cases felt themselves under intense pressure to compete for scarce resources, even by cheating if necessary. As the pressure increases, this kind of dishonesty is almost sure to become more common.

Other kinds of dishonesty will also become more common. For example, peer review, one of the crucial pillars of the whole edifice, is in critical danger. Peer review is used by scientific journals to decide what papers to publish, and by granting agencies such as the National Science Foundation to decide what research to support. Journals in most cases, and agencies in some cases operate by sending manuscripts or research proposals to referees who are recognized experts on the scientific issues in question, and whose identity will not be revealed to the authors of the papers or proposals. Obviously, good decisions on what research should be supported and what results should be published are crucial to the proper functioning of science.

Peer review is usually quite a good way to identify valid science. Of course, a referee will occasionally fail to appreciate a truly visionary or revolutionary idea, but by and large, peer review works pretty well so long as scientific validity is the only issue at stake. However, it is not at all suited to arbitrate an intense competition for research funds or for editorial space in prestigious journals. There are many reasons for this, not the least being the fact that the referees have an obvious conflict of interest, since they are themselves competitors for the same resources. This point seems to be another one of those relativistic anomalies, obvious to any outside observer, but invisible to those of us who are falling into the black hole. It would take impossibly high ethical standards for referees to avoid taking advantage of their privileged anonymity to advance their own interests, but as time goes on, more and more referees have their ethical standards eroded as a consequence of having themselves been victimized by unfair reviews when they were authors. Peer review is thus one among many examples of practices that were well suited to the time of exponential expansion, but will become increasingly dysfunctional in the difficult future we face.

We must find a radically different social structure to organize research and education in science after The Big Crunch. That is not meant to be an exhortation. It is meant simply to be a statement of a fact known to be true with mathematical certainty, if science is to survive at all. The new structure will come about by evolution rather than design, because, for one thing, neither I nor anyone else has the faintest idea of what it will turn out to be, and for another, even if we did know where we are going to end up, we scientists have never been very good at guiding our own destiny. Only this much is sure: the era of exponential expansion will be replaced by an era of constraint. Because it will be unplanned, the transition is likely to be messy and painful for the participants. In fact, as we have seen, it already is. Ignoring the pain for the moment, however, I would like to look ahead and speculate on some conditions that must be met if science is to have a future as well as a past.
"""

Well for those like wondering what scientology has edited (lwhy it has led to such massive ban). I finally found those modifications through wikiscanner. http://katrina.cs.caltech.edu/erenrich_rnd345/scanner_final/ The result: http://katrina.cs.caltech.edu/erenrich_rnd345/scanner_final/company_selection.php?company_name=scientology You see 182 editors (I don't know how they found them) You can see all their modifications .

Well for those like wondering what scientology has edited (lwhy it has led to such massive ban). I finally found those modifications through wikiscanner. http://katrina.cs.caltech.edu/erenrich_rnd345/scanner_final/ The result: http://katrina.cs.caltech.edu/erenrich_rnd345/scanner_final/company_selection.php?company_name=scientology You see 182 editors (I don't know how they found them) You can see all their modifications .

Maybe a little background is in order:

http://www.its.caltech.edu/~jsnyder/

Classic Greek authors tell us that in the ancient Greece, dolphins and whales were already found stranded on the shore. This was a windfall for the locals, who were not eating meat very often. They saw it as a divine gift and thanked Poseidon for it.

So considering that the Greek galleys didn't use sonar, we need to stop barking at the wrong tree and find the cause of this phenomenon. My money is on a parasitic disease that affects the brain.

I had to reply to this thread, seeing only 9 hidden comments so far. That's a bit sad, since the JWST will be one of the most important science events since the Hubble. It will be an infrared telescope like the Spitzer, but it will effectively be an optical telescope for the distant universe because of red shift! And it will be able to peer into the distant past unlike any telescope prior.

In the sense of being a "space race" this is one area where the US really shines. There's no other nation that really is in the running, although there are lots of international contributions (yay Canada!). Maybe it's because of the language barrier, but I can't think of a single Russian space telescope. I can name a half dozen US scopes and one or two from the ESA. (Be sure to look up the Chandra, Fermi, Spitzer, XMM-Newton)

But then it's not really a space race, it's about science, so maybe it's a little boring for the general public. I only hope Slashdotter's are more aware that this is one of the great scientific adventures of our time.

If by delivery method, I think you might be right. Cable is probably on the way out and perhaps satellite to the consumer is as well. Not sure that holds true for digital broadcast.

However if by "TV" you mean the display device I have in the living room, then I think you are way off course. I do not want to watch something longer than 10 minutes on a computer. In the living room I have a nice comfy couch to sit on. I can share it with friends. You can have a date over to watch a movie (oh, wait I'm commenting on Slashdot, some members of the audiance might not understand that reference).

In the living room I enjoy watching movies from Netflix, Simpsons from Fox, and video podcasts from the internet. For example: http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/features/hd/hdfeed.xml

As already mentioned in a previous comment, the article is somewhat speculative and it is a little bit late to verify the experiment. The standard accepted practice for claiming the detection of a GW is to observe the event with at least 2 detectors which are separated far enough to not measure the same external disturbances (but preferably 3 or more spread around the world so that you can do proper triangulation of the source). One single glitch might be a cosmic ray, lightning, dust falling before your detector, an earthquake, an instrumental error, anything. We see more of those than we like. One glitch measured at different observatories within the time it takes to travel at lightspeed (a few ms) at different observatories around the world might give you a nobel prize.

One book that is high on my 'to read' list is Gravity's shadow, which supposedly describes not only Weber's experiments, but also its reception by the scientific community and the eventual downfall of Weber's reputation.

This is same idea, but a much larger mirror, as the Spitzer Space Telescope:
http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/about/index.shtml

The ESA, NASA and JPL have collaborated on this project since this appears to scaled up version of Spitzer Space Telescope with 6 years of advanced technology and lesson learned from Spitzer Space Telescope.

Good luck ESA with sending Herschel and Planck in space.

If you're interested in Axel, you should check out the Axel Homepage at Caltech. It has more information about the hardware, more movies, etc.

Slashdot might also be interested to know that Axel currently runs a stripped down version of Debian.

We are using lithium polymer batteries to power it right now. One of our current batteries will power Axel for about 20 minutes. With the current design we could easily fit two of these batteries inside, giving a running time of ~40 minutes.

It's important to note that Axel wraps the tether around it's own body. There's no winch at the top, just an anchor point. That anchor point could be a larger rover/lander or just a rock.

Here is Axel's official website:
http://robotics.caltech.edu/~pablo/axel/home.html

Disclaimer: The designer of the robot is my good friend.

Kepler is a tool for managing workflows that has been used for physics, see Plasma Edge Kinetic-MHD Modeling in Tokamaks Using Kepler Workflow for Code Coupling, Data Management and Visualization. Disclaimer: I contribute to the Kepler Project.

##sigh## Yes, now is the time we need Carl Lydick to join the discussion

[blink] I'm a little nearsighted (20/40 and 20/80) but I can see that double star without even thinking about it. With correction, it's perfectly evident.

However, I'm one of those freaks with obscenely precise colour vision; I also see VERY well in the dark (and tend to see better by looking straight at something than by the "not quite at it" technique). I suspect the two abilities are related. -- Conversely my neighbour, while not per-se colourblind, has poor colour vision with some deficit in yellow, and poor distinction among reds; she also sees VERY poorly in the dark, even with full correction and no retinal issues. Again, I suspect the deficits are related.

I do think some of us freaks have colour ranges that aren't kosher. Frex, when I had a woodstove, I could tell how hot the black metal top was by sight, even tho it stayed black; I suspect I was seeing a tish into infrared. On the other end of the visible spectrum, I see "black lights" as painfully bright.

BTW apparently there is disagreement on whether Tetrachromacy is strictly a female thing; from Wikipedia: "Another study suggests that as many as 50% of women and 8% of men may have four photopigments. [cite: http://www.klab.caltech.edu/cns186/papers/Jameson01.pdf "It is also the case that an estimated
8% of males presumed to be color "normal" likely
represent a four-photopigment retinal phenotype
heterozygous carriers."]

My own favourite, which admittedly comes out of thin air, is that negative gravity corresponds to negative mass.

Dark energy doesn't have the properties of negative mass. It actually has the properties of negative pressure: that is its defining feature (Sean Carroll has suggested renaming "dark energy" to smooth tension for this reason, since "tension" is negative presure).

In general relativity, both mass and pressure gravitate (they're both components of the stress-energy tensor which is the source of gravity). That is in fact why black holes form: you'd think that if you crush a star enough, its internal pressure will increase to the point that the pressure halts the gravitational collapse. But in GR, a high enough pressure actually ADDS to the the collapse, because the pressure itself gravitates, and this attraction outweighs the pressure's own repulsion.

If pressure attracts gravitationally, then negative pressure repels. This is dark energy.

Thank you to you and the others who challenged me on about this. You have caused me to learn something new today :-).

What is actually being done though is a bit different than what I interpreted GP to be saying. Talking about needing to keep the number of 1's and 0's constant. That makes me imagine a system in which charge just flows from the gate of one transistor to the gate of another.

This is not anything anyone has proposed. I stand by my assertion that technology where transistors are not directly closing the connection between either a positive or negative source.

Take a look at the pdf here. There are a couple of circuit diagrams for different types of "Adiabatic" circuits. (I put adiabatic in quotes, because these are not adiabatic in the thermodynamic sense that GP was discussing, just very low power.) Adiabatic Circuits Paper
Those circuits are of the same family as what I describe in my original post. The main difference is that the positive and negative sources are functions rather than constant.

It is an interesting idea. I don't think even this is practical though, for a simple reason. Clock skew is one of the biggest problems in modern circuit design. For this to work, you need to have this perfectly smooth wave that passes over one logic stage after another so that each one generates the output while generating minimum heat, and stays on just long enough for the input to be received by the next stage.

But, hey it would be really neat.

Also, just to reiterate. This will have zero impact on programming. There is nothing here about conserving 1's and 0's. That is Star Trek stuff.

Here is a long list of problems that have superpolynomial i.e. more than polynomial speedup compared to classical computation. Even though the author doesn't think so many do have practical applications.

Microsoft has patents on Compound TCP. The above patch is only for use in research.

from

http://netlab.caltech.edu/lachlan/ctcp/

On Neural Nets at least.. The only text book that I can think of offhand which is decent is Duda, Hart and Stork

Hawkins, like many others, has ripped off many of his ideas from Steve Grossberg (in this case, the ART model). Although he's not very easy to read, especially if you start much earlier than say, Ellias and Grossberg, 1975. You should also check out the work of people like Jack Cowan, Rajesh Rao, Christof Koch , Tom Poggio, David McLaughlin, Bard Ermentrout, among many, many others. I think the above names are sufficient to start a survey.

On top of this TCP hasn't seen a major update since the 80's.

Uhh, TCP Vegas, TCP New Reno, BIC and CUBIC? All of which have been implemented in the Linux kernel? TCP has only been standing still since the 80's if you're using an OS from the 80's... or a Microsoft OS.

Note that the only one of those which made it into an RFC is New Reno, aka RFC 2582, which has been implemented in the Windows TCP stack since Vista, along with a number of other recent RFCs.

The others are basically different suggestions for implementing TCP congestion control. Microsoft has its own variant of those (Compound TCP, which is quite similar to TCP Vegas and has also been ported to Linux).

Your 1980s comment is not quite up to date, of course. Microsoft has been sticking to their BSD-based implementation of the TCP stack for quite a long time (too long in fact), but with Vista it's been undergoing quite a bit of change. I know it's unpopular to say something in favour of MS and/or Vista here and I'm far from being a MS apologetic, but it's worth actually reading their Cable Guy columns every now and then to be up to date with regards to what the Windows network stack actually does and doesn't do - especially if you are a sysadmin or interested in developments in the TCP arena.

Here is a neat link that explains differences:

When the water freezes, most of these impurities are not actually included in the ice crystals, but they usually do get stuck somewhere in little pockets in the ice cubes. That's why, with our very sensitive sense of taste, we can tell the diference between different types of ice cubes, the same as you can taste the diference between water from different sources. These small differences between tap water and distilled water may not produce any obvious visible difference in ice cubes, however. A less subtle difference might arise from the fact that many taps "aerate" the water by passing it through a fine mesh with an air intake. Tap water out of most taps has quite a bit of air dissolved in it. If you leave a glass of tap water out for a while you may notice tiny air bubbles forming on the side. If you freeze the water quickly, the ice will form before the air has a chance to bubble out. The bubbles will form anyway inside of the ice cubes because the dissolved air does not fit into the ice crystal lattice. So if you look at ice cubes made from tap water compared with distilled water, you might find that the tap water ones are not as clear and transparent as the distilled water ones because of all the air bubbles inside. But this isn't a fixed property of tap water or distilled water, just in their handling (you can dissolve air in the distilled water too!).

I heard/saw somewhere that if you use new plastic ice cube trays and distilled water, and do things just right, you can get a spike to form on the ice. Ahh, here it is.