Slashdot Mirror

They operate in different wavelength bands - Hubble is not an long-wave IR telescope. The space analogy for SOFIA is the 85 centimeter Spitzer telescope.

These telescopes operate in the IR so their wavelengths are longer and thus their resolutions are poorer for a given size telescope.

Here are the numbers :

So the score card is: Hubble 0.1 Arc Sec (best); Keck 0.3 Arc Sec many other telescopes are doing as well as the Keck; SOFIA greater than 2.0 arc sec

Note that radio Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) can routinely do factions of a milliarcsecond resolution, or a factor of 100 times better than Hubble. This requires synthesizing a telescope the size of the Earth, which you can do in the radio.

Since it is one of the most famous engineering schools in the world, and this is news for nerds, it would be nice if Slashdot could spell Caltech's name correctly.

http://styleguide.caltech.edu/wordmark

Wasn't this settled, oh, a DECADE ago, when some simulations showed that yes, there could be naked singularities formed? It doesn't matter how many scenarios don't create one, if one scenario does, then the theory allows for it (whether the real universe does or not).

NYT story on naked singularity bet

(Research on this comment consisted of one query to google, keywords "naked singularity")

BTW, "naked black hole" is a contradiction in terms. A naked singularity is, by definition, not a black hole.

That isn't quite right, the first announcement from Moreno's group occurred before they did the new observations. You really should read the timeline to get it straight before making posts, otherwise you are just wasting people's time. Moreno's group sent the announcement to the IAU the day after the first access of Brown's observing logs. It was only after this announcement that Moreno accessed Brown's logs again and requested the additional observations. After that, Moreno sent a follow-up email to the IAU with the new observations, and also some more of their 2003 data. This is suspicious, but it is also possible that Moreno's group simply hadn't finished analyzing all the 2003 data by the 27th, but were desperate to claim the discovery nevertheless. That would be impolite, but not fraudulent.

The whole dispute would have been avoided if Brown's group had contacted the IAU in the first instance, instead of just publishing an abstract for a forthcoming paper that had no official status.

You fool, I already read the timeline; once, at the time of the original event, and once again before I wrote my post. From there I hunted around until I got to http://web.gps.caltech.edu/~mbrown/, and from there to http://www.mikebrownsplanets.com/ .

FWIW, my Dad is an astronomer. I'm just a condensed matter physicist. I don't have any inside information though, nor does the old man. For you to make such accusations, I would hope that you do have such information. But since you have never deigned to show the proof, I can only assume you are full of it.

When someone takes an abstract for an upcoming talk, Googles the software-assigned name "K40506A," from said abstract, then plays around with the url to get access to unlinked data, then points their telescope at the spot mentioned in the data, then sends out an email (from the same computer used to access the data in the first place) saying "here's our discovery, look at my new data plus some archival data from this telescope," and doesn't even mention the data access, doesn't even respond when confronted...well yeah, my bullshit alarm goes off.

Look, here's the timeline (which you never read, because your entire expertise on this comes from the link to Mike Brown's blog you saw elsewhere in the discussion -- those who have followed this for a while have a bit of an advantage, eh?).

Maybe Moreno couldn't be convicted in a court of law. But anybody that believes Moreno's highly improbable account has his brain dribbling from his nose-holes.

It seems clear that you simply read my original quote from Wikipedia, thought that was all there was, and became a Slashdot InstaExpert on the subject. You probably do it all the time. Once I called you on it, you did a little extra reading, found that I was right, and retreated to your "no firm evidence" stance. Just because you own a keyboard doesn't mean we need to see you pontificate on every subject under the sun. The internet will be a better place with a little less of your stupidity in the future, huh?

Here's a bit more information from Brown, if you don't really understand how astronomy works: hasty announcement and the reports of "hacking". Yes, yes, I know that you are even now composing a reply with a huge list of your qualifications. The hacking discussion was linked from the original 2005 New York Times article about the controversy, which again, you never read, but which I saw when the story broke.

When someone takes an abstract for an upcoming talk, Googles the software-assigned name "K40506A," from said abstract, then plays around with the url to get access to unlinked data, then points their telescope at the spot mentioned in the data, then sends out an email (from the same computer used to access the data in the first place) saying "here's our discovery, look at my new data plus some archival data from this telescope," and doesn't even mention the data access, doesn't even respond when confronted...well yeah, my bullshit alarm goes off.

Look, here's the timeline (which you never read, because your entire expertise on this comes from the link to Mike Brown's blog you saw elsewhere in the discussion -- those who have followed this for a while have a bit of an advantage, eh?).

Maybe Moreno couldn't be convicted in a court of law. But anybody that believes Moreno's highly improbable account has his brain dribbling from his nose-holes.

It seems clear that you simply read my original quote from Wikipedia, thought that was all there was, and became a Slashdot InstaExpert on the subject. You probably do it all the time. Once I called you on it, you did a little extra reading, found that I was right, and retreated to your "no firm evidence" stance. Just because you own a keyboard doesn't mean we need to see you pontificate on every subject under the sun. The internet will be a better place with a little less of your stupidity in the future, huh?

Here's a bit more information from Brown, if you don't really understand how astronomy works: hasty announcement and the reports of "hacking". Yes, yes, I know that you are even now composing a reply with a huge list of your qualifications. The hacking discussion was linked from the original 2005 New York Times article about the controversy, which again, you never read, but which I saw when the story broke.

http://evo.caltech.edu/

the evo system evolved from a system called VRVS. it has been in use for many years now supporting multiple platforms. there is much more info on the web page, but the brief summary is that evo is a java app that allows one to have multi-party video conferences. each vid stream can be adjusted for quality (network bandwidth and framerate). conversations are run in "rooms" which can be private or public.

many other features.

Technically its for the physics community, but its free and everything you're looking for.

Try http://evo.caltech.edu./

Is written in Java Web Start so its about as cross platform as you can find. It seems to work with most video cameras and microphones. It also features the following:

-Group Chats
-Screen Sharing
-Whiteboard
-Hard line call in to call from a phone line

Its for the physics community, so try not to abuse it. It should be fine if you just use it to chat.

Some of the people in my (physics) research group use EVO online. It is written in java and seems to work just fine on multiple platforms, provided java web start works for you (we've got it working reliably on 64-bit SuSE 11).

http://evo.caltech.edu/evoGate/

2 points - cosmic rays move fast and don't hang around the earth.

And occasionally they slam into the atmosphere, with far more energy than any collision generated in the LHC. Hell, we've detected tiny gamma ray bursts from high-altitude balloon-mounted observatories that have demonstrated this.

And that's the point. What the LHC can do is nothing like what happens in earth's upper atmosphere on a fairly regular basis.

Cosmic rays of the kind that could cause problems are infinitesimal in their interactions with the earth.

Uhh, not hardly. See here:

http://www.srl.caltech.edu/personnel/dick/cos_encyc.html

To quote:

"The frequency of air showers ranges from about 100 per m^2 per year for energies >10^15 eV"

To put that in perspective, the LHC will be generating collisions with energies of roughly 1.4*10^13 eV (14 TeV).

So, every year, there are 100 cosmic ray interactions per *square meter* of atmosphere. Every single year. That's a truly enormous number. And each interaction involves ten times the amount of energy the LHC can produce, or more. So if we haven't been gobbled up yet, we won't.

Better to get your facts right:

The antarctic ice cap is stable or increasing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctica#Effects_of_global_warming

The volume is increasing where it isn't melting outright; this is due to a number of factors including the fact that like other materials ice expands when heated. But around the edges we find significant melting:

Between February 28 and March 8, 2008, about 570 square kilometers of ice from the Wilkins Ice Shelf in Western Antarctica collapsed, putting the remaining 15,000 square kilometers of the ice shelf at risk. The ice is being held back by a "thread" of ice about 6 km wide.[62][63] According to NASA, the most significant Antarctic melting in the past 30 years occurred in 2005, when a mass of ice comparable in size to California briefly melted and refroze; this may have resulted from temperatures rising to as high as 5 C (41 F).[64]

I take you you're granting the point on the north?

--MarkusQ

From: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html

"In the meantime, the real crisis that is coming has started to produce a number of symptoms, some alarming and some merely curious. One of these is what I like to call The Paradox of Scientific Elites and Scientific Illiterates. The paradox is this: as a lingering result of the golden age, we still have the finest scientists in the world in the United States. But we also have the worst science education in the industrialized world.

There seems to be little doubt that both of these seemingly contradictory observations are true. American scientists, trained in American graduate schools produce more Nobel Prizes, more scientific citations, more of just about anything you care to measure than any other country in the world; maybe more than the rest of the world combined. Yet, students in American schools consistently rank at the bottom of all those from advanced nations in tests of scientific knowledge, and furthermore, roughly 95% of the American public is consistently found to be scientifically illiterate by any rational standard.

How can we possibly have arrived at such a result? How can our miserable system of education have produced such a brilliant community of scientists? That is what I mean by The Paradox of the Scientific Elites and the Scientific Illiterates.

...

I would like to propose a different and more illuminating metaphor for American science education. It is [currently] 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.

...

Let me finish by summarizing what I've been trying to tell you. We stand at an historic juncture in the history of science. The long era of exponential expansion ended decades ago, but we have not yet reconciled ourselves to that fact. The present social structure of science, by which I mean institutions, education, funding, publications and so on all evolved during the period of exponential expansion, before The Big Crunch. They are not suited to the unknown future we face.

Today's scientific leaders, in the universities, government, industry and the scientific societies are mostly people who came of age during the golden era, 1950 - 1970. I am myself part of that generation. We think those were normal times and expect them to return. But we are wrong.

Nothing like it will ever happen again.

It is by no means certain that science will even survive, much less flourish, in the difficult times we face. Before it can survive, those of us who have gained so much from the era of scientific elites and scientific illiterates must learn to face reality, and admit that those days are gone forever. I think we have our work cut out for us."

From: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
"In the meantime, the real crisis that is coming has started to produce a number of symptoms, some alarming and some merely curious. One of these is what I like to call The Paradox of Scientific Elites and Scientific Illiterates. The paradox is this: as a lingering result of the golden age, we still have the finest scientists in the world in the United States. But we also have the worst science education in the industrialized world. There seems to be little doubt that both of these seemingly contradictory observations are true. American scientists, trained in American graduate schools produce more Nobel Prizes, more scientific citations, more of just about anything you care to measure than any other country in the world; maybe more than the rest of the world combined. Yet, students in American schools consistently rank at the bottom of all those from advanced nations in tests of scientific knowledge, and furthermore, roughly 95% of the American public is consistently found to be scientifically illiterate by any rational standard. How can we possibly have arrived at such a result? How can our miserable system of education have produced such a brilliant community of scientists? That is what I mean by The Paradox of the Scientific Elites and the Scientific Illiterates. ... 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. ... Let me finish by summarizing what I've been trying to tell you. We stand at an historic juncture in the history of science. The long era of exponential expansion ended decades ago, but we have not yet reconciled ourselves to that fact. The present social structure of science, by which I mean institutions, education, funding, publications and so on all evolved during the period of exponential expansion, before The Big Crunch. They are not suited to the unknown future we face. Today's scientific leaders, in the universities, government, industry and the scientific societies are mostly people who came of age during the golden era, 1950 - 1970. I am myself part of that generation. We think those were normal times and expect them to return. But we are wrong. Nothing like it will ever happen again. It is by no means certain that science will even survive, much less flourish, in the difficult times we face. Before it can survive, those of us who have gained so much from the era of scientific elites and scientific illiterates must learn to face reality, and admit that those days are gone forever. I think we have our work cut out for us."

A picture is linked to in the summary: http://www.optofluidics.caltech.edu/projects/nanoparticle/index.html Thanks for reading before posting though!

See also:
    "The Big Crunch" by David Goodstein
    http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
"... 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. ... Let me finish by summarizing what I've been trying to tell you. We stand at an historic juncture in the history of science. The long era of exponential expansion ended decades ago, but we have not yet reconciled ourselves to that fact. The present social structure of science, by which I mean institutions, education, funding, publications and so on all evolved during the period of exponential expansion, before The Big Crunch. They are not suited to the unknown future we face. Today's scientific leaders, in the universities, government, industry and the scientific societies are mostly people who came of age during the golden era, 1950 - 1970. I am myself part of that generation. We think those were normal times and expect them to return. But we are wrong. Nothing like it will ever happen again. It is by no means certain that science will even survive, much less flourish, in the difficult times we face. Before it can survive, those of us who have gained so much from the era of scientific elites and scientific illiterates must learn to face reality, and admit that those days are gone forever. I think we have our work cut out for us."

I'm a little more optimistic that abundance for all will result in more free time for hobby research, but until then, Dr. Goodstein (Vice Provost of Caltech) outlines the collapse of the PhD pyramid scheme and its consequences.

An important question that the article does not address is why science education is important (the article is about science education in college, but it's an important question in general). Despite periodic complaints about how there aren't enough engineers, chemists, or what ever the flavor of the moment is, that's not really a problem. Many of us believe that some science training makes better citizens (better ability to reason, better knowledge of why things happen, etc.). Another reason is laid out by David Goodstein, a physicist at CalTech, in an article titled The Big Crunch (which focuses on a different issue for science -- how the number of researchers, amount of funding, etc. is no longer growing exponentially).

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. ...(skipping a lot)

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 [that basic research should be funded by the government]. ...(skipping a fair amount again)

The frontiers of science have moved far from the experience of ordinary persons. Unfortunately, we have never developed a way to bring people along as informed tourists of the vast terrain we have conquered, without training them to become professional explorers. If it turns out to be impossible to do that, the people may decide that the technological trinkets we send back from the frontier are not enough to justify supporting the cost of the expedition. If that happens, science will not merely stop expanding, it will die.

Sorry for butchering his article so much -- the whole thing is a good read.

http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html

I wonder if similar detection rates have been calculated for SETI (e.g., assume ET having a transmitter of 1 MW, at what distance would you still detect anything? And how many life supporting planets are in that range? ) This will depend a lot on the parameters in your Drake's equations, but they should at least give some order of magnitudes. I remember reading some skeptic article several years ago, which claimed that even with optimistic estimates, the chance of detecting anything would be absolutely zero.

Until that time, I rather waste my computer cycles on the LIGO data (Einstein at home) or one of the various medical applications (e.g. Folding at home), which produce scientific results today.

nobod with this color scheme on a home page should be allow to post anything, ever~
http://www.klab.caltech.edu/~koch/index-main-page.html

a lot of the applications for "security" actually is the defeat of cryptanalysis systems as these computers could crack keys in a reasonable amount of time. This would start to drive key length to very large values in order to keep data safe.

Essentially the value in quantum computing is you can set up a logical relationship between all the qbits and then preform an operation on any number of them and they instantaneously effect the remaining qbits. This saves the computation time for preforming operations on all the other qbits. The question on making this feasible is can you make the read/write time for each of the qbits reasonable and the technology affordable to do so. This seems to be a huge step in the right direction for the latter.

As other readers have noticed, the authors of this study have used existing DNA synthesis technology to incorporate non-natural bases into DNA. While it is impressive that the authors could design bases with the correct geometry to support a DNA-like double helix, the chemistry is not too novel. However, the ability to customize DNA-like polymers has a few interesting applications.

First, all of the sci-fi applications involving artificial life are not really feasible because one would have to design a huge number of new enzymes to recognize these artificial bases. As the field of enzyme design is still in its infancy, I do not see this happening anytime soon.

The real applications come from non-biological uses of DNA. As previous commenter have noted, biotechnologists are investigating the use of DNA as a tool for computation/data storage. Doi et al. have designed their DNA-like scaffold such that other researchers could relatively easily construct new nucleotide pairs in order to expand the number of nucleotides used in the helix. This ability to expand the number of nucleotides could aid researchers in performing calculations using DNA.

Another application involves DNA nanostructures (such as the "DNA origami" designed by Paul Rothemund). DNA is useful for creating nanostructures because it can be easily programmed for self-assembly into arbitrary structures (such as happy faces or long six-helical nanotubes). However, biology is full of enzymes that can degrade DNA, limiting its usefulness. As the authors of this study note, these artificial DNA molecules are resistant to degradation by natural enzymes. Furthermore, it may be possible to alter the mechanical properties of the artificial DNA by tailoring the strength of base-pairing and stacking of the non-natural bases. This could give researchers much greater control over the properties of their DNA nanostructures. One disadvantage of these artificial DNA molecules over natural DNA molecules would be the fact that it is much easier to produce long molecules of natural DNA (the non-enzymatic DNA synthesis technologies used to create the artificial DNA have difficulty creating long [>100bp] strands of DNA). Another caveat is that the authors of the study did not provide a crystal structure of the DNA so we don't yet know its true 3D structure (i.e. whether it forms a helix with the same geometry as regular DNA, although a different geometry could also be interesting).

A real significant advance for DNA nanostructures would be an artificial DNA-like polymer that incorporates a non-natural sugar-phosphate backbone. DNA nanostructures are not stable outside of water which limits their possible applications, in part because water molecules help to stabilize the structure of the sugar-phosphate backbone. Designing a DNA nanostructure that retains its properties outside of water would be a huge boon to the field.

The thing most people don't understand about TCP is that it accelerates linearly and falls back exponentially.

That is the AIMD behaviour of some variants of TCP (reno for example) and only when they have past slow start and are in steady state. This page has some graphs which show the difference in the cwnd behaviour for different TCP variations, it also links to the relevant papers. There is currently a mix of TCP variations in use and not all use AIMD. Linux, for example, uses CUBIC and in the past has used BIC and NewReno as the default TCP variation.

For instance, some scientists invented a new alloy which they suggest will revolutionize crumple-zones in cars. This alloy includes palladium, a rare-metal. Indeed so rare, if all the palladium on earth were to be used to make this new alloy, we'd get about a cubic meter of the stuff.

Personally, I was more caught by the blogger's throwaway remarks about "corporate science". The truth in my experience is that academics exaggerate to get grants and manipulate data to publish papers. For instance, a substantial fraction of chemistry research cannot be reproduced because the results shown are a fluke, and the applications of an idea are often grossly exaggerated. For instance, some scientists invented a new alloy which they suggest will revolutionize crumple-zones in cars. This alloy includes palladium, a rare-metal. Indeed so rare, if all the palladium on earth were to be used to make this new alloy, we'd get about a cubic meter of the stuff.

You just don't get away with this sort of stuff in industry. For instance the famous Bell Labs scientist who falsified his nanotech research. This was then discovered by a competing group at IBM. In industry, scientific fraud is hard b.c. the standards for research go beyond publishing a few page journal article.

Go visit the LIGO Hanford Observatory. It is one of a handful of places that can detect gravity waves, the kind of waves made by colliding black holes and the like. LIGO is south of Moses lake, and just make sure to check out their public tour times.

Go visit the LIGO Hanford Observatory. It is one of a handful of places that can detect gravity waves, the kind of waves made by colliding black holes and the like. LIGO is south of Moses lake, and just make sure to check out their public tour times.

Actually the MIPSGAL website has the composite image in the Google Maps interface. Here's our shiny

Here are the links to segments of the high res jpegs. You have to click on the word jpeg.

http://gallery.spitzer.caltech.edu/Imagegallery/image.php?image_name=ssc2008-11a

Here's a link to one of the pictures:

http://ipac.jpl.nasa.gov/media_images/ssc2008-11a4.jpg

But, the images (the huge ones) are right there, here is the direct link to the huge images http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/Media/releases/ssc2008-11/ssc2008-11a.shtml

Here are some hi-res images - found them finally.

Wow they took a 400,000 by 13,000 pixel image and compressed it to a 200x200 jpeg

I giggled when I read this. But since I was also wondering: http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/Media/releases/ssc2008-11/ssc2008-11a.shtml.

http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/Media/releases/ssc2008-08/release.shtml

Accessgrid:

Works fine, even supports multipoint *HD* video conferencing, open source though the "hours to set up" depends on your tech competence. It doesn't *need* working multicast, but works a lot better with it.

Not really AG-specific: Also note that multipoint video conferencing requires either echo cancellation (and ALL software echo cancellation sucks, you need still need hardware DSP units even in 2008) or headsets for everyone - one bad node can ruin they meeting - if you think an echoey 2-way conversation is bad, you should experience a 15-way conference some time (though that might need academic/military bandwidth :-) )

http://accessgrid.org/

EVO? (Successor to VRVS).

Kind of new, but descendant of VRVS. Kind of a cut-down accessgrid. Easy to use, though is web-page based.

AFAIK, like VRVS, interoperates with AccessGrid, though participants in a conference tend to be "second class citizens".

http://evo.caltech.edu/evoGate/FAQ/index.jsp#Basics01

Scyld has released the Scyld Beowulf Scalable Computing Software:
http://linuxcentral.com/catalog/index.php3?prod_code=L000-089

I also recommend looking at these URLs for additional help:
http://www.cacr.caltech.edu/beowulf/tutorial/building.html
http://fscked.org/writings/clusters/cluster.html

Making that effort to keep up, I see that my Ph. 136 professor has not yet conceded the bet. http://www.theory.caltech.edu/~preskill/jp_24jul04.html While I have the utmost respect for Prof. Preskill, and am inclined to prefer myself that information is not destroyed, if Prof. Thorne has not conceded I would suggest that the matter is not entirely resolved.

Linkin Park songs...You'll be amazed at how different they aren't.

Somebody took two songs, pitch-shifted one (and probably tweaked the timing a bit) and built an MP3 with one song in each speaker.

Old school advice...

First of all, school up to the PhD is a pyramid scheme (currently failing):
"The Big Crunch" by David Goodstein (Vice Provost CalTech)
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
The end result is "disciplined minds" who will not step out of line politically:
http://disciplined-minds.com/
Or journalistically:
http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/20051207.htm
"By the time you've gone through, you know, Oxford and Cambridge and here you could say Harvard and Princeton and so on, and even less fancy places, you have instilled into you the understanding that there are certain things that just wouldn't do to say, and that's what a good deal of education is. So the people who come out of it - and there are many filters, if people go off and try to be too critical there are many ways of discouraging them or eliminating them one way or the other. Some get through, it's not a uniform story. ... The more educated you are the more indoctrinated you are. And you believe you are being free and objective, whereas in fact you're just repeating state propaganda."

The reason schooling exists in its current form is to teach these seven lessons:
"The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher" by John Taylor Gatto - 1991 New York State Teacher of the Year
http://hometown.aol.com/tma68/7lesson.htm
in order to prepare most people for a life of servitude to the military or factories (and to not be very thoughtful about consumption or politics either).
"The Prussian Connection" -- Gatto
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/7a.htm
And from:
"A conversation with historian and author James Loewen. Sort of."
http://www.stayfreemagazine.org/archives/18/loewen.html
"We like to believe schooling is a good thing. But when it comes to understanding any problem with historical roots, we might expect that the more traditional schooling in history that Americans have, the less they will understand it. Students who have taken math courses are better at math. The same is true for English, foreign languages, and almost every other subject. But in history, stupidity is the result of more, not less, schooling."

Still, studies have shown that the only people who really get economic value out of an Ivy League degree or equivalent are those from lower middle class backgrounds. All other things being equal, for most other people it's not worth the money as an investment. See the book "Class" for some other details:
http://www.amazon.com/Class-Through-American-Status-System/dp/0671792253
Otherwise, consider:
"College is a Waste of Time and Money" (1975)
http://www.grossmont.edu/bertdill/docs/CollegeWaste.pdf
"College, then, may be a good place for those few young people who are really drawn to academic work, who would rather read than eat, but it has become too expensive, in money, time, and intellectual effort to serve as a holding pen for large numbers of our young. We ought to make it possible for those reluctant, unhappy students to find alternative ways of growing up, and more realistic preparation for the years ahead."

And consider those years ahead following Moore's Law will include computers 10000X faster than what we have now for the same price in 20 or so years.
http://www.transhumanis

http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/Media/releases/ssc2007-12/release.shtml NASA's Spitzer Finds Water Vapor on Hot, Alien Planet For Release: July 11, 2007

My guess is that that imagery is from IRAS which did not complete its sky survey due to failure of some components.

If you haven't already, you might want to read Eugene Wigner's essay, on The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences. Here's one link: http://nedwww.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/March02/Wigner/Wigner.html

That's sociopaths, not psychopaths.

Think of it as the difference between a politician and a serial killer.

Consider 2 points that according to general relativity, have a variable distance between them, when it varies, doesn't the frequency of light between these vary as well ? doesn't the detector of light vary as well ? if all content varies uniformly, how could there be any "detection" at all unless something broke the rule of spacetime bending ? do the nuclear forces feel the need to have their own definition of length that doesn't change ?

I wrestled with this one too. After a little bit of research I think I have an answer for you. Yes, the distances would change and the frequency would change but the speed of light through the distance would not. Which would lead to it taking a shorter/longer amount of time for the light to travel the distance between the two masses. If I recall correctly that is the underlying basis for relativity. If you look at the LIGO fact sheet from the group doing this work they use this difference in time to look for phase changes in two originally in phase light rays.

Many are able to see the potential of interpreting gravity as the product of observing the universe changing shape. Time could very well be the product of a high degree of causality and stability in a changeable universe and not a dimension at all. Sounds intriguing. Please elaborate as I haven't heard of this one.

I'm confused by your point about the debate on the definition of force. I've never heard that one. Can you point me to some references? Everything I've seen shows it as just the negative derivative of potential energy.

there is no workable cosmology being presented

Indeed, there is no alternative, scientific cosmology being presented.

When you get a chance, would you mind providing links to material on any such alternative that addresses (quantitatively, of course) the following:
* why the night sky is dark
* the Hubble relationship (i.e. the relationship between observed redshift and distance, for galaxies, quasars, GRBs, etc)
* the primordial abundance of light nuclides (H, D, 3He, 4He, and 6Li)
* the SED (spectral energy distribution) of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) - i.e. its 2.73K blackbody spectrum
* the CMB dipole
* the CMB angular power spectrum
* the observed large-scale structure of the universe (here's an example: http://www.sdss.org/news/releases/20031028.powerspectrum.html).

You act as if there is only one possible cosmology that can possibly be created

No need to read the APODNereid tea leaves ... I'll say it directly, loudly, and clearly: I think the number of possible cosmologies (to use pln2bz's term) is certainly greater than one. Further, only a few decades ago at least two possible cosmologies seemed consistent with the relevant astronomical observations and experimental results (today there's only one, that I know of).

many very intelligent people have backed the plasma-based cosmology approach

I thought you'd've given up using this kind of argument; you've certainly been beaten up for it many times, here in SD.

Once upon a time, many very intelligent people backed the "Earth is flat" idea too, and the élan vital approach. The universe cares not one jot what people, intelligent or not, back.

I can tell that you have not read the materials because you consistently assume that the arguments are less powerful than they actually are.

Right, like the one about magnetic reconnection has never been observed in a laboratory (URL:http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=426528&no_d2=1&cid=22144874>), or the solar wind continues to accelerate even as it passes the planets! (http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=426528&no_d2=1&cid=22148864), or Arguing that space must be charge neutral on some scale is tantamount to declaring that we've reached a conclusion on a metaphysical question (http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=358211&cid=21392029).

your objections to it would give way to more nuanced feeling towards it

If you care to read my previous SD comment, in this thread, you'll see what I'm planning to do. In a nutshell, I will examine - using standard methods found in science - "the plasma-based cosmology approach"; specifically, the extent to which it is internally consistent, independently verifiable (or can be independently validated, if you prefer), and key characteristics of the methods used to classify things as "facts" (and "evidence"). I intend to use an empirical approach.

the telescopes are getting better

Indeed they are!

Let's do a little "what if" experiment, shall we?

Imagine you were granted 1 million seconds of time on the Hubble Space Telescope, using any instruments (or combination), and spread out over as much as a year. What would you use your time to observe?

Imagine the same, on any (or combo) of the VLTs (http://www.eso.org/public/astronomy/teles-instr/whitebook/).

On Spitzer (http://ssc.spitzer.caltech.edu/), XMM-Newton (http://xmm.vilspa.esa.es/), any of the ATNF (

Since the two neutron stars in PSR1913+16 are moving so fast and close together they should, according to General Relativity, emit large amounts of gravitational radiation. This makes them lose energy: Their orbits will therefore shrink and their orbiting period will shorten.

Indirect evidence: The binary pulsar has been observed continuously since its discovery, and the orbiting period has in fact decreased. Agreement with the prediction of General Relativity is better than 1/2%. This is considered to prove that gravitational radiation really exists. This in turn is currently one of our strongest supports for the validity of the General Theory of Relativity.

GP-B scientists expect to announce the final results of the experiment in december 2007, follow-
ing eight months of further data analysis and refinement. Today, Everitt and his team are poised to
share what they have found so far--namely that the data from the GP-B gyroscopes clearly confirm
Einstein's predicted geodetic effect to a precision of better than 1 percent.

The absence of a gravitational-wave signal meant GRB070201 could not have originated in this way in Andromeda. Other causes for the event, such as a soft gamma-ray repeater or a binary merger from a much further distance, are now the most likely contenders.

Actually we do have more than two of these. I used to work for a lab at the University of Florida making components for the cavities; I was also with them the day they went live! Part of me wished I stayed with the research, but it was a complicated racket and I had other interests. Anyway, one of the interferometers is out in Washington State and the other is just up the road from me now outside Baton Rouge in Livingston Parish. I got off I-10 one day helping a friend get to some wreckage yard out in the sticks and low and behold right there off the interstate was a sign pointing south with the words LIGO on it. I thought I should drive out there for those months of work I put into it. Well, anyway, i decided against it, if for no other reason than because just the slightest vibration from road traffic even miles away can throw this thing out of alignment. Perhaps this is why the thing didn't detect any waves a while back. Signal-to-noise on this thing is the most crucial aspect out there!

Actually we do have more than two of these. I used to work for a lab at the University of Florida making components for the cavities; I was also with them the day they went live! Part of me wished I stayed with the research, but it was a complicated racket and I had other interests. Anyway, one of the interferometers is out in Washington State and the other is just up the road from me now outside Baton Rouge in Livingston Parish. I got off I-10 one day helping a friend get to some wreckage yard out in the sticks and low and behold right there off the interstate was a sign pointing south with the words LIGO on it. I thought I should drive out there for those months of work I put into it. Well, anyway, i decided against it, if for no other reason than because just the slightest vibration from road traffic even miles away can throw this thing out of alignment. Perhaps this is why the thing didn't detect any waves a while back. Signal-to-noise on this thing is the most crucial aspect out there!

The picture is here:

http://gallery.spitzer.caltech.edu/Imagegallery/image.php?image_name=ssc2007-09a

I don't know why TFA is reporting it like it's just coming out--this is old news.

From the vice-provost of CalTech, Dr. David Goodstein:

http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html

"The question of how we educate our young in science lies close to the heart of the issues we have been discussing. The observation that, for hundreds of years the number of scientists had been growing exponentially means, quite simply, that the rate at which we produced scientists has always been proportional to the number of scientists that already existed. We have already seen how that process works at the final stage of education, where each professor in a research university turns out 15 Ph.D's, most of those wanting to become research professors and turn out 15 more Ph.D's. ... If federal support for basic research were to be doubled (as many are calling for), the result would merely be to tack on a few more years of exponential expansion before we'd find ourselves in exactly the same situation again. Lederman has performed a valuable service in promoting public debate of an issue that has worried me for a long time (the remark he quoted is one I made in 1979), but the issue itself is really just a symptom of the larger fact that the era of exponential expansion [of PhDs] has come to an end. The End of the Frontier could just as well have been called The Big Crunch. ... 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."

That's the deeper problem; read the entire linked article for more on it and some possible solutions.

Favorite movie of mine. I like all the Caltech references. Apparently there really was a guy like Lazlo at Caltech that lived in the tunnels. Who knew?? http://alumnus.caltech.edu/~erich/real_genius_refs.html http://eternal-mysteries.org/LegendOfLazlo.htm http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XseSQeN3QuY

Telemaintenance (I think) prior to ~1995 was systems-sensors reporting status of equipment at remote locations.
Telemaintenance (I think) post ~1996 becomes the wearable wireless computer diagnostic tool-set for telemaintence.

http://www.media.mit.edu/
http://www.media.mit.edu/wearables/mithril/
http://www.cacr.caltech.edu/
http://e-science.caltech.edu/

I am an old guy ... I remember .... You can Yahoo/Google "Telemaintenance YYYY" to confirm/learn.

In ~1996 (I think, I remember) the telemaintenance acronym APES [Avatar Populated Experience/Environment Simulations/Synergy] in a CCT [Collaborative Community Technologies] proposal/paper. Considering present social-web environments, games .... Anyway, it is all still very interesting.

For SoA (State of Art), Yahoo/Google ("wearable computer" MIT CalTech hardware software) or ("ubiquitous computing" MIT CalTech hardware software 2007) to confirm/learn.

Nope, I never attended MIT, CalTech ..., I ain't got a college degree, I dropped out of high school in 1969, then too the USMC at 17yo, Honorable Discharge at 19yo ... I always think about where education is going for individuals like me (more of US than there was), I mean, look at POTUS Bush ... he is far less educated then most folks I talk to every day, and VPDryDick has more ability to deliver humor/torture/terror than a POTUS-puppet performance. Oh, I do have a GED and over 160SemHrs in many subjects.

!HAVEFUN!