Slashdot Mirror

In related news, a team of physicists from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have developed a new way to perform radial velocity measurements to unprecedented precision. The current state-of-the art can achieve a precision of about 60 cm/s, enough to say, observe a Jupiter-class planet (such as the one pointed out in this article). However, this new method should be able to achieve a precision of about 1 cm/s, enough to observe an Earth-class planet.

The press release is available here:
http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/press/2008/pr200808.html.

The journal article the press release refers to is "available" (subscription required) here: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v452/n7187/pdf/nature06854.pdf.

The gist of the approach is to use a "laser frequency comb [combined with] a Fabry-Perot filtering cavity" to provide an improved, consistent calibration source. Strangely enough, it appears that spectroscopy is not (currently) limited by the resolving power of the spectrometer; rather it is limited by quality of the calibration source.

Here's a picture. For comparison, 802.11a/g gets up to ~48 megabits/s out of 20MHz of bandwidth.

Qutrits with optics is cool, but is the quantum computer just around the corner? Most definitely not! Optics are great for communicating quantum information, not so much for storing them. Quantum memory needs solid state technology, and while some promising results have been reported using diamonds by researchers at Harvard and other places, the quantum computer is still many many years, maybe even decades away. TFA is overhyped, as seems to be the case with all articles reporting quantum computing breakthroughs!

They're doing different things, to be sure. Women use it more for social activities, men more for browsing and collecting (hunting and gathering?). I think some of the reports consider using e-mail as being online. I do believe that you are correct in saying that men spend more money online than women.

My wife and I are somewhat exceptions in the spending category. Although I spend more time online, and she does spend a lot of time using e-mail, she pays our bills and occasionally buys things online. I almost never do that.

Some Harvard and Berkeley researchers wrote a paper on their findings about Why Phishing Works to explain the success of one type of internet scam.

Wrong.

Eating saturated fat produces LDL and HDL in a fixed ratio. This is not bad for you, the ratio is what's important, not the total amount, as many seem to think. Eating trans-fatty acids (hydrogenated) raises LDL without raising HDL. This is bad. Eating poly/monounsaturated fats lowers LDL and raises HDL. This is good.

Source

A quantum dot is a semiconductor whose excitons are confined in all three spatial dimensions (links to other terminology you may or may not understand from the link provided)

From Wikipedia: "There is no page titled "Stark-shifting." However, a Google search of the term brings up lots of interesting links, like "Effect of pressure-dependent quantum interference on the ac Stark shifting of two-photon resonances". The dictionary only lists towns named "Stark" when you search for the term.

snooze. snooze. snort. no mention of stun, kill, slicing, death ray, x-ray specs or photonic propulsion, so there is nothing there for me

Well then you should read my journals. Lots of sex, drunken debauchery, and violence. No lasers, but there's mention of taking a "hydrogen bomb" to junior high school. See, slashdot's got something for everybody!

Well, when you have something equal to around a 20 billion yottaton nuclear explosion... you tend to sit back and watch from a safe distance. The heat really doesn't bother me much from a few hundred million light years away. At that distance, you can't roast marshmallows, even on the double-degenerate (super-Chandrasekhar-mass) ones like SN2007if.

This probably won't get read, but I need a way to procrastinate my thesis :) I can't say much about the financial aid policies of lesser institutions, but I do know my college's financial aid policies pretty well, and the other elite institutions have been catching up to us lately. Just some rough figures for Princeton, the median income for a family on financial aid here is $90,000/year, and the average family on financial aid only pays $10,000/year to Princeton. Our aid policies are all need-based, so it depends on your exact financial situation, but I'm guessing that "upper-middle class" will be somewhere in that range. Also, education is an investment, so you might also want to consider student loans. Princeton doesn't make you take out a loan as part of the aid package either, but if you need a loan to help cover the family contribution, they are available.

The best advice I can give you is, for the most part, apply to colleges without looking at the price tag. Then, when you get your acceptances, look at the aid awards and make a decision then.

Oh, and if you're interested in CS, I just have to say that I'm currently taking Brian Kernighan's class, and it's awesome :)

Glad I could be of service. BTW I think your "periodic table" comment is an apt description of the situation. I think what's missing is dynamics.

Rather than google, if you want to keep up with Lisi (or anyone else's) papers, I suggest the SLAC Spires database. For instance, this is Lisi's "exceptionally simple" paper. Click on the "Cited..." to get a list of citations. This is updated daily from journal sources, and more importantly arxiv.org. This database generally has topics of relevance to high-energy physics, astrophysics, and gravity. Another good database is the NASA Astrophysical Data Service, here's Lisi's "exceptionally simple" paper on ADS. I warn you however, everything retrieved this way will be technical in nature.

This is what the web was invented for, by the physics community at CERN no less, and now days all our papers are freely available before they are sent to journals, and the public is welcome to read them. Indeed, I despise the "ivory tower" perception and think we are much better off by having outsiders look at what we're doing. I just with the popular press would wrap their heads around the idea of citing primary sources with a hyperlink....but I digress.

-- Bob

Glad I could be of service. BTW I think your "periodic table" comment is an apt description of the situation. I think what's missing is dynamics.

Rather than google, if you want to keep up with Lisi (or anyone else's) papers, I suggest the SLAC Spires database. For instance, this is Lisi's "exceptionally simple" paper. Click on the "Cited..." to get a list of citations. This is updated daily from journal sources, and more importantly arxiv.org. This database generally has topics of relevance to high-energy physics, astrophysics, and gravity. Another good database is the NASA Astrophysical Data Service, here's Lisi's "exceptionally simple" paper on ADS. I warn you however, everything retrieved this way will be technical in nature.

This is what the web was invented for, by the physics community at CERN no less, and now days all our papers are freely available before they are sent to journals, and the public is welcome to read them. Indeed, I despise the "ivory tower" perception and think we are much better off by having outsiders look at what we're doing. I just with the popular press would wrap their heads around the idea of citing primary sources with a hyperlink....but I digress.

-- Bob

25 years later, and here's the abstract I used for the science lab (of course, my version was a paper copy obtained through interlibrary loan):

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1971Sci...172.1248I

"Chemical methylation of inorganic mercury with methylcobalamin"

Wow. How far we've come in 25 years. Probably time to start researching the long-term chronic effects of mercury poisoning. I see that dimethymercury was one of the byproducts...

Whether they tax blank CDs or not has no bearing on whether or not distributing copyrighted content without the copyright holder's consent is legal.

In Canada, for example, it's not: http://grep.law.harvard.edu/articles/03/08/22/1655233.shtml

Though Canada does require a higher standard of evidence than "here's some plain text log files showing that this IP was making available a file named usher.mp3. We don't have any evidence that this file was by the musician Usher or that this file was uploaded to anyone or that it resided on the computer of the person who's name is on the account (not that we have that name since there are privacy laws requiring us to get a court order by providing actual evidence before the ISP will reveal it). But make them give us money anyway."

While this discovery is of great importance, we still need to find an inhibitor for this enzyme that will not also inhibit normal pyruvate kinases. BTW, if anyone is interested in reading more about the discovery, Harvard Medical School has a more detailed press release and the two related articles in Nature can be found here (protein structure) and here (relationship to cancer). We haven't gotten to AZT yet, but this is a pretty large step towards finding a sort of "magic bullet" for tumors. At the very least, it's a common weakness most cancerous cells share.

Whether they tax blank CDs or not has no bearing on whether or not distributing copyrighted content without the copyright holder's consent is legal.

In Canada, for example, it's not: http://grep.law.harvard.edu/articles/03/08/22/1655233.shtml

Nuclear fission is a poor solution anyway. Inherent safety problems, limited fuel supply (on the order of a century or two at most, perhaps much less), security concerns (both weapons technology proliferation and terrorist targeting concerns), unsolved waste disposal problems - the only reason this gets the support it does is because the military-industrial complex loves nuclear technologies, and some technical types who grew up on science fiction have a romantic attachment to Harassing the Power of the Atom.

We should be devoting our resources to efficiency, renewables (including orbital photovoltaic), accelerator-based thorium reactors, and fusion. Building new fission reactors is a distraction from the real solutions.

Nuclear fission is a poor solution anyway. Inherent safety problems, limited fuel supply (on the order of a century or two at most, perhaps much less), security concerns (both weapons technology proliferation and terrorist targeting concerns), unsolved waste disposal problems - the only reason this gets the support it does is because the military-industrial complex loves nuclear technologies, and some technical types who grew up on science fiction have a romantic attachment to Harassing the Power of the Atom.

We should be devoting our resources to efficiency, renewables (including orbital photovoltaic), accelerator-based thorium reactors, and fusion. Building new fission reactors is a distraction from the real solutions.

I think it's far more important that he was in charge of the Fermilab Permanent Magnet Antiproton Recycler Ring.

"The Recycler Ring incorporates a number of innovative cost-saving features including strontium ferrite hybrid permanent magnets, a low-cost high-vacuum system, and novel stochastic cooling and broadband RF systems."

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1997APS..PAC..4C01F

According to this "Harvard Unversity that just happens to be in the USA" link Jonathan Zittrain is a visiting professor at Oxford - it looks like he's just another "know-it-all" Yank after all.

For precisely the reason evolution feels counterintuitive in the first place.

So, are the EU member countries planning stop importing Oil ? http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/saudiarabia/

Try this. I've used it to "correct" a few oddities in the default behavior of my mac, although I probably wouldn't have bothered with it unless I had also needed it for typesetting in LaTeX.

But what they lack is perspective, judgment, experience, and a sense of the consequences of their actions. To wit: teens are 4 times as likely as other drivers to be involved in a motor vehicle accident. This lack of experience & judgment might be called "dumb" colloquially but in reality is simply a fact that in homo sapiens, the section of the brain that implements these functions- the pre-frontal cortex- tends to develop later on average. Again, individual cases vary. And before you make the argument that we should treat everyone on a case by case basis; I would point out that with publicly-funded institutions like schools and courts we simply don't have the resources, nor necessarily do most families want that kind of uncertainty. For teens in exceptional circumstances there is emancipation.

The cases you describe- self sufficient teens- are pretty rare. The anecdotes you cite hint at selection bias. There certainly are many cases of extraordinary teens, either mature beyond their years or possessing skills that would make adults envious. But these are interesting precisely because they deviate from the norm.

Adults are often too hard on teenagers and (as a parent of a 16yo son) I can say that it is difficult to balance issues of power and authority in your interpersonal relationship with your child, with the child's need to develop into a self-sufficient independent adult. For instance, I own a house; it doesn't matter that my son has "his" room; he may not do "anything he wants" with it as it affects the value of my considerable real estate investment. He intellectually is capable of understanding this but his actions show either a lack of understanding of consequences or a lack of caring for the consequences. This is, I understand, typical for a teen, but can be a source of friction as I have to enforce rules such as "clean up after yourself" that he finds oppressive. He feels that he should have sovereignty over a piece of the house that I own, but even his recent history (last two weeks) indicates that he is unable to follow that simple house rule, so he's subject to periodic quick inspections, with lots of advance notice, which he still feels are invasions of his space.

In the online space we have a growing number of teens (and adults) who are unaware (or just don't care) that their "free speech" causes real harm. Adults don't get to say whatever they want; if teens want to be treated as adults and given adult rights then they must accept that responsibilities are concomitant. As an aside, I am sick of people of all ages whining about their right to free speech as justification for the most outrageous behavior- slander/libel, posting people's addresses online to invite harassment or violence, etc. Free speech is not an absolute as the Supreme Court has ruled numerous times, and saying stupid, mean or illegal things has consequences, whether they are legal or social. In many ways the internet is the worst possible place to say irresponsible things because it has such a long memory, but then again we are talking about teens and I am asserting that, on average, teens lack the judgment of adults.

The research was presented in a poster at the AAS meeting. I have a copy of the poster on my desk, but it's not, to my knowledge, in a generally available place, and no paper has appeared (yet). It's a tad unusual for a press release to be put out with no accompanying published paper.

The abstract is available. However, as is typical for the AAS, the abstract has to be submitted in October for the January meeting and therefore doesn't have the actual result that's in the poster.

The *abstract* of the paper (presumably; it fits) here: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2007AAS...211.1420G

Apparently not, even at the BBC. What they were saying is that there could be hundreds of worlds in the solar system, not in the galaxy. (They meant in the Kuiper belt, far outside of Pluto and Neptune.)

We have already found 273 extra-solar planets in the galaxy. No one doubts now that there are millions, if not billions, in the galaxy, and a puling "hundreds" of Earth type planets in the galaxy would strike most people following this research as a very low estimate.

From the article : "Some astronomers believe there may be hundreds of small rocky bodies in the outer edges of our own Solar System, and perhaps even a handful of frozen Earth-sized worlds."

I would also regard this as almost not news at all, given the rapid rate of discovery of TNOs (Trans Neptunian Objects), three of which so far are the size of Pluto or larger.

Now, back to yellow-on-white situation:

This is indeed an artifact of the human eye. White will excite all 3 kinds of cones (red+green+blue), whereas yellow will only excite red+green. The difference is in the blue. However, as the maximum sensitivity wavelengths for red and green lie relatively close together whereas blue lies more far out, the eye will focus on red/green, rather than blue. Hence, any image where all information is in the difference of blue will be blurred. Any small artifacts (such as dots...) will just disappear...

But no need to use chemical analysis or blacklights: using another optical device which doesn't have that quirk (such as a digital camera...) should be enough...

It is rare that you can completely separate every context of every step of your processing. There is always some data that needs to be shared between the threads and they become bottlenecks. The faster you serve your requests, the worse the contention (waiting for a resource) and thus the inefficiency.

It depends on the task at hand and on your architecture. A file or web server is less likely to encounter contention than for example an IRC server. The first requires some authentication and resource resolving through configuration data but the actual data can be send without interference from other requests. An IRC server requires constant lookups in the user database for routing information and this is likely to take longer than actually sending the messages (even without multi-threading). In these cases, you really have to think your locking scheme through or you will lose more time waiting for a lock than doing actual work - defeating much of the purpose of going MT.

When it comes to architecture, multi threading is an option in your architecture, not an architecture in itself. There is no problem doing a multi-threaded event-driven architecture or a MT message passing architecture -- these are actually very effective. For some interesting reading about this, I would suggest you check out the SEDA white paper for a pretty in depth list of options and their goals.

Why is it bad for programmers? Because locking is hard to do in itself and if your locking scheme is subobtimal it often requires a lot of work to change it afterwards.

If they don't throw us crumbs like this every once in while, then we lowly commoners might get uppity and demand they put an end to their unfair admissions practices or something.

Before you call bullshit, you should actually know what you're talking about.

Remember the first portable MP3 player? The Diamond Multimedia Rio 300? Diamond WAS sued.

Only because 'the Rio must be able to reproduce, either "directly" or "from a transmission," a "digital music recording."' did Diamond win, a.k.a. the fact that it did not support music transfer off the device without software hacks.

This is the legal precedent that the entire industry has been shielded under.

Space Elevators going up to geosynchronous orbit aren't needed, so carbon nanotubes aren't needed either. We could build a Space Pier - which is a series of towers 100km tall with an accelerator on the top - out of pressurized cylindrical columns made out of boron. (The linked article talks about diamondoid materials, but other researchers have looked into more conventional materials which would allow us to build towers 100km high.) Also, Robert Zubrin has looked into a Hypersonic Skyhook which doesn't extend all the way to the ground or out to geosynch. However, it's a lot easier to design and build a SSTO or TSTO craft that can acheive 100km altitude and 4 or 5 km/s delta-v, as opposed to 8.5 km/s needed for low earth orbit. It is rumored that Burt Rutan's White Knight Two is designed to also launch a higher performance rocket plane that could acheive this. (In addition to the Space Ship Two space tourism craft.)

I have not performed any experiments on exploding double layers. Acutally, I am not aware of any having been done at all. The idea of exploding DLs by Alfven was to describe the substorm process in the Earth's magnetotail.

To be sure, double layers explode not only in the magnetotail. Alfven himself observed it en vivo, for example, when he was invited to investigate certain large-scale accidents at the Swedish power company. Moreover, double layers are heavily involved in the process deceptively called "magnetic" reconnection.

J.F. Drake. Collisionless Magnetic Reconnection.

However, this tenet is not usable any more, because this double layer has not been found to exist in the Earth's magnetotail.

Really? Not found to exist? Please point me to the sources for your statement. In the meantime, allow me to remind the readers of the most elementary properties of plasma. Double layers always form at the boundaries between plasma regions of different physical conditions. As an example, consider the stable double layer in the magnetopause. They even form under the conditions of relativistic Weibel instability; in lab, point a relativistic electron-positron or electron-ion beam at a slightly magnetized plasma; in space, a gamma ray burst will do:

Milosavljevic M., et. al. Steady-State Electrostatic Layers from Weibel Instability in Relativistic Collisionless Shocks. Astrophys. J. 637 (2006)

Double layers also form in current-carrying plasmas; in general, wherever there exists a voltage differential in plasma. Their formation leads to and/or is result of various plasma instabilities. Therefore, among other things, double layers are very common in multi-ion-species plasmas (typical in space). The cross-field current instability, that plays such an important part in the current disruption model, is one; see, for example:

G. Zimbardo, et. al. Magnetic turbulence and particle dynamics in the Earth's magnetotail. Annales Geophysicae 21 (2003)

R. L. Stenzel, et. al. Double layer formation during current sheet disruptions in a reconnection experiment. Geophysical Research Letter 9 (1982)

J. E. Borovsky. Double layers do accelerate particles in the auroral zone. Physical Review Letters 69, 7 (1992)

Reddy R.V., Lakhina G.S. Ion acoustic double layers and solitons in auroral plasma. Planetary and Space Science 39, 10 (1991)

El-Taibany, W. F.; Sabry, R. Dust-acoustic solitary waves and double layers in a magnetized dusty plasma with nonthermal ions and dust charge variation. Physics of Plasmas 12, 8 (2005)

Xiao C., et. al. Cluster Observation of Wave Excitation in the Magnetopause Caused by Interplanetary Shocks. 2006 Western Pacific Geophysics Meeting

Quoting the abstract: "Intense geomagnetic storms are usually caused by the CME-magnetosphere interaction. Up to now there are only very few in situ measurements with respect to the details of interactions of CME with the front shock and magnetosphere. In this paper we report such a fortuitous observation made by Cluster four spacecraft. At 16:35 UT on Nov. 4, 2001 LASCO/SOHO observed an Earth-direction halo CME. Associated with the CME were a front shock and a magnetic cloud, which caused an intense magnetic storm with $DstI could keep citing articles ad nauseum; there are too many to list here. Jus

I have not performed any experiments on exploding double layers. Acutally, I am not aware of any having been done at all. The idea of exploding DLs by Alfven was to describe the substorm process in the Earth's magnetotail.

To be sure, double layers explode not only in the magnetotail. Alfven himself observed it en vivo, for example, when he was invited to investigate certain large-scale accidents at the Swedish power company. Moreover, double layers are heavily involved in the process deceptively called "magnetic" reconnection.

J.F. Drake. Collisionless Magnetic Reconnection.

However, this tenet is not usable any more, because this double layer has not been found to exist in the Earth's magnetotail.

Really? Not found to exist? Please point me to the sources for your statement. In the meantime, allow me to remind the readers of the most elementary properties of plasma. Double layers always form at the boundaries between plasma regions of different physical conditions. As an example, consider the stable double layer in the magnetopause. They even form under the conditions of relativistic Weibel instability; in lab, point a relativistic electron-positron or electron-ion beam at a slightly magnetized plasma; in space, a gamma ray burst will do:

Milosavljevic M., et. al. Steady-State Electrostatic Layers from Weibel Instability in Relativistic Collisionless Shocks. Astrophys. J. 637 (2006)

Double layers also form in current-carrying plasmas; in general, wherever there exists a voltage differential in plasma. Their formation leads to and/or is result of various plasma instabilities. Therefore, among other things, double layers are very common in multi-ion-species plasmas (typical in space). The cross-field current instability, that plays such an important part in the current disruption model, is one; see, for example:

G. Zimbardo, et. al. Magnetic turbulence and particle dynamics in the Earth's magnetotail. Annales Geophysicae 21 (2003)

R. L. Stenzel, et. al. Double layer formation during current sheet disruptions in a reconnection experiment. Geophysical Research Letter 9 (1982)

J. E. Borovsky. Double layers do accelerate particles in the auroral zone. Physical Review Letters 69, 7 (1992)

Reddy R.V., Lakhina G.S. Ion acoustic double layers and solitons in auroral plasma. Planetary and Space Science 39, 10 (1991)

El-Taibany, W. F.; Sabry, R. Dust-acoustic solitary waves and double layers in a magnetized dusty plasma with nonthermal ions and dust charge variation. Physics of Plasmas 12, 8 (2005)

Xiao C., et. al. Cluster Observation of Wave Excitation in the Magnetopause Caused by Interplanetary Shocks. 2006 Western Pacific Geophysics Meeting

Quoting the abstract: "Intense geomagnetic storms are usually caused by the CME-magnetosphere interaction. Up to now there are only very few in situ measurements with respect to the details of interactions of CME with the front shock and magnetosphere. In this paper we report such a fortuitous observation made by Cluster four spacecraft. At 16:35 UT on Nov. 4, 2001 LASCO/SOHO observed an Earth-direction halo CME. Associated with the CME were a front shock and a magnetic cloud, which caused an intense magnetic storm with $DstI could keep citing articles ad nauseum; there are too many to list here. Jus

I have not performed any experiments on exploding double layers. Acutally, I am not aware of any having been done at all. The idea of exploding DLs by Alfven was to describe the substorm process in the Earth's magnetotail.

To be sure, double layers explode not only in the magnetotail. Alfven himself observed it en vivo, for example, when he was invited to investigate certain large-scale accidents at the Swedish power company. Moreover, double layers are heavily involved in the process deceptively called "magnetic" reconnection.

J.F. Drake. Collisionless Magnetic Reconnection.

However, this tenet is not usable any more, because this double layer has not been found to exist in the Earth's magnetotail.

Really? Not found to exist? Please point me to the sources for your statement. In the meantime, allow me to remind the readers of the most elementary properties of plasma. Double layers always form at the boundaries between plasma regions of different physical conditions. As an example, consider the stable double layer in the magnetopause. They even form under the conditions of relativistic Weibel instability; in lab, point a relativistic electron-positron or electron-ion beam at a slightly magnetized plasma; in space, a gamma ray burst will do:

Milosavljevic M., et. al. Steady-State Electrostatic Layers from Weibel Instability in Relativistic Collisionless Shocks. Astrophys. J. 637 (2006)

Double layers also form in current-carrying plasmas; in general, wherever there exists a voltage differential in plasma. Their formation leads to and/or is result of various plasma instabilities. Therefore, among other things, double layers are very common in multi-ion-species plasmas (typical in space). The cross-field current instability, that plays such an important part in the current disruption model, is one; see, for example:

G. Zimbardo, et. al. Magnetic turbulence and particle dynamics in the Earth's magnetotail. Annales Geophysicae 21 (2003)

R. L. Stenzel, et. al. Double layer formation during current sheet disruptions in a reconnection experiment. Geophysical Research Letter 9 (1982)

J. E. Borovsky. Double layers do accelerate particles in the auroral zone. Physical Review Letters 69, 7 (1992)

Reddy R.V., Lakhina G.S. Ion acoustic double layers and solitons in auroral plasma. Planetary and Space Science 39, 10 (1991)

El-Taibany, W. F.; Sabry, R. Dust-acoustic solitary waves and double layers in a magnetized dusty plasma with nonthermal ions and dust charge variation. Physics of Plasmas 12, 8 (2005)

Xiao C., et. al. Cluster Observation of Wave Excitation in the Magnetopause Caused by Interplanetary Shocks. 2006 Western Pacific Geophysics Meeting

Quoting the abstract: "Intense geomagnetic storms are usually caused by the CME-magnetosphere interaction. Up to now there are only very few in situ measurements with respect to the details of interactions of CME with the front shock and magnetosphere. In this paper we report such a fortuitous observation made by Cluster four spacecraft. At 16:35 UT on Nov. 4, 2001 LASCO/SOHO observed an Earth-direction halo CME. Associated with the CME were a front shock and a magnetic cloud, which caused an intense magnetic storm with $DstI could keep citing articles ad nauseum; there are too many to list here. Jus

I have not performed any experiments on exploding double layers. Acutally, I am not aware of any having been done at all. The idea of exploding DLs by Alfven was to describe the substorm process in the Earth's magnetotail.

To be sure, double layers explode not only in the magnetotail. Alfven himself observed it en vivo, for example, when he was invited to investigate certain large-scale accidents at the Swedish power company. Moreover, double layers are heavily involved in the process deceptively called "magnetic" reconnection.

J.F. Drake. Collisionless Magnetic Reconnection.

However, this tenet is not usable any more, because this double layer has not been found to exist in the Earth's magnetotail.

Really? Not found to exist? Please point me to the sources for your statement. In the meantime, allow me to remind the readers of the most elementary properties of plasma. Double layers always form at the boundaries between plasma regions of different physical conditions. As an example, consider the stable double layer in the magnetopause. They even form under the conditions of relativistic Weibel instability; in lab, point a relativistic electron-positron or electron-ion beam at a slightly magnetized plasma; in space, a gamma ray burst will do:

Milosavljevic M., et. al. Steady-State Electrostatic Layers from Weibel Instability in Relativistic Collisionless Shocks. Astrophys. J. 637 (2006)

Double layers also form in current-carrying plasmas; in general, wherever there exists a voltage differential in plasma. Their formation leads to and/or is result of various plasma instabilities. Therefore, among other things, double layers are very common in multi-ion-species plasmas (typical in space). The cross-field current instability, that plays such an important part in the current disruption model, is one; see, for example:

G. Zimbardo, et. al. Magnetic turbulence and particle dynamics in the Earth's magnetotail. Annales Geophysicae 21 (2003)

R. L. Stenzel, et. al. Double layer formation during current sheet disruptions in a reconnection experiment. Geophysical Research Letter 9 (1982)

J. E. Borovsky. Double layers do accelerate particles in the auroral zone. Physical Review Letters 69, 7 (1992)

Reddy R.V., Lakhina G.S. Ion acoustic double layers and solitons in auroral plasma. Planetary and Space Science 39, 10 (1991)

El-Taibany, W. F.; Sabry, R. Dust-acoustic solitary waves and double layers in a magnetized dusty plasma with nonthermal ions and dust charge variation. Physics of Plasmas 12, 8 (2005)

Xiao C., et. al. Cluster Observation of Wave Excitation in the Magnetopause Caused by Interplanetary Shocks. 2006 Western Pacific Geophysics Meeting

Quoting the abstract: "Intense geomagnetic storms are usually caused by the CME-magnetosphere interaction. Up to now there are only very few in situ measurements with respect to the details of interactions of CME with the front shock and magnetosphere. In this paper we report such a fortuitous observation made by Cluster four spacecraft. At 16:35 UT on Nov. 4, 2001 LASCO/SOHO observed an Earth-direction halo CME. Associated with the CME were a front shock and a magnetic cloud, which caused an intense magnetic storm with $DstI could keep citing articles ad nauseum; there are too many to list here. Jus

A little more of this http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2008/01/30/the-1000-hp-desktop-tower-running-windows-vista/
and that won't be true anymore.

Unless Dell is just as bad of course.

And it should come as no surprise to SD readers that lab experiments have been done on "exploding double layers"! Indeed, here is a PhD thesis on just this topic (the author did this at no less an august lab than the Alfvén Lab, at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm Sweden): http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1993JPhD...26.1192V. Now that may be a little difficult to get one's hands on, and it is now nearly 15 years' old, so how about something more recent and accessible? Like "TOPICAL REVIEW: A review of recent laboratory double layer experiments" perhaps (http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2007PSST...16....1C)?

Of course, research has been done on exploding double layers! How nice of you to quote work from the other side of the divide. Or did you think that Plasma/Electric Universe is to be defined as what has NOT been published?

Leo

I don't know, the D block has awfully little bandwidth.

Check this figure, and compare it with the GSM spectrum for some perspective.

Privacy would not be a problem if we consumers were allowed to track ourselves and had complete ownership of our private data.

It would then be great if you could harness your own profile data to personalise every bit of digital content you get in contact with, from web browsing/searching, to mobile usage, to the adverts you see on TV and out in the street.

Corporations invest so much money into CRM systems, yet you only get the benefit of 'personalisation' from each company, whereas if you had your own data silo you could interface with everyone out there.

I'm glad this vision is shared by others. Doc Searls already coined the term VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) and started a community around ProjectVRM.

I still think the biggest challenge is to convince the corporations out there that they can trust such a paradigm-shifting concept, and as a result stop trying to invade our privacy.

Privacy would not be a problem if we consumers were allowed to track ourselves and had complete ownership of our private data.

It would then be great if you could harness your own profile data to personalise every bit of digital content you get in contact with, from web browsing/searching, to mobile usage, to the adverts you see on TV and out in the street.

Corporations invest so much money into CRM systems, yet you only get the benefit of 'personalisation' from each company, whereas if you had your own data silo you could interface with everyone out there.

I'm glad this vision is shared by others. Doc Searls already coined the term VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) and started a community around ProjectVRM.

I still think the biggest challenge is to convince the corporations out there that they can trust such a paradigm-shifting concept, and as a result stop trying to invade our privacy.

Icarus, "International Journal of Solar System Studies"; unfortunately it's a subscription publication (though with some ingenuity you can find at least the abstracts of many Icarus papers through ADS; papers with preprints on arXiv are, of course, free) http://icarus.cornell.edu/. This is the best, deepest, etc resource (IMHO).

ADS Abstract service, for finding papers relevant to planetary formation (click on Physics and Geophysics Search http://adsabs.harvard.edu/ads_abstracts.html)

General, diffuse website: Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD, most have at least some good links; not specific to planet formation though http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html)

General astronomy discussion forum (LOTS of very knowledgeable and helpful people): BAUT (http://www.bautforum.com/)

General physics discussion forum (not much on planetary formation however): Physics Forums (http://physicsforums.com/index.php)

I'll suggest some of the other resources in a later comment ...

It is a true synthesis of all of the natural sciences, but what it concludes is that plasmas in space are being mathematically modeled incorrectly. And this is where people tend to turn off. In plasma-based cosmologies, plasmas are electrodynamic entities that, like in the lab, respond with electrical resistance and luminosity to changes in their charge density. In conventional cosmologies, astrophysicists *assume* that plasmas are "perfect conductors", they *assume* that space is "quasi-neutral" -- that a given volume of space essentially has equal numbers of positive and negative charges -- and they *assume* that magnetic fields are "frozen-in place" within a plasma (as opposed to being affected by the mechanics and electrodynamics of the plasma itself).

The concept of "magnetic reconnection", for instance [...] has never been validated within a laboratory despite being discussed for decades now. And importantly, there is no reason for why we cannot validate magnetic reconnection within the lab.

If asked to guess, I'd say you wrote this without critically thinking about it, and certainly without investigating the work of the scientists who study the Earth's magnetosphere and the IPM (inter-planetary medium).

Last month, the AGU (American Geophysical Union) held its Fall 2007 meeting in San Francisco. I think I recall reading that some 15,000 people attended.

Just from the titles of the sections (http://www.agu.org/meetings/fm07/?content=program&show=glance), I'd guess that this would have been an extremely important meeting for all Plasma Universe/Electric Universe groupies - 'Atmospheric and Space Electricity', 'Planetary Sciences', 'Solar and Heliospheric Physics', 'Magnetospheric Physics', and so on.

Within Solar and Heliospheric Physics (http://www.agu.org/cgi-bin/sessions5?meeting=fm07&sec=SH) it would seem there were quite a few sessions that would have been of intense interest to you. Some examples:

SH41C - Magnetic Reconnection in Laboratory, Magnetospheric, and Solar Plasmas I (http://www.agu.org/cgi-bin/sessions5?meeting=fm07&part=SH41C&maxhits=400), with such sessions as:
* "Causes and Consequences of Reconnection in the Laboratory" (abstract is here: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2007AGUFMSH41C..06P), and,
* "Experimental merging, coalescence, reconnection, and bouncing of two flux ropes" (abstract: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2007AGUFMSH41C..07I - note that the six authors seem to work in the same lab as Peratt; interesting, don't you think?)

SH44A - Magnetic Reconnection in Laboratory, Magnetospheric, and Solar Plasmas IV Posters (http://www.agu.org/cgi-bin/sessions5?meeting=fm07&part=SH44A&maxhits=400), which featured posters with such interesting titles as:
"Magnetic reconnection with multiple X-lines in an open system: Two fluid simulations with finite electron inertial effects"
"Breakdown of the Frozen-in Condition and Plasma Acceleration: Dynamical Theory"
"Self-regulation of the reconnecting current sheet in relativistic pair plasmas"
"Fast Reconnection in Electron-Positron Plasmas via Turbulent Outflow Jets"
"Universal Method for Describing Magnetic Reconnection"

From a different pln2bz comment:

Nereid, you seem to think that I *really* care about responding to your interruptions. But you present nothing for my mind to chew on. You are little more than a pest to

It is a true synthesis of all of the natural sciences, but what it concludes is that plasmas in space are being mathematically modeled incorrectly. And this is where people tend to turn off. In plasma-based cosmologies, plasmas are electrodynamic entities that, like in the lab, respond with electrical resistance and luminosity to changes in their charge density. In conventional cosmologies, astrophysicists *assume* that plasmas are "perfect conductors", they *assume* that space is "quasi-neutral" -- that a given volume of space essentially has equal numbers of positive and negative charges -- and they *assume* that magnetic fields are "frozen-in place" within a plasma (as opposed to being affected by the mechanics and electrodynamics of the plasma itself).

The concept of "magnetic reconnection", for instance [...] has never been validated within a laboratory despite being discussed for decades now. And importantly, there is no reason for why we cannot validate magnetic reconnection within the lab.

If asked to guess, I'd say you wrote this without critically thinking about it, and certainly without investigating the work of the scientists who study the Earth's magnetosphere and the IPM (inter-planetary medium).

Last month, the AGU (American Geophysical Union) held its Fall 2007 meeting in San Francisco. I think I recall reading that some 15,000 people attended.

Just from the titles of the sections (http://www.agu.org/meetings/fm07/?content=program&show=glance), I'd guess that this would have been an extremely important meeting for all Plasma Universe/Electric Universe groupies - 'Atmospheric and Space Electricity', 'Planetary Sciences', 'Solar and Heliospheric Physics', 'Magnetospheric Physics', and so on.

Within Solar and Heliospheric Physics (http://www.agu.org/cgi-bin/sessions5?meeting=fm07&sec=SH) it would seem there were quite a few sessions that would have been of intense interest to you. Some examples:

SH41C - Magnetic Reconnection in Laboratory, Magnetospheric, and Solar Plasmas I (http://www.agu.org/cgi-bin/sessions5?meeting=fm07&part=SH41C&maxhits=400), with such sessions as:
* "Causes and Consequences of Reconnection in the Laboratory" (abstract is here: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2007AGUFMSH41C..06P), and,
* "Experimental merging, coalescence, reconnection, and bouncing of two flux ropes" (abstract: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2007AGUFMSH41C..07I - note that the six authors seem to work in the same lab as Peratt; interesting, don't you think?)

SH44A - Magnetic Reconnection in Laboratory, Magnetospheric, and Solar Plasmas IV Posters (http://www.agu.org/cgi-bin/sessions5?meeting=fm07&part=SH44A&maxhits=400), which featured posters with such interesting titles as:
"Magnetic reconnection with multiple X-lines in an open system: Two fluid simulations with finite electron inertial effects"
"Breakdown of the Frozen-in Condition and Plasma Acceleration: Dynamical Theory"
"Self-regulation of the reconnecting current sheet in relativistic pair plasmas"
"Fast Reconnection in Electron-Positron Plasmas via Turbulent Outflow Jets"
"Universal Method for Describing Magnetic Reconnection"

From a different pln2bz comment:

Nereid, you seem to think that I *really* care about responding to your interruptions. But you present nothing for my mind to chew on. You are little more than a pest to