Slashdot Mirror

All these archives are searchable from the web site, and (if you've registered with them) available for download. Images from HST and CADC are restricted to only the primary researcher(s) for a period of time (I think it's a year).

Process generally refers to smallest feature size, e.g. "lambda." Given this, the smallest a gate can be is 2*lamba on a side (i.e. wide and long), i.e. 0.36um.
For more info, check out this link.

Okay, first, this object will probably not be called "Plutino", because that name's already pretty much taken and has been used for a class of objects which astronomers decide are larger than the average asteroid, but smaller than the traditional definition of a planet

"Plutinos" are actually one type of Kuiper Belt (or Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt) objects, so named because they are in orbits similar to Pluto. The other major class of KBOs are "cubewanos", after the first KBO discovered, 1992 QB1. Cubewanos tend to have somewhat more distant, circular orbits than the plutinos. There are also some scattered disk objects that appear to be KBOs but have orbits that fit into neither the plutino nor cubewano classes.

Beyond the Kuiper Belt is yet another conglomeration of chunks of rock and dust called the Oort Cloud. This also surrounds our solar system and may actually protect us from some of the things that could zip into the system and strike another planet or disrupt things

The density of the Oort Cloud is so low as to prevent it from being any kind of effective shield.

Actually, Pluto and Charon are just a system of two kuiper belt objects. My astronomy buddy mentioned that it was recently decided that Pluto is no longer a planet by an astronomical committee (not sure whom), leaving us back with 8 planets again -- I'm sure this means that this new tiny object will also be ruled a kuiper belt object.. NOT a planet :-)
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This object belongs the the Knuiper Belt a class of objects similiar to asteroids. Pluto is thought to be the largest example of a Knuiper object>.

There is an excellent computer program called Monkey God, which creates random universes with different fundamental physical constants. (Most of them -do- have long lived stars.) The math and physics are also described in detail on links from the page above.
This recently notable movement towards a popularization in the media of some bad science turned towards apologia for theology is very troubling to me. Religion and physics don't mix. I would rather (shudder have religion insinuating itself into politics then into science. Any faith based and socially constructed mythological delusion can only significantly harm true and objective inquiry into the true fundamental structure of reality itself.
Still, I must give this man for credit for ultimately being an empiricist. After finishing the article my initial discomfort was defused when he talked of it as sheer speculation, and of being hopefully proved or disproved by the techniques of scientific rigor.
The monkey god program [and some of the writings on the site above] was aimed more at deconstructing the arguments of some cosmomythologists who argue that the tenability of life in our universe is tantamount to proof of divine creation.


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A truly functioning police state needs no police.

We have two space habitats now, MIR and the International Space Station. The history of the development of space habitats shows that, using current technology, we produce very high cost habitats that are dependent upon the Earth. O'Neill in his promotion of real space habitats makes it clear that to be built cost effectively, the material for their construction must come from someplace other than the Earth. That requires future technology.

Given current habitat dependence on earth, a civilization destroying asteroid, would presumably doom the crews on the station(s) as well. If the impact is not too large (sufficiently large to vaporize the oceans), then we should expect crews in submerged nuclear submarines to survive. Because they have long life power sources and extensive food stores, they would presumably be able to emerge someplace where even longer term energy resources are available (e.g. the Middle East). This would potentially allow them to construct green houses that could support a small population until the dust clears from the atmosphere. There are possible locations (deep valleys, underground facilities, etc.) that could survive the impact as well. Collectively, these would form the seeds of a new civilization. There are of course problems such as how do you identify locations where there are likely to be preserved the seeds, power sources, light sources, etc. in relative proximity that would allow you to maintain an agricultural base. But I think people could figure this out. It would be interesting to start a project that created a number of protected "humanity shelters" around the world that were widely know about just to be able to know we had a solution to the most probable doomsday scenarios.

Now, with regard to moving extensive numbers of people into space habitats or colonizing other planets with self-sustaining groups. This is going to require nanotechnology to be done cost effectively. If you have self-replicating systems based on nanotechnology (discussed by Josh Hall in this paper), then you can rapidly move people off the planet. You can also dissassemble a planet or two and build in the vicinity of ~100 billion telescopes the diameter of the moon. This array of telescopes would fill most of the inner solar system out to the orbit of Jupiter. At that point we would certainly be able to identify all of the Oort Cloud objects. Nanoprobes would then be launched to these objects using mass drivers. Once they arrive at these objects, they can be disasssembled into useful construction material and reoriented on orbits to deliver that material to useful locations. If objects were found that were on killer trajectories that could not be reformatted/redirected in time by the nanoengineers, then the mass drivers could also be used to deliver high velocity projectiles into the oncoming path of the object to deflect or vaporize it.

So the answer, as it is with most things, is we need molecular nanotechnology and self-replicating engineering systems. The last time I looked at some of the sites suggested, they did not include nanotechnology in their habitat development strategies. Without nanotechnology, the costs are likely to be so high that serious people can only consider them fantasies.

You might only get a few months warning on those at best (they mostly shine within the orbit of mars), and at worst, they come at you from the sunward direction where our telescopes can't see them. You wake up one day wondering what that wall of fire is. Or maybe we don't wake up at all.

There probably is no reasonable defense against such asteroids. Moving them- there probably is no way that can be done in that short time scale.

Think about it. This is a planet busting disaster and there is no way to save the earth.

Its not particularly likely to happen soon, but it will happen eventually. Even long period comets that come round once a millenia or so. So this time they line with the earth for the first time and...

There is one way for humans to survive however. We need to build space habitats as soon as we possibly can.

Check out:

Artemis

Neofuels

Permanent

Sleep well, don't have nightmares!

...could probably be considered a non-issue seeing as the atmosphere is made up of roughly 70% nitrogen already.

Nitrogen is also an inert element, so it doesn't go forming nasty things that deplete ozone layers. Every breath you take is mostly nitrogen already.

And that's probably at 1 atmosphere. I doubt there's anywhere near that kind of pressure on Titan. I would think that would mean that it would have to be colder than that there.

http://www2.ke ck.hawaii.edu:3636/realpublic/gen_info/news/titan. html says it has "a surface temperature of minus 180 degrees Celsius (- 290 F)"

Don't lick any flagpoles, doorknobs, or train tracks on your next trip there.

Not a very slick, but a very informative site.

I think that's either the most clueless, or the most willful distortion of history I've ever seen.

While it's correct to note that the Statute of Anne was the first modern copyright law, it was introduced as a response to serious problems - an unlimited printer's monopoly combined with oppressive government censorship. Before the Statute of Anne, the right to print (anything!) was a monopoly controlled by a trade guild, the Stationer's Company. This situation arose in part with the support of Crown, particularly Queen Mary, as a means of controlling the political dialogue (and resulted in large numbers of "dissenting" printers setting up in the Netherlands). The Stationer's Company enforced a "perpetual" monopoly on printed works - each printer registered the works he was printing and no other printer could print them. They also enforced import restrictions - primarily designed to dissuade heresy and dissent, but also to enforce the printer's guild's monopoly.

After over a hundred years of this monopoly, the printers were rudely suprised by the Statute of Anne, which allowed anyone (who could afford it) to become a printer, and which, for the first time, gave authors a copyright, for 14 years (renewable for another 14).

Before free speech, before freedom of assembly, before freedom of religion, there was copyright protection in our Constitution. The founding fathers knew copyright protection could improve society by preserving the economic incentive for people to come up with brilliant ideas and inventions.

The founding fathers knew the history when publishers controlled ideas (as a surrogate for governments), and were trying to prevent it from happening, again.

Links:

• http://www.marcihamilton.com/ip/occ asional.html
• http://www.lawsch.uga.edu/~jipl/vol1/patterson.htm l#english
• http://www.soc.hawaii. edu/~future/dissertation/Chapter2.html

A very educational dissertation, Weaving Webs of Ownership, covers the historical background of copyright. I highly recommend it.

Those are good points, and they have precedence in the previous information revolution.

For a phenomenally good overview of the furor created when printing presses made publishing inexpensive, and thus threatened the profits and power of the traditional publishing houses, see [The Copyright Story].

You'll certainly be able to see the parallels:
- how the publishers told tales of hardship and despair at the loss of their licensing control
- how publishers owned the works, not the authors
- how book piracy increased the popularity of books (and literacy) in Germany
- how authors eventually came to own their own works, instead of the damned publishers
- how copyright was originally intended to promote the development and spread of ideas, and came to be bastardized into mere corporate profits.

This is only one chapter of the fellow's dissertation. Give it a go!


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B. Huge telescopes aren't yet even possible in space; no way to get them up there.

Yes, Hubble is space based, but it isn't "huge". The Hubble has a main reflecting mirror 2.4m in diameter; the largest single telescopes on Earth are the 10m telescopes on top of Mauna Kea, Hawaii. (The Keck telescopes are individually bigger than other individual telescopes, but telescopes can be linked to provide an effectively larger telescope. That is what Chris is doing. Keck is doing something simila r for NASA's Origin's program.)

Louis Wu

Thinking is one of hardest types of work.

B. Huge telescopes aren't yet even possible in space; no way to get them up there.

Yes, Hubble is space based, but it isn't "huge". The Hubble has a main reflecting mirror 2.4m in diameter; the largest single telescopes on Earth are the 10m telescopes on top of Mauna Kea, Hawaii. (The Keck telescopes are individually bigger than other individual telescopes, but telescopes can be linked to provide an effectively larger telescope. That is what Chris is doing. Keck is doing something simila r for NASA's Origin's program.)

Louis Wu

Thinking is one of hardest types of work.

Now, it is not protected primarily for SETI. Submm is an extremely important branch of astronomy, and gaining. The page of the largest submm telescope in the world the JCMT is a good place to start if you want to find out more about submm astronomy.

As for SETI funding, there are not huge amounts of resources going into it. There are small amounts of resources. IMHO, that is the way it should be, but piggyback projects should be conducted. Computing is best done through distributed projects, like the SETI@Home project. I have stopped running the client, though, I think they're not managing the project right.

As far as we know the 'gravity only' type of calculation that the Grape boards perform is sufficient to describe the motion of this matter.

However, there is indeed great interest in performing hydrodynamical simulations of galaxies, mostly because then we can attempt to calculate where and how the stars are forming in the galaxy. Dealing with the gas expicitly also allows us to follow things like shock fronts in the gas and to attempt to calculate the thermal properties of the gas. Of course this is all rather complicated stuff so we have to make gross approximations. And remember, even with that massive grape board if you describe a galaxy with a million particles, they are still going to each be representing at least 10 to 100 thousand solar masses. We are still a long way off from being able to describe the milky way on a 'star by star' basis.

Two really good URL's for people who are interested in reading some of the technical details of this stuff are the web pages of my advisor Matthias Steinmetz and one of the fathers of modern galaxy simulations Josh Barnes.

Note that Matthias's simulations (check out the pictures and movies) are all done with a high end workstation and a handfull of Grape 3 boards.

Cheers

The truth about gravity is very interesting. However, my knowledge cannot be passed on to you because my life holds greater value than the dissemination of this info (from my point of view). I apologize for my selfishness, but must point out that this what society has taught me.

Search here.

There is more info on the methods used to analyze the grains, and associated research
here.

The so-called 'Internet revolution' that is supposed to be sweeping the world is going to be hard pressed to reach the small island state of Tuvalu now. Has this government sold out it's people by selling this domain or has there government pulled down a really cool score. After a quick search around the net I discovered the countries GDP is approximately US$10M, do the math, the US$1million basic yearly amount will either half the taxation of it's citizens or allow some serious infrastructure improvement. Here are some nice details about this little island state:
LAND AREA: 26 SQ. KM.
POPULATION: 9,500 (1994 EST.)
GDP: US$10M (1990)
GDP PER CAPITA: US$1,009 (1990)
OFFICIAL CURRENCY: AUSTRALIAN DOLLAR

For more details about Tuvalu click here.

Of course, tcl is also used. Most of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey software is written in Dervish, which is a Fermilab branch of tcl.

What basically happens is that the data comes in off the telescope, and when ORAC-DR sees it, the data gets reduced. It automagically removes any sorts of defects that are common to CCD observations (flat-fields, bias levels, sky levels), and often produces publication-quality results. We were joking that astronomers wouldn't even have to write their papers. We'd just reduce the data, fill in some fields on a paper template, then ship the paper off to the appropriate journal. *heh* When I left there was some talk of dedicating a Linux box to the data reduction (instead of the Solaris box they had then).

And it's a Perl-friendly environment at the Joint Astronomy Centre (the place that runs UKIRT in Hawaii). My supervisor (Frossie Economou) has written articles for The Perl Journal, she's got a stuffed penguin on her desk, and the license plate for her Jeep? "PERL5". Another software guy (Tim Jenness) has written stuff for Perldl and is altogether cool for Perl (and stereo equipment too...).

ORAC-DR information is found here. Props to Frossie, Tim, and Chad (who wrote the Apache modules that give the look-and-feel to the JAC webpages -- look for it on CPAN).

Congrats John,
Hope the weather is nice and the surf is kicking. Itchi

If you don't want to be modded down, guy

Don't threaten, okay? Just ask. You had a good question, but this is just plain rude. An apology would serve you well.

Anyhow...

give us links for that stuff. I'm just a real programmer, not a CS wonk, and I haven't even heard of half of your buzzwords.

No problem.

RMMM doesn't matter (it's a detail of spiral development); look up Spiral Lifecycle Model in any decent SW engineering book. The closest one I have is "Rapid Development", and it does indeed discuss it.

Code Reviews are a formal SW engineering practice documented at Univ. Hawaii's page.

The Surgical Team model is one of the many memorable concepts discussed in Fred Brook's "Mythical Man Month". Read it. It's the #1 most recommended book by the Greats of CS and SW engineering.

Refactoring is part of XP, and is documented best in the book titled "Refactoring". I highly recommend it; serious programming stuff there, no fancy-pants process requirements.

XP is facinating because it tends to reduce the parasitic overhead of process. For example, no formal design documents are required with the exception of the user stories and the code.

-Billy

Hey, nice followup! This is a good start. But your 71 million figure is fundamentally misleading for a simple reason. In any conflict between two peoples, historically, save perhaps the communist examples, both groups will claim that "God" is on their side. Does this self-justification mean that organized religion was responsible for the conflict? Obviously not. And doesn't the party starting the conflict deserve the blame? Unfortunately, this is notoriously difficult to determine.

So we need to define some terms. I propose that "perpetrated in the name of God" (your phrase) implies that the primary purpose of the conflict was religious in nature (not economic or political). You would hopefully agree with this definition since you define the problem group as "organized religions ... attacking another group for their convictions." Obviously social, economic, political, and religious issues do get intertwined, hence the emphasis on "primary" purpose. What evidence would satisfy such a claim? One piece of evidence of a primary religious motive would be public cries by a significant fraction of religious leaders for violent action. An even stronger piece of evidence would be the religious leaders organizing to carry out such violent action.

By these hopefully reasonable definitions, I fail to see how the following would be considered "perpetrated in the name of God":
- 30 M Native Americans- killed largely by disease and for motives of greed over land and in some cases politics (e.g. the French allied with and paid some Indians to fight British/American interests) There *was* an active effort to peacefully convert the Indians, but I've never run across evidence of violent or evil attempts at forced conversion.
- 13 M in WWI- this isn't even remotely a religious conflict; it's almost entirely political fallout from the decline of the Austro-hungarian empire of the Hapsburgs. Warring tribes and nationalism, not warring religions.
- 10 M (?!) in the Balkans - As above, this is an issue of warring tribes, not warring religions as far as I can tell. I could be convinced otherwise given evidence under the above definition.

There goes a quick 50 million of your 71 milion "perpetrated in the name of God" deaths, and I have a different set of concerns with your 15 million Crusade deaths.

The big arrow in your quiver IMHO is the Crusades. Based on my admittedly feeble understanding of it, it *would* qualify as "perpetrated in the name of God" by the above definition. We could argue about whether it was solely driven by the Catholic church's drive for power (a common western view) or whether it was a response to the aggressive "holy war" expansion of Muslims up through Turkey, in North Africa, and through sizeable fractions of Spain. But in either case organized religion seemed to be a driving, encouraging factor feeding the conflict. As for the 15 million figure, it seems rather high. At least one nice and well-sourced web source on genocide, a facinating historical view of the topic, seems to indicate that the number across multiple crusades is under 200,000. Perhaps it is omitting something, but for now, I consider the burden of proof to be in your court. I'd be even more willing to agree that the Inquisitions and the Salem Witch trials conform to my definition, although I'd note their relatively small numbers (in the 5-digit range according to the above source.) What are we down to, 6 million? And I'm skipping addressing some of the other "small potatoes" you mentioned.

I'm surprised you omitted the Reformation-era conflicts like the Thirty Years War which were due to an mix of religious and political forces. It's arguable whether such conflicts were primarily religious or primarily political power struggles, but in any case it's a stronger anti-religion case than the three conflicts mentioned above. Tell you what, I'll let you add that one if you let me add Mao alongside Hitler and Stalin. That accounts for another 10-15 million he executed and 30 million he led into man-made starvation.

I don't know whether or not Hitler was a Catholic, but from what I recall reading some of his autobiography, Mein Kampf, religion played little or no role in his upbringing; he was almost completely consumed by political issues. It's also well documented that towards the end of the war, he increasingly became involved in a variety of occult practices, attempting to set up his own state religion based on German myths and the notion of the sanctity of German blood. It's pretty clear (to me at least) that he agreed with Nietsche that God is dead, and let's manipulate whatever religious systems exist to our own ends.

Don't forget, the Hitler extermination figure isn't 6 million; that's the figure referring to the number of Jews exterminated, and doesn't include the blacks, handicapped, homosexuals, Christian opposition, gypsies, Polish people, etc. The overall figure is apparently about double: 12 million.

Now I'd agree with you that there might be various murders throughout the world due to religious and anti-religious individuals. How many murderers or serial killers are religious and how many are areligious or anti-religious? Let's agree that these aren't going to be too countable with our crude methods and keep focused on the bigger social conflicts. I will point out that the systematic allowance of killing of human fetuses, 40 million in America alone over the last 20 years, might be a relevant figure, but I'll try to decline pushing the point once made, in the interest of avoiding another large discussion surrounding definitions of whether fetuses count as human.

So I've added another 16-90 million to your atheist-led tally.

In closing, I think your claim that "taking the whole of history more acts have been attributed to organized religions... than [those committed] solely by atheists" argument, besides being largely unsupported by the facts, also has a severe statistical bias. How is it fair to measure 100-250 years of atheism against 1000+ years of religious behavior?

Look, I'm not trying to exclude religion from culpability; religions *are* culpable for the acts of their followers. "You shall judge a tree by its fruit," as one of them says, urging adherents to carefully screen potential leaders. I'd even agree that religions and religious followers should be held to a higher standard than atheists, since they espouse one. But lets try to look at the evidence without too many preconceptions. What do I make of the evidence? In general, I would say that the nation state is far, far more culpable for mass deaths than religion, which has really only become guilty of great failings when it wrapped its power structures up with those of the state. To the extent that religion encourages restraint on the excercise of state power (due to some moral code,) organized religion can provide a beneficial counterweight in a civilization.

Like you, I'm not trying to offend but attempting to offer a thought-provoking rebuttal. Why does this matter? Besides the issue of "what is true", on a purely pragmatic basis, casting off the moral constraints provided by religion can have significant costs in return for relatively unproven benefits. The "free love" of the '60s didn't come free.

--LP

First, the Keck observations are on the net at Titan, with plenty of info on the adaptive optics technology they used to get a better view than Hubble or Voyager I.

Next, visit "The Nine Planets" and their page on Saturn or Titan to get a broad view of what is being researched and who is doing it.

This leads us ot Cassini and the expected observations of Titan. Thanks to the Keck observations, there should be a lot of interest in Cassini's Titan probe. As noted on the Huygens Titan Probe site, on their Why Titan page, the peculiar nature of Titan, with its plentiful organics and opaque atmosphere, have been well known and of great interest since Voyager.

But anyone who wanted to know already knew. So why are we makig a slashdot fuss over mass media coverage of anything scientific?

Generally, most of the data volume seems to come from reading out large CCDs. For example, a friend here at Caltech is doing fluid dynamics research in which they read out a 1024x1024 array at 1000 fps for a couple of seconds (I think the pixels are 12 bits each or so). This isn't too different from the interferometers, which are creating data at sustained rates of around 5-10 KHz. At those volumes, it doesn't take long to fill a terabyte, and when you go to long-term storage, you're into petabytes. Of course, for time-series image data like this, lossless differential compression schemes can be a big help (by a factor of four or ten), enough to save a few million dollars of storage space.