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Yes. An accurate map, or one with mistakes. Here is one that makes no mistakes about the names of the continents and where they are. Other than forgetting entirely about Antarctica :)

The problem with that is confusion. It is fine to call a region Central America, as there is not already something with that name. However, there have been continents named North America and South America for a very long time (even before "Central America" was distinguished). Why call a region North America when this region is a mere subset of the continent that already has this name?

There is a region named used which is "Anglo America" which could be used for US and Canada, but as you can see it leaves out Mexico.

"has dissapeared I am glad I got rid of my school books, apparently they are all "wrong" now"

They were indeed wrong if the mistakenly included the region of Central America as a distinct continent. The word continent means something, and having a "distintive history" is not part of it. This is why Europe, more and more, is considered to be part of the continent of Eurasia.

Where do we find such a map that has CA as its own continent? Something that world geographers ignore? Do Iberians (Spain and Portugal) also have odd textbooks that make Iberia a separate continent even though no-one else recognizes it as such?

"I am a NORTH American..........next time I travel to the US I will say that to the INS agent and see what he says about that"

Go to images.google.com and find one of the many maps which shows what the continents are, and print it out. Flap it in his face. If he insists that you are not from North America, he is probably one of those dumb "United Statesians" who thinks that New Mexico is a separate country from the USA.

Here is yet another nice map of continents.

All volcanic activity on Mars has ceased. Could there be any vents?

simply owing to the earth's rotation, you are, at this moment, moving at a rate of approximately 1000 mph? Probably less since you are probably not at the equator.

Also, Due to the earth's orbit around the sun, were are traveling at approximately 67000mph.

According to findings of COBE, our galaxy is traveling at 300 k/s or about 1.34 million mph.

Why aren't you torn apart?

No evidence? How do you explain the most rapid rise in global temperatures *and* CO2 levels ever seen?

No evidence? How do you explain the most rapid rise in global temperatures *and* CO2 levels ever seen?

Actually, it's a 66/67 minute delay. The distance from Saturn to Earth is 746 million miles

Correct, but again, to dismiss clear evidence that we are experiencing the most rapid rise in global temperatures *and* CO2 levels ever seen is stupid. Furthermore, while i havn't verified your statement that US temperatures have remained stable, that certainly isnt the case for Australia where it is quite frankly hot enough already, on top of our worrying decrease in annual rainfall...

Correct, but again, to dismiss clear evidence that we are experiencing the most rapid rise in global temperatures *and* CO2 levels ever seen is stupid. Furthermore, while i havn't verified your statement that US temperatures have remained stable, that certainly isnt the case for Australia where it is quite frankly hot enough already, on top of our worrying decrease in annual rainfall...

Just look at those sources you are suggesting...

Hit #1: 25 April 2002
Hit #2: January 25, 2000
Hit #3: September 27, 2002
Hit #4: November 24, 2003

I'm not even going to go further... Last time I checked, it was Deceber 2004...

Pluto is 2300 km diameter, ranges from 4.3 to 7.4 billion km from the sun.

http://www.windows.ucar.edu/tour/link=/pluto/stati stics.html [ucar.edu] xgs

At the 65K foot hieght they are talking about They are well above even the highest of storm clouds (50K feet is the top height I was able to find listed by the national weather service.) Also high enough to be above commercial and military flight paths. So weather is not a problem.

The other thought I've seen expressed concerns lag time With only 65K feet to transgress the lag shouldn't be any greater than wired communications in any single band. Point being that 13 miles isn't that great a distance for radio wave propogation ( 3,00000 km per second in vacuum ) So unlike SatCom where You have to calculate in Phase delay etc there is none of that affecting something at such a low height. Granted in it's initial phase it may not be the ideal gaming platform for some really lag sensitive games for most situations it won't be a concern.

What does have potential affects can be things like ground clutter (Extreme example turn on your microwave while using 802.11b in a small apartment.) Radio shadow. (tall buildings) etc. However these are things that affect a number of current radio communications systems and the 13M hieght will help. (Thats why the roof of the tallest building in a city is such valuable real estate)

The other neat thing is that you have a much lower horizon affect (the horizon is farther away from the top of a mountain than at sea level.) etc. I wouldn't expect it to be reliable for symetric communications links (The power down will be easier to create than the power up from a small device like a handheld. So give the db loss over the distance you won't find yourself serving a slashdotable server off of the connection. But for e-mail, blackberry, web surfing or sending off a modified spread sheet to the boss I would expect it would equal normal home DSL without a problem.

Strange too that no one ever talks about the lag in wired communications even though it is there. I remember as a child talking with my Aunt and Uncle living in Europe at the time on the phone. You really had a problem with knowing when the other person was speaking because of the lag.

Some useful links
http://www.cosmic.ucar.edu/related_papers/2002_wu_ cedar_sporadic_e.pdf

http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/SSC/CSER/UOSAT/IJSSE/is sue1/seumahu/seumahu.html

URL:http://www.vigyanprasar.com/ham/IONOS.htm

And for the other posters wondering about whether there's a market for accurate forecasts, the answer is yes, a very big one. When you operate a power grid, for example, a difference of a few degrees a day or two out saves a lot of money. There's a reason that Enron et al. were trying to run their own models in house.

Mostly not, I'm afraid.

Basically, while I can see how you got your ideas, they really aren't right. First of all, there is a range of scientific studies and approaches that support the global warming consensus, not just models. Secondly, the models are not developed to study global warming,. They are developed to study the earth as a system. Global warming prediction is an important output, but far from the only one.

In fact, we build the models from the physical principles, with the hope that realistic model behavior emerges. We have millions of data points, thousands of phenomena, and thousands of person-years of research into the physics and chemistry of the atmosphere, ocean and ice systems that we attempt to capture in these models.

The curve-fitting exercise you describe is trivial compared to the actual efforts underway.

I don't know why you think you can't afford to read the full-fledged climate models by the way. They are open source. You may not be able to afford to run them, but that's reasonable; they require supercomputers to run. They just require patience to read. Here's one.. Let me warn you that you will have difficulty reading it. Unlike you, I actually do have to read this thing and so far I am not enjoying it.

While I see where you are coming from with your questions, it doesn't seem fruitful to take them all on at once. As in any science, the answers are not immediately accessible in the sense that an outsider can expect to follow all the arguments in detail in a reasonable amount of time. If you want to study the subject in detail, no one is stopping you. Start with, say, Wallace and Hobbs and see if you have a taste for this stuff.

If not (and to be honest I've never encountered anyone who learned this material outside a university classroom) another alternative is to skip trying to understand the material in detail and simply survey it.

Fortunately that is possible. Every few years the scientific community publishes a report that describes what is known and what is strongly suspected in this field. Even this isn't easy reading, but if you are diligent you can understand this with just the sort of basically sound scientifically influenced thinking you display. The most recent one (getting a bit stale now) is here

Your concluding paragraph, unfortunately, is insightful.This is ultimately the problem with democracy. None of us has the time and energy to know everything. If the network of trust between the public and the experts with relevant knowledge breaks down, we can only throw up our hands and punt. I find the fact that you are not coy about doing so refreshingly honest.

I appreciate your comments and while I doubt you'll find it as helpful as you wanted, I hope you'll take this reply in the constructive spirit in which it was intended.

This guy ate his Wheaties before he made that joke. According to this, Uranus' atmosphere is composed almost entirely of methane.

Many Earth Science types have been using the LDM for quite some time now. The LDM always struck me as the academic's BitTorrent.

Granted, the LDM is geared more towards providing data in "near real-time," as opposed to delivering static content. . .but you can download and upload from/to just about anybody else with the LDM.

Would be interesting to know exactly what stuff do these machines do? Maybe they would even be able to share some code so that people can fiddle around with it optimizing


I don't know about the VT cluster specifically, but here's a couple of typical supercomputer applications that happen to be open source:

ABINIT, a DFT code.

CP2K, another DFT code, focused more on Car-Parinello MD.

Gromacs, a molecular dynamics program.


(should be fun)


Well, if optimizing 200 000 line Fortran programs parallelized using MPI sounds like fun to you, jump right in! ;-)

Note: Above applies to abinit and cp2k only, I don't know anything about gromacs except that it's written in C, not Fortran (though inner loops are in Fortran for speed).

Oh, and then there's MM5, a weather prediction code which I think is also open source. I don't know anything about it, though.

The heat island effect is rather basic and every meterologist I know (one person granted) is quite aware of that (for example, at the NCAR -- National Center for Atmospheric Research -- website they have a disclaimer for their weather station including mention of the heat island effect). I'm sure most of the scientists take that into account in their studies. Also, that would only has a sizeable effect on sunny, summer days. It's quite reduced in winter, especially at more northern latitudes.

Pluto is 2300 km diameter, ranges from 4.3 to 7.4 billion km from the sun.

http://www.windows.ucar.edu/tour/link=/pluto/stati stics.html oe

The place even looks cool http://www.ncar.ucar.edu/eo/what/arch1.html

Very cool place indeed, if you're in the area.

The place even looks cool http://www.ncar.ucar.edu/eo/what/arch1.html

Very cool place indeed, if you're in the area.

The place even looks cool http://www.ncar.ucar.edu/eo/what/arch1.html

Very cool place indeed, if you're in the area.

I have a degree in English Literature. When I took my first job in IT, my boss told me that most IT people were an inch wide and a mile deep.

In this case you surely have read this essay, but if not -- you'll enjoy it! ;-)

To quite its epigraph: If there's nothing different about UNIX people, how come so many were liberal-arts majors?
It's the love of words that makes UNIX stand out.

Paul B.

details of how it is done

60 IBM 3390 Model 3 disks.
Disks

five StorageTek Powderhorn Automated Cartridge Systems. containing 6,000 tape cartridges.
tape library

And the problem is still not N complete, the more data there is the harder it is going to get, not being able to get wiretaps made the problem almost manageable. The right to silence was their luxury. At petabytes of data that is oh lots for every person on the planet.Lets all get with the careless talk.

I am being lazy the numbers are staggering, the data is way beyond for example phone company records.
[Which are allegedly held for 3 years for security reasons. Gosh I feel so secure.]

For things like weather forecasting, maybe big vector machines still have an edge, but I suspect that's changing as the weather guys get more experience in using machines with large numbers of micros. This seems to have already occurred, in fact; NCAR appears to have mostly IBM RS6000 and SGI computers these days, with nary a Cray in sight.

The most common term I used to hear in the early 90's was Killer Micros; I think the term dates back David Bailey in the 80's sometime. If you want more evidence that the death of the supercomputer has been going on for a long time, check out The Dead Supercomputer Society, which lists dozens of failed companies and projects over the years; this page was apparently last updated 6 years ago!

Easy to do using exception chaining.

" An exception chain is a list of all the exceptions generated in response to a single root exception (say, a SQLException). As each exception is caught and converted to a higher-level exception for rethrowing, it's added to the chain. This provides a complete record of how an exception is handled "

10GigE is what I'd use as a backbone between buildings, metro area networks, etc.

Come in real handy if GigE rollouts to the desktop start happening.

And before anyone starts spouting off about maximum 100m spans, I'm talking 10GigE over fiber

-transiit

Mars has a magnetosphere

Take a tour

Would this be it?

As well as Joseph von Fraunhofer did not research in audio compression but lenses for telescopes.

I was in general referring to the surface temperature of the ocean as that is where majority of life happens as well as the locations of animals that would try to "save themselves" by jumping into water. (My Source)

It has also been about 5-1/2 years since that model was announced so I would expect to see about 0.1C of warming since then

some climate models are supposedly so accurate, why do we have so many different models that contradict each other?

While it's very hard to verify this legend, one thing we know for sure is that Syracuse was conquered via land, and Archimedes ingenuity had an important part to play in defending Syracuse from the sea.

So yeah, this is stuff that matters, but hardly "news"

Yes and no. Interannual trends are captured fairly well, seasonal forecasts tend to be off (worse, as you get down to the scale of weather) See here, for more information than you'd possibly want.

Other way around.

Windows to the Universe

or

PhysLink

Io?
It's highly unlikely that there's any life on Io. It appears to be too extreme for extremophiles. Perhaps you are thinking of Europa. Europa's the icy moon. Io's the volcanic one covered in sulfur.

Pluto is 2300 km diameter, ranges from 4.3 to 7.4 billion km from the sun.

http://www.windows.ucar.edu/tour/link=/pluto/stati stics.html

Pluto is 2300 km diameter, ranges from 4.3 to 7.4 billion km from the sun.

http://www.windows.ucar.edu/tour/link=/pluto/stati stics.html

I say the Soviet Mars 2 mission dug the first hole :)

Google it.

Here

Here

Here (scroll down to find a movie)

Nice idea, but crap physics. Here's why:

From chemistry and Avogadro's Law, the weight of one mole of a substance is the same as the atomic weight of that molecule, and has a volume of 22.4 liters at standard pressure and temperature (0C and 29.92 inches). So, for 78% N2 (28), 21% O2, and 1% H2O (32), air weighs about 1.28 kg/m3, or almost exactly 1kg per cubic yard. The same yd3 of Helium (2) would weigh only 68 grams. So a cubic yard of helium displacing air provides 932 grams of lift. (The mass != weight quibble isn't really relevant here, OK?)

Allowing the airship to have the same volume of the USS Akron, 6.5 million ft3 is 224 tonnes (metric) of air displaced by 16.4 tonnes of He, so the maximum potential lift is 208 tonnes.

Now the problems start.

Blimps use balonets to allow for helium expansion with heating and especially altitutde changes. For a maximum altitude of 10,000 feet (700mb), the blimp must allow for 30% expansion (1000mb at surface to 700mb at altitude) if it doesn't want to vent helium. Zepplins and other airships handled this through flexible bags containing the helium/hydrogen.

The movie in the article's website said their airship would rise some 10 miles before floating back down. Ten miles is 50,000 feet, or about 100mb. This requirement limits the on-ground volume of helium to only 10% of all available to allow for expansion. Thus the maximum lift would fall 208 tonnes to only 20.8 tonnes.

Okay, how about only five miles/25,000 feet? Pressure there is about 350mb, so you can only start with 35% helium volume, or 72.8 tonnes possible lift.

Now, somebody explain how to build a 6.5 million ft3 volume container for less than 20 tonnes (or 70 tonnes) that can be pressurized, as stated in the movie, to compress the Helium enough to start descent. Oh, not to mention the pressure tanks and multi-kilowatt vertical turbine to electically power the flyweight air pumps filling those tanks. The paint on the hull would weigh more than the cargo.

This might work on a planet like Jupiter, where the air pressure is around 10,000mb and more the deeper you go, but until somebody comes up with aluminum-strength aerogel, I think this plan is crap.

I'm not implying that, I'm telling you that.

The Moon's gravity is one-sixth of the Earth's gravity, so it's a hell of a lot easier to get off the gound. It just seems it would be a lot easier to assemble these parts in a place where there's plenty of room to work.

You ever see the Moon lander they used the first time? You think something like that could get out of Earth's gravity easily? Worked on the Moon just fine.

Debian used to snub KDE, alright. Thing is, they no longer do. So cut them some slack, who cares what they used to do and say as long as they've changed and improved. Don't blame the current distro for how it used to be managed.

In fact, if Debian keeps improving that way, it may very well become a strong contender for the desktop, which would be a Really Good Thing. While we may be a much of geeks here on /., I found that as you mature, you eventually reach a point where you're tired of fiddling with stuff all day long, and end up only using stuff that Just Works the way YOU want. In that regard, Debian+KDE is pretty much a killer combo.

(NB: Nope, I don't currently use Deb on my desktops, but if it keeps its current trend I may well switch eventually.)

Dropping those who use more than 100x the median usage will not result in losing either a fixed number or percentage. It will eventually truncate the curve, however. If you draw the curve on paper, and cut the area under the curve to the X and Y axis, they want a shape that has the middle of its weight more than 1% from the Y axis.

I suspect typical residential bandwidth usage patterns follow a Poisson distribution shaped curve-- and that's probably what the ISP is expecting. It has a few bumps up top from the filesharers and Linux ISO loaders, no doubt... who are using far more throughput than the ISPs expect from a typical user. On a poisson curve, the chances of being 100x out from the mean are something like 1 in 2e158.

Of course, as available bandwidth increases, more applications will arise, and more people will want high bandwidth-- which is good for those who sell it. On the other hand, the more applications, the more throughput the individual people using the bandwidth will want-- which is bad.

What the companies who are concerned about this should (IMHO) do before putting these "stop or die" letters out is first add some info on everyone's bills-- to wit, the throughput of the average user on your plan, and your (billing cycle)ly throughput. Then create modified plans-- you get up to Foo GB per (billing cycle) at high-speed, and past that you get throttled to 56K modem speeds. You want more than Foo? Well, you can get a 2 Foo limit plan for an extra $20 per month, 3 Foo for an extra $50... or whatever.

Yes, it's similar to a telco phone type plan. Just make it clear where the damn limits are, let people see measurement of what they are doing... and don't EVER require anyone to drop below 56kbps unlimited throughput if you want to keep your business.

my great-great-grandfather Amos Ives Root published the first eye witness account of the Wright Brothers flight almost 100 years ago.

Sorry to disabuse you of your forebear's first. He may indeed have been the first to publish an eye-witness account in a popular publication, but there was a prior publication, perhaps not by an eye-witness but at least a collaborator, who was even part of the scientific establishment, in a journal of the scientific establishment.

The Nov-Dec issue of Weather-Wise magazine has an article titled Wright Weather for this anniversary that, while discussing their search for ideal winds and other meteorological trivia regarding the Wrights, Flight, and Kitty Hawk, includes the factoid that the first public disclosure of the secretive Wright's success was by the Weather Bureau local forecaster who'd helped them,

Joseph J. Dosher, the observer and lone Weather Bureau employee at Kitty Hawk [...] That afternoon, the brothers walked four miles to the Kitty Hawk Weather Bureau station. Joseph J. Dosher, who three years earlier had responded to the Wright's inquiry about wind conditions at Kitty Hawk, reported news of the first flight in a telegram to the Wrights' father in Dayton. Dosher also published an account of the events, titled "Meteorology and the Art of Flying," in the December 1903 issue of the Monthly Weather Review . In the brief article, he wrote: "Their success is undoubtedly due in great part to the preliminary careful study of the winds, and for this reason, although machinery is essential, . . . consider that meteorology also has played an important part in their work."

The magazine article has great pictures that aren't on the website, and I enjoyed the other articles too (and the ads, even).

-- Bill N1VUX
Posted as A/C since I already moderated.

When scientists look for life out side the solar system, why don't they focus on moons of Jupiter like planets instead of finding Earth like planets.

Actually, they have looked for moons around extrasolar planets that eclipse their star. The main example (so far) of the "transiting technique" is HD 209458b, a hot Jupiter in a 3-day period. This transit has been observed using Hubble, with a sensitivity that would allow one to detect Saturn-like rings or moons as small as twice the size of Earth. None were found. More information here.

Of course, a 3-day period planet's moon would still be unable to harbor life as we know it (too hot). But these are the first steps being taken to look for such objects. As more transiting planets are detected, this technique will tell us a lot about moon systems around these planets.

Moons of giant planets in temperate zones may indeed be the key to finding life-sustaining bodies. Our own Moon stabilizes the rotational axis of the Earth, which prevents many extreme climatic changes. Compare this to Mars, which has no large moons (only two small ones) that lead to the same stability. A giant planet would have a similar affect on the dynamics. This is just one example of how a second body (in our case, the Moon) aids the development of life. One can ponder how much the probability of life drops off if such a body does not exist, though I'm not sure anyone has a convincing answer, yet.

We can barely image planets that are twice the size of Jupiter and you are suggesting we should image MOONS!?

So far, scientists have been unable to image any extra-solar planets at all. The planets have been detected indirectly--by looking at the effects of the planet on the star. An overview of these techniques. Astronomers have directly imaged brown dwarfs, which are somewhat like both planets and stars. We can't yet image exoplanets, but we can still learn a lot about them.

Direct imaging of planets may be made with the Keck Interferometer in Nulling Mode (a similar setup is being designed for the LBTI in Arizona, and the European VLTI), or with "Extreme Adaptive Optics", or finally with the Terrestrial Planet Finder.

That nuclear material could have an unmeasureable detrimental effect on any life there is there, so NASA needs to be damn certain that this baby will not contaminate the surface even if the worst case scenario was to occur.

The possibility of contamination is precisely why the Galileo satellite was purposefully crashed into Jupiter. It was to prevent earth-based microbes (not nuclear material) from contaminating Europa, in the chance that it would eventually crash there after loosing power. Preventing biological contamination of enviroments in which life may have independently originated is of prime importance.

Concerns of biological contamination could be addressed in future missions via proper sterilization of the spacecraft. This was not done with Galileo because there was no reason to do so at the time. It may have been sterile, but had not been checked as such.

Though nuclear contamination was not the issue, Galileo did have nuclear material onboard for power (but not a fission reactor). This led to some folks speculate that NASA was trying to detonate Jupiter, which is nicely debunked here.

Europa's oceans are thought to be at least 2 times as voluminous as all of Earth's oceans combined

One of the main points of the mission is to confirm the existence of these oceans. The oceans are only inferred: we believe that there is a large liquid water ocean because of Europa's magnetic moment. The salt-water is conductive, and as Jupiter's magnetic fied varies, it induces a field in Europa. As Europa moves through various parts of Jupiter's field, the orientation varies. We detect this field and its variations, and deduce a large ocean. More information is here.

That nuclear material could have an unmeasureable detrimental effect on any life there is there, so NASA needs to be damn certain that this baby will not contaminate the surface even if the worst case scenario was to occur.

The possibility of contamination is precisely why the Galileo satellite was purposefully crashed into Jupiter. It was to prevent earth-based microbes (not nuclear material) from contaminating Europa, in the chance that it would eventually crash there after loosing power. Preventing biological contamination of enviroments in which life may have independently originated is of prime importance.

Concerns of biological contamination could be addressed in future missions via proper sterilization of the spacecraft. This was not done with Galileo because there was no reason to do so at the time. It may have been sterile, but had not been checked as such.

Though nuclear contamination was not the issue, Galileo did have nuclear material onboard for power (but not a fission reactor). This led to some folks speculate that NASA was trying to detonate Jupiter, which is nicely debunked here.

Europa's oceans are thought to be at least 2 times as voluminous as all of Earth's oceans combined

One of the main points of the mission is to confirm the existence of these oceans. The oceans are only inferred: we believe that there is a large liquid water ocean because of Europa's magnetic moment. The salt-water is conductive, and as Jupiter's magnetic fied varies, it induces a field in Europa. As Europa moves through various parts of Jupiter's field, the orientation varies. We detect this field and its variations, and deduce a large ocean. More information is here.

the word 'conductivity' refers to a property of a material in respect to how it behaves in relation to electromagnetic engery, so I don't see this as being completely off the wall.

let me put you straight on some of the mechanics of optical/holographic memory. Firstly, it doesn't employ a rotating mechanism...

Your default posting score of 0 appears to have been earned justly.

Lastly, by saying that hard drives do not last long enough to be affected by events that happen in 'geological time' is an assumption. There is nothing to tell us for certain that the Earths' magnetic field will not flip tomorrow or next week, or next year. This is a real possibility within our lifetimes...

Is the Earth's magnetic field changing?

Indeed it is. It currently has a strength at the Earth's surface of 0.6 Gauss. But long term observations show that it is DECREASING at a rate of about 0.07 percent PER YEAR. This means that in 1500 years from now, it will only be about 35 percent as strong as it is today, and in 4000 years it will have a strength of practically zero.

As for your fear of people with mod points who find comments interesting...

According to this rather detailed paper, IBM designed the unit around 700 MHz (0.13 micron) PowerPC 440 Processors. This is not the modern equivalent of a Cray 3.

The node to node density, though, is very high. The maximum cable length is 8m.