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Someone needs to go back to school...
Humans have not been around for anywhere near 100 million years.

The longest estimates have humans as a species (Homo Sapiens) arriving around 50 thousand years ago. Some early hominids may have existed as much as 700 thousand years ago. But even that is fraction of what you suggest.

We're barely even a speck at the end of the earth's timeline.
Here's a fun analogy - http://jersey.uoregon.edu/~mstrick/AskGeoMan/geoQu erry16.html

I have tested TeXShop for OS X found here: http://www.uoregon.edu/~koch/texshop/ and I really enjoy it. You can use it to write in (La)TeX without having to use Terminal.app and can have it show the output (in pdf) at a given moment if you desire to "see" what it would look like.

I'll give it a 4 out of 5 stars - but thats' only because I haven't been exposed to other Mac native LaTeX programs. I would encourage everyone to try it out.

Mac solutions rock: TeXShop + XeTeX is a powerful combination. LaTeX simply can't be beat for consistency and ease of use once the basics are put to memory.

"Quantum fluctuations" is a widely recognized phrase in physics, used variously to refer to uncertain outcomes of quantum mechanics:

A book by Edward Nelson of CMU in the Princeton Series in Physics: http://www.math.princeton.edu/~nelson/books/qf.pdf
From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_fluctuation
From a physics lecture at the University of Oregon (the mention is about halfway down the page): http://zebu.uoregon.edu/~js/ast123/lectures/lec17. html
From Encyclopaedia Britannica: http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-64917
From an article in New Scientist: http://www.ldolphin.org/qfoam.html
A paper from the Division of Engineering and Applied Science, Roxbury Community College/Harvard: http://www.eduprograms.deas.harvard.edu/reu03_pape rs/Lopez.C.FinReport03.pdf
Theses at Penn State: http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/31075.html

A book from the World Scientific Series in Contemporary Chemical Physics: http://www.worldscibooks.com/physics/5952.html

My argument fits the term as used in any one of these sources, or in the half-million others that can be found with a two-second Google search.

Humans.... They ARE what's for dinner!

The closest they get is HD 10307. The entire list is:

Tau Ceti, 11.9 light years
Alpha Centauri B, 4.35 light years
Epsilon Eridani, 10.5 light-years
Epsilon Indi A, 11.8 light-years
http://www.glyphweb.com/esky/stars/keid.html">Omic ron 2 Eridani, 16 light years
Beta Canum Venaticorum - 27.31 light years
HD 10307, 41.2 light years
HD 211415>/a>, 44.4 light years
18 Scorpii, 45.7 light years
51 Pegasus, 40 light years

There is also a top 50 list

We were in a pretty good position to get pushed around. I mean, I don't think calling the PUC occured to anybody here, but I think the idea would've met with resistence because we're short of manpower. There are 5 guys here, plus a part-time employee who's a student at UC Irvine, and our CEO, who's a professor of particle physics at the University of Oregon. The programmers are here to program, not haggle with the PUC, and any extra time that our boss has needs to go to his students, family, or research. And at that time I was splitting my time between writing specs, which I was still learning to do, and playing network admin.

The blame also falls on the little ISP. Their support reps were pretty incompetant - only after talking to five people did we figure out what the problem was, and even every time we called them they stated that it would be ready the next day. If, at any point, we knew that it was going to take a small eternity, we would've been more likely to bitch. But I guess I'll remember this the next time I need DSL.

Everyone does iTunes podcasting, it's simple to set up and deploy. The University of Oregon, on the other hand, makes a lot of campus lectures and events available as a video feed: http://media.uoregon.edu/

No, I didn't give any supporting links because I wouldn't know where to begin...

We're talking about thousands of scientific papers going back to the 1930's....

Instead, here are some links to some non-technical introductions:
http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/m_uni/uni_101matter.html
http://astron.berkeley.edu/~mwhite/darkmatter/dm.h tml
http://pancake.uchicago.edu/~carroll/cfcp/primer/d ark.html
http://www.astro.princeton.edu/~dns/MAP/Bahcall/no de2.html#SECTION00020000000000000000
http://zebu.uoregon.edu/text/darkmatter.txt

No, you probably won't find technical details in these sources, but many of them contain links to more detailed information.

Also, as much as I find your dismissive attitude obnoxious, I am happy to help you explore the actual evidence for dark matter. Feel free to reply to this post with any actual questions.

Doug

Enough solar energy in a day for 1000 years? Ummm... can I share some of your apparently abundant supply of crack?

The US alone uses 8.4 trillion kilowatts of electricity. The sun provides up to 1.367kW per square meter during daylight hours. After factoring night, cloud cover, inclimate weather, and latitudes that seasonally aren't receiving much light, it comes out to about 164 Watts per square meter over a 24 hour day. All together, the entire planet receives the equivalent of 84 billion kilowatts. Multiply by 24 (hours) to get 2.016 trillion kilowatt hours or a little less than one fourth of just the US annual consumption. Multiply that last number by 365 and we get 735.840 trillion kilowatt hours per year. Quite a lot, but far less than 1000 years' worth. Less than 100 years just for the US.

Factor in the energy requirements for the rest of the world and you start talking in terms of a decade.

But there's an important thing forgotten here:

This assumes that we completely cover the planet in solar panels that are 100% efficient. We will never be 100% efficient. I find it highly unlikely that we'll get above 50% on a large scale. Our most efficient panels that last longer than 18 months and don't cost more than its weight in platinum are about 15%-20% efficient. So now we're into the realm of covering the planet just to break even.

But there's one more important thing forgotten here:

We need that sunlight! We need it to grow crops, for all animal life and plant life to sustain itself, for warmth, etc.

So please, for the sake of all rational thinkers, stop spouting nonsense like, "...we get enough solar energy in a day on this planet to fuel our civilization for the next 1000 years." It's not true (unless you want a large portion of humanity to starve because we've reverted to pre-1900 technology), and it only serves to hurt your credibility.

I was horrified by this point when reading a 2002 SciAm article about Jackson Pollock - apparently someone's developed a program to "read the fractal dimensions" of a given image, and written it so that most of Pollock's paintings have a very high number.

They made a fuss over how pollock wasn't using randomly chosen paint paths, as everyone thought, but was choosing careful fractal patterns. This was then used to determine if another of Pollock's paintings was authentic or not.

My call of complete bullshit stands after reading the research paper:

http://materialscience.uoregon.edu/taylor/art/Tayl orSubmission.pdf

You can tweak the variables however you want, and with such a small sample (known pollock paintings vs known fakes)set it's not hard to create a "successful" program.

This may be slightly off-topic. but it seems to me that if we improve drilling technology enough to breach the Earth's Mantle, there lies an almost endless supply of heat energy. According to http://zebu.uoregon.edu/ph162/l18.html, the average thermal gradient is 30 degrees C per kilometer, so that at a depth of 20,000 feet, the temperature is 190 degrees C. The problem is that in solids the heat can only be replenished by diffusion, so that steam extraction of heat would occur faster than the heat can be replenished. However, if we could dig deep enough to where heat could be replenished by convection, then the concept of geothermal heat extraction could be feasible.

Another alternative that may currently be feasible is to detonate small H-bombs in deep cavities to replenish the heat. This, in fact, was already done in the PACER project, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PACER. The major problem in the Pacer project was the reliance of plutonium fission bombs to initiate the fusion reaction, which created problems with radioactive waste. If a "Fusion Fuse" other than fission could be devised, we could dispense with esoteric, far-in-the-future methods of controlling fusion above ground, and simply use deep cavities in the Earth to release heat via uncontrolled fusion reactions, and extract the heat.

Bottom Line: I am not buying into the "Peak Oil Doomsday Scenario" http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/Index.html just yet.

The biggest argument against liquid water on mars is this little thing called physics. Water on earth and water on Mars, both being made of H20, behave the same. Since we're aware of the temperature of Mars, liquid water on the surface NOT existing is pretty much a forgone conclusion. The average surface temperature on Mars is MINUS 63 Celcius. Considering that water freezes at 0 degress celcius, I hardly think that it's dogma to insist that the "puddle" you saw was something else besides liquid water.

The other argument against it is another little thing called vapor pressure. Since the atmosphere of Mars is considerable thinner than that of Earth. The atmospheric pressure on Mars is 0.0056 that of Earth's. Given the temperature there, any water would move directly from a solid (ice) to gaseous (steam) state. Liquid simply isn't physically possible.

Since it's really not possbile, the dogmatics are the ones who insist that it exists despite every bit of scientific evidence to the contrary. Unless of course you're proposing the Mars is actually an alternate universe with complete seperate physical laws. Or perhaps you're advocating "Intelligent Design" on Mars????

Seriously, don't take my word for it. Dave Soper has posted a really nice article about it here - http://zebu.uoregon.edu/~soper/Mars/water.html

2 cents,

Queen B

http://reading.uoregon.edu/scope/trial_scope_index .php http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTI CLE_ID=23709 http://www.educationnext.org/20061/23.html

Ugh, no. No wonder you're pulling your hair out. You don't want to use fink and you really don't want to compile it yourself, unless you have a serious streak of masochism. (In which case drive on, by all means.)

What you want is i-Installer, sometimes referred to as II2 (i-Installer 2). It's a very nice GUI package manager but with a more limited scope than Fink. It's designed so that anyone could use it to distribute software, but the only thing I've ever actually seen it used for is TeX.

You download II2 and read its (fairly simple) instructions here:
http://ii2.sourceforge.net/

Personally I recommend following this procedure:
http://www.uoregon.edu/~koch/texshop/installing.ht ml

Basically once you get it running and point it to which mirror you'd like to use, you get a list of possible packages to install, choose them, and sit back while it does its thing. (Hope you're on a fast connection.)

I've used it for probably half a dozen OS X TeX installs now, and it's always done a great job. The only thing I'd suggest on top of that is TeX Shop, which is a GUI editor and frontend -- although there's no reason why you can't use Emacs and the commandline if you wanted to. I like TeX Shop because it produces PDFs by default and also integrates well with BibDesk, another GUI program for managing bibliographies.

Reminds me of Arthur C. Clarke's humorous short story.

This is not a fault zone. Fault zones arise in response to subduction.

Not always. San Andreas is a transform fault - no subduction involved. See http://jersey.uoregon.edu/~mstrick/AskGeoMan/geoQu erry22.html

The collision of two neutron stars is common enough to produce some of the heavy elements.

You can see the decay of heavy elements in the afterglow of a supernova.

Heavy element production occurs there, and it occurs exactly as you would expect from shock acceleration. You wouldn't expect this sort of production from a magnetic pinch, as you need a relativistic long-lived shock in order to account for the observed elements.

unlike these little buggers that poisoned the earth's atmosphere forever.

Not exactly spirals, but you have the right idea. It is a perihilion advance. The orbit is, well, egg shaped. Trouble is, every time Mercury orbits, the "position" of the egg shape moves a little, so the shape of the "egg" is never correctly traced... Here, A graphic will probably explain it better.

Our audio environments are so suffused with fans and other hums that our bodies are adapted to these sounds. Without them the soundscape feels empty and eerie. Think of it as an extension of chronic industrial disease, however. Case studies in the Sahel discovered that 70 year-olds showed no significant hearing loss, due to typically healthy blood and an extremely quiet environment.

Some of that deep discomfort people feel when they're camping away from honking traffic is also due to ideology that's sunk down into the bones over a few industrial generations. Silence, not just quiet but really quiet, is deathlike, an absence of life, an absence of civilization. It's dangerous.

Interesting how I can always hear these "silent" computers. It really is relative.

What I wonder is how there appears to be snow on the hillside

I don't think I've ever heard anything about ADM price fixing.

here
here
here

does it matter? meh, probably not, but you didn't hear before, and now you have.

"I don't think I've ever heard anything about ADM price fixing."

Really? Check this out.

http://www.uoregon.edu/~bruceb/lysine_l.htm

Who the fschk (edited) is Malfoy?

Wasn't he a character in "The Faerie Queen"?

My interpretation is that these ideas, like the one in TFA, are acting as Modest Proposals. They'll cost an absurd amount of money to design and build, and the obvious absurdity causes people to contemplate that it would be more effective to just stop the introduction of carbon into the atmosphere.

Looking at Mars' Atmosphere there is substantially less atmospheric oxygen, nitrogen, and argon on the red planet.

Since, Earth's Aurora is caused by the magnectic excitation of ions in the atmosphere, namely the O2 and N2 -- I imagine the "Aurora Martiania" would be a lot less intense. Also, because there's a greater distance to Mars from the Sun, I would also think the intensity of the magnetic 'bursts' would be smaller (due to lambertian emission, i.e. equidirectional).

But, since "they've" detected *something*, it's reasonable to say there is an aurora present on Mars. I would wait on booking your MLT vacation until some hard evidence comes in...

This is more or less the Fermi paradox, i.e. the first civilization which develops the ability to colonize space, will do it in no time.

If this is correct then we can only expect to discover ruins from civilizations advanced enough to build artifacts that will last for millions of years. Like stars arranged in patterns which spell "ET was here".

• airplanes are stupendously complex. They are perhaps the quintessential example of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."
  
• the 737 is a safe airplane. When BA flew out to accept his Pulitzer, he could not have been safer on any plane other than a 737, even with the original rudder.
  
• the 737 had a known, rare, failure mode, which flight crews were trained to deal with.
  
• correcting this flaw hastily could easily have introduced new flaws that were not known or understood.
  
• In fact, the "Do Something!" imperative offered by BA's articles could, quite conceivably, have made the 737 more dangerous.
  

You truly undervalue babies in your statement. I suggest that you read
A Modest Proposal (1729) by Jonathan Swift.

Now pay attention class, using a simple Google search you can find usefull items that the author can use, like: http://www.42explore.com/signlang.htm and http://babel.uoregon.edu/yamada/guides/asl.html.

</sarcasim>

Really, it is not that we object to sarcasim around here (we seem to thrive on it) but at least make it useful sarcasim.

[Hmmm, this story reminds me I wanted to learn ASL also, that way I might understand what all those other drivers are trying to sign to me on the way home.]

Merlin.

The fight over cheap broadband access has striking parallels with the fight for cheap access to electricity that took place between the Government controlled public works projects, such as the Bonneville Power Administration, and the private power produced by the monopolistic corporations during the early 1930s. The private power corporations used many of the same arguments that we are hearing againg today from the telcos including, "public access is un-American" and "the people that supprot this are communists", etc...

public vs private power

Bah. Old Stuff. A modest proposal by Jonathan Swift wasn't printed yesterday ...

How original.

Depends on the pressure.

e.g.
http://zebu.uoregon.edu/2001/ph162/l10.html

The MDI aircar proposes 400 atmospheres. They don't have a production model with tanks to hold that though. Energy density is similar to recent (but not cutting edge) batteries.

The problem with compressed air is that it is basically still a heat engine whereas electric motors are not. Electric motors are 90%+ efficient and compressed air motors, well, 40% maybe.

I would hope that fellow /.ers would understand the satire... kinda hard to miss. ;) I also suggest that any person with a sense of decency begin eating babies... aka Jonathan Swift's, A Modest Proposal http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~rbear/modest.html

Sir Arthur C. Clarke came up with something like this in his 1958 story A Slight Case of Sunstroke" . At a soccer game held near the equator, fans were supplied with a mirror under their seats. If the referee made a dishonest call, the fans would use the mirrors to vaporize him.

Don't knock "Urysses". He returned after after twenty years and almost single handedly killed all his wife's suitors. So if IE went to the wilderness a couple of years ago, say, the competing browsers will have a lot to worry about in ummm... 2023.

If you want to benefit from it without learning it, you can use a number of GUIs. Scientific Workplace on win32 (commercial, but good to push on those using Word) or LyX (F/OSS) for nearly any platform or many others. Even abiword can write LaTeX!

It isn't difficult to learn & becomes much more powerful when you eventually ditch the GUI & either use a quality TeX-focused editor like KILE (KDE), TeXnicCenter (win32), TeXShop (OS X) (all F/OSS) or your favorite multi-purpose editor. I prefer vim with LaTeX-Suite.

The best way to learn is to look at other code. Either get some from peers, from the net, or make some in either the GUIs or the friendlier editors. Then just write.

If you need a reference, you can usually learn to google for how to do something (or post to comp.text.tex). I maintain a list of www links. You might find something useful, but I can't suggest the best starting point from that list. The best introductory book I've used is Guide to LaTeX. The other books in LaTeX Companions are also excellent for reference, particularly The LaTeX Companion.

On average the extraterrestrial irradiance is 1367 Watts/meter2 (W/m2).

[...]

Near noon on a day without clouds, about 25% of the solar radiation is scattered and absorbed as it passes through the atmosphere. Therefore about 1000 w/m2 of the incident solar radiation reaches the earth's surface without being significantly scattered.

I went to high school in canada not many years ago when our high school was a test school for a new national program spearheaded by a company called "Athena". This company would install a TV / VCR into every class/meeting room in the school, pay for and maintain a computer lab in our school.

In return every at 9:00 every morning all students would watch 12.5 minute "News" brief complete with 2.5 minutes of target advertising (Imaging what you could charge advertisers if you could tell them every single child in canada aged 15-19 will see your ad!)

My group of friends were very opposed to the idea of a private company being able to control the news that all students see you can only imagine the way they could have shapped the next generation. So SACC (Students against corporate classroms) was formed (briefly)

Our friends put up posters in the school, organised over 1000 signatures of students, parents and teachers (one who got in trouble), but after we organised rallies during lunch hours to protest and after being interviewed during one of those rallies on national TV we were threatened to stop, even after we moved all of our activities off of school property.

I ended up leaving that school after the second time we were warned about our disruptive behavior. The Youth News Network began broadcasting briefly, but with no ads being broadcast (the program was now in the publics eye) Last I heard the company ran out of money, the school got to keep the computers and tv's and the project died before it could brainwash an entire generation (Any more than it already is)

Some of the above story may be a little off as it was 1998/1999 and I was a high school student. The link below is to YNN (Athena)'s website.

A letter from the manitoba teachers society
http://interact.uoregon.edu/MediaLit/CAMEO/ynn/26. html

The YNN (Athena) website
http://interact.uoregon.edu/MediaLit/CAMEO/YNN/ind ex.html

While looking book at that time I believe we did make a difference, although probably a smaller one than we thought at the time.

North or south of the boreder keeping the private sector out of our schools is a must, now if we can juist find a way to keep the government and religion out of the classroom as well.

I went to high school in canada not many years ago when our high school was a test school for a new national program spearheaded by a company called "Athena". This company would install a TV / VCR into every class/meeting room in the school, pay for and maintain a computer lab in our school.

In return every at 9:00 every morning all students would watch 12.5 minute "News" brief complete with 2.5 minutes of target advertising (Imaging what you could charge advertisers if you could tell them every single child in canada aged 15-19 will see your ad!)

My group of friends were very opposed to the idea of a private company being able to control the news that all students see you can only imagine the way they could have shapped the next generation. So SACC (Students against corporate classroms) was formed (briefly)

Our friends put up posters in the school, organised over 1000 signatures of students, parents and teachers (one who got in trouble), but after we organised rallies during lunch hours to protest and after being interviewed during one of those rallies on national TV we were threatened to stop, even after we moved all of our activities off of school property.

I ended up leaving that school after the second time we were warned about our disruptive behavior. The Youth News Network began broadcasting briefly, but with no ads being broadcast (the program was now in the publics eye) Last I heard the company ran out of money, the school got to keep the computers and tv's and the project died before it could brainwash an entire generation (Any more than it already is)

Some of the above story may be a little off as it was 1998/1999 and I was a high school student. The link below is to YNN (Athena)'s website.

A letter from the manitoba teachers society
http://interact.uoregon.edu/MediaLit/CAMEO/ynn/26. html

The YNN (Athena) website
http://interact.uoregon.edu/MediaLit/CAMEO/YNN/ind ex.html

While looking book at that time I believe we did make a difference, although probably a smaller one than we thought at the time.

North or south of the boreder keeping the private sector out of our schools is a must, now if we can juist find a way to keep the government and religion out of the classroom as well.

See Joe St. Sauver's The Impending End of Traditional .forward-style Forwarding. This is a growing problem, and traditional .forward is dead.

Joe runs network ops for University of Oregon, and has a good set of for-the-public articles at his website.

These days, however, how your mail gets routed is a very important issue for one simple reason: deliverability.

"Deliverability" is a term that has been coined to capture the problem that sites increasingly face trying to get legitimate mail through anti-spam measures. Trying to send mail that includes bad keywords? You may have "deliverability issues" at sites that use content-based filters. Had an accidental configuration problem that resulted in spammers exploiting your system for a while? You may be listed on one or more DNSBLs, and have "deliverability problems" as a result.

Deliverability is particularly closely tied to reputation. Every piece of mail that gets sent from your campus, whether created by a local user or forwarded by that user to another account using a dot forward forwarding entry, "counts" against your reputation at a growing number of providers. As far as they can tell (and remember, this is all automated because of the hundreds of millions of messages that are involved), when you hand their mail servers a message, "you" sent them those messages, even if all you did was innocently and dutifully forward the mail on behalf of one of your users, as instructed by that user's .forward file.

If you're going to emit it (allow .forward), then you're going to have to own it, and if you own it, you're going to have to deal with incoming spam. Unfiltered .forward is a dying breed. Either find an alternate solution, or filter the mail.

TeXShop is an excellent Mac OS X application for those who want to give LATEX a try. Installation is easy and does not require using X11, but you'll probably need to learn some LATEX first.

I really think it's worth the effort.

NUCLEAR REACTOR plant! This is pretty cool stuff!

Guys, check this out! There's DICK in the middle of the forest!

http://pmovid.uoregon.edu/axis-cgi/mjpg/video.cg i? &showlength=1

"The Internet reacts to censorship as damage and routes around it." - John Gilmore (frequently misattributed to Howard Rheingold)

The paper you reference that you indicate disputes the ability of the inflationary model to produce homogenous CMBR dates from 1988. I have not read it as I was not registered for that journal. The only thing I would say is that while it may or may not be relevant, a lot has happened since then.

All scientific theories are works in progress subject to refutation by new multiply verifiable experiments. The fact that there are things that a theory does not adequately explain is only an indication that additional experiments need to take place.

In fact, the flowering of the astrophysics field is due (IMHO) to the great amount of new, high quality, experimental data from Hubble, Chandra, and the many other space and ground based experiments that have come online in recent years.

"The Big Bang theory isn't about beliefs as you seem to use the word. It's about the best explanation that fits the evidence."

It is perhaps the best CURRENT explanation. But it is not as good a theory as it was even a few years ago. There are questions that the Big Bang theory has no explanation for.

For example, as recently as 1998 it was discovered that the universe is "flat". A tiny difference in the density of the universe, either up or down, would make it curved. This means the Big Bang was "tuned" to produce exactly this density. The odds of that happening by chance are estimated at 1 to 10^50.

The Big Bang does not explain the increasing evidence that the expansion of the universe is actually accelerating .

The Big Bang theory does not adequately explain (IMHO) the "Horizon Problem", which is that the universe looks uniform in all directions, from galaxy evolution to background radiation. (Yes, I am aware of "Inflation Theory", which seeks to address the Horizon Problem, but it's pretty shaky. Here's a paper disputing the ability of the inflationary model to produce homogenous CMBR if you are interested.)

Dead-Tree References:
"The Field", Lynne McTaggart - Recommended for everyone, written for laymen.
"Science and the Akashic Field", Ervin Laszlo - This is a bit more technical.