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This sounds very interesting, but is it just simply a strange twist on words?

No

Let me explain: Quantum mechanics takes place in the realm of the extremely super small. Einstein's relativity takes place in the realm of extremely large values of velocity.

No, relativity applies just as accurately to a garden snail as a laser beam and quantum mechanics applies to a neutron star just as much as an electron (in fact in many ways neutron stars can be considered large atomic nuclei). The disconnect between quantum physics and relativity comes from the fact that the former describes reality in terms of wave functions (although practicing physicists use a different, equivalent formulation in terms of fields) and the latter in terms of curvature tensors. Reconciling those points of view is the point of a ToE.

The Theory of Everything. The Holy Grail of physics is to find this super theory that unites relativity, quantum mechanics, electricity and magnetism, gravity, mechanics. Although relativity is used in quantum for calculations, there are some contradictions in reconciling the two theories, thus Einstein's famous quote (during his hunt to reconcile relativity with quantum), "God does not play dice with the universe!"

This is wrong on so many levels I don't know where to begin but I'll try. Neither quantum mechanics nor relativity have any problems describing electromagnetism (now more properly known as the electroweak force), there is no succesful theory of quantum gravity yet, but the creation of one does not require a ToE as far as anyone can tell, although a ToE will necessarily have a quantum theory of gravity as one of its consequences. Einstein's "God does not play dice..." quote was in reference to his belief in (now discredited) hidden variable theories which would attempt to remove some of the probabilistic aspects of quantum mechanics.

Look around, and everyone will see that quantum mechanics is not something that happens around us!

Aagh, my computer just vanished thanks to the impossibility of its existence! Given the physical nature of a quantum well (a system that traps a particle in a particular energy state, typically very small and cold) if I could see one I'd probably have several more pressing problems to address than my misunderstanding of quantum physics.

As you observe the movement of the train, does the Heisenberg uncertainty principle come into play?

Yes, but thanks to the fact that uncertainty in the product of position and momentum only has to be larger than Planck's constant divided by 2*pi and Planck's constant is a very small number in SI units given the relatively large errors in the equipment at hand for observing trains I can safely cross train tracks. Or to put it another way, the de Broglie wavelength of a typical train is so small as to be safely ignored.

This uncertainty principle does not conflict with everyday life chiefly because it only applies to the special case of extremely small and extremely fast particles.

To be precise, only when the de Broglie wavelength approaches the spatial extent of a system do quantum mechanical effects become significant. Similarly, although there is no equivalent to the de Broglie wavelength in relativity, when the energy of an object is smaller than a certain threshhold relativistic effects can be safely ignored.

So this comparison, extension and exercise of extending quantum mechanics to Darwinian proportions appears to me to be more than anything a philosophical exercise.

What's a Darwinian proportion?

that Canadians don't read articles even after being called on it.

The san andreas is a remnant of the subduction of the pacific spreading ridge.

Okay, let's go to Plate Tectonics and Volcanoes and the San Andreas Fault for a quick lesson on the differences between subduction zones and transform faults.

It didn't occur to you that there could still be a piece of the ocean plate descending at depth did it huh?

Actually, it did occur to me. However, the article states this isn't at a subduction zone (45 degree slope) but rather at a transform fault (nearly vertical slope) and that the mechanism currently believed to cause the tremors in the subduction zones--fluids from seawater saturating the rocks--isn't present at the location. From the San Francisco Chronicle article:

In California, the most mystifying feature of the unexplained tremors is that they are occurring right on the deepest part of the San Andreas -- a fault that does not involve subduction or volcanic activity.

Furthermore, it should be noted that the activity at the Cascadia Subduction Zone isn't between the Pacific plate and the North American plate--the two plates involved in the San Andreas fault system--but rather between the Juan de Fuca plate and North American plate. So we can't just trace down the North American plate, assuming everything will be the same along it.

that Canadians don't read articles even after being called on it.

The san andreas is a remnant of the subduction of the pacific spreading ridge.

Okay, let's go to Plate Tectonics and Volcanoes and the San Andreas Fault for a quick lesson on the differences between subduction zones and transform faults.

It didn't occur to you that there could still be a piece of the ocean plate descending at depth did it huh?

Actually, it did occur to me. However, the article states this isn't at a subduction zone (45 degree slope) but rather at a transform fault (nearly vertical slope) and that the mechanism currently believed to cause the tremors in the subduction zones--fluids from seawater saturating the rocks--isn't present at the location. From the San Francisco Chronicle article:

In California, the most mystifying feature of the unexplained tremors is that they are occurring right on the deepest part of the San Andreas -- a fault that does not involve subduction or volcanic activity.

Furthermore, it should be noted that the activity at the Cascadia Subduction Zone isn't between the Pacific plate and the North American plate--the two plates involved in the San Andreas fault system--but rather between the Juan de Fuca plate and North American plate. So we can't just trace down the North American plate, assuming everything will be the same along it.

Who will do the actual reading of all these books whose copyrights expired? And, under what terms will these reading performances be distributed?

Even if the text they read is public domain, the rights to the performance of the reading belong to the performer, and can be bought and sold if the performer chooses. He or she can also choose to release the performances into the public domain with a copyleft license. Obviously, this is what I would prefer. Then, the controversies of storage would be less pressing. There would need to be a fail-safe central archive of the recordings at maximum quality (maybe losslessly compressed, or not at all), and then the libraries would "loan out" compressed versions of these files in whatever format makes sense at the time. These days I'd say it's mp3; in the future, the format with the widest playback possibilities will hopefully be something better.

What I'm worried about is that the libraries will get commercial companies to do proprietary performances, so they will be much less free to distribute them according to the needs of their patrons. This is a real shame. For a long time I've wanted to have an open-source project to read certain classics in English whose copyright has expired. I've actually gotten started; see here. I think that if the libraries of the english-speaking world asked nicely and pooled their resources, they could get a whole bunch of the classics read by excellent performers, and released to the general public. I'm in the middle of listening to Ian McKellan reading The Odyssey and it's incredibly moving and entertaining. This isn't just for the visually impaired, you know.

Anyway, if libraries are going to do this, they have to do it right, because they won't get a chance to re-do it. I think they are setting themselves up for hardship if somebody else owns the rights to the stuff they distribute, even if it makes a few things easier at the start. So let's stop bickering about file formats and concentrate on the important stuff.

I took the liberty of creating a link for a Google search for you, since you're too busy trolling to do it yourself.

Your claim was that 'The eruption of Mt. Pinatubo, for instance, launched more stuff into the atmosphere than all human activity during the 19th and 20th centuries combined.' . Even at a subset, that means you are claiming that the eruption put more CO2, SO2, Nitrogen oxides and particulates into the atmosphere than all human activities for the past 200 years. You've made an absurd claim that you can't back up in a couple of sentances, which looks a lot more like trolling than my post.

A good starting point..

Mt. Pinatubo put around 17 Million tonnes of Sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere (17Tg). Humans emit 66Tg PER YEAR. However, volcanic emissions are injected higher than human ones, making the contribution for a single year approxamately equal.

Mt Pinatubo put around 44 Million tonnes CO2 into the atmosphere. That's around half a day's worth of human emissions. 3 Million tonnes HCl, the vast majority of which rained straight out.

And the effect was a short lived pulse of cooling; the particulates come out in a few months. This is why you don't see anything about longer term effects. There are none.

So, contrary to what is endlessly repeated and recycled, volcanoes do not have anything near the impact of humans and the figures - could you be bothered to research them - support this entirely.

Doesn't water expand when it freezes?

Yes.

But this inverse temperature/density relationship only applies over a small temperature range, as this document describes:

The density of water does increase as it cools (as it should), but at 4 C the density vs. temperature graph goes the other way and the density actually begins to decrease.

This decrease continues until the solid state is achieved (at 0 C), at which temperature the density vs. temperature graph resumes its normal trace.

Except for that four-degree range, water expands as it gets warmer.

This problem also exists with glass lenses. THat's why were invented. It won't matter unless you try and use your camera to take pictures of mars from your backyard though.

This reminds me strongly of a talk I went to by Richard Taylor, a physics prof at the University of Oregon. He's determined that Jackson Pollock's paintings are fractal in nature, and is one of the people contacted when a new painting of his turns up. So far, he's been in total agreement with expert opinion. An interesting note is that Pollock got to a "sweet spot" of what Taylor calls "drip fractal dimension" of ~1.6-1.7, whereas nature is around about 1.2-1.3. Pollock, Taylor said, seemed to want to challenge the viewer with more intense fractal patterns. He could get higher drip fractal dimensions, to a value of greater than 2, but he decided it was too far and painted over it--too challenging or something. This was something mentioned in Taylor's talk, not in the link. Anyway, it was a really interesting talk that's made me look for repeating patterns in nature when I'm out hunting or something, and gave me a greater appreciation for Pollock's paintings, which always used to look like...er...Jackson Pollocks to me. Also Taylor talked about how fractal nature seems to be appealing and relaxing to us, with our mood improved if there are either real plants or large photographs of natural scenes around our cube farms--which are incredibly unfractal like and horridly plain and repetitive.

You said: "So what happens when the temperature (down to -90C) goes below the sublimation temperature of CO2 (-76C, if I recall correctly)? Does it just freeze out of the air?"

Most likely. The phase diagram for CO2 shows that for our standard atmospheric pressure, CO2 freezes at -78.5 C. If the temperature is only slightly lower than -78.5 C it may take some time for a significant amount of CO2 to precipitate due to the latent heat of solidification for CO2 of -43 cal/g (smaller than the absolute value of water which is about -80 cal/g) . Additionally some CO2 may remain in the air which varies by temperature (which would be relative humidity for water). As the temperature drops the amount of CO2 that can be dissolved in air decreases. Unfortunately I couldn't find a reference for CO2 saturation vs temperature. If it is reasonably low (which it should be) at -90 C, CO2 frost will develop.

On Mars with an atmospheric pressure that varies from about 5 - 10 mbar (1 atm = 1013.25 millibars), CO2 frost can develop as seen by Viking 2 and by satellite pictures of the poles. Snowflakes won't form, since the shape of a snowflake is determined by van der Waals forces (don't occur in CO2). CO2 frost should look similar to this.

"Many of the calls to our hotline were from voters who had pressed the Kerry button on their electronic voting screen, only to have Bush light up as the candidate they had chosen. In some cases, this would happen repeatedly until about the 5th or 6th time the voter pressed Kerry and eventually his name would light up. In other cases, the voters pushed Kerry but were later asked to confirm their Bush vote."

In my opinion, one of the most beautiful equations is the one that computes natural cubic splines. Given a set of knots (points) on a graph, this equation figures out a smooth curve between each point. This is called "curve-fitting". Very cool calculus, and it includes a tridiagonal matrix equation, which gives it extra beauty points! See this page for an excellent discussion on it:

This study makes no sense. My school, the University of Oregon, offers free web hosting, discounted computers, support for handheld computers, multimedia equipment to borrow, and courses in emerging technologies. Why is all the information at Forbes.com wrong?

I'm not saying the UO is high tech, or that they should have been rated higher. I just wonder if they screwed up the data from other schools, too.

This study makes no sense. My school, the University of Oregon, offers free web hosting, discounted computers, support for handheld computers, multimedia equipment to borrow, and courses in emerging technologies. Why is all the information at Forbes.com wrong?

I'm not saying the UO is high tech, or that they should have been rated higher. I just wonder if they screwed up the data from other schools, too.

This study makes no sense. My school, the University of Oregon, offers free web hosting, discounted computers, support for handheld computers, multimedia equipment to borrow, and courses in emerging technologies. Why is all the information at Forbes.com wrong?

I'm not saying the UO is high tech, or that they should have been rated higher. I just wonder if they screwed up the data from other schools, too.

This study makes no sense. My school, the University of Oregon, offers free web hosting, discounted computers, support for handheld computers, multimedia equipment to borrow, and courses in emerging technologies. Why is all the information at Forbes.com wrong?

I'm not saying the UO is high tech, or that they should have been rated higher. I just wonder if they screwed up the data from other schools, too.

http://www.uni-leipzig.de/urz/images/abacus.gif
http://www.sphere.bc.ca/test/tubes3/600-nl-807.jpg
http://www.ti.com/corp/graphics/press/image/on_lin e/transistor.jpg
http://www.cs.uoregon.edu/resources/cisnews/v2i2/i lliac/Chip_Ant.jpg

Again, you've caught me being sloppy. I'm talking about total system efficiency, not just the efficiency of the individual components. A lead-acid battery is more efficient than electrolysis, but electrolyized hydrogen used in a fuel cell is potentially much more efficient in a working PV generator or vehicle than batteries.

Here's a comprehensive study on lead-acid batteries from Sandia Nat'l Laboratories:

Lead Acid Battery Efficiency Study

The combustion of hydrogen releases energy at higher efficiency than a lead-acid battery, but an internal combustion engine is much less efficient than that (I don't have numbers), thanks to losses in the engine itself, but the difference here is energy density: A tank of compressed hydrogen can store more energy in much less mass than a battery, making it more practical, especially in a vehicle. Fuel cells could theoretically improve the picture a great deal, making hydrogen the winner by a mile (more scientific precision! ;-)

AFAIK, nobody has a economically viable fuel cell that can compete in payback terms with chemical batteries right now. Also, I'm just an interested amateur, I do not work or research in this field!

A good (but light) summary of these issues can be found at http://zebu.uoregon.edu/1999/ph162/l10h.html

A little article with two boffins talking abour terraforming mars.

They harp on about oxygen levels. I started to wonder - what gas other than nitrogen would be good to compose the other 80% (assuming we reach earth density - could we have a 1/5 less atomosphere than was 99% 02?

So I think (although mars contains nitrogen - composition) the matter is how to make nitrogen and oxygen and enough co2.

Nitrogen in the air is vital for plant life also, so I think a valid nitrogen cycle, water cycle and healthy o2/co2 ratios would need to be established.

Would they find thier own levels, or will it be *bloody* hard to establish a balanced eco system?

Any other thoughts on mars ecosynthesis?

The only problem with terraforming mars is the lack of magnetic field and its weak gravity. The weak gravity allows the atmosphere to escape http://zebu.uoregon.edu/~soper/Mars/atmosphere.htm l and the lack of magnetic field allows the solar wind to blow the rest of the atmosphere away. http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2001/ast31jan_1 .htm So, we could make it fit for human habitation, but we would have to continually replenish the atmosphere making it uneconomical.

There is a really wierd thing with real website. They have a different website depending og whenewer you are located in europa or usa.

• Windows users: MiKTeX
• Mac Users: TeXShop
• General: Emacs w/ AucTeX
• There are many others, Google is your friend.

This link suggests otherwise. And this discussion refers to a different court case that clearly supports the notion of "redskin" as a derogatory term referring to the scalps of Indian victims. And in the Kotelly case you mention, the judge plainly states that her ruling is not a ruling on whether the term is offensive to Indians in general or not. Whether or not Dietz put paint on his face, it's pretty clear that this term is widely considered an insult based on the history cited in these links.

The individual effect of each of the Sun or the Moon on the Earth is to cause two tidal bulges of the oceans/lakes/rivers of the Earth
(one facing the object, and the other on the opposite side). These lead to diurnal (24 hour cycle) and semi-diurnal (12 hour cycle) tides.

When the Moon and Sun are aligned together, you have Spring tides. Neap tides are caused when th e Moon and Sun are perpendicular to one another. There is also the Proxigean Spring Tide, when the moon is at its closest point to the Earth (perigee). This time is known as the "proxigee", and causes even higher tides than ordinary Spring Tides. Fortunately, these only occur once every 1.5 years.

The gravitational acceleration at the Earth's surface is 9.8 metres/second per second (towards the centre of the Earth).

The gravitational acceleration on Earth due to the Sun is 0.0059 metres/second per second.
Or about 5.9 millimetres/second.

The gravitational acceleration on Earth due to the Moon is 0.000033 metres/second per second.
Or about 0.033 millimetres/second.

Source: Space Talk Forum

These amounts are small, but research groups at one of the particle accelerator rings actually noticed a distortion in the targeting of the beams due to the stretching/squashing of the surrounding land caused by the changing positions of the Sun and Moon. This caused the beam to periodically go off target.

Intuitively, one would assume that gravity would be less when the Sun and Moon were overhead, and the pendulum would swing slightly higher and slower. Plus the behavior of the pendulum should vary according to the positions of the Sun and Moon.

If the "shielding effect" occurred with large objects, then it would also apply to Earth's ocean tides. The closest side of the Earth one should shield the opposite side, but the bulging effect can be explained by simple vector addition/subtraction.

It's not the case, unless we are in a Star Trek episode where the DNA of an ancient race was spread through the galaxy in the primordial oceans of life friendly worlds. Scientists can go back the evolution chain and they know that humans evolved from primates and primates from small mammals and so on. It's extremely unlikely that we are colonizers. And even if we were the colonizers, where are our cousins?

Some interesting links: 3.75 millon year colonization theory And a much more conservative estimation of 50 million years

I just installed gigabit at my home network but sprung for a cheaper switch, the only problem with it is that it doesn't do jumbo framing, and here is a list of jumbo frame compatible hardware

to test your link speeds you should not be using Samba, instead use ttcp (windows version,java version, or your favorite distro should have a copy, I know it's in the ports of FreeBSD)

Don't forget this one. :)

I'm not sure your statement's entirely true. It requires some extra code, but PNG24's can be properly rendered in IE >= 6. Microsoft article on the subject is located here. I've mocked up a sample usage here. The fake button has a partially transparent "erasure" section that does seem to blend with the colored box behind it. Note that the sample image does NOT show up in Mozilla, at least on my version. The point is not that it's nice or proper or pleasant, just that it's technically possible.

Saturn is a huge gas giant like Jupiter. Jupiter eminates massive amounts of life-frying radiation. Even though Saturn has only about 30% the mass of Jupiter (Saturn is also the only planet that has lower density than water!), it is reported that Saturn's radiation output is even higher than that of Jupiter.

Everything crosses the event horizon according to an observer that is outside the event horizon.

False. An outside observer NEVER sees anything cross the event horizon. He sees infinite time dilation as the object gets infinitely close to the horizon. This portion is not in dispute. Any google will confirm it. Here is the first Google result:

to an outside observer any objects approaching the Schwarzschild radius appear to take an infinite time to penetrate toward the inside

-

While technologically do-able, I'm uncertain as to whether this will succeed in the commercial world.

I think we'll all just have to wait and see.

The objects are expanding as well. All of spacetime is expanding. Maybe this will help. If you read up on the cosmic background radiation, you will see that before it was discovered, physicists were correctly predicting its temperature. They accounted for the fact that the expanding universe would redshift this radiation [that has been around since the Big Bang]. Unlike the Doppler effect, this isn't caused by a velocity difference of the object and observer, but because the wavelength of the radiation has been stretched. It would follow that stars, planets, etc. have also been stretching, but we just can't look into the past to see.

*laugh* Gads, it's the Dark X of the Month Club :)

If I may be philosophical for a minute...

We have a lot of observations that are pretty close to indisputable: we have spectra from other stars, we have comets visit the inner solar system periodically, there are other planets relatively close nearby. Where a lot of the flux is, is where we attempt to explain how such things got to be, or guess at the meanings or causes of things that we can't directly observe or experiment with.

It's hard to remember sometimes that the assumptions that go into a set of theories could themselves be wrong, and that the theories can support one another without ever actually proving the assumption correct.

Some of the most powerful theories are ones that survive new levels of direct experimentation. Take evolution; regardless of the furor it causes in some circles, it has survived from a period of time where nobody knew what "stuff" caused parents and children to look similar, and successive closer looks all the way up to the various Genome Projects have given it actual mechanisms and even experimental techniques.

The old Greek theory of vision resulting from ray emanations from the eye certainly wouldn't survive the advent of experimental biology, yet in its own time, it was entirely self-consistent (and raytracers behave as though it really were the case :)

It wasn't all that long ago that some theories we take for granted were still being hammered out. Take solar planetary formation. According to Gamow's One, Two, Three... Infinity, one of the major fights was between collision theory and accretion theory. Accretion theory makes so much sense to us these days - so what was the problem?

Well, back at the time, folks doing calculations determined mathematically that a planetary disk would not coalesce, but instead remain like the rings of Saturn. One way around this problem had the gaseous elements being removed by infall into the sun, but this caused profound troubles in that the sun would gain way too much angular momentum.

As it stands, the collision theory (formation from collisions between stars) ended up having more problems, and we ended up with accretion theory, with the lighter elements being blown away by solar wind/radiation pressure. The "Zodiacal Light" is assumed to be the remains of those lighter gases, but of that, we certainly can't be sure.

We can't be 100% sure of accretion theory, regardless, because we can't take perfect pictures of planetary systems in formation over millions of years. It's a good working guess, though - and as a corollary, it implies that most star systems have planets, which we seem to be finding (collision theory required a very infrequent condition, which would make planets rare).

Who knows what else out there is ready to be overturned? Gravity? (current assumption: caused by geometry) Velocity of galaxies? (current assumptions: Doppler is the cause of redshift) The Oort cloud (current assumption: there's a near-perfect sphere of comet nuclei that can be disturbed by passing stars enough to send comets our way, but not enough to distort the sphere... amongst other things ;)

Some cherished scientific beliefs will be overturned in our lifetimes. (Fortunately, of course, this will not stop our electronics and entertainment from working). There's still a hell of a lot more to discover than the "we're nearing the point when we've discovered everything" crew would have us believe.

...and that should be an exciting, not a disillusioning, thought.

Yeah, here is a nice summary with pictures.

I'm not a quantum physicist, but I think I have a idea what this is about; the light waves just interfere differently with four slits. Since this Deutsch guy draws wildly different conclusions about the result, I guess he's either much stupider or much smarter than me. And since he's the university physicist and not me, I feel bad for him if it's the former.

IIRC, you're thinking of Trademarks.

Patents definitely allow selective enforcement and Copyrights may allow selective enforcement (I'm not sure), but you have to defend your Trademark.
If you don't it can become a generic term and you can lose protection.
Anyone need an Aspirin?

Will the motor companies become the next RIAA when it is possible to make a perfect copy of any car? What will Coca-Cola say when I can nano-replicate coke from water and hydrocarbons?

They'll probably just say that your Coke tastes like Pepsi or something.

Seriously, I think exact duplication of an item will probably be a bit tricky, even with nanomanufacturing. Many /. readers are probably familiar with Star Trek replicators, and the more anal among us probably remember that most replicators can't get foodstuffs perfectly right due to "resolution" limitations. It may just be their way to prevent replicating living beings, but it makes sense.

Making an exact duplicate of a given object would require exact knowledge of that object's state - certainly down to the bonds between its atoms, possibly down to the spin of its electrons (or even smaller parts!) That oft-quoted Heisenberg uncertainty principle means that, once we get to that level, we won't be able to learn the exact state of an item. It probably doesn't matter for your Coke, but it might matter for the metallic structure of the can it's in. Duplicating the metallurgical qualities of a car's engine block, or the electric properties of a silicon chip, may be beyond what nanotech can do.

With that fact in mind, the manufacturers may still be able to produce a better product than your homemade knock-off. If that's true, than manufacturers won't be limited to making money off of patents, copyrights, and licensing.

(By the way, a very funny webcomic set in the 31st century, Schlock Mercenary, considered and dealt with this issue. I've linked a specific relevant strip here.)

It's worth noting that there are no theories (so far as I've heard anyway) that expressly forbid superconductivity at room temperature. The BCS theory of conventional superconductors forbids Tc's beyond about ~50K if I recall correctly, but high temp. superconductors don't follow BCS and have much higher Tc's, who knows if there's another class of electron superconductors with even higher Tc's. In fact it is thought that certain parts of the insides of neutron stars have superconducting protons floating around in a sea of superfluid neutrons at many millions of Kelvin!!

I've just gone through the same process of learning LaTeX. However, I'm an OS X user and I found Mac-Tex at Penn State to be a very good resource. I chose TexShop for my front end iInstaller to install the LaTeX backend. You can also use Fink to install your backend but I didn't feel like comand line install this time as suggested previously.

Other than getting the software installed, I simply used Google for tutorials on LaTeX and BibTex.

1. Total Solar Eclipses
2. Planetary Transits
3. Naked-eye visible Supernovas

Not only do I get to see amazing astronomical events, while I am there I travel around and see wonderful and interesting parts of our own planet!

To pay for my vacations to these selected events, I have established travel investment funds (setup many years in advance) for:

• Total Solar Eclipses:
  • 29 March 2006 (Libya)
  • 01 Aug 2008 (Siberia or Mongolia)
  • 22 Jul 2009 (China or Pacific)
  • 11 Jul 2010 (Easter Island)
  • 13 Nov 2012 (high speed jet over the Pacific?)
• Planetary Transits:
  • Venus: 8 June 2004 (Italy)
  • Mercury: 8 Nov 2006 (TBD)
  • Venus: 6 June 2012 (TBD)

I also keep an emergency fund that allows me go anywhere in the world at a moments notice to see a Supernova bright enough seen with the naked eye. I had such a fund in place which allowed me to rush from California to Australia some 21 hours after the discovery of 1987A (24 Feb 1987).

Maybe next naked eye supernova viewable in my hemisphere. But if not, I have another supernova fund ready ...

I first learned about the Transit of Venus, in the early summer of 1970, during a Morrison Planetarium program of the California Academy of Science. At the age of 9 I decided that I wanted to see next transit.

I have waiting patiently for 34 years to make my transit observations. It is now only a few dozen days away!!!

Cariolis Effect, I believe, should have no effect on the movement of cars around a track unless the track is very big, as in spanning a large ways north and south (hundreds of miles) and the cars are floating above the track or something. As Cariolis Effect explains the motion of something like clouds traveling southward on the greath sphere that is the Earth (link).

Contrary to popular belief and that hilarious episode of the Simpsons water doesn't necessarily flush in a different direction on the southern hemisphere :P There is no "natural" tendency of rotation on the different hemispheres. Or, now, am I missing something even further about the Cariolis effect? I could be. I'm terrible at the sciences.

Stroke isn't "the" core of Network Utility... the app drives eleven command line programs, of which stroke is just one. (The others are in [/usr]/sbin.)

The sort of apps you're talking about here (there are tons more, e.g. SimpleWget) are very limited though: basically they just exec CLI apps, and all they can be is some sort of form-based interface to enter CLI arguments. Which invariably turns out to be crippling -- soon enough we're back to the command line and manpage, if we want to dig -x or wget less than the entire internet.

Much more interesting (and relevant to the TUI question, IMO) are apps that expose libraries: ReSTedit, TestXSLT, TeXShop,...

I'll believe in man caused global warming when

a) We figure out why the amount of light we get from the sun is dimming. (10% in the last 30 years)Link
b) We figure out why the earth's spin is erratic. It slows down and speeds up for its own rhyme and reason.Link

The fact is that we are just along for the ride here. The notion that man is in control of the climate is laughable. This planet is not a stable, sublime, resort town. Mother Nature has a hell of a temper.

The main language is amharic, english being the major foreign language taught in schools.

Amharic Localization Project by Mr. Daniel Yacob:

http://www.geez.org

http://gnome.geez.org

At least some provable properties can be "pushed" through the compilation process all the way to the resulting object code. If you're interested, you can look into proof-carrying code and typed assembly language (papers by Necula, Appel, Walker, Zdanzewic, Crary and a cast of thousands.)

The resulting proofs are still hairy enough that they have to be checked by machine, but the size and complexity of the proof-checker is much less than that of the compilation toolchain. That means that while there's still some code that has to be trusted, it's much less. Here's my informal scariness hierarchy:

Normal model (you have to trust everything) > type safe languages (you have to trust the compilers / interpreters) > proof-carrying code (you have to trust the proof-checker*).

If you haven't already, you should definitely read Ken Thompson's Turing Award lecture, "Reflections on Trusting Trust" here.

* - Pedantry point: If you're talking about Necula's original PCC work, you also have to trust the verification condition generator, which is some fairly deep voodoo. Appel's Foundational PCC addresses this to a signficant extent.

By way of example, one of the axioms is that parallel lines never meet. We don't actually know if that's true, but it's pretty close. If we do turn out to live in a curved universe, we'll have to throw away some bits of maths.

I have a first class degree in Maths, and a lower second in Physics too.

Actually, they are not. While energy does correlate to mass (via the famous E=mc^2 formula) and a photon (just energy, no mass) could become mass with less energy; a sub-atomic partical a photon is not.

The wave-partical duality refered to in quantum-mechanics says basically that since a photon is not a wave of constant amplitude (a picture), it can behave like a particle in some sense (albeight a massless one). Additionally, particles with mass also have wave properties, but with extremely high frequencies.

All that said, not all particles are sub-atomic particles. The particles of potato-chip at the bottom of my bag are not sub-atomic particles. Likewise, nutrinos and photons, while they can pass through atoms and collide with or originate from them, are not subatomic particles. Aside from light being massless, photons are not sub-atomic particles because they are not "glued" inside an atom by electrostatic forces, strong nuclear forces, weak nuclear forces, gravitational forces, or any other kind of force. When an electron/other sub-atomic particle falls into a lower energy state and releases its excess energy as a photon, that photon leaves the atom. Hence, the stars, LEDs, light-bulbs, and all other light-emitting things "work".

They'v been throwing their rocks at us for years; we're just returning the favor.

Is LaTeX or one of the other prertty TeX front ends available for Mac?

Yes. I think the best is Texshop.

I've been using Frame for about 5 years on Mac and Windoze: documenting software, writing scholarly papers, and some modestly-creative writing. Some of the things I have done I don't think I could have done in any other software. I know (La)TeX, I know OO.org, but I'd have bought Frame for OS X without hesitation -- I *loved* it.

TeX is wonderful, Knuth is a god. But try getting your support people to write doc & tutorials in it. And try thinking that a non-technical dissertation looks like it'll ever be publishable staring at that sort of markup, even if it is in a nice OS X GUI like TeXShop. If using TeX, however, I do like (the idea of) the Cocoa-app Bibdesk.

I'm hopeful for OO.org, but, well, I don't like it, not yet. Maybe it reminds me too much of my year using M$Word, maybe it's too slow, maybe that download took too long, or the project too seemingly amorphous. I also like the promise of things like the Pybliographer project and it's plug-in for OO.org.

What I use for (scholarly) writing now on OS X: Mellel. It doesn't have all of Frame's page-formatting features yet, but it seems to be on the right track with OpenType for broad language support. They seem really eager to ensure that those who like Frame and Nota Bene will be happy in their app. As for a nice writing experience on OS X most similar to Frame, this seems the best chance.

I wrote a cool program in Matlab for a graduate astrodynamics class I took that would plot the planets and their orbits at any time. One thing immediately jumps out at you.... Pluto is not a freakin planet! Any good diagram of the solar system shows to screwed up Pluto is.

For those who hate pictures, here are the orbit elements of the planets in tabular form

First off, note that Pluto has an eccentricity of almost 0.25, that is WAY oblate. Now, someone will probably point out that Mercury is nearly that oblate and we can argue whether Mercury is really a planet also. It probably is, however, it is soooo close to the Sun that it has comparatively zero angular momentum - and remember, that is the job of the planets, to store the bulk of the angular momentum of the solar system as it was formed (you do remember that right?) Anyway, Mercury is so close to the Sun, that its orbit is much more easily perturbed by higher J2 and J3 harmonics of the Sun and you would expect it to have be a little out of plane and eccentric due to multibody effects as well.

Moving on, how about that inclination... 17 degrees. Again, excluding Mercury, the next closest is 3.4 deg and the next closest outer planet is 2.5 deg.

And how bout these data. Check out the rotational period... 153 hrs.. the next closest outer planet is 17 hrs.

Sorry folks, it is a captured Kupiter belt object... move along.