Problem with the corporation idea is you severely hurt legitimate small businesses then. A good number of small businesses are incorporated, but definitely don't have the cash to pony up $1000 for a website to help them grow and expand their business. I've been amazed how much web traffic we've had for my family's brewery, but there's no way we could've afforded a domain for the business at $1000 when we were getting set up.
Uh, you can't hide anything in low-earth orbit. Space may be gigantic, but LEO is getting rather cluttered. NASA has been tracking space debris to a size smaller than the typical satellite for a while now. There's really no such thing as a "low-profile" satellite unless it used lasers to communicate to its ground station and had the radar profile of a stealth plane. Even then I doubt you could hide it for long for the simple fact it's hard to hide launching a rocket into space.
When it comes time to talk about Christianity, however, people apparently forget how to behave properly.
This phenomenon is hardly unique to Christianity. I would say two key ingredients almost inevitably guarantee a flamewar:
1. Commonality of strong personal beliefs
2. Lack or widespread obfuscation of concrete empirical data or evidence to support a position
I think you'll find at least one of these two things to be common to nearly every flamewar on Slashdot (and in the world at large). It certainly explains what happens to nearly every article regarding politics, religion, climatology (i.e. global warming), evolution, console wars, etc.
This really depends on what temperature statistic you're talking about. Global annual mean? That's actually fairly variable on a year-to-year basis, but it is certainly hasn't been going down much in the long-term lately. And then you have things like the accelerating melting of the arctic sea ice that make it pretty clear something is going on. While the details of end result is still up in the air, it's pretty idiotic to think you can more than double the concentration of a significant greenhouse gas with zero effect on climate.
Yes, but the people who run those satellites, interpret the data, issue the weather forecasts are mostly scientists.... you get my drift. Your local TV weatherman is generally coming up with his local forecast from the official data/forecast put out by the NWS.
Well, yes and no. It's been a while since I've done the analysis, but as I recall only about 1/2 of Earth's carbon is sequestered in the mantle and plate tectonics keep that reservoir relatively fixed. Volcanic outgassing is just as much a source of carbon as carbonate rocks being subducted are a sink. My real point was carbonate rocks are fairly stable at the surface and can sequester a lot of carbon.
In regards to plate tectonics, yes, Venus does have twice the crustal thickness of the Earth, but lack of water could play just as much or more of a role in why Venus doesn't have plate tectonics. Who knows what'd happen if we added the water back. As of the time I graduated how you get plate tectonics to start in the first place was still an open question.
No, really, I was answering you. If you take what I wrote earlier and extrapolate you can see one possible (albeit slow) solution. And no one said terraforming was going to be easy or practical, it's just not technically impossible.
If you can manage to cool Venus's atmosphere sufficiently (with say a giant sunshade in orbit at the Lagrange point, but you can use your imagination) for carbonate rocks to form the chemistry does the work for you. Venus has a nearly identical chemical makeup to the Earth, so as long as you can get some water back on the planet (probably a much more daunting challenge than an orbital sunshade) erosional processes do the rest.
No huge constant energy input for storage (aside from keeping your sunshade in place), no flammable hydrocarbons, which were the two complaints in your original post.
Well, Earth has managed to safely sequester billions of tons of carbon. We have just as much of it as Venus, ours just happens to be locked up in nifty things like carbonate rocks. Venus could have carbonate rocks too if we could just get it a little cooler and get some water back on the surface to help with erosion. Just at present the reaction goes the wrong way and you have CaCO3 + SiO2 -> CaSiO3 + CO2, so there aren't a lot of carbonate rocks laying about. In terms of atmospheric composition if you removed most of the CO2 from Venus's atmosphere it'd have roughly the same amount of nitrogen, which is a good starting point, and you only need to liberate oxygen from a relatively small amount of the CO2 that's presently there for a breathable atmosphere.
Actually, Mars has lost a significant amount of hydrogen (as has Venus, but not as severely) and most of the surface rocks are highly oxidized. Really, you'd need to add back some hydrogen to make Mars really work. And as far as the radiation goes, Earth's atmosphere (and also Venus's) do a LOT to stop radiation. Sure it doesn't get all of it, but astronauts on the space station are getting a much higher radiation dose than you and I down at ground level.
Actually, likely not. Jupiter is massive enough the center is likely made of metallic hydrogen and there may not be any clearly identifiable "surface" (i.e. sharp density jump) given most of the planet is made of the stuff and it's still convecting. Contrast this to Uranus or Neptune which very likely do have a rocky core surrounded by a very thick atmosphere, given their relatively low masses. And then there's Saturn which may be somewhere in the middle.
Sadly it's not much more than that. One of my friends was booted from the Marines under "don't ask don't tell" when a fellow marine he'd had a relationship decided to file allegations that my friend basically got him drunk and made sexual advances when things weren't working out anymore.
Katrina really wasn't that mysterious. The Gulf of Mexico is a very warm basin of sea water in comparison to the surrounding Caribbean and Atlantic waters. A hurricane that happens to wander in there under favorable conditions (low wind shear) tends to blow up. It's the meteorological equivalent of a spark hitting a powder keg. If you really want to understand its "sudden change in course" there's a nice report on it.
Yes, and yet no. CO2 sources/sinks are not purely temperature dependent, unlike water. Yes, the ocean is a huge temperature sensitive repository of CO2, but carbonate rocks and volcanos, not so much. Many of the large changes in CO2 concentration that correlate with climate tend to also correlate with other events in the geologic record (i.e. periods of increased volcanic activity, snowball earth, mountain uplift, etc.). So to answer you and the first response to you, CO2 is both the cause and the effect. If you could magically raise the temperature of the oceans by 10 degrees, yes, you'd release a lot of CO2 and the opposite if you lowered it. However, the total amount of CO2 the ocean can dissolve is rather small compared to the total amount of potential CO2 contained in the geologic carbon cycle (i.e. not just the highly mobile part contained in biomass and oceans).
On short time scales you can ignore the long timescale sources/sinks and just consider the ocean/biosphere/atmosphere CO2 cycle as oscillating about some equilibrium. What's happening here is the long timescale sources/sinks are slowly nudging the equilibrium of the system. What we're currently doing at the moment is releasing massive quantities of trapped carbon that had been removed from the system over millions of years. As a byproduct we're nudging up temperatures globally which are in turn altering the equilibrium states of the highly mobile parts of the system.
If you look at it purely from a standpoint of carbon budgeting it becomes pretty clear we have to be having some impact with the amount of carbon we've returned to circulation over the past 150 years. The greater sources/sinks operate on much slower timescales, and we've effectively put more carbon in circulation. Arguing over whether CO2 is a cause or an effect is kind of a moot point. It's both.
Water vapor tends to be rather self-regulating on a very short timescale. It has this tendency to saturate and condense out of the atmosphere during a phenomenon we call "rain". It also can form clouds which may or may not increase albedo and lead to cooling. It can also form snow cover and increase albedo and lead to cooling. Additionally, owing to it's very short mean lifetime in the atmosphere, it tends to have very localized effects on weather.
To put it simply, water vapor tends to track the global climate rather than set it. If there were no other greenhouse gasses the Earth would have frozen into a snowball long ago (and it actually has done this before in Earth's history). Research tends to show water definitely provides feedback mechanisms which can amplify the effects of other forcings, but it is too volatile to be the driving factor all on its own.
Really, the other major greenhouse gas is methane, which is also increasing in the Earth's atmosphere (albeit not as quickly). It has a much shorter lifetime than CO2 does, so it tends not to accumulate without a constant source (which is a good thing). There is some evidence that the rise of agriculture may have had some impact on global climate thousands of years ago. Essentially the cultivation of rice and domestic animals are both non-negligible sources of methane which is extremely potent as a greenhouse gas, but in this case the warming was likely much more moderate than the current trend.
What Phil was really getting at is Jupiter most likely did not form in the same way as binary stars or brown dwarfs. The formation of Jupiter-size objects is still somewhat of a mystery, but the most promising scenario is one of a runaway core accretion, whereas it's generally thought that brown dwarfs and binary systems form through a direct instability in the collapsing proto-stellar cloud/accretion disk. In the current catalogue of stellar objects there's somewhat of a gap between the largest known gas giants (~15 times Jupiter) and the smallest brown dwarfs (around 60 times Jupiter's mass). I'm a little fuzzy on the numbers as it's been a few years since I worked on that area, but the general idea is there's a continuum of objects going from star to brown dwarf and a similar continuum from gas giant to super massive gas giant, but nothing in the middle. What's not clear is if this is an observational bias or something else is going on. The state of the art in planet/star formation simulations hasn't really filled in all of the pieces just yet.
If all the ice melts will the sea levels rise? Yes they will. Will they rise 7 meters? No way. 1-2 meters maybe.
The melting of the Laurentide ice sheet over North America at the end of the last ice age produced a 20 meter rise in sea level over roughly 500 years. Granted, it was larger than Greenland, but definitely it's on par with Antarctica. The volume of ice contained in Antarctica is 30 million cubic kilometers of ice. Spread that out over the ocean surface area of the world (362 million sq km) and you get about 80 meters before you account for the fact that ocean surface area increases as sea level goes up. Greenland's ice sheet is roughly 1/10th that of Antarctica (and is firmly on land), I'll let you do that math.
And don't forget that the ice already floating in the water will not make the sea level rise anymore since it already displaces it's own weight.
Actually, not quite true. The floating ice has a lower salinity than the ocean, meaning even in liquid form it's less dense. So it does contribute, just not as much as melting a block of ice that's firmly on land.
One of my office mates in grad school actually worked on this very problem. What I recall of his preliminary research was that one potential (but unlikely) explanation was the impactor maybe had formed along-side the Earth. However, isotope distributions among the terrestrial planets appeared to be completely random from dynamical models of accretion. While there may be some segregation in the protoplanetary disk there are a sufficient number of large accretion events from bodies from all over the inner solar system that the end result is somewhat a game of chance.
What I remember of Canup's models is that the iron core of the protoplanet ends up merging with Earth and the Moon ended up being formed largely out of the impactor's mantle material and a little bit of Earth's. But her original dynamical model predicted insufficient mixing to account for the homogeneity in isotopes. Right before I left he and Stevenson began exploring transport in the silicone vapor atmosphere that would've enveloped both the Earth and accretion disk shortly after the impact, but I'm not sure if they ever got it to work out. Some other grad students actually began work on a smooth particle hydrodynamical model to expand on Canup's at that point too, but no idea where that's at either (this was in early 2006).
That you just posted is a piece of pseudo-scientific dreck from all I can tell. I had a course on MHD in grad school, the theory of magnetic reconnection most certainly can account for the speed of energy release in solar events. It's also an important problem in plasma instability in tokamaks. Searching on google scholar didn't find any peer-reviewed papers by plasma physicists refuting magnetic reconnection.
Perhaps they were confused by Biskamp's 1986 paper on the Sweet-Parker model failing to achieve fast reconnection that was cleared up in a 1992 paper by Priest and they missed that Biskamp himself seems to accept fast reconnection as possible in his 1994 paper?
You know, reading both of TFAs, it seems like she really didn't think about what she was wearing. It's worth noting she wasn't actively trying to enter the airport, she was there to pick up a friend. From TFA:
FYI, friends at MIT say she wears the hoodie on a regular basis- it's just unfortunate that she had it on while trying to pick a friend up at the airport. MIT students don't really do mornings, or worry about what they're wearing, so I can't imagine she'd even think about her clothes before heading out to pick up a friend at the airport before 8am.
I know people want take sides and have meaningless arguments, but it seems like she really just didn't think. No stupid act of protest, despite everyone who wants to play this up as a stunt. Was it stupid? Yes. Was she trying to actually get into the terminal or on a plane? No. Did the police overreact? Maybe.
America is a country where a small amount of freedom has been removed from the people in order to insure their security.
But isn't that always how these things begin? First you take away this small bit in the name of security, but it never gets returned when the threat has passed and then the next threat comes along and you lose another bit. Before you know it, all those little bits add up to something significant, but you haven't noticed because each time it was just a "small amount".
I'm pretty sure most police states don't become that way overnight. It took Mussolini two years to transform Italy into a fascist state with himself as dictator. Sure, we may not be a complete police state at the moment, but how many more times can we give up a "small amount of freedom" before we've sleepwalked our way there?
Your post nicely sums up much of what I originally wanted to say, except for one nitpick.
Conversely, if the PS3 can build some decent momentum as its prices drop, it could overtake Microsoft overall with core gamers. If this does happen, it will happen very late in this console cycle (no earlier than say, 2010). And if it does do so, it will not overtake the 360 in the US.
As much as Sony and its supporters want to say the console race is a marathon, it isn't. Currently Sony has a console priced out of the range of the mass market and their sales numbers just aren't improving. At their current installed base and the cost of developing for the PS3 no sane developer is going to touch it. Most of what's coming out seems to be games already in progress where the developer has decided to write it off as a loss and/or port it to 360 as well to recoup some of the development costs. That or Sony has given them enough money to basically pay for the game to be developed for them. Unless sales figures change quickly the PS3 will be living off of ports of 360 games or what they can pay to have developed. I honestly don't see the PS3 beating the 360 outside of Japan where it's already in the lead.
From what I recall, the 360 is possibly still ahead of the Wii in North America (given the Japanese sales numbers it pretty much has to be). It may be a few more months to a year before Nintendo completely captures all of the markets not accounting their supply limitations during the holiday season and the release of Halo 3, which makes it possibly even longer. I really can imagine at least the 360 and Wii both being viable platforms for nearly the entire lifetime of this generation of consoles. The only real competition between these two is game sales where their market shares intersect. The PS3 and 360 however are in a much more direct competition, and currently the 360 is outselling the PS3 worldwide.
Slashdot Mirror
I really wanted to contribute to the cascade, but all of the puns I could come up with were only half-baked.
Problem with the corporation idea is you severely hurt legitimate small businesses then. A good number of small businesses are incorporated, but definitely don't have the cash to pony up $1000 for a website to help them grow and expand their business. I've been amazed how much web traffic we've had for my family's brewery, but there's no way we could've afforded a domain for the business at $1000 when we were getting set up.
Uh, you can't hide anything in low-earth orbit. Space may be gigantic, but LEO is getting rather cluttered. NASA has been tracking space debris to a size smaller than the typical satellite for a while now. There's really no such thing as a "low-profile" satellite unless it used lasers to communicate to its ground station and had the radar profile of a stealth plane. Even then I doubt you could hide it for long for the simple fact it's hard to hide launching a rocket into space.
This phenomenon is hardly unique to Christianity. I would say two key ingredients almost inevitably guarantee a flamewar:
1. Commonality of strong personal beliefs
2. Lack or widespread obfuscation of concrete empirical data or evidence to support a position
I think you'll find at least one of these two things to be common to nearly every flamewar on Slashdot (and in the world at large). It certainly explains what happens to nearly every article regarding politics, religion, climatology (i.e. global warming), evolution, console wars, etc.
Yes, but the people who run those satellites, interpret the data, issue the weather forecasts are mostly scientists.... you get my drift. Your local TV weatherman is generally coming up with his local forecast from the official data/forecast put out by the NWS.
I always knew there was something fishy about Count Chocula...
Well, yes and no. It's been a while since I've done the analysis, but as I recall only about 1/2 of Earth's carbon is sequestered in the mantle and plate tectonics keep that reservoir relatively fixed. Volcanic outgassing is just as much a source of carbon as carbonate rocks being subducted are a sink. My real point was carbonate rocks are fairly stable at the surface and can sequester a lot of carbon.
In regards to plate tectonics, yes, Venus does have twice the crustal thickness of the Earth, but lack of water could play just as much or more of a role in why Venus doesn't have plate tectonics. Who knows what'd happen if we added the water back. As of the time I graduated how you get plate tectonics to start in the first place was still an open question.
No, really, I was answering you. If you take what I wrote earlier and extrapolate you can see one possible (albeit slow) solution. And no one said terraforming was going to be easy or practical, it's just not technically impossible.
If you can manage to cool Venus's atmosphere sufficiently (with say a giant sunshade in orbit at the Lagrange point, but you can use your imagination) for carbonate rocks to form the chemistry does the work for you. Venus has a nearly identical chemical makeup to the Earth, so as long as you can get some water back on the planet (probably a much more daunting challenge than an orbital sunshade) erosional processes do the rest.
No huge constant energy input for storage (aside from keeping your sunshade in place), no flammable hydrocarbons, which were the two complaints in your original post.
Well, Earth has managed to safely sequester billions of tons of carbon. We have just as much of it as Venus, ours just happens to be locked up in nifty things like carbonate rocks. Venus could have carbonate rocks too if we could just get it a little cooler and get some water back on the surface to help with erosion. Just at present the reaction goes the wrong way and you have CaCO3 + SiO2 -> CaSiO3 + CO2, so there aren't a lot of carbonate rocks laying about. In terms of atmospheric composition if you removed most of the CO2 from Venus's atmosphere it'd have roughly the same amount of nitrogen, which is a good starting point, and you only need to liberate oxygen from a relatively small amount of the CO2 that's presently there for a breathable atmosphere.
Actually, Mars has lost a significant amount of hydrogen (as has Venus, but not as severely) and most of the surface rocks are highly oxidized. Really, you'd need to add back some hydrogen to make Mars really work. And as far as the radiation goes, Earth's atmosphere (and also Venus's) do a LOT to stop radiation. Sure it doesn't get all of it, but astronauts on the space station are getting a much higher radiation dose than you and I down at ground level.
I disagree.
Actually, likely not. Jupiter is massive enough the center is likely made of metallic hydrogen and there may not be any clearly identifiable "surface" (i.e. sharp density jump) given most of the planet is made of the stuff and it's still convecting. Contrast this to Uranus or Neptune which very likely do have a rocky core surrounded by a very thick atmosphere, given their relatively low masses. And then there's Saturn which may be somewhere in the middle.
Sadly it's not much more than that. One of my friends was booted from the Marines under "don't ask don't tell" when a fellow marine he'd had a relationship decided to file allegations that my friend basically got him drunk and made sexual advances when things weren't working out anymore.
Katrina really wasn't that mysterious. The Gulf of Mexico is a very warm basin of sea water in comparison to the surrounding Caribbean and Atlantic waters. A hurricane that happens to wander in there under favorable conditions (low wind shear) tends to blow up. It's the meteorological equivalent of a spark hitting a powder keg. If you really want to understand its "sudden change in course" there's a nice report on it.
Yes, and yet no. CO2 sources/sinks are not purely temperature dependent, unlike water. Yes, the ocean is a huge temperature sensitive repository of CO2, but carbonate rocks and volcanos, not so much. Many of the large changes in CO2 concentration that correlate with climate tend to also correlate with other events in the geologic record (i.e. periods of increased volcanic activity, snowball earth, mountain uplift, etc.). So to answer you and the first response to you, CO2 is both the cause and the effect. If you could magically raise the temperature of the oceans by 10 degrees, yes, you'd release a lot of CO2 and the opposite if you lowered it. However, the total amount of CO2 the ocean can dissolve is rather small compared to the total amount of potential CO2 contained in the geologic carbon cycle (i.e. not just the highly mobile part contained in biomass and oceans).
On short time scales you can ignore the long timescale sources/sinks and just consider the ocean/biosphere/atmosphere CO2 cycle as oscillating about some equilibrium. What's happening here is the long timescale sources/sinks are slowly nudging the equilibrium of the system. What we're currently doing at the moment is releasing massive quantities of trapped carbon that had been removed from the system over millions of years. As a byproduct we're nudging up temperatures globally which are in turn altering the equilibrium states of the highly mobile parts of the system.
If you look at it purely from a standpoint of carbon budgeting it becomes pretty clear we have to be having some impact with the amount of carbon we've returned to circulation over the past 150 years. The greater sources/sinks operate on much slower timescales, and we've effectively put more carbon in circulation. Arguing over whether CO2 is a cause or an effect is kind of a moot point. It's both.
Water vapor tends to be rather self-regulating on a very short timescale. It has this tendency to saturate and condense out of the atmosphere during a phenomenon we call "rain". It also can form clouds which may or may not increase albedo and lead to cooling. It can also form snow cover and increase albedo and lead to cooling. Additionally, owing to it's very short mean lifetime in the atmosphere, it tends to have very localized effects on weather.
To put it simply, water vapor tends to track the global climate rather than set it. If there were no other greenhouse gasses the Earth would have frozen into a snowball long ago (and it actually has done this before in Earth's history). Research tends to show water definitely provides feedback mechanisms which can amplify the effects of other forcings, but it is too volatile to be the driving factor all on its own.
Really, the other major greenhouse gas is methane, which is also increasing in the Earth's atmosphere (albeit not as quickly). It has a much shorter lifetime than CO2 does, so it tends not to accumulate without a constant source (which is a good thing). There is some evidence that the rise of agriculture may have had some impact on global climate thousands of years ago. Essentially the cultivation of rice and domestic animals are both non-negligible sources of methane which is extremely potent as a greenhouse gas, but in this case the warming was likely much more moderate than the current trend.
What Phil was really getting at is Jupiter most likely did not form in the same way as binary stars or brown dwarfs. The formation of Jupiter-size objects is still somewhat of a mystery, but the most promising scenario is one of a runaway core accretion, whereas it's generally thought that brown dwarfs and binary systems form through a direct instability in the collapsing proto-stellar cloud/accretion disk. In the current catalogue of stellar objects there's somewhat of a gap between the largest known gas giants (~15 times Jupiter) and the smallest brown dwarfs (around 60 times Jupiter's mass). I'm a little fuzzy on the numbers as it's been a few years since I worked on that area, but the general idea is there's a continuum of objects going from star to brown dwarf and a similar continuum from gas giant to super massive gas giant, but nothing in the middle. What's not clear is if this is an observational bias or something else is going on. The state of the art in planet/star formation simulations hasn't really filled in all of the pieces just yet.
The melting of the Laurentide ice sheet over North America at the end of the last ice age produced a 20 meter rise in sea level over roughly 500 years. Granted, it was larger than Greenland, but definitely it's on par with Antarctica. The volume of ice contained in Antarctica is 30 million cubic kilometers of ice. Spread that out over the ocean surface area of the world (362 million sq km) and you get about 80 meters before you account for the fact that ocean surface area increases as sea level goes up. Greenland's ice sheet is roughly 1/10th that of Antarctica (and is firmly on land), I'll let you do that math.
Actually, not quite true. The floating ice has a lower salinity than the ocean, meaning even in liquid form it's less dense. So it does contribute, just not as much as melting a block of ice that's firmly on land.
One of my office mates in grad school actually worked on this very problem. What I recall of his preliminary research was that one potential (but unlikely) explanation was the impactor maybe had formed along-side the Earth. However, isotope distributions among the terrestrial planets appeared to be completely random from dynamical models of accretion. While there may be some segregation in the protoplanetary disk there are a sufficient number of large accretion events from bodies from all over the inner solar system that the end result is somewhat a game of chance.
What I remember of Canup's models is that the iron core of the protoplanet ends up merging with Earth and the Moon ended up being formed largely out of the impactor's mantle material and a little bit of Earth's. But her original dynamical model predicted insufficient mixing to account for the homogeneity in isotopes. Right before I left he and Stevenson began exploring transport in the silicone vapor atmosphere that would've enveloped both the Earth and accretion disk shortly after the impact, but I'm not sure if they ever got it to work out. Some other grad students actually began work on a smooth particle hydrodynamical model to expand on Canup's at that point too, but no idea where that's at either (this was in early 2006).
Well, it goes like this.
That you just posted is a piece of pseudo-scientific dreck from all I can tell. I had a course on MHD in grad school, the theory of magnetic reconnection most certainly can account for the speed of energy release in solar events. It's also an important problem in plasma instability in tokamaks. Searching on google scholar didn't find any peer-reviewed papers by plasma physicists refuting magnetic reconnection.
Perhaps they were confused by Biskamp's 1986 paper on the Sweet-Parker model failing to achieve fast reconnection that was cleared up in a 1992 paper by Priest and they missed that Biskamp himself seems to accept fast reconnection as possible in his 1994 paper?
I know people want take sides and have meaningless arguments, but it seems like she really just didn't think. No stupid act of protest, despite everyone who wants to play this up as a stunt. Was it stupid? Yes. Was she trying to actually get into the terminal or on a plane? No. Did the police overreact? Maybe.
But isn't that always how these things begin? First you take away this small bit in the name of security, but it never gets returned when the threat has passed and then the next threat comes along and you lose another bit. Before you know it, all those little bits add up to something significant, but you haven't noticed because each time it was just a "small amount".
I'm pretty sure most police states don't become that way overnight. It took Mussolini two years to transform Italy into a fascist state with himself as dictator. Sure, we may not be a complete police state at the moment, but how many more times can we give up a "small amount of freedom" before we've sleepwalked our way there?
That could be because Nintendo has produced more consoles than any other company if you include handhelds.
Your post nicely sums up much of what I originally wanted to say, except for one nitpick.
As much as Sony and its supporters want to say the console race is a marathon, it isn't. Currently Sony has a console priced out of the range of the mass market and their sales numbers just aren't improving. At their current installed base and the cost of developing for the PS3 no sane developer is going to touch it. Most of what's coming out seems to be games already in progress where the developer has decided to write it off as a loss and/or port it to 360 as well to recoup some of the development costs. That or Sony has given them enough money to basically pay for the game to be developed for them. Unless sales figures change quickly the PS3 will be living off of ports of 360 games or what they can pay to have developed. I honestly don't see the PS3 beating the 360 outside of Japan where it's already in the lead.
From what I recall, the 360 is possibly still ahead of the Wii in North America (given the Japanese sales numbers it pretty much has to be). It may be a few more months to a year before Nintendo completely captures all of the markets not accounting their supply limitations during the holiday season and the release of Halo 3, which makes it possibly even longer. I really can imagine at least the 360 and Wii both being viable platforms for nearly the entire lifetime of this generation of consoles. The only real competition between these two is game sales where their market shares intersect. The PS3 and 360 however are in a much more direct competition, and currently the 360 is outselling the PS3 worldwide.