The Moon does not orbit the Earth
on
Defining "Planet"
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The earth and moon are a double-planetary system. If you calculate the gravitational pull of the earth on the moon vs the pull of the sun on the moon, the sun's pull is always grearter. That means that the moon's orbit is always concave toward the sun. The earth does a lot to perturb the moon's orbit, but it's not strong enough that the moon can be said to orbit the earth as the earth orbits the sun.
The moons of jupiter and saturn, for example, move in paths that are always concave toward their respective planets. Earth's artificial satellites and so forrth can be sait to orbit the earth, but the moon does not.
My thinking on this is that it would be best to integrate the math a little more tightly into the game play, so that it doesn't become "game plus math", but "game. oh, is that math that I'm doing?". For example, an enemy ship comes toward you, and it has some certain number of fuel cartridges, and you have to select a bomb that fits into the space where the empty fuel cartridges go.
Set it up so that a full set of cartridges is ten wide, so you have to do 10-n every time you kill one. But the subtraction is not explicitly written out, just something you "naturally" have to do as part of the game.
(Not that I want to discourage you in any way whatsoever from trying anything or going on with the implementation you are talking about. Whatever _you_ think would be fun to play would probably be the best thing for you to work on, etc.)
Thanks for the link! The quotes from users/participants were great--stuff to the effect of "this isn't math, this is _fun_". Looks like a great leap in the right direction.
Well, that's a good point. However, if one wanted to split hairs, one might argue that such mammals, having shuffled off their mortal coils, pulled down the curtain and joined the choir invisible, etc, are more properly referred to as ex-mammals.
There's nothing commercial on the site. The home page has a use of 3-d game technology for an instructional purpose. I noted in the subject that I was going to refer to my own work. Are you sure that it's not just that your spam detector is set to "grassy knoll"?:)
That was hilarious. I am clearly spending way too much time here, because I knew exactly the sig you were referring to (which of course made it all the funnier).
[n.b. to anyone that doesn't know what I'm talking about, go to comment preferences and turn on sigs]
As someone's sig on slashdot says, "all mammals learn by playing". I have a site where I talk about ideas like this. Science/engineering/math/philosophy/history are (according to my wild theories) actually very naturally interesting to average humans, but the presentation of them is so pathetically boring that it's no wonder that they look for something else to do when the subject gets brought up.
Video games often present optimization problems that would be rather dull if stated formally, but in the presentation of the game are quite engaging, even addictive.
My belief is that pretty much anything worth learning has this addictive element, and that, if we worked at it, we could start off sparking kids' interest, then provide more stuff to satisfy that interest, and encourage deeper exploration. Like drug pushing, basically.
i have little doubt that people will post all kinds of "Video games are exactly what kids today DON'T need! In my day a slide rule was what everyone wanted for Christmas!", etc in response to this story. But the truth is that people get into a field because something about it was intriguing to them. They learned it in spite of the way it was taught, not because of it. All I'm suggesting is that we try to make this happen less by the occasional accident and more often by design.
Everyone whines that, e.g., legislators don't know anything about technology, but then when you try to suggest a way, through making an introduction to technology fun and interesting, to fix that problem, it gets railed aganst as being nothing but glitz, etc, etc.
If you want "tough" subjects to remain an exclusive club, keep making the classes boring. If you want more people to understand the things you are interested in, you have to find a way to get them intrigued about it.
The "flippy triangle thing" on my home page is the beginning of something like that. It's an illustration of an abstract algebraic group. I'm trying to present it as an interactive art piece that will put the simple question "what is that?" in random passers-by's heads. Getting people to say "Hmmm, I wonder what that is?" about an abstract mathematical concept is a first step to a world I envision where we work as hard to entice people to "get into" science, mathematics, and history as hard as we try now to get them interested/addicted to the latest reality show stunt.
In other words, I think this guy is on the right track.
It is official; A new study confirms: Europa is dead.
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered moon's chances for having life when UPI Deputy Science and Technology Editor Phil Berardelli confirmed that the possibility of life on Europa just got worse given a huge magnetic gas cloud around a former darling of extraterrestrial life seekers. Coming on the heels of the recent shuttle disaster (after which no consolation messages were detected coming from the icy moon), this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. The possibility of life on a moon of Jupiter is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by falling dead last in a recent "Which moon of Jupiter do you think is a most likely hope for extraterrestrial life?" slashdot poll.
You don't need to be a Berardelli to understand Europa's predicament. The hand writing is in the data: Europa's chance of hosting life faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for life there, because Eurpoa is dead. Things are looking very bad for Europa. As many of us are already aware, Europa's chance for hosting life continues to lose scientist mind share. Red ink flows like a river of blood (and when hasnt it?)
Europa's likelihood as a host of extra-terrestrial life is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core adherents. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time promotors of Europan life theories, planetary geologists Some_Scientist#1 and Some_Scientist#2, only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: the chance that there is life on Europa is basically zero.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
The Europa-favoring planetary geologist Hu Everr said that there are 7000 people that believe in life on Europa. How many adherents to life on Europa now remain? Let's see. The number of geologist versus crackpot posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 believers in Europan life. Pro-Europan life posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of such posts. Therefore there are about 700 Europan life adherents. A recent poll put Europa at about 80 percent of the moons-of-Jupiter-life crowd. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 astronaut wannabes. This is consistent with the number of "I'll go!" Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of radiation, gigantic magnetic doughnuts, and so on, study of life on Europa is going out of fashion and is being taken over by Russian scientists who send up craft to test other troubled theories. Now life at the core of the Sun is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that belief in life on Europa has steadily declined in mind share. The theory is waning quickly and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If the idea is to survive at all it will be among space dilettante dabblers. The probability of life on Europa continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Europa is dead.
Yes, I've had an email go further than I meant it to. But when it did, even though I was chagrined, I stood up for what I said in the email, even though it put me in a bit of a difficult position with the CEO of my company.
And, to this day, the person I sent the mail to does not know that it caused me a problem that he forwarded it along. And why is that? Because I recognized that it was my fault, not his, that that information got out like it did. That's the critical difference between my reaction and hers. I felt like lashing out at the guy, too, but a moment's honest reflection showed me that I was the only one to blame.
Don't say anything in email, or any other kind of writing, that you would be ashamed of other people reading. (And I don't mean embarrassed. If I wrote a mushy love letter to my wife and it when out on the internet I would be embarrassed, but I would have no cause to be ashamed.) Don't say things behind someone's back that you wouldn't say to their face. Don't pretend you are one way for one crowd, and another way for another.
Actually, maybe it's been too long since I browsed at -1, mabye this is already in use. You could just take the text of this post, and put the name of whoever is in it for Stallman.
Not that I would EVER encourage the trolls. EVER. I NEVER laugh at a good troll. That would undermine the role of slashdot as a high quality source of news and discussion. Just laughing. So stop that!
Way back when Math::MatrixReal 's author was hard to find and I was submitting a patch as an exension because of that, Ilya Zakharevich pointed me to this:
I don't know anything about the PARI library, but google can correct that for you if you are interested in treatment. I'm just living with the ignorance.
As digital photography becomes more and more prevalent it subtly makes our photographic records less durable.
however, it would be trivial to have an offsite backup of your digital photos if you wanted to. Not so with normal photographs.
I agree that because of our behavior we lose durability, but that is correctable. The technology of having things stored digitally can acutally make things more durable, but we have to choose to make it so. Nothing is preventing people from prining those photos out, for example.
For what it's worth, I did give you the benefit of the doubt and assumed you made the typo/braino of thinking about the law the more logical way, a = F / m, but trying to type it in the more often presented way, F = m * a.
(I think of the first as being more logical because it sort of reads like the cause/effect relationship you think of--the acceleration that results is equal to the force applied divided by the mass it is applied to. "Force equals mass times acceleration" really doesn't _say_ anything, and to get it to say anything you have to really twist it around--"The force F required to produce an acceleration a of a mass m is equal to the product of the mass and the acceleration" or something.
(Despite the fact that I have noted this, no physics text authors have beaten down my door asking for help with their next editions. Imagine.:)
Slashdot Mirror
The earth and moon are a double-planetary system. If you calculate the gravitational pull of the earth on the moon vs the pull of the sun on the moon, the sun's pull is always grearter. That means that the moon's orbit is always concave toward the sun. The earth does a lot to perturb the moon's orbit, but it's not strong enough that the moon can be said to orbit the earth as the earth orbits the sun.
The moons of jupiter and saturn, for example, move in paths that are always concave toward their respective planets. Earth's artificial satellites and so forrth can be sait to orbit the earth, but the moon does not.
Usually I'm supposed to wire Nigeria, not Senegal. I can't believe the Peace Corps fell for it, though.
My thinking on this is that it would be best to integrate the math a little more tightly into the game play, so that it doesn't become "game plus math", but "game. oh, is that math that I'm doing?". For example, an enemy ship comes toward you, and it has some certain number of fuel cartridges, and you have to select a bomb that fits into the space where the empty fuel cartridges go.
Set it up so that a full set of cartridges is ten wide, so you have to do 10-n every time you kill one. But the subtraction is not explicitly written out, just something you "naturally" have to do as part of the game.
(Not that I want to discourage you in any way whatsoever from trying anything or going on with the implementation you are talking about. Whatever _you_ think would be fun to play would probably be the best thing for you to work on, etc.)
Thanks for the link! The quotes from users/participants were great--stuff to the effect of "this isn't math, this is _fun_". Looks like a great leap in the right direction.
Ah, yes, an excellent idea. However, I shant be the one to investigate whether they still lactate.
Well, that's a good point. However, if one wanted to split hairs, one might argue that such mammals, having shuffled off their mortal coils, pulled down the curtain and joined the choir invisible, etc, are more properly referred to as ex-mammals.
There's nothing commercial on the site. The home page has a use of 3-d game technology for an instructional purpose. I noted in the subject that I was going to refer to my own work. Are you sure that it's not just that your spam detector is set to "grassy knoll"? :)
That was hilarious. I am clearly spending way too much time here, because I knew exactly the sig you were referring to (which of course made it all the funnier).
[n.b. to anyone that doesn't know what I'm talking about, go to comment preferences and turn on sigs]
As someone's sig on slashdot says, "all mammals learn by playing". I have a site where I talk about ideas like this. Science/engineering/math/philosophy/history are (according to my wild theories) actually very naturally interesting to average humans, but the presentation of them is so pathetically boring that it's no wonder that they look for something else to do when the subject gets brought up.
Video games often present optimization problems that would be rather dull if stated formally, but in the presentation of the game are quite engaging, even addictive.
My belief is that pretty much anything worth learning has this addictive element, and that, if we worked at it, we could start off sparking kids' interest, then provide more stuff to satisfy that interest, and encourage deeper exploration. Like drug pushing, basically.
Anyway, if you want to read stuff about it you can go to http://fulcrum.org/old_index.html if you want to read more about it.
You can see (with a shockwave browser, sorry) a couple of things I've done to sort of get started at
http://fulcrum.org/test/stretcher.html
http;//fulcrum.org/index.html
http://fulcrum.org/test/oodometer
i have little doubt that people will post all kinds of "Video games are exactly what kids today DON'T need! In my day a slide rule was what everyone wanted for Christmas!", etc in response to this story. But the truth is that people get into a field because something about it was intriguing to them. They learned it in spite of the way it was taught, not because of it. All I'm suggesting is that we try to make this happen less by the occasional accident and more often by design.
Everyone whines that, e.g., legislators don't know anything about technology, but then when you try to suggest a way, through making an introduction to technology fun and interesting, to fix that problem, it gets railed aganst as being nothing but glitz, etc, etc.
If you want "tough" subjects to remain an exclusive club, keep making the classes boring. If you want more people to understand the things you are interested in, you have to find a way to get them intrigued about it.
The "flippy triangle thing" on my home page is the beginning of something like that. It's an illustration of an abstract algebraic group. I'm trying to present it as an interactive art piece that will put the simple question "what is that?" in random passers-by's heads. Getting people to say "Hmmm, I wonder what that is?" about an abstract mathematical concept is a first step to a world I envision where we work as hard to entice people to "get into" science, mathematics, and history as hard as we try now to get them interested/addicted to the latest reality show stunt.
In other words, I think this guy is on the right track.
There's a guy that works here who can hack into it for you and demonstrate that it's not secure.
Europa is dead.
It is official; A new study confirms: Europa is dead.
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered moon's chances for having life when UPI Deputy Science and Technology Editor Phil Berardelli confirmed that the possibility of life on Europa just got worse given a huge magnetic gas cloud around a former darling of extraterrestrial life seekers. Coming on the heels of the recent shuttle disaster (after which no consolation messages were detected coming from the icy moon), this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. The possibility of life on a moon of Jupiter is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by falling dead last in a recent "Which moon of Jupiter do you think is a most likely hope for extraterrestrial life?" slashdot poll.
You don't need to be a Berardelli to understand Europa's predicament. The hand writing is in the data: Europa's chance of hosting life faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for life there, because Eurpoa is dead. Things are looking very bad for Europa. As many of us are already aware, Europa's chance for hosting life continues to lose scientist mind share. Red ink flows like a river of blood (and when hasnt it?)
Europa's likelihood as a host of extra-terrestrial life is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core adherents. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time promotors of Europan life theories, planetary geologists Some_Scientist#1 and Some_Scientist#2, only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: the chance that there is life on Europa is basically zero.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
The Europa-favoring planetary geologist Hu Everr said that there are 7000 people that believe in life on Europa. How many adherents to life on Europa now remain? Let's see. The number of geologist versus crackpot posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 believers in Europan life. Pro-Europan life posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of such posts. Therefore there are about 700 Europan life adherents. A recent poll put Europa at about 80 percent of the moons-of-Jupiter-life crowd. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 astronaut wannabes. This is consistent with the number of "I'll go!" Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of radiation, gigantic magnetic doughnuts, and so on, study of life on Europa is going out of fashion and is being taken over by Russian scientists who send up craft to test other troubled theories. Now life at the core of the Sun is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that belief in life on Europa has steadily declined in mind share. The theory is waning quickly and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If the idea is to survive at all it will be among space dilettante dabblers. The probability of life on Europa continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Europa is dead.
Fact: Europa is dead.
Yes, I've had an email go further than I meant it to. But when it did, even though I was chagrined, I stood up for what I said in the email, even though it put me in a bit of a difficult position with the CEO of my company.
And, to this day, the person I sent the mail to does not know that it caused me a problem that he forwarded it along. And why is that? Because I recognized that it was my fault, not his, that that information got out like it did. That's the critical difference between my reaction and hers. I felt like lashing out at the guy, too, but a moment's honest reflection showed me that I was the only one to blame.
Don't say anything in email, or any other kind of writing, that you would be ashamed of other people reading. (And I don't mean embarrassed. If I wrote a mushy love letter to my wife and it when out on the internet I would be embarrassed, but I would have no cause to be ashamed.) Don't say things behind someone's back that you wouldn't say to their face. Don't pretend you are one way for one crowd, and another way for another.
The medium has changed, but the rules haven't.
(gif of) text of that note
...to find out what the _real_ latest one is, send your credit card #, social security #, mother's maiden name, and slashdot login/password to (etc)
Hey, now that the source to China is open, maybe someone could fix the population leak?
Well, that's probably why China wants it.
"Look, you bring up Tianamen Square ONE MORE TIME and you'll be reading the code for kernel32.dll the rest of your life!"
Actually, maybe it's been too long since I browsed at -1, mabye this is already in use. You could just take the text of this post, and put the name of whoever is in it for Stallman.
Not that I would EVER encourage the trolls. EVER. I NEVER laugh at a good troll. That would undermine the role of slashdot as a high quality source of news and discussion. Just laughing. So stop that!
Good, then you'll be glad to know we're about to go after a huge killer of innocent civilians...
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Way back when Math::MatrixReal 's author was hard to find and I was submitting a patch as an exension because of that, Ilya Zakharevich pointed me to this:
Z /M ath-Pari-2.010201.readme
http://www.cpan.org/modules/by-module/CPAN/ILYA
I don't know anything about the PARI library, but google can correct that for you if you are interested in treatment. I'm just living with the ignorance.
however, it would be trivial to have an offsite backup of your digital photos if you wanted to. Not so with normal photographs.
I agree that because of our behavior we lose durability, but that is correctable. The technology of having things stored digitally can acutally make things more durable, but we have to choose to make it so. Nothing is preventing people from prining those photos out, for example.
For what it's worth, I did give you the benefit of the doubt and assumed you made the typo/braino of thinking about the law the more logical way, a = F / m, but trying to type it in the more often presented way, F = m * a.
:)
(I think of the first as being more logical because it sort of reads like the cause/effect relationship you think of--the acceleration that results is equal to the force applied divided by the mass it is applied to. "Force equals mass times acceleration" really doesn't _say_ anything, and to get it to say anything you have to really twist it around--"The force F required to produce an acceleration a of a mass m is equal to the product of the mass and the acceleration" or something.
(Despite the fact that I have noted this, no physics text authors have beaten down my door asking for help with their next editions. Imagine.
...it's the One True Operating System, isn't it?
not to mention that the students benefit from what they learn supporting it.
later, they realized that you got much more accurate results with f = m * a and the units worked out, too! :)
(I know, it's the mathematical equivalent of a spelling flame, sue me.)