I thought that I'd pass along a link to a computer simulation of the Electoral College for this year's Presidential election that I've been working on.
This program takes current state polling data, calculates the probabilities of the candidates winning each state, and runs through a large number of simulated elections randomly awarding each state to Kerry or Bush in proportion to their state probabilities. What's cool is that I've made it so that you can put in your own polling data and see how it effects the results. If you think there's a national polling bias one way or the other, you can model that, too. At any rate, check it out and pass it along if you like.
Optical SETI looks for targeted signals, not leakage radiation. Radio SETI can look for leakage, but only for closest few stars among 100 billion. For a Obviously that's why OSETI experiments use photodetectors with nanosecond speed (eg. photomultiplier tubes). Nanosecond pulses are perfectly resolvable on these detectors. For a detailed analysis of these scenarios out a recent paper.
Obviously that's why OSETI experiments use photodetectors with nanosecond speed (eg. photomultiplier tubes). Nanosecond pulses are perfectly resolvable on these detectors. Check out a recent paper to see how this really works and for edification on other technical issues.
--Andrew
There's a lot of technical speculation in these posts, and little in the way of calculation. For a sober analysis of the technical issues, check out the Harvard Optical SETI page (disclaimer: I'm a graduate student in that research group). Of particular interest are a recent paper describing the search methodology and 5 years worth of targeted observational data, and an older technical paper that calculated everything you need to verify that optical SETI is a reasonable idea.
the future is in wavelets -- orthogonal functions that are localized in both time and frequency (unlike mp3's sines and cosines that are only localized in frequency)
as far as codecs go, there are a couple good ones at this link does anyone have favorite wavelet codecs?
the abstract for the technical article is already on the preprint servers. it's much better than the cnn article, for the technically trained. (the complete article was temporarily withdrawn, but they tell you how to get it.) see http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/astro-ph/0112407
What if MIT (and possibly other schools) were free? Once you're in, you don't pay anything. Could this possibly be done? How much money would it take? Less than you might think:
In round numbers, MIT collects $25,000 (a good share of which is already covered by financial aid) from 4000 undergraduates every year. That's $100 million per year. How large of an self-sustaining endowment is necessary to generate this kind of cash each year? For a 5% return, 2 billion dollars is required. For a 2% return, the figure is 5 billion.
That's a lot of money, but it is the same order of magnitude that Harvard, MIT, Stanford, and other schools are raising in just a few years time (Harvard raised 2.somthing billion in it's recent capital campaign). There are quite a lot of very rich entrepre-nerds who got their start at MIT (and many other schools). I'd bet that many of them would be willing to give generously if they knew that enrollment at their university would be free of charge.
This could kick off a revolution: free (and therefore universal) college education. The fact that a top university would be free would force other universities to do the same. The result would be many more minorites, poor kids, and kids from rural areas going to college. Now that is a realization of the American Dream. It would be to the benefit of MIT, as well; their annual crops of bright, young freshmen would be even more diverse and talented.
If you think that this idea is crazy, I'll remind you that most of Europe has free post-secondary education.
people seem to be missing the boat on the one. gould writes:
Second, the unique contingencies of history,
not the laws of physics, set many properties
of complex biological systems.
what's he really talking about here? to gould this is part of the debate of "punctuated" vs. "gradual" evolution. it's about the cambrian explosion -- was the resulting biological diversity an accident? was the resulting development of intelligence in homo sapiens a similar cosmic accident? gould answers "yes" to both of these questions and therefore believes that human beings may be the sole intelligent residents of the milky way. [see, among other books, "here be dragons" by simon levay and david koerner]
i agree that the key to human development is "more combinations and interactions generated by fewer units of code." but, let's not overstate the consequences. history and chance certainly played a role in the development of complexity, and the development of intelligence, but its impact was more likely on the timing of the development and not on ultimate emergence of the traits.
It should be noted that this telescope will actually search for Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN), of which supermassive black holes play a small, but important role. There is alot of other really interesting physics here though! For a cool picture of an AGN, click here. For more info, click here.
A very interesting article. The question then becomes, does this experiment change the phase of the photon? The article didn't say (it said that the atom's phase was changed), but I would expect that it was since the atom and the photon interacted. If the phase of the photon changes in the experiment, then this technique won't work for eavesdropping.
By "impossible" I mean that within the framework of quantum electrodynamics it can *never* happen. Just like within the framework of arithematic you can never add one and one and get three. That's just how it works.
So you might say: "well, the laws of physics are changing so rapidly these days that this will soon be a possibility." But revolutions in physics are rarely, if ever, of the sort where all of the old theory is thrown out and a completely new theory is developed. Instead, discrepencies are discovered in some corner of a theory and new a theory is discovered which is a superset of both the old theory and the new data.
Also, "spooky action at a distance" in the form of quantum entanglement was never "impossible," it was just philosophically objectionable to some people, including Einstein. If you mean that "information can never travel faster than the speed of light in vacuum" when you say "faster than light (FTL)" travel, then you are incorrect if Maxwell's equations are to hold. All know examples of FTL (which are trivial and miss the point) violate some aspect of my previous statement in quotations. As for heavier-than-air flight, no rational scientist in any age who has observed a bird would tell you that it's impossible.
This is contradictory because 'to observe' is 'to interact' in quantum mechanics. It is impossible to observe a single particle without interacting with it in some way.
The sender would know to point it in our direction because They (with a captical "T") would have surveyed their corner of the galaxy, and found planets that potentially harbor life. They could do this is to first discovering planets by astrometry or radial-velocity techniques, and then looking for absorption lines such as ozone in the planet's spectrum. In fact, NASA will employ this very techinque in its Terrestrial Planet Finder mission. In optical SETI (where the beams are much more slender than in radio SETI), one expects to discover intentional beacons, rather than accidentally intercepting interstellar communication.
Optical SETI isn't a new idea though. Townes and Schwartz's first proposed optical SETI in 1961, a year after the invention of the laser. After many years of lobbying be a few brave scientists, optical SETI experiments are now running (or being built) at a handful of institutions.
I'll explain a bit about optical SETI below, but let me also point you to a few good resources. The SETI group at Harvard (of which I am a member) maintains www.oseti.org which has a couple articles on optical SETI: a technical paper that gives the full arguments for optical SETI, and another technical paper which details our current running experiment and our future all-sky survey.
Here's why optical SETI is a good idea (much of which lythari cites): A high-intensity pulsed laser, teamed with a moderate sized transmitting telescope, forms an efficient interstellar beacon. To a distant observer in the direction of its slender beam, such a laser transmitter, built with ``Earth 2000'' technology only, would appear (during its brief pulse) a thousand times brighter than our sun in broadband visible light; even at ranges of 1000 light years a single nanosecond laser pulse would deliver roughly a thousand photons to a 10-meter receiving telescope.
There are several reasons why optical SETI is at least as good an idea as radio SETI. First, transmitted beams from optical telescopes are far more slender than their radio counterparts owing to the high gain of optical telescopes (150 dB for the Keck Telescope versus 70 dB for Arecibo). Dispersion, which spectrally broadens radio pulses, is completely negligible at optical frequencies. The capability of radio transmitters has reached a stable maturity, while the power of optical lasers has shown an annual Moore's law doubling extending over the past 30 years. And finally, the computational power and sophistication characteristic of the sensitive microwave searches today is unnecessary for optical SETI. Detection can be quite simple -- a pair of fast, broadband photon counting detectors in coincidence.
We have built a photometer to search for such unresolved pulses, and are using it in a piggyback targeted search of some 3000 nearby solar-type stars. The photometer receives about 1/3 of the light focused by the 1.5-meter optical reflector, otherwise unused by the primary experiment (a stellar radial-velocity survey). A beamsplitter followed by a pair of fast hybrid avalanche detectors is triggered in coincidence to record the time and intensity profile of large pulses.
We're also working on an all-sky search for pulsed optical SETI beacons at Agassiz station in Harvard, Massachusetts. We envision a 2 meter f/1 parabolic "light bucket" (1 arcminute resolution) focused onto a multipixel camera consisting of eight 64-pixel photomultiplier tubes (with pixels measuring 4 arcminutes on a side) in two matched focal planes. It will observe a two degree by half degree patch of the sky in transit mode, thereby covering the Northern sky in 150 clear nights. Fast custom IC electronics will monitor corresponding pixels for coincident optical pulses of nanosecond timescale, triggering storage of a detailed digitized waveform of the light flash.
Slashdot Mirror
If you want to know how to correctly pronounce Huygens, go to this web site.
This program takes current state polling data, calculates the probabilities of the candidates winning each state, and runs through a large number of simulated elections randomly awarding each state to Kerry or Bush in proportion to their state probabilities. What's cool is that I've made it so that you can put in your own polling data and see how it effects the results. If you think there's a national polling bias one way or the other, you can model that, too. At any rate, check it out and pass it along if you like.
--Andrew
Obviously that's why OSETI experiments use photodetectors with nanosecond speed (eg. photomultiplier tubes). Nanosecond pulses are perfectly resolvable on these detectors. Check out a recent paper to see how this really works and for edification on other technical issues. --Andrew
--Andrew Howard
Here's the amusing narrative that accompanies the mp3 Huygens pronunciation.
http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/astro-ph/0201003
as far as codecs go, there are a couple good ones at this link does anyone have favorite wavelet codecs?
the abstract for the technical article is already on the preprint servers. it's much better than the cnn article, for the technically trained. (the complete article was temporarily withdrawn, but they tell you how to get it.) see http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/astro-ph/0112407
But you can do more.
What if MIT (and possibly other schools) were free? Once you're in, you don't pay anything. Could this possibly be done? How much money would it take? Less than you might think:
In round numbers, MIT collects $25,000 (a good share of which is already covered by financial aid) from 4000 undergraduates every year. That's $100 million per year. How large of an self-sustaining endowment is necessary to generate this kind of cash each year? For a 5% return, 2 billion dollars is required. For a 2% return, the figure is 5 billion.
That's a lot of money, but it is the same order of magnitude that Harvard, MIT, Stanford, and other schools are raising in just a few years time (Harvard raised 2.somthing billion in it's recent capital campaign). There are quite a lot of very rich entrepre-nerds who got their start at MIT (and many other schools). I'd bet that many of them would be willing to give generously if they knew that enrollment at their university would be free of charge.
This could kick off a revolution: free (and therefore universal) college education. The fact that a top university would be free would force other universities to do the same. The result would be many more minorites, poor kids, and kids from rural areas going to college. Now that is a realization of the American Dream. It would be to the benefit of MIT, as well; their annual crops of bright, young freshmen would be even more diverse and talented.
If you think that this idea is crazy, I'll remind you that most of Europe has free post-secondary education.
-Andrew Howard (class of '98 @ MIT -- physics)
what's he really talking about here? to gould this is part of the debate of "punctuated" vs. "gradual" evolution. it's about the cambrian explosion -- was the resulting biological diversity an accident? was the resulting development of intelligence in homo sapiens a similar cosmic accident? gould answers "yes" to both of these questions and therefore believes that human beings may be the sole intelligent residents of the milky way. [see, among other books, "here be dragons" by simon levay and david koerner]
i agree that the key to human development is "more combinations and interactions generated by fewer units of code." but, let's not overstate the consequences. history and chance certainly played a role in the development of complexity, and the development of intelligence, but its impact was more likely on the timing of the development and not on ultimate emergence of the traits.
nature doesn't do anything just once.
bacteria photosynthesize CO2 into hydrocarbons, sugars, etc. and store some energy. they die and become coal.
you burn the coal and change the hydrocarbons, sugars, etc. into CO2, and release the stored energy.
now, you worry about the CO2 so you bring in some bacteria to photosynthesize it.
you get some bacteria (alive now!) with hydrocarbons, sugars, etc. and stored energy.
you're right back where you started though! in the process you've invented the biological solar panel!
Look for this guy in next year's Darwin Awards.
It should be noted that this telescope will actually search for Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN), of which supermassive black holes play a small, but important role. There is alot of other really interesting physics here though! For a cool picture of an AGN, click here. For more info, click here.
A very interesting article. The question then becomes, does this experiment change the phase of the photon? The article didn't say (it said that the atom's phase was changed), but I would expect that it was since the atom and the photon interacted. If the phase of the photon changes in the experiment, then this technique won't work for eavesdropping.
So you might say: "well, the laws of physics are changing so rapidly these days that this will soon be a possibility." But revolutions in physics are rarely, if ever, of the sort where all of the old theory is thrown out and a completely new theory is developed. Instead, discrepencies are discovered in some corner of a theory and new a theory is discovered which is a superset of both the old theory and the new data.
Also, "spooky action at a distance" in the form of quantum entanglement was never "impossible," it was just philosophically objectionable to some people, including Einstein. If you mean that "information can never travel faster than the speed of light in vacuum" when you say "faster than light (FTL)" travel, then you are incorrect if Maxwell's equations are to hold. All know examples of FTL (which are trivial and miss the point) violate some aspect of my previous statement in quotations. As for heavier-than-air flight, no rational scientist in any age who has observed a bird would tell you that it's impossible.
This is contradictory because 'to observe' is 'to interact' in quantum mechanics. It is impossible to observe a single particle without interacting with it in some way.
Suppose a god exists. Wouldn't this god want us to *use* the intelligence it endowed us with to explore and discover the natural universe?
The bible may be very clear creation, but so are many other religious documents on the subject. How do you know which one (if any) to believe?
I'm not sure what you meant by, "Moreover, are these the people that you want to have sending it [the message to god]?" Perhaps you could expand.
The sender would know to point it in our direction because They (with a captical "T") would have surveyed their corner of the galaxy, and found planets that potentially harbor life. They could do this is to first discovering planets by astrometry or radial-velocity techniques, and then looking for absorption lines such as ozone in the planet's spectrum. In fact, NASA will employ this very techinque in its Terrestrial Planet Finder mission. In optical SETI (where the beams are much more slender than in radio SETI), one expects to discover intentional beacons, rather than accidentally intercepting interstellar communication.
Optical SETI isn't a new idea though. Townes and Schwartz's first proposed optical SETI in 1961, a year after the invention of the laser. After many years of lobbying be a few brave scientists, optical SETI experiments are now running (or being built) at a handful of institutions.
I'll explain a bit about optical SETI below, but let me also point you to a few good resources. The SETI group at Harvard (of which I am a member) maintains www.oseti.org which has a couple articles on optical SETI: a technical paper that gives the full arguments for optical SETI, and another technical paper which details our current running experiment and our future all-sky survey.
Here's why optical SETI is a good idea (much of which lythari cites): A high-intensity pulsed laser, teamed with a moderate sized transmitting telescope, forms an efficient interstellar beacon. To a distant observer in the direction of its slender beam, such a laser transmitter, built with ``Earth 2000'' technology only, would appear (during its brief pulse) a thousand times brighter than our sun in broadband visible light; even at ranges of 1000 light years a single nanosecond laser pulse would deliver roughly a thousand photons to a 10-meter receiving telescope.
There are several reasons why optical SETI is at least as good an idea as radio SETI. First, transmitted beams from optical telescopes are far more slender than their radio counterparts owing to the high gain of optical telescopes (150 dB for the Keck Telescope versus 70 dB for Arecibo). Dispersion, which spectrally broadens radio pulses, is completely negligible at optical frequencies. The capability of radio transmitters has reached a stable maturity, while the power of optical lasers has shown an annual Moore's law doubling extending over the past 30 years. And finally, the computational power and sophistication characteristic of the sensitive microwave searches today is unnecessary for optical SETI. Detection can be quite simple -- a pair of fast, broadband photon counting detectors in coincidence.
We have built a photometer to search for such unresolved pulses, and are using it in a piggyback targeted search of some 3000 nearby solar-type stars. The photometer receives about 1/3 of the light focused by the 1.5-meter optical reflector, otherwise unused by the primary experiment (a stellar radial-velocity survey). A beamsplitter followed by a pair of fast hybrid avalanche detectors is triggered in coincidence to record the time and intensity profile of large pulses.
We're also working on an all-sky search for pulsed optical SETI beacons at Agassiz station in Harvard, Massachusetts. We envision a 2 meter f/1 parabolic "light bucket" (1 arcminute resolution) focused onto a multipixel camera consisting of eight 64-pixel photomultiplier tubes (with pixels measuring 4 arcminutes on a side) in two matched focal planes. It will observe a two degree by half degree patch of the sky in transit mode, thereby covering the Northern sky in 150 clear nights. Fast custom IC electronics will monitor corresponding pixels for coincident optical pulses of nanosecond timescale, triggering storage of a detailed digitized waveform of the light flash.
Could you explain *how* SETI research "flies in the face of God?"