At this point a large use of GPUs seems to be for processes where they are more efficient than CPU. The most obvious is vector processing. If one is doing heavy computational work then the standard benchmarks seem fine. What fraction of the GPU market is for actual graphical use?
Note that what is going on is essentially chemical, not nuclear. That is, the bacteria are getting energy out by chemical processes of elements that happen to be radioactive. If one had a sample of pure uranium 238 (which is radioactive but only a tiny bit so, with a very very long halflife) these bacteria would act identically. And if one could magically make uranium not radioactive the behavior of these bacteria would not change at all.
We don't know if there is life on Mars. The evidence for it is weak and inconclusive. The Viking missions suggested there was life on Mars from some tests but didn't find any organic molecules which was really confusing. It is now thought that perchlorates in the soil could have destroyed the organics when heated. If so, there may be life on Mars that isn't that uncommon. Unfortunately, no successful Mars mission since Viking has focused on biological questions. Moreover, even if life is rarer on Mars contamination could still harm it. Finally, if there is no life on Mars but there once was life then this sort of contamination could wipe out all traces of it.
No. There isn't a difference just of scale. In one situation people are getting fucking killed. In the other situation people are getting pat-down searches when they choose a specific type of commercial interaction. These are not just differences in degree. There's a genuine difference in kind here.
Oh really? The woman who was groped knew a TSA agent would insert part of her hand into the woman's vagina multiple times? Somehow I doubt that.
Um. That allegation is precisely the main thing that the TSA agent is disputing. Please reread my comment.
Should Jews have publicly renounced/defamed their faith because they "knew what they were getting into" by continuing to be Jewish in the face of the Nazi takeover of Germany?
First, you've got the history all wrong. The Nazis killed people whether or not they denounced their religion. People with even ancestral descent from Jews were also killed. Second, let's assume that your counterfactual version of history was accurate. Do you not see a difference between "I have orders to do a patdown search of everyone who decides to use this method of transport as opposed to other methods" and "I have orders to kill everyone who professes a certain set of religious beliefs?" Really? No difference at all?
We're all in agreement that the TSA security measures are stupid, inefficient, unlikely to actually stop any actual threats, and invasive to our privacy. TSA policy resembles a large scale version of the Milgram experiments. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment/
This doesn't mean that TSA employees are not people to. They have lives, they have names. They have friends and families. Sure, TSA employees are often incompetent and stupid. The TSA could try to hire retired police and retired MPs but they seem to out of their way not to. But, the low level employees are not deciding policy. They have the same rights as everyone else not be defamed and libeled if they didn't actually do something. So when one of them exercises their legal rights mocking and insulting them is uncalled for. They are just doing their jobs. In the current economy there aren't many jobs out there and the TSA employees want to get paid and not starve like everyone else. You might be smart and well-educated and have a steady job. Good for you. Now meet everyone else.
And since someone is going to probably twist "they are just doing their jobs" into some ridiculous example of Godwin's Law, let's be clear: this is not the same thing as the Nuremberg defense. "I was just doing my job and following orders" has a very different meaning when one is being told to murder people than when someone is being told to do something to someone who knew what they were getting into and elected to go flying anyways.
Instead of insulting and labeling individual TSA people, try to fix the actual issues, a general culture of fear and a succession of US Presidents who have minimal respect for the Constitution.
Of course if the TSA person did do what the blogger claimed (which wouldn't be that surprising) then the TSA person should be fired and does deserve to have their name plastered everywhere. But let's not rush to judgment ok?
The three elements thing is actually something we have a very good understanding of. This isn't an example of a new theory with tentative evidence. Question: If you think this is deeply wrong then you presumably think it is much more likely that the scientific consensus about this will change yes? Do you want to make a bet on whether or not it will change in some timespan? Say whether this will change in the next few years or more longterm like 20 or 30 years?
That doesn't make any sense. The people in question were the youngest to do what they've done, not the youngest females to do what they've done. There's a clear series of accomplishments here.
The cost of astronomy programs of this sort is actually tiny. The program in question uses a series of semi-automated or fully automated telescopes which are distributed around the world. Once the telescopes are constructed the marginal cost to keeping them running is small. Moreover, these telescopes are being used for other projects as well, such as imaging stars, looking for recent supernova, and careful imaging of supernova discovered by other means (such as the very recent very close supernova in M101). This sort of study helps give us a lot of fundamental knowledge. Data about comets and asteroids helps us find out in detail what the early solar system was like. Work with far away stars like Cepheid variables lets us map the farthest reaches of the universe. Imaging of supernova also contributes to that task but also allows us to test the laws of physics with fine precision, getting information about things like dark matter and the like. Given the high return rate of this sort of thing and the comparatively low cost, it definitely makes sense for the UK to spend money on this.
One thing you might notice is that all of these people are female. I tentatively don't think this is a coincidence but at the same time don't think this is a strong example of the growth of females in science (although it certainly should help inspire other young girls). There's been for a very long history of women astronomers. While the specific example prior to about 1850 there are isolated examples like Caroline Herschel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caroline_Herschel but in the second half of the 19th century a large number of women went into astronomy related work. Examples include Antonia Maury who did some of the first careful analysis and cataloging of stellar spectra http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonia_Maury and Annie Jump Cannon who followed on Maury's and others work making systematic the correlations between spectra, temperature and brightness, a crucial issue for trying to estimate the distance of any start that is more than a few hundred light years away http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annie_Jump_Cannon. And then you have Henrietta Swan Leavitt http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrietta_Swan_Leavitt who discovered Cepheid variable stars which allow one to extend distance estimates even farther, to outside our own galaxy. One thing that is important to notice is that a lot of these early female astronomers were doing work careful cataloging and classification work that was actually considered women's work and considered to be not that important by many. Thus, they got a lot less credit in their lifetimes than male astronomers. So at least that aspect has changed a lot.
The most naive question to ask if is this sort of delay is relevant to Moore's law and similar patterns. There are a variety of different forms of Moore's law. We've seem an apparent slowdown in the increase in clockspeed http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/mother-cpu-charts-2005,1175.html. The original version of Moore's Law was about the number of transistors on a single integrated circuit and that's slowed down also. A lot of these metrics have slowed down.
But this isn't an example of that phenomenon. This appears to be due more to the usual economic hiccups and the lack of desire to release new chips during an economic downturn (although TFA does note that this is a change in strategy for Intel's normal approach to recessions.) This is not by itself a useful data point, so this is not further need to panic.
On a related note there's been a lot of improvement in the last few years simply by making algorithms more efficient. As was discussed on Slashdot last December http://science.slashdot.org/story/10/12/24/2327246/Progress-In-Algorithms-Beats-Moores-Law by a variety of benchmarks linear programming has become 40 million times more efficient in the last fifteen years and that only a factor 1000 or so is due to the better machines, with a factor of about 40,000 attributable to better algorithms. So even if Moore's law is toast, the rate of effective progress is still very high. Overall, I'm not worried.
Hmm, interesting. So you didn't care about canajin56 and sockatume's more technical complaint. I'll try to briefly clear up some of these issues (with the disclaimer that I'm not an astrophysicist so I may get some details wrong.)
It's entertaining and depressing at the same time. People engage in mental self-gratification, using wacky unproven theories by astrophysicists who have never even gotten out of the solar system as a proxy for knowledge. Science actually doesn't work that way, despite the fantasy land that has been constructed around the field of astronomy.
Actually, science does work that way. We work with the best evidence we have and we make simulations and models of those. And then we test it against new data. But you do raise a good question: we've never been outside our solar system, how can we have good ideas about the rest of the universe? Well, there are few different methods. The primary method is looking at the colors in stars. To the naked eye, stars all look almost completely the same. But every element gives off light at slightly different frequencies and absorbs light at certain specific frequencies. So, we can look at stars and get data about what elements they are made of. We can also get temperature data from this by studying these lines very carefully. From that, we can get (approximate) distances by looking at how bright the stars are. There's a lot of other stuff going on in this (for example for nearby stars we actually can use essentially highschool geometry to get their distances if one has very sensitive telescopes. This was done in the early 19th century and allowed us to start gathering the data necessary to do what I just described). So, we can get a lot of information about stars while not leaving the comfort of our own solar system.
We can get other data also that helps confirm that our models for stars aren't too far off. For example, in 1987 there was a very close supernova, SN 1987A http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SN_1987A (the A means it was the first supernova found in that year). Now, we detected neutrinos from this supernova. What's more, these neutrinos arrived before the light from the supernova arrived. At this point you should be saying something like "that doesn't make any sense! Nothing travels faster than light." And here's the neat thing: neutrinos don't like interacting with almost anything, but the neutrinos produced in a supernova are produced in the core of the star, they then don't do much to the rest of the star and immediately can stream out. The light produced in a supernova is produced at the edge of the star. So the neutrinos get a tiny head start. In the case of 1987A that headstart was enough for them to arrive about three hours before the light did. Cool stuff. Here's the nice thing: the neutrino levels detected were within experimental error in line with theory. This is one example of many ways that astronomers and astrophysicists have confirmed that a lot of our basic picture of the universe is correct even without leaving our little solar system.
I already knew it was extreme, but I must acknowledge my ignorance of the fact that they are trying to insist that not only were there only 3 elements created shortly after the big bang, but that they know which ones they were
They've been thinking about these issues for a very long time. The original paper discussing elements formed right after the Big Bang is the Alpher–Bethe–Gamow
paper http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpher%E2%80%93Bethe%E2%80%93Gamow_paper. If you can get access to a copy I recommend that you take a look. The paper is highly readable. How do we have a good guess that those three elements are the elements created after the Big Bang? First of all, the easiest check is simple abundancy: there's a lot more hydrogen and helium in the universe than almost any other elements, an
Who gives a flying fart if he supports ID. A whole shitload of great science has been done by religious people. Like Einstein and Newton. It is a complete red herring to assert that his science is no good because he also holds religious beliefs.
First, Einstein wasn't religious in any traditional sense. He did occasionally have his deistic moments, and his views changed over time. (He was like most humans in this regard. There's a mistake in viewing him as some monolith. That's why there are so many dueling quotes about what he believed.)
Second, and more importantly, no one is arguing that religious scientists can't do good work. That's not in dispute. There are a lot of deeply religious scientists who are doing top-notch work. Ken Miller is a religious Catholic and a very accomplished biologist. Robert Aumann is an Orthodox Jew and a Nobel prize winning scientist. Etc. The problem is not that Spencer is religious. The problem is that the whole point of Intelligent Design is claiming that it is science. The Millers and Aumanns of the world aren't claiming that their religious beliefs are science and they aren't letting their religion interfere with their work. Spencer is doing just that, taking his religious ideas and letting it interfere with his work as a scientist and then claiming that work is science. And that should be a serious warning sign about how much one should listen to his work.
The science is either right or wrong on it's own merits.
Sure, at the end of the day, any work should stand or fall on its merits. But at the same time there's far more science out there then any of us have the ability to keep track. So we need to use heuristics to decide which science is good science that is worth paying attention to, which science we should pay more attention to if it gets experts in the field who become convinced, and which science is unlikely to be good. Let's use a more extreme example: if Gene Ray got a paper published in a low-quality, low-impact journal, and that paper went against the consensus in the relevant areas (say claiming that special relativity is wrong), how much attention would you pay to it? Humans do this sort of calculation all the time. The difference is a matter of degree, not a difference in kind.
USA-193 was in a severely decaying orbit so its debris did not add substantially to the total space debris. Both the old Russian and US tests did not produce nearly as many pieces as the Chinese test. I think that again has to do with orbital dynamics (or just very low orbits) and other issues but I don't know enough to discuss that in detail (what a satellite is made of and how exactly it is hit could change a lot how many pieces it will fracture into). Keep in mind that individual pieces of space debris are counted and kept track of via very sophisticated radar systems. The claim that the Chinese satellite test created a lot more debris is based on the raw debris counts.
There's an idea dating back to the late 1970s of "Kessler Syndrome" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome in which repeated collisions of objects in orbit will result in so many debris objects that they will become a self-reinforcing problem (since when debris collides with other bits of debris the result is a lot more smaller pieces now in different orbits from the original large pieces). The level at which things become inconvenient is well before where we hit full on Kessler syndrome, but it may well be that one won't get much warning before Kessler syndrome starts to take hold.
There's a very real danger at this point that we will soon run into a real Kessler syndrome situation in low-Earth orbit. This would be really bad since this is both a really useful area to have satellites and the area where it is cheapest to put them in orbit. We have taken a few steps to help matters. For example, it became apparent that the Delta rockets were causing a lot of space debris and the more recent versions have been redesigned to minimize those issues. Unfortunately, many rockets from other countries and some other US rockets still have serious problems. There's no indication that China is taking any serious steps to minimize space debris. There have been some attempts to require people who put up satellites to have plans for either deorbiting them or parking them in graveyard orbits. That's now being done for most civilian satellites, but we don't know what if anything is being done for military satellites. This is in some sense one massive tragedy-of-the-commons type situation.
The current engineering solutions for removing space debris are also lacking. There's a proposal to use lasers to ablate small bits of debris but this is politically not great since lasers powerful enough to do that could be used as weapons. Most of the other proposals have other problems or have the same problem: essentially any method of easily deorbiting objects is going to be a threat to satellites, and so for obvious reasons governments don't want other governments to have that sort of capability.
One point which this new study makes that I had not seen before is the point that the calculated cost of satellite collisions is underestimated because not only do
satellites collisions destroy satellites but they also create more debris which can then endanger other satellites and requires further tracking.
The paper in question was written by Roy Spencer. Aside from his views on climate change he's also a vocal proponent of intelligent design. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Spencer_(scientist)#Views_on_intelligent_design and what he calls "the theory of creation". While in a strict formal logic setting ad hominem attacks are not useful, they are a relevant heuristic to decide if someone knows what they are talking about. In this context, it seems pretty clear that Spencer lets his ideological allegiances dictate beliefs instead of careful scientific thinking. There's a certain point where you just stop assigning large amounts of weight to claims made by an individual because they've demonstrated repeated failure before. Spencer is past that point.
Yes ok. You are correct. I didn't mention beryllium. I'm not an astronomer or an astrophysicist but my impression is that the beryllium created was primarily in unstable isotopes like Beryllium-7 which have such a short half-lives that it would all decay before star formation even got started. Is that correct? If so, then this really doesn't matter for star formation issues. Although yes for technical accuracy I it probably would have been better to say something like "the only stable elements" or something like that.
So Bradley Manning is mistreated by the federal government. The BART protesters are badly treated (and the cell phone thing was probably illegal). Topiary was arrested in Britain. Can give a coherent ideological explanation why therefore one goes after police departments in Texas? These emails are full (unsurprisingly) of evidence of racism and corruption. So it isn't like having these out in the open is a bad thing. But let's not pretend this makes almost any sense as retaliation for previous actions against LulzSec or other individuals.
I think you mean "Contact". Contact is the Sagan scifi novel that touches on this and was made into a movie. Cosmos was the TV showed he starred in that was about astronomy.
K'Breel seems to be using this invasion to get more and more power. In the early versions K'Breel was just the chief of the council. Then he started punishing Martian reporters who disagreed with his assessment of the danger. Now he's achieved such power and control that his name is directly put in the sign-off propaganda chant at the end. It seems that Martians really are just like Earthlings.
Unfortunately Opportunity is not well-equipped for actually checking for life and so even if it does encounter life (which is unlikely) we'd have at best circumstantial evidence for it. The Viking tests of Martian soil http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_biological_experiments didn't seem to give any signs of life but they did result in chemistry which we still don't fully understand what was happening. This in general makes further tests for life to be difficult since we don't fully understand the non-organic behavior (although one thing that Viking found was a lot less organic material than was expected. That's still not fully understood.).
The follow-up to Opportunity is going to be the Curiosity rover. Curiosity is about the size of a large car and will have a lot of different equipment. That should be launched by the end of this year. If Curiosity lands successfully (it is much larger than other things we've tried to land on Mars before and there's some new tech in the landing method) it will blow Opportunity and Spirit away in terms of the number of experiments it can do and a lot of other things. For example, Curiosity can simply move a lot faster than any other rover we have put on Mars. This means that when it is in a less interesting spot it will be able to go somewhere more interesting in days or hours rather than in weeks or months.
The term Von Neumann architecture has a variety of different meanings. One common meaning of the term is one in which instructions and data retrieval share a common bus. The original meaning was a bit more specific referring to a system that had a CPU, a separate memory for data and instructions, and input/output capability. Originally the real step forward was storing data and instructions together and treating them in some sense the same way which in many ways allowed a lot more flexibility in programming. Treating data and instructions the same way is something that still creates issues; SQL injection attacks are essentially just this: adding data that is formatted to look like instructions. But the upshot is that this use of the term- to use Von Neumann architecture to mean just having a working memory is a less common use of the term.
Moving on from there, the system in question uses superconductors to control qubits. This is one of a variety of different systems being proposed. For example, the most recent quantum computing article on Slashdot ahref=http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/08/31/1844252/Record-Low-Error-Rate-For-Qubit-Processorrel=url2html-5998http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/08/31/1844252/Record-Low-Error-Rate-For-Qubit-Processor> used ion traps. It is important to realize that different systems cannot be used together in any meaningful way. This means that improvements on any one type don't really carry over to the others. This is important if one is thinking in terms of when all this research will come together. A really good example of this is how early quantum computing used NMR systems http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_magnetic_resonance_quantum_computer which was then abandoned due to scaling and other issues. A lot of what was learned with NMR systems could not be applied to later quantum computers.
Since we're nowhere near having long-term colonization of the moon, and the summary actually acknowledges that this is a PR stunt why are getting this mentioned at all on Slashdot? This is ridiculous. There's no where near the tech level to easily put this sort of thing on the moon and there's no way the company will actually spend money to do this. Meanwhile all sorts of interesting science and technology developments are happening that aren't getting mentioned. For example, astronomers have discovered a star that doesn't fit with a lot of our theories of star formation http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/08/110831155340.htm. Or Slashdot could have given us another update on the ISS's current situation. Heck, if you need something with minimal actual scientific content you could have linked to this amusing video by the ISS crew about the matter http://www.universetoday.com/88559/iss-crew-provides-light-hearted-look-at-current-space-flight-plight/. Or you could talk about the new website devoted to the exploration of Mars by the Spirit and Opportunity http://www.universetoday.com/88562/driving-miss-spirit/. Stop wasting our time.
TFA discusses how having this genome may help us better understand evolution by getting a better picture of how different reptile species diverged and how exactly they diverged from mammals. One of the neatest aspect of this research are the discovery of a large number of transposons. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transposon. These are segments of DNA which can jump around the genome inserting themselves where they please. They can be disruptive or helpful or just do weird things (in fact they were initially discovered in corn when Barbara McClinctock was trying to figure out what controlled the very strange behavior of corn coloration) . As TFA discusses, some of the same transposons in the lizard genome also exist in humans but many have been tamed and put to productive use.
Too bad they aren't taking requests for which lizards to sequence. I'd be very interesting in the sequencing of the New Mexico whiptail http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Mexico_whiptail in the hope that its weird reproductive behavior might be better understood. The whiptail has evolved to be an all female species. The females reproduce in a way that does shuffle their own genes so that children aren't complete clones. But one really neat detail is that they need to engage in mock sexual behavior in order to reproduce. If they don't hump each other they won't produce eggs. This is has earned them the nickname "lesbian lizards". They are not the only species that has adopted this sort of process but it is very rare, and the whiptail is one of the better understood examples. I would hope that having the full genome might give us more insight into how/why this sort of thing can evolve.
More pessimistically, there's been very little direct benefit from finding species complete genomes. While the human genome project has provided some benefits most of those benefits have been fairly subtle. It seems that the human genome project has been helpful but not nearly as much as some people predicted. Some of the modern genetic work uses techniques developed during the genome project but much doesn't seem to actually use the human genome project data itself.
Slashdot Mirror
At this point a large use of GPUs seems to be for processes where they are more efficient than CPU. The most obvious is vector processing. If one is doing heavy computational work then the standard benchmarks seem fine. What fraction of the GPU market is for actual graphical use?
Note that what is going on is essentially chemical, not nuclear. That is, the bacteria are getting energy out by chemical processes of elements that happen to be radioactive. If one had a sample of pure uranium 238 (which is radioactive but only a tiny bit so, with a very very long halflife) these bacteria would act identically. And if one could magically make uranium not radioactive the behavior of these bacteria would not change at all.
We don't know if there is life on Mars. The evidence for it is weak and inconclusive. The Viking missions suggested there was life on Mars from some tests but didn't find any organic molecules which was really confusing. It is now thought that perchlorates in the soil could have destroyed the organics when heated. If so, there may be life on Mars that isn't that uncommon. Unfortunately, no successful Mars mission since Viking has focused on biological questions. Moreover, even if life is rarer on Mars contamination could still harm it. Finally, if there is no life on Mars but there once was life then this sort of contamination could wipe out all traces of it.
No. There isn't a difference just of scale. In one situation people are getting fucking killed. In the other situation people are getting pat-down searches when they choose a specific type of commercial interaction. These are not just differences in degree. There's a genuine difference in kind here.
Oh really? The woman who was groped knew a TSA agent would insert part of her hand into the woman's vagina multiple times? Somehow I doubt that.
Um. That allegation is precisely the main thing that the TSA agent is disputing. Please reread my comment.
Should Jews have publicly renounced/defamed their faith because they "knew what they were getting into" by continuing to be Jewish in the face of the Nazi takeover of Germany?
First, you've got the history all wrong. The Nazis killed people whether or not they denounced their religion. People with even ancestral descent from Jews were also killed. Second, let's assume that your counterfactual version of history was accurate. Do you not see a difference between "I have orders to do a patdown search of everyone who decides to use this method of transport as opposed to other methods" and "I have orders to kill everyone who professes a certain set of religious beliefs?" Really? No difference at all?
We're all in agreement that the TSA security measures are stupid, inefficient, unlikely to actually stop any actual threats, and invasive to our privacy. TSA policy resembles a large scale version of the Milgram experiments. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment/
This doesn't mean that TSA employees are not people to. They have lives, they have names. They have friends and families. Sure, TSA employees are often incompetent and stupid. The TSA could try to hire retired police and retired MPs but they seem to out of their way not to. But, the low level employees are not deciding policy. They have the same rights as everyone else not be defamed and libeled if they didn't actually do something. So when one of them exercises their legal rights mocking and insulting them is uncalled for. They are just doing their jobs. In the current economy there aren't many jobs out there and the TSA employees want to get paid and not starve like everyone else. You might be smart and well-educated and have a steady job. Good for you. Now meet everyone else.
And since someone is going to probably twist "they are just doing their jobs" into some ridiculous example of Godwin's Law, let's be clear: this is not the same thing as the Nuremberg defense. "I was just doing my job and following orders" has a very different meaning when one is being told to murder people than when someone is being told to do something to someone who knew what they were getting into and elected to go flying anyways.
Instead of insulting and labeling individual TSA people, try to fix the actual issues, a general culture of fear and a succession of US Presidents who have minimal respect for the Constitution.
Of course if the TSA person did do what the blogger claimed (which wouldn't be that surprising) then the TSA person should be fired and does deserve to have their name plastered everywhere. But let's not rush to judgment ok?
The three elements thing is actually something we have a very good understanding of. This isn't an example of a new theory with tentative evidence. Question: If you think this is deeply wrong then you presumably think it is much more likely that the scientific consensus about this will change yes? Do you want to make a bet on whether or not it will change in some timespan? Say whether this will change in the next few years or more longterm like 20 or 30 years?
That doesn't make any sense. The people in question were the youngest to do what they've done, not the youngest females to do what they've done. There's a clear series of accomplishments here.
The cost of astronomy programs of this sort is actually tiny. The program in question uses a series of semi-automated or fully automated telescopes which are distributed around the world. Once the telescopes are constructed the marginal cost to keeping them running is small. Moreover, these telescopes are being used for other projects as well, such as imaging stars, looking for recent supernova, and careful imaging of supernova discovered by other means (such as the very recent very close supernova in M101). This sort of study helps give us a lot of fundamental knowledge. Data about comets and asteroids helps us find out in detail what the early solar system was like. Work with far away stars like Cepheid variables lets us map the farthest reaches of the universe. Imaging of supernova also contributes to that task but also allows us to test the laws of physics with fine precision, getting information about things like dark matter and the like. Given the high return rate of this sort of thing and the comparatively low cost, it definitely makes sense for the UK to spend money on this.
There seems to be a growing trend of young amateur astronomers. In 2009, Caroline Moore, a 14 year-old at the time became the youngest person to discover a supernova- http://www.astronomy.com/en/News-Observing/News/2009/06/Profile%20Youngest%20person%20to%20discover%20a%20supernova.aspx. She was then shortly thereafter surpassed by the 10-year old Kathryn Aurora Gray http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2011/01/04/girl-10-becomes-youngest-to-discover-supernova/ If one is at all old this thing starts to really make one feel unaccomplished by comparison.
One thing you might notice is that all of these people are female. I tentatively don't think this is a coincidence but at the same time don't think this is a strong example of the growth of females in science (although it certainly should help inspire other young girls). There's been for a very long history of women astronomers. While the specific example prior to about 1850 there are isolated examples like Caroline Herschel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caroline_Herschel but in the second half of the 19th century a large number of women went into astronomy related work. Examples include Antonia Maury who did some of the first careful analysis and cataloging of stellar spectra http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonia_Maury and Annie Jump Cannon who followed on Maury's and others work making systematic the correlations between spectra, temperature and brightness, a crucial issue for trying to estimate the distance of any start that is more than a few hundred light years away http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annie_Jump_Cannon. And then you have Henrietta Swan Leavitt http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrietta_Swan_Leavitt who discovered Cepheid variable stars which allow one to extend distance estimates even farther, to outside our own galaxy. One thing that is important to notice is that a lot of these early female astronomers were doing work careful cataloging and classification work that was actually considered women's work and considered to be not that important by many. Thus, they got a lot less credit in their lifetimes than male astronomers. So at least that aspect has changed a lot.
The most naive question to ask if is this sort of delay is relevant to Moore's law and similar patterns. There are a variety of different forms of Moore's law. We've seem an apparent slowdown in the increase in clockspeed http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/mother-cpu-charts-2005,1175.html. The original version of Moore's Law was about the number of transistors on a single integrated circuit and that's slowed down also. A lot of these metrics have slowed down.
But this isn't an example of that phenomenon. This appears to be due more to the usual economic hiccups and the lack of desire to release new chips during an economic downturn (although TFA does note that this is a change in strategy for Intel's normal approach to recessions.) This is not by itself a useful data point, so this is not further need to panic.
On a related note there's been a lot of improvement in the last few years simply by making algorithms more efficient. As was discussed on Slashdot last December http://science.slashdot.org/story/10/12/24/2327246/Progress-In-Algorithms-Beats-Moores-Law by a variety of benchmarks linear programming has become 40 million times more efficient in the last fifteen years and that only a factor 1000 or so is due to the better machines, with a factor of about 40,000 attributable to better algorithms. So even if Moore's law is toast, the rate of effective progress is still very high. Overall, I'm not worried.
Hmm, interesting. So you didn't care about canajin56 and sockatume's more technical complaint. I'll try to briefly clear up some of these issues (with the disclaimer that I'm not an astrophysicist so I may get some details wrong.)
It's entertaining and depressing at the same time. People engage in mental self-gratification, using wacky unproven theories by astrophysicists who have never even gotten out of the solar system as a proxy for knowledge. Science actually doesn't work that way, despite the fantasy land that has been constructed around the field of astronomy.
Actually, science does work that way. We work with the best evidence we have and we make simulations and models of those. And then we test it against new data. But you do raise a good question: we've never been outside our solar system, how can we have good ideas about the rest of the universe? Well, there are few different methods. The primary method is looking at the colors in stars. To the naked eye, stars all look almost completely the same. But every element gives off light at slightly different frequencies and absorbs light at certain specific frequencies. So, we can look at stars and get data about what elements they are made of. We can also get temperature data from this by studying these lines very carefully. From that, we can get (approximate) distances by looking at how bright the stars are. There's a lot of other stuff going on in this (for example for nearby stars we actually can use essentially highschool geometry to get their distances if one has very sensitive telescopes. This was done in the early 19th century and allowed us to start gathering the data necessary to do what I just described). So, we can get a lot of information about stars while not leaving the comfort of our own solar system.
We can get other data also that helps confirm that our models for stars aren't too far off. For example, in 1987 there was a very close supernova, SN 1987A http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SN_1987A (the A means it was the first supernova found in that year). Now, we detected neutrinos from this supernova. What's more, these neutrinos arrived before the light from the supernova arrived. At this point you should be saying something like "that doesn't make any sense! Nothing travels faster than light." And here's the neat thing: neutrinos don't like interacting with almost anything, but the neutrinos produced in a supernova are produced in the core of the star, they then don't do much to the rest of the star and immediately can stream out. The light produced in a supernova is produced at the edge of the star. So the neutrinos get a tiny head start. In the case of 1987A that headstart was enough for them to arrive about three hours before the light did. Cool stuff. Here's the nice thing: the neutrino levels detected were within experimental error in line with theory. This is one example of many ways that astronomers and astrophysicists have confirmed that a lot of our basic picture of the universe is correct even without leaving our little solar system.
I already knew it was extreme, but I must acknowledge my ignorance of the fact that they are trying to insist that not only were there only 3 elements created shortly after the big bang, but that they know which ones they were
They've been thinking about these issues for a very long time. The original paper discussing elements formed right after the Big Bang is the Alpher–Bethe–Gamow paper http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpher%E2%80%93Bethe%E2%80%93Gamow_paper. If you can get access to a copy I recommend that you take a look. The paper is highly readable. How do we have a good guess that those three elements are the elements created after the Big Bang? First of all, the easiest check is simple abundancy: there's a lot more hydrogen and helium in the universe than almost any other elements, an
First, Einstein wasn't religious in any traditional sense. He did occasionally have his deistic moments, and his views changed over time. (He was like most humans in this regard. There's a mistake in viewing him as some monolith. That's why there are so many dueling quotes about what he believed.)
Second, and more importantly, no one is arguing that religious scientists can't do good work. That's not in dispute. There are a lot of deeply religious scientists who are doing top-notch work. Ken Miller is a religious Catholic and a very accomplished biologist. Robert Aumann is an Orthodox Jew and a Nobel prize winning scientist. Etc. The problem is not that Spencer is religious. The problem is that the whole point of Intelligent Design is claiming that it is science. The Millers and Aumanns of the world aren't claiming that their religious beliefs are science and they aren't letting their religion interfere with their work. Spencer is doing just that, taking his religious ideas and letting it interfere with his work as a scientist and then claiming that work is science. And that should be a serious warning sign about how much one should listen to his work.
The science is either right or wrong on it's own merits.
Sure, at the end of the day, any work should stand or fall on its merits. But at the same time there's far more science out there then any of us have the ability to keep track. So we need to use heuristics to decide which science is good science that is worth paying attention to, which science we should pay more attention to if it gets experts in the field who become convinced, and which science is unlikely to be good. Let's use a more extreme example: if Gene Ray got a paper published in a low-quality, low-impact journal, and that paper went against the consensus in the relevant areas (say claiming that special relativity is wrong), how much attention would you pay to it? Humans do this sort of calculation all the time. The difference is a matter of degree, not a difference in kind.
USA-193 was in a severely decaying orbit so its debris did not add substantially to the total space debris. Both the old Russian and US tests did not produce nearly as many pieces as the Chinese test. I think that again has to do with orbital dynamics (or just very low orbits) and other issues but I don't know enough to discuss that in detail (what a satellite is made of and how exactly it is hit could change a lot how many pieces it will fracture into). Keep in mind that individual pieces of space debris are counted and kept track of via very sophisticated radar systems. The claim that the Chinese satellite test created a lot more debris is based on the raw debris counts.
There's a very real danger at this point that we will soon run into a real Kessler syndrome situation in low-Earth orbit. This would be really bad since this is both a really useful area to have satellites and the area where it is cheapest to put them in orbit. We have taken a few steps to help matters. For example, it became apparent that the Delta rockets were causing a lot of space debris and the more recent versions have been redesigned to minimize those issues. Unfortunately, many rockets from other countries and some other US rockets still have serious problems. There's no indication that China is taking any serious steps to minimize space debris. There have been some attempts to require people who put up satellites to have plans for either deorbiting them or parking them in graveyard orbits. That's now being done for most civilian satellites, but we don't know what if anything is being done for military satellites. This is in some sense one massive tragedy-of-the-commons type situation.
The current engineering solutions for removing space debris are also lacking. There's a proposal to use lasers to ablate small bits of debris but this is politically not great since lasers powerful enough to do that could be used as weapons. Most of the other proposals have other problems or have the same problem: essentially any method of easily deorbiting objects is going to be a threat to satellites, and so for obvious reasons governments don't want other governments to have that sort of capability.
One point which this new study makes that I had not seen before is the point that the calculated cost of satellite collisions is underestimated because not only do satellites collisions destroy satellites but they also create more debris which can then endanger other satellites and requires further tracking.
The paper in question was written by Roy Spencer. Aside from his views on climate change he's also a vocal proponent of intelligent design. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Spencer_(scientist)#Views_on_intelligent_design and what he calls "the theory of creation". While in a strict formal logic setting ad hominem attacks are not useful, they are a relevant heuristic to decide if someone knows what they are talking about. In this context, it seems pretty clear that Spencer lets his ideological allegiances dictate beliefs instead of careful scientific thinking. There's a certain point where you just stop assigning large amounts of weight to claims made by an individual because they've demonstrated repeated failure before. Spencer is past that point.
Yes ok. You are correct. I didn't mention beryllium. I'm not an astronomer or an astrophysicist but my impression is that the beryllium created was primarily in unstable isotopes like Beryllium-7 which have such a short half-lives that it would all decay before star formation even got started. Is that correct? If so, then this really doesn't matter for star formation issues. Although yes for technical accuracy I it probably would have been better to say something like "the only stable elements" or something like that.
So Bradley Manning is mistreated by the federal government. The BART protesters are badly treated (and the cell phone thing was probably illegal). Topiary was arrested in Britain. Can give a coherent ideological explanation why therefore one goes after police departments in Texas? These emails are full (unsurprisingly) of evidence of racism and corruption. So it isn't like having these out in the open is a bad thing. But let's not pretend this makes almost any sense as retaliation for previous actions against LulzSec or other individuals.
I think you mean "Contact". Contact is the Sagan scifi novel that touches on this and was made into a movie. Cosmos was the TV showed he starred in that was about astronomy.
K'Breel seems to be using this invasion to get more and more power. In the early versions K'Breel was just the chief of the council. Then he started punishing Martian reporters who disagreed with his assessment of the danger. Now he's achieved such power and control that his name is directly put in the sign-off propaganda chant at the end. It seems that Martians really are just like Earthlings.
Unfortunately Opportunity is not well-equipped for actually checking for life and so even if it does encounter life (which is unlikely) we'd have at best circumstantial evidence for it. The Viking tests of Martian soil http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_biological_experiments didn't seem to give any signs of life but they did result in chemistry which we still don't fully understand what was happening. This in general makes further tests for life to be difficult since we don't fully understand the non-organic behavior (although one thing that Viking found was a lot less organic material than was expected. That's still not fully understood.).
The follow-up to Opportunity is going to be the Curiosity rover. Curiosity is about the size of a large car and will have a lot of different equipment. That should be launched by the end of this year. If Curiosity lands successfully (it is much larger than other things we've tried to land on Mars before and there's some new tech in the landing method) it will blow Opportunity and Spirit away in terms of the number of experiments it can do and a lot of other things. For example, Curiosity can simply move a lot faster than any other rover we have put on Mars. This means that when it is in a less interesting spot it will be able to go somewhere more interesting in days or hours rather than in weeks or months.
The term Von Neumann architecture has a variety of different meanings. One common meaning of the term is one in which instructions and data retrieval share a common bus. The original meaning was a bit more specific referring to a system that had a CPU, a separate memory for data and instructions, and input/output capability. Originally the real step forward was storing data and instructions together and treating them in some sense the same way which in many ways allowed a lot more flexibility in programming. Treating data and instructions the same way is something that still creates issues; SQL injection attacks are essentially just this: adding data that is formatted to look like instructions. But the upshot is that this use of the term- to use Von Neumann architecture to mean just having a working memory is a less common use of the term.
Moving on from there, the system in question uses superconductors to control qubits. This is one of a variety of different systems being proposed. For example, the most recent quantum computing article on Slashdot ahref=http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/08/31/1844252/Record-Low-Error-Rate-For-Qubit-Processorrel=url2html-5998http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/08/31/1844252/Record-Low-Error-Rate-For-Qubit-Processor> used ion traps. It is important to realize that different systems cannot be used together in any meaningful way. This means that improvements on any one type don't really carry over to the others. This is important if one is thinking in terms of when all this research will come together. A really good example of this is how early quantum computing used NMR systems http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_magnetic_resonance_quantum_computer which was then abandoned due to scaling and other issues. A lot of what was learned with NMR systems could not be applied to later quantum computers.
That's a good point. I've submitted the one about the small low metal star.
Since we're nowhere near having long-term colonization of the moon, and the summary actually acknowledges that this is a PR stunt why are getting this mentioned at all on Slashdot? This is ridiculous. There's no where near the tech level to easily put this sort of thing on the moon and there's no way the company will actually spend money to do this. Meanwhile all sorts of interesting science and technology developments are happening that aren't getting mentioned. For example, astronomers have discovered a star that doesn't fit with a lot of our theories of star formation http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/08/110831155340.htm. Or Slashdot could have given us another update on the ISS's current situation. Heck, if you need something with minimal actual scientific content you could have linked to this amusing video by the ISS crew about the matter http://www.universetoday.com/88559/iss-crew-provides-light-hearted-look-at-current-space-flight-plight/. Or you could talk about the new website devoted to the exploration of Mars by the Spirit and Opportunity http://www.universetoday.com/88562/driving-miss-spirit/. Stop wasting our time.
TFA discusses how having this genome may help us better understand evolution by getting a better picture of how different reptile species diverged and how exactly they diverged from mammals. One of the neatest aspect of this research are the discovery of a large number of transposons. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transposon. These are segments of DNA which can jump around the genome inserting themselves where they please. They can be disruptive or helpful or just do weird things (in fact they were initially discovered in corn when Barbara McClinctock was trying to figure out what controlled the very strange behavior of corn coloration) . As TFA discusses, some of the same transposons in the lizard genome also exist in humans but many have been tamed and put to productive use.
Too bad they aren't taking requests for which lizards to sequence. I'd be very interesting in the sequencing of the New Mexico whiptail http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Mexico_whiptail in the hope that its weird reproductive behavior might be better understood. The whiptail has evolved to be an all female species. The females reproduce in a way that does shuffle their own genes so that children aren't complete clones. But one really neat detail is that they need to engage in mock sexual behavior in order to reproduce. If they don't hump each other they won't produce eggs. This is has earned them the nickname "lesbian lizards". They are not the only species that has adopted this sort of process but it is very rare, and the whiptail is one of the better understood examples. I would hope that having the full genome might give us more insight into how/why this sort of thing can evolve.
More pessimistically, there's been very little direct benefit from finding species complete genomes. While the human genome project has provided some benefits most of those benefits have been fairly subtle. It seems that the human genome project has been helpful but not nearly as much as some people predicted. Some of the modern genetic work uses techniques developed during the genome project but much doesn't seem to actually use the human genome project data itself.