Frighteningly, MOO2 is still in my CD pouch of games I always take when I travel. Even if I'm tired of all the
others, I know I can pull that out an be amused.
I hope you also have a laptop with you when you are traveling:) --
if memory serves there's still a
company selling supplements for Traveller.
Yes, Traveller is still around... its creator,
Marc Miller, still owns the rights to it and
is reprinting the original game books, plus all the
supplements, adventures, alien modules etc, in
single volumes (eg all the rules booklets in
one book). Great for a nostalgic Traveller player
like me who never gets to play it anymore! (Nice,
uncluttered system; but it's the richly detailed backdrop which is compelling...)
There was a short-lived attempt by a company
called Imperium Games to release a 4th edition,
back to basics Traveller, but it folded after
a couple of books and supplements. --
Well, it's trivial to determine the base - just
listen for a while and count how many distinctive
types of signals there are - eg Morse has a short pulse and a long pulse, so it's binary.
But you are right, by eavesdropping in this way
there is a very high chance that any signal we
detect will be (almost?) impossible to decipher. If they aren't trying to be universally
understandable, they probably won't be understandable at all, except to somebody who knows the format.
OTOH, there is a very significant piece of information which will be obtained from
the mere existence of any ET signal - that is
of course, that ETs exist, and we are not alone. That would be worth
knowing even if (frustratingly) we couldn't
understand what they were saying. And if
optical SETI advocates are right in suggesting that optical communication would be the norm for
a spacefaring civilisation, then by all means,
let's look in the optical, as it might be our best
chance of finding them.
Actually, I (and a few others) thought the same thing. But he actually is replying
to posts, not just starting new threads. It
seems this is a natural mistake to make because...
Jon seems to always change the subject header
(so no "Re:" to clue you in)
he also seems to like replying to posts
with a score of 0, or sometimes 1
most people with more sense than time browse at +2 or higher...
The upshot is it only looks like his posts appear out of context... even browsing at +1 you would often miss that his posts are part of a thread.
That explains so much! That sequence precisely
parallels the decline in my appreciation of the Rama series. (I quite enjoyed Rama II, but by Rama Revealed I wished I'd just stopped with Rendezvous.)
That was a television series, not a movie, you nut.
I saw it when I was a kid before I ever read the books, and
the actors in the series are how I'll always
imagine the characters - it will be hard to
beat. But I heard a rumour that Hugh Laurie
was up for the Arthur Dent role - he would
be a perfect dim-witted English twit.
Put very simply (and I apologise for this, I'm too tired to explain it more intelligently) there has to be something else there to
do the "tugging". Otherwise, the stars would move
in a straight line. The easiest explanation is
a companion body (we see this for the motions of
binary star systems too, where it is much easier
to detect because the companions are much bigger).
The star will have relict momentum, linear and angular, from its earlier history (formation, encounters) but I can't see any way for that to
make the star wobble from side to side as it travels through space. Once the other star has passed, the motion of the original star would revert to a straight line.
Arguing with pseudoscientists (in this case, apparently a
sophisticated form of creationist) is like trying to
nail jelly to the wall. But so much fun!
As an (ex-)astrophysicist, I don't know what the
hell you are talking about. You seem to have a
weird interpretation of temperature, for one
thing:
Someone who specializes in stellar births seeks must reconcile the thermonuclear fusion theory of stellar energy generation with
evidence blantantly pointing to an external energy source: accelerating solar winds as the leave the surface of the sun, the corona's temperature
being twice that of the surface, and a dozen other readily observable phenomenon, just to make his job pallatable.
The corona's temperature is twice that of the
surface. I suppose this is supposed to be some
sort of energy imbalance showing that astronomers don't really know where the Sun's energy comes from? Pfft. The corona is extremely
tenuous; the total amount of energy in contained within it is trivial compared with the photosphere. Ie, higher temperature (=more energy per particle), but far fewer particles (so *less* total energy).
he thermonuclear fusion theory
(or hypothesis, rather) of stellar generation was not one gathered by the facts, but rather one created to fit the model of a billions of years old
Universe. All other theories had stars that burn out *way* too quickly.
We have a few facts to go on. Have you never heard
of thermonuclear fusion, as also seen in fusion reactors and fusion bombs? We understand the physics of this pretty well. We know the mass of stars, and hence the density at their cores. We know that at these pressures and temperatures, fusion *will* occur. What part of this is made up
to fit a model? It's standard physics.
You talk as if there was some sort of desire on the part of scientists to have a universe billions of years old. 'T isn't so. The data impelled scientists to believe this. Geologists were the first to face up to this, who then dragged biologists kicking and screaming into this, and physicists and astronomers came later (cf. Kelvin's famous models of the Sun, suggesting an age of (at most) a few million years). I'd reverse
it and ask why you seem so offended by the
idea of a universe billions of years old?
The Big
Bang does a great job of predicting observations observed with the specific intention of proving the Big Bang. I've as yet to read a science article
touting a new proof of the Big Bang from a research team not specifically looking for that proof. Our observations are engineered to observe what
we want to observe. Not because of any conspiracy or other absurdity, but because we pursue proof of our models with religious conviction.
Well, the original microwave background observations were made by engineers who knew nothing of big bang theory, but let's leave that
aside. In which ways are our observations "engineered" to agree with the big bang model? I mean specific ways, not bald assertions. How are
observations of cosmic lithium abundances,
microwave background fluctuations, and cosmic
velocity flows "engineered"? They either agree
with big bang or they don't. They either agree
with *your* theory, or they don't.
Until you can show me a better theory,
I see no need to abandon the big bang model.
(Steady staters tried this in the 1950s, without
success.) And yes, I know all about Ted Holden's rubbish.
Perhaps you've seen videotapes of Dr. Julius Sumner Miller... the rather animated British professor who would teach lessons of physics a few
decades ago.
Hey, cool! I never expected to see a Julius
Sumner Miller reference on slashdot. The old
prof. spent much time here in Australia, and was
much loved by the public - due to his appearance in a long-running series of Cadbury's chocolate
commericials, nearly everyone in my generation
can ask "Why is it so?" in a Millerian accent:)
But he wasn't British (or even Australian): he
was American. There seems to be some confusion
on this point (even the web page for the Julius Sumner Miller Fellowship at the University of Sydney refers to his "unmistakeable Canadian accent" but in the prologue to his second book of Millergrams, Miller himself refers to his "native New England". Unless he meant the AUSTRALIAN New England...
That's interesting, but irrelevant. The observatories don't let the astronomers take the data away
and then beg them to give it back - they keep
their own copies for archival purposes. So their
is no problem here - the observatory just unilaterally releases the data to the public whenever it wants to. Also, astronomy (at its best) has much more of a pure science, data-sharing mentality than agrochemicals, which I presume is sullied by real-world concerns;)
I'm not saying this like "I think this is so", I'm telling you how it is. I used to be an astronomer and my old thesis supervisor occasionally tries to interest me in working on one of these virtual observatory projects.
Both IE and Netscape come preinstalled with MacOS... have done since at least MacOS 8.5.1. And while I use Netscape eveywhere else, on a Mac IE
wins hands down.
Skyview and NED are also very useful resources along similar lines.
But apart from Microsoft's involvement (and the
idea has been batted around the astro community
for years, it's nothing new), assembling the whole lot in one place *is* a big step up from all those disparate collections which currently exist. It's like the move from BBS's to the Internet - the
"barriers to entry" are so much lower that it becomes easy to use (and so will be used) rather than tedious (and so is used only by the cognoscenti).
He'd also figure out that researchers build their little kingdoms, and they are NOT going to want to
contribute their data to the project.
Not true actually; the data - as in the raw
observations - usually belongs to the observatory
where it was collected. The researcher has first
use of it, obviously, but eventually it all becomes public access. Space Telescope are a prime
example of this, but most big observatories do
something similar these days.
The lack of equivalence between "bad" and "bad" is precisely my point. Yes, mouldy bread (and Microsoft) are bad, but
genocide (and the Nazis) are considerably worse than merely bad,
evil in fact. That's why the
comparison is invalid. It's quantitatively
so much badder that it becomes a qualitatively
different case. Saying they are both "super powerful" organisations is missing a whole lotta points and is quite meaningless.
And I'll repeat once more: it's not about
reining in Microsoft's rampant monopoly abuses
at all, it's about Germany's long-standing,
well-documented and possibly even well-founded
hang-up over Scientology. So the comparison should be between Scientology and the Nazis. Make of that
what you will...
And I never said he did say that. What's your definition of "super powerful"? The Nazis
directly caused the deaths of tens of millions of
people. They destroyed the political freedom of Germany for over 12 years, and did the same to much of Europe between 1939-45. It's taken this long for Germans to get over the stigma ensuing from having supported Hitler, and they are still twitchy about it.
How does Microsoft rate on that power scale? It doesn't. Millions of people are forced to use bad software... again, so what? I'd rather that than be in a concentration camp. If you still think Microsoft is "super powerful", in the same league as the Nazis, go read some
history books.
just imagine what it would be like if every
desktop system, run by completely clueless users in a majority of cases, had this kind of remote control
built in, without the need for sneaking in BO or Netbus.
The impression I got was exactly the opposite. Germany have (unsurprisingly) a large set of strong laws that are designed to prevent large super powerful organisations (MS, the Nazi party) using their power to over promote a single point of view.
Um, yeah. Microsoft are on a par with the Nazis.
That is so offensive and historically bogus I don't even know where to begin with that. Only a highly superficial reading of history could sustain such an opinion.
The whole thing breaks down (again) to choice. German law is very very hot on freedom of religous
choice. They've forced MS to respect that freedom, even over a very very minor point, which is a good
thing.
What does religious freedom have to do with a friggin' disk defragmenter? How does it impinge
on my religious freedom if I am "forced" to use
a software tool written by a Scientologist's firm? It could have been written by a Christian or a Muslim
or an atheist - so what? Does using the Win2k defrag
tool surreptitiously turn me into a Scientologist? It's just a piece of SOFTWARE.
1) Their references are necessary - if you don't get the reference, you don't get the joke
You may not get the joke, but you can still get a joke. Part of the reason why The Simpsons is a classic is because the humour works on different levels (to put it mostly basicly, adult and juvenile - cf the old Warner Brothers cartoons, which also worked on multiple levels).
I have two younger brothers, aged 17 and 12, and they laugh their asses off at The Simpsons, just like me. But we laugh for somewhat different reasons. Whenever I try to explain a Simpsons joke which is a reference, they look at me like I'm an idiot. They don't get it, and it's
not why they love the show. Similarly, my sister
started watching Futurama, and loves it too, despite not getting any of the sci-fi jokes. In an infinite universe, all things are possible.
Slashdot Mirror
I hope you also have a laptop with you when you are traveling :)
--
Yes, Traveller is still around ... its creator,
Marc Miller, still owns the rights to it and
is reprinting the original game books, plus all the
supplements, adventures, alien modules etc, in
single volumes (eg all the rules booklets in
one book). Great for a nostalgic Traveller player
like me who never gets to play it anymore! (Nice,
uncluttered system; but it's the richly detailed backdrop which is compelling ...)
The website is at Far Future Enterprises.
There was a short-lived attempt by a company called Imperium Games to release a 4th edition, back to basics Traveller, but it folded after a couple of books and supplements.
--
Seems the idea was in the air, so to speak ...
But you are right, by eavesdropping in this way there is a very high chance that any signal we detect will be (almost?) impossible to decipher. If they aren't trying to be universally understandable, they probably won't be understandable at all, except to somebody who knows the format.
OTOH, there is a very significant piece of information which will be obtained from the mere existence of any ET signal - that is of course, that ETs exist, and we are not alone. That would be worth knowing even if (frustratingly) we couldn't understand what they were saying. And if optical SETI advocates are right in suggesting that optical communication would be the norm for a spacefaring civilisation, then by all means, let's look in the optical, as it might be our best chance of finding them.
Uh, dude, this is 2001 - those articles are from 1999, and so are like 13 and 17 months old, respectively ...
The upshot is it only looks like his posts appear out of context ... even browsing at +1 you would often miss that his posts are part of a thread.
Sorry ... somebody had to say it - didn't they? :)
That explains so much! That sequence precisely parallels the decline in my appreciation of the Rama series. (I quite enjoyed Rama II, but by Rama Revealed I wished I'd just stopped with Rendezvous.)
Umm, I think that's the point that nomadic was making.
I saw it when I was a kid before I ever read the books, and the actors in the series are how I'll always imagine the characters - it will be hard to beat. But I heard a rumour that Hugh Laurie was up for the Arthur Dent role - he would be a perfect dim-witted English twit.
Put very simply (and I apologise for this, I'm too tired to explain it more intelligently) there has to be something else there to do the "tugging". Otherwise, the stars would move in a straight line. The easiest explanation is a companion body (we see this for the motions of binary star systems too, where it is much easier to detect because the companions are much bigger).
The star will have relict momentum, linear and angular, from its earlier history (formation, encounters) but I can't see any way for that to make the star wobble from side to side as it travels through space. Once the other star has passed, the motion of the original star would revert to a straight line.
As an (ex-)astrophysicist, I don't know what the hell you are talking about. You seem to have a weird interpretation of temperature, for one thing:
Someone who specializes in stellar births seeks must reconcile the thermonuclear fusion theory of stellar energy generation with evidence blantantly pointing to an external energy source: accelerating solar winds as the leave the surface of the sun, the corona's temperature being twice that of the surface, and a dozen other readily observable phenomenon, just to make his job pallatable.
The corona's temperature is twice that of the surface. I suppose this is supposed to be some sort of energy imbalance showing that astronomers don't really know where the Sun's energy comes from? Pfft. The corona is extremely tenuous; the total amount of energy in contained within it is trivial compared with the photosphere. Ie, higher temperature (=more energy per particle), but far fewer particles (so *less* total energy).
he thermonuclear fusion theory (or hypothesis, rather) of stellar generation was not one gathered by the facts, but rather one created to fit the model of a billions of years old Universe. All other theories had stars that burn out *way* too quickly.
We have a few facts to go on. Have you never heard of thermonuclear fusion, as also seen in fusion reactors and fusion bombs? We understand the physics of this pretty well. We know the mass of stars, and hence the density at their cores. We know that at these pressures and temperatures, fusion *will* occur. What part of this is made up to fit a model? It's standard physics.
You talk as if there was some sort of desire on the part of scientists to have a universe billions of years old. 'T isn't so. The data impelled scientists to believe this. Geologists were the first to face up to this, who then dragged biologists kicking and screaming into this, and physicists and astronomers came later (cf. Kelvin's famous models of the Sun, suggesting an age of (at most) a few million years). I'd reverse it and ask why you seem so offended by the idea of a universe billions of years old?
The Big Bang does a great job of predicting observations observed with the specific intention of proving the Big Bang. I've as yet to read a science article touting a new proof of the Big Bang from a research team not specifically looking for that proof. Our observations are engineered to observe what we want to observe. Not because of any conspiracy or other absurdity, but because we pursue proof of our models with religious conviction.
Well, the original microwave background observations were made by engineers who knew nothing of big bang theory, but let's leave that aside. In which ways are our observations "engineered" to agree with the big bang model? I mean specific ways, not bald assertions. How are observations of cosmic lithium abundances, microwave background fluctuations, and cosmic velocity flows "engineered"? They either agree with big bang or they don't. They either agree with *your* theory, or they don't.
Until you can show me a better theory, I see no need to abandon the big bang model. (Steady staters tried this in the 1950s, without success.) And yes, I know all about Ted Holden's rubbish.
Hey, cool! I never expected to see a Julius Sumner Miller reference on slashdot. The old prof. spent much time here in Australia, and was much loved by the public - due to his appearance in a long-running series of Cadbury's chocolate commericials, nearly everyone in my generation can ask "Why is it so?" in a Millerian accent :)
But he wasn't British (or even Australian): he was American. There seems to be some confusion on this point (even the web page for the Julius Sumner Miller Fellowship at the University of Sydney refers to his "unmistakeable Canadian accent" but in the prologue to his second book of Millergrams, Miller himself refers to his "native New England". Unless he meant the AUSTRALIAN New England ...
I'm not saying this like "I think this is so", I'm telling you how it is. I used to be an astronomer and my old thesis supervisor occasionally tries to interest me in working on one of these virtual observatory projects.
Typical American, can't even spell right :)
Both IE and Netscape come preinstalled with MacOS ... have done since at least MacOS 8.5.1. And while I use Netscape eveywhere else, on a Mac IE
wins hands down.
But apart from Microsoft's involvement (and the idea has been batted around the astro community for years, it's nothing new), assembling the whole lot in one place *is* a big step up from all those disparate collections which currently exist. It's like the move from BBS's to the Internet - the "barriers to entry" are so much lower that it becomes easy to use (and so will be used) rather than tedious (and so is used only by the cognoscenti).
Not true actually; the data - as in the raw observations - usually belongs to the observatory where it was collected. The researcher has first use of it, obviously, but eventually it all becomes public access. Space Telescope are a prime example of this, but most big observatories do something similar these days.
Brahe didn't even have that - the telescope wasn't invented until after his death. Making his observations even more amazing!
And I'll repeat once more: it's not about reining in Microsoft's rampant monopoly abuses at all, it's about Germany's long-standing, well-documented and possibly even well-founded hang-up over Scientology. So the comparison should be between Scientology and the Nazis. Make of that what you will ...
Well, duh. It happens in many elections, it's not a special feature of American ones.
How does Microsoft rate on that power scale? It doesn't. Millions of people are forced to use bad software ... again, so what? I'd rather that than be in a concentration camp. If you still think Microsoft is "super powerful", in the same league as the Nazis, go read some
history books.
Can you say "MacOS X"? *shudder*
I hope it aint gonna be like that.
Um, yeah. Microsoft are on a par with the Nazis. That is so offensive and historically bogus I don't even know where to begin with that. Only a highly superficial reading of history could sustain such an opinion.
The whole thing breaks down (again) to choice. German law is very very hot on freedom of religous choice. They've forced MS to respect that freedom, even over a very very minor point, which is a good thing.
What does religious freedom have to do with a friggin' disk defragmenter? How does it impinge on my religious freedom if I am "forced" to use a software tool written by a Scientologist's firm? It could have been written by a Christian or a Muslim or an atheist - so what? Does using the Win2k defrag tool surreptitiously turn me into a Scientologist? It's just a piece of SOFTWARE.
You may not get the joke, but you can still get a joke. Part of the reason why The Simpsons is a classic is because the humour works on different levels (to put it mostly basicly, adult and juvenile - cf the old Warner Brothers cartoons, which also worked on multiple levels).
I have two younger brothers, aged 17 and 12, and they laugh their asses off at The Simpsons, just like me. But we laugh for somewhat different reasons. Whenever I try to explain a Simpsons joke which is a reference, they look at me like I'm an idiot. They don't get it, and it's not why they love the show. Similarly, my sister started watching Futurama, and loves it too, despite not getting any of the sci-fi jokes.
In an infinite universe, all things are possible.