First, thanks for the detailed (and quick!) reply - I don't post much on/. nowadays but your post has really interested me.
I wouldn't (and didn't) say that uniform has a direct impact on how a person thinks, but the underlying impression I always got was that the people in charge were most bothered about how their students looked to the public and that's why they enforced uniform.
Well, your grandparent post mentioned:
Uniform also instills some very negative values: conformity is more valued than creativity, personal expression is something to stamped out and you must obey what someone above tells you rather than what you feel you should do.
...and I took this to be a direct comment as saying "that uniform has a direct impact on how a person thinks...", but posts on/. are a very hard medium to convey subtle meaning, and if I misunderstood, please accept my apology!
I *do* agree with you that the school is doing this not for the student's benefit, but for the school's image - I think that there's nothing wrong with that. From my personal experience at school, it had the added benefit that I didn't worry about what to wear. I think that any negative confirmity issues with wearing a uniform is more than offset by the cost (to the parents and kids) of the cool clothing, and the removal of the endless anxitey that would be put on uncool kids. You at least had the option of buying cool clothes - I honestly had no option.
I also agree with you about the bullying correlated to personality. Even with the uniform rule, there was a definite pressure to wear the 'right' trainers at PE (Addidas and Reebok were the expensive fashion at the time), so there was a definite focus for bullies' attention otherwise. Case in point, I was bullied very badly in my first year at the secondary school - and we were wearing uniforms there - and the bullying only stopped when they left the school that year. For me to fight back at them was a joke (didn't stop me from trying), as I was 8 and they were 12 years old and the school's rugby players (of course, being public school they could do no wrong in the teachers' eyes). They could physically abuse me and throw me about the place (which they did) and they certainly did it to a lot of the other first year kids too, so I wasn't a special case either.
Even though in later years I was an absolutely prime target for further bullying (fat kid with glasses and tramlines on my teeth), I was never successfully bullied in the rest of my school days, as I could joke my way out of any further situations and embarass them without much effort on my part, and I was lucky enough to be a very outgoing kid with very good friends. I'm not mad enough to think that school days were the best days of my life (helloooo university!) but I passed them easily enough.
So, to recap - I think your earlier post *did* say that uniform has a direct impact on how a person thinks, but that your comments on bullying mitigated by a confident approach is bang on the money.
Damn, this is the first interesting thread I have read on/. in *years*!
Your comment made me think back to my school days around London - I went to a private school for 8 to 12 and then local state school for 12-6th form, and both had a uniform requirement.
I really enjoyed having a school uniform - as a kid, I had the nerdiest clothes in the world, and having no pocket money meant that my clothes were definitely uncool. I used to really, really dread the odd casual clothes day we would have at the school. Everyone else loved it, as the bullies would have the coolest clothes, whilst I had to go as a bad eighties clothing joke - I'd get teased for the whole bloody day.
Having a uniform meant not having to sweat what new cool clothes I would have to wear, and it definitely made my schooling experience a lot smoother.
Also, I disagree with you on the whole 'conformity' thing - it certainly didn't crimp my thinking, nor that of any other people I knew. In fact, I'd argue that not having to sweat over what clothes coordination would be in vogue that week actually frees you up to think about other, non-conforming things. But then I would say that, as I am a "conformist" *grin*
Ech, just realised that your comment is 11 days old. Damn. I would appreciate your comments if you do read this!
"Finite and unbounded" was Einstein's model, and nobody's come up with a compelling reason to think otherwise so far.
Sure, but cosmologies with zero and negative curvature work just as well. Until we can measure the difference between "finite and unbounded" (positive curvature) and "infinite and unbounded" (negative curvature) we can't say which one is the correct description of our universe.
Most measurements put the universe's geometry as zero plus or minus a measurement error. The measured error puts a 'minimum size' of the universe on the scale of 24 Gigaparsec, at least.
Douglas Adam's joke is ruined by the currently accepted theory that the universe is finite.
Actually, no. There is a finite age for the universe (about 13 billion years) but that does not mean that the universe is that size. There's evidence to suggest that the universe is considerably larger than that, and possibly even infinite in extent.
If this were an engineered system, you would have a single point of failure with these type Ia supernovae observations.
You're quite right, and because it was a single technique, it is vulnerable to this problem. I found an article written by the head of one of the supernova search teams, and it does a much better job than my/. post:
Other methods that independently point towards the existence of a dark energy term include results from the WMAP explorer (looking at the microwave background from the Big Bang):
I was wrong in my last comment to you - dark energy can describe the observations we see, and it ties in neatly with other independent checks, but I'm not sure I can call it an 'observed phenomenon' in the sense of something I can point to and say 'there it is!'
As for the Pioneer craft, that anomaly is way too large to be caused by 'dark energy' acceleration. The dark energy term is directly proportional to separation of objects (and not inverse square like gravity) and it is only marginally apparent in measurements that look back over half the universe's current age! I suspect that in the Voyager case there will be something pretty mundane that explains it.
First, how do they know the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate rather rather than decelerating at a slower than expected rate. The distance measurements I recall seeing were rather crude to determine acceleration. Second, if fundamental physical constants can vary over time, then perhaps so can things that depend on those constants like the brightness of the supernova types that are used to calibrate distance scales.
Well, over the past few years the initial results from 1998 have been confirmed with more measurements. Two groups were independently making this measurement, and the discovery of this acceleration was so unexpected, both groups didn't publish for a few months and in the end agreed to publish in the same journal with back to back articles.
So how did they do it? It turns out that a certain type of star explosion (a type 1a supernova) has a very distinct and specific brightness when they go off. these supernovae can shine as bright as their host galaxies for a few days, and so by looking at lots of galaxies, every so oftern they see the distinct brightness of a supernova going off. They then intensively monitor the light curve as the supernova fades over many tens of days, which gives a good indication of the physical distance to the supernova.
They then measure the redshift of the host galaxy, which gives the speed of recession for that supernova (the supernova system is moving within the galaxy), and you plot a form of these two quantities against each other. The resultant curve implied that only accelerating universe models fit. This was such a suprise that many astronomers started up more intensive searches for really distant supernovae, and these confirmed what the intial experiments suggested.
Now, there are sertain systematic errors to take account of - how do we know that all supernovae go off with the same brightness of explosion? What happens if there's lots of dust that makes supernovae appear dimmer (and thus farther away than they physically are?) I'd be happy to explain if you want, so send a reply to this post and I'll talk some more.
The short version (THIS is short?!) is that many effects that could give a false signal have been ruled out - exceptional results require excepconal evidence (sorry, Prof. Sagan!) so 99% of astronomers believe these results.
Ultimately, and I think this is a reasonable view, we shouldn't count "dark energy" as a solid theory until we observe it locally in our labs where we have far more control over observations and the experiment.
Sorry to be pedantic, but dark energy is an observed phenomenon. WHAT dark energy is, is the reall million dollar question. We'd love to see it in the lab, but when you work out what the typical effect of dark energy would be over omething the size of the solar system, it is a fantastically miniscule effect that we could not detect, never mind trying to detect it in a lab.
Hope this helps (and that you'll still be around to read this some 8 hours later....)
I had multiple folders, sorted by people/project. I got in a complete mess and finally snapped when I spent half an hour looking for a simple message.
Use procmail to write all incoming messages to 'all-mail-YYYY-MM' and use Mutt hooks to write out to the same directory.
At the end of the year, cat them together and make 'all-mail-YYYY'. Accessing and reading this mailbox can be done with 'mutt -R -f all-mail-YYYY' as this opens read-only. Use 'l' to do 'limit' searches and use ~t, ~f, and ~b in AND combinations to limit on To: From: and body of messages. It's lovely only having to look in one place!
Procmail: INCOMING=all-mail-`date +%Y-%m` # now I want to keep a copy of EVERYTHING in a dated directory:0 c: $INCOMING
Having read V for Vendetta many times over, I think it manages to keep away from the rampant Thatcher bashing very well. You can certainly read it without knowing any British politics. I think it's pretty accessible.
The gist of the story is that the world has undergone a mini-nuclear war (one of the characters mentions that "there aren't any elephants any more") and the resulting food shortages lead to the collapse of the old government and a fascist regime takes over. I'd imagine that it was seen as a frighteningly plausible scenario in the mid 80's.
It's one of his best, and I can keep reading it again and again. Go buy it, go read it!
Please don't blame the religion... Just because there are a lot of people who claim to subscribe to that religion doesn't mean they all want to attack other beliefs.
That's a very good point, and I stand corrected. I was trying to criticize the parent's post for what I percieved to be their aggression against the grandparent's atheist point of view. I apologise.
A number of [fanatic atheists] regularly post on/., but are rarely modded Trolls like their religious counterparts are.
Well, it makes a change from the flames on Yahoo newsgroups, at least:-)
Did you ever consider that saying you stopped accepting that the core of everything they believe in and the basis of everything they do had any value might be inherently hostile?
How is it hostile? He's not saying that he hates you or wants to attack you for your belief. That's a damn sight more tolerant than many other religions I've encountered...
There are guys with real responsibilities like families and mortgage payments who'd kill for your opportunity.
In which case, now they know that the midwest is a great place for tech jobs, and they can move out there at the earliest possible opportunity.
Yes, opportunity... You have a chance and a choice. If you're going to be petty I hope you starve for it.
He's a single guy, not earning for a family. I think that gives him plenty of right to be petty if he wants to. When the question of having a family comes up, that's a good time to reasses your options.
I've commented elsewhere down this tree, but just to say I share your pain. Spent 18 mo. in Cinti and hated just about all of it. Downtown is frightening, Vine just scares me, Clifton was nice though.
To make the best of a shit place, I would recommend:
Ambar Indian Curry house in Clifton. Simply the best Indian I've ever had, and that includes from my home country of Britain. Chicken Tikka Massala to die for.
The Comet Pub, somewhere in the west of Cinti. Excellent Bluegrass, and they have Newcastle Brown Ale on tap, along with quite a few other beers.
Go to the Railway Museum and check it out. Very nicely restored. Park downtown and walk across the Brooklyn Bridge (actually the prototype for the Brooklyn one) and then around the North Kentucky town, across that bridge and back up into Cinti.
River boat cruise is definitely worth it, but this was at the end of my prison sentence(bb2dw) work there, so watching popcorn pop was relatively exciting by then, too....
Oktoberfest over in the town across the river (can't remember its name) on the Mainstrasse, and also the Oktoberfest in downtown Cinti, but this is a lot poorer.
That's all I could find that was notable in Cinti in 18 months. Oh! The downtown library is fairly rocking, though:)
Good luck, I hope you make it out of there without losing your brain. Not all the midwest is that awful.
I understand the point you're making, but I've lived in Cincinnati for 18 months and I know what brufleth is going on about. The rest of the midwest may be dramatically different, but Cincinnati blows HARD.
To put this in perspective, I worked in Tucson, then in Cinti, then back to Tucson. Tucson is a radiant shining city of equality and tolerance compared to Cinti. Christ, am I glad to be out of that shithole.
The racism there is frightening - I'm originally from Britain, from a suburb of London, and after a few days in Cinti I realised how frightening a place it was. I lived in Clifton, and many white suburbanites were amazed that anyone would want to live in a 'culturaly diverse' district as that.
Beautyon, you were doing okay until this post. Your previous post came across as a good rant - the image you successfully put in my mind was that of a middle aged hippy raging against the system, "don't let them fool you, man!" who's taking it all a bit too seriously. The scene was set for a good old flamewar.
Unfortunately, you successfully avoided all the points that the poster asked of you, and kicked it off with "You are as thick as shit" (ad hominem attack, how crass), then started in with the CAPITAL LETTERS, beloved of teenagers and AOL users everywhere. Suddenly the image of a hippie sprouted troll-like horns.
And then you made reference to the Holocaust - the small 'pop' you hear is the last of any credibility you may have had suddenly disappearing.
Your scores are:
Style - 8/10 General frothing - 9/10 Keeping up the troll - 2/10 (very poor!)
Overall, not a bad troll for a beginner, but you could (and should) have kept it going for another couple of posts instead of blowing your load all at once. Shame on you!
but when you are looking at something 50 light years away does it really make a difference that you take measurements from 120 feet apart?
It makes a big difference. The aim of the game is to increase your angular resolution, and interferometry is a way of combining two separate telescopes to get the angular resolution of one larger telescope.
You cannot take one image, wait a few seconds to get a baseline, and then take another image. For the technique to work, you need the two images to be recorded with phase information, and for wavelengths shorter than radio waves, you cannot easily and efficiently do that.
For a 8.4m single mirror, the 125 feet separation increases the angular resolution by a factor of 6.25. That's a very useful improvement.
The problem is that the light from the two mirrors has to be cophased to within 1/10 of a single wavelength of UV light. Those tolerances are absolute bastards to achieve, even in outer space.
I would say that, for the type of science that HST does (at the wavelengths that it does it), there is nothing on the ground that can match its resolving power.
*winces* sorry to be anal about it, but if you added "for visible wavelengths" to that then it would be on the money.
HST has an IR camera, and with that the AO ground observations on large telescopes beat HST in spatial resolution, period. The diffraction limit for HST at 1.65 microns is 200 mas, whereas for a 6.5m telescope, it is 64 mas. The PSF of HST is cleaner (i.e. follows a sinc pattern well) and stable than that of a ground based AO equipped telescope, but you can split binaries in the NIR on the ground that HST could not resolve. Because of the power law of the atmospheric turbulence, visible light AO is not being tackled, and so far there is no big push to work on it, as there is a lot to be done at near IR wavelengths where AO works a couple of orders better.
Thanks for your patience with my nitpicking - I do agree with your general view! AO in near IR is extremely competitive, but for visible and UV imaging, HST cannot be beat.
Well, the 85 mas is for the MMT AO deformable secondary mirror system. I've reduced Ks band images with 90 mas full width at half maximum, and that's pretty repeatable. We're not the best by any means, and I've seen better images from the larger telescopes, but that's mostly due to larger aperture and having excellent seeing. (Nobody will showcase images from AO nights of 2 arcsecond seeing!)
The general definition of resolution is pretty fuzzy anyway (no pun intended) for AO systems, because the FWHM doesn't tell you the Strehl ratio of the image, which is what you really care about with these instruments. You can have poor image quality and yet still have a good FWHM measurement.
My original comment was on your fairly blanket statement about "nothing less than 100mas". I would have emphasised the lack of wide field correction, lack of UV wavelength coverage, and the problem with clouds as better reasons why AO cannot replace space telescopes.
AO is by no means a replacement for a space telescope (I would never claim that, and I work on an AO system!) but for certain science cases, it can do better than HST, partially because 8 meters of aperture beats a highly competitive 2m space telescope in light gathering capibility.
I've just had a thought rereading your comments - were you referring to purely visible (0.4 - 1.0 um) AO correction with 0.1 arcseconds? If you were, please accept my apologies - that'll teach me to RTF Comments:)
I have NEVER heard of anyone getting better than 0.3 arcseconds from the ground (and rarely even anything approaching that)
Well, that's not true. Speckle interferometry can get to 70 milliarcseconds at 1.2 microns wavelength, and I'm working on an AO system that can get down to 85 milliarcseconds. What you may mean is that the Strehl ratio is nowhere near as good, which is very true.
If you are talking about the visible bands though, then it is true that hardly anyone has done well in that wavelength regime, and there I've heard the AEOS telescope on Maui can get halfway decent performance around a micron wavelength.
We discussed this at astronomer's coffee this morning. They did take a very low spectral resolution spectrum of it and it is fairly consistent with colours from a cool planet, but a proper motion measurement (i.e. take a picture about 2 years from now and see if they both move across the sky together) will confirm it.
Just to add to what you said, the radial velocity technique starts to get into trouble with metal-poor stars or stars that have periodic fluctiations in their chromospheres. The reflex velocity signal of a earth mass planet is much smaller than the fake signal caused by turbulence in the star's atmosphere.
Slashdot Mirror
You utter bastard. I haven't laughed so hard at slashdot in years. Thank you!
I wouldn't (and didn't) say that uniform has a direct impact on how a person thinks, but the underlying impression I always got was that the people in charge were most bothered about how their students looked to the public and that's why they enforced uniform.
Well, your grandparent post mentioned:
Uniform also instills some very negative values: conformity is more valued than creativity, personal expression is something to stamped out and you must obey what someone above tells you rather than what you feel you should do.
...and I took this to be a direct comment as saying "that uniform has a direct impact on how a person thinks...", but posts on /. are a very hard medium to convey subtle meaning, and if I misunderstood, please accept my apology!
/. in *years*!
I *do* agree with you that the school is doing this not for the student's benefit, but for the school's image - I think that there's nothing wrong with that. From my personal experience at school, it had the added benefit that I didn't worry about what to wear. I think that any negative confirmity issues with wearing a uniform is more than offset by the cost (to the parents and kids) of the cool clothing, and the removal of the endless anxitey that would be put on uncool kids. You at least had the option of buying cool clothes - I honestly had no option.
I also agree with you about the bullying correlated to personality. Even with the uniform rule, there was a definite pressure to wear the 'right' trainers at PE (Addidas and Reebok were the expensive fashion at the time), so there was a definite focus for bullies' attention otherwise. Case in point, I was bullied very badly in my first year at the secondary school - and we were wearing uniforms there - and the bullying only stopped when they left the school that year. For me to fight back at them was a joke (didn't stop me from trying), as I was 8 and they were 12 years old and the school's rugby players (of course, being public school they could do no wrong in the teachers' eyes). They could physically abuse me and throw me about the place (which they did) and they certainly did it to a lot of the other first year kids too, so I wasn't a special case either.
Even though in later years I was an absolutely prime target for further bullying (fat kid with glasses and tramlines on my teeth), I was never successfully bullied in the rest of my school days, as I could joke my way out of any further situations and embarass them without much effort on my part, and I was lucky enough to be a very outgoing kid with very good friends. I'm not mad enough to think that school days were the best days of my life (helloooo university!) but I passed them easily enough.
So, to recap - I think your earlier post *did* say that uniform has a direct impact on how a person thinks, but that your comments on bullying mitigated by a confident approach is bang on the money.
Damn, this is the first interesting thread I have read on
Cheers,
Dr Fish
Your comment made me think back to my school days around London - I went to a private school for 8 to 12 and then local state school for 12-6th form, and both had a uniform requirement.
I really enjoyed having a school uniform - as a kid, I had the nerdiest clothes in the world, and having no pocket money meant that my clothes were definitely uncool. I used to really, really dread the odd casual clothes day we would have at the school. Everyone else loved it, as the bullies would have the coolest clothes, whilst I had to go as a bad eighties clothing joke - I'd get teased for the whole bloody day.
Having a uniform meant not having to sweat what new cool clothes I would have to wear, and it definitely made my schooling experience a lot smoother.
Also, I disagree with you on the whole 'conformity' thing - it certainly didn't crimp my thinking, nor that of any other people I knew. In fact, I'd argue that not having to sweat over what clothes coordination would be in vogue that week actually frees you up to think about other, non-conforming things. But then I would say that, as I am a "conformist" *grin*
Ech, just realised that your comment is 11 days old. Damn. I would appreciate your comments if you do read this!
Dr Fish
"Finite and unbounded" was Einstein's model, and nobody's come up with a compelling reason to think otherwise so far.
:http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0310233
Sure, but cosmologies with zero and negative curvature work just as well. Until we can measure the difference between "finite and unbounded" (positive curvature) and "infinite and unbounded" (negative curvature) we can't say which one is the correct description of our universe.
Most measurements put the universe's geometry as zero plus or minus a measurement error. The measured error puts a 'minimum size' of the universe on the scale of 24 Gigaparsec, at least.
Reference paper
Dr Fish
Douglas Adam's joke is ruined by the currently accepted theory that the universe is finite.
Actually, no. There is a finite age for the universe (about 13 billion years) but that does not mean that the universe is that size. There's evidence to suggest that the universe is considerably larger than that, and possibly even infinite in extent.
Dr Fish
If this were an engineered system, you would have a single point of failure with these type Ia supernovae observations.
/. post:
p df
o smic_darknrg_020115-1.html
You're quite right, and because it was a single technique, it is vulnerable to this problem. I found an article written by the head of one of the supernova search teams, and it does a much better job than my
http://www-supernova.lbl.gov/PhysicsTodayArticle.
Other methods that independently point towards the existence of a dark energy term include results from the WMAP explorer (looking at the microwave background from the Big Bang):
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/astronomy/c
I was wrong in my last comment to you - dark energy can describe the observations we see, and it ties in neatly with other independent checks, but I'm not sure I can call it an 'observed phenomenon' in the sense of something I can point to and say 'there it is!'
As for the Pioneer craft, that anomaly is way too large to be caused by 'dark energy' acceleration. The dark energy term is directly proportional to separation of objects (and not inverse square like gravity) and it is only marginally apparent in measurements that look back over half the universe's current age! I suspect that in the Voyager case there will be something pretty mundane that explains it.
Dr Fish
First, how do they know the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate rather rather than decelerating at a slower than expected rate. The distance measurements I recall seeing were rather crude to determine acceleration. Second, if fundamental physical constants can vary over time, then perhaps so can things that depend on those constants like the brightness of the supernova types that are used to calibrate distance scales.
Well, over the past few years the initial results from 1998 have been confirmed with more measurements. Two groups were independently making this measurement, and the discovery of this acceleration was so unexpected, both groups didn't publish for a few months and in the end agreed to publish in the same journal with back to back articles.
So how did they do it? It turns out that a certain type of star explosion (a type 1a supernova) has a very distinct and specific brightness when they go off. these supernovae can shine as bright as their host galaxies for a few days, and so by looking at lots of galaxies, every so oftern they see the distinct brightness of a supernova going off. They then intensively monitor the light curve as the supernova fades over many tens of days, which gives a good indication of the physical distance to the supernova.
They then measure the redshift of the host galaxy, which gives the speed of recession for that supernova (the supernova system is moving within the galaxy), and you plot a form of these two quantities against each other. The resultant curve implied that only accelerating universe models fit. This was such a suprise that many astronomers started up more intensive searches for really distant supernovae, and these confirmed what the intial experiments suggested.
Now, there are sertain systematic errors to take account of - how do we know that all supernovae go off with the same brightness of explosion? What happens if there's lots of dust that makes supernovae appear dimmer (and thus farther away than they physically are?) I'd be happy to explain if you want, so send a reply to this post and I'll talk some more.
The short version (THIS is short?!) is that many effects that could give a false signal have been ruled out - exceptional results require excepconal evidence (sorry, Prof. Sagan!) so 99% of astronomers believe these results.
Ultimately, and I think this is a reasonable view, we shouldn't count "dark energy" as a solid theory until we observe it locally in our labs where we have far more control over observations and the experiment.
Sorry to be pedantic, but dark energy is an observed phenomenon. WHAT dark energy is, is the reall million dollar question. We'd love to see it in the lab, but when you work out what the typical effect of dark energy would be over omething the size of the solar system, it is a fantastically miniscule effect that we could not detect, never mind trying to detect it in a lab.
Hope this helps (and that you'll still be around to read this some 8 hours later....)
Dr Fish
...and let mutt sort out.
:0 c:
I had multiple folders, sorted by people/project. I got in a complete mess and finally snapped when I spent half an hour looking for a simple message.
Use procmail to write all incoming messages to 'all-mail-YYYY-MM' and use Mutt hooks to write out to the same directory.
At the end of the year, cat them together and make 'all-mail-YYYY'. Accessing and reading this mailbox can be done with 'mutt -R -f all-mail-YYYY' as this opens read-only. Use 'l' to do 'limit' searches and use ~t, ~f, and ~b in AND combinations to limit on To: From: and body of messages. It's lovely only having to look in one place!
Procmail:
INCOMING=all-mail-`date +%Y-%m`
# now I want to keep a copy of EVERYTHING in a dated directory
$INCOMING
Muttrc:
set record="+all-mail-`date +%Y-%m`"
Works for me!
Dr Fish
Maybe it's because I'm completely drunk after a two hour lunch, but that was a very revealing and informative post. Thanks!
Dr Fish
Having read V for Vendetta many times over, I think it manages to keep away from the rampant Thatcher bashing very well. You can certainly read it without knowing any British politics. I think it's pretty accessible.
The gist of the story is that the world has undergone a mini-nuclear war (one of the characters mentions that "there aren't any elephants any more") and the resulting food shortages lead to the collapse of the old government and a fascist regime takes over. I'd imagine that it was seen as a frighteningly plausible scenario in the mid 80's.
It's one of his best, and I can keep reading it again and again. Go buy it, go read it!
England prevails.
Dr Fish
Please don't blame the religion... Just because there are a lot of people who claim to subscribe to that religion doesn't mean they all want to attack other beliefs.
/., but are rarely modded Trolls like their religious counterparts are.
:-)
That's a very good point, and I stand corrected. I was trying to criticize the parent's post for what I percieved to be their aggression against the grandparent's atheist point of view. I apologise.
A number of [fanatic atheists] regularly post on
Well, it makes a change from the flames on Yahoo newsgroups, at least
Cheers,
Dr Fish
Did you ever consider that saying you stopped accepting that the core of everything they believe in and the basis of everything they do had any value might be inherently hostile?
How is it hostile? He's not saying that he hates you or wants to attack you for your belief. That's a damn sight more tolerant than many other religions I've encountered...
Dr Fish
"Is not necessaraily true, comrade," said the drunk Siberian, licking his vodka popsicle and squinting at the sun.
There are guys with real responsibilities like families and mortgage payments who'd kill for your opportunity.
In which case, now they know that the midwest is a great place for tech jobs, and they can move out there at the earliest possible opportunity.
Yes, opportunity... You have a chance and a choice. If you're going to be petty I hope you starve for it.
He's a single guy, not earning for a family. I think that gives him plenty of right to be petty if he wants to. When the question of having a family comes up, that's a good time to reasses your options.
Dr Fish
I've commented elsewhere down this tree, but just to say I share your pain. Spent 18 mo. in Cinti and hated just about all of it. Downtown is frightening, Vine just scares me, Clifton was nice though.
:)
To make the best of a shit place, I would recommend:
Ambar Indian Curry house in Clifton. Simply the best Indian I've ever had, and that includes from my home country of Britain. Chicken Tikka Massala to die for.
The Comet Pub, somewhere in the west of Cinti. Excellent Bluegrass, and they have Newcastle Brown Ale on tap, along with quite a few other beers.
Go to the Railway Museum and check it out. Very nicely restored. Park downtown and walk across the Brooklyn Bridge (actually the prototype for the Brooklyn one) and then around the North Kentucky town, across that bridge and back up into Cinti.
River boat cruise is definitely worth it, but this was at the end of my prison sentence(bb2dw) work there, so watching popcorn pop was relatively exciting by then, too....
Oktoberfest over in the town across the river (can't remember its name) on the Mainstrasse, and also the Oktoberfest in downtown Cinti, but this is a lot poorer.
That's all I could find that was notable in Cinti in 18 months. Oh! The downtown library is fairly rocking, though
Good luck, I hope you make it out of there without losing your brain. Not all the midwest is that awful.
Dr Fish
I understand the point you're making, but I've lived in Cincinnati for 18 months and I know what brufleth is going on about. The rest of the midwest may be dramatically different, but Cincinnati blows HARD.
To put this in perspective, I worked in Tucson, then in Cinti, then back to Tucson. Tucson is a radiant shining city of equality and tolerance compared to Cinti. Christ, am I glad to be out of that shithole.
The racism there is frightening - I'm originally from Britain, from a suburb of London, and after a few days in Cinti I realised how frightening a place it was. I lived in Clifton, and many white suburbanites were amazed that anyone would want to live in a 'culturaly diverse' district as that.
Very, very bizzare.
Dr Fish
Beautyon, you were doing okay until this post. Your previous post came across as a good rant - the image you successfully put in my mind was that of a middle aged hippy raging against the system, "don't let them fool you, man!" who's taking it all a bit too seriously. The scene was set for a good old flamewar.
Unfortunately, you successfully avoided all the points that the poster asked of you, and kicked it off with "You are as thick as shit" (ad hominem attack, how crass), then started in with the CAPITAL LETTERS, beloved of teenagers and AOL users everywhere. Suddenly the image of a hippie sprouted troll-like horns.
And then you made reference to the Holocaust - the small 'pop' you hear is the last of any credibility you may have had suddenly disappearing.
Your scores are:
Style - 8/10
General frothing - 9/10
Keeping up the troll - 2/10 (very poor!)
Overall, not a bad troll for a beginner, but you could (and should) have kept it going for another couple of posts instead of blowing your load all at once. Shame on you!
Dr Fish
It makes a big difference. The aim of the game is to increase your angular resolution, and interferometry is a way of combining two separate telescopes to get the angular resolution of one larger telescope.
You cannot take one image, wait a few seconds to get a baseline, and then take another image. For the technique to work, you need the two images to be recorded with phase information, and for wavelengths shorter than radio waves, you cannot easily and efficiently do that.
For a 8.4m single mirror, the 125 feet separation increases the angular resolution by a factor of 6.25. That's a very useful improvement.
The problem is that the light from the two mirrors has to be cophased to within 1/10 of a single wavelength of UV light. Those tolerances are absolute bastards to achieve, even in outer space.
Dr Fish
"So the Perkinses turned to Jaysen's therapist, Kim McDaniel, for help."
Uh, he's already got a therapist? Oh boy...
I would say that, for the type of science that HST does (at the wavelengths that it does it), there is nothing on the ground that can match its resolving power.
*winces* sorry to be anal about it, but if you added "for visible wavelengths" to that then it would be on the money.
HST has an IR camera, and with that the AO ground observations on large telescopes beat HST in spatial resolution, period. The diffraction limit for HST at 1.65 microns is 200 mas, whereas for a 6.5m telescope, it is 64 mas. The PSF of HST is cleaner (i.e. follows a sinc pattern well) and stable than that of a ground based AO equipped telescope, but you can split binaries in the NIR on the ground that HST could not resolve. Because of the power law of the atmospheric turbulence, visible light AO is not being tackled, and so far there is no big push to work on it, as there is a lot to be done at near IR wavelengths where AO works a couple of orders better.
Thanks for your patience with my nitpicking - I do agree with your general view! AO in near IR is extremely competitive, but for visible and UV imaging, HST cannot be beat.
Dr Fish
Well, the 85 mas is for the MMT AO deformable secondary mirror system. I've reduced Ks band images with 90 mas full width at half maximum, and that's pretty repeatable. We're not the best by any means, and I've seen better images from the larger telescopes, but that's mostly due to larger aperture and having excellent seeing. (Nobody will showcase images from AO nights of 2 arcsecond seeing!)
The general definition of resolution is pretty fuzzy anyway (no pun intended) for AO systems, because the FWHM doesn't tell you the Strehl ratio of the image, which is what you really care about with these instruments. You can have poor image quality and yet still have a good FWHM measurement.
My original comment was on your fairly blanket statement about "nothing less than 100mas". I would have emphasised the lack of wide field correction, lack of UV wavelength coverage, and the problem with clouds as better reasons why AO cannot replace space telescopes.
AO is by no means a replacement for a space telescope (I would never claim that, and I work on an AO system!) but for certain science cases, it can do better than HST, partially because 8 meters of aperture beats a highly competitive 2m space telescope in light gathering capibility.
I've just had a thought rereading your comments - were you referring to purely visible (0.4 - 1.0 um) AO correction with 0.1 arcseconds? If you were, please accept my apologies - that'll teach me to RTF Comments :)
Dr Fish
Well, that's not true. Speckle interferometry can get to 70 milliarcseconds at 1.2 microns wavelength, and I'm working on an AO system that can get down to 85 milliarcseconds. What you may mean is that the Strehl ratio is nowhere near as good, which is very true.
If you are talking about the visible bands though, then it is true that hardly anyone has done well in that wavelength regime, and there I've heard the AEOS telescope on Maui can get halfway decent performance around a micron wavelength.
Dr Fish
He's hampered more by the blind faith of other people in their own way of doing things, and their unwillingness to listen to anything new.
Whatever you say, Tom. *grin*
Dr Fish (who's ALWAYS right)
We discussed this at astronomer's coffee this morning. They did take a very low spectral resolution spectrum of it and it is fairly consistent with colours from a cool planet, but a proper motion measurement (i.e. take a picture about 2 years from now and see if they both move across the sky together) will confirm it.
Dr Fish
Just to add to what you said, the radial velocity technique starts to get into trouble with metal-poor stars or stars that have periodic fluctiations in their chromospheres. The reflex velocity signal of a earth mass planet is much smaller than the fake signal caused by turbulence in the star's atmosphere.
Cheers,
Dr Fish