This reminds me a lot of something one of my grad-school professors did: he looked at Lewis & Clark's compass & sextant measurements to re-construct the magnetic field declination in the interior continental US ~200 years ago:
http://www.geosociety.org/gsatoday/archive/13/10/
they were remarkably accurate at dead reckoning direction & distance.
Good point, though I can imagine that your average movie outsells your average video game by a factor of 3-6 (plus video games don't have box office profits).
The presence of water vapor in an object like HD 189733b is not remarkable: water has been detected in the spectra of brown dwarfs, in the giant planets of our own solar system, and the transiting exoplanet HD209458b.
Carbon dioxide, on the other hand, is a surprise: at the temperatures and pressures encountered in an exoplanet atmosphere of this type, all carbon should be present as methane (if cool enough) or carbon monoxide. Giant planet atmospheres are generally far too hydrogen-rich for CO2 to form in any appreciable quantity. So its detection requires an extra-ordinary explanation for its origin.
Here is a Nature preprint from the same research group, describing H2O, CH4, and CO detection. I was hoping to find a research article (and not just a news story or press release) describing CO2 detection, but haven't found any yet...
(x) Pointlessness of an animal adapted for an ice age during a period of global warming
Great post. I know I'm being pedantic, but we are currently in an interglacial period (Holocene) of an ice age (Quaternary; the polar regions still have ice sheets). So a mammoth would probably be fine in northern Canada or parts of Greenland...
So, as for being too young? Not buying it. There are many ranking officers that are much younger than their ranking CPOs (high ranking enlisted) on board. Subsequently, junior officers are much younger than the Chief's on-board.
Good point. A good movie example is Master & Commander: the average age of the officer corps is below that of the enlisted/sailors, and some of the officers are young boys.
I don't see anything wrong with the shadows either. Sun-synchronous doesn't mean there won't be any shadows, it just means that the shadow angles will be consistent every time the satellite takes a picture of a given location.
Well that brings up an interesting memory, relevant to this line of research:
I watched Empire Strikes Back several dozen times as a child - I had (and for the most part, still have) that movie memorized: the sounds and the visual images.
Any child who grew up attending church with their parents can relate to how bored they got during the sermon/homily. I had a simple solution: I would "replay" The Empire Strikes Back in my mind (starting with the launches of the imperial probes; replaying the text scroll never really worked). So instead of being bored, I would basically "watch" my favorite movie to pass the time.
It is true that a very small percentage of images are processed and released to the public (usually accompanied by a press release caption). But if you dig, you can almost always find that the raw images are available.
The vast majority of images are unspectacular, and really not worth processing (color correction, etc) and putting in a press release. As I graduate student, I briefly worked on a project using ALL of the Voyager images of Saturn's icy satellites Mimas and Tethys. Most of the images were lousy: out of focus, too dark, too bright, too far, etc. Out of all the images, I'd estimate about 2% were useful for the project.
Though the corona's temperature is high it's molecules are so far apart that the gases release little heat. If a person were to stand on the sun's corona they wouldn't burn, they would freeze in the near vacuum of the corona.
Oh, they'd burn alright - but it would be a really bad tan. The side facing the Sun would absorb insane amounts of radiation; the side facing away would freeze...
A good example (though far away from the corona): the extreme surface temperatures of Mercury, depending on the amount of sunlight, range from around 100 K to over 700 K.
Even when it comes to mapping, we have more complete coverage, and better resolution, of the global topography of Mars (thanks to the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter) than of Earth.
That book was a great read. I particularly enjoyed the story about testing the radar cross section of an early scale model of the Have Blue aircraft. Basically, they would stick the model on a pole on the other side of an airfield, point a radar beam at it, and measure the cross section.
When they fired up the test on the Have Blue model, there was *nothing* there - basically zero cross section. The radar operators were perplexed and wondering if their was something amiss with their equipment. Then one of the operators said, "Oh, we've got it now". What the operators didn't see was that a bird had just landed atop the model aircraft...
Talking to Chinese of all stripes, I find they don't understand the western image of China is a man standing down a tank. That isn't the life they came from. On the other hand, most can't grapple with the Maoist atrocities. They're taught all about the opium wars and colonialism, though. So when east meets west, both sides see the world in very different light. Yes, we're raised with different narratives, but there is one big difference: those in "the West" actually have the freedom to learn both sides of a story. The Chinese cannot say the same thing.
An example: learning about some of America's bad behavior in Latin America, in a public school system. Is there any comparable self-criticism in China's history lessons? Of course not.
If the 200 billion tonne ball of iridium and iron a ball of iridium and iron? Um, no.
1) Iridium is much more abundant in meteorites than on the Earth (elevated Ir levels at the KT boundary is one of the key lines of evidence for the impact theory of dinosaur extinction), BUT: Ir is still only present at the ppm level even in iron meteorites (which have the highest Ir concentrations).
2) Apophis is not a ball of iron - its density is too low. Like other asteroids (and for that matter, the majority of meteorites), it's a chunk of rock. In terms of impact energy, composition is irrelevant (mass is the key parameter). "Ball of iridium and iron" is just crappy, sensationalist writing because getting hit by a ball of metal seems worse than getting hit by a rock.
But there is an intriguing suggestion that the gas giant, which is some 14 times the size of our Jupiter, could be even younger. That is a very good point. 14 Jupiter masses is very close to the lower mass limit for temporary deuterium fusion. It will end up being a brown dwarf, not a planet. The 75 Jupiter mass threshold is for sustained hydrogen fusion (a star).
Slashdot Mirror
just less concentrated. Interesting SciAm article
This reminds me a lot of something one of my grad-school professors did: he looked at Lewis & Clark's compass & sextant measurements to re-construct the magnetic field declination in the interior continental US ~200 years ago: http://www.geosociety.org/gsatoday/archive/13/10/ they were remarkably accurate at dead reckoning direction & distance.
Good point, though I can imagine that your average movie outsells your average video game by a factor of 3-6 (plus video games don't have box office profits).
or from the Big Bang, if we get good at fusion (D-D)...
the landers are very clean, but they're not that clean. Of course, whether or not they survived the trip is another question.
Carbon dioxide, on the other hand, is a surprise: at the temperatures and pressures encountered in an exoplanet atmosphere of this type, all carbon should be present as methane (if cool enough) or carbon monoxide. Giant planet atmospheres are generally far too hydrogen-rich for CO2 to form in any appreciable quantity. So its detection requires an extra-ordinary explanation for its origin.
Here is a Nature preprint from the same research group, describing H2O, CH4, and CO detection. I was hoping to find a research article (and not just a news story or press release) describing CO2 detection, but haven't found any yet...
(x) Pointlessness of an animal adapted for an ice age during a period of global warming
Great post. I know I'm being pedantic, but we are currently in an interglacial period (Holocene) of an ice age (Quaternary; the polar regions still have ice sheets). So a mammoth would probably be fine in northern Canada or parts of Greenland...
You are statically safer flying an airplane then driving
so the drive to the airport is more dangerous than the drive from the airport
So, as for being too young? Not buying it. There are many ranking officers that are much younger than their ranking CPOs (high ranking enlisted) on board. Subsequently, junior officers are much younger than the Chief's on-board.
Good point. A good movie example is Master & Commander: the average age of the officer corps is below that of the enlisted/sailors, and some of the officers are young boys.
I don't see anything wrong with the shadows either. Sun-synchronous doesn't mean there won't be any shadows, it just means that the shadow angles will be consistent every time the satellite takes a picture of a given location.
Well that brings up an interesting memory, relevant to this line of research:
I watched Empire Strikes Back several dozen times as a child - I had (and for the most part, still have) that movie memorized: the sounds and the visual images.
Any child who grew up attending church with their parents can relate to how bored they got during the sermon/homily. I had a simple solution: I would "replay" The Empire Strikes Back in my mind (starting with the launches of the imperial probes; replaying the text scroll never really worked). So instead of being bored, I would basically "watch" my favorite movie to pass the time.
It is true that a very small percentage of images are processed and released to the public (usually accompanied by a press release caption). But if you dig, you can almost always find that the raw images are available. The vast majority of images are unspectacular, and really not worth processing (color correction, etc) and putting in a press release. As I graduate student, I briefly worked on a project using ALL of the Voyager images of Saturn's icy satellites Mimas and Tethys. Most of the images were lousy: out of focus, too dark, too bright, too far, etc. Out of all the images, I'd estimate about 2% were useful for the project.
Though the corona's temperature is high it's molecules are so far apart that the gases release little heat. If a person were to stand on the sun's corona they wouldn't burn, they would freeze in the near vacuum of the corona.
Oh, they'd burn alright - but it would be a really bad tan. The side facing the Sun would absorb insane amounts of radiation; the side facing away would freeze... A good example (though far away from the corona): the extreme surface temperatures of Mercury, depending on the amount of sunlight, range from around 100 K to over 700 K.
Even when it comes to mapping, we have more complete coverage, and better resolution, of the global topography of Mars (thanks to the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter) than of Earth.
That book was a great read. I particularly enjoyed the story about testing the radar cross section of an early scale model of the Have Blue aircraft. Basically, they would stick the model on a pole on the other side of an airfield, point a radar beam at it, and measure the cross section.
When they fired up the test on the Have Blue model, there was *nothing* there - basically zero cross section. The radar operators were perplexed and wondering if their was something amiss with their equipment. Then one of the operators said, "Oh, we've got it now". What the operators didn't see was that a bird had just landed atop the model aircraft...
Umm, yes. That was kind of the point: The history of our past wrongs is freely accessible...
1) Iridium is much more abundant in meteorites than on the Earth (elevated Ir levels at the KT boundary is one of the key lines of evidence for the impact theory of dinosaur extinction), BUT: Ir is still only present at the ppm level even in iron meteorites (which have the highest Ir concentrations).
2) Apophis is not a ball of iron - its density is too low. Like other asteroids (and for that matter, the majority of meteorites), it's a chunk of rock. In terms of impact energy, composition is irrelevant (mass is the key parameter). "Ball of iridium and iron" is just crappy, sensationalist writing because getting hit by a ball of metal seems worse than getting hit by a rock.