Reactor buildings are designed in a way that when such an explosion occurs, the force of the explosion goes out through the walls and roof and not toward the critical components. You can see this quite clearly in the aftermath pictures of the explosion: the walls are cut off clean at a certain height and the steel structure of the building is still standing. If you look at pictures of the other reactors building and the reactor building before the explosion you see a line running around the building at that height. This explosion was very spectacular but the building was designed with this scenario in mind. Luck had nothing to do with it.
So you say 'Blade Runner' is a 'so-so' book, put 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep' in the list of great works of Philip K. Dick on Slashdot. And you act surprised you get corrected 3 times and then continue the smugness? If you did something like this in a bar you'd be happy to walk out with your pants on.
And it doesn't have 'Blade Runner' in the title. If Philip K. Dick wanted it named Blade Runner he would have done so. Some idiots did so after his death and should be forced to eat all copies...
Photographically it is well within reach of DSLRs equiped with a 200mm lens. I managed to go down to magnitude 17 (or 100 times less bright) and even fainter with a Canon 20D and a 200mm f/2.8 lens, placed on a tracking mount and exposed for about 2 hours (accumulated in exposures of a few minutes). I'm sure it would even lie within the limits of a 50mm lens. The problem becomes distinguishing it from the host galaxy.
Visually it was within reach of 4.5" beginner scopes at dark locations! These will set you back less than $200 nowadays. A $1000 12" would have produced very decent views of the SN together with it's host galaxy. There are a lot of telescopes of this size around. You obviously should take the time to visit a public observatory once.
The host galaxy of SN2011b is moving away at 1400km/s (NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database). The velocity of the SN will be around that. Quite a bit faster than GPS satellites (or we'd have to launch new ones every day).
Maybe they celebrated in the streets because of a lack of education, which is directly caused by the corurpt goverment? Generally, well educated, happy people don't start celebrating when 3000 innocent civilians die, even if it happens in a country they really dislike. The fact that they are being repressed with tear gas and other weapons which has 'made in USA' printed on it probably doesn't help.
The Egyptian president denounced it because he would probably lose international support (Israel actually likes Mubarak) and probably more important the yearly $1.5 billion in US 'aid' if he joined the celebrations.
It's people like you that make genocides possible.
Either still Aurora Borealis or Aurora Australis or just Aurora, as it is called when discussing the phenomenon in general. Even during the record breaking geomagnetic storms of 1859 (observations as far south as Hawaii, Cuba, Mexico) and 1989 (Texas) it did not reach the equator. There is little point in coining a new name for something that has never occured before and hopefully never will. The visual show would be very impressive and I wouldn't want to miss it, but the damage to the electrical grid and other systems would be enormous.
You can't set back what isn't there. Zimbabwe's "democratic progress" is just a veil, like in any other dictatorship. The first signs of progress would be Mugabe in front of a court answering for the crimes he and his regime committed. If anything the article shows people are still taking this stuff hook line and sinker. Somehow I'm now less surprised about Palin mistaking the "Democratic People's Republic of Korea" for the good guys... I bet you believe the last elections in Belarus showed real progress toward democracy as well.
3) How many jobs keep paying you money after you've died? Why do authors deserve this special privilege?
How about calling it an investment? These are big names who've made it as writers. Do you know how many people are struggling to make a living off writing? Do you know what kind of investment it takes to write a book, putting years of your life into it, and not knowing at all if it will pay off?
I don't see how paying them after they died solves that. If they are struggling now to survive, how does a copyright term of Life + 70 years improve their conditions? Would a copyright term of let's say Life or 50 years, whichever expires last (to prevent the untimely deaths of some authors), be that unreasonable?
As a belgian I feel I should point out that this is not quite correct.
The law is: If you have the belgian nationality or have lived in Belgium for 6 months at the time of your death your organs become available for donation unless: a) you specifically refused this to happen during your life or b) your relatives (children, parents or partner) refuse this.
The only way to make sure your organs become available for donation is by going to the city hall and register yourself as a donor. If you die and one (or more) of your organs match with a patient on the waiting lists a database will be consulted for either your explicit approval or denial. If no entry for you exists your relatives will be asked.
I don't know where you got the idea that there haven't been meteorites (meteor remains) found at Meteor Crater. There have been, thousands of fragments, totalling over 30 tons, collected from the region, including a 600kg specimen.
Not quite. You are assuming that the cook and/or owner of the restaurant are involved, which is very unlikely. Trusting a minimum wage waiter to carry food from the kitchen to my table is one thing. Trusting him with an easily copied card with thousands of dollars credit is another.
Just remember to replace them weekly. They get more stiff as they dehydrate and that really destroys the whole purpose.
Alternatively you can use the cartilage of the vestigial leg bones inside Baiji dolphins, but I heard they're pretty hard to find nowadays. Supports made from this will stay good for years. There's some research into a replacement...
I guess forcing radios on people and hoping some will use it (and get a tax on it passed) is easier than making quality radio and making people WANT a radio in their cell phone... I seem to have an FM tuner in my phone (low end Nokia), but discovered it because of this story. I had no idea and never wished to use it before. I have a tuner in my mp3 player as well and never used it either. If your music taste goes a bit of the beaten path, radio is pretty poor....
Indeed, I agree with the parent and grand parent. For meteors you don't even need long exposure times, 30s is more than sufficient. Prepare to end up with hundreds of exposures without a meteor though... The meteors only last a fraction of a second, baring some exceptions. However, you do need the fastest lens you can get your hands on. I use my Canon 50mm f/1.4 for it, but stopped down to f/2.8 due to heavy optical aberations at any faster stop. This is just sufficient to get the brighter meteors (magnitude 1 and lower).
If you use a cheap tracking mount or barndoor mount, you can still stack the individual images. This will give you a nice deep view of the sky (depending on the stacking process, probably without any meteors, but you can add them again).
Personally, I avoided buying a cheap mount. I played around a bit with the mounts available at the local observatory and decided I'd rather chuck out some more money than deal with the frustration. I got myself a nice Losmandy GM-8 (nowadays around $1400 without accessories) and have enjoyed it a lot. It is still a very limited mount, only capable of handing about 10kg of equipment (scope, camera, guide scope), but very well made and easy to service and use. The results are on my website.
The odds are based on the accuracy of the orbit of the asteroid. Every observation has an error and the orbit can be any orbit that fits in these errors. The errors in the future positions of the asteroid increase exponentially and it is not that exceptional that they can predict this event. Another impact candidate is 1950 DA, which has a 1/300 chance of hitting Earth on March 16, 2880.
The come up with these odds by running tons of simulations taking into account the gravity of the Sun, all planets and some of the larger asteroids. This gives a set of possible paths of the asteroid through the Solar System in the future. The odds of the impact are then the number of possible orbits intersecting the surface of the Earth (including the lower atmosphere) divided by the total number of orbits. This is not magic nor arbitrary, but applied physics.
C3-PO's odds would probably be based on the number of ships ever entering an asteroid field and coming out again. In the real world, flying through our asteroid belt isn't that tricky. Current estimates put the odds of a probe traversing the asteroid belt and accidentally hitting something at around 1 in a billion.
But it has no torino scale entry because the torino scale is only defined for impacts in the next 100 years. Hence it is listed as n/a.
And the impact probability you cited is the cumulative probability of 8 events. There is only a probability of 5.4E-04 (1/1850) of an impact in 2182.
I don't quite get the publicity at the moment. It has been at that level for quite a while and is still at a much lower level than (99942) Apophis was (which hit 1% chance). In all likelihood new data will rule out an impact.
With the advent of Pan-Starrs and LSST, discovering objects will become a lot harder for amateurs, which is already quite hard with LINEAR, CSS, SDSS,... taking the bulk of discoveries of comets, asteroids and supernovae. There will still be some opportunities. I these surveys generally do not operate during dusk and dawn, creating a gap where amateurs can look for comets and supernovae. Some amateurs already do this to beat LINEAR, CSS and other surveys.
Amateurs have two huge advantages over professionals: time and numbers. An amateur can devote years to a dedicated observation program, monitoring the same object for hours after each other, and they can band together to create a large geographical coverage. These are thing pro's can only do on very special occasions. Some examples are:
Occultations of stars by asteroids: Geographical coverage is very important to get the best data. You cannot move professional observatories to the narrow path of these occultations, often only miles wide. These observations can be used to refine the orbits of the asteroids involved, and give better size and shape estimates.
Fireball and meteor observations: again geographical coverage is essential. This used to be a mostly visual branch of observations, but in the past years photographic and video observations have lead to a great increase of observations and led to the discovery of new swarms, better forecasts of outbursts, etc... Needless to say that knowledge in this field is pretty interesting for the space industry.
Photometry of variable stars, comets and asteroids: Surveys such as Pan-Starrs can only image an object once a day or less, while prolonged fine grained observations can lead to better insights. Outbursts (large increases in brightness) of comets are often discovered by amateurs, because professionals cannot track all comets (dozens at each given moment). Asteroid ligthcurves can give insight in their shape and rotation period. Lightcurves of variable stars are valuable sources of data. Amateurs are almost always the discoverers of outburst of unpredictable or cataclysmic variables.
Some amateurs have embarked on exo-planet searches with the transit method, which again amounts to monitoring stars on a fine grained timescale. Except for redetections of known exoplanets I do not know of any success here.
Actually, accumulation time for Pan-Starrs survey images is typically only around 30 seconds, which is not dramatically different from other surveys. At 2.8 gigabytes of data per image (16-bits per pixel) you are looking at a data rate of 1.50 gigabit per second.
Most of processing (calibration, star detection...) and object detection (asteroids, supernovae and other transient objects) is very automated, with minimal interference from humans. Next to the asteroid/supernova search the project will create a master sky image, adding all good images into one to create a comprehensive and deep survey of the cosmos.
Better information, though not of great quantity is found on the Pan=Starrs website.
What is now online is the PS1 prototype on Haleakala. PS4 is the final goal of this project, which is basically 4 PS1 units each equipped with 1 1.4 Gigapixel camera, to be build on Mauna Kea. As usual there are delays and the project focus is now bringing PS1 to "full survey" status (which seems to be completed) and building the PS2 telescope, also on Haleakala.
No, I even read that page. It seems to me from your highlighted text that BP still stands for British Petrol. Its HQ is located in London, it lists on the LSE (as well as on the NYSE) so it is still clearly very British. I cannot see any connection with Belgium though.
Slashdot Mirror
I prefer it to be h*pi*r^2. I'll take volume over circumference to fill my stomach every day...
Reactor buildings are designed in a way that when such an explosion occurs, the force of the explosion goes out through the walls and roof and not toward the critical components. You can see this quite clearly in the aftermath pictures of the explosion: the walls are cut off clean at a certain height and the steel structure of the building is still standing. If you look at pictures of the other reactors building and the reactor building before the explosion you see a line running around the building at that height. This explosion was very spectacular but the building was designed with this scenario in mind. Luck had nothing to do with it.
You must be new here.
So you say 'Blade Runner' is a 'so-so' book, put 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep' in the list of great works of Philip K. Dick on Slashdot. And you act surprised you get corrected 3 times and then continue the smugness? If you did something like this in a bar you'd be happy to walk out with your pants on.
And it doesn't have 'Blade Runner' in the title. If Philip K. Dick wanted it named Blade Runner he would have done so. Some idiots did so after his death and should be forced to eat all copies...
Correction. There's still much you have to learn. Please don't extrapolate your ignorance to everyone else.
Photographically it is well within reach of DSLRs equiped with a 200mm lens. I managed to go down to magnitude 17 (or 100 times less bright) and even fainter with a Canon 20D and a 200mm f/2.8 lens, placed on a tracking mount and exposed for about 2 hours (accumulated in exposures of a few minutes). I'm sure it would even lie within the limits of a 50mm lens. The problem becomes distinguishing it from the host galaxy.
Visually it was within reach of 4.5" beginner scopes at dark locations! These will set you back less than $200 nowadays. A $1000 12" would have produced very decent views of the SN together with it's host galaxy. There are a lot of telescopes of this size around. You obviously should take the time to visit a public observatory once.
The host galaxy of SN2011b is moving away at 1400km/s (NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database). The velocity of the SN will be around that. Quite a bit faster than GPS satellites (or we'd have to launch new ones every day).
Maybe they celebrated in the streets because of a lack of education, which is directly caused by the corurpt goverment? Generally, well educated, happy people don't start celebrating when 3000 innocent civilians die, even if it happens in a country they really dislike. The fact that they are being repressed with tear gas and other weapons which has 'made in USA' printed on it probably doesn't help.
The Egyptian president denounced it because he would probably lose international support (Israel actually likes Mubarak) and probably more important the yearly $1.5 billion in US 'aid' if he joined the celebrations.
It's people like you that make genocides possible.
It's better TV than Big Brother, *-ian Idol, ... and all the other junk...
That said, I didn't watch either. I prefer the real deal.
Either still Aurora Borealis or Aurora Australis or just Aurora, as it is called when discussing the phenomenon in general. Even during the record breaking geomagnetic storms of 1859 (observations as far south as Hawaii, Cuba, Mexico) and 1989 (Texas) it did not reach the equator. There is little point in coining a new name for something that has never occured before and hopefully never will. The visual show would be very impressive and I wouldn't want to miss it, but the damage to the electrical grid and other systems would be enormous.
You can't set back what isn't there. Zimbabwe's "democratic progress" is just a veil, like in any other dictatorship. The first signs of progress would be Mugabe in front of a court answering for the crimes he and his regime committed. If anything the article shows people are still taking this stuff hook line and sinker. Somehow I'm now less surprised about Palin mistaking the "Democratic People's Republic of Korea" for the good guys... I bet you believe the last elections in Belarus showed real progress toward democracy as well.
3) How many jobs keep paying you money after you've died? Why do authors deserve this special privilege? How about calling it an investment? These are big names who've made it as writers. Do you know how many people are struggling to make a living off writing? Do you know what kind of investment it takes to write a book, putting years of your life into it, and not knowing at all if it will pay off?
I don't see how paying them after they died solves that. If they are struggling now to survive, how does a copyright term of Life + 70 years improve their conditions? Would a copyright term of let's say Life or 50 years, whichever expires last (to prevent the untimely deaths of some authors), be that unreasonable?
As a belgian I feel I should point out that this is not quite correct.
The law is: If you have the belgian nationality or have lived in Belgium for 6 months at the time of your death your organs become available for donation unless: a) you specifically refused this to happen during your life or b) your relatives (children, parents or partner) refuse this.
The only way to make sure your organs become available for donation is by going to the city hall and register yourself as a donor. If you die and one (or more) of your organs match with a patient on the waiting lists a database will be consulted for either your explicit approval or denial. If no entry for you exists your relatives will be asked.
source: Orgaandonatie (Dutch)
I don't know where you got the idea that there haven't been meteorites (meteor remains) found at Meteor Crater. There have been, thousands of fragments, totalling over 30 tons, collected from the region, including a 600kg specimen.
The equivalent device for the ear already exists for many years. It is called the cochlear implant.
Not quite. You are assuming that the cook and/or owner of the restaurant are involved, which is very unlikely. Trusting a minimum wage waiter to carry food from the kitchen to my table is one thing. Trusting him with an easily copied card with thousands of dollars credit is another.
Just remember to replace them weekly. They get more stiff as they dehydrate and that really destroys the whole purpose.
Alternatively you can use the cartilage of the vestigial leg bones inside Baiji dolphins, but I heard they're pretty hard to find nowadays. Supports made from this will stay good for years. There's some research into a replacement...
I guess forcing radios on people and hoping some will use it (and get a tax on it passed) is easier than making quality radio and making people WANT a radio in their cell phone... I seem to have an FM tuner in my phone (low end Nokia), but discovered it because of this story. I had no idea and never wished to use it before. I have a tuner in my mp3 player as well and never used it either. If your music taste goes a bit of the beaten path, radio is pretty poor....
Indeed, I agree with the parent and grand parent. For meteors you don't even need long exposure times, 30s is more than sufficient. Prepare to end up with hundreds of exposures without a meteor though... The meteors only last a fraction of a second, baring some exceptions. However, you do need the fastest lens you can get your hands on. I use my Canon 50mm f/1.4 for it, but stopped down to f/2.8 due to heavy optical aberations at any faster stop. This is just sufficient to get the brighter meteors (magnitude 1 and lower).
If you use a cheap tracking mount or barndoor mount, you can still stack the individual images. This will give you a nice deep view of the sky (depending on the stacking process, probably without any meteors, but you can add them again).
Personally, I avoided buying a cheap mount. I played around a bit with the mounts available at the local observatory and decided I'd rather chuck out some more money than deal with the frustration. I got myself a nice Losmandy GM-8 (nowadays around $1400 without accessories) and have enjoyed it a lot. It is still a very limited mount, only capable of handing about 10kg of equipment (scope, camera, guide scope), but very well made and easy to service and use. The results are on my website.
Good luck with the Perseids!
The odds are based on the accuracy of the orbit of the asteroid. Every observation has an error and the orbit can be any orbit that fits in these errors. The errors in the future positions of the asteroid increase exponentially and it is not that exceptional that they can predict this event. Another impact candidate is 1950 DA, which has a 1/300 chance of hitting Earth on March 16, 2880.
The come up with these odds by running tons of simulations taking into account the gravity of the Sun, all planets and some of the larger asteroids. This gives a set of possible paths of the asteroid through the Solar System in the future. The odds of the impact are then the number of possible orbits intersecting the surface of the Earth (including the lower atmosphere) divided by the total number of orbits. This is not magic nor arbitrary, but applied physics.
C3-PO's odds would probably be based on the number of ships ever entering an asteroid field and coming out again. In the real world, flying through our asteroid belt isn't that tricky. Current estimates put the odds of a probe traversing the asteroid belt and accidentally hitting something at around 1 in a billion.
But it has no torino scale entry because the torino scale is only defined for impacts in the next 100 years. Hence it is listed as n/a.
And the impact probability you cited is the cumulative probability of 8 events. There is only a probability of 5.4E-04 (1/1850) of an impact in 2182.
I don't quite get the publicity at the moment. It has been at that level for quite a while and is still at a much lower level than (99942) Apophis was (which hit 1% chance). In all likelihood new data will rule out an impact.
With the advent of Pan-Starrs and LSST, discovering objects will become a lot harder for amateurs, which is already quite hard with LINEAR, CSS, SDSS, ... taking the bulk of discoveries of comets, asteroids and supernovae. There will still be some opportunities. I these surveys generally do not operate during dusk and dawn, creating a gap where amateurs can look for comets and supernovae. Some amateurs already do this to beat LINEAR, CSS and other surveys.
Amateurs have two huge advantages over professionals: time and numbers. An amateur can devote years to a dedicated observation program, monitoring the same object for hours after each other, and they can band together to create a large geographical coverage. These are thing pro's can only do on very special occasions. Some examples are:
Actually, accumulation time for Pan-Starrs survey images is typically only around 30 seconds, which is not dramatically different from other surveys. At 2.8 gigabytes of data per image (16-bits per pixel) you are looking at a data rate of 1.50 gigabit per second.
Most of processing (calibration, star detection...) and object detection (asteroids, supernovae and other transient objects) is very automated, with minimal interference from humans. Next to the asteroid/supernova search the project will create a master sky image, adding all good images into one to create a comprehensive and deep survey of the cosmos.
Source: Pan-Starrs Website.
Better information, though not of great quantity is found on the Pan=Starrs website.
What is now online is the PS1 prototype on Haleakala. PS4 is the final goal of this project, which is basically 4 PS1 units each equipped with 1 1.4 Gigapixel camera, to be build on Mauna Kea. As usual there are delays and the project focus is now bringing PS1 to "full survey" status (which seems to be completed) and building the PS2 telescope, also on Haleakala.
No, I even read that page. It seems to me from your highlighted text that BP still stands for British Petrol. Its HQ is located in London, it lists on the LSE (as well as on the NYSE) so it is still clearly very British. I cannot see any connection with Belgium though.