Re:you can't stop the doomsayers
on
LHC Success!
·
· Score: 1
The smallest stars (defined as a body that's got enough mass to ignite a sustained hydrogen-burning fusion reaction in its core) are something like 50-80 Jupiter masses. So you'd have to pile an awful lot of extra stuff on Jupiter before you could light it up. Keep in mind that all the other planets in the solar system added together are about another Jupiter mass, so you'd have to start bringing in fifty more solar systems worth of planets to stack up.
Even if you could pull this off, the smallest stars are incredibly dim. The nearest star to the Earth is Proxima Centauri, in orbit around the more famous Alpha Centauri. This star is a tiny red dwarf at the low end of how big something's got to be to be a star, 12% the mass of the sun, which is still way larger than 50 Jupiter masses. It's only 0.17% as luminous as the sun, so even though it's the closest star out there you have to try really hard to see it with a decent telescope (it's only 11th magnitude!!). So, although Jupiter is a heck of a lot closer and apparent brightness goes as 1/r^2, a star-jupiter would just be pretty bright, more like the moon than the sun. We wouldn't all start needing extra sunscreen.
Correct - GLAST would see WIMPS only indirectly. If WIMP/antiWIMP pairs are out there in the quantities needed to make up all that missing mass, quite a lot of them will be colliding and annihilating anywhere you look at any given time. Some of those annhilation products will be gamma rays. Since WIMPS get pulled around by gravity, you might get a lot of annhilation in the bottom of a potential well, but then the only resulting products which we could see would be whatever eventually decays to neutrinos, which we might see in Super-K.
You're right that exactly what the mixture of decay products and their energies might be are highly model dependent (not the least of which is that we don't know what the higgs weighs), but seeing something is a good first start, it's easier to put the puzzle together when you have some non-invisible pieces to play with.
While it's true that it was "known" in learned circles that the Earth was probably round for thousands of years, the vast majority thought it flat.
Except for anybody involved with seafaring, where approaching ships becoming visible from the topsails down was a vital bit of everyday knowledge. Even if all the navigational knowledge was somehow confined to a few learned people on the quarterdeck.
It is not merely about the "same energy". It is about: the exact same combination of conditions as will exist within the LHC.
At the individual particle scale, energy all that matters here. Space is mostly empty, whether you're a few blasts of protons smacking into each other in a pretty good vacuum in the LHC or individual ones from outer space hitting nuclei in the Earth's upper atmosphere. Really, it makes no difference. Not just theory, thousands of rather smart people have been building clever devices to watch this stuff happen for decades, and it all adds up.
You might say "but the basic laws of physics might fall apart just past where you've carefully studied so far. Ok, unlikely, but they might. However, everything we've seen by watching what flies of cosmic ray collisions across the whole range of energies above where we've well-studied the things is very consistent with what we know from lower energy ones. It's the fine detail we're missing, not the basics.
Please show me where on Earth I would find the natural combination of conditions that are the same as will exist within the operational LHC.
No need to buy a ticket. Sit back and look up. The LHC center of mass energy is about the same as the average collision which creates the cosmic ray muon showers I see every couple of seconds in the MINOS Far Detector. Here, look for yourself. And these are garden variety things compared the the more rare and far more energetic ones we've observed in really big arrays designed specifically to go count how many we get of each one, like this experiment.
2A) Because input stimuli in the LHC happen in nature all of the time, the LHC is perfectly safe.
versus
2B) We have spent billions of Euros on this thing, because we have never observed the outcomes of the LHC in nature.
1A and 1B cannot both be true. 2A and 2B cannot both be true.
Your cyclic illogic has a fatal flaw. Just because we know these things happen in nature all the time doesn't mean we can easily study them. However, we know they happen, the Earth has survived 4.5by of them, and we're not dead yet. Ergo, they can't be too dangerous.
Mother Nature does hit the Earth with collisions of LHC energies on up all the time and has been doing so since the beginning. Although we know this because we can see the results with cosmic ray experiments, they are unusual enough that we can't build a detector of the quality being done here, fly it to the upper atmosphere, then sit and wait for decades for that interaction to occur where we can study it to see what happens. On the other hand, build this thing, aim it where you want, and watch zillions of such interactions occur right where they can be studied.
And yes, I Am A Physicist, specializing in the study of cosmic rays. I even happen to be sitting shift at the moment on an experiment at Fermilab, watching a lower energy particle beam zap my experiment every 2.2 seconds. Beep. Beep. Beep.
Wish I had mod points here. Goldstein, Sakurai, and Griffiths are the books the questioner missed while taking a math degree instead of a physics degree. Throw in Carrol & Ostlie for the astrophysics side of things, and he's covered.
However, I disagree about the "skimming" part. The only way any of these things will be useful is if you actually work through some of the problems. Do a few random problems from each chapter and they'll make a whole heck of a lot more sense.
Mathmatical Methods for Physicists by Arfken. If it's not in here, you won't be using it in a physics class till you get into some really hard core theory.
The Amazon links to a newer version than I have, but presumably it's the same beast.
Does that mean that we may already have a few of these things in the Earth or Sun, but don't have to really worry about that for the next 100 million years?
That's where TFA's existence of neutron stars argument comes in. Those things are so heavy and dense (the whole thing is as dense as an atomic nucleus) that if microscopic black holes were accumulating instead of evaporating, a microscopic black hole would not remain microscopic for long. Unlike in the earth, which is mostly just empty space.
Given the observed rate of cosmic ray collisions, making one such black hole on any given neutron star would happen pretty quickly, which would then convert the neutron star to a black hole forthwith. So, we should not see _any_ "old" neutron stars out there if the LHC is to do us in. Since we see gobs of the beasts, this specific doomsday scenario here won't happen.
What's the real status of the released docs? Is there enough to do a real implementation with all the little things like RandR, dual head support, TV-Out and 3D-support, or is ati just stringing us along, pretending to be one of the good guys?
RandR and dual head work, based on what's running on my desk right now. Better than fglrx.
No idea about TV-out. Some 2D acceleration is in the works, but the 3D bits were not in the released docs (although rumors of people taking advantage of standardized calls abound, see the sibling of this post).
No mention from the article summary of whether this is supported by ATI's recent decision to release driver source code. If you buy this card can you use it with free software?
While AMD has done a good thing and released a lot of documentation for their cards, it has not been source code, and has not yet included the necessary bits for acceleration (either 2D or 3D). That said, I'm watching what I'm typing right now courtesy of the surprisingly functional radeonhd driver being developed by the SUSE folks for Xorg from this documentation release. While lacking acceleration, it's already more stable and lacks the numerous show-stopper bugs present in ATI's fglrx binary blob.
Dunno yet if this latest greatest chunk of silicon is supported, but being open source and actively developed, I'm sure that support will arrive sooner rather than later.
Yes, times have changed - people used to use their SSN's in public all over the place. Now, we know that this is like handing out keys to your bank accounts. Privacy about personal information is suddenly a (rightfully) important topic.
If TFA had been about someone at the school who let his laptop get stolen with all that sensitive information on it, slashdot would be full of people calling for his head. These guys break in, sell their access, and are suddenly martyrs because they got caught quickly, limiting the damage to changed grades? Bogus.
Also, beware the hyperbole. The court's job is to make sure that the sentence fits the crime, the listed penalties are maximums.
Interestingly, there's about the same energy density in a cc of space from cosmic rays as there is from starlight. The difference is that photons travel straight so you see the stars as points of light, cosmic rays get all scrambled from the magnetic field so things would appear hazy.
But Olber's paradox says that if the universe were infinitely large and infinitely old, then no matter where you looked you'd eventually see the surface of a star, so the sky wouldn't just be bright: it would be be sun-bright, rather than just faintly hazy.
Borexino should also be sensitive to them, but I don't think they've put out a paper on them yet, as the real-time 7Be neutrino detection was the New News.
You are _certainly not_ replacing the battery pack in a Prius by 100k miles. There are plenty of people with even more than 200k mi on their battery packs without any issues.
Please research your wild claims before making them.
Mea culpa - the 100k number stuck in my head because it was the warrenty on the battery pack. Of course, the reason why I knew that number? Because my Dad's Prius had to get a new battery pack at ~80k miles, and he got it for free because of the nice long warrenty.
Sure, anecdotal one data point evidence does not make a good argument. But I'd trust a pressure vessel not to wear out after many cycles more than I would a battery pack.
Which if that makes me a Detroit shill, point me to their pneumatic hybrid, I'd buy it in a heartbeat.
Not crumble, per se, but not nearly so astounding. Compare the Prius to the Scion or Aveo rather than the Hummer and go from there.
300,000 isn't a valid life expectancy for most cars, but it is at least possible for a gas engine to last that long. I've known such cars. On the other hand, you're _certainly_ replacing the battery pack in a Prius by 100,000 miles, and the battery pack is the nastiest thing to make.
Now, what this does make a good point for is a pneumatic hybrid. Use an air compressor and a pressure tank instead of a generator and a battery. Skip all those nasty batteries. Plus air tanks don't wear out, are lighter, and can more efficiently take the inrush of braking energy than a battery (electric hybrids re-use only 1/3 of the braking enegy since batteries can't absorb charge fast enough).
Haven't played a lot of driving games, but I have had the thought "that oncoming car in the other lane's trying to get into my space, maybe he carries!" -- drop cloak, tractor, fire fire fire fire.
Which is actually not that different than standard Italian driving (was living over there at the time), so maybe it wasn't the Netrek after all.
Personally, I think Dell should offer Centos support on its servers - they are very widely used in the web hosting industry, and Centos seems to be the most common distro for that. Dell would capture a significant part of its customer base that way.
Dell does sell pre-installed RHEL on their server class boxes, as well as many of their workstations. Or, you can save some $ and they'll sell you a no-OS box. In which case, you can still download the box-specific RHEL drivers from their support website, which include nice things like BIOS flash utilities which are shell scripts not.exe's.
Exactly what we want, unless you're buying their consumer desktop stuff. And I can see why they don't offer linux there - the Venn diagram of the most clueless user set they have to support, combined with the hardest OS to support (for such users) is not particularly attractive from Dell's end.
I'm personally impress with efficiency not bulkyness. Write me a competent word processor that fits on a floppy disk. That'd be a hoot.
Word Perfect v5.1. Could run from a 5.25" floppy, and had was featureful enough to write whole books or court documents with.
Of course, it was also the last major application written in assembly, so it also had to be a maintenance nightmare, but from a user standpoint it was pretty cool. Wrote a PhD thesis with it (shoulda used latex, oh well).
The problem is the energy of the neutrinos. Fission neutrinos are below the energy threshold of Super-K, which is why they built Kamland to look at the reactor and geo-neutrino signals. It's smaller but more sensitive to tiny signals.
How is attending class an important part of the educational process? If a student gets the assignment listed in the syllabus in on time and passes the midterms, it means he has learned the material.
Speaking as an actual professor, while I agree that the point is learning the material and that some people can do so without coming to class, there is a strong correlation between attendance and how well people do at the whole learning thing as measured by grades. I know this for sure, having personally assigned a rather large number of grades.
Some of this is certainly due to the fact that those who are apathetic neither learn nor come to class, but hopefully I'm also doing something in lectures to help students learn. If not, I'm wasting 60+ hour work weeks, and a lot of students are wasting several hours each per week.
As usual, a Slashdotter doesn't grasp the difference betwen "generally useful" and "useful to me".
On the contrary, but I don't much care about "generally useful", being a "me" rather than a "general". Usefulness to the Word-typing Explorer-clicking masses is a spectator sport, in the meantime I've got work to do.
That said, Thinkpads are famed for their long history of linux compatability, quite a large crowd makes happy use of that middle mouse button in linux. Laptops, especially leading-edge ones, can be a tricky beast in linux, but thinkpads are easier than most.
Well, if you actually have an application that uses a three-button mouse, than yeah, that third button is nice. But there aren't a lot of those, and anyway it's not what IBM/Lenovo had in mind when they invented the thing.
X-windows? And thereby every graphical unix app ever. Middle mouse button is paste, use it endlessly.
Re:The Hubble Constant and the age of the universe
on
An Older, Larger Universe
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Stating that the age of the universe is 15.8 billion years old gives the impression that this is accurate to around 1 percent or better. The error bars on this sort of figure are probably closer to +/- 2 billion years or more, implying that the 99% percentile answer is something in the range 12 - 20 billion years.
No, the startling thing about recent cosmological work is that we do know this number to ~percent. The flagship for this new "precision cosmology" are the WMAPresults. The number is weighing in at 13.7+/-0.2 billion years. Take a look at the tables of cosmological parameters in this paper and the carefully calculated error bars.
This particular press release's sweeping claims do overreach, as nicely summarized by Michael Richmond in a post above. M33 isn't at a cosmological distance, the observations being done by this project help to understand the lower rungs of the distance ladder, from which you can figure out distances to far-off galaxies and try to calculate numbers to independently compare to the microwave background fits. These results are one of many such distance calibrations, and have to be factored in statistically with the others. On the whole, several other means of figuring out cosmological parameters (such as the Age of the Universe) agree with the WMAP results within errors. You only get TFA's 15% increase if that is the only measurement you use to calibrate distances, throwing out all the rest.
Slashdot Mirror
The smallest stars (defined as a body that's got enough mass to ignite a sustained hydrogen-burning fusion reaction in its core) are something like 50-80 Jupiter masses. So you'd have to pile an awful lot of extra stuff on Jupiter before you could light it up. Keep in mind that all the other planets in the solar system added together are about another Jupiter mass, so you'd have to start bringing in fifty more solar systems worth of planets to stack up.
Even if you could pull this off, the smallest stars are incredibly dim. The nearest star to the Earth is Proxima Centauri, in orbit around the more famous Alpha Centauri. This star is a tiny red dwarf at the low end of how big something's got to be to be a star, 12% the mass of the sun, which is still way larger than 50 Jupiter masses. It's only 0.17% as luminous as the sun, so even though it's the closest star out there you have to try really hard to see it with a decent telescope (it's only 11th magnitude!!). So, although Jupiter is a heck of a lot closer and apparent brightness goes as 1/r^2, a star-jupiter would just be pretty bright, more like the moon than the sun. We wouldn't all start needing extra sunscreen.
Correct - GLAST would see WIMPS only indirectly. If WIMP/antiWIMP pairs are out there in the quantities needed to make up all that missing mass, quite a lot of them will be colliding and annihilating anywhere you look at any given time. Some of those annhilation products will be gamma rays. Since WIMPS get pulled around by gravity, you might get a lot of annhilation in the bottom of a potential well, but then the only resulting products which we could see would be whatever eventually decays to neutrinos, which we might see in Super-K.
You're right that exactly what the mixture of decay products and their energies might be are highly model dependent (not the least of which is that we don't know what the higgs weighs), but seeing something is a good first start, it's easier to put the puzzle together when you have some non-invisible pieces to play with.
While it's true that it was "known" in learned circles that the Earth was probably round for thousands of years, the vast majority thought it flat.
Except for anybody involved with seafaring, where approaching ships becoming visible from the topsails down was a vital bit of everyday knowledge. Even if all the navigational knowledge was somehow confined to a few learned people on the quarterdeck.
It is not merely about the "same energy". It is about: the exact same combination of conditions as will exist within the LHC.
At the individual particle scale, energy all that matters here. Space is mostly empty, whether you're a few blasts of protons smacking into each other in a pretty good vacuum in the LHC or individual ones from outer space hitting nuclei in the Earth's upper atmosphere. Really, it makes no difference. Not just theory, thousands of rather smart people have been building clever devices to watch this stuff happen for decades, and it all adds up.
You might say "but the basic laws of physics might fall apart just past where you've carefully studied so far. Ok, unlikely, but they might. However, everything we've seen by watching what flies of cosmic ray collisions across the whole range of energies above where we've well-studied the things is very consistent with what we know from lower energy ones. It's the fine detail we're missing, not the basics.
Please show me where on Earth I would find the natural combination of conditions that are the same as will exist within the operational LHC.
No need to buy a ticket. Sit back and look up. The LHC center of mass energy is about the same as the average collision which creates the cosmic ray muon showers I see every couple of seconds in the MINOS Far Detector. Here, look for yourself. And these are garden variety things compared the the more rare and far more energetic ones we've observed in really big arrays designed specifically to go count how many we get of each one, like this experiment.
Let's review the messed-up logic:
cyclic illogic #2
2A) Because input stimuli in the LHC happen in nature all of the time, the LHC is perfectly safe.
versus
2B) We have spent billions of Euros on this thing, because we have never observed the outcomes of the LHC in nature.
1A and 1B cannot both be true. 2A and 2B cannot both be true.
Your cyclic illogic has a fatal flaw. Just because we know these things happen in nature all the time doesn't mean we can easily study them. However, we know they happen, the Earth has survived 4.5by of them, and we're not dead yet. Ergo, they can't be too dangerous.
Mother Nature does hit the Earth with collisions of LHC energies on up all the time and has been doing so since the beginning. Although we know this because we can see the results with cosmic ray experiments, they are unusual enough that we can't build a detector of the quality being done here, fly it to the upper atmosphere, then sit and wait for decades for that interaction to occur where we can study it to see what happens. On the other hand, build this thing, aim it where you want, and watch zillions of such interactions occur right where they can be studied.
And yes, I Am A Physicist, specializing in the study of cosmic rays. I even happen to be sitting shift at the moment on an experiment at Fermilab, watching a lower energy particle beam zap my experiment every 2.2 seconds. Beep. Beep. Beep.
Wish I had mod points here. Goldstein, Sakurai, and Griffiths are the books the questioner missed while taking a math degree instead of a physics degree. Throw in Carrol & Ostlie for the astrophysics side of things, and he's covered.
However, I disagree about the "skimming" part. The only way any of these things will be useful is if you actually work through some of the problems. Do a few random problems from each chapter and they'll make a whole heck of a lot more sense.
Mathmatical Methods for Physicists by Arfken. If it's not in here, you won't be using it in a physics class till you get into some really hard core theory.
The Amazon links to a newer version than I have, but presumably it's the same beast.
That's where TFA's existence of neutron stars argument comes in. Those things are so heavy and dense (the whole thing is as dense as an atomic nucleus) that if microscopic black holes were accumulating instead of evaporating, a microscopic black hole would not remain microscopic for long. Unlike in the earth, which is mostly just empty space.
Given the observed rate of cosmic ray collisions, making one such black hole on any given neutron star would happen pretty quickly, which would then convert the neutron star to a black hole forthwith. So, we should not see _any_ "old" neutron stars out there if the LHC is to do us in. Since we see gobs of the beasts, this specific doomsday scenario here won't happen.
RandR and dual head work, based on what's running on my desk right now. Better than fglrx.
No idea about TV-out. Some 2D acceleration is in the works, but the 3D bits were not in the released docs (although rumors of people taking advantage of standardized calls abound, see the sibling of this post).
While AMD has done a good thing and released a lot of documentation for their cards, it has not been source code, and has not yet included the necessary bits for acceleration (either 2D or 3D). That said, I'm watching what I'm typing right now courtesy of the surprisingly functional radeonhd driver being developed by the SUSE folks for Xorg from this documentation release. While lacking acceleration, it's already more stable and lacks the numerous show-stopper bugs present in ATI's fglrx binary blob.
Dunno yet if this latest greatest chunk of silicon is supported, but being open source and actively developed, I'm sure that support will arrive sooner rather than later.
Yes, times have changed - people used to use their SSN's in public all over the place. Now, we know that this is like handing out keys to your bank accounts. Privacy about personal information is suddenly a (rightfully) important topic.
If TFA had been about someone at the school who let his laptop get stolen with all that sensitive information on it, slashdot would be full of people calling for his head. These guys break in, sell their access, and are suddenly martyrs because they got caught quickly, limiting the damage to changed grades? Bogus.
Also, beware the hyperbole. The court's job is to make sure that the sentence fits the crime, the listed penalties are maximums.
Interestingly, there's about the same energy density in a cc of space from cosmic rays as there is from starlight. The difference is that photons travel straight so you see the stars as points of light, cosmic rays get all scrambled from the magnetic field so things would appear hazy.
But Olber's paradox says that if the universe were infinitely large and infinitely old, then no matter where you looked you'd eventually see the surface of a star, so the sky wouldn't just be bright: it would be be sun-bright, rather than just faintly hazy.
If your Wii is gathering dust, I've a so-far Wii-less home where my two sons would love to keep the dust off it for you.
Can't say as I've seen any at garage sales, where shelf-dust-collecting devices tend to end up.
Do these findings at all bring new life to the Nuke at the Center of the Earth theory?
The Borexino results do not, but a similar experiment in Japan called Kamland has seen these geo-neutrinos:
http://www.physorg.com/news5491.html
Borexino should also be sensitive to them, but I don't think they've put out a paper on them yet, as the real-time 7Be neutrino detection was the New News.
You are _certainly not_ replacing the battery pack in a Prius by 100k miles. There are plenty of people with even more than 200k mi on their battery packs without any issues.
Please research your wild claims before making them.
Mea culpa - the 100k number stuck in my head because it was the warrenty on the battery pack. Of course, the reason why I knew that number? Because my Dad's Prius had to get a new battery pack at ~80k miles, and he got it for free because of the nice long warrenty.
Sure, anecdotal one data point evidence does not make a good argument. But I'd trust a pressure vessel not to wear out after many cycles more than I would a battery pack.
Which if that makes me a Detroit shill, point me to their pneumatic hybrid, I'd buy it in a heartbeat.
Not crumble, per se, but not nearly so astounding. Compare the Prius to the Scion or Aveo rather than the Hummer and go from there.
300,000 isn't a valid life expectancy for most cars, but it is at least possible for a gas engine to last that long. I've known such cars. On the other hand, you're _certainly_ replacing the battery pack in a Prius by 100,000 miles, and the battery pack is the nastiest thing to make.
Now, what this does make a good point for is a pneumatic hybrid. Use an air compressor and a pressure tank instead of a generator and a battery. Skip all those nasty batteries. Plus air tanks don't wear out, are lighter, and can more efficiently take the inrush of braking energy than a battery (electric hybrids re-use only 1/3 of the braking enegy since batteries can't absorb charge fast enough).
Haven't played a lot of driving games, but I have had the thought "that oncoming car in the other lane's trying to get into my space, maybe he carries!" -- drop cloak, tractor, fire fire fire fire.
Which is actually not that different than standard Italian driving (was living over there at the time), so maybe it wasn't the Netrek after all.
Personally, I think Dell should offer Centos support on its servers - they are very widely used in the web hosting industry, and Centos seems to be the most common distro for that. Dell would capture a significant part of its customer base that way.
.exe's.
Dell does sell pre-installed RHEL on their server class boxes, as well as many of their workstations. Or, you can save some $ and they'll sell you a no-OS box. In which case, you can still download the box-specific RHEL drivers from their support website, which include nice things like BIOS flash utilities which are shell scripts not
Exactly what we want, unless you're buying their consumer desktop stuff. And I can see why they don't offer linux there - the Venn diagram of the most clueless user set they have to support, combined with the hardest OS to support (for such users) is not particularly attractive from Dell's end.
I'm personally impress with efficiency not bulkyness. Write me a competent word processor that fits on a floppy disk. That'd be a hoot.
Word Perfect v5.1. Could run from a 5.25" floppy, and had was featureful enough to write whole books or court documents with.
Of course, it was also the last major application written in assembly, so it also had to be a maintenance nightmare, but from a user standpoint it was pretty cool. Wrote a PhD thesis with it (shoulda used latex, oh well).
The problem is the energy of the neutrinos. Fission neutrinos are below the energy threshold of Super-K, which is why they built Kamland to look at the reactor and geo-neutrino signals. It's smaller but more sensitive to tiny signals.
How is attending class an important part of the educational process? If a student gets the assignment listed in the syllabus in on time and passes the midterms, it means he has learned the material.
Speaking as an actual professor, while I agree that the point is learning the material and that some people can do so without coming to class, there is a strong correlation between attendance and how well people do at the whole learning thing as measured by grades. I know this for sure, having personally assigned a rather large number of grades.
Some of this is certainly due to the fact that those who are apathetic neither learn nor come to class, but hopefully I'm also doing something in lectures to help students learn. If not, I'm wasting 60+ hour work weeks, and a lot of students are wasting several hours each per week.
As usual, a Slashdotter doesn't grasp the difference betwen "generally useful" and "useful to me".
On the contrary, but I don't much care about "generally useful", being a "me" rather than a "general". Usefulness to the Word-typing Explorer-clicking masses is a spectator sport, in the meantime I've got work to do.
That said, Thinkpads are famed for their long history of linux compatability, quite a large crowd makes happy use of that middle mouse button in linux. Laptops, especially leading-edge ones, can be a tricky beast in linux, but thinkpads are easier than most.
Somehow I don't hink IBM or Lenovo had that in mind when they addeded the third button to a Windows-based laptop.
Of course - but that doesn't make it any less useful.
Well, if you actually have an application that uses a three-button mouse, than yeah, that third button is nice. But there aren't a lot of those, and anyway it's not what IBM/Lenovo had in mind when they invented the thing.
X-windows? And thereby every graphical unix app ever. Middle mouse button is paste, use it endlessly.
Stating that the age of the universe is 15.8 billion years old gives the impression that this is accurate to around 1 percent or better. The error bars on this sort of figure are probably closer to +/- 2 billion years or more, implying that the 99% percentile answer is something in the range 12 - 20 billion years.
No, the startling thing about recent cosmological work is that we do know this number to ~percent. The flagship for this new "precision cosmology" are the WMAP results. The number is weighing in at 13.7+/-0.2 billion years. Take a look at the tables of cosmological parameters in this paper and the carefully calculated error bars.
This particular press release's sweeping claims do overreach, as nicely summarized by Michael Richmond in a post above. M33 isn't at a cosmological distance, the observations being done by this project help to understand the lower rungs of the distance ladder, from which you can figure out distances to far-off galaxies and try to calculate numbers to independently compare to the microwave background fits. These results are one of many such distance calibrations, and have to be factored in statistically with the others. On the whole, several other means of figuring out cosmological parameters (such as the Age of the Universe) agree with the WMAP results within errors. You only get TFA's 15% increase if that is the only measurement you use to calibrate distances, throwing out all the rest.