On the positive side, solar flares are the primary cause of the aurora. Over next couple of years is the most likely time for them to occur. The link is NOAA's page where the data on auroras is updated every 5 minutes.
Sort of a Liberace with a bad rug who scores with all the green guys on the worlds they visit? Or were you thinking more along the lines of a Rock Hudson or Jim Nabors? Certainly the "hanging around in the bar" scenes should be different than previous series.
I got my first programmer trainee job in 73 as a summer job in high school (I was 16). The regular programmers were pretty much sure the only valuable skill a teen could bring was typing, and that's most of what I got to do. When they finally ran out of stuff to type, the manager gave me a project to work on. I finished it in 3 weeks, and they then fired the regular programmer who had been working on it for the previous 3 months.
Keep in mind that there are a lot of incompetent managers out there. If you're doing a good job and not receiving any credit, consider working elsewhere. Life is too short to waste it working for a jerk.
According to the Hipparcos data (the best there is currently), Betelgeuse is about 430 light years away. While it is relatively close in astronomical terms to the point in its life where it might go *bang*, in human terms it could be a very long time (i.e., thousands of years). It is one of the closest stars big enough to be a potential problem.
The Soviets did accomplish the first landings on the Moon, Mars, and Venus. They're still the only nation who has landed anything on Venus. They even managed a return mission from the Moon - one in which a payload of Moon rocks were delivered back to Earth. Back in the 60s the Soviets were significantly ahead of the US in space technology and much of the USian effort was spent trying to outdo something the Soviets had already done or beat them to something they were trying to do. Most of the best successes of the US space program were direct results of that competition. Ever since the Russians reduced their efforts in space (due primarily to economic problems) the US space program has seemed somewhat aimless.
What about Jules Verne? Verne's writing is the earliest stuff I've read that has the "science fiction" feel to it. His first books were published in the 1860s and he died in 1905, wealthy from the sales of those books. His writings were tremendously influential - the first nuclear submarine was named Nautilus after Captain Nemo's vessel in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. He wrote From the Earth to the Moon in 1866, the year H.G. Wells was born, and 35 years before Wells wrote The First Men in the Moon.
Those "rolling blackouts" in California suddenly become a lot more interesting. I guess the first thing you're gonna wanna do is get yourself the best uninterruptible power supply on the market.
Have you looked at crime trends? They're going up you know.
According to the Department of Justice they're going down and are currently at the lowest levels in over 20 years. I'm curious where you got the idea they're going up. If you have data to back up that claim I would like to see it.
And no-one, but no-one uses machinery unless it reduces staff numbers.
Nobody uses machinery unless it increases profits. Reducing staff is a good way to cut expenses, but if you can increase productivity with the same staff you can also increase profits, often way more than offsetting the costs of automation. The "computer revolution" is a good example of this. When computers first came out many feared it would put lots of people (accountants, for example) out of work. Not only do we still need the bean counters, but now we also need people to maintain the machines those bean counters use.
Miners already use machinery for their jobs. Automation in a mine means the miners will spend less time underground in a dangerous environment. Better machinery means each miner can produce more ore than before, (hopefully) at less risk to life and limb.
The really interesting part is that the government is the one spending the big money. In 1995 the gov't spent 6.7 billion USD and in 1998 almost 8.7 billion USD on HIV and AIDS. A lot of that money is spent actually treating people to already have AIDS, only 1.4 billion USD in 1995 and about 1.7 billion USD in 1998 went to research. The funny word in that sentence is only. These corporations get to patent ideas resulting (at least in part) from the government spending money on research, then claim that they have to jack the price way up to make up for those horrible research costs. Don't expect any discounts for us for using our tax dollars for that research. These corporations will next insist of receiving tax breaks or government subsidies for any charitable uses of "their IP".
If you could figure out a way for it to be profitable to do it, hunger and disease would be wiped out in a generation. Except (yes, I am that cynical), most of them still wouldn't want to do it, because it would eliminate the market, and they wouldn't be able to make still more money in the future.
Ceres is the largest asteroid, and it has a diameter of 580 miles. Pluto has a diameter of 1413 miles. That makes Pluto almost 15 times bigger than Ceres.
Various groups have tried to "demote" Pluto over the years. The IAU is generally regarded as the final authority, and previous posters have linked to the press release where it was announced that Pluto's status would not change.
Re:We need a simple definition of planet...
on
Is Pluto A Planet?
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· Score: 1
I'm not looking to flame, but I don't entirely understand where you're trying to go with this.
How close to a sphere should the object have to be? Ignoring oblateness due to rotation or tidal effects will still leave some smaller objects with huge "mountains" resulting from collisions with realtively large bodies. We're talking about mountains which are a significant percentage of the size of the overall body. How big should such a mountain be before it means the body is no longer a planet?
What in heck is a "concave" or "convex" orbit? Unperturbed orbits are conic sections - circles (eccentricity=0), ellipses (01). The Moon would never be considered a planet because it is clearly in orbit around the Earth (the center of gravity of the Earth-Moon system is inside the Earth), not the Sun.
Incidentally, Pluto would ordinarily meet both a "nearly spherical body" and "orbits the sun" test.
I managed about 45 minutes once, too. This guy was trying to sell me one of those coupon books with discounts. I got him to read me all the coupons in the book. The only one I remember anymore was one for "buy a hang glider, get a second hang glider for a penny".
Re:does this break ....PROBABLY REDUNDANT BY NOW!
on
Stop, Light.
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· Score: 2
The speed of light in a medium is inversely proportional to the refractive index of the medium. The refractive index of air is about 1.0008, of water is 1.33, of quartz is 1.54, and diamond is 2.42. When light crosses a boundary between media with different refractive indices the path changes (Snell's Law).
As far as relativity is concerned, this doesn't cause any problems. Relativity only says you can't go faster than the speed of light in vacuo. As others above have pointed out, Cerenkov radiation is emitted when particles exceed the speed of light in a medium - those particles are not exceeding the speed of light in vacuo. Relativistic mass gain is due to velocity, not acceleration (review those Lorenz transforms). A (relatively) easy way to think of this is to view the Lorenz transforms as mathematically compressing Newton's mechanics so that what Newton would have called an infinite velocity is instead perceived as the speed of light. Think of taking the straight line from velocity = acceleration * time (Newton's model) and bending it so that it approaches the vertical speed of light line asymptotically (special relativity). Some extremely counterintuitive things occur, but they have actually been observationally verified. (Now I'm rambling, too, so I'll stop...)
Yeah, but the worst ones of the lot are the US government. I was once interviewed by 2 guys from the NIS (Naval Investgative Service) who were evaluating someone for a security clearance. He was a friend of mine, but he and his family moved away when we were 12, and I hadn't seen him since. They spent about 30 minutes asking me questions about his character and things like that. They seemed to understand that it was a long time ago and we were little kids, but the idea that the gov't might interview people who only knew you when you were 10 or something is really weird.
No, there aren't any such photographs currently. There was a photograph taken by the Hubble telescope which was possibly such an object, but it was later announced that they no longer believe this to be a planet.
In general, there are more and more small objects, and the smaller you go the more there are of them. In our solar system, first we have Jupiter (which is bigger than all the other planets put together); second is Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus (the next size down, but all gas giants); third is Earth, Venus, Mars, Mercury, and Pluto (rocky/icy bodies much smaller than gas giants); fourth are the larger asteroids, e.g., Ceres, Pallas, Juno, Vesta; next there are countless smaller asteroids and the comets. Objects the size of a car or smaller aren't represented much because we don't have any good ways to find them, but there are almost certainly at least millions of them in the solar system. And, of course, the most common (massive) thing of all is random free atoms of hydrogen.
With the use of any forseeable technology for finding planets we will probably see something vaguely resembling a Gaussian distribution, but the low end is not because of a lack of smaller bodies, it is because the technology doesn't detect those smaller bodies.
I think you're right, that this is exactly where the MPAA and cronies are intending to take us. But who, in their right mind, is going to actually pay to watch the drivel they currently broadcast? The quality of their programming is going to have to improve dramatically before I would consider giving them money for the privilege of watching it. Considering that the networks actually believe they're producing good stuff, improvement is unlikely, to say the least.
Current research suggests we may be having less effect than many environmentalists would have us believe. On the other hand, the research also shows that "greenhouse gases" are increasing steadily without regard to volcanic eruptions, or other natural or artificial disasters.
But the heating is not caused directly by the energy generated. The heating of the earth is caused by the sun, through the mechanism of greenhouse gases. Daily the earth receives about 3E18 KCal of energy from the sun. But the generation of greenhouse gases causes the earth's atmosphere to trap a small percentage more of that energy from the sun as heat. Since the greenhouse gases so generated don't go away (unlike the energy we generate, which is mostly radiated into space), the total amount accumulates and increases the amount of solar energy trapped. And we are currently generating about 20 gigatons of greenhouse gases per year.
Your point is well taken. The news media everywhere sucks in general. SciAm is one of the few somewhat newsy publications that doesn't suck like the general media does.
Fortunately, outbreaks of most of the really awful diseases are scarce currently. The biggest one now is HIV (AIDS), which has killed about 19 million people, and is well on its way to much larger numbers. There is no cure or immunization yet, and with the large number of different strains being discovered there probably won't be any soon.
Not curable yet, and currently there is an outbreak of Ebola in Uganda which has taken 162 lives so far (with 421 cases). And, unfortunately, the outbreaks occur primarily in the poorer areas of the world, where the populace cannot afford the cost of immunization. We are not likely to see a significant drop in the occurances of hemmorhagic fevers anytime soon.
BTW, you're absolutely right that SciAm is a great site (and magazine).
While it's not as good a market as it once was, what about Combat Flight Simulator 2 or Crimson Skies? (I know they're both M$, but I'll admit they put out pretty good games) The primary group that seems to be suffering currently are sims of the really high tech planes. The older stuff (World War 1 or 2) has a lot of releases out.
The geek produces beauty as a byproduct, much like a mathematician who is above all concerned with finding a proof, and is not concerned whether that proof is elegant or not, though it often will be.
I beg to differ. If one studies mathematics enough to understand it, the vast majority of mathematical proofs are startlingly elegant. I would instead opine that the elegance of good mathematics, engineering, or science differs from art in that significant education and knowledge are required to appreciate the elegance. As an example I would like to cite Einstein's Theory of General Relativity. The mathematical elegance of this theory is so impressive that, combined with its phenomenal predictive accuracy in modelling the real world, the person who formulates the theory which supplants it will be enshrined similarly to Einstein and Newton. The most common comment I have heard from professional physicists about various newer Grand Unified Theories being proposed is that they "lack elegance."
The greatest difference between the arts and the sciences is that the arts are created with a more generalized population in mind. Almost everyone appreciates the fine arts of Michelangelo or Renoir. It takes considerable study, time, and effort to appreciate the works of a Newton or Einstein. But I suggest that the elegance of the works of all of these are of a similar magnitude.
Slashdot Mirror
On the positive side, solar flares are the primary cause of the aurora. Over next couple of years is the most likely time for them to occur. The link is NOAA's page where the data on auroras is updated every 5 minutes.
Sort of a Liberace with a bad rug who scores with all the green guys on the worlds they visit? Or were you thinking more along the lines of a Rock Hudson or Jim Nabors? Certainly the "hanging around in the bar" scenes should be different than previous series.
I got my first programmer trainee job in 73 as a summer job in high school (I was 16). The regular programmers were pretty much sure the only valuable skill a teen could bring was typing, and that's most of what I got to do. When they finally ran out of stuff to type, the manager gave me a project to work on. I finished it in 3 weeks, and they then fired the regular programmer who had been working on it for the previous 3 months.
Keep in mind that there are a lot of incompetent managers out there. If you're doing a good job and not receiving any credit, consider working elsewhere. Life is too short to waste it working for a jerk.
According to the Hipparcos data (the best there is currently), Betelgeuse is about 430 light years away. While it is relatively close in astronomical terms to the point in its life where it might go *bang*, in human terms it could be a very long time (i.e., thousands of years). It is one of the closest stars big enough to be a potential problem.
Which, in this case, is not likely.
The Soviets did accomplish the first landings on the Moon, Mars, and Venus. They're still the only nation who has landed anything on Venus. They even managed a return mission from the Moon - one in which a payload of Moon rocks were delivered back to Earth. Back in the 60s the Soviets were significantly ahead of the US in space technology and much of the USian effort was spent trying to outdo something the Soviets had already done or beat them to something they were trying to do. Most of the best successes of the US space program were direct results of that competition. Ever since the Russians reduced their efforts in space (due primarily to economic problems) the US space program has seemed somewhat aimless.
They're talking about actually landing on the body, not just flying by it or crashing. Nobody has landed on anything farther away than Mars yet.
What about Jules Verne? Verne's writing is the earliest stuff I've read that has the "science fiction" feel to it. His first books were published in the 1860s and he died in 1905, wealthy from the sales of those books. His writings were tremendously influential - the first nuclear submarine was named Nautilus after Captain Nemo's vessel in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. He wrote From the Earth to the Moon in 1866, the year H.G. Wells was born, and 35 years before Wells wrote The First Men in the Moon.
Those "rolling blackouts" in California suddenly become a lot more interesting. I guess the first thing you're gonna wanna do is get yourself the best uninterruptible power supply on the market.
Have you looked at crime trends? They're going up you know.
According to the Department of Justice they're going down and are currently at the lowest levels in over 20 years. I'm curious where you got the idea they're going up. If you have data to back up that claim I would like to see it.
And no-one, but no-one uses machinery unless it reduces staff numbers.
Nobody uses machinery unless it increases profits. Reducing staff is a good way to cut expenses, but if you can increase productivity with the same staff you can also increase profits, often way more than offsetting the costs of automation. The "computer revolution" is a good example of this. When computers first came out many feared it would put lots of people (accountants, for example) out of work. Not only do we still need the bean counters, but now we also need people to maintain the machines those bean counters use.
Miners already use machinery for their jobs. Automation in a mine means the miners will spend less time underground in a dangerous environment. Better machinery means each miner can produce more ore than before, (hopefully) at less risk to life and limb.
The really interesting part is that the government is the one spending the big money. In 1995 the gov't spent 6.7 billion USD and in 1998 almost 8.7 billion USD on HIV and AIDS. A lot of that money is spent actually treating people to already have AIDS, only 1.4 billion USD in 1995 and about 1.7 billion USD in 1998 went to research. The funny word in that sentence is only. These corporations get to patent ideas resulting (at least in part) from the government spending money on research, then claim that they have to jack the price way up to make up for those horrible research costs. Don't expect any discounts for us for using our tax dollars for that research. These corporations will next insist of receiving tax breaks or government subsidies for any charitable uses of "their IP".
If you could figure out a way for it to be profitable to do it, hunger and disease would be wiped out in a generation. Except (yes, I am that cynical), most of them still wouldn't want to do it, because it would eliminate the market, and they wouldn't be able to make still more money in the future.
Ceres is the largest asteroid, and it has a diameter of 580 miles. Pluto has a diameter of 1413 miles. That makes Pluto almost 15 times bigger than Ceres.
Various groups have tried to "demote" Pluto over the years. The IAU is generally regarded as the final authority, and previous posters have linked to the press release where it was announced that Pluto's status would not change.
I'm not looking to flame, but I don't entirely understand where you're trying to go with this.
How close to a sphere should the object have to be? Ignoring oblateness due to rotation or tidal effects will still leave some smaller objects with huge "mountains" resulting from collisions with realtively large bodies. We're talking about mountains which are a significant percentage of the size of the overall body. How big should such a mountain be before it means the body is no longer a planet?
What in heck is a "concave" or "convex" orbit? Unperturbed orbits are conic sections - circles (eccentricity=0), ellipses (01). The Moon would never be considered a planet because it is clearly in orbit around the Earth (the center of gravity of the Earth-Moon system is inside the Earth), not the Sun.
Incidentally, Pluto would ordinarily meet both a "nearly spherical body" and "orbits the sun" test.
Bush has to pick his stuff very carefully.
Such as, for example, issuing executive orders instituting abortion restrictions as his first major policy action as president?
I managed about 45 minutes once, too. This guy was trying to sell me one of those coupon books with discounts. I got him to read me all the coupons in the book. The only one I remember anymore was one for "buy a hang glider, get a second hang glider for a penny".
The speed of light in a medium is inversely proportional to the refractive index of the medium. The refractive index of air is about 1.0008, of water is 1.33, of quartz is 1.54, and diamond is 2.42. When light crosses a boundary between media with different refractive indices the path changes (Snell's Law).
As far as relativity is concerned, this doesn't cause any problems. Relativity only says you can't go faster than the speed of light in vacuo. As others above have pointed out, Cerenkov radiation is emitted when particles exceed the speed of light in a medium - those particles are not exceeding the speed of light in vacuo. Relativistic mass gain is due to velocity, not acceleration (review those Lorenz transforms). A (relatively) easy way to think of this is to view the Lorenz transforms as mathematically compressing Newton's mechanics so that what Newton would have called an infinite velocity is instead perceived as the speed of light. Think of taking the straight line from velocity = acceleration * time (Newton's model) and bending it so that it approaches the vertical speed of light line asymptotically (special relativity). Some extremely counterintuitive things occur, but they have actually been observationally verified. (Now I'm rambling, too, so I'll stop...)
Yeah, but the worst ones of the lot are the US government. I was once interviewed by 2 guys from the NIS (Naval Investgative Service) who were evaluating someone for a security clearance. He was a friend of mine, but he and his family moved away when we were 12, and I hadn't seen him since. They spent about 30 minutes asking me questions about his character and things like that. They seemed to understand that it was a long time ago and we were little kids, but the idea that the gov't might interview people who only knew you when you were 10 or something is really weird.
No, there aren't any such photographs currently. There was a photograph taken by the Hubble telescope which was possibly such an object, but it was later announced that they no longer believe this to be a planet.
In general, there are more and more small objects, and the smaller you go the more there are of them. In our solar system, first we have Jupiter (which is bigger than all the other planets put together); second is Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus (the next size down, but all gas giants); third is Earth, Venus, Mars, Mercury, and Pluto (rocky/icy bodies much smaller than gas giants); fourth are the larger asteroids, e.g., Ceres, Pallas, Juno, Vesta; next there are countless smaller asteroids and the comets. Objects the size of a car or smaller aren't represented much because we don't have any good ways to find them, but there are almost certainly at least millions of them in the solar system. And, of course, the most common (massive) thing of all is random free atoms of hydrogen.
With the use of any forseeable technology for finding planets we will probably see something vaguely resembling a Gaussian distribution, but the low end is not because of a lack of smaller bodies, it is because the technology doesn't detect those smaller bodies.
I think you're right, that this is exactly where the MPAA and cronies are intending to take us. But who, in their right mind, is going to actually pay to watch the drivel they currently broadcast? The quality of their programming is going to have to improve dramatically before I would consider giving them money for the privilege of watching it. Considering that the networks actually believe they're producing good stuff, improvement is unlikely, to say the least.
Current research suggests we may be having less effect than many environmentalists would have us believe. On the other hand, the research also shows that "greenhouse gases" are increasing steadily without regard to volcanic eruptions, or other natural or artificial disasters.
But the heating is not caused directly by the energy generated. The heating of the earth is caused by the sun, through the mechanism of greenhouse gases. Daily the earth receives about 3E18 KCal of energy from the sun. But the generation of greenhouse gases causes the earth's atmosphere to trap a small percentage more of that energy from the sun as heat. Since the greenhouse gases so generated don't go away (unlike the energy we generate, which is mostly radiated into space), the total amount accumulates and increases the amount of solar energy trapped. And we are currently generating about 20 gigatons of greenhouse gases per year.
My misunderstanding of where you saw the irony.
Your point is well taken. The news media everywhere sucks in general. SciAm is one of the few somewhat newsy publications that doesn't suck like the general media does.
Fortunately, outbreaks of most of the really awful diseases are scarce currently. The biggest one now is HIV (AIDS), which has killed about 19 million people, and is well on its way to much larger numbers. There is no cure or immunization yet, and with the large number of different strains being discovered there probably won't be any soon.
Not curable yet, and currently there is an outbreak of Ebola in Uganda which has taken 162 lives so far (with 421 cases). And, unfortunately, the outbreaks occur primarily in the poorer areas of the world, where the populace cannot afford the cost of immunization. We are not likely to see a significant drop in the occurances of hemmorhagic fevers anytime soon.
BTW, you're absolutely right that SciAm is a great site (and magazine).
While it's not as good a market as it once was, what about Combat Flight Simulator 2 or Crimson Skies? (I know they're both M$, but I'll admit they put out pretty good games) The primary group that seems to be suffering currently are sims of the really high tech planes. The older stuff (World War 1 or 2) has a lot of releases out.
The geek produces beauty as a byproduct, much like a mathematician who is above all concerned with finding a proof, and is not concerned whether that proof is elegant or not, though it often will be.
I beg to differ. If one studies mathematics enough to understand it, the vast majority of mathematical proofs are startlingly elegant. I would instead opine that the elegance of good mathematics, engineering, or science differs from art in that significant education and knowledge are required to appreciate the elegance. As an example I would like to cite Einstein's Theory of General Relativity. The mathematical elegance of this theory is so impressive that, combined with its phenomenal predictive accuracy in modelling the real world, the person who formulates the theory which supplants it will be enshrined similarly to Einstein and Newton. The most common comment I have heard from professional physicists about various newer Grand Unified Theories being proposed is that they "lack elegance."
The greatest difference between the arts and the sciences is that the arts are created with a more generalized population in mind. Almost everyone appreciates the fine arts of Michelangelo or Renoir. It takes considerable study, time, and effort to appreciate the works of a Newton or Einstein. But I suggest that the elegance of the works of all of these are of a similar magnitude.