The pixels are smaller than the actual resolution of the telescope, and the point spread function is just smearing the light from the entire planet over several pixels. You would need pixels and resolution several thousand time smaller to see distinct details from the planet, which would require a telescope much larger due to diffraction limits.
Yes, I know. What we could do with is a space based telesope array better than the James Webb, which is yet to be launched. This would remove some of the problems with single lens size limits and light interference if we put it in a good observation spot.
These pictures are 6px by 6px. With 30 or so pixels squared you can start to really make out stuff. Compare to our recent Juno probe's view of the Earth Moon system as it passed us on it's way to Jupiter (it will go past us twice).
Can somebody explain why this stuff matters? I mean speculation without a chance of experimental verification?
Thinking about things -- why they happen, how they may happen -- in great detail without actually experiencing them is one aspect that makes us human beings. Thinking about the eventual fate of the universe and our current home is something that we should all do at some point.
It also is several notches above the other rampant speculation without experimental verification here and lifts the profile of/. a bit from where you have to shovel down to the level sometimes.
That teacher made no effort to make the distinction between the actions of people in the past, and the young white men in the room.
It is weird how you got all that ranting out of some uncited event. How do you even know you are talking about the same event the previous poster was talking about?
The parent started off generally addressing the question at the end of the GP and moved on to a more specific personal example in the same general manner. This is not the typical/. "I'll post something that completely derails the thread, but appeals to mods." This kind of thing is emotive, so it's easy to see things through your own lens.
In typical/. fashion the parent gets a +5 insightful comment when he goes off on a tangent (GP was talking about network transparency in X and not 'problems with the ideologies of Unix') and talks absolute crap. These projects are all separate. The best thing people can do is to find one of them and contribute positively to them (although I do acknowledge Gnome3 may be beyond help, but it is a bit off from talking about X and Wayland).
PS: I have mod points, but if IMO I modded the parent troll it would just get another +1 insightful for following a now "standard pattern" for good scores on/.
I can't believe I get modded troll and GP gets +5 insightful for successfully attacking a strawman and calling me an idiot. Maybe it's time to join the ranks of those that say/. is on a downward trajectory.
You have it 100% backwards. The current fossil fuel based energy economy is built on a foundation of taxpayer subsidies.
I do know this and am not a supporter of oil or gas. It's just that the major players in solar power are not that benign either, and it could be that the solar companies are much the same as the gas and oil companies you dislike -- just that they are not in control yet. The idea of replacing one broken system with another doesn't appeal to me and I don't see anywhere here any real progress or money for research and development to get there. Instead there is a 'feel good' factor that seems to apply and a bunch of people with little or no scientific backgrounds running amok, shouting their opinions everywhere, thinking they are doing good for the world. I just feel sad that there is not much focus on real physics research into energy and serious policy discussions.
...In short, you're an idiot.
I used to be a university student too. There are life lessons that everyone learns for themselves that I think you have yet to learn and won't do from me. There's a reason why people shift from being radical and in support of something as a group (like 'environmentalism' or 'anti-corporatism') over time to a more moderate way of thinking. Sometimes young people (or young mentally) are taken for a ride when they think they are doing the right thing.
Why not fund research into energy storage technologies so when the grid is overloaded, the energy can be saved and used later?
Personally I would love to see storage technology being really worked on. Things like nano batteries that physicists like Michio Kaku sometimes talks about would be really nice and blow out of the water all of our current technology. This or many other types of real improvements would make solar power useful, but solar would still really limit our use of electricity if deployed as a replacement for coal/nuclear. This is because solar is just a waste product of fusion in the sun, and fusion or matter/anti-matter power is IMO what we really should be aiming for. Maybe in the meantime we could look to see how much uranium/thorium is on asteroids that are in elliptic orbits around the sun for mining (as they would have left our solar system anyway). Solar just seems backwards to me </rant>.
I also wanted to point out that those groups that cry the loudest about large companies profiteering and attempt to change public opinion should be scrutinized as well -- because they may well be very similar. These groups generally have many resources at their disposal and look after their own interests to other people's detriment. I think it is important to note that few people in leadership positions in greenie groups have any scientific background and many might in fact be hostile towards scientific progress.
Good old greenies are at it again. If you force taxpayers to subsidise solar power installations for people well off to afford them (e.g. most greenies) you are contributing to wealth inequality. At least if you want to do this it would make sense to use a more efficient means of power production. You have to wonder how we might be better off if instead research and development was not cut off from nuclear power technologies by these various rich greenie groups that often bring in 100 million a year in revenue or are endowed with large trust funds.
I think the parent is right on the money. Women's groups and ethnic rights groups are just the 'useful idiots of the West' on this. Only people that will get ahead from all this are people already ahead.
As a manager in IT, I used to go out of my way to hire attractive women in CS, but they are just super rare. They hardly exist, and the smart ones are very expensive.
I've seen the job ads:
WANTED: COMPUTER PROGRAMMER
Job spec:
Knows how to press buttons.
Able to take any and all directions from line manager.
The United States, or, rather, its corporate citizens, benefited from trade with South Africa, but they eventually sided with the divestment movement and hit South Africa where it hurt.
I don't claim it's a likely outcome, but if my government keeps behaving like a bully, there has to be some major blowback eventually.
From the wikipedia article it shows that this was primarily backed by religious people in the US and not the politicians of the time in government. Today South Africa has a policy of Black Economic Empowerment which is essentially a tit-for-tat policy that further puts into law race differences and somehow benefits a "Chinese" looking person who may come into the country fresh today over a local "white person" who is being "reverse discriminated" against. Whilst not as bad as Zimbabwe's policies, the sentiments are similar, and you wonder how race can still be an issue there when in most places in the west it doesn't matter at all. Perhaps South Africa could have been today in a much better shape if it just went out of Aparteid on commercial and trade foundations and actually enshrined into law equality for all.
Cheapest might be to learn from the Soviet example where several competing departments tried to come up with an idea or implementation and more optimum solution sort of came out naturally as a result. Given the number of firsts the Soviets had of the USA it might be much faster as well. Funny how the USA has had an almost authoritarian system in place for managing projects in space since the start of NASA and they don't embrace a more free-market approach.
Wind turbines produces little steady electrical current, and even if you go with peak energy production from these things and couple with solar there is a cost to the environment. A large wind farm that produces any sort of useful amount of electricity for private or industrial consumption takes the wind out of the environment as a system in the same way that damming a river takes the water out. You have a "dead zone" where there is little wind and above you have a much higher flow of wind, which can only lead to the wind above pushing down over some distance from the wind farm to fill the void and dumping down inland (because if you put the things too far out you would need really long cables). This would increase the temperature inland and has the potential to change weather patterns close to the surface of the earth (where is of course most important to us living there). Here's a video in the crazy greenie sinister tone, but might be what future environmentalists have to deal with.
The environmental impacts of large scale wind energy production are pretty much completely untested for and could potentially be very bad. There has been little actual scientific research, and this has been almost entirely due to moneyed "greenie" groups (a single group in the US brings in yearly 100m dollars in income!) opposition to performing basic research in a proper scientific study.
Another thing to remember is that the moon was much closer in the past and is slowly drifting away from the Earth. Tidal influences on the moon and earth system would have been much greater in the period it is thought the moon was formed.
You're right. I see these speeling and grammar things all the time when I post, and it is a little embarassing. It's a habit from other sites that I post quickly without proof-reading. This is because I am used to posting, then proof-reading, and then editing. I suppose I should do better.
First that theory assumes the the moon became instantly tidally locked from near the moment of its creation, which seems highly unlikely for a body born of an impact, followed by re-impact. (The debris impacts on the far side would occur more often, because the near side would not be shielded by the earth, but that works ONLY once the proto-moon is tidally locked.).
I'm not sure there is much in the way of evidence for exactly when the moon became tidally locked.
This is the current leading theory. Yes, it is very recent, but in the video I linked to you'll see lots of famous physicsts that you should recognize.
It's been a while since I was in physics studying this kind of thing, but it seems to me that since it is a smaller body and formed around the earth at a much smaller distance from the earth and then moved out, that there would be only a handful of parameters that would determine how long a tidal lock would take. First would be the small mass of the moon and smaller iron core, which would lead to faster tidal lock than say a planet around a star. Second would be the distance from the Earth (smaller the distance the faster it would occur). Thirdly, the impact between the 2 'proto-moons' would directly influence the rotation rate and axis of rotation of the moon (although from a disk around the earth, the eccentricty with respect the earth would be minimal). Since the moon was very close to the earth around its formation, and it formed in orbit around the earth, I would assume that a tidal lock would have occured very soon after its formation. Probably somewhere there is a simulation to show this.
Here's an article that explains why the composition is likely to be different for more fluid materials upon the theorised collision of the 2 'proto-moons'. This explains in principal that the less solid objects were drawn to the near side (as per the original article linked to in the summary), leaving a thinner crust on the near side. The only new interesting take-home is that the period of bombardment of comets and asteroids (due to the stabilization of the orbits of Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus throwing them towards the inner solar system) was likely slightly less violent than predicted before.
but the moon itself believed to have been formed from a collision of a planet with the mass that became the earth. in that model, the reason why composition would be uneven as the moon tidal lock with one side facing the earth that in fact due to earth's gravity acting on object of uneven composition.
Almost. The moon was thought to be formed in stages. First by a proto-planet called Thea roughly about the size of mars hitting the earth not full on, leaving debre in space. Over time the debree formed a ring to minimize energy between the earth and the ejected material. The ring then had paricles clump together that rolled on more dust to form 2 objects. These 2 objects with different material makeups (probably from the different amounts of Earth or Thea in them) then collided after some passes around the earth, leaving one side completely different in makeup from the other side. One side is tidal locked to the Earth, so it always faces us as you already know. You can see some of this by looking at the smooth section of moon vs the rough section as well.
What you neglected to mention is that the "greenies" are the source of much of the fearmongering in those steps and are in many cases simply anti-corporation, except for new "environmental" companies that many have financial interest in, and mostly anti-science. These are groups such as Greenpeace, which its founder has tried to distance himself from because he actually cares about the end result for the environment.
Now gas injection underground seems like a bad idea, but many greenies are in favor of deep underground heat extraction to power turbines, which if ramped up may be worse for the environment from similar problems and loss of efficiency being far away from people's homes and businesses. Who know, wind farms could be about the worst thing for the environment and people, as well as long standing communities that are divided by these things. Out at sea they if ramped up they might even change weather patterns. This is a new entriely unproven experiment unfortunately with little science to back up it being good for the environment. Damming for hydro used to be something that environmentalists blocked because it changes the ecosystem downstream forever.
Environmentalist that have scientific backgrounds and care about the environment, its animals and its plants, should really separate from the scare mongering "greenies" that have directly led to these gas recovery efforts through their actions in the past through the processes described in the parent post. At least they feel good about themselves and have something to rile against.
Slashdot Mirror
The pixels are smaller than the actual resolution of the telescope, and the point spread function is just smearing the light from the entire planet over several pixels. You would need pixels and resolution several thousand time smaller to see distinct details from the planet, which would require a telescope much larger due to diffraction limits.
Yes, I know. What we could do with is a space based telesope array better than the James Webb, which is yet to be launched. This would remove some of the problems with single lens size limits and light interference if we put it in a good observation spot.
It's funny, but the NSA actually has the best telescopes and has donated some of their old ones to NASA.
These pictures are 6px by 6px. With 30 or so pixels squared you can start to really make out stuff. Compare to our recent Juno probe's view of the Earth Moon system as it passed us on it's way to Jupiter (it will go past us twice).
Can somebody explain why this stuff matters? I mean speculation without a chance of experimental verification?
Thinking about things -- why they happen, how they may happen -- in great detail without actually experiencing them is one aspect that makes us human beings. Thinking about the eventual fate of the universe and our current home is something that we should all do at some point.
It also is several notches above the other rampant speculation without experimental verification here and lifts the profile of /. a bit from where you have to shovel down to the level sometimes.
Of course when I mentioned 'parent' and 'GP' in the above post I meant from the perspective of the post I was replying to, so 'GP' and 'GGP'
That teacher made no effort to make the distinction between the actions of people in the past, and the young white men in the room.
It is weird how you got all that ranting out of some uncited event. How do you even know you are talking about the same event the previous poster was talking about?
The parent started off generally addressing the question at the end of the GP and moved on to a more specific personal example in the same general manner. This is not the typical /. "I'll post something that completely derails the thread, but appeals to mods." This kind of thing is emotive, so it's easy to see things through your own lens.
In typical /. fashion the parent gets a +5 insightful comment when he goes off on a tangent (GP was talking about network transparency in X and not 'problems with the ideologies of Unix') and talks absolute crap. These projects are all separate. The best thing people can do is to find one of them and contribute positively to them (although I do acknowledge Gnome3 may be beyond help, but it is a bit off from talking about X and Wayland).
PS: I have mod points, but if IMO I modded the parent troll it would just get another +1 insightful for following a now "standard pattern" for good scores on /.
I can't believe I get modded troll and GP gets +5 insightful for successfully attacking a strawman and calling me an idiot. Maybe it's time to join the ranks of those that say /. is on a downward trajectory.
Most news reports of people going off-grid in America ends up with them...not having proper safe level of quality of living.
You read/hear about the horror stories... If one builds a place to code (which is wise in any case), there shouldn't be any issues for the most part.
So that's what happened to Richard Stallman. Just kidding, just kidding.
You have it 100% backwards. The current fossil fuel based energy economy is built on a foundation of taxpayer subsidies.
I do know this and am not a supporter of oil or gas. It's just that the major players in solar power are not that benign either, and it could be that the solar companies are much the same as the gas and oil companies you dislike -- just that they are not in control yet. The idea of replacing one broken system with another doesn't appeal to me and I don't see anywhere here any real progress or money for research and development to get there. Instead there is a 'feel good' factor that seems to apply and a bunch of people with little or no scientific backgrounds running amok, shouting their opinions everywhere, thinking they are doing good for the world. I just feel sad that there is not much focus on real physics research into energy and serious policy discussions.
...In short, you're an idiot.
I used to be a university student too. There are life lessons that everyone learns for themselves that I think you have yet to learn and won't do from me. There's a reason why people shift from being radical and in support of something as a group (like 'environmentalism' or 'anti-corporatism') over time to a more moderate way of thinking. Sometimes young people (or young mentally) are taken for a ride when they think they are doing the right thing.
Why not fund research into energy storage technologies so when the grid is overloaded, the energy can be saved and used later?
Personally I would love to see storage technology being really worked on. Things like nano batteries that physicists like Michio Kaku sometimes talks about would be really nice and blow out of the water all of our current technology. This or many other types of real improvements would make solar power useful, but solar would still really limit our use of electricity if deployed as a replacement for coal/nuclear. This is because solar is just a waste product of fusion in the sun, and fusion or matter/anti-matter power is IMO what we really should be aiming for. Maybe in the meantime we could look to see how much uranium/thorium is on asteroids that are in elliptic orbits around the sun for mining (as they would have left our solar system anyway). Solar just seems backwards to me </rant>.
I also wanted to point out that those groups that cry the loudest about large companies profiteering and attempt to change public opinion should be scrutinized as well -- because they may well be very similar. These groups generally have many resources at their disposal and look after their own interests to other people's detriment. I think it is important to note that few people in leadership positions in greenie groups have any scientific background and many might in fact be hostile towards scientific progress.
Good old greenies are at it again. If you force taxpayers to subsidise solar power installations for people well off to afford them (e.g. most greenies) you are contributing to wealth inequality. At least if you want to do this it would make sense to use a more efficient means of power production. You have to wonder how we might be better off if instead research and development was not cut off from nuclear power technologies by these various rich greenie groups that often bring in 100 million a year in revenue or are endowed with large trust funds.
I think the parent is right on the money. Women's groups and ethnic rights groups are just the 'useful idiots of the West' on this. Only people that will get ahead from all this are people already ahead.
As a manager in IT, I used to go out of my way to hire attractive women in CS, but they are just super rare. They hardly exist, and the smart ones are very expensive.
I've seen the job ads:
WANTED: COMPUTER PROGRAMMER
Job spec:
(Goodbye karma)
The United States, or, rather, its corporate citizens, benefited from trade with South Africa, but they eventually sided with the divestment movement and hit South Africa where it hurt.
I don't claim it's a likely outcome, but if my government keeps behaving like a bully, there has to be some major blowback eventually.
From the wikipedia article it shows that this was primarily backed by religious people in the US and not the politicians of the time in government. Today South Africa has a policy of Black Economic Empowerment which is essentially a tit-for-tat policy that further puts into law race differences and somehow benefits a "Chinese" looking person who may come into the country fresh today over a local "white person" who is being "reverse discriminated" against. Whilst not as bad as Zimbabwe's policies, the sentiments are similar, and you wonder how race can still be an issue there when in most places in the west it doesn't matter at all. Perhaps South Africa could have been today in a much better shape if it just went out of Aparteid on commercial and trade foundations and actually enshrined into law equality for all.
Cheapest might be to learn from the Soviet example where several competing departments tried to come up with an idea or implementation and more optimum solution sort of came out naturally as a result. Given the number of firsts the Soviets had of the USA it might be much faster as well. Funny how the USA has had an almost authoritarian system in place for managing projects in space since the start of NASA and they don't embrace a more free-market approach.
Wind turbines produces little steady electrical current, and even if you go with peak energy production from these things and couple with solar there is a cost to the environment. A large wind farm that produces any sort of useful amount of electricity for private or industrial consumption takes the wind out of the environment as a system in the same way that damming a river takes the water out. You have a "dead zone" where there is little wind and above you have a much higher flow of wind, which can only lead to the wind above pushing down over some distance from the wind farm to fill the void and dumping down inland (because if you put the things too far out you would need really long cables). This would increase the temperature inland and has the potential to change weather patterns close to the surface of the earth (where is of course most important to us living there). Here's a video in the crazy greenie sinister tone, but might be what future environmentalists have to deal with.
The environmental impacts of large scale wind energy production are pretty much completely untested for and could potentially be very bad. There has been little actual scientific research, and this has been almost entirely due to moneyed "greenie" groups (a single group in the US brings in yearly 100m dollars in income!) opposition to performing basic research in a proper scientific study.
Another thing to remember is that the moon was much closer in the past and is slowly drifting away from the Earth. Tidal influences on the moon and earth system would have been much greater in the period it is thought the moon was formed.
Doh. I even misspell 'spelling'. Okay. I'm going to get spell check in Firefox working again.
Debris
You're right. I see these speeling and grammar things all the time when I post, and it is a little embarassing. It's a habit from other sites that I post quickly without proof-reading. This is because I am used to posting, then proof-reading, and then editing. I suppose I should do better.
First that theory assumes the the moon became instantly tidally locked from near the moment of its creation, which seems highly unlikely for a body born of an impact, followed by re-impact. (The debris impacts on the far side would occur more often, because the near side would not be shielded by the earth, but that works ONLY once the proto-moon is tidally locked.).
I'm not sure there is much in the way of evidence for exactly when the moon became tidally locked.
This is the current leading theory. Yes, it is very recent, but in the video I linked to you'll see lots of famous physicsts that you should recognize.
It's been a while since I was in physics studying this kind of thing, but it seems to me that since it is a smaller body and formed around the earth at a much smaller distance from the earth and then moved out, that there would be only a handful of parameters that would determine how long a tidal lock would take. First would be the small mass of the moon and smaller iron core, which would lead to faster tidal lock than say a planet around a star. Second would be the distance from the Earth (smaller the distance the faster it would occur). Thirdly, the impact between the 2 'proto-moons' would directly influence the rotation rate and axis of rotation of the moon (although from a disk around the earth, the eccentricty with respect the earth would be minimal). Since the moon was very close to the earth around its formation, and it formed in orbit around the earth, I would assume that a tidal lock would have occured very soon after its formation. Probably somewhere there is a simulation to show this.
Here's an article that explains why the composition is likely to be different for more fluid materials upon the theorised collision of the 2 'proto-moons'. This explains in principal that the less solid objects were drawn to the near side (as per the original article linked to in the summary), leaving a thinner crust on the near side. The only new interesting take-home is that the period of bombardment of comets and asteroids (due to the stabilization of the orbits of Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus throwing them towards the inner solar system) was likely slightly less violent than predicted before.
but the moon itself believed to have been formed from a collision of a planet with the mass that became the earth. in that model, the reason why composition would be uneven as the moon tidal lock with one side facing the earth that in fact due to earth's gravity acting on object of uneven composition.
Almost. The moon was thought to be formed in stages. First by a proto-planet called Thea roughly about the size of mars hitting the earth not full on, leaving debre in space. Over time the debree formed a ring to minimize energy between the earth and the ejected material. The ring then had paricles clump together that rolled on more dust to form 2 objects. These 2 objects with different material makeups (probably from the different amounts of Earth or Thea in them) then collided after some passes around the earth, leaving one side completely different in makeup from the other side. One side is tidal locked to the Earth, so it always faces us as you already know. You can see some of this by looking at the smooth section of moon vs the rough section as well.
You all the type of people the Administrators are.
They are the ones who were never picked in PE.
Tick
They are the ones who never had a date to the dance.
Well... some of them you'd think might have looked pretty good in the past, but yeah -- tick
They are the ones who excelled in class...
You've clearly never worked at a school before.
Sorry to tell you, but all this time you've been talking to Bonobos.
What you neglected to mention is that the "greenies" are the source of much of the fearmongering in those steps and are in many cases simply anti-corporation, except for new "environmental" companies that many have financial interest in, and mostly anti-science. These are groups such as Greenpeace, which its founder has tried to distance himself from because he actually cares about the end result for the environment.
Now gas injection underground seems like a bad idea, but many greenies are in favor of deep underground heat extraction to power turbines, which if ramped up may be worse for the environment from similar problems and loss of efficiency being far away from people's homes and businesses. Who know, wind farms could be about the worst thing for the environment and people, as well as long standing communities that are divided by these things. Out at sea they if ramped up they might even change weather patterns. This is a new entriely unproven experiment unfortunately with little science to back up it being good for the environment. Damming for hydro used to be something that environmentalists blocked because it changes the ecosystem downstream forever.
Environmentalist that have scientific backgrounds and care about the environment, its animals and its plants, should really separate from the scare mongering "greenies" that have directly led to these gas recovery efforts through their actions in the past through the processes described in the parent post. At least they feel good about themselves and have something to rile against.