Light "bends" around stars because space-time itself is "bent" around the star by the star's gravitation. Light in free space (outside of transparent objects, etc) travels along a geodesic of space-time, which is (usually) the shortest way to get from one place to another. It would be difficult to say that a photon's relativistic mass is interacting with gravity because if that were the case then you would expect that photons of different energy would take different paths in a gravitational field, which they don't. It is misleading to say that "Photons are massless in rest", because they can't exist at rest.
On the other hand, I was 42 when my first kid was born twelve years ago and I had 20+ years before that with few responsibilities. When you have kids late you can never claim, "you didn't get to do things in life" -- if you haven't gotten around to the sports cars, exotic vacations, or advanced degrees by the time you are 40, you are never going to get around to them and so can be content that you already did all the things you wanted to do by yourself. I'm not planning on becoming feeble and unable to keep up with the kids any time soon -- I look forward to when they can give me a good run or tennis match.
pixelpusher got most of it, but in a simplified nutshell -- the oceans are not static bowls of water - even neglecting tides, they have currents and winds pushing the water around. Steady currents and winds can push the water up against the continents and create semi-permanent "hills" and "valleys" of water which become part of the "normal" sea level for that area. If the currents change due to climate or any other reason then the local sea level there can have a change not reflected globally.
OK, you got me on that one. Somalia is pretty hackneyed by now, though it is the poster child for a country with no controlling government telling people what to do. The fact is that there are no real functioning Libertarian societies in the world at this time, none even close it you consider all aspects of life. Probably the closest there ever was were parts of the USA in the 19th century but that was a special set of circumstances with a rich, undeveloped continent containing an existing population unable to effectively defend its territory. Since then the closest we have had are the Western democracies (Euro and North American) unless you count countries where the rich can do whatever they want and ignore the rest of the populace. Any place else pretty quickly devolved to autocracies (benign or not). I would say that Libertarianism just doesn't work in the world of the 20th and 21st centuries; it works even more poorly than Communism did in the 20th -- at least Communism got a shot in some countries and lip service by a lot. Libertarianism never got that far. The Libertarian ideal of some god-like authority which enforces always paying for what you use up -- where is that expected to come from? I guess I'm just sensitive that members of those pseudo-Libertarian Western democracies are so quick to gripe about what has been the most successful way (by almost any measure) to organize large populations in the history of human existence. The story "Coventry" by Heinlein (I think) comes to mind. The one thing I must take issue with you is on the estimate of Libertarians on Slashdot -- it has got to be way more than 20%.
Slashdot editors -- why post this article? 50% of the comments are predictably along the lines of, "good riddance" or "the politicians/leaders are the threat to the Constitution!" I get it -- half the Slashdot posters are rugged libertarians ready to live the independent life of government-free self sufficiency, though they won't move to Somalia and prove it, nor do they explain how the instantaneous collapse of technological civilization is going to maintain the society where they are techno-gods on the Internet. To the couple of posters who actually put up a thought out comment, such as, "the State governments will step in," I thank-you. It still wasn't worth it though. I have only myself to blame, I knew this was going to be bad one from the headline...
How about doing some research or at least keeping up with the news before spewing? One of the two US attorneys on the leak case is Rod J. Rosenstein, a Republican appointed into his current position as US Attorney in 2005 by George W. Bush -- hardly the profile of an Obama partisan.
"A drone attacking some guy as he's driving down the street, blissfully unaware that anyone is out to get him at the moment, isn't remotely the same." -- These guys who are on the target list have all been put on notice (at least de facto notice, if not de jure) that the drones are out to get them all the time. They can get off that list by turning themselves in -- then they at least have an argument to get legal protections. Until then they are on the battlefield that they chose and eligible to be off'ed without further warning. That's the real world judicial process in action. Anyone who wants to change it needs to get the American public to give a rat's ass about the civil rights of guys who have publicly stated their goals to kill as many Americans as possible -- good luck with that.
As a physicist/engineer I would say that a study like this IS science, but is investigating a very noisy system with lots of feedbacks, poorly understood interactions, and is not very amenable to controlled experimentation. So the choice is to try to tease some predictive observations out of these social studies using mathematical techniques or just throw up our hands, declare it is too hard, and let the politicians and religious leaders tell us everything about social and human systems that we are allowed to know. I'll take the social science research.
I logged in to say just about exactly what you did and then caught your comment. I'll rephrase it so it will show up at a higher mod rating -- this shows that the Europeans have absolutely no standing on which to make statements about science illiteracy in the USA!
Most of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo astronauts saw their job as part of the Cold War to defeat the Russians. I heard a talk by Frank Borman (Apollo 8) and he said that was exactly his motivation. Their peers and friends from flight training in the military were being shot at and shot down in Vietnam. Being in space was dangerous but so was being over Hanoi at that time. So these guys were military men fighting the same war many of them had first been part of over the skies in Korea during that war. These motivations don't apply to a moonbase now.
Besides the fact that the economy has turned around since near collapse in 2008, I don't know how many big projects you've worked on but 3 years is not a lot of time to get a huge turnaround going, especially with half the middle management (Congress) actively fighting you. And, the last time a president had to clean up a mess like this, Roosevelt didn't have much to show after 3 years either but he got reelected 3 more times!
The rest of the story: Before the landers, the US had the first successful flyby of Venus with Mariner 3 in 1962 and the first successful flyby of Mars with Mariner 4 in 1964, ahead of the Russians in both cases. As for landers: Luna 9, first soft lander on the moon (Russian) -- landed Feb 3, 1966, operated for 8 hours on the moon, returned 3 series of TV pictures. Surveyor 1, first American soft lander on the moon -- landed June 2, 1966, returning 11,237 photos over 42 days of operations, continued to return engineering data until Jan 7, 1967, over 7months later. Mars 3, first soft lander on Mars (Russian), landed Dec 2, 1971, 14.5 seconds after landing communications from the lander permanently ceased, one partial image was transmitted containing nothing identifiable. Viking 1, first US soft lander on Mars -- landed Jul 20, 1976. Operated for over 6 years until Nov 11, 1982, returning several hundred photos along with life search and other science experiments. The Russians landed first and I commend them for it, but the US missions were vastly more productive; this information should always be included when the statements about who got there first are made.
I don't agree with your first three points, but, being a realist, I whole-heartedly agree with your last one so for practical purposes we advocate the same actions. In the end that's all that really counts.
121 megapixels -- can any of the photo aficionados tell us how that compares with the shots of earth taken with the film cameras aboard the Apollo spacecraft? Some of those were mighty good.
No social controls required -- just implement a tax on all fuels so that their cost to the user reflects all the true costs of the fuel, both direct to the user and indirect to everyone else who has to live with the waste products from the extraction and use of the fuel. That's what the professional economists recommend and the real libertarians should be all for it -- that is, the ones which state that you pay for what you use, not the fakers who say that their garbage can be everyone else's problem. Setting the value of the indirect costs might cause a bit of disagreement -- but for CO2, just say that your cost of dumping CO2 into the air is whatever the cost is to pull it back out and sequester it with best available technology -- phase this in over a few years as the sequestration technology gets cheaper.
I don't know what the amplitude is but incandescents on a 60 Hz circuit do have a 120 Hz ripple. We are doing some lab work with infrared sensors and we can see the ripple when we point at incandescent lights; I can't tell what the percentage of the ripple is over the DC component since our amplifiers block DC. Doesn't work on fluorescents -- not enough IR output in the range we observe.
The US law didn't ban incandescents -- it set minimum efficiency standards for them which good halogen incandescents meet. I kind of disapprove -- a person should be allowed to buy whatever piece of shit bulb they want as long as they pay the electric bill without griping. HOWEVER as long as the emissions of the coal burning plants are allowed to foul the air upwind of me for the electricity used to power those POS's then I am partly paying for them, too -- that's not right either.
A lot of the stuff that the rich buy in larger proportioins than the poor (legal and financial services for example) are not taxed, at least not in Texas which has a high sales tax.
If all those who loudly proclaim their faith in the writings of the New Testament would actually read it and get the same message that you did the world would be a lot better place.
Those endless square miles of corn are not going to feed anyone who is starving in this world -- they are going to produce high fructose corn syrup and a thousand other unhealthy industrial food calories which reduces the life-span of every American who eats it. As well as industrial corn feeding of cows with the same unhealthy result. Plus it is going to inefficient production of ethanol which barely, if at all, produces more fuel energy than the fossil fuels it burns up in production. All subsidized by the American taxpayer. And all those fertilizers sluice down the Mississippi and poison the Gulf of Mexico reducing its ability to produce high quality seafood. So we would all be better off if the midwestern industrial corn farmers would indeed convert to some other crops, some varieties more healthful than corn. The price of a bag of corn chips and a hamburger would go up some, but we would all make that up on lower medical bills for the population as a whole.
Two points: 1) At the risk of starting a flame war, the world's manned (crewed..., whatever) space program began its slow down when the last crewed Apollo-Saturn V launched in 1972. Neither the US nor any other country has produced a crewed vehicle which could reach earth escape velocity since then. The shuttle turned out to be a very expensive and long delaying regression to earth orbit only. Perhaps we can get back to going forward and outward now. 2) You are correct that the maximum speed that a few select humans can go has been higher in the past -- retirement of SR-71 and Concorde apply here, too, but with the general expansion of air and automobile travel worldwide the "average" (whatever that is) person has access to more mobility and speed of mobility than ever.
What about the mercury decrease from less coal burning? If coal is supplying the electricity, the mercury released into the environment is far less using CFLs.
So, I have to ask, "Are their women their property to do with as they please?". It used to be pretty much that way in the US up to about 60 years ago, but now we don't put up with domestic violence even when confined within a private family unit. And we don't put up with it in those weird compounds out West. And the Feds stepped in during the 50's and 60's (with troops when necessary) when it was perceived that the southern states weren't treating their residents right. I know there is a difference (somewhere) between the those examples, but where is the line between minding your own business and saving those in need from their oppressors?
Clarification -- when I said "shills for the oil and coal industries" I didn't mean the hard working geoscientists who are finding and developing extraction methods for what, for now, are necessary resources to bridge us to more sustainable ones, but the PR shills I see on TV and the web touting how fine the status quo is and to ignore any warnings of problems ahead.
Slashdot Mirror
Light "bends" around stars because space-time itself is "bent" around the star by the star's gravitation. Light in free space (outside of transparent objects, etc) travels along a geodesic of space-time, which is (usually) the shortest way to get from one place to another. It would be difficult to say that a photon's relativistic mass is interacting with gravity because if that were the case then you would expect that photons of different energy would take different paths in a gravitational field, which they don't.
It is misleading to say that "Photons are massless in rest", because they can't exist at rest.
On the other hand, I was 42 when my first kid was born twelve years ago and I had 20+ years before that with few responsibilities. When you have kids late you can never claim, "you didn't get to do things in life" -- if you haven't gotten around to the sports cars, exotic vacations, or advanced degrees by the time you are 40, you are never going to get around to them and so can be content that you already did all the things you wanted to do by yourself. I'm not planning on becoming feeble and unable to keep up with the kids any time soon -- I look forward to when they can give me a good run or tennis match.
pixelpusher got most of it, but in a simplified nutshell -- the oceans are not static bowls of water - even neglecting tides, they have currents and winds pushing the water around. Steady currents and winds can push the water up against the continents and create semi-permanent "hills" and "valleys" of water which become part of the "normal" sea level for that area. If the currents change due to climate or any other reason then the local sea level there can have a change not reflected globally.
OK, you got me on that one. Somalia is pretty hackneyed by now, though it is the poster child for a country with no controlling government telling people what to do. The fact is that there are no real functioning Libertarian societies in the world at this time, none even close it you consider all aspects of life. Probably the closest there ever was were parts of the USA in the 19th century but that was a special set of circumstances with a rich, undeveloped continent containing an existing population unable to effectively defend its territory. Since then the closest we have had are the Western democracies (Euro and North American) unless you count countries where the rich can do whatever they want and ignore the rest of the populace. Any place else pretty quickly devolved to autocracies (benign or not). I would say that Libertarianism just doesn't work in the world of the 20th and 21st centuries; it works even more poorly than Communism did in the 20th -- at least Communism got a shot in some countries and lip service by a lot. Libertarianism never got that far. The Libertarian ideal of some god-like authority which enforces always paying for what you use up -- where is that expected to come from? I guess I'm just sensitive that members of those pseudo-Libertarian Western democracies are so quick to gripe about what has been the most successful way (by almost any measure) to organize large populations in the history of human existence. The story "Coventry" by Heinlein (I think) comes to mind. The one thing I must take issue with you is on the estimate of Libertarians on Slashdot -- it has got to be way more than 20%.
Slashdot editors -- why post this article? 50% of the comments are predictably along the lines of, "good riddance" or "the politicians/leaders are the threat to the Constitution!" I get it -- half the Slashdot posters are rugged libertarians ready to live the independent life of government-free self sufficiency, though they won't move to Somalia and prove it, nor do they explain how the instantaneous collapse of technological civilization is going to maintain the society where they are techno-gods on the Internet. To the couple of posters who actually put up a thought out comment, such as, "the State governments will step in," I thank-you. It still wasn't worth it though. I have only myself to blame, I knew this was going to be bad one from the headline...
How about doing some research or at least keeping up with the news before spewing? One of the two US attorneys on the leak case is Rod J. Rosenstein, a Republican appointed into his current position as US Attorney in 2005 by George W. Bush -- hardly the profile of an Obama partisan.
"A drone attacking some guy as he's driving down the street, blissfully unaware that anyone is out to get him at the moment, isn't remotely the same." -- These guys who are on the target list have all been put on notice (at least de facto notice, if not de jure) that the drones are out to get them all the time. They can get off that list by turning themselves in -- then they at least have an argument to get legal protections. Until then they are on the battlefield that they chose and eligible to be off'ed without further warning. That's the real world judicial process in action. Anyone who wants to change it needs to get the American public to give a rat's ass about the civil rights of guys who have publicly stated their goals to kill as many Americans as possible -- good luck with that.
As a physicist/engineer I would say that a study like this IS science, but is investigating a very noisy system with lots of feedbacks, poorly understood interactions, and is not very amenable to controlled experimentation. So the choice is to try to tease some predictive observations out of these social studies using mathematical techniques or just throw up our hands, declare it is too hard, and let the politicians and religious leaders tell us everything about social and human systems that we are allowed to know. I'll take the social science research.
I logged in to say just about exactly what you did and then caught your comment. I'll rephrase it so it will show up at a higher mod rating -- this shows that the Europeans have absolutely no standing on which to make statements about science illiteracy in the USA!
Most of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo astronauts saw their job as part of the Cold War to defeat the Russians. I heard a talk by Frank Borman (Apollo 8) and he said that was exactly his motivation. Their peers and friends from flight training in the military were being shot at and shot down in Vietnam. Being in space was dangerous but so was being over Hanoi at that time. So these guys were military men fighting the same war many of them had first been part of over the skies in Korea during that war. These motivations don't apply to a moonbase now.
Besides the fact that the economy has turned around since near collapse in 2008, I don't know how many big projects you've worked on but 3 years is not a lot of time to get a huge turnaround going, especially with half the middle management (Congress) actively fighting you.
And, the last time a president had to clean up a mess like this, Roosevelt didn't have much to show after 3 years either but he got reelected 3 more times!
The rest of the story: Before the landers, the US had the first successful flyby of Venus with Mariner 3 in 1962 and the first successful flyby of Mars with Mariner 4 in 1964, ahead of the Russians in both cases. As for landers: Luna 9, first soft lander on the moon (Russian) -- landed Feb 3, 1966, operated for 8 hours on the moon, returned 3 series of TV pictures. Surveyor 1, first American soft lander on the moon -- landed June 2, 1966, returning 11,237 photos over 42 days of operations, continued to return engineering data until Jan 7, 1967, over 7months later. Mars 3, first soft lander on Mars (Russian), landed Dec 2, 1971, 14.5 seconds after landing communications from the lander permanently ceased, one partial image was transmitted containing nothing identifiable. Viking 1, first US soft lander on Mars -- landed Jul 20, 1976. Operated for over 6 years until Nov 11, 1982, returning several hundred photos along with life search and other science experiments. The Russians landed first and I commend them for it, but the US missions were vastly more productive; this information should always be included when the statements about who got there first are made.
I don't agree with your first three points, but, being a realist, I whole-heartedly agree with your last one so for practical purposes we advocate the same actions. In the end that's all that really counts.
121 megapixels -- can any of the photo aficionados tell us how that compares with the shots of earth taken with the film cameras aboard the Apollo spacecraft? Some of those were mighty good.
No social controls required -- just implement a tax on all fuels so that their cost to the user reflects all the true costs of the fuel, both direct to the user and indirect to everyone else who has to live with the waste products from the extraction and use of the fuel. That's what the professional economists recommend and the real libertarians should be all for it -- that is, the ones which state that you pay for what you use, not the fakers who say that their garbage can be everyone else's problem. Setting the value of the indirect costs might cause a bit of disagreement -- but for CO2, just say that your cost of dumping CO2 into the air is whatever the cost is to pull it back out and sequester it with best available technology -- phase this in over a few years as the sequestration technology gets cheaper.
I don't know what the amplitude is but incandescents on a 60 Hz circuit do have a 120 Hz ripple. We are doing some lab work with infrared sensors and we can see the ripple when we point at incandescent lights; I can't tell what the percentage of the ripple is over the DC component since our amplifiers block DC. Doesn't work on fluorescents -- not enough IR output in the range we observe.
The US law didn't ban incandescents -- it set minimum efficiency standards for them which good halogen incandescents meet. I kind of disapprove -- a person should be allowed to buy whatever piece of shit bulb they want as long as they pay the electric bill without griping. HOWEVER as long as the emissions of the coal burning plants are allowed to foul the air upwind of me for the electricity used to power those POS's then I am partly paying for them, too -- that's not right either.
A lot of the stuff that the rich buy in larger proportioins than the poor (legal and financial services for example) are not taxed, at least not in Texas which has a high sales tax.
If all those who loudly proclaim their faith in the writings of the New Testament would actually read it and get the same message that you did the world would be a lot better place.
Those endless square miles of corn are not going to feed anyone who is starving in this world -- they are going to produce high fructose corn syrup and a thousand other unhealthy industrial food calories which reduces the life-span of every American who eats it. As well as industrial corn feeding of cows with the same unhealthy result. Plus it is going to inefficient production of ethanol which barely, if at all, produces more fuel energy than the fossil fuels it burns up in production. All subsidized by the American taxpayer. And all those fertilizers sluice down the Mississippi and poison the Gulf of Mexico reducing its ability to produce high quality seafood. So we would all be better off if the midwestern industrial corn farmers would indeed convert to some other crops, some varieties more healthful than corn. The price of a bag of corn chips and a hamburger would go up some, but we would all make that up on lower medical bills for the population as a whole.
Two points:
1) At the risk of starting a flame war, the world's manned (crewed..., whatever) space program began its slow down when the last crewed Apollo-Saturn V launched in 1972. Neither the US nor any other country has produced a crewed vehicle which could reach earth escape velocity since then. The shuttle turned out to be a very expensive and long delaying regression to earth orbit only. Perhaps we can get back to going forward and outward now.
2) You are correct that the maximum speed that a few select humans can go has been higher in the past -- retirement of SR-71 and Concorde apply here, too, but with the general expansion of air and automobile travel worldwide the "average" (whatever that is) person has access to more mobility and speed of mobility than ever.
What about the mercury decrease from less coal burning? If coal is supplying the electricity, the mercury released into the environment is far less using CFLs.
Just to let you know, you are pretty much right on your reply. It's not a pretty world out there, everything can' t be perfect or maybe even good.
So, I have to ask, "Are their women their property to do with as they please?". It used to be pretty much that way in the US up to about 60 years ago, but now we don't put up with domestic violence even when confined within a private family unit. And we don't put up with it in those weird compounds out West. And the Feds stepped in during the 50's and 60's (with troops when necessary) when it was perceived that the southern states weren't treating their residents right. I know there is a difference (somewhere) between the those examples, but where is the line between minding your own business and saving those in need from their oppressors?
Clarification -- when I said "shills for the oil and coal industries" I didn't mean the hard working geoscientists who are finding and developing extraction methods for what, for now, are necessary resources to bridge us to more sustainable ones, but the PR shills I see on TV and the web touting how fine the status quo is and to ignore any warnings of problems ahead.