I was in a spacesuit. I just wanted to see the probe, and make sure it was ok. I just returned to my capsule a few hundred meters away from the landing site. I was tempted to drop a couple of fossils around, as a joke, but I was sorta running late, and had to get back in time to make this post.
I know that Slashdot tends to be a metric love-fest,
OH the irony on Memorial Day. Someone is complaining about metric again at the very moment 150,000 US soldiers in Iraq are using metric -all- the time.
*grin* Special relativity breaks absolute simultaneity. To say that you could account for the speed of light to calculate the precise absolute instant that the lander touched down is not even correct. An observer moving very fast towards Mars and away from Earth could make the same calculation and come to a different conclusion.
But you can say that. The whole point of GR is to provide the mathematical tools to translate from one frame to another, the idear being that I can define simultaneity in terms of a translation from another frame to my frame.
Thus, I can put a spaceship on Mars, and really can know that to this earth bound observer, what happened however many minutes ago ago is in fact what happened, AND, I can imagine myself being on Mars in a spacesuit a few minutes earlier, looking at the robot probe as it did its thing.
The land is still not yours, you just own a piece of paper that the King will use violence to enforce on your behalf
Actually, I'm an American citizen, and as such, have a -natural- right to possess guns. I do not need a king to enforce my property rights. I have a gun to enforce my property rights, and by my act of agreeing not to shoot the "king", I consent to be governed and live by the laws of the USA. Thus, because I have a gun, I own my land, and the King (aka gov't), has no rights of its own at all.
You forgot to mention that you should, by all means, avoid having any plants on your field being pollinated with pollen from Monsantos plants, because if this happens, one or two of the following might happen: 1) you get slapped with a lawsuit from Monsanto for infringing on their patented stuff, 2)
Well, now, THAT situation is totally wrong, and the wise course of public policy would hold that whatever Monsanto pollen did to your land, that pollen is now yours, and Monsanto has absolutely no right to go and block you from not only planting their crops, but reselling YOUR seeds.
So, if a guy next door to you plants his Monsanto seeds, that's all well and good and he and Monsanto are entitled to the proceeds. But, if your neighbor's pollen somehow alters your crops, you are either entitled to damages from Monstanto, and in ALL cases you are perfectly entitled to regrow and resell whatever seeds you have.
So you (and the moderators who modded you up) oppose the concept of inheritance? And what should happen after you die to the property that you created?
I think the essence of the disposition of a man's estate after his death is to ask, what's best for the people. I do not see property rights as an excuse to create a nobility, but I do think it is right to want to give your children -something- extra. So, could a man that builds a small company be able to pass that to his kids? Yes. But, should the likes of a Bill Gates be able to enshrine his or her children? ER, no.
Property is a muddy concept at least, and one-liner generalizations like "You do not have a right to what you did not create" (or "Your are just totally wrong") don't describe it with justice nor can't be used as moral guidelines, at danger of making a radical out of you.
Nothing is ever absolute, but when confronted with a radical threatening to hang people, then you need to be able to make polarizing statements back.
Nothing is completely absolute. If property rights were completely absolute, then, western society would not exist because, a few hundred years ago, all of the land belonged to the King and the King had an absolute right for commercial enterprises as well. In western society, ownership of land became more decentralized due to a wide variety of forces - ranging from wars that weakened monarchs, to a demand for the king to actually act something like the religion he claimed to uphold, to political and revolutionary reform. But it is fair to say that decentralization took place because the crown's sheer greed made it necessary for the crown to begin to share power with other people in the form of king's charters and patents and grants, where the king got a cut in exchange for a transfer of ownership from "public" to private, and from that, we have the idea of taxation. The king still gets his or her cut, but, now, the ownership is private.
IF other countries haven't had that sort of chain of events take place, then, they aren't going to have that. In Kenya, for example, all of the good land is locked up by giant estates that are descendants of their colonial forbears. This arrangement was set up by the imperial powers to create products for export back to the mother country and on the cheap. So, in Kenya, you have thousands of acres of the very best farmland growing coffee for export to the West, all owned by a handful of people, while the vast majority of the country starves. The problem in these countries, is that, what happens is that a marxist revolution takes place, and the "people" wind up owning the land, but in practice the people are just another small gang of thugs and for the average guy, the situation hasn't changed at all, except what little he did have was lost in the revolution designed to liberate him.
Quite honestly, in those countries, what is needed is a redistribution of land into private ownership. You can't have an equitable system of property rights without everyone being able to own some sort of property!
It's pretty simple. If you do not like paying for music, then do not buy it. If you do not like to pay for software, then use the free stuff. But remember the free stuff has its strings too.
Everyone complains about paying for music or movies or how it is not fair a song should not lapse into the public domain? But, why not write your own?
If that were true, would you make further compromises so that we can all work together, or would you sit in your stronghold with your poisoned seeds, waiting for us to come string you up by the neck and claim what you consider yours?
If you don't like Monsanto's seeds, don't buy them. It's pretty simple. You can use your old seeds just fine, just don't bitch if he has less weeds and more food than you. And, if you try string this man up by his neck to steal his seeds, my little gang will be along to defend him, and then we will punish you and your bloodline to make sure that the human race is no longer contaminated by your bad blood.
If you claim I do not have a right to my birthright, I consider that justification to kill you and take it by force.
You do not have a right to what you did not create. If you want something, you should make it yourself. It's my land, my idea, my property, and you can go find your own. Your laziness and lack of creativity does not give you a right to steal.
Oh please don't go bleat on about having the right to food, housing or medical. Those things are important, yes, but, if they are so important than shouldn't you be willing to work for them?
or (b) it is in self-defence to a current or imminent threat (with no time to seek a UN resolution). The invasion was therefore illegal..
The invasion was not illegal because Saddam Hussein had abrogated the terms of his cease fire with the United Nations forces. Because he did not live up to his cease fire agreements, then, there was no obligation for the USA to not to continue the war. So, the invasion of 2003 was perfectly legal under international law because the resolution that authorized the original military action against Iraq in 1991 still remained in force owing to Saddam's cease fire violation.
Even Bush himself has stopped trying to claim this. He now admits there were no WMDs, and has shifted to blaming "bad intelligence".
You didn't speak to my point. My point was not that there were no WMD in Iraq in 2003, there were, not. It was that, with the sanctions lifted, it is very likely that Saddam would have resumed his weapons program. He even said so. If we do not get Saddam, then the sanctions get lifted, Saddam gets the bomb, and then nukes Iran and Saudi Arabia and makes himself master of the middle east. For Saddam, the whole sanctions and inspection regime process was an always a plan to get the UN off of his back so he could go back to his original plan.
America has always been a nation of geeks
on
The Rise of Geekdom
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Thomas Jefferson : Geek. Made all sorts of inventions at Monticello
Westinghouse : Geek. Invents airbrakes.
Edison : Geek. Genuine Geek. Anyway one that could think of electrocuting an elephant to prove the superiority of his or her technology, well, that's a geek.
Henry Ford, the Dodge Brothers, Stanley family: all geeks.
Being a genuine geek is not about the kind of clothes you wear or what sort of a show you watch. It's about having an uncontrollable urge to express yourself by making things. Geekdome isn't even an academic thing. Machinists at WL Gore, guys that build their own cars and people that alter their own guns, those are all geeks.
Sure, its nice to hope that some of us will get stinking rich off of something we invent, but most of the time, we're really more inventing because the curious act of exploration occupies the mind in such a way as to silence for a time the storms that otherwise lie within it.
Environmentalists managed to detect dioxins being generated by incinerators being undertemperatured through the use of laser chromatography. Couldn't the same work for the traces of explosives?
Do you have a link for that? If so, I'd like to see it.
Spray on detectors are fine and well, but what we really need is something that can detect a fairly large amount of explosives on a person or a car from a few blocks away. If it were car mountable and relatively cheap, we could put it in cop cars and at a few strategic locations, and basically snuff out terrorism without all of this silly finger printing and wiretapping by getting the jump on disarming would be bad guys. Sure, some people might get nailed by false positives, but that's far better than people getting nailed by having their names match someone on a do-not-fly list.
That deserve to be unelected. Two are Republicans, three are Democrats, so, supporting the opposite on all five cases would really be a nearly even deal.
If you don't want to see that happen, vote Republicans into congress and the whitehouse
Hmmm. Here's the thing. The great irony of American politics is that despite Liberals being aligned to Democrats and Conservatives being aligned to Republicans, it is the Republicans that have actually passed most of the liberal legislation over the last 40 years.
Check this out:
Richard Nixon (R) - Clear Air Act, Clean Water Act, EPA
Jimmy Carter (D) - deregulates the transporation sector. His 1b loan to chrylser would later be dwarfed by the massive bailouts of savings and loans, and financial institutions under Bush I and Bush II.
Ronald Reagan (R) - signed amnesty for all illegal aliens then in the USA, appoints first woman to supreme court
George Bush I (R) - Revises the Clean Air Act. Signs the Americans with Disabilities Act. Massive federal intervention to bail out troubled banks.
Bill Clinton (D) - Essentially adds little or no new regulation. Deregulates wall street. Cuts federal budget across the board. Raises taxes slightly in 1993 but repeals more liberal measures and then cuts capital gains tax later in term. Balances budget, encourages private investment that economy roars.
George Bush II (R) - signs massive energy bill with subsidies and incentives for alternative energy. Extends Medicare with prescription drug program. Doubles federal spending on physics and medical research, adds Sarbanes Oxley appoints first african american secretary of state, and, now the kicker, if the stars align right, Bush might be the guy that signs a massive cap and trade CO2 bill working its way through congress.
Computer data centers use too much energy. Next thing you know, Congressman will be up in arms, hauling data center leads in front of a good public beating, and then passing legislation to tax excess profits. What would happen next? Data centers leave the USA in droves, 1,000,000 jobs evaporate, and the USA loses yet another industry due to a government that is as malicious towards successful enterprise as it is incompetent.
Well, actually, we've been able to measure that. Here's a summary [nasa.gov], but we're pretty sure that the universe is flat (parallel lines will never converge), to within a 2% margin of error. Neat work, that.
I read that. Yeah, it could still be flat overall thought, couldn't it. In other words, the question is the general shape of the universe.
Imagine if the United States spent half as much money on science as we are spending on this war.
Actually, the United States spends far more on science than it does on the war. It's just that most of it is in the private sector, though.
And in fact, the most spectacular accomplishments of astronomy are when we show that cosmological theories can be found even on good old earth, and vice versa. I present as exhibit 1 the Big Bang. the Big Bang, as I understand it, came from an application of Einstein's GR, coupled with Hubble's discoveries, all together with the insight that the math predicted that there would be some sort of radiation from the event all around us to this day. Thus, some dude puts up an antenna, discovers background noise that was inexplicable, and then makes the connection that this is indeed the radiation predicted by the various big bang theories. That's a stunning triumph.
The short form is that we've covered all of the other bases with dark matter.
I read it... very interesting. It seems to me though, that "covered all the bases" really means "researched as much as we think we can with the tools that we have." It's like, you can't just go out there and measure stuff, you know. A lot of it is weighing subtle things together and making a case, until someone does something really amazing and discovers that background noise on a satellite antenna is actually radiation from the big bang. That is fricking cool.
Things behave wildly differently than they're supposed to, and short of revising our theory of gravitation in a complex and inconsistent way
Of course, here I am the luddite, intrigued by this. I mean, what if space time isn't the flat sheet distorted like is thought... what if it is rumpled and rotating and twisting throughout the whole universe, so that, matter flows into the twists and rotations of space time and that's why things are the way they are....maybe our understanding of gravity is backwards...
See, here's the thing. I like to make fun of astronomers because the way they do science is sort like puzzle fitting and there's a lot of intuition and guesswork and searching for clues, because, you know, you just can't go and build a universe. But, at the same time, I do actually have a remarkable appreciation for what they do. I mean, coming up with the big bang and then tying that to measurable radiation all around us, and knowing where to listen for it, because you fit the cosmology, the physics, everything together, to do something so subtle and so dramatic, wow, that just blows me a way. That hiss you hear, that's the universe being made billions of years ago. It boggles the imagination in the most delightful way.
This is Physics, where we do not generally speak of "proving" things
It goes like this, when an astronomer tells me something about the universe, or a biologist about the earth's past, they usually put together a chain of evidence in much the same way a detective tries to fit a puzzle together. It's interesting, for sure, but, when a physicist or a chemist tells me something, most of the time it is because THEY BUILT SOMETHING USEFUL. From physics and chemistry come a wide variety of materials and devices, from motorized things of all shapes and sizes, calculating and communicating devices, really everything in industrial society.
So yeah, you can claim that astronomy and evolution fall into the same sort of science that practical physics does, but, it doesn't. See, physics and its cousin, chemistry give us products that we can see and touch and use, while astronomy really just gives us good special effects on the History Channel and a bunch of jackasses in the back of the movie theater whining that Star Wars is silly because everyone knows that parsecs aren't the right kind of unit referred to by Harrison Ford.
Every time we talk about something new being found in the universe, someone likes to say, "Oh look at those stupid astronomers, making up stuff no one can prove
That statement is essentially true. The best you can ever know about the universe is by inference. Standard candles are an approximation and you aren't really able to prove anything by duplication as much as you are trying to say this is a pretty good story based on a computer model kicking out a similar result. I mean, it all sounds pretty good on paper, but I could always make a computer model of the "real killer" stabbing Nicole and Ron, and not OJ.
Fine, find some sort of matter interacts gravitationally with the observable universe but not electromagnetically, and call it whatever you want when you do. We'll be over here calling it non-baryonic matter, or dark matter
Wouldn't a big blob of noble gases in the galaxies and then some sort of interstellar / undiscovered physics to mute the spectra do the trick?
I'm not an astronomer, but I thought the deal with dark matter is that it was necessary to explain the measured rotational speed of the galaxies - like, the edges travel faster than one would expect and so therefor there must be some additional mass tugging things along out on the edge of the galactic disk that we can't see. Right off the wheel, (pun intended), why couldn't you just have a bunch of standard material that you couldn't see? Maybe it doesn't get bright enough out there to illuminate it? Maybe it just never gets dense enough to do stellar formation. If you view a galaxy as a bathtub draining, with the blackhole as the drain and the whirling around the drain the galactic disk, then, if you sprinkled some little floating things on the tub, randomly (stars), then, the only things you'll see moving, in fact, would be the disk, although surely the shape of the disk would change with the overall depth of the water, even if you would not be able to see all of it. Perhaps it could be something like that?
I mean, I find it rather unreasonable that you feel the need to invent an entirely new kind of matter. Are you that confident that you understand the makeup of something as unimaginably vast as a galaxy, so many thousands of light years away that you will never even be able to touch it?
It's pretty simple. I take the train to work. The train station is about 1.5 miles from where I work, which I walk, rain, snow, or shine. Then, I come home and lift weights 3-4 times a week. It's a bit gone to hell since I'm in the process of moving, but I might actually add a body building section to my Linux blog. Just because we like the Penguin, doesn't mean you have to be built like one!
Fair enough! Good luck with Bob Barr. At least he had the 'nads to come out against that USA PATRIOT Act and all of the other Gestapo crap that the mainstream parties tell us is necessary for our "safety".
well, plastic, whereas wood and steel are quite difficult to form into complicated shapes.
Hmm. I might disagree with this. Yes, plastic can be injection molded, but you can get wood into a lot of shapes with a good CNC machine these days and those are basically automatic any more. Steel is actually pretty flexible. You can stamp it, press it, and you can mold it too. I think the problem with it would be that it is too flexible.
Slashdot Mirror
I was in a spacesuit. I just wanted to see the probe, and make sure it was ok. I just returned to my capsule a few hundred meters away from the landing site. I was tempted to drop a couple of fossils around, as a joke, but I was sorta running late, and had to get back in time to make this post.
I know that Slashdot tends to be a metric love-fest,
OH the irony on Memorial Day. Someone is complaining about metric again at the very moment 150,000 US soldiers in Iraq are using metric -all- the time.
*grin* Special relativity breaks absolute simultaneity. To say that you could account for the speed of light to calculate the precise absolute instant that the lander touched down is not even correct. An observer moving very fast towards Mars and away from Earth could make the same calculation and come to a different conclusion.
But you can say that. The whole point of GR is to provide the mathematical tools to translate from one frame to another, the idear being that I can define simultaneity in terms of a translation from another frame to my frame.
Thus, I can put a spaceship on Mars, and really can know that to this earth bound observer, what happened however many minutes ago ago is in fact what happened, AND, I can imagine myself being on Mars in a spacesuit a few minutes earlier, looking at the robot probe as it did its thing.
The land is still not yours, you just own a piece of paper that the King will use violence to enforce on your behalf
Actually, I'm an American citizen, and as such, have a -natural- right to possess guns. I do not need a king to enforce my property rights. I have a gun to enforce my property rights, and by my act of agreeing not to shoot the "king", I consent to be governed and live by the laws of the USA. Thus, because I have a gun, I own my land, and the King (aka gov't), has no rights of its own at all.
You forgot to mention that you should, by all means, avoid having any plants on your field being pollinated with pollen from Monsantos plants, because if this happens, one or two of the following might happen: 1) you get slapped with a lawsuit from Monsanto for infringing on their patented stuff, 2)
Well, now, THAT situation is totally wrong, and the wise course of public policy would hold that whatever Monsanto pollen did to your land, that pollen is now yours, and Monsanto has absolutely no right to go and block you from not only planting their crops, but reselling YOUR seeds.
So, if a guy next door to you plants his Monsanto seeds, that's all well and good and he and Monsanto are entitled to the proceeds. But, if your neighbor's pollen somehow alters your crops, you are either entitled to damages from Monstanto, and in ALL cases you are perfectly entitled to regrow and resell whatever seeds you have.
Any other outcome would be unjust, I would say.
So you (and the moderators who modded you up) oppose the concept of inheritance? And what should happen after you die to the property that you created?
I think the essence of the disposition of a man's estate after his death is to ask, what's best for the people. I do not see property rights as an excuse to create a nobility, but I do think it is right to want to give your children -something- extra. So, could a man that builds a small company be able to pass that to his kids? Yes. But, should the likes of a Bill Gates be able to enshrine his or her children? ER, no.
Property is a muddy concept at least, and one-liner generalizations like "You do not have a right to what you did not create" (or "Your are just totally wrong") don't describe it with justice nor can't be used as moral guidelines, at danger of making a radical out of you.
Nothing is ever absolute, but when confronted with a radical threatening to hang people, then you need to be able to make polarizing statements back.
Nothing is completely absolute. If property rights were completely absolute, then, western society would not exist because, a few hundred years ago, all of the land belonged to the King and the King had an absolute right for commercial enterprises as well. In western society, ownership of land became more decentralized due to a wide variety of forces - ranging from wars that weakened monarchs, to a demand for the king to actually act something like the religion he claimed to uphold, to political and revolutionary reform. But it is fair to say that decentralization took place because the crown's sheer greed made it necessary for the crown to begin to share power with other people in the form of king's charters and patents and grants, where the king got a cut in exchange for a transfer of ownership from "public" to private, and from that, we have the idea of taxation. The king still gets his or her cut, but, now, the ownership is private.
IF other countries haven't had that sort of chain of events take place, then, they aren't going to have that. In Kenya, for example, all of the good land is locked up by giant estates that are descendants of their colonial forbears. This arrangement was set up by the imperial powers to create products for export back to the mother country and on the cheap. So, in Kenya, you have thousands of acres of the very best farmland growing coffee for export to the West, all owned by a handful of people, while the vast majority of the country starves. The problem in these countries, is that, what happens is that a marxist revolution takes place, and the "people" wind up owning the land, but in practice the people are just another small gang of thugs and for the average guy, the situation hasn't changed at all, except what little he did have was lost in the revolution designed to liberate him.
Quite honestly, in those countries, what is needed is a redistribution of land into private ownership. You can't have an equitable system of property rights without everyone being able to own some sort of property!
It's pretty simple. If you do not like paying for music, then do not buy it. If you do not like to pay for software, then use the free stuff. But remember the free stuff has its strings too.
Everyone complains about paying for music or movies or how it is not fair a song should not lapse into the public domain? But, why not write your own?
If that were true, would you make further compromises so that we can all work together, or would you sit in your stronghold with your poisoned seeds, waiting for us to come string you up by the neck and claim what you consider yours?
If you don't like Monsanto's seeds, don't buy them. It's pretty simple. You can use your old seeds just fine, just don't bitch if he has less weeds and more food than you. And, if you try string this man up by his neck to steal his seeds, my little gang will be along to defend him, and then we will punish you and your bloodline to make sure that the human race is no longer contaminated by your bad blood.
If you claim I do not have a right to my birthright, I consider that justification to kill you and take it by force.
You do not have a right to what you did not create. If you want something, you should make it yourself. It's my land, my idea, my property, and you can go find your own. Your laziness and lack of creativity does not give you a right to steal.
Oh please don't go bleat on about having the right to food, housing or medical. Those things are important, yes, but, if they are so important than shouldn't you be willing to work for them?
or (b) it is in self-defence to a current or imminent threat (with no time to seek a UN resolution). The invasion was therefore illegal. .
The invasion was not illegal because Saddam Hussein had abrogated the terms of his cease fire with the United Nations forces. Because he did not live up to his cease fire agreements, then, there was no obligation for the USA to not to continue the war. So, the invasion of 2003 was perfectly legal under international law because the resolution that authorized the original military action against Iraq in 1991 still remained in force owing to Saddam's cease fire violation.
Even Bush himself has stopped trying to claim this. He now admits there were no WMDs, and has shifted to blaming "bad intelligence".
You didn't speak to my point. My point was not that there were no WMD in Iraq in 2003, there were, not. It was that, with the sanctions lifted, it is very likely that Saddam would have resumed his weapons program. He even said so. If we do not get Saddam, then the sanctions get lifted, Saddam gets the bomb, and then nukes Iran and Saudi Arabia and makes himself master of the middle east. For Saddam, the whole sanctions and inspection regime process was an always a plan to get the UN off of his back so he could go back to his original plan.
Thomas Jefferson : Geek. Made all sorts of inventions at Monticello
Westinghouse : Geek. Invents airbrakes.
Edison : Geek. Genuine Geek. Anyway one that could think of electrocuting an elephant to prove the superiority of his or her technology, well, that's a geek.
Henry Ford, the Dodge Brothers, Stanley family: all geeks.
Being a genuine geek is not about the kind of clothes you wear or what sort of a show you watch. It's about having an uncontrollable urge to express yourself by making things. Geekdome isn't even an academic thing. Machinists at WL Gore, guys that build their own cars and people that alter their own guns, those are all geeks.
Sure, its nice to hope that some of us will get stinking rich off of something we invent, but most of the time, we're really more inventing because the curious act of exploration occupies the mind in such a way as to silence for a time the storms that otherwise lie within it.
Environmentalists managed to detect dioxins being generated by incinerators being undertemperatured through the use of laser chromatography. Couldn't the same work for the traces of explosives?
Do you have a link for that? If so, I'd like to see it.
Spray on detectors are fine and well, but what we really need is something that can detect a fairly large amount of explosives on a person or a car from a few blocks away. If it were car mountable and relatively cheap, we could put it in cop cars and at a few strategic locations, and basically snuff out terrorism without all of this silly finger printing and wiretapping by getting the jump on disarming would be bad guys. Sure, some people might get nailed by false positives, but that's far better than people getting nailed by having their names match someone on a do-not-fly list.
That deserve to be unelected. Two are Republicans, three are Democrats, so, supporting the opposite on all five cases would really be a nearly even deal.
If you don't want to see that happen, vote Republicans into congress and the whitehouse
Hmmm. Here's the thing. The great irony of American politics is that despite Liberals being aligned to Democrats and Conservatives being aligned to Republicans, it is the Republicans that have actually passed most of the liberal legislation over the last 40 years.
Check this out:
Richard Nixon (R) - Clear Air Act, Clean Water Act, EPA
Jimmy Carter (D) - deregulates the transporation sector. His 1b loan to chrylser would later be dwarfed by the massive bailouts of savings and loans, and financial institutions under Bush I and Bush II.
Ronald Reagan (R) - signed amnesty for all illegal aliens then in the USA, appoints first woman to supreme court
George Bush I (R) - Revises the Clean Air Act. Signs the Americans with Disabilities Act. Massive federal intervention to bail out troubled banks.
Bill Clinton (D) - Essentially adds little or no new regulation. Deregulates wall street. Cuts federal budget across the board. Raises taxes slightly in 1993 but repeals more liberal measures and then cuts capital gains tax later in term. Balances budget, encourages private investment that economy roars.
George Bush II (R) - signs massive energy bill with subsidies and incentives for alternative energy. Extends Medicare with prescription drug program. Doubles federal spending on physics and medical research, adds Sarbanes Oxley appoints first african american secretary of state, and, now the kicker, if the stars align right, Bush might be the guy that signs a massive cap and trade CO2 bill working its way through congress.
Computer data centers use too much energy. Next thing you know, Congressman will be up in arms, hauling data center leads in front of a good public beating, and then passing legislation to tax excess profits. What would happen next? Data centers leave the USA in droves, 1,000,000 jobs evaporate, and the USA loses yet another industry due to a government that is as malicious towards successful enterprise as it is incompetent.
Well, actually, we've been able to measure that. Here's a summary [nasa.gov], but we're pretty sure that the universe is flat (parallel lines will never converge), to within a 2% margin of error. Neat work, that.
I read that. Yeah, it could still be flat overall thought, couldn't it. In other words, the question is the general shape of the universe.
Imagine if the United States spent half as much money on science as we are spending on this war.
Actually, the United States spends far more on science than it does on the war. It's just that most of it is in the private sector, though.
And in fact, the most spectacular accomplishments of astronomy are when we show that cosmological theories can be found even on good old earth, and vice versa. I present as exhibit 1 the Big Bang. the Big Bang, as I understand it, came from an application of Einstein's GR, coupled with Hubble's discoveries, all together with the insight that the math predicted that there would be some sort of radiation from the event all around us to this day. Thus, some dude puts up an antenna, discovers background noise that was inexplicable, and then makes the connection that this is indeed the radiation predicted by the various big bang theories. That's a stunning triumph.
The short form is that we've covered all of the other bases with dark matter.
I read it... very interesting. It seems to me though, that "covered all the bases" really means "researched as much as we think we can with the tools that we have." It's like, you can't just go out there and measure stuff, you know. A lot of it is weighing subtle things together and making a case, until someone does something really amazing and discovers that background noise on a satellite antenna is actually radiation from the big bang. That is fricking cool.
Things behave wildly differently than they're supposed to, and short of revising our theory of gravitation in a complex and inconsistent way
Of course, here I am the luddite, intrigued by this. I mean, what if space time isn't the flat sheet distorted like is thought... what if it is rumpled and rotating and twisting throughout the whole universe, so that, matter flows into the twists and rotations of space time and that's why things are the way they are....maybe our understanding of gravity is backwards...
See, here's the thing. I like to make fun of astronomers because the way they do science is sort like puzzle fitting and there's a lot of intuition and guesswork and searching for clues, because, you know, you just can't go and build a universe. But, at the same time, I do actually have a remarkable appreciation for what they do. I mean, coming up with the big bang and then tying that to measurable radiation all around us, and knowing where to listen for it, because you fit the cosmology, the physics, everything together, to do something so subtle and so dramatic, wow, that just blows me a way. That hiss you hear, that's the universe being made billions of years ago. It boggles the imagination in the most delightful way.
More funding for astronomers, that's what I say.
This is Physics, where we do not generally speak of "proving" things
It goes like this, when an astronomer tells me something about the universe, or a biologist about the earth's past, they usually put together a chain of evidence in much the same way a detective tries to fit a puzzle together. It's interesting, for sure, but, when a physicist or a chemist tells me something, most of the time it is because THEY BUILT SOMETHING USEFUL. From physics and chemistry come a wide variety of materials and devices, from motorized things of all shapes and sizes, calculating and communicating devices, really everything in industrial society.
So yeah, you can claim that astronomy and evolution fall into the same sort of science that practical physics does, but, it doesn't. See, physics and its cousin, chemistry give us products that we can see and touch and use, while astronomy really just gives us good special effects on the History Channel and a bunch of jackasses in the back of the movie theater whining that Star Wars is silly because everyone knows that parsecs aren't the right kind of unit referred to by Harrison Ford.
Every time we talk about something new being found in the universe, someone likes to say, "Oh look at those stupid astronomers, making up stuff no one can prove
That statement is essentially true. The best you can ever know about the universe is by inference. Standard candles are an approximation and you aren't really able to prove anything by duplication as much as you are trying to say this is a pretty good story based on a computer model kicking out a similar result. I mean, it all sounds pretty good on paper, but I could always make a computer model of the "real killer" stabbing Nicole and Ron, and not OJ.
Fine, find some sort of matter interacts gravitationally with the observable universe but not electromagnetically, and call it whatever you want when you do. We'll be over here calling it non-baryonic matter, or dark matter
Wouldn't a big blob of noble gases in the galaxies and then some sort of interstellar / undiscovered physics to mute the spectra do the trick?
I'm not an astronomer, but I thought the deal with dark matter is that it was necessary to explain the measured rotational speed of the galaxies - like, the edges travel faster than one would expect and so therefor there must be some additional mass tugging things along out on the edge of the galactic disk that we can't see. Right off the wheel, (pun intended), why couldn't you just have a bunch of standard material that you couldn't see? Maybe it doesn't get bright enough out there to illuminate it? Maybe it just never gets dense enough to do stellar formation. If you view a galaxy as a bathtub draining, with the blackhole as the drain and the whirling around the drain the galactic disk, then, if you sprinkled some little floating things on the tub, randomly (stars), then, the only things you'll see moving, in fact, would be the disk, although surely the shape of the disk would change with the overall depth of the water, even if you would not be able to see all of it. Perhaps it could be something like that?
I mean, I find it rather unreasonable that you feel the need to invent an entirely new kind of matter. Are you that confident that you understand the makeup of something as unimaginably vast as a galaxy, so many thousands of light years away that you will never even be able to touch it?
It's pretty simple. I take the train to work. The train station is about 1.5 miles from where I work, which I walk, rain, snow, or shine. Then, I come home and lift weights 3-4 times a week. It's a bit gone to hell since I'm in the process of moving, but I might actually add a body building section to my Linux blog. Just because we like the Penguin, doesn't mean you have to be built like one!
Don't blame me -- I vote Libertarian.
Fair enough! Good luck with Bob Barr. At least he had the 'nads to come out against that USA PATRIOT Act and all of the other Gestapo crap that the mainstream parties tell us is necessary for our "safety".
well, plastic, whereas wood and steel are quite difficult to form into complicated shapes.
Hmm. I might disagree with this. Yes, plastic can be injection molded, but you can get wood into a lot of shapes with a good CNC machine these days and those are basically automatic any more. Steel is actually pretty flexible. You can stamp it, press it, and you can mold it too. I think the problem with it would be that it is too flexible.