And herein lies the root of all conspriacy theory.
If you do something nasty, get caught, and backpedal it looks suspicious.
If you do something inadvertent for perfectly altruistic reasons and get accused of falling into the prior catagory and say, "Oh, shit. Ok, we fixed it," it looks just as suspicious.
If you suspect conspiracy everything always looks like it.
Hi, I knew you'd show up.:) I oversimplified a bit within the context of the argument. It's hard not to when discussing copyright it's so complex and just plain daft sometimes.
I think at least touched on the difference between the printed code and the recording in the body though, however briefly and obscurely.
See My Sweet Lord v. He's so Fine.
Three notes of a musical work was deemed a violation. Three. Out of the standard twelve. Which by convention you cannot even arrange in an arbitrary manner.
It has been impossible to affirmatively avoid copying a musical work since before radio existed I think.
Ah, but I didn't say anything about fear and respect. I said unopposable. I neither fear nor respect the second law of thermodynamics. Online we have the advantage of being able to diddle with "natural law."
As you say, we have more options.
But again, as you note, one of those options is not changing the base nature of human behaviour. That has to be taken as a given.
Eh. Can you try to be a little more condescending next time, Brain? Thanks.
We have the computing power right now, if you use real humans instead of AI. That's what games like Everquest really are. The problem is that people such as yourself don't have the wherewithal to impliment such a computing structure on that scale.
What would be interesting though is if people such as yourself got to make, and modify, the rules of the game.
It might well be rather instructive to the "players" if they had the oportunity to do so from time to time as well. Few people have a really good grasp on just how complicated society really is and what varibles really effect what happens to it.
Franklin understood something about politics, law, publishing, business and invention that most have forgotten:
It all comes down to a dietary issue in the end.
Food, clothing and shelter.
Everything else is frills and frippery when it comes right down to it.
Now he was hardly a man who eschewed frills and frippery, but he always knew they were frills and frippery and kept things in some sort of perspective.
I'm not sure I would have found him likeable, although he was one of the most sought after dinner guests on more than one continent, but was clearly a remarkable man. In more modern times he would have been a candidate for multiple Nobels in science (electricity, the Gulf Stream and other discoveries) as well as the Peace Prize and multiple Pulitzers (Just for Poor Richard's alone, let alone his other writings) and lord knows what all awards.
And yet among his greatest accomplishments as an inventor in his own mind was a warm stove and a comfortable chair to put by it.
Add a table, bowl of fruit and a violin and you're set.
I've been pretty vocal about slagging off the Segway, but never for its technology and the creative inventiveness it took to create it.
I'm with you on this one.
Hell, I even think the Segway is more useful.
You want to see real creativity and invention in personal watercraft? Well, then go to the guys with a history. . . Hobie.
Their Mirage drive for kayaks is one of those things that I wish I had designed myself. It's based on the funtion of penquin wings ( so it's Linux compliant ) that generate "lift" when you pedal them, all in one amazing compact unit.
http://www.hobiecat.com/kayaking/index.html
Beats the hell out of " Gee, I don't know. How about a kayak with. . . a motor! Yeah. Nobody's ever done anything like that before."
KFG
Re:anyone who uses units like this is a know nothi
on
Build Your Own Mortar
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Who uses units like that?
Oh sure. Weeks of people complaining that "bowling balls" isn't a unit of measurement, and now. ..
In this light I might point out that copyright law does not refer to "music."
It refers to sound recordings (that's how Shatner "got away with it").
The story's question is phrased somewhat improperly improperly.
Nor is the issue new. It's just more pressing now than before. Without using a computer at all I can convert light (and therefore photoimages) into sound and vice versa. I can turn mathmatics into music and music into mathmatics (Mozart was fond of doing this and developed a method using dice to develop themes). I can turn text into images, sound ( no, that's not a degenerate statement. I can turn text into arbitrarty sound. It's called "reading music" and any text can be used for such).
What is needlepoint other than a set of Cartesian Coordinates with a color code translated into an image?
How about this piece of paper I have here with some symbols on it? Is it my copywritable intellectual property, or is it a chess game? And if I can copywrite it what rights do the players have to it? It was their game, and thus their creation, after all.
Computers just make the process faster, easier and more ubiquitous, but artists, scientists and home experimenters. ..and even some lawyers, have been dealing with all of this stuff for decades.
There's an awful lot of what I think of as "Peter Pan" science about.
As illustration, I'm fascintated by the fact that the actual lots were found at Masada. Many take this as proof that the story as told Josephus is factual.
But this like saying that because London actually exist, and it actually contains children, the story of Peter Pan must be factual.
Then they waste their lives going off in search of Never-Never Land.
Got Atlantis?
Of course there's no saying that Never-Never Land (or Troy) doesn't exist, but forgive me if I want to see flying children before I go looking for it.
Exactly. Even if it were merely a collision with a large garden shed you'd expect to find the odd bit of lawnmower, terracotta and sprinkling of weed killer. Even if it blew up in mid air you wouldn't expect these things to simply vanish. They'd just be in smaller pieces and distributed around a wider area.
Like the Space Shuttle.
Rocks may explode, but they don't just go "poof" without leaving a trace.
If, however, the Tunguska object wasn't a small house, but was a large Snowcone. ..
You'll find, if you examine the situation without cultural bias ( or at least a reaonsable facsimile of same ) that democracy exhibits a rather peculiar quality.
To the extent that it is functional it approaches communism asymptotically.
Why? Very simply because both systems rely heavily on the quality of the mass of people. Read the works of America's founding fathers and you will find they were painfully aware of this. They attempted a loose democracy. It didn't work very well and they had to reform as a Constitutional Republic.
True democracy absolutely relies on the fact that the vast majority of the people are willing to vote for things that are in the greater good and do not merely benefit themselves. (Ah, I can hear the battalions of Objectivists forming up now and the shouts of "Let's Roll!" Stay back. I warn you. I have a box cutter and I'm not afraid to use it).
What we see in actual democracies is the innate tendency to develop a welfare state. The poor, by definition ( poverty being a relative state, not an absolute), always outnumber the rich. The poor have the most votes and eventually realize they can simply "vote themselves wealth." It doesn't work, of course, and simply ends up impoverishing all, but at least then everyone is "equal" ( a communist ideal, not a democratic one)and so the masses can have warm and fuzzy feelings about everyone's poverty. Democracies can also do things like giving Jews positions of power and respect today, then stone them tomorrow. They are flighty creatures without some form of self control and they have no such control other than the control "of the people."
Democracy requires a healthy dose of enlightened selfinterest to function at all (exactly as does communism)and the education and wisdom to accurately decide where that interest lies.
In practice this means that democracy works best, in fact may only work, when the numbers of people are relatively small and can draw from a larger source of population from outside itself. This is exactly how America built itself. It in no way discribes America as she is now.
It also requires a method of disposing of undesirables, those that do not favor the common good. Athens did this. It is the source of the word "Ostracise." Locking them up in prisons at public expense doesn't work, impoverishes all and builds internal dissent with no viable outlet other than destruction. Pat your dissidents on the head, buy them a new suit of clothes, give them a bus ticket out of town and wish them well.
This was the great failure of the Soviet system. The forced retention of those that did not agree with the structure. Communism cannot work unless everyone is on the same train; and putting your dissidents in prison or in forced labor camps may put them seperate cars, but they're still on the same train.
I myself come from the land of the town meeting. Perhaps the last bastion of true democracy in America. It worked. I liked it, but I note that it worked because it was small and existed inside a larger, and less democratic, structure that took care of a lot of the "messy bits" of government. Vermont towns had to do little to defend their own borders. People who liked the system were free to come in to it. People who didn't could stay where they were or were "invited" to leave town.
And there was another town to go to.
The inherent problem with this is the protection of borders. What prevents the malicious outsider from deciding you have it good and coming in and forcibly messing things up?
Only a militia really. See the 16th century definition of militia. See the Federalist Papers. See the Bill of Rights. See the Second Article in particular.
And what has history proven to be the best overall orginization for a military? Why, Oligarchic Communism! Proud of your military service? Support our boys "over there?" Well, that's pride and support of a communist oligarchy. The irony
And how does one go about examining democracy and its inherent problems? How does one go about changing them without throwing nations into turmoil and playing God with millions of innocent lives? How does even buy a clue about what to change?
Exactly the same way I go about designing a car that's safer, has higher performance and greater efficiency without risking the lives of test drivers and the general populace.
I'm familiar with his work. In fact I think it's wonderful. Not only showing the blast pattern, but also being able to determine the path of the incoming object.
I don't think there is anyone who seriously disputes the airblast theory at this point. I certainly don't. The only question is what could both explode like that and leave no (or very little) physical trace of itself behind.
It was a pretty big boom. It must have been caused by something containing a lot of matter. All that matter seems to have vanished into, well, thin air. Our experience with rocky objects suggests that they can cause airblast phenomenon, but not without spreading about a lot of "junk." They don't just simply vaporize. Little bits of themselves going flying all over the place, like the wrapper on a firecracker.
It's easy to understand how some sort of "iceball" could do this. It's difficult to understand how any rocky object could do this, so the "comet" theory is favored.
But everyone but the tin foil hat the aliens are coming crowd accept that there was a big bang up in the air caused by the heating of an incoming natural space object.
We do not know the composition of the "rock" that flattened Tunguska. It very well could have been an asteroid. Most likely it was a small comet, but we simply do not know.
As I stated its unlikely we will ever know. We do not know because it left behind no debris from which to determine its composition and created no crater. This alone is puzzling.
Another "airblast impact" is known that destroyed several hundred square miles of forest in Brazil in 1930 but seems to have left a crater and debris, although this is still being studied.
While this impact has several intersting points of convergence with the Tanguska event it has a number of points of divergence as well.Such as the crater.
http://star.arm.ac.uk/impact-hazard/Brazil.html
The Chicago fire "theory" (hypothesis really, since there is absolutely nothing to back it up) is a very old crackpot "the sky is falling" story. In "theory" it could be possible, but it defies many points of logic and known science.
I might point out that it is common for for there to be many fires across the midwest, even at the same time, under certain conditions, and those conditions prevailed at the time. It is little reported for instance, that Chicago had already had a number of fires that same season and was a tinder box just waiting for the spark to set it off. As was most of the midwest.
There is no reason to suspect a meteor for setting off fires during hot, dry weather which completely dried ponds when no meteoric activity or big explosions in the sky were reported.
Tokyo has burned down a lot too, as have other cities in Japan. That's what happens when you build your houses out of sticks and paper, then heat them with coals in the middle of the living room floor and light them with fire.
http://www.boisestate.edu/history/ncasner/hy210/ pe shtigo.htm
Solving a Lorentz Transformation is not creative. Discovering the Lorentz Transformation was.
Even designing a Ford is not terribly creative. Manufaturing them can be done by robots. The mere manufacture of a Boyd is creative.
My own mom worked as an advertising graphic artist. This was not creative. The stuff that the Guggenheim Museum made her a multitime finalist for a grant for was very creative.
Ya ever notice the term "code monkey?" That's a derisive term that programers invented for those that crank out uncreative code on an assembly line.
I didn't use the term "widget" in my original post without forthought.
I operated under the assumption that since an outside company was willing to pay contract rates to someone for working on his existing Open Source project that what was involved was something a bit more than their own inhouse code monkeys could handle.
I could, of course, have been wrong, but such seems unlikely.
That's a pretty poor article actually. Thousands of "earth-orbital" asteroids? I think not.
It's also pretty clear that whatever happened in Tunguska Siberia wasn't an asteroid and consensus was that it was most likely a small comet. There's no "big hole in the ground" and no debris (other than some microparticles in the trees which may be related), thus no "big rock." There was a shockwave from the object vaporizing completely in the atmosphere, but no actual impact.It's true that what it was isn't certain (and likely never will be) and some still hold out for an asteroid, but they're in the distinct minority. For the asteroid hypothesis to prevail someone has to show how a really big rock can just go "poof" when we know that littler ones don't ( such as the one that just struck in India).
http://www.galisteo.com/tunguska/docs/tmpt.html
You'll find a true asteroid/meteor crater clearly displayed in Arizona. That's what getting hit by a rock looks like. Over 30 million tons of meteoric debris has been collected from around the crater.It was a fairly small rock too, as space rocks go.
http://www.barringercrater.com/
You'll find a rather less clearly displayed impact crater in the Yucatan.
The author of the article was a "science editor," not a scientist.It clearly shows, as do the works of most science editors who are trained in journalism, not science, little, if any, actual understanding about the science she is writing about.
Through a study of physics, astronomy and cosmology.
The two objects had no relationship to each other. They were on totally dissimilar paths, made of different materials and of obvious divergent origin. In fact, only one of them was an asteroid.
An asteroid is orbital, just like a planet (asteroids are also called "minor planets"), and behaves like a planet. Once detected its behaviour is highly predictable.
The other was a meteor. Space junk. A rock. Very possibly a comet fragment but being hit by such a fragment means little about the odds of ever being hit by the comet it came from, which may well be tens of thousands of years away from coming anywhere near earth. There is a small army of astronomers, both professional and amatuer, watching for incoming comets because they're neat and get named after you if you see it first.
Tons of stuff falls on earth from space every day. It isn't indicitive of anything much other than there's lots of stuff out there and a lot of it hits us.
Some of the stuff that hits us is clearly related to other stuff that hits us.Meteor showers are such related stuff. Some of the stuff is entirely unrelated to all the other stuff.
These two things don't happen to have any relationship to each other, and thus have no joint relationship to some third object.
This is not to say that something big isn't on a collision course with earth at some future point. In fact such an event seems highly likely at some future time.
It just that these two unrelated events don't presage that.
Bummer, huh? You'll have to pay those credit card bills after all.
I never said that they couldn't provide me with things.
It's just that those things have, at best, no value to me, and at worst cost me a good deal of money.
I can get airplay. Not on Clearchannel, but I can get airplay. Airplay that turns into bookings and sales that puts money in my pocket. People who listen to Clearchannel stations aren't going to buy my stuff anyway.
Brick and mortar access is far more open than in the "old" days. The stores, even some major chains such as B&N, have already realized where the wind is blowing and are opening up access to independant labels. Otherwise all those sales are likely to transfer to the internet and cut them out of the loop. In any case what's the point of selling CDs through the major outlets if it's some polyester clad slimeball with bad hair that's getting all the money? That's like working the register at Wal-Mart and paying them for the priviledge. It's daft.
Oh yeah, they can offer remolding you into a Brittney Spears or N'Sync.
Blech.
I suppose if what you want is "fame" and will pay any price for it the record labels still have something to offer.
But then an obscure Turkish accordian player named Mahir became world famous without a record label, through the internet.
Slashdot Mirror
And herein lies the root of all conspriacy theory.
If you do something nasty, get caught, and backpedal it looks suspicious.
If you do something inadvertent for perfectly altruistic reasons and get accused of falling into the prior catagory and say, "Oh, shit. Ok, we fixed it," it looks just as suspicious.
If you suspect conspiracy everything always looks like it.
KFG
What, only two? :)
KFG
Hi, I knew you'd show up. :) I oversimplified a bit within the context of the argument. It's hard not to when discussing copyright it's so complex and just plain daft sometimes.
I think at least touched on the difference between the printed code and the recording in the body though, however briefly and obscurely.
See My Sweet Lord v. He's so Fine.
Three notes of a musical work was deemed a violation. Three. Out of the standard twelve. Which by convention you cannot even arrange in an arbitrary manner.
It has been impossible to affirmatively avoid copying a musical work since before radio existed I think.
KFG
Ah, but I didn't say anything about fear and respect. I said unopposable. I neither fear nor respect the second law of thermodynamics. Online we have the advantage of being able to diddle with "natural law."
As you say, we have more options.
But again, as you note, one of those options is not changing the base nature of human behaviour. That has to be taken as a given.
Eh. Can you try to be a little more condescending next time, Brain? Thanks.
No. I'm afraid that's pretty much my limit.
KFG
We have the computing power right now, if you use real humans instead of AI. That's what games like Everquest really are. The problem is that people such as yourself don't have the wherewithal to impliment such a computing structure on that scale.
What would be interesting though is if people such as yourself got to make, and modify, the rules of the game.
It might well be rather instructive to the "players" if they had the oportunity to do so from time to time as well. Few people have a really good grasp on just how complicated society really is and what varibles really effect what happens to it.
Again, as history has shown us.
KFG
Franklin understood something about politics, law, publishing, business and invention that most have forgotten:
It all comes down to a dietary issue in the end.
Food, clothing and shelter.
Everything else is frills and frippery when it comes right down to it.
Now he was hardly a man who eschewed frills and frippery, but he always knew they were frills and frippery and kept things in some sort of perspective.
I'm not sure I would have found him likeable, although he was one of the most sought after dinner guests on more than one continent, but was clearly a remarkable man. In more modern times he would have been a candidate for multiple Nobels in science (electricity, the Gulf Stream and other discoveries) as well as the Peace Prize and multiple Pulitzers (Just for Poor Richard's alone, let alone his other writings) and lord knows what all awards.
And yet among his greatest accomplishments as an inventor in his own mind was a warm stove and a comfortable chair to put by it.
Add a table, bowl of fruit and a violin and you're set.
KFG
I've been pretty vocal about slagging off the Segway, but never for its technology and the creative inventiveness it took to create it.
I'm with you on this one.
Hell, I even think the Segway is more useful.
You want to see real creativity and invention in personal watercraft? Well, then go to the guys with a history. . . Hobie.
Their Mirage drive for kayaks is one of those things that I wish I had designed myself. It's based on the funtion of penquin wings ( so it's Linux compliant ) that generate "lift" when you pedal them, all in one amazing compact unit.
http://www.hobiecat.com/kayaking/index.html
Beats the hell out of " Gee, I don't know. How about a kayak with. . . a motor! Yeah. Nobody's ever done anything like that before."
KFG
Who uses units like that?
.
Oh sure. Weeks of people complaining that "bowling balls" isn't a unit of measurement, and now. .
You just can't make some people happy.
KFG
In this light I might point out that copyright law does not refer to "music."
.and even some lawyers, have been dealing with all of this stuff for decades.
It refers to sound recordings (that's how Shatner "got away with it").
The story's question is phrased somewhat improperly improperly.
Nor is the issue new. It's just more pressing now than before. Without using a computer at all I can convert light (and therefore photoimages) into sound and vice versa. I can turn mathmatics into music and music into mathmatics (Mozart was fond of doing this and developed a method using dice to develop themes). I can turn text into images, sound ( no, that's not a degenerate statement. I can turn text into arbitrarty sound. It's called "reading music" and any text can be used for such).
What is needlepoint other than a set of Cartesian Coordinates with a color code translated into an image?
How about this piece of paper I have here with some symbols on it? Is it my copywritable intellectual property, or is it a chess game? And if I can copywrite it what rights do the players have to it? It was their game, and thus their creation, after all.
Computers just make the process faster, easier and more ubiquitous, but artists, scientists and home experimenters. .
And then there was Dr. Leary. Think about it.
KFG
There's an awful lot of what I think of as "Peter Pan" science about.
As illustration, I'm fascintated by the fact that the actual lots were found at Masada. Many take this as proof that the story as told Josephus is factual.
But this like saying that because London actually exist, and it actually contains children, the story of Peter Pan must be factual.
Then they waste their lives going off in search of Never-Never Land.
Got Atlantis?
Of course there's no saying that Never-Never Land (or Troy) doesn't exist, but forgive me if I want to see flying children before I go looking for it.
Maybe they can show me the way.
KFG
Indeed. And if MS emulated this all you would have to do to run Linux would be. . .
Buy a Windows license, install it (making much HD space "worthless"), and boot it (making you need to comply with their EULA).
Cool. Who woulda thunk that it would be Microsoft who discovered the way to make big bucks from Linux?
Do you mind if I sit this one out?
KFG
Hey Honey?
Yeah, that Dahmer character has invited us over for dinner.
I know, I know. But that doesn't mean he's going to eat us.
This time could be different.
KFG
Exactly. Even if it were merely a collision with a large garden shed you'd expect to find the odd bit of lawnmower, terracotta and sprinkling of weed killer. Even if it blew up in mid air you wouldn't expect these things to simply vanish. They'd just be in smaller pieces and distributed around a wider area.
.
Like the Space Shuttle.
Rocks may explode, but they don't just go "poof" without leaving a trace.
If, however, the Tunguska object wasn't a small house, but was a large Snowcone. .
KFG
You'll find, if you examine the situation without cultural bias ( or at least a reaonsable facsimile of same ) that democracy exhibits a rather peculiar quality.
To the extent that it is functional it approaches communism asymptotically.
Why? Very simply because both systems rely heavily on the quality of the mass of people. Read the works of America's founding fathers and you will find they were painfully aware of this. They attempted a loose democracy. It didn't work very well and they had to reform as a Constitutional Republic.
True democracy absolutely relies on the fact that the vast majority of the people are willing to vote for things that are in the greater good and do not merely benefit themselves. (Ah, I can hear the battalions of Objectivists forming up now and the shouts of "Let's Roll!" Stay back. I warn you. I have a box cutter and I'm not afraid to use it).
What we see in actual democracies is the innate tendency to develop a welfare state. The poor, by definition ( poverty being a relative state, not an absolute), always outnumber the rich. The poor have the most votes and eventually realize they can simply "vote themselves wealth." It doesn't work, of course, and simply ends up impoverishing all, but at least then everyone is "equal" ( a communist ideal, not a democratic one)and so the masses can have warm and fuzzy feelings about everyone's poverty. Democracies can also do things like giving Jews positions of power and respect today, then stone them tomorrow. They are flighty creatures without some form of self control and they have no such control other than the control "of the people."
Democracy requires a healthy dose of enlightened selfinterest to function at all (exactly as does communism)and the education and wisdom to accurately decide where that interest lies.
In practice this means that democracy works best, in fact may only work, when the numbers of people are relatively small and can draw from a larger source of population from outside itself. This is exactly how America built itself. It in no way discribes America as she is now.
It also requires a method of disposing of undesirables, those that do not favor the common good. Athens did this. It is the source of the word "Ostracise." Locking them up in prisons at public expense doesn't work, impoverishes all and builds internal dissent with no viable outlet other than destruction. Pat your dissidents on the head, buy them a new suit of clothes, give them a bus ticket out of town and wish them well.
This was the great failure of the Soviet system. The forced retention of those that did not agree with the structure. Communism cannot work unless everyone is on the same train; and putting your dissidents in prison or in forced labor camps may put them seperate cars, but they're still on the same train.
I myself come from the land of the town meeting. Perhaps the last bastion of true democracy in America. It worked. I liked it, but I note that it worked because it was small and existed inside a larger, and less democratic, structure that took care of a lot of the "messy bits" of government. Vermont towns had to do little to defend their own borders. People who liked the system were free to come in to it. People who didn't could stay where they were or were "invited" to leave town.
And there was another town to go to.
The inherent problem with this is the protection of borders. What prevents the malicious outsider from deciding you have it good and coming in and forcibly messing things up?
Only a militia really. See the 16th century definition of militia. See the Federalist Papers. See the Bill of Rights. See the Second Article in particular.
And what has history proven to be the best overall orginization for a military? Why, Oligarchic Communism! Proud of your military service? Support our boys "over there?" Well, that's pride and support of a communist oligarchy. The irony
And how does one go about examining democracy and its inherent problems? How does one go about changing them without throwing nations into turmoil and playing God with millions of innocent lives? How does even buy a clue about what to change?
Exactly the same way I go about designing a car that's safer, has higher performance and greater efficiency without risking the lives of test drivers and the general populace.
I model it. Virtually. On a computer.
Go figure.
KFG
You forgot to mention that this law does not apply while in San Francisco.
Ah, well. I thought that went without saying. Almost all known natural law, and much unnatural law, is suspended in San Francisco.
Scientists are puzzled, but think it has something to do with commie pinko liberal hippies. They emit "weirdons" or something.
KFG
I'm familiar with his work. In fact I think it's wonderful. Not only showing the blast pattern, but also being able to determine the path of the incoming object.
I don't think there is anyone who seriously disputes the airblast theory at this point. I certainly don't. The only question is what could both explode like that and leave no (or very little) physical trace of itself behind.
It was a pretty big boom. It must have been caused by something containing a lot of matter. All that matter seems to have vanished into, well, thin air. Our experience with rocky objects suggests that they can cause airblast phenomenon, but not without spreading about a lot of "junk." They don't just simply vaporize. Little bits of themselves going flying all over the place, like the wrapper on a firecracker.
It's easy to understand how some sort of "iceball" could do this. It's difficult to understand how any rocky object could do this, so the "comet" theory is favored.
But everyone but the tin foil hat the aliens are coming crowd accept that there was a big bang up in the air caused by the heating of an incoming natural space object.
The only question is what it was.
KFG
Well, you could be worse off it seems.
Just be grateful you don't negotiate contracts by negotiating with the other party. That way, apparently, lies madness and ruin.
KFG
We do not know the composition of the "rock" that flattened Tunguska. It very well could have been an asteroid. Most likely it was a small comet, but we simply do not know.
/ pe shtigo.htm
As I stated its unlikely we will ever know. We do not know because it left behind no debris from which to determine its composition and created no crater. This alone is puzzling.
Another "airblast impact" is known that destroyed several hundred square miles of forest in Brazil in 1930 but seems to have left a crater and debris, although this is still being studied.
While this impact has several intersting points of convergence with the Tanguska event it has a number of points of divergence as well.Such as the crater.
http://star.arm.ac.uk/impact-hazard/Brazil.html
The Chicago fire "theory" (hypothesis really, since there is absolutely nothing to back it up) is a very old crackpot "the sky is falling" story. In "theory" it could be possible, but it defies many points of logic and known science.
I might point out that it is common for for there to be many fires across the midwest, even at the same time, under certain conditions, and those conditions prevailed at the time. It is little reported for instance, that Chicago had already had a number of fires that same season and was a tinder box just waiting for the spark to set it off. As was most of the midwest.
There is no reason to suspect a meteor for setting off fires during hot, dry weather which completely dried ponds when no meteoric activity or big explosions in the sky were reported.
Tokyo has burned down a lot too, as have other cities in Japan. That's what happens when you build your houses out of sticks and paper, then heat them with coals in the middle of the living room floor and light them with fire.
http://www.boisestate.edu/history/ncasner/hy210
http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/tv/skyfire.html
KFG
Hollywood would have you believe that any car that has all of its wheels leave the ground blows up while in midair.
This tends to make me distrust Hollywood as a source of physical phenomenon.
Maybe it's just me?
KFG
Solving a Lorentz Transformation is not creative. Discovering the Lorentz Transformation was.
Even designing a Ford is not terribly creative. Manufaturing them can be done by robots. The mere manufacture of a Boyd is creative.
My own mom worked as an advertising graphic artist. This was not creative. The stuff that the Guggenheim Museum made her a multitime finalist for a grant for was very creative.
Ya ever notice the term "code monkey?" That's a derisive term that programers invented for those that crank out uncreative code on an assembly line.
I didn't use the term "widget" in my original post without forthought.
I operated under the assumption that since an outside company was willing to pay contract rates to someone for working on his existing Open Source project that what was involved was something a bit more than their own inhouse code monkeys could handle.
I could, of course, have been wrong, but such seems unlikely.
KFG
That's a pretty poor article actually. Thousands of "earth-orbital" asteroids? I think not.
y 1b .html
It's also pretty clear that whatever happened in Tunguska Siberia wasn't an asteroid and consensus was that it was most likely a small comet. There's no "big hole in the ground" and no debris (other than some microparticles in the trees which may be related), thus no "big rock." There was a shockwave from the object vaporizing completely in the atmosphere, but no actual impact.It's true that what it was isn't certain (and likely never will be) and some still hold out for an asteroid, but they're in the distinct minority. For the asteroid hypothesis to prevail someone has to show how a really big rock can just go "poof" when we know that littler ones don't ( such as the one that just struck in India).
http://www.galisteo.com/tunguska/docs/tmpt.html
You'll find a true asteroid/meteor crater clearly
displayed in Arizona. That's what getting hit by a rock looks like. Over 30 million tons of meteoric debris has been collected from around the crater.It was a fairly small rock too, as space rocks go.
http://www.barringercrater.com/
You'll find a rather less clearly displayed impact crater in the Yucatan.
http://www.azstarnet.com/clips/signs_of_life_da
The author of the article was a "science editor," not a scientist.It clearly shows, as do the works of most science editors who are trained in journalism, not science, little, if any, actual understanding about the science she is writing about.
KFG
Through a study of physics, astronomy and cosmology.
The two objects had no relationship to each other. They were on totally dissimilar paths, made of different materials and of obvious divergent origin. In fact, only one of them was an asteroid.
An asteroid is orbital, just like a planet (asteroids are also called "minor planets"), and behaves like a planet. Once detected its behaviour is highly predictable.
The other was a meteor. Space junk. A rock. Very possibly a comet fragment but being hit by such a fragment means little about the odds of ever being hit by the comet it came from, which may well be tens of thousands of years away from coming anywhere near earth. There is a small army of astronomers, both professional and amatuer, watching for incoming comets because they're neat and get named after you if you see it first.
Tons of stuff falls on earth from space every day. It isn't indicitive of anything much other than there's lots of stuff out there and a lot of it hits us.
Some of the stuff that hits us is clearly related to other stuff that hits us.Meteor showers are such related stuff. Some of the stuff is entirely unrelated to all the other stuff.
These two things don't happen to have any relationship to each other, and thus have no joint relationship to some third object.
This is not to say that something big isn't on a collision course with earth at some future point. In fact such an event seems highly likely at some future time.
It just that these two unrelated events don't presage that.
Bummer, huh? You'll have to pay those credit card bills after all.
KFG
I never said that they couldn't provide me with things.
It's just that those things have, at best, no value to me, and at worst cost me a good deal of money.
I can get airplay. Not on Clearchannel, but I can get airplay. Airplay that turns into bookings and sales that puts money in my pocket. People who listen to Clearchannel stations aren't going to buy my stuff anyway.
Brick and mortar access is far more open than in the "old" days. The stores, even some major chains such as B&N, have already realized where the wind is blowing and are opening up access to independant labels. Otherwise all those sales are likely to transfer to the internet and cut them out of the loop. In any case what's the point of selling CDs through the major outlets if it's some polyester clad slimeball with bad hair that's getting all the money? That's like working the register at Wal-Mart and paying them for the priviledge. It's daft.
Oh yeah, they can offer remolding you into a Brittney Spears or N'Sync.
Blech.
I suppose if what you want is "fame" and will pay any price for it the record labels still have something to offer.
But then an obscure Turkish accordian player named Mahir became world famous without a record label, through the internet.
Go figure.
KFG
That one wasn't officially recognized by the " World Asteroids Snooker Association."
We all know it happened, but the paperwork was messed up.
KFG