The Slate article shows the way to do this prediction thing. As my own similar research logically explains, the use of radios has declined from its height in the 1940's, obviously because there are no more "entertainment" shows nationally broadcast, such as "The Shadow, et al." Radio technology was a short lived fad, behaving just like a viral epidemic. Google search trends show that interest in "television" has declined 80% in the last 10 years. Thus, the use of TVs is similarly on the decline, again proving technology behaves as a viral epidemic. Films in 3D are currently increasing in theaters. Communicable diseases spread quickly in large groups of people, so the 3D fad will spread from theater to home use. This implies development of a new home entertainment system. Home use implies it will be compact, ambulatory, and with voice recognition, since people hate to get up to change channels and like to talk back to their TV shows. Therefore, portable 3D projection systems will be the next fad to replace TV. QED. "Help me, Obi Wan, you're my only hope!"
My lab is 10 m underground, and there is no alternate carrier coverage. We're not allowed to use most VOIP applications. My office has metal walls and a metallic window film, so my cell phone doesn't work there very well. And I'm not even a spook or defense contractor.
My land line is tied between my office and lab. Sounds like a good plan for it to stay that way.
This may be modded funny, but I was serious... this is exactly the type of 'well, it could happen' hypothetical attack that the TSA and it's counterparts around the world would take seriously. Recall that for a time (was it ever reversed?) passangers were forbidden from carrying their own drinks onto the flight out of a fear that the bottles could contain a liquid explosive?
You must not fly anywhere, or are not paying attention. No food or liquid can be brought inside the airport secure areas (outside of packaged trail mix, etc.) The only food or drink available to bring onto the plane is the over-priced, fast food and bottled drinks available from the airport shops inside the inspection sites. (It's hard to bring a cup of something on board without drinking it quickly, since there is no place to set it during takeoff.) A lot of people do bring a meal and bottle of soda onto the plane to eat immediately, or they spend the time waiting to board by eating something.
As for everyone bringing their own dinner, try that on a long trans-ocean flight. Maybe some people like to eat a room temperature sandwich of stale or soggy bread, processed meat, and limp lettuce some 24 hours after it was pre-packaged by the local fast food processor shop, or 8 hours after being "hot-off-the-grill". The heated airline food may not be 5-star, but the sandwiches in the "box lunch" are nearly inedible.
Given that h is very small (1e-15, 1e-34 or 1e-27 depending on units), a limit of.007 seems rather large.
Considering NIST in Washington, NRC in Ottawa, NPL in London, and METAS in Berne (all national metrology labs) have directly measured h to within 300 parts in a billion (1E9), this is an unusual report. Those results are within a relative limit of 0.0000003.
Planck's constant cannot be measured with only a GPS or atomic clock, so this is at best some comparative result.
If an atomic clock is your most accurate timepiece then how on earth can you tell if something is more accurate?
Can someone explain?
Also , given that a second is defined in terms of the ceasium atom as used in atomic clocks then surely anything that deviates from this is by definition LESS accurate (if you see what I mean)?
The SI unit for time and frequency is defined by using the Cesium atom. There are other atomic clocks that are "better", meaning their energy transition lines are sharper and higher frequency, usually optical rather than microwave. This is like keeping time with a nanosecond electronic timer versus a pendulum grandfather clock.
One reason to have a more accurate clock is in looking for very tiny time-dependent changes in physics constants. One can look for the change of a second over the age of the universe (astronomical observations of spectra light from the edge of the universe), or one can look for a change in a higher frequency of a part in 10^20 in a few minutes.
'Proper' SF (which I dare not attempt to define, but feel free to have a go) will always be too 'niche' for the general public to appreciate in this way. Perhaps there should be a Best Picture category at the Hugos instead.
There is an SF film award. From Wikipedia: "The Saturn Award is an award presented annually by the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films to honor the top works in science fiction, fantasy, and horror in film, television, and home video."
They break the award down by category. Started in 1972. Impressive list!
If there is an entity that can and does affect results in an intelligent way (let's call it god) it is impossible to reproduce any conditions completely.
Thus rendering the scientific process meaningless, because we may be at the mercy of a trickster who is carefully guiding the results of our experiments to ensure that we see what we are supposed to see, and nothing different.
Which only brings us back to the discussion about science and religion being incompatible with each other.
You just came close to repeating the essence of philosopher Descarte's argument. He argued that either Descarte (we all) really exists, or he is being fooled by a trickster (the devil) to think he exists. But if the devil is doing something to him to make him think he exists, then he must exist. "I think, therefore I am." Even a trickster cannot fool reality, and only a devil would try to fool us.
It would probably take us MILLIONS of years to reach the nearest planet that's even remotely habitable.
That's assuming we use the present technology of "one short blast of acceleration followed by drifting forever". We would no more do that than Columbus paddled a canoe to cross the Atlantic.
A constant 1 g acceleration would reduce travel time considerably, plus it is needed to keep a human's bones from turning to mush over many years. (A spinning cylinder with 1 g on the inside has its own issues, beside the long travel time, baring a "huge" engine plus fuel supply for that acceleration. It has to be "really big" so the inside surface area is enough live on comfortably. A very small cylinder spinning fast would have so much coriolis force that it would probably knock you over every time you stood up.)
Granted it will also take a generation ship (or suspended animation, or genetic manipulation for longevity) even if the time is down to hundreds or a few thousand years. Add on the other things needed to survive a long, one way trip: 100% recycling efficiency (both biological for food and material to replace old equipment) failure proof power sources other than sunlight sufficient medical supplies to treat cancers, mutated germs, and psychological illnesses ways to create new entertainment (everyone would go crazy-bored being stranded on that "desert island" with only a favorite eBook, DVD, or iTune) manufacturing facilities (to replace the iPads and LED lighting that will eventually break or fail) research facilities (will your children's children's... be better off than you when you left town?).
Finally, colonists can't expect to find friendly natives to help them build houses, or bio-fuels to run the factories and transports, so it all has to be brought with them, or nano-fabricated at the end of the road. Plus, regrow those genetic stores of Earth's biosphere. (I'd be wanting to check if that 300 year old myth about latte or tea with cream and sugar tastes as good as the eBooks mentioned.)
Whether humanity even goes anywhere in the near term, i.e. 100-200 years, these are just the technologies that should be developing here on Earth. An active space program might just make them happen faster, with less built-in obsolescence.
I also have a collection of most of her books. I found "Weyr Search" in a compilation of Hugo winners, for which she won best novella in 1968. I've been hooked on all her books ever since.
Note: I read in an essay of hers that her compilation of short stories, "Get Off the Unicorn" was supposed to be "Get of the Unicorn", where the meaning of "get" was "offspring". Some editor didn't "get" it and thought "of" was misspelled. The poor title made no sense after the correction.
Ride on, Anne. I will miss you as a friend I've come to know through reading your stories. ____________ From the Weyr and from the Bowl, Bronze and brown and blue and green, Rise the dragonmen of Pern, Aloft, on wing, seen, then unseen. "Dragonflight, 1969"
The story description and this comment about a reactor reminds me of "Accidents Happen", a Robert Heinlein story where scientists building a huge nuclear reactor on Earth suspect that someone or something may have built something similar on the moon, and it went "Boom".
Besides, isn't it rather difficult to make a Bose-Einstein Condensate - you need to be fractions of a degree close to absolute zero, the liquid helium used is hotter than that, like 1.9K.
Liquid helium starts to becomes superfluid (similar to a Bose-Einstein condensate) at 2.17 K. The lower the temperature, the closer it gets to 100% superfluid. The liquid He cooling magnets is usually at atmospheric pressure, meaning it is around 4.2 K at sea level. The way to cool the liquid He is to pump it down below atmospheric pressure, so it is not easy to maintain a temperature below 4.2 K. There is little reason to do so just to keep the magnets superconducting, unless they need to run near the current limit of the wire. The liquid is simply keeping the magnet metals below their superconducting temperature, which is probably in the range of 12 K, and is not needed to carry off heat from the magnet current. Although the maximum current decreases with magnetic field, around 4 K is most always cold enough to run plenty of current for several Tesla fields.
What that statement means is from the observational perspective of the earth.
Many of the statements about this report are basically correct, but the emphasis of most are inaccurate, referring to either "young" or "nearby". Most other supernova seen from earth are much closer to earth, but the last one was "seen" to occur 400 years ago. This one is 26,000 light years away, but the events as earth sees them are only 140 years ago.
The misleading part is in the fine print: "in our galaxy". Supernova 1987-a is only 11 years old and has been observed from from Day 1, but it is much farther away and outside our galaxy. There may well be closer stars that have gone supernova more recently, but if they happen to be behind a nebula or dust cloud, they would also have gone unnoticed.
Then it is stated that there are plenty sources of helium but no one bothers to take advantage of them due to the fact that at the moment it simply does not make anyone any money.
Not nearly so simple. Helium gas comes from natural gas mines. Not all mines are as copious in helium. But the significant problem is that to get more helium, companies would have to extract more natural gas, which would cause a glut and drastically decrease the price of natural gas. Since the market for natural gas is far larger, limiting that supply to keep prices up is considered more important than making helium available. Already the helium supply during certain times of the years is less than demand. You can't pay more for what is not available.
It's also a problem because as helium gets more expensive, that means research that needs ultracold temperatures becomes even more limited by funding than it is already. Add to that the costs of MRI medical scans, which also use liquid helium to cool the magnets and sensors, and medical costs start to go up. As other countries improve their health care, they build more MRI machines and demand more of the helium supply coming from overseas, at the expense of the USA. Prices go up again...
It may only be accumulating mass more slowly than the copies, in which case the kilogram is increasing overall. There are a number of possible surface effects theorized. The artifact is mostly platinum, so there could be mercury absorption from air pollution, or catalytic breakdown of hydrocarbons and hydrogen absorption from the air or the cleaning process. There is some research being done by the mass standards groups, but no one wants to sacrifice their national standard to test the theories by destructive analysis of the surface of a hundred year old artifact.
Check out the latest Wikipedia entry on mass changes in the kilogram and proposed alternative standards. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilogram. Just updated this week. Total coincidence.
The reason people in the US are ignorant about physics isn't because they see movies with incorrect physics in them, it's because K-12 science education in the US is a disaster.
This is exactly right. We don't need to have science taught in boring movies, but kids, and adults, should know the difference!
I teach middle school kids a two hour session on science by showing them the bad, and occasionally good, science in movies. We watch film clips and discuss why the visual effects are wrong or right. For example, why do spaceships bank on a turn, how can the hero jump out of the way of a laser... We have a great time and the kids will actually sit there for the 2 hours and be interested.
No one is likely to try to jump a river in their SUV from watching movies, but it is important that at least most people know a little science. Or else someday, too many people will be buying things like "detergentless laundry balls", "100 MPG gasoline additives", or "psychic investment strategies". If the entire populace is so uninformed, these bogus scams will clog everything from the economy to scientific advancement, since there won't be any money around for actual research grants, tech development, or infrastructure improvement. Everyone will want only to put all their investment money into get-rich-quick schemes. Imagine the politicians of the near future asking voters where to put their tax money: into rebuilding boring old roads that are optimistically termed "deficient", or investing in a company that promises to build engines that run forever on "free energy". If this actually came up for a vote, which way would it go? Are you sure?
We're not that far away from that scenario, folks...
Most geologists believe the Tunguska object exploded in the air. (This sounds crazy, but it's apparently possible - just as a person doing a belly flop off a cliff is going to be killed by the impact, a meteor can be destroyed by the impact with the lower atmosphere.)
That's sort of a correct picture. For a more scientific explanation, meteors come in roughly three kinds: all iron, all stone conglomerate, and a mix of the two. When entering the atmosphere, one side, or just the surface, of the meteor gets very hot, while the inside is still near absolute zero temperature of space. For the kind that is mostly stone (carbonaceous chondrite, to be precise), this temperature gradient causes immense and sudden expansion of the conglomerate rocky materials. For bigger meteors, that means a huge explosion, with fragmentation of the meteor into much smaller bits. If the meteor is big enough, even those smaller bits can be fairly big. It is thought that most of the smaller earth craters have been formed by iron meteorites that do not experience catastrophic explosions.
It is interesting that this presumed crater is away from the burst point. If others could be found, it might indicate the trajectory, which would help to understand other details: how big, makeup, velocity, etc...
I agree. I'm a research physicist now, and I grew up watching the early Mr. Wizard as one of my favorite shows. Even had a picture of him on my office door here at work. His TV style was simple. No hyper-kinetic antics, no video magic, not even wacky sound effects. Just very patiently explaining to some other kids how things worked. I loved it!
I saw a TV panel discussion with him, Bill Nye, Paul Zaloom (Beakman) and a few others some years ago, and they all said they had learned from the Master. I just now realized that I also like to do science presentations for kids, too, so he definitely had an effect on me, beyond just getting me interested in science.
Along with many others, I'll miss Mr. Wizard, and owe him a debt of gratitude.
However, the melting glacial ice has volume that correlates directly to rising ocean levels. Rising ocean levels correlates directly to displaced populations.
And those displaced populations (about 40% of the world lives within 150 km of an ocean , see ref below) means someone has to PAY to build new cities to move the displaced within country, or just let them migrate to a nearby country, adding to already bad immigration problems in richer countries.
Not entirely pointless, but very dangerous. Had there been some miniscule statistical variation towards prayer being helpful, you could expect immediate passage of a new law which would state:
"Since prayer has been proven helpful, and since the USA does not have enough money to spend on health care for all, then unless you have enough money to buy your own health care,
Stop the presses! Big news! There's a new "virus", capable of attacking all computer systems and not only breaks into your computer, but your friends' and your bank's as well!!!
"You too can get rich! I'll transfered all the money from a Nigerian general's account into yours! Simply download my instruction file, open it up, and follow all the directions by giving me your computer ID and password, and while you're at it, your bank account number and password as well. Have any friends you'd like to help out? Email them this instruction file and live like kings!"
I found the option to replace a mistyped word with another that the user entered. After that, whenever she typed the word "the", it was replaced with "WARNING! VIRUS DETECTED! PULL PLUG FROM OUTLET AS SOON AS POSSIBLE!"
This is an example of a "trusted" co-worker doing mischief to an unprotected computer, and as such, it has NOTHING to do with computer viruses.
Yes, it is important to protect your Mac with proper login security procedures. Yes, maintain an anti-virus application so your Mac doesn't harbor a PC virus. No, don't panic over yet another scare monger announcement of Mac viruses soon-to-be-appearing on a computer near you.
Even if global warming is "normal", just how do we deal with the 100+ million evacuees from the 50 miles on each coast that are expected to get flooded out when Antarctic ice melts? Do we build giant dikes? Relocate each metropolis?
Even though it will take years to occur, it took more than a hundred years of "free" wood, coal, and oil and to build these cities' infrastructures in the first place. Already people are complaining about the expense of rebuilding just one city!
Slashdot Mirror
The Slate article shows the way to do this prediction thing. As my own similar research logically explains, the use of radios has declined from its height in the 1940's, obviously because there are no more "entertainment" shows nationally broadcast, such as "The Shadow, et al." Radio technology was a short lived fad, behaving just like a viral epidemic.
Google search trends show that interest in "television" has declined 80% in the last 10 years. Thus, the use of TVs is similarly on the decline, again proving technology behaves as a viral epidemic.
Films in 3D are currently increasing in theaters. Communicable diseases spread quickly in large groups of people, so the 3D fad will spread from theater to home use. This implies development of a new home entertainment system. Home use implies it will be compact, ambulatory, and with voice recognition, since people hate to get up to change channels and like to talk back to their TV shows.
Therefore, portable 3D projection systems will be the next fad to replace TV. QED.
"Help me, Obi Wan, you're my only hope!"
My lab is 10 m underground, and there is no alternate carrier coverage. We're not allowed to use most VOIP applications. My office has metal walls and a metallic window film, so my cell phone doesn't work there very well. And I'm not even a spook or defense contractor.
My land line is tied between my office and lab. Sounds like a good plan for it to stay that way.
Good call.
I would add TNG: "The Inner Light"
And TOS: "The Trouble with Tribbles"
Excellent points. Tom Swift is how I got interested in Sci Fi. They are hard to find these days, but were in the supermarkets back in the 60's.
When I was older, about 12, I got Heinlein's "Puppet Masters" and proceeded to read my way through the library shelves.
This may be modded funny, but I was serious... this is exactly the type of 'well, it could happen' hypothetical attack that the TSA and it's counterparts around the world would take seriously. Recall that for a time (was it ever reversed?) passangers were forbidden from carrying their own drinks onto the flight out of a fear that the bottles could contain a liquid explosive?
You must not fly anywhere, or are not paying attention. No food or liquid can be brought inside the airport secure areas (outside of packaged trail mix, etc.) The only food or drink available to bring onto the plane is the over-priced, fast food and bottled drinks available from the airport shops inside the inspection sites. (It's hard to bring a cup of something on board without drinking it quickly, since there is no place to set it during takeoff.) A lot of people do bring a meal and bottle of soda onto the plane to eat immediately, or they spend the time waiting to board by eating something.
As for everyone bringing their own dinner, try that on a long trans-ocean flight. Maybe some people like to eat a room temperature sandwich of stale or soggy bread, processed meat, and limp lettuce some 24 hours after it was pre-packaged by the local fast food processor shop, or 8 hours after being "hot-off-the-grill". The heated airline food may not be 5-star, but the sandwiches in the "box lunch" are nearly inedible.
Given that h is very small (1e-15, 1e-34 or 1e-27 depending on units), a limit of .007 seems rather large.
Considering NIST in Washington, NRC in Ottawa, NPL in London, and METAS in Berne (all national metrology labs) have directly measured h to within 300 parts in a billion (1E9), this is an unusual report. Those results are within a relative limit of 0.0000003.
Planck's constant cannot be measured with only a GPS or atomic clock, so this is at best some comparative result.
If an atomic clock is your most accurate timepiece then how on earth can you tell if something is more accurate?
Can someone explain?
Also , given that a second is defined in terms of the ceasium atom as used in atomic clocks then surely anything that deviates from this is by definition LESS accurate (if you see what I mean)?
The SI unit for time and frequency is defined by using the Cesium atom. There are other atomic clocks that are "better", meaning their energy transition lines are sharper and higher frequency, usually optical rather than microwave. This is like keeping time with a nanosecond electronic timer versus a pendulum grandfather clock.
One reason to have a more accurate clock is in looking for very tiny time-dependent changes in physics constants. One can look for the change of a second over the age of the universe (astronomical observations of spectra light from the edge of the universe), or one can look for a change in a higher frequency of a part in 10^20 in a few minutes.
'Proper' SF (which I dare not attempt to define, but feel free to have a go) will always be too 'niche' for the general public to appreciate in this way. Perhaps there should be a Best Picture category at the Hugos instead.
There is an SF film award. From Wikipedia: "The Saturn Award is an award presented annually by the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films to honor the top works in science fiction, fantasy, and horror in film, television, and home video."
They break the award down by category. Started in 1972. Impressive list!
If there is an entity that can and does affect results in an intelligent way (let's call it god) it is impossible to reproduce any conditions completely.
Thus rendering the scientific process meaningless, because we may be at the mercy of a trickster who is carefully guiding the results of our experiments to ensure that we see what we are supposed to see, and nothing different.
Which only brings us back to the discussion about science and religion being incompatible with each other.
You just came close to repeating the essence of philosopher Descarte's argument. He argued that either Descarte (we all) really exists, or he is being fooled by a trickster (the devil) to think he exists. But if the devil is doing something to him to make him think he exists, then he must exist. "I think, therefore I am." Even a trickster cannot fool reality, and only a devil would try to fool us.
It would probably take us MILLIONS of years to reach the nearest planet that's even remotely habitable.
That's assuming we use the present technology of "one short blast of acceleration followed by drifting forever". We would no more do that than Columbus paddled a canoe to cross the Atlantic.
A constant 1 g acceleration would reduce travel time considerably, plus it is needed to keep a human's bones from turning to mush over many years.
(A spinning cylinder with 1 g on the inside has its own issues, beside the long travel time, baring a "huge" engine plus fuel supply for that acceleration. It has to be "really big" so the inside surface area is enough live on comfortably. A very small cylinder spinning fast would have so much coriolis force that it would probably knock you over every time you stood up.)
Granted it will also take a generation ship (or suspended animation, or genetic manipulation for longevity) even if the time is down to hundreds or a few thousand years. Add on the other things needed to survive a long, one way trip:
100% recycling efficiency (both biological for food and material to replace old equipment)
failure proof power sources other than sunlight
sufficient medical supplies to treat cancers, mutated germs, and psychological illnesses
ways to create new entertainment (everyone would go crazy-bored being stranded on that "desert island" with only a favorite eBook, DVD, or iTune)
manufacturing facilities (to replace the iPads and LED lighting that will eventually break or fail)
research facilities (will your children's children's... be better off than you when you left town?).
Finally, colonists can't expect to find friendly natives to help them build houses, or bio-fuels to run the factories and transports, so it all has to be brought with them, or nano-fabricated at the end of the road. Plus, regrow those genetic stores of Earth's biosphere. (I'd be wanting to check if that 300 year old myth about latte or tea with cream and sugar tastes as good as the eBooks mentioned.)
Whether humanity even goes anywhere in the near term, i.e. 100-200 years, these are just the technologies that should be developing here on Earth. An active space program might just make them happen faster, with less built-in obsolescence.
I also have a collection of most of her books. I found "Weyr Search" in a compilation of Hugo winners, for which she won best novella in 1968. I've been hooked on all her books ever since.
Note: I read in an essay of hers that her compilation of short stories, "Get Off the Unicorn" was supposed to be "Get of the Unicorn", where the meaning of "get" was "offspring". Some editor didn't "get" it and thought "of" was misspelled. The poor title made no sense after the correction.
Ride on, Anne. I will miss you as a friend I've come to know through reading your stories.
____________
From the Weyr and from the Bowl,
Bronze and brown and blue and green,
Rise the dragonmen of Pern,
Aloft, on wing, seen, then unseen.
"Dragonflight, 1969"
Now that is prescient!
Timothy. Timothy. Where on earth did you go oh...?
Liquid helium starts to becomes superfluid (similar to a Bose-Einstein condensate) at 2.17 K. The lower the temperature, the closer it gets to 100% superfluid. The liquid He cooling magnets is usually at atmospheric pressure, meaning it is around 4.2 K at sea level. The way to cool the liquid He is to pump it down below atmospheric pressure, so it is not easy to maintain a temperature below 4.2 K. There is little reason to do so just to keep the magnets superconducting, unless they need to run near the current limit of the wire. The liquid is simply keeping the magnet metals below their superconducting temperature, which is probably in the range of 12 K, and is not needed to carry off heat from the magnet current. Although the maximum current decreases with magnetic field, around 4 K is most always cold enough to run plenty of current for several Tesla fields.
What that statement means is from the observational perspective of the earth. Many of the statements about this report are basically correct, but the emphasis of most are inaccurate, referring to either "young" or "nearby". Most other supernova seen from earth are much closer to earth, but the last one was "seen" to occur 400 years ago. This one is 26,000 light years away, but the events as earth sees them are only 140 years ago. The misleading part is in the fine print: "in our galaxy". Supernova 1987-a is only 11 years old and has been observed from from Day 1, but it is much farther away and outside our galaxy. There may well be closer stars that have gone supernova more recently, but if they happen to be behind a nebula or dust cloud, they would also have gone unnoticed.
Not nearly so simple. Helium gas comes from natural gas mines. Not all mines are as copious in helium. But the significant problem is that to get more helium, companies would have to extract more natural gas, which would cause a glut and drastically decrease the price of natural gas. Since the market for natural gas is far larger, limiting that supply to keep prices up is considered more important than making helium available. Already the helium supply during certain times of the years is less than demand. You can't pay more for what is not available.
It's also a problem because as helium gets more expensive, that means research that needs ultracold temperatures becomes even more limited by funding than it is already. Add to that the costs of MRI medical scans, which also use liquid helium to cool the magnets and sensors, and medical costs start to go up. As other countries improve their health care, they build more MRI machines and demand more of the helium supply coming from overseas, at the expense of the USA. Prices go up again...
It may only be accumulating mass more slowly than the copies, in which case the kilogram is increasing overall. There are a number of possible surface effects theorized. The artifact is mostly platinum, so there could be mercury absorption from air pollution, or catalytic breakdown of hydrocarbons and hydrogen absorption from the air or the cleaning process. There is some research being done by the mass standards groups, but no one wants to sacrifice their national standard to test the theories by destructive analysis of the surface of a hundred year old artifact.
Check out the latest Wikipedia entry on mass changes in the kilogram and proposed alternative standards. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilogram. Just updated this week. Total coincidence.
This is exactly right. We don't need to have science taught in boring movies, but kids, and adults, should know the difference!
I teach middle school kids a two hour session on science by showing them the bad, and occasionally good, science in movies. We watch film clips and discuss why the visual effects are wrong or right. For example, why do spaceships bank on a turn, how can the hero jump out of the way of a laser... We have a great time and the kids will actually sit there for the 2 hours and be interested.
No one is likely to try to jump a river in their SUV from watching movies, but it is important that at least most people know a little science. Or else someday, too many people will be buying things like "detergentless laundry balls", "100 MPG gasoline additives", or "psychic investment strategies". If the entire populace is so uninformed, these bogus scams will clog everything from the economy to scientific advancement, since there won't be any money around for actual research grants, tech development, or infrastructure improvement. Everyone will want only to put all their investment money into get-rich-quick schemes. Imagine the politicians of the near future asking voters where to put their tax money: into rebuilding boring old roads that are optimistically termed "deficient", or investing in a company that promises to build engines that run forever on "free energy". If this actually came up for a vote, which way would it go? Are you sure?
We're not that far away from that scenario, folks...
That's sort of a correct picture. For a more scientific explanation, meteors come in roughly three kinds: all iron, all stone conglomerate, and a mix of the two. When entering the atmosphere, one side, or just the surface, of the meteor gets very hot, while the inside is still near absolute zero temperature of space. For the kind that is mostly stone (carbonaceous chondrite, to be precise), this temperature gradient causes immense and sudden expansion of the conglomerate rocky materials. For bigger meteors, that means a huge explosion, with fragmentation of the meteor into much smaller bits. If the meteor is big enough, even those smaller bits can be fairly big. It is thought that most of the smaller earth craters have been formed by iron meteorites that do not experience catastrophic explosions.
It is interesting that this presumed crater is away from the burst point. If others could be found, it might indicate the trajectory, which would help to understand other details: how big, makeup, velocity, etc...
I agree. I'm a research physicist now, and I grew up watching the early Mr. Wizard as one of my favorite shows. Even had a picture of him on my office door here at work. His TV style was simple. No hyper-kinetic antics, no video magic, not even wacky sound effects. Just very patiently explaining to some other kids how things worked. I loved it!
I saw a TV panel discussion with him, Bill Nye, Paul Zaloom (Beakman) and a few others some years ago, and they all said they had learned from the Master. I just now realized that I also like to do science presentations for kids, too, so he definitely had an effect on me, beyond just getting me interested in science.
Along with many others, I'll miss Mr. Wizard, and owe him a debt of gratitude.
However, the melting glacial ice has volume that correlates directly to rising ocean levels. Rising ocean levels correlates directly to displaced populations.
t us=ND0xODc3LjIxMDkmNj1lbiYzMz1kb2N1bWVudHMmMzc9aW5 mbw~~
And those displaced populations (about 40% of the world lives within 150 km of an ocean , see ref below) means someone has to PAY to build new cities to move the displaced within country, or just let them migrate to a nearby country, adding to already bad immigration problems in richer countries.
http://www.oceansatlas.org/servlet/CDSServlet?sta
Not entirely pointless, but very dangerous. Had there been some miniscule statistical variation towards prayer being helpful, you could expect immediate passage of a new law which would state:
"Since prayer has been proven helpful,
and since the USA does not have enough money to spend on health care for all,
then unless you have enough money to buy your own health care,
start praying."
Stop the presses! Big news! There's a new "virus", capable of attacking all computer systems and not only breaks into your computer, but your friends' and your bank's as well!!!
"You too can get rich! I'll transfered all the money from a Nigerian general's account into yours! Simply download my instruction file, open it up, and follow all the directions by giving me your computer ID and password, and while you're at it, your bank account number and password as well. Have any friends you'd like to help out? Email them this instruction file and live like kings!"
Hah! Dopey is as dopey does.
I found the option to replace a mistyped word with another that the user entered. After that, whenever she typed the word "the", it was replaced with "WARNING! VIRUS DETECTED! PULL PLUG FROM OUTLET AS SOON AS POSSIBLE!"
This is an example of a "trusted" co-worker doing mischief to an unprotected computer, and as such, it has NOTHING to do with computer viruses.
Yes, it is important to protect your Mac with proper login security procedures.
Yes, maintain an anti-virus application so your Mac doesn't harbor a PC virus.
No, don't panic over yet another scare monger announcement of Mac viruses soon-to-be-appearing on a computer near you.
Even if global warming is "normal", just how do we deal with the 100+ million evacuees from the 50 miles on each coast that are expected to get flooded out when Antarctic ice melts? Do we build giant dikes? Relocate each metropolis?
Even though it will take years to occur, it took more than a hundred years of "free" wood, coal, and oil and to build these cities' infrastructures in the first place. Already people are complaining about the expense of rebuilding just one city!