A group at New Mexico Tech was working on a similar experiment using a cylindrical chamber filled with liquid sodium and a way to introduce turbulence to create magnetic fields. This was started over ten years ago. Their group page is a bit out of date, though.
If I remember correctly, the array uses time-domain binning of RF "pulses" from the lightning along with a big-damn matrix inversion to generate their data. The reliance on pulses means you can't look for signals of a specific frequency. I'm also curious as to where this 60 MHz signal is supposed to come from. Most lightning acts as a very, very wideband (RF through X-rays) signal source.
New array? I worked on this project in 99-00 and it was several years old then. I think "new" here just corresponds to awareness in the minds of the public. Papers derived from this research have been around ten years, at least. The results are, however, quite impressive. It's possible to plot, in time, the path a lightning bolt takes through a cloud. Airplanes are also quite easy to spot on their graphs. A quick look on their research page might make for interesting reading: Langmuir Labs.
I was essentially a Gov't Antenna Engineer for ~2.5 years. It isn't everything it's cut out to be. You do learn all the interesting uses that antennas are put to and the wide variety out there.
Some of them are still in operation, since there are relatively few stealth bombers and they're really expensive. But there aren't nearly as many active B-52s as there were during the Cold War.
I can think of a lot of things he could have done better. I'm not saying he's wrong, but I'm not saying he's necessarily right; that's why I titled my post "Grain of Salt." He's gonna have to do more work to convince people of this.
I'm familiar with Monte Carlo modeling. My beef with the 13-standard deviations was how he got the value. He ran a bunch of simulations and evaluated the probability that there was an alignment in the direction he observed, instead of calculating the probability of a significant alignment at all.
They can be circular disks, but they can also be elliptical disks, oblate spheroids, prolate spheroids. The article does a fair bit of hand-waving without addressing the fundamental geometry of the disk, just its apparent geometry. In fact, an oblate spheroid could appear the same as a perfect sphere to us; how then do you determine the rotational axis. Looking at the variation of the spectrum of light emitted from the galaxy seems like a better way to determine the axis or, at least, the base geometric shape.
I read the article, and there seem to be a few problems he doesn't really address. First, he assumes that all elliptical galaxies have a point-of-view from which they appear circular. I don't think anyone has determined this to be the case, and he doesn't really have a way to get this from his data. Secondly, he doesn't give much real discussion to the error in the measurements, which is significant. No preffered axis of alignment would fall well within his measurement uncertainties. Finally, the 13-standard deviations is not from any real sort of error propagation, but from some random computer generated results. Could be interesting, but to be taken with a grain of salt.
For the record, I am a physicist. A lot of nuclear materials can under-go a chain reaction if a significant mass is accumulated. It has to do with production versus escape of neutrons and scales as volume-to-area. So, if two sub-critical masses were combined, they could become critical. I am somewhat leary of a "spill" making something go critical, unless the mass was over-critical and the container provided some damping effect.
This seems like a great opportunity for either corporate sponsorship, or a grass-roots donation drive. In all honesty, $5 million isn't a whole lot of money for the likes of any real corporation, and it probably wouldn't be that hard to raise it through small donations from individuals. Espectially if you could ascribe names to some or all of it. How would it feel to be able to personally identify which plates you paid to have scanned? (this image of the Crab Nebula brought to you by John Smith) I'm surprised Paul Allen or Richard Branson aren't all over this like stink on shit.
I'm a scientist working for a government subcontractor in Albuquerque (mostly for Sanida Labs and AFRL). Fresh out of school with a Bachelor's and Master's Degree in Physics I started making $50K a year plus fringe benefits. To contrast, starting teachers salaries with a Master's degree are ~$30K a year.
If I remember correctly from my astrophysics days, for every 8 billion anti-matter particles in the early universe, there were 8 billion and one matter particles. I would say an excess of 1 per 8 billion is "just a bit."
Lots of times they do test it on themselves, and volunteers at whichever laboratory/gov't installation the researchers work at. That sort of testing can only go so far, though. I think the idea is to have the inital deployments be domestic ones, as a show of good faith, if you will. That way when the weapons are deployed over-seas, people won't cry foul that the gov't is deploying lethal weapons under a non-lethal banner.
The US Court System has previously ruled (need a reference here) that parody is protected under the First Amendment. That's how people like Weird Al get away with what they do. I doubt that the website seriously considers Barney to be either Satan or the Antichrist, so it's a parody, it's protect, no lawsuit.
I'm sure all the lawyers know this and were just trying to bully the website into closing, knowing they couldn't win a trial.
The country's name is not "Hungaria" it is "Hungary." And the country is in Eastern Europe. Though, given the average American these days, we should feel luck he didn't think it was in the US.
Besides, Chuck Norris doesn't need a bridge. Chuck Norris walks to the river and the water gets out of his way. Sorry.
I think if a game is able to scare you, that's just a sign that the game has successfully pulled you in. Rather than being an outside observer to the bame, you become the character. I still remember play Half-Life for the first time, after a long battle with soldiers on the cliff-side, and climbing the ladder into the last tube only to have the crap scared out of me by a sudden, jumping head-crab. That fright is part of the reason I knew Half-Life was a great game...I wasn't playing as Gordon Freeman, I was Gordon Freeman.
Randomness and chaos theory are highly inter-linked concepts. Furthermore, true randomness does exist in a wide variety of systems; it is not just the scientists throwing up their hands and saying "we don't know." Also, I think a better example than Brownian motion would be statistical physics, were the ensemble behavior is of interest, not individual interactions.
Chaos theory, on the other hand, usually involves systems of non-linear equations, where small effects to not get damped out, but can increase greatly in size. For a large number of observations, patterns begin to emerge, but any single system can take any end state...randomness.
I always found it amusing when people take scientific estimates at face value. The article says something along the lines of "the universe could be up to a trillion years old," so, obviously, the universe is precisely 1 trillion years old.
I had a professor who worked on a similar project for a while. The point is not to physically destroy a satellite, that would be pretty much impossible. The idea is to over-load the satellite's CCD camera, thereby rendering it useless (blind). That also means that the proper filters or multiple CCDs with different operational frequency ranges could circumvent the laser...unless you had multiple lasers.
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A group at New Mexico Tech was working on a similar experiment using a cylindrical chamber filled with liquid sodium and a way to introduce turbulence to create magnetic fields. This was started over ten years ago. Their group page is a bit out of date, though.
If I remember correctly, the array uses time-domain binning of RF "pulses" from the lightning along with a big-damn matrix inversion to generate their data. The reliance on pulses means you can't look for signals of a specific frequency. I'm also curious as to where this 60 MHz signal is supposed to come from. Most lightning acts as a very, very wideband (RF through X-rays) signal source.
New array? I worked on this project in 99-00 and it was several years old then. I think "new" here just corresponds to awareness in the minds of the public. Papers derived from this research have been around ten years, at least. The results are, however, quite impressive. It's possible to plot, in time, the path a lightning bolt takes through a cloud. Airplanes are also quite easy to spot on their graphs. A quick look on their research page might make for interesting reading: Langmuir Labs.
Depends on which "Tech" you're referring to. Students at every "Tech" seem to forget that there are others.
I was essentially a Gov't Antenna Engineer for ~2.5 years. It isn't everything it's cut out to be. You do learn all the interesting uses that antennas are put to and the wide variety out there.
Some of them are still in operation, since there are relatively few stealth bombers and they're really expensive. But there aren't nearly as many active B-52s as there were during the Cold War.
A lot of them are being cut up in the Arizona and California deserts and sold for scrap.
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I can think of a lot of things he could have done better. I'm not saying he's wrong, but I'm not saying he's necessarily right; that's why I titled my post "Grain of Salt." He's gonna have to do more work to convince people of this.
Any spheroid with three different axes will lack an angle from which they appear spherical.
I'm familiar with Monte Carlo modeling. My beef with the 13-standard deviations was how he got the value. He ran a bunch of simulations and evaluated the probability that there was an alignment in the direction he observed, instead of calculating the probability of a significant alignment at all.
They can be circular disks, but they can also be elliptical disks, oblate spheroids, prolate spheroids. The article does a fair bit of hand-waving without addressing the fundamental geometry of the disk, just its apparent geometry. In fact, an oblate spheroid could appear the same as a perfect sphere to us; how then do you determine the rotational axis. Looking at the variation of the spectrum of light emitted from the galaxy seems like a better way to determine the axis or, at least, the base geometric shape.
I read the article, and there seem to be a few problems he doesn't really address. First, he assumes that all elliptical galaxies have a point-of-view from which they appear circular. I don't think anyone has determined this to be the case, and he doesn't really have a way to get this from his data. Secondly, he doesn't give much real discussion to the error in the measurements, which is significant. No preffered axis of alignment would fall well within his measurement uncertainties. Finally, the 13-standard deviations is not from any real sort of error propagation, but from some random computer generated results. Could be interesting, but to be taken with a grain of salt.
For the record, I am a physicist.
A lot of nuclear materials can under-go a chain reaction if a significant mass is accumulated. It has to do with production versus escape of neutrons and scales as volume-to-area. So, if two sub-critical masses were combined, they could become critical. I am somewhat leary of a "spill" making something go critical, unless the mass was over-critical and the container provided some damping effect.
This seems like a great opportunity for either corporate sponsorship, or a grass-roots donation drive. In all honesty, $5 million isn't a whole lot of money for the likes of any real corporation, and it probably wouldn't be that hard to raise it through small donations from individuals. Espectially if you could ascribe names to some or all of it. How would it feel to be able to personally identify which plates you paid to have scanned? (this image of the Crab Nebula brought to you by John Smith) I'm surprised Paul Allen or Richard Branson aren't all over this like stink on shit.
I'm a scientist working for a government subcontractor in Albuquerque (mostly for Sanida Labs and AFRL). Fresh out of school with a Bachelor's and Master's Degree in Physics I started making $50K a year plus fringe benefits. To contrast, starting teachers salaries with a Master's degree are ~$30K a year.
If I remember correctly from my astrophysics days, for every 8 billion anti-matter particles in the early universe, there were 8 billion and one matter particles. I would say an excess of 1 per 8 billion is "just a bit."
Lots of times they do test it on themselves, and volunteers at whichever laboratory/gov't installation the researchers work at. That sort of testing can only go so far, though. I think the idea is to have the inital deployments be domestic ones, as a show of good faith, if you will. That way when the weapons are deployed over-seas, people won't cry foul that the gov't is deploying lethal weapons under a non-lethal banner.
The US Court System has previously ruled (need a reference here) that parody is protected under the First Amendment. That's how people like Weird Al get away with what they do. I doubt that the website seriously considers Barney to be either Satan or the Antichrist, so it's a parody, it's protect, no lawsuit.
I'm sure all the lawyers know this and were just trying to bully the website into closing, knowing they couldn't win a trial.
The country's name is not "Hungaria" it is "Hungary."
And the country is in Eastern Europe.
Though, given the average American these days, we should feel luck he didn't think it was in the US.
Besides, Chuck Norris doesn't need a bridge. Chuck Norris walks to the river and the water gets out of his way. Sorry.
I think if a game is able to scare you, that's just a sign that the game has successfully pulled you in. Rather than being an outside observer to the bame, you become the character. I still remember play Half-Life for the first time, after a long battle with soldiers on the cliff-side, and climbing the ladder into the last tube only to have the crap scared out of me by a sudden, jumping head-crab. That fright is part of the reason I knew Half-Life was a great game...I wasn't playing as Gordon Freeman, I was Gordon Freeman.
Randomness and chaos theory are highly inter-linked concepts. Furthermore, true randomness does exist in a wide variety of systems; it is not just the scientists throwing up their hands and saying "we don't know." Also, I think a better example than Brownian motion would be statistical physics, were the ensemble behavior is of interest, not individual interactions.
Chaos theory, on the other hand, usually involves systems of non-linear equations, where small effects to not get damped out, but can increase greatly in size. For a large number of observations, patterns begin to emerge, but any single system can take any end state...randomness.
"...at least 986 billion years older ..."
I always found it amusing when people take scientific estimates at face value. The article says something along the lines of "the universe could be up to a trillion years old," so, obviously, the universe is precisely 1 trillion years old.
I had a professor who worked on a similar project for a while. The point is not to physically destroy a satellite, that would be pretty much impossible. The idea is to over-load the satellite's CCD camera, thereby rendering it useless (blind). That also means that the proper filters or multiple CCDs with different operational frequency ranges could circumvent the laser...unless you had multiple lasers.
Remarkably like your post. *applauds* Congratulations on the wonderful demonstration of irony.
Great George Carlin quote:
"Selling is legal...fucking is legal...why isn't selling fucking legal?"