I think the interesting question is, what would constitute evidence of the Oort cloud's actual existence?
Well, how about the range of aphelion distances of the orbits of sporadic comets? OK, it's exactly the evidence that Oort used back in... when was it, about 1940?... but that doesn't stop it from being true. As far as it goes. (We've also acquired a lot more orbital data on Kuiper belt objects, and done a huge amount of modelling of how you can put things there, from here or here, without also putting things into what fit's Oort's description.
Every textbook and Wikipedia article I've read still describes it as a theoretical construct.
Yes. And? The nuclear reactions inside a detonating hydrogen bomb are theoretical constructs too. You are within 40km of a theoretical construct which it is quite unlikely that anyone is ever going to see without landing a 5km+ meteorite into the Earth at an orbital velocity. what is going on inside your head while you read and think are more disputed theoretical concepts then the Oort cloud.
If someone gives you a weapon and tells to you go outside and kill some,
... you shoot the person who gave you the gun and the instructions. That way everyone wins.
If you're good enough with the gun and just destroy one of his legs and his gonads (much harder if he's a she), then everyone wins, including the idiot who gets an unearned second chance.
You should be able to argue it down to a self-defence charge - you thought that he was going to pull another gun to duel you, or something.
Stop buying content. And stop using it too, so they've got no-one to sue.
Once they've all gone bankrupt... well, IF you think the content which is now in the public domain is worth spending your time listening to/ watching/ whatever, then you're probably good to go.
It's a plan ; if you can't handle 30 years without music or movies... well, that's your lookout. Nobody ever got anywhere worth going to without putting in some effort.
But, the fact that things are stacked in the house's favor and that the house keeps it that way is dubious ethically speaking.
How is it dubious ethically speaking? The rules are designed to give the house an edge ; no house would allow play under rules that did not guarantee them an edge ("edge" can simply be room, croupier and food fees).
Most players are not in any position to understand that to any appreciable degree.
That is their problem, not a question of ethics. The rules are posted ; if you're stupid enough to think that you can win, you're welcome to lose your shirt.
I used to frequent a casino in my home town. One night I was having a fag outside with the manager, who asked me why he never saw me on the tables. "I did some statistics at university," I replied. "From what I can see, you run fair tables, so there's no way that I can cheat you out of your money. So I enjoy a late beer, chat up your bar maids, and occasionally have a game of Go with one or other of the Chinese customers."
He had no problem with that ; the beers were relatively expensive, and I didn't take up too much of his barmaids' time, so he was still making profit.
do not consider to be a valid use of the word "evidence".
Just admit that you're afraid to face the fact that you are going to die, and then rot. Fear of death is perfectly rational - it means you've got no more choices to make. But lieing to yourself is stupid and ineffective. You're still going to die.
How did Woody Allen put it? "I want to achieve immortality by not dieing" ; he's going to die too.
perhaps it was a bad example to refer to "The Hubble Telescope" as it is indeed designed to look deep at a very small segment of the sky.
Actually, not particularly ; it's a deliberately middle-of-the-road telescope design, because of the changeable cameras. For PHA-hunting,the pixel size matters. If you've got a very faint object, and you focus it perfectly (well, Rayleigh criterion ; no, you "cannae change the Laws of Physics" in the real world, no matter how Canadian your Aberdonian accent is.) onto a sensor with large pixels (relatively low resolution), then your signal may be lost in the thermal and optical noise. Did I mention Zodiacal light and things like that? Since most of the "interesting" objects are going to be in (near) the plane of the ecliptic, you're in competition with this as well as "deep sky" background levels of light.
Hubble's different cameras are optimised for different tasks - some have been as light buckets, some for near IR, some for high resolution, some for spectroscopy. Horses for courses. But all are subject to nearly the same geometrical constraints of the prime mirror and optical front end (including the "Ooops!" package of corrective optics). You could maybe get a factor of ten by efficiency of telescope design. But the observing task is in the order of five orders of magnitude more than a Hubble-grade telescope could handle. There are probably useful things you could do with more Hubble-grade instruments - rapid follow up and detailed analysis of PHAs discovered by the survey system is already a task that it gets used for. But it's not a wide-field survey system. For that, you need a very different telescope design. Possibly a radically different design... I'm thinking of perhaps a 1-d telescope (and internally I'm wincing at the memory of David Levy's "Fork Mounted Telescope" design, NOT pictured at http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=sEyCQEqLAnIC&lpg=PA208&ots=ytsNGPV1wa&dq=Levy%20fork%20mounted%20telescope&pg=PA208#v=onepage&q=Levy%20fork%20mounted%20telescope&f=false, ) in a Earth-Trojan orbit, and completing an ecliptic scan every couple of days in it's orbit. Hmmm, two ; one Greek, one Trojan ; a more conventional co-mounted imaging telescope to provide reference imagery to help the 1-d light bucket (light ribbon?) sensor be interpreted. That might work. For the ecliptic. Actually, if the idea of using 1-d sensors works, that could take several orders of magnitude out of the surveying task. That was a worthwhile bit of brain-sweat.
On the other hand, if we get hit by a "planet killer", I guess some cockroach will survive;D
I rather suspect that the moon-forming Giant Impact wouldn't have left the cockroaches staggering around wondering what hit them ; equally, I suspect that the cockroaches didn't notice the "dinosaur killer" (didn't I see mention of a new paper by Gerta "Chixulub was Innocent!" Keller recently.... I'd better follow that up.). But I'm less bothered about the existence of cockroaches than I am about the existence of self-aware self-conscious organisms with imaginations. Life may not be so difficult to get started (though we're still working on a sample of 1 to determine exactly how that happened, if we ever can) ; but there have been lots of contingent events in the history of life where there's no obvious reason for history to have gone "our way" rather than "another way". Was there anything inevitable about the rise of grasses 20-odd million years ago which currently provide 70-80% of our calories?
Many countries consider the possession of GPS capable devices as a priori evidence that the possessor is a spy, and are likely to treat you as such. When I was working in the oilfields of Siberia (between the missile bases of Siberia) in the mid-2000s, this was well known. If you had a GPS, you definitely did not take it to work with you. ("Work" being a 2-3 month posting to the area, with a month off in between hitches. Free Russian language lessons!)
When I worked one summer as a Resident Adviser, I had one guest that constantly complained about noise from me. Thing was, I got up to go to work at 4am to avoid traffic (I had to drive 40 miles each way through downtown Chicago). Mind you, I had the TV volume for news, at that hour, just loud enough I could hear it when I was in my room
I know the feeling.
Until recently we were living in an apartment where the occupant upstairs was dealing crack. We also suspect that he was a grass for the police, so he avoided getting busted. As his use (and sales) escalated, the music from his rooms through our ceilings got worse and worse. So we started the process of getting the council's Noise Complaints people onto him, which steadily worked. His business did not benefit from the disruption of having the police hammering on his door in front of his customers at 03:00, scaring them ; he didn't like being told that because of the noise, the police could now forcibly enter his premises at any time to seize his sound equipment if it was making too much noise (and his police contacts could do nothing to protect him from this... it went through a different branch of the police)... all lots of hassle. (Spreading the suspicion of him being a grass probably didn't hurt either.)
But explicitly what the council could not entertain complaints about were "normal" sounds - the squeeking of floor boards, normal conversation, normal TV - they were not something you could (successfully) complain about, even if they disturbed you. When the buildings were built for the council in the 1930s the design didn't consider sound insulation to be an issue, so you just had to live with it. And will have to until they get a major refit involving new structural woodwork). Which will be 100 to 200 years, looking at ground stability and weatherproofing.
Surely, it would have been March 14, 285? The best approximation to the actual value of in use for a long time was our kindergarten value of 22/7 (equal to 3.1428571428571... with the sequence "142857" repeating infinitely).
I didn't know whether or not they were available for Android. I'd never bothered to research the issue. I get slightly irritated by the various adverts in my applications, but it hasn't been enough irritation to do anything about it. Thus far.
But now I do know. And if the adverts get sufficiently irritating (developers - are you listening?) - boom - away they go.
And if the ad-blocking itself is blocked... well, I can go back to using a dumb phone. It's cheaper and much, much less hassle.
Why can't you cover your walls in foam? Go to the big box store and get 2-3" blue or pink plastic insulation and just put it up. Use double sided tape. No one says you have to tail things to the wall.
Other people have pointed out that some foams can be lethally flammable, which is true.
But when I lived in university-provided accommodation (I guess that's what the Americanism "dorm" means), the rules about what you could use to attach things to the wall were unambiguous. You could use "Blu-Tak", or "White-Tak". Nothing else. Absolutely nothing else. And the cleaning staff were under orders to report anyone using anything else, and were also under orders (on pain of disciplinary action up to and including being fired) to report any rooms which they can't get into for two consecutive weeks. It can take weeks to clean up form a corpse, and costs a lot of money.
These accommodations aren't democracies, and there are no human rights issues involved- if you don't like the rules which you sign up to before you get your key, you're free to go somewhere else and pay them, not the university. And the rules aren't intended to stifle your personal creativity. They're intended to protect the building's decor from damage, so that when you move out, the room can be re-let in a usable condition in a matter of days.
If you went into a hotel room and stuck foam all over the walls, you'd expect a large repair bill. Same here.
If the university is providing these "dorms", they'll have rules about reasonable behaviour. And they'll have complaints procedures. Use them. And if you get shit through your letter box, report that. And if you get shot in the head, "Welcome to America, home of the Brave." That'll deal with the "bong hitters" (whatever that is. Sorry, I was a spliff man myself ; much quieter and cooler) and music players. Can't do much about reasonable conversation, shagging, vomiting etc. though. But consider it a life lesson : for most of your life you're going to have to live with people whose number one occupation is not "making your life easy".
I do appreciate where the OP is coming from ; I'm the reverse : silence worries me. But I live in the city ; when I'm at work, the noise of the engines, cranes, passing helicopters and the occasional 20m wave hitting the boat all create ambient noise ; when I'm holidaying in the wilds, the wind soughs through the trees and flaps the tent. Silence is rare. It usually means that something has gone (badly) wrong.
"What..."
[visual effect : using forceps to pick up something very dead, soggy and not easily recognisable, even to one experienced in identifying roadkill]
"... the fuck is one of those when it's at home?"
By definition, religions are things that rely on faith, very explicitly without the presence of evidence. Therefore there is nothing at all within religion, any religion, to subject to rational study.
A traditional Question and Answer session goes like this:
There's your problem. You're looking for "traditional" and the correspondent is Bob Bakker.
How can I contextualise Bakker in terms that would be generally understood on Slashdot?
Try this for size : Bob Bakker is to traditional palaeontology as Richard Stallman is to traditional computing. Which is not to say that either are always right (or wrong), and is not to say that no-one (or everyone) in their respective fields thinks that they're heroes. Or villains. But they're important figures whose opinions are worth considering, even if you eventually don't agree with them.
And you expected a "traditional" response from Bakker? I didn't.
I didn't have any particular questions to ask of Bakker (because his opinions are well advertised, by himself, within our mutual field) ; but I was interested in the narrative he has to tell. And I think that he's done an interesting job. If nothing else, it has successfully stirred up a few people's opinion of what they think getting an answer means. Which is just the sort of thing Bakker has been doing for the 30+ years that I've been following his professional activities.
I had what I thought were great questions, but he never got to those.
Assuming that you read the bit of the introduction that said:
The first part is a narrative about [...]. We'll post the second half, [...], tomorrow.
Did your questions get answered there?
I don't recall the Slashdot interviewees ever committing to answer ALL questions. Bob Bakker has a long history of doing things his way and no-one else's ; it's absolutely no surprise to me that he's taken a very "different" approach to answering people's questions. It's almost his trademark.
I've enjoyed reading his article (on an oil rig, in an office with "Geologist" on the door, and "Geologist" embroidered into my coveralls). And I'm about to read the second half. And very likely enjoy that too.
Anyway, regarding off planet telescopes, what we need is basically 2 of them (more is better) and shoot them into an orbit perpendicular to the ecliptic. So basically they circle the sun more or less with the same distance than the earth. But half a year above the plane and half a year below the plane. The effect of this is: the sun is only blocking a part of the view field two times a year. With two such telescopes in 30 degree "distance" behind each other we always had a view from top or from bottom onto the solar system.
OK ; so your scopes would then, during the northern and southern (what's the word... "apparition"?) of each orbit, they'd need to schedule [calculates] around 2000 square degrees of sky [I know, I should be working in steradians, but it's 23:00 local and I'm up at 05:00 for work at 05:30. Again.] with a field of view of [damn, "vies" is a valid mis-spelling of "view"] Hubble grade...
Pick a number for the Hubble FoV from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_of_view ; I'll go for a mid-range 1 sq.arc-minute. So, that's 7,200,000 fields of view, which would need completing in 6 months (per apparition) : that's 27+ images per second (allowing 5 days down time a year). The discovery photos for Nix and Hydra (Pluto's second and third-discovered moons took 950s approx. http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0601018). To mis-quote "Jaws" Quint, "You're going to need a bigger telescope ; or more telescopes ; or both."
With simple long term exposure photos that get analyzed on earth, we would pick up nearly everything.
I am not an astronomer. But I have spent a considerable sum of my own cash on a week-long practical course in observational astronomy using telescopes of the Observatory of Mallorca and run by the Open University (open.ac.uk ; I know that URL by heart.). I know better what I'm talking about than the next 90+people you meet on the street (unless you're living near La Silla, and possibly then too).
i don't agree that we don't have the infrastructure to build such telescopes, two Hubble like scopes would be enough.
Sorry, I disagree with you. My grounds are above.
Incidentally, I've only so-far considered searching for objects in the plane of the ecliptic. Actually, to be more precise, within 6 degrees of the ecliptic. Scale up by a factor of 15 for the whole sky. We are a LONG way from having the necessary infrastructure.
Imagine the dickheads on planet earth wasting the first decade in discussion about funding...
We're all dead already. It's your children that you should be worried about.
OTOH if those guys who want to mine asteroids are serious, they likely do that for us:D
Both in terms of building the infrastructure for building lots of telescopes ; and for putting them into orbits (various) ; and for providing the high-latency interplanetary network links ; and,as a side effect, having lots of people living in self-maintained self-sufficient habitats OFF THE EARTH. The important point is the last one : killing a species in one place (Earth) is relatively easy ; killing a species in a hundred places is decidedly harder, particularly if the little buggers keep on moving and breeding. I see that we rendered the Rattus rattus extinct... when?
Imagine there are perhaps much more asteroids close to earth than we know and lots of them perhaps have so nice orbits (like their year one month longer or shorter than an earth year) that they are easy to capture.
By coincidence, I was reading a paper at lunch about the Earth's (first) Trojan asteroid. Exactly what y
So, there's about a one-in-twelve chance of you siding with the French on this one.
[TBH, I haven't considered it deeply enough to wonder if I need to have an opinion on the issue, though it's pretty clear that it's an SEP (Someone Else's Problem). Will I TFA? Well, if I've got nothing better to do with my evening.]
Slashdot Mirror
Well, how about the range of aphelion distances of the orbits of sporadic comets? OK, it's exactly the evidence that Oort used back in ... when was it, about 1940? ... but that doesn't stop it from being true. As far as it goes. (We've also acquired a lot more orbital data on Kuiper belt objects, and done a huge amount of modelling of how you can put things there, from here or here, without also putting things into what fit's Oort's description.
Yes. And? The nuclear reactions inside a detonating hydrogen bomb are theoretical constructs too. You are within 40km of a theoretical construct which it is quite unlikely that anyone is ever going to see without landing a 5km+ meteorite into the Earth at an orbital velocity. what is going on inside your head while you read and think are more disputed theoretical concepts then the Oort cloud.
... you shoot the person who gave you the gun and the instructions. That way everyone wins.
If you're good enough with the gun and just destroy one of his legs and his gonads (much harder if he's a she), then everyone wins, including the idiot who gets an unearned second chance.
You should be able to argue it down to a self-defence charge - you thought that he was going to pull another gun to duel you, or something.
s/"tapes"/"CDs"/
s/"hurtling down the highway"/"flying across the Atlantic"/
Anon, CIS 75643:235675, 1993.
Get up to date, Prof Tanenbaum!
... and coming soon to a universe near us, Melindagatesosaurus melonsii?
Once they've all gone bankrupt ... well, IF you think the content which is now in the public domain is worth spending your time listening to/ watching/ whatever, then you're probably good to go.
It's a plan ; if you can't handle 30 years without music or movies ... well, that's your lookout. Nobody ever got anywhere worth going to without putting in some effort.
How is it dubious ethically speaking? The rules are designed to give the house an edge ; no house would allow play under rules that did not guarantee them an edge ("edge" can simply be room, croupier and food fees).
That is their problem, not a question of ethics. The rules are posted ; if you're stupid enough to think that you can win, you're welcome to lose your shirt.
I used to frequent a casino in my home town. One night I was having a fag outside with the manager, who asked me why he never saw me on the tables. "I did some statistics at university," I replied. "From what I can see, you run fair tables, so there's no way that I can cheat you out of your money. So I enjoy a late beer, chat up your bar maids, and occasionally have a game of Go with one or other of the Chinese customers."
He had no problem with that ; the beers were relatively expensive, and I didn't take up too much of his barmaids' time, so he was still making profit.
do not consider to be a valid use of the word "evidence".
Just admit that you're afraid to face the fact that you are going to die, and then rot. Fear of death is perfectly rational - it means you've got no more choices to make. But lieing to yourself is stupid and ineffective. You're still going to die.
How did Woody Allen put it? "I want to achieve immortality by not dieing" ; he's going to die too.
No he doesn't. He forcibly converts them to !Kung animism before he fricassees them. Don't you read anything?
Actually, not particularly ; it's a deliberately middle-of-the-road telescope design, because of the changeable cameras. For PHA-hunting,the pixel size matters. If you've got a very faint object, and you focus it perfectly (well, Rayleigh criterion ; no, you "cannae change the Laws of Physics" in the real world, no matter how Canadian your Aberdonian accent is.) onto a sensor with large pixels (relatively low resolution), then your signal may be lost in the thermal and optical noise. Did I mention Zodiacal light and things like that? Since most of the "interesting" objects are going to be in (near) the plane of the ecliptic, you're in competition with this as well as "deep sky" background levels of light.
Hubble's different cameras are optimised for different tasks - some have been as light buckets, some for near IR, some for high resolution, some for spectroscopy. Horses for courses. But all are subject to nearly the same geometrical constraints of the prime mirror and optical front end (including the "Ooops!" package of corrective optics). You could maybe get a factor of ten by efficiency of telescope design. But the observing task is in the order of five orders of magnitude more than a Hubble-grade telescope could handle. There are probably useful things you could do with more Hubble-grade instruments - rapid follow up and detailed analysis of PHAs discovered by the survey system is already a task that it gets used for. But it's not a wide-field survey system. For that, you need a very different telescope design. Possibly a radically different design ... I'm thinking of perhaps a 1-d telescope (and internally I'm wincing at the memory of David Levy's "Fork Mounted Telescope" design, NOT pictured at http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=sEyCQEqLAnIC&lpg=PA208&ots=ytsNGPV1wa&dq=Levy%20fork%20mounted%20telescope&pg=PA208#v=onepage&q=Levy%20fork%20mounted%20telescope&f=false, ) in a Earth-Trojan orbit, and completing an ecliptic scan every couple of days in it's orbit. Hmmm, two ; one Greek, one Trojan ; a more conventional co-mounted imaging telescope to provide reference imagery to help the 1-d light bucket (light ribbon?) sensor be interpreted. That might work. For the ecliptic. Actually, if the idea of using 1-d sensors works, that could take several orders of magnitude out of the surveying task. That was a worthwhile bit of brain-sweat.
I rather suspect that the moon-forming Giant Impact wouldn't have left the cockroaches staggering around wondering what hit them ; equally, I suspect that the cockroaches didn't notice the "dinosaur killer" (didn't I see mention of a new paper by Gerta "Chixulub was Innocent!" Keller recently .... I'd better follow that up.). But I'm less bothered about the existence of cockroaches than I am about the existence of self-aware self-conscious organisms with imaginations. Life may not be so difficult to get started (though we're still working on a sample of 1 to determine exactly how that happened, if we ever can) ; but there have been lots of contingent events in the history of life where there's no obvious reason for history to have gone "our way" rather than "another way". Was there anything inevitable about the rise of grasses 20-odd million years ago which currently provide 70-80% of our calories?
Many countries consider the possession of GPS capable devices as a priori evidence that the possessor is a spy, and are likely to treat you as such. When I was working in the oilfields of Siberia (between the missile bases of Siberia) in the mid-2000s, this was well known. If you had a GPS, you definitely did not take it to work with you. ("Work" being a 2-3 month posting to the area, with a month off in between hitches. Free Russian language lessons!)
Or buying hardware for the TSA.
I know the feeling.
Until recently we were living in an apartment where the occupant upstairs was dealing crack. We also suspect that he was a grass for the police, so he avoided getting busted. As his use (and sales) escalated, the music from his rooms through our ceilings got worse and worse. So we started the process of getting the council's Noise Complaints people onto him, which steadily worked. His business did not benefit from the disruption of having the police hammering on his door in front of his customers at 03:00, scaring them ; he didn't like being told that because of the noise, the police could now forcibly enter his premises at any time to seize his sound equipment if it was making too much noise (and his police contacts could do nothing to protect him from this ... it went through a different branch of the police) ... all lots of hassle. (Spreading the suspicion of him being a grass probably didn't hurt either.)
But explicitly what the council could not entertain complaints about were "normal" sounds - the squeeking of floor boards, normal conversation, normal TV - they were not something you could (successfully) complain about, even if they disturbed you. When the buildings were built for the council in the 1930s the design didn't consider sound insulation to be an issue, so you just had to live with it. And will have to until they get a major refit involving new structural woodwork). Which will be 100 to 200 years, looking at ground stability and weatherproofing.
If I wanted to draw this out, I'd make up a series of jokes following on from the successive "best approximations" listed at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_computation_of_%CF%80 .
I didn't know whether or not they were available for Android. I'd never bothered to research the issue. I get slightly irritated by the various adverts in my applications, but it hasn't been enough irritation to do anything about it. Thus far.
But now I do know. And if the adverts get sufficiently irritating (developers - are you listening?) - boom - away they go.
And if the ad-blocking itself is blocked ... well, I can go back to using a dumb phone. It's cheaper and much, much less hassle.
Other people have pointed out that some foams can be lethally flammable, which is true.
But when I lived in university-provided accommodation (I guess that's what the Americanism "dorm" means), the rules about what you could use to attach things to the wall were unambiguous. You could use "Blu-Tak", or "White-Tak". Nothing else. Absolutely nothing else. And the cleaning staff were under orders to report anyone using anything else, and were also under orders (on pain of disciplinary action up to and including being fired) to report any rooms which they can't get into for two consecutive weeks. It can take weeks to clean up form a corpse, and costs a lot of money.
These accommodations aren't democracies, and there are no human rights issues involved- if you don't like the rules which you sign up to before you get your key, you're free to go somewhere else and pay them, not the university. And the rules aren't intended to stifle your personal creativity. They're intended to protect the building's decor from damage, so that when you move out, the room can be re-let in a usable condition in a matter of days.
If you went into a hotel room and stuck foam all over the walls, you'd expect a large repair bill. Same here.
If the university is providing these "dorms", they'll have rules about reasonable behaviour. And they'll have complaints procedures. Use them. And if you get shit through your letter box, report that. And if you get shot in the head, "Welcome to America, home of the Brave." That'll deal with the "bong hitters" (whatever that is. Sorry, I was a spliff man myself ; much quieter and cooler) and music players. Can't do much about reasonable conversation, shagging, vomiting etc. though. But consider it a life lesson : for most of your life you're going to have to live with people whose number one occupation is not "making your life easy".
I do appreciate where the OP is coming from ; I'm the reverse : silence worries me. But I live in the city ; when I'm at work, the noise of the engines, cranes, passing helicopters and the occasional 20m wave hitting the boat all create ambient noise ; when I'm holidaying in the wilds, the wind soughs through the trees and flaps the tent. Silence is rare. It usually means that something has gone (badly) wrong.
"What ..."
[visual effect : using forceps to pick up something very dead, soggy and not easily recognisable, even to one experienced in identifying roadkill]
"... the fuck is one of those when it's at home?"
By definition, religions are things that rely on faith, very explicitly without the presence of evidence. Therefore there is nothing at all within religion, any religion, to subject to rational study.
... by treating them like sophomores. Evidently so.
There's your problem. You're looking for "traditional" and the correspondent is Bob Bakker.
How can I contextualise Bakker in terms that would be generally understood on Slashdot?
Try this for size : Bob Bakker is to traditional palaeontology as Richard Stallman is to traditional computing. Which is not to say that either are always right (or wrong), and is not to say that no-one (or everyone) in their respective fields thinks that they're heroes. Or villains. But they're important figures whose opinions are worth considering, even if you eventually don't agree with them.
And you expected a "traditional" response from Bakker? I didn't.
I didn't have any particular questions to ask of Bakker (because his opinions are well advertised, by himself, within our mutual field) ; but I was interested in the narrative he has to tell. And I think that he's done an interesting job. If nothing else, it has successfully stirred up a few people's opinion of what they think getting an answer means. Which is just the sort of thing Bakker has been doing for the 30+ years that I've been following his professional activities.
... and now that you've finished being reasonable, Slashdot's security trolls will escort you off the website and take your credentials from you.
Assuming that you read the bit of the introduction that said :
Did your questions get answered there?
I don't recall the Slashdot interviewees ever committing to answer ALL questions. Bob Bakker has a long history of doing things his way and no-one else's ; it's absolutely no surprise to me that he's taken a very "different" approach to answering people's questions. It's almost his trademark.
I've enjoyed reading his article (on an oil rig, in an office with "Geologist" on the door, and "Geologist" embroidered into my coveralls). And I'm about to read the second half. And very likely enjoy that too.
OK ; so your scopes would then, during the northern and southern (what's the word ... "apparition"?) of each orbit, they'd need to schedule [calculates] around 2000 square degrees of sky [I know, I should be working in steradians, but it's 23:00 local and I'm up at 05:00 for work at 05:30. Again.] with a field of view of [damn, "vies" is a valid mis-spelling of "view"] Hubble grade ...
Pick a number for the Hubble FoV from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_of_view ; I'll go for a mid-range 1 sq.arc-minute. So, that's 7,200,000 fields of view, which would need completing in 6 months (per apparition) : that's 27+ images per second (allowing 5 days down time a year). The discovery photos for Nix and Hydra (Pluto's second and third-discovered moons took 950s approx. http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0601018). To mis-quote "Jaws" Quint, "You're going to need a bigger telescope ; or more telescopes ; or both."
I am not an astronomer. But I have spent a considerable sum of my own cash on a week-long practical course in observational astronomy using telescopes of the Observatory of Mallorca and run by the Open University (open.ac.uk ; I know that URL by heart.). I know better what I'm talking about than the next 90+people you meet on the street (unless you're living near La Silla, and possibly then too).
Sorry, I disagree with you. My grounds are above.
Incidentally, I've only so-far considered searching for objects in the plane of the ecliptic. Actually, to be more precise, within 6 degrees of the ecliptic. Scale up by a factor of 15 for the whole sky. We are a LONG way from having the necessary infrastructure.
We're all dead already. It's your children that you should be worried about.
Both in terms of building the infrastructure for building lots of telescopes ; and for putting them into orbits (various) ; and for providing the high-latency interplanetary network links ; and ,as a side effect, having lots of people living in self-maintained self-sufficient habitats OFF THE EARTH. The important point is the last one : killing a species in one place (Earth) is relatively easy ; killing a species in a hundred places is decidedly harder, particularly if the little buggers keep on moving and breeding. I see that we rendered the Rattus rattus extinct ... when?
By coincidence, I was reading a paper at lunch about the Earth's (first) Trojan asteroid. Exactly what y
But he was sane enough for the US military ... oh, wait. There's a phone call coming in from some place called "Fort Hood"?
... and who took a month to get through it.
[TBH, I haven't considered it deeply enough to wonder if I need to have an opinion on the issue, though it's pretty clear that it's an SEP (Someone Else's Problem). Will I TFA? Well, if I've got nothing better to do with my evening.]
Year 40 after September 11, don't you mean. The date that the USA lost what little moral authority and international reputation it ever had.
(Overthrow of the democratically elected government in Chile, organised by the CIA. As if you'd forgotten.)