I get (for reasons that I cannot really explain but no doubt are some sort of karmic burden predestined for all time) lots of people who write me with their own special "unified theory of everything"
There was an article on... the Science new site, IIRC. "Science reports" or something like that... a week or two ago about some jobbing post-doc who covered her bills between research contracts doing Skype sessions with "autodidacts" (I think that was the term she used), trying to help them to express their ideas effectively - and in the process lead them to some of their more egregious errors.
If you're going to wade through bullshit, you might as well get paid for it. Ah, found it.
We're still in an ice age, we have been for about 5 million years and after this little climate blip we will be again for probably several tens of millions of years more, until either the Patagonian Andes and West Antarctic Peninsula connect, or the Himalayas stop rising, or both, whichever comes soonest.
Of course, that "we" assumes that Homo sapiens survives the experience, which is not very likely. (Few species survive for tens of millions of years.)
So I simply repeat -- if somebody wants to explain the cosmological galactic orbital anomaly data that gives rise to the dark matter hypothesis using "gravitational standing waves" instead, they have their work cut out for them.
Yeah, I think we're in agreement on that point from different directions.
My maths was never good enough to consider continuing physics beyond the 18-YO exams (UK 'A'-level) - I got out while the getting was good. I did better in statistics, but I could feel the mathematical sand slipping under my feet then too, so I turned down a request to transfer into the Stats Dept. Realistically, I know that I'm not going to get much deeper into the mathematically-dependent sciences. I just don't get it. So I have to work by analogy, but I recognise tht analogies are poor substitutes for actually understanding the maths. However, people who think they're smarter than me are continually coming up with "Electric Universes" and such like palaver which claim to not need that mathematical finesse. I treat such claims with the interest I have in the geological opinions of someone who can't spend 20 minutes describing a rock without repeating themselves - i.e. potentially dangerous wastes of time.
a single observation or even two or three of gravity waves does not prove that "gravity" is a quantum wave phenomenon.
Again, I'm not even sure that that is a question that people are considering. If gravity is a wave-mediated phenomenon (which the LIGO observations of September and December last year and more this year confirm to many significant figures), then like every other wave-mediated phenomenon people would expect it to be quantised in the same way that the generation of EM waves is quantised. What the relevant quantised parameters are for understanding gravity waves remains a topic of serious study - it's the whole research direction of "quantum gravity". I just searched ARXIV for "quantum gravity"
and got 600 total hits for the last year. Not a subject I'm going to try to get up to speed on without someone paying me a decent salary - that's understanding 3 papers a day for a year, just to be a year out of date. And they're all assuming that gravity is quantised, even if arguing about how it is quantised, or the consequences.
Given what we know about the quantisation of the fields of the electroweak force and the strong force, it would be most surprising if the gravity field were not quantised. However, given the extreme weakness of the gravity field (I can overcome the gravity of 10^23 grammes of the Earth with the electroweak power of a couple of kg of leg muscle!! That's a factor of about 10^20 ; and the strong force is similarly stronger.), the technological hurdles to measuring that quantisation are significant.
How many researchers are working on non-quantum approaches to gravity? "No matches were found for your search: abs:("non quantum" AND gravity)" (I actually searched for "non-quantum").
Plan 'B' - if it's non-quantum, then you might describe it as "classical". So, doing the comparable search, I get "results 1 through 25 (of 235 total) for abs:(classical AND gravity)". But I think that's going to contain results about (something classical) and "quantum gravity" because of hits like "6. arXiv:1608.00285 [pdf, ps, other] Reissner-Nordstrom Solution from Weyl Transverse Gravity Subjects: General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc); High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th)" I'd need more ARXIV-fu to search better. Maybe there are researchers working on non-quantum theories of gravity. But I doubt there are many.
would be just to replace gas contents of the space between hydrogen cells and the airship outer shell.
If the airship is powered by IC engines, would the engine's exhaust be sufficiently low in oxygen to provide a non-flammable envelope around the lifting gas bags, for effectively free. Then it wouldn't really matter if there were minor leaks in the outer envelope.
If the exhaust gases also heated the lifting gas appreciably, you might get noticeable lift from a "hot air" effect too.
Not that I'm ever likely to have a swimming pool at home (more likely to live where the snorkelling and SCUBA diving would tempt me out to sea), but does "indoor pool" include one open to the air but with a sufficiency of sunroof (VIS translucent plastic, whatever) to keep UV levels on the water surface low?
I'm assuming that it's the UV that does for your free chlorine by photodissociation and the free Cl* radicals being mopped up by any organic molecules around.
If you want an idea that seems MORE likely to be fruitful, imagine that the black hole is radiating quantized gravity waves in all directions,
Ummm, why imagine that?
Unless I misunderstand things quite severely, you get gravitational waves from the acceleration of masses, in much the same way that you get EM waves from the acceleration of charges. So you're not talking about a single black hole, but a black hole and some other object that is sufficiently massive to be accelerating the black hole sufficiently to cause the radiation of gravity waves. Anything large enough (in mass, or in electrical charge, if your black hole is also charged, but you didn't mention that) to accelerate the black hole is going to either be another black hole (which really ought to have been mentioned), or something more noticeable than a black hole.
I realise that my argument doesn't make your scenario impossible, just incomplete and likely to contain the seeds of it's own self-contradiction. IANAphysicist.
Generally, a question involving space science that boils down to "why didn't they think of 'X'?" is normally going to have an answer "they did think of 'X', but these (or other) reporters didn't think it worth writing about".
Actually, that answer goes for most other fields of science which I've studied or worked in.
Shouldn't we have been checking there, like, first?
Well, you certainly could make that argument. If you thought that a 2 decade process of searching for candidate planets would be a significant part of the time to get exploration equipment to this postulate planet. OTOH, if the 2 decades of searching moves the first human exploration from your great-great grand children's time to your great-great-great grand children's time, it's probably not terribly important.
(You'll note that I refer to "human exploration," not to "exploration by humans.")
Our current planet-detecting technologies are strongly (very strongly) biased to large panets close to their primaries and orbiting in a plane that passes through the solar system. That's around 1% of star systems (for Sun-like stars and Earth-like planets, regardless of the above biases). Since we can see the mutual orbits of Alpha and Beta Centauri on the plane of the sky, then the most-likely orientation of the angular momentum vector for the Proxima Centauri system (including any putative planets) is off the plane of the sky, which in turn means that transiting methods are unlikely to work well in this system. That's in spherical geometry 1.0.1 - a basic piece of geometry. So now you know why the last 20 years of planet hunting technologies haven't been aimed at a system unlikely (on information we've had for a century or so) to yield useful information.
TFA doesn't say what the data source is, or whose embargo they're breaking. Maybe they're trying a new planet hunting technique developed in the last few years (the Atacama telescopes are mentioned, so it's not a space telescope, and so might be less than 15 years old, technology-wise).
That would be my wife, on the advice of her daughter who worked for a mobile phone shop.
Hi ho - I guess it's time for me to look at sorting out a new phone and/ or contract for the wife.
So, people specifically chosen and trained to be reliable and in control around weapons... aren't trusted with access to them by the very people who choose them and train them. I'd say that was the whole concept of "safe gun user" shot in the foot, but I'd prefer to take it as a correction to the charge that the American Authorities don't understand irony.
Donald Trump eats babies on toast!
Why does nobody care?
Because he only used good, clean American-bred babies, not filthy illegal immigrant babies. And they're properly peeled alive, then thoroughly cooked, so there is no safety risk.
A one-time pad is a long as the message. If you have a method to securely send the one-time pad, why not use it to send the message instead?
Distribute the one-time pad publicly years before you need it, just call it something else.
Remember the "Insurance" file that Wikileaks distributed some years ago? I'll bet that large stretches of that are statistically indistinguishable from random, so if you wanted an unobtrusive one-time-pad, then taking a section of that from one point to another would be trivial.
Steganography is hiding a message in a place that people wouldn't look for it - the Classic example being tattooing your message on a slave's scalp, before letting his hair grow out and sending him off with the message. And deeper steganography would be that the message (by a previously agreed code) is in the fact that you sent slave Stavros, not slave Dimitrios. Not that Stavros or Dimitrios know this, or that they both have Aunt Hera's keftides recipe tattooed on their scalp.
The other process you are describing is also well known, it's called "steganography". There are already algorithms written to not only encode data that way, but also to detect patterns of encoded data in an image. Read up on "stegbreak".
Which might work if you were to restrict yourself to, for example, image files. There are a myriad of other non-human-readable data formats available, and any half-way competent person could choose a different format to encode their data into.
Of course, if you make the assumption that your potential terrorist is an incompetent idiot, run by incompetent idiots with no hint of competence all up and down the command and control chain, then you might be safe to just deal with JPEGs. But if you assume that there is at least one competent person in the chain...
Oh, both ends of the channel need an "ensteg" and "desteg" tool pair. So, someone, somewhere needs the competence to design and install those, and to arrange for them to be used.
Personally, I'd probably go for audio files, just because there are so many more common file formats to use. "Hey man, we did a new dub-jam mix of that set from last Friday's gig. See attached OGG. I can send you a FLAC if you want to re-edit it yourself."
and fighting to defend the USA is pretty strong evidence that you're probably not a terrorist bent on destroying it.
Wasn't there a mass-shooting a year or so ago (yeah, I know; that doesn't restrict the choice of mass-shootings much) in Texas (-ish ; somewhere not-Washington and not-California) where the shooter was a serving member of the US armed forces?
Of course, this mass shooting taking place on a military base in Texas, the shooter was taken down in seconds by a hoard of gun-equipped fellow-soldiers. Errr, not. Perfect support case for the "we need more guns on our streets to protect us from guns on our streets" argument.
Why an Android distro and not a generic Linux/ HURD/ BSD* or other OS? For example, the hinted at Huwaei-OS.
Yeah, a runnable Huawei-OS distro for Surface-RT would put a nice big hungry cat in amongst a large flock of fat wing-clipped pigeons.
On the solid surface of Venus, you'd need instruments better than a human eye to tell if it were daytime (viz : sun above local horizon) or not. You'd probably get a little bit of dull red colour from the atmosphere temperature, but you'd not be seeing the Sun directly. The atmosphere does a fine job of evening out solar heating. It has some winds which go entirely around the equator far faster than the planet rotates.
The current expectation is that the growth rate will continue to decrease and that the population will eventually reach a maximum around 9 billions
The last time that I checked the UN's demographic predictions, they were looking at a mean of more like 10 billion with a variation of about 2 billion.
So, checking the UN 2015 predictions (published April 2016), at 2100, the 80% confidence interval is between 10.1 billion (and just levelled off) and 12.5 billion (increasing at ~0.05 billion/year) ; the 95% confidence interval is 9.7 billion (and very slightly declining) and 13.8 billion (increasing at ~0.08 billion/year). That's the summary of 60-odd projections under different models (changes in birth rates and death rates with time, by region). Follow links from the cited page for more data than you ever really wanted.
It's a couple of years since I looked up the numbers. So I think they're still increasing the population estimates year on year - which probably reflects changing assumptions about death rates against age, and maybe increasing numbers of old-age mothers (~34+).
Slashdot Mirror
It's ... 6 or 7 years since I sacked Windows, and I see no reason to switch back.
There was an article on ... the Science new site, IIRC. "Science reports" or something like that ... a week or two ago about some jobbing post-doc who covered her bills between research contracts doing Skype sessions with "autodidacts" (I think that was the term she used), trying to help them to express their ideas effectively - and in the process lead them to some of their more egregious errors.
If you're going to wade through bullshit, you might as well get paid for it. Ah, found it.
We're still in an ice age, we have been for about 5 million years and after this little climate blip we will be again for probably several tens of millions of years more, until either the Patagonian Andes and West Antarctic Peninsula connect, or the Himalayas stop rising, or both, whichever comes soonest. Of course, that "we" assumes that Homo sapiens survives the experience, which is not very likely. (Few species survive for tens of millions of years.)
Yeah, I think we're in agreement on that point from different directions.
My maths was never good enough to consider continuing physics beyond the 18-YO exams (UK 'A'-level) - I got out while the getting was good. I did better in statistics, but I could feel the mathematical sand slipping under my feet then too, so I turned down a request to transfer into the Stats Dept. Realistically, I know that I'm not going to get much deeper into the mathematically-dependent sciences. I just don't get it. So I have to work by analogy, but I recognise tht analogies are poor substitutes for actually understanding the maths. However, people who think they're smarter than me are continually coming up with "Electric Universes" and such like palaver which claim to not need that mathematical finesse. I treat such claims with the interest I have in the geological opinions of someone who can't spend 20 minutes describing a rock without repeating themselves - i.e. potentially dangerous wastes of time.
Again, I'm not even sure that that is a question that people are considering. If gravity is a wave-mediated phenomenon (which the LIGO observations of September and December last year and more this year confirm to many significant figures), then like every other wave-mediated phenomenon people would expect it to be quantised in the same way that the generation of EM waves is quantised. What the relevant quantised parameters are for understanding gravity waves remains a topic of serious study - it's the whole research direction of "quantum gravity". I just searched ARXIV for "quantum gravity" and got 600 total hits for the last year. Not a subject I'm going to try to get up to speed on without someone paying me a decent salary - that's understanding 3 papers a day for a year, just to be a year out of date. And they're all assuming that gravity is quantised, even if arguing about how it is quantised, or the consequences.
Given what we know about the quantisation of the fields of the electroweak force and the strong force, it would be most surprising if the gravity field were not quantised. However, given the extreme weakness of the gravity field (I can overcome the gravity of 10^23 grammes of the Earth with the electroweak power of a couple of kg of leg muscle!! That's a factor of about 10^20 ; and the strong force is similarly stronger.), the technological hurdles to measuring that quantisation are significant.
How many researchers are working on non-quantum approaches to gravity? "No matches were found for your search: abs:("non quantum" AND gravity)" (I actually searched for "non-quantum").
Plan 'B' - if it's non-quantum, then you might describe it as "classical". So, doing the comparable search, I get "results 1 through 25 (of 235 total) for abs:(classical AND gravity)". But I think that's going to contain results about (something classical) and "quantum gravity" because of hits like "6. arXiv:1608.00285 [pdf, ps, other]
Reissner-Nordstrom Solution from Weyl Transverse Gravity
Subjects: General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc); High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th)" I'd need more ARXIV-fu to search better. Maybe there are researchers working on non-quantum theories of gravity. But I doubt there are many.
If the airship is powered by IC engines, would the engine's exhaust be sufficiently low in oxygen to provide a non-flammable envelope around the lifting gas bags, for effectively free. Then it wouldn't really matter if there were minor leaks in the outer envelope. If the exhaust gases also heated the lifting gas appreciably, you might get noticeable lift from a "hot air" effect too.
Just flying a kite here.
Not that I'm ever likely to have a swimming pool at home (more likely to live where the snorkelling and SCUBA diving would tempt me out to sea), but does "indoor pool" include one open to the air but with a sufficiency of sunroof (VIS translucent plastic, whatever) to keep UV levels on the water surface low? I'm assuming that it's the UV that does for your free chlorine by photodissociation and the free Cl* radicals being mopped up by any organic molecules around.
Ummm, why imagine that?
Unless I misunderstand things quite severely, you get gravitational waves from the acceleration of masses, in much the same way that you get EM waves from the acceleration of charges. So you're not talking about a single black hole, but a black hole and some other object that is sufficiently massive to be accelerating the black hole sufficiently to cause the radiation of gravity waves. Anything large enough (in mass, or in electrical charge, if your black hole is also charged, but you didn't mention that) to accelerate the black hole is going to either be another black hole (which really ought to have been mentioned), or something more noticeable than a black hole.
I realise that my argument doesn't make your scenario impossible, just incomplete and likely to contain the seeds of it's own self-contradiction. IANAphysicist.
Generally, a question involving space science that boils down to "why didn't they think of 'X'?" is normally going to have an answer "they did think of 'X', but these (or other) reporters didn't think it worth writing about".
Actually, that answer goes for most other fields of science which I've studied or worked in.
... not one of which turned a profit, even after a decade.
QED.
And you consider this to be a benefit, or a problem? From this side of the Atlantic, I see it as a useful spin-off.
Well, you certainly could make that argument. If you thought that a 2 decade process of searching for candidate planets would be a significant part of the time to get exploration equipment to this postulate planet. OTOH, if the 2 decades of searching moves the first human exploration from your great-great grand children's time to your great-great-great grand children's time, it's probably not terribly important.
(You'll note that I refer to "human exploration," not to "exploration by humans.")
Our current planet-detecting technologies are strongly (very strongly) biased to large panets close to their primaries and orbiting in a plane that passes through the solar system. That's around 1% of star systems (for Sun-like stars and Earth-like planets, regardless of the above biases). Since we can see the mutual orbits of Alpha and Beta Centauri on the plane of the sky, then the most-likely orientation of the angular momentum vector for the Proxima Centauri system (including any putative planets) is off the plane of the sky, which in turn means that transiting methods are unlikely to work well in this system. That's in spherical geometry 1.0.1 - a basic piece of geometry. So now you know why the last 20 years of planet hunting technologies haven't been aimed at a system unlikely (on information we've had for a century or so) to yield useful information.
TFA doesn't say what the data source is, or whose embargo they're breaking. Maybe they're trying a new planet hunting technique developed in the last few years (the Atacama telescopes are mentioned, so it's not a space telescope, and so might be less than 15 years old, technology-wise).
That would be my wife, on the advice of her daughter who worked for a mobile phone shop. Hi ho - I guess it's time for me to look at sorting out a new phone and/ or contract for the wife.
So, people specifically chosen and trained to be reliable and in control around weapons ... aren't trusted with access to them by the very people who choose them and train them. I'd say that was the whole concept of "safe gun user" shot in the foot, but I'd prefer to take it as a correction to the charge that the American Authorities don't understand irony.
Because he only used good, clean American-bred babies, not filthy illegal immigrant babies. And they're properly peeled alive, then thoroughly cooked, so there is no safety risk.
Distribute the one-time pad publicly years before you need it, just call it something else.
Remember the "Insurance" file that Wikileaks distributed some years ago? I'll bet that large stretches of that are statistically indistinguishable from random, so if you wanted an unobtrusive one-time-pad, then taking a section of that from one point to another would be trivial.
Steganography is hiding a message in a place that people wouldn't look for it - the Classic example being tattooing your message on a slave's scalp, before letting his hair grow out and sending him off with the message. And deeper steganography would be that the message (by a previously agreed code) is in the fact that you sent slave Stavros, not slave Dimitrios. Not that Stavros or Dimitrios know this, or that they both have Aunt Hera's keftides recipe tattooed on their scalp.
Which might work if you were to restrict yourself to, for example, image files. There are a myriad of other non-human-readable data formats available, and any half-way competent person could choose a different format to encode their data into.
Of course, if you make the assumption that your potential terrorist is an incompetent idiot, run by incompetent idiots with no hint of competence all up and down the command and control chain, then you might be safe to just deal with JPEGs. But if you assume that there is at least one competent person in the chain ...
Oh, both ends of the channel need an "ensteg" and "desteg" tool pair. So, someone, somewhere needs the competence to design and install those, and to arrange for them to be used.
Personally, I'd probably go for audio files, just because there are so many more common file formats to use. "Hey man, we did a new dub-jam mix of that set from last Friday's gig. See attached OGG. I can send you a FLAC if you want to re-edit it yourself."
Or, if you intend to go to senior school, let alone university, then you're signing yourself up to working until you're 80. Or older.
Wasn't there a mass-shooting a year or so ago (yeah, I know; that doesn't restrict the choice of mass-shootings much) in Texas (-ish ; somewhere not-Washington and not-California) where the shooter was a serving member of the US armed forces?
Of course, this mass shooting taking place on a military base in Texas, the shooter was taken down in seconds by a hoard of gun-equipped fellow-soldiers. Errr, not. Perfect support case for the "we need more guns on our streets to protect us from guns on our streets" argument.
Why an Android distro and not a generic Linux/ HURD/ BSD* or other OS? For example, the hinted at Huwaei-OS. Yeah, a runnable Huawei-OS distro for Surface-RT would put a nice big hungry cat in amongst a large flock of fat wing-clipped pigeons.
They locked the nag's bridle and forgot the chastity belt?
On the solid surface of Venus, you'd need instruments better than a human eye to tell if it were daytime (viz : sun above local horizon) or not. You'd probably get a little bit of dull red colour from the atmosphere temperature, but you'd not be seeing the Sun directly. The atmosphere does a fine job of evening out solar heating. It has some winds which go entirely around the equator far faster than the planet rotates.
My good friend and frequent advisor, the Ancient Philosopher, once said "Progress is made by lazy bastard looking for easier way."
Buy the DVD. You won't regret it. They can't delete it from you next time they want you to buy it again. It might even be available on Blue-Ray.
The last time that I checked the UN's demographic predictions, they were looking at a mean of more like 10 billion with a variation of about 2 billion.
So, checking the UN 2015 predictions (published April 2016), at 2100, the 80% confidence interval is between 10.1 billion (and just levelled off) and 12.5 billion (increasing at ~0.05 billion/year) ; the 95% confidence interval is 9.7 billion (and very slightly declining) and 13.8 billion (increasing at ~0.08 billion/year). That's the summary of 60-odd projections under different models (changes in birth rates and death rates with time, by region). Follow links from the cited page for more data than you ever really wanted.
It's a couple of years since I looked up the numbers. So I think they're still increasing the population estimates year on year - which probably reflects changing assumptions about death rates against age, and maybe increasing numbers of old-age mothers (~34+).