This is the second Amazon Prime Day, and it's pretty hard to miss.
No, not hard to miss. I worked all day, went to a bar, went home, cooked, ate, went to bed. Didn't see a thing about Amazon Prime Day.
Oh, it may have been in adverts on the telly. But that's what the fast-forward button is for. Never watch live TV again - just put it on hold when you're making a cuppa tea, having a piss, or rewind if you didn't quite catch something - you'll accumulate enough time easily to be able to FF through the adverts easily.
No, it'll be the headline for weeks. A different body part, in a different river. Same judge. And eventually the body parts will show evidence of having been cut from a corpse (ummm, capillary blood oxygenation levels, maybe) instead from a live judge.
Every story in the technical press has covered the point that whether or not Voyager 1 has "left the Solar system" depends very critically on what your definition of "the edge of the Solar system" is.
One fairly popular suggestion is to use the heliopause - the area swept of interstellar gas by the exudations of the Sun - as a boundary. In which case, the magnetometers and plasma instruments on Voyager 1 do appear to be detecting the "edge". By that definition.
Of course, there is no reason I'm aware of to believe that the boundary is sharp. Unless you have some reason to believe that, in which case, do tell.
With a perihelion distance (~34AU) fairly close to the distance of Neptune (30AU), then the orbit of 2015 RR245 will be controlled by Neptune, rather than the hypothesised Brown-Batygin "Planet 9."
I continually re-use photocopies of a bill which I picked up from the tips-bowl of a LA brothel 20 years ago. Probably explains why Clinton keeps on getting hacked.
Well, some points to consider in your reading : (1) what was this "long standing" "pre-existing" definition of a planet which was cast into the roadside mud? ; (2) how long had the problem of Pluto been discussed in "the literature" (I've seen books throwing a stark light on it by plotting pre-1979 mass estimates on a logarithmic scale -Pluto's mass as measured by the Pluto-Charon couple, where the actual mass of Pluto-Charon is three orders of magnitude lower than the first (small) estimates. (IIRC, Earth is 2.5 orders smaller than Jupiter). Those studies were published and illustrated the remarkably minuscule size of Pluto-Charon in the mid-80s.
(2) Most astronomers don't care. If your specialism is mass flow from Wolf-Rayet stars, is it good use of your budget to pay for another night in the hotel ? This isn't business with infinite money to piss against the wall -that hotel room may cost a half-week of employment for a post-doctoral assistant.
(3) 434 voted. That would easily encompass the world's complement of planetary scientists who cared about the question.
I made an error in my earlier post when I suggested that hydrogen burning 'defined' star vs. a not-star. Re-reading the relevant literature on the train yesterday, I realised that, for some people, the important question is formation by core-accretion vs. gas collapse. Again I suspect that the definition of a "star" (not re-definition, but the first definition) is an issue looming in the near future. Consider, for example, some of the current undoubted Brown Dwarf stars with surface temperatures comparable to Venus' surface. Do they shine? To the human eye? To a far IR telescope like JWST? Perhaps that's a good debate to have before the scope gets launched.
My opinion (and only mine, yours may differ) The _only_ way that Hyperloop is viable for freight operations is if the lines are large enough to take the largest standard intermodal shipping containers and the pods that carry them can run at the same speed as everything else.
That means that your locomotives are going to have to be powerful enough to accelerate a [maximum length] * [maximum weight] train at [design speed] And for a lighter train, accelerations will be higher.
Unless you have a system to decouple freight cars on the fly, freight will travel terminus to terminus, and intermediate stations are out of luck. Or your passengers will have a 20-30-40 minute stop at some stations. Your coupling system will fail at some point, leading to loose freight containers on the line.
What's that? It's starting to sound like Hyperloop are going to have to contract some experienced rail design and management people. How - what's the word? - disruptive.
You don't swipe cards anymore, you stick them in and wait 30s.
Either you missed a decimal point ("3.0s"), have a problem with your card - dirty contacts maybe - or your retail experience involves a retailer with a fucked-up IT system.
That last reference I gave (Russell) does make some interesting points.
The result of the current definition is that, if transposed from it's present orbit to Pluto's orbit (or any orbit with the same semi-major axis as Pluto's orbit), the Earth would cease to be a planet, and become a "dwarf planet", despite the absence of calorie-controlled diets. How undesirable this is, is a matter of taste. But it's certainly a point to consider in a taxonomy. If you move a specimen of Cannabis sativa from Boston MA to Denver CO, does it change in any significant way? But in the taxonomy of the law, it goes from "legal" to "illegal".
However, in Russell's proposed taxonomy ("proposed" being an important word!), then Earth, being by a factor of hundreds more massive than anything else in the general vicinity, would remain a "principle planet", rather than being demoted to a "belt planet" (Pluto's status in Russell's taxonomy)
Oh, Mr (or Prof) Russell! I know this is a first-draft of a paper. But really! "The planets of the Solar System have incredible diversity." Tut, tut! Their diversity is a matter of observational fact. Whether you or the Flat Earth Society consider this degree of diversity credible or incredible is neither here nor there. As I sometimes drive into a shillelagh's head with 6-in nails, then beat into the skulls of Creationists, "You can choose your opinions, but you can't choose your facts!"
A problem with applying names such as Earth, super-Earth, mini-Neptune, Neptune, mini-Jupiter, or Jupiter to exoplanets is that these names imply not only a mass, but also a composition.
A good point. Got to be careful with terms like that implying un-evidenced expectations.
Yes, the Russell paper was time well spent. Bearing in mind it is a proposal, and it produces codings that look like - well. codings, rather than descriptive terms. In itself, that points at a further question - are you (not we, this is a personal question which you can't answer for the planetary scientist next to you, nor for your mentors or students) involved in this field of study because you're intereted in the formation of planetary bodies in general, or if you're looking to compare the planets of the Sun with average planets in the universe.
While it is generally understood and acknowledged that the biases inherent in current planet-hunting techniques severely bias the plants we identify ; and that these techniques are not well-suited to detecting planetary systems like the one we live in... well, do we live in a 10% planeary system, a 1% system, or a 0.1% system? That's still not question with a slam-dunk answer.
So if the definition is something about clearing its orbit of anything that could possibly eject it, that isn't the definition I have ever heard.
That's because you're now near the cutting edge of science. This is a taxonomy for a continuous natural variable. There isn't an obvious criterion for separation (such as the "hydrogen fusion" criterion for distinguishing between a brown dwarf and a star - that's a natural binary criterion), but the IAU people were trying to find a definition which distinguishes between two different, but potentially overlapping, classes.
As a geologist, I don't get terribly fussed up over whether something is a "claystone" (grains averaging less than 1/256 mm in diameter) or a "siltstone" (grains averaging 1/32 to 1/256 mm) because (1) I don't have the apparatus to distinguish the two classes, (2) my clients don't care - they're both too low a permeability to be of interest, and (3) we have the useful term "mudstone" to cover both cases.
The IAU sought to tighten up the definition of "planet". That's a work in progress. One early paper discussing it was presented in 2002, with some additional thoughts by one of the authors here (that one is less than an hour's work to read, unless you want to check every line of the maths; it's what convinced me that my geological favour for the "gravitational self-rounding" criterion was misplaced). A more recent proposal is here. This last one is interesting, as it adds some interesting considerations that I'd not wasted too much of my life thinking about, but I now feel the need to consider.
By the time you've digested a couple of those, you'll be in a better place to discuss the arguments that are occupying almost no astronomer's time outside the bar at conferences. Taxonomy never really gets much attention, once the tool is "good enough" to be useful. Which is where things are, amongst the astronomical community.
What interaction scenario between Jupiter and one - or all - of it's Trojans would result in Jupiter being ejected from the Solar system?
The point of the "clearing it's neighbourhood" part of the definition is not that every last speck of dust is removed from the orbital vicinity (however you define the region around the line of the orbit - and it's chaotic past and future), but that the planet is capable of scattering or accreting anything in in it's orbit, rather than being scattered by anything in it's orbit. The former is an observation that would require minute inspection of every kilometre of the orbit ; the latter means that you need to study the orbit to find if there is nothing more than about 10% of the mass of the planet/ dwarf planet contender.
If you think that the Jupiter (and Saturnian) Trojans (and the Greeks, at the trailing Lagrange point) invalidate Jupiter (and Saturn) as planets, that's fine. But in that case, 3753 Cruithne invalidates Earth as a planet. Until 3753 Cruithne gets scattered away. When Earth becomes a planet again. Until some other temporary visitor comes into orbital co-residence with the Earth, at which point we are likely to continue calling Earth a planet when in fact it is not, but we don't know that.
Such unstable terminology is undesirable - to most people. Certainly to most astronomers and other scientists. Come to think of it - it would probably offend the sensitivities of most engineers too. Theologians too.
Air conditioner invented 1902. First skyscraper was beteen 1857 (invention of safety elevators) and 1890 (development of steel-framed buildings instead of masonry-supported buildings).
Since China is less than 100 thousand people more populous than India, you're going to have to start checking statements like this every time you make them.
So it's a fabrication that "traditional Chinese medicine" uses a lot of weird shit to make impossible claims?
Its a global issue. In the USA, you have people who think the earth was created six thousand years ago, and evolution is wrong. Would you want them to make contact?
I think that would be a good idea. I've never seen someone's head explode, without duct-taping a hand grenade into their mouth first. But this way - I might.
Hey, if you're going to do vivisection, what's the point in using anaesthetics and non-sentient subjects?
America has the highest incarceration rate in the world, much much higher than China, Russia, Iran, etc. Our prison system is enormously expensive, and is mostly a waste of resources.
You are obviously not a shareholder in a profit-making prison corporation.
I suspect that terminology of automatics is EN_US only - automatics are certainly rare in the UK (I've only used less than half a dozen in nearly 30 years behind the wheel, having driven I-forget how many cars overall).
So more recent cars have a special mode (either D or M) where tapping is not prevented... Most more modern cars I've seen tend to have the button not on the side, but so placed (under the forward facing part) that you'll automatically press it when you grasp firmly the selector.
Every automatic I can remember looking at closely enough to drive have the locking button positioned so that it is on a different force axis to the movement axis of the selector - i.e. you have to apply two distinct forces to change the mode of the transmission, and an accident (perhaps a kid hitting the controls while left in the car at a gate or garage door) cannot change the transmission's mode. This "tapping" concept seems to be designed out of the system. Since this is all parts that use push rods and/ or cables to connect between the dashboard controls and the actual transmission, they may vary between country and country.
I've never seen a steering-column selector. (Except for specially adapted cars for disabled people, or some weird construction machines)
Actually, the first automatic I drove was a disabled-access adapted vehicle with a "column shift" literally bolted onto one side of the steering column, and a pull-to-accelerate, push-to-brake control on the other side. Strange to drive, but it did the job. The owner had mashed his waist and legs, but had reasonable upper-body motion. I've never seen a "column shift" since, in real life.
Which movie do you refer to ? Or do you refer to the letters display on the dashboard itself ?
Essentially every movie I've seen with a shot from the vehicle interior of hero/ine wrestling with the controls to speed up/ slow down/ reverse, you see them manipulating a stick on the steering column in addition to the normal two for direction indicators and lights control. Now, it's 25 years since I drove in the US myself (and that was a manual gear box, and the owner was astonished that I knew how to drive one), so I don't know what has happened in the intervening years, and it is always possible that the film directors choose cars with the steering column shift because it provides a better visible image of what is happening.
The control/ status indicator (for normal automatics) in Britain is on the "central console", down beside the drivers inner knee, and just in front of the parking (mechanical) brake lever. Same place as the gear change in any vehicle that isn't a Citroen 2CV.
More modern car might react if you press the accelerator pedal more firmly and automatically drop gear and rev up to give you more power.
I'll actually R the FM next time I find myself with an automatic. Never felt the need previously w.r.t. the transmission, though figuring non-standard lights does sometimes have me reach into the glove box.
In fact, a few of the latest-gen manual transmission cars that I've driven will also blink a light and show an advice to drop down or shift up a gear if you're outside the best torque zone.
Well, that's the "Eco" mode for the last two cars I've owned. It's all software running off the basic engine sensors, with some sort of transmission status sensor (I think 6 limit switches would do it, to work out the active gear). Personally, I don't need it (I keep an internal counter in my head, calibrated by having had to change clutches, brakes, starter motors, transmissions over the years. So I count 10 pence an hour for running the engine, then fuel, then £1 for starting the engine, an extra £1 for every stall, another £2 for every time the rev counter goes into the red, then 3p fo
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmm, that sounds interesting enough to follow up on.
No, not hard to miss. I worked all day, went to a bar, went home, cooked, ate, went to bed. Didn't see a thing about Amazon Prime Day.
Oh, it may have been in adverts on the telly. But that's what the fast-forward button is for. Never watch live TV again - just put it on hold when you're making a cuppa tea, having a piss, or rewind if you didn't quite catch something - you'll accumulate enough time easily to be able to FF through the adverts easily.
No, it'll be the headline for weeks. A different body part, in a different river. Same judge. And eventually the body parts will show evidence of having been cut from a corpse (ummm, capillary blood oxygenation levels, maybe) instead from a live judge.
Yes, I did say "summary," not "news." Because it's not exactly news, is it?
Sounds like games are too complex to bother with these days. I'll stick to CIV and Oolite. Oh, and for a change, XCom.
One fairly popular suggestion is to use the heliopause - the area swept of interstellar gas by the exudations of the Sun - as a boundary. In which case, the magnetometers and plasma instruments on Voyager 1 do appear to be detecting the "edge". By that definition.
Of course, there is no reason I'm aware of to believe that the boundary is sharp. Unless you have some reason to believe that, in which case, do tell.
Also, for many decades books for adults about kids waned that masturbation can make you go blind. Did that make it true?
With a perihelion distance (~34AU) fairly close to the distance of Neptune (30AU), then the orbit of 2015 RR245 will be controlled by Neptune, rather than the hypothesised Brown-Batygin "Planet 9."
I continually re-use photocopies of a bill which I picked up from the tips-bowl of a LA brothel 20 years ago. Probably explains why Clinton keeps on getting hacked.
You could certainly if you were at Alpha Centauri - but it (the Sun) would be far from the brightest star in the sky.
Secondly, they're probably hoping to boost ales of their execrable excuse for porn in "the Sun".
(2) alternate hands between typing digits. It's not difficult. Step (1) is probably best.
(2) Most astronomers don't care. If your specialism is mass flow from Wolf-Rayet stars, is it good use of your budget to pay for another night in the hotel ? This isn't business with infinite money to piss against the wall -that hotel room may cost a half-week of employment for a post-doctoral assistant. (3) 434 voted. That would easily encompass the world's complement of planetary scientists who cared about the question.
I made an error in my earlier post when I suggested that hydrogen burning 'defined' star vs. a not-star. Re-reading the relevant literature on the train yesterday, I realised that, for some people, the important question is formation by core-accretion vs. gas collapse. Again I suspect that the definition of a "star" (not re-definition, but the first definition) is an issue looming in the near future. Consider, for example, some of the current undoubted Brown Dwarf stars with surface temperatures comparable to Venus' surface. Do they shine? To the human eye? To a far IR telescope like JWST? Perhaps that's a good debate to have before the scope gets launched.
That means that your locomotives are going to have to be powerful enough to accelerate a [maximum length] * [maximum weight] train at [design speed] And for a lighter train, accelerations will be higher.
Unless you have a system to decouple freight cars on the fly, freight will travel terminus to terminus, and intermediate stations are out of luck. Or your passengers will have a 20-30-40 minute stop at some stations. Your coupling system will fail at some point, leading to loose freight containers on the line.
What's that? It's starting to sound like Hyperloop are going to have to contract some experienced rail design and management people. How - what's the word? - disruptive.
Other bombers would see it as a serious disadvantage. If your aim is to be SEEN to be performing a mass killing, than this would not be desirable.
Either you missed a decimal point ("3.0s"), have a problem with your card - dirty contacts maybe - or your retail experience involves a retailer with a fucked-up IT system.
However, in Russell's proposed taxonomy ("proposed" being an important word!), then Earth, being by a factor of hundreds more massive than anything else in the general vicinity, would remain a "principle planet", rather than being demoted to a "belt planet" (Pluto's status in Russell's taxonomy)
Oh, Mr (or Prof) Russell! I know this is a first-draft of a paper. But really! "The planets of the Solar System have incredible diversity." Tut, tut! Their diversity is a matter of observational fact. Whether you or the Flat Earth Society consider this degree of diversity credible or incredible is neither here nor there. As I sometimes drive into a shillelagh's head with 6-in nails, then beat into the skulls of Creationists, "You can choose your opinions, but you can't choose your facts!"
A good point. Got to be careful with terms like that implying un-evidenced expectations.
Yes, the Russell paper was time well spent. Bearing in mind it is a proposal, and it produces codings that look like - well. codings, rather than descriptive terms. In itself, that points at a further question - are you (not we, this is a personal question which you can't answer for the planetary scientist next to you, nor for your mentors or students) involved in this field of study because you're intereted in the formation of planetary bodies in general, or if you're looking to compare the planets of the Sun with average planets in the universe.
While it is generally understood and acknowledged that the biases inherent in current planet-hunting techniques severely bias the plants we identify ; and that these techniques are not well-suited to detecting planetary systems like the one we live in ... well, do we live in a 10% planeary system, a 1% system, or a 0.1% system? That's still not question with a slam-dunk answer.
That's because you're now near the cutting edge of science. This is a taxonomy for a continuous natural variable. There isn't an obvious criterion for separation (such as the "hydrogen fusion" criterion for distinguishing between a brown dwarf and a star - that's a natural binary criterion), but the IAU people were trying to find a definition which distinguishes between two different, but potentially overlapping, classes.
As a geologist, I don't get terribly fussed up over whether something is a "claystone" (grains averaging less than 1/256 mm in diameter) or a "siltstone" (grains averaging 1/32 to 1/256 mm) because (1) I don't have the apparatus to distinguish the two classes, (2) my clients don't care - they're both too low a permeability to be of interest, and (3) we have the useful term "mudstone" to cover both cases.
The IAU sought to tighten up the definition of "planet". That's a work in progress. One early paper discussing it was presented in 2002, with some additional thoughts by one of the authors here (that one is less than an hour's work to read, unless you want to check every line of the maths; it's what convinced me that my geological favour for the "gravitational self-rounding" criterion was misplaced). A more recent proposal is here. This last one is interesting, as it adds some interesting considerations that I'd not wasted too much of my life thinking about, but I now feel the need to consider.
By the time you've digested a couple of those, you'll be in a better place to discuss the arguments that are occupying almost no astronomer's time outside the bar at conferences. Taxonomy never really gets much attention, once the tool is "good enough" to be useful. Which is where things are, amongst the astronomical community.
The point of the "clearing it's neighbourhood" part of the definition is not that every last speck of dust is removed from the orbital vicinity (however you define the region around the line of the orbit - and it's chaotic past and future), but that the planet is capable of scattering or accreting anything in in it's orbit, rather than being scattered by anything in it's orbit. The former is an observation that would require minute inspection of every kilometre of the orbit ; the latter means that you need to study the orbit to find if there is nothing more than about 10% of the mass of the planet/ dwarf planet contender.
If you think that the Jupiter (and Saturnian) Trojans (and the Greeks, at the trailing Lagrange point) invalidate Jupiter (and Saturn) as planets, that's fine. But in that case, 3753 Cruithne invalidates Earth as a planet. Until 3753 Cruithne gets scattered away. When Earth becomes a planet again. Until some other temporary visitor comes into orbital co-residence with the Earth, at which point we are likely to continue calling Earth a planet when in fact it is not, but we don't know that.
Such unstable terminology is undesirable - to most people. Certainly to most astronomers and other scientists. Come to think of it - it would probably offend the sensitivities of most engineers too. Theologians too.
Cart, Horse, Rearrange.
Since China is less than 100 thousand people more populous than India, you're going to have to start checking statements like this every time you make them.
I think that would be a good idea. I've never seen someone's head explode, without duct-taping a hand grenade into their mouth first. But this way - I might.
Hey, if you're going to do vivisection, what's the point in using anaesthetics and non-sentient subjects?
You are obviously not a shareholder in a profit-making prison corporation.
Every automatic I can remember looking at closely enough to drive have the locking button positioned so that it is on a different force axis to the movement axis of the selector - i.e. you have to apply two distinct forces to change the mode of the transmission, and an accident (perhaps a kid hitting the controls while left in the car at a gate or garage door) cannot change the transmission's mode. This "tapping" concept seems to be designed out of the system. Since this is all parts that use push rods and/ or cables to connect between the dashboard controls and the actual transmission, they may vary between country and country.
Actually, the first automatic I drove was a disabled-access adapted vehicle with a "column shift" literally bolted onto one side of the steering column, and a pull-to-accelerate, push-to-brake control on the other side. Strange to drive, but it did the job. The owner had mashed his waist and legs, but had reasonable upper-body motion. I've never seen a "column shift" since, in real life.
Essentially every movie I've seen with a shot from the vehicle interior of hero/ine wrestling with the controls to speed up/ slow down/ reverse, you see them manipulating a stick on the steering column in addition to the normal two for direction indicators and lights control. Now, it's 25 years since I drove in the US myself (and that was a manual gear box, and the owner was astonished that I knew how to drive one), so I don't know what has happened in the intervening years, and it is always possible that the film directors choose cars with the steering column shift because it provides a better visible image of what is happening.
The control/ status indicator (for normal automatics) in Britain is on the "central console", down beside the drivers inner knee, and just in front of the parking (mechanical) brake lever. Same place as the gear change in any vehicle that isn't a Citroen 2CV.
I'll actually R the FM next time I find myself with an automatic. Never felt the need previously w.r.t. the transmission, though figuring non-standard lights does sometimes have me reach into the glove box.
Well, that's the "Eco" mode for the last two cars I've owned. It's all software running off the basic engine sensors, with some sort of transmission status sensor (I think 6 limit switches would do it, to work out the active gear). Personally, I don't need it (I keep an internal counter in my head, calibrated by having had to change clutches, brakes, starter motors, transmissions over the years. So I count 10 pence an hour for running the engine, then fuel, then £1 for starting the engine, an extra £1 for every stall, another £2 for every time the rev counter goes into the red, then 3p fo
You'd hope that a Volvo engineer would be a Volvo driver.