Not because our big cartoon-broadcasting neighbor to the south had just turned 200 years old. Not because the Olympics were in Canada, nor because Nadia Comaneci scored the first perfect 10 in Olympic history - causing one of the most famous computer crashes in history. Not even because Disco Duck was Top 40.
I remember the summer of 1976 vividly because Viking 1 touched down on the flat plains of Chryse Planitia on Mars, and shortly thereafter discovered the first scientific evidence of extraterrestrial life - a very big event for a nine year old spacegeek like me. Curiously though, not long after NASA announced discovering life on Mars, they retracted their statement and said what they detected was not life, but rather an unusual chemical reaction.
Need an OWL to do this on the scale you speak...Marconi is here tonight at Paranal, Scarpa usually is as well and Gilmozzi is my boss...it was me that pointed to MOND.
We were closed monday night...and closed early on another night this week...can't remember which...they all blur together...would be easier to figure out if people would just wear different clothes on different nights, but I 've given that one up as hopeless.
Hey! I've never run into a fellow telescope operator before. Very cool. Seeing.44 right now... looking 161019/-113838 for a comet that does not seem to be there...
"A pilot experiment suitable to test Newton's law of gravity down to the regime of acceleration typical of galaxies has been carried out in Omega Centauri. Stars in the extreme periphery of this globular cluster are used as test particles immersed in such weak gravitational field. The stellar velocity dispersion is found to remain constant at large radii, rather than decrease monotonically, starting at acceleration a=10e-7 cm/s2. This is comparable to the acceleration at which the effect of dark matter becomes relevant in galaxies. Explanations for this result within Newtonian dynamics exist (e.g. cluster evaporation, tidal effects, presence of dark matter) but require fine tuning of the relevant parameters in order to make the dispersion profile flat. An interesting alternative is that this result, together with a similar one for Palomar 13 and the anomalous behavior of spacecrafts outside the solar system, suggests a breakdown of Newton's law in the weak acceleration regime."
Dark Matter isn't the only explanation for Fritz Zwicky's 1993 observation.
MOND or Modified Newtonian Dynamics proposed by Moti Milgrom is I think better. If I were to bet on someone winning a future Nobel, Milgrom would be the person.
I'm driving the VLT as I type this...sentence was interrupted for a preset...I'm back now.
Anyway, I know a number of scientists that seriously consider the Newton's may not work at large scales. Nature recently rejected a paper from some rather prominent that seemed to confirm that gravity behaves differently at large scales. But, science is very reluctant to change its equations and publication will have to await more data.
Just remember - Dark matter may not exist. Be skeptical of those who treat it as fact.
Interesting. A friend who is a computer science grad and now TV commercial producer is trying to morph himself into a TV show producer. He just finished a pilot for a show called "The Expatriates"...wonder how many of us geeks have this interest in producing for the box, but who don't like to watch it?
BTW, thanks for the Bod reference. I had never heard of him before. I will read his work; it seems interesting.
Bods concludes [correctly I believe] in 'Beyond Grammar' [p. 144-145]:
"...any systemic restriction of the fragments [training] seems to jeopardize the statistical dependencies that are needed for predicting the appropriate structure of a sentence. We derive from this that the productive units of natural language cannot be defined in terms of a minimal set of rules (or constraints or principles), as is usually attempted in linguistic theory, but need to be defined in terms of a large, redundant set of previously experienced structures with virtually no restriction on size or complexity...It means that the knowledge of a speaker/hearer cannot be understood as a grammar, but as a statistical ensamble of language experiences that changes slightly every time a new utterance is perceived or produced. The regularities we observe in language may be viewed as emergent phenomena, but they cannot be summarized into a consistent non-redundant system that unequivocally defines the structures of new utterances. The notion of "Univeersal Grammar" becomes obsolete, and should be substituted by the notion of "Universal Representation" for language experience."
I happen to think binary propositions are the closest thing to a "Universal Representation" that we have, which is why I have spent the last nine years collecting them -- this might never have happened if PVRs were invented in 1994.
Of course not. You see, grammar is not a list of rules [see: Rens Bod - Beyond Grammar : An Experience-Based Theory of Language]. Human language actually requires human common sense to understand. If you augment your parser with a mindpixel or two (better yet 1.3 million - I can sell them to you cheap) it wouldn't fail because it doesn't know that televisions don't win prizes.
Slashdot Mirror
My article A Closer Look at the Summer of '76 written in July of 2001 Begins:
I remember the summer of 1976 well.
Not because our big cartoon-broadcasting neighbor to the south had just turned 200 years old. Not because the Olympics were in Canada, nor because Nadia Comaneci scored the first perfect 10 in Olympic history - causing one of the most famous computer crashes in history. Not even because Disco Duck was Top 40.
I remember the summer of 1976 vividly because Viking 1 touched down on the flat plains of Chryse Planitia on Mars, and shortly thereafter discovered the first scientific evidence of extraterrestrial life - a very big event for a nine year old spacegeek like me. Curiously though, not long after NASA announced discovering life on Mars, they retracted their statement and said what they detected was not life, but rather an unusual chemical reaction.
Thanks. It's on the way to the printer now.
Yes. Underdeveloped works better. The USA and Chile are underdeveloped socially.
Of course I understand where the Chilean system came from...
Anyone who knows what MOND is is great in my books. Anyone who tries to formutlate a covariant form of MOND is just plain wonderful. Keep trying!
Sorry...the correct phrase [and system] is Universal Healthcare.
Need an OWL to do this on the scale you speak...Marconi is here tonight at Paranal, Scarpa usually is as well and Gilmozzi is my boss...it was me that pointed to MOND.
No. Any country without free healthcare is second world in my book. I hate what the USA does to its poor and I hate that the Chileans copy them.
[For the record, I'm a Canadian currently living in Chile]
Try living out of the country for a few years...in a second world country like Chile or the USA and you'll stop complaining really quickly.
If we're very very lucky, in 200 years most countries will be like Canada is now. I was going to type a joke here, but I just discovered, I'm serious.
We were closed monday night...and closed early on another night this week...can't remember which...they all blur together...would be easier to figure out if people would just wear different clothes on different nights, but I 've given that one up as hopeless.
Hey! I've never run into a fellow telescope operator before. Very cool. Seeing .44 right now... looking 161019/-113838 for a comet that does not seem to be there...
That's what I get for driving and posting at the same time!! 1933 obviously.
Yes, there are tests for gravity at large scales. See for example: A Test of Newton's Law of Gravity in the Weak Acceleration Regime
From the abstract:
"A pilot experiment suitable to test Newton's law of gravity down to the regime of acceleration typical of galaxies has been carried out in Omega Centauri. Stars in the extreme periphery of this globular cluster are used as test particles immersed in such weak gravitational field. The stellar velocity dispersion is found to remain constant at large radii, rather than decrease monotonically, starting at acceleration a=10e-7 cm/s2. This is comparable to the acceleration at which the effect of dark matter becomes relevant in galaxies. Explanations for this result within Newtonian dynamics exist (e.g. cluster evaporation, tidal effects, presence of dark matter) but require fine tuning of the relevant parameters in order to make the dispersion profile flat. An interesting alternative is that this result, together with a similar one for Palomar 13 and the anomalous behavior of spacecrafts outside the solar system, suggests a breakdown of Newton's law in the weak acceleration regime."
Dark Matter isn't the only explanation for Fritz Zwicky's 1993 observation.
MOND or Modified Newtonian Dynamics proposed by Moti Milgrom is I think better. If I were to bet on someone winning a future Nobel, Milgrom would be the person.
I'm driving the VLT as I type this...sentence was interrupted for a preset...I'm back now.
Anyway, I know a number of scientists that seriously consider the Newton's may not work at large scales. Nature recently rejected a paper from some rather prominent that seemed to confirm that gravity behaves differently at large scales. But, science is very reluctant to change its equations and publication will have to await more data.
Just remember - Dark matter may not exist. Be skeptical of those who treat it as fact.
MOND FAQ
Dark-Matter Heretic [This is a wonderful article]
Next step: Implantation.
I expect we will have an IP crash, after which people will then learn to pay, make their own, live with the sponsored IP or live without it at all.
The law is unenforceable without on demand inspections. Any packaged string can always be resampled from analog and move out into the wild.
It will be up to individuals in the future to decide the value of and reward the creators of binary strings.
Actually, that's just what it will take if media corporations expect to survive.
There are two futures:
1) Corporate IP dies and we move to a gift economy.
2) We have to be able to prove ownership every binary string we control on demand.
I vote for a gift economy.
Interesting. A friend who is a computer science grad and now TV commercial producer is trying to morph himself into a TV show producer. He just finished a pilot for a show called "The Expatriates"...wonder how many of us geeks have this interest in producing for the box, but who don't like to watch it?
Wow. That "sentence" is a difficult parse...
I tend to spend too much time on the internet because books are difficult to get in Chile and I have these 12-16 hour nights with little to do...
What kind of shows??
BTW, thanks for the Bod reference. I had never heard of him before. I will read his work; it seems interesting.
Bods concludes [correctly I believe] in 'Beyond Grammar' [p. 144-145]:
"...any systemic restriction of the fragments [training] seems to jeopardize the statistical dependencies that are needed for predicting the appropriate structure of a sentence. We derive from this that the productive units of natural language cannot be defined in terms of a minimal set of rules (or constraints or principles), as is usually attempted in linguistic theory, but need to be defined in terms of a large, redundant set of previously experienced structures with virtually no restriction on size or complexity...It means that the knowledge of a speaker/hearer cannot be understood as a grammar, but as a statistical ensamble of language experiences that changes slightly every time a new utterance is perceived or produced. The regularities we observe in language may be viewed as emergent phenomena, but they cannot be summarized into a consistent non-redundant system that unequivocally defines the structures of new utterances. The notion of "Univeersal Grammar" becomes obsolete, and should be substituted by the notion of "Universal Representation" for language experience."
I happen to think binary propositions are the closest thing to a "Universal Representation" that we have, which is why I have spent the last nine years collecting them -- this might never have happened if PVRs were invented in 1994.
Aside from this single posting, you would have to visit my apartment to know I don't own a television.
Damn, ok, now there are two postings that mention it.
Ok. So now I'm that guy.
I have an excuse:
I'm in the middle of the Atacama desert driving a telescope...very long exposures...and out of books for the week.
You are quite correct on all point [save Bod.] However, I do not care to invest my precision in a bunch of PVR freaks, yourself notwithstanding.
Oh fuck. Really, what I mean to say is, I think and write fast and rely heavily on revision.
Of course not. You see, grammar is not a list of rules [see: Rens Bod - Beyond Grammar : An Experience-Based Theory of Language]. Human language actually requires human common sense to understand. If you augment your parser with a mindpixel or two (better yet 1.3 million - I can sell them to you cheap) it wouldn't fail because it doesn't know that televisions don't win prizes.