That's actually a maximum since even in this quiet phase the sun is changing and therefore isn't at the extreme end of the variation for any length of time.
The "mini ice age" had really nothing to do with the state of the sun. It was brought on by The Year Without A Summer (a disaster caused by a volcano not much smaller than a supervolcano shutting off virtually all sunlight for half a year). The disruption to the global reserviours of heat, the ocean currents and air currents, the plant life, etc, resulted in global cooling that far outlasted the direct effects. It was used extensively in modelling the effects of a Nuclear Winter for precisely that reason.
Not entirely true. Climate is chaotic in nature and can be likened to the "owl mask" of the Lorenz atrange attractor system, with glaciation being one orbit and inter-glaciation being the other. But if you displace the system too far, the system will lock onto a very different set of strange attractors and very different orbits, none of which are guaranteed to be glacial in nature. The problem with chaotic systems is that you can't ever know what "too much" means in advance, you can only ever know when the system realigns.
The weather is about as meaningful to climate science as the ability to track individual gas molecules is meaningful to the physics of gasses. It is precisely because brownian motion is chaotic that the whole is statistically predictable. If it were not for the unpredictability on the micro scale, you could not have gasoline engines, pressure cookers or jet engines.
To claim that the weather channel's difficulties in predicting the impact on one small place at one small interval of time has any bearing on being able to predict the net change of an entire planet over decades is ignorance at its most extreme.
If you were driving in stop-go traffic, you can't predict when you will reach any given traffic light, right? But you know on aggregate about how long the journey will take because the average is much easier to work out. That it'll be approximate doesn't change the fact that you will reach your destination.
The 1000 Genome Project has mapped just over 1000 whole genomes now. To get them to map that many entire families - well, it's going to cost a bit. You are right that N is way too low to do much with, though.
My point is less to do with interferometry and more to do with the length of baseline used. The longer the baseline, the less fuzz you get but at a cost of losing anything that's time-dependent. Constant signals will clearly be the same value (the average being the same as the maximum and minimum), pulsed signals will show up at a fraction of their strength where the fraction is equal to the fraction of the time the pulse is present AND will not show any pulsation, and so on.
To observe pulsars, you want the shortest baseline (and therefore maximum signal and maximum variation) you can get away with. You can do this with either hard realtime data sets and a very very accurate start time measurement (since you can do DSP offline) or very high-speed, very low-latency data lines and attempt to mix the data as it is being collected.
For those interested in stats, here's the facts and figures for the telescope. If you're not interested in clicking through, the numbers that matter are that the dish is 76.2 meters in diameter and weighs 3,200 metric tonnes. It's also the third-largest steerable dish. The Chinese proposal isn't truly a steerable telescope - you can do the maths to work out how heavy a 500 meter steerable monster would be - but would be able to see outside the strict limit of vertically above since it will be distortable.
However, for precisely the same reason Jodrell Bank's telescope needed resurfacing, the distortions in the Chinese telescope have to be very carefully controlled and the quality of every mirror needs to be amazing. Imperfections will result in the telescope being useless at shorter frequencies which is where it wants to be.
Worse, Arecibo is deformed, requiring complex hardware to compensate. There's bound to be some loss of quality when trying to compensate. Also, it's an old telescope now. There have even been plans to shut it down, which would likely go through if presented to Congress today. If China had a rival, even if only of equal size, astronomers needing a single dish rather than an interferometer would have no alternative but to buy telescope time from them.
I dunno. The politics over SKA, where it would be located, etc, show that people do indeed care. Nobody can put a telescope even the size of the Lovell dish into space, never mind the size of this monster. Single dishes have benefits (such as reduced edge effects) that arrays do not, which is extremely important for some of the science needed. Radio telescopes are still the only systems you can build large interferometers from (you can do small optical interferometers, but that's it). RFI is an increasing problem for radio observatories, due to flagrant abuse of the spectrum by many nations, and it's much easier to shield one site than a hundred. Precision-engineering a single dish of this size will require advances in material science that will have spin-off benefits in other fields.
In short, there's lots of reasons for them to do this and no obvious reason for them to copy SKA or SHA.
Overlap is actually a good thing, since observations that can only be repeated on the same instrument or same class of instrument cannot be definitely attributed to a cosmological source - it could be explained equally well as a flaw in the design of the instrument. Having two entire classes of radio observatory being able to validate each other will permit testing and validating of the devices.
That's long baseline radio astronony, which would be useless for things like pulsars (there's not a pulsar slow enough to observe the pulses with long baseline) and of questionable value for extrasolar planets close to their sun (the orbit will result in the aggregate signal being worse) but it's great for observing stars, nebulae, gas clouds and 95% of the stuff radio astronomers get excited over.
There are all kinds of factors. Imperfections in the dish, for example, will reduce the useful photons collected and increase the noise. Since materials expand and contract with change in temperature, such imperfections will vary with time.
Single dish should also give a clearer image for the same surface area (less edge, less perimeter you need to seal against terrestrial radio inteference, fewer timing problems since you're not using interferometry). The problem with single dish is steering. Aricebo is fixed for a reason. The telescope at Jodrel Bank observatory, although not the largest steerable dish, is one of the larger steerable telescopes and the infrastructure needed is absolutely staggering.
Transporting military assets by any method leaves you vulnerable to being tracked. They tend to be high-volume and officers routinely say far too much when they visit strip joints.
Not really. Iraq II took many months to transport the men, vehicles and supplies. The logistics were terrible, since the aircraft had to fly to specific airfields. A train can unload anywhere along a track, but a plane cannot unload anywhere in the sky (ok, transport planes can but there's a limit to what you can parachute in).
If you hit a plane with a missile, you take out the whole plane. The chances of any survivors is remote. If you hit a coach with a missile, the odds are that people and equiptment in other coaches won't get through unscathed but that it won't be a total loss either. Even in the worst of the worst train accidents that have happened in history (and there have been some at very high speeds ploughing into bridges or vehicles), 100% fatalities are exceedingly rare. Had any of the transport planes flying into Iraq or Afghanistan been hit with a stinger missile, there's not the slightest chance anyone would have walked away. Hence the exceedingly dangerous flying that was required.
Now, we're actually quite fortunate that most opponents of the US are incompetent. There have been plans on the Internet for DIY cruise missiles with a 100 mile range for over a decade. Amateur rocketry is quite capable of launching a projectile in excess of 20,000' (the altitude considered safe against the kind of SAMs the US is ever likely to face). This is why Israel is interested in air-to-air missiles and other defences on passenger aircraft. Do you seriously imagine they'd be funding that kind of research if they thought air transport was safe?
(It is for now, as the weapons pose no threat without guidance systems and the kind of guidance systems needed require skills and other resources that hostile nations don't have. The V1, despite amazing range for the time, posed no military threat whatsoever - it was only effective as a psychological weapon.)
But if you don't have guidance systems, then the odds of hitting a train aren't much better than the odds of hitting a plane. From a long range, they're both very small targets.
Besides, attacking the vehicle is a bit stupid as the other nation would just send another. Take out an airport and it's a whole 'nother story. Sending another vehicle then becomes futile. Trains are another matter - as I've said, they can unload anywhere. As such, if a station is taken out it doesn't matter a whole lot. You just have a little further to jump to get to the ground and there's no waiting room.
Manchester, England, falsified this theory in the 90s with their light rail system. It wasn't between particularly congested routes, but it sliced 1/3rd off the total cars on the road, boosted the number of places in the city that were practical to reach and was judged an astronomical success. Most of Scotland also falsifies this theory, as there isn't a population density high enough to cause significant congestion but there are distances great enough to make mobility a severe problem.
Congestion over short distances is better resolved through wider roads or traffic calming schemes. Since acceleration is the only point at which energy (and therefore resources) gets consumed, an object in a state of uniform motion only has to overcome friction. Friction at the speeds concerned is insignificant compared to the energy requirements of accelerating an object as massive as a goods train to high speeds. Even in a road car, you will have observed that stop/start traffic consumes fuel at a far greater rate than traffic that is moving uniformly.
Short hop trains are very, very fuel-inefficient. The efficiency rises with distance. Therefore long distance is Good.
It takes 24 hours because the trains travel at the same speed (or slower) than cars. Which may have been acceptable at the turn of the 20th century but it's not really acceptable now. No, since the debate was whether a 220mph train would be faster than a car, that is the figure to use in determining ig the claim is correct. Environmental concerns are a non-issue since the debate is over whether such a rail network would permit the current level of freedom in less time and less cost.
(The cost issue is the only argument you offer that's applicable, but it fails to consider that you only buy land once and if the tracks are any good that they can last upwards of 50-100 years. In order to call something cost-prohibitive, you have to establish that the cost per unit time is excessive. Instantaneous values aren't significant and never have been.)
Their trains will be upped to 175mph and they're not complaining. The US' trains will continue plodding ever-slower as the rails deteriorate though ignorance and arrogance. I see a problem with this.
What "oddball" universe requires me to prove that if two segments of track are independent they can be replaced at the same time? The rest of your post continues the gibberish and is not worth wasting database capacity refuting.
Slashdot Mirror
Answer the point or bugger off, choice is yours. Arguing over whether other people misuse syntax is of no interest to me.
That's actually a maximum since even in this quiet phase the sun is changing and therefore isn't at the extreme end of the variation for any length of time.
The "mini ice age" had really nothing to do with the state of the sun. It was brought on by The Year Without A Summer (a disaster caused by a volcano not much smaller than a supervolcano shutting off virtually all sunlight for half a year). The disruption to the global reserviours of heat, the ocean currents and air currents, the plant life, etc, resulted in global cooling that far outlasted the direct effects. It was used extensively in modelling the effects of a Nuclear Winter for precisely that reason.
Not entirely true. Climate is chaotic in nature and can be likened to the "owl mask" of the Lorenz atrange attractor system, with glaciation being one orbit and inter-glaciation being the other. But if you displace the system too far, the system will lock onto a very different set of strange attractors and very different orbits, none of which are guaranteed to be glacial in nature. The problem with chaotic systems is that you can't ever know what "too much" means in advance, you can only ever know when the system realigns.
The weather is about as meaningful to climate science as the ability to track individual gas molecules is meaningful to the physics of gasses. It is precisely because brownian motion is chaotic that the whole is statistically predictable. If it were not for the unpredictability on the micro scale, you could not have gasoline engines, pressure cookers or jet engines.
To claim that the weather channel's difficulties in predicting the impact on one small place at one small interval of time has any bearing on being able to predict the net change of an entire planet over decades is ignorance at its most extreme.
If you were driving in stop-go traffic, you can't predict when you will reach any given traffic light, right? But you know on aggregate about how long the journey will take because the average is much easier to work out. That it'll be approximate doesn't change the fact that you will reach your destination.
The 1000 Genome Project has mapped just over 1000 whole genomes now. To get them to map that many entire families - well, it's going to cost a bit. You are right that N is way too low to do much with, though.
...mistakes make you! ...as, indeed, they do everywhere else...
Yes, but can you imagine the daily Scrums that would have taken place? And what if God plays by Australian Rules?
Serendipity is the art of making useful mistakes. Nature is 100% serendipitous.
My point is less to do with interferometry and more to do with the length of baseline used. The longer the baseline, the less fuzz you get but at a cost of losing anything that's time-dependent. Constant signals will clearly be the same value (the average being the same as the maximum and minimum), pulsed signals will show up at a fraction of their strength where the fraction is equal to the fraction of the time the pulse is present AND will not show any pulsation, and so on.
To observe pulsars, you want the shortest baseline (and therefore maximum signal and maximum variation) you can get away with. You can do this with either hard realtime data sets and a very very accurate start time measurement (since you can do DSP offline) or very high-speed, very low-latency data lines and attempt to mix the data as it is being collected.
But... but... if you lift four elephants at the same time, the Earth will fall off the back of the turtle!
Big and hard to maintain. :) This is a map of the distortions that resulted, generated apparently using some form of holographic technique. The quality has greatly improved since the resurfacing, allowing for a much greater range of frequencies to be observed.
For those interested in stats, here's the facts and figures for the telescope. If you're not interested in clicking through, the numbers that matter are that the dish is 76.2 meters in diameter and weighs 3,200 metric tonnes. It's also the third-largest steerable dish. The Chinese proposal isn't truly a steerable telescope - you can do the maths to work out how heavy a 500 meter steerable monster would be - but would be able to see outside the strict limit of vertically above since it will be distortable.
However, for precisely the same reason Jodrell Bank's telescope needed resurfacing, the distortions in the Chinese telescope have to be very carefully controlled and the quality of every mirror needs to be amazing. Imperfections will result in the telescope being useless at shorter frequencies which is where it wants to be.
Worse, Arecibo is deformed, requiring complex hardware to compensate. There's bound to be some loss of quality when trying to compensate. Also, it's an old telescope now. There have even been plans to shut it down, which would likely go through if presented to Congress today. If China had a rival, even if only of equal size, astronomers needing a single dish rather than an interferometer would have no alternative but to buy telescope time from them.
I dunno. The politics over SKA, where it would be located, etc, show that people do indeed care. Nobody can put a telescope even the size of the Lovell dish into space, never mind the size of this monster. Single dishes have benefits (such as reduced edge effects) that arrays do not, which is extremely important for some of the science needed. Radio telescopes are still the only systems you can build large interferometers from (you can do small optical interferometers, but that's it). RFI is an increasing problem for radio observatories, due to flagrant abuse of the spectrum by many nations, and it's much easier to shield one site than a hundred. Precision-engineering a single dish of this size will require advances in material science that will have spin-off benefits in other fields.
In short, there's lots of reasons for them to do this and no obvious reason for them to copy SKA or SHA.
Overlap is actually a good thing, since observations that can only be repeated on the same instrument or same class of instrument cannot be definitely attributed to a cosmological source - it could be explained equally well as a flaw in the design of the instrument. Having two entire classes of radio observatory being able to validate each other will permit testing and validating of the devices.
That's long baseline radio astronony, which would be useless for things like pulsars (there's not a pulsar slow enough to observe the pulses with long baseline) and of questionable value for extrasolar planets close to their sun (the orbit will result in the aggregate signal being worse) but it's great for observing stars, nebulae, gas clouds and 95% of the stuff radio astronomers get excited over.
There are all kinds of factors. Imperfections in the dish, for example, will reduce the useful photons collected and increase the noise. Since materials expand and contract with change in temperature, such imperfections will vary with time.
Single dish should also give a clearer image for the same surface area (less edge, less perimeter you need to seal against terrestrial radio inteference, fewer timing problems since you're not using interferometry). The problem with single dish is steering. Aricebo is fixed for a reason. The telescope at Jodrel Bank observatory, although not the largest steerable dish, is one of the larger steerable telescopes and the infrastructure needed is absolutely staggering.
What's an elephant doing that deep in space? I know NASA launched monkeys and Russia sent up some dogs, but is there something else we should know?
Transporting military assets by any method leaves you vulnerable to being tracked. They tend to be high-volume and officers routinely say far too much when they visit strip joints.
Not really. Iraq II took many months to transport the men, vehicles and supplies. The logistics were terrible, since the aircraft had to fly to specific airfields. A train can unload anywhere along a track, but a plane cannot unload anywhere in the sky (ok, transport planes can but there's a limit to what you can parachute in).
If you hit a plane with a missile, you take out the whole plane. The chances of any survivors is remote. If you hit a coach with a missile, the odds are that people and equiptment in other coaches won't get through unscathed but that it won't be a total loss either. Even in the worst of the worst train accidents that have happened in history (and there have been some at very high speeds ploughing into bridges or vehicles), 100% fatalities are exceedingly rare. Had any of the transport planes flying into Iraq or Afghanistan been hit with a stinger missile, there's not the slightest chance anyone would have walked away. Hence the exceedingly dangerous flying that was required.
Now, we're actually quite fortunate that most opponents of the US are incompetent. There have been plans on the Internet for DIY cruise missiles with a 100 mile range for over a decade. Amateur rocketry is quite capable of launching a projectile in excess of 20,000' (the altitude considered safe against the kind of SAMs the US is ever likely to face). This is why Israel is interested in air-to-air missiles and other defences on passenger aircraft. Do you seriously imagine they'd be funding that kind of research if they thought air transport was safe?
(It is for now, as the weapons pose no threat without guidance systems and the kind of guidance systems needed require skills and other resources that hostile nations don't have. The V1, despite amazing range for the time, posed no military threat whatsoever - it was only effective as a psychological weapon.)
But if you don't have guidance systems, then the odds of hitting a train aren't much better than the odds of hitting a plane. From a long range, they're both very small targets.
Besides, attacking the vehicle is a bit stupid as the other nation would just send another. Take out an airport and it's a whole 'nother story. Sending another vehicle then becomes futile. Trains are another matter - as I've said, they can unload anywhere. As such, if a station is taken out it doesn't matter a whole lot. You just have a little further to jump to get to the ground and there's no waiting room.
Manchester, England, falsified this theory in the 90s with their light rail system. It wasn't between particularly congested routes, but it sliced 1/3rd off the total cars on the road, boosted the number of places in the city that were practical to reach and was judged an astronomical success. Most of Scotland also falsifies this theory, as there isn't a population density high enough to cause significant congestion but there are distances great enough to make mobility a severe problem.
Congestion over short distances is better resolved through wider roads or traffic calming schemes. Since acceleration is the only point at which energy (and therefore resources) gets consumed, an object in a state of uniform motion only has to overcome friction. Friction at the speeds concerned is insignificant compared to the energy requirements of accelerating an object as massive as a goods train to high speeds. Even in a road car, you will have observed that stop/start traffic consumes fuel at a far greater rate than traffic that is moving uniformly.
Short hop trains are very, very fuel-inefficient. The efficiency rises with distance. Therefore long distance is Good.
It takes 24 hours because the trains travel at the same speed (or slower) than cars. Which may have been acceptable at the turn of the 20th century but it's not really acceptable now. No, since the debate was whether a 220mph train would be faster than a car, that is the figure to use in determining ig the claim is correct. Environmental concerns are a non-issue since the debate is over whether such a rail network would permit the current level of freedom in less time and less cost.
(The cost issue is the only argument you offer that's applicable, but it fails to consider that you only buy land once and if the tracks are any good that they can last upwards of 50-100 years. In order to call something cost-prohibitive, you have to establish that the cost per unit time is excessive. Instantaneous values aren't significant and never have been.)
Their trains will be upped to 175mph and they're not complaining. The US' trains will continue plodding ever-slower as the rails deteriorate though ignorance and arrogance. I see a problem with this.
What "oddball" universe requires me to prove that if two segments of track are independent they can be replaced at the same time? The rest of your post continues the gibberish and is not worth wasting database capacity refuting.
No idea, but the mother would be Inanna.
Depends. If we assume "later" is a time-traveling host and Open Innovation is the open port, it's ok. :: would imply that OI is IPv6-compatible.