Well, then you design some standard way to represent scientific symbols and equations with ASCII phrases. Given the wide use of TeX among scientists and mathemeticians, I would say this is a solved problem.
Well, the thing is that most science is published in English. Publications of the Astronomical Society of Japan? English. English has become the language of science and engineering. And to use TeX or LaTeX well (who uses just TeX anyway?), you have to know english. \footnote does not make a lot of sense otherwise.
When I first started writing this, instead of using < em >, I wanted to put \em . Too much LaTeX makes the baby go blind....
The web address you want is here. As far as I remember, you have to rebuild the kernel, which is rather annoying. You may not have to with newere versions of the operating system. Instead, you might be able to build just a module or two and load them instead of redoing everything.
Of course, NONE of these is actually a replacement for Hubble. Each one of these satellites is built to study one problem. The TPF is suppose to look for planets around other stars by monitoring a thousand or so nearby stars. SIM is suppose to measure the positions of stars very accurately using an intereferometer. By measuring the position of a star as the earth moves around the sun, you figure out how far away the star is using simple trig. And LISA is a
gravity wave experiment. None of these will ever take picture like Hubble does.
So, to reiterate the artcle, unless the Next Generation Space Telescope flies, there will be no optical telescope in space taking pictures. As a huge amount of good science has come out having an optical/ultra-violet/near infrared imager in space, I hope NASA either keeps Hubble flying, or,
better yet, flies NGST.
Travel is expensive. This way you can do
stuff on site and not wake up the neighbors in the $400,000 houses right next to the lab. This prevents the problem where you forget that one key piece of equipment or that one key person could not make the trip because their kid has a soccer game. The lab is secured, the explosives and all of the scientists are on site, it just make sense.
It will no doubt shorten the testing cycle to boot.
Wouldn't the intense gravity of the black hole cause a change in the progression of time within the black hole? Could it be possible that the black hole is actually spinning at a much different rate than we are able to observe considering that our rate of time may be different?
The short answer is, yes and yes. Time will
be different near the event horizon than where we
are, and that the apparent rotation rate measured
at the event horizon will be very different than the one we measure. This is why whenever you make a theoretical prediction, you always compute what you will observe infinitely far away.
Which is exactly what this is for. PG&E and other companies want you to sign up (for a discounted rate) your AC for remote control. Thus, on the REALLY hot days, they can turn it off and
save power.
I would not saying a total misreading, the author of the paper clearly states that he thinks this is a big deal. For those who don't follow-up the New Scientist link, this is in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, the british journal for astronomy papers, so the paper has been reviewed and approved by anonymous referee.
Nonetheless, this strikes me as rather speculative. For some reason the British get really hung up about stuff from space causing problems for earth. My favorite being mad cow disease coming from space
Maybe the brits don't have enough real things to worry about, like the NASDAQ crashing.
Unfortunately, they are small telescopes. When
you are doing interferometry, bigger is better
because you toss so many photons out the window.
Palomar has an interferometer, and they
have/are working on one at Mt Wilson. The point
with Keck is not that you will have an optical
interferometer, but rather you will have one
you can use from planet searches. Good luck doing
that with 1 meter telescopes.
COAST is amazingly impressive, though. Typical Brits, great instruments, crappy site.
To follow up on the previous, Chandra has star trackers which allow the telescope to point pretty well, though not to Hubble like accuracy. Chandra is also on an orbit (unlike Hubble) which allows it spend a long time away from the earth, this means you can point at something for a long time and not worry about the earth getting in the way.
The second thing to note is that Chandra is an X-ray telescope. Each individual X-ray photon is
detected and its position and time of arrival
(along with energy) are logged. So, all you have
to work out is where the telescope was pointing
when the event landed, and you can reconstruct
the image.
I love working in a field where you name individual photons.
Ground based Adaptive Optics currently does not
produce very many pretty pictures. There are basically a number of technical reasons why, some of which will be ironed out in the short term and some of which will take a long time to solve (and involve things like batteries of lasers, which makes me think I will stop doing astronomy and start doing laser engineering if I am not careful.)
Stars and planets are much easier with adaptive optics than are galaxies, though my housemate does galaxies wtih AO, because whenever you correct for atmospheric distortion, you never do a perfect job. The part of the beam of light that is not corrected can throw light all over your image. This means, if your object is not bright, a bright nearby thing could swamped it. And, in order to get adaptive optics to work, you have to have a bright nearby object to correct your image with.
The solution is better adaptive optics systems, so for the mean time, Hubble will continue to surpass ground telescopes for image quality.
I just wanted to point out that this
picture, and many other cool ones, are brought to you by the Hubble Heritage project. The point of this project is to create an archive of both beautiful and scientifically useful pictures of things while Hubble still works.
They have done some cool stuff and I am glad that they are doing it (even if does mean a smaller chance my own proposals will get approved).
What I found the most interesting was the author's hypothetical claim that if a piece of software for a set of brakes fails, the software writer is not liable for the death of the passengers.
This raises an interesting question. If a car manufacturer puts out a buggy car, they are required, by law, to issue recalls and fix the automobiles. If the car has a potentially hazardous problem because of a software only glitch, could the manufacturer simply say, "I am
sorry, I am not issuing the recall, read your licensing agreement for the brakes"?
Of course, the first automaker to try that would suffer a PR nightmare. I don't think congress or the US court system would let them not issue a recall. So, god help them if they subcontract the software. They will be left holding the bag with the authors of the code saying, "too bad for you guys our code sucks."
The Japanese name on the telescope is for the star cluster we call the Pleiades, or the seven sisters.
The funding for Subaru came mostly from the government of Japan through a number of universities, much like how telescopes such as the Gemini telescopes are built. In fact it is run by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, the counterpart to the US's National Optical Astronomy Observatories. As the Japanese built it and paid for it, they can call it whatever they want. The only thing they have to do is give 15% of the time to observers at the University of Hawai'i.
Subaru's site is here and
it has pictures, though the headquarters is on the
big island (aka Hawai'i) and the net connection is slow.
Clusters of galaxies are not so large that there is not enough time in the universe to form them. There are two pieces of evidence for this.
One piece is that clusters of galaxies are only 1.5 Megaparsecs in size (or about 5 million light years). The universe is 15 billion years old, so over the course of the history of the universe your average galaxy go back and forth across a cluster about 10 or so times at the speeds galaxies whiz about at in clusters. And don't forget, according to the standard model, the universe was a lot smaller back in time, so clusters were not as big.
Secondly, we are watching clusters form as we find higher redshift clusters. Clusters at redshifts of z~1 look a lot more like amorphous blobs then low redshift clusters (which look more like circular blobs). Quantify that and you have nice paper in ApJ.
I suspect you are talking about super clusters and the like. It is not clear that you need to toss out everything we know yet because of super clusters. First off, they are not bound by gravity, so they could be very young. Secondly, as I said before, the universe was a lot smaller many billions of years ago, so it takes less work to form them early. And, of course, any theorist
would respond with one word and one word only, inflation. Fortunately, I am not a theorist.
I would just like to note there are a number of cluster surveys going on out there. Including one, called the REFLEX survey, that uses the same data, the ROSAT All Sky Survey, as the MACS survey as a starting point.
What makes cluster surveys interesting is not just the scientific output but the various means of finding clusters people are trying. For example, the MACS survey mentioned above uses a Voronoi tesselation of the original X-ray data to detect and find sources. Other surveys use wavelet techniques, such as the SHARC survey (to pick one out of the air) or adaptive kernel smoothing, such as the Northern Sky Optical Cluster Survey.
Is it a bit odd to see what I do for a living on/.
X-ray cluster science has been a bit slow about accepting Omega_matter = 1. I still see papers with Omega_matter = 1 and the hubble constant at 50 km/s/Mpc.
What is interesting about the MACS survey is that they will find the most massive systems at z~0.3. Optical selection has some serious problems, X-ray selection has different problems but at least, unlike optical selection, you will not be stuck with a large amount of flotsam and jetsam in your sample. And, the most massive systems are the ones that are suppose to have the most constraining power if you believe the semi-analytical results.
I do agree, however, that RASS results are not all that interesting, at least in a/. sense.
Read it again. Materials which have the
desired properties for microwaves and radio waves already exist.
If you read the abstract of his paper here, you will see he hypothesizes you could do this with optical light using silver.
Materials science is one of the fastest moving fields there is, I would not underestimate how fast this could change optics. And saying something is "just theory" completely denigrates how important an idea can be in changing a field.
Slashdot Mirror
Though this quote both cracked me up and
shows how much the rest of the military thinks of
DARPA.
"Holy cow, an actual tech transfer!? This is very un-DARPA like, I like it!"
- Major General Clifford Stanley,
Deputy Commanding General Combat,
Development Command Quantico Marine Base
Well, the thing is that most science is published in English. Publications of the Astronomical Society of Japan? English. English has become the language of science and engineering. And to use TeX or LaTeX well (who uses just TeX anyway?), you have to know english. \footnote does not make a lot of sense otherwise.
When I first started writing this, instead of using < em >, I wanted to put \em . Too much LaTeX makes the baby go blind....
For laptops, the RedHat Linux on Laptops page is really useful.
So, to reiterate the artcle, unless the Next Generation Space Telescope flies, there will be no optical telescope in space taking pictures. As a huge amount of good science has come out having an optical/ultra-violet/near infrared imager in space, I hope NASA either keeps Hubble flying, or, better yet, flies NGST.
IAPA (I Am a Paid Astronomer)
For the inhumor impaired, this was a joke.
Apparently, /. readers are not good at making fun of themselves....
That enough reasons for you?
Both of these are Ham radio swamp meets, though both have a lot of computer stuff (anyone need an UltraSparc 5?)
However, most vendors go to both meets, so you only need visit one.
The short answer is, yes and yes. Time will be different near the event horizon than where we are, and that the apparent rotation rate measured at the event horizon will be very different than the one we measure. This is why whenever you make a theoretical prediction, you always compute what you will observe infinitely far away.
Which is exactly what this is for. PG&E and other companies want you to sign up (for a discounted rate) your AC for remote control. Thus, on the REALLY hot days, they can turn it off and save power.
I would not saying a total misreading, the author of the paper clearly states that he thinks this is a big deal. For those who don't follow-up the New Scientist link, this is in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, the british journal for astronomy papers, so the paper has been reviewed and approved by anonymous referee.
Nonetheless, this strikes me as rather speculative. For some reason the British get really hung up about stuff from space causing problems for earth. My favorite being mad cow disease coming from space
Maybe the brits don't have enough real things to worry about, like the NASDAQ crashing.
Unfortunately, they are small telescopes. When you are doing interferometry, bigger is better because you toss so many photons out the window.
Palomar has an interferometer, and they have/are working on one at Mt Wilson. The point with Keck is not that you will have an optical interferometer, but rather you will have one you can use from planet searches. Good luck doing that with 1 meter telescopes.
COAST is amazingly impressive, though. Typical Brits, great instruments, crappy site.
The second thing to note is that Chandra is an X-ray telescope. Each individual X-ray photon is detected and its position and time of arrival (along with energy) are logged. So, all you have to work out is where the telescope was pointing when the event landed, and you can reconstruct the image.
I love working in a field where you name individual photons.
I was going to post that!
But you don't wait for it, you just get an email with URL or a CD in the mail....
I love satellite astronomy.
Ground based Adaptive Optics currently does not produce very many pretty pictures. There are basically a number of technical reasons why, some of which will be ironed out in the short term and some of which will take a long time to solve (and involve things like batteries of lasers, which makes me think I will stop doing astronomy and start doing laser engineering if I am not careful.)
Anyway, for a cool adaptive optics astro pic done by people where I work, look here for Neptune and here for the moons of Jupiter. For some stars, and other cool stuff, check out this image of the galactic center.
Stars and planets are much easier with adaptive optics than are galaxies, though my housemate does galaxies wtih AO, because whenever you correct for atmospheric distortion, you never do a perfect job. The part of the beam of light that is not corrected can throw light all over your image. This means, if your object is not bright, a bright nearby thing could swamped it. And, in order to get adaptive optics to work, you have to have a bright nearby object to correct your image with. The solution is better adaptive optics systems, so for the mean time, Hubble will continue to surpass ground telescopes for image quality.
I just wanted to point out that this picture, and many other cool ones, are brought to you by the Hubble Heritage project. The point of this project is to create an archive of both beautiful and scientifically useful pictures of things while Hubble still works.
They have done some cool stuff and I am glad that they are doing it (even if does mean a smaller chance my own proposals will get approved).
What I found the most interesting was the author's hypothetical claim that if a piece of software for a set of brakes fails, the software writer is not liable for the death of the passengers.
This raises an interesting question. If a car manufacturer puts out a buggy car, they are required, by law, to issue recalls and fix the automobiles. If the car has a potentially hazardous problem because of a software only glitch, could the manufacturer simply say, "I am sorry, I am not issuing the recall, read your licensing agreement for the brakes"?
Of course, the first automaker to try that would suffer a PR nightmare. I don't think congress or the US court system would let them not issue a recall. So, god help them if they subcontract the software. They will be left holding the bag with the authors of the code saying, "too bad for you guys our code sucks."
Open source anti-lock brakes anyone?
The Japanese name on the telescope is for the star cluster we call the Pleiades, or the seven sisters.
The funding for Subaru came mostly from the government of Japan through a number of universities, much like how telescopes such as the Gemini telescopes are built. In fact it is run by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, the counterpart to the US's National Optical Astronomy Observatories. As the Japanese built it and paid for it, they can call it whatever they want. The only thing they have to do is give 15% of the time to observers at the University of Hawai'i.
Subaru's site is here and it has pictures, though the headquarters is on the big island (aka Hawai'i) and the net connection is slow.
The FCC.
Clusters of galaxies are not so large that there is not enough time in the universe to form them. There are two pieces of evidence for this.
One piece is that clusters of galaxies are only 1.5 Megaparsecs in size (or about 5 million light years). The universe is 15 billion years old, so over the course of the history of the universe your average galaxy go back and forth across a cluster about 10 or so times at the speeds galaxies whiz about at in clusters. And don't forget, according to the standard model, the universe was a lot smaller back in time, so clusters were not as big.
Secondly, we are watching clusters form as we find higher redshift clusters. Clusters at redshifts of z~1 look a lot more like amorphous blobs then low redshift clusters (which look more like circular blobs). Quantify that and you have nice paper in ApJ.
I suspect you are talking about super clusters and the like. It is not clear that you need to toss out everything we know yet because of super clusters. First off, they are not bound by gravity, so they could be very young. Secondly, as I said before, the universe was a lot smaller many billions of years ago, so it takes less work to form them early. And, of course, any theorist would respond with one word and one word only, inflation. Fortunately, I am not a theorist.
I would just like to note there are a number of cluster surveys going on out there. Including one, called the REFLEX survey, that uses the same data, the ROSAT All Sky Survey, as the MACS survey as a starting point.
What makes cluster surveys interesting is not just the scientific output but the various means of finding clusters people are trying. For example, the MACS survey mentioned above uses a Voronoi tesselation of the original X-ray data to detect and find sources. Other surveys use wavelet techniques, such as the SHARC survey (to pick one out of the air) or adaptive kernel smoothing, such as the Northern Sky Optical Cluster Survey.
Is it a bit odd to see what I do for a living on /.
X-ray cluster science has been a bit slow about accepting Omega_matter = 1. I still see papers with Omega_matter = 1 and the hubble constant at 50 km/s/Mpc.
What is interesting about the MACS survey is that they will find the most massive systems at z~0.3. Optical selection has some serious problems, X-ray selection has different problems but at least, unlike optical selection, you will not be stuck with a large amount of flotsam and jetsam in your sample. And, the most massive systems are the ones that are suppose to have the most constraining power if you believe the semi-analytical results.
I do agree, however, that RASS results are not all that interesting, at least in a /. sense.
Here is a web page that talks about to do this for a Palm Pilot:
Palm Notes - Free ISPs
Read it again. Materials which have the desired properties for microwaves and radio waves already exist.
If you read the abstract of his paper here, you will see he hypothesizes you could do this with optical light using silver.
Materials science is one of the fastest moving fields there is, I would not underestimate how fast this could change optics. And saying something is "just theory" completely denigrates how important an idea can be in changing a field.
I was working at FermiLab when the transition from VMS to UNIX (and from F77 to C) occured.
Boy did I hear a lot of bitching.
But yes, FNAL was one of the biggest first users of RedHat (aka fRedHat).