Certainly, in an ideal world, we would have
satellites going from the radio to gamma rays.
Resources are finite, however, and so are allocated on a needs first basis. We still have not seen one serious radio observatory in space, for example.
If you look, however, the number of people using EUVE is quite small. The wavelength range EUVE looks in is quite difficult to work in. The whole satellite was an experiment and one that worked.
10 years, however, is a lot of time for one satellite and in the current climate, no satellite will last for more than that. HST is
probably the only exception to this rule and that
is because is serves a huge fraction of the scientific community and serves a PR value that no
other satellite can match. Proof is left as an excercise to thumbing through the astronomy picture of the day.
FWIF, Chandra goes down to below 0.1 keV, which, is 100 Angstroms. Of course, my knee jerk reaction is to toss the data below 0.5 keV because it is so noisey.
Most people don't realize how old some of
these systems are. The EUVE was flown a long
time ago and there are now two different
instruments that provide similar capability, the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph on HST, and the Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer.
The EUVE has been running for like 10 years,
it is probably a good time for it to end (and Stu Bowyer to find something else to do).
I dropped my IBM thinkpad from a height of 3 feet onto concrete.
It powered up without a problem.
I am going to be hardpressed
to ever purchase a laptop from anyone else.
Given all of my experiences with Sony consumer
electronics, I must say I would NEVER buy anything, especially a laptop, from them, regardless of how cool it looked.
- Film has a logarithmic response to exposure to light. CCDs and CMOS have a linear response. Therefore, the electronic devices will never be able to match the dynamic range of film, or at least not with a generous dose of innovation. This is very apparent when you light a scene for film, and then light another for video. Professional video cameras use a few tricks to approximate a log response, but the result
is far less than perfect.
Film does not approach the dynamic range of high-end CCDs. The top flight CCDs have dynamic ranges on the order 5 orders of magnitude. Film does 3 at best. When I say top flight, though,
I mean $100,000 CCDs.
CCDs certainly have a linear response, though
if you really want one that is non-linear, that
should be trivial to implement in software.
I am going to include the obligatory link
to the science goals of the square kilometer array. If you read the outline, you will see that
SETI is only one of many. In fact, this is the first I had heard of using the SKA to do SETI. Most people talk about 21 cm studies out to high redshift, not LGMs....
I am trying to decide which sucks worse,
space.com or salon.com. Instead I will try
to answer your questons.
For what it is worth, black holes have a certain effeciency in converting stuff into energy that we can observe. The more effecient they are in converting matter into radio waves, light, and X-rays, the less effecient they are at gobbling up matter. I think that the article uses effecient in two different ways.
Reading the actual abstract you see that the authors are proposing that this object is a smaller mass black hole with a high matter to energy effeciency rather than
a larger mass black hole that does not have a lot of fuel to work with. Why this is interesting is beyond me, but then I don't study AGN....
I once read that good chess players learn to recognize patterns on the board, and build up a simpler model based on those patterns.
I am now going to speculate that what may make a good programmer is the ability to build up a mental model of a problem using a similar thought pattern. Basically, you break down the problem into chunks that you understand and, more importantly, you know how to glue those chunks together. You then create a program out of those chunks, and the optimized glue. The emphasis on algorithms and object-oriented programming supports this notion (though it is only a notion).
So, how a native language would effect programming would be more in what sort of natural chunks does the native language have? I don't know enough linguistics to answer this.
The problem is, (and I should have made it clearer in my earlier post) I really get the impression that most physicists today are just trying to "patch up" these theories. And there are so many holes that there is lots to do, so they all keep pretty busy.
I think that this characterization of theoretical physics is a little unfair, though often bandied about.
Most modern particle theorists, real theorists, of which there are probably twelve, are not so much trying predict things as trying to prove whether or not you can predict things. To use a computer science analogy, they are not patching code for alogrithm, they trying to prove that the algorithm answers the question and find out when it fails.
Many modern physicists calculate things. They assume something about the algorithm, code it up, and see what they get. You can think of this "patching" as proposed modifications to the algorithm to make it work in certain special cases, like the observable universe. It does not pre-suppose that the current theory is correct. Instead they are showing where the theory is incorrect and how one could fix it.
Is anyone (other than crackpots) even trying to come up with an alternative explanation? Or is it true, as another response to my post said,
that "string theory IS the simpler theory.". If so, why are there so many different string theories, and what's with the M-theory "unifying"
them but "adding complications"?
Well, yea, string theory is much simpler in concept then having quantum electrodynamics, quantum chromodynamics, general relativity, etc.
Let's look at General Relativity. No one complains anymore about living in a four dimensional space-time. GR works by almost equating time with space, yet time still gets special properties in GR. Why? Isn't that an
ugly complication, basically a patch? Shouldn't all four dimensions be equal? And why four dimensions? Why not an
infinite number?
Simplicity in physics is a slippery thing. General Relativity has a beautiful formalism and only a handful of equations. Now try and calculate something simple, like a massive body orbiting another massive body. Good luck....
The prices from UMD are outrageous. Especially when you consider that they give a reduced size version of the thesis (it is 5 by 8 instead of
8.5 by 11).
It was much cheaper to go to Kinko's and
have copies made.
HST has a 2 micron filter.
The filter is used with NICMOS which
is currently not working. NICMOS is scheduled
to be fixed for the next servicing mission, assuming it ever flies.
Adaptive optics is quite promising for planetary science. Soon we will be getting HST
quality images from the ground with these techniques. Just don't ask me how soon soon is....
Anything orbiting a planet is a moon. The "moons" of Mars are smaller than the biggest asteroids but because they orbit mars. It just a naming thing, it doesn't mean anything scientifically.
There is a long drawn bureaucratic process for naming any astronomical object. It will have to be approved by the International Astronomical Union before it can be officially called anything interesting. In the mean time, the astronomers are suppose to use specific designations for specific objects (not that a great many astronomers follow these designations but in press releases, at least, appearances must be maintained).
Orbital Sciences makes the Pegasus, a completely privately developed launch vehicle. NASA loved it. Anything that opens up competition in the launch industry NASA loves, NASA hates being beholden to a couple of companies.
Anyway, Pegasus has been a complete disaster. One went off course into Russian airspace and required the president to ring the Kremlim, a number have failed with NASA payloads, etc. NASA has gone back to McBoeing and Lock-Mart products for the time being....
Academia is really unfriendly to people who want to have families.
First, if a woman wants to have children, the biological best time to do that is when she is in her 20's, right when an academic is suppose to be putting in long hours and writing lots of papers, not spending lots of time being pregnant and raising a child.
Secondly, the lifestyle of young academics, long hours, low pay, and frequent moves across continents, is not conducive to having anything resembling a normaly lifestyle, much less raising a family.
All of my female academic friends are under enourmous amounts of pressure, especially from family, to lead so-called normal lives (ie. get a real job or a husband with a real job and settle down and produce grandkids).
For whatever reason, almost none of my male friends in academia are subjected to these pressures. For whatever reason, it is acceptable to their family and friends that they are spending years of their lives studying arcane fields for little pay with no guarentee of a well-paying job down the line.
My girlfriend (almost) has a Ph. D. in astrophysics. In high school she was turned down for an award in a science class because it would be wasted on her, girls don't go into science.
The teachers who made that decision still teach at that high school.
So, yes, people still get told "Oh, dearie -- don't you think a nice course in domestice engineering would be more suitable to a nice lady like yourself?"
On the odd chance anyone is still reading this thread....
Apparently there are some problems with the Wired article. The SkyServer.org website is owned by CalTech, who is not a SDSS participant, and their project is open to everyone who willing to contribute data for their National Virtual Observatory. In other words, this observatory will have everything not just the SDSS.
This Microsoft site will not be the official distribution of the SDSS. In fact, that will be done through the SDSS with a completely different database.
The final design of this National Virtual Observatory has not been decided. The article only mentions one possible design.
Background on the SDSS data and database
on
Democratizing Space
·
· Score: 1
The SDSS has been working for a number of years on a database for the survey. The database will contain two things, raw image data and it will contain reduced data, actual measurements of the image data. This is a step up from what is available at SkyView, ADS and the Space Telescope Science Archive. Those archives only provide the image data, or only provide the resulting catalogs. With the SDSS you will be able to choose what level data processing you want before you make a query. The only comparable archives out there are the APS archives in Minnesota, the APM results from Cambridge and the SuperCosmos scans archived at the Naval Research Lab. The SDSS will be higher quality data than those, and better the Digitize Palomar Sky Survey from CalTech, and will have more colors to boot. Colors give you important information in indentifying an object. Finally, the spectra (light taken from an object and spread out into its colors at a much higher resolution) will also be available. This combination of data has not been available yet at the scale the SDSS will provide.
The science database has gone through multiple revisions and at least two different companies before this annoucement, neither of which could handle the size and variety of data and data queries in the science database. Nonetheless, a deal with MS is quite a surprise. The SDSS, up til now, has been a Linux and Solaris only place.
Slashdot Mirror
Certainly, in an ideal world, we would have satellites going from the radio to gamma rays. Resources are finite, however, and so are allocated on a needs first basis. We still have not seen one serious radio observatory in space, for example.
If you look, however, the number of people using EUVE is quite small. The wavelength range EUVE looks in is quite difficult to work in. The whole satellite was an experiment and one that worked.
10 years, however, is a lot of time for one satellite and in the current climate, no satellite will last for more than that. HST is probably the only exception to this rule and that is because is serves a huge fraction of the scientific community and serves a PR value that no other satellite can match. Proof is left as an excercise to thumbing through the astronomy picture of the day.
FWIF, Chandra goes down to below 0.1 keV, which, is 100 Angstroms. Of course, my knee jerk reaction is to toss the data below 0.5 keV because it is so noisey.
The question is money well spent.
Most people don't realize how old some of these systems are. The EUVE was flown a long time ago and there are now two different instruments that provide similar capability, the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph on HST, and the Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer.
The EUVE has been running for like 10 years, it is probably a good time for it to end (and Stu Bowyer to find something else to do).
I dropped my IBM thinkpad from a height of 3 feet onto concrete.
It powered up without a problem.
I am going to be hardpressed to ever purchase a laptop from anyone else. Given all of my experiences with Sony consumer electronics, I must say I would NEVER buy anything, especially a laptop, from them, regardless of how cool it looked.
I have a nit to pick:
- Film has a logarithmic response to exposure to light. CCDs and CMOS have a linear response. Therefore, the electronic devices will never be able to match the dynamic range of film, or at least not with a generous dose of innovation. This is very apparent when you light a scene for film, and then light another for video. Professional video cameras use a few tricks to approximate a log response, but the result is far less than perfect.
Film does not approach the dynamic range of high-end CCDs. The top flight CCDs have dynamic ranges on the order 5 orders of magnitude. Film does 3 at best. When I say top flight, though, I mean $100,000 CCDs.
CCDs certainly have a linear response, though if you really want one that is non-linear, that should be trivial to implement in software.
I am going to include the obligatory link to the science goals of the square kilometer array. If you read the outline, you will see that SETI is only one of many. In fact, this is the first I had heard of using the SKA to do SETI. Most people talk about 21 cm studies out to high redshift, not LGMs....
I am trying to decide which sucks worse, space.com or salon.com. Instead I will try to answer your questons.
For what it is worth, black holes have a certain effeciency in converting stuff into energy that we can observe. The more effecient they are in converting matter into radio waves, light, and X-rays, the less effecient they are at gobbling up matter. I think that the article uses effecient in two different ways.
Reading the actual abstract you see that the authors are proposing that this object is a smaller mass black hole with a high matter to energy effeciency rather than a larger mass black hole that does not have a lot of fuel to work with. Why this is interesting is beyond me, but then I don't study AGN....
I once read that good chess players learn to recognize patterns on the board, and build up a simpler model based on those patterns.
I am now going to speculate that what may make a good programmer is the ability to build up a mental model of a problem using a similar thought pattern. Basically, you break down the problem into chunks that you understand and, more importantly, you know how to glue those chunks together. You then create a program out of those chunks, and the optimized glue. The emphasis on algorithms and object-oriented programming supports this notion (though it is only a notion).
So, how a native language would effect programming would be more in what sort of natural chunks does the native language have? I don't know enough linguistics to answer this.
The problem is, (and I should have made it clearer in my earlier post) I really get the impression that most physicists today are just trying to "patch up" these theories. And there are so many holes that there is lots to do, so they all keep pretty busy.
I think that this characterization of theoretical physics is a little unfair, though often bandied about.
Most modern particle theorists, real theorists, of which there are probably twelve, are not so much trying predict things as trying to prove whether or not you can predict things. To use a computer science analogy, they are not patching code for alogrithm, they trying to prove that the algorithm answers the question and find out when it fails.
Many modern physicists calculate things. They assume something about the algorithm, code it up, and see what they get. You can think of this "patching" as proposed modifications to the algorithm to make it work in certain special cases, like the observable universe. It does not pre-suppose that the current theory is correct. Instead they are showing where the theory is incorrect and how one could fix it.
Is anyone (other than crackpots) even trying to come up with an alternative explanation? Or is it true, as another response to my post said, that "string theory IS the simpler theory.". If so, why are there so many different string theories, and what's with the M-theory "unifying" them but "adding complications"?
Well, yea, string theory is much simpler in concept then having quantum electrodynamics, quantum chromodynamics, general relativity, etc.
Let's look at General Relativity. No one complains anymore about living in a four dimensional space-time. GR works by almost equating time with space, yet time still gets special properties in GR. Why? Isn't that an ugly complication, basically a patch? Shouldn't all four dimensions be equal? And why four dimensions? Why not an infinite number?
Simplicity in physics is a slippery thing. General Relativity has a beautiful formalism and only a handful of equations. Now try and calculate something simple, like a massive body orbiting another massive body. Good luck....
Sorry, error. It is UMI, not UMD.
UMD is the University of Maryland (who was not my ph.d. granting institution) UMI is a company spun off by the University of Michigan, go blue....
What makes me mad about all of this is the following:
My university required me to have my thesis "published" by UMD
UMD requires that you hand over to them the right redistribute your thesis
You have to pay for this, out of pocket, the university passes the charges to you
UMD will then gladly sell you a copy of your dissertation at a 10% discount.
and UMD gets to sell these things to other people, hence UMD is making money off of Contentville.
Besides, the bastards are slow (my thesis is not online yet there but you can find it here. At least they have my my moms online....
The prices from UMD are outrageous. Especially when you consider that they give a reduced size version of the thesis (it is 5 by 8 instead of 8.5 by 11).
It was much cheaper to go to Kinko's and have copies made.
HST has a 2 micron filter. The filter is used with NICMOS which is currently not working. NICMOS is scheduled to be fixed for the next servicing mission, assuming it ever flies.
Adaptive optics is quite promising for planetary science. Soon we will be getting HST quality images from the ground with these techniques. Just don't ask me how soon soon is....
For propaganda about Adaptive Optics, check out the CfAO homepage
I set up an @home account and cable modem a month ago. In that time, I have gotten 0 Spam adverts!
This goes to show how much you should trust one data point.
On the odd chance anyone is still reading this, check out this Washington Post article on just how lousy a business Napster is:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A425 31-2000Jul25.html
How do you make a company without a business model? And how do you dupe investors into giving you venture capital? My favorite line being
"...Berry is awed by the sheer size of Napster's fan base and figures there has to be some way to reap money from the site"
Anything orbiting a planet is a moon. The "moons" of Mars are smaller than the biggest asteroids but because they orbit mars. It just a naming thing, it doesn't mean anything scientifically.
There is a long drawn bureaucratic process for naming any astronomical object. It will have to be approved by the International Astronomical Union before it can be officially called anything interesting. In the mean time, the astronomers are suppose to use specific designations for specific objects (not that a great many astronomers follow these designations but in press releases, at least, appearances must be maintained).
Congratulations, you just reinvented the Pegasus.
Orbital Sciences makes the Pegasus, a completely privately developed launch vehicle. NASA loved it. Anything that opens up competition in the launch industry NASA loves, NASA hates being beholden to a couple of companies.
Anyway, Pegasus has been a complete disaster. One went off course into Russian airspace and required the president to ring the Kremlim, a number have failed with NASA payloads, etc. NASA has gone back to McBoeing and Lock-Mart products for the time being....
Here are some my thoughts on part of the problem.
Academia is really unfriendly to people who want to have families.
First, if a woman wants to have children, the biological best time to do that is when she is in her 20's, right when an academic is suppose to be putting in long hours and writing lots of papers, not spending lots of time being pregnant and raising a child.
Secondly, the lifestyle of young academics, long hours, low pay, and frequent moves across continents, is not conducive to having anything resembling a normaly lifestyle, much less raising a family.
All of my female academic friends are under enourmous amounts of pressure, especially from family, to lead so-called normal lives (ie. get a real job or a husband with a real job and settle down and produce grandkids).
For whatever reason, almost none of my male friends in academia are subjected to these pressures. For whatever reason, it is acceptable to their family and friends that they are spending years of their lives studying arcane fields for little pay with no guarentee of a well-paying job down the line.
go figure....
My girlfriend (almost) has a Ph. D. in astrophysics. In high school she was turned down for an award in a science class because it would be wasted on her, girls don't go into science.
The teachers who made that decision still teach at that high school.
So, yes, people still get told "Oh, dearie -- don't you think a nice course in domestice engineering would be more suitable to a nice lady like yourself?"
On the odd chance anyone is still reading this thread....
Apparently there are some problems with the Wired article. The SkyServer.org website is owned by CalTech, who is not a SDSS participant, and their project is open to everyone who willing to contribute data for their National Virtual Observatory. In other words, this observatory will have everything not just the SDSS.
This Microsoft site will not be the official distribution of the SDSS. In fact, that will be done through the SDSS with a completely different database.
The final design of this National Virtual Observatory has not been decided. The article only mentions one possible design.
The science database has gone through multiple revisions and at least two different companies before this annoucement, neither of which could handle the size and variety of data and data queries in the science database. Nonetheless, a deal with MS is quite a surprise. The SDSS, up til now, has been a Linux and Solaris only place.