Interesting idea, but the Variety article says: "Fox said it would rather see the film killed instead of collecting a percentage of the box office." Plus issues of prejudicial delay (posted a mere minute before your comment...there's some good analysis up there.)
It's buried at the end of the article, but Near Earth Neutral Line wins, current disruption loses. The real kicker is that the aurora were detected before the cross-tail current was disrupted, so the auroral currents are apparently not caused by closure of the cross-tail current. That should be very interesting.
The mission planners had the foresight to include a substantial ground-observation component, which made this second result possible.
This had a reset key (called Break, IIRC), on the main keyboard itself and it was very easy to hit by accident.
Huh? My Model B had the break key on the F-key row and I don't recall ever hitting it by accident. It also didn't have a lock-down screw. Hiding it on the back of the machine would've been a major PITA since shift-break was the way to boot off a floppy.
What's great about science is we can figure this stuff out! Take a look at CDAWeb. I'm using the OMNI dataset based on the WIND spacecraft, and per rules of the road I should acknowledge the data providers: J.H. King, N. Papatashvilli of Perot Sys, NASA/Goddard spaceflight center, and CDAweb. I'm using 3 October 2006, 1000UT-1200UT for no particular reason, just pulled it out of my hat. The data for this time period show a solar wind speed of about 400km/s, density of 5/cc (that's almost all protons, BTW, or fully ionized hydrogen if you prefer--the electrons are along for the ride but don't really contribute significant mass), temperature of about 70000K, magnetic field strength 3.5nT, electric field 1mV/m.
So let's figure out the energy density: There's.5mv^2 kinetic energy in the flow--the energy that turns windmill blades, by analogy. That comes out to 6.7e-11 J/m^3. There's kinetic energy in the temperature of the plasma (1.5nkT, depending on the definition of temperature used)--about 1.4e-18 J/m^3. Then the magnetic field carries 4.9e-12 J/m^3 and electric field, 4.4e-18 J/m^3.
Hmmm. Already the bulk flow far dominates the electromagnetic energy. And that's generally how we describe energetics in the magnetosphere: the solar wind acts as a dynamo, generating electric and magnetic fields in interaction with Earth's field. So if we multiply those energy densities times the rate at which they flow past (400km/s), and the size of the magnetosphere's cross-section (roughly, a circle with twenty times the radius of the Earth), the total energy inputs are 1.4e12W, 2.9e4W, 1.0e11W, and 9.2e4W for bulk flow, thermal, magnetic, and electric energies. Total energy input to the Earth from sunlight? 1.7e17W--one hundred thousand times all these other effects. (Yes, the Earth reflects back 2/3 of that, but the magnetosphere also doesn't tap 100% of the available solar wind energy...not even close.)
It's possible that there are climate implications to the Sun-Earth connection, and people are working on it. But if there are, they're relatively subtle processes (which may have large effects, of course) resulting from, say, alteration of global circulation patterns--not the raw energy input.
If astrophysicists realize this is essentially an electrical engineering problem, why has it not been diagrammed as such
Because it isn't essentially an electrical engineering problem. Fluid dynamics plays a major role. "Winds," "rains," and "shocks" are all fundamentally fluid dynamics concepts. BTW, this isn't an astrophysics field...we're space physicists. The lines are blurry--one space physicist in our department is doing heliospheric research, and one astrophysicist does a lot of work on magnetic processes (esp. magnetohydrodynamic shocks) beyond the solar system.
We do talk about double layers (and the plasma mantle, and the low latitude boundary layer....), and Birkeland currents, and currentclosure. We use the terminology that seems best to describe the processes. Sometimes we really are talking about different things and that needs different terminology.
There's a lot of crossover between lab plasma and space plasma research. One of the professors I work with started in fusion research; in the other direction, I know several space physicists who are doing lab work to try and pinpoint processes observed in space. As far as EE, these people build their own instruments. My advisor has dual appointments to astronomy and EE. We use Chen as one textbook.
If you're really interested in the field, Kivelson and Russell is a pretty good introduction, written at roughly an advanced undergrad level (i.e. real E&M). It is getting a bit dated, though; AGU monographs are a decent source of semi-digested information. I do like the Cravens text for something a little meatier (IMO) than K&R, although less applied. Gurnett and Bhattacharjee is up to date and rigorous, but somewhat dense.
I think Gene Parker got the solar wind about right. Hydrodynamics gets a lot of plasma behaviour about right. I recall Cravens has a pretty good treatment of the derivation.
"these are Birkeland Currents?" Which are? I don't know exactly what Dr. Sibeck's quote is referencing, so I'm not going to comment on that. But as I've said, field aligned currents are hardly a controversial matter. Tworecent JGR publications. And here's a review paper.
What are you saying? What, to you, distinguishes an "electrical" plasma from any other type of plasma? (What other types do you assert exist?)
The magnetic connection between the Earth and the Sun is not a new idea; it was first seriously proposed by Dungey in 1961 and has survived some very rigourous testing. What is "off-message"? The existence of large-scale currents in space? Those have been accepted for decades at least--otherwise there can't be a magnetopause. Field aligned currents? Again, long established. Parallel electric fields? Necessary in some form for auroral acceleration (although beyond that there's still some debate.)
Oh, yes, and flux ropes aren't particularly new, either. The interesting thing here is their role in transferring solar wind energy to the magnetosphere.
Um, I was replying to a comment on having to "start" doing space VLBI and specifically linked the WP topic on space VLBI. I've done the NRAO "boot camp" and published work from VLA data; I'm aware of the history of radio interferometry.
I'd say that's pretty much how all the King Arthur legends developed, and probably every other myth/legend/story from pre-copyright days.
And stories from the copyright days which have now reverted to the public domain. Little Mermaid, anyone? etc. etc. That's how legends grow, and that's why a perpetual copyright is a drag on creativity.
It's reasonable to ask for ID; it is reasonable to require someone to identify himself. It is not reasonable to require identification. [T]he Nevada Supreme Court has interpreted the instant statute to require only that a suspect disclose his name. It apparently does not require him to produce a driver's license or any other document. If he chooses either to state his name or communicate it to the officer by other means, the statute is satisfied and no violation occurs.
As long as you had time the night after your wedding for anything other than seeing the guests off and sleeping, you're doing better than most people I've discussed that with....
It would be worse than people obsessed with their low Slashdot UID!
Yeah, those people suck...
The way I see it, this is less "latecomers subsidizing the early adopters" and more a matter of blurring the line between promotional distribution and retail distribution. Pairing it up with an effective rating and recommendations system would make it particularly powerful--get something unknown for dirt cheap, or pay a little more for something that has some chance of matching your tastes. They should pair up with MovieLens.
As an astronomer, I'd say it's freakin' inconvenient....
For even more fun, the instrument hit safing mode literally hours before a solar wind disturbance reached Saturn...and the time was assigned to auroral observations. There was minor wailing and gnashing of teeth around here, but Clarke's being philosophical..."it's better to be lucky than to be good."
Can anyone clarify just what this poorly-written and sensational article is actually saying?
It's saying that the guy doing the experiment believes in the heterodox bidirectional guide wave hidden variable formulation of quantum mechanics. I'd suggest reading "Where Does the Weirdness Go?" if you really want to understand--unfortunately my copy is in my cube, otherwise I could look up who is associated with this particular formulation. He also is replacing non-locality ("spooky action-at-a-distance") with time travel.
As far as I can tell, his experiment is set up something like this: Release two entangled photons. Send one (A) down a "holding loop" of fibre optic cable to make it wait around a bit. Send the other one (B) through a double-slit apparatus. After B has finished its journey and been registered, A finishes the holding loop and comes out towards another double-slit apparatus, which has a photon detector over one slit (or one over each, if you prefer). After B hits but before A arrives, the detector is turned on or off. If it is on, A will act like a particle, and B must act like a particle and pass through only one slit of the double-slit. If the detector is off, A will act like a wave and B must act like a wave, pass through both slits, and form an interference pattern. In order for this to really work, you'd need to repeat the experiment several times to develop the interference pattern.
I'd have to think long and hard to figure if there's any information transfer, much less time travel, in this setup. It's certainly a clever idea and will make for interesting results, if the technical challenges don't doom it.
Yes, I am a physicist; no, quantum isn't my field; yes, this is as accurate as I can glean from the article.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting idea, but the Variety article says: "Fox said it would rather see the film killed instead of collecting a percentage of the box office." Plus issues of prejudicial delay (posted a mere minute before your comment...there's some good analysis up there.)
It's buried at the end of the article, but Near Earth Neutral Line wins, current disruption loses. The real kicker is that the aurora were detected before the cross-tail current was disrupted, so the auroral currents are apparently not caused by closure of the cross-tail current. That should be very interesting.
The mission planners had the foresight to include a substantial ground-observation component, which made this second result possible.
If you read the citations from WP, the MiFare Classic is specifically called out.
According to Wikipedia, the same tech is used by Atlanta, DC Metro, the L, and the T.
4.77 MHz, actually. Why, I have no idea...maybe they had a bunch of crystals at that frequency lying around?
Great. Now I just want to know...will it blend?
And how does this explain them dicking over the sellers with the new feedback policy?
Huh? My Model B had the break key on the F-key row and I don't recall ever hitting it by accident. It also didn't have a lock-down screw. Hiding it on the back of the machine would've been a major PITA since shift-break was the way to boot off a floppy.
So let's figure out the energy density: There's .5mv^2 kinetic energy in the flow--the energy that turns windmill blades, by analogy. That comes out to 6.7e-11 J/m^3. There's kinetic energy in the temperature of the plasma (1.5nkT, depending on the definition of temperature used)--about 1.4e-18 J/m^3. Then the magnetic field carries 4.9e-12 J/m^3 and electric field, 4.4e-18 J/m^3.
Hmmm. Already the bulk flow far dominates the electromagnetic energy. And that's generally how we describe energetics in the magnetosphere: the solar wind acts as a dynamo, generating electric and magnetic fields in interaction with Earth's field. So if we multiply those energy densities times the rate at which they flow past (400km/s), and the size of the magnetosphere's cross-section (roughly, a circle with twenty times the radius of the Earth), the total energy inputs are 1.4e12W, 2.9e4W, 1.0e11W, and 9.2e4W for bulk flow, thermal, magnetic, and electric energies. Total energy input to the Earth from sunlight? 1.7e17W--one hundred thousand times all these other effects. (Yes, the Earth reflects back 2/3 of that, but the magnetosphere also doesn't tap 100% of the available solar wind energy...not even close.)
It's possible that there are climate implications to the Sun-Earth connection, and people are working on it. But if there are, they're relatively subtle processes (which may have large effects, of course) resulting from, say, alteration of global circulation patterns--not the raw energy input.
Because it isn't essentially an electrical engineering problem. Fluid dynamics plays a major role. "Winds," "rains," and "shocks" are all fundamentally fluid dynamics concepts. BTW, this isn't an astrophysics field...we're space physicists. The lines are blurry--one space physicist in our department is doing heliospheric research, and one astrophysicist does a lot of work on magnetic processes (esp. magnetohydrodynamic shocks) beyond the solar system.
We do talk about double layers (and the plasma mantle, and the low latitude boundary layer....), and Birkeland currents, and current closure. We use the terminology that seems best to describe the processes. Sometimes we really are talking about different things and that needs different terminology.
There's a lot of crossover between lab plasma and space plasma research. One of the professors I work with started in fusion research; in the other direction, I know several space physicists who are doing lab work to try and pinpoint processes observed in space. As far as EE, these people build their own instruments. My advisor has dual appointments to astronomy and EE. We use Chen as one textbook.
If you're really interested in the field, Kivelson and Russell is a pretty good introduction, written at roughly an advanced undergrad level (i.e. real E&M). It is getting a bit dated, though; AGU monographs are a decent source of semi-digested information. I do like the Cravens text for something a little meatier (IMO) than K&R, although less applied. Gurnett and Bhattacharjee is up to date and rigorous, but somewhat dense.
"these are Birkeland Currents?" Which are? I don't know exactly what Dr. Sibeck's quote is referencing, so I'm not going to comment on that. But as I've said, field aligned currents are hardly a controversial matter. Two recent JGR publications. And here's a review paper.
What are you saying? What, to you, distinguishes an "electrical" plasma from any other type of plasma? (What other types do you assert exist?) The magnetic connection between the Earth and the Sun is not a new idea; it was first seriously proposed by Dungey in 1961 and has survived some very rigourous testing. What is "off-message"? The existence of large-scale currents in space? Those have been accepted for decades at least--otherwise there can't be a magnetopause. Field aligned currents? Again, long established. Parallel electric fields? Necessary in some form for auroral acceleration (although beyond that there's still some debate.) Oh, yes, and flux ropes aren't particularly new, either. The interesting thing here is their role in transferring solar wind energy to the magnetosphere.
That's in package smartmontools (at least in feisty), for those who don't want to go searching...
Um, I was replying to a comment on having to "start" doing space VLBI and specifically linked the WP topic on space VLBI. I've done the NRAO "boot camp" and published work from VLA data; I'm aware of the history of radio interferometry.
Actually, we've been doing it for a decade.
If you just want a lot of money, go work for a NASA contractor.
I wish!
I'd say that's pretty much how all the King Arthur legends developed, and probably every other myth/legend/story from pre-copyright days.
And stories from the copyright days which have now reverted to the public domain. Little Mermaid, anyone? etc. etc. That's how legends grow, and that's why a perpetual copyright is a drag on creativity.
It's reasonable to ask for ID; it is reasonable to require someone to identify himself. It is not reasonable to require identification. [T]he Nevada Supreme Court has interpreted the instant statute to require only that a suspect disclose his name. It apparently does not require him to produce a driver's license or any other document. If he chooses either to state his name or communicate it to the officer by other means, the statute is satisfied and no violation occurs.
That would be true if the were simply "The PSP is slower when networked". However, the actual clock speed of the processor is decreased.
As long as you had time the night after your wedding for anything other than seeing the guests off and sleeping, you're doing better than most people I've discussed that with....
Yeah, those people suck...
The way I see it, this is less "latecomers subsidizing the early adopters" and more a matter of blurring the line between promotional distribution and retail distribution. Pairing it up with an effective rating and recommendations system would make it particularly powerful--get something unknown for dirt cheap, or pay a little more for something that has some chance of matching your tastes. They should pair up with MovieLens.
For even more fun, the instrument hit safing mode literally hours before a solar wind disturbance reached Saturn...and the time was assigned to auroral observations. There was minor wailing and gnashing of teeth around here, but Clarke's being philosophical..."it's better to be lucky than to be good."
No, a person is missing. That she was murdered is an inference.
Court costs (in this context) == the judge's salary, the lights for the building, etc. Not the payment for the prosecuting attorney.
Can anyone clarify just what this poorly-written and sensational article is actually saying?
It's saying that the guy doing the experiment believes in the heterodox bidirectional guide wave hidden variable formulation of quantum mechanics. I'd suggest reading "Where Does the Weirdness Go?" if you really want to understand--unfortunately my copy is in my cube, otherwise I could look up who is associated with this particular formulation. He also is replacing non-locality ("spooky action-at-a-distance") with time travel.
As far as I can tell, his experiment is set up something like this: Release two entangled photons. Send one (A) down a "holding loop" of fibre optic cable to make it wait around a bit. Send the other one (B) through a double-slit apparatus. After B has finished its journey and been registered, A finishes the holding loop and comes out towards another double-slit apparatus, which has a photon detector over one slit (or one over each, if you prefer). After B hits but before A arrives, the detector is turned on or off. If it is on, A will act like a particle, and B must act like a particle and pass through only one slit of the double-slit. If the detector is off, A will act like a wave and B must act like a wave, pass through both slits, and form an interference pattern. In order for this to really work, you'd need to repeat the experiment several times to develop the interference pattern.
I'd have to think long and hard to figure if there's any information transfer, much less time travel, in this setup. It's certainly a clever idea and will make for interesting results, if the technical challenges don't doom it.
Yes, I am a physicist; no, quantum isn't my field; yes, this is as accurate as I can glean from the article.