Well, problem is, if the speed of light was different, a lot of other things would be different too, but we can look into the past by looking at distant object in space. As far as we can tell, the laws of physics are the same everywhere, so the constants really are constant.
Same thing with radioactive decay -- we can measure brightness curves from supernova explosions (like SN 1987a) and tell that radioactive decay rates have remained constant for at least several hundred thousand years.
Right, I am not an astrophysicist, but here's what I understand:
1. How do the black holes form? (i.e. Where do babies come from?;-)
A normal "burning" star is in a state of balance of two forces: 1) the star's gravity, which wants to make it smaller, and 2) the pressure from the nuclear reactions inside which make it want to blow up. Stars eventually run out of fuel; that is, they run out of hydrogen in the core, and start burning helium, and then other elements until eventually you get a bunch of iron. You can't get any more energy out of fusing iron. In fact, it *takes* energy to do it. The pressure from the nuclear reactions drops, gravity wins, and the star collapses. Small stars like the sun become white dwarfs, larger stars become neutron stars, and even larger stars become black holes.
2. Once a black hole is formed, it sucks all nearby matter in. Will it keep growing indefinitely or will it somehow stop at some point?
As long as there is matter around, it should keep growing. Mind you, we think black holes 'evaporate' eventually (Hawking radiation), but it is a very slow process for large black holes.
3. What exactly is meant by the size of the black hole? You can't just go there and measure its size. Heck, you can't even see it. You can only infer its mass by looking at the effects on nearby objects. Right? So what's this talk about small/big black holes?
Usually they are talking about mass, but you can also talk about the radius of the event horizon. The event horizon is the distance you can be from the center of the black hole before you get stuck. As long as you are outside the event horizon, you can still get away (given a big enough rocket:)). The more massive the black hole, the larger the event horizon.
4. (I totally don't get this). When something is being sucked into a black hole it starts accelerating due to the gravitational pull of the black hole. At some point the speed of the sucking object (did I just invent this term?;-) will approach the speed of light, at which point the time is supposed to slow down...
Well, no. If you throw a ball into the air, it doesn't reach infinite velocity before it reaches the ground, does it? Falling toward a black hole is no different than falling toward anything else with mass. That's not saying that there aren't some odd effects. If someone was watching you fall into a black hole, they would see you move slower and slower as you approached the event horizon, but you would never actually cross it. From your point of view, everything looks normal (apart from being ripped apart by tidal forces) and you cross the event horizon and land on the singularity in a finite amount of time.
2) New stuff tends to be added to flagships first. This sub was the about the same as the US Navy sees the USS Enterprise, its a flagship being the first in its class.
Nit pick: the USS Enterprise (the carrier, not the starship) is the *only* one of its class. There are no other Enterprise-class carriers out there; our other CVNs are Nimitz-class. The Enterprise is also quite old.
Those crew members were in the death-dealing business - I don't miss them. Not a one.
Boggle. So because they were crewmembers on an attack submarine, they were just lowlife scum? Do you think the submarine guys just drive around blowing up enemy ships all day? Sheesh.
There are more of them now, MANY more potential players, all having faster network access, and yet the number of players per mud have dropped.
Well, I code on a MUD, so I feel I should stick up for the Old School.:) There may be many more MUDs now, but most of them suck. Some k1dd13 downloads a mud base, manages to get it compiled and running, and suddenly he is 1337 with his own MUD. Except that there's 1000 copies of the same game running elsewhere.
The MUDs that have been around for a while and have a good theme are doing OK. I don't want to name names in case they get Slashdotted, but the MUD I play on has a 24-hour average of about 120-125 players, peaking at over 200, and there a some MUDS that get a lot more.
Also, a good MUD is not a static thing that you can 'master' and then move on. New areas are always being added, new commands, new quests, new guilds, etc. We have had people playing for 6+ years. Yes, they have very high skill levels and can kill just about everything, but they still play because there is almost always something to look forward to.
Another reason they stay is for the social aspect that you don't get on other games. I have more friends thanks to the MUD than I ever would have otherwise, and I have met a lot of them in real life.
Another nice feature is the fact that you don't have to shell out $30-50 to be able to play a MUD.:)
So, I don't think MUDs will die soon. Oh sure, they might get pushed into some little corner of the Net, but that's where they were anyway.:)
Thats why European countries restrict some speech, not because we are information nazis, but because that speech is intended to have a negative effect on the people who read it and the vast majority of people find it distasteful and abhorent.
OK, fine. Who gets to decide what is "distasteful and abhorent"? You? Your neighbors? The government? Any idiot on the street?
Download the program.
Double click the installation file.
Run the program.
I guess that is a bit tough for some people...
It is when this doesn't work; or Windows informs you that in order to do this, you need the latest updates to X, Y, and Z; or it overwrites a DLL needed by another program; or it trashes your registry; or it puts stuff all over the system that doesn't get removed by the uninstaller, or...
But Unix doesn't use those things enough! The philosophy hasn't carried over to the graphical applications, so we have a schitzophrenic Unix where the little text tools try to do one thing well, and the GUI applications are monolithic and try to do everything.
Well, hang on. Is that the fault of UNIX? Or is it the fault of the developers? I mean, there's no reason why you can't write some code that take some arguments and gives you back a Motif (or whatever) widget that anyone could use. I've done it for small stuff like drop-down menus, but it should be possible to scale up. It takes some thinking sometimes, but doesn't everything?:) The operating system is separate from the interface (something MS and Apple never figured out). I don't think you can blast the OS for the problems in the interface.
Well, you could set up an LP MUD. LPC has inheritance and objects.
A nice thing about LP is that you can change and reload your code on the fly without bringing down the rest of the MUD. Instant feedback is a Good Thing.:)
Pluto doesn't have enough mass to explain the distortions in the orbits of other planets (esp. Neptune). This is why many believe there must be a 'Planet X'.
Actually, there *are* no distortions in Neptune's orbit. Once, it seemed that there were, which led to the search and discovery of Pluto, which then turned out to be too small to have affected the orbits anyway. It turned out that our estimate for the mass of Neptune (and Uranus) was wrong. Once you use the correct masses, the orbital oddities go away.
The chips are way too close in the multiprocessor board. Yes, they could be expensive thru-board, but don't forget that the other components missing from the single board (the ram chip?/flash rom?) would have to be on the other side, (one for each cpu? at least ram...) and would take up a lot of room.
Mmmm, not necessarily. Depending on what the processors are, you can pack them damn close. For example, on my desk right now, I have a small daughtercard (about 3"x4") with 8 Analog Devices 21060 SHARC processors on it (4 on each side). Now, admittedly, these aren't PIII-class chips, but they can crank out FFTs pretty fast.:)
Having said that, though, I'm still suspicious about this SETI board.
You would like someone to figure it out themselves, but if they have no bible (and very few in China have bibles) then how are they to do this?
Hang on, if Christianity is the Right Religion, then why do people need Bibles, or testimonials from others, or any other prop to figure it out for themselves? For that matter, why doesn't the Christian God Himself just make it obvious?
s#]*>)##gi; Think it's unreadable? What about this sentence: "Cette phrase en francais est difficile a traduire en anglais." (From Douglas Hofstader's "Metamagical Themas") The point is, it's impossible to read anything until you know the language.
Disagree. Even though I don't know French, I could get the general idea out of the French sentence. The Perl code looks like someone put both palms on the keyboard and pressed a bunch of keys.:)
Slashdot Mirror
- 4Gb RAM
- 16 vector CPUs
Cranking SETI@Home blocks like mad: Priceless
I got to see that machine on a field trip from school one time. In fact, I got to sit on it. :) Nice padded bench around the 'C'-shaped CPU core.
Well, problem is, if the speed of light was different, a lot of other things would be different too, but we can look into the past by looking at distant object in space. As far as we can tell, the laws of physics are the same everywhere, so the constants really are constant.
Same thing with radioactive decay -- we can measure brightness curves from supernova explosions (like SN 1987a) and tell that radioactive decay rates have remained constant for at least several hundred thousand years.
1. How do the black holes form? (i.e. Where do babies come from? ;-)
A normal "burning" star is in a state of balance of two forces: 1) the star's gravity, which wants to make it smaller, and 2) the pressure from the nuclear reactions inside which make it want to blow up. Stars eventually run out of fuel; that is, they run out of hydrogen in the core, and start burning helium, and then other elements until eventually you get a bunch of iron. You can't get any more energy out of fusing iron. In fact, it *takes* energy to do it. The pressure from the nuclear reactions drops, gravity wins, and the star collapses. Small stars like the sun become white dwarfs, larger stars become neutron stars, and even larger stars become black holes.
2. Once a black hole is formed, it sucks all nearby matter in. Will it keep growing indefinitely or will it somehow stop at some point?
As long as there is matter around, it should keep growing. Mind you, we think black holes 'evaporate' eventually (Hawking radiation), but it is a very slow process for large black holes.
3. What exactly is meant by the size of the black hole? You can't just go there and measure its size. Heck, you can't even see it. You can only infer its mass by looking at the effects on nearby objects. Right? So what's this talk about small/big black holes?
Usually they are talking about mass, but you can also talk about the radius of the event horizon. The event horizon is the distance you can be from the center of the black hole before you get stuck. As long as you are outside the event horizon, you can still get away (given a big enough rocket :)). The more massive the black hole, the larger the event horizon.
4. (I totally don't get this). When something is being sucked into a black hole it starts accelerating due to the gravitational pull of the black hole. At some point the speed of the sucking object (did I just invent this term? ;-) will approach the speed of light, at which point the time is supposed to slow down...
Well, no. If you throw a ball into the air, it doesn't reach infinite velocity before it reaches the ground, does it? Falling toward a black hole is no different than falling toward anything else with mass. That's not saying that there aren't some odd effects. If someone was watching you fall into a black hole, they would see you move slower and slower as you approached the event horizon, but you would never actually cross it. From your point of view, everything looks normal (apart from being ripped apart by tidal forces) and you cross the event horizon and land on the singularity in a finite amount of time.
There's some good stuff in the black hole section of the Usenet Relativity FAQ
Evidence?
Nit pick: the USS Enterprise (the carrier, not the starship) is the *only* one of its class. There are no other Enterprise-class carriers out there; our other CVNs are Nimitz-class. The Enterprise is also quite old.
No, the complaint was that they tacked a GUI on top of DOS and called it a new operating system.
Is a Model T still a car?
Just wondering.
Boggle. So because they were crewmembers on an attack submarine, they were just lowlife scum? Do you think the submarine guys just drive around blowing up enemy ships all day? Sheesh.
I know at least one ex-Navy sonarman who would laugh at that. :)
There are more of them now, MANY more potential players, all having faster network access, and yet the number of players per mud have dropped.
Well, I code on a MUD, so I feel I should stick up for the Old School. :) There may be many more MUDs now, but most of them suck. Some k1dd13 downloads a mud base, manages to get it compiled and running, and suddenly he is 1337 with his own MUD. Except that there's 1000 copies of the same game running elsewhere.
The MUDs that have been around for a while and have a good theme are doing OK. I don't want to name names in case they get Slashdotted, but the MUD I play on has a 24-hour average of about 120-125 players, peaking at over 200, and there a some MUDS that get a lot more.
Also, a good MUD is not a static thing that you can 'master' and then move on. New areas are always being added, new commands, new quests, new guilds, etc. We have had people playing for 6+ years. Yes, they have very high skill levels and can kill just about everything, but they still play because there is almost always something to look forward to.
Another reason they stay is for the social aspect that you don't get on other games. I have more friends thanks to the MUD than I ever would have otherwise, and I have met a lot of them in real life.
Another nice feature is the fact that you don't have to shell out $30-50 to be able to play a MUD. :)
So, I don't think MUDs will die soon. Oh sure, they might get pushed into some little corner of the Net, but that's where they were anyway. :)
Given that the other name is Vorbis, you might include The Book of Om ;)
OK, fine. Who gets to decide what is "distasteful and abhorent"? You? Your neighbors? The government? Any idiot on the street?
Double click the installation file.
Run the program.
I guess that is a bit tough for some people...
It is when this doesn't work; or Windows informs you that in order to do this, you need the latest updates to X, Y, and Z; or it overwrites a DLL needed by another program; or it trashes your registry; or it puts stuff all over the system that doesn't get removed by the uninstaller, or ...
Well, hang on. Is that the fault of UNIX? Or is it the fault of the developers? I mean, there's no reason why you can't write some code that take some arguments and gives you back a Motif (or whatever) widget that anyone could use. I've done it for small stuff like drop-down menus, but it should be possible to scale up. It takes some thinking sometimes, but doesn't everything? :) The operating system is separate from the interface (something MS and Apple never figured out). I don't think you can blast the OS for the problems in the interface.
Assuming your gaming world consists of nothing but carbon-copy first-person shooters. Mine doesn't. :-b
A nice thing about LP is that you can change and reload your code on the fly without bringing down the rest of the MUD. Instant feedback is a Good Thing. :)
You mean Neptune, not Uranus.
Nor does its location fit in with Bode's law.
Bode's Law is probably a coincidence, and there most likely is no tenth planet.
Actually, there *are* no distortions in Neptune's orbit. Once, it seemed that there were, which led to the search and discovery of Pluto, which then turned out to be too small to have affected the orbits anyway. It turned out that our estimate for the mass of Neptune (and Uranus) was wrong. Once you use the correct masses, the orbital oddities go away.
Mmmm, not necessarily. Depending on what the processors are, you can pack them damn close. For example, on my desk right now, I have a small daughtercard (about 3"x4") with 8 Analog Devices 21060 SHARC processors on it (4 on each side). Now, admittedly, these aren't PIII-class chips, but they can crank out FFTs pretty fast. :)
Having said that, though, I'm still suspicious about this SETI board.
Hang on, if Christianity is the Right Religion, then why do people need Bibles, or testimonials from others, or any other prop to figure it out for themselves? For that matter, why doesn't the Christian God Himself just make it obvious?
Area of the State of Texas: 267,339 sq. mi. Area of the United Kingdom: 94,251 sq. mi. HTH!
Disagree. Even though I don't know French, I could get the general idea out of the French sentence. The Perl code looks like someone put both palms on the keyboard and pressed a bunch of keys. :)
Well, not *all* of us. :) I mean, it's OK, but after a while it all starts to look the same.
We had this as a lunch time puzzle at work one day. I won a free lunch because I was the first one to get it. :)