Except that he has threatened to veto spending bills in the past. Congress has to play the "how far can we push this before he pushes back" game. Congress can't just spend money without check.
Nonsense. The President can both pitch his own budget (and does, every year) and has the final authority to veto or sign the bill that Congress may eventually pass. Saying he has no authority is outright wrong. This President has consistently refused to suggest bills which offer a reasonable amount of funding (NASA internal and external reviews have said so, repeatedly) and he threatens to veto bills that offer more money to NASA. He calls it "pork" when they try it.
This isn't spite, this is Congress doing what it's suppose to do.
Precisely. It's an old trick to give an agency more to do than you know its funding will carry. You look like a visionary *and* and a fiscal conservative and force someone else to make the painful cuts and to be the bad guy. In the case of NASA, it's almost invariably the manned program or engineering side that is supported and the unmanned and/or science that is cut.
Really, all Congress seems to be asking is for the Administration to be honest with its funding requests: ask for the money needed to do what you want, or stop claiming to be visionary in sending people to Mars. Congress is actually doing its job, in that case.
They reason that they want to stop funding isn't because they think it's necessarily a waste, it's because the President hasn't properly funded it. The result will either be a half-ass Mars program *or* the gutting of other NASA programs. Given that the current NASA administrator considers himself to be entirely an employee of the President (and therefore follows whatever priorities the White House dreams up), it'll be the latter.
So which programs do you want cut? (Hint: it won't be the shuttles or ISS, since those are also top WH priorities for NASA.)
I actually asked employees at all three stores and they checked their computer systems. They were out, good and proper. Maybe Best Buy (or SoCal, perhaps) just got 'em all?;-)
Is anyone else having a helluva time getting a copy? I went to three stores in Boulder, CO on Wednesday. All had carried it, but were sold out (and I heard that a fourth was in the same boat). Is this a local phenomenon or is this just selling that well? If so, excellent... except the part where I can't get a copy.
Pretty much exactly this idea (completely with microscopic view of a prototype) was featured about a decade or so ago in Scientific American. (I think it was SciAm, anyway.) I don't recall who was working on the product at that time — I doubt it was HP, but I find myself wondering what's either different about this version (perhaps the system of propelling the drugs through the microneedles?) or why the other product hasn't appeared/taken off yet and, as a result, why this will do better.
I read an opinion piece* a few years ago (not too long after the DNC registry went into effect) that said that most of those charity calls you get now are actually telemarketering firms who give a small fraction (less than half) of the money to the charities. I suppose the charities often don't mind, they're getting money for, it appears, free. But it's bad news. I'd like to see the law amended to say that you can only use the charity exemption to the DNC registry if you're giving, say, 80% or more of the donations to the charity itself.
* I mention the source because I'm taking the author's word for this -- although it wasn't perhaps the best authority. However, my experience is that I'm getting far, far more calls on behalf of charities than I used to, so I fully believe that this is the case.
Fair enough, but you needn't be booted for things to turn uncomfortable for you. All I'm saying is that there can be a significant difference between how a person feels about themself and how society feels.
Better yet, since these homosexual men felt the revelation of their orientation was defamatory, what does that say about how they feel about their own sexuality? Probably not much. What it most likely tells you about is how their society perceives their sexuality. (Or, even more pedantically, how they think that society perceives it.) A gay person in the US military may be quite happy and well-adjusted about his or her orientation, but also realize that word of that getting out would have serious negative consequences.
Well, sure, if you get to the right altitude and dry air you can see through. But I can't think of a dedicated microwave telescope that isn't atop a fairly inaccessible mountain, ideally somewhere extremely dry (such as Atacoma). And surely you won't deny that there have been microwave and IR telescopes lofted via balloons, especially before we had decent access to the high, dry sites (or tools like Sophia).
Got it in one. The rings are generally too close to withstand the tidal forces of the planet, along with the fact that for small bodies (~1 km in size or less) the accreted material is too under-dense to keep accreting for long.
What peer-review? This wasn't a peer-reviewed paper (I don't think). It was in The American Scientist, a magazine like Scientific American (only slightly more technical, written for other scientists specifically). I'm pretty sure that it isn't peer-reviewed. (I've certainly seen no evidence of peer-reviewing in the almost ten years I've been reading it.)
Oh, this is perhaps a shameless plug, but a friend noted the need for some images to help understand the story. So here are the discovery images of the first four propellers found: http://ciclops.org/search.php?x=0&y=0&search=propellers
All four giant planets have rings, there is just considerable variation in them.
As I've noted in another reply, the evolutionary path of rings is not entirely clear. There are a myriad of processes, from collisional grinding to accretion to gravitational scattering to resonances to E&M effects that play roles in the story. How large a role each plays and the timescales are generally a matter of debate. It is possible, according to some researchers, that the rings are as old as the planet (or very nearly so). It's also possible that they can't be more than tens or hundreds of millions of years old. Frankly, no one has a compelling argument for any particular number. (Anyone who tells you otherwise should be treated with skepticism.) I call this a "field ripe for research". That, or we're just plain confused.:-)
Uh, no. Saturn's rings have no way to escape the planet's gravity, either.
What happens over long timescales is that the rings spread through collisions and gravitational encounters. Some particles are sent inwards, others outwards. (More of the former than the latter, typically.) Eventually, the particles will either get close enough to the planet to feel the atmosphere (the D ring is around 5,000 km from the 'top' of the atmosphere already) or spread far enough out that they'll get swept up by a moon. Escape from the system is very unlikely.
There are several additional factors here, however. First, there are moons in the system that hold the rings back in places, slowing the spreading down. (The moons can't stop it completely since they get pushed by the rings.) Second, particles colliding can grind the system down into smaller chunks of ice which eventually are small enough to feel a host of drag forces, including plasma drag and Poynting-Robertson drag. (On the other hand, it's possible that the small ice "dust" can get swept back up onto bigger particles and be recycled, slowing this process down.)
The age and evolutionary track of the rings isn't clear, although physics does give certain constraints.
I know that the CU team wrote their press-release to make it sound like they're the first to discover propellers in the rings, but these were first found and identified as moonlets in a paper released a year and a half ago in Nature. The discovered was Matt Tiscareno at Cornell.
What this new paper finds is some new propellers and that these moonlets might exist only within a belt in the rings.
While the scope and precision of this project appears to be admirable and new, the idea of using balloons to loft telescopes is most certainly not, though the summary and article may both give that impression. They launch balloons in Antarctica all the time for astronomical observations (remember BOOMERANG?) and much of the initial attempts to view the universe through non-optical, non-radio wavelengths (the ones where our atmosphere is basically opaque) was done with balloons in addition to the sounding rockets.
How is Saturn like a failed star? It has a solid core that makes up ~20% of it it's mass, that's no star. Even if it were somehow a failed star, that in no way implies that it'd have liquid water on any moons. The issue has nothing to do with formation, it's all about composition and heat: the moons of Saturn are made of ices (especially water) in a way that the terrestrial planets aren't *and* are too far from the Sun to support liquid water without some less conventional energy source. And since they're small, they're mostly cold and dead. We're *still* sort of shocked by Enceladus.
Er, I think grandparent was referring to
Several of the researchers, including Stamler, have consulting and/or equity relationships with Nitrox/N30, a company developing nitric oxide based therapies. The research might very well be 100% valid, but that's not something that instills confidence that they're unbiased.
Titan, the only moon in the solar system large enough to support an atmosphere Sorry to nitpick, but this just isn't true. I can think of at least two other moons that have atmospheres (Io at Jupiter and Triton at Neptune), Titan's is just the thickest and most Earth-like. It can be argued (and is, but some researchers) that even the Moon has an atmosphere, it's just very thin and made of silicates and sodium.
In any case, not only is Titan not alone, it's not the "only moon large enough..." Ganymede at Jupiter is actually larger than Titan, both in radius and (especially) in mass. If it were only a matter of size, Ganymede would have a thicker atmosphere than Titan. Heck, Titan's surface pressure is 1.5 times that of Earth, so clearly size isn't the only issue.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that he has threatened to veto spending bills in the past. Congress has to play the "how far can we push this before he pushes back" game. Congress can't just spend money without check.
Nonsense. The President can both pitch his own budget (and does, every year) and has the final authority to veto or sign the bill that Congress may eventually pass. Saying he has no authority is outright wrong. This President has consistently refused to suggest bills which offer a reasonable amount of funding (NASA internal and external reviews have said so, repeatedly) and he threatens to veto bills that offer more money to NASA. He calls it "pork" when they try it.
This isn't spite, this is Congress doing what it's suppose to do.
Precisely. It's an old trick to give an agency more to do than you know its funding will carry. You look like a visionary *and* and a fiscal conservative and force someone else to make the painful cuts and to be the bad guy. In the case of NASA, it's almost invariably the manned program or engineering side that is supported and the unmanned and/or science that is cut.
Really, all Congress seems to be asking is for the Administration to be honest with its funding requests: ask for the money needed to do what you want, or stop claiming to be visionary in sending people to Mars. Congress is actually doing its job, in that case.
They reason that they want to stop funding isn't because they think it's necessarily a waste, it's because the President hasn't properly funded it. The result will either be a half-ass Mars program *or* the gutting of other NASA programs. Given that the current NASA administrator considers himself to be entirely an employee of the President (and therefore follows whatever priorities the White House dreams up), it'll be the latter.
So which programs do you want cut? (Hint: it won't be the shuttles or ISS, since those are also top WH priorities for NASA.)
I actually asked employees at all three stores and they checked their computer systems. They were out, good and proper. Maybe Best Buy (or SoCal, perhaps) just got 'em all? ;-)
Is anyone else having a helluva time getting a copy? I went to three stores in Boulder, CO on Wednesday. All had carried it, but were sold out (and I heard that a fourth was in the same boat). Is this a local phenomenon or is this just selling that well? If so, excellent... except the part where I can't get a copy.
Pretty much exactly this idea (completely with microscopic view of a prototype) was featured about a decade or so ago in Scientific American. (I think it was SciAm, anyway.) I don't recall who was working on the product at that time — I doubt it was HP, but I find myself wondering what's either different about this version (perhaps the system of propelling the drugs through the microneedles?) or why the other product hasn't appeared/taken off yet and, as a result, why this will do better.
I read an opinion piece* a few years ago (not too long after the DNC registry went into effect) that said that most of those charity calls you get now are actually telemarketering firms who give a small fraction (less than half) of the money to the charities. I suppose the charities often don't mind, they're getting money for, it appears, free. But it's bad news. I'd like to see the law amended to say that you can only use the charity exemption to the DNC registry if you're giving, say, 80% or more of the donations to the charity itself.
* I mention the source because I'm taking the author's word for this -- although it wasn't perhaps the best authority. However, my experience is that I'm getting far, far more calls on behalf of charities than I used to, so I fully believe that this is the case.
Possibly. It depends on who they didn't want to know and whether they'd already found out before the suit was filed, doesn't it?
Fair enough, but you needn't be booted for things to turn uncomfortable for you. All I'm saying is that there can be a significant difference between how a person feels about themself and how society feels.
Well, sure, if you get to the right altitude and dry air you can see through. But I can't think of a dedicated microwave telescope that isn't atop a fairly inaccessible mountain, ideally somewhere extremely dry (such as Atacoma). And surely you won't deny that there have been microwave and IR telescopes lofted via balloons, especially before we had decent access to the high, dry sites (or tools like Sophia).
;-)
I think we're stridently agreeing.
Got it in one. The rings are generally too close to withstand the tidal forces of the planet, along with the fact that for small bodies (~1 km in size or less) the accreted material is too under-dense to keep accreting for long.
What peer-review? This wasn't a peer-reviewed paper (I don't think). It was in The American Scientist, a magazine like Scientific American (only slightly more technical, written for other scientists specifically). I'm pretty sure that it isn't peer-reviewed. (I've certainly seen no evidence of peer-reviewing in the almost ten years I've been reading it.)
Oh, this is perhaps a shameless plug, but a friend noted the need for some images to help understand the story. So here are the discovery images of the first four propellers found: http://ciclops.org/search.php?x=0&y=0&search=propellers
All four giant planets have rings, there is just considerable variation in them.
:-)
As I've noted in another reply, the evolutionary path of rings is not entirely clear. There are a myriad of processes, from collisional grinding to accretion to gravitational scattering to resonances to E&M effects that play roles in the story. How large a role each plays and the timescales are generally a matter of debate. It is possible, according to some researchers, that the rings are as old as the planet (or very nearly so). It's also possible that they can't be more than tens or hundreds of millions of years old. Frankly, no one has a compelling argument for any particular number. (Anyone who tells you otherwise should be treated with skepticism.) I call this a "field ripe for research". That, or we're just plain confused.
And yes, I *am* a rings researcher.
Uh, no. Saturn's rings have no way to escape the planet's gravity, either.
What happens over long timescales is that the rings spread through collisions and gravitational encounters. Some particles are sent inwards, others outwards. (More of the former than the latter, typically.) Eventually, the particles will either get close enough to the planet to feel the atmosphere (the D ring is around 5,000 km from the 'top' of the atmosphere already) or spread far enough out that they'll get swept up by a moon. Escape from the system is very unlikely.
There are several additional factors here, however. First, there are moons in the system that hold the rings back in places, slowing the spreading down. (The moons can't stop it completely since they get pushed by the rings.) Second, particles colliding can grind the system down into smaller chunks of ice which eventually are small enough to feel a host of drag forces, including plasma drag and Poynting-Robertson drag. (On the other hand, it's possible that the small ice "dust" can get swept back up onto bigger particles and be recycled, slowing this process down.)
The age and evolutionary track of the rings isn't clear, although physics does give certain constraints.
I know that the CU team wrote their press-release to make it sound like they're the first to discover propellers in the rings, but these were first found and identified as moonlets in a paper released a year and a half ago in Nature. The discovered was Matt Tiscareno at Cornell.
What this new paper finds is some new propellers and that these moonlets might exist only within a belt in the rings.
While the scope and precision of this project appears to be admirable and new, the idea of using balloons to loft telescopes is most certainly not, though the summary and article may both give that impression. They launch balloons in Antarctica all the time for astronomical observations (remember BOOMERANG?) and much of the initial attempts to view the universe through non-optical, non-radio wavelengths (the ones where our atmosphere is basically opaque) was done with balloons in addition to the sounding rockets.
You can find the whole press release about the correlation between the Tiger Stripes and jets of Enceladus here.
Er, are you joking? I'll assume you aren't...
How is Saturn like a failed star? It has a solid core that makes up ~20% of it it's mass, that's no star. Even if it were somehow a failed star, that in no way implies that it'd have liquid water on any moons. The issue has nothing to do with formation, it's all about composition and heat: the moons of Saturn are made of ices (especially water) in a way that the terrestrial planets aren't *and* are too far from the Sun to support liquid water without some less conventional energy source. And since they're small, they're mostly cold and dead. We're *still* sort of shocked by Enceladus.
See, I was thinking of something more along the lines of, "It's DC. Most of the dummies ride in the *back* seats." :-)
In any case, not only is Titan not alone, it's not the "only moon large enough..." Ganymede at Jupiter is actually larger than Titan, both in radius and (especially) in mass. If it were only a matter of size, Ganymede would have a thicker atmosphere than Titan. Heck, Titan's surface pressure is 1.5 times that of Earth, so clearly size isn't the only issue.
Sorry for the interruption, please carry on.