Why would making a glass elevator be a way to get press? It's hardly a new idea or something that hasn't been done many times before. Quite a few expensive buildings have elevators whose walls are largely transparent. Have you never seen one?
Which is not as bad as you may think: I recall reading (perhaps a decade ago) that analysis shows that a fair fraction of the the Mona Lisa's face is really based off of da Vinci's. He probably didn't have the subject sit for him for very long, and then finished the painting without her.
No object on the Moon is visible from Earth-based telescopes at present. You can verify that the mirrors are there with a suitable laser, but you can't image the landers, the rovers, or anything. And you surely cannot see them, even with a telescope. Pity, really.
Crichton gets my vote, too. PhD in "Theoretical Science", snappy dresser, and carries some serious firepower. Also, he can command wormholes, is completely off his gourd, and got the babe. We must all aspire to be more like him. (Modulo getting a person of your preferred gender, obviously.)
The 1991 agreement said that Apple Computers could sell entertainment products products provided they didn't sell them on *physical media*. They do not, so it sounds to me like that case is closed.
But you'll notice that in all of your examples the intution was backed up by long, careful scientific analysis. Einstein spend years on both Special and General Relativities after his initial inklings about what to persue before he was able to present workable theories.
I'll totally agree that intuition is useful in science, but ONLY if you follow up on it with the real labor required.
You're right, but only up to a point. Infering that all ducks are green, in your example, isn't a bad inference. As long as you're willing to allow for new data to disprove the hypothesis, it's actually the most reasonable conclusion you could draw from that case.
In the real world, all we have is what we can observe. What we observe now is a universe with too little mass and energy to recollapse. (In fact, it's accelerating even now.) What would have changed on this iteration and why are we in the special one? You can posit all kinds of things, but that's just speculation. The most reasonable conclusion with this data is that this is the only iteration of the Big Bang in this universe. (Note carefully that this isn't to say that it's *accurate*, just the best guess we could make at the moment. That's all science can ever do for you.)
Considering that the universe shows every signs of expanding forever (based on observations), it's not hard to see why the idea of a cyclic universe was not considered a serious contender. In fact, it's difficult to see why it should be now.
That isn't a problem with the theory, though. Nor is that point addressed with this new theory, as far as I can see. The only question is "How large the universe compared with how long it's been since the last Big Bang?" You still need inflation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_inflation) to make the universe get to the correct size.
Getting into a car isn't that hard. Getting it to move is tougher. So it's precisely the ignition that I'd be worried about, not the keyless entry.
As far as the GP's logic goes, I understood it perfectly: not everyone wants/needs all of the add-ons. If you're looking at a Civic, you're probably worried about the bottom line you're paying right now, not in five years. I know I was when I got my hybrid. Which is part of why I didn't get a Prius myself.
I don't think anyone is saying that the Prius is over-priced. But it is undeniably more expensive. For many of us, that's a factor.
I don't think I really believe that ID has spurred advanced in evolutionary theory. I don't know any biologists who are doing their research because they feel compelled to prove the IDers wrong. Most of them seem to realize that for any data they come up with, the Creationist crowd will find a new way to spin it and dismiss it. The researchers do what they do because they love the subject; if anything, the ID argument is distracting them from their work.
The argument about lots of discoveries recently is dicey. To some extent, ID has probably gotten these discoveries in the news more than they might otherwise have been. But there have certainly been a steady stream of discoveries among the fossils for as long as I can remember, so I don't think that the pace has picked up of late.
I'm sorry, you're right. I hadn't heard that they'd set the third stage to hit the Moon until just now and had assumed you meant the landers. (Which also hit the Moon again.) I'm impressed that they were able to set the buggers to hit the Moon from so far away.
Except that HST is expected to fail before that. "A few years" is a very long time to a spacecraft. If nothing else, the gyros aren't happy and are getting less so all the time and the batteries are expected fail around 2008/2009.
Not the Saturn V, they crashed the lunar landers back into the Moon after the astronauts left. And they've already done this experiment once (with Lunar Prospector) and found nothing. Granted, it wasn't a dedicated mission, just an interesting way to end the spacecraft. But that does argue for considerable caution in allocating serious money to repeating the experiment.
The Sun didn't actually start at 0% helium, so that throws things off quite a bit. Really, pretty much just the core (and maybe a shell outside of that) will get converted to helium. That's 30% of it's radius, but thanks to compression (therefore a much higher density), it includes a lot more than (0.3)^3 of the total mass. (Sorry, I can't recall that number off hand and my texts are all in my office:(
Probably not. Stars with large iron cores can't produce enough power to support their own masses. That's how you get a supernova. And there are a lot of things about the idea tha a supernova formed the planets that make me very skeptical, including how you get the dichotomy between planet compositions. Of course, a supernova probably *started* our Sun's formation, a theory which is widely held in good regard, if not actually believed, by many astronomers.
How many of the "experts" you refer to where bona fide scientists? Sure, it happens. And they get caught when their work is shown to be deliberately mislead, just like in the other sciences. (You do know that other sciences have had fraud crop up, right?) The social sciences are sciences. The follow the methodolgy. Their results are usually a lot shakier than what we get in the physical sciences, but that doesn't make them non-science or inferior. They're merely different.
You sound like the sort of natural scienist or engineer who is so egocentric that he can't conceive of the value of any other field. Sad bunch of people who don't even have the conviction to post with their identities attached.
I'm plenty cyncial; but just because you're cynical, it doesn't mean that you're right. Foolish cynicism may feel smuggly intellectual to you, but it's every bit as hollow as blind optimism.
All sciences evolve like this. How many revolutions have occured in biology in our lifetimes alone? The thing with astronomy is that in many areas we're only at the present epoch getting good looks at the objects we study. You're surpised that there are new discoveries?
Also, you need to understand what a science is. It's not just a "lab science". Not all science rests on laboratory experients. Many require observations. Often, the observations are not exactly repeatable. (How often will you observe a species of bird do exactly the same thing in the wild?) These sciences include geology, meteorology, astronomy, and a lot of biology and are referred to as "historical sciences". In these fields, you can't control the experiment, so you rely on similar observations and the ability to test theories with other, related observations. The key isn't the laboratory or the controls; it's being able to somehow falsify the theory. As long as you can do that, it's a science.
It's a poorly worded article, actually. What they *mean* is that the Sun's relative amounts of oxygen-16 may be similar to one thing or another. Clearly the overall compositions are quite different. (Even the gas giants are not all that similar to the Sun's composition.)
It's mostly hydrogen; helium makes up around 20-25% of the Sun. Everything other than those two are trace elements.
The stuff in the corona is injected from the photosphere: basically the Sun's visible "surface". There's a lot of convection in the upper layers of the Sun, so apart from the core (where helium "ash" builds up), it's probably reasonably well-mixed.
Actually, I'd say it's a *lot* more like stealing music than land. (An analogy isn't invalid just because it makes *you* look bad.) No one is depriving the Brazilians of their native species, after all.
The key difference being that there's no obvious ownership associated any natural species's genetic code. (This is quite apart from saying that companies and researchers shouldn't work with the native people and pass along some of the rewards. "Should" and "must" are two very different concepts, though.)
Wow. You clearly have no idea of the realities of the situation, yet you feel free to make wild claims about what you think can be done with NASA's money.
Let's see... $13 billion... of which most goes to the manned-missions right off. So that's ISS and the shuttles getting the bulk of the money. Research for aerospace stuff gets another reasonably heafty share. In fact, when you get down to it, the solar system exploration budget is around $2 billion, total. That goes to fund research, build new missions, and support existing missions.
In reality, missions are very expensive and mass-producing parts doesn't fix that. Every single mission has to be launched, which is a huge fraction of the total expense right there. Fuel isn't going to get a lot cheaper through the wonders of mass-production. Neither is the man-power needed to plan the details of each mission and to work out and check things like the trajectories. (I'm periphrially involved with selecting an extended tour on a mission right now. It's complicated to say the least.) And modular components only work if the modules are sufficiently useful to a broad number of missions. This is generally not the case, as it turns out. Every mission has specific goals and requirements that almost always demand a new suite of designs. (Check out the latest Mars missions; the new objectives have caused their instruments to be VERY carefully and specifically designed.)
And to put $13 billion into perspective: that's a few percent of what the war in Iraq has costed so far and around 1% of what it will ultimately cost us. In fact, that's the price of about 7 stealth bombers. Which were easier to mass-produce than interplanetary missions, incidentally.
Your intuition for the money here is dead wrong. I'm not saying NASA is above reproach; it very much so is not. (I can spend days ranting about how much they waste time and money.) But if you want to help solve the problem, you'll have to understand the situation first.
Slashdot Mirror
Why would making a glass elevator be a way to get press? It's hardly a new idea or something that hasn't been done many times before. Quite a few expensive buildings have elevators whose walls are largely transparent. Have you never seen one?
don't think it was just woman either
Which is not as bad as you may think: I recall reading (perhaps a decade ago) that analysis shows that a fair fraction of the the Mona Lisa's face is really based off of da Vinci's. He probably didn't have the subject sit for him for very long, and then finished the painting without her.
No object on the Moon is visible from Earth-based telescopes at present. You can verify that the mirrors are there with a suitable laser, but you can't image the landers, the rovers, or anything. And you surely cannot see them, even with a telescope. Pity, really.
Crichton gets my vote, too. PhD in "Theoretical Science", snappy dresser, and carries some serious firepower. Also, he can command wormholes, is completely off his gourd, and got the babe. We must all aspire to be more like him. (Modulo getting a person of your preferred gender, obviously.)
The 1991 agreement said that Apple Computers could sell entertainment products products provided they didn't sell them on *physical media*. They do not, so it sounds to me like that case is closed.
But you'll notice that in all of your examples the intution was backed up by long, careful scientific analysis. Einstein spend years on both Special and General Relativities after his initial inklings about what to persue before he was able to present workable theories.
I'll totally agree that intuition is useful in science, but ONLY if you follow up on it with the real labor required.
You're right, but only up to a point. Infering that all ducks are green, in your example, isn't a bad inference. As long as you're willing to allow for new data to disprove the hypothesis, it's actually the most reasonable conclusion you could draw from that case.
In the real world, all we have is what we can observe. What we observe now is a universe with too little mass and energy to recollapse. (In fact, it's accelerating even now.) What would have changed on this iteration and why are we in the special one? You can posit all kinds of things, but that's just speculation. The most reasonable conclusion with this data is that this is the only iteration of the Big Bang in this universe. (Note carefully that this isn't to say that it's *accurate*, just the best guess we could make at the moment. That's all science can ever do for you.)
Considering that the universe shows every signs of expanding forever (based on observations), it's not hard to see why the idea of a cyclic universe was not considered a serious contender. In fact, it's difficult to see why it should be now.
But who needs data?
That isn't a problem with the theory, though. Nor is that point addressed with this new theory, as far as I can see. The only question is "How large the universe compared with how long it's been since the last Big Bang?" You still need inflation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_inflation) to make the universe get to the correct size.
Getting into a car isn't that hard. Getting it to move is tougher. So it's precisely the ignition that I'd be worried about, not the keyless entry.
As far as the GP's logic goes, I understood it perfectly: not everyone wants/needs all of the add-ons. If you're looking at a Civic, you're probably worried about the bottom line you're paying right now, not in five years. I know I was when I got my hybrid. Which is part of why I didn't get a Prius myself.
I don't think anyone is saying that the Prius is over-priced. But it is undeniably more expensive. For many of us, that's a factor.
I don't think I really believe that ID has spurred advanced in evolutionary theory. I don't know any biologists who are doing their research because they feel compelled to prove the IDers wrong. Most of them seem to realize that for any data they come up with, the Creationist crowd will find a new way to spin it and dismiss it. The researchers do what they do because they love the subject; if anything, the ID argument is distracting them from their work.
The argument about lots of discoveries recently is dicey. To some extent, ID has probably gotten these discoveries in the news more than they might otherwise have been. But there have certainly been a steady stream of discoveries among the fossils for as long as I can remember, so I don't think that the pace has picked up of late.
I'm sorry, you're right. I hadn't heard that they'd set the third stage to hit the Moon until just now and had assumed you meant the landers. (Which also hit the Moon again.) I'm impressed that they were able to set the buggers to hit the Moon from so far away.
Not to ruin the humor, but it isn't like the lander is there anymore. It crashed elsewhere after lifting Neil and Buzz into orbit.
I'm hoping that they hit those damn whalers on the Moon. (They carry a harpoon!) Their song is driving me nuts.
Except that HST is expected to fail before that. "A few years" is a very long time to a spacecraft. If nothing else, the gyros aren't happy and are getting less so all the time and the batteries are expected fail around 2008/2009.
Not the Saturn V, they crashed the lunar landers back into the Moon after the astronauts left. And they've already done this experiment once (with Lunar Prospector) and found nothing. Granted, it wasn't a dedicated mission, just an interesting way to end the spacecraft. But that does argue for considerable caution in allocating serious money to repeating the experiment.
The Sun didn't actually start at 0% helium, so that throws things off quite a bit. Really, pretty much just the core (and maybe a shell outside of that) will get converted to helium. That's 30% of it's radius, but thanks to compression (therefore a much higher density), it includes a lot more than (0.3)^3 of the total mass. (Sorry, I can't recall that number off hand and my texts are all in my office :(
Probably not. Stars with large iron cores can't produce enough power to support their own masses. That's how you get a supernova. And there are a lot of things about the idea tha a supernova formed the planets that make me very skeptical, including how you get the dichotomy between planet compositions. Of course, a supernova probably *started* our Sun's formation, a theory which is widely held in good regard, if not actually believed, by many astronomers.
How many of the "experts" you refer to where bona fide scientists? Sure, it happens. And they get caught when their work is shown to be deliberately mislead, just like in the other sciences. (You do know that other sciences have had fraud crop up, right?) The social sciences are sciences. The follow the methodolgy. Their results are usually a lot shakier than what we get in the physical sciences, but that doesn't make them non-science or inferior. They're merely different.
You sound like the sort of natural scienist or engineer who is so egocentric that he can't conceive of the value of any other field. Sad bunch of people who don't even have the conviction to post with their identities attached.
I'm plenty cyncial; but just because you're cynical, it doesn't mean that you're right. Foolish cynicism may feel smuggly intellectual to you, but it's every bit as hollow as blind optimism.
Oh, that evil, deadly chemical is destroyed by the wholesome Sun. 5,800 K does a lot of damage to most molecules. I think of it as "cleansing fire."
All sciences evolve like this. How many revolutions have occured in biology in our lifetimes alone? The thing with astronomy is that in many areas we're only at the present epoch getting good looks at the objects we study. You're surpised that there are new discoveries?
Also, you need to understand what a science is. It's not just a "lab science". Not all science rests on laboratory experients. Many require observations. Often, the observations are not exactly repeatable. (How often will you observe a species of bird do exactly the same thing in the wild?) These sciences include geology, meteorology, astronomy, and a lot of biology and are referred to as "historical sciences". In these fields, you can't control the experiment, so you rely on similar observations and the ability to test theories with other, related observations. The key isn't the laboratory or the controls; it's being able to somehow falsify the theory. As long as you can do that, it's a science.
"meteorologists"? What's the weather connection?
It's a poorly worded article, actually. What they *mean* is that the Sun's relative amounts of oxygen-16 may be similar to one thing or another. Clearly the overall compositions are quite different. (Even the gas giants are not all that similar to the Sun's composition.)
It's mostly hydrogen; helium makes up around 20-25% of the Sun. Everything other than those two are trace elements.
The stuff in the corona is injected from the photosphere: basically the Sun's visible "surface". There's a lot of convection in the upper layers of the Sun, so apart from the core (where helium "ash" builds up), it's probably reasonably well-mixed.
Who is denying anyone use of a while species of plant and what court is upholding such an absurd IP claim?
Actually, I'd say it's a *lot* more like stealing music than land. (An analogy isn't invalid just because it makes *you* look bad.) No one is depriving the Brazilians of their native species, after all.
The key difference being that there's no obvious ownership associated any natural species's genetic code. (This is quite apart from saying that companies and researchers shouldn't work with the native people and pass along some of the rewards. "Should" and "must" are two very different concepts, though.)
Wow. You clearly have no idea of the realities of the situation, yet you feel free to make wild claims about what you think can be done with NASA's money.
Let's see... $13 billion... of which most goes to the manned-missions right off. So that's ISS and the shuttles getting the bulk of the money. Research for aerospace stuff gets another reasonably heafty share. In fact, when you get down to it, the solar system exploration budget is around $2 billion, total. That goes to fund research, build new missions, and support existing missions.
In reality, missions are very expensive and mass-producing parts doesn't fix that. Every single mission has to be launched, which is a huge fraction of the total expense right there. Fuel isn't going to get a lot cheaper through the wonders of mass-production. Neither is the man-power needed to plan the details of each mission and to work out and check things like the trajectories. (I'm periphrially involved with selecting an extended tour on a mission right now. It's complicated to say the least.) And modular components only work if the modules are sufficiently useful to a broad number of missions. This is generally not the case, as it turns out. Every mission has specific goals and requirements that almost always demand a new suite of designs. (Check out the latest Mars missions; the new objectives have caused their instruments to be VERY carefully and specifically designed.)
And to put $13 billion into perspective: that's a few percent of what the war in Iraq has costed so far and around 1% of what it will ultimately cost us. In fact, that's the price of about 7 stealth bombers. Which were easier to mass-produce than interplanetary missions, incidentally.
Your intuition for the money here is dead wrong. I'm not saying NASA is above reproach; it very much so is not. (I can spend days ranting about how much they waste time and money.) But if you want to help solve the problem, you'll have to understand the situation first.