As long as it's being sold across state lines, they have the right to regulate it. And tabacco is produced with the intent to be shipped across state lines. So yes, the Federal Government does have the constitutional right to regulate tabacco.
Actually, you get disks from collisions as well as spin. The objects smack into each other and average out their orbits. Since the average velocity lies in the plane perpindicular to the axis, that's where you get a disk.
The universe as a whole is too tenuous to be collisional. So that's not it.
Isotropy does imply conservation of angular momentum, but I'm not sure that it implies a non-rotating universe.
I'm told that there are ways to tell if the universe were rotating, but I've never figured out what they are. (For the record, those telling me are other astronomers, so there's hopefully some knowledge there...) I wouldn't be surprised, though; I can tell you if an an object IN the universe is rotating. (But not, as it turns out, moving through space at a constant speed, apart from declaring a relative motion.)
Cosmology is like all of science. Each answer opens new questions. The questions get more detailed and specific with each iteration, but they don't stop. Although I'm not sure that we'll find that the aswers are simple. I see no reason for them to be; our brains are wired to see certain things as simple, cosmology isn't one of those things.
You can create spin*, as long as you create the opposite spin elsewhere. Just like you can start yourself from rest and get moving as long as you push something the other way.
There is (according to current understanding) definately a density wave there. Read Binney and Tremaine's "Galactic Dynamics", for example. While it's certainly true that stars virtually never collide, they don't have to to propogate a wave. Their mutual gravity binds them together quite nicely. (We see the same sorts of behaviors in Saturn's rings, incidentally. The rings are also collisional, but self-gravity is what lets most of the waves propogate.)
If the arms rotated because of the stellar orbits, you can easily see that the arms would be wound up beyond recognition by now. So that clearly doesn't work. (It's referred to as the "winding problem" in astrophysics.)
By the way, I'm pretty sure that sound waves aren't consider "density waves". The latter are driven by gravity, sound waves are pressure waves.
The result is only one of a number of odd things in granular flow studies. It's still a very poorly understood set of physics, but with a lot of applications. Mixing products, including drugs, often requires understanding granular flows, for example.
Out of curiosity, did anyone manage to get seismic data by looking at how Jupiter's envelope moved after Shoemaker-Levy 9's fragments hit?
Kind of. I think some groups looked at it, but they were only looking for atmosphere-level diagnostics. (I think the farthest down they thought they might be able to sense was the metallic hydrogen transition.) I don't recall any results from that, actually, so I'm not sure if they really panned out. Certainly I've heard nothing that says we learned about the core.
I'm pretty sure this question has been answered at some point, though, as you get very similar material coming out of conventional fast neutron reactors in the form of spent fuel.
Ooo, good point. Unless they do something to the spent fuel that I don't know about, I've never heard of a worry about the spent fuel restarting itself. Which is probably saying something for our purposes.
Any of the books I have lying around that talk about gas giant structure are old enough that they're still speculating about whether a rocky core exists at all, so they weren't much help.
Actually, they're not that old necessarily. We still don't know if there's a core. The problem is that we don't have a good equation of state for materials at those pressures and temperatures and that the data from the Voyager flybys and Galileo orbits isn't that strong a constraint. (You're forced to use minor deflections in the trajectories to determine the deep interior structure. But that structure is, of course, shielded by many Earth-masses of overlying hydrogen and helium.)
It's easier to tell what's going on at the other planets, being lighter, since the temperatures and pressures are lower and there is less material over the core. (Also, Saturn's rings provide an interesting constraint, as I recall.)
My older sources on Jupiter mainly say that its heat source is from things like latent heat of fusion as materials continue to fraction out. Is this still thought to be the case?
I don't think I've ever seen anyone speculate about heat of fusion. (For anyone who doesn't know, this isn't nuclear fusion, it's the latent heat released when your go from liquid to solid phase. It's probably unfortunate that the chemists use the word "fusion" here.) Differentiation has been considered, but I don't think it's held in favor. The planet has probably had ample time for most kinds of differentiation to occur. (Saturn still has some differentiation occuring, we think. But in this case, it's helium rain in the atmosphere. But the conditions only appear to be right for this at Saturn and nowhere else.) However, it does seem that Jupiter could still be contracting, which also releases heat.
Even using a fast-neutron raction, I'd wager (feel free to fill in the nuclear physics here, though) that if the daughter isotopes moderate the reaction enough to stop it, then their daughter products probably will as well. Lighter elements aren't necessarily incapable of this, after all. (Carbon is a good moderator, as I recall.)
Yeah, I considered that the restarted dynamo would be randomly oriented. That was actually the objection, although I didn't want to go on about it in the original post. You'd expect, in reactor case, to see the new field aligned the same way as before the (dipole!) fieldless period as often as anti-aligned. You don't see that, however. It actually reverses. That requires explanation in the model and the reactor doesn't manage that. A simple, continuous dynamo does it well. (You can get a dynamo with feedback to do this, never mind one as complex as Earth's. And besides, the Sun does it. And we know that the Sun's energy source doesn't shut off every 11 years;-)
I'd like to see your sources on the core of Jupiter. I can cite a lot of sources to back up my statement, if you like. "The New Solar System" is an easily accessable book that covers the topic adequately. If you want something more detailed, "Protostars and Planets IV" has a nice discussion of this. I'd bet that the new Jupiter book from Cambridge University Press covers it, but my copy hasn't arrived yet.
If you're not finding references that say that the core is mainly ice, I'm curious where you're looking. (No, really: I'm curious.)
That said, no, there probably ices there if there is, in fact, a core. (We don't know for certain that there is as the data are sketchy. Oddly, it's easier to tell at the other giant planets.) Under the kinds of pressures at the center of Jupiter, rock and ice would be slushy, we think. We really don't understand the physics all that well for those pressures and temperatures, alas. (Which are, obviously, difficult to reproduce and to model since we have no good equations of state.)
Even if there aren't any ices, you're right that it's a moot point: there's not that much uranium in the planet unless our cosmochemistry is seriously wacked. (That is to say, unless there's a lot MORE uranium in Jupiter than in the Earth and in the galaxy at large. Which then requires an explanation as to where it all came from and how it got enriched in the giant planets.)
What's worse is that you need a lot more uranium than Earth has to generate your heat that way. Jupiter puts significantly more heat that it takes in from the Sun. (Earth takes in about 1360 W/m^2 and adds an additional 0.01 W/m^2 to the outgoing flux due to internal heat. Jupiter's internal heat is of order the same as what it takes in from the Sun. The latter being about 1/30 of what the Earth recieves.)
And you can't restart the reactor by letting the uranium daughter istopes decay. What do you think that they decay into? Lead, mainly. If thorium stops the reactions, I'm pretty sure that lead will, too.
If you want other objects, I gots 'em. Like the fact that you need a LOT of uranium to make this work. (Again, where is it coming from?) And that the primorial Earth would have been wickedly active. (Take the heat for formation, heat of differentiation, and add in not the radioactive decay buy a nuclear generator with a LOT more fuel and therefore a much more vigorous reactor. Basically, what the reactor model does is speed the burn rate. Which means, since we know the present heating rate of the Earth pretty well, you have to make it a lot hotter in the past with the reactor model than with pure decay. One would need to look at the model to see how hot, but I wouldn't be surprised, say, 3 billion years ago there would be too much heating to leave solid rock lying around.
You raised another of mine, how the uranium headed downward rather than sticking around with the silicates.
Actually, in a direct sense, the ground currents are caused by Earth's field. It's when the field snaps back from CME*-induced distortions that we get those nasty currents. The Sun is driving it, but it's via a CME, which then messes with Earth's field, which then causes the currents.
That said, if Earth's magnetic field didn't exclude the Sun's, would there be an EMF? Yeah, I should think so. But the Sun's field is mainly in the plane of Earth's orbit and varies comparatively slowly. (Over hours or more, rather than, say, seconds.) So I wouldn't expect a lot of induced EMF as per Faraday's law. (Caveat: This is from memory. I have the details about the solar wind and interplanetary magnetic field in my texts in my office, but I'm (happily) not there at the moment.)
That theory is treated with serious skepticism for a reason. (Well, lots of reasons, really.) I can recall having this discussion here before and I forget the details of the theory, but I recall that the author showed an accute lack of understanding of planetary science among other things. (Jupiter is unlikely to have much more of a given metal than the Earth, oddly enough. The core is only at most about 10 Earth masses, and that's mostly ices. Also, the reactor theory doesn't explain field reversals or why the Sun has a field while dynamo theory explains both fairly naturally. Mind you, no one pretends to understand the details of theory since it's wickedly non-linear, but the basics of the theory seem to be fairly solid.)
Just in your post, I can say that it's unlikely that the field would stop because of build-up of wastes. For one thing, the wastes would either build up or they'd continually be lost. If they *did* build up, they'd slow the reactor down which would cool the system, leading to more sluggish convection and less mobile atoms. That would tend to freeze the wastes in place, not remove them.
Radioactive materials aren't the same as a nuclear reactor. Unstable elements (like uraniam) or isotopes will break down regardless. A reactor has nearby radioative atoms triggering fission in their neighbors. For this, you need a fairly high density of radioative elements in close proximity. That's why they have to purify uranium ore, for example, to make fuel rods. (And further purify the isotopes to make weapons-grade uranium.)
The interiorof the Earth is almost certainly not a reactor. That theory has a lot of holes (we've argued this before on Slashdot, I know). The Earth's interior is more like an RTG on a spacecraft: you let the atoms decay at their own pace and use the heat rather than trigger a chain-reaction.
Eccentricity isn't a player in moon-ness. It can tell you something about the origin of the moon in question (a large eccentricity, along with a high inclination and a retrograde orbit, is symptomatic of a captured body), but the distinction is bascially: does the object orbit a planet and is it bigger than some minimum size. (Probably in the region of kilometers or tens of kilometers. Opinions will vary about where to draw the line.)
What, Mars's moons? No. They're big enough to be moons.
A moonlet is of order 10 km is diameter, typically. Actually, I don't think we've actually seen any to date. (Well, not conclusively.) In reality, the term is sort of slang anyway. Either you're a moon or you aren't. (Ring particles, dust, etc. are too small to be moons. Bigger, natural things orbiting planets... moons.)
Well, for one thing, an asteroid is a rocky/metallic body that orbits the Sun, not a planet. Moons can be made of anything and orbit planets (major or minor).
I'm dubious of a definition of "moon" that allows for artifical satellites, by the way. While the use of the word "moon" is somewhat debated in astronomical circles (there are those who claim that it should only apply to the Moon), I don't know that anyone thinks that it should include artifical satellites.
To be fair, the article (around the middle) mentions that voters had the opposite problem: votes intended for Bush were showing up for Kerry. So it doesn't sound like a systematic attempt to cheat the vote. (Although statistics on how many mis-votes occur each way would be very interesting.)
That said, of course the friggin' problem is in the machines. OK, so the voters are maybe not using them exactly as intended. But, I'm sorry, if touching the screen with my palm accidentally will mis-register a vote, then they need to re-work the design. It's clear that a lot of people are having this sort of problem, so it's a design flaw.
If they're selling the things under the premise that they'll make voting easier and more accurate, they'd better be able to handle real-world usage.
(And that's all assuming that the problem is not a more basic bug in the system. The fact that people have had multiple misvotes in a row implies, to me, that it might be a more basic flaw than how people are using them. When you make a mistake once, you usually are much more careful the next time. So I'm dubious that people are making the same mistakes. It's possible, but I'm not convinced.)
What bothered me about the negative values is that in a one or two places the curve drops about an error bar below 0. While within the error bar, that's still kind of scary. And since the sunspot number is at least *claimed* to have gotten down that far in the past 400 years (during the Maunder Minimum), they should be able to extrapolate assuming a robust algorithm.
One meta-reason that I was (and am) so skeptical of the error bars is how dicey their extrapolation seems. They're using C-14 as a proxy for cosmic rays, which in turn they're using as a proxy for sunspots. You can imagine a lot of ways to mess with these steps. (For example, variations in Earth's magnetic field would cause more or less bombardment from solar particles, regardless of the actual variations in the flux.)
I'm not sure I trust their error bars (they appear on the second plot). Since they're using 10-year averages, they should be removing the effects of the solar cycle. But their sunspot number curves drop below 0 sunspots in several places. A negative number of sunspots is, obviously, unphysical. Also, their data is pretty wildly varying over short timescales (again, solar cycle should be removed) and doesn't match the actual sunspot records from 1610 on very well, either.
While it's true people don't often explicitly vote for someone because he's more handsome, it doesn't seem like it's that far below the surface in their thinking. Several times I've heard people say, "I think so-and-so just looks like a nicer person," and other things to that effect.
True, it's pretty silly. (And pretty clearly a joke, given the icons posted with the story.) But is it worse than picking a candidate based on who is more attractive or taller? Given that people seem to use things like looks or who they're most like to have a beer with, I'm not sure the web page validity is necessarily a significantly dumber criterion. They all leave me weeping for my country.
How does the energy in the Sun matter? What matters is how the field lines are tangled up. There is nothing that I can see that would indicate that a bulge would affect that at all, it would just draw out the radial region over which things are occuring a bit. The motions are the same, though. So no significant change seems expected.
If your intuition says otherwise, go ahead and make the models. It's every bit as much up to your to prove your intuition as it is up to me to prove mine. (More, in as much as I've given at least hand-wavy explanations of my case.) However, you'll find that modelling MHD is a pain in the butt and we're only just barely capable of doing it on small scales. Doing the kinds of models you need is well beyond present capabilities.
And the net result of those photons's gravitionation affects the Earth not a measurable amount. I don't have a calculator handy, but even the sunlight streaming toward the Earth only has an equivalent mass density of 1E-22 kg/m^3 fight over the surface. You can kind of tell that this isn't important because you never hear about anyone having to account for it. For example, NASA doesn't need to take this into account when plotting spacecraft trajectories. The distance to the Moon, which varies by a few Earth radii (out of an average of 62) is going to affect things a lot more.
Also, you're theory breaks down when you consider that the Earth gets more additional sunlight when it's closer to the Sun than it does from a full moon. Remember, the Moon is about as reflective as charcoal. Not a lot of light bounces off o it. And what is bounced off (of a smaller surface than Earth has to begin with) is sent off in a lot of directions, not just straight at the Earth.
Slashdot Mirror
As long as it's being sold across state lines, they have the right to regulate it. And tabacco is produced with the intent to be shipped across state lines. So yes, the Federal Government does have the constitutional right to regulate tabacco.
Actually, you get disks from collisions as well as spin. The objects smack into each other and average out their orbits. Since the average velocity lies in the plane perpindicular to the axis, that's where you get a disk.
The universe as a whole is too tenuous to be collisional. So that's not it.
Isotropy does imply conservation of angular momentum, but I'm not sure that it implies a non-rotating universe.
I'm told that there are ways to tell if the universe were rotating, but I've never figured out what they are. (For the record, those telling me are other astronomers, so there's hopefully some knowledge there...) I wouldn't be surprised, though; I can tell you if an an object IN the universe is rotating. (But not, as it turns out, moving through space at a constant speed, apart from declaring a relative motion.)
Cosmology is like all of science. Each answer opens new questions. The questions get more detailed and specific with each iteration, but they don't stop. Although I'm not sure that we'll find that the aswers are simple. I see no reason for them to be; our brains are wired to see certain things as simple, cosmology isn't one of those things.
You can create spin*, as long as you create the opposite spin elsewhere. Just like you can start yourself from rest and get moving as long as you push something the other way.
* By "spin" I really mean angular momentum.
There is (according to current understanding) definately a density wave there. Read Binney and Tremaine's "Galactic Dynamics", for example. While it's certainly true that stars virtually never collide, they don't have to to propogate a wave. Their mutual gravity binds them together quite nicely. (We see the same sorts of behaviors in Saturn's rings, incidentally. The rings are also collisional, but self-gravity is what lets most of the waves propogate.)
If the arms rotated because of the stellar orbits, you can easily see that the arms would be wound up beyond recognition by now. So that clearly doesn't work. (It's referred to as the "winding problem" in astrophysics.)
By the way, I'm pretty sure that sound waves aren't consider "density waves". The latter are driven by gravity, sound waves are pressure waves.
The result is only one of a number of odd things in granular flow studies. It's still a very poorly understood set of physics, but with a lot of applications. Mixing products, including drugs, often requires understanding granular flows, for example.
Out of curiosity, did anyone manage to get seismic data by looking at how Jupiter's envelope moved after Shoemaker-Levy 9's fragments hit?
Kind of. I think some groups looked at it, but they were only looking for atmosphere-level diagnostics. (I think the farthest down they thought they might be able to sense was the metallic hydrogen transition.) I don't recall any results from that, actually, so I'm not sure if they really panned out. Certainly I've heard nothing that says we learned about the core.
I'm pretty sure this question has been answered at some point, though, as you get very similar material coming out of conventional fast neutron reactors in the form of spent fuel.
Ooo, good point. Unless they do something to the spent fuel that I don't know about, I've never heard of a worry about the spent fuel restarting itself. Which is probably saying something for our purposes.
Any of the books I have lying around that talk about gas giant structure are old enough that they're still speculating about whether a rocky core exists at all, so they weren't much help.
Actually, they're not that old necessarily. We still don't know if there's a core. The problem is that we don't have a good equation of state for materials at those pressures and temperatures and that the data from the Voyager flybys and Galileo orbits isn't that strong a constraint. (You're forced to use minor deflections in the trajectories to determine the deep interior structure. But that structure is, of course, shielded by many Earth-masses of overlying hydrogen and helium.)
It's easier to tell what's going on at the other planets, being lighter, since the temperatures and pressures are lower and there is less material over the core. (Also, Saturn's rings provide an interesting constraint, as I recall.)
My older sources on Jupiter mainly say that its heat source is from things like latent heat of fusion as materials continue to fraction out. Is this still thought to be the case?
I don't think I've ever seen anyone speculate about heat of fusion. (For anyone who doesn't know, this isn't nuclear fusion, it's the latent heat released when your go from liquid to solid phase. It's probably unfortunate that the chemists use the word "fusion" here.) Differentiation has been considered, but I don't think it's held in favor. The planet has probably had ample time for most kinds of differentiation to occur. (Saturn still has some differentiation occuring, we think. But in this case, it's helium rain in the atmosphere. But the conditions only appear to be right for this at Saturn and nowhere else.) However, it does seem that Jupiter could still be contracting, which also releases heat.
Even using a fast-neutron raction, I'd wager (feel free to fill in the nuclear physics here, though) that if the daughter isotopes moderate the reaction enough to stop it, then their daughter products probably will as well. Lighter elements aren't necessarily incapable of this, after all. (Carbon is a good moderator, as I recall.)
Yeah, I considered that the restarted dynamo would be randomly oriented. That was actually the objection, although I didn't want to go on about it in the original post. You'd expect, in reactor case, to see the new field aligned the same way as before the (dipole!) fieldless period as often as anti-aligned. You don't see that, however. It actually reverses. That requires explanation in the model and the reactor doesn't manage that. A simple, continuous dynamo does it well. (You can get a dynamo with feedback to do this, never mind one as complex as Earth's. And besides, the Sun does it. And we know that the Sun's energy source doesn't shut off every 11 years ;-)
I'd like to see your sources on the core of Jupiter. I can cite a lot of sources to back up my statement, if you like. "The New Solar System" is an easily accessable book that covers the topic adequately. If you want something more detailed, "Protostars and Planets IV" has a nice discussion of this. I'd bet that the new Jupiter book from Cambridge University Press covers it, but my copy hasn't arrived yet.
If you're not finding references that say that the core is mainly ice, I'm curious where you're looking. (No, really: I'm curious.)
That said, no, there probably ices there if there is, in fact, a core. (We don't know for certain that there is as the data are sketchy. Oddly, it's easier to tell at the other giant planets.) Under the kinds of pressures at the center of Jupiter, rock and ice would be slushy, we think. We really don't understand the physics all that well for those pressures and temperatures, alas. (Which are, obviously, difficult to reproduce and to model since we have no good equations of state.)
Even if there aren't any ices, you're right that it's a moot point: there's not that much uranium in the planet unless our cosmochemistry is seriously wacked. (That is to say, unless there's a lot MORE uranium in Jupiter than in the Earth and in the galaxy at large. Which then requires an explanation as to where it all came from and how it got enriched in the giant planets.)
What's worse is that you need a lot more uranium than Earth has to generate your heat that way. Jupiter puts significantly more heat that it takes in from the Sun. (Earth takes in about 1360 W/m^2 and adds an additional 0.01 W/m^2 to the outgoing flux due to internal heat. Jupiter's internal heat is of order the same as what it takes in from the Sun. The latter being about 1/30 of what the Earth recieves.)
And you can't restart the reactor by letting the uranium daughter istopes decay. What do you think that they decay into? Lead, mainly. If thorium stops the reactions, I'm pretty sure that lead will, too.
If you want other objects, I gots 'em. Like the fact that you need a LOT of uranium to make this work. (Again, where is it coming from?) And that the primorial Earth would have been wickedly active. (Take the heat for formation, heat of differentiation, and add in not the radioactive decay buy a nuclear generator with a LOT more fuel and therefore a much more vigorous reactor. Basically, what the reactor model does is speed the burn rate. Which means, since we know the present heating rate of the Earth pretty well, you have to make it a lot hotter in the past with the reactor model than with pure decay. One would need to look at the model to see how hot, but I wouldn't be surprised, say, 3 billion years ago there would be too much heating to leave solid rock lying around.
You raised another of mine, how the uranium headed downward rather than sticking around with the silicates.
Actually, in a direct sense, the ground currents are caused by Earth's field. It's when the field snaps back from CME*-induced distortions that we get those nasty currents. The Sun is driving it, but it's via a CME, which then messes with Earth's field, which then causes the currents.
That said, if Earth's magnetic field didn't exclude the Sun's, would there be an EMF? Yeah, I should think so. But the Sun's field is mainly in the plane of Earth's orbit and varies comparatively slowly. (Over hours or more, rather than, say, seconds.) So I wouldn't expect a lot of induced EMF as per Faraday's law. (Caveat: This is from memory. I have the details about the solar wind and interplanetary magnetic field in my texts in my office, but I'm (happily) not there at the moment.)
* Coronal Mass Ejection
That theory is treated with serious skepticism for a reason. (Well, lots of reasons, really.) I can recall having this discussion here before and I forget the details of the theory, but I recall that the author showed an accute lack of understanding of planetary science among other things. (Jupiter is unlikely to have much more of a given metal than the Earth, oddly enough. The core is only at most about 10 Earth masses, and that's mostly ices. Also, the reactor theory doesn't explain field reversals or why the Sun has a field while dynamo theory explains both fairly naturally. Mind you, no one pretends to understand the details of theory since it's wickedly non-linear, but the basics of the theory seem to be fairly solid.)
Just in your post, I can say that it's unlikely that the field would stop because of build-up of wastes. For one thing, the wastes would either build up or they'd continually be lost. If they *did* build up, they'd slow the reactor down which would cool the system, leading to more sluggish convection and less mobile atoms. That would tend to freeze the wastes in place, not remove them.
Radioactive materials aren't the same as a nuclear reactor. Unstable elements (like uraniam) or isotopes will break down regardless. A reactor has nearby radioative atoms triggering fission in their neighbors. For this, you need a fairly high density of radioative elements in close proximity. That's why they have to purify uranium ore, for example, to make fuel rods. (And further purify the isotopes to make weapons-grade uranium.)
The interiorof the Earth is almost certainly not a reactor. That theory has a lot of holes (we've argued this before on Slashdot, I know). The Earth's interior is more like an RTG on a spacecraft: you let the atoms decay at their own pace and use the heat rather than trigger a chain-reaction.
Eccentricity isn't a player in moon-ness. It can tell you something about the origin of the moon in question (a large eccentricity, along with a high inclination and a retrograde orbit, is symptomatic of a captured body), but the distinction is bascially: does the object orbit a planet and is it bigger than some minimum size. (Probably in the region of kilometers or tens of kilometers. Opinions will vary about where to draw the line.)
What, Mars's moons? No. They're big enough to be moons.
A moonlet is of order 10 km is diameter, typically. Actually, I don't think we've actually seen any to date. (Well, not conclusively.) In reality, the term is sort of slang anyway. Either you're a moon or you aren't. (Ring particles, dust, etc. are too small to be moons. Bigger, natural things orbiting planets... moons.)
Well, in fairness, this time he's stealing ice rather than fire. So maybe he's trying to make amends.
Well, for one thing, an asteroid is a rocky/metallic body that orbits the Sun, not a planet. Moons can be made of anything and orbit planets (major or minor).
I'm dubious of a definition of "moon" that allows for artifical satellites, by the way. While the use of the word "moon" is somewhat debated in astronomical circles (there are those who claim that it should only apply to the Moon), I don't know that anyone thinks that it should include artifical satellites.
To be fair, the article (around the middle) mentions that voters had the opposite problem: votes intended for Bush were showing up for Kerry. So it doesn't sound like a systematic attempt to cheat the vote. (Although statistics on how many mis-votes occur each way would be very interesting.)
That said, of course the friggin' problem is in the machines. OK, so the voters are maybe not using them exactly as intended. But, I'm sorry, if touching the screen with my palm accidentally will mis-register a vote, then they need to re-work the design. It's clear that a lot of people are having this sort of problem, so it's a design flaw.
If they're selling the things under the premise that they'll make voting easier and more accurate, they'd better be able to handle real-world usage.
(And that's all assuming that the problem is not a more basic bug in the system. The fact that people have had multiple misvotes in a row implies, to me, that it might be a more basic flaw than how people are using them. When you make a mistake once, you usually are much more careful the next time. So I'm dubious that people are making the same mistakes. It's possible, but I'm not convinced.)
What bothered me about the negative values is that in a one or two places the curve drops about an error bar below 0. While within the error bar, that's still kind of scary. And since the sunspot number is at least *claimed* to have gotten down that far in the past 400 years (during the Maunder Minimum), they should be able to extrapolate assuming a robust algorithm.
One meta-reason that I was (and am) so skeptical of the error bars is how dicey their extrapolation seems. They're using C-14 as a proxy for cosmic rays, which in turn they're using as a proxy for sunspots. You can imagine a lot of ways to mess with these steps. (For example, variations in Earth's magnetic field would cause more or less bombardment from solar particles, regardless of the actual variations in the flux.)
Still, thanks for the extra info!
Can't it be both? ;-)
I'm not sure I trust their error bars (they appear on the second plot). Since they're using 10-year averages, they should be removing the effects of the solar cycle. But their sunspot number curves drop below 0 sunspots in several places. A negative number of sunspots is, obviously, unphysical. Also, their data is pretty wildly varying over short timescales (again, solar cycle should be removed) and doesn't match the actual sunspot records from 1610 on very well, either.
While it's true people don't often explicitly vote for someone because he's more handsome, it doesn't seem like it's that far below the surface in their thinking. Several times I've heard people say, "I think so-and-so just looks like a nicer person," and other things to that effect.
True, it's pretty silly. (And pretty clearly a joke, given the icons posted with the story.) But is it worse than picking a candidate based on who is more attractive or taller? Given that people seem to use things like looks or who they're most like to have a beer with, I'm not sure the web page validity is necessarily a significantly dumber criterion. They all leave me weeping for my country.
How does the energy in the Sun matter? What matters is how the field lines are tangled up. There is nothing that I can see that would indicate that a bulge would affect that at all, it would just draw out the radial region over which things are occuring a bit. The motions are the same, though. So no significant change seems expected.
If your intuition says otherwise, go ahead and make the models. It's every bit as much up to your to prove your intuition as it is up to me to prove mine. (More, in as much as I've given at least hand-wavy explanations of my case.) However, you'll find that modelling MHD is a pain in the butt and we're only just barely capable of doing it on small scales. Doing the kinds of models you need is well beyond present capabilities.
And now we know what Bush had strapped to his back during the debates.
And the net result of those photons's gravitionation affects the Earth not a measurable amount. I don't have a calculator handy, but even the sunlight streaming toward the Earth only has an equivalent mass density of 1E-22 kg/m^3 fight over the surface. You can kind of tell that this isn't important because you never hear about anyone having to account for it. For example, NASA doesn't need to take this into account when plotting spacecraft trajectories. The distance to the Moon, which varies by a few Earth radii (out of an average of 62) is going to affect things a lot more.
Also, you're theory breaks down when you consider that the Earth gets more additional sunlight when it's closer to the Sun than it does from a full moon. Remember, the Moon is about as reflective as charcoal. Not a lot of light bounces off o it. And what is bounced off (of a smaller surface than Earth has to begin with) is sent off in a lot of directions, not just straight at the Earth.