"There are a hundred billion stars in the Galaxy, and if just one in a million of those have planets, and if just one in a million of *those* have life, and if just one in a million of _those_ have intelligent civilizations, then that's still thousands of civilizations!"
*smacks head*
Maybe she was just trying to impress her hottie bible-guy, but still, that was lame.
We cannot ignore that the word "theory" is widely misunderstood outside the scientific community, where it means something closer to "wild guess" or "stab in the dark" than a rigourous, well-tested hypothesis that is almost certainly correct, or close to correct.
This yahoo's attempt to insert "theory" after "Big Bang" in press releases is not out of want for scientific rigor; it is the point of a very disturbing wedge, one whose ultimate goal is a society in which everything is subservient to theology, even the physical sciences. We are sliding down the slippery slope, toward Sagan's Demon-Haunted Land.
Some of this will undoubtedly be self-correcting, as the insurance companies are probably going to up their premiums significantly for anyone who insists on rebuilding in the area.
But the insurance companies are surely going to get bailed out by the federal government. Isn't that SOP when a disaster like this strikes? Surely they wouldn't have the gall to up their premiums given that we the taxpayers are picking up the tab! Surely...right?
The two Texas Universities are not spearheading this effort; that Aggie article was very misleading. The Carnegie Institute is the major player, and that is a private institution. The remaining partners (except Harvard) are public universities.
The spin-cast oven is huge. In these pictures, you only see the top portion of it, it actually fills the floor below as well. I believe this is the only large spin-cast mirror facility in the world. The idea behind spin-casting is that, by spinning the molten glass as it is slowly cooled, you automatically get a paraboloid top surface. This makes the final shaping of the mirror much easier, since the first-order shape is already there.
Actually, in the case of the GMT, it will use seven mirrors, six of which are off-axis. The off-axis mirrors will obviously have a more complicated surface than a typical on-axis paraboloid. The mirror being cast now is an off-axis mirror; it is a proof-of-concept that they can grind an eight-meter chunk of glass to an off-axis paraboloid shape with a surface RMS of 20 nanometers (!).
In a few months when the mirror has cooled and solidified, it will be removed from the oven, cleaned, ground, and eventually, polished. The stress-lap polisher is very impressive. It has a network of stress actuators above it, which can dynamically change the shape of the polisher's surface as it travels across the mirror.
It's interesting that the "Aggie Daily News" was chosen as the linked story, which makes it sound like UT Austin and Texas A&M are the major players in the GMT, along with a handful of other, unnamed institutions. In fact, the Carnegie Institute is the impetus behind the project, and the U of Arizona is providing the mirrors. I think this UA News article is much more informative.
It's one piece of glass, with a single, smooth surface on the front, 8.4 m in diameter. The hexagonal "pieces" are holes on the backside. It basically looks like a big honeycomb. This design gives you great stiffness and strength, with only 20% the weight that a solid mirror would have.
Ah, the indignation of the armchair Free Software Critic. Note how he comes to conclusions based on a cursory glance at a few mockups, and is able to sneer in plain text. Especially skilled is his repeated entreaty that someone, ANYONE, give him a Free desktop which meets his exacting (if completely unspecified) standards for usability, innovation, and excellence.
Their existence in the geek ecosystem is a bit of a mystery, since for all their bluster, they generally contribute nothing to the actual development of the projects they rail against endlessly. Suggestions that they actually help by making suggestions on a mailing list, or filing a bug report or wish, or (perish the thought) actually write some actual code, usually fall on deaf ears.
I should really know better than to reply to crackpots, but what the heck...
I looked into that whole thing. Most of the people who make that claim refer to Keplers laws of motion for orbiting bodies. If you assume the stars orbit a heavy core and don't interact with each other you get a galactic rotation curve that tapers off with radius. Real measured curves are nearly flat, so they conclude some "dark matter" that has some really unintuitive properties (see below).
Newton showed that given an spherical mass distribution, the gravitational force felt at a particular point at radius R is mathematically identical to having the enclosed mass M(R) in a point at the center. For points in the plane of a disk distribution of mass, the same arguments hold. In other words, if there is no dark matter, you should still see a "Keplerian falloff" in the velocities of stars in the outskirts of a galactic disk (where M(R) is becoming constant with R because the density is falling off exponentially). No such falloff is seen in real galaxy disks. Therefore, either gravity is not an inverse-square law, or there is more mass in the outskirts of galaxies that we can't see.
My own calculations of a rotation curve for a uniform flat disk of stars using interactions between all stars shows velocity increasing roughly linearly all the way out, and increasing even faster toward the edge.
Your calculations are either totally wrong, or you are using a bizarre M(R) mass distribution.
Perhaps reading a modern textbook on galactic dynamics, such as Binney & Tremaine will help you to better understand the fundamentals of modern dynamics theory.
The interaction with regular matter must be asymetric. Why? Because they model it as a sphere of dark matter enclosing a disk shaped galaxy to get the expected rotation curve. If dark matter interacted with itself and visible matter in the same way visible matter interacts with itself, they should have the same distribution.
The reason the dark matter distribution is spherical and the baryonic matter distribution is a flattened disk is quite simple: hydrodynamics. Gas feels hydrodynamic forces, DM feels only gravity. IOW, gas particles can dissipate energy through collisional interactions, which will cause an initially spherical distribution to flatten into a rotating disk as it collapses under gravity. DM particles, apparently, cannot dissipate energy in this fashion (which is entirely consistent with the fact that DM doesn't emit light...both properties result if DM simply does not participate in the electromagnetic force). That's your asymmetry.
I think they just observed that a big sphere of stuff would make their flawed model match reality and said "oh there must be this goofy thing here".
What can I say? I'm insulted. You're utterly wrong if you think that real cosmological theory is only flimsily supported by evidence and weakly motivated by theory. Just because you are ignorant of the evidence and theory behind cosmology does not mean they don't exist.
Remember, there are NO direct observations of dark matter (or energy).
Given the nature of DM, our observations of it are as direct as they can possibly be. I mean, consider for the moment that a particle exists which only interacts through the gravitational force. What, pray tell, would satisfy you as direct evidence of its existence, if not the telltale signs of a gravitational field unaccompanied by baryonic matter?
My biggest complaint isn't with the distributors, but with the software developers
Since you are complaining about lack of binaries, you have this opening sentence precisely backwards. Binaries are the responsibility of the distributors, not the developers. How could it be otherwise?
Yeah, interesting theory. Too bad no one has ever taken a spectrum of a comet tail to find out if it's sublimated ices or 'supersonic' bits of rock.
How does their 'theory' purport to explain the second tail of comets, which points along the comet's direction of motion, rather than away from the Sun? Maybe only *some* of the bits of rock are electrically charged? Maybe magic comet elves rub the charge off of some bits?
I had never heard of the Electric Universe, but they seem on par with the flat-earthers and creationists.
The problem with KDE is, even if its usability is fine, it's all thrown out the window as soon as you open non-KDE apps, because in their infinite wisdom, open source programmers decided to divide programs up into groups, each group having completely different interfaces and settings.
Yes, this is completely unique to open source. OS X would never craft a commpletely unique interface for, say, Quicktime. Or The Calculator. It's all about the HIG for them, right?
The larger point here is that opne source developers are not a single entity, so *of course* they don't necessarily coordinate UI decisions. However, this is starting to change. And commercial desktops like OS X and Windows don't have this excuse.
Even simple dialog boxes seem to be over 1200 pixels wide.
I hate to call you a liar, can you tell us what this "simpe" dialog is?
His machine is a 2.2 GHz celeron. What you are quoting is the "minimum system requirements" according to MS, which he included as part of his comparison.
It may very well be true that only an idiot would try to run MS Office with a pentium 233; however, if so then it must also be true that MS thinks its customers are idiots, since that's what they recommend.
Thankfully in this country we have checks and balances.
...but the checks and balances are among the components of our Republic being systematically dismantled. "Activist judge" is the new slander for a judge that dares exercise their duty to check and balance.
Except that Yellow Dog has already said that they aren't going to transition to x86, they're sticking to PPC. Yes, it's possible that this divergence will decrease sales to the point that they go out of business, but they seem to think it will increase their presence in the xserve market.
Nah, it's not even a little scary. Fusion is quite unlike fission, in that it's really hard to get going and just as hard to keep going.
With fission, all you have to do is put too much Uranium (or Plutonium or whatever nasty, radioactive stuff) in a closet, and it will spontaneously sustain itself in a "chain reaction". If you put way too much stuff in the closet, then the chain reaction runs away and explodes, spontaneously.
With fusion, you take a tiny sphere of deuterium (or tritium) and blast it for a tiny fraction of a second with the World's Largest Laser Beam. If you are really, really lucky, the deuterium will fuse to helium and you'll get out a little bit more energy than you spent getting the thing to fuse. There's no possibility of a runaway here, because there's no chain reaction. You can simply choose not to fire the WLLB at any point.
What if the maintainer doesn't agree with Random Joe Developer's patch, with which Joe was hoping to claim a bounty? The patch could be poor-quality, or maybe it doesn't conform to the guidelines in the project's CODING file, or maybe the maintainer doesn't want to see the feature in question implemented for some reason (bloat, perhaps).
The whole bounty thing is a huge headache for all involved, with almost no real benefit, AFAICS.
Oh, bullshit. There's a huge mountain of great hobbyist software that belies your "fatal flaw" argument.
I myself try to fix every bug reported to my app as soon as I am able. I respect my users' opinions and feedback; I don't need their money to induce my attention. The fact that I am a hobbyist developer doesn't mean I am uninterested in what you call the "grunt work", because a large part of the satisfaction I derive from the project is the knowledge that others find it useful, beautiful, and fun to use.
This satisfaction is sufficient motivation without some kind of cash-compensation carrot. All I am saying is that a bounty system has the potential to ruin a hobby project, because suddenly it's more like a job, and the users are your boss (not to mention all of the practical implementation nightmares that a bounty system requires). No thanks, we (devs and users) seem to be doing just fine without it.
I don't understand your "commune" analogy either. I take out my trash because I want my kitchen to be clean, and it's not going to take itself out. That's a much more appropriate analogy.
What is needed is a bounty system that users could pay into easily so the bounty could grow over time.
Users love this idea, but FLOSS developers generally hate it. I develop my project for fun in my spare time; I don't want users dictating what I must do with my project. Don't get me wrong; I love getting ideas from users, and more often than not, I implement them. I like my hobby, I don't want it to be a job.
Anyway, there was a huge thread on kde-devel on this very topic a few weeks ago, in case you want more dev perspectives on the matter.
Slashdot Mirror
Also consider Step, which from the description of phun sounds similar to that program.
Step is part of the KDE Edutainment module (or rather, it will be soon...)
Ellie had me until:
"There are a hundred billion stars in the Galaxy, and if just one in a million of those have planets, and if just one in a million of *those* have life, and if just one in a million of _those_ have intelligent civilizations, then that's still thousands of civilizations!"
*smacks head*
Maybe she was just trying to impress her hottie bible-guy, but still, that was lame.
We cannot ignore that the word "theory" is widely misunderstood outside the scientific community, where it means something closer to "wild guess" or "stab in the dark" than a rigourous, well-tested hypothesis that is almost certainly correct, or close to correct.
This yahoo's attempt to insert "theory" after "Big Bang" in press releases is not out of want for scientific rigor; it is the point of a very disturbing wedge, one whose ultimate goal is a society in which everything is subservient to theology, even the physical sciences. We are sliding down the slippery slope, toward Sagan's Demon-Haunted Land.
Be glad you don't have a link, these Electric Universe guys are nothing but crackpots. Think "Flat Earth Society".
Some of this will undoubtedly be self-correcting, as the insurance companies are probably going to up their premiums significantly for anyone who insists on rebuilding in the area.
But the insurance companies are surely going to get bailed out by the federal government. Isn't that SOP when a disaster like this strikes? Surely they wouldn't have the gall to up their premiums given that we the taxpayers are picking up the tab! Surely...right?
Prior art by whom? Creative filed the patent before the iPod was even announced, so you must mean another product...
The two Texas Universities are not spearheading this effort; that Aggie article was very misleading. The Carnegie Institute is the major player, and that is a private institution. The remaining partners (except Harvard) are public universities.
The Steward Observatory Mirror Lab had an open house yesterday for observatory personnel, which I attended.
The spin-cast oven is huge. In these pictures, you only see the top portion of it, it actually fills the floor below as well. I believe this is the only large spin-cast mirror facility in the world. The idea behind spin-casting is that, by spinning the molten glass as it is slowly cooled, you automatically get a paraboloid top surface. This makes the final shaping of the mirror much easier, since the first-order shape is already there.
Actually, in the case of the GMT, it will use seven mirrors, six of which are off-axis. The off-axis mirrors will obviously have a more complicated surface than a typical on-axis paraboloid. The mirror being cast now is an off-axis mirror; it is a proof-of-concept that they can grind an eight-meter chunk of glass to an off-axis paraboloid shape with a surface RMS of 20 nanometers (!).
In a few months when the mirror has cooled and solidified, it will be removed from the oven, cleaned, ground, and eventually, polished. The stress-lap polisher is very impressive. It has a network of stress actuators above it, which can dynamically change the shape of the polisher's surface as it travels across the mirror.
It's interesting that the "Aggie Daily News" was chosen as the linked story, which makes it sound like UT Austin and Texas A&M are the major players in the GMT, along with a handful of other, unnamed institutions. In fact, the Carnegie Institute is the impetus behind the project, and the U of Arizona is providing the mirrors. I think this UA News article is much more informative.
It's one piece of glass, with a single, smooth surface on the front, 8.4 m in diameter. The hexagonal "pieces" are holes on the backside. It basically looks like a big honeycomb. This design gives you great stiffness and strength, with only 20% the weight that a solid mirror would have.
I hardly think that's innovative.
Ah, the indignation of the armchair Free Software Critic. Note how he comes to conclusions based on a cursory glance at a few mockups, and is able to sneer in plain text. Especially skilled is his repeated entreaty that someone, ANYONE, give him a Free desktop which meets his exacting (if completely unspecified) standards for usability, innovation, and excellence.
Their existence in the geek ecosystem is a bit of a mystery, since for all their bluster, they generally contribute nothing to the actual development of the projects they rail against endlessly. Suggestions that they actually help by making suggestions on a mailing list, or filing a bug report or wish, or (perish the thought) actually write some actual code, usually fall on deaf ears.
"Sideways" had brief male nudity too...
I should really know better than to reply to crackpots, but what the heck...
I looked into that whole thing. Most of the people who make that claim refer to Keplers laws of motion for orbiting bodies. If you assume the stars orbit a heavy core and don't interact with each other you get a galactic rotation curve that tapers off with radius. Real measured curves are nearly flat, so they conclude some "dark matter" that has some really unintuitive properties (see below).
Newton showed that given an spherical mass distribution, the gravitational force felt at a particular point at radius R is mathematically identical to having the enclosed mass M(R) in a point at the center. For points in the plane of a disk distribution of mass, the same arguments hold. In other words, if there is no dark matter, you should still see a "Keplerian falloff" in the velocities of stars in the outskirts of a galactic disk (where M(R) is becoming constant with R because the density is falling off exponentially). No such falloff is seen in real galaxy disks. Therefore, either gravity is not an inverse-square law, or there is more mass in the outskirts of galaxies that we can't see.
My own calculations of a rotation curve for a uniform flat disk of stars using interactions between all stars shows velocity increasing roughly linearly all the way out, and increasing even faster toward the edge.
Your calculations are either totally wrong, or you are using a bizarre M(R) mass distribution.
Perhaps reading a modern textbook on galactic dynamics, such as Binney & Tremaine will help you to better understand the fundamentals of modern dynamics theory.
The interaction with regular matter must be asymetric. Why? Because they model it as a sphere of dark matter enclosing a disk shaped galaxy to get the expected rotation curve. If dark matter interacted with itself and visible matter in the same way visible matter interacts with itself, they should have the same distribution.
The reason the dark matter distribution is spherical and the baryonic matter distribution is a flattened disk is quite simple: hydrodynamics. Gas feels hydrodynamic forces, DM feels only gravity. IOW, gas particles can dissipate energy through collisional interactions, which will cause an initially spherical distribution to flatten into a rotating disk as it collapses under gravity. DM particles, apparently, cannot dissipate energy in this fashion (which is entirely consistent with the fact that DM doesn't emit light...both properties result if DM simply does not participate in the electromagnetic force). That's your asymmetry.
I think they just observed that a big sphere of stuff would make their flawed model match reality and said "oh there must be this goofy thing here".
What can I say? I'm insulted. You're utterly wrong if you think that real cosmological theory is only flimsily supported by evidence and weakly motivated by theory. Just because you are ignorant of the evidence and theory behind cosmology does not mean they don't exist.
Remember, there are NO direct observations of dark matter (or energy).
Given the nature of DM, our observations of it are as direct as they can possibly be. I mean,
consider for the moment that a particle exists which only interacts through the gravitational force. What, pray tell, would satisfy you as direct evidence of its existence, if not the telltale signs of a gravitational field unaccompanied by baryonic matter?
My biggest complaint isn't with the distributors, but with the software developers
Since you are complaining about lack of binaries, you have this opening sentence precisely backwards. Binaries are the responsibility of the distributors, not the developers. How could it be otherwise?
Yeah, interesting theory. Too bad no one has ever taken a spectrum of a comet tail to find out if it's sublimated ices or 'supersonic' bits of rock.
How does their 'theory' purport to explain the second tail of comets, which points along the comet's direction of motion, rather than away from the Sun? Maybe only *some* of the bits of rock are electrically charged? Maybe magic comet elves rub the charge off of some bits?
I had never heard of the Electric Universe, but they seem on par with the flat-earthers and creationists.
The problem with KDE is, even if its usability is fine, it's all thrown out the window as soon as you open non-KDE apps, because in their infinite wisdom, open source programmers decided to divide programs up into groups, each group having completely different interfaces and settings.
Yes, this is completely unique to open source. OS X would never craft a commpletely unique interface for, say, Quicktime. Or The Calculator. It's all about the HIG for them, right?
The larger point here is that opne source developers are not a single entity, so *of course* they don't necessarily coordinate UI decisions. However, this is starting to change.
And commercial desktops like OS X and Windows don't have this excuse.
Even simple dialog boxes seem to be over 1200 pixels wide.
I hate to call you a liar, can you tell us what this "simpe" dialog is?
What's the difference between Linux & OS X? Usability.
Eh...I'd say KDE usability is actually better than OS X in many respects. What you describe in your post is hardware compatibility, not usability.
Come on! Spoiled little brat in Empire of the Sun...Hello?!
His machine is a 2.2 GHz celeron. What you are quoting is the "minimum system requirements" according to MS, which he included as part of his comparison.
It may very well be true that only an idiot would try to run MS Office with a pentium 233; however, if so then it must also be true that MS thinks its customers are idiots, since that's what they recommend.
Except that Yellow Dog has already said that they aren't going to transition to x86, they're sticking to PPC. Yes, it's possible that this divergence will decrease sales to the point that they go out of business, but they seem to think it will increase their presence in the xserve market.
Still, you have to admit, it's miles better than a closed, binary document format which gets minor-but-frustrating changes every version.
Nah, it's not even a little scary. Fusion is quite unlike fission, in that it's really hard to get going and just as hard to keep going.
With fission, all you have to do is put too much Uranium (or Plutonium or whatever nasty, radioactive stuff) in a closet, and it will spontaneously sustain itself in a "chain reaction". If you put way too much stuff in the closet, then the chain reaction runs away and explodes, spontaneously.
With fusion, you take a tiny sphere of deuterium (or tritium) and blast it for a tiny fraction of a second with the World's Largest Laser Beam. If you are really, really lucky, the deuterium will fuse to helium and you'll get out a little bit more energy than you spent getting the thing to fuse. There's no possibility of a runaway here, because there's no chain reaction. You can simply choose not to fire the WLLB at any point.
What if the maintainer doesn't agree with Random Joe Developer's patch, with which Joe was hoping to claim a bounty? The patch could be poor-quality, or maybe it doesn't conform to the guidelines in the project's CODING file, or maybe the maintainer doesn't want to see the feature in question implemented for some reason (bloat, perhaps).
The whole bounty thing is a huge headache for all involved, with almost no real benefit, AFAICS.
Oh, bullshit. There's a huge mountain of great hobbyist software that belies your "fatal flaw" argument.
I myself try to fix every bug reported to my app as soon as I am able. I respect my users' opinions and feedback; I don't need their money to induce my attention. The fact that I am a hobbyist developer doesn't mean I am uninterested in what you call the "grunt work", because a large part of the satisfaction I derive from the project is the knowledge that others find it useful, beautiful, and fun to use.
This satisfaction is sufficient motivation without some kind of cash-compensation carrot. All I am saying is that a bounty system has the potential to ruin a hobby project, because suddenly it's more like a job, and the users are your boss (not to mention all of the practical implementation nightmares that a bounty system requires). No thanks, we (devs and users) seem to be doing just fine without it.
I don't understand your "commune" analogy either. I take out my trash because I want my kitchen to be clean, and it's not going to take itself out. That's a much more appropriate analogy.
What is needed is a bounty system that users could pay into easily so the bounty could grow over time.
Users love this idea, but FLOSS developers generally hate it. I develop my project for fun in my spare time; I don't want users dictating what I must do with my project. Don't get me wrong; I love getting ideas from users, and more often than not, I implement them. I like my hobby, I don't want it to be a job.
Anyway, there was a huge thread on kde-devel on this very topic a few weeks ago, in case you want more dev perspectives on the matter.