Hm, I think I would have been surprised if the opposite had been announced. After all, the dominant theory for the central engine of quasars is that they have a supermassive (larger than 10^6 solar masses (why isn't the SUP element supported by/., BTW?)) black hole in the center, and an accretion disk around it with infalling matter. This infalling matter isn't going anywhere, so as it falls into the black hole, the black hole becomes bigger. Now, this is a pretty fast process, Hawking radiation, mentioned by others here, is a pretty slow process, so that a black hole gains mass is not at all surprising.
As for the existence of black holes, well, it is the nature (and the funny part) of astronomy that ideas come and go, some ideas havea great impact some have not.
Besides, it's a moot point anyway. Why not just do both? Have the happy little disk, the menu bar, and perhaps some keyboard shortcuts, preferably user-definable.
Well, AFAIK, you can do that in Word, can't you....? People just don't want to learn that you know. The problem is that if you've got a lot of fancy stuff, they might slow down the application, requiring you to buy a lot more powerful computer than you really need. However, I think the drop-down menus of Emacs is kind of nice, I use them untill I get the short cuts into my fingers. But that's about as far as I'm willing to go....;-)
Unfortunately a big hurdle is all the PHB's whose time is spent created powerpoint slide shows to yammer on about at meeting after meeting. Until we get a powerpoint clone that can 100% handle powerpoint files (these are probably the MOST incompatible between versions) then forget it.
Hm, I don't like this... Why should so much emphasis be put on clones? OK, we have a problem marketing other options, but PP is not really that good. And when you see a PP presentation, it smells (stinks) PP of it.
I remember some time long ago in a galaxy far away, I was kind of a MS Word fan (it's long ago, I said!:-) ). My old dad, more than 55 years old, was on WP5.1, with that blue screen. I tried to convince him to migrate over to MS Word. He claimed that you could do things faster with WP5.1 with the menues and stuff there, than with the dropboxes and buttons of Word. I disputed that at that time. Well, so we had a competition, who could create a fancy looking table with lots of stuff in the shortest time. I did it on MS Word and he did on WP5.1.
Well, it turned out that the old man beat the shit out of me. Making a fancy table in WP5.1 was a lot faster than using MS Word. OK, I should have realized it back then that the M$ interface was simply no good, but it took me several years.
Anyway, that's the story we want to tell, we can do better than M$ is, we don't want to clone, we want to make our own stuff. At least I do. Unfortunately, I'm not a programmer...:-)
Yes, this is all-so-true, but, the problem is that many people just don't want to learn. We need to change people's attitude towards knowledge about technology. I think it is possible to teach people a lot, I don't think people are as brain-dead as some might think (ok, they exist, but they are forever lost, they are few), they are capable of learning if you point out how important it is. Really, someone here gave an 80-year-old emeritius an X-Terminal, and at the end of they day, he could print documents, read his e-mail, and all that he needed. OK, he might have been really bright, but anyway.
My personal belief is that the lack of knowledge about computers is a significant threat to democracy. First, it is a problem when going to war is not a different action from pressing a button on a coffee machine. Then, certain judges doesn't realize the obvious, that a DVD can be copied bit by bit, etc. etc.
OK, this is a little vague, but you get my drift, knowledge is important, education is important.
Well, it has allready been there for nine years, a lot longer than planned. While it certainly does have some really great instruments on board, they are getting old, and new missions are pretty much replacing them, so the retirement doesn't come surprising.
If you want to learn more, a good place to start is the.com they have put up for one of the instruments, BATSE, that I have seen some data from a few times. Check out www.batse.com.
I've had lots of fun with the BATSE instrument onboard this observatory. On May 19, 1998, I was at the Nordic Optical Telescope at La Palma, Canary Islands. BATSE came up with some rough coordinates for a Gamma Ray Burst during that day. When darkness came, the BeppoSAX satelites came with more accurate coordinates, and we took a few exposures of the sky. My first thought when I saw the images was that it would be almost impossible to find anything there, there were lots and lots of stars, and all we where looking for was another tiny dot. Nevertheless, one of the other guys on the team found it, it was the 7th Gamma Ray Burst Optical Counterpart that was discovered. More about it here. I can tell you it was exciting.
I had another attempt after getting some coordinates in January this year as well, but failed to find anything.
Anything you transmit or post may be sued by Apogee or its affiliates for any purpose,
(my bolding...) I just wonder what was on this lawyer's mind...:-)
Well, their spelling isn't much better than mine, look at the title as well.
BTW, what are they trying to see by:
Linking the Site to any other third party web site through a hypertext, text, banner, logo or contextual link ("Graphical Image") which permits a user to go from one party's web site to another by clicking on the Graphical Image.
That you can't link their web site without permission...?
The possibility that a massive object could bend light rays was discussed by Newton as early as 1704, and the Munich astronomer Soldner predicted in 1804 that a light ray passing near the limb of the sun would be deflected by 0.875". It was never attempted to observe the predicted deflection.
The third was not shown until decades after. But neither of those is therefore a good test since pretty much any realistic theory would be likely to have the same first-order effects.
Einstein predicted in 1915 that a ray of light would be bent when close to the limb of the sun by an angle 1.75", this was confirmed in 1919, which is hardly decades.
AFAIK, Presently, the result is confirmed to precision better than 0.1% by VLBI measurements, see D. E. Lebach et al., Physical Review Letters, vol 75, 1995.
Anyway, the Relativity Mission is a nice project, it has been a dream for a few people for a long time, and there are certinaly great stuff involved, even though GR is pretty strong as it is.
Well, ebay is free to do whatever they want. They may choose to cancel an auction as long as it is on their network. And they would probably not want a fight with M$. So, consumers loose, as usual. So, since I don't like this, I'll just go somewhere else. If everybody do, ebay's dead. EoS.
I'm using the R statistics system for my thesis, it's truly astonishing what the R team has come up with in such a short time. Go to CRAN. R has a GNU license, and is similar to S and S-plus in syntax. In fact, one of the original designers of the S system just joined the R core team. R is object-oriented, has many very nice array manipulation features and graphics capabilities, and is still evolving rapidly.
It can be used on Unices (the use of emacs as frontend is strongly recommended, it's an excellent collection of modes for it in the ESS package) and on Win32, there's a GUI for it on that platform.
Then, there's the PDL, offering "Number crunching capabilities for perl", I haven't used that either, but I hear it is good. Probably meant as an alternitive to IDL, that I have used, I didn't like it's syntax, so I did some hacking to replace the features I needed from IDL in R.
As an alternative to MATLAB, I hear SCILAB can be used. It doesn't seem to evolve very fast, and I haven't used it.
Now, I miss an alternative to Mathematica. Mathematica is the only proprietary software (and that I would think about using...) I can think of that still is better than Open Source alternatives. I have heard that some emacs package does have symbolic mathematical capabilities, but I don't what it is.
But hell, we all live in this capitalistic, consummeristic society and if we didn't like it we'd move to China.
Well, I don't like it (at least there are large deficiencies), but I think it is a better chance of success trying to reform this society than to reform China....
Just a minor thing: ESA is not a European Union agency. There are (at least) two countries that are members of ESA that are not members of the European Union and three countries are members of EU without being members of ESA.
Personally, I don't think it is such a big deal, but coming to think about integrating the browser in the operating system: It was certainly not M$' idea. Tim Berners-Lee talked about that a long time ago, think it was in 1995.
Laws are probably an issue here, but I think how science works these days are more important.
Whoever publishes something first gets all the credit for any discoveries that may have been done using those data. And, there's are race, I mean a race to get that stuff out. There are a bunch of people, if they get their hands on the data, they will publish stuff as soon as they can, even though they may never have been a part of the project at all, they have no investment in it.
So as to make sure that they people who obtained the data gets a chance to publish it first, it is common, if not the rule, that data have a proprietary period of one year. It's not just NASA.
I don't like this situation. I think science should be as open as possible, and it is not. Obviously, you can't have people running around "stealing" data who have not done anything to obtain it, but that needs regulating by a code of ethics, not by keeping things secret. As long as it doesn't work this way, it is perfectly understandable that MSSS keeps the data.
I don't think they will keep anything secret in the long run, that would not benefit neither the MSSS nor NASA, it's publish or perish.
BTW, have a look at some reductions made by a friend of mine of the face.
Yep, that's right! So if anybody comes messing with our servers, Tux will make sure 1.2 million penguins come charging at them in excess of 100 mph!:-) (I sites someone there, guess who!)
However, the Bouvet Island is populated by penguins. We can't hurt the penguins, so the invasion must be done in a very peaceful manner. We shouldn't even disturb them... However, if we just quietly place a box on the shore, with a fiber to each of the coasts a few thousand kilometers away, and a satelite connection just to be sure, they can't easily pull the plug on us. Then, norwegian police should not be a problem, since you wouldn't see any clueless police officers grabbing the equipment, and once it gets to court, we argue that it is a free-speech issue, and we're ok. Yep, it should work. Who has a box to spare and a long fibre-optic cable?:-)
A court can grant juridiction over a website because it is targeted to an area that they have jurisdiction. Since it is then intended to cause the harm in an area that the court has jurisdiction, you can be sued in that court.
If I understand the intention behind this, it is not about actually doing something that is really illegal, i.e. in court, you would be pretty sure of winning, based on a free-speech argument. The problem is rather that you wouldn't want to be taken down for no other reason that your ISP is afraid of some big corp with a huge legal department but without a good case. Then, off-shore might work.
Well, I regularily check ping between here (Oslo, Norway) and the Astronomy Data Service mirrors, which are in Germany, France and at Harvard (plus a few more I wouldn't dream of could be fast). Outside U.S. East Coast working hours, the average time is about 70ms, during U.S. working hours, its about 150ms. Early in the morning my time, it is actually the Harvard mirror that is the fastest.
If I understand the problem correctly, the original author is not so much concerned that a legal battle will be lost, but that the website will be taken down by ISPs who are not willing to risk anything. I think you will find a few small ISPs in Norway that would be willing to host (don't go for the big) a controversial site, and there are strong consumer protection laws in Norway (e.g. one Norwegian ISP tried to argue that they couldn't remove a spammer because the spammer was protected by a law that states they would have a three month warning, the same law states that spamming is illegal, but anyway...), and the law often takes the side of the underdog. The problem is that the police is, well, a bit overeager at times, so you might get downtime, when clueless police-officers are knocking on the ISPs door.
The Working Group for Planetary system nomenclature of the International Astronomical Union. I know the chairman of this working group. He's as professor at the institute where I'm studying.
While cool as hell, any practical value in this knowedge?
Beep! Wrong question! Do you want me to go citing people who have said things like that before:-)?
Like "what is the practical value of electricity?", "what is the practical value of understanding the internal structure of atoms?", "what is the practical value of Quantum Mechanics?", of semi-conductors?
Well, if that was an important question, you wouldn't have been writing this. Yet, the question is surely asked every time, you get sick of it, I can tell you that...:-) (OK, I'm biased, I'm a cosmology-student).
Slashdot Mirror
As for the existence of black holes, well, it is the nature (and the funny part) of astronomy that ideas come and go, some ideas havea great impact some have not.
Well, something that might be relevant, that I have posted before: TimBL has a page called Link and Law, which is worth a read.
Well, AFAIK, you can do that in Word, can't you....? People just don't want to learn that you know. The problem is that if you've got a lot of fancy stuff, they might slow down the application, requiring you to buy a lot more powerful computer than you really need. However, I think the drop-down menus of Emacs is kind of nice, I use them untill I get the short cuts into my fingers. But that's about as far as I'm willing to go.... ;-)
Hm, I don't like this... Why should so much emphasis be put on clones? OK, we have a problem marketing other options, but PP is not really that good. And when you see a PP presentation, it smells (stinks) PP of it.
I remember some time long ago in a galaxy far away, I was kind of a MS Word fan (it's long ago, I said! :-) ). My old dad, more than 55 years old, was on WP5.1, with that blue screen. I tried to convince him to migrate over to MS Word. He claimed that you could do things faster with WP5.1 with the menues and stuff there, than with the dropboxes and buttons of Word. I disputed that at that time. Well, so we had a competition, who could create a fancy looking table with lots of stuff in the shortest time. I did it on MS Word and he did on WP5.1.
Well, it turned out that the old man beat the shit out of me. Making a fancy table in WP5.1 was a lot faster than using MS Word. OK, I should have realized it back then that the M$ interface was simply no good, but it took me several years.
Anyway, that's the story we want to tell, we can do better than M$ is, we don't want to clone, we want to make our own stuff. At least I do. Unfortunately, I'm not a programmer... :-)
My personal belief is that the lack of knowledge about computers is a significant threat to democracy. First, it is a problem when going to war is not a different action from pressing a button on a coffee machine. Then, certain judges doesn't realize the obvious, that a DVD can be copied bit by bit, etc. etc.
OK, this is a little vague, but you get my drift, knowledge is important, education is important.
If you want to learn more, a good place to start is the .com they have put up for one of the instruments, BATSE, that I have seen some data from a few times. Check out www.batse.com.
I had another attempt after getting some coordinates in January this year as well, but failed to find anything.
Bye, CGRO, you've been a great instrument.
(my bolding...) I just wonder what was on this lawyer's mind... :-)
Well, their spelling isn't much better than mine, look at the title as well.
BTW, what are they trying to see by:
That you can't link their web site without permission...?
In Norway, one has to have a handsfree set if you wanna talk while driving. They outlawed talking into the phone....
Einstein predicted in 1915 that a ray of light would be bent when close to the limb of the sun by an angle 1.75", this was confirmed in 1919, which is hardly decades.
AFAIK, Presently, the result is confirmed to precision better than 0.1% by VLBI measurements, see D. E. Lebach et al., Physical Review Letters, vol 75, 1995.
Anyway, the Relativity Mission is a nice project, it has been a dream for a few people for a long time, and there are certinaly great stuff involved, even though GR is pretty strong as it is.
Well, ebay is free to do whatever they want. They may choose to cancel an auction as long as it is on their network. And they would probably not want a fight with M$. So, consumers loose, as usual. So, since I don't like this, I'll just go somewhere else. If everybody do, ebay's dead. EoS.
It can be used on Unices (the use of emacs as frontend is strongly recommended, it's an excellent collection of modes for it in the ESS package) and on Win32, there's a GUI for it on that platform.
Then, there's the PDL, offering "Number crunching capabilities for perl", I haven't used that either, but I hear it is good. Probably meant as an alternitive to IDL, that I have used, I didn't like it's syntax, so I did some hacking to replace the features I needed from IDL in R.
As an alternative to MATLAB, I hear SCILAB can be used. It doesn't seem to evolve very fast, and I haven't used it.
Now, I miss an alternative to Mathematica. Mathematica is the only proprietary software (and that I would think about using...) I can think of that still is better than Open Source alternatives. I have heard that some emacs package does have symbolic mathematical capabilities, but I don't what it is.
Well, I don't like it (at least there are large deficiencies), but I think it is a better chance of success trying to reform this society than to reform China....
I'm using this on my website to tell people "please don't ask me about links, just link the site if you like it" :-),
BTW, I couldn't connect to feedmag.com, did it go down (responds to ping)?
Just a minor thing: ESA is not a European Union agency. There are (at least) two countries that are members of ESA that are not members of the European Union and three countries are members of EU without being members of ESA.
Personally, I don't think it is such a big deal, but coming to think about integrating the browser in the operating system: It was certainly not M$' idea. Tim Berners-Lee talked about that a long time ago, think it was in 1995.
Whoever publishes something first gets all the credit for any discoveries that may have been done using those data. And, there's are race, I mean a race to get that stuff out. There are a bunch of people, if they get their hands on the data, they will publish stuff as soon as they can, even though they may never have been a part of the project at all, they have no investment in it.
So as to make sure that they people who obtained the data gets a chance to publish it first, it is common, if not the rule, that data have a proprietary period of one year. It's not just NASA.
I don't like this situation. I think science should be as open as possible, and it is not. Obviously, you can't have people running around "stealing" data who have not done anything to obtain it, but that needs regulating by a code of ethics, not by keeping things secret. As long as it doesn't work this way, it is perfectly understandable that MSSS keeps the data.
I don't think they will keep anything secret in the long run, that would not benefit neither the MSSS nor NASA, it's publish or perish.
BTW, have a look at some reductions made by a friend of mine of the face.
Yep, that's right! So if anybody comes messing with our servers, Tux will make sure 1.2 million penguins come charging at them in excess of 100 mph! :-) (I sites someone there, guess who!)
However, the Bouvet Island is populated by penguins. We can't hurt the penguins, so the invasion must be done in a very peaceful manner. We shouldn't even disturb them... However, if we just quietly place a box on the shore, with a fiber to each of the coasts a few thousand kilometers away, and a satelite connection just to be sure, they can't easily pull the plug on us. Then, norwegian police should not be a problem, since you wouldn't see any clueless police officers grabbing the equipment, and once it gets to court, we argue that it is a free-speech issue, and we're ok. Yep, it should work. Who has a box to spare and a long fibre-optic cable? :-)
Certainly! But I think all the network over there is cluttered up by useless Animated GIFs enough comparable in magnitude to the latency... :-)
If I understand the intention behind this, it is not about actually doing something that is really illegal, i.e. in court, you would be pretty sure of winning, based on a free-speech argument. The problem is rather that you wouldn't want to be taken down for no other reason that your ISP is afraid of some big corp with a huge legal department but without a good case. Then, off-shore might work.
If I understand the problem correctly, the original author is not so much concerned that a legal battle will be lost, but that the website will be taken down by ISPs who are not willing to risk anything. I think you will find a few small ISPs in Norway that would be willing to host (don't go for the big) a controversial site, and there are strong consumer protection laws in Norway (e.g. one Norwegian ISP tried to argue that they couldn't remove a spammer because the spammer was protected by a law that states they would have a three month warning, the same law states that spamming is illegal, but anyway...), and the law often takes the side of the underdog. The problem is that the police is, well, a bit overeager at times, so you might get downtime, when clueless police-officers are knocking on the ISPs door.
Well, since the guy in charge of naming things is a Norwegian.... Anyway, it should have been Loke, not Loki (not pronounced ee).
The Working Group for Planetary system nomenclature of the International Astronomical Union. I know the chairman of this working group. He's as professor at the institute where I'm studying.
Beep! Wrong question! Do you want me to go citing people who have said things like that before :-)?
Like "what is the practical value of electricity?", "what is the practical value of understanding the internal structure of atoms?", "what is the practical value of Quantum Mechanics?", of semi-conductors?
Well, if that was an important question, you wouldn't have been writing this. Yet, the question is surely asked every time, you get sick of it, I can tell you that... :-) (OK, I'm biased, I'm a cosmology-student).