I had to check to see if you were kidding! And actually:
ali@katamari:~$ tex --version TeX 3.1415926 (TeX Live 2009/Debian)
The joke is that he says he's going to quit working on it when he reaches version pi. So he just keeps adding significant digits, without ever getting there.
The matrix left high concept Sci Fi and became more comic gothic and set piece action oriented as it went along. The reason people hated it was because people who like physics based sci-fi are not comfortable with meta-physics and fantasy sci-fi or at least don't like it when expecting one and get served the other.
For what it's worth, I thought it was merely boring.
I'm not any particular fan of "scientific" sci fi... maybe I just have an aversion to pop metaphysics.
I don't know where you got that idea, but this section [wikipedia.org] of the Wikipedia article on the battle should demonstrate how wrong you are. The Red Army fought to defend the city right from the beginning, although all they had left was a toe-hold by the time the counter-offensive started.
FWIW, according to some sources the Germans could have had it for a song early in the '42 campaign, but their interests were elsewhere at the time. It was only later that it became a dick swizzling contest.
I love reading the stories posted by the readership about all of the odd systems found stuck in closets and under desks which nobody knows what are doing.
Well, with regard to Congress, there are roughly 535 of them at any given time.
Actually, it's the interns that are under the desks.
But lots of CongressCritters still in the closet, I trow.
And we don't have any way to test for matter whose only property is it brings our mathematical formulae in line with our physical observations.
The, "Gee, that's funny" observation is what drives all science.
Now:
Making observations and theories is part of science. But what sets science apart from superstition is rigorous testing of the theories.
Believe it or not, some scientists do real science.
There was a competing explanation for this family of "Gee, that's funny" observations called MOND - Modification Of Newtonian Dynamics. It was ruled out on the basis of evidence. (There may be a MOND v. 2.0 out there now - not sure.)
One candidate for dark matter is the sterile neutrino, which people - real scientists - are trying to detect right now. A few years ago they were almost ready to dismiss its existence, but more recent results suggest that it may actually exist.
So no, contrary to your majestic disbelief, dark matter is a Real Hypothesis (tm), investigated by Real Scientists (tm), doing Real Science (tm).
If you want to actually learn something about the topic rather than simply using Slashdot as an outlet for you whingeing about the universe not working the way you learned in fifth grade, Wikipedia is an easy place to get started.
I think we'd expect to see the kind of supermassive black hole that could be mistaken for a dwarf galaxy. The processes that form black holes of that size mean that there would probably still be a lot of material in the vicinity, if not actively accreting then still getting pulled around, compressed, and prompting star formation
Going out on a limb... I would expect dark matter to form "dark black holes" if you brought enough mass of it together in a small enough space.
For that matter, I would expect dark matter to get caught up into "normal" black holes, and normal matter into "dark" black holes, if you brought one kind of matter near the other kind of black hole.
I suspect a physicist would say it's impossible to distinguish a "normal" black hole from a "dark" black hole.
How do you tell the difference between a blob of dark matter and a black hole? With all the small galaxies the Milky Way has swallowed over its lifetime, would it not be reasonable to find some relic black holes that have swung back out after being stripped of most of their surrounding gas/stars? Or, when "dark matter" is being talked about in this situation, is a black hole simply one of the possible candidates to supply the mystery mass?
Good thinking - astronomers thought of it too.
I don't know the details, but they've ruled out black holes, brown dwarfs, neutrinos (except the hypothetical sterile neutrino), and all the other "normal" matter anyone knows about.
One day we'll find out why we're having to explain shit with "dark matter", and the stupid concept will be laughed at like the Luminiferous aether is now.
Yeah, like neutrinos and X-rays and all that other weird shit people made up to explain problems away.
Wouldn't dark matter galaxies so close to ours result in the occlusion of galaxies behind them?
Since a galaxy is mostly empty space -- wouldn't this result in a detectable degree of light variation?
No, for the dark matter hypothesis to work as an explanation of what it's supposed to explain, it doesn't have any kind of EML interaction with normal matter, so it can't obscure any more than it can be seen.
It does bend space, and AIUI the best support for the DM hypothesis is the lensing effect it has at a distant cluster, but there may not be enough in the postulated satellite galaxies to cause any detectable lensing.
Seriously. I'm a rocket scientist, and I'm baffled by the mixed properties of 'dark matter'. Can we land a probe on it, or would baryonic space probes pass right through it?
Due to the presumed lack of electrostatic interaction, your probe could not "touch" it. You could orbit it or settle into a common center of gravity, but not land on it.
There was an interesting musing by the author of a recent Scientific American about how dark matter may interact with its own kind by forces other than the ones that cause normal matter to interact with its own kind. According to the musing (which the author rejects), dark matter operating under such forces could form complex systems, maybe even an unseen parallel universe where "people" live lives like ours, as unaware of us as we are of them. All undetectable, except by their gravitational attraction on us.
It seems pretty clear that nobody in Washington is interested in controlling illegal immigration, so why do we continue to waste money on it?
It's a political football.
You can predict with full confidence that US politicians aren't going to do anything that actually stops illegal aliens from entering the country, because it has been going on so long that it has become an integral part of our economy.
Least of all the Republicans, who very much like the idea of cheap exploitable labor. But as long as they can keep the issue alive they can use the threat of Scary Mexicans to sucker a certain class of people into voting against their own self-interests, just as they've been doing with Scary Blacks since the 1960s. History will call this the "Southwestern Strategy".
I'm curious as to why the project failed. They claim to have a much cheaper plan that they're going to try now; why didn't they try that in the first place? Is it going to be substantially less effective? So ineffective that it's not worth spending money on that, either?
Don't ignore the need for government handouts to big corporations when considering the history of this kind of big, expensive, and predictably-failing project.
Orrrr you could legalize drugs, cut off their income/buying power, and thus put them out of business?
Spot on. And most of the rest of the world's gangs, in one chop.
Unfortunately, murder doesn't create as much moral outrage in the USA as vices do, so dope is going to stay illegal and gangs will keep getting more powerful.
Ophiuchus has stuck a wedge into the zodiac at least since the modern perimeters of the constellations were defined. It has just been ignored to make the number of signs work out to the magical 12.
Slashdot Mirror
I had to check to see if you were kidding! And actually:
ali@katamari:~$ tex --version
TeX 3.1415926 (TeX Live 2009/Debian)
The joke is that he says he's going to quit working on it when he reaches version pi. So he just keeps adding significant digits, without ever getting there.
The matrix left high concept Sci Fi and became more comic gothic and set piece action oriented as it went along. The reason people hated it was because people who like physics based sci-fi are not comfortable with meta-physics and fantasy sci-fi or at least don't like it when expecting one and get served the other.
For what it's worth, I thought it was merely boring.
I'm not any particular fan of "scientific" sci fi... maybe I just have an aversion to pop metaphysics.
I'm just hoping for a Bill & Ted / Matrix Crossover movie....
Or a MST3K edition...
I don't know where you got that idea, but this section [wikipedia.org] of the Wikipedia article on the battle should demonstrate how wrong you are. The Red Army fought to defend the city right from the beginning, although all they had left was a toe-hold by the time the counter-offensive started.
FWIW, according to some sources the Germans could have had it for a song early in the '42 campaign, but their interests were elsewhere at the time. It was only later that it became a dick swizzling contest.
I love reading the stories posted by the readership about all of the odd systems found stuck in closets and under desks which nobody knows what are doing.
Well, with regard to Congress, there are roughly 535 of them at any given time.
Actually, it's the interns that are under the desks.
But lots of CongressCritters still in the closet, I trow.
Righthaven has publicly dismissed fair use as well.
I'm sure a judge is really going to care if you publicly dismiss a law you don't like.
Pseudoscience, I say.
I'm sure the cosmology journals are eagerly awaiting your article.
Let's get this out of the way first:
And we don't have any way to test for matter whose only property is it brings our mathematical formulae in line with our physical observations.
The, "Gee, that's funny" observation is what drives all science.
Now:
Making observations and theories is part of science. But what sets science apart from superstition is rigorous testing of the theories.
Believe it or not, some scientists do real science.
There was a competing explanation for this family of "Gee, that's funny" observations called MOND - Modification Of Newtonian Dynamics. It was ruled out on the basis of evidence. (There may be a MOND v. 2.0 out there now - not sure.)
One candidate for dark matter is the sterile neutrino, which people - real scientists - are trying to detect right now. A few years ago they were almost ready to dismiss its existence, but more recent results suggest that it may actually exist.
So no, contrary to your majestic disbelief, dark matter is a Real Hypothesis (tm), investigated by Real Scientists (tm), doing Real Science (tm).
If you want to actually learn something about the topic rather than simply using Slashdot as an outlet for you whingeing about the universe not working the way you learned in fifth grade, Wikipedia is an easy place to get started.
Tell me, what properties does dark matter have, save for explaining the factor 2-4 miscalculation of the universe's mass?
What you describe isn't a property, it's an effect. (And I've never heard of any such miscalculation anyway.)
Properties: it has mass (bends space)... don't know of any others, except the trivial stuff like it can move and be scattered around.
Effects: explains galactic rotation curves, explains some instances of lensing, possibly explains the perturbations this article is about.
I think we'd expect to see the kind of supermassive black hole that could be mistaken for a dwarf galaxy. The processes that form black holes of that size mean that there would probably still be a lot of material in the vicinity, if not actively accreting then still getting pulled around, compressed, and prompting star formation
Going out on a limb... I would expect dark matter to form "dark black holes" if you brought enough mass of it together in a small enough space.
For that matter, I would expect dark matter to get caught up into "normal" black holes, and normal matter into "dark" black holes, if you brought one kind of matter near the other kind of black hole.
I suspect a physicist would say it's impossible to distinguish a "normal" black hole from a "dark" black hole.
How do you tell the difference between a blob of dark matter and a black hole? With all the small galaxies the Milky Way has swallowed over its lifetime, would it not be reasonable to find some relic black holes that have swung back out after being stripped of most of their surrounding gas/stars? Or, when "dark matter" is being talked about in this situation, is a black hole simply one of the possible candidates to supply the mystery mass?
Good thinking - astronomers thought of it too.
I don't know the details, but they've ruled out black holes, brown dwarfs, neutrinos (except the hypothetical sterile neutrino), and all the other "normal" matter anyone knows about.
One day we'll find out why we're having to explain shit with "dark matter", and the stupid concept will be laughed at like the Luminiferous aether is now.
Yeah, like neutrinos and X-rays and all that other weird shit people made up to explain problems away.
Wouldn't dark matter galaxies so close to ours result in the occlusion of galaxies behind them?
Since a galaxy is mostly empty space -- wouldn't this result in a detectable degree of light variation?
No, for the dark matter hypothesis to work as an explanation of what it's supposed to explain, it doesn't have any kind of EML interaction with normal matter, so it can't obscure any more than it can be seen.
It does bend space, and AIUI the best support for the DM hypothesis is the lensing effect it has at a distant cluster, but there may not be enough in the postulated satellite galaxies to cause any detectable lensing.
Seriously. I'm a rocket scientist, and I'm baffled by the mixed properties of 'dark matter'. Can we land a probe on it, or would baryonic space probes pass right through it?
Due to the presumed lack of electrostatic interaction, your probe could not "touch" it. You could orbit it or settle into a common center of gravity, but not land on it.
"The creature from invisible Galaxy X"
There was an interesting musing by the author of a recent Scientific American about how dark matter may interact with its own kind by forces other than the ones that cause normal matter to interact with its own kind. According to the musing (which the author rejects), dark matter operating under such forces could form complex systems, maybe even an unseen parallel universe where "people" live lives like ours, as unaware of us as we are of them. All undetectable, except by their gravitational attraction on us.
Two tenth birthdays in one week - that's impressive!
Mandatory 1 year federal prison sentence for each illegal alien employed by anyone for any reason.
That one sentence would solve the problem immediately and better than any fence or wall.
But when we keep discovering that the very politicians who complain the loudest about illegal aliens turn out to be the ones with an illegal gardener or nanny, it becomes obvious that this isn't really about keeping illegal aliens out of the country.
It seems pretty clear that nobody in Washington is interested in controlling illegal immigration, so why do we continue to waste money on it?
It's a political football.
You can predict with full confidence that US politicians aren't going to do anything that actually stops illegal aliens from entering the country, because it has been going on so long that it has become an integral part of our economy.
Least of all the Republicans, who very much like the idea of cheap exploitable labor. But as long as they can keep the issue alive they can use the threat of Scary Mexicans to sucker a certain class of people into voting against their own self-interests, just as they've been doing with Scary Blacks since the 1960s. History will call this the "Southwestern Strategy".
I'm curious as to why the project failed. They claim to have a much cheaper plan that they're going to try now; why didn't they try that in the first place? Is it going to be substantially less effective? So ineffective that it's not worth spending money on that, either?
Don't ignore the need for government handouts to big corporations when considering the history of this kind of big, expensive, and predictably-failing project.
Nah. They were happy to get the blankets we gave them.
That's one government handout you won't hear the right wingers complain about.
Orrrr you could legalize drugs, cut off their income/buying power, and thus put them out of business?
Spot on. And most of the rest of the world's gangs, in one chop.
Unfortunately, murder doesn't create as much moral outrage in the USA as vices do, so dope is going to stay illegal and gangs will keep getting more powerful.
Hmm, my sign appears to have shifted from Leo the Lion to the Michelin Man.
We should have corporate sponsored signs of the zodiac, like we do stadiums:
"I'm a Haliburton." "I'm a PepsiCo." "I used to be an Exxon, until they went bust."
And what kind of name is Parke Kunkle?!!!
It's a pseudonym; he was born "Wayne Kerr".
Ophiuchus has stuck a wedge into the zodiac at least since the modern perimeters of the constellations were defined. It has just been ignored to make the number of signs work out to the magical 12.
The Earth gets hotter, the Earth gets cooler.
But do WE have an impact on this variation. That is the question.
So are you doubting the physics of greenhouse gasses, or doubting whether we are dumping greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere?