2. I assume we've measured whether Rosetta is rotating, even slightly. Is there a chance that this will help (or hurt) Philae's chances at coming back on line?
The comet is actually rotating a lot, once every twelve hours. Since the comet acts as a gyroscope its axis of rotation keeps pointing towards the same distant star while the comet goes around the sun, and because the axis is tilted, different parts of the comet will receive light. The comet has seasons.
A simple calculatoin: Current amount of energy from panels is a quarter of what's needed current distance from the sun is 3 earth units, it will go down to 1.3. That means energy flux no the panels will increase (3/1.3)^^2 or more than 5 times. If all the rest remains the same(er, what?), that should be enough. And if the system can handle currents five times as high.
Or what was it again. Is google going to guess the length of the nose of the emperor of China next, based on search items? And has it got the flu? Look , that there's a good correlation is clear, but the reliability of the results is very low. Next the NSA will be using those tools in order to find out how much they can get away with. Or wait, they already made their minds up about that.
I had to think about that. I don't have much time for creationism but I think their arguments have been underestimated. The main problem with creationism is not that their arguments are so weak. I believe some of their arguments are valid and too easily dismissed by let's say 'most people who believe in evolution theory'. For instance it's a very legitimate concern that the power of the combination of selection and random variation may be too weak to explain what we see around us.
The thing is that the approach is one of case-making rather than scientific investigation. That's why you can't discuss with them. The arguments they'll come up with will be borrowed (in let's say, the best cases) from investigation that is arguably scientific. So it's not really proper to dismiss the arguments as a rehash of things that have long been settled. but because the appoach is one of case making, the arguments are only pursued as long as they can support a case. The story ends once the case is won. Another approach is to accept the validity of some of the creationist's objections and to just keep on digging and finding out how it works. And gradually you figure out more. And that is what has happened and will happen. A lot of work has been done on the speed of evolution since the first iteration of Fred Hoyle's Junkyard Tornado argument in 1982.
The NYTimes article covers the issue well. The remnants of chemical weapons were not handled well which resulted in american casualties and which resulted in potential(I would say actual) use as IEDs. So Pentagon has reasons for not wanting to talk about this. I know mustard gas preserves fairly well. VX and sarin does not.
So there is no thinking in the line of ' Saddam had chemical weapons after all'. At least not anymore. Before the war there was deliberate obfuscation on the subject of how much chemical weapons capability one needs in order to provide a reason for war, so any find of a weapons cache was considered proof. The idea is still around but officials have dropped it long ago.
That was so important about the work by Scott Ritter in the runup to the war. He quantified the possible capability and made clear that whatever capability there was it could be military significant. So instead of asking 'are there chemical weapons' he asked 'are there enough chemical weapons', which is what every military analyst should do. An important part of propaganda is making you ask the wrong questions.
I know what the article says. did you look at the stats? Did you read my post? It says So maybe the actual marketing campaign for the FR-S was aimed at younger people than who actually bought it. Also in my first post I was not really thinking about marketing but about the product design part of the marketing. So what I wanted to say is that even if Scion wants to be young, it's not aiming as young as it used to, its product is not as young as one would think, and they mainly reaching people who are not that young either.
(logged in now). And I'm talking about the F-RS not the Scion of 2004. This article has a few statistics showing that the people buying the FR-S are not that young Edmunds . So maybe the actual marketing campaign for the FR-S was aimed at younger people than who actually bought it. I don't know. But I know the car and the design is towards handling - difficult to sell to youngsters - and tuning - easier to sell but maybe not such a large market.
I haven't spent any thought yet on the distinction between BRZ and FR-S.
Oh you made me remember reading about it. Microgravimetric analysis of Cheops in 1980. Of course the Cavendish experiment required only 300 kg of material two centuries ago, so I suppose the whole thing about precision is how far away you are when doing the measuring. So my initial point remains: the title isn't saying much. Not like "Gravitational change now big enough to cause some people to have to update their tables".
Of course, the instruments measuring it can never ever be faulted ?
On the contrary, an alternate title for the article could have been "Measurement of gravity is now so incredibly precise that it can detect the effect of Antarctica melting away." . But that was too long.
It's a bit more than a concern, it's distrust because the idea has some attributes I'm suspicious about. Compare it with panspermia theories. These theories were successful primarily because people had problems thinking up ways of how life could spring out of nothing. That by themselves doesn't make them wrong of course, and some may claim that it's unsigntific to use such things as distrust. I disagree.
On the other hand, if it turns out that electroweak parity breaking does percolate upwards all into chemistry that would make it a very fascinating find.
The article is rather dubious really. There's an underlying assumption that the symmetry braking of the solution requires an asymmetry in the starting condition. If you place a pencil upright it is very unstable and it will fall over. In what direction it will fall depends on the 'background noise' disturbances which can be completely symmetrical - on average. So you have a completely symmetrical situation but the outcome will be completely asymmetrical: the pencil falls over in one direction. It is not an interesting question to investigate why exactly the pencil fell in this specific direction. So what's the deal here, if our dna pencil comes out oriented one way? That electroweak parity breaking causes the pencil to fall over in one direction? That the chances of the pencil falling over in a specific direction are slightly enhanced but the outcome can still be anything - as with a single roll of a dice with 17 'left' faces and 15 'right' faces? Or that the effect will just be drowned by the background noise? I think the latter.
It reminds me of the claims that the bathtub always drains with a rotation that depends on the hemisphere, while in fact the impact of the coriolis effect is completely negligeable..
It's nice to have technology to better dispose of diapers, but it should not be used as an alternative to tackling the main problem, which is that babies now wear diapers over longer and longer periods. The main reason for this is interfering with biofeedback. The better the diaper the less feedback the baby gets so the less it is inclined to change its behavior.
The best way to reduce spent diapers is to reintroduce a form of biofeedback. An irritation. An annoyance. But of course that would interfere with the gains of Proctor and Gamble.
If I might propose an environmental regulation, it would be about the minimum allowed amount of negative biofeedback in pampers. In other words, from a certain age on it would not be allowed to make them too good.
I think you're far off the mark. The conflict in Ukraine has been building up for years and the Russians have since long threatened with very aggressive countermoves if the west and especially NATO would attempt to incorporate Ukraine - or Georgia for that matter. The west disregarded the threats because they thought Russia is no major player anymore and could be ignored. So yes, Putin knows that Ukraine isn't worth a major conflict to the west and he makes use of that. But Putin is not on a mission of conquest and he has no desire to absorb parts of Ukraine.
Let's say he's got reasonable demands but stopping NATO expansion is important enough for him to use very brutal methods. And that could include ruining Ukraine or splitting it up.
Yeah right. If you want a source for how Hamas stuck to the ceasefire agreement: here
The distinction between Hamas and other resistance parties matters or not dependent on what you want. The current policy is -more or less- that Hamas is just a symptom, you have to tackle the complete population. That is what the Dahiya doctrine is about, collective punishment and dedevelopment. If you're interested in a negotiated solution (well, negotiated improvement), and some hardnosed Israelis have really been in support of that option for a long time, Ephraim Halevy for instance, then the distinction matters. Because people like Halevy notice that Hamas is very moderate and organized compared to the other parties and that they are capable of policing the other parties.They may not be moderate in terms of how they see local government, but that is no concern of Israel.
I saw your two wikipedia links (sinai and rockets). I did mean Hamas, not other groups and I don't see any confirmation about Hamas involvement. Hamas was very cautious about upsetting the egyptian government But Sisi went ahead and closed the border anyway. It'll be a few hours before I can dig into this. I'm also not sure which of the rocket attacks in the list of the last two years you think were from Hamas.
It will take a few hours before I can dig into this.
I recall you from posts on Iran nuclear. I disagreed with you but you're better informed than average.
It's worth bearing in mind that part the reason Gaza is so heavily blockaded right now is because Hamas was also attacking Egyptian soldiers in support of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood's violent resistance to it's overthrow forcing Egypt to shut Gaza's southern borders.
Contrary to common opinion I think the Muslim Brotherhood has been quite nonviolent. I'm not counting demonstrations but actual armed resistance. Hamas was targeted by Egypt because of its good ties with the MB , not because of what it actually did. And because the new regime in Egypt works tightly together with Israel. It's not about Hamas being violent, they are not. It's about control. Look at the history. Hamas for years incited to suicide attacks. from a military point of view the approach had its merit because in effect it came close to tit-for-tat retaliation strategies. Tit-for-tat is a good base for negotiations, but of course the approach was untenable and Israel has its own reasons to oppose negotiated resolutions in general.Then they chose the political approach and this was immediately met with a blockade. Look up Dov Weissglass comments about putting Gazans on a diet, right after the elections. Then started the rockets against the blockade. They were highly ineffective (30 killed in a decade) but they scared people and forced them to adapt. Then after being beaten up constantly Hamas only fired rockets when being hit exceptionally hard.
In the last case there was a failed hostage taking instance begin june in the westbank. Not directly related to Hamas. It took several weeks of being all over Hamas before they launched their first rockets(end of june). Before that they hadn't fired any rockets in two years time and they had mostly suppressed those of other parties. And that reaction was enough for the vast majority of Israelis to demand that the IDF just wipe them all out.
So you think Hamas should disarm in order to take away the excuse. . Ok. And let's not forget all provocations should be ignored and make sure nobody else can react to provocations as well. Also give up all hope to build up an economy because any significant economy can create sophisticated rockets in no time. And learn to do without water because Israel needs it. Actually , best just disappear.
There has been hope to achieve things using nonviolent approaches, especially the hope to build up momentum. But really, mostly that meant everyone could ignore the westbank and Israel could go on and complete its plans. Also the bar was raised: sorry, not nonviolent enough. There was throwing stones. Less than a fullfledged Gandhi will not do.
Nonviolence may work, but there are countermeasures for everything, and demanding nonviolence from the oppressed is ridiculous. It's just the standard pattern of always raising the demands fom the oppressed and asking nothing from the oppressor. Well I'd be willing to look away if the IDF wanted to get a few nasty jobs done , as long as the overall plan was acceptable. But the Israeli plan is to make the Palestinians disappear as much as possible. In practice it means concentrating them in the minimum of space and dedeveloping them. Violent resistance makes the process go faster but at the same time raises awareness. I can see that a western government wants to quietly look away while it happens,you know, just looking after itself. But it always annoys me how anyone is willing to believe just anything just to make it easier to look away.
Well I asked for that. I should have said it differently. Another try: there is a lot of experimental evidence to show that the fine structure constant is constant. If it hadn't been constant we would have known. With the claim that the fine structure constant is a real constant one is on solid ground.
Then the possibility that outside of the solid experimental proof the constant could still vary "maybe the constant was not always the same" - should be handled very sparingly. It's an idea to be kept on a short leash because it's speculation. And often its untestable speculation , and it's best to stay out of that territory. And when you do experiments and they don't come out right, the hypothesis that 'maybe current scientific understanding is wrong' should be considered a very expensive claim that should be postponed until all other options have been exhausted. Instead, and partly because of popular media, it's become a very cheap claim that is easily made. In the OPERA experiment they came up with the explanation that maybe neutrinos go faster than light. If you want to claim that maybe all of our scientific understanding is wrong then you need an awful lot of evidence to back it up, or you shouldn't make the claim. The guy should just have shut up and kept searching rather than hoping for a scoop.
People should not start trotting out a 'variable constant' hypothesis because some ratio of elements is wrong in ore.
Mazda is still selling sport vehicles with Wankel engines... a friend of mine drives one, an awesome car.
The RX8 has been sold for a long time but they discontinued it a few years back. They're working on a successor but as long as they fail to satisfy the emission requirements it's not going to enter the market.
Slashdot Mirror
The comet is actually rotating a lot, once every twelve hours. Since the comet acts as a gyroscope its axis of rotation keeps pointing towards the same distant star while the comet goes around the sun, and because the axis is tilted, different parts of the comet will receive light. The comet has seasons.
It'll drop to 1.25 actually. That's 5.6 times current flux.
A simple calculatoin:
Current amount of energy from panels is a quarter of what's needed
current distance from the sun is 3 earth units, it will go down to 1.3.
That means energy flux no the panels will increase (3/1.3)^^2 or more than 5 times.
If all the rest remains the same(er, what?), that should be enough.
And if the system can handle currents five times as high.
Yes.
Or what was it again. Is google going to guess the length of the nose of the emperor of China next, based on search items? And has it got the flu? Look , that there's a good correlation is clear, but the reliability of the results is very low. Next the NSA will be using those tools in order to find out how much they can get away with. Or wait, they already made their minds up about that.
Ok, maybe I'm hineininterpretierung this a bit
I had to think about that. I don't have much time for creationism but I think their arguments have been underestimated.
The main problem with creationism is not that their arguments are so weak. I believe some of their arguments are valid and too easily dismissed by let's say 'most people who believe in evolution theory'. For instance it's a very legitimate concern that the power of the combination of selection and random variation may be too weak to explain what we see around us.
The thing is that the approach is one of case-making rather than scientific investigation. That's why you can't discuss with them. The arguments they'll come up with will be borrowed (in let's say, the best cases) from investigation that is arguably scientific. So it's not really proper to dismiss the arguments as a rehash of things that have long been settled. but because the appoach is one of case making, the arguments are only pursued as long as they can support a case. The story ends once the case is won.
Another approach is to accept the validity of some of the creationist's objections and to just keep on digging and finding out how it works.
And gradually you figure out more. And that is what has happened and will happen. A lot of work has been done on the speed of evolution since the first iteration of Fred Hoyle's Junkyard Tornado argument in 1982.
Ow brilliant.fixing blockquotes the smart way.
The NYTimes article covers the issue well. The remnants of chemical weapons were not handled well which resulted in american casualties and which resulted in potential(I would say actual) use as IEDs. So Pentagon has reasons for not wanting to talk about this. I know mustard gas preserves fairly well. VX and sarin does not.
So there is no thinking in the line of ' Saddam had chemical weapons after all'. At least not anymore. Before the war there was deliberate obfuscation on the subject of how much chemical weapons capability one needs in order to provide a reason for war, so any find of a weapons cache was considered proof.
The idea is still around but officials have dropped it long ago.
That was so important about the work by Scott Ritter in the runup to the war. He quantified the possible capability and made clear that whatever capability there was it could be military significant. So instead of asking 'are there chemical weapons' he asked 'are there enough chemical weapons', which is what every military analyst should do. An important part of propaganda is making you ask the wrong questions.
I know what the article says. did you look at the stats? Did you read my post? It says So maybe the actual marketing campaign for the FR-S was aimed at younger people than who actually bought it. Also in my first post I was not really thinking about marketing but about the product design part of the marketing. So what I wanted to say is that even if Scion wants to be young, it's not aiming as young as it used to, its product is not as young as one would think, and they mainly reaching people who are not that young either.
(logged in now). And I'm talking about the F-RS not the Scion of 2004. This article has a few statistics showing that the people buying the FR-S are not that young Edmunds . So maybe the actual marketing campaign for the FR-S was aimed at younger people than who actually bought it. I don't know. But I know the car and the design is towards handling - difficult to sell to youngsters - and tuning - easier to sell but maybe not such a large market.
I haven't spent any thought yet on the distinction between BRZ and FR-S.
If you'd seen the guy who's still driving that last Topazs you'd understand.
Oh you made me remember reading about it. Microgravimetric analysis of Cheops in 1980. Of course the Cavendish experiment required only 300 kg of material two centuries ago, so I suppose the whole thing about precision is how far away you are when doing the measuring. So my initial point remains: the title isn't saying much. Not like "Gravitational change now big enough to cause some people to have to update their tables".
On the contrary, an alternate title for the article could have been "Measurement of gravity is now so incredibly precise that it can detect the effect of Antarctica melting away." . But that was too long.
It's a bit more than a concern, it's distrust because the idea has some attributes I'm suspicious about. Compare it with panspermia theories. These theories were successful primarily because people had problems thinking up ways of how life could spring out of nothing. That by themselves doesn't make them wrong of course, and some may claim that it's unsigntific to use such things as distrust. I disagree.
On the other hand, if it turns out that electroweak parity breaking does percolate upwards all into chemistry that would make it a very fascinating find.
Well, I'll need a lot of convincing to conclude that the asymmetry in amino acids was not due to contamination at some stage.
The article is rather dubious really.
There's an underlying assumption that the symmetry braking of the solution requires an asymmetry in the starting condition.
If you place a pencil upright it is very unstable and it will fall over. In what direction it will fall depends on the 'background noise' disturbances which can be completely symmetrical - on average.
So you have a completely symmetrical situation but the outcome will be completely asymmetrical: the pencil falls over in one direction. It is not an interesting question to investigate why exactly the pencil fell in this specific direction.
So what's the deal here, if our dna pencil comes out oriented one way? That electroweak parity breaking causes the pencil to fall over in one direction? That the chances of the pencil falling over in a specific direction are slightly enhanced but the outcome can still be anything - as with a single roll of a dice with 17 'left' faces and 15 'right' faces? Or that the effect will just be drowned by the background noise?
I think the latter.
It reminds me of the claims that the bathtub always drains with a rotation that depends on the hemisphere, while in fact the impact of the coriolis effect is completely negligeable..
It's nice to have technology to better dispose of diapers, but it should not be used as an alternative to tackling the main problem, which is that babies now wear diapers over longer and longer periods. The main reason for this is interfering with biofeedback. The better the diaper the less feedback the baby gets so the less it is inclined to change its behavior.
The best way to reduce spent diapers is to reintroduce a form of biofeedback. An irritation. An annoyance. But of course that would interfere with the gains of Proctor and Gamble.
If I might propose an environmental regulation, it would be about the minimum allowed amount of negative biofeedback in pampers.
In other words, from a certain age on it would not be allowed to make them too good.
I think you're far off the mark. The conflict in Ukraine has been building up for years and the Russians have since long threatened with very aggressive countermoves if the west and especially NATO would attempt to incorporate Ukraine - or Georgia for that matter.
The west disregarded the threats because they thought Russia is no major player anymore and could be ignored. So yes, Putin knows that Ukraine isn't worth a major conflict to the west and he makes use of that. But Putin is not on a mission of conquest and he has no desire to absorb parts of Ukraine.
Let's say he's got reasonable demands but stopping NATO expansion is important enough for him to use very brutal methods. And that could include ruining Ukraine or splitting it up.
Yeah right.
If you want a source for how Hamas stuck to the ceasefire agreement: here
The distinction between Hamas and other resistance parties matters or not dependent on what you want. The current policy is -more or less- that Hamas is just a symptom, you have to tackle the complete population. That is what the Dahiya doctrine is about, collective punishment and dedevelopment. If you're interested in a negotiated solution (well, negotiated improvement), and some hardnosed Israelis have really been in support of that option for a long time, Ephraim Halevy for instance, then the distinction matters. Because people like Halevy notice that Hamas is very moderate and organized compared to the other parties and that they are capable of policing the other parties.They may not be moderate in terms of how they see local government, but that is no concern of Israel.
I saw your two wikipedia links (sinai and rockets). I did mean Hamas, not other groups and I don't see any confirmation about Hamas involvement. Hamas was very cautious about upsetting the egyptian government But Sisi went ahead and closed the border anyway. It'll be a few hours before I can dig into this. I'm also not sure which of the rocket attacks in the list of the last two years you think were from Hamas.
It will take a few hours before I can dig into this.
I recall you from posts on Iran nuclear. I disagreed with you but you're better informed than average.
Contrary to common opinion I think the Muslim Brotherhood has been quite nonviolent. I'm not counting demonstrations but actual armed resistance. Hamas was targeted by Egypt because of its good ties with the MB , not because of what it actually did. And because the new regime in Egypt works tightly together with Israel. It's not about Hamas being violent, they are not. It's about control. Look at the history. Hamas for years incited to suicide attacks. from a military point of view the approach had its merit because in effect it came close to tit-for-tat retaliation strategies. Tit-for-tat is a good base for negotiations, but of course the approach was untenable and Israel has its own reasons to oppose negotiated resolutions in general.Then they chose the political approach and this was immediately met with a blockade. Look up Dov Weissglass comments about putting Gazans on a diet, right after the elections. Then started the rockets against the blockade. They were highly ineffective (30 killed in a decade) but they scared people and forced them to adapt. Then after being beaten up constantly Hamas only fired rockets when being hit exceptionally hard.
In the last case there was a failed hostage taking instance begin june in the westbank. Not directly related to Hamas. It took several weeks of being all over Hamas before they launched their first rockets(end of june). Before that they hadn't fired any rockets in two years time and they had mostly suppressed those of other parties. And that reaction was enough for the vast majority of Israelis to demand that the IDF just wipe them all out.
So you think Hamas should disarm in order to take away the excuse. . Ok. And let's not forget all provocations should be ignored and make sure nobody else can react to provocations as well. Also give up all hope to build up an economy because any significant economy can create sophisticated rockets in no time. And learn to do without water because Israel needs it. Actually , best just disappear.
There has been hope to achieve things using nonviolent approaches, especially the hope to build up momentum. But really, mostly that meant everyone could ignore the westbank and Israel could go on and complete its plans. Also the bar was raised: sorry, not nonviolent enough. There was throwing stones. Less than a fullfledged Gandhi will not do.
Nonviolence may work, but there are countermeasures for everything, and demanding nonviolence from the oppressed is ridiculous. It's just the standard pattern of always raising the demands fom the oppressed and asking nothing from the oppressor. Well I'd be willing to look away if the IDF wanted to get a few nasty jobs done , as long as the overall plan was acceptable. But the Israeli plan is to make the Palestinians disappear as much as possible. In practice it means concentrating them in the minimum of space and dedeveloping them. Violent resistance makes the process go faster but at the same time raises awareness. I can see that a western government wants to quietly look away while it happens,you know, just looking after itself. But it always annoys me how anyone is willing to believe just anything just to make it easier to look away.
Well I asked for that. I should have said it differently. Another try: there is a lot of experimental evidence to show that the fine structure constant is constant. If it hadn't been constant we would have known. With the claim that the fine structure constant is a real constant one is on solid ground.
Then the possibility that outside of the solid experimental proof the constant could still vary "maybe the constant was not always the same" - should be handled very sparingly. It's an idea to be kept on a short leash because it's speculation. And often its untestable speculation , and it's best to stay out of that territory. And when you do experiments and they don't come out right, the hypothesis that 'maybe current scientific understanding is wrong' should be considered a very expensive claim that should be postponed until all other options have been exhausted. Instead, and partly because of popular media, it's become a very cheap claim that is easily made.
In the OPERA experiment they came up with the explanation that maybe neutrinos go faster than light. If you want to claim that maybe all of our scientific understanding is wrong then you need an awful lot of evidence to back it up, or you shouldn't make the claim. The guy should just have shut up and kept searching rather than hoping for a scoop.
People should not start trotting out a 'variable constant' hypothesis because some ratio of elements is wrong in ore.
The RX8 has been sold for a long time but they discontinued it a few years back. They're working on a successor but as long as they fail to satisfy the emission requirements it's not going to enter the market.