I'm not going to be happy until we get a Slashdot headline that reads something like: "Rabid Ninja Mosad Assassin Zombie Horde Goes On Rampage Against Patent Trolls".
I know this will come as a shock to many of you, but there once was a time before the Internets, when people had to decide, almost in a vacuum, whether a certain new movie was worth the money or not. Siskel and Ebert were one of the few reliable sources of decent information about new movies. And once you got to know them, you would know "Well, Gene liked it, but Roger didn't, (or whatever) so it probably is/isn't for me".
If I had gone with the more standard backwards "In Soviet Russia, cicadia eats YOU!", perhaps you and the adjectivially-challenged AC directly above you would have gotten the joke. Then again, probably not.
He's referring to a Byte Magazine "Coming Soon" from the April issue, back when 64Kx1 DRAMs cost ~$100 apiece. The blurb was about a hard disk for your Sinclair, no operating system available as yet. There was also a knife sharpener that mounted on the side of your 128K Macintosh, so you could "Knife the Mac".
Whenever you're doing a boring task, just think of the Benny Hill theme song and things go at twice their normal speed! Sometimes you're even chased by girls in bikinis while you're doing it! It's like magic!
I should have know the Standard Model aside would distract. My question isn't why aren't astronomers working on the Standard Model, it's why aren't astronomers working on Dark matter/energy? Why aren't astronomers working on the question of the constancy of gravity and the speed of light everywhere? Why aren't astronomers working on the topology of spacetime?
In other words why are astronomers working on exoplanets when there are so many other (IMO) more interesting astronomical questions?
I just don't understand the current astronomical obsession with nearby stars/solar systems and exoplanets. OK, I do understand that in this particular case, it's WISE data and simply fell into their laps while going through the survey data. But in the general case, from an astronomy/astrophysics interested layman's perspective, way way way too much intellectual bandwidth, funding, and future research proposals go into the search for exoplanets. I mean, here we are, postulating "dark matter" and "dark energy" to explain why the universe doesn't match our models, and yet we're spending all this time and money on looking for (mostly Jupiter-sized or bigger) planets that don't really tell us anything useful.
And don't even get me started on the Standard Model, with it's 27 Magic Constants; which I think is part and parcel of the whole dark matter/energy problem. Sure, the Standard Model has lots of predictive/descriptive power, but absolutely ZERO explanatory power.
I'm not trolling here, I really don't understand it and really want to know: what's the strange obsession with exoplanets, and what do we learn besides simply cataloging them?
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Of course not. They expect to be PAID to have their advertisers commercials shown to a larger audience.
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
"ubuntu" is Swahili for "I can't configure Debian".
I'm not going to be happy until we get a Slashdot headline that reads something like: "Rabid Ninja Mosad Assassin Zombie Horde Goes On Rampage Against Patent Trolls".
Which is exactly how the laws got written in the first place.
I know this will come as a shock to many of you, but there once was a time before the Internets, when people had to decide, almost in a vacuum, whether a certain new movie was worth the money or not. Siskel and Ebert were one of the few reliable sources of decent information about new movies. And once you got to know them, you would know "Well, Gene liked it, but Roger didn't, (or whatever) so it probably is/isn't for me".
If I had gone with the more standard backwards "In Soviet Russia, cicadia eats YOU!", perhaps you and the adjectivially-challenged AC directly above you would have gotten the joke. Then again, probably not.
You know, in Japan, parents tell their children that chicken tastes just like squid.
What a maroon.
You misspelled "Godzilla".
Ooooooohhhh. The Grand Canyon filled with the corpses of Google and government employees..... Do you have a newsletter or something?
Something about "All these worlds are yours, except something-or-other"...
Was there white smoke coming out the chimney or something?
He's referring to a Byte Magazine "Coming Soon" from the April issue, back when 64Kx1 DRAMs cost ~$100 apiece. The blurb was about a hard disk for your Sinclair, no operating system available as yet. There was also a knife sharpener that mounted on the side of your 128K Macintosh, so you could "Knife the Mac".
Redirecting Isaac Asimov's output onto William Shatner is just rude.
Thank you for shedding light where there was no darkness.
For those of you keeping track, that's the funniest thing on /. today.
It could explain why all the people one the Microsoft Surface commercials look like they're having grand mal seizures.
Their server room is one of the hotter spots in the cosmic background radiation.
Well, you did ask...
This should do the trick.
I hope you get William Shatner's "Rocket Man" stuck in your head for weeks.
Whenever you're doing a boring task, just think of the Benny Hill theme song and things go at twice their normal speed! Sometimes you're even chased by girls in bikinis while you're doing it! It's like magic!
I should have know the Standard Model aside would distract. My question isn't why aren't astronomers working on the Standard Model, it's why aren't astronomers working on Dark matter/energy? Why aren't astronomers working on the question of the constancy of gravity and the speed of light everywhere? Why aren't astronomers working on the topology of spacetime?
In other words why are astronomers working on exoplanets when there are so many other (IMO) more interesting astronomical questions?
I just don't understand the current astronomical obsession with nearby stars/solar systems and exoplanets. OK, I do understand that in this particular case, it's WISE data and simply fell into their laps while going through the survey data. But in the general case, from an astronomy/astrophysics interested layman's perspective, way way way too much intellectual bandwidth, funding, and future research proposals go into the search for exoplanets. I mean, here we are, postulating "dark matter" and "dark energy" to explain why the universe doesn't match our models, and yet we're spending all this time and money on looking for (mostly Jupiter-sized or bigger) planets that don't really tell us anything useful.
And don't even get me started on the Standard Model, with it's 27 Magic Constants; which I think is part and parcel of the whole dark matter/energy problem. Sure, the Standard Model has lots of predictive/descriptive power, but absolutely ZERO explanatory power.
I'm not trolling here, I really don't understand it and really want to know: what's the strange obsession with exoplanets, and what do we learn besides simply cataloging them?