ISS videos of the visible aurora have been doing the rounds internally at Cassini for a few months now, and they really are spectacular, but a height of 1200km is hardly a surprise new value, given that it falls in the exact range expected when compared with observations of the UV aurora made by the Hubble Space Telescope:
Is it a world-level scandal? Really? Because I, in the UK, had no idea, so I looked on the BBC website and there's no mention of it, even on the gymnastics page - so I searched for He Kexin and again the BBC site says nothing.
Given that we're a neutral country here, in that winning a bronze in gymnastics was big news for us, this suggests that it's not really a huge worldwide scandal, rather annoyance from the countries who could have won.
Maybe China are in the wrong, but it hasn't yet, as some here are suggesting, dragged the name of the IOC through the mud - and it certainly isn't as big a news story as those athletes who have positive drug tests.
While 03:30UT is definitely in daylight, 05:00 is 7pm - after sunset, though the sky won't be fully dark at that point. We're observing out here at the moment, so we're very aware of the sky conditions.
As an aside, can you guess who has a flight out of Hawaii at 6:45pm on the 20th? Joy!
That's a fair point, but remember that the tax payer currently has to pay for the extended costs of using gas and coal power stations too. How can you calculate the cost that results from using an energy source that contributes significantly to global warming and relies on supplies that require a direct involvement with an 'unstable' political region?
No-one thinks nuclear power is perfectly safe - the real question is whether it is less dangerous than the only currently usable alternative.
Several people within my department use Lyx for a number of different processes. I use a Mac, so I work with TexShop. To be honest though, when it comes to submitting to journals, it's a moot point, as you are required to use the LaTeX code they provide with the macros they provide, so you have to work within the coded files anyway.
Most journals are fixed to a fairly limited number of formats: Geophysical Research Letters and Astrophysical Journal both use LaTeX, Icarus uses PDF or Word. I tend to write my papers in Word or TextEdit, simply because it's easy to add any code needed than remove it.
As a few people have already stated, Nature not accepting.docx files isn't really a surprise to anyone working in the field, as journals have their own work-flow processes which are painful to adapt, so they tend to stick with what works.
My experience of nupedia was somewhat different. Academics don't have a lot of time available to them to sit and write entries for an encyclopedia, so it was with tentative steps that I applied to provide content.
What I found was that the experience was utterly negative. There was little feedback, and despite having 'passed' the academic test, I felt I was looked down upon by the editors, who counter-guessed me without query. Needless to say, I removed my name from the system, and the bookmark from my browser, and I never went back. It had little to do with not trusting the source, as you have suggested, it was just a bad experience from a bad editorial process.
Wikipedia probably gets a lot of the same responses, but there are thousands of people who are willing to fill the breach. I have certainly never put anything into wikipedia as a direct response to my experience of nupedia. No matter - there are plenty of people willing to write about something they only know partially, so wikipedia thrives. If you want real experts to write about their subjects, you have to rely on them not getting so annoyed with the experience as to just give up. I'd rather have my scientific papers pushed through a hard review process than some encyclopedia entry that doesn't really benefit me.
Maybe I'm poor-spirited, and am not a good example of the scientific community, but given the 'success' of nupedia, I doubt it.
Or more specifically, a dramatic change in the distribution of money in the UK/European planetary community.
Britain remains the only country in the world to have developed a working space program and then cancel it. The reason was because of the mantra that has been argued ever since: it is better to develop science-based programs than 'waste' money on putting people in space. If science is your driver, robot missions are much better value for money, which is why you get huge UK involvement in, for example, Cassini, while there remains only one official UK astronaut.
But coming soon is a huge change in the way money is going to be fed into the European space program. It's called Aurora, and it basically says Europe should do what Bush has said the US should do: people going to the Moon, then Mars, and all that entails (tellingly, it said this before Bush).
Many countries in Europe are very positive about a human spaceflight mission, but the current UK position is that we intend to put in money only for the robot mission part of getting to Mars. In the long run, however, joining the club all the way and signing up for the aim to get people to Mars, would allow us to dip into a much larger pot of money. Especially if the scientists convince the politians that they should put up the money for political reasons.
There will be a lower percentage of science for the money, but the gamble is that there'll be enough of an increase in the total funding to mean more money for direct reasearch. As it is, the planetary community is already gambling their current research money to buy into the robotic part of aurora, hoping to get a large return on Mars science (at the cost of a small reduction for research of other planets) by getting more money than they put in back from ESA and the UK government. This is just a radical and markedly different extension of that.
All solid planets already have evidence for most of these features. What has previously made the Earth unique is Plate Tectonics, a form of Global Tectonics. It allows the recycling of both the atmosphere and crustal rocks within an extended carbon cycle, which in turn produces much more complicated minerology. The Earth's surface is very young compared to most planets, both through constant erosion, and renewal from sea-floor spreading and high levels of volcanism.
Mars is nearly or completely dead, but it would be very interesting if it once had plate tectonics, because it tests either 1) the prediction that plate tectonics requires massive oceans (to lubricate subduction zones), or 2) the prediction that Mars never had a global ocean.
Both Pioneer Spacecraft (as well as Voyager) measure the anomaly, and they are moving away from the Sun in different directions. A distant object has been ruled out as a potential source of the effect, since to produce a slowing of all the spacecraft you need a force acting towards the sun. Whatever is causing them to slow down, it's not a solar system body too far out for us to see.
I think you need to try and separate out Greenhouse warming from man-made greenhouse warming. There is little question that events like massive amounts of vocanic material being thrown into the atmosphere are going to effect the climate. Dust will cool the atmosphere dramatically for a shorter period, then greenhouse gases will lead to lower levels of heating over a longer period of time. These aren't just some small volcano erupting here, the formation of Traps is a massive event that would have profound effects on the localised and global climate, though the release of volcanic gasses into the atmosphere. Just as the impact of a giant meteorite would cause such effects.
The question really is whether the slow and determined use of fuels by human-like can have a similar effect to these truly massive events.
The thing is, neither Yellowstone or Toba match the kinds of scale that the Deccan Flats or any of the older flood lava's reached in terms of massive scale destruction. Flood lavas occur over periods of many years, so it's an ongoing process, rather than a single huge event. It means that the damage done just keeps growing.
The Deccan Flats cover about 500,000 square km of India to a depth of 2km. That's a hell of a lot of lava, and a hell of a lot of gas being released into the atmosphere. It is fortunate that the cause of this type of volcanic eruption appears to have gone away - they were far more common in the Earth's early history than now.
No - he's hypothesising, rather than guessing.... The point, clearly, is that there are a lot of Kuiper Belt objects around, so doublets are much more likely, whereas a double planet system of a much larger size, like that of the Earth-Moon system, is far less likely. Capturing a free floating object the size of the moon is much more unlikely - current theory suggests the moon was created by a giant impact, another potentially difficult thing to happen in the right conditions for the moon to have formed.
The mass and ratio of mass of the Earth-Moon system might be very difficult to get, a potentially important component of the Drake equation that explains why we can't ask the wise ones for all the answers....
Stupid question, If it costs as much as another hubble up there , why are we not building another one and send it up again ?
So - what happens if the next one breaks after a year as well. Or, say, the mirror is badly fitted, and you have to fly an alteration up to correct for it. It happened with Hubble. And what if you want to upgrade the telescope, rather than rebuild it?
Hubble has been corrected, refitted and repaired by astronauts at least three times. If you had to build a new telescope every time you make a repair, you'll simply not get the money to repair. Much better to have a working solution - say astronauts, or if you're bored with a highly successful method, magical-robots-from-the-future.
With the aim of replenishing depleted state funds, Vespasianus introduced, among other things, a new tax on public lavatories. When objected to by his son Titus, Vespasianus held a coin collected under that tax law to his son's nose and asked him if it smelled.
Cooking may be imprecise, but baking requires much more exact measurements if you want your bread or cake to come out right. Using recipes from the internet generally means using American units, which can be horrible to convert (since America uses volume and metric uses weight).
I have a set of American cups and spoons that I bought over there, because it's easier than trying to remember the density of butter.
2003 May 07 07:52 2006 Nov 08 21:41 2016 May 09 14:57 2019 Nov 11 15:20 2032 Nov 13 08:54 2039 Nov 07 08:46 2049 May 07 14:24 2052 Nov 09 02:30 2062 May 10 21:37 2065 Nov 11 20:07 2078 Nov 14 13:42 2085 Nov 07 13:36 2095 May 08 21:08 2098 Nov 10 07:18
I must be missing something here... Why not just have bluetooth devices to the whole process? Surely the point of RFID tags is that they are cheap and can be spread, virus-like, through the known multi-verse. But if you have to have a transmitter for the transfer process anyway, why not just do it all through the bluetooth or wi-fi in the first place..?
One of the great mysteries that my girlfriend brought up about working for Distributed Proofreaders was that they would spend so long making sure of every detail of the formatting, and then the final text was as vanilla as manilla... I think she got tired of me asking why this should be, and why there couldn't be a HTML version, let alone a.pdf version.
I actually wrote a.pdf interpreter for the text outputs from PG. None of the files exactly formatted, though there are some similarities, so it took a while, but it basically reads in the file and outputs a.pdf. Of course, there is no 'actual' formatting, but I find it a lot better to read than the ascii version.
I'm willing to bet that you have a similar murder rate (statistically)
UK: 1.13e-4 % of the population murdered by gun. US: 3.79e-3 % of the population murdered by gun.
i.e. You are 33.5 times more likely to be murdered by a gun in the US than you are in the UK (if you believe the quoted statistics).
Finding actual murder rates is hard, numbers for the states varies between about 5.5 to 8, and the UK is quoted as about 1-2. Also, it seems they count murder rates in a different way, the UK counting murder convictions, and the US counting murder arrests. Still, using typical figures:
6.8e-3 % of the population murdered 1.5e-3 % of the population murdered
You are 4.5 times more likely to be murdered in the US than the UK.
As a side note, it does happen. The son of a friend was shot dead last year, so I'm well aware of the meaning behind these statistics. But - basically, you are more likely to be killed in the US, and *much* more likely to be shot.
More important from my point of view is statistics on people accidentally killed by guns each year in the US and the UK...
In the US, a conservative estimate is ~1500 people are killed by guns accidentally each year. I'm willing to bet thats at least 1495 more than the UK.
Olivine forms volcanically, and will alter quickly (on a geological scale) into another mineral called Serpentine, which is why finding it here is very suggestive that both during its formation and subsequence existance on Mars, the rock has remained dry. It's not such a surprise that olivine has been found, is it?
Slashdot Mirror
ISS videos of the visible aurora have been doing the rounds internally at Cassini for a few months now, and they really are spectacular, but a height of 1200km is hardly a surprise new value, given that it falls in the exact range expected when compared with observations of the UV aurora made by the Hubble Space Telescope:
Altitude of Saturn's aurora and its implications for the characteristic energy of precipitated electrons
Is it a world-level scandal? Really? Because I, in the UK, had no idea, so I looked on the BBC website and there's no mention of it, even on the gymnastics page - so I searched for He Kexin and again the BBC site says nothing.
Given that we're a neutral country here, in that winning a bronze in gymnastics was big news for us, this suggests that it's not really a huge worldwide scandal, rather annoyance from the countries who could have won.
Maybe China are in the wrong, but it hasn't yet, as some here are suggesting, dragged the name of the IOC through the mud - and it certainly isn't as big a news story as those athletes who have positive drug tests.
While 03:30UT is definitely in daylight, 05:00 is 7pm - after sunset, though the sky won't be fully dark at that point. We're observing out here at the moment, so we're very aware of the sky conditions.
As an aside, can you guess who has a flight out of Hawaii at 6:45pm on the 20th? Joy!
That's a fair point, but remember that the tax payer currently has to pay for the extended costs of using gas and coal power stations too. How can you calculate the cost that results from using an energy source that contributes significantly to global warming and relies on supplies that require a direct involvement with an 'unstable' political region?
No-one thinks nuclear power is perfectly safe - the real question is whether it is less dangerous than the only currently usable alternative.
If that's the case, then why are many meteors made of pure nickel/iron - a sure sign of a larger differentiated body having broken up.
Several people within my department use Lyx for a number of different processes. I use a Mac, so I work with TexShop. To be honest though, when it comes to submitting to journals, it's a moot point, as you are required to use the LaTeX code they provide with the macros they provide, so you have to work within the coded files anyway.
.docx files isn't really a surprise to anyone working in the field, as journals have their own work-flow processes which are painful to adapt, so they tend to stick with what works.
Most journals are fixed to a fairly limited number of formats: Geophysical Research Letters and Astrophysical Journal both use LaTeX, Icarus uses PDF or Word. I tend to write my papers in Word or TextEdit, simply because it's easy to add any code needed than remove it.
As a few people have already stated, Nature not accepting
http://www.gps.caltech.edu/~mbrown/planetlila/hubb le.jpeg
My experience of nupedia was somewhat different. Academics don't have a lot of time available to them to sit and write entries for an encyclopedia, so it was with tentative steps that I applied to provide content.
What I found was that the experience was utterly negative. There was little feedback, and despite having 'passed' the academic test, I felt I was looked down upon by the editors, who counter-guessed me without query. Needless to say, I removed my name from the system, and the bookmark from my browser, and I never went back. It had little to do with not trusting the source, as you have suggested, it was just a bad experience from a bad editorial process.
Wikipedia probably gets a lot of the same responses, but there are thousands of people who are willing to fill the breach. I have certainly never put anything into wikipedia as a direct response to my experience of nupedia. No matter - there are plenty of people willing to write about something they only know partially, so wikipedia thrives. If you want real experts to write about their subjects, you have to rely on them not getting so annoyed with the experience as to just give up. I'd rather have my scientific papers pushed through a hard review process than some encyclopedia entry that doesn't really benefit me.
Maybe I'm poor-spirited, and am not a good example of the scientific community, but given the 'success' of nupedia, I doubt it.
Or more specifically, a dramatic change in the distribution of money in the UK/European planetary community.
Britain remains the only country in the world to have developed a working space program and then cancel it. The reason was because of the mantra that has been argued ever since: it is better to develop science-based programs than 'waste' money on putting people in space. If science is your driver, robot missions are much better value for money, which is why you get huge UK involvement in, for example, Cassini, while there remains only one official UK astronaut.
But coming soon is a huge change in the way money is going to be fed into the European space program. It's called Aurora, and it basically says Europe should do what Bush has said the US should do: people going to the Moon, then Mars, and all that entails (tellingly, it said this before Bush).
Many countries in Europe are very positive about a human spaceflight mission, but the current UK position is that we intend to put in money only for the robot mission part of getting to Mars. In the long run, however, joining the club all the way and signing up for the aim to get people to Mars, would allow us to dip into a much larger pot of money. Especially if the scientists convince the politians that they should put up the money for political reasons.
There will be a lower percentage of science for the money, but the gamble is that there'll be enough of an increase in the total funding to mean more money for direct reasearch. As it is, the planetary community is already gambling their current research money to buy into the robotic part of aurora, hoping to get a large return on Mars science (at the cost of a small reduction for research of other planets) by getting more money than they put in back from ESA and the UK government. This is just a radical and markedly different extension of that.
All solid planets already have evidence for most of these features. What has previously made the Earth unique is Plate Tectonics, a form of Global Tectonics. It allows the recycling of both the atmosphere and crustal rocks within an extended carbon cycle, which in turn produces much more complicated minerology. The Earth's surface is very young compared to most planets, both through constant erosion, and renewal from sea-floor spreading and high levels of volcanism.
Mars is nearly or completely dead, but it would be very interesting if it once had plate tectonics, because it tests either 1) the prediction that plate tectonics requires massive oceans (to lubricate subduction zones), or 2) the prediction that Mars never had a global ocean.
In a word - No.
Both Pioneer Spacecraft (as well as Voyager) measure the anomaly, and they are moving away from the Sun in different directions. A distant object has been ruled out as a potential source of the effect, since to produce a slowing of all the spacecraft you need a force acting towards the sun. Whatever is causing them to slow down, it's not a solar system body too far out for us to see.
I think you need to try and separate out Greenhouse warming from man-made greenhouse warming. There is little question that events like massive amounts of vocanic material being thrown into the atmosphere are going to effect the climate. Dust will cool the atmosphere dramatically for a shorter period, then greenhouse gases will lead to lower levels of heating over a longer period of time. These aren't just some small volcano erupting here, the formation of Traps is a massive event that would have profound effects on the localised and global climate, though the release of volcanic gasses into the atmosphere. Just as the impact of a giant meteorite would cause such effects.
The question really is whether the slow and determined use of fuels by human-like can have a similar effect to these truly massive events.
The thing is, neither Yellowstone or Toba match the kinds of scale that the Deccan Flats or any of the older flood lava's reached in terms of massive scale destruction. Flood lavas occur over periods of many years, so it's an ongoing process, rather than a single huge event. It means that the damage done just keeps growing.
The Deccan Flats cover about 500,000 square km of India to a depth of 2km. That's a hell of a lot of lava, and a hell of a lot of gas being released into the atmosphere. It is fortunate that the cause of this type of volcanic eruption appears to have gone away - they were far more common in the Earth's early history than now.
No - he's hypothesising, rather than guessing.... The point, clearly, is that there are a lot of Kuiper Belt objects around, so doublets are much more likely, whereas a double planet system of a much larger size, like that of the Earth-Moon system, is far less likely. Capturing a free floating object the size of the moon is much more unlikely - current theory suggests the moon was created by a giant impact, another potentially difficult thing to happen in the right conditions for the moon to have formed.
The mass and ratio of mass of the Earth-Moon system might be very difficult to get, a potentially important component of the Drake equation that explains why we can't ask the wise ones for all the answers....
Stupid question, If it costs as much as another hubble up there , why are we not building another one and send it up again ?
So - what happens if the next one breaks after a year as well. Or, say, the mirror is badly fitted, and you have to fly an alteration up to correct for it. It happened with Hubble. And what if you want to upgrade the telescope, rather than rebuild it?
Hubble has been corrected, refitted and repaired by astronauts at least three times. If you had to build a new telescope every time you make a repair, you'll simply not get the money to repair. Much better to have a working solution - say astronauts, or if you're bored with a highly successful method, magical-robots-from-the-future.
For those who can't use java translators, like me - from Latin Proverbs and locutions:
Pecunia non olet. (Vespasianus)
Money has no smell. Money doesn't stink.
With the aim of replenishing depleted state funds, Vespasianus introduced, among other things, a new tax on public lavatories. When objected to by his son Titus, Vespasianus held a coin collected under that tax law to his son's nose and asked him if it smelled.
Cooking may be imprecise, but baking requires much more exact measurements if you want your bread or cake to come out right. Using recipes from the internet generally means using American units, which can be horrible to convert (since America uses volume and metric uses weight).
I have a set of American cups and spoons that I bought over there, because it's easier than trying to remember the density of butter.
Pirates of the Federation: The Curse of the Black Enterprise
What a good idea! Get Johnny Depp to stagger around with his arms wandering, and talking in scattered patterns of speech.
"I.... Am The.... Captain of... This.... Ship"
Doesn't this sound somewhat familiar?
With thanks to Google:
Transits of Mercury: 2001-2100
Date Time
2003 May 07 07:52
2006 Nov 08 21:41
2016 May 09 14:57
2019 Nov 11 15:20
2032 Nov 13 08:54
2039 Nov 07 08:46
2049 May 07 14:24
2052 Nov 09 02:30
2062 May 10 21:37
2065 Nov 11 20:07
2078 Nov 14 13:42
2085 Nov 07 13:36
2095 May 08 21:08
2098 Nov 10 07:18
I must be missing something here... Why not just have bluetooth devices to the whole process? Surely the point of RFID tags is that they are cheap and can be spread, virus-like, through the known multi-verse. But if you have to have a transmitter for the transfer process anyway, why not just do it all through the bluetooth or wi-fi in the first place..?
One of the great mysteries that my girlfriend brought up about working for Distributed Proofreaders was that they would spend so long making sure of every detail of the formatting, and then the final text was as vanilla as manilla... I think she got tired of me asking why this should be, and why there couldn't be a HTML version, let alone a .pdf version.
.pdf interpreter for the text outputs from PG. None of the files exactly formatted, though there are some similarities, so it took a while, but it basically reads in the file and outputs a .pdf. Of course, there is no 'actual' formatting, but I find it a lot better to read than the ascii version.
I actually wrote a
Sounds like The Crying Game, where at the end, it was a man. :)
UK: 1.13e-4 % of the population murdered by gun.
US: 3.79e-3 % of the population murdered by gun.
i.e. You are 33.5 times more likely to be murdered by a gun in the US than you are in the UK (if you believe the quoted statistics).
Finding actual murder rates is hard, numbers for the states varies between about 5.5 to 8, and the UK is quoted as about 1-2. Also, it seems they count murder rates in a different way, the UK counting murder convictions, and the US counting murder arrests. Still, using typical figures:
6.8e-3 % of the population murdered
1.5e-3 % of the population murdered
You are 4.5 times more likely to be murdered in the US than the UK.
As a side note, it does happen. The son of a friend was shot dead last year, so I'm well aware of the meaning behind these statistics. But - basically, you are more likely to be killed in the US, and *much* more likely to be shot.
More important from my point of view is statistics on people accidentally killed by guns each year in the US and the UK...
In the US, a conservative estimate is ~1500 people are killed by guns accidentally each year. I'm willing to bet thats at least 1495 more than the UK.
That's what I'd heard as well.
Olivine forms volcanically, and will alter quickly (on a geological scale) into another mineral called Serpentine, which is why finding it here is very suggestive that both during its formation and subsequence existance on Mars, the rock has remained dry. It's not such a surprise that olivine has been found, is it?