Which of the wavelengths that the hubble can shoot which ground based cannot will fail to be served far, far better by Webb?
The UV. Our atmosphere is opaque to the UV, and JWST, being an infrared optimised telescope, isn't going to be capable of observing the UV at all.
Its important to note that JWST is not a simple upgrade to HST. It has a very different mission and set of instruments. Its not just HST with a bigger mirror.
The Hubble is being replaced in 2011 with an improved space telescope, so it is a waste of limited resources (shuttle launches) to upgrade it just to drag out its lifetime by three years or so.
The Next Generation Space Telescope, now called the James Webb Space Telescope (first time NASA's named a scientific instrument after an administrator) is not a replacement for Hubble.
Its an infrared optimised 6ish m telescope (downscoped from 8m). It has little optical capability, no UV capability. Its an extension to what Hubble can do not a replacement. There is much excellent stuff that JWST will be able to do, but there is much that Hubble can and could do in the future that JWST cannot. Indeed there has been a lot of debate about keeping HST running so that it can operate concurrently with JWST filling in the missing parts of the spectrum for the new telescope as well as continuing with its own excellent work. The synergy would have been excellent.
To suggest that JWST is a straightforward replacement for HST is very wrong, and demonstrates a complete misunderstanding of the capabilities of the two instruments. Do check your facts first.
Actually this isn't correct. The exemption only applies to citizens of these countries travelling under the visa waiver scheme. If, like me, you're travelling with a visa, then you get your picture and fingerprints taken - I'm British, and had this done when I arrived at San Francisco yesterday.
Its interesting to see what they do and don't like. For example:
- the one item that we know has been used to try to blow up a plane in the last two years, matches, are still permitted. This is allegedly at the insistence of the tobacco lobby, who want to make sure all their addicts can light up as soon as they arrive at their destination.
- metal forks are still provided by many airlines and airport outlets for meals. Among cutlery items, forks are arguably more dangerous than knives, especially the blunt knives you used to get on planes.
- glass is an interesting one. I could convert my glass eye glasses into weapons in a few moments. Glass cutting edges could be more effective than boxcutters, as long as you don't mind getting too messy.
Time and time again, from ID cards to the TSA, it seems this whole intrusive system isn't about providing real security its about providing the illusion of security, and that makes me very worried.
Of course now I'll probably get strip searched whenever I get within a mile of an airport...
Will this kit be able to do genetic testing for paternity? If some stidues are right, then many people do not have the father they think they have. Having home genetic testing for this could produce some very interesting results...
The thread asks what will happen when we move into an era of plenty. Since money is a way of rationing scarce items, then when you get rid of scarcity, perhaps you don't need money any more. The economic model becomes fundamentally different. As others have noted on this thread, OSS may be an example of this beginning to happen already.
Now I don't actually agree with the premis that we're moving to an era of plenty. Things might get less scarce in the affluent west, but there will still be grinding poverty in much of the rest of the world, and much of the western affluence will be based on unsustainable levels of energy and resource use, at least until we get rid of our dependence on fossil fuels etc.. However, a world where there is a genuine lack of scarcity might not need money in the way we understand it today.
There are still quite a few countries that use paper and pencil ballots - the UK and canada to name two.
I actually fail to understand the love of machines in elections. A paper ballot is easily understandable, easily countable, is reliant only on pencil and paper at the user end (so no trouble with butterfly ballots, hanging chads or whetever) and is pretty unambiguous on the colunting end. As someone else has noted, the US only has an election once every 2 years, so the costs of paying people to do the count would not be very high. As long as the counters can be trusted (and you can have scruitineers from all parties wandering the counting floor to check) I don't see that this system will be any less reliable than machines, and it could be a lot better. I also don't see that the scale-up from a country with a 60 million population to one with 250 million would be that bad.
So why, apart from the commercial interests of the election machine makers, does the US stick with voting machines?
I'm a dedicated IDL user. Its much more than just a plotting package, and can be used for all sorts of analysis and other numerical work. It isn't cheap, though RSI do a lot of campus site lisences so you be able to get it through the university. It does need to have X11 installed, but it works fine with either Apple's version or X-Darwin. The numerical part of IDL makes excellent use of the G4's vector processor if you have one.
I believe a number of citation indexes deal with this problem by excluding self-citation when looking at the impact of any given paper. Of course with some projects where a sizable fraction of a given scientific community are involved (eg. big particle physics collaborations) this may lead to underestimating a paper's impact.
Journal of Applied Physics -- December 15, 2002 -- Volume 92, Issue 12, pp. 7008-7021
The abstract is as follows:
Comparison of excessive Balmer alpha line broadening of glow discharge and microwave hydrogen plasmas with certain catalysts
R. L. Mills, P. C. Ray, B. Dhandapani, R. M. Mayo, and J. He
BlackLight Power, Incorporated, 493 Old Trenton Road, Cranbury, New Jersey 08512
(Received 11 April 2002; accepted 25 September 2002)
From the width of the 656.3 nm Balmer alpha line emitted from microwave and glow discharge plasmas, it was found that a strontium-hydrogen microwave plasma showed a broadening similar to that observed in the glow discharge cell of 27-33 eV; whereas, in both sources, no broadening was observed for magnesium-hydrogen. Microwave helium-hydrogen and argon-hydrogen plasmas showed extraordinary broadening corresponding to an average hydrogen atom temperature of 180-210 eV and 110-130 eV, respectively. The corresponding results from the glow discharge plasmas were 33-38 eV and 30-35 eV respectively, compared to [approximate]4 eV for plasmas of pure hydrogen, neon-hydrogen, krypton-hydrogen, and xenon-hydrogen maintained in either source. Similarly, the average electron temperature Te for helium-hydrogen and argon-hydrogen microwave plasmas were high, 30 500±5% K and 13 700±5% K, respectively; compared to 7400±5% K and 5700±5% K for helium and argon alone, respectively. External Stark broadening or acceleration of charged species due to high fields can not explain the microwave results since no high field was present, and the electron density was orders of magnitude too low for the corresponding Stark effect. Rather, a resonant energy transfer mechanism is proposed.
What format and storage medium you adopt for truly long term data storage is still a thorny issue. The only medium we know can survive this long, and which has a reasonable data density, is good old fashioned acid-free paper and ink. This was the approach that the Hipparcos Project, a satellite mission to measure the positions and motions of stars to unprecedented accuracy, chose for their long term archive. As well as electronic storage, they published a paper catalog in books using acid free paper, long duration inks, and a font specially designed to make OCR easy, and then made sure that lots of different libraries, scattered over the world, had copies.
So are these security features for the users, as everyone seems to be assuming, or for the content producers? Incorporating DRM into zipping would be a good way of placing speedbumnps on various P2P sharing systems.
With greater use of the spectrum, and the potential for software defined radios to use any frequency they want to transmit on, we're going to close out the possibility of ground based radio astronomy. This is not a good thing!
Radio astronomy produced many of the basic technologies that todays wireless communications revolution depends on, but is seeing none of the (financial) benefits and is gradually getting squeezed out of its own very limited parts of reserved spectrum. Maybe there should be a 1% levy on all radio licenses dedicated to help astronomers get around this problem and properly police their parts of the spectrum. Or maybe all the money raised from spectrum auctions should be dedicated to establishing space-based astronomy in the radio - probably on the backside of the moon to get away from all the noise!
There are needs for regulation to protect the other users of spectrum that wireless networkers forget about. Total spectrum freedom is not possible or a reasonable goal.
Calling Parkes mroe 'powerful' than Arecibo is somewhat confusing. Arecibo actually has a much larger disk, so it can detect fainter sources (one definition of powerful). However, it gets this collecting area at the expense of being unable to steer, while Parkes can point all over the sky. The other issue is the multibeam receiver. Parkes with multibeam can observe 13 positions at once, while Arecibo is constrained to one. In this sense Parkes could be said to be 13 times as powerful as Arecibo.
It should be noted that there is also a multibeam receiver at Jodrell Bank near Manchester. I'm not sure if this has been involved with any SETI observations.
As to going to the south, an earlier SETI search by META found a few signals that might've been of artificial origin, but these did not repeat, so were not cast iron SETI candidates. Intrigingly, these sources clustered along the Galactic Plane. By moving the search to the south, SETI will be able to see far more galactic stars. The reference for this is: Horowitz and Sagan, 1993, Astrophysical Journal vol. 415 p.218.
I don't know what field your partner is in, but it should be noted that a PhD is not a guarantee of an academic career. You might want to see how things develop in her studies as well as her and your job market over the next few years before making any irreversible decisions.
A friend of mine tried gargling with it (it can be done) and swallowed some. He belched for about a minute solid, but that was it. And he thermally shocked his teeth, knocking the dental cares off, which was perhaps a good thing...
I could trot out the stale comment here about how the BBC, funded by lisence fee, has no commercials.
But there's an interesting extra point to TV in the UK. Because there's a commercial-free alternative, the commercials themselves have to work to get viewers.
I've watched commercial TV in the US and UK, and I have to say that the commercials on British TV are a lot better - they're better made, have more interesting scripts and better, more subtle presentation.
This may be because the makers know there's a commercial-free station that the viewer can just switch to if they want. The commercial must thus be eye catching and engaging. We thus get much less of the hard sell than US commercials, and more subtlty and humour.
A PVR viewer thus might have their interest caught by a bank advert directed in the Blade Runner style by Ridley Scott (yes, there were such things). The viewer might not want to watch this every time it comes up, but if their interest can be piqued just once by a well-made commercial competing successfully with the impulse to skip over it, then its probably worth a thousand repeat viewings by uninterested viewers.
Yes, this means networks and advertisers will have to work harder. And that might be just what they're afraid of.
Hey, I am an astronomer, and I'd love to see this confirmed. But its a very tough experiment and there are lots of possible problems. I'm sure there are also theorists out there who have already incorporated it into their latest model.
But, as the man says, extrordinary claims require extrordinary evidence. It took two totally groups conducting large long term projects, and some anciliary data that could be explained by it, for the reality of the Cosmological Constant to be seriously considered and incorporated into many standard models. And there are still problems with that results, both observationally and theoretically (we're in the process of publishing a paper on it in fact). It'll take a similar amount of effort and length of time for John Webb et al. to do the same with varying fine structure constant. The VLT data is a step, and publication of the paper in Nature meqans they're being taken seriously. Things will get interesting, though, when the VLT data becomes public (a year after observation) and other teams can go over it with independent analyses and try to confirm or refute the result.
Its also worth noting that a movie exec is unlikely to do any actual hacking even though they may order an attack. In legal terms this is conspiracy to commit a crime (in this case computer misuse) and thus carries significantly increased penalties.
One of the standard arguments against the existance of ETI are 'von-Neuman' probes - self reproducing probes that go to a star system, use local resources to make more of themselves, then head off to other systems. Repeat until you've explored the whole galaxy. This can take as little as 15 million years. The absence of von Neuman probes in the solar system was used by Frank Tipler to argue against the existence of ETI.
A simple change to this idea leads to 'Beserkers' - von Neuman probes that don't just look for life, but hunt it out and destroy it, to remove competition for their builders. This idea was originally described in Fred Saberhagen's Berserker books, and something similar comes up in Greg Bear's Forge of God and Anvil of Stars, Alistair Reynold's Revelation Space and other recent work, and elsewhere. This also could explain the failure of SETI to detect radio signals - if you make yourself obvious, you get wiped out.
An alternative to this is that its not the probes that kill you, but colonising aliens, who use up all the resources in a part of the galaxy and then expire, making way for a fallow period and then another round of colonisation. Stephen Baxter's Space addresses this idea.
The basic message of these theories is that the galaxy may be like a quiet forest, but its not quiet because there's nothing there, its quiet because there are wolves in the forest.
This is no surprise at all. Way back in 1990, at the Texas Symposium on Relativistic Atrophysics, I saw presentatioons that demonstrated that no real science was going to get done on whatever the space station was called at the time. They'd just stripped off all the astrophsycis capability and much else. Why has it taken so long for this panel to reach a conclusion that has been blindingly obvious to anyone with a set of eyes for more than a decade?
Slashdot Mirror
Which of the wavelengths that the hubble can shoot which ground based cannot will fail to be served far, far better by Webb?
The UV. Our atmosphere is opaque to the UV, and JWST, being an infrared optimised telescope, isn't going to be capable of observing the UV at all.
Its important to note that JWST is not a simple upgrade to HST. It has a very different mission and set of instruments. Its not just HST with a bigger mirror.
The Hubble is being replaced in 2011 with an improved space telescope, so it is a waste of limited resources (shuttle launches) to upgrade it just to drag out its lifetime by three years or so.
The Next Generation Space Telescope, now called the James Webb Space Telescope (first time NASA's named a scientific instrument after an administrator) is not a replacement for Hubble.
Its an infrared optimised 6ish m telescope (downscoped from 8m). It has little optical capability, no UV capability. Its an extension to what Hubble can do not a replacement. There is much excellent stuff that JWST will be able to do, but there is much that Hubble can and could do in the future that JWST cannot. Indeed there has been a lot of debate about keeping HST running so that it can operate concurrently with JWST filling in the missing parts of the spectrum for the new telescope as well as continuing with its own excellent work. The synergy would have been excellent.
To suggest that JWST is a straightforward replacement for HST is very wrong, and demonstrates a complete misunderstanding of the capabilities of the two instruments. Do check your facts first.
Actually this isn't correct. The exemption only applies to citizens of these countries travelling under the visa waiver scheme. If, like me, you're travelling with a visa, then you get your picture and fingerprints taken - I'm British, and had this done when I arrived at San Francisco yesterday.
Its interesting to see what they do and don't like. For example:
- the one item that we know has been used to try to blow up a plane in the last two years, matches, are still permitted. This is allegedly at the insistence of the tobacco lobby, who want to make sure all their addicts can light up as soon as they arrive at their destination.
- metal forks are still provided by many airlines and airport outlets for meals. Among cutlery items, forks are arguably more dangerous than knives, especially the blunt knives you used to get on planes.
- glass is an interesting one. I could convert my glass eye glasses into weapons in a few moments. Glass cutting edges could be more effective than boxcutters, as long as you don't mind getting too messy.
Time and time again, from ID cards to the TSA, it seems this whole intrusive system isn't about providing real security its about providing the illusion of security, and that makes me very worried.
Of course now I'll probably get strip searched whenever I get within a mile of an airport...
Will this kit be able to do genetic testing for paternity? If some stidues are right, then many people do not have the father they think they have. Having home genetic testing for this could produce some very interesting results...
The man said those that trained Bin Laden should indeed be punished. Oh wait, that would be the CIA .
The word was 'trained' not 'funded', and I don't know anyone who is denying that the CIA trained him.
So please address the point that was made, not the one you'd like to answer.
The thread asks what will happen when we move into an era of plenty. Since money is a way of rationing scarce items, then when you get rid of scarcity, perhaps you don't need money any more. The economic model becomes fundamentally different. As others have noted on this thread, OSS may be an example of this beginning to happen already.
Now I don't actually agree with the premis that we're moving to an era of plenty. Things might get less scarce in the affluent west, but there will still be grinding poverty in much of the rest of the world, and much of the western affluence will be based on unsustainable levels of energy and resource use, at least until we get rid of our dependence on fossil fuels etc.. However, a world where there is a genuine lack of scarcity might not need money in the way we understand it today.
There are still quite a few countries that use paper and pencil ballots - the UK and canada to name two.
I actually fail to understand the love of machines in elections. A paper ballot is easily understandable, easily countable, is reliant only on pencil and paper at the user end (so no trouble with butterfly ballots, hanging chads or whetever) and is pretty unambiguous on the colunting end. As someone else has noted, the US only has an election once every 2 years, so the costs of paying people to do the count would not be very high. As long as the counters can be trusted (and you can have scruitineers from all parties wandering the counting floor to check) I don't see that this system will be any less reliable than machines, and it could be a lot better. I also don't see that the scale-up from a country with a 60 million population to one with 250 million would be that bad.
So why, apart from the commercial interests of the election machine makers, does the US stick with voting machines?
I have a Casio calculator (FX501p) still running happily after more than 22 years!
I'm a dedicated IDL user. Its much more than just a plotting package, and can be used for all sorts of analysis and other numerical work. It isn't cheap, though RSI do a lot of campus site lisences so you be able to get it through the university. It does need to have X11 installed, but it works fine with either Apple's version or X-Darwin. The numerical part of IDL makes excellent use of the G4's vector processor if you have one.
Surely this is the ideal opportunity to learn voodoo and with an ideal practice subject!
I believe a number of citation indexes deal with this problem by excluding self-citation when looking at the impact of any given paper. Of course with some projects where a sizable fraction of a given scientific community are involved (eg. big particle physics collaborations) this may lead to underestimating a paper's impact.
The details of the paper are:
Journal of Applied Physics -- December 15, 2002 -- Volume 92, Issue 12, pp. 7008-7021
The abstract is as follows:
Comparison of excessive Balmer alpha line broadening of glow discharge and microwave hydrogen plasmas with certain catalysts
R. L. Mills, P. C. Ray, B. Dhandapani, R. M. Mayo, and J. He
BlackLight Power, Incorporated, 493 Old Trenton Road, Cranbury, New Jersey 08512
(Received 11 April 2002; accepted 25 September 2002)
From the width of the 656.3 nm Balmer alpha line emitted from microwave and glow discharge plasmas, it was found that a strontium-hydrogen microwave plasma showed a broadening similar to that observed in the glow discharge cell of 27-33 eV; whereas, in both sources, no broadening was observed for magnesium-hydrogen. Microwave helium-hydrogen and argon-hydrogen plasmas showed extraordinary broadening corresponding to an average hydrogen atom temperature of 180-210 eV and 110-130 eV, respectively. The corresponding results from the glow discharge plasmas were 33-38 eV and 30-35 eV respectively, compared to [approximate]4 eV for plasmas of pure hydrogen, neon-hydrogen, krypton-hydrogen, and xenon-hydrogen maintained in either source. Similarly, the average electron temperature Te for helium-hydrogen and argon-hydrogen microwave plasmas were high, 30 500±5% K and 13 700±5% K, respectively; compared to 7400±5% K and 5700±5% K for helium and argon alone, respectively. External Stark broadening or acceleration of charged species due to high fields can not explain the microwave results since no high field was present, and the electron density was orders of magnitude too low for the corresponding Stark effect. Rather, a resonant energy transfer mechanism is proposed.
What format and storage medium you adopt for truly long term data storage is still a thorny issue. The only medium we know can survive this long, and which has a reasonable data density, is good old fashioned acid-free paper and ink. This was the approach that the Hipparcos Project, a satellite mission to measure the positions and motions of stars to unprecedented accuracy, chose for their long term archive. As well as electronic storage, they published a paper catalog in books using acid free paper, long duration inks, and a font specially designed to make OCR easy, and then made sure that lots of different libraries, scattered over the world, had copies.
We still can't beat paper for durability.
So are these security features for the users, as everyone seems to be assuming, or for the content producers? Incorporating DRM into zipping would be a good way of placing speedbumnps on various P2P sharing systems.
With greater use of the spectrum, and the potential for software defined radios to use any frequency they want to transmit on, we're going to close out the possibility of ground based radio astronomy. This is not a good thing!
Radio astronomy produced many of the basic technologies that todays wireless communications revolution depends on, but is seeing none of the (financial) benefits and is gradually getting squeezed out of its own very limited parts of reserved spectrum. Maybe there should be a 1% levy on all radio licenses dedicated to help astronomers get around this problem and properly police their parts of the spectrum. Or maybe all the money raised from spectrum auctions should be dedicated to establishing space-based astronomy in the radio - probably on the backside of the moon to get away from all the noise!
There are needs for regulation to protect the other users of spectrum that wireless networkers forget about. Total spectrum freedom is not possible or a reasonable goal.
For more information see:
AAS webpages.
Calling Parkes mroe 'powerful' than Arecibo is somewhat confusing. Arecibo actually has a much larger disk, so it can detect fainter sources (one definition of powerful). However, it gets this collecting area at the expense of being unable to steer, while Parkes can point all over the sky. The other issue is the multibeam receiver. Parkes with multibeam can observe 13 positions at once, while Arecibo is constrained to one. In this sense Parkes could be said to be 13 times as powerful as Arecibo.
It should be noted that there is also a multibeam receiver at Jodrell Bank near Manchester. I'm not sure if this has been involved with any SETI observations.
As to going to the south, an earlier SETI search by META found a few signals that might've been of artificial origin, but these did not repeat, so were not cast iron SETI candidates. Intrigingly, these sources clustered along the Galactic Plane. By moving the search to the south, SETI will be able to see far more galactic stars. The reference for this is: Horowitz and Sagan, 1993, Astrophysical Journal vol. 415 p.218.
I don't know what field your partner is in, but it should be noted that a PhD is not a guarantee of an academic career. You might want to see how things develop in her studies as well as her and your job market over the next few years before making any irreversible decisions.
A friend of mine tried gargling with it (it can be done) and swallowed some. He belched for about a minute solid, but that was it. And he thermally shocked his teeth, knocking the dental cares off, which was perhaps a good thing...
I could trot out the stale comment here about how the BBC, funded by lisence fee, has no commercials.
But there's an interesting extra point to TV in the UK. Because there's a commercial-free alternative, the commercials themselves have to work to get viewers.
I've watched commercial TV in the US and UK, and I have to say that the commercials on British TV are a lot better - they're better made, have more interesting scripts and better, more subtle presentation.
This may be because the makers know there's a commercial-free station that the viewer can just switch to if they want. The commercial must thus be eye catching and engaging. We thus get much less of the hard sell than US commercials, and more subtlty and humour.
A PVR viewer thus might have their interest caught by a bank advert directed in the Blade Runner style by Ridley Scott (yes, there were such things). The viewer might not want to watch this every time it comes up, but if their interest can be piqued just once by a well-made commercial competing successfully with the impulse to skip over it, then its probably worth a thousand repeat viewings by uninterested viewers.
Yes, this means networks and advertisers will have to work harder. And that might be just what they're afraid of.
Hey, I am an astronomer, and I'd love to see this confirmed. But its a very tough experiment and there are lots of possible problems. I'm sure there are also theorists out there who have already incorporated it into their latest model.
But, as the man says, extrordinary claims require extrordinary evidence. It took two totally groups conducting large long term projects, and some anciliary data that could be explained by it, for the reality of the Cosmological Constant to be seriously considered and incorporated into many standard models. And there are still problems with that results, both observationally and theoretically (we're in the process of publishing a paper on it in fact). It'll take a similar amount of effort and length of time for John Webb et al. to do the same with varying fine structure constant. The VLT data is a step, and publication of the paper in Nature meqans they're being taken seriously. Things will get interesting, though, when the VLT data becomes public (a year after observation) and other teams can go over it with independent analyses and try to confirm or refute the result.
Its also worth noting that a movie exec is unlikely to do any actual hacking even though they may order an attack. In legal terms this is conspiracy to commit a crime (in this case computer misuse) and thus carries significantly increased penalties.
There are quite a few chilling ones out there...
One of the standard arguments against the existance of ETI are 'von-Neuman' probes - self reproducing probes that go to a star system, use local resources to make more of themselves, then head off to other systems. Repeat until you've explored the whole galaxy. This can take as little as 15 million years. The absence of von Neuman probes in the solar system was used by Frank Tipler to argue against the existence of ETI.
A simple change to this idea leads to 'Beserkers' - von Neuman probes that don't just look for life, but hunt it out and destroy it, to remove competition for their builders. This idea was originally described in Fred Saberhagen's Berserker books, and something similar comes up in Greg Bear's Forge of God and Anvil of Stars, Alistair Reynold's Revelation Space and other recent work, and elsewhere. This also could explain the failure of SETI to detect radio signals - if you make yourself obvious, you get wiped out.
An alternative to this is that its not the probes that kill you, but colonising aliens, who use up all the resources in a part of the galaxy and then expire, making way for a fallow period and then another round of colonisation. Stephen Baxter's Space addresses this idea.
The basic message of these theories is that the galaxy may be like a quiet forest, but its not quiet because there's nothing there, its quiet because there are wolves in the forest.
And that's quite scary...
This is no surprise at all. Way back in 1990, at the Texas Symposium on Relativistic Atrophysics, I saw presentatioons that demonstrated that no real science was going to get done on whatever the space station was called at the time. They'd just stripped off all the astrophsycis capability and much else. Why has it taken so long for this panel to reach a conclusion that has been blindingly obvious to anyone with a set of eyes for more than a decade?
Another route to protection is financial... Take the Swiss. They have everyone's money, so if you attack them, they burn your money. Simple really!