When I first read the acronymn, I thought it said that SCOTS was going to hear the case. I was puzzled as to what they had to do with patents, but perhaps they could get a song out of it?
But couldn't terrorists get hold of this information and use it to execute their agendas of fear on the American (and World) public? We should definitely not allow the terrorists to do this! All information should be taken off the Internet immediately! </tounge-in-cheek>
There are several methods of detecting extra-solar planets. One of the first was detecting the extremely small wobble of the parent star as the planet orbits it. This works for planets less than the size of a "brown dwarf" (15-80 times the mass of Jupiter) down to around the size of Jupiter. As an example of the size of the wobble we detect, at 10 parsecs from the Sun, the wobble due to the orbit of Jupiter would be something like (if memory serves me correctly) three tenths of an arc-second.
Another method that also uses this wobble measures the Doppler shift of the light from the star as it comes towards us and away from us due to the planet's rotation. According to this paper, these velocities of the star are on the order of meters per second, so we're talking about extremely tiny Doppler shifts.
The method used in this study measures the slight dimming of the light of the star as the planet transits the star. This still generally works for larger, close-in planets. However, by studying the spectrum of the light that comes from the star and passes through the atmosphere of the planet, we can figure out what the atmosphere of the planet is made of.
For much smaller planets, it is possible to detect a slight localized brightening of the parent star when the planet is transiting across it. This brightening is due to the same gravitational lensing that we use to see far-away galaxies. The gravity of the planet focuses the light very slightly near it, and so we see a slightly bright spot on the star. This technique, called gravitational microlensing, has been used to discover planets of roughly the same size as the Earth.
Actually, a good rule of thumb for evaluating physical theories is that if they require us to appear special, they're probably wrong. So the more extra-solar planets we discover, the less special the Earth becomes, and the better it looks for our theories of solar system creation.
(very slightly off topic... sorry.)
I attended a physics colloquium the other week in which a professor from Duke was presenting the results of his research into the question of whether information could be sent faster than light through the various ways of coaxing wave speeds to be faster than c in anomalously dispersive media.
If you concoct a medium in which the index of refraction decreases as the wavelength of light increases, the "group velocity", or the speed at which pulses propagate, can be made to be faster than c. The "phase velocity", or the velocity at which each frequency of light propagates, is still less than c, but the pulse that each frequency is a part of is going faster than light.
The problem is that for the most part, the shape of a wave is pretty deterministic once you've seen a fairly small sample of the waveform. So recieving just the first few microseconds / nanoseconds / etc. of the pulse tells you everything about all of the frequencies which make it up.
But he added a nondeterministic part to the signal he sent (through this anomalously dispersive media), changing the shape of the pulse midstream depending on whether he was sending a "1" or a "0". He then timed how long it took before his detector could tell whether the incoming pulse was a "1" or a "0", and determined that despite the media appearing to emit the pulse before it recieved the pulse, his detector still could not differentiate between a "1" and a "0" faster than the speed of light. So Einstein (and Maxwell) continues to be vindicated, and information cannot possibly travel faster than the speed of light.
Only sites using "HitBox" software (HitBox is a division of WebSideStory, as is StatMarket) are polled. They may represent 125,000 sites among the millions on the Web, but they are invariably sites created on and often served on Windows machines. You can bet your bottom dollar that Slashdot and Low End Mac are not among these sites."
Why doesn't Slashdot take a poll of the OSs that hit it? Heck. All the OSDN sites could take the poll, and then release their results as the TRUE results. I mean, gosh. As long as we're having baised samples of the Internet, we should bias it the RIGHT way!
Actual quote from a (weirdo) guy near N. C. State University:
"People don't invent things. People pay college students to invent things."
We ran into this guy at a chinese restaurant, where he was discussing his scheme to get a biochemistry major to develop implants for Marilyn Monroe (??)...
He said that he'd have gone to UNC-CH (just around the corner), but there are too many, you know, actual doctors there, who'd have asked too many questions...
There are plenty of weird people floating around colleges...
(sings) There should be clones.... send in the clones....
(... and they ate Sir Robin's minstrels, and there was much rejoicing -- yaay)
'View Source' on the bandwidth-testing page?
on
Gaming On Demand
·
· Score: 1
Did anyone happen to view the source of the 'bandwidth testing' page at www.eb1.com?
It has a long commented out tract of what appears to be random characters... I can't post an excerpt here because/.'s lameness filter thinks it's garbage...
IANA Musician, but I seem to remember from my ancient days of playing violin that C-sharp is equivalent to D-flat. Which also seems to be an appropriate description.
My mother tells the story of when she was working as a lobbyist for NRECA.
They were working on a bill to pass some tax code, and it fell on my mother to actually write the language. When she was finished with it, it was ugly and barely readable, but it worked and fulfilled the objectives of the bill.
The people she was working with were, to put it lightly, horrified with the tax code she'd written. She encouraged people to try to make it prettier, but nobody could figure out a better way of saying what the bill needed to say, so they eventually had to go with her language.
The bill eventually passed, and the language used in it was eventually used in several other places. To this day she still gets calls from friends that have run across something derived from her 'ugly' language that could not be improved.
The moral of this story is that perhaps sometimes there really is no way to rewrite it to make it better. Going into a redesign might sound like a good idea, but actually doing a redesign and a rework might be useless, and produce something just as complex and inscrutable as the original.
Slashdot Mirror
Are these bacteria found on sheeps' bladders, by any chance?
When I first read the acronymn, I thought it said that SCOTS was going to hear the case. I was puzzled as to what they had to do with patents, but perhaps they could get a song out of it?
I wonder what bit of US government paranoia caused this:9 6&spn=0.008122,0.008690&t=k&hl=en
9 4&spn=0.008122,0.008690&t=k&hl=en
http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=38.889145,-77.0087
but not this:
http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=38.897502,-77.0365
One step closer to "Monkey Wash, Donkey Rinse" ... whatever that means ...
But couldn't terrorists get hold of this information and use it to execute their agendas of fear on the American (and World) public? We should definitely not allow the terrorists to do this! All information should be taken off the Internet immediately!
</tounge-in-cheek>
There are several methods of detecting extra-solar planets. One of the first was detecting the extremely small wobble of the parent star as the planet orbits it. This works for planets less than the size of a "brown dwarf" (15-80 times the mass of Jupiter) down to around the size of Jupiter. As an example of the size of the wobble we detect, at 10 parsecs from the Sun, the wobble due to the orbit of Jupiter would be something like (if memory serves me correctly) three tenths of an arc-second.
Another method that also uses this wobble measures the Doppler shift of the light from the star as it comes towards us and away from us due to the planet's rotation. According to this paper, these velocities of the star are on the order of meters per second, so we're talking about extremely tiny Doppler shifts.
The method used in this study measures the slight dimming of the light of the star as the planet transits the star. This still generally works for larger, close-in planets. However, by studying the spectrum of the light that comes from the star and passes through the atmosphere of the planet, we can figure out what the atmosphere of the planet is made of.
For much smaller planets, it is possible to detect a slight localized brightening of the parent star when the planet is transiting across it. This brightening is due to the same gravitational lensing that we use to see far-away galaxies. The gravity of the planet focuses the light very slightly near it, and so we see a slightly bright spot on the star. This technique, called gravitational microlensing, has been used to discover planets of roughly the same size as the Earth.
Actually, a good rule of thumb for evaluating physical theories is that if they require us to appear special, they're probably wrong. So the more extra-solar planets we discover, the less special the Earth becomes, and the better it looks for our theories of solar system creation.
whoops. missed the
tags. sorry.
(very slightly off topic... sorry.) I attended a physics colloquium the other week in which a professor from Duke was presenting the results of his research into the question of whether information could be sent faster than light through the various ways of coaxing wave speeds to be faster than c in anomalously dispersive media. If you concoct a medium in which the index of refraction decreases as the wavelength of light increases, the "group velocity", or the speed at which pulses propagate, can be made to be faster than c. The "phase velocity", or the velocity at which each frequency of light propagates, is still less than c, but the pulse that each frequency is a part of is going faster than light. The problem is that for the most part, the shape of a wave is pretty deterministic once you've seen a fairly small sample of the waveform. So recieving just the first few microseconds / nanoseconds / etc. of the pulse tells you everything about all of the frequencies which make it up. But he added a nondeterministic part to the signal he sent (through this anomalously dispersive media), changing the shape of the pulse midstream depending on whether he was sending a "1" or a "0". He then timed how long it took before his detector could tell whether the incoming pulse was a "1" or a "0", and determined that despite the media appearing to emit the pulse before it recieved the pulse, his detector still could not differentiate between a "1" and a "0" faster than the speed of light. So Einstein (and Maxwell) continues to be vindicated, and information cannot possibly travel faster than the speed of light.
You cut your little finger on the edge of the knife...
Can I ask how this post got "insightful" and the one it responds to got "funny"? Shouldn't that be reversed?
Actual quote from a (weirdo) guy near N. C. State University:
"People don't invent things. People pay college students to invent things."
We ran into this guy at a chinese restaurant, where he was discussing his scheme to get a biochemistry major to develop implants for Marilyn Monroe (??)...
He said that he'd have gone to UNC-CH (just around the corner), but there are too many, you know, actual doctors there, who'd have asked too many questions...
There are plenty of weird people floating around colleges...
Although, if I'd spelled his name correctly, he'd be even prouder of me....
Jim Graham
Reminds me of the butter sculpture of N.C's own "Sodfather", Jim Grahm, (ex-Commisioner of Agriculture), at the N.C. State Fair.
(sings)
There should be clones.... send in the clones....
(... and they ate Sir Robin's minstrels, and there was much rejoicing -- yaay)
Did anyone happen to view the source of the 'bandwidth testing' page at www.eb1.com?
/.'s lameness filter thinks it's garbage...
It has a long commented out tract of what appears to be random characters... I can't post an excerpt here because
IANA Musician, but I seem to remember from my ancient days of playing violin that C-sharp is equivalent to D-flat. Which also seems to be an appropriate description.
Seeing as where you started Red Hat, just one question comes to mind:
Carolina, Duke, or <gasp!> the Wolfpack?
My mother tells the story of when she was working as a lobbyist for NRECA.
They were working on a bill to pass some tax code, and it fell on my mother to actually write the language. When she was finished with it, it was ugly and barely readable, but it worked and fulfilled the objectives of the bill.
The people she was working with were, to put it lightly, horrified with the tax code she'd written. She encouraged people to try to make it prettier, but nobody could figure out a better way of saying what the bill needed to say, so they eventually had to go with her language.
The bill eventually passed, and the language used in it was eventually used in several other places. To this day she still gets calls from friends that have run across something derived from her 'ugly' language that could not be improved.
The moral of this story is that perhaps sometimes there really is no way to rewrite it to make it better. Going into a redesign might sound like a good idea, but actually doing a redesign and a rework might be useless, and produce something just as complex and inscrutable as the original.