A chip in the glass could be a fatal injury for a spy satellite as the article suggests was the intended use. Such telescopes use active optics to improve image quality; they apply pressure over the glass to bend it slightly. A chip could have micro-cracks and other damage that would easily spread across the surface. Without the actuators deforming the glass the image won't be as clear, but it would be good enough for a hobby telescope.
Once the glass chipped they likely just stopped the process, so the new owner would need to add the mirror surface on his own.
Not so. Firstly, adaptive optics is still fairly rare and likely this mirror was never intended for use in such a telescope. Secondly, the mirror deformations on a telescope with adaptive optics are not done at the primary mirror (the large chipped one) but at the secondary or even tertiary mirror. It's much easier to do this on a small, thin, mirror than large, thick one. Finally, a little chip is no big deal. You just coat the mirror as normal then paint over the chipped area. You'll never see the difference. There are observatory mirrors out there into which someone unloaded a hand gun. They work just fine.
Yeah, that's totally true. I get put off some of these open world games because I worry I won't have the time for them. I messed around a bit with Oblivion when it first came out and, while fun, I felt I couldn't give it the attention it deserved.
Not to be a downer but I bought a PS3 along with some games and media remote around mid-2012. I was planning to use it for blu-rays and playing netflix but it hasn't turned out that well. It came with Uncharted 3 and I bought a combo pack of 1 and 2.
I did much the same but didn't buy the Uncharted 1 & 2 combo. I must say it took me a few hours of play before I started to like Uncharted 3. At first I hated the aiming (I'm a PC gamer). Also, I kept forgetting what button did what and the game comes with no cheat-sheet. About a 1/3 of the way through it I begun to like it but it's not as compelling as, say, Half Life 2. The puzzles are too easy, the climbing bits can be annoying, and the shooting feels dumbed down to cope with the crappy aiming abilities of a gamepad. For those reasons I find Uncharted over-rated, but it's fun enough and I'll probably finish it soon.
You're right, though, if everything was like Uncharted the PS3 would suck. I played the Two Souls demo and that really did suck (IMO). Where's the game-play? However there are good games that have kept me coming back. Right now these are Journey (although it's short), Little Big Planet 2, and GT5. I bought Metal Gear Solid 4 cheaply but haven't spent time with it yet (finishing Uncharted first). I'm intrigued by Puppeteer and want to give that a shot.
The thing is, with the exception of GT and possibly LBP, I wouldn't want to pay $60 for many of these games. Uncharted 3 is entertaining in its way, but the game-play feels a little stale and it doesn't have much re-play value (unless for some weird reason I was interested in finding all the treasures). I reckon that, for me at least, the PS4 would be the same experience but with better graphics. So if I want to play Watchdogs next year, it'll probably be on my PC.
I totally agree with that. In particular because, unlike with OtherOs, they've not given you something then taken it away. You know going into it that it won't play your music collection.
I miss turn based strategy games that depend on reflection and planning, for example. That's not to say they don't exist, but they're place in the market has diminished.
I miss them too. I spent AGES playing the first Civ on my Amiga 1200 and that was a really big title back then: a big deal. I agree you don't often see a game like that being marketed heavily nowadays. I don't know much about Eve Online, but perhaps it's the spiritual successor of games such as Civ. I think the increase in computing power that we've seen over the last 15 years has pushed things towards real-time and away from turn-based.
Its an assault on freedom when the entire purpose media playback was removed was to funnel you to their services. Its insulting, demeaning and petty as hell. There is NO REASON other then greed for this decision. Its a huge 'fuck you'.
You're right that it's likely an unsubtle way of forcing their music service. I can see how it would be fucking annoying if you expected to rely on your PS4 as a music centre. Nonetheless, I have a hard time seeing this as an assault on "freedom." Consoles, iDevices, and their brethren are not multi-purpose computers. They're obviously media-distribution portals designed for the benefit of their manufacturers. You (should) know that when you buy them and you take the risks that come with it. Most manufacturers of these products cripple them as much as possible without actually turning away too many people. We saw this dramatically with the used game policy on the upcoming Bone. If you want the certainty of "freedom", then run your own media server or plug an MP3 player of your choice into your amp. Yes, it means pointless hardware redundancy but that's nothing new.
Oh no, they have a clue, but their clue is that more marketing=more money. Better game = not much more money.
They learned this from Hollywood and, if Hollywood is anything to go by, things in the AAA game field will only get worse. If the movie industry analogy pans out, which it more or less seems to be doing, then we end up with two clusters: 1) A load of expensive, technically impressive, but derivative titles. 2) Titles that are cheaper and less technically impressive (i.e. shorter, less content, graphically simpler) but more creative, more thoughtfully made, etc. The rare happy moments occur when 1 & 2 meet in a single title.
The other thing the game industry and the movie industry have in common is that they both flood the market with shit and it's down to the consumer to navigate their way through the cess pool to find the hidden gems.
Also, video games used to target a more intellectual audience, because there was a time when you had to be seriously interested in computers to play most games.
Are you sure this isn't the rose-tinted glasses talking? Was the NES more intellectually stimulating than the Wii? Ditto with PCs. You used to get flight sims back in the day and you still get them now. Civ has continued to come out at regular intervals and has spawned clones. There were shitty platformers and cheaply made crap back in the Amiga days and you still get that now. The difference with now and then is that there is much more of everything now. In particular there is more marketing and, like with Hollywood, most of the marketing in gaming is promoting the blockbusters.
No one should be buying this proprietary garbage to begin with. These companies despise openness and users' freedoms.
This is such bollocks. It's a fucking games console: it's an optional luxury in life. It plays games and that's why you buy it. If you're not interested in the games then don't buy it. Yes, it's locked it down, and there are obvious reasons for that. I fail to see how it being locked down takes away your freedom. You're still free to buy a general purpose computer and use that instead. You're still free to shove Linux on your PS3 (despite the lack of OtherOS), it's just more of a pain in the arse now: http://www.linux.com/learn/answers/view/490-is-it-possible-to-put-linux-on-my-ps3-without-the-use-of-any-other-pc Yes, it's annoying that they took away the feature and it would have pissed me off if I depended on it. But it's an annoyance, not an assault on freedom.
What's the point of a machine that can't play media? What am I supposed to do with it? Play games?
I guess you didn't read the FAQ, then:
Will I be able to watch Blu-ray movies on the PS4 system?
Yes, you will need to download and install the PS4 system’s day-one system software update 1.50, and then activate your Blu-ray Disc video capability with a one-time activation through the internet in order to play Blu-ray Disc films and DVD video content.
Very likely you can also access Netflix, or Amazon VOD as with the PS3.
I almost pre-ordered the PS4 but in the end I bought a PS3 instead. They're only $250 right now and there's a vast games collection with lots of great older titles at under $20. Didn't seem worth paying a premium for a PS4 given the tiny game selection at launch and the fact that I'd be forking out $60 for each game. If I want great graphics, I'll go to the study and fire up the PC. However, I find myself preferring GT5 or Little Big Planet in the living room whilst hanging out with my girlfriend and the dog. The only problem is that the dog is unsettled by video games for some weird, dog-only-knows, reason.
If you do your statistics right, the likelihood of a Type I error is unaffected by sample size. When you use an arbitrary threshold for determining a significant effect (typically 5%), the number of papers attaining that threshold "by chance" (=5%) is independent of sample size.
The point is that the error being made in research isn't purely a statistical one. It originates in various bad practices, such as "flexible" study design and an ignorance of statistical power. The smaller the sample size, the greater the standard error of the mean. Thus, studies with small sample sizes are more likely to produce an estimate of the population mean that is very different from the true value. Negative results aren't interested and don't get pursued, so we're left with a bias. The result is that under-powered studies are more likely to produce large, "interesting looking", effects which get published in top journals.
. The notion of "professional scientist" is actually an idea with internal conflicts. It's a contradiction out in the open which apparently few have put any thought into. But, once you look at the way we train professionals today, it becomes apparent that we are not training them to actually think like scientists.
But science has never been done the "pure" way. It's been decided by consensus all along, this isn't a new thing related to training in grad school. You can see this is so because the phenomenon (science by consensus) is world-wide, yet the grad school works differently in different countries. e.g. in the UK you don't even have "grad school." A graduate student enters a PhD lab after their first degree (MSc not necessary in most cases) and gets on with it. In a good university, the first year or two are devoted to learning the facts and the second year or to two to critiquing them. So to get a top degree you have to demonstrate that you've thought about the literature and what it means. There's no textbook memorisation at that point: it's all primary source analysis. If you come up with your own interpretation and defend it then you'll get the credit for it. You won't be failed if you can back up your opinions. What more do you want from the training process?
It has been said in other papers too that a lot of the literature is wrong (http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124) and that this is more likely in higher impact journals and for papers with lower sample sizes (http://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nrn3475-c6.html). The idea is that a smaller sample size is more likely to lead to a Type I error (incorrectly finding a statistically significant result) or over-estimating the size of an effect. Consequently, these smaller sample size studies find what looks like a stunning effect but what they're really seeing is an outlier. The paper looks awesome so it gets published somewhere high impact, where it is sensationalised. This effect is exacerbated by the "publish or perish" mentality, where researchers are pressured to produce many high impact papers in order to get grants. It's also a function of the fact that a lot of research is being done, so the high volume increases the odds of this shit happening. Cancer biology is particularly prone to this sort of effect because it's very competitive, there's a lot of interest in it and so it generates high impact papers, and there are a lot of big screening studies that depend heavily on statistics to confirm effects. In some branches of biology you hardly need a stats test because variables are few in significance is obvious. However, when you're screening vast numbers of drug targets then you have all sorts of problems with multiple comparisons and the like. You need elaborate stats tests and they have to be done right.
Overall, however, whether the community as a whole believes something is determined by state of the literature in general and not just a single study. What we consider true or false is influenced by the politics of science as well as the data. This is nicely reviewed in the controversial book, "The Golem", by Collins and Pinch (http://www.amazon.com/The-Golem-Should-Science-Classics/dp/1107604656).
I work in academia so I have access to most of the journals I need but not all. When I hit a paywall, I either Google for the PDF (a lot of authors chuck their papers on the web somewhere even if it's "illegal") or I e-mail the authors. Many papers are available free with a year delay. I've never, ever, had to pay at the wall to get a paper I needed. I know the scientific article situation is bad in many ways, but you don't have to wait multiple years for access: use your brain and get it some other way.
I said it *will* become impossible, not that it is now. Besides, you'll probably always be able to detect the very brightest DSOs; I've found M81 and M82 from the London suburbs under terrible conditions. However, they're merely "detectable" and appear as only a shadow of what they actually look like under dark skies. Very impressive objects, such as M33, aren't visible at all under those conditions. The night sky itself looks shit to the naked eye. Astronomy under these conditions gets boring pretty quickly and conditions are only getting worse.
I don't know what your marina was like, but you describe only a local source of light pollution. In my experience, the sky glow from a big city is far worse than observing next to a few lamp posts. If you stick a towel over your head when at the eyepiece and allow yourself to dark adapt. A great deal can then be seen if you're not too near a big city.
Your sarcastic comment about cars misses the point. I do currently travel with my telescope to dark skies, but to get to mag. 6 I have drive 3.5 hours and spend the night. I don't often have the chance to do that because it's effectively a 2 day commitment and it has to be juggled alongside work, weather, and the phase of the moon. Usually I can only do the 1.5 hour trip to ~mag 5 skies. Then there's still 30 minutes of so of set up and then tear-down. I make the investment: I'm not lazy. Fuck, I've driven 3000 miles for a star party in the past. But I rarely get the time for that and the journeys are getting longer for the same reward due to the spreading lights.
I don't know what you mean by "there's more of it all the time." We're losing many of the dark skies (even in rural and semi-rural areas) we currently have *despite* any depopulation of these areas to the city.
Exactly. A similar effect occurs if you're sitting around an outdoor table at night and the only form of illumination is a bright lamp in the middle of the table. You can't see the faces of most people sitting around the table when you do that. However, if the lamp is placed further away, illuminating the scene less but more uniformly, then the problem goes away.
It's unlikely to be perfect; but LEDs (being costly; but easy to aim fairly tightly, as well as very good at doing accent work (say, lighting a set of stairs with small lamps set just above the steps, rather than one big bulb-on-a-stick pointed in the direction of the stairs and cranked to 11), do encourage more efficient targeting in a way that big, cheap, one-size-fits-all bulbs don't.
Except that most people think a big bright light is better and LEDs already can be purchased as fittings that encourage this use. It's cheaper to set up one bright light that floods everything than lots of small integrated accent lighting. The fact that the accent lighting will be far, far, nicer, and cheaper to run doesn't enter people's heads. Also, there's a perception that illuminating the shit out of something will reduce crime. It is unclear whether this is really case. The only thing that is clear is that public lighting increases people's subjective feeling of personal safety.
LEDs are more directional, meaning that more light goes down, instead of up. Do you think that would help any?
This was the hope, yes. Unfortunately it's not working out that way. Mainly this is because these LEDs are *so* much brighter that the directionality advantage is lost since we're seeing more light reflecting off the ground and into the sky. Also, some direct light likely does creep into the sky from the fitting. Secondly, the directionality advantage assumes the fittings are attached correctly (sometimes they're not). In addition, it's now becoming possible for home users to buy LED "globes" with LEDs pointing in all directions. Thirdly, LEDs are broad-band and so they hit the peak absoption of your rods, which inhibits dark adaptation and masks out the objects you're trying to see. So white LEDs are not only churning out more light, but it's "worse" light.
Finally, we do have narrow-band "light pollution filters" for visual astronomy. These work well for emission nebulae which emit fluorescence at particular wavelengths. The filters let through these wavelengths and cut out the red of sodium lights. However, with more and more "white" light pollution, the effectiveness of the filters will go down considerably. Furthermore, no filter helps on galaxies because these are composed of stars and so are broad-band emitters.
The night sky is a massive part of our natural heritage and an important gateway into science. It's a pity we're wiping it out, because the pretty pictures aren't a patch on seeing things for real (even if what the human eye can see is so much less). I do astronomy outreach and regularly have adults babbling like kids when they're at the telescope. The observatory I attend will be dead in 10 or 20 years because of light pollution, which each year gets visibly worse.
The other two console makers are surviving almost exclusively on FPS games. Eventually that market will saturate and simultatenously the innovations in the games will be so minimal that the profit will start to disappear. Neither Sony nor Microsoft seem to have a plan for what to do when the Halo / Battlefield / Medal of Honor / Call of Duty franchises start to lose their appeal.
Which is odd if it's true, considering many of those games are available on a PC, where they have better graphics and a more accurate input system.
You mean the one star that I can sort-of see in NYC will disappear?:)
No. I mean that suburban areas which now have a limiting magnitude of 5 or so (okish for astronomy but not great) will turn into NYC. Also, the skyglow from these areas will creep into currently pretty good skies. e.g. The skyglow from the NYC area is currently just visible on the SE horizon from the heart of the Catskills, but we still have some dramatic skies there (Milky Way almost to the horizon). With these white lights appearing and spreading, that is going to change.
Yeah, but it looks like what they're actually doing is over-lighting. So there's way more light than before. It's a disaster for amateur astronomy, nocturnal species, and even diurnal species which have their circadian rhythym disturbed.
I'm an amateur astronomer and it's become pretty clear to me that we're fucked with these bright white LEDs. Light pollution is already very, very, bad and these bright, broad-band, light sources are effectively going to finish the job and destroy the night completely for locations within 100 or so miles of any urban area that uses them. In areas of high population density it will become impossible to see the night sky without traveling vast distances.
Lighting levels have been increasing at a far greater rate that population is increasing. There's a constant push to make things brighter but little thought as to lighting more thoughtfully or efficiently (by which I mean lighting only what needs to be lighted and not over-lighting).
Slashdot Mirror
A chip in the glass could be a fatal injury for a spy satellite as the article suggests was the intended use. Such telescopes use active optics to improve image quality; they apply pressure over the glass to bend it slightly. A chip could have micro-cracks and other damage that would easily spread across the surface. Without the actuators deforming the glass the image won't be as clear, but it would be good enough for a hobby telescope.
Once the glass chipped they likely just stopped the process, so the new owner would need to add the mirror surface on his own.
Not so. Firstly, adaptive optics is still fairly rare and likely this mirror was never intended for use in such a telescope. Secondly, the mirror deformations on a telescope with adaptive optics are not done at the primary mirror (the large chipped one) but at the secondary or even tertiary mirror. It's much easier to do this on a small, thin, mirror than large, thick one. Finally, a little chip is no big deal. You just coat the mirror as normal then paint over the chipped area. You'll never see the difference. There are observatory mirrors out there into which someone unloaded a hand gun. They work just fine.
Yeah, that's totally true. I get put off some of these open world games because I worry I won't have the time for them. I messed around a bit with Oblivion when it first came out and, while fun, I felt I couldn't give it the attention it deserved.
Not to be a downer but I bought a PS3 along with some games and media remote around mid-2012. I was planning to use it for blu-rays and playing netflix but it hasn't turned out that well. It came with Uncharted 3 and I bought a combo pack of 1 and 2.
I did much the same but didn't buy the Uncharted 1 & 2 combo. I must say it took me a few hours of play before I started to like Uncharted 3. At first I hated the aiming (I'm a PC gamer). Also, I kept forgetting what button did what and the game comes with no cheat-sheet. About a 1/3 of the way through it I begun to like it but it's not as compelling as, say, Half Life 2. The puzzles are too easy, the climbing bits can be annoying, and the shooting feels dumbed down to cope with the crappy aiming abilities of a gamepad. For those reasons I find Uncharted over-rated, but it's fun enough and I'll probably finish it soon.
You're right, though, if everything was like Uncharted the PS3 would suck. I played the Two Souls demo and that really did suck (IMO). Where's the game-play? However there are good games that have kept me coming back. Right now these are Journey (although it's short), Little Big Planet 2, and GT5. I bought Metal Gear Solid 4 cheaply but haven't spent time with it yet (finishing Uncharted first). I'm intrigued by Puppeteer and want to give that a shot.
The thing is, with the exception of GT and possibly LBP, I wouldn't want to pay $60 for many of these games. Uncharted 3 is entertaining in its way, but the game-play feels a little stale and it doesn't have much re-play value (unless for some weird reason I was interested in finding all the treasures). I reckon that, for me at least, the PS4 would be the same experience but with better graphics. So if I want to play Watchdogs next year, it'll probably be on my PC.
I totally agree with that. In particular because, unlike with OtherOs, they've not given you something then taken it away. You know going into it that it won't play your music collection.
I miss turn based strategy games that depend on reflection and planning, for example. That's not to say they don't exist, but they're place in the market has diminished.
I miss them too. I spent AGES playing the first Civ on my Amiga 1200 and that was a really big title back then: a big deal. I agree you don't often see a game like that being marketed heavily nowadays. I don't know much about Eve Online, but perhaps it's the spiritual successor of games such as Civ. I think the increase in computing power that we've seen over the last 15 years has pushed things towards real-time and away from turn-based.
Its an assault on freedom when the entire purpose media playback was removed was to funnel you to their services. Its insulting, demeaning and petty as hell. There is NO REASON other then greed for this decision. Its a huge 'fuck you'.
You're right that it's likely an unsubtle way of forcing their music service. I can see how it would be fucking annoying if you expected to rely on your PS4 as a music centre. Nonetheless, I have a hard time seeing this as an assault on "freedom." Consoles, iDevices, and their brethren are not multi-purpose computers. They're obviously media-distribution portals designed for the benefit of their manufacturers. You (should) know that when you buy them and you take the risks that come with it. Most manufacturers of these products cripple them as much as possible without actually turning away too many people. We saw this dramatically with the used game policy on the upcoming Bone. If you want the certainty of "freedom", then run your own media server or plug an MP3 player of your choice into your amp. Yes, it means pointless hardware redundancy but that's nothing new.
Oh no, they have a clue, but their clue is that more marketing=more money. Better game = not much more money.
They learned this from Hollywood and, if Hollywood is anything to go by, things in the AAA game field will only get worse. If the movie industry analogy pans out, which it more or less seems to be doing, then we end up with two clusters: 1) A load of expensive, technically impressive, but derivative titles. 2) Titles that are cheaper and less technically impressive (i.e. shorter, less content, graphically simpler) but more creative, more thoughtfully made, etc. The rare happy moments occur when 1 & 2 meet in a single title.
The other thing the game industry and the movie industry have in common is that they both flood the market with shit and it's down to the consumer to navigate their way through the cess pool to find the hidden gems.
Also, video games used to target a more intellectual audience, because there was a time when you had to be seriously interested in computers to play most games.
Are you sure this isn't the rose-tinted glasses talking? Was the NES more intellectually stimulating than the Wii? Ditto with PCs. You used to get flight sims back in the day and you still get them now. Civ has continued to come out at regular intervals and has spawned clones. There were shitty platformers and cheaply made crap back in the Amiga days and you still get that now. The difference with now and then is that there is much more of everything now. In particular there is more marketing and, like with Hollywood, most of the marketing in gaming is promoting the blockbusters.
No one should be buying this proprietary garbage to begin with. These companies despise openness and users' freedoms.
This is such bollocks. It's a fucking games console: it's an optional luxury in life. It plays games and that's why you buy it. If you're not interested in the games then don't buy it. Yes, it's locked it down, and there are obvious reasons for that. I fail to see how it being locked down takes away your freedom. You're still free to buy a general purpose computer and use that instead. You're still free to shove Linux on your PS3 (despite the lack of OtherOS), it's just more of a pain in the arse now: http://www.linux.com/learn/answers/view/490-is-it-possible-to-put-linux-on-my-ps3-without-the-use-of-any-other-pc Yes, it's annoying that they took away the feature and it would have pissed me off if I depended on it. But it's an annoyance, not an assault on freedom.
What's the point of a machine that can't play media? What am I supposed to do with it? Play games?
I guess you didn't read the FAQ, then:
Will I be able to watch Blu-ray movies on the PS4 system?
Yes, you will need to download and install the PS4 system’s day-one system software update 1.50, and then activate your Blu-ray Disc video capability with a one-time activation through the internet in order to play Blu-ray Disc films and DVD video content.
Very likely you can also access Netflix, or Amazon VOD as with the PS3.
I almost pre-ordered the PS4 but in the end I bought a PS3 instead. They're only $250 right now and there's a vast games collection with lots of great older titles at under $20. Didn't seem worth paying a premium for a PS4 given the tiny game selection at launch and the fact that I'd be forking out $60 for each game. If I want great graphics, I'll go to the study and fire up the PC. However, I find myself preferring GT5 or Little Big Planet in the living room whilst hanging out with my girlfriend and the dog. The only problem is that the dog is unsettled by video games for some weird, dog-only-knows, reason.
Or the 20th century hypothesis of the neutrino.
There are better candidates for the Big Brother award than Shuttleworth.
If you do your statistics right, the likelihood of a Type I error is unaffected by sample size. When you use an arbitrary threshold for determining a significant effect (typically 5%), the number of papers attaining that threshold "by chance" (=5%) is independent of sample size.
http://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/v14/n5/full/nrn3475.html
Maybe I phrased it badly. Also I gave the wrong link. The correct one is: http://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/v14/n5/full/nrn3475.html and is worth reading.
The point is that the error being made in research isn't purely a statistical one. It originates in various bad practices, such as "flexible" study design and an ignorance of statistical power. The smaller the sample size, the greater the standard error of the mean. Thus, studies with small sample sizes are more likely to produce an estimate of the population mean that is very different from the true value. Negative results aren't interested and don't get pursued, so we're left with a bias. The result is that under-powered studies are more likely to produce large, "interesting looking", effects which get published in top journals.
. The notion of "professional scientist" is actually an idea with internal conflicts. It's a contradiction out in the open which apparently few have put any thought into. But, once you look at the way we train professionals today, it becomes apparent that we are not training them to actually think like scientists.
But science has never been done the "pure" way. It's been decided by consensus all along, this isn't a new thing related to training in grad school. You can see this is so because the phenomenon (science by consensus) is world-wide, yet the grad school works differently in different countries. e.g. in the UK you don't even have "grad school." A graduate student enters a PhD lab after their first degree (MSc not necessary in most cases) and gets on with it. In a good university, the first year or two are devoted to learning the facts and the second year or to two to critiquing them. So to get a top degree you have to demonstrate that you've thought about the literature and what it means. There's no textbook memorisation at that point: it's all primary source analysis. If you come up with your own interpretation and defend it then you'll get the credit for it. You won't be failed if you can back up your opinions. What more do you want from the training process?
It has been said in other papers too that a lot of the literature is wrong (http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124) and that this is more likely in higher impact journals and for papers with lower sample sizes (http://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nrn3475-c6.html). The idea is that a smaller sample size is more likely to lead to a Type I error (incorrectly finding a statistically significant result) or over-estimating the size of an effect. Consequently, these smaller sample size studies find what looks like a stunning effect but what they're really seeing is an outlier. The paper looks awesome so it gets published somewhere high impact, where it is sensationalised. This effect is exacerbated by the "publish or perish" mentality, where researchers are pressured to produce many high impact papers in order to get grants. It's also a function of the fact that a lot of research is being done, so the high volume increases the odds of this shit happening. Cancer biology is particularly prone to this sort of effect because it's very competitive, there's a lot of interest in it and so it generates high impact papers, and there are a lot of big screening studies that depend heavily on statistics to confirm effects. In some branches of biology you hardly need a stats test because variables are few in significance is obvious. However, when you're screening vast numbers of drug targets then you have all sorts of problems with multiple comparisons and the like. You need elaborate stats tests and they have to be done right. Overall, however, whether the community as a whole believes something is determined by state of the literature in general and not just a single study. What we consider true or false is influenced by the politics of science as well as the data. This is nicely reviewed in the controversial book, "The Golem", by Collins and Pinch (http://www.amazon.com/The-Golem-Should-Science-Classics/dp/1107604656).
I work in academia so I have access to most of the journals I need but not all. When I hit a paywall, I either Google for the PDF (a lot of authors chuck their papers on the web somewhere even if it's "illegal") or I e-mail the authors. Many papers are available free with a year delay. I've never, ever, had to pay at the wall to get a paper I needed. I know the scientific article situation is bad in many ways, but you don't have to wait multiple years for access: use your brain and get it some other way.
I said it *will* become impossible, not that it is now. Besides, you'll probably always be able to detect the very brightest DSOs; I've found M81 and M82 from the London suburbs under terrible conditions. However, they're merely "detectable" and appear as only a shadow of what they actually look like under dark skies. Very impressive objects, such as M33, aren't visible at all under those conditions. The night sky itself looks shit to the naked eye. Astronomy under these conditions gets boring pretty quickly and conditions are only getting worse.
I don't know what your marina was like, but you describe only a local source of light pollution. In my experience, the sky glow from a big city is far worse than observing next to a few lamp posts. If you stick a towel over your head when at the eyepiece and allow yourself to dark adapt. A great deal can then be seen if you're not too near a big city.
Your sarcastic comment about cars misses the point. I do currently travel with my telescope to dark skies, but to get to mag. 6 I have drive 3.5 hours and spend the night. I don't often have the chance to do that because it's effectively a 2 day commitment and it has to be juggled alongside work, weather, and the phase of the moon. Usually I can only do the 1.5 hour trip to ~mag 5 skies. Then there's still 30 minutes of so of set up and then tear-down. I make the investment: I'm not lazy. Fuck, I've driven 3000 miles for a star party in the past. But I rarely get the time for that and the journeys are getting longer for the same reward due to the spreading lights.
I don't know what you mean by "there's more of it all the time." We're losing many of the dark skies (even in rural and semi-rural areas) we currently have *despite* any depopulation of these areas to the city.
No, but the skyglow from NYC spreads at least a hundred miles. I live 40 miles away and its destroyed amateur astronomy for me.
Exactly. A similar effect occurs if you're sitting around an outdoor table at night and the only form of illumination is a bright lamp in the middle of the table. You can't see the faces of most people sitting around the table when you do that. However, if the lamp is placed further away, illuminating the scene less but more uniformly, then the problem goes away.
It's unlikely to be perfect; but LEDs (being costly; but easy to aim fairly tightly, as well as very good at doing accent work (say, lighting a set of stairs with small lamps set just above the steps, rather than one big bulb-on-a-stick pointed in the direction of the stairs and cranked to 11), do encourage more efficient targeting in a way that big, cheap, one-size-fits-all bulbs don't.
Except that most people think a big bright light is better and LEDs already can be purchased as fittings that encourage this use. It's cheaper to set up one bright light that floods everything than lots of small integrated accent lighting. The fact that the accent lighting will be far, far, nicer, and cheaper to run doesn't enter people's heads. Also, there's a perception that illuminating the shit out of something will reduce crime. It is unclear whether this is really case. The only thing that is clear is that public lighting increases people's subjective feeling of personal safety.
LEDs are more directional, meaning that more light goes down, instead of up. Do you think that would help any?
This was the hope, yes. Unfortunately it's not working out that way. Mainly this is because these LEDs are *so* much brighter that the directionality advantage is lost since we're seeing more light reflecting off the ground and into the sky. Also, some direct light likely does creep into the sky from the fitting. Secondly, the directionality advantage assumes the fittings are attached correctly (sometimes they're not). In addition, it's now becoming possible for home users to buy LED "globes" with LEDs pointing in all directions. Thirdly, LEDs are broad-band and so they hit the peak absoption of your rods, which inhibits dark adaptation and masks out the objects you're trying to see. So white LEDs are not only churning out more light, but it's "worse" light.
Finally, we do have narrow-band "light pollution filters" for visual astronomy. These work well for emission nebulae which emit fluorescence at particular wavelengths. The filters let through these wavelengths and cut out the red of sodium lights. However, with more and more "white" light pollution, the effectiveness of the filters will go down considerably. Furthermore, no filter helps on galaxies because these are composed of stars and so are broad-band emitters.
The night sky is a massive part of our natural heritage and an important gateway into science. It's a pity we're wiping it out, because the pretty pictures aren't a patch on seeing things for real (even if what the human eye can see is so much less). I do astronomy outreach and regularly have adults babbling like kids when they're at the telescope. The observatory I attend will be dead in 10 or 20 years because of light pollution, which each year gets visibly worse.
The other two console makers are surviving almost exclusively on FPS games. Eventually that market will saturate and simultatenously the innovations in the games will be so minimal that the profit will start to disappear. Neither Sony nor Microsoft seem to have a plan for what to do when the Halo / Battlefield / Medal of Honor / Call of Duty franchises start to lose their appeal.
Which is odd if it's true, considering many of those games are available on a PC, where they have better graphics and a more accurate input system.
It's a disaster for amateur astronomy,
You mean the one star that I can sort-of see in NYC will disappear? :)
No. I mean that suburban areas which now have a limiting magnitude of 5 or so (okish for astronomy but not great) will turn into NYC. Also, the skyglow from these areas will creep into currently pretty good skies. e.g. The skyglow from the NYC area is currently just visible on the SE horizon from the heart of the Catskills, but we still have some dramatic skies there (Milky Way almost to the horizon). With these white lights appearing and spreading, that is going to change.
In the end, an LED might only need to give off 20 or 30% as much light to still illuminate the same area effectively
Source: http://www.al-e.com/led-vs-sodium-lamps
Yeah, but it looks like what they're actually doing is over-lighting. So there's way more light than before. It's a disaster for amateur astronomy, nocturnal species, and even diurnal species which have their circadian rhythym disturbed.
I'm an amateur astronomer and it's become pretty clear to me that we're fucked with these bright white LEDs. Light pollution is already very, very, bad and these bright, broad-band, light sources are effectively going to finish the job and destroy the night completely for locations within 100 or so miles of any urban area that uses them. In areas of high population density it will become impossible to see the night sky without traveling vast distances. Lighting levels have been increasing at a far greater rate that population is increasing. There's a constant push to make things brighter but little thought as to lighting more thoughtfully or efficiently (by which I mean lighting only what needs to be lighted and not over-lighting).