And this confuses me to no end, as all the Americans I have met have been friendly, easygoing people, not at all like the theocratic government of the US would lead me to believe they should be.
Of course, there's a huge selection effect here. I would guess that you've met the Americans that have either chosen to travel outside the US, or who are in major cities. Most of those people tend to be more liberal and don't get all worked up by a little nudity.
OK. Now I'm starting to think that you might be a bit confused. We _do_ observe black holes. Not directly, admittedly, but we do observe big, massive things that emit no light. There have been pretty convincing arguments for stellar-mass black holes in BH binaries and supermassive black holes in galactic centers. I'm not sure how much we know about the supermassive variety, but we're pretty sure we understand how the stellar mass ones form (collapse of Type II Supernovae).
But, it should be pointed out, there is nothing special about the event horizon, from the perspective of an observer falling through it. I mean, we have no idea what's beyond it (since information can never escape), but it's not like an observer falling through it will notice anything special. I know that this is true, from (astrophysics) theory. I'm not sure exactly how the frames work out, but I know that there's no GR argument about stars collapsing into BH's.
A KVM switch sounds like the answer for you. Run (K, V, and M) cables to all of the machines you want to work on, plug the other end of those cables into your KVM switch, and plug your monitor, mouse, and keyboard of choice into the switch.
I think you may have your frames wrong. Maybe I'm the one that's wrong, but I feel like the person at the event horizon is the one that sees the time dilation effects.
And how would you explain the fact that black holes are observed (in X-ray binaries, in their most definate form) all over the universe?
It may be old, but it's not nearly as prevelant as the other acronyms (at least on/.) . . . and it always takes me a while to figure out even what the more common ones (AFAIK, IANAL, etc) are . . .
Ha! Tim's page (the open-source advocate) is easily reachable, and is having no problems, but Joe's page seems to be experiencing a sounds slashdoting.
Ha! I actually did this the other day. I was making an Open Office presentation and I was trying to remember the way to go "up a level" in a bulleted list.
The scientific evidence that humans are affecting the climate with CO2 is as clear as day, and scientists who say otherwise are hired by special interest groups or oil companies.
This is simply not true. I'm as liberal as the next guy, but if you look at the data from a scientific perspective, you cannot say that the increased CO2 levels are causing a significant change in our atmosphere different from what the Earth has experienced in the past. You just can't. There's no definative evidence that the correlation exists, and I think that environmentalists (amung which I count myself) do their cause a disservice by trying to "massage the data" to manufacture catastrophe.
HOWEVER, I would argue that it is much better to err on the side of alarmism than the other way around. There are two options: we are either causing global warming, or we aren't. In either case, there is no harm done by cutting CO2 emission levels, and in the first case, there is SERIOUS good done by cutting emissions. This is just IMHO, but I think this is a much stronger argument than "we are definately causing global warming."
Doh! I forgot about NICMOS! You can tell I'm one of those biased, UBVRI astronomers. Actually I do a lot of spectroscopy, so HST is now almost completely useless to me. Alright. Well done. True. I should have added "at visable wavelengths"
Damnit! I'm a scientist! I should be precise in what I say:-)
Also, I wouldn't call the VLT interferometer "clunky"... It looks impressive to me, but then I have never had any use for it...
Alright. "Clunky" was probably unfair. But my understanding is that it still in an "engineering" phase, and there's a fair amount of work to do before it's "ready for prime time" ... But this was from a friend who was wanting to use it for his science and was grumpy it wasn't working well yet, so he was probably just disgruntled:-)
Well, I was (mostly) refering to the standard UBVRI bands, but I honestly didn't know that people were doing _that_ well in IR (and my first comment was vague).
Let me adjust my first blanket statement:
I would say that, for the type of science that HST does (at the wavelengths that it does it), there is nothing on the ground that can match its resolving power.
Yes. You're absolutely right. Speckle can give you much better resolution. But for most astronomy, Speckle isn't an option, and most AO systems can't do much better than 0.3 arcseconds. But now you've got me interested. What AO system are you working on that can get down to 85 mas? I would think that, even if you can do that, it would still be over a relatively small field of view, because of the size of the isoplanatic patches in the atmosphere. . . unless you're doing different corrections at different parts of the field. . .
While the second part of this statement has some truth, the first part of this statement is completely false. Adaptive Optics on ground-based optical telescopes are just barely starting to get in the same ballpark as HST, when it comes to resolution. You have diffraction-limited imaging on HST, which gives you a resolution of 0.05 arcseconds (see here). I have NEVER heard of anyone getting better than 0.3 arcseconds from the ground (and rarely even anything approaching that). Moreover, optical interferometry has NOT been shown to work reliably in any sort of consistant way. I think they've managed to get two of the telescopes of the VLT to work as an interferromerter in a very clunky way, but nothing NEAR what would be necessary for regular users.
That said, you're right to say that ground-based telescopes have some advantages: easier repaired, bigger mirrors (although this becomes less true with JWST), cheaper.
But, as the parent notes, space-based telescopes also are able to observe at wavelengths normally blocked by the atmosphere.
Well, it's what some physicists may be thinking, anyway. I suspect that the Guardian article is meaning to hint at this, as well. For those who don't know, MOND is a modification of standard Newtonian Dynamics that has to do with very small accelerations. I'd actually really, really like to see a MONDian calcuation of what the forces should be on those probes and see if it matches their current paths.
Wow. I think this is the second time I've advocated MOND (a theory which I just barely consider reasonable, and no where near verified) on/.
Well, they often come out of the telescopes that way (and, in fact, this is the way that it appears if you look up on the sky- looking up as opposed to down flips things). However, when people make up P.R. images, they often orient them in whatever way is pretty.
You haven't walked the streets much apparently if you think progress has been made.
Are you kidding me?!? You honestly think that progress has not been made in the past 40 years of race/sex relations? The grandparent didn't say that all of the problems had been solved (and I would be the first to disagree there), but that progress had been made. I would say that the 24th Amendment (abolishing the poll tax) was progress. I'd say that allowing interracial marriage is progress. I'm ceratainly not saying that all of the problems have been solved, but there certainly has been progress.
Well, I think this particular theory (i.e. the one suggested by the parent) is more than a little far fetched.
Despite my (rather snide) comment, I actually really do like the idea of MOND. Something that I have heard pointed out about MOND that I think is an important complaint is that it is NOT an expansion of our current theory of gravity (General Relativity), but rather an expansion on an older theory of gravity (Newtonian Gravity). Until there is a convincing case for a Relativistic MOND, I think I'll reserve judgement. MOND is an intriguing hypothosis, but not a complete theory (yet).
Yes. The universe is accelerating in its expansion. To say that the universe is expanding "at the speed of light" isn't quite right in a couple of ways. First off, if we look at objects nearby, they are moving away from us at some (quite reasonable) finite speed (i.e. the nearby Virgo Cluster is moving only at ~1000 km/s). Secondly, the somewhat more subtle point is that we generally talk about velocites not exceeding the speed of light; however, this is motion THROUGH space. The expansion of the universe (expansion OF space) doesn't necessarily need to follow this rule. ..
I should also point out that "Dark Matter" and "Dark Energy" are COMPLETELY DIFFERENT THINGS (as far as we know). Astronomers have just named them both "Dark" because they don't know what they are. They both also affect the expansion of the universe, but dark matter is slowing down the expansion of the universe (presumably via gravity) and dark energy is accelerating the expansion of the universe (by some yet-unknown force). Dark Matter is weird, but at least it seems to sortta obey the rules of the universe (i.e. gravity); dark energy is completely unlike anything we've seen before.
It's one of those theories that sounds totally crackpot when you first hear it (and, admittedly, has some problems), but many would argue that it's no weirder than a bunch of dark stuff that we know nothing about. The destain with which astronomers and physicists view MOND is quite surprising, since they are asking us to be believe that (something like) 95% of the matter in the universe is composed of some sort of weird, non-Baryonic particle (most people favor WIMPs over MaCHOs now-a-days).
Slashdot Mirror
And this confuses me to no end, as all the Americans I have met have been friendly, easygoing people, not at all like the theocratic government of the US would lead me to believe they should be.
Of course, there's a huge selection effect here. I would guess that you've met the Americans that have either chosen to travel outside the US, or who are in major cities. Most of those people tend to be more liberal and don't get all worked up by a little nudity.
OK. Now I'm starting to think that you might be a bit confused. We _do_ observe black holes. Not directly, admittedly, but we do observe big, massive things that emit no light. There have been pretty convincing arguments for stellar-mass black holes in BH binaries and supermassive black holes in galactic centers. I'm not sure how much we know about the supermassive variety, but we're pretty sure we understand how the stellar mass ones form (collapse of Type II Supernovae).
But, it should be pointed out, there is nothing special about the event horizon, from the perspective of an observer falling through it. I mean, we have no idea what's beyond it (since information can never escape), but it's not like an observer falling through it will notice anything special. I know that this is true, from (astrophysics) theory. I'm not sure exactly how the frames work out, but I know that there's no GR argument about stars collapsing into BH's.
A KVM switch sounds like the answer for you. Run (K, V, and M) cables to all of the machines you want to work on, plug the other end of those cables into your KVM switch, and plug your monitor, mouse, and keyboard of choice into the switch.
Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
You called?
I think you may have your frames wrong. Maybe I'm the one that's wrong, but I feel like the person at the event horizon is the one that sees the time dilation effects.
And how would you explain the fact that black holes are observed (in X-ray binaries, in their most definate form) all over the universe?
It may be old, but it's not nearly as prevelant as the other acronyms (at least on /.) . . . and it always takes me a while to figure out even what the more common ones (AFAIK, IANAL, etc) are . . .
(current front page NSFW)
Ahhhh! Please SPELL OUT the important acronyms. So other people won't have the panicked clicking-to-close-windows that I just had:
NSFW = Not Safe For work
Ha! Tim's page (the open-source advocate) is easily reachable, and is having no problems, but Joe's page seems to be experiencing a sounds slashdoting.
Excellent.
It's times like these that I wish there were a "+1, Groan" moderation option. . .
Ha! I actually did this the other day. I was making an Open Office presentation and I was trying to remember the way to go "up a level" in a bulleted list.
Ctrl-Tab? No.
Alt-Tab? No.
Ctrl-Backspace? No.
Alt-Backspace? No.
Ctrl-Alt-Backspace? Arrrr!
The scientific evidence that humans are affecting the climate with CO2 is as clear as day, and scientists who say otherwise are hired by special interest groups or oil companies.
This is simply not true. I'm as liberal as the next guy, but if you look at the data from a scientific perspective, you cannot say that the increased CO2 levels are causing a significant change in our atmosphere different from what the Earth has experienced in the past. You just can't. There's no definative evidence that the correlation exists, and I think that environmentalists (amung which I count myself) do their cause a disservice by trying to "massage the data" to manufacture catastrophe.
HOWEVER, I would argue that it is much better to err on the side of alarmism than the other way around. There are two options: we are either causing global warming, or we aren't. In either case, there is no harm done by cutting CO2 emission levels, and in the first case, there is SERIOUS good done by cutting emissions. This is just IMHO, but I think this is a much stronger argument than "we are definately causing global warming."
Doh! I forgot about NICMOS! You can tell I'm one of those biased, UBVRI astronomers. Actually I do a lot of spectroscopy, so HST is now almost completely useless to me. Alright. Well done. True. I should have added "at visable wavelengths"
:-)
Damnit! I'm a scientist! I should be precise in what I say
Also, I wouldn't call the VLT interferometer "clunky"... It looks impressive to me, but then I have never had any use for it...
.. But this was from a friend who was wanting to use it for his science and was grumpy it wasn't working well yet, so he was probably just disgruntled :-)
Alright. "Clunky" was probably unfair. But my understanding is that it still in an "engineering" phase, and there's a fair amount of work to do before it's "ready for prime time" .
Well, I was (mostly) refering to the standard UBVRI bands, but I honestly didn't know that people were doing _that_ well in IR (and my first comment was vague).
:-)
Let me adjust my first blanket statement:
I would say that, for the type of science that HST does (at the wavelengths that it does it), there is nothing on the ground that can match its resolving power.
Fair? Or is there something I'm missing?
Yes. You're absolutely right. Speckle can give you much better resolution. But for most astronomy, Speckle isn't an option, and most AO systems can't do much better than 0.3 arcseconds. But now you've got me interested. What AO system are you working on that can get down to 85 mas? I would think that, even if you can do that, it would still be over a relatively small field of view, because of the size of the isoplanatic patches in the atmosphere. . . unless you're doing different corrections at different parts of the field. . .
While the second part of this statement has some truth, the first part of this statement is completely false. Adaptive Optics on ground-based optical telescopes are just barely starting to get in the same ballpark as HST, when it comes to resolution. You have diffraction-limited imaging on HST, which gives you a resolution of 0.05 arcseconds (see here). I have NEVER heard of anyone getting better than 0.3 arcseconds from the ground (and rarely even anything approaching that). Moreover, optical interferometry has NOT been shown to work reliably in any sort of consistant way. I think they've managed to get two of the telescopes of the VLT to work as an interferromerter in a very clunky way, but nothing NEAR what would be necessary for regular users.
That said, you're right to say that ground-based telescopes have some advantages: easier repaired, bigger mirrors (although this becomes less true with JWST), cheaper.
But, as the parent notes, space-based telescopes also are able to observe at wavelengths normally blocked by the atmosphere.
MOND
/.
Well, it's what some physicists may be thinking, anyway. I suspect that the Guardian article is meaning to hint at this, as well. For those who don't know, MOND is a modification of standard Newtonian Dynamics that has to do with very small accelerations. I'd actually really, really like to see a MONDian calcuation of what the forces should be on those probes and see if it matches their current paths.
Wow. I think this is the second time I've advocated MOND (a theory which I just barely consider reasonable, and no where near verified) on
Well, they often come out of the telescopes that way (and, in fact, this is the way that it appears if you look up on the sky- looking up as opposed to down flips things). However, when people make up P.R. images, they often orient them in whatever way is pretty.
(bottom left, which *is* south-east)
Not to nit-pick too much, but south east is actually almost directly up in the image, as indicated by the directional arrows on the annotated image.
You haven't walked the streets much apparently if you think progress has been made.
Are you kidding me?!? You honestly think that progress has not been made in the past 40 years of race/sex relations? The grandparent didn't say that all of the problems had been solved (and I would be the first to disagree there), but that progress had been made. I would say that the 24th Amendment (abolishing the poll tax) was progress. I'd say that allowing interracial marriage is progress. I'm ceratainly not saying that all of the problems have been solved, but there certainly has been progress.
Well, I think this particular theory (i.e. the one suggested by the parent) is more than a little far fetched.
Despite my (rather snide) comment, I actually really do like the idea of MOND. Something that I have heard pointed out about MOND that I think is an important complaint is that it is NOT an expansion of our current theory of gravity (General Relativity), but rather an expansion on an older theory of gravity (Newtonian Gravity). Until there is a convincing case for a Relativistic MOND, I think I'll reserve judgement. MOND is an intriguing hypothosis, but not a complete theory (yet).
Wow. This makes MOND sound like a mainstream theory! :-)
Yes. The universe is accelerating in its expansion. To say that the universe is expanding "at the speed of light" isn't quite right in a couple of ways. First off, if we look at objects nearby, they are moving away from us at some (quite reasonable) finite speed (i.e. the nearby Virgo Cluster is moving only at ~1000 km/s). Secondly, the somewhat more subtle point is that we generally talk about velocites not exceeding the speed of light; however, this is motion THROUGH space. The expansion of the universe (expansion OF space) doesn't necessarily need to follow this rule. . .
I should also point out that "Dark Matter" and "Dark Energy" are COMPLETELY DIFFERENT THINGS (as far as we know). Astronomers have just named them both "Dark" because they don't know what they are. They both also affect the expansion of the universe, but dark matter is slowing down the expansion of the universe (presumably via gravity) and dark energy is accelerating the expansion of the universe (by some yet-unknown force). Dark Matter is weird, but at least it seems to sortta obey the rules of the universe (i.e. gravity); dark energy is completely unlike anything we've seen before.
Or, an acronym, actually.
MOND = Modified Newtonian Dynamics
It's one of those theories that sounds totally crackpot when you first hear it (and, admittedly, has some problems), but many would argue that it's no weirder than a bunch of dark stuff that we know nothing about. The destain with which astronomers and physicists view MOND is quite surprising, since they are asking us to be believe that (something like) 95% of the matter in the universe is composed of some sort of weird, non-Baryonic particle (most people favor WIMPs over MaCHOs now-a-days).
Anyway, just food for thought.
I've heard they have Ph. D. working at the patent office
I find that the respect that I have for people with Ph.D.'s is inversely proportional to the time until I recieve my own Ph.D.