Joking, but it actually did take me an embarrassingly long time to figure out why on earth someone would want a handheld console of all things... I think we Unix geeks had dibs on that word before gamers.:)
A neutron star farting out gas, which caught fire from a tiny spark created by a neighboring EM field, lasting one hundred days?
It's not my explanation, and I'm not an expert, but I think "accreting" is rather different than "farting out.":)
If a neutron star, white dwarf, or whatever, can gravitationally pull enough stuff onto it to start up fusion (or deflagration-detonation) you can get something kinda sorta like this.
Just to flesh this out and offer a few corrections, as someone who works around the AO LGS at Gemini (and Keck):
Tomduck is correct that an adaptive optics (AO) system uses deformable optics to bring a guide star into sharp focus, and the rest of the scene with it. He fails to mention that this process is in no way inherently dependent upon the use of a laser. Indeed, when a bright natural star is close enough to the target to be used, it is in many ways preferable to using the laser. (For one, the brightness of natural stars tends to be pretty constant, and not subject to the usual game of "so, how many watts shy of nominal power are we tonight?":) So Gemini's AO system, Altair (read all about it here) is quite often used with natural guide stars (NGS).
A NGS can, incidentally, also be used for guiding - keeping the telescope pointed correctly - as its name implies. This isn't the case for a laser guide star (LGS), which in fact has absolutely no use for pointing, since the laser is fastened to, and aligned with, the telescope. It's a horrible misnomer.:( LGS come into play because the field of view of large (8-10m) telescopes is narrow enough that NGS are frequently not visible at the same time as science targets.
There are three large telescopes on Mauna Kea with LGS capabilities - Keck II has an older-technology sodium dye laser (pumped/amped by about six YAGs), Gemini has a solid-state (crystal) laser, and I'm not certain what Subaru has as I haven't worked with them yet. The W.M. Keck Observatory has funding to put a laser on Keck I also, but I'm unsure when it'll be operational. All of the lasers propagate at around 589nm for sodium fluorescence (this is coincidentally about the same frequency put out by the low-pressure sodium streetlights used in the towns on the island, so astronomers can pretty much ignore this frequency).
Each beam is about 8-12W with an objective lens diameter of typically 30-50cm, spreading a little as it goes up. Not enough power to punch holes in stuff, but enough that the FAA requires aircraft spotters to be positioned outside each observatory to make sure they don't blind the pilots of flights between the west coast and Australia/New Zealand. I've done this work sporadically since 2005 at Keck and 2006 at Gemini, so I have tons of pictures and time-lapse video... here's one of the Gemini beam with me ruining the picture by sitting in front of it.
Along with the FAA, AFSC (that's Air Force Space Command, not the American Friends Service Committee) is rather particular about us not shining the bright lights into the sensitive sensors of keyholes and such things. We look up, they look down, etc.
By the way, if there are any Farkers on the Big Island of Hawaii who think this kind of work sounds like fun, it looks like Keck has openings. It's temp-agency work, and probably the coldest, highest-altitude temp-agency work you'll ever get...
I could maybe mod you up, or I could just reply, and at least you, as one of the few people who's paying attention, might get something out of it.:)
A few of the people in the authors list of that paper (maybe 4 or 5) are also in another research collaboration that's sort of a spinoff/descendant of the supernova cosmology project. I'm one of their collaborators in that other thing, and I asked one of them about 06F6.
His "best guess" was a neutron star (and your comment here is the only one to mention neutron stars seriously) - possibly formed by a "failed" supernova - which has accreted some material, maybe just gas it was passing through, and flared up/fused that material/blew that material off, or something.
Since SCP (like the collaboration that I'm in) is specifically interested in supernovae, it is likely this thing was found, and they weren't sure whether it might be a supernova, so they took a bunch of data on it, then ultimately decided it wasn't and wrote it up.
Unfortunately, it appears even the collaboration that discovered it aren't sure enough to say what it is, which isn't really surprising; there's a lot of specialization in astronomy and cosmology these days, and even though survey projects give everyone a whole bunch of cool data to analyze, someone who's looking for supernovae wouldn't necessarily also be able to tell you that a set of exposures of a chunk of space also showed an asteroid, a kuiper-belt object, or a whatever-this-is, let alone give you much insight into those other non-supernova objects.
The good news is that as the surveys really ramp up, with things like Pan-STARRS and the LSST coming, there will be a lot more data, and it will take less time to find the second, third, etc. examples of whatever weird new thing gets discovered. For example, the math for relating type Ia supernova (SN Ia) mass to light curve was worked out in 1993, it took ten years after that to find the first super-chandrasekhar-mass SN Ia, three years after that to find the second and one year after that to find the third (which is titled "a second example" because the second one found hadn't been formally written up and announced at the time, I think.:)
So whatever 06F6 is, it's likely we'll be seeing more of them... first of a class, yeah.
Just out of interest, why? It is part of the RF spectrum, just way way way up there.
...or, depending on whom you ask, part of the "far IR" spectrum, just way way way... down there.:)
It's also good to call it that, because it reminds people that it's part of the same thing as light, xrays, Ham Radio, and mobile phones.
Most folks I know don't think of light and xrays as "radio." Maybe you mean that it would be good to refer to everything as "electromagnetic radiation?"
If there's really a need to divide the electromagnetic spectrum into only two categories, I suppose one might go along the lines of "things that have to be reflected off mirrors" versus "things that can be reflected off metal dishes" - but I don't think there's such a need.
And while we're at it, can article-writers stop referring to the submillimeter/microwave portion of the spectrum as "radio"?
Linking together radio dishes is not a big deal - radio astronomy goes back to the 1930s, and the Very Long Baseline Array has stretched from Hawaii to the Virgin Islands for decades now.
Linking together JCMT and SMA with some dishes on the mainland is a big deal in submillimeter astronomy. The Cosmic Microwave Background wasn't even discovered until the 1960s, and then it took another couple decades to develop serious observing capabilities. There's plenty of interferometry on Mauna Kea, both within the SMA and between the SMA and JCMT and/or CalTech Submillimeter Observatory, but that's all relatively short-baseline.
VATT's primary mirror is f/1. The entire optical system is, according to the same Wikipedia page you linked to, an "Aplanatic Gregorian f/9."
If I've read the LSST web site correctly, I believe the design calls for its entire optical system to be f/1.25.
LSST's field of view will also be much wider than VATT. As a camera user, this seems sensible to me - my short/wide lenses are "faster" than my long zooms.
The problem is that the government doesn't fund research... Unless your lab is tied to the defense dept. you won't get funding.
While I'll agree that there isn't enough money for scientific funding, to claim that the government doesn't fund any non-defense related research is absurd. Have you heard of the DOE, NSF, or NIH?
Yeah, what this one says. And not even all DOE labs are weapons-oriented. Lawrence Berkeley Lab has (in part because it's in Berkeley, for Pete's sake!) taken a tack of not working on weapons, and indeed, generally not working on classified stuff. (Full disclosure: I collaborate on some stuff with people at LBL.)
And departments you might not think of at first are involved in physics research. Even the Department of Commerce is involved, through its NIST and NOAA departments, in everything from nanotechnology to neutrons to geophysical fluid dynamics.
Fundamental physics research has really taken on a life of its own, and is conducted with really big, really expensive toys.
I don't think Lucent now (or even Bell back in the day) could really justify building something like the Large Hadron Collider.
So, yes, a lot of good work was done, but perhaps they've gone as far as they can within the constraints of what's reasonable for them to do as an entity.
And hey, if the best and brightest minds on their payroll instead work on something that makes my connection faster, it's not like I'm gonna complain.
I'm going to hazard a guess that in addition to not sharing chargers, they don't share much else either... they don't necessarily use the same memory, or have interchangeable parts, or interoperate in cool and interesting ways (like forming Voltron, for example).
So... congratulations. You've ammassed enough technology to discover why corporate IT departments standardize on a limited number of vendors. It looks like you surf the web, talk, take pictures, play media, and do computer stuff... right?
You've got somewhere between 2 and 4 different ways to surf the web. You've got somewhere between 3 and 5 ways to talk. You've got somewhre between 3 and 5 ways to take a picture.
Do you actually need this degree of redundancy? Are you collecting random shiny toys just to say you've done it?:)
I surf the web, talk, take pictures, play media, and do computer stuff, too. The only things charging off my power strip, 99.999% of the time, are a laptop and a phone. Why? Well, the laptop lets me surf the web, talk (via Skype etc), take crappy pictures via a built-in webcam, play all kinds of media, and do all kinds of computer stuff. The phone lets me surf the web, talk, take slightly better crappy pictures, and play media.
Do I have other kit? Sure - but I don't use my standalone media player that often any more, so it stays in my backpack. Ditto for the pocket camera. Ditto for the DSLR. Ditto for a lot of chargers. Oh, and my phone and media player are the same brand, so they charge the same way.
On page 867, there's mention of a two-meter-wide thermal exhaust port, right below the main port. The exhaust shaft leads directly to the reactor system, and a precise hit would start a chain reaction which should destroy the LHC.
Right, right... it's been so long since I did that puzzle, I doubt those were the real answers (though I suppose there should be multiple permutations of the puzzle floating around out there, potentially including one in which they are).
Dunno, having used package management tools on several unix flavors, and having resolved dependencies manually on systems where such tools hadn't yet evolved, I have a lot of respect for their logic capabilities.;)
Yes, but set theory is a subfield of mathematical logic, which came about when people decided to apply logic to their math (before which all math was presumably illogical, and used only irrational numbers). And in studying, you would have learned that this sort of logic puzzle most likely predates the existence of set theory by some number of centuries, so I clearly cannot choose the wine in front of me.
Sudoku isn't a math puzzle, it's a logic puzzle - just one where you're filling in digits instead of the man in the blue house smoking Pall Malls and having a goldfish.
The digits 1-9 in Sudoku could be replaced with any 9 other symbols without changing the underlying rules. So yeah, logic can be used to solve it.
Who the hell granted Tibet, or anyone for that matter, the right to self-determination?
Well, since China is a member of the United Nations, the UN Charter, chapter XI, article 73 might apply.
Members of the United Nations which have or assume responsibilities for the administration of territories whose peoples have not yet attained a full measure of self-government... accept as a sacred trust the obligation... to develop self-government, to take due account of the political aspirations of the peoples, and to assist them in the progressive development of their free political institutions, according to the particular circumstances of each territory and its peoples and their varying stages of advancement...
That being said, the official list of non-self-governing territories is basically just a bunch of old colonies, since one of the things the UN is working on ending is colonialism, and doesn't include many things that would actually be found controversial.
Oh, and if you think this is all just a bunch of people whining about who's in charge, well, Armenia, East Timor, Estonia, Georgia, Latvia and Palau would beg to differ, since they were all non-self-governing in 1990 and have UN member status now.:)
I had to do it repeatedly on Friendster, since a group of friends (no doubt drawn together by their shared interest in being clueless) decided to repeatedly set up accounts using made-up local-parts in a domain I owned... and I had a catch-all on email.
Being given the chance to modify someone's profile on a social networking site, and send any kind of messages to their friends, certainly is good exercise for the ol' creativity.
At the visitor information station on Mauna Kea, I am routinely approached by followers of astronomy (henceforth "gullibles") during the evening stargazing sessions. It usually goes something like this:
Gullible: It's my birthday, can you point out my sign? Me: (points at the ground)
Anyone who subscribes to pseudoscientific nonsense but doesn't even read enough of it to know that their sign is the one the Sun is in when they're born, should be duct-taped in place and forced to listen to Weird Al's "Your Horoscope for Today."
To their credit, no Christians have asked me to point out the star from when Jesus was born. Yet.
Slashdot Mirror
Like the little planetarium in my town?
Joking, but it actually did take me an embarrassingly long time to figure out why on earth someone would want a handheld console of all things... I think we Unix geeks had dibs on that word before gamers. :)
Yeah, or even a phone!
Oh, wait...
No one suggested just recompiling the Linux apps and running them under OS X? :)
A neutron star farting out gas, which caught fire from a tiny spark created by a neighboring EM field, lasting one hundred days?
It's not my explanation, and I'm not an expert, but I think "accreting" is rather different than "farting out." :)
If a neutron star, white dwarf, or whatever, can gravitationally pull enough stuff onto it to start up fusion (or deflagration-detonation) you can get something kinda sorta like this.
Just to flesh this out and offer a few corrections, as someone who works around the AO LGS at Gemini (and Keck):
Tomduck is correct that an adaptive optics (AO) system uses deformable optics to bring a guide star into sharp focus, and the rest of the scene with it. He fails to mention that this process is in no way inherently dependent upon the use of a laser. Indeed, when a bright natural star is close enough to the target to be used, it is in many ways preferable to using the laser. (For one, the brightness of natural stars tends to be pretty constant, and not subject to the usual game of "so, how many watts shy of nominal power are we tonight?" :) So Gemini's AO system, Altair (read all about it here) is quite often used with natural guide stars (NGS).
A NGS can, incidentally, also be used for guiding - keeping the telescope pointed correctly - as its name implies. This isn't the case for a laser guide star (LGS), which in fact has absolutely no use for pointing, since the laser is fastened to, and aligned with, the telescope. It's a horrible misnomer. :( LGS come into play because the field of view of large (8-10m) telescopes is narrow enough that NGS are frequently not visible at the same time as science targets.
There are three large telescopes on Mauna Kea with LGS capabilities - Keck II has an older-technology sodium dye laser (pumped/amped by about six YAGs), Gemini has a solid-state (crystal) laser, and I'm not certain what Subaru has as I haven't worked with them yet. The W.M. Keck Observatory has funding to put a laser on Keck I also, but I'm unsure when it'll be operational. All of the lasers propagate at around 589nm for sodium fluorescence (this is coincidentally about the same frequency put out by the low-pressure sodium streetlights used in the towns on the island, so astronomers can pretty much ignore this frequency).
Each beam is about 8-12W with an objective lens diameter of typically 30-50cm, spreading a little as it goes up. Not enough power to punch holes in stuff, but enough that the FAA requires aircraft spotters to be positioned outside each observatory to make sure they don't blind the pilots of flights between the west coast and Australia/New Zealand. I've done this work sporadically since 2005 at Keck and 2006 at Gemini, so I have tons of pictures and time-lapse video... here's one of the Gemini beam with me ruining the picture by sitting in front of it.
Along with the FAA, AFSC (that's Air Force Space Command, not the American Friends Service Committee) is rather particular about us not shining the bright lights into the sensitive sensors of keyholes and such things. We look up, they look down, etc.
By the way, if there are any Farkers on the Big Island of Hawaii who think this kind of work sounds like fun, it looks like Keck has openings. It's temp-agency work, and probably the coldest, highest-altitude temp-agency work you'll ever get...
I could maybe mod you up, or I could just reply, and at least you, as one of the few people who's paying attention, might get something out of it. :)
A few of the people in the authors list of that paper (maybe 4 or 5) are also in another research collaboration that's sort of a spinoff/descendant of the supernova cosmology project. I'm one of their collaborators in that other thing, and I asked one of them about 06F6.
His "best guess" was a neutron star (and your comment here is the only one to mention neutron stars seriously) - possibly formed by a "failed" supernova - which has accreted some material, maybe just gas it was passing through, and flared up/fused that material/blew that material off, or something.
Since SCP (like the collaboration that I'm in) is specifically interested in supernovae, it is likely this thing was found, and they weren't sure whether it might be a supernova, so they took a bunch of data on it, then ultimately decided it wasn't and wrote it up.
Unfortunately, it appears even the collaboration that discovered it aren't sure enough to say what it is, which isn't really surprising; there's a lot of specialization in astronomy and cosmology these days, and even though survey projects give everyone a whole bunch of cool data to analyze, someone who's looking for supernovae wouldn't necessarily also be able to tell you that a set of exposures of a chunk of space also showed an asteroid, a kuiper-belt object, or a whatever-this-is, let alone give you much insight into those other non-supernova objects.
The good news is that as the surveys really ramp up, with things like Pan-STARRS and the LSST coming, there will be a lot more data, and it will take less time to find the second, third, etc. examples of whatever weird new thing gets discovered. For example, the math for relating type Ia supernova (SN Ia) mass to light curve was worked out in 1993, it took ten years after that to find the first super-chandrasekhar-mass SN Ia, three years after that to find the second and one year after that to find the third (which is titled "a second example" because the second one found hadn't been formally written up and announced at the time, I think. :)
So whatever 06F6 is, it's likely we'll be seeing more of them... first of a class, yeah.
The iPhone, at least, has a "Disable Data Roaming" option... of course, they probably had that clue shoved down their throats by Apple. :)
Just out of interest, why? It is part of the RF spectrum, just way way way up there.
...or, depending on whom you ask, part of the "far IR" spectrum, just way way way... down there. :)
It's also good to call it that, because it reminds people that it's part of the same thing as light, xrays, Ham Radio, and mobile phones.
Most folks I know don't think of light and xrays as "radio." Maybe you mean that it would be good to refer to everything as "electromagnetic radiation?"
If there's really a need to divide the electromagnetic spectrum into only two categories, I suppose one might go along the lines of "things that have to be reflected off mirrors" versus "things that can be reflected off metal dishes" - but I don't think there's such a need.
Yes. Please.
And while we're at it, can article-writers stop referring to the submillimeter/microwave portion of the spectrum as "radio"?
Linking together radio dishes is not a big deal - radio astronomy goes back to the 1930s, and the Very Long Baseline Array has stretched from Hawaii to the Virgin Islands for decades now.
Linking together JCMT and SMA with some dishes on the mainland is a big deal in submillimeter astronomy. The Cosmic Microwave Background wasn't even discovered until the 1960s, and then it took another couple decades to develop serious observing capabilities. There's plenty of interferometry on Mauna Kea, both within the SMA and between the SMA and JCMT and/or CalTech Submillimeter Observatory, but that's all relatively short-baseline.
VATT's primary mirror is f/1. The entire optical system is, according to the same Wikipedia page you linked to, an "Aplanatic Gregorian f/9."
If I've read the LSST web site correctly, I believe the design calls for its entire optical system to be f/1.25.
LSST's field of view will also be much wider than VATT. As a camera user, this seems sensible to me - my short/wide lenses are "faster" than my long zooms.
So there you have it - what's really cool about LSST, from a guy who drives a boring old f/10 2.2-meter. ;)
...and who absent-mindedly checked the "Post Anonymously" box for no reason. Whoops.
Douglas Adams died at 49, now Perkins at 55... maybe the Universe is killing off people who know The Question.
The problem is that the government doesn't fund research... Unless your lab is tied to the defense dept. you won't get funding.
While I'll agree that there isn't enough money for scientific funding, to claim that the government doesn't fund any non-defense related research is absurd. Have you heard of the DOE, NSF, or NIH?
Yeah, what this one says. And not even all DOE labs are weapons-oriented. Lawrence Berkeley Lab has (in part because it's in Berkeley, for Pete's sake!) taken a tack of not working on weapons, and indeed, generally not working on classified stuff. (Full disclosure: I collaborate on some stuff with people at LBL.)
And departments you might not think of at first are involved in physics research. Even the Department of Commerce is involved, through its NIST and NOAA departments, in everything from nanotechnology to neutrons to geophysical fluid dynamics.
Fundamental physics research has really taken on a life of its own, and is conducted with really big, really expensive toys.
I don't think Lucent now (or even Bell back in the day) could really justify building something like the Large Hadron Collider.
So, yes, a lot of good work was done, but perhaps they've gone as far as they can within the constraints of what's reasonable for them to do as an entity.
And hey, if the best and brightest minds on their payroll instead work on something that makes my connection faster, it's not like I'm gonna complain.
I'm going to hazard a guess that in addition to not sharing chargers, they don't share much else either... they don't necessarily use the same memory, or have interchangeable parts, or interoperate in cool and interesting ways (like forming Voltron, for example).
So... congratulations. You've ammassed enough technology to discover why corporate IT departments standardize on a limited number of vendors. It looks like you surf the web, talk, take pictures, play media, and do computer stuff... right?
You've got somewhere between 2 and 4 different ways to surf the web. You've got somewhere between 3 and 5 ways to talk. You've got somewhre between 3 and 5 ways to take a picture.
Do you actually need this degree of redundancy? Are you collecting random shiny toys just to say you've done it? :)
I surf the web, talk, take pictures, play media, and do computer stuff, too. The only things charging off my power strip, 99.999% of the time, are a laptop and a phone. Why? Well, the laptop lets me surf the web, talk (via Skype etc), take crappy pictures via a built-in webcam, play all kinds of media, and do all kinds of computer stuff. The phone lets me surf the web, talk, take slightly better crappy pictures, and play media.
Do I have other kit? Sure - but I don't use my standalone media player that often any more, so it stays in my backpack. Ditto for the pocket camera. Ditto for the DSLR. Ditto for a lot of chargers. Oh, and my phone and media player are the same brand, so they charge the same way.
On page 867, there's mention of a two-meter-wide thermal exhaust port, right below the main port. The exhaust shaft leads directly to the reactor system, and a precise hit would start a chain reaction which should destroy the LHC.
Right, right... it's been so long since I did that puzzle, I doubt those were the real answers (though I suppose there should be multiple permutations of the puzzle floating around out there, potentially including one in which they are).
And let us not forget that he drinks $BEVERAGE.
Dunno, having used package management tools on several unix flavors, and having resolved dependencies manually on systems where such tools hadn't yet evolved, I have a lot of respect for their logic capabilities. ;)
Just because numbers don't have to be used doesn't mean it's not math.
You must be a mathematician. :)
Sudoku is a set theory problem
Yes, but set theory is a subfield of mathematical logic, which came about when people decided to apply logic to their math (before which all math was presumably illogical, and used only irrational numbers). And in studying, you would have learned that this sort of logic puzzle most likely predates the existence of set theory by some number of centuries, so I clearly cannot choose the wine in front of me.
Sudoku isn't a math puzzle, it's a logic puzzle - just one where you're filling in digits instead of the man in the blue house smoking Pall Malls and having a goldfish.
The digits 1-9 in Sudoku could be replaced with any 9 other symbols without changing the underlying rules. So yeah, logic can be used to solve it.
Who the hell granted Tibet, or anyone for that matter, the right to self-determination?
Well, since China is a member of the United Nations, the UN Charter, chapter XI, article 73 might apply.
Members of the United Nations which have or assume responsibilities for the administration of territories whose peoples have not yet attained a full measure of self-government... accept as a sacred trust the obligation... to develop self-government, to take due account of the political aspirations of the peoples, and to assist them in the progressive development of their free political institutions, according to the particular circumstances of each territory and its peoples and their varying stages of advancement...
That being said, the official list of non-self-governing territories is basically just a bunch of old colonies, since one of the things the UN is working on ending is colonialism, and doesn't include many things that would actually be found controversial.
The Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization has more participants, I think, and then there are a whole lot of random autonomist and secessionist movements. The last group would contain the various sovereignty movements in Tibet, Hawaii, etc.
Oh, and if you think this is all just a bunch of people whining about who's in charge, well, Armenia, East Timor, Estonia, Georgia, Latvia and Palau would beg to differ, since they were all non-self-governing in 1990 and have UN member status now. :)
I had to do it repeatedly on Friendster, since a group of friends (no doubt drawn together by their shared interest in being clueless) decided to repeatedly set up accounts using made-up local-parts in a domain I owned... and I had a catch-all on email.
Being given the chance to modify someone's profile on a social networking site, and send any kind of messages to their friends, certainly is good exercise for the ol' creativity.
Oooh, that was an embarrassing typo. :)
I didn't know that astrologers used telescopes.
At the visitor information station on Mauna Kea, I am routinely approached by followers of astronomy (henceforth "gullibles") during the evening stargazing sessions. It usually goes something like this:
Gullible: It's my birthday, can you point out my sign?
Me: (points at the ground)
Anyone who subscribes to pseudoscientific nonsense but doesn't even read enough of it to know that their sign is the one the Sun is in when they're born, should be duct-taped in place and forced to listen to Weird Al's "Your Horoscope for Today."
To their credit, no Christians have asked me to point out the star from when Jesus was born. Yet.