So, Kepler is up, in orbit, doing it's thing. Scientists expect to learn a lot, from finally being able to see alien worlds that are a similar size to earth.
Those of us who are non-scientists know that this isn't really going to be that exciting, unless they find something that differs from are assumptions. We expect that there are many small planets out there, that have not been visible until Kepler. We know that we will never actually "see" these planets. Kepler is just able to watch for periodic changes in brightness of the star, which indicates planets crossing our view of the star. Based on the period, we can "guess" the diameter of orbit, and the size of the planet.
When we see a spectrum of light produced by a stellar body, we know something of its composition. But, we aren't seeing that with alien worlds. We just see the star that they orbit getting dimmer. So, we'll never know the real composition. Once again, we "guess" the composition based on the size of the orbit, and the mass of the planet, both of which we guessed, based on the periodic nature of the brightness.
In a matter of 3 weeks, slashdot has seen 4+ articles about planets "discovered" by Kepler. None of them have findings different from what we've expected, yet they've all received prime coverage by pop-science publications. This leads me to a new theorem:
What part of "coming out of an ice age" does not include a bit of natural increase in temperature?
The aberration in temperature seems unusual, but it's nothing compared to the little ice age that froze Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries.
If temperatures are naturally rising (as all data seems to indicate), then I have no doubt that we'll see articles like this multiple times a year until the warming trend ends. I just checked and the record high for my area was set in 1954. If we have news stories every time a new record high is set for any area, then it will be quite annoying. That's probably why most voices of reason have stayed out of this discussion.
We're quickly changing from "oh there's likely not many planets" to "the universe is full of them"
I wouldn't quite say that.
I don't really think that the estimates of how many planets there may be has increased. Instead, our technology has increased so that we can actually start finding the planets that we've always assumed were there.
The somewhat-dubious values that Drake used in 1961, according to Wikipedia, include: fp = 0.5 (half of all stars formed will have planets) ne = 2 (stars with planets will have 2 planets capable of developing life)
The value given for ne seems to be rather optimistic, but it's still too early to have reliable numbers. It will be a long time before we can take any arbitrary star, and see exactly how many planets it has.
I really couldn't understand why Megaupload ever went to court over this. Youtube has the right to take down anything that they choose. They are a private corporation.
It seems naïve to think that they wouldn't make deals with big players for exclusive takedown rights. There would be big money in such a contract.
Megaupload would just be best served to just use this publicity as a platform. Give a link to the video on a different site, and hopefully it will hurt youtube's popularity also.
So, 20 years of beating around the Arctics and seeing seepings of 10s m in diameter and, unlucky them, it is only recently that they found the larger ones... What are the chances? I mean, pretty hard luck to miss something that large and find only the smaller ones for 20 years... I wonder why the International Arctic Research Centre at the University of Alaska Fairbanks keeps such unlucky researchers on its payroll?
First, I don't think you understand the magnitude of the ocean. Even a hole 1 km in diameter is pretty small when you consider the area they have covered.
Second, there is no reason to believe that this phenomenon happens every year. Even if it happens only once every 50 years, that's still pretty high frequency when you look at the timescales we are working with here.
Does anyone else freak out like I do at the possibility of laws like this?
For example, let's imagine Stacy (fictional person) has a 30 minute commute to work. 5 days each week, she spends the time driving home from work on the phone, talking with friends.
After the NTSB recommendations are applied, she drives home in silence. Then when she gets home, she spends 30 minutes talking on the phone with friends. Everything else in her evening is pushed back 30 minutes, and now she goes to bed 30 minutes later each night.
Now, Stacy is missing out on 2.5 hours of sleep each week. After a couple weeks, this mounts up to a substantial amount, and it begins impairing her driving!
I honestly feel safer with Stacy being able to choose how she spends her time each day. She might not always make the right choices, but I trust her choices more than the ones the government would like to force on her.
We need the "Caps Lock Annhilation Program" to stop loud posters.
FTFA:
TTY: 1-888-835-5322 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: NEWS MEDIA CONTACT: December 13, 2011 Janice Wise (202) 418-8165 Email: janice.wise@fcc.gov FCC QUIETS PERSISTENT PROBLEM OF TELEVISION AGE – LOUD COMMERCIALS – BY ADOPTING RULES TO REDUCE VOLUME
Unfortunately, I cannot maintain the monospace font, due to slashfilters. View the original article for the full loudness effect.
If I had the money I would put one of these in my back yard and sell the power back to the power company or the local town. I want one with simple mechanical controls and really good circuit breakers though. Failsafe baby, especially if there are 'unforeseen' events.
Actually, "simple mechanical controls" is exactly what went wrong with Chernobyl.
If they would have just let the system go through it's normal shutdown procedure, then nothing would have happened, other than the town being without power for about a week.
Instead, the engineers at the plant were told "Don't question the orders, just do whatever it takes to keep the reaction from shutting down! We can't afford another week to wait for the reaction to start again."
The engineers couldn't have done anything, if it was in the US, because all those controls were automated. But, in Russia, they were still 10-20 years behind in design, so manual overrides allowed them to remove the control rods -- against all safety regulations -- which raised the temperature enough to cause all the water coolant to evaporate. That is what caused the fuel to meltdown.
The safety problem with nearly all fission designs is that there is no "unplug one machine, and everything stops gracefully" option. Since Chernobyl, all reactors are pretty close to being idiot proof. There is no way to override the systems in such a way to prevent a graceful shutdown. But, the shutdown still relies on the physical integrity of the reactor and the containment vessels. Unexpected events like Tsunamis or falling bombs can cause containment vessels to break, so essentially there is no way to make such a design 100% safe. I'm still for nuclear power, because the value far outweighs the risk, but when the opposing side says that they can't be 100% infallible, unfortunately they are correct.
Actually, that funny old law is essentially why the FRC (Federal Radio Commission) was formed in 1912, which eventually became the FCC.
See, for you to receive radio transmissions from a tower far away, you need cooperation from all your neighbors. They have to silence any machinery that would cause interference on channels designated for radio.
Cell phone jammers are illegal because they interfere with designated channels for radio transmission. If they were legal, then you would have no way to deal with a neighbor that runs one near your house. That neighbor would legally be able to interfere with your radio, television, wi-fi, cell phone, etc.
I'm not completely sure whether you were being sarcastic or not, but this regulation, honestly, is very important. Without it, we'd pretty much have to rely on wired communication.
Everyone agrees that the headline is sensationalist and basically fiction. And, of course, the/. summary is based on the headline.
But the article actually makes some sense:
The committee's action is aimed more towards developers: as war games become more realistic, do they have a responsibility to add humanitarian elements to their games?
The Red Cross doesn't prosecute war criminals. They see war as an opportunity to do what they are trained to do -- provide medical help, and assist refugees.
They aren't against gaming. They see that gaming is becoming closer and closer to real life, yet the part that they play in war is not represented. Can "assisting refugees" ever be present in a way that would be fun? It seems like a hard sell, but possible.
If a game did focus on that part of the war, it could also focus on other war-related issues, such as determining what actions in the game could be considered violation of human rights. The Red Cross probably had someone write this up as an idea, and then the Dailymail got ahold of it, and wrote a sensationalist article.
So, it seems that after finding the "holy grail" of the missing genome, they have been set back by one year.
I did a lot of research about this back in January, when they first said that it was 5 years away. I heard a genome scientist interviewed on the radio, and he said that the resulting baby will be at most half Mammoth. It will have more elephant characteristics than mammoth, and will most likely be non-fertile, but it is still an important step to eventually having a fertile mammoth clone.
So, as much as I'd like to imagine mammoths in the zoo for my children to see, the truth is that we are still far from that point.
I just watched the Doctor Who 2009 Christmas special called The End of Time last night. There were probably at least 50 actors/actresses who all had their head replaced by that of The Master. Even Barack Obama (a semi-prominent character in this episode) had his head replaced by that of The Master.
If only the BBC team had had this technology available, those characters could have actually turned their heads, instead of staring directly at the camera during these scenes. Oh well, it is this cheesieness that make Doctor Who what it is!
I've had high-speed since it was available in my area, long before most people in my town did.
I've been a bandwidth hog in the past. I used to leave file-sharing programs running all day long, keeping seeds active (all legal stuff of course!) So, I definitely can identify with those who abuse the service.
For the past 5 or so years, though, finding a high-speed ISP that doesn't get bogged down around 7pm each night is nearly impossible. I've started getting up early, just so that I can watch streamed video without it queueing. Internet access is like everything else, it's limited.
I know that 10% of the people use 90% of the bandwidth. If the ISP just identifies those people, and charges them 25-50% more, then maybe they'll leave and go some place else.
Is it so unreasonable to want this? There are other options for hosting servers (ie. SDSL), and if people want to host large amount of video files to others, they shouldn't be scared of such services. Leave standard consumer-level internet packages who use a standard amount of data.
Well, from what I see in the.pdf, they can set the gait of the robot, and then just let it crawl, using the preset list of positions.
It is autonomous in a sense. The controls for the different positions come from within the software. The human only gives a single instruction (walk with this gait), and then all the small instructions to make it function come from software.
As far as the semantics go, I am a bit annoyed that they call it a robot, since there are no feedback loops that allow the device to make any type of decisions. But, consider that:
a) Robotics is a much newer word than Robot, and has a much stricter definition. Using non-biological methods to move limbs is frequently referred to as a subset of robotics, even when the device is not autonomous.
b) The word "robot" most likely comes from a play written in 1920. The "robots" here are essentially artificial life, made from some strange new chemical. The word "robot" comes from a Czech word that roughly means "worker". Although the robots in the play are fully autonomous, the idea of a non-living worker does not imply autonomy.
Also, most people have only seen this film through the edits made by MST3K.
I normally love all MST3K stuff, but in this case, they complain about how the whole movie just doesn't make sense. The reason it doesn't make sense is that a lot of the important scenes were cut out, to make room for all the MST3K content. They chose to cut out plot-important scenes so that they could be sure to preserve all the "driving in silence" scenes at the beginning of the movie.
Essentially, MST3K edited it horribly, and then proceeded to make fun of how badly it was edited.
I always remember mosquitoes as being the primary example of a pest that serves no known purpose.
Sure, other things that seem to be pests have upsides, but not mosquitoes. Anything that enjoys eating them will be just as happy dining on whatever insect increases to take their place.
I thought the last x86 processor produced was the Pentium Pro
When the Pentium 4 came out, it was frequently called the "7th generation", but it was never called the 786 or 80786, either formally or informally. Sure, it's just naming conventions, but that's exactly what x86 is about, it's about a trend in naming conventions.
My new hobby will be referring to processors as having x87 architecture, as a distinction to indicate they support floating point instructions.
Reminds me a little of our library. I would be able to see it from my window if they had built it above ground, but they chose to go down instead.
The legend of this decision lives on through a song about the Morrow Plots. As the song goes, "You Can't Throw Shade on The Corn!"
The Morrow Plots were built in 1876 as an experimental field for growing crops, and is the oldest such field in existence in the western hemisphere. It might not sound like that big of a landmark, but the university decided to build our library underground to preserve it.
The way I understand "clear or transparent core walls", some floors will have clear, others would have transparent. It seems obvious to me that the first 10 stores (shopping malls, etc) would have transparent walls, so that the space would feel more natural.
Whether pedestrians are allowed to walk across the glass courtyard is a different question.
SMS technically is not free. If it was, then they would just send all voice data through SMS packets.
Voice data is limited. SMS is limited. (see the Shannon-Hartley theorem page on wikipedia.) With basic GSM or CDMA, a voice channel was used to send SMS data. Although the channel was quickly released after being reserved, it still could cause a tower to be overloaded, if each person sent enough text messages per second.
With GPRS (aka 2.5g), SMS were moved to a separate data packet type that could piggyback onto a voice channel that was already in use for a different SU. The motivation for the change of the standard was that customers would not ever be changed by the networks again for SMS.
Now, we are throwing around terms like 3g and 4g, and most carriers still charge differently for plans with and without text plans. This should make it plainly obvious to everyone that it's a gimmick to get more out of the average customer, which I believe was your point. But your assessment that it is technically "free" for the carrier is incorrect.
Well, the amount of movement of the plates (continental drift) is definitely outside of our control. If some fracking did cause the earthquake to happen prematurely, then it is probably set to go an even longer than normal stretch now before the next earthquake.
Slashdot Mirror
So, Kepler is up, in orbit, doing it's thing. Scientists expect to learn a lot, from finally being able to see alien worlds that are a similar size to earth.
Those of us who are non-scientists know that this isn't really going to be that exciting, unless they find something that differs from are assumptions. We expect that there are many small planets out there, that have not been visible until Kepler. We know that we will never actually "see" these planets. Kepler is just able to watch for periodic changes in brightness of the star, which indicates planets crossing our view of the star. Based on the period, we can "guess" the diameter of orbit, and the size of the planet.
When we see a spectrum of light produced by a stellar body, we know something of its composition. But, we aren't seeing that with alien worlds. We just see the star that they orbit getting dimmer. So, we'll never know the real composition. Once again, we "guess" the composition based on the size of the orbit, and the mass of the planet, both of which we guessed, based on the periodic nature of the brightness.
In a matter of 3 weeks, slashdot has seen 4+ articles about planets "discovered" by Kepler. None of them have findings different from what we've expected, yet they've all received prime coverage by pop-science publications. This leads me to a new theorem:
Kepler (spacecraft) is a spammer!
Wake me up when we get interesting news.
What part of "coming out of an ice age" does not include a bit of natural increase in temperature?
The aberration in temperature seems unusual, but it's nothing compared to the little ice age that froze Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries.
If temperatures are naturally rising (as all data seems to indicate), then I have no doubt that we'll see articles like this multiple times a year until the warming trend ends. I just checked and the record high for my area was set in 1954. If we have news stories every time a new record high is set for any area, then it will be quite annoying. That's probably why most voices of reason have stayed out of this discussion.
Time to play some disc golf.
Actually, that mystery was solved back in 1991 when the first one fell. Here's a really in-depth article about it:
http://fernlea.tripod.com/tank.html
I think the use of flavour here is quite okay, to be honest
Actually, it's not, because flavour has a very distinct and very different meaning in this context.
We're quickly changing from "oh there's likely not many planets" to "the universe is full of them"
I wouldn't quite say that.
I don't really think that the estimates of how many planets there may be has increased. Instead, our technology has increased so that we can actually start finding the planets that we've always assumed were there.
The somewhat-dubious values that Drake used in 1961, according to Wikipedia, include:
fp = 0.5 (half of all stars formed will have planets)
ne = 2 (stars with planets will have 2 planets capable of developing life)
The value given for ne seems to be rather optimistic, but it's still too early to have reliable numbers. It will be a long time before we can take any arbitrary star, and see exactly how many planets it has.
I had suspected this from the beginning.
I really couldn't understand why Megaupload ever went to court over this. Youtube has the right to take down anything that they choose. They are a private corporation.
It seems naïve to think that they wouldn't make deals with big players for exclusive takedown rights. There would be big money in such a contract.
Megaupload would just be best served to just use this publicity as a platform. Give a link to the video on a different site, and hopefully it will hurt youtube's popularity also.
So, 20 years of beating around the Arctics and seeing seepings of 10s m in diameter and, unlucky them, it is only recently that they found the larger ones... What are the chances? I mean, pretty hard luck to miss something that large and find only the smaller ones for 20 years... I wonder why the International Arctic Research Centre at the University of Alaska Fairbanks keeps such unlucky researchers on its payroll?
First, I don't think you understand the magnitude of the ocean. Even a hole 1 km in diameter is pretty small when you consider the area they have covered.
Second, there is no reason to believe that this phenomenon happens every year. Even if it happens only once every 50 years, that's still pretty high frequency when you look at the timescales we are working with here.
Does anyone else freak out like I do at the possibility of laws like this?
For example, let's imagine Stacy (fictional person) has a 30 minute commute to work. 5 days each week, she spends the time driving home from work on the phone, talking with friends.
After the NTSB recommendations are applied, she drives home in silence. Then when she gets home, she spends 30 minutes talking on the phone with friends. Everything else in her evening is pushed back 30 minutes, and now she goes to bed 30 minutes later each night.
Now, Stacy is missing out on 2.5 hours of sleep each week. After a couple weeks, this mounts up to a substantial amount, and it begins impairing her driving!
I honestly feel safer with Stacy being able to choose how she spends her time each day. She might not always make the right choices, but I trust her choices more than the ones the government would like to force on her.
We need the "Caps Lock Annhilation Program" to stop loud posters.
FTFA:
Unfortunately, I cannot maintain the monospace font, due to slashfilters. View the original article for the full loudness effect.
If I had the money I would put one of these in my back yard and sell the power back to the power company or the local town. I want one with simple mechanical controls and really good circuit breakers though. Failsafe baby, especially if there are 'unforeseen' events.
Actually, "simple mechanical controls" is exactly what went wrong with Chernobyl.
If they would have just let the system go through it's normal shutdown procedure, then nothing would have happened, other than the town being without power for about a week.
Instead, the engineers at the plant were told "Don't question the orders, just do whatever it takes to keep the reaction from shutting down! We can't afford another week to wait for the reaction to start again."
The engineers couldn't have done anything, if it was in the US, because all those controls were automated. But, in Russia, they were still 10-20 years behind in design, so manual overrides allowed them to remove the control rods -- against all safety regulations -- which raised the temperature enough to cause all the water coolant to evaporate. That is what caused the fuel to meltdown.
The safety problem with nearly all fission designs is that there is no "unplug one machine, and everything stops gracefully" option. Since Chernobyl, all reactors are pretty close to being idiot proof. There is no way to override the systems in such a way to prevent a graceful shutdown. But, the shutdown still relies on the physical integrity of the reactor and the containment vessels. Unexpected events like Tsunamis or falling bombs can cause containment vessels to break, so essentially there is no way to make such a design 100% safe. I'm still for nuclear power, because the value far outweighs the risk, but when the opposing side says that they can't be 100% infallible, unfortunately they are correct.
Some funny old FCC thing baring them.
Actually, that funny old law is essentially why the FRC (Federal Radio Commission) was formed in 1912, which eventually became the FCC.
See, for you to receive radio transmissions from a tower far away, you need cooperation from all your neighbors. They have to silence any machinery that would cause interference on channels designated for radio.
Cell phone jammers are illegal because they interfere with designated channels for radio transmission. If they were legal, then you would have no way to deal with a neighbor that runs one near your house. That neighbor would legally be able to interfere with your radio, television, wi-fi, cell phone, etc.
I'm not completely sure whether you were being sarcastic or not, but this regulation, honestly, is very important. Without it, we'd pretty much have to rely on wired communication.
Everyone agrees that the headline is sensationalist and basically fiction. And, of course, the /. summary is based on the headline.
But the article actually makes some sense:
The Red Cross doesn't prosecute war criminals. They see war as an opportunity to do what they are trained to do -- provide medical help, and assist refugees.
They aren't against gaming. They see that gaming is becoming closer and closer to real life, yet the part that they play in war is not represented. Can "assisting refugees" ever be present in a way that would be fun? It seems like a hard sell, but possible.
If a game did focus on that part of the war, it could also focus on other war-related issues, such as determining what actions in the game could be considered violation of human rights. The Red Cross probably had someone write this up as an idea, and then the Dailymail got ahold of it, and wrote a sensationalist article.
They were 5 years away, one year ago.
So, it seems that after finding the "holy grail" of the missing genome, they have been set back by one year.
I did a lot of research about this back in January, when they first said that it was 5 years away. I heard a genome scientist interviewed on the radio, and he said that the resulting baby will be at most half Mammoth. It will have more elephant characteristics than mammoth, and will most likely be non-fertile, but it is still an important step to eventually having a fertile mammoth clone.
So, as much as I'd like to imagine mammoths in the zoo for my children to see, the truth is that we are still far from that point.
I just watched the Doctor Who 2009 Christmas special called The End of Time last night. There were probably at least 50 actors/actresses who all had their head replaced by that of The Master. Even Barack Obama (a semi-prominent character in this episode) had his head replaced by that of The Master.
If only the BBC team had had this technology available, those characters could have actually turned their heads, instead of staring directly at the camera during these scenes. Oh well, it is this cheesieness that make Doctor Who what it is!
I've had high-speed since it was available in my area, long before most people in my town did.
I've been a bandwidth hog in the past. I used to leave file-sharing programs running all day long, keeping seeds active (all legal stuff of course!) So, I definitely can identify with those who abuse the service.
For the past 5 or so years, though, finding a high-speed ISP that doesn't get bogged down around 7pm each night is nearly impossible. I've started getting up early, just so that I can watch streamed video without it queueing. Internet access is like everything else, it's limited.
I know that 10% of the people use 90% of the bandwidth. If the ISP just identifies those people, and charges them 25-50% more, then maybe they'll leave and go some place else.
Is it so unreasonable to want this? There are other options for hosting servers (ie. SDSL), and if people want to host large amount of video files to others, they shouldn't be scared of such services. Leave standard consumer-level internet packages who use a standard amount of data.
Well, from what I see in the .pdf, they can set the gait of the robot, and then just let it crawl, using the preset list of positions.
It is autonomous in a sense. The controls for the different positions come from within the software. The human only gives a single instruction (walk with this gait), and then all the small instructions to make it function come from software.
As far as the semantics go, I am a bit annoyed that they call it a robot, since there are no feedback loops that allow the device to make any type of decisions. But, consider that:
tl:dr: I'd let it slide
Also, most people have only seen this film through the edits made by MST3K.
I normally love all MST3K stuff, but in this case, they complain about how the whole movie just doesn't make sense. The reason it doesn't make sense is that a lot of the important scenes were cut out, to make room for all the MST3K content. They chose to cut out plot-important scenes so that they could be sure to preserve all the "driving in silence" scenes at the beginning of the movie.
Essentially, MST3K edited it horribly, and then proceeded to make fun of how badly it was edited.
Awesome link!
I always remember mosquitoes as being the primary example of a pest that serves no known purpose.
Sure, other things that seem to be pests have upsides, but not mosquitoes. Anything that enjoys eating them will be just as happy dining on whatever insect increases to take their place.
Why do we still use this terminology (x86)?
I thought the last x86 processor produced was the Pentium Pro
When the Pentium 4 came out, it was frequently called the "7th generation", but it was never called the 786 or 80786, either formally or informally. Sure, it's just naming conventions, but that's exactly what x86 is about, it's about a trend in naming conventions.
My new hobby will be referring to processors as having x87 architecture, as a distinction to indicate they support floating point instructions.
What? And let it fall in the hands of the zombie Nazis?
We all know that zombie Nazis only exist in Norway
Reminds me a little of our library. I would be able to see it from my window if they had built it above ground, but they chose to go down instead.
The legend of this decision lives on through a song about the Morrow Plots. As the song goes, "You Can't Throw Shade on The Corn!"
The Morrow Plots were built in 1876 as an experimental field for growing crops, and is the oldest such field in existence in the western hemisphere. It might not sound like that big of a landmark, but the university decided to build our library underground to preserve it.
All the concept art in the technology review article clearly shows transparent floors.
The way I understand "clear or transparent core walls", some floors will have clear, others would have transparent. It seems obvious to me that the first 10 stores (shopping malls, etc) would have transparent walls, so that the space would feel more natural.
Whether pedestrians are allowed to walk across the glass courtyard is a different question.
SMS technically is not free. If it was, then they would just send all voice data through SMS packets.
Voice data is limited. SMS is limited. (see the Shannon-Hartley theorem page on wikipedia.) With basic GSM or CDMA, a voice channel was used to send SMS data. Although the channel was quickly released after being reserved, it still could cause a tower to be overloaded, if each person sent enough text messages per second.
With GPRS (aka 2.5g), SMS were moved to a separate data packet type that could piggyback onto a voice channel that was already in use for a different SU. The motivation for the change of the standard was that customers would not ever be changed by the networks again for SMS.
Now, we are throwing around terms like 3g and 4g, and most carriers still charge differently for plans with and without text plans. This should make it plainly obvious to everyone that it's a gimmick to get more out of the average customer, which I believe was your point. But your assessment that it is technically "free" for the carrier is incorrect.
Well, the amount of movement of the plates (continental drift) is definitely outside of our control. If some fracking did cause the earthquake to happen prematurely, then it is probably set to go an even longer than normal stretch now before the next earthquake.