Both interact with light solely through gravitation, but dark matter is constitutionally incapable of interacting with light. It's dark not because it holds onto light, but because light just passes through it the same way a piece of plastic ignores a magnetic field. (Actually, not quite the same, but it's close enough for the moment.)
Black holes may or may not interact with light; what's inside a black hole is undefined. But when light falls on it, it passes the point of no return and never leaves.
Light passing near either will be bent by the gravity, but you can tell the difference in light that falls directly on it.
In fact, because the inside of a black hole is unseeable, it's possible that you could have a black hole that condensed from a blob of dark matter. You couldn't see it, but you could infer it: if there's a black hole inside a dark matter blob, it might have fallen in that way. Unfortunately, our tools for detecting dark matter are poor, so we can't resolve them with that kind of precision.
It is possible that some of the evidence that caused us to deduce dark matter could have implied black holes instead. There are two competing theories, Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (dark matter) and Massive Compact Halo Objects (black holes). That these are called WIMPs and MACHOs is a sign that we have detected physicist humor. The MACHOs hypothesis has been largely ruled out by the failure to detect the kind of gravitational lensing that small, massive objects cause, so the suspected mass must be more diffuse. That leaves us with the WIMPs as the best hypothesis, but it leaves a lot of questions open.
I'm not very familiar with it, but it should probably be necessary reading. The Germans went with a very low-tech fence, and it kinda worked. We could throw up such a thing easily enough.
But there is one major difference: East Germany had much more restrictions on the movement of its people. Mexico isn't going to start shooting people who try to cross. Ladders are cheaper than fences.
The astonishing thing is that we have something the Germans didn't: an enormous desert on both sides. Vehicles cut that, but some immigrants apparently walk over the border both ways. It's an astonishing feat (and one that kills a number of people, I'm told).
This plan was much more elaborate than that fence. Presumably, the backup plan looks a lot more similar to it.
Not as far as I can tell, after some assiduous googling.
What I do find repeated complaints that you can't stop them even with the ESC key, and as far as I can tell that still holds. That's going to make some web sites completely unusable. But it's less common than Javascript and Flash based annoyances, which exist on major web sites, not just blogs.
It's a bit of a stretch, but science is part of news for nerds. The fact that there's a disturbingly large portion of the public who's gullible enough to buy into the most appallingly stupid idea in millennia is kind of on track.
The articles cited aren't spoofs. The AP is perhaps the world's most important news service. Depressingly, the fact that people bought into it is real news.
(Now, I could turn around and question whether the number of people who actually bought into this was significant enough to merit it being real news. So there's a separate story on whether the wire services manufactured something from a relatively small number of stupid people. But sadly, I think it's pretty clear that the dimwits have a pretty substantial caucus.)
I do wonder, though. As you say, "it should work". It doesn't seem completely unreasonable as an idea. Was it actually possible to do? Were there any feasibility studies, and if they said it was feasible, why were they wrong?
(Whether it was necessary or reasonable to do is a political and strategic question that I don't feel qualified to ask, since the answers will always come back with a partisan filter for cherry-picking data.)
I'm curious as to why the project failed. They claim to have a much cheaper plan that they're going to try now; why didn't they try that in the first place? Is it going to be substantially less effective? So ineffective that it's not worth spending money on that, either?
The article mentions "glitches and delays". Is that because Boeing is just bad at its job? Or is it a fundamentally difficult thing?
I'm not asking about the political implications, which are substantial. I just want to know: America is supposed to be good at tech, but this is hardly the first time that a Big Government Project has failed. Is there a lesson we can learn here? Or is it endemic to the fact that the US government does things on a scale no other operation in the world does?
Just one more thing I need: the ability to stop animated gifs. But that's less common, and I can now switch to Chrome for more stuff than I currently use it.
An unstated piece of my pessimism is that it seems to me that the technology to pull off a colonization trip with even a moderate chance of success is a long way off. Even the 18-year-olds volunteering today will be too old by the time this comes around.
Just getting a human being to Mars would take a decade of dedicated effort, and that just means keeping somebody alive for a few months. Keeping them alive indefinitely is much harder, even with the resources Mars offers, because they're pretty meager. And you'd need a huge margin of error to have even a slim chance of success.
It's all so speculative that I might as well imagine that the there-and-back technology is more likely.
Why, yes. You've completely grasped my argument. A mission known to be suicidal is exactly the same thing as one designed with safety in mind and a track record of often, but not always, successful missions.
It's easy to volunteer for something that doesn't sound like it's going to hurt. When the radio messages come back with "Please... I'm running out of oxygen... it's cold and the pain is excruciating," the mission will be viewed as a fiasco for the rest of time.
Facing death with dignity is a lot easier to imagine than it is in real life. Some do manage it anyway, of course, but which of those hundreds of volunteers is really going to pull it off? It's the kind of thing you don't find out about for certain until you get your one-and-only shot.
Even if they do pull it off, the people behind the mission are going to be accused of murder. It will be an ugly stain on them for the rest of their lives. The mission is temporary, but the subsequent death is forever.
So we can treat this as a charming mental exercise, and even be surprised by how many people would volunteer for the mission. But it's simply not ever going to happen.
The money that they are taking is in the no-man's-land between buyer and seller. A sale happens only when the buyer agrees to buy for at least as much as the seller demands. The delta doesn't belong to either of them: both have made a commitment to buy/sell at a certain price that they are presumably satisfied with.
Since neither of them has a claim to the money, it could go anywhere. You could re-write the rules to split the difference, or some other algorithm, and eliminate the arbitrage opportunity, but it doesn't: the gap remains. The arbitrageurs have found a place where both buyer and seller are happy with the gap, and nobody misses the money that they're taking. They'd rather have it, of course, but they don't even know about it unless they play the arbitrage game themselves.
Which they can't really do if they're on either the buying or selling side. If they are, they can combine the arbitraging and buy/sell into one step, which just means plain old trading.
It wasn't the HFT they got hammered on. It was other investment strategies, ones with a lot less transparency. Worse, they were much longer term: we're still figuring out who owns all those bad debts.
As far as I can tell, the HFT is harmless. Though I'm sure they'll find a way to prove me wrong on that.
If you had some inside knowledge of how the lotto numbers were picked, yes.
They're charging him with fraud. It remains to be shown how he got knowledge of the glitch, and if he merely exploited a pattern he was able to observe, that charge may well not stick. But if he hacked the machines to gain information he wasn't supposed to have, it sounds like fraud to me, whether it was the lotto machine or a slot machine.
Liquidity IS good, and in the end, I don't see how this is doing anything but provide more of it.
If the hackers are netting themselves a bunch of money by out-trading the other high-frequency-traders... good for them. It's not my money they're taking, because I've got better places to put my money than trying to out-arbitrage the arbitrageurs. But both of them, the Evil Hackers and the White Hat Ginormous Wall Street Bank, are both making sure that when I do sell my stocks, I've always got somebody to sell it to.
The arbitrage means that maybe I'm losing.01% off the transaction. If that's Big Money in aggregate, it's still only a tiny fraction of the mount of money on the line. It's money I couldn't ever get my hands on.
So I don't really much care who wins here. Let 'em fight it out.
For what it's worth, I've found that nearly all discussion forms have somebody who both (a) understand and accept the scientific evidence that global climate change is real and caused by humans, and (b) will refute those who believe the same thing but cite anecdotal evidence to the contrary.
That is, when somebody says, "Hey, it's hot, it must be the global warming", there will always be somebody who says, "Look, I appreciate you being on the right side of the argument, but you're using the same invalid reasoning that the deniers are. Stop it because you make me look bad."
What I have yet to see is a skeptic/denier refute a different kind of skeptic/denier. That is, I have never seen any person say, "No no, the world really is getting warmer, so stop pointing out that it's cold in one place because that's irrelevant. It's just that it's not caused by humans". Skeptic/deniers come in many stripes, mutually contradictory, but they seem to keep any disagreements behind closed doors.
Honestly... if Palin gets elected, then this country deserves what it gets. I've watched conservative supporters play some truly abominable politics over the past few years, from birtherism to "death panels" to the fact that Obama has had less than half of his nominees confirmed. Republicans have an even lower approval rating in Congress than Democrats do, and yet the American people elected them in droves in November.
The US is in an extremely perilous state and I can't see a route to recovery: massive debts, an aging population, and its best qualities increasingly being taken over by hungrier countries like India and China (who can do the jobs nearly as well, or better, while demanding a much lower standard of living).
So at this point, I can only see electing Palin as the final declaration by Americans that democracy was a noble but futile experiment. It feels increasingly like an empire whose best days are behind it. I don't know if Obama can lead it out; I can't imagine who could. But if they decide Palin is the one to try, I figure they might as well. I leave them to it.
It's because the people demanded it. In the 18th and 19th centuries, parties really did just go into smoke-filled rooms and appoint a candidate, just like the private institutions they were intended to be. The party conventions, where the state delegations get together to hold a vote whose result is known in advance, is a remnant of that.
It wasn't until the early 20th century the reformers demanded more say in the process. And it really didn't become widespread until 1968, when the Democratic party leaders ignored the primaries and ran their own candidate (who lost to Nixon).
That's why it's publicly sponsored: because the public demanded it. The party leaders would be very happy just handing you a candidate again, and such things might well avoid some of the embarrassing mis-steps like we've seen in the past.
There aren't actually any less of them in other countries, but in the US that tail seems to wag the dog more than anywhere else in the world. Except, of course, for autocracies, where a minority group seizes power and brutally represses the the majority.
In the US, it doesn't take brutal repression. All it takes is a major television network. Only about 1% actually watches it, but it's the most ideologically cohesive and has managed to create a bizarro-world that its believers find perfectly consistent. And they vote in astonishing numbers.
The real problem is that it's not a very profitable plan. Suing viable American companies in an American court means a tolerable chance of actually getting some money out of it. Where would you sue the Russian Mafia? How would you collect if you won?
They'd save the price of a hit man by simply ignoring you.
Well, this guy is making a living out of it. He's seeking spammers, at least the kinds of spammers he can figure out where to send a subpoena.
Unfortunately, those seem to be the comparatively benign spammers. Oh, they're still spammers and I wouldn't shed a single tear if any of them had their faces eaten off by wild dogs. But at least from the article, this isn't the Nigerian princes, or Russians trying to sell you v1@gra. It's the companies who really should be complying with the CAN-SPAM laws so that they "can spam" you. (And the kind that's REALLY easy to filter.)
They're not filling your in-box with millions of spams. That's the other guys, and as far as I can tell this guy isn't doing squat about them. Work for somebody else, but it means that this guy is less interesting than he might appear from a cursory summary.
Is there any chance that would be the reason they never claimed to have gone into space?
This article may have been more careful than some. Often, by the time the hyperbolic press release gets a coat of polish by the editors desperate for a way to fill a few column-inches with something other than economic collapse or war, it sounds as if they just needed an extra gallon of gas to land on the moon.
It's a tolerable human-interest story, though old hat around here. And the exaggerations have long since worn out their welcome, even if the next article down the pike is better written.
For researchers, the fact that dogs go nuts for treats is a bonus. You can use it as an incentive to participate in the experiment. As opposed to cats, who will generally just ignore everything going on around them, treats or no.
Face-watching is certainly not unique to humans, but the "uncanny valley" presumably is. Or if other species have a similar response, it's a lot harder to test.
We might well learn something if we could get a cat to respond to The Polar Express, but getting cats to do ANYTHING reliably in a behavioral study is a pain in the ass. You'd be better trying it on dogs.
For that matter, it would be interesting to see where the uncanny valley arises in observations of other species. Does can you get that creepy effect from a not-quite-right dog or cat? Humans anthropomorphize like crazy anyway, especially with faces, so much so that they've given it a name (pareidolia). I don't think cats experience that to the same degree.
Slashdot Mirror
Both interact with light solely through gravitation, but dark matter is constitutionally incapable of interacting with light. It's dark not because it holds onto light, but because light just passes through it the same way a piece of plastic ignores a magnetic field. (Actually, not quite the same, but it's close enough for the moment.)
Black holes may or may not interact with light; what's inside a black hole is undefined. But when light falls on it, it passes the point of no return and never leaves.
Light passing near either will be bent by the gravity, but you can tell the difference in light that falls directly on it.
In fact, because the inside of a black hole is unseeable, it's possible that you could have a black hole that condensed from a blob of dark matter. You couldn't see it, but you could infer it: if there's a black hole inside a dark matter blob, it might have fallen in that way. Unfortunately, our tools for detecting dark matter are poor, so we can't resolve them with that kind of precision.
It is possible that some of the evidence that caused us to deduce dark matter could have implied black holes instead. There are two competing theories, Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (dark matter) and Massive Compact Halo Objects (black holes). That these are called WIMPs and MACHOs is a sign that we have detected physicist humor. The MACHOs hypothesis has been largely ruled out by the failure to detect the kind of gravitational lensing that small, massive objects cause, so the suspected mass must be more diffuse. That leaves us with the WIMPs as the best hypothesis, but it leaves a lot of questions open.
I'm not very familiar with it, but it should probably be necessary reading. The Germans went with a very low-tech fence, and it kinda worked. We could throw up such a thing easily enough.
But there is one major difference: East Germany had much more restrictions on the movement of its people. Mexico isn't going to start shooting people who try to cross. Ladders are cheaper than fences.
The astonishing thing is that we have something the Germans didn't: an enormous desert on both sides. Vehicles cut that, but some immigrants apparently walk over the border both ways. It's an astonishing feat (and one that kills a number of people, I'm told).
This plan was much more elaborate than that fence. Presumably, the backup plan looks a lot more similar to it.
Not as far as I can tell, after some assiduous googling.
What I do find repeated complaints that you can't stop them even with the ESC key, and as far as I can tell that still holds. That's going to make some web sites completely unusable. But it's less common than Javascript and Flash based annoyances, which exist on major web sites, not just blogs.
It's a bit of a stretch, but science is part of news for nerds. The fact that there's a disturbingly large portion of the public who's gullible enough to buy into the most appallingly stupid idea in millennia is kind of on track.
The articles cited aren't spoofs. The AP is perhaps the world's most important news service. Depressingly, the fact that people bought into it is real news.
(Now, I could turn around and question whether the number of people who actually bought into this was significant enough to merit it being real news. So there's a separate story on whether the wire services manufactured something from a relatively small number of stupid people. But sadly, I think it's pretty clear that the dimwits have a pretty substantial caucus.)
Very interesting.
I do wonder, though. As you say, "it should work". It doesn't seem completely unreasonable as an idea. Was it actually possible to do? Were there any feasibility studies, and if they said it was feasible, why were they wrong?
(Whether it was necessary or reasonable to do is a political and strategic question that I don't feel qualified to ask, since the answers will always come back with a partisan filter for cherry-picking data.)
I'm curious as to why the project failed. They claim to have a much cheaper plan that they're going to try now; why didn't they try that in the first place? Is it going to be substantially less effective? So ineffective that it's not worth spending money on that, either?
The article mentions "glitches and delays". Is that because Boeing is just bad at its job? Or is it a fundamentally difficult thing?
I'm not asking about the political implications, which are substantial. I just want to know: America is supposed to be good at tech, but this is hardly the first time that a Big Government Project has failed. Is there a lesson we can learn here? Or is it endemic to the fact that the US government does things on a scale no other operation in the world does?
Well, that's much better, thank you.
Just one more thing I need: the ability to stop animated gifs. But that's less common, and I can now switch to Chrome for more stuff than I currently use it.
As long as Chrome lacks NoScript, there will continue to be a reason for Firefox. Fix that dealbreaker, and all of the rest is negotiable.
An unstated piece of my pessimism is that it seems to me that the technology to pull off a colonization trip with even a moderate chance of success is a long way off. Even the 18-year-olds volunteering today will be too old by the time this comes around.
Just getting a human being to Mars would take a decade of dedicated effort, and that just means keeping somebody alive for a few months. Keeping them alive indefinitely is much harder, even with the resources Mars offers, because they're pretty meager. And you'd need a huge margin of error to have even a slim chance of success.
It's all so speculative that I might as well imagine that the there-and-back technology is more likely.
Why, yes. You've completely grasped my argument. A mission known to be suicidal is exactly the same thing as one designed with safety in mind and a track record of often, but not always, successful missions.
It's easy to volunteer for something that doesn't sound like it's going to hurt. When the radio messages come back with "Please... I'm running out of oxygen... it's cold and the pain is excruciating," the mission will be viewed as a fiasco for the rest of time.
Facing death with dignity is a lot easier to imagine than it is in real life. Some do manage it anyway, of course, but which of those hundreds of volunteers is really going to pull it off? It's the kind of thing you don't find out about for certain until you get your one-and-only shot.
Even if they do pull it off, the people behind the mission are going to be accused of murder. It will be an ugly stain on them for the rest of their lives. The mission is temporary, but the subsequent death is forever.
So we can treat this as a charming mental exercise, and even be surprised by how many people would volunteer for the mission. But it's simply not ever going to happen.
The money that they are taking is in the no-man's-land between buyer and seller. A sale happens only when the buyer agrees to buy for at least as much as the seller demands. The delta doesn't belong to either of them: both have made a commitment to buy/sell at a certain price that they are presumably satisfied with.
Since neither of them has a claim to the money, it could go anywhere. You could re-write the rules to split the difference, or some other algorithm, and eliminate the arbitrage opportunity, but it doesn't: the gap remains. The arbitrageurs have found a place where both buyer and seller are happy with the gap, and nobody misses the money that they're taking. They'd rather have it, of course, but they don't even know about it unless they play the arbitrage game themselves.
Which they can't really do if they're on either the buying or selling side. If they are, they can combine the arbitraging and buy/sell into one step, which just means plain old trading.
It wasn't the HFT they got hammered on. It was other investment strategies, ones with a lot less transparency. Worse, they were much longer term: we're still figuring out who owns all those bad debts.
As far as I can tell, the HFT is harmless. Though I'm sure they'll find a way to prove me wrong on that.
If you had some inside knowledge of how the lotto numbers were picked, yes.
They're charging him with fraud. It remains to be shown how he got knowledge of the glitch, and if he merely exploited a pattern he was able to observe, that charge may well not stick. But if he hacked the machines to gain information he wasn't supposed to have, it sounds like fraud to me, whether it was the lotto machine or a slot machine.
Liquidity IS good, and in the end, I don't see how this is doing anything but provide more of it.
If the hackers are netting themselves a bunch of money by out-trading the other high-frequency-traders... good for them. It's not my money they're taking, because I've got better places to put my money than trying to out-arbitrage the arbitrageurs. But both of them, the Evil Hackers and the White Hat Ginormous Wall Street Bank, are both making sure that when I do sell my stocks, I've always got somebody to sell it to.
The arbitrage means that maybe I'm losing .01% off the transaction. If that's Big Money in aggregate, it's still only a tiny fraction of the mount of money on the line. It's money I couldn't ever get my hands on.
So I don't really much care who wins here. Let 'em fight it out.
For what it's worth, I've found that nearly all discussion forms have somebody who both (a) understand and accept the scientific evidence that global climate change is real and caused by humans, and (b) will refute those who believe the same thing but cite anecdotal evidence to the contrary.
That is, when somebody says, "Hey, it's hot, it must be the global warming", there will always be somebody who says, "Look, I appreciate you being on the right side of the argument, but you're using the same invalid reasoning that the deniers are. Stop it because you make me look bad."
What I have yet to see is a skeptic/denier refute a different kind of skeptic/denier. That is, I have never seen any person say, "No no, the world really is getting warmer, so stop pointing out that it's cold in one place because that's irrelevant. It's just that it's not caused by humans". Skeptic/deniers come in many stripes, mutually contradictory, but they seem to keep any disagreements behind closed doors.
Honestly... if Palin gets elected, then this country deserves what it gets. I've watched conservative supporters play some truly abominable politics over the past few years, from birtherism to "death panels" to the fact that Obama has had less than half of his nominees confirmed. Republicans have an even lower approval rating in Congress than Democrats do, and yet the American people elected them in droves in November.
The US is in an extremely perilous state and I can't see a route to recovery: massive debts, an aging population, and its best qualities increasingly being taken over by hungrier countries like India and China (who can do the jobs nearly as well, or better, while demanding a much lower standard of living).
So at this point, I can only see electing Palin as the final declaration by Americans that democracy was a noble but futile experiment. It feels increasingly like an empire whose best days are behind it. I don't know if Obama can lead it out; I can't imagine who could. But if they decide Palin is the one to try, I figure they might as well. I leave them to it.
It's because the people demanded it. In the 18th and 19th centuries, parties really did just go into smoke-filled rooms and appoint a candidate, just like the private institutions they were intended to be. The party conventions, where the state delegations get together to hold a vote whose result is known in advance, is a remnant of that.
It wasn't until the early 20th century the reformers demanded more say in the process. And it really didn't become widespread until 1968, when the Democratic party leaders ignored the primaries and ran their own candidate (who lost to Nixon).
That's why it's publicly sponsored: because the public demanded it. The party leaders would be very happy just handing you a candidate again, and such things might well avoid some of the embarrassing mis-steps like we've seen in the past.
There aren't actually any less of them in other countries, but in the US that tail seems to wag the dog more than anywhere else in the world. Except, of course, for autocracies, where a minority group seizes power and brutally represses the the majority.
In the US, it doesn't take brutal repression. All it takes is a major television network. Only about 1% actually watches it, but it's the most ideologically cohesive and has managed to create a bizarro-world that its believers find perfectly consistent. And they vote in astonishing numbers.
The real problem is that it's not a very profitable plan. Suing viable American companies in an American court means a tolerable chance of actually getting some money out of it. Where would you sue the Russian Mafia? How would you collect if you won?
They'd save the price of a hit man by simply ignoring you.
Well, this guy is making a living out of it. He's seeking spammers, at least the kinds of spammers he can figure out where to send a subpoena.
Unfortunately, those seem to be the comparatively benign spammers. Oh, they're still spammers and I wouldn't shed a single tear if any of them had their faces eaten off by wild dogs. But at least from the article, this isn't the Nigerian princes, or Russians trying to sell you v1@gra. It's the companies who really should be complying with the CAN-SPAM laws so that they "can spam" you. (And the kind that's REALLY easy to filter.)
They're not filling your in-box with millions of spams. That's the other guys, and as far as I can tell this guy isn't doing squat about them. Work for somebody else, but it means that this guy is less interesting than he might appear from a cursory summary.
Is there any chance that would be the reason they never claimed to have gone into space?
This article may have been more careful than some. Often, by the time the hyperbolic press release gets a coat of polish by the editors desperate for a way to fill a few column-inches with something other than economic collapse or war, it sounds as if they just needed an extra gallon of gas to land on the moon.
It's a tolerable human-interest story, though old hat around here. And the exaggerations have long since worn out their welcome, even if the next article down the pike is better written.
For researchers, the fact that dogs go nuts for treats is a bonus. You can use it as an incentive to participate in the experiment. As opposed to cats, who will generally just ignore everything going on around them, treats or no.
It can be done. It's just more work.
Face-watching is certainly not unique to humans, but the "uncanny valley" presumably is. Or if other species have a similar response, it's a lot harder to test.
We might well learn something if we could get a cat to respond to The Polar Express, but getting cats to do ANYTHING reliably in a behavioral study is a pain in the ass. You'd be better trying it on dogs.
For that matter, it would be interesting to see where the uncanny valley arises in observations of other species. Does can you get that creepy effect from a not-quite-right dog or cat? Humans anthropomorphize like crazy anyway, especially with faces, so much so that they've given it a name (pareidolia). I don't think cats experience that to the same degree.
Or as Shakespeare put it, "There's no art/To find the mind's construction in the face." That quote leaped to mind when I read your post.