While the BBC article was interesting, and the thought of mapping half a billion stars is a bit overwhelming, I am stunned by the pointlessness of the included graphic. It shows the Milky Way from an exterior point on its equatorial plane. Almost all galaxies look alike from this position. What in the world is the author thinking? This is like taking the trouble to visit France, but rather than send home pictures of the Eiffel Tower, one sends home pictures of clouds and rainbows.
Ted Ralls trots out the old "Taliban are on the payroll of Union Oil" theory again without benefit of any evidence or logic.
#1-If Taliban were the creation of Union Oil why didn't construction of the pipeline begin immediately after they had taken 90% of Afghanistan?
#2-Fact: The Taliban were the creation of Pakistan, who were sick of the bickering and instability occuring in Afghanistan after the anti-soviet alliance took power. Remember 15% of Pakistanis are Pashtun. The south Asians I know all seemed aware of this long before anyone in the US did. Now the US media have begun to realize this and have begun to report on it. Ted Ralls is blithly unaware of the fact.
The study of ant behavior to design better systems is fascinating, but ants can also be used directly as tools. When I was in graduate school in the 1970s one other graduate student spent his time checking out every ant mound in the Southwestern US. He was looking at what minerals they brought to the surface in their excavation. It became a way to employ lots of cheap field assistants to map geology beneath the alluvium and search for particular minerals.
If 100 of these natural black holes occur per year in the atmosphere, then the odds of one appearing within the view of the Fly's Eye cosmic ray detector in Utah is quite high. The Fly's Eye has documented several events the apparent energy of which is so large (single atomic nuclei with the kinetic energy of a hard ball) that they are difficult to explain. Perhaps these natural black holes offer some alternative that reconciles observation with theory.
In contrast to what Stokes supposes, for example, the "rights" that content owners now demand for themselves were never available to them in the status quo. For example, in the evolving concept of the consumer as a mere renter of content it might be construed as illegal to share books with friends and colleagues, or sell used books at garage sales.
Moreover, the discussion about "rights" of content holders in the digital age, follows exactly the evolution that has occurred throughout society in the past 50 years; which is to say a focus on rights but nary a word about responsibilities. Forget about worrying that the school system might be used as a propaganda tool in this evolution, schools are already little more than propaganda tools in the "rights" babble. The education system presents everything in cartoon form. This is why hackers and physicists alike, always learn more on their own or working with friends than they do in school.
Stokes somehow has it that the greatest threat to getting GM crop technology out to feed a hungry world are corporations and hordes of lawyers. I can make a cogent argument that the greatest threat is actually from sparkle-headed protestors who destroy other people property to vent their synthetic rage at injustice. These folks scare politicians, who haven't much courage anyway.
Stokes made not one useful suggestion. Want to fix the problem? Shorten the term for copyright and patents, in our time-compressed world patents have to pay for themselves quickly anyway. Use the education system to focus on both rights and responsibilities. And legislate an automatic life in prison sentence for anyone found using the DMCA to censore and silence their critics.
The authors of this site have said it all when they explain, in effect, that *...these images have enormous detail making possible several different interpretations.*
Several people have already provided excellent alternative interpretations, and all that I might add is that what they interpret as trees are most likely boulders. They have done this interpretation on the basis of what appear to be tall, straight shadows toward the upper right-hand corner. These look much more like changes in the exposure of bedrock or underlying soil in the prevailing downwind direction of large boulders.
Another point to keep in mind is that Mars has a gravitational acceleration about one-sixth that of earth, and many landforms may look unfamiliar on aerial photos because of the increased steepness of surfaces this allows.
The article referenced in this post is a bit short on information, but readers can get a more detailed view of the story from this article.
The technique involved is refered to as resonant hole burning. Rufus Cone and his optical group at MSU have been working on many applications of this technique for years, including optical storage and stabilization of diode lasers (how's 20Hz linewidth for stabilization of a diode laser?) highly accurate clocks, metrology and so forth. Cone has a link to a nice power-point presentaion on his web page.
Cone and his group have been using crystalline materials, while this Japanese group is using glass. The advantage of glass is that the storage medium can be tailored to a specific shape. This abstract, published by the Active Glass Project, indicates other interesting research, including the up-conversion of photons using glass.
...the feud between scientists and musicians! The original remark about musicians versus scientists was off topic. It was unfortunate. The original article was about on-line publishing, but the better moderated posts concerned the feud. Let me return to the topic at hand.
Print journals want to control the dissemination of content in order to fund their activities. There is nothing wrong with journals wishing to make a profit, but there is no reason to grant them a monopoly to do so. The "activities" they fund are rarely all that important. They rarely fund scholarships, or research itself, but rather fund their semi-scientific editorial staffs who stuff the limited available space with pet peeves, and then decide what submissions shall receive the coveted remaining space. An open forum would allow more scientific results to reach a wider audience more quickly at less expense.
Print journals will have to make scientists pay for publishing if subscriptions fall! Oh, dear. Canals will have to charge more if railroads carry the freight! Page charges, which are sometimes waived, already reach $1000 per page.
Print journals are very afraid of errors creeping into on-line archives? Oh, please. Sorry to tell everyone this, but the errors have already got into the articles. The authors put them there. The peer reviewers didn't catch them. I, myself, managed to formulate an equation that violates the second law of thermodynamics and got it into the peer reviewed literature. It is a cross I shall have to bear alone, but it didn't cause a crisis in science. Much scientific work is wrong or outdated by the time it manages to get into the print medium. This is why demand for articles diminishes sharply after only a few months.
Print journals are the present keepers of truth. By limiting space and organizing peer review they restrict the supply of scientific discussion. If anyone truly believes all the current trendy blather about diversity, then science would improve through diversity of view points, opinion, and interpretation. In the present system the only dissenting voices come from the well connected. An open system could allow obscure voices to be heard occasionally.
In connection with this last point scientists and musicians are in the same position. There are lots of truly creative artists, of all types, who cannot find an outlet because the current distribution system of "art" stricts supply. Luckily artists can set up on a street corner and appeal directly to an audience. This is more for difficult for scientists, but the internet makes all things possible.
Too much peer review is badly organized, and is done by people who are not truly peers, but who refuse to admit as much. An open forum would allow true peers to review scientific work.
So far, there are a lot of "if you aren't doing anything illegal, you have nothing to worry about" posts.
About 10 years ago there were many stories in the news about government agencies, from the county level on up, who were trying to emulate the DEA's property seizure powers. In one such case a paramilitary group from the Department of the Interior, in conjunction with the DEA, raided a Southern California ranch and killed the ranch owner when he appeared on the porch with a gun.
It turned out that the rationale for the raid was that the rancher's wife had a "history of drug problems" and there were likely to be illegal drugs on the property. A judge leading the ensuing investigation of this incident concluded that the raid was instigated to a great degree by a desire to confiscate the ranch and add it to the Department of Interior's holdings. This is not the only example of a lame government operation, it is simply a particularly egregious one.
No matter how someone feels about the "war on drugs," and no matter how beneficent our officials, we all have to be concerned about dove-tailing the agendas of various government agencies and where this may lead.
For those who keep fretting about how peer review works in the world of open-online publishing, let me assure you that it barely works now.
Any academic who has had to publish can provide a long list of "peer" reviews which have been off-target, inaccurate, and sometimes little more than ad hominem attacks. The problem with this system is that the reviewers are anonymous and the reviewed aren't. This leads to lots of irresponsible and unethical behavior.
I've been publishing in scientific journals for 25 years now, and the number of really good peer reviews I've gotten amount to less than 10% of the total. These 10% were incredibly useful, after a couple of them I understood the subject of my paper better. However, this only partially makes up for the following sins:
1) Reviewers who have a self interest in squashing a publication because it conflicts with their view of a topic or may scoop their work. As science becomes more politicized, this can only get worse. These are usually the adhominem reviews.
2) Reviewers who pass on the substance of confidential material to other interested parties.
3) Reviewers who demand that the author include references to their work as the price of favorable review. (These of course do not remain anonymous.)Some have even solicited a junior author status.
4) Reviewers who squash a paper because it may make their own published errors more visible.
Even well intentioned reviews can be utterly wrong, and act to retard the progress of science. For example, L.W.Morley sent papers to JGR and other respectible journals outlining the therory of plate tectonic years before matthews and vines, but he couldn't get his work past the reviewers. It was "too speculative."
Finally, the last time I submitted a paper to a leading journal it took just shy of 9 months to get the reviews done, and one reviewer waited these nine months to inform the journal he was too busy. At the current pace of science this isn't reasonable.
Could we struggle along without peer review?
It seems to me that replacing it with a Slashdot-esque model is worth a try.
The discussion on solar sails is interesting, but it has diverged along two different routes which makes it confusing. Solar sails can generate thrust by two different mechanisms. First, they can absorb the solar wind and generate thrust by "braking" the motion of these particles. Second, it can interact with solar light, i.e. use photons to produce thrust. Material sails can interact with both. Solar sails using a magnetic field can only interact with the solar wind. Even so, one analysis showed generating a thrust of 250Newtons at a distance from the sun equaling the Earth's orbit. If the space craft weighed, say, 1000Kg then it would accelerate at 0.25meters/second squared, and could reach a speed of 100,000 meters per second in 400,000 seconds (5 days roughly). Need more speed? Accelerate for a longer time. I don't see any limitation to interstellar travel via this mechanism.
Using photons to propel a solar sail is more complicated than simply providing thrust perpendicular to the plane of the sail. The reason is that the sail not only reflects photons, it also absorbs them. The thrust generated now depends on the ulimate disposition of the absorbed photons. Look for information on the Poynting-Robertson effect to learn something about the mechanics of material propelled by solar photons.
Slashdot Mirror
While the BBC article was interesting, and the thought of mapping half a billion stars is a bit overwhelming, I am stunned by the pointlessness of the included graphic. It shows the Milky Way from an exterior point on its equatorial plane. Almost all galaxies look alike from this position. What in the world is the author thinking? This is like taking the trouble to visit France, but rather than send home pictures of the Eiffel Tower, one sends home pictures of clouds and rainbows.
Ted Ralls trots out the old "Taliban are on the payroll of Union Oil" theory again without benefit of any evidence or logic.
#1-If Taliban were the creation of Union Oil why didn't construction of the pipeline begin immediately after they had taken 90% of Afghanistan?
#2-Fact: The Taliban were the creation of Pakistan, who were sick of the bickering and instability occuring in Afghanistan after the anti-soviet alliance took power. Remember 15% of Pakistanis are Pashtun. The south Asians I know all seemed aware of this long before anyone in the US did. Now the US media have begun to realize this and have begun to report on it. Ted Ralls is blithly unaware of the fact.
The study of ant behavior to design better systems is fascinating, but ants can also be used directly as tools. When I was in graduate school in the 1970s one other graduate student spent his time checking out every ant mound in the Southwestern US. He was looking at what minerals they brought to the surface in their excavation. It became a way to employ lots of cheap field assistants to map geology beneath the alluvium and search for particular minerals.
If 100 of these natural black holes occur per year in the atmosphere, then the odds of one appearing within the view of the Fly's Eye cosmic ray detector in Utah is quite high. The Fly's Eye has documented several events the apparent energy of which is so large (single atomic nuclei with the kinetic energy of a hard ball) that they are difficult to explain. Perhaps these natural black holes offer some alternative that reconciles observation with theory.
In contrast to what Stokes supposes, for example, the "rights" that content owners now demand for themselves were never available to them in the status quo. For example, in the evolving concept of the consumer as a mere renter of content it might be construed as illegal to share books with friends and colleagues, or sell used books at garage sales.
Moreover, the discussion about "rights" of content holders in the digital age, follows exactly the evolution that has occurred throughout society in the past 50 years; which is to say a focus on rights but nary a word about responsibilities. Forget about worrying that the school system might be used as a propaganda tool in this evolution, schools are already little more than propaganda tools in the "rights" babble. The education system presents everything in cartoon form. This is why hackers and physicists alike, always learn more on their own or working with friends than they do in school.
Stokes somehow has it that the greatest threat to getting GM crop technology out to feed a hungry world are corporations and hordes of lawyers. I can make a cogent argument that the greatest threat is actually from sparkle-headed protestors who destroy other people property to vent their synthetic rage at injustice. These folks scare politicians, who haven't much courage anyway.
Stokes made not one useful suggestion. Want to fix the problem? Shorten the term for copyright and patents, in our time-compressed world patents have to pay for themselves quickly anyway. Use the education system to focus on both rights and responsibilities. And legislate an automatic life in prison sentence for anyone found using the DMCA to censore and silence their critics.
Geez, I would have liked to see a computer that weighed 888 pounds per square inch. Those flat vacuum tubes must have been something!
The authors of this site have said it all when they explain, in effect, that *...these images have enormous detail making possible several different interpretations.*
Several people have already provided excellent alternative interpretations, and all that I might add is that what they interpret as trees are most likely boulders. They have done this interpretation on the basis of what appear to be tall, straight shadows toward the upper right-hand corner. These look much more like changes in the exposure of bedrock or underlying soil in the prevailing downwind direction of large boulders.
Another point to keep in mind is that Mars has a gravitational acceleration about one-sixth that of earth, and many landforms may look unfamiliar on aerial photos because of the increased steepness of surfaces this allows.
The article referenced in this post is a bit short on information, but readers can get a more detailed view of the story from this article.
The technique involved is refered to as resonant hole burning. Rufus Cone and his optical group at MSU have been working on many applications of this technique for years, including optical storage and stabilization of diode lasers (how's 20Hz linewidth for stabilization of a diode laser?) highly accurate clocks, metrology and so forth. Cone has a link to a nice power-point presentaion on his web page.
Cone and his group have been using crystalline materials, while this Japanese group is using glass. The advantage of glass is that the storage medium can be tailored to a specific shape. This abstract, published by the Active Glass Project, indicates other interesting research, including the up-conversion of photons using glass.
...the feud between scientists and musicians! The original remark about musicians versus scientists was off topic. It was unfortunate. The original article was about on-line publishing, but the better moderated posts concerned the feud. Let me return to the topic at hand.
Print journals want to control the dissemination of content in order to fund their activities. There is nothing wrong with journals wishing to make a profit, but there is no reason to grant them a monopoly to do so. The "activities" they fund are rarely all that important. They rarely fund scholarships, or research itself, but rather fund their semi-scientific editorial staffs who stuff the limited available space with pet peeves, and then decide what submissions shall receive the coveted remaining space. An open forum would allow more scientific results to reach a wider audience more quickly at less expense.
Print journals will have to make scientists pay for publishing if subscriptions fall! Oh, dear. Canals will have to charge more if railroads carry the freight! Page charges, which are sometimes waived, already reach $1000 per page.
Print journals are very afraid of errors creeping into on-line archives? Oh, please. Sorry to tell everyone this, but the errors have already got into the articles. The authors put them there. The peer reviewers didn't catch them. I, myself, managed to formulate an equation that violates the second law of thermodynamics and got it into the peer reviewed literature. It is a cross I shall have to bear alone, but it didn't cause a crisis in science. Much scientific work is wrong or outdated by the time it manages to get into the print medium. This is why demand for articles diminishes sharply after only a few months.
Print journals are the present keepers of truth. By limiting space and organizing peer review they restrict the supply of scientific discussion. If anyone truly believes all the current trendy blather about diversity, then science would improve through diversity of view points, opinion, and interpretation. In the present system the only dissenting voices come from the well connected. An open system could allow obscure voices to be heard occasionally.
In connection with this last point scientists and musicians are in the same position. There are lots of truly creative artists, of all types, who cannot find an outlet because the current distribution system of "art" stricts supply. Luckily artists can set up on a street corner and appeal directly to an audience. This is more for difficult for scientists, but the internet makes all things possible.
Too much peer review is badly organized, and is done by people who are not truly peers, but who refuse to admit as much. An open forum would allow true peers to review scientific work.
So far, there are a lot of "if you aren't doing anything illegal, you have nothing to worry about" posts.
About 10 years ago there were many stories in the news about government agencies, from the county level on up, who were trying to emulate the DEA's property seizure powers. In one such case a paramilitary group from the Department of the Interior, in conjunction with the DEA, raided a Southern California ranch and killed the ranch owner when he appeared on the porch with a gun.
It turned out that the rationale for the raid was that the rancher's wife had a "history of drug problems" and there were likely to be illegal drugs on the property. A judge leading the ensuing investigation of this incident concluded that the raid was instigated to a great degree by a desire to confiscate the ranch and add it to the Department of Interior's holdings. This is not the only example of a lame government operation, it is simply a particularly egregious one.
No matter how someone feels about the "war on drugs," and no matter how beneficent our officials, we all have to be concerned about dove-tailing the agendas of various government agencies and where this may lead.
For those who keep fretting about how peer review works in the world of open-online publishing, let me assure you that it barely works now. Any academic who has had to publish can provide a long list of "peer" reviews which have been off-target, inaccurate, and sometimes little more than ad hominem attacks. The problem with this system is that the reviewers are anonymous and the reviewed aren't. This leads to lots of irresponsible and unethical behavior. I've been publishing in scientific journals for 25 years now, and the number of really good peer reviews I've gotten amount to less than 10% of the total. These 10% were incredibly useful, after a couple of them I understood the subject of my paper better. However, this only partially makes up for the following sins: 1) Reviewers who have a self interest in squashing a publication because it conflicts with their view of a topic or may scoop their work. As science becomes more politicized, this can only get worse. These are usually the adhominem reviews. 2) Reviewers who pass on the substance of confidential material to other interested parties. 3) Reviewers who demand that the author include references to their work as the price of favorable review. (These of course do not remain anonymous.)Some have even solicited a junior author status. 4) Reviewers who squash a paper because it may make their own published errors more visible. Even well intentioned reviews can be utterly wrong, and act to retard the progress of science. For example, L.W.Morley sent papers to JGR and other respectible journals outlining the therory of plate tectonic years before matthews and vines, but he couldn't get his work past the reviewers. It was "too speculative." Finally, the last time I submitted a paper to a leading journal it took just shy of 9 months to get the reviews done, and one reviewer waited these nine months to inform the journal he was too busy. At the current pace of science this isn't reasonable. Could we struggle along without peer review? It seems to me that replacing it with a Slashdot-esque model is worth a try.
The discussion on solar sails is interesting, but it has diverged along two different routes which makes it confusing. Solar sails can generate thrust by two different mechanisms. First, they can absorb the solar wind and generate thrust by "braking" the motion of these particles. Second, it can interact with solar light, i.e. use photons to produce thrust. Material sails can interact with both. Solar sails using a magnetic field can only interact with the solar wind. Even so, one analysis showed generating a thrust of 250Newtons at a distance from the sun equaling the Earth's orbit. If the space craft weighed, say, 1000Kg then it would accelerate at 0.25meters/second squared, and could reach a speed of 100,000 meters per second in 400,000 seconds (5 days roughly). Need more speed? Accelerate for a longer time. I don't see any limitation to interstellar travel via this mechanism. Using photons to propel a solar sail is more complicated than simply providing thrust perpendicular to the plane of the sail. The reason is that the sail not only reflects photons, it also absorbs them. The thrust generated now depends on the ulimate disposition of the absorbed photons. Look for information on the Poynting-Robertson effect to learn something about the mechanics of material propelled by solar photons.