I played around with it a bit, but it seems to be somewhat lacking compared to Celestia, which does many of the same things and more. A couple gripes: Sirius was listed as Alpha Cassiopeiae, though it's Bayer designation is Alpha Canis Majoris. Also, it seems to be lacking nearly all of the red dwarfs that make up the majority of the solar neighborhood. Seriously? No Wolf 359?
Ok, so he predicted the outcomes of two elections. A laudable achievement, to be sure. However, as the collapse of the financial system (due in part to exotic instruments) showed us, a model works until it doesn't.
So they seem to be saying that a purified sequence of nucleotides is fundamentally different than that same sequence found within a chromosome. To me, that seems rather like saying one could patent benzene (or a short polymer) because you can purify it from crude oil and it is fundamentally different than if you had a beaker full of crude oil. More abstractly, it's like saying you can patent a paragraph from a book because it's fundamentally different than the paragraph in the context of a book. Fair use, anyone?
Personally, I think this is a terrible decision. Now, if they had a particular METHOD for purifying and replicating this sequence, they would have a valid patent. Heck, if the introns that they stick onto these sequences are proprietary, they could patent THOSE as well. Otherwise, they really are just patenting something that occurs in nature.
FYI, the total power output of the world is only about 2500 GW, as opposed to their "potential" energy generation estimate of 200,000 GW, which made me start to question this. Specifically, I checked into their assumptions regarding rural power generation. They quote a potential area for use in solar power generation in Texas of around 450,000 km^2. The total area of the state is about 700,000 km^2. So, unless I'm misreading, they would propose to cover roughly 64% of the entire state in solar panels. That's simply not feasible, given that much of the land is used for things like crops, improvements, wilderness, etc.
This isn't to say that I don't believe that solar power is a viable alternative, but the quoted numbers in this study just don't seem to add up.
Are simply investment firms, such as T. Rowe Price, Northern Trust, or Depository Trust Company. They're interconnected and large, but the holdings they have generally do not confer any amount of control (you generally need to hold at least 10% of a given firm to get representation on the board of directors). Likewise, their holdings are generally in name only as nominees since they are trusts or mutual funds. In other words, many of these companies appear big, but they're really just investing YOUR money without any say in the day-to-day operations of the companies in which they've invested.
There's one thing I've learned after having borrowed and spent nearly $100,000 to get an MBA; about 90% of new companies fail within 5 years. So, if he's spending $2 million to allow 20 semi-educated people to try to start new companies, maybe 2 will succeed. Still, it's an interesting experiment.
Sure, the big investment banks may be "luring" some engineers into finance, but I think the biggest problem is systemic. Speaking as someone who has moved from physics to finance, I can say that there simply aren't enough opportunities for bright engineers and scientists. For me, it was a number of factors, but I found that finance had ways of thinking that were similar to physics, so the leap wasn't particularly hard. The real deciding point for me, though, was seeing a friend of mine who had a PhD in physics. He was brilliant, doing basic research on spintronics, but he was also working for peanuts and could expect to do so for nearly a decade. Not that money is everything, but it is certainly necessary to pay for things like rent, food, and beer. The biggest problem, it seems to me, is that there aren't nearly enough opportunities for scientists and engineers in this country and they aren't paid nearly enough for all of the hard work they do. This is not a new trend. This country is basically throwing away talent because basic research is severely undervalued. See also the NSF and NASA and how their budgets get treated by Congress.
I just took a class on this kind of thing. Basically, you take the forcasted cash flows and discount appropriately depending on your required rate of return. We only have one data point, so it's very difficult to really project, but given an approximate cash flow of $500 million and a valuation of about $50 billion, the difference between Goldman's required rate of return and Facebook's growth rate is about 1%. From this, I can deduce that Goldman Sachs either thinks Facebook is a very safe investment or a high-growth company or both. In my opinion, you can only have one or the other and my gut feeling is that they overpaid. On the other hand, I'm just one guy with one data point. They have a ton of quants analyzing this thing, so you can take that how you will.
I've been researching my genealogy for almost a decade at this point. It's a lot of work, but I find it fun and enlightening.
Now, there are really two questions here. First, software. There are many different programs out there, the one that I have the most experience with is Legacy. The free version is quite powerful, even if it's closed source.
The second question that wasn't really asked though is regarding the data. You could have the best genealogy software in the world, but it's useless without the data. I'm afraid that simply adding you, your parents, and your grandparents isn't going to do much for you, no matter the website or software. Part of the problem is that the most useful source of information for ancestry, census records, isn't available for any census later than 1930 in the U.S. due to privacy concerns. Most likely, you'll have to find some great-grandparents (ask your parents or grandparents about them) and from there it's relatively easy to bootstrap your family tree back to the 1850s. Unfortunately, the most complete census records are found on Ancestry.com, which is a pay site of course, but there are so many other records that they have that it can be worth it to pay the monthly fee (I do). In addition to that, you can also piggyback on other peoples' research through their community.
If you don't feel like paying, there are plenty of other sites out there with free data and the number grows constantly. Familysearch.org is probably the best. Rootsweb (owned by Ancestry) is also free and has the World Connect function that will show you family trees (secondary sources). Be persistent. There are plenty of sources out there.
"The GWS drive tests also revealed that 98.59 percent of voice calls connected over the AT&T network nationwide are completed without interruption. That's a difference of about one-tenth of one percentage point, or one call in 1,000, from the only higher score in the industry."
So no, they do not drop only 1 out of 1000 calls, they drop more like 15 out of 1000 calls.
Not that my anecdotal evidence has any weight, but I personally experience more like a 5 to 10% dropped call rate with AT&T (one time I was dropped 4 times in a half hour).
I don't know where AT&T gets their numbers. I don't have any hard statistics, but as a regular iPhone user, I've experienced a 5-10% dropped call rate, times when even texts wouldn't be sent, and depending on where I am in this large metropolitan area I call home, download speeds of 0.03 Mbps (though right now I'm getting 2.12 Mbps down and 0.180 Mbps up). I'm certainly not impressed with AT&T's network. On the other hand, Verizon's customer service was what prompted me to switch in the first place.
It's basic physics, maybe not quite on the scale of the LHC, maybe not quite as useful as the HST has been, but still worthwhile. Yes, $100 billion is a lot to spend if this was the sole reason for its existence, but the $100 billion is a sunk cost at this point and the AMS certainly helps with the return on that investment.
On the other hand, $100 billion is a lot of investment that could have been put into other science projects. I've begun to question the point of NASA. Ideally, they would be the forefront of technological demonstrations. They would take risks, some of which wouldn't work but would lead the way for private industries to succeed. They would fund basic science probes such as Cassini or the Mars rovers, which no private company is going to fund at this point but which produce significant returns. The NASA I envision is far from reality and I don't know how it can get from here to there.
Is $100 billion worth an orbiting apartment? Not really. Is it worth a $1 trillion space tourism/commerce industry 10 to 15 years from now? Definitely. Let's just hope that comes to fruition.
I think this just illustrates the elegance of the universe. For many different scales, the same mathematics get reused, whether it's a theoretical white hole or a hydraulic jump in a kitchen sink. Another example which may be similar is the edge of our solar system, the heliopause. In a very similar way, high-speed solar wind particles prevent a lot of particles from outside from entering the inner solar system. Like the hydraulic jump in a kitchen sink, the heliopause is where the speed of the outgoing particles reaches the speed of sound of the medium in which it is traveling.
However, I think the 20% to 50% number comes from the size of the star, Gliese 581. The mass of the star is 20% to 50% of the sun's mass.
Thus far, the lowest-massed planet discovered by the radial velocity method was about 150% to 200% the mass of Earth. Discovering one as small as 20% to 50% is currently beyond the capabilities of the RV method, so the 300% to 400% figure makes a lot more sense.
Besides being old, the article is inaccurate. What we consider a diamond consists of a lattice of carbon atoms linked by covalent bonds. This, quite simply, would not support itself against its own gravity. White dwarfs are made up of electron degenerate matter, supported by the Pauli exclusion principle. Electrons can only withstand being compressed to a certain point under this principle and that pressure offsets the inward pressure due to gravity. Covalent bonds as in a diamond would break down long before that. Yes, the star may be 100% carbon, but that doesn't make it a diamond. It's akin to saying graphite is the same as diamond since they're both 100% carbon. A carbon white dwarf is a completely different state of matter than a diamond.
"In most urban markets, only two wireline providers supply the vast majority of homes, and the remainder are served by a range of wireless Internet providers."
Yes, it's a little redundant, but it bears noting again...
What piques my suspicion is the claimed link between a solar flare and an observed drop in decay rate. If indeed this is a real effect and it has something to do with nuclear processes in the core of the sun as they suspect, then a solar flare should have NO bearing whatsoever on the decay rate. It stems from the simple fact that a solar flare is the release of pent-up energy from twisted magnetic field lines. Effects in the core have no effect on solar flares. It's akin to saying the subduction of a tectonic plate on Earth is a cause for a hurricane. They're very different processes.
Needless to say, there MAY be some new physics here and it definitely needs to be investigated.
I've read numerous articles in the past dealing with supermassive stars and as often as not, the largest stars turn out to be binaries, i.e. what they thought was a 300 solar mass star was simply two 150 solar mass stars. However, I read the paper on arxiv (http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1007/1007.3284v1.pdf) and it appears that the scientists have ruled that out. The thinking is that if it was actually two unresolved stars revolving around each other, their stellar winds would collide and produce x-rays, which are not evident.
However, they do rely heavily on models to come up with the theoretical mass. Without an orbiting companion, it's currently impossible to measure the mass reliably except for depending on those models. Refined models may result in different masses.
Another thing to consider is this. The Eddington limit refers to a star in equilibrium. However, such a large star is not in equilibrium. In the paper, they estimate its original mass to be about 320 solar masses, with 265 being the current mass. Obviously, since the star exceeds the Eddington limit, it is shedding its outer layers as expected. In this case, it has shed a whopping 55 solar massses since its birth...
Slashdot Mirror
I played around with it a bit, but it seems to be somewhat lacking compared to Celestia, which does many of the same things and more. A couple gripes: Sirius was listed as Alpha Cassiopeiae, though it's Bayer designation is Alpha Canis Majoris. Also, it seems to be lacking nearly all of the red dwarfs that make up the majority of the solar neighborhood. Seriously? No Wolf 359?
Ok, so he predicted the outcomes of two elections. A laudable achievement, to be sure. However, as the collapse of the financial system (due in part to exotic instruments) showed us, a model works until it doesn't.
So they seem to be saying that a purified sequence of nucleotides is fundamentally different than that same sequence found within a chromosome. To me, that seems rather like saying one could patent benzene (or a short polymer) because you can purify it from crude oil and it is fundamentally different than if you had a beaker full of crude oil. More abstractly, it's like saying you can patent a paragraph from a book because it's fundamentally different than the paragraph in the context of a book. Fair use, anyone?
Personally, I think this is a terrible decision. Now, if they had a particular METHOD for purifying and replicating this sequence, they would have a valid patent. Heck, if the introns that they stick onto these sequences are proprietary, they could patent THOSE as well. Otherwise, they really are just patenting something that occurs in nature.
FYI, the total power output of the world is only about 2500 GW, as opposed to their "potential" energy generation estimate of 200,000 GW, which made me start to question this. Specifically, I checked into their assumptions regarding rural power generation. They quote a potential area for use in solar power generation in Texas of around 450,000 km^2. The total area of the state is about 700,000 km^2. So, unless I'm misreading, they would propose to cover roughly 64% of the entire state in solar panels. That's simply not feasible, given that much of the land is used for things like crops, improvements, wilderness, etc.
This isn't to say that I don't believe that solar power is a viable alternative, but the quoted numbers in this study just don't seem to add up.
Are simply investment firms, such as T. Rowe Price, Northern Trust, or Depository Trust Company. They're interconnected and large, but the holdings they have generally do not confer any amount of control (you generally need to hold at least 10% of a given firm to get representation on the board of directors). Likewise, their holdings are generally in name only as nominees since they are trusts or mutual funds. In other words, many of these companies appear big, but they're really just investing YOUR money without any say in the day-to-day operations of the companies in which they've invested.
I've been wanting a nuclear-powered car for years and I may get my wish! Granted, it's not fission or fusion, but still a cool concept.
There's one thing I've learned after having borrowed and spent nearly $100,000 to get an MBA; about 90% of new companies fail within 5 years. So, if he's spending $2 million to allow 20 semi-educated people to try to start new companies, maybe 2 will succeed. Still, it's an interesting experiment.
I loved "The City of New York vs Homer Simpson". Great episode even after 9/11.
Sure, the big investment banks may be "luring" some engineers into finance, but I think the biggest problem is systemic. Speaking as someone who has moved from physics to finance, I can say that there simply aren't enough opportunities for bright engineers and scientists. For me, it was a number of factors, but I found that finance had ways of thinking that were similar to physics, so the leap wasn't particularly hard. The real deciding point for me, though, was seeing a friend of mine who had a PhD in physics. He was brilliant, doing basic research on spintronics, but he was also working for peanuts and could expect to do so for nearly a decade. Not that money is everything, but it is certainly necessary to pay for things like rent, food, and beer. The biggest problem, it seems to me, is that there aren't nearly enough opportunities for scientists and engineers in this country and they aren't paid nearly enough for all of the hard work they do. This is not a new trend. This country is basically throwing away talent because basic research is severely undervalued. See also the NSF and NASA and how their budgets get treated by Congress.
I just took a class on this kind of thing. Basically, you take the forcasted cash flows and discount appropriately depending on your required rate of return. We only have one data point, so it's very difficult to really project, but given an approximate cash flow of $500 million and a valuation of about $50 billion, the difference between Goldman's required rate of return and Facebook's growth rate is about 1%. From this, I can deduce that Goldman Sachs either thinks Facebook is a very safe investment or a high-growth company or both. In my opinion, you can only have one or the other and my gut feeling is that they overpaid. On the other hand, I'm just one guy with one data point. They have a ton of quants analyzing this thing, so you can take that how you will.
'nuff said
I've been researching my genealogy for almost a decade at this point. It's a lot of work, but I find it fun and enlightening.
Now, there are really two questions here. First, software. There are many different programs out there, the one that I have the most experience with is Legacy. The free version is quite powerful, even if it's closed source.
The second question that wasn't really asked though is regarding the data. You could have the best genealogy software in the world, but it's useless without the data. I'm afraid that simply adding you, your parents, and your grandparents isn't going to do much for you, no matter the website or software. Part of the problem is that the most useful source of information for ancestry, census records, isn't available for any census later than 1930 in the U.S. due to privacy concerns. Most likely, you'll have to find some great-grandparents (ask your parents or grandparents about them) and from there it's relatively easy to bootstrap your family tree back to the 1850s. Unfortunately, the most complete census records are found on Ancestry.com, which is a pay site of course, but there are so many other records that they have that it can be worth it to pay the monthly fee (I do). In addition to that, you can also piggyback on other peoples' research through their community.
If you don't feel like paying, there are plenty of other sites out there with free data and the number grows constantly. Familysearch.org is probably the best. Rootsweb (owned by Ancestry) is also free and has the World Connect function that will show you family trees (secondary sources). Be persistent. There are plenty of sources out there.
From TFA,
"The GWS drive tests also revealed that 98.59 percent of voice calls connected over the AT&T network nationwide are completed without interruption. That's a difference of about one-tenth of one percentage point, or one call in 1,000, from the only higher score in the industry."
So no, they do not drop only 1 out of 1000 calls, they drop more like 15 out of 1000 calls.
Not that my anecdotal evidence has any weight, but I personally experience more like a 5 to 10% dropped call rate with AT&T (one time I was dropped 4 times in a half hour).
I don't know where AT&T gets their numbers. I don't have any hard statistics, but as a regular iPhone user, I've experienced a 5-10% dropped call rate, times when even texts wouldn't be sent, and depending on where I am in this large metropolitan area I call home, download speeds of 0.03 Mbps (though right now I'm getting 2.12 Mbps down and 0.180 Mbps up). I'm certainly not impressed with AT&T's network. On the other hand, Verizon's customer service was what prompted me to switch in the first place.
Perhaps this helps justify the cost.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_Magnetic_Spectrometer
It's basic physics, maybe not quite on the scale of the LHC, maybe not quite as useful as the HST has been, but still worthwhile. Yes, $100 billion is a lot to spend if this was the sole reason for its existence, but the $100 billion is a sunk cost at this point and the AMS certainly helps with the return on that investment.
On the other hand, $100 billion is a lot of investment that could have been put into other science projects. I've begun to question the point of NASA. Ideally, they would be the forefront of technological demonstrations. They would take risks, some of which wouldn't work but would lead the way for private industries to succeed. They would fund basic science probes such as Cassini or the Mars rovers, which no private company is going to fund at this point but which produce significant returns. The NASA I envision is far from reality and I don't know how it can get from here to there.
Is $100 billion worth an orbiting apartment? Not really. Is it worth a $1 trillion space tourism/commerce industry 10 to 15 years from now? Definitely. Let's just hope that comes to fruition.
Exploiting a hole of some sort is exactly what the author mentioned a number of times.
A lot of my ancestors were from England. Don't I deserve a cut of England's national heritage?
I think this just illustrates the elegance of the universe. For many different scales, the same mathematics get reused, whether it's a theoretical white hole or a hydraulic jump in a kitchen sink. Another example which may be similar is the edge of our solar system, the heliopause. In a very similar way, high-speed solar wind particles prevent a lot of particles from outside from entering the inner solar system. Like the hydraulic jump in a kitchen sink, the heliopause is where the speed of the outgoing particles reaches the speed of sound of the medium in which it is traveling.
I could have sworn that was Buzz Aldrin....
Space.com gives a better summary:
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/earth-like-exoplanet-possibly-habitable-100929.html
However, I think the 20% to 50% number comes from the size of the star, Gliese 581. The mass of the star is 20% to 50% of the sun's mass.
Thus far, the lowest-massed planet discovered by the radial velocity method was about 150% to 200% the mass of Earth. Discovering one as small as 20% to 50% is currently beyond the capabilities of the RV method, so the 300% to 400% figure makes a lot more sense.
Besides being old, the article is inaccurate. What we consider a diamond consists of a lattice of carbon atoms linked by covalent bonds. This, quite simply, would not support itself against its own gravity. White dwarfs are made up of electron degenerate matter, supported by the Pauli exclusion principle. Electrons can only withstand being compressed to a certain point under this principle and that pressure offsets the inward pressure due to gravity. Covalent bonds as in a diamond would break down long before that. Yes, the star may be 100% carbon, but that doesn't make it a diamond. It's akin to saying graphite is the same as diamond since they're both 100% carbon. A carbon white dwarf is a completely different state of matter than a diamond.
"In most urban markets, only two wireline providers supply the vast majority of homes, and the remainder are served by a range of wireless Internet providers."
Yes, it's a little redundant, but it bears noting again...
a valid, non-religious reason not to experiment with embryonic stem cells? Hey, I'm just asking questions here...
What piques my suspicion is the claimed link between a solar flare and an observed drop in decay rate. If indeed this is a real effect and it has something to do with nuclear processes in the core of the sun as they suspect, then a solar flare should have NO bearing whatsoever on the decay rate. It stems from the simple fact that a solar flare is the release of pent-up energy from twisted magnetic field lines. Effects in the core have no effect on solar flares. It's akin to saying the subduction of a tectonic plate on Earth is a cause for a hurricane. They're very different processes.
Needless to say, there MAY be some new physics here and it definitely needs to be investigated.
I've read numerous articles in the past dealing with supermassive stars and as often as not, the largest stars turn out to be binaries, i.e. what they thought was a 300 solar mass star was simply two 150 solar mass stars. However, I read the paper on arxiv (http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1007/1007.3284v1.pdf) and it appears that the scientists have ruled that out. The thinking is that if it was actually two unresolved stars revolving around each other, their stellar winds would collide and produce x-rays, which are not evident.
However, they do rely heavily on models to come up with the theoretical mass. Without an orbiting companion, it's currently impossible to measure the mass reliably except for depending on those models. Refined models may result in different masses.
Another thing to consider is this. The Eddington limit refers to a star in equilibrium. However, such a large star is not in equilibrium. In the paper, they estimate its original mass to be about 320 solar masses, with 265 being the current mass. Obviously, since the star exceeds the Eddington limit, it is shedding its outer layers as expected. In this case, it has shed a whopping 55 solar massses since its birth...