But the teams are going to need to be funded so that they can do a complete survey of a larger area of the sky, and begin to get a bound on the number of MACHOs/galaxy or/unit space. That will let us get at least a rough estimate of how much of the universe's dark matter is bound up in these MACHO's.
Anyone know what the longer term funding situation is here? Is it NSF funded?
With the present success of the robotic drones in Afghanistan, the idea of using some sort of similar robot to explore difficult environments is looking seriously promising.
There is of course the delay time in communication that makes it unlikely we'll be able to control the drones remotely from Earth - but that just makes it an interesting programing problem.
Seriously - cheap disposable robots that don't need the kinds of life support systems (or return flight ticket) that human exploration needs makes a ton more sense then sending up an expensive and non-expendable team.
Sure you don't get the kind of glamor exposure that a human explorer would get - but robots are clearly the best pragmatic and economical choice.
In general, the scientific process does not require conclusions during an experiment. I think CERN should cite a different reason for this project, there are many valid ones.
For instance, one possible application of this technology would be the ability to modify the beam in some way (flux, pulse, polariztion etc.) in real time during the experiment. Say that a high number of certain desirable event is observed. It might be interesting to try to modify the beam quickly to see what effect that might cause.
Heck- you could even set up some sort of feedback algorithm to maximize the number of events in real time, and that would be incredibly useful for people struggling to dig a signal out of a high noise level.
In prinicple this sort of high density data acquisition and rapid analysis could have applications in a number of fields way beyond experimental particle physics.
In stellar astronomy, people have used pictures of the sky for a long time to quickly and easily search for interesting objects like binary stars, galaxies or variables. Many modern celestial maps are just digitized sky images.
I suppose that a set of full scale photo map of Mars taken at different times will allow us to look for any climate or seasonal surface changes - which would be useful in a search for Matian life forms. Given a broad enough time scale, you might also be able to look for evidence of erosion features - but I doubt we'll be able to see such processes on Mars in my lifetime.
If nothing else, it'd be interesting to look closely at the boundary between the northern and southern hemispheric regions.
If it's just an occasional occurence, then there's nothing wrong at all - her advertisement is just a more efficient way of fulfilling her desires.
But if the idea catches on and we start choosing wholesale on a single characteristic (IQ) then I worry we're going down a perilous road.
I know that you can easily refute the argument by noting that we've been breeding selectively for height for generations - and that's probably why we're so much taller now than we were 2 or 3 thousand years ago. But it seems to me that height is a less explosive characteristic than IQ. (At least in terms of the number of possible ramifications.)
This sort of finding bothers me. It bothers me in the same way as did a news article a couple of weeks ago reporting that a women was offering something on the order $10k for primo sperm from a Stanford student with certain physical characteristics.
Given the knowledge of this genetic connection, we should in principle be able to start a breeding program to increase the average IQ of the human species.
But is this necesssarily a good thing? I'm not convinced that a high IQ is the primary trait needed for human survival. (It's not a bad thing in of itself... some of my best friends have a high IQ. grin.)
We've come pretty far as a species responding to a number of adverse environments trusting in good old Natural Selection. If we start intentionally selecting out a certain set of genes as especially desirable, what's to stop us from creating a hyper specialized race of savants that do great in math and music, but don't have the ability to bind people together to a common goal?
I guess what I'm saying is that I've seen what effect overbreeding has had on the canine species - especially when humans have gotten involved. What will happen to our species if we follow that path?
I took a group of about 30 or so students to the local observatory of the Lehigh Valley Amatuer Astronomy Society. We had a couple of our members there to help me out openining up the various domes and manning a couple of portable telescopes. They had set up some outdoor loudspeakers playing "music to observe by" and heated up the coffee and the hot water.
We started about observing about 2 AM EST - and in between seeing the sights of the sky we were counting something on the order of about 50-70 Leonids per hour.
At 3:45 AM things started to get truly lovely, so we set ourselves up in the lawn chairs and started counting rates for a minute at a time every 5 minutes or so. Viewing was okay - given the relatively urban setting - with seeing down to about 4.5 Mag and calm atmosphere and high humidity. We counted rates increasing from around 2-3 a minute to about 14 a minute getting close to 4:30 AM.
At 4:45 AM we had high clouds start to scud across the sky, and I gave up formal counting since there would be no normalize the numbers. At our peak around 5:30 AM or so, we were seeing a couple of bright Leonids a minute, some so bright that they lit up the domes like a lightning flash, as well as many (~.25-.5/second) smaller Leonids. We saw a number of truly lovely simultaneous events. The best part was that two or three atmospheric skipping meteors were seen as well.
People from the surrounding area started joining us about 4 AM and we probably had something like 70 people or so up there just before dawn. It was like watching the fireworks on the Mall in DC on the 4th of July with people Ooohing and Ahhhing, and occasionally cheering. My students fanned out in the crowd and I heard them explaining what we were seeing to the new arrivals, and showing them around the sky.
We didn't get to see the full effect of the storm because of the high clouds, but the spectacular fireballs, and the mood of the crowd made in a once in a lifetime event for me. Truly superb!
Sen. Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, who favored the simple extension, said Americans don't want to be taxed when they log on the Internet for their news, weather and sports.
He said there was danger in a "crazy quilt" tax system that would "chew up a vast amount of time for compliance."
It seems to me that the real issue would be trying to figure out a way to equitably structure the tax rates on the internet - and then decide who gets to charge the tax.
For instance: Delaware has no sales tax. If I buy something over the net using a server located in Delaware from a company with a branch in PA and headquarters in NY and I live in NJ, who's tax rate applies? The lowest (DE)? The highest (NY)? Should everyone get a cut?
I wonder how taxes on telephone lines are handled. Are they simply taxed by the locale of the consumer - or is there some complicated relationship that allows states distance from the consumer to charge an "access" fee for information that crosses the state's borders?
I generally don't like sales tax anyhow as a revenue producer for goverment. Sure it taxes spending and not saving, but it's a flat rate and hit's the lower economic rungs harder than the upper rungs.
I know that in PA we're expected (on the honor system) to calculate the appropriate state sales tax on items bought outside the state, and send the amount onto the state office in Harrisburg.
I'm not aware that there is a large active office for collecting those revenues. (Disclaimer - I only know this in principle - since I'm not aware of anyone actually doing this.)
I'm pretty sure that I read somewhere that this was true for other states that have a state sales tax. (Some states like Delaware do not.)
As the other comment in this thread noted, the water molecules detected are definately in the vapor phase, especially in a planetary nebula of this age (...still very hot). Vaporized water is still water.
Assuming this is a medium mass main sequence star (and it should be to have this behavior at the end of its life) this is the final stage where it is sloughing off its outer atmosphere, and the core of the star (with a mass now less than the Chandresekhar (sp?) limit of 1.4 solar masses) is on its way to degeneracy and whitedwarfdom.
The core should mostly be carbon and helium now - with helium and mostly hydrogen being released in the nebula. The Oxygen is probably remnents from so the of various fusion sequences (like the CNO cycle). The hot elemental oxygen is very likely to encounter a couple of Hydrogen atoms, and next thing you know - boom - you've got water.
As someone else pointed out- the fact that water is such a great absorber of radio energy, and that it only forms early on - it's a great detector.
Water does exist elsewhere in interstellar space, as a cold vapor generally. It probably comes directly from these sorts of events.
I just don't see a reason, honestly, for having 'awesome gfx' in a laptop.
Maybe not all the time but...
I've stopped using my desktop machines and moved myself over fulltime to my laptop and docking stations. (I work in three different locations, and it was too much work keeping all three computers in sync with each other.)
I'm pleased with all that my laptop lets me do - but to tell the truth, the graphics are pretty slow. I usually play 2-D games (like Age of Empires) and I miss my Matrox card on my desktop while I watch the screen "chunk" by on the laptop.
So... it would be nice to have the power for gaming available if I wanted to use it.
But I still probably just going to buy a console after Christmas. (I'm waiting to see which one emerges as the favorite (hoping for Gamecube...))
Head west toward the Poconos. Good, reasonably dark sky and about an hour and a half away from you.
If you're into it, there's a number of people gathering at the Lehigh Valley Observatory sites (LVAAS). I'm going to take my class to the South Mountain site if the weather holds.
Here's a site that is predicting a ZHR (zenith hourly rate) of meteors during the height of the shower on the order of 1000-3000. Works out to one a second or so - which while not totally amazing - would be a much higher rate than I've ever seen.
They've got two models and both seem to be in relative agreement. It all depends on how the Earth is oriented and moving through the comet trail and the exact geometry of the dust distribution in the trail. But what the heck - I've hung out before, maybe this will be my year to get lucky!
For those on the East Coast, it'll probably be worth getting up a little (okay - a lot) earlier than normal. Check out Leo in the Southeast sky (about 45 degrees above the horizon) around 5 AM in the morning. That should get you right around peak.
The rate should start to ramp up after midnight EST peaking just before dawn. Those to the west will get to see the decline.
The only problem for those on the west is that with the constellation of Leo being the radiant (hence the name) and Leo being low or below the horizon, they'll be missing most of the show. It's just as bad or worse in Europe this time around, since they'll be in daylight during the predicted max.
There's no scale on the coverage maps, and I don't know the region, but it looks like the signal is only on the order of miles in range.
Twice modem speed, limited roaming and ~$50/month?
It's in an urban area that is probably already going to have some sort of higher speed connection (though perhaps not...). This would make more sense to me in a rural area, but the range isn't great enough.
I suppose if the cost of the individual cell was low enough that you could put them everywhere it might work (economically speaking) - but from reading the website, it looks more like this is just sort of a cool "Looky - I can check stocks at lunch!" sort of thing.
(I use a my cell phone and a cable to my laptop if I really really need that sort of thing - it's not as fast, but I don't use it all that often. I'm sure not interested in paying that much more.)
When I was working in Liquid Crystal Phase Transition research, we used to force the "orientation" of certain liquid crystal phases by swiping our finger across the glass slide.
The oil on your finger and the ridges of your finger prints would leave a nice little pattern on the glass, and the molecules of the liquid crystal would pick up a preferential ordering from the trail.
I never thought of making a circular pattern though - I wonder what would have happened? It might be expecially cool with Cholesteric liquid crystal phases that have a helical structure to them...
I wonder if you could create springs using nanotubes with a bend in them (like an elbow macaroni) and this sort of etching technique? Probably not - since I can't imagine how to get the 3rd dimension involved, but then I was always better at theory anyhow... (not saying much).
The problem I have with my Palm III is tossing in in to the seat bag of my bike when I go off for an afternoon ride.
I'm often on call all day - and as long as I've got my cell phone and my palm (sycn'd to my deskptop) - I can pretty much handle anything that comes up. But I haven't found a great way to keep all of it (phone and organizer) at hand with out having my belt starting to look like the batman's.
If I could painlessly off load my schedule and my phone list to a wristwatch - and then just schlep a little phone/email/web combo doohicky - I'd be in mobile worker heaven!
And people wouldn't shake their heads and lower their eyes when I walk by - like they used to do in High School when I proudly wore my TI-55 on my belt loop... grin.
To explain the discrepancy between their very precise findings and their expectations, NuTeV experimenters wonder if their neutrinos have felt a new force previously unobserved in nature, or if there is some hitherto undiscovered particle influencing neutrino interactions.
It seems like there a whole bunch of weird shi^H^Htuff going on with Neutrinos. The Sudbury experiment this summer is starting to show non-zero neutrino mass, which I understood meant that oscillation between states was going to not happer - or be severely limited.
Now this experiment seems to show that not only is oscillation possibly happening but at a slightly greater rate than we expect.
Admittedly these are completely different effects - and on the surface aren't related but...
I agree with the quote above - my "spidey sense" is making me think that something really interesting is going on with Neutrinos, and perhaps the elementary particle types should start really focusing on getting some better data...
You know - there are going to be a number of vacant deep mine shafts coming vacant in Afgahnistan soon...
Delighted space scientists have hailed the approval of missions to Pluto and Jupiter's moon Europa, on which there could be life.
As exciting as the news is that we're finally going to try to hook up with Pluto - the idea that we're going to look more closely at Europa is probably going to be more important scientifically in the long run.
Assume Pluto is just a particularly large denizen of the Kuiper belt - interesting primarily because of its close relationship with Charon, an object roughly its size... We can see something like this basically anytime we get a comet in our neighborhood.
Europa, on the other hand, if it truly has liquid H20 under that ice on the surface might well be the best near candidate for life in the solar system.
I figure if life can survive at the sulfer vents deep in the mid-ocean trenches, Europa should be a relative sure bet.
If there is life - and it isn't terribly similar to ours, then we win (life is likely in the Universe, and the Copernican principle is upheld). If there is life - and it's similar to terrestial life - then we have good support for a pan-spermia theory and we can get off our duffs and start looking harder for other life in the Universe.
I can understand someone ditching broadband if they only had one computer hanging on the connection - and if they have access to a fast connection somewhere (like the office) - and their connection was unreliable (like mine is).
But at my house, there's three of us in the family all sharing the same pipe. We got the broadband connection so I could load slashdot pages, the spousal unit could shop and browse and the daughter chat and play at the same time.
Before that there was too much shouting about other people hogging the bandwidth... Grin. So we put up with the timeouts and the waits to pull an IP from the DHCP server... and dream of the day when we go to 2-way.
It's going to be hard to convince me and other home LAN users to give up our broadband connections.
"We discovered that the outflowing material was just a surface feature," said Zhao. "If you can look a bit deeper, you find material rushing inward, like a planet-sized whirlpool or hurricane. This inflow pulls the magnetic fields together."
The cool thing for me (and I confess upfront that I don't remember much about plasma flow in stellar atmospheres) is the question of which comes first now - the magnetic field disturbance or the plasma flow.
I know that a hot ionized plasma will freeze the magnetic field lines to the plasma - and that as the plasma moves it will drag the field with it.
So what's happening here? Is the magnetic field causing the whirlpool ala the Babcock model - or is there some sort of convention flow pulling the magnetic field along with it?
This new sail design reminded me of something that I once saw in a book of sail design.
In the 1920's a German designer started designing sailing ships that used a rotating sail pillar as a mast rather than a sheet of material. Here's a link to a page that describes not only the concept but a a way to put together a modern version.
I always figured this was a wonderful idea because this way I wouldn't have to put down my beer when the person on the wheel called out a turn while tacking. I mean for heaven's sake - let's keep in mind the real point to recreational sailing. Grin.
I know that every year for the last couple of years, there's been people predicting that this will be the year that Leonids develop storm like rates... and I've taken my Astro. classes out and we've frozen our collective butts off waiting.
But...
Here's a site (http://www.aero.org/leonid/encounterData.html) that is predicting a ZHR (zenith hourly rate) of meteors during the height of the shower on the order of 1000-3000. Works out to one a second or so - which while not totally amazing - would be a much higher rate than I've ever seen.
They've got two models and both seem to be in relative agreement. It all depends on how the Earth is oriented and moving through the comet trail and the exact geometry of the dust distribution in the trail. But what the heck - I've hung out before, maybe this will be my year to get lucky!
The trouble with teaching quantum mechanics before classical physics (assuming that this is what the article implications lead to...) is that the math is more advanced to do real Quantum Mechanics.
With Quantum you at least need Fourier Series and partial Diff. Eq. to solve basic problems. In classical physics you can often get by with just Algebra.
Perhaps someone particulary bright will come along and restate QM so that it's easier to express, but until then - I expect it will always be Classical first then Quantum.
Besides, Classical physics is probably more intuitive simply because our consciousness seems to function in the classical regime primarily.
It's really hard to tell what's going on from this article directly - it mostly just points out that some research is going on in this field. (And I haven't read the original article)
What I can read into it is that by working out the equations for a condensed matter system with where the interactions between individual particles are strong enough to influence the larger properties of the material - the authors have recognized that the equations look very similar to standard equations found in the classical fields of physics (E&M, Relativity, etc.)
If this is the case, then assuming that the basic assumptions are portable (that these types of quantum interactions are important on a macroscopic scale) then you have basically derived classical physics from Quantum mechanics.
This would hint (at least) that Quantum theory is scientifically more fundamental than classical physics. It gives a motivation for the observation that Quantum equations tend to reduce to classical equations when the systems get large.
Pretty cool if it all pans out. Lovely philosphical shift in thinking...
I think it becomes a "Church/State" issue when the goverment starts supporting one group to the exclusion of others. (In this case it would be using Microsoft exclusively or disproportionatly more than other vendors.)
The problem is of course that standardization in software is a good thing - but too much is a bad thing. I don't know that anyone has figured out where the golden mean is between the two poles. We obviously need some sort of standard software to run our computers, and we need some sort of quality assurance. Open Source certainly is a candidate to develop a standard (think RFC) - but in its present form the quality of software offered is uneven. (Some is extraordinary, some is crap.)
Perhaps the real way to develop a vendor agnosticism would be to actively support and have people on the goverment payroll contribute to the open-source development model. That way the goverment is actively looking out for its own interest, but in a way which supports communal development.
Which of course sounds good, but I have no idea what it would look like... or how it would play out.
Slashdot Mirror
Wonderful bit of observation.
/unit space. That will let us get at least a rough estimate of how much of the universe's dark matter is bound up in these MACHO's.
But the teams are going to need to be funded so that they can do a complete survey of a larger area of the sky, and begin to get a bound on the number of MACHOs/galaxy or
Anyone know what the longer term funding situation is here? Is it NSF funded?
With the present success of the robotic drones in Afghanistan, the idea of using some sort of similar robot to explore difficult environments is looking seriously promising.
There is of course the delay time in communication that makes it unlikely we'll be able to control the drones remotely from Earth - but that just makes it an interesting programing problem.
Seriously - cheap disposable robots that don't need the kinds of life support systems (or return flight ticket) that human exploration needs makes a ton more sense then sending up an expensive and non-expendable team.
Sure you don't get the kind of glamor exposure that a human explorer would get - but robots are clearly the best pragmatic and economical choice.
In general, the scientific process does not require conclusions during an experiment. I think CERN should cite a different reason for this project, there are many valid ones.
For instance, one possible application of this technology would be the ability to modify the beam in some way (flux, pulse, polariztion etc.) in real time during the experiment. Say that a high number of certain desirable event is observed. It might be interesting to try to modify the beam quickly to see what effect that might cause.
Heck- you could even set up some sort of feedback algorithm to maximize the number of events in real time, and that would be incredibly useful for people struggling to dig a signal out of a high noise level.
In prinicple this sort of high density data acquisition and rapid analysis could have applications in a number of fields way beyond experimental particle physics.
In stellar astronomy, people have used pictures of the sky for a long time to quickly and easily search for interesting objects like binary stars, galaxies or variables. Many modern celestial maps are just digitized sky images.
I suppose that a set of full scale photo map of Mars taken at different times will allow us to look for any climate or seasonal surface changes - which would be useful in a search for Matian life forms. Given a broad enough time scale, you might also be able to look for evidence of erosion features - but I doubt we'll be able to see such processes on Mars in my lifetime.
If nothing else, it'd be interesting to look closely at the boundary between the northern and southern hemispheric regions.
If it's just an occasional occurence, then there's nothing wrong at all - her advertisement is just a more efficient way of fulfilling her desires.
But if the idea catches on and we start choosing wholesale on a single characteristic (IQ) then I worry we're going down a perilous road.
I know that you can easily refute the argument by noting that we've been breeding selectively for height for generations - and that's probably why we're so much taller now than we were 2 or 3 thousand years ago. But it seems to me that height is a less explosive characteristic than IQ. (At least in terms of the number of possible ramifications.)
This sort of finding bothers me. It bothers me in the same way as did a news article a couple of weeks ago reporting that a women was offering something on the order $10k for primo sperm from a Stanford student with certain physical characteristics.
Given the knowledge of this genetic connection, we should in principle be able to start a breeding program to increase the average IQ of the human species.
But is this necesssarily a good thing? I'm not convinced that a high IQ is the primary trait needed for human survival. (It's not a bad thing in of itself... some of my best friends have a high IQ. grin.)
We've come pretty far as a species responding to a number of adverse environments trusting in good old Natural Selection. If we start intentionally selecting out a certain set of genes as especially desirable, what's to stop us from creating a hyper specialized race of savants that do great in math and music, but don't have the ability to bind people together to a common goal?
I guess what I'm saying is that I've seen what effect overbreeding has had on the canine species - especially when humans have gotten involved. What will happen to our species if we follow that path?
I took a group of about 30 or so students to the local observatory of the Lehigh Valley Amatuer Astronomy Society. We had a couple of our members there to help me out openining up the various domes and manning a couple of portable telescopes. They had set up some outdoor loudspeakers playing "music to observe by" and heated up the coffee and the hot water.
We started about observing about 2 AM EST - and in between seeing the sights of the sky we were counting something on the order of about 50-70 Leonids per hour.
At 3:45 AM things started to get truly lovely, so we set ourselves up in the lawn chairs and started counting rates for a minute at a time every 5 minutes or so. Viewing was okay - given the relatively urban setting - with seeing down to about 4.5 Mag and calm atmosphere and high humidity. We counted rates increasing from around 2-3 a minute to about 14 a minute getting close to 4:30 AM.
At 4:45 AM we had high clouds start to scud across the sky, and I gave up formal counting since there would be no normalize the numbers. At our peak around 5:30 AM or so, we were seeing a couple of bright Leonids a minute, some so bright that they lit up the domes like a lightning flash, as well as many (~.25-.5/second) smaller Leonids. We saw a number of truly lovely simultaneous events. The best part was that two or three atmospheric skipping meteors were seen as well.
People from the surrounding area started joining us about 4 AM and we probably had something like 70 people or so up there just before dawn. It was like watching the fireworks on the Mall in DC on the 4th of July with people Ooohing and Ahhhing, and occasionally cheering. My students fanned out in the crowd and I heard them explaining what we were seeing to the new arrivals, and showing them around the sky.
We didn't get to see the full effect of the storm because of the high clouds, but the spectacular fireballs, and the mood of the crowd made in a once in a lifetime event for me. Truly superb!
Sen. Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, who favored the simple extension, said Americans don't want to be taxed when they log on the Internet for their news, weather and sports.
He said there was danger in a "crazy quilt" tax system that would "chew up a vast amount of time for compliance."
It seems to me that the real issue would be trying to figure out a way to equitably structure the tax rates on the internet - and then decide who gets to charge the tax.
For instance: Delaware has no sales tax. If I buy something over the net using a server located in Delaware from a company with a branch in PA and headquarters in NY and I live in NJ, who's tax rate applies? The lowest (DE)? The highest (NY)? Should everyone get a cut?
I wonder how taxes on telephone lines are handled. Are they simply taxed by the locale of the consumer - or is there some complicated relationship that allows states distance from the consumer to charge an "access" fee for information that crosses the state's borders?
I generally don't like sales tax anyhow as a revenue producer for goverment. Sure it taxes spending and not saving, but it's a flat rate and hit's the lower economic rungs harder than the upper rungs.
I know that in PA we're expected (on the honor system) to calculate the appropriate state sales tax on items bought outside the state, and send the amount onto the state office in Harrisburg.
I'm not aware that there is a large active office for collecting those revenues. (Disclaimer - I only know this in principle - since I'm not aware of anyone actually doing this.)
I'm pretty sure that I read somewhere that this was true for other states that have a state sales tax. (Some states like Delaware do not.)
As the other comment in this thread noted, the water molecules detected are definately in the vapor phase, especially in a planetary nebula of this age (...still very hot). Vaporized water is still water.
Assuming this is a medium mass main sequence star (and it should be to have this behavior at the end of its life) this is the final stage where it is sloughing off its outer atmosphere, and the core of the star (with a mass now less than the Chandresekhar (sp?) limit of 1.4 solar masses) is on its way to degeneracy and whitedwarfdom.
The core should mostly be carbon and helium now - with helium and mostly hydrogen being released in the nebula. The Oxygen is probably remnents from so the of various fusion sequences (like the CNO cycle). The hot elemental oxygen is very likely to encounter a couple of Hydrogen atoms, and next thing you know - boom - you've got water.
As someone else pointed out- the fact that water is such a great absorber of radio energy, and that it only forms early on - it's a great detector.
Water does exist elsewhere in interstellar space, as a cold vapor generally. It probably comes directly from these sorts of events.
I just don't see a reason, honestly, for having 'awesome gfx' in a laptop.
Maybe not all the time but...
I've stopped using my desktop machines and moved myself over fulltime to my laptop and docking stations. (I work in three different locations, and it was too much work keeping all three computers in sync with each other.)
I'm pleased with all that my laptop lets me do - but to tell the truth, the graphics are pretty slow. I usually play 2-D games (like Age of Empires) and I miss my Matrox card on my desktop while I watch the screen "chunk" by on the laptop.
So... it would be nice to have the power for gaming available if I wanted to use it.
But I still probably just going to buy a console after Christmas. (I'm waiting to see which one emerges as the favorite (hoping for Gamecube...))
Head west toward the Poconos. Good, reasonably dark sky and about an hour and a half away from you.
If you're into it, there's a number of people gathering at the Lehigh Valley Observatory sites (LVAAS). I'm going to take my class to the South Mountain site if the weather holds.
Here's a site that is predicting a ZHR (zenith hourly rate) of meteors during the height of the shower on the order of 1000-3000. Works out to one a second or so - which while not totally amazing - would be a much higher rate than I've ever seen.
They've got two models and both seem to be in relative agreement. It all depends on how the Earth is oriented and moving through the comet trail and the exact geometry of the dust distribution in the trail. But what the heck - I've hung out before, maybe this will be my year to get lucky!
For those on the East Coast, it'll probably be worth getting up a little (okay - a lot) earlier than normal. Check out Leo in the Southeast sky (about 45 degrees above the horizon) around 5 AM in the morning. That should get you right around peak.
The rate should start to ramp up after midnight EST peaking just before dawn. Those to the west will get to see the decline.
The only problem for those on the west is that with the constellation of Leo being the radiant (hence the name) and Leo being low or below the horizon, they'll be missing most of the show. It's just as bad or worse in Europe this time around, since they'll be in daylight during the predicted max.
There's no scale on the coverage maps, and I don't know the region, but it looks like the signal is only on the order of miles in range.
Twice modem speed, limited roaming and ~$50/month?
It's in an urban area that is probably already going to have some sort of higher speed connection (though perhaps not...). This would make more sense to me in a rural area, but the range isn't great enough.
I suppose if the cost of the individual cell was low enough that you could put them everywhere it might work (economically speaking) - but from reading the website, it looks more like this is just sort of a cool "Looky - I can check stocks at lunch!" sort of thing.
(I use a my cell phone and a cable to my laptop if I really really need that sort of thing - it's not as fast, but I don't use it all that often. I'm sure not interested in paying that much more.)
When I was working in Liquid Crystal Phase Transition research, we used to force the "orientation" of certain liquid crystal phases by swiping our finger across the glass slide.
The oil on your finger and the ridges of your finger prints would leave a nice little pattern on the glass, and the molecules of the liquid crystal would pick up a preferential ordering from the trail.
I never thought of making a circular pattern though - I wonder what would have happened? It might be expecially cool with Cholesteric liquid crystal phases that have a helical structure to them...
I wonder if you could create springs using nanotubes with a bend in them (like an elbow macaroni) and this sort of etching technique? Probably not - since I can't imagine how to get the 3rd dimension involved, but then I was always better at theory anyhow... (not saying much).
The problem I have with my Palm III is tossing in in to the seat bag of my bike when I go off for an afternoon ride.
I'm often on call all day - and as long as I've got my cell phone and my palm (sycn'd to my deskptop) - I can pretty much handle anything that comes up. But I haven't found a great way to keep all of it (phone and organizer) at hand with out having my belt starting to look like the batman's.
If I could painlessly off load my schedule and my phone list to a wristwatch - and then just schlep a little phone/email/web combo doohicky - I'd be in mobile worker heaven!
And people wouldn't shake their heads and lower their eyes when I walk by - like they used to do in High School when I proudly wore my TI-55 on my belt loop... grin.
To explain the discrepancy between their very precise findings and their expectations, NuTeV experimenters wonder if their neutrinos have felt a new force previously unobserved in nature, or if there is some hitherto undiscovered particle influencing neutrino interactions.
It seems like there a whole bunch of weird shi^H^Htuff going on with Neutrinos. The Sudbury experiment this summer is starting to show non-zero neutrino mass, which I understood meant that oscillation between states was going to not happer - or be severely limited.
Now this experiment seems to show that not only is oscillation possibly happening but at a slightly greater rate than we expect.
Admittedly these are completely different effects - and on the surface aren't related but...
I agree with the quote above - my "spidey sense" is making me think that something really interesting is going on with Neutrinos, and perhaps the elementary particle types should start really focusing on getting some better data...
You know - there are going to be a number of vacant deep mine shafts coming vacant in Afgahnistan soon...
Delighted space scientists have hailed the approval of missions to Pluto and Jupiter's moon Europa, on which there could be life.
As exciting as the news is that we're finally going to try to hook up with Pluto - the idea that we're going to look more closely at Europa is probably going to be more important scientifically in the long run.
Assume Pluto is just a particularly large denizen of the Kuiper belt - interesting primarily because of its close relationship with Charon, an object roughly its size... We can see something like this basically anytime we get a comet in our neighborhood.
Europa, on the other hand, if it truly has liquid H20 under that ice on the surface might well be the best near candidate for life in the solar system.
I figure if life can survive at the sulfer vents deep in the mid-ocean trenches, Europa should be a relative sure bet.
If there is life - and it isn't terribly similar to ours, then we win (life is likely in the Universe, and the Copernican principle is upheld). If there is life - and it's similar to terrestial life - then we have good support for a pan-spermia theory and we can get off our duffs and start looking harder for other life in the Universe.
Excellent news.
I can understand someone ditching broadband if they only had one computer hanging on the connection - and if they have access to a fast connection somewhere (like the office) - and their connection was unreliable (like mine is).
But at my house, there's three of us in the family all sharing the same pipe. We got the broadband connection so I could load slashdot pages, the spousal unit could shop and browse and the daughter chat and play at the same time.
Before that there was too much shouting about other people hogging the bandwidth... Grin. So we put up with the timeouts and the waits to pull an IP from the DHCP server... and dream of the day when we go to 2-way.
It's going to be hard to convince me and other home LAN users to give up our broadband connections.
"We discovered that the outflowing material was just a surface feature," said Zhao. "If you can look a bit deeper, you find material rushing inward, like a planet-sized whirlpool or hurricane. This inflow pulls the magnetic fields together."
The cool thing for me (and I confess upfront that I don't remember much about plasma flow in stellar atmospheres) is the question of which comes first now - the magnetic field disturbance or the plasma flow.
I know that a hot ionized plasma will freeze the magnetic field lines to the plasma - and that as the plasma moves it will drag the field with it.
So what's happening here? Is the magnetic field causing the whirlpool ala the Babcock model - or is there some sort of convention flow pulling the magnetic field along with it?
Anyone more current than I know?
This new sail design reminded me of something that I once saw in a book of sail design.
In the 1920's a German designer started designing sailing ships that used a rotating sail pillar as a mast rather than a sheet of material. Here's a link to a page that describes not only the concept but a a way to put together a modern version.
I always figured this was a wonderful idea because this way I wouldn't have to put down my beer when the person on the wheel called out a turn while tacking. I mean for heaven's sake - let's keep in mind the real point to recreational sailing. Grin.
I know that every year for the last couple of years, there's been people predicting that this will be the year that Leonids develop storm like rates... and I've taken my Astro. classes out and we've frozen our collective butts off waiting.
But...
Here's a site (http://www.aero.org/leonid/encounterData.html) that is predicting a ZHR (zenith hourly rate) of meteors during the height of the shower on the order of 1000-3000. Works out to one a second or so - which while not totally amazing - would be a much higher rate than I've ever seen.
They've got two models and both seem to be in relative agreement. It all depends on how the Earth is oriented and moving through the comet trail and the exact geometry of the dust distribution in the trail. But what the heck - I've hung out before, maybe this will be my year to get lucky!
The trouble with teaching quantum mechanics before classical physics (assuming that this is what the article implications lead to...) is that the math is more advanced to do real Quantum Mechanics.
With Quantum you at least need Fourier Series and partial Diff. Eq. to solve basic problems. In classical physics you can often get by with just Algebra.
Perhaps someone particulary bright will come along and restate QM so that it's easier to express, but until then - I expect it will always be Classical first then Quantum.
Besides, Classical physics is probably more intuitive simply because our consciousness seems to function in the classical regime primarily.
It's really hard to tell what's going on from this article directly - it mostly just points out that some research is going on in this field. (And I haven't read the original article)
What I can read into it is that by working out the equations for a condensed matter system with where the interactions between individual particles are strong enough to influence the larger properties of the material - the authors have recognized that the equations look very similar to standard equations found in the classical fields of physics (E&M, Relativity, etc.)
If this is the case, then assuming that the basic assumptions are portable (that these types of quantum interactions are important on a macroscopic scale) then you have basically derived classical physics from Quantum mechanics.
This would hint (at least) that Quantum theory is scientifically more fundamental than classical physics. It gives a motivation for the observation that Quantum equations tend to reduce to classical equations when the systems get large.
Pretty cool if it all pans out. Lovely philosphical shift in thinking...
The problem is of course that standardization in software is a good thing - but too much is a bad thing. I don't know that anyone has figured out where the golden mean is between the two poles. We obviously need some sort of standard software to run our computers, and we need some sort of quality assurance. Open Source certainly is a candidate to develop a standard (think RFC) - but in its present form the quality of software offered is uneven. (Some is extraordinary, some is crap.)
Perhaps the real way to develop a vendor agnosticism would be to actively support and have people on the goverment payroll contribute to the open-source development model. That way the goverment is actively looking out for its own interest, but in a way which supports communal development.
Which of course sounds good, but I have no idea what it would look like... or how it would play out.