Check out the galaxies in the star field
on
Moon and Stars
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· Score: 1
It really is a lovely picture...
There are a number of spiral galaxies visible in the larger version of the picture, and I suppose if you looked closely you might find a couple of irregulars or ellipticals.
I expect this picture will be making an appearance in my Intro. to Astronomy class tomorrow.
We've found the Palms to be so enormously helpful to clergy doing the sort of everyday work that clergy do - visiting the sick, dealing with relationship crises, making calls - that for those who don't have a secretary, the Bishop is personally buying Palms and giving them away.
I'll take credit for the idea - my palm with my calendar (linked to Outlook) and parish phone directory (linked to our parish database) has saved my bacon more times than I want to count - especially when we've got a real emergency (e.g. dying parishioner, relatives to be gathered, advance directives to be followed etc...
As of 4 PM EDT, on the 10th of July, I still can't log in to MSN messenger. A number of other people are having the same issue, at least according to the posts on www.neowin.net.
I've been using the service for a quick and simple way to quickly contact family and people on our staff who are spread around. MSN - at least for Windows seems to have the smallest memory footprint, and uses the fewest CPU cycles when running in the background... which is of course immaterial if the system is completely unreliable.
What about the Blair Witch Project? Wasn't the inital vibe about that music almost totally Internet community based?
If I recall- most of what I heard about the movie- I heard about from the Net. Wasn't it until the movie had gotten such a "hip" buzz to it from the net that the traditional media started covering it? As I recall- that was the P.R. strategy of the production company- build online buzz- reap profit.
Though admittedly I never saw the movie... no LOTR will be like a religious experience for me so I might be more than a little predjudiced.
Re:Couldn't connect to ad.doubleclick.net alerts
on
Mozilla M17 Is Out
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· Score: 1
I've been using the same setup, and have the same edited hosts file.
But I'm using eDexter as a tiny webserver at 127.0.0.1 that serves up transparent gifs in place of the adverts. In other words, whenever a browser request for a graphic gets redirected to localhost, the browser receives a null request.
Without this Mozilla/ Netscape hang waiting and trying to get the graphic they're expecting from the webpage link from your localhost.
People are using different servers, but for me (Win98) eDexter is the simplest and it's free (as in beer) I suppose in Linux or BeOS you could set up a local server to do the same sort of thing on your boxen.
I found eDexter at http://accs-net.com/hosts/
Re:Ahh, memories. (gambling and astronomy,)
on
Comet LINEAR Erupts
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· Score: 1
It wouldn't depend on resolution at all. Stars are so far away that there is no chance that they can be "resolved" Resolution is important for viewing large objects like nebula, galaxies or close objects like planets.
What would matter is "field of view" A nova is a bright enough object that it should be observed if it occurs in the field of view of the telescope."
I suppose what would really matter more is the f-stop of the telescope. Which is probably why commet hunters don't use large deep sky telesopes, but instead gravitate toward Rich Field Telescopes.
I don't understand your prof's. reasoning though... Perhaps as someone else mentioned, it's a function of the number of instruments... but then it should be much higher than a single of order of magnitude.
I'm sure that Mr Archer is a good guy, and intends to do just as you say...
But what happens when he retires/sells/whatever the company? The new owners would be much less likely to run such a business out of love, and instead be in it for the (gasp) money. They have the signed agreement in hand giving them the power that Mr. Archer has, but (according to your report) doesn't intend to use...
That's the problem with all these "agreements". If I am going to invest all my time and money into a domain, what promise do I have that I'll actually get to reap the benefits of my work? Are you familiar with what has happened with sex.com?
Frankly I find this entire subject very worrisome, especially with the astronomical prices some of these domains are going for...
I am a physicist/ priest and I've found myself being asked to speak on this subject more and more lately. Davies is right on the money when he speaks of compelling witness that creation makes to our spiritual senses. I don't think that the beauty and symmetry of creation can prove the existence of a creator, but it certainly points towards such a thing.
(Thank heavens for Godel's Thm- that there are things which are true which can not be proven true via logic.)
John Polkinghorne, also a priest/physicist has written extensively in the field- though unlike Davies, he doesn't try to prove the existence of God- at least not overtly, but instead writes of how he personally reconciles the two apparently conflicting world views in his own mind.
The two books you might particularly want to check out by Polkinghorne are The Faith of a Physicist and Beyond Science: The Wider Human Context Both are wonderful reads and, if you keep an open mind, might take you someplace you didn't expect to go.
The dust would orbit the black hole in an accretion disk (I know I've mispelled accretion-sorry)
You're right that the dust ought to fall into the black hole from a spherical cloud of dust, all things being equal.
But Black Holes rotate, and rotating they grab space-time and drag it with them. Short version- in the presence of a rotating black hole, the tidal forces caused by the rotation force the particles into a disk symmetry rather than a shell symmetry. (Much like the rings of Saturn are rings because of the planet's shape.)
One of the common ideas about 20 years ago was that the matter being sucked into the blackhole was ejected somewhere else - the "whitehole" that was connected to the blackhole by a "tunnel" in the spacetime continuim.
For a long while Quasers were thought to be the most likely candidates for "whiteholes" but they are now thought to be primordial galactic cores- perhaps a view of a very young super blackhole.
The idea of a white hole being linked to a blackhole is still played around with in the "wormhole" effect- which is seen so impressively in Star Trek DS9 - grin. To the best of my knowledge, no one has ever definitely seen evidence of a wormhole.
Not that they would be any fun, even if they do exist. The tidal forces as you get close to them would rip apart any sort of macroscopically sized object.
I don't think that the article is exactly clear on whether or not this technology is useful for building new kinds of very dense, low power memory chips (something like a very tiny bubble memory chip) or if they can use the "magnetic" transistors to build gates, etc..
This would make a lot of sense to me if these were memory elements. This would be astonishing if they had some new way of manipulating magnetic domains and turning them into basic boolean operators. (To tell the truth, I think the author of the news report isn't very clear on what the difference is.)
I am teaching a college astronomy course again for the first time in about 15 years. It is astonishing to me to see how more information we have been able to accumulate in that time, and the effect that our nearly instantaneous access to that information is having on the way I can teach. So much of this change seems to be because the access to the information allows groups to informally come together to share resources and work together in problem solving. (e.g. One fundemental insight into a solution is quickly shared and implemented when you can just knock together a webpage and post it rather than waiting for the peer-reviewed journals to publish your short paper.)
Nano tech devices that would allow for raw information to be distributed more effeciently would increase the rate of progress.
The only downside to this announcement is that ~500 million of a 2.8 billion dollar budget isn't really nearly the kind of investment we should be making in fundenmental research.
There must be some sort of mechanism (other invoking "Tang" and "Blister packaging") to convince people of the benefits that investing basic research brings.
There are some wonderful websites already up discussing the shower (possible storm)
See http://www.leonidslive.com for NASA's webcast and frequently updated meteor counts. BTW- there are some great tips on observing at this site, plus a number of star charts and data sheets, should you want to submit your observations.
Two other sites that I like are http://www.leonidstorm.com and http://www.space.com
Maybe we'll get lucky this year. Next year it looks like the Moons phase and location is going to really hamper any observations.
Had a couple of friends over to watch the movie last weekend. No problem on my inexpensive RCA player (one of the newer models though)
I do have occasional problems with Apollo 13 - in that occasionally the Player can not decode the disk, but I just keep pressing play until the "magic" works.
I remember reading in Wired yesterday about the problems that Japan is having with Y2K issues, since nobody will publically say that another person is responsible - for that would cause too much shame in the culture. The article mentioned the slow response to the Kobe Quake as a similar example where uniquely Japanese cultural issues had hampered response time.
It seems to me that we might well be seeing the same sort of thing right now. (Japanese authorities don't seem to be reacting as fast or as hard as we might expect authorities to react in this culture (USA))
Einstein's first set of solutions to the General Relativity problem included a constant (lambda) which allowed for Gravity, at a very great distance to be a repulsive rather than attractive force. The term was included for mathematical completeness, but most people have always set it to zero.
If it is a non-zero term, than it could explain what is being seen, though you would expect the satellites to be experience an anomolous acceleration rather than a deacceleration.
It actually isn't surprising at all that this might occur. There are a number of models that would argue that there are spacetime features in a gravity well (like that of the sun) that would not be present in relatively flat spacetime. The further we get from the sun's well, the more likely we are to begin observing these effects.
Slashdot Mirror
It really is a lovely picture...
There are a number of spiral galaxies visible in the larger version of the picture, and I suppose if you looked closely you might find a couple of irregulars or ellipticals.
I expect this picture will be making an appearance in my Intro. to Astronomy class tomorrow.
GG NASA!
I can show you one company - our diocese.
We've found the Palms to be so enormously helpful to clergy doing the sort of everyday work that clergy do - visiting the sick, dealing with relationship crises, making calls - that for those who don't have a secretary, the Bishop is personally buying Palms and giving them away.
I'll take credit for the idea - my palm with my calendar (linked to Outlook) and parish phone directory (linked to our parish database) has saved my bacon more times than I want to count - especially when we've got a real emergency (e.g. dying parishioner, relatives to be gathered, advance directives to be followed etc...
-Nick+
I've been using the service for a quick and simple way to quickly contact family and people on our staff who are spread around. MSN - at least for Windows seems to have the smallest memory footprint, and uses the fewest CPU cycles when running in the background... which is of course immaterial if the system is completely unreliable.
If I recall- most of what I heard about the movie- I heard about from the Net. Wasn't it until the movie had gotten such a "hip" buzz to it from the net that the traditional media started covering it? As I recall- that was the P.R. strategy of the production company- build online buzz- reap profit.
Though admittedly I never saw the movie... no LOTR will be like a religious experience for me so I might be more than a little predjudiced.
I've been using the same setup, and have the same edited hosts file.
But I'm using eDexter as a tiny webserver at 127.0.0.1 that serves up transparent gifs in place of the adverts. In other words, whenever a browser request for a graphic gets redirected to localhost, the browser receives a null request.
Without this Mozilla/ Netscape hang waiting and trying to get the graphic they're expecting from the webpage link from your localhost.
People are using different servers, but for me (Win98) eDexter is the simplest and it's free (as in beer) I suppose in Linux or BeOS you could set up a local server to do the same sort of thing on your boxen.
I found eDexter at http://accs-net.com/hosts/
It wouldn't depend on resolution at all. Stars are so far away that there is no chance that they can be "resolved" Resolution is important for viewing large objects like nebula, galaxies or close objects like planets.
What would matter is "field of view" A nova is a bright enough object that it should be observed if it occurs in the field of view of the telescope."
I suppose what would really matter more is the f-stop of the telescope. Which is probably why commet hunters don't use large deep sky telesopes, but instead gravitate toward Rich Field Telescopes.
I don't understand your prof's. reasoning though... Perhaps as someone else mentioned, it's a function of the number of instruments... but then it should be much higher than a single of order of magnitude.
I'm sure that Mr Archer is a good guy, and intends to do just as you say...
But what happens when he retires/sells/whatever the company? The new owners would be much less likely to run such a business out of love, and instead be in it for the (gasp) money. They have the signed agreement in hand giving them the power that Mr. Archer has, but (according to your report) doesn't intend to use...
That's the problem with all these "agreements". If I am going to invest all my time and money into a domain, what promise do I have that I'll actually get to reap the benefits of my work? Are you familiar with what has happened with sex.com?
Frankly I find this entire subject very worrisome, especially with the astronomical prices some of these domains are going for...
Finally! Something I can really comment on.
I am a physicist/ priest and I've found myself being asked to speak on this subject more and more lately. Davies is right on the money when he speaks of compelling witness that creation makes to our spiritual senses. I don't think that the beauty and symmetry of creation can prove the existence of a creator, but it certainly points towards such a thing.
(Thank heavens for Godel's Thm- that there are things which are true which can not be proven true via logic.)
John Polkinghorne, also a priest/physicist has written extensively in the field- though unlike Davies, he doesn't try to prove the existence of God- at least not overtly, but instead writes of how he personally reconciles the two apparently conflicting world views in his own mind.
The two books you might particularly want to check out by Polkinghorne are The Faith of a Physicist and Beyond Science: The Wider Human Context Both are wonderful reads and, if you keep an open mind, might take you someplace you didn't expect to go.
Who says the Pythagoreans were totally wrong!
Re: The spiraling dust
The dust would orbit the black hole in an accretion disk (I know I've mispelled accretion-sorry)
You're right that the dust ought to fall into the black hole from a spherical cloud of dust, all things being equal.
But Black Holes rotate, and rotating they grab space-time and drag it with them. Short version- in the presence of a rotating black hole, the tidal forces caused by the rotation force the particles into a disk symmetry rather than a shell symmetry. (Much like the rings of Saturn are rings because of the planet's shape.)
One of the common ideas about 20 years ago was that the matter being sucked into the blackhole was ejected somewhere else - the "whitehole" that was connected to the blackhole by a "tunnel" in the spacetime continuim.
For a long while Quasers were thought to be the most likely candidates for "whiteholes" but they are now thought to be primordial galactic cores- perhaps a view of a very young super blackhole.
The idea of a white hole being linked to a blackhole is still played around with in the "wormhole" effect- which is seen so impressively in Star Trek DS9 - grin. To the best of my knowledge, no one has ever definitely seen evidence of a wormhole.
Not that they would be any fun, even if they do exist. The tidal forces as you get close to them would rip apart any sort of macroscopically sized object.
I don't think that the article is exactly clear on whether or not this technology is useful for building new kinds of very dense, low power memory chips (something like a very tiny bubble memory chip) or if they can use the "magnetic" transistors to build gates, etc..
This would make a lot of sense to me if these were memory elements. This would be astonishing if they had some new way of manipulating magnetic domains and turning them into basic boolean operators. (To tell the truth, I think the author of the news report isn't very clear on what the difference is.)
I am teaching a college astronomy course again for the first time in about 15 years. It is astonishing to me to see how more information we have been able to accumulate in that time, and the effect that our nearly instantaneous access to that information is having on the way I can teach. So much of this change seems to be because the access to the information allows groups to informally come together to share resources and work together in problem solving. (e.g. One fundemental insight into a solution is quickly shared and implemented when you can just knock together a webpage and post it rather than waiting for the peer-reviewed journals to publish your short paper.)
Nano tech devices that would allow for raw information to be distributed more effeciently would increase the rate of progress.
The only downside to this announcement is that ~500 million of a 2.8 billion dollar budget isn't really nearly the kind of investment we should be making in fundenmental research.
There must be some sort of mechanism (other invoking "Tang" and "Blister packaging") to convince people of the benefits that investing basic research brings.
There are some wonderful websites already up discussing the shower (possible storm)
See http://www.leonidslive.com for NASA's webcast and frequently updated meteor counts. BTW- there are some great tips on observing at this site, plus a number of star charts and data sheets, should you want to submit your observations.
Two other sites that I like are http://www.leonidstorm.com and http://www.space.com
Maybe we'll get lucky this year. Next year it looks like the Moons phase and location is going to really hamper any observations.
Had a couple of friends over to watch the movie last weekend. No problem on my inexpensive RCA player (one of the newer models though)
I do have occasional problems with Apollo 13 - in that occasionally the Player can not decode the disk, but I just keep pressing play until the "magic" works.
I remember reading in Wired yesterday about the problems that Japan is having with Y2K issues, since nobody will publically say that another person is responsible - for that would cause too much shame in the culture. The article mentioned the slow response to the Kobe Quake as a similar example where uniquely Japanese cultural issues had hampered response time.
It seems to me that we might well be seeing the same sort of thing right now. (Japanese authorities don't seem to be reacting as fast or as hard as we might expect authorities to react in this culture (USA))
Einstein's first set of solutions to the General Relativity problem included a constant (lambda) which allowed for Gravity, at a very great distance to be a repulsive rather than attractive force. The term was included for mathematical completeness, but most people have always set it to zero.
If it is a non-zero term, than it could explain what is being seen, though you would expect the satellites to be experience an anomolous acceleration rather than a deacceleration.
It actually isn't surprising at all that this might occur. There are a number of models that would argue that there are spacetime features in a gravity well (like that of the sun) that would not be present in relatively flat spacetime. The further we get from the sun's well, the more likely we are to begin observing these effects.