> Also, scores of habitable planets and *moons with earthlike > gravity*? That's my main problem with the "moons" hypothesis..
There's nothing about being a moon that prohibits high gravity. Dense material = smaller radius per unit of mass = higher gravity. Similarly, there's noting about being a huge planet that mandates high gravity. If one were able to stand on the "surface" of a gas giant, its gravity wouldn't be all that different from what we experience. It's all about density.
> However, anyone who thinks that using embryonic stem cells is a > no-brainer either doesn't understand the ethical considerations at > stake, or simply doesn't believe in ethical considerations at all.
Ah, how exactly does this follow? You're being silly, using hyperbole to get your point made, then leaving this illogical nonsense dangling.
So: I do believe that using embryonic stem cells is a no-brainer. And I most definitely do understand the ethical considerations, and the science. And I do believe in ethical considerations.
Your statement above, designed to neatly and tidily put people into a manageable group for purposes of dismissal, is clumsy, illogical, and wrong. If you want to debate the ethics of using embryonic stem cells, fine. But this sort of blanket statement doesn't further the discussion. It is, in fact, little more than a playground insult: "nah nah! you're a nincompoop!"
Before you go off attacking someone for talking about something you apparently know nothing about, perhaps you'd benefit from actually doing some reading? There is a large body of educational literature relating to peer instruction. It is not a 'vacuous' term without definition.
> Can you give us even ONE good reason why we > should listen to this bullshit?
It works. Students learn more. Teachers are better able to pace their material. Teachers spend less time going over unneccessary ground. Students attend class more often, do their reading more often, and retain more.
This is not speculation, it's been repeatedly shown, and most people who have made a serious effort to incorporate peer instruction in some significant degree in their classrooms report positive results (as per the parameters I lay out above).
I am somewhat surprised at the venomous response to this article, particularly considering that the vast majority of negative comments are from people who know NOTHING about how this technology can be used effectively, while most of the positive comments are from people who have had some experience with it.
> A show of hands would do the same thing cheaper, faster, and just about as accurately.
Absolute nonsense. I've used both systems in my classroom. Have you?
When I've got four or five multiple choice answers listed, and need to quickly assess how people are looking at a problem (not just got 'the right answer', but 'are they thinking it's x? or y?'), using a show of hands is MORE time-consuming. What am I going to do, say "Ok, if you think it's option A", followed by B, C, D, E? Or maybe you want me to have them hold their hands up at different heights for each option?
If I can tell that virtually nobody was confused by some particular aspect of a problem but were confused about some other aspect, then I'm saving my students' time by not going over things previously discussed that they already understand.
Just because you don't understand how the technology is used and is useful, don't go dissing it until you've a) tried it, and b) read up on how it's most useful (see ch.1 and ch.2 from this book).
Which is why we'll be using the elevator to create feasible, large-scale inrastructure in orbit so that we can send Buck Rogers on to Mars, and anywhere else they want to go.
We can send thirty, or three hundred, astronauts into orbit and on to their destinations more easily than we can send 3 to sit in a useless tin can in orbit.
Your "elevator mechanic" argument is bogus because we currently emply loads of electricians and mecahnics on the shuttle program - they're not the ones anyone visualizes when contemplating who gets funding...it's the guys riding to orbit on outdated, dangerous, inflexible lunch systems.
Re:George Bush does not care about Slashdot.
on
Bill Gates Speaks Out
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
Mod parent funny, for crying out loud!
For crying out loud...
on
Brute Force
·
· Score: 2, Funny
UltraEdit offers exactly one thing: everything I need in an editor. While it's not OSS, it's cheap, regularly updated (but without breaking itself when new versions are released), has all of the features I could want: macros, extensible syntax highlighting, column editing, function collapse, templates, HTML validation & tidying, project & workspace management, etc.
God I hate the writers at Space.com. I stopped writing them with corrections early on when I realized that they don't care about accuracy, and weren't going to bother to improve. It's predigested space-oriented pabulum for the masses...but it's often incorrect or misleading.
Case in point, from TFA: "The most active black holes eat so voraciously that they create a colossal cloud of gas and dust around them, through which astronomers cannot peer."
This is kind of true, but it's also more correct when reversed: the black hole is "active" BECAUSE there is gas and dust in the vincinity for it to 'eat'. The BH doesn't create the cloud of gas and dust in any sense.
Another:"A few quasars have been identified" Well, ok, it you count well over two thousand of them 'a few'.
This is just sloppy work on the author's part, and is typical of the schlock they produce on a regular basis. I've seen them make patently false statements as well, in addition to simply misleading or incomplete ones. Sigh..
I'm not sure I would say that I have 'faith' in those things, because faith implies something absolute. I think that those things are almost certainly true, but are subject to revision based on new data. That's very different from the sort of faith religious peolpe describe.
a) Open and subject to change based upon available evidence, b) Based upon a great deal of observational evidence as well as deductive reasoning, and c) Not a matter of 'faith' in that I don't have 'faith' in my vision of the beginning, only a sense that it is the best picture currently defensible based upon what we've learned about the universe in which we find ourselves.
So, no - my vision of the beginning of the universe is NOT a matter of faith. I require no creator to have flipped a switch because I am comfortable with not have the complete picture, just as I and others srtive to acquire a more complete picture.
I don't demand the existence of a God based on what I 'feel' - if I had evidence that there was one, I would believe in one. Believing in one without evidence is wrong.
> In fact, if everything does work through God's > design, then he *created* evolution. Yes, this is a > hard one for many to digest.
This is just so bloody convenient for you, isn't it? You can talk all you want about being open-minded, scientific, whatever - but whenever you're challenged, you get to say "But it's all God's design!!" like that's some sort of get out of jail free card.
When I talk to religious folks, it always comes down to "because the bible says so". Yeah, well, I have a book about green eggs and ham...but that doesn't mean anything. It's a book, not evidence.
THAT is why ID is a fucking crock. THAT is why religion is a crock. Fine, so it's "faith" - does that excuse you believing in something that in any other context would qualify you as insane?
I'll go around claiming that the universe was created by, and is still controlled by, small green elves who live in people's closets. I'll have EXACTLY as much evidence/proof as you do of your mythological deity - and yet religious folks get to claim that they're not nuts for believing in invisiable, all-powerful entities NOBODY HAS EVER SEEN.
At optical wavelengths, they could keep station using very small thrusters perfectly well to within the required tolerances. You could place one at the leading lagrange, another at the trailing lagrange, and get, what - a couple million km? (too tired to do the calculations here).
We had one of my former profs come and talk to our astro club about a long-range project he's involved with working on x-ray interferometry in space (there are a couple big projects along these lines).
For X-rays, station-keeping is much more difficult. One has to be within at most a few microns, best yet a few tenths of a micron. I don't think that this is possible yet - but it's a real target due to missions like MAXIM.
Being able to image things at very fine resolution in the x-ray band will be very, very cool. For example, if you could get 10^-6 arcseconds resolution (right now, a pie in the sky...but at least theoretically possible), you might be able to image a black hole directly (well, ok, its accretion disc and event horizon).
For those of you not familiar with why astronomers would place (frickin') lasers onto telescopes, there are multiple reasons.
The primary reason is to provide a "fake star" that can be monitored for distortion, which helps adaptive optics systems counteract atmospheric distortion in the final telescope image/data. In other words, it helps remove the "twinkle" caused by the atmosphere.
The laser at Apache Point, as well as at other locations (see previous message), is used to measure the distance to the moon (which is useful in, among other things, studies looking at the accuracy of general relativity).
The Apache Point laser is capable of measuring the distance to the moon to a millimeter using this device. (think about it: at a telescope, up on a mountain around 10,000 feet, there's probably more 'flex' in the mountain itself!).
I agree, it'll be easier to build (although OWL will use multiple segments/single focus).
But...when I read "..milli-arcsecond" resolution (in the optical!) on the OWL site, in spite of its competitors, my knees got weak, my toes curled...And I'm a grown man.
I and the guy who teaches the class I TA for recently had students calculate how large a primary would be necessary to read a homework page on the moon, from Earth. (assuming, of course, diffraction-limited seeing...hah!). Needless to say, even OWL wouldn't cut the mustard. But it'll be way, way cool, even without laser beams.
Oh - and speaking of laser beams and telescopes: Apache Point Apollo Laser. (I've been down to see this...very cool!)
"With a diameter of 100 meter, OWL [Overwhelmingly Large Telescope] will combine unrivalled light gathering power with the ability to resolve details down to a milli-arc second."
> But if the goal of the United States is to be >truly a spacefaring nation, then bypassing the > moon is silly.
Perhaps, perhaps not. The problem is that history shows that grand plans like "becoming a truly spacefaring nation" get funded for a little while -- long enough for the politicians to take credit for their daring vision -- and then cancelled. Witness the aftermath of the final Apollo missions: Saturn V assembly line shut down, a retreat to low earth orbit, and a boondoggle tincan in orbit that exists more or less so that we can continue to claim to have a manned space program.
I think the best shot we have of actually sending people to Mars is to just go. I think that if we stop at the Moon, people (i.e., Congress) will get tired of the costs and call it a day once we've built some tin can "base" on the Moon, which we can them promptly abandon...or sell to the Chinese.
> Yes of course we could do it otherwise, but not as > efficiently or as often
This is not the case. At all.
We don't go up from a gravity well, then down into another gravity well 390,000 km away, to a surface even less hospitable than low Earth orbit, and gain anything except higher fuel costs, more danger, and theed for even MORE hardware.
Most well-respected mission designs came to the conclusion a long time ago that the Moon wasn't a "stepping stone" to Mars, it was an unnecessary detour.
Re:Shoot, I thought it said 'Astrology Hacks'
on
Astronomy Hacks
·
· Score: 1
"The zodiac" doesn't necessarily imply "astrological".
The term refers to the constellations (usually considered to number twelve, but not always) along the ecliptic, the path in the sky along which the Sun appears to travel in one year.
There are plenty of ways the term is used in decisively non-astrological ways. For exmaple, the "zodiacal light" is a faint but discernable brightness in the sky along the ecliptic created by the diffuse dust in the plane of the solar system.
I wouldn't mind a patch every DAY, as lnog as it fixed the problem.
This whole situation is much like what happened with FarCry last year - it, too, had a patch that did more harm than good, and the follow-on patch removed the more glaring errors but left others unfixed.
Right now, BF2's patch #2 has the game working, more or less, but players still show up as the wrong color (leading to teamkills), there remain graphical anomalies (which may or may not be the fault of the software) on many systems, server lag, even on machines with low pings and good stats, can be bad, and the server list will occasionally simply go blank when refreshing the list of servers.
> Not to sound all doomy & gloomy here, but i > seriously question the appeal of video clips on an > ipod.
Agreed.
As I wrote in the comments on the site in TFA:
This thing will be nifty and all, from a geek tech fetish sort of standpoint, but I have to wonder......what the hell use will it be for anyone old enough to have a life outside of watching music videos? As noted above, it'll be useless to watch films on, too small and underpowered to be useful for any sort of in-the-field DV watching/storing/editing, and now that broadcast is dead, won't even be as useful as the (never very useful) Sony Watchman back in the day.
Oh, he'll sell a bunch initially to the kind of people who bought the 1st-gen iPod Photo, but unless it has some other MAJOR selling point besides watching short form video (telephone? PDA?), it'll fly like a (beautifully-designed) lead brick.
I'm sure not going to pay several hundred dollars just to watch Amanda Congdon on the bus. I prefer to do that in the privacy of my own home. Heh.
Slashdot Mirror
2.5g's would be no fun to (try to) walk around in, true. But try it for Saturn, or Neptune, etc. You get a different picture.
Saturn: ~10.4g
Neptune: ~11.1g
Uranus: ~8.9g
> Also, scores of habitable planets and *moons with earthlike
> gravity*? That's my main problem with the "moons" hypothesis..
There's nothing about being a moon that prohibits high gravity. Dense material = smaller radius per unit of mass = higher gravity. Similarly, there's noting about being a huge planet that mandates high gravity. If one were able to stand on the "surface" of a gas giant, its gravity wouldn't be all that different from what we experience. It's all about density.
> However, anyone who thinks that using embryonic stem cells is a
> no-brainer either doesn't understand the ethical considerations at
> stake, or simply doesn't believe in ethical considerations at all.
Ah, how exactly does this follow? You're being silly, using hyperbole to get your point made, then leaving this illogical nonsense dangling.
So: I do believe that using embryonic stem cells is a no-brainer. And I most definitely do understand the ethical considerations, and the science. And I do believe in ethical considerations.
Your statement above, designed to neatly and tidily put people into a manageable group for purposes of dismissal, is clumsy, illogical, and wrong. If you want to debate the ethics of using embryonic stem cells, fine. But this sort of blanket statement doesn't further the discussion. It is, in fact, little more than a playground insult: "nah nah! you're a nincompoop!"
Before you go off attacking someone for talking about something you apparently know nothing about, perhaps you'd benefit from actually doing some reading? There is a large body of educational literature relating to peer instruction. It is not a 'vacuous' term without definition.
> Can you give us even ONE good reason why we
> should listen to this bullshit?
It works. Students learn more. Teachers are better able to pace their material. Teachers spend less time going over unneccessary ground. Students attend class more often, do their reading more often, and retain more.
This is not speculation, it's been repeatedly shown, and most people who have made a serious effort to incorporate peer instruction in some significant degree in their classrooms report positive results (as per the parameters I lay out above).
I am somewhat surprised at the venomous response to this article, particularly considering that the vast majority of negative comments are from people who know NOTHING about how this technology can be used effectively, while most of the positive comments are from people who have had some experience with it.
But I guess that par around here.
> one that I remember from high-school but not from university.
Yes, because high school kids are sooo different from incoming freshmen...
> A show of hands would do the same thing cheaper, faster, and just about as accurately.
Absolute nonsense. I've used both systems in my classroom. Have you?
When I've got four or five multiple choice answers listed, and need to quickly assess how people are looking at a problem (not just got 'the right answer', but 'are they thinking it's x? or y?'), using a show of hands is MORE time-consuming. What am I going to do, say "Ok, if you think it's option A", followed by B, C, D, E? Or maybe you want me to have them hold their hands up at different heights for each option?
If I can tell that virtually nobody was confused by some particular aspect of a problem but were confused about some other aspect, then I'm saving my students' time by not going over things previously discussed that they already understand.
Just because you don't understand how the technology is used and is useful, don't go dissing it until you've a) tried it, and b) read up on how it's most useful (see ch.1 and ch.2 from this book).
Which is why we'll be using the elevator to create feasible, large-scale inrastructure in orbit so that we can send Buck Rogers on to Mars, and anywhere else they want to go.
We can send thirty, or three hundred, astronauts into orbit and on to their destinations more easily than we can send 3 to sit in a useless tin can in orbit.
Your "elevator mechanic" argument is bogus because we currently emply loads of electricians and mecahnics on the shuttle program - they're not the ones anyone visualizes when contemplating who gets funding...it's the guys riding to orbit on outdated, dangerous, inflexible lunch systems.
Mod parent funny, for crying out loud!
> by an ad-hok distributed network
Come one..."ad-hok?"
Crawl back into your evolutionary dead-end, you fucking troglodyte.
Who the hell wants to make friends with some random screen name on /.?
I've got to second this.
UltraEdit offers exactly one thing: everything I need in an editor. While it's not OSS, it's cheap, regularly updated (but without breaking itself when new versions are released), has all of the features I could want: macros, extensible syntax highlighting, column editing, function collapse, templates, HTML validation & tidying, project & workspace management, etc.
Recommended.
God I hate the writers at Space.com. I stopped writing them with corrections early on when I realized that they don't care about accuracy, and weren't going to bother to improve. It's predigested space-oriented pabulum for the masses...but it's often incorrect or misleading.
Case in point, from TFA:
"The most active black holes eat so voraciously that they create a colossal cloud of gas and dust around them, through which astronomers cannot peer."
This is kind of true, but it's also more correct when reversed: the black hole is "active" BECAUSE there is gas and dust in the vincinity for it to 'eat'. The BH doesn't create the cloud of gas and dust in any sense.
Another:"A few quasars have been identified"
Well, ok, it you count well over two thousand of them 'a few'.
This is just sloppy work on the author's part, and is typical of the schlock they produce on a regular basis. I've seen them make patently false statements as well, in addition to simply misleading or incomplete ones. Sigh..
I'm not sure I would say that I have 'faith' in those things, because faith implies something absolute. I think that those things are almost certainly true, but are subject to revision based on new data. That's very different from the sort of faith religious peolpe describe.
My vision of the beginning of the universe is:
a) Open and subject to change based upon available evidence,
b) Based upon a great deal of observational evidence as well as deductive reasoning, and
c) Not a matter of 'faith' in that I don't have 'faith' in my vision of the beginning, only a sense that it is the best picture currently defensible based upon what we've learned about the universe in which we find ourselves.
So, no - my vision of the beginning of the universe is NOT a matter of faith. I require no creator to have flipped a switch because I am comfortable with not have the complete picture, just as I and others srtive to acquire a more complete picture.
I don't demand the existence of a God based on what I 'feel' - if I had evidence that there was one, I would believe in one. Believing in one without evidence is wrong.
> In fact, if everything does work through God's
> design, then he *created* evolution. Yes, this is a
> hard one for many to digest.
This is just so bloody convenient for you, isn't it? You can talk all you want about being open-minded, scientific, whatever - but whenever you're challenged, you get to say "But it's all God's design!!" like that's some sort of get out of jail free card.
When I talk to religious folks, it always comes down to "because the bible says so". Yeah, well, I have a book about green eggs and ham...but that doesn't mean anything. It's a book, not evidence.
THAT is why ID is a fucking crock. THAT is why religion is a crock. Fine, so it's "faith" - does that excuse you believing in something that in any other context would qualify you as insane?
I'll go around claiming that the universe was created by, and is still controlled by, small green elves who live in people's closets. I'll have EXACTLY as much evidence/proof as you do of your mythological deity - and yet religious folks get to claim that they're not nuts for believing in invisiable, all-powerful entities NOBODY HAS EVER SEEN.
Why bolt them onto a big bar?
At optical wavelengths, they could keep station using very small thrusters perfectly well to within the required tolerances. You could place one at the leading lagrange, another at the trailing lagrange, and get, what - a couple million km? (too tired to do the calculations here).
We had one of my former profs come and talk to our astro club about a long-range project he's involved with working on x-ray interferometry in space (there are a couple big projects along these lines).
For X-rays, station-keeping is much more difficult. One has to be within at most a few microns, best yet a few tenths of a micron. I don't think that this is possible yet - but it's a real target due to missions like MAXIM.
Being able to image things at very fine resolution in the x-ray band will be very, very cool. For example, if you could get 10^-6 arcseconds resolution (right now, a pie in the sky...but at least theoretically possible), you might be able to image a black hole directly (well, ok, its accretion disc and event horizon).
For those of you not familiar with why astronomers would place (frickin') lasers onto telescopes, there are multiple reasons.
The primary reason is to provide a "fake star" that can be monitored for distortion, which helps adaptive optics systems counteract atmospheric distortion in the final telescope image/data. In other words, it helps remove the "twinkle" caused by the atmosphere.
The laser at Apache Point, as well as at other locations (see previous message), is used to measure the distance to the moon (which is useful in, among other things, studies looking at the accuracy of general relativity).
The Apache Point laser is capable of measuring the distance to the moon to a millimeter using this device. (think about it: at a telescope, up on a mountain around 10,000 feet, there's probably more 'flex' in the mountain itself!).
I agree, it'll be easier to build (although OWL will use multiple segments/single focus).
But...when I read "..milli-arcsecond" resolution (in the optical!) on the OWL site, in spite of its competitors, my knees got weak, my toes curled...And I'm a grown man.
I and the guy who teaches the class I TA for recently had students calculate how large a primary would be necessary to read a homework page on the moon, from Earth. (assuming, of course, diffraction-limited seeing...hah!). Needless to say, even OWL wouldn't cut the mustard. But it'll be way, way cool, even without laser beams.
Oh - and speaking of laser beams and telescopes: Apache Point Apollo Laser. (I've been down to see this...very cool!)
Largest optical, perhaps...until OWL!
"With a diameter of 100 meter, OWL [Overwhelmingly Large Telescope] will combine unrivalled light gathering power with the ability to resolve details down to a milli-arc second."
Link: OWL
> But if the goal of the United States is to be
>truly a spacefaring nation, then bypassing the
> moon is silly.
Perhaps, perhaps not. The problem is that history shows that grand plans like "becoming a truly spacefaring nation" get funded for a little while -- long enough for the politicians to take credit for their daring vision -- and then cancelled. Witness the aftermath of the final Apollo missions: Saturn V assembly line shut down, a retreat to low earth orbit, and a boondoggle tincan in orbit that exists more or less so that we can continue to claim to have a manned space program.
I think the best shot we have of actually sending people to Mars is to just go. I think that if we stop at the Moon, people (i.e., Congress) will get tired of the costs and call it a day once we've built some tin can "base" on the Moon, which we can them promptly abandon...or sell to the Chinese.
> Yes of course we could do it otherwise, but not as
> efficiently or as often
This is not the case. At all.
We don't go up from a gravity well, then down into another gravity well 390,000 km away, to a surface even less hospitable than low Earth orbit, and gain anything except higher fuel costs, more danger, and theed for even MORE hardware.
Most well-respected mission designs came to the conclusion a long time ago that the Moon wasn't a "stepping stone" to Mars, it was an unnecessary detour.
"The zodiac" doesn't necessarily imply "astrological".
The term refers to the constellations (usually considered to number twelve, but not always) along the ecliptic, the path in the sky along which the Sun appears to travel in one year.
There are plenty of ways the term is used in decisively non-astrological ways. For exmaple, the "zodiacal light" is a faint but discernable brightness in the sky along the ecliptic created by the diffuse dust in the plane of the solar system.
I wouldn't mind a patch every DAY, as lnog as it fixed the problem.
This whole situation is much like what happened with FarCry last year - it, too, had a patch that did more harm than good, and the follow-on patch removed the more glaring errors but left others unfixed.
Right now, BF2's patch #2 has the game working, more or less, but players still show up as the wrong color (leading to teamkills), there remain graphical anomalies (which may or may not be the fault of the software) on many systems, server lag, even on machines with low pings and good stats, can be bad, and the server list will occasionally simply go blank when refreshing the list of servers.
Some patch.
> Not to sound all doomy & gloomy here, but i
...what the hell use will it be for anyone old enough to have a life outside of watching music videos? As noted above, it'll be useless to watch films on, too small and underpowered to be useful for any sort of in-the-field DV watching/storing/editing, and now that broadcast is dead, won't even be as useful as the (never very useful) Sony Watchman back in the day.
> seriously question the appeal of video clips on an
> ipod.
Agreed.
As I wrote in the comments on the site in TFA:
This thing will be nifty and all, from a geek tech fetish sort of standpoint, but I have to wonder...
Oh, he'll sell a bunch initially to the kind of people who bought the 1st-gen iPod Photo, but unless it has some other MAJOR selling point besides watching short form video (telephone? PDA?), it'll fly like a (beautifully-designed) lead brick.
I'm sure not going to pay several hundred dollars just to watch Amanda Congdon on the bus. I prefer to do that in the privacy of my own home. Heh.