I'll second the Dozois anthologies, and go on to recommend Robert Reed's other stuff, like The Hormone Jungle. I wouldn't have come across it except for an unusual semisecret fact.
It'd be nice if they read this and answered. But it seems like in practice any natural object in a reasonably stable orbit around a planet or even an asteroid is called a moon. I think at about 1.6 km Dactyl holds the record - Ida, the asteroid it orbits, is only about 30 km across. There is a size limit for moons, but it's based on whether we can determine a definite orbit.
The findings represent the first discovery of moons from ground-based telescopes in more than a half-century
around Neptune. The same people (more or less) involved in this discovery have also been finding previously unknown moons around Jupiter and Saturn, using Earth based telescopes.
The cool (hee hee) thing here is that Neptune's largest moon, Triton, appears to be a recently captured Kuiper Belt object. The orbits of Neptune's other satellites should have some "memory" of the capture. But this is a bit like putting a Swiss watch back together after it's been hit with a hammer.
Re:Let's hope this means the end of veal
on
Lab-Grown Steak
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· Score: 1
Please don't take this as a quibble, but what about Omega-3 fatty acids? A lack of them can cause depression and heart problems (but IANAD or the mythical unbiased nutritionist;-).
There are 3 kinds; one comes from flaxseed oil and the other two from oily fish. It also seems like they break down when heated. That's right, cowkillers, you're no better off! Omega-3's are part of why the typical Japanese diet is supposed to be so much better than the typical North American diet. (The hens that produce Omega-3 eggs are fed either flax or oily fish.)
The problem is that it's not clear whether only one of flaxseed or oily fish is enough by itself. I've googled for it, but it all seems so biased by commercial interests or even a little vegan head in the sandism.
So I think it would be great if lab grown mackerel, tuna, etc. became commercially available, and not just for peace of mind. Beef can be faked with veggie "meat" satisfyingly enough, but I've never found good veggie "fish". I really miss sashimi, and don't believe for a second that tuna fishing is dolphin safe.
Ah...the real reason why Canada is still together;-)
Ask the average Ontarian why Quebec should stay in Canada and the answer is "so we can drive to New Brunswick". (Manitobans + westward admit they never drive to the Maritimes anyway)
An old joke (and yes it is a joke) but newly relevant to our southern neighbors.
Wouldn't the most fair jurors be lawyers or judges? Somehow I'm guessing they usually get declined as well.
Geeks of a different sort;-) They may also have a conflict of interests. That could be ameliorated by changing venues, but still the other jurors would probably be intimidated by the lawyer in their midst. I think the fix for that would be to instruct all jurors not to reveal their occupations to each other.
To clarify what I originally posted, I think random juror selection is fairest to jurors, the plaintiff, and the accused, but I accept that some jurors should be rejected, with the biggies being conflict of interest or unreasonable burden for a juror. I have a feeling that weeding out conflicts of interest, as objected to by the lawyers, may have been the seed that the current mess sprouted from, but obviously the fraction of rejected jurors should be lower than it is.
A fair judge would be a good position to spot trouble early, but if all judges were reliably fair we wouldn't need juries so much. The rejection rules should be specified before hand (i.e. no lawyers), probably by a legislative body.
Statistically, the best rejection threshhold and jury size would be a very interesting optimization problem.
My lawyer neighbor says this is because they don't want computer people because we think logically and are not emotional.
So lawyers are rejecting exactly the fairest jurors, doing a grave injustice to justice. We should be outraged, but on the other hand...
...in a complex trial the personyears spent by the jury can easily outweigh the time of the sentence (if a guilty verdict is found, of course). Would society really be better served by disciplined thinkers spend their time in juries as opposed to whatever it is they would normally be doing? A bit bitter, but we're being given lemons.
I think lawyers should have NO say on who goes in the jury. Not only can it skew the results, but it wastes a LOT of time. The time of people like you who are called in, interviewed, and rejected (I've heard of hundreds of people being summoned for high profile cases), and the court's time for the time spent interviewing and haggling. And they complain of a backlog!
Sure, not every random person is suitable, but neither is every lawyer-edited jury. IANAL, but I suspect that the time savings from simplifying jury trials (and reducing the number of jury members while we're at it) would greatly outweigh the putative increase in the mistrial rate. Bumping up the frequency of venue changes would help.
Since you asked about my juror experience as a geek, I was called once for a trial in Quebec, but I was in a Waterloo (Ontario) co-op program at the time. I was freaked out because the initial estimate of the trial length was 6 months, and even a couple of months would have delayed my degree by a whole year. Fortunately I did not have to go because they would have had to pay hotel bills since I was from out-of-province. It seems likely that professional geeks are more mobile than nongeeks, and therefore undersummoned for juries. In my case though, I was greatly relieved.
Alright, today the US military is disbanded. Boom, gone. How long do think it would take for the US to invaded?
Pretty long! Who would do it, and why? All U.S. neighbors are too economically entwined to really want to rock the boat, and besides, the U.S. has 300 000 000 people. The most obvious threat would be China, but exactly what would they get out of it?
Sure the U.S. has enemies that would consider attacking out of sheer hate, but they are
too small
too far away
too poor
and besides, the US military doesn't do much to stop those enemies - if anything they're egged on by its existence.
Think before the next time you ask a rhetorical question!
how long do we think it took for "mostly hydrogen, some helium, and a little lithium" to be converted into all of the naturally occuring elements of today?
It seems to have happened rapidly with the first generation of stars, and then more gently from then on, as can be seen by looking at very distant galaxies (whose light left them long ago). As for why, metals help gas cool, reducing the mass needed for a clump to collapse and form a star. Waving aside everything we don't understand about star formation, this suggests that the pre-metal stars would have been very massive. Compared to our sun, massive stars burn very quickly and then go supernova, spreading the metals they copiously produced all over the place. According to this theory, and more or less agreeing with what we see, the first generation of stars should be very rare since they all exploded long ago, but made enough metal that the next generation was (and is, since many of them are still around) relatively normal.
To go way out on a limb, perhaps this newly discovered star was at the low end of the mass distribtion for the first stars.
What happens when a dust cloud that has some metals, but not many, forms a stellar system? Do you still get planets the size of Jupiter? Or do all the planets get downscaled, so instead of Jupiters you get Neptunes? Would the inner planets get downscaled too? Or maybe you just get inner planets, of similar sizes to ours, and no big gas bag planets at all?
We can't yet say, because it is so difficult to detect anything smaller than a Jupiter, i.e. just because our instruments aren't yet powerful enough to find the smaller planets doesn't mean they're not there.
We do know that stars with higher metallicities are more likely to have planets.
Or is it just that if we were that far from jupiter the water content would be too small to detect?
Bingo. Detecting nearby water vapor is just a matter of using a spectroscope. Seeing it from parsecs away requires at least one of:
much larger telescope
a lot more water
the water to be doing something to call attention to itself.
In this situation we're talking about the last option (masing). When a cloud mases, it becomes incredibly bright in the masing spectral line, but masing requires certain conditions. The announcement of the nondetection surmised that masing might happen in our solar system when a comet hits a planet, but that's a temporary and sporadic occurance. How often it happens depends on the age and numbers of comets and planets in the system, but the bottom line is
that not detecting water masing in any given single observation does not mean that there's no water there.
Just don't venture into the psych building, or the 6th floor of the math building without a compass and a ball of string, or you'll never get out alive.
Hah, I did the 6th floor without aids...but anything past the 1st floor of the psych building should only be attempted with a GPS. U(W) should invite Bill to survey his new possession, take him for a tour, and strand him on the 6th floor.
And of course you wouldn't want to have the backup HD(s) in the same computer. A friend was doing that until all three HDs fizzled at once (probably a power supply problem).
No, but I do have electrical tape holding a 3.5" HD in a 5.25" slot. That means I've accomplished the impossible: using tape for random access storage...but not in a terribly exciting way. I eventually splurged on those mounting racks, but I haven't installed them yet.
On a related note, due to the inherent instabilities of a ringworld, I would suggest looking for signs of jets (or other methods of in-space propulsion) around the peripherary of the disk. That should provide significant evidence as to whether it's really a ringworld, or "just" a belt of dust, as the article indicates.
We can already see that there's lots of dust all over the system, because the hamburger buns are light scattered from dust. Also, although I didn't see it mentioned in the article, they probably took a spectrum which should show carbon
dust like other stars of this type do.
As for grav. instability, that's only if you make it in one big piece. Many individual particles would still be stable, like Saturn's rings. The particles could be space stations, and the same principle applies to Dyson spheres (which are more energy efficient).
they do not have to pay any of the massive insurrance costs that should go with nuclear power
Not so massive compared to the insurance costs of fossil fuel fired power plants in case they pollute and kill people, or flooding from hydroelectricity... oh wait, those things do happen, and you can't buy insurance for things that are pretty much guaranteed to happen.
GNU emacs 21 has query-replace-regexp-eval, which means search and replace (after prompting) a regexp with the result of a lisp expression, which can use the results of the match of course .
It's not a spreadsheet and could be expanded upon, but it can do spreadsheet like things surprisingly easily without needing to export to/import from a spreadsheet, especially since you can develop your regexp and expression one match at a time (using undo to back up) then ! when everything's ready to do it all. Don't worry about not knowing lisp; if you can handle reverse Polish notation, you're ready for the bread and butter of spreadsheet type operations.
And AM mostly gets reflected by the ionosphere; i.e. most of it does not go into space. That's why AM stations have larger ranges. I thought solar excitation of the ionosphere was the reason for the day/night variation, but it doesn't really matter for us.
Encryption and compression, or a billion little cell phones instead of one big transmitting station, all tend to resemble noise, but the artificial transmissions could still have a different spectrum from stellar emission, and be noticeable that way.
1. I wasn't saying that oxygen is a requirement for life. I was saying that where you see oxygen, there's probably life, so it's worthwhile looking.
2. None of the anaerobic life on Earth has reached any sort of intelligence. Multicellurarism especially seems to need an efficient fuel for passing energy around and for now oxygen is king.
Our A.I. offspring will use electrons (positrons if they're crazy;) or light, but most likely will remember that oxygen use is one of the stages on the way to intelligence.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll second the Dozois anthologies, and go on to recommend Robert Reed's other stuff, like The Hormone Jungle. I wouldn't have come across it except for an unusual semisecret fact.
Second, it's a good thing he branched out from General Relativity.
I strongly recommend Great Sky River and Tides of Light.
Just make sure you read Protector before Ringworld Engineers! Actually, skip Ringworld Engineers and go to The Integral Trees and The Smoke Ring.
Check this out. It's ADOM (another Roguelike game), and statically rendered scenes, but there you go.
It'd be nice if they read this and answered. But it seems like in practice any natural object in a reasonably stable orbit around a planet or even an asteroid is called a moon. I think at about 1.6 km Dactyl holds the record - Ida, the asteroid it orbits, is only about 30 km across. There is a size limit for moons, but it's based on whether we can determine a definite orbit.
around Neptune. The same people (more or less) involved in this discovery have also been finding previously unknown moons around Jupiter and Saturn, using Earth based telescopes.
The cool (hee hee) thing here is that Neptune's largest moon, Triton, appears to be a recently captured Kuiper Belt object. The orbits of Neptune's other satellites should have some "memory" of the capture. But this is a bit like putting a Swiss watch back together after it's been hit with a hammer.
There are 3 kinds; one comes from flaxseed oil and the other two from oily fish. It also seems like they break down when heated. That's right, cowkillers, you're no better off! Omega-3's are part of why the typical Japanese diet is supposed to be so much better than the typical North American diet. (The hens that produce Omega-3 eggs are fed either flax or oily fish.)
The problem is that it's not clear whether only one of flaxseed or oily fish is enough by itself. I've googled for it, but it all seems so biased by commercial interests or even a little vegan head in the sandism.
So I think it would be great if lab grown mackerel, tuna, etc. became commercially available, and not just for peace of mind. Beef can be faked with veggie "meat" satisfyingly enough, but I've never found good veggie "fish". I really miss sashimi, and don't believe for a second that tuna fishing is dolphin safe.
Ask the average Ontarian why Quebec should stay in Canada and the answer is "so we can drive to New Brunswick". (Manitobans + westward admit they never drive to the Maritimes anyway)
An old joke (and yes it is a joke) but newly relevant to our southern neighbors.
Geeks of a different sort ;-) They may also have a conflict of interests. That could be ameliorated by changing venues, but still the other jurors would probably be intimidated by the lawyer in their midst. I think the fix for that would be to instruct all jurors not to reveal their occupations to each other.
To clarify what I originally posted, I think random juror selection is fairest to jurors, the plaintiff, and the accused, but I accept that some jurors should be rejected, with the biggies being conflict of interest or unreasonable burden for a juror. I have a feeling that weeding out conflicts of interest, as objected to by the lawyers, may have been the seed that the current mess sprouted from, but obviously the fraction of rejected jurors should be lower than it is.
A fair judge would be a good position to spot trouble early, but if all judges were reliably fair we wouldn't need juries so much. The rejection rules should be specified before hand (i.e. no lawyers), probably by a legislative body. Statistically, the best rejection threshhold and jury size would be a very interesting optimization problem.
So lawyers are rejecting exactly the fairest jurors, doing a grave injustice to justice. We should be outraged, but on the other hand...
I think lawyers should have NO say on who goes in the jury. Not only can it skew the results, but it wastes a LOT of time. The time of people like you who are called in, interviewed, and rejected (I've heard of hundreds of people being summoned for high profile cases), and the court's time for the time spent interviewing and haggling. And they complain of a backlog!
Sure, not every random person is suitable, but neither is every lawyer-edited jury. IANAL, but I suspect that the time savings from simplifying jury trials (and reducing the number of jury members while we're at it) would greatly outweigh the putative increase in the mistrial rate. Bumping up the frequency of venue changes would help.
Since you asked about my juror experience as a geek, I was called once for a trial in Quebec, but I was in a Waterloo (Ontario) co-op program at the time. I was freaked out because the initial estimate of the trial length was 6 months, and even a couple of months would have delayed my degree by a whole year. Fortunately I did not have to go because they would have had to pay hotel bills since I was from out-of-province. It seems likely that professional geeks are more mobile than nongeeks, and therefore undersummoned for juries. In my case though, I was greatly relieved.
Pretty long! Who would do it, and why? All U.S. neighbors are too economically entwined to really want to rock the boat, and besides, the U.S. has 300 000 000 people. The most obvious threat would be China, but exactly what would they get out of it?
Sure the U.S. has enemies that would consider attacking out of sheer hate, but they are
- too small
- too far away
- too poor
and besides, the US military doesn't do much to stop those enemies - if anything they're egged on by its existence.Think before the next time you ask a rhetorical question!
It seems to have happened rapidly with the first generation of stars, and then more gently from then on, as can be seen by looking at very distant galaxies (whose light left them long ago). As for why, metals help gas cool, reducing the mass needed for a clump to collapse and form a star. Waving aside everything we don't understand about star formation, this suggests that the pre-metal stars would have been very massive. Compared to our sun, massive stars burn very quickly and then go supernova, spreading the metals they copiously produced all over the place. According to this theory, and more or less agreeing with what we see, the first generation of stars should be very rare since they all exploded long ago, but made enough metal that the next generation was (and is, since many of them are still around) relatively normal.
To go way out on a limb, perhaps this newly discovered star was at the low end of the mass distribtion for the first stars.
We do know that stars with higher metallicities are more likely to have planets.
Bingo. Detecting nearby water vapor is just a matter of using a spectroscope. Seeing it from parsecs away requires at least one of:
- much larger telescope
- a lot more water
- the water to be doing something to call attention to itself.
In this situation we're talking about the last option (masing). When a cloud mases, it becomes incredibly bright in the masing spectral line, but masing requires certain conditions. The announcement of the nondetection surmised that masing might happen in our solar system when a comet hits a planet, but that's a temporary and sporadic occurance. How often it happens depends on the age and numbers of comets and planets in the system, but the bottom line is that not detecting water masing in any given single observation does not mean that there's no water there.OT: What's with all the OT trolls in this thread?
Aargh...and here we physicists thought we were tormenting you engineers when we pointed it out in our lobby ;-)
I don't know if even the poster knew, but U(W) has been using a Borg ship as its Arts library for years.
Hah, I did the 6th floor without aids...but anything past the 1st floor of the psych building should only be attempted with a GPS. U(W) should invite Bill to survey his new possession, take him for a tour, and strand him on the 6th floor.
And of course you wouldn't want to have the backup HD(s) in the same computer. A friend was doing that until all three HDs fizzled at once (probably a power supply problem).
No, but I do have electrical tape holding a 3.5" HD in a 5.25" slot. That means I've accomplished the impossible: using tape for random access storage...but not in a terribly exciting way. I eventually splurged on those mounting racks, but I haven't installed them yet.
We can already see that there's lots of dust all over the system, because the hamburger buns are light scattered from dust. Also, although I didn't see it mentioned in the article, they probably took a spectrum which should show carbon dust like other stars of this type do.
As for grav. instability, that's only if you make it in one big piece. Many individual particles would still be stable, like Saturn's rings. The particles could be space stations, and the same principle applies to Dyson spheres (which are more energy efficient).
Not so massive compared to the insurance costs of fossil fuel fired power plants in case they pollute and kill people, or flooding from hydroelectricity ... oh wait, those things do happen, and you can't buy insurance for things that are pretty much guaranteed to happen.
It's not a spreadsheet and could be expanded upon, but it can do spreadsheet like things surprisingly easily without needing to export to/import from a spreadsheet, especially since you can develop your regexp and expression one match at a time (using undo to back up) then ! when everything's ready to do it all. Don't worry about not knowing lisp; if you can handle reverse Polish notation, you're ready for the bread and butter of spreadsheet type operations.
Encryption and compression, or a billion little cell phones instead of one big transmitting station, all tend to resemble noise, but the artificial transmissions could still have a different spectrum from stellar emission, and be noticeable that way.
2. None of the anaerobic life on Earth has reached any sort of intelligence. Multicellurarism especially seems to need an efficient fuel for passing energy around and for now oxygen is king. Our A.I. offspring will use electrons (positrons if they're crazy ;) or light, but most likely will remember that oxygen use is one of the stages on the way to intelligence.