The bottom line here is that most professional astronomers don't care about these objective definitions. When astronomers are doing research, none of it hangs precariously on the definition of planet or asteroid or something else. They specify what they mean -- Jupiter, or the major gas giants, or the Earth-crossing asteroids, or transneptunian objects, or plutinos.
These names (planet, asteroid, comet, etc.) are just arbitrary labels invented by people, after all. They have no special significance, and they never have. After all, planet comes from the Greek word for "wanderer," a reference to the fact that planets appeared to be stars in the sky that moved. Asteroid means "star-like," a reference to the fact (as astronomical observations improved) they appeared to be moving objects that didn't have observable disks like the other planets (because they are too small).
The IAU, the international organization responsible for such names, has never given them any objective definitions. Why? Because they don't need any. Sorting out terminology like this is almost completely ancillary to getting actual astronomy and astrophysics done. The very reason that those interested in establishing definitions can't agree on objective definitions underlines the point: because they are totally arbitrary and not very important.
Almost all of the furor about redefining terms, recategorizing objects, demoting planets and promoting asteroids, has come from amateurs and the popular media. Don't you think that if professional astronomers thought that this was such a crucial issue that they wouldn't have taken care of it handily? They haven't because it's not nearly as important as amateurs seem to think. That amateurs and the popular media are seemingly fixated on such trivialities indicates strongly to me that they're missing something: namely that these classifications have no external significance.
The map is not the territory. Give it a rest, already. I know, why doesn't everyone concentrate their energies on doing actual astronomy?
Regional differences in pay rates totally swamp any validity in comparing one's salary to a single "average" figure. Regional differences can easily account for 30-50% of a difference in salary, and that's even before you take into account at what level in their career these people are.
These surveys are useful for seeing overall trends in the average salary (whether it's increasing or decreasing, and at what relative to what it's done in the past). They're not at all useful for determining whether your salary is above or below average for what you do, where in your career you are, and where you live.
This is a pretty silly, vastly oversimplified analysis. Yes, World of Warcraft is very poular. And yes, MMOs create a certain mindset where some players feel like they're not getting their money's worth if they're not playing as often as possible. But that hardly means that other games will seriously suffer. As for the Need for Speed example, duh, yes people will consider playing Need for Speed over World or Warcraft, because they're totally different games!
Even people who like MMORPGs and have an investment in a particular one which they like very much will still want to play other kinds of games. Come on, guys, be serious.
Here. Fusion takes place everywhere, all the time, although usually at such fantastically low rates that it is for all intents and purposes negligible. The 13-Jupiter mass threshold is for sustained fusion of deuterium; below that threshold, some D-D fusion still takes place.
This is a good example of why an attempt of amateur objective definitions don't work. First, what's the distinction between energy emitted by nuclear fusion" and by contrast "thermal radiation?" The energy liberated in nuclear fusion gets emitted as thermal radiation! And even Jupiter undergoes some deuterium fusion in its core.
There's no distinction between the terms plantesimal and minor planet. They're synonyms, so drawing a contrast between them doesn't make any sense. Similarly, moon and satellite are also synonyms, so defining one as being spherical and one as not is silly." They're the same thing; if you want to make some further distinction, you should choose it by distinguishing between two terms which aren't already synonyms!
Planet X was thought to be a very large planet, responsible for causing apparent perturbations we were seeing in the orbit of Uranus and Neptune. When Voyager II flew by these planets and got refined measurements of their masses, the discrepancies went away. We now know that the revised data shows no perturbations, putting severe limits on very large objects to very great distances. That is, there is no Planet X, and there never was.
There are likely all sorts of Pluto-sized objects out there, though. So finding another one is not surprising. There's nothing special about the mass of Pluto, and so some Kuiperoids will be around the same mass, and some will be more (though probably not too many). Thus, this discovery is nothing very surprising. You'd expect to find Kuiperoids more massive than Pluto out there.
As for reigniting the "controversy" about Pluto's planetary status, probably not. There's really not much controversy here. The IAU does not have and never has had an objective definition of the word planet that Pluto succeeds or fails in meeting the criteria for. A planet is literally what we point to and say, "That's a planet." The terms are made up by us, after all; do you think Pluto cares what it's called? Do you think that somehow further enhances the study of it, knowing that it's in this classification bin but not this one?
There have been a few serious astronomers suggesting conferring dual classification -- as both a planet and an asteroid/Kuiperoid -- to Pluto. The official proposal was never about demotion. Talk at length about removing planetary status from Pluto has largely been taking place in the popular press and by amateurs. Most actual astronomers don't care, because it doesn't matter what name you give something.
For those that found this interesting, there's actually a good deal of this in the book Half-Life 2: Raising the Bar, including the side-by-side character references.
I'm afraid your analogy turns against itself. Yes, I clicked "Preview" and proofread that post. And, of course, as you'd expect, for a few hundred words, you'd expect some typos that needed to be corrected, and there were, and I did.
I could have just clicked "Submit" without proofreading it. I didn't, because I took the care to make sure that it was at least reasonably free of typos. And gee, if the result of my posting would be a transaction of hundreds of millions of dollars, I would have proofread it even more carefully.
Your example is one of someone using their own discretion and care to make sure that something was right rather than just going ahead and doing it. And that's exactly what this lady didn't do with sufficient care. And that's the whole point.
Sure, I've done really stupid things. Everyone has; that's part of life. But I've never done anything really stupid and expected not to suffer the consequences. That's the essential difference.
That's an absurd hypothetical. If it's my responsibility to do something, and I hand it off to someone else without authorization, yes, you can bet it's going to be my fault if something goes wrong.
This woman was an experienced professional and was given the authority and discretion to make such purchases. She was not some lackey hired for minimum wage.
Slashdot at its best. Look, if you fuck up so badly that you cause your company millions of dollars in immediate losses and expect the people in charge who enabled you to fuck up (not the ones who actually fucked up, because that's you) to take the responsibility for you instead of you, then you're a fool.
Are there going to be policy changes because of this? Of course, duh (and by the way, the article says that). Should there be recriminations for the people involved who allowed this person to do what was done? Yes, and there almost certainly will be, even if behind the scenes and out of sight. Should the person who screwed up be allowed to continue? Of course not; given the power to make such transactions they failed in a grotesque manner.
Is this person helpless? Is she unable to fend for herself in the world? Is she not responsible for her own actions, positive or negative? She did something, she screwed it up in a major way, and she should suffer the consequences of it. Other heads will roll, but before you chop the heads off of the people who allowed someone to do something massively stupid, you first fire the person who actually did something massively stupid.
I mean, really, this is kind of silly. Do you think that this person was authorized to make penny (well, whatever the Taiwanese equivalent is) stock purchases and accidentally typed six or seven more zeroes? No. Obviously this was someone authorized to make major transactions. She, unfortunately for her, accidentally made a purchase even more major than she had intended. You can blame procedures and software and management all you want, but do you really think that someone authorized to make major transactions shouldn't be really, really careful about it while doing it? And if such a person isn't, are they blameless?
It's hard to see the value of a report like this. It's acceptably random, but not as random as it could be? What is that supposed to mean?
Given that the article says glaringly incorrect things such as, "But no one has ever found evidence that calculating finer and finer values of pi will ever reveal an end to the string or that there is any regular pattern to be found within it" (pi has been proven to be transcendental, so the first part of this is clearly wrong; it's known that the sequence cannot end) it's a bit hard to take their confusingly stated thesis seriously.
I mean is it really a shock to anyone that a grammar checker, Microsoft's or not, is not perfect? Not until you get something that can completely parse natural language will you get a completely accurate grammar checker, and we're obviously nowhere near that point.
It's like complaining loudly that an OCR system doesn't do a perfect job. Of course it doesn't!
There is a completely different approach to pictoral messages, which I think is actually much more promising. Instead of trying to communicate by drawing pictures, it just consists of a sequence of symbols indicating different concepts and ideas, starting with basic mathematics and moving its way on up. A great deal of repetition and examples are used, with cross-referencing and more generalized examples, in order to help make the meaning clear. Freudenthal put this together in a book called Lincos.
As a flagship example, and then offered with no explanation whatsoever to a group of volunteers who tried to decipher it. Given that the alien civilization that was modeled here was quite different from our own, it is surprising how much of the message was deciphered by the participants. (Oh, and Lincos-like messages can easily encode pictoral-type messages in themselves, just as the Contact Project showed.)
Keep in mind there's a quality of issue here. The latest programs people are talking about here are Voyager, Enterprise, and maybe Crusade. These were not at all the best science fiction television shows.
There's a much simpler explanation to all this: It's just that the quality of the product has gone way down. People don't watch them anymore, so these bad shows don't do well, and they get cancelled. There's a maniac fan element, but maniac fans don't make ratings appear out of the air, so no one listens to them.
So the real question is: Why has the quality been so bad lately? From Voyager and Enterprise, it certainly seems like the Star Trek franchise has completely run out of new things to show us. As for other people with new ideas willing to take risks, the studios are probably a little nervous about it since the big names are doing so bad, and studios aren't making a distinction between _decent_ science fiction and utter crap.
Slashdot Mirror
The bottom line here is that most professional astronomers don't care about these objective definitions. When astronomers are doing research, none of it hangs precariously on the definition of planet or asteroid or something else. They specify what they mean -- Jupiter, or the major gas giants, or the Earth-crossing asteroids, or transneptunian objects, or plutinos.
These names (planet, asteroid, comet, etc.) are just arbitrary labels invented by people, after all. They have no special significance, and they never have. After all, planet comes from the Greek word for "wanderer," a reference to the fact that planets appeared to be stars in the sky that moved. Asteroid means "star-like," a reference to the fact (as astronomical observations improved) they appeared to be moving objects that didn't have observable disks like the other planets (because they are too small).
The IAU, the international organization responsible for such names, has never given them any objective definitions. Why? Because they don't need any. Sorting out terminology like this is almost completely ancillary to getting actual astronomy and astrophysics done. The very reason that those interested in establishing definitions can't agree on objective definitions underlines the point: because they are totally arbitrary and not very important.
Almost all of the furor about redefining terms, recategorizing objects, demoting planets and promoting asteroids, has come from amateurs and the popular media. Don't you think that if professional astronomers thought that this was such a crucial issue that they wouldn't have taken care of it handily? They haven't because it's not nearly as important as amateurs seem to think. That amateurs and the popular media are seemingly fixated on such trivialities indicates strongly to me that they're missing something: namely that these classifications have no external significance.
The map is not the territory. Give it a rest, already. I know, why doesn't everyone concentrate their energies on doing actual astronomy?
Resign. You're obviously in way over your head if you have to resort to asking Slashdot readers for advice like this.
Regional differences in pay rates totally swamp any validity in comparing one's salary to a single "average" figure. Regional differences can easily account for 30-50% of a difference in salary, and that's even before you take into account at what level in their career these people are.
These surveys are useful for seeing overall trends in the average salary (whether it's increasing or decreasing, and at what relative to what it's done in the past). They're not at all useful for determining whether your salary is above or below average for what you do, where in your career you are, and where you live.
This is a pretty silly, vastly oversimplified analysis. Yes, World of Warcraft is very poular. And yes, MMOs create a certain mindset where some players feel like they're not getting their money's worth if they're not playing as often as possible. But that hardly means that other games will seriously suffer. As for the Need for Speed example, duh, yes people will consider playing Need for Speed over World or Warcraft, because they're totally different games!
Even people who like MMORPGs and have an investment in a particular one which they like very much will still want to play other kinds of games. Come on, guys, be serious.
Slashdot really needs some more scientifically literate editors. You guys keep jumping on crank bandwagons and making yourselves look foolish.
It's several million amperes, but it only operates for a few millionths of a second, so the total charge involve ends up only being a few coulombs.
Here. Fusion takes place everywhere, all the time, although usually at such fantastically low rates that it is for all intents and purposes negligible. The 13-Jupiter mass threshold is for sustained fusion of deuterium; below that threshold, some D-D fusion still takes place.
This is a good example of why an attempt of amateur objective definitions don't work. First, what's the distinction between energy emitted by nuclear fusion" and by contrast "thermal radiation?" The energy liberated in nuclear fusion gets emitted as thermal radiation! And even Jupiter undergoes some deuterium fusion in its core.
There's no distinction between the terms plantesimal and minor planet. They're synonyms, so drawing a contrast between them doesn't make any sense. Similarly, moon and satellite are also synonyms, so defining one as being spherical and one as not is silly." They're the same thing; if you want to make some further distinction, you should choose it by distinguishing between two terms which aren't already synonyms!
Planet X was thought to be a very large planet, responsible for causing apparent perturbations we were seeing in the orbit of Uranus and Neptune. When Voyager II flew by these planets and got refined measurements of their masses, the discrepancies went away. We now know that the revised data shows no perturbations, putting severe limits on very large objects to very great distances. That is, there is no Planet X, and there never was.
There are likely all sorts of Pluto-sized objects out there, though. So finding another one is not surprising. There's nothing special about the mass of Pluto, and so some Kuiperoids will be around the same mass, and some will be more (though probably not too many). Thus, this discovery is nothing very surprising. You'd expect to find Kuiperoids more massive than Pluto out there.
As for reigniting the "controversy" about Pluto's planetary status, probably not. There's really not much controversy here. The IAU does not have and never has had an objective definition of the word planet that Pluto succeeds or fails in meeting the criteria for. A planet is literally what we point to and say, "That's a planet." The terms are made up by us, after all; do you think Pluto cares what it's called? Do you think that somehow further enhances the study of it, knowing that it's in this classification bin but not this one?
There have been a few serious astronomers suggesting conferring dual classification -- as both a planet and an asteroid/Kuiperoid -- to Pluto. The official proposal was never about demotion. Talk at length about removing planetary status from Pluto has largely been taking place in the popular press and by amateurs. Most actual astronomers don't care, because it doesn't matter what name you give something.
There's already an Apollo asteroid named Bacchus.
55% means women control it? Who failed math?
For those that found this interesting, there's actually a good deal of this in the book Half-Life 2: Raising the Bar , including the side-by-side character references.
I'm afraid your analogy turns against itself. Yes, I clicked "Preview" and proofread that post. And, of course, as you'd expect, for a few hundred words, you'd expect some typos that needed to be corrected, and there were, and I did.
I could have just clicked "Submit" without proofreading it. I didn't, because I took the care to make sure that it was at least reasonably free of typos. And gee, if the result of my posting would be a transaction of hundreds of millions of dollars, I would have proofread it even more carefully.
Your example is one of someone using their own discretion and care to make sure that something was right rather than just going ahead and doing it. And that's exactly what this lady didn't do with sufficient care. And that's the whole point.
Sure, I've done really stupid things. Everyone has; that's part of life. But I've never done anything really stupid and expected not to suffer the consequences. That's the essential difference.
That's an absurd hypothetical. If it's my responsibility to do something, and I hand it off to someone else without authorization, yes, you can bet it's going to be my fault if something goes wrong.
This woman was an experienced professional and was given the authority and discretion to make such purchases. She was not some lackey hired for minimum wage.
Slashdot at its best. Look, if you fuck up so badly that you cause your company millions of dollars in immediate losses and expect the people in charge who enabled you to fuck up (not the ones who actually fucked up, because that's you) to take the responsibility for you instead of you, then you're a fool.
Are there going to be policy changes because of this? Of course, duh (and by the way, the article says that). Should there be recriminations for the people involved who allowed this person to do what was done? Yes, and there almost certainly will be, even if behind the scenes and out of sight. Should the person who screwed up be allowed to continue? Of course not; given the power to make such transactions they failed in a grotesque manner.
Is this person helpless? Is she unable to fend for herself in the world? Is she not responsible for her own actions, positive or negative? She did something, she screwed it up in a major way, and she should suffer the consequences of it. Other heads will roll, but before you chop the heads off of the people who allowed someone to do something massively stupid, you first fire the person who actually did something massively stupid.
I mean, really, this is kind of silly. Do you think that this person was authorized to make penny (well, whatever the Taiwanese equivalent is) stock purchases and accidentally typed six or seven more zeroes? No. Obviously this was someone authorized to make major transactions. She, unfortunately for her, accidentally made a purchase even more major than she had intended. You can blame procedures and software and management all you want, but do you really think that someone authorized to make major transactions shouldn't be really, really careful about it while doing it? And if such a person isn't, are they blameless?
It's hard to see the value of a report like this. It's acceptably random, but not as random as it could be? What is that supposed to mean?
Given that the article says glaringly incorrect things such as, "But no one has ever found evidence that calculating finer and finer values of pi will ever reveal an end to the string or that there is any regular pattern to be found within it" (pi has been proven to be transcendental, so the first part of this is clearly wrong; it's known that the sequence cannot end) it's a bit hard to take their confusingly stated thesis seriously.
Where's James Harris when you need him?
Slashdot sure like crackpots, for some reason.
Let it go, already, folks, the franchise has nothing left to give except "a copy of a copy of a copy," to quote Roger Ebert.
I mean is it really a shock to anyone that a grammar checker, Microsoft's or not, is not perfect? Not until you get something that can completely parse natural language will you get a completely accurate grammar checker, and we're obviously nowhere near that point.
It's like complaining loudly that an OCR system doesn't do a perfect job. Of course it doesn't!
There is a completely different approach to pictoral messages, which I think is actually much more promising. Instead of trying to communicate by drawing pictures, it just consists of a sequence of symbols indicating different concepts and ideas, starting with basic mathematics and moving its way on up. A great deal of repetition and examples are used, with cross-referencing and more generalized examples, in order to help make the meaning clear. Freudenthal put this together in a book called Lincos .
As a flagship example, and then offered with no explanation whatsoever to a group of volunteers who tried to decipher it. Given that the alien civilization that was modeled here was quite different from our own, it is surprising how much of the message was deciphered by the participants. (Oh, and Lincos-like messages can easily encode pictoral-type messages in themselves, just as the Contact Project showed.)
He's running Linux, not any version of MacOS. You don't call someone running an Intel box running Linux a Windows machine, do you?
Keep in mind there's a quality of issue here. The latest programs people are talking about here are Voyager, Enterprise, and maybe Crusade. These were not at all the best science fiction television shows.
There's a much simpler explanation to all this: It's just that the quality of the product has gone way down. People don't watch them anymore, so these bad shows don't do well, and they get cancelled. There's a maniac fan element, but maniac fans don't make ratings appear out of the air, so no one listens to them.
So the real question is: Why has the quality been so bad lately? From Voyager and Enterprise, it certainly seems like the Star Trek franchise has completely run out of new things to show us. As for other people with new ideas willing to take risks, the studios are probably a little nervous about it since the big names are doing so bad, and studios aren't making a distinction between _decent_ science fiction and utter crap.
After The Legend of the Rangers, is there really any question why the film didn't get greenlit?