I had to read this several times to realize that the OP wasn't talking about something being sold at WalMart. Maybe Michael Robertson should add this to the Linspire line.
He is trying to model an effect that has aspects in both the radio and the optical (at least - let's ignore the X ray). The termination shock and the heliosphere in general (or the galactic wind) is an excellent vacuum - a very dilute plasma where 1 proton per cubic centimeter is high density. We know the physics of the interaction between such dilute plasmas and light very well. The plasma is a dispersive media, which means that its effect on light (including radio) has a strong frequency dependance. The CMB measurements are at a number of different frequencies, and the better ones (such as COBE) are at multiple frequencies, precisely so that such plasma effects can be removed from the data. So, the effect on the CMB has been estimated and removed. By the way, such a dilute plasma has no effect on visible light, so this does nothing to explain the other signatures of the Axis of Evil in visible light. Similar things can be said about radio and visible light emissions from the heliosphere.
Now, if he had tried to calculate these effects, that would have been a physics paper, even if he had to postulate unusual and unlikely things at the heliosphere to get the effect he wants. But, he doesn't. All he does is mention various effects, without attempting to calculate anything. That's why I said there was no physics in it.
I hardly know where to begin, but the physics, as described in the original post, is wrong. I am going to read the article now, but just remember that Arxiv articles are not peer reviewed before they are posted.
Now-a-days, operators are supposed to "deorbit" satellites. For geosynchronous satellites, that means boosting them up out of that orbit by a few 100 km, while for LEOs that generally means putting them into the atmosphere.
I thought that there was a formal requirement to do this, but this article indicates that it is just an informal agreement :
There is a "gentlemens agreement" to either de-orbit the satellite when in low earth orbit, or raise it to a "graveyard" orbit some 300kms above the geo-synchronous orbit of most large communications and television broadcast satellites.
Re:Word and TeX/LaTex are two different Animals
on
MS Word 2010 Takes On TeX
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
In my experience, in Word you layout your document exactly how you want it to be viewed, make some minor change, again layout your document, make another change which again screws up your layout, and repeat throughout the editing process. What a waste of time.
I hate Word, and use it rarely. Those that like it can have it.
Quite true. The VP's house is (inside the USNO) known as "Quarters A" - there are 7 (IIRC) other Quarters at the USNO, 6 houses for Admirals and one for the on-site Navy facility manager.
Quarters A was build for the USNO Superintendent, was occupied by the Navy CNO for a long time, and taken over for the VP in the 1970's. Note in each case a higher rank bumped the previous occupant.
The old US Naval Observatory was located in Foggy Bottom, just across from where the Kennedy Center is now. If you are coming in from Virginia across the Roosevelt Bridge, you can see at one point the old dome for the 26 inch telescope, where Hall discovered the moons of Mars.
This site is now the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery for the Navy. I bet that the article is referring to a bunker at Observatory Circle.
I remember reading some time ago (in the 1970's) of some research that was already old then (1950's?), about sleep deprivation literally killing cats. (Who would do such research is not clear, but looking back on things I suspect a military connection.)
This must be available in some public archive, if anyone cares to hunt for it.
In this case, none of my systems were down, and I wouldn't have known that there was a problem if I hadn't heard from outside, as my connection to Google goes through Cogent, and that seems to have been unaffected.
In the 1970's, on IBM 370's, you could have virtual memory if you created your own swap tables. This required a lot of thinking about program structure and execution order. You had to figure out if a routine was in use or not, and swap it in and out of memory. If someone added a call to a routine while it was swapped out, the program would dump core.
Worse, sloppy programmers would assume that the contents of non global variables would be there from one call of a routine to the next. That would be true - as long as the routine wasn't swapped out. So, changing the swap tables was likely to cause subtle bugs, as counters or indices suddenly got reset to random numbers. Since the swapping would generally depend on what the program was doing, it might pass simple check cases, but go weird some of the time on extended runs.
I can remember literally spending weeks debugging such problems in previously working code.
I believe that this works out to over $ 200 billion per year. I suspect we spend almost this much already; the trouble is it is mostly for the military, which doesn't always do much for the rest of us.
I am not a lawyer, but my understanding is that fair use is an old common law concept that was just (partially) codified in the 1976 Copyright Act. Putting that in the law was a good thing, but adopting the Berne Convention (life + 50 years, no registration) was not a good thing.
Slashdot Mirror
I had to read this several times to realize that the OP wasn't talking about something being sold at WalMart. Maybe Michael Robertson should add this to the Linspire line.
Cars... Hmm... Not a good one. You ask too much.
Here is why I said what I said.
He is trying to model an effect that has aspects in both the radio and the optical (at least - let's ignore the X ray). The termination shock and the heliosphere in general (or the galactic wind) is an excellent vacuum - a very dilute plasma where 1 proton per cubic centimeter is high density. We know the physics of the interaction between such dilute plasmas and light very well. The plasma is a dispersive media, which means that its effect on light (including radio) has a strong frequency dependance. The CMB measurements are at a number of different frequencies, and the better ones (such as COBE) are at multiple frequencies, precisely so that such plasma effects can be removed from the data. So, the effect on the CMB has been estimated and removed. By the way, such a dilute plasma has no effect on visible light, so this does nothing to explain the other signatures of the Axis of Evil in visible light. Similar things can be said about radio and visible light emissions from the heliosphere.
Now, if he had tried to calculate these effects, that would have been a physics paper, even if he had to postulate unusual and unlikely things at the heliosphere to get the effect he wants. But, he doesn't. All he does is mention various effects, without attempting to calculate anything. That's why I said there was no physics in it.
Having read the paper, there is basically no physics in it. A lot of handwaving and references to various effects, but no physics.
Because cosmologists read the news and have a sense of humor.
Some of the basic Axis of Evil papers are
http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0502237
http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0611518
http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0604410
Note the date on the first one.
I hardly know where to begin, but the physics, as described in the original post, is wrong. I am going to read the article now, but just remember that Arxiv articles are not peer reviewed before they are posted.
Putting mass off the Earth into orbit around the Earth does not change the orbit of the combined (Earth + satellite) system.
Basically every city that gets its water from a river drinks the recycled urine etc. from the folks upstream.
And, that is most cities located on rivers.
I've been doing that on this planet for years !
Now-a-days, operators are supposed to "deorbit" satellites. For geosynchronous satellites, that means boosting them up out of that orbit by a few 100 km, while for LEOs that generally means putting them into the atmosphere.
I thought that there was a formal requirement to do this, but this article indicates that it is just an informal agreement :
There is a "gentlemens agreement" to either de-orbit the satellite when in low earth orbit, or raise it to a "graveyard" orbit some 300kms above the geo-synchronous orbit of most large communications and television broadcast satellites.
Given that the Shuttle can launch 24 tons to LEO, and Arianne V 21 tons to LEO, one has to wonder how, if
the expected satellite mass is expected to remain near or slightly above 100,000 kilograms ,
these satellites will be launched ? Of course, no one is launching 100 metric ton satellites. That is presumably satellite mass launched per year.
Both the slashdot post and the original article seemed to have munged this totally.
In Opera
Preferences > Advanced > Content > Enable Java (uncheck) > OK
In my experience, in Word you layout your document exactly how you want it to be viewed, make some minor change, again layout your document, make another change which again screws up your layout, and repeat throughout the editing process. What a waste of time.
I hate Word, and use it rarely. Those that like it can have it.
Quite true. The VP's house is (inside the USNO) known as "Quarters A" - there are 7 (IIRC) other Quarters at the USNO, 6 houses for Admirals and one for the on-site Navy facility manager.
Quarters A was build for the USNO Superintendent, was occupied by the Navy CNO for a long time, and taken over for the VP in the 1970's. Note in each case a higher rank bumped the previous occupant.
The old US Naval Observatory was located in Foggy Bottom, just across from where the Kennedy Center is now. If you are coming in from Virginia across the Roosevelt Bridge, you can see at one point the old dome for the 26 inch telescope, where Hall discovered the moons of Mars.
This site is now the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery for the Navy. I bet that the article is referring to a bunker at Observatory Circle.
I remember reading some time ago (in the 1970's) of some research that was already old then (1950's?), about sleep deprivation literally killing cats. (Who would do such research is not clear, but looking back on things I suspect a military connection.)
This must be available in some public archive, if anyone cares to hunt for it.
There is a cool graph on the outage from Wired and Arbor Networks.
ack'ed is short for acknowledged, by way of TCP (which sends ACKs and NACKs). In the networking world, saying ACK as shorthand is pretty common.
In this case, none of my systems were down, and I wouldn't have known that there was a problem if I hadn't heard from outside, as my connection to Google goes through Cogent, and that seems to have been unaffected.
There has been a long search for metallic hydrogen, which is supposed to be (once made under high pressure) possibly both stable and superconducting at room temperature.
Given that metallic hydrogen is also supposed to be quite dense, I have to wonder if they haven't made metallic deuterium.
+1 from here.
70% of the country's 1.2 billion people live on 1/20 as much.
True, but not relevant.
This is aimed at the middle class in India, which numbers 50 - 100 million now and is expected to grow rapidly :
India's middle class is expected to swell almost 12-fold from its size of 50 million people to over 583 million - some 41% of the population.
Let's see, 10 million homes for $ 10K each is $ 100 billion USD - a market worth going after.
One of my rules is : Only a fool would trust legal advice from slashdot.
Now I have a new one : Only a fool would trust economic advice from slashdot.
In the 1970's, on IBM 370's, you could have virtual memory if you created your own swap tables. This required a lot of thinking about program structure and execution order. You had to figure out if a routine was in use or not, and swap it in and out of memory. If someone added a call to a routine while it was swapped out, the program would dump core.
Worse, sloppy programmers would assume that the contents of non global variables would be there from one call of a routine to the next. That would be true - as long as the routine wasn't swapped out. So, changing the swap tables was likely to cause subtle bugs, as counters or indices suddenly got reset to random numbers. Since the swapping would generally depend on what the program was doing, it might pass simple check cases, but go weird some of the time on extended runs.
I can remember literally spending weeks debugging such problems in previously working code.
I believe that this works out to over $ 200 billion per year. I suspect we spend almost this much already; the trouble is it is mostly for the military, which doesn't always do much for the rest of us.
I am not a lawyer, but my understanding is that fair use is an old common law concept that was just (partially) codified in the 1976 Copyright Act. Putting that in the law was a good thing, but adopting the Berne Convention (life + 50 years, no registration) was not a good thing.