If a large meteor landed in an urban area, it will be captured on multiple videos (surveillance cameras, plus the odd person filming something at the time, and even people quick enough to whip out their cell phones). Pretty much every recent meteor fall has had such documentary evidence; each video found narrows down the trajectory and frequently allows more to be found, by going to the right area and asking.
The absence of such multiply interlocking independent streams of evidence is one reason why I find recent UFO reports unconvincing.
No, not really. This is the usual ratchet effect - you wait, in 15 years (if this goes through) there will be a call to "normalize" to some other country that has lengthened their term in the meantime.
As long as there are politicians willing to be bought off, and nobody rioting in the streets over this, terms will continue to lengthen.
Virtual browsing ? Sure. And, I am willing to grant that visual GUIs for doing this could be dramatically improved. But...
Browsing a virtual store mimicking a physical store ? I am sure it would be a useful shoplifters training tool, but I am not sure who else would want it.
He gave an example of a shopkeeper creating 3D models of his store's interior and goods with Photosynth and then uploading the results into a large 3D model of local shopping district. Customers could 'visit' the area, browse products, and order them for real-world delivery."
With all due respect, this sounds very 1996. Why on Earth would anyone want to shop that way ?
Not necessarily. You could place a big enough solar sail at the far end of the elevator arm to put the whole thing in tension, which would make it stable. That may be the only way to have a space elevator for Venus.
There may be some real stuff behind this, but it sure doesn't read like it. You might go into orbit, 40,000 km from the Earth, off by a few dozen km ! And that might take fuel to fix !
I would guess that whoever wrote that doesn't know much about geostationary satellite station keeping. And, of course, if you have an elevator, fuel will be cheap to lift too.
It is clear that a space elevator arm will be a dynamic structure. And the schedulers of traffic will have to take the conservation of angular momentum (the way to look at the Coriolis force in a non-rotating reference frame) into account. But just because the arm moves around doesn't mean it can't function.
I always like to say that if we lived for milliseconds, we would find the weather to be very predictable, while if we lived for millions of years, we would find the solar system to be as unpredictable as the weather.
The solar system looses comets all of the time, so there are presumably comets out there in galactic space from other solar systems. With velocities of order of 30 km / sec or so relative to other stars, they will go through the outer regions of other solar systems every few million years at least, which will randomize their velocities fairly quickly (by astronomical standards) and would very-likely prevent us from determining where an extra-solar system comet came from. In this case, of course, even this is an extra-solar system comet, it has now interacted with one of the Sun's planets, and figuring out where it is coming from from celestial mechanics is hopeless.
Lets face it, even if we retrieved a sample and analysed it in a lab, we wouldn't be able to say with any real certainty where it came from.
With an actual sample, and isotope analysis, we could say whether or not it came from this solar system. This is done all of the time for tiny grains found in meteors and collected directly, some of which do not come from this solar system.
True, saying where it did come from might require sampling most of the star systems in our region of the galaxy and that will take... a while.
Having read the article, the extra-terrestrial origin idea seems like a long shot to me. There is less cyanogen than normal ! Maybe it formed in unusual conditions... or could it be from another solar system ! Note, in all seriousness, that there has never been a firmly established extra-terrestrial "new comet" (on a hyperbolic orbit), so the statistics make this unlikely but certainly not impossible.
I find dwarf-planet Sedna much more intriguing Sedna's orbit is very strange, this orbit probably formed in an 3-body interaction between the Sun, Sedna, and another star and, if so, there is about a 10% chance that Sedna was originally in orbit about that other star. If I was NASA administrator, one thing I would certainly try and do would be to send a "Pluto Express" type spacecraft there.
Dijkstra's quote "Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes" is in my opinion just wrong.
Indeed. It is hard to imagine a more incorrect statement about astronomy (especially if you include all of the wide variety of observing instruments as telescopes).
By the way, I am a physicist, and IMHO all of the best physicists develop a physical intuition about their physics, and that is certainly true with those who deal with quantum mechanics. Listen to the recorded lectures of Richard Feynman, for example.
I hate to say it, but you are living in cloud-coo-coo land. Of course we are in a recession, and have been for some time. In my business, I deal with corporations, both large and small. All are hurting, all are cutting spending, and this is a major topic of conversation at literally every meeting I go to. To think that this is driven by the media is to be deluded.
The "Mandate of Heaven effect," by which the party in power gets blamed for a bad economy, and praised for good results, regardless of what they had to do with it, is another matter. I agree with you in principle, but it seems clear to me that the current administration had plenty to do with what's going on in practice.
"What is in 1.9: uTP, the micro transport protocol. This UDP-based reliable transport is designed to minimize latency, but still maximize bandwidth when the latency is not excessive. We use this for communication between peers instead of TCP, if both sides support it. In addition, we use information from this transport, if active, to control the transfer rate of TCP connections. This means uTorrent, when using uTP, should not kill your net connection - even if you do not set any rate limits.
What was in 1.8.1: uTP, but connection attempts were not initiated by default, and there was no control over TCP as described above. You can enable it, but likely you will see the uTP connections not transfering much data, because they are pushed out of the way by TCP."
This sounds like congestion control of some sort to me.
For about the last decade, the core of the network has been in good shape, and the problems occur at the edges, so at the edge is where filtering (e.g., Sandvine) occurs.
From what I hear, that is not likely to change anytime soon.
Both BitTorrent and Comcast are working in the IETF ALTO working group, which is intended to improve the use of bandwidth and other resources by P2P.
Having been in these sessions, it is clear to me that BitTorrent has no interest in melting down the Internet and is well aware of the implications of what they are doing. Note that if worse comes to worse, UDP can be blocked too.
Sure. But if you had one of these in space, that would not be an issue. The beam is charged, and that will make it spread out - by my calculations, to maybe a meter wide in 1000 km, which would limit the range.
I think that the beam dump targets are impressive. Down 600 meter tunnels there are 7 meter long graphite dumps, with 750 tons of shielding, just to safely absorb the beam energy when they want to shut the thing off.
Not really. Geology gave us deep time, the idea that it takes a long time to create the structures we see. This dates to the 1780s (yes, that long ago) and James Hutton's work in Scotland. Before then, it was assumed that any weirdnesses you could see in the rocks (sea shells in rocks high above sea level, say) was due to the Biblical Flood. Hutton realized that it would take a long time to create layers of rock, tilt them, erode them down, deposit new layers, etc. He related this to the idea of uniformitarianism, which simply means that processes in the past are the same as they are today. (Land, for example, typically erodes slowly, so a big canyon probably implies a long time of erosion, and not a single catastrophic event like the Biblical flood.) This does not imply that catastrophic events never happen, just that they should not be automatically assumed. That is not quite the same thing as saying that the Earth is static.
The biological ideas of evolution came later, and were based on the comparison of isolated species (such as Darwin's finches). Of course, they were aware of the geological findings, but as far as I can remember, it didn't really inspire their thinking that much.
Re:No its worse than that
on
Evolving Rocks
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
If you bother to RTFA, they say that the earth's mineralogy and crustal composition has changed and is affected by biology.
Yes, and this is not news. This would have been news in 1908, maybe, so as news this is at least century late, probably more.
Now, the America Heritage Dictionary says
evolve v. tr. To develop or achieve gradually: evolve a style of one's own.
To work (something) out; devise: "the schemes he evolved to line his purse" (S.J. Perelman).
Biology To develop (a characteristic) by evolutionary processes.
To give off; emit.
Are the rocks developing this gradually ? Are they working out how to adapt to changing oxygen levels ? No. This is like saying "As Christmas approaches, the mall parking lot will evolve to be full of cars." It is a misuse of words (which is different from saying that it is wrong).
Given the politicization of biology, this misuse of words makes me suspicious, but it is more probably just over-enthusiasm.
Misuse of words
on
Evolving Rocks
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
What a misuse of terms.
Our Earth's surface is overwhelmingly shaped by biology - most of the surface carbon, for example (which on Venus is in the atmosphere) is in carbonate rocks, like limestone. There are whole island chains (coral atolls) made biologically. Soil results from biological processes (in fact, I would suspect that soil has evolved over time, as the organisms that make it have evolved). The marble in our public buildings results from biology (and metamorphism).
Could this be used to look for extra-terrestrial life ? Sure. Does this mean that the rocks are evolving ? No.
And I predict it will go nowhere. The military has never liked truly autonomous machines. It goes against too many hot buttons in their value system, and it's easy to shut down. (The first friendly fire episode with fighting robots is highly likely to be the last.)
What I predict will go somewhere is the infantry version (or the tank version) of the Predator drone - NCO's in trailers will fight wars by remote control on the ground, just as they do now in the air. It will probably be made to look like a video game on the trailer end...
Slashdot Mirror
If a large meteor landed in an urban area, it will be captured on multiple videos (surveillance cameras, plus the odd person filming something at the time, and even people quick enough to whip out their cell phones). Pretty much every recent meteor fall has had such documentary evidence; each video found narrows down the trajectory and frequently allows more to be found, by going to the right area and asking.
The absence of such multiply interlocking independent streams of evidence is one reason why I find recent UFO reports unconvincing.
No, not really. This is the usual ratchet effect - you wait, in 15 years (if this goes through) there will be a call to "normalize" to some other country that has lengthened their term in the meantime.
As long as there are politicians willing to be bought off, and nobody rioting in the streets over this, terms will continue to lengthen.
What "shopkeeper" is going to take the time or invest the money in a developer who would take the time to do all this
Ooo, I know ! I know !
Shoe Circus!
And, they can sell the new Microsoft line of clothes !
And, courtesy of your friendly neighborhood botnets, virtual pickpockets !
Virtual browsing ? Sure. And, I am willing to grant that visual GUIs for doing this could be dramatically improved. But...
Browsing a virtual store mimicking a physical store ? I am sure it would be a useful shoplifters training tool, but I am not sure who else would want it.
Then when they call it the Blue Screen of Death, they aren't kidding.
He gave an example of a shopkeeper creating 3D models of his store's interior and goods with Photosynth and then uploading the results into a large 3D model of local shopping district. Customers could 'visit' the area, browse products, and order them for real-world delivery."
With all due respect, this sounds very 1996. Why on Earth would anyone want to shop that way ?
Not necessarily. You could place a big enough solar sail at the far end of the elevator arm to put the whole thing in tension, which would make it stable. That may be the only way to have a space elevator for Venus.
By the farking article.
There may be some real stuff behind this, but it sure doesn't read like it. You might go into orbit, 40,000 km from the Earth, off by a few dozen km ! And that might take fuel to fix !
I would guess that whoever wrote that doesn't know much about geostationary satellite station keeping. And, of course, if you have an elevator, fuel will be cheap to lift too.
It is clear that a space elevator arm will be a dynamic structure. And the schedulers of traffic will have to take the conservation of angular momentum (the way to look at the Coriolis force in a non-rotating reference frame) into account. But just because the arm moves around doesn't mean it can't function.
I always like to say that if we lived for milliseconds, we would find the weather to be very predictable, while if we lived for millions of years, we would find the solar system to be as unpredictable as the weather.
The solar system looses comets all of the time, so there are presumably comets out there in galactic space from other solar systems. With velocities of order of 30 km / sec or so relative to other stars, they will go through the outer regions of other solar systems every few million years at least, which will randomize their velocities fairly quickly (by astronomical standards) and would very-likely prevent us from determining where an extra-solar system comet came from. In this case, of course, even this is an extra-solar system comet, it has now interacted with one of the Sun's planets, and figuring out where it is coming from from celestial mechanics is hopeless.
Sorry, extra-solar.
Lets face it, even if we retrieved a sample and analysed it in a lab, we wouldn't be able to say with any real certainty where it came from.
With an actual sample, and isotope analysis, we could say whether or not it came from this solar system. This is done all of the time for tiny grains found in meteors and collected directly, some of which do not come from this solar system.
True, saying where it did come from might require sampling most of the star systems in our region of the galaxy and that will take... a while.
Having read the article, the extra-terrestrial origin idea seems like a long shot to me. There is less cyanogen than normal ! Maybe it formed in unusual conditions... or could it be from another solar system ! Note, in all seriousness, that there has never been a firmly established extra-terrestrial "new comet" (on a hyperbolic orbit), so the statistics make this unlikely but certainly not impossible.
I find dwarf-planet Sedna much more intriguing Sedna's orbit is very strange, this orbit probably formed in an 3-body interaction between the Sun, Sedna, and another star and, if so, there is about a 10% chance that Sedna was originally in orbit about that other star. If I was NASA administrator, one thing I would certainly try and do would be to send a "Pluto Express" type spacecraft there.
Dijkstra's quote "Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes" is in my opinion just wrong.
Indeed. It is hard to imagine a more incorrect statement about astronomy (especially if you include all of the wide variety of observing instruments as telescopes).
I am very glad I never had him as a professor.
By the way, I am a physicist, and IMHO all of the best physicists develop a physical intuition about their physics, and that is certainly true with those who deal with quantum mechanics. Listen to the recorded lectures of Richard Feynman, for example.
I hate to say it, but you are living in cloud-coo-coo land. Of course we are in a recession, and have been for some time. In my business, I deal with corporations, both large and small. All are hurting, all are cutting spending, and this is a major topic of conversation at literally every meeting I go to. To think that this is driven by the media is to be deluded.
The "Mandate of Heaven effect," by which the party in power gets blamed for a bad economy, and praised for good results, regardless of what they had to do with it, is another matter. I agree with you in principle, but it seems clear to me that the current administration had plenty to do with what's going on in practice.
See http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?id=49813
"What is in 1.9:
uTP, the micro transport protocol. This UDP-based reliable transport is designed to minimize latency, but still maximize bandwidth when the latency is not excessive. We use this for communication between peers instead of TCP, if both sides support it. In addition, we use information from this transport, if active, to control the transfer rate of TCP connections. This means uTorrent, when using uTP, should not kill your net connection - even if you do not set any rate limits.
What was in 1.8.1:
uTP, but connection attempts were not initiated by default, and there was no control over TCP as described above. You can enable it, but likely you will see the uTP connections not transfering much data, because they are pushed out of the way by TCP."
This sounds like congestion control of some sort to me.
For about the last decade, the core of the network has been in good shape, and the problems occur at the edges, so at the edge is where filtering (e.g., Sandvine) occurs.
From what I hear, that is not likely to change anytime soon.
Both BitTorrent and Comcast are working in the IETF ALTO working group, which is intended to improve the use of bandwidth and other resources by P2P.
Having been in these sessions, it is clear to me that BitTorrent has no interest in melting down the Internet and is well aware of the implications of what they are doing. Note that if worse comes to worse, UDP can be blocked too.
Sure. But if you had one of these in space, that would not be an issue. The beam is charged, and that will make it spread out - by my calculations, to maybe a meter wide in 1000 km, which would limit the range.
I think that the beam dump targets are impressive. Down 600 meter tunnels there are 7 meter long graphite dumps, with 750 tons of shielding, just to safely absorb the beam energy when they want to shut the thing off.
The beam would make a good weapon (if the LHC a bad weapons system).
The beam was 200 MJoules, the equivalent of 48 kilo's of TNT. That's a pretty good bomb if it should hit you.
(Note that there are 2 beams; it is not clear to me if that is the energy per beam on in total.)
Not really. Geology gave us deep time, the idea that it takes a long time to create the structures we see. This dates to the 1780s (yes, that long ago) and James Hutton's work in Scotland. Before then, it was assumed that any weirdnesses you could see in the rocks (sea shells in rocks high above sea level, say) was due to the Biblical Flood. Hutton realized that it would take a long time to create layers of rock, tilt them, erode them down, deposit new layers, etc. He related this to the idea of uniformitarianism, which simply means that processes in the past are the same as they are today. (Land, for example, typically erodes slowly, so a big canyon probably implies a long time of erosion, and not a single catastrophic event like the Biblical flood.) This does not imply that catastrophic events never happen, just that they should not be automatically assumed. That is not quite the same thing as saying that the Earth is static.
The biological ideas of evolution came later, and were based on the comparison of isolated species (such as Darwin's finches). Of course, they were aware of the geological findings, but as far as I can remember, it didn't really inspire their thinking that much.
If you bother to RTFA, they say that the earth's mineralogy and crustal composition has changed and is affected by biology.
Yes, and this is not news. This would have been news in 1908,
maybe, so as news this is at least century late, probably more.
Now, the America Heritage Dictionary says
evolve
v. tr.
To develop or achieve gradually: evolve a style of one's own.
To work (something) out; devise: "the schemes he evolved to line his purse" (S.J. Perelman).
Biology To develop (a characteristic) by evolutionary processes.
To give off; emit.
Are the rocks developing this gradually ? Are they working out how to adapt to changing oxygen levels ? No. This is like saying "As Christmas approaches, the mall parking lot will evolve to be full of cars." It is a misuse of words (which is different from saying that it is wrong).
Given the politicization of biology, this misuse of words makes me suspicious, but it is more probably just over-enthusiasm.
What a misuse of terms.
Our Earth's surface is overwhelmingly shaped by biology - most of the surface carbon, for example (which on Venus is in the atmosphere) is in carbonate rocks, like limestone. There are whole island chains (coral atolls) made biologically. Soil results from biological processes (in fact, I would suspect that soil has evolved over time, as the organisms that make it have evolved). The marble in our public buildings results from biology (and metamorphism).
Could this be used to look for extra-terrestrial life ? Sure. Does this mean that the rocks are evolving ? No.
And I predict it will go nowhere. The military has never liked truly autonomous machines. It goes against too many hot buttons in their value system, and it's easy to shut down. (The first friendly fire episode with fighting robots is highly likely to be the last.)
What I predict will go somewhere is the infantry version (or the tank version) of the Predator drone - NCO's in trailers will fight wars by remote control on the ground, just as they do now in the air. It will probably be made to look like a video game on the trailer end...