IIRC, the discussions at the astronomical society have come to the conclusion that most of the good roman names have been used up. They're talking about moving into other pantheons for names (Hindu I believe was considered).
It better be a big set of names if we're going to start naming all the large Kuiper belt objects we're going to find.
Your momma is so big and so cold they launched her into space and couldn't figure out if she was a planet or not!
OK, that was a crappy joke.
I'd have to agree with the "no 1000 planets, please" antagonists. Defining Kuiper belt objects as planets demotes the concept of "planet". We might as well call every object that orbits the sun "space thing" and be done with it.
Indeed, back in the days of the Magellan mission, I recall worries about the temperature of the spacecraft inching upwards towards the 60C mark near the end of the mission, perhaps during the aerobreaking experiment. There were some conerns about the electronics overheating.
Yes, this information was on the internet (Usenet, I believe), in 1993/4. I've so dated myself...
Our homebrew PVRs and quarterly free renewals to labs.zap2it.com don't look so bad now, do they?!? </dick>
Seriously, how many people shelled out for "lifetime" subscriptions for scheduling data and product updates from TiVo and expected them to really last for a decade or more?
(Even the homebrew's time is coming. We won't even have analog cable in a few years and our cards will be mostly worthless... we'll have to start jury-rigging our digital cable boxes with IR blasters and it will be a fine mess. Hopefully Haupauuge comes out with a solution before then.)
btw, I dare ANY body who's watched a loved one suffer to deny that they said a few words to God 'Just in case'. It certainly can't hurt. I'm not religious, but I've been there.
This is the *very definition* of why I'm an agnostic instead of an atheist. A little prayer for suffering in birth, a little prayer for suffering in death (both witnessed firsthand). To claim that I'm an atheist after that would be hypocracy.
Prayer for things like job promotions or successful wedding *rehersals*... how fucking trivial is *that*?!?
This reminds me of religious leaders who preach about not giving into the temptation of homosexuality, only later to be found out to be having homosexual relationships themselves. CLUE TO PRIESTS: If you talk about the "temptation" of homosexuality, you're not heterosexual! (0 Kinsey scale) heterosexuals aren't tempted by people of the same gender because they just don't care.
Link to the Kinsey Scale for anyone who's confused...
(I could bitch about bisexuality being completely off the radar of American discussion, skewing everyone's perspectives, but that's a completely different topic...)
Fast forward 100 years on evolutionary theory... and the fitness of the individual is irrelevant, but rather of her genes (Dawkins). Also, sexual selection between mates is even more important than natural selection(Ridley).
So the number of children isn't necessarily a measure of evolutionary fitness. Her children might not be fed well enough to reach maturity and breed themselves. Or if she has hundreds of grandchildren, her genes are very successful..
But, during the Oscars, the President of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences made a HUGE pitch about how movies should be seen on the big screen!
I think he's right. I'm gonna go see Star Wars IV at my local theatre!!!... what'dya mean it's not playing today?
Did anyone else see that Oscar segment and think "How the hell am I supposed to watch all these great movies on the big screen if they're not kept on the big screen?" Heck, most of the movies in that montage I was either not born yet, or not old enough to get into the theatre when they were first screened?
The dumb part is that a Friday night "Oscar Night" at the theatre would probably go over extremely well. Have one screen of your local megaplex devoted to some great movie of the past. Hollywood can even do the distributing. *That* will give you a realistic test of releasing a movie simultaneously to screen and DVD, and will give me more options over the dreck that usually is on screen.
If I want to have any chance of actually *hearing* the music in an urban setting, I need to crank the volume up to max. The environmental noise of busses, people chatting on their cell phones, (heck, even an office environment,) means that I need to have that music set at max-1 or max (depending on the track) to have any chance of actually hearing it.
I had the pleasant surprise of being in a park this weekend and found that 60% volume was more than adequate to actually hear the music. But finally being in a park and not having all that incessant background noise, I didn't feel the need to listen to music that much.
I should really just shell out the cash and get a good set of earplug/earbud combo headphones that block external noise. Do these things really work at 50% volume?
I had to actually check out what the MRO bandwidth actually *was*
According to the MRO telecommunications page, the max bandwidth from MRO is 6 mbps. That's faster than my Cable internet connection!
Also, according to this page, our slashdot article summary is wrong. MRO is sending back 34 terabits, not 34 terabytes. Still that's a lot of (geology) porn. Looking forward to it. I wonder if the DSN guys will throttle their bandwidth?
OK, after three replies along the same theme.. I have to make some sort of comment.
I'm not disagreeing with you at all. But I am saying there are people out there who do use this kind of non-logic to try to justify something they don't care about.
I didn't mean to lump the intelligent Christians who want to keep unmanned missions alive with the kind that have a habit for mis-spelled trolls...;)
when the bible says there isnt any. stupid sintists....
I wish I could simply mod this "Funny", laugh and move on, except so many people actually think this way. At the moment, unmanned missions are being canned, next thing we know a new government is in and cans the manned missions as economically unfeasable, and then there's no more science *or* engineering/political activities going on at NASA.
It's not even that inefficient. We're still using paper here in Canada, and consistently have our final results within hours after the polls close. Watching the US election results on TV, I've never said to myself "Wow, that's way faster than Canada".
Scaling up from 32 million to 350 million (* percentage eligible voters * percentage of people who vote) isn't too hard.
At most you're looking at an extra hour on election night, and any extra money you spend on scrutineers has to be less than development and equipment costs for automated voting.
I'll just wait for the first "What's a scrutineer?" reply and get ready to put my face into my hand and sigh... Here, read and learn...
Not bad. I have a physics minor, I'm not sure I could do much better. I'm hoping that a real physics major will come along and be able to clean up the best explanations here. (I'm concerned that 90% of the mods here are "funny")
Firstly, the computer is definately "run". If there's no computer, there's no result. A photon has definately traversed the computer, at least *before* the wave-function collapses and the photon is observed.
Someone come along and correct me here. I want to see if I understand this correctly in my own words.
The quantum computer is constructed, let's say one to crack 128 bit encryption in 1 second. (Sure the experiment here isn't doing encryption, but I'm attempting to generalize). You can fire a photon into it, it goes through a number of possible states (simultaneously), the "solution" only occurs in universes that "exist", and then the computer is observed to determine what the result of the computation is. The problems with quantum computers (if I understand correctly) is that you have to attempt to observe each possible state to see if it happened or not. This means there's not much point in running the computation in the first place. If you have to check every state, you might as well do a brute force computation in the first place.
Now, this time, before you put the photon into the machine, put a half silvered mirror BEFORE the machine. In the world of quantum mechanics, the photon both goes into the computer, and is bounced off the half silvered mirror to go somewhere else (perhaps a chamber OUTSIDE) the computer. The photon is in both inside the computer and in the external chamber, simultaneously, much in the same way Schrodinger's cat is both dead and alive simultaneously. Then (and this is the part I don't quite understand) you observe the photon in the external chamber for properties it would have taken on inside the computer, and deduce that the answer was without looking at the computer at all.
One way of looking at this is that the computer is indeed used, but not in "our" universe. You have to allow the computer "running time". If you cut off the computation too early, you don't get a result.
From a Feynman perspective, the photon travels backwards in time out of the computer and into the external chamber.
The flaw in the article is that it tries to understand the computer in a non-quantum mechanical terms. Trying to explain why a photon can be in two very different places at once is just too complicated for an article at this level. The truth is, the photon takes every possible path, and that's just too outside our everyday perception of reality for the lay-article to convey.
Slashdotters, if this is confusing to you but you want to understand more, go learn about the Quantum Two slit experiment. It's the core of the mystery surrounding Quantum Physics. And as Feynman would say (paraphrased): Don't try to understand why nature works this way. If you do, you'll go into a blind alley which no-one has returned from. Nobody understands why it works this way, it just does.
Many years ago we had a piece of software that checked a chat log for the words "close" and "area" to initiate an audio chat. Except that it didn't care what order the words cane in, or if they were nested in other words.
He often used the phrase "bareass closet" to initiate the audio chat in testing.
One day, our firstborn 1 year old daugter was running around the living room. She had learned to walk pretty well, but the occasional toy or loose sock sent her into a tumble. (Learning to walk is really learning to fall, which gives you the confidence to actually try this standing up vertical thing). She was learning words slowly, perhaps her vocabulary was about 100 or 200 words at that point (a 100 or 200 word vocuabulary is mostly nouns, like "Tinky Winky")
One day she tripped, toppled face first into the ground, and blurted out "FUCK!" totally in context. She caught herself pretty well, but she swore in the same sense that Mom or Dad would, when something really unexpected or bad happened.
Afterwards we checked our language a bit more in front of the kids. They're 8 and 5 now. They don't swear in front of us. They know what the words *are* (at least the older one does), but she knows they're bad words not to be used in public or people you don't know.
Remember parents, use "shit" and "fuck" respobsibly in front of your kids. Which means, teaching them, by example, when it's a good time to swear, and not *totally* clamming up in front of them. That's just going to fuel the idea that strong emotions should be repressed, and that's just bad news going into teenage years. I fear anyone who never swears in front of their kids will have their kids learn swearing from the schoolyard.
** Disclaimer. This appears to be working with my kids. EVERY CHILD IS DIFFERENT. The strategy would probably fall flat on its face with some, many, or perhaps even most kids.
No, there's a weak linkage here. It's just curious that there might be a left-eye/right-eye differential in brain processing. I'd never really given it much thought.
I find this interesting, because at the age of four, I was legally blind in my right eye. There was no damage, the eye was just dramaticly lazy, and incredibly far sighted. The correction was so strong that without my glasses I could barely see a foot square letter 10 feet away. My left eye, at the time was perfectly normal.
Years of patching have brought my right eye very close to normal. With time my left has drifted into near sightedness, leaving me nearsighted in my left eye and farsighted in my right.
However even now my vision is almost exclusively left eyed. My perceived field of vision is biased towards my left, making me turn my head slightly to my right to "face" someone. The information from my right eye is there, it just feels a lot like peripheral vision. I read exclusively with my left eye. My brain actually has data from both eyes, but has difficulty co-ordinating them. Sometimes it uses the double vision to judge distance, but other times, my brain seems pretty good at shutting down the right-eye image when I'm reading. This is all done subconciously, I don't realize I'm doing it a lot of the time.
I'm still trying to figure out exactly what this would mean related to this article. That I'm unbiased by language? That I'm a wishy washy pinko liberal? I'd like to think that this means my perception of the world is unbiased. More than likely all of these explanations are absolute junk.
(See, I can't make up my mind.:)
Side note: Of course with eye problems like this we've watched very carefully for eye problems in our own children. Our oldest's eyes are fine, but my youngest daughter is very farsighted (5.5/6 diopters). People, Watch for and catch eye problems with your own kids BEFORE they turn four. Early corrective measures (potentially surgery, don't be afraid of it) can have a dramtic effect on proper vision into adulthood.
...at least, not in the traditional sense of "contagious".
Just because something is caused by a virus doesn't mean that there isn't a pre-existing genetic defect that's triggered by the virus. If it were this simple, understanding a number of genetic problems would be a lot simpler. Instead, there's no "single source" of the problem.
Also many viruses aren't contagious in the "sneeze, cough, make you sick" sense of contagious. Viruses are a lot more common than people thing. Perfectly normal cells contain viruses and parasites, not harming you but are "along for the ride". Some bacteria are actually helpful and required for the body to function normally.
This isn't as simple as "I sneeze on you and get you fat".
Slashdot Mirror
IIRC, the discussions at the astronomical society have come to the conclusion that most of the good roman names have been used up. They're talking about moving into other pantheons for names (Hindu I believe was considered).
It better be a big set of names if we're going to start naming all the large Kuiper belt objects we're going to find.
The following joke just came to mind...
Your momma is so big and so cold they launched her into space and couldn't figure out if she was a planet or not!
OK, that was a crappy joke.
I'd have to agree with the "no 1000 planets, please" antagonists. Defining Kuiper belt objects as planets demotes the concept of "planet". We might as well call every object that orbits the sun "space thing" and be done with it.
It also doesn't make clear that 2003 UB313 is still larger than Pluto after the new measurement (~1,430 vs ~1,490 miles diameter respectively).
Indeed, back in the days of the Magellan mission, I recall worries about the temperature of the spacecraft inching upwards towards the 60C mark near the end of the mission, perhaps during the aerobreaking experiment. There were some conerns about the electronics overheating.
Yes, this information was on the internet (Usenet, I believe), in 1993/4. I've so dated myself...
Before we had grammar nazis.. now we have.. Tense Nazis!
(Actually I was thinking the same damned thing)
Ahh, if this were not the case, the world would be a better place. Millennium of repression wiped away.
Won't happen overnight, yada yada yada.
Our homebrew PVRs and quarterly free renewals to labs.zap2it.com don't look so bad now, do they?!?
</dick>
Seriously, how many people shelled out for "lifetime" subscriptions for scheduling data and product updates from TiVo and expected them to really last for a decade or more?
(Even the homebrew's time is coming. We won't even have analog cable in a few years and our cards will be mostly worthless... we'll have to start jury-rigging our digital cable boxes with IR blasters and it will be a fine mess. Hopefully Haupauuge comes out with a solution before then.)
btw, I dare ANY body who's watched a loved one suffer to deny that they said a few words to God 'Just in case'. It certainly can't hurt. I'm not religious, but I've been there.
This is the *very definition* of why I'm an agnostic instead of an atheist. A little prayer for suffering in birth, a little prayer for suffering in death (both witnessed firsthand). To claim that I'm an atheist after that would be hypocracy.
Prayer for things like job promotions or successful wedding *rehersals*... how fucking trivial is *that*?!?
This reminds me of religious leaders who preach about not giving into the temptation of homosexuality, only later to be found out to be having homosexual relationships themselves. CLUE TO PRIESTS: If you talk about the "temptation" of homosexuality, you're not heterosexual! (0 Kinsey scale) heterosexuals aren't tempted by people of the same gender because they just don't care.
Link to the Kinsey Scale for anyone who's confused...
(I could bitch about bisexuality being completely off the radar of American discussion, skewing everyone's perspectives, but that's a completely different topic...)
Fast forward 100 years on evolutionary theory... and the fitness of the individual is irrelevant, but rather of her genes (Dawkins). Also, sexual selection between mates is even more important than natural selection(Ridley).
So the number of children isn't necessarily a measure of evolutionary fitness. Her children might not be fed well enough to reach maturity and breed themselves. Or if she has hundreds of grandchildren, her genes are very successful..
But, during the Oscars, the President of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences made a HUGE pitch about how movies should be seen on the big screen!
... what'dya mean it's not playing today?
I think he's right. I'm gonna go see Star Wars IV at my local theatre!!!
Did anyone else see that Oscar segment and think "How the hell am I supposed to watch all these great movies on the big screen if they're not kept on the big screen?" Heck, most of the movies in that montage I was either not born yet, or not old enough to get into the theatre when they were first screened?
The dumb part is that a Friday night "Oscar Night" at the theatre would probably go over extremely well. Have one screen of your local megaplex devoted to some great movie of the past. Hollywood can even do the distributing. *That* will give you a realistic test of releasing a movie simultaneously to screen and DVD, and will give me more options over the dreck that usually is on screen.
Wow, that is cheap. Thanks for the reccomendation, I'll check them out!
It's going to be a dupe comment but here goes.
If I want to have any chance of actually *hearing* the music in an urban setting, I need to crank the volume up to max. The environmental noise of busses, people chatting on their cell phones, (heck, even an office environment,) means that I need to have that music set at max-1 or max (depending on the track) to have any chance of actually hearing it.
I had the pleasant surprise of being in a park this weekend and found that 60% volume was more than adequate to actually hear the music. But finally being in a park and not having all that incessant background noise, I didn't feel the need to listen to music that much.
I should really just shell out the cash and get a good set of earplug/earbud combo headphones that block external noise. Do these things really work at 50% volume?
I had to actually check out what the MRO bandwidth actually *was*
According to the MRO telecommunications page, the max bandwidth from MRO is 6 mbps. That's faster than my Cable internet connection!
Also, according to this page, our slashdot article summary is wrong. MRO is sending back 34 terabits, not 34 terabytes. Still that's a lot of (geology) porn. Looking forward to it. I wonder if the DSN guys will throttle their bandwidth?
The vector is different, but the mechanism is the same. Multicellular life fighting an endless arms race against parasites.
Anyone remotely interested in this discussion who has not yet read Matt Ridley's The Red Queen should try to grab a copy from their library.
More info on the Red Queen Hypothesis at wikipedia.
OK, after three replies along the same theme.. I have to make some sort of comment.
;)
I'm not disagreeing with you at all. But I am saying there are people out there who do use this kind of non-logic to try to justify something they don't care about.
I didn't mean to lump the intelligent Christians who want to keep unmanned missions alive with the kind that have a habit for mis-spelled trolls...
when the bible says there isnt any. stupid sintists....
I wish I could simply mod this "Funny", laugh and move on, except so many people actually think this way. At the moment, unmanned missions are being canned, next thing we know a new government is in and cans the manned missions as economically unfeasable, and then there's no more science *or* engineering/political activities going on at NASA.
It's not even that inefficient. We're still using paper here in Canada, and consistently have our final results within hours after the polls close. Watching the US election results on TV, I've never said to myself "Wow, that's way faster than Canada".
Scaling up from 32 million to 350 million (* percentage eligible voters * percentage of people who vote) isn't too hard.
At most you're looking at an extra hour on election night, and any extra money you spend on scrutineers has to be less than development and equipment costs for automated voting.
I'll just wait for the first "What's a scrutineer?" reply and get ready to put my face into my hand and sigh... Here, read and learn...
Not bad. I have a physics minor, I'm not sure I could do much better. I'm hoping that a real physics major will come along and be able to clean up the best explanations here. (I'm concerned that 90% of the mods here are "funny")
Firstly, the computer is definately "run". If there's no computer, there's no result. A photon has definately traversed the computer, at least *before* the wave-function collapses and the photon is observed.
Someone come along and correct me here. I want to see if I understand this correctly in my own words.
The quantum computer is constructed, let's say one to crack 128 bit encryption in 1 second. (Sure the experiment here isn't doing encryption, but I'm attempting to generalize). You can fire a photon into it, it goes through a number of possible states (simultaneously), the "solution" only occurs in universes that "exist", and then the computer is observed to determine what the result of the computation is. The problems with quantum computers (if I understand correctly) is that you have to attempt to observe each possible state to see if it happened or not. This means there's not much point in running the computation in the first place. If you have to check every state, you might as well do a brute force computation in the first place.
Now, this time, before you put the photon into the machine, put a half silvered mirror BEFORE the machine. In the world of quantum mechanics, the photon both goes into the computer, and is bounced off the half silvered mirror to go somewhere else (perhaps a chamber OUTSIDE) the computer. The photon is in both inside the computer and in the external chamber, simultaneously, much in the same way Schrodinger's cat is both dead and alive simultaneously. Then (and this is the part I don't quite understand) you observe the photon in the external chamber for properties it would have taken on inside the computer, and deduce that the answer was without looking at the computer at all.
One way of looking at this is that the computer is indeed used, but not in "our" universe. You have to allow the computer "running time". If you cut off the computation too early, you don't get a result.
From a Feynman perspective, the photon travels backwards in time out of the computer and into the external chamber.
The flaw in the article is that it tries to understand the computer in a non-quantum mechanical terms. Trying to explain why a photon can be in two very different places at once is just too complicated for an article at this level. The truth is, the photon takes every possible path, and that's just too outside our everyday perception of reality for the lay-article to convey.
Slashdotters, if this is confusing to you but you want to understand more, go learn about the Quantum Two slit experiment. It's the core of the mystery surrounding Quantum Physics. And as Feynman would say (paraphrased): Don't try to understand why nature works this way. If you do, you'll go into a blind alley which no-one has returned from. Nobody understands why it works this way, it just does.
Many years ago we had a piece of software that checked a chat log for the words "close" and "area" to initiate an audio chat. Except that it didn't care what order the words cane in, or if they were nested in other words.
He often used the phrase "bareass closet" to initiate the audio chat in testing.
One day, our firstborn 1 year old daugter was running around the living room. She had learned to walk pretty well, but the occasional toy or loose sock sent her into a tumble. (Learning to walk is really learning to fall, which gives you the confidence to actually try this standing up vertical thing). She was learning words slowly, perhaps her vocabulary was about 100 or 200 words at that point (a 100 or 200 word vocuabulary is mostly nouns, like "Tinky Winky")
One day she tripped, toppled face first into the ground, and blurted out "FUCK!" totally in context. She caught herself pretty well, but she swore in the same sense that Mom or Dad would, when something really unexpected or bad happened.
Afterwards we checked our language a bit more in front of the kids. They're 8 and 5 now. They don't swear in front of us. They know what the words *are* (at least the older one does), but she knows they're bad words not to be used in public or people you don't know.
Remember parents, use "shit" and "fuck" respobsibly in front of your kids. Which means, teaching them, by example, when it's a good time to swear, and not *totally* clamming up in front of them. That's just going to fuel the idea that strong emotions should be repressed, and that's just bad news going into teenage years. I fear anyone who never swears in front of their kids will have their kids learn swearing from the schoolyard.
** Disclaimer. This appears to be working with my kids. EVERY CHILD IS DIFFERENT. The strategy would probably fall flat on its face with some, many, or perhaps even most kids.
Here on Slashdot, both the bullying and the representation of social status are done with mod points. ;)
No, there's a weak linkage here. It's just curious that there might be a left-eye/right-eye differential in brain processing. I'd never really given it much thought.
I find this interesting, because at the age of four, I was legally blind in my right eye. There was no damage, the eye was just dramaticly lazy, and incredibly far sighted. The correction was so strong that without my glasses I could barely see a foot square letter 10 feet away. My left eye, at the time was perfectly normal.
:)
Years of patching have brought my right eye very close to normal. With time my left has drifted into near sightedness, leaving me nearsighted in my left eye and farsighted in my right.
However even now my vision is almost exclusively left eyed. My perceived field of vision is biased towards my left, making me turn my head slightly to my right to "face" someone. The information from my right eye is there, it just feels a lot like peripheral vision. I read exclusively with my left eye. My brain actually has data from both eyes, but has difficulty co-ordinating them. Sometimes it uses the double vision to judge distance, but other times, my brain seems pretty good at shutting down the right-eye image when I'm reading. This is all done subconciously, I don't realize I'm doing it a lot of the time.
I'm still trying to figure out exactly what this would mean related to this article. That I'm unbiased by language? That I'm a wishy washy pinko liberal? I'd like to think that this means my perception of the world is unbiased. More than likely all of these explanations are absolute junk.
(See, I can't make up my mind.
Side note: Of course with eye problems like this we've watched very carefully for eye problems in our own children. Our oldest's eyes are fine, but my youngest daughter is very farsighted (5.5/6 diopters). People, Watch for and catch eye problems with your own kids BEFORE they turn four. Early corrective measures (potentially surgery, don't be afraid of it) can have a dramtic effect on proper vision into adulthood.
...at least, not in the traditional sense of "contagious".
Just because something is caused by a virus doesn't mean that there isn't a pre-existing genetic defect that's triggered by the virus. If it were this simple, understanding a number of genetic problems would be a lot simpler. Instead, there's no "single source" of the problem.
Also many viruses aren't contagious in the "sneeze, cough, make you sick" sense of contagious. Viruses are a lot more common than people thing. Perfectly normal cells contain viruses and parasites, not harming you but are "along for the ride". Some bacteria are actually helpful and required for the body to function normally.
This isn't as simple as "I sneeze on you and get you fat".