No need to be sad. Increasing effective aperture size of the telescope increases its resolving power. The imaging element doesn't have to be a single mirror or lens, but can consist of an array of elements scattered over a large area. Tricky part is getting all of the elements in phase agreement. Also doesn't have to be visible light. We are already 'imaging' surfaces of planets with synthetic aperture radar, operating on the same principle.
So ex-VicePresident Nixon communicated with a foreign leadership, telling them to wait after his "re-election" and that he would be more 'flexible' in his dealings with them. Hmm, where have we heard that treasonous trash talk before?:-|
No, you are wrong. Bob Bruinga, WB4APR, the inventor of APRS has reverted in the naming convention, and now supports the "_packet_ reporting" moniker because he wants to emphasize that APRS is not just for position reporting. For example, it's extensively used for weather reporting from mostly non-mobile CWOP (Citizen Weather Observers Program) volunteers, who include a lot of non-amateur radio enthusiasts who augment NWS mesolevel forecasts with thousands of home-made stations reporting every ten minutes or so over the Internet. (The ham-radio CWOP volunteers can also report weather via amateur RF frequencies).
The first humanoid "words" were probably grunted utterances representing names of other humanoids, animals, places and (eventually) events.
Even so, automatically generating unique labels is no big deal for a computer. Every automatic "builder" program already do this. Except they're usually enumerated (i.e. box1,box2, box3,..., box999), instead of randomly generated ciphers ("xyzzy" etc). But computers don't do anything randomly, it all has to be programmed by a human.
>>... thousands of years of _safe_ operation...
Completely "safe"? Then how do you explain this paragraph about 'decommissioning' the ORNL test MSR from the article you cited?
"After shutdown the salt was believed to be in long-term safe storage, but beginning in the mid-1980s, there was concern that radioactivity was migrating through the system. Sampling in 1994 revealed concentrations of uranium that created a potential for a nuclear criticality accident, as well as a potentially dangerous build-up of fluorine gas —"
You already are paying one very low fee to use the Internet: zero dollars.
What you're paying real dollars for is the right to access the Internet by means of various physical carriers: price to be negotiated between carrier and user.
Peronally I prefer the Asok (Dilbert's intern) sewage activated access. Whereever you have a sewer pipe, then you have turdo-charged access!
Technology similar to the Omega system is still in operation in Russian, known as "Radiotehnicheskaya Sistema Dal'ney Navigatsii", RSDN-20. In the West it's known by the nickname "Alpha" and is based on a system of three VLF transmitters located in western, middle and eastern Russian. It provides nearly world-wide coverage and is used primarily by the Russian maritime fleet, some using very ancient semi-mechanical receivers still in operation.
If you want to see how these Alpha signal look like, take a peak at this Web Softwarre Defined Radio located in the Netherlands, operating in the VLF band. It is picking up 2 of the 3 stations (Krasnodar and Novosibirsk). They look like long Morse dashes around 11 to 15 kHz frequencies.
... which is the layer of the atmosphere, 50km-85km, immediately above the statosphere. This is a very lonely place, the air's too thin to float baloons, airplanes and such, and too thick for orbiting spacecraft. Its major inhabitants are falling meteors and rocket ships enroute to outer spaces. Also hosts the D Layer of the ionosphere (during daylight hours) which tends to absorb radio waves transmitted from the ground.
Convection stops in the stratosphere (because there is no temperature inversion there) so very difficult for gases and vapors rising from the ground to reach this desolate place. :-)
>> "... and the Player can come up with solutions to problems that the Designer might not have thought of. "
Maybe the world is just a big game and we're the Players. What would happen if we did not play the game the way the Designer wanted it to played?
Gen 6:5 And GOD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth,
and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.
Gen 6:6 And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth,
and it grieved him at his heart.
Gen 6:7 And the LORD said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth;
both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air;
for it repenteth me that I have made them.
OK, Hubbert, not Burton, but the theory originally was based on gelogical availability. Now it's complicated by other factors.
The so-called U.S. peak in the 70's merely signalled a shift to relying on imported oil. Coal production "peaked" too, but no one can argue that we're running out of coal.
My point is that no one seems to be concerned anymore about running out of oil now, whereas Jimmie Carter et al. warned that it was imminent way back in the 70's. If oil came only from squashed ferns and dinosaur remains, we would have run out a long time ago.
... and the demand for oil will continue to rise. No problem, we'll just import it from Mars.:-)
> layers of ferns and trees that I find imprinted
> throughout a 30 foot thick seam
The fact that fossils are sometimes found embedded in
coal deposits actually proves that the coal itself could not be from fossils. Read here for more insight on this:
http://www.semp.us/publications/biot_reader.php?BiotID=182
> it sure as hell ain't being made
> in the quantities we currently use daily.
But we haven't run out, have we? In spite of Burton's Peak Oil theory which originally predicted oil would start to run out in the 70's, then revised to the 90's, now currently projected to "run out" in the 2020's, all based on the belief that oil and coal were made out of fossil remains.
One of the biggest myths of modern times is the belief that coal and oil are the fossil remains of prehistoric plants and animals. These deposits were created from abiotic hydrocarbon gases deep within the earth.
This discovery of methane on Mars may lead to the further discovery of hopanoids or hydrocarbon fuels on Mars and possibly a biomass of organisms similar to ones that are found deep within the earth.
Thomas Gold predicted all of this years ago(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Gold). His seminal paper "The Deep,Hot Biosphere", which explains this is available here:
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=49434
-Johanus
If you've actually visited yandex.com and noticed the big red backward-looking letter "R", then you might be interested to know that it's actually a vowel in the Russian alphabet, pronounced "yah". It's also a pronoun in the Russian language, first-person singular, i.e. equivalent to the English pronoun "I".
So, the term "yandex" replaces the "I" in "Index" with "I", in Russian it comes out "yah" + "ndex" => yandex.
Why "index"? Well all search engines work by building huge inverted indexes (but we slashdotters already knew that, right?).
Wikipedia says it stands for "Yet Another iNDEX". That may be true, but the average Russian citizen, without any knowledge of Western Computer Science, would have no understanding of that cute etymology.
Background: blue works best because the human brain naturally perceives blue (sky, ocean etc) as something in the distance. Red is the worst in this department (the color of blood seems to evoke proximity, danger etc)
Foreground: white or yellow works best
My favorite: Yellow on dark blue (shades of Turbo Pascal!)
>>... The seed is the word of God.
Wow, very insightful, why only +1 score? Mod parent up to at least +4. (Must overcome inertia of low score mass).
-Johanus
I view the the creation story in Genesis as a literary fable, but believe that the creation and evolution of life is the result of an "intelligent design". Yes, parts of it appear to behave randomly, but all life is "derived" (using a software design metaphore) from abstract "foundation classes" i.e. sets of universal templates and behavioral principles, that permit life to be instantianted and elaborated with form to match needed functionality.
So, for example, I would not be surprised to travel to another planet and find creatures with teeth, arms, legs and brains similar to those found in terrestial creatures. I would not be surprised to find creatures swimming in extra-terrestial oceans with fins and shaped like our fish. etc.
Also, I don't think this idea conflicts with the teachings of Jesus at all. It is well-known that the "genetic code" is a kind of language where triplets of nucleotides ("codons" => words) denote individual amino acids and sequences of codons (=> sentences) are interpreted by RNA to produce proteins. It seems to me that you could interpret these "sentences" as the very Word of God.
In fact, that's exactly how one could interpret Jesus' Parable of the Seed (Luke 8:5-8:16)
"A sower went out to sow his seed: and as he sowed, some fell by the way side; and it was trodden down, and the fowls of the air devoured it.
And some fell upon a rock; and as soon as it was sprung up, it withered away, because it lacked moisture.
And some fell among thorns; and the thorns sprang up with it, and choked it.
And other fell on good ground, and sprang up, and bare fruit an hundredfold. And when he had said these things, he cried, He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.
And his disciples asked him, saying, What might this parable be?
And he said, Unto you it is given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of God: but to others in parables; that seeing they might not see, and hearing they might not understand.
Now the parable is this: The seed is the word of God. "
I repeat: RTFA. This so-called "complex math" is _not_ about imaginary numbers! It's about stochastic programming and _complex algorithms_ (i.e. complicated). Why don't you mod me up (for a change) so you people can get this straight.
"The idea is to use high-level math techniques, which IBM calls Stochastic programming, to help speed up and simplify complex tasks "
>> Complex math? Aren't real numbers good enough for the job?
RTFA. It's not about imaginary numbers. That's "complex" as in "complicated" math, specifically stochastic algorithms, which are probability contrained problems dealing with random variables!
FYI, so-called "neural network software" has been exploiting this kind of repetitive neural strengthening for years. It's called Hebbian learning, in honor of Donald Hebb, who first described it in 1949. Not everyone believes that neural net software corresponds to anything really happening in the brain, it just works and produces useful results. I suppose this article could be used to motivate the biological "truth" of Hebbian learning.
I don't think it's that amazing. I think all they're doing is logging the brightness of the disk while it rotates around the sun, not actually resolving surface features. So, the 'hot spot' represents the side of the planet of the planet always facing the sun, so as it revolves around the star you see all sides, but the hot side reads out a higher intensity. The poles are pointed away from the earth so the apparent hot spot is seen best at the equator.
Think of it as heat glare. We not really seeing any surface features at all, since this phenomenon would occur even if the planet was completely homogenized, heat-proof green cheese.
That's my theory anyway, correct me if I'm wrong.:-)
This is nothing new. The ancients believed that random events could predict the future:
Jonah 1:7 And they said every one to his fellow, Come, and let us cast lots, that we may know for whose cause this evil is upon us. So they cast lots, and the lot fell upon Jonah.
It is well known that the collection of "cast lots" is distributed randomly, but the ancients believed that everything happened for a purpose. Thus Jonah cheerfully accepted this random verdict as truth as he was thrown into the whale's belly!
There's nothing new here. This phenomenon was well known to the ancients
Jonah 1:7 And they said every one to his fellow, Come, and let us cast lots, that we may know for whose cause this evil is upon us. So they cast lots, and the lot fell upon Jonah.
We all know that the collection of "cast lots" is distributed randomly, but here we see that the ancients believed that such random sets could reliably predict the future. Even Jonah went along with this and cheerfully let himself be cast into the whales belly!
You may freely sell most any object that you rightfully own (except maybe guns, drugs, your kids etc).
But digital music is another matter. In what sense do you own the music? Do you own the ones and zeroes that comprise the music?
Can you make copies of songs for your own use? Can you sell or give away the "original"? If 'yes' and 'yes' then Why can't you give away copies of music?
You may listen to and record the music broadcast on the radio. I'll concede you shouldn't try to sell these recorded songs, but what's wrong with giving away music that was freely given away over the airwaves?
And how is that any different than sharing music "broadcast" over P2? Provided that somebody "owned" the original and that no money was charged for the performance.
-johanus
Slashdot Mirror
... not some paid actors: http://www.google.com/intl/en/jobs/students/
No need to be sad. Increasing effective aperture size of the telescope increases its resolving power. The imaging element doesn't have to be a single mirror or lens, but can consist of an array of elements scattered over a large area. Tricky part is getting all of the elements in phase agreement. Also doesn't have to be visible light. We are already 'imaging' surfaces of planets with synthetic aperture radar, operating on the same principle.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_Large_Telescope
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_Large_Array
So imagine a much larger optical array network, many miles in diameter, for imaging the surfaces of these exoplanets.
So ex-VicePresident Nixon communicated with a foreign leadership, telling them to wait after his "re-election" and that he would be more 'flexible' in his dealings with them. Hmm, where have we heard that treasonous trash talk before? :-|
> Wikipedia has the name wrong.
No, you are wrong. Bob Bruinga, WB4APR, the inventor of APRS has reverted in the naming convention, and now supports the "_packet_ reporting" moniker because he wants to emphasize that APRS is not just for position reporting. For example, it's extensively used for weather reporting from mostly non-mobile CWOP (Citizen Weather Observers Program) volunteers, who include a lot of non-amateur radio enthusiasts who augment NWS mesolevel forecasts with thousands of home-made stations reporting every ten minutes or so over the Internet. (The ham-radio CWOP volunteers can also report weather via amateur RF frequencies).
Also APRS has been used ("firenet") for reporting brush and forest fires.
http://wa8lmf.net/aprs/get_nws_shapefiles.htm
The first humanoid "words" were probably grunted utterances representing names of other humanoids, animals, places and (eventually) events.
..., box999), instead of randomly generated ciphers ("xyzzy" etc). But computers don't do anything randomly, it all has to be programmed by a human.
Even so, automatically generating unique labels is no big deal for a computer. Every automatic "builder" program already do this. Except they're usually enumerated (i.e. box1,box2, box3,
>> ... thousands of years of _safe_ operation ...
Completely "safe"? Then how do you explain this paragraph about 'decommissioning' the ORNL test MSR from the article you cited?
"After shutdown the salt was believed to be in long-term safe storage, but beginning in the mid-1980s, there was concern that radioactivity was migrating through the system. Sampling in 1994 revealed concentrations of uranium that created a potential for a nuclear criticality accident, as well as a potentially dangerous build-up of fluorine gas —"
You already are paying one very low fee to use the Internet: zero dollars.
What you're paying real dollars for is the right to access the Internet by means of various physical carriers: price to be negotiated between carrier and user.
Peronally I prefer the Asok (Dilbert's intern) sewage activated access. Whereever you have a sewer pipe, then you have turdo-charged access!
:-]
http://www.vlf.it/alphatrond/alpha.htm
If you want to see how these Alpha signal look like, take a peak at this Web Softwarre Defined Radio located in the Netherlands, operating in the VLF band. It is picking up 2 of the 3 stations (Krasnodar and Novosibirsk). They look like long Morse dashes around 11 to 15 kHz frequencies.
http://websdr.pa3weg.nl/
Johanus
... which is the layer of the atmosphere, 50km-85km, immediately above the statosphere. This is a very lonely place, the air's too thin to float baloons, airplanes and such, and too thick for orbiting spacecraft. Its major inhabitants are falling meteors and rocket ships enroute to outer spaces. Also hosts the D Layer of the ionosphere (during daylight hours) which tends to absorb radio waves transmitted from the ground.
:-)
Convection stops in the stratosphere (because there is no temperature inversion there) so very difficult for gases and vapors rising from the ground to reach this desolate place.
Maybe the world is just a big game and we're the Players. What would happen if we did not play the game the way the Designer wanted it to played?
OK, Hubbert, not Burton, but the theory originally was based on gelogical availability. Now it's complicated by other factors.
The so-called U.S. peak in the 70's merely signalled a shift to relying on imported oil. Coal production "peaked" too, but no one can argue that we're running out of coal.
My point is that no one seems to be concerned anymore about running out of oil now, whereas Jimmie Carter et al. warned that it was imminent way back in the 70's. If oil came only from squashed ferns and dinosaur remains, we would have run out a long time ago.
> layers of ferns and trees that I find imprinted
:-)
> throughout a 30 foot thick seam
The fact that fossils are sometimes found embedded in coal deposits actually proves that the coal itself could not be from fossils. Read here for more insight on this: http://www.semp.us/publications/biot_reader.php?BiotID=182
> it sure as hell ain't being made
> in the quantities we currently use daily.
But we haven't run out, have we? In spite of Burton's Peak Oil theory which originally predicted oil would start to run out in the 70's, then revised to the 90's, now currently projected to "run out" in the 2020's, all based on the belief that oil and coal were made out of fossil remains.
The truth is: oil and gas are created by abiogensis. Read on:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenic_petroleum_origin
One of the biggest myths of modern times is the belief that coal and oil are the fossil remains of prehistoric plants and animals. These deposits were created from abiotic hydrocarbon gases deep within the earth. This discovery of methane on Mars may lead to the further discovery of hopanoids or hydrocarbon fuels on Mars and possibly a biomass of organisms similar to ones that are found deep within the earth. Thomas Gold predicted all of this years ago(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Gold). His seminal paper "The Deep,Hot Biosphere", which explains this is available here: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=49434 -Johanus
Has anyone checked the gamma ray detection networks? Perhaps another "Clarke Event"?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GRB_080319B
If you've actually visited yandex.com and noticed the big red backward-looking letter "R", then you might be interested to know that it's actually a vowel in the Russian alphabet, pronounced "yah". It's also a pronoun in the Russian language, first-person singular, i.e. equivalent to the English pronoun "I".
So, the term "yandex" replaces the "I" in "Index" with "I", in Russian it comes out "yah" + "ndex" => yandex.
Why "index"? Well all search engines work by building huge inverted indexes (but we slashdotters already knew that, right?).
Wikipedia says it stands for "Yet Another iNDEX". That may be true, but the average Russian citizen, without any knowledge of Western Computer Science, would have no understanding of that cute etymology.
So, the Big Red Yah puts the I back in Index!
HTH,
-Johanus
Background: blue works best because the human brain naturally perceives blue (sky, ocean etc) as something in the distance. Red is the worst in this department (the color of blood seems to evoke proximity, danger etc)
Foreground: white or yellow works best
My favorite: Yellow on dark blue (shades of Turbo Pascal!)
Hope that helps.
>> ... The seed is the word of God.
Wow, very insightful, why only +1 score? Mod parent up to at least +4. (Must overcome inertia of low score mass).
-Johanus
I view the the creation story in Genesis as a literary fable, but believe that the creation and evolution of life is the result of an "intelligent design". Yes, parts of it appear to behave randomly, but all life is "derived" (using a software design metaphore) from abstract "foundation classes" i.e. sets of universal templates and behavioral principles, that permit life to be instantianted and elaborated with form to match needed functionality.
So, for example, I would not be surprised to travel to another planet and find creatures with teeth, arms, legs and brains similar to those found in terrestial creatures. I would not be surprised to find creatures swimming in extra-terrestial oceans with fins and shaped like our fish. etc.
Also, I don't think this idea conflicts with the teachings of Jesus at all. It is well-known that the "genetic code" is a kind of language where triplets of nucleotides ("codons" => words) denote individual amino acids and sequences of codons (=> sentences) are interpreted by RNA to produce proteins. It seems to me that you could interpret these "sentences" as the very Word of God.
In fact, that's exactly how one could interpret Jesus' Parable of the Seed (Luke 8:5-8:16)
I repeat: RTFA. This so-called "complex math" is _not_ about imaginary numbers! It's about stochastic programming and _complex algorithms_ (i.e. complicated). Why don't you mod me up (for a change) so you people can get this straight.
"The idea is to use high-level math techniques, which IBM calls Stochastic programming, to help speed up and simplify complex tasks "
>> Complex math? Aren't real numbers good enough for the job?
RTFA. It's not about imaginary numbers. That's "complex" as in "complicated" math, specifically stochastic algorithms, which are probability contrained problems dealing with random variables!
FYI, so-called "neural network software" has been exploiting this kind of repetitive neural strengthening for years. It's called Hebbian learning, in honor of Donald Hebb, who first described it in 1949. Not everyone believes that neural net software corresponds to anything really happening in the brain, it just works and produces useful results. I suppose this article could be used to motivate the biological "truth" of Hebbian learning.
I don't think it's that amazing. I think all they're doing is logging the brightness of the disk while it rotates around the sun, not actually resolving surface features. So, the 'hot spot' represents the side of the planet of the planet always facing the sun, so as it revolves around the star you see all sides, but the hot side reads out a higher intensity. The poles are pointed away from the earth so the apparent hot spot is seen best at the equator. Think of it as heat glare. We not really seeing any surface features at all, since this phenomenon would occur even if the planet was completely homogenized, heat-proof green cheese. That's my theory anyway, correct me if I'm wrong. :-)
This is nothing new. The ancients believed that random events could predict the future:
Jonah 1:7 And they said every one to his fellow, Come, and let us cast lots, that we may know for whose cause this evil is upon us. So they cast lots, and the lot fell upon Jonah.
It is well known that the collection of "cast lots" is distributed randomly, but the ancients believed that everything happened for a purpose. Thus Jonah cheerfully accepted this random verdict as truth as he was thrown into the whale's belly!
-Johanus
There's nothing new here. This phenomenon was well known to the ancients
Jonah 1:7 And they said every one to his fellow,
Come, and let us cast lots, that we may know for whose cause this evil is upon us. So they cast lots, and the lot fell upon Jonah.
We all know that the collection of "cast lots" is distributed randomly, but here we see that the ancients believed that such random sets could reliably predict the future. Even Jonah went along with this and cheerfully let himself be cast into the whales belly!
-Johanus
You may freely sell most any object that you rightfully own (except maybe guns, drugs, your kids etc). But digital music is another matter. In what sense do you own the music? Do you own the ones and zeroes that comprise the music? Can you make copies of songs for your own use? Can you sell or give away the "original"? If 'yes' and 'yes' then Why can't you give away copies of music? You may listen to and record the music broadcast on the radio. I'll concede you shouldn't try to sell these recorded songs, but what's wrong with giving away music that was freely given away over the airwaves? And how is that any different than sharing music "broadcast" over P2? Provided that somebody "owned" the original and that no money was charged for the performance. -johanus