It's matter spread out between galaxies very thinly. We initially found dark matter because of how galaxies rotate and by gravitational lensing, means that dark matter can accumulate in something analogous to clumps at astronomical scales. The newly discovered matter doesn't act like how we've observed dark matter to act.
Also, there's far too little of it. Currently, we expect the Universe to be about 4% ordinary matter and about 25% dark matter, the remainder not being matter. We found half of the expected ordinary matter, which is less than a tenth of the dark matter we'd expect. There's not enough ordinary matter out there to produce the sort of universe we observe.
The matter referred to in the summary is ordinary matter, like you find in the atmosphere or the lint trap. There's nothing special about it, except that we hadn't noticed it.
Dark matter has gravitational effects, visible not only in galactic rotation but in gravitational lensing, and predicted by theories of the Universe being created. It doesn't interact significantly electromagnetically. We have detected it by noticing that there are gravitational fields where there is no ordinary matter, or at least not enough to create the field. We haven't detected it in any other way.
What counts as detecting things? We see effects from various forces. We can touch things because of electromagnetic fields holding finger atoms out of the space containing spoon atoms. Hearing is similar. We can taste and smell based on chemistry, which is a function of electromagnetism. Seeing is straight transmission of electromagnetic waves/particles from an object into our eyes. If something doesn't interact electromagnetically, we have to detect it in a slightly more indirect manner.
You're exaggerating. At least through the middle of the first millennium, there were no spaces between words in many important documents. I don't remember seeing any in the copies of the Magna Carta I saw when I visited southern England, and that's later.
Hey, I didn't provide any of the premises or assumptions. What I said is the logical consequence of what you said, as well as an analysis (which might be wrong, but that's not what you're complaining about). If you don't want a reductio ad absurdam, don't set one up.
If I can say things that make people more likely to invite me to something, hire me, or have sex with me, then I can certainly say other things and people will be less likely to invite me to something, hire me, or have sex with me. Them's consequences. Are you trying to tell me that, if I would invite someone to dinner if they talked about wanting racial equality, I'd have to invite that person if they were a self-described Nazi? If not, then there clearly are some consequences of free speech that you're comfortable with, and presumably some you aren't.
This came up recently with the discussion about whether a business should fire a Nazi for demonstrating as a Nazi. Neither side is obviously completely correct.
It's stating facts, which is normally considered part of free speech. This isn't a confidentiality that was privately agreed to. The reason people are prosecuted for revealing classified information is that they agreed not to. It's perfectly legal for me to publish classified information I'm given, as part of free speech. I've signed NDAs with companies I've worked for, and saying certain things about them would be a breach of contract. HIPAA, on the other hand, is a blanket legal ban of certain speech. If you're in a certain occupation, it is illegal for you to say certain true things.
Confidentiality agreements can be used to work against free speech. Automatic legal confidential requirements can do the same.
They've done a very good job so far, reducing price to LEO dramatically. They're working on reducing it further. Cheap and reliable travel to LEO is an essential part of doing anything in space.
Did you see their plan for being able to pay for the spaceship?
Actually, I don't really care about it. I don't think sending people to Mars os high priority. Developing infrastructure in space around Earth is much more important in the short run (say, the next fifty years). I really like what they're doing right now, and they need to improve that further for a Mars mission.
"Lies and fraud" is closer to reality.
Really? Where does the fraud come in? Musk can talk about Mars all he wants, but right now people are getting their stuff into space on Space-X rockets. Not because they want Musk to go to Mars, but because he provides excellent value for the money. "Hey, Elon, can you send our satellite into orbit for $X?" "Sure, customer, we can do that. It's another stepping stone to Mars!" "Well, OK, but I'm just interested in getting stuff to orbit. Here's the satellite and the check."
Fraud is lying for money. Having unrealistically hopeful plans is not itself lying, and I don't see that Space-X is making money off it.
It really doesn't matter if BFR depends on Falcon Heavy or not. Falcon Heavy has taken something like six years to get to launch status. As AC said, that's a reasonably impressive achievement, but it suggests that "working on the BFR" is a pretty long-term project for a 2024 launch, considering everything else that needs to happen and leaving time for integration testing.
One reason to work to establish self-sustaining colonies is the simple fact that at present, humans are one decent-sized asteroid impact (or any massively-cataclysmic event) away from total extinction.
In the event of any massively cataclysmic event, Earth is almost certainly still going to be the most hospitable planet in the Solar System. It will have air and be at a halfway reasonable temperature somewhere. Besides, we haven't had an event that would wipe out humanity in hundreds of millions, perhaps billions of years, so there's no reason to worry about one soon.
Also, a self-sustaining colony off Earth is going to have to be very large. It will need high technology to survive, and it will have to be able to produce all of that technology on site. It will have to have experts and scientists of all sorts. I'd be surprised if fewer than a hundred thousand people would be necessary.
People used to be able to "start over" in new lands, escape overly-oppressive regimes, and bad life-choices
And people in general aren't going to Mars. In order to get to Mars, you first have to get to low Earth orbit, and that's going to continue to be really expensive. This means that potential emigrants will be carefully vetted. Consider how much damage one person could do in a bubble environment. There will be no emigration for people who made bad life choices as long as there's a plentiful supply of people who didn't. Once there, of course, the person will probably be crowded into a crowded structure, because maintaining livable conditions over a large area is going to be really expensive. The combination of high population density, colony reliance on high tech, and individual reliance on the colony for survival suggests a rigid and not particularly democratic regime.
Humans also need a common goal around which to unite and work towards to minimize conflict.
Space is probably too distant to hold a common goal, and too irrelevant to the average person. The interest that fueled Apollo wasn't sustainable, even with the possibility of people living in space. I'm not sure we can get that common a goal towards anything that isn't mundane.
For that matter, it would probably be easier to build giant orbiting colonies at Earth/Moon La Grange points, and later move on to Mars & beyond.
I like that idea. Lunar orbit isn't that far away in time, and trying to live off the currently available air for a few days while waiting for a spare part is a lot more doable than a few months. If we can get the necessary materials there, we could learn a lot about lower-gravity living. We know that people can function normally under one gravity, and suffer seriously from any prolonged living in microgravity.
They are a great orbital rocket company, and will continue to be the best they can, because everything in space depends on stuff getting to Earth orbit. This includes any Mars-bound spaceship. Therefore, Musk has every incentive to make Space-X work inexpensively (well, inexpensively for space shots) and reliably.
I don't really care about sending people to Mars in the near future, but I do appreciate reduced cost to near Earth orbit.
It's also a very clear signal that the company doesn't give a rat's ass about you. It endorses the idea that employees should look after their own welfare first and the company's welfare maybe third or ninety-second. It makes it futile to try to assemble an excellent team, since you'll just have to fire some really good people.
The short-term view ("loot it now") isn't recent. It's at least thirty years old, when the boomers weren't dominating top management yet. I'm not clear on how it went, but I do know when.
As a boomer nearing retirement, a lot of my assets are in stocks (directly and through mutual funds). I want companies to do well over a twenty-year period, so my assets increase. I don't care nearly as much about the next quarter as the next decade.
If you're talking about the time when the carbon wasn't sequestered in fossil fuels and such, the Sun was dimmer then. If you're talking about a more recent time, we didn't have all that carbon around then. I'm not as confident of future results matching past results as you are.
Climate denier means someone who has concluded that there is no global warming or that our actions have nothing to do with it, and will find whatever explanations necessary to discredit all evidence to the contrary. Climate skeptics are those who are unsure but open to being persuaded, and if these examine the evidence they normally realize that AGW is happening.
A climate denier will nitpick any temperature measurement, and throw out all similar measurements if a small and perhaps imaginary nitpick is correct. The denier will sometimes claim that some balancing force is stopping CO2 concentration from increasing, despite the actual measurements. The denier will look at climate scientists and find that the scientists are saying things that the denier "knows" are false, and therefore the scientists must be wrong/stupid/in a vast global conspiracy usually attributed to political trends in the US only.
The Washington Post, and others, were not held to high journalistic standards by the government. It was never a certifiable news source. It was a newspaper put out by people who, if nothing else, saw that a good reputation for journalism would help sell papers and deliver ads to readers.
What the Internet did was give us the ability to read articles in hundreds of newspapers without paying the newspapers anything or displaying their ads. This meant that there was far less money in journalism, which eroded standards and cut into the ability of journalists to dig deep on things.
And the only reason that your tirade is legal is free speech. You don't cite any reputable journals. You make statements that I know to be false. Now, it's good in a sense that you talk nonsense about depression (something I do have experience with), and I wouldn't wish you to find out otherwise yourself, but that doesn't make what you say true.
What laws were being violated and not being enforced? Much of the 2008 collapse was because laws that would at least have slowed it down had been repealed.
That's why the Supreme Court has pretty consistently decided that the government has no business interfering with political speech. False advertising for commercial purposes is illegal. False advertising for political purposes is legal (or there'd be a lot of Republican candidates behind bars).
The problem is that lots of people said that Obama was a Muslim born in Kenya because they believed that. We can't punish people for saying stupid things because they believe them. Heck, sometimes what looks like stupid speech turns out to be prophetic (look at some of what Richard Stallman wrote).
Similarly, there's no law against saying that global warming isn't happening. The court cases are about demonstrating that companies knew it was, and deliberately made false statements to further their business.
Kant discussed his "categorical imperative" as a basis for morals. One of the formulations (and I'm not offering to prove the formulations are anywhere near equivalent) was "Always behave as if your behavior could be made a rule". If lying becomes the rule, then there's no point in speech, or lying.
If someone were to discover a simple and inexpensive cure for depression, some drug company is going to want to have it and sell it, doubtless for an inflated price. Alternatively, it could be marketed as a dietary supplement or something, provided no medical claims were made.
The FDA has rules about what claims can be made. They need to be based on a certain level of evidence. If you claim to have a simple and inexpensive depression cure, you really need to conduct certain experiments to make sure. What happens if your cure typically causes schizophrenia to develop? If it affects people's mental state, it may not do so only for good.
I had a friend working at the FDA for a while, in animal nutrition. She said she'd accept anything that had three scientifically sound studies verifying it with statistically 95% confidence each.
The difference with a company is that no one is forced to buy their product or service, with a government there is no choice.
The other difference is that you have some influence over government, but not private companies, and governments have to work under stricter rules than corporations.
For the average person to have freedom, there needs to be government and private business, neither dominating the other.
One thing that offends me about politicians is when they lie clumsily. Assuming I'll believe any old lie is an insult to my intelligence. I want my politicians to lie a lot better when they do.
Hey, it's more realistic than expecting them to always speak the truth.
Slashdot Mirror
It's matter spread out between galaxies very thinly. We initially found dark matter because of how galaxies rotate and by gravitational lensing, means that dark matter can accumulate in something analogous to clumps at astronomical scales. The newly discovered matter doesn't act like how we've observed dark matter to act.
Also, there's far too little of it. Currently, we expect the Universe to be about 4% ordinary matter and about 25% dark matter, the remainder not being matter. We found half of the expected ordinary matter, which is less than a tenth of the dark matter we'd expect. There's not enough ordinary matter out there to produce the sort of universe we observe.
The matter referred to in the summary is ordinary matter, like you find in the atmosphere or the lint trap. There's nothing special about it, except that we hadn't noticed it.
Dark matter has gravitational effects, visible not only in galactic rotation but in gravitational lensing, and predicted by theories of the Universe being created. It doesn't interact significantly electromagnetically. We have detected it by noticing that there are gravitational fields where there is no ordinary matter, or at least not enough to create the field. We haven't detected it in any other way.
What counts as detecting things? We see effects from various forces. We can touch things because of electromagnetic fields holding finger atoms out of the space containing spoon atoms. Hearing is similar. We can taste and smell based on chemistry, which is a function of electromagnetism. Seeing is straight transmission of electromagnetic waves/particles from an object into our eyes. If something doesn't interact electromagnetically, we have to detect it in a slightly more indirect manner.
You're exaggerating. At least through the middle of the first millennium, there were no spaces between words in many important documents. I don't remember seeing any in the copies of the Magna Carta I saw when I visited southern England, and that's later.
I like the idea of control for the user, I just don't see how it could happen.
Hey, I didn't provide any of the premises or assumptions. What I said is the logical consequence of what you said, as well as an analysis (which might be wrong, but that's not what you're complaining about). If you don't want a reductio ad absurdam, don't set one up.
If I can say things that make people more likely to invite me to something, hire me, or have sex with me, then I can certainly say other things and people will be less likely to invite me to something, hire me, or have sex with me. Them's consequences. Are you trying to tell me that, if I would invite someone to dinner if they talked about wanting racial equality, I'd have to invite that person if they were a self-described Nazi? If not, then there clearly are some consequences of free speech that you're comfortable with, and presumably some you aren't.
This came up recently with the discussion about whether a business should fire a Nazi for demonstrating as a Nazi. Neither side is obviously completely correct.
It's stating facts, which is normally considered part of free speech. This isn't a confidentiality that was privately agreed to. The reason people are prosecuted for revealing classified information is that they agreed not to. It's perfectly legal for me to publish classified information I'm given, as part of free speech. I've signed NDAs with companies I've worked for, and saying certain things about them would be a breach of contract. HIPAA, on the other hand, is a blanket legal ban of certain speech. If you're in a certain occupation, it is illegal for you to say certain true things.
Confidentiality agreements can be used to work against free speech. Automatic legal confidential requirements can do the same.
So, when can we expect a first test of BFR? Add a few years onto that for making sure it works great, and 2024 looks pretty aggressive.
They've done a very good job so far, reducing price to LEO dramatically. They're working on reducing it further. Cheap and reliable travel to LEO is an essential part of doing anything in space.
Actually, I don't really care about it. I don't think sending people to Mars os high priority. Developing infrastructure in space around Earth is much more important in the short run (say, the next fifty years). I really like what they're doing right now, and they need to improve that further for a Mars mission.
Really? Where does the fraud come in? Musk can talk about Mars all he wants, but right now people are getting their stuff into space on Space-X rockets. Not because they want Musk to go to Mars, but because he provides excellent value for the money. "Hey, Elon, can you send our satellite into orbit for $X?" "Sure, customer, we can do that. It's another stepping stone to Mars!" "Well, OK, but I'm just interested in getting stuff to orbit. Here's the satellite and the check."
Fraud is lying for money. Having unrealistically hopeful plans is not itself lying, and I don't see that Space-X is making money off it.
It really doesn't matter if BFR depends on Falcon Heavy or not. Falcon Heavy has taken something like six years to get to launch status. As AC said, that's a reasonably impressive achievement, but it suggests that "working on the BFR" is a pretty long-term project for a 2024 launch, considering everything else that needs to happen and leaving time for integration testing.
In the event of any massively cataclysmic event, Earth is almost certainly still going to be the most hospitable planet in the Solar System. It will have air and be at a halfway reasonable temperature somewhere. Besides, we haven't had an event that would wipe out humanity in hundreds of millions, perhaps billions of years, so there's no reason to worry about one soon.
Also, a self-sustaining colony off Earth is going to have to be very large. It will need high technology to survive, and it will have to be able to produce all of that technology on site. It will have to have experts and scientists of all sorts. I'd be surprised if fewer than a hundred thousand people would be necessary.
And people in general aren't going to Mars. In order to get to Mars, you first have to get to low Earth orbit, and that's going to continue to be really expensive. This means that potential emigrants will be carefully vetted. Consider how much damage one person could do in a bubble environment. There will be no emigration for people who made bad life choices as long as there's a plentiful supply of people who didn't. Once there, of course, the person will probably be crowded into a crowded structure, because maintaining livable conditions over a large area is going to be really expensive. The combination of high population density, colony reliance on high tech, and individual reliance on the colony for survival suggests a rigid and not particularly democratic regime.
Space is probably too distant to hold a common goal, and too irrelevant to the average person. The interest that fueled Apollo wasn't sustainable, even with the possibility of people living in space. I'm not sure we can get that common a goal towards anything that isn't mundane.
I like that idea. Lunar orbit isn't that far away in time, and trying to live off the currently available air for a few days while waiting for a spare part is a lot more doable than a few months. If we can get the necessary materials there, we could learn a lot about lower-gravity living. We know that people can function normally under one gravity, and suffer seriously from any prolonged living in microgravity.
They are a great orbital rocket company, and will continue to be the best they can, because everything in space depends on stuff getting to Earth orbit. This includes any Mars-bound spaceship. Therefore, Musk has every incentive to make Space-X work inexpensively (well, inexpensively for space shots) and reliably.
I don't really care about sending people to Mars in the near future, but I do appreciate reduced cost to near Earth orbit.
FWIW, when I was laid off in 2002, it looked like the company was getting rid of the higher-paid developers.
It's also a very clear signal that the company doesn't give a rat's ass about you. It endorses the idea that employees should look after their own welfare first and the company's welfare maybe third or ninety-second. It makes it futile to try to assemble an excellent team, since you'll just have to fire some really good people.
The short-term view ("loot it now") isn't recent. It's at least thirty years old, when the boomers weren't dominating top management yet. I'm not clear on how it went, but I do know when.
As a boomer nearing retirement, a lot of my assets are in stocks (directly and through mutual funds). I want companies to do well over a twenty-year period, so my assets increase. I don't care nearly as much about the next quarter as the next decade.
If you're talking about the time when the carbon wasn't sequestered in fossil fuels and such, the Sun was dimmer then. If you're talking about a more recent time, we didn't have all that carbon around then. I'm not as confident of future results matching past results as you are.
Climate denier means someone who has concluded that there is no global warming or that our actions have nothing to do with it, and will find whatever explanations necessary to discredit all evidence to the contrary. Climate skeptics are those who are unsure but open to being persuaded, and if these examine the evidence they normally realize that AGW is happening.
A climate denier will nitpick any temperature measurement, and throw out all similar measurements if a small and perhaps imaginary nitpick is correct. The denier will sometimes claim that some balancing force is stopping CO2 concentration from increasing, despite the actual measurements. The denier will look at climate scientists and find that the scientists are saying things that the denier "knows" are false, and therefore the scientists must be wrong/stupid/in a vast global conspiracy usually attributed to political trends in the US only.
The Washington Post, and others, were not held to high journalistic standards by the government. It was never a certifiable news source. It was a newspaper put out by people who, if nothing else, saw that a good reputation for journalism would help sell papers and deliver ads to readers.
What the Internet did was give us the ability to read articles in hundreds of newspapers without paying the newspapers anything or displaying their ads. This meant that there was far less money in journalism, which eroded standards and cut into the ability of journalists to dig deep on things.
And the only reason that your tirade is legal is free speech. You don't cite any reputable journals. You make statements that I know to be false. Now, it's good in a sense that you talk nonsense about depression (something I do have experience with), and I wouldn't wish you to find out otherwise yourself, but that doesn't make what you say true.
What laws were being violated and not being enforced? Much of the 2008 collapse was because laws that would at least have slowed it down had been repealed.
That's why the Supreme Court has pretty consistently decided that the government has no business interfering with political speech. False advertising for commercial purposes is illegal. False advertising for political purposes is legal (or there'd be a lot of Republican candidates behind bars).
The problem is that lots of people said that Obama was a Muslim born in Kenya because they believed that. We can't punish people for saying stupid things because they believe them. Heck, sometimes what looks like stupid speech turns out to be prophetic (look at some of what Richard Stallman wrote).
Similarly, there's no law against saying that global warming isn't happening. The court cases are about demonstrating that companies knew it was, and deliberately made false statements to further their business.
Kant discussed his "categorical imperative" as a basis for morals. One of the formulations (and I'm not offering to prove the formulations are anywhere near equivalent) was "Always behave as if your behavior could be made a rule". If lying becomes the rule, then there's no point in speech, or lying.
If someone were to discover a simple and inexpensive cure for depression, some drug company is going to want to have it and sell it, doubtless for an inflated price. Alternatively, it could be marketed as a dietary supplement or something, provided no medical claims were made.
The FDA has rules about what claims can be made. They need to be based on a certain level of evidence. If you claim to have a simple and inexpensive depression cure, you really need to conduct certain experiments to make sure. What happens if your cure typically causes schizophrenia to develop? If it affects people's mental state, it may not do so only for good.
I had a friend working at the FDA for a while, in animal nutrition. She said she'd accept anything that had three scientifically sound studies verifying it with statistically 95% confidence each.
The other difference is that you have some influence over government, but not private companies, and governments have to work under stricter rules than corporations.
For the average person to have freedom, there needs to be government and private business, neither dominating the other.
One thing that offends me about politicians is when they lie clumsily. Assuming I'll believe any old lie is an insult to my intelligence. I want my politicians to lie a lot better when they do.
Hey, it's more realistic than expecting them to always speak the truth.