I wonder if he graduated from the same British bastion of learning that employs a professor who rejected an Israeli's application for a position because of Israel's policies.
How is this remark in any way germane to the current discussion of global warming? This is like me, for instance, pointing out that Ariel Sharon is a war criminal. Not relevant, not relevant...
In the early part of the last millenium people were growing settling Greenland and Iceland
People still live in Greenland and Iceland, and their populations are still growing. Wine still grows in England (I wouldn't drink it, though). Your point?
If this prediction is true then how have so many species of plants and animals survived so long through and between ice ages?
Perhaps because during previous ice ages there hasn't been a bipedal species bent on cutting down all the rain forests, polluting all the water supplies, and releasing tonnes of greenhouse gasses and toxic emissions into the atmosphere. You are comparing apples and oranges.
Evolution will fill in the gaps that are opened when those animals are extinct
Only over evolutionary timescales -- that is, millions of years. Over shorter timescales, the decline in biodiversity on Earth can only spell trouble for those species (like ours) which manage temporarily to stave off extinction.
My understanding of the hack is this: it is possible to unlock a word document or form (i.e., make read-only parts writeable), modify it, and then re-lock it with the original password, without ever having to know what the original password is.
Which then raises the question: in the hashing algorithm Microsoft is using to scramble the password, why the hell aren't they adding in some cryptographic salt?. If they had made the scrambled password (which is leaked when a locked document is saved as HTML) depend not only on the cleartext password, but also on the read-only parts of the document, then they wouldn't have this problem: a hacked document re-locked with the same scrambled password would have a different salt, and therefore a different cleartext password. D'oh!
Hawking came up with the idea of Hawking radiation, which is a quantum-mechanical mechanism for matter to escape from a black hole. The basic idea is this: a quantum fluctuation creates a matter/antimatter pair of particles near the event horizon of a black hole. The antiparticle falls in, destroying some of the mass of the black hole, while its partner escapes. The net effect is as if the black hole had emitted a particle.
What I don't understand about this concept is where the energy from the antiparticle annihilation gees. However, this is just limited understanding on my behalf, and I believe that Hawking radiation is a widely-accepted notion.
On a side note, it has been demonstrated that the surface area of a black hole behaves like entropy, in that it is subject to something akin to the second law of thermodynamics. Anything with entropy should have an associated temperature, and anything with a temperature should radiate. This radiation is Hawking radiation.
Are black holes genuinely considered by the experts to be actually infinitely dense, or just very, very (but finitely) dense?
It's more the case that, at the central singularity of a black hole, so many physical laws break down that normal physical quantities are poorly defined. In the case of the density, we have a finite amount of mass contained in a point. Since density is mass/volume, and the volume of a point is zero, then one could indeed say that the density is infinite. But it might be better to say that it is just undefined, since the concept of density loses its meaning and physical relevance when we are dealing with a singularity.
Physics breaks down at the edge of the event horizon, so beyond that there's no "gravity" or anything else.
Rubbish, physics works perfectly well beyond the event horizon. What does go screwy at the event horizon is the Schwarzschild metric, which describes the local curvature of space. However, the screwyness is a mathematical artifice, much like the fact that longitude is ill defined at the north and south poles. Using a different coordinate system gets rid of the problem in both cases.
So there is nothing particularly unphysical about the event horizon, above and beyond the fact that the effective escape velocity there exceeds the speed of light. The place where the physics blows up is in fact the central singularity.
Oh, and your phrase "accelerating at the speed of light" is meaningless. The speed of light is a speed, not an acceleration, and to compare them directly is meaningless.
As of Monday, the pressure had declined a total of nine millimeters. That is equivalent to about one-quarter of a pound per square inch, said NASA spokesman James Hartsfield.
Hasn't NASA yet learned that mixing units can lead to very bad things
Silly fact: 1.7446551e-40 is Planck's constant in British Thermal Unit-hours.
While Indian programmers (we used 8 different ones for 6 different projects) may be perfectly competent to produce software to spec, they usually ALWAYS built it to spec and NEVER brought up any issues they might have found in the process.
You should be thankful that they build to spec. I recall seeing Microsoft's first stab at XML: an atrocious hack-job which departed from the standard in so many places that it was breathtaking.
Coding to spec is not always as simple as it might appear. This you would understand if, for instance, you had to write an X.400 implementation. You should regard the spec-adherence of your Indian colleagues as a major plus point, not as an incidental fact of little importance.
What several companies found when they got the code back was that trojan horses, backdoors, logic bombs, and other nasties in the code in addition to the Y2K fixes.
Care to back up this statement with some hard facts?
NOTE: I am *NOT* saying *ALL* people from other countries are dishonest.
But, by your emphasis on "ALL", you are implying that *MOST* people from other countries are dishonest. Care to back up this statement with some hard facts?
Hubble can also see well into the IR, which is *also* impossible using ground based telescopes
Idiot. What the hell do you think the initials in "UKIRT" stand for?
In any case, sure there are needs for space-based telescopes, especially in the UV. However, the point I was making is that for optical telescopes, it is perfectly possible to build competitive solutions on Earth, at a fraction of the cost of space-based mission. The same applies to radio and submm telescopes, which is why we have facilities like the VLA, Arecibo, the JCMT, ALMA etc etc.
If you're going to spend a $1B on a telescope, aren't you reaching the point where the money would be better spent to put one in space away from the atmosphere and associated debris rather than sticking it on terra firma?
No, putting a project into space something in space is like going for the "I'd like an inch-thick gold-plate finish with diamond encrusting" when purchasing a car. Consider this: the Hubble Space Telescope cost $1.5 billion in the 1980s, for a 2.4m diameter primary mirror. If we were to scale the cost based on the diameter of the mirror, then a 100m space telescope would cost $62.5 billion, over an order of magnitude more than the proposed ground-based facility.
And don't think that ground-based telescopes are the poor cousins of space-based ones. The European Southern Observatory'sVery Large Telescope (VLT) can achieve resolutions better than Hubble, even if the latter had been built without the optical problems, and the VLT cost 1/10th of what Hubble did.
What courses did you teach? We may have seen each other, I graduated in 1994
Ah, I would have just missed you; I was teaching first year in 1994 (telescope training on the Meades, and the classroom-based stuff). Out of interest, are you still in astronomy?
Spend the $1 billion on better things. We should try and solve our own planets problems before going out into space.
Yes, the c. $400 billion being spent on the US military has a far better chance of furthering the lot of humanity. And Bush's tax cut of $1.4 trillon sure helped out all of those disadvantaged rich people.
C'mon, weigh it up: vast amounts of money are already being spent on things which are much further down the priority list than astronomy programmes. Surely it is these which should be considered ripe for cancellation, far ahead of projects which seek to understand our place in the Universe. To quote from a particularly aposite letter which appears in today's Guardian:
Abandoning endeavours of discovery because of alleged "wastefulness", whether the target be space exploration or medieval history, will not improve matters. It will only feed the underlying shallow thinking and barbarism that have created the problems in the first place.
look this is ridiculous. you've insulted my intelligence now on two occasions.
Yes, I have, because you've failed twice to address what I wrote. I've already explained that neither the word "sniped" nor the word "shotgun" were mine, but you've chosen to ignore that. Instead, you've taken me for a gun control nut, and proceeded to attack me based on this erroneous supposition. Unfortunately, you were racing so fast to knock down your hastily-erected strawman, that you didn't bother to read what I wrote.
it's fine if you're not familiar with firearms - just dont go around telling other people what to do with them
Your completely specious argument belies an inability to think deeply about issues such as this.
Although I may know little about firearms, I would claim that people like me have a voice in the firearms debate. Why? Because I may one day be like those poor sods who were shot at and/or killed by kids thinking it fun to shoot up vehicles. If firearms are a potential threat to my life, then I should have a say in issues such as their availability. Why is this difficult for you to understand?
what i find bothersome is that you know so little about firearms that you suggest a shotgun is a sniper weapon
Apologies, one of the articles I read regarding the event (by ABC news) claimed that the boys were using shotguns. The word "sniping" was the New York Post's phraseology, not mine. In any case, further research reveals that they were using.22 rifle(s), so perhaps "sniping" is not too off the mark.
On a side note: you appear distraught that I know very little about firearms. In what way does my lack of knowledge cause you concern? Does it mean that I'm somehow less of a man? Explain.
In the jurisdiction in which I live, that makes it a criminal offence to sell or rent either item to anyone under the age of 18.
I'm guessing from your website that you live in the UK. Based on that assumption, I wonder whether you're aware that the certification of movies, undertaken by the British Board of Film Classification, has no legal basis? By this, I mean that no crime is committed if an under-18 walks into an 18-certificate movie. Of course, almost all mainstream cinemas will not let the under-18 see the 18-certificate movie; but this decision is made at the discretion of the management, and has no basis in UK law.
On to the case with GTA3 and GTA:Vice City, both of my (UK-purchased) copies have, like yours, 18 certificates on the back. However, this classification is BBFC-based, and therefore most likely carries the same legal weight as movie classifcation: none. So your initial points would appear to be wrong, although I'm not 100% sure, and you may want to check this. You're spot on, though, with your closing remarks about electronic babysitters.
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I wonder if he graduated from the same British bastion of learning that employs a professor who rejected an Israeli's application for a position because of Israel's policies.
How is this remark in any way germane to the current discussion of global warming? This is like me, for instance, pointing out that Ariel Sharon is a war criminal. Not relevant, not relevant...
In the early part of the last millenium people were growing settling Greenland and Iceland
People still live in Greenland and Iceland, and their populations are still growing. Wine still grows in England (I wouldn't drink it, though). Your point?
If this prediction is true then how have so many species of plants and animals survived so long through and between ice ages?
Perhaps because during previous ice ages there hasn't been a bipedal species bent on cutting down all the rain forests, polluting all the water supplies, and releasing tonnes of greenhouse gasses and toxic emissions into the atmosphere. You are comparing apples and oranges.
We need to see how horrible pollution can be firsthand before we really give an effort.
Maybe you getting a good dose of colon cancer will demonstrate to you that you need to eat less crappy food?
C'mon, your attitude is just plain dumb. What ever happened to 'prevention is better than cure'?
Evolution will fill in the gaps that are opened when those animals are extinct
Only over evolutionary timescales -- that is, millions of years. Over shorter timescales, the decline in biodiversity on Earth can only spell trouble for those species (like ours) which manage temporarily to stave off extinction.
My understanding of the hack is this: it is possible to unlock a word document or form (i.e., make read-only parts writeable), modify it, and then re-lock it with the original password, without ever having to know what the original password is.
Which then raises the question: in the hashing algorithm Microsoft is using to scramble the password, why the hell aren't they adding in some cryptographic salt?. If they had made the scrambled password (which is leaked when a locked document is saved as HTML) depend not only on the cleartext password, but also on the read-only parts of the document, then they wouldn't have this problem: a hacked document re-locked with the same scrambled password would have a different salt, and therefore a different cleartext password. D'oh!
Of course, this Gravastar ideas hasn't really been accepted yet.
...and remember that the idea of a black hole hasn't been debunked yet. Give it a decade or so, and we'll see what happens.
Has he come up with anything unique? What?
Hawking came up with the idea of Hawking radiation, which is a quantum-mechanical mechanism for matter to escape from a black hole. The basic idea is this: a quantum fluctuation creates a matter/antimatter pair of particles near the event horizon of a black hole. The antiparticle falls in, destroying some of the mass of the black hole, while its partner escapes. The net effect is as if the black hole had emitted a particle.
What I don't understand about this concept is where the energy from the antiparticle annihilation gees. However, this is just limited understanding on my behalf, and I believe that Hawking radiation is a widely-accepted notion.
On a side note, it has been demonstrated that the surface area of a black hole behaves like entropy, in that it is subject to something akin to the second law of thermodynamics. Anything with entropy should have an associated temperature, and anything with a temperature should radiate. This radiation is Hawking radiation.
Are black holes genuinely considered by the experts to be actually infinitely dense, or just very, very (but finitely) dense?
It's more the case that, at the central singularity of a black hole, so many physical laws break down that normal physical quantities are poorly defined. In the case of the density, we have a finite amount of mass contained in a point. Since density is mass/volume, and the volume of a point is zero, then one could indeed say that the density is infinite. But it might be better to say that it is just undefined, since the concept of density loses its meaning and physical relevance when we are dealing with a singularity.
Physics breaks down at the edge of the event horizon, so beyond that there's no "gravity" or anything else.
Rubbish, physics works perfectly well beyond the event horizon. What does go screwy at the event horizon is the Schwarzschild metric, which describes the local curvature of space. However, the screwyness is a mathematical artifice, much like the fact that longitude is ill defined at the north and south poles. Using a different coordinate system gets rid of the problem in both cases.
So there is nothing particularly unphysical about the event horizon, above and beyond the fact that the effective escape velocity there exceeds the speed of light. The place where the physics blows up is in fact the central singularity.
Oh, and your phrase "accelerating at the speed of light" is meaningless. The speed of light is a speed, not an acceleration, and to compare them directly is meaningless.
As of Monday, the pressure had declined a total of nine millimeters. That is equivalent to about one-quarter of a pound per square inch, said NASA spokesman James Hartsfield.
Hasn't NASA yet learned that mixing units can lead to very bad things
Silly fact: 1.7446551e-40 is Planck's constant in British Thermal Unit-hours.
While there's certainly no shortage of 'write an essay about us/you and we might give you a scholarship' offerings, I find it hard to swallow
Many people have found success by overcoming the gag reflex, and thus swallowing with ease. Maybe worth a try?
While Indian programmers (we used 8 different ones for 6 different projects) may be perfectly competent to produce software to spec, they usually ALWAYS built it to spec and NEVER brought up any issues they might have found in the process.
You should be thankful that they build to spec. I recall seeing Microsoft's first stab at XML: an atrocious hack-job which departed from the standard in so many places that it was breathtaking.
Coding to spec is not always as simple as it might appear. This you would understand if, for instance, you had to write an X.400 implementation. You should regard the spec-adherence of your Indian colleagues as a major plus point, not as an incidental fact of little importance.
What several companies found when they got the code back was that trojan horses, backdoors, logic bombs, and other nasties in the code in addition to the Y2K fixes.
Care to back up this statement with some hard facts?
NOTE: I am *NOT* saying *ALL* people from other countries are dishonest.
But, by your emphasis on "ALL", you are implying that *MOST* people from other countries are dishonest. Care to back up this statement with some hard facts?
...and all of your problems will disappear. Voila!
Hubble can also see well into the IR, which is *also* impossible using ground based telescopes
Idiot. What the hell do you think the initials in "UKIRT" stand for?
In any case, sure there are needs for space-based telescopes, especially in the UV. However, the point I was making is that for optical telescopes, it is perfectly possible to build competitive solutions on Earth, at a fraction of the cost of space-based mission. The same applies to radio and submm telescopes, which is why we have facilities like the VLA, Arecibo, the JCMT, ALMA etc etc.
If you're going to spend a $1B on a telescope, aren't you reaching the point where the money would be better spent to put one in space away from the atmosphere and associated debris rather than sticking it on terra firma?
No, putting a project into space something in space is like going for the "I'd like an inch-thick gold-plate finish with diamond encrusting" when purchasing a car. Consider this: the Hubble Space Telescope cost $1.5 billion in the 1980s, for a 2.4m diameter primary mirror. If we were to scale the cost based on the diameter of the mirror, then a 100m space telescope would cost $62.5 billion, over an order of magnitude more than the proposed ground-based facility.
And don't think that ground-based telescopes are the poor cousins of space-based ones. The European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT) can achieve resolutions better than Hubble, even if the latter had been built without the optical problems, and the VLT cost 1/10th of what Hubble did.
What courses did you teach? We may have seen each other, I graduated in 1994
Ah, I would have just missed you; I was teaching first year in 1994 (telescope training on the Meades, and the classroom-based stuff). Out of interest, are you still in astronomy?
Spend the $1 billion on better things. We should try and solve our own planets problems before going out into space.
Yes, the c. $400 billion being spent on the US military has a far better chance of furthering the lot of humanity. And Bush's tax cut of $1.4 trillon sure helped out all of those disadvantaged rich people.
C'mon, weigh it up: vast amounts of money are already being spent on things which are much further down the priority list than astronomy programmes. Surely it is these which should be considered ripe for cancellation, far ahead of projects which seek to understand our place in the Universe. To quote from a particularly aposite letter which appears in today's Guardian:
Abandoning endeavours of discovery because of alleged "wastefulness", whether the target be space exploration or medieval history, will not improve matters. It will only feed the underlying shallow thinking and barbarism that have created the problems in the first place.
When I was an undergraduate at University College London, we had to trek up tok to the university's observatory at Mill Hill
When were you an undergrad there? I used to teach up at Mill Hill from 1994-1997.
look this is ridiculous. you've insulted my intelligence now on two occasions.
Yes, I have, because you've failed twice to address what I wrote. I've already explained that neither the word "sniped" nor the word "shotgun" were mine, but you've chosen to ignore that. Instead, you've taken me for a gun control nut, and proceeded to attack me based on this erroneous supposition. Unfortunately, you were racing so fast to knock down your hastily-erected strawman, that you didn't bother to read what I wrote.
stupid people are the root of the problem.
People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.
it's fine if you're not familiar with firearms - just dont go around telling other people what to do with them
Your completely specious argument belies an inability to think deeply about issues such as this.
Although I may know little about firearms, I would claim that people like me have a voice in the firearms debate. Why? Because I may one day be like those poor sods who were shot at and/or killed by kids thinking it fun to shoot up vehicles. If firearms are a potential threat to my life, then I should have a say in issues such as their availability. Why is this difficult for you to understand?
what i find bothersome is that you know so little about firearms that you suggest a shotgun is a sniper weapon
Apologies, one of the articles I read regarding the event (by ABC news) claimed that the boys were using shotguns. The word "sniping" was the New York Post's phraseology, not mine. In any case, further research reveals that they were using .22 rifle(s), so perhaps "sniping" is not too off the mark.
On a side note: you appear distraught that I know very little about firearms. In what way does my lack of knowledge cause you concern? Does it mean that I'm somehow less of a man? Explain.
Couples are gay. People who want to be "together" should be shot "together."
I think someone needs a hug!
In the jurisdiction in which I live, that makes it a criminal offence to sell or rent either item to anyone under the age of 18.
I'm guessing from your website that you live in the UK. Based on that assumption, I wonder whether you're aware that the certification of movies, undertaken by the British Board of Film Classification, has no legal basis? By this, I mean that no crime is committed if an under-18 walks into an 18-certificate movie. Of course, almost all mainstream cinemas will not let the under-18 see the 18-certificate movie; but this decision is made at the discretion of the management, and has no basis in UK law.
On to the case with GTA3 and GTA:Vice City, both of my (UK-purchased) copies have, like yours, 18 certificates on the back. However, this classification is BBFC-based, and therefore most likely carries the same legal weight as movie classifcation: none. So your initial points would appear to be wrong, although I'm not 100% sure, and you may want to check this. You're spot on, though, with your closing remarks about electronic babysitters.