A minor point. It's not only seat-of-the-pants operations that might ask you not to come in on Monday. It was policy at the large corporation (75k employees) where I worked that anyone leaving to work for a competitor was immediately given a box and asked to pack up while their manager watched. I assume that "it's none of your business where I'm working" was met with the same response.
I started reading the RFC and I was initially alarmed by the title ".sex Considered Dangerous". Then I realized that I am a Slashdot reader, so I am unlikely to encounter any actual sex. Whew! That was close!
Are you being honest with me about the 'fossil'? Have you looked at it closely? It seems to me that they didn't take a cross section, they ground it up, simple. You can see the structure, then its gone.
Sorry... I've seen many crinoid stems and other fossils; that just doesn't look like one. The "structure" fades imperceptibly into the overall fabric of the rock. These are cracks, not evidence of fossil life. There are plenty of inorganic structures in rocks on Earth that look more like fossils than this Martian feature does.
As for the face, the (recently damaged) Old Man of the Mountain in New Hampshire was remarkably face-like. Our brains like to see patterns and tend to impose them on images. Whether faces or fossils or witches, just saying "it looks like one" is not enough.
There has been ongoing sesmic monitoring of Yellowstone from 1972-1981 and 1983-present (see this page. If any magma is moving around, this network should pick it up. I don't know why one would want continuous monitoring of the magnetic field in Yellowstone. Molten magma cannot be detected magnetically (look up "Curie point"). And while they may not be continously monitoring the lake bottom, there is continuous GPS monitoring in Yellowstone and the surrounding region (see this page). And of course every scientist wishes for better equipment and more money for research. No surprise there. I wouldn't be worried by these comments.
You're assuming that the chances of an eruption increase from year to year. That isn't necessarily so. It's quite possible that the magmatic system underlying Yellowstone could be in an essentially steady state for thousands of years, in which case the chances of an eruption could remain unchanged for a very long time. It all depends on how you model the behavior of the volcano. I don't think it's obvious that the "pressure cooker" model is the correct one in the case of Yellowstone.
The GPL doesn't force anyone to do anything. If you don't want to contribute your code to a GPL project, then don't distribute any modifications you've made. You're always able to use it for yourself or within your organization as you see fit. And of course, you're free not to use it at all
The GPL is as libertarian as any other contract freely entered into by informed sentient beings. You seem to have a rather broad definition of socialism. I've always understood socialism to be the state whereby the workers own the means of production, or more generally the excercise of significant economic control by the "people". If socialism means "anything socially beneficial", then it seems to be a less useful term in political and economic discourse.
I am guessing that the worldwide flood on Earth you are referring to is the flood of Gilgamesh (retold in the Jewish scriptures as the flood of Noah). I don't know of any scientists who believe that there was a planet-wide flood on Mars. There is clear evidence of channelization on Mars, apparently caused by large volumes of water. It is likely that much of the ancient water of Mars has "boiled off" due to the much weaker gravity of Mars as compared to Earth.
Here on Earth, we have abundant water, along with some ancient landforms that indicate that large floods have taken place in various parts of the world at various times in the past (e.g., the "channeled Scablands" in the US state of Washington). However, the Near East story of the worldwide Deluge is not supported by the geologic evidence. By the way, the Earth is currently about 70% flooded. There is not enough water in the polar ice caps to flood the remaining 30% of the Earth's surface (where's the rest of Noah's water?). The ocean basins hold too much water. If they were shallower, then the Earth would in fact be flooded. So it's not impossible that the Earth could be flooded. It just so happens that it's not. And it certainly wouldn't happen over the course of just 40 days.
That could be a TI if it was a "pocket" calculator. I think they were the first to use microprocessors in calculators. My dad had an early 70s model that could do trig functions, square roots, and logarithms. If I recall, it cost ~$300 1970s dollars.
But have you ever seen a mechanical adding machine that could multiply and divide? I have. Press the "divide" button and it would literally crank for quite a while before spitting out an answer. Kachunk kachunk kachunk!
Actually, I think the BBC Dr. Who website (too lazy to hunt for URL, but check in the Cult TV section) gives a "dual timeline" for the Daleks. That is, the events of "Genesis of the Daleks" nudged the Daleks into a different timeline (or the Doctor was nudged? or both?). In any event, the events that occur in the Doctor's timeline after Genesis of the Daleks are not necessarily the same ones that occured at dates earlier in his timeline but "in the future" relative to the date of the destruction of Davros' bunker. Thus the absence of both Davros and the Movellans from any of the pre-Genesis Dalek stories. I would assume that in the pre-Genesis timeline, Davros was destroyed by the Daleks and maybe even forgotten. I'm not a reader of the various post-1989 novels (New Adventures, Missing Adventures, etc.), so I don't know if any of this has been thoroughly covered.
To be fair, there was more than one quarry used for Doctor Who location shooting. And in "The Hand of Fear", they actually used a quarry location to represent a quarry, complete with blasting. I've wondered if there was a little in-joke there.
Actually, though I'm no expert in the field, my impression is that chaos theory tells us that while we may not be able to make precise predictions with imperfect data, it is possible to discern patterns in data that are very sensitive to initial conditions. Thus "strange attractors" and the like. I don't know if the Russian/UCLA group is on to anything or not. I believe that most workers in earthquake seismology feel that precise prediction of earthquakes is impossible (e.g., magnitude 7.3 in LA on March 3). However, there are still many people who believe that forecasts may be possible. But if the forecasts are no better than chance based on average earthquake rates in a region, then they aren't very useful. That's what I want to know; can these UCLA guys do better than I could by looking up seismicity figures for a particular area?
I'm not sure what Piltdown Man has to do with any of this. If you are saying that the UCLA group or others working on similar problems are hoaxing or committing fraud, that's a pretty serious charge. Do you have any evidence for this? On the other hand, if you merely are asserting that they are wrong, that happens all the time in science and is to be expected. Piltdown Man and an incorrect method of quake prediction are rather different types of error. There are enough quake prediction skeptics in seismology (probably a majority) that I'm sure these results will be thoroughly scrutinized.
Actually, the Richter scale is no longer used to describe earthquakes. What is reported in the media as a value on the "Richter scale" is usually a moment magnitude, a much better estimate of the released energy. I think the USGS has been trying to educate the reports not to use the term "Richter", and it seems to be working, as one usually now hears about "magnitude 7.3" earthquakes.
Using the Mercalli scale is much more difficult, as it is not quantitative. Mercalli intensity is a qualitative description of the amount of shaking felt and the amount of property destruction. Plus, Mercalli intensity is not a single value, but rather may be different at every location. Nevertheless, the USGS has been working on a product called ShakeMap that can estimate Mercalli intensity within a few minutes of a quake. However, constructing these maps requires extensive local seismic networks. For an example of a ShakeMap, see this link.
Predicting the shaking from a given quake (e.g. mag. 7 and 15 km depth in a particular location) before the fact for planning purposes is also done. Small variations in the earthquake parameters (location, direction of slip, depth, etc.) may significantly affect the shaking felt at a given location. Local geology also has a big effect on the amount of shaking experienced. So, it's a tough problem that requires lots of data.
Here's the NIST link for spelling of SI units. According to this document, the only SI units that use irregular plurals in English are lux, hertz, and siemens, which are unchanged in the plural. All other plurals are to be formed using the standard rules of English pluralization. So the plural of kelvin is kelvins, and one would spell out a temperature as "300 kelvins", although NIST recommends using the symbol for scientific communication to reduce ambiguity.
Well, 1/100 of the difference between the freezing and boiling points of water at sea level is more closely tied to a measurable physical quantity than the Farenheit scale, but the size of the degree is no less arbitrary. It's just an artifact of using a base-10 numbering system. If I were Babylonian, I might use a temperature scale where the boiling point of water is 60 degrees instead of 100. Here's the definition of the SI unit kelvin, courtesy of the US National Institute of Standards and Technology:
The kelvin, unit of thermodynamic temperature, is the fraction 1/273.16 of the thermodynamic temperature of the triple point of water.
Gotta love 1/273.16!
Actually, the Wrights did not invent the wind tunnel (see this link for some history). However, they did put their wind tunnel to good use when designing their craft.
Maybe they all decided that it wasn't worth the trouble to colonize the galaxy and just sent out probes to take pictures. Or maybe they are all locked up inside perfect Dyson spheres that are painted black. Or maybe the government really does have alien ships at Area 51 and
{{@#$@
Maybe. Many natural events can be modeled quite well as random variables following a particular distribution. I don't know whether magnetic field reversals follow such a pattern. However, the rate of reversals has varied significantly with time. For instance, there was a 37 million year period of stability during the Cretaceous period. More recently, the time between reversals has varied from less than one million to around 5 million years. And reversals in the mid- to late-Jurrasic were more frequent than any time since. (see this link).
The mechanism behind magnetic field reversals is poorly understood. I haven't seen any statistical analysis, but I would be interested to know if magnetic field reversals can best be modeled as periodic or as random, with some sort of variation about an expected value. It may be more accurate to say that the probablility of a reversal in any given year is increasing, rather than saying we are "overdue". Or maybe that is just splitting hairs.
To elaborate on mikerich's reply, EM waves (e.g. x-rays) attenuate rapidly in the earth. Ground penetrating radar, for instance, can penetrate about 10 meters in good areas. Experiments have been done with extremely high-powered GPR systems, but they tend to turn the ground surface into glass (not good from an airplane). Very low frequency electric currents generated by the interaction of the earth's magnetic field with the solar wind are used in the method known as magnetotellurics. You can see down maybe 100 km, but the wavelengths are so long that the resolution is very coarse. And 100 km is still just the uppermost mantle.
Yeah, one of the louder critics of the plume hypothesis has his office in the basement of the building I'm in. I'm not a geodynamicist, so I am not sure what to think about that. However, the critics are all respectable earth scientists, so they are worth listening to. I wouldn't be surprised if some proposed plumes turn out not to be. There's already significant evidence that there is no plume at Yellowstone, even before this paper. That doesn't mean there aren't plumes elsewhere, though.
Uranium is not a particularly abundant element cosmically, being only produced in small quantities by supernovae. The meteorites we recover are not particularly uranium-enriched. I don't believe that significant quantities of uranium have ever been observed spectrographically in the solar system. The seismic velocity of the core is well known (it doesn't require tomography to determine). The moment of inertia of the earth constrains the density profile. The solid inner core does show some seismic anisotropy (waves travel faster in some directions than others), and I think they've found this anisotropy to be consistent with high pressure/temperature crystal forms of iron or iron-nickel. It would take some significant evidence to convince anyone working in the field that the core is something other than an iron-nickel solid core surrounded by molten iron-nickel. And don't forget that you need to explain the earth's magnetic field while you are at it.
Slashdot Mirror
A minor point. It's not only seat-of-the-pants operations that might ask you not to come in on Monday. It was policy at the large corporation (75k employees) where I worked that anyone leaving to work for a competitor was immediately given a box and asked to pack up while their manager watched. I assume that "it's none of your business where I'm working" was met with the same response.
I started reading the RFC and I was initially alarmed by the title ".sex Considered Dangerous". Then I realized that I am a Slashdot reader, so I am unlikely to encounter any actual sex. Whew! That was close!
Sorry... I've seen many crinoid stems and other fossils; that just doesn't look like one. The "structure" fades imperceptibly into the overall fabric of the rock. These are cracks, not evidence of fossil life. There are plenty of inorganic structures in rocks on Earth that look more like fossils than this Martian feature does.
As for the face, the (recently damaged) Old Man of the Mountain in New Hampshire was remarkably face-like. Our brains like to see patterns and tend to impose them on images. Whether faces or fossils or witches, just saying "it looks like one" is not enough.
There has been ongoing sesmic monitoring of Yellowstone from 1972-1981 and 1983-present (see this page. If any magma is moving around, this network should pick it up. I don't know why one would want continuous monitoring of the magnetic field in Yellowstone. Molten magma cannot be detected magnetically (look up "Curie point"). And while they may not be continously monitoring the lake bottom, there is continuous GPS monitoring in Yellowstone and the surrounding region (see this page). And of course every scientist wishes for better equipment and more money for research. No surprise there. I wouldn't be worried by these comments.
You're assuming that the chances of an eruption increase from year to year. That isn't necessarily so. It's quite possible that the magmatic system underlying Yellowstone could be in an essentially steady state for thousands of years, in which case the chances of an eruption could remain unchanged for a very long time. It all depends on how you model the behavior of the volcano. I don't think it's obvious that the "pressure cooker" model is the correct one in the case of Yellowstone.
S**t! And I thought I had that beautiful lounge suite!
The GPL doesn't force anyone to do anything. If you don't want to contribute your code to a GPL project, then don't distribute any modifications you've made. You're always able to use it for yourself or within your organization as you see fit. And of course, you're free not to use it at all
The GPL is as libertarian as any other contract freely entered into by informed sentient beings. You seem to have a rather broad definition of socialism. I've always understood socialism to be the state whereby the workers own the means of production, or more generally the excercise of significant economic control by the "people". If socialism means "anything socially beneficial", then it seems to be a less useful term in political and economic discourse.
This is known as publication bias or the "file drawer problem". For one view of this issue, see this link.
Here on Earth, we have abundant water, along with some ancient landforms that indicate that large floods have taken place in various parts of the world at various times in the past (e.g., the "channeled Scablands" in the US state of Washington). However, the Near East story of the worldwide Deluge is not supported by the geologic evidence. By the way, the Earth is currently about 70% flooded. There is not enough water in the polar ice caps to flood the remaining 30% of the Earth's surface (where's the rest of Noah's water?). The ocean basins hold too much water. If they were shallower, then the Earth would in fact be flooded. So it's not impossible that the Earth could be flooded. It just so happens that it's not. And it certainly wouldn't happen over the course of just 40 days.
But have you ever seen a mechanical adding machine that could multiply and divide? I have. Press the "divide" button and it would literally crank for quite a while before spitting out an answer. Kachunk kachunk kachunk!
Actually, I think the BBC Dr. Who website (too lazy to hunt for URL, but check in the Cult TV section) gives a "dual timeline" for the Daleks. That is, the events of "Genesis of the Daleks" nudged the Daleks into a different timeline (or the Doctor was nudged? or both?). In any event, the events that occur in the Doctor's timeline after Genesis of the Daleks are not necessarily the same ones that occured at dates earlier in his timeline but "in the future" relative to the date of the destruction of Davros' bunker. Thus the absence of both Davros and the Movellans from any of the pre-Genesis Dalek stories. I would assume that in the pre-Genesis timeline, Davros was destroyed by the Daleks and maybe even forgotten. I'm not a reader of the various post-1989 novels (New Adventures, Missing Adventures, etc.), so I don't know if any of this has been thoroughly covered.
"Eldrad must live!"
Actually, though I'm no expert in the field, my impression is that chaos theory tells us that while we may not be able to make precise predictions with imperfect data, it is possible to discern patterns in data that are very sensitive to initial conditions. Thus "strange attractors" and the like. I don't know if the Russian/UCLA group is on to anything or not. I believe that most workers in earthquake seismology feel that precise prediction of earthquakes is impossible (e.g., magnitude 7.3 in LA on March 3). However, there are still many people who believe that forecasts may be possible. But if the forecasts are no better than chance based on average earthquake rates in a region, then they aren't very useful. That's what I want to know; can these UCLA guys do better than I could by looking up seismicity figures for a particular area?
I'm not sure what Piltdown Man has to do with any of this. If you are saying that the UCLA group or others working on similar problems are hoaxing or committing fraud, that's a pretty serious charge. Do you have any evidence for this? On the other hand, if you merely are asserting that they are wrong, that happens all the time in science and is to be expected. Piltdown Man and an incorrect method of quake prediction are rather different types of error. There are enough quake prediction skeptics in seismology (probably a majority) that I'm sure these results will be thoroughly scrutinized.
Using the Mercalli scale is much more difficult, as it is not quantitative. Mercalli intensity is a qualitative description of the amount of shaking felt and the amount of property destruction. Plus, Mercalli intensity is not a single value, but rather may be different at every location. Nevertheless, the USGS has been working on a product called ShakeMap that can estimate Mercalli intensity within a few minutes of a quake. However, constructing these maps requires extensive local seismic networks. For an example of a ShakeMap, see this link.
Predicting the shaking from a given quake (e.g. mag. 7 and 15 km depth in a particular location) before the fact for planning purposes is also done. Small variations in the earthquake parameters (location, direction of slip, depth, etc.) may significantly affect the shaking felt at a given location. Local geology also has a big effect on the amount of shaking experienced. So, it's a tough problem that requires lots of data.
Heh. I can't say that I'm surprised. It's hard to keep people from writing whatever they are used to.
Here's the NIST link for spelling of SI units. According to this document, the only SI units that use irregular plurals in English are lux, hertz, and siemens, which are unchanged in the plural. All other plurals are to be formed using the standard rules of English pluralization. So the plural of kelvin is kelvins, and one would spell out a temperature as "300 kelvins", although NIST recommends using the symbol for scientific communication to reduce ambiguity.
Well, 1/100 of the difference between the freezing and boiling points of water at sea level is more closely tied to a measurable physical quantity than the Farenheit scale, but the size of the degree is no less arbitrary. It's just an artifact of using a base-10 numbering system. If I were Babylonian, I might use a temperature scale where the boiling point of water is 60 degrees instead of 100. Here's the definition of the SI unit kelvin, courtesy of the US National Institute of Standards and Technology: The kelvin, unit of thermodynamic temperature, is the fraction 1/273.16 of the thermodynamic temperature of the triple point of water. Gotta love 1/273.16!
Actually, the Wrights did not invent the wind tunnel (see this link for some history). However, they did put their wind tunnel to good use when designing their craft.
NO CARRIER
I for one welcome our new Indian space-robot overlords! (Sorry, I had to say that!)
I do not like it from a boat
I do not like it from a goat
I don't need a huge torpedo
I don't need help with my libido
I do not like it from Chinese
I do not like it, stop it, please!
I do not like unsolicited Spam,
So please REMOVE ME Sam I Am!
The mechanism behind magnetic field reversals is poorly understood. I haven't seen any statistical analysis, but I would be interested to know if magnetic field reversals can best be modeled as periodic or as random, with some sort of variation about an expected value. It may be more accurate to say that the probablility of a reversal in any given year is increasing, rather than saying we are "overdue". Or maybe that is just splitting hairs.
To elaborate on mikerich's reply, EM waves (e.g. x-rays) attenuate rapidly in the earth. Ground penetrating radar, for instance, can penetrate about 10 meters in good areas. Experiments have been done with extremely high-powered GPR systems, but they tend to turn the ground surface into glass (not good from an airplane). Very low frequency electric currents generated by the interaction of the earth's magnetic field with the solar wind are used in the method known as magnetotellurics. You can see down maybe 100 km, but the wavelengths are so long that the resolution is very coarse. And 100 km is still just the uppermost mantle.
Yeah, one of the louder critics of the plume hypothesis has his office in the basement of the building I'm in. I'm not a geodynamicist, so I am not sure what to think about that. However, the critics are all respectable earth scientists, so they are worth listening to. I wouldn't be surprised if some proposed plumes turn out not to be. There's already significant evidence that there is no plume at Yellowstone, even before this paper. That doesn't mean there aren't plumes elsewhere, though.
Uranium is not a particularly abundant element cosmically, being only produced in small quantities by supernovae. The meteorites we recover are not particularly uranium-enriched. I don't believe that significant quantities of uranium have ever been observed spectrographically in the solar system. The seismic velocity of the core is well known (it doesn't require tomography to determine). The moment of inertia of the earth constrains the density profile. The solid inner core does show some seismic anisotropy (waves travel faster in some directions than others), and I think they've found this anisotropy to be consistent with high pressure/temperature crystal forms of iron or iron-nickel. It would take some significant evidence to convince anyone working in the field that the core is something other than an iron-nickel solid core surrounded by molten iron-nickel. And don't forget that you need to explain the earth's magnetic field while you are at it.