... 'cause they're way too sweet. The best way to make a palatable carrot for my particular taste buds is to peel them and eat them raw. The peel contains a bitter substance. Of course this may be an issue related to nontasters, tasters, and supertasters, which makes recommending a particular vegetable cooking style a crapshoot. You might think I'm lucky to be a supertaster, but my cancer risk is apparently higher.
I at least agree with the "don't boil them" statement.
Dark matter's existence was postulated to explain rotation curves of galaxies, although it also does a good job explaining how galaxies or clusters can gravitationally lens light so well. A universe with dark matter doesn't imply a big bang, but any good big bang theory will have to explain the phenomena we blame on dark matter.
The assumption of a 60 Hz hum and 25 twists implies a total visible travel time of.42 seconds, which seems about right. The fact that the trail isn't more smeared is an indication that the meteor trail is made by a swiftly moving light source that would look like, if we could have taken a very short duration exposure, more like a point source than a bright coma followed by a tail of brightly glowing plasma. The roughly constant production of light along the trajectory and its length suggests that the meteor was a so-called "earth-grazer" (not to be confused with asteroids or comets of the same name) dumping most of its kinetic energy rather high in the atmosphere along an almost horizontal path. Somebody with more time on their hands than I could develop an algorithm, using simple and fairly reliable assumptions (a straight trajectory at at a slowly decelerating velocity, damped sinusoidal oscillation, etc.) to extract a third dimension of information from the photo. In other words, a crude movie of the meteor moving across a backdrop of comet and stars could be made. I find this encoding of an extra dimension on a flat piece of film intriguing. It reminds me of holograms, although they of course encode an extra spacial, not temporal, dimension.
A google search for "world's largest bird of prey" reveals that there's no concensus on which bird is the largest bird of prey. My money is on the Andean Condor, which, according to The Peregrine Fund, "has a body length of 43 - 51 inches and an 11-foot wingspan. The smaller female weighs 17 1/2 - 24 pounds while the larger male weighs 24 - 33 pounds." According to the same source, "The Harpy Eagle has a body length of 35 - 41 inches, a 6 1/2 -foot wingspan, and weighs 10 - 20 pounds. The female can be as much as twice as heavy as her mate." The argument that the Andean Condor, being a type of vulture, isn't a bird of prey is moot: "Andean Condors may kill some living prey."
That's what the Torino scale measures. Low numbers such as the current asteroid has are nothing to worry about. And 100 % of what? We have no idea what the final observational accuracy will be, partially because we don't even know what technology will be observing it 25 years hence. Additional numbers will make things more confusing, not less.
Math boxes allow for greater flexibility and adaptability to varied mathematical abilities. (This text is the only one that gives the instructor a choice of teaching planetary science either at a descriptive level or at a moderately advanced level involving algebra and elementary calculus.)
Hartmann also mentions freshmen in the book's preface. Clearly the book was written for a wide college audience. Just because you don't use it as an introductory text doesn't mean that it can't be or isn't being used that way somewhere. And just because I disagree with you on the matter doesn't mean I'm trying to insult your intelligence.
b) According to the IAU's Committee for Small Body Nomenclature, three objects are both minor planets and comets: Chiron, Wilson-Harrington, and Elst-Pizzaro. Your comment that "comets and asteroids have very different histories and compositions" is irrelevent, as the histories and compositions of individual objects are often not known (even spectroscopy can only tell you about the surface, not what's beneath). Thus an object that has never been known to sport a coma is typically designated as a minor planet (i.e. asteroid) regardless of composition. The clear-cut distinction between asteroids and comets disappears in the face of observational constraints.
c) Armagh Observatory, on Centaurs: "These bodies, many of which have diameters greater than 100 km, are called "Centaurs" because of their "half-comet, half-asteroid" status." There are many links on that page to other pages discussing the controversy surrounding the naming of objects. Centaurs are usually referred to in the literature as asteroids, not comets. Notice that the Minor Planet Center (which was given responsibility by the IAU of designating minor bodies in the Solar System) lists Centaurs on the minor planet orbits page, not the comet orbits page.
The nomenclature problem isn't limited to Centaurs, as discussed in this excellent but dated Spacedaily article, which says (referring to a April 20, 2000, "Nature" article by Dr. Don Yeomans):
Yeomans in Nature points out that recent computer simulations show that as much as three percent of Kuiper Belt objects are likely to be rocky asteroids that formed in the outer fringes of the Asteroid Belt -- but then, at some point over the eons, flew close enough to Jupiter to be catapulted by its gravity into the outer Solar System.... [M]eteorites have been found still containing significant traces of water trapped inside them -- which means that "Far from being the dry rocky bodies they were once thought to be, it would seem that some asteroids, along with with comets, might be significant sourcees [sic] of water."
Google is my friend. Is it yours?
I wasn't talking about Sedna. I was responding to a general statement you made about asteroids, not any particular asteroid.
"You mean volatile sublimation, like comets when they get near the Sun? I don't know of any asteroids that do that."
Examples are so well known they're in introductory college-level texts like William Hartmann's Moons & Planets. This text mentions cases like asteroid 4015, whose 1979 discovery turned out to be a rediscovery of comet Wilson-Harrington, first discovered in 1949, and the case of asteroid 2090 Chiron, which suddenly sprouted a coma in 1988. Hartmann writes:
Many outer solar system asteroids with dark carbonaceous surfaces might thus contain ices trapped inside.... [I]nstead of thinking of the Victorian, semantic distinction between two distinct types of bodies, we have to learn to think in terms of a continuum between less ice-rich bodies and more ice-rich bodies, depending on the original location and conditions of origin.
You're right. Its hard to find scientists who support the idea though. Mostly because its a solution looking for a problem. Field reversals have already been seen in computer models of the dynamo theory.
You're confusing the Oklo natural reactor which occurred near the surface in Africa with the Earth's core. These are entirely separate. The core is iron, not uranium (for the most part). While radioactive materials are responsible for keeping the Earth's interior warm, there's no "reactor" involved (unstable isotopes really don't need help to decay).
Take a look at the moon. Those dark spots are the sites of enormous ancient impacts. They may have been holes briefly, but they then filled up with lakes of lava. As far as the Earth goes, the impact was so devastating that the outer layers of the Earth had to reform by falling back down.
The following contains some links to mostly non-technical explanations of planetary roundness. I'd like to point out that part of this explanation, by "Derek Sears, professor of cosmochemistry at the University of Arkansas and editor of the journal Meteoritics and Planetary Science," is wrong. He says "Planets are round because their gravitational field acts as though it originates from the center of the body and pulls everything toward it." But this is a circular argument (pardon the pun). Generally a non-spherically symmetric distribution of matter doesn't have a gravitational field that acts as if it originates from the center of the body (the "center" being the center of mass). Spherically symmetric mass distributions do have this special property, so what Sears really implied is that planets that are already round will have gravitational fields that point towards the object's center of mass. This does absolutely nothing to address cases of objects that deviate from perfect roundness, i.e. all celestial bodies.
This explanation by Dr. Sten Odenwald suffers from the same argument, and there's even a hint of it here. Nonetheless, these explanations are approximately true, and require bizarre shapes to break them.
For example, imagine a homogenous, perfectly shaped doughnut (a torus with a circular cross section). At the center of the doughnut hole we'd feel no gravitational field at all (a perfectly balanced tug-of-war). But deviate from the exact center just a tiny amount, and the closer side of the doughnut becomes more attractive than the other. One suddenly experiences a gravitational field that points away from the center of mass.
From the article - "They add that characteristics seen in modern people who have pathologies causing a small brain were not evident in the ancient remains." I.e. if they were anomolous Homo sapiens, then one would expect their anomoly to be an anomoly found in Homo sapiens. It's not, so they're not.
What's your point? I was talking about the slashdot headline. In fact the entire/. story failed to mention the word "astrometrically." Just proving that once again slashdot editors and story submitters don't RTFA.
check out the 1972 daylight fireball. It came so close it actually skipped off the atmosphere. There are plenty of other close encounters in the literature that came well before this.
that ABC has messed up the story. What is really getting into the voids is water vapor or nitrogen. Either that or the tank is so poorly constructed that dangerously flammable liquid hydrogen is leaking out, in which case it is a wonder that the shuttle hasn't exploded right on the launch pad.
AFAIK, Bjorn made no predictions about coral bleaching and thus deserves no credit. Furthermore, the coral researchers indicated there may be unforeseen consequences of the change in algal symbionts that may be harmful to ocean ecology
And there's little discussion of the effects of CO2 absorption by the oceans. This will increase the oceans' acidity. Recall that the coral skeleton is mostly calcium carbonate, which is labile to dissolution by acid.
Slashdot Mirror
Which replacement? James Webb S.T. is not a replacement, because it's not designed to see the same wavelengths.
I at least agree with the "don't boil them" statement.
Just bump your intake up to two apples a day and the doctor will be right over. I believe the principle at work here is "too much of a good thing."
The image is of a region of space about 14 light years across, and the highest res version of the photo I've seen so far is about 800 pixels wide. That makes each pixel ~ 10 billion km wide.
Dark matter's existence was postulated to explain rotation curves of galaxies, although it also does a good job explaining how galaxies or clusters can gravitationally lens light so well. A universe with dark matter doesn't imply a big bang, but any good big bang theory will have to explain the phenomena we blame on dark matter.
The assumption of a 60 Hz hum and 25 twists implies a total visible travel time of .42 seconds, which seems about right. The fact that the trail isn't more smeared is an indication that the meteor trail is made by a swiftly moving light source that would look like, if we could have taken a very short duration exposure, more like a point source than a bright coma followed by a tail of brightly glowing plasma. The roughly constant production of light along the trajectory and its length suggests that the meteor was a so-called "earth-grazer" (not to be confused with asteroids or comets of the same name) dumping most of its kinetic energy rather high in the atmosphere along an almost horizontal path. Somebody with more time on their hands than I could develop an algorithm, using simple and fairly reliable assumptions (a straight trajectory at at a slowly decelerating velocity, damped sinusoidal oscillation, etc.) to extract a third dimension of information from the photo. In other words, a crude movie of the meteor moving across a backdrop of comet and stars could be made. I find this encoding of an extra dimension on a flat piece of film intriguing. It reminds me of holograms, although they of course encode an extra spacial, not temporal, dimension.
A google search for "world's largest bird of prey" reveals that there's no concensus on which bird is the largest bird of prey. My money is on the Andean Condor, which, according to The Peregrine Fund, "has a body length of 43 - 51 inches and an 11-foot wingspan. The smaller female weighs 17 1/2 - 24 pounds while the larger male weighs 24 - 33 pounds." According to the same source, "The Harpy Eagle has a body length of 35 - 41 inches, a 6 1/2 -foot wingspan, and weighs 10 - 20 pounds. The female can be as much as twice as heavy as her mate." The argument that the Andean Condor, being a type of vulture, isn't a bird of prey is moot: "Andean Condors may kill some living prey."
That's what the Torino scale measures. Low numbers such as the current asteroid has are nothing to worry about. And 100 % of what? We have no idea what the final observational accuracy will be, partially because we don't even know what technology will be observing it 25 years hence. Additional numbers will make things more confusing, not less.
b) According to the IAU's Committee for Small Body Nomenclature, three objects are both minor planets and comets: Chiron, Wilson-Harrington, and Elst-Pizzaro. Your comment that "comets and asteroids have very different histories and compositions" is irrelevent, as the histories and compositions of individual objects are often not known (even spectroscopy can only tell you about the surface, not what's beneath). Thus an object that has never been known to sport a coma is typically designated as a minor planet (i.e. asteroid) regardless of composition. The clear-cut distinction between asteroids and comets disappears in the face of observational constraints.
c) Armagh Observatory, on Centaurs: "These bodies, many of which have diameters greater than 100 km, are called "Centaurs" because of their "half-comet, half-asteroid" status." There are many links on that page to other pages discussing the controversy surrounding the naming of objects. Centaurs are usually referred to in the literature as asteroids, not comets. Notice that the Minor Planet Center (which was given responsibility by the IAU of designating minor bodies in the Solar System) lists Centaurs on the minor planet orbits page, not the comet orbits page.
The nomenclature problem isn't limited to Centaurs, as discussed in this excellent but dated Spacedaily article, which says (referring to a April 20, 2000, "Nature" article by Dr. Don Yeomans):
Google is my friend. Is it yours?
I wasn't talking about Sedna. I was responding to a general statement you made about asteroids, not any particular asteroid.
You are familiar with night and day, aren't you? They are the result of the Earth's rotation around its own center of mass.
Actually it revolves around the sun. It rotates around its own center of mass.
Examples are so well known they're in introductory college-level texts like William Hartmann's Moons & Planets. This text mentions cases like asteroid 4015, whose 1979 discovery turned out to be a rediscovery of comet Wilson-Harrington, first discovered in 1949, and the case of asteroid 2090 Chiron, which suddenly sprouted a coma in 1988. Hartmann writes:
You're right. Its hard to find scientists who support the idea though. Mostly because its a solution looking for a problem. Field reversals have already been seen in computer models of the dynamo theory.
At the moment, this is all I can find.
You're confusing the Oklo natural reactor which occurred near the surface in Africa with the Earth's core. These are entirely separate. The core is iron, not uranium (for the most part). While radioactive materials are responsible for keeping the Earth's interior warm, there's no "reactor" involved (unstable isotopes really don't need help to decay).
The following contains some links to mostly non-technical explanations of planetary roundness. I'd like to point out that part of this explanation, by "Derek Sears, professor of cosmochemistry at the University of Arkansas and editor of the journal Meteoritics and Planetary Science," is wrong. He says "Planets are round because their gravitational field acts as though it originates from the center of the body and pulls everything toward it." But this is a circular argument (pardon the pun). Generally a non-spherically symmetric distribution of matter doesn't have a gravitational field that acts as if it originates from the center of the body (the "center" being the center of mass). Spherically symmetric mass distributions do have this special property, so what Sears really implied is that planets that are already round will have gravitational fields that point towards the object's center of mass. This does absolutely nothing to address cases of objects that deviate from perfect roundness, i.e. all celestial bodies. This explanation by Dr. Sten Odenwald suffers from the same argument, and there's even a hint of it here. Nonetheless, these explanations are approximately true, and require bizarre shapes to break them.
For example, imagine a homogenous, perfectly shaped doughnut (a torus with a circular cross section). At the center of the doughnut hole we'd feel no gravitational field at all (a perfectly balanced tug-of-war). But deviate from the exact center just a tiny amount, and the closer side of the doughnut becomes more attractive than the other. One suddenly experiences a gravitational field that points away from the center of mass.
From the article - "They add that characteristics seen in modern people who have pathologies causing a small brain were not evident in the ancient remains." I.e. if they were anomolous Homo sapiens, then one would expect their anomoly to be an anomoly found in Homo sapiens. It's not, so they're not.
"correlated to the orbit of Jupiter which is 11.86 earth years" No. There is no correlation (and I have looked).
CNN's N Korean Blast
What's your point? I was talking about the slashdot headline. In fact the entire /. story failed to mention the word "astrometrically." Just proving that once again slashdot editors and story submitters don't RTFA.
check out the 1972 daylight fireball. It came so close it actually skipped off the atmosphere. There are plenty of other close encounters in the literature that came well before this.
There are fewer neutrons from the He3-catalyzed D-D fusion that they hope they can achieve with the Levitated Dipole Experiment.
Space is a 2.7 K heat sink, but computers don't perform very well there.
that ABC has messed up the story. What is really getting into the voids is water vapor or nitrogen. Either that or the tank is so poorly constructed that dangerously flammable liquid hydrogen is leaking out, in which case it is a wonder that the shuttle hasn't exploded right on the launch pad.
And there's little discussion of the effects of CO2 absorption by the oceans. This will increase the oceans' acidity. Recall that the coral skeleton is mostly calcium carbonate, which is labile to dissolution by acid.