Escape velocity would have been more informative, which using your values of r and rho comes out to.9 m/s or about 3.2 km/hr. Just trying to walk would cause you to fly off the surface, though I guess you'd still be stuck orbiting Ida.
... on an Australian science and technology show with the futuristic name Discover 2000 or something like that. They dunked a tv in carbon tetrachloride and it kept working. So this new substance isn't the first fluid that doesn't wet things, its novelty stems from the fact that it doesn't destroy ozone.
I remember some aspects of the show very well for some reason. It had a cute red-head and a slightly balding guy with a mustache. Does anybody else remember this show? I can't google any references to it, so I must have the name wrong.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.........
That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. I'm not certain why you'd need a gigantinormous lightning bolt to explain loose rock on the surface of a planet which bears the scars of millions of impacts. And since planetary surfaces tend to act as equipotential surfaces, what sort of bizarro explanation do you have for a lightning bolt that travels horizontally for 4000 km? You claim that "water, sand and tectonics don't explain much" without one shred of evidence. Here's what the USGS has to say about the formation of the Valles Marineris:
"[F]irst the surface collapsed into a few deep depressions that later became filled with layered material, perhaps as lake deposits. Then graben-forming faults cut across some of the older troughs thus widening existing troughs, breaching barriers between troughs, and forming additional ones. At that time the interior deposits were locally bent and tilted, and perhaps water, if still present, spilled out and flowed toward the outflow channels. Huge landslides fell into the voids created by the new grabens. Wind-drifted material, mostly dark in color, apparently still moves along the canyon floor and locally forms conspicuous dunes."
I don't think this theory relies on tectonics per se. The surface collapse was merely due to the enormous weight of the nearby and recently extruded Tharsis bulge. But in the strange world of leonbrooks, the theory that requires the largest rewrite of physics is always the correct one.
Your ideas about the magnetic fields of planets are almost as wacko. Ignoring the fact that each planet's chemistry, structure, rotation, and history are unique and that dynamo theories are highly nonlinear, you insist that the noted variation in them can't be explained by dynamo theories and give no evidence.
How you'd set about reconciling a dynamo theory with the lesser gas giants is beyond me. John, if you do try to explain it (as many great men have tried to do in the past) please give me time to sell tickets.
Too late. Its already been done. Perhaps if you weren't wasting your time vainly trying to debunk all mainstream science, you'd have noticed.....
You managed to stay on topic for only 20% of your rant. Sticking with magnetic fields for the moment.... Another poster has already pointed out quite reasonable explanations for the magnetic fields of the terrestrial planets. "It is quite clear that our current ideas about planetary magnetism are at best whistling in the dark" because we don't know enough about the interiors of the planets, not because of fundamental flaws in physics theories as you seem to imply. A recent model has explained the complex fields of Neptune and Uranus, relying on a thin convective region over a nonconvective fluid. It would thus be quite difficult to compare Venus and Uranus, as their internal structures are radically different.
He goes on to assert that charge seperation cannot occur (which is funny, since a child can do it in the lab with a peice of metal and a blowtorch held at one end) because we'd detect the powerful magnetic field from the electrostatics
I wouldn't let blow-torch-wielding children loose in my lab, but I'd certainly let them separate charge by rubbing their heads with balloons. Or let them pet my cat.
None the less, I tend to like simpler solutions than a chaotic tri-poled earth magnetic field, or whatever currently is the explanation.
The sun provides an interesting example of polarity flips, which only take 11 years and thus are fairly well studied. The way it does it is different than Earth, as the sun's convective layer is what produces the field, and the convective layer extends to the surface. None the less, during the flip, the sun's surface sprouts many magnetic poles, almost always in pairs. We call them sunspots. Current theory suggests that the polarity flip actually occurs because the sun sheds the old polarity like a snake sheds its skin. It's not the sunspots or x-ray flares themselves that do it, it's the gigantic explosions known as Coronal Mass Ejections that violently heave enormous quantities of magnetic gas/plasma into space. The Earth can't shed a magnetic field this way, which might help explain why it takes so long. Multipole explanations of polarity flips are not that esoteric.
but it reminds me of when the Hell's Angels held their annual rally in Missoula, MT in 2000 (the full story in 4 parts: 1, 2, 3, 4). They decided to party at a local ski hill, and the army of police officers that had been recruited from far and wide attacked the local citizenry in the downtown area instead. A friend of mine whose sole indiscretion was to have a job downtown that let him off at midnight was pepper-sprayed while trying to make his way home. The moral:
Just because you've been GPS-tagged doesn't mean you're guilty.
... should have something to say about this. I doubt farmers want Roundup-resistant grass infesting their Roundup-resistant crops, or passing the resistance to even worse types of grass. There is a reason why two bureaus within the Department of Agriculture have already expressed concern.
Selective breeding is noit a form of genetic engineering. You muddy the issue when comparing the two. There is no 'engineering' involved in deciding which of two corn plants has better kernels. There is engineering involved when shooting gold particles coated with foreign DNA into corn cells.
You obviously have no idea what genetic engineering is. What the Native Americans and many other cultures did was selective breeding, not genetic engineering. With selective breeding, organisms with bad traits are removed from the population, increasing the population of plants bearing good alleles, like those that make corn kernels large vs. those that make them small. Or perhaps closely related species are hybridized together. Rarely a mutation might happen, but generally selective breeding only takes genes that are already present and filters out the undesireable ones.
The methods of genetic engineering are entirely different. Completely novel genes (from entirely unrelated organisms or dreamed up in a lab) are inserted randomly into an organism's genome using methods that are far more complicated than simply mating two organisms together and looking at their offspring. These methods may insert a new gene into a previously working gene or its control regions, rendering it useless. Or the insertion into a control region may make a previously inactive gene active, or cause it to express itself at a different time during the growth cycle.
Using selective breeding I can make better corn. Using genetic engineering I can make corn express botulinum toxin.
It's amazing. They rip the grass, roots and all, straight out of the ground. Then they clench the stems in their mouths and whip their heads so they can knock the root ball against a fence and get the dirt out. It's the most effective means of removing an invasive grass species that I've ever seen. Not.
Apparently a variety of infrared images of Titan at different wavelengths have been taken from the European Southern Observatory. These different wavelengths allow features at different depths in the atmosphere to be visualized, revealing dynamic and asymmetric atmospheric features, one dubbed the Southern Smile.
How are x-rays made? With electron beams. Wilhelm Roentgen discovered x-rays in 1895. They were produced when electrons from the cathode of his cathode ray tube (CRT) hit the glass walls or another target within the tube. The continuous x-ray spectrum is produced by bremsstrallung, or braking radiation, when the electrons are decelerated by the target atoms. Superimposed on that is x-rays at discrete wavelengths. This is a result of high-speed electrons knocking the inner electrons of atoms into higher energy levels. When the excited atoms relax, they emit x-rays. Televisions and CRTs (most computer montiors) create x-rays, so they must be shielded
And electrons do not pose a radiation hazard.
Atoms emitting beta radiation are merely emitting high speed electrons. And beta radiation is hazardous, though remarkably easy to block.
The Moon receives unfiltered sunlight and yet is sterile. Deep-sea hydrothermal vents receive no sunlight and yet support life. Sunlight is neither always necessary nor solely sufficient for the presence of life.
Any microorganisms that we'd accidentally be bringing along are not extremophiles, but garden variety human-digestive-tract stuff and the like, which would die pretty quickly when exposed to the extremes of temperature, radiation, and/or chemical concentrations on either of those worlds.
You have heard of spores, haven't you? The garden variety stuff would be the easiest to get rid of, but the unusual stuff would still hang around. Take any random sample of atmospheric air, filter it, expose the filter to lethal doses of ultraviolet radiation, plate it on growth medium, and you'll find numerous colonies of various species of Deinococcus. Use gamma radiation, and you'll still find Deinococcus radiodurans. Just because humans make the probe doesn't mean that only human-specific microbes will contaminate it. Organisms have been happily dispersing themselves through the air for hundred of millions, if not billions, of years.
Indeed. I had read the APOD version before this was posted to/., and so it was instantly obvious that it was identical except for the links. How does this make Suman any better than a copy-and-paste Troll? Not that this isn't standard practice throughout the entire news industry....
And what is up with a low/. id number, no comments, no journal, and only one story submittal? Suman is one of the more mysterious shades lurking in the electronic deep.
Re:Why are major "storms" in souther hemisphere?
on
Titanic Saturn
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Saturn's southern hemisphere is currently receiving more sunlight (i.e. summer), so one might expect solar heating to cause turbulent convection in the southern hemisphere. Half a Saturn-year from now (15 Earth years), there may very well be storms in the northern hemisphere. El Nino is a bit of a red herring. There's only been one recorded hurricane in the southern Atlantic (this week), and hundreds in the northern Atlantic. The distribution of land masses is asymmetric, so we should expect this.
Jupiter, on the other hand, has an obliquity of only 3.08 degrees, so there should be little or no seasonal effect. The Great Red Spot is truly mysterious.
Either it is a left-handed knife or it is an ambidextrous knife. If it's ambidextrous, it's not so funny that a right-handed person wields it in the diagram. It is, however, a very strange looking knife no matter which way you look at it.
Someone has pointed out the short half-life of methane in the martian atmosphere (~300 years). I still like this theory, however, because a significant amount of gaseous material from the impact of a comet would have been incorporated into the ice caps, either in bubbles or even as a methane hydrate. In case folks weren't aware, there's evidence that Mars is experiencing a form of global warming, so perennial ice is currently melting and releasing whatever load of gases was contained in it. The methane spike over Meridiani Planum would be an argument against this, but their data seems to be noisy.
Slashdot Mirror
Beware the baboon tribe that throws bones and worships rectangular black obelisks....
Escape velocity would have been more informative, which using your values of r and rho comes out to .9 m/s or about 3.2 km/hr. Just trying to walk would cause you to fly off the surface, though I guess you'd still be stuck orbiting Ida.
I remember some aspects of the show very well for some reason. It had a cute red-head and a slightly balding guy with a mustache. Does anybody else remember this show? I can't google any references to it, so I must have the name wrong.
That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. I'm not certain why you'd need a gigantinormous lightning bolt to explain loose rock on the surface of a planet which bears the scars of millions of impacts. And since planetary surfaces tend to act as equipotential surfaces, what sort of bizarro explanation do you have for a lightning bolt that travels horizontally for 4000 km? You claim that "water, sand and tectonics don't explain much" without one shred of evidence. Here's what the USGS has to say about the formation of the Valles Marineris:
"[F]irst the surface collapsed into a few deep depressions that later became filled with layered material, perhaps as lake deposits. Then graben-forming faults cut across some of the older troughs thus widening existing troughs, breaching barriers between troughs, and forming additional ones. At that time the interior deposits were locally bent and tilted, and perhaps water, if still present, spilled out and flowed toward the outflow channels. Huge landslides fell into the voids created by the new grabens. Wind-drifted material, mostly dark in color, apparently still moves along the canyon floor and locally forms conspicuous dunes."
I don't think this theory relies on tectonics per se. The surface collapse was merely due to the enormous weight of the nearby and recently extruded Tharsis bulge. But in the strange world of leonbrooks, the theory that requires the largest rewrite of physics is always the correct one.
Your ideas about the magnetic fields of planets are almost as wacko. Ignoring the fact that each planet's chemistry, structure, rotation, and history are unique and that dynamo theories are highly nonlinear, you insist that the noted variation in them can't be explained by dynamo theories and give no evidence.
How you'd set about reconciling a dynamo theory with the lesser gas giants is beyond me. John, if you do try to explain it (as many great men have tried to do in the past) please give me time to sell tickets.
Too late. Its already been done. Perhaps if you weren't wasting your time vainly trying to debunk all mainstream science, you'd have noticed.....
You managed to stay on topic for only 20% of your rant. Sticking with magnetic fields for the moment.... Another poster has already pointed out quite reasonable explanations for the magnetic fields of the terrestrial planets. "It is quite clear that our current ideas about planetary magnetism are at best whistling in the dark" because we don't know enough about the interiors of the planets, not because of fundamental flaws in physics theories as you seem to imply. A recent model has explained the complex fields of Neptune and Uranus, relying on a thin convective region over a nonconvective fluid. It would thus be quite difficult to compare Venus and Uranus, as their internal structures are radically different.
I wouldn't let blow-torch-wielding children loose in my lab, but I'd certainly let them separate charge by rubbing their heads with balloons. Or let them pet my cat.
The sun provides an interesting example of polarity flips, which only take 11 years and thus are fairly well studied. The way it does it is different than Earth, as the sun's convective layer is what produces the field, and the convective layer extends to the surface. None the less, during the flip, the sun's surface sprouts many magnetic poles, almost always in pairs. We call them sunspots. Current theory suggests that the polarity flip actually occurs because the sun sheds the old polarity like a snake sheds its skin. It's not the sunspots or x-ray flares themselves that do it, it's the gigantic explosions known as Coronal Mass Ejections that violently heave enormous quantities of magnetic gas/plasma into space. The Earth can't shed a magnetic field this way, which might help explain why it takes so long. Multipole explanations of polarity flips are not that esoteric.
The Going To The Sun Highway in Glacier National Park is plowed out every spring. Somehow 600,000 vehicles a year manage to use it.
Just because you've been GPS-tagged doesn't mean you're guilty.
150 million kilometers, or 93 million miles.
... should have something to say about this. I doubt farmers want Roundup-resistant grass infesting their Roundup-resistant crops, or passing the resistance to even worse types of grass. There is a reason why two bureaus within the Department of Agriculture have already expressed concern.
Selective breeding is noit a form of genetic engineering. You muddy the issue when comparing the two. There is no 'engineering' involved in deciding which of two corn plants has better kernels. There is engineering involved when shooting gold particles coated with foreign DNA into corn cells.
The methods of genetic engineering are entirely different. Completely novel genes (from entirely unrelated organisms or dreamed up in a lab) are inserted randomly into an organism's genome using methods that are far more complicated than simply mating two organisms together and looking at their offspring. These methods may insert a new gene into a previously working gene or its control regions, rendering it useless. Or the insertion into a control region may make a previously inactive gene active, or cause it to express itself at a different time during the growth cycle.
Using selective breeding I can make better corn. Using genetic engineering I can make corn express botulinum toxin.
Mod parent clueless.
It's amazing. They rip the grass, roots and all, straight out of the ground. Then they clench the stems in their mouths and whip their heads so they can knock the root ball against a fence and get the dirt out. It's the most effective means of removing an invasive grass species that I've ever seen. Not.
Apparently a variety of infrared images of Titan at different wavelengths have been taken from the European Southern Observatory. These different wavelengths allow features at different depths in the atmosphere to be visualized, revealing dynamic and asymmetric atmospheric features, one dubbed the Southern Smile.
And electrons do not pose a radiation hazard.
Atoms emitting beta radiation are merely emitting high speed electrons. And beta radiation is hazardous, though remarkably easy to block.
RTFpseudoA again.
The Moon receives unfiltered sunlight and yet is sterile. Deep-sea hydrothermal vents receive no sunlight and yet support life. Sunlight is neither always necessary nor solely sufficient for the presence of life.
You have heard of spores, haven't you? The garden variety stuff would be the easiest to get rid of, but the unusual stuff would still hang around. Take any random sample of atmospheric air, filter it, expose the filter to lethal doses of ultraviolet radiation, plate it on growth medium, and you'll find numerous colonies of various species of Deinococcus. Use gamma radiation, and you'll still find Deinococcus radiodurans. Just because humans make the probe doesn't mean that only human-specific microbes will contaminate it. Organisms have been happily dispersing themselves through the air for hundred of millions, if not billions, of years.
And what is up with a low /. id number, no comments, no journal, and only one story submittal? Suman is one of the more mysterious shades lurking in the electronic deep.
Jupiter, on the other hand, has an obliquity of only 3.08 degrees, so there should be little or no seasonal effect. The Great Red Spot is truly mysterious.
Either it is a left-handed knife or it is an ambidextrous knife. If it's ambidextrous, it's not so funny that a right-handed person wields it in the diagram. It is, however, a very strange looking knife no matter which way you look at it.
Try a google search on the phrase "heat stable protein" or even just "heat stable" to discover just how wrong you are.
Its outer core is still molten.there's no mention of any existance of faults on the surface of mars
Patently false. Any decent geological map of Mars shows faults.
Someone has pointed out the short half-life of methane in the martian atmosphere (~300 years). I still like this theory, however, because a significant amount of gaseous material from the impact of a comet would have been incorporated into the ice caps, either in bubbles or even as a methane hydrate. In case folks weren't aware, there's evidence that Mars is experiencing a form of global warming, so perennial ice is currently melting and releasing whatever load of gases was contained in it. The methane spike over Meridiani Planum would be an argument against this, but their data seems to be noisy.