Thanks for the link to the Intelligent Design site. There I learned this:
Specified complexity is displayed by any object or event that has an extremely low probability of occurring by chance, and matches a discernable pattern. According to contemporary design theory, the presence of highly specified complexity is an indicator of an intelligent cause.
and also
When a design theorist says that a string of letters is specified, he's saying that it fits a recognizable pattern. And when he says it's complex, he's saying there are so many different ways the object could have turned out that the chance of getting any particular outcome by accident is hopelessly small.
Which led me to conjecture..... God is obviously complex, because He was able to create a complex Universe filled with complex beings. And He is a specific God, getting very angry if you try to worship just any god. Our God is the god with the specific abilities to create this Universe. So obviously God is a creation of Intelligent Design, and we can conclude in a similar manner that all Intelligent Designers are the products of Intelligent Designers. This implies an infinitely old chain of Gods creating each other.
Alternatively, God's creator was Man. This at least avoids the infinite cycle of Gods.
Well, you had a valid point in there somewhere. It is rather amazing that they had the equipment in orbit with the capability of taking high-res photos, but only did so for the landing site after the landing.
Isidis Planitia is ~1500 km in diameter, your "close-up" shows it roughly 300 pixels wide, and so the scale is ~ 5 km/pixel. The crater in question is only 1 km. wide, so don't try to convince us it's visible.
No, he wasn't. Amsterdam Vallon is a famous troll (is he ekrout or $$$$$exyGal?). Was he working for the NWS at the same time he was "a consultant for the Israelis"? And try clicking on the link he's got for Slauhgter College. There's no such server, no such college.
Thus "deforestation" has become a scientific process of cutting down older trees and encouraging the growth of young ones. Nature would have eventually wiped a whole area out with a forest fire instead.
After having viewed alerce trees over a thousand years old in Chile and redwoods and sequoias in the U.S. of similar age, I can assure you that your view of fire is simplistic and. in many geographic areas, just plain wrong. Many mature forests survive repeated fires, and often rely on them to clean out the undergrowth. Logged lands can experience fires more devastasting than on unlogged lands.
you may have noticed that the ozone hole isn't in the news as much anymore. There's a reason for that -- since our industries have stopped emitting CFCs in such incredible quantities, the hole has slowly begun to close itself up again.
Elk ranches? Here's the problem: CWD is found in the wild less often than it is in captive populations. The ranches are fenced so that the animals (good jumpers) can't get out, and so poachers and wolves can't get in. Wolves aren't going to interact with CWD in captive populations, only with CWD in wild populations. Here's a map of CWD. The wolves haven't made it down past Yellowstone, so they haven't encountered the wild CWD spreading north yet. Looking at the wolf populations in the Great Lakes area, we note that the wolf populations are in northern Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota, whereas wild CWD outbreaks are only in southern Wisconsin and northern Illinois.
That leaves one last area: Saskatchewan, with two small wild CWD outbreaks. One CWD spot is the Manito Sand Hills (I find no mention of wolves there, though they may be) and near Saskatchewan Landing Provincial Park, where I think there are wolves. Since only 5 cases have been found in the whole huge province, though, it's impossible to study the interaction of wolves and the disease.
Montana has shown great wisdom in outlawing game farms. CWD isn't the only reason.
Had the submitter actually read up on CWD, they'd have learned that it's already present in areas where there are wild wolves, and that there's no sign of the wolf population contracting it.
Had the parent RTFA, they'd have read that CWD has not been found in areas near wolves, and that's why nobody knows what's going to happen. To quote:
No one has been able to study whether wolves single out CWD-infected animals because the range of predator and disease have never overlapped.
Without some sort of fluid, the wipers would scrape the dry dust across the solar cells. The resultant scratches would decrease the amount of light getting into the cells. W/ a fluid (and it can't just be a methanol/water/glycol solution 'cause it would just freeze) there would be less scratching, but there could be instrument contamination from dirty fluid, and it would add way too much extra mass. Some sort of electrostatic device might work though.
Switching from a ring to a torus solved this problem.
A ring is a torus.
you'd be looking at the kind of energy released in a few dozen hydrogen bombs, and you're trying to keep it compressed to something the size of a small two-storey house
VLBI is great for radio telescopes, but even regular, non-VLB interferometry is very difficult in the infrared, and all but impossible (with current tech) in the optical.
Hang on there. Astronomical interferometry with visible light has been going on since Albert Michelson's measurements of the angular diameters of Jupiter's moon in 1890 and 1891. Perhaps you're talking about imaging interferometry. Even in that case, imaging of simple systems such as binary stars has already occurred.
Yeah. There was a previous image, but it was a calibration image taken before the telescope had cooled down to its final operating temperature, and/. jabbered about it. To get good quality data they have to subtract a dark-field image (basically a shot taken with the lens cap on) from the image of the subject (and do other stuff), but when the telescope was warm it would have imaged its own heat. Makes for noisy data, which is why they imaged really infrared-bright stars. As we already know stars emit infrared, the scientific value of the image was to make scientists salivate over the prospect of better images in the future.
Comet Halley perihelion: 0.5871 AU aphelion: 35.25 AU
So, as I was saying, Earth's and Saturn's orbits aren't that elliptical.
I can draw you a picture if youd like.
Please don't. I teach astronomy at a university. You're trying to explain some very complicated issues to an audience that was still trying to sort out the basics: whether an opposition is when the Earth is opposite the Sun from Saturn or when the Sun is opposite the Earth from Saturn. When the original poster said "Earth is also closest to Saturn," I assume he/she was merely trying to differentiate between the two aforementioned cases. But yes, saying "close" would have been more accurate than "closest". You yourself haven't mentioned all of the relevant factors, including tugs from other planets, especially mighty Jove, and Saturn's orbital inclination 2.49 degrees from the ecliptic. Exactly how were you going to include those in your picture?
"Earth is also closest to Saturn" merely means that they are on the same side of the sun rather than on opposite sides. Discussing the elliptical nature of the orbits takes the discussion to a whole new unnecessary level, especially considering that Saturn's and Earth's orbits are not very elliptical.
Since when is it a mistake to describe what you see using language an audience would understand? He saw three bright points, and he described them as three bright stars. If that was a mistake, then astronomers can do nothing besides make mistakes, because eventually someone will come along with a better optical instrument, see more detail, and describe the thing with new language.
Re:The price of uncertainty.
on
Global Dimming
·
· Score: 1
We can't predict the weather a week out, but people use the very same techniques to "predict" the climate a century out.
Weather and climate aren't the same thing. The aggregate properties of a system are usually much easier to predict than the individual components. For example, I can't tell you that it won't snow in Dallas sometime this winter, but I can certainly claim that the yearly average temperature of Dallas will be above the freezing mark. It's the same way with human activity. I can't tell you whether I will need to put gas in my car this week, but an estimate of the total gas purchased by Americans in one year is quite predictable. The real question is just how far into the future these trends can be predicted, and I'd have to agree that a century is pushing it. So that's where the next trick comes into play. Models can be run under many different scenarios. Whether you believe petroleum production starts declining at the peak of the Hubbert curve in 2010, or that there's immense reserves of deep abiogenic oil, models run under both scenarios suggest global warming, not cooling. The models are useful tools, up to a point.
Re:Not enough data
on
Global Dimming
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Until we have thousands of years worth of data, observed from outside the atmosphere, we can't prove that solar radiation is a constant.
It's not constant, and so it only took several decades to prove it.
No. The bottoms of certain craters near the North and South Poles of the Moon do not ever get sunlight. Currently debates rage over whether said craters contain significant deposits of water ice, with radar saying nay and epi-thermal neutron detectors saying yeah.
Seems like most posters, the original article submitter FU_Fish, and/. editor michael did not actually RTFA, or at least not very well. This new arm is gas, not stars, and it may just be an extension of an arm we already know about.
Re:OT: low tech spam on Mexican beach
on
Smart Billboards
·
· Score: 1
but its nice when you don't have to get off your ass to buy a cigar...
Having him let Frodo go was an important element of the story. Tolkien stresses the inheritance of traits a lot in the books (including Silmarillion). For example, Aragorn is a descendant of kings, and this is reflected in his physical strength, prowess with a sword, ability to lead others, cunning and knowledge, ability to heal, etc.. Orcs were once elves bred by Sauron to be evil, and are evil to this day. The Bagginses themselves come from the high end of the Shire social strata, and they are usually the only hobbits brave enough to go on adventures.
So when the brothers Faramir and Boromir are both presented with the same test, the One Ring within their grasp, it is very telling that very different things happen (in the books). Boromir attempts to nab the Ring, destroys the Fellowship, and gets himself killed. Faramir resists temptation, doesn't kill Gollum, resupplies Frodo and Sam, and lets all three of them go. Tolkien was saying that inherited behavior doesn't always have to triumph over free will. For those of us who have a parent as crazy as Denethor but are not that crazy ourselves, this rings very true.
The argument that Faramir's character needed more development in the TTs is a red herring. Much of his character is revealed in the contrasts between him and his brother. And we learn much more about him in the RoTK.
The "Osgiliath thing" was a very big mistake. The Ring causes its bearers to become possessive of it. Bilbo had a hard time handing the Ring over to one of his oldest friends who could've kicked his ass with one magical word. Even in the presence of the most evil of the Enemy's agents, the Ring Wraiths, Ring bearers attempt to fight or hide -witness Frodo's actions on Weathertop. At Osgiliath it appeared for all the world like Frodo was willingly going to give the Ring to a Nazgul. I sat there stunned in disbelief. It didn't seem right and it still doesn't. Other viewers thought he was just going to put the Ring on. I wonder how many people interpreted it my way?
Slashdot Mirror
Specified complexity is displayed by any object or event that has an extremely low probability of occurring by chance, and matches a discernable pattern. According to contemporary design theory, the presence of highly specified complexity is an indicator of an intelligent cause.
and also
When a design theorist says that a string of letters is specified, he's saying that it fits a recognizable pattern. And when he says it's complex, he's saying there are so many different ways the object could have turned out that the chance of getting any particular outcome by accident is hopelessly small.
Which led me to conjecture..... God is obviously complex, because He was able to create a complex Universe filled with complex beings. And He is a specific God, getting very angry if you try to worship just any god. Our God is the god with the specific abilities to create this Universe. So obviously God is a creation of Intelligent Design, and we can conclude in a similar manner that all Intelligent Designers are the products of Intelligent Designers. This implies an infinitely old chain of Gods creating each other.
Alternatively, God's creator was Man. This at least avoids the infinite cycle of Gods.
Well, you had a valid point in there somewhere. It is rather amazing that they had the equipment in orbit with the capability of taking high-res photos, but only did so for the landing site after the landing.
Isidis Planitia is ~1500 km in diameter, your "close-up" shows it roughly 300 pixels wide, and so the scale is ~ 5 km/pixel. The crater in question is only 1 km. wide, so don't try to convince us it's visible.
Pure crap. A 1 km. crater isn't even going to show up on the highest res map you linked.
No, he wasn't. Amsterdam Vallon is a famous troll (is he ekrout or $$$$$exyGal?). Was he working for the NWS at the same time he was "a consultant for the Israelis"? And try clicking on the link he's got for Slauhgter College. There's no such server, no such college.
After having viewed alerce trees over a thousand years old in Chile and redwoods and sequoias in the U.S. of similar age, I can assure you that your view of fire is simplistic and. in many geographic areas, just plain wrong. Many mature forests survive repeated fires, and often rely on them to clean out the undergrowth. Logged lands can experience fires more devastasting than on unlogged lands.
B.S. The largest ozone hole on record was in 2000. The second largest was this year. There's too much inter-year variability to make such a claim. Perhaps the Earth's weakening magnetic field will allow in more electrons, which have been shown to destroy ozone.
That leaves one last area: Saskatchewan, with two small wild CWD outbreaks. One CWD spot is the Manito Sand Hills (I find no mention of wolves there, though they may be) and near Saskatchewan Landing Provincial Park, where I think there are wolves. Since only 5 cases have been found in the whole huge province, though, it's impossible to study the interaction of wolves and the disease.
Montana has shown great wisdom in outlawing game farms. CWD isn't the only reason.
Had the parent RTFA, they'd have read that CWD has not been found in areas near wolves, and that's why nobody knows what's going to happen. To quote:
No one has been able to study whether wolves single out CWD-infected animals because the range of predator and disease have never overlapped.
Damn. I'm going to have to change my sig.
Without some sort of fluid, the wipers would scrape the dry dust across the solar cells. The resultant scratches would decrease the amount of light getting into the cells. W/ a fluid (and it can't just be a methanol/water/glycol solution 'cause it would just freeze) there would be less scratching, but there could be instrument contamination from dirty fluid, and it would add way too much extra mass. Some sort of electrostatic device might work though.
A ring is a torus.
you'd be looking at the kind of energy released in a few dozen hydrogen bombs, and you're trying to keep it compressed to something the size of a small two-storey house
Monkeys flying, my butt. etc.
Hang on there. Astronomical interferometry with visible light has been going on since Albert Michelson's measurements of the angular diameters of Jupiter's moon in 1890 and 1891. Perhaps you're talking about imaging interferometry. Even in that case, imaging of simple systems such as binary stars has already occurred.
Yeah. There was a previous image, but it was a calibration image taken before the telescope had cooled down to its final operating temperature, and /. jabbered about it. To get good quality data they have to subtract a dark-field image (basically a shot taken with the lens cap on) from the image of the subject (and do other stuff), but when the telescope was warm it would have imaged its own heat. Makes for noisy data, which is why they imaged really infrared-bright stars. As we already know stars emit infrared, the scientific value of the image was to make scientists salivate over the prospect of better images in the future.
perihelion: 0.5871 AU
aphelion: 35.25 AU
So, as I was saying, Earth's and Saturn's orbits aren't that elliptical.
I can draw you a picture if youd like.
Please don't. I teach astronomy at a university. You're trying to explain some very complicated issues to an audience that was still trying to sort out the basics: whether an opposition is when the Earth is opposite the Sun from Saturn or when the Sun is opposite the Earth from Saturn. When the original poster said "Earth is also closest to Saturn," I assume he/she was merely trying to differentiate between the two aforementioned cases. But yes, saying "close" would have been more accurate than "closest". You yourself haven't mentioned all of the relevant factors, including tugs from other planets, especially mighty Jove, and Saturn's orbital inclination 2.49 degrees from the ecliptic. Exactly how were you going to include those in your picture?
"Earth is also closest to Saturn" merely means that they are on the same side of the sun rather than on opposite sides. Discussing the elliptical nature of the orbits takes the discussion to a whole new unnecessary level, especially considering that Saturn's and Earth's orbits are not very elliptical.
Since when is it a mistake to describe what you see using language an audience would understand? He saw three bright points, and he described them as three bright stars. If that was a mistake, then astronomers can do nothing besides make mistakes, because eventually someone will come along with a better optical instrument, see more detail, and describe the thing with new language.
Not quite right either. The solar 'constant' is not constant.
Weather and climate aren't the same thing. The aggregate properties of a system are usually much easier to predict than the individual components. For example, I can't tell you that it won't snow in Dallas sometime this winter, but I can certainly claim that the yearly average temperature of Dallas will be above the freezing mark. It's the same way with human activity. I can't tell you whether I will need to put gas in my car this week, but an estimate of the total gas purchased by Americans in one year is quite predictable. The real question is just how far into the future these trends can be predicted, and I'd have to agree that a century is pushing it. So that's where the next trick comes into play. Models can be run under many different scenarios. Whether you believe petroleum production starts declining at the peak of the Hubbert curve in 2010, or that there's immense reserves of deep abiogenic oil, models run under both scenarios suggest global warming, not cooling. The models are useful tools, up to a point.
It's not constant, and so it only took several decades to prove it.
No. The bottoms of certain craters near the North and South Poles of the Moon do not ever get sunlight. Currently debates rage over whether said craters contain significant deposits of water ice, with radar saying nay and epi-thermal neutron detectors saying yeah.
Seems like most posters, the original article submitter FU_Fish, and /. editor michael did not actually RTFA, or at least not very well. This new arm is gas, not stars, and it may just be an extension of an arm we already know about.
but its nice when you don't have to get off your ass to buy a cigar...
So when the brothers Faramir and Boromir are both presented with the same test, the One Ring within their grasp, it is very telling that very different things happen (in the books). Boromir attempts to nab the Ring, destroys the Fellowship, and gets himself killed. Faramir resists temptation, doesn't kill Gollum, resupplies Frodo and Sam, and lets all three of them go. Tolkien was saying that inherited behavior doesn't always have to triumph over free will. For those of us who have a parent as crazy as Denethor but are not that crazy ourselves, this rings very true.
The argument that Faramir's character needed more development in the TTs is a red herring. Much of his character is revealed in the contrasts between him and his brother. And we learn much more about him in the RoTK.
The "Osgiliath thing" was a very big mistake. The Ring causes its bearers to become possessive of it. Bilbo had a hard time handing the Ring over to one of his oldest friends who could've kicked his ass with one magical word. Even in the presence of the most evil of the Enemy's agents, the Ring Wraiths, Ring bearers attempt to fight or hide -witness Frodo's actions on Weathertop. At Osgiliath it appeared for all the world like Frodo was willingly going to give the Ring to a Nazgul. I sat there stunned in disbelief. It didn't seem right and it still doesn't. Other viewers thought he was just going to put the Ring on. I wonder how many people interpreted it my way?
Butch and Sundance were killed by the Bolivian army.