This stuff looks a great deal like features found all over Mars, just enormously more concentrated, and steeper. (Notice particularly the flat-bottomed craters on hillsides and on the right side of the image.) Of course the mechanisms normally proposed for the Martian features ("collapse pits") are inconceivable applied to identical features on Hyperion. That doesn't reduce the objective similarity, of course, but it makes those mechanisms much less plausible for the Martian features.
The notion that the straight lines on Tethys are fault lines is nothing short of ludicrous. Any fractures it has (a) would have no reason to be straight, and (b) wouldn't selectively attract meteorite craters centered along them. Carving by oblique impacts is even worse; butter would not slice out that cleanly, they wouldn't follow up and down hills with occasional wide/deep spots, and there's still the problem of round craters preferentially centered on them.
The only plausible source of geometrically straight lines on a body like this is geometric: rotation past an external reference.
The electromagnetic environment around Saturn is certainly busy enough to make electric arcing a mechanism worth investigating. That would explain the craters along the lines -- each records a spike of current flow -- and the oddly-shaped excavation at the end. The length of each line, coupled with the (approximate) rotation rate, reveals the duration of the arcing, the rate of excavation, and (thereby) the approximate current involved.
This might be a good place to correct a misconception (propagated in postings to the previous instance of this story) that since the web site isn't distributing the code, GPLv3 can't restrict them.
Copyright law also allows authors to impose restrictions on "public performance". Originally, the idea was that the distribution of sheet music for a melody was restricted, but playing a piece on the radio was not reproducing the sheet music. The public performance clause closed that loophole. Here, public performance would amount to "playing" the code (i.e., the "noises" it encodes, as it were) over the web. The analogy is strong, except that there's lots of stuff specified in code that doesn't go out over the wire. However, that probably just means that what's "played" and broadcast is a derived (abridged) work.
(IANAL. This ain't legal advice. Kowtow before the Law guild.)
There is no such thing as an "EU theory". EU people have adopted a portfolio of theories and claims from others, some indisputable (interstellar plasma exhibits plasma-dynamic phenomena, film at 11), others ridiculous (Earth orbited Saturn?). I never claimed that Birkeland currents power the sun, and to claim I did is actively dishonest both for you and for your "original poster". As noted, anybody can look at what I did write. (Bark up another tree, AC.)
Congratulations, to admit that interstellar Birkeland currents flow is quite a concession. Of course, once you admit multi-billion-Watt power flows run, you have to explain why they mustn't have any effect on anything we see. That's what astronomers are avoiding.
It was Joe Betts, working at IBM Almaden Research Lab, who designed the first 90%+ efficient switching power-brick, for the Thinkpad. Before that, bricks were all twice as big, and ran hot-hot-hot. After that, all the other guys had to clean up their acts too. He didn't study electrical engineering in school, but he didn't let that slow him down; he learned what he needed when he needed it.
Power is defined as energy transmitted/consumed/converted per unit time. A battery (like a fuel tank, or a dam) stores energy. Unplugged, power is zero. When you draw from it, it's producing power, and drawing down its energy reserves to do so.
Things get simpler when you use precise language, and avoid confusing yourself.
It's not hard to measure astronomical electrical currents: electrical current is directly proportional to magnetic field strength, which is routinely measured using the Zeeman effect. Yes, any place you find a magnetic field, electric charges are in motion. No, the interior of a rotating star is not the only place where charged particles can move.
It's not clear that interstellar currents produce much of the sun's light. (It would account for events at the sun surface that core fusion cannot, but the evidence is incomplete.) What is perfectly clear is that they power x-ray emissions of similar magnitudes distributed across light-years-wide nebulae. Any description of a celestial phenomenon where they are known to occur (e.g. where there is a visible "jet", or x-rays over an extended region) that neglects them, and also fails to explain why their effects must be negligible, is trivially wrong. Any model of galactic or cosmic evolution that fails to reproduce them is, likewise, trivially wrong.
People who take dark matter and dark energy seriously obviously aren't very interested in "convincing evidence", because they have exactly none at all. (Not only that, there's no place to put it: galactic lensing analyses show galaxies are no more massive than the stars and dust in 'em.) The only properties either has is whatever mass or repulsion is needed to prop up a falsified cosmogological theory -- and a different amount for each theory.
It always cracks me up when they announce what must have caused each new, completely unexpected (i.e. unpredicted) event. They really have no idea, and just make it up as they go along. Dark matter, dark energy, inflation, billion-solar-mass black holes. Now we have cracks in neutron stars. It's especially comical whenever they invoke "magnetic reconnection" (as in the Febrary story linked), a process known only to astronomers that has no meaning in the maths of electrodynamics as practiced by people who do it for a living. Astronomers occasionally admit to discomfort at the prevalence of ordinary 1e14 eV cosmic rays, which no plausible gravitational process can produce. Nothing that's even slightly understood can account for this kind of energy release.
Well, that's not true. There's a well-understood process in plasma fluid dynamics where what is called a "double layer" explodes. (Each solar flare is such an event.) There's really no upper limit on how much energy such an explosion might release; it depends on the magnitude of the current that is interrupted. Similarly, charged particles can be accelerated to just about any degree in a big enough electric field gradient. However, astronomers, as a rule, have never heard of double layers, and they think of interstellar space as infinitely conductive. (I'm not joking!) They don't read plasma physics journals, despite that everything they can see is plasma, and most of what they can't. (They prefer to call it all "hot gas" and to imagine it just blows around like especially thin air.) They are astonished and mystified at each new observation of familiar plasma phenomena.
Thus, all that lovely filamentary stuff in the Crab Nebula, nicely separated by elemental composition and glowing in x-ray bands, is not fantastically intricate plasma fluid (and current) flows, but just "hot gas" clouds pushed around by "winds" and "shock waves". High-energy events can't happen without some sort of heavy lump to happen on or near, hence the burgeoning population of implausibly massive black holes and and impossibly dizzy neutron stars. A great lot of current accelerated in a straight line is a "jet" or (like the one connecting to our own sun's south pole, identically as to the axes of galaxies, of pulsars, and lately just about everything) a "plume".
It's pretty clear the "dark matter" reference was just pro forma compliance with Astronomers' Union regulations. From the brochure:
It's so embarrassing to be censured by the Union for leaving mention of dark matter out of one's press release, when it's so easy to drop in. It's not as if "dark matter" (or "dark energy", not yet required!) has any awkward properties to conflict with one's speculations. Even though one's own hypothesis may actually agree with observations and not need shoring up, just mentioning dark matter may help other astronomers who are not so fortunate. Please be considerate.
The "completely insane and already disproven multiple times" Electric Universe theory isn't one, and so can't have been. That is, "electric universe" is an amalgam of a lot of different theories, by a lot of different people, smushed together. Some are utterly compelling, and should make the jokers at NASA blush at their own poor educations. Others are frankly nuts. Most are in between, but testable.
It's adolescent rubbish that (as far as I have been able to discern from their writings) Earth used to orbit Saturn, or that Venus was calved off of Saturn in immediate prehistory. It's almost certain that within that same period there were terrifying Aurorae Australis, bright enough to be seen by day. It's unlikely that there's no fusion going on within the sun, but very possible that the sun's chromosphere is a plasma "double layer" that accelerates into the corona those particles that overcome its activation threshold, producing the corona's astonishing temperature.
It's likely that galaxies are not organized around "billion-solar-mass black holes," and that quasars are no more distant or energetic than the nearby Seyfert galaxies they cluster about. It's visibly true that currents in the interstellar plasma self-organize into intertwining filaments and extended membranes that sometimes fluoresce, exactly like neon lights, to produce stunningly beautiful nebular displays.
It's an easy bet that cosmologists' notions of "dark matter" and "dark energy" adding up to over 99 times as much stuff as the visible universe are fantasies ginned up to rescue failed hypotheses. It's a matter of public record that astrophysicists, as a rule, have only rudimentary training in the dynamics of the plasma that they admit fills all of space, but insist on calling "ionized gas".
Among the best things about running and writing only Free Software is that I don't have to pay the slightest attention to What Bill Gates Says. I don't have to speculate on What Bill Gates Really Thinks, or on What Microsoft Will Do Next, or read anybody else's speculations. I don't have to subscribe to MSDN and ragpick the CDs (DVDs, now?) for essential trivia.
If life is hellish for Microsoft-watchers out here, imagine what it must be like In There, even for the ones not dodging chairs. You not only need to hang on every word from the Chairman and various Gangs of Four, you also have to worry about what Google, AOL, Apple, IBM, and even Adobe and Nokia might do next.
Life's too short to spend watching corporations and their sociopathic officers.
The source will turn out to be (angularly speaking) right next to a nearby Seyfert galaxy that has an improbable number of other particularly bright quasars clustered around it. The other quasars' redshifts will be found to decrease with angular distance from the galaxy.
One reason people distrust scientists may be that scientists have so
frequently been untrustworthy. Not, perhaps, so untrustworthy as
politicians, or columnists, or "business leaders"; but none of those
asserts the unbiased authority scientists do. Scientists may have a
more plausible claim to it, if only because people who become scientists
are more inclined to be careful about details. At the same time,
however, people who become scientists are also much less comfortable
than most of us with uncertainty. People who don't feel a need to know
-- who don't need to feel they know -- don't become scientists. The
mores of science are rife with safeguards against temptation to bias,
but they are all too easily and too often overcome.
Recent history is filled with instances of major advances stalled by
decades through systematic bias. (Name three? OK, just in recent
biology, McClintock's "jumping genes", now a cornerstone of genetics;
Nerve cell reproduction in the human brain; Weak electromagnetic fields
affecting genetic expression.) It is routine that a new theory must
vault hurdles far higher to be considered, or even to be examined, than
the currently orthodox notion ever has.
Science, in its modern form, unfortunately reinforces every worst
inclination of a scientist. Not only the grants needed to fund
investigation, but the right to publish results of it, are personally
controlled by those with the most to lose when their own work is
supplanted. Scientists in many fields have become accustomed to
entertain only minor variations of a single theory, making it impossible
even to gather and present contrary evidence. Some fields are dominated
by corporate interests that would be damaged by change, or revelation.
Finally, political ideologists have found it appallingly easy to close
off lines of inquiry uncomfortable for their supporters.
Public distrust of scientific orthodoxy is well-earned. To (re-?) gain
trust, and trustworthiness, will require fundamental changes in how the
daily business of science is administered. Unfortunately, the trend is
toward greater orthodoxy, not less.
Instead of dismissing them without looking, let's look at the predictions:
"An abundance of water... is unlikely": Inconclusive. Lack of water would have meant something.
"Electrical interactions... should be measurable... The most obvious would be a flash (lightning-like discharge) shortly before impact": Check. there was a flash, producing x-rays, well before impact. No conventional explanation.
A "sheath", or plasma double-layer: Inconclusive. How would we know?
"Electrical stress may short out the electronics before impact": It did stop transmitting before impact, but that might have been a debris collision. Inconclusive.
"More energy will be released than expected": Check. The logs at planetary.org have everybody marveling at how big the pop was.
Copious X-rays... sudden onset: Check. No conventional explanation.
"If the energy distributed over several flashes...": One big flash. Inconclusive.
"arcs generated will be hotter than can be explained by mechanical impact: Check; x-rays.
"impact may initiate a new jet on the nucleus": Check.
"impact... will not reveal 'primordial dirty ice,' but the same composition as the surface": Apparently not.
"impact... will be into rock, not loosely consolidated ice and dust. The impact crater will be smaller than expected": Apparently not.
So, how did they do?
From the X-rays and unexpected flashes there do seem to have been interesting electrical events, but, presuming the data are being interpreted correctly, they seem to be wrong about the origin of the comet.
It's strange that reports immediately after impact didn't indicate abundant volatiles. I wonder what changed.
Does "emotional commitment" mean "reluctance to spend tens of hours re-encoding my music in a format for which I have no good encoder"? Does "emotional commitment" mean wanting to carry my music in a format that will always be decodeable, no matter what some company decides I should be able to do? Or both?
It would take one Apple engineer about the same time to add Ogg support (for everybody) as for me to re-encode my music in some proprietary, patent-encumbered, and probably inferior format.
Actually, the product would be substantially better if, instead of built-in flash memory, it just had a compactflash slot. Not this year, it seems. Still waiting for the sweet spot.
As far as I know, you still can't plug two stock iPods together and transfer files & tracks. Is there an aftermarket gadget to trick them? If it sells, that's proof (if it were needed) that it's useful.
It would cost Apple nothing at all to build it in, and it would add at least twice as much value as the gross sales of that gadget. It might be that providing Ogg support, besides, would add relatively little measurable market value to the product. However, it is certain that it would cost them nothing -- either in direct per-unit cost, or even in such intangibles as interface complexity.
How many people are working on alternative firmware, or downloading it? Thousands, certainly. Most of them wouldn't bother if the features they wanted were already there. For each person who downloads such an image, many more might, but for fear, or difficulty, or just not knowing it's there. For each one of them -- who bought despite missing one or more features -- how many didn't buy because of them? Certainly many more.
When a company prefers excuses for leaving out features over quietly adding them, that tells us a lot about the company's attitude toward potential customers. When its existing customers deride, in crudely insulting terms, anybody who asks about missing features or missing information, that tells us volumes more about them. Are they people I would want to seem to be associated with? It's nice enough hardware, but a distinctly toxic milieu.
It is a fact that there's no way to tell from the Apple web site what's up with the dock connector. It is a fact that there's no direct way to tell from their web site whether the dock is needed to connect, or even how heavy the dock is. (There's no reason to think that a Google search would tell anything about a completely new product; the nano dock isn't the same as the mini's.)
The most direct interpretation of what little it does say is misleading. I suppose it could be true that new iPods are only meant for people who already bought the old one, or who are inclined to sit down, shut up, and take what they get and like it, but I didn't find either spelled out on the site.
It's nice hardware at a not unreasonable price, and we have proof that it can be programmed to do useful things. If I had no kids, I might put in the effort to help out, myself. As it is, I have to wait and see.
(My experience is that anything not distinctly fawning toward Apple gets moderated to oblivion. I wonder if we will be permitted to discuss this topic.)
This seems helpful, at first:
"Dock Connector:... If you've bothered to ever use an iPod you'd know the cable that comes with it has USB or Firewire on one end, and the dock connector on the other end..."
Let me see if I understand. Only people who already have an iPod should expect to understand the web page offering to sell them? If I already had one, why in the world would I want to buy another? (Not to transfer files between, evidently.)
"Shut up troll... you're too stubborn and arrogant to support a popular standard... I don't bitch at Sony... People just like to bitch... "
The reply started out so helpfully... I guess it's not just Apple. I wonder which got it from whom. I always thought if you paid for something, you had a right to look into what you were getting. I thought it reasonable to check if useful features missing from previous models, and that wouldn't cost anything to add, might show up in a later model.
Maybe I'm just not worthy to host the sublimity that is iPod during its short visit to Earth. Or maybe I'll make a donation to BJ at http://ipodlinux.org/, wait a bit, and see what happens.
That's not what it says. It says it only has a "dock connector", and the dock is included.
I'm guessing the iPod you bought last month isn't a nano.
And, if you can transfer files directly between iPods without booting Linux on one of 'em, you must be the only one. The capability wouldn't cost them anything to provide, so it's only stubbornness keeping the feature out.
Likewise, Ogg support doesn't cost anything to provide. That's what all my music is encoded in, at 240 kbps. I should re-encode it all just so I can listen to it on an iPod, and I have to do it only because they were too stubborn and arrogant to support Ogg?
Each new iPod makes me feel like waiting for the next one. 4G of solid-state storage for $250 is pretty good, and it's nice to have a sharp color display this time, but on this one they took away the IEEE1394 and USB2 connectors. I can't find anything to suggest how big or heavy the "dock" is, or even what it uses for power. (The link on Apple's nano page points to the wrong dock, BTW; you have to use "search" to find the right one.)
I won't spend $250 just to move music; I want to put be able to put *anything* on it. If that means carrying the dock around, I want to know how big and heavy it is; but they keep that a secret. Furthermore, there's no technical reason this thing couldn't be an IEEE1394 host, and let me transfer files to another another one, or to some other IEEE1394 device.
And, of course, no Ogg (again!).
Each of these is a deal-breaker -- at least until Linux is ported...
All cosmologists border on crankhood; it goes with the territory. What's important is whether they cross the line. (Hint: 99% "dark matter" is way, way beyond.) However, Lerner has his own page disputing the many misrepresentations on that page. We don't know if Wright's or Lerner's is a better model, but it is clear, at least, that Wright is pretending to answer claims Lerner didn't make.
"Electric Universe" is not "Plasma Cosmology"
on
Supernova 1987A Decoded
·
· Score: 2, Informative
It's worth noting here that the serious people working in Plasma Cosmology (e.g. Peratt and Lerner) don't acknowledge the "Electric Universe" people (never mind the Velikovsky adherents). Being quoted by cranks doesn't make one a crank.
There's serious work going on detecting and characterizing solar-, nebular-, galactic-, and galactic-supercluster- scale current flow that the Electric Universe people are happy to co-opt. Regardless of how supernovas happen, what you end up with really are huge clouds of electrically-conductive plasma at widely-varying densities, compositions, and degrees of ionization, that spontaneously organize. Forms routinely observed in laboratory plasma experiments, scaled up many orders of magnitude, are unmistakable in such nebulae, just as is also seen on a smaller scale in our own solar system (e.g. the aurora), and on an immensely larger scale in the galactic core.
"We're nowhere near break-even, but Sandia's been doing all right!" ... "Whatever are you talking about? The Z-machine at sandia has only produced millijoule fusion yields, the JET at cullham has produced kilojoules."
Enormous transfers of funds are effected from the public till to Sandia, for very small investment of lobbying effort. Your employer must be realizing similar immediate gains, even neglecting the advantages realized for landing beam-weapon system development contracts.
"electrically-accelerated boron-[hydrogen] reactor..." "that is a nonequilibrium system which was proven impossible for generating excess energy."
The young rarely understand that graduate theses are to be read for the analyses, never for the conclusions. This is not because the youth of the graduate lends overconfidence (although it may), but mainly because the thesis conclusion must satisfy the prejudices of the examiners -- in this case, most likely hot-neutron careerists.
Even skimming the document reveals, for example, that 10^8 W is taken (evidently by analogy with a hot-neutron reactor) as a lower limit to economic viability, despite that for such a system a 10^6 W yield, or even 10^4 W, might well be preferable, if it could be mass-produced. (Cue "Mr. Fusion" remarks. The 1.21x10^9 W required might be accumulated capacitively; 10^5 W is plenty for a normal car.) A factor of three orders of magnitude can change fundamentally the engineering involved in implementing an idea.
The thesis author's true colors are revealed in Appendix E. Despite the disclaimers, he is evidently eager to develop the measures he proposes.
You needn't wait until the middle of the next decade... Only 2 more years. That is when our new [blah blah] will come online and [blah blah] experiment will begin...
Ha Ha Ha.
Fusion "experiments" have been "beginning" for over three decades, to the tune of over $60 billion dollars when last I checked. It will take an enormous amount of power to break even on that -- and every year the bar gets higher. *We're* nowhere near break-even, but Sandia's been doing all right!
If they ever do pass "break-even", all we'll have is hot neutrons, just like the old fission reactors. The plant will cost another $50 billion, and will only last 20 years until it's a pile of radioactive slag, and we need another one.
Meanwhile, not a penny for research on an electrically- accelerated boron-deuterium reactor. It wouldn't cost any $50 billion. Its energy would be extracted electromagnetically, it wouldn't wear out, each small city could could have one, and it wouldn't create a thousand tons of radioactive slag. Of course anything that might actually *work* would be bad for everybody (currently) involved.
Anyway, if it doesn't produce enough neutrons to keep the tritium bombs charged up, what the hell good is it?
...Professor Thomas Gold, of Cornell University... showed that the pulses had regular patterns which would only arise from a process where a driving momentum was continuously stabilizing the signal...
Evidently the only thing that could carry that much momentum must be neutronium, because it has to be imagined physically tiny. That model fails, though, to account for recently discovered pulsars that would have to spin fast enough to break up even a neutron star. Whatever model accounts for them might as well be used for the slower variety, obviating neutron stars.
... you consider gravitational lensing to be an iffy phenomen[on], despite the fact that it's been observed happening in our very own solar system, in accordance to general relativity, since 1919!
Do please read more carefully.
It's one thing for Eddington's South American companion expedition to have successfully recorded the sun's gravitation bending light (though his own plates from Africa were spoiled). It's entirely another to invoke galactic lensing every time one needs to discount inconvenient evidence (anomalous quasar red-shift, usually) wherever it comes to light.
I know Dark Matter is a bit difficult to swallow - something out there exists but it's difficult to observe directly
-- indeed, impossible, by definition --
- but "magnetic reconnection" is not entirely difficult to understand
Ask your neighborhood park ranger to explain topo-map contour-line reconnection. He won't confuse the contour lines with the geological features they trace. He won't imagine enormous energy releases caused by them moving about, even though it happens when a volcano pops. Energy is released explosively when the current feeding a magnetic field is interrupted.
Space is *IN NO WAY* assumed to be superconducting - rather areas with plasma are considered to be so...
You know of somewhere in space without plasma? Low-density plasmas as found in (real, outer) space have finite -- non-zero, non-infinite -- conductivity, inconveniently so for calculation, but there it is.
Plasmas have a tendency to "drag" the H-field with them, as they are conductors.... This type of behavior has been shown quite clearly to exist.
You'll have to find your crackpots elsewhere. It's one thing for magnetic fields to display a sort of inertia, and another to portray them as incapable of any sort of evolution or interaction -- as you must admit is common in astrophysics, even if not in your own calculations.
Mostly ballistic flows of charged particles at extremely high velocities are very correctly known as relativistic jets - phenome[no]logically they have very little likeness to electrical flows through conventional conducting mediums, as we would be familiar with on earth.... And, while it's true that these flows would create their own magnetic field... their motion will be dominated by ballistic tendencies and electrical forces. I do not see what is so hard to understand about this...
You seem to imagine these jets blasting in an ideal
vacuum, rather than in the (not-infinitely-conductive)
plasma we both know surrounds them. Where is the current flow that maintains electrical neutrality in the system? For a relativistic jet of thousands (or billions) of tons per second of electrons, there must be a corresponding flow of positive ions, thousands of times slower, but of hundreds of times greater mass.
Where is it? Why do astrophysicists insist it can have no effect on the processes observed? That gives them two problems: they have to invent dark matter and supermassive black holes to account for events gravitationally, and they also have to explain why all those ions moving about can't have any de
"Interstellar gas" made of "ionized hydrogen" is what we call, outside the walled garden of astronomy, plasma. As plasma, it's much more interesting stuff than gas, because when it moves, that's an electric current, and it produces a magnetic field that affects the motion of other plasma around it. Such currents naturally self-organize, through a positive-feedback process (neglected in MHD, note), into ropelike bundles of tubes, sweeping the surrounding material together and carrying it along.
Such currents in near-vacuum plasma, called Birkeland currents, have been directly detected flowing between stars. Finding and analyzing these (real, measurable) flows has to be more interesting than mapping interstellar "gas" density or chasing "dark matter" unicorns. Actually to measure a current flowing between the Milky Way and a Magellanic cloud would make a career -- and ultimately make "dark matter" and "supermassive black holes" seem about as relevant to future work as phlogiston gas and cranial phrenology are today.
"... why don't you publish a paper so we can all share your remarkable insight? I'm sure you'll be given a Nobel Prize for it."
There are plenty of papers published by serious plasma researchers. Astrophysicists don't read them. That's what makes it sad, but it's also what makes the press releases positively comical.
Birkeland currents have been studied for more than a century, ever since they were elucidated as the process behind the Aurora Borealis. Next time you meet an astrophysicist, ask why Birkeland currents can operate between the sun and Earth, but not between any distant star and anything else. (The answer will be sad, but funny.)
Slashdot Mirror
This stuff looks a great deal like features found all over Mars, just enormously more concentrated, and steeper. (Notice particularly the flat-bottomed craters on hillsides and on the right side of the image.) Of course the mechanisms normally proposed for the Martian features ("collapse pits") are inconceivable applied to identical features on Hyperion. That doesn't reduce the objective similarity, of course, but it makes those mechanisms much less plausible for the Martian features.
The notion that the straight lines on Tethys are fault lines is nothing short of ludicrous. Any fractures it has (a) would have no reason to be straight, and (b) wouldn't selectively attract meteorite craters centered along them. Carving by oblique impacts is even worse; butter would not slice out that cleanly, they wouldn't follow up and down hills with occasional wide/deep spots, and there's still the problem of round craters preferentially centered on them.
The only plausible source of geometrically straight lines on a body like this is geometric: rotation past an external reference.
The electromagnetic environment around Saturn is certainly busy enough to make electric arcing a mechanism worth investigating. That would explain the craters along the lines -- each records a spike of current flow -- and the oddly-shaped excavation at the end. The length of each line, coupled with the (approximate) rotation rate, reveals the duration of the arcing, the rate of excavation, and (thereby) the approximate current involved.
Copyright law also allows authors to impose restrictions on "public performance". Originally, the idea was that the distribution of sheet music for a melody was restricted, but playing a piece on the radio was not reproducing the sheet music. The public performance clause closed that loophole. Here, public performance would amount to "playing" the code (i.e., the "noises" it encodes, as it were) over the web. The analogy is strong, except that there's lots of stuff specified in code that doesn't go out over the wire. However, that probably just means that what's "played" and broadcast is a derived (abridged) work.
(IANAL. This ain't legal advice. Kowtow before the Law guild.)
There is no such thing as an "EU theory". EU people have adopted a portfolio of theories and claims from others, some indisputable (interstellar plasma exhibits plasma-dynamic phenomena, film at 11), others ridiculous (Earth orbited Saturn?). I never claimed that Birkeland currents power the sun, and to claim I did is actively dishonest both for you and for your "original poster". As noted, anybody can look at what I did write. (Bark up another tree, AC.)
Congratulations, to admit that interstellar Birkeland currents flow is quite a concession. Of course, once you admit multi-billion-Watt power flows run, you have to explain why they mustn't have any effect on anything we see. That's what astronomers are avoiding.
Nowadays he's at Oqo.
Power is defined as energy transmitted/consumed/converted per unit time. A battery (like a fuel tank, or a dam) stores energy. Unplugged, power is zero. When you draw from it, it's producing power, and drawing down its energy reserves to do so.
Things get simpler when you use precise language, and avoid confusing yourself.
Replying to trolls is usually a mistake, but fine:
It's not hard to measure astronomical electrical currents: electrical current is directly proportional to magnetic field strength, which is routinely measured using the Zeeman effect. Yes, any place you find a magnetic field, electric charges are in motion. No, the interior of a rotating star is not the only place where charged particles can move.It's not clear that interstellar currents produce much of the sun's light. (It would account for events at the sun surface that core fusion cannot, but the evidence is incomplete.) What is perfectly clear is that they power x-ray emissions of similar magnitudes distributed across light-years-wide nebulae. Any description of a celestial phenomenon where they are known to occur (e.g. where there is a visible "jet", or x-rays over an extended region) that neglects them, and also fails to explain why their effects must be negligible, is trivially wrong. Any model of galactic or cosmic evolution that fails to reproduce them is, likewise, trivially wrong.
People who take dark matter and dark energy seriously obviously aren't very interested in "convincing evidence", because they have exactly none at all. (Not only that, there's no place to put it: galactic lensing analyses show galaxies are no more massive than the stars and dust in 'em.) The only properties either has is whatever mass or repulsion is needed to prop up a falsified cosmogological theory -- and a different amount for each theory.
Well, that's not true. There's a well-understood process in plasma fluid dynamics where what is called a "double layer" explodes. (Each solar flare is such an event.) There's really no upper limit on how much energy such an explosion might release; it depends on the magnitude of the current that is interrupted. Similarly, charged particles can be accelerated to just about any degree in a big enough electric field gradient. However, astronomers, as a rule, have never heard of double layers, and they think of interstellar space as infinitely conductive. (I'm not joking!) They don't read plasma physics journals, despite that everything they can see is plasma, and most of what they can't. (They prefer to call it all "hot gas" and to imagine it just blows around like especially thin air.) They are astonished and mystified at each new observation of familiar plasma phenomena.
Thus, all that lovely filamentary stuff in the Crab Nebula, nicely separated by elemental composition and glowing in x-ray bands, is not fantastically intricate plasma fluid (and current) flows, but just "hot gas" clouds pushed around by "winds" and "shock waves". High-energy events can't happen without some sort of heavy lump to happen on or near, hence the burgeoning population of implausibly massive black holes and and impossibly dizzy neutron stars. A great lot of current accelerated in a straight line is a "jet" or (like the one connecting to our own sun's south pole, identically as to the axes of galaxies, of pulsars, and lately just about everything) a "plume".
It's adolescent rubbish that (as far as I have been able to discern from their writings) Earth used to orbit Saturn, or that Venus was calved off of Saturn in immediate prehistory. It's almost certain that within that same period there were terrifying Aurorae Australis, bright enough to be seen by day. It's unlikely that there's no fusion going on within the sun, but very possible that the sun's chromosphere is a plasma "double layer" that accelerates into the corona those particles that overcome its activation threshold, producing the corona's astonishing temperature.
It's likely that galaxies are not organized around "billion-solar-mass black holes," and that quasars are no more distant or energetic than the nearby Seyfert galaxies they cluster about. It's visibly true that currents in the interstellar plasma self-organize into intertwining filaments and extended membranes that sometimes fluoresce, exactly like neon lights, to produce stunningly beautiful nebular displays.
It's an easy bet that cosmologists' notions of "dark matter" and "dark energy" adding up to over 99 times as much stuff as the visible universe are fantasies ginned up to rescue failed hypotheses. It's a matter of public record that astrophysicists, as a rule, have only rudimentary training in the dynamics of the plasma that they admit fills all of space, but insist on calling "ionized gas".
Whatever their failings, the Electric Universe people have the best astronomical picture gallery on the web.
If life is hellish for Microsoft-watchers out here, imagine what it must be like In There, even for the ones not dodging chairs. You not only need to hang on every word from the Chairman and various Gangs of Four, you also have to worry about what Google, AOL, Apple, IBM, and even Adobe and Nokia might do next.
Life's too short to spend watching corporations and their sociopathic officers.
The source will turn out to be (angularly speaking) right next to a nearby Seyfert galaxy that has an improbable number of other particularly bright quasars clustered around it. The other quasars' redshifts will be found to decrease with angular distance from the galaxy.
Recent history is filled with instances of major advances stalled by decades through systematic bias. (Name three? OK, just in recent biology, McClintock's "jumping genes", now a cornerstone of genetics; Nerve cell reproduction in the human brain; Weak electromagnetic fields affecting genetic expression.) It is routine that a new theory must vault hurdles far higher to be considered, or even to be examined, than the currently orthodox notion ever has.
Science, in its modern form, unfortunately reinforces every worst inclination of a scientist. Not only the grants needed to fund investigation, but the right to publish results of it, are personally controlled by those with the most to lose when their own work is supplanted. Scientists in many fields have become accustomed to entertain only minor variations of a single theory, making it impossible even to gather and present contrary evidence. Some fields are dominated by corporate interests that would be damaged by change, or revelation. Finally, political ideologists have found it appallingly easy to close off lines of inquiry uncomfortable for their supporters.
Public distrust of scientific orthodoxy is well-earned. To (re-?) gain trust, and trustworthiness, will require fundamental changes in how the daily business of science is administered. Unfortunately, the trend is toward greater orthodoxy, not less.
"An abundance of water ... is unlikely": Inconclusive. Lack of water would have meant something.
"Electrical interactions ... should be measurable ... The most obvious would be a flash (lightning-like discharge) shortly before impact": Check. there was a flash, producing x-rays, well before impact. No conventional explanation.
A "sheath", or plasma double-layer: Inconclusive. How would we know?
"Electrical stress may short out the electronics before impact": It did stop transmitting before impact, but that might have been a debris collision. Inconclusive.
"More energy will be released than expected": Check. The logs at planetary.org have everybody marveling at how big the pop was.
Copious X-rays ... sudden onset: Check. No conventional explanation.
"If the energy distributed over several flashes...": One big flash. Inconclusive.
"arcs generated will be hotter than can be explained by mechanical impact: Check; x-rays.
"impact may initiate a new jet on the nucleus": Check.
"impact ... will not reveal 'primordial dirty ice,' but the same composition as the surface": Apparently not.
"impact ... will be into rock, not loosely consolidated ice and dust. The impact crater will be smaller than expected": Apparently not.
So, how did they do?
From the X-rays and unexpected flashes there do seem to have been interesting electrical events, but, presuming the data are being interpreted correctly, they seem to be wrong about the origin of the comet.
It's strange that reports immediately after impact didn't indicate abundant volatiles. I wonder what changed.
It would take one Apple engineer about the same time to add Ogg support (for everybody) as for me to re-encode my music in some proprietary, patent-encumbered, and probably inferior format.
Actually, the product would be substantially better if, instead of built-in flash memory, it just had a compactflash slot. Not this year, it seems. Still waiting for the sweet spot.
It would cost Apple nothing at all to build it in, and it would add at least twice as much value as the gross sales of that gadget. It might be that providing Ogg support, besides, would add relatively little measurable market value to the product. However, it is certain that it would cost them nothing -- either in direct per-unit cost, or even in such intangibles as interface complexity.
How many people are working on alternative firmware, or downloading it? Thousands, certainly. Most of them wouldn't bother if the features they wanted were already there. For each person who downloads such an image, many more might, but for fear, or difficulty, or just not knowing it's there. For each one of them -- who bought despite missing one or more features -- how many didn't buy because of them? Certainly many more.
When a company prefers excuses for leaving out features over quietly adding them, that tells us a lot about the company's attitude toward potential customers. When its existing customers deride, in crudely insulting terms, anybody who asks about missing features or missing information, that tells us volumes more about them. Are they people I would want to seem to be associated with? It's nice enough hardware, but a distinctly toxic milieu.
It is a fact that there's no way to tell from the Apple web site what's up with the dock connector. It is a fact that there's no direct way to tell from their web site whether the dock is needed to connect, or even how heavy the dock is. (There's no reason to think that a Google search would tell anything about a completely new product; the nano dock isn't the same as the mini's.) The most direct interpretation of what little it does say is misleading. I suppose it could be true that new iPods are only meant for people who already bought the old one, or who are inclined to sit down, shut up, and take what they get and like it, but I didn't find either spelled out on the site.
It's nice hardware at a not unreasonable price, and we have proof that it can be programmed to do useful things. If I had no kids, I might put in the effort to help out, myself. As it is, I have to wait and see.
(My experience is that anything not distinctly fawning toward Apple gets moderated to oblivion. I wonder if we will be permitted to discuss this topic.)
Let me see if I understand. Only people who already have an iPod should expect to understand the web page offering to sell them? If I already had one, why in the world would I want to buy another? (Not to transfer files between, evidently.)
"Shut up troll ... you're too stubborn and arrogant to support a popular standard ... I don't bitch at Sony ... People just like to bitch ... "
The reply started out so helpfully ... I guess it's not just Apple. I wonder which got it from whom. I always thought if you paid for something, you had a right to look into what you were getting. I thought it reasonable to check if useful features missing from previous models, and that wouldn't cost anything to add, might show up in a later model.
Maybe I'm just not worthy to host the sublimity that is iPod during its short visit to Earth. Or maybe I'll make a donation to BJ at http://ipodlinux.org/, wait a bit, and see what happens.
That's not what it says. It says it only has a "dock connector", and the dock is included.
I'm guessing the iPod you bought last month isn't a nano.
And, if you can transfer files directly between iPods without booting Linux on one of 'em, you must be the only one. The capability wouldn't cost them anything to provide, so it's only stubbornness keeping the feature out.
Likewise, Ogg support doesn't cost anything to provide. That's what all my music is encoded in, at 240 kbps. I should re-encode it all just so I can listen to it on an iPod, and I have to do it only because they were too stubborn and arrogant to support Ogg?
I'll wait and see about a Linux port.
I won't spend $250 just to move music; I want to put be able to put *anything* on it. If that means carrying the dock around, I want to know how big and heavy it is; but they keep that a secret. Furthermore, there's no technical reason this thing couldn't be an IEEE1394 host, and let me transfer files to another another one, or to some other IEEE1394 device.
And, of course, no Ogg (again!).
Each of these is a deal-breaker -- at least until Linux is ported...
All cosmologists border on crankhood; it goes with the territory. What's important is whether they cross the line. (Hint: 99% "dark matter" is way, way beyond.) However, Lerner has his own page disputing the many misrepresentations on that page. We don't know if Wright's or Lerner's is a better model, but it is clear, at least, that Wright is pretending to answer claims Lerner didn't make.
There's serious work going on detecting and characterizing solar-, nebular-, galactic-, and galactic-supercluster- scale current flow that the Electric Universe people are happy to co-opt. Regardless of how supernovas happen, what you end up with really are huge clouds of electrically-conductive plasma at widely-varying densities, compositions, and degrees of ionization, that spontaneously organize. Forms routinely observed in laboratory plasma experiments, scaled up many orders of magnitude, are unmistakable in such nebulae, just as is also seen on a smaller scale in our own solar system (e.g. the aurora), and on an immensely larger scale in the galactic core.
Enormous transfers of funds are effected from the public till to Sandia, for very small investment of lobbying effort. Your employer must be realizing similar immediate gains, even neglecting the advantages realized for landing beam-weapon system development contracts.
"electrically-accelerated boron-[hydrogen] reactor ..." "that is a nonequilibrium system which was proven impossible for generating excess energy."
The young rarely understand that graduate theses are to be read for the analyses, never for the conclusions. This is not because the youth of the graduate lends overconfidence (although it may), but mainly because the thesis conclusion must satisfy the prejudices of the examiners -- in this case, most likely hot-neutron careerists.
Even skimming the document reveals, for example, that 10^8 W is taken (evidently by analogy with a hot-neutron reactor) as a lower limit to economic viability, despite that for such a system a 10^6 W yield, or even 10^4 W, might well be preferable, if it could be mass-produced. (Cue "Mr. Fusion" remarks. The 1.21x10^9 W required might be accumulated capacitively; 10^5 W is plenty for a normal car.) A factor of three orders of magnitude can change fundamentally the engineering involved in implementing an idea.
The thesis author's true colors are revealed in Appendix E. Despite the disclaimers, he is evidently eager to develop the measures he proposes.
Ha Ha Ha.
Fusion "experiments" have been "beginning" for over three decades, to the tune of over $60 billion dollars when last I checked. It will take an enormous amount of power to break even on that -- and every year the bar gets higher. *We're* nowhere near break-even, but Sandia's been doing all right!
If they ever do pass "break-even", all we'll have is hot neutrons, just like the old fission reactors. The plant will cost another $50 billion, and will only last 20 years until it's a pile of radioactive slag, and we need another one.
Meanwhile, not a penny for research on an electrically- accelerated boron-deuterium reactor. It wouldn't cost any $50 billion. Its energy would be extracted electromagnetically, it wouldn't wear out, each small city could could have one, and it wouldn't create a thousand tons of radioactive slag. Of course anything that might actually *work* would be bad for everybody (currently) involved.
Anyway, if it doesn't produce enough neutrons to keep the tritium bombs charged up, what the hell good is it?
Evidently the only thing that could carry that much momentum must be neutronium, because it has to be imagined physically tiny. That model fails, though, to account for recently discovered pulsars that would have to spin fast enough to break up even a neutron star. Whatever model accounts for them might as well be used for the slower variety, obviating neutron stars.
Do please read more carefully.
It's one thing for Eddington's South American companion expedition to have successfully recorded the sun's gravitation bending light (though his own plates from Africa were spoiled). It's entirely another to invoke galactic lensing every time one needs to discount inconvenient evidence (anomalous quasar red-shift, usually) wherever it comes to light.
I know Dark Matter is a bit difficult to swallow - something out there exists but it's difficult to observe directly
-- indeed, impossible, by definition --
- but "magnetic reconnection" is not entirely difficult to understand
Ask your neighborhood park ranger to explain topo-map contour-line reconnection. He won't confuse the contour lines with the geological features they trace. He won't imagine enormous energy releases caused by them moving about, even though it happens when a volcano pops. Energy is released explosively when the current feeding a magnetic field is interrupted.
Space is *IN NO WAY* assumed to be superconducting - rather areas with plasma are considered to be so ...
You know of somewhere in space without plasma? Low-density plasmas as found in (real, outer) space have finite -- non-zero, non-infinite -- conductivity, inconveniently so for calculation, but there it is.
Plasmas have a tendency to "drag" the H-field with them, as they are conductors. ... This type of behavior has been shown quite clearly to exist.
You'll have to find your crackpots elsewhere. It's one thing for magnetic fields to display a sort of inertia, and another to portray them as incapable of any sort of evolution or interaction -- as you must admit is common in astrophysics, even if not in your own calculations.
Mostly ballistic flows of charged particles at extremely high velocities are very correctly known as relativistic jets - phenome[no]logically they have very little likeness to electrical flows through conventional conducting mediums, as we would be familiar with on earth. ... And, while it's true that these flows would create their own magnetic field ... their motion will be dominated by ballistic tendencies and electrical forces. I do not see what is so hard to understand about this ...
You seem to imagine these jets blasting in an ideal vacuum, rather than in the (not-infinitely-conductive) plasma we both know surrounds them. Where is the current flow that maintains electrical neutrality in the system? For a relativistic jet of thousands (or billions) of tons per second of electrons, there must be a corresponding flow of positive ions, thousands of times slower, but of hundreds of times greater mass.
Where is it? Why do astrophysicists insist it can have no effect on the processes observed? That gives them two problems: they have to invent dark matter and supermassive black holes to account for events gravitationally, and they also have to explain why all those ions moving about can't have any de
Such currents in near-vacuum plasma, called Birkeland currents, have been directly detected flowing between stars. Finding and analyzing these (real, measurable) flows has to be more interesting than mapping interstellar "gas" density or chasing "dark matter" unicorns. Actually to measure a current flowing between the Milky Way and a Magellanic cloud would make a career -- and ultimately make "dark matter" and "supermassive black holes" seem about as relevant to future work as phlogiston gas and cranial phrenology are today.
There are plenty of papers published by serious plasma researchers. Astrophysicists don't read them. That's what makes it sad, but it's also what makes the press releases positively comical.
Birkeland currents have been studied for more than a century, ever since they were elucidated as the process behind the Aurora Borealis. Next time you meet an astrophysicist, ask why Birkeland currents can operate between the sun and Earth, but not between any distant star and anything else. (The answer will be sad, but funny.)