Redhat (1999) > Laser5 (Japanese) > Kondara (Japanese) > Mandrake > Ubuntu > Lubuntu (couldn't even boot on two machines after upgrade made Unity the default, and it's an abomination anyway)
window manager: FVWM file browser: TkDesk both required major config-file changes to pare them down and tweak them, but they now are indispensible to me
Uninstall overlay-scrollbar and liboverlay-scrollbar. I hate them to. I can never get them to appear and stay long enough to scroll.
I found Unity frustrating, baffling and unusable. I've installed Lubuntu, which is fast, light and easy. It has everything that makes Ubuntu easy, and dumps everything that makes it slow and annoying.
Smithsonian magazine had a good article on Eden and the Persian Gulf in 1987, too long ago to be in their online archives. Most references to it are on Christian sites. The article was based on archaeology by Juris Zarins. Genesis describes three rivers flowing into Eden. Zarins says two were the Tigris and Euphrates. The third is a fossil river in Saudi Arabia. The idea is simple and plausible.
The Wikipedia page on Zarins: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juris_Zarins/
A good description of the research: http://ldolphin.org/eden/
I thought of this often during the Persian Gulf War -- the war in the Garden of Eden.
The microscope photo in the article shows four man-made particles of aluminum (blue arrows) plus one particle of olivine (left red arrow) and one of pyroxene (right red arrow).
I am pleased to see SoftMaker get some recognition. I've used OpenOffice.org since the early days of StarOffice, and have tried every GUI editor available for Linux. SoftMaker's suite is worth the money. I've bought it twice (the original TextMaker, and the 2006 suite), and will buy it again. TextMaker (the only member of the suite I use) is easy to use, has everything I need and more, and works well with Word formats. I only use OpenOffice when I have to make a document that uses Japanese and also requires formatting.
Kennedy is right about OpenOffice's weakness. Not long ago I tried to make a document containing Machu Picchu pictures gleaned off the Web, with identifying captions. Just two to four photos on a page, with captions, so I could print out the set I had collected. OpenOffice failed utterly. Making captions was difficult, and it kept crashing. After each crash, photos would be distorted or missing. It couldn't properly reopen a document it had made, even one made fresh without a crash. TextMaker 2006 had no such problems. I was amazed that OpenOffice failed on such a simple task.
TextMaker does have a number of weaknesses, and I have given SoftMaker feedback on my main gripes and requests. The biggest have to do with encodings and non-European languages. It allegedly can deal with Asian characters, but in practice does not. I have not bought the most recent versions because the older ones (I use two) work just fine for me, and because I am waiting until they iron out their encoding problems.
It also has a proprietary file format, which I use only while working on a document; I keep documents for the long term as plain text, or in RTF or PDF format.
This anecdote, if true, must be relatively recent -- this clearly is not a guy whose life, and that of his family, depended on his ability to hunt from his kayak in any weather. Traditionally, Arctic peoples certainly could roll, with differences among cultures. Hunters who used kayaks could roll even if they lost their paddle or dislocated a shoulder. Even so, kayak deaths were common. From what I understand, children learning to kayak first learned how to brace ("leaning" on the water with a moving paddle) to keep from capsizing in the first place, then learned how to roll up, and only later learned how to paddle forward. Their kayaks were narrow and sat low in the water, both of which made rolling easier and helped keep the kayak from getting blown around. They also wore one-piece sealskin jackets whose bottoms were tied around the hatch, keeping the paddler warmer and drier than modern equipment does. For a list (with pictures) of capsize maneuvers performed at the Greenland championships, including rolling without a paddle while holding an 8-kg stone, see http://216.92.139.192/QK/rolls/rolls.html.
For a considered, detailed and (pardon me) chilling examination of the evidence for global warming, you couldn't do better than Elizabeth Kolbert's series in The New Yorker. I believe it is no longer on The New Yorker's Web site, but you can find it at http://www.wesjones.com/climate1.htm. It's in three parts (all linked on that page), and worth more than one read. She has written a book based on the series.
Of the stories I have read on the Bush administration's war against science, this New Yorker article http://www.wesjones.com/specter2.htm is the best, all the more devastating because it is scrupulously fair.
To me, the biggest question is how many planets will turn out to have water. I think that as our telescope technology improves, we will find that most single stars (roughly half the total) have planets, and that virtually all of those with liquid water have life.
Where there is life there will, eventually, be intelligent creatures. Intelligence isn't a fluke; it's a result of evolution, which tends to produce ever more complex forms (in ever smaller numbers). Given the number of stars out there, it is unlikely that we are the only intelligent creatures in our galaxy.
So why don't we have any evidence of them? I suspect there are three reasons:
1. Planets with a mix of water and land may be rare. Most with life may be water worlds, where intelligent life, even if it developed, wouldn't create the kinds of technology -- fire, electricity, metalworking -- that would get them off the planet or create signals we can detect.
2. We are overly optimistic to think advanced civilizations will produce signals we can detect. Even with us, broadcasting is a short-lived phenomenon that soon will vanish. Any properly advanced civilization will save energy by using wires and compressed signals. Any signals we do detect will be so compressed they will seem like random noise, much like the sounds a modem makes when connecting.
3. There aren't any aliens here because travel between the stars is impossible, or nearly so -- it requires huge amounts of energy and takes lifetimes to get anywhere, and shielding a ship from collisions will be impossible. Somewhere between you and your goal, you are likely to get smacked and wiped out. There are no magic drives, no subspace. The first civilization in a galaxy that could travel between stars and also wanted to colonize them would be able to spread across the galaxy in no more than a few million years by setting up colonies that in their turn sent out more. If there were any spacefaring civilizations, they would have landed here long ago, and we would never have had a chance to evolve.
Given the number of stars, I think there must be other civilizations, most of them much more advanced than ours. They aren't here because they can't get here.
We're only just starting to detect other planets, and so far of course we can only find the heavy worlds and those near their star. In a few years we'll have fairly firm numbers on how many stars have planetary systems, what those systems are like, and perhaps what proportion of them have planets with liquid water. Knowing that, we can start making reasonable calculations of how many may have intelligent life. But don't expect contact. We aren't alone, but we might as well be.
I saw this in a Tokyo theater a couple of months ago. Even though I could only follow the story in the most general way, I loved it. Maybe having most of the dialog go over my head helped in a way, since I just lost myself in the animation, which is beautiful and hypnotic. I wanted to see it a second time (at least) but it didn't stay in the theater long enough. With luck it'll return dubbed in English, which is how I saw "Ghost in the Shell" (and funny, I don't think I followed much of that story either, and didn't much care).
One of the most basic utterly sensible things WP did was have a code take effect from that point on. If you canceled or changed it, WP put in an end code, much like HTML. None of this BS about defining first, though you could do that too. Flexible, simple. It also kept codes from piling up -- in Word every paragraph starts from zero and has to spell out all the formatting all over again.
Now all word processors follow the Word approach as if it were inevitable, which is a shame and a waste of time nearly every time I set some formatting.
And the macros were addictive. Anything I had to do more than a couple of times I would just make a temporary macro for.
These days I use TextMaker for Linux as the lightest, fastest and easiest program I can find that also allows font selection and formatting, plus everthing else I want and not much I'll never need. Wish it didn't have a proprietary file format, but I convert everything to text after printing anyway.
Of course "falling stars" is not technically accurate. I used the term to illustrate a point. I don't think anyone over the age of six is in danger of being misled into thinking they are actual stars falling from the sky, and I doubt any of them read Slashdot anyway. If you want the term and its cousins excised from the language, go complain to NASA ("A meteor, sometimes called a 'shooting star'": http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/academy/space/solarsy stem/meteors/meteors.html ). If they can, I can.
My point is the definitions of the terms come from their history. People saw streaks of light, and called them meteors. They found strange pitted rocks, and called them all sorts of things. Eventually they figured out the two were connected, and scientists called the stones meteorites. That's why your definitions are wrong, even if they are useful in their own way. Meteors flash through the air. Meteorites sit on the ground.
The International Astronomical Union, the world governing body for astronomy, sets the following definitions (http://www.amsmeteors.org/define.html#meteor):
A. meteor:
in particular, the light phenomenon which results from the entry into the Earth's atmosphere of a solid particle from space; more generally, as a noun or an adjective, any physical object or phenomenon associated with such an event. B. meteoroid:
a solid object moving in interplanetary space, of a size considerably smaller than an asteroid and considerably larger than an atom or molecule. C. meteorite:
any object defined under B which has reached the surface of the Earth without being completely vaporized.
I basically agree with you; the meteor became a meteorite when it hit the roof, if it stopped there. If it kept going, it was still a meteor. I disagree with the previous poster, blue trane, who said meteorite hit the roof, and I'm afraid I was careless when clicking and should have responded to that post. The mistake is common and understandable, but it bugged me to see someone criticize someone else (The Monster) who was right to complain the media had gotten it wrong, as usual.
The definition you cite proves mainly that people can't see the sand-size specks that produce most meteors when those specks are traveling at 20 miles per second a hundred miles away. We think of the meteor as the light because that's all we can see. We tend to think of meteorites as the rock because that's what we see of the few that survive the trip. But properly, it's a meteoroid as it heads through the void toward us, a meteor as it plunges through the atmosphere, and a meteorite after it comes to rest.
My Oxford dictionary defines a meteorite as a meteor that has fallen to earth; also, loosely, a meteor or meteoroid. Sky & Telescope magazine agrees. Meteors are falling stars, emphasis on the falling.
Historically, people knew of meteors and knew of meteorites, and the stones were named after the phenomenon once the two were finally connected. So meteors are both the light and the rocks that we eventually realized produced the light upon being vaporized in the atmosphere.
But language is malleable. Now the words distinguish between falling and fallen, not between the light and its source, which are both meteors. If enough people come to see meteors as the streaks of light and meteorites as the stones that produce them, whether falling or not, then that will become right, and will be a useful distinction to make in modern times when everyone knows what makes a falling star.
Your mention of aluminum versus aluminium is interesting, by the way. The English chemist who discovered the stuff, Humphry Davy, called it aluminum, but his compatriots later thought metals should end in -ium and altered it (though they have yet to start saying platinium). So in this case American usage is more English and true to tradition than the English usage is.
Meteors are moving. Meteorites aren't. Do you think the people who originated the term distinguished between the flaming stone half a foot above a roof and half a foot below, when it has just punched through? No. They distinguished between things streaking through the air -- meteors -- and certain rare odd stones, which came to be called meteorites once the connection was realized.
Meteors have been known throughout history. The origin of the stones was a mystery -- they were called thunder stones and such. Connecting the two came late and was controversial. The first proof was given at the end of the 1700s, but even a century later few scientists believed the stones came from the heavens or had been meteors. The terms meteorite and meteoroid date from the 1830s and 1860s.
Meteorites don't hit things. Meteors do. Confusion of the terms is common and loose usage is acceptable, especially since they're not everyday words. Not acceptable is criticizing someone who troubles to use them correctly. The thing can hit any number of roofs and clang around all it wants, but until it comes to rest, it's still a meteor.
Or think of it another way. A raindrop can glance off any number of leaves on its way down, but not until it hits the ground does it become a puddle.
If you think Japanese don't like being different, you don't know Japan. The "Japan is unique" attitude is one of the prime tropes for Japan-bashers, so I'm surprised anyone thinks Japanese really want to be anyone else. The Japanese genius is to digest anything and everything from abroad and make it their own, usually improving it.
For Celestia I can't say, but you can get ephemerides for most astronomy programs from http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/iau/MPEph/MPEph.html . Just type Toutatis into the big box near the top, pick your program down below, and click on Get ephemerides.
A collision that would slow Sedna's rotation down isn't unlikely in the least, and I was surprised that this isn't one of the top possibilities under consideration. Of the nine planets, Earth once got smacked by something the size of Mars, splatting off debris that formed the moon, and Venus got hit by something that knocked it right over on its side (its axis is tilted 177 degrees) and actually reversed the rotation it must have had before, so that it now has a retrograde rotational period of a creaking 243 days -- 10 days longer than its orbit around the sun, giving it longer days than years. By comparison, Sedna is whipping around. Out past Pluto there's plenty of big stuff still floating around, and as in the asteroid belts collisions must be common. Maybe Sedna has a moon, and maybe it had one but lost it, and maybe the periodic brightening isn't actually an effect of its rotation. But a rotation-slowing collision was easily possible.
Galeon seems to have the features you want, and plenty of others that aren't in Mozilla or Firebird. I do sometimes lose the focus, but it might have to do with my window manager instead of the browser itself.
OK, I soften the "couldn't possibly" in talking about Earth bacteria's chances of competing on an alien planet. But unless the alien world had very similar chemistry, they would stand a very poor chance, not even considering their low numbers, poor viability after eons of being battered in space, and inability to swap genes. The possibility does exist, but they would only stand a decent chance on a world that is just getting going. It may have happened here. If so, viable life should still be arriving. But if it is, it's not surviving long enough or in enough numbers to have been noticed yet.
The absence of alien life here is pretty good evidence against life being able to survive naked travel in space, then colonize a new world. And the simplicity of the first bacterial fossils, plus the clear relatedness of all life, is good evidence it didn't happen in the past.
Another thought is that alien organisms would stand the best chance on a pristine new world, but they would have to be anaerobic, which on a world mature enough to produce spacecraft will be few, and living in odd buried corners from which they couldn't hitch a ride. The things most likely to hitch a ride are least likely to survive once they reach a new home.
Still, comet and asteroid impacts have sent many a chunk of Earth flying into the void, with attendant bacteria able to survive at least the trip into space, so the cosmos ought to have a thin dusting of hibernating microbes.
NASA has sent up aerogel to collect comet dust. We could use the same stuff to troll for alien microbes as well, and find out for sure. It might take a fair bit of the stuff and years of scooping, but it could be done from Earth orbit, and stand at least as good a chance of success as the SETI project.
The chance of it reaching another planet is roughly 0.00000000000000083956 in a septillion. The chance of it surviving atmospheric entry, and of its microbes surviving millions of years of space radiation as well, is vastly smaller.
If it did make it, though, it could seed life on a very young, wet world that was primed for life but hadn't produced any of its own. This would be a very short window of opportunity -- Earth seems to have had life just as soon as it could.
If it landed on a planet with life, it couldn't cause a plague because alien life, while probably broadly similar in its chemistry, would still be too different for them to interact. Infection requires familiarity, and the use of the same genetic language. The chance of infection is the same as the chance that intelligent alien beings speak an intelligible form of English. The microbes also couldn't spread on such a planet because it couldn't possibly compete against indigenous life, which would be far better adapted to conditions there.
So either way, no effect.
This is also why we needn't worry about our getting infected by extraterrestrial life (and why extraterrestials couldn't breed with humans). Interstellar grains have been found in our atmosphere, and have been raining from the sky for the whole history of our planet. If any carried microbes that survived the trip, they didn't survive the competition, otherwise we would have a kingdom of life with completely different biology from all the others. Conceivably they seeded life here, but I doubt we needed the help -- where there is water, life will form, and right quick.
The new paper really claims only that current temperatures aren't unprecedented -- that they fall within the range of normal variation, and the 20th century is no longer the highest.
But even their corrected data show the same sudden, sustained recent rise. Furthermore, their data stop decades before the century ends. See http://www.giss.nasa.gov/data/update/gistemp/graph s/ for fuller recent data. Recent data run straight out the top of M&M's charts. Their point is invalid.
It comes down to this:
1. Recent global warming is a fact -- measurable, concrete and undeniable. All the debate is over its causes and consequences.
2. The first question is whether it is part of random variation.
3. If it's not random, what's the cause?.
4. Having found the (main) cause, will it continue?
5. If it does, is that necessarily bad?
6. If it is, what should we do?
Many people work the logic backwards: changing our ways is unthinkable, therefore we're not having any effect, so the warming must be random.
This is a wishful denial of physics. The recent warming begins around the same time that internal combustion engines started converting vast quantities of petroleum into free carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. They reflect back infrared radiation that would have escaped into space. The effect may be ameliorated by secondary effects, such as increased cloud cover and plant growth, but the steadily increasing temperatures and the melting of millennia-old ice across the globe show plainly that they aren't enough.
Does it matter? Hippos and elephants once roamed England. Climate has varied, and will vary. Better to have the world grow warmer than have the ice sheets return to bury whole nations.
But any change, warmer or colder, will cause huge disruptions. Farmlands will turn to desert. Floods and fires will wipe out communities. Rising seas will swallow low-lying nations, coastal cities and entire regions. Famine and war will follow.
The sensible course is to reduce emissions as much as practical, and encourage use of and research into energy sources other than fossil fuels, making the transition as smoothly and painlessly as possible. Conservatives worthy of the name would understand this best of all.
Slashdot Mirror
Redhat (1999) > Laser5 (Japanese) > Kondara (Japanese) > Mandrake > Ubuntu > Lubuntu
(couldn't even boot on two machines after upgrade made Unity the default, and it's an abomination anyway)
window manager: FVWM
file browser: TkDesk
both required major config-file changes to pare them down and tweak them, but they now are indispensible to me
Uninstall overlay-scrollbar and liboverlay-scrollbar. I hate them to. I can never get them to appear and stay long enough to scroll.
I found Unity frustrating, baffling and unusable. I've installed Lubuntu, which is fast, light and easy. It has everything that makes Ubuntu easy, and dumps everything that makes it slow and annoying.
Make that the Tigris and the Karun.
Smithsonian magazine had a good article on Eden and the Persian Gulf in 1987, too long ago to be in their online archives. Most references to it are on Christian sites. The article was based on archaeology by Juris Zarins. Genesis describes three rivers flowing into Eden. Zarins says two were the Tigris and Euphrates. The third is a fossil river in Saudi Arabia. The idea is simple and plausible. The Wikipedia page on Zarins: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juris_Zarins/ A good description of the research: http://ldolphin.org/eden/ I thought of this often during the Persian Gulf War -- the war in the Garden of Eden.
The microscope photo in the article shows four man-made particles of aluminum (blue arrows) plus one particle of olivine (left red arrow) and one of pyroxene (right red arrow).
Sky & Telescope magazine has a thorough story on this in its November issue. A press release with a link to a PDF of the article is at http://www.skyandtelescope.com/about/pressreleases/64679127.html#
I am pleased to see SoftMaker get some recognition. I've used OpenOffice.org since the early days of StarOffice, and have tried every GUI editor available for Linux. SoftMaker's suite is worth the money. I've bought it twice (the original TextMaker, and the 2006 suite), and will buy it again. TextMaker (the only member of the suite I use) is easy to use, has everything I need and more, and works well with Word formats. I only use OpenOffice when I have to make a document that uses Japanese and also requires formatting. Kennedy is right about OpenOffice's weakness. Not long ago I tried to make a document containing Machu Picchu pictures gleaned off the Web, with identifying captions. Just two to four photos on a page, with captions, so I could print out the set I had collected. OpenOffice failed utterly. Making captions was difficult, and it kept crashing. After each crash, photos would be distorted or missing. It couldn't properly reopen a document it had made, even one made fresh without a crash. TextMaker 2006 had no such problems. I was amazed that OpenOffice failed on such a simple task. TextMaker does have a number of weaknesses, and I have given SoftMaker feedback on my main gripes and requests. The biggest have to do with encodings and non-European languages. It allegedly can deal with Asian characters, but in practice does not. I have not bought the most recent versions because the older ones (I use two) work just fine for me, and because I am waiting until they iron out their encoding problems. It also has a proprietary file format, which I use only while working on a document; I keep documents for the long term as plain text, or in RTF or PDF format.
This anecdote, if true, must be relatively recent -- this clearly is not a guy whose life, and that of his family, depended on his ability to hunt from his kayak in any weather. Traditionally, Arctic peoples certainly could roll, with differences among cultures. Hunters who used kayaks could roll even if they lost their paddle or dislocated a shoulder. Even so, kayak deaths were common. From what I understand, children learning to kayak first learned how to brace ("leaning" on the water with a moving paddle) to keep from capsizing in the first place, then learned how to roll up, and only later learned how to paddle forward. Their kayaks were narrow and sat low in the water, both of which made rolling easier and helped keep the kayak from getting blown around. They also wore one-piece sealskin jackets whose bottoms were tied around the hatch, keeping the paddler warmer and drier than modern equipment does. For a list (with pictures) of capsize maneuvers performed at the Greenland championships, including rolling without a paddle while holding an 8-kg stone, see http://216.92.139.192/QK/rolls/rolls.html.
For a considered, detailed and (pardon me) chilling examination of the evidence for global warming, you couldn't do better than Elizabeth Kolbert's series in The New Yorker. I believe it is no longer on The New Yorker's Web site, but you can find it at http://www.wesjones.com/climate1.htm. It's in three parts (all linked on that page), and worth more than one read. She has written a book based on the series.
Of the stories I have read on the Bush administration's war against science, this New Yorker article http://www.wesjones.com/specter2.htm is the best, all the more devastating because it is scrupulously fair.
long-term support
To me, the biggest question is how many planets will turn out to have water. I think that as our telescope technology improves, we will find that most single stars (roughly half the total) have planets, and that virtually all of those with liquid water have life.
Where there is life there will, eventually, be intelligent creatures. Intelligence isn't a fluke; it's a result of evolution, which tends to produce ever more complex forms (in ever smaller numbers). Given the number of stars out there, it is unlikely that we are the only intelligent creatures in our galaxy.
So why don't we have any evidence of them? I suspect there are three reasons:
1. Planets with a mix of water and land may be rare. Most with life may be water worlds, where intelligent life, even if it developed, wouldn't create the kinds of technology -- fire, electricity, metalworking -- that would get them off the planet or create signals we can detect.
2. We are overly optimistic to think advanced civilizations will produce signals we can detect. Even with us, broadcasting is a short-lived phenomenon that soon will vanish. Any properly advanced civilization will save energy by using wires and compressed signals. Any signals we do detect will be so compressed they will seem like random noise, much like the sounds a modem makes when connecting.
3. There aren't any aliens here because travel between the stars is impossible, or nearly so -- it requires huge amounts of energy and takes lifetimes to get anywhere, and shielding a ship from collisions will be impossible. Somewhere between you and your goal, you are likely to get smacked and wiped out. There are no magic drives, no subspace. The first civilization in a galaxy that could travel between stars and also wanted to colonize them would be able to spread across the galaxy in no more than a few million years by setting up colonies that in their turn sent out more. If there were any spacefaring civilizations, they would have landed here long ago, and we would never have had a chance to evolve.
Given the number of stars, I think there must be other civilizations, most of them much more advanced than ours. They aren't here because they can't get here.
We're only just starting to detect other planets, and so far of course we can only find the heavy worlds and those near their star. In a few years we'll have fairly firm numbers on how many stars have planetary systems, what those systems are like, and perhaps what proportion of them have planets with liquid water. Knowing that, we can start making reasonable calculations of how many may have intelligent life. But don't expect contact. We aren't alone, but we might as well be.
I saw this in a Tokyo theater a couple of months ago. Even though I could only follow the story in the most general way, I loved it. Maybe having most of the dialog go over my head helped in a way, since I just lost myself in the animation, which is beautiful and hypnotic. I wanted to see it a second time (at least) but it didn't stay in the theater long enough. With luck it'll return dubbed in English, which is how I saw "Ghost in the Shell" (and funny, I don't think I followed much of that story either, and didn't much care).
One of the most basic utterly sensible things WP did was have a code take effect from that point on. If you canceled or changed it, WP put in an end code, much like HTML. None of this BS about defining first, though you could do that too. Flexible, simple. It also kept codes from piling up -- in Word every paragraph starts from zero and has to spell out all the formatting all over again.
Now all word processors follow the Word approach as if it were inevitable, which is a shame and a waste of time nearly every time I set some formatting.
And the macros were addictive. Anything I had to do more than a couple of times I would just make a temporary macro for.
These days I use TextMaker for Linux as the lightest, fastest and easiest program I can find that also allows font selection and formatting, plus everthing else I want and not much I'll never need. Wish it didn't have a proprietary file format, but I convert everything to text after printing anyway.
Of course "falling stars" is not technically accurate. I used the term to illustrate a point. I don't think anyone over the age of six is in danger of being misled into thinking they are actual stars falling from the sky, and I doubt any of them read Slashdot anyway. If you want the term and its cousins excised from the language, go complain to NASA ("A meteor, sometimes called a 'shooting star'": http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/academy/space/solarsy stem/meteors/meteors.html ). If they can, I can.
My point is the definitions of the terms come from their history. People saw streaks of light, and called them meteors. They found strange pitted rocks, and called them all sorts of things. Eventually they figured out the two were connected, and scientists called the stones meteorites. That's why your definitions are wrong, even if they are useful in their own way. Meteors flash through the air. Meteorites sit on the ground.
The International Astronomical Union, the world governing body for astronomy, sets the following definitions (http://www.amsmeteors.org/define.html#meteor):
A. meteor:
in particular, the light phenomenon which results from the entry into the Earth's atmosphere of a solid particle from space; more generally, as a noun or an adjective, any physical object or phenomenon associated with such an event.
B. meteoroid:
a solid object moving in interplanetary space, of a size considerably smaller than an asteroid and considerably larger than an atom or molecule.
C. meteorite:
any object defined under B which has reached the surface of the Earth without being completely vaporized.
I basically agree with you; the meteor became a meteorite when it hit the roof, if it stopped there. If it kept going, it was still a meteor. I disagree with the previous poster, blue trane, who said meteorite hit the roof, and I'm afraid I was careless when clicking and should have responded to that post. The mistake is common and understandable, but it bugged me to see someone criticize someone else (The Monster) who was right to complain the media had gotten it wrong, as usual.
The definition you cite proves mainly that people can't see the sand-size specks that produce most meteors when those specks are traveling at 20 miles per second a hundred miles away. We think of the meteor as the light because that's all we can see. We tend to think of meteorites as the rock because that's what we see of the few that survive the trip. But properly, it's a meteoroid as it heads through the void toward us, a meteor as it plunges through the atmosphere, and a meteorite after it comes to rest.
My Oxford dictionary defines a meteorite as a meteor that has fallen to earth; also, loosely, a meteor or meteoroid. Sky & Telescope magazine agrees. Meteors are falling stars, emphasis on the falling.
Historically, people knew of meteors and knew of meteorites, and the stones were named after the phenomenon once the two were finally connected. So meteors are both the light and the rocks that we eventually realized produced the light upon being vaporized in the atmosphere.
But language is malleable. Now the words distinguish between falling and fallen, not between the light and its source, which are both meteors. If enough people come to see meteors as the streaks of light and meteorites as the stones that produce them, whether falling or not, then that will become right, and will be a useful distinction to make in modern times when everyone knows what makes a falling star.
Your mention of aluminum versus aluminium is interesting, by the way. The English chemist who discovered the stuff, Humphry Davy, called it aluminum, but his compatriots later thought metals should end in -ium and altered it (though they have yet to start saying platinium). So in this case American usage is more English and true to tradition than the English usage is.
Meteors are moving. Meteorites aren't. Do you think the people who originated the term distinguished between the flaming stone half a foot above a roof and half a foot below, when it has just punched through? No. They distinguished between things streaking through the air -- meteors -- and certain rare odd stones, which came to be called meteorites once the connection was realized.
Meteors have been known throughout history. The origin of the stones was a mystery -- they were called thunder stones and such. Connecting the two came late and was controversial. The first proof was given at the end of the 1700s, but even a century later few scientists believed the stones came from the heavens or had been meteors. The terms meteorite and meteoroid date from the 1830s and 1860s.
Meteorites don't hit things. Meteors do. Confusion of the terms is common and loose usage is acceptable, especially since they're not everyday words. Not acceptable is criticizing someone who troubles to use them correctly. The thing can hit any number of roofs and clang around all it wants, but until it comes to rest, it's still a meteor.
Or think of it another way. A raindrop can glance off any number of leaves on its way down, but not until it hits the ground does it become a puddle.
If you think Japanese don't like being different, you don't know Japan. The "Japan is unique" attitude is one of the prime tropes for Japan-bashers, so I'm surprised anyone thinks Japanese really want to be anyone else. The Japanese genius is to digest anything and everything from abroad and make it their own, usually improving it.
For Celestia I can't say, but you can get ephemerides for most astronomy programs from http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/iau/MPEph/MPEph.html . Just type Toutatis into the big box near the top, pick your program down below, and click on Get ephemerides.
A collision that would slow Sedna's rotation down isn't unlikely in the least, and I was surprised that this isn't one of the top possibilities under consideration. Of the nine planets, Earth once got smacked by something the size of Mars, splatting off debris that formed the moon, and Venus got hit by something that knocked it right over on its side (its axis is tilted 177 degrees) and actually reversed the rotation it must have had before, so that it now has a retrograde rotational period of a creaking 243 days -- 10 days longer than its orbit around the sun, giving it longer days than years. By comparison, Sedna is whipping around. Out past Pluto there's plenty of big stuff still floating around, and as in the asteroid belts collisions must be common. Maybe Sedna has a moon, and maybe it had one but lost it, and maybe the periodic brightening isn't actually an effect of its rotation. But a rotation-slowing collision was easily possible.
Galeon seems to have the features you want, and plenty of others that aren't in Mozilla or Firebird. I do sometimes lose the focus, but it might have to do with my window manager instead of the browser itself.
OK, I soften the "couldn't possibly" in talking about Earth bacteria's chances of competing on an alien planet. But unless the alien world had very similar chemistry, they would stand a very poor chance, not even considering their low numbers, poor viability after eons of being battered in space, and inability to swap genes. The possibility does exist, but they would only stand a decent chance on a world that is just getting going. It may have happened here. If so, viable life should still be arriving. But if it is, it's not surviving long enough or in enough numbers to have been noticed yet.
The absence of alien life here is pretty good evidence against life being able to survive naked travel in space, then colonize a new world. And the simplicity of the first bacterial fossils, plus the clear relatedness of all life, is good evidence it didn't happen in the past.
Another thought is that alien organisms would stand the best chance on a pristine new world, but they would have to be anaerobic, which on a world mature enough to produce spacecraft will be few, and living in odd buried corners from which they couldn't hitch a ride. The things most likely to hitch a ride are least likely to survive once they reach a new home.
Still, comet and asteroid impacts have sent many a chunk of Earth flying into the void, with attendant bacteria able to survive at least the trip into space, so the cosmos ought to have a thin dusting of hibernating microbes.
NASA has sent up aerogel to collect comet dust. We could use the same stuff to troll for alien microbes as well, and find out for sure. It might take a fair bit of the stuff and years of scooping, but it could be done from Earth orbit, and stand at least as good a chance of success as the SETI project.
for more, see Discover on tweaking the theory of gravity, and Sky & Telescope on evidence against it.
The chance of it reaching another planet is roughly 0.00000000000000083956 in a septillion. The chance of it surviving atmospheric entry, and of its microbes surviving millions of years of space radiation as well, is vastly smaller.
If it did make it, though, it could seed life on a very young, wet world that was primed for life but hadn't produced any of its own. This would be a very short window of opportunity -- Earth seems to have had life just as soon as it could.
If it landed on a planet with life, it couldn't cause a plague because alien life, while probably broadly similar in its chemistry, would still be too different for them to interact. Infection requires familiarity, and the use of the same genetic language. The chance of infection is the same as the chance that intelligent alien beings speak an intelligible form of English. The microbes also couldn't spread on such a planet because it couldn't possibly compete against indigenous life, which would be far better adapted to conditions there.
So either way, no effect.
This is also why we needn't worry about our getting infected by extraterrestrial life (and why extraterrestials couldn't breed with humans). Interstellar grains have been found in our atmosphere, and have been raining from the sky for the whole history of our planet. If any carried microbes that survived the trip, they didn't survive the competition, otherwise we would have a kingdom of life with completely different biology from all the others. Conceivably they seeded life here, but I doubt we needed the help -- where there is water, life will form, and right quick.
Yay, at last we get to the point.
h s/
The new paper really claims only that current temperatures aren't unprecedented -- that they fall within the range of normal variation, and the 20th century is no longer the highest.
But even their corrected data show the same sudden, sustained recent rise. Furthermore, their data stop decades before the century ends. See http://www.giss.nasa.gov/data/update/gistemp/grap
for fuller recent data. Recent data run straight out the top of M&M's charts. Their point is invalid.
It comes down to this:
1. Recent global warming is a fact -- measurable, concrete and undeniable. All the debate is over its causes and consequences.
2. The first question is whether it is part of random variation.
3. If it's not random, what's the cause?.
4. Having found the (main) cause, will it continue?
5. If it does, is that necessarily bad?
6. If it is, what should we do?
Many people work the logic backwards: changing our ways is unthinkable, therefore we're not having any effect, so the warming must be random.
This is a wishful denial of physics. The recent warming begins around the same time that internal combustion engines started converting vast quantities of petroleum into free carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. They reflect back infrared radiation that would have escaped into space. The effect may be ameliorated by secondary effects, such as increased cloud cover and plant growth, but the steadily increasing temperatures and the melting of millennia-old ice across the globe show plainly that they aren't enough.
Does it matter? Hippos and elephants once roamed England. Climate has varied, and will vary. Better to have the world grow warmer than have the ice sheets return to bury whole nations.
But any change, warmer or colder, will cause huge disruptions. Farmlands will turn to desert. Floods and fires will wipe out communities. Rising seas will swallow low-lying nations, coastal cities and entire regions. Famine and war will follow.
The sensible course is to reduce emissions as much as practical, and encourage use of and research into energy sources other than fossil fuels, making the transition as smoothly and painlessly as possible. Conservatives worthy of the name would understand this best of all.