There is probably a cloud containing nothing but radon (the heaviest elemental gas) somewhere in the universe as well, right? If that exists would it disprove the big bang, or would it simply have been there by chance for billions of years, just like this one could have been?
Hydrogen and helium isotopes (and a little bit of lithium and beryllium) are made in the Big Bang. Everything heavier is made in stars. So these pure clouds can exist only as long as there are no stars nearby to pollute them with heavier elements. Stars are common in the modern universe, which is why it has been so hard to find such clouds.
Radon in particular is made in supernova explosions (and by the decay of radioactives which were made in supernova explosions) and there is no natural mechanism to separate it back out from mixtures of supernova debris. So in a sense, yes, if a massive, primordial, pure radon cloud was out there, it would disprove the Big Bang theory's prediction of nucleosynthesis, which can only make light elements.
The impact on Mercury which created the Caloris basin caused some wacky geology at the antipodal point to the collision. This is called "chaotic" or "weird" terrain. Link.
The edge like that because you see a shallower, thus cooler, portion of the sun's photosphere. As a cooler source of blackbody radiation, it looks darker and more orange. The phenomena is called limb darkening.
The instrument detects high-energy electrons. They found an excess (only 70, but statistically significant) with a particular energy, which if they come from a galactic source (like a pulsar), that source must be within 3000 light years. However, the researchers can't find an appropriate source.
Alternatively, this could be due to annihilating dark matter---the energy spectrum matches some models---but that's not necessarily coming from a particular source.
This paper has no discussion of the ellipticities caused by imperfections in the telescope optics. This is a well known problem for weak gravitational lensing and cosmic shear measurements, which also use measured ellipticities. This problem can be corrected by using the stars (which should be round at the telescope resolution) to figure out and fix the distortions in the image.
I have little direct experience with this, but I suspect that optical distortions could be the cause of the effect he is seeing. The universe may very well have some weird features, but this paper is not a careful analysis.
2. Don't paper receipts and online checking facilitate vote selling or coercion of voters?
No. Whichever of the two sheets of a Punchscan ballot form--top or bottom-the voter keeps as a receipt, it does not reveal the votes: the top sheet does not reveal what letters were visible through the holes in it; and the bottom sheet does not reveal which letter was next to which candidate name on the top sheet. What is displayed online is just a copy of the receipt the voter keeps. Thus, short of illegally making a photograph in the booth, there is no way for voters to convince others of who they voted for.
I checked Hamlet from Project Gutenberg... It is about 200kB, with Hamlet having a fair fraction of the lines. That is, the sheer volume of memorization is probably a similar task. 16 hours is obviously longer than the play's runtime, but digits average more than one syllable per character, while words average less than one.
The real trick would be setting up cues so you don't lose track of where you are.
Also cool is http://pi.nersc.gov/, which allows you to seach digits of pi (converted to letters) for words and such.
Our first major broadcast went out in 1936, and arrived there in 1977.
Their response could come in 2018. Cool.
Re:Moon Base Bush is pie in the sky
on
Back to the Moon
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· Score: 1
While I'll freely admit NASA is merely a vast sinkhole for funds and functioning solely as a reason to have a space station right now, the return to the Moon does not fit that category.
Remember that NASA funds a lot of basic research in Earth and space science. Resetting NASA's priorities in this way represents a shift in funding, away from science and to aerospace industry. To me, this seems short sighted. Most of the recent successes (robotic Mars rovers, Stardust, microwave background anisotropy measurements) come from the science portion of the budget, and not from the manned program, which is more what I'd called the "vast sinkhole for funds."
Although NASA budget is increasing overall, science is getting squeezed out. Quoting a recent New Scientist Space article:
The $16.8 billion budget request, announced in February, includes $5.3 billion for science in 2007. But it calls for $3.1 billion in cuts to science programmes by 2010, compared to projections made in the 2006 budget request.
A shockingly large fraction of this shrinking budget (30%-50%) is already committed to just one project, the James Webb Space Telescope. Smaller projects, the source of much innovation and knowledge, are being considered for cancelation or slated for "indefinite postponement." For this and other reasons, the 2007 budget request was roundly criticized by the National Research Council, mentioned in the above article.
In my opinion, from a cost/benefit/risk point of view, it is foolish to divert money from science projects with modest costs, strong research returns, and low risk (for failure and to life and limb) to expensive projects with perhaps marginal research returns and much higher risk.
Is one manned moon mission (estimate $100 billion) worth 200 mid-sized science missions (at 500 million each)? Even if my numbers are a bit off, my thinking says no.
The Guardian summary is very poor and mostly misses the point of the new work.
The cyclic model has been around for several years, and there is plenty I don't understand about it, but it is distinct from the old big bang-big crunch ideas. The "cycle" is the repeated collision between two sub-universes, called branes. We live in one of these sub-universes. Each collision resets our sub-universe with a new big bang... Our universe is constantly expanding; there is no crunch.
Importantly, the cyclic theory has detectable differences from the standard big bang scenario. For example, primordial gravity waves, detectable through their influence on the polarization of the cosmic microwave background, are present in the standard big bang scenario and absent here. Thus their possible detection by a future microwave experiment could rule out this theory.
The purpose of this new work is to argue that the cosmological constant (the factor which make the expansion of the universe accelerate) is naturally small and positive in the cyclic model. This is as we observe it. The standard big bang theory does not make a prediction for the size of the cosmological constant (it's just a parameter), while in string theories the expected size of the constant is vastly larger.
Steinhardt has many materials (including a cartoon movie of the brane collision) on his homepage.
Now, I don't mean to be a complete jerk by pointing this out. Just 80 percent jerk. The other 20 percent wants people to actually go and read, listen, or watch the news source before they criticize it.
Informed opinion makes the discussion more interesting, and civil.
One argument against evolution that I have is you don't see all these half developed fossils being dug up. For example, you'd expect to see animals with 1 arm, 2 arms, 3 arms, 10 arms, no arms, half an arm, round arms, and so on...
Those who are interested should check out the truly bizarre fauna of the Burgess shale, presented in Stephen Jay Gould's "Wonderful Life," which provide examples of the enormous diversity of animals following the Cambrian explosion. Some pictures of reconstructions are at http://www.washington.edu/burkemuseum/bshale/galle ry.html.
in the U.S., as in virtually every other country in the world, under the copyright law, it is illegal to make a copy of something without the permission of the copyright holder, except for fair use rights etc. so this makes (unauthorized) downloading illegal.
On this point I have always been unclear. If I download something from a server, did I copy it, or did the server copy it? Who violated the copy right?
Also---now playing devil's advocate---if I can't examine a file without downloading it, how can I know whether it is copyrighted?
From this point of view, it seems like the server is the violator of the copy right, not the client. This would not be true in other forms of distribution... BitTorrent for example.
In an SLR camera, you are looking through the lens when you put your eye to the viewfinder. In a simpler camera you are not.
Digital SLR always struck me as peculiar. With a digital camera, you can see what the camera sees on the display.
I almost never look through the viewfinder of my digital camera, so the additional optics to divert the lens-image to the viewfinder would be a waste.
In at least some film SLR cameras (i.e. my old Canon EOS Rebel), the viewfinder optics had to flip up out of the way to allow the film an unimpeded view from the lens. I don't know if digital SLRs also work this way. It seems like a lot of mechanical complication given the pay-off.
I suspect that only professionals and very, very serious amateurs would find looking at the LCD display unsatifying by comparison to the viewfinder.
I want to see hard questions asked. Let the candidates ask each other questions. Have fact-checkers on hand.
I want to see Bush and Kerry squirm a little bit. A president's job is to run a country, yet the forum we set up for them to perform is as safe and predictable as possible.
Sigh... Something unpredictable would be nice. I always feel like I know what the next thing out of their mouths is going to be.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, should have read the summary more closely. It's already in there.
Also includes more advanced ideas, like Bayes' Theorem and Central Limit Theorem, but presented conceptually.
http://www.amazon.com/Cartoon-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Hydrogen and helium isotopes (and a little bit of lithium and beryllium) are made in the Big Bang. Everything heavier is made in stars. So these pure clouds can exist only as long as there are no stars nearby to pollute them with heavier elements. Stars are common in the modern universe, which is why it has been so hard to find such clouds.
Radon in particular is made in supernova explosions (and by the decay of radioactives which were made in supernova explosions) and there is no natural mechanism to separate it back out from mixtures of supernova debris. So in a sense, yes, if a massive, primordial, pure radon cloud was out there, it would disprove the Big Bang theory's prediction of nucleosynthesis, which can only make light elements.
But ASL has different grammar and syntax than spoken English. It's closer to signed French.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Sign_Language versus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Sign_Language
For infrared/sub-mm astronomy see, for example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLAST_(telescope)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLAST!_(movie)
The impact on Mercury which created the Caloris basin caused some wacky geology at the antipodal point to the collision. This is called "chaotic" or "weird" terrain. Link.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limb_darkening
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_body
The summary misinterprets the results.
The instrument detects high-energy electrons. They found an excess (only 70, but statistically significant) with a particular energy, which if they come from a galactic source (like a pulsar), that source must be within 3000 light years. However, the researchers can't find an appropriate source.
Alternatively, this could be due to annihilating dark matter---the energy spectrum matches some models---but that's not necessarily coming from a particular source.
They just bought everything on Amazon.
Wikipedia has a fuller discussion on this point:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_fluorescent_lamp#Mercury_emissions
1.5 million kilometers = 1.6 x 10^-7 light year.
Distance to galactic center = 26,000 light years
Distance to nearest (Andromeda) galaxy = 2.5 million light years
"Faster than radio" probably refers to increased bandwidth, because light-speed is light-speed.
I have little direct experience with this, but I suspect that optical distortions could be the cause of the effect he is seeing. The universe may very well have some weird features, but this paper is not a careful analysis.
2. Don't paper receipts and online checking facilitate vote selling or coercion of voters?
No. Whichever of the two sheets of a Punchscan ballot form--top or bottom-the voter keeps as a receipt, it does not reveal the votes: the top sheet does not reveal what letters were visible through the holes in it; and the bottom sheet does not reveal which letter was next to which candidate name on the top sheet. What is displayed online is just a copy of the receipt the voter keeps. Thus, short of illegally making a photograph in the booth, there is no way for voters to convince others of who they voted for.
http://punchscan.org/faq-general.php#1
The real trick would be setting up cues so you don't lose track of where you are.
Also cool is http://pi.nersc.gov/, which allows you to seach digits of pi (converted to letters) for words and such.
Their response could come in 2018. Cool.
Remember that NASA funds a lot of basic research in Earth and space science. Resetting NASA's priorities in this way represents a shift in funding, away from science and to aerospace industry. To me, this seems short sighted. Most of the recent successes (robotic Mars rovers, Stardust, microwave background anisotropy measurements) come from the science portion of the budget, and not from the manned program, which is more what I'd called the "vast sinkhole for funds."
Although NASA budget is increasing overall, science is getting squeezed out. Quoting a recent New Scientist Space article:
A shockingly large fraction of this shrinking budget (30%-50%) is already committed to just one project, the James Webb Space Telescope. Smaller projects, the source of much innovation and knowledge, are being considered for cancelation or slated for "indefinite postponement." For this and other reasons, the 2007 budget request was roundly criticized by the National Research Council, mentioned in the above article.
In my opinion, from a cost/benefit/risk point of view, it is foolish to divert money from science projects with modest costs, strong research returns, and low risk (for failure and to life and limb) to expensive projects with perhaps marginal research returns and much higher risk.
Is one manned moon mission (estimate $100 billion) worth 200 mid-sized science missions (at 500 million each)? Even if my numbers are a bit off, my thinking says no.
The cyclic model has been around for several years, and there is plenty I don't understand about it, but it is distinct from the old big bang-big crunch ideas. The "cycle" is the repeated collision between two sub-universes, called branes. We live in one of these sub-universes. Each collision resets our sub-universe with a new big bang... Our universe is constantly expanding; there is no crunch.
Importantly, the cyclic theory has detectable differences from the standard big bang scenario. For example, primordial gravity waves, detectable through their influence on the polarization of the cosmic microwave background, are present in the standard big bang scenario and absent here. Thus their possible detection by a future microwave experiment could rule out this theory.
The purpose of this new work is to argue that the cosmological constant (the factor which make the expansion of the universe accelerate) is naturally small and positive in the cyclic model. This is as we observe it. The standard big bang theory does not make a prediction for the size of the cosmological constant (it's just a parameter), while in string theories the expected size of the constant is vastly larger.
Steinhardt has many materials (including a cartoon movie of the brane collision) on his homepage.
So NPR ignores positive news in Iraq? Subtle and devious. Of course, I'm sure you checked your fact with a simple web search.
Oh wait...
Rate of New U.S. Deaths Declining in Iraq
Now, I don't mean to be a complete jerk by pointing this out. Just 80 percent jerk. The other 20 percent wants people to actually go and read, listen, or watch the news source before they criticize it.
Informed opinion makes the discussion more interesting, and civil.
Those who are interested should check out the truly bizarre fauna of the Burgess shale, presented in Stephen Jay Gould's "Wonderful Life," which provide examples of the enormous diversity of animals following the Cambrian explosion. Some pictures of reconstructions are at http://www.washington.edu/burkemuseum/bshale/galle ry.html.
Five eyes and vacuum hose mouth parts... Evolutionary tinkering sounds like reasonable explanation to me.
On this point I have always been unclear. If I download something from a server, did I copy it, or did the server copy it? Who violated the copy right?
Also---now playing devil's advocate---if I can't examine a file without downloading it, how can I know whether it is copyrighted?
From this point of view, it seems like the server is the violator of the copy right, not the client. This would not be true in other forms of distribution... BitTorrent for example.
Hear that, Google? Microsoft just gave you a deadline to get Gmail out of beta.
4. Profit?
Hurling profanities out the window was starting to strain my vocal cords.
Digital SLR always struck me as peculiar. With a digital camera, you can see what the camera sees on the display. I almost never look through the viewfinder of my digital camera, so the additional optics to divert the lens-image to the viewfinder would be a waste.
In at least some film SLR cameras (i.e. my old Canon EOS Rebel), the viewfinder optics had to flip up out of the way to allow the film an unimpeded view from the lens. I don't know if digital SLRs also work this way. It seems like a lot of mechanical complication given the pay-off.
I suspect that only professionals and very, very serious amateurs would find looking at the LCD display unsatifying by comparison to the viewfinder.
(Nobody wants to be the first candidate to say, "Now this isn't what I signed up for.")
Of course, that would probably run afoul of their agreement to moderate the debate: http://www.theolympian.com/home/news/20040923/tops tories/151247.shtml.
I want to see hard questions asked. Let the candidates ask each other questions. Have fact-checkers on hand.
I want to see Bush and Kerry squirm a little bit. A president's job is to run a country, yet the forum we set up for them to perform is as safe and predictable as possible.
Sigh... Something unpredictable would be nice. I always feel like I know what the next thing out of their mouths is going to be.