If you actually read his story, Peng was put $15,000 in debt to the RIAA not for sharing music, but for writing a utility that allowed you to search people's publicly accessible directories for their mp3's. He was a student at Princeton; the assumption was that the reason the RIAA hit him so hard was that he made the script accessible to non-Princeton IPs.
He didn't fight -- couldn't fight -- the RIAA, so even though the case was bogus ($15,000 for writing a search engine? Will the RIAA now sue google because you can find copyrighted mp3s there as well?), he had to drop out of school to pay it back.
I think the numbers are off relative to each other by many orders of magnitude. The real problem is that both KBOs and stars are essentially points. The chance of accidental overlap is vanishingly small. (If you stuck a telescope and watched a field of stars for brightness variations, you would see a lot of other stuff: eclipsing binaries, orbiting planets, etc -- see the OGLE project, e.g. They have been recently looking for eclipsing planets, but there are huge numbers of contaminants from plain old binary systems.
You need some mechanism to "increase" the apparent area of the (in this case KBO.) Unfortunately, KBOs are just small rocks, with not too much interesting going on. (Planets that eclipse their own star are easier to see, because they are fixed in the angle they explore on the sky relative to the star.)
If you're looking for some kind of "eclipse" effect on the background stars, the best way to increase the effective area of your object is to make it heavy enough that it can gravitationally lens something behind it. The lensing effect increases the angular size of the "sweet spot." See the various MACHO searches.
I can't resist adding additional comments on this thread.
1. Read Juise's post above. Civil rights at this point in time is not about Thoreau-ish arguments about showing an ID nobody cares about. It matters, right now. Learn, be informed, join the ACLU.
2. I like Thoreau, and also care about the Thoreau-ish arguments about showing an ID nobody cares about. I think it's an important thing to increase the "time penalty" police suffer for randomly asking people for ID.
3. If you are going to do this sort of thing, expect your life to be more difficult. The police may decide that you are suspicious, and take you in for questioning. There is nothing you can do (I mean, what are you going to do? Throw a punch? Moron.) You may be fined. If you refuse to pay the fine, you may go to jail, or be "fined" by a lawyer who will try to defend you. Do not expect much sympathy from your town.
4. Thus: only do this if you are willing to take the heat. Think carefully, and ahead of time, whether the particular issue you care about is important enough to get you in trouble for. If you decide to exercise the full extent of your rights, your life will not be easier in the short-run. To me, the freedom to walk alone on the beach, or in the city among my fellow citizens, without having to answer to any authority is very important, and it is something I am willing to go through a lot for; but I have thought about it. It helps me stay calm in the cases when I am challenged for doing it.
As someone with a contrarian (read: Yankee) spirit, I often leave my wallet at home when I go out for a walk. And, being a dork, I'm often up late working or thinking, and so I end up walking late at night.
I have never had a problem in the big cities. This is most probably because I am white. The police there have focused their efforts on hispanic and Af-Am people. If you want to hear about civil rights violations, how about the kid who was just shot and killed for walking on the roof of a housing project in NYC?
But when I go down to the beach in small town Long Island, I often run into cops. Either rent-a-cops who will watch me as I walk down a long, empty avenue, or the real police.
Here are your rights (as understood by the court up until now):
1. The police have a recognized right to try to stop and talk to you. (i.e., don't get all like "hey, you have no right to bother me. I ain't doing nuffing wrong.") Argue with it if you like, agitate to change the system, but don't bother to try to change it right there.
2. The police have a (generally) recognized right to ask you where you're going and where you're coming from. This is a bit fuzzier.
3. You do not have to show them identification if you don't want to. This does not apply if you are in your car and driving, and are pulled over: then you must produce Driver's ID. If you are a cyclist, like me, you have to have some kind of ID if you a cycling on the road, but it does not have to be a Driver's license.
Watching this video, this guy is making a lot of mistakes. Look, I don't like dealing with the police, but if your real intent is to be left alone to exercise your freedoms (and not to just cause trouble), you are well advised to:
1. NOT make any sudden movements, jump around, act agitated, or get nervous. Look, I know you want to exercise your rights, and if you're (like me) a white male who's never been in trouble with the law you are probably the most likely to succeed, but calm the hell down. If you can't calm down, you have lost. Bzzt. Sorry, Constitutional Crusader.
2. Do not elaborate. Repeat what you have said. Refuse to show your id. Expect the officer to play mind games.
3. Once you have repeated your refusal not to show your id, ask, very calmly, "am I free to go?" If the officer says, "no," ask "am I under arrest?" Repeat this question until you get a firm answer. If he says "no," then say "as I am not under arrest, I wish to go. Am I free to go?"
4. If questions of searching, "helping out" or otherwise obliging come up, repeat "I do not consent." This is robot time, people, don't get involved in a debate.
It's the way it works. If you really care, give $100 to the ACLU. They work on these things, and they really have been effective in a huge number of national, state and local cases. They don't just cover the big ones.
We're talking about the distortion of science. Not science.
If you look at the report, what you will see is not a discussion of a particular scientific theory or set of theories.
You are correct that science is not a handmill to grind out fact (although science does establish facts in the long run.) I have made similar points on/. about this (and gotten flamed for my patience.)
But the report is discussing how Bush's administration is suppressing scientific debate for ideological reasons. They are selecting against people who hold particular, well established and reasonable views that happen to clash with the White House ideology. They are excluding qualified scientists and preferrentially choosing people who are involved in the very industries they are meant to regulate. They are denying funding to AIDS researchers who use "hot button" words.
20 Nobel Prizewinners may be wrong about science. But they've seen enough of how science should be done to be accurate judges of when it's being distorted.
My point was about theory, not practice. What is new is the idea that certain speech needs to be suppressed in order to preserve liberal society. I don't believe that earlier censors saw themselves as working within the liberal framework.
The idea that liberal society requires a certain amount of censorship (e.g., of child pornography, of pornography in general, of terror manuals) is of pretty recent vintage. I would put it at 1970 or so, with Andrea Dworkin et al.'s anti-pornography campaigns. The anti-bias-language craze hit the US campus in 1980 or so. 451 F (the novel) also hit some of these highlights, not sure of its vintage.
The archetects of the liberal society's user manual -- J.S. Mill in particular -- simply assumed that obviously bad things would be (to update his language) modded down by the 'marketplace of ideas' (his language.)
The Freenet project, from reading the FAQ, seems to be fundamentally flawed: the people that we'd most like to help out (dissidents, oppressed cubicle drones, etc.) must reveal their identity at some point in the process.
On the other hand, here is a device that will enable you to test your own committment to J.S. Mill's original thesis. Here is software that will contribute to the free functioning of the marketplace of ideas (no question there.) Do you want to install? [y/n]
However, oddly enough, the moon - being basically made out of the same stuff Earth is - has all the raw materials to make mirrors.
So the idea isn't to send a telescope from the Earth to the Moon.
The idea is to build it on the Moon in the first place.
The idea of using in situ resources is great. But I wonder if it will really be a short term or medium term solution (on the scale of twenty years, say.) We have certainly been talking about asteroid mining &c, but I wonder if the costs for sending up infrastructure are feasable?
Think about it this way: the mass of the systems used to construct, test and characterise the PSF of a mirror are huge compared to the mass of the mirror itself. You would need (I think) technology on a near magical scale to get that down.
The authors also then go to say "why would we want to keep a state of the art instrument around for a long time?" implying, of course, that state of the art changes so rapidly that keeping something around for a long time is meaningless.
They somewhat fail to see one thing: a gigantic mirror will always be state of the art.
Yes, and no. A gigantic mirror with a particular radius, smoothness and PSF will go out of date. The technology you have will improve continuously so that the best giant mirror you can make now will suck compared to the one you can make later. That will hold down to the level of smoothness given by the wavelength in question (I worked at Arecebo for a bit, and I believe for the radio wavelengths they were using, their mirror was pretty much "as good as it gets." I don't believe we're anywhere even close for optical telescopes.)
I am a fan of all the cool science you are assuming. But let's see NASA get together a working probe that can build a stop sign out of in situ materials so that we can characterize exactly how cost effective your suggestion is. My intuition is: not very, at least in the next fifty years.
Are you sure you're a scientist? Most scientific theories are continually debated and the debates are never finished. There will never be certainty on this issue. That's the nature of scientific theories. Playing the uncertainty card is the tactic of corporate spin-meisters who are content to drag this issue out while they continue to sell our future livelihood away.
Playing the "playing the card" is the tactic of far too many people.
Some science is better understood than others. Tobacco causes cancer: pretty solid. It's a good idea to spend billions of dollars figuring out ways to get people to stop smoking.
Other science is a bit more uncertain. Do Head Start programs really produce lasting educational benefits for underpriviledged children? Not sure. We should keep going with it, but if something better comes along we should not be afraid to put our resources in a different kind of program with different methodology.
The science in this article is exciting, but tentative. Have you considered the vast economic disruption that would be caused by stopping all CO2 emissions instantly? OK, you say, I didn't mean that, I only meant that we should pull back a little. How much is reasonable? How much should we burden the world (most of whom, unlike me and presumably you, don't have a slush fund of resources to absorb increased costs)?
Rational decisions on those matters can only be made when we really enter the debates and look at what is going on. My purpose in my comment was to point out that everyone running to conclusion (A) suggested in this article is ignoring conclusion (B). If conclusion (A) is true, we might want to burden people more with CO2 regulations -- but consider the demand you're making.
The first warning sign was that we were being told to listen to someone who uses the word "technopolitical" in his job description. The second was that he was writing for the National Review Online, a magazine that has decided to throw it's lot in with "lie through the teeth" conservatism.
In the article, the author writes, with all the assurance that this is not just his belief, but rather a fact to be "remembered":
But it is worth remembering that a permanent presence on the moon will provide a far better platform for a space telescope, and it is likely a telescope will be put there.
As the slashdot saying goes, "BZZZZZT!" In fact, astronomers and instrumentation people have considered "moon bases," and concluded that there is absolutely no good reason to go all the way up to the moon (a very expensive trip between gravity wells) instead of putting your telescopes in low Earth orbit. The most enthusiastic moon astronomers want to do radio stuff -- not replicate Hubble's optical work.
Here is where today's science becomes guesswork, however. Less ice could actually be better. Scientists still know very little about how the Arctic Ocean processes carbon, and a competing theory holds that open water could actually pick up more greenhouse gases.
If human activity is turning "much of the Arctic into a polynya (a body of water that doesn't freeze in winter), then the Arctic or polar seas may become much more effective at removing the atmospheric carbon than they currently are," Papakyriakou said.
The poster of this article (and those discussing the potential positive feedback mechanism that kicks in if ice is a greater sink than open water) are really smudging the issue here, and smudging it for political effect without regard either for the necessarily tentative nature of science at the margins (here, the untested margins of modelling an entire planetary ecosystem) or for the consequences of making scientists look like ridiculous Chicken Littles.
I ride a bicycle to work, take the train, and am generally supportive of environmentally friendly living and governance. But, as a scientist, I am severely disappointed when other scientists (let alone journalists or Greenpeace) take an unfinished scientific debate and use it to propose sweeping changes in our lives -- changes that woud plunge a huge number of people into poverty (I live an environmentally sustainable life, but it does cost a lot more and I wouldn't demand that a single mother of two do it as well -- hey, you driving that pickup! shell out $50,000 for an electric car.)
This is turning into a bit of a rant, but if you want to learn what other enivronmentalists -- who are also scientists -- think about the current fights over the greenhouse effect, GMOs, etc, you should read Patrick Moore's recent article (Moore was the cofounder of Greenpeace.)
Bzzzzt! Wrong. Astronomers are no more protective of their own research, and yet the PR still works very well. HINT: it is the public that pushed for science funding. Hubble has done more to encourage public interest in pure science (not the gadgets and gizmos applied stuff) in the last ten years than almost anything else.
Astronomers often release photos ahead of time; there is a one year "time out" after which your data *has* to go public. What about the ISS?
It's hard to judge superiority when the applications are often very specific; my experience with the code that gets passed from researcher to researcher is that it often works extremely well and can be adapted and extended a great deal. See, for example, CMBFAST, the code used to compute predicted anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background. Not only have people have parallelized it or sped it up (trading off for accuracy), but over the years it has been extended to test more and more exotic physics.
But code quality aside, what about applications elsewhere? NASA's codebase presumably does a wide variety of things in addition to running gazillion-ly redundant life support on the space shuttle. Think about all the design and testing it does of hardware, the software it writes for image processing and signal analysis, running the deep space network. How about making models of satellite structural integrity? Surely something useful -- although it might take someone within the field to realize the similarity between a problem they face and one NASA has already solved.
And, of course, scientists love to write their own tools for text editing, data analysis (often these are incredibly powerful and extendable -- naturally more so than, say, commercial software products which remain close-sourced), collaboration software, yadda yadda ad infinitum
It's a bit more complex than that. The dark matter has to be non-baryonic (or, rather, at least a very large fraction of it has to be non-baryonic), or else it will mess up big bang nucleosynthesis constraints.
Thus, actually, it is very mysterious. It's not made of any kind of matter we've ever detected on or near Earth.
Dark matter has gotten more mysterious; a while ago, it was possible that you could build a model with baryonic dark matter (e.g., burned out stars), and solve galactic rotation curves. But as the evidence for dark matter kept piling up on different scales, it became harder and harder to make it out of anything that (e.g.) *could* be vaguely normal: that could participate in nucleosynthesis (or, lots of other things: *could* scatter light, even just a little, *could* self-interact, etc.)
It's an interesting article; I think Shanks would himself say that it would take a lot more work to show that neither dark matter or energy existed -- in particular, a lot of astrophysical work would have to be done to explain why the measurements are lining up the way they are. Shanks is laboring quite hard not (I think) because he is a true believer in a 100% baryon universe, but because he is a bit aghast at the claims others have made for precision cosmology.
He is also quite interested in alternative modes of gravity that invoke higher dimensions and branes. I think a good part of his motivation comes from the fact that focusing on dark matter phenomenology biases one against looking for alternative gravity effects. (I said in a post below that many alternative models behave phenomenologically like dark matter, and I guess I have to qualify that a bit more -- Shanks is referencing a host of models that explain some observations but cannot be reduced to talk about collisionless fluids.)
It is doubtful that the entire theoretical edifice of dark matter and dark energy will collapse all at once (in the way it might more reasonably have been said to have happened for the electromagnetic aether.)
In particular, dark matter, though incredibly mysterious, is probably on firm enough ground that it will withstand a series of challenges. Galactic rotation curves and measurements of cluster temperatures both give very strong evidence for dark matter on vastly different scales; in addition, it is difficult (OK, fine: downright impossible in standard Einsteinian gravity) to get any kind of structure to form *at all* in the universe if one is only allowed to use the visible matter. The precise ratio of dark to visible is definitely up in the air; and, of course, there are competing models that modify gravity -- if these matured enough (they may already have -- I haven't kept up) to make predictions on a wider range of scales, they might work as well.
Indeed, a lot of gravity modifications (extra dimensions, etc.) behave *phenomenologically* as if there was dark matter -- so all the effort we've put into simulating dark matter may not be in vain after all, even if Einsteinian four dimensional spacetime is not the name of the game.
In contrast, indeed, is the exact count of the "baryons" (ordinary matter.) I would be very surprised if we were off by a factor of (lets be ultra-conservative here) five in the baryon number, which is constrained very well by big bang nucleosynthesis, whose predictions remain in the "ordinary" realm of nuclear explosions. Something we know a little about.
The real mystery is "dark energy." There, the evidence is a lot shakier. It rests on a few pillars. There is a theoretical bias that wants the universe to be flat (so that the missing mass-energy is made up for by some dark energy component that doesn't cluster and affect our galactic rotation curves.) There are some really excellent (but difficult) measurements of universe acceleration, a signature of dark energy, from people who observe distant supernovae (these provide "standard candles" that allow you to measure distance given an apparent brightness.)
Finally, there are the CMB measurements, which provide a similar kind of distance measurement, but are open to alternative interpretations (instead of measuring apparent brightness, they measure apparent angular size -- but it is perhaps possible, if you squeezed around, to construct a different model where the apparent angular size is squished in odd ways.)
And then there are a host of other measurements that one might call more "marginal" (without prejudice to the people who work very hard to do them -- I aspire to be one of them.) They rely on a few more astrophysical assumptions, and perhaps would not convince the slashdot skeptic. (My profound apologies if I've missed out someone's awesome measurement.)
One big "trouble" is that we haven't seen good evidence for a very particular signal that one would associate with the simplest model of dark energy. (This is the "low quadrupole" -- the news stories you read about finite universes are from people who, in part, are motivated by the desire to explain this low quadrupole signal by other means.) Of course, it is entirely possible to make more exotic dark energy models that don't show this signal (I've coauthored a paper on one such model), but that missing signal, gosh, damn.
The Economist is usually good with science articles, but it really kind of missed the point on this one. Shanks et al. are not "bringing down the whole edifice"; they are pointing out what they see as a possibly problematic signal in the CMB data. This may inspire in some a little additional -- and very healthy -- skepticism about the dominant models. But it is important to mention that there really is no "dark energy mafia"; nearly any astrophysicist worth his or her salt would drop dark energy like a stone if the evidence started piling up, and many, many astrophysicists keep a hand in alternate models that don't rely on dark energy because, hey, what a scoop that would be.
The Domesday Book was the catalogue of stuff William the Conqueror had got when he took over (what was) England in 1066. The "Doomsday book" linked in the article is, apparently, a popular novel about the Black Death four centuries later.
So, if it's a Domesday book, when was the Battle of Hastings?
According to Simbad, 37 Gem has a parallax of about 50 milliarcseconds; this data is from the Hipparcos satellite. In other words, it's about 17 parsecs (56 light years) away.
No doubt, the inhabitants of 37 Gem are listening with interest to our broadcast stations from 1947. Perhaps they consider World War II a big "reality TV" show.
Slashdot Mirror
He didn't fight -- couldn't fight -- the RIAA, so even though the case was bogus ($15,000 for writing a search engine? Will the RIAA now sue google because you can find copyrighted mp3s there as well?), he had to drop out of school to pay it back.
So next time, learn before you post.
You need some mechanism to "increase" the apparent area of the (in this case KBO.) Unfortunately, KBOs are just small rocks, with not too much interesting going on. (Planets that eclipse their own star are easier to see, because they are fixed in the angle they explore on the sky relative to the star.)
If you're looking for some kind of "eclipse" effect on the background stars, the best way to increase the effective area of your object is to make it heavy enough that it can gravitationally lens something behind it. The lensing effect increases the angular size of the "sweet spot." See the various MACHO searches.
1. Read Juise's post above. Civil rights at this point in time is not about Thoreau-ish arguments about showing an ID nobody cares about. It matters, right now. Learn, be informed, join the ACLU.
2. I like Thoreau, and also care about the Thoreau-ish arguments about showing an ID nobody cares about. I think it's an important thing to increase the "time penalty" police suffer for randomly asking people for ID.
3. If you are going to do this sort of thing, expect your life to be more difficult. The police may decide that you are suspicious, and take you in for questioning. There is nothing you can do (I mean, what are you going to do? Throw a punch? Moron.) You may be fined. If you refuse to pay the fine, you may go to jail, or be "fined" by a lawyer who will try to defend you. Do not expect much sympathy from your town.
4. Thus: only do this if you are willing to take the heat. Think carefully, and ahead of time, whether the particular issue you care about is important enough to get you in trouble for. If you decide to exercise the full extent of your rights, your life will not be easier in the short-run. To me, the freedom to walk alone on the beach, or in the city among my fellow citizens, without having to answer to any authority is very important, and it is something I am willing to go through a lot for; but I have thought about it. It helps me stay calm in the cases when I am challenged for doing it.
I have never had a problem in the big cities. This is most probably because I am white. The police there have focused their efforts on hispanic and Af-Am people. If you want to hear about civil rights violations, how about the kid who was just shot and killed for walking on the roof of a housing project in NYC?
But when I go down to the beach in small town Long Island, I often run into cops. Either rent-a-cops who will watch me as I walk down a long, empty avenue, or the real police.
Here are your rights (as understood by the court up until now):
1. The police have a recognized right to try to stop and talk to you. (i.e., don't get all like "hey, you have no right to bother me. I ain't doing nuffing wrong.") Argue with it if you like, agitate to change the system, but don't bother to try to change it right there.
2. The police have a (generally) recognized right to ask you where you're going and where you're coming from. This is a bit fuzzier.
3. You do not have to show them identification if you don't want to. This does not apply if you are in your car and driving, and are pulled over: then you must produce Driver's ID. If you are a cyclist, like me, you have to have some kind of ID if you a cycling on the road, but it does not have to be a Driver's license.
Watching this video, this guy is making a lot of mistakes. Look, I don't like dealing with the police, but if your real intent is to be left alone to exercise your freedoms (and not to just cause trouble), you are well advised to:
1. NOT make any sudden movements, jump around, act agitated, or get nervous. Look, I know you want to exercise your rights, and if you're (like me) a white male who's never been in trouble with the law you are probably the most likely to succeed, but calm the hell down. If you can't calm down, you have lost. Bzzt. Sorry, Constitutional Crusader.
2. Do not elaborate. Repeat what you have said. Refuse to show your id. Expect the officer to play mind games.
3. Once you have repeated your refusal not to show your id, ask, very calmly, "am I free to go?" If the officer says, "no," ask "am I under arrest?" Repeat this question until you get a firm answer. If he says "no," then say "as I am not under arrest, I wish to go. Am I free to go?"
4. If questions of searching, "helping out" or otherwise obliging come up, repeat "I do not consent." This is robot time, people, don't get involved in a debate.
This is the ACLU 'Bust Card.'
It's the way it works. If you really care, give $100 to the ACLU. They work on these things, and they really have been effective in a huge number of national, state and local cases. They don't just cover the big ones.
If you look at the report, what you will see is not a discussion of a particular scientific theory or set of theories.
You are correct that science is not a handmill to grind out fact (although science does establish facts in the long run.) I have made similar points on /. about this (and gotten flamed for my patience.)
But the report is discussing how Bush's administration is suppressing scientific debate for ideological reasons. They are selecting against people who hold particular, well established and reasonable views that happen to clash with the White House ideology. They are excluding qualified scientists and preferrentially choosing people who are involved in the very industries they are meant to regulate. They are denying funding to AIDS researchers who use "hot button" words.
20 Nobel Prizewinners may be wrong about science. But they've seen enough of how science should be done to be accurate judges of when it's being distorted.
My point was about theory, not practice. What is new is the idea that certain speech needs to be suppressed in order to preserve liberal society. I don't believe that earlier censors saw themselves as working within the liberal framework.
The archetects of the liberal society's user manual -- J.S. Mill in particular -- simply assumed that obviously bad things would be (to update his language) modded down by the 'marketplace of ideas' (his language.)
The Freenet project, from reading the FAQ, seems to be fundamentally flawed: the people that we'd most like to help out (dissidents, oppressed cubicle drones, etc.) must reveal their identity at some point in the process.
On the other hand, here is a device that will enable you to test your own committment to J.S. Mill's original thesis. Here is software that will contribute to the free functioning of the marketplace of ideas (no question there.) Do you want to install? [y/n]
The idea of using in situ resources is great. But I wonder if it will really be a short term or medium term solution (on the scale of twenty years, say.) We have certainly been talking about asteroid mining &c, but I wonder if the costs for sending up infrastructure are feasable?
Think about it this way: the mass of the systems used to construct, test and characterise the PSF of a mirror are huge compared to the mass of the mirror itself. You would need (I think) technology on a near magical scale to get that down.
The authors also then go to say "why would we want to keep a state of the art instrument around for a long time?" implying, of course, that state of the art changes so rapidly that keeping something around for a long time is meaningless. They somewhat fail to see one thing: a gigantic mirror will always be state of the art.
Yes, and no. A gigantic mirror with a particular radius, smoothness and PSF will go out of date. The technology you have will improve continuously so that the best giant mirror you can make now will suck compared to the one you can make later. That will hold down to the level of smoothness given by the wavelength in question (I worked at Arecebo for a bit, and I believe for the radio wavelengths they were using, their mirror was pretty much "as good as it gets." I don't believe we're anywhere even close for optical telescopes.)
I am a fan of all the cool science you are assuming. But let's see NASA get together a working probe that can build a stop sign out of in situ materials so that we can characterize exactly how cost effective your suggestion is. My intuition is: not very, at least in the next fifty years.
Playing the "playing the card" is the tactic of far too many people.
Some science is better understood than others. Tobacco causes cancer: pretty solid. It's a good idea to spend billions of dollars figuring out ways to get people to stop smoking.
Other science is a bit more uncertain. Do Head Start programs really produce lasting educational benefits for underpriviledged children? Not sure. We should keep going with it, but if something better comes along we should not be afraid to put our resources in a different kind of program with different methodology.
The science in this article is exciting, but tentative. Have you considered the vast economic disruption that would be caused by stopping all CO2 emissions instantly? OK, you say, I didn't mean that, I only meant that we should pull back a little. How much is reasonable? How much should we burden the world (most of whom, unlike me and presumably you, don't have a slush fund of resources to absorb increased costs)?
Rational decisions on those matters can only be made when we really enter the debates and look at what is going on. My purpose in my comment was to point out that everyone running to conclusion (A) suggested in this article is ignoring conclusion (B). If conclusion (A) is true, we might want to burden people more with CO2 regulations -- but consider the demand you're making.
In the article, the author writes, with all the assurance that this is not just his belief, but rather a fact to be "remembered":
But it is worth remembering that a permanent presence on the moon will provide a far better platform for a space telescope, and it is likely a telescope will be put there.
As the slashdot saying goes, "BZZZZZT!" In fact, astronomers and instrumentation people have considered "moon bases," and concluded that there is absolutely no good reason to go all the way up to the moon (a very expensive trip between gravity wells) instead of putting your telescopes in low Earth orbit. The most enthusiastic moon astronomers want to do radio stuff -- not replicate Hubble's optical work.
Does the Lunar Surface Still Offer Value As a Site for Astronomical Observatories?, by three members of JPL, Goddard and UT, and published in Space Policy (I guess NRO wasn't taking articles then) provides the full story.
Sorry, forgot to flag for irony. You are right, of course -- this is exactly my point.
Here is where today's science becomes guesswork, however. Less ice could actually be better. Scientists still know very little about how the Arctic Ocean processes carbon, and a competing theory holds that open water could actually pick up more greenhouse gases.
If human activity is turning "much of the Arctic into a polynya (a body of water that doesn't freeze in winter), then the Arctic or polar seas may become much more effective at removing the atmospheric carbon than they currently are," Papakyriakou said.
The poster of this article (and those discussing the potential positive feedback mechanism that kicks in if ice is a greater sink than open water) are really smudging the issue here, and smudging it for political effect without regard either for the necessarily tentative nature of science at the margins (here, the untested margins of modelling an entire planetary ecosystem) or for the consequences of making scientists look like ridiculous Chicken Littles.
I ride a bicycle to work, take the train, and am generally supportive of environmentally friendly living and governance. But, as a scientist, I am severely disappointed when other scientists (let alone journalists or Greenpeace) take an unfinished scientific debate and use it to propose sweeping changes in our lives -- changes that woud plunge a huge number of people into poverty (I live an environmentally sustainable life, but it does cost a lot more and I wouldn't demand that a single mother of two do it as well -- hey, you driving that pickup! shell out $50,000 for an electric car.)
This is turning into a bit of a rant, but if you want to learn what other enivronmentalists -- who are also scientists -- think about the current fights over the greenhouse effect, GMOs, etc, you should read Patrick Moore's recent article (Moore was the cofounder of Greenpeace.)
Bzzzzt! Wrong. Astronomers are no more protective of their own research, and yet the PR still works very well. HINT: it is the public that pushed for science funding. Hubble has done more to encourage public interest in pure science (not the gadgets and gizmos applied stuff) in the last ten years than almost anything else. Astronomers often release photos ahead of time; there is a one year "time out" after which your data *has* to go public. What about the ISS?
But code quality aside, what about applications elsewhere? NASA's codebase presumably does a wide variety of things in addition to running gazillion-ly redundant life support on the space shuttle. Think about all the design and testing it does of hardware, the software it writes for image processing and signal analysis, running the deep space network. How about making models of satellite structural integrity? Surely something useful -- although it might take someone within the field to realize the similarity between a problem they face and one NASA has already solved.
And, of course, scientists love to write their own tools for text editing, data analysis (often these are incredibly powerful and extendable -- naturally more so than, say, commercial software products which remain close-sourced), collaboration software, yadda yadda ad infinitum
Thus, actually, it is very mysterious. It's not made of any kind of matter we've ever detected on or near Earth.
Dark matter has gotten more mysterious; a while ago, it was possible that you could build a model with baryonic dark matter (e.g., burned out stars), and solve galactic rotation curves. But as the evidence for dark matter kept piling up on different scales, it became harder and harder to make it out of anything that (e.g.) *could* be vaguely normal: that could participate in nucleosynthesis (or, lots of other things: *could* scatter light, even just a little, *could* self-interact, etc.)
He is also quite interested in alternative modes of gravity that invoke higher dimensions and branes. I think a good part of his motivation comes from the fact that focusing on dark matter phenomenology biases one against looking for alternative gravity effects. (I said in a post below that many alternative models behave phenomenologically like dark matter, and I guess I have to qualify that a bit more -- Shanks is referencing a host of models that explain some observations but cannot be reduced to talk about collisionless fluids.)
IANTS.
In particular, dark matter, though incredibly mysterious, is probably on firm enough ground that it will withstand a series of challenges. Galactic rotation curves and measurements of cluster temperatures both give very strong evidence for dark matter on vastly different scales; in addition, it is difficult (OK, fine: downright impossible in standard Einsteinian gravity) to get any kind of structure to form *at all* in the universe if one is only allowed to use the visible matter. The precise ratio of dark to visible is definitely up in the air; and, of course, there are competing models that modify gravity -- if these matured enough (they may already have -- I haven't kept up) to make predictions on a wider range of scales, they might work as well.
Indeed, a lot of gravity modifications (extra dimensions, etc.) behave *phenomenologically* as if there was dark matter -- so all the effort we've put into simulating dark matter may not be in vain after all, even if Einsteinian four dimensional spacetime is not the name of the game.
In contrast, indeed, is the exact count of the "baryons" (ordinary matter.) I would be very surprised if we were off by a factor of (lets be ultra-conservative here) five in the baryon number, which is constrained very well by big bang nucleosynthesis, whose predictions remain in the "ordinary" realm of nuclear explosions. Something we know a little about.
The real mystery is "dark energy." There, the evidence is a lot shakier. It rests on a few pillars. There is a theoretical bias that wants the universe to be flat (so that the missing mass-energy is made up for by some dark energy component that doesn't cluster and affect our galactic rotation curves.) There are some really excellent (but difficult) measurements of universe acceleration, a signature of dark energy, from people who observe distant supernovae (these provide "standard candles" that allow you to measure distance given an apparent brightness.)
Finally, there are the CMB measurements, which provide a similar kind of distance measurement, but are open to alternative interpretations (instead of measuring apparent brightness, they measure apparent angular size -- but it is perhaps possible, if you squeezed around, to construct a different model where the apparent angular size is squished in odd ways.)
And then there are a host of other measurements that one might call more "marginal" (without prejudice to the people who work very hard to do them -- I aspire to be one of them.) They rely on a few more astrophysical assumptions, and perhaps would not convince the slashdot skeptic. (My profound apologies if I've missed out someone's awesome measurement.)
One big "trouble" is that we haven't seen good evidence for a very particular signal that one would associate with the simplest model of dark energy. (This is the "low quadrupole" -- the news stories you read about finite universes are from people who, in part, are motivated by the desire to explain this low quadrupole signal by other means.) Of course, it is entirely possible to make more exotic dark energy models that don't show this signal (I've coauthored a paper on one such model), but that missing signal, gosh, damn.
The Economist is usually good with science articles, but it really kind of missed the point on this one. Shanks et al. are not "bringing down the whole edifice"; they are pointing out what they see as a possibly problematic signal in the CMB data. This may inspire in some a little additional -- and very healthy -- skepticism about the dominant models. But it is important to mention that there really is no "dark energy mafia"; nearly any astrophysicist worth his or her salt would drop dark energy like a stone if the evidence started piling up, and many, many astrophysicists keep a hand in alternate models that don't rely on dark energy because, hey, what a scoop that would be.
The Domesday Book was the catalogue of stuff William the Conqueror had got when he took over (what was) England in 1066. The "Doomsday book" linked in the article is, apparently, a popular novel about the Black Death four centuries later.
So, if it's a Domesday book, when was the Battle of Hastings?
According to Simbad, 37 Gem has a parallax of about 50 milliarcseconds; this data is from the Hipparcos satellite. In other words, it's about 17 parsecs (56 light years) away.
No doubt, the inhabitants of 37 Gem are listening with interest to our broadcast stations from 1947. Perhaps they consider World War II a big "reality TV" show.