How about the fact that the Keck/Gemini team just happened to release the news a few hours before a press conference by the Hubble team. A press conference that was announced a week ago. They could have waited until tomorrow. Or next week. Looked to me like they figured out that Hubble had a similar announcement, and tried to beat them to the punch.
You are correct. I pretty much guessed what the gist of the announcement would be, thanks to his presence in the pre-announcement last week . After all - his big extrasolar claim to fame is figuring out that the dust ring at that star had a sharp inner edge that had to be caused by a planet.
New York State still uses the Lever based voting machine. There is no way to tie an individual voter, to an individual vote. Voting just increments a bunch of dials.
So if the machine has a problem, they know whose votes were affected?
If you're in NY, your probably using the old fashioned lever voting machine - their is no way they can keep track of individual votes with it. It only tracks the totals.
Given this reality, NASA should concentrate only on projects that can be completed with useful results within a short time frame. Certainly no more than five to ten years total. That means no more fantasies about moon bases and Mars manned missions. If NASA commits itself to these hugely expensive but largely symbolic projects, they will most likely find themselves cut off from funding in the middle of the 20-30 year projects. With no lasting results to show for the expense.
You're still too ambitious - if what you're saying is true, NASA should only concentrate on projects that can be completed in 5-10 days total. I propose a mission to the dry cleaner and back. On foot (since gasoline will be gone). With guns (to fight off the cannibals).
If you're wondering if Earth is going flying into space during the lifespan of our species... probably not. But over the lifespan of the Sun... there's a good chance that one or more of the inner planets is in trouble before the Sun goes nova.
These ideas aren't _directly_ coming from the admittedly biased detection of large gas giants with close in orbits. Everyone knows that the detection scheme we use is biased to find them, and it would be impossible to find many systems like ours using it. But that doesn't really matter at all. The very fact that Hot Jupiters exist at all, have big implications to how systems form.
Finding these big planets close in meant that old planetary formation theories had to be revised. New theories, based off how these planets could form at all, state that planets don't form in place - they form farther out and migrate in. It also means the Solar System is lucky Jupiter stopped where it did - if it migrated further inwards all the planets in the inner solar system would've been flung into space...
Plenty of big 8 and alt groups get traffic still
on
R.I.P Usenet: 1980-2008
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· Score: 3, Insightful
If they end up dropping the binary groups... who cares? Google hasn't announced that they are dropping their mediocre (but useful) usenet client service. There are plenty of usenet groups still active - usenet may be in decline.. but hasn't that but true for so long already its practically a joke? Lets face it - there is still a need for readily available, easily searched (and filtered), unmoderated discussion groups.
Whose suprised? The first few planets last decade were suprises, because there was a real debate as to how rare planetary systems were. Now that we know they are common, its long expected that we will find Earth mass planets - the only question is when. The real suprises are coming when we look at overall systems (no one expected to find Jupiter+ massed planets in close orbits), or when we look at the atmospheres.
Interesting science they are doing over there. So lacking any evidence that planets are ubiquitous, and even worse that true Earth-like planets exist in the first place even though they can't yet detect them, they are ready to say that they must exist because they have now found some "smaller" hunks of mass orbiting a star? This is sheer idiocy. Astronomers are finding planets all over our immediate vicinity in space - how more ubiquitious can you get than the current rate of discovery? It seems any star with metallicity has a planet or planet system around it. As for the second part - the only limitation in finding Earth sized worlds is detector sensitivity. Seeing how they can find individual objects larger than Earth, and comet sized and smaller debris (in bulk), it seems pretty obvious they will find planets with masses the size of Earth, or smaller, as soon as we can get the sensitivity down to that point.
You don't get packaging like Ancient Art of War (or Ancient Art of War at Sea) anymore. I've held onto all my old 80;s game boxes - my Gold Box collection. Simcity. Starflight (1 and 2), Gunship, Space Quest 1 & 2, Kings Quest 1-5, Zork 1 - 3 (now those are some good boxes!), plus tons I don't even remember anymore. Thank goodness I've got a ton of storage space...
Exactly - its one marketing flick after another now a days. First the Red Cross puts out There Will be Blood, then the Obama campaign releases No Country for Old Men, and now AARP comes out with INDY 4.
Well F*** off Hollywood marketers - the $ stops here - we're not buying the crap you're pushing!
Brilliant! Instead of sending up astronauts on 6 months shifts to minimize costly and dangerous launches, we could spend billions extra to shuttle them up and down to the International Space Station weekly! Plus added bonus - we could thin out the astronaut corp by exposing them to extra trips inevitably killing them.
Maybe we could send them home every weekend. I'm sure astronauts will look forward to their uncluttered weekend after working 120 hours straight.
You're 100% right - their ineffecient breaks from work are costing the taxpayers $$$! Think of the cost savings if we went with your ideas! Instead of needlessly ferrying them back for millions of dolalrs, we could just wait for them to commit suicide or have a coronary from liteally being worked and scheduled 24x7 for months at a time, and chuck their worthless carcases out the airlock. Of course their paycheck will be docked since disposing of the corpse instead of letting it rot in place will be a "leisure activity" in your administration.
6 hours a night? 2 nights in a row of that I'm completely useless at work the next day and most likely have a bad headache all day. How do people cope? I pity your employer--I can only imagine what they have to endure with an employee that consistently needs rest and needs 8 hours of sleep like a little baby. Apparently the lack of sleep also ends up causing a bad attitude too.
C'mon - who else is IN scientology except for celeb's and bored rich people pining away for fun exclusivity of the old mystery religions of 2000 years ago.
well - the effective minimal critical mass of a black hole is whatever amount of mass is required to get the Schwartzschild Radius (aka - area of no return - aka the size of your cosmic vacuum cleaner's mouth) bigger than elementary particles. If you're too small to suck in even an electron, you're not much of a beastly killing machine.
But going with your whole evil super weapon train of thought - a practical black hole weapon would have to be pretty massive. Like really really massive. I'm too lazy to do the math myself - but according to whoever edited wikipedia last, even an Earth massed black hole would be pretty tiny - its event horizon would be 9mm across. The gravitational effects would probably rip the Earth apart long before it could suck down any appreciable amount of mass (even though its only 9 mm across, its gravitational pull would be identical as an Earth massed object - so at 1 Earth radius, it would have a pull of 1 G).
If you want real fun with super science weapons, you'd can't beat relativistic kill vehicle: You speed marbles up to near light speed and shoot 'em off at targets - leaving continent sized craters on a planet with a weapon that can barely be detected, let alone stopped.
Except for the tiny detail that the black holes were too tiny to do any damage. To be big enough to suck the earth in from the inside, they'd need a pretty powerful gravitational field - anything lab produced would just disapate as it starves to death (earthly material is not dense enough to grow it substantially).
Fun sci-fi trash read though... he pretty much through every prediction he could think of at the wall and hoped they would stick.
Slashdot Mirror
Either way, its a good day for armchair astronomers (and professional ones too).
How about the fact that the Keck/Gemini team just happened to release the news a few hours before a press conference by the Hubble team. A press conference that was announced a week ago. They could have waited until tomorrow. Or next week. Looked to me like they figured out that Hubble had a similar announcement, and tried to beat them to the punch.
You are correct. I pretty much guessed what the gist of the announcement would be, thanks to his presence in the pre-announcement last week . After all - his big extrasolar claim to fame is figuring out that the dust ring at that star had a sharp inner edge that had to be caused by a planet.
This came out after I posted the article... Hubble presents - Fomalhaut B! This graphic is particularly nice!
These reasons don't exist anymore.
Really? They stopped ethnic ghettos and allow free exercise of religion? Did anyone tell France this?
New York State still uses the Lever based voting machine. There is no way to tie an individual voter, to an individual vote. Voting just increments a bunch of dials.
So if the machine has a problem, they know whose votes were affected? If you're in NY, your probably using the old fashioned lever voting machine - their is no way they can keep track of individual votes with it. It only tracks the totals.
Given this reality, NASA should concentrate only on projects that can be completed with useful results within a short time frame. Certainly no more than five to ten years total. That means no more fantasies about moon bases and Mars manned missions. If NASA commits itself to these hugely expensive but largely symbolic projects, they will most likely find themselves cut off from funding in the middle of the 20-30 year projects. With no lasting results to show for the expense.
You're still too ambitious - if what you're saying is true, NASA should only concentrate on projects that can be completed in 5-10 days total. I propose a mission to the dry cleaner and back. On foot (since gasoline will be gone). With guns (to fight off the cannibals).
If you're wondering if Earth is going flying into space during the lifespan of our species... probably not. But over the lifespan of the Sun... there's a good chance that one or more of the inner planets is in trouble before the Sun goes nova.
These ideas aren't _directly_ coming from the admittedly biased detection of large gas giants with close in orbits. Everyone knows that the detection scheme we use is biased to find them, and it would be impossible to find many systems like ours using it. But that doesn't really matter at all. The very fact that Hot Jupiters exist at all, have big implications to how systems form.
Finding these big planets close in meant that old planetary formation theories had to be revised. New theories, based off how these planets could form at all, state that planets don't form in place - they form farther out and migrate in. It also means the Solar System is lucky Jupiter stopped where it did - if it migrated further inwards all the planets in the inner solar system would've been flung into space...
If they end up dropping the binary groups... who cares? Google hasn't announced that they are dropping their mediocre (but useful) usenet client service. There are plenty of usenet groups still active - usenet may be in decline.. but hasn't that but true for so long already its practically a joke? Lets face it - there is still a need for readily available, easily searched (and filtered), unmoderated discussion groups.
Does anyone know? Or do I have to waste my time again and read the article to find out if Timothy has posted utter crap onto the frontpage?
Whose suprised? The first few planets last decade were suprises, because there was a real debate as to how rare planetary systems were. Now that we know they are common, its long expected that we will find Earth mass planets - the only question is when. The real suprises are coming when we look at overall systems (no one expected to find Jupiter+ massed planets in close orbits), or when we look at the atmospheres.
You don't get packaging like Ancient Art of War (or Ancient Art of War at Sea) anymore. I've held onto all my old 80;s game boxes - my Gold Box collection. Simcity. Starflight (1 and 2), Gunship, Space Quest 1 & 2, Kings Quest 1-5, Zork 1 - 3 (now those are some good boxes!), plus tons I don't even remember anymore. Thank goodness I've got a ton of storage space...
Well F*** off Hollywood marketers - the $ stops here - we're not buying the crap you're pushing!
If he thinks Indy sucks, then thats a GOOD sign.
Actual knowledge on slashdot - its a miracle!
Brilliant! Instead of sending up astronauts on 6 months shifts to minimize costly and dangerous launches, we could spend billions extra to shuttle them up and down to the International Space Station weekly! Plus added bonus - we could thin out the astronaut corp by exposing them to extra trips inevitably killing them.
Maybe we could send them home every weekend. I'm sure astronauts will look forward to their uncluttered weekend after working 120 hours straight.
You a buzzkill? No way.
You're 100% right - their ineffecient breaks from work are costing the taxpayers $$$! Think of the cost savings if we went with your ideas! Instead of needlessly ferrying them back for millions of dolalrs, we could just wait for them to commit suicide or have a coronary from liteally being worked and scheduled 24x7 for months at a time, and chuck their worthless carcases out the airlock. Of course their paycheck will be docked since disposing of the corpse instead of letting it rot in place will be a "leisure activity" in your administration.
How can I tell? Neither Sco, the RIAA, or Windows Vista are involved in the plot. And every plot on slashdot has to involve one of the three.
C'mon - who else is IN scientology except for celeb's and bored rich people pining away for fun exclusivity of the old mystery religions of 2000 years ago.
well - the effective minimal critical mass of a black hole is whatever amount of mass is required to get the Schwartzschild Radius (aka - area of no return - aka the size of your cosmic vacuum cleaner's mouth) bigger than elementary particles. If you're too small to suck in even an electron, you're not much of a beastly killing machine.
But going with your whole evil super weapon train of thought - a practical black hole weapon would have to be pretty massive. Like really really massive. I'm too lazy to do the math myself - but according to whoever edited wikipedia last, even an Earth massed black hole would be pretty tiny - its event horizon would be 9mm across. The gravitational effects would probably rip the Earth apart long before it could suck down any appreciable amount of mass (even though its only 9 mm across, its gravitational pull would be identical as an Earth massed object - so at 1 Earth radius, it would have a pull of 1 G).
If you want real fun with super science weapons, you'd can't beat relativistic kill vehicle: You speed marbles up to near light speed and shoot 'em off at targets - leaving continent sized craters on a planet with a weapon that can barely be detected, let alone stopped.
Except for the tiny detail that the black holes were too tiny to do any damage. To be big enough to suck the earth in from the inside, they'd need a pretty powerful gravitational field - anything lab produced would just disapate as it starves to death (earthly material is not dense enough to grow it substantially).
Fun sci-fi trash read though... he pretty much through every prediction he could think of at the wall and hoped they would stick.