Sorry, but I think you and many of the others here need to go back and read his question. He didn't say he wanted ideas for labs, he said he wanted his students to contribute to real science, as in, do things that lead to publications by professional physicists.
While I did many of the experiments that you did and found them interesting and learned a lot from them, none of those produced publishable results.
You made fun of Galaxy Zoo, but the work that the thousands of people did who participated in that experiment led to real publications in the astronomical literature.
Astronomy in particular is a science where amateurs can contribute and I think he cited Galaxy Zoo not because he thought it was better than building a Foucault Pendulum, but because it has a different goal -- it is getting his students to put in their time as essentially free labor on science projects much larger than they could do in class. Although, maybe you know of a high school building a 3.5 meter telescope with a drift scan camera and multi-object spectrograph that is recording images and spectra for a million galaxies. Because at that school, kids could get the same experience the ones in his class got by participating in Galaxy Zoo.
Apple may be cutting corners in QA in response to the lower premiums they've been able to charge over the years.
I've had hardware problems with a PBook G4 17", an iMac G5, and an older iBook. When I mentioned this to my local Apple Service guy, he told me that he's noticed that as Apple has come down in price, they've been forced to use less expensive components with correspondingly higher failure rates.
True or not, I agree with another poster who pointed out they've been much more responsive to these issues. I had all three fixed for free, even post AppleCare warranty period.
I teach astronomy, and I just tried to go to Cassini's website for some information for a presentation I'm giving next week. When I found the Cassini website down with some strange error, I clicked over to/. to check the news until their site comes back up. Lo and behold, the first story on/. is about Cassini.
Actually, the MSNBC article gets it right -- they didn't say that white dwarfs are the result of Type Ia supernovas, they said:
"...white dwarfs are involved in explosions called Type Ia supernovas."
White dwarfs are the remnant of Sun-like stars -- they are not formed in supernova explosions. However, some white dwarfs in binary star systems can accumulate mass from their companion and explode in a nova or in some cases a Type Ia supernova.
The nearest star most likely to go supernova (and not Type Ia, but Type II), is eta Carina.
Re:What other pre-web services are out there?
on
IMDb Turns 15
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· Score: 1
I knew the URL pointed to Strasbourg, what I meant in my original comment was that I didn't know the meaning of the name "SIMBAD".
In the meantime, I have found out what it stands for (since I'm sure everyone has been waiting on the edge of their seats to find out): SIMBAD = Set of Identifications, Measurements, and Bibliography for Astronomical Data.
Re:What other pre-web services are out there?
on
IMDb Turns 15
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· Score: 1
I remember reading at one point in the mid-90s in the astro-ph archive it saying something along the lines of, "be careful about your searches, this service is being run off of a 68030 Mac and a 386 PC." or something like that.
I don't think that the astronomy (astro-ph -- part of the same xxx.lanl.gov service) archive pre-existed the net, though, my recollection is that we were still sending around paper preprints even after mosaic arrived on the scene.
Re:What other pre-web services are out there?
on
IMDb Turns 15
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I would guess that many scientific / other university research databases did the same thing. I can think of, for
example, NED:
As one caller pointed out, only the United States is looking at this debate seriously, and every country in Europe is laughing at it because it's so stupid.
I was at a conference recently where we were discussing the state of science literacy in the US, and a leading authority on the topic (Jon Miller from Northwestern University) showed the results of a survey conducted in the US and in Europe.
I don't have a copy of his numbers, but I recall that his results showed that in the US, approximately 50% of those surveyed believed that evolution really occurs on the Earth. In Europe, using the same survey, the results for the same question were closer to 90% of those surveyed believe that evolution occurs.
not really that new -- this just seemed much more wacky than average. There are usually a few good seeds of info in among the trolls and jokes, but I didn't find any.
I know the/. community isn't known for doing things like, say, staying on topic, R'ingTFA, but this is crazy.
in this discussion on an article about giant squid, the comments that stick out are about space suits, Japanese culture and pornography, and grade-school bullying.
anyone care that scientists actually photographed a real, live giant squid?
Re:Where are the Editor's Choice CRTs??
on
CNET's HDTV World
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· Score: 1
I wish I had more guidance when I bought my HDTV -- I made the mistake of buying the "starter's HDTV" -- the Panasonic CT-27HL14.
If anyone is thinking of buying this set (or something similar from Panasonic), I urge you to reconsider. Check the reviews at amazon -- (Panasonic CT-27HL14) -- when I bought mine, everyone was giving it 5 stars, and in fact, for $500 it was great. Unfortunately, anywhere from 6 - 18 months later the screen craps out. Happened to me about a week ago. Of course, Panasonic *only* warranties the thing for 90 days completely, then a year for parts, and the reports are this repair costs more than the set. So, most of us who bought this model are stuck with a TV that is just past a year old and worthless. To make matters worse, if you call Panasonic's number (or try their website), the only information they give out is a phone number for a local repairshop, so there isn't even anyone to complain to about the problem. I took mine in to a local repair shop to document the problem, and they told me that even their Techs can't get a human on the special Tech only phone number.
I'm pretty pissed at Panasonic right now after mostly singing their praises for years and years. I think that their other models are probably not as bad as this one, but be prepared for bottom of the barrel service if you ever do need to deal with them if you have a problem. I know this is probably not the best sentence to include on/., but I would love to see a class action lawsuit come out of this, and I would happily join it in minutes.
seeing is a measurement of how the atmosphere is degrading the images of stars. So if the seeing is 1.0 arcseconds, this means that after the light from the star passes through the atmosphere, its full-width at half-maximum (FWHM) intensity has an angular size of 1.0 arcseconds. Telescopes and the domes that they are mounted in usually cause the seeing to get worse, so even though the atmosphere is only blurring the image of a star to an angular size of 1.0 arcsecond, when the image is recorded in a camera, it might appear to have a FWHM of 1.2 or 1.5 arcseconds. This effect is sometimes called "dome seeing".
What they are claiming is that they did such a good job on the optics and the design of the dome that the dome contributes negligibly to the seeing and that it is performing optimally.
My guess is that the reason for this statement is that the HET (the telescope SALT was modeled after) is well known to have issues with bad dome seeing.
The only reason they are revisiting the Hubble decision is to appease Senator Mikulski of MD.
Well, that, and the fact that a committee made up of scientists that are members of the National Academy of Sciences recommended saving Hubble, which you neglected to mention.
To date, almost every survey of astronomers has resulted in support for saving Hubble. Senator Mikulski is lending her support to the effort, because the Space Telescope Science Institute is in her constituency, but she is also doing it because the NAS and the community of astronomers have asked her to do so.
It its comprised of large amounts of Dark Matter, how can they tell that its spinning?
I haven't read the article yet, but I can give you my guess as to what is going on. They probably detected it first in neutral hydrogen gas, and then investigated the area where they detected this large gas cloud in optical light to look for stars. The claim that it is rotating comes again from the gas, by measuring the doppler shifts in the galaxy's radio emission, they can measure the velocity field of the galaxy. This measurement allows you to derive a plot of speed as a function of distance from the center, which for a rotating object has a certain pattern, which is very commonly seen in normal galaxies (those that contain stars).
A lot of this work was done by the "Green Bank Telescope" aka the Great Big Telescope or GBT. You should check out the specs on this telescope. It is the world's largest fully steerable telescope and it is taller than the Statue of Liberty. I was a grad student while this was being built, and was always impressed when I saw presentations about the amount of work that went into creating this instrument. It is not nearly as famous as other telescopes like Hubble or Keck, but is very impressive nevertheless.
On average, the stars in our Milky Way are moving at about 1/3 of this velocity (the outcast star is moving at 670 km/sec, the Sun is moving at 220 km/sec).
The nearest stars to the Sun are several parsecs away, so even if the nearest stars were all approaching us at 220 km/sec it would take them about 25,000 years to make it to the Sun's present location.
If you want to worry about something, you should be more concerned with near earth asteroids than rogue stars heading for us at ~700 km/sec.
Thanks for making this point (I was skimming to see if anyone had done so).
In fact it is worse than this -- one astronomer I know tells me that it looks like *all* funding for astronomy in the NASA budget may go away.
Besides missions like Hubble, Spitzer, Chandra, Swift, Con-X, LISA, GalEx, FUSE, etc. etc. etc., NASA funds science investigations by astronomers through various programs. If the money from these programs goes into Mars exploration, that will have a major detrimental impact on our nation's astronomy research programs.
Does anyone know anything more about "possible radio transmissions from a distant planet"? TIA
sometimes it is hard to tell the serious inquiries / responses from the jokes, but here is my attempt at a serious response. You may also be thinking of the "Wow" signal that was detected at Ohio State in the 70's. It is one of the most interesting signals detected by a radio SETI search so far, but it was never confirmed even after intensive efforts.
"Obscure NASA bureaucrat," my ass! James Webb was the NASA administrator during the development of Project Apollo, arguably the most complex and difficult endeavor in human history. They ought to name the whole damn agency after him, not just one little telescope.
Actually, I think most astronomers would agree with you -- they'd rather have the whole agency named after him than this one telescope. Precedent is that telescopes (especially the three great observatories -- Hubble, Chandra, & Spitzer) have been named after astronomers. Naming this one after a NASA director instead of an astronomer was seen as a mistake by many. This isn't to say that leading the Apollo program wasn't an amazing accomplishment, only that it breaks with tradition to name a telescope after a director, especially one who *wasn't* an astronomer.
I searched for Pepsi bottles with the caps near the Penn State campus, but they were late to arrive and didn't last long here.
I'm not a tinfoil hat type, but I wonder if they hosed us because of our well publicized deal with Napster (which I don't have access to, and wouldn't use if I did).
They should have *saturated* this area with caps, to show people how much better iTMS is.
Is this a standard term to describe the process of increasing processor speed in a line of computers?
I don't know how standard it is across the industry, but it is at least a standard term in the Mac press. I didn't even blink when I read the headline because I've seen that expression used with Macs so often.
Why does Apple never drop the price of current hardware instead?
You can usually find good deals on older hardware right around the time that they are about to announce a new model. They just don't offer it to everyone through the Apple Store. Instead, I usually see them advertised in the Mac User's Group store and places that other long time customers have a chance at them.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, but I think you and many of the others here need to go back and read his question. He didn't say he wanted ideas for labs, he said he wanted his students to contribute to real science, as in, do things that lead to publications by professional physicists. While I did many of the experiments that you did and found them interesting and learned a lot from them, none of those produced publishable results. You made fun of Galaxy Zoo, but the work that the thousands of people did who participated in that experiment led to real publications in the astronomical literature. Astronomy in particular is a science where amateurs can contribute and I think he cited Galaxy Zoo not because he thought it was better than building a Foucault Pendulum, but because it has a different goal -- it is getting his students to put in their time as essentially free labor on science projects much larger than they could do in class. Although, maybe you know of a high school building a 3.5 meter telescope with a drift scan camera and multi-object spectrograph that is recording images and spectra for a million galaxies. Because at that school, kids could get the same experience the ones in his class got by participating in Galaxy Zoo.
Apple may be cutting corners in QA in response to the lower premiums they've been able to charge over the years.
I've had hardware problems with a PBook G4 17", an iMac G5, and an older iBook. When I mentioned this to my local Apple Service guy, he told me that he's noticed that as Apple has come down in price, they've been forced to use less expensive components with correspondingly higher failure rates.
True or not, I agree with another poster who pointed out they've been much more responsive to these issues. I had all three fixed for free, even post AppleCare warranty period.
troll, stupid, dvorak, moron
Did you all purposely do this?
White dwarfs are the remnant of Sun-like stars -- they are not formed in supernova explosions. However, some white dwarfs in binary star systems can accumulate mass from their companion and explode in a nova or in some cases a Type Ia supernova.
The nearest star most likely to go supernova (and not Type Ia, but Type II), is eta Carina.
In the meantime, I have found out what it stands for (since I'm sure everyone has been waiting on the edge of their seats to find out): SIMBAD = Set of Identifications, Measurements, and Bibliography for Astronomical Data.
I don't think that the astronomy (astro-ph -- part of the same xxx.lanl.gov service) archive pre-existed the net, though, my recollection is that we were still sending around paper preprints even after mosaic arrived on the scene.
The NASA Extragalactic Database
and SIMBAD:
(Sorry, no idea what this one stands for -- it's French, but I don't know if it is an acronym or proper name)
I was at a conference recently where we were discussing the state of science literacy in the US, and a leading authority on the topic (Jon Miller from Northwestern University) showed the results of a survey conducted in the US and in Europe.
I don't have a copy of his numbers, but I recall that his results showed that in the US, approximately 50% of those surveyed believed that evolution really occurs on the Earth. In Europe, using the same survey, the results for the same question were closer to 90% of those surveyed believe that evolution occurs.
Scary.
not really that new -- this just seemed much more wacky than average. There are usually a few good seeds of info in among the trolls and jokes, but I didn't find any.
in this discussion on an article about giant squid, the comments that stick out are about space suits, Japanese culture and pornography, and grade-school bullying.
anyone care that scientists actually photographed a real, live giant squid?
If anyone is thinking of buying this set (or something similar from Panasonic), I urge you to reconsider. Check the reviews at amazon -- (Panasonic CT-27HL14) -- when I bought mine, everyone was giving it 5 stars, and in fact, for $500 it was great. Unfortunately, anywhere from 6 - 18 months later the screen craps out. Happened to me about a week ago. Of course, Panasonic *only* warranties the thing for 90 days completely, then a year for parts, and the reports are this repair costs more than the set. So, most of us who bought this model are stuck with a TV that is just past a year old and worthless. To make matters worse, if you call Panasonic's number (or try their website), the only information they give out is a phone number for a local repairshop, so there isn't even anyone to complain to about the problem. I took mine in to a local repair shop to document the problem, and they told me that even their Techs can't get a human on the special Tech only phone number.
I'm pretty pissed at Panasonic right now after mostly singing their praises for years and years. I think that their other models are probably not as bad as this one, but be prepared for bottom of the barrel service if you ever do need to deal with them if you have a problem. I know this is probably not the best sentence to include on /., but I would love to see a class action lawsuit come out of this, and I would happily join it in minutes.
seeing is a measurement of how the atmosphere is degrading the images of stars. So if the seeing is 1.0 arcseconds, this means that after the light from the star passes through the atmosphere, its full-width at half-maximum (FWHM) intensity has an angular size of 1.0 arcseconds. Telescopes and the domes that they are mounted in usually cause the seeing to get worse, so even though the atmosphere is only blurring the image of a star to an angular size of 1.0 arcsecond, when the image is recorded in a camera, it might appear to have a FWHM of 1.2 or 1.5 arcseconds. This effect is sometimes called "dome seeing". What they are claiming is that they did such a good job on the optics and the design of the dome that the dome contributes negligibly to the seeing and that it is performing optimally. My guess is that the reason for this statement is that the HET (the telescope SALT was modeled after) is well known to have issues with bad dome seeing.
Well, that, and the fact that a committee made up of scientists that are members of the National Academy of Sciences recommended saving Hubble, which you neglected to mention.
To date, almost every survey of astronomers has resulted in support for saving Hubble. Senator Mikulski is lending her support to the effort, because the Space Telescope Science Institute is in her constituency, but she is also doing it because the NAS and the community of astronomers have asked her to do so.
I haven't read the article yet, but I can give you my guess as to what is going on. They probably detected it first in neutral hydrogen gas, and then investigated the area where they detected this large gas cloud in optical light to look for stars. The claim that it is rotating comes again from the gas, by measuring the doppler shifts in the galaxy's radio emission, they can measure the velocity field of the galaxy. This measurement allows you to derive a plot of speed as a function of distance from the center, which for a rotating object has a certain pattern, which is very commonly seen in normal galaxies (those that contain stars).
A lot of this work was done by the "Green Bank Telescope" aka the Great Big Telescope or GBT. You should check out the specs on this telescope. It is the world's largest fully steerable telescope and it is taller than the Statue of Liberty. I was a grad student while this was being built, and was always impressed when I saw presentations about the amount of work that went into creating this instrument. It is not nearly as famous as other telescopes like Hubble or Keck, but is very impressive nevertheless.
The nearest stars to the Sun are several parsecs away, so even if the nearest stars were all approaching us at 220 km/sec it would take them about 25,000 years to make it to the Sun's present location.
If you want to worry about something, you should be more concerned with near earth asteroids than rogue stars heading for us at ~700 km/sec.
In fact it is worse than this -- one astronomer I know tells me that it looks like *all* funding for astronomy in the NASA budget may go away.
Besides missions like Hubble, Spitzer, Chandra, Swift, Con-X, LISA, GalEx, FUSE, etc. etc. etc., NASA funds science investigations by astronomers through various programs. If the money from these programs goes into Mars exploration, that will have a major detrimental impact on our nation's astronomy research programs.
Hey, Paris is pretty ho... HOLY CRAP! HE HAS A NIXON BOWLING POSTER!
--El Duderino
sometimes it is hard to tell the serious inquiries / responses from the jokes, but here is my attempt at a serious response. You may also be thinking of the "Wow" signal that was detected at Ohio State in the 70's. It is one of the most interesting signals detected by a radio SETI search so far, but it was never confirmed even after intensive efforts.
A good summary by Seth Shostak (a SETI pioneer and really funny guy) is here.
Actually, I think most astronomers would agree with you -- they'd rather have the whole agency named after him than this one telescope. Precedent is that telescopes (especially the three great observatories -- Hubble, Chandra, & Spitzer) have been named after astronomers. Naming this one after a NASA director instead of an astronomer was seen as a mistake by many. This isn't to say that leading the Apollo program wasn't an amazing accomplishment, only that it breaks with tradition to name a telescope after a director, especially one who *wasn't* an astronomer.
The nerd lobby just isn't big enough to oust a president.
I'm not a tinfoil hat type, but I wonder if they hosed us because of our well publicized deal with Napster (which I don't have access to, and wouldn't use if I did).
They should have *saturated* this area with caps, to show people how much better iTMS is.
I don't know how standard it is across the industry, but it is at least a standard term in the Mac press. I didn't even blink when I read the headline because I've seen that expression used with Macs so often.
You can usually find good deals on older hardware right around the time that they are about to announce a new model. They just don't offer it to everyone through the Apple Store. Instead, I usually see them advertised in the Mac User's Group store and places that other long time customers have a chance at them.