Actually Prince Vlad Dracul was from Wallachia. It was changed for the book as Transylvania sounded more mysterious, while Wallachia sounded like it could be a rural county somewhere in Cornwall.
There are upper limits on the amount of regular matter in the universe, because we can SEE through regions that would be opaque if they held the number of baryons necessary to make up the mass that's there.
As a ratio between their size and the space between them. A star is huge, but the space between stars is mind-bogglingly enormous, even in the middle of a galaxy or a globular cluster.
They're not random guesses people have pulled out of their asses and declared to be infallible truths. The framework was originally built out of example stars in our immediate neighborhood, such as Sirius, which we can examine in fairly good detail. We know that Sirius is x-many kilometers wide, has a specific luminosity, radiates in a set range of frequencies, and interacts in a certain manner with the other two stars in its system. From the frequencies we know that it's mostly hydrogen, from the gravitational interactions with its companions we can tell its mass. We can predict from that how much space that much hydrogen would need to occupy at what temperature, and how much light it would radiate at which temperature. From that set of values we can pick the known luminosity, and wonder of wonders it matches the observed size.
Do this enough times and you can build a model of what other stars should be like. The model works really well, it's not a "GUESS".
"Dark Matter" is not a definition of anything other than where our ignorance begins, and that's all it's meant to be at this time. It's a place-holder until we can get better data to change our theories. There's no hand-waving going on and no one is sitting on their laurels and saying "Everything's OK now since we invented a new word". Astrophysicists have models that fit most of the observations very well and make some good predictions that can be tested. We don't have the technology or the models available yet to test the properties of Dark Matter and Dark Energy, they've adjusted their theory and models to the edge of what we can test.
You sounded like you thought the Electric Universe quackery was in some way scientific, which may have been my misinterpretation.
We're actually conducting this experiment now. We'll get back to you in a couple hundred million years to let you know the results.
Seriously, this is your objection? Have you heard of these things called 'fossils'? We can pretty clearly look at the remains of what were fish which over the course of millions of years became something less like fish and more like amphibians, then less like amphibians and more like lizards, then less like lizards and more like opossums. You can look at the mudskipper today and it's pretty obvious what its future would be if its prey gradually migrates to drier habitats slower than the mudskipper's mutation rate.
Why does Dark Matter only appear in our results if we look at galaxy scale?
Scale. The motes of dust floating around in the air in your office are denser than the stars in the center of the Milky Way. The gravitational effects of Dark Matter are so miniscule that you need to fill the spaces between the clumps of 'normal' matter (i.e. stars, planets, interstellar clouds) with the stuff for the effect to be measurable.
So you propose replacing a bent, cobbled-together theory that explains most of what we're seeing with a out-of-the-box broken theory that explains almost nothing? That doesn't seem like much of an advance.
If you're in the building you have physical access to some of the company resources, unless you're very closely watched. One local software company found a wireless access point had been plugged into a network port in a conference room and taped to the bottom of the table so that the network could be browsed from the parking lot or the coffee shop downstairs. They think it was a job applicant being interviewed who planted it. In another janitorial staff plugged a netbook into a port in an empty cubicle, where it sniffed the network for a few days until it was removed and handed off.
Did you know that your network printer has a hard drive that stores print jobs? Depending on the model that interface can be available via USB, Bluetooth, or even its own WAP. Security on that all-in-one printer tends to be pitiful, many of them run a customized Linux kernel that can run a network sniffer and store the results. So if you don't watch your soda delivery guy you might be losing data.
I think Mythosaz might be remembering, the same as I do, when they said that the necessary Doppler shift measurements were so subtle that astronomers would NEVER be able to detect them. Now they're detecting Earth-sized planets, and it's incredibly cool.
Really? You guys in the UK are lucky. If the police can in any way connect a drug charge to an arrest they will, because then they can confiscate anything even remotely related to drugs (including the car you smoked the joint in and the house you grew the plant in) and sell it. In some departments that makes up a really considerable percentage of their annual budget. Very frequently the property gets sold before the case even comes before the judge, and if you're found innocent you now have to sue the new owner to get your property back.
Oh, and yes, when they smash down your door (even when they've gone to the wrong address) it is solely your responsibility to repair the damage at your own cost. It's hell for landlords.
5000 years ago there were perhaps 15 cities in all of North America, none in Europe, a couple dozen in South America and Asia, a dozen in India, and a couple score in Africa and the Middle East. Not much in the way of targets, and they were pretty small. Even then, Ubar in the Arabian Peninsula seems to have been destroyed by a nearby meteor strike while at the height of its power.
Rather wonder if the current rate of medium-size meteors isn't just a statistical fluke. Comet Shoemaker-Levy was described as a once in a hundred or even once in a thousand year event that we were being treated to. Since that time there have been three or possibly four more similar-sized events on Jupiter that we didn't see happen, we just saw the effects of. The first meteor impact that we managed to observe on the Moon was also described as something that was supposed to be exceedingly rare, and now we're finding that it's not.
Ancient legends and stories are full of meteors that presage or bring about important events. Some of them would be fictional, inserted by the storyteller for dramatic effect, but there are an awful lot of them.
I don't know about that, we somehow managed to keep Ronnie Raygun from starting the nuclear war in Europe that he seemed to think was "winnable". That was even with Wolfowitz whispering "Nuke them now" in his ear.
My parents and grandparents remember the time before the existence of the UN, and the two world wars that prompted its creation. Having an outlet to vent disagreements publicly helped prevent their being vented privately and exploding into the conflict that would have left Earth uninhabitable by life forms higher than moles. It that's worthless to you, so be it. I'm glad it was there so Khrushchev (?) could bang his shoe on the table and Reagan could play to his base and no one started shooting.
I think we (and other arboreal animals and their descendents) have particularly good pattern-recognition for long twisty things; rather like the branches we needed to move safely through the trees. Some long twisty things were NOT good to grab though, as they might grab back.
Every arboreal climbing animal has binocular stereo vision, predator or not. Squirrels aren't predators but have excellent stereoscopic vision, or else they'd fall out of trees pretty frequently. They're not predators, they are in fact prey of pretty much everything that can get hold of one. Their eyes are much more forward-facing they they are side-facing. (When they do fall out of a tree it's funny as hell, though. They look even more embarrassed than a cat that's fallen.)
Primarily arboreal animals tend to have binocular vision, for rather obvious reasons. I've never heard of squirrels being called predators (although red squirrels will occasionally eat eggs). They need stereoscopic vision to navigate through their environment.
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Considering the level of competence of a lot of parents? A random wino on the street corner might be preferable to make the decision.
Actually Prince Vlad Dracul was from Wallachia. It was changed for the book as Transylvania sounded more mysterious, while Wallachia sounded like it could be a rural county somewhere in Cornwall.
There are upper limits on the amount of regular matter in the universe, because we can SEE through regions that would be opaque if they held the number of baryons necessary to make up the mass that's there.
As a ratio between their size and the space between them. A star is huge, but the space between stars is mind-bogglingly enormous, even in the middle of a galaxy or a globular cluster.
They're not random guesses people have pulled out of their asses and declared to be infallible truths. The framework was originally built out of example stars in our immediate neighborhood, such as Sirius, which we can examine in fairly good detail. We know that Sirius is x-many kilometers wide, has a specific luminosity, radiates in a set range of frequencies, and interacts in a certain manner with the other two stars in its system. From the frequencies we know that it's mostly hydrogen, from the gravitational interactions with its companions we can tell its mass. We can predict from that how much space that much hydrogen would need to occupy at what temperature, and how much light it would radiate at which temperature. From that set of values we can pick the known luminosity, and wonder of wonders it matches the observed size.
Do this enough times and you can build a model of what other stars should be like. The model works really well, it's not a "GUESS".
"Dark Matter" is not a definition of anything other than where our ignorance begins, and that's all it's meant to be at this time. It's a place-holder until we can get better data to change our theories. There's no hand-waving going on and no one is sitting on their laurels and saying "Everything's OK now since we invented a new word". Astrophysicists have models that fit most of the observations very well and make some good predictions that can be tested. We don't have the technology or the models available yet to test the properties of Dark Matter and Dark Energy, they've adjusted their theory and models to the edge of what we can test.
You sounded like you thought the Electric Universe quackery was in some way scientific, which may have been my misinterpretation.
We're actually conducting this experiment now. We'll get back to you in a couple hundred million years to let you know the results.
Seriously, this is your objection? Have you heard of these things called 'fossils'? We can pretty clearly look at the remains of what were fish which over the course of millions of years became something less like fish and more like amphibians, then less like amphibians and more like lizards, then less like lizards and more like opossums. You can look at the mudskipper today and it's pretty obvious what its future would be if its prey gradually migrates to drier habitats slower than the mudskipper's mutation rate.
Why does Dark Matter only appear in our results if we look at galaxy scale?
Scale. The motes of dust floating around in the air in your office are denser than the stars in the center of the Milky Way. The gravitational effects of Dark Matter are so miniscule that you need to fill the spaces between the clumps of 'normal' matter (i.e. stars, planets, interstellar clouds) with the stuff for the effect to be measurable.
So you propose replacing a bent, cobbled-together theory that explains most of what we're seeing with a out-of-the-box broken theory that explains almost nothing? That doesn't seem like much of an advance.
And I should add they also have Android phones and iPads.
Not necessarily. A lot of people at Microsoft use Firefox and Chrome.
If you're in the building you have physical access to some of the company resources, unless you're very closely watched. One local software company found a wireless access point had been plugged into a network port in a conference room and taped to the bottom of the table so that the network could be browsed from the parking lot or the coffee shop downstairs. They think it was a job applicant being interviewed who planted it. In another janitorial staff plugged a netbook into a port in an empty cubicle, where it sniffed the network for a few days until it was removed and handed off.
Did you know that your network printer has a hard drive that stores print jobs? Depending on the model that interface can be available via USB, Bluetooth, or even its own WAP. Security on that all-in-one printer tends to be pitiful, many of them run a customized Linux kernel that can run a network sniffer and store the results. So if you don't watch your soda delivery guy you might be losing data.
I think Mythosaz might be remembering, the same as I do, when they said that the necessary Doppler shift measurements were so subtle that astronomers would NEVER be able to detect them. Now they're detecting Earth-sized planets, and it's incredibly cool.
Really? You guys in the UK are lucky. If the police can in any way connect a drug charge to an arrest they will, because then they can confiscate anything even remotely related to drugs (including the car you smoked the joint in and the house you grew the plant in) and sell it. In some departments that makes up a really considerable percentage of their annual budget. Very frequently the property gets sold before the case even comes before the judge, and if you're found innocent you now have to sue the new owner to get your property back.
Oh, and yes, when they smash down your door (even when they've gone to the wrong address) it is solely your responsibility to repair the damage at your own cost. It's hell for landlords.
Actually, anyone who has done a lot of driving in northern Michigan in the winter will deal with a PIT maneuver without even thinking.
Have you some new method of preventing earthquakes? I'm sure the Nobel Prize committee would be interested in hearing about it.
5000 years ago there were perhaps 15 cities in all of North America, none in Europe, a couple dozen in South America and Asia, a dozen in India, and a couple score in Africa and the Middle East. Not much in the way of targets, and they were pretty small. Even then, Ubar in the Arabian Peninsula seems to have been destroyed by a nearby meteor strike while at the height of its power.
Rather wonder if the current rate of medium-size meteors isn't just a statistical fluke. Comet Shoemaker-Levy was described as a once in a hundred or even once in a thousand year event that we were being treated to. Since that time there have been three or possibly four more similar-sized events on Jupiter that we didn't see happen, we just saw the effects of. The first meteor impact that we managed to observe on the Moon was also described as something that was supposed to be exceedingly rare, and now we're finding that it's not.
Ancient legends and stories are full of meteors that presage or bring about important events. Some of them would be fictional, inserted by the storyteller for dramatic effect, but there are an awful lot of them.
My wife does the same thing with frogs, and my niece with spiders. It may be deeply seated, but it's not instinctual.
I don't know about that, we somehow managed to keep Ronnie Raygun from starting the nuclear war in Europe that he seemed to think was "winnable". That was even with Wolfowitz whispering "Nuke them now" in his ear.
My parents and grandparents remember the time before the existence of the UN, and the two world wars that prompted its creation. Having an outlet to vent disagreements publicly helped prevent their being vented privately and exploding into the conflict that would have left Earth uninhabitable by life forms higher than moles. It that's worthless to you, so be it. I'm glad it was there so Khrushchev (?) could bang his shoe on the table and Reagan could play to his base and no one started shooting.
Supposedly the holy Free Market will provide the one true solution.
I think we (and other arboreal animals and their descendents) have particularly good pattern-recognition for long twisty things; rather like the branches we needed to move safely through the trees. Some long twisty things were NOT good to grab though, as they might grab back.
Every arboreal climbing animal has binocular stereo vision, predator or not. Squirrels aren't predators but have excellent stereoscopic vision, or else they'd fall out of trees pretty frequently. They're not predators, they are in fact prey of pretty much everything that can get hold of one. Their eyes are much more forward-facing they they are side-facing. (When they do fall out of a tree it's funny as hell, though. They look even more embarrassed than a cat that's fallen.)
Primarily arboreal animals tend to have binocular vision, for rather obvious reasons. I've never heard of squirrels being called predators (although red squirrels will occasionally eat eggs). They need stereoscopic vision to navigate through their environment.