Three (3) week period of public comment? Eighty-nine (89) total public comments?
Where was everybody??
I don't think I need to mention how many comments are posted to slashdot every...say, hour.
Maybe the FTC designed a well-thought-out regulation with expert input into the technical requirements of the rule. Maybe they stress tested those technical measures designed to control the industry whose participant's primary work duty is to find ways to weasel / sleeze-el around anti-spam efforts. And maybe we all don't have any responsibility to provide a little input on a regulation that potentially places technical (see the "brown paper wrapper") and content controls (loosely-speaking) like motion pictures have, onto pervasive personal communication. Now, I haven't yet read the full text of the regulation, (just the FTC notice/release) or the 89 public comments (mostly by private citizens) but does anyone else still see potential for both unenforcibility and abuse? (Note the "valid physical postal address" requirements, and what defines "SEXUALLY EXPLICIT" spam and then falls under the various controls....)
From a quick search of stories, from the front pages search and my swiss-cheese memory, I don't see the this story posted before the end of public comment on the rules. Rrgh. While I'm not usually particularly vocal or active on these issues, I'm as guilty as anyone else in missing this FTC RFC, but... does anyone else see a big collective OOOPS here? 89 total public comments?
Ah, wow...that was one of the most lucid & instructive comments I've ever seen posted to/. in six years.... (Have you considered writing a textbook? Or are you one of those selfish astronomers that sticks to spending time doing science?;) j/k)</gratuitous>
Of course, I think it's one of the only times a paper's or topic's author has posted to the topic. I knew there was a reason I wade through the comments.
Too bad the attention span of readers here (and volume of the site) ensures no one will read (or mod) it.:( Rgh. (Which is, incidentally why I figure I can post a shameless comment like this now that doesn't contribute to the topic one iota.) I did my paltry bit of thesis work in near-infrared, and looking at protostellar outflows rather than galactic, but these techniques sound quite interesting; I'll have to read a couple of your papers when I have time. Anyway, I mostly liked the cool factor of your commenting here on your research. (I'm a fan of felicitous positive contribution to communites.) Thanks very much!
It's a good article (Hardware Central) that takes a more middle-of-the-road approach, without getting into the discussion of politics, patents and marketing. I still like the several articles/columns at everybody's favorite Tom's Hardware: Tom's Blurb: Why We Don't Trust Rambus (from last month on/. )
1. As for the first musings, the DoJ has just recently (the last several years), been stepping up its efforts in monitoring large companies and enforcing anti-trust laws, particularly in light of the huge number of recent large mergers. This comes after decades of near silence from the feds following the end of the Standard Oil/industry trusts of the early century. Most of us have only lived in the era where DoJ has played almost no role in this area, as there was little need for a long time. AT&T is the only case most people can think of, and I'm sure many slashdotters couldn't even walk and talk then.
As for preventing more mergers, I think big business has gotten used to the gov't staying silent and I recall seeing on CNN a little while ago about the growing number of abuses that make the crushing of small businesses easier. There are some sectors in which I think the feds need to step in more these days; this is not the best/most cut-and-dry case for that, but I think it's clear that there was significant strong-arming in exclusivity agreements and such going on at MS and something probably needed to be done. True, I don't like the gov't having to step in and meddle, and often mess things up, but big business did prove 100 years ago that it can't be always simply left to itself.
2. There is a clause in the anti-trust laws stating that the gov't _can_ ask for mid-level appeals to be bypassed. (This was written specifically to prevent large businesses with vast resources from stretching multiple trials out to decades.) Who knows whether it will be happening here.
Perhaps I'll try _reading_ a few papers before generalizing, one of these days. I was aware of the cold gas studies, but the hot hydrogen applications were interesting news to me. I'll have to look it up (and maybe check upstairs and see what the theorists come up with...).:} Much obliged.
Yes, and there's the idea that the universe was set up to _look_ like it has been around longer than it has, or is otherwise different than it appears to us....
That wasn't really my point, tho; I was mostly making an idle comment on the amusing correlation of scientific cosmological arguments and the changing couter-arguments. That creationists have this knack for not only using _scientific_"truth"_ (theory) as the basis for arguments refuting it, but grabbing the latest scientific piece of the puzzle and jumping directly to the whole picture (rather than making predictions of probablilities of the shape of the final picture a la sci). Creationist arguments change with each new scientific discovery/hypothesis and usually contradict the last truth and worldview they had, and generally don't really help any. You can track, say, historical edicts of the Vatican, up thru todays evangelistic subculture. It's, well...reactionary. It's just that, heck, most scientists can make better creationist arguments that most creationists. (Not that those two are necessarily mutually exclusive....)
Nor was I billing off religion, nor even necessarily saying that science "exists" or is correct.:} (Note that "creationism" and "religion" are not at all the same thing. (The word "multi-culturalism" comes to mind....):)
Well, it's not really a question an astonomer/physicist would likely ask, but I'll bite anyway; it's been a long day....
I'm not suprised you got three different answers, as it's not very definitive what you're asking. I can't tell from your post if you believe you yourself have the "answer" to the puzzle, (and you didn't say if you considered any of the answers "decent") but you could answer lots of things about it.... These gedanken experiments (esp. special relativity-related ones) tend to be very sensitive to the point you're trying to make. That is, you put bunch of physical laws on hold to illustrate another one or group of laws/theories. (Getting a person of superhuman speed aside, the pole-and-the-barn experiment requires you to assume some mechanism for closing the barn doors instantly, etc.) So, at the risk of having a long discussion of the barn doors, I'll take a couple angles on your question....
Of course, the pole doesn't matter for the physicist's take on a relativistic gedanken experiment (we just solve for the endpoints and any arbitrary point in between that you want to discuss), and the distance is on the order of 10^10 rather than 10^9 miles if you must refuse cgs.:}
The impossibility of the steel pole itself aside, you could make mass-energy, angular momentum arguments about the inertia of the pole and the requirements for accelerating it. And energy requirements partially aside, if you wanted to spin it at a human-normal rate, say a turn in a few seconds, relativistic effects/problems appear as you go out along the pole. So if you are referring to what a physicist means when you say what would the pole _look_ like," I could put the lorentz transformations into polar and spew, but I don't think anyone here want to listen to that. Many students/people are interested in, or think they are learning, how a relativistic object would actually _look_, whilst the example neglects relativistic doppler effects, apparent rotation, certain optics, the observers environment and attributes, etc.
As to how it would actually _look_, I'll offer that if you are turning slowly enough to keep the speed of the far end of the pole realistic, since you're looking down one end of it, to you, it _looks_ like a point (or a circle, or whatever the end/crossection of your pole is like). When you spin it around (and it would take you a long time, the time-to-travel of the light won't matter), it will still look like a point.:)
And the discussion of an outside observer is heavily dependent on assumptions like those above. And I've gone on long enough....
Creationist arguments are always pretty amusing. They're a constant backpeddaling of partially-informed responses to old news as the science constantly pushes back the frontiers of understanding. A chronological summary of such arguments over the centuries is an interesting, and amusing study (particularly, for juxtaposition, if you know some astronomical and other scientific history).
The business of science and scientists is thorough testing and skeptecism, and nearly every discovery/hypothesis/etc brings about published counterarguments probing its weak points and challanging its assumptions.
Not necessarily to put down creationists themselves, but their arguments given are usually just a latching-on to these skeptics criticisms, with only a pseudo-understanding of them or the original issue.
"Scientific" evidence/support articles/books about creation are usually a pretty quick read (though their entertainment value wore off on me some time ago...:).
In a sense, it is just another step, but this is an important one in the efforts for more acurate cosmological models. This area wasn't my specialty, (those better qualified correct me if I'm wrong) but it doesn't seem to me that this first observation can give terribly accurate measures of the _quantities_ of the interglalactic gas; more extensive studies will likely be needed. Of interest to baryonic matter studies (and of more remote interest to dark matter studies) will be quantities like this, and the next-gen space telescope will no doubt be an asset for further studies, as this is a technologically difficult one. I'm not sure if this is something we can follow up on from the ground.
This is certainly a long-standing and very interesting question to have addressed (and a kool way to celebrate a ten-year anniversary).
FYI, more information/photos/etc can be found at the space telescope website here
As an astrophysics-credentialed reader, I sympathize with your irritation, but there are posters worth listening to; but not everybody posts within 40 min of a story's appearance, nor do the moderators (who's part, despite all the problems, is extremely useful and important) get around to those comments in that time. Try this...this... this... this...or this. Chill and try reading a few hours or a day if you'd rather read other's comments than participate.
Refresh my memory; should it actually be able to get down to 25 magnitudes V filter? I thought Keck reached just a shade over 26, with almost an order greater collection area, among other things. (I should know the answer to this, but (like plenty of others here) figure I should also be entitled to relinquish intelligent thought when reading/.....)
I wonder if there was a particular choice to their section of the sky being surveyed, or if it was mainly observ/operational requirements.
Since you mentioned the significant additional work that could/may/will be done on these images, and the issues with their auto-processing, I wonder if they will also release raw(-er) data for better reduction, if nothing else. I can see plenty of potential shortcomings with their, in some areas, one-size-fits-all "pipelines." Seems like better, more frustrating by-hand work on many of these image strips will often be necessary. And massive deconvolution reps on terabytes of images...yum...and tedium...wow. And heck, people will be doing statistical surveys of these data for decades.
BTW, kudos to Hemos for a (rare) "real" astronomy info post, albeit under the guise of a Microsoft story.... And seriously, thanx to, in this case, the resident astronomers for taking the time to give info and the straight scoop on the story(ies). (Helpful for those of us who don't keep up on every line of astrophysical research underway.)
As for the comment on success of distributed public image processing, I dunno in this case; analyses of part of LMC are far less sexy than being part of the search for LGM.:}
It's actually not a bad point, though not so much for external access, but within the project itself, this is not an unconsidered problem. SDSS is a large collaboration and the image processing is distributed amongst many institutions. And IIRC from some near-IR thesis work on Keck, data sets from a single night can run to gigs or even tens of GB. (and their data reduction, due to their observing, is time sensitive, so they can't wait all day for a download) Since Internet2 is not sufficiently online to help this distributed project, it looks like their taking the "old"-fashioned approach to data transport:} On their "Data Processing Challanges" page:
...Charge "buckets" are then converted to digitized signals and written to tape on the mountain. The data travel from Apache Point to Fermilab via express courier. The tapes go to Fermilab's Feynman Computing Center and thence into the various pipelines: spectrographic data into the spectrographic pipeline; monitor data into the monitor pipeline; and imaging data into the astrometric, photometric, target selection and two other pipelines. Out of the pipelines comes information about the stars, galaxies and quasars, for inclusion in the Operations Database, written at Fermilab and at the Naval Observatory, which collates the information to keep the Sky Survey running.
But as has been said, it's unlikely that the full database will be available to individuals (through SDSS or even less likely, Microsoft (bandwidth/media=$) Heck, do you know what the fragile, insured, etc. postal rates would be for 25TB worth of DATs!?):)
Cheers,
K
Re:My problem with wormhole theories
on
Wormholes? Maybe.
·
· Score: 3
Actually it's a more a question for light-hearted physicists in the crowd; anyone doing serious physics work and without a sense of humor isn't reading this discussion. (I don't have a doctorate yet, so I can talk about them in the third person--and I have the luxury of answering this.:)
I may not be able to convince you of an answer with just hand-waving, (w/o a mess of formal mathematics) which is really what this all is, but well, neither of the first couple of replies is quite right I think; here's the best I can say:
It's true that 2D-3D, 3D-4D comparisons are not exactly analogous in every way, but the significant part is more that wormholes create a distortion--locally (you're not "folding" the whole worldsheet/universe)--in spacetime such that the distance along a wormhole's wall is not zero, but pretty short. In your earth/tunnel analogy, the earth hasn't changed/distorted any, and, well, there's really nothing analagous to the dirt dug up.:) The 2D surface of the earth is usually compared to our 3D universe; if you think of the surface as first flat with a grid drawn on it, and then distort it by placing a mass on it, the grid lines will distort or "stretch," if you like. The wormhole is like when the object is so dense it pushes the surface down so far the grid lines on the "walls" of the wormhole are effectively "infinitely" far apart. If this distortion connects up with another place on the surface, you have a wormhole, where just normally going one ("stretched") grid unit gets you really far.
Supersymmetric theories and their extensions tend to only work if space has, say, 10 dimensions, or 26. Obviously, by looking around, we can tell that these "extra" dimensions don't manifest themselves macroscopically. Where they "are" is a subject of speculation in this theoretical work.
Anyway, most of this is just hand-waving, which is why most physicists don't even glance at this subject unless they're actually doing formal work in it. Very little in this subject is "reasonable" or makes sense, without the massive formalisms that the ideas are based on. I find it interesting that (almost all) otherwise brilliant coders and the like latch on to some pretty strange ideas about the physical world they live in. I've been coding for long enough to know this; and I've done physics for enough years to know that I don't understand this stuff (theoretical cosmology and the like), and probably never will. You (anyone) may think you are starting to understand a lot of it, but, trust me, you don't.:) (It has nothing to do with you intrinsically.)
This phenomenon helps explain many of Hemos's strange science posts.:) Not to say that you shouldn't keep waving your hands (you just won't be doing any real/useful physics by it); while this subject itself is not "Stuff that Matters" much, it's fun, and maybe that matters enough.
Ah, but those 8 years tell you that the experimentalists would remind you that to build a _theoretical_ wormhole, all you need is a theoretician, a closed office, scratch paper, some coffee and a bad day, and you'll have a whole wealth of constructions. The experimentalist needs all that other practical crap you talked about....:)
<incredulous>But where'd you get to using units of _inches_ in (quasi-)science?</incredulous> :}
Or just tell your spouse that because of Quake and coding, (s)he's not getting any for the next week. "Oh, and I forgot to take out the trash and pick up the your parents at the airport; would you mind doing that for me?"
(S)He's refering to the good old-fashioned way black holes are created: fusion is the only known reasonable process--as in stars--which can support the infall pressure of gravity. Black-hole-destined stars in some sense _start_ with that requisite amount of matter; since we don't have a lab that big (with that much mass) to begin with, you'd have to start with something smaller, and acrete matter onto it in some way. In the meantime, you'd need that fusion power (outward thermal pressure) to support it as it gained mass so it didn't begin collapsing before it reached that critical mass.
This assumes you're going to use gravity to do the squishing. (a good assumption, as there's no force that we are capable of harnessing to do this ourselves) The other part he mentioned was trying to "compress an already existing mass"--again, kinda hard if it's < a few solar masses. (If you do come up with a harnessable energy source greater than that of the world, however, let us know, we'll want to patent it....oops, faux pas?:} ) Though he was saying that any mass can theoretically be made a black hole. Since gravity goes as the inverse square root of the density, you just have to squish it enough so that gravity can overwhelm all EM/quantum forces. _You_ could be a black hole, too! (Batteries not included) You'd have to become a lot smaller than.7 inches, though....
After perusing the website, I can see the progression of Pinkerton and its partners into this area of efforts. To its credit, Pinkerton has a long and distinguished history in safety and security in the United States and worldwide. In reading their "about" pages and the like, it seems that they're over their head in this new arena that those controlling education have dived into faster than every frickin' toilet paper retailer into e-commerce. It's an old knee-jerk reaction to big-news school violence.
In Pinkerton's case, the company has dived in with only experience in workplace security (they call it their AlertLine(R) service). But this is only dealing with working adults, who have very different behavior patterns, needs and concerns than students. The company/group claims to be made up of "a full-time staff of designers, illustrators, copywriters, graphic designers and project managers"; I don't see any, oh, psychologists, counselors, teachers, student leaders, or even any claims of "people who can get through to kids"(tm).
I think teenagers need reasons to struggle through a difficult, and confusing time in life. things to do--to want to do, to reach for. In high school, I did varsity sports--and I programmed. I fought to fit in--and stand out. Through school I was picked on, but school adults didn't care enough to or didn't know how to do much of anything about it or the punks around school. I saw that adult's stereotypes and profiling didn't work. I was confused--but always open to ideas, if somebody would only give a damn and maybe offer something. And we were smart--but weren't equipped to make judgement calls like this program is asking. (And, like most here have pointed out of themselves, I turned out fine, like most of the people these profiles would pick on.)
As for this hotline, it sticks out like a severed thumb in the program. I mean, there are actually good parts to their program, even a few things people have suggested here on this discussion. But most of them, like positive-oriented discourse programs, tend to end up taking a back seat to things like this hotline, which sounds like it's "doing something"(tm). Especially at a large, for-profit company. I mean, there are pleny of intelligent teenagers on/. to correct me if I'm wrong, but I hardly think this hotline is the way to connect to students. Especially, who the heck is going to rat to (or seek help from) a big corporation!?
And, OTOH,/. is also no utopia; there are plenty of sophmoric lusers--just like any other on- or off-line community, school, society, etc.--to see what goal-less punks do in their excessive free time: if Pinkerton wants to see a preview of how their system will be used, it can just scrape the bottom of this discussion or most others (too bad there's no "browse threshold below +1" option.:} ).
All told, == Waste of Time. The hotline is mostly out of line. Programs for counselling, challenging activities, tolerance, or even reporting actual violence, should be for schools, parents, students, local authorities or other grass-roots organisations to take responsibility for, not done by corporations that have the image of just trying to make money off the latest sensationalized headline news.
Heh. When I was wading thru gigs of NIRC data, Slashdot was definitely a procrastination technique, and I was posting anonymously then, too.... If you read enough, and care to, make yourself an account; I know I find it worth it to vaguely keep an eye out for/. physicists and their comments, who are a good reminder that it is more often select/. comments than/. stories that are decent/fun sources for science tidbits.
(And I'd moderate this up, but, well, you're at 5 already, so I'm posting instead....)
I'm not sure where everyone's getting their data for nVidia's supremacy, but 3dfx's release of PC Data's latest report is here. This probably includes OEM boards shipped with machines and the like, but all opinions aside, I'm pretty sure 3dfx has almost always (during the life of the Voodoos) held the top spot in multiple categories.
I think you need to get out more and appreciate how stunningly beautiful nature actually is.:}
Seriously, though, when we do analysis, a large part of the work can be considered a form of image enhancement or image manipulation. You might spend two hours or two nights on the actual observing, and two months (or much more) on the data reduction. That tedious work makes a big difference in how good your images will be for use in actual analysis and publication, or, alternatively, how good the pretty John Q. Public version of them will look on a webpage (cummulative with, but largely independent of the quality of the actual observation). (Ah, I C while I was typing someone mentioned a few of those things that go on in optical and other regimes; I'll skip things related to that.)
Your point jogs my memory on something about NASA graphics people, tho. ("They're goood...real goood.") When I visited a digital video lab at the JPL last year or so, they showed an S-VHS of a nice fly-by of the LA basin (centered around JPL site, and sans human structures). It was about 30 sec, in 24-bit and some ridiculous 3D res, making it some 2.5 GB.
Not impressed? It was made in _1982_. On a 286 speed equivalent machine. It took five days to render. And it was stunningly beautiful. Just (aside from you guys who actually _know_) imagine what they're doing now.
Well, you certainly got answers.... You've clearly been Addicted long enough to know not to bait slashdotters like that with a push-button topic like envir.:}
Growing up as a kid in the 70's, I have an eager fascination with space exploration. Despite growing up as a kid in the 80's, I manage to have an eager facination with space exploration. (Said facination was nearly vaporized in the process of getting an astrophysics degree, but, 'nother story.)
I'm just getting over the fact that it's 1999 and we *still* don't have a moon base...) Heck, why try and get over it? Hang in there....
It's too bad it's only convenient for most of us to get space (and astro, and other sci) news from the mainstream news.
As others have mentioned, earth-orbiting crap will soon become a serious problem. Elsewhere is another story. I was an Eagle Scout, but this isn't exactly the Yosemite valley: extraterrestrial space is an incomprehensibly violent and hostile place--or range of places. And even though our surface probes aren't going anywhere for a long time (a few posted planetary misconceptions notwithstanding) there's really very little chance that they're doing any harm. (While also remote, the chances of it being the other way around are much more likely.) I think most astronomers and aerospace engineers have a good grasp of what they--and their machines--are getting into.
And more practically, we barely give NASA enough money to get space probes put up anywhere, much less bring them back. I think we should applaud achievements in these realms and do our environmental worrying down here where it matters. (Updated: maybe knowledge is a lunar vacation, but I rather prefered to to look at it as an "In the name of Science and Understanding" program....)
...and they aren't standing out at normal threshold! Moderators, are you listening?
I haven't had the chance to read either of the papers mentioned, but I was wondering (idle curiosity) where the (deeply scientifically respected) BBC got the idea of O, Si, Mg detection in the observations.
Of course, if you beleive theories,...
Sure, I'll believe theories; even 2sigma ones, so long as I don't actually have to bet my dog....
Hopefully, we'll see a similar headline in the future that is more beleivable.
Having spent time in physics and general journalism, the aims of the two are in fact mutually exclusive. I'm pretty sure that if the headline is scientifically believable, it will never appear in the popular press (Somebody's Law). (Too bad/. is sucked into the same trap too often.)
Slashdot Mirror
Three (3) week period of public comment? Eighty-nine (89) total public comments?
Where was everybody??
I don't think I need to mention how many comments are posted to slashdot every...say, hour.
Maybe the FTC designed a well-thought-out regulation with expert input into the technical requirements of the rule. Maybe they stress tested those technical measures designed to control the industry whose participant's primary work duty is to find ways to weasel / sleeze-el around anti-spam efforts. And maybe we all don't have any responsibility to provide a little input on a regulation that potentially places technical (see the "brown paper wrapper") and content controls (loosely-speaking) like motion pictures have, onto pervasive personal communication. Now, I haven't yet read the full text of the regulation, (just the FTC notice/release) or the 89 public comments (mostly by private citizens) but does anyone else still see potential for both unenforcibility and abuse? (Note the "valid physical postal address" requirements, and what defines "SEXUALLY EXPLICIT" spam and then falls under the various controls....)
From a quick search of stories, from the front pages search and my swiss-cheese memory, I don't see the this story posted before the end of public comment on the rules. Rrgh. While I'm not usually particularly vocal or active on these issues, I'm as guilty as anyone else in missing this FTC RFC, but... does anyone else see a big collective OOOPS here? 89 total public comments?
Where was everybody?
Ah, wow...that was one of the most lucid & instructive comments I've ever seen posted to /. in six years.... (Have you considered writing a textbook? Or are you one of those selfish astronomers that sticks to spending time doing science? ;) j/k)</gratuitous>
:( Rgh. (Which is, incidentally why I figure I can post a shameless comment like this now that doesn't contribute to the topic one iota.) I did my paltry bit of thesis work in near-infrared, and looking at protostellar outflows rather than galactic, but these techniques sound quite interesting; I'll have to read a couple of your papers when I have time. Anyway, I mostly liked the cool factor of your commenting here on your research. (I'm a fan of felicitous positive contribution to communites.) Thanks very much!
Of course, I think it's one of the only times a paper's or topic's author has posted to the topic. I knew there was a reason I wade through the comments.
Too bad the attention span of readers here (and volume of the site) ensures no one will read (or mod) it.
Cheers,
Kurtis
Tom's Blurb: Why We Don't Trust Rambus (from last month on
Memory Wars
Dissecting Rambus and
Rambus Requiem for good technical discussions and benchmarking.
And there are several other good ones if you look up "Rambus" or the mainboard guides on the site.
And if anyone can get a copy of the serious and excellent Forbes ASAP, apparently the May 29, 2000 issue has a good summary of Rambus's tactics.
K
1. As for the first musings, the DoJ has just recently (the last several years), been stepping up its efforts in monitoring large companies and enforcing anti-trust laws, particularly in light of the huge number of recent large mergers. This comes after decades of near silence from the feds following the end of the Standard Oil/industry trusts of the early century. Most of us have only lived in the era where DoJ has played almost no role in this area, as there was little need for a long time. AT&T is the only case most people can think of, and I'm sure many slashdotters couldn't even walk and talk then.
...
As for preventing more mergers, I think big business has gotten used to the gov't staying silent and I recall seeing on CNN a little while
ago about the growing number of abuses that make the crushing of small businesses easier. There are some sectors in which I think the feds need to step in more these days; this is not the best/most cut-and-dry case for that, but I think it's clear that there was significant strong-arming in exclusivity agreements and such going on at MS and something probably needed to be done. True, I don't like the gov't having to step in and meddle, and often mess things up, but big business did prove 100 years ago that it can't be always simply left to itself.
2. There is a clause in the anti-trust laws stating that the gov't _can_ ask for mid-level appeals to be bypassed. (This was written specifically to prevent large businesses with vast resources from stretching multiple trials out to decades.) Who knows whether it will be happening here.
3. NanoSoft
PicoSoft
FemtoSoft
AttoSoft
ZeptoSoft
YoctoSoft
KKN
Perhaps I'll try _reading_ a few papers before generalizing, one of these days. I was aware of the cold gas studies, but the hot hydrogen applications were interesting news to me. I'll have to look it up (and maybe check upstairs and see what the theorists come up with...).
Cheers,
Kurtis
Yes, and there's the idea that the universe was set up to _look_ like it has been around longer than it has, or is otherwise different than it appears to us....
:} (Note that "creationism" and "religion" are not at all the same thing. (The word "multi-culturalism" comes to mind....) :)
That wasn't really my point, tho; I was mostly making an idle comment on the amusing correlation of scientific cosmological arguments and the changing couter-arguments. That creationists have this knack for not only using _scientific_"truth"_ (theory) as the basis for arguments refuting it, but grabbing the latest scientific piece of the puzzle and jumping directly to the whole picture (rather than making predictions of probablilities of the shape of the final picture a la sci). Creationist arguments change with each new scientific discovery/hypothesis and usually contradict the last truth and worldview they had, and generally don't really help any. You can track, say, historical edicts of the Vatican, up thru todays evangelistic subculture. It's, well...reactionary. It's just that, heck, most scientists can make better creationist arguments that most creationists. (Not that those two are necessarily mutually exclusive....)
Nor was I billing off religion, nor even necessarily saying that science "exists" or is correct.
What topic was this on anyway...? <g>
Cheers,
K
Well, it's not really a question an astonomer/physicist would likely ask, but I'll bite anyway; it's been a long day....
:}
:)
I'm not suprised you got three different answers, as it's not very definitive what you're asking. I can't tell from your post if you believe you yourself have the "answer" to the puzzle, (and you didn't say if you considered any of the answers "decent") but you could answer lots of things about it.... These gedanken experiments (esp. special relativity-related ones) tend to be very sensitive to the point you're trying to make. That is, you put bunch of physical laws on hold to illustrate another one or group of laws/theories. (Getting a person of superhuman speed aside, the pole-and-the-barn experiment requires you to assume some mechanism for closing the barn doors instantly, etc.) So, at the risk of having a long discussion of the barn doors, I'll take a couple angles on your question....
Of course, the pole doesn't matter for the physicist's take on a relativistic gedanken experiment (we just solve for the endpoints and any arbitrary point in between that you want to discuss), and the distance is on the order of 10^10 rather than 10^9 miles if you must refuse cgs.
The impossibility of the steel pole itself aside, you could make mass-energy, angular momentum arguments about the inertia of the pole and the requirements for accelerating it. And energy requirements partially aside, if you wanted to spin it at a human-normal rate, say a turn in a few seconds, relativistic effects/problems appear as you go out along the pole. So if you are referring to what a physicist means when you say what would the pole _look_ like," I could put the lorentz transformations into polar and spew, but I don't think anyone here want to listen to that. Many students/people are interested in, or think they are learning, how a relativistic object would actually _look_, whilst the example neglects relativistic doppler effects, apparent rotation, certain optics, the observers environment and attributes, etc.
As to how it would actually _look_, I'll offer that if you are turning slowly enough to keep the speed of the far end of the pole realistic, since you're looking down one end of it, to you, it _looks_ like a point (or a circle, or whatever the end/crossection of your pole is like). When you spin it around (and it would take you a long time, the time-to-travel of the light won't matter), it will still look like a point.
And the discussion of an outside observer is heavily dependent on assumptions like those above. And I've gone on long enough....
Cheers,
Kurtis
Creationist arguments are always pretty amusing. They're a constant backpeddaling of partially-informed responses to old news as the science constantly pushes back the frontiers of understanding. A chronological summary of such arguments over the centuries is an interesting, and amusing study (particularly, for juxtaposition, if you know some astronomical and other scientific history).
The business of science and scientists is thorough testing and skeptecism, and nearly every discovery/hypothesis/etc brings about published counterarguments probing its weak points and challanging its assumptions.
Not necessarily to put down creationists themselves, but their arguments given are usually just a latching-on to these skeptics criticisms, with only a pseudo-understanding of them or the original issue.
"Scientific" evidence/support articles/books about creation are usually a pretty quick read (though their entertainment value wore off on me some time ago...:).
This is certainly a long-standing and very interesting question to have addressed (and a kool way to celebrate a ten-year anniversary).
FYI, more information/photos/etc can be found at the space telescope website here
Cheers,
Kurtis
Refresh my memory; should it actually be able to get down to 25 magnitudes V filter? I thought Keck reached just a shade over 26, with almost an order greater collection area, among other things. (I should know the answer to this, but (like plenty of others here) figure I should also be entitled to relinquish intelligent thought when reading /. ....)
:}
I wonder if there was a particular choice to their section of the sky being surveyed, or if it was mainly observ/operational requirements.
Since you mentioned the significant additional work that could/may/will be done on these images, and the issues with their auto-processing, I wonder if they will also release raw(-er) data for better reduction, if nothing else. I can see plenty of potential shortcomings with their, in some areas, one-size-fits-all "pipelines." Seems like better, more frustrating by-hand work on many of these image strips will often be necessary. And massive deconvolution reps on terabytes of images...yum...and tedium...wow. And heck, people will be doing statistical surveys of these data for decades.
BTW, kudos to Hemos for a (rare) "real" astronomy info post, albeit under the guise of a Microsoft story.... And seriously, thanx to, in this case, the resident astronomers for taking the time to give info and the straight scoop on the story(ies). (Helpful for those of us who don't keep up on every line of astrophysical research underway.)
As for the comment on success of distributed public image processing, I dunno in this case; analyses of part of LMC are far less sexy than being part of the search for LGM.
Kurtis
On their "Data Processing Challanges" page:
But as has been said, it's unlikely that the full database will be available to individuals (through SDSS or even less likely, Microsoft (bandwidth/media=$) Heck, do you know what the fragile, insured, etc. postal rates would be for 25TB worth of DATs!?) :)
Cheers,
K
I may not be able to convince you of an answer with just hand-waving, (w/o a mess of formal mathematics) which is really what this all is, but well, neither of the first couple of replies is quite right I think; here's the best I can say:
It's true that 2D-3D, 3D-4D comparisons are not exactly analogous in every way, but the significant part is more that wormholes create a distortion--locally (you're not "folding" the whole worldsheet/universe)--in spacetime such that the distance along a wormhole's wall is not zero, but pretty short. In your earth/tunnel analogy, the earth hasn't changed/distorted any, and, well, there's really nothing analagous to the dirt dug up. :) The 2D surface of the earth is usually compared to our 3D universe; if you think of the surface as first flat with a grid drawn on it, and then distort it by placing a mass on it, the grid lines will distort or "stretch," if you like. The wormhole is like when the object is so dense it pushes the surface down so far the grid lines on the "walls" of the wormhole are effectively "infinitely" far apart. If this distortion connects up with another place on the surface, you have a wormhole, where just normally going one ("stretched") grid unit gets you really far.
Supersymmetric theories and their extensions tend to only work if space has, say, 10 dimensions, or 26. Obviously, by looking around, we can tell that these "extra" dimensions don't manifest themselves macroscopically. Where they "are" is a subject of speculation in this theoretical work.
Anyway, most of this is just hand-waving, which is why most physicists don't even glance at this subject unless they're actually doing formal work in it. Very little in this subject is "reasonable" or makes sense, without the massive formalisms that the ideas are based on. I find it interesting that (almost all) otherwise brilliant coders and the like latch on to some pretty strange ideas about the physical world they live in. I've been coding for long enough to know this; and I've done physics for enough years to know that I don't understand this stuff (theoretical cosmology and the like), and probably never will. You (anyone) may think you are starting to understand a lot of it, but, trust me, you don't. :) (It has nothing to do with you intrinsically.)
This phenomenon helps explain many of Hemos's strange science posts. :) Not to say that you shouldn't keep waving your hands (you just won't be doing any real/useful physics by it); while this subject itself is not "Stuff that Matters" much, it's fun, and maybe that matters enough.
$0.02
Ah, but those 8 years tell you that the experimentalists would remind you that to build a _theoretical_ wormhole, all you need is a theoretician, a closed office, scratch paper, some coffee and a bad day, and you'll have a whole wealth of constructions. The experimentalist needs all that other practical crap you talked about....:)
:}
<incredulous>But where'd you get to using units of _inches_ in (quasi-)science?</incredulous>
Or just tell your spouse that because of Quake and coding, (s)he's not getting any for the next week. "Oh, and I forgot to take out the trash and pick up the your parents at the airport; would you mind doing that for me?"
:}
(S)He's refering to the good old-fashioned way black holes are created: fusion is the only known reasonable process--as in stars--which can support the infall pressure of gravity. Black-hole-destined stars in some sense _start_ with that requisite amount of matter; since we don't have a lab that big (with that much mass) to begin with, you'd have to start with something smaller, and acrete matter onto it in some way. In the meantime, you'd need that fusion power (outward thermal pressure) to support it as it gained mass so it didn't begin collapsing before it reached that critical mass.
:} ) Though he was saying that any mass can theoretically be made a black hole. Since gravity goes as the inverse square root of the density, you just have to squish it enough so that gravity can overwhelm all EM/quantum forces. _You_ could be a black hole, too! (Batteries not included) You'd have to become a lot smaller than .7 inches, though....
This assumes you're going to use gravity to do the squishing. (a good assumption, as there's no force that we are capable of harnessing to do this ourselves) The other part he mentioned was trying to "compress an already existing mass"--again, kinda hard if it's < a few solar masses. (If you do come up with a harnessable energy source greater than that of the world, however, let us know, we'll want to patent it....oops, faux pas?
Phun with (impractical) physics
In Pinkerton's case, the company has dived in with only experience in workplace security (they call it their AlertLine(R) service). But this is only dealing with working adults, who have very different behavior patterns, needs and concerns than students. The company/group claims to be made up of "a full-time staff of designers, illustrators, copywriters, graphic designers and project managers"; I don't see any, oh, psychologists, counselors, teachers, student leaders, or even any claims of "people who can get through to kids"(tm).
I think teenagers need reasons to struggle through a difficult, and confusing time in life. things to do--to want to do, to reach for. In high school, I did varsity sports--and I programmed. I fought to fit in--and stand out. Through school I was picked on, but school adults didn't care enough to or didn't know how to do much of anything about it or the punks around school. I saw that adult's stereotypes and profiling didn't work. I was confused--but always open to ideas, if somebody would only give a damn and maybe offer something. And we were smart--but weren't equipped to make judgement calls like this program is asking. (And, like most here have pointed out of themselves, I turned out fine, like most of the people these profiles would pick on.)
As for this hotline, it sticks out like a severed thumb in the program. I mean, there are actually good parts to their program, even a few things people have suggested here on this discussion. But most of them, like positive-oriented discourse programs, tend to end up taking a back seat to things like this hotline, which sounds like it's "doing something"(tm). Especially at a large, for-profit company. I mean, there are pleny of intelligent teenagers on /. to correct me if I'm wrong, but I hardly think this hotline is the way to connect to students. Especially, who the heck is going to rat to (or seek help from) a big corporation!?
And, OTOH, /. is also no utopia; there are plenty of sophmoric lusers--just like any other on- or off-line community, school, society, etc.--to see what goal-less punks do in their excessive free time: if Pinkerton wants to see a preview of how their system will be used, it can just scrape the bottom of this discussion or most others (too bad there's no "browse threshold below +1" option. :} ).
All told, == Waste of Time. The hotline is mostly out of line. Programs for counselling, challenging activities, tolerance, or even reporting actual violence, should be for schools, parents, students, local authorities or other grass-roots organisations to take responsibility for, not done by corporations that have the image of just trying to make money off the latest sensationalized headline news.
Just my opinion, I could be wrong.
Heh. When I was wading thru gigs of NIRC data, Slashdot was definitely a procrastination technique, and I was posting anonymously then, too.... If you read enough, and care to, make yourself an account; I know I find it worth it to vaguely keep an eye out for /. physicists and their comments, who are a good reminder that it is more often select /. comments than /. stories that are decent/fun sources for science tidbits.
(And I'd moderate this up, but, well, you're at 5 already, so I'm posting instead....)
Cheers
I'm not sure where everyone's getting their data for nVidia's supremacy, but 3dfx's release of PC Data's latest report is here . This probably includes OEM boards shipped with machines and the like, but all opinions aside, I'm pretty sure 3dfx has almost always (during the life of the Voodoos) held the top spot in multiple categories.
I think you need to get out more and appreciate how stunningly beautiful nature actually is. :}
Seriously, though, when we do analysis, a large part of the work can be considered a form of image enhancement or image manipulation. You might spend two hours or two nights on the actual observing, and two months (or much more) on the data reduction. That tedious work makes a big difference in how good your images will be for use in actual analysis and publication, or, alternatively, how good the pretty John Q. Public version of them will look on a webpage (cummulative with, but largely independent of the quality of the actual observation). (Ah, I C while I was typing someone mentioned a few of those things that go on in optical and other regimes; I'll skip things related to that.)
Your point jogs my memory on something about NASA graphics people, tho. ("They're goood...real goood.") When I visited a digital video lab at the JPL last year or so, they showed an S-VHS of a nice fly-by of the LA basin (centered around JPL site, and sans human structures). It was about 30 sec, in 24-bit and some ridiculous 3D res, making it some 2.5 GB.
Not impressed? It was made in _1982_. On a 286 speed equivalent machine. It took five days to render. And it was stunningly beautiful. Just (aside from you guys who actually _know_) imagine what they're doing now.
Fun, fun
K
Well, you certainly got answers.... You've clearly been Addicted long enough to know not to bait slashdotters like that with a push-button topic like envir. :}
Growing up as a kid in the 70's, I have an eager fascination with space exploration.
Despite growing up as a kid in the 80's, I manage to have an eager facination with space exploration. (Said facination was nearly vaporized in the process of getting an astrophysics degree, but, 'nother story.)
I'm just getting over the fact that it's 1999 and we *still* don't have a moon base...)
Heck, why try and get over it? Hang in there....
It's too bad it's only convenient for most of us to get space (and astro, and other sci) news from the mainstream news.
As others have mentioned, earth-orbiting crap will soon become a serious problem. Elsewhere is another story. I was an Eagle Scout, but this isn't exactly the Yosemite valley: extraterrestrial space is an incomprehensibly violent and hostile place--or range of places. And even though our surface probes aren't going anywhere for a long time (a few posted planetary misconceptions notwithstanding) there's really very little chance that they're doing any harm. (While also remote, the chances of it being the other way around are much more likely.) I think most astronomers and aerospace engineers have a good grasp of what they--and their machines--are getting into.
And more practically, we barely give NASA enough money to get space probes put up anywhere, much less bring them back. I think we should applaud achievements in these realms and do our environmental worrying down here where it matters.
(Updated: maybe knowledge is a lunar vacation, but I rather prefered to to look at it as an "In the name of Science and Understanding" program....)
my ~38.00 lira
K
I haven't had the chance to read either of the papers mentioned, but I was wondering (idle curiosity) where the (deeply scientifically respected) BBC got the idea of O, Si, Mg detection in the observations.
Of course, if you beleive theories, ...
Sure, I'll believe theories; even 2sigma ones, so long as I don't actually have to bet my dog....
Hopefully, we'll see a similar headline in the future that is more beleivable.
Having spent time in physics and general journalism, the aims of the two are in fact mutually exclusive. I'm pretty sure that if the headline is scientifically believable, it will never appear in the popular press (Somebody's Law). (Too bad /. is sucked into the same trap too often.)