That reminds me about an interesting project "global consciousness project", which based on years of randomly generated numbers says, that basically - when a lot of people think about the same thing - the standard deviation of randomly generated numbers is exceeded.
The random numbres are generated using eg. quantum-indeterminate electronic noise, and when there is a tsunami, or the pope died - the random numbers are suddenly not as random as expected.
I have a decent cassegrain, so I know what I'm talking about. A *good* cassegrain would be immensely expensive, because it needs APO coating on *two* lens and a perfect mirror, coated also. And still you have a black hole in the middle which reduces your aperture to about 80%. This hole plainly wastes that expensive APO layers, and this perfect mirror.
Your choice about in-home viewing, and portability seems to assume that you must carry the luggage in a bus. Oh well... then you really need to pick sth smaller. But if you got a car, your choice is different: reflector for deep-sky or refractor for planets. Or... a very good refractor for both deep-sky and planets. Cassegrains suck by definition. Just look at the geometry layout and light transmission. There is nothing that can fix it. The portability does *not* outweigh this.
I have a cassegrain, and I simply don't bother to take it anywhere, because the view is too terrible, compared with other (yep, heavier and bigger) refractors.
dobson: newtonian reflector on dobsonian mount
on
Entry-Level Astronomy?
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· Score: 2, Informative
Just a clarification, so you can compare what I'm talking about in my other post. A dobson is a newtonian reflector (has a huge mirror, and good brightness) with a dobsonian mount. Dobsonian mount is the cheapest possible. You cannot adjust it to the ecliptic plane, etc.
Also such dobson is quite good for deep-sky (big mirror = big brightness), and terrible for planets (blurry view on high magnifications due to airflow turbulences and cannot track planet moevement on the sky due to cheap dosbon mount).
Personally I'd advice against dobson, because after the initial enthusisam wears down, you get tired by the unconfortability of working with dobson mount. It's like using debian 4 years ago (eg. woody release) compared with comfort of using kubuntu today;) So get a better mount if you can. But that's expensive too. Oh well, if you can't spend more than that $1000 you gotta buy just binoculars.
$1000 is not much. I've been doing research quite a long time on what should I buy, to get the best possible view both for planets and deep-sky. You know - usually for deeps skies a newton with huge mirrors is good, while they are not applicable for planets, because newtons cannot produce big magnification with enough detail. While for planet viewing the refractors are the best, because they can produce big magnifications without the distortions of newtonians. But refractors have too small aperture to collect enough light for comfortable deep-sky viewing.
The best balance in this big_mirror/refractor conflict is an apochromatic refractor. Because - apochromatic means that the lens are covered with special layers that give about 96+% of light transmission (so it's better than non-apochromatic refractor, where some light is wasted on the lens and you don't see deep-sky objects clearly), and special layer eliminates light dispersion like in an optical prism (otherwise each color would go on a different path and the resulting picture of something looked more like a rainbow instead of beight sharp). And also as a refractor it's good for planets. But... this APO refractor has to have big aperture, or it won't work for deep-sky anyway.
Refractors have some other advantages - for instance you don't have unnecessary air flow between the lens because they are inside a tube. Newtons are much brighter (good for deep-sky) but air turbulence blurries the view on planets.
Oh, and forget about cassegrains, they are compact, that's true (the only advantage). But the view is terrible.
Well if you have just $1000 you gotta decide: (1) want to see distant galaxies (newton), or (2) view to see planets (refractor). But I suggest to spend a bit more cash and get APO refractor. Should be good for both.
I particularly like the spelling feature in new vim, right-click menu (:set mousemodel=popup) to select a corrected word or remember current word as correct. Perhaps writing a vim plugin as you explain could be possible? I'd be very glad to use it too;)
the tags are right. The brown color is not in the hue (compare with rainbow), so controlling the wavelength is not enough. You'd need to controll brightness at least, and then brown would be kind-of dark-orange.
Also, if you rely on reflecting light (aka. mirror), you rely on fact that the light source HAS this color wavelength in its spectrum. This is not always the case if you don't use sunlight.
I remember reading an article about demographic problems in germany. People have a very small amount of kids, and due to this problem they have unreasonably high expectations about their kids. It is frequent to hire a private teacher to work with the kid, to find many extra exercises for them like swimming, studying foreign languages (even at the age of 3!), etc.
The problem arising from that is a very high psychological stress the kid must cope with. High expectations from their parents cause headaches and other health problems, especially when a kid fails at some task. Give a kid free time.
In fact at that age all kid's time must be a free time. Your job is to find a method to put fun into a learning. Small kids decide what they want to do with their free time only directed by their enthusiasm at some activity. When you find yourself trying to convince him to do something you have already failed. You can only show your own enthusiasm, and show how fun it is. It's in fact easy to convince a kid when you are enthusiastic yourself (which is not frequent with teachers who are bored with their job). But when you see that the kid loses an interest you must immediatly stop.
And expect nothing! If you will expect that the kid will be successfull at anything you will only increase the stress level.
You say exactly what is written in that article. I pointed to it in the opening of this thread. Of course nobody bothered to read it. A finer point there:
Interestingly, as we were first writing this paper, Bill Gates announced his intention to retire from running Microsoft in 2008 -- the same year we see the 64-bit transition completing. The timing is suggestive, and Gates isn't stupid; we assume he can read the hardware trend curves as well as we can. Perhaps, suspecting he knows what's coming, he has decided to leave at the top of his game. Gates' successor, Ray Ozzie, seems much more open to the idea that there are portions of the universe Microsoft cannot easily consume.
Hey, it was just a week ago, and it summarizes all the struggle pretty well:
Eveyone will switch to 64bit hardware by the end of 2008, it's impossible otherwise. The moore's law tells us what will be the memory capacity by 2008. And with 32bit it's impossible to address more than 4GB. Yeah, go ahead and tell that it will take a bit more, like just one year more. No problem. We will not see a working 64bit version of windows by then.
That article is great and gave me a lot of thought
I remember there was a lot of effort put into ODF, then there was a change of political leaders in Massachusetts, and then.. I can't remember - did they scrap whole project, or not?
What is the current state of Massachusetts switch?
Slashdot Mirror
OMG, such people really DO exist in US. I couldn't belive this before. Pray tell me - is Poland a state or a country? ;p
because it is NOT this ODF (the ISO standard (almost?), by OASIS) everyone knows about. Just some stupid group of people with same name.
It's just 1 mod point ;-)
"standard deviation .. is exceeded"
sorry for the inaccurrancy. Look at technical details if you want.
That reminds me about an interesting project "global consciousness project", which based on years of randomly generated numbers says, that basically - when a lot of people think about the same thing - the standard deviation of randomly generated numbers is exceeded.
The random numbres are generated using eg. quantum-indeterminate electronic noise, and when there is a tsunami, or the pope died - the random numbers are suddenly not as random as expected.
Interesting stuff.
hopefully The Chaos will save us!
If this page used to exist, you may find an archived version:
I have a decent cassegrain, so I know what I'm talking about. A *good* cassegrain would be immensely expensive, because it needs APO coating on *two* lens and a perfect mirror, coated also. And still you have a black hole in the middle which reduces your aperture to about 80%. This hole plainly wastes that expensive APO layers, and this perfect mirror.
Your choice about in-home viewing, and portability seems to assume that you must carry the luggage in a bus. Oh well... then you really need to pick sth smaller. But if you got a car, your choice is different: reflector for deep-sky or refractor for planets. Or... a very good refractor for both deep-sky and planets. Cassegrains suck by definition. Just look at the geometry layout and light transmission. There is nothing that can fix it. The portability does *not* outweigh this.
I have a cassegrain, and I simply don't bother to take it anywhere, because the view is too terrible, compared with other (yep, heavier and bigger) refractors.
Just a clarification, so you can compare what I'm talking about in my other post. A dobson is a newtonian reflector (has a huge mirror, and good brightness) with a dobsonian mount. Dobsonian mount is the cheapest possible. You cannot adjust it to the ecliptic plane, etc. Also such dobson is quite good for deep-sky (big mirror = big brightness), and terrible for planets (blurry view on high magnifications due to airflow turbulences and cannot track planet moevement on the sky due to cheap dosbon mount). Personally I'd advice against dobson, because after the initial enthusisam wears down, you get tired by the unconfortability of working with dobson mount. It's like using debian 4 years ago (eg. woody release) compared with comfort of using kubuntu today ;) So get a better mount if you can. But that's expensive too. Oh well, if you can't spend more than that $1000 you gotta buy just binoculars.
$1000 is not much. I've been doing research quite a long time on what should I buy, to get the best possible view both for planets and deep-sky. You know - usually for deeps skies a newton with huge mirrors is good, while they are not applicable for planets, because newtons cannot produce big magnification with enough detail. While for planet viewing the refractors are the best, because they can produce big magnifications without the distortions of newtonians. But refractors have too small aperture to collect enough light for comfortable deep-sky viewing.
The best balance in this big_mirror/refractor conflict is an apochromatic refractor. Because - apochromatic means that the lens are covered with special layers that give about 96+% of light transmission (so it's better than non-apochromatic refractor, where some light is wasted on the lens and you don't see deep-sky objects clearly), and special layer eliminates light dispersion like in an optical prism (otherwise each color would go on a different path and the resulting picture of something looked more like a rainbow instead of beight sharp). And also as a refractor it's good for planets. But... this APO refractor has to have big aperture, or it won't work for deep-sky anyway.
Refractors have some other advantages - for instance you don't have unnecessary air flow between the lens because they are inside a tube. Newtons are much brighter (good for deep-sky) but air turbulence blurries the view on planets.
Oh, and forget about cassegrains, they are compact, that's true (the only advantage). But the view is terrible.
Well if you have just $1000 you gotta decide: (1) want to see distant galaxies (newton), or (2) view to see planets (refractor). But I suggest to spend a bit more cash and get APO refractor. Should be good for both.
You can look at those reviews I had bookmarked long time ago: http://www.cloudynights.com/item.php?item_id=1260 and http://www.cloudynights.com/item.php?item_id=32&pr=2x6x17
You can consider Takahashi also, althought from my research it looks like TMB make better equipment, but you never know that for sure: http://www.tmboptical.com/itemsGrid.asp?cat_id=4 .
I particularly like the spelling feature in new vim, right-click menu (:set mousemodel=popup) to select a corrected word or remember current word as correct. Perhaps writing a vim plugin as you explain could be possible? I'd be very glad to use it too ;)
you should have an account for writing such insightful comments. Now you are not too likely to get modded up.
or try rsnapshot.org, I'm using it succesfully.
this gave me another idea - it may turn out, that the best usage of those displays is to use them as handheld spectrometers.
the tags are right. The brown color is not in the hue (compare with rainbow), so controlling the wavelength is not enough. You'd need to controll brightness at least, and then brown would be kind-of dark-orange.
Also, if you rely on reflecting light (aka. mirror), you rely on fact that the light source HAS this color wavelength in its spectrum. This is not always the case if you don't use sunlight.
I remember reading an article about demographic problems in germany. People have a very small amount of kids, and due to this problem they have unreasonably high expectations about their kids. It is frequent to hire a private teacher to work with the kid, to find many extra exercises for them like swimming, studying foreign languages (even at the age of 3!), etc.
The problem arising from that is a very high psychological stress the kid must cope with. High expectations from their parents cause headaches and other health problems, especially when a kid fails at some task. Give a kid free time.
In fact at that age all kid's time must be a free time. Your job is to find a method to put fun into a learning. Small kids decide what they want to do with their free time only directed by their enthusiasm at some activity. When you find yourself trying to convince him to do something you have already failed. You can only show your own enthusiasm, and show how fun it is. It's in fact easy to convince a kid when you are enthusiastic yourself (which is not frequent with teachers who are bored with their job). But when you see that the kid loses an interest you must immediatly stop.
And expect nothing! If you will expect that the kid will be successfull at anything you will only increase the stress level.
yes, exactly my thoughts too. There was a story about that. He who finds the link gets the karma :)
yay!
I have a nano sense of humor, so I don't get it.
check the older news "Russia Agrees To Shut Down AllOfMP3.com"
wtf?
compare with old news.
You say exactly what is written in that article. I pointed to it in the opening of this thread. Of course nobody bothered to read it. A finer point there:
Hey, it was just a week ago, and it summarizes all the struggle pretty well:
Eveyone will switch to 64bit hardware by the end of 2008, it's impossible otherwise. The moore's law tells us what will be the memory capacity by 2008. And with 32bit it's impossible to address more than 4GB. Yeah, go ahead and tell that it will take a bit more, like just one year more. No problem. We will not see a working 64bit version of windows by then.
That article is great and gave me a lot of thought
aye aye sir! tagging pigpile, done.
I remember there was a lot of effort put into ODF, then there was a change of political leaders in Massachusetts, and then .. I can't remember - did they scrap whole project, or not?
What is the current state of Massachusetts switch?