The writer's conclusion is that we Humans will progress to the point that we won't care to travel to other stars, and that other species have likely evolved to the same state. I'd suggest that the first part is likely correct. We will progress to the point that we have access to all the information and Human opinions that might interest us and, thus would allow us to travel to the stars. However, whether or not we're interested might be much less important than the issue of latency. If we're all connected, traveling much past the Moon will cut us off from the "hive mind" in such a way that we'd be so lost as to no longer be functional, due to the delay in exchange of information due to the finite speed of light.
This isn't an original thought. The late, great space scientist, philosopher, and SciFi writer Charles Sheffield made this exact point in his short story "Power Failure", which I read in his 1979 collection known as "Vectors". It is the single most thought-provoking SciFi collection I've read.
I'd be very happy if governments got out of the business of recognizing religion. Let ALL religious organizations compete in the marketplace with no government recognition or support whatsoever!
OK, putting all the snarky, sophomoric thoughts aside, the USAF *should* be doing this sort of thing. It's the ultimate in military intelligence, finding out who's out there, how far away "they" are, and making an estimate of what nasty things they might be capable of doing to our species. (Oh, and I worked doing operations planning on the old NASA SETI Program in the 1980s, and I came at SETI from two points of view: One was for the pure science of finding out more about our Universe, but the other from the point of view of military intelligence, on the periphery of which I worked a decade earlier.)
I teach at a small charter high school here in N. AZ. Aside from grading papers, the bane of my existence is that students come to school WITHOUT so much as a single pencil with which to write! They have their cell phone, they have their cigarettes and lighter, and they can afford piercings and tattoos, but not a single pencil!
WHAT was that "teacher" thinking?
http://www.jamesbrennan.org/algebra/
Nicely done Algebra 1 text. No problem set, however.
http://cnx.org/content/m19435/latest/
Don't let the somewhat klutzy organization of this text put you off. What this guy is doing is running you through Algebra 2 by discovering it for yourself. This is the text I use at the small charter school where I teach, and it's working well with kids who have never, ever gotten school at all!
Good luck to you.
OK, at the time of that article, the Internet had already become much more than a novelty. Newsweek just didn't notice. And I'd have to agree that the Internet had NOT become a necessity. I'd even agree that, if the Internet isn't available to me for say, 48-hours, it's no biggie. I'd just have to deal with a bunch of emails that have been accumulating. However, if the Internet as a whole went down for an extended period of time, there would be hell to pay. Just look at the economic consequences to businesses in Egypt when that ship hit and cut an undersea cable carrying much of the Internet connectivity between there and Europe. It wasn't pretty for them....
We already have something that will allow folks to evaluate information from multiple sources. It's called an EDUCATION! We're just doing a piss-poor job of it.
I worked on the NASA SETI Program in the 1980s in the Deep Space Network at NASA/JPL in Pasadena, CA. I led a small team of engineer/astronomers who provided a wide variety of planning, scheduling, and execution of radio astronomy and radar astronomy experiments withing the DSN. Sometime during that time, a senior manager of SETI, N. A. Renzetti, arranged for the late Dr. Philip Morrison to meet with my team and a few others one afternoon. There was no particular agenda, but we understood that we were there to hear about Dr. Morrison's opinions about SETI. One of my colleagues asked what his definition of life was. He replied that, boiled down to its essentials, it was the ability to reproduce. He then mentioned, almost in passing, that he had heard from a geologist at MIT about a particular variety of clay that, if given the right raw materials, could reporduce itself, but, if the raw materials were present, but the clay was not, no clay would be produced. I asked the obvious question: "How was the original batch of this clay produced?" Dr. Morrison replied that he really didn't know, but made a joke about chickens and eggs.... I've occasionally wondered about that clay over the years. Has anyone else every heard of this (possibly) prolific stuff?
Uh, actually, no airfoil, either fixed or rotary, generates lift. For example, the wing of an airplane sitting on the ground generates no lift unless air is flowing over it. A frisbee sitting on the ground is just the same. Only when the person flying it imparts a force to it does it "fly". Another way of looking at this is to hold a frisbee at shoulder height in a horizontal position and then drop it. It will float in a semi-stable position down to the ground, because it has a large cross-sectional area WRT its mass. Do the same thing, but give it a bit of spin, and it will float down very smoothly. It's behavior is no different from a parachute, with the exceptions that parachutes aren't designed to spin, and you don't strap it on!
Everything has its place, and the Aerobie's place needs to be really BIG, because they fly faaaaaaar! Alan Adler, the (extremely clever) inventor of the Aerobie flying ring, recognized this when he came out with his own line of flying disks. True to form, they fly really, really well!
I never had the pleasure of knowing Mr. Morrison, but I played various frisbee-disk games for a lotta years, and even played flying-disk golf at the pro level for a while. But I had a real job, so left the ultra-serious play to other, better players. I heard various stories about Fred over the years. All seemed to indicate that he was friendly, very straightforward man. I was told once that he had bought a hardware store in the early 1960s in Sierra Madre, CA. Folks asked him why he was going to his hardware store every day if he was making so much money in royalties from frisbee sales. "Well, I like owning my own hardware store!", he replied. I really can't prove this story to be true, but if it's not, it oughta be! Thanks for the revolutions, Fred! Adieu.....
It used to be that the big error of many scientists was to make studies of studies. Now, it appears that studies of news reports of studies are becoming acceptable. Are climate scientists the mysterious "they" that they're always talkiing about?
"known as Sagittarius A* (pronounced 'Sagittarius A-Star')"
Oh, horse puckey! I did radio astronomy for a lotta years. Most folks refer to that source as "Sag-A", although a few folks tried "Saj-A".
I agree that "clearing the BS" is one of the most important part of the job. Right up up there with that is paying attention when hiring new people. The old saying about marrying in haste could just as well be modified to "Hire in haste; repent at leisure."....
Sorry, but I haven't had time to read the entire thread. If what I'm writing is a rerun, then so be it.
Fuller, like Frank Lloyd Wright, George Ellery Hale, and more than a few other greats of the 20th Century, was part genius, and part con man. His plan to design a revolutionary car was flawed by the fact that he assumed that his great intellect was a worthy substitute for experience in designing cars. Aside from the points about stability raised by others, I point out that there was a plenum in front of the radiator. It's purpose was to hold the DRY ICE that was necessary to keep the car cool. Yes, that's right, Fuller couldn't be bothered to actually design a working cooling system! Instead, every time the car was to be driven, an assistant dumped dry ice into the plenum!
I'm having this fantasy about feet of clay being exposed to dry ice, and then shattering the first time somebody says a word....
Uh, any idea just how complex doing this would be, even supposing the laser could be funded and then built in a timely manner?
Oh, and BTW, the Star Wars Missile Defense System had no chance of actually working, again, due to its excessive complexity. It was just designed to make the Russkies THINK it would work, and thereby bankrupt the USSR. In that sense, it worked very well!
I'll leave the theory to someone more qualified than I, or to those folks who begin their post with "Well this is way beyond my understanding of Physics, but, as I understand it....". Rather, I just want to comment that, as it is commonly used, the word "signal" connotes transmission of a message from a sentient sender to a sentient receiver. The definition given by TheFreeDictionary.com should suffice: "3. Electronics An impulse or a fluctuating electric quantity, such as voltage, current, or electric field strength, whose variations represent coded information." (I suppose that we could assume that the Universe herself, himself, or itself is sending "coded information" to us, but then we'd have to parse the word "assume", and we wouldn't want to make donkeys of ourselves, now, would we?) So, I suggest that this "signal" is really an "emission", the characteristics of which lead astronomers to conclude that there are spiraling magnetic fields in the region of space they were observing. They expected to find IR radiation accompanying those spiraling magnetic field, but they didn't. Hence their surprise.
Now, despite the fact that I'm not qualified to form such a theory, I'll state mine: The Universe is actually like an onion, only the number of layers is infinite. Once we humans peel back one layer -- Eratosthenes did! -- another is revealed. Newton peeled that one, to reveal the one that Einstein peeled, and then Hugh Everett III peeled-back another, and so on, ad universium.... Do I have my layers labeled right? I don't rightly know. But you might ask the Mother Hen....
Only a little while after Gene Roddenberry passed, I attended the inaugural showing of Laserium's (exquisite) "The Wall" at Griffith Observatory in LA. Ms. Barrett-Roddenberry was also in attendance. After the show, I remained in my seat, because I wanted to let the show percolate a bit in my head before departing. As I sat there, Ms. Barrett-Roddenberry was approaching my aisle seat. She was alone, and her face showed the considerable strain of losing her life-long mate. (I learned later that she was one of a considerable number of folks associated with the Star-Trek franchise that do not travel with an entourage, but just do their normal business in public just like anyone else, a choice I find refreshing.)
Everyone still in the hall was ignoring her, which might or might not have been appropriate. I'll never know. But I didn't ignore her. I stood up and said, "Ms. Roddenberry, you don't know me, but I was saddened by your husband's passing. I'm so sorry for your loss."
With a slight smile, she replied, "Oh, thank you so much. It's been very hard to lose him, but many people have let me know how special he was to them, just as he was to me. That's helped a bit."
With that, she bade me good evening, and went out of the hall. As I already mentioned, we didn't know one another, so I had no intention engaging her in a long, intrusive conversation. I just wanted her to know that I shared her loss and pain, even just a little bit.
There's nothing earthshaking about this minor incident, except that many Hollywood stars would have either ignored me or been ungracious in the extreme. Instead, Ms. Barret-Roddenberry took my greeting for what it was, and replied graciously. Oh, sure, she was an actress, so the whole thing could have been "an act", but so what? If she chose to "act graciously", that, in itself, is an act of grace.
I choose to believe that Majel Barrett-Roddenberry was a lovely, very-talented, and gracious woman. I'm betting that those who knew her well would agree. May she rest in peace.
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The writer's conclusion is that we Humans will progress to the point that we won't care to travel to other stars, and that other species have likely evolved to the same state. I'd suggest that the first part is likely correct. We will progress to the point that we have access to all the information and Human opinions that might interest us and, thus would allow us to travel to the stars. However, whether or not we're interested might be much less important than the issue of latency. If we're all connected, traveling much past the Moon will cut us off from the "hive mind" in such a way that we'd be so lost as to no longer be functional, due to the delay in exchange of information due to the finite speed of light. This isn't an original thought. The late, great space scientist, philosopher, and SciFi writer Charles Sheffield made this exact point in his short story "Power Failure", which I read in his 1979 collection known as "Vectors". It is the single most thought-provoking SciFi collection I've read.
I'd be very happy if governments got out of the business of recognizing religion. Let ALL religious organizations compete in the marketplace with no government recognition or support whatsoever!
OK, putting all the snarky, sophomoric thoughts aside, the USAF *should* be doing this sort of thing. It's the ultimate in military intelligence, finding out who's out there, how far away "they" are, and making an estimate of what nasty things they might be capable of doing to our species. (Oh, and I worked doing operations planning on the old NASA SETI Program in the 1980s, and I came at SETI from two points of view: One was for the pure science of finding out more about our Universe, but the other from the point of view of military intelligence, on the periphery of which I worked a decade earlier.)
I teach at a small charter high school here in N. AZ. Aside from grading papers, the bane of my existence is that students come to school WITHOUT so much as a single pencil with which to write! They have their cell phone, they have their cigarettes and lighter, and they can afford piercings and tattoos, but not a single pencil! WHAT was that "teacher" thinking?
http://www.jamesbrennan.org/algebra/ Nicely done Algebra 1 text. No problem set, however. http://cnx.org/content/m19435/latest/ Don't let the somewhat klutzy organization of this text put you off. What this guy is doing is running you through Algebra 2 by discovering it for yourself. This is the text I use at the small charter school where I teach, and it's working well with kids who have never, ever gotten school at all! Good luck to you.
OK, at the time of that article, the Internet had already become much more than a novelty. Newsweek just didn't notice. And I'd have to agree that the Internet had NOT become a necessity. I'd even agree that, if the Internet isn't available to me for say, 48-hours, it's no biggie. I'd just have to deal with a bunch of emails that have been accumulating. However, if the Internet as a whole went down for an extended period of time, there would be hell to pay. Just look at the economic consequences to businesses in Egypt when that ship hit and cut an undersea cable carrying much of the Internet connectivity between there and Europe. It wasn't pretty for them....
So, this works for Alice and Bob. What about Homer and Jethro?
We already have something that will allow folks to evaluate information from multiple sources. It's called an EDUCATION! We're just doing a piss-poor job of it.
Well, what we need is twofold: (1) A Prime Directive, and (2) A permanent prohibition of William Shatner entering outer space!
Have any images exploded due to this glitch? When will the recall be announced?
I worked on the NASA SETI Program in the 1980s in the Deep Space Network at NASA/JPL in Pasadena, CA. I led a small team of engineer/astronomers who provided a wide variety of planning, scheduling, and execution of radio astronomy and radar astronomy experiments withing the DSN. Sometime during that time, a senior manager of SETI, N. A. Renzetti, arranged for the late Dr. Philip Morrison to meet with my team and a few others one afternoon. There was no particular agenda, but we understood that we were there to hear about Dr. Morrison's opinions about SETI. One of my colleagues asked what his definition of life was. He replied that, boiled down to its essentials, it was the ability to reproduce. He then mentioned, almost in passing, that he had heard from a geologist at MIT about a particular variety of clay that, if given the right raw materials, could reporduce itself, but, if the raw materials were present, but the clay was not, no clay would be produced. I asked the obvious question: "How was the original batch of this clay produced?" Dr. Morrison replied that he really didn't know, but made a joke about chickens and eggs.... I've occasionally wondered about that clay over the years. Has anyone else every heard of this (possibly) prolific stuff?
Uh, actually, no airfoil, either fixed or rotary, generates lift. For example, the wing of an airplane sitting on the ground generates no lift unless air is flowing over it. A frisbee sitting on the ground is just the same. Only when the person flying it imparts a force to it does it "fly". Another way of looking at this is to hold a frisbee at shoulder height in a horizontal position and then drop it. It will float in a semi-stable position down to the ground, because it has a large cross-sectional area WRT its mass. Do the same thing, but give it a bit of spin, and it will float down very smoothly. It's behavior is no different from a parachute, with the exceptions that parachutes aren't designed to spin, and you don't strap it on!
Everything has its place, and the Aerobie's place needs to be really BIG, because they fly faaaaaaar! Alan Adler, the (extremely clever) inventor of the Aerobie flying ring, recognized this when he came out with his own line of flying disks. True to form, they fly really, really well!
I never had the pleasure of knowing Mr. Morrison, but I played various frisbee-disk games for a lotta years, and even played flying-disk golf at the pro level for a while. But I had a real job, so left the ultra-serious play to other, better players. I heard various stories about Fred over the years. All seemed to indicate that he was friendly, very straightforward man. I was told once that he had bought a hardware store in the early 1960s in Sierra Madre, CA. Folks asked him why he was going to his hardware store every day if he was making so much money in royalties from frisbee sales. "Well, I like owning my own hardware store!", he replied. I really can't prove this story to be true, but if it's not, it oughta be! Thanks for the revolutions, Fred! Adieu.....
OK. This is a serious breach of decorum. It's Frisbeeterianism, with a capital "F"....
Please see subject.
It used to be that the big error of many scientists was to make studies of studies. Now, it appears that studies of news reports of studies are becoming acceptable. Are climate scientists the mysterious "they" that they're always talkiing about?
"My people are the people of the dessert," said T. E. Lawrence, picking up his fork.
"known as Sagittarius A* (pronounced 'Sagittarius A-Star')" Oh, horse puckey! I did radio astronomy for a lotta years. Most folks refer to that source as "Sag-A", although a few folks tried "Saj-A".
and this is a story because?
I agree that "clearing the BS" is one of the most important part of the job. Right up up there with that is paying attention when hiring new people. The old saying about marrying in haste could just as well be modified to "Hire in haste; repent at leisure."....
Sorry, but I haven't had time to read the entire thread. If what I'm writing is a rerun, then so be it. Fuller, like Frank Lloyd Wright, George Ellery Hale, and more than a few other greats of the 20th Century, was part genius, and part con man. His plan to design a revolutionary car was flawed by the fact that he assumed that his great intellect was a worthy substitute for experience in designing cars. Aside from the points about stability raised by others, I point out that there was a plenum in front of the radiator. It's purpose was to hold the DRY ICE that was necessary to keep the car cool. Yes, that's right, Fuller couldn't be bothered to actually design a working cooling system! Instead, every time the car was to be driven, an assistant dumped dry ice into the plenum! I'm having this fantasy about feet of clay being exposed to dry ice, and then shattering the first time somebody says a word....
Uh, any idea just how complex doing this would be, even supposing the laser could be funded and then built in a timely manner? Oh, and BTW, the Star Wars Missile Defense System had no chance of actually working, again, due to its excessive complexity. It was just designed to make the Russkies THINK it would work, and thereby bankrupt the USSR. In that sense, it worked very well!
I'll leave the theory to someone more qualified than I, or to those folks who begin their post with "Well this is way beyond my understanding of Physics, but, as I understand it....". Rather, I just want to comment that, as it is commonly used, the word "signal" connotes transmission of a message from a sentient sender to a sentient receiver. The definition given by TheFreeDictionary.com should suffice: "3. Electronics An impulse or a fluctuating electric quantity, such as voltage, current, or electric field strength, whose variations represent coded information." (I suppose that we could assume that the Universe herself, himself, or itself is sending "coded information" to us, but then we'd have to parse the word "assume", and we wouldn't want to make donkeys of ourselves, now, would we?) So, I suggest that this "signal" is really an "emission", the characteristics of which lead astronomers to conclude that there are spiraling magnetic fields in the region of space they were observing. They expected to find IR radiation accompanying those spiraling magnetic field, but they didn't. Hence their surprise. Now, despite the fact that I'm not qualified to form such a theory, I'll state mine: The Universe is actually like an onion, only the number of layers is infinite. Once we humans peel back one layer -- Eratosthenes did! -- another is revealed. Newton peeled that one, to reveal the one that Einstein peeled, and then Hugh Everett III peeled-back another, and so on, ad universium.... Do I have my layers labeled right? I don't rightly know. But you might ask the Mother Hen....
Only a little while after Gene Roddenberry passed, I attended the inaugural showing of Laserium's (exquisite) "The Wall" at Griffith Observatory in LA. Ms. Barrett-Roddenberry was also in attendance. After the show, I remained in my seat, because I wanted to let the show percolate a bit in my head before departing. As I sat there, Ms. Barrett-Roddenberry was approaching my aisle seat. She was alone, and her face showed the considerable strain of losing her life-long mate. (I learned later that she was one of a considerable number of folks associated with the Star-Trek franchise that do not travel with an entourage, but just do their normal business in public just like anyone else, a choice I find refreshing.) Everyone still in the hall was ignoring her, which might or might not have been appropriate. I'll never know. But I didn't ignore her. I stood up and said, "Ms. Roddenberry, you don't know me, but I was saddened by your husband's passing. I'm so sorry for your loss." With a slight smile, she replied, "Oh, thank you so much. It's been very hard to lose him, but many people have let me know how special he was to them, just as he was to me. That's helped a bit." With that, she bade me good evening, and went out of the hall. As I already mentioned, we didn't know one another, so I had no intention engaging her in a long, intrusive conversation. I just wanted her to know that I shared her loss and pain, even just a little bit. There's nothing earthshaking about this minor incident, except that many Hollywood stars would have either ignored me or been ungracious in the extreme. Instead, Ms. Barret-Roddenberry took my greeting for what it was, and replied graciously. Oh, sure, she was an actress, so the whole thing could have been "an act", but so what? If she chose to "act graciously", that, in itself, is an act of grace. I choose to believe that Majel Barrett-Roddenberry was a lovely, very-talented, and gracious woman. I'm betting that those who knew her well would agree. May she rest in peace.