Do what you love and the money will follow. While I think this is just an appropriate example of market forces at work, job markets can be hard to judge (I have degrees in engineering, physics, and astronomy and the job market was supposes to be great when I started, turned out not to be so much later). There will be jobs for the excellent and hard working in pretty much any field they enter. If you're just chasing the jobs, please rethink your major, unless you want six figures and a company car with a BA in philosophy. Really though, be a life-long learner and a good human being and you'll probably get by OK.
Thanks for checking out my page and hope you like my book. Only one out so far (Star Dragon), writing the second one right now (almost literally). As for NASA and space science, I try to be cool about it. Spacecraft fail, blow up, etc. Hubble was originally going to be launched in 1986, on the mission right after Challenger exploded, and the spherical abberation was a minor set-back in the grand scheme of things. I work in every waveband, so no matter when Hubble comes down, I'll have other options for my science.
Hey thanks for the positive reply -- I was probably overly aggresive in mine. Like I said, a couple of glasses of wine...All in all, I'd prefer to educate people than piss them off!
Oh, I didn't realize that the money saved on the servicing mission would go into another space telescope. Oh, that's because it won't. There is already a Next Generation Space Telescope, and it is already funded. The servicing mission money will just go toward the deficit, a tiny drop in the giant bucket, and the billions of dollars invested in Hubble will not produce any more science or pretty pictures or good will of any sort. There are some valid reasons to question the servicing mission, but money is not one of them (and O'Keefe has not claimed money to be the issue either). I'm not wild about Bush, but I'd love to see people land on Mars -- the money spent servicing Hubble has zero bearing on that issue.
Impressive rant! Simple and to the point. Being in the community and being a bit more circumspect, I would say that O'Keefe has not shown any of the vision that marked Goldin. I wasn't always happy with Goldin, but the man was visionary in the best sense of the word.
And what, exactly, is obsolete about Hubble? Seriously, tell me. Sure, the computers are slow, but they do the job fine. The gyroscopes could last longer. But those are functionalities that don't affect the bottom line if they do their job. The instruments could be updated, the very key thing, AND THAT IS WHAT THE SERVICING MISSION WILL DO. Hubble is still producing great science still today that no other facility can touch. When we've already spent a few billion on the thing, a few hundred million is CHEAP in relative terms to get a few more years of service out of it.
Yeah, well don't post an ignorant opinion if you don't know what you're talking about. Insightful not! Other posters have pointed out that the servicing mission is to install more modern technology on the telescope -- EXACTLY WHAT YOU WANT! And for image quality (spatial resolution, which is what Hubble does best) 100 times that of Hubble, you'd need a 250 meter telescope in space, which we probably can't do this CENTURY unless we spent the entire GDP. We have a better telescope planned right now (the James Webb Telescope budgeted at yes, about 3 times the repair mission cost), for probably 2012, which is better, but not 100 times better, and won't work in the ultraviolet AT ALL. I'm an astronomer who uses Hubble, and I bust my ass working on proposals to use the thing because I have science to do that I can only do with Hubble, not for sentimental reasons. With new instruments, there is more unique science to come that can be done no other way.
Sorry for YELLING, ErichTheWebGuy, but I've had a few glasses of wine and my tolerance for ignorant spouting off tonight isn't too high. There are pros and cons to the Hubble servicing issue, you sound like an idiot telling astronomers like me that the telescope is obsolete.
I'm a collaborator on the SHEEP project (that's the Search for the High Energy Extragalactic Population) and there are more like 88 of them (approximately), rather than 88 million. We write articles with cute titles like "Counting SHEEP", etc.
...I've put my student to work on the SDSS DR2 already! He was working on a paper characterizing a rare type of quasar, we found 3 examples in DR1, and now we'll take the extra time to see if we can add a few more before submission. Just looked at a big pile of spectra today. It was fun!
There is certainly a chance of a super volcano going up from Yellowstone, and the timescale where that is likely is longer than all of human history. There's an interesting book called Yellowstone Farwell by Wyoming geologist Wanyne Sutherland and his wife Judy (selling well in Wyoming anyway...see at http://www.yelllowstonefarewll.com). I live in Wyoming and worry about terrorism at a greater level than volcanoes (and I recall a Time magazine essay saying that all Americans could do to alleviate their worry over terrorism was to move to Wyoming!).
I'm a writer and applaud Harlan Ellison in this case. Do I think he foams at the mouth too much? Yes, as an individual he does, but there aren't a lot of writers out there with time, energy, and money to pursue such things. Writers have no RIAA (whose tactics stink, for sure), so I am glad we at least have Harlan. Now though, what you're really saying is that ebooks aren't so great, so no one should complain? How about the dirt-poor writer who has lost money? What happens when the technology is more mature and no one complained before? We set up a whole generation to think it's OK to steal stuff. I actually think giving away books can be effective advertising for a writer (e.g., Cory Doctorow online, libraries in the real world), but the issue is complex, and in this case Harlan gave away nothing -- people STOLE from him. Let each writer/artist decide about electronic rights and distribution, not thieves. And AOL ought to follow the law they profit from and get spanked if they don't.
Too late, too late...
Today in America, it is impossible in a public forum for the obvious to not be stated (whether or not clever, whether or not in good taste). If there was once a chance, Fox News has now removed it for sure.
I was referring to Oracle raising their offer to 26 just a couple of weeks ago. The price jumped rapidly then fell rapidly the same day because most analysts were saying it wasn't going to happen. Last June I think there was less negativity about the liklihood of the take-over and the market jumped. Basically I think we're in agreement without getting into the month-by-month and blow-by-blow of the market and legal situations.
There are many types of "nova" if you include everything with that name. There are supernova, dwarf nova, hypernova, etc. The garden variety nova is from hydrogen fusion on the surface of a white dwarf star, normally in a binary system with mass transfer. Dwarf nova happen in the accretion disks in binary systems. Supernova can happen in single, massive stars at the end of their lives (type II), or in white dwarf binary systems when enough mass transfer makes the white dwarf collapse, probably to form a neutron star (type I). I'll go ahead and plug my novel Star Dragon (see my webpage link) which takes place in the dwarf nova system SS Cygni and explains some of this in a work of fiction.
Oracle has made it clear their plan is to take Peoplesoft apart and get access to their customer base for Oracle software, phasing out Peoplesoft entirely. They basically want to buy Peoplesoft to eliminate a competitor, leaving the market to Oracle and SAS (the European gorilla in the field). This is not good for Peoplesoft or Peoplesoft customers (and there are a *lot* of them out there) or the market in general. This is only good for Oracle (duh). Many hear complain about Microsoft -- well, do you want another Microsoft in the tech field? Larry Ellison does. The US Government does not. By the way, the Peoplesoft stock price going down instead of jumping to 26 (the Oracle bid) says what the market thinks about the takeover happening.
...if we don't send more probes to Venus?!
I mean, hey, there's a big movie remake starring Jim Carey and the way I see it, NASA needs to start slinging probes to Venus to satisfy the Hollywood overlords, or the six milllion dollar man is going to have to fight the reanimated corpse of Andre the Giant in Robot Bigfoot make-up.
I'm a fan of Sagan and appreciated his contributions to humankind. Unfortunately the people who need Demon-Haunted World are the ones who won't read it. I wish there were a simple solution to the problem.
Yes, you're right in general but the problem is that X-rays tend to go through things like mirrors if you build a conventional mirror. To focus them you need to use glancing angles and this means that you need to build enormous and super accurate mirrors to get the equivalent of any substantial diameter. The Chandra mirrors are probably the finest optics ever produced and consist of nested, gold-coated paraboloids (I think) that cost some $200 million just on their own.
I never used HRI, only PSPC where the FWHM was worse than 30 arcseconds. Did HRI get used much? I confess I usually work on the fainter stuff. I should have remembered HRI, although to be fair I was also using Chandra ACIS resolution for comparison rather than the HRC. Thanks for all the numbers!
Hey Jonah Hex was a favorite comic of mine! On topic, yes, the theory that every massive galaxy hosts a massive black hole at its core is in fine shape. Observations, particularly from the Hubble Space Telescope, continue to offer strong support for this idea to the level that we can now make good estimates of the black hole mass just from looking at the galaxy. In this case we are indeed talking about a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy rather than a stellar-sized black hole. And I'm not sure I'd say "free-floating hole" in mixed company. Stars are so small anyway that stellar collisions essentially never happen in a galaxy, and the cross-section for a black hole is really the same as a star.
I'm talking primarily about the resolution (Chandra resolution is 0.5 arcseconds, ROSAT resolution like 50 arcseconds). XMM also has a huge improvement in collecting area which may be something like 100 times better sensitivity, at least for harder energies, but I'd have to look up the numbers for a quantitative comparison. I think it's fair to say in general that the new X-ray telescopes are a couple of orders of magnitude "better" (in terms of resolution and sensitivity) than the previous generation of X-ray telescopes like ROSAT. Not to denigrate ROSAT, which was great for its time and produced wonderful science.
I know Stefanie a little bit (overlapped at some meetings). This is her second coup in the last year -- she was also involved with using X-ray observations to identify a binary black hole in another active galaxy.
There has been good evidence for such X-ray flaring in the past from ROSAT data alone (now you see it, now you don't), but this is the first time to catch one of these things in the act using XMM and Chandra which are much more capable than the previous generation of X-ray telescopes. XMM can collect more photons, and Chandra can provide image quality equal to that of optical telescopes (telescopes like ROSAT were 100 times worse).
We still have no idea how important such stellar disruptions are in the grand scheme of thing, fuelling black holes, etc., but dang, they are cool. I want to put one in a science fiction novel someday.
Slashdot Mirror
Do what you love and the money will follow. While I think this is just an appropriate example of market forces at work, job markets can be hard to judge (I have degrees in engineering, physics, and astronomy and the job market was supposes to be great when I started, turned out not to be so much later). There will be jobs for the excellent and hard working in pretty much any field they enter. If you're just chasing the jobs, please rethink your major, unless you want six figures and a company car with a BA in philosophy. Really though, be a life-long learner and a good human being and you'll probably get by OK.
Thanks for checking out my page and hope you like my book. Only one out so far (Star Dragon), writing the second one right now (almost literally). As for NASA and space science, I try to be cool about it. Spacecraft fail, blow up, etc. Hubble was originally going to be launched in 1986, on the mission right after Challenger exploded, and the spherical abberation was a minor set-back in the grand scheme of things. I work in every waveband, so no matter when Hubble comes down, I'll have other options for my science.
Hey thanks for the positive reply -- I was probably overly aggresive in mine. Like I said, a couple of glasses of wine...All in all, I'd prefer to educate people than piss them off!
Oh, I didn't realize that the money saved on the servicing mission would go into another space telescope. Oh, that's because it won't. There is already a Next Generation Space Telescope, and it is already funded. The servicing mission money will just go toward the deficit, a tiny drop in the giant bucket, and the billions of dollars invested in Hubble will not produce any more science or pretty pictures or good will of any sort. There are some valid reasons to question the servicing mission, but money is not one of them (and O'Keefe has not claimed money to be the issue either). I'm not wild about Bush, but I'd love to see people land on Mars -- the money spent servicing Hubble has zero bearing on that issue.
Impressive rant! Simple and to the point. Being in the community and being a bit more circumspect, I would say that O'Keefe has not shown any of the vision that marked Goldin. I wasn't always happy with Goldin, but the man was visionary in the best sense of the word.
And what, exactly, is obsolete about Hubble? Seriously, tell me. Sure, the computers are slow, but they do the job fine. The gyroscopes could last longer. But those are functionalities that don't affect the bottom line if they do their job. The instruments could be updated, the very key thing, AND THAT IS WHAT THE SERVICING MISSION WILL DO. Hubble is still producing great science still today that no other facility can touch. When we've already spent a few billion on the thing, a few hundred million is CHEAP in relative terms to get a few more years of service out of it.
Yeah, well don't post an ignorant opinion if you don't know what you're talking about. Insightful not! Other posters have pointed out that the servicing mission is to install more modern technology on the telescope -- EXACTLY WHAT YOU WANT! And for image quality (spatial resolution, which is what Hubble does best) 100 times that of Hubble, you'd need a 250 meter telescope in space, which we probably can't do this CENTURY unless we spent the entire GDP. We have a better telescope planned right now (the James Webb Telescope budgeted at yes, about 3 times the repair mission cost), for probably 2012, which is better, but not 100 times better, and won't work in the ultraviolet AT ALL. I'm an astronomer who uses Hubble, and I bust my ass working on proposals to use the thing because I have science to do that I can only do with Hubble, not for sentimental reasons. With new instruments, there is more unique science to come that can be done no other way. Sorry for YELLING, ErichTheWebGuy, but I've had a few glasses of wine and my tolerance for ignorant spouting off tonight isn't too high. There are pros and cons to the Hubble servicing issue, you sound like an idiot telling astronomers like me that the telescope is obsolete.
I'm a collaborator on the SHEEP project (that's the Search for the High Energy Extragalactic Population) and there are more like 88 of them (approximately), rather than 88 million. We write articles with cute titles like "Counting SHEEP", etc.
...I've put my student to work on the SDSS DR2 already! He was working on a paper characterizing a rare type of quasar, we found 3 examples in DR1, and now we'll take the extra time to see if we can add a few more before submission. Just looked at a big pile of spectra today. It was fun!
Small typo on that URL. Should be http://www.yelllowstonefarewell.com -- thanks.
There is certainly a chance of a super volcano going up from Yellowstone, and the timescale where that is likely is longer than all of human history. There's an interesting book called Yellowstone Farwell by Wyoming geologist Wanyne Sutherland and his wife Judy (selling well in Wyoming anyway...see at http://www.yelllowstonefarewll.com). I live in Wyoming and worry about terrorism at a greater level than volcanoes (and I recall a Time magazine essay saying that all Americans could do to alleviate their worry over terrorism was to move to Wyoming!).
I'm a writer and applaud Harlan Ellison in this case. Do I think he foams at the mouth too much? Yes, as an individual he does, but there aren't a lot of writers out there with time, energy, and money to pursue such things. Writers have no RIAA (whose tactics stink, for sure), so I am glad we at least have Harlan. Now though, what you're really saying is that ebooks aren't so great, so no one should complain? How about the dirt-poor writer who has lost money? What happens when the technology is more mature and no one complained before? We set up a whole generation to think it's OK to steal stuff. I actually think giving away books can be effective advertising for a writer (e.g., Cory Doctorow online, libraries in the real world), but the issue is complex, and in this case Harlan gave away nothing -- people STOLE from him. Let each writer/artist decide about electronic rights and distribution, not thieves. And AOL ought to follow the law they profit from and get spanked if they don't.
Too late, too late... Today in America, it is impossible in a public forum for the obvious to not be stated (whether or not clever, whether or not in good taste). If there was once a chance, Fox News has now removed it for sure.
Seems like this would be a natural in some clubs in the big cities, at least in the days of Plato's. Or is this too scary to contemplate?
I was referring to Oracle raising their offer to 26 just a couple of weeks ago. The price jumped rapidly then fell rapidly the same day because most analysts were saying it wasn't going to happen. Last June I think there was less negativity about the liklihood of the take-over and the market jumped. Basically I think we're in agreement without getting into the month-by-month and blow-by-blow of the market and legal situations.
There are many types of "nova" if you include everything with that name. There are supernova, dwarf nova, hypernova, etc. The garden variety nova is from hydrogen fusion on the surface of a white dwarf star, normally in a binary system with mass transfer. Dwarf nova happen in the accretion disks in binary systems. Supernova can happen in single, massive stars at the end of their lives (type II), or in white dwarf binary systems when enough mass transfer makes the white dwarf collapse, probably to form a neutron star (type I). I'll go ahead and plug my novel Star Dragon (see my webpage link) which takes place in the dwarf nova system SS Cygni and explains some of this in a work of fiction.
Oracle has made it clear their plan is to take Peoplesoft apart and get access to their customer base for Oracle software, phasing out Peoplesoft entirely. They basically want to buy Peoplesoft to eliminate a competitor, leaving the market to Oracle and SAS (the European gorilla in the field). This is not good for Peoplesoft or Peoplesoft customers (and there are a *lot* of them out there) or the market in general. This is only good for Oracle (duh). Many hear complain about Microsoft -- well, do you want another Microsoft in the tech field? Larry Ellison does. The US Government does not. By the way, the Peoplesoft stock price going down instead of jumping to 26 (the Oracle bid) says what the market thinks about the takeover happening.
...if we don't send more probes to Venus?! I mean, hey, there's a big movie remake starring Jim Carey and the way I see it, NASA needs to start slinging probes to Venus to satisfy the Hollywood overlords, or the six milllion dollar man is going to have to fight the reanimated corpse of Andre the Giant in Robot Bigfoot make-up.
I'm a fan of Sagan and appreciated his contributions to humankind. Unfortunately the people who need Demon-Haunted World are the ones who won't read it. I wish there were a simple solution to the problem.
Yes, those are spectacular. I use them in my lectures for both non-majors and graduate students.
Yes, you're right in general but the problem is that X-rays tend to go through things like mirrors if you build a conventional mirror. To focus them you need to use glancing angles and this means that you need to build enormous and super accurate mirrors to get the equivalent of any substantial diameter. The Chandra mirrors are probably the finest optics ever produced and consist of nested, gold-coated paraboloids (I think) that cost some $200 million just on their own.
I never used HRI, only PSPC where the FWHM was worse than 30 arcseconds. Did HRI get used much? I confess I usually work on the fainter stuff. I should have remembered HRI, although to be fair I was also using Chandra ACIS resolution for comparison rather than the HRC. Thanks for all the numbers!
Hey Jonah Hex was a favorite comic of mine! On topic, yes, the theory that every massive galaxy hosts a massive black hole at its core is in fine shape. Observations, particularly from the Hubble Space Telescope, continue to offer strong support for this idea to the level that we can now make good estimates of the black hole mass just from looking at the galaxy. In this case we are indeed talking about a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy rather than a stellar-sized black hole. And I'm not sure I'd say "free-floating hole" in mixed company. Stars are so small anyway that stellar collisions essentially never happen in a galaxy, and the cross-section for a black hole is really the same as a star.
I'm talking primarily about the resolution (Chandra resolution is 0.5 arcseconds, ROSAT resolution like 50 arcseconds). XMM also has a huge improvement in collecting area which may be something like 100 times better sensitivity, at least for harder energies, but I'd have to look up the numbers for a quantitative comparison. I think it's fair to say in general that the new X-ray telescopes are a couple of orders of magnitude "better" (in terms of resolution and sensitivity) than the previous generation of X-ray telescopes like ROSAT. Not to denigrate ROSAT, which was great for its time and produced wonderful science.
I know Stefanie a little bit (overlapped at some meetings). This is her second coup in the last year -- she was also involved with using X-ray observations to identify a binary black hole in another active galaxy. There has been good evidence for such X-ray flaring in the past from ROSAT data alone (now you see it, now you don't), but this is the first time to catch one of these things in the act using XMM and Chandra which are much more capable than the previous generation of X-ray telescopes. XMM can collect more photons, and Chandra can provide image quality equal to that of optical telescopes (telescopes like ROSAT were 100 times worse). We still have no idea how important such stellar disruptions are in the grand scheme of thing, fuelling black holes, etc., but dang, they are cool. I want to put one in a science fiction novel someday.