Did you RTFA? Check this out, from the link, taken from the lips of head-of-commission Pete Aldridge:
"The Commission believes that commercialization of space should become the primary focus of the vision, and that the creation of a space-based industry will be one of the principal benefits of this journey," the report states. "Today an independent space industry does not really exist. Instead, we have various government funded space programs and their vendors. Over the next several decades -- if the exploration vision is implemented to encourage this -- an entirely new set of businesses can emerge that will seek profit in space."
This is almost truly like the obligatory/. joke:
1. Go to Moon
2. Go to Mars
3. Profit!
Too bad it doesn't come with a plan on how industry will benefit from space applications.
For those of you who want a bit of information, check out this link on retrograde motion, which does an excellent job of explaining what retrograde is.
For those who are curious but too lazy to click, some of the interesting info is given below:
# Venus rotates slowly in the retrograde direction.
# The moons Ananke, Carme, Pasiphaë and Sinope all orbit Jupiter in a retrograde direction, and are thought to be fragments of a single body that Jupiter captured long ago. Many other minor moons of Jupiter orbit retrograde.
# The moon Phoebe orbits Saturn in a retrograde direction, and is thought to be a captured asteroid.
# The moon Triton orbits Neptune in a retrograde direction, and is thought to be a captured Kuiper belt object.
# The planet Uranus has an axial tilt which is very near to 90, and can be considered to be rotating in a retrograde direction depending on one's interpretation.
The Liaoning embryo has a wingspan of 10.6 inches, indicating that the embryo would have grown up into a medium-to-large pterosaur.
While I agree that this is one possible conclusion, is there anywhere where it has evidence as to what stage of embryonic development this dinosaur is currently at?
For instance, at varying stages of embryonic development, a human fetus has gills, fins, and wings. Someone viewing a gilled human fetus might even go as far as to mis-classify it. My question is, how sure are we that this is actually the dinosaur we think it is, and not some later evolutionary descendent?
I have a question for people -- how many rich scientists do you know? Although I've never published in Nature, publishing in the Astrophysical Journal (ApJ) costs ~$250 PER PAGE for the author... I'm sure Nature is at least as expensive.
Furthermore, Nature is extremely stingy with their copyright laws -- i.e. they don't let you use graphs from their papers in other scientific journals, even if it is virtually essential to the science.
I say, if you want to read it, then pay for it -- it's not fair to make people who aren't rich to begin with to foot the entire bill, especially when the information is clearly not "open to all" for use.
As far as I know, from the Methuselah Mouse Prize, the current record holder (by a lot, mind you) has been people who have kept their mice alive the longest by keeping their mice healthy.
It's nice to think science will hold all the answers to everything, as (at least the USA) is obsessed with looking/staying young, but does anyone else see this as not realistic? Anyone else think that just staying as healthy and active as you can is the best way to go, rather than literally hoping for a miracle?
Alright, I hope this doesn't come off as condescending, but IAAA (grad student, at least), and *one* dim, tiny dwarf galaxy will tell us very little about dark matter.
You can measure its velocity dispersion to infer its total mass, and you can measure its light and spectra to attempt to infer its mass in baryons (protons, neutrons, and electrons), and you can measure the spectral lines to determine its metallicity, but this has nothing to do with inferring dark matter.
Dark Matter is inferred, at least when it comes to galaxies and clusters of galaxies (to keep it simple), because the mass required to provide the galaxy/cluster with the internal velocities observed is much more than what we see in starlight. Therefore, some of the matter is non-luminous, or "dark". Dark matter exists, on AVERAGE, so that 1/7 of the total mass in a galaxy is in baryons, and 6/7 is in dark matter. This ratio varies widely for different galaxies, and I do not see how *one* galaxy is going to tell us anything?
Also, if this satellite galaxy is less than ~100 kpc from Andromeda, the main galaxy's dark halo will envelop the satellite, too, further complicating the matter.
And the other alternatives suck, too -- solar and wind might be eco-friendly, but they sure ain't cheap. Think the recession in 2000 was bad? Wait until you see what doubling the cost of electricity would do.
Correct me if I'm misinformed, but aren't the greatest users of electricity the large corporations, plants, etc. and laboratories owned by the government, the largest corporation of all?
While this might cause a small hit into the profits of those corporations, average Joe isn't going to go to the poorhouse because he has to pay more for electricity.
Example, I'm a graduate student. I make roughly $1400 a month after taxes. My monthly electricity bill comes to about $50 per month. That's about 3.5% of my salary. If I can afford to pay 7% to electricity instead, we can use solar and wind, as you say. Doesn't sound as terrible as what the article says are the alternatives.
And do you really think when we run out of coal, oil, and gas, we'll go back to living in the stone age? Please. Necessity is the mother of invention, and although it may not be as cheap as what we have today, I'm sure that when the time comes, we'll be able to make do.
I completely agree. Just because we are such fragile creatures, we often (so erroneously) assume that all other creatures are fragile, too.
Single-celled organisms, especially, can survive in ridiculous environments. A virus can be frozen and thawed years later with no ill effects. It's not that life is easy to just "create" out of nothing (oogenesis, and it's hard), but life is very hard to eradicate.
Cockroaches, for one, can survive over 100x the radiation levels that would be lethal to humans.
It's good that science is confirming what we all should have expected, I agree with the parent, and don't understand why anyone would have expected otherwise. Can anyone respond to this? (IANAB)
Although you've obviously intended to be funny, it is a common misconception that elaborate explosives can usually be triggered by a "nudge". This is hardly the case -- think about nuclear weapons, which require an elaborate creation of slow neutrons, or even simple explosives that require the mixing of two compounds.
The force of a missile blast with compounds inside will be sufficient to mix the two compounds (usually, but even then, not always, as plenty of missiles are "duds" for this reason). Shooting a golf-ball sized detector-weapon at this is hardly dangerous. The reason they build explosives so that they're hard to set off is so they DON'T accidentally detonate while being constructed or transported.
That said, this is an extremely cool invention (and maybe I'm biased considering where I'm based...)
Originally, I thought this would be a detrimental thing categorically.
But with all the thievery of intellectual property, and all the monopolizing tactics of the biggest corporations, maybe this is the protection that the individual/small corporate developers need?
I hate to say it, but if some other country (China, India, Russia, etc.) got their act together and went and did something of note in space, it might inspire the administration and congress of the US to place a higher priority and more resources into the american space program. This is a shameful decision for both China and for the space program of the world.
So, in the grandparent to this, I said
Before everyone starts making "slippery slope" arguments, think about what can be learned/gained, scientifically and medically......and you went right into the slippery slope. Here's my take on it. If stem cell research isn't done, people will continue to suffer from alzheimers, will continue to die from many many diseases that could be cured were this research allowed.
You argue against creating human life and snuffing it out to save others. You argue that it's the same as slaughtering innocent people to save other people. I tell you this -- *not* performing this research, *not* searching to eliminate this diseases is tantamount to sitting back and allowing these diseases to ravage us. The whole point of the Nancy Reagan thing is that she was NOT for stem cell research until it AFFECTED HER.
There is an opportunity to save and enhance countless lives, but you say that because this is murder in your eyes (as I'm sure abortion is too), this ought to be illegal, and people ought to continue suffering. I'm just disgusted, both with your viewpoint, and with your dismissive arguments. I guarantee you, if you learn that stem cell research could have saved the life of your dying child or your dying spouse, you would change your mind on this topic very quickly.
Even Nancy Reagan is for stem cell research.
The unfortunate point is that people (much like with abortion, -1 flamebait) get on their high moral horse and preach about the sanctity of life. But what they miss is that stem cell research is about saving lives. Human cloning is an inseparable issue from this, IMO.
Before everyone starts making "slippery slope" arguments, think about what can be learned/gained, scientifically and medically, and then tell me with what certainty we should throw it out because it instinctively feels like something we shouldn't be doing?
But when you think about these quick puzzle games, what comes to mind besides tetris, that isn't a blatant tetris knock-off?
The *other* successful games for handhelds were ones that didn't need to have anything saved, as the original Game Boy couldn't handle it. Imagine playing Final Fantasy I and not being able to save...
That said, I think that the technology is definitely there to put little memory chips in the games, which would open up a whole new market in addition to the short, pithy games.
Of course, putting a good old fun classic (like Street Fighter II) could spell success in a whole new way...
I hate to say it, but CDMS II (this experiment) was SUPPOSED to not find WIMPs in this range. There was an experiment called DAMA which had found a modulation in their noise consistent with their being WIMP dark matter, and they claimed detection. The whole purpose of this press release is to say that DAMA's claimed detection is now *ruled out*.
As for the description of gravity being incorrect, I hate to tell you this, but general relativity solves *so* many problems that cannot be solved otherwise that it's preposterous at this point to consider anything else. Gravitational lensing, bending of light by masses, binary pulsar decay, Mercury's perihelion precession... etc. etc... NO other theory of gravity explains any of this, unless it starts with General Relativity and expands on it.
As for your proof that there is no dark matter because it's there in small quantities in three (out of ~250,000) galaxies, give me a break. Normal matter clumps and interacts with itself, so it's quite reasonable to expect we will get some cases where we have more normal matter than dark matter.
On average, though, Dark Matter is well known (see my comment history for examples) to exist in about 6-7 times the abundance of normal matter.
Sorry if this is a rant, but talk about throwing the baby out with the bath water...
Of course, there have were some wonderful mishaps with stonehenge in the year 2000...
First of all, there were the solstice celebrations/banning by the british from 1985-2000 here, which led to wonderful clashes with the british police.
Then there was the attempt to recreate the trek of bringing the massive rocks to stonehenge here,
which ended in dismal failure, and the sinking of a great bluestone rock.
I guess New Zealand couldn't possibly do worse...
Geez, how funny is it that three consecutive posts here are consistently modded "+1, funny" because people don't shower?!
There's actually a guy where I work who doesn't shower, and the smell got so bad I had to bring up the issue with him.
Whatever bacteria's growing on your shower curtain is probably nothing that a little *antibacterial* soap can't handle. Trust me, we'll all be better off for you having showered.
Not only is it/.'ed (as I cannot even connect), but it sounds like blatant false advertising, as my Iron Maiden-hungry eyes nearly popped out at the possibility of a server that reflects my musical tastes...
As a former HS teacher, I remember "book return day" at the end of the year. Ugh. Do you know how many kids wanted to pay $60 to replace the physics textbook they lost or damaged so badly it was unusable?
Now, what happens when instead of $60, a lost or stolen COMPUTER costs 25 times that to replace? I sense that the parents may not be so happy with this arrangement, either.
Keep the computers in the schools, I say. Give the kids books to take home.
He has a projector that's actually near the bottom of the line (~$1500), and he's really happy with it. Projects a nice 100" image or so, and though it's not as good quality (I'm sure) as a $30,000 projector, it does save him $28,500...
I've seen it, BTW, and I think it's not worth it to spend more. But check it out for yourself at various AV stores.
The fact that the parent wasn't modded as "sarcastic" is an affront to/.'s moderation options.
In seriousness, there are the 4 million brits who stand to lose their homes,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,120 0272,00.html
(Sorry I don't know how to highlight links), and that's just the impact in one place.
But I think the importance is that, although we are coming out of an iceage, there is a definite climate change being caused by human impact on the Earth. No, it won't wipe out all life on Earth or even cause us to go extinct, but (in the spirit that Earth day was yesterday) at least consider that we may be messing with things that we cannot control, and may be damaging things that we certainly cannot undo.
Alright, disclaimer first: Just a grad student, still learning stuff, apologies ahead of time if it's wrong.
Attempt at an answer: "Frame-dragging", as I understand it, goes all the way back to an old theory of the aether, that the aether is all around us, but is dragged by masses so that some oddball features of special relativity is explained. I'm not sure how this applies to the problem here, so maybe people use frame-dragging to refer to something else.
This part, though, how gravity works, is easier. Einstein's theory relies upon the stress-energy tensor. All forms of energy, including energy due to angular momentum and relative motions, are included in this. Binary pulsars precess and their orbits evolve in time, as do their rotation rates, as energy is radiated away gravitationally. There is definitely a contribution to gravity due to what you call "velocity components". Gravitational signals only propagate at c, so don't worry.
You can look at my first 2 posts on this topic if you like, but basically GR predicts that there will be a precession of this little spinning sphere that's very small and hopefully detectable. If we don't detect it, it's probably due to the difficulty of the experiment, not to the failure of GR.
The James Webb Space telescope, when launched, will be temperature controlled by simply putting a shield around it on the sun-side, keeping the telescope side cool and out of sunlight.
A pretty simple idea; as once it cools down to equilibrium temperature, there'll be nothing to heat it up.
One complaint I have about this is, although the engineering is incredibly fancy, and advances were probably made on many fronts, this was shelved for 45 years for a reason -- a ridiculously small effect is expected to be observed.
Compare the expected General Relativistic correction to the Newtonian contribution and you'll see why, the GR contribution is about 3-4 orders of magnitude smaller.
Case in point, it took hundreds of years of observations of mercury to determine its orbit precessed by 5599 arcsec/century. Newtonian Mechanics accounts for 5556 of those, and GR accounts for the other 43. I have serious reservations about whether a 16 month experiment will observe what it's designed to observe.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a question for people -- how many rich scientists do you know? Although I've never published in Nature, publishing in the Astrophysical Journal (ApJ) costs ~$250 PER PAGE for the author... I'm sure Nature is at least as expensive.
Furthermore, Nature is extremely stingy with their copyright laws -- i.e. they don't let you use graphs from their papers in other scientific journals, even if it is virtually essential to the science.
I say, if you want to read it, then pay for it -- it's not fair to make people who aren't rich to begin with to foot the entire bill, especially when the information is clearly not "open to all" for use.
As far as I know, from the Methuselah Mouse Prize, the current record holder (by a lot, mind you) has been people who have kept their mice alive the longest by keeping their mice healthy.
It's nice to think science will hold all the answers to everything, as (at least the USA) is obsessed with looking/staying young, but does anyone else see this as not realistic? Anyone else think that just staying as healthy and active as you can is the best way to go, rather than literally hoping for a miracle?
Alright, I hope this doesn't come off as condescending, but IAAA (grad student, at least), and *one* dim, tiny dwarf galaxy will tell us very little about dark matter.
You can measure its velocity dispersion to infer its total mass, and you can measure its light and spectra to attempt to infer its mass in baryons (protons, neutrons, and electrons), and you can measure the spectral lines to determine its metallicity, but this has nothing to do with inferring dark matter.
Dark Matter is inferred, at least when it comes to galaxies and clusters of galaxies (to keep it simple), because the mass required to provide the galaxy/cluster with the internal velocities observed is much more than what we see in starlight. Therefore, some of the matter is non-luminous, or "dark". Dark matter exists, on AVERAGE, so that 1/7 of the total mass in a galaxy is in baryons, and 6/7 is in dark matter. This ratio varies widely for different galaxies, and I do not see how *one* galaxy is going to tell us anything?
Also, if this satellite galaxy is less than ~100 kpc from Andromeda, the main galaxy's dark halo will envelop the satellite, too, further complicating the matter.
I completely agree. Just because we are such fragile creatures, we often (so erroneously) assume that all other creatures are fragile, too.
Single-celled organisms, especially, can survive in ridiculous environments. A virus can be frozen and thawed years later with no ill effects. It's not that life is easy to just "create" out of nothing (oogenesis, and it's hard), but life is very hard to eradicate.
Cockroaches, for one, can survive over 100x the radiation levels that would be lethal to humans.
It's good that science is confirming what we all should have expected, I agree with the parent, and don't understand why anyone would have expected otherwise. Can anyone respond to this? (IANAB)
Although you've obviously intended to be funny, it is a common misconception that elaborate explosives can usually be triggered by a "nudge". This is hardly the case -- think about nuclear weapons, which require an elaborate creation of slow neutrons, or even simple explosives that require the mixing of two compounds.
The force of a missile blast with compounds inside will be sufficient to mix the two compounds (usually, but even then, not always, as plenty of missiles are "duds" for this reason). Shooting a golf-ball sized detector-weapon at this is hardly dangerous. The reason they build explosives so that they're hard to set off is so they DON'T accidentally detonate while being constructed or transported.
That said, this is an extremely cool invention (and maybe I'm biased considering where I'm based...)
Originally, I thought this would be a detrimental thing categorically.
But with all the thievery of intellectual property, and all the monopolizing tactics of the biggest corporations, maybe this is the protection that the individual/small corporate developers need?
I hate to say it, but if some other country (China, India, Russia, etc.) got their act together and went and did something of note in space, it might inspire the administration and congress of the US to place a higher priority and more resources into the american space program. This is a shameful decision for both China and for the space program of the world.
So, in the grandparent to this, I said Before everyone starts making "slippery slope" arguments, think about what can be learned/gained, scientifically and medically... ...and you went right into the slippery slope. Here's my take on it. If stem cell research isn't done, people will continue to suffer from alzheimers, will continue to die from many many diseases that could be cured were this research allowed.
You argue against creating human life and snuffing it out to save others. You argue that it's the same as slaughtering innocent people to save other people. I tell you this -- *not* performing this research, *not* searching to eliminate this diseases is tantamount to sitting back and allowing these diseases to ravage us. The whole point of the Nancy Reagan thing is that she was NOT for stem cell research until it AFFECTED HER.
There is an opportunity to save and enhance countless lives, but you say that because this is murder in your eyes (as I'm sure abortion is too), this ought to be illegal, and people ought to continue suffering. I'm just disgusted, both with your viewpoint, and with your dismissive arguments. I guarantee you, if you learn that stem cell research could have saved the life of your dying child or your dying spouse, you would change your mind on this topic very quickly.
Even Nancy Reagan is for stem cell research. The unfortunate point is that people (much like with abortion, -1 flamebait) get on their high moral horse and preach about the sanctity of life. But what they miss is that stem cell research is about saving lives. Human cloning is an inseparable issue from this, IMO. Before everyone starts making "slippery slope" arguments, think about what can be learned/gained, scientifically and medically, and then tell me with what certainty we should throw it out because it instinctively feels like something we shouldn't be doing?
But when you think about these quick puzzle games, what comes to mind besides tetris, that isn't a blatant tetris knock-off?
The *other* successful games for handhelds were ones that didn't need to have anything saved, as the original Game Boy couldn't handle it. Imagine playing Final Fantasy I and not being able to save...
That said, I think that the technology is definitely there to put little memory chips in the games, which would open up a whole new market in addition to the short, pithy games.
Of course, putting a good old fun classic (like Street Fighter II) could spell success in a whole new way...
I hate to say it, but CDMS II (this experiment) was SUPPOSED to not find WIMPs in this range. There was an experiment called DAMA which had found a modulation in their noise consistent with their being WIMP dark matter, and they claimed detection. The whole purpose of this press release is to say that DAMA's claimed detection is now *ruled out*.
As for the description of gravity being incorrect, I hate to tell you this, but general relativity solves *so* many problems that cannot be solved otherwise that it's preposterous at this point to consider anything else. Gravitational lensing, bending of light by masses, binary pulsar decay, Mercury's perihelion precession... etc. etc... NO other theory of gravity explains any of this, unless it starts with General Relativity and expands on it.
As for your proof that there is no dark matter because it's there in small quantities in three (out of ~250,000) galaxies, give me a break. Normal matter clumps and interacts with itself, so it's quite reasonable to expect we will get some cases where we have more normal matter than dark matter.
On average, though, Dark Matter is well known (see my comment history for examples) to exist in about 6-7 times the abundance of normal matter.
Sorry if this is a rant, but talk about throwing the baby out with the bath water...
Of course, there have were some wonderful mishaps with stonehenge in the year 2000... First of all, there were the solstice celebrations/banning by the british from 1985-2000 here, which led to wonderful clashes with the british police. Then there was the attempt to recreate the trek of bringing the massive rocks to stonehenge here, which ended in dismal failure, and the sinking of a great bluestone rock. I guess New Zealand couldn't possibly do worse...
Geez, how funny is it that three consecutive posts here are consistently modded "+1, funny" because people don't shower?!
There's actually a guy where I work who doesn't shower, and the smell got so bad I had to bring up the issue with him.
Whatever bacteria's growing on your shower curtain is probably nothing that a little *antibacterial* soap can't handle. Trust me, we'll all be better off for you having showered.
When will you people learn that heavy metal (iron maiden, metallica, megadeth, anthrax, etc.) is not the same as a monster truck rally!
Not only is it /.'ed (as I cannot even connect), but it sounds like blatant false advertising, as my Iron Maiden-hungry eyes nearly popped out at the possibility of a server that reflects my musical tastes...
As a former HS teacher, I remember "book return day" at the end of the year. Ugh. Do you know how many kids wanted to pay $60 to replace the physics textbook they lost or damaged so badly it was unusable?
Now, what happens when instead of $60, a lost or stolen COMPUTER costs 25 times that to replace? I sense that the parents may not be so happy with this arrangement, either.
Keep the computers in the schools, I say. Give the kids books to take home.
He has a projector that's actually near the bottom of the line (~$1500), and he's really happy with it. Projects a nice 100" image or so, and though it's not as good quality (I'm sure) as a $30,000 projector, it does save him $28,500...
I've seen it, BTW, and I think it's not worth it to spend more. But check it out for yourself at various AV stores.
The fact that the parent wasn't modded as "sarcastic" is an affront to /.'s moderation options.
In seriousness, there are the 4 million brits who stand to lose their homes,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,120 0272,00.html
(Sorry I don't know how to highlight links), and that's just the impact in one place.
But I think the importance is that, although we are coming out of an iceage, there is a definite climate change being caused by human impact on the Earth. No, it won't wipe out all life on Earth or even cause us to go extinct, but (in the spirit that Earth day was yesterday) at least consider that we may be messing with things that we cannot control, and may be damaging things that we certainly cannot undo.
Alright, disclaimer first:
Just a grad student, still learning stuff, apologies ahead of time if it's wrong.
Attempt at an answer:
"Frame-dragging", as I understand it, goes all the way back to an old theory of the aether, that the aether is all around us, but is dragged by masses so that some oddball features of special relativity is explained. I'm not sure how this applies to the problem here, so maybe people use frame-dragging to refer to something else.
This part, though, how gravity works, is easier. Einstein's theory relies upon the stress-energy tensor. All forms of energy, including energy due to angular momentum and relative motions, are included in this. Binary pulsars precess and their orbits evolve in time, as do their rotation rates, as energy is radiated away gravitationally. There is definitely a contribution to gravity due to what you call "velocity components". Gravitational signals only propagate at c, so don't worry.
You can look at my first 2 posts on this topic if you like, but basically GR predicts that there will be a precession of this little spinning sphere that's very small and hopefully detectable. If we don't detect it, it's probably due to the difficulty of the experiment, not to the failure of GR.
The James Webb Space telescope, when launched, will be temperature controlled by simply putting a shield around it on the sun-side, keeping the telescope side cool and out of sunlight.
A pretty simple idea; as once it cools down to equilibrium temperature, there'll be nothing to heat it up.
One complaint I have about this is, although the engineering is incredibly fancy, and advances were probably made on many fronts, this was shelved for 45 years for a reason -- a ridiculously small effect is expected to be observed.
Compare the expected General Relativistic correction to the Newtonian contribution and you'll see why, the GR contribution is about 3-4 orders of magnitude smaller.
Case in point, it took hundreds of years of observations of mercury to determine its orbit precessed by 5599 arcsec/century. Newtonian Mechanics accounts for 5556 of those, and GR accounts for the other 43. I have serious reservations about whether a 16 month experiment will observe what it's designed to observe.