.. and "she" was probably (if true) breaking national security laws by disclosing this type of information to you. It does not take a genius to estimate the system requirements to reproduce said results.
Wouldn't be too hard to coordinate with a satellite to bounce off of them. I'd just be concerned about the laser transmission loss going through the atmosphere for that long of a distance.
To coordinate with a satellite... easy. To worry about the transmission loss... irrelevant. To achieve the pointing requirements, both from the plane and the spacecraft, to hit the target (priceless... literally...). What happens when a little gust of wind hits the plane (they do bounce around a bit). Your beam will miss the target by many kilometers (and that's if you were lucky enough to hit your mirror-in-space?). GPS or something along those capabilities would not even come close to the resolution required for this type of thing, to say nothing of a moving target, a moving source, and a moving relay.
It's easy to blame everything on Bush p.s. This is more of a rant than a reply!
I don't blame Bush for anything at all. Bush did not give himself the power (well other than e.g., that little spy-on-you-any-time-I-want thing)
I blame 51% of the voting public (+- 2%, two times!!!) for supporting the agenda.
Actually that's not true. I don't blame the 30% that continue to enjoy the republican agenda, it's that 21% that have, for some reason, changed their minds, that I have a problem with.
I'm quite happy to agree to disagree. You have your way, I have mine, and we can gleefully debate all of the pros and cons of this, that, and the other topics until we are dead.
But that 21% who voted for the administration (including all of the local votes that give it power), and now (for some strange reason) have changed their minds? WTF? Your elected officials are doing exactly what they said they would do, how can you possibly change your mind when they are doing exactly what you voted for?
please don't equate something you don't understand, "a German book", with confusing,"a poorly written article"
Just because you "labor" while reading a book in German does not mean there is anything wrong with that book, nor does it mean that there is anything wrong with the German language! (as you seem to imply).
A poorly written article is a poorly written article (independent of the language)
On a side note I would really like to understand the logic behind why something is a der, die, or a das: das auto + die bahn = die Autobahn? == subject for another thread
An interesting post. I am not familiar with the tests you refer to but a few things strike me as odd.
implying that the DNA was highly resilient to the effects of ionizing radiation.
Isn't one of the points of evolution (and I'm way out of my field here) that DNA is affected by radiation and that is, at least, one of the reasons why species change?
Just because a small test is conducted and no changes were observed does not imply that DNA is "resilient" at all, right? It only shows that under the conditions of the test, which were obviously very limited, no changes were observed.
Deep space is far, far nastier and the present experiments don't show that interstellar microbial travel is possible... but it doesn't rule it out, either.
Why is deep space "nastier"? It's certainly colder, if that is what you mean. Is the galactic cosmic ray (GCR) intensity really that much different in deep space than it is around Earth? (sure, we see modulation but that does not imply significantly less intensity right?, granted we really don't know). Inside the heliosphere we have not only the GCR problem but we are also, by definition, fairly near to the Sun, I ~ 1/R^2
Why would some little-microbe-dude, partying inside a little rock, many light years from any star have a "nastier" environment than one inside our heliosphere?
No one really knows the lifetime of these "dudes" but (humor me) if it's ~ millions of years then why could they not arrive (in tact) at a distant star? And the obvious question is, why then could our planet not have been populate in a similar scenario?
absolutely true, and it's sad that your post was modded "troll".
Welcome the "common man"
So you don't understand the significance of this observation because?
It is the endless stories like this...
Perhaps you could reference these "endless stories Seriously, it sounds pretty cool to me. I don't see in any way, shape, or form how this is a "dupe", if that was your conjecture. Or perhaps by "endless" you mean any scientific study that does not result in a star-trek utopia?
..we're about as smart as the bacteria that occupies a Petri dish..
hasn't this bit already been done?
Put on your "bucket helmet" (think Sponge Bob movie) and follow...
A giant educationally-advanced species of bacteria decides to rule the "Earth", etc... even a "bacteria" knows where this joke goes... I'm just not sure that I do.
what? the AC wasn't a troll, people who have to explain their jokes shouldn't make them, especially lame ones like what was posted. and i'm pretty sure bad d.n.a. got modded down because the AC never said that the original poster claimed to be Jesus. the AC was using "Jesus" as as an interjection, completely in vain but bad d.n.a. 'corrected' him. so really his post was kind of a troll, although not necessarily worthy of getting modded down.
And I do thank that one moderator that understood I was trying to make a joke.
I think I'll change my sig to something like...
the difference between a joke and a troll is/. subjective.
I do have a degree in physics and saving face is something I'm not really interested in (on/.)
The poster said...
If you think E=MC^2 has anything to do with an endothermic oxidation reaction, you had to have flunked basic chemistry.
I contend that statement is wrong! And as I stated.. correct me.
The basic statement "E=MC^2 has nothing to do with X" is always incorrect.
b.t.w. The poster did explain his comment. I found it quite useful
I guess it's that peer-review mentality in me... I review a lot of papers, most of which I understand the lingo, and therefore let it slide because the audience will also understand the lingo and can therefore brush over an incorrect statement because "we knew what he meant"
For instance.. You may understand the words:
nongyrotropic
gradient
anisotropies
but if I put them all together in a complete sentence:
I want to investigate the nongyroropic gradient anisotropies of the phase space distribution upstream of the Jovian bow shock, you may find that confusing.
There is nothing wrong with that statement, it's a factual "abstract if you will", although some may not understand the context.
The post in question contained a flaw, perhaps I did not understand the context "fine", I thought I made my lack of knowledge clear.
X-ray are a form of electromagnetic energy, and as such don't have a temperature. Temperature is a measure of the average kinetic motion of atoms or molecules. X-rays aren't atoms or molecules.
You have just rocked the entire scientific establishment with your new theory that energy is not related to temperature... WOW
All you ignorant astronomers that want to determine the temperature of a star based on these lack-of-carrying-information-photons can hang your heads in shame.
Forget you solar physicists that think you know the temperature of the corona based on your silly lack-of-information-carrying-electromagnetic-energ y-photons.
I mean really, who the hell did Max Planck think he was? relating the radiation of an object to its temperature how absurd.
no relation at all
throw your science books in the trash and move along
Someone does need a science class, a very basic science class (staff writers excluded of course)
For those as dumb as me... let me save you some time
One entry found for caper.
Function: intransitive verb
Inflected Form(s): capered; capering/-p(&-)ri[ng]/
Etymology: probably by shortening & alteration from capriole : to leap or prance about in a playful manner
"Whilst Congress is at it, I hope they also pass a bill to fire Dr. Griffin and pass a law prohibiting yes-men from ever being hired or retained by the agency."
Of course you understand WHO actually appoints an individual to this position.
You cant possibly be serious to think that a politician would want anything other than a yes-man in this position.
and for the record, I totally agree with you.
and on an off-topic sub-sub-note. Every time I read "whilst" I crack up... It's just that there are few things printed that tip-the-hat to a british author more that using the word "whilst". Recently, while reviewing a paper, I had to slam the author for his repeated usage of the word "whilst". It's just not commonly used in US scientific literature (and it was in a US journal)... and, by the way, it was an excellent paper that did get published (after the author removed the "proper English")
I am sure the state of the art will progress without a few extra missions
So sure are you?
What exactly is required to progress?
1.) People
2.) New/additional information
When you cut a mission who gets hurt? Is it the main players (your government scientists)? NO
The main players have many other sources of funding to carry them along, after all, they are the big shots. Is it the engineers/IT/technical people? To some extent, but the best of them also have other sources of funding to carry them along (it will just get thinned out).
The people that get hurt the most are the up-and-coming generation of people (i.e. the students, the future) that may choose to go into a field. Would you want your smart/optimistic/motivated child to enter this field right now? No way. With fewer and fewer missions to support them, their interests, and their future, why should they bust a gut getting a degree with a dismal future? (go be a medical doctor, a lawyer, a plumber, etc.. don't waste your time with science.. it's nothing but a long and expensive road to a very untenable future.
Without new/additional information and the funding that comes with it, the people go away, and you have lost BOTH things required to progress.
And this applies to every field that NASA supports (cosmology, astrophysics, astronomy, solar, heliospheric, magnetospheric, planetary, and even your intentionally derogatory comments "We are talking about observational science here" to the EOS community (I'm sure I left others out).
So you're going to bitch over everything I say, huh?
It did kind of come out that way didn't it.
I'd hate to have.... where dreaming about something literally above our petty problems and dreaming about maybe being able to go out there is apparently too expensive
Well, I have this little problem in that I am in the space business, and I have to worry about these things. I certainly can dream, but I cannot live in a fantasy land either. Sure, I would love to launch a probe to 0.1 AU with a full suite of plasma, magnetic and electric field, and energetic particle sensors. Add to that a neutron detector, a hard X-ray detector, and while I'm in la-la land throw in a few vector magnetograms, and a couple of coronagraphs.... Oh... oh...ooohhhhh... I'd better get a towel. Yes I do dream.. we would learn more about the Sun and its connection to the heliosphere in 60 seconds with that mission then our present knowledge combined. I cream my jeans thinking about the papers I could write with data from a mission like that.
But then reality and expense knocks at the door.
Manned spaceflight is very, very expensive compared to robotic missions. We could fly 10 or 20 or more...robotic missions compared with 1 manned mission. There is no evidence that a manned mission would produce any significant scientific results that 1 well funded robotic mission would produce, and at a fraction of a fraction of the cost. So go ahead and dream.. I will too.. just remember that is exactly what you/me are doing.
Slashdot Mirror
.. and "she" was probably (if true) breaking national security laws by disclosing this type of information to you. It does not take a genius to estimate the system requirements to reproduce said results.
Wouldn't be too hard to coordinate with a satellite to bounce off of them. I'd just be concerned about the laser transmission loss going through the atmosphere for that long of a distance.
To coordinate with a satellite... easy. To worry about the transmission loss... irrelevant. To achieve the pointing requirements, both from the plane and the spacecraft, to hit the target (priceless... literally...). What happens when a little gust of wind hits the plane (they do bounce around a bit). Your beam will miss the target by many kilometers (and that's if you were lucky enough to hit your mirror-in-space?). GPS or something along those capabilities would not even come close to the resolution required for this type of thing, to say nothing of a moving target, a moving source, and a moving relay.
Pipe it over to Mars, and kill two birds with one stone?
That's one hell of a flexible pipe
It's easy to blame everything on Bush p.s. This is more of a rant than a reply!
I don't blame Bush for anything at all. Bush did not give himself the power (well other than e.g., that little spy-on-you-any-time-I-want thing)
I blame 51% of the voting public (+- 2%, two times!!!) for supporting the agenda.
Actually that's not true. I don't blame the 30% that continue to enjoy the republican agenda, it's that 21% that have, for some reason, changed their minds, that I have a problem with.
I'm quite happy to agree to disagree. You have your way, I have mine, and we can gleefully debate all of the pros and cons of this, that, and the other topics until we are dead.
But that 21% who voted for the administration (including all of the local votes that give it power), and now (for some strange reason) have changed their minds? WTF? Your elected officials are doing exactly what they said they would do, how can you possibly change your mind when they are doing exactly what you voted for?
This article reminds me of German
please don't equate something you don't understand, "a German book", with confusing,"a poorly written article"
Just because you "labor" while reading a book in German does not mean there is anything wrong with that book, nor does it mean that there is anything wrong with the German language! (as you seem to imply).
A poorly written article is a poorly written article (independent of the language)
On a side note I would really like to understand the logic behind why something is a der, die, or a das: das auto + die bahn = die Autobahn? == subject for another thread
Also, I think the replies are AJAX. Woo
I dont know why, but every time I read "AJAX" I always think people are talking about
http://www.jaxa.jp/index_e.html
go figure?
pedant
What a fabulous word! I had no idea that word existed, and that is exactly what I was doing.
An interesting post. I am not familiar with the tests you refer to but a few things strike me as odd.
implying that the DNA was highly resilient to the effects of ionizing radiation.
Isn't one of the points of evolution (and I'm way out of my field here) that DNA is affected by radiation and that is, at least, one of the reasons why species change?
Just because a small test is conducted and no changes were observed does not imply that DNA is "resilient" at all, right? It only shows that under the conditions of the test, which were obviously very limited, no changes were observed.
Deep space is far, far nastier and the present experiments don't show that interstellar microbial travel is possible... but it doesn't rule it out, either.
Why is deep space "nastier"? It's certainly colder, if that is what you mean. Is the galactic cosmic ray (GCR) intensity really that much different in deep space than it is around Earth? (sure, we see modulation but that does not imply significantly less intensity right?, granted we really don't know). Inside the heliosphere we have not only the GCR problem but we are also, by definition, fairly near to the Sun, I ~ 1/R^2
Why would some little-microbe-dude, partying inside a little rock, many light years from any star have a "nastier" environment than one inside our heliosphere?
No one really knows the lifetime of these "dudes" but (humor me) if it's ~ millions of years then why could they not arrive (in tact) at a distant star? And the obvious question is, why then could our planet not have been populate in a similar scenario?
They found a new planet, 13 times the mass of Earth, and you're bored?
dude. You can't explain the relevance of the study when your audience does not understand the word "relevance"
absolutely true, and it's sad that your post was modded "troll".
Welcome the "common man"
So you don't understand the significance of this observation because?
It is the endless stories like this...
Perhaps you could reference these "endless stories Seriously, it sounds pretty cool to me. I don't see in any way, shape, or form how this is a "dupe", if that was your conjecture. Or perhaps by "endless" you mean any scientific study that does not result in a star-trek utopia?
..we're about as smart as the bacteria that occupies a Petri dish..
hasn't this bit already been done?
Put on your "bucket helmet" (think Sponge Bob movie) and follow...
A giant educationally-advanced species of bacteria decides to rule the "Earth", etc... even a "bacteria" knows where this joke goes... I'm just not sure that I do.
what? the AC wasn't a troll, people who have to explain their jokes shouldn't make them, especially lame ones like what was posted. and i'm pretty sure bad d.n.a. got modded down because the AC never said that the original poster claimed to be Jesus. the AC was using "Jesus" as as an interjection, completely in vain but bad d.n.a. 'corrected' him. so really his post was kind of a troll, although not necessarily worthy of getting modded down.
/. subjective.
And I do thank that one moderator that understood I was trying to make a joke.
I think I'll change my sig to something like...
the difference between a joke and a troll is
Thousands (plural) means more than 2,000. Reality is, 616 of the laws restricted information - a net change of 332 new information restricting laws.
Accuracy like this just gives geeks a bad name
Jesus, you have to explain your joke in your title.... and the joke isn't even funny!
I'm no expert here but he never claimed he was "Jesus"
I do have a degree in physics and saving face is something I'm not really interested in (on /.)
The poster said...
If you think E=MC^2 has anything to do with an endothermic oxidation reaction, you had to have flunked basic chemistry.
I contend that statement is wrong! And as I stated.. correct me.
The basic statement "E=MC^2 has nothing to do with X" is always incorrect.
b.t.w. The poster did explain his comment. I found it quite useful
I guess it's that peer-review mentality in me... I review a lot of papers, most of which I understand the lingo, and therefore let it slide because the audience will also understand the lingo and can therefore brush over an incorrect statement because "we knew what he meant"
For instance.. You may understand the words:
nongyrotropic
gradient
anisotropies
but if I put them all together in a complete sentence:
I want to investigate the nongyroropic gradient anisotropies of the phase space distribution upstream of the Jovian bow shock, you may find that confusing.
There is nothing wrong with that statement, it's a factual "abstract if you will", although some may not understand the context.
The post in question contained a flaw, perhaps I did not understand the context "fine", I thought I made my lack of knowledge clear.
X-ray are a form of electromagnetic energy, and as such don't have a temperature. Temperature is a measure of the average kinetic motion of atoms or molecules. X-rays aren't atoms or molecules.
g y-photons.
You have just rocked the entire scientific establishment with your new theory that energy is not related to temperature... WOW
All you ignorant astronomers that want to determine the temperature of a star based on these lack-of-carrying-information-photons can hang your heads in shame.
Forget you solar physicists that think you know the temperature of the corona based on your silly lack-of-information-carrying-electromagnetic-ener
I mean really, who the hell did Max Planck think he was? relating the radiation of an object to its temperature how absurd.
no relation at all
throw your science books in the trash and move along
Someone does need a science class, a very basic science class (staff writers excluded of course)
W00T
If you think E=MC^2 has anything to do with an endothermic oxidation reaction, you had to have flunked basic chemistry.
So your claiming that E=MC^2 is not intimately and directly related to a endothermic oxidation reaction ?
Your claiming that somehow the basic principles of E=MC^2 break down when it comes to a specific type of reaction?
is it the endothermic part?
is it the oxidation part?
is it the (god forbid) the reaction part?
Granted.. I did sleep through a great many of my graduate physics courses but this one strikes me as odd
Please do correct my mis-understanding.
I'd be capering around the room
/-p(&-)ri[ng]/
: to leap or prance about in a playful manner
For those as dumb as me... let me save you some time
One entry found for caper.
Function: intransitive verb
Inflected Form(s): capered; capering
Etymology: probably by shortening & alteration from capriole
This is just an unexpected but well understood method of heating
/sarcasm
sarcasm Your comment is simply an unexpected but anticipated statement
Professor... Your too fast for me... what exactly did you mean?
Some of the best science starts with the words "Gee, that's funny..."
wrong... All good science starts with:
WTF..
"Back under the bridge you little troll"
/. all of the time just to get
people to his blog. Please, please, dont start him
on his GOLD fetish.
grandparent spams
"Whilst Congress is at it, I hope they also pass a bill to fire Dr. Griffin and pass a law prohibiting yes-men from ever being hired or retained by the agency."
... and, by the way, it was an excellent paper that did get published (after the author removed the "proper English")
Of course you understand WHO actually appoints an individual to this position.
You cant possibly be serious to think that a politician would want anything other than a yes-man in this position.
and for the record, I totally agree with you.
and on an off-topic sub-sub-note. Every time I read "whilst" I crack up... It's just that there are few things printed that tip-the-hat to a british author more that using the word "whilst". Recently, while reviewing a paper, I had to slam the author for his repeated usage of the word "whilst". It's just not commonly used in US scientific literature (and it was in a US journal)
I am sure the state of the art will progress without a few extra missions
So sure are you?
What exactly is required to progress?
1.) People
2.) New/additional information
When you cut a mission who gets hurt? Is it the main players (your government scientists)? NO
The main players have many other sources of funding to carry them along, after all, they are the big shots.
Is it the engineers/IT/technical people? To some extent, but the best of them also have other sources of funding to carry them along (it will just get thinned out).
The people that get hurt the most are the up-and-coming generation of people (i.e. the students, the future) that may choose to go into a field. Would you want your smart/optimistic/motivated child to enter this field right now? No way. With fewer and fewer missions to support them, their interests, and their future, why should they bust a gut getting a degree with a dismal future? (go be a medical doctor, a lawyer, a plumber, etc.. don't waste your time with science.. it's nothing but a long and expensive road to a very untenable future.
Without new/additional information and the funding that comes with it, the people go away, and you have lost BOTH things required to progress.
And this applies to every field that NASA supports (cosmology, astrophysics, astronomy, solar, heliospheric, magnetospheric, planetary, and even your intentionally derogatory comments "We are talking about observational science here" to the EOS community (I'm sure I left others out).
So you're going to bitch over everything I say, huh?
.... where dreaming about something literally above our petty problems and dreaming about maybe being able to go out there is apparently too expensive
It did kind of come out that way didn't it.
I'd hate to have
Well, I have this little problem in that I am in the space business, and I have to worry about these things. I certainly can dream, but I cannot live in a fantasy land either. Sure, I would love to launch a probe to 0.1 AU with a full suite of plasma, magnetic and electric field, and energetic particle sensors. Add to that a neutron detector, a hard X-ray detector, and while I'm in la-la land throw in a few vector magnetograms, and a couple of coronagraphs.... Oh... oh...ooohhhhh... I'd better get a towel. Yes I do dream.. we would learn more about the Sun and its connection to the heliosphere in 60 seconds with that mission then our present knowledge combined. I cream my jeans thinking about the papers I could write with data from a mission like that.
But then reality and expense knocks at the door.
Manned spaceflight is very, very expensive compared to robotic missions. We could fly 10 or 20 or more...robotic missions compared with 1 manned mission. There is no evidence that a manned mission would produce any significant scientific results that 1 well funded robotic mission would produce, and at a fraction of a fraction of the cost. So go ahead and dream.. I will too.. just remember that is exactly what you/me are doing.