If people who die in a wheel well always have their dead bodies discovered, while *some* of the people who survive a wheel-well journey don't -- they sneak out on the tarmac undetected -- then the survival rate of 25 percent must be an under-estimate, or at least is potentially an under-estimate.
I think this is probably right -- the idea is that a valet-parked car has had its interior presented to a valet, voluntarily. But what about the trunk? Did the valets open the trunk? I think the owner of the car *does* have a reasonable expectation of privacy wrt the contents of the trunk. IANAL
Tch, they're not really planets, right? I mean, if they're not orbiting a star, then they can't have "cleared the neighborhood of their orbit". Yet one more reason the IAU's current definition is so idiotic. (Besides the fact that it suggests that Mercury is more like Jupiter than it is like Ceres.)
Yes, they are planets most likely, because they probably formed around a star and then got kicked out dynamically. This is expected generically in models of how solar systems form and evolve (in particular we think it happened multiple times in our own Solar System).
Free-floating planets are generically expected: Essentially all models for how solar systems like ours (and the others we now know) involve dynamical interactions that would kick out planets at high velocity, leaving them unbound. Astronomers have expected to find these for decades, but have been unable to do so because a planet not warmed by a nearby star gets cold fast (hundreds of thousands to millions of years) and therefore invisible even in the infrared. This result is very important if correct, because gravitational lensing is an emission-insensitive way to find the planets.
And yes, IAAA!
(ps As for whether they are "spacecraft": I love that idea, but the "people" onboard probably wouldn't give the planet an impulse themselves (way, way, espensivo), they would make use of a free-floater passing by and hitch the ride.)
My experience is that cable trays -- a long, continuous metal shelf near the ceiling everywhere -- is much better than conduits, because (a) recabling is trivial, (b) you never know where you will want to put new stuff (recall that a few years ago no-one wanted electronics in their hallways, and now everyone has a wireless router there), (c) you don't create new dark environments for rodents, and (d) transparent technology is good technology.
You can't compress this stuff unless you do it losslessly. Compression artifacts mess up photometry
This is not strictly true. What's true is that the current standard lossy compression techniques mess up photometry. However, if you know what you are going to photometer and how you are going to photometer it, it is certainly possible to compress in a lossy way without ruining the photometry. In a trivial sense, photometry is lossy compression of data (you have turned huge images into a few numbers with error bars)!
The government research group didn't unveil the 2005 Grand Challenge location in the Mojave Desert until weeks before that race, in order to avoid giving any team an advantage .
Openness about everything is actually much better for avoiding any advantage to any team! Keeping it secret just opens up the possibility that one team will get an advantage through a backdoor channel. Openness = fairness.
Of course if you win this race you will spend the rest of your life doing things in secret in our secret underground laboratories.
Although I think a fingerprint can be used to distinguish among a small number of people, it has never been demonstrated, to my knowledge, to be useable to locate a person in a multi-million-person database. The US and UK pretend to have this capability, but I don't think it has ever been demonstrated in a public (much less peer-reviewed, double-blind) test. If I am wrong, please reply to this with references.
Routine, un-targeted fingerprinting of this kind is a method for scaring people, not catching people.
If you assume that IE7 and Firefox assembled their phishing lists independently (maybe that's a bad assumption), the fact that one misses 117 and the other misses 243 can be used to estimate the total number of phishing sites out there. You need to know the total number listed by each browser first though; I didn't RTFA so I can't calculate it for you, but I leave it as an exercise for the ambitious \.er
Actually, the mistake about Pluto is not understood at this level. The effect it has on Neptune's orbit depends on Pluto's mass but not Neptune's mass (because, essentially, all things fall at the same rate). At the moment, the fact that Pluto was found roughly where a ninth planet was expected is considered by most astronomers to be a huge coincidence.
If these things made up the "dark matter" then it wouldn't be dark -- these objects (it might not be clear from the article) were found because they emit strongly in the infrared. In short, they can't make up the majority of the dark matter, either observationally or theoretically. Good idea, though.
That's correct, though the MACHO experiment places its best limits on much more massive objects than Jupiters; for now it is conceivable that such objects could be a significant part of the dark matter.
OTOH, there is no way (without huge modifications to what we know about the early universe) to make the majority of the dark matter anything (dust, rocks, planetesimals, planets, brown dwarfs, white dwarfs, neutron stars) that are made from atoms; we now know that the atomic component of the Universe must be only a few percent of the total. So though these could be part of the dark matter, they can't be all of it.
I didn't RTFA, but a thorassic surgeon I know told me that using a waldo in lung surgery can be very useful, because the machinery can scale down your motions, making it possible to perform extremely precise, tiny cuts and stitches, etc; for some operations a waldo is indispensible, apparently.
I have to admit that this doesn't have much to say about the idea of remote operation, but I, for one, will welcome our scalpel-wielding aluminum overlords when I need some surgery.
If you are more of a hardware hacker (and less of a kid), check out the handyboard, which is a robotics platform used in may robotics classes at the tertiary level. It is super flexible and fun.
I agree -- the article says that the signal can be transmitted "over the internet" but isn't that just the same as transmitting any white noise source over the internet, without the expense of a radio observatory?
I think they are forgetting that (for some deranged part of our society), creating Linux was fun. Will translating orders for toilet paper for the Iraqi National Guard mess hall be fun too? Only if you can write your translation as a perl poem!
FWIW, I have had very good experiences running postgres in astronomy applications, including for of order millions of galaxies with of order hundreds of attributes in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. For scientific applications, open-source is a must, because (a) you have to be sure that the db is doing what you think it is, (b) you have to be able to rely on support or self-maintainance into the asymptotic future, and (c) (usually) you end up having to make small customizations.
Point (b) is especially big: in the Sloan Survey early days we had a proprietary database with our only copy of some of our data; when the company went belly-up (I think is was Objectivity), our data was effectively "encrypted" in whatever proprietary internal format was used by Objectivity and we had no way to reverse-engineer it, and no-one to call.
On point (c), try calling Oracle or Microsoft and asking for customizations that astronomers want. Evidently they don't consider us an important part of their market!?
Slashdot Mirror
If people who die in a wheel well always have their dead bodies discovered, while *some* of the people who survive a wheel-well journey don't -- they sneak out on the tarmac undetected -- then the survival rate of 25 percent must be an under-estimate, or at least is potentially an under-estimate.
agreed
I think this is probably right -- the idea is that a valet-parked car has had its interior presented to a valet, voluntarily. But what about the trunk? Did the valets open the trunk? I think the owner of the car *does* have a reasonable expectation of privacy wrt the contents of the trunk. IANAL
Tch, they're not really planets, right? I mean, if they're not orbiting a star, then they can't have "cleared the neighborhood of their orbit". Yet one more reason the IAU's current definition is so idiotic. (Besides the fact that it suggests that Mercury is more like Jupiter than it is like Ceres.)
Yes, they are planets most likely, because they probably formed around a star and then got kicked out dynamically. This is expected generically in models of how solar systems form and evolve (in particular we think it happened multiple times in our own Solar System).
Free-floating planets are generically expected: Essentially all models for how solar systems like ours (and the others we now know) involve dynamical interactions that would kick out planets at high velocity, leaving them unbound. Astronomers have expected to find these for decades, but have been unable to do so because a planet not warmed by a nearby star gets cold fast (hundreds of thousands to millions of years) and therefore invisible even in the infrared. This result is very important if correct, because gravitational lensing is an emission-insensitive way to find the planets. And yes, IAAA! (ps As for whether they are "spacecraft": I love that idea, but the "people" onboard probably wouldn't give the planet an impulse themselves (way, way, espensivo), they would make use of a free-floater passing by and hitch the ride.)
Damn that game was fun and it ran on an Apple II loaded from a floppy!
My experience is that cable trays -- a long, continuous metal shelf near the ceiling everywhere -- is much better than conduits, because (a) recabling is trivial, (b) you never know where you will want to put new stuff (recall that a few years ago no-one wanted electronics in their hallways, and now everyone has a wireless router there), (c) you don't create new dark environments for rodents, and (d) transparent technology is good technology.
This is not strictly true. What's true is that the current standard lossy compression techniques mess up photometry. However, if you know what you are going to photometer and how you are going to photometer it, it is certainly possible to compress in a lossy way without ruining the photometry. In a trivial sense, photometry is lossy compression of data (you have turned huge images into a few numbers with error bars)!
Many corps do have Hubbles; they point them downwards, not upwards.
Openness about everything is actually much better for avoiding any advantage to any team! Keeping it secret just opens up the possibility that one team will get an advantage through a backdoor channel. Openness = fairness.
Of course if you win this race you will spend the rest of your life doing things in secret in our secret underground laboratories.
Although I think a fingerprint can be used to distinguish among a small number of people, it has never been demonstrated, to my knowledge, to be useable to locate a person in a multi-million-person database. The US and UK pretend to have this capability, but I don't think it has ever been demonstrated in a public (much less peer-reviewed, double-blind) test. If I am wrong, please reply to this with references.
Routine, un-targeted fingerprinting of this kind is a method for scaring people, not catching people.
hear hear
If you assume that IE7 and Firefox assembled their phishing lists independently (maybe that's a bad assumption), the fact that one misses 117 and the other misses 243 can be used to estimate the total number of phishing sites out there. You need to know the total number listed by each browser first though; I didn't RTFA so I can't calculate it for you, but I leave it as an exercise for the ambitious \.er
If you have something cold to work as a heatsink, eg, cold water, why not just take a bath in it? A one-minute cold bath beats hours of AC any day!
Welcome to slashdot, Quaoar. I thought it would take ages for the outer solar system to get online.
Actually, the mistake about Pluto is not understood at this level. The effect it has on Neptune's orbit depends on Pluto's mass but not Neptune's mass (because, essentially, all things fall at the same rate). At the moment, the fact that Pluto was found roughly where a ninth planet was expected is considered by most astronomers to be a huge coincidence.
If these things made up the "dark matter" then it wouldn't be dark -- these objects (it might not be clear from the article) were found because they emit strongly in the infrared. In short, they can't make up the majority of the dark matter, either observationally or theoretically. Good idea, though.
That's correct, though the MACHO experiment places its best limits on much more massive objects than Jupiters; for now it is conceivable that such objects could be a significant part of the dark matter. OTOH, there is no way (without huge modifications to what we know about the early universe) to make the majority of the dark matter anything (dust, rocks, planetesimals, planets, brown dwarfs, white dwarfs, neutron stars) that are made from atoms; we now know that the atomic component of the Universe must be only a few percent of the total. So though these could be part of the dark matter, they can't be all of it.
I didn't RTFA, but a thorassic surgeon I know told me that using a waldo in lung surgery can be very useful, because the machinery can scale down your motions, making it possible to perform extremely precise, tiny cuts and stitches, etc; for some operations a waldo is indispensible, apparently. I have to admit that this doesn't have much to say about the idea of remote operation, but I, for one, will welcome our scalpel-wielding aluminum overlords when I need some surgery.
If you are more of a hardware hacker (and less of a kid), check out the handyboard, which is a robotics platform used in may robotics classes at the tertiary level. It is super flexible and fun.
I agree -- the article says that the signal can be transmitted "over the internet" but isn't that just the same as transmitting any white noise source over the internet, without the expense of a radio observatory?
I think they are forgetting that (for some deranged part of our society), creating Linux was fun. Will translating orders for toilet paper for the Iraqi National Guard mess hall be fun too? Only if you can write your translation as a perl poem!
Celebration!? That's the best song ever recorded, bar none!
FWIW, I have had very good experiences running postgres in astronomy applications, including for of order millions of galaxies with of order hundreds of attributes in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. For scientific applications, open-source is a must, because (a) you have to be sure that the db is doing what you think it is, (b) you have to be able to rely on support or self-maintainance into the asymptotic future, and (c) (usually) you end up having to make small customizations.
Point (b) is especially big: in the Sloan Survey early days we had a proprietary database with our only copy of some of our data; when the company went belly-up (I think is was Objectivity), our data was effectively "encrypted" in whatever proprietary internal format was used by Objectivity and we had no way to reverse-engineer it, and no-one to call.
On point (c), try calling Oracle or Microsoft and asking for customizations that astronomers want. Evidently they don't consider us an important part of their market!?