Now that we’re competing with the amateurs, we can’t afford to invest that little extra in story, production value, feeling.
While joking and playing with the absurd, you've described a deadpan mentality that infects many areas of business - clone mediocrities going at each other. Back in my hometown, my favorite mini-market had a selection of products that I would buy daily, in fact it was THE most successful mini-mart in a town of just under half a million. Great selection, motivated employees, etc. Across the street, when a national chain opened for business, you could hear the crickets chirping. Then a national rival bought my favorite mini-mart, and systematically eliminated every reason I (and many other fellow citizens), had for going there, to "compete" with the "business" across the street. About a year later, corporate HQ did a survey to determine why sales had plummeted at that particular store, after it became a franchise.
As for story, production value, feeling in porn, blame Shakespeare-trained actor and overall Twentieth Century Renaissance Man Jamie Gillis for inventing gonzo. But wait, that's Boogie Nights and Dirk Diggler, San Fernando, Las Vegas, etc. What's the deal with the relentless waves of "fresh meat" coming (no pun intended) out of Eastern Europe? It's like WWII on the Eastern Front (the REAL War), no matter how successful the Axis were in any given campaign, they always had to face yet another wave of better trained and equipped Soviet soldiers. Yeah, an incredibly insensitive analogy, I know, but there it is, the porn wars fought by ex-socialist women, from societies way more bohemian than WASPs like openly allow.
In Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, right on the Texas border, criminological hypothesis suggest that the thousands of women who have vanished in the last twenty years are not victims of a serial killer or killers, but of a cartel (or cartels) of snuff films. What kind of a sexually repressed, fucked up world we live in, where something like that is even a possibility? It's like institutionalized psychosis, not in an "All I wanted was a Pepsi" simplicity.
The mind being the body's largest sexual organ, one or more people making reproductively-inspired physical contact is erotic, whether or not it uses the right or wrong biologically-inspired canals, whether I like it or not. The same number of people or more inflicting non-consensual physical contact (sexual or violent), is the definition of obscenity to me.
Material blasted off the earth by an impact event or events has made its way to the surface of Titan. But those were massively violent events, involving impact-ejecta-transit-impact. By this standard, Huygens is the equivalent of gently scooping material here and gently placing it there.
The probe was sterilized, if I recall correctly. So it shouldn't be an issue. Agreed. Speaking of contamination, no political or religious pamphlets tacked on Huygens either, "Game Players of Titan, vote YES on California's Proposition X, expanding reservation casinos", or "Game Players of Titan, repent! For the end is nigh".
If you find me something that can survive 10,000k temperatures and 10 million atmospheres I'd bow down to my new overlord.
To quote the Four Yorkshiremen, luxury. How about conscious entities improbably generating and evolving on the quite stable surface of a pulsar? By the time I finish writing this post (including beer runs, bathroom breaks and all), several million rotations would have passed in the pulsar. If each rotation is the equivalent of a terrestrial day, and following our evolutionary pace, in the space between FIFA World Cups they'd go from microscopic tadpoles to Multiverse Overlords.
BTW, Serenity is a +5 Insightful post with 0 replies, great sig.
Same here. About a year ago, I went to a sleep therapist, among the best five hundred bucks I've spent in my life. Officially diagnosed with DSPS, my treatment is: 1. Half an hour of blue-light therapy in the morning, 16 hours before the desired bedtime, with this bad boy: http://www.amazon.com/Philips-GoLite-Spectrum-Therapy-Device/dp/B000C1946S/ref=pd_sim_hpc_9 2. Use a good pair of sunglasses and avoid direct sunlight on the eyes in the afternoon and early evening. For example, if I gaze at a sunset, my circadian system might interpret it as a sunrise and reset the cycle. 3. Switch off all electronics half an hour before bedtime.
With these three steps, I can effortlessly maintain a morning schedule for 2-3 weeks at a time. More often than not, stress, illness or alcohol will screw up the morning schedule. And so, I've got a six-week old son at home right now, so I've suspended treatment until further notice, as every night gets kind of noisy during this time, and dealing with the medical bills and insurance company... well, that's incredibly stressful.
The Google Translation says that LOFAR has made unique observations, which in context I understand to mean as measurements, not the same as saying that it has grabbed the first images. Also, there are no jpgs of pulsars in TFA, so show us the money!
Any Netherlanders who could kindly clarify this? BTW, I'm from Mexico and have been to your peculiar, intense and wonderful country three times, I hope to return in about a decade with my wife and son (who was born three weeks ago), to skate from town to town at night in the frozen canals, torches in our hands to guide our way.
this HAS to be the first manfred mann reference on slashdot. at least, i hope so. well played, sir.
Here's a dirty little secret: "Blinded By The Light" is actually a Bruce Springsteen song, from his debut album. After who knows how many albums, it's curious that Manfred Mann are only remembered for cover versions, the other being "Do Wah Diddy Diddy", actually by a band called The Exciters. Manfred Mann, however, did OWN those songs with their versions, so I'm not putting them down, much as Jimi Hendrix owned Bob Dylan's "All Along The Watchtower", or Led Zeppelin owned Joan Baez' "Babe I'm Gonna Leave You".
And sometimes they end up in key positions. There's a college teacher in Mexico who told me about a class of fifty engineering students, where five of them flunked. As per the rules, a couple of months later he performed an "extraordinary exam", and only one of them flunked, a student who made this a pattern in other classes throughout his college years, yet eventually managed to graduate. There's something wrong with an education system that allows for that to happen, but that's another topic.
Anyway, this D student ended up working for the national petroleum company (PEMEX), scheduling deliveries to gas stations all over town. Predictably, some stations ran out of product, while others with full inventory received unscheduled deliveries, had to turn the tanker trucks back and go through an infuriating process of contending the service fees PLUS fines. This was a daily crapshoot all over town for months, until the D student was yanked and reassigned to screw up in another post, so the man wasn't even fired. Somehow, I doubt the local PEMEX management did this because they listened to the outcry, but because the spike in reimbursement hassles started to bog down other departments, such as legal, accounting, finance, etc. Ah, yes... the idiots in management, but that's also another topic.
I used my binoculars to go spotting at Jupiter a while back after this image... Outstanding picture....a sense of being inside a solar system than any of those things.
About ten years ago, I had a 4" Newtonian telescope, and being a fairly constant reader of Sky & Telescope Magazine, I knew that the Moon was to occult Uranus at a specific date and time. So I pointed my telescope in the right direction and, sure enough, this perfect little green sphere rose from the mountains of the Moon, definitely one of those "wow!" moments. At other times, I did also manage to "snag" a couple of the LINEAR comets.
So my best advice for the budding amateur astronomer is to buy Sky & Telescope Magazine or visit http://www.skyandtelescope.com/ to get monthly tips of celestial event watching.
A friend of mine owns several more serious telescopes, in the 10" - 18" inch range, and what's kept him up at night during the past year is the challenge of "capturing" binary star systems, here's the drill: 1. Find your target binary in a star atlas. There's tons of them. Some of them are even triple or quadruple star systems. 2. Point the telescope in the general direction, find your bearings and lock on target. This might take a while. 3. Increase magnification by changing lenses, until the lesser magnitude companion star pops out. Mission accomplished. 4. Go for a more difficult (lesser magnitude) system next time around, thereby honing your skills.
I would argue that most Apple fanboys (the real hardcore ones anyway) only THINK they're "free-thinking." They're original and free-thinking in the same way that hippies thought they were original and free-thinking in the 60's--by acting, dressing, and thinking like every other hippie. Real free-thinkers don't start out with an set ideology, and they certainly don't have a cult leader or product line that they worship.
Well said, as most comments in this thread suffer from black-and-whiteness. I've been using Mac since college, then just kept on with it, and now find the thought of switching OS unnecessary and extremely displeasurable.
That said, several monolithic aspects of Apple software are very annoying, such as the iTunes library, where I'm supposed to handle my music collection the way Apple tells me to. Also, 99% of the time I use Firefox instead of Safari, VLC instead of Quicktime and Graphic Converter instead of Preview or iPhoto, to name a few. All of this puzzles most fellow Mac users, who stare and openly wonder why I don't drink the kool-aid along with them, while dangling iPhones at me like Conquistadors dangled mirrors at the Aztecs, suckering them into believing mirrors were more valuable than gold. Then again, there's many Windows twerps who invite themselves, with no provocation, to tell me anecdotal "evidence" about why Apple sucks, and that's just as robotic as fanboys are accused of being.
Meanwhile, besides safer surfing and no risk of malicious.exe disasters, there's at least two pieces of software that make me glad to stick with Mac: 1. DVD Studio Pro has incredible DVD authoring features, and I used to run the cinema department of a cultural center, so that came in very handy indeed. 2. Filemaker Pro is the best database software on the market. Originally created for Mac even though there's also a Windows version, it is very well integrated with OSX and its' networking functions, which allowed a neophyte like me to design a Human Resources database/interface/server for my boss (also a Mac user), without a single call for IT support. Not only am I proud of my work, it's also openly appreciated.
So I'll stick with Mac, surely to be kept on prodded and nudged by fanboys on both sides of the OS divide.
First time I heard that line I thought he was complaining about the beans.
Suit yourself, but somehow I enjoy thinking it's all about the heapin' helpin' of garbanzos Spock scoops up in the Enterprise cafeteria's salad bar. Vulcans just can't get enough of that Terran delicacy, smothered in Thousand Island dressing and a thick crust of black pepper. The first time Uhura and Sulu saw Spock doing that, they were like "whoa!", while Chekov was like "ay yay yay!". Scotty grimaced, stole a quick gulp of whiskey from his flask masquerading as a phaser, and breathed out with a slow whistle.
An outraged Bones approached Spock at his table and said "Are you out of your Vulcan mind, you green blooded bastard? Do you have any idea of the discomfort you are putting your fellow crewmembers on the bridge in?" Spock slowly turned and replied "It is my understanding, Doctor, that the Enterprise's ventilation system is quite adequate at handling any situation that may arise from my culinary preferences". "Well at least take these chewable tablets, then". "I will do no such thing, Doctor. It is not the Vulcan way".
Kirk was amused no end, silently pondering his secret enjoyment of Spock's emissions while scanning for the outraged faces of the bridge crew. But more than anything, the sadistic Kirk relished sending redshirts to fetch Spock in his quarters. You know, Kirk's idea of a dutch oven is to get Spock alone in the Enterprise elevator, down and sideways to the hangar and back again, that sick fuck.
Offtopic, but WTHell: Watch Cosmos again and be on the lookout for "billions and billions", and it's not there, anywhere at all. This was uttered by Johnny Carson, in a Tonight Show bit where he parodied Carl. But the phrase turned out to be too good to not be true, so it became a classic case of "print the legend".
Headcheese, very European. Or you could do some authentic Mexican food, dice up the brain and toss the chunks into a vat of simmering bone marrow soup, in which case the brains are called sesos. No joke, I've had this with a dash of lemon and besides being super tasty, it's an incredible hangover recipe, although the amounts of cholesterol involved are ridiculously high.
Speaking of hardcore food from the central Mexico region, the only thing I can think of that I haven't dared try yet are escamoles, a buttery, cheese-like spread made of (wait for it...) ant eggs. This thing won a culinary competition in Spain a couple of years ago, the judges finding out what they ate and praised only after they handed out the prize. Some of the judges then probably scrambled towards the toilets, head first. Seriously though, they don't use just any ants, but those that set up their colonies in fields of maguey plants, where mezcal and tequila come from. Call it Mexico's idea of "kosher", I dunno.
Actually, the Moonies own the Washington Times -- still pretty big, but not nearly as big as the Post.
The Times has approximately 12% of the circulation of the Post. Simultaneously, the Times also enjoys a microscopic, maybe even subatomic fraction, of the Post's prestige and credibility. The numbers are not surprising, as the Times is for the printed word as Clear Channel is for radio, Faux for cable news.
In the Wikipedia article, there is a quote on the Times by historian Thomas Frank, published in an essay for Harper's Magazine. Here's what Frank had to say:
There is even a daily newspaper—the Washington Times—published strictly for the movement’s benefit, a propaganda sheet whose distortions are so obvious and so alien that it puts one in mind of those official party organs one encounters when traveling in authoritarian countries.
Tellingly, the newspaper-reading target audience for this sort of manure is much, much lower than in radio and television. Those damned Right Coast intellectual elites!
I would rephrase that, for specificity: By a very, very wide margin, gaps are the rule, not the exception. To quote a post above, Anything that gets within an AU or so of Jupiter is seriously deflected, and sent off on a different trajectory. A radius of one AU means a diameter of two. Jupiter's orbital perimeter measures around thirty AUs, give or take a couple. So, if two out of thirty AUs are covered, that's one fifteenth "protection" against any celestial bombardment of the inner solar system.
Because of smaller size and larger orbital perimeters, adding up Saturn, Uranus and Neptune do not change the numbers very much. So we're not quite naked, but we are basically wearing only an armored thong in a war zone. But since this thread discusses the possibility of panspermia, the image of a chastity belt keeps popping up in my mind.
Back before we had 200 channels on TV and the Internet most people got their news from one of three networks and or the news paper. The news coverage was limited but they where actually pretty careful to report facts or report nothing at all. A lot of people grew up trusting that if it was on TV that it was based in fact. The downside is that you where limited in what facts you could get without a lot of effort.
Now we have the Internet and 200 channels of TV. Now a person can find out a huge amount of facts but there is no gatekeeper. With that vast resource of facts comes an even bigger flood of opinion, ego, and fantasy all pretending to be facts.
Brilliantly put, PP should get modded up. I'd like to just underline a link between both paragraphs, to state the obvious: A lot of people still think that because it's on TV, it's based on fact, are unaware that the gatekeeper has left the building, believe to this day that the 24-hour "news" cycle is still in the tradition and standard of Walter Cronkite. The contemporary tabloid-news cacophony didn't happen overnight, I am reminded of the metaphor of the frog in slowly boiling water, unaware that it's in the process of being boiled alive. After the increasingly crass coverage of Bobbitt, Buttafuoco and then OJ Simpson, I said to friends "The noise level is getting unbearable, how can they (the media) possibly turn any more sordid? Who can they possibly exploit next?" As it turned out, Clinton and Lewinsky were right around the corner.
Then there's the incessant fear mongering flavor of the week, When it comes to hyping Niburu and 2012, the majority of the weight can be put squarely on Fart Bell and friends of Coast To Coast, broadcast by, who else, Clear Channel Radio, home of Rush Limbaugh. Lest we forget how back in 1996, over the course of several shows with several guests, Bell sensationalized a bit of optical noise behind Comet Hale-Bopp as a UFO, only to packpedal and bowdlerize his indirect but real role as inspiration in the mass suicide event of the Heaven's Gate cult.
Is non-stop sensationalism what's in store for us, from here to fucking eternity? A fitting tag would be The Culture Of McDonald's, thrust aggressively in the faces of TV viewers everywhere, keeping them numb and highly addicted in an intellectually stultifying environment.
My wife and I, we have a TV and DVD player with neither cable nor satellite, so we only rent what we want to watch (our last big escapade was Battlestar Galactica), while on the internet I limit my daily TV diet to the brilliant deconstructions of The Daily Show.
To be as precise as possible, any two objects orbit each other on an axis called the barycenter, which may lie within the more massive object, but it's there nonetheless.
It's amazing how something so obvious in retrospect was such an intuitive leap forward in (ahem) the dark.
Telescopes existed for some time before Galileo, but in extremely limited quantities and mainly used for practical purposes, such as scanning for mast and sails of ships as they emerged in the horizon.
In those days, the church told you how the heavens went, and that was that. After plenty of leeway for intellectuals during the Middle Ages, a panicky Vatican was in full-tilt political damage control mode since Martin Luther had sparked a movement that split the church in two, with the support of a new, rich merchant class who were ready to challenge the power of Rome. A famous victim of this scramble to put the toothpaste back in the tube was Giordano Bruno, who was burned at the stake for heresy, an inconceivable prospect a couple of centuries before. Remember that Copernicus came up with the heliocentric idea to explain the embarrassing discrepancy of the Julian calendar having thrown the seasons off-sync (think an error in calculation of 15 minutes per year, then add it up over a millennium and a half). Even so, the first edition of De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium was published with a HUGE disclaimer that went along the lines of "This is a hypothetical treatise, an mathematical exercise, and is in no way intended to conflict with the canon of the almighty church". To get a feel for the times, picture yourself as a Darwinist teacher of Biology in Kansas, then multiply by a hundred.
Not surprising then that in this climate, it took a while before some foolhardy individual decided to get a bit creative with a telescope and point it up into the night sky.
Just sacrifice some interns to Quezacotl and I'm sure the repossessor gods will pass over your humble conglomerate.
For the record, the accepted spelling is Quetzalcoatl. However, keeping in mind it's a Nahuatl word, this is the Aztec manifestation of the ever-popular Feathered Serpent, originally a Toltec concept so awesomely cool that it spread throughout most of Mesoamerica. This being a 2012 thread, better to go with the Mayan equivalent Kukulkan. But if you really want to get your sacrifices right, skip the middleman and get right to the top, Itzamna is the head honcho in the Mayan pantheon.
Can't resist quoting Colbert here: "Hey Quetzalcoatl! Nice feathers, man! Is there a men's department at the store where you bought those?"
Oh man, I intend this as a high compliment - fifty years from now, Primer is going to be regarded by intellectual snobs (the trendsetters) in Brazil, China, India and Indonesia as maybe the finest example of American Geek Cinema of early Twentieth First Century, so far ahead of its' cultural time that it's almost awe-inspiring.
Slashdot Mirror
Smaug!
Now that we’re competing with the amateurs, we can’t afford to invest that little extra in story, production value, feeling.
While joking and playing with the absurd, you've described a deadpan mentality that infects many areas of business - clone mediocrities going at each other. Back in my hometown, my favorite mini-market had a selection of products that I would buy daily, in fact it was THE most successful mini-mart in a town of just under half a million. Great selection, motivated employees, etc.
Across the street, when a national chain opened for business, you could hear the crickets chirping. Then a national rival bought my favorite mini-mart, and systematically eliminated every reason I (and many other fellow citizens), had for going there, to "compete" with the "business" across the street.
About a year later, corporate HQ did a survey to determine why sales had plummeted at that particular store, after it became a franchise.
As for story, production value, feeling in porn, blame Shakespeare-trained actor and overall Twentieth Century Renaissance Man Jamie Gillis for inventing gonzo.
But wait, that's Boogie Nights and Dirk Diggler, San Fernando, Las Vegas, etc. What's the deal with the relentless waves of "fresh meat" coming (no pun intended) out of Eastern Europe? It's like WWII on the Eastern Front (the REAL War), no matter how successful the Axis were in any given campaign, they always had to face yet another wave of better trained and equipped Soviet soldiers. Yeah, an incredibly insensitive analogy, I know, but there it is, the porn wars fought by ex-socialist women, from societies way more bohemian than WASPs like openly allow.
In Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, right on the Texas border, criminological hypothesis suggest that the thousands of women who have vanished in the last twenty years are not victims of a serial killer or killers, but of a cartel (or cartels) of snuff films. What kind of a sexually repressed, fucked up world we live in, where something like that is even a possibility? It's like institutionalized psychosis, not in an "All I wanted was a Pepsi" simplicity.
The mind being the body's largest sexual organ, one or more people making reproductively-inspired physical contact is erotic, whether or not it uses the right or wrong biologically-inspired canals, whether I like it or not. The same number of people or more inflicting non-consensual physical contact (sexual or violent), is the definition of obscenity to me.
you gotta love nature. just when you think you figured out what is behind the curtain, nature reveals yet another curtain.
Right, yet another case of "Who ordered THAT?!!".
Material blasted off the earth by an impact event or events has made its way to the surface of Titan.
But those were massively violent events, involving impact-ejecta-transit-impact. By this standard, Huygens is the equivalent of gently scooping material here and gently placing it there.
The probe was sterilized, if I recall correctly. So it shouldn't be an issue.
Agreed. Speaking of contamination, no political or religious pamphlets tacked on Huygens either,
"Game Players of Titan, vote YES on California's Proposition X, expanding reservation casinos", or
"Game Players of Titan, repent! For the end is nigh".
If you find me something that can survive 10,000k temperatures and 10 million atmospheres I'd bow down to my new overlord.
To quote the Four Yorkshiremen, luxury.
How about conscious entities improbably generating and evolving on the quite stable surface of a pulsar? By the time I finish writing this post (including beer runs, bathroom breaks and all), several million rotations would have passed in the pulsar. If each rotation is the equivalent of a terrestrial day, and following our evolutionary pace, in the space between FIFA World Cups they'd go from microscopic tadpoles to Multiverse Overlords.
BTW, Serenity is a +5 Insightful post with 0 replies, great sig.
I've got a severe case of DSPS (~5-6 hour delay).
Same here. About a year ago, I went to a sleep therapist, among the best five hundred bucks I've spent in my life. Officially diagnosed with DSPS, my treatment is:
1. Half an hour of blue-light therapy in the morning, 16 hours before the desired bedtime, with this bad boy:
http://www.amazon.com/Philips-GoLite-Spectrum-Therapy-Device/dp/B000C1946S/ref=pd_sim_hpc_9
2. Use a good pair of sunglasses and avoid direct sunlight on the eyes in the afternoon and early evening. For example, if I gaze at a sunset, my circadian system might interpret it as a sunrise and reset the cycle.
3. Switch off all electronics half an hour before bedtime.
With these three steps, I can effortlessly maintain a morning schedule for 2-3 weeks at a time. More often than not, stress, illness or alcohol will screw up the morning schedule.
And so, I've got a six-week old son at home right now, so I've suspended treatment until further notice, as every night gets kind of noisy during this time, and dealing with the medical bills and insurance company... well, that's incredibly stressful.
The Google Translation says that LOFAR has made unique observations, which in context I understand to mean as measurements, not the same as saying that it has grabbed the first images. Also, there are no jpgs of pulsars in TFA, so show us the money!
Any Netherlanders who could kindly clarify this?
BTW, I'm from Mexico and have been to your peculiar, intense and wonderful country three times, I hope to return in about a decade with my wife and son (who was born three weeks ago), to skate from town to town at night in the frozen canals, torches in our hands to guide our way.
How many iPads do you think they brought up?
Two for each crew member
This somehow invokes the image of Dr Strangelove standing up from his wheelchair - "Mein Fuhrer, I can walk!"
this HAS to be the first manfred mann reference on slashdot. at least, i hope so. well played, sir.
Here's a dirty little secret: "Blinded By The Light" is actually a Bruce Springsteen song, from his debut album. After who knows how many albums, it's curious that Manfred Mann are only remembered for cover versions, the other being "Do Wah Diddy Diddy", actually by a band called The Exciters.
Manfred Mann, however, did OWN those songs with their versions, so I'm not putting them down, much as Jimi Hendrix owned Bob Dylan's "All Along The Watchtower", or Led Zeppelin owned Joan Baez' "Babe I'm Gonna Leave You".
I see idiots with engineering degrees every day.
And sometimes they end up in key positions.
There's a college teacher in Mexico who told me about a class of fifty engineering students, where five of them flunked. As per the rules, a couple of months later he performed an "extraordinary exam", and only one of them flunked, a student who made this a pattern in other classes throughout his college years, yet eventually managed to graduate. There's something wrong with an education system that allows for that to happen, but that's another topic.
Anyway, this D student ended up working for the national petroleum company (PEMEX), scheduling deliveries to gas stations all over town. Predictably, some stations ran out of product, while others with full inventory received unscheduled deliveries, had to turn the tanker trucks back and go through an infuriating process of contending the service fees PLUS fines. This was a daily crapshoot all over town for months, until the D student was yanked and reassigned to screw up in another post, so the man wasn't even fired. Somehow, I doubt the local PEMEX management did this because they listened to the outcry, but because the spike in reimbursement hassles started to bog down other departments, such as legal, accounting, finance, etc. Ah, yes... the idiots in management, but that's also another topic.
I used my binoculars to go spotting at Jupiter a while back after this image... Outstanding picture. ...a sense of being inside a solar system than any of those things.
About ten years ago, I had a 4" Newtonian telescope, and being a fairly constant reader of Sky & Telescope Magazine, I knew that the Moon was to occult Uranus at a specific date and time. So I pointed my telescope in the right direction and, sure enough, this perfect little green sphere rose from the mountains of the Moon, definitely one of those "wow!" moments.
At other times, I did also manage to "snag" a couple of the LINEAR comets.
So my best advice for the budding amateur astronomer is to buy Sky & Telescope Magazine or visit http://www.skyandtelescope.com/ to get monthly tips of celestial event watching.
A friend of mine owns several more serious telescopes, in the 10" - 18" inch range, and what's kept him up at night during the past year is the challenge of "capturing" binary star systems, here's the drill:
1. Find your target binary in a star atlas. There's tons of them. Some of them are even triple or quadruple star systems.
2. Point the telescope in the general direction, find your bearings and lock on target. This might take a while.
3. Increase magnification by changing lenses, until the lesser magnitude companion star pops out. Mission accomplished.
4. Go for a more difficult (lesser magnitude) system next time around, thereby honing your skills.
Happy hunting!
I would argue that most Apple fanboys (the real hardcore ones anyway) only THINK they're "free-thinking." They're original and free-thinking in the same way that hippies thought they were original and free-thinking in the 60's--by acting, dressing, and thinking like every other hippie. Real free-thinkers don't start out with an set ideology, and they certainly don't have a cult leader or product line that they worship.
Well said, as most comments in this thread suffer from black-and-whiteness. I've been using Mac since college, then just kept on with it, and now find the thought of switching OS unnecessary and extremely displeasurable.
That said, several monolithic aspects of Apple software are very annoying, such as the iTunes library, where I'm supposed to handle my music collection the way Apple tells me to. Also, 99% of the time I use Firefox instead of Safari, VLC instead of Quicktime and Graphic Converter instead of Preview or iPhoto, to name a few. All of this puzzles most fellow Mac users, who stare and openly wonder why I don't drink the kool-aid along with them, while dangling iPhones at me like Conquistadors dangled mirrors at the Aztecs, suckering them into believing mirrors were more valuable than gold.
Then again, there's many Windows twerps who invite themselves, with no provocation, to tell me anecdotal "evidence" about why Apple sucks, and that's just as robotic as fanboys are accused of being.
Meanwhile, besides safer surfing and no risk of malicious .exe disasters, there's at least two pieces of software that make me glad to stick with Mac:
1. DVD Studio Pro has incredible DVD authoring features, and I used to run the cinema department of a cultural center, so that came in very handy indeed.
2. Filemaker Pro is the best database software on the market. Originally created for Mac even though there's also a Windows version, it is very well integrated with OSX and its' networking functions, which allowed a neophyte like me to design a Human Resources database/interface/server for my boss (also a Mac user), without a single call for IT support. Not only am I proud of my work, it's also openly appreciated.
So I'll stick with Mac, surely to be kept on prodded and nudged by fanboys on both sides of the OS divide.
First time I heard that line I thought he was complaining about the beans.
Suit yourself, but somehow I enjoy thinking it's all about the heapin' helpin' of garbanzos Spock scoops up in the Enterprise cafeteria's salad bar. Vulcans just can't get enough of that Terran delicacy, smothered in Thousand Island dressing and a thick crust of black pepper. The first time Uhura and Sulu saw Spock doing that, they were like "whoa!", while Chekov was like "ay yay yay!".
Scotty grimaced, stole a quick gulp of whiskey from his flask masquerading as a phaser, and breathed out with a slow whistle.
An outraged Bones approached Spock at his table and said "Are you out of your Vulcan mind, you green blooded bastard? Do you have any idea of the discomfort you are putting your fellow crewmembers on the bridge in?" Spock slowly turned and replied "It is my understanding, Doctor, that the Enterprise's ventilation system is quite adequate at handling any situation that may arise from my culinary preferences".
"Well at least take these chewable tablets, then". "I will do no such thing, Doctor. It is not the Vulcan way".
Kirk was amused no end, silently pondering his secret enjoyment of Spock's emissions while scanning for the outraged faces of the bridge crew. But more than anything, the sadistic Kirk relished sending redshirts to fetch Spock in his quarters. You know, Kirk's idea of a dutch oven is to get Spock alone in the Enterprise elevator, down and sideways to the hangar and back again, that sick fuck.
can I view it until...
I need glasses?
Or until anaglyph hair grows out the palm of your hand.
13 billion (emphasis homage to Carl Sagan)
Offtopic, but WTHell: Watch Cosmos again and be on the lookout for "billions and billions", and it's not there, anywhere at all. This was uttered by Johnny Carson, in a Tonight Show bit where he parodied Carl. But the phrase turned out to be too good to not be true, so it became a classic case of "print the legend".
Deli Sliced brain
Headcheese, very European.
Or you could do some authentic Mexican food, dice up the brain and toss the chunks into a vat of simmering bone marrow soup, in which case the brains are called sesos.
No joke, I've had this with a dash of lemon and besides being super tasty, it's an incredible hangover recipe, although the amounts of cholesterol involved are ridiculously high.
Speaking of hardcore food from the central Mexico region, the only thing I can think of that I haven't dared try yet are escamoles, a buttery, cheese-like spread made of (wait for it...) ant eggs.
This thing won a culinary competition in Spain a couple of years ago, the judges finding out what they ate and praised only after they handed out the prize. Some of the judges then probably scrambled towards the toilets, head first.
Seriously though, they don't use just any ants, but those that set up their colonies in fields of maguey plants, where mezcal and tequila come from. Call it Mexico's idea of "kosher", I dunno.
Actually, the Moonies own the Washington Times -- still pretty big, but not nearly as big as the Post.
The Times has approximately 12% of the circulation of the Post.
Simultaneously, the Times also enjoys a microscopic, maybe even subatomic fraction, of the Post's prestige and credibility.
The numbers are not surprising, as the Times is for the printed word as Clear Channel is for radio, Faux for cable news.
In the Wikipedia article, there is a quote on the Times by historian Thomas Frank, published in an essay for Harper's Magazine. Here's what Frank had to say:
There is even a daily newspaper—the Washington Times—published strictly for the movement’s benefit, a propaganda sheet whose distortions are so obvious and so alien that it puts one in mind of those official party organs one encounters when traveling in authoritarian countries.
Tellingly, the newspaper-reading target audience for this sort of manure is much, much lower than in radio and television.
Those damned Right Coast intellectual elites!
There are lots of gaps for stuff to pass through.
I would rephrase that, for specificity: By a very, very wide margin, gaps are the rule, not the exception.
To quote a post above, Anything that gets within an AU or so of Jupiter is seriously deflected, and sent off on a different trajectory.
A radius of one AU means a diameter of two. Jupiter's orbital perimeter measures around thirty AUs, give or take a couple.
So, if two out of thirty AUs are covered, that's one fifteenth "protection" against any celestial bombardment of the inner solar system.
Because of smaller size and larger orbital perimeters, adding up Saturn, Uranus and Neptune do not change the numbers very much.
So we're not quite naked, but we are basically wearing only an armored thong in a war zone.
But since this thread discusses the possibility of panspermia, the image of a chastity belt keeps popping up in my mind.
Back before we had 200 channels on TV and the Internet most people got their news from one of three networks and or the news paper. The news coverage was limited but they where actually pretty careful to report facts or report nothing at all. A lot of people grew up trusting that if it was on TV that it was based in fact. The downside is that you where limited in what facts you could get without a lot of effort.
Now we have the Internet and 200 channels of TV. Now a person can find out a huge amount of facts but there is no gatekeeper. With that vast resource of facts comes an even bigger flood of opinion, ego, and fantasy all pretending to be facts.
Brilliantly put, PP should get modded up. I'd like to just underline a link between both paragraphs, to state the obvious: A lot of people still think that because it's on TV, it's based on fact, are unaware that the gatekeeper has left the building, believe to this day that the 24-hour "news" cycle is still in the tradition and standard of Walter Cronkite.
The contemporary tabloid-news cacophony didn't happen overnight, I am reminded of the metaphor of the frog in slowly boiling water, unaware that it's in the process of being boiled alive. After the increasingly crass coverage of Bobbitt, Buttafuoco and then OJ Simpson, I said to friends "The noise level is getting unbearable, how can they (the media) possibly turn any more sordid? Who can they possibly exploit next?" As it turned out, Clinton and Lewinsky were right around the corner.
Then there's the incessant fear mongering flavor of the week,
When it comes to hyping Niburu and 2012, the majority of the weight can be put squarely on Fart Bell and friends of Coast To Coast, broadcast by, who else, Clear Channel Radio, home of Rush Limbaugh.
Lest we forget how back in 1996, over the course of several shows with several guests, Bell sensationalized a bit of optical noise behind Comet Hale-Bopp as a UFO, only to packpedal and bowdlerize his indirect but real role as inspiration in the mass suicide event of the Heaven's Gate cult.
Is non-stop sensationalism what's in store for us, from here to fucking eternity?
A fitting tag would be The Culture Of McDonald's, thrust aggressively in the faces of TV viewers everywhere, keeping them numb and highly addicted in an intellectually stultifying environment.
My wife and I, we have a TV and DVD player with neither cable nor satellite, so we only rent what we want to watch (our last big escapade was Battlestar Galactica), while on the internet I limit my daily TV diet to the brilliant deconstructions of The Daily Show.
To be as precise as possible, any two objects orbit each other on an axis called the barycenter, which may lie within the more massive object, but it's there nonetheless.
It's amazing how something so obvious in retrospect was such an intuitive leap forward in (ahem) the dark.
Telescopes existed for some time before Galileo, but in extremely limited quantities and mainly used for practical purposes, such as scanning for mast and sails of ships as they emerged in the horizon.
In those days, the church told you how the heavens went, and that was that. After plenty of leeway for intellectuals during the Middle Ages, a panicky Vatican was in full-tilt political damage control mode since Martin Luther had sparked a movement that split the church in two, with the support of a new, rich merchant class who were ready to challenge the power of Rome. A famous victim of this scramble to put the toothpaste back in the tube was Giordano Bruno, who was burned at the stake for heresy, an inconceivable prospect a couple of centuries before.
Remember that Copernicus came up with the heliocentric idea to explain the embarrassing discrepancy of the Julian calendar having thrown the seasons off-sync (think an error in calculation of 15 minutes per year, then add it up over a millennium and a half). Even so, the first edition of De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium was published with a HUGE disclaimer that went along the lines of "This is a hypothetical treatise, an mathematical exercise, and is in no way intended to conflict with the canon of the almighty church". To get a feel for the times, picture yourself as a Darwinist teacher of Biology in Kansas, then multiply by a hundred.
Not surprising then that in this climate, it took a while before some foolhardy individual decided to get a bit creative with a telescope and point it up into the night sky.
Rapture 2012 (Score:2, Troll) ... on Monday October 26, @12:04PM ...
Many Christians waiting to be raptured on 2012... Now they have to wait again!
The above post seems to have miraculous modding.
It's a sign, brothers and sisters!
Repent, for the end is nigh!
Just sacrifice some interns to Quezacotl and I'm sure the repossessor gods will pass over your humble conglomerate.
For the record, the accepted spelling is Quetzalcoatl. However, keeping in mind it's a Nahuatl word, this is the Aztec manifestation of the ever-popular Feathered Serpent, originally a Toltec concept so awesomely cool that it spread throughout most of Mesoamerica. This being a 2012 thread, better to go with the Mayan equivalent Kukulkan.
But if you really want to get your sacrifices right, skip the middleman and get right to the top, Itzamna is the head honcho in the Mayan pantheon.
Can't resist quoting Colbert here:
"Hey Quetzalcoatl! Nice feathers, man!
Is there a men's department at the store where you bought those?"
Oh man, I intend this as a high compliment - fifty years from now, Primer is going to be regarded by intellectual snobs (the trendsetters) in Brazil, China, India and Indonesia as maybe the finest example of American Geek Cinema of early Twentieth First Century, so far ahead of its' cultural time that it's almost awe-inspiring.
A/S/L?