...on this 512kb ADSL link (ie, under 10% of normal flat strap, so I guess it's Microsoft's fault. Again.:-) so I hope WINE lets me run the installer EXE tomorrow morning, when I unpack the EULA so I can post it here. But as I said in my RTFA post below, the public statement on their related FAQ page pretty much gives you carte blanche as far as Australian law is concerned, regardless of what their illegally post facto EULA has to say.
Are there any restrictions on how I use the Visual C++ Toolkit?
In general, no. You may use the Toolkit to build C++-based applications, and you may redistribute those applications. Please read the End User License Agreement (EULA), included with the Toolkit, for complete details.
The EULA may well say slightly differently, but the above public statement is more than enough of a disclaimer to get you past any such inconveniences in an Aussie court, anyway.
A clock at a higher altitude will tick at a different rate to a clock at a lower altitude due to the difference in gravitic "depth", but if you compared a laser fired from each clock at a common point, they would be different colours. If the universal redshift were due to the stretching of space, this would not be so.
Stretch-redshift is loved by cosmologists because it appears to make big bang cosmologies possible, not because it has actually been tested and found good (it hasn't). There are other explanations which avoid the need to rely on unproven theories, explain the same phenomena (CBR, for example as well or better) and as an added bonus explain some things which are quietly not discussed in big bang communities (quantum redshifts, for example).
If you ignore stretch-redshifting, though, you'd still be right but for the wrong reasons. (-:
The photon would appear to be "redshifted" in steps because of quantum changes in the physics of the observer. Or perhaps it's the other way around, 'coz it's all relative and all in accord with GR.
...if what you say about rotation and cooling is true and relevant, it should also apply to Mercury - and doesn't. True, I believe - relevant, less so.
The gas giant "reconciliation" is just a guess, not tested, not known to be workable. Considerably less definite than the actual measurements.
When I talk about lightning, I don't have atmospheric storms in mind. They don't have the energy density to do much, and it's not as if Mars has an atmosphere to brag about anyway.
However, if the discharge came from a near-miss by a highly charged comet or KBO or even planet, the scar would look pretty much as it does, random gougey bits starting in the west, picking up to a single (pair of) stream as enough debris flies up to provide really good conduction, a big splatch in the middle at closest approach where the discharge "sticks" at the shortest distance between two points, then more trench tailing off to the ever shallower random isletty-looking stuff to the east.
As to the always-forms-glass idea, I call bullshit. (-:
More examples? here (check out some of the secondary damage and think about what a few thousand cubic km of Mars rock would do under suitably scaled-up circumstances) here and many other places. Google is your friend.
Neither my wife nor my SIL know how to mount stuff, wife would be aghast at the thought of having to type unrepresentative mumbo-jumbo into an unresponsive black window (or, heaven help us, a text screen - which she calls "dos"). It Just Works(tm). The coloured bar graph in K3B is a lifesaver when SWMBO is building CDs to go, the raw numbers would only be confusing. As an artist or musician, she excels, but sit her in front of a command prompt and terror reigns supreme.
then take your trolling crap elsewhere. I do know what a pedant is, but you don't seem to understand that without a foundation it's a hard climb to a successful argument, or in this case to the successful application of a word in a sentence.
You can't find any idea about anything that was accepted by everyone.
Missing word: revolutionary.
As long as the new thing is close enough to safe orthodox dogma, it runs a fair risk of being wildly accepted by everyone who matters.
It's only as it tends towards truly useful in breaking the inevitable ossification that an idea (and by contamination its originators and supporters) starts getting daggers in its back.
the cratering rate appears to have been fairly constant over the past 3-4 billion or so years.
References? Comments on the delta between farside and nearside? Comments on ghost craters?
Serious question: why does my replying bother you?
It doesn't, I'm delighted by it. Seldom are people serious enough to make me think about my replies. Sad but true. Welcome to the elite.
However, I get the distinct impression that I'm pushing you near the edge of your resources sometimes. You're asking me for references and getting them but the best I've seen in return are whole books, and even those are basically popsci. For someone whose responses are so thinly supported (presumably because "everyone knows" - which is the core problem, dang it), you're too assertive. Too many throwaway lines, too much drama.
Cosmology lectures are all well and good, but count the references to actual data in them, and the references to actual data in those references, and you're getting pretty close to homeopathic doses of actual observation behind the whole structure you're supporting. This is almost tragic for science which is so well funded and supposedly mainstream.
You're right, there is evidence there for a rapid reverse. Not *good* evidence, but evidence.
Good evidence. It's been challenged, as you might expect, and reviewed and checked by the authors themselves in anticipation of this, and re-done in several different ways and the answers always come up smiling. Peer review has pounded on it, hard, and failed to break it.
In any event, you're either jerking my chain or you're a raving lunatic.
My turn to come off at a corner, I guess.
I present evidence, and the segue from that is that I'm either jerking your chain or a nutcase? Has the phrase "impossible to please" ever been used in your presence? What happens when I send you forty impeccable references, you call the cops? (-:
It does look like you're running out of depth, and know it, and are looking for an exit line. Well, good luck sitting on your conscience...
Neither is my car's alternator. But linear should be in the ballpark, and it's an order of magnitude off. And you haven't even spoken to my observations about the variety of compositions, temperatures and spins, and in particular to the complete absence of systematism amongst them.
Valles Marineris is way to big to be carved by lightening.
Cloud-to-ground lightning, I agree. (And by the way, Konqueror spellchecks within web forms starting from the version which comes with KDE 3.2, hint, hint). But how about body-to-body? What's the charge on a comet? What's the charge on a planetisimal the size of Pluto, and how many of them have wandered in past Mars so far? Something for the asteroid defense guys to consider. An event to watch from the comfort of something like Hubble, rather than on the ground.
On the other hand, while you causually dismiss erosion and tectonics, you probably should step up to the plate and explain the Grand Canyon on Earth (erosion-caused) and the Himilays (tectonics).
No worries. Remember that you asked for this, and that sacred cows make the tastiest barbeque. (-:
A bunch of the carving in the Canyon was done in perhaps a week or few with [RB Scarborough, Cenozoic Erosion & Sedimentation in Arizona, Arizona Bureau of Geology and Mineral Technology, 16 Nov 1984] a single or few rushes of water from a "fossil" lake or lakes with several times the size of Lake Missoula - of which mighty Lake Powell is a mere shadow and the beaches above it silent witnesses - in the Colorado Plateau area, which is possibly also responsible for the severely flat peneplane above it, and was followed up by a series of large flows (one pegged at "up to 15 million cfs"), which did a lot of the "slotting" which we observe today. The sudden removal of so much material (plus the water) may even have triggered uplifting in the area.
Slow and steady won't do it, and we've collectively known that for a long time [ED McKee, RF Wilson, WJ Breed, and CS Breed, "Evolution of the Colorado River in Arizona," Museum of Northern Arizona Bulletin 44 (1967), 1-67] and it's caused a fair bit of headscratching since [RJ Rice, "The Canyon Conundrum," Geographical Magazine 55, 1983, pg 291]. The Havasupai Indians even have a legend about it, although where they got it from is still an open question.
Have a look at the floods at Milford Lake, Coralville Lake, Burlingame Canyon, Providence Canyon and Tuttle Creek Reservoir [Archer, AW, J Kinser, SC Grant, JR Underwood, PC Twiss, RR West, KB Miller. 1993. Geology of the recently formed Grand Canyon of Manhattan. Department of Geology, Kansas State University, Manhattan] for much smaller but contemporary (and so better documented) examples of similar erosion. The prehistoric flooding of the Altay Mountains was also pretty spectacular, requiring water up to 1900m deep to produce the observed landforms [Baker, VR, G Benito, and AN Rudoy. 1993. Paleohydrology of late Pleistocene superflooding, Altay Mountains, Siberia. Science 259:348-350].
A thing to remember in connection with the origin of this discussion on Mars is that there's a good deal more obvious water available on Earth to do these things with, and none no Mars, nor an atmosphere which would support it, and there hasn't been for a very long time.
There are marine fossils right up near the top of Everest, a big hint that the many-miles-up peaks were once on a sea floor - or at least had sea floor dumped on them before they hardened - and haven't been subducted in between times.
And while you're at it, you can use your lightening "theory" to explain the Tharsis Bulge on Mars.
Why?
Have a careful look at VM. Flat bottom, steep sides, side-canyons crossi
In other words, you have nothing that you can put forth to show what you're talking about.
So says the man who has not read a word of the two references cited in the GP?
Go back and read them, then try again. Meanwhile...
we'd be all *over* something revolutationary and new
As long as:
It wasn't too terrifyingly different (ie, not too different from our current worldview - or to put it differently, it has to be modestly "revolutationary and new");
we thought we had a plausible answer to quench it with, or at least weren't more than a hairsbreadth away from figuring it out ourselves;
we don't have to rework too much existing theory if we accept it
Without those qualifiers, your assertion is codswallop.
The Giant Impact model of the Moon's formation took hold quite quickly, too.
Pity it's still under heavy dispute then, isn't it? (-:
You might also want to think about a couple of decades in terms of "quickly accepted" and the difference between acceptance of a theory de novo when contrasted with the acceptance of a theory which has already been abuilding for years.
Maybe it's just me, but I rate the functionality of an idea far more highly than its peer acceptance rate.
usually you'll find a number of them quickly jumping into the new field. (That's how you make a name for youself, after all)
I call bullshit. That's how you get fired, or at least get a black mark on your research record which cripples your career.
The "heroes" adopt incremental improvements ahead of the pack. The vast majority of true pioneers, willing to avidly and openly explore genuinely revolutionary ideas, get pilloried for years, sometimes decades, and many die scorned only to have people come around to an understanding of what they were doing long after they're safely buried.
J Harlan Bretz, for example, was sidelined and scorned for forty years before his ideas were even investigated, and for the justification of hearing one of the investigators who was finally cajoled into actually taking a trip out to look at the Washington badlands for an actual look at the rocks exclaim "how could we have been so blind?"
His sin? Heresy. His theories, which are now mainstream and shatteringly obvious in hindsight, challenged the dominant orthodoxy in geology. They sailed too politically close to ideologically sensitive areas, to "political" boundaries which have absolutely nothing to do with science and everything to do with philosophical prejudice, and which still exist.
It's a brave and stubborn scientist who candidly investigates truly novel theories.
But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses.
I suppose that, being SlashDot, it's a point that constantly needs to be made.
Go read a book on the scientific method.
Done. Now go and see how it works in real life. You're speaking to a bloke with four qualified scientists that he knows of in his family tree, and several more as friends.
If you actually suddenly reversed the polarity on an AC device that would certainly blow it up if it were under load. DC devices can be more forgiving sometimes -- usually you just fry the transformer.
I enoyed your rant, but this one in particular amused me:
Uranus's spin and magnetic field axes are about 60 degrees apart. That's no where near alignment.
He [...] procedes to blame large amounts of cobalt and iron in Earth's crust for the slightly off spin axis magnetic field axis.
He forgets, of course, that as well as being magnetic, it's also heavy and enough of it to influence the magnetic field would produce an effect not unlike your car's harmonic balancer disintegrating.
I don't know whether people sited opposite these deposits would have much time to enjoy the lowered apparent gravity before Earth set about becoming an extremely large and dense set of rings around the Moon.
Based on the cratering record on the Moon, mainly, the calculated interval between mass exinction causing impacts is about 100 million years.
Yeah? Which part of the Moon did you have in mind? Poles? Maria? Farside? And how did you set about dating the craters? You used a number of WAGs, I'll bet. (-:
I had to reply to that nonsense theory.
Did you? Why? Serious question. I'm interested in seen how straight an answer you'll give.
I'd also love to see your proported research showing field changes if 90 minutes or less. How in the heck do you DATE to that accuracy?
You don't. See, for example:
Mankinen, E. A., Prévot, M., Grommé, C. S. and Coe, R. S., 1985. The Steens Mountain (Oregon) geomagnetic polarity transition, 1. Directional variation, duration of episodes, and rock magnetism. Journal of Geophysical Research, 90:10,393-10,416.
[ditto] 2. Field intensity variations and discussion of reversal models. Journal of Geophysical Research, 90:10,417-10,448. Return to text
Coe, R. S. and Prévot, M., 1989. Evidence suggesting extremely rapid field variation during a geomagnetic reversal. Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 92:292-298.
These guys were getting firm evidence of up to 8 degrees per day, but there are more reports to read if you want them.
You're right to be surprised, though, 'coz Nature ran an article on later (1995) reports entitled "The principle of least astonishment" (316:230-234).
However, the astute person would have noticed that Venus does spin very, very slowly. This would generally lead to a small or non-existant field, since planet spin is thought to be tied in to the dynamo process. (There's a strong correlation between field strength and planet's angular momentum, for example.) Of course, Mercury only spins 3 times faster, but that's still something.
This had me giggling. (-:
OK... so if Mercury spins 3x faster, it should have roughly 3x, or 3^2x the field depending on how your dynamo works? It's about 0.7% of Earth's field, and Venus' is less than 0.06%, which doesn't work either multiplied or by multiplied by the square, particularly with mass factored in. But it still spins roughly 90x slower than Mars... which has a field only twice as strong as Venus'. Venus has not cooled as much as Mars, but OTOH Mercury's core has to have cooled much more than Mars'. And for all of Jupiter's spectacle, a magnetic field only 8x stronger than Earth's is pretty disappointing, given all of that mass and spin, and that cold compressed H2 is metallic. Is this all producing as little rhymne or reason for you as it is for me?
MESSENGER will be fun, when it starts telling us stuff.
<aside> Mars has patches of magnetised rock, but no serious field today. This is said to imply a strong field in the past, but maybe not.
One of the few forces which explain nearly all of the features of Valles Marineris is lightning (pardon the kind of bolt which could leave a scar 3000km long! - but water, sand and tectonics don't explain much) which would imply (there's that word again) an essentially singular event and also explain a lot of loose rock scattered around on the surface of Mars. Such an event would be big enough to magnetise mucho rock, and/or disrupt an existing magnetic field. Until we can explain VM, we might be struggling to explain a few other features of our solar system as well. </aside>
As for Uranus and Neptune, I'm not sure I'd actually describe a 60% tilt (plus lateral offset) as "aligned" in the conventional sense of the word... and right next door gyrates Saturn, with the magnetic axis apparently perfectly aligned with the spin axis.
How you'd set about reconciling a dynamo theory with the lesser gas giants is beyond me. John, if you do try to explain it (as many great men have tried to do in the past) please give me time to sell tickets. (-:
Slashdot Mirror
...on this 512kb ADSL link (ie, under 10% of normal flat strap, so I guess it's Microsoft's fault. Again. :-) so I hope WINE lets me run the installer EXE tomorrow morning, when I unpack the EULA so I can post it here. But as I said in my RTFA post below, the public statement on their related FAQ page pretty much gives you carte blanche as far as Australian law is concerned, regardless of what their illegally post facto EULA has to say.
The EULA may well say slightly differently, but the above public statement is more than enough of a disclaimer to get you past any such inconveniences in an Aussie court, anyway.
"What do I do with a virus.c attachment to make it run?" (-:
Apparent solaris answer: define the MIME type text/x-c to invoke the cc command.
...it's also the Most Favoured Compiler for virus authors, as well?
You know, the old "find out what the developers ran and and buy exactly the same stuff if you want stability" trick? (-:
and
-1, Microsoft Troll? (-:
# tail -2 /var/log/messages
Apr 18 23:15:00 lappie Damn!
Apr 18 23:15:01 lappie last message repeated MAXINT times
#
...it seems that Microsoft's "give lots of stuff away for $0" phase has started.
Microsoft has bulked up with enough cash to operate with zero income for five years - but they're not a monopoly, oh no sirree!
echo 0123456789abI send a message$ >demo.com
debug demo.com
a
mov ah,09
mov dx,010c
int 21
mov ax,4c00
int 21
w
q
demo
-1, Doesn't know how to spell "|_337".
<g/d/r>
...but not for stretching.
A clock at a higher altitude will tick at a different rate to a clock at a lower altitude due to the difference in gravitic "depth", but if you compared a laser fired from each clock at a common point, they would be different colours. If the universal redshift were due to the stretching of space, this would not be so.
Stretch-redshift is loved by cosmologists because it appears to make big bang cosmologies possible, not because it has actually been tested and found good (it hasn't). There are other explanations which avoid the need to rely on unproven theories, explain the same phenomena (CBR, for example as well or better) and as an added bonus explain some things which are quietly not discussed in big bang communities (quantum redshifts, for example).
If you ignore stretch-redshifting, though, you'd still be right but for the wrong reasons. (-:
The photon would appear to be "redshifted" in steps because of quantum changes in the physics of the observer. Or perhaps it's the other way around, 'coz it's all relative and all in accord with GR.
...if what you say about rotation and cooling is true and relevant, it should also apply to Mercury - and doesn't. True, I believe - relevant, less so.
The gas giant "reconciliation" is just a guess, not tested, not known to be workable. Considerably less definite than the actual measurements.
When I talk about lightning, I don't have atmospheric storms in mind. They don't have the energy density to do much, and it's not as if Mars has an atmosphere to brag about anyway.
However, if the discharge came from a near-miss by a highly charged comet or KBO or even planet, the scar would look pretty much as it does, random gougey bits starting in the west, picking up to a single (pair of) stream as enough debris flies up to provide really good conduction, a big splatch in the middle at closest approach where the discharge "sticks" at the shortest distance between two points, then more trench tailing off to the ever shallower random isletty-looking stuff to the east.
As to the always-forms-glass idea, I call bullshit. (-:
More examples? here (check out some of the secondary damage and think about what a few thousand cubic km of Mars rock would do under suitably scaled-up circumstances) here and many other places. Google is your friend.
...to explain the birds and the bees to you. (-:
Neither my wife nor my SIL know how to mount stuff, wife would be aghast at the thought of having to type unrepresentative mumbo-jumbo into an unresponsive black window (or, heaven help us, a text screen - which she calls "dos"). It Just Works(tm). The coloured bar graph in K3B is a lifesaver when SWMBO is building CDs to go, the raw numbers would only be confusing. As an artist or musician, she excels, but sit her in front of a command prompt and terror reigns supreme.
Contrast this with the stencil on the window of Nat's hotel room in Toronto: "Please do not throw objects from the room".
Done. And...?
Loser's limp if ever I saw it. (-:
Missing word: revolutionary.
As long as the new thing is close enough to safe orthodox dogma, it runs a fair risk of being wildly accepted by everyone who matters.
It's only as it tends towards truly useful in breaking the inevitable ossification that an idea (and by contamination its originators and supporters) starts getting daggers in its back.
References? Comments on the delta between farside and nearside? Comments on ghost craters?
It doesn't, I'm delighted by it. Seldom are people serious enough to make me think about my replies. Sad but true. Welcome to the elite.
However, I get the distinct impression that I'm pushing you near the edge of your resources sometimes. You're asking me for references and getting them but the best I've seen in return are whole books, and even those are basically popsci. For someone whose responses are so thinly supported (presumably because "everyone knows" - which is the core problem, dang it), you're too assertive. Too many throwaway lines, too much drama.
Cosmology lectures are all well and good, but count the references to actual data in them, and the references to actual data in those references, and you're getting pretty close to homeopathic doses of actual observation behind the whole structure you're supporting. This is almost tragic for science which is so well funded and supposedly mainstream.
The good is the enemy of the best.
Good evidence. It's been challenged, as you might expect, and reviewed and checked by the authors themselves in anticipation of this, and re-done in several different ways and the answers always come up smiling. Peer review has pounded on it, hard, and failed to break it.
My turn to come off at a corner, I guess.
I present evidence, and the segue from that is that I'm either jerking your chain or a nutcase? Has the phrase "impossible to please" ever been used in your presence? What happens when I send you forty impeccable references, you call the cops? (-:
It does look like you're running out of depth, and know it, and are looking for an exit line. Well, good luck sitting on your conscience...
Neither is my car's alternator. But linear should be in the ballpark, and it's an order of magnitude off. And you haven't even spoken to my observations about the variety of compositions, temperatures and spins, and in particular to the complete absence of systematism amongst them.
Cloud-to-ground lightning, I agree. (And by the way, Konqueror spellchecks within web forms starting from the version which comes with KDE 3.2, hint, hint). But how about body-to-body? What's the charge on a comet? What's the charge on a planetisimal the size of Pluto, and how many of them have wandered in past Mars so far? Something for the asteroid defense guys to consider. An event to watch from the comfort of something like Hubble, rather than on the ground.
No worries. Remember that you asked for this, and that sacred cows make the tastiest barbeque. (-:
A bunch of the carving in the Canyon was done in perhaps a week or few with [RB Scarborough, Cenozoic Erosion & Sedimentation in Arizona, Arizona Bureau of Geology and Mineral Technology, 16 Nov 1984] a single or few rushes of water from a "fossil" lake or lakes with several times the size of Lake Missoula - of which mighty Lake Powell is a mere shadow and the beaches above it silent witnesses - in the Colorado Plateau area, which is possibly also responsible for the severely flat peneplane above it, and was followed up by a series of large flows (one pegged at "up to 15 million cfs"), which did a lot of the "slotting" which we observe today. The sudden removal of so much material (plus the water) may even have triggered uplifting in the area.
Slow and steady won't do it, and we've collectively known that for a long time [ED McKee, RF Wilson, WJ Breed, and CS Breed, "Evolution of the Colorado River in Arizona," Museum of Northern Arizona Bulletin 44 (1967), 1-67] and it's caused a fair bit of headscratching since [RJ Rice, "The Canyon Conundrum," Geographical Magazine 55, 1983, pg 291]. The Havasupai Indians even have a legend about it, although where they got it from is still an open question.
Have a look at the floods at Milford Lake, Coralville Lake, Burlingame Canyon, Providence Canyon and Tuttle Creek Reservoir [Archer, AW, J Kinser, SC Grant, JR Underwood, PC Twiss, RR West, KB Miller. 1993. Geology of the recently formed Grand Canyon of Manhattan. Department of Geology, Kansas State University, Manhattan] for much smaller but contemporary (and so better documented) examples of similar erosion. The prehistoric flooding of the Altay Mountains was also pretty spectacular, requiring water up to 1900m deep to produce the observed landforms [Baker, VR, G Benito, and AN Rudoy. 1993. Paleohydrology of late Pleistocene superflooding, Altay Mountains, Siberia. Science 259:348-350].
A thing to remember in connection with the origin of this discussion on Mars is that there's a good deal more obvious water available on Earth to do these things with, and none no Mars, nor an atmosphere which would support it, and there hasn't been for a very long time.
There are marine fossils right up near the top of Everest, a big hint that the many-miles-up peaks were once on a sea floor - or at least had sea floor dumped on them before they hardened - and haven't been subducted in between times.
Why?
Have a careful look at VM. Flat bottom, steep sides, side-canyons crossi
So says the man who has not read a word of the two references cited in the GP?
Go back and read them, then try again. Meanwhile...
As long as:
- It wasn't too terrifyingly different (ie, not too different from our current worldview - or to put it differently, it has to be modestly "revolutationary and new");
- we thought we had a plausible answer to quench it with, or at least weren't more than a hairsbreadth away from figuring it out ourselves;
- we don't have to rework too much existing theory if we accept it
Without those qualifiers, your assertion is codswallop.Pity it's still under heavy dispute then, isn't it? (-:
You might also want to think about a couple of decades in terms of "quickly accepted" and the difference between acceptance of a theory de novo when contrasted with the acceptance of a theory which has already been abuilding for years.
Maybe it's just me, but I rate the functionality of an idea far more highly than its peer acceptance rate.
I call bullshit. That's how you get fired, or at least get a black mark on your research record which cripples your career.
The "heroes" adopt incremental improvements ahead of the pack. The vast majority of true pioneers, willing to avidly and openly explore genuinely revolutionary ideas, get pilloried for years, sometimes decades, and many die scorned only to have people come around to an understanding of what they were doing long after they're safely buried.
J Harlan Bretz, for example, was sidelined and scorned for forty years before his ideas were even investigated, and for the justification of hearing one of the investigators who was finally cajoled into actually taking a trip out to look at the Washington badlands for an actual look at the rocks exclaim "how could we have been so blind?"
His sin? Heresy. His theories, which are now mainstream and shatteringly obvious in hindsight, challenged the dominant orthodoxy in geology. They sailed too politically close to ideologically sensitive areas, to "political" boundaries which have absolutely nothing to do with science and everything to do with philosophical prejudice, and which still exist.
It's a brave and stubborn scientist who candidly investigates truly novel theories.
Now get off your ass and read, boy!
I suppose that, being SlashDot, it's a point that constantly needs to be made.
Done. Now go and see how it works in real life. You're speaking to a bloke with four qualified scientists that he knows of in his family tree, and several more as friends.
</sarcasm> I hope? Just checking.
He forgets, of course, that as well as being magnetic, it's also heavy and enough of it to influence the magnetic field would produce an effect not unlike your car's harmonic balancer disintegrating.
I don't know whether people sited opposite these deposits would have much time to enjoy the lowered apparent gravity before Earth set about becoming an extremely large and dense set of rings around the Moon.
Yeah? Which part of the Moon did you have in mind? Poles? Maria? Farside? And how did you set about dating the craters? You used a number of WAGs, I'll bet. (-:
Did you? Why? Serious question. I'm interested in seen how straight an answer you'll give.
You don't. See, for example:
These guys were getting firm evidence of up to 8 degrees per day, but there are more reports to read if you want them.
You're right to be surprised, though, 'coz Nature ran an article on later (1995) reports entitled "The principle of least astonishment" (316:230-234).
This had me giggling. (-:
OK... so if Mercury spins 3x faster, it should have roughly 3x, or 3^2x the field depending on how your dynamo works? It's about 0.7% of Earth's field, and Venus' is less than 0.06%, which doesn't work either multiplied or by multiplied by the square, particularly with mass factored in. But it still spins roughly 90x slower than Mars... which has a field only twice as strong as Venus'. Venus has not cooled as much as Mars, but OTOH Mercury's core has to have cooled much more than Mars'. And for all of Jupiter's spectacle, a magnetic field only 8x stronger than Earth's is pretty disappointing, given all of that mass and spin, and that cold compressed H2 is metallic. Is this all producing as little rhymne or reason for you as it is for me?
MESSENGER will be fun, when it starts telling us stuff.
<aside> Mars has patches of magnetised rock, but no serious field today. This is said to imply a strong field in the past, but maybe not.
One of the few forces which explain nearly all of the features of Valles Marineris is lightning (pardon the kind of bolt which could leave a scar 3000km long! - but water, sand and tectonics don't explain much) which would imply (there's that word again) an essentially singular event and also explain a lot of loose rock scattered around on the surface of Mars. Such an event would be big enough to magnetise mucho rock, and/or disrupt an existing magnetic field. Until we can explain VM, we might be struggling to explain a few other features of our solar system as well. </aside>
As for Uranus and Neptune, I'm not sure I'd actually describe a 60% tilt (plus lateral offset) as "aligned" in the conventional sense of the word... and right next door gyrates Saturn, with the magnetic axis apparently perfectly aligned with the spin axis.
How you'd set about reconciling a dynamo theory with the lesser gas giants is beyond me. John, if you do try to explain it (as many great men have tried to do in the past) please give me time to sell tickets. (-:
[field changes next]