someone has utterly failed to clue me in on some breaking developments in astronomy
Think Copernicus. Tell me of any seriously revolutionary idea which you know was accepted with open arms by all.
You'd better show me a paper that suggest that gravitational redshift doesn't happen, because I have yet to hear of it.
Of course not. You wouldn't hear good things about Linux in any Microsoft-sponsored presentation either, and wouldn't expect to. If you don't expose yourself to anything but orthodox dogma, why would you expect to understand heresy?
arXiv censored one of the clearest presentations, but try, from the start, no less than "A. Einstein, Relativity: The Special and General Theory" in which he says "An atom absorbs or emits light of a frequency which is dependent on the potential of the gravitational field in which it is situated." Not on any delta-G it travels through. Was he right? If so, the heresy was always present, and the high priests of cosmology have simply failed to acknowledge it.
J. H. Taylor, in "Astronomical and Space Experiments To Test Relativity," in General Relativity and Gravitation (Cambridge Uni Press, 1987), compares atomic clock time with pulsar timing data and concludes "Here is direct proof, based on a clock some 15,000 light years from the solar system, that clocks on Earth run more slowly when the moon is full - because at this time of the month we are deeper in the gravitational potential of the sun!" Looks like he was on Albert's side.
Seems sort of odd that the speaker would talk about GR without mentioning that it broke down.
Probably mostly because it doesn't break down at all. (-:
"Redshift" (frequency changes) produced by one's position in a gravity well is part and parcel of GR. Redshift produced by a change in gravitational potential isn't.
Since I just attended a lecture by a well-known cosmologist and he didn't say a word about the Big Bang being "broken",
"I just attended a talk by a Newtonian physicist and he didn't say a word about physics being broken"? (-:
Consider the pennies-on-a-balloon model of cosmology. Why should the balloon stretch and the pennies not? Is that not a special pleading unsupported by any verification or experimentation? Why should space strecth on a large scale and not on a small? Shouldn't such an effect be visible in the outer galaxies of a cluster? Or vary in the space surrounding a cluster? That's not science, that's dogma.
It also utterly fails to deal with stepped redshifts, as evidenced by visual observation of large samples of galaxies, and of Gamma Ray Bursters. Nor does it cope with the "excessive" brightness of distant galaxies, nor with closely associated galaxies featuring differing redshifts. And this is but the beginning of its troubles.
Knock out the "special pleading" by allowing space to stretch more or less uniformly, and you wind up with a galaxyless, even starless universe from a big-bang start.
And I have yet to see a steady-state model that matches the data very well at all. The whole "cosmic microwave background" thing is hard to get around.
Steady-state-ish. I'm favouring a system which has achieved an essentially steady state, not one which always was steady.
In this case, one doesn't have to "get around" CBR at all, since it fits nicely as the redshifted remnant of a cosmic "flame front" of galaxies and/or stars. The observed CBR variations fit nicely as well. On top of that, it also solves the "dark night sky" issue far more neatly than does entrenched cosmology, and a big long laundry list of other conundra.
[this is too long now, planets coming in a second reply]
First off, patents are incompatible with free markets. Argentina (you know, South American country, hardly has two nickels to rub together) developed their own AIDS vaccine but weren't allowed to send it to Africa for patent reasons. When they rumbled about going ahead and doing that anyway for humanitarian reasons (on one hand, "dirt poor" and "humanitarian" are uneasy bedfellows; on the other, it wasn't going to be a huge drain even on Argentina and the need is great; on the gripping hand, it happened regardles) the US intervened, telling them that trade sanctions would be applied. Free market, my ass.
Second off, limited patent protection (not the biggest-lawyer-wins multi-decade rort we have now) is sometimes necessary to get a new idea to market.
Third off, in the real world human nature will distort and destroy anything like a free market (/ME waves to William Henry "Trey" Gates III, Pharmacea-Upjohn, General Electric and a few of their mates), so some ground-rules are needed, and some intervention to enforce them is also needed.
Free markets are a nice ideal, but incompatible with reality. The best we can hope for is a simple and evenly-enforced intervention policy. Not a lightly enforced one: the penalties for violation should be devastating, in order to stop punters from treating cheating as just another business risk.
He's right, look it up, it's not as if that takes more than ten seconds or anything. OTOH, both the OP (and his horrible typing to match his horrible shallowness of understanding of English) and your parent are being pedants:
One who pays undue attention to book learning and formal rules.
One who exhibits one's learning or scholarship ostentatiously.
Obsolete. A schoolmaster.
I think my GP should have said catachrestic, which would both have been more correct and more interesting, as well as letting you know that you didn't have a clue what was being said, whereas "pedant" is used often enough that you might be under the delusion of knowing what it really means. (-: Your mis-step was blatant rather than flagrant:-)
It was fun being your pedant du jour, have a good day. (-:
it just plain become a huge PITA with little return.
Eh? I run my own. Many of my customers, even small ones, run their own. They tick over quietly, day after day, year after year. I (they) get as much control as I (they) want, instant updates, and a choice of how to specify those updates (hand edit, web form, automated etc). For vanila-flavoured domains the zonefiles are all pretty much identical anyway.
For outgoing DNS queries, the traffic and time saving through query cacheing is not huge, but it is there and does help a lot when the ISP's DNSes go legs-in-the-air (which has not been a problem with ArachNet, but other local ISPs haven't been such a lucky choice).
Maintenance? Pretty much zero. Maybe once every year or two, URPMI will nudge the version number to cope with a security flaw, but that's about it.
BTW, I generally us ethe much-maligned BIND. Yes, it is huge and probably not necessary but it works, and does do the special tricks when you want it to.
...yet there are records stamped in lava of massive (in excess of a right-angle from the PoV of the region sampled) pole-swing which took place in 90 minutes or less.
Mercury has a reasonable magnetic field, yet shouldn't be large enough to still have much fluid inside. Mars has negligible magnetism, yet is many times larger than Mbeercury. Venus is in many ways comparable to Earth, yet no serious field. It can't be the retrograde spin, because Uranus spins on its side and has quite a strong field - laterally offset from the core and steeply angled. It is quite clear that our current ideas about planetary magnetism are at best whistling in the dark.
They have plenty of company. Our current ideas about cosmology are based on principles under which the GPS system would not work. To really drive the point home, the military people had to correct their initial GPS software after writing it according to cosmology and not to observation - they even had to be shown using a test satellite because they were so sure that the theory was right.
In this case, the broken bit of theory is that photons lose energy as they climb through a gravity field. They don't. The wavelength is altered by the emitter's position in a "gravity well", but does not change as the photon travels in or out of the well.
Naturaly, this completely invalidates everything currently based on expansion-redshift, a concept intimately tied into the same principle - which means bye-bye to big-bang cosmology. That's distressing for the status quo, but a good thing for science because we now have an opportunity to shrug off the dud theory and find something which better fits observation.
Happily, there are several steady-state-ish concepts being bruited about which continue to match the observed data at least as well as any big-bang-ish theories while managing to avoid conflict with this particular observation.
My current favourite is one which features a changing ZPE, since this also neatly explains the "steps" observed in redshift (including midway through galaxies!). While this arrangement doesn't require galactocentrism up front (ie, the "steps" should appear to be the same when viewed from almost anywhere in the universe because the changes which produce them are, well, universal), it is buried in the fine print, in particular the part of the model which deals with the CBR (and matches it much more closely in general and in detail than any big-bang model I've seen). Some punters will argue that the redshift-stepping isn't really there, but I've not seen any of those arguments come close to surviving serious examination.
In case you've siezed on the wrong idea, I make no claim to deep understanding, I'm neither astronomer nor physicist, I know barely enough to clearly discern why big-bang is broken, but I do know enough to be sure that it is.
Of course, if you prefer wasting your time hard-coding OpenGL calls and re-compiling for each make of phone, that is up to you, but as a business model its suicide.
Java isn't the only way to abstract either your graphics interface or endianness. There are much more efficient ways of doing both. If I was using an abstract language for my cellphone, I'd prefer something like Ruby.
Amongst other benefits, including much faster coding/debugging and better reusability, Sun's newfound cameraderie with Microsoft would then pose no risk to the future of my mobile 'phone code. Sun want to both have their cake and eat it, which is not a sustainable model of reality. Microsoft's view is much simpler: they want your piece of the cake, now, or they'll bury you in lobbyists and lawyers. It suits them to leave Scott's delusions intact.
Ruby, I might add, integrates with Java and you can even compile Ruby to Java bytecode if you like. This gives you a choice of JRE or native target. Ooh, let me think, which language would I rather use?
...for eating D'ohl's steak. And then claim that since he couldn't identify which parts of the crocodile were made from his particular steak, he owns the entire crocodile.
Fortunately, a six-meter saltie wouldn't care. The "wookie argument" pales into insignificance alongside the "saltie death-roll argument".
I suppose it's possible some Aussie contractor gets hit with legal claims.
Yes please! I'll take three!
The instant D'ohl's minions send me such paperwork, I become eligible to spend money pounding their miserable claims into the sand. And pound I will. They'll get the legal equivalent of a FSWE from me, and their wandoo is waiting, nicely pre-splintered, in the front yard of our Albany farm. Unfortunately, they're not interested in attacking me, they want someone who'll drop trou and grab their ankles at a moment's notice.
I just about walked into a pretty girl at a supermarket on Friday. They use a radio station as Muzak and it had just announced Gmail as if it was a serious product, right in the middle of all of the other tech news. Whaaaat?
She understood that it was an April Fool's joke which had hit the big time, but was too hazy on what a gigabyte was to understand why it was funny.
Phsstpok the Pak does some impromptu terraforming in Protector (built Kobold and tricked attacking Protectors into hitting another planet) but the ultimate has to be ringworlds (of Larry Niven fame) and (Freeman) Dyson spheres. There's also the black obelisks in 2010, Terry Pratchett's Spindle Kings and their human successors, and MiB's worlds-within-worlds idea to consider. And heaps else that I missed. Brontomek! The Magratheans (and, after their fashion, Vogons) from THHGTTG. Ad infinitum.
Send some poor suckers with starry eyes off to get killed on Mars to make it habitable for "us", and then "we" (meaning the richest 1% or less) move to Mars when the Earth passes the Pollution Event Horizon. Good plan - for the 1%, maybe. We always make laws to stop everyone else from doing things, not us.
Douglas Adams put it well in one of the HHGTTG books, when he spoke of nobody complaining about some massive elitist project, or at least nobody who mattered.
the earlier we start thinking about something, the less likely it is we'll mess it up once we can do it.
Exactly like those planning sessions, what you said here sounds eminently reasonable but it isn't.
The earlier you start thinking about something, the less data you have to work with, the more likely you are to paint yourself into a bizarre political corner long before real information surfaces. Once trapped there, it can be surprisingly difficult to reaim things in the light of reality as it arrives.
I vote for writing more scifi stories about it. That way the people that matter can read them and think, "Wow, what an imagination this dude has... hmm..." and start thinking about it without making any formal political commitment to a particular approach, and without establishing the foundations for a sea of red tape like that hobbling NASA and the US public space effort as you read this.
Think about Arthur Clarke or better yet Robert Forward. I can't see us running into a RocheWorld or Dragon's Egg anytime soon, but Forward's laid out some "harmless" thought experiments well in advance, realistic in that they don't posit any serendipitous breakthroughs in physics (barrinjg catastrophe, we could probably build his whacking great frequency multiplier a decade or to from now), and we seem to be surprisingly close to having his "Christmas Tree" avatars in real life.
When real data rolls up, untenable positions can be quickly and quietly dropped, and public positions can be established and worked from which bear at least a passing resemblance to Real Life(tm).
Slashdot Mirror
Think Copernicus. Tell me of any seriously revolutionary idea which you know was accepted with open arms by all.
Of course not. You wouldn't hear good things about Linux in any Microsoft-sponsored presentation either, and wouldn't expect to. If you don't expose yourself to anything but orthodox dogma, why would you expect to understand heresy?
arXiv censored one of the clearest presentations, but try, from the start, no less than "A. Einstein, Relativity: The Special and General Theory" in which he says "An atom absorbs or emits light of a frequency which is dependent on the potential of the gravitational field in which it is situated." Not on any delta-G it travels through. Was he right? If so, the heresy was always present, and the high priests of cosmology have simply failed to acknowledge it.
J. H. Taylor, in "Astronomical and Space Experiments To Test Relativity," in General Relativity and Gravitation (Cambridge Uni Press, 1987), compares atomic clock time with pulsar timing data and concludes "Here is direct proof, based on a clock some 15,000 light years from the solar system, that clocks on Earth run more slowly when the moon is full - because at this time of the month we are deeper in the gravitational potential of the sun!" Looks like he was on Albert's side.
Probably mostly because it doesn't break down at all. (-:
"Redshift" (frequency changes) produced by one's position in a gravity well is part and parcel of GR. Redshift produced by a change in gravitational potential isn't.
"I just attended a talk by a Newtonian physicist and he didn't say a word about physics being broken"? (-:
Consider the pennies-on-a-balloon model of cosmology. Why should the balloon stretch and the pennies not? Is that not a special pleading unsupported by any verification or experimentation? Why should space strecth on a large scale and not on a small? Shouldn't such an effect be visible in the outer galaxies of a cluster? Or vary in the space surrounding a cluster? That's not science, that's dogma.
It also utterly fails to deal with stepped redshifts, as evidenced by visual observation of large samples of galaxies, and of Gamma Ray Bursters. Nor does it cope with the "excessive" brightness of distant galaxies, nor with closely associated galaxies featuring differing redshifts. And this is but the beginning of its troubles.
Knock out the "special pleading" by allowing space to stretch more or less uniformly, and you wind up with a galaxyless, even starless universe from a big-bang start.
Steady-state-ish. I'm favouring a system which has achieved an essentially steady state, not one which always was steady.
In this case, one doesn't have to "get around" CBR at all, since it fits nicely as the redshifted remnant of a cosmic "flame front" of galaxies and/or stars. The observed CBR variations fit nicely as well. On top of that, it also solves the "dark night sky" issue far more neatly than does entrenched cosmology, and a big long laundry list of other conundra.
[this is too long now, planets coming in a second reply]
First off, patents are incompatible with free markets. Argentina (you know, South American country, hardly has two nickels to rub together) developed their own AIDS vaccine but weren't allowed to send it to Africa for patent reasons. When they rumbled about going ahead and doing that anyway for humanitarian reasons (on one hand, "dirt poor" and "humanitarian" are uneasy bedfellows; on the other, it wasn't going to be a huge drain even on Argentina and the need is great; on the gripping hand, it happened regardles) the US intervened, telling them that trade sanctions would be applied. Free market, my ass.
Second off, limited patent protection (not the biggest-lawyer-wins multi-decade rort we have now) is sometimes necessary to get a new idea to market.
Third off, in the real world human nature will distort and destroy anything like a free market (/ME waves to William Henry "Trey" Gates III, Pharmacea-Upjohn, General Electric and a few of their mates), so some ground-rules are needed, and some intervention to enforce them is also needed.
Free markets are a nice ideal, but incompatible with reality. The best we can hope for is a simple and evenly-enforced intervention policy. Not a lightly enforced one: the penalties for violation should be devastating, in order to stop punters from treating cheating as just another business risk.
sed /' >destfile.html
kprinter -j none --nodialog destfile.html
If you want PDFs instead of hardcopy, use CUPS and add "-P nameofPDFqueue".
I think my GP should have said catachrestic, which would both have been more correct and more interesting, as well as letting you know that you didn't have a clue what was being said, whereas "pedant" is used often enough that you might be under the delusion of knowing what it really means. (-: Your mis-step was blatant rather than flagrant
It was fun being your pedant du jour, have a good day. (-:
Eh? I run my own. Many of my customers, even small ones, run their own. They tick over quietly, day after day, year after year. I (they) get as much control as I (they) want, instant updates, and a choice of how to specify those updates (hand edit, web form, automated etc). For vanila-flavoured domains the zonefiles are all pretty much identical anyway.
For outgoing DNS queries, the traffic and time saving through query cacheing is not huge, but it is there and does help a lot when the ISP's DNSes go legs-in-the-air (which has not been a problem with ArachNet, but other local ISPs haven't been such a lucky choice).
Maintenance? Pretty much zero. Maybe once every year or two, URPMI will nudge the version number to cope with a security flaw, but that's about it.
BTW, I generally us ethe much-maligned BIND. Yes, it is huge and probably not necessary but it works, and does do the special tricks when you want it to.
...yet there are records stamped in lava of massive (in excess of a right-angle from the PoV of the region sampled) pole-swing which took place in 90 minutes or less.
Mercury has a reasonable magnetic field, yet shouldn't be large enough to still have much fluid inside. Mars has negligible magnetism, yet is many times larger than Mbeercury. Venus is in many ways comparable to Earth, yet no serious field. It can't be the retrograde spin, because Uranus spins on its side and has quite a strong field - laterally offset from the core and steeply angled. It is quite clear that our current ideas about planetary magnetism are at best whistling in the dark.
They have plenty of company. Our current ideas about cosmology are based on principles under which the GPS system would not work. To really drive the point home, the military people had to correct their initial GPS software after writing it according to cosmology and not to observation - they even had to be shown using a test satellite because they were so sure that the theory was right.
In this case, the broken bit of theory is that photons lose energy as they climb through a gravity field. They don't. The wavelength is altered by the emitter's position in a "gravity well", but does not change as the photon travels in or out of the well.
Naturaly, this completely invalidates everything currently based on expansion-redshift, a concept intimately tied into the same principle - which means bye-bye to big-bang cosmology. That's distressing for the status quo, but a good thing for science because we now have an opportunity to shrug off the dud theory and find something which better fits observation.
Happily, there are several steady-state-ish concepts being bruited about which continue to match the observed data at least as well as any big-bang-ish theories while managing to avoid conflict with this particular observation.
My current favourite is one which features a changing ZPE, since this also neatly explains the "steps" observed in redshift (including midway through galaxies!). While this arrangement doesn't require galactocentrism up front (ie, the "steps" should appear to be the same when viewed from almost anywhere in the universe because the changes which produce them are, well, universal), it is buried in the fine print, in particular the part of the model which deals with the CBR (and matches it much more closely in general and in detail than any big-bang model I've seen). Some punters will argue that the redshift-stepping isn't really there, but I've not seen any of those arguments come close to surviving serious examination.
In case you've siezed on the wrong idea, I make no claim to deep understanding, I'm neither astronomer nor physicist, I know barely enough to clearly discern why big-bang is broken, but I do know enough to be sure that it is.
...it'll just be ordering it for you. And because it uses DRM, there will be no plausible deniability for you.
Java isn't the only way to abstract either your graphics interface or endianness. There are much more efficient ways of doing both. If I was using an abstract language for my cellphone, I'd prefer something like Ruby.
Amongst other benefits, including much faster coding/debugging and better reusability, Sun's newfound cameraderie with Microsoft would then pose no risk to the future of my mobile 'phone code. Sun want to both have their cake and eat it, which is not a sustainable model of reality. Microsoft's view is much simpler: they want your piece of the cake, now, or they'll bury you in lobbyists and lawyers. It suits them to leave Scott's delusions intact.
Ruby, I might add, integrates with Java and you can even compile Ruby to Java bytecode if you like. This gives you a choice of JRE or native target. Ooh, let me think, which language would I rather use?
...the hey-you-forgot-the-batteries jokes.
Errrr... oh, I get it! You'd be searching for stuff? (-:
Offtopic? Whatever happened to Funny? Pikers! )-:
Do you, by any chance, happen to have very light-coloured hair? (-:
Also, can I refer to a very old adage that urges you to "live your life so that you could sell the family parrot to the town gossip without fear"?
It might take google.ie some time (maybe millennia) to get around to complying with a law which has effect only on US soil.
...for eating D'ohl's steak. And then claim that since he couldn't identify which parts of the crocodile were made from his particular steak, he owns the entire crocodile.
Fortunately, a six-meter saltie wouldn't care. The "wookie argument" pales into insignificance alongside the "saltie death-roll argument".
Yes please! I'll take three!
The instant D'ohl's minions send me such paperwork, I become eligible to spend money pounding their miserable claims into the sand. And pound I will. They'll get the legal equivalent of a FSWE from me, and their wandoo is waiting, nicely pre-splintered, in the front yard of our Albany farm. Unfortunately, they're not interested in attacking me, they want someone who'll drop trou and grab their ankles at a moment's notice.
Wrong? If it was my April Fool's Day joke and it was still rolling a week later, I'd be insufferably pleased. (-:
I just about walked into a pretty girl at a supermarket on Friday. They use a radio station as Muzak and it had just announced Gmail as if it was a serious product, right in the middle of all of the other tech news. Whaaaat?
She understood that it was an April Fool's joke which had hit the big time, but was too hazy on what a gigabyte was to understand why it was funny.
...the bit around about when the lizard uses Death Blossom.
He's just predicted Visual BASIC post factum. Whoopee. (-:
Once more with feeling: "if it is to be, it's up to me" - if you don't like it, you have all of the pieces and all of the tools. Fix it.
Phsstpok the Pak does some impromptu terraforming in Protector (built Kobold and tricked attacking Protectors into hitting another planet) but the ultimate has to be ringworlds (of Larry Niven fame) and (Freeman) Dyson spheres. There's also the black obelisks in 2010, Terry Pratchett's Spindle Kings and their human successors, and MiB's worlds-within-worlds idea to consider. And heaps else that I missed. Brontomek! The Magratheans (and, after their fashion, Vogons) from THHGTTG. Ad infinitum.
They forgot to archive the old site before the DNS change, and had no local copy. (-:
...people want others to make the sacrifices.
Send some poor suckers with starry eyes off to get killed on Mars to make it habitable for "us", and then "we" (meaning the richest 1% or less) move to Mars when the Earth passes the Pollution Event Horizon. Good plan - for the 1%, maybe. We always make laws to stop everyone else from doing things, not us.
Douglas Adams put it well in one of the HHGTTG books, when he spoke of nobody complaining about some massive elitist project, or at least nobody who mattered.
Exactly like those planning sessions, what you said here sounds eminently reasonable but it isn't.
The earlier you start thinking about something, the less data you have to work with, the more likely you are to paint yourself into a bizarre political corner long before real information surfaces. Once trapped there, it can be surprisingly difficult to reaim things in the light of reality as it arrives.
I vote for writing more scifi stories about it. That way the people that matter can read them and think, "Wow, what an imagination this dude has... hmm..." and start thinking about it without making any formal political commitment to a particular approach, and without establishing the foundations for a sea of red tape like that hobbling NASA and the US public space effort as you read this.
Think about Arthur Clarke or better yet Robert Forward. I can't see us running into a RocheWorld or Dragon's Egg anytime soon, but Forward's laid out some "harmless" thought experiments well in advance, realistic in that they don't posit any serendipitous breakthroughs in physics (barrinjg catastrophe, we could probably build his whacking great frequency multiplier a decade or to from now), and we seem to be surprisingly close to having his "Christmas Tree" avatars in real life.
When real data rolls up, untenable positions can be quickly and quietly dropped, and public positions can be established and worked from which bear at least a passing resemblance to Real Life(tm).
Have to paint the Shuttle yellow, maybe. Mind you, it ain't exactly "paradise" as it stands.