From this link, the U.S. electrical energy use for the month of April was 290.7 terawatthours, which corresponds to an average current of over 3 billion amps (U.S. alone). That is much higher than the Atlas current. As other posters pointed out, they must be talking about power. From the press release:
Scientists today successfully generated a powerful current - roughly four times the electrical power on Earth - to create....
So they never actually said the current itself was equal to four times the electrical power of the Earth, but implied the power generated from the current was that size.
But, as you can see here, they were generating the same current level over 4 years ago, so this is hardly a new result.
This is only enough plutonium to make a dozen or so nuclear weapons- that's hardly a significant addition to the thousands of warheads we already have.
As far as I can tell, this result rules out extra dimensions larger than about the width of a atom. While string theory allows extra dimensions on this scale, the "natural" scale is still fifteen orders of magnitude smaller. This result doesn't seem to rule out string theory, just an enticing (but unnecessary) possibility- "large" extra dimensions.
Can anyone familiar with this experiment elaborate?
Except that the material must either escape Earth's orbit or be in an orbit with sufficiently high ellipticity as to return to Earth (the launch point, barring the Earth's rotation, will be on the orbital path).
The gamma rays only appeared in a short burst. The object still emitted x-rays for a few minutes after this, just long enough for the Swift telescope to reorient itself and catch the tail end of the glow.
From the article:
Swift automatically repositioned itself within 50 seconds to image the same patch of sky in X-rays. It just barely caught an X-ray afterglow, Gehrels said in a telephone interview.
The X-ray counterpart was barely detectable and only observed for a few minutes.
From an event such as this 2.2 billion light years away, the gravity waves would be negligibly small. The LIGO detector will not be sensitive enough to detect merging neutron stars farther away than the local galaxy cluster (10 million light years in diameter).
I'm sure there's a few organizations around the world (some recognized governments, others informal organizations) that would jump at the possibility of aiming this to land in the vicinity of 1600 Pensylvania Avenue.
But the asteroid will surely be deflected by the copious amounts of hot air emanating from the Capitol...
Yes, the energy of impact would be equivalent to about 1 billion tons of TNT. But the largest nuclear bomb ever tested was equivalent to about 50 million tons- about 1/20 the size. IF this were to hit Earth, anyone at 100 miles from impact would be exposed to only a moderate (~6.5 magnitude) earthquake and a small amount of ejecta (might want to be indoors). At 50 miles, most people will survive. At 25 miles, there will be significant destruction, but people will likely survive if they are in a solid structure.
So we could avoid nearly all deaths by evacuating a 100 mile region around the impact site. Odds are, the impact site will be either water (any tsunami will be smaller than the one last December) or a rural area and the damage will not be huge. Furthermore, even in the worst case, we will be able to determine the rough impact area weeks ahead of time and can reasonably evacuate the area.
A billion people are not going to die. The impact on the Earth might be equivalent to a large volcano and it might depress the temperature by a couple degrees for a few years (we survived Pinatubo); certainly not much larger than recent disasters. And spending 100's of billions of dollars on trying to deflect this right now is certainly a waste of money, given that it is exceedingly unlikely this asteroid will cause that amount of damage even if it hits Earth.
Group Red Hat and Fedora together and the growth rate is around 10%, close to the other distributions. This "growth" is mostly due to the name change- if I upgrade from Red Hat 9.0 to Fedora, I'm really not changing distributions (semantics aside), but giving the impression that Fedora is growing rapidly. That increase could be due entirely to ~10% of older Red Hat servers being upgraded along the free Fedora path rather than through Enterprise Red Hat, without drawing any servers away from other distributions.
Gentoo seems to have the largest "true" increase, but that is only in percentages since they appear to have a relatively small share of the overall webservers. Any new distribution is inevitably going to have a large percentage increase- if I installed WhiteCastleOS (assuming they leverage their grilling expertise into the software sector) on one server last year and four more since then, its growth rate would put all the others to shame, but no one is going to be seriously concerned with it taking over the market.
I was only speaking in hypotheticals. I would never myself use any spam filter for fear of trampling the rights of those poor, hardworking spammers just trying to support their families....
Clearly, the first amendment protects free speech - and this is a clear abridgement of this right.
Let's take a look at the bill:
22 . requires a service provider to prevent certain access to Internet material harmful to 23 minors, if requested by the consumer;
So this bill is creating an OPT-IN list, preventing access to sites only to those customers who ask the ISP to do this. How is this violating free speech? If I don't want spam and decide to use a spam filter, am I violating the free speech rights of the spammers?
As of now, all of the 'Hockey Team' reconstructions (shown left) agree that the late 20th century is anomalous in the context of last millennium, and possibly the last two millennia.
I guess the one good thing about the NHL lockout is now all those players can get back to their global warming research.
Seems to me that, if the universe is 28 ly across but only 14 ly old, if we look at the universe starting from the center and expanding outward, then it is only 14 ly distant from any direction from center.
Two problems:
1) We don't believe we are at the center of the universe. So a person sitting in a galaxy 14 billion ly to our left is more than 14 billion ly away from a person sitting in a galaxy to our right, and they are too far away to ever have been in contact. So how can one look like the other? While this may be moot if you assume we are at the center and everything is moving away from us, you also have to assume those galaxies 14 billion ly from us have been moving away from us at the speed of light ever since the Big Bang. However:
2) The galaxies we are seeing 14 billion ly from us now are not moving at the speed of light. So a billion years ago, they might have been 13.5 billion light years away, in which case we know the universe was at least 27 billion light years across, but only 13 billion years old.
And to anyone who knows GR here, yes I have oversimplified.:)
Dark energy has also been "observed" with microwave background measurements, which are independent of the supernovae measurements. So dark energy is no longer based upon a single result, but upon several different results.
The light that passes near a black hole is bent, but in most cases that light then becomes more spread out and too dim to see. Suppose you and a buddy are standing outside staring up the Sun. Your buddy has a photoelectric cell and points it at the Sun, then powers a lightbulb with that. Basically, the light reaching your buddy is being taken and spread out in all directions by the lightbulb. Now which is brighter? Both spots are receiving the same amount of light, but only a fraction of the light reaching your buddy is sent your way.
Same thing happens in general with black holes- if Star A emits light towards the black hole, that light is scattered in many directions and becomes much (and by much, I mean ALOT) dimmer than the light that reaches you directly from Star A. But what I say here only applies in most cases. If the black hole is lined up just right with an object, then you can get very observable images (but it doesn't even need to be a black hole to do this; e.g. Galaxy Clusters).
But the biggest problem with "observing" black holes is that the large ones (most of the ones near the centers of galaxies) tend to be surrounding by large amounts of material, such as hydrogen clouds, that block any light coming close enough to be strongly bent by the black hole anyways. Not all that bad; those clouds of gasses tend to become very energetic and bright due to the large gravity, so they themselves are easy to see (so we can observe black holes indirectly by observing this bright gas around them).
The horizon problem exists because humans need to think that there's a point of beginning for the Universe. What if it's always been in existence? No horizon problem...
Actually, most astronomers/cosmologists back in the day assumed that the universe was static- not expanding or contracting and going to remain roughly the same forever. It was only after observations to the contrary that the scientists turned to Big Bang models. Even Einstein attempted to make General Relativity allow for a non-changing universe; he eventually accepted that that is not the case.
But just to be clear, the Big Bang was not chosen because the scientists had some innate desire to have a beginning to the universe (although I admit there were probably some who did, but the general consensus was quite the opposite); however, the Big Bang theory became accepted because observational evidence was becoming overwhelmingly incompatible with any static models.
We're getting close to no data back from the Voyagers. they are at the end, at some point you cut them off and it doesn't matter when that is, "scientists" are going to resist it. How many PhD grants do those operations costs cover? How much science is comming back? What's being published?
I have seen talks given about the heliosphere, based upon current data from these probes, and how future data will shed light on this. This is an active area of research and the Voyagers are providing very useful data. The scientists are not suggesting indefinite funding- they want the funding to be continued because these probes are on the verge of passing out of the solar system into interstellar space. This is a very real boundary that astronomers would like to know more about and it seems absurd to end these missions right before we get there.
Terminate these Voyagers now, and in ten years you will see calls for a new probe to be launched to study these regions; only now, you will need 1/2 billion dollars for an entirely new mission. That is why this is penny wise, pound foolish. The scientific review board apparently agrees- they felt there was enough science there to continue funding.
If you would like to see what is being published, do a search for Voyager on the ADS; you will find numerous papers based upon this current data: http://adswww.harvard.edu/
Slashdot Mirror
But, as you can see here, they were generating the same current level over 4 years ago, so this is hardly a new result.
This is only enough plutonium to make a dozen or so nuclear weapons- that's hardly a significant addition to the thousands of warheads we already have.
Can anyone familiar with this experiment elaborate?
Except that the material must either escape Earth's orbit or be in an orbit with sufficiently high ellipticity as to return to Earth (the launch point, barring the Earth's rotation, will be on the orbital path).
From the article:
From an event such as this 2.2 billion light years away, the gravity waves would be negligibly small. The LIGO detector will not be sensitive enough to detect merging neutron stars farther away than the local galaxy cluster (10 million light years in diameter).
Uhh, check that table again. 92 is its atomic number, not its abundance. Only the first 20 entries in that table are ranked by abundance.
But the asteroid will surely be deflected by the copious amounts of hot air emanating from the Capitol...
So we could avoid nearly all deaths by evacuating a 100 mile region around the impact site. Odds are, the impact site will be either water (any tsunami will be smaller than the one last December) or a rural area and the damage will not be huge. Furthermore, even in the worst case, we will be able to determine the rough impact area weeks ahead of time and can reasonably evacuate the area.
A billion people are not going to die. The impact on the Earth might be equivalent to a large volcano and it might depress the temperature by a couple degrees for a few years (we survived Pinatubo); certainly not much larger than recent disasters. And spending 100's of billions of dollars on trying to deflect this right now is certainly a waste of money, given that it is exceedingly unlikely this asteroid will cause that amount of damage even if it hits Earth.
Gentoo seems to have the largest "true" increase, but that is only in percentages since they appear to have a relatively small share of the overall webservers. Any new distribution is inevitably going to have a large percentage increase- if I installed WhiteCastleOS (assuming they leverage their grilling expertise into the software sector) on one server last year and four more since then, its growth rate would put all the others to shame, but no one is going to be seriously concerned with it taking over the market.
...have they implemented multicore support for greater speed and accuracy?
I was only speaking in hypotheticals. I would never myself use any spam filter for fear of trampling the rights of those poor, hardworking spammers just trying to support their families....
Let's take a look at the bill:
So this bill is creating an OPT-IN list, preventing access to sites only to those customers who ask the ISP to do this. How is this violating free speech? If I don't want spam and decide to use a spam filter, am I violating the free speech rights of the spammers?Two problems:
1) We don't believe we are at the center of the universe. So a person sitting in a galaxy 14 billion ly to our left is more than 14 billion ly away from a person sitting in a galaxy to our right, and they are too far away to ever have been in contact. So how can one look like the other? While this may be moot if you assume we are at the center and everything is moving away from us, you also have to assume those galaxies 14 billion ly from us have been moving away from us at the speed of light ever since the Big Bang. However:
2) The galaxies we are seeing 14 billion ly from us now are not moving at the speed of light. So a billion years ago, they might have been 13.5 billion light years away, in which case we know the universe was at least 27 billion light years across, but only 13 billion years old.
And to anyone who knows GR here, yes I have oversimplified. :)
Dark energy has also been "observed" with microwave background measurements, which are independent of the supernovae measurements. So dark energy is no longer based upon a single result, but upon several different results.
Same thing happens in general with black holes- if Star A emits light towards the black hole, that light is scattered in many directions and becomes much (and by much, I mean ALOT) dimmer than the light that reaches you directly from Star A. But what I say here only applies in most cases. If the black hole is lined up just right with an object, then you can get very observable images (but it doesn't even need to be a black hole to do this; e.g. Galaxy Clusters).
But the biggest problem with "observing" black holes is that the large ones (most of the ones near the centers of galaxies) tend to be surrounding by large amounts of material, such as hydrogen clouds, that block any light coming close enough to be strongly bent by the black hole anyways. Not all that bad; those clouds of gasses tend to become very energetic and bright due to the large gravity, so they themselves are easy to see (so we can observe black holes indirectly by observing this bright gas around them).
Hope that answers your questions.
But just to be clear, the Big Bang was not chosen because the scientists had some innate desire to have a beginning to the universe (although I admit there were probably some who did, but the general consensus was quite the opposite); however, the Big Bang theory became accepted because observational evidence was becoming overwhelmingly incompatible with any static models.
I have seen talks given about the heliosphere, based upon current data from these probes, and how future data will shed light on this. This is an active area of research and the Voyagers are providing very useful data. The scientists are not suggesting indefinite funding- they want the funding to be continued because these probes are on the verge of passing out of the solar system into interstellar space. This is a very real boundary that astronomers would like to know more about and it seems absurd to end these missions right before we get there.
Terminate these Voyagers now, and in ten years you will see calls for a new probe to be launched to study these regions; only now, you will need 1/2 billion dollars for an entirely new mission. That is why this is penny wise, pound foolish. The scientific review board apparently agrees- they felt there was enough science there to continue funding.
If you would like to see what is being published, do a search for Voyager on the ADS; you will find numerous papers based upon this current data: http://adswww.harvard.edu/