I don't get spam. I just don't get any. I don't let my e-mail get out to stupid places on the net where a spider will get them. I don't sign up for weird things. I avoid anything slightly untrustworthy. And as a result I get no spam. I can't lie, I don't get no spam. I get maybe 1 spam every 2 weeks. That's right, 1. If I have managed to prevent myself from getting more than 2 spams a month so can you. So do it and stop complaining.
Good for you. Unforuntely, some of us work for a living. Our workplaces put our email addresses all over the site, because we are expected to be able to be contacted by our students. I don't admin the site, so I can't go in there and obfuscate my email address.
Some of us concider helping our fellow Free Software advocates, by posting on mailing lists. Some fool comes along, and archives the mailing list on a public website, and doesn't bother obfuscating the email address. Again, I can't do anything about it, because you need to have a valid address to post to the freaking list.
I am glad that you can dictate whether everyone on the net can publish your email address or not. Because if you ever mail me, I am now inclined to post your email address on one of my sites.
Yeegads! For 2 freaking years, I have struggled with that stupid bookmark manager. You couldn't have two bookmarks pointing to they same URL (bug number 51683), because some bright spark thought it would be a good idea to use the URL as a key. The bug had many many many comments on it, was a dataloss bug, and it was completely ignored for 2 years. Finally been fixed.
I know quite a few people who got turned off the mozilla effort because of that one bug alone.
I don't fault this PhD guy for not knowing how to defrag a hard drive, but I don't necessarily think its all that impressive that he has a PhD and does NOT know how to defrag a hard drive!!!
Defragging a HD is not an obvious concept. Hell, on a decently designed system, one should never have to invoke a defragger!
But it doesn't seem to occur to everyone here, than most physics PhD's never use windows. Why use windows when you can use UNIX? The guy has probably used UNIX all his academic life, simply because that is what we use in academia. So he uses a Windows box for the first time, and hasn't heard of defragging or know how to do it. Big deal.
From an Infoworld article [infoworld.com] on the subject:
"Governments signing up to the security program will be able to build systems that offer the high levels of security required for national security, Microsoft has said. However, government users will not be allowed to make modifications to the code or compile the source code into Windows programs themselves, according to Microsoft."
Yeah, real 'open'.
Hmmm - So MS took their windows source, compiled it, modified the code to remove the backdoors, and sent it to China. To ensure that China aren't then going to modify the source, they make sure the source is not buildable - Have in the agreement that they don't give China some important part of the building process.
So China search through the code, find no backdoors (because they have been removed), but runs the original version of the code with the backdoors still in it, because they are not able to build fresh sources.
As for the "googling" incident, I just think they're attempting to defend their trademark. If you don't do that kind of stuff, you lose your trademark. Kinda like how Kleenex and Xerox lost theirs (everyone says "may I have a kleenex?" or "could you xerox this?" and so it became colloquial and no longer a trademark).
I believe the phrase is "Only in America[TM]"
Fortunately, in more sane countries, we still say "pass the tissues", and "where is the photocopier?".
I did a "find ~ -name '*.mp3'" when I first heard about it and was disappointed that I only had three mp3 files. None of which were music, and all of which were legally obtained.
G'day sholden - long time no see. You obviously weren't looking in the right place. But I think you knew that already:)
Every radio station in every city that's making any money is probably 9 times out of 10 part of ClearChannel's vast network (dare I say monopoly) of radio stations across the United States.
The same Top 40 songs are heard day in and day out in every city. Nothing changes. Only artists with big media contracts (Sony, Columbia, etc.) can afford to buy air time.
Man, am I glad I live in Australia. Here, the publicly funded radio stations run by ABC are excellent. They are all nationally run, but there are several of them, catering to rather different tastes. They all seem to do a great job too, and all of them run on paltry budgets. JJJ for youth radio, ABC classic FM for, duh, classical music (and damn good stuff when I am in the mood), regional radio for the bush, etc.
In the odd occasion I listened to private radio several years ago, I was rather annoyed at the ratio of ad-time to music time up near the unity level. Then the fact that MMM (the only real private station that didn't play top 40 crud all the time) would boast that they have a brand new single and are promoting the fact that they are bringing out a band to Australia, when JJJ was playing the single roughtly 2 or 3 months beforehand (I think - certainly long enough that the song felt rather old-hat to me), and had been advertising the band about a month ago.
Then the fact that a large amount of the bands to come out of Asutralia in the past 10 years have been "discovered" through JJJ's "Unearthed" program - they go around to a different part of the country (very rarely a capital city) every few months and find another band with a heck of a lot of talent.
I searched quite a while when I spent a few weeks in.us for a station that I could stand, but failed. Good thing I brought my CD player with me.
John Howard is acting more and more as one of Bush's little lackeys, first with considering a trade agreement that will force australia to reduce local content on TV (and open up more time for US shows), lately marching into and illegal war for no other reason than USA asked him to (more likely said or else!)
I tried searching on google with no success. Can you provide references to the local content on TV claim?
I currently live in Melbourne, and in the news down here, it (the 2 week old bushfires in ACT) are being blamed on severe lightning strikes. Same goes for Blue Moutains in NSW.
That makes me feel slightly better. I wouldn't have been surprised if some moron lit the fires.
I heard this on the news lastnight. I was absolutely devestated. I know many of the PhD students - we have 2 visiting this insitution currently - I rang up one of them yesterday, but all her family is safe.
There have been emails flying around all the astronoical lists - my supervisor did his PhD thesis there. All the telescopes have gone. The computers destroyed - some (most? All?) tapes were stored offsite as soon as they realised there was a fire coming (why they don't store them offsite as part of normal backup routines escape me). The biggest loss will be for the students - the telescope is not at a dark sky site (Canberra is/big/ these days), but the students do most of their PhD's on this set of telescope, almost exclusively. We also lost one instrument that had just about been finished and was soon being send off to the Gemini telescopes. Another one that they were meant to be building will have to have other plans - the workshop is destroyed. A lot of the astonomers lost their houses, but so far, every life has been accounted for, and the main university site is still safe... for the time being.
I'll be there in 2 weeks, as part of a cosmology school. We were meant to be taking a tour of the site. Oh shit, I don't know whether I want to go there anymore.
I am really worried about MOST telescope that the university of Sydney runs. A bit north of Canberra, but I think it is out of the way of fires. The grass around there will go up in seconds though - I hear the fire in these situations travels at up to 60 km/h. All the telescopes in Australia are somewhat unsafe from fires - the Siding Springs Observatory is in the middle of bushland, and there is no fire-break up there (I think there was one for Mt Stromlo). The fires in 1998 came too close for my liking...
Uhhh...Science and Nature are the two most prestigous and influential scientific journals in the world.
True. But, what I am saying, is that Science is not an astrophysical journal. Sure it may be pretigous. I presonally don't agree with publishing in Science (or Nature) - I think people only tend to publish there thinking they will get more citations.
Science and Nature are biased more towards biological science. The readership isn't specilised, so requires that the science submitted to it is truly ground-breaking - enough so that any old scientist will enjoy reading the article. They get more citations precisly because these papers are imortant papers (otherwise they would have been dropped as soon as submitted to Nature/Science), not because they appear in Nature or Science (show me citations to an astrophysical paper in Nature/Science by a non-astrophysicist). The articles are also usually light on contents. You may say that this is great - get the science out to more people that might appreciate it, and hence support funding it, even though they would never read a more traditional astrophysical journal. My personal opinion is that I would much prefer reading the ground breaking science in a traditional journal, with none of this "dumbing down", and light-on-details approach adopted with certain Nature articles I have had to read recently. Then write up an article that not only general scientists can understand, but also the relatively intelligent portion of the public that read say, "Scientific American". I have always been a huge fan of Scientific American. Before I even started uni, I read all the articles on astrophysics/cosmology, understood them to a degree, and really got interested in it all. I still read them when I hear an interesting author (such as Guinevere Kauffman - sorry for the speeling) has written an article.
I have seen plenty of articles on Astro-ph recently on various topics in astrophysics that truly are of great importance, and cross disiplinary - none of them were submitted to Nature, even though they were probably Nature worthy. They were all submitted to ApJ, etc. They make for much better reading. The way non-astrophysicist physicists find out about the cross-disciplinary research is by reading their respective xxxx-ph site, and finding the article cross-posted to the relevent ones.
And as for what to believe, while I agree with your numbers, the point of this whole thing is that this new measurement is yet another new and independent way of measuring the age of the universe. Since the error bars of virtually all the methods are overlapping, that gives us confidence that the numbers we are getting from all the various methods are correct.
That is why this is important.
Sure. The techinque has long been used - the limits on cosmological paramaters are generally quite small these days precisely because of this - you plot certain variables, and find that every single study has a large degeneracy in one direction in parameter space. But the degeneracy in study X always handily seems to be orthogonal to the degeneracy in study Y.
But I was disapointed in the article on space.com, not actually suplying a link (or even reference) to the original Science article, so I can't check their method. In the method I posted, done by Gibson et al (I don't think the one I posted was the only paper by the group), their results of 13+/-2 Gyr were from their single study alone. This, I was quite impressed with. I was disapointed in the writeup in Space.com saying that now we have improved the result to 11-20Gyr (wheeee!!!), not mentioning that this is the result of just one study, as if astronomers have now downgraded our confidence in the results.
Ever since I was at school over 10 years ago it's been "between 10-20 billion years, most likely 16ish". That's why I also wonder what's changed.
We have more data to back this up. Having said that, I am suspicious of this claim - not only did it appear in science rather than one of the astrophysical journals, I haven't heard of this group in my day-to-day research (OK, so sue me, I am only a first year PhD student, but I should still have heard of them if they are doing real science), and I trust my supervisor more than I trust this mob. See one of my other posts for more details.
Really? This figure has been known for at least ~30 years.
1: there must have been a few big stars go bang to make all the elements of the earth.
Yeah, I think one SN in your environment will bring the content of metals in your environment up to about 1/10^5 of the value found near the sun. Stars born in these regions are called population 3 stars, and roughly represent the first stars to be born. All they had at birth was hydrogen (75% by mass) and helium (25%). Then came pop 2 stars, then pop 1 stars (like the sun). ie, there have been roughly 2 generations before us. The first stars to be born were probably very massive, and these died very very quickly (lifetime goes down as a factor of hmmm, maybe mass squared - I can't back this up by data, and my memory is dead after all those ginger martini's, and I want to go home), subsequent generations were probably biased more towards low mass, but this is still very much subject to speculation and simulations (we know virtually nothing about star formation, and the initial mass function (the number of stars formed as a function of their birth mass - more massive stars are increasingly rare), even whether it varies with time)
If the Earth is 4.5billion years old, then the solar system must be say 5 billion years old, how quick do large stars explode? must be say 1 billion - 3 billion years tops
Far shorter. 1 billion years is the lifetime of a very low mass star - only say 2 solar masses (I can't be bothered running my program to find out the proper number). Normal SN happen about 10^6 years after birth, but depending on mass.
So, last year, they had an estimate of 13-14 billion. This year, it's 11-20 billion. Yeah to scientific progress!
Science is not exactly a reputable astrophysical journal. I would tend to go with the estimate of 13-14 billion years. See this ppaper - the figure of H0=73+/-2(r)+/-7(s) km s-1 Mpc-1 (hmm,/. does not allow sup tags) combined with standard cosmological models (omega m = 0.3, lambda = 0.7) implies an age of 13+/-2 Gyr. I tend to believe this one more. The errors quotes are probably 1 sigma errors (ie, 68 precent confidence - double the errors for 95%).
However, I am possibly biased, the author is my supevisor:)
What if it's because we're doing something RIGHT? What if by accepting the best and brightest from all over the world, we're leaving these heavily armed countries with the dregs of humanity?
Score 5, insightful? Whoa!
Because your universities import a few thousand people, the rest of the 5.9 billion are scum? I thought humans were unintelligent on the whole, but I didn't think that 99% of the population were "the dregs of humanity".
The U.S. is the world's superpower. The only country with economic strength and the ability to project military power.
Only?
People are going to hate you because:
1. The U.S took the other side in some international dispute.
I hate them, because they always side with the country that will benefit them the most - usually to do with oil. Your wars are never ever over your "moral stance". Oh, and BTW, your morals are no superior to any other country's just in case you might be thinking that - Most people laugh at the existance of things such as your bible belt, and the fact that 95% of your country is brain-washed into thinking that the lord will save them.
2. They resent their culture being pushed aside by U.S. pop culture.
Whilst I resent culture here being pushed back by the Macdonalds pop culture, this is not the main reason I hate America.
3. They are jealous of the standard of living in the U.S.
Heh. No. No I am not. I very much like Australia. I would very much not want to go back to America ever again. I have been there once. I will probably have to go back again for conferences. But I sure as hell am going to avoid going when it comes time to do my postdoc. So no, I don't think I have any jeolousy towards America, but I still hate America, your government, your people's attitudes,
colour changing cases would be cool. server status at a glance?
Yeah - come a slashdotting, your computer first brightens in the infrared, then glows a dull red, then works its way up to orange, white, a pale but very bright blue, and then, well, becomes a naked singularity.
Sheetrock has had a far greater impact on the world than the theory of relativity, regardless of its comparative simplicity.
Without knowing what Sheetrock is, I'd say relativity is far more important. Have you ever flown in a plane? How would you like navigating without GPS, or for that matter, without relativistic corrections to the flight path? Even though the plane is highly non-relativistic, you still need relativity to get the plane within about 10 km after a world-wide flight.
I don't want to say we have no willpower or convictions, but there are just things people will always want to see and hear, and these things are provided by an evil company.
A few years ago, when I started hearing about the ills of MS, I vowed never to buy one of their products again. I have kept true to my word. I don't buy them. I don't use them. I did unfortunately buy 2 copies when I bought a computer and a laptop. The former I could have gotten away with avoiding (I was young and naive) - the latter is impossible in todays world.
I keep hearing that maybe, finally, windows 2000 is not a pile of cruft, but I don't know - I've got something that is perfectly good for me, and guarentees my Freedoms - Debian GNU/Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't get spam. I just don't get any. I don't let my e-mail get out to stupid places on the net where a spider will get them. I don't sign up for weird things. I avoid anything slightly untrustworthy. And as a result I get no spam. I can't lie, I don't get no spam. I get maybe 1 spam every 2 weeks. That's right, 1. If I have managed to prevent myself from getting more than 2 spams a month so can you. So do it and stop complaining.
Good for you. Unforuntely, some of us work for a living. Our workplaces put our email addresses all over the site, because we are expected to be able to be contacted by our students. I don't admin the site, so I can't go in there and obfuscate my email address.
Some of us concider helping our fellow Free Software advocates, by posting on mailing lists. Some fool comes along, and archives the mailing list on a public website, and doesn't bother obfuscating the email address. Again, I can't do anything about it, because you need to have a valid address to post to the freaking list.
I am glad that you can dictate whether everyone on the net can publish your email address or not. Because if you ever mail me, I am now inclined to post your email address on one of my sites.
Has no-one mentioned the bookmarks?
Yeegads! For 2 freaking years, I have struggled with that stupid bookmark manager. You couldn't have two bookmarks pointing to they same URL (bug number 51683), because some bright spark thought it would be a good idea to use the URL as a key. The bug had many many many comments on it, was a dataloss bug, and it was completely ignored for 2 years. Finally been fixed.
I know quite a few people who got turned off the mozilla effort because of that one bug alone.
I long for the days of the text-only web.
See, in .au, it is no longer April Fools. I almost fell for the NewCode thing, until about half way through!
But I foiled the whitespace langauge. You can't see it, until you click and drag down the mozilla windows. Ha ha! I can see it now! Suckers.
"Arista is the home of Santana, Whitney Houston, Pink, TLC and Kenny G."
That's just too easy.
Like, Arista forms one arm of the axis of really-evil?
I don't fault this PhD guy for not knowing how to defrag a hard drive, but I don't necessarily think its all that impressive that he has a PhD and does NOT know how to defrag a hard drive!!!
Defragging a HD is not an obvious concept. Hell, on a decently designed system, one should never have to invoke a defragger!
But it doesn't seem to occur to everyone here, than most physics PhD's never use windows. Why use windows when you can use UNIX? The guy has probably used UNIX all his academic life, simply because that is what we use in academia. So he uses a Windows box for the first time, and hasn't heard of defragging or know how to do it. Big deal.
From an Infoworld article [infoworld.com] on the subject:
"Governments signing up to the security program will be able to build systems that offer the high levels of security required for national security, Microsoft has said. However, government users will not be allowed to make modifications to the code or compile the source code into Windows programs themselves, according to Microsoft."
Yeah, real 'open'.
Hmmm - So MS took their windows source, compiled it, modified the code to remove the backdoors, and sent it to China. To ensure that China aren't then going to modify the source, they make sure the source is not buildable - Have in the agreement that they don't give China some important part of the building process.
So China search through the code, find no backdoors (because they have been removed), but runs the original version of the code with the backdoors still in it, because they are not able to build fresh sources.
Seems like a good deal to me.
As for the "googling" incident, I just think they're attempting to defend their trademark. If you don't do that kind of stuff, you lose your trademark. Kinda like how Kleenex and Xerox lost theirs (everyone says "may I have a kleenex?" or "could you xerox this?" and so it became colloquial and no longer a trademark).
I believe the phrase is "Only in America[TM]"
Fortunately, in more sane countries, we still say "pass the tissues", and "where is the photocopier?".
read the patent [uspto.gov]
Heh. I read that as "Patent #6,526,440, a method of reading a patent."
.. and all of a sudden, 1000 Overclockers wonder, "How do I get my Athlon to Centaurus?"
Pity silicon doesn't semi-conduct below about -90 C or thereabouts.
Heh. It pays to look at the command properly?
I did a "find ~ -name '*.mp3'" when I first heard about it and was disappointed that I only had three mp3 files. None of which were music, and all of which were legally obtained.
:)
G'day sholden - long time no see. You obviously weren't looking in the right place. But I think you knew that already
I won't mention anything with the initials M O D.
Every radio station in every city that's making any money is probably 9 times out of 10 part of ClearChannel's vast network (dare I say monopoly) of radio stations across the United States.
.us for a station that I could stand, but failed. Good thing I brought my CD player with me.
The same Top 40 songs are heard day in and day out in every city. Nothing changes. Only artists with big media contracts (Sony, Columbia, etc.) can afford to buy air time.
Man, am I glad I live in Australia.
Here, the publicly funded radio stations run by ABC are excellent. They are all nationally run, but there are several of them, catering to rather different tastes. They all seem to do a great job too, and all of them run on paltry budgets. JJJ for youth radio, ABC classic FM for, duh, classical music (and damn good stuff when I am in the mood), regional radio for the bush, etc.
In the odd occasion I listened to private radio several years ago, I was rather annoyed at the ratio of ad-time to music time up near the unity level. Then the fact that MMM (the only real private station that didn't play top 40 crud all the time) would boast that they have a brand new single and are promoting the fact that they are bringing out a band to Australia, when JJJ was playing the single roughtly 2 or 3 months beforehand (I think - certainly long enough that the song felt rather old-hat to me), and had been advertising the band about a month ago.
Then the fact that a large amount of the bands to come out of Asutralia in the past 10 years have been "discovered" through JJJ's "Unearthed" program - they go around to a different part of the country (very rarely a capital city) every few months and find another band with a heck of a lot of talent.
I searched quite a while when I spent a few weeks in
John Howard is acting more and more as one of Bush's little lackeys, first with considering a trade agreement that will force australia to reduce local content on TV (and open up more time for US shows), lately marching into and illegal war for no other reason than USA asked him to (more likely said or else!)
I tried searching on google with no success. Can you provide references to the local content on TV claim?
I currently live in Melbourne, and in the news down here, it (the 2 week old bushfires in ACT) are being blamed on severe lightning strikes. Same goes for Blue Moutains in NSW.
That makes me feel slightly better. I wouldn't have been surprised if some moron lit the fires.
The depth humans seem to go...
I heard this on the news lastnight. I was absolutely devestated. I know many of the PhD students - we have 2 visiting this insitution currently - I rang up one of them yesterday, but all her family is safe.
/big/ these days), but the students do most of their PhD's on this set of telescope, almost exclusively. We also lost one instrument that had just about been finished and was soon being send off to the Gemini telescopes. Another one that they were meant to be building will have to have other plans - the workshop is destroyed. A lot of the astonomers lost their houses, but so far, every life has been accounted for, and the main university site is still safe... for the time being.
a l/index.cgi?030119.001042611975
There have been emails flying around all the astronoical lists - my supervisor did his PhD thesis there. All the telescopes have gone. The computers destroyed - some (most? All?) tapes were stored offsite as soon as they realised there was a fire coming (why they don't store them offsite as part of normal backup routines escape me). The biggest loss will be for the students - the telescope is not at a dark sky site (Canberra is
I wrote my journal entry lastnight - I'm afraid it might be a bit emotional. But I will keep updaeing it as I find things out - http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/staff/tconnors/journ
I'll be there in 2 weeks, as part of a cosmology school. We were meant to be taking a tour of the site. Oh shit, I don't know whether I want to go there anymore.
I am really worried about MOST telescope that the university of Sydney runs. A bit north of Canberra, but I think it is out of the way of fires. The grass around there will go up in seconds though - I hear the fire in these situations travels at up to 60 km/h. All the telescopes in Australia are somewhat unsafe from fires - the Siding Springs Observatory is in the middle of bushland, and there is no fire-break up there (I think there was one for Mt Stromlo). The fires in 1998 came too close for my liking...
My kswapd went zombie after ~18days uptime; it had gone zombie after about 70 days prior to that reboot.
I got the feeling this was always from bad RAM/motherboard etc.
Uhhh...Science and Nature are the two most prestigous and influential scientific journals in the world.
True. But, what I am saying, is that Science is not an astrophysical journal. Sure it may be pretigous. I presonally don't agree with publishing in Science (or Nature) - I think people only tend to publish there thinking they will get more citations.
Science and Nature are biased more towards biological science. The readership isn't specilised, so requires that the science submitted to it is truly ground-breaking - enough so that any old scientist will enjoy reading the article. They get more citations precisly because these papers are imortant papers (otherwise they would have been dropped as soon as submitted to Nature/Science), not because they appear in Nature or Science (show me citations to an astrophysical paper in Nature/Science by a non-astrophysicist). The articles are also usually light on contents. You may say that this is great - get the science out to more people that might appreciate it, and hence support funding it, even though they would never read a more traditional astrophysical journal. My personal opinion is that I would much prefer reading the ground breaking science in a traditional journal, with none of this "dumbing down", and light-on-details approach adopted with certain Nature articles I have had to read recently. Then write up an article that not only general scientists can understand, but also the relatively intelligent portion of the public that read say, "Scientific American". I have always been a huge fan of Scientific American. Before I even started uni, I read all the articles on astrophysics/cosmology, understood them to a degree, and really got interested in it all. I still read them when I hear an interesting author (such as Guinevere Kauffman - sorry for the speeling) has written an article.
I have seen plenty of articles on Astro-ph recently on various topics in astrophysics that truly are of great importance, and cross disiplinary - none of them were submitted to Nature, even though they were probably Nature worthy. They were all submitted to ApJ, etc. They make for much better reading. The way non-astrophysicist physicists find out about the cross-disciplinary research is by reading their respective xxxx-ph site, and finding the article cross-posted to the relevent ones.
And as for what to believe, while I agree with your numbers, the point of this whole thing is that this new measurement is yet another new and independent way of measuring the age of the universe. Since the error bars of virtually all the methods are overlapping, that gives us confidence that the numbers we are getting from all the various methods are correct.
That is why this is important.
Sure. The techinque has long been used - the limits on cosmological paramaters are generally quite small these days precisely because of this - you plot certain variables, and find that every single study has a large degeneracy in one direction in parameter space. But the degeneracy in study X always handily seems to be orthogonal to the degeneracy in study Y.
But I was disapointed in the article on space.com, not actually suplying a link (or even reference) to the original Science article, so I can't check their method. In the method I posted, done by Gibson et al (I don't think the one I posted was the only paper by the group), their results of 13+/-2 Gyr were from their single study alone. This, I was quite impressed with. I was disapointed in the writeup in Space.com saying that now we have improved the result to 11-20Gyr (wheeee!!!), not mentioning that this is the result of just one study, as if astronomers have now downgraded our confidence in the results.
Ever since I was at school over 10 years ago it's been "between 10-20 billion years, most likely 16ish". That's why I also wonder what's changed.
We have more data to back this up. Having said that, I am suspicious of this claim - not only did it appear in science rather than one of the astrophysical journals, I haven't heard of this group in my day-to-day research (OK, so sue me, I am only a first year PhD student, but I should still have heard of them if they are doing real science), and I trust my supervisor more than I trust this mob. See one of my other posts for more details.
Hmm... That does seem a bit small.
Really? This figure has been known for at least ~30 years.
1: there must have been a few big stars go bang to make all the elements of the earth.
Yeah, I think one SN in your environment will bring the content of metals in your environment up to about 1/10^5 of the value found near the sun. Stars born in these regions are called population 3 stars, and roughly represent the first stars to be born. All they had at birth was hydrogen (75% by mass) and helium (25%). Then came pop 2 stars, then pop 1 stars (like the sun). ie, there have been roughly 2 generations before us. The first stars to be born were probably very massive, and these died very very quickly (lifetime goes down as a factor of hmmm, maybe mass squared - I can't back this up by data, and my memory is dead after all those ginger martini's, and I want to go home), subsequent generations were probably biased more towards low mass, but this is still very much subject to speculation and simulations (we know virtually nothing about star formation, and the initial mass function (the number of stars formed as a function of their birth mass - more massive stars are increasingly rare), even whether it varies with time)
If the Earth is 4.5billion years old, then the solar system must be say 5 billion years old, how quick do large stars explode? must be say 1 billion - 3 billion years tops
Far shorter. 1 billion years is the lifetime of a very low mass star - only say 2 solar masses (I can't be bothered running my program to find out the proper number). Normal SN happen about 10^6 years after birth, but depending on mass.
So, last year, they had an estimate of 13-14 billion. This year, it's 11-20 billion. Yeah to scientific progress!
/. does not allow sup tags) combined with standard cosmological models (omega m = 0.3, lambda = 0.7) implies an age of 13+/-2 Gyr. I tend to believe this one more. The errors quotes are probably 1 sigma errors (ie, 68 precent confidence - double the errors for 95%).
:)
Science is not exactly a reputable astrophysical journal. I would tend to go with the estimate of 13-14 billion years. See this ppaper - the figure of H0=73+/-2(r)+/-7(s) km s-1 Mpc-1 (hmm,
However, I am possibly biased, the author is my supevisor
What if it's because we're doing something RIGHT? What if by accepting the best and brightest from all over the world, we're leaving these heavily armed countries with the dregs of humanity?
Score 5, insightful? Whoa!
Because your universities import a few thousand people, the rest of the 5.9 billion are scum? I thought humans were unintelligent on the whole, but I didn't think that 99% of the population were "the dregs of humanity".
The U.S. is the world's superpower. The only country with economic strength and the ability to project military power.
Only?
People are going to hate you because:
1. The U.S took the other side in some international dispute.
I hate them, because they always side with the country that will benefit them the most - usually to do with oil. Your wars are never ever over your "moral stance". Oh, and BTW, your morals are no superior to any other country's just in case you might be thinking that - Most people laugh at the existance of things such as your bible belt, and the fact that 95% of your country is brain-washed into thinking that the lord will save them.
2. They resent their culture being pushed aside by U.S. pop culture.
Whilst I resent culture here being pushed back by the Macdonalds pop culture, this is not the main reason I hate America.
3. They are jealous of the standard of living in the U.S.
Heh. No. No I am not. I very much like Australia. I would very much not want to go back to America ever again. I have been there once. I will probably have to go back again for conferences. But I sure as hell am going to avoid going when it comes time to do my postdoc. So no, I don't think I have any jeolousy towards America, but I still hate America, your government, your people's attitudes,
colour changing cases would be cool. server status at a glance?
Yeah - come a slashdotting, your computer first brightens in the infrared, then glows a dull red, then works its way up to orange, white, a pale but very bright blue, and then, well, becomes a naked singularity.
Sheetrock has had a far greater impact on the world than the theory of relativity, regardless of its comparative simplicity.
Without knowing what Sheetrock is, I'd say relativity is far more important. Have you ever flown in a plane? How would you like navigating without GPS, or for that matter, without relativistic corrections to the flight path? Even though the plane is highly non-relativistic, you still need relativity to get the plane within about 10 km after a world-wide flight.
I don't want to say we have no willpower or convictions, but there are just things people will always want to see and hear, and these things are provided by an evil company.
A few years ago, when I started hearing about the ills of MS, I vowed never to buy one of their products again. I have kept true to my word. I don't buy them. I don't use them. I did unfortunately buy 2 copies when I bought a computer and a laptop. The former I could have gotten away with avoiding (I was young and naive) - the latter is impossible in todays world.
I keep hearing that maybe, finally, windows 2000 is not a pile of cruft, but I don't know - I've got something that is perfectly good for me, and guarentees my Freedoms - Debian GNU/Linux.