The whole point of Anonymous is that anyone could say that they are Anonymous. There's no real group/code/leader, so anyone who says they are Anonymous IS.
It is important to keep in mind that, in the absence of a PGP signature or some other non-forgeable means of verification, there's no way to be able to tell that this"The activist group called "anonymous" is indeed the same or different people than "the group best known for its jousts with the Church of Scientology."
Anybody can call themselves anonymous.
The wikileaks site seems to be slashdotted at the moment.
Taikonaut is not a Chinese word. (That should be obvious, since Greek roots like "naut" are not native to Chinese).
The Chinese word is "yuhangyuan" or "hangtianyuan."
Check http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taikonaut
Thanks to Bill Clinton and a Republican congress all SS#'s are in our drivers lisences.
??
Not in Ohio-- I got my liscense renewed three months ago; no Social security number anywhere in sight.
In fact, up until the Clinton years, Social Security Number used to be on liscenses by default, but you could opt out... now, they are not on liscenses by default, but you can opt to have it added.
Re:How about the worst abuse of statistics EVER?
on
Plane Simple Truth
·
· Score: 1
The dreadful Kellerman "Study" on guns. A horrendously flawed study, still spouted by the media.
The one whose study said a handgun in the home is 43 times more likely to kill a family member than a criminal. Of the 43 deaths reported in his flawed study, 37 (86%) were suicides. Other deaths involved criminal activity between the family members (drug deals gone bad).
That doesn't seem to "debunk" the statistic; it only serves to add context. OK, so a handgun is more likely to kill a family member than a criminal because the most common use of a handgun to kill somebody is in a suicide.
The factor of 43 does seem unexpectedly high... last statistics I saw, 55% of gun deaths were suicides.
but then, it's a commonly made observation that the person most likely to have committed a murder is the husband or wife of the murder victim, so I suppose it's possible that the in-family murders make up much of the difference.
Back in the 1940's - 50's, when the Steady State theory still looked popular in Cosmology, some very serious scientists (Bertrand Russell and Fred Hoyle, for two), routinely pointed to the SS as a disproof of God.... Most of these scientists, when the Big Bang theory won out, fought to find ways to use it as a disproof too.
Sorry, no. Fred Hoyle in fact never did accept the big bang theory, so it's disingenuous to suggest that he pointed to the big bang as a disproof of God.
Nor did Russell make such an argument. Famously, in his article "Am I an Atheist or an Agnostic?", Russell stated "I do not think that there is a conclusive argument by which one can prove that there is not a God." So it's a little hard to say that he used the big bang as an argument to prove God doesn't exist, when he already said that no such argument exists.
...Then there's Carl Sagan:
"In many cultures it is customary to answer that God created the universe out of nothing. But this is mere temporizing. If we wish courageously to persue the question, we must of course ask next where God comes from. And if we decide this to be unanswerable, why not save a step and decide that the origin of the universe is an unanswerable question? Or, if we say that god has always existed, why not save a step and conclude that the universe has always existed?" - Carl Sagan - Cosmos p.257
Before writing this, Dr. Sagan has already outlined the two main recent theories of cosmogenesis in previous chapters - The "Big Bang' theory, and the competing "Steady State" theory were both covered in the third chapter of Cosmos. He has then explained why the best evidence supports the "Big Bang" model. But, if we accept the big bang model, we can't simultaneously conclude that the universe has always existed. Dr. Sagan, by his own writing, does not really think the universe has always existed, and so he has a good reason for not "saving that final step". Why not conclude that the universe has always existed? Because the cosmic microwave background records the flash of its birth, so we are not allowed to take that step. You told us that, Dr. Sagan, so why are you asking this question like it is a rhetorical one? If the Steady State prevailed, we could save your step.
If you actually read what he wrote he said that if you ask the question "where did the universe come from" and get the reply "God created it," then you must logically ask the question "where did God come from," which is exactly as difficult a question as the original question "where did the universe come from."
There are two proposed responses to the question "where did God come from?" He points out that you can take either answer, and apply that answer to the original question, "where did the universe come from" as easily as you can apply it to the question "where did God come from."
His response is phrased using the word "if". If you are told that "God always existed" in response to the second question, then you can answer "the universe always existed to the first question.
So pointing out that "the universe always existed" is inconsistent with the big bang cosmology is irrelevant... that was an if statement. When I say "If you tell me that elves exist, then you should leave a bowl of milk on your doorstep" -- this does not imply that I believe elves exist.
I consider a 747 to be almost as technically complicated as the Shuttle, and surprisingly has similar energy requirements if you consider a flight from Los Angeles to Sydney (something that routinely does happen with 747s nearly ever day). rom the current group of spaceflight engineers at NASA.
A quick calculation will tell you that a flight from Sydney to Los Angeles takes about one quarter of the energy (per kilogram) as getting to orbit.
But that's a little unfair, of course-- in flying from Sydney to LA, you can use atmospheric oxygen, while getting to orbit requires you carry all the oxygen needed to burn your fuel onboard.
Getting to orbit takes about fifty percent more energy than flying around the world unrefuelled... To my knowledge, only two aircraft have ever done that, and when you compute the cost per kilogram, it was as expensive as getting to orbit.
(and even then, those two aircraft did use atmospheric oxygen.)
It's not really a question of intelligence so much as motivation and organization.
NASA's goal is not to launch things into space. Their goal is to obtain greater funding and employ people. Launching things into space is just a technique for doing that. Lately they seem to have discovered that merely preparing to launch things into space works nearly as well for accomplishing their goals, so they don't have to actually launch very much.
SpaceX's goal is, of course, to make money. It's a lot harder to make money without putting things into space, so they have a lot of motivation to do so.
And yet, NASA routinely does launch things into space, and with a success rate high enough that when a mission doesn't succeed, it's headline news. While Space-X routinely doesn't launch things into space, with a success rate so low that when they fail, it barely makes page 8 of the paper. Why is that?
NASA is not organized very well. They require an enormous amount of people to accomplish very little in the way of results. This is because they are management-heavy and suffer from a lot of micromanagement from their bosses in government.
Well, in the way of "acomplishing very little," right now NASA has five missions operating on or in orbit around Mars, a mission in orbit around Saturn; spacecraft currently on the way to Mercury, Pluto, the two largest asteroids, and a comet, and spacecraft getting ready to launch to Jupiter and the Moon; not to mention three astronomical observatories (Hubble, Chandra, Spitzer) looking across the universe in wavelengths from infrared to X-ray, and a slew of Earth-observation satellites, too many for me to easily enumerate. They've launched more humans into space than all the other nations combined. The four orbital launch vehicles developed by NASA (Shuttle, Saturn V, Saturn 1, Scout) are respectively the most reliable, second most reliable, third most reliable, and fourth most reliable boosters ever developed, by any country, in history.
SpaceX is, I presume, much better organized by virtue of being a small company which must succeed or die.
There's also the whole O-ring issue, but I guess that can be solved by operating the thing within its design parameters.
And it was solved, and solved twenty years ago-- there's been well over a hundred flights (with two SRBS per flight) since then.
(Amazing how many engineering issues that can be said of). What I've been wondering (not a rocket scientist) is, what additional complications/issues might be introduced by changing from 4 segments to 5?
Higher thrust. Longer resonating chamber.
Seems if we wanted to really get the maximum design re-use, we should use exactly the same SRB.
This is the essential conundrum of real-world engineering. Yes, it's true, if you never change anything you will indeed be running systems that are well understood... unfortunately, you won't get anything any better, either.
If the 4-segment SSRB doesn't have the lift capacity we need,
You got it.
we could use two of them and have that much more payload capacity.
Two answers here: cost and complexity.
Despite all the analysis slashdot engineers are doing, if everything does work, the Area-1 in principle is a remarkably low-cost booster. But it's cheap by being simple, and having few parts. (*)
We're already used to using two of them in tandem, and it occurs to me that the connector struts would be an easy place to add vibration-dampening bits. 'Zat make any sense?
Sure. But the whole point was to be cheaper than the existing launch system. If you keep backing off and replicating all the features of the way we launch now, it sorta defeats the point.
----
* I'll put a footnote here: just a reminder that being cheap "in principle" is not the same thing as being cheap. There are a lot of ways that a system that's cheap in principle can become expensive in practice (but unfortunately, much fewer ways in which a system that's expensive in principle can become cheap in practice).
The Register's coverage of the LHC is a lot more, well, entertaining than the coverage by other newspapers. Same news, but a little more energy in the presentation...
...anyway, getting back on topic, they also tell us, in Today is not Hadron Collider Day,
"Only a year or more from now will the colliding protons be disintegrated with sufficient violence to produce the various treats we have been promised. Strangely perhaps, by then it seems a racing cert that the broadcasters will all have gone home, and the scribblers will mostly have ceased to file copy. Once the insane laughs begin to truly ring out in the LHC's underground caverns, once the mad scientists wipe the foam from their lips, roll up their sleeves, lock and load their outrageous particle guns and really start to show what they can do, the chances are that nobody will be watching.
"But there will be at least one exception. The Reg hereby pledges to stay on the story, bringing you all the humonguous subterranean cavern magno-doughnut beam cannon news hot off the wires - perhaps with a garnish of hysterical rip-in-the-very-fabric-of-spacetime dimension portal angle here and there. As long as there's a universe to report from, we will continue to follow the Quest for the Big Answers (TM)"
If we must spend public money on a new multipurpose rocket (Ares) system to carry future payloads and capsules then why not fund the SpaceX guys
They are.
...Projects like the Space Shuttle were interesting from an engineering standpoint but one of the main goals, save money with a re-usable vehicle and launch components, turned out to be a dud (and economists might have been able to tell them that by studying the launch industry and giving their advice before NASA just went ahead with the design).
At the time the space shuttle program was started (January 5, 1972) economists could not study the "launch industry" because the launch industry, as we know it, did not exist.
Email is also compared to slot machines in the way it works psychologically: "So with email, usually when I check it there is nothing interesting, but every so often there's something wonderful."
You don't need to be out of town or anything to get an absentee ballot. All you have to do is request one ahead of time.
Come on, people; is this so difficult?
Last election I actually was out of town. I'd requested an absentee ballot well before the deadline, and received it with plenty of time to spare.
Two days after the election (*), we received letters from the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections saying that there had been an error with the original absentee ballots that had been distributed, don't use those ones because they won't count, here are replacement ballots to use, sorry for the mistake.
I do not intend to vote absentee again.
(*) The letters were mailed before the election, but of course we were out of town-- that's the whole reason we'd asked for absentee ballots-- and mail forwarding took almost a week.
They are getting better. Virgin mobile has unlimited voice (data plans, not so much) for $80
It's thinking like this which is exactly what tricks people into $20,000 phone bills. The plan you showed a link for has unlimited domestic calling. The bill in question was for international calling. Get that Virgin service because you think it has "unlimited" voice and data, and you're gonna get a big surprise when you send a couple of megabytes from Vancouver, too.
God god, you'd have to be an idiot to take that challenge. You pay them sixty dollars for the "privilege" of entering the contest... plus paying round trip shipping... and that gives you a chance to win... forty dollars!
(plus an obsolete hard disk, list cost sixty dollars, resale value about five dollars)
Let's see, you pay shipping both ways, you're not allowed to disassemble the drive, you're "allowed" to do three days of work (suppose eight hours per day, a hundred dollars an hour, about twenty-four hundred dollars worth of labor)... and if you win, you get forty dollars. And you get to keep the drive.
Why would anybody enter this "contest"?
I would certainly believe, for what it's worth, that you can't recover the data from an overwritten drive without disassembling it. That's a "well, duh" statement. You have to get at the physical media. And it's certainly going to cost you more than the forty dollars, minus the amount you paid for round-trip shipping, that you could win.
The original Insight got slightly better gas mileage than the Prius-- for people who don't need the room of the 4-door, it was a nice car. I wonder if the new one will also blow away the Prius mileage?
Due to the length of their slow and eventual extinction
Do note that the "fact" that the Cretaceous-Ternary extinction event was "slow" is not well established; there are many palentologists who cite evidence that it was, in fact, extremely rapid, and the apparent "slowness" is a statistical artifact of the discontinuous nature of the fossil record. The microfossil record, which is much more continuous, seem to show very rapid extinction.
The dinosaurs lasted for about 165 million years. It seems rather unreasonable to think that they coexisted with insects prefectly well for 164.9 of those 165 million years, and then suddenly every dinosaur species died of insect-borne infestation in the last 0.1% of their reign-- including the ocean-dwelling dinosaurs. And including a lot of other marine life. And microbiota. And many species of plants.
Why only look at the factors mentioned by the authors? D[...] I am just saying that all the discussion is centered around the ideas of the authors without any one suggesting something else. don't let the original authors imagination limit our imaginations
Exactly. As I said, the data is lousy, and the correlation to the Earth's distance from the sun is out of phase.
Let me rephrase the question slightly. "Which of the many source of measurement noise in decay-rate data, at the one tenth of one percent level, might vary with a one year period?"
Slashdot Mirror
The whole point of Anonymous is that anyone could say that they are Anonymous. There's no real group/code/leader, so anyone who says they are Anonymous IS.
Exactly.
Anybody can call themselves anonymous.
The wikileaks site seems to be slashdotted at the moment.
Taikonaut is not a Chinese word. (That should be obvious, since Greek roots like "naut" are not native to Chinese). The Chinese word is "yuhangyuan" or "hangtianyuan." Check http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taikonaut
Thanks to Bill Clinton and a Republican congress all SS#'s are in our drivers lisences.
??
Not in Ohio-- I got my liscense renewed three months ago; no Social security number anywhere in sight.
In fact, up until the Clinton years, Social Security Number used to be on liscenses by default, but you could opt out... now, they are not on liscenses by default, but you can opt to have it added.
The dreadful Kellerman "Study" on guns. A horrendously flawed study, still spouted by the media.
The one whose study said a handgun in the home is 43 times more likely to kill a family member than a criminal. Of the 43 deaths reported in his flawed study, 37 (86%) were suicides. Other deaths involved criminal activity between the family members (drug deals gone bad).
That doesn't seem to "debunk" the statistic; it only serves to add context. OK, so a handgun is more likely to kill a family member than a criminal because the most common use of a handgun to kill somebody is in a suicide.
The factor of 43 does seem unexpectedly high... last statistics I saw, 55% of gun deaths were suicides.
but then, it's a commonly made observation that the person most likely to have committed a murder is the husband or wife of the murder victim, so I suppose it's possible that the in-family murders make up much of the difference.
Back in the 1940's - 50's, when the Steady State theory still looked popular in Cosmology, some very serious scientists (Bertrand Russell and Fred Hoyle, for two), routinely pointed to the SS as a disproof of God. ... Most of these scientists, when the Big Bang theory won out, fought to find ways to use it as a disproof too.
Sorry, no. Fred Hoyle in fact never did accept the big bang theory, so it's disingenuous to suggest that he pointed to the big bang as a disproof of God.
Nor did Russell make such an argument. Famously, in his article "Am I an Atheist or an Agnostic?", Russell stated "I do not think that there is a conclusive argument by which one can prove that there is not a God." So it's a little hard to say that he used the big bang as an argument to prove God doesn't exist, when he already said that no such argument exists.
...Then there's Carl Sagan:
"In many cultures it is customary to answer that God created the universe out of nothing. But this is mere temporizing. If we wish courageously to persue the question, we must of course ask next where God comes from. And if we decide this to be unanswerable, why not save a step and decide that the origin of the universe is an unanswerable question? Or, if we say that god has always existed, why not save a step and conclude that the universe has always existed?" - Carl Sagan - Cosmos p.257
Before writing this, Dr. Sagan has already outlined the two main recent theories of cosmogenesis in previous chapters - The "Big Bang' theory, and the competing "Steady State" theory were both covered in the third chapter of Cosmos. He has then explained why the best evidence supports the "Big Bang" model. But, if we accept the big bang model, we can't simultaneously conclude that the universe has always existed. Dr. Sagan, by his own writing, does not really think the universe has always existed, and so he has a good reason for not "saving that final step". Why not conclude that the universe has always existed? Because the cosmic microwave background records the flash of its birth, so we are not allowed to take that step. You told us that, Dr. Sagan, so why are you asking this question like it is a rhetorical one? If the Steady State prevailed, we could save your step.
If you actually read what he wrote he said that if you ask the question "where did the universe come from" and get the reply "God created it," then you must logically ask the question "where did God come from," which is exactly as difficult a question as the original question "where did the universe come from."
There are two proposed responses to the question "where did God come from?" He points out that you can take either answer, and apply that answer to the original question, "where did the universe come from" as easily as you can apply it to the question "where did God come from."
His response is phrased using the word "if". If you are told that "God always existed" in response to the second question, then you can answer "the universe always existed to the first question.
So pointing out that "the universe always existed" is inconsistent with the big bang cosmology is irrelevant... that was an if statement. When I say "If you tell me that elves exist, then you should leave a bowl of milk on your doorstep" -- this does not imply that I believe elves exist.
I consider a 747 to be almost as technically complicated as the Shuttle, and surprisingly has similar energy requirements if you consider a flight from Los Angeles to Sydney (something that routinely does happen with 747s nearly ever day). rom the current group of spaceflight engineers at NASA.
A quick calculation will tell you that a flight from Sydney to Los Angeles takes about one quarter of the energy (per kilogram) as getting to orbit.
But that's a little unfair, of course-- in flying from Sydney to LA, you can use atmospheric oxygen, while getting to orbit requires you carry all the oxygen needed to burn your fuel onboard.
Getting to orbit takes about fifty percent more energy than flying around the world unrefuelled... To my knowledge, only two aircraft have ever done that, and when you compute the cost per kilogram, it was as expensive as getting to orbit.
(and even then, those two aircraft did use atmospheric oxygen.)
It's not really a question of intelligence so much as motivation and organization.
NASA's goal is not to launch things into space. Their goal is to obtain greater funding and employ people. Launching things into space is just a technique for doing that. Lately they seem to have discovered that merely preparing to launch things into space works nearly as well for accomplishing their goals, so they don't have to actually launch very much.
SpaceX's goal is, of course, to make money. It's a lot harder to make money without putting things into space, so they have a lot of motivation to do so.
And yet, NASA routinely does launch things into space, and with a success rate high enough that when a mission doesn't succeed, it's headline news. While Space-X routinely doesn't launch things into space, with a success rate so low that when they fail, it barely makes page 8 of the paper. Why is that?
NASA is not organized very well. They require an enormous amount of people to accomplish very little in the way of results. This is because they are management-heavy and suffer from a lot of micromanagement from their bosses in government.
Well, in the way of "acomplishing very little," right now NASA has five missions operating on or in orbit around Mars, a mission in orbit around Saturn; spacecraft currently on the way to Mercury, Pluto, the two largest asteroids, and a comet, and spacecraft getting ready to launch to Jupiter and the Moon; not to mention three astronomical observatories (Hubble, Chandra, Spitzer) looking across the universe in wavelengths from infrared to X-ray, and a slew of Earth-observation satellites, too many for me to easily enumerate. They've launched more humans into space than all the other nations combined. The four orbital launch vehicles developed by NASA (Shuttle, Saturn V, Saturn 1, Scout) are respectively the most reliable, second most reliable, third most reliable, and fourth most reliable boosters ever developed, by any country, in history.
SpaceX is, I presume, much better organized by virtue of being a small company which must succeed or die.
And their accomplishments are?
There's also the whole O-ring issue, but I guess that can be solved by operating the thing within its design parameters.
And it was solved, and solved twenty years ago-- there's been well over a hundred flights (with two SRBS per flight) since then.
(Amazing how many engineering issues that can be said of).
What I've been wondering (not a rocket scientist) is, what additional complications/issues might be introduced by changing from 4 segments to 5?
Higher thrust. Longer resonating chamber.
Seems if we wanted to really get the maximum design re-use, we should use exactly the same SRB.
This is the essential conundrum of real-world engineering. Yes, it's true, if you never change anything you will indeed be running systems that are well understood... unfortunately, you won't get anything any better, either.
If the 4-segment SSRB doesn't have the lift capacity we need,
You got it.
we could use two of them and have that much more payload capacity.
Two answers here: cost and complexity.
Despite all the analysis slashdot engineers are doing, if everything does work, the Area-1 in principle is a remarkably low-cost booster. But it's cheap by being simple, and having few parts. (*)
We're already used to using two of them in tandem, and it occurs to me that the connector struts would be an easy place to add vibration-dampening bits. 'Zat make any sense?
Sure. But the whole point was to be cheaper than the existing launch system. If you keep backing off and replicating all the features of the way we launch now, it sorta defeats the point.
----
* I'll put a footnote here: just a reminder that being cheap "in principle" is not the same thing as being cheap. There are a lot of ways that a system that's cheap in principle can become expensive in practice (but unfortunately, much fewer ways in which a system that's expensive in principle can become cheap in practice).
Botanist sues to stop CERN hurling Earth into parallel universe
Boffinry bitchslap brouhaha: Higgs and Hawking head to head.
...and they also answer important questions, like So, what's the velocity of a sheep in a vacuum? Plus, the size of Wales in cubic furlongs
...anyway, getting back on topic, they also tell us, in Today is not Hadron Collider Day,
"Only a year or more from now will the colliding protons be disintegrated with sufficient violence to produce the various treats we have been promised. Strangely perhaps, by then it seems a racing cert that the broadcasters will all have gone home, and the scribblers will mostly have ceased to file copy. Once the insane laughs begin to truly ring out in the LHC's underground caverns, once the mad scientists wipe the foam from their lips, roll up their sleeves, lock and load their outrageous particle guns and really start to show what they can do, the chances are that nobody will be watching.
"But there will be at least one exception. The Reg hereby pledges to stay on the story, bringing you all the humonguous subterranean cavern magno-doughnut beam cannon news hot off the wires - perhaps with a garnish of hysterical rip-in-the-very-fabric-of-spacetime dimension portal angle here and there. As long as there's a universe to report from, we will continue to follow the Quest for the Big Answers (TM)"
If we must spend public money on a new multipurpose rocket (Ares) system to carry future payloads and capsules then why not fund the SpaceX guys
They are.
...Projects like the Space Shuttle were interesting from an engineering standpoint but one of the main goals, save money with a re-usable vehicle and launch components, turned out to be a dud (and economists might have been able to tell them that by studying the launch industry and giving their advice before NASA just went ahead with the design).
At the time the space shuttle program was started (January 5, 1972) economists could not study the "launch industry" because the launch industry, as we know it, did not exist.
My only real question regarding transportation would be how they got the tank TO the road (ie railroads, boats, or was it built right next to a road?)
Space-X Photo Gallery has a picture of it being loaded.
Email is also compared to slot machines in the way it works psychologically: "So with email, usually when I check it there is nothing interesting, but every so often there's something wonderful."
Obligatory xkcd reference
(don't forget to mouse over)
Mr Reynolds has even begun to think of email as rude and invasive, preferring to use tools such as Twitter
Yeah, right! And did you know that heroin was invented because doctors in the 19th century thought morphine was too addictive?
You don't need to be out of town or anything to get an absentee ballot. All you have to do is request one ahead of time.
Come on, people; is this so difficult?
Last election I actually was out of town. I'd requested an absentee ballot well before the deadline, and received it with plenty of time to spare.
Two days after the election (*), we received letters from the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections saying that there had been an error with the original absentee ballots that had been distributed, don't use those ones because they won't count, here are replacement ballots to use, sorry for the mistake.
I do not intend to vote absentee again.
(*) The letters were mailed before the election, but of course we were out of town-- that's the whole reason we'd asked for absentee ballots-- and mail forwarding took almost a week.
They are getting better. Virgin mobile has unlimited voice (data plans, not so much) for $80
It's thinking like this which is exactly what tricks people into $20,000 phone bills. The plan you showed a link for has unlimited domestic calling. The bill in question was for international calling. Get that Virgin service because you think it has "unlimited" voice and data, and you're gonna get a big surprise when you send a couple of megabytes from Vancouver, too.
(plus an obsolete hard disk, list cost sixty dollars, resale value about five dollars)
Why would anybody enter this "contest"?
I would certainly believe, for what it's worth, that you can't recover the data from an overwritten drive without disassembling it. That's a "well, duh" statement. You have to get at the physical media. And it's certainly going to cost you more than the forty dollars, minus the amount you paid for round-trip shipping, that you could win.
See data and reports on Solar Probe Plus
Most people's commutes are only a couple miles and would be most economical to bike. Not to mention the exercise perks.
Most people don't have a job where they can show up sweaty. For those who do, additional "exercise" may not be a "perk."
For that matter, I don't have a job where I can show up soaked, and I'm not thrilled about arriving back home soaked, or frozen.
Most people who pimp the advantages of bikes seem to live in southern California, where a little rain is a noteworthy occasion.
The original Insight got slightly better gas mileage than the Prius-- for people who don't need the room of the 4-door, it was a nice car. I wonder if the new one will also blow away the Prius mileage?
Due to the length of their slow and eventual extinction
Do note that the "fact" that the Cretaceous-Ternary extinction event was "slow" is not well established; there are many palentologists who cite evidence that it was, in fact, extremely rapid, and the apparent "slowness" is a statistical artifact of the discontinuous nature of the fossil record. The microfossil record, which is much more continuous, seem to show very rapid extinction.
The dinosaurs lasted for about 165 million years. It seems rather unreasonable to think that they coexisted with insects prefectly well for 164.9 of those 165 million years, and then suddenly every dinosaur species died of insect-borne infestation in the last 0.1% of their reign-- including the ocean-dwelling dinosaurs. And including a lot of other marine life. And microbiota. And many species of plants.
Why only look at the factors mentioned by the authors? D[...] I am just saying that all the discussion is centered around the ideas of the authors without any one suggesting something else. don't let the original authors imagination limit our imaginations
Exactly. As I said, the data is lousy, and the correlation to the Earth's distance from the sun is out of phase.
Let me rephrase the question slightly. "Which of the many source of measurement noise in decay-rate data, at the one tenth of one percent level, might vary with a one year period?"
Also, note that since the perihelion is right around Jan 1, only about eleven days after solstace-- this data equally well correlates with season.
Then they wouldn't constantly be pointing north. Only at the poles do you see a drastic north to south disparity of the sun.
Exactly to the contrary. Outside the polar regions, a cow facing due north, or due south, will never have the sun directly in front of them.
There's no need to invoke magnetism.