Back in the days of the space race, cosmonauts were not displayed as celebrities until after they had made their first flight. Nobody even knew their names until they were pretty much sitting on the launch pad.
The point I was making was that the earth is going to do its own thing, without regard to us. We'll just have suck it up and deal with it cause there is nothing we did to cause it, and nothing we can do to stop it. If an ice age comes along and kills everything on the planet, well that definitely would suck, but it was going to happen anyway, so there's no reason to get all up in arms about it.
I always thought the water level would stay exactly the same. The ice displaces an amount of water exactly equal to its mass, so when it becomes water, it should "fill in" precisely the volume displaced by the ice.
I find it difficult to accept that an ecosystem as complex and massive as earth's atmosphere could be irreversibly damaged by the puny acts of man. Global increases and decreases in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases have been going on since the formation of the atmosphere, just look at the geological data. The earth has to have natural cycles of CO2 abundance because it is able regulate the levels through a negative feedback loop. For example, higher CO2 abundance means a slight warming of the earth, which leads to melting of the ice caps, which leads to increased ocean surface area, and the warmer temperatures leads to increased amounts of green vegetation. These lead to a decrease in CO2, because it is scrubbed from the atmosphere by the plants, and absorped by the oceans. IMHO, the earth can take care of itself, and what little we do really isn't going to make a difference.
If memory serves me right, I believe there was a sketch where Charles Barkley kicked the crap out of Barney while playing a one-on-one basketball game.
Its not fucked up shit, and its really not that hard to understand. The trouble everybody has with quantum mechanics is that it is non-intuitive. Think about this: you throw a ball over a wall, with enough energy to get over the wall, but quantum mechanically, there is a probability the ball will bounce back. (albeit in a real world scenario the probability is so infinitely small it doesn't matter) This is a result of one of the fundamentals of QM, wave-particle duality (Everything has both a wave nature and a particle nature)
Quantum mechanics is no more than an extension of regular mechanics that is only really handy when dealing with very small particles (on the order of the size of a subatomic partcle). It may take an MS in physics to be able to actually do all the math (I dare you to try Schrodiner's equation in polar coordinates) but anybody can understand the concepts if they have an open mind about it.
I don't think they've made quantum computers to emulate another other type of computer, and I don't think they plan to. Quantum computers aren't just really really fast computers, like the ones we have now, they work on a completely different concept on how to perform operations. When they do work, theoretically, there will only be one speed, and all computations will take the same amount of time, the time it takes for an electron(or other suitable particle) to choose a spin.
I may be remembering this number incorrectly, but I believe in most circuits electricity travels about 2.6 x 10^8 m/s. A little bit less than the speed of light.
Actually, factoring in this small amount of mass for all the neutrinos still does not close the universe. I think the article says it makes up only about 18% of the mass needed. (Not that the mass is really NEEDED imho)
I don't think the Simpsons is watchable at all until the second or third season. Once the voices change and the animation settles down, its the funniest show ever.
Its unfortunate, but these agencies have become slow moving because of all the bad recoil from the "Faster, better, cheaper" plan, which led to quite a few million dollar failures. When dealing with this of this complexity, its probably better to move slow and ensure it will work the first time, instead of just throwing the GNP of some small nation away in the Martian atmosphere.
Re:Not really important
on
Space Blimps
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· Score: 1
That same scheme was proposed for the moon landing, and was quickly denied by NASA. They don't seem to like sending people to die on another world with no hope of ever returning.
Re:supernova isn't the right term
on
Star In A Jar
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· Score: 2
A nova really doesn't have anything to do with a supernova, nor is a nova a smaller form of a supernova. A nova is gas falling onto a very dense object like a white dwarf, basically just a flash of light, no explosion. The reason they have similar names is because in early observational astronomy, they kinda looked like the same thing.
Re:pressures and densities of the sun
on
Star In A Jar
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· Score: 4
Just a few corrections, it takes on the order of 30000 years, not 10 million years for photons to reach the surface of the sun(trust me, i've done the calculations) Also, photons don't experience Brownian motion, they don't have any mass so they can't. The photons are slowed so much because they are continually absorbed at emitted by the atoms making up the convective layer of the sun. Photons take a "random walk" with steps of about 1 cm for the entire radius of the sun.
A supernova is powerful because its pretty much the entire mass of a star expanding at incredible speeds (a good fraction of the speed of light). Even if scientists could create pressure and temperature at the levels needed for a supernova, they'd still have to drop the entire mass of a star onto their experiment to get the explosion. Considering the mass of a star is a couple thousand times the mass of earth, I wouldn't be too worried about supernova bombs.
There are thousands of bodies orbiting (under the gravitational influence) of our sun. It's called the Oort Cloud, and just because someone happened to find a pretty big hunk of rock out there does not mean it is the mysterious planet X. Frankly, with all the flak Pluto has been taking about being a planet, I seriously doubt that this new body will ever be considered as a member of our solar system.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm pretty sure it was Arthur C. Clarke.
Back in the days of the space race, cosmonauts were not displayed as celebrities until after they had made their first flight. Nobody even knew their names until they were pretty much sitting on the launch pad.
The point I was making was that the earth is going to do its own thing, without regard to us. We'll just have suck it up and deal with it cause there is nothing we did to cause it, and nothing we can do to stop it. If an ice age comes along and kills everything on the planet, well that definitely would suck, but it was going to happen anyway, so there's no reason to get all up in arms about it.
I always thought the water level would stay exactly the same. The ice displaces an amount of water exactly equal to its mass, so when it becomes water, it should "fill in" precisely the volume displaced by the ice.
I find it difficult to accept that an ecosystem as complex and massive as earth's atmosphere could be irreversibly damaged by the puny acts of man. Global increases and decreases in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases have been going on since the formation of the atmosphere, just look at the geological data. The earth has to have natural cycles of CO2 abundance because it is able regulate the levels through a negative feedback loop. For example, higher CO2 abundance means a slight warming of the earth, which leads to melting of the ice caps, which leads to increased ocean surface area, and the warmer temperatures leads to increased amounts of green vegetation. These lead to a decrease in CO2, because it is scrubbed from the atmosphere by the plants, and absorped by the oceans. IMHO, the earth can take care of itself, and what little we do really isn't going to make a difference.
If memory serves me right, I believe there was a sketch where Charles Barkley kicked the crap out of Barney while playing a one-on-one basketball game.
Its not fucked up shit, and its really not that hard to understand. The trouble everybody has with quantum mechanics is that it is non-intuitive. Think about this: you throw a ball over a wall, with enough energy to get over the wall, but quantum mechanically, there is a probability the ball will bounce back. (albeit in a real world scenario the probability is so infinitely small it doesn't matter) This is a result of one of the fundamentals of QM, wave-particle duality (Everything has both a wave nature and a particle nature) Quantum mechanics is no more than an extension of regular mechanics that is only really handy when dealing with very small particles (on the order of the size of a subatomic partcle). It may take an MS in physics to be able to actually do all the math (I dare you to try Schrodiner's equation in polar coordinates) but anybody can understand the concepts if they have an open mind about it.
I don't think they've made quantum computers to emulate another other type of computer, and I don't think they plan to. Quantum computers aren't just really really fast computers, like the ones we have now, they work on a completely different concept on how to perform operations. When they do work, theoretically, there will only be one speed, and all computations will take the same amount of time, the time it takes for an electron(or other suitable particle) to choose a spin.
I may be remembering this number incorrectly, but I believe in most circuits electricity travels about 2.6 x 10^8 m/s. A little bit less than the speed of light.
Actually, factoring in this small amount of mass for all the neutrinos still does not close the universe. I think the article says it makes up only about 18% of the mass needed. (Not that the mass is really NEEDED imho)
Actually, I thought Star Trek DID have the Slip Stream, in the Voyager series. I may be mistaken on this, so correct me if I'm wrong.
I believe the current count is 269, I don't recall if they did anything exciting for the 250th episode.
I don't think the Simpsons is watchable at all until the second or third season. Once the voices change and the animation settles down, its the funniest show ever.
I believe there was a quote from Homer himself: "I'm tired of dealing with this round fruit"
Its unfortunate, but these agencies have become slow moving because of all the bad recoil from the "Faster, better, cheaper" plan, which led to quite a few million dollar failures. When dealing with this of this complexity, its probably better to move slow and ensure it will work the first time, instead of just throwing the GNP of some small nation away in the Martian atmosphere.
That same scheme was proposed for the moon landing, and was quickly denied by NASA. They don't seem to like sending people to die on another world with no hope of ever returning.
A nova really doesn't have anything to do with a supernova, nor is a nova a smaller form of a supernova. A nova is gas falling onto a very dense object like a white dwarf, basically just a flash of light, no explosion. The reason they have similar names is because in early observational astronomy, they kinda looked like the same thing.
Just a few corrections, it takes on the order of 30000 years, not 10 million years for photons to reach the surface of the sun(trust me, i've done the calculations) Also, photons don't experience Brownian motion, they don't have any mass so they can't. The photons are slowed so much because they are continually absorbed at emitted by the atoms making up the convective layer of the sun. Photons take a "random walk" with steps of about 1 cm for the entire radius of the sun.
A supernova is powerful because its pretty much the entire mass of a star expanding at incredible speeds (a good fraction of the speed of light). Even if scientists could create pressure and temperature at the levels needed for a supernova, they'd still have to drop the entire mass of a star onto their experiment to get the explosion. Considering the mass of a star is a couple thousand times the mass of earth, I wouldn't be too worried about supernova bombs.
I'd say its about damn time, that thing was a floating hunk of junk with outdated technology.
Here's another space tourism site run by some UVA graduates and endorsed by several astronauts. Space Adventures
There are thousands of bodies orbiting (under the gravitational influence) of our sun. It's called the Oort Cloud, and just because someone happened to find a pretty big hunk of rock out there does not mean it is the mysterious planet X. Frankly, with all the flak Pluto has been taking about being a planet, I seriously doubt that this new body will ever be considered as a member of our solar system.