I'll start off by saying that, unfortunately, we shouldn't be thinking of initiating a manned mars program for at least 20-30 years. However, having said that...
ISS, or a similar facility, will be necessary before any manned Mars mission for a number of reasons, not least of which is that we still don't have much good information on the long term effects of microgravity on people, and the information we do have is from scenarios which wouldn't map accurately onto a manned mars mission (particularly, the mission astronauts would be subjected to months of microgravity either side of high-g during orbit/surface/orbit transfer, and this we don't have good models for).
Some science needs to be done in low/micro-g, and in these cases the return on the investment for the ISS will be very high, primarily because of it's reuseability and the fact that much of the equipment will only need hauling up there once rather than carrying it up on every shuttle flight as happens now when micro-g experiments need performing.
That said, there is critical underfunding in a wide number of un-cool areas of science, and the scientific infrastructure is starting to suffer as post-docs leave academe for business and undergrads have little reason to stay on for a PhD in, say, physics, when starting salaries in industry are, even during recession, treble what they'll get in a university as a doctoral student. If these issues aren't addressed soon, then in 10-15 years time we won't have the scientific infrastructure necessary for advanced projects - we need to do un-cool science now in order to do cool science in 10 years time.
Alan Cox's contribution to the development of Linux has been significant and undeniable, and his opposition to DMCA quite understandable. The problems solely in his decission to combine the two, even though many would agree with his intensions. The means aren't justified by the ends.
2.4 VM is, IMO, a significant improvement over the 2.2 VM, but completely rewriting something as important as VM management is intrinsicaly risky and it's difficult to predict with even the slightest confidence many of the consequences of such a change. This sort of thing should be left for major revisions.
A lot of Bayley's books are still in print, mainly with Cosmos Books, and are relatively easy to find (as easy as obscure old SF ever is). He manages to do a fair job keeping the science reasonable (if dated) even though the settings are generally space-operary.
Unless you're a student of the genre, skip his first novel "Star Virus" - it's interesting as an example of an early SF disaster story, rather than a good, well written tale. His next book "Annihilation Factor" is better, but most valuable as it introduces well many motifs he uses in later works. Next come "Empire of Two Worlds" and "Collision with Chronos" (aka Collision Course) - the former good, the latter probably his best work; of his later books "The Fall of Chronopolis" and "The Garments of Caean" are the strongest, with "The Zen Gun" being the last decent thing he's written. Scattered among these are his short stories, which vary greatly in merit, the early ones have for the most part been collected in "Knights of the Limits" and "Seed of Evil", the most notable of these is "The 4 Colour Problem"; the later ones are mostly missable.
There wouldn't be a problem, black holes that small would evaporate so quickly as to never be any risk. Plus it would be virtually impossible to accidently create one in the process of doing other things. And besides, cosmic rays of several hundred GeV smack into our atmosphere every day.
Now all we need is a good book teaching subscribers how to _use_ mailing lists - not replying to all, not sending admin commands to the list, realising that digested people really don't like binaries.
This should be very popular with companies - problem #1 with giving managers/execs laptops is they'll lose them or have them stolen, which, when combined with the lack of (transparently) easy security means that a lot of important data can be compromised very easily.
For the same reasons it should be popular with MI6 who last year seemed to be losing a laptop a month.
So long as it's implemented sensibley, I think Acer are on a winner here.
Jeez... I can't believe your karma got bumped up by two points for this...
You're more prepared to believe that there is matter in the universe that pre-dates the big bang than that we've got the age of the Universe slightly wrong? So we've got matter existing "before" the creation of space, time, and even the higgs scalar background necessary for "mass" to exist? Not only that but it surviving the singularity at t=0 ?
Anyway, moot point, last time I checked mosts people seemed to think the Universe was 12-15 billion years old +/- 10% ish, and the 14 billion figure in the article has probably got a pretty hefty error range on it itself. So it's perfectly possible that these were created after t=0.
Your grasp of elementary cosmology it fundametally flawed as you are attempting to apply traditional Newtonian/classical physics to the creation and expansion of the Universe. In your second paragraph you twice refer to space expanding outwards, this dosn't really make any more sense than the idea of events "before" the big bang, just as there was no time "before" the big bang for events to occur in, there is no "space" outside the universe for objects to exist in or for space to expand into. Modern physics, whether classical, quantum or relativistic, cannot be applied to to events outside the universe.
Your third paragraph almost touches on a valid physical point. We can observe that two regions of space which are not causally connected (ie a light signal cannot have travelled from one object to the other within the age of the universe) abide by the same laws of physics without there being any real reason why they should (major oversimplification, but that's a key point) and this is a topic of debate and research within the physics community.
If you've got very good (graduate level or better) physics and maths, plus good astronomy (at least one college course with "cosmology" or "extra-galactic" in the title) then try Principles of Physical Cosmology by Peebles, if not then wade through the last 10 years back catalouge of New Scientist, Scientific American, and Astronomy, and buy a copy of A Brief History of Time.
For the benefit of anyone overseas who might not be familiar with the British security and intel services...
GCHQ = Government Communication HeadQuarters, it is pretty much our equivalent of the NSA, belongs to the Foreign office
MI5 = Security Service, domestic activities only, they have no (few) teeth, closest US equiv would be FBI but 5 are only really involved in national security rather than crime. Belongs to the Home Office
MI6 = Secret Intelligence Service, foreign affairs only, these are the James Bond guys, equiv of the CIA, belongs to the Foreign and Colo^H^Hmmonwealth Office
Other folks you may hear about....
DERA = Defence Evaluation & Research Agency, our equivalent of DARPA, belongs to the Ministry of Defence
CID (Criminal Investigation Department), NCIS (National Criminal Intelligence Service) = branches of the police force
14IC (14 Intel Company) = Army unit, intelligence and infiltration specialist unit, originally founded for "hazardous duties in Northern Ireland" ie infiltrating terrorist groups. Sometimes refered to as "the thinking man's SAS".
Ye olde "how do I know I'm not simply a brain-in-a-vat hooked up to a VR machine" is a standard first year philosophy question. IIRC the traditional, Cartesian skeptic, argument is:
1) I only know that I am a real human bean, if I know for certain that I am not being decieved into thinking that I am.
2) I cannot know for certain that I am not being decieved.
3) Therefore I cannot know whether or not I am real human bean.
Check out philosophy texts for "externalism", "Descartes' Demon" and "closure of knowledge under entailment" and you'll probably find a more rigorous discussion of this.
Most heavy elements have "real" names, but there are some clashes between the names assigned by the American Chemistry Society, and the International Union for Pure and Applied Chemistry. The current situation is something along the lines of:
Atomic #| Temporary | Old International | Old American | Current
For a little while now it has been apparent that elements high up in the NSA having been backing away from their stance on requiring backdoors into crypto; and have, according to congressional sources, been disgussing backdoors with the actual hardware vendors. However with the ever increasing influence of the private sector on government, it can be suspected that it would be difficult to upgrade gov crypto powers without undermining private sector confidence in the security of the communications networks. The gov is not interested in actions which will hamper private sector international competetiveness, and will be plowing its resources (time, manpower, money) into producing smarter crypanalysis (better collection of ciphered info, and analysis of the decrypted contents) rather than stronger (better actual decryption).
I suspect we'll see the emphasis shifting towards more specialised, manually or semi-manually, compiled indices of websites, complemented by robots searching these manually created indices for new/relevant/expired items of information/people/links.
And alas, as far as the crap that accounts for 75% of the web goes, the cost of accommodating the vast quantities of crap is less than the cost of removing it or improving ways of avoiding it; and until that is no longer the case we're going to have to put up with ever increasing quantities of sewage.
Light can be redshifted by a variety of means, although the most well known cause is recession. Other causes include interstellar gas and dust (which soak up some of the energy), gravity (photons escaping from high-gravity are less energetic) and expansion of space (the wavelength of the photon gets stretched out, tied into the recession when your talking about things on this sort of scale).
Tricky thing #3174 in astronomy is figuring out which of many possible causes is actually redening the light.
Kepler's laws say that the square of the period is approximately proportional to the cube of the radius (and using the right units, years and AU) equal. Which makes the orbital period just over 5 million years.
The sun won't expand until it runs out of hydrogen and starts helium burning, even then it probably won't expand beyond the radius of Mars. Pluto will get a bit cooked, but it won't be swallowed up, the Jupiter and maybe Saturn could start to evaporate which would be really cool to watch if we weren't dead. And as the others said this ain't gonna happen for another five or six billion years, and it won't go BANG! though there will be a little pop! as it blows off it's outer layers to make a planetary nebula which will look really pretty if you're a couple of hundred light years away and not dead. Callum (just another astrophysics geek)
Slashdot Mirror
I'll start off by saying that, unfortunately, we shouldn't be thinking of initiating a manned mars program for at least 20-30 years. However, having said that...
ISS, or a similar facility, will be necessary before any manned Mars mission for a number of reasons, not least of which is that we still don't have much good information on the long term effects of microgravity on people, and the information we do have is from scenarios which wouldn't map accurately onto a manned mars mission (particularly, the mission astronauts would be subjected to months of microgravity either side of high-g during orbit/surface/orbit transfer, and this we don't have good models for).
Some science needs to be done in low/micro-g, and in these cases the return on the investment for the ISS will be very high, primarily because of it's reuseability and the fact that much of the equipment will only need hauling up there once rather than carrying it up on every shuttle flight as happens now when micro-g experiments need performing.
That said, there is critical underfunding in a wide number of un-cool areas of science, and the scientific infrastructure is starting to suffer as post-docs leave academe for business and undergrads have little reason to stay on for a PhD in, say, physics, when starting salaries in industry are, even during recession, treble what they'll get in a university as a doctoral student. If these issues aren't addressed soon, then in 10-15 years time we won't have the scientific infrastructure necessary for advanced projects - we need to do un-cool science now in order to do cool science in 10 years time.
Damn, my speling (and gramme^Har) sucks.
Alan Cox's contribution to the development of Linux has been significant and undeniable, and his opposition to DMCA quite understandable. The problems solely in his decission to combine the two, even though many would agree with his intensions. The means aren't justified by the ends.
2.4 VM is, IMO, a significant improvement over the 2.2 VM, but completely rewriting something as important as VM management is intrinsicaly risky and it's difficult to predict with even the slightest confidence many of the consequences of such a change. This sort of thing should be left for major revisions.
A lot of Bayley's books are still in print, mainly with Cosmos Books, and are relatively easy to find (as easy as obscure old SF ever is). He manages to do a fair job keeping the science reasonable (if dated) even though the settings are generally space-operary.
Unless you're a student of the genre, skip his first novel "Star Virus" - it's interesting as an example of an early SF disaster story, rather than a good, well written tale. His next book "Annihilation Factor" is better, but most valuable as it introduces well many motifs he uses in later works. Next come "Empire of Two Worlds" and "Collision with Chronos" (aka Collision Course) - the former good, the latter probably his best work; of his later books "The Fall of Chronopolis" and "The Garments of Caean" are the strongest, with "The Zen Gun" being the last decent thing he's written. Scattered among these are his short stories, which vary greatly in merit, the early ones have for the most part been collected in "Knights of the Limits" and "Seed of Evil", the most notable of these is "The 4 Colour Problem"; the later ones are mostly missable.
There wouldn't be a problem, black holes that small would evaporate so quickly as to never be any risk. Plus it would be virtually impossible to accidently create one in the process of doing other things. And besides, cosmic rays of several hundred GeV smack into our atmosphere every day.
Now all we need is a good book teaching subscribers how to _use_ mailing lists - not replying to all, not sending admin commands to the list, realising that digested people really don't like binaries.
This should be very popular with companies - problem #1 with giving managers/execs laptops is they'll lose them or have them stolen, which, when combined with the lack of (transparently) easy security means that a lot of important data can be compromised very easily.
For the same reasons it should be popular with MI6 who last year seemed to be losing a laptop a month.
So long as it's implemented sensibley, I think Acer are on a winner here.
You're more prepared to believe that there is matter in the universe that pre-dates the big bang than that we've got the age of the Universe slightly wrong? So we've got matter existing "before" the creation of space, time, and even the higgs scalar background necessary for "mass" to exist? Not only that but it surviving the singularity at t=0 ?
Anyway, moot point, last time I checked mosts people seemed to think the Universe was 12-15 billion years old +/- 10% ish, and the 14 billion figure in the article has probably got a pretty hefty error range on it itself. So it's perfectly possible that these were created after t=0.
Your grasp of elementary cosmology it fundametally flawed as you are attempting to apply traditional Newtonian/classical physics to the creation and expansion of the Universe. In your second paragraph you twice refer to space expanding outwards, this dosn't really make any more sense than the idea of events "before" the big bang, just as there was no time "before" the big bang for events to occur in, there is no "space" outside the universe for objects to exist in or for space to expand into. Modern physics, whether classical, quantum or relativistic, cannot be applied to to events outside the universe.
Your third paragraph almost touches on a valid physical point. We can observe that two regions of space which are not causally connected (ie a light signal cannot have travelled from one object to the other within the age of the universe) abide by the same laws of physics without there being any real reason why they should (major oversimplification, but that's a key point) and this is a topic of debate and research within the physics community.
If you've got very good (graduate level or better) physics and maths, plus good astronomy (at least one college course with "cosmology" or "extra-galactic" in the title) then try Principles of Physical Cosmology by Peebles, if not then wade through the last 10 years back catalouge of New Scientist, Scientific American, and Astronomy, and buy a copy of A Brief History of Time.
For the benefit of anyone overseas who might not be familiar with the British security and intel services...
GCHQ = Government Communication HeadQuarters, it is pretty much our equivalent of the NSA, belongs to the Foreign office
MI5 = Security Service, domestic activities only, they have no (few) teeth, closest US equiv would be FBI but 5 are only really involved in national security rather than crime. Belongs to the Home Office
MI6 = Secret Intelligence Service, foreign affairs only, these are the James Bond guys, equiv of the CIA, belongs to the Foreign and Colo^H^Hmmonwealth Office
Other folks you may hear about....
DERA = Defence Evaluation & Research Agency, our equivalent of DARPA, belongs to the Ministry of Defence
CID (Criminal Investigation Department), NCIS (National Criminal Intelligence Service) = branches of the police force
14IC (14 Intel Company) = Army unit, intelligence and infiltration specialist unit, originally founded for "hazardous duties in Northern Ireland" ie infiltrating terrorist groups. Sometimes refered to as "the thinking man's SAS".
1) I only know that I am a real human bean, if I know for certain that I am not being decieved into thinking that I am.
2) I cannot know for certain that I am not being decieved.
3) Therefore I cannot know whether or not I am real human bean.
Check out philosophy texts for "externalism", "Descartes' Demon" and "closure of knowledge under entailment" and you'll probably find a more rigorous discussion of this.
Might I reccommend the newsgroup soc.culture.jewish.parenting as a potentially invaluable forum for your troubles.
Please don't feel the need to thank me.
Re the unununium entry
The temporary systematic names are latinised from the atomic number
1=un 2=bi 3=tri 4=quad 5=pent 6=hex 7=sept 8=oct 9=enn 0=nil
element 106 whould be unnilhexium
Most heavy elements have "real" names, but there are some clashes between the names assigned by the American Chemistry Society, and the International Union for Pure and Applied Chemistry.
The current situation is something along the lines of:
Atomic #| Temporary | Old International | Old American | Current
104 | Unnilquadium Unq | Dubnium Db | Rutherfordium Rf | Rutherfordium Rf
105 | Unnilpentium Unp | Joliotium Jl | Hahnium Ha | Dubnium Db
106 | Unnilhexium Unh | Rutherfordium Rf | Seaborgium Sg | Seaborgium Sg
107 | Unnilseptium Uns | Bohrium Bh | Nielsbohrium Ns | Bohrium Bh
108 | Unniloctium Uno | Hahnium Hn | Hassium Hs | Hassium Hs
109 | Unnilenium Une | Meitnerium Mt | Meitnerium Mt | Meitnerium Mt
For a little while now it has been apparent that elements high up in the NSA having been backing away from their stance on requiring backdoors into crypto; and have, according to congressional sources, been disgussing backdoors with the actual hardware vendors. However with the ever increasing influence of the private sector on government, it can be suspected that it would be difficult to upgrade gov crypto powers without undermining private sector confidence in the security of the communications networks. The gov is not interested in actions which will hamper private sector international competetiveness, and will be plowing its resources (time, manpower, money) into producing smarter crypanalysis (better collection of ciphered info, and analysis of the decrypted contents) rather than stronger (better actual decryption).
And alas, as far as the crap that accounts for 75% of the web goes, the cost of accommodating the vast quantities of crap is less than the cost of removing it or improving ways of avoiding it; and until that is no longer the case we're going to have to put up with ever increasing quantities of sewage.
Tricky thing #3174 in astronomy is figuring out which of many possible causes is actually redening the light.
Callum
check out... http://www.sciam.com/0596issue/0596jewitt.html Callum
Kepler's laws say that the square of the period is approximately proportional to the cube of the radius (and using the right units, years and AU) equal. Which makes the orbital period just over 5 million years.
The sun won't expand until it runs out of hydrogen and starts helium burning, even then it probably won't expand beyond the radius of Mars. Pluto will get a bit cooked, but it won't be swallowed up, the Jupiter and maybe Saturn could start to evaporate which would be really cool to watch if we weren't dead. And as the others said this ain't gonna happen for another five or six billion years, and it won't go BANG! though there will be a little pop! as it blows off it's outer layers to make a planetary nebula which will look really pretty if you're a couple of hundred light years away and not dead. Callum (just another astrophysics geek)