catdynamics | October 29, 2009
You either get this or you do not.
courtesy John F. (click to embiggen)
Loathe as I am to admit it, that is rather good.
Hm. E/mc √(-1) pV/nR is way too derivative.
Maybe Q/V √-1 pV/nR
Or,
Q/V √-1 4√(P/A ε σ)
yeah, that's the ticket!
nRT/V kBln(Ω) (TS - pV)
has potential though.
Especially in that nice blue & white.
Right sub-field also...
catdynamics | October 28, 2009another random walk through recent blog bits
JDEM Euclid er whatever they want to call the new joint mission is having a catfight ,
Nature News (sub) has the nasty details.
And for this they shot down LISA? A factor of two descoped, still overpriced mission?
JDEM's strength in the NAS review was that the 2m concept was TRL9+ - that something like it had already flown and costs were known.
So now they want to do a smaller less instrumented telescope for more cost. Pah.
Which reminds me, I need to cover HETDEX/BigBOSS concepts soon.
Has Fermi Seen New Evidence for Dark Matter.
No, probably…
catdynamics | October 28, 2009The governator writes a letter.
A manly man letter, not at all a girly man letter.
Hm, primitive steganography.
Read the first letter of each row.
Context from the SF Chronicle
Sounds like CA is getting even better than PA.
catdynamics | October 28, 2009In case you missed it, the Ares 1-X launch this morning was successful.
Ares is the new NASA expendable launcher, developed under the Constellation program, designed too provide medium and heavy (Ares V) lift after Shuttle and to provide man-rated launchers for future maneuverable crewed capsule launches - the Orions.
Think Saturn 1 and Saturn V type launchers, with Apollo type capsules - but modernised and hopefully safer, and cheaper.
Ares 1-X is the prototype experimental test vehicle for Ares 1
It finally launched this morning.
All went well, apparently.
Cool launch video though.
catdynamics | October 27, 2009my precious has returned from its mystery excursion
it vanished, my precious did, last friday
then, just as mysteriously, it reappeared today
like having a gnome it is
photos, I want photos
catdynamics | October 26, 2009McDonald's to abandon Iceland
Ha ha ha.
Tommaborgari wins.
Mmmm. With cocktail sauce
catdynamics | October 23, 200930 new planets reported at "Towards Other Earths" Porto conference.
Some of them are rather interesting.
The Extrasolar Planet Encyclopaedia reported 30 new planets reported by 7 different teams at the Towards Other Earths conference in Porto - wish I could have been there, too many meetings going on, too little time.
This is going to be the trend for a while - most planet discoveries will be announced in batches, unless there is something startling, unexpected or record breaking found.
With about 400 extrasolar planets now known, finding just one is not news, unless it is different.
One of…
catdynamics | October 22, 2009"Seeking a Human Spaceflight Program Worthy of a Great Nation"
Review of U.S. Human Spaceflight Plans Committee
The Augustine Report on Human Spaceflight is out: all 157 pages of it (pdf), with press conference starting at 1 pm today.
As you know, Bob, the committee, chaired by Augustine of the Augustine Report, and a list of impressive members (and, as you know, the output of a committee can to some extent be determined by the choice of membership...), had a mission to sort out the unsustainable and vague ambitions for human exploration in space that was the legacy of the last 20 years of…
catdynamics | October 20, 2009So, I was thinking, where are the cold alien intelligences who ought to be out there, studying us dispassionately, as if we were microbes...?
Well, what if we accidentally killed them all?
No, really.
See there has been this flap about the LHC destroying the universe....
Now, it could happen, like if it actually made a Higgs and triggered a vacuum phase transition or something (yeah, blah blah - ultra-high energy cosmic rays hitting the moon ought to have c-o-m collision energies comparable to LHC collision energies, even given the GZK cutoff, so why hasn't that destroyed the universe, eh?…
catdynamics | October 20, 2009Undecidable financial contracts, crowdsourcing nepotism and explaining the Nobel Prize.
We got it all...
Financial Derivatives - just intractable or formally undecidable?
- see comment by "Ken" at 20 Oct 09 11:39
yes, it looks like you can do arithmetic and boolean algebra with financial derivaties, and create undecidable statement.
Whose Kid Are You - ever wondered how your boss rose so quickly fromskipped the mailroom and took over?
The Y-Ranter is starting a crowdsourced "Whose Kid Are You" - a pedia of nepotism and backscratching.
Brilliant. I wonder if we can have one for Iceland.
With…
catdynamics | October 18, 2009An interesting paper just out, suggests that modern financial instruments are computationally intractable: specifically finding that inverting the synthesis of CDOs is equivalent to finding whether there is a dense subgraph of the CDO graph.
Thus figuring whether CDOs are manipulated to dump bad collateral selectively on a subset of buyers is probably NP hard!
Ouch.
Paper is "Computational Complexity and Information Asymmetry in Financial Products" by Arora, Barak, Brunnermeier and Ge (pdf)
Good discussion at Freedom to Tinker
If correct, then the current structure of Collateralized Debt…
catdynamics | October 15, 2009Dear media,
The density of air is just over 1.2 kg per cubic meter. At about STP.
The density of helium is just under 0.2 kg per cubic meter.
A helium balloon can therefore lift about 1 kg per cubic meter.
There are about 30 cubic feet per cubic meter and just over two pounds per kg.
To lift a 50 pound load you therefore need about 750 cubic feet of helium filled balloon,
bit more allowing for envelope, rope, basket etc.
You do the math.
I hope they find that little kid in Colorado, and that he is very scared of his parents being angry with him.
This is allowing for buoyancy only, with wind…
catdynamics | October 15, 2009let it...
snow!
noon, 15th October 2009.
it is even sticking a bit, for now. More to come maybe.
PS: enough accumulation on elevated and "soft" surfaces to make, and throw, the first snowball of the season. Yay!
More snow expected, though I am skeptical of claims of accumulations of up to a foot over the weekend.
Roads are a mess - slush and wet leaves.
catdynamics | October 14, 2009Recently, Pennsylvania became the last state in the union of these states of America to have a budget. State budget, that is, s for fiscal 2009-10. Some 101 days after the beginning of the fiscal year on July 1st 2009.
Thereby beating California.
However, the Pennsylvania State University (not to be mistaken for the State University of Pennsylvania, or the University of Pennsylvania) does not have a budget.
Oh, we're listed on the official Budget of the Comptroller.
Shade over $300 million, down a smidgen from last year, but not enough to jeopardize federal stimulus funding.
But, the money…
catdynamics | October 14, 2009There have been a lot of rather belated reports of the LHC failing due to acausal physics.
This is clearly nonsense.
We have known for a long time that it is most likely due to anthropic selection within a many worlds universe.
This is serious.
catdynamics | October 13, 2009Continuing our inadvertent theme of "alternative physics", we contemplate whether the Force really is with us, and find the fundamental mass scale for MOND...
Earlier, we had a nice little discussion about the persistent fringe phenomenon of one of the alternative models for gravity that persistently bob up in astrophysics...
Specifically MOND.
Now, the details of MOND are kinda irrelevant, what is a key point is that MOND provides a phenomenological argument for a fundamental acceleration scale, a0 ~ 10-10 m s-2.
Whether this is really "fundamental" is disputable, and at some level…
catdynamics | October 12, 2009We had one of these annoying small leaks from our washing machine.
It started late this summer, we noticed a small intermittent leak, from somewhere underneath the machine, but it wasn't reliably repeatable, but it was enough to be a concern, not to mention a possible harbinger of future trouble.
We could not find the problem. It is a relatively new and reliable machine, gets used a lot, sometimes multiple loads in a day. So, we called in the pros.
First repairman found nothing, and was rude about it.
Second repairman was much nicer, made several helpful suggestions and left the bill open,…
catdynamics | October 9, 2009To President Barack Obama for winning the Nobel Peace Prize.
Honestly people, that is really all you have to say.
If you can't say anything nice then, as your mother should have told you, don't say anything.
The guy iust got the fucking Nobel Prize and half the country is having paroxysms and doing the "yeah, so what's he done then"?
Can we just agree that we do not want to have a paranoid President, again, and be nice?
Let the man enjoy it, and then worry what it was about.
For those who want to contemplate the historical analogies: consider President Mikhail Gorbachev, who got the Peace…
catdynamics | October 9, 2009"...to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses..."
I am in total awe of the Nobel Committee of the Norwegian Storting.
What I really want to know, is who took the phone call at the White House this morning?
Also, just how long does it take them to get a press release out on whitehouse.gov?
"For 108 years, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has sought to stimulate precisely that international policy and those attitudes for which Obama is now the…
catdynamics | October 9, 2009"There is no use trying; one can't believe impossible things."
"I dare say you haven't had much practice. When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."
This week, a short, innocuous little astrophysics paper appeared in Nature discussing the apparent inferred constant surface density of cold dark matter in the inner part of galaxies.
This somewhat startled fellow SciBling Ethan, enough for him to bang out a new post - discussing why cold dark matter is to be preferred to an alternative model…