Irish Class, October 4, 2010
Rang Gaeilge, an 4ú lá Mí Dheireadh Fómhair 2010
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Fadas: áéíóúÁÉÍÓÚ
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First night as a member of Will’s class!
Monday night Irish class, October 4, 2010
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Monthly Archives: October 2010
Frozen dwarf planets
Frozen World of Eris Looks a Lot Like Pluto
The frozen surface of the dwarf planet Eris looks a lot like that of its smaller neighbor Pluto, new research has found.
Both frozen worlds are covered predominantly with nitrogen ice, a research team announced Tuesday (Oct. 5). The find could help astronomers get a better handle on the history of the outer reaches of the solar system….
Eris, discovered in 2005 by planet-hunting astronomer Michael Brown, has one known moon called Dysnomia.
Eris is larger than Pluto — about 1,600 miles (2,581 kilometers) across, compared with 1,430 miles (2,306 km) — and about 27 percent more massive. Eris’ bulk effectively forced astronomers to strip Pluto of its planethood and rebrand it a “dwarf planet” back in 2006.
The ensuing controversy over Pluto’s demotion makes Eris’ name quite fitting: Eris is the Greek goddess of discord and strife, who stirred up jealousy and envy among the goddesses, leading to the Trojan War.
Eris circles the sun from about 9 billion miles (15 billion km) away, making it about twice as remote as Pluto.
Apollo’s competition
Philosophers are no longer allowed at environmentalist conferences
The nature of time
The beginning of the Space Age
Weirdness check
So, gmcdavid, your LiveJournal reveals…
You are… 3% unique (blame, for example, your interest in woodwright’s shop), 31% peculiar, 36% interesting, 21% normal and 10% herdlike (partly because you, like everyone else, enjoy science fiction). When it comes to friends you are normal. In terms of the way you relate to people, you are wary of trusting strangers. Your writing style (based on a recent public entry) is conventional.
Your overall weirdness is: 40
(The average level of weirdness is: 28.
You are weirder than 80% of other LJers.)
Not a day of rest
Twitter, Facebook, and social activism
Why the revolution will not be tweeted, via Slashdot.
This reminded me of something a friend wrote last summer:
Facebook connected me to current friends, old friends, old non-friends, current non-friends, concert venues, my library, and dozens of other people. But these were, as Umair Haque phrased it so well, “weak, artificial connections, what I call thin relationships.” Following all these people takes time and attention, but I have as much connection with a person who used to share deep conversation with me as I do with someone who was a passing acquaintance: not only thin, but impersonally thin.
Searching for Extraterrestrial AI
Looking for E.T.? Try His Artificial Intelligence Instead, Astronomer Says
The suggestion that artificial ET’s might more evident than biological ones is not new. Frank Tipler (before he went off the deep end) suggested in 1981 that alien civilizations might use von Neumann probes to explore a galaxy. He concluded that since we do not see such probes,
there are no ET’s in our galaxy. In science fiction the concept goes back at least to 1963, when Fred Saberhagen’s first Berserker story appeared.
Actually, almost all suggestion for SETI come down to Searches for ExtraTerrestial Technology. It will be a long time before we can find any other sign of intelligence out there.
Bok globules are another search target for sentient machines. These dense regions of dust and gas are notorious for producing multiple-star systems. At around negative 441 degrees Fahrenheit, they are about 160 degrees F colder than most of interstellar space. [Is this correct?-GTM]
This climate could be a major draw because thermodynamics implies that machinery will be more efficient in cool regions that can function as a large “heat sink”. A Bok globule’s super-cooled environment might represent the Goldilocks Zone for the machines, says Shostak.
The idea that Bok Globules might be linked to ET’s was anticipated by Fred Hoyle in his 1957 novel The Black Cloud. Early in the book some astronomers are looking at some images of the cloud (which turns out to be an intelligent and powerful life form). One of them describes it as “a fine example of a Bok globule.”
From Hilbert Space to Dilbert Space, and beyond 