> I am aware, and that behavior is despicable, but I still don’t believe that this puts all the responsibility for climate change on oil companies generally or Exxon specifically.
They should pay, they knew what they were selling and were misleading people now we are in a critical situation because of their actions. Individuals can do only so much and most of the people don't even really grasp and understand the implications of their actions, but gets appalled when they do...
You can turn the problem in all directions, the manipulation of public opinion to freeze any attempt at reversing climate change is actually a crime against humanity...
I realised through hearing through channel 5 and average Americans that they don't really get it. They don't want to think, they want an easy solution to complex problems and anyone coming with a pre made thing is seen as the Messiah. The other part don't care because they saw a lot of screaming and failed to grasp what was so bad about Trump. If he was so bad why was he still nominee? If he was so bad why wasn't he arrested? If he was so bad... You get the picture...
This can be seen as the democrats also not understanding the average person and this is where Bernie was actually hitting good points, his message was consistent and he was never demonising Trump on his name but explaining what they could do better by explaining policies in a way that people understood what they would get from them or lose if they didn't get implemented...
Of course the issue is a bit more complex, but they exacerbated the people that were unseen instead of helping the healing and some actors of course were way too happy to fan the flames.
This is a very bad day that is marking the beginning of a very bad period for everyone...
Even if I am not a radio astronomer, this instrument was unique in nature and still in use for very specific observations and until the very end of its operation was able to deliver data. It is disheartening to learn that it was indeed due to gross maintenance negligence (as assumed originally by many) that the final fatal failure occurred, when potentially the structure could have been salvaged.
Losing Arecibo was, as I understand it, a big blow to the NANOGrav experiment, which is looking for very low frequency gravitational waves by measuring pulsar timing variations[1].
Albeit having limited field of view the Arecibo Telescope was very sensitive[2], and so could see pulsars that the other telescopes they used could not. And the longer they could collect data from a set of pulsars the lower frequency waves they could probe.
My uninformed recollection from when the warning signs were raised, is there was not even budget to perform emergency maintenance, and they were resigned to the inevitable collapse.
I worked and did research atobservatory for my PhD - you are exactly correct. It was well known to the scientists and onsite engineers that a collapse was imminent, for years. Ironically, prior to the collapse the agency responsible for funding performed a study to see would need to do to stop supplying money to the observatory, and found that due to environmental impact, it would actually be more expensive to stop funding. After that study we all suspected that the agency was just waiting for decay or a natural disaster to do the dirty work for them
That's not what the report says. There was ~$14 million allocated for repairs in 2-18 after Hurricane Maria, but the cable sockets weren't identified as needing repairs until the first one failed. The problem wasn't the money, it was the failure to identify the problem. See page 28/29.
Arecibo did high power transmit for radar imaging of asteroids/comets/the sun/etc and ionosphere studies, among other things. FAST is not capable of transmit (it was not designed for it and the suspended receiver mass is much lower). Also, FAST has a RF-noise emitting theme park built just outside of it's grounds.
The uniqueness of Arecibo was this transmit coupled with such a large aperture (so small pattern on sky).
> Arecibo did high power transmit for radar imaging of
the Sun? that's something I never thought about, and now that I'm thinking about it, still seems very interesting. It seems like there would be so much noise radiating from the burning ball of fusion that radar signals would just get absorbed/lost. And now I've sat here for 5 minutes doing nothing but imagining this.
The sun is bright, but it's not bright all over in the lower VHF/UHF ranges. The quiet sun has a mimimum radio emission at about 50 MHz and then linearly (mostly) increases up to 10 GHz (and more). So at the lower frequencies radar echos can be detected as long as there are no active flares/etc going on. http://a.superkuh.com/radio-sources.jpg
So the main issue here is how people were presenting it, in Quantum field theory, as stated by other people, each force is associated with a field and has at least one force carrier, the exact number is linked to the specifics of the mathematical framework underlying it
To that extent you can build 3 fundamental forces, electro magnetic, weak (that are called together electroweak) and the strong force. You have an extra force carrier through the Higgs that allows you to give mass to everyone.
Now you need to consider gravity because you know that gravity exist and since everything under the sub is quantised, well so should gravity.
The main issue with gravity is that it is interpreted so far as a curvature of space time, it's mainly fine for big items, but the implications for quantum field theory is that you should modify the small integral element that you use (space shouldn't have the same size) except that you look locally at space that is mainly flat... And changing the integral does not lead to well behaved behaviours.
You can start to introduce new fields but doing so also causes an issue...
Funnily enough even in the standard model something is missing, everything mostly fits, but that's the trick, mostly, neutrinos have mass and this in itself is a problem because the Higgs mechanism doesn't provide mass to them ...
Long story short, people take shortcut when explaining the messy gritty part of it, which is "fine" but not really, and from a simple standpoint one would like to have a simple field from which gravity is born, which might be but so far, to my simpleton understanding, this hasn't been too successful, unless some form of string theory is realised. But the pre requisite for this is a form of supersymmetric theory existing which is currently disfavored, but could exist in the unproved energy scales from here to the plank energy scale.
Sorry this ended being a tad long and I'm not sure this is clarifying things.
> The main issue with gravity is that it is interpreted so far as a curvature of space time,
Yes, that is the main issue. It doesn't have to be that way though. If you look at the Einstein field equations, and solutions like the Schwarzschild and Kerr metrics, the key component is a metric tensor that is nothing more than a mapping from flat spacetime to curved spacetime. We have the ability to choose which interpretation to use. The metrics are nothing more than Mercator-like projections.
If you take the curved spacetime view then you get distortions of spacetime. If you take the flat spacetime view then you get other distortions like that the speed of light -though always seen as the same locally- varies according to the gravitational potential (there are other distortions as well).
We seem to have a bit of a fetish for the curved spacetime view. But oddly when you look for animations depicting interactions with black holes and photons or particles / small bodies what you almost invariably find are of two types: a) flat spacetime representations, or b) the funnel representation, and (b) often comes with a flat spacetime representation above the funnel. How do you think the authors produce the flat spacetime representations? A: By applying the metrics to go from curved spacetime to flat! And why do they use flat spacetime for their animations? A: Because it's easier for humans to understand!
The reality is that flat and curved spacetime are two sides of the same coin. If curved spacetime is the sticking point for quantizing gravity, then switch to flat spacetime.
> neutrinos have mass and this in itself is a problem because the Higgs mechanism doesn't provide mass to them ...
The Higgs mechanism doesn't provide all mass, even of the things that it provides mass for. They each have a "bare" mass, that is, a mass without any Higgs interactions. They just have a much greater mass because of the Higgs interaction. (And maybe that's why neutrinos have so little mass...)
No need to excuse yourself as a French speaker but not French, the baguettes will indeed unscrupulously bend people over if it serves their own interest without excuses or valid justification.
I used to moderate a fairly large subreddit, used to, I decided to leave and never come back after the API debacle, it was a long time coming though.
I think if the business model had been thought in the sense of the communities and involving mods and users in, it would have been genius, a lot of smaller companies would kill to have people genuinely recommending their products/tools that are hidden behind the biggest wall of them all...
Alas they completely ignored this as a viable avenue and went for the quick buck.
But this won't last and at some point people are going to move on from mass scraping, either because they already got what they want or because garbage goes in garbage comes out or because most of the content will be bot generated and require too much filtering to be useful.
Of course this is the opinion and rambling of a moderately educated individual and I might be totally wrong.
Change can often be for the best, pretty sure it wasn't in this case...
* where do you download the 2017-2018 data for ATLAS?
* make the methods and data section part of the PDF or provide additional PDF's (some people will opt to "download PDF" for later perusal, and then be disappointed they have to use the browser to render the methods section to PDF as well)
* provide explicit URL's in the data section
* data and code availability upon request: why would you want to organise the bothering of physicists and engineers with N (interested parties) times code and data requests if you can provide them as downloads 1 time?
They should pay, they knew what they were selling and were misleading people now we are in a critical situation because of their actions. Individuals can do only so much and most of the people don't even really grasp and understand the implications of their actions, but gets appalled when they do...
You can turn the problem in all directions, the manipulation of public opinion to freeze any attempt at reversing climate change is actually a crime against humanity...
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