JamesF

It may perhaps be helpful to know what the device manager shows as the "VID" and "PID" values for the device, if you can find those.  I seem to recall they're shown somewhere in the device details though not being a Windows user I can't recall exactly where at the moment.

James

4 minutes ago, Xilman said:

The classic 6-degrees of connection applies to almost every one. I doubt that we are more than six apart.

Some people consider me quite reclusive (mostly only those who know me, to be fair), but given your academic connections if we do have such a link then it would probably come through the late 80s Computer Science department at Warwick University.  Someone there surely must have occasionally kicked about with Ian Stewart, who must have all sorts of other connections that you might connect with.

James

1 minute ago, Xilman said:

No idea what a Sabbath number may be but I will try to find out.

Similar to the Bacon Number, but having recorded with a member of Black Sabbath.  Apparently Brian Cox has an EBS number of 13.

James

16 minutes ago, Xilman said:

Erdős number

I had to look this up :)

Apparently Angela Merkel (yes, that one) has a number of at most 5, and Lavoisier, who was executed just shy of 120 years before Erdős was even born, still manages 13.

What amused me most however was this section: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erd%C5%91s_number#Variations

Natalie Portman apparently has an Erdős-Bacon-Sabbath number of 11, which is allegedly only one less than Richard Feynman :D

James

Good job.  Let's hope that's an end to it :)

James

8 minutes ago, Tiny Clanger said:

Really ? I'll not be seeking that out though, the short story itself is perfect  !

My recollection is that it remains quite true to the original (which I agree is an outstanding piece of work), but adds more detail to the start and end.

James

2 minutes ago, Tiny Clanger said:

I know the 'Many coloured Land' counts as fantasy, 'cos it's got pastel coloured covers😀  (well my old paperbacks do anyway) but it has no magic, dragons wizards or dispossessed adolescent royalty as far as I recall, just time travel and aliens on a past Earth (and it's ages since I read it , firvulag was it ? Explained as the distant human memory that gave rise to the 'wild hunt' myths.)  So a fantasy averse reader might be OK with it as sci fi.especially the later volumes .

It has telepathy and telekinesis and other stuff too   And my paperbacks are similarly coloured.  Magic, wizards and dispossessed adolescent royalty brings to mind the Belgariad.  I can't recall whether it had dragons though.  It's a very long time since I last read that.

James

2 minutes ago, Tiny Clanger said:

Corgi SF collector's library edition on my shelves !  The title story is only 7 pages long, but a bit like Asimov's 'Nightfall' or Bradbury's 'A Miracle of Rare Device' the short story resonates for years afterwards ...

Nightfall was subsequently re-written as a full length novel as far as I recall.  Possibly with Robert Silverberg?

James

34 minutes ago, Second Time Around said:

Has anyone read "Report on Planet Three", a short story in the book of the same name by Sir Arthur C. Clarke?

It's supposedly written by an alien (Martian?) scientist "proving" that life couldn't exist on Earth!

I have, but it must have been many, many years ago.  I shall dig it out of my library for another read.  And just for balance I'll re-read a fantasy novel too.  I've not read Julian May's "The Many-Coloured Land" for a while...

James

24 minutes ago, saac said:

Maybe the magi were just fed up with sat nav backing them up a cul de sac  

Cos it's an absolute nightmare getting your camel turned around in a narrow cul de sac.

James

32 minutes ago, Mick H said:

Gabriel said (who was from Yorkshire)

"There's a babby boy been booarn toneet, a reight special babby, who's liggin in a manger, wrapped up in swaddling bands, ovver in tut Leeds. God's own lad, Saviour o' World, Christ the Lord, the Messiah.

Did you forget the bit about him being the world's greatest left-handed spin bowler?

James

3 minutes ago, saac said:

Good point James  Although I don't know the respective evolutionary timelines but the theory goes that the mitochondria were the descendants of bacteria engulfed by other prokaryotes and somehow survived and ended up being incorporated into the cytoplasm and DNA.  Not sure if that was predation or just good luck but then ultimately natural selection decided it was an advantage and , well, here we are   

I didn't have predation in mind, certainly.  I was thinking more that the two somehow got "squidged together" and found symbiosis worked nicely for them.

James

9 minutes ago, Greggy-spaceboy said:

to be fair I only started to understand quantum mechanics last weekend

I am reminded of the quote widely attributed to Richard Feynman:

"If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics."

:D

James

2 minutes ago, saac said:

I haven't came across the "external predator" theory before but I guess that evolutionary pressures are inevitable as they would arise from any "stress point" . A stress point being a condition which places a challenge to the organism, environmental change being the most likely.  Stress in turn would give rise to natural selection processes which would favour organisms with advantageous mutations.  So I'm guessing, again I'm not on solid ground here,  that evolution could occur without an externally arrived predator to light the blue touch paper.  Homegrown (evolved) predators would of course in turn eventually bring additional stress points and perhaps accelerate the natural selection process.

I agree, Jim.  My biology isn't that hot to be fair, but isn't this somewhat similar to the way that some organisms "absorbed" others that became mitochondria, to the benefit of both?

James

To deal with your model first, the universe does not necessarily have a radius of 45.6 billion light years.  The article you link to says it's the estimated current distance from us of the furthest galaxies we can observe (the light from which has taken 13.8 billion years to reach us).  It says nothing about the actual size of the universe.  It may be infinite.  Or perhaps it isn't.

Secondly, there is no specific "place" where the Big Bang happened.  It happened everywhere at once, and until it happened there wasn't really much of anywhere at all.  If you like, the Big Bang "created" space.  As the universe expands (as far as we know), everything is not moving away from some "centre", but moving away from everything else (there are exceptions to this).  The universe is not expanding to fill some pre-existing space.  This is not a particularly easy idea to get one's head around and isn't anywhere near as simple as the few sentences I've just used to describe it.

So, yes, I'm afraid your model is, as you say, "wrong on many levels".  There are some good books that try to explain it to people who don't do cosmology for a living though.  I quite like Simon Singh's "Big Bang", perhaps partly because he was a couple of years above me at school :)  I believe Marcus Chown covers it in several books, too (and far more besides).

As regards the search for life, I don't think scientists currently care about evolutionary development time.  My understanding is that life is considered to have started very soon after the Earth cooled sufficiently.  That might suggest we got lucky, or it might suggest that life of some sort will start pretty much as soon as conditions allow.  Right now it would be a major leap forward to find any kind of life at all, so anything that looks like a planet capable of maintaining water in a liquid state, as was the case when life is believed to have started on Earth, is probably considered "of interest".

If you're after live that's multi-celled or has technological society then you might need to factor in evolutionary time, but whilst it would be fascinating I really don't think that's the primary goal right now.

James

Game over for today then.  Better luck tomorrow.

James

Ah, over-pressure indication on O2, someone claims.

James

Missed the first attempt because I was swimming, but I see it's still at T-45.  Do we know why?  I was thinking it might be the weather.  It looks fairly poor in the Space-X stream.

James

25 minutes ago, johninderby said:

Interesting bit here. So the reduction in dark current means reduced noise.

https://physicsworld.com/a/curved-camera-chips-may-be-the-next-leap-in-astronomical-imaging/

Though they don't seem too certain about the reason for the reduction in dark current at the moment?

Quote

Dave Walton, Head of Photon Detection Systems at UCL’s Mullard Space Science Laboratory in the UK, agrees: “I’m sure there’ll be other space missions that will want to use curved sensors.

Oh, I imagine.  Like, err, spy satellites, perhaps...

James

2 hours ago, Ags said:

But... field flatteners work pretty good don't they? What are we fixing here?

That was my initial reaction, too.  Flatteners generally seem to do a pretty good job, relatively inexpensively.  I'm wondering if there isn't some specific application or group of applications where that isn't true, or where "pretty good" just isn't good enough.  Science research, perhaps?  Military use?

James

7 minutes ago, Zermelo said:

Based on the meteorological behaviour of the last few weeks, I'd go further:

- even the attempt to make toast by an astronomer will attract clouds
- any astronomical purchases will cause all toast to land butter side down
- forecasts of the landing orientation of buttered toast will be 90% wrong

And by the time you actually get to making toast, you'll be unable to remember how the toaster works.

James

Looks like there's another SpaceX launch on Thursday, this time with the first stage landing back at Cape Canaveral.  India have a launch the same day, too.  No idea if that is livestreamed though.

James

Excellent   Shame they lost coverage of the booster landing.

James

4 minutes ago, niallk said:

My own effort at a solar graph

I'd like to have a go at one myself soon, but given my current lack of gainful employment I'm also every tempted to have a crack at creating an annalemma image.

James

4 hours ago, John said:

I've just come in from a rather nice, if muddy, rural hike having really enjoyed extensive views across to Wales and in the other direction the Mendip Hills and Somerset Levels

Is that the M5 down in the valley, John?  It all looks oddly familiar though I've never seen things from that viewpoint before.

James