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Dr. Clayton Forrester's Science Roundup

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Re: Dr. Clayton Forrester's Science Roundup

Don't forget, today is the last day to submit an application to NASA to be an astronaut for this round.
https://www.usajobs.gov/GetJob/ViewDetails/423817000

Submitted mine. I *just* meet their height limit. Not sure I'd pass a physical though. And my education *barely* passes their minimum requirements. But I'm keeping the dream alive. :D
 
Re: Dr. Clayton Forrester's Science Roundup

Jimjamesak said:
Man, those degree requirements are really specific. :D
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I did graduate from an accredited University. My degree is not one of the many from their ineligible list, but it may not be quite what they're looking for. Honestly, I'd be happy to get an "FOAD" e-mail from them. :D
 
Re: Dr. Clayton Forrester's Science Roundup

The Tarantula Nebula used to be the wallpaper on my work PC. The image didn't have that level of resolution, but it was spectacular nonetheless.
 
Re: Dr. Clayton Forrester's Science Roundup

Kepler said:
R136a1 is in the central cluster, and Chait doesn't mention it, which is too bad, as it is the most massive and most luminescent known star (though far from the largest).
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Dear lord...

Luminosity

At around 8,000,000 L☉, R136a1 is the most luminous star known, radiating more energy in five seconds than the Sun does in a year. If it replaced the Sun in the Solar System, it would outshine the Sun by 94,000 times (MV = −7.6) and would appear from Earth at magnitude -39. Its brightness at a distance of 10 parsecs, the absolute visual magnitude, is -7.6, three magnitudes brighter than Venus ever appears from Earth.
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Re: Dr. Clayton Forrester's Science Roundup

If it replaced the sun in the solar system, it might not appear from Earth at all. Our orbit might be inside the star. Think about that for a while. It's almost impossible to imagine. Yet there are supergiants which would extend out beyond Saturn's orbit.

Yeah, I don't think God is worried about where you put your dick...
 
Re: Dr. Clayton Forrester's Science Roundup

Kepler said:
If it replaced the sun in the solar system, it might not appear from Earth at all. Our orbit might be inside the star. Think about that for a while. It's almost impossible to imagine. Yet there are supergiants which would extend out beyond Saturn's orbit.

Yeah, I don't think God is worried about where you put your dick...
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Sometimes the scale that is required when talking about space makes my head hurt....
 
Re: Dr. Clayton Forrester's Science Roundup

My favorites are the energies released when two bodies collide. Like two supermassive black holes.

The staggering strength of the merger gave rise to a new black hole and created a gravitational field so strong that it distorted spacetime in waves that spread throughout space with a power about 50 times stronger than that of all the shining stars and galaxies in the observable universe
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Re: Dr. Clayton Forrester's Science Roundup

So this is a really big deal.

The world's best Go player, Lee Sedol, lost yesterday to Google's deepmind AlphaGo. This was the first time a 9-Dan player had lost to a computer.

The video was a lot of fun to watch. They are kicking off the second game live on YouTube in 20 minutes.
 
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Re: Dr. Clayton Forrester's Science Roundup

Most proposals to revise the calendar or revise time zones seem a bit too, um, ... "cerebral" ever to catch on. One genius wants the entire world to be one single time zone. Kind of eliminates the mystique of midnight that way...

One idea though might actually catch on, though I doubt it given how much coordination would be needed: to save tons of money every year from no longer having to revise schedules. The idea basically is to have one day a year (two in Leap Year) that are not part of any month. Then you have exactly 52 7-day weeks in the months of the year, so that the same day of the month is always the same day of the week as well. For example, depending on how it lines up, New Year's Day would always be on Sunday, every year.

Standardized time zones were adopted in the US in 1883 to simplify train schedules (before that, every town had local time and that was a nightmare for the schedules).

Four standard time zones for the continental United States were introduced on November 18, 1883. Britain, which already adopted its own standard time system for England, Scotland, and Wales, helped gather international consensus for global time zones in 1884.
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www.timeanddate.com/time/time-zones-history.html

The calendar proposal would be for analogous reasons as standard time zones, to simplify scheduling and improve societal coordination over large distances.


It would probably be a stretch too far to have 13 "moon"ths of the year, each 28 days, to correspond with the lunar cycle. (a "blue moon" occurs when the same month has two full moons, which has to happen at least once a year).
 
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Re: Dr. Clayton Forrester's Science Roundup

FreshFish said:
One idea though might actually catch on, though I doubt it given how much coordination would be needed: to save tons of money every year from no longer having to revise schedules. The idea basically is to have one day a year (two in Leap Year) that are not part of any month. Then you have exactly 52 7-day weeks in the months of the year, so that the same day of the month is always the same day of the week as well. For example, depending on how it lines up, New Year's Day would always be on Sunday, every year.
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Uh, no, that's not how calendars work. A year isn't an arbitrary unit of time, it was carefully studies - impressively so even, given the tech at the time, to measure a full revolution of the Earth around the Sun so that the same months are as close to being in the same seasons year in and year out, allowing for leap year adjustments and such. Because we had arbitrarily decided at some point in time that a week is seven days, and then decided that months were 30 days, give or take, that's what makes for problems. If we had 13 months of four weeks each in a year, there would still be a leap day assigned to one of the months every four years and that single extra day to account for every year. That still means that during a non-leap years, March 1 was on a Tuesday this year, and next year it will still have to be on a Wednesday. Last year it would have been on a Sunday because leap year accounting in February made it a two-day change for a weekly calendar.
 
Re: Dr. Clayton Forrester's Science Roundup

FreshFish said:
Most proposals to revise the calendar or revise time zones seem a bit too, um, ... "cerebral" ever to catch on. One genius wants the entire world to be one single time zone. Kind of eliminates the mystique of midnight that way...

One idea though might actually catch on, though I doubt it given how much coordination would be needed: to save tons of money every year from no longer having to revise schedules. The idea basically is to have one day a year (two in Leap Year) that are not part of any month. Then you have exactly 52 7-day weeks in the months of the year, so that the same day of the month is always the same day of the week as well. For example, depending on how it lines up, New Year's Day would always be on Sunday, every year.

Standardized time zones were adopted in the US in 1883 to simplify train schedules (before that, every town had local time and that was a nightmare for the schedules).



www.timeanddate.com/time/time-zones-history.html

The calendar proposal would be for analogous reasons as standard time zones, to simplify scheduling and improve societal coordination over large distances.


It would probably be a stretch too far to have 13 "moon"ths of the year, each 28 days, to correspond with the lunar cycle. (a "blue moon" occurs when the same month has two full moons, which has to happen at least once a year).
Click to expand...

lousy smarch weather...
 
Re: Dr. Clayton Forrester's Science Roundup

St. Clown said:
...there would still be a leap day assigned to one of the months every four years ...
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No, Leap Day would not be assigned to any month. and one day of every year would not be assigned to any month either.

We might have a "solstice day" every year, not part of any month (Global Holiday! YAY!), and we would have an opposite "solstice day" once every four years. I forget the exact details to keep the cycle of months aligned with the cycle of years. That's the only way to keep every day of every month the same day of the week, have a day (or two) outside of all months altogether.

364 (e.g. 52 * 7) days in months and also one day (or two) not in any month yet part of every year.
 
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Re: Dr. Clayton Forrester's Science Roundup

FreshFish said:
No, Leap Day would not be assigned to any month. and one day of every year would not be assigned to any month either.

We might have a "solstice day" every year, not part of any month (Global Holiday! YAY!), and we would have an opposite "solstice day" once every four years. I forget the exact details to keep the cycle of months aligned with the cycle of years. That's the only way to keep every day of every month the same day of the week, have a day (or two) outside of all months altogether.

364 (e.g. 52 * 7) days in months and also one day (or two) not in any month yet part of every year.
Click to expand...

So you're suspending the days of the week in this new scheme too, and we creating a new NotADay to this? That's where you're losing it. Those floating days still end up on the calendar somewhere, and push the date from a Monday to a Tuesday, etc.
 
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