Observatory Version of Misc Musings, Ravings, and Random Thoughts

[smartalco]

Dmytry[/url]":36v2aow5]You can picture what it would look like with two balloons

I'm imagining a giant hotdog/bun in the sky. Lets get Oscar Meyer to fund this, world's largest advertisement.

 

[smartalco]

Coherence, I think is what you're looking for.

Spatial coherence of laser beams also manifests itself as speckle patterns and diffraction fringes seen at the edges of shadow.

 

[smartalco]

Reasonableness be damned, I want a spacecraft powered by a battery-chucking rail gun now.

 

[smartalco]

dragonlord[/url]":jt6oscsp]We'd see andronimia (sp???) before we saw the whole of the milky way. Then they'd be nothing for centuries. Slowly the light from other galaxies would reach us.

Assuming you're talking about the Andromeda galaxy, it's 2.5 million light years away. The Milky Way is estimated at < 180,000 light years wide. So we'd see the entire Milky Way roughly 2.4 million years before we even caught the first hint of Andromeda.

 

[smartalco]

Also, once that percentage has diffused to a significant amount of the population, it isn't really going to go away is it? Especially locally. I'm assuming that most of the populations of northern/western Europe have the majority of Neanderthal DNA left, and since most of the people on the planet mate relatively locally, that would take a long time for whatever's left to diffuse out significantly.

 

[smartalco]

Here's something I've been curious about. I've known for awhile that the solar system plane is not in line with the galactic plane (as that gif shows), is this usual or unusual (or neither)? In my head it would make more sense if, as a general rule of thumb, the plane of rotation of any local star systems matched the plane that they're all roughly aligned in anyway. However, like with all things space, it's hard to wrap your head around the sheer scale of it all. So does anyone have any sources on how that generally plays out?

 

[smartalco]

Which, for those of us who can't convert mph to km/s in our heads, that's roughly 23 km/s.

 

[smartalco]

Basically, while you don't get the literal electrons

With AC power, he wouldn't be getting the literal electrons anyway, he'd just be choosing which electrons push on (other electrons that push on other electrons, etc, that push on) his electrons

 

[smartalco]

Then don't? The explanations that Tom and Dan gave are perfectly reasonable. It's just a way for the customers of a utility to vote (with their wallet) for more renewables before the politics catch up.

 

[smartalco]

For lossless data compression, the analogy I came with was that your data compression algorithm is "counting by fives and adding the remainder," with the idea that the "compressed" data (tally of fives and the leftovers) would usually be smaller than the original data. Simply by adhering to the count-by-five-plus-remainders algorithm you could lossless transform one dataset into the other. It occurred to me that this is not just an analogy, it's an actual legitimate albeit very primitive data compression scheme that's people-friendly. Is that the case?

It kinda is? Although you kinda just went halfway to re-invented base-5 counting. I think you were thinking '527:3' (to make up a notation) is 527 fives and then three extra, which is like base 10 with an extra step (take your base 10 number *2, and cut off the last digit and /2 as your leftovers). In base 10 that's just 2638, and in actual base 5 would be 41023. If you have to keep this method lossless, then compared to base 10, you've constructed a horrible compression algorithm since it will either take the same or more digits than base 10 100% of the time

We're really just playing with number systems here, but a better example (since it would actually compress) would be to convert to hex, since then the resulting number at least takes fewer digits.

 

[smartalco]

While this is anecdotal, I have two friends who would have a hard time finding anything more than half a mile from their house without guidance in places they’ve lived for a decade. One of them also can’t articulate their route to their job that hasn’t changed in 4 years.

So, yes, ‘hopelessly navigationally challenged’ is definitely a category of people.

 

[smartalco]

In a recent Hank Green Video there is a pinned comment by him (and item #3 within that) where he states that the glow is zodiacal light, light which is reflected from dust particles in the solar system.

That comment is specifically about this image, which is a night shot of the dark side of the Earth with a little bit of glow off the side the sun is biased towards, not the picture shown in this comment chain (and that Earth image is an overexposed version of this, where you can see that the glow is much more subtle).

I’m not saying that the glow around the moon in the pic in this thread is or isn’t zodiacal light as well, because I definitely don’t know, just that the comment on that video is not necessarily related to what was asked.