“Building on what you siad, Hubble was only launched in 1990 - about 21 years ago. However, it had imaging problems so it ws not actually in fully-functioning mode until December 9, 1993, with the first pictures being released in January of '94 - about 17-18 years ago. So, really, the pictures used to make this "video" have been collected for the mast majority of Hubble's existence.”
“Well, one place we went wrong was in deeply cutting taxes through the Reagan and Bush II eras and magically thinking that it would all just be okay somehow.”
“Somehow many in Congress truly believe that is the right formula that works... What is the definition of insanity? "Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results"...”
I've read through your posts and they are, I am afraid, incomprehensible to a non-specialist. I am a scientist myself, and I have frequently been called upon to teach and write for non-specialists -- it can be done, without substantially sacrificing accuracy, but without using jargon and referring to an assumed common framework of highly specializd knowledge. You might want to cultivate this skill.
From what I do know, it looks as if you are proposing a wildly unorthodox theory suggesting that we are about to plunge into another ice age unless we have plenty of anthropogenic CO2 in the atmosphere, and backing this up with another unorthodox reading of the paleoclimatological data. Now, unorthodox theories in a well-studied field are occasionally right. But this happens very seldom.
I must say that this is a strange series of posts. I feel much as I might if I were asked to referee a paper somewhat outside my field, and, reading the paper, got the strong impression that it was wrong, but didn't quite have the expertise to show it without a huge amount of digging. You might want to write up your findings carefully and submit them to a true expert. It would be very interesting to see how far you got in that forum, because a true expert can smell animal products from a great distance.”
“You are pretty close in your assessment, although you seem to give the posts a little too much credit. Those posts include some pretty significant misconceptions about some pretty basic ideas (such as the attempting to compare a projected sea level rise over a limited time frame to total rises that occurred over centuries in the past). Also, he is actually posting multiple ideas in an apparent effort to attack the dominant position rather than to support his own. He uses some jargon, some very poor analysis, and plenty of misinformation to do so, but his arguments can be broken down to a few basic concepts (concepts that mirror familiar talking points). ................ All of this is the typical "debate" technique of AGW opponents. They take what arguments they can find, wrap them in scientific wording, and act as if they are evidence. However, they actually offer very little, if any, proof. In the end though, their arguments boil down to "what ifs". Most of the thousands of words the poster has written come down to saying "it happened in the past so how do we know this isn't natural". No evidence against AGW, just a question, a question that has been addressed. ............... The entire thing is pointless. Debate tactics are useful in swaying public opinions but they are not scientific research.”
“What? "supersonic" means "faster than the speed of sound", but not the speed of sound in air -- that definition is incorrect, wherever you got it from. Supersonic means faster than the speed of sound in the gas under consideration, which is in this case a molecular cloud in interstellar space.
“So, Mr. astrophysicist, you've never heard of alliteration?
Most people think of supersonic as very, very fast. The clouds of visible gas and whatever are traveling at supersonic speeds. In other words, they are moving at very, very fast speeds.”
“I agree that the comment is amazingly ill-informed, but it is true that NASA does not run most ground-based telescopes. They were, at one point, told that it was not their mission to do so.
The poster being (implicitly) right on this point is similar to a stopped clock being right twice a day, though.”
“Sir Fred Hoyle explained the expansion of the universe using the peculiarly British example of a raisin pudding expanding as it is baked -- every raisin recedes from every other raisin, and furthermore, widely separated raisins recede from each other more quickly than adjacent raisins, because they are separated by a larger expanse of expanding pudding.
To extend this to the universe, he said, "Now imagine an infinite pudding."
Ever since, I have thought that "Infinite Pudding" would have been a great name for a British psychedelic band in the 1960s.”
“"In astrophysics, it's not about air, it's about the speed of sound in the ambient gas."
Almost, but more correctly "In astrophysics, it's not about air, it's about the speed."
Was Superman, who supposedly could fly faster than a speeding bullet, an actual bullet when he was traveling faster than a speeding bullet? If not, then why was he described as able to fly faster than a speeding bullet?”
We can pretty much deduce that it has to be a _lot_ bigger than the current event horizon. Inflation very neatly solves a number of vexing puzzles and predicted the scale-invariant fluctuation spectrum that we deduce for the original state, and a pretty much inescapable consequence of inflation is that the observed universe is a minuscule fraction of the total. We still don't know if the totality is finite or not.”
“They look different from old stars; they occur in regions of high interstellar density where new stars are likely to be condensing from the interstellar gas; they have high abundances of lithium on their surfaces that gets rapidly destroyed in old stars; and so on.”
“"Supersonic" refers to the sound speed in the ambient gas, which could easly be tens of thousands of miles per hour. This isn't air, and it isn't on earth.”
“You're probably right, then, though I think the statement works a little better the other way around. Instead of "no money, no space program", it takes on the somewhat more subtle message "if we don't have people in space, no one will care enough to fund it.".
Ah, Grissom. Almost drowned, after flying in space. If I remember that (wonderful) book, there was a certain amount of pooch-screwing involved in his first flight, or at least in the recovery from same.”
“He claimed the hatch blew on it's own when the capsule hit the water. he got out but the capsule sank. He got blamed for it. He later flew the first docking Gemini flight.”
“When you say "our", do you mean "that of the United States", or "that of humankind"?
Incidentally, if you'd like to keep the US at the forefront scientifically, support your state university system. Michigan, Ohio, Minnesota, Illinois, Iowa, Texas, and, for heavens' sake, California -- and there are many more! -- are great universities, that keep our country strong at at the forefront. In many cases they are in peril.”
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