ADAMANT

Palaeo Ontonology

The ever-philosophical American Spectator blog wonders if Alaska's born again Governatrix will be John McCain's answer to  Aspasia :

"Matt Damon's Single Issue: Dinosaurs - Thursday, September 11, 2008 @ 1:09:23 AM
Who knew that Matt Damon was a single issue voter? 

"I need to know whether she thinks that dinosaurs existed 4,000 years ago. That's important. I want to know that. I really do. Because she's going to have the nuclear codes."

To believe that Patton thought he was a reincarnation of Pericles and we still let him command soldiers in World War II." 

Pericles I can handle. It's Alley Oop I worry about. 

Another Pterodactyl On Steroids

This Time With A J-Boat Mast !

Once more, the America's Cup  challenge and defense may come down to the question of who can build the fastest boat in the world? Here is the BMW/ Oracle entry.

The 1851 race led to a 19th century Deed of Gift that says any challenge from a boat  under 90 feet  on the waterline must be met, and thanks to its reverse bow rake, this carbon fiber bird of prey is exactly that. The carbon fiber wing section mast has an I measurement of 158 feet, same as the hallowed J class, although I shudder to think how this thing will accelerate with a 5,000 square foot main,since it can['t weigh much more than 20 tonnes soaking wet. 

Judging by the performance of the last multihull to race for the Cup, Stars and Stripes  in 1988, expect this one to reach  at close to, if not above ,three times wind speed in the light air prevailing on the Valencia AC course.   

Bolting Though The Fifth Dimension

While Bolt was blowing away the 100 meter mark , another  speed record  fell, with far more portentious consequences . An entangled pair of photons  ran an information relay at better that ten thousnd times the speed of light , and those who managed the race may end up with another sort of gold medal , for  passing a milestone on the road to multiple worlds.

Physicist Nicolas Gisin and colleagues report in Nature that pairs of quantum-entangled photons sent  from the university  University of Geneva through fiber-optic cables to two Swiss villages 18 kilometers apart changed polarization not just  identically, but  faster than synchronized atomic clocks could detect. 

Whatever was affecting the photons seems to have happened so nearly instantaneously that t the phenomenon influencing the particles had to be traveling at least 10,000 times faster than light.  Since that can't happen in four dimensions of space and time, the experiments show that entanglement might be controlled by something existing beyond it.

 Gisin says that once the scientific community "accepts that nature has this ability, we should try to create models that explain it." This doesn't demonstrate spooky action at a distance directly, but does provide a lower bound-the speed is truly superluminal. And out of this world.

 

The Don A. Cthulhu Show

A  so called 'biology' professor alleges that a cult at his university  holds a weekly cannibal feast , preceded two days in advance by  day long orgy of piscivory  termed  "Friday' that spares not even the flesh of the Great Tentacled One.

According to professor P.Z.Myers ,the cult's media avatars have  demanded his  dismissal  from the University of Minnesota, protesting his confusion of our  metaphysical rituals with the flesh and blood sacrifices of Miskatonic University's  Neo-Aztec student union, which has been threatening death by lutfisk or immersion in wasabi to any who dare desacrate their ritually correct cuisine. Their embryo free  eatery  was gutted last December as ovarian rights and  anti-abortion activists clashed over who would get to set fire to the  human eggnog at a New Year's Eve celebration.

Myers' vociferous campaign to wean acolytes from spiritual nourishment  by offering them unconsecrated shrimp crackers suggests  IQ testing of  giant squid has left him with a bad case of Cephalopod Tourette's Syndrome.

The league agrees with Bill O'Reilly that pending Myers sacrifice to The Great Tentacled One, the University Of Minnesota remove giant squid  from its faculty club menu,and desist from serving beef, pork, clams, horsemeat and soybean products during Hindu, Muslim, Jewish  and Pythagorean holidays and major rodeos.

Textured swan protein and whale steaks  produced in accordance with our alien masters stem cell research guidelines must replace these items on the menu, and  the club must freeze its caviar stocks until such time as the eggs can be fertilized  by the Sturgeon General.

Let me conclude by assuring Professor Myers that no mutant octopi were killed or injured in creating this podcast , and reminding  him that  I'm not  just the founder of the Tentacle Club For Men, I'm a customer.

 

The Twenty Kiloton Torch

FIRE FROM HEAVEN CAN BE A HEAVY BURDEN

Lit  without flame by  a solar spark, and consuming mere ounces of fuel a day as it is carried by fleet footed runners, the Olympic torch is acquiring a monumental carbon footprint none the less--it is being spirited across the oceans on a dedicated Chinese Airbus 330  belching forth 129 pounds of CO2 for every mile it travels.

In all , Earthlab estimates the jet will consume 462 thousand gallons of fuel-  petro, not bio. So  it will take 20,130 tonnes of CO2 to see the torch around the world on its meandering 85,000 mile Odyssey from Greece to Beijing

The Emperor Concerto Strikes Back

Modern conductors face a dilemma. In the bad old days of orchestral performance, they risked a shower of rotten tomatoes and brickbats if they butchered some beloved work of Mozart or Brahms. But works of modern composers are  likely to provoke greater ire if perfectly performed/

The proprietor of a music minded blog describes a performance of

“Apotheosis of this Earth” by Karel Husa... meant to express the composers displeasure with the terrible way in which man was / is treating the planet earth. It included a number of unusual devices such as instruments playing quarter stepped notes to be deliberately out of tune with others instruments, and sections of the score which direct to play some unspecified notes for a certain amount of time.

These devices seemed to be most often realized at high pitches and high volumes which frequently became physically painful to listen to. It did not help matters that it was being performed in a relatively small “recital hall” space and not a large concert hall which may have been better able to handle the intense sound levels...

Before the music began I had high hopes for something interesting as they brought out 2 marimbas, 2 glockenspiel, 2 xylophones, 2 gongs, tom toms and a set of concert bells, but alas that was before I knew they would be used for evil instead of for good... The conductor stated that this was a piece you would not often hear in a concert, alas he apparently did understand why..."

Audiences can of course prepare themselves for high decibel avant garde music by shooting  birds in season or  clays  if not, the afternoon before a performance ,  but  what about the players?

Symphonies obliged to present avant garde works lest they be accused of philistinism may find relief from orchestral ear damage on the way from Japan. Long home to the mechanical Suzuki method of raising ranks of  mindless five year old violinists, its robotics industry has moved on to mechanizing the rest of the orchestra.

The next step is clear -- serious orchestra or opera patrons  need AudienceBots to fill their seats during outbursts of Schoenberg, dull acts of Wagner or Husa premieres. Those who come to suffer earnestly will be free to return to the balconies in person  while those sensibly seconded by formally attired robots continue their greetings or gossip,or finish their champagne in the intervals that used  the most dependable form of modern operatic and  orchestral entertainment.

No longer!  Now that paintball  has become a form of performance art, it is time to turn the tables on the unpleasantness in Ford's theater by encouraging audiences to take pot shots incompetent Cyberconductors, or bean  Robo-oboeists that drift off key,  without fear of civil suits or manslaughter indictments.  Bring the family, but to avoid serious bodily injury, best lay off the percussionist-- hydraulics can cause a world of hurt.

RINGWORLD

             From Pale Blue Dot to Cold Grey Clot
The European Space agency has generated some alarming  pictures of the ring of geostationary debris that is growing to rival the cloud of satellite dandruff already orbiting the Earth closer in.
The Agency notes
Between the launch of Sputnik on 4 October 1957 and 1 January 2008, approximately 4600 launches have placed some 6000 satellites into orbit, of which about 400 are travelling beyond geostationary orbit or on interplanetary trajectories.

Today, it is estimated that only 800 satellites are operational - roughly 45 percent of these are both in LEO and GEO. Space debris comprise the ever-increasing amount of inactive space hardware in orbit around the Earth as well as fragments of spacecraft that have broken up, exploded or otherwise become abandoned. About 50 percent of all trackable objects are due to in-orbit explosion events (about 200) or collision events (less than 10).

Perfect Storm

Much as it resembles a bad  hurricane day on Jupiter , this near life-size image of a soap film domed into a bubble above a heat source eerily reproduces the dynamics of a cyclonic storm on a real planet. You can see it in motion as well

Up From.......Oh, Never Mind!

Only those  who smile to see the Republican Party marching off to the war of ideas on an empty stomach find comfort in this focused political poll of the intellectual ground state of the  Red States. With the elephant's skull running on empty, no wonder the GOP think tanks are fading. 

Ancient Of Days

Once Upon A Time In Arcadia

Pausing on his grand tour of Greece,  slightly winded after  climbing 4500 feet to the summit of Mount  Lykaion , the traditional birthplace of Zeus,  the original Lonely Planet Guide, Pausanias, wrote:

“Before the altar on the east stand two pillars, on which there were once gilded eagles. On this altar they sacrifice in secret to Lykaion Zeus. I was reluctant to pry into the details of the sacrifice; let them be as they are and were from the beginning.”

Pausanias did not have carbon dating at his disposal , but  ow archaeologists trenching deep into that altar's base have encountered an earlier foundation, and remains of burnt offerings made some 5,000 years ago, fully  1,500 years before the earliest mention of the god's name in Minoan linear B tablets, and a millennium before the arrival of indo-european speakers in mainland Greece. The new evidence make the nameless deity 's worship twice as old to Pausanias , as the more familiar pantheon assembled on Olympus some twenty miles away.

Image:University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology

And On The Third Day,

,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,IT LANDED

With the wingspan , but not the weight, of a pterodactyl on steroids, the carbon fiber Zephyr  ultra-lightweight  unmanned  aircraft  can be launched  like a paper airplane- if you can throw a  66 pound barbell overhand. Normally several men pick it up and  toss it into the air.

Once there it can stay up for quite a while.  By day  the QinetiQ  UAV  flies on solar power generated by  paper thin amorphous silicon photovoltaic arrays that cover the aircraft's wings. By night, or under cloud cover,  its rechargeable lithium-sulfur batteries keep it aloft- it can find sun when it must by flying over the weather and into the stratosphere.

Recent  trials validated modifications that have improved the efficiency of Zephyr's power system; new solar arrays supplied by United Solar Ovonic, a full flight-set of Sion Power batteries as well as a novel solar-charger and bespoke autopilot developed by QinetiQ allowed the aircraft to fly  twice carrying a surveillance payload , first for 54 hours to a maximum altitude of 58,355 feet, and then for 33 hours 43 minutes to a maximum altitude of 52,247 feet.  This is an unofficial un-fueled heavier than air endurance record, it being kind of hard to get the equivalent of the Guinness guys to hang around for that  long. If the UAV jocks keep this up, expect the Swiss to retaliate , and next year's Book Of World Records to include the first chronometer certified 100 hour stopwatch.

God Gets A Webcam

The world's largest telescope lens, of fused quartz, will sharpen the vigilance of the fastest giant sky survey telescope.

Cerro Pachon , Chile is to host the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope. Starting in 2015, the LSST will take images seven times the Moon's diameter, providing a complete new panorama of the heavens every 3 nights.

At 3,200 megapixels, it will be the world's biggest digital camera, delivering very wide, bright and exquisitely detailed images from optics fast as any 35 mm camera lens-- f 1.25

It's A Christmas Present From Bill Gates

"Most telescopes look at a tiny part of the sky, to look deep and in detail. We want to look broadly, to cover everything," said deputy project managerVictor Krabbendam. The LSST telescope consists of three aspheric mirrors; an 8.4-m primary (M1), a 3.4-m convex secondary (M2), and a 5.0-m tertiary (M3). The inner primary and outer tertiary edges are such that these mirrors can be fabricated f rom a single piece of glass. The secondary mirror will be the largest convex mirror ever made. The light path through the telescope is shown in the diagram.

Its mirrored vision of the heavens is rendered razor sharp by refraction through three fused silica lenses and a filter. The largest lens, 1.55 m in diameter, is half again as a large as that of the 40-inch Yerkes refractor, the world's largest for nearly a century . The 0.69-m third lens serves as a rigid vacuum window to keep the liquid nitrogen cooled focal plane array from frosting over even in the bone dry desert mountain air.

By a mythic coincidence --Thousand Eyed Argus kept watch on mortal affairs for Olympian Zeus-- the imaging array has about a thousand times the resolution of the human retina.

Hot Pockets

While Noah Schactman of Wired  complains of Pentagon  reluctance to release technical details of its crowd-singeing pain ray technology,  the guts of the system are being bragged about  elsewhere- here's the skinny on a microwave beam source  that shoots 2,000 times the  power of your breakfast table muffin zapper:

High power operation of 110 GHz gyrotron at 1.2 MW on the JT-60 ECRF system Naka Fusion Research Establishment, Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute & Electron tubes and devices division, Toshiba Co., Otawara Japan    Abstract

A high power operation of 1.2 MW for 4 s was obtained by a 110 GHz gyrotron with depressed collector on the JT-60 ECRF system, where the cathode voltage is −58 kV without voltage regulation and the acceleration voltage is +85 kV with regulation. The gyrotron is featured by a diamond output window and a RF absorber in its beam tunnel. The RF absorber suppresses the parasitic oscillation, which limited the performance of the gyrotron without the RF absorber less than 1 MW×2 s.

The operation was done with the JT-60 tokamak plasma as a dummy load, where the EC wave was transmitted through a diamond antenna window on the corrugated waveguide. The edge temperature of the antenna window without cooling was in proportion to the pulse duration. The maximum efficiency of the gyrotron was about 42% in the depressed collector operation on the JT-60 ECRF system.

In plain English, given the right antenna, the high power gyrotrons being developed to heat plasmas for hot fusion research could cook a pizza in your pocket at 100 yards

Bush 2.0 : The Life Of The Party

Who says American  political life is as artificial as it can get?

Adamant noted The advent of Synthetic Life on Earth  last June, when the replication of a bacterial chromosome using man-made amino acids was reported to the Zurich Synthetic Biology conference.

Now a Venter Institute team led by Nobel laureate Hamilton Smith is about to announce the design and construction of a new species  with a synthetic chromosome built from scratch, ready to  install into empty cells to kick-start the first artificial life form on Earth.

"The announcement, which is expected within weeks and could come as early as Monday at the annual meeting of his scientific institute in San Diego, California," says The Guardian, reporting "they have painstakingly stitched together a chromosome that is 381 genes long and contains 580,000 base pairs of genetic code." The DNA sequence, based on the bacterium Mycoplasma genitalium has been pared down to the bare essentials,  trademarked with fluoromeres , and rechristened Mycoplasma laboratorium.

But disconcerting as Beltway metaphysicians may find this rather predictable prospect, it should not distract us from more pressing biotech needs :

The Nation Needs Another President Bush

.

.Clone Vannevar
.....For 2008

The Committee To Re-Elect The MIT President

Donate now, before Harvard  recombines the DNA of the first fifty democrats in the Cambridge phone book.

Since Venter patented the synthetic gene sequence in question las year, it's only a matter of time before patented candidates appear--why not now ? Consider the  preceding a Record of Invention for 'A means for securing multiple presidential terms by recombination and expression of Candidate Genes.'

As a paleocon I naturally disapprove of Neocons bent on cloning Wilson, Woodrow 1.0,  but if Harvard has President Mather's DNA in its archives, I grant them free license to amplify Increase at will.

All The Sun That's Fit To Print

Greens are overjoyed to see Hemlock Semiconductor gearing up a 17,000 tonne polysilicon plant to furnish two gigawatts of solar cells a year, but some materials scientists have  doubts about the billion dollar investment: the DOE estimates PhotoVoltaic capacity will barely reach 10 billion kilowatt hours by 2030.

This is only .2% of projected energy use, far below projections for other renewable energy sources notes Materials Today ,which opines "The PV industry must sidestep the need for high capital expenditure by tapping into unused capacity."

Silicon computer chip foundries  have no surplus capacity. They are running flat out, so John de Mello and Omar Cheema of Imperial College London suggest the future of cheap solar may lie in Rupert Murdoch's back yard. Tabloid printing presses can bang out organic solar cells when the news is slow:

'organic semiconductors... share many of the chemical and rheological properties of conventional inks...Their low materials cost, ease of processing, and minimal component counts promise  significant savings ."

Printed solar cells lag behind crystalline semiconductors in efficiency and lifetime-- the best they can presently do is 6% energy conversion for about one year, though advanced  n-type PODOT derivatives  or boromers may  soon do better . Yet though silicon cells are not much better, they attract massive investment, and the prospect of founding a fabulously Fab-less new electronic power sector may intrigue printers union pension funds:

"OPV is still an early stage, high-risk technology, but its successful adaptation to print manufacturing would be genuinely revolutionary, enabling solar electricity to be deployed on a scale and at a rate that is unimaginable with Silicon."

6%  is no solution to the world's energy woes, but newsprint solar already beats photosynthesis when it comes to quantum efficiency.

Power is never too cheap to meter, but if next generation laptops start printing out power supplies when taken to the beach, scrap solar cells may one day supplant newspapers as the foremost medium for wrapping fish.

Got A Light ?

Bronze roasting tripods were long favorite prizes in ancient funeral games, and winning big in the Olympiad might touch off a small holocaust with a hecatomb of 100 oxen sacrificed and burned.

Yet the Classics record nothing rivaling the wave of wildfires ravaging the Peloppenese today. Forget the oxen. Thus far, half a hecatomb of Greeks have been immolated, and Athens awoke Sunday to flurries of oily ash from fires sweeping the olive clad hillsides around the ruins of Olympia
MISS HADES 2007? 
A source close to the Hierophant says that although some of the blazes were certifiably ignited by the wrath of Olympian Zeus, Beijing has ominously neglected to ask that fire from heaven be passed along for torch lighting in 2008. Claiming a headache, the Dephic Oracle declined comment.

 

 

A Mecca For Shoppers

"Before he was a prophet" says First Things "Muhammad was a businessman"

The Neo-theocratic journal finds it " perfectly in keeping with honoring him that a market is set up next to the Great Mosque. In fact, there’s always been a market next to the mosque;"

"The Christian heaven which is primarily characterized by the intimate and intelligible presence of God, the paradise of Islam is the perfection of sensual pleasures. And what better way to give a foretaste of these divine gifts than a mall and a first-rate hotel?"

True, but if its bar serves nothing stronger than djinn and tonic, the Seventh Heaven may seem distant. That's why the seven-spires of the Abraj Al Bait shopping center are rising "steps away from the holy mosque."  The website of  "Makkah’s most prestigious retail address"  says the air conditioned  supersouk is fishing for tenants with a "Spectacular view of the Ka’abah" that will afford " a new shopping experience."

The location's unbeatable, but what will make pilgrims shop till they drop after a long day stoning the devil ?  The prayer rug market is saturated, and forget Cartier and Tiffany --Wahabi austerity frowns on wearing gold on the egalitarian pilgrimage to Islam's Holy Places. Yet with the Black Stone of the Ka'abah in sight, Blackstone's seems ideal. The upmarket widget retailer already stocks meteorite watches and a wider selection could turn Abraj Al Bait into a mecca for extraterrestrial souvenir sales. 

A mountain of meteorites overhangs the market. Metal detectors and wholesale de-mining of the formerly war-torn sands of the Western Sahara are turning up thousands of nickel-iron octahedrites and stony chondrites annually. Will the new bazaar commission a fatwa commending  heavenly fallout to pilgrims in the market for stones to throw at the pillars of Shaitan?

Consider A Spherical Dyson

The redoubtable Freeman Dyson goes on Disturbing The Universe:

"Biology is now bigger than physics, as measured by the size of budgets, by the size of the workforce, or by the output of major discoveries; and biology is likely to remain the biggest part of science through the twenty-first century. Biology is also more important than physics, as measured by its economic consequences, by its ethical implications, or by its effects on human welfare.

These facts raise an interesting question. Will the domestication of high technology, which we have seen marching from triumph to triumph with the advent of personal computers and GPS receivers and digital cameras, soon be extended from physical technology to biotechnology? I believe that the answer to this question is yes.

I predict that the domestication of biotechnology will dominate our lives during the next fifty years at least as much as the domestication of computers has dominated our lives during the previous fifty years.

INSTANT HYDROGEN ?

All Gallium Is Not Divided Into Three  Parts

Schemes for  conquering climate change by substituting hydrogen for carbon stand or fall on where the hydrogen is to  come from   ?  Everything from solar cell photolysis to hydroelectricity and geothermal power  figures in future tense  hydrogen evangelism, but in the real world it comes cheaply only from natural gas or coal -- which utterly obviates the point of  using hydrogen to reduce CO2 emissions.

This is old hat- so to revive interest , a Perdue  professor is publicizing  a seemingly   cheap and easy way to generate hydrogen. Based on aluminum, It looks carbon free on first glance. Many reactive metals liberate hydrogen from water, but those reactions can be spectacularly energetic. Tossing one pound ingots of sodium into Essex Bay  was my own  preferred ( and widely applauded )  4th of July fireworks finale until liability lawyers, the EPA , and the post-9/11 aversion to things that go bang   banished  such instant pyrotechnics from the marketplace.

Aluminum is potentially just as reactive- mixed with granulated rust and ignited , it yields white hot molten iron. Yet  aluminum foil is non-flammable, because a tenacious oxide layer coats the metal, preventing runaway reaction with air or water. If disrupted, say by amalgamating an aluminum bar's  surface with mercury, the light metal reacts on contact with water ,  releasing a hissing froth of hydrogen bubbles.

But mercury too has succumbed to a sort of paranoia--it has vanished from medicine ,and  a whole cottage industry seeks to ban it from light bulbs and switches as well. So what other low melting metal can  turn normally passive aluminum into a well behaved hydrogen source ?

Chemically speaking , non-toxic gallium is to aluminum as silicon is to carbon-  lower melting and heavier. But while silicon is common as sand and dirt cheap, gallium is as rare and expensive byproduct of processing aluminum ore. Useful  in semiconductors, its high price reflects the huge energy cost of concentrating it - bauxite contains roughly  only 1 atom of gallium    per million of aluminum.Yet Galliu is thre for the taking,, as common as copper in the rocks of the Eart'scrust, and enough to enable a hydrogen car would coust little more than the platinum melts in the catalytic converter  of  a truck engine  Because though melts in the palm of your hand , just a small percentage added to aluminum  yields a crystalline alloy , GaAl28 suitable for hydrogen generation.

GaAl28 is being hyped along the lines of  :

 Instant Hydrogen -- Just Add Water .

But first you need some aluminum- and aluminum takes a lot of electricity to make . Since 51% of America's electricity comes from coal , that half of the energy economy is off limits from a Green Hydrogen perspective. Note that LA is especially dependent-  a coal-fired Prius  is not what California Greens have in mind.   But  much imported  aluminum embodies  hydro-electricity  from Norway   or Canada , so can't we  celebrate  this new found route to clean green internal combustion? Surely the white soup of  gallium spiked Milk of Alumina that would remain in the former gasoline  tanks of our hydrogen cars could be endlessly recycled back to the dams and nuclear electric plants whence the  fuel-metal came ? 

Not so fast. Gallium does more to aluminum than facilitate hydrolyzing it into hydrogen. Since gallium  melts in the palm of your hand, the silvery stuff can be slapped on to anything made of aluminum- an airplane say, or an engine block . It wicks into the grain boundaries of structural aluminum alloys like hot water being sucked into a sugar cube.  And behold, the stuff just falls apart. Give an aluminum baseball bat a dab of gallium , and a girl scout can break it with a karate chop.

Long before The Transportation Safety  Authority  arose , the FAA  enacted a ferocious ban on air transport of gallium , and as  energy conservation  leads to ever greater use of light aluminum alloys in  vehicles for land sea and air , the gallium solution to the hydrogen conundrum  must overcome more than its already parlous enegy economics

Mergers and Acquisitions

There has  been no comment as yet  by the Securities and Exchange Commission on a paper accepted by the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society , that is nothing less than the red herring for the M&A Deal At The End Of The Universe.

In it ,analysts at the Harvard Center for Astrophysics lay out a 5 billion year  prospectus for the future merger of the  Andromeda  galaxy and our own . Computer simulations indicate an initial exchange of shares in about 2 billion years.

Though by then the sun, burning brighter than at present , may have boiled off Earth's oceans, Ginnie Mae and real estate  trust values may rise as the arrival of Andromeda's center of mass shifts the solar system  to a choice location about 100,000 light-years closer to  the new galactic center.

In a gravitational merger directed by the  Bank Andromeda CEO shown here resolving an Athenian shareholder dispute some years ago , The Milky Way's liquidity  is expected to  increase as it diffuses into a larger stellar cloud.  Offshore shareholders may experience dilution , but the rearrangement is unlikely to endanger Earth directly , says theoretical astrophysicist Avi Loeb , because the stars are spread too thinly to render them likely to collide. However,  passing stars will disturb the Oort cloud located beyond Pluto's orbit, precipitating comet showers and perhaps a cataclysmic impact or two.

"Galaxies fall together and basically stick," says one coauthor , but the current simulation does not cover the  unknown dynamics of  galactic dark matter distribution  and its potentially deflationary effect on dividends when the Milky Way and Andromeda merger hits the big board.

Disclosure: None of the analysts cited have any beneficial interest in Chase Galactic or BankAndromeda

It's Greek To Me

Though Spartan in the austerity of his atheism , P.Z. Meyers  has suffered an Easter epiphany. Watching 300 it struck him that it wasn't about dead white males hell bent for the Elysian Fields at all. Eureka- it's a retelling :
"of the creation-evolution struggle!"
 

Pharyngula 's patritarch thinks it's "All about how the Spartans are the products of intense selection; the weak are culled from birth through adulthood, resulting in a collection of perfect physical specimens…exactly like all evolutionists...modesty compels us to conceal our awesome physiques beneath our lab coats, in the movie the Spartan products of evolution proudly expose their muscular pectorals, washboard abs...If everyone only accepted evolution, they too could look so ruggedly handsome."

He includes "evolutionist women" in his Olympian leg-pull, but every scientist has a Pantheon, and Biologist Meyer's naturally  features bewhiskered worthies like Darwin:
"The manly beards of the heroes also reflected the historical significance of the bearded scientist. Leonidas's beard reminded me of that of Thomas Hunt Morgan, the great geneticist...another burly brawler with a loud Scottish bellow."

If The Faculty Meeting Stakes Get Really Low

..Bre Break out the sherry and lock and load ?

"There are reasons one may be wary of arming academia... Students spend a lot of time drinking...Academic disputes can get vicious ; we wouldn't want them to get bloody. But...if Cho Seung-hui had encountered someone else with a gun, fewer people would lie dead at Virginia Tech."

...........................................-- James Taranto  Opinion Journal 

Unless, having two guns in hand, Mr. Cho had acquired a third,
........................... .and another victim.

So Who Gets The Spartans' Residuals ?

If Herodotus is to be believed , the 300  had a supporting cast of 4,000,  give or take a phalanx  :

. 80  Mycenaens
200   Phylians
400 Corinthians
400  Thebans
500 Maniteans
500  Tegeans
1120 Arcadians 

And in case of any Persian theatrics

700 Thespians

Seven hundred Thespians-- by  Apollo , the Muses , and the stunt double of Herakles , they must have fielded every media lawyer from Pergamon to Philadelphia !

Between the Arcadian agents , the Peloponnesian pistachio vendors , Rhodean rhinoceros wranglers, second unit ambrosia caterers , Persian Best Boy , Greek Key Grips  , life insurance cover for The Immortals ,  Xena's kill fee for the Amazon outtakes and the audio remix for the Theban Band , it's a wonder Xerxes got a hemiobol on the stater on the box office split.

That's why the Thermopylae remake will  surely get a hecatomb of Oscar nominations--not a single thespian appears to have been killed , injured , or otherwise employed in this production.

Or is that that they're  chronosynclastic infundibulum fans-- It was a rather Darwinian battle.

Climate Modeling 101

What Models Can (and Can't) Tell Us About Risk

Excerpt from an Interview with the very model of a modern major modeler , Tom McKone in:     Science@Berkeley Lab

..."McKone sees models as descriptors of the physical and chemical processes that govern the behavior or chemicals in the environment. "You can build relationships between factors that you can't otherwise do without a model," he says, including chemical properties, transport within and among different media, and abundance in the environment. "..."But just understanding how the pieces fit together doesn't guarantee correct results, McKone says. "You can still get results that don't correlate to the real thing. So models are both potentially powerful, and potentially dangerous."

While a model can hint at what interventions have the best chance of reducing pollutant concentrations and exposures, "A lot of people think models provide predictions," McKone says, "but they don't do this. Models are not very useful if you don't have something with which to anchor them. You need observations to confirm the model and move it closer to a representation of reality.This is a particular problem for policymakers, who "don't like to make choices involving uncertainty," McKone says. "A danger is that they may just use model results to tell them what to do.

A Sophisticated One Dimensional Model

"Adding more detail into a model doesn't necessarily get you a better result if you don't understand the basic science," says McKone. "Model development has to be paced with the science."..."Says McKone,

"The reliability of the calculation depends on the reliability of the least well known element. If you don't know how uncertain this weak link is, then you are making the model results look more accurate than they really are."...