PBS NOVA special about Hubble Servicing Mission 4, including a behind-the-scenes look at preparations for the mission, will air October 13 at 8 p.m. Please check your local listings to confirm the channel and time.
For a glimpse at what you’ll see, view the 3 minute preview which is available at: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/
NASA held a press conference on Wednesday September 9 at 11:00 am EDT to highlight the results of the recent Hubble Servicing Mission. After the press conference, data from all non-proprietary programs that have executed since the servicing mission are available to the community. See a complete set of press-release materials at http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2009/25
Saturday, August 29thGiving Grill to benefit Gwynns Falls Trail Council
11:00am-5:00pm on the Patio at Mt. Washington's Whole Foods Market
Join us for grilling to benefit a worthy non profit organization. All proceeds of grilled hamburgers and cheeseburgers, hot dogs and veggie dogs and drinks and chips will go to the Gwynns Falls Trail Council.
The Gwynns Falls Trail Council oversees a 15 mile trail which runs along the Gwynns Falls stream from the Inner Harbor and Harbor Hospital to the I-70 Park & Ride. The Gwynns Falls Trail is a unique urban hiking and biking trail providing access to a scenic and historic greenway stream valley in Baltimore City.
By participating in the Giving Grill, by buying your lunch, supper or grilled snack, you will help ensure that the Gwynns Falls Trail Council can continue to offer quality programming, activities and events for the residents of Baltimore and beyond.
The Wall Street Journal, quoting “people familiar with the matter,” reported Wednesday that International Business Machines was in talks to buy Sun for at least $6.5 billion in cash, a premium of more than 100 percent over the company’s closing share price Tuesday. Officials of Sun and IBM could not immediately be reached for comment.
But get this: the assymetry can enhance the waves by a factor of 10^4.
He also points out that SN1987A is aspherical in exactly the way that might create this enhancement. So if SN1987A generated gravitational waves, Weber would have been perfectly able to detect them.
Qadir concludes: “The claim of Weber to have observed gravitational waves from [SN1987A] needs to be re-assessed”.
By all accounts, Weber was a careful experimenter who got something of a rough deal for his efforts
With quantum mechanics rewritten in time-free form, combining it with general relativity seems less daunting, and a universe in which time is fundamental seems less likely. But if time doesn't exist, why do we experience it so relentlessly? Is it all an illusion?
Yes, says Rovelli, but there is a physical explanation for it. For more than a decade, he has been working with mathematician Alain Connes at the College de France in Paris to understand how a time-free reality could give rise to the appearance of time. Their idea, called the thermal time hypothesis, suggests that time emerges as a statistical effect, in the same way that temperature emerges from averaging the behaviour of large groups of molecules
Eric Krangel, who now writes for Silicon Alley Insider, was more trenchant:The very things that most appeal to Second Life's hardcore enthusiasts are either boring or creepy for most people: Spending hundreds of hours of effort to make insignificant amounts of money selling virtual clothes, experimenting with changing your gender or species, getting into random conversations with strangers from around the world, or having pseudo-nonymous sex (and let's not kid ourselves, sex is a huge draw into Second Life)... It was about as fun as watching paint dry.
What's left for Second Life? Community meetings, underattended cultural events, and education.
Only compared to the life of a university professor might Second Life actually seem exciting.
Sun Microsystems is just the high-tech poster child for dead-man-walking corporations. Our economy is littered with them ... and they exert a tremendous, though rarely recognized, drag on our economy.
And that drag becomes even greater when we try to save them -- or worse, bail them out. Surely there is a better way to put obsolete companies out of business rather than slowly wither away, tying up financial, intellectual and labor capital for years in the process.
Perhaps what we need is some kind of formal liquidation event -- think of it as assisted suicide for companies in extremis -- by which they can easily distribute their assets to all stakeholders, shut their doors and hold a big, drunken "gone out of business" party. Then, those assets could be recirculated back into the economy to, in part, serve as investment capital for new start-up companies -- just as the employees would be returned to the labor pool, many of them bringing their experience to help run those start-ups.
