Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Let's talk about sex, baby (Score 3, Insightful) 368

Which is rather Stross' point. Here is an example where the cultural norm is wildly different from your own, and you can't imagine it. It might be perfectly acceptable in that culture to say "not interested", it was also important, in the context of the culture Bujold was describing, for reproduction to be controlled, because of extremely limited resources under a dome colony. An extra mouth to feed, and lungs to breath the air was significant to everyone's resources.

Comment Re:Dobsonian (Score 1) 187

The steppers are now all "microstepped", which basically means you don't see quantisation from the drives, but you can't "beat" field rotation, and you'd be surprised how few de-rotators are out there - the imaging guys pretty well all use equatorials, with their attendant problems.

ALL mounts have their issues - an equatorial can't view the area around the celestial pole, and is rarely as stiff as an alt-az for the money. An Alt-az has the field rotation issue, and can't view its zenith.

Mount wars get like computer language wars....

Space

Can the Multiverse Be Tested Scientifically? 147

astroengine writes: Physicists aren't afraid of thinking big, but what happens when you think too big? This philosophical question overlaps with real physics when hypothesizing what lies beyond the boundary of our observable universe. The problem with trying to apply science to something that may or may not exist beyond our physical realm is that it gets a little foggy as to how we could scientifically test it. A leading hypothesis to come from cosmic inflation theory and advanced theoretical studies — centering around the superstring hypothesis — is that of the "multiverse," an idea that scientists have had a hard time in testing. But now, scientists at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, in Ontario, Canada have, for the first time, created a computer model of colliding universes in the multiverse in an attempt to seek out observational evidence of its existence.
Education

It's Time To Bring Pseudoscience Into the Science Classroom 470

Hugh Pickens DOT Com (2995471) writes "'Roughly one in three American adults believes in telepathy, ghosts, and extrasensory perception,' wrote a trio of scientists in a 2012 issue of the Astronomy Education Review. 'Roughly one in five believes in witches, astrology, clairvoyance, and communication with the dead (PDF). Three quarters hold at least one of these beliefs, and a third has four distinct pseudoscientific beliefs.' Now Steven Ross Pomeroy writes in Forbes Magazine that it's time to bring pseudoscience into public schools and universities. 'By incorporating examples of pseudoscience into lectures, instructors can provide students with the tools needed to understand the difference between scientific and pseudoscientific or paranormal claims,' say Rodney Schmaltz and Scott Lilienfeld." (Read more, below.)

Slashdot Top Deals

No man is an island if he's on at least one mailing list.

Working...