The daily upgrade broke booting on the new kernel; it forced booting with the next older kernel and required a "yum reinstall kernel" command for the latest kernel, 3.1.5-2.fc16.x86_64, to boot on my hardware - an AMD, Radeon, and Realtek equipped Toshiba T115D. Grubby reported a fatal error, no valid template found.

--
Michael J. Burns

I understand now how Friedmann coordinates obscure thinking on cosmology. So an addition to my old meditation on superluminal philosophers is needed. Even though they are contemporary to us by definition, they actually are on the far side of the big bang. Before we imagine them at a suitable distance, we must think of evidence of the big bang being mathematically deducible at a closer distance. Reasoning that excludes communication with such philosophers is complemented by the argument that they are on the far side of the big bang.

The Friedmann, also known as comoving, coordinates are artificially curved, non inertial and non homogeneous. This is confusing to the unwary, and academics do get caught in the trap. Pontifications on the acceleration of the universe and on the cosmological constant are invalidated by this error.

And my worries about matter tunneling into the universe from outside are solved by this enlightenment. That eventuality is actually assignable to the big bang itself.

--
Michael J. Burns

With today's update of Fedora 15, I no longer need to suspend my Toshiba 115D to enable the external sound output.

--
Michael J. Burns

I am indebted to Professor Furton of GVSU for presenting the Carl Sagan Day Lecture in Grand Rapids. It was presented in a gentle and friendly spirit.

He was also humble in his presentation of cosmological data and analysis. As I must be humble but only in part, since I am not a master of coordinate based calculations when the premises are unphysical, namely the cosmological constant. (But I am a master of diagrammatical solutions of curved space. Take my tutorial!) The lecture was an incentive for me to do more study.

None the less, I must comment on a bias in the discussion by physicists of cosmological data. Here is a link to supernova Ia data and analysis, which shows a very mild departure from empty and flat space - about 5%. This is a philosophically important comparison. Evolution of supernovae and accumulation of graphene dust (a nanotube form recently observed) might yet account for this small departure of 10% from the expected brightness.
http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/sne_cosmology.html

Physicists habitually use Friedmann coordinates for discussion of cosmology. But a point mostly forgotten is that this coordinate system is highly noninertial and artificially curved. Such coordinates invoke fictitious acceleration. By the weak principle of equivalence, fictitious acceleration is the equivalent of fictitious gravity, and thereby the equivalent of fictitious sources of gravity. So declarations of cosmological constants and acceleration of the universe must be adjusted for this bias. (Analysis from data on the cosmological microwave background must also be adjusted.)

So the challenge for me is to analysis the data in inertial coordinates.

The cosmological constant breaks the principle of conservation from mechanics. It also violates the Bianchi identities from differential geometry. (Confusion here comes from another habitual error of physicists - using the wrong tensor rank, or diagram type, to represent physical objects.)

Lets speculate that spacetime is indeed flat, which is fairly close to the evidence. That would require a background source of negative gravity, which is conserved in agreement with the Bianchi identities, and which is sufficient to counterbalance the positive gravity from matter, radiation and dark matter. (Differential geometry has no prohibition on negative gravity.) By the evidence as taken in an inertial coordinate system, the universe fairly closely resembles one which is flying apart with neither acceleration nor deceleration.

The cosmological constant is not needed now, only a conserved background source of gravity. If anything, the universe is decelerating. A simple kinetic understanding of supernovae distances also indicates this deceleration if it is real.

--
Michael J. Burns

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/08/science/08fukuyama.html?pagewanted=all

âoeThe Origin of Political Orderâ, by Professor Francis Fukuyama, seems (to me) to make fundamental points. It is an ongoing struggle to suppress older methods of government: personal vengeance, nepotism, gangs, tribal war gods, graft, bribery and patronage.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/national-affairs/a-history-of-americas-eleven-nations-20111006

âoeAmerican Nationsâ, by Colin Woodard, identifies me as a citizen of Yankeedom, a secular puritan who sees government as a serious contributor to an ideal society. Maybe the nation competing for sovereignty over Grand Rapids is the Midlands, where emotional and intellectual detachment from government is the norm.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/09/14/a_dictators_handbook_for_the_president?page=0,0

âoeThe Dictatorâ(TM)s Handbookâ, by Professors Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith, expounds on the stability of systems other than democracies. President Obamaâ(TM)s inclusive coalition is a fairly fragile accident of history.

--
Michael J. Burns

My Fedora 16 upgrade only allows my Gnome 3 login twice in an hour of trying. It is a legacy home directory originally from Fedora 14 and earlier, then switched to a uid and gid of 1000 from 500 before the upgrade. My XFCE login reports a dbus error. A new test account is allowed.

--
Michael J. Burns

The new tight bunching of neutrinos, at 500 nanoseconds of separation, are a bit too close to be distinguished by uncalibrated Ethernet timers. The specification, as pointed out by AZSquib, is only plus or minus fifty parts per million. Before being reset by the master clock every six tenths of a second, these 100MHz timers could be off by 3000 ticks, or 30000 nanoseconds. Suppose that these timers are fifty times more accurate than the specification, then the maximum error could be 600 nanoseconds.

This consideration is a woeful omission in the error analysis by the original paper. Lets hope that the new results to be announced at the end of the month really are hashed.

--
Michael J. Burns

I studied the published graphs of supernovae Ia brightness versus redshift. So I came to accept that the comparison curve on what is expected in an empty universe is correct. This certainly makes interpretation on the deviations easier. (In Wikipedia the dimming due to redshift is stated incorrectly, so my doubts were not unfounded.) See http://www.pha.jhu.edu/~bfalck/SeminarPres.html#adeptsim

One plausible interpretation is that a few groups of supernovae binned by their redshift are 10% more distant than expected. But simple kinetics interprets that as deceleration of the observer. Cruising away from the starting point at speed gets you more separation than accelerating to speed after the starting point. Slowing to speed after the starting point gets you yet more separation.

Could obscuration by dust, nanofiber carbon produced in mass ejection from stars and accretion disks, increase to 20% and then decline by dilution? Divergent spacial curvature would cause this 20% dimming, but why does that dimming reach a peak? The extended conservation theorems, from the Bianchi identities applied to superluminal sources of gravity, imply that divergent curvature must decrease with time. These Bianchi identities, when used with a hard-fought insight into geometry, rule out any nonconserved version of dark energy.

These supernovae intrinsically vary by 20% due simply to their ragged shape and random orientation. Aboriginal supernovae may be as much as 10% brighter due to their lack of heavy elements. Recent supernovae may be brighter due to their rapid spin and cooler temperature that delay detonation.

--
Michael J. Burns

I have already written on the contradictions involved in electromagnetic radiation from a superluminal source. The best conclusion is that superluminal charges themselves should be defined as unobservable.

But superluminal sources of gravity are not contradictory in their effects, unlike superluminal sources of electromagnetic potential. And their gravitational radiation is shared in only one direction - the direction of travel of the superluminal source. (In higher dimensions, more directions for gravitational radiation are available for sharing. And in two dimensions gravitational radiation is not possible at all, because two dimensions plus time are required to produce it, and another dimension is required to propagate in.)

The questions are: Does this have anything to do with the number of dimensions we experience? And is there an additional uncertainty principle needed to prohibit the communication of contrary observations from a superluminal partner?

--
Michael J. Burns

For this the kudos go to Scott Gray, publishing as AZSquib - see http://blog.vixra.org/2011/09/19/can-neutrinos-be-superluminal/#comment-11088 . It is regrettable that, as quickly as the problem was identified, it was not found sooner, before public attention was expended on the reported results. As discovered by AZSquib, standard issue Ethernet quartz crystals and circuits were used to timestamp event records. These were never calibrated, and their possible variation was not included in the error analysis. Neither the official specification nor the usual accuracy are sufficient for the task of measuring the speed of neutrinos. The experimenters used a master clock, but to no real effect.

--
Michael J. Burns

http://hajoonchang.net/

I watched the talk by Professor Ha-Joon Chang on Book TV just now. I thought that I knew about market failure theory, but he threatens to break the entire theory of a free market in his book, "23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism". He points out that the classical economist, Richardo, wrote in the 19th century that the accumulation of wealth by the landed gentry was insufficient for economic growth. A government policy on investment was an apparent necessity even then.

--
Michael J. Burns

I actually sat down recently to calculate the dimensions of a Kaluza-Klein charge that emulates the charge and mass of an electron. My calculator was a page of penciled equations plus the Unix command line facility, units. I included in this calculation the effects of the internal polarization that I wrote on earlier this year. In doing so, I realized that the push me pull you polarization of a Kaluza-Klein charge is an amplifier of the background Kaluza-Klein field that the charge is subjected to.

The amplification factor was computed to be 5.8e21; my barista was the first to pronounce the number out loud. The rest mass of the Kaluza-Klein components was computed to be (plus and minus) .12 Planck mass, and their radii .24 Planck length.

--
Michael J. Burns

An advanced or efficient civilization most likely makes for a more closely balanced and diverse legislature. This will increase the power of the executive of the government. The President has the remarkable powers of veto and of authorizing debt, not to mention the ability to unleash the Department of Justice. His refusal to make use of these powers marks him as a genuine conservative.

I think that I am not the first to call this behavior avoidant. The President does not wish to pick a fight with father figures (but only with foreign opponents).

--
Michael J. Burns

I am going to try to confirm that the new Linux kernel for Fedora 15 has eliminated my crash on resume for Gnome 3 and the T115D Satellite portable.

--
Michael J. Burns

It's a matter of history. Red Hat, then Pink Tie and Fedora 1, worked fine on my Compaq Armada.

My white box, using a Via chip set with a 64 bit AMD processor, and which was retired in November 2010 after working since the summer of 2006, would only boot cold with Fedora or Windows 2000. I used Knoppix with a hot reboot to use video and the K desktop. But, when Fedora improved and I could download packages conveniently, I abandoned Knoppix and Debian hot rebooting.

Yum updating has the advantages of incremental package updates, and of an extra stage of prechecking installations to avoid certain manual repairs that can be precipitated by apt-get. The yum command line is not perfect though. Some command line options are sometimes needed to work around upgrade conflicts.

I am annoyed at the thought of the new Ubuntu desktop; it's all but proprietary. Gnome 3 is sweet but takes initial study to exploit. I do login to the xfdce desktop often on my Toshiba 11.6", so that problems and overhead with compositing can be avoided. My new black box with an i5 processor exhibits no problems with Fedora 15

--
Michael J. Burns