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Space

Mysterious Feature Appears and Disappears In a Sea On Titan 65

Posted by Soulskill from the interplanetary-game-of-battleship dept.
schwit1 writes: Cassini images taken in 2007, 2013, and 2014 of one of Titan's largest hydrocarbon seas find that a mysterious feature there keeps appearing and disappearing. Quoting: "The mysterious feature, which appears bright in radar images against the dark background of the liquid sea, was first spotted during Cassini's July 2013 Titan flyby. Previous observations showed no sign of bright features in that part of Ligeia Mare. Scientists were perplexed to find the feature had vanished when they looked again, over several months, with low-resolution radar and Cassini's infrared imager. This led some team members to suggest it might have been a transient feature. But during Cassini's flyby on August 21, 2014, the feature was again visible, and its appearance had changed during the 11 months since it was last seen.

Scientists on the radar team are confident that the feature is not an artifact, or flaw, in their data, which would have been one of the simplest explanations. They also do not see evidence that its appearance results from evaporation in the sea, as the overall shoreline of Ligeia Mare has not changed noticeably. The team has suggested the feature could be surface waves, rising bubbles, floating solids, solids suspended just below the surface, or perhaps something more exotic." That the seasons are slowly changing on Titan is probably contributing to the transient nature of this feature.
Space

Are the World's Religions Ready For ET? 534

Posted by Soulskill from the Alf-as-messiah dept.
Science_afficionado writes: At the current rate of discovery, astronomers will have identified more than a million exoplanets by the year 2045. That means, if life is at all common in the Milky Way, astronomers could soon detect it. Realization that the nature of the debate about life on other worlds is about to fundamentally change, lead Vanderbilt astronomer David Weintraub to begin thinking seriously about how people will react to such a discovery. He realized that people's reactions will be heavily influenced by their religious beliefs, so he decided to find out what theologians and leaders from the world's major religions have to say about the matter. The result is a book titled Religions and Extraterrestrial Life, published by Springer this month. He discovered that from Baptists to Buddhists, from Catholics to Mormons, from Islam to the Anglican Communion, religious views on alien life differ widely.

Comment Re:try SLASH (Score 1) 57

by MikeTheGreat (#48028333) Attached to: How To Find the Right Open Source Project To Get Involved With

No worries on the search - I embedded the link to the slashdot stories AND quoted it above :)

I agree that the 24 bit counter was incomprehensible. Apparently it's a standard choice in MySQL, though, which explains why it's an issue - one can just pick 'mediumint' and bam - 24 bit integer.

I'm mystified as to why one would want to do that - does MySQL actually pack the integers in such a way as to use those extra 8 bits for something else? On a 32 bit machine you're going to need to either ignore (zero-pack) those extra 8 bits or else extract whatever you put there before every operation (addition, comparison, etc) that you do.

Anyways - those were good times :)

Comment Re:try SLASH (Score 1) 57

by MikeTheGreat (#48025009) Attached to: How To Find the Right Open Source Project To Get Involved With

16 bits? Dude, that's ridiculous.

Ok, just so everyone else on slashdot will stop laughing at us I looked it up:

http://slashdot.org/story/06/1...

From TFS:

Last night we crossed over 16,777,216 comments in the database. The wise amongst you might note that this number is 2^24, or in MySQLese an unsigned mediumint. Unfortunately, like 5 years ago we changed our primary keys in the comment table to unsigned int (32 bits, or 4.1 billion) but neglected to change the index that handles parents. We're awesome! Fixing is a simple ALTER TABLE statement... but on a table that is 16 million rows long, our system will take 3+ hours to do it, during which time there can be no posting. So today, we're disabling threading and will enable it again later tonight. Sorry for the inconvenience. We shall flog ourselves appropriately. Update: 11/10 12:52 GMT by J : It's fixed.

There we go - a 24 bit index caused the crash :)
Open Source

How To Find the Right Open Source Project To Get Involved With 57

Posted by samzenpus from the get-going dept.
An anonymous reader writes Writing on Opensource.com, Matt Micene shares his thoughts on getting started with an open source project. "I came back from OSCON this year with a new fire to contribute to an open source project. I've been involved in open source for years, but lately I've been more of an enthusiast-evangelist than a hands-on-contributor to an open source community. So, I started some thinking about what to do next. When I was involved in projects before, it was due to a clear progression from user to forum guru to contributor. It's a great path to take but what do you do if you just want to jump into something?" Matt goes on to lay out several steps to help new contributors get started.

Comment Re:Watson is not AI (Score 1) 161

by MikeTheGreat (#47660313) Attached to: New Watson-Style AI Called Viv Seeks To Be the First 'Global Brain'

Back in college I had a professor who said that he was glad he didn't work in AI. Asked to explain further, he said that the definition of "intelligent" is pretty much "a machine can't do it", so as soon as you've got a program that can do something everyone else immediately says "Huh! I always thought that needed intelligence. I guess not!" He then illustrated his opinion by saying that it had previously been thought that you needed intelligence to take the derivative of something, until someone wrote a program to do it.

Obviously, it was an informal, off-the-cuff, and mostly tongue-in-cheek comment, but there's definitely some truth there too.

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