1. It is a balloon. Not even the people who fly these for a living call them spacecraft. Says WikiP: "A spacecraft is a craft or machine designed for spaceflight." This thing popped when it rose above too much atmosphere. It was not designed for space. It was still in the stratosphere when it failed according to design.

2. The Karman line is the generally accepted edge of space at 100 km (62.5 mi). This is where an aircraft would have to fly so fast to get lift from the thin air that it would achieve orbital velocity in the attempt and so wings would be superfluous. The US has awarded astronaut wings to pilots flying above 50 miles. This doesn't change the objective criteria of the Karman line.

3. The CSXT GoFast achieved space altitude (72 miles) on May 17 2004 and is the only unmanned civilian craft to do so to date. It was designed for a flight profile carrying it into space and so was a spacecraft. As was SpaceShip One, the only civilian manned spacecraft to date.

4. Reaction Research Society hit 50 miles in 1996. Hunstville L5 passed this 19 mile mark, but was ballooned launched and so not entirely spacecraft.

5. No amateur spacecraft made from off the shelf or home made components has achieved even a 50K ft altitude according to Tripoli records. With Tripoli and the National Association of Rocketry's recent facing down ATFE over the definition of 'explosives', the FAA et al. is redefining amateur rocketry to include power up to 200,000 lb-ft sec and a concominant (and easily achieved with this power) 93 mile altitude. Most motors in this range are "experimental" ie. home made, but there are a few commercially available motors that can be staged and/or clustered for this power, the 152mm dia + 96" Loki Research P motor at 80kN-sec each being the largest you can currently put on your credit card. 11 of these will put you just under the FAA's proposed limit. 12, and you have to apply to NASA's office of space transportation for a permit. Expect an amateur spacecraft to make the flight, because now it's a matter of qualifying for the license and buying the parts.
 

"From The Earth" is rather prosaic when you compare it to 3 dimensions. Look at any constellation from the side. The distances are usually much greater than the apparent angular separation as seen from Earth. It makes it quite obvious that 'constellation' is as synonymous with 'illusion' as it is with anything else. But from the side you can see that some groupings hold, such as the majority of Taurus. Most of it is an open cluster, so of course things won't change much in 50K years, the members are moving together through the sky on parallel paths. And it's the cluster that's moving more than the local stars, so the one "moving" in these pictures is really just getting passed by.

Earth's (Sol's) location as it moves affects these, but not as much as its position over a much longer time scale, like 250M years. In that time you can see the milky way wash up and down the sky a few times, like a huge wave. Seen from outside the galaxy, it's obvious why. The sun and the local group of stars in traveling around the galactic center, but the orbit swings back and forth through the galactic plane two and a half times as it oscillates it way around the center. We'll lose almost all the constellations at the peaks because we'll be outside the populated arms.

All this makes 50K years from one viewpoint rather humdrum. It also suggests an answer to one of the SETI questions, why aren't they here. If technical and traveling civilizations exist in the numbers supposed, and they wanted to go to other stars, they would probably want to go to those they know would be in the neighborhood for some time. Among the last they would consider visiting would be a small group of tiny stars, none greater than 8.5 absolute magnitude, that used to belong to another galaxy ripped to shreds by this one and on a trajectory taking them out of the plane of the majority of stars. For half the next 50 million years they'll be more isolated than the present 90% of the way out from the center position. And on each pass-through more and more of these interlopers will be captured by the galactic arms, so who can say where they'll end up, IF they slow down and hang around. They could get thrown out of their own grouping entirely and end up hovering around in the galactic halo too far from anyplace to be accessible (relatively). So why go to those, when there's thousands times more stable members of the galactic arms? All that disruption makes it unlikely there's any life on those tiny galactic fast-walkers anyway.

But if we did happen to get thrown out of the local group's obit and outside the galaxy, no more constellations then. Instead we'd have the entire galaxy all on one side, in one hemisphere of the sky. With a view like that, who needs constellations?
 

This is a very common topic in social psychology experiments. Many that are published fall prey to an error of calling the example selected most to be 'attractive'. It's more correct to say that the most common answer is the most common opinion of attractiveness. In the press to prove their point, they ignore the fact that a less common answer is also an opinion of attractiveness, just to fewer people. Just because more guys like the hard, bony ones with corners so sharp they bruise you and threaten to poke holes in the water bed doesn't mean some don't consider the softer, more squeezable ones to be attractive.

And while you're getting your 'fat chick' jokes ready to throw, keep in mind that the less likely a guy is to get a girl at all, the more likely he is to adopt an attractiveness standard in line with the majority (so he can lie as much as possible) but to an even greater degree (so he can better lies than the other guys do do). He might as well claim that's his preference since he's not likely to get any sort, and will take advantage of any chance to toss his artificial preference out for others to see, expecting them to take his preference as a history. Yes, there's an awful lot of this attractiveness research done, and only some of it tends to reach erroneous conclusions.
 

feh, spoiled brats. Got it all handed to you.

In the century before that one, we didn't even have a browser add on. All we had was View Source and a text editor. We had to edit the page's code by hand. And then, we couldn't shoot anything at the web page -- all we could do was throw rocks at our monitors. And THEN we had to edit the page's code from MEMORY. It was tough, but we were better for it.

I tell ya, you kids got it easy. Browser add ons and asteroids and hemeroids and enemas and NURSE! NURSE, WHERE'S MY SNACK? AND WHERE'S MY CAPS LOCK? oh there it is. Was I saying something?

The last time I caught Plait living up to his marketing gimmick, it was also about asteroids. He fell into the common trap of starting with the descriptive statistic (an asteroid of X size has hit every Y years on average) and assuming the predictive (last one hit Z years ago so the next one is due in Y - Z years). He should know better. These objects are independent. One has nothing to do with another (unless the happen to bump each other). If one hits today, the next may hit in a billion years or tomorrow. While you *can* make an average out of X events in Y years, it tells you nothing that can be used for anything.

This time it has to do with reporting science vs. reporting news. This NEW system has found one object that its calculations suggest something about. How accurate and precise is it? That can be estimated but can't be proven without replication and comparison with other instruments. And apparently if it has been, they haven't arrived at the same conclusion. This rock does not appear in the SENTRY data as displayed on NASA's NEO Program impact risk tables, not even as an only recently observed object, as of 27 Sept. It's not among the objects removed from the list either, so the teams contributing to SENTRY haven't seen it or the data associated in order to check the validity of the instrument, much less the claims. Things are not as PANStarrs says, or they're making claims without corroboration.

There *is* an object with a 5.5% chance of impact in 2095 -- 2010 RF12. But it's a whopping 7 meters diameter. And having been observed for a whole 3 days, that probability is extremely likely to fall drastically. That one object kicks the total cumulative impact probability up over 2% for the next century, but only for now. The cumulative will probably fall right back to the 1.5% before this object appeared.

But as for 2010 ST3, nowhere to be found. Real astronomers should know better than to announce something from a new instrument as though it's a conclusion. At best they have a data set for the SENTRY people to check over and verify their measurements. Other real astronomers should call out the ones who make such claims. Bad astronomers, masquerading as bad science writers, obviously would rather pretend to refute some aspects of the implications without bothering to talk about things like validity, replication and responsible reporting.

The brain already does this itself. It's called neural plasticity. If they brain can do it, it will. If it can't, sticking wires into it and applying shocks and other intrusions and insults is not going to make it happen. Not properly anyway.

TFA is about neural jumper cables that can focus on only the signals they want, bypass damage and send the signal to another location. Fine idea except you kill the target quickly. But it specifically states "artificially". That makes the stuff about guiding axonal growth complete bullshit.

Neural connection is guided by glial cells, which are half the brain. If a region is damaged, both kinds of cells are damaged -- there's nothing to guide the growth of neural cells which are also damaged anyway. If you stimulate growth without the guiding mechanism, the cells form a tangle called a neuroma. The best outcome would be no result. Such neuromas caused by severed nerves, such as in amputations ('stump neuromas') are one of the causes of phantom limb pain. Neuromas in the cortex may not cause pain, but if they produce any result other than none, it'll be wrong and potentially interfering with function in the undamaged areas. Plus, stimulating growth where it can't happen properly is an excellent way to stimulate excessive, unguided, pathological growth -- tumors.

That's not a humorous article at all. Someone has leaked the instruction manual that those cheesy word weasels use when they have to do something more than simply rewrite a press release.

I suspect there's an addendum that says "Get someone to chop out a chunk of your main point, add a title that makes it sound like the hypothetical being tested by the research has already been proven and then some. For instance, if a physicist posits a theory that the space-time continuum is comprised of many dimensions with at least one other time-like dimension besides ours, then give it a title like "Time Runs Both Directions At The Same Time". Then submit it to Slashdot."

I've used recurrence plot analysis and surrogate data testing for this. Both are more suited to time series analysis, but can be used with any data. In principle these examine compressibility, and any form of compression could be adapted and give you a yes/no), but these give you meaningful statistical analyses (if yes, then how much). Be aware that your random isn't rally, and so will give you a non-zero result. But you'll get very close to the same very small result, whereas with surrogate it'll be different and some data set will acutually improve with scrambling. But you should bw ablew to trell yes/no ns how diferent dfrom random

"We are inundated with warnings that social media is systematically stripping away our privacy."

We are inundated with hair-on-fire cliches being used to preface a forced association between someone's inconsequential issue and some hot button topics and trigger words, in order to convince us that the association is valid and the issue is significant. Needing to use these is a good sign that the ensuing issue is too insubstantial to stand on its own.

Fear, uncertainty and uh-huh.

"...that will capture stuff..."

I've got one of those. It's called a keyboard, but its primary function seems to be to capture stuff. Cookie crumbs, coffee spills, cigarette ashes...

Does anyone else find the prospect of running Windows on a window to be a bit surreal? What's next, wearable computers so you could have a Macintosh on your rain coat?

"I'm a college physics professor."

Then your job is to teach physics, not to insure that everyone who gets a grade from you earns it honestly. Your students' job is to learn. If they decide to do a poor job of it, it's their loss. Stop wasting the time that should go to your job, chasing around after security issues. Let them use anything they want.

Then write your final exam so that rather than solving problems, they instead have to state how they would set up the problem to solve it. No need for devices, thus no devices allowed.

For a long time children were the future. Last week it was self-powered parts. Now, algae. Elsewhere we find the future is variously Africa, robots, iPad, intelligence and Ashton Kucher. All of them THE future. Maybe I'm old fashioned but I'd rather stick with the traditional future comprised of the indefinite span of time that has not yet occurred.

You are what you eat: pond scum.

> How can I prove it's not me?

You don't. You can't without producing the culprit and proof they did it.

You sue for wrongful termination. Then it's up to them to go on the defense and try to prove that you did it. They can't, they lose, you gain, they pay your lawyer.

You say you're not terminated yet? If you are, your reputation is shot, so you do it pre-emptively, based on suspension and the fact that you're facing a shiny new right-to-work law (actually, a right-to-fire-for-no-reason) in Indiana with the assumption THEY will use it to finish the termination. Check out badforindiana.org and see if they have recommendations for a lawyer.

Don't defend yourself, don't just fight back. They're firing a warning shot so fire back point blank with both barrels.

Worried about the job should you win? Or whether you'd even want to stay? An untenable employment situation after an action like this is common. So you make your settlement be that they continue to pay you or else accept an injunction preventing them from firing you (even after r-t-w passes) without going before the judge and justifying it. And, make their continuing to pay you apply to termination by either party. Thus, they'll want to keep you happy (and you'd have to show just cause to leave without foregoing the settlement money).

Kick ass, or they will walk all over you.

There's little worse than speaking for someone without their permission. Doing so while inventing a problem to solve for them is worse. So's presenting as evidence an unpublished, unreviewed "paper".

The "nascent space tourism industry" presently consists of Virgin Galactic and a handful of sites wanting to be spaceports. The Rutan Clan has been doing fine so far, and landing sites don't need it. ITAR goods are too expensive, unnecessary, and frequently overly complex in and of themselves as well as with respect to the subsystems that feed and operate them.

And just what class of, um, entities makes a habit of speaking for others? Lawyers. Guess what. TFA is a sales pitch for what he wants people to need him for.

Discovery "News" scoops the field with this exercise in weasel words. No science was harmed in the making of this story. And besides, the pig might learn to fly.

> and generally provides a dynamic environment
> for advantageous life forms.

Well of course. It's well known that following any global scale catastrophe there's a surge in speciation. Turns out this happens because the environment is dynamic, rather than the old scientists' wives tale about a few survivors taking over the available niches since pretty much everything else that might have been competition was wiped out.