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Comment Re:Not news in Canada (Score 1) 173

"diesel engines are known for being especially difficult to start in cold."

When I was in the Army in Korea in 1985/86 one of the duties on the duty roster was to start every vehicle in the motor pool every 4 hours and run it for half an hour to keep it warm. Nothing like getting up at 0200 on a Sunday morning to spend an hour in the motor pool.

Submission + - Another One Bites The Dust

Submitted by wiredog
wiredog writes: One of the few remaining blogs from Ye Olden Days of blogging, Dave "I am not making this up" Barry's Blog, is shutting down with the end of Typepad.

Comment I remember buying my first Linux (Score 5, Interesting) 66

by wiredog (#65616220) Attached to: Linux Turns 34

Yes, buying. I lived in Cedar City Utah and first encountered Linux in a RedHat 2.0 beige box at a gaming store in Red Cliffs Mall in St George. Probably in 1994 or 5. Came with a couple of manuals, a boot floppy, and a CD. Had the 0.95 kernel. Getting dial-up configured was interesting since the ISP only knew about Trumpet Winsock... Then leaving it running for a few hours in the evening to update everything.

Within a week I was at the local BN buying O'Reilly books.

Submission + - Another large Black hole in "our" Galaxy (arxiv.org)

Submitted by RockDoctor
RockDoctor writes: A recent paper on ArXiv reports a novel idea about the central regions of "our" galaxy.

Remember the hoopla a few years ago about radio-astronomical observations producing an "image" of our central black hole — or rather, an image of the accretion disc around the black hole — long designated by astronomers as "Sagittarius A*" (or SGR-A*)? If you remember the image published then, one thing should be striking — it's not very symmetrical. If you think about viewing a spinning object, then you'd expect to see something with a "mirror" symmetry plane where we would see the rotation axis (if someone had marked it). If anything, that published image has three bright spots on a fainter ring. And the spots are not even approximately the same brightness.

This paper suggests that the image we see is the result of the light (radio waves) from SGR-A* being "lensed" by another black hole, near (but not quite on) the line of sight between SGR-A* and us. By various modelling approaches, they then refine this idea to a "best-fit" of a black hole with mass around 1000 times the Sun, orbiting between the distance of the closest-observed star to SGR-A* ("S2" — most imaginative name, ever!), and around 10 times that distance. That's far enough to make a strong interaction with "S2" unlikely within the lifetime of S2 before it's accretion onto SGR-A*.)

The region around SGR-A* is crowded. Within 25 parsecs (~80 light years, the distance to Regulus [in the constellation Leo] or Merak [in the Great Bear]) there is around 4 times more mass in several millions of "normal" stars than in the SGR-A* black hole. Finding a large (not "super massive") black hole in such a concentration of matter shouldn't surprise anyone.

This proposed black hole is larger than anything which has been detected by gravitational waves (yet) ; but not immensely larger — only a factor of 15 or so. (The authors also anticipate the "what about these big black holes spiralling together?" question : quote "and the amplitude of gravitational waves generated by the binary black holes is negligible.")

Being so close to SGR-A*, the proposed black hole is likely to be moving rapidly across our line of sight. At the distance of "S2" it's orbital period would be around 26 years (but the "new" black hole is probably further out than than that). Which might be an explanation for some of the variability and "flickering" reported for SGR-A* ever since it's discovery.

As always, more observations are needed. Which, for SGR-A* are frequently being taken, so improving (or ruling out) this explanation should happen fairly quickly. But it's a very interesting, and fun, idea.

Submission + - Surado, formerly Slashdot Japan, is closing at the end of the month. (srad.jp) 1

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: Slashdot Japan was launched on May 28, 2001. On 2025/03/31, it will finally close. Since starting the site separated from the main Slashdot one, and eventually rebranded as "Surado", which was it's Japanese nickname.

Last year the site stopped posting new stories, and was subsequently unable to find a buyer. In a final story announcing the end, many users expressed their sadness and gratitude for all the years of service.

Comment Re:Perfect (Score 1) 54

by Ralph Wiggam (#63322328) Attached to: Spotify Is Testing Playlists That Could Be Unlocked By NFT Holders

It doesn't look like they have. I just spent 3 minutes trying to hear some of the music from this band, or at least learn what kind of music it is. Literally the only thing I can find for free is an M&Ms commercial they made. Asking people to pay money to listen to a band they've never heard before is more than a little insane. But so are crypto nuts, so we'll see.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-N-pFG_oo0

Comment Re:If anyone still thinks... (Score 1) 518

by Ralph Wiggam (#63314083) Attached to: Republican Bill In Idaho Would Make mRNA-Based Vaccination a Crime

I was reading yesterday about how the vast majority of Americans believed that Jane Fonda, after having been given notes from American POWs in Vietnam, handed those notes to their North Vietnamese captors. It was never true, but pro-war Republicans wanted to discredit a leading anti-war celebrity- so they made up a bullshit story about her and repeated it often enough that everyone believed it.

This was before Fox News and before Ronald Reagan. Republicans have always been like that.

Comment Re:If anyone still thinks... (Score 0) 518

by Ralph Wiggam (#63314077) Attached to: Republican Bill In Idaho Would Make mRNA-Based Vaccination a Crime

"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

-Martin Luther King 1963

What you're calling "bigoted prejudice" is really just decent people judging you by the content of your character.

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