Click here to support the Daily Grail for as little as $US1 per month on Patreon

News Briefs 17-09-2010

By Grail-seekeron

More raw novelty from the post-geographical age.

Thanks to Greg, RPJ

Quote of the Day:

There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.

George Orwell

Grail-seeker
Related

9 Comments

  1. 10,000
    10,000 birds crash into twin towers of light.

    Wow, that’s beautiful. Must have been a real enlightening experience XD I hope those birds didn’t wear themselves out too much, bet some of ’em went into orbit after that trip. I wonder if the people around there could hear them chirping or not.

    Hunting for farts on Mars.

    lol

    1. birds and tall buildings
      I hear sometimes about the problems caused by tall buildings with lots of glass for birds.

      Also I have seen birds fly into ground floor windows and ground floor walls. Some of them just don’t pay attention to where they are going.

    1. Lost me RPJ
      Frat boys are typically known for loud obnoxious parties where lots of alcohol is consumed.

      Tea-bagging is a derogitory term applied to an activity of homosexual males.

      What does that have to do with spray on clothing?

      ASM

      1. Pranks
        Well ASM, it just occurred to me that to have a spray can of a substance that produces some kind of cloth when applied to the skin, could be the source of endless pranks and practical jokes… if it fell in the wrong hands >:)

        Yes, I know: I scare myself sometimes.

  3. pioneer
    The wikipedia article on the Pioneer Anomaly is quite interesting.

    Apparently some other spacecraft could be showing the same effects, but measurements are not accurate enough to confirm this. Fortunately for the speculative mind, the measurements are not accurate enough to deny the effect either.

    Remembering the recent reports about (small) uncertainties in the gravitational constant, I quickly put 0.2 and 0.2 together to get 0.4000000000000000222:

    Gravitation does not always propagate at the rate of c. Just as light does not always propagate at the rate of c, the propagation of gravity depends on what it is propagating through.

    What further evidence do I have for this? None.
    Why do I then believe that this is true? I don’t.

    However, for the technologically attuned people who always trust their computers to the finest detail, this little program usually shows you that 0.2 + 0.2 is indeed something other than 0.4:

    #include

    int
    main (int argc, char *argv[])
    {
    double t1,t2;
    double ts;
    t1 = 0.2;
    t2 = 0.2;
    ts = t1 + t2;

    printf (“t1 %20.10lf t2 %20.10lf sum %20.20lfn”, t1, t2, ts);

    }

      1. circular
        As far as I understand that model, gravity is the effect of mass on spacetime geometry. So if mass distribution changes, then spacetime geometry will change. This change supposedly propagates at some speed. It does this supposedly at the speed of light in vacuum, regardless of what is between the mass-distribution change and the other places of interest.

        So in other words, the gravity component of the sun that we are observing at this moment is not due to the mass distribution of the sun right now, but as it was about 8 minutes ago, and in the direction of where it was 8 minutes ago.

        The same should be true of the rest of the masses in the universe.

        This is really hard to measure, because the distribution of mass doesn’t change very much. It’s hard to destroy an appreciable amount of mass and live to measure the effects of that. Also it’s hard to move appreciable mass around quickly.

        Because measuring the propagation speed is so difficult, it is much easier to speculate about it 🙂

        But seriously, how do we know if there are effects of exotic stuff like dark matter on the propagation?

        1. from the Right-Round-Spinning-Round-Right-Round-Dept.
          Thank you for the explanation, there.

          That is one of the things that has always confuzzled me. Take the solar system — here we have several massive bodies that are going around a very massive body via ‘gravity’. Ok, their orbits seem to be predictable. If the gravity from the sun takes time to reach the planets, wouldn’t gravity have to travel faster than the speed of light because the planets aren’t careening out of control as they wait for the next gravity effect to come?

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Mobile menu - fractal