Re: Southwest Research Institute in..
...Pebble Boulder, Colorado.
Bravo!
Gas giant cores actually built from shedloads of gravel
New research has lent weight to the idea that the cores of gas giants, such as Saturn and Jupiter, were quickly formed from billions of small pebbles, rather than a smaller number of more substantial rocks over an extended period of time. According to Nature, previous wisdom had it that these planets built up from "a stately …
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Thursday 20th August 2015 22:01 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Southwest Research Institute in..
The Mountain West exists so people in the Southwest have world class skiing (plus you have to put the Mormons somewhere, I keed). Still Boulder was a real funky place during the first dot com. You would see entire suburbs made of people under 30. Those days of early house ownership are long gone today.
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Thursday 20th August 2015 17:51 GMT Ugotta B. Kiddingme
knowledgebase expansion
The rate at which we discover knowledge of the universe (and particularly our little corner of it) is expanding rapidly. (Or perhaps I'm just paying closer attention now but, I don't think it's that.) The scientific gains in the last 50 years seem to be coming faster and faster - whilst simultaneously tending to be more and more profound.
I raise a glass for astroboffins the world over. Thank you.
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Thursday 20th August 2015 18:10 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: knowledgebase expansion
Indeed! and a big aspect is how easy it is to peek into all the dens of boffims and find out what they're boffining away on. When I was a nipper there was Sci Am to look forward to every month for the big bricks and New Scientist for smaller and more topical matters: now I stand under a pressure shower of fascinating stuff.
Let alone open source projects! Once I could delude myself that I was the smart guy in the room (it was a pretty small room...), but now on mailing lists like LLVM not even a myopic narcissist like me can maintain such a delusion. We used to read about luminaries in fabled places like MIT, now we can work with them.
Strangest of all is how quickly I've come to take it all for granted!
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Friday 21st August 2015 14:07 GMT John Mangan
Re: knowledgebase expansion
At least some of that has to be down to the increasing number of brains on the planet unencumbered by slavery, disease, local warlords/chieftains, etc. living in (reasonably) free societies. Now if we could just do the same for those souls struggling on less than $10/day imagine the rise on the resulting curve!
Of course there are those who believe we may get to the point where it takes so long for even a very bright human to get to the cutting edge of even a small area of knowledge that rpogress will effectively stop.
Better hope we have truly intelligent machines before we hit that wall.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
