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Bomb threats, clear thoughts, and planetary rotation How to phone in a bomb threat and not be charged with a crime: Claim to be a "psychic. I rather hope this tactic doesn't catch on. Jeff Duntemann says some nice things about my brief rantings on March 21 about clear thinking and the importance of knowing what words mean. Some of the material is from basic epistemology and philosophy of language. Because philosophy is the study of hard problems , far too many students come away from Philosophy with the impression that nothing is really known about anything, and confusion reigns supreme.

Not so. For thousands of years, philosophers have been making real progress on important issues. This doesn't mean the newest ideas are always right, but, particularly in grappling with issues of science and artificial intelligence, philosophers really have come to understand some things more clearly than in the past.

A good criterion for judging philosophers is that progress is localized. Anyone who comes along with a Complete Grand Theory of Everything is likely to be wrong or even nonsensical. But a well-informed person who announces progress on a clearly defined issue - such as a specific point of logic or metaphysics - is worth listening to. Finally, one last astronomical picture from last night's session: This is a copyrighted image. Please contact me for permission to republish it.

Jupiter rotates nearly 40 degrees in one hour. Here, south is up, and everything is moving to the left. Melody and Cathy want me to make an animation of the planet rotating, by imaging it every ten minutes for several hours. That will require a night of very steady temperatures so that the steadiness of the air doesn't change a great deal from one image to the next.

Otherwise you might get to see Jupiter turning and also going in and out of focus! The outdoor temperature was about the same as indoors, so I was able to take the telescope right outside and use it almost immediately, without waiting for temperature stabilization.

This was a nearly painless 4-hour process. That is, it does not appear to be descended from XP. That may be superficial, or there may have been a fork in the Windows family tree.

Note that there is no server edition of XP. Everything works very much the same, but security has been tightened up. Right now, Remote Desktop Administration which was very restricted already doesn't work; something about needing a certificate for L2TP access.

However, our VPN works. I'll sort this out on Monday. Windows Server does not burn CDs. To get it to do so, you have to install CD-burning software and also enable a service that is, by default, disabled. Normally, people don't burn CDs on servers anyhow, but it would have been nice if the Windows XP CD-burner had been included even if disabled by default.

Read about it here. I'm told that when an elephant feels it must kill a human being - generally a human who has tormented and mistreated it for a long time - the elephant prefers to perform the execution in front of as large an audience as possible.

That's what happened here. And then, since in Valdosta had no gun that would kill an elephant, a tragicomedy ensued as the beast was pursued out of town and eventually dispatched and buried.

Its bones are probably about to be dug up in a new real estate development. I will not call Valdosta a "sleepy little town. Tifton is a very sleepy little town. Clyattville is a nearly comatose little town. But Valdosta - since or so - has been the catch-all for everything in the southern half of Georgia that is a little too odd for the rest of the region.

I'm proud to be a Valdostan, but also a little puzzled by my heritage sometimes. I have a new astronomy gadget coming, a Meade Lunar-Planetary Imager. It comes with software actually designed for what we're doing with it, which will be a welcome relief.

This product has been getting mixed reviews , so I'm a little apprehensive. But some of the reviewers' disappointment seems misdirected. If the USB cable is too short, simply get another one. And if the field is the same as a 6mm eyepiece which is reasonable , then sure enough, the face of Jupiter will not fill the picture; that's not a defect. The bottom line seems to be that it isn't "you press the button, we do the rest.

Astrophotography wouldn't be fun if it were reduced to snapshots. Christian mathematicians? Another busy day. At noon I gave a talk on "Christianity and the History of Mathematics" actually a rerun of a talk given to a faculty group in , which is why the web version of it looks so scruffy; I lost the file and had to scan it in. If that interests you, see also D.

Knuth 's recent book, Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About a defense of his Christian faith; not very deep theology, but at least he's telling us where he stands. Revising notes about Python I didn't have time to write a notebook entry today, but I did write this and revise this. Janet Mattei and the variable stars Dr. A variable star is a star whose brightness varies. Some are predictable; some are irregular; and some are not known to be variable at all until someone notices a change.

Mattei's death. It did, however, end with the tag line: "We have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night" -- Grace Taylor, Self-written epitaph. This is actually an allusion to a poem by Sarah Williams which you can read here and is also the epitaph of astronomer John Brashear. I met Dr. Mattei only briefly a few years ago and am not an avid variable star observer.

But variable star observing is probably the most fruitful way amateurs contribute to astronomical science. You might think the big professional observatories see everything worth observing.

Many scientifically interesting variable stars are seldom observed at all. Since , the AAVSO has done a remarkable job of coordinating volunteer observations of variable stars. Millions of data points have been collected, and it is the AAVSO, not the large observatory, that supplies most data about variable stars to scientific researchers.

Useful work requires only binoculars , though a telescope helps. Mostly, you need time and dedication. This notebook is now getting about 30 hits per day in addition to my own which are numerous; besides checking that it looks right, I look up my own notes surprisingly often. Arguably, this notebook is just a way of bamboozling Google into helping me organize my own notes!

Advanced placement can backfire An observation based on several recent experiences advising students: Advanced placement can backfire. Take a student who's doing well, and keep promoting him into harder courses, and eventually he'll end up in something for which he's not adequately prepared.

You can rise to your level of incompetence in school as well as in business. And when people rise to their level of incompetence, if they're lucky, they get frustrated.

That is a sign of sanity. The alternative is something deadly: some people get accustomed to not knowing what they're doing. When helping students who are in over their heads, I almost always find that they don't realize how long they've been lost.

They got lost so long ago that they don't know what it's like to understand things clearly - or don't believe it's possible in an advanced course. Speaking of students with difficulties, here's a heuristic to dispel confusion about almost anything: Do you know what the words mean? Can you define every word in what you're reading? If not, go back and find out what the words mean. The older I get, the more I use a dictionary, because I can't stand being left in the dark.

Beware of what I call purely syntactic thinking , where you can rearrange words and sound intelligent without really knowing what the words mean. Some people get through college doing just this. Sometimes they say things that make sense without knowing it.

They may be able to regurgitate other people's knowledge, and even rearrange it so it sounds original, all the while not understanding their own words. Dilbert 's boss is an example; he might demand "object-oriented technology" and even get it, but he can't tell you what it is.

More about that motherboard: Why did it go bzzt! The answer has to do with how a PC starts up. As soon as you turn a motherboard on, it reads and executes a machine-language program the boot code stored in the BIOS chip on the motherboard itself. The first part of this program requires no memory other than the CPU registers, and it can perform no input or output except for making pops, beeps, and buzzes in the PC's internal speaker.

As it starts up, the boot code looks around for the memory and the other input-output devices. If it finds itself in serious distress, it makes various funny noises in the speaker, then places an error code on the system bus, then stops. If it's happy, it makes a brief beep in the speaker, goes and tests the memory, goes and finds the video card, and starts displaying information on the screen.

This is where you get the Dell logo that pops up on the screen or, on my home computer, the Covington Innovations logo ; the invitation to "press F2 for setup;" and so on. Finally the boot code reads the first sector of the disk drive and transfers control to the program that resides there.

The term boot comes from the old expression pull yourself up by your own bootstraps because the purpose of the boot code is to make the computer start itself up. The first one is the "raw" image after Registax has selected and stacked the best video frames, but before any deblurring. The second one is a heavily processed image that looks like a trained observer's drawing of Jupiter. The detail in it is real, but shown with much more contrast than in real life.

The processing consists of bandpass filtering to emphasize detail of a certain size while de-emphasizing features that are both smaller and larger. Thus you get to pick out the components of the image that are near your telescope's limit of resolution, while discarding both graininess and overall blur. Bandpass filtering is a boon to planetary imaging. It works especially well with images of the Moon, where the original detail is known to be very crisp. With Jupiter, sometimes you can't distinguish real features which are inherently blurry and cloud-like from processing artifacts.

The overprocessed Jupiter image shows some streaks at the right, concentric with the edge, which are in fact "echoes" of the edge. The great motherboard replacement was a complete success. Presently, the server sits in my office, so the lab technicians and I cleared off my desk, parts of which had not been exposed in years, to use as an operating table.

We sprayed anti-static spray all over the carpet and used it like furniture polish on the desktop which is fake wood. Then we laid down paper towels paper generates much less static electricity than plastic , solemnly shut down the server, laid it on the desk, and opened it up. During the operation I wore an anti-static wristband connected most of the time to the chassis of the computer.

After we got the old motherboard out and put it down on the table, I connected my wrist strap to the grounding tabs on both the old and the new motherboards, then carefully transferred the memory, CPU, and heat sink, adding a dab of heat sink grease.

Then we put everything back together and tried to get it going. But all we could get was "bzzt! More careful checking of work Problem found: A memory module loose in its socket.

After carefully securing all the memory modules, we got the computer working without further ado. Windows Server did not even notice that the motherboard had been changed. We use Windows drive mirroring, and for reasons known only to itself, the server insisted on spending its first few hours resynchronizing the mirror images of its disks. This kept the CPU busy, and for a while it made me think we had a virus. From a motherboard?

Viruses can't do that But there were no other problems. We confirmed that, indeed, the plastic is cracked on the fan connector, and that's the only problem. We're sending it back to Dell with a note to that effect. If you replace a motherboard with one that is different from the original, you have to do a "repair installation" of Windows in order to regenerate the HAL Hardware Abstraction Layer.

For some reason Windows XP is by far the messiest of the three, unless as I rather suspect the Windows technique would work equally well in XP. We didn't have to do any of this.

Next week we convert to Windows Server Stay tuned for news! Here's a rather good picture of Jupiter that I took last night around p. The tactic is to record about a minute of video frames at 5 fps , then let the computer pick out the best frames, automatically align and stack them, and finally under manual control bandpass-filter the image to bring out details.

I use the video recording software that came with the ToUCam, but it is crash-prone and I need to look at alternatives. The processing is done with Registax 2. I could have filtered it more heavily to make it look more like an observer's drawing of Jupiter, but I preferred a picture that looks like Jupiter itself. Even so, the contrast is enhanced. If you were actually flying by Jupiter in a spaceship, you would see lots of detail, but it would be low-contrast, like the features that you see on clouds in our own atmosphere.

More on the Dell motherboard replacement tomorrow. I should clarify that they gave us the new motherboard under warranty; we have to give the old one back; and the only reason we got to do the replacement ourselves is that the campus electronic shop, which is a Dell repair facility, is familiar with our lab and our capabilities. Almost hit by an asteroid As often happens, we were almost hit by an asteroid today. The only difference is, this time we knew about it.

This one would not have done major damage to the earth; it might have burned up entirely before impact. My main worry about asteroids is not the big, rare ones that could wipe us out with very low but uncertain probability ; it's the medium-small ones that might be mistaken for military action if they hit Earth.

A correspondent in China wrote to say that the Pythagorean Theorem should not be called by that name because someone in China discovered it before Pythagoras did. I knew that, but I still call it the Pythagorean Theorem because Pythagoras made it famous, and because that's what it is normally called in our language. If someone were to prove that Pythagoras had not known about it after all, I would not want to call it by his name, but that's different.

Likewise I call the planets by their Roman names even though the Babylonians identified them long before the Romans. After seeing my March 15 entry , Dell insisted on giving us a new motherboard. I get to put it in tomorrow. More news then. Feast day of St. Patrick of Ireland Everybody knows the Irish wear green and have parades on March 17 and this web page wears green too, in honor of Melody's Irish ancestry , but how much do you actually know about the man who brought Christianity to Ireland around A.

Click here for some particulars. Though his story has certainly been embellished by tradition, the basic facts are well attested. One of the curious prejudices of modern times is that nothing is really known about the Middle Ages.

Plenty of records from that time survive, and they were made by people with brains just like ours. In St. Patrick's case we even have his brief autobiography " Confession ". Although Patrick is more or less identified with Irish Catholicism, Protestants are quick to point out that nothing in his Confession is particularly Roman; the Reformation and even the Great Schism were far in the future, and St. Patrick was simply an early Christian.

In case you're wondering, the modern, married archbishop mentioned in the first link is Anglican. An even more detailed - but perhaps more embellished - account of St. Patrick is here. Miscellanea The question whether Pluto is a planet is even more muddled now that a similar-sized object, tentatively named Sedna, has been discovered at 3 times Pluto's distance, in a highly eccentric off-centered elliptical orbit.

Pluto's orbit is also noticeably eccentric smaller than Neptune's at the small end , and Pluto is much more like the Kuiper belt asteroids than like the gas-giant planets. My vote? Demote Pluto; go back to recognizing as planets only the 8 objects that are in nearly circular orbits and are comparable in size to their neighbors. See also the discoverers' web page Sedna is magnitude There are 2 possible resolutions for this problem Resolution 1 - Deselect the Sparse file systems do not support more than 2TB, so you cannot use a Data container larger than 2TB on There are 3 possible res No action is required.

There are two possible reasons for this condition: 1. A compulsory component of a participating VSS writer was not Try BackupAssist No cost, unlimited 30 day free trial. All rights reserved. Toggle navigation. Reseller Login. Double check the username and password which BackupAssist is using to authenticate with the FTP server.

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