And I guess that means Andromeda isn't our twin anymore.

I'm quite pleased this thread hasn't descended into a Milky Way Barred candy pun cascade yet. It's quite sweet really.

Welcome to my universe, people. Mind your feet.

In said speech, said recipient at one point said: "a solar system is bigger than a galaxy. Or is it the other way around? I can never remember."

Afterwards, this being a banquet, I thanked said speechifier for that passage. "I'm assuming, as a former Astronomy professor, that this was a clever joke about academics and the 'Two Cultures' hypothesis, and alluding to Sherlock Holmes telling an astonished Watson that he didn't know if the Earth revolved around the Sun or vice versa, and didn't care unless it was germane to a case...?"

"Oh, right," came the awkward reply. "A joke. Yes. Of course..."

It's been known that the Milky Way was a barred sprial for quite some time, but all the observations were radio based. Getting IR imagery confirming it (and indicating the bar is longer than we thought) is a win, though.

Remember, also, that were on a collision course with M31. So, you've got about 3 billion years to get your affairs in order and get out before a few hundred million stars come storming through the gates.

Clearly you aren't familiar with the broad outlines of PNAG. But then, so many people are still part of the carbon-based community.

But if we're in a similar cloud of stars at the outer arms of our galaxy, then why isn't there more light running around? Why do we have night at all? After all, if those clumpings of stars can make big light clouds from across the far reaches of space, then why are the close reaches so dark?

I know there has to be a relatively simple explanation for this, but my brain isn't really up to figuring it out. Anybody know?

Ah, that reminds me of my mechanics professor, who was very good but had a thick Russian accent. On the first day of class, he was discussing coordinate transformations, and he said, "And then you get . . . a magic lambda!" My friends and I, in our first upper-level physics course, dutifully wrote "magic lambda" in our notes. It wasn't until after class that someone realized that he had meant matrix lambda . . . which was pretty sad, considering that we had been dealing with matrices throughout the lecture.

PiscusFiche, far-off galaxies appear to have "clouds" of light because they are so far away that we cannot resolve individual stars in a distant galaxy (the exception is Andromeda, and the brightest stars in the Virgo cluster). So even though the outer regions of galaxies are relatively sparsely populated, those stars appear as a faint cloud of light in observations.

LOL.

One of my Computer Science profs (IRRC, he was from Armenia) was putting forth a logic puzzle in which people in a small village "had only one Babar, and nobody saves themselves, so they are all saved by Babar. So, who saves Babar if he cannot save himself?"

We all stared at each other blankly, and he repeated the puzzle, astonished that we were so slow. By the third repetition, someone realized he was saying "shaved by the barber."

Personally, I preferred the image of Babar the Redeemer.

You can see this by looking at the Andromeda Galaxy with the naked eye on a clear, dark night; you can see it, and it's close enough that it extends over a visible area, but it doesn't look like the pictures.

The short answer is that, because the universe is both expanding and not infinitely old, a good deal of the light just hasn't gotten here yet.

Good analysis here, with some equations (though it's comprehensible without them):

And then there's this, which is a nice example of what an energetic mind can do when it is compeletely unclouded by facts or understanding. He's got a book for sale, too. (It's a little scary that this came up just a couple of googleslots below the U. Oregon piece.)

He finally solved the problem by writing both words on the board at the beginning of each lecture and pointing to one or the other. Like I said, he was a pretty good teacher.

They don't work during daytime because every morning Fenris eats them. Then each evening he gets Grumbly Tummy, and out pop the dark stars, no worse for wear.

The One True Faith holds that someday Iams will introduce a new line of Premium Fenris Kibble, and on that day, all will be dark forever. Or at least until Ilmarinen forges a new Sampo.

On the topic of this thread: The Andromeda Galaxy and the Milky Way go into a pub and order two pints. "Here's yours", says the barman to the Andromeda galaxy, "but I'm not serving him, he's barred".

This, amongst other things, goes so far as to deny the coming Fimbulwinter by insisting that heat will always pass from the that which is hotter to that which is colder, when we of the one true Faith know that it is cold which moves, and indeed passes from that which is colder to that which hotter. Precisely the reverse!

The passing of Flu rather than Cold is, of course, still a matter of intense theological debate.

1. You can't win.
2. You can't even break even.
3. You can't get out of the game.

. . . a very wide variety of philosophies, by no means all of them secular, have already assimilated it, at least for what happens here on Middle-Earth.*

*Or, to borrow another illustration, "while the bird is flying through the rafters and thinks the whole world's warm and smells like le Spam de le sanglier roti."

...well, when Obelix threatens you with a Menhir then you put what he says into your industrially processed meats.

Umm, what were we talking about again? Oh, barred spiral galaxies. Tasty, tasty, fried in boar-fat, barred spiral galaxies. Mmmmmmmmmm.

Sorry, I need to go eat.

Dark. That was a silly question. Light Milky Ways pale in comparision.

And does the Bar at the Center of the Galaxy serve pan-galactic gargle blasters?

It better.

And no, I feel no need to appolygize.

Stars are just efficient darkon annihilators.

You ask: "What goes faster than light?"
I know, sure as day follows night.
It's the inverse of spark,
that old demon Dark,
It always gets there first, alright?

Stars are just efficient darkon annihilators.

Are you sure about that now? Even on a starry night, it's dark out.

(Before I'd read any of your explanations, my brain got busy in that half hour before drifting off to sleep, and decided that it thought the reason was similar to how we can see electron clouds in microscopes but the individual electrons are hard to pull out. The brain didn't get any further than that, being distracted by a shiny dream involving the launch of the Apollo space craft and Paris Hilton's dog, Tinkerbell, doing backflips. In the same dream!)

(And has anyone else noticed how Atom's aliens resemble Clangers. How many filkers with electric guitars does it need to achieve Warp Speed?)

Why is there always some yahoo willing to roll it in batter and bath it in hot oil? It's like some sick American fetish.

Never had any, mind you, but I've heard of them.

"Why not?"

"You're barred!"

Frying batter is a grain meal/flour with a liquid to hold it together; using eggs as the liquid (which is optional) will give it some cholesterol, but not much, unless the coating is the consistency of spackle. The main problem, however, is that most home cooks -- and way too many restaurants -- don't get the oil hot enough to begin with, and then put in too much food, causing the temperature to drop sharply. The coating doesn't harden, allowing it to soak up lots of greas, and the e extra time it takes to get back to browning temperature allows even more saturation. With an overly thick coating, you're both spending a lot of effort just cooking the crumbs and providing more absorbency for grease.

Indeed, the entire point of an immersion fryer is that it contains a large volume of oil in comparison to the food, so the temp loss is reduced, and since it cooks on all sides at once, the cooking time is at a minimum. There's also a steam-pressure effect, where the water at the food's surface flashes to steam and pushes back at the oil -- which, as you might expect, doesn't last forever.

Okay, Alton Brown act over. Maybe I can make some of you my ale-battered walleye one of these days.

And, of course, you end up there on Karaoke night, and some tone-deaf lush gets up and mangles Bryan Adams' "Summer of '69," which is ironic if only because, looking at him, you wouldn't think he was born until at least a decade later.
(yeah, I was that guy the other week. What? Somebody's got to be him)

I need to start hanging out at better bars.

Fried ice cream is good but still a steady diet of it will probably kill you, like most things.

Now for a recipe:

soak chicken bits in sake.

role in tempura mix or potato starch (yes I know)

fry.

As for the galaxy I think it's much more pretty now.

I would be happy to eat your deep-fried walleye, if you and I are ever in the same place and have access to a deep-fryer and the fish.

I can make apple cakelings for dessert.

... Hoping not to derail this charming, galactic, thread into some Bush love-fest - but that goes without saying.

No, the current Bush admin - especially the Department of Defense - are clearly kzin. Because, obviously, they always tend to attack before they're quite ready.

See press statements like:
Look, plant-eater, you go to war with the attack horde you have, not the attack horde you want.

A formal challenge is unnecessary. You scream and you leap.

They send *others* into battle, leading from behind.

In Bush's case, from somewhere behind a bunch of brush down on the ranch. Gotta clear that brush and git on with your life, you know.

(Aside: Did Niven have a *clue* about animal behavior when he made up those aliens? I'd rather deal with a "ferocious carnivore" cougar or wolf than a "cowardly" vegetarian bull. One of my best friends is an 80 lb. carnivore.)

Somewhere between 60 and 80 percent of spiral galaxies have a bar of some kind, though it's not always dramatically big or strong. So the Milky Way is really pretty typical in this respect.

Strong evidence for a bar in the Milky Way goes back at least ten years, including infrared data from the COBE satellite. Estimates of its size and orientation have differed significantly, though.

Of course, these new results probably are a step up from what's gone before. A preprint of the actual paper can be found here:

http://xxx.arXiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0508325

-- Peter

I propose we begin referring to Bush as "Hindmost."

They send *others* into battle, leading from behind.

Yeah, but the Puppeteers were also really smart, subtle, pro-science, and excellent at long-term planning.

I'd rather deal with a "ferocious carnivore" cougar or wolf than a "cowardly" vegetarian bull.

Well, the effect is slightly different if it's a ferocious carnivorous tiger contrasted with a cowardly vegetarian mule deer, and sentience is added to the mix. Which is a little bit closer to Kzinti and Puppeteers, IMHO.

Parallels with any present-day follies, I leave as an exercise for the reader....

I think the deep fried lettuce would be very good in a tempura batter say.

As Mike says -- the secret is the temperature of the oil

MKK

This has always bothered me about reports of experiments on the foundations of quantum mechanics: results that are intuitively weird, but simply predictable from quantum mechanics, are commonly reported as if they were unexplained anomalies.

Also, you make the good point that it's often press releases from the scientists' own organization that cause the trouble. The journalists are just repeating what they read. Granted, it may reveal a lack of willingness to talk to primary sources, but the PR office really ought to do better in the first place.

`... mostly they remembered that it was a delight to hear the voice speaking, all that it said seemed wise and reasonable, and desire awoke in them by swift agreement to seem wise themselves. When others spoke they seemed harsh and uncouth by contrast; and if they gainsaid the voice, anger was kindled in the hearts of those under the spell... For many the sound of the voice alone was enough to hold them enthralled... But none were unmoved; none rejected its pleas and its commands without an effort of mind and will, so long as its master had control of it.'

Bush is at the other end of that scale of elocutionary brilliance. Bush the Stumble-Tongued.

(I can't talk, really: I'm far worse than Bush, stammering in a robotic high-pitched monotone.)

Oddities of learning.

The Army, in its infinite wisdom made it possible (incumbent even) for me to study Russian, and gain some small fluency.

It was an interesting year. In the course of it I learned my teachers' English was worse than it at first appeared, though as our Russian got more fluent this mattered less, and how to hear things which previously hadn't existed.

There is a sound in Russian, the soft-L, which is fleeting, and basically invisble to the untrained mouth (until one can pronounce it, one cannot truly hear it).

On a different note, when I was in high school I was on the campus paper (James Monroe High School, the Paper was "The Doctrine"), and there were three staff-members named "Terry".

The staff learned to pronounce the name three, slightly, different ways, and we to hear them. Which meant only the right Terry would answer.

Until someone who wasn't a staff member would come into the chaos of the room and ask, "Is there a Terry here?" and get three heads swivelling to look, and saying yes.

TK

For those who belong to the Cult of the Shrub,

if they gainsaid the voice, anger was kindled in the hearts of those under the spell... For many the sound of the voice alone was enough to hold them enthralled...

this part at least is pretty accurate. Completely baffling to those of us not under the spell, but true nonetheless.

We called our Moons For Goons, the spiritual kin of Rocks For Jocks.

Sacrifice enough freshly deflowered black goats to M'Hup-Tep, the Thousand-eyed Beast of a Thousand Spindoctors, and luck will go your way too. For a while.

It does make a mess of the ranch though; "clearing brush" is Bush-speak for covering up blood orgy evidence.

This presumes that the "69" in the title and the song refers to the year... Adams is, I believe, on record as saying that that's an incorrect assumption. (I leave it to your imagination as to what he says it really refers to.)

The late Mark M. Keller (who taught bio) was very sarcastic about Niven's alleged biology. He was especially scathing about the idea of non-sentients (i.e., female Kzinti) raising sentients.

If it refers to anything but the year, the phrasing is so badly strained it makes the song WORSE than it already is.

First Church of Jesus Christ, Elephant?

Hark! The quark! Wilson Laboratory hosts first-ever poet-in-residence, By Franklin Crawford

David Cassel, Cornell physics professor and associate director of Wilson Laboratory, shows Bridget Meeds, the lab's new poet-in-residence, the synchrotron's vacuum status panel in the facility's control room. Charles Harrington/University Photography

POETRY FOR PHYSICISTS

About a year ago, while conducting Rutherford Backscattering Spectroscopy experiments in the 2 MEV Van de Graff Accelerator Lab, I was seized by a startling revelation. I am sure that I will look back on the insight as the happiest thought of my life. "What," I wondered to myself, bathed in the soft green glow from the controlling terminal, "would it be like if words meant things?" I was caught off guard. For in such an imaginary world, one could use words to say things that meant something! Emotions could be captured, laughter could be preservered, and thought could be expressed! I quickly recorded this profound discovery in my lab notebook before it had a chance to fade from my mind. The proof of my theorem was trivial in one and two dimensions, but I had a hard time extending it to the twenty-four dimensions in which we live. It wasn't until 6:00 AM the next morning that I realized the magnitude of what I had discovered. I had discovered the New Conservative Literature.