Forgot your password?


Comment: Re:Question (Score 1) 128


If it exhausted its "nuclear fuel," how could it explode?

When they say the fuel is "exhausted", what they really mean is that there is no longer enough to maintain an equilibrium with gravity. There is still a lot left. As gravity sucks down the remaining fuel it increases the pressure, heating it up enough for a big fusion reaction.

Comment: Re:Quintessential classic military sci-fi book? (Score 3, Insightful) 732

by invid (#45349239) Attached to: Movie Review: <em>Ender's Game</em>
Ender's Game is a fanciful allegory, a forced, fictional situation someone would come up with in a classroom in order to made some sort of philosophical point about ethics. I personally wasn't in the military, but a good friend of mine was in Special Forces, and everyone in his unit read Starship Troopers and would quote from it and even use its terminology in the performance of their profession. Ender's Game is as much about war as Swordfish is about hacking.

Comment: Re:Have they considiered... (Score 2) 293

by invid (#45284905) Attached to: Most Sensitive Detector Yet Fails To Find Any Signs of Dark Matter

You say "it's there, we've detected it" -- isn't that not strictly true? I mean, aren't their theories (MoND) that could potentially explain things w/o Dark Matter. Not saying they're likely, just that as I understand it they aren't completely ruled out....or am I wrong?

You're technically correct. We've detected something or some phenomenon, and there are theories that can explain that something without dark matter, but like you said, they're not likely. Perhaps I was a little too dismissive of the fringe theories. Without direct evidence of what it is, all we really have is Occam's razor.

Comment: Re:Have they considiered... (Score 5, Interesting) 293

by invid (#45284505) Attached to: Most Sensitive Detector Yet Fails To Find Any Signs of Dark Matter

Comment: Re:Talent is 90% desire (Score 2) 251

by invid (#45280919) Attached to: Root of Maths Genius Sought

I believe that for the most part, people don't have a "natural" talent for what they are good at -- instead, they have a strong desire for it, which makes the many hours of work they put in seem more like fun than work..

Is the "strong desire" for particular things genetic? For instance, programming is fun for me, and was fun the first time I tried it. But I know many people who consider it some kind of punishment.

Comment: Re:Packed together tightly is misleading (Score 2) 54

by invid (#45278739) Attached to: Astronomers Detect Planetary System Similar To Our Own

However, quite a few of the exoplanets I have been reading about do orbit their star pretty closely (although I would say I haven't even looked at 5% of the 1000 exoplanets out there).

It is easier to detect planets with tight orbits because you don't have to look at it very long to see that there is a planet. For an alien to detect Earth, they would have to observe Sol for a year. For them to detect Jupiter, they would have to observe Sol for 12 years.

You've been Berkeley'ed!