Posts Made By: jess tauber

I have a question regarding air currents above primary mirrors created by heating and/or cooling the primary. How much visual distortion will there be during warmup/cooldown and is it severe for very low power views? Will the effect be different depending on the aperture of the mirror (I already figure that the thickness will make a difference).

I'm assuming an open structure so that tube currents will be minimal. Thanks.

Best regards
Jess Tauber

By now you've heard about Chief Justice Roberts' little run-in with mortality. One can but hope he takes it as a *sign* (risking cross-category posting here....), but most likely such signs are for the other guys, and one can simply explain it all away as a manifestation of a merely physical nature- kinda like the low batteries in Vice President Palpitine's 'heart device'. Hmmm- that must explain it.

Hope they got the messages, though... Can't wait for '08!

Jess 'Ben, Why didn't you TELL ME??!!!' Tauber

You see, Lord Voldemort has returned! er, sorry, wrong forum. I MEANT to write that in today's Yahoo News was this little story about how religious physicians are no more likely to serve poor patients than those evil atheist doctors, you know, the ones that sacrifice fetuses to the altar of Science? See:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/doctors_religion_dc

Hmmm- what can this possibly mean? No pay, no play? What happened to public service in the name of Whomever? If you haven't saved, you won't be (at least in the fleshly sense)? I guess the only *real* insurance you'll need in that case is You-Know-Who (not the one mentioned at the top ).

Jess Tauber

Perhaps I missed something here. Haven't visited the eyepieces forum for a while, tried to go back to review some earlier threads but they seem to have been 'gutted'. And with apologies to J.K.Rowling, all the guttings seem to involve You-Know-Who. After a parting of the ways, or the destruction of the last horcrux, is there no way to archive what may be valuable insights and spells of the bansheed? Ancient Pharoahs often effaced as many traces of their predecessors as possible- must the bathwater be thrown out with the baby? Curses!!!! :S

Jess Tauber

Last night ended up cloudy so I ended up watching old Spencer Tracy movies on TV. The second was Inherit the Wind, about the 1925 Scopes Trial (I figured Scopes..AM, ).

So anyway....this dramatization was a bit on the extreme side, heavy on the notion that somehow unleashing religious prejudices by ignorant townspeople would bring back Middle Ages-style repression of free thought, and reinforcing the idea that southern country bumpkins feel that northern city folk are the ones responsible for the decline of morality.

Doesn't sound like much has changed since this movie came out 47 years ago. I wonder, though, whether this merely reflects the fact that cities tend to have centers of learning and also attract those who eschew traditional lifestyles or manners of thought- scientists, artists, performers, and so on. There would thus always be a sort of tension between such centers and the more traditional regions, and not just in the marketplace of ideas- city life also tends to be a bit less 'nice', or intimate (except when economics makes people live like sardines in a can). Almost a left (city) versus right (country) brain thing, with all that would entail- including technical versus social mindsets, with the former more interested in whether ideas actually make technology work better, versus the latter more interested in whether ideas make society work better, or seem to (in theory or practice).

Thus Christianity and Darwinism really wouldn't be the deepest issues at all- just particular configurations of more basic notions, though their protagonists might not realize this. Throughout the ages the faiths and philosophies, and creation myths, keep changing, but the city/country polarization would remain, in all its guises.

It would have been fascinating then to see whether similar 'battles' existed in earlier societies outside the Judeo-Christian-Roman framework, or whether the scale of development (chiefdoms, city-states, empires) made a difference in the degree of polarization, given the depth of hierarchicalization or stratification and specialization, and raw numbers of persons (and their ideas) involved.

Does it all boil down to a contest between 'less filling' and 'tastes great'?

Jess 'Deep Thought' Tauber

Taking a break from the 'life from scratch' bickering, it occurred to me, based on a couple of science fiction pieces I'd seen or read over the years, that religion might be a factor in alien encounters. ET might have his own belief system, which, given his superior brains and technology, social system, and so forth, he might deign to share with us lowly earthers.

It could go both ways, though- we could one day make planetfall on some dustball where the folks are still sacrificing their yunguns to Shmootzik the god of fire and left-tentacle-ness. Government appointed clergy on our ships debark and begin proselytizing, while the more practical crew try to figure out ways to enslave or murder the populace, otherwise take their land, culture, and faith away from them.

We here in 2007 have trouble accepting even slight variations of the same theme religionwise- how do you think that TRULY ALIEN points of view, in their cosmologies and faiths, would impact humanity, or would we have to be blasted into submission first? This of course assumes that they'll let us live at all. But heck, we only have our own examples from the last couple of thousand years to go by, right?

Jess 'Ever Hopeful' Tauber

So we've done the aliens to death. Here's a question for you re Tard(i)s- if you had a machine that could travel back into the past, what religious event would you wanna actually witness. And, would you want to be just one more face in the crowd or actually participate? Dinosaurs don't count, despite some recent Christian museum displays.

Jess Tauber

Have you heard the latest about the sudden collapse of honeybee populations in the US, which is surely going to cause problems with growers of many of our favorite food crops and perhaps lead us to even greater dependency on foreign sources (who might not be using safe pesticides or procedures- witness the recent spate of discoveries about what is coming out of the PRC)?

It seems that because of the problems caused to hives by the varroa mite the US Government in 2004 (we know who that must *bee*....) authorized the lifting of a ban preventing the importation of bees from Australia, a ban that has *been* in place since 1922. 1922!

Another brilliant idea (from on high?) of the current administration! Unfortunately, the Australian bees imported into the US carried a virus (which THEY are immune to) which has spread like wildfire through hives all across the country- leading to a shocking decline in numbers- entire hives simply vanish in days.

Talk about regime change! This sound eerily familiar?

The Bush administration has been notoriously anti-science, putting its faith in faith rather than the wisdom of the experts other administrations relied upon, putting religiously and politically motivated cronies with little or no actual knowledge of the fields they were being sent to monitor in charge of them.

Well boys and girls out there who still think that Bush is great will have to pay the price, literally, along with the rest of us. It isn't enough that energy prices have soared. It isn't enough that our military resources are being ground into dust, and that our national debt is going to be hanging around our necks for another generation- now it is going to affect what you can eat and how much you are going to pay for it too, not to mention the possible safety issues (another area that the geniuses in the White House don't think really matters to Haliburton and friends).

This time the decisions of this President and his friends are literally going to fly around and sting you on the [moderator snip].

Jess Tauber

Creation: The original Faith-Based Initiative?
Noah's Flood: The Surge?
Exodus: No Child Left Behind?
And on the seventh day HE rested: Mission Accomplished?
The Last Supper: Bring It On.

Jess Tauber

Expanding the scope here, as it were (SF aperture fever?).

What was your favorite SF BOOK or TV SERIES?

TV series- Dr. Who (though a lot of the stuff late in the original sucked wind). EXTERMINATE!

TV miniseries- the newer Dune, Children of Dune. Much more intelligent than the Italian Dune movie. I liked most of Herbert's books as well. Very ahead of its time. His son's stuff not so much.

Books- Ender's Game and so on, Blood Music, that whole Shrike/webworld thing. Simple-minded but I like em- the Ringworld series, and the Mote in God's Eye series.

Jess Tauber