Posts Made By: Paul Kammueller

"you are JUST having too much fun on this forum"

Well it's a lot easier to follow than the "good & evil" thread on the P&R&P forum. How do you keep up with that? It's a rat maze over there!
:-)

3 problems:

1) coma (distortion away from center of field) increases dramatically at very low f/ratios. It can be dealt with with a coma corrector, or can be mitigated somewhat by very expensive eyepieces -- in either case it basically takes money.

2) fussy collimation -- f-ratios this fast are pretty unforgiving of collimation/alignment errors, you need to be right on the money here to get real diffraction-limited performance.

3) Mirror quality / expense -- it is much harder to grind a good parabola at f/3.5 than, say, f/5-f/8 -- much deeper curve, lot more parabolic correcting to be done -- and thus, a lot more opportunity for error, or more effort required to achieve perfection.

"Even if the Bible is 100% correct"

As a factual matter, it is not possible for the Bible to be 100% correct. The gospels do not even agree amongst themselves upon as fundamental a fact as Jesus' geneaology or the number of generations from Kind David to him. Clearly there are errors present.

There are mutual conflicts in principle between various books of course, too. Many quote the apostle Paul to illustrate the importance of grace over the virtue of one's works in life, which puts him at odds with the writings of other disciples where it is shown in no uncertain terms that one's works in life do matter when one is ultimately judged.

By treating the Bible as God's only known truth one is in fact putting a great deal of faith in a group of men (authors of the various books), not God per se.

Okay, Mr. Free-and-Clear HomeOwner Smartypants. ;-)

A mortgage is something that young non-wealthy people need to get a roof over their head without being enslaved to rent inflation the rest of their lives. Got our first mortgage 6 years ago, a 15-year at 7.375% and it seemed a good deal at the time.

Refinanced to a 30-year a couple years later along with some other, erm, lifestyle adjustments, to free up cash flow so my wife could stay home with our new baby girl. We're still a one-income household, so going back to a 15-year amort isn't really do-able yet but 20 years is.

"If your nervous over just one days events, you should not be playing."

No one gets nervous from one days events. It is merely the larger context in which that day occurs that makes one nervous. ;-)

Nasdaq's peek over the red line has fallen back and is yet to be confirmed by either the S&P500 or the Nasdaq100. What is really odd is that the Naz100 isn't even close to the Nasdaq Comp in this regard. I'll try to post a chart illustrating it when I have a chance. This may be in part due to multiple stock de-listings putting an upward 'survivorship bias' on the Nasdaq comp causing it to advance more than a fixed-stock index. Below is the S&P500:

Very interesting hypothesis, Vincent. Wonder if anyone's ever researched anything like this?

Do you ever wonder if flood myths are vestigeal memories of rising sea levels and disappearing coastlines after the end of the ice age? It happened, after all, 'only' 10,000 years ago, recent enough to be closer to the beginnings of civilized history than we are. Granted it didn't happen overnight but over a series of generations a lot of the most well-populated and well-used land would have gone underwater. There was even an article recently (wish I could find it again) discussing new paleogeologic data indicating that a sizeable part of this rise (like 70 feet or 70 meters or something) might have happened in less than 200 years.

The old ones would point down into the bay and talk of how their grandfathers' village was 'down there' below where the water is now. Their children would take these stories and start talking of 'before' and 'after' the water rose, later generations would start speaking of it as 'the flood', growing the story and characters into epic proportions...

Very nice! What's that base made of? Looks like granite? That's kind of going overkill on the vibration-reduction thing.

You're full of fascinating ideas. I've wondered about the possibility of collective unconscious memories like this.

The brain is a fascinating structure, and to be sure the mammalian brain has the capacity for hardwired memories if there is information sufficiently important to be made "permanent". We often call this hardwiring 'instinct'.

For our tiny, hairy forbears, living for eons trying to stay out from underfoot of the giant lizards, it is not too great a leap to consider that fear of reptiles might be important enough to become 'hardwired' into mammalian brains much as knowledge of how to eat, drink, breathe, mate, etc. is to some extent. Built-in fear of fire is another example for many animals.

"How come there is no questioning against
other religous beliefs such as Islam, or buddism, or confucism, or hinduism"

Because there are no Muslims, Buddhists, Confucians or Hindus present here to argue with. Having a discussion with no opposing representative makes for a rather boring debate.

Discussions here frequently center on various Christian vs. non-religious because, frankly, that's the representation here.

As I recall (I once owned one of these) I think this thing uses a 3.1" secondary which is pretty proper for this size & focal ratio scope, but uses an overly-large and oddly-shaped secondary holder. Yes the support bar is thick on those babies.

I would recommend replacing with a thinner more classical 3-vane or 4-vane spider from Novak or similar. You'll have more diffraction spikes but they will be *much* dimmer than the big bright line you see running through stars right now. If you don't like spikes at all you could get a 3-vane curved spider from 1800 Destiny or something similar.