Joss talks...

He chats in an incredibly long interview about scriptwriting, directing, TV, films, and comix. A very interesting piece.
http://www.infocusmag.com/05augustseptember/whedonuncut.htm

Big knowledge and small tribes

We are probably already far beyond the ability of any one person to understand all areas of human knowledge. We nevertheless have a small number of experts, and hope that covers things well enough to keep knowledge manageable. But we have already passed beyond human ability to catalogue all the information we could use, and depend upon computers to do that -- they are no longer a convenience, but a necessity; we require them in order to keep track of what is known. As soon as we realise this, and not just in a detached academic fashion, but in a day-to-day taken-for-granted way, then society will banish a strange constraint that many today are just not aware of. We each work best in a small, tribal, circle of friends, but many situations require us to form large groups in which we are apt to feel lost and isolated. Student class-size is often an example of this. It has been known for a long time that it has regularly far exceeded the optimum number of students. Computers can help if we abandon any pretense that we can control what people learn. We can open up all human knowledge to millions of small tribes, each pushing at the boundaries as they desire. All knowledge being catalogued and coordinated by computers would feed an explosive growth in knowledge.

pioneer puzzle

Anybody see this before? I found out about it through the new Australian science magazine Cosmos. Space.com has a good article on the problem at http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/mystery_monday_041018.html

The two old Pioneer spacecraft 10 and 11 have been heading out of our solar system for the last 34 years in opposite directions, but it turns out that they are not where they "should" be. The calculations are just a tiny bit out -- by about 400,000km, which sounds like a lot to us here on Earth, but out there it is a miniscule compared to the distance they've traveled.

Something is slowing their travel more than expected. What could it be? After posing many possibilities, all but 3 have been investigated and dismissed. Those 3 are:

    • dark matter
    • some other unknown force
    • our understanding of gravity is incomplete

Edit: the list of undiscounted possibilities is greater than those 3 above. See the article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_anomaly for lots more info. Thanks to keithlard.