Posts by Jim McDonald

1) Questions and Answers : Windows : I down loaded Bonic Seti@Home No Autopulse (Message 1214736)
Posted 6 Apr 2012 by Profile Jim McDonald
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Never mind, it started working after about 20 minutes. Thanks.
2) Questions and Answers : Windows : I down loaded Bonic Seti@Home No Autopulse (Message 1214727)
Posted 6 Apr 2012 by Profile Jim McDonald
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Oh, it's letting me post now, wouldn't before.

So I rejoined Seti at home after a couple of years and the screensaver is running normally except that it isn't processing anything. At first there was no screensaver and I tried updating, eventually the screen saver started running with data it says was recorded in Jan 2011 but there is no data being processed. I haven't seen this before, what could be wrong?
3) Message boards : Cafe SETI : Magnetosphere species travellers. (Message 931366)
Posted 6 Sep 2009 by Profile Jim McDonald
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Skidude,

You make some good points but I can't agree with you that a squirrel is not self aware. I see self awareness as a quality that's broadly shared among virtually all life forms, with a kind of volume control that mediates its quantity among various species.

Self awareness is present when an organism seeks its own preservation. This does not have to mean that it plans for college, merely that it realizes to some degree that it's alive and wants to stay that way.

Squirrels are actually a lot closer to humans that most of Earth's organisms because they plan, however haphazardly, for the future on several fronts including food caching and nest building. And they're furiously determined to stay alive.
4) Message boards : SETI@home Science : when will the Universe end? (Message 579097)
Posted 31 May 2007 by Profile Jim McDonald
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I can't recall where I saw this number, but it was apparently set to occur in 11,500,000,000 years. That's over 11 billion years! Rad - that gives me time to make some coffee and watch the headlines on CNN.......

Does that number look at all reasonable, though? I'm using this date as the cornerstone of a project on which I'm working - and would very much appreciate your expert input before I publish the reading material (I'm doing this tomorrow)


EDIT: "collapse" may be the wrong word, but I mean an "irreversible expiration" in any form


thank you, guys!

Since the discovery that the expansion of the universe is accelerating due to dark energy, I don't think collapse is going to happen. The view now is that it will continue to expand faster and faster until galaxies are completely out of sight of each other. Then it's just a dark lonely future until even atoms deteriorate trillions of years from now. Pretty bleak but that's what I've read.
5) Message boards : SETI@home Science : Gravity? (Message 574691)
Posted 24 May 2007 by Profile Jim McDonald
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In addition, if the SUN spontaneously disappeared, the Earth would continue in it's orbit for a further 8 minutes attracted to an object which is no longer there.



haha that's excellent! How long do you think we'd survive if this were to happen? What would be the timeline of events once our eight minutes were up? You think hiding in bed with a Thermos of coffee would do the trick! hehe



I would guess that we would all be dead within seconds since there would be worldwide earthquakes running into 15 or higher on the richter scare and massive volcanoe eruptions. And the very few that survives that will freeze to death in another hour as temperatures plumet below -100celcius.


After the 8+ minutes it takes for Earth to not feel the sun's gravity, it would probably just start traveling in a straight line at a tangent from its last position in orbit. Agreed on the temperature plummeting, but I don't see why there would be earthquakes and volcano eruptions. I think it would be smooth motion. It would still be rotating but no more dawns.
6) Message boards : SETI@home Science : How do you 'go' in space? (Message 571161)
Posted 19 May 2007 by Profile Jim McDonald
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Trying to adapt humans to a space environment is not a good thing.
Adapt the space environment to that suitable for humans, and it would solve a lot of long term problems.
As in the film 2010, rotate the habitational modules to simulate 1G.
And yes, I know it would cost a lot.

I'm not sure adapting to life in space is a bad thing. I read an article from Stanford University that said that the human heart should last at least 400 years but it wears out in 1/4 of that time pumping against Earth's gravity.

Then there's the question of bones. The only function of the solid part is to hold us up against gravity but they break too easily. They would be useless in space and in fact start disappearing after a short time in zero gravity, which tells me the body would happily adapt.

Gravity keeps handicapped people like Stephen Hawking in wheelchairs, locks us into a two dimensional existence on the planet's surface and unforgiveably makes breasts sag.

I think living in zero gravity would be a major advantage. The big problem is adapting to radiation.
7) Message boards : SETI@home Science : Drake Equation Revisited (Message 552296)
Posted 24 Apr 2007 by Profile Jim McDonald
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A planet needs to be massive enough to hold on to the gases in its atmosphere, and the closer it is to its star the more massive it has to be.

This is a little off the subject but I've often wondered if toward the end of the formation of the sun, the inner planets, especially Mercury, might have actually been gas giants. Mercury is the densest planet in the solar system and could have captured a lot of the gas that was falling toward the sun.

It makes sense that the closer a planet is to its star, the more gas would be available to it during the formation of its solar system. Then when the early sun started radiating - a lot more furiously than it does today - the inner planet atmospheres would be largely blown away toward the outer solar system. Maybe what once was Mercury's is now Jupiter's, leaving Mercury a bare little nut of nearly solid iron.
8) Message boards : SETI@home Science : Heavy reliance on ETI'S to help us detect them? (Message 516173)
Posted 11 Feb 2007 by Profile Jim McDonald
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What if ET is doing the same thing we are and keeping silent on 1.42ghz? For the same reasons we are. To study the cosmos and to listen for other life. Would be kinda ironic.

yes an interesting idea. Reading this it struck me that perhaps once or twice a year we should send a powerful signal on this frequency and see what happens One or Two Hundred Years down the line lol:-)

If we transmitted once or twice a year and they did receive it, it would probably wind up in the anamoly bucket like the strong signals we receive just once.
9) Message boards : Politics : Darwin Day: A Dialog between Science and Religion (Message 515676)
Posted 10 Feb 2007 by Profile Jim McDonald
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Central to this inspired grass-roots movement to honor Darwin is the notion that deeply held religious convictions and respect for the advancements of science can co-exist.

They dont have to look past Einstein to find an example of this.
10) Message boards : SETI@home Science : Questions and still no answers (Message 514529)
Posted 7 Feb 2007 by Profile Jim McDonald
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The correct answer is 42.
11) Message boards : Politics : Religious Thread [9] - CLOSED (Message 514003)
Posted 6 Feb 2007 by Profile Jim McDonald
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I read the thread. Who in their right mind would give these scrolls to the vatican ? Thays like putting ME in charge of the mint. They might change the words of Jesus? Good ! lets learn. Who knows, maybe he wasn't blond with blue eyes. When the bible was written, nobody was alive that knew anybody that was alive at the time of Jesus. Where did all the quotes come from?

I've heard a theory that the Christmas story was basically just made up in an attempt to convert some of the remaining Pagans to Christianity around 300AD. They picked December 25 to hold a big celebration so it would be remembered instead of the Pagan celebration of the winter solstice a few days earlier. It seems plausable because Christianity was largely based on the death of Jesus, not his birth, so why would the details of his birth be known in such detail in a primitive world after 300 years?
12) Message boards : Cafe SETI : PAY ATTENTION PLEASE (Message 513557)
Posted 5 Feb 2007 by Profile Jim McDonald
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I was in China a year ago this month and was thoroughly impressed with what I saw in Shanghai. Of course that city is a showplace for China but there's an openness that would have been impossible 20 years ago. A lot of happy prosperous people and more Buicks there than in Seattle. Plus Seattle would fit in a small corner of Shanghai and be totally hidden behind square miles of skyscrapers. I think there's much less difference between the mainland and Taiwan than there once was. Maybe they will grow closer together naturally without any strongarm politics.

Tibet is a different story. No doubt the Dahlai Lama would like to see the back of them and I hope he does.

Also it's not surprising Margaret wasn't able to access Wikipedia. The government still exercises control over access to knowledge and that's just one site that's blocked. But it's slowly changing.
13) Message boards : Politics : Fun with Global Warming - Part Deux! (Message 512098)
Posted 2 Feb 2007 by Profile Jim McDonald
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Good grief, we're doomed!

The bird embryo uses up all the resources and space in its shell, then it either hatches or dies.

Humanity needs to either hatch into space, spread out and find new places to live, or accept the consequences.

The 20th century saw the world population increase from 1 billion to 6 billion. The tools of war went from guns and TNT to more than a dozen countries with nuclear weapons. Thousands of species went extinct. There was unparalleled damage to the climate. What will the world be like at the end of the 21st century?

I sympathize with conservationists and all the people trying to correct the situation but I think it's just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.


14) Message boards : Politics : Fun with Global Warming - Part Deux! (Message 511442)
Posted 1 Feb 2007 by Profile Jim McDonald
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Science by Bush at ThinkProgress.org

Bush Administration Has Pressured Half Of Gov’t Scientists To Downplay Global Warming

A new report presented to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee by the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Government Accountability Project shows 435 instances in which the Bush administration interfered into the global warming work of government scientists over the past five years. Some other findings of the survey:

– 46 percent of government scientists “personally experienced pressure to eliminate the words ‘climate change,’ ‘global warming,’ or other similar terms from a variety of communications.”

– 46 percent “perceived or personally experienced new or unusual administrative requirements that impair climate-related work.”

– 38 percent “perceived or personally experienced the disappearance or unusual delay of websites, reports, or other science-based materials relating to climate.”

– 25 percent “perceived or personally experienced situations in which scientists have actively objected to, resigned from, or removed themselves from a project because of pressure to change scientific findings.”

James Hansen, the government’s top global warming researcher, has also revealed that the Bush administration tried to prevent him from speaking freely about global warming to the media. In 2004, the administration also had a requirement that “NASA press officers listened in whenever NASA scientists spoke with reporters, either on the telephone or in person.”
15) Message boards : SETI@home Science : Arecibo searches at the 1.42 mhz...why? (Message 508883)
Posted 26 Jan 2007 by Profile Jim McDonald
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Actually it's 1.42 GHz - 1,000 times higher than 1.42 MHz
16) Message boards : SETI@home Science : Is the existence of life limited only to planets? (Message 505227)
Posted 19 Jan 2007 by Profile Jim McDonald
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I would say fluids rather than liquids are necessary for life. Fluids include liquids, but also gas, plasma and certain solids (like glass) that flow but very very slowly. It's the mixing that's necessary, as alphax says, to stir up life (well, in my opinion anyway). The other factor is time but there's been plenty of that. Seems to me that life could form in a gas, like Jupiter's atmosphere. I've also wondered about the possibility of life in a plasma -- not something we would be likely to recognize if so, and its scale and perception of time could be radically different from our own.

Radiation doesn't necessarily mean life can't form. Earth is exposed to an amount of internal radioactivity and external radiation that we can tolerate because we evolved here... light and heat are radiation, we get showered with energetic particles from cosmic rays colliding with molecules in the upper atmosphere, soil has occasional uranium atoms, and radon escapes into the atmosphere from the crust and below. A life form that manages to appear in any environment would be at least somewhat tolerant of that environment by definition. We don't have any idea of the upper limit of life's survivability because we're only aware of life on Earth.
17) Message boards : Politics : Religious Thread [9] - CLOSED (Message 502183)
Posted 13 Jan 2007 by Profile Jim McDonald
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A burning question about sin...

There is no question that the preacher in question is not sane. To my view the only cogent question is if he should suffer the death penalty or be imprisoned for the rest of his life. It will come as no surprise to many that I prefer the death penalty in this situation.

If sanity is the range of ordinary human behavior, I don't think anybody ever kills anybody while sane. Even in cases of self defense or in wartime, people have to be worked up to an unnatural state (i.e. momentarily not sane) to kill. When they do it without cause as this preacher did, thinking he was Jesus, it can only be because his brain or its content is defective.

If a school bus had defective brakes and killed some kids, would it be declared sane enough to stand trial and hauled into court? I don't see the difference between defective brakes and a defective brain. Certainly murderers have to be taken off the streets, but executing them is simply pointless vengeance. Don't most religions have proscriptions against vengeance?

Execution is beyond punishment. People are punished to correct their behavior. Murder isn't just ultra-naughty behavior, it's always insanity -- even when murderers are put to death.

One thing I think as a Society we have to consider is the person that commits a crime while 'insane' and then BECOMES 'sane' while incarcerated and gets set free. SHOULD the person be set free? How can we KNOW that the person is now really 'sane' and will never commit that crime again?

Setting them free is a whole different subject. Society has to be protected but execution just repeats the murder that produced it.
18) Message boards : Politics : Religious Thread [9] - CLOSED (Message 502132)
Posted 13 Jan 2007 by Profile Jim McDonald
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A burning question about sin...

There is no question that the preacher in question is not sane. To my view the only cogent question is if he should suffer the death penalty or be imprisoned for the rest of his life. It will come as no surprise to many that I prefer the death penalty in this situation.

If sanity is the range of ordinary human behavior, I don't think anybody ever kills anybody while sane. Even in cases of self defense or in wartime, people have to be worked up to an unnatural state (i.e. momentarily not sane) to kill. When they do it without cause as this preacher did, thinking he was Jesus, it can only be because his brain or its content is defective.

If a school bus had defective brakes and killed some kids, would it be declared sane enough to stand trial and hauled into court? I don't see the difference between defective brakes and a defective brain. Certainly murderers have to be taken off the streets, but executing them is simply pointless vengeance. Don't most religions have proscriptions against vengeance?

Execution is beyond punishment. People are punished to correct their behavior. Murder isn't just ultra-naughty behavior, it's always insanity -- even when murderers are put to death.
19) Message boards : SETI@home Science : Interesting thought on life in the universe... (Message 501579)
Posted 12 Jan 2007 by Profile Jim McDonald
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The Drake equation seems to assume that intelligent life will also stay on the originating planet. How many civilisations will spread to other planets..adapting the environment there to suit them then perhaps go on to seed other civilisations or intelligent life? From what I understand about life is it is quite catching. ( I know there are lots of theories abounding that life on this planet may have actually started out elsewhere).

Spreading out is really the best way to ensure the survival of any species. Animals confined to a small area on this planet, or civilizations on a single planet, guarantees that the species will be wiped out eventually. Technological societies would recognize this and presumably do something about it. Colonizing Mars looks to be our first step but the effort has been kind of feeble so far.
20) Message boards : SETI@home Science : Problem regarding distances in the Universe. (Message 499960)
Posted 9 Jan 2007 by Profile Jim McDonald
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I think it is interesting about these stars that "dim" from time to time. I wonder is this a sign that they may have planets that are orbiting them.

The brightening and dimming of Cepheids happens because they expand and contract in a regular cycle, not because of planets passing in front of them. Cepheids are large stars and much more luminous than the sun. The dimming effect of a planet passing in front of a star is a great deal less than the change in brightness of Cepheids. Too bad, it would make finding planets a lot easier if it were true because there are a lot of known Cepheids.


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