Re: Astronomically Bad Jokes (Or good)
Posted: Mon Mar 04, 2013 12:39 am
Oh Yeah, me too!!
APOD and General Astronomy Discussion Forum
https://asterisk.apod.com/
geckzilla wrote:
saturno2 wrote:In my area, they met face to face on a narrow sidewalk, a great politician
and a great writer.
Great politician said: I do not give way to stupids.
Great writer stepped aside and said: Well, I do
saturno2 wrote:In my area, they met face to face on a narrow sidewalk, a great politician
and a great writer.
Great politician said: I do not give way to stupids.
Great writer stepped aside and said: Well, I do
emc wrote:coffee helps us write faster… making caffeine a “participle accelerator”
bystander wrote:
Interstellar Memes (2013 May 15)
http://metro.co.uk/2013/05/08/mother-that-bark-on-the-fire-is-spitting-up-ashes-what-cavemen-really-talked-about-3715676/ wrote:
‘Mother, that bark on the fire is spitting up ashes’
What cavemen really talked about [15,000 years ago]
Metro News, Wednesday 8 May 2013 6:00 am<<For while we may like to think that the words which come out of our mouth have evolved from a series of indecipherable grunts to the erudite banter we spout today, the truth could be rather different. Research from the University of Reading, published this week in US scientific journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), indicates that our ancestors weren’t quite as monosyllabic as first thought. Using a series of statistical models which examine the frequency with which certain words are used and their role in speech, those behind the study were able to predict which phrases were used at the time of the last ice age.Click to play embedded YouTube video.Wootson - 15000 Light-years
They claim that people living in southern Europe and central Asia 15,000 years ago would have used words such as ‘I’, ‘thou’, ‘you’, ‘who’, ‘we’ and ‘not’. More interestingly, words such as ‘mother’, ‘bark’, ‘fire’, ‘ashes’, ‘spit’ and ‘worm’ were also part of their vocabulary. In all, 23 words were identified, as the research identified a linguistic super-family tree made up of the seven major language families of Eurasia, including Indo-European, which comprises tongues such as English and Spanish. These ‘ultraconserved’ words were identified after feeding them into a model which calculates the words’ rate of replacement based on the frequency with which they are used today. The researchers studied cognates, words which have the same meaning and roughly the same sound in different languages.
The research pushes the boundaries of etymology in that it goes back 15,000 years – previous studies have been reluctant to venture further than 9,000 years ago. ‘These words would have been spoken amongst a small group or groups of people who were living in southern Europe and central Asia around 15,000 years ago,’ said Mark Pagel, professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Reading and leader of the study. He told Metro: ‘That speculation isn’t just pulling a rabbit out of a hat – it’s based on the fact we know how far the ice sheets came down. We have a sense that the language origin of this family is around that area.’ Prof Pagel said the use of the words – which would have sounded similar to the way they do today – was in such far-flung locations because of the ice age. ‘You need an excuse for why all of these people were spread out. The excuse is that 15,000 years ago is when the ice sheets were retreating from all over Europe. ‘The last glacial maximum, the height of the ice age, was 18,000 years ago. That was the height and then it started to recede after that. It’s fascinating that this spread of this Eurasian super-family coincides with the retreat of the glaciers.’
All this glacial activity begs one big question: why didn’t ‘ice’ show up as one of the words being regularly spoken by humans 15,000 years ago? As in, ‘Hello mother, what’s the story will all this flipping ice?’ Strangely, a variation of the similar-sounding ‘lice’ almost made the cut of the top 23 – the singular ‘louse’ just fell short.
‘Most of the words on that list are used in a very high frequency in common everyday speech,’ explained Prof Pagel. ‘These were precisely the words we had predicted would be likely to be so old that they had actually been present in a common ancestry to all of these language families.’
There were, however, surprises. If you did have a time machine, you wouldn’t expect cavemen – and cavewomen – to sit around at the end of a long day talking about spitting. ‘Hunter-gatherers do a lot of spitting,’ said Prof Pagel. ‘There’s a suggestion that “to spit” is an onomatopoeia word – it sounds like what you’re doing. Onomatopoeia should be the same across different languages, the same sound.’
And what about bark, which in this case refers to the wood on a tree, not the noise made by a dog? ‘The bark of the tree would have been a very important commodity among hunter-gatherers,’ said Prof Pagel. ‘When you go back 15,000 years, everyone was a hunter-gatherer. There wasn’t any domestication of crops or animals and there weren’t any real tools to speak of or other technological things, so people had to rely on what they could get their hands on. ‘Bark is used as an insulator: people sleep on it, you can burn it and they would have used it to make fibres. Bark is sometimes useful as a medicinal source.’
The use of words such as ‘fire’ and ‘ashes’ is easier to explain, he said. ‘If you ever spent any time around hunter-gatherers – I can tell because I have – they spend a lot of times sitting around fires, so there’s probably a lot of discussion about ashes!’
The word on the list which caught his eye most, however, is ‘give’. He said: ‘Human societies are unique among all animal societies or tribes or groups in the amount of giving that they do. ‘We are uniquely co-operative with each other, especially within our tribal group. I can imagine discussion of giving and receiving goes on in hunter-gatherer societies.’
According to Prof Pagel, we are the linguistic – if perhaps not the genetic – descendants of those people in southern Europe and central Asia thousands of years ago. ‘We should be astonished really that our languages can be transmitted with such accuracy that they can retain traces of their ancestry for maybe 15,000 years,’ he said, adding that languages go back even further, perhaps 45,000 years.>>
http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/nuplanet.htm wrote:
ASTRONOMERS, AMATEUR SKYWATCHERS FIND NEW PLANET 15,000 LIGHT YEARS AWAY
Andrew Gould, OSU Research News
COLUMBUS, Ohio -- <<An international collaboration featuring Ohio State University astronomers has detected a planet in a solar system that, at roughly 15,000 light years from Earth, is one of the most distant ever discovered. In a time when technology is starting to make such finds almost commonplace, this new planet -- which is roughly three times the size of Jupiter -- is special for several reasons, said Andrew Gould, professor of astronomy at Ohio State .
The technique that astronomers used to find the planet worked so well that he thinks it could be used to find much smaller planets -- Earth-sized planets, even very distant ones. And because two amateur astronomers in New Zealand helped detect the planet using only their backyard telescopes, the find suggests that anyone can become a planet hunter.
The astronomers used a technique called gravitational microlensing, which occurs when a massive object in space, like a star or even a black hole, crosses in front of a star shining in the background. The object's strong gravitational pull bends the light rays from the more distant star and magnifies them like a lens. Here on Earth, we see the star get brighter as the lens crosses in front of it, and then fade as the lens gets farther away.
On March 17, 2005, Andrzej Udalski, professor of astronomy at Warsaw University and leader of the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment, or OGLE, noticed that a star located thousands of light years from Earth was starting to move in front of another star that was even farther away, near the center of our galaxy. A month later, when the more distant star had brightened a hundred-fold, astronomers from OGLE and from Gould's collaboration (the Microlensing Follow Up Network, or MicroFUN) detected a new pattern in the signal -- a rapid distortion of the brightening -- that could only mean one thing. "There's absolutely no doubt that the star in front has a planet, which caused the deviation we saw," Gould said. Because the scientists were able to monitor the light signal with near-perfect precision, Gould thinks the technique could easily have revealed an even smaller planet. "If an Earth-mass planet was in the same position, we would have been able to detect it," he said.
OGLE finds more than 600 microlensing events per year using a dedicated 1.3-meter telescope at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile (operated by Carnegie Institution of Washington). MicroFUN is a collaboration of astronomers from the US, Korea, New Zealand, and Israel that picks out those events that are most likely to reveal planets and monitors them from telescopes around the world. "That allows us to watch these events 24/7," Gould said. "When the sun rises at one location, we continue to monitor from the next."
Two of these telescopes belong to two avid New Zealand amateur astronomers who were recruited by the MicroFUN team. Grant Christie of Auckland used a 14-inch telescope, and Jennie McCormick of Pakuranga used a 10-inch telescope. Both share co-authorship on the paper submitted to Astrophysical Journal Letters. Two other collaborations -- the Probing Lensing Anomalies NETwork (PLANET) and Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics (MOA) -- also followed the event and contributed to the journal paper.
This is the second planet that astronomers have detected using microlensing. The first one, found a year ago, is estimated to be at a similar distance. Gould's initial estimate is that the new planet is approximately 15,000 light years away, but he will need more data to refine that distance, he said. A light year is the distance light travels in a year -- approximately six trillion miles.>>
Too much coffee.Beyond wrote:Moonlady, that was the good joke. Here's the bad one.-->SHAZAM = Moo slurp-slurp.
When you have coffee squared, you look like this--> ...