Customers who have been waiting for
such services to be perfected will find improvements are slow in coming.
Overall, I found the Arabic-English translations rife with syntactic and
semantic errors -- from the merely too-literal to the laughably bad.
For the purposes of my test, I selected
different texts: conversation, news stories, and legal and scientific
documents. First, I picked an Associated Press story that started with the
sentence: "A wintry storm caked the center of the nation with a thick
layer of ice Monday..."
I got a variety of imprecise
translations into Arabic (which I'm interpreting below).
Applied Language and WorldLingo
offered identical translations, which were slightly better than the other two:
"A storm covered the center's storm from the nation with a thick layer snow
Monday."
Systran: "A stormy storm covered
the center for the mother with a thick layer snow Monday."
Language Tools: "The storm
grilled bloc in the middle of the nation with a thick layer of snow
Monday."
The translations would have been
nearly impossible to understand were I not fluent in both languages. It's worse
in Arabic than it seems above. Arabic has masculine and feminine nouns, verbs
and adjectives that have to agree in a sentence; otherwise, the sentence makes
a native speaker wince.
Next, I processed some longer news
stories. Only Language Tools didn't set text limits. WorldLingo and Applied
Language each had a 150-word limit. Systran didn't specify a limit, but it
rendered only a short part of the text.
Language Tools came out ahead this
time. It was the only one to translate the word "Taliban" from Arabic
to English contextually correct, as a movement. The other services translated
it literally from the Arabic as "two students."
The services were better at
translating everyday phrases, but even these sometimes came out missing a word,
or were scrambled.
In this category, I again found
translations by Google's Language Tools closest to the original texts. Still,
there is much room for improvement. Google, for example, translated from Arabic
to English the simple question, "Do you speak English?" as "Do
they speak English?"
Other services got the pronoun right
but botched other parts of the sentence. With the exception of Google, all
three services, oddly, attempted to write the Arabic word for
"English" in the Roman alphabet (aalaanklyzyh) in the middle of an
Arabic sentence.
All the services did a terrible job
with metaphors and other figurative uses of the language, whether Arabic or
English.
The weakest performance by all the
services was the translation of legal and scientific texts. Only Language Tools
correctly translated the word "noncompliance" in a legal text, for
example. Instead of using the proper word in Arabic, the other services
transliterated it phonetically into a meaningless word.
All four services have an interface
that is easy to use, with a pull-down menu listing several languages. Each has
two text boxes, one for the original language and the other for the desired
translation. They also translate entire Web sites, but the translation again
tended to be awkwardly verbatim.
Google also has a feature that lets
you translate search results free. (It also offers users an option to send in a
better translation.) The others require you to become a paid subscriber.
English and Arabic results appeared side-by-side.
I also liked WorldLingo and Applied
Language's email-translation feature. After clicking the email button, a window
with two text boxes pops up. You enter your name and email address, and the
recipient's name and address. When you send the message with WorldLingo, both
recipient and sender see the message in both languages. Neither Google nor
Systran has this feature.
Systran has a convenient swap button
that lets users easily flip the source and target languages. This saves time
when going back-and-forth between two languages. The other services have you
use pull-down menus. Systran's interface also allows prompt translation of a
text as soon as it's pasted in a text box, without the need to click a
"translate" button.
Free online translation tools help
travelers or those curious about languages, but I found them unreliable for
important documents. Use with caution.
Write to Sarmad Ali at
sarmad.ali@wsj.com1 Walt Mossberg is on vacation.
Fran --
They don’t seem to list direct dials
on the Berger and Montague website, but I found their general phone number.
Berger & Montague, P.C. | 1622
Locust Street | Philadelphia, PA 19103 | 800-424-6690 | Fax: 215-875-4604
Abbott A. Leban
Berger & Montague PC
Philadelphia, Pa.
http://www.bergermontague.com
Abbott A. Leban joined Berger &
Montague P.C., in December 2004 as senior counsel. Leban had been with Grant
& Eisenhofer in Wilmington, Del., since 1997. Prior to joining Grant &
Eisenhofer, Leban was senior counsel at Blank, Rome, Comisky & McCauley in
Philadelphia, where he was a member of the firm's Corporate Department and
served a diverse clientele in corporate, fiduciary, employee benefits, tax, and
litigation matters.
Leban is a graduate of Columbia
College (1955) and Yale Law School (1958). He is a member of the Delaware and
New York State Bar Associations, and the American Bar Association. He was an
original member of the National Association of Public Pension Attorneys (NAPPA)
and served for a time as chair of its Federal Legislation Committee.
Leban began his legal career in
Washington, where he clerked in the D.C. Circuit, served as an appellate
attorney with the former Civil Aeronautics Board, then as an Assistant U.S.
Attorney for D.C. From 1962 to 1965, he was counsel to Senator Kenneth B.
Keating of New York.
Starting in 1965, Leban held
successive in-house legal and executive positions in the finance, insurance,
and real estate sector. At Equitable Life Assurance Society, he served in the
investment and government relations divisions of its Law Department and later
as Counsel for Federal Relations. He subsequently joined the Colonial Penn
Insurance Group, beginning as President/COO of Intramerica Life Insurance
Company, its New York-based life/health insurance subsidiary. He moved to the
parent company in Philadelphia in 1972 as senior vice president in charge of
the legal, public relations, personnel, and home office administration
departments, as well as serving as corporate secretary. From the effective date
of ERISA, he was also chairman of the boards of trustees for Colonial Penn's
retirement and profit-sharing plans. Leban left Colonial Penn in the 1980s to
become part of the founding management of American Homestead Mortgage Corp., a
mortgage banking firm that was the commercial pioneer in marketing and
underwriting reverse mortgages for senior citizens.
From 1987 to 1991, Leban served as
chief counsel of the three Pennsylvania Retirement Systems for public
employees, with then combined assets of over $20 billion. He was responsible
for significant initiatives on the part of the state and public school pension
funds in corporate governance and shareholder rights matters and received
national recognition for his representation of the school fund as an ex officio
member of the official Equity Committee in the Chapter 11 proceedings of
Texaco, Inc.
Leban has many articles to his credit,
including "Not A Dime's Worth of Difference: When 'Withhold Authority'
Means 'No,'" M&A Lawyer (Apr. 2001). Among his other recent
publications, he co-authored, with Jay Eisenhofer, the series of articles in
the Corporate Governance Advisor on "One Easy Step to Reform:
Institutional Investors Must Wake Up" (July/Aug. 1995);"Securities
Litigation and the Institutional Investor: An Assessment" (Mar./Apr.
1998); and "The Lead Plaintiff Provision: Does It Work?" (May/June
1999); and, most recently, on "Ceding Ground to Insiders: The Renunciation
of Corporate Opportunities Under Delaware Law (Mar.-Apr. 2001).
Leban is a member of BNA's Pension
& Benefits Advisory Board.
WASHINGTON -- Two weeks before the
Iowa caucus, the race for president, while tightening among Democrats, is wide
open on the Republican side, highlighting the unusual fluidity of the first
campaign for the White House in over a half- century that doesn't include an
incumbent president or vice president.
A new Wall Street Journal/NBC News
poll shows that Rudy Giuliani has lost his national lead in the Republican
field after a flurry of negative publicity about his personal and business
activities, setting the stage for what could be the party's most competitive
nomination fight in decades.
After holding a double-digit advantage
over his nearest rivals just six weeks ago, the former New York City mayor now
is tied nationally with former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney at 20% among
Republicans, just slightly ahead of former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee at 17%
and Arizona Sen. John McCain at 14%. Other polls show Mr. Giuliani's lead
shrinking in Florida, one of the states he has based his strategy around.
With the poll's margin of error of
plus-or-minus 3.1 percentage points, that puts Mr. Huckabee, who had only
single-digit support in the previous poll in early November, within striking
distance of the leaders. Mr. Romney's national support has also nearly doubled
since then.
At the same time, Mr. Romney has
fallen behind Mr. Huckabee in the leadoff nominating contest in Iowa. The
results signal a dramatic shift in the nature of the Republican contest: In a
party with a history of rewarding established front-runners, there's no longer
a front-runner of any kind.
"There is no hierarchy,"
said Democratic pollster Peter Hart, who conducts the Journal/NBC survey with
Republican counterpart Bill McInturff. "There is no establishment
candidate. The Republican voters are searching."
9999999999
Struggle for Vicksburg
(DVD Video)
A workmanlike presentation of some of the very basic facts
of the Siege. To my
disappointment, no re-enactors were used.
I’ve yet to across a source that answers these questions
that follow, so I don’t want to imply my asking them suggests unique faults
with this movie.
To what extent could the Fort of Vicksburg inhibit Union
supply river traffic upstream and downstream (i.e., completely? 30% 70?)?
Realizing rivers were relatively efficient ways to transport
supplies (vis-à-vis wagons and mules albeit I am not as certain as to the
relative merits between the use of rivers and railroads), how critical was it
to have “unrestricted” access to the ENTIRE river? (Recall, New Orleans was in Union hands.)
What would the effects have been – and the responses to –
random/sporadic/varying placements of Rebel cannon along the long shoreline of
the otherwise “unrestricted” river?
By only holding a non-besieged Vicksburg, did that allow the
Rebels to effectively transfer supplies and troops across the Misssissippi from
West to East?
Beginning in
the summer of 1863, how much material and how many troops were
effectively contained in the Western Confederacy and prohibited from moving
East? Assuming any, how much of a difference might they have made and how? Louis J Sheehan
http://louis-j-sheehan.us/Blog/blog.aspx
http://www.amazon.com/Struggle-for-Vicksburg/dp/B000EM6XDM/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1198124012&sr=1-1
333333
Louis J Sheehan Final exams are over
(they went well) and now I’m doing things that piled up – were delayed – while
I was preparing for Finals.
I’m feeling tired and sluggush, but
ironically I think that is because I HAVEN’T been exercising; in a very short
time exercising seems to actually create more energy than it uses!
Here is a little slice of life story –
I have very large front-loading
washers and dryers (because of the dogs) in a wash closet (a standard American
arrangement).
The other day I pulled some clothes
out of the dryer and stacked them on top of the dryer. Then I accidently knocked off some of
the clothes into the space behind the dryer (there is a little space between
the washer/dryer and the wall behind them). The small open area behind the washer & dryer is not
easily accessed.
I climbed on top of the dryer to use
broom sticks (a la oriental chop-sticks) to retrieve the clothes. In my effort, I accidently knocked off
the loosely affixed connection between the dryer and the outdoor vent (the vent
is to funnel the humid heat and the bits of cloth that come loose in the
dryer).
Yes, yes, one goof-up after
another. My personality is
normally to stay on top of things and, in a situation like this, to fix things
back to where they were right away. But I had finals so I put the recovery off
for a few days.
A few days later I pulled the dryer
out enough to get behind it … but that was too far to allow me to reconnect the
vent. While I was back there I
became aware of years’ worth of accumulated dust.
I climbed back out and pushed the
dryer about halfway back and then moved to pull out the washer to allow me to
finish the job. In grabbing the
washer, I accidently pushed a button that started the longest possible washing
cycle – 2 hours, 45 minutes. So I
had to wait.
After the washer had finished washing
nothing, I was able to crawl back there, clean out the mountains of dust, more
securely affix the vent than it had been before, and retrieve the two socks
that had fallen behind the dryer.
Life is like that: sometimes little
mistakes are made which require extra effort yet from which one can
benefit. I’m also happy to report
that I am becoming ever more patient with age.
http://Louis-J-Sheehan.us
http://louis-j-sheehan.us/page1.aspx
http://louis-j-sheehan.us/Blog/blog.aspx
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Louis J Sheehan Industrial black
carbon—–particularly
in the period around 1900—left a dirty, harmful human smudge on the Arctic,
researchers say.
Black carbon absorbs a wide spectrum
of light radiation, so a little soot retains a lot of heat. “Even the tiniest
amount of black carbon will change quite dramatically the reflectance
properties of the snow,” says Joe McConnell of the Desert Research Institute in
Reno, Nevada. http://Louis-J-Sheehan.us
“That means that the snow will absorb more energy and
therefore melt faster.” If the snow melts early, he adds, the ground below it
is even less reflective, heating the surroundings still more.
Studying ice cores from central
Greenland, McConnell and his colleagues measured black carbon levels from 1788
to 2002. At their peak, in 1908, the concentrations were 10 times their
preindustrial levels, the researchers reported in September. Concentrations of
two other chemicals in the ice cores, vanillic acid (a chemical formed when
conifer forests burn) and non–sea salt sulfur (a primary component in acid
rain), helped distinguish between soot from natural sources and that from
industrial pollution. Forest fires produced much of the Arctic soot before
1850, but between the late 1880s and 1950, industrial black carbon pollution
predominated.
http://louis-j-sheehan.us/Blog/blog.aspx
4444444444444
It is a rare researcher who can
fundamentally change our picture of our place in the universe. In the 16th
century, Nicolaus Copernicus did it by arguing that Earth is just one planet
among many revolving around the sun; in 1924, Edwin Hubble did it by showing
that our galaxy is just one among many. Louis J Sheehan This year DISCOVER
honors David Charbonneau, a Harvard University astronomer whose research could
soon lead to an equally stunning revelation: By studying alien worlds, he may
find the first direct evidence of life beyond Earth, a sign that our living
planet is—yet again—one among many.
Astronomers currently know of roughly
200 planets circling nearby stars, and more and more of these so-called
exoplanets are discovered every year. Most of the newfound bodies are so
strange that scientists have had to coin new terms, like “hot Jupiters” and
“super-Earths,” to describe them. Playing the celestial detective, Charbonneau
has systematically gone about investigating these impossible planets and
uncovering their secrets. In 1999, he led the team that made the first
observation of a transiting exoplanet—one that passes directly between its
parent star and Earth. By examining how the planet blocks out some of the light
from its star, Charbonneau can see what gases are present in the planet’s
atmosphere. In 2001, Charbonneau and astronomer Tim Brown of the High Altitude
Observatory in Boulder, Colorado, used this technique to “sniff” the atmosphere
of a huge, broiling planet called HD 209458b, even though it is 150 light-years
away—4 billion times as distant as the moon. Just a few months ago,
Charbonneau’s team at Harvard made another breakthrough and created the first
weather map of an exosolar planet. The forecast: hot and windy, same as
yesterday, same as tomorrow.
Charbonneau’s personal journey to
becoming a planet hunter began with his desire to be a marine biologist. Born
to a physician and a geologist, Charbonneau was no stranger to science. As a
teenager growing up in Ontario, he visited the tide pools at the Pacific Rim
National Park in British Columbia during a family vacation and witnessed
firsthand the wild diversity of life at the border of the sand and the sea. His
dedication to biology gave way to a passion for physics when he encountered
special relativity, quantum mechanics, and Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of
Time. Theoretical physics then led him to astronomy, a passion that now colors
every part of his life (his daughters are named Stella and Aurora). http://Louis-J-Sheehan.us
For his next act, the 33-year-old
Charbonneau wants to move beyond the exotic and bizarre planets he has studied
so far. Now he is looking for something far more familiar: a smallish rocky
planet with an atmosphere that bears the chemical imprint of life, like the
abundant (and otherwise inexplicable) oxygen that plants pump into our own air.
Charbonneau hopes to refine the transit technique so that even the faint wisps
of an Earth-size planet’s atmosphere can soon be detected and analyzed. If he
spots the signature of alien biology on such a world, we will know that we are
not alone in the universe. If he fails, it will strongly support the idea that
we are truly unique. That is why David Charbonneau is DISCOVER’s Scientist of
the Year.
You were one of the first people to
use the transit method to study exoplanets, and suddenly that technique is
really taking off. Why now?
Why it’s suddenly working may have two
factors. One, the astronomical community has slowly figured out how to get very
good data on tens of thousands of stars, night after night after night. We’ve
also gotten very good at understanding most of the little winks and blips in
our data. The other answer is the same reason as “why the four-minute mile?”
Why didn’t people run a four-minute mile before 1954? There was this perception
that it was extremely difficult and perhaps couldn’t be done. Most astronomers
thought that most solar systems looked like our own. That meant that the
planets that were big enough, the ones that blocked enough of the light, were
far from their stars. That meant that they would only transit once every few
years instead of once every few days. The probability of a transit was very
small with this model. No one was looking because we had entrenched ideas.
What are some of the planets that
you’ve studied like? How strange are they?
189733b orbits a K dwarf, a smaller,
redder star than the sun. Basically, its star is more of a lightweight compared
to the sun, so it’s a bigger planet orbiting a smaller star. With 189733b, the
excitement is that it’s the first planet that we really have a feeling for what
it looks like. We actually have a weather map. It’s the first planet that I
have a mental map of in my head because we’ve actually measured, to some
degree, the physical map. We know where the hot and cold areas are, and so on.
The nightside of the planet is actually quite hot. It didn’t have to be the case—it
could have been that these planets were very, very hot on the dayside and very
cold on the nightside, but apparently there are these very strong winds that
can move energy around to the cold side, so the nightside on those planets is
really quite hot. In a sense, that planet feels the closest because we have
this image of it.
TrES-4 is a newcomer on the scene.
What we know about it is that it is extremely low density. I think TrES-4 is
really going to be difficult to explain—it really pushes the laws of physics to
try to understand how it can maintain such a low density when it should want to
contract under its own gravity.
HD 209458b is very hot. It’s tucked in
very close to its star; it orbits its star every three and a half days. Its
temperature is probably about 1400 degrees Kelvin! It’s very puffy, so it’s
very low density, which means that given its mass—which is less than that of
Jupiter—its diameter is bigger than we expect, and so the puffiness of this
planet is actually still somewhat of a puzzle. Its star is rather like the sun,
maybe a little bit hotter. Basically, its star is a twin of the sun, so that’s
why it’s intriguing, because the star is similar to the sun in terms of its age
and its mass, and yet the planets around it are obviously so much different
from the planets of our own solar system.
If we find life on other planets, we’ll want to
know whether the basic forces of evolution and biology are universal.
Does that mean that our solar system
is exceptional?
We don’t know the answer yet. We don’t
have any clue about systems with terrestrial [Earth-like] planets because no
one has yet looked with enough precision to find them. What we have learned is
that the diversity of exoplanet systems is immense. The basic architecture of
our solar system, where things go in circles, and there are small rocky planets
close to the sun and big massive gas giants far from the sun, is certainly not
the only architecture. It may not even be the most common architecture. There
are many ways to make a planetary system, so, for example, the planets could be
on eccentric orbits, or you could have the most massive planets right up next
to the star, even closer than Mercury, and those might even be more common.
The Jupiter-size planet HE 189733b
transits in front of its star in this artist's impression. Analysis of light
from the planet has revealed evidence of water vapor in its atmosphere.
Image courtesy of Courtesy
NASA/JPL-Caltech
What’s it like to be the first person
to see an exoplanet?
You know, the discovery moment now in
astronomy isn’t at the telescope looking through the eyepiece but at a computer
screen when you’re analyzing that data. But there is still that moment where
you make that first plot, and you look at it—and right there, no question,
there is the signal. The first time that we measured the actual emitted light
from these planets, or the first time that we detected that one of them had an
atmosphere, those were very unambiguous signals. And the first time you see
that, that’s the most rewarding moment in science.
You’re now working on the MEarth
project, which is going to look for Earth-size planets orbiting close to “M
dwarfs,” which are small, dim stars. How long until it’s up and running, and
how long until it gives its first results?
The project (pdf) is being built now
in southern Arizona, and we hope to have two telescopes working in October and
then six more by January, so we hope to start the survey early in 2008, and the
nominal survey will take three years. Our telescopes are pretty humble by
astronomy standards. The telescopes are 16-inch telescopes—tiny compared to
what we often use for our research, telescopes that are 10 meters [about 400
inches] in size. But I think that it’s not unrealistic that someone will make
the first detection of a transiting planet in the habitable zone of its star in
the next couple of years.
Suppose you find a planet the size of
Earth. How do you then look for life?
We are very biased by having grown up
here on Earth, but there’s a huge challenge in asking yourself the question,
“What different forms might life take?” It would be so difficult to recognize
life if it were very different chemically from life on Earth. The easier
question is to look for life that is very similar to life on Earth. That’s
probably going to be our first step. When we talk about life on other planets,
we’re talking about life as we know it.
The first measurement is to determine
that the planet has an atmosphere. You need a thick atmosphere for life as we
know it. Then the trick is to examine the atmosphere spectroscopically for the
presence of certain molecules. If we look at the spectrum of Earth, we see
there’s a lot of oxygen. All of that oxygen is driven by biological activity.
The only way Earth’s atmosphere has this large quantity of oxygen, especially
in the presence of methane and other things that would like to react with
oxygen, is that there’s this driver, which is life, which through
photosynthesis supports this equilibrium. We look to see if life has done
things to that distant atmosphere that we know it did to the atmosphere here on
Earth—that’s a nice remote-sensing approach; it doesn’t require any assumptions
about the life, like that it wants to communicate with us or anything fancy
like that.
If you stepped back from the solar
system and you took a spectrum of Earth and Mars and Venus, you would see that
there’s something really special about Earth. The atmospheres of Venus and Mars
have mostly carbon dioxide, which is not a good molecule for life. However, if
you don’t see those [Earth-like] signals, you can’t conclude that there isn’t
life, because the life may be completely different; it may proceed in some
chemical pathway that we might mistake for nonbiotic processes, for geologic
processes.
How do you think people will be
affected if we discover that there is another living world out there?
Philosophically, if it were the case
that the galaxy is full of habitable planets, and perhaps even other
civilizations, I think that people would think of themselves quite differently.
Or to know that Earth was truly unique in that it was the only habitable planet
would affect how many people view their place in the universe. When I went to
school, there weren’t planets around the stars—they were there, of course, but
nobody had ever detected them. My daughters will grow up in a world where there
were always planets around the stars. They’ll learn in school that of course
there are planets around the stars—hundreds of them. By the time they go to
school, even a few years from now, there may be a thousand. And maybe even by
the time they’re in a university, and hopefully before then, it’ll just be a
fact that there is life on some of those planets. There will be this amazing
change, and they’ll have just grown up in this world where that was always the
case.
What are we learning about our own
lives on Earth as we look at these distant planets?
Well, I think there is certainly a
very clear answer to that if we look ahead. If we find life on other planets,
what we want to know is whether the basic forces of evolution and biology are
universal. You kind of wonder about how life started on Earth. Maybe it’s the
case that you just have to cook up a planet with roughly the right properties
and life is unavoidable—life will just spontaneously get going on any such
planet, and that it’s a very universal process. Or maybe that’s a really rare
process. Maybe it’s not enough to have all the right conditions. Even if you
have those right conditions, it’s still one in a billion. So I think it really
is something that is very close to home. http://louis-j-sheehan.us/page1.aspx
Has there been any specific new
research triggered by these studies of planets around other stars?
We want to understand a lot of the
molecules that we look at in planets around other stars. Those molecules are
the exact same molecules as here on Earth, but we now want to see them under
very different conditions, very high temperatures and pressures. And so we have
to go and study them here on Earth. We’ve been learning a lot about the
spectral signatures of water and methane, motivated by these exoplanet studies.
Those molecules are crucial to us here on Earth. You’d think we would know
everything there is to know about water, but that’s not true.
Did you ever worry that you wouldn’t
find anything when you began searching for planets?
I was very nervous at the time that we
wouldn’t find any of these planets, or that it wouldn’t turn into a very rich
field. It’s given me a great sense of delight to see that those risks were rewarded
many times beyond my expectations. But it’s only with accepting a level of risk
that there’s the possibility of a truly novel discovery. If you do a very
conservative project that you know will be productive, in the sense that it’s
going to yield some results, there’s a limit on what is the most exciting thing
that could happen within that project. If that thing isn’t something that would
really keep you up at night, then why are you going through the motions?
How has planet hunting changed since
you started?
Maybe 10, certainly 20, years ago—if
you talked about looking for life on other planets, then you were kind of
nutty, right? It was probably a very dangerous thing to do if you were a junior
faculty who might be looking for tenure, let’s say. And that’s completely
changed—I think now there’s this huge sense that we are really going to make
this work, and we’re going to figure out how to actually study the atmospheres
of these planets that we’re detecting and look for the chemical signatures of biological
activity. So that has gone from being a kind of crazy scientific idea that
could never be tested to something that’s really at the heart of the big
funding agencies, in particular NASA.
Why search for distant planets when
there’s still so much we don’t know about our own Earth?
Look back through history and you can
find writings from the Greeks that talk about life on planets orbiting other
stars. I think there’s been this abiding human question about whether we are
alone in the universe. And I think that strikes at the very soul of humanity—of
how we picture ourselves in the cosmos. We’ve learned in the last hundred years
of the incredible physical size and age of the universe. And now the question
is, as it has always been, are we truly alone? And I think that everybody is
willing to put in a little bit of money to actually get at the answer to that
question.
http://louis-j-sheehan.us/Blog/blog.aspx
555555555555
Has there been any specific new
research triggered by these studies of planets around other stars?
We want to understand a lot of the
molecules that we look at in planets around other stars. Those molecules are
the exact same molecules as here on Earth, but we now want to see them under
very different conditions, very high temperatures and pressures. And so we have
to go and study them here on Earth. We’ve been learning a lot about the
spectral signatures of water and methane, motivated by these exoplanet studies.
Those molecules are crucial to us here on Earth. You’d think we would know
everything there is to know about water, but that’s not true.
Did you ever worry that you wouldn’t
find anything when you began searching for planets?
I was very nervous at the time that we
wouldn’t find any of these planets, or that it wouldn’t turn into a very rich
field. It’s given me a great sense of delight to see that those risks were rewarded
many times beyond my expectations. But it’s only with accepting a level of risk
that there’s the possibility of a truly novel discovery. If you do a very
conservative project that you know will be productive, in the sense that it’s
going to yield some results, there’s a limit on what is the most exciting thing
that could happen within that project. If that thing isn’t something that would
really keep you up at night, then why are you going through the motions?
How has planet hunting changed since
you started?
Maybe 10, certainly 20, years ago—if
you talked about looking for life on other planets, then you were kind of
nutty, right? It was probably a very dangerous thing to do if you were a junior
faculty who might be looking for tenure, let’s say. And that’s completely
changed—I think now there’s this huge sense that we are really going to make
this work, and we’re going to figure out how to actually study the atmospheres
of these planets that we’re detecting and look for the chemical signatures of
biological activity. So that has gone from being a kind of crazy scientific
idea that could never be tested to something that’s really at the heart of the
big funding agencies, in particular NASA.
Why search for distant planets when
there’s still so much we don’t know about our own Earth?
Look back through history and you can
find writings from the Greeks that talk about life on planets orbiting other
stars. I think there’s been this abiding human question about whether we are
alone in the universe. And I think that strikes at the very soul of humanity—of
how we picture ourselves in the cosmos. We’ve learned in the last hundred years
of the incredible physical size and age of the universe. And now the question
is, as it has always been, are we truly alone? And I think that everybody is
willing to put in a little bit of money to actually get at the answer to that
question.
http://louis-j-sheehan.us/Blog/blog.aspx
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The cellphones that so many of us
carry around in our pockets every day are packed with functionality. They can
be used for Web browsing, watching TV, purchasing digital music, gaming,
Bluetooth synching, capturing photos and videos, instant messaging and GPS
navigation. Oh, and they also make phone calls.
It seems that this last attribute --
the ability to make and receive calls on a cellphone -- is overlooked and
underestimated by many manufacturers. But believe it or not, there are plenty
of people out there who simply want to use their cellphones for calls, period.
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