Sayonara

Oooh, and our house now has a spiffy Freevo server routing all our network shares from the gateway to the TV. Ask LuTze if you want info on setting those babies up!

My PC is 9 months old, built it myself ofc. Sorry faf but it humbles yours in every respect - time to upgrade Mister! 2.1Ghz processor (about as much as I need seeing as at that speed Maya will happily manipulate shaded models while the animation is running). Fairly new MSI motherboard \o/ go go MSI, we lub joo! Only half the memory of Newbie's PC but then ofc hardly anything supports 1 gig and upwards atm. I'll be getting another 512Mb (at least) fairly soon as fast DDR sticks are going very cheap right now in the UK, and it never hurts to be forward-facing. I am so glad I forked out the most cash for my monitor and graphics card - that's where the money really shows. GeForce 4 - not a scummy MX, mwa ha haaa - with 128Mb memory and superfastiness. 3Dmark loves it long time. Monitor is a 21" CTX flatscreen with the high definition coating thingy that makes it look lush. Monitor 2 is a godawful 15" goldfish bowl that only ever has palettes, Trillian and Kazaa on it.

Guiltalise them until they pay you to shut up and watch it.

Invader Zim cost too much to make (3D/cell animation composite - quite expensive) compared to the ratings it was getting. So blame Nik for keeping the audience small. You can find the 6 or so unscreened s2 episodes on eMule but they're still difficult to get. Kazaa is bursting with s1 episodes.

The best part of Nemesis is the moment where the Enterprise rams the Scimitar. Mwaaa. Then they decide to ignore all of physics and the Scimitar pulls away while the Enterprise stays where it is, which was beyond unrealistic and completely ruined the moment. Just like in Pirates of the Carribean when the drama of the ending was punctured by the hero being told he was to be "hung by the neck".

lol Euthanasia?

You mean the blob thing of doom?

Saw it last night. Great script, excellent acting, cracking dialogue. Surprisingly the best movie I've seen for ages!

Such cameras are already available. I believe http://www.iwantoneofthose.com used to sell them, but they no longer appear to be in stock.

I explained how that works somewhere in the physics forums - do a search for it. Basically it comes down to "information cannot come from nowhere, but the goalposts can be moved".

You mean like the thingy in the movie posted in the "your favourite star" thread?

Oh, NOW you like the BBC, lol. I don't like to rub it in when you so laudably admitted your error, but you're wrong on the eclipse issue too. Ogle doesn't actually 'see' the planets moving in front of the stars at all. It analyses the light coming from the star and calculates spectroscopic data, gravitational variance etc, which allows deductions to be made about what's happening. Consider eclipses of the sun seen from Earth. In a solar eclipse, the moon appears the same size as the sun due to a massive mathematical fluke. But the moon's shadow - the umbra, or darkest part, is tiny compared to the surface of the Earth. Imagine how insignificant light variations due to the transit of a planet across a massive yet distant star must be viewed from here. If you remember the images of Mercury crossing the face of the sun that were publicised recently, you'll also remember there was no blinking at all. And that was all happening right on our doorstep.

How? And why? (them blinking, not me seeing them. I know how vision works)

You are saying that my eyes are capable of simultaneously detecting the planets that may or may not be passing between my retinas and the thousands of stars in my field of view?

Errrr... where did you hear/read that? Seriously.

If you are going to make these claims, the onus is on you to prove them. Find a better, more trustworty, more accurate, and more impartial source than the BBC and I will be very impressed. Additionally, I don't know of any telescopes that can monitor 1000's of stars simultaneously.

You clearly didn't. You got it completely wrong. You said I was talking about searching for planets, and I was not. So NYAAAAHH. You are too aggressive and not nearly linky enough I think NASA should go to Europa too - it's the best prospect for finding complex alien life in this system.

ANYWAY: Here is what I was looking for: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2636643.stm Apparently only two planets have ever been found this way, with two more candidates being investigated - even though the Ogle focuses on a densely packed part of the galaxy. This is not really a flat-out method for finding planets, it is more a tool for analyzing the atmosphere of known planets.

This is 11 months out of date but I found it interesting: http://astro.estec.esa.nl/SA-general/Projects/Staff/perryman/planet-figure.pdf This is an abysmal web site, but it gives the basics of the currently favoured method: http://obswww.unige.ch/~udry/planet/method.html

Indeed I did MrL. "Many years ago?" It's still used now. The latest word in planetary detection technology isn't exactly standard all over the world just quite yet.

Apart from that one time where the planet's motion in front of the sun caused gravitational lensing (about 5 weeks ago iirc). What has NASA got anything to do with this thread? By the time we are searching extrasolar planets for life there will be no NASA, and probably no America.

Don't discourage him. I want to hear about quantum transpositioning.

Unfortunately, there is little chance we will ever meet or contact even advanced races. The difficulties in doing so are enormous. There is a thread somewhere about non-carbon based life, the consensus was that it's unlikey to have arisen (barring freaky energy-based life that we can't really predict with much confidence).

He's not the Messiah, he's a very naughty boy.

Well, didn't get the chance tonight. But I am off to a funeral this weekend so I will print off the thread and read your mega post of lengthy DOOM on the train.