Recent content by Landifarne

I'd have to go and find the article again [written by a UCLA emritus professor of economics about 15 years ago] to answer whether the figure included administration costs. I don't think it did, and I believe UCLA had the lowest overall percentage spent upon undergraduate instruction. Having...

As a high school teacher (physics and chemistry), for every hour I spend actively teaching students I spend one hour prepping, grading, fixing/fabricating equipment, responding to parents and cleaning. That equates to nearly 30 hours of instruction and 30 hours of ancillary work each week. I'm...

Oh, and again, props to all of you guys for putting up with this. "The patience of Job" comes to mind...

I got that; understood the context. [Probably in my genuine ignorance] this sounds incredibly speculative. Is this so intertwined with our understanding of quantum mechanics to say it's a given? "To the extent that the following is probable" is likely the answer... You're saying that the...

"...within a biggish galaxy like ours, we don't know if many/most of the subhalos have been smoothed out by the gravitational effects of normal matter (which are more important than dark matter in the inner parts of galaxies like ours). So we wouldn't necessarily see much (micro)lensing in...

I'm glad that I began reading this thread. I've learned more about cosmology over the last few weeks from looking here (and visiting Wikipedia) than I did as an undergrad. Thanks all around! OK, here's another one: If our universe is a false vacuum [a concept I had never heard of before]...

Makes good sense but, with a 5-to-1 ratio of DM to Regular Matter (RM), it seems like there couldn't be a perfect correlation. In fact, all of the previous comments on the vastness of the universe (and corresponding variety of structures) would suggest that we should observe many cases of DM...

Somewhat related to what you chaps have been discussing: Even though dark matter is rather isotropic thoughout the visible universe, there must be regions where it is clumped. Also, it supposedly makes up the majority of the matter in the universe. So, why don't we see a great deal of...

Uh, yeah, I fully understand the magnitude of 10^120. That approximates the number of atoms in all of the galaxies in about 10^45 visible universes. One visible universe has about (~10^24 atoms/kg of matter)(10^30 kg of matter/star)(10^11stars/galaxy)(10^10galaxies in the visible universe) =...

I'm sorry, but I don't find this argument at all convincing. You're suggesting that an infinite number of "Similar Earths" exist out there, and that an infinite number of branches have continuously broken away from them every fraction of a second for nearly 5 billion years (or, perhaps ~14...

The 12th issue of & Magazine is available for download. With articles by Len Lakofka, and other notables, & Magazine is sure to meet your old school needs: Cheers!

Yeah, it was interesting. Neat to think that we could characterize/fingerprint a particular atom by the nodal surfaces and the surfaces' intersections. I hadn't heard anyone ever speak of such a thing and was wondering if the resulting geometries/topologies had any significance, relation or...

Interesting question from one of my AP Chemistry kids (12th grader, dreamer-stoner type, but the guy often has intriguing ideas): My student understands that, when discussing electron orbitals in an introductory manner, we are not terribly concerned that indivdual orbitals (and their...

It was confirmed (two decades ago) that we live in an open, ever-expanding universe.

Lol, I know. Sorry about that. I have a BS in physics ('94), but the nuclear physics course that I took back in '92 was just that...BS. My impression was that my professor (or anyone, really) did not have a very good idea of what was going on. However, I know that new models have been floating...