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Hontas FarmerRSS Feed of this column.

My research focuses on astrophysics from massive star formation to astroparticle physics. Born and raised in Chicagoland I have lived in Bellwood, IL since 1984 and attended public schools here... Read More »

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The open access, open post publication peer review journal, The Winnower will issue DOI's to all past and future Reddit r/Science AMA's.  The people who write on reddit, sometimes called "redditors", are known for having a large impact on the discourse on the internet.  Millions of people use redit as a place to find human filtered relevant information.    This step is intended to provide a way to cite these discussions.  Often important points about research papers are made on Reddit and nowhere else.  
(Full disclosure:  I was one of the authors who beta tested The Winnower.  Work I published there lead to me getting a conference talk at the April APS conference this year.) 


Here is what The Winnower says quote:

Pluto does not meet the definition of a planet but as we will see that does not diminish it.  Far from a random and uninteresting chunk of ice, with little local gravitational influence on it’s neighborhood, it is an example of binary planetoids with tantalizing features. 

UPDATE

Most models of quantum gravity propose or predict that at very short distances space is a frothing foam where distance and time intervals themselves fluctuate rapidly.  These models predict that if light can travel long distances there will be a cumulative effect due to photons from a source gaining slightly different phases.  The precise nature of the effect, the underlying mechanisms would vary but otherwise they would be probed by the same observation of quasars, the most distant short wavelength light we can observe.
Windows 10 build 10122 marks the arrival of something like a first beta Build of Windows 10.  (Build 10130 has a bit more polish, new icons, but has the same issues as 10122.) As such, one can now start to ask the question how will my favorite games fare under Windows 10?  Back when Windows 8 came out many people from corporate IT to Gamers said "We'll wait for Windows 9".  Microsoft has skipped to 10 and kept the live tiles and touch friendly aspects of the interface it was fashionable to hate about Windows 8 and 8.1.
Google Maps searches for the words "Nigger House" will bring up a map pin pointing the white house and the underground railroad museum in Chicago.  Searches for racial and ethnic slurs on other groups produce MORE questionable results.   In fact the most targeted group is your generic "white" American.

Google says sorry over racist Google Maps White House search results. Searches using a racist slur return results pinpointing the White House in Washington DC (UK Guardian). 
On April 11th 2015 I delivered a presentation on the subject of Quantum Gravity in which I questioned the basic assumption that quantum is more fundamental than relativity.  Relativization is the name for the approach I propose.  In a nutshell let us try treating relativity as the more fundamental set of principles and make quantum field theory obey those.  The talk was well received.    There is still lots of work do on this and a lifetime to do it in, but the approach is now firmly not "crackpot".  Indeed as the money plot from my presentation shows this approach gets a very nice result for the behavior of black holes. 

The talk: