Looks like solar cycle 24 has finally ended.
The Termination Event has Arrived:
The "Termination Event" is a new idea in solar physics, outlined by McIntosh and Leamon in a December 2020 paper in the journal Solar Physics. Not everyone accepts it–yet. If Solar Cycle 25 unfolds as McIntosh and Leamon predict, the Termination Event will have to be taken seriously.
The basic idea is this: Solar Cycle 25 (SC25) started in Dec. 2019. However, old Solar Cycle 24 (SC24) refused to go away. It hung on for two more years, producing occasional old-cycle sunspots and clogging the sun's upper layers with its decaying magnetic field. During this time, the two cycles coexisted, SC25 struggling to break free while old SC24 held it back.
[...] Researchers have long known that solar cycles can overlap. The twist added by McIntosh and Leamon is the realization that overlapping cycles interact. [...] In the early 20th century, George Ellery Hale discovered that the magnetic polarity of sunspot pairs reverses itself from one cycle to the next; indeed, the sun's entire global magnetic field flips every ~11 years.
[...] Termination Events mark the end of interference, when a new cycle can break free of the old.
The timing of the Termination Event can predict the intensity of the new cycle. In their Solar Physics paper, McIntosh and Leamon looked back over 270 years of sunspot data and found that Termination Events happen every 10 to 15 years.
"We found that the longer the time between terminators, the weaker the next cycle would be," explains Leamon. "Conversely, the shorter the time between terminators, the stronger the next solar cycle would be."
Journal Reference:
Scott W. McIntosh, Sandra Chapman, Robert J. Leamon, et al. Overlapping Magnetic Activity Cycles and the Sunspot Number: Forecasting Sunspot Cycle 25 Amplitude [open], Solar Physics (DOI: 10.1007/s11207-020-01723-y)
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 05 2022, @06:33AM (12 children)
Termination event for SoylentNews was the censorship of a Soylentil, one who has been with us from the beginning, a Buck Feta of the old Skool, our dear aristarchus. After this, there is only death, darkness, janrinok, and Fat Phil. Martyb was not able to save us. It is all Runaway Shit, from now on. Adieu, mon Freres!
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 05 2022, @06:36AM (5 children)
"Adieu" doesn't seem to mean the same thing to you as it does to the rest of us.
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 05 2022, @06:40AM (4 children)
Vaya con Dios, you fucking Republican cunt? Do you understand, now, your ignorant moron? Does God himself have to descend into your brain, to give the merest glimmer of intelligence? Are you a conservative? Or are you stupider than that, a Runaway? Against stupidity, the Gods themselves strive in vain. Lots of Gods have given up on Runaway. Oh, and khallow. Some just cannot be educated.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 05 2022, @07:29AM (3 children)
Adieu means goodbye.
Yet here you are on every article.
If you really mean goodbye why do you keep returning?
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by janrinok on Saturday March 05 2022, @08:24AM (2 children)
Actually it means 'Until we meet with God' (A Dieu), although it is taken to mean 'Goodbye'. It is not used in common speech very often at all. It was intended to be a final farewell by those facing imminent death or a journey from which there was no return.
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 05 2022, @09:37AM
Janrinok is correct. "Go with god". So all you editorial bastard, you are going without god, sort of "godless", so to speak, and Demons will run all through your bodies, not the mention the Daemons running on your BSD install. Godless, Heathens! Barbarians! Anglo-Saxon Heathen Barbarians! Well, we knew it would end like this, after the Stonehenge article. Wasn't there a Ylvis [www.last.fm] spoof on this? Why am I geoblocked? Is it the graphic content, or that Runaway posts here?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 05 2022, @02:10PM
So does adios, but few take it literally.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 05 2022, @06:42AM (3 children)
Here I was, hoping you finally left. Why don't you go back to the green site?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 05 2022, @10:04AM (2 children)
Sorry, aristarchus never had an account on the "green site". He is one of the naive few who thought that SoylentNews could be what Slashdot never quite was. But, sadly, he was wrong, and now he is permabanned, condemned to roam the threads of SoylentNews, rattling chains and moaning, occasionally, to remind every one of what could have been: A world with out Censorship, And as Neo said, "A world without you."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 05 2022, @12:11PM (1 child)
At least you finally admit to being 'starchus. Progress!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 05 2022, @06:54PM
#WeAreAristarchus
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 05 2022, @05:10PM (1 child)
What self-pitying drivel from a legend in his own mind.
All he needed to do was not be a sockpuppeting moron, and to actually engage with the staff when they reached out to him.
Martyrdom is when someone else does it to you. A freakshow is when you're doing it to yourself.
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 07 2022, @09:34AM
You have no idea of the backstory, do you! TMB objected to some submissions that painted the alt-right in an unflattering light, and got the editors to censor aristarchus, for years. Still going on, only know explicit censorship. This is why you cannot have nice things.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 05 2022, @06:34AM
I went to grad school with Leamon. Good for you Bob. You're posting journal papers and I'm posting AC.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 05 2022, @06:36AM
Obvious the Looney Cycle is not yet closed, otherwise the crazed Runaway, nor the intellectually confused khallow, would not be posting quite so much, with lunacy, and other Moon influenced stupidities.
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 05 2022, @09:17AM (1 child)
Poor little bird, just trying to contribute to the SoylentNews! And PhatFil just kicked him, in the beak! So cruel, and unprofessional.
[Woke Soylentils! Time to this post being erased. Screen save the original. Time stamp everything. We are building a case.]
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 05 2022, @09:41AM
Followed by:
Lot of fat and Phil there. Not sure what is going on. ADS? (Aristarchus Derangement Syndrome)
(Score: 4, Touché) by PiMuNu on Saturday March 05 2022, @09:20AM (6 children)
This approach, take a big non-linear system, do some fitting until you find some correlated parameters, is pretty much numerology. Take enough random variables, throw through enough random computer programs and anything can be "predicted". Maybe they get lucky and the next cycle agrees with their "prediction", maybe not, its just guess work.
(Score: 2) by MIRV888 on Saturday March 05 2022, @12:35PM (2 children)
Statistics are hard.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by PiMuNu on Saturday March 05 2022, @01:36PM (1 child)
Not sure if you are being sarcastic. The statistics in this paper determines the "quality of fit". Any model like this can be tuned to produce a reasonable quality of fit. For example a Fourier transform can be implemented to get a perfect fit, and no doubt the paper authors would claim some incredible precision for their model?
Contrast it, for example, with weather forecasting, a problem of similar complexity, where forecasters are integrating up the differential equations that model atmospheric physics. By contrast, one can famously get a reasonable accuracy on weather forecasting by "predicting" the weather tomorrow will be the same as it is today; but most would not consider that really a satisfactory level of forecasting. However, it's similar to what these folks are doing.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 05 2022, @02:13PM
Yep, I can't comment on this particular paper, but p-hacking is a thing and that's all well and good as a source for a new hypothesis to test, but if it doesn't predict the outcome of an experiment, it has little value.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 05 2022, @12:51PM
>> This approach, take a big non-linear system, do some fitting until you find some correlated parameters, is pretty much numerology.
I believe it's called "millennial science".
(Score: 3, Informative) by HiThere on Saturday March 05 2022, @02:22PM (1 child)
Well, it sort of makes sense, to my non-expert eye. The proof will be the test against predictions.
Now if you're saying it doesn't explain *why* this is happening, you may have a very good point. An observed regularity can have lots of very different explanations. But that the regularity exists is important.
Again, this theory makes predictions. If the predictions turn out to be correct, it has to be taken seriously, even if it doesn't offer an explanation.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 06 2022, @05:14PM
Ding, ding, ding!! You get a gold star!
Although, I may take away points for taking it seriously given the long time frames needed to determine it's "correct". At 10-15 year cycles, we'll need multiple of those to see the correlations, and more to trust it. So, awesome for pointing out this is a "theory", and that we are now testing the theory. Taking anything more away from this is premature. We'll need 30+ years to start evaluating it's output.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 06 2022, @07:04PM
OPERA
TENET
AREPO
SATOR