Proof: https://twitter.com/KenEhrenberg/status/780400465049706496 I direct the jurisprudence specialization at the University of Alabama and work in the areas of the nature of law and its relation to morality, authority, and the epistemology of evidence law. My first book, The Functions of Law, was just published by Oxford, the intro chapter is available online at http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199677474.001.0001/acprof-9780199677474-chapter-1 Ask Me Anything Edit: So it’s now 1pm Central (2pm Eastern) and I have to take our one-week old baby to the doctor for her first checkup. If you want to upvote the questions you want to see answered, I can try to answer a few more later when I get back. Thanks for some great questions! This has been a blast!

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I am Benoit Lavraud, I am permanent staff researcher at the Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planétologie in Toulouse - France, and Editor of Geophysical Research Letters (GRL), a research journal published by AGU focusing on high-impact scientific advances in all major geoscience disciplines. My research topics include the whole chain of phenomena occurring during solar storms between the Sun and the Earth: What are the basic processes of solar storm release? How do solar storm propagate/interact in interplanetary space? How do solar storms trigger geomagnetic activity? What are the key plasma processes controlling this interaction? Can solar and geomagnetic storms be predicted? What are the potential impacts of solar storms on society? I try to tackle these questions through both basic science and instrumentation (ion and electron spectrometers in space). I am Bill Peterson, a research associate at the University of Colorado, Boulder, at the Laboratory of Atmospheric and Space Physics. I have been studying the space weather and the coupling of the ionospheric, magnetospheric, and solar wind plasmas using satellite instrumentation since 1973. I have participated in the design, implementation, and operation of instruments on several NASA missions focused on space weather. I started out studying the physical process that that cause the aurora and the effects of the aurora on the Earth’s magnetosphere and ionosphere. I’m currently working on identifying how these processes differ at Mars using data from the MAVEN spacecraft. I am Andrew Yau, Professor of Physics at University of Calgary, Canada, and Associate Editor of Geophysical Research Letters (GRL), a research journal published by AGU focusing on high-impact scientific advances in all major geoscience disciplines. I am a space scientist. I design satellite instruments such as ion mass spectrometers, and I study the effects of weather in space on the Earth’s upper atmosphere and ionosphere. For example, how and why do solar storms and other space phenomena cause the heating of the upper atmosphere and its escape into space? How does this heating impact Earth-orbiting satellites? How does the solar wind produce the aurora, and the associated electrical currents in the ionosphere? How do these electrical currents affect radio communications - and impact the operations of satellite navigation systems such as my cell phone’s GPS receiver? We’ll be back at 11 am EST (8 am PST, 4 pm UTC) to answer your questions, ask me anything!

Hi Reddit! As hurricane season is in full swing we wanted to give you the opportunity to ask us any questions you have: My name is Dr. Frank Marks. I am the Director of the Hurricane Research Division at NOAA’s Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory. I received my Sc.D. in Meteorology from MIT. I’m an expert in tropical cyclones (known as hurricanes here in the US) and serve as the research lead of NOAA’s Hurricane Forecast Improvement Project (HFIP). I have been flying into tropical cyclones since 1980, and have logged over 10,000 hours on the P-3 aircraft! I’m here to answer all your questions about hurricanes and the latest hurricane research at NOAA. Ask me anything! I’m Commander Justin Kibbey of the NOAA Corps. I am a trained P-3 pilot. In March 2010, I was selected for an interservice transfer from the United States Navy to the NOAA Commissioned Officer Corps, at the Aircraft Operations Center in Tampa, Florida. My first hurricane flight was in September 2010, and ever since, I have flown about 20 flights per year! I help scientists gather data by piloting planes into hurricanes. Ask me anything! You can follow us on twitter @NOAA_AOML & @HRD_NOAA_AOML to stay up to date with all the different research projects at the lab! We’re live! Ask us anything! 3:25pm: Thanks Reddit, our time is up! Thanks for all your insightful and thoughtful questions about hurricane hunting and all things hurricanes. This was tons of fun and a great opportunity for us to share our experiences and connect with all of you! For more information on hurricanes and hurricane hunting you can go to the following NOAA websites: Office of Marine and Aviation Operations: www.omao.noaa.gov Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory: www.aoml.noaa.gov National Hurricane Center: www.hurricanes.gov To stay up to date on all things hurricane hunting & more follow us on twitter: Hurricane Research Division: HRD Twitter Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory: NOAA AOML Twitter Office of Marine and Aviation Operations: NOAA OAMO Twitter NOAA Hurricane Hunters: NOAA Hurricane Hunter Twitter

Hi reddit! Our team has completed a digital analysis of the extremely fragile En-Gedi scroll — the oldest Pentateuchal scroll in Hebrew outside of the Dead Sea Scrolls — revealing the ink-based writing hidden on its untouchable, disintegrating sheets, without ever opening it. While prior research has successfully identified text within ancient artifacts, the En-Gedi manuscript represents the first severely damaged, animal skin-based scroll to be virtually unrolled and non-invasively read line by line. The series of digitization techniques we employed demonstrates that it is possible to “see” ink-based text within an extremely fragile scroll while avoiding the need for physical handling. The traditional approach of unrolling a scroll and pressing it flat in order to duplicate text is not an option for splintering manuscripts like the En-Gedi scroll, which has been burned and crushed into lumps of charcoal. We began by performing a volumetric scan of the scroll using X-ray microtomography, followed by segmentation, which digitally creates a “page” containing the writing. We pieced together over 100 such scanned segments of the scroll by hand. Further manipulation of the digitized scroll involved using texturing and flattening techniques, and finally, virtual unwrapping to unveil the text written on its pages. At last, we were able to “see” the text on five complete wraps of the En-Gedi scroll, and the resulting image is one of two distinct columns of Hebrew writing that contain legible and countable lines, words, letters, and spacing. Further analysis revealed the scroll’s writings to be the book of Leviticus, which makes it the earliest copy of a Pentateuchal book ever found in a synagogue’s Holy Ark. This virtual unlocking of the En-Gedi scroll paves the way for further scholarly analysis of this and other text buried in delicate, damaged materials. Our research was published yesterday in Science Advances, the open-access journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Here is our article: “From damage to discovery via virtual unwrapping: Reading the scroll from En-Gedi” Brent Seales, professor and chairman in the department of computer science at the University of Kentucky Michael Segal, the Otsuki Professor of Biblical Studies and head of the School of Philosophy and Religions at Hebrew University of Jerusalem Seth Parker is the Project Manager on the Scrolls Project, directly overseeing software development by the team’s 8 student developers. He’s also a big fan of Whit Stillman and Ross McElwee. We’ll be back at 11 am EST (8 am PST, 4 pm UC) to answer your questions, ask us anything!

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As previously announced, /r/philosophy is hosting an AMA series this fall semester which kicked off with AMAs by Caspar Hare (MIT) and Kevin Scharp. Check out our series announcement post to see all the upcoming AMAs this semester. We continue our series this upcoming Monday with Kenneth M. Ehrenberg, Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Adjunct Professor of Law at the University of Alabama. Hear it from Professor Ehrenberg himself: After getting my JD from Yale in ’97 I worked for two years as a lawyer, one with the NYC Parks Dept and one with the firm O’Melveny & Myers (doing first environmental insurance defense and then a private antitrust case against Microsoft), before going back for my PhD in philosophy at Columbia. There I studied under Jeremy Waldron and Joseph Raz and had worked with Jules Coleman at Yale and when he visited Columbia. My dissertation was about doing legal philosophy by investigating the functions of law in general and legal systems. Some of the ideas are reprised in my new book, The Functions of Law (OUP 2016), although it is a completely newly written work with a completely new ontological claim. OUP is offering a 30% discount on the book: UK addressees can use the code ALAUTH16 and US addressees can use the code ALAUTHC4 for 30% off. After finishing my PhD, I took my first tenure track job at University at Buffalo, SUNY, taking leave to do a term at Oxford as the HLA Hart visiting fellow in 2010. In 2012 I took a second tenure track job at University of Alabama, heading up their jurisprudence specialization. My main areas of interest are in analytic general jurisprudence (especially the ontology of law and methodology of legal philosophy), the relation of law to morality and grounds of legal authority, and the epistemology of evidence law. The following is a short description of the book. This book seeks to contribute to a legal positivist picture of law by defending two metaphysical claims about law and investigating their methodological implications. One claim is that the law is a kind of artifact, a thoroughgoing human creation for performing certain tasks or accomplishing certain goals. That is, artifacts are generally understood in terms of their functions. When discussing artifacts, the notion of function need not be as mysterious or problematic as might be the case with biological functions. The other claim is that the law is an institution, a specific kind of artifact that creates artificial roles which allow for the establishment and manipulation of rights and duties among those subject to the institution. The methodological implication of this picture of law is that it is best understood in terms of the social functions that it performs and that the job of the legal philosopher is to investigate those functions. This position is advanced against non-positivist theories of law that nonetheless rely upon notions of law’s function, and is also advanced against positivist pictures that tend to de-emphasize or overlook the central role that function must play to understand the nature of law. One key implication of this picture is that it can help explain how law might give people reasons to act beyond its use of force to do so. AMA Professor Ehrenberg will join us Monday for a couple hours of live Q&A on his research in the philosophy of law. Please feel free to post questions for Professor Ehrenberg here. He will look at this thread before he starts and begin with some questions from here while the initial questions in the new thread come in. Please join me in welcoming Professor Ehrenberg to our community!

Good morning, Reddit! This is Burt Rutan here to answer your questions. While I am best known for just those two projects, I am known in aviation circles for an unprecedented list of 45 other research aircraft developed by the two companies I founded and ran over a 43-year career. My first company, Rutan Aircraft Factory, also developed 14 other research aircraft and marketed plans for five of them so individuals could build their own personal airplanes. Or, you may, know me because my small team at my second company, Scaled Composites in the Mojave Desert covertly developed an entire Manned Space Program, and flew three of the world’s five manned space flights in 2004. You can read about me at burtrutan.com, or in a new book, How to Make a Spaceship, by Julian Guthrie. “Black Sky”, an award-winning 2004 documentary by Discovery TV described our private, non-Government space program. I will be back at 3 pm ET to answer your questions, Ask Me Anything!

Hi Reddit! I am Keira Havens - you’ve seen me here on Reddit before when I shared my color changing flower project a few years ago. I’m a molecular biologist by training and focused on synthetic biology while in academia. I went on to start a company around the color changing flower concept and learned a lot about the way a new application makes it into the marketplace - or doesn’t. That experience got me thinking closely about the systems we use to identify beneficial technologies and eventually brought me to LAUNCH, to build networks that connect technology more closely with society. And I am Rafael “Rafa” Gomez Bombarelli: Postdoctoral Fellow, Harvard University. I currently work at the Aspuru-Guzik group in the computer driven design of molecular materials. I combine machine learning and first principles simulation to rapidly discover practical materials: organic light emitting diodes for displays, electrolytes for flow batteries, and organic photovoltaics for solar cells. I have a Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from the Universidad de Salamanca in Spain. We’re here to answer your questions. In particular, we’re excited to talk about the LAUNCH Smarter Chemistry Challenge, developed in partnership with the ACS Green Chemistry Institute, and other organizations. The challenge is a global call for innovators and entrepreneurs, companies, and organizations, to enable predictive chemical design through innovative applications of data. Why data? Predictive design can’t exist without good information. This requires the right data to exist, that the data is publicly accessible, and that the data is in a consistent format that can be easily used by scientists, companies and institutions. By any of these measures, chemistry faces enormous challenges. Check out the challenge here, and ask us anything about the challenge, data in chemistry, computer driven design, and the process of technological innovation, from discovery to adoption! Back to answer a few more questions!

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