Slashdot Mirror

I heard about a project where Virtual Reality was used to help burn patients suffer less. They participate in a VR world called SnowWorld Link http://www.hitl.washington.edu/projects/vrpain/ and a report about it http://www.npr.org/2012/02/12/146775049/virtual-penguins-a-prescription-for-pain

The reduction in pain for the patients was significant and consistent. I had first heard of this when NPR was talking about soldiers returning from Iraq and how this helped them deal with pain. It's amazing what this kind of technology can do to help people, particularly those who have been injured. I am sure that VR will be able to help those who suffer from PTSD and who knows what else. The SnowWorld stuff is quite fascinating and worth a read. Do a Google search and you'll find plenty of information on it.

So now you want to conflate eating meat with rape, and then tell me I need to study formal logic a bit more? You need to study your teeth and your stomach a bit more. Presumably you are already sufficiently familiar with your asshole.

Carnivore teeth:
1) Tiger
2) Baboon

Herbivore teeth:
1) Deer
2) Horse

And finally, human teeth.

We like to think of ourselves as "King of the Jungle", and we are. But that's not due to our physical power, but rather, to our brain power. Also - our teeth are much closer to the herbivore's teeth than to the carnivores. We don't have the ruminant stomachs, but we have the ruminant teeth with a carnivore-lite's stomach. Which suggests to me that we're probably designed to eat mostly plants but can digest animal protein if we come across it.

[citation needed]

[1] [2] [3] [4] [4]

5% within 3 years isn't that bad actually, assuming the 95% aren't just better at hiding their crimes ;).

If the rates don't go up that much after 3 years, it sure seems completely unjustified to have lifetime bans especially for stuff like online games. The more hours they spend on games the less time they have for raping people in real life, or even planning to do so.

I'd say it's fine to have lifetime bans for adult child-pedos[1] from being kindergarten teachers etc. That's not that harsh - plus I doubt guys should be a kindergarten teachers anyway given the extra dangers to them- everyone is less likely to give guys the benefit of the doubt, and kids and adults do make stuff up especially if the prosecution insists stuff happens: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fells_Acres_Day_Care_Center_preschool_trial
There are plenty of ways false memories can be created too:
http://faculty.washington.edu/eloftus/Articles/sciam.htm

[1] To me there's a difference between "pedos" who are 16 year olds "consensually raping" each other, and pedo adults raping young children. Those 16 year old "couple" pedos aren't likely to be more dangerous to young children than average.

Yawning is not all about breathing. Why would you post so authoritatively about something you are ignorant? Oh right, slashdot.

Here's a link at your level

http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/yawning.html

Educate yourself.

There seems to be some confusion on this thread between magnetic resonance, which is the type of power transfer used by WiTricity and others, and radiative RF which is the radio technology we are used to. For example, received power does not fall off with the square of distance in the case of magnetic resonant systems. There are definitely a ton of challenges to this technology, but it is good to keep in mind that they are NOT talking about transmitting a high power RF signal and having it received at range. Here is a link to a paper that describes both types of systems so you can understand the implementation and trade-offs. The author's have achieved 80% efficiency over a few meters using magnetic resonance. Experimental Results with two Wireless Power Transfer Systems http://sensor.cs.washington.edu/pubs/WISP-WARP.pdf Video and other good info: http://www.alansonsample.com/research/wrel.html

"The Casimir effect is the best known example of negative energy:" [Dumb Scientist]

This is going to be one of my rare responses to your posts. Prepare to be ignored for the most part, from here on in. ... Get a clue. If you are seriously using that link as a citation, then you lose. You did not properly comprehend what it said. ... Dude. I know you are a scientist. But do you even really know what the Casimir effect is? Of course I expect you will by the time you answer (if you do). And if you do answer, I probably won't reply. But at this very moment, at the time you first read this, from what you have already stated, I suspect that you really don't know what it is. [Jane Q. Public]

Comments like these suggest that you're not really interested in studying physics. On the other hand, John Cramer's Alternate View columns inspired me to study physics in high school. In 1998, FTL Photons introduced me to the Casimir effect. In 2001, I made an offhand remark about these faster-than-light (FTL) implications to my experimental physics professor, and he asked me to give a presentation to the class.

The next comment I wrote summarized the first part of my presentation. The second part showed that virtual particles actually slow down light in the standard vacuum, because photons spend some of their time as electron-positron pairs that travel slower than "true" lightspeed. Because the Casimir effect suppresses some of these virtual particles, light actually travels faster between the plates (perpendicular to the plates) than in the standard vacuum. This is called the Scharnhorst effect.

The Casimir effect can be modeled mathematically as a negative-mass region; Hawking showed that negative energy is necessary for certain effects on WORMHOLES to take place in conjunction with such a negative mass. But he did not claim that the negative energy was supplied by it. But that does not establish a direct relationship between the two. It is a very FAR cry from equating negative energy with the Casimir effect. [Jane Q. Public]

Why are you talking about Hawking? I already pointed you to "Wormholes, Time Machines, and the Weak Energy Condition":

"The following model explores the use of the 'Casimir vacuum'[12] (a quantum state of the electromagnetic field that violates the unaveraged weak energy condition[11]) to support a wormhole..." [Morris, Thorne, and Yurtsever, 1988]

Nevertheless, Hawking's findings did not point at Casimir effect as a source of negative energy; they merely indicated that negative energy was necessary for the negative mass to have the calculated effect. Not the same thing. [Jane Q. Public]

Again, why are you talking about Hawking? You might want [1] to read "FTL Photons":

"Since the energy density of normal vacuum is defined to be zero, the vacuum between the metal plates actually becomes a region of negativ

"The Casimir effect is the best known example of negative energy:" [Dumb Scientist]

This is going to be one of my rare responses to your posts. Prepare to be ignored for the most part, from here on in. ... Get a clue. If you are seriously using that link as a citation, then you lose. You did not properly comprehend what it said. ... Dude. I know you are a scientist. But do you even really know what the Casimir effect is? Of course I expect you will by the time you answer (if you do). And if you do answer, I probably won't reply. But at this very moment, at the time you first read this, from what you have already stated, I suspect that you really don't know what it is. [Jane Q. Public]

Comments like these suggest that you're not really interested in studying physics. On the other hand, John Cramer's Alternate View columns inspired me to study physics in high school. In 1998, FTL Photons introduced me to the Casimir effect. In 2001, I made an offhand remark about these faster-than-light (FTL) implications to my experimental physics professor, and he asked me to give a presentation to the class.

The next comment I wrote summarized the first part of my presentation. The second part showed that virtual particles actually slow down light in the standard vacuum, because photons spend some of their time as electron-positron pairs that travel slower than "true" lightspeed. Because the Casimir effect suppresses some of these virtual particles, light actually travels faster between the plates (perpendicular to the plates) than in the standard vacuum. This is called the Scharnhorst effect.

The Casimir effect can be modeled mathematically as a negative-mass region; Hawking showed that negative energy is necessary for certain effects on WORMHOLES to take place in conjunction with such a negative mass. But he did not claim that the negative energy was supplied by it. But that does not establish a direct relationship between the two. It is a very FAR cry from equating negative energy with the Casimir effect. [Jane Q. Public]

Why are you talking about Hawking? I already pointed you to "Wormholes, Time Machines, and the Weak Energy Condition":

"The following model explores the use of the 'Casimir vacuum'[12] (a quantum state of the electromagnetic field that violates the unaveraged weak energy condition[11]) to support a wormhole..." [Morris, Thorne, and Yurtsever, 1988]

Nevertheless, Hawking's findings did not point at Casimir effect as a source of negative energy; they merely indicated that negative energy was necessary for the negative mass to have the calculated effect. Not the same thing. [Jane Q. Public]

Again, why are you talking about Hawking? You might want [1] to read "FTL Photons":

"Since the energy density of normal vacuum is defined to be zero, the vacuum between the metal plates actually becomes a region of negativ

Plus, you don't even need to actually download anything to frame someone, as can be seen here: http://dmca.cs.washington.edu/.

• Measurements of Time-Variable Gravity Show Mass Loss in Antarctica
• Increasing rates of ice mass loss from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets revealed by GRACE
• Accelerated Antarctic ice loss from satellite gravity measurements
• Increasing Antarctic Sea Ice under Warming Atmospheric and Oceanic Conditions
• Simulation of Recent Southern Hemisphere Climate Change
• Interpretation of Recent Southern Hemisphere Climate Change
• Nonannular atmospheric circulation change induced by stratospheric ozone depletion and its role in the recent increase of Antarctic sea ice extent

This little canard about Antartic ice being okay will continue well beyond being a pants-on-fire bald-face lie. We will have to wait until it is *so* obvious that Antartica is losing ice, that even Glenn Beck has to admit it. But then, the forbes (and the conservative think tanks) will just slip right on to another canard.

History repeats itself. We've seen this before.

Actually the Arctic sea ice melt is about three times greater than the increase in Antarctic sea ice. Antarctic sea ice has not increased because it's been getting colder in Antarctica because it hasn't. It's really kind of an interesting and complex explanation.

One part of the explanation doesn't have much to do with global warming but rather the Antarctic ozone hole. Ozone is a greenhouse gas and the hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica causes the stratosphere to cool. This increases the strength of the circumpolar winds around the continent which pushes the ice around opening up polynyas exposing more open water to subsequently freeze thus expanding the ice area.

The second part does have to do with global warming. "The Southern Ocean consists of a layer of cold water near the surface and a layer of warmer water below. Water from the warmer layer rises up to the surface, melting sea ice. However, as air temperatures warm, the amount of rain and snowfall also increases. This freshens the surface waters, leading to a surface layer less dense than the saltier, warmer water below. The layers become more stratified and mix less. Less heat is transported upwards from the deeper, warmer layer. Hence less sea ice is melted." The paper on that effect is (Zhang 2007)

One other interesting fact, the Antarctic sea ice melts (nearly) completely every year before reforming the next winter as opposed to Arctic sea ice which has multi-year sea ice (for a few more years anyway). The reason being is that the Arctic is an ocean surrounded by continents and the Antarctic is a continent surrounded by ocean.

http://psc.apl.washington.edu/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/schweiger/ice_volume/Bpiomas_plot_daily_heff.2sst.png

As we can see, arctic ice thickness has been picking up. This is consistent with the weaker ice being broken off and stronger thicker ice remaining.

Antarctic sea ice has increased somewhat. That is partly an effect of the ozone hole over Antarctica strengthening the circumpolar winds pushing existing ice around and opening more leads that subsequently freeze over (Turner 2009) and partly an effect of global warming causing increasing precipitation over the Southern Ocean freshening the surface and less mixing of the ocean layers (Zhang 2007). Antarctic sea ice is different than Arctic sea ice in that it melts nearly completely and then reforms every year rather than being more or less permanent.

From measurements of the GRACE satellites we know that land ice in the Antarctic is decreasing.

It looks as though sea ice volume was recovering before sea ice extent in 2007 http://psc.apl.washington.edu/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/schweiger/ice_volume/BPIOMASIceVolumeAnomalyCurrentV2_CY.png?%3C?php%20echo%20time()? so your argument may apply more clearly to that parameter.

Mars, where global warming is welcome!

Soil temperatures on Mars can reach 81F.

WTF is F?! How much is that in C's?

Mars, where global warming is welcome!

Soil temperatures on Mars can reach 81F.

You wrote:

>Think about an isolated hunter gatherer society. They spend all of their time trying to survive.

What unmitigated bullshit! Foraging on average takes 6.5 hour per day in foraging societies which were studied by anthropologies. Proof: http://courses.washington.edu/anth457/timeallo.htm

In some cases, it is as little as 3 hours per day nearly year-round: http://ihhr.asu.edu/AMH/AM/1990%20Seasonality%20in%20a%20Foraging%20Society-%20Variation%20in%20Diet,%20Work%20Effort,%20Fertility,%20and%20Sexual%20Division%20of%20Labor%20Among%20the%20Hiwi%20of%20Venezuela.pdf

Please stop pulling made up "facts" out of your ass when it's clear you're completely ignorant of that which you speak of--not to mention that the rest of your argument falls apart due to its reliance on this flawed assumption.

"I don't know of any proposed cryptographic standard with 923 bit anything."

Ha I found it, purely by luck. First of all assume the press release went thru a journalism and PR filter so its almost entirely incorrect other than some numbers might not be incorrect.

I remember reading a paper on implementing IDEA (which is a two decade old, semi-patent-unencumbered algo because its so old) on a Spartan FPGA, which I remember because I fool around with a spartan dev board at home and this is the kind of thing you find when you google for fpga and various crypto system names, etc. Anyway that specific FPGA implementation of IDEA has a latency of ... 923 cycles. So its not 923 bit anything, they're talking about a streaming cryptosystem that takes 923 cycles from the first bit squirts in until that encrypted first bit bit squirts out, and the journalist filter rewrote it. Thats low enough latency for high bandwidth stuff like video, but not so good for voice or keyboard ssh unless you play some games (which is a whole nother topic)

Anyway, cracking a "mere" 128 bit sample in 148 days or whatever is still kinda interesting, even if its not cracking an entire 923 bit system. Landauer limit alone would imply they had to have cracked the algorithm not just brute forced it.

http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/courses/cse590g/01sp/fccm00_idea1.pdf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Data_Encryption_Algorithm

• Adblock plus
• Sharemenot, stops like-buttons from facebook and so on
• Cookie white list, allows you to block cookies by default and only allow where you really want to. Turns out that it's not many sites.. I have approx. 50 sites in the white list, and you can white-list allowing only for session cookies or forever.

The tools are there for those who want. And it doesn't take much work to use them.

Actually, the original work seems to be stemming from what is now the Bundler project. A fork (so to speak) became phototourism and photosynth. But Slashdotters probably prefer Bundler

http://phototour.cs.washington.edu/bundler/

He's also released a good portion of the underlying algorithms (though not the actual tools) in the open-source bundler library, which is quite helpful in terms of having a base to build other applications on, or to do research in this area.

http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/courses/cse455/10wi/lectures/455sfm.ppt

however, during that same time period, the sea ice in the Antarctic, you know, at the other end of the planet, has been increasing. uh oh.

First of all, it's important that people know what "sea ice" is and its not. It *is* frozen sea water, which in the Antarctic mostly melts in the summer. It is *not* the permanent Antarctic ice sheets, which originate in glaciers (land ice, not sea ice, even though it is on the sea). The ice sheets are losing about 40 gigtons of mass per year[5].

Second, the gain in sea ice in the Antarctic is tiny, and it is not the result of atmospheric temperature decreases. There has been an increase in Antarctic atmosphere temperatures [1], accompanied by a stronger winds blowing cold surface water to the northwest which produces the increase in winter sea ice extent [2]. In the lee of the Antarctic Peninsula, which blocks this surface movement, there has been a dramatic decrease in sea ice [3]. Another factor is that slightly warmer surface temperatures can actually lead to an increase in ice extent by reducing the salinity of water near the edge of ice-formation[6].

Overall, the changes in polar sea ice are consistent with models predicting CO2 induced global warming [2][4], and in any case land ice is a much better indication of antarctic temperature changes, and that has being lost; if the small sea ice increases we've been seeing were due to cooling, we would see an equilibrium or gain in land ice.

CITATIONS:
[1] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v457/n7228/abs/nature07669.html
[2] http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/faq/#wintertimeantarctic
[3] http://nsidc.org/cryosphere/quickfacts/seaice.html
[4] http://www.sciencemag.org/content/278/5340/1104.short
[5] http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2010EGUGA..12.6127I
[6] http://psc.apl.washington.edu/zhang/Pubs/Zhang_Antarctic_20-11-2515.pdf

That's not particularly useful since all of the modern trackers inject random fake IP addresses as seeds.

You're assuming they give the slightest damn about accuracy or false accusations. There's no oversight! Why wouldn't they just accuse every IP on the list whether it's fake or not? It doesn't cost them anything, and they're assholes.

Remember this? "Innocent" printers being accused of copyright infringement. The fun begins when anyone with half a clue realizes that they can now easily frame anyone else they want to and get them kicked off the internet. It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if some asshats like Anonymous started framing large numbers of innocent people like that, just to be jackasses.

There is a reason this sort of thing is supposed to require due process and judicial oversight. (Not that "disconnecting people from the internet" is the sort of thing that should ever happen for any reason. Can you imagine what people would have said even fifty years ago if someone proposed prohibiting accused but not convicted book pirates from having pen and paper?)

I don't know how much of a problem this is in higher academia, but according to more articles like this

And the fact that prestigious universities such as this only accept a handful of students in computer science in a year, it's not surprising. One of the more surprising things is that UW received 40 million dollars from Paul Allen a while ago, and they used it to build a giant 40 million dollar new computer science building. But the number of students they accepted per year didn't change. Why is this? If you have lots of students who want to go there, why not use extra funds you have to expand the number of applications you can accept?

I dunno, I'm sure the downward trend of education spending all over our country isn't helping universities to expand the number of students they can accept either.

It should be noted that Brian Ferris is from the United States. He got hired by Google to do transit work as a result of his thesis doing similar work for the Seattle area public transit (see OneBusAway if you are in the Seattle area and haven't heard of it). He's not some random European complaining about the United States.

Sure it does. There's plenty of evidence that women are better-suited to long-distance endurance running and other events than men are.

How much does solar irradiance vary at wavelengths below 400nm

Quite a bit! The UV component of the sun varies far more than the average luminosity with solar activity.

and what are the physical and chemical effects of this variance on the atmosphere and global climate?

That is a subject of research; a lot of people would like to know! For the most part, the UV doesn't make it to the troposphere, so it doesn't have a direct effect, but it's still an unresolved question as to what indirect effects it may have.

The best study I know of looking at the correlation of solar activity with global temperature shows only a plus or minus 0.1 degree variation from solar max to solar min, though, so it doesn't seem to be a major player in temperature (the reference is Camp and Tung, http://depts.washington.edu/amath/research/articles/Tung/journals/GRL-solar-07.pdf ) The Working-Group 1 report links to more references on the subject; you might look at some of them: http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/publications_and_data_reports.shtm

Do the variance in solar magnetic index and the interaction of the solar and terrestrial magnetic fields have any direct or indirect effects on global climate?

I don't know of any confirmed effects there, other than aurorae.

http://sharemenot.cs.washington.edu/

This should block those iframes.

I have psychological research showing that lcd screens showing live feed images of waterfalls and other such fake things don't work. Source.

IANAL, but no, EULA are not the same as free software licenses. The primary difference is that one is a *licensing agreement*, and the other is a *license*.

The concrete difference between the two is that a licensing agreement rests on contract law, in that it is an agreement between two parties. Generally speaking this means it must have (at least) two parties (software vendor and user) and there must be mutual consideration (they give you a license to software, you provide the agreement not to do certain things, and often toss in some money). A license rests on copyright law. Thus it does not require two parties or mutual consideration. Rather it is the unilaterally granted permission of a copyright holder to someone else to use their work.

The best place to see the difference is in the consequences of failure to adhere. The only way to fail to adhere to most free software licenses is to distribute binaries without the source and/or license du'jour. If you fail to adhere to the conditions of the license, then you have no license and are distributing a copyrighted work without permission of the author, which is copyright infringement. If you fail to adhere to the conditions of an EULA, then you are in breach of contract.

A helpful overview: http://www.law.washington.edu/lta/swp/law/contractvlicense.html

And not just in the tech world. You can be sued if you do CPR and crack someone's ribs if you're not certified.

"there has never been a successful suit brought against someone performing CPR."

http://depts.washington.edu/learncpr/askdoctor.html#Can I get sued

also

"if you give assistance, including CPR, for a medical emergency Good Samaritan laws cover you."

http://depts.washington.edu/learncpr/askdoctor.html#Does the Good

You can be prosecuted if you shoot an invader in your house (at least in the UK).

That's why I live in Texas.

And not just in the tech world. You can be sued if you do CPR and crack someone's ribs if you're not certified.

"there has never been a successful suit brought against someone performing CPR."

http://depts.washington.edu/learncpr/askdoctor.html#Can I get sued

also

"if you give assistance, including CPR, for a medical emergency Good Samaritan laws cover you."

http://depts.washington.edu/learncpr/askdoctor.html#Does the Good

You can be prosecuted if you shoot an invader in your house (at least in the UK).

That's why I live in Texas.

Head injuries account for between 4% and 22% of all soccer injuries.

In soccer, concussions make up 2-3% of all injuries. This is the same rate as for American football!

A study involving men's and women's college soccer teams from the Atlantic Coast Conference found a total of 29 concussions in a 2-year period. The most common cause of the concussions was when one player's head struck the head of another player. This was also the most common source of concussions in a group of soccer players at the US Olympic Sport Festival in 1993. The second most common cause of concussions occurred when a ball struck a player's head. These head-to-ball concussions happened when a player was hit in the head by a ball kicked from close range. In many cases, the ball traveled so quickly the player did not have time to react. NONE of the concussions were caused by proper heading of the ball. Heading the ball, however, is not without consequences. A player may head the ball many times during practice sessions and about eight times during a game. Many players at the 1993 US Olympic Festival experienced headaches after heading the ball. These headaches lasted from a few seconds to several days.

A Norwegian study found that 35% of 69 Division I soccer players had abnormal electroencephalogram (EEG) patterns. This is more than twice the rate of abnormal EEG patterns in control subjects. Retired soccer players had several brain abnormalities including reduced cortical tissue and increased lateral ventricle size.

Soccer players also seem to perform more poorly than control subjects on some types of IQ tests and many former players (81%) suffer from problems with attention, concentration, and memory. Players who typically head the ball have also been found to have more neurological problems than non-headers. Compared to goalies and midfielders ("non-headers"), forwards and defenders ("headers") performed more poorly on some memory, visual perception and planning tests.

Most of the data come from players at the elite level who have played soccer for many years. Professional soccer players head the ball thousands of times during their careers. There has not been much research on the effects of heading the soccer ball on children or recreational players. Although helmets may protect players from concussions, their usefulness has not been tested. At least one company is selling helmets to be used by children while playing soccer.

So, how can head injuries be reduced and minimized? Here are some recommendations:

Players should have proper instruction on the correct way to head the ball.

The ball should be the appropriate size for the age of the players. Smaller balls are less likely to cause injury. Also, make sure the ball is inflated properly.

Use "no heading" rules for younger players. If a player is not allowed to head the ball, the ball is less likely to hit a player's head.

Use padded goalposts.

Soccer and the Brain

Wonderful plan. Little problem: as far as I know, the tech simply doesn't exist to do get any sort of reasonable performance out of a wireless mesh. If the tech for a mesh did exist, then you would probably want to run it on 802.11 first, so you could set it up simply with alternate firmware on existing hardware (as pretty much everyone already has a wireless router and in urban areas they have overlapping ranges).

As a lighterweight solution, it would be nice to have protocols that could handle UUCP-style updates of e-mail/social networking so updates could be transferred among nearby cell phones.

Also, I saw a talk recently on two-way radio where they had combined two old and one new interference-reduction techniques so they were able to just barely send and receive at the same time on the same frequency.

Different creatures have different sized brains measured either by Weight in grams or Number of neurons in the brain

But as an animal increases in size, neuronal density decreases. Below a certain body size, neurons get larger, known as "fat neurons".

We hear the refrain that jobs lost overseas are 'never coming back.' Yet the first time an impediment to supply appears mines get reopened, and in CA no less. Despite the fact that those workers will be paid living wages and probably have union representation you'll still be able to afford your iPhone. No, California's precious 'environment' won't be destroyed. The next time some wag claims this or that job is lost forever you'll know better.

There is an undercurrent building in the US. The effect of >70% of all imports being tariff free is too obvious to ignore any longer. The US has been trading away its prosperity for dubious diplomatic achievements for decades. People have caught on. The 'oh noes trade war!' cry won't work any more.

When you get down to it with the common leftist they'll tell you they don't want industry returning to the US. Exporting pollution to Asia is just fine with them. Their leaders never hesitate to sign away more of our trade leverage. Today the left's union allies are mostly service sector and government; they simply don't care about the industrial base.

While the big-business wing of the Republican party is all about 'free' trade, the party also harbors a buchanan wing of anti 'free' trade types. Curiously, that stripe is completely unrepresented among all of our presidential candidates today. I predict that will change; when someone that can articulate the problems inherent in trying to compete with disposable workers and indifferent regulation finally appears they will discover a broad and deep well of support.

Hmm, I like the following:

http://faculty.washington.edu/gmobus/Energy/NetEnergy/NetEnergyAndTheEconomy.pdf

Slide 16 is interesting apart from explaining that money is a highly inaccurate means to model energy flows, they call money's flow wage message, and purchase message.

You're just bitter that I don't want to pay your college loans....

Let me give you a small bit of advice.

First, go to a community college for your first two years. Live with your parents. Work part time at any job. You won't be a CEO and it won't be glamorous, but college isn't about making you feel special.

Second, go to an instate college. Preferably go to a college in the city your family lives in.

Third, go into a field that you can legitimately say will improve your earning ability.

And as far as making shit up...

I live in Seattle, here are the facts for this area:

Seattle Central Community College, quarterly tuition for in state student with 16 credits: $1224.00. (From here: http://seattlecentral.edu/registration/tuition.php)

University of Washington, total annual tuition for transfer students: $11,340. (From: http://admit.washington.edu/Paying/Cost#freshmen-transfer)

Top ten college majors: (From: http://www.princetonreview.com/college/top-ten-majors.aspx)

6) English Language and Literature
8) Communications Studies/Speech Communication and Rhetoric
9) Political Science and Government

Sorry, but the demand for English Language and Literature does not justify even $10,000/yr in debt, let alone $20,000+/yr. Compare the list of top majors with this list of top earning majors http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist/0,29569,2073703,00.html and tell me again that I'm making shit up.

And there are lots of jobs out there, they're just jobs that you apparently think you are above. Stop being such an elitist asshole and recognize that any work is better than no work and that no one is above doing any type of job.

There is a professor named Eric Klavins at University of Washington who was doing this like 2 years ago. I toured his lab and I think he already had all the basic logic gates working, and they were working on getting an oscillator going. Here is his site in case you are interested. http://depts.washington.edu/soslab/mw/index.php?title=Main_Page

http://sharemenot.cs.washington.edu/

Excellent firefox plugin to solve just this "problem".

"ShareMeNot is a Firefox add-on designed to prevent third-party buttons (such as the Facebook “Like” button or the Twitter “tweet” button) embedded by sites across the Internet from tracking you until you actually click on them. Unlike traditional solutions, ShareMeNot does this without completely removing the buttons from the web experience."

Sharemenot

Not having an account with them and blocking everything from their domains is what I chose to do.

the SNMP server
http://www.net-snmp.org/

A good IMAP server
http://www.washington.edu/imap/

I'm currently using ShareMeNot, it doesn't exactly follow the method you described but it should be effective in preventing the "usual suspects" from tracking your on-line behavior.

http://sharemenot.cs.washington.edu/

"ShareMeNot is a Firefox add-on designed to prevent third-party buttons (such as the Facebook “Like” button or the Twitter “tweet” button) embedded by sites across the Internet from tracking you until you actually click on them. Unlike traditional solutions, ShareMeNot does this without completely removing the buttons from the web experience."

This is exactly what the Sharemenot plugin for Firefox is for. To protect against this type of thing.

"What's the alternative?"

The alternative is not that Einstein was wrong, but that neutrinos have imaginary mass rather than real mass. This is consistent with observations. We can't measure neutrino mass in experiments, only mass squared, and the error bars on those measurements persistently include some small negative numbers. (And some of these measurements virtually exclude any positive mass^2 values. Other measurements purporting to exclude negative mass^2 values may be the result of over-correction and wishful thinking.)

Imaginary-mass particles are consistent with relativity and were first theorized in the 1960s and given the name "tachyons". High-energy tachyons move near the speed of light; low-energy tachyons move at unlimited velocities. This accounts for the fact that the neutrinos from the 1987A supernova were only 18 hours ahead of the light from the explosion, despite the distance -- they were extremely high energy tachyons.

If neutrinos are tachyons, this could account for a couple of odd things about them - the exceptionally low cross section (likelihood of interaction) and their oscillating between different flavors (electron, muon, tau). Exactly how is a job for the theoreticians, but it seems to me that a neutral particle moving effectively backward in time and at unlimited velocities coupled with low energies is not often going to interact, and imaginary mass could be likened to a rotation or oscillation, much like many other things involving imaginary numbers in physics.

Physicist John Cramer talked about the idea back in 1992 in his Analog column: Neutrino Physics: Curiouser and Curiouser (Alternate View Column AV-54)

of the six most recent experimental determinations of neutrino mass, all have given negative values of the mass-squared to within the statics of the measurements. The experimental observation is that in the vicinity of the end point the yield of electrons lies above the zero-mass line, while for neutrinos with non-zero real mass, the electron yield should lie below this line. The measured mass-squared values are negative to an accuracy of several standard deviations in the most recent of these experiments.

These experimenters have been strangely quiet about mass-squared measurements with negative values. If the results had been positive by the same amount, the literature would be filled with claims that a non-zero value for the neutrino mass had been established. But a negative mass-squared is not something that can be easily publicized.

You obtain the measured mass value from a mass-squared measurement by taking the square root of the measured value. However, the square root of a negative number is an imaginary number. Thus the measurements could, in principle, be taken as an indication that the electron neutrino has an imaginary mass.

What are the physical implications of a particle with an imaginary rest mass? Gerald Feinberg of Columbia University has suggested hypothetical imaginary-mass particles which he has christened "tachyons". Tachyons are particles that always travel at velocities greater than the speed of light. Instead of speeding up when they are given more kinetic energy, they slow down so that their speed moves closer to the velocity of light from the high side as they become more energetic. Feinberg argued that since there are no physical laws forbidding the existence of tachyons, they may well exist and should be looked for.

Here's a link to another, slightly more technical look at the idea: Neutrinos Must be Tachyons by Eue Jin Jeong. Googling "neutrino tachyon" also turns up several previous discussions.

This isn't the first time some neutrino experiments indicated an imaginary mass.
A 1993 article
But other experiments indicated an ordinary (yet tiny) neutrino mass.
Another article
A third article

This isn't the first time some neutrino experiments indicated an imaginary mass.
A 1993 article
But other experiments indicated an ordinary (yet tiny) neutrino mass.
Another article
A third article