Slashdot Mirror

Actually diamond density is only ~3,500 kg/m3, so no, it wouldn't be very heavy. ~35kg, more or less: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(big+watermelon+serving+volume)+*+diamond+density

I'm having trouble finding a chart that shows 0 (or very low) pressure, but using wolframalpha at 0Pa or at 1 trillionth of an atmosphere (source) the phase is returned as solid at 175 degrees K.
The lack of botherance does seem to be the most likely cause of the other issue. Pity; a lot of people could have learned a new word today.

At a range of lightseconds your lasers will be too diffuse

The diffusion of laser goes down with diameter of main mirror squared (or waist size squared, to be technical). If I am not mistaken (and I might be, please tell me if I am), a 400 nm laser with a 10 m waist will have a width of 14 m at 2.6 light seconds (formula from Wikipedia). It will thus have an effect per area of half of what is has a point blank range, which is far from useless.

A light year is the distance it takes light to travel one year:
    | 0.3066013938 pc (parsecs)
    | 63241.07708 AU (astronomical units)
    | 9.461×10^12 km (kilometers)
    | 9.461×10^15 meters
    | 5.879 trillion miles

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=light+year

Though according to general relativity spacetime is 4 dimensional and the distance between two events can be measured in interchangeable units of space and time measured in light-years or light seconds.

We all travel through spacetime at the speed of light, in the direction of time, but when we start to travel in the space direction at a fraction of the speed of light, we still travel at the speed of of light, but as an angle in space time, like the hypotenuse (long side) of a triangle using Pythagoras' equation (a^2 + b^2 = c^2), with part of our direction in time and part of our direction in space. This accounts for most of the weirdness experienced with time dilation and dimensions appearing to shorten (the object is partially rotated into the time dimension).

Even worse: your tin-foil skivvies will crimp when your dedicated TSA agent gives your junk its mandatory anti-weapon-smuggling squeeze. Try to work those kinks out while strapped into your three fourths of a cubic meter of cattle cargo space in Economy.

$2 Billion is pretty small on scale of what the planet spends on energy. For rough maths a GW of power, for 1 year at 10c/kWh is ~ $1Billion ( http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1+GW+*+1+year+*+(0.1USD+%2F+kWh) ).

ITER is a prototype for a 0.5GW machine. Now first of their kind machines cost stupidly more than general production machines (R&D is not cheap). So the hope would be that you can one day build a 1GW reactor for something less than $10 Billion. Then it is cost effective even if you are paying interest at 10%. (for nuclear (and renewables) you can neglect fuel costs).

If one barrel is 306 pounds and a ton is 2000 pounds then that's 400,000 pounds of oil consumed, or 1324 barrels. In contrast, BP trashed the Gulf with an estimated 5 million barrels.

It's interesting that bacteria are working hard to consume the spilled oil, but hardly a successful method of cleanup.

I don't know how you arrived at "400,000 lbs" from 200,000 tons, but I came up about 1.3M barrels of oil:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=200000+tons++%2F+307+lbs%2Fbarrel

Which is still only about 25% of the spill, yet the article said that it accounts for 40% of the oil, what happened to the rest?

20mW x (conservatively) 50,000,000 devices nationwide (what, you thought this was just about cell phones? Don't forget LameBoys, PeeS2's and the NoMindO DS) ~= [insignificant figure in the grand scheme of things]

The CEOs started the class warfare in 1981.

Oh, and the current velocity of Voyager 1 is only 17,060 m/s. That's 5.691 x 10^-5 of the speed of light. If we sped up just 100 fold, we'd still be at thousandths of the speed of light, but catch up in less than six months.

But thank you for again demonstrating that Republicans have no sense of proportion.

It's not about if someone making $149k, $150k or $151k can be considered rich.

Try instead to figure out who's standard of living is poor and how much are they making. Keep in mind that there are many levels below simply "poor".
Then you look above that until you get to an acceptable standard of living.
Then above that you'll find the "Doing OK" crowd.
Then the "Well off" ones.
Then the rich.
Then the very rich.
Then the super rich.

Or... you can take a shortcut and just look at the minimum wage.
I'm guessing that we can agree that it is a decent enough economic indicator for an online discussion between laymen.

You're making one minimum wage? You can barely afford the cost of living for one person. Yourself.
1-2 MinWage? You could support another person and still live poorly, or live at some more acceptable level alone.
5 times minimum wage allows you alone to support an entire family of four and then some.
Incidentally, that is apparently also the point where one earns enough to be happy.

It's pretty easy to see where those $150k guys, making 10+ minimum wages, fall on such a scale.

As for a "why a specific number"...
Well, try it like this.
If you are making enough money to provide a family of 4.1 (Mom, dad and the statistical number of children needed to continue the growth of population.) with their own 2*MinWage - you are the golden standard of upper middle class.
Each member of a such family can afford a middle class life on their own, and together they are a happy, economically functional, upper middle class family.
The fucking ***American DreamTM***. America The Beautiful starts playing in the background, a bald eagle flies through the frame.

Add those numbers up for the highest US MinWage (Washington) and you get:
$9.04 * 8 hours * 5 day * 50 weeks * 4.1 people * 2 = $148256

That is the PEAK of upper middle class in the USA. Above that starts the upper class - the rich.

"Your information is only stored for one hour, so each time you return, we'll run fresh analytics on your Facebook data." (according to this: http://www.wolframalpha.com/facebook/). Considering all the ways your data can "get out" this does not seem that bad...

If you’re doing this for the first time, you’ll be prompted to authenticate the Wolfram Connection app in Facebook, and then sign in to Wolfram|Alpha (yes, it’s free).

How-to here.

Well, fail2ban won't stop someone who compromises a terminal (mobile or laptop, most likely) with ssh keys on it and uses them to log in -- because they succeed first try.

And it won't stop someone guessing random ssh keys, because they're already stopped.

So against what attack are you "even more safe"?

Hg 198 and Au 197 - off by one.

Kick two neutrons out of Hg 198 and add a proton - alchemy!

There's a clear difference between immediate danger and taking what you want.

Libya is not a Middle Eastern country, it's a North African country. The region is called North Africa, because that's where it is, by everyone including the UN and state department(s).

See the correct definition and geographical area:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=middle+east

There was one US state dept employee that wanted to coin a new phrase, the so-called "Greater Middle East". A creative "re-interpretation" that has found little support. It includes a very broad group of countries not limited to the actual geographical region in question, on the basis that they were majority Muslim (but not Arabs). It's a terribly silly idea and only makes sense if you see Muslims in general as the "enemy". That specific definition would include the NATO-member and loyal American ally Turkey as the "enemy"!

Rule 54 has nothing to do with the famous rule 34.

Rule 34 is

terminally boring

, but "nothing" seems a bit exaggerated. related alt text

For example, at present I can only think of a couple of opponents that would rise to the level of 'enemy' for the US.

I can think of about 306 million enemies of the current US regime.

Total annual insolation of the earth is closer to 5 million exajoules, of which at least half makes it to the surface.

Assuming constant acceleration/deceleration for each half of the trip:
d = .5a(t/2)^2 + .5a(t/2)^2 = 1/4at^2
a = 4d/t^2
NY to LA is 2464 miles
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%5B4*2464miles%2F(60min)%5E2%5D+%2F+32ft%2Fs%5E2
0.13 g for a 60 min trip.

Ah, yes, and I have 28,000 daily visitors on my blog.

Bing vs. Google: Fight! Yeah, Bing loses pretty badly.

Just to pick a nit (as I am in no way qualified to comment on the rest), you need to remember the electrons when calculating atomic masses

As I said before I'm not familiar with the term "average high". So I use the absoluter high. It is regulary in August over 40Â centigradfe wich is: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=40+degree+centigrate+in+fahrenheit 104 fahrenheit.
The link you show is wikipedia, so some random guys picked it from some random place. The data is likely from before the climate change :D anyway and outdated.
We had here Augusts where every day was close to 40Â or above it ... I assume something like the average high in the table you linked is calculated over a few years. So it obviously also includes cold years.

Where exactly is this "most places" you speak of? I live in Phoenix, which is within a few percent of the national average cost of living index, and $10 an hour (while not exactly providing for a luxurious lifestyle) was plenty to live off of only a year ago (I've increased my income substantially since then, in case you're wondering.)

Source: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=cost+of+living+in+phoenix

Keep in mind, cities like New York with their large populations and massive cost of living over the national average go a long ways towards pushing up that national average figure, while only being a tiny fraction of the US. To say that 12/hour isn't a living wage in most places is a bit naive.

With US unemployment at a six month high [...]

Wait... what?

The US unemployment in March, April, and May was 8.2, 8.1, and 8.2% respectively. Although that is certainly way too high, is is by far not the highest in the last six months. In fact, it's the lowest since January 2009.

With US unemployment at a six month high [...]

Wait... what?

The US unemployment in March, April, and May was 8.2, 8.1, and 8.2% respectively. Although that is certainly way too high, is is by far not the highest in the last six months. In fact, it's the lowest since January 2009.

With US unemployment at a six month high [...]

Wait... what?

The US unemployment in March, April, and May was 8.2, 8.1, and 8.2% respectively. Although that is certainly way too high, is is by far not the highest in the last six months. In fact, it's the lowest since January 2009.

With US unemployment at a six month high [...]

Wait... what?

The US unemployment in March, April, and May was 8.2, 8.1, and 8.2% respectively. Although that is certainly way too high, is is by far not the highest in the last six months. In fact, it's the lowest since January 2009.

Sorry, messed up the link. Let me try that again.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Integrate[2^x%2C+{x%2C+0%2C+a}]+%2F+Integrate[2^x%2C+{x%2C+0%2C+48}]%29+%3D+.5

The moon is great for things that require a lot of support infrastructure to produce a lightweight, but valuable product. Semiconductors come to mind as an example of such a product, but production is better suited to Earth. Perhaps there's another manufacturing process that would benefit from no atmosphere and low gravity?

Farming would be another thing to consider. The moon has a significant gravity well, but it's also huge relative to anything we could construct (9.37 billion acres). If the entire world population had an equal share of the moon, each person could have 1.38 acres.

Phobos is a better materials target if it can be used.
It's so small that its escape velocity is under 25 mph. If we don't mine it, it's going to crash into Mars anyway.

I dunno why Russia is on that list, since population-wise it's more than twice as small as US.

My bad, I still think of Russia as 'that-what-we-used-to-call-the-ussr'-big. About 300.000.000 of people. But here's a proper list, http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=population+by+country.

That's problem with government funded health care. Whoever pays the bills gets to make the rules! If you let government take over your health care, you are giving the government control over your health.

What an absurd conclusion. In my country, we have free healthcare that costs us 8% of our GDP, while you spend 16% of your GDP. I do pay for a private insurance, to have a bit more of "control", at 40$/month, but I rarely use it as public health's nice enough.
I say, even if it's payed by taxes, it's money well spent. Everyone pays less and everyone's healthy: we live 2 years more than you. The only downside, less people getting rich, that's why I think it won't last for long.

That's problem with government funded health care. Whoever pays the bills gets to make the rules! If you let government take over your health care, you are giving the government control over your health.

What an absurd conclusion. In my country, we have free healthcare that costs us 8% of our GDP, while you spend 16% of your GDP. I do pay for a private insurance, to have a bit more of "control", at 40$/month, but I rarely use it as public health's nice enough.
I say, even if it's payed by taxes, it's money well spent. Everyone pays less and everyone's healthy: we live 2 years more than you. The only downside, less people getting rich, that's why I think it won't last for long.

You might want to try that again

As in, the real answer is 900%...

Whenever you are doing estimates like that you should always use some kind of quick common sense check of your result. For example, a 100% increase from 0.2 is 0.4 - so obviously your 90% calculation was way too low.

No. Just no.

You measure the percentage error from some sort of average, not between the largest and smallest values.

For example, if they were predicting sea level rises between 0 and 1 millimeter, you wouldn't say that they had an infinity% error (which is what would happen if you plugged it into wolframalpha like you did). That would actually be an EXTREMELY precise prediction, so saying that you had infinite error would be misleading to say the least.

Basically, if you want to lecture people about using common sense, please use it yourself.

You might want to try that again

As in, the real answer is 900%...

Whenever you are doing estimates like that you should always use some kind of quick common sense check of your result. For example, a 100% increase from 0.2 is 0.4 - so obviously your 90% calculation was way too low.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Schwarzschild+radius+of+4+million+solar+mass+ = 7 million miles
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Sagittarius++A*+radius = 13 million miles
Seems Sag A* radius is based on observed angular size of the radio source.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Schwarzschild+radius+of+4+million+solar+mass+ = 7 million miles
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Sagittarius++A*+radius = 13 million miles
Seems Sag A* radius is based on observed angular size of the radio source.

Wolfram Alpha disagrees with both of you. It gives the result as 1.1 kg.

Your mass/volume ratio is way off, though the other three are correct. It should be...

mass / volume = 1.155 * 10^6 kg/m^3
1 tsp = 4.929 * 10^-6 m^3
1 tsp of Sagittarius A* = 5.693 kg

So, it's pretty heavy, but eg. neutron stars are far, far heavier. This black hole is far denser than the sun, which has about 6.94 g per tsp.

Our closest apps to AI are Siri and whatever the Android voice app is. All they do is retrieve information. Same as a google search.

I would say the closest "app" to what you describe, that would still fall under the category of specialized AI, would be Watson.
It too is a huge information retrieval system, but specifically designed to play Jeopardy and play it well. It already bested the top two human players.

Of course it is still only a specialized AI engine, no where NEAR expert AI, and it most certainly does not think. Hell, it can't even read visually, see, hear, or a lot of other things required to truly play a game of Jeopardy. But it is leaps and bounds more complex and advanced than Siri currently is!

To me, Siri is nothing more than a good voice recognition app combined with Wolfram Alpha.
I don't mean to be belittling Siri in general, but in this comparison it is hard not to.

they are conflicted with themselves :
security:6 weak
entropy: 117.5 bits
but try that one:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=password+strength+Correct_house_battery_staple :
security: 151 very strong
entropy: 185.4 bits

Its not a good calculator either:
Compare a scandinavia sentence with a number in it with Same text with the number written. This clearly shows us that the XKCD scheme is more than good enough. And we can still add in things like spaces, underscores instead of spaces, and replacing letters with numbers.

Its not a good calculator either:
Compare a scandinavia sentence with a number in it with Same text with the number written. This clearly shows us that the XKCD scheme is more than good enough. And we can still add in things like spaces, underscores instead of spaces, and replacing letters with numbers.

In short, Mark Henderson wants Technocrats not Politicians running our system. I tend to agree.

I haven't read this book and I think the article discussing it doesn't accomplish much aside from briefly agreeing with the author on everything. I think this whole argument is sort of a nonstarter. Oftentimes I try to look at "soft" issues as an ethical engineer and I come to the conclusion that you can approach a lot of hotly debated issues from two sides. And, like the limit as x approaches zero in y(x) = -1/x, you can sort of logically come to two extremely different conclusions. As an oversimplified example, take anti-trust laws. From the left we start with something really innocuous like it's the government's job to protect an individual's basic rights which means that if they wish to enter a market then other individuals shouldn't be able to collude to keep them out of that market by price fixing which means that we should have government regulations against it ... and we're at positive infinity. But if you approach from the right you start with something really innocuous as well like governments should enable individuals to follow their dreams and if their dreams are price fixing so be it because the free market will decide whose product is better and the consumer will be smart enough to buy the new product if it is indeed made better and the price fixing will result in a loss to the colluding parties and so therefore we need to make the free market freer and truly free to alleviate all these issues ... and we're at negative infinity. Both sides are clamoring for one extreme and the engineer is just sitting there saying "Technically it's undefined."

Basically, two strong narratives will ruin an ethical engineer's best intents.

Another topic that I'm not sure how it is addressed is that you only get one experiment. There is no control group for your political policies. On top of that a negative stigma has been attached to people being used as lab rats so don't even try to divide your populace into statistical experiments -- they have to do that themselves. If an engineer does not have absolute control over an environment, he or she usually considers the experiment flawed and the resulting data potentially worthless. This is one of the defining hallmarks of our political process -- no one person controls all of the variables.

I'm left wondering why any ethical engineer would desire to be a technocrat.

I am 100% behind pushing science in the public forum and seeking more data and more models. I will argue, however, that the first decision an engineer makes in office will likely be as emotionally, personally and financially motivated as it would had Governor Evil been there instead.

This, probably. Wolfram Alpha is where Siri goes with the questions it doesn't understand - or maybe even most of the questions. Try asking Alpha "Do i need a raincoat?" and other questions from Siri promos and see.

wolfram alpha powers Bing a microsoft product and rates a windows phone as the best in the world.

So what? It powers Bing, it is not powered by Bing. Why would the WA results be biased at all? Here is their results page:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=best+smartphone

As of the time I'm writing this, they have results listed by average customer rating and they list 2 HTC phones, 2 iPhones, and the N900 with averages of 5.

Besides, by your logic, since WA also powers Siri then they should be biased towards Apple, so why did it recommend a competing product?

If you look at the current results for "what is the best smartphone ever" in Wolfram Alpha you will find that they also changed the answer. Now it just gives you a list of five smartphones tied at 5 points of average score by Best Buy customers: HTC Trophy, iPhone 4s, iPhone 4, Lumia 900, HTC Rhyme, in that order.

That's because Wolfram Alpha was indeed being embarrassed because it seemed like they were endorsing a particular phone by providing a lot of details about the first entry in the list (at the time the Lumina 900), but if you looked deeper the whole thing was bogus.

Expand the list (press the "More" button four times) and you will find that there are actually 28 smartphones with average scores of 5 in the list! A couple of days back when Siri's comical response was revealed there were 13 tied in first place.

  And let's not forget that these scores are averages of a very small number of reviews (at this time 9 for the iPhone 4s and 5 for the Lumia 900; yesterday it was 2 for the 4s, 4 for the Lumia 900) making the whole measure even more worthless.

(Apparently when they are tied the order in the list is decided by the number of reviews, thus the descent of the Lumia).

Wolfram Alpha tells me that $3 million a day is $34.72 per second. So, Google's copyright malfeasance scored them a market-leading edge of at least $173.60.

Oracle's unjust loss must be made right! Oracle must be made whole!

Too bad it's too small for a Kickstarter or something. Maybe an PayPal donation site?

Everyone knows integers only go from 0 to 4294967295!

That's quite large.