Science says that it is highly unlikely that anyone can walk through walls, or walk on water, or...
Hmmmm... Maybe you should be a bit more careful about making such claims. Some 30 years ago, while I was at the U of Wisconsin (which is on the shore of a good-size lake), I watched a small group of people experimenting with and demoing equipment that quite literally implemented "walking on water". They're generally called "water shoes" or "pontoon shoes".
Yeah that's how Jesus did it too. It's all there in John 6:19--21:
19 When therefore they had rowed about five and twenty or thirty furlongs, they behold Jesus walking on the sea, and drawing nigh unto the boat: and they were afraid.
20 But he saith unto them, It is I; be not afraid and make room for my holy inflatable clown shoes, for they are large and do leak a bit.
21 They were willing therefore to receive him into the boat: and straightway the boat was at the land whither they were going.
Where is the hierarchy of this knowledge? Is there a database which gets updated when some part is expanded or falsified?
I'm not an advocate of Creationism, but they DO make one point that should sink in... There is no mechanism for maintaining the pedigree of scientific information.
[ . . . ]
There is a need for a comprehensive, multilingual database of theories, experimental results, and their interdependencies.
Holy cow. I'm almost sure I'm just being trolled here, but just in case this isn't actually broadly understood...
The solution you're looking for here is called a library. Books. Journals. You know the stuff real science generates for precisely the reasons you state.
Science is probably the best documented human endeavor, period. The interdependencies and 'pedigree' is embedded through direct references to other books and journal articles (ie. author(s), journal/book, volume/edition, publisher, page number, year). This kind of documentation is so ingrained in the hard sciences that even 'letters to the editor' have referenced statements.
Hit a science library on campus sometime and check out the journal section, or floor, or often floors. The bigger/better the institution the more documentation is on-site. Of course there is currently a large move to get all this stuff on the net. This allows following reference chains forward and backward with a simple click rather than all that tedious walking around and photocopying -- fantastically useful.
Can anyone recommend a one-time-pad (OTP) implementation for use with openssh under linux?
I looked into this some time ago and was only able to come up with a couple of hits, most of which were suffering from bit-rot... The most promising candidate was libpam-opie (though I seem to recall it had it's own problems.) However the URL I had for it is now dead too.
As an aside, can anyone with a clue comment on 'S/Key'. It appears to be a method of generate OTP passwords -- is this a ubiquitous standard? A generalized algorithm that can be implemented in mutually incompatible ways (ie. different hash functions)? Some proprietary, patent-encumbered thing?
Mass and energy are both human terms. They have no inherent meaning beyond how we interpret them.
This is crap. They are certainly human terms, but they do have a specific meaning (which is as inherent as it gets). The fact is the best theory about the universe we have makes energy and mass two measures of the same quantity -- they're just expressed using different units.
For example, I can easily say that an electron has a mass of about 0.5 MeV, but I certainly wouldn't measure the mass of an apple in Joules.
Why not, it's about 3x10^16 J. Granted, that's not as meaningful to most as 300 grams, but then 300 grams doesn't mean a hell of a lot to many Americans either...
This is about having the photon source in the middle that sends to two superposed photons to opposite directions. Now, what's amazing is that you can force the state of the other photon in the other end to what you want
I am quite sure that this statement is wrong. You can't "force the state" of an entangled photon. All you know if you measure a photon and it's in state X is that your friend will measure the entangled photon in state NOT-X.
See EPR Paradox, and this answer for more information and references.
Turneaure hemmed and hawed because a negative result is pretty damn unlikely given the existing data. On the other hand, if their data *do* show a discrepancy with theory -- well hot damn, that's what Nobel Prizes are made of!
His collaboration gets first crack at the data because it's their toy. They designed it, they get to play with it first. Seriously. That's whole reason they became scientists.
And, as other people have pointed out, interpreting the data is undoubtedly complicated. Getting started with the data will require considerable knowledge about the design and implementation of their probe. Analysis software will have to be written, procedures developed, etc. This isn't something that even someone in the field will be able to do without essentially becoming part of the collaboration. The team will analyse the data, try hard to prove themselves wrong, and when they're satisfied they have a solid case for whatever conclusion they come to, they'll release their results and let the rest of the community beat on them. That's how science works.
I've never understood the popular notion that scientists are a bunch of yes-men (women, whatever), keen on supporting the status quo. If their data disagree with GR, and they can establish a strong case that they haven't screwed up, they will be *extremely excited*. Experimentalists dream of being able prove theorists wrong (bunch of cocky punks:-)
To first order, because the field strength drops with the cube of the distance from the magnet. For example, if the magnetic field strength at 20mm from the surface will only be 0.0125% as strong as it is 1mm from the magnet. (It's inverse-cube rather than inverse-square because it's a dipole.)
The other important point is that you're looking for small fluctuations in the field (as you mentioned). The effect of the constant (at least on time scales relative to the signal) background field can be subtracted off through a variety of engineering and signal-processing tricks. The coil in a stationary read head won't even 'see' a truely constant field (it doesn't matter how strong it is) -- it is only sensitive to a changing field.
What were they thinking -- just making the software freely available isn't enough, dammit. They *owe* us free support too, and they should be happy to do it! After all, I went out of my way to indulge some total stranger by attempting to install his software and it didn't work to my satisfaction. I did him a favor, and all I got were some binaries, the source code, direct email access to the developer, and some crappy "documentation" scattered across a few files and some archived mailing lists. (And don't get me started on the weak-ass servers and lousy bandwith provided by those jerks hosting the mailing lists -- now they're just wasting more of my time...)
I guess I just hadn't thought of it that way. Hey! I wonder if the same principle applies with other free stuff too? The next time I try one of those little samples in the grocery store and it tastes bad I'm going to tear such a strip off the little old lady holding the platter she won't know what hit her. I used to be polite, perhaps mumble "too salty", and discretely spit it into a tissue. It hadn't occured to me to spit it in her face and demand that she cook me up something better. Mmm, mmm, mmm. Can't wait till the weekend, that's good eatin!
But you say I'm not allowed to complain unless I fix it myself. I have always disagreed with this idea. Let analyze it:
Perhaps you, or the parent post, made a poor choice of words. If by complain, you mean post constructive criticism, then you are contributing. Not a lot...but some. It's possible that the developers hadn't noticed your issue, or didn't realize it would be such a problem. This is good -- the developers may not be inclined or able to do anything about it, but at least the issue is documented. Perhaps someone else will choose to make the additional contribution.
What pisses people off are those individuals who appear personally offended that they can't get this free software to work. Well, NEWS FLASH:it doesn't matter if the software's interface is a god-awful eyesore and the only documentation consists of really_long_variable_names in the source -- it was FREE! Neither they, nor anyone else, is obliged to help a newcomer figure it out, or even to fix legitimate bugs. Joe User took a free sample, he didn't like it. That's fine. Joe should pay special attention to the 'free' part, and either contribute, or quietly move on.
(Yes, Joe has a 'right' (in the free speech sense), to complain. The point is that exercising that right in this context makes him an antisocial prick.)
OK, the majority is generally happy that RealAudio has been ditched. Great, I dislike the spyware-ridden load of crap too -- so I used mplayer like all sane people. Now they switch to WMA9. Not sure why they didn't go with a format that isn't open, but whatever, mplayer will handle it...
But no: "Cannot find codec for audio format 0xA" and mplayer bails. Many hours of googling, trolling mplayer-dev/user and all I can come up with is:
a number of others having the same problem,
an offhanded redirect to the mplayer FAQ (which, while an interesting read, doesn't actually address this problem),
a dated discussion about how MS had made life very difficult for developers to hook into the WMA9 dlls as they had in the past,
and a story from a ripe.org admin who had concluded that WMA9 streaming audio could not be decoded by a non-MS player and had switched to the older WMA8 audio codec instead.
I've got MPlayer 1.0pre3, and/usr/lib/win32/wma9dmod.dll (along with the rest of the "essential.tar.bz2" codecs) from the mplayer web site.
If someone has *actually* listened to a wma CarTalk feed and can tell me where to find the magic codec I will be a very happy camper. I will even accept a necessary minimum of abuse for not finding the solution on my own.
The majority of automobile accidents were "caused" by cars that were legally bought as well. Should we get rid of automobiles too?
It is generally accepted that the benefits of automobiles far exceed the associated risks. "Risk" here includes the possibility of the car being used improperly.
Consider the smallpox vaccine. When introduced into a general population there will be deaths due to an adverse reaction (generally correlated with the sick, elderly, etc). However, the benefits (widespread immunity to a lethal, extremely virulent disease) far outweigh the relatively few deaths induced by the vaccine.
(Note that this assumes that the general population was at sufficient risk to a smallpox epidemic in the first place.)
For me the question boils down to "Are the benefits of widespread gun ownership worth the costs?". Part of the cost is the probability that the guns will "leak" into the hands of those who can't handle or abuse the responsibility. The "guns don't kill people..." line is a pathetic dodge.
Incidentally, your "tree" metaphor is so weak it just makes you sound like an idiot.
Is playing with an in car computer really the same tho? I'm all a-quiver at the talents of these techy types, but what actual difference does this in car computer make? None, really, it won't inflame the mind or create beauty, and this is the problem with modern tinkering. 1950's mobiles had flaming jet burners on the back, and we are adding little bits of silicon? Yuk.
This kind of attitude is a bit of a hot-button for me. It smacks of the stereotype that tech/science types are uncreative automatons unable to appreciate, never mind create, something of beauty. There is a lot of beauty in a well wrought hack (in software or hardware) and it should not be dismissed simply because it serves a function in addition to being "art."
Yes, I think an in car computer can be art -- it all depends on the vision and execution involved.
Re:does this break the theory of relativity?
on
Stop, Light.
·
· Score: 1
This isn't really a consistant way of understanding why light travels more slowly through matter than vacuum.
Light that makes it through a material has not lost any energy. If it did, it's frequency would have changed. The fact that we can pass light through material without a frequency shift at the other end, but clearly measure the increased propogation time through the material (relative to vacuum) tells us no energy has been lost by that light in the material.
Note that some fraction of the light *will* be absorbed and that energy will be lost. I'm talking about the light that made it through.
Moreover, photons don't rattle through material like pinballs richocheting off the atoms. If that were true then the final direction of the photon when it leaves the material should be essentially random and determined by the final scatter. It's hard to imagine a process by which this final scatter should preferentially point the photon in the same direction as it was travelling when it entered the material.
The most consistant description comes when you model the material (at least in the way that light "sees" it) as a general electromagnetic soup through which the photon (a self-contained electromagnetic object itself) must propogate.
There are two clarifications to be made here.
First, the propogation speed of the light through some material is a property of that material. So while a given photon will travel more slowly through matter than through vacuum, it will "speed up" again when it re-enters the vacuum.
Secondly, the frequency (colour) of the light does *not* change when it enters a different medium (it's wavelength does). The frequency is a fixed property of a given photon. It is directly tied to the photon energy and does not change just because it enters another medium.
So, photon propogation speed does not affect the spectrum at all. The frequency shift described by the Doppler effect is due to the motion of the emitting and detecting bodies at the time the photon is generated and absorbed. That is, if you are at rest relative to the star you will measure the "standard" hydrogen spectrum. If you are moving with respect to the star the entire spectrum will be shifted slightly to higher or lower frequencies.
Slashdot Mirror
Science says that it is highly unlikely that anyone can walk through walls, or walk on water, or ...
Hmmmm ... Maybe you should be a bit more careful about making such claims. Some 30 years ago, while I was at the U of Wisconsin (which is on the shore of a good-size lake), I watched a small group of people experimenting with and demoing equipment that quite literally implemented "walking on water". They're generally called "water shoes" or "pontoon shoes".
Yeah that's how Jesus did it too. It's all there in John 6:19--21:
19 When therefore they had rowed about five and twenty or thirty furlongs, they behold Jesus walking on the sea, and drawing nigh unto the boat: and they were afraid.
20 But he saith unto them, It is I; be not afraid and make room for my holy inflatable clown shoes, for they are large and do leak a bit.
21 They were willing therefore to receive him into the boat: and straightway the boat was at the land whither they were going.
It's easy. If you don't know who to contact or how to phrase your objection use this link:
https://secure.aclu.org/site/Advocacy?pagename=homepage&id=727&page=UserAction
Note that you can modify the letter template before you hit send if you don't agree with all of the text or wish to add points of your own.
There is another informational article on Salon.
(*) Does not apply to non-US citizens. (Although nothing actually stops you from mailing them anyway.)
The bad guy knocks off a bank that kept its high-value goods in a safe built into an ordinary looking wooden cabinet in the strongroom.
Security through obscurity fails again
The solution you're looking for here is called a library. Books. Journals. You know the stuff real science generates for precisely the reasons you state.
Science is probably the best documented human endeavor, period. The interdependencies and 'pedigree' is embedded through direct references to other books and journal articles (ie. author(s), journal/book, volume/edition, publisher, page number, year). This kind of documentation is so ingrained in the hard sciences that even 'letters to the editor' have referenced statements.
Hit a science library on campus sometime and check out the journal section, or floor, or often floors. The bigger/better the institution the more documentation is on-site. Of course there is currently a large move to get all this stuff on the net. This allows following reference chains forward and backward with a simple click rather than all that tedious walking around and photocopying -- fantastically useful.
Can anyone recommend a one-time-pad (OTP) implementation for use with openssh under linux? I looked into this some time ago and was only able to come up with a couple of hits, most of which were suffering from bit-rot... The most promising candidate was libpam-opie (though I seem to recall it had it's own problems.) However the URL I had for it is now dead too. As an aside, can anyone with a clue comment on 'S/Key'. It appears to be a method of generate OTP passwords -- is this a ubiquitous standard? A generalized algorithm that can be implemented in mutually incompatible ways (ie. different hash functions)? Some proprietary, patent-encumbered thing?
This is crap. They are certainly human terms, but they do have a specific meaning (which is as inherent as it gets). The fact is the best theory about the universe we have makes energy and mass two measures of the same quantity -- they're just expressed using different units.
Why not, it's about 3x10^16 J. Granted, that's not as meaningful to most as 300 grams, but then 300 grams doesn't mean a hell of a lot to many Americans either...
Err, so there.
I am quite sure that this statement is wrong. You can't "force the state" of an entangled photon. All you know if you measure a photon and it's in state X is that your friend will measure the entangled photon in state NOT-X.
See EPR Paradox, and this answer for more information and references.
His collaboration gets first crack at the data because it's their toy. They designed it, they get to play with it first. Seriously. That's whole reason they became scientists.
And, as other people have pointed out, interpreting the data is undoubtedly complicated. Getting started with the data will require considerable knowledge about the design and implementation of their probe. Analysis software will have to be written, procedures developed, etc. This isn't something that even someone in the field will be able to do without essentially becoming part of the collaboration. The team will analyse the data, try hard to prove themselves wrong, and when they're satisfied they have a solid case for whatever conclusion they come to, they'll release their results and let the rest of the community beat on them. That's how science works.
I've never understood the popular notion that scientists are a bunch of yes-men (women, whatever), keen on supporting the status quo. If their data disagree with GR, and they can establish a strong case that they haven't screwed up, they will be *extremely excited*. Experimentalists dream of being able prove theorists wrong (bunch of cocky punks :-)
The other important point is that you're looking for small fluctuations in the field (as you mentioned). The effect of the constant (at least on time scales relative to the signal) background field can be subtracted off through a variety of engineering and signal-processing tricks. The coil in a stationary read head won't even 'see' a truely constant field (it doesn't matter how strong it is) -- it is only sensitive to a changing field.
What were they thinking -- just making the software freely available isn't enough, dammit. They *owe* us free support too, and they should be happy to do it! After all, I went out of my way to indulge some total stranger by attempting to install his software and it didn't work to my satisfaction. I did him a favor, and all I got were some binaries, the source code, direct email access to the developer, and some crappy "documentation" scattered across a few files and some archived mailing lists. (And don't get me started on the weak-ass servers and lousy bandwith provided by those jerks hosting the mailing lists -- now they're just wasting more of my time...)
I guess I just hadn't thought of it that way. Hey! I wonder if the same principle applies with other free stuff too? The next time I try one of those little samples in the grocery store and it tastes bad I'm going to tear such a strip off the little old lady holding the platter she won't know what hit her. I used to be polite, perhaps mumble "too salty", and discretely spit it into a tissue. It hadn't occured to me to spit it in her face and demand that she cook me up something better. Mmm, mmm, mmm. Can't wait till the weekend, that's good eatin!
What pisses people off are those individuals who appear personally offended that they can't get this free software to work. Well, NEWS FLASH: it doesn't matter if the software's interface is a god-awful eyesore and the only documentation consists of really_long_variable_names in the source -- it was FREE! Neither they, nor anyone else, is obliged to help a newcomer figure it out, or even to fix legitimate bugs. Joe User took a free sample, he didn't like it. That's fine. Joe should pay special attention to the 'free' part, and either contribute, or quietly move on.
(Yes, Joe has a 'right' (in the free speech sense), to complain. The point is that exercising that right in this context makes him an antisocial prick.)
But no: "Cannot find codec for audio format 0xA" and mplayer bails. Many hours of googling, trolling mplayer-dev/user and all I can come up with is:
I've got MPlayer 1.0pre3, and /usr/lib/win32/wma9dmod.dll (along with the rest of the "essential.tar.bz2" codecs) from the mplayer web site.
If someone has *actually* listened to a wma CarTalk feed and can tell me where to find the magic codec I will be a very happy camper. I will even accept a necessary minimum of abuse for not finding the solution on my own.
It is generally accepted that the benefits of automobiles far exceed the associated risks. "Risk" here includes the possibility of the car being used improperly.
Consider the smallpox vaccine. When introduced into a general population there will be deaths due to an adverse reaction (generally correlated with the sick, elderly, etc). However, the benefits (widespread immunity to a lethal, extremely virulent disease) far outweigh the relatively few deaths induced by the vaccine. (Note that this assumes that the general population was at sufficient risk to a smallpox epidemic in the first place.)
For me the question boils down to "Are the benefits of widespread gun ownership worth the costs?". Part of the cost is the probability that the guns will "leak" into the hands of those who can't handle or abuse the responsibility. The "guns don't kill people..." line is a pathetic dodge.
Incidentally, your "tree" metaphor is so weak it just makes you sound like an idiot.
You can always use the command line utility malsync. FWIW, there is a tarball and an OSX binary (compiled under OSX 10.1.x) available here.
This kind of attitude is a bit of a hot-button for me. It smacks of the stereotype that tech/science types are uncreative automatons unable to appreciate, never mind create, something of beauty. There is a lot of beauty in a well wrought hack (in software or hardware) and it should not be dismissed simply because it serves a function in addition to being "art."
Yes, I think an in car computer can be art -- it all depends on the vision and execution involved.
This isn't really a consistant way of understanding why light travels more slowly through matter than vacuum.
Light that makes it through a material has not lost any energy. If it did, it's frequency would have changed. The fact that we can pass light through material without a frequency shift at the other end, but clearly measure the increased propogation time through the material (relative to vacuum) tells us no energy has been lost by that light in the material.
Note that some fraction of the light *will* be absorbed and that energy will be lost. I'm talking about the light that made it through.
Moreover, photons don't rattle through material like pinballs richocheting off the atoms. If that were true then the final direction of the photon when it leaves the material should be essentially random and determined by the final scatter. It's hard to imagine a process by which this final scatter should preferentially point the photon in the same direction as it was travelling when it entered the material.
The most consistant description comes when you model the material (at least in the way that light "sees" it) as a general electromagnetic soup through which the photon (a self-contained electromagnetic object itself) must propogate.
There are two clarifications to be made here. First, the propogation speed of the light through some material is a property of that material. So while a given photon will travel more slowly through matter than through vacuum, it will "speed up" again when it re-enters the vacuum. Secondly, the frequency (colour) of the light does *not* change when it enters a different medium (it's wavelength does). The frequency is a fixed property of a given photon. It is directly tied to the photon energy and does not change just because it enters another medium. So, photon propogation speed does not affect the spectrum at all. The frequency shift described by the Doppler effect is due to the motion of the emitting and detecting bodies at the time the photon is generated and absorbed. That is, if you are at rest relative to the star you will measure the "standard" hydrogen spectrum. If you are moving with respect to the star the entire spectrum will be shifted slightly to higher or lower frequencies.