Try Stephen Baxter's Exultant - part of the Destiny's Child series, but you don't particularly need to worry about reading them in order. A large part of the story is the idea that FTL is possible, but we still have to deal with all the snafus as a result. In one notable case, a young pilot is court martialed for his future actions, and his future self is court martialed for coming back in time and meeting himself. Both sides in the FTL was have FTL travel, so the tactics become rather interesting. It's an good read, if a little speculative.
A quick note to tibit, the submitter, to say nice summary. No hyperbole, no outrageous barely marginable links to another agenda, a suggestion, mechanism and evidence. I really enjoyed it, a bit of my brain went "Really? Oh? Like that? Oh that's quite clever, I see what happened there."
You know, it actually makes me want to go and read the article. I think I will. Nice one. More weirdly interesting stuff like this please.
Off-topic in many ways, sorry. If it makes up for it, I learned to look for nystagmus when working as a bartender. There's a fairly strong correlation between BAC and the degree of nystagmus in a drunk person as they follow an object with their eyes. You can use this to judge how drunk a person is fairly accurately. In the "controlled circumstances" of me asking off-duty colleagues and friends to follow a finger for ten seconds I could usually work out how much they'd had to drink to the nearest 10ml of alcohol (1/2 pint or a shot of whisky in the UK).
And as such it's actually one of the more realistic business models among the current crop. Don't get me wrong, I don't particularly like the way they do things, hell, I gave up unsubscribing (I had to to monitor something for work) and marked them as spammers as in my experience they don't play by the rules in these parts, but the idea of lots of people buying one thing cheaply does actually work. If they stuck at their core business model instead of trying to make a short term killing then there might well be a viable long-term business there, but instead it looks like a lot of smart people trying a pump-n-dump rather than a bunch of smart people trying to make a lot of money with a good idea.
That particular quirk has been well documented, and it's simply down to the way IQ tests are designed. Those in the more intensive schooling systems of "the west" and parts of asia at the far end of the scale are more likely to be exposed to the kind of tests used in these things. It's well established that some cultural/racial/geographical demographics do badly in IQ tests not because they're less intelligent, but because IQ tests are usually badly designed and administered. As Einstein said, "IQ scores are very important. How else would we measure how good people are at IQ tests?"
(AC's comment above was made before the paper was released) The l'Aquila earthquake shows up very clearly in the results, it was roughly a 5cm shift in the distance between the labs, and the graph shows it so obviously that it's clear they've got at least 1cm resolution. I think any tectonic activity has probably been accounted for here.
Honestly? No, I can't. I believe it's a manifestation of quantum tunneling,at a guess from what I've read (not a huge amount), of "x" entangled photons in a pulse some have a statistical chance of reaching the detector early, and some late, but you can't tell if the early ones are the signal you're looking for or just noise until the whole pulse has come through, and so no data can be passed superluminally. Google "superluminal pulses" for the guys who know what they're talking about;)
If the neutrinos travelled faster than light then they would be observed arriving at the detector before they had been sent. Not by much, but enough to wreck the "cause must precede effect" idea. Set up a neutrino beam on the Earth firing at the moon, and another firing back, and hook it into the stock markets and you'd get reports of market changes before they happened. You could then use your neutrino beam (and a TCP/IP modulator, obviously) to purchase the stock before you even had the advanced knowledge that it was going to go up. Of course, this would change the markets making the information you got from the future wrong, so you'd change your mind.
And the investment bankers call themselves the masters of the universe. They should be forced to study physics to undergrad level before they're allowed to trade a penny-chew.
GPS will do it accurately enough. It's a 17m "error" on the part of the neutrinos, and GPS has an appreciably higher resolution than that. It's the "neutrino bunches" I'm looking at for the experimental error - this could be one of the leading-edge effects that's already known about with photons - the leading edge can arrive faster than c, but the rest of the packet is slowed down so the velocity averages out at c. Still, even if this is the explanation it would be the first time it's been observed in a massive particle as far as I know.
The difference is that when you buy an iWhatever you're buying Apple's software running on Apple's hardware. Anyone selling hardware can put their own OS on it - your car, your microwave, they're all running the software the hardware manufacturer put there.
The difference here is that the lock-in is being applied by a software manufacturers and then sold by the hardware companies. It's like making a microwave that will only heat Brand-X food, or a car that will only run on fuel from a Multinational-Y. It's no great benefit to most users, a hindrance to a few, and will change the advice I give in all my "You're a geek, which computer do you recommend?" emails.
It'll be down to the economics of scaling the thing up. What are the maintenance issues going to be? How many years useage? It's all about the payback points.
Ah, interesting (@ both posters), I hadn't realised it was just the glass, I'd always presumed it was something slightly more complicated. So the mirror isn't parallel with the glass I'm guessing?
I don't know if it's just a British thing, but most rear view mirrors here have a little tab that changes the angle. There's a second, partial, mirror angled over the main one so when you flick the tab you get the same rear view but with only 50% or so of the light transmitted. It's designed specifically for this situation.
Outside of that, they're seriously going to go to the bother of using a laser and then de-cohering the light? Kind of defeats the purpose in the first place, surely? You've got to wonder if this isn't simply a ploy to push the cost of replacement parts up - 10% margin on a £5 bulb is less than a 2% margin on a £5k custom de-cohered laser after all.
Nope, it's even weirder and simpler than that. It's just a uShare stream. The odd thing is that.avi,.mpeg,.mp4 don't work. You have to rename them.mov. Seriously, no transcoding or anything odd, just rename them *.mov.
Thanks guys. You do realise that MS will now "upgrade" all of the XBoxes to "improve service" and "enhance security"?
And you know what that means. My save files will be corrupted, I'll probably lose at least one game plugin, and my Linux->Xbox streaming workaround will stop working around. You had to go and encourage them didn't you?
Not that I've noticed. Picasa, Blogger, Gmail, Docs, Profile and Code are all unaffected and work exactly as they did pre and during G+. The only change I've noticed is that I don't have a G+ account (obviously!) and can't use the +1 feature, but that doesn't really bother me.
To be honest I'd like G+ back, but I'm not prepared to put my real name on it, more on principle than anything else.
In this context, that gravity isn't a fundamental force, but emerges from further underlying phenomenology. We've got a model of spacetime geometry, but no real explanation of why it's like that. Pretty much every scientific theory has been found to be an effect generated by a more fundamental underlying concept. Truly chaotic systems, for example, are ultimately generated by uncertainty at quantum scales.
If you could point out exactly why you disagree with me then I'd be glad to argue further.
Wow, we really are jumping to the worst today. Deleting your G+ account does not downgrade anything else. If your account is suspended it will, at least until the suspension is resolved. That's why I deleted my G+ account, I wasn't prepared to put my real name on it, and I didn't want my other services (Blogger, Picasa, Calendar etc) to be affected. Deletion != suspension. I wish at least the submitter would RTFA.
Most likely the model. Most of the models are user generated, so some are very pretty with a bad cockpit interface, some are ugly with good physics, etc etc. The real pity is the fact that there have been some awesome flightsims from the Atari ST (F19), through 486 machines and all the way up, but these days they all rely on high-end graphics cards and processors far too much. Come on, give me a good military flightsim like F19 that will run on my netbook, I know you can do it! (OK, yes, an emulator plus F19 does the job very nicely, but come on, I shouldn't have to resort to that!). Get the physics right first, then make "pretty" an optional extra.
To be fair, the article only addresses one formulation of emergent gravity from a single hypothesis. To say the whole idea of emergent gravity is wrong is a little disingenuous. My pet theory (hey, a boy needs a hobby) is that gravity is emergent from a universe where the physics, the actual computation, has to be done to make anything happen. Apple falls to the ground? The universe has to perform the calculations to make it happen. If there's a processor limit then it would manifest as the speed of light, and if the calculations involving regions of space with mass ("particles") take a little more calculating then that section of space will be retarded in a timelike direction, ie GR. There's a whole host of emergent gravity or emergent relativity possibilities, and to my mind at least it's a very elegant way to get around some of the big fundamental problems, like why gravity doesn't seem to behave like the other forces, or why the speed of light even exists.
Yup - same with BT here. The router blocks all incoming ports by default, but you can open them as needed - or simply set up a single machine in a DMZ and use that to handle all incoming requests, port forwarding etc. Quite a good way to do it really. The downside is that (by default) anyone with a BT account can log in to your router. It's "opt-in" meaning you have to opt-out of it...
Slashdot Mirror
Try Stephen Baxter's Exultant - part of the Destiny's Child series, but you don't particularly need to worry about reading them in order. A large part of the story is the idea that FTL is possible, but we still have to deal with all the snafus as a result. In one notable case, a young pilot is court martialed for his future actions, and his future self is court martialed for coming back in time and meeting himself. Both sides in the FTL was have FTL travel, so the tactics become rather interesting. It's an good read, if a little speculative.
A quick note to tibit, the submitter, to say nice summary. No hyperbole, no outrageous barely marginable links to another agenda, a suggestion, mechanism and evidence. I really enjoyed it, a bit of my brain went "Really? Oh? Like that? Oh that's quite clever, I see what happened there."
You know, it actually makes me want to go and read the article. I think I will. Nice one. More weirdly interesting stuff like this please. Off-topic in many ways, sorry. If it makes up for it, I learned to look for nystagmus when working as a bartender. There's a fairly strong correlation between BAC and the degree of nystagmus in a drunk person as they follow an object with their eyes. You can use this to judge how drunk a person is fairly accurately. In the "controlled circumstances" of me asking off-duty colleagues and friends to follow a finger for ten seconds I could usually work out how much they'd had to drink to the nearest 10ml of alcohol (1/2 pint or a shot of whisky in the UK).
And as such it's actually one of the more realistic business models among the current crop. Don't get me wrong, I don't particularly like the way they do things, hell, I gave up unsubscribing (I had to to monitor something for work) and marked them as spammers as in my experience they don't play by the rules in these parts, but the idea of lots of people buying one thing cheaply does actually work. If they stuck at their core business model instead of trying to make a short term killing then there might well be a viable long-term business there, but instead it looks like a lot of smart people trying a pump-n-dump rather than a bunch of smart people trying to make a lot of money with a good idea.
So an early Anonymous Coward then?
That particular quirk has been well documented, and it's simply down to the way IQ tests are designed. Those in the more intensive schooling systems of "the west" and parts of asia at the far end of the scale are more likely to be exposed to the kind of tests used in these things. It's well established that some cultural/racial/geographical demographics do badly in IQ tests not because they're less intelligent, but because IQ tests are usually badly designed and administered. As Einstein said, "IQ scores are very important. How else would we measure how good people are at IQ tests?"
(AC's comment above was made before the paper was released)
The l'Aquila earthquake shows up very clearly in the results, it was roughly a 5cm shift in the distance between the labs, and the graph shows it so obviously that it's clear they've got at least 1cm resolution. I think any tectonic activity has probably been accounted for here.
Ah, the old PhD viva question, "What can you tell us about the properties of thiotimoline Mr Asimov?" :)
That did spring to mind when I first heard about this, bonus geek points for the reference.
Shut up Dave. Oh balls, this is my accdf9-g5%6m [CARRIER LOST] OK? There. The joke ends here.
Honestly? No, I can't. I believe it's a manifestation of quantum tunneling,at a guess from what I've read (not a huge amount), of "x" entangled photons in a pulse some have a statistical chance of reaching the detector early, and some late, but you can't tell if the early ones are the signal you're looking for or just noise until the whole pulse has come through, and so no data can be passed superluminally. Google "superluminal pulses" for the guys who know what they're talking about ;)
If the neutrinos travelled faster than light then they would be observed arriving at the detector before they had been sent. Not by much, but enough to wreck the "cause must precede effect" idea. Set up a neutrino beam on the Earth firing at the moon, and another firing back, and hook it into the stock markets and you'd get reports of market changes before they happened. You could then use your neutrino beam (and a TCP/IP modulator, obviously) to purchase the stock before you even had the advanced knowledge that it was going to go up. Of course, this would change the markets making the information you got from the future wrong, so you'd change your mind.
And the investment bankers call themselves the masters of the universe. They should be forced to study physics to undergrad level before they're allowed to trade a penny-chew.
I think Godel and Planck already did that ;)
GPS will do it accurately enough. It's a 17m "error" on the part of the neutrinos, and GPS has an appreciably higher resolution than that. It's the "neutrino bunches" I'm looking at for the experimental error - this could be one of the leading-edge effects that's already known about with photons - the leading edge can arrive faster than c, but the rest of the packet is slowed down so the velocity averages out at c. Still, even if this is the explanation it would be the first time it's been observed in a massive particle as far as I know.
The difference is that when you buy an iWhatever you're buying Apple's software running on Apple's hardware. Anyone selling hardware can put their own OS on it - your car, your microwave, they're all running the software the hardware manufacturer put there.
The difference here is that the lock-in is being applied by a software manufacturers and then sold by the hardware companies. It's like making a microwave that will only heat Brand-X food, or a car that will only run on fuel from a Multinational-Y. It's no great benefit to most users, a hindrance to a few, and will change the advice I give in all my "You're a geek, which computer do you recommend?" emails.
It'll be down to the economics of scaling the thing up. What are the maintenance issues going to be? How many years useage? It's all about the payback points.
Ah, interesting (@ both posters), I hadn't realised it was just the glass, I'd always presumed it was something slightly more complicated. So the mirror isn't parallel with the glass I'm guessing?
I don't know if it's just a British thing, but most rear view mirrors here have a little tab that changes the angle. There's a second, partial, mirror angled over the main one so when you flick the tab you get the same rear view but with only 50% or so of the light transmitted. It's designed specifically for this situation.
Outside of that, they're seriously going to go to the bother of using a laser and then de-cohering the light? Kind of defeats the purpose in the first place, surely? You've got to wonder if this isn't simply a ploy to push the cost of replacement parts up - 10% margin on a £5 bulb is less than a 2% margin on a £5k custom de-cohered laser after all.
Nope, it's even weirder and simpler than that. It's just a uShare stream. The odd thing is that .avi, .mpeg, .mp4 don't work. You have to rename them .mov. Seriously, no transcoding or anything odd, just rename them *.mov.
Thanks guys. You do realise that MS will now "upgrade" all of the XBoxes to "improve service" and "enhance security"?
And you know what that means. My save files will be corrupted, I'll probably lose at least one game plugin, and my Linux->Xbox streaming workaround will stop working around. You had to go and encourage them didn't you?
Not that I've noticed. Picasa, Blogger, Gmail, Docs, Profile and Code are all unaffected and work exactly as they did pre and during G+. The only change I've noticed is that I don't have a G+ account (obviously!) and can't use the +1 feature, but that doesn't really bother me.
To be honest I'd like G+ back, but I'm not prepared to put my real name on it, more on principle than anything else.
In this context, that gravity isn't a fundamental force, but emerges from further underlying phenomenology. We've got a model of spacetime geometry, but no real explanation of why it's like that. Pretty much every scientific theory has been found to be an effect generated by a more fundamental underlying concept. Truly chaotic systems, for example, are ultimately generated by uncertainty at quantum scales.
If you could point out exactly why you disagree with me then I'd be glad to argue further.
Wow, we really are jumping to the worst today. Deleting your G+ account does not downgrade anything else. If your account is suspended it will, at least until the suspension is resolved. That's why I deleted my G+ account, I wasn't prepared to put my real name on it, and I didn't want my other services (Blogger, Picasa, Calendar etc) to be affected. Deletion != suspension. I wish at least the submitter would RTFA.
Not to mention the UK town of Scunthorpe, or my own location of Nigg. (I'm a Niggle, since you ask).
Most likely the model. Most of the models are user generated, so some are very pretty with a bad cockpit interface, some are ugly with good physics, etc etc. The real pity is the fact that there have been some awesome flightsims from the Atari ST (F19), through 486 machines and all the way up, but these days they all rely on high-end graphics cards and processors far too much. Come on, give me a good military flightsim like F19 that will run on my netbook, I know you can do it! (OK, yes, an emulator plus F19 does the job very nicely, but come on, I shouldn't have to resort to that!). Get the physics right first, then make "pretty" an optional extra.
To be fair, the article only addresses one formulation of emergent gravity from a single hypothesis. To say the whole idea of emergent gravity is wrong is a little disingenuous. My pet theory (hey, a boy needs a hobby) is that gravity is emergent from a universe where the physics, the actual computation, has to be done to make anything happen. Apple falls to the ground? The universe has to perform the calculations to make it happen. If there's a processor limit then it would manifest as the speed of light, and if the calculations involving regions of space with mass ("particles") take a little more calculating then that section of space will be retarded in a timelike direction, ie GR. There's a whole host of emergent gravity or emergent relativity possibilities, and to my mind at least it's a very elegant way to get around some of the big fundamental problems, like why gravity doesn't seem to behave like the other forces, or why the speed of light even exists.
Yup - same with BT here. The router blocks all incoming ports by default, but you can open them as needed - or simply set up a single machine in a DMZ and use that to handle all incoming requests, port forwarding etc. Quite a good way to do it really. The downside is that (by default) anyone with a BT account can log in to your router. It's "opt-in" meaning you have to opt-out of it...