This is not entirely accurate. Swarms always contain the old queen; the new queen stays put. This is because the swarming event actually takes place shortly before the new queen(s) emerge -- the old queen leaves so there is no fight with the new queen.
One of my hive swarmed this spring...it was an awesome event, although bittersweet. I felt some sadness about losing half the bees in that hive, but I also felt happy that I was sending a new colony out into the world.
I'm not sure what benefit this really offers, aside from being an interesting project. There was another bee project a while back that recorded hive temperature and aggregate weight -- that thing was able to measure the total weight of bees in the hive with sufficient accuracy that you could easily spot the times when the foragers were leaving the hive and returning later in the day.
FWIW I am an amateur beekeeper and I don't think I would use the bee-counting Rpi gizmo. I would much rather wander out to my bee yard and just stare at each hive for a few seconds. The only thing the Rpi approach would get me is an alarm if the activity is below "normal" for the hive...that would enable me to be lazy and ignore my hives for extended periods. Not sure this is a good thing. But honestly, my once-a-week checkins ( 5 minutes to check in on 5 hives) are totally sufficient for normal conditions.
I saw a related phenomenon in ~2006. My employer was developing some software for a DoD system. Everything worked great in our lab but weird things happened when installed on the servers that the Government bought. It took us *months* to figure out that the problem was a resonance between the hard drives and the cooling fans. After an hour or so of running, the drives would stop working.
We contacted the manufacturer of the hardware and they (a) replaced the fans with fans of a different RPM and (b) isolated the fans with rubber mounts. The problem disappeared immediately and never returned.
WordPad works on Mac OS files just fine. I use notepad++ if it's available because WordPad defaults to a proportional font, which makes code and script really hard to read...but in a pinch, WordPad will do.
A friend of mine works for one of the companies involved in the Mastercard pilot. As I understand it, their card is powered by the chip reader, which already supplies power to the EMV chip.
A hash is not enough. Fingerprint matching is a notoriously fuzzy process because fingers deform under pressure, they get damaged (cuts, burns), etc. The matching process works by doing a "good enough" comparison between the newly-acquired image and a pre-digested "template" computed from the enrolled image.
Not just my favorite sci-fi film, my favorite film in general. Agree with other comments about preferring the original version. The sappy end one sucks.
When the human body goes into shock from blood loss, the first reaction is to shut off blood flow to the extremities so there is enough blood left to keep the brain and core going. I see this announcement as analogous for Yahoo, except it's "cash shock" at work.
MS must just have cash to burn. This is one of the stupidest acquisitions I have ever heard of. Best I can tell, LinkedIn, serves most people as nothing more than a centrally-maintained contact list so they can find somewhat current contact info for former coworkers. Where is the revenue stream in that?
Has LinkedIn *ever* turned a profit?
Microsoft is rapidly devolving into the most clueless tech firm out there...
Flash? You mean the Fucking Large-Ass Security Hole? I have had it disabled on my machines for years now, all the way back to the "FlashToggler" software of from the early 2000s. It's about time the rest of the world ditches it too.
The only good thing about Flash is it made blocking animated ads trivial simply by disabling the plugin. I have not had similar success with HTML5, and fear that the rise of HTML5 will signal the return of pages with so much animated ad content that I can't concentrate on the text.:(
Actually, "mass squared" is a completely relevant concept in this context. The reason is that the equation everybody thinks they know as Einstein's special relativity equation is NOT E = mc^2. That is the simplified version for objects at rest. The version that includes particles in motion is E^2 = p^2c^2 + m^2c^4, where p is the momentum of the particle. Note the presence of an m^2 term in that equation. Thus, a negative mass squared -- which others have pointed out should be read as "negative (mass squared)" -- implies that the particle's energy is *decreased* by its mass rather than increased by it. This is a counterintuitive idea, but quite plausible mathematically.
One thing that I should point out is that it is possible that Erlich wrote this paper not because he actually believes it, but because he did the math. Got a surprising result that did not obviously contradict known principles of experiments, and is challenging the world to tell him where he went wrong. We used to do this all the time when I was in grad school. It was a lot of fun. The main difference is that when you stake out an outrageous position and your friends catch your mistake over some beer, no one calls you an idiot on Slashdot. When you publish a paper, the results can be less... um.. . "civil."
Ummm...according to my calculator, 0.33 eV / 510998 eV = 0.646 x 10^-6, which is reasonably close to "two thirds of a millionth" quote
As for the imaginary mass, let's say that some particle had 0.33i eV as its mass. Then if you squared that, you would end up with -0.108 eV^2. How is that not "negative mass squared" ?
There are lots of potential problems with Erlich's theory, but the ideas you chose to nitpick are not at issue..
You seem to have a really bad case of apples and oranges syndrome. I'm really not trying to get on your case -- rather, I want to help you understand the way things really work.
1. "for example "light" can travel faster than light if they are travelling in different mediums."
Whether you realize it or not, what you're saying here is that the speed of light depends on the medium. This is true. It seems like you are saying that this is some sort of contradiction, when in fact it isn't. Consider your own running speed: do you run faster in air or in a pool? Light faces a similar situation; in denser media it has a slower speed. Saying "light can travel faster than light" is just silly. Light always travels at the speed of light -- just not always at "speed of light in a vacuum."
2. "a vacuum has really high resistance and I seem to remember that electrons travel at different speeds depending on the resistance."
If you are talking about electron drift velocity in a conductor, then I recommend you start reading here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D.... If you are talking about the velocity of free electrons in a vacuum, that's a completely different story. A free electron in a vacuum has no single speed, no more than a free cue ball in a vacuum would have. Either object travels at a speed consistent with its momentum and energy. If you're talking about electrons shot out the back end of an accelerator, they're going close to c (the dreaded speed of light in a vacuum). If you're talking about electrons accelerated by some other mechanism, well, then the speed is going to depend on what energy the accelerator imparted to the electron.
You should really read the "abstract," because the entire paper is available there at no cost. The discovered relationship is not a*C = b, but rather x = A y ** (-B), which is a much more complex relationship, and quite startling in this arena. Also be sure to look at all his graphs so you will understand what this guy did, what he discovered, and why this is a Big Deal (tm). Then maybe you won't be so quick to mock this discovery...
This. For the love of god, people need to mod the parent up. In classic Slashdot fashion, the entire conversation on this thread has missed the point, which is that the farm workers are carrying these antibiotic-resistant bacteria BECAUSE THEY CAME IN CONACT WITH LIVESTOCK THAT CARRY THE BACTERIA.
Why do the livestock carry these bacteria? Because they were fed low doses of antibiotics for long times. Antibiotics work great when you use a nice high dose for a specified period of time, and kill all the targeted bacteria. If you use low doses that don't kill all the bacteria, then some survive and eventually the survivors evolve a resistance to the antibiotics.
By using these low doses of antibiotics in livestock, we are *helping* bacteria develop resistance to the very drugs we use to treat those same bacterial infections in humans. In other words, we are setting the stage for an epidemic of disease that we can't treat because we rendered the treatment tools ineffective.
MRSA is the first. What this article is pointing out is that more are on the way, because they now have direct evidence that the resistant bacteria have a means of getting from the livestock to human populations.
This article ain't a political discussion, folks. It's a canary in a coal mine.
I read it. It makes some claims that are not actually related to cell lifetime but rather to tricks they can play with the fancy firmware that allow them to do fewer writes and erases. That has nothing to do with the native cell lifetime.
Seems like the durability of flash cells decreases with every process shrink. It makes me wonder what the lifetime of this new stuff will be. A 10% reduction in cost is no bargain if it comes with a 10% reduction in lifetime.
Reading e-books two or three lines at a time on a 3.2-inche screen would turn anyone off of reading. If you're trying to interest people in reading more, it's going to have to be a pleasant experience.
...if they open-sourced the design or at least just let me download a PDF so I could print one and make it at home. As the FAQ says, however, "Foldscope is not yet commercially available."
This, of course, makes me wonder why this needs to be commercial at all...
Slashdot Mirror
This is not entirely accurate. Swarms always contain the old queen; the new queen stays put. This is because the swarming event actually takes place shortly before the new queen(s) emerge -- the old queen leaves so there is no fight with the new queen.
One of my hive swarmed this spring...it was an awesome event, although bittersweet. I felt some sadness about losing half the bees in that hive, but I also felt happy that I was sending a new colony out into the world.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-p...
I'm not sure what benefit this really offers, aside from being an interesting project. There was another bee project a while back that recorded hive temperature and aggregate weight -- that thing was able to measure the total weight of bees in the hive with sufficient accuracy that you could easily spot the times when the foragers were leaving the hive and returning later in the day.
FWIW I am an amateur beekeeper and I don't think I would use the bee-counting Rpi gizmo. I would much rather wander out to my bee yard and just stare at each hive for a few seconds. The only thing the Rpi approach would get me is an alarm if the activity is below "normal" for the hive...that would enable me to be lazy and ignore my hives for extended periods. Not sure this is a good thing. But honestly, my once-a-week checkins ( 5 minutes to check in on 5 hives) are totally sufficient for normal conditions.
I saw a related phenomenon in ~2006. My employer was developing some software for a DoD system. Everything worked great in our lab but weird things happened when installed on the servers that the Government bought. It took us *months* to figure out that the problem was a resonance between the hard drives and the cooling fans. After an hour or so of running, the drives would stop working.
We contacted the manufacturer of the hardware and they (a) replaced the fans with fans of a different RPM and (b) isolated the fans with rubber mounts. The problem disappeared immediately and never returned.
WordPad works on Mac OS files just fine. I use notepad++ if it's available because WordPad defaults to a proportional font, which makes code and script really hard to read...but in a pinch, WordPad will do.
A friend of mine works for one of the companies involved in the Mastercard pilot. As I understand it, their card is powered by the chip reader, which already supplies power to the EMV chip.
A hash is not enough. Fingerprint matching is a notoriously fuzzy process because fingers deform under pressure, they get damaged (cuts, burns), etc. The matching process works by doing a "good enough" comparison between the newly-acquired image and a pre-digested "template" computed from the enrolled image.
Not just my favorite sci-fi film, my favorite film in general. Agree with other comments about preferring the original version. The sappy end one sucks.
6502 CPU, 8 kB RAM, cassette tape drive for storage. Fun times.
WTF? The headline makes it seem like this is a done deal, but the text makes it clear this is legislation proposed by one of the govt ministries.
An accurate headline would read "German transportation ministry proposed requirement for black boxes in autonomous vehicles."
SMH.
When the human body goes into shock from blood loss, the first reaction is to shut off blood flow to the extremities so there is enough blood left to keep the brain and core going. I see this announcement as analogous for Yahoo, except it's "cash shock" at work.
MS must just have cash to burn. This is one of the stupidest acquisitions I have ever heard of. Best I can tell, LinkedIn, serves most people as nothing more than a centrally-maintained contact list so they can find somewhat current contact info for former coworkers. Where is the revenue stream in that?
Has LinkedIn *ever* turned a profit?
Microsoft is rapidly devolving into the most clueless tech firm out there...
Flash? You mean the Fucking Large-Ass Security Hole? I have had it disabled on my machines for years now, all the way back to the "FlashToggler" software of from the early 2000s. It's about time the rest of the world ditches it too.
The only good thing about Flash is it made blocking animated ads trivial simply by disabling the plugin. I have not had similar success with HTML5, and fear that the rise of HTML5 will signal the return of pages with so much animated ad content that I can't concentrate on the text. :(
Actually, "mass squared" is a completely relevant concept in this context. The reason is that the equation everybody thinks they know as Einstein's special relativity equation is NOT E = mc^2. That is the simplified version for objects at rest. The version that includes particles in motion is E^2 = p^2c^2 + m^2c^4, where p is the momentum of the particle. Note the presence of an m^2 term in that equation. Thus, a negative mass squared -- which others have pointed out should be read as "negative (mass squared)" -- implies that the particle's energy is *decreased* by its mass rather than increased by it. This is a counterintuitive idea, but quite plausible mathematically.
One thing that I should point out is that it is possible that Erlich wrote this paper not because he actually believes it, but because he did the math. Got a surprising result that did not obviously contradict known principles of experiments, and is challenging the world to tell him where he went wrong. We used to do this all the time when I was in grad school. It was a lot of fun. The main difference is that when you stake out an outrageous position and your friends catch your mistake over some beer, no one calls you an idiot on Slashdot. When you publish a paper, the results can be less ... um .. . "civil."
Ummm...according to my calculator, 0.33 eV / 510998 eV = 0.646 x 10^-6, which is reasonably close to "two thirds of a millionth" quote
As for the imaginary mass, let's say that some particle had 0.33i eV as its mass. Then if you squared that, you would end up with -0.108 eV^2. How is that not "negative mass squared" ?
There are lots of potential problems with Erlich's theory, but the ideas you chose to nitpick are not at issue..
You seem to have a really bad case of apples and oranges syndrome. I'm really not trying to get on your case -- rather, I want to help you understand the way things really work.
1. "for example "light" can travel faster than light if they are travelling in different mediums."
Whether you realize it or not, what you're saying here is that the speed of light depends on the medium. This is true. It seems like you are saying that this is some sort of contradiction, when in fact it isn't. Consider your own running speed: do you run faster in air or in a pool? Light faces a similar situation; in denser media it has a slower speed. Saying "light can travel faster than light" is just silly. Light always travels at the speed of light -- just not always at "speed of light in a vacuum."
2. "a vacuum has really high resistance and I seem to remember that electrons travel at different speeds depending on the resistance."
If you are talking about electron drift velocity in a conductor, then I recommend you start reading here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D.... If you are talking about the velocity of free electrons in a vacuum, that's a completely different story. A free electron in a vacuum has no single speed, no more than a free cue ball in a vacuum would have. Either object travels at a speed consistent with its momentum and energy. If you're talking about electrons shot out the back end of an accelerator, they're going close to c (the dreaded speed of light in a vacuum). If you're talking about electrons accelerated by some other mechanism, well, then the speed is going to depend on what energy the accelerator imparted to the electron.
You should really read the "abstract," because the entire paper is available there at no cost. The discovered relationship is not a*C = b, but rather x = A y ** (-B), which is a much more complex relationship, and quite startling in this arena. Also be sure to look at all his graphs so you will understand what this guy did, what he discovered, and why this is a Big Deal (tm). Then maybe you won't be so quick to mock this discovery...
So...when this device gets hacked, does my entire home get pwned ?
This. For the love of god, people need to mod the parent up. In classic Slashdot fashion, the entire conversation on this thread has missed the point, which is that the farm workers are carrying these antibiotic-resistant bacteria BECAUSE THEY CAME IN CONACT WITH LIVESTOCK THAT CARRY THE BACTERIA.
Why do the livestock carry these bacteria? Because they were fed low doses of antibiotics for long times. Antibiotics work great when you use a nice high dose for a specified period of time, and kill all the targeted bacteria. If you use low doses that don't kill all the bacteria, then some survive and eventually the survivors evolve a resistance to the antibiotics.
By using these low doses of antibiotics in livestock, we are *helping* bacteria develop resistance to the very drugs we use to treat those same bacterial infections in humans. In other words, we are setting the stage for an epidemic of disease that we can't treat because we rendered the treatment tools ineffective.
MRSA is the first. What this article is pointing out is that more are on the way, because they now have direct evidence that the resistant bacteria have a means of getting from the livestock to human populations.
This article ain't a political discussion, folks. It's a canary in a coal mine.
I read it. It makes some claims that are not actually related to cell lifetime but rather to tricks they can play with the fancy firmware that allow them to do fewer writes and erases. That has nothing to do with the native cell lifetime.
Seems like the durability of flash cells decreases with every process shrink. It makes me wonder what the lifetime of this new stuff will be. A 10% reduction in cost is no bargain if it comes with a 10% reduction in lifetime.
Reading e-books two or three lines at a time on a 3.2-inche screen would turn anyone off of reading. If you're trying to interest people in reading more, it's going to have to be a pleasant experience.
...if they open-sourced the design or at least just let me download a PDF so I could print one and make it at home. As the FAQ says, however, "Foldscope is not yet commercially available."
This, of course, makes me wonder why this needs to be commercial at all...
...and here's the link to the article on NHS.
Here is a link to the Daily Telegraph article.