Do you (or anyone else in this thread) realize just how little energy is in noise, from which this crystal can only extract 18% at best, and that a large percentage of the noise will radiate in directions that don't pass through the crystals, let alone be absorbed by them?
I say it again, It would be inefficient in principle but HUGELY efficient in practice since it would be using energy that is otherwise WASTED. In this case, your argument is irrelevant since it is simply NOT about how much of the sound energy is radiated in other directions. So what if it does? It would done so anyway - that's the default situation. We're not hiring gnomes to produce the noise for this system - the noise occurs naturally. If you can harvest a fraction of it, it's still worth it. The question that WOULD be relevant is the following: Given the cost of building and deploying this system and given its predicted lifetime, will it produce enough hydrogen in ts lifetime to amply offset its cost? As long as a finite amount of hydrogen can be harvested this way, any questions of efficiency are simply not relevant.
But can it produce enough electricity to power a small radio that plays the music used to create the vibrations necessary to produce the electricity?
Am I missing something here? The summary clearly states - "any vibration can produce the effect, the system could one day be used to generate power from anything that produces noise — cars whizzing by on the highway, crashing waves in the ocean, or planes landing at an airport". Even if the conversion efficiency was MUCH less than it is (18% fta), it would still be worth it since you're using sound energy that is wasted anyway. It would be inefficient in principle but HUGELY efficient in practice since it would be using energy that is otherwise WASTED.
Let's see what happens when all these smart people doing the research start figuring out that living and working in Mumbai or Shanghai doesn't offer the same "perks" as living in the Bay Area of California.
Like low prices? Free health care and free education for your children? The freedom to marry someone regardless of their gender? California has none of those, at least. Seriously, what perks are you referring to?
Traffic culture is different (And I dare say: better) but that's a cultural thing and something you can get used to. Most claims regarding hygienic conditions, crime rates, etc. can only be made when compared to Mumbais as a whole. When comparing to the wealthy districts, the difference in such things is a lot smaller...
Eh. Not really. The difference lies in how rich you have to be to enjoy a certain standard of living. I am technically under the poverty line (and living in the Bay Area to boot:P - grad student with a stipend) but I want for nothing and can actually save a significant amount of my paycheck each month. Even living in a city like Oakland, I feel reasonably safe and experience quite acceptable living conditions in terms of environmental cleanliness, lack of visible poverty (well, until I get to Berkeley anyway:P) and just plain stability even in the middle of what is one of the worst economies in recent history. The ratio of work/reward is SIGNIFICANTLY higher in the other places you mention (and I speak from 18 years of experience when it comes to Mumbai).
Good point. I was assuming a standard set of derivations starting with the Newtonian definitions of kinematic quantities and his 3 laws and going from there. And yes, your second point is exactly why I inserted that bit about consolidation. The physical sciences are one area (probably unique) where going back to the historical origin of a concept is NOT even remotely the best way to learn the concept. The level of clutter and bad notation that gets dumped given a few years after the birth of a notion is glorious to behold, not to mention the inevitable connections and simplifications discovered after the fact. What a lot of people don't get is that a genius may arise once in a blue moon to create a new idea but there are more than sufficient people that are merely brilliant:P who can build upon that idea and make it truly breathtaking. I would worship the genius but I would learn from the consolidators;-)
I'm guessing I know which camp you are in when it comes to being either for or against fuzzy logic.
I'm not for or against anything like that. The discussion was solely about Newtonian physics, and indeed works for (non-chaotic) classical physics. I refuse to be bullied into "supporting" a particular stance championed by any particular loudmouthed scientist that happens to be in vogue.
Your post smacks of a religious fervor that mathematics is certain when it refers to reality.
Quite the contrary. I'm an experimental physicist working with quantum fluids and I have profound reservations to that effect myself. However, I would strenuously make the distinction between physics and other fields when it comes to how well certain areas of mathematics reflect reality. In these cases, the degree of synergy between the two goes far beyond simply a "model" working well.
A final point - Einstein makes a good argument but he did not live to see the fantastic agreement between theory and reality for fields like Quantum Electrodynamics (and in general, the Standard Model of particle physics). To put things very simply, I was once asked by an engineer friend of mine what kind of models I use and what statistical tools I apply to check for agreement or otherwise. Well, when I expect to confirm or disprove a rather fundamental theory that predicts a slope of h (Planck's constant) when I plot my data a certain way, it's a bit more than just a model isn't it?
By the way, I'm a bit confused about your Feynman reference. No sensible scientist would ever "skip" classical physics "in favor of" quantum physics. It's simply a matter of choosing the most accurate model of reality that is the easiest to calculate with for a given model. In that sense, it's all an approximation (of course). With a minor quibble that some of these "approximations" to reality usually give predictions that turn out to be correct to dozens of decimal places!
That is why Kuhn was so tragically misinterpreted. Physics tends to converge upon reality after the fashion of a strongly damped oscillator. A pop culture view of the matter would have you believe instead that we oscillate between largely separated viewpoints every few generations, getting nowhere in the end.
And that artificial distinction between types of physics courses is exactly why people struggle with physics. What you're doing is simply downgrading the meaning of the word "understanding" when you remove essential things like Calculus from it.
A previous poster complained about derivations. (The rest of this post is directed at him/her, not to the immediate parent before me with whom I agree - for the most part). Well, without understanding where equations come from, haven't you just walked away with a cargo cult understanding of physics? Plug this into that equation and voila, you have a bridge that is probably as shaky as your concepts. A course like Physics for Poets is nothing but a compromise course, because there will always exist a class of people who will refuse to be bothered with "useless" things like mathematics and will demand that the workings of the universe be made comprehensible to them in simple terms that require only a modicum of thought. The very idea that the math and the physical concepts exist separately from each other in meaningful ways is ludicrous. In fact, without the math to derive the real world consequences of a physical idea in a logical way, a book on physics would have no more authority than a religious text. It is the math that makes it different. And the fact that students don't get this is responsible for the scientific illiteracy that plagues our nation today. A scientific explanation of a complex question (such as say, why the sky is blue) without recourse to mathematical analysis (like simply blubbering something about Rayleigh scattering) is only MARGINALLY superior to an answer such as "because God made it so". Because in the end, without the math, you're relying on your faith (in god or the scientist) to pacify (rather than satisfy) your curiosity about the world. The long road from a simple concept like light being an electromagnetic wave (as a first approximation) to the scattering of different colors of light that goes as the fourth power of the frequency can be traveled only in the vehicle that is mathematics. No amount of hand-waving arguments will let you bridge that gap in an intellectually honest way. Sure, you can resign yourself to the fact that some people cannot or will not (or do not wish to) travel that road and simply show them a picture of the final destination. Is that understanding? Or is it a low level faith masquerading as understanding?
The worst delusion is the one where people who "learn" through pop-sci books feel they "understand" something. To name something is not to understand. It's a delusion borrowed from the humanities and it has no place in the physical sciences. It's a start, but 99% of the work still remains to be done on your part.
Without deriving an equation yourself (or at the very least seeing it derived), you will NEVER understand (1) the assumptions that went into it and (2) consequently, the domain of its validity. So, the next time you try to use it in a practical situation to say, build something, I can only hope that the thing you build is safer than your general attitude.
Besides, we're talking about an introductory course on physics. 20 pages of derivations is something you'll see in an advanced course on quantum field theory (if that). If every equation in an intro physics course were rigorously derived, it wouldn't add more than 2 weeks to the course (and perhaps 20 pages TOTAL to your notebook if you scrupulously wrote it all down). But what it would do, in exchange for that minor inconvenience, is give you a level of understanding of the subject that (given the consolidation and refinement of the intervening years) would rival that of Newton himself. Ditto for relativity and Einstein, or quantum theory and Schroedinger.
It does degrade somewhat under UV light, but then, you can just put an UV filter on top of it, it's not going to be a problem for the panel itself.
Good post, but getting rid of UV also means getting rid of the most energetic light. Wonder if that would dramatically degrade the efficiency? In other words, I just don't know the frequency dependence of the solar conversion in this case so I don't know whether your solution is viable.
Of course, if the group was clever enough to come up with this stuff in the first place, I'm sure they must have given it some thought. Pretty damn exciting in any case!!
Lets see, if anti cheating is such a priority, how come MW2 is so broke?
I can't play anymore, as its got so bad that I've seen 3 aimbotters in one game.
No votekicking or PB makes it so that you have to put up with it. VACs answer to banning people is purely based on stats, there is no checking of memory resident cheats at all.
Add to the fact that the game gets patched every blue moon, and it's a hackers dream.
Shove VAC up your arse, don't try and blow your own trumpet over something that just doesn't work.
From the comments under TFA:
Angry MW2 Player 02.19.2010
Blatent bullshit. VAC does not work at all for MW2, to the point where I've seen 3 aimbots in use on one 12 player game. Checking for memory resident hacks or altered texture files? nope, VAC doesn't do that either. What other false claims you want to make? VAC makes the best pizza?.
...to which another poster replied:
Jake 02.19.2010
Hey - Angry MW2 Player -VAC is for Valve developed games. Not for third party games distributed via Steam. Get a clue and go bitch to MW2 devs..
I guess I can see why parent was modded 'troll':P. Dunno if what the latter poster wrote is true but it does make sense.
I don't do multiplayer at all since my Jedi Knight days so I'm getting a kick out of this thread as a disinterested spectator:).
To build on your point, I read the same story yesterday (could be the same source, I don't recall) and their work is based on mass spectrometry only (from the vague, unscientific, dumbed down crap that finally makes it to the popular press so I could be wrong). Essentially, they would crush a small sample of the meteorite, analyze it for known compounds/elements (dunno what instruments they use) and infer the composition. Their spokesperson also mentioned that their instruments aren't sensitive to every single ion species so they might even be missing things. Also, since their selection is just that - a selection - the actual number of different compounds may be much higher!
At this point, people that are really interested in understanding the science should look up the working of a mass spectrometer. The toy model is that you volatilize ("gassify [sic] by heating") your sample and electrically tear apart the molecules using a high voltage between (canonically) a pair of electrodes. Guide the ions electromagnetically into a chamber with a magnetic field perpendicular to the ions' motion. This bends the ions in different circular paths (the radii are different because of the ions' charge/mass ratio). Now, here is where the sophistication (read: cost) of the instrument comes into play - the detectors that measure the incidence of these separated ions. For organic chemistry, your instrument would have C, H, O, N and other common elements calibrated. Of course, this is all just a toy model of how things work - the specific instrument you use would of course have its own pros/cons. Cheaper ones might have more assumptions built into them (where you know what you're trying to measure and just wanna know relative element ratios - clearly this is not what you would want to use for exobiology where assumptions can be fatal).
From a quick perusal of the text (University library FTW), this paper is a breakthrough for precisely the reason I alluded to above, i.e. for exobiology, you want to have little to no assumptions built into your investigation - a so-called 'non-targeted investigation' as the authors say. The newer analytical methods they used include (for keyword searches by interested readers): Electrospray ionization (ESI) Fourier transform ion cyclotron resonance/mass spectrometry (FTICR/MS), Nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR) and ultraperformance liquid chromatography coupled to quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometry (UPLC-QTOF/MS). This was from the actual paper.
Intuitively, you can sort of see what all that jargon means (thank science for meaningful terminology). FTICR/MS sounds like making the ions go in a circle using a magnetic field (the rotation frequency for a given charge/mass and mag field is the cyclotron resonant frequency - can be found via Fourier transform methods I presume - this sounds quite interesting and I believe I'll look this up to see exactly how they do it). NMR is simply MRI (the latter is a term used because neobarbs get their panties in a bunch when they hear "nuclear"). Vaguely speaking: you flip nuclear spins using an oscillatory mag field and measure the response - tells you what stuff is made of. Time-of-flight spectrometry is exactly what it sounds like. Recall my toy model of spectrometry. Well, instead of a mag field, you use an electric field to accelerate the ions and figure out how long it takes to make a given trip. Simple high school kinematics tells you the rest. Dunno offhand what the chromatography or ESI are but I'm sure you can google them if you're interested.
By the way, I see that there are many here who bring up the question of whether this is just terrestrial contamination. While the question is legit, the idea that scientists routinely ignore such obvious questions is a symptom of the irresponsible and incomplete nature of sc
Alright! Jeez...way to make a federal case out of it. Do I at least get a last meal before the chair?:P Do you like... work for Netflix or summin?;-)
But seriously, I guess I tried a while back, got the response I talked about before from Netflix and just didn't try again after that. My bad. I will now proceed to slash my wrists for being *shudder* wrong on/.
That said, I believe I'll stick with my current setup. A completely stripped down IE is actually quite fast considering all the extensions and RSS feeds I have in FF.
Only one reason as far as I'm concerned - Netflix instant viewing. Won't run in FF at all (as per their policy as well - dunno if there's a hack that can do this). So, I have IE for Netflix and FF for everything else. Actually not a bad deal as I've set IE to open Netflix logged in - that way it works just like a TV;-) with the browsing kept to the TV guide minimum.
In fact, any ideas on getting around this would be appreciated.
3 wonderfully candid and informative posts in a row. It's a pity that that won't stop the idiots crying "OMG conspiracy of silence by egotistical scientists!":P
So Calvin was our Aeon Flux?
The chaos warrior, in the face of massive ordering?
I'll take that. It lends more to Calvin than was previously theorized.
Interesting. I'd never looked into Aeon Flux. Your comment made me google it and yes... I guess you could say that:). I stay away from anime but Wikipedia specifically states that this is NOT anime so I may give it a shot - looks quirky enough.
Forgive me if you're a rapturous AF fan, but I can't get over the vague similarity between Charlize Theron in that... costume, and... Stuuuuupenddddousssss Mannnnnnnnnn =D
"Any rebellion was accidental, as it usually is in the case of very young children."
One of the first words that comes out of most kids mouths is "No". Belive me, it's no accident.
I stand corrected insofar as real kids are concerned* but I stand by my assertion as it pertains to Calvin. A simple "no" would have made for a piss-poor comic.
_________
* I don't have kids and if what you say is right, my little cousins (on whom I based my previous post) appear to be intellectual giants seeing as how they can argue in such fascinatingly convoluted ways. They have harried but proud parents:-).
It's very unusual for a first-grader to use words like "arboreal" and "ichthyoid". He played by his own rules, often living in his own head, and shunned the status quo. The strip showcases the importance of imagination contributing to intelligence and richness of experience. Calvin and Hobbes was the single largest influence of my childhood and I am happy that Watterson never whored out his work, unlike the guy who wrote the preface of the first C&H book.[scroll down for the strip]
Most of the parodies of Calvin and Hobbes revolve around the fact that Calvin's rambunctiousness would be considered abnormal, today. Very sad.
Well now. The fact that I too admired Calvin's rambunctiousness does not in any way mean that his behavior was admirable in an objective sense. Fact is that Watterson himself wrote (in his Tenth Anniversary collection annotations) that he would hate to have a kid like Calvin and that he frequently disagreed with Calvin's POVs.
On the other hand, there are aspects of his personality that I absolutely adore. I hate organized events, just like Calvin. That just means that I have a hard time having a social life because I find most social events to be unimaginative, mundane and frightfully limited in scope. Ditto for sports. Calvin would grow up into the kind of person for whom boredom would be a fate worse than death (it's a blessing and a curse, for obvious reasons). In a strip where Calvin complains in his wonderfully frank way - "Why can't I just have fun on my own?", his dad retorts (in an unusual burst of man-to-man honesty), "When you grow up, it's not allowed". That pretty much says it all. I think it comes from needing greater variety in entertainment (which obviously includes education) options at a lower tree level of organization (i.e. "I'm bored with music, switch to reading", as opposed to "I'm bored with classical, switch to punk rock").
Also, you speak of shunning the status quo. I know what you're trying to say, but I think Watterson's genius lay in specifically NOT portraying Calvin as a rebel. Any rebellion was accidental, as it usually is in the case of very young children. Many of Calvin's exploits stemmed from taking an adult principle literally or following it to the logical conclusion - something that adults almost never do. In that sense, I get some of the same vicarious thrill from several C&H strips that I got from Atlas Shrugged;-). Essentially, he never deliberately shunned the status quo - he just didn't give a damn either way - something I found quite charming. It's sorta like Doctor Who - you just can't wait to see what he does next - there's an expectation of magic on the horizon:-). The deliberate rebels (as typified by the surly teen variety) are too predictable to be interesting. Simply negating something is neither subtle nor entertaining.
Wasting your time in actual school taking actual classes is a net loser compared to getting a cheap diploma from a diploma mill and getting a paying job today.
That's like saying that the existence of counterfeit money proves the uselessness of money.
Now, there's an analogy for you (you decide if it's good or bad:P).
As far as "useless" goes, okay, I probably use at most about 5% of what I learned at university.
By 5% of course, you mean a very little amount, since this is hardly quantifiable. Of course, these small percentages in many cases are such that their lack can make it extremely difficult to get the remaining 95% of the knowledge. As you said yourself, a university education can give you a good foundation (the operative word being 'can'). I took just one sequence of programming courses (C++) in college and that was enough to be comfortable with any language I needed to know thereafter for working in physics.
What if it is not that our best minds couldn't produce to our expectations, but rather, they were prevented from doing so by our not-so-best minds?
You're right of course. It is a distinct possibility. However, the consequence in either case is the same - the desired future has not been attained. That is what I meant by the glorious SF futures being neither inevitable nor part of some grand human destiny. Destiny exists only in retrospect:P.
Being a science fiction aficionado myself, I can attest that our problem is that we see some amalgam of those glorious futures as an inevitability. They are simply possibilities to be realized through the applied power of the human mind. Clearly, we have fallen short of the expectations of our best minds in bringing these futures to reality. There is nothing inevitable about the continued existence of the human race, especially not its existence in a manner to our liking. So, work for it - don't expect it to just happen spontaneously. For all we know, John Galt has spirited away the people who can make it happen:P.
Since I'm a human*, I'll just get whatever works and doesn't cost me a king's ransom;). I tend to use "PC" as an acronym for personal computer, regardless of brand. If I ever bought a Mac, I'm sure I'll annoy regular Mac users by calling it a PC.
This manufacturer appears to be a small one with its eyes on the thrifty geek - I doubt its interests will really intersect those of the giants so if I were its CEO (or owner as the case may be), I'd simply market it as an electronic scratchpad, which neither the Apple tablet nor the Courier is (they are both full fledged computers).
Update: After talking to an Improv Electronics representative, we’ve confirmed that they are indeed working on a recordable Boogie Board tablet that would utilize flash memory and a USB connection to save and download your work. It would be the size and model, just with added storage and USB connection. They anticipate having this new version available for sale within the year but will still sell the current base version. Price on this new recordable model would be around $50.
Read more: http://besttabletreview.com/the-boogie-board-paperless-lcd-writing-tablet-very-cool-and-only-30/#ixzz0dYELgHng
AWESOME! I've been waiting for something like this in a portable version ever since I was blown away by a chalkboard sized version in a conference room at Cornell a few years back. That one was in color (!) with different light pens for each color and the ability to save the entire board to a connected computer. I'm hardly ever a first-adopter (they call me Mr. SP2 *cough*) but this thing I'll buy as soon as it gets storage and/or a PC connection.
I agree. Having seen this on screen however, I feel like I'm ready for my dentures:'(.
\Now GET OFF MY LAWN!!
\\Asimov, Clarke, et al FTW
\\\Never thought et al & FTW could appear in the same line
\\\\Sorry about the caps before...
\\\\I'll shut up now...
so really, from a strictly photographic perspective, yes, this guy's pictures are better, because they show what the thing *really* looks like.
Meh. True color would be relevant only if you were going to live out there and wanted your curtains to match;-).
(Some of the explanations in the following are not directed to parent (who appears to already know this) but to anyone who's interested).
If you read some of the descriptions below his (quite fantastic!) pictures, you'll see something like this "using the HST palette" or "H-a, RGB" or "H-alpha, RGB". The first refers to the Hubble Space Telescope palette, which you can read about here - http://astroprofspage.com/archives/1500 (brilliantly written article understandable at the elementary school level - I recommend it to anyone interested in what false color processing is really all about). The H-alpha of course refers to the lowest energy line in the Hydrogen spectrum, which I would assume has been filtered out (or enhanced) during processing. A lot of false color processing is merely enhancing certain wavelengths over others because there's more interesting structure (and astrophysical processes) to be explored there and they would otherwise be swamped by high intensities of more 'boring' wavelengths (whose origins are well known - such as the H-alpha). Of course, sometimes you would do such processing for purely aesthetic reasons - to make a celestial scene look more... space-operaish for instance;-).
Slashdot Mirror
Do you (or anyone else in this thread) realize just how little energy is in noise, from which this crystal can only extract 18% at best, and that a large percentage of the noise will radiate in directions that don't pass through the crystals, let alone be absorbed by them?
I say it again, It would be inefficient in principle but HUGELY efficient in practice since it would be using energy that is otherwise WASTED. In this case, your argument is irrelevant since it is simply NOT about how much of the sound energy is radiated in other directions. So what if it does? It would done so anyway - that's the default situation. We're not hiring gnomes to produce the noise for this system - the noise occurs naturally. If you can harvest a fraction of it, it's still worth it. The question that WOULD be relevant is the following:
Given the cost of building and deploying this system and given its predicted lifetime, will it produce enough hydrogen in ts lifetime to amply offset its cost? As long as a finite amount of hydrogen can be harvested this way, any questions of efficiency are simply not relevant.
But can it produce enough electricity to power a small radio that plays the music used to create the vibrations necessary to produce the electricity?
Am I missing something here? The summary clearly states - "any vibration can produce the effect, the system could one day be used to generate power from anything that produces noise — cars whizzing by on the highway, crashing waves in the ocean, or planes landing at an airport". Even if the conversion efficiency was MUCH less than it is (18% fta), it would still be worth it since you're using sound energy that is wasted anyway. It would be inefficient in principle but HUGELY efficient in practice since it would be using energy that is otherwise WASTED.
Let's see what happens when all these smart people doing the research start figuring out that living and working in Mumbai or Shanghai doesn't offer the same "perks" as living in the Bay Area of California.
Like low prices? Free health care and free education for your children? The freedom to marry someone regardless of their gender? California has none of those, at least. Seriously, what perks are you referring to?
Traffic culture is different (And I dare say: better) but that's a cultural thing and something you can get used to. Most claims regarding hygienic conditions, crime rates, etc. can only be made when compared to Mumbais as a whole. When comparing to the wealthy districts, the difference in such things is a lot smaller...
Eh. Not really. The difference lies in how rich you have to be to enjoy a certain standard of living. I am technically under the poverty line (and living in the Bay Area to boot :P - grad student with a stipend) but I want for nothing and can actually save a significant amount of my paycheck each month. Even living in a city like Oakland, I feel reasonably safe and experience quite acceptable living conditions in terms of environmental cleanliness, lack of visible poverty (well, until I get to Berkeley anyway :P) and just plain stability even in the middle of what is one of the worst economies in recent history. The ratio of work/reward is SIGNIFICANTLY higher in the other places you mention (and I speak from 18 years of experience when it comes to Mumbai).
Good point. I was assuming a standard set of derivations starting with the Newtonian definitions of kinematic quantities and his 3 laws and going from there. And yes, your second point is exactly why I inserted that bit about consolidation. The physical sciences are one area (probably unique) where going back to the historical origin of a concept is NOT even remotely the best way to learn the concept. The level of clutter and bad notation that gets dumped given a few years after the birth of a notion is glorious to behold, not to mention the inevitable connections and simplifications discovered after the fact. What a lot of people don't get is that a genius may arise once in a blue moon to create a new idea but there are more than sufficient people that are merely brilliant :P who can build upon that idea and make it truly breathtaking. I would worship the genius but I would learn from the consolidators ;-)
I'm guessing I know which camp you are in when it comes to being either for or against fuzzy logic.
I'm not for or against anything like that. The discussion was solely about Newtonian physics, and indeed works for (non-chaotic) classical physics. I refuse to be bullied into "supporting" a particular stance championed by any particular loudmouthed scientist that happens to be in vogue.
Your post smacks of a religious fervor that mathematics is certain when it refers to reality.
Quite the contrary. I'm an experimental physicist working with quantum fluids and I have profound reservations to that effect myself. However, I would strenuously make the distinction between physics and other fields when it comes to how well certain areas of mathematics reflect reality. In these cases, the degree of synergy between the two goes far beyond simply a "model" working well.
A final point - Einstein makes a good argument but he did not live to see the fantastic agreement between theory and reality for fields like Quantum Electrodynamics (and in general, the Standard Model of particle physics). To put things very simply, I was once asked by an engineer friend of mine what kind of models I use and what statistical tools I apply to check for agreement or otherwise. Well, when I expect to confirm or disprove a rather fundamental theory that predicts a slope of h (Planck's constant) when I plot my data a certain way, it's a bit more than just a model isn't it?
By the way, I'm a bit confused about your Feynman reference. No sensible scientist would ever "skip" classical physics "in favor of" quantum physics. It's simply a matter of choosing the most accurate model of reality that is the easiest to calculate with for a given model. In that sense, it's all an approximation (of course). With a minor quibble that some of these "approximations" to reality usually give predictions that turn out to be correct to dozens of decimal places!
That is why Kuhn was so tragically misinterpreted. Physics tends to converge upon reality after the fashion of a strongly damped oscillator. A pop culture view of the matter would have you believe instead that we oscillate between largely separated viewpoints every few generations, getting nowhere in the end.
And that artificial distinction between types of physics courses is exactly why people struggle with physics. What you're doing is simply downgrading the meaning of the word "understanding" when you remove essential things like Calculus from it.
A previous poster complained about derivations. (The rest of this post is directed at him/her, not to the immediate parent before me with whom I agree - for the most part). Well, without understanding where equations come from, haven't you just walked away with a cargo cult understanding of physics? Plug this into that equation and voila, you have a bridge that is probably as shaky as your concepts. A course like Physics for Poets is nothing but a compromise course, because there will always exist a class of people who will refuse to be bothered with "useless" things like mathematics and will demand that the workings of the universe be made comprehensible to them in simple terms that require only a modicum of thought. The very idea that the math and the physical concepts exist separately from each other in meaningful ways is ludicrous. In fact, without the math to derive the real world consequences of a physical idea in a logical way, a book on physics would have no more authority than a religious text. It is the math that makes it different. And the fact that students don't get this is responsible for the scientific illiteracy that plagues our nation today. A scientific explanation of a complex question (such as say, why the sky is blue) without recourse to mathematical analysis (like simply blubbering something about Rayleigh scattering) is only MARGINALLY superior to an answer such as "because God made it so". Because in the end, without the math, you're relying on your faith (in god or the scientist) to pacify (rather than satisfy) your curiosity about the world. The long road from a simple concept like light being an electromagnetic wave (as a first approximation) to the scattering of different colors of light that goes as the fourth power of the frequency can be traveled only in the vehicle that is mathematics. No amount of hand-waving arguments will let you bridge that gap in an intellectually honest way. Sure, you can resign yourself to the fact that some people cannot or will not (or do not wish to) travel that road and simply show them a picture of the final destination. Is that understanding? Or is it a low level faith masquerading as understanding?
The worst delusion is the one where people who "learn" through pop-sci books feel they "understand" something. To name something is not to understand. It's a delusion borrowed from the humanities and it has no place in the physical sciences. It's a start, but 99% of the work still remains to be done on your part.
Without deriving an equation yourself (or at the very least seeing it derived), you will NEVER understand (1) the assumptions that went into it and (2) consequently, the domain of its validity. So, the next time you try to use it in a practical situation to say, build something, I can only hope that the thing you build is safer than your general attitude.
Besides, we're talking about an introductory course on physics. 20 pages of derivations is something you'll see in an advanced course on quantum field theory (if that). If every equation in an intro physics course were rigorously derived, it wouldn't add more than 2 weeks to the course (and perhaps 20 pages TOTAL to your notebook if you scrupulously wrote it all down). But what it would do, in exchange for that minor inconvenience, is give you a level of understanding of the subject that (given the consolidation and refinement of the intervening years) would rival that of Newton himself. Ditto for relativity and Einstein, or quantum theory and Schroedinger.
It does degrade somewhat under UV light, but then, you can just put an UV filter on top of it, it's not going to be a problem for the panel itself.
Good post, but getting rid of UV also means getting rid of the most energetic light. Wonder if that would dramatically degrade the efficiency? In other words, I just don't know the frequency dependence of the solar conversion in this case so I don't know whether your solution is viable.
Of course, if the group was clever enough to come up with this stuff in the first place, I'm sure they must have given it some thought. Pretty damn exciting in any case!!
Lets see, if anti cheating is such a priority, how come MW2 is so broke? I can't play anymore, as its got so bad that I've seen 3 aimbotters in one game. No votekicking or PB makes it so that you have to put up with it. VACs answer to banning people is purely based on stats, there is no checking of memory resident cheats at all. Add to the fact that the game gets patched every blue moon, and it's a hackers dream. Shove VAC up your arse, don't try and blow your own trumpet over something that just doesn't work.
From the comments under TFA:
I guess I can see why parent was modded 'troll' :P. Dunno if what the latter poster wrote is true but it does make sense.
I don't do multiplayer at all since my Jedi Knight days so I'm getting a kick out of this thread as a disinterested spectator :).
To build on your point, I read the same story yesterday (could be the same source, I don't recall) and their work is based on mass spectrometry only (from the vague, unscientific, dumbed down crap that finally makes it to the popular press so I could be wrong). Essentially, they would crush a small sample of the meteorite, analyze it for known compounds/elements (dunno what instruments they use) and infer the composition. Their spokesperson also mentioned that their instruments aren't sensitive to every single ion species so they might even be missing things. Also, since their selection is just that - a selection - the actual number of different compounds may be much higher!
At this point, people that are really interested in understanding the science should look up the working of a mass spectrometer. The toy model is that you volatilize ("gassify [sic] by heating") your sample and electrically tear apart the molecules using a high voltage between (canonically) a pair of electrodes. Guide the ions electromagnetically into a chamber with a magnetic field perpendicular to the ions' motion. This bends the ions in different circular paths (the radii are different because of the ions' charge/mass ratio). Now, here is where the sophistication (read: cost) of the instrument comes into play - the detectors that measure the incidence of these separated ions. For organic chemistry, your instrument would have C, H, O, N and other common elements calibrated. Of course, this is all just a toy model of how things work - the specific instrument you use would of course have its own pros/cons. Cheaper ones might have more assumptions built into them (where you know what you're trying to measure and just wanna know relative element ratios - clearly this is not what you would want to use for exobiology where assumptions can be fatal).
Here's the abstract of the actual paper: http://www.pnas.org/content/107/7/2763
Full text requires a subscription, alas.
From a quick perusal of the text (University library FTW), this paper is a breakthrough for precisely the reason I alluded to above, i.e. for exobiology, you want to have little to no assumptions built into your investigation - a so-called 'non-targeted investigation' as the authors say. The newer analytical methods they used include (for keyword searches by interested readers): Electrospray ionization (ESI) Fourier transform ion cyclotron resonance/mass spectrometry (FTICR/MS), Nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR) and ultraperformance liquid chromatography coupled to quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometry (UPLC-QTOF/MS). This was from the actual paper.
Intuitively, you can sort of see what all that jargon means (thank science for meaningful terminology). FTICR/MS sounds like making the ions go in a circle using a magnetic field (the rotation frequency for a given charge/mass and mag field is the cyclotron resonant frequency - can be found via Fourier transform methods I presume - this sounds quite interesting and I believe I'll look this up to see exactly how they do it). NMR is simply MRI (the latter is a term used because neobarbs get their panties in a bunch when they hear "nuclear"). Vaguely speaking: you flip nuclear spins using an oscillatory mag field and measure the response - tells you what stuff is made of. Time-of-flight spectrometry is exactly what it sounds like. Recall my toy model of spectrometry. Well, instead of a mag field, you use an electric field to accelerate the ions and figure out how long it takes to make a given trip. Simple high school kinematics tells you the rest. Dunno offhand what the chromatography or ESI are but I'm sure you can google them if you're interested.
By the way, I see that there are many here who bring up the question of whether this is just terrestrial contamination. While the question is legit, the idea that scientists routinely ignore such obvious questions is a symptom of the irresponsible and incomplete nature of sc
Alright! Jeez...way to make a federal case out of it. Do I at least get a last meal before the chair? :P Do you like ... work for Netflix or summin? ;-)
/.
But seriously, I guess I tried a while back, got the response I talked about before from Netflix and just didn't try again after that. My bad. I will now proceed to slash my wrists for being *shudder* wrong on
That said, I believe I'll stick with my current setup. A completely stripped down IE is actually quite fast considering all the extensions and RSS feeds I have in FF.
Only one reason as far as I'm concerned - Netflix instant viewing. Won't run in FF at all (as per their policy as well - dunno if there's a hack that can do this). So, I have IE for Netflix and FF for everything else. Actually not a bad deal as I've set IE to open Netflix logged in - that way it works just like a TV ;-) with the browsing kept to the TV guide minimum.
In fact, any ideas on getting around this would be appreciated.
3 wonderfully candid and informative posts in a row. It's a pity that that won't stop the idiots crying "OMG conspiracy of silence by egotistical scientists!" :P
So Calvin was our Aeon Flux? The chaos warrior, in the face of massive ordering? I'll take that. It lends more to Calvin than was previously theorized.
Interesting. I'd never looked into Aeon Flux. Your comment made me google it and yes ... I guess you could say that :). I stay away from anime but Wikipedia specifically states that this is NOT anime so I may give it a shot - looks quirky enough.
... costume, and ... Stuuuuupenddddousssss Mannnnnnnnnn =D
Forgive me if you're a rapturous AF fan, but I can't get over the vague similarity between Charlize Theron in that
"Any rebellion was accidental, as it usually is in the case of very young children." One of the first words that comes out of most kids mouths is "No". Belive me, it's no accident.
I stand corrected insofar as real kids are concerned* but I stand by my assertion as it pertains to Calvin. A simple "no" would have made for a piss-poor comic.
:-).
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* I don't have kids and if what you say is right, my little cousins (on whom I based my previous post) appear to be intellectual giants seeing as how they can argue in such fascinatingly convoluted ways. They have harried but proud parents
It's very unusual for a first-grader to use words like "arboreal" and "ichthyoid". He played by his own rules, often living in his own head, and shunned the status quo. The strip showcases the importance of imagination contributing to intelligence and richness of experience. Calvin and Hobbes was the single largest influence of my childhood and I am happy that Watterson never whored out his work, unlike the guy who wrote the preface of the first C&H book.[scroll down for the strip] Most of the parodies of Calvin and Hobbes revolve around the fact that Calvin's rambunctiousness would be considered abnormal, today. Very sad.
Well now. The fact that I too admired Calvin's rambunctiousness does not in any way mean that his behavior was admirable in an objective sense. Fact is that Watterson himself wrote (in his Tenth Anniversary collection annotations) that he would hate to have a kid like Calvin and that he frequently disagreed with Calvin's POVs.
;-). Essentially, he never deliberately shunned the status quo - he just didn't give a damn either way - something I found quite charming. It's sorta like Doctor Who - you just can't wait to see what he does next - there's an expectation of magic on the horizon :-). The deliberate rebels (as typified by the surly teen variety) are too predictable to be interesting. Simply negating something is neither subtle nor entertaining.
On the other hand, there are aspects of his personality that I absolutely adore. I hate organized events, just like Calvin. That just means that I have a hard time having a social life because I find most social events to be unimaginative, mundane and frightfully limited in scope. Ditto for sports. Calvin would grow up into the kind of person for whom boredom would be a fate worse than death (it's a blessing and a curse, for obvious reasons). In a strip where Calvin complains in his wonderfully frank way - "Why can't I just have fun on my own?", his dad retorts (in an unusual burst of man-to-man honesty), "When you grow up, it's not allowed". That pretty much says it all. I think it comes from needing greater variety in entertainment (which obviously includes education) options at a lower tree level of organization (i.e. "I'm bored with music, switch to reading", as opposed to "I'm bored with classical, switch to punk rock").
Also, you speak of shunning the status quo. I know what you're trying to say, but I think Watterson's genius lay in specifically NOT portraying Calvin as a rebel. Any rebellion was accidental, as it usually is in the case of very young children. Many of Calvin's exploits stemmed from taking an adult principle literally or following it to the logical conclusion - something that adults almost never do. In that sense, I get some of the same vicarious thrill from several C&H strips that I got from Atlas Shrugged
Wasting your time in actual school taking actual classes is a net loser compared to getting a cheap diploma from a diploma mill and getting a paying job today.
That's like saying that the existence of counterfeit money proves the uselessness of money.
:P).
Now, there's an analogy for you (you decide if it's good or bad
As far as "useless" goes, okay, I probably use at most about 5% of what I learned at university.
By 5% of course, you mean a very little amount, since this is hardly quantifiable. Of course, these small percentages in many cases are such that their lack can make it extremely difficult to get the remaining 95% of the knowledge. As you said yourself, a university education can give you a good foundation (the operative word being 'can'). I took just one sequence of programming courses (C++) in college and that was enough to be comfortable with any language I needed to know thereafter for working in physics.
The worthlessness is even worse since ![anything worth knowing is] skills needed for a particular job are learned on the job and not in the classroom.
FTFY
Strikeout tag, where art thou?
What if it is not that our best minds couldn't produce to our expectations, but rather, they were prevented from doing so by our not-so-best minds?
You're right of course. It is a distinct possibility. However, the consequence in either case is the same - the desired future has not been attained. That is what I meant by the glorious SF futures being neither inevitable nor part of some grand human destiny. Destiny exists only in retrospect :P.
Being a science fiction aficionado myself, I can attest that our problem is that we see some amalgam of those glorious futures as an inevitability. They are simply possibilities to be realized through the applied power of the human mind. Clearly, we have fallen short of the expectations of our best minds in bringing these futures to reality. There is nothing inevitable about the continued existence of the human race, especially not its existence in a manner to our liking. So, work for it - don't expect it to just happen spontaneously. For all we know, John Galt has spirited away the people who can make it happen :P.
Sounds like an awful lot of bullshit and hassle for the same stuff I get with Linux for free and out of the box. How's that working out for you?
I'm not a Mac user but I believe GP won the point on this one. A linux user complaining about hassle is worth a Daily show skit by John Hodgman :).
Since I'm a human*, I'll just get whatever works and doesn't cost me a king's ransom ;). I tend to use "PC" as an acronym for personal computer, regardless of brand. If I ever bought a Mac, I'm sure I'll annoy regular Mac users by calling it a PC.
This manufacturer appears to be a small one with its eyes on the thrifty geek - I doubt its interests will really intersect those of the giants so if I were its CEO (or owner as the case may be), I'd simply market it as an electronic scratchpad, which neither the Apple tablet nor the Courier is (they are both full fledged computers).
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*v1.1 beta, to be precise
Update: After talking to an Improv Electronics representative, we’ve confirmed that they are indeed working on a recordable Boogie Board tablet that would utilize flash memory and a USB connection to save and download your work. It would be the size and model, just with added storage and USB connection. They anticipate having this new version available for sale within the year but will still sell the current base version. Price on this new recordable model would be around $50. Read more: http://besttabletreview.com/the-boogie-board-paperless-lcd-writing-tablet-very-cool-and-only-30/#ixzz0dYELgHng
AWESOME! I've been waiting for something like this in a portable version ever since I was blown away by a chalkboard sized version in a conference room at Cornell a few years back. That one was in color (!) with different light pens for each color and the ability to save the entire board to a connected computer. I'm hardly ever a first-adopter (they call me Mr. SP2 *cough*) but this thing I'll buy as soon as it gets storage and/or a PC connection.
:)
Thanks for the info
I agree. Having seen this on screen however, I feel like I'm ready for my dentures :'(.
...
\Now GET OFF MY LAWN!!
\\Asimov, Clarke, et al FTW
\\\Never thought et al & FTW could appear in the same line
\\\\Sorry about the caps before
\\\\I'll shut up now...
so really, from a strictly photographic perspective, yes, this guy's pictures are better, because they show what the thing *really* looks like.
Meh. True color would be relevant only if you were going to live out there and wanted your curtains to match ;-).
... space-operaish for instance ;-).
(Some of the explanations in the following are not directed to parent (who appears to already know this) but to anyone who's interested).
If you read some of the descriptions below his (quite fantastic!) pictures, you'll see something like this "using the HST palette" or "H-a, RGB" or "H-alpha, RGB". The first refers to the Hubble Space Telescope palette, which you can read about here - http://astroprofspage.com/archives/1500 (brilliantly written article understandable at the elementary school level - I recommend it to anyone interested in what false color processing is really all about). The H-alpha of course refers to the lowest energy line in the Hydrogen spectrum, which I would assume has been filtered out (or enhanced) during processing. A lot of false color processing is merely enhancing certain wavelengths over others because there's more interesting structure (and astrophysical processes) to be explored there and they would otherwise be swamped by high intensities of more 'boring' wavelengths (whose origins are well known - such as the H-alpha). Of course, sometimes you would do such processing for purely aesthetic reasons - to make a celestial scene look more