The sky tree seems to have problems with ice build up on its steel beams during cold winter days (Mentioned in this article here: CNet). Although after a quick google search this seems to be general problem of tall structures with open truss structures (for example here is video of a ice falling from a TV tower Youtube).
I guess usually that is not such a big problem as TV towers are build in parks or large open spaces but the Tokyo sky tree is build in the center of the city surrounded by a lot buildings. Apparently they had to install electric heaters on the Sky tree to prevent ice forming.
Well in my experience the standards of high school education is only half the story. Sure the better it is the more easily you will master challenges in your later life but I think you can rectify most of the gaps during college or university as most of the things you learn in high school are not so important.
I'm from germany and in my high school (I graduated in 2003) there were no multiple choice tests, but mostly essay type of questions. In science tests you were given a questions and you had to develop the answer just like at university. I had no problems with that, I thought it was normal and math, physics and chemistry tests were actually quite fun to do (not so much the language tests, that was a fucking nightmare:)). I guess in retrospect it was quite a good high school education and I basically aced my first university semesters for my physics degree.
But after that I tanked, my performance got worse and worse and I just barely graduated from university with average grades. Basically because there was nothing to motivate me.
Anyway my point is, a good high school education doesn't help you very much in later life. It gives you a good head start but you loose that advantage pretty fast. The problem with todays youth is not the lack of good education but the lack of visible(!) pioneering research programs. Seriously if the government started a massive mars program today (probes, manned missions and colonization etc.) they would have no problem finding young people in their 20s willing to rise up to the challenge (if the challenges are completely novel, a 20 year old is just as good as a 40 year old).
I think the reason we wouldn't trust people in their 20s with todays kind of technology is that we have become far less tolerant to failures. Before apollo rocket scientists/engineers blew up engines and rockets regularly. But with todays limited funding you have one failure and you are out of the game.
Look at SpaceX, they had a lot of failures in the beginning but now they have one delay after another because they want to make 100% sure that their Falcon 9 rocket does not fail. One failure and spaceX would loose a lot of business. For this you want experienced people.
Man, with that kind of money you could probably fund almost all experiments currently running in the world.
I mean think about it, with the exception of large scale experiments like Tevatron or LHC, Bill Gates could fund almost the entire physics research currently active in the world.
I wonder why he is so focused on curing AIDS, when he could practically double the world research output in all other fields? It seems to me, that this could have much larger impact on a larger group of people.
I mean Africa is a fucked up place with or without AIDS, Malaria and so on (which are just syptoms of more complex socio-economic problems). You can probably dump billions of dollars in this continent, and all you'd get in return is more powerful warlords, more intensive and brutal ethnic/religous conflicts and a few very rich people, who get a little richer.
This looks pretty vacant to me. Here the location on google maps: Khimki, Russia
A little wikipedia research tells you that this is the old OKB-456 development and test facility for the RD-100 engine, a predecessor of the modern RD-107 engines. the plant was build right after WWII to build a copy of the german V2 rocket and probably has not been used for years. Todays Sojus rockets fly with the RD-107 or with its upgrades RD-117 and RD-118. These are produced by NPO energomash in samara at this location: Progress Plant, Samara
Why so impatient? Do you have some important business meeting on Alpha Centauri b in the next 150 years?
Don't worry manned interstellar spaceflight will not happen in our lifetime, so wether it happens in 150 years or in 10000 years doesn't matter from our perspective.
Maybe just maybe a probe will be sent to some nearby starsystem. But what would be the point? By the time it reaches the star our technology will have changed so much, that we probably won't even be able to communicate with the probe anymore.
And again entangled diamonds (or whatever) cannot be used for FTL communication, only for something like superdense coding (two bit transmission for each entangled qubit). And even if so, currently the lifetime of entangled atomic quantum systems is at most on the order of seconds (which is already very hard to achieve) and most of the experiments achieve something in the ms range. For interstellar spaceflight you'd need many years of entanglement lifetime and for one single 100kb jpeg image transmitted from the probe to earth you'd need at least 50000 entangled individually adressable qubits shared between the spaceprobe and earth.
From someone who works in the field, believe me, interstellar probes will not use any form of quantum communication.
I think for the time beeing, the things we will learn just by looking at the universe with ever sharper eyes will be exciting enough. We should enjoy that and not hopelessly yearn for some magical technology that brings us to the stars (it is kind of childish if you think about it).
Basically I prefer email over talking directly to people. As a previous poster wrote, it allows you to organize your thoughts or think something through before telling it to somebody else. This way email communication is of higher quality and more productive.
But the phone is much better suited when dealing with more trivial tasks. In my work we depend on a lot of external suppliers and you'll never get anywhere with them if you communicate via email (long delays between reponses). Somebody wrote that an advantage of email is that you can answer at your convenience. Sure that's nice if you are on the right side, but if you are the manager of a large factory and a crucial machine breaks down, you call the manufacturer so that he can fix that ASAP. With email it would take days before the factory can produce again
My advice is to use email in high level design/development/research discussions, non-trivial troubleshooting and document exchange (bills, quotes etc.) and the phone for everything else. Forget icq/facebook, it combines the disadvantage of the phone (no organization of thoughts, chit chat) with the disadvantage of the email (no one is forced to answer you immediately).
every physics student gets a demonstration of this effect in his solid state physics lecture. But usually the superconductor is rather small and is put into a small matchbox type car to drive it around a track.
Here they used a relatively large and bulky superconducting disk, so the orientation locking is more visible.
Although not new, it never gets old and I'm always fascinated by it.
Just don't use the word "discovery" here!
In their original paper on arxiv they reported on using the ETRF2000 reference frame (IERS) to determine the distance between the neutrino source at CERN and the detector at Gran Sasso. This reference frame already includes effects from general relativity.
If it turns out that time dilation due to gravity is the reason, then the error must be in the ETRF2000 or it was applied incorrectly in this case (Neutrinos moving from A to B).
Considering that hundreds of people work on this project it seems unlikely to me that such an error slipped through. They even took into account the very small distance change induced by the L'Aquila earthquake.
From my chinese coworkers I got the information that the module is currently in a 350km by 200km orbit at around 45 inclination.The finished station will consist of 3 modules at 20t each and has a designed lifetime of 2 years. It is basically used for testing purposes (docking procedures etc.) and will be manned by a 2-3 man crew with 20 day rotation.
The problem with capturing him and locking him up for live would have been, that it makes the US vulnerable to threats by his followers. They could hijack planes and threaten to crash them or threaten to ignite a bomb somewhere if the US doesn't release Bin Laden (has happened before with Palestinian terrorism).
No better to kill him and avoid all the trouble. Al Qaida and islamic terrorism is like cancer that must be exterminated. Do you think twice before killing a moscito that just stung you?
Personally I think people who are willing to commit suicide and take as many innocent people as possible with them in the name of some imaginary creature in the sky are not people who deserve a fair trial. Well obviously you first need to find out whether a certain person is of this kind but for Bin Laden I think it is pretty clear.
I hope this whole stupid terrorism chapter in our history will now come to a swift end, so that we can focus again on more important stuff. Restore our civil rights, invest in science and technology again,..., colonize the solar system and so on.
True. The chinese generally have no interest in overthrowing there government and things are definitely better than say 30 years ago. But I have been working with chinese researches for the last 2 years and they tell me that in the last 10 years things have basically stagnated or become worse for the middle and lower classes due to excessive inflation (current food prices in Beijing have increased by almost 30% over the last year). The only ones profiting from chinese progress right now are the rich and powerful and the chinese government knows this. So there is definitely cause for unrest and the government tries everything to suppress even the idea of protesting. My chinese friends (who mostly rely on chinese news services) were almost completely unaware of the extent of the protests in egypt and tunisia.
The chinese goverment is basically brainwashing their population (or creating "Harmony" as the goverment calls it).
What was he thinking? Many people wish they could work for google and this guy just throws his job out of the window!
Or has the work environment at google become so bad, that he was no longer interested in keeping his job?
Surely he must have been aware that he would get caught eventually.
any "academic paper" that cites wikipedia as a reference somehow fails to inspire me. Not that I don't like Wiki... it just tends to suggest the paper lacks enough independent research.
Also, the article is hard to read due to numerous grammatical errors and missing words. Doesn't really give much credibility to the authors either!
After the Ixtoc I oil spill, we learned that the only working method to to stop the spill is drilling relieve wells. So to me it seems the best way to prevent large spills is to drill at least two wells for every drilling plattform. Then we have redundancy and in the case of a single well failure the remaining well can be used for pressure relieve.
Besides the obvious costs of additional wells, is there any other reason why this was never made obligatory by the government 30 years after Ixtoc I ?
I easily type 120wpm and it is still far too slow for me, whether it's coding or writing English (documents, slashdot posts, e-mails) I think much faster than I type, typing is *the* primary bottleneck in my work... if I could type 500 wpm my productivity would go through the roof.
So what you are saying is, in your slow typing mode(120 wpm) you could write a book with 256 full pages (10 words per line, 45 lines per page) in only two 8 hour workdays without break, but your mind is so freakingly fast that you could easily write the same book in 3.84 hours?
What the hell are you? A lier perhaps?
Or to say it with the words of Einstein:
"Shame to all those that use science and technology without understanding it anymore than a cow understanding the biology of the plant it eats with delight"
On the other hand, what if life is tolerant in the beginning. And later when it established a basic biosphere it is capable of creating more favourable conditions for higher life forms (remember the oxygen rich atmosphere was created by bacteria).
Sure the conditions must be favourable but if biospheres in general were not self-regulating systems who can deal with small changes in environmental conditions life on earth would have become extinct a long time ago.
In which way is the news about Runway testing WhiteKnightTwo
(powered by conventional air-breathing engines) related to testing a VASIMR Engine on the ISS (a Plasma propulsion system with a magnetic nozzle)?
Oh and here is another one, the "Euclidean algorithm" to calculate the GCD (Greatest Common Divisor). Wikipedia states it's as the oldest algorithm known
This question arouses my interest when observing this conflict.
Evolution is an observation of how nature behaves and through scientific analysis in the field of biology certain rules or repeating patterns were discovered which characterize how life develops in an environment of limited resources. However evolution is observable in every system that is governed by restricted resources (e.g. in the free market, selection of workforce and so on). I would even go so far as to postulate that the existence of time or even logic itself causes evolution (galaxies and starsystems evolved, just replace "DNA" with "laws of physics"). Nevertheless it is an observation, that does not contain imperatives and is as such no competitor to religion or any other form of social utopia.
So why are some people fighting against it? Perhaps because the theory of evolution reminds us of how unforgiving reality is (if only the suitable lifeforms persist what happens with the unsuitable?), and the idea of god and creation is so much more comforting. But maybe its just a struggle of ideas and faiths for survival just for the sake of it. Ups there we go again, evolution...
Slashdot Mirror
The sky tree seems to have problems with ice build up on its steel beams during cold winter days (Mentioned in this article here: CNet). Although after a quick google search this seems to be general problem of tall structures with open truss structures (for example here is video of a ice falling from a TV tower Youtube).
I guess usually that is not such a big problem as TV towers are build in parks or large open spaces but the Tokyo sky tree is build in the center of the city surrounded by a lot buildings. Apparently they had to install electric heaters on the Sky tree to prevent ice forming.
Well in my experience the standards of high school education is only half the story. Sure the better it is the more easily you will master challenges in your later life but I think you can rectify most of the gaps during college or university as most of the things you learn in high school are not so important.
I'm from germany and in my high school (I graduated in 2003) there were no multiple choice tests, but mostly essay type of questions. In science tests you were given a questions and you had to develop the answer just like at university. I had no problems with that, I thought it was normal and math, physics and chemistry tests were actually quite fun to do (not so much the language tests, that was a fucking nightmare:)). I guess in retrospect it was quite a good high school education and I basically aced my first university semesters for my physics degree.
But after that I tanked, my performance got worse and worse and I just barely graduated from university with average grades. Basically because there was nothing to motivate me.
Anyway my point is, a good high school education doesn't help you very much in later life. It gives you a good head start but you loose that advantage pretty fast. The problem with todays youth is not the lack of good education but the lack of visible(!) pioneering research programs. Seriously if the government started a massive mars program today (probes, manned missions and colonization etc.) they would have no problem finding young people in their 20s willing to rise up to the challenge (if the challenges are completely novel, a 20 year old is just as good as a 40 year old).
I think the reason we wouldn't trust people in their 20s with todays kind of technology is that we have become far less tolerant to failures. Before apollo rocket scientists/engineers blew up engines and rockets regularly. But with todays limited funding you have one failure and you are out of the game.
Look at SpaceX, they had a lot of failures in the beginning but now they have one delay after another because they want to make 100% sure that their Falcon 9 rocket does not fail. One failure and spaceX would loose a lot of business. For this you want experienced people.
Damn, first line should be: ...fund almost all <insert your research area> experiments currently running...
Man, with that kind of money you could probably fund almost all experiments currently running in the world.
I mean think about it, with the exception of large scale experiments like Tevatron or LHC, Bill Gates could fund almost the entire physics research currently active in the world.
I wonder why he is so focused on curing AIDS, when he could practically double the world research output in all other fields? It seems to me, that this could have much larger impact on a larger group of people.
I mean Africa is a fucked up place with or without AIDS, Malaria and so on (which are just syptoms of more complex socio-economic problems). You can probably dump billions of dollars in this continent, and all you'd get in return is more powerful warlords, more intensive and brutal ethnic/religous conflicts and a few very rich people, who get a little richer.
Well, maybe 'vacant' is not the right word. It just looks like it has not been used for a long time and somebody forgot to switch of the electricty.
Sorry it should be soyuz rocket. I'm german and we call it "sojus".
This looks pretty vacant to me. Here the location on google maps:
Khimki, Russia
A little wikipedia research tells you that this is the old OKB-456 development and test facility for the RD-100 engine, a predecessor of the modern RD-107 engines. the plant was build right after WWII to build a copy of the german V2 rocket and probably has not been used for years. Todays Sojus rockets fly with the RD-107 or with its upgrades RD-117 and RD-118. These are produced by NPO energomash in samara at this location:
Progress Plant, Samara
This was a 5 min research, so I could be wrong.
Why so impatient? Do you have some important business meeting on Alpha Centauri b in the next 150 years? Don't worry manned interstellar spaceflight will not happen in our lifetime, so wether it happens in 150 years or in 10000 years doesn't matter from our perspective.
Maybe just maybe a probe will be sent to some nearby starsystem. But what would be the point? By the time it reaches the star our technology will have changed so much, that we probably won't even be able to communicate with the probe anymore.
And again entangled diamonds (or whatever) cannot be used for FTL communication, only for something like superdense coding (two bit transmission for each entangled qubit). And even if so, currently the lifetime of entangled atomic quantum systems is at most on the order of seconds (which is already very hard to achieve) and most of the experiments achieve something in the ms range. For interstellar spaceflight you'd need many years of entanglement lifetime and for one single 100kb jpeg image transmitted from the probe to earth you'd need at least 50000 entangled individually adressable qubits shared between the spaceprobe and earth. From someone who works in the field, believe me, interstellar probes will not use any form of quantum communication.
I think for the time beeing, the things we will learn just by looking at the universe with ever sharper eyes will be exciting enough. We should enjoy that and not hopelessly yearn for some magical technology that brings us to the stars (it is kind of childish if you think about it).
Basically I prefer email over talking directly to people. As a previous poster wrote, it allows you to organize your thoughts or think something through before telling it to somebody else. This way email communication is of higher quality and more productive.
But the phone is much better suited when dealing with more trivial tasks. In my work we depend on a lot of external suppliers and you'll never get anywhere with them if you communicate via email (long delays between reponses). Somebody wrote that an advantage of email is that you can answer at your convenience. Sure that's nice if you are on the right side, but if you are the manager of a large factory and a crucial machine breaks down, you call the manufacturer so that he can fix that ASAP. With email it would take days before the factory can produce again
My advice is to use email in high level design/development/research discussions, non-trivial troubleshooting and document exchange (bills, quotes etc.) and the phone for everything else. Forget icq/facebook, it combines the disadvantage of the phone (no organization of thoughts, chit chat) with the disadvantage of the email (no one is forced to answer you immediately).
IANAV, but is this the paper they are talking about? At least it seems to be about the same subject: Multidrug Resistant 2009 A/H1N1 Influenza Clinical Isolate with a Neuraminidase I223R Mutation Retains Its Virulence and Transmissibility in Ferrets
every physics student gets a demonstration of this effect in his solid state physics lecture. But usually the superconductor is rather small and is put into a small matchbox type car to drive it around a track. Here they used a relatively large and bulky superconducting disk, so the orientation locking is more visible. Although not new, it never gets old and I'm always fascinated by it. Just don't use the word "discovery" here!
If it turns out that time dilation due to gravity is the reason, then the error must be in the ETRF2000 or it was applied incorrectly in this case (Neutrinos moving from A to B). Considering that hundreds of people work on this project it seems unlikely to me that such an error slipped through. They even took into account the very small distance change induced by the L'Aquila earthquake.
From my chinese coworkers I got the information that the module is currently in a 350km by 200km orbit at around 45 inclination.The finished station will consist of 3 modules at 20t each and has a designed lifetime of 2 years. It is basically used for testing purposes (docking procedures etc.) and will be manned by a 2-3 man crew with 20 day rotation.
The problem with capturing him and locking him up for live would have been, that it makes the US vulnerable to threats by his followers. They could hijack planes and threaten to crash them or threaten to ignite a bomb somewhere if the US doesn't release Bin Laden (has happened before with Palestinian terrorism).
No better to kill him and avoid all the trouble. Al Qaida and islamic terrorism is like cancer that must be exterminated. Do you think twice before killing a moscito that just stung you?
Personally I think people who are willing to commit suicide and take as many innocent people as possible with them in the name of some imaginary creature in the sky are not people who deserve a fair trial. Well obviously you first need to find out whether a certain person is of this kind but for Bin Laden I think it is pretty clear.
I hope this whole stupid terrorism chapter in our history will now come to a swift end, so that we can focus again on more important stuff. Restore our civil rights, invest in science and technology again,..., colonize the solar system and so on.
True. The chinese generally have no interest in overthrowing there government and things are definitely better than say 30 years ago. But I have been working with chinese researches for the last 2 years and they tell me that in the last 10 years things have basically stagnated or become worse for the middle and lower classes due to excessive inflation (current food prices in Beijing have increased by almost 30% over the last year). The only ones profiting from chinese progress right now are the rich and powerful and the chinese government knows this. So there is definitely cause for unrest and the government tries everything to suppress even the idea of protesting. My chinese friends (who mostly rely on chinese news services) were almost completely unaware of the extent of the protests in egypt and tunisia. The chinese goverment is basically brainwashing their population (or creating "Harmony" as the goverment calls it).
Or has the work environment at google become so bad, that he was no longer interested in keeping his job? Surely he must have been aware that he would get caught eventually.
any "academic paper" that cites wikipedia as a reference somehow fails to inspire me. Not that I don't like Wiki... it just tends to suggest the paper lacks enough independent research.
Also, the article is hard to read due to numerous grammatical errors and missing words. Doesn't really give much credibility to the authors either!
After the Ixtoc I oil spill, we learned that the only working method to to stop the spill is drilling relieve wells. So to me it seems the best way to prevent large spills is to drill at least two wells for every drilling plattform. Then we have redundancy and in the case of a single well failure the remaining well can be used for pressure relieve. Besides the obvious costs of additional wells, is there any other reason why this was never made obligatory by the government 30 years after Ixtoc I ?
I easily type 120wpm and it is still far too slow for me, whether it's coding or writing English (documents, slashdot posts, e-mails) I think much faster than I type, typing is *the* primary bottleneck in my work ... if I could type 500 wpm my productivity would go through the roof.
So what you are saying is, in your slow typing mode(120 wpm) you could write a book with 256 full pages (10 words per line, 45 lines per page) in only two 8 hour workdays without break, but your mind is so freakingly fast that you could easily write the same book in 3.84 hours? What the hell are you? A lier perhaps?
Or to say it with the words of Einstein: "Shame to all those that use science and technology without understanding it anymore than a cow understanding the biology of the plant it eats with delight"
So the best we can do for manned spaceflight is to start a war with china. On the moon!
On the other hand, what if life is tolerant in the beginning. And later when it established a basic biosphere it is capable of creating more favourable conditions for higher life forms (remember the oxygen rich atmosphere was created by bacteria). Sure the conditions must be favourable but if biospheres in general were not self-regulating systems who can deal with small changes in environmental conditions life on earth would have become extinct a long time ago.
In which way is the news about Runway testing WhiteKnightTwo (powered by conventional air-breathing engines) related to testing a VASIMR Engine on the ISS (a Plasma propulsion system with a magnetic nozzle)?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sieve_of_Eratosthenes. It was concieved by Eratosthenes of Cyrene sometime between 276 BCE and 194 BCE. That one's certainly still used somewhere on the planet.
Oh and here is another one, the "Euclidean algorithm" to calculate the GCD (Greatest Common Divisor). Wikipedia states it's as the oldest algorithm known
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclidean_algorithm
most certainly also still used today.The Egyptians apparently had an algorithm to muliply numbers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Egyptian_multiplication
which is of course much older than the first two but no longer in use today (I guess) so I doesn't count.This question arouses my interest when observing this conflict. Evolution is an observation of how nature behaves and through scientific analysis in the field of biology certain rules or repeating patterns were discovered which characterize how life develops in an environment of limited resources. However evolution is observable in every system that is governed by restricted resources (e.g. in the free market, selection of workforce and so on). I would even go so far as to postulate that the existence of time or even logic itself causes evolution (galaxies and starsystems evolved, just replace "DNA" with "laws of physics"). Nevertheless it is an observation, that does not contain imperatives and is as such no competitor to religion or any other form of social utopia. So why are some people fighting against it? Perhaps because the theory of evolution reminds us of how unforgiving reality is (if only the suitable lifeforms persist what happens with the unsuitable?), and the idea of god and creation is so much more comforting. But maybe its just a struggle of ideas and faiths for survival just for the sake of it. Ups there we go again, evolution...