a.) The strength of quantum entanglement is independent of the distance between system components.
b.) The sun is almost certainly not entangled with carbon on the earth. Entanglement is incredibly hard to maintain, because every interaction with the environment tends to diffuse the quantum state. Usually it takes a vacuum, really big refrigerators, and special laser traps to preserve entanglement between hadrons for any appreciable time.
"This is why you have no credibility. This is why you sound more like (your ideological opponents) the fire-and-brimstone preachers than like a rational human being. This is bigotry in its purest form: the demonization of your opponents as fundamentally, irredeemably defective."
Yeah! Ad hominem SUCKS! In fact...
"This would be getting tiresome if you weren't so obviously coming unglued at the notion that someone could possibly disagree with you. It's almost endearing--like Gizmo wearing a Rambo bandanna."
"Anyone who understands anything about statistics understands this."
I'll bite. It's *also* not proper to interpret a statement like "the trend is +0.12 C/year at slightly below two-sigma" as "there is no warming". The most correct layspeak interpretation for a noisy time series like this is "We don't have sufficient data to make a strong claim about this short of a time period, but the data is *most* consistent with warming".
IANACS (I Am Not A Climate Scientist) but I have worked extensively with nonlinear time series analysis.:)
I think you have it backwards. Time series estimates tend to be more uncertain with shorter windows. The "also calculated" trends were from longer datasets with higher statistical significance (and surprise! They also indicate warming!) He's being asked to comment on a period where insufficient data exists for a statistically strong statement, and says the trend is still positive, albeit with less confidence.
And the Oregon Petition strikes again! It hasn't passed peer review--and skimming the thing suggests why. It's like multivariate analysis never even entered the picture. For the more obvious factual errors, I suggest:
AUGH. Stop with the Professor Jones thing already! The whole question was *designed* to get a talking point for people who don't like global warming.
Question: "Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming?"
Jones: "Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods."
This is a total no-brainer: statistical significance is a measure of how likely it is that your results are due to variance in the sample--broken stations, noisy data, rounding errors, and plain-old weather. In ANY time series involving short-term variations, measurements over a short period of time have lower significance in predicting a long-term trend because the data is very noisy.
You couldn't, for example, tell me with much confidence whether the earth is warming over decades based on a single hour's observation, or samples running from June to January. It's like trying to predict how much you'll weigh in ten years by measuring your weight for a week.
Because of the extreme seasonal and year-to-year variability of climate, it takes about *thirty years* to extract a statistically significant measure of a small-scale (relative to seasonal change) trend like global warming. The question is therefore meaningless--even though the data is consistent with global warming, the probability that that consistency is due to chance is too high given limited time. More importantly, when you *do* include enough samples to reach two-sigma significance (that 95% confidence he's talking about), those data *do* indicate global warming.
The question was clearly intended to confuse those who don't understand statistical significance--and it clearly worked, as evidenced by Fox:
I started programming modula-2 in K-5, and had there been a way to combine that with my lego collection, I would have been all over it! I think it's a safe bet that a decent-sized elementary school will have a few kids who can enjoy building and programming their own robots.:)
Scrolls are fragile, hard to store, and a pain to read. They roll off the table, they don't lie flat, and are a pain to flip to the other side of. The codex was a big improvement, by all accounts.
Not all of these drawbacks apply to e-ink displays, though.
Hey dude, just so you know, Millikan's Oil Drop experiment is not exceptionally difficult. You'll need some oil, an atomizer (like a perfume spritzer), some sheet metal and wires, and a DC voltage supply. Then it's just a matter of sitting there with a stopwatch and ruler and timing drop velocities while you switch the field polarity back and forth, and waiting for a droplet to ionize. The tough bit, at least in our analysis, was deciding on the appropriate quantization, since you're getting numbers like 1e, 2e, 3e, etc., and need to extract e from them when the data can be kind of noisy.
Anyway, it's totally doable at the high school level, and is a great way for kids to practice experimental technique and "discover" charge quantization on their own. It's also a great opportunity to discuss the controversy over Millikan's results, whether you should compute results during measurement or just record blindly, and so forth.:)
Actually, cosmic rays can and do cause errors. Muon flux where I live tends to be roughly one through your hand per second, and they're going a pretty hefty fraction of C. With memory size and transistors scaling further and further down, cosmic ray interference becomes a really big issue, which is why ECC is so important.
Agreed; RK4 is a well-documented algorithm, and unless you're dealing with truly pathological functions or edge-case parameters, results should be easily reproducible no matter what implementation of the algorithm you use.
I *do* understand your frustration when dealing with algorithms that have just been invented for purposes of the analysis; I'm in the process of trying to compare the divergence of trajectories in the quantum vs classical Duffing oscillators, and some of the papers I'm reading leave their algorithm almost completely undescribed. On the other hand, explaining how the analysis works could easily take dozens of pages, so for limitations of space, perhaps that's best.:-)
Begging your pardon, I was under the impression that the confirmed measurements of Bell's inequalities for spin correlation demonstrated the impossibility of *any* local hidden-variable theory. Bohm's interpretation chooses to preserve the notion of causality at the cost of introducing non-locality. Of course, what it means to maintain causality in a world where, depending on one's frame of reference, effects precede causes, is a mind-boggling question in itself.:-)
I must admit being somewhat confused as to whether you subscribe to Bohm's interpretation: "changing the outcome by measuring it" is exactly what Bohm (and DeBroglie) were trying to avoid with the pilot-wave approach, and does not occur (in the sense of the Copenhagen interpretation) for the particle's state within Bohm's quantum-potential model.
This has always bugged me; how in the heck do you quantize geometry like |x>? I was under the impression there wasn't a good way to do that without losing isotropy. Moreover, wouldn't that screw up the coordinate transforms that we use to talk about some of the only analytically solvable systems in quantum, like the two-body central force problem?
Moreover, given that momentum and position are Fourier conjugates, does that quantize momentum as well? I guess if I can accept a continuous basis for position states I should have no problem with a countably infinite one, but it still confuses me.:-)
Finally, (and this shows I haven't gotten very far in quantum), I'm troubled by the asymmetry between position and time in the formalism I learned, that is, position is a state, but time is merely a parameter. To be consistent with relativity, do you need to make time a state as well? How does that change \hat{U}(t)?
Slashdot Mirror
a.) The strength of quantum entanglement is independent of the distance between system components.
b.) The sun is almost certainly not entangled with carbon on the earth. Entanglement is incredibly hard to maintain, because every interaction with the environment tends to diffuse the quantum state. Usually it takes a vacuum, really big refrigerators, and special laser traps to preserve entanglement between hadrons for any appreciable time.
Virak: Give up! You're being trolled!
"This is why you have no credibility. This is why you sound more like (your ideological opponents) the fire-and-brimstone preachers than like a rational human being. This is bigotry in its purest form: the demonization of your opponents as fundamentally, irredeemably defective."
Yeah! Ad hominem SUCKS! In fact...
"This would be getting tiresome if you weren't so obviously coming unglued at the notion that someone could possibly disagree with you. It's almost endearing--like Gizmo wearing a Rambo bandanna."
"Anyone who understands anything about statistics understands this."
I'll bite. It's *also* not proper to interpret a statement like "the trend is +0.12 C/year at slightly below two-sigma" as "there is no warming". The most correct layspeak interpretation for a noisy time series like this is "We don't have sufficient data to make a strong claim about this short of a time period, but the data is *most* consistent with warming".
IANACS (I Am Not A Climate Scientist) but I have worked extensively with nonlinear time series analysis. :)
I think you have it backwards. Time series estimates tend to be more uncertain with shorter windows. The "also calculated" trends were from longer datasets with higher statistical significance (and surprise! They also indicate warming!) He's being asked to comment on a period where insufficient data exists for a statistically strong statement, and says the trend is still positive, albeit with less confidence.
And the Oregon Petition strikes again! It hasn't passed peer review--and skimming the thing suggests why. It's like multivariate analysis never even entered the picture. For the more obvious factual errors, I suggest:
http://www.climatesciencewatch.org/file-uploads/Comment_on_Robinson_et_al-2007R.pdf
AUGH. Stop with the Professor Jones thing already! The whole question was *designed* to get a talking point for people who don't like global warming.
Question: "Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming?"
Jones: "Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods."
This is a total no-brainer: statistical significance is a measure of how likely it is that your results are due to variance in the sample--broken stations, noisy data, rounding errors, and plain-old weather. In ANY time series involving short-term variations, measurements over a short period of time have lower significance in predicting a long-term trend because the data is very noisy.
You couldn't, for example, tell me with much confidence whether the earth is warming over decades based on a single hour's observation, or samples running from June to January. It's like trying to predict how much you'll weigh in ten years by measuring your weight for a week.
Because of the extreme seasonal and year-to-year variability of climate, it takes about *thirty years* to extract a statistically significant measure of a small-scale (relative to seasonal change) trend like global warming. The question is therefore meaningless--even though the data is consistent with global warming, the probability that that consistency is due to chance is too high given limited time. More importantly, when you *do* include enough samples to reach two-sigma significance (that 95% confidence he's talking about), those data *do* indicate global warming.
The question was clearly intended to confuse those who don't understand statistical significance--and it clearly worked, as evidenced by Fox:
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/02/15/global-warming-insignificant-years-admits-uks-climate-scientist/?test=latestnews
I started programming modula-2 in K-5, and had there been a way to combine that with my lego collection, I would have been all over it! I think it's a safe bet that a decent-sized elementary school will have a few kids who can enjoy building and programming their own robots. :)
Scrolls are fragile, hard to store, and a pain to read. They roll off the table, they don't lie flat, and are a pain to flip to the other side of. The codex was a big improvement, by all accounts.
Not all of these drawbacks apply to e-ink displays, though.
Hey dude, just so you know, Millikan's Oil Drop experiment is not exceptionally difficult. You'll need some oil, an atomizer (like a perfume spritzer), some sheet metal and wires, and a DC voltage supply. Then it's just a matter of sitting there with a stopwatch and ruler and timing drop velocities while you switch the field polarity back and forth, and waiting for a droplet to ionize. The tough bit, at least in our analysis, was deciding on the appropriate quantization, since you're getting numbers like 1e, 2e, 3e, etc., and need to extract e from them when the data can be kind of noisy.
Anyway, it's totally doable at the high school level, and is a great way for kids to practice experimental technique and "discover" charge quantization on their own. It's also a great opportunity to discuss the controversy over Millikan's results, whether you should compute results during measurement or just record blindly, and so forth. :)
Actually, cosmic rays can and do cause errors. Muon flux where I live tends to be roughly one through your hand per second, and they're going a pretty hefty fraction of C. With memory size and transistors scaling further and further down, cosmic ray interference becomes a really big issue, which is why ECC is so important.
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=/iel1/16/6912/00278509.pdf?temp=x
We're dealing with more delicate technology these days; It's only gotten worse since then.
Agreed; RK4 is a well-documented algorithm, and unless you're dealing with truly pathological functions or edge-case parameters, results should be easily reproducible no matter what implementation of the algorithm you use.
I *do* understand your frustration when dealing with algorithms that have just been invented for purposes of the analysis; I'm in the process of trying to compare the divergence of trajectories in the quantum vs classical Duffing oscillators, and some of the papers I'm reading leave their algorithm almost completely undescribed. On the other hand, explaining how the analysis works could easily take dozens of pages, so for limitations of space, perhaps that's best. :-)
Begging your pardon, I was under the impression that the confirmed measurements of Bell's inequalities for spin correlation demonstrated the impossibility of *any* local hidden-variable theory. Bohm's interpretation chooses to preserve the notion of causality at the cost of introducing non-locality. Of course, what it means to maintain causality in a world where, depending on one's frame of reference, effects precede causes, is a mind-boggling question in itself. :-)
I must admit being somewhat confused as to whether you subscribe to Bohm's interpretation: "changing the outcome by measuring it" is exactly what Bohm (and DeBroglie) were trying to avoid with the pilot-wave approach, and does not occur (in the sense of the Copenhagen interpretation) for the particle's state within Bohm's quantum-potential model.
This has always bugged me; how in the heck do you quantize geometry like |x>? I was under the impression there wasn't a good way to do that without losing isotropy. Moreover, wouldn't that screw up the coordinate transforms that we use to talk about some of the only analytically solvable systems in quantum, like the two-body central force problem?
Moreover, given that momentum and position are Fourier conjugates, does that quantize momentum as well? I guess if I can accept a continuous basis for position states I should have no problem with a countably infinite one, but it still confuses me. :-)
Finally, (and this shows I haven't gotten very far in quantum), I'm troubled by the asymmetry between position and time in the formalism I learned, that is, position is a state, but time is merely a parameter. To be consistent with relativity, do you need to make time a state as well? How does that change \hat{U}(t)?