The sky doesn't emit radiation, it actually blocks a lot of it. Solar radiation would be a hundred times worse without the sky. However, it does transmit a small amount highly energetic radiation, so it isn't blameless. It just doesn't emit anything.
Fire is far and away the deadliest emitter of harmful radiation.
What is San Fransisco doing about the radiation danger of matches and lighters?
Quick! We need a government mandated Cell Phone Industry funded add campaign warning about the horrors of first and second hand cell phone radiation exposure!
Next time, put your phone in Airplane Mode. It cuts off all wireless transmissions from your phone. It will last a week like that, if you are only occasionally checking it.
A race condition between two processes is easy. A race condition between three is several times harder. Race conditions between a half dozen processes? Forget about it, at least for the hobbyist.
Race conditions can be notoriously difficult to program around. You can go from 20 lines of code to 200 in a heartbeat with just one or two of them. Get five or six, and your 20 line program needs a thousand lines to deal with it all. That's pretty ridiculous, especially for hobbyists.
If you've got a tool to eliminate the problem completely, why would you poopoo it?
I've been pushing for that for years! All children should have a proper engineering degree before playing with legos! I mean, have you seen what some kids come up with? Totally unworkable.
Curiously, nowhere does e360 have to defend this action.
It's not curious, Spamhaus didn't show up for court. The only evidence the court had to go by was e360's. It doesn't matter if a second grader could refute the evidence, there was nobody there to refute it.
Everybody knows gravity guns are frickin sweet, but we need to find the Higgs in order to build one. Hopefully it doesn't take too many of them though, it looks super expensive to make Higgs bosons.
Noooo shit. That's possibly the understatement of the century.
This whole thing is driven by the fact that energy and matter must be the same thing, yet the common understanding is that they are completely different.
Physics is all about why everything (literally everything) works. And the more we know, the more we realize we don't know. It's like running faster and the goal line just gets farther away.
Or perhaps it's because it's the explanation that accounts for everything of substance in the universe (aka mass), yet has remained hitherto unseen.
Sorta like a religious explanation of god, don't you think? God is a divine being responsible for the entire universe, yet nobody has seen him. Higgs boson is responsible for all the mass in the universe, yet nobody has seen it. Sounds like a "God particle" to me, especially since it's the lynch-pin for the existence of all matter in the universe.
The only reason I could see for you cringing whenever you hear it is some misplaced violent anti-god sentiment.
(but I don't know if the phenomenon is actually FTL or not).
It is, that's what makes it cool. When particles are entangled, if you move one the other moves with no outside influence - the action is instantaneous and distance doesn't matter. The hard part right now is keeping them entangled at a distance - the further apart you move the particles the harder it is to keep them from losing their entanglement. So long as they are actually entangled, though, distance doesn't introduce any kind of delay in the reaction of one particle to another. If they could get it to work across the world it would be phenomenal, but so far they've only managed a few feet.
In any case, the parent poster was talking about actual applications of quantum entanglement today. As you said, we've got ideas, but no applications yet.
I personally think understanding how/why mass exists is going to do a lot in the area of energy at first, and if it opens up a more correct theory of physics the sky is the limit really. There is no telling what it might do for us.
He upchucked a bit, which is simply amazing considering what that guy can successfully put down his throat. To be fair, he was in a durian orchard, so that raw sewage smell was probably 100x worse than what most people get from a single piece of fruit.
The only other thing that I saw that he couldn't get down was some particularly ripe stinky tofu. It's literally rotten tofu, so it's no wonder, but some people love it.
Shit, does the cosmetics industry know about these glaring irregularities in their makeup statistics? I know Maybelline will be very interested at the very least!
Re:One of the most un-American things I've ever re
on
The Real Science Gap
·
· Score: 1
I watched Mike Rowe's Dirty Jobs tribute to Discovery's 25 year anniversary, and I thought he was brilliant. He basically called bullshit on all the platitudes you hear encouraging people to be good workers. Things like "Work smarter, not harder" and other bullshit (you should work smarter and harder).
The one that struck me the most was the platitude "follow your passion". Bullshit. 99% of us aren't going to be able to do what we love, it's just not going to happen. So he said instead "bring your passion with you". Whatever you end up doing, put everything you've got into it, and chances are you'll be successful and happy.
Like the guy who wanted to be a jet pilot, but couldn't afford school, and so got into the business of steam cleaning gum off sidewalks. He turns over a pretty penny doing that, and is probably a hell of a lot happier than most jet pilots. Pilots only make about $90k a year on average, and top out at around $105k. That's not hard for a successful business owner to surpass, and one can do so without the years of school debt piled on top.
Indeed, I went to a private school where yearly tuition was about $4,000 and it produced students that on average performed significantly better than the public schools in the area, which were spending around $10,000 per student.
Public school teachers were more highly paid, but not by any large amount. In a 20 student classroom, a tuition increase of $1,000 would add $20,000 to the teacher's salary and still be half what the state was paying.
We had smaller class sizes and a smaller ratio of students to teachers, yet spent less than half what the state did on a better education. There's obviously a massive amount of waste in the public school system if this is possible, and I'm thinking it's largely above the level of the school principal. In my school, the principal was top dog, and made almost all of the big decisions. He had the full support of the group that owned the school, and didn't need to seek them out unless a major construction project was called for.
It seems to me that large schools with a large infrastructure supporting them bizarrely cost more, not less, than a small school with a limited support structure. Generally the idea of "going big" is that you pool resources and save money, but this does not seem to be the net effect for education in the real world.
With education, at least the way we've done it, we spend more money and get less in return for it.
That's clearly not universal though. A friend of mine is a research chemist for a university, working on his master's degree, and he makes around $50k per year.
There is a lot of BS that goes on in public universities, but he has (mostly) his own office and oversees millions of dollars worth of research equipment. The complaints I hear from him about his job aren't much different than the complaints I have at my job working IT for an engineering department of a big oil company.
Basically, as bad as you think scientists have it, most people have it just as bad or worse.
That said, I do think scientists in general are undervalued, but that has always been the case throughout history. It's not a recent phenomenon.
The grocery store essentially doesn't have a salesman...
You obviously have no idea how grocery stores work.
There is nobody up front pushing a sale, but they have marketing teams that agonize over the placement of products to maximize profits.
This requires the exact same skill and knowledge of people of a standard salesman, it's simply a different communication medium. The food companies have sales teams that work to get their product put in the ideal positions on grocery store shelves as well. Same thing there. It's still salesmen who are driving the profits.
You can't straight up lie, you still have to be able deliver something that could be construed as what was promised. If you don't, lawyers get involved.
The brilliance of a good salesman is to make something feel better than it is, without actually describing it as anything other than what it actually is.
That takes serious skill, and those who can do it are worth far more in real dollars to the company than the engineer or technician who actually has to perform the service or create the product.
Frankly, people think good engineers are rare. They aren't. Of course there are always those one-in-a-million engineers, but really most engineers can handle most engineering problems without much trouble. The reason they got into engineering is because they have an affinity for it. Salesmen deal with people, and that's always a lot trickier than dealing with machines.
Besides, like it or no, salesmen are the ones who actually bring in the cash. You can have the best engineering team in the world, but if you've got a crappy sales team your company will go broke. On the flip side, a great sales team can keep a company afloat in spite of a crappy engineering team or more likely, crappy management.
For a business, sales are all-important. The service or product is nothing more than a tool for generating a sale.
Why did he make 8x what some of these world class engineers make? Is it because sales is more important?
Yes.
For a business, there is absolutely nothing in the world that is more important than the sale. Everything else is only relevant with regards to how well it helps you generate more sales. That's why a good salesman is worth 10x what a good engineer is worth. They literally bring in the money. A good salesman with bad engineers can still turn a profit. A good salesman with good engineers can do far more than that.
I used to work for a tech company that is particularly famous for a cat herding super-bowl advertisement. I swear it wasn't the low level techs' fault, but due to ridiculously bad management and tools, the service said company provided was abysmal. And this is from someone who was providing the service. However, the company was still profitable, and every week we had a Casual Friday as a direct result of the Sales team winning another huge contract.
It completely flabbergasted me that they could pull such feats off, given how obviously bad the service was, but the sales team was worth their weight in gold.
I sometimes wonder what would happen if traders were forced to own a stock for a week to a month before selling; would that stabilize the markets, as they'd need to look for less risky ventures?
More likely it would severely reduce the amount of trading. Without day trading you would not be able to simply push a button and sell (or buy) a stock. You would have to wait until someone else was buying or selling the exact same number of stocks you wish to trade.
It would basically be the end of the stock market system as the dominant form of investing. Investing would shift to capital investment firms and the like, and on the whole the economy would see a massive hit in efficiency.
Yes, there are glitches, but they are rare and self-correcting (see the 1000 point dow drop - it correct itself in minutes), and their costs are far outweighed by the increase in market efficiency they provide.
It's also important to remember that day trading is a zero-sum game, but investing is not. For every day trader who "wins" another loses, so there is no net loss or gain in the system for the trades themselves. Investing, however, generates new value, and leverages the rapid trades of day traders to increase market efficiency.
I suppose it depends on how you define "hard science".
There is pretty much zero benefit for a business to be performing theoretical research. Steven Hawking's theoretical proofs about the probable existence of black holes isn't going to make anybody rich from the application of his theories any time soon, even though we now have proof that black holes exist. Having Hawking on staff at IBM isn't going to make them any more money.
However, the IBMer who figures out how to generate wormholes at will based on Hawking's theories and creates the foundations for a whole new class of ultra-long range communications links is going to make IBM a fortune.
There isn't much direct benefit theoretical research in business - another company is more likely to profit off your discovery than you are, but there is an assload of use for experimental research. That's why historically governments (generally via universities or the military) have funded theoretical research - the next big thing may not be possible without it, and there is no incentive for businesses to do it.
Slashdot Mirror
-The sky
The sky doesn't emit radiation, it actually blocks a lot of it. Solar radiation would be a hundred times worse without the sky. However, it does transmit a small amount highly energetic radiation, so it isn't blameless. It just doesn't emit anything.
Fire is far and away the deadliest emitter of harmful radiation.
What is San Fransisco doing about the radiation danger of matches and lighters?
Quick! We need a government mandated Cell Phone Industry funded add campaign warning about the horrors of first and second hand cell phone radiation exposure!
It would be better if it said something like "Caution! Radiation Exposure Risk!"
Next time, put your phone in Airplane Mode. It cuts off all wireless transmissions from your phone. It will last a week like that, if you are only occasionally checking it.
A race condition between two processes is easy. A race condition between three is several times harder. Race conditions between a half dozen processes? Forget about it, at least for the hobbyist.
Race conditions can be notoriously difficult to program around. You can go from 20 lines of code to 200 in a heartbeat with just one or two of them. Get five or six, and your 20 line program needs a thousand lines to deal with it all. That's pretty ridiculous, especially for hobbyists.
If you've got a tool to eliminate the problem completely, why would you poopoo it?
I've been pushing for that for years! All children should have a proper engineering degree before playing with legos! I mean, have you seen what some kids come up with? Totally unworkable.
Curiously, nowhere does e360 have to defend this action.
It's not curious, Spamhaus didn't show up for court. The only evidence the court had to go by was e360's. It doesn't matter if a second grader could refute the evidence, there was nobody there to refute it.
e360 basically won by default.
Shall y'all moderate this "Informative" or "Funny"?
Yes.
What do you think is driving this?
Everybody knows gravity guns are frickin sweet, but we need to find the Higgs in order to build one. Hopefully it doesn't take too many of them though, it looks super expensive to make Higgs bosons.
Physics is hard. :(
Noooo shit. That's possibly the understatement of the century.
This whole thing is driven by the fact that energy and matter must be the same thing, yet the common understanding is that they are completely different.
Physics is all about why everything (literally everything) works. And the more we know, the more we realize we don't know. It's like running faster and the goal line just gets farther away.
Probably a funding trick or some in-joke.
Or perhaps it's because it's the explanation that accounts for everything of substance in the universe (aka mass), yet has remained hitherto unseen.
Sorta like a religious explanation of god, don't you think? God is a divine being responsible for the entire universe, yet nobody has seen him. Higgs boson is responsible for all the mass in the universe, yet nobody has seen it. Sounds like a "God particle" to me, especially since it's the lynch-pin for the existence of all matter in the universe.
The only reason I could see for you cringing whenever you hear it is some misplaced violent anti-god sentiment.
(but I don't know if the phenomenon is actually FTL or not).
It is, that's what makes it cool. When particles are entangled, if you move one the other moves with no outside influence - the action is instantaneous and distance doesn't matter. The hard part right now is keeping them entangled at a distance - the further apart you move the particles the harder it is to keep them from losing their entanglement. So long as they are actually entangled, though, distance doesn't introduce any kind of delay in the reaction of one particle to another. If they could get it to work across the world it would be phenomenal, but so far they've only managed a few feet.
In any case, the parent poster was talking about actual applications of quantum entanglement today. As you said, we've got ideas, but no applications yet.
I personally think understanding how/why mass exists is going to do a lot in the area of energy at first, and if it opens up a more correct theory of physics the sky is the limit really. There is no telling what it might do for us.
but if they can figure something out before they get branded as that "cock flashing website"
It's way, way too late then.
I don't get it, why is it too late for them to create their own instead of buying someone else's product?
How did Zimmern react to Durian?
He upchucked a bit, which is simply amazing considering what that guy can successfully put down his throat. To be fair, he was in a durian orchard, so that raw sewage smell was probably 100x worse than what most people get from a single piece of fruit.
The only other thing that I saw that he couldn't get down was some particularly ripe stinky tofu. It's literally rotten tofu, so it's no wonder, but some people love it.
Shit, does the cosmetics industry know about these glaring irregularities in their makeup statistics? I know Maybelline will be very interested at the very least!
I watched Mike Rowe's Dirty Jobs tribute to Discovery's 25 year anniversary, and I thought he was brilliant. He basically called bullshit on all the platitudes you hear encouraging people to be good workers. Things like "Work smarter, not harder" and other bullshit (you should work smarter and harder).
The one that struck me the most was the platitude "follow your passion". Bullshit. 99% of us aren't going to be able to do what we love, it's just not going to happen. So he said instead "bring your passion with you". Whatever you end up doing, put everything you've got into it, and chances are you'll be successful and happy.
Like the guy who wanted to be a jet pilot, but couldn't afford school, and so got into the business of steam cleaning gum off sidewalks. He turns over a pretty penny doing that, and is probably a hell of a lot happier than most jet pilots. Pilots only make about $90k a year on average, and top out at around $105k. That's not hard for a successful business owner to surpass, and one can do so without the years of school debt piled on top.
Indeed, I went to a private school where yearly tuition was about $4,000 and it produced students that on average performed significantly better than the public schools in the area, which were spending around $10,000 per student.
Public school teachers were more highly paid, but not by any large amount. In a 20 student classroom, a tuition increase of $1,000 would add $20,000 to the teacher's salary and still be half what the state was paying.
We had smaller class sizes and a smaller ratio of students to teachers, yet spent less than half what the state did on a better education. There's obviously a massive amount of waste in the public school system if this is possible, and I'm thinking it's largely above the level of the school principal. In my school, the principal was top dog, and made almost all of the big decisions. He had the full support of the group that owned the school, and didn't need to seek them out unless a major construction project was called for.
It seems to me that large schools with a large infrastructure supporting them bizarrely cost more, not less, than a small school with a limited support structure. Generally the idea of "going big" is that you pool resources and save money, but this does not seem to be the net effect for education in the real world.
With education, at least the way we've done it, we spend more money and get less in return for it.
That's clearly not universal though. A friend of mine is a research chemist for a university, working on his master's degree, and he makes around $50k per year.
There is a lot of BS that goes on in public universities, but he has (mostly) his own office and oversees millions of dollars worth of research equipment. The complaints I hear from him about his job aren't much different than the complaints I have at my job working IT for an engineering department of a big oil company.
Basically, as bad as you think scientists have it, most people have it just as bad or worse.
That said, I do think scientists in general are undervalued, but that has always been the case throughout history. It's not a recent phenomenon.
The grocery store essentially doesn't have a salesman...
You obviously have no idea how grocery stores work.
There is nobody up front pushing a sale, but they have marketing teams that agonize over the placement of products to maximize profits.
This requires the exact same skill and knowledge of people of a standard salesman, it's simply a different communication medium. The food companies have sales teams that work to get their product put in the ideal positions on grocery store shelves as well. Same thing there. It's still salesmen who are driving the profits.
You can't straight up lie, you still have to be able deliver something that could be construed as what was promised. If you don't, lawyers get involved.
The brilliance of a good salesman is to make something feel better than it is, without actually describing it as anything other than what it actually is.
That takes serious skill, and those who can do it are worth far more in real dollars to the company than the engineer or technician who actually has to perform the service or create the product.
Frankly, people think good engineers are rare. They aren't. Of course there are always those one-in-a-million engineers, but really most engineers can handle most engineering problems without much trouble. The reason they got into engineering is because they have an affinity for it. Salesmen deal with people, and that's always a lot trickier than dealing with machines.
Besides, like it or no, salesmen are the ones who actually bring in the cash. You can have the best engineering team in the world, but if you've got a crappy sales team your company will go broke. On the flip side, a great sales team can keep a company afloat in spite of a crappy engineering team or more likely, crappy management.
For a business, sales are all-important. The service or product is nothing more than a tool for generating a sale.
Why did he make 8x what some of these world class engineers make? Is it because sales is more important?
Yes.
For a business, there is absolutely nothing in the world that is more important than the sale. Everything else is only relevant with regards to how well it helps you generate more sales. That's why a good salesman is worth 10x what a good engineer is worth. They literally bring in the money. A good salesman with bad engineers can still turn a profit. A good salesman with good engineers can do far more than that.
I used to work for a tech company that is particularly famous for a cat herding super-bowl advertisement. I swear it wasn't the low level techs' fault, but due to ridiculously bad management and tools, the service said company provided was abysmal. And this is from someone who was providing the service. However, the company was still profitable, and every week we had a Casual Friday as a direct result of the Sales team winning another huge contract.
It completely flabbergasted me that they could pull such feats off, given how obviously bad the service was, but the sales team was worth their weight in gold.
I sometimes wonder what would happen if traders were forced to own a stock for a week to a month before selling; would that stabilize the markets, as they'd need to look for less risky ventures?
More likely it would severely reduce the amount of trading. Without day trading you would not be able to simply push a button and sell (or buy) a stock. You would have to wait until someone else was buying or selling the exact same number of stocks you wish to trade.
It would basically be the end of the stock market system as the dominant form of investing. Investing would shift to capital investment firms and the like, and on the whole the economy would see a massive hit in efficiency.
Yes, there are glitches, but they are rare and self-correcting (see the 1000 point dow drop - it correct itself in minutes), and their costs are far outweighed by the increase in market efficiency they provide.
It's also important to remember that day trading is a zero-sum game, but investing is not. For every day trader who "wins" another loses, so there is no net loss or gain in the system for the trades themselves. Investing, however, generates new value, and leverages the rapid trades of day traders to increase market efficiency.
I suppose it depends on how you define "hard science".
There is pretty much zero benefit for a business to be performing theoretical research. Steven Hawking's theoretical proofs about the probable existence of black holes isn't going to make anybody rich from the application of his theories any time soon, even though we now have proof that black holes exist. Having Hawking on staff at IBM isn't going to make them any more money.
However, the IBMer who figures out how to generate wormholes at will based on Hawking's theories and creates the foundations for a whole new class of ultra-long range communications links is going to make IBM a fortune.
There isn't much direct benefit theoretical research in business - another company is more likely to profit off your discovery than you are, but there is an assload of use for experimental research. That's why historically governments (generally via universities or the military) have funded theoretical research - the next big thing may not be possible without it, and there is no incentive for businesses to do it.
It's extortion, that's what is mafia-like.