I'm sorry about bursting your bubble, but its boiling is a result of its change of state: it is not releasing mechanical/thermal energy into the environment, but rather receiving thermal energy from a hotter thermal bath (at room temperature).
Also, don't forget that you'd spend more energy taking heat off a volume of nitrogen (or oxygen, or other gas for that effect) to liquify it. I'm not fully aware of the details (too lazy now to look into Wikipedia, go figure...), but I believe it involves using machines to expand the gas (thereby cooling it), then compressing it, etc. These machines would be fossil-fuel-powerwed, as I'm not aware of the existence of sun- or wind-powered machines that are efficient enough to do such mechanical work.
My academic background is in physics, so I'm likely more on the other side of the fence than you are, and still have little idea of what your expectations are book-wise.
Anyway, here's a few just to get you started that I would recommend looking into:
"Analytic Methods in Physics" by Charlie Harper. Reference/study book, I'd say intermediate level.
"Quantum Field Theory for Mathematicians: A Mathematical Account of the Practice" by Robin Ticciati. Advanced/very advanced textbook in case you're contemplating looking into the subject of QFT.
Some software is still around (spec. at my workplace) for operational tasks, which was developed for Windows 3.1. Long, long time ago, and I was still entering junior high. That software has proven its reliability (I'm speaking only of the software, not the window manager) for many years, the original maintainers have come and are long gone, and there's an unspoken policy here about not messing with each other's work to the point that people grumble and moan and complaint if it's concluded that a problem must be solved by changing code even if it's a single line. So they keep it because it's asking for trouble to change something that works merely on the ground of updating the OS/hardware. It's like keeping the old battered, many-hundred-thousand-mileaged car because it's paid for and still works.
What does OpenOffice offer the average user that Google Docs is lacking? I'd venture to say: a Formula Editor. (Can't say Equation because of proprietarity.)
He needs to be himself, and when the right woman finds him, it'll click. [...] You don't find a woman when you're looking for one. At least I didn't.
The problem with the "just be yourself" advice is often toxic to chronic introverts is that it gives the clueless guys (and I hope Stachybotris is not assuming I'm calling him clueless, I'm not because first and foremost I don't really know him) the wrong impression that continuing their present behavior is correct. And it exhempts them from wishing to have some degree of control over their actions.
And I personally don't see anything wrong with a guy admitting that he's (actively) looking for a gal. (And what to say of women's magazines with catchy titles like "How to catch the man of your dreams" etc.?...) I understand it may make you look like a creep if you admit it openly, so please don't advertise it/say it openly unless someone asks directly. And keep it non-challant. After all, what's wrong with one wanting a good life partner except others wanting him/her to be/look/feel bad about it?
As for party ideas...
IMHO, I'm sure you'll agree that the idea of a party is to get people to interact, not just sit around in a corner. The hosts/hostesses are supposed to have a minimum social knowledge about the guests, so I'd suggest arranging some sort of "hunt" which would encourage people to interact at a social and not intellectual level (something I dare say might be challenging in this environment...) instead of just be wallflowers. Dumb examples that come to mind:
Having people talk to each other to try to find out whether a three-algarism sequence they have matches with the algarism sequence of Pi or some other known number; or giving each one a sliver of paper (before attending the party) with the name of famous mathematicians and their birth years/natal cities. Distribute the little pieces of paper beforehand, and through different groups, to try to break people away from their usual small group of friends.
Be roudy. Use a Twister game where the spots are supposed to be multiples of 2, 3 or 5. It only takes a couple of more "daring" people to start it; although it may cause the more introverts to lock up and/or women to shy away from possible physical contact. A smart host should be sensible to "feeling the vibe" and be prepared to make prehemptive changes.
For example it is possible to make a "square root of not" gate, that when applied *twice* to the qubit |1> produces |0> and vice versa. I suppose you mean that, if |1> = |0> times exp(i pi/2), for example, then that "square root of not" operator would be something like SRN = exp(i pi/4) ?
This kind of concern isn't something new. When the first tests of the Hydrogen bomb were conducted (early 1950's) there were some worried scientists (can't remember who) thinking that detonating an hydrogen bomb in Earth's atmosphere **could** initiate a chain reaction involving atmospheric nitrogen that would propagate through the entire world...
"Positive" as in "matter as opposed to anti-matter" is simply a convention.
When it was experimentally established (early XX century) that atoms are composed of a central mass surrounded by oppositely-charged particles, someone (don't know who did it) had to pick which ones would be called "positive" and which would be "negative". I guess it was "felt" that the nucleus is the most significant part of the atom (true, if you look it purely from its mass contents), and to claim that it had "negative" charge and the surrounding charge is "positive" didn't seem "right" (as in, you can make an whole Economy with an algebra where people have negative amounts of money... it works, but it feels "unnatural" from a purely anthropomorphic point of view).
This "old" question was first successfully addressed, in a scientific way, by Andrei Sakharov circa 1967, and was called Baryogenesis (meaning "generation of baryons"). Sakharov's paper had little exposure until several years later, partly because at the time it was published in then-USSR and scientific collaboration was not as permeable as it is nowadays and also because it involved then-new knowledge (Cosmic Background Radiation, and CP-violation), and (I think) few people had the expertise, time or other constringencies favoring the immediate approach of this then-new subject.
Baryons are hadrons (particles composed by quarks), specifically three quarks, and the proton and neutron are the lightest and most stable of baryons.
The Baryogenesis theory, as proposed by Sakharov, describes a set of three conditions which all had to be met together in order to have a matter-asymetric universe. A baryogenic reaction sets off from a baryon-symmetric state to produce a final state which has a greater content of particles than anti-particles; or, in effect, no anti-particles and a "small" ammount of matter particles (in comparison to the number of annihilation photon "sea" which might be interpreted as the Cosmic Background Radiation). According to Sakharov, a potencially baryogenic reaction has to satisfy all of three conditions:
It must violate the baryonic number, i.e., the number of baryons in the final state must differ from the initial state. This might seem a trivial requirement, but under the current (very successful) Standard Model of Particle Physics, it is not.
It must violate CP (charge-parity) symmetry. In other words, the physics of the reaction/decay must be different from its charge-conjugated (and parity-conjugated) counterpart. Specifically, the rate of a baryogenic reaction must differ from the reaction involving the corresponding anti-particles, due to a non-trivial theoretical result known as "CPT theorem".
It must happen away from equilibrium (thermal and "chemical"). In other words, the reaction rate must be faster than the time it takes for the mixture between initial and final state domain contents to mix and reach equilibrium.
The first two conditions are mostly related to particle physics, and the third is more oriented to cosmology and especially the macroscopic treatment of the universe with (relativistic) thermodynamics. IMHO, the trickiest is to find a decay that satisfies the first condition, since in the Standard Model of Particle Physics this should not happen directly (technically, the baryon number operator does not show up explicitly in the Standard Model Hamiltonian).
From what I've gathered, this is the job of looking for a "new" particle whose decay can, not only, satisfy the three Sakharov conditions, but also give the correct predictions. The matter-to-radiation content is fairly precise: it's very small, but not null, about 1 matter particle (think "hydrogen atom") per 10 billion (1010) cosmic background radiation photons. It's one thing to find a particle whose decay satisfies the Sakharov conditions, especially one that violates the baryon number conservation "directly" (i.e., as a "first order" process); it's another thing entirely to justify that that same decay is enough to give that particle-to-photon ratio within an order of magnitude.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder how much energy is released as it boils
I'm sorry about bursting your bubble, but its boiling is a result of its change of state: it is not releasing mechanical/thermal energy into the environment, but rather receiving thermal energy from a hotter thermal bath (at room temperature).
Also, don't forget that you'd spend more energy taking heat off a volume of nitrogen (or oxygen, or other gas for that effect) to liquify it. I'm not fully aware of the details (too lazy now to look into Wikipedia, go figure...), but I believe it involves using machines to expand the gas (thereby cooling it), then compressing it, etc. These machines would be fossil-fuel-powerwed, as I'm not aware of the existence of sun- or wind-powered machines that are efficient enough to do such mechanical work.
My academic background is in physics, so I'm likely more on the other side of the fence than you are, and still have little idea of what your expectations are book-wise.
Anyway, here's a few just to get you started that I would recommend looking into:
Hope this helps!
Some software is still around (spec. at my workplace) for operational tasks, which was developed for Windows 3.1. Long, long time ago, and I was still entering junior high. That software has proven its reliability (I'm speaking only of the software, not the window manager) for many years, the original maintainers have come and are long gone, and there's an unspoken policy here about not messing with each other's work to the point that people grumble and moan and complaint if it's concluded that a problem must be solved by changing code even if it's a single line. So they keep it because it's asking for trouble to change something that works merely on the ground of updating the OS/hardware. It's like keeping the old battered, many-hundred-thousand-mileaged car because it's paid for and still works.
Heh... You mean 1E9 watts?
Has your boss/company tried piking the public phonebook list and calling random people? Why / why not?
In a related story: The day after tomorrow will have exam questions similar to these: http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=574165&cid=23663359
This kind of concern isn't something new. When the first tests of the Hydrogen bomb were conducted (early 1950's) there were some worried scientists (can't remember who) thinking that detonating an hydrogen bomb in Earth's atmosphere **could** initiate a chain reaction involving atmospheric nitrogen that would propagate through the entire world...
"Positive" as in "matter as opposed to anti-matter" is simply a convention.
When it was experimentally established (early XX century) that atoms are composed of a central mass surrounded by oppositely-charged particles, someone (don't know who did it) had to pick which ones would be called "positive" and which would be "negative". I guess it was "felt" that the nucleus is the most significant part of the atom (true, if you look it purely from its mass contents), and to claim that it had "negative" charge and the surrounding charge is "positive" didn't seem "right" (as in, you can make an whole Economy with an algebra where people have negative amounts of money... it works, but it feels "unnatural" from a purely anthropomorphic point of view).
Baryons are hadrons (particles composed by quarks), specifically three quarks, and the proton and neutron are the lightest and most stable of baryons.
The Baryogenesis theory, as proposed by Sakharov, describes a set of three conditions which all had to be met together in order to have a matter-asymetric universe. A baryogenic reaction sets off from a baryon-symmetric state to produce a final state which has a greater content of particles than anti-particles; or, in effect, no anti-particles and a "small" ammount of matter particles (in comparison to the number of annihilation photon "sea" which might be interpreted as the Cosmic Background Radiation). According to Sakharov, a potencially baryogenic reaction has to satisfy all of three conditions:
- It must violate the baryonic number, i.e., the number of baryons in the final state must differ from the initial state. This might seem a trivial requirement, but under the current (very successful) Standard Model of Particle Physics, it is not.
- It must violate CP (charge-parity) symmetry. In other words, the physics of the reaction/decay must be different from its charge-conjugated (and parity-conjugated) counterpart. Specifically, the rate of a baryogenic reaction must differ from the reaction involving the corresponding anti-particles, due to a non-trivial theoretical result known as "CPT theorem".
- It must happen away from equilibrium (thermal and "chemical"). In other words, the reaction rate must be faster than the time it takes for the mixture between initial and final state domain contents to mix and reach equilibrium.
The first two conditions are mostly related to particle physics, and the third is more oriented to cosmology and especially the macroscopic treatment of the universe with (relativistic) thermodynamics. IMHO, the trickiest is to find a decay that satisfies the first condition, since in the Standard Model of Particle Physics this should not happen directly (technically, the baryon number operator does not show up explicitly in the Standard Model Hamiltonian).From what I've gathered, this is the job of looking for a "new" particle whose decay can, not only, satisfy the three Sakharov conditions, but also give the correct predictions. The matter-to-radiation content is fairly precise: it's very small, but not null, about 1 matter particle (think "hydrogen atom") per 10 billion (1010) cosmic background radiation photons. It's one thing to find a particle whose decay satisfies the Sakharov conditions, especially one that violates the baryon number conservation "directly" (i.e., as a "first order" process); it's another thing entirely to justify that that same decay is enough to give that particle-to-photon ratio within an order of magnitude.