Fits perfectly with other announcements in the past:
- Hey, look at our new battery swapping station, it swaps a battery in half the time it takes to fill a gas tank! Every Model S will be able to use it once we actually get around to building the stations... soon... (in a few years) - Hey, look at our awesome autopilot, standard with every Tesla you buy today! Once we actually get around to implementing the software which will be... errr... soon. - Hey, look, with this OTA update all our cars are now capable of actually using a battery swap station! Yep, "a" battery swap station, because we only have one so far, but more are coming... errr... soon.
Since it's OTA, it can't be a new battery. And anyway, they said a few months ago that no significant hardware upgrades (batteries,...) were forthcoming in the near future. And if it's a software upgrade extending range through better battery management, it could never make such a drastic difference that it would "end range anxiety".
Torque sleep only makes sense for dual engine models, definitely not "the entire fleet". Could be part of the announcement (torque sleep is overdue), but there has to be more. Something that also applies to the single engine models.
Battery swap could be it. They have been testing a single swapping station with a limited number of cars. Maybe they are now planning to build more, and the OTA update activates the capability for everyone. Fast "refueling" is about to become a requirement for the California clean energy credits (or whatever they're called again), so it would make sense for Tesla to finally introduce it now.
The problem is that the US has a nasty habit of convicting people for crimes they did not commit. "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, just look at this guy. He was in the neighbourhood and... he's black. Need I say more?" (And we needed our department head to look good by catching the killer).
If you really know beyond the shadow of a doubt that the person is guilty of some serious violent crime without attenuating circumstances (raping and killing a child, for example), by all means kill him (or her). But if there's even the slightest possibility of error (and there usually is), there's no way you can justify it.
Now, on the other hand, if you're past that discussion and really want to officially kill someone in a humane way, I'm really having trouble seeing what the practical difficulties are. Just give the same kind of anaesthetic you give to people going into surgery. Lots of it, much more than normal so there's no chance of him waking up, possibly even killing them just with that shot. Then finish the kill in any way you choose. Drill through the heart with a power drill for all I care. If you can do open heart surgery without the patient suffering, why would it be so hard to kill someone? I don't get it.
(And then of course there's the whole issue of whether or not someone who raped and killed a child even deserves humane treatment, but that's a whole other can of worms I'm not even going to get into).
Well, if they are almost 18, why don't you just let them decide for themselves? Explain the pros and cons, they should be old enough to understand. If you think they lack the maturity to make the decision, then they'll probably be better off without the complexity of filing American tax reports for the rest of their lives. Basically, don't do it unless they understand the consequences and want you to.
"Today" makes no sense at intergalactic scales. There is no one clock that ticks for the entire universe that isn't bound to the cone of causality; time is only a local phenomenon. (...) Due to the increasing rate of expansion of the universe, the galaxies near the end of what we can observe will appear to recede at a speed faster than c
"recede at a speed faster than c" makes no sense at intergalactic scales. Speed is only a local phenomenon.
Of course, we could just agree to stop being pedantic and use the same coordinate system that pretty much everybody (including you, apparently) seems to be using: the one where space is roughly homogenous at large scales and the speed of light is the same everywhere, measured relative to local expanding space. Then you'll find that both my and your statements about "now" and "speed" end up making sense after all.
That doesn't mean you can't use different coordinates and give the word "now" pretty much any meaning you like. But without explicit specification of the coordinate system, it's safe to assume "now" means the time when a local clock, moving together with the expanding universe ever since the big bang, shows the same time as a similar clock at our location now.
(All of the above of course assumes the valididy of the big bang theory. Otherwise, things become a little more complicated)
- Objects that are far away, also appear to be flying away from us at high speeds. Speed and distance even appear to be proportional. We can measure the speed quite easily using redshift: all light (and other electromagnetic radiation) is shifted to lower frequencies, the entire spectrum moves down (well below red, by the way). Spectrums have thin black lines corresponding to the presence of certain elements, and we see the same thin lines at lower frequencies when something is moving away from us, so we can measure the speed quite precisely. Distance is harder to measure, but we can occasionally use events of a fixed brightness (certain types of supernova that always have the same brightness) to determine how far away something is.
- Objects that are far away (high redshift) appear younger. Less heavy elements, different kinds of radiation, etc. Since distance corresponds directly to the age at which things appear (because light had to travel all the way here), this means that the universe was different when it was younger, and evolved to what it is today.
And that last bit is what is causing the paradox with this new galaxy: although it is far away and should therefore appear younger (it is the same age today, but we see it as it was in the past), it looks much older than it ought to look.
Any other particle behaves the same way. The dual slit experiment can be done with electrons instead of photons, and you get the same result. A particle IS something that shows up in one place when you try to figure out where it is, but travels as a wave until you try to detect it. That's how particles can interfere with themselves: the probability waves travel through space and determine the likelihood of the particle appearing in any place. Photons are no different from other particles in this way.
So light does simply consist of particles, and nothing else, but particles are nothing like billiard balls and in fact travel like waves.
Objective C++ works well for me. You can not only mix and match Objective C and C++ files, you can use a mix of both in the same files. Just give them the ".mm" extension. No problem usig std::cout from [theView dosomethingWith:(int) i]. Of course you do have to understand both languages, so it takes more time to learn. But you can use the strong points of both languages and pick whatever you need. Need to stick a bunch of UIView*s into a std::vector? No problem!
No. First of all, we don't know whether the Big Bang had a center, it may have occurred everywhere at the same time throughout the infinite universe. But even if it did have a center, the light coming from the other side of that center would still have traveled the same long amount of time to get here, so it should still appear just as young as any other galaxy at that distance. The apparent age (how old it looks when we watch it through our telescopes) is not due to absolute location, but relative distance to us. The further away it is, the younger it should look. This side or other side does not matter.
So either we are looking at something that is much closer than we think it is (maybe a high redshift because of motion relative to local space, or some gravitational anomaly) or the whole big bang model is wrong.
Or: please step aside, follow me into this room where somebody will meet you in an hour or so to question you about why exactly you are using this high tech device to keep your identity hidden from our security cameras and what you were planning to do here. Then someone else will come and ask the same questions all over again. I hope you didn't have any other plans for today.
Or maybe in another century everything will be way more puritan than today. Throughout history, we've gone back and forth quite a lot when it comes to sexual openness.
The definitive clue is in the almost perfectly specular reflection on the draped bits near the shoulders: This is clearly a reflection of the illuminating light, and it's a bluish color in the picture. Pick that as the white point and you get a white dress with golden-brown applications.(...)Then you'll clearly see that it's a picture where the white balance is off (in terms that most people will find on their cameras, the camera balanced for "incandescent light" instead of "fluorescent light"), not a blue dress.
Great theory, except for the fact that the company that makes the dress has confirmed that it's blue and black.
When I first saw it, I was completely convinced it was blue and black. But then later that day, I saw it again and it was definitely white and gold. I couldn't believe I had ever seen it as blue and black. Ambient light and monitor color settings definitely change the perception. When you see the dress as white and gold, looking at the bright spot at the lower right of the picture makes the dress start to turn blue. Dimming the monitor also helps.
Indeed, it doesn't really say much interesting. Half the article is about the definition of absolute and relative magnitude (yawn...), then they say it will be about a quarter as bright as the moon. What about radiation? Lots of highly charged particles will be coming our way. Could give a pretty significant EMP pulse.
Would it only cost $4.5 billion? Bill Gates' net worth is $79.2 billion, Zuckerberg has $33.4 billion, Elon Musk has $7.9 billion and then I've skipped a lot of billionaires in between. If a few of those guys pool together, $4.5 billion sounds like peanuts. I suspect that figure was wildly optimistic, though. And anyway, even with all the money in the world, pulling off such a mission is simply unlikely with current technology. They'll get something wrong, or some vital equipment will fail unexpectedly, and that will be the end of it.
SpaceX is still having trouble simply landing a rocket booster back on the same planet it came from, would they be able to do it with twice the amount of money? Ten times? A hundred times? Nope, they just have to try, fail, try again, and finally they'll get it right. It's not about money, it's about experience.
Maybe try the moon first. I've always wondered why they didn't go for that first. See if you can get people to live there and survive. You can even get them back after a few years. Then, when we've got a colony up and running on the moon, we can start thinking about Mars.
I think he just got it from the 270 mile EPA 5-cycle range officially published for the 85D. I don't see any reason to link his post to Top Gear. They never featured the Model S anyway, only the Roadster.
DDT doesn't just kill mosquitoes, but lots of other more useful insects (pollinators) and even some larger animals as well. Not exactly good for the ecosystem. It accumulates in fat tissue and works itself up through the food chain, even making it into penguins on Antarctica.
It could be useful when applied locally, for example inside homes, but afaik spraying large areas of land is no longer considered a good idea. And then of course there's the pesky little problem of resistance to DDT which has been shown to develop rather quickly when DDT is used indiscriminately.
I do seem to remember an article saying that drug resistance decreased when the organisms were no longer frequently exposed to the drug. Resistance is a huge genetic advantage when the drug is regularly applied (as with antibiotics in hospitals), but actually a small disadvantage when the drug is no longer applied because it makes the rest of the organism less efficient. In an environment without the drug, the non-resistant bacteria apparently outperformed the resistant bacteria so that resistance faded away. The article was about antibiotics, but I imagine it probably applies to protozoa as well. I wish I could find the link.
Slashdot Mirror
Fits perfectly with other announcements in the past:
- Hey, look at our new battery swapping station, it swaps a battery in half the time it takes to fill a gas tank! Every Model S will be able to use it once we actually get around to building the stations... soon... (in a few years)
- Hey, look at our awesome autopilot, standard with every Tesla you buy today! Once we actually get around to implementing the software which will be... errr... soon.
- Hey, look, with this OTA update all our cars are now capable of actually using a battery swap station! Yep, "a" battery swap station, because we only have one so far, but more are coming... errr... soon.
Since it's OTA, it can't be a new battery. And anyway, they said a few months ago that no significant hardware upgrades (batteries,...) were forthcoming in the near future. And if it's a software upgrade extending range through better battery management, it could never make such a drastic difference that it would "end range anxiety".
Torque sleep only makes sense for dual engine models, definitely not "the entire fleet". Could be part of the announcement (torque sleep is overdue), but there has to be more. Something that also applies to the single engine models.
Battery swap could be it. They have been testing a single swapping station with a limited number of cars. Maybe they are now planning to build more, and the OTA update activates the capability for everyone. Fast "refueling" is about to become a requirement for the California clean energy credits (or whatever they're called again), so it would make sense for Tesla to finally introduce it now.
The problem is that the US has a nasty habit of convicting people for crimes they did not commit. "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, just look at this guy. He was in the neighbourhood and... he's black. Need I say more?" (And we needed our department head to look good by catching the killer).
If you really know beyond the shadow of a doubt that the person is guilty of some serious violent crime without attenuating circumstances (raping and killing a child, for example), by all means kill him (or her). But if there's even the slightest possibility of error (and there usually is), there's no way you can justify it.
Now, on the other hand, if you're past that discussion and really want to officially kill someone in a humane way, I'm really having trouble seeing what the practical difficulties are. Just give the same kind of anaesthetic you give to people going into surgery. Lots of it, much more than normal so there's no chance of him waking up, possibly even killing them just with that shot. Then finish the kill in any way you choose. Drill through the heart with a power drill for all I care. If you can do open heart surgery without the patient suffering, why would it be so hard to kill someone? I don't get it.
(And then of course there's the whole issue of whether or not someone who raped and killed a child even deserves humane treatment, but that's a whole other can of worms I'm not even going to get into).
What do you mean, worry? Do they have a kickstarter page yet?
Well, if they are almost 18, why don't you just let them decide for themselves? Explain the pros and cons, they should be old enough to understand. If you think they lack the maturity to make the decision, then they'll probably be better off without the complexity of filing American tax reports for the rest of their lives. Basically, don't do it unless they understand the consequences and want you to.
"Today" makes no sense at intergalactic scales. There is no one clock that ticks for the entire universe that isn't bound to the cone of causality; time is only a local phenomenon.
(...)
Due to the increasing rate of expansion of the universe, the galaxies near the end of what we can observe will appear to recede at a speed faster than c
"recede at a speed faster than c" makes no sense at intergalactic scales. Speed is only a local phenomenon.
Of course, we could just agree to stop being pedantic and use the same coordinate system that pretty much everybody (including you, apparently) seems to be using: the one where space is roughly homogenous at large scales and the speed of light is the same everywhere, measured relative to local expanding space. Then you'll find that both my and your statements about "now" and "speed" end up making sense after all.
That doesn't mean you can't use different coordinates and give the word "now" pretty much any meaning you like. But without explicit specification of the coordinate system, it's safe to assume "now" means the time when a local clock, moving together with the expanding universe ever since the big bang, shows the same time as a similar clock at our location now.
(All of the above of course assumes the valididy of the big bang theory. Otherwise, things become a little more complicated)
C++ is already arguably 4 languages: the preprocessor, C++ core, templates, and the constexpr subset. Now to throw Objective-C into the mix...
You just summed up all the things I like about it ;-)
The big bang hypothesis is based on two things:
- Objects that are far away, also appear to be flying away from us at high speeds. Speed and distance even appear to be proportional. We can measure the speed quite easily using redshift: all light (and other electromagnetic radiation) is shifted to lower frequencies, the entire spectrum moves down (well below red, by the way). Spectrums have thin black lines corresponding to the presence of certain elements, and we see the same thin lines at lower frequencies when something is moving away from us, so we can measure the speed quite precisely. Distance is harder to measure, but we can occasionally use events of a fixed brightness (certain types of supernova that always have the same brightness) to determine how far away something is.
- Objects that are far away (high redshift) appear younger. Less heavy elements, different kinds of radiation, etc. Since distance corresponds directly to the age at which things appear (because light had to travel all the way here), this means that the universe was different when it was younger, and evolved to what it is today.
And that last bit is what is causing the paradox with this new galaxy: although it is far away and should therefore appear younger (it is the same age today, but we see it as it was in the past), it looks much older than it ought to look.
Any other particle behaves the same way. The dual slit experiment can be done with electrons instead of photons, and you get the same result. A particle IS something that shows up in one place when you try to figure out where it is, but travels as a wave until you try to detect it. That's how particles can interfere with themselves: the probability waves travel through space and determine the likelihood of the particle appearing in any place. Photons are no different from other particles in this way.
So light does simply consist of particles, and nothing else, but particles are nothing like billiard balls and in fact travel like waves.
Objective C++ works well for me. You can not only mix and match Objective C and C++ files, you can use a mix of both in the same files. Just give them the ".mm" extension. No problem usig std::cout from [theView dosomethingWith:(int) i]. Of course you do have to understand both languages, so it takes more time to learn. But you can use the strong points of both languages and pick whatever you need. Need to stick a bunch of UIView*s into a std::vector? No problem!
No. First of all, we don't know whether the Big Bang had a center, it may have occurred everywhere at the same time throughout the infinite universe. But even if it did have a center, the light coming from the other side of that center would still have traveled the same long amount of time to get here, so it should still appear just as young as any other galaxy at that distance. The apparent age (how old it looks when we watch it through our telescopes) is not due to absolute location, but relative distance to us. The further away it is, the younger it should look. This side or other side does not matter.
So either we are looking at something that is much closer than we think it is (maybe a high redshift because of motion relative to local space, or some gravitational anomaly) or the whole big bang model is wrong.
Like it has in one of the most scientifically advanced countries on the planet, the US?
Or: please step aside, follow me into this room where somebody will meet you in an hour or so to question you about why exactly you are using this high tech device to keep your identity hidden from our security cameras and what you were planning to do here. Then someone else will come and ask the same questions all over again. I hope you didn't have any other plans for today.
You might as well wear a balaclava.
Or maybe in another century everything will be way more puritan than today. Throughout history, we've gone back and forth quite a lot when it comes to sexual openness.
The definitive clue is in the almost perfectly specular reflection on the draped bits near the shoulders: This is clearly a reflection of the illuminating light, and it's a bluish color in the picture. Pick that as the white point and you get a white dress with golden-brown applications.(...)Then you'll clearly see that it's a picture where the white balance is off (in terms that most people will find on their cameras, the camera balanced for "incandescent light" instead of "fluorescent light"), not a blue dress.
Great theory, except for the fact that the company that makes the dress has confirmed that it's blue and black.
When I first saw it, I was completely convinced it was blue and black. But then later that day, I saw it again and it was definitely white and gold. I couldn't believe I had ever seen it as blue and black. Ambient light and monitor color settings definitely change the perception. When you see the dress as white and gold, looking at the bright spot at the lower right of the picture makes the dress start to turn blue. Dimming the monitor also helps.
And then they actually do make it work and you lose your job.
Well, I hope he learned to be more careful with what he orders on Silk Road.
Indeed, it doesn't really say much interesting. Half the article is about the definition of absolute and relative magnitude (yawn...), then they say it will be about a quarter as bright as the moon. What about radiation? Lots of highly charged particles will be coming our way. Could give a pretty significant EMP pulse.
Don't give them any ideas
Yes, I agree, people repeating those old memes over and over again should be shot.
With a laser. By a friggin shark. Oh, wait...
Would it only cost $4.5 billion? Bill Gates' net worth is $79.2 billion, Zuckerberg has $33.4 billion, Elon Musk has $7.9 billion and then I've skipped a lot of billionaires in between. If a few of those guys pool together, $4.5 billion sounds like peanuts. I suspect that figure was wildly optimistic, though. And anyway, even with all the money in the world, pulling off such a mission is simply unlikely with current technology. They'll get something wrong, or some vital equipment will fail unexpectedly, and that will be the end of it.
SpaceX is still having trouble simply landing a rocket booster back on the same planet it came from, would they be able to do it with twice the amount of money? Ten times? A hundred times? Nope, they just have to try, fail, try again, and finally they'll get it right. It's not about money, it's about experience.
Maybe try the moon first. I've always wondered why they didn't go for that first. See if you can get people to live there and survive. You can even get them back after a few years. Then, when we've got a colony up and running on the moon, we can start thinking about Mars.
I think he just got it from the 270 mile EPA 5-cycle range officially published for the 85D. I don't see any reason to link his post to Top Gear. They never featured the Model S anyway, only the Roadster.
DDT doesn't just kill mosquitoes, but lots of other more useful insects (pollinators) and even some larger animals as well. Not exactly good for the ecosystem. It accumulates in fat tissue and works itself up through the food chain, even making it into penguins on Antarctica.
It could be useful when applied locally, for example inside homes, but afaik spraying large areas of land is no longer considered a good idea. And then of course there's the pesky little problem of resistance to DDT which has been shown to develop rather quickly when DDT is used indiscriminately.
Well, they do seem to be an important food source for lots of insect eating animals. Birds, bats,...
I do seem to remember an article saying that drug resistance decreased when the organisms were no longer frequently exposed to the drug. Resistance is a huge genetic advantage when the drug is regularly applied (as with antibiotics in hospitals), but actually a small disadvantage when the drug is no longer applied because it makes the rest of the organism less efficient. In an environment without the drug, the non-resistant bacteria apparently outperformed the resistant bacteria so that resistance faded away. The article was about antibiotics, but I imagine it probably applies to protozoa as well. I wish I could find the link.