is a sentence, consisting of a verb in imperative form, with the understood subject 'You' (the listeners). So is "Try." So is "(You) go again." Or "(You) try again."
Oh, and since you are supposedly representing the grammar police on/., and I'm challenging your absurd statement that this is a fragment, I suppose I ought to provide you with at least some K-12 level documentation that your assertion is, in fact, absurd:
Yeah, if I were going to get hydrogen from water I would take a solar panel and hook it up to a floating platform sitting in the ocean. Underneath there would be two gold or platinum plated electrodes, one of which I would leave free and the other of which I would put in a vertical tube. On top I would have a small pump (also run by the solar cell, or maybe powered by a small wind turbine since there is usually a wind over the ocean) that compressed the hydrogen into a collection tank. That would produce hydrogen at a very, very predictable rate, fully compressed and ready to use. A small hydrogen powered boat (powered indirectly by the same solar cells) could make the rounds every week or so to replace the tanks and bring the tanks ashore for use. The rafts themselves would attract fish and de facto cool the ocean underneath. And best of all, they would produce the hydrogen for only four or five times what the electricity that produced it was worth!
Now to patent this, get a government grant, and fight the NIMBY battle with all of the boaters and fisherpeople who don't want to see the oceans and sounds scattered with floating platforms covered with solar cells and hydrogen gas tanks. I'll be rich!
Oh, wait. You mean that this idea has been around for over forty years now?
You mean that it is developed to the point where one could produce hydrogen peroxide, or release the CO2 in the ocean water and capture THAT at the same time we generate the hydrogen (for an even larger multiplier for the actual value of the electricity)? You mean that even a patent troll would have a hard time locking this one down? You mean that there really are some people, somewhere, who have heard of the second law of thermodynamics or the first law of economics (that in business, one's product has to sell for more than the cost of production)?
So what? As long as we have a government, these will not be obstacles...
Presumption of innocence is essential to a society run by laws, and it says, if you didn't get convicted by a court, you're innocent of the crime. There's not one iota of ambiguity there.
I've been following, and mostly agreeing with, your marvelous string of rant(s) on this topic, but here I must pick a very important epistemological nit.
When I drove to work today, I exceeded the legal speed limit, as I do every day. I am therefore in reality guilty of violating the laws restricting the speed I am permitted to drive my car. This guilt persists whether or not I am stopped, observed, ticketed, taken to court. It persists whether or not I am stopped, go to court, and pay a lawyer a large sum of money to have the case thrown out or to convince judge or jury that my excess speed was within some legal uncertainty associated with its measurement, whether or not there was a technical error in my citation that makes it null and void. Being guilty in reality of violating a law is quite independent of the courts, arrests, prosecutions, and verdicts. Did I commit the crime? Yes (just like pretty much every human alive driving today). Have I been "declared guilty" by a court? Absolutely not, got away with it just like almost every human alive who exceeds the speed limit today will get away with it, some of whom will exceed it by a lot. Yesterday I (accidentally, seriously) ran a red light. Didn't get caught, didn't harm anyone, but I'm absolutely guilty of doing it and am still kicking myself for letting myself get too distracted at the intersection as I could have hurt someone. Guilty, guilty, guilty.
So let's correct your statement above:
Presumption of innocence is essential to a society run by laws, and it says, if you didn't get convicted by a court, you're presumed to be innocent (in the eyes of the law). There's not one iota of ambiguity there.
NOT THE SAME as saying you ARE innocent in reality, only that as far as the law goes, you have the benefit of any doubt (and various legal protections against others acting on their own as if you were guilty). This is true even if Colonel Mustard is found in the pantry holding the wrench, is arrested without being Mirandized, confesses everything and leads the police to a wealth of absolute proof that he did it, that he planned to do it, that he is glad he did it, that he is guilty, guilty, guilty of doing it -- but all of that evidence is thrown out and consequently the jury declares him (not innocent, but) not guilty. At which point he could write a book: "I Did it in the Pantry with the Wrench, and I'm Glad", by Colonel Mustard, Esq, and could admit it on Oprah and he'd still be "not guilty" in the eyes of the law for the rest of eternity because of the double jeopardy clause.
Outside of this small but important exception, I agree with what you are saying. And it matters! Those rules that might get Col. Mustard a walk even though he is guilty as hell might protect Miss Scarlet who is intimidated into admitting that she did it in the kitchen with the knife but really was in the Library with Professor Plum. They prevent many a miscarriage of justice where a DA aggressively prosecutes somebody for political reasons on inadequate or trumped up evidence. It's not like we don't routinely convict the innocent because the person accused happens to be black or hispanic even WITH the protections we have...
That doesn't stop people from "convicting" O.J. Simpson of murder in their own minds even though he is declared "not guilty" in a trial. It doesn't stop him from (maybe) BEING guilty even though he was acquitted. It doesn't stop people from convicting Hilary Clinton and/or Donald Trump in their own minds of everything from murder down to simple child molestation and rape and (while we are obligated to presume their innocence in all legal matters including not defaming them by asserting their ce
Well, that escalated quickly! Howbow I just reply to your first questions, because sunlight blocking isn't related nor makes much sense to me.
Let's try to make it make sense. The solar wind is driven by light pressure. Particles do not, however, follow strict radii out from the sun. They have transverse velocity components as well as radial ones. Also, they are pushed by photons from all over the face of the sun, which have different impact angles, which constantly change their transverse velocity. To put it another way, the particles driven away from the sun that will eventually hit Mars have a phase space envelope at least as large as the truncated cone formed by the surface of revolution whose boundaries are the circumference of the Sun on one end and the circumference of mars at the other.
Now consider a satellite (say) 100m in diameter. Suppose you locate it at the Lagrange point so that it is always along the line between the center of the Earth and the center of the Sun. Question: Will it dim the total sunlight received by the Earth?
Not measurably. The penumbra of this little satellite extends from its dark side to the tip of the extended cone formed by the circumference of the satellite and the circumference of the Sun. Since the Sun is basically 0.5 degrees from the Earth or the Lagrange point either way, the height of this cone is found from tan(0.5 degrees \approx 0.02 rad) \approx 0.02 rad = 100/H, or 50x100 = 5 km. So the satellite will cast a complete shadow of the sun that starts out 100 m wide right behind the satellite, then shrinks to zero around 5 km (give or take a km, I'm being lazy) . Beyond that you are in the umbra, which basically means that you are in bright sunlight from the annulus of sun surface visible around the satellite. The further out you go, the smaller the ratio of the occluded part to the directly visible part. By the time you reach the earth, the satellite is completely invisible -- the umbra is irrelevantly dimmed relative to no satellite at all, and it "covers" less of the sun's face from any viewpoint on Earth than a medium sized sunspot.
Now, if somebody were to tell you "hey, we're going to fix global warming by putting a sun shield in geosync orbit to reduce the total insolation of the Earth", your first concern would be to think about the geometry of that penumbral cone with a known cone height of roughly 5 earth radii vs a 0.5 degree Sun. Just how large would it have to be to reduce total insolation by a single whopping percent? The answer is really, really large. Even at only 5 Earth radii, which is not the distance to a Lagrange point. At the Lagrange point, really really REALLY REALLY large.
Now, is the solar wind deflection by a magnet going to be exactly like this? No, of course not. The magnetic field doesn't have a sharp cutoff -- it drops off roughly like 1/r^3 from the center of the (presumably dipole) magnet. Also, the force acting on the solar wind (charged only) particles depends on their charge and speed, the acceleration depends on their mass as well, and it has the usual nasty cross products in it so that it only really exerts a large force when particles run across the field at right angles. One would LIKE to think that a small deflection far away produced by a magnet large enough to produce a reasonable deflection a REALLY REALLY large distance away from the magnet could create a shadow as large as Mars, but it is by no means clear that this is the case, and just saying "hey, we can make really big magnets" doesn't actually help. I've got really really big magnets in my house -- ones I've pulled out of dead hard drives, that can basically hold a (small) newspaper pinned to your fridge. IF you get them within an appallingly short distance of the fridge. From a meter away, you can't feel any force at all. If you take an old CRT television or computer monitor and wave this really really strong magnet from ten or twenty meters away, it has
So, 1-2 Tesla peak in a device how large? A meter? Ten meters? A kilometer? (what are we going to pay for, in other words) sitting in the middle of nowhere is going to be enough to deflect off-axis charged particles by how much? Bear in mind that Mr. Sun subtends a pretty substantial arc. One such that an entire planetoid object the size of the moon barely obstructs line of sight in a tiny penumbra, sometimes, at 384K kilometers...
So just how large a region WOULD we have to cover to actually put the entire planet of Mars in its deflection penumbra? Hmmm....
If we're going to this place, why not do the same thing for Mother Earth -- put a large cloud of stuff at the lagrange point, reduce insolation, fight global warming. Price is no object! Fantasies are free! Besides, what could go wrong?
Hey, this is just the first step. Then we crash Europa into Mars and wait a few million years for it to cool and the water to recondense. We'll need the magnetic shield in the meantime unless Europa has enough of an iron core that the remelted Martian core turns magnetic.
Of course, we might hasten the cooling by a few hundred thousand years if we install a cloaking device at the same Lagrange point so that Mars is in its shadow.
All it takes is money, right? Unbelievably enormous amounts of money. And time, don't forget the time. Something like the entire world GDP for a few centuries. But what the heck, you're buying another whole planet, one in the same solar system, which makes this way, way more realistic a proposal than imagining travelling to a nearby star.
Well, except for the building a large enough field generator at a Lagrange point to shield a whole planet, and except for moving a good sized moon. Except for that.
Not so much Jesus as King John. 36 barleycorns to the foot! How can one not love a system of weights and measures based on the grain upon which so much human happiness depends?
And hey, the mile is really decimal. Heck it STANDS for 1000. It's just a "kilo-roman-pace". Is it anyone's fault, really, that the British went with a clothyard arrow as their intermediate standard instead of something sensible, like 1 pace = 5 feet = 180 barleycorns!
Jesus, OTOH, no doubt used cubits, anticipating that in modern times we'd use qubits, which even now is a critical word to know if you play words with friends or scrabble. Thanks, Jesus!
... having actually looked at the problem, as opposed to saying the moral equivalent of "if pink unicorns farted fairy dust, toads could fly", what else is there to do but laugh hysterically at this proposal?
Look, if we lived in a sane universe, the problem being solved wouldn't even exist, because the government would have established a rigorous data portability standard in the first place. Given a rigorous data portability standard, data sharing across EHR's becomes a "necessary feature" instead of a malignant threat to the company that wrote the EHR who hopes that once you've invested the hundreds to thousands of hours and tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars in installing their product and porting/importing the data and training all of the staff to where they are expert enough to have learned just how their product really, really sucks, you will find all that money and time to be a large enough barrier to prevent you (physician, practice management company, hospital, whoever) from running away like a scalded llama towards absolutely anything else that might, just might, suck less.
The alternative -- that they'd actually have to continue to employ a large staff of developers who are tasked with both debugging their existing product and advancing it with feedback from users in order to actually make their users happy so that they stay with the product out of choice -- is anathema to them, because paying all of those developers and admitting errors and retraining customers as necessary dilutes their profits.
So now implementing an enormously complicated solution (one that will require a huge investment in programmers, security experts, trainers and so on and worse, will require every vendor to have hooks that permit more or less automated replication of features in other vendors' EHRs, some of which might even be proprietary or trade secrets or whatever) is suddenly going to make this particular post-apocalyptic landscape a lot better? Without laws mandating it? Without it immediately breaking as (say) Epic refuses to disclose key internals to (say) eClinicalworks or (say) Allscripts? Epic won't even willingly import HL7 data exported by other products.
So excuse me if I pause to catch my breath before resuming maniacal laughter...
Sure, one built with imaginary and probably impossible materials, ignoring petty little details such as the non-equivalence of the accelerating inertial reference frames at the ground and top (not to mention all of the way up).
Here's a hint for you (and everybody else that proposes this absurdity):
a) Equatorial speed relative to center of Earth: 460 meters/second or just over 1000 mph. Around 1.35 x the speed of sound. b) Speed at geosync orbit at R \approx 6 R_e: 6 x 460 = 2.78 km/sec.
Or if you prefer energy: c) Total mechanical energy of 1 kg object sitting at "rest" at equator: = GMm/R_e + 1/2 m v^2 (using v from a) above): -64 MJ/kg d) TME of same object sitting at "rest" in geosync orbit \approx -10 MJ/kg
And the worst of them all, angular momentum: e) Total z-directed angular momentum of 1 kg on equator = mR_e v (from a): 2.9 x 10^9 kg-m^2/sec f) Ditto at geosync (36x larger): 105 x 10^9 kg-m^2/sec
So, to lift something up from the surface to geosync, one has to:
1) Increase its tangential speed -- tangent to great circles around the axis -- by a factor of 6 as it rises. 2) Increase its mechanical energy by 50 million Joules per kilogram of payload. 3) Increase its angular momentum by well over 100 BILLION kg-m^2/sec. This is done by means of the same torque required to increase its tangential speed.
Now, let's ignore all the picky details, such as how to make a cable that can support its own weight hanging to the ground from geosync orbit -- where if we not unreasonably insist on it having a specific gravity around 1 (same as water) then we need the weight of a cable well over 5 R_e long (at least, if you want to be able to apply tangential force via the same cable) so let's START with 5 R_e -- in round numbers 5 x 6.4 x 10^6 = 32 million meters long (yes, that is million). Figuring the top tension is a bit tricky and involves an integral, but the result of the integral is that the tension at the top is the change in potential energy per kilogram times the density times the cross sectional area: GM_e\rho \Delta A (1/R_e - 1/6R_e) = 50 MJ/kg x 1000 kg/m^3 \Delta A.
This is 50 x 10^9 Newtons times the cross sectional area (in m^2), and is most easily expressed by dividing out the area to get:
The highest tensile yield strength observed in any material (so far) is less than 5 GPa. Carbon nanotubes have a tensile strength reported as high as 63 GPa, but this is not a yield strength and could not support a sustained load, certainly not safely. So far, then, we are (honestly) well over an order of magnitude short of the required yield tensile strength required for a cable to JUST support its own weight "hanging" from the vicinity of geosync orbit. One cannot force a lower orbit USING such a cable, and higher orbits (with more cable) that are still geosync require more tension and make little sense. But hey, this is science fiction, let's PRETEND that we can make carbon nanotube cables 32 million meters long that have a yield strength of (what the hell) 500 GPa -- our 50 plus a generous margin of safety. Let's not worry about what we are going to wrap our cable around as far as pulleys go at the ends, how we will build bearings etc -- heck, that's just "engineering". Heck, anybody can design a pulley that can support a 64+ million meter long cable (looped, remember! -- oops, there goes a factor of 2 of our ten already!) that has been looped and joined "perfectly" without the slightest defect that might lower the yield strength to (say) 5 GPa and lead to catastrophe! Engineering is just drawing a picture! Why worry about what actual material you might make it out of that the cable won't cut right through (if it is thin) or crush (if it is thick) or wear out in short order as it operates?
Let's just imagine how it might WORK. After all, the whole idea is that you send a payload up on one side of the loop at the same time you send some coun
You mean to say Pink Unicorns COULD exist -- if we build them -- and I agree. And they could exist even if we don't. For a long time, Europeans thought that there were no black swans because they'd never seen any. They were wrong -- they just hadn't looked in the right place. Now we would say that there are no paisley dayglo multicolored swans because we've looked everywhere that one could reasonably find swans, we've catalogued swan DNA, we understand the process of evolution that gave rise to swans and the artistic human process that produces paisley and concluded that they are pretty much orthogonal, and concluded that it is very, very,.... very unlikely that there are swans whose natural feather color pattern is a riotous mix of dayglo colors arranged in perfect swirls against (say) a dark blue or violet background. But not impossible. It is likely that SOME DNA pattern, possibly intercalated from peacock DNA and then hacked a bit, could produce an animal with 99.99% Swan DNA -- morphologically a swan -- that naturally expresses paisley on its feathers. Maybe even an animal that could breed true with other swans.
As for Shetland Ponies with horns -- it's a lot easier to just drill their skulls under anesthetic and install a screw-in socket that will accept a spiral horn. Or an iron plate that one can attach a rare-earth magnetic horn to without any break in the skin. Pink dye is a lot easier than recombinant DNA. One could do that "tomorrow", if one didn't have to contend with those silly animal cruelty laws, and it isn't clear that they'd protect the pony even from this insult if the result didn't really hurt them...
Now try to do the same thing with God(s). That's why I (sarcastically) suggest that they aren't really even conceivable. Humans imagine God by:
a) Taking a purely human concept, such as that of a Human Despot (Lord, King, Emperor). They say to themselves "Hey, Lords are pretty powerful, but Kings are more powerful. And Emperors are even more powerful -- Kings of Kings as it were. I therefore can understand the sequence from me = not powerful, to my feudal lord = more powerful, to my king = still more powerful, to my emperor = most powerful in the worldly realm as an ordinal set in "power".
b) Adding other concepts -- artist/creators from me (fingerpainter) to a high school art instructor, to a modern artists who is well enough known to get shows in museums and galleries, to the Renoir's, Da Vinci's, Picasso's of the world -- an ordinal set in "creativity"; dumb as a post (e.g. farm animals), to a high school graduate, to a college graduate, to brilliant mathematicians and physicists e.g. Einstein or Ramanujan -- an ordinal set in "knowledge" or "reasoning ability".
c) Extrapolating the set. Suppose we imagine a being that is more powerful than any other being as the limit of this ordinal set. Same being is also more creative, more knowledgeable, more intelligent, more compassionate, more loving... name any positive ordinal quality, imagine a being with that quality, extrapolate to a hypothesized most whatever of that quality, possessing perfection in that quality, all with conjunctions, so that they are the most loving andmost just. Don't worry too much if the two qualities are consistent, that in some sense one cannot be the most just (giving people what they deserve) and the most loving (NOT giving people what they deserve but rather what they want) -- just keep your thoughts vague enough that they don't have to confront any contradictions and imagine each "most" quality one at a time.
d) The result is God. God is bigger than the biggest, hence larger than the Universe. He is smarter than the smartest, so he knows EVERYTHING. He's more creative than the most creative, indeed anything that exists was created by God; even my fingerpaintings are really God's fingerpaintings, planned out in complete detail to the subatomic scale long before I was born. He's perf
Thankfully, God has made a way of escape through Jesus Christ, His Son (John 3:16). The choice is yours alone to make. Do you really believe that the Creator is âoeThe God who wasn't thereâ as atheists allege. Every watch has a maker, and I assure you that the universe has a Maker as well. It is not only improbable; but impossible that this universe just happened, let alone that it evolved from some chaotic explosion... A BIG BANG! Please, what a joke! Chaos never leads to order. Order can only come from careful planning and meticulous precision, which God has certainly accomplished. It is man that steals, kills, and destroys as Satan wants them too (John 10:10).
So let's get this straight. The Universe is a big, complex place that doesn't show the slightest evidence of actual design or intervention. You assert without proof that it must have been created, even though all the laws of nature based on observation are CONSERVATION LAWS that suggest that NOTHING has ever been created in the history of the Universe itself. Everything that you think of as being the "creation" of something is just preexisting stuff moving around. You have never observed one single thing actually being created -- or destroyed -- only the changing of forms of that which already is. In some very deep sense, your error comes from this -- you misinterpret the actual, literal meaning of the verb "to create" as it applies to every single actual thing you've ever seen or experienced. A potter does not "create" a pot, not in the sense you are using the term to refer to an act of a hypothesized deity. A potter reshapes preexisting clay to -- very temporarily, on a cosmic scale -- have the form of a pot. You are conflating your experience with pots -- one day not there, another day there -- to misapply common language to Universes, forgetting that you've never seen anything actually come out of nothing and have no reason whatsoever to think that it ever has.
This big, complex place, then, is supposed to be like that pot, something shaped by some intelligent hand. You assert it because (implicitly) nothing can have complex shapes unless intelligence produces them. If we ignore for the moment the fact that every snowflake that has ever existed or will ever exist refutes you -- complexity arising out of thoughtless matter interacting with remarkably simple rules -- and grant the premise, then you immediately encounter a consistency issue and problem with recursion. The potter is without doubt more "complex" than the pot he creates. But that (according to you) is why we cannot view the pot as having been produced by a natural process, or the potter as being produced by a natural process. The Universe itself, with all of its apparently natural processes is really really complex, and complex things are NEVER to be found without being put there by intelligence that is even more complex.
If we ignore the long string of unprovable, unfounded assumptions (in most cases, assumptions that are easily refuted by actual examples in physics, chemistry, even formal mathematics) we find that your conclusion -- that God must exist to have been the greater intelligence that designed the Universe that -- through the pure unfolding of natural law -- evolved the potter that -- following the inevitable path of his life determined by those same natural laws -- appeared to "design" a pot that he then assembled out of some stuff that he dug out of the ground which was eventually sold, used for a dozen years, broke, and was then ground over centuries back into dust once again -- is inconsistent. God is more complex than the world, complexity only can happen through intelligent design, therefore God was intelligently designed, therefore God was designed and "created" by a still more complex God and isn't really God. There is no terminus to the chain thus induced -- any God you postulate must always have been "created" by a still smarter, still more powerful and more intellig
There are none who do not believe in Pink Unicorns! How can any man say, who has not travelled to the farthest end of the Universe, that Pink Unicorns do not exist? Indeed, anybody who says so secretly is claiming to BE a Pink Unicorn. Pink Unicorns hate fags and commies so you -- I'm talking to you, you apostatic Pink Unicorn believer wearing the halloween costume -- need to pass draconian laws punishing commies and let us arrest fags and send them against their will to a special school that will teach them to find only members of the opposite sex attractive, and then only within the bounds of holy matrimony. I'm talking about you, Robert De Niro and you, Billy Joel! You claim not to believe in the Pink One's Perfect Horn, but deep in your heart you have seen its Cornute Majesty as the twist in every spiral galaxy, especially those that radiate high in the Pink part of the spectrum.
DON'T BLAME ME, you anunicornists, if the great Pink Unicorn shows up one day and impales you on its Horn of Perfect Justice! It could happen! Seriously! You haven't BEEN to Alpha Centauri -- it could be liberally populated with Pink Unicorns for all you know! I have had a Holy Vision of Pink, and I Know! So sayeth the prophets, and everybody knows that people who wrote stuff down LONG AGO are always right and never made mistakes! Only that liberal commie activity known as "science" makes mistakes -- imagine, insisting on POSITIVE evidence for the existence of Pink Unicorns when the Holy Fathers among the ancients speak of "walking with the Unicorn" and tell of the many miracles performed by the Pinkest of them all. What more evidence do you need?
Oh, and by the way, pay no attention to the deluded fools in that cult over there who claim that Unicorns are not Pink, they are really Blue. Or that group -- Purple Dinosaurs (that walked with men back before the flood) are clearly right up there with Winkie-Tink, thinly disguised Faggery intended to corrupt the morals of our children and distract them from Pink! Besides, they have no evidence to back their claim, as clearly THEIR ancient prophets were just smelly old men who are lying to you to corrupt you. But the one true Pink Unicorn knows all and sees all, peering out from behind every rock and stone in the Universe, and...
What's that? Take your hands off of me, sir! I protest! Well of course I stopped taking that medicine! It was distracting me from my holy duty! I could no longer see Pink when I closed my eyes, my mortal body was in danger of being Holed and the prophets say that sinners who turn their back on the Unicorn will be trampled under hoof for all eternity! Let me go!
I will not be silenced! No! Don't put me in there! No! No! Not the needle! The TRUTH will soon be known! BEWARE, you foul, white jacketed sinners, the Unicorn that comes to trample you and everyone you love in the ni
OK, I'll try again. YOU DON'T. All you see is electrons being "consumed" as they hit the screen, forming the interference pattern.
If you DO look for them as they pass through the slits -- where one can do this without "consuming" them by e.g. putting a conducting loop around the slit that will experience a voltage pulse as the electron passes THROUGH it or by illuminating the volume right behind one of the slits with intense light that can scatter off of the moving electron and hence detect the slit the electron passed though -- then the interference pattern goes away.
This is a fundamental sort of "goes away". It isn't just that we gave a small extra push to the electron, as in principle you can CLASSICALLY make the detection so weak that it wouldn't affect the classical trajectory. It is that the detection itself shifts the PHASE of the electron and hence destroys its coherence with the electron(s) passing through the other slit, so there is no longer any interference.
It is. The point is that if you measure which slit it passes through, the interference pattern that implies that it passed through both AS A WAVE, not a particle, disappears. The rule for this sort of thing is that if you measure wavelike properties, you don't get a definite particle position/state. If you measure a definite particle position/state, you don't get wavelike behavior any more. This is called complementarity and is the basis of the uncertainty principle. Electrons and photons alike behave the same way. Even at very low intensities where you can effectively observe single photons or electrons AT THE DETECTOR, if you don't look to see which slit they go through you get interference, implying that the electron passed through both as a wave (function). If you do look and measure the slit the photon or electron passes through, no more interference pattern, no more waves.
The electron in some sense isn't in two places at once -- it is "everywhere" at once, but with a low probability, if it has a very well defined momentum and hence wavelength. If you measure it or confine it to some specific location, you do so at the irreducible expense of having a well-defined momentum (and hence wavelength).
I'm actually teaching this stuff right now at the most elementary level. There aren't a lot of good intro level books on it, but I'm using Harris's "Modern Physics", which is at least pretty readable and has some of the real math in it. Beyond intro modern physics books, you can try Wikipedia (often has surprisingly good articles on this sort of thing) or a real quantum textbook. Or two. Or three or four. It takes years to not quite understand quantum mechanics, and an important step along the way is to UNlearn all of the nonsense you "learned" about it in English statements and to concentrate on the consistent mathematical and conceptual formulation of the theory.
Hey, somebody had to do it. Using English with embedded classical logic to describe quantum phenomena is a waste of time. And even most physicists have never read Schwinger or studied the Nakajima-Zwanzig equation and hence have little idea of how to formally obtain the classical measurement projection in an open system interacting with a classically described statistical bath when the combined closed system is in a stationary state and has no probabilities at all. And then there is relativity and time reversal invariance.
I'm just sitting here, wondering if the back of the envelope computation is dead. When did we get to the point where we could resolve 30+ orders of magnitude effects in the lab? We haven't even -- as far as I know -- experimentally verified whether normal matter gravitation attracts or repels antimatter, which seems like it would be a pretty important first step in building a QFT with gravity or GR, but even that seems beyond us so far.
Mod +1. This is the second or third time I've seen summaries of the press announcement, and the first time it has been even obliquely acknowledged that the so called "repeller" is nothing more than a localized lack of PULL, not any sort of actual gravitational "push". -1 to the article itself for being misleading bullshit and creating a "dipole" like an electron and an electron hole create a "dipole" in a uniform neutral metal, no more.
Surely there is nothing surprising about this. People have been doing cosmological simulations for a LONG time with a large number of pointlike objects interacting with GMm/r^2 attractive forces but to simulate galactic evolution and universal evolution from the big bang. The interesting point being that in the center of a uniform mass distribution, there is no net force but nevertheless 1/r^2 forces with any kind of inhomogeneity in the underlying free mass distribution tends to accrete in some places and abandon others, especially if it can inelastically interact and clump together into bound subsystems. This must have been seen in simulations pretty much every time, and should come as no surprise in nature.
Having used the "sweet rm" trick back in the 80's somewhere (with much more limited space, and a cron FIFO groomer) it also doesn't protect you from a wide variety of file corruption issues and overwrites. Remove a file, recreate it, remove it again? Delete two files from different parts of your tree -- e.g. README -- that have the same name? Original file gone (unless you don't just alias rm, you write a very complicated script). If you run out of space and have an alias/script like "flush" to take out the trash and make room for more, it just moves the problem one notch downstream.
With that said, it did save my ass a few times. Then I learned personal discipline, started using version control (SCCS at the time, IIRC) onto a reliable server to not just back up any files of any importance I create but to save reversible strings of revisions back to the Egg, and stopped using my reversible rm altogether after one or two of the disasters it still leaves open.
Moral: Version control with frequent checkins usually leaves your working image itself on your working machine. Keeping the repository on a different machine is already one level of redundancy. Keeping it on a server class machine in a tier 1 or tier 2 facility with reliable, regular backups and RAIDed disk is suddenly very, very, very reliable. As the current incident shows, not perfectly reliable. Human error, multiple disk failures in an array, nuclear war, internal malice or incompetence or just plain accident can still cause data loss, but in this case what is being reported isn't disaster -- they had 6 hour backups! Even though I'm sure there will be some folks who are inconvenienced, MOST of the users will still have usable, current working copies and be out anywhere from zero to a few hours of work. I've been on both sides of the sysadmin aisle in data loss server crashes, and -- they happen. Wise users use a belt AND suspenders to the extent possible lest they find their pants gathered around their ankles one day...
Because of dispersion (different frequencies) inside dynamically polarizable materials. Not in a vacuum. In a vacuum, the speed of light is predicted to be -- the speed of light.
Light can be bent by gravitational fields, but the thought is that the bent trajectories are geodesics in bent spacetime, not actual lenses which bend light by slowing it down due to the susceptibility of space.
OK, have to step in here. The map is not the territory, and the idea of a thing is not a thing. If you are saying "God is not a thing, it is an idea" I'd agree with you. But ideas are not in any necessary one-to-one correspondence with the Universe of "things that actually exist", and ideas to the very best of our experience a) are highly complex phenomena contingent on all sorts of material stuff and do not just float around like quantum particles that permeate and surround the Universe (h/t to Terry Pratchett); b) cannot and do not "create" anything, ever. In fact there is no evidence that anything, ever, has been created. The laws of physics are all pretty much constrained by conservation principles (consistent with observation) that state that nothing is ever created, it is all just existing stuff changing form and moving around.
The second thing I'd object to is the idea that anyone at all can "reason" about God in a meaningful or useful way. The first step in such a reasoning process is to choose one's premises, or axioms, or postulates -- the basis for one's eventual "consistent" conclusions. This is precisely the same whether one is reasoning about mathematics, the Universe of stuff that actually exists, or the enormous metaphysical space of pure speculation -- reasoning about pink unicorns, trying to decide if Santa likes hot chocolate with or without a splash of peppermint Schnapps on Christmas eve, how many angels can dance on the head of a standard shirt-packing pin. The premises themselves cannot be proven -- they are PREMISES -- so all reasoning contingent upon the premises is Bullshit in the precise sense that there is (as noted) no necessary one-to-one correspondence with the pattern of consistent results on derives with the very best of intentions and the real world.
The second step in USEFUL reasoning is to seek out objective correspondences between those contingent results AND the real world. To the extent that they are discovered to exist, we strengthen our degree of belief in the conclusions, and by Bayesian reasoning, the premises that led to the conclusions in good correspondence. To the extent that they are contradicted, we at least weaken our degree of belief in the conclusions, and again by inheritance in the premises that led to the contradiction. This is a slight oversimplification as multiple premises contribute to most nontrivial conclusions and it is not necessarily clear which one(s) fail, but there is no doubt that REASON requires reduction of belief in the conclusion itself rather than amplification when there is either no evidence supporting it (but there is evidence supporting competing ideas and arguments) or if the evidence contradicts it.
And here's the rub. The very first step about any reasoning process about God has to begin with the pure assertion that God exists. This is because we have no direct and usable sensory data, no direct "experience" of God the way we have experience of toast, or things falling down when dropped. We have built powerful apparatus that extends the range and sensitivity of our senses and none of it reveals God. We have conducted careful statistical analyses of human experience contingent on things like belief and prayer and behavior and -- outside of obvious stuff that behaving "well" is more likely to make one happy than being a butt in human society -- no phenomena or statistical anomalies are observed that require supernatural explanation. One cannot predict one single thing about the world and how it behaves or outcomes based on religious belief or the asserted premise "God exists for some useful meaning of the word `exists'". To paraphrase, the rain falls on Saint and Sinner alike.
What we CAN do is examine the consequences of BELIEF ITSELF. Believing in something has an enormous impact on human existence. In a sense, our society (or societies!) are defined by their beliefs, their memetic structure, their history, their evolution -- including religious beliefs. Religious beliefs make an enormous set of
Personally, I think we evolved without it when we took to walking upright. A penis bone would have kept all male penises pointing up at the angle of optimum intromission. This would have forced all males to urinate in long rainbow arcs that got piss all over the place in a highly conspicuous way and would have made the penis, sticking out and up right up front, highly vulnerable to all sorts of weapons as tribal man fought one another. Hard to tuck the junk back and out of risk when you are standing if you have to break a bone to do it. Humans are also enormously mutually fertile (roughly 10% of the time) and live a very long time, so long intromission, short intromission, neither one is going to be effective at ensuring "monogamy" and of course arguing that human culture is monogamous even today is pretty much to make a RELIGIOUS argument as the best that can be supported empirically is some mix of serial monogamy, serial polygamy, serial polyandry, and just plain fucking around with a smattering of true "lifetime exclusive" monogamy mixed in, maybe 10 or 20%. Swans may mate for life, but humans are lucky if they mate for dinner, if one follows overt statistics, and even that is probably driven more by religious memes than by "nature". The memes are rather at war with the genes, and different cultures follow different patterns for optimizing mate selection worldwide.
As many above have pointed out, there is little reason to read the entire series "like a novel" from cover to cover, in addition to the fact that yeah, it would take a while to WORK through it like a textbook as opposed to read through it quickly to see what is there. And yeah, there are better books now in profusion on many of the topics covered, although AFAIK there is no book or book series that is as encyclopedic on the subjects he covers.
However, many people will find some of the sections very useful. I personally found "Seminumerical Algorithms" useful indeed when learning about random number generators and testing random number generators. It isn't the last word, and it certainly isn't the latest word as we move into a 64 bit world and beyond, but it is an excellent starting point. In other parts of the series there are other gems or nuggets well worth studying or reading, even if you move on to actual research papers or better books afterwards.
To sum up, it is a useful thing to own if you are doing a lot of very widely spread code development and need to acquire literacy quickly in subjects it covers, even if you are going to end up looking for an O'Reilly text on some of those subjects to get a more modern perspective. Those OR books are probably going to reference, rewrite, and augment Knuth.
Note well that I'm an Old Guy (tm) and actually did write a lot of code in Fortran once in the long ago before abandoning it for C and Unix and beyond. TAOCP was one of the ONLY really good encyclopedic references for people who were NOT CPS majors and who needed to learn about algorithms of one sort or another or some aspect of coding covered in one of the many CPS courses they never took. They (I) didn't need a course with the best textbook of the day -- we needed to get started. Once started, we knew how to learn and go beyond the start. 1.5 cubic feet of shelf space wasn't too high a price to be able to learn something about everything or anything to get started.
Hmmm, your philosophy seems rather familiar, AC. Fortunately I do not need to reply, as you are incapable of reading letters containing angles. But hey, nobody can measure angles, right? Or is that right angles. I forget.
Slashdot Mirror
Why, exactly, is this a sentence fragment?
"Go!"
is a sentence, consisting of a verb in imperative form, with the understood subject 'You' (the listeners). So is "Try." So is "(You) go again." Or "(You) try again."
Oh, and since you are supposedly representing the grammar police on /., and I'm challenging your absurd statement that this is a fragment, I suppose I ought to provide you with at least some K-12 level documentation that your assertion is, in fact, absurd:
http://www.k12reader.com/learn...
Yeah, if I were going to get hydrogen from water I would take a solar panel and hook it up to a floating platform sitting in the ocean. Underneath there would be two gold or platinum plated electrodes, one of which I would leave free and the other of which I would put in a vertical tube. On top I would have a small pump (also run by the solar cell, or maybe powered by a small wind turbine since there is usually a wind over the ocean) that compressed the hydrogen into a collection tank. That would produce hydrogen at a very, very predictable rate, fully compressed and ready to use. A small hydrogen powered boat (powered indirectly by the same solar cells) could make the rounds every week or so to replace the tanks and bring the tanks ashore for use. The rafts themselves would attract fish and de facto cool the ocean underneath. And best of all, they would produce the hydrogen for only four or five times what the electricity that produced it was worth!
Now to patent this, get a government grant, and fight the NIMBY battle with all of the boaters and fisherpeople who don't want to see the oceans and sounds scattered with floating platforms covered with solar cells and hydrogen gas tanks. I'll be rich!
Oh, wait. You mean that this idea has been around for over forty years now?
https://books.google.com/books...
You mean that it is developed to the point where one could produce hydrogen peroxide, or release the CO2 in the ocean water and capture THAT at the same time we generate the hydrogen (for an even larger multiplier for the actual value of the electricity)? You mean that even a patent troll would have a hard time locking this one down? You mean that there really are some people, somewhere, who have heard of the second law of thermodynamics or the first law of economics (that in business, one's product has to sell for more than the cost of production)?
So what? As long as we have a government, these will not be obstacles...
rgb
Presumption of innocence is essential to a society run by laws, and it says, if you didn't get convicted by a court, you're innocent of the crime. There's not one iota of ambiguity there.
I've been following, and mostly agreeing with, your marvelous string of rant(s) on this topic, but here I must pick a very important epistemological nit.
When I drove to work today, I exceeded the legal speed limit, as I do every day. I am therefore in reality guilty of violating the laws restricting the speed I am permitted to drive my car. This guilt persists whether or not I am stopped, observed, ticketed, taken to court. It persists whether or not I am stopped, go to court, and pay a lawyer a large sum of money to have the case thrown out or to convince judge or jury that my excess speed was within some legal uncertainty associated with its measurement, whether or not there was a technical error in my citation that makes it null and void. Being guilty in reality of violating a law is quite independent of the courts, arrests, prosecutions, and verdicts. Did I commit the crime? Yes (just like pretty much every human alive driving today). Have I been "declared guilty" by a court? Absolutely not, got away with it just like almost every human alive who exceeds the speed limit today will get away with it, some of whom will exceed it by a lot. Yesterday I (accidentally, seriously) ran a red light. Didn't get caught, didn't harm anyone, but I'm absolutely guilty of doing it and am still kicking myself for letting myself get too distracted at the intersection as I could have hurt someone. Guilty, guilty, guilty.
So let's correct your statement above:
Presumption of innocence is essential to a society run by laws, and it says, if you didn't get convicted by a court, you're presumed to be innocent (in the eyes of the law). There's not one iota of ambiguity there.
NOT THE SAME as saying you ARE innocent in reality, only that as far as the law goes, you have the benefit of any doubt (and various legal protections against others acting on their own as if you were guilty). This is true even if Colonel Mustard is found in the pantry holding the wrench, is arrested without being Mirandized, confesses everything and leads the police to a wealth of absolute proof that he did it, that he planned to do it, that he is glad he did it, that he is guilty, guilty, guilty of doing it -- but all of that evidence is thrown out and consequently the jury declares him (not innocent, but) not guilty. At which point he could write a book: "I Did it in the Pantry with the Wrench, and I'm Glad", by Colonel Mustard, Esq, and could admit it on Oprah and he'd still be "not guilty" in the eyes of the law for the rest of eternity because of the double jeopardy clause.
Outside of this small but important exception, I agree with what you are saying. And it matters! Those rules that might get Col. Mustard a walk even though he is guilty as hell might protect Miss Scarlet who is intimidated into admitting that she did it in the kitchen with the knife but really was in the Library with Professor Plum. They prevent many a miscarriage of justice where a DA aggressively prosecutes somebody for political reasons on inadequate or trumped up evidence. It's not like we don't routinely convict the innocent because the person accused happens to be black or hispanic even WITH the protections we have...
That doesn't stop people from "convicting" O.J. Simpson of murder in their own minds even though he is declared "not guilty" in a trial. It doesn't stop him from (maybe) BEING guilty even though he was acquitted. It doesn't stop people from convicting Hilary Clinton and/or Donald Trump in their own minds of everything from murder down to simple child molestation and rape and (while we are obligated to presume their innocence in all legal matters including not defaming them by asserting their ce
Well, that escalated quickly! Howbow I just reply to your first questions, because sunlight blocking isn't related nor makes much sense to me.
Let's try to make it make sense. The solar wind is driven by light pressure. Particles do not, however, follow strict radii out from the sun. They have transverse velocity components as well as radial ones. Also, they are pushed by photons from all over the face of the sun, which have different impact angles, which constantly change their transverse velocity. To put it another way, the particles driven away from the sun that will eventually hit Mars have a phase space envelope at least as large as the truncated cone formed by the surface of revolution whose boundaries are the circumference of the Sun on one end and the circumference of mars at the other.
Now consider a satellite (say) 100m in diameter. Suppose you locate it at the Lagrange point so that it is always along the line between the center of the Earth and the center of the Sun. Question: Will it dim the total sunlight received by the Earth?
Not measurably. The penumbra of this little satellite extends from its dark side to the tip of the extended cone formed by the circumference of the satellite and the circumference of the Sun. Since the Sun is basically 0.5 degrees from the Earth or the Lagrange point either way, the height of this cone is found from tan(0.5 degrees \approx 0.02 rad) \approx 0.02 rad = 100/H, or
50x100 = 5 km. So the satellite will cast a complete shadow of the sun that starts out 100 m wide right behind the satellite, then shrinks to zero around 5 km (give or take a km, I'm being lazy) . Beyond that you are in the umbra, which basically means that you are in bright sunlight from the annulus of sun surface visible around the satellite. The further out you go, the smaller the ratio of the occluded part to the directly visible part. By the time you reach the earth, the satellite is completely invisible -- the umbra is irrelevantly dimmed relative to no satellite at all, and it "covers" less of the sun's face from any viewpoint on Earth than a medium sized sunspot.
Now, if somebody were to tell you "hey, we're going to fix global warming by putting a sun shield in geosync orbit to reduce the total insolation of the Earth", your first concern would be to think about the geometry of that penumbral cone with a known cone height of roughly 5 earth radii vs a 0.5 degree Sun. Just how large would it have to be to reduce total insolation by a single whopping percent? The answer is really, really large. Even at only 5 Earth radii, which is not the distance to a Lagrange point. At the Lagrange point, really really REALLY REALLY large.
Now, is the solar wind deflection by a magnet going to be exactly like this? No, of course not. The magnetic field doesn't have a sharp cutoff -- it drops off roughly like 1/r^3 from the center of the (presumably dipole) magnet. Also, the force acting on the solar wind (charged only) particles depends on their charge and speed, the acceleration depends on their mass as well, and it has the usual nasty cross products in it so that it only really exerts a large force when particles run across the field at right angles. One would LIKE to think that a small deflection far away produced by a magnet large enough to produce a reasonable deflection a REALLY REALLY large distance away from the magnet could create a shadow as large as Mars, but it is by no means clear that this is the case, and just saying "hey, we can make really big magnets" doesn't actually help. I've got really really big magnets in my house -- ones I've pulled out of dead hard drives, that can basically hold a (small) newspaper pinned to your fridge. IF you get them within an appallingly short distance of the fridge. From a meter away, you can't feel any force at all. If you take an old CRT television or computer monitor and wave this really really strong magnet from ten or twenty meters away, it has
So, 1-2 Tesla peak in a device how large? A meter? Ten meters? A kilometer? (what are we going to pay for, in other words) sitting in the middle of nowhere is going to be enough to deflect off-axis charged particles by how much? Bear in mind that Mr. Sun subtends a pretty substantial arc. One such that an entire planetoid object the size of the moon barely obstructs line of sight in a tiny penumbra, sometimes, at 384K kilometers...
So just how large a region WOULD we have to cover to actually put the entire planet of Mars in its deflection penumbra? Hmmm....
If we're going to this place, why not do the same thing for Mother Earth -- put a large cloud of stuff at the lagrange point, reduce insolation, fight global warming. Price is no object! Fantasies are free! Besides, what could go wrong?
rgb
Hey, this is just the first step. Then we crash Europa into Mars and wait a few million years for it to cool and the water to recondense. We'll need the magnetic shield in the meantime unless Europa has enough of an iron core that the remelted Martian core turns magnetic.
Of course, we might hasten the cooling by a few hundred thousand years if we install a cloaking device at the same Lagrange point so that Mars is in its shadow.
All it takes is money, right? Unbelievably enormous amounts of money. And time, don't forget the time. Something like the entire world GDP for a few centuries. But what the heck, you're buying another whole planet, one in the same solar system, which makes this way, way more realistic a proposal than imagining travelling to a nearby star.
Well, except for the building a large enough field generator at a Lagrange point to shield a whole planet, and except for moving a good sized moon. Except for that.
rgb
Not so much Jesus as King John. 36 barleycorns to the foot! How can one not love a system of weights and measures based on the grain upon which so much human happiness depends?
And hey, the mile is really decimal. Heck it STANDS for 1000. It's just a "kilo-roman-pace". Is it anyone's fault, really, that the British went with a clothyard arrow as their intermediate standard instead of something sensible, like 1 pace = 5 feet = 180 barleycorns!
Jesus, OTOH, no doubt used cubits, anticipating that in modern times we'd use qubits, which even now is a critical word to know if you play words with friends or scrabble. Thanks, Jesus!
... having actually looked at the problem, as opposed to saying the moral equivalent of "if pink unicorns farted fairy dust, toads could fly", what else is there to do but laugh hysterically at this proposal?
Look, if we lived in a sane universe, the problem being solved wouldn't even exist, because the government would have established a rigorous data portability standard in the first place. Given a rigorous data portability standard, data sharing across EHR's becomes a "necessary feature" instead of a malignant threat to the company that wrote the EHR who hopes that once you've invested the hundreds to thousands of hours and tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars in installing their product and porting/importing the data and training all of the staff to where they are expert enough to have learned just how their product really, really sucks, you will find all that money and time to be a large enough barrier to prevent you (physician, practice management company, hospital, whoever) from running away like a scalded llama towards absolutely anything else that might, just might, suck less.
The alternative -- that they'd actually have to continue to employ a large staff of developers who are tasked with both debugging their existing product and advancing it with feedback from users in order to actually make their users happy so that they stay with the product out of choice -- is anathema to them, because paying all of those developers and admitting errors and retraining customers as necessary dilutes their profits.
So now implementing an enormously complicated solution (one that will require a huge investment in programmers, security experts, trainers and so on and worse, will require every vendor to have hooks that permit more or less automated replication of features in other vendors' EHRs, some of which might even be proprietary or trade secrets or whatever) is suddenly going to make this particular post-apocalyptic landscape a lot better? Without laws mandating it? Without it immediately breaking as (say) Epic refuses to disclose key internals to (say) eClinicalworks or (say) Allscripts? Epic won't even willingly import HL7 data exported by other products.
So excuse me if I pause to catch my breath before resuming maniacal laughter...
Sure, one built with imaginary and probably impossible materials, ignoring petty little details such as the non-equivalence of the accelerating inertial reference frames at the ground and top (not to mention all of the way up).
Here's a hint for you (and everybody else that proposes this absurdity):
a) Equatorial speed relative to center of Earth: 460 meters/second or just over 1000 mph. Around 1.35 x the speed of sound.
b) Speed at geosync orbit at R \approx 6 R_e: 6 x 460 = 2.78 km/sec.
Or if you prefer energy:
c) Total mechanical energy of 1 kg object sitting at "rest" at equator: = GMm/R_e + 1/2 m v^2 (using v from a) above): -64 MJ/kg
d) TME of same object sitting at "rest" in geosync orbit \approx -10 MJ/kg
And the worst of them all, angular momentum:
e) Total z-directed angular momentum of 1 kg on equator = mR_e v (from a): 2.9 x 10^9 kg-m^2/sec
f) Ditto at geosync (36x larger): 105 x 10^9 kg-m^2/sec
So, to lift something up from the surface to geosync, one has to:
1) Increase its tangential speed -- tangent to great circles around the axis -- by a factor of 6 as it rises.
2) Increase its mechanical energy by 50 million Joules per kilogram of payload.
3) Increase its angular momentum by well over 100 BILLION kg-m^2/sec. This is done by means of the same torque required to increase its tangential speed.
Now, let's ignore all the picky details, such as how to make a cable that can support its own weight hanging to the ground from geosync orbit -- where if we not unreasonably insist on it having a specific gravity around 1 (same as water) then we need the weight of a cable well over 5 R_e long (at least, if you want to be able to apply tangential force via the same cable) so let's START with 5 R_e -- in round numbers 5 x 6.4 x 10^6 = 32 million meters long (yes, that is million). Figuring the top tension is a bit tricky and involves an integral, but the result of the integral is that the tension at the top is the change in potential energy per kilogram times the density times the cross sectional area: GM_e\rho \Delta A (1/R_e - 1/6R_e) = 50 MJ/kg x 1000 kg/m^3 \Delta A.
This is 50 x 10^9 Newtons times the cross sectional area (in m^2), and is most easily expressed by dividing out the area to get:
Requirement: 50 GPa minimum tensile (yield!) strength
The highest tensile yield strength observed in any material (so far) is less than 5 GPa. Carbon nanotubes have a tensile strength reported as high as 63 GPa, but this is not a yield strength and could not support a sustained load, certainly not safely. So far, then, we are (honestly) well over an order of magnitude short of the required yield tensile strength required for a cable to JUST support its own weight "hanging" from the vicinity of geosync orbit. One cannot force a lower orbit USING such a cable, and higher orbits (with more cable) that are still geosync require more tension and make little sense. But hey, this is science fiction, let's PRETEND that we can make carbon nanotube cables 32 million meters long that have a yield strength of (what the hell) 500 GPa -- our 50 plus a generous margin of safety. Let's not worry about what we are going to wrap our cable around as far as pulleys go at the ends, how we will build bearings etc -- heck, that's just "engineering". Heck, anybody can design a pulley that can support a 64+ million meter long cable (looped, remember! -- oops, there goes a factor of 2 of our ten already!) that has been looped and joined "perfectly" without the slightest defect that might lower the yield strength to (say) 5 GPa and lead to catastrophe! Engineering is just drawing a picture! Why worry about what actual material you might make it out of that the cable won't cut right through (if it is thin) or crush (if it is thick) or wear out in short order as it operates?
Let's just imagine how it might WORK. After all, the whole idea is that you send a payload up on one side of the loop at the same time you send some coun
You mean to say Pink Unicorns COULD exist -- if we build them -- and I agree. And they could exist even if we don't. For a long time, Europeans thought that there were no black swans because they'd never seen any. They were wrong -- they just hadn't looked in the right place. Now we would say that there are no paisley dayglo multicolored swans because we've looked everywhere that one could reasonably find swans, we've catalogued swan DNA, we understand the process of evolution that gave rise to swans and the artistic human process that produces paisley and concluded that they are pretty much orthogonal, and concluded that it is very, very,.... very unlikely that there are swans whose natural feather color pattern is a riotous mix of dayglo colors arranged in perfect swirls against (say) a dark blue or violet background. But not impossible. It is likely that SOME DNA pattern, possibly intercalated from peacock DNA and then hacked a bit, could produce an animal with 99.99% Swan DNA -- morphologically a swan -- that naturally expresses paisley on its feathers. Maybe even an animal that could breed true with other swans.
As for Shetland Ponies with horns -- it's a lot easier to just drill their skulls under anesthetic and install a screw-in socket that will accept a spiral horn. Or an iron plate that one can attach a rare-earth magnetic horn to without any break in the skin. Pink dye is a lot easier than recombinant DNA. One could do that "tomorrow", if one didn't have to contend with those silly animal cruelty laws, and it isn't clear that they'd protect the pony even from this insult if the result didn't really hurt them...
Now try to do the same thing with God(s). That's why I (sarcastically) suggest that they aren't really even conceivable. Humans imagine God by:
a) Taking a purely human concept, such as that of a Human Despot (Lord, King, Emperor). They say to themselves "Hey, Lords are pretty powerful, but Kings are more powerful. And Emperors are even more powerful -- Kings of Kings as it were. I therefore can understand the sequence from me = not powerful, to my feudal lord = more powerful, to my king = still more powerful, to my emperor = most powerful in the worldly realm as an ordinal set in "power".
b) Adding other concepts -- artist/creators from me (fingerpainter) to a high school art instructor, to a modern artists who is well enough known to get shows in museums and galleries, to the Renoir's, Da Vinci's, Picasso's of the world -- an ordinal set in "creativity"; dumb as a post (e.g. farm animals), to a high school graduate, to a college graduate, to brilliant mathematicians and physicists e.g. Einstein or Ramanujan -- an ordinal set in "knowledge" or "reasoning ability".
c) Extrapolating the set. Suppose we imagine a being that is more powerful than any other being as the limit of this ordinal set. Same being is also more creative, more knowledgeable, more intelligent, more compassionate, more loving... name any positive ordinal quality, imagine a being with that quality, extrapolate to a hypothesized most whatever of that quality, possessing perfection in that quality, all with conjunctions, so that they are the most loving and most just. Don't worry too much if the two qualities are consistent, that in some sense one cannot be the most just (giving people what they deserve) and the most loving (NOT giving people what they deserve but rather what they want) -- just keep your thoughts vague enough that they don't have to confront any contradictions and imagine each "most" quality one at a time.
d) The result is God. God is bigger than the biggest, hence larger than the Universe. He is smarter than the smartest, so he knows EVERYTHING. He's more creative than the most creative, indeed anything that exists was created by God; even my fingerpaintings are really God's fingerpaintings, planned out in complete detail to the subatomic scale long before I was born. He's perf
...Because they can.
Thankfully, God has made a way of escape through Jesus Christ, His Son (John 3:16). The choice is yours alone to make. Do you really believe that the Creator is âoeThe God who wasn't thereâ as atheists allege. Every watch has a maker, and I assure you that the universe has a Maker as well. It is not only improbable; but impossible that this universe just happened, let alone that it evolved from some chaotic explosion... A BIG BANG! Please, what a joke! Chaos never leads to order. Order can only come from careful planning and meticulous precision, which God has certainly accomplished. It is man that steals, kills, and destroys as Satan wants them too (John 10:10).
So let's get this straight. The Universe is a big, complex place that doesn't show the slightest evidence of actual design or intervention. You assert without proof that it must have been created, even though all the laws of nature based on observation are CONSERVATION LAWS that suggest that NOTHING has ever been created in the history of the Universe itself. Everything that you think of as being the "creation" of something is just preexisting stuff moving around. You have never observed one single thing actually being created -- or destroyed -- only the changing of forms of that which already is. In some very deep sense, your error comes from this -- you misinterpret the actual, literal meaning of the verb "to create" as it applies to every single actual thing you've ever seen or experienced. A potter does not "create" a pot, not in the sense you are using the term to refer to an act of a hypothesized deity. A potter reshapes preexisting clay to -- very temporarily, on a cosmic scale -- have the form of a pot. You are conflating your experience with pots -- one day not there, another day there -- to misapply common language to Universes, forgetting that you've never seen anything actually come out of nothing and have no reason whatsoever to think that it ever has.
This big, complex place, then, is supposed to be like that pot, something shaped by some intelligent hand. You assert it because (implicitly) nothing can have complex shapes unless intelligence produces them. If we ignore for the moment the fact that every snowflake that has ever existed or will ever exist refutes you -- complexity arising out of thoughtless matter interacting with remarkably simple rules -- and grant the premise, then you immediately encounter a consistency issue and problem with recursion. The potter is without doubt more "complex" than the pot he creates. But that (according to you) is why we cannot view the pot as having been produced by a natural process, or the potter as being produced by a natural process. The Universe itself, with all of its apparently natural processes is really really complex, and complex things are NEVER to be found without being put there by intelligence that is even more complex.
If we ignore the long string of unprovable, unfounded assumptions (in most cases, assumptions that are easily refuted by actual examples in physics, chemistry, even formal mathematics) we find that your conclusion -- that God must exist to have been the greater intelligence that designed the Universe that -- through the pure unfolding of natural law -- evolved the potter that -- following the inevitable path of his life determined by those same natural laws -- appeared to "design" a pot that he then assembled out of some stuff that he dug out of the ground which was eventually sold, used for a dozen years, broke, and was then ground over centuries back into dust once again -- is inconsistent. God is more complex than the world, complexity only can happen through intelligent design, therefore God was intelligently designed, therefore God was designed and "created" by a still more complex God and isn't really God. There is no terminus to the chain thus induced -- any God you postulate must always have been "created" by a still smarter, still more powerful and more intellig
There are none who do not believe in Pink Unicorns! How can any man say, who has not travelled to the farthest end of the Universe, that Pink Unicorns do not exist? Indeed, anybody who says so secretly is claiming to BE a Pink Unicorn. Pink Unicorns hate fags and commies so you -- I'm talking to you, you apostatic Pink Unicorn believer wearing the halloween costume -- need to pass draconian laws punishing commies and let us arrest fags and send them against their will to a special school that will teach them to find only members of the opposite sex attractive, and then only within the bounds of holy matrimony. I'm talking about you, Robert De Niro and you, Billy Joel! You claim not to believe in the Pink One's Perfect Horn, but deep in your heart you have seen its Cornute Majesty as the twist in every spiral galaxy, especially those that radiate high in the Pink part of the spectrum.
DON'T BLAME ME, you anunicornists, if the great Pink Unicorn shows up one day and impales you on its Horn of Perfect Justice! It could happen! Seriously! You haven't BEEN to Alpha Centauri -- it could be liberally populated with Pink Unicorns for all you know! I have had a Holy Vision of Pink, and I Know! So sayeth the prophets, and everybody knows that people who wrote stuff down LONG AGO are always right and never made mistakes! Only that liberal commie activity known as "science" makes mistakes -- imagine, insisting on POSITIVE evidence for the existence of Pink Unicorns when the Holy Fathers among the ancients speak of "walking with the Unicorn" and tell of the many miracles performed by the Pinkest of them all. What more evidence do you need?
Oh, and by the way, pay no attention to the deluded fools in that cult over there who claim that Unicorns are not Pink, they are really Blue. Or that group -- Purple Dinosaurs (that walked with men back before the flood) are clearly right up there with Winkie-Tink, thinly disguised Faggery intended to corrupt the morals of our children and distract them from Pink! Besides, they have no evidence to back their claim, as clearly THEIR ancient prophets were just smelly old men who are lying to you to corrupt you. But the one true Pink Unicorn knows all and sees all, peering out from behind every rock and stone in the Universe, and...
What's that? Take your hands off of me, sir! I protest! Well of course I stopped taking that medicine! It was distracting me from my holy duty! I could no longer see Pink when I closed my eyes, my mortal body was in danger of being Holed and the prophets say that sinners who turn their back on the Unicorn will be trampled under hoof for all eternity! Let me go!
I will not be silenced! No! Don't put me in there! No! No! Not the needle! The TRUTH will soon be known! BEWARE, you foul, white jacketed sinners, the Unicorn that comes to trample you and everyone you love in the ni
OK, I'll try again. YOU DON'T. All you see is electrons being "consumed" as they hit the screen, forming the interference pattern.
If you DO look for them as they pass through the slits -- where one can do this without "consuming" them by e.g. putting a conducting loop around the slit that will experience a voltage pulse as the electron passes THROUGH it or by illuminating the volume right behind one of the slits with intense light that can scatter off of the moving electron and hence detect the slit the electron passed though -- then the interference pattern goes away.
This is a fundamental sort of "goes away". It isn't just that we gave a small extra push to the electron, as in principle you can CLASSICALLY make the detection so weak that it wouldn't affect the classical trajectory. It is that the detection itself shifts the PHASE of the electron and hence destroys its coherence with the electron(s) passing through the other slit, so there is no longer any interference.
Also, you can read:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
which both walks through all of this and provides you with references to at least some of the actual experiments that verify it.
It is. The point is that if you measure which slit it passes through, the interference pattern that implies that it passed through both AS A WAVE, not a particle, disappears. The rule for this sort of thing is that if you measure wavelike properties, you don't get a definite particle position/state. If you measure a definite particle position/state, you don't get wavelike behavior any more. This is called complementarity and is the basis of the uncertainty principle. Electrons and photons alike behave the same way. Even at very low intensities where you can effectively observe single photons or electrons AT THE DETECTOR, if you don't look to see which slit they go through you get interference, implying that the electron passed through both as a wave (function). If you do look and measure the slit the photon or electron passes through, no more interference pattern, no more waves.
The electron in some sense isn't in two places at once -- it is "everywhere" at once, but with a low probability, if it has a very well defined momentum and hence wavelength. If you measure it or confine it to some specific location, you do so at the irreducible expense of having a well-defined momentum (and hence wavelength).
I'm actually teaching this stuff right now at the most elementary level. There aren't a lot of good intro level books on it, but I'm using Harris's "Modern Physics", which is at least pretty readable and has some of the real math in it. Beyond intro modern physics books, you can try Wikipedia (often has surprisingly good articles on this sort of thing) or a real quantum textbook. Or two. Or three or four. It takes years to not quite understand quantum mechanics, and an important step along the way is to UNlearn all of the nonsense you "learned" about it in English statements and to concentrate on the consistent mathematical and conceptual formulation of the theory.
rgb
Hey, somebody had to do it. Using English with embedded classical logic to describe quantum phenomena is a waste of time. And even most physicists have never read Schwinger or studied the Nakajima-Zwanzig equation and hence have little idea of how to formally obtain the classical measurement projection in an open system interacting with a classically described statistical bath when the combined closed system is in a stationary state and has no probabilities at all. And then there is relativity and time reversal invariance.
I'm just sitting here, wondering if the back of the envelope computation is dead. When did we get to the point where we could resolve 30+ orders of magnitude effects in the lab? We haven't even -- as far as I know -- experimentally verified whether normal matter gravitation attracts or repels antimatter, which seems like it would be a pretty important first step in building a QFT with gravity or GR, but even that seems beyond us so far.
rgb
"I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today."
So, only really expensive designer brainburning drugs for you, eh? Or is it cheap brain enhancing drugs (he says, sipping his coffee...:-)
rgb
Mod +1. This is the second or third time I've seen summaries of the press announcement, and the first time it has been even obliquely acknowledged that the so called "repeller" is nothing more than a localized lack of PULL, not any sort of actual gravitational "push". -1 to the article itself for being misleading bullshit and creating a "dipole" like an electron and an electron hole create a "dipole" in a uniform neutral metal, no more.
Surely there is nothing surprising about this. People have been doing cosmological simulations for a LONG time with a large number of pointlike objects interacting with GMm/r^2 attractive forces but to simulate galactic evolution and universal evolution from the big bang. The interesting point being that in the center of a uniform mass distribution, there is no net force but nevertheless 1/r^2 forces with any kind of inhomogeneity in the underlying free mass distribution tends to accrete in some places and abandon others, especially if it can inelastically interact and clump together into bound subsystems. This must have been seen in simulations pretty much every time, and should come as no surprise in nature.
Having used the "sweet rm" trick back in the 80's somewhere (with much more limited space, and a cron FIFO groomer) it also doesn't protect you from a wide variety of file corruption issues and overwrites. Remove a file, recreate it, remove it again? Delete two files from different parts of your tree -- e.g. README -- that have the same name? Original file gone (unless you don't just alias rm, you write a very complicated script). If you run out of space and have an alias/script like "flush" to take out the trash and make room for more, it just moves the problem one notch downstream.
With that said, it did save my ass a few times. Then I learned personal discipline, started using version control (SCCS at the time, IIRC) onto a reliable server to not just back up any files of any importance I create but to save reversible strings of revisions back to the Egg, and stopped using my reversible rm altogether after one or two of the disasters it still leaves open.
Moral: Version control with frequent checkins usually leaves your working image itself on your working machine. Keeping the repository on a different machine is already one level of redundancy. Keeping it on a server class machine in a tier 1 or tier 2 facility with reliable, regular backups and RAIDed disk is suddenly very, very, very reliable. As the current incident shows, not perfectly reliable. Human error, multiple disk failures in an array, nuclear war, internal malice or incompetence or just plain accident can still cause data loss, but in this case what is being reported isn't disaster -- they had 6 hour backups! Even though I'm sure there will be some folks who are inconvenienced, MOST of the users will still have usable, current working copies and be out anywhere from zero to a few hours of work. I've been on both sides of the sysadmin aisle in data loss server crashes, and -- they happen. Wise users use a belt AND suspenders to the extent possible lest they find their pants gathered around their ankles one day...
Also the fact that your eyes can see because of the index of refraction of the lens...
Because of dispersion (different frequencies) inside dynamically polarizable materials. Not in a vacuum. In a vacuum, the speed of light is predicted to be -- the speed of light.
Light can be bent by gravitational fields, but the thought is that the bent trajectories are geodesics in bent spacetime, not actual lenses which bend light by slowing it down due to the susceptibility of space.
OK, have to step in here. The map is not the territory, and the idea of a thing is not a thing. If you are saying "God is not a thing, it is an idea" I'd agree with you. But ideas are not in any necessary one-to-one correspondence with the Universe of "things that actually exist", and ideas to the very best of our experience a) are highly complex phenomena contingent on all sorts of material stuff and do not just float around like quantum particles that permeate and surround the Universe (h/t to Terry Pratchett); b) cannot and do not "create" anything, ever. In fact there is no evidence that anything, ever, has been created. The laws of physics are all pretty much constrained by conservation principles (consistent with observation) that state that nothing is ever created, it is all just existing stuff changing form and moving around.
The second thing I'd object to is the idea that anyone at all can "reason" about God in a meaningful or useful way. The first step in such a reasoning process is to choose one's premises, or axioms, or postulates -- the basis for one's eventual "consistent" conclusions. This is precisely the same whether one is reasoning about mathematics, the Universe of stuff that actually exists, or the enormous metaphysical space of pure speculation -- reasoning about pink unicorns, trying to decide if Santa likes hot chocolate with or without a splash of peppermint Schnapps on Christmas eve, how many angels can dance on the head of a standard shirt-packing pin. The premises themselves cannot be proven -- they are PREMISES -- so all reasoning contingent upon the premises is Bullshit in the precise sense that there is (as noted) no necessary one-to-one correspondence with the pattern of consistent results on derives with the very best of intentions and the real world.
The second step in USEFUL reasoning is to seek out objective correspondences between those contingent results AND the real world. To the extent that they are discovered to exist, we strengthen our degree of belief in the conclusions, and by Bayesian reasoning, the premises that led to the conclusions in good correspondence. To the extent that they are contradicted, we at least weaken our degree of belief in the conclusions, and again by inheritance in the premises that led to the contradiction. This is a slight oversimplification as multiple premises contribute to most nontrivial conclusions and it is not necessarily clear which one(s) fail, but there is no doubt that REASON requires reduction of belief in the conclusion itself rather than amplification when there is either no evidence supporting it (but there is evidence supporting competing ideas and arguments) or if the evidence contradicts it.
And here's the rub. The very first step about any reasoning process about God has to begin with the pure assertion that God exists. This is because we have no direct and usable sensory data, no direct "experience" of God the way we have experience of toast, or things falling down when dropped. We have built powerful apparatus that extends the range and sensitivity of our senses and none of it reveals God. We have conducted careful statistical analyses of human experience contingent on things like belief and prayer and behavior and -- outside of obvious stuff that behaving "well" is more likely to make one happy than being a butt in human society -- no phenomena or statistical anomalies are observed that require supernatural explanation. One cannot predict one single thing about the world and how it behaves or outcomes based on religious belief or the asserted premise "God exists for some useful meaning of the word `exists'". To paraphrase, the rain falls on Saint and Sinner alike.
What we CAN do is examine the consequences of BELIEF ITSELF. Believing in something has an enormous impact on human existence. In a sense, our society (or societies!) are defined by their beliefs, their memetic structure, their history, their evolution -- including religious beliefs. Religious beliefs make an enormous set of
Just kidding. Not so much.
Personally, I think we evolved without it when we took to walking upright. A penis bone would have kept all male penises pointing up at the angle of optimum intromission. This would have forced all males to urinate in long rainbow arcs that got piss all over the place in a highly conspicuous way and would have made the penis, sticking out and up right up front, highly vulnerable to all sorts of weapons as tribal man fought one another. Hard to tuck the junk back and out of risk when you are standing if you have to break a bone to do it. Humans are also enormously mutually fertile (roughly 10% of the time) and live a very long time, so long intromission, short intromission, neither one is going to be effective at ensuring "monogamy" and of course arguing that human culture is monogamous even today is pretty much to make a RELIGIOUS argument as the best that can be supported empirically is some mix of serial monogamy, serial polygamy, serial polyandry, and just plain fucking around with a smattering of true "lifetime exclusive" monogamy mixed in, maybe 10 or 20%. Swans may mate for life, but humans are lucky if they mate for dinner, if one follows overt statistics, and even that is probably driven more by religious memes than by "nature". The memes are rather at war with the genes, and different cultures follow different patterns for optimizing mate selection worldwide.
As many above have pointed out, there is little reason to read the entire series "like a novel" from cover to cover, in addition to the fact that yeah, it would take a while to WORK through it like a textbook as opposed to read through it quickly to see what is there. And yeah, there are better books now in profusion on many of the topics covered, although AFAIK there is no book or book series that is as encyclopedic on the subjects he covers.
However, many people will find some of the sections very useful. I personally found "Seminumerical Algorithms" useful indeed when learning about random number generators and testing random number generators. It isn't the last word, and it certainly isn't the latest word as we move into a 64 bit world and beyond, but it is an excellent starting point. In other parts of the series there are other gems or nuggets well worth studying or reading, even if you move on to actual research papers or better books afterwards.
To sum up, it is a useful thing to own if you are doing a lot of very widely spread code development and need to acquire literacy quickly in subjects it covers, even if you are going to end up looking for an O'Reilly text on some of those subjects to get a more modern perspective. Those OR books are probably going to reference, rewrite, and augment Knuth.
Note well that I'm an Old Guy (tm) and actually did write a lot of code in Fortran once in the long ago before abandoning it for C and Unix and beyond. TAOCP was one of the ONLY really good encyclopedic references for people who were NOT CPS majors and who needed to learn about algorithms of one sort or another or some aspect of coding covered in one of the many CPS courses they never took. They (I) didn't need a course with the best textbook of the day -- we needed to get started. Once started, we knew how to learn and go beyond the start. 1.5 cubic feet of shelf space wasn't too high a price to be able to learn something about everything or anything to get started.
Hmmm, your philosophy seems rather familiar, AC. Fortunately I do not need to reply, as you are incapable of reading letters containing angles. But hey, nobody can measure angles, right? Or is that right angles. I forget.