However, you must also understand that some (most? I'm not that clear on the subject) don't believe to be women. They don't believe to be men either. They believe they're 'third' gender.
Those who don't consider themselves to be either would be lumped into a category like "genderqueer" rather than "transsexual". It's interesting how culture plays into gender identity and sexuality, too. Each society has different "bins", categories people can fall into, and you only get a sort of revolution, a breaking of the norms, when the limits of said categories are too confining for enough of the people in the society. The standard of course, at a minimum, is straight male and straight female. But many societies have had more. Two examples among thousands:
1) Historic (and to a very tiny degree, modern) Albania had the "sworn virgins". These were people born as woman who would swear an oath to never sleep with a man. They then would live in men's clothing, could marry women, had men's property rights, and so forth; they were legally treated as men. There was no reverse situation. The concept was created to deal with families who only had female heirs, and the person would often swear at a young age, but some people would swear later in life, so there's some mix between "obligation" and "wanting" in the concept.
2) The Samoan Fa'afafine is people who are anatomically male but live as women and are fully treated as women by society. It's so accepted that it's rare for parents to try to discourage an anatomically male child from living as a Fa'afafine. It is a much more informal concept.
When you look at societies like that, you find that a lot of people living as the third gender identify specifically as the third gender. Some, however, do not, but said "third gender" is the closest that's accepted in their society to how they feel - for example, a person who is simply gay, or simply transsexual but not attracted to members of the same anatomic sex, is put in a bind. In some cases, being seen specifically as a member of the opposite anatomic sex, rather than a third gender, is very important to the person. And of course, rarely in societies do you see matching pairs of concepts - there may be an accepted third gender for anatomic males or anatomic females without an equivalent for the other.
A really extreme example of people being forced into specific categories from modern society can be found in modern Iran. Transsexuality is accepted in Iran - not to a great degree (although to a surprising degree) among the populace, but fully accepted within law (actually, it's handled better in Iranian law than in most western nations). Homosexuality, however, is punishable by death. So there can be significant pressure for gay individuals to physically alter their sex.
The fundamental question I have is if it's possible to determine entanglement relationships between particles in the system for less energy than independently measuring each particle
Whether you're measuring an entangled particle or the particle itself, it fundamentally requires more energy than you gain by operating the demon. It makes no difference whether entangled or not.
Entropy of a closed system must always rise, at any scale. It's just that measuring entropy can get kind of nuanced at the atomic scale, as this team has well shown.
It is not inherent that you "create sound, heat, crack bricks, and break mortar free of bricks" in a nanoscale collision (akin to the collisions constantly occurring under your feet when you stand). Collisions at the atomic level can be (and usually are) 100% elastic. The impact is changing the kinetic energy of the particle into bond strain in the wall, which then springs back with no generation of heat or other loss unless it was a very high velocity impact.
Work (change in energy) is force times distance. The barrier is not moving, hence, no work is being done to it, any more than you standing on the floor is doing work to it because of gravity. The particle is retaining its kinetic energy, just redirecting it - again, no change in energy. The energy input comes in from Brownian Motion - the heat (motion) of the particles on which the particle is intercting. But that's seemingly a violation of the 2nd law at hand. The missing piece of the picture is the entropy embodied by the information used to decide whether to lower the gates.
This isn't about antiparticles; it's about information being exchangeable for energy.
This is really fascinating in that they've actually implemented Maxwell's Demon. A bit of backstory: Maxwell's Demon is a thought experiment about there being two chambers with a tiny, atom-sized demon sitting guarding an atom-sized gate between them. If there's a high-energy particle coming, he open's the gate. If there's a low-energy particle, he lowers the gate. Hence, you end up doing work (pumping heat) without a relevant source of energy (since there's no realistic constraints on the mass of the demon or the gate, they can be discounted). Entropy is going in the wrong direction. The question is: would such a thing work, violating the laws of physics, and if not, why?
The solution was that to know when to open the gate, the demon would have to measure the incoming particles. And it turns out that the entropy change involved in the measurement is more than the gain from what the demon is doing. But then later a hole in this argument was pointed out: if you have information on quantum states stored in a "memory", the demon doesn't need to measure the particles. But since memory can't be infinite, at some point you must cause the entropy change that the information storage is hiding. Information is basically acting as a form of energy.
Here, from the sound of it, they've actually implemented that in the real world, which I find just fascinating.
Lol, I'm used to it myself. That's Slashdot for ya'.;)
Heh, I'm helping develop the computer systems for the new Icelandic branch of the Pirate Party (we're fortunate, as our founder is already a member of parliament, so we've instantly got representation - yeay!). So I painted my nails as such for the meeting. I usually try to do stuff like that - for example, one time when I was meeting with a group of physicists to discuss an idea of mine for using anodized aluminum oxide templates to produce nanoscale capacitors, I painted my nails with the probability distribution function of spin-0 particle in 1 dimension. Nail pens are just awesome;)
I don't think that "First time submitter KateKintail" was planning to wear a tie. I mean, she could, but...
Kate: consider a geeky mug on your desk (I have ":w! saves") and geeky accessories (earrings, necklaces, bracelets, etc - I even have a purse made of computer-keyboard keys). You can also totally geek out on your fingernails with nail pens. Mine right now have the Pirate Party logo.
I read that as "A kid could go up to the moon on a T-rex" and thought for a minute that Palmer has been chatting with Musk, billionaire-to-billionare, about trying to create the Most Awesome Thing Ever(TM).
The real goal would be twofold: the historic and the modern.
From the historic side, chemicals have been recovered from dinosaur bones, not just mineralization. While DNA recovery is unlikely, one can identify the remains of proteins and other compounds and get a sense of what chemicals the dinosaurs were producing and in what quantities. The cellular structures of some dinosaur bone and even soft tissue is known and inferences can be made thusly about how different genes were being expressed on the microscopic scale. And of course we have a pretty good sense of how they were expressed on the macroscopic scale, in particular regarding bone and what we can infer from them about tendon and muscle.
From the modern side, one can sequence as diverse of a range of avian clades as possible. You can then reverse-populate a genetic tree, getting a good sense of out what is old and what is a modern mutation. This should enable backpopulating avians back to their latest genetic bottleneck. You won't be able to pin down a single specific genome, and a number of what you come out with as "possibilities" won't have been the actuality, while some actual genes may have since been altogether lost, but you should be able to figure out a lot. You could likewise use data from reptiles, in particular crocodilians, to try to infer some pre-dinosaur genetic datapoints which you could blend with your avian results to narrow down the possibiltiies or add more genetic diversity. Lastly, you have the option of reactivating genes that have been clearly broken by obvious mutation sequences if you feel it necessary and if the data suggests that there's a chance they might have been active in the past. Combining the two concepts, for example, if your inference from birds comes up with a broken gene at their bottleneck and your inference from reptiles comes up with a working gene at its bottleneck, then the gene broke at some point between when crocodilians branched off from what later became the dinosaurs, and when birds branched off from the raptors. So not only do you have the option of using or not using the gene, but you have the option of using it for older dinosaur species you're trying to recreate and not using it for newer species.
Combining this all, you can basically mix the range of known possible genes with the desired expression patterns of those genes and their known family trees to try to recreate species from the past. Perfection? Far from it. But I bet a well-funded project could get some interesting results.
The main message of "Airframe" was "The media is evil lying scum" The main message of "The Andromeda Strain" was "Scientists shouldn't do anything experimental and I am an idiot when it comes to biology."
I'm sorry, but do you want *no* stations in urban areas, even though there *are* urban areas in the US? How do you propose the validity of data from stations in urban areas be evaluated without reference stations in urban areas?
Indeed, that's why there is the (growing) Climate Reference Network. The USCRN is a smaller subset of stations which are carefully chosen in terms of siting and instrumentation and carefully monitored in a way that couldn't realistically be done with all stations. The results from the USCRN are then compared with the broader results in both localized and aggregate comparisons and used A) to help refine the adjustment algorithms used to detect and compensate for localization biases, and B) to determine the accuracy of the aggregate results.
What makes you think that Dr. Horrible would be a bad fit with the under-18 female crowd? Since when are romantic musicals starring guys like Nathan Fillion and Neil Patrick Harris not a good fit for under-18 female viewers? Anyway, CW's prime demographic is ostensibly 18-34-old women.
Would you be kind enough to define how you are using the term "climatologist"?
Do I really need to link wikipedia or a dictionary for you? It's not a vague term; it's a very specific term. A climatologist is a person who studies climate - aka, long-term changes in averages of weather (weather being short-term fluctuations in things like temperature, precipitation, etc). Climate is the signal, weather is the noise. The difference between a climatologist and a meteorologist is the difference between a paleontologist and a biologist.
The paper you link to is dated 2010. I therefore doubt whether it debunks the paper in the story
Correct, it debunks Watt's previous claims. Which is why he had to change them. And will almost certainly get debunked again. He's only ever had one paper published with his name on it, and it amusingly totally undercuts his own claims, arguing that there's no statistical difference in warming trends between good and poor sites and that if anything the global warming trend could be higher than the surface record.
Oh and as regards peer-review, this is an important part of he scientific process, but it is fallible because of the heavy human subjectivity aspect.
Because something is not perfect, it's irrelevant? Is that what you're trying to say? If I write something on a napkin, it's just as good as if experts in a field meticulously review all of the claims of a carefully constructed and controlled study?
In the case of climatology, as documented in the climate-gate emails, peer-reveiw has been effectively subverted by AGW supporters
Which are, of course, un-reviewed claims, and totally distort the picture (the reason for the adjustments and how they're tested was just discussed in the post right above yours - to sum up, people looking at the GISS dataset aren't idiots and know about the various ways station data can be biased, and have automated algorithms to detect and correct for bias - algorithms which have been rigorously tested by peer-reviewed research, and it should be noted, actually yield a lower warming trend than the raw data, which also shows a greater rural warming trend than urban).
Slashdot Mirror
Those who don't consider themselves to be either would be lumped into a category like "genderqueer" rather than "transsexual". It's interesting how culture plays into gender identity and sexuality, too. Each society has different "bins", categories people can fall into, and you only get a sort of revolution, a breaking of the norms, when the limits of said categories are too confining for enough of the people in the society. The standard of course, at a minimum, is straight male and straight female. But many societies have had more. Two examples among thousands:
1) Historic (and to a very tiny degree, modern) Albania had the "sworn virgins". These were people born as woman who would swear an oath to never sleep with a man. They then would live in men's clothing, could marry women, had men's property rights, and so forth; they were legally treated as men. There was no reverse situation. The concept was created to deal with families who only had female heirs, and the person would often swear at a young age, but some people would swear later in life, so there's some mix between "obligation" and "wanting" in the concept.
2) The Samoan Fa'afafine is people who are anatomically male but live as women and are fully treated as women by society. It's so accepted that it's rare for parents to try to discourage an anatomically male child from living as a Fa'afafine. It is a much more informal concept.
When you look at societies like that, you find that a lot of people living as the third gender identify specifically as the third gender. Some, however, do not, but said "third gender" is the closest that's accepted in their society to how they feel - for example, a person who is simply gay, or simply transsexual but not attracted to members of the same anatomic sex, is put in a bind. In some cases, being seen specifically as a member of the opposite anatomic sex, rather than a third gender, is very important to the person. And of course, rarely in societies do you see matching pairs of concepts - there may be an accepted third gender for anatomic males or anatomic females without an equivalent for the other.
A really extreme example of people being forced into specific categories from modern society can be found in modern Iran. Transsexuality is accepted in Iran - not to a great degree (although to a surprising degree) among the populace, but fully accepted within law (actually, it's handled better in Iranian law than in most western nations). Homosexuality, however, is punishable by death. So there can be significant pressure for gay individuals to physically alter their sex.
Whether you're measuring an entangled particle or the particle itself, it fundamentally requires more energy than you gain by operating the demon. It makes no difference whether entangled or not.
Not in a closed system you can't.
Entropy of a closed system must always rise, at any scale. It's just that measuring entropy can get kind of nuanced at the atomic scale, as this team has well shown.
It is not inherent that you "create sound, heat, crack bricks, and break mortar free of bricks" in a nanoscale collision (akin to the collisions constantly occurring under your feet when you stand). Collisions at the atomic level can be (and usually are) 100% elastic. The impact is changing the kinetic energy of the particle into bond strain in the wall, which then springs back with no generation of heat or other loss unless it was a very high velocity impact.
Anyone remember the Toyota Simulator which went public after the brake pedal / floor mat issue? ;)
(Apparently the site is dead, here's what you saw when you went there (on loop): link)
Work (change in energy) is force times distance. The barrier is not moving, hence, no work is being done to it, any more than you standing on the floor is doing work to it because of gravity. The particle is retaining its kinetic energy, just redirecting it - again, no change in energy. The energy input comes in from Brownian Motion - the heat (motion) of the particles on which the particle is intercting. But that's seemingly a violation of the 2nd law at hand. The missing piece of the picture is the entropy embodied by the information used to decide whether to lower the gates.
This isn't about antiparticles; it's about information being exchangeable for energy.
This is really fascinating in that they've actually implemented Maxwell's Demon. A bit of backstory: Maxwell's Demon is a thought experiment about there being two chambers with a tiny, atom-sized demon sitting guarding an atom-sized gate between them. If there's a high-energy particle coming, he open's the gate. If there's a low-energy particle, he lowers the gate. Hence, you end up doing work (pumping heat) without a relevant source of energy (since there's no realistic constraints on the mass of the demon or the gate, they can be discounted). Entropy is going in the wrong direction. The question is: would such a thing work, violating the laws of physics, and if not, why?
The solution was that to know when to open the gate, the demon would have to measure the incoming particles. And it turns out that the entropy change involved in the measurement is more than the gain from what the demon is doing. But then later a hole in this argument was pointed out: if you have information on quantum states stored in a "memory", the demon doesn't need to measure the particles. But since memory can't be infinite, at some point you must cause the entropy change that the information storage is hiding. Information is basically acting as a form of energy.
Here, from the sound of it, they've actually implemented that in the real world, which I find just fascinating.
Lol, I'm used to it myself. That's Slashdot for ya'. ;)
Heh, I'm helping develop the computer systems for the new Icelandic branch of the Pirate Party (we're fortunate, as our founder is already a member of parliament, so we've instantly got representation - yeay!). So I painted my nails as such for the meeting. I usually try to do stuff like that - for example, one time when I was meeting with a group of physicists to discuss an idea of mine for using anodized aluminum oxide templates to produce nanoscale capacitors, I painted my nails with the probability distribution function of spin-0 particle in 1 dimension. Nail pens are just awesome ;)
Thinkgeek is always great for accessories - everything from an anatomic-heart necklace to a sundial ring.
No, I believe that the lack of common sense was not making explicit a particular detail which Slashdotters almost never never assume.
I don't think that "First time submitter KateKintail" was planning to wear a tie. I mean, she could, but...
Kate: consider a geeky mug on your desk (I have ":w! saves") and geeky accessories (earrings, necklaces, bracelets, etc - I even have a purse made of computer-keyboard keys). You can also totally geek out on your fingernails with nail pens. Mine right now have the Pirate Party logo.
There's no reason one has to pay attention to the views of anyone. If they're going to be an arse, they deserve any "being ignored" that they get.
I read that as "A kid could go up to the moon on a T-rex" and thought for a minute that Palmer has been chatting with Musk, billionaire-to-billionare, about trying to create the Most Awesome Thing Ever(TM).
The real goal would be twofold: the historic and the modern.
From the historic side, chemicals have been recovered from dinosaur bones, not just mineralization. While DNA recovery is unlikely, one can identify the remains of proteins and other compounds and get a sense of what chemicals the dinosaurs were producing and in what quantities. The cellular structures of some dinosaur bone and even soft tissue is known and inferences can be made thusly about how different genes were being expressed on the microscopic scale. And of course we have a pretty good sense of how they were expressed on the macroscopic scale, in particular regarding bone and what we can infer from them about tendon and muscle.
From the modern side, one can sequence as diverse of a range of avian clades as possible. You can then reverse-populate a genetic tree, getting a good sense of out what is old and what is a modern mutation. This should enable backpopulating avians back to their latest genetic bottleneck. You won't be able to pin down a single specific genome, and a number of what you come out with as "possibilities" won't have been the actuality, while some actual genes may have since been altogether lost, but you should be able to figure out a lot. You could likewise use data from reptiles, in particular crocodilians, to try to infer some pre-dinosaur genetic datapoints which you could blend with your avian results to narrow down the possibiltiies or add more genetic diversity. Lastly, you have the option of reactivating genes that have been clearly broken by obvious mutation sequences if you feel it necessary and if the data suggests that there's a chance they might have been active in the past. Combining the two concepts, for example, if your inference from birds comes up with a broken gene at their bottleneck and your inference from reptiles comes up with a working gene at its bottleneck, then the gene broke at some point between when crocodilians branched off from what later became the dinosaurs, and when birds branched off from the raptors. So not only do you have the option of using or not using the gene, but you have the option of using it for older dinosaur species you're trying to recreate and not using it for newer species.
Combining this all, you can basically mix the range of known possible genes with the desired expression patterns of those genes and their known family trees to try to recreate species from the past. Perfection? Far from it. But I bet a well-funded project could get some interesting results.
Let me add a couple more:
The main message of "Airframe" was "The media is evil lying scum"
The main message of "The Andromeda Strain" was "Scientists shouldn't do anything experimental and I am an idiot when it comes to biology."
I don't know why anyone would care what Crichton has to say. Sorry, but he's just a petty little man.
It's been analyzed over and over (see the different inquiries listed therein). It's rubbish.
I don't think you know what the word "extraordinary" means. If it's easy to do, then it's "ordinary", not "extraordinary".
"Clearly" according to what? Watts's claims which never pass peer-review?
I'm sorry, but do you want *no* stations in urban areas, even though there *are* urban areas in the US? How do you propose the validity of data from stations in urban areas be evaluated without reference stations in urban areas?
Indeed, that's why there is the (growing) Climate Reference Network. The USCRN is a smaller subset of stations which are carefully chosen in terms of siting and instrumentation and carefully monitored in a way that couldn't realistically be done with all stations. The results from the USCRN are then compared with the broader results in both localized and aggregate comparisons and used A) to help refine the adjustment algorithms used to detect and compensate for localization biases, and B) to determine the accuracy of the aggregate results.
What makes you think that Dr. Horrible would be a bad fit with the under-18 female crowd? Since when are romantic musicals starring guys like Nathan Fillion and Neil Patrick Harris not a good fit for under-18 female viewers? Anyway, CW's prime demographic is ostensibly 18-34-old women.
Do I really need to link wikipedia or a dictionary for you? It's not a vague term; it's a very specific term. A climatologist is a person who studies climate - aka, long-term changes in averages of weather (weather being short-term fluctuations in things like temperature, precipitation, etc). Climate is the signal, weather is the noise. The difference between a climatologist and a meteorologist is the difference between a paleontologist and a biologist.
Correct, it debunks Watt's previous claims. Which is why he had to change them. And will almost certainly get debunked again. He's only ever had one paper published with his name on it, and it amusingly totally undercuts his own claims, arguing that there's no statistical difference in warming trends between good and poor sites and that if anything the global warming trend could be higher than the surface record.
Because something is not perfect, it's irrelevant? Is that what you're trying to say? If I write something on a napkin, it's just as good as if experts in a field meticulously review all of the claims of a carefully constructed and controlled study?
That claim is absolute rubbish.
If you don't call receiving nearly six figures "funding", then the term "funding" has no meaning.
The science of climate change.
Which are, of course, un-reviewed claims, and totally distort the picture (the reason for the adjustments and how they're tested was just discussed in the post right above yours - to sum up, people looking at the GISS dataset aren't idiots and know about the various ways station data can be biased, and have automated algorithms to detect and correct for bias - algorithms which have been rigorously tested by peer-reviewed research, and it should be noted, actually yield a lower warming trend than the raw data, which also shows a greater rural warming trend than urban).