Yep. There are five basic types of nuclear emission: proton emission (rare, but occurs in e.g. cobalt-53 decay), electron emission (also called beta minus decay, occurs when a proton becomes a neutron), positron emission (also called beta plus decay, occurs when a neutron becomes a proton), neutron emission (e.g. helium-5), and EM ray emission (such as gamma or X-ray emission; these are the result of much more high-powered events.)
However, several different kinds of more complex things can happen. During a nuclear chemistry event, essentially what happens is that all of the baryons in the nucleus have been jammed together by a violent impact, and through strong and weak nuclear force interactions, they stumble randomly onto a stable energy state. Sometimes the result of this is a relatively small decay, such as the generation of a lepton (beta decay), but with larger nuclei, multi-baryonic discharges, especially the rather stable alpha particle, get ejected.
In most nuclear chemistry scenarios, that's what actually gets generated, not a happy helium atom with two electrons. (And I think in this case it's actually alpha decay that's occurring, so there may not be any free electrons kicking around.) Alpha particles are very obnoxious to nearby matter because of their habit of stealing electrons—as one of the most electronegative elements on the periodic table, they're extremely good at pilfering them from other atoms. (Although you'd have to swallow a lump of radioactive metal in order to actually hurt yourself significantly with alpha radiation, we do have to use shielding that absorbs the alpha particles in order to make them totally safe.)
To my knowledge, there's been no effort to generate helium on a commercial scale through alpha decay under controlled conditions. However, (almost) all naturally-occurring helium on Earth actually comes from alpha decay underground of heavy elements; we isolate it as a byproduct of gas pockets found during mining operations. Presumably as helium shortages become more serious we'll start investigating artificial means of generating it through nuclear chemistry, which will surely sound utterly perplexing (and squeaky) from a Renaissance-era alchemist's perspective.
As long as we don't run out of the other stuff, anyway. The Earth's crust contains about 5x as much Boron as Uranium, but we already use quite a lot of it for other applications and are extracting it at almost seventy times the rate.
Actually I'm more militant—I think embedding a language is still pretty kludgy. I'd opt for writing a new language that replaces the whole Make syntax, rather than $(encrusting everything). (But I'm not really a fan of the syntax of shell scripting, so admittedly I'm a bit biased.)
Well put. I haven't had the displeasure of working with huge makefiles personally, and I am quite fond of the Lisp language family, but it doesn't make sense to me to put it into a build system, and the tab magic thing is slightly Turing tarpit worthy. Maybe it's time for a classic fork of 3.x?
Britain is just the one island. The "Great" part is to distinguish it from so-called "Lesser" Britain, which is Brittany, a chunk of France. (And this, I gather, is how people feel about that.)
Wikipedia is quick to point out that, since there's more than one grocer guilty of that particular offence, it's properly referred to as a grocers' apostrophe. (And now I, Zoidberg, will make with the oh-ing and the snapping.)
Yes, but what would distinguish it from other potential shows featuring strongly-worded email-at-desk action is that the people doing it would be completely fucking unbearably obnoxious self-entitled arsebuckets. Or, at least employed, by them. So it'd really be more like a reality show.
Because the people who write those sort of languages and the people who write the languages you're stuck using in the name of performance won't talk to each other and are essentially on opposite sides of the holy war of pure vs. applied mathematics.
I cannot, for the life of me, think of the last time I wrote a program where I didn't have to rearrange a simple mathematical expression like that at least once. Unless we're all writing text adventures and parsers now?
Okay. Let's examine a person who obsessively builds wealth by providing value and expecting compensation. Isn't that just ransoming your own ability? You're essentially saying "I could do all of these wonderful things for everyone, but I won't, because I believe I need recognition for my actions in the form of these many little rectangles of paper that I may or may not someday use to reward someone else for the same thing."
On its own, this is the fast road to total economic deflation; people stop exchanging goods and services because they lose the ability to, necessitating inventions like bracketed income tax and programmed inflation simply to keep the system stable. The economy may not even be growing if the products are perishables like food, and yet the scales continually tip themselves towards exhaustion. (The sole exception is when a company's employees are its entire and only customer base and the money just circulates back and forth, never growing or shrinking due to interaction with the outside world.)
I would still say that a university overcharging in its food facilities (which they inevitably seem to do) qualifies as immoderate, since the whole campaign amounts to a significant profit; it's merely distributed, as with most sophisticated forms of money-extraction, e.g. high-frequency trading.
Question: all of the regions on that map (even when zooming in) appear to be either average or above-average. What's the average calibrated against if there aren't any below-average data points? Is the rest of London really slightly-below-average enough to counterbalance the mess in the middle?
If you remember the blatant IBM marketing material that was interspersed with the Jeopardy episodes, they had planned from the start for Watson to be scalable (one of the first applications was medical literature search)—and if you remember the episodes themselves, you'd realise that it's a tad silly to suggest it couldn't handle cases with zero or multiple answers, since it performs Bayesian reasoning on a huge pool of possible hits and simply announced the best one.
But Watson isn't, wasn't, and would never make sense as a simple search engine like Google; it's more like Ask Jeeves in its intended use; the internet is its source text. And do keep in mind that TFS even suggests performing a Google-style search as a fallback mode. (You did actually read something about this before posting, right?)
More importantly, was this headline conceived specifically to foil machine-learning methods for inferring meaning from context? This seems profound in its poignancy.
It's basically like asking Google to set the evil bit when they poll your data. I am mesmerized that the MIT Media Lab would turn out something so obviously incapable of disrupting the current ecosystem.
There's an old machine learning technique called genetic programming, which consists of randomly trying to find the correct algorithm to solve a problem. It's infeasible for large problems, but I've seen an example of using it to find Newton's law of universal gravitation. The raw result was a hilariously overcomplicated equation full of redundant multiplication and division operations, but it showed a real, meaningful evolutionary process. Just because a program's insane doesn't mean it's disqualified! (And as for engineers, remember Weinberg's Second Law: If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.)
Anyway, there are a lot of analogies that are easily grasped to a computer expert that have significant value in understanding biology, even if they're not perfect—I've been working for a while on comparing chromatin modelling to disk seek time optimization. It doesn't really seem to break down until the focus is on actual networks, although there seems to be no shortage of design patterns in use.
Sort of... but the reality is that the core of how cells work is directly analogous to the hardware/software distinction in a computer (in fact, they're Turing-complete), so stretching things into a car metaphor is much harder to do—try explaining the contents of a typical Unix box's task list in terms of types of vehicles you see on a road, and you'll see how pointless it is.
Slashdot Mirror
The first thing that comes to your mind when someone brings up face-to-face family interaction is violent feuding? You may want to get that looked at.
Yep. There are five basic types of nuclear emission: proton emission (rare, but occurs in e.g. cobalt-53 decay), electron emission (also called beta minus decay, occurs when a proton becomes a neutron), positron emission (also called beta plus decay, occurs when a neutron becomes a proton), neutron emission (e.g. helium-5), and EM ray emission (such as gamma or X-ray emission; these are the result of much more high-powered events.)
However, several different kinds of more complex things can happen. During a nuclear chemistry event, essentially what happens is that all of the baryons in the nucleus have been jammed together by a violent impact, and through strong and weak nuclear force interactions, they stumble randomly onto a stable energy state. Sometimes the result of this is a relatively small decay, such as the generation of a lepton (beta decay), but with larger nuclei, multi-baryonic discharges, especially the rather stable alpha particle, get ejected.
In most nuclear chemistry scenarios, that's what actually gets generated, not a happy helium atom with two electrons. (And I think in this case it's actually alpha decay that's occurring, so there may not be any free electrons kicking around.) Alpha particles are very obnoxious to nearby matter because of their habit of stealing electrons—as one of the most electronegative elements on the periodic table, they're extremely good at pilfering them from other atoms. (Although you'd have to swallow a lump of radioactive metal in order to actually hurt yourself significantly with alpha radiation, we do have to use shielding that absorbs the alpha particles in order to make them totally safe.)
To my knowledge, there's been no effort to generate helium on a commercial scale through alpha decay under controlled conditions. However, (almost) all naturally-occurring helium on Earth actually comes from alpha decay underground of heavy elements; we isolate it as a byproduct of gas pockets found during mining operations. Presumably as helium shortages become more serious we'll start investigating artificial means of generating it through nuclear chemistry, which will surely sound utterly perplexing (and squeaky) from a Renaissance-era alchemist's perspective.
As long as we don't run out of the other stuff, anyway. The Earth's crust contains about 5x as much Boron as Uranium, but we already use quite a lot of it for other applications and are extracting it at almost seventy times the rate.
Actually I'm more militant—I think embedding a language is still pretty kludgy. I'd opt for writing a new language that replaces the whole Make syntax, rather than $(encrusting everything). (But I'm not really a fan of the syntax of shell scripting, so admittedly I'm a bit biased.)
Well put. I haven't had the displeasure of working with huge makefiles personally, and I am quite fond of the Lisp language family, but it doesn't make sense to me to put it into a build system, and the tab magic thing is slightly Turing tarpit worthy. Maybe it's time for a classic fork of 3.x?
Britain is just the one island. The "Great" part is to distinguish it from so-called "Lesser" Britain, which is Brittany, a chunk of France. (And this, I gather, is how people feel about that.)
Wikipedia is quick to point out that, since there's more than one grocer guilty of that particular offence, it's properly referred to as a grocers' apostrophe. (And now I, Zoidberg, will make with the oh-ing and the snapping.)
Yes, but what would distinguish it from other potential shows featuring strongly-worded email-at-desk action is that the people doing it would be completely fucking unbearably obnoxious self-entitled arsebuckets. Or, at least employed, by them. So it'd really be more like a reality show.
Mumble mumble, this guy seems to get it, therefore blame Reaganism.
The best part about Five Year Plans is that, like other strawman arguments, if they fail you can always make up another one.
Because the people who write those sort of languages and the people who write the languages you're stuck using in the name of performance won't talk to each other and are essentially on opposite sides of the holy war of pure vs. applied mathematics.
I cannot, for the life of me, think of the last time I wrote a program where I didn't have to rearrange a simple mathematical expression like that at least once. Unless we're all writing text adventures and parsers now?
Okay. Let's examine a person who obsessively builds wealth by providing value and expecting compensation. Isn't that just ransoming your own ability? You're essentially saying "I could do all of these wonderful things for everyone, but I won't, because I believe I need recognition for my actions in the form of these many little rectangles of paper that I may or may not someday use to reward someone else for the same thing."
On its own, this is the fast road to total economic deflation; people stop exchanging goods and services because they lose the ability to, necessitating inventions like bracketed income tax and programmed inflation simply to keep the system stable. The economy may not even be growing if the products are perishables like food, and yet the scales continually tip themselves towards exhaustion. (The sole exception is when a company's employees are its entire and only customer base and the money just circulates back and forth, never growing or shrinking due to interaction with the outside world.)
I would still say that a university overcharging in its food facilities (which they inevitably seem to do) qualifies as immoderate, since the whole campaign amounts to a significant profit; it's merely distributed, as with most sophisticated forms of money-extraction, e.g. high-frequency trading.
Question: all of the regions on that map (even when zooming in) appear to be either average or above-average. What's the average calibrated against if there aren't any below-average data points? Is the rest of London really slightly-below-average enough to counterbalance the mess in the middle?
If you remember the blatant IBM marketing material that was interspersed with the Jeopardy episodes, they had planned from the start for Watson to be scalable (one of the first applications was medical literature search)—and if you remember the episodes themselves, you'd realise that it's a tad silly to suggest it couldn't handle cases with zero or multiple answers, since it performs Bayesian reasoning on a huge pool of possible hits and simply announced the best one.
But Watson isn't, wasn't, and would never make sense as a simple search engine like Google; it's more like Ask Jeeves in its intended use; the internet is its source text. And do keep in mind that TFS even suggests performing a Google-style search as a fallback mode. (You did actually read something about this before posting, right?)
More importantly, was this headline conceived specifically to foil machine-learning methods for inferring meaning from context? This seems profound in its poignancy.
Of course, it's wrong.
It's basically like asking Google to set the evil bit when they poll your data. I am mesmerized that the MIT Media Lab would turn out something so obviously incapable of disrupting the current ecosystem.
Facebook makes about $16/year/user in English-speaking North America—and it's believed that about 10% of all web traffic is ad-blocked. I'm guessing there are some other people at Facebook who are aware of this situation!
Alas, your cat lacks the capacity for it. As does mine. (*thunk*)
There's an old machine learning technique called genetic programming, which consists of randomly trying to find the correct algorithm to solve a problem. It's infeasible for large problems, but I've seen an example of using it to find Newton's law of universal gravitation. The raw result was a hilariously overcomplicated equation full of redundant multiplication and division operations, but it showed a real, meaningful evolutionary process. Just because a program's insane doesn't mean it's disqualified! (And as for engineers, remember Weinberg's Second Law: If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.)
Anyway, there are a lot of analogies that are easily grasped to a computer expert that have significant value in understanding biology, even if they're not perfect—I've been working for a while on comparing chromatin modelling to disk seek time optimization. It doesn't really seem to break down until the focus is on actual networks, although there seems to be no shortage of design patterns in use.
Still thinking about this one. Will get back to you sooner or later.
Funny you should mention that. Guess what Nokia was doing before Elop showed up?
Sort of... but the reality is that the core of how cells work is directly analogous to the hardware/software distinction in a computer (in fact, they're Turing-complete), so stretching things into a car metaphor is much harder to do—try explaining the contents of a typical Unix box's task list in terms of types of vehicles you see on a road, and you'll see how pointless it is.
Sure; I've just given an explanation in response to this somewhat more sceptical post.