Slashdot Mirror


User: Americium

Americium's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
456
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 456

  1. Re:Concusion detection tech on NIH Neuroscientists: Junior Seau Had Brain Disease Caused By Hits To the Head · · Score: 1

    If statistics work, those numbers are very comparable. 11.3 concussions / 100 player-seasons = 11.3% concussions per player per season. I don't know how I could make it more simple to see the equality of those statements.

  2. Re:Concusion detection tech on NIH Neuroscientists: Junior Seau Had Brain Disease Caused By Hits To the Head · · Score: 1

    How can you start the discussion that football is too dangerous to partake in by the millions. You cannot convincingly get across the point that this sport causes more suffering than joy created by spectating. This is what the sensors are for, gathering scientific data showing the causes of future mental issues. Then the discussion can begin.

    Stopping multiple concussions from occurring within a short time will stop unnecessary injury, as you suggest, so there will be immediate gains.

  3. Re:Concusion detection tech on NIH Neuroscientists: Junior Seau Had Brain Disease Caused By Hits To the Head · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's less, but not by much.

    11.3% for high school rugby

    15.3% for high school football

    Professional injuries don't bother me nearly as much as the amount of injuries that occur in high school and even earlier. I don't see how you could reasonable argue that either concussion rate is acceptable at all, and the uncertainties in these studies actually overlap.

  4. Re:better explanation on Quantum Gas Goes Below Absolute Zero · · Score: 1

    Isn't this an unstable state, it wouldn't last for long? The experiment in the article claimed to have made an unstable state, similar to the one you describe, stable.

  5. Re:Dark Energy on Quantum Gas Goes Below Absolute Zero · · Score: 2, Informative

    Could we even answer that question without an absolute reference frame in an infinite universe with gravitational attractions from just about everywhere?

    And you go on like this, but the universe is expanding and accelerating away from us in all directions and there is no absolute reference frame, yet GR works just fine. Dark energy is responsible for this and was put into the equation as the cosmological constant by Einstein himself, although he removed it and it wasn't put back in until dark energy was discovered in the 90s.

  6. Re:better explanation on Quantum Gas Goes Below Absolute Zero · · Score: 1

    Temperature ... derivative of energy with respect to entropy.

    Absolute zero is the temperature at which there is no energy left in the system.

    Are these two separate definitions, because the derivative being zero does not imply the function to be zero.

  7. Re:better explanation on Quantum Gas Goes Below Absolute Zero · · Score: 1

    If you flip the magnetic field they will be in an unstable state and therefore all flip, perhaps completely randomly, so as to produce the infinite temperature you speak of.

    The entire point of this experiment was to keep the unstable state, stable, which they call negative temperature.

  8. Re:Nobody with a clue is surprised on Violation of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle · · Score: 1

    I see your point, the encryption only holds true if quantum mechanics is correct.

  9. Re:Magic on Violation of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle · · Score: 2

    But could it have been hearts? No, it was actually a spades card the whole time, you just didn't know. It had the property of being a spades the entire time (a hidden variable). Could you spin flip his card to a hearts and have yours change to a spade faster than light? No. Quantum mechanics however works this way, although you still cannot transfer information faster than light, and there is no property (hidden variable) that tells you what it was before the measurement was made. Measuring the spin on a different axis will also give you non classical results in these entangled states.

  10. Re:Magic on Violation of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Feynman's path integrals are over all space, or all paths, but are of the wave function. Bell's proof showed that any hidden variables would produce different results when measurements are taken, or Feynman's path integrals calculated. So no, hidden variables do not exist. Thinking about whether the particle is actually spin up or spin down before measurements are taken is meaningless, as quantum mechanics only give probabilities of the outcome of a measurement using the wave function to calculate these probabilities. It actually says nothing at all about the particle before measurements are taken.

  11. Re:Nobody with a clue is surprised on Violation of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle · · Score: 1

    That's what quantum encryption is used to exchange.

  12. Re:Nobody with a clue is surprised on Violation of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle · · Score: 1

    The whole basis of quantum encryption was mathematical and the error checking routines have been prove mathematically. It's only used to exchange keys.

  13. Re:Magic on Violation of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle · · Score: 1

    Your idea supposes the card is actually a heart before you look at it and it couldn't be something else when you look at it. This supposes the particle is actually spin up or spin down before you make a measurement and that quantum mechanics must be missing this "hidden variable", i.e. it's not a complete theoretical description of reality. See Bell's Theorem for details as to why this is incorrect. There is no way to tell if it's spin up or spin down before you make the measurement and if there was a "hidden variable", quantum mechanics wouldn't work the way it does. You can also spin flip the particles several times before taking measurement without affecting the entanglement.

  14. Re:Magic on Violation of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle · · Score: 1

    Quantum cryptography does error checking to assure no one else is measuring said quanta. Other measurements would introduce error if they don't commute with your measurements.

  15. Re:Magic on Violation of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle · · Score: 2

    To prove Bell's Theorem you simply assume a single other hidden variable exists, perhaps signifying if the particle is actually spin up or spin down before you measure it. This assumption contradicts quantum mechanics and therefore cannot be true, so there is nothing else you can know about the system if quantum mechanics is the correct description.

    If simply one more variable produced this result, I do not see how adding infinitely many more variables would help, or be of any practical use as a theory of nature.

  16. Re:Over dramatic much? on This Is What Wall Street's Terrifying Robot Invasion Looks Like · · Score: 1

    Well you could still look at the underlying loans and see how they aren't triple A. They already gave crazy disclaimers about how dangerous it was to invest in them. The rating agencies are monopolies and blessed by the government, there's no free market in ratings agencies. A year ago S&P actually did something sensible and downgraded the US bond rating and immediately got investigated for fraud for rating those derivatives too high. But it's much worse now, all those people doing those crazy things got trillions in bailouts, and now the US government is guaranteeing an even larger percentage of mortgages.

  17. Re:Over dramatic much? on This Is What Wall Street's Terrifying Robot Invasion Looks Like · · Score: 2

    If I take droppings from a bunch of individual chickens, put them together, cook them a little, and then sell them as "Chicken derived high-fiber compound", I can't very well lie to you and tell you that I'm not selling you shit.

    See hotdog.

  18. Re:Someone explain to me... on This Is What Wall Street's Terrifying Robot Invasion Looks Like · · Score: 1

    It would just take longer for markets to equlibrate. Less volume, more volatility. Higher transactions costs. I think of HFT as just how markets work. It should be less and less profitable as we move forward and algorithms and cpu cost goes down. Market makers giving certain companies HFT advantages to make massive profits and charge the buyer a higher price, are clearly monopolistic practices that go against everything HFT is designed to do.

  19. Re:Over dramatic much? on This Is What Wall Street's Terrifying Robot Invasion Looks Like · · Score: 1

    HFT means high-frequency, not long term. Bubbles take years to develop, no microseconds.

  20. Re:Over dramatic much? on This Is What Wall Street's Terrifying Robot Invasion Looks Like · · Score: 1

    I think it had more to do with the government guaranteeing normal loans (subsidized by low FED interest rates), government subsidized loans and government entities buying sub-prime loans. If you were a bank, why wouldn't you make bad loans to sell to Franny and Freddy.

  21. Re:Actually a Good Thing on Is Your Neighbor a Democrat? There's an App For That · · Score: 1

    However, it's rather odd that the Obama campaign would release this. Perhaps they are proud of their lack of privacy record.

  22. Re:Stupid units on You're Driving All Wrong, Says NHTSA · · Score: 1

    Since when did you have only 1 pi radians in a circle? I think you're using madeup units.

  23. Re:I ran into that on T-Mobile's Optional Censorship Falls Down · · Score: 1

    Is there anywhere you can buy a t-mobile sim without giving them your name and address?

  24. Re:I ran into that on T-Mobile's Optional Censorship Falls Down · · Score: 3, Funny

    Right, because normally I don't have to "log in" using a cellphone, they just bill random people for the minutes I use.

  25. Re:I ran into that on T-Mobile's Optional Censorship Falls Down · · Score: 1

    Took me about two minutes to find the checkbox. I looked at the main page for about a minute, gave up and google how to do it... about 60 seconds later I had my porn. No odd information for me, but I think they already had my birthday so...

    And blocking children from accessing forums about firearms seems reasonable to me.