While it is quite interesting to see it appear in a quantum mechanical setting, it isn't particularly shocking (to me). The number is the result of a fairly simple equation (as shown above) which is why it seems to appear so frequently in nature. While I didn't get this far in my studies of quantum theories, it wouldn't surprise me if, once the mathematicians have a chance to look into this, the reason behind this appearance of phi is found to be rather trivial.
Yes, it's more the other way around really. The fact that the ratio between the first two frequencies measured in the spectrum was the Golden Ratio (within error), was evidence that the state had E8 symmetry, for group-theoretical reasons I can't quite explain. (I'm kind of in the opposite situation; I know QM but Group Theory was never my strongest point)
This is interesting because E8 isn't a symmetry many real physical systems have. But it's of interest for string theorists and other advanced theories, so it's interesting if they can find systems that can act as a model. The 'real' system here doesn't have E8 symmetry either. Rather it's a system of quasiparticles created by the spins of the system which is E8, when exposed to a magnetic field at a certain critical phase-change point.
Which is why the title of the Science article calls it "emergent E8 symmetry".
You don't understand quantum mechanics. For QM the world is fundamentally stochastic, not just pseudo random.
That's actually not quantum mechanics but rather the Copenhagen interpretation of QM.
QM doesn't actually tell us much on whether the universe is deterministic or not, because:
A) The time-evolution of the wave-function itself is deterministic.
and
B) Because it's a philosophical question Science will never be able to answer.
You can always simply deny that it's the ultimate theory of Reality
and then add a metaphysical layer explaining why it only 'appears' to be random. Or non-random.
That is completely wrong. Where did you get that idea?
Oh there's been some speculation about possible 'deeper' significances of Planck length, as well as other Planck units. But as far as we KNOW, they have no significance at all.
They're just a set of units, convenient to eliminate a bunch of constants from equations. (There are other sets as well, e.g. Atomic units, depending on which kind of equation you're working with)
But nowhere anywhere in current quantum theory is there 'no such thing' as a circle, or anything else. Circles have a diameter of Pi times the radius in QM just as anywhere else.
Being a scientist but not of the climate variety, I've got to say 'No'. In a lot of cases, if not most, dialogue on the merits of your scientific work is simply impossible with a layperson.
I work with this stuff. Every day. 40 (well more like 50-60) hours a week. It took years of study for me (and everyone else) just to get to the level where you can properly understand what it is, exactly, that I do. That's what being an expert at something entails. Now when I get into a dispute with someone, they typically have the same level of expertise. They know more or less everything I do. I know what they're saying, and they usually know what I'm saying.
Now you bring into that situation some layperson with their religious reasons or ideological reasons or crank personality, who wants to dispute the results of my work. So they pore over it, and they simply don't understand it. (And ignorance breeds arrogance more often than humility, as Lincoln said) But they think they do. And then they formulate their criticism. Even if that criticism makes sense (often not), it's typically wrong at the most basic level. And that will practically always be the case - because there's virtually *nothing* in the way of criticism that a beginner would be able to think of that an expert hadn't thought about already. You're just not going to find a professor of physics having made a mistake of forgetting the first law of thermodynamics.
Now I'm happy to defend my science against legitimate, good, criticism. But a scientific debate is *NOT* where anybody should be TEACHING anybody science. What kind of 'debate' is it if every answer amounts to "That's not what that word means, read a damn textbook." It's not the scientists who are being arrogant then. Hell, since when didn't scientists bend over backwards to educate the public? We write textbooks, and popular-scientific accounts. Research gets published in journals for everyone to see, etc. It's not like we're keeping it a big secret - The problem is that some people are simply unwilling to learn, yet arrogant enough to believe they should be entitled to 'debate' with me, and that I should be personally burdened with educating them in the name of 'open debate'!
(Just to pick one out of the climate bag. How often haven't you seen someone say "Yeah but climate change is cyclical!" - What? As if _climate scientists_ didn't know that?! Refuting someone's research with arguments from an introductory textbook)
The fact that these climate-skeptics were prepared to take these e-mails, pore over them for some choice quotes (which didn't even look incriminating to me out of context), blatantly misinterpret them without making any kind of good-faith effort to understand the context or the science behind it, and trumpet it all out as some kind of 'disproval' of global warming (which wouldn't have been the case even if they were right), just goes to show that they're simply not interested in either learning the science, or engaging in a real debate. And it's in itself pseudo-scientific behavior in action: Decide there's a big conspiracy of fraud behind climate change, and go look for evidence to support your theory, and ignore all other explanations.
So the "green-ness" or carbon footprint of these electrically based technologies should be
measured with two separate baselines:
1. What would their carbon footprint be if all electricity was generated with carbon-neutral generation
methods such as wind/solar/geothermal/hydro/wave/nuclear.
No. That's a totally useless basis for comparison. If I can have 'free' energy (from a carbon-footprint POV), then I can propose any old idiotic idea and can label it 'green'. If I get to disregard efficiency, then I might as well sequester CO2 from the air and turn it back into gasoline - giving me a negative carbon footprint. Not a problem if you've no regard for energy efficiency!
Compressed air is just a medium in which to store energy. The energy could come from solar panels on your garage. It compresses the air. The air powers you car. Zero emitions.
It said 'worse for the environment'. Using more energy is worse for the environment and will continue to be until ALL our energy comes from clean sources.
<blockquote>This is opposed to batteries which really aren't good for the environment, but all those Prius owners don't really seem to care about Lithum strip mines while patting themselves on their backs.</blockquote>
A ridiculous argument - As opposed to your air canisters which aren't made out of mined metals at all? Besides which, that's a whole different environmental issue.
<blockquote>Hydrogen is yet another method of storing energy. </blockquote>
And a vastly more efficient one, making this technology pointless.
Not on debunking this, because it's a completely ridiculous idea that anyone who's taken even introductory engineering thermodynamics should be able to debunk. Rather, they should get credit for going the extra mile and actually getting a paper out of the thing (and media attention!).
I mean really. There's perfectly good reasons why we're not using compressed air as a 'fuel', and it's not that we hadn't thought of it. The idea (and applications) have been around since the 19th century.
Yes, but if someone tries to create a new Biosphere and call the project "GeoCity", a website about the project will find itself needlessly blocked by filter rules set years ago and were never removed.
Well, it still wouldn't hurt their reputation as badly as if they'd called it Bio-Dome.
Who decides what "a prior fair and impartial procedure" is?
- The member states, when they pass the laws intended to implement this.
- The member states courts, when ruling and setting precedent on those laws.
- The European Court, should someone challenge whether the implementation is within the bounds of the directive.
There are definite downsides to the way it is in America, heh. But I suppose most countries have downsides related to their governmental systems...
Unfortunately, we "put up" with stupid politicians and have decided to make "politics" a career choice, not a service to your country..
Actually 'career politicians' is not really a problem with the US system. Especially not compared to the Scandinavian countries where, unless you had the foresight to join a party youth organization back when you were 18, you're largely SOL towards ever reaching the higher echelons of a party.
Obama spent 12 years as a politician before becoming president. Bush had six. You're not going to find any Scandinavian (and few European) leaders (party leaders, even) with that short a career as a politician. Compared to most European nations, Americans move in (and out) of politics with relative ease.
The big difference is (as someone said) campaign contributions. Not only do they not get individual contributions, but party contributions are pretty limited too. By-and-large they don't need contributions since they get gov't funding, and the industry doesn't need lobbyists, at least not for the legitimate purpose of 'having their voice heard', since there's a 'referral process' built into legislating where proposed legislation gets sent to related authorities and NGOs for comment.
There is a theory that the flood story of Noah is based on the actual deluge which created the Black Sea.
Yeah there are lots of stupid theories from Christian apologetics who want scientific proof that the Old Testament really happened in one way or another.
Anyone who doesn't have a religious agenda to promote tends to find it pretty dang obvious that the Jewish flood story was based off the Babylonian/Sumerian one. Why any rational person (without an agenda) would need to look for a big, epic reason for why people who were living on a floodplain would have a folk-tale about a giant catastrophic flood, is beyond me.
No, the key piece of work is the idea. Ion bridges have been around forever.
This has to permit the travel of one kind of ion but not the other, i.e. Na+ or Cl-. Looks like this material could be expensive.
So you use, for instance, a polymer electrolyte (ionomer) with negatively charged side-chains for one bridge and a polymer with positively charged side-chains on the other. Only the counterions are mobile. The article says they're using modified polystyrene. This is not new, or terribly expensive. Similar things are already being used in industrial desalination technology for ion exchange columns.
It might plug up need to be periodically replaced.
Plug up with what? You naturally would have a mechanical filter to keep the crap out. It's not a major problem.
How expensive these are? How non toxic these are? What is needed to manufacture them? These are the questions we need to ask.
No, they're the questions asked by someone who doesn't know s--t about chemistry/chemical engineering. I happen to have a degree in the subject, but damnit, I learned about (used, even) polymer ion exchange columns in high school. If you want answers to your questions, go get Coulson & Richardson or some other chemical engineering textbook, and find the relevant section.
This technology is certainly very clever, but it does not make use of any new technology. The only question I think is worth asking here is whether or not it turns out to be more efficient or not.
First, I should mention that I actually do quantum chemical studies of biochemical systems for a living (indeed my username here is a QC reference). So I know something about this subject.
To be honest, the result here, while important, is entirely unsurprizing. What you're dealing with here is bound electrons, moving from say, a chlorophyll group to a tyrosine amino acid residue. There's nothing knew that electrons, in particular bound electrons (such as in an atom or molecule) can only be accurately described quantum-mechanically. Electrons move through QM 'tunneling' quite a bit, so you simply cannot accurately describe electron-transfer kinetics (which is what's going on here) without QM.
This research has science a step closer to showing that the brain functions as a quantum computer. Having a quantum computer in our head would explain why we're not like classical computers and have "intelligence", "free will" and "awareness."
No, it does not. First off, it spells trouble that you seem to view that as a desired end result. Hardly a good way to do science. Second, there is no good reason to believe that the brain cannot be described in terms of straight-up chemistry and biochemistry. We don't know how the brain works, but that doesn't mean it's unexplainable in terms of what we already know. There are plenty of things we haven't fully understood in biochemistry, but that doesn't mean they're generally believed to be unexplainable in the current framework of things. Occam's razor would dictate that that idea should be disregarded until there is some evidence that would make it necessary. No such evidence exists.
Further, your 'philosophical' points are simply invalid. Quantum mechanics says nothing about 'free will', or philosophical determinism for that matter. Quantum mechanics can be interpreted in either way, and has; e.g. the Copenhagen interpretation is nondeterministic, whereas the Bohm interpretation is.
Scientists who dismiss quantum processes at work in the body due heat and other quantum noise have little imagination to realize how exquisitely nature works on the molecular level to solve problems like these.
I work with applying quantum mechanics at the molecular level, in biochemical systems, all day long. I have yet to find anyone in my field who thinks there are macroscopic quantum-mechanical processes going on in the human body. That is not due to lack of imagination, it's due to experience with actual quantum mechanics. All chemistry is inherently quantum mechanical. Physics cannot explain an atom even, much less a molecule, with classical theory. The relationship between chemistry and biochemistry is well-understood. The quantum mechanics of chemistry is fairly well understood (due to people doing what I do). And transition in the chemical domain from what is quantum-mechanical to what is classically describable is also well understood. There is simply no physics that explains how or why quantum mechanical effects would disappear and then re-appear orders of magnitude 'upwards' on the scale of matter.
How about we stop runnaway spending and reduce the national debt.
One doesnt' exclude the other at all. First off, tech creates new jobs, that's a pretty well-known fact.
Second, government spending is only part of it, the % of GDP figure includes business spending on R&D.
Last but not least, you don't actually have a choice. Other countries are spending more, and increasingly so. Sweden already spends nearly 5% of their GDP on R&D. Do you want to be a leader or a follower? The USA is increasingly uncompetitive in an increasingly competitive game.
But sure, if your future vision of the USA is competing with China for low-end manufacturing jobs, fine.
"Cosmetic neurology"? What's wrong with the existing term for someone who takes Adderall without a prescription: Amphetamine abuser.
Take it from someone actually has (quite pronounced) ADD: It doesn't work the same way on someone who doesn't have ADD. Likewise, if I overdose, I don't get the intended effect either. (and the dosage that 'works' best for me is about ~30-60 mg a day. Not really an addictive-level dose. In fact, I have a much harder time holding up on coffee)
It's hardly news that someone taking amphetamines can be more productive than someone who's not. But not for the same reasons that an ADD patient is. Amphetamines don't make ordinary folks more concentrated. It makes them more active. Whereas, at the correct dosage, it has the opposite effect in an ADD patient. (I can literally take 30 mg of amphetamine and then go to bed and fall asleep.)
When you're using a prescription drug without a prescription, that's drug abuse. When you're using a drug in a way its not intended to be used, that's drug abuse.
Let's not kid ourselves with name games here.
"Pathologically" would mean in this context, like in most health contexts, "having a detrimental effect on your quality of life".
Saying that something is an 'illness' depends entirely on the severity. For instance, my back isn't perfectly straight - I have a very slight scoliosis. But it has had zero impact on my life and its quality. So it's not something you would ever bother to treat medically, even if it's not 'normal'.
People tend to think of medicine in binary terms, like with infectious diseases: Either you're infected or not. But that's not a realistic way to view medicine, and in particular, it fails completely when it comes to mental disorders.
So the bottom line about whether a gaming 'addiction' is a 'pathological' addiction or not, is dependent on whether it's actually an addiction, proper. Does the person have control over it? If they don't, then it's pretty obvious that's a negative for their quality-of-life.
For the same reasons, it'd also be stupid to define a gaming addiction in simplistic terms as "hours played", etc. And I'm skeptical of this particular study; the diagnostic criteria seem pretty simplistic. You can't really evaluate whether someone is addicted or not just from a few survey-type questions. I doubt any practicing psychiatrist would, either.
But I don't see any reason to doubt the actual idea that computer-gaming addiction exists. Heck, I read about a lady who lost her life to Bingo. Yes.. *Bingo*.
They can. Just not the works of people who haven't given them permission. They're TOTALLY free to create works and release them for distribution under whatever terms they want.
Apparently not. Not if those works happen to inform you about other people who are offering copyrighted material.
Somehow I don't think they'd have been going after TPB if all the works on the site were legitimately being shared.
All the works on their site were being shared legitimately. No copyright holders of any.torrent files were represented at the trial. They were not found guilty of actual copyright infringement.
Ya know, there's these reports in the news about folks who are "breaking tax laws" and what not. Let me ask you folks this, How many of you check your local tax laws before engaging in a money making activity? I don't. I go ahead and worry about the tax consequences later.
Ignorance of the law has never been an excuse for violating it. Besides which, it's not as if 'income tax' is something most people have never heard of. And 'worrying about the consequences later' is hardly a good idea in Sweden, for instance, where you're liable to incur a tax penalty for not registering beforehand.
It's bad for an economy when an entrepreneur has to first take into consideration the taxes before engaging in a business enterprise or even consider them. That's just idiotic.
No, 'idiotic' would be to start a business without taking taxes into consideration, as well as any other expenditures. Also, any other laws and regulations that might apply to the business you're doing.
Taxes are a necessity for a society, but when they become a burden and retard entrepreneurial activity, then its tax structure needs to be examined.
Either your employer withholds tax and pays it for you, or the responsibility is on your head. (Well actually it's always on your head, ultimately) How is that difficult?
>The article was pretty vague handwaving. It didnt actually how any problem was solved with fractal mathematics. It could have tried to explain one example.
By coincidence I just looked through a text book on 'quantum chaos' today, paying attention to an example they had for the quantum mechanics of the Helium atom. (something I know something about, as a chemical physicist).
What they did there, was model Helium semi-classically as 'colinear'; as if the two electrons and the nucleus were in a straight line. A pretty weird model from a physics standpoint, but I suppose necessary from their perspective since that dynamical system apparently displays chaotic behavior. After some math, they managed to show how this replicated the overall spectrum of Helium.
Now that's nice and fairly impressive. But I don't actually see any direct usefulness of it. It's not a better or more accurate way than solving the Schrödinger equation for the electrons. It does illustrate that the main properties of atoms/molecules are due to the nonlinear dynamics of electron motion. But we knew that already. So in a way it was like a lot like how you react to fractals: "Well, that does look a lot like a fern leaf!... So?"
Now I'm not entirely certain if this is representative of the work in TFA. But there's a definitely the risk when you attempt to mate 'buzzword topics' like this, that you start doing stuff for its own sake, and always end up with rather contrived connections. Now, if chaos theory can really explain quantum physics at a more fundamental level, that's one thing. But I don't think coming up with chaotic systems that share properties with quantum ones is doing so, any more than a fractal image of a fern leaf 'explains' the biology of ferns.
Seriously. Why do actors and actresses who pretend to be politicans and soldiers for tv and movies get more influence over "real world" politics like the UN than I do?
Um, because Slashdot wouldn't have a story on its front page if you were to visit the UN?
The only honest source during this whole controversy was boingboing, who said that they are not electrical engineers and can't be sure of what it does.
I don't see what's honest about that. Why didn't they ask an electrical engineer then, rather than engage in wild speculation?
Because anyone who did know anything about electronics could immediately tell you that you should expect to find a chip in there; something the people at BoingBoing gadgets made a big deal out of. With three button states to send over a single wire, you'd expect at least a shift register.
From the looks of it, this is not a complicated chip, much less a DRM chip. I'd wager it isn't anything much more than a shift register, perhaps with some timer for button-bounces and stuff built in. Nothing I think it would take an electrical engineer long to find out.
I wouldn't call it lying. But I would call it very, very, very bad 'reporting' (and did so at the time).
Basically the 'story' amounted to "We heard there was DRM in the iPod, so we opened the headphones and found this unknown chip!"
As if proprietary chips with strange numbers was an unusual thing. And as if the chip they found could really concievably be used for DRM
(it's a simple chip that doesn't look anything like a DSP or microcontroller. IMHO, hardly likely to be a DRM decoder of any sort).
More importantly, why didn't they just draw up the schematic and try to deduce what the thing did? And look at the signals with a logic analyzer or similar? The answer seems to be 'because they simply didn't know what they were doing'.
Really, I think any halfway competent Electrical Engineer with the right tools should probably be able to fully reverse-engineer those headphones in very little time. I know I probably could, and I'm just an electronics hobbyist.
Lesson here is: "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt."
That we're talking about _spin_ here, as in a property of subatomic particles corresponding to an 'intrinsic' angular momentum, not as in something that's physically 'spinning'.
Electrons spin +1/2 or -1/2 and that's it. They can't stop. The energy here is being stored in the form of the _orientations_ of these spins, not the spin itself. What's keeping them that way is conservation of spin. Which is analogous to conservation of angular momentum. (Bound) Electrons can't change their spin state spontaneously. Which is why stuff which is magnetized stays that way for a long time. It's also the reason for phosphorescence.
While I think what they've done here is undeniably pretty cool, in turning spin-state transitions into electricity directly, it's probably not going to create any real competition for conventional batteries, for fairly simple reasons. Batteries store electricity in the form of chemical redox states, which means adding/removing electrons from atoms/ions.
The energy differences between spin states are typically an order of magnitude smaller than the energy difference between redox states.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, it's more the other way around really. The fact that the ratio between the first two frequencies measured in the spectrum was the Golden Ratio (within error), was evidence that the state had E8 symmetry, for group-theoretical reasons I can't quite explain. (I'm kind of in the opposite situation; I know QM but Group Theory was never my strongest point)
This is interesting because E8 isn't a symmetry many real physical systems have. But it's of interest for string theorists and other advanced theories, so it's interesting if they can find systems that can act as a model. The 'real' system here doesn't have E8 symmetry either. Rather it's a system of quasiparticles created by the spins of the system which is E8, when exposed to a magnetic field at a certain critical phase-change point.
Which is why the title of the Science article calls it "emergent E8 symmetry".
That's actually not quantum mechanics but rather the Copenhagen interpretation of QM.
QM doesn't actually tell us much on whether the universe is deterministic or not, because:
A) The time-evolution of the wave-function itself is deterministic.
and
B) Because it's a philosophical question Science will never be able to answer.
You can always simply deny that it's the ultimate theory of Reality and then add a metaphysical layer explaining why it only 'appears' to be random. Or non-random.
That is completely wrong. Where did you get that idea?
Oh there's been some speculation about possible 'deeper' significances of Planck length,
as well as other Planck units. But as far as we KNOW, they have no significance at all.
They're just a set of units, convenient to eliminate a bunch of constants from equations.
(There are other sets as well, e.g. Atomic units, depending on which kind of equation you're working with)
But nowhere anywhere in current quantum theory is there 'no such thing' as a circle, or anything else.
Circles have a diameter of Pi times the radius in QM just as anywhere else.
Being a scientist but not of the climate variety, I've got to say 'No'.
In a lot of cases, if not most, dialogue on the merits of your scientific work is simply impossible with a layperson.
I work with this stuff. Every day. 40 (well more like 50-60) hours a week. It took years of study for me (and everyone else)
just to get to the level where you can properly understand what it is, exactly, that I do. That's what being an expert at something entails.
Now when I get into a dispute with someone, they typically have the same level of expertise. They know more or less everything I do. I know what they're saying, and they usually know what I'm saying.
Now you bring into that situation some layperson with their religious reasons or ideological reasons or crank personality, who wants to dispute the results of my work. So they pore over it, and they simply don't understand it. (And ignorance breeds arrogance more often than humility, as Lincoln said) But they think they do. And then they formulate their criticism. Even if that criticism makes sense (often not), it's typically wrong at the most basic level. And that will practically always be the case - because there's virtually *nothing* in the way of criticism that a beginner would be able to think of that an expert hadn't thought about already. You're just not going to find a professor of physics having made a mistake of forgetting the first law of thermodynamics.
Now I'm happy to defend my science against legitimate, good, criticism. But a scientific debate is *NOT* where anybody should be TEACHING anybody science. What kind of 'debate' is it if every answer amounts to "That's not what that word means, read a damn textbook." It's not the scientists who are being arrogant then. Hell, since when didn't scientists bend over backwards to educate the public? We write textbooks, and popular-scientific accounts. Research gets published in journals for everyone to see, etc. It's not like we're keeping it a big secret - The problem is that some people are simply unwilling to learn, yet arrogant enough to believe they should be entitled to 'debate' with me, and that I should be personally burdened with educating them in the name of 'open debate'!
(Just to pick one out of the climate bag. How often haven't you seen someone say "Yeah but climate change is cyclical!" - What? As if _climate scientists_ didn't know that?! Refuting someone's research with arguments from an introductory textbook)
The fact that these climate-skeptics were prepared to take these e-mails, pore over them for some choice quotes (which didn't even look incriminating to me out of context), blatantly misinterpret them without making any kind of good-faith effort to understand the context or the science behind it, and trumpet it all out as some kind of 'disproval' of global warming (which wouldn't have been the case even if they were right), just goes to show that they're simply not interested in either learning the science, or engaging in a real debate. And it's in itself pseudo-scientific behavior in action: Decide there's a big conspiracy of fraud behind climate change, and go look for evidence to support your theory, and ignore all other explanations.
No. That's a totally useless basis for comparison. If I can have 'free' energy (from a carbon-footprint POV), then I can propose any old idiotic idea and can label it 'green'. If I get to disregard efficiency, then I might as well sequester CO2 from the air and turn it back into gasoline - giving me a negative carbon footprint. Not a problem if you've no regard for energy efficiency!
It said 'worse for the environment'. Using more energy is worse for the environment and will continue to be until ALL our energy comes from clean sources.
<blockquote>This is opposed to batteries which really aren't good for the environment, but all those Prius owners don't really seem to care about Lithum strip mines while patting themselves on their backs.</blockquote>
A ridiculous argument - As opposed to your air canisters which aren't made out of mined metals at all? Besides which, that's a whole different environmental issue.
<blockquote>Hydrogen is yet another method of storing energy. </blockquote>
And a vastly more efficient one, making this technology pointless.
Not on debunking this, because it's a completely ridiculous idea that anyone who's taken even introductory engineering thermodynamics should be able to debunk. Rather, they should get credit for going the extra mile and actually getting a paper out of the thing (and media attention!).
I mean really. There's perfectly good reasons why we're not using compressed air as a 'fuel', and it's not that we hadn't thought of it. The idea (and applications) have been around since the 19th century.
Well, it still wouldn't hurt their reputation as badly as if they'd called it Bio-Dome.
- The member states, when they pass the laws intended to implement this.
- The member states courts, when ruling and setting precedent on those laws.
- The European Court, should someone challenge whether the implementation is within the bounds of the directive.
Actually 'career politicians' is not really a problem with the US system. Especially not compared to the Scandinavian countries where, unless you had the foresight to join a party youth organization back when you were 18, you're largely SOL towards ever reaching the higher echelons of a party.
Obama spent 12 years as a politician before becoming president. Bush had six. You're not going to find any Scandinavian (and few European) leaders (party leaders, even) with that short a career as a politician. Compared to most European nations, Americans move in (and out) of politics with relative ease.
The big difference is (as someone said) campaign contributions. Not only do they not get individual contributions, but party contributions are pretty limited too. By-and-large they don't need contributions since they get gov't funding, and the industry doesn't need lobbyists, at least not for the legitimate purpose of 'having their voice heard', since there's a 'referral process' built into legislating where proposed legislation gets sent to related authorities and NGOs for comment.
There is a theory that the flood story of Noah is based on the actual deluge which created the Black Sea.
Yeah there are lots of stupid theories from Christian apologetics who want scientific proof that the Old Testament really happened in one way or another.
Anyone who doesn't have a religious agenda to promote tends to find it pretty dang obvious that the Jewish flood story was based off the Babylonian/Sumerian one. Why any rational person (without an agenda) would need to look for a big, epic reason for why people who were living on a floodplain would have a folk-tale about a giant catastrophic flood, is beyond me.
The key piece of the work is an ion bridge.
No, the key piece of work is the idea. Ion bridges have been around forever.
This has to permit the travel of one kind of ion but not the other, i.e. Na+ or Cl-. Looks like this material could be expensive.
So you use, for instance, a polymer electrolyte (ionomer) with negatively charged side-chains for one bridge and a polymer with positively charged side-chains on the other. Only the counterions are mobile. The article says they're using modified polystyrene. This is not new, or terribly expensive. Similar things are already being used in industrial desalination technology for ion exchange columns.
It might plug up need to be periodically replaced.
Plug up with what? You naturally would have a mechanical filter to keep the crap out. It's not a major problem.
How expensive these are? How non toxic these are? What is needed to manufacture them? These are the questions we need to ask.
No, they're the questions asked by someone who doesn't know s--t about chemistry/chemical engineering. I happen to have a degree in the subject, but damnit, I learned about (used, even) polymer ion exchange columns in high school. If you want answers to your questions, go get Coulson & Richardson or some other chemical engineering textbook, and find the relevant section.
This technology is certainly very clever, but it does not make use of any new technology. The only question I think is worth asking here is whether or not it turns out to be more efficient or not.
What's funnier is that Sweden already has a guy named Butt: Billy Butt.
He was a record producer who was convicted on multiple counts of rape.
To be honest, the result here, while important, is entirely unsurprizing. What you're dealing with here is bound electrons, moving from say, a chlorophyll group to a tyrosine amino acid residue. There's nothing knew that electrons, in particular bound electrons (such as in an atom or molecule) can only be accurately described quantum-mechanically. Electrons move through QM 'tunneling' quite a bit, so you simply cannot accurately describe electron-transfer kinetics (which is what's going on here) without QM.
No, it does not. First off, it spells trouble that you seem to view that as a desired end result. Hardly a good way to do science. Second, there is no good reason to believe that the brain cannot be described in terms of straight-up chemistry and biochemistry. We don't know how the brain works, but that doesn't mean it's unexplainable in terms of what we already know. There are plenty of things we haven't fully understood in biochemistry, but that doesn't mean they're generally believed to be unexplainable in the current framework of things. Occam's razor would dictate that that idea should be disregarded until there is some evidence that would make it necessary. No such evidence exists.
Further, your 'philosophical' points are simply invalid. Quantum mechanics says nothing about 'free will', or philosophical determinism for that matter. Quantum mechanics can be interpreted in either way, and has; e.g. the Copenhagen interpretation is nondeterministic, whereas the Bohm interpretation is.
I work with applying quantum mechanics at the molecular level, in biochemical systems, all day long. I have yet to find anyone in my field who thinks there are macroscopic quantum-mechanical processes going on in the human body. That is not due to lack of imagination, it's due to experience with actual quantum mechanics. All chemistry is inherently quantum mechanical. Physics cannot explain an atom even, much less a molecule, with classical theory. The relationship between chemistry and biochemistry is well-understood. The quantum mechanics of chemistry is fairly well understood (due to people doing what I do). And transition in the chemical domain from what is quantum-mechanical to what is classically describable is also well understood. There is simply no physics that explains how or why quantum mechanical effects would disappear and then re-appear orders of magnitude 'upwards' on the scale of matter.
One doesnt' exclude the other at all. First off, tech creates new jobs, that's a pretty well-known fact.
Second, government spending is only part of it, the % of GDP figure includes business spending on R&D.
Last but not least, you don't actually have a choice. Other countries are spending more, and increasingly so. Sweden already spends nearly 5% of their GDP on R&D. Do you want to be a leader or a follower? The USA is increasingly uncompetitive in an increasingly competitive game.
But sure, if your future vision of the USA is competing with China for low-end manufacturing jobs, fine.
"Cosmetic neurology"? What's wrong with the existing term for someone who takes Adderall without a prescription: Amphetamine abuser. Take it from someone actually has (quite pronounced) ADD: It doesn't work the same way on someone who doesn't have ADD. Likewise, if I overdose, I don't get the intended effect either. (and the dosage that 'works' best for me is about ~30-60 mg a day. Not really an addictive-level dose. In fact, I have a much harder time holding up on coffee) It's hardly news that someone taking amphetamines can be more productive than someone who's not. But not for the same reasons that an ADD patient is. Amphetamines don't make ordinary folks more concentrated. It makes them more active. Whereas, at the correct dosage, it has the opposite effect in an ADD patient. (I can literally take 30 mg of amphetamine and then go to bed and fall asleep.) When you're using a prescription drug without a prescription, that's drug abuse. When you're using a drug in a way its not intended to be used, that's drug abuse. Let's not kid ourselves with name games here.
"Pathologically" would mean in this context, like in most health contexts, "having a detrimental effect on your quality of life".
Saying that something is an 'illness' depends entirely on the severity. For instance, my back isn't perfectly straight - I have a very slight scoliosis. But it has had zero impact on my life and its quality. So it's not something you would ever bother to treat medically, even if it's not 'normal'.
People tend to think of medicine in binary terms, like with infectious diseases: Either you're infected or not. But that's not a realistic way to view medicine, and in particular, it fails completely when it comes to mental disorders.
So the bottom line about whether a gaming 'addiction' is a 'pathological' addiction or not, is dependent on whether it's actually an addiction, proper. Does the person have control over it? If they don't, then it's pretty obvious that's a negative for their quality-of-life.
For the same reasons, it'd also be stupid to define a gaming addiction in simplistic terms as "hours played", etc. And I'm skeptical of this particular study; the diagnostic criteria seem pretty simplistic. You can't really evaluate whether someone is addicted or not just from a few survey-type questions. I doubt any practicing psychiatrist would, either.
But I don't see any reason to doubt the actual idea that computer-gaming addiction exists. Heck, I read about a lady who lost her life to Bingo. Yes.. *Bingo*.
Apparently not. Not if those works happen to inform you about other people who are offering copyrighted material.
All the works on their site were being shared legitimately. No copyright holders of any .torrent files were represented at the trial. They were not found guilty of actual copyright infringement.
Ignorance of the law has never been an excuse for violating it. Besides which, it's not as if 'income tax' is something most people have never heard of. And 'worrying about the consequences later' is hardly a good idea in Sweden, for instance, where you're liable to incur a tax penalty for not registering beforehand.
No, 'idiotic' would be to start a business without taking taxes into consideration, as well as any other expenditures. Also, any other laws and regulations that might apply to the business you're doing.
Either your employer withholds tax and pays it for you, or the responsibility is on your head. (Well actually it's always on your head, ultimately) How is that difficult?
>The article was pretty vague handwaving. It didnt actually how any problem was solved with fractal mathematics. It could have tried to explain one example.
By coincidence I just looked through a text book on 'quantum chaos' today, paying attention to an example they had for the quantum mechanics of the Helium atom. (something I know something about, as a chemical physicist).
What they did there, was model Helium semi-classically as 'colinear'; as if the two electrons and the nucleus were in a straight line. A pretty weird model from a physics standpoint, but I suppose necessary from their perspective since that dynamical system apparently displays chaotic behavior. After some math, they managed to show how this replicated the overall spectrum of Helium.
Now that's nice and fairly impressive. But I don't actually see any direct usefulness of it. It's not a better or more accurate way than solving the Schrödinger equation for the electrons. It does illustrate that the main properties of atoms/molecules are due to the nonlinear dynamics of electron motion. But we knew that already. So in a way it was like a lot like how you react to fractals: "Well, that does look a lot like a fern leaf!... So?"
Now I'm not entirely certain if this is representative of the work in TFA. But there's a definitely the risk when you attempt to mate 'buzzword topics' like this, that you start doing stuff for its own sake, and always end up with rather contrived connections. Now, if chaos theory can really explain quantum physics at a more fundamental level, that's one thing. But I don't think coming up with chaotic systems that share properties with quantum ones is doing so, any more than a fractal image of a fern leaf 'explains' the biology of ferns.
Um, because Slashdot wouldn't have a story on its front page if you were to visit the UN?
I don't see what's honest about that. Why didn't they ask an electrical engineer then, rather than engage in wild speculation?
Because anyone who did know anything about electronics could immediately tell you that you should expect to find a chip in there; something the people at BoingBoing gadgets made a big deal out of. With three button states to send over a single wire, you'd expect at least a shift register.
From the looks of it, this is not a complicated chip, much less a DRM chip. I'd wager it isn't anything much more than a shift register, perhaps with some timer for button-bounces and stuff built in. Nothing I think it would take an electrical engineer long to find out.
I wouldn't call it lying. But I would call it very, very, very bad 'reporting' (and did so at the time). Basically the 'story' amounted to "We heard there was DRM in the iPod, so we opened the headphones and found this unknown chip!" As if proprietary chips with strange numbers was an unusual thing. And as if the chip they found could really concievably be used for DRM (it's a simple chip that doesn't look anything like a DSP or microcontroller. IMHO, hardly likely to be a DRM decoder of any sort). More importantly, why didn't they just draw up the schematic and try to deduce what the thing did? And look at the signals with a logic analyzer or similar? The answer seems to be 'because they simply didn't know what they were doing'. Really, I think any halfway competent Electrical Engineer with the right tools should probably be able to fully reverse-engineer those headphones in very little time. I know I probably could, and I'm just an electronics hobbyist. Lesson here is: "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt."
Do you still wear an onion on your belt?
That we're talking about _spin_ here, as in a property of subatomic particles corresponding to an 'intrinsic' angular momentum, not as in something that's physically 'spinning'. Electrons spin +1/2 or -1/2 and that's it. They can't stop. The energy here is being stored in the form of the _orientations_ of these spins, not the spin itself. What's keeping them that way is conservation of spin. Which is analogous to conservation of angular momentum. (Bound) Electrons can't change their spin state spontaneously. Which is why stuff which is magnetized stays that way for a long time. It's also the reason for phosphorescence. While I think what they've done here is undeniably pretty cool, in turning spin-state transitions into electricity directly, it's probably not going to create any real competition for conventional batteries, for fairly simple reasons. Batteries store electricity in the form of chemical redox states, which means adding/removing electrons from atoms/ions. The energy differences between spin states are typically an order of magnitude smaller than the energy difference between redox states.