So you think that the feds requiring people to protect your health records, for example, is a waste?
I would rather that my health records are ACTUALLY protected, rather than companies simply complying with regulations which may, or may not, actually protect my health records. The point here is that a lot of resources are being expended in order to comply with regulations. Insofar as complying with regulations actually protects my data, I'm fine with that. But do the regulations actually make anything more secure? Given the government's track record in these areas, I doubt it.
So yes, I think it's a waste that the government forces corporations to spend a shit ton of money doing things that don't actually help me, instead of spending that money actually securing my data.
If you have to spend enormous energy to blast a proton to unlock a hypothetical quark then how do you know the energy itself doesn't manifest as particles that don't even play a role in ordinary matter?
You don't have to blast a proton with enormous energy to see quarks. All it takes are some simple electrons. If you use electrons with small enough wavelength (i.e. high enough energy) to get good resolution, and you look at a proton, lo and behold, you see these three little thingies whizzing around in there.
When this was first done, it caused a bit of consternation among one Dr. Gell-Mann and one Dr. Zweig, who had initially proposed quarks merely as mathematical mechanisms for aiding certain types of calculations -- nobody actually thought the quarks were real. But then some assholes at SLAC decided to probe the proton with high speed electrons, and God forbid it, they saw the damned things. Still, a few dumb people such as Dick Feynman weren't convinced the quarks were actually real. It wasn't until numerous further experiments were performed that physicists grudgingly accepted that the quarks were actual particles, not mathematical oddities.
April Fool's is one of the only near-universally-celebrated, meaningful, capitalism-unencumbered holidays on this planet. It only requires you to have a sense of humor. For one day out of 365.25, everyone tells silly jokes.
April Fool's is NOT about a bunch of people acting like idiots. It's about the apprehension of knowing that at any moment somebody may do or say something completely unexpected. It's about needing to stop for minute to figure out whether your colleague was really being serious about that last bit...
It's not about being barraged by stupid jokes. Every single fucking article on the main page is a joke. That makes it NO FUN. How am I supposed to be tickled and amused when I already know the story I'm about to read is complete bullshit?
I have a sense of humor, it's just that it's more developed than that of a three year old.
What are you talking about? If you want to exchange ideas, art, theory, process, and emotion with other like-minded individuals, then do so. Who the hell is stopping you?
PDF has some superficial syntactic similarities to PostScript. Beyond that, it is not at all like PostScript. The reason the content stream language of PDF is PostScript-like is because it made it easy to print PDF by simply blowing the content stream out as PostScript, accompanied by the appropriate ProcSets. Such usage is deprecated these days -- ProcSets are no longer required to be declared, and modern PDFs can't be printed by blowing the content stream directly to the printer any more.
Even in the areas where PDF looks like PostScript, it's fundamentally different. There is no operand stack. There are no control flow operators. If you start trying to create a PDF under the impression that it's just like PostScript, you'll fail miserably.
Calibrating models on historic data is an important check, but it in no way verifies that the model is correct
Well I was really starting to get upset by this comment, but then I remembered that science has nothing to do with demonstrating the correctness of theories, only their incorrectness. Whew. Looks like science dodged a bullet there.
Methods to obtain "95% significance" out of a measly 14 observations of what could for all intents and purposes be a random walk are usually taught in politics 101.
Instead of waving your hands saying "That just doesn't feel right," why not try plugging the numbers into the equations which are universally accepted for measuring significance and see what pops out?
If you want to demonstrate that being shot in the head is fatal, you don't need a very big sample to do so. You don't shoot 14 people in the head, killing all of them, then say "Well, the sample size was small, so we really can't conclude anything from this test."
Attorneys provided by insurance companies, as ours was, are not really interested in winning cases as their primary goal. They are interested in minimizing the cost to the insurance company. Yes, we could have gone with our own lawyer and had more control over the process, but we could have been financially ruined. It came down to a choice -- have insurance handle it, and be protected no matter what happened, or go it alone and run the risk of having our lives destroyed. It's a tough choice, and I don't regret making it the way we did.
If it makes you feel better, I'd be willing to bet there are lots of cases of people getting screwed, all over the world, that you don't give a crap about!
How can I give a crap about something I don't even know is happening? See the point now?
It's only an "excuse" if you would have committed the act anyway, or if you deliberately subjected yourself to it. If I spike your soda with LSD and you flip out and kill somebody, do you really think you should be completely culpable for that act?
If somebody wants to raise this as a defense or mitigating factor in court, then let them. Luckily we have judges and juries who sort through these things instead of applying blanket rules. I seriously doubt that this effect, even if real, could ever cause a little old lady to become a serial killer, though.
In image processing, resolution is the number of dots per unit length. That's one dimensional. Nobody EVER talks about resolution as dots per unit area.
If you double the horizontal and vertical resolution, you quadruple the number of pixels. Well congratulations, you've discovered the concept of squaring a number. But that's not what resolution means, and nobody who knows the terminology would ever interpret it that way.
What's this talk about "correctness?" No formula in the history of physics is known to be "correct." There are a bunch of tattered old incorrect theories which were disproved by experiment, and what's left is the best we have to work with. But to think that we could ever prove a theory "correct" displays a fundamental misunderstanding of science.
And what about the poor person who is actually suffering because of this idiot? You don't think the plight of this person should be made known to the world?
My wife was sued last year for a completely stupid reason, and one of the worst parts of the experience for me was knowing that we were getting screwed and nobody in the world gave a crap about it.
We know that photons have a small amount of mass, and we know that the force required to accelerate to the speed of light approaches infinity.
Photons don't have any mass. Not sure where you get that idea. They have energy due to their frequency, and energy and mass are equivalent as far as general relativity is concerned, but the photon doesn't literally have a rest mass. This is because the photon is never at rest.
Your confusion arises because you aren't using the correct definitions of energy and momentum. When you use the proper relativistic definitions, there is nothing confusing about it.
To the issue of how a photon, which is massless, can possibly carry a momentum, you can explain this several ways. The simplest, but more opaque explanation is that photons always originate from charged matter. Because a photon carries energy (I don't see how you can dispute THAT fact), this means the energy of the charged particle which emits a photon must change somehow. Suppose this change is of the kinetic type (as opposed to a change purely in electronic state). This means the momentum of the charged particle changes, because its velocity changes. But the momentum cannot change without putting the extra momentum elsewhere -- basic conservation of momentum. Ergo, the momentum MUST be in the photon.
A more physically revelatory way of looking at it is to consider it from a wave perspective. An EM wave has an electric component and a magnetic component. When the electric component interacts with a charged particle, it causes this particle to oscillate. As the particle oscillates, it moves through the magnetic field from the very same light wave. This produces a Lorentz force which generally points in the same direction the light wave is propagating -- ergo, light carries momentum.
"A number that is ten greater than the largest number which is expressible in the English language using no more than 140 letters or numbers."
Your number seems to be the largest number expressible in the Englihs language using no more than 140 letters or numbers. My number is one more than that. I win.
I'm not sure why I got modded down. I guess somebody doesn't get the paradox.
Yes they can. For one example, consider the difference in sea level between the two sides of the Panama Canal of about 8 inches, mostly due to salinity and air pressure differences.
I don't understand what your point is. Are you saying that because it has happened before (and nobody is disputing that), that is somehow isn't a problem? If sea level rises and begins wiping out portions of Manhattan, are you going to tell New Yorkers that they shouldn't worry about it because it's normal?
I can decelerate to 0 and never change direction. If I eventually do change direction then that is an acceleration by definition, not a deceleration.
There is no difference between acceleration and deceleration. The term "deceleration" is hardly ever used in physics, but when it is, all it means is that the acceleration is in a direction which tends to reduce the magnitude of the velocity. As such, the distinction between acceleration and deceleration depends on your frame of reference, which is why physicists generally regard the distinction as useless.
The danger of undercooked ground beef is the possible presence of fecal bacteria. Fecal bacteria do not naturally occur in animal flesh. They can be introduced by sloppy processing -- mechanical gutting and stripping of meat from bone may place the meat in contact with fecal material.
If you process your own ground beef from a large hunk of meat that's been butchered properly, it's EXTREMELY unlikely that it will contain any significant amount of fecal material. But cheap-ass ground beef from the supermarket? Cook that shit till it's black.
Slashdot Mirror
So you think that the feds requiring people to protect your health records, for example, is a waste?
I would rather that my health records are ACTUALLY protected, rather than companies simply complying with regulations which may, or may not, actually protect my health records. The point here is that a lot of resources are being expended in order to comply with regulations. Insofar as complying with regulations actually protects my data, I'm fine with that. But do the regulations actually make anything more secure? Given the government's track record in these areas, I doubt it.
So yes, I think it's a waste that the government forces corporations to spend a shit ton of money doing things that don't actually help me, instead of spending that money actually securing my data.
If you have to spend enormous energy to blast a proton to unlock a hypothetical quark then how do you know the energy itself doesn't manifest as particles that don't even play a role in ordinary matter?
You don't have to blast a proton with enormous energy to see quarks. All it takes are some simple electrons. If you use electrons with small enough wavelength (i.e. high enough energy) to get good resolution, and you look at a proton, lo and behold, you see these three little thingies whizzing around in there.
When this was first done, it caused a bit of consternation among one Dr. Gell-Mann and one Dr. Zweig, who had initially proposed quarks merely as mathematical mechanisms for aiding certain types of calculations -- nobody actually thought the quarks were real. But then some assholes at SLAC decided to probe the proton with high speed electrons, and God forbid it, they saw the damned things. Still, a few dumb people such as Dick Feynman weren't convinced the quarks were actually real. It wasn't until numerous further experiments were performed that physicists grudgingly accepted that the quarks were actual particles, not mathematical oddities.
In short, why don't you go fuck a goat?/p?
April Fool's is one of the only near-universally-celebrated, meaningful, capitalism-unencumbered holidays on this planet. It only requires you to have a sense of humor. For one day out of 365.25, everyone tells silly jokes.
April Fool's is NOT about a bunch of people acting like idiots. It's about the apprehension of knowing that at any moment somebody may do or say something completely unexpected. It's about needing to stop for minute to figure out whether your colleague was really being serious about that last bit...
It's not about being barraged by stupid jokes. Every single fucking article on the main page is a joke. That makes it NO FUN. How am I supposed to be tickled and amused when I already know the story I'm about to read is complete bullshit?
I have a sense of humor, it's just that it's more developed than that of a three year old.
Top quarks don't live long enough to be bound to anything else.
Quarks are ALWAYS bound to something else. A solitary quark has never been seen.
What are you talking about? If you want to exchange ideas, art, theory, process, and emotion with other like-minded individuals, then do so. Who the hell is stopping you?
PDF has some superficial syntactic similarities to PostScript. Beyond that, it is not at all like PostScript. The reason the content stream language of PDF is PostScript-like is because it made it easy to print PDF by simply blowing the content stream out as PostScript, accompanied by the appropriate ProcSets. Such usage is deprecated these days -- ProcSets are no longer required to be declared, and modern PDFs can't be printed by blowing the content stream directly to the printer any more.
Even in the areas where PDF looks like PostScript, it's fundamentally different. There is no operand stack. There are no control flow operators. If you start trying to create a PDF under the impression that it's just like PostScript, you'll fail miserably.
Calibrating models on historic data is an important check, but it in no way verifies that the model is correct
Well I was really starting to get upset by this comment, but then I remembered that science has nothing to do with demonstrating the correctness of theories, only their incorrectness. Whew. Looks like science dodged a bullet there.
Methods to obtain "95% significance" out of a measly 14 observations of what could for all intents and purposes be a random walk are usually taught in politics 101.
Instead of waving your hands saying "That just doesn't feel right," why not try plugging the numbers into the equations which are universally accepted for measuring significance and see what pops out?
If you want to demonstrate that being shot in the head is fatal, you don't need a very big sample to do so. You don't shoot 14 people in the head, killing all of them, then say "Well, the sample size was small, so we really can't conclude anything from this test."
Attorneys provided by insurance companies, as ours was, are not really interested in winning cases as their primary goal. They are interested in minimizing the cost to the insurance company. Yes, we could have gone with our own lawyer and had more control over the process, but we could have been financially ruined. It came down to a choice -- have insurance handle it, and be protected no matter what happened, or go it alone and run the risk of having our lives destroyed. It's a tough choice, and I don't regret making it the way we did.
If it makes you feel better, I'd be willing to bet there are lots of cases of people getting screwed, all over the world, that you don't give a crap about!
How can I give a crap about something I don't even know is happening? See the point now?
It's only an "excuse" if you would have committed the act anyway, or if you deliberately subjected yourself to it. If I spike your soda with LSD and you flip out and kill somebody, do you really think you should be completely culpable for that act?
If somebody wants to raise this as a defense or mitigating factor in court, then let them. Luckily we have judges and juries who sort through these things instead of applying blanket rules. I seriously doubt that this effect, even if real, could ever cause a little old lady to become a serial killer, though.
In image processing, resolution is the number of dots per unit length. That's one dimensional. Nobody EVER talks about resolution as dots per unit area.
If you double the horizontal and vertical resolution, you quadruple the number of pixels. Well congratulations, you've discovered the concept of squaring a number. But that's not what resolution means, and nobody who knows the terminology would ever interpret it that way.
What's this talk about "correctness?" No formula in the history of physics is known to be "correct." There are a bunch of tattered old incorrect theories which were disproved by experiment, and what's left is the best we have to work with. But to think that we could ever prove a theory "correct" displays a fundamental misunderstanding of science.
And what about the poor person who is actually suffering because of this idiot? You don't think the plight of this person should be made known to the world?
My wife was sued last year for a completely stupid reason, and one of the worst parts of the experience for me was knowing that we were getting screwed and nobody in the world gave a crap about it.
We know that photons have a small amount of mass, and we know that the force required to accelerate to the speed of light approaches infinity.
Photons don't have any mass. Not sure where you get that idea. They have energy due to their frequency, and energy and mass are equivalent as far as general relativity is concerned, but the photon doesn't literally have a rest mass. This is because the photon is never at rest.
Your confusion arises because you aren't using the correct definitions of energy and momentum. When you use the proper relativistic definitions, there is nothing confusing about it.
To the issue of how a photon, which is massless, can possibly carry a momentum, you can explain this several ways. The simplest, but more opaque explanation is that photons always originate from charged matter. Because a photon carries energy (I don't see how you can dispute THAT fact), this means the energy of the charged particle which emits a photon must change somehow. Suppose this change is of the kinetic type (as opposed to a change purely in electronic state). This means the momentum of the charged particle changes, because its velocity changes. But the momentum cannot change without putting the extra momentum elsewhere -- basic conservation of momentum. Ergo, the momentum MUST be in the photon.
A more physically revelatory way of looking at it is to consider it from a wave perspective. An EM wave has an electric component and a magnetic component. When the electric component interacts with a charged particle, it causes this particle to oscillate. As the particle oscillates, it moves through the magnetic field from the very same light wave. This produces a Lorentz force which generally points in the same direction the light wave is propagating -- ergo, light carries momentum.
And NO ONE has admin access to their computer.
I have another genius idea. The doors to the buildings should be LOCKED at night!
(You know, the idiom "It goes without saying" is meant to be taken literally.)
I was going to post the same thing. He doesn't pick mushrooms because he's crazy, he picks mushrooms because he's Russian.
"A number that is ten greater than the largest number which is expressible in the English language using no more than 140 letters or numbers."
Your number seems to be the largest number expressible in the Englihs language using no more than 140 letters or numbers. My number is one more than that. I win.
I'm not sure why I got modded down. I guess somebody doesn't get the paradox.
Sea levels can't just rise in one place.
Yes they can. For one example, consider the difference in sea level between the two sides of the Panama Canal of about 8 inches, mostly due to salinity and air pressure differences.
I don't understand what your point is. Are you saying that because it has happened before (and nobody is disputing that), that is somehow isn't a problem? If sea level rises and begins wiping out portions of Manhattan, are you going to tell New Yorkers that they shouldn't worry about it because it's normal?
In a given frame of reference. Which makes the distinction entirely non-physical, non-predictive, and pointless.
There are various laws which protect minority groups from discrimination. That kind of requires knowing who's in the minority, don't you think?
I can beat everyone.
"A number that is one greater than the largest number which is expressible in the English language using no more than 140 letters or numbers."
Did you head explode?
I can decelerate to 0 and never change direction. If I eventually do change direction then that is an acceleration by definition, not a deceleration.
There is no difference between acceleration and deceleration. The term "deceleration" is hardly ever used in physics, but when it is, all it means is that the acceleration is in a direction which tends to reduce the magnitude of the velocity. As such, the distinction between acceleration and deceleration depends on your frame of reference, which is why physicists generally regard the distinction as useless.
The danger of undercooked ground beef is the possible presence of fecal bacteria. Fecal bacteria do not naturally occur in animal flesh. They can be introduced by sloppy processing -- mechanical gutting and stripping of meat from bone may place the meat in contact with fecal material.
If you process your own ground beef from a large hunk of meat that's been butchered properly, it's EXTREMELY unlikely that it will contain any significant amount of fecal material. But cheap-ass ground beef from the supermarket? Cook that shit till it's black.