That's just totally wrong. A decelerating object will eventually change direction, no matter how small the deceleration. Not to mention relativity -- "change in direction" is entirely dependent on reference frame, whereas acceleration is completely INDEPENDENT of frame (for inertial frames). Your statement is insane.
Fascinating, but I can only imagine this is a very expensive solution to implement since the sterilized males must be specially bred
The technique has been used worldwide with other insects for decades. You may not even know it ever existed, but there used to be flies which laid larvae in your flesh, where they would gestate and then eat their way out of your body. Yeah. Not nice. We got rid of that this way. (Not globally -- the species remains in a few other places)
That's all I needed to read to understand. While East Texas juries are reknown for their patent infringement jurisprudence, Boston juries never met a victim they didn't love, no matter the circumstances. And they never met a corporation they didn't think deserved to pay out a little cash. No surprise at all here.
I've heard this said before, but thought it was hyperbole. Then I flew to Boston for business. Upon leaving the airport in the rental car, I immediately passed a huge billboard which said, simply: "WHO CAN I SUE?" followed by a telephone number. Not making it up.
Sound waves are being generated all over nature as a natural left over of different processes.
Sorry, but sound fucking sucks as an energy source. Take an 90 dB noise for instance, which is rather loud. What power does that noise deliver to a square meter of area? About 1 milliwatt.
It's interesting that they got the efficiency as high as they did, but even if it was 100% efficient, 1 milliwatt per square meter just absolutely blows. It's a waste of time.
Clearly this was a violation of the tree's rights and I demand reparation immediately!
This story is so ridiculous it makes me cry. Oh no, a murderer got caught because he left evidence at a crime scene. That sounds... just about right to me. It's one thing when we are building databases of human DNA collected from people who have committed no crimes -- a person cannot choose to not have DNA, so this is a serious ethical and human rights issue. But what I see here is that this guy idiotically left physical evidence at the crime scene and this evidence ended up convicting him. Unless you're willing to claim that dogs have some kind of inherent right not to have their DNA cataloged, I don't see the problem here.
The object is not in two places at once. The quantum wavefunction of the object has non-negligible probability in two places at once. This means that the object is equally likely to be found in two different locations.
The wording of the article is extremely sloppy. Remember that a wavefunction is not the object. The wavefunction is nothing more than a way to calculate the probability of finding the object in a particular place. A better description of where the object is when it is in superposition is "nowhere in particular, until measured, at which point it is highly likely to be found at point A or at point B." But that also goes for more run-of-the-mill quantum states.
The interesting thing here is not the wavefunction, but the fact that they have achieved a coherent quantum state between about a trillion atoms.
Imagine the impossibility of the oceans drying up.
For the ocean to "dry up" the water would have to be removed from the planet. That requires two energy inputs: first, enough energy to boil all the water in all the oceans. Second, enough energy to raise the velocity of each molecule of water vapor to the escape velocity.
I won't bother calculating the energy required to reach escape velocity, but the energy required just to boil the oceans into water vapor is around 3e27 J. Using another value I calculated earlier this morning, this is the equivalent of moving the moon's orbit outward by more than 15,000 km. Or, it would be like directing the entire energy output of the sun (not just the fraction of it which hits the Earth) into the oceans for ten seconds. It's a HUGE amount of energy.
Obviously, books printed before the digital era are not available in digital form. Duh. But I don't understand -- you want to take a very old, presumably fragile book, and run it through a 200-page-per-minute scanner? The only books I'd feel comfortable doing that to are books where the value is mostly in the words, not the paper they are printed on -- and for the most part, those are recently published books where a digital representation is available.
I'm not discounting the value of scanning old books. But be careful with them, ok? Jeez.
Why the fuck are we scanning books? Isn't there, you know, a DIGITAL REPRESENTATION which is used during typesetting? This reminds me of that crazy story of the person who printed out a spreadsheet, scanned it in, printed out the scan, laid it on a wooden table, took a digital picture of it, then uploaded it to his web site (or something like that).
There's one thing about it that has me concerned. Darwinism is cruel. It causes the weak to fall by the wayside of evolution and the strong to perpetuate the best of the species. Nature does things for a reason.
"Cruel," "weak," "strong," "best," "reason." That's an awful lot of total bullshit.
Here's one of my favorite analogies. You're driving on a country road in autumn. On either side of the road, there are fallen leaves piled up. On the road itself, there are no leaves. LIKEOHMIGOD. What could have caused this to happen? The answer, obviously, is that any leaf which lies in the road will be blown around by passing cars at random, until it eventually (randomly!) comes to rest on the side of the road, away from the influence of the cars. The result is an ordering of the system. The leaves on the side of the road are stable. The leaves on the road are not stable. Hopefully, you see the insanity of ascribing any sort of willfulness, or distinction between "weak" and "strong" leaves, or try to find any "reason" for it other than simply that the leaves move until they no longer move.
In this case, the passing cars represent the forces of nature and environment which dictate which organisms survive and which do not survive. When you say that nature is weeding out the weak from the strong, it's like saying that one of the goals of the passing cars is to push all the leaves to the side of the road.
Now, you're driving down the road and you see a leaf right in the middle. LIKEOHMIGOD-AGAIN! Something terribly deep must be happening here. Something unexpected, like the lack of mammalian regeneration. There must be a good reason for it! The passing cars (nature) must be singling out this leaf as special somehow, and not throwing it to the side of the road!
The answer turns out to be that the leaf is stuck to the pavement by a piece of chewing gum. Aww, there wasn't any deep meaning after all.
So that implies the question Why is it inactive? I would think the ability to regenerate body parts on demand would be an evolutionary advantage, wouldn't it?
Lots of things would be an evolutionary advantage. If my forearms contained modified follicles which grew tooth-like protrusions and I could fire these at great speed at an incoming predator like Spiderman, that would seem to be an evolutionary advantage. But I don't see anyone asking why we don't have such an adaptation.
The force of gravity between the earth and the moon is roughly 2*10^20 newtons. Moving the moon 10 meters further from the earth would take over 10^13 Joules of energy
I think you're missing a "few" orders of magnitude there... 2*10^20 N over 10 meters is 2*10^21 J. 10^13 J is an absolutely wimpy amount of energy -- humanity consumes that much every couple of seconds.
Lets contemplate and "electron striking metal". Given that the metal is in a simple case, made of a singular type of atom, which contains a vast amount pf empty space, electrons, neutrons and protons, and that it already travels at or near the speed of light, how much energy in excess of the norm can it it impart? Also, one it enters the lattice of the metal, why would it not just be integrated into the electron shells? Every atom should be a giant magnet and effectively absorb the electron.
Well, you can speculate that that's true, but the reality is that it is not true. But let's put the money where the mouth is -- I'll crank up a beam of relativistic electrons, and you can get into a Faraday cage and stand in front of the beam, and we can see what happens.
ot so oddly, we have this same conflict. I rearrange things in hopes of finding new solutions and he finds that disturbing. It seems to help my creative process to tear down things once in awhile and put them back together. I suppose it is all relative or relativistic and that, I think, in this context, is a triple entendre.
There is certainly nothing wrong with trying to find alternate, maybe even superior, ways of looking at something. My point is that the choice of the color analogy was not arbitrary. They could have named the three color charges Elephant, Dolphin, and Giraffe, but this wouldn't be of any help in understanding WHY the charges combine in the ways they do. The color analogy is not capricious. That isn't to say that the color charges couldn't have been described some other way -- the directional analogy I mentioned is another way it can be understood, with each color charge being a vector.
I still don't think you get it. You know how it's easy to tell when something has been 'shopped? Yeah, it's like that. Now, the algorithm isn't, obviously, as good at a human at telling when you are bullshitting, but it's better than you might think, and it takes a non-trivial effort to create data that isn't immediately flagged as suspicious. The world is full of garbage, inaccuracy, and irrelevancy, and the entire purpose of data mining algorithms is to be able to sift through this stuff to find the true pieces of meaning.
It really makes no difference what they are called, and names that overload unrelated concepts in the same field seems like a "strange" leap to me. It has to do with charge and so it is called color. Perfectly logical.
It IS perfectly logical, if you bother to actually understand the way the three color charges interact. If you mix red, green, and blue, you get white, which is the absence of color. If you mix red and anti-red, you get nothing, which is again, the absence of color. Look at the diagrams on Wikipedia if you need further elucidation.
The color analogy is a wonderfully simple and apt way of explaining the reality of how color charge interacts and cancels out. We could have used directions, instead. In that case, it would have been "north," "south-east", and "south-west". A baryon with a combination of all three would have no "direction." A meson with a combination of north and south ("anti-north") would again have no "direction."
Could we have used a directional analogy instead of a color analogy? Sure. It would have been equally explanatory. But color was chosen. The fact that you cannot see the purpose of the analogy is no reflection on the analogy but it does point out your own ignorance of the subject.
A Faraday cage blocks electromagnetic fields basically by reflecting them -- it's a mirror. An electron is not an electromagnetic field. An electron is an electron. Your Faraday cage is uncharged. Why would an electron interact with it? If the electron actually struck the metal, it MIGHT be bound to the metal, but at relativistic speeds an electron is more like a bullet which simply passes through things, dissipating energy as it goes.
Out in the wild universe, energies, velocities, and field strengths can become MUCH larger than anything we can easily produce on Earth. Even your trusty Faraday cage can't block an electric field which is strong enough to physically rip the electrons from the metal.
Better yet, poison the well. Change your account data to be complete garbage. It's going to skew their demographics and reduce the value of the data.
Sigh... No. It's rather difficult to spoil data in a way the algorithms cannot see. Garbage data is just noise, and easy to filter. How to handle corrupted or extraneous data points is a Data Mining 101 sort of topic. To "skew the demographics" (whatever that means -- you need to know what data mining techniques are used) would require concerted manipulation of large swaths of data in a consistent way. Data mining algorithms are not designed by idiots, and a bunch of people randomly being stupid their data isn't going to confuse it that much.
You mean like Strange matter? I honestly think they just aren't creative sometimes and just say "It's weird stuff, we can't think of a name for it, we're wasting time...let's just call it strange matter."
The term "strange matter" has a lot more history behind it than you make it sound. The origin of the term "strange" was in connection with mesons observed in cosmic ray data which, given our then-current understanding of QCD, had unusually long ("strange") lifetimes. Eventually it was discovered that the long-lifetime mesons contained quarks which had not been seen before. The quark was thus named the "strange" quark because it was one of the keys to understanding the strange mesons. Now, imagine a non-negligible assembly of matter consisting of mesons and baryons with strange quarks. This matter is called strange matter.
Yes, the term "strange" was originally used because it was a "WTF?" kind of moment, but that happened a long time ago. Strange matter is perfectly well-understood.
I understand that, but "Vaccines that contain a mercury-based preservative called thimerosal cannot cause autism on their own" is an inarguably absolute statement.
Slashdot Mirror
a change in direction is a big acceleration.
That's just totally wrong. A decelerating object will eventually change direction, no matter how small the deceleration. Not to mention relativity -- "change in direction" is entirely dependent on reference frame, whereas acceleration is completely INDEPENDENT of frame (for inertial frames). Your statement is insane.
Didn't I see something just the other day about doing the exact same thing but with smartphones?
Fascinating, but I can only imagine this is a very expensive solution to implement since the sterilized males must be specially bred
The technique has been used worldwide with other insects for decades. You may not even know it ever existed, but there used to be flies which laid larvae in your flesh, where they would gestate and then eat their way out of your body. Yeah. Not nice. We got rid of that this way. (Not globally -- the species remains in a few other places)
That's all I needed to read to understand. While East Texas juries are reknown for their patent infringement jurisprudence, Boston juries never met a victim they didn't love, no matter the circumstances. And they never met a corporation they didn't think deserved to pay out a little cash. No surprise at all here.
I've heard this said before, but thought it was hyperbole. Then I flew to Boston for business. Upon leaving the airport in the rental car, I immediately passed a huge billboard which said, simply: "WHO CAN I SUE?" followed by a telephone number. Not making it up.
Holy shit, we're not even reading the article TITLES now? The whole reason this is new is because it makes the object invisible from all angles.
Sound waves are being generated all over nature as a natural left over of different processes.
Sorry, but sound fucking sucks as an energy source. Take an 90 dB noise for instance, which is rather loud. What power does that noise deliver to a square meter of area? About 1 milliwatt.
It's interesting that they got the efficiency as high as they did, but even if it was 100% efficient, 1 milliwatt per square meter just absolutely blows. It's a waste of time.
Clearly this was a violation of the tree's rights and I demand reparation immediately!
This story is so ridiculous it makes me cry. Oh no, a murderer got caught because he left evidence at a crime scene. That sounds... just about right to me. It's one thing when we are building databases of human DNA collected from people who have committed no crimes -- a person cannot choose to not have DNA, so this is a serious ethical and human rights issue. But what I see here is that this guy idiotically left physical evidence at the crime scene and this evidence ended up convicting him. Unless you're willing to claim that dogs have some kind of inherent right not to have their DNA cataloged, I don't see the problem here.
The object is not in two places at once. The quantum wavefunction of the object has non-negligible probability in two places at once. This means that the object is equally likely to be found in two different locations.
The wording of the article is extremely sloppy. Remember that a wavefunction is not the object. The wavefunction is nothing more than a way to calculate the probability of finding the object in a particular place. A better description of where the object is when it is in superposition is "nowhere in particular, until measured, at which point it is highly likely to be found at point A or at point B." But that also goes for more run-of-the-mill quantum states.
The interesting thing here is not the wavefunction, but the fact that they have achieved a coherent quantum state between about a trillion atoms.
Imagine the impossibility of the oceans drying up.
For the ocean to "dry up" the water would have to be removed from the planet. That requires two energy inputs: first, enough energy to boil all the water in all the oceans. Second, enough energy to raise the velocity of each molecule of water vapor to the escape velocity.
I won't bother calculating the energy required to reach escape velocity, but the energy required just to boil the oceans into water vapor is around 3e27 J. Using another value I calculated earlier this morning, this is the equivalent of moving the moon's orbit outward by more than 15,000 km. Or, it would be like directing the entire energy output of the sun (not just the fraction of it which hits the Earth) into the oceans for ten seconds. It's a HUGE amount of energy.
Obviously, books printed before the digital era are not available in digital form. Duh. But I don't understand -- you want to take a very old, presumably fragile book, and run it through a 200-page-per-minute scanner? The only books I'd feel comfortable doing that to are books where the value is mostly in the words, not the paper they are printed on -- and for the most part, those are recently published books where a digital representation is available.
I'm not discounting the value of scanning old books. But be careful with them, ok? Jeez.
Why the fuck are we scanning books? Isn't there, you know, a DIGITAL REPRESENTATION which is used during typesetting? This reminds me of that crazy story of the person who printed out a spreadsheet, scanned it in, printed out the scan, laid it on a wooden table, took a digital picture of it, then uploaded it to his web site (or something like that).
There's one thing about it that has me concerned. Darwinism is cruel. It causes the weak to fall by the wayside of evolution and the strong to perpetuate the best of the species. Nature does things for a reason.
"Cruel," "weak," "strong," "best," "reason." That's an awful lot of total bullshit.
Here's one of my favorite analogies. You're driving on a country road in autumn. On either side of the road, there are fallen leaves piled up. On the road itself, there are no leaves. LIKEOHMIGOD. What could have caused this to happen? The answer, obviously, is that any leaf which lies in the road will be blown around by passing cars at random, until it eventually (randomly!) comes to rest on the side of the road, away from the influence of the cars. The result is an ordering of the system. The leaves on the side of the road are stable. The leaves on the road are not stable. Hopefully, you see the insanity of ascribing any sort of willfulness, or distinction between "weak" and "strong" leaves, or try to find any "reason" for it other than simply that the leaves move until they no longer move.
In this case, the passing cars represent the forces of nature and environment which dictate which organisms survive and which do not survive. When you say that nature is weeding out the weak from the strong, it's like saying that one of the goals of the passing cars is to push all the leaves to the side of the road.
Now, you're driving down the road and you see a leaf right in the middle. LIKEOHMIGOD-AGAIN! Something terribly deep must be happening here. Something unexpected, like the lack of mammalian regeneration. There must be a good reason for it! The passing cars (nature) must be singling out this leaf as special somehow, and not throwing it to the side of the road!
The answer turns out to be that the leaf is stuck to the pavement by a piece of chewing gum. Aww, there wasn't any deep meaning after all.
So that implies the question Why is it inactive? I would think the ability to regenerate body parts on demand would be an evolutionary advantage, wouldn't it?
Lots of things would be an evolutionary advantage. If my forearms contained modified follicles which grew tooth-like protrusions and I could fire these at great speed at an incoming predator like Spiderman, that would seem to be an evolutionary advantage. But I don't see anyone asking why we don't have such an adaptation.
So what you're saying is it's too expensive to behave morally?
The force of gravity between the earth and the moon is roughly 2*10^20 newtons. Moving the moon 10 meters further from the earth would take over 10^13 Joules of energy
I think you're missing a "few" orders of magnitude there... 2*10^20 N over 10 meters is 2*10^21 J. 10^13 J is an absolutely wimpy amount of energy -- humanity consumes that much every couple of seconds.
The headline should read, "Is Microsoft about to conjure up a hellstorm of backlash and animosity on themselves?" The answer is No.
Lets contemplate and "electron striking metal". Given that the metal is in a simple case, made of a singular type of atom, which contains a vast amount pf empty space, electrons, neutrons and protons, and that it already travels at or near the speed of light, how much energy in excess of the norm can it it impart? Also, one it enters the lattice of the metal, why would it not just be integrated into the electron shells? Every atom should be a giant magnet and effectively absorb the electron.
Well, you can speculate that that's true, but the reality is that it is not true. But let's put the money where the mouth is -- I'll crank up a beam of relativistic electrons, and you can get into a Faraday cage and stand in front of the beam, and we can see what happens.
ot so oddly, we have this same conflict. I rearrange things in hopes of finding new solutions and he finds that disturbing. It seems to help my creative process to tear down things once in awhile and put them back together. I suppose it is all relative or relativistic and that, I think, in this context, is a triple entendre.
There is certainly nothing wrong with trying to find alternate, maybe even superior, ways of looking at something. My point is that the choice of the color analogy was not arbitrary. They could have named the three color charges Elephant, Dolphin, and Giraffe, but this wouldn't be of any help in understanding WHY the charges combine in the ways they do. The color analogy is not capricious. That isn't to say that the color charges couldn't have been described some other way -- the directional analogy I mentioned is another way it can be understood, with each color charge being a vector.
I still don't think you get it. You know how it's easy to tell when something has been 'shopped? Yeah, it's like that. Now, the algorithm isn't, obviously, as good at a human at telling when you are bullshitting, but it's better than you might think, and it takes a non-trivial effort to create data that isn't immediately flagged as suspicious. The world is full of garbage, inaccuracy, and irrelevancy, and the entire purpose of data mining algorithms is to be able to sift through this stuff to find the true pieces of meaning.
It really makes no difference what they are called, and names that overload unrelated concepts in the same field seems like a "strange" leap to me. It has to do with charge and so it is called color. Perfectly logical.
It IS perfectly logical, if you bother to actually understand the way the three color charges interact. If you mix red, green, and blue, you get white, which is the absence of color. If you mix red and anti-red, you get nothing, which is again, the absence of color. Look at the diagrams on Wikipedia if you need further elucidation.
The color analogy is a wonderfully simple and apt way of explaining the reality of how color charge interacts and cancels out. We could have used directions, instead. In that case, it would have been "north," "south-east", and "south-west". A baryon with a combination of all three would have no "direction." A meson with a combination of north and south ("anti-north") would again have no "direction."
Could we have used a directional analogy instead of a color analogy? Sure. It would have been equally explanatory. But color was chosen. The fact that you cannot see the purpose of the analogy is no reflection on the analogy but it does point out your own ignorance of the subject.
A Faraday cage blocks electromagnetic fields basically by reflecting them -- it's a mirror. An electron is not an electromagnetic field. An electron is an electron. Your Faraday cage is uncharged. Why would an electron interact with it? If the electron actually struck the metal, it MIGHT be bound to the metal, but at relativistic speeds an electron is more like a bullet which simply passes through things, dissipating energy as it goes.
Out in the wild universe, energies, velocities, and field strengths can become MUCH larger than anything we can easily produce on Earth. Even your trusty Faraday cage can't block an electric field which is strong enough to physically rip the electrons from the metal.
Better yet, poison the well. Change your account data to be complete garbage. It's going to skew their demographics and reduce the value of the data.
Sigh... No. It's rather difficult to spoil data in a way the algorithms cannot see. Garbage data is just noise, and easy to filter. How to handle corrupted or extraneous data points is a Data Mining 101 sort of topic. To "skew the demographics" (whatever that means -- you need to know what data mining techniques are used) would require concerted manipulation of large swaths of data in a consistent way. Data mining algorithms are not designed by idiots, and a bunch of people randomly being stupid their data isn't going to confuse it that much.
You mean like Strange matter? I honestly think they just aren't creative sometimes and just say "It's weird stuff, we can't think of a name for it, we're wasting time...let's just call it strange matter."
The term "strange matter" has a lot more history behind it than you make it sound. The origin of the term "strange" was in connection with mesons observed in cosmic ray data which, given our then-current understanding of QCD, had unusually long ("strange") lifetimes. Eventually it was discovered that the long-lifetime mesons contained quarks which had not been seen before. The quark was thus named the "strange" quark because it was one of the keys to understanding the strange mesons. Now, imagine a non-negligible assembly of matter consisting of mesons and baryons with strange quarks. This matter is called strange matter.
Yes, the term "strange" was originally used because it was a "WTF?" kind of moment, but that happened a long time ago. Strange matter is perfectly well-understood.
Uh, "killer electrons" is the accepted scientific name for this phenomenon. Physicists sometimes use weird names for things. Deal with it.
I understand that, but "Vaccines that contain a mercury-based preservative called thimerosal cannot cause autism on their own" is an inarguably absolute statement.