However, one must agree that most radio communications are not point sources (not even "omni" antennas) and most high gain antennas are absolutely not so.
Consider our recent communications from earth to the New Horizons mission. These are "highly-collimated" (I'm putting that in square quotes because of course at the wavelengths being emitted it's not as collimated as a laser through an optical telescope would be) beams of radio waves leaving a 70m aperture (Tidbinbilla DSN) here on earth and going in one direction. Now I don't have time right now to dust off my college optics textbook to compute the diameter of that radio beam at the edge of the solar system, and at say 10 light years, or 100 light years away, but it will NOT be a compete sphere of radio waves and it will not be dropping off in intensity as the inverse-square of the distance.
I hope you can see this and I hope others can as well.
Like I said later in the post, a directed beam would have the best chance of getting to Earth; however, despite a high gain antenna's increased directional strength, the intensity still drops off in proportion to the inverse square. This is fundamental to the radiation field. In a perfect world, you can construct phase in such a way that intensity does not drop off, but this requires an infinite aperture with infinite power (see, for instance, airy beams).
So, yes, you can increase the range of communication, but you have to know who to shoot the beam at. This is why I suggested that we search for communications along the Earth-Sun ecliptic, since another civilization is more likely, perhaps, to have discovered us along that plane (which is still a long shot).
In theory, an advanced civilization with access to an extreme amount of energy (on the order of an entire star) could send out a sustained omni-directional signal strong enough to propagate throughout the galaxy. I find this to be far less likely, considering the already slim prospects for intelligent life.
You couldn't detect radio signals from a planet. The electric field of a radio signal drops off inversely with the distance that it's traveled, the intensity inversely with the square of the distance. The closest large galaxy is about 2.4 million light-years away. Compare that to the measly 100 light-years that our radio signals have traveled. In Andromeda, the intensity of our radio signal will have dropped off by a factor of about a billion -- 2.4 million years from now-- compared to the already weak signals that we sent 100 years ago. So we will not likely find a signal from another civilization like our own.
As far as detecting extremely advanced civilizations goes, it's silly to assume that they will output enough infrared heat to be detected on a galactic scale. Assuming they're able to overcome their population constraints (lack of resources, planets, living in space far from another star, etc), the heat that they generate on their own would still be negligible compared to even the dimmest brown dwarf stars that we can detect... unless you think that their population exceeds the mass of many thousands of stars. It's not downright impossible for a civilization to have spread throughout a galaxy -- it only takes about 250 million years to orbit your own galaxy -- but it's rather unlikely that we could see them from such distance.
Furthermore, it took Earth about 4 billion years to form (mind you, just the planet... the evolution was much quicker with a bit of luck). As far as we can tell, the universe has only been churning out planets for 13.6 billion years. So you might be hard pressed to look at galaxies much farther than 9 billion light-years, since we can only receive light from civilizations that have had the time to develop on formed planets with good chemicals.
I suspect that our best bet is looking at exoplanets within our own galaxy. As of now, we don't have a sun-sized telescope, so we'll have to stick with examining planetary atmospheres via transits (so absorption spectra of light coming from the star through the atmosphere). With some extreme amount of luck, we may be able to see the byproducts of an organic life-form within a planetary atmosphere, but there's no reason that it'd be life with advanced intelligence.
If you wanted to search for a signal from another civilization similar to our own, they'd probably have to be directing a strong signal towards us intentionally (and from within our own galaxy). I suggested to Geoff Marcy during a colloquium that we should look for signals within our own ecliptic, since if we've been discovered as a non-advanced life-form (remember we've only been technologically 'advanced' for less than 100 years), they would most likely have discovered our atmosphere via the transiting technique. You can actually detect transits in mass simply by observing the intensity of thousands of stars over a few decades. No need to zero in on a planet with a *giant* telescope. He seemed to think it was a decent idea, but I probably would have been better off by emailing someone at seti:P
If your operations can be carried out in specific countries, you might be able to bypass some anti-hacking laws, or at least diminish some of the potential legal blame of 'going too far'. If you have to limit your offensive capabilities, there are probably ways of cataloging/surveying/classifying incoming attacks and thwarting them without doing anything illegal. The main factor in the success of this business relies on them providing monetarily valuable information to potential targets.
That said, what they say they're doing is not illegal, and it is probably already practiced by most security companies. It's just a business pitch. From TFA, they spend their time
monitoring underground chatter and markets, analyzing computer code meant to cause harm, watching the networks of potential attackers and poring over social media channels for signs of imminent attacks.
Arts and crafts transcend science as a recognition of the fact that you can do whatever the fuck that tickles you during your short period of awareness of immanent existence.
Machine learning won't 'solve' the economics problem (a problem which the TFA doesn't really define). The problem with math in economics is that economic time-series is extremely chaotic -- a practically infinitesimal change in initial conditions vastly changes the outcome of the system. Hey, remember how we can only predict the weather out 15 days *max* (using big ass supercomputers along with lots of soil moisture content, temperature, wind and other seasonal data)?... well the weather is just one of the tiny effects that propagate through economic time-series. Don't forget about psychology, trading strategies, oh yeah, and the fact that people are actively trying to trick your trading strategies into losing money.
No, machine learning is only natural to takeover a human's limited computational ability, but it doesn't solve the problem of unpredictability. In fact, it will make the market harder to predict for joe blow.
That said, TFA did rightly point out that economics is filled with lots of bullshit conjecture and over-rigorized high-brow nonsense.
Now now, yall have the right to judge cheaters just as much as cheaters have the right to cheat. But those 'vigilante' privacy-hating folks have the right to steal private information just as much as anarchists have the right to kill.
If you're interested in using windows, keep it on your desktop. In my experience, macbooks mesh a little better in research/workplace environments than windows laptops. For desktops on the other hand, where you might actually need some power (for gaming, design, personal computation, etc), windows is still king of compatibility.
Improvements in battery technology are one of the most important stepping stones in getting us to that Star Trek utopia. Obviously they're used everywhere, but with 'perfect' battery technology, you don't need to worry about peak load energy production (ie, you can produce clean energy sporadically and save it if power demand isn't high enough), you don't need gasoline for cars, and your smartphones won't take hours to charge.
It seems that the main advantage of this breakthrough is, among other benefits, eliminating the heating problems associated with high energy devices like car batteries. One of the biggest problems people have with electric cars is that you can't charge them faster than you can fill up a tank of gas. FTFA:
The electrolyte in such batteries — typically a liquid organic solvent whose function is to transport charged particles from one of a battery’s two electrodes to the other during charging and discharging — has been responsible for the overheating and fires... The lithium itself is not flammable in the state it’s in in these batteries.
This is big, and I'm excited. Don't get me wrong, this isn't an overall solution to our dirty energy practices and clunky smartphones, but it's a big step in the right direction. Surely there will be design hurdles to overcome, which will probably delay implementation for some time, but this century is going to be great if we don't fuck it up too bad.
Also, if you can get past the paywall, here's a link to the nature materials article that the article didn't have: http://www.nature.com/nmat/jou...
There don't seem to be very many good free alternatives other than microsoft's default package. I've wondered if it's possible for me to make my own security system, but I've never given it a good amount of thought.
If classification is the name of the game, couldn't you use some machine learning techniques based on what malware does and write your own classifier?
It doesn't have to. At any given moment your body requires a certain amount of energy to maintain its current level of functionality. If there is more than that available, it will store the surplus. A prolonged surplus will result in the creation of fat to store it for the long term.
So if you routinely eat more calories than your body needs, you'll get fat. It doesn't matter how much of what you eat gets absorbed or what your specific caloric needs are or any other factors that change what your body needs at any given instant - eat too much, too often, you get fat.
=Smidge=
Like you say, and as I said, calories certainly contribute to weight gain, but they are an imperfect approximation, and they take no account of how the type of food you eat interacts with metabolic processes and neurochemistry. For instance, one common measure of caloric content of food approximates the human metabolism as taking 85% of the energy content available in food. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
So in other words, they do help you lose weight as long as you don't change your other eating habits.
Not exactly. Artificial sweeteners in general have an impact on your gut chemistry. Here's a study that links non-caloric artificial sweeteners to metabolic diseases like diabetes: http://www.nature.com/nature/j...
How the hell else do you get fat? You consume more calories than you burn, your body mass will increase. It's really basic thermodynamics at work here...
It's true that eating more calories will contribute to weight gain, but it's not simply 'thermodynamics'. If you put chemicals in your body, a chemical reaction happens! Just like drugs, all food is based on nonlinear dynamics and chemical reactions. Your metabolism doesn't extract 100% of available calories, that depends on the bacteria in your gut along with a slew of other chemical activities.
Not to mention, food (and drugs) have an appreciable effect on our mood and actions. At this point, psychology depends on neurology, which in turn depends on metabolism, which depends on what chemicals you're putting in your body. The concept of a calorie is imperfect just like our aspirations of looking sexy are imperfect.
in other related news, researchers tightly focus light bulb light. They contend that their invention should have a wide spectrum of uses, but critics argue that their results aren't coherent.
I would imagine that if you have a strong inhomogeneous magnetic field, you could rip out particle-antiparticle pairs, and move them as a group before they recombine, in which case you've exerted momentum on massive particles, independent of the fact that the momentum of their individual reaction is conserved. I can only picture this working though if you ejected the particles out the back. The contraption is apparently entirely closed.
I've always wondered about sitting on the floor with a pad and no back, and treating it like a meditative posture (so keeping a straight back is paramount). Has anyone tried this for work?
If not, has anyone spent a considerable amount of time meditating on the floor? I'm wondering if it's still stressful on your back a
"A terrible social crime". Sounds like he's mad because his wife couldn't read Facebook.
I experienced the outage all the way in the placer county area. My internet, phone and cable were affected since they all are run through wave broadband. Yes, having no internet for a day sucked, but it got me thinking. Those vandals cut a single line, and I effectively lost 3/4 of my modes of communication.
I had my cell phone, so I was able to call and text. If a coordinated group of terrorists or a nation wanted to attack US soil, it wouldn't be that hard to cut out the people's communication. Our communication infrastructure might be more vulnerable than you think.
In time, there might be viable alternatives to the big ISPs, but for now, there's a huge disparity between the price/speed of the US vs other modern countries. Things only need to get bad enough for people to notice, then we'll either regulate it or somebody will find a more competitive option.
Slashdot Mirror
However, one must agree that most radio communications are not point sources (not even "omni" antennas) and most high gain antennas are absolutely not so.
Consider our recent communications from earth to the New Horizons mission. These are "highly-collimated" (I'm putting that in square quotes because of course at the wavelengths being emitted it's not as collimated as a laser through an optical telescope would be) beams of radio waves leaving a 70m aperture (Tidbinbilla DSN) here on earth and going in one direction. Now I don't have time right now to dust off my college optics textbook to compute the diameter of that radio beam at the edge of the solar system, and at say 10 light years, or 100 light years away, but it will NOT be a compete sphere of radio waves and it will not be dropping off in intensity as the inverse-square of the distance.
I hope you can see this and I hope others can as well.
Like I said later in the post, a directed beam would have the best chance of getting to Earth; however, despite a high gain antenna's increased directional strength, the intensity still drops off in proportion to the inverse square. This is fundamental to the radiation field. In a perfect world, you can construct phase in such a way that intensity does not drop off, but this requires an infinite aperture with infinite power (see, for instance, airy beams).
So, yes, you can increase the range of communication, but you have to know who to shoot the beam at. This is why I suggested that we search for communications along the Earth-Sun ecliptic, since another civilization is more likely, perhaps, to have discovered us along that plane (which is still a long shot).
In theory, an advanced civilization with access to an extreme amount of energy (on the order of an entire star) could send out a sustained omni-directional signal strong enough to propagate throughout the galaxy. I find this to be far less likely, considering the already slim prospects for intelligent life.
You couldn't detect radio signals from a planet. The electric field of a radio signal drops off inversely with the distance that it's traveled, the intensity inversely with the square of the distance. The closest large galaxy is about 2.4 million light-years away. Compare that to the measly 100 light-years that our radio signals have traveled. In Andromeda, the intensity of our radio signal will have dropped off by a factor of about a billion -- 2.4 million years from now-- compared to the already weak signals that we sent 100 years ago. So we will not likely find a signal from another civilization like our own.
As far as detecting extremely advanced civilizations goes, it's silly to assume that they will output enough infrared heat to be detected on a galactic scale. Assuming they're able to overcome their population constraints (lack of resources, planets, living in space far from another star, etc), the heat that they generate on their own would still be negligible compared to even the dimmest brown dwarf stars that we can detect... unless you think that their population exceeds the mass of many thousands of stars. It's not downright impossible for a civilization to have spread throughout a galaxy -- it only takes about 250 million years to orbit your own galaxy -- but it's rather unlikely that we could see them from such distance.
Furthermore, it took Earth about 4 billion years to form (mind you, just the planet... the evolution was much quicker with a bit of luck). As far as we can tell, the universe has only been churning out planets for 13.6 billion years. So you might be hard pressed to look at galaxies much farther than 9 billion light-years, since we can only receive light from civilizations that have had the time to develop on formed planets with good chemicals.
I suspect that our best bet is looking at exoplanets within our own galaxy. As of now, we don't have a sun-sized telescope, so we'll have to stick with examining planetary atmospheres via transits (so absorption spectra of light coming from the star through the atmosphere). With some extreme amount of luck, we may be able to see the byproducts of an organic life-form within a planetary atmosphere, but there's no reason that it'd be life with advanced intelligence.
If you wanted to search for a signal from another civilization similar to our own, they'd probably have to be directing a strong signal towards us intentionally (and from within our own galaxy). I suggested to Geoff Marcy during a colloquium that we should look for signals within our own ecliptic, since if we've been discovered as a non-advanced life-form (remember we've only been technologically 'advanced' for less than 100 years), they would most likely have discovered our atmosphere via the transiting technique. You can actually detect transits in mass simply by observing the intensity of thousands of stars over a few decades. No need to zero in on a planet with a *giant* telescope. He seemed to think it was a decent idea, but I probably would have been better off by emailing someone at seti :P
If your operations can be carried out in specific countries, you might be able to bypass some anti-hacking laws, or at least diminish some of the potential legal blame of 'going too far'. If you have to limit your offensive capabilities, there are probably ways of cataloging/surveying/classifying incoming attacks and thwarting them without doing anything illegal. The main factor in the success of this business relies on them providing monetarily valuable information to potential targets.
That said, what they say they're doing is not illegal, and it is probably already practiced by most security companies. It's just a business pitch. From TFA, they spend their time
monitoring underground chatter and markets, analyzing computer code meant to cause harm, watching the networks of potential attackers and poring over social media channels for signs of imminent attacks.
Arts and crafts transcend science as a recognition of the fact that you can do whatever the fuck that tickles you during your short period of awareness of immanent existence.
Hobbies also give you:
- confidence (mad G-chord skillz!!1)
- a peaceful break from your current mindfuck
- a diversification of perspectives
- a sense of personal satisfaction security
- an extra way to relate to other people
- other stuff
Why wouldn't they help you in science?
Machine learning won't 'solve' the economics problem (a problem which the TFA doesn't really define). The problem with math in economics is that economic time-series is extremely chaotic -- a practically infinitesimal change in initial conditions vastly changes the outcome of the system. Hey, remember how we can only predict the weather out 15 days *max* (using big ass supercomputers along with lots of soil moisture content, temperature, wind and other seasonal data)?... well the weather is just one of the tiny effects that propagate through economic time-series. Don't forget about psychology, trading strategies, oh yeah, and the fact that people are actively trying to trick your trading strategies into losing money.
No, machine learning is only natural to takeover a human's limited computational ability, but it doesn't solve the problem of unpredictability. In fact, it will make the market harder to predict for joe blow.
That said, TFA did rightly point out that economics is filled with lots of bullshit conjecture and over-rigorized high-brow nonsense.
In the US, it's a lot harder to clean up all the trash that people throw on the ground.
Noo it iz all about da powah. I djust find back-propah-gating weights and pumping ions to be orgasmic.
[terminate joke]
Now now, yall have the right to judge cheaters just as much as cheaters have the right to cheat. But those 'vigilante' privacy-hating folks have the right to steal private information just as much as anarchists have the right to kill.
If you're interested in using windows, keep it on your desktop. In my experience, macbooks mesh a little better in research/workplace environments than windows laptops. For desktops on the other hand, where you might actually need some power (for gaming, design, personal computation, etc), windows is still king of compatibility.
Improvements in battery technology are one of the most important stepping stones in getting us to that Star Trek utopia. Obviously they're used everywhere, but with 'perfect' battery technology, you don't need to worry about peak load energy production (ie, you can produce clean energy sporadically and save it if power demand isn't high enough), you don't need gasoline for cars, and your smartphones won't take hours to charge.
It seems that the main advantage of this breakthrough is, among other benefits, eliminating the heating problems associated with high energy devices like car batteries. One of the biggest problems people have with electric cars is that you can't charge them faster than you can fill up a tank of gas. FTFA:
The electrolyte in such batteries — typically a liquid organic solvent whose function is to transport charged particles from one of a battery’s two electrodes to the other during charging and discharging — has been responsible for the overheating and fires... The lithium itself is not flammable in the state it’s in in these batteries.
This is big, and I'm excited. Don't get me wrong, this isn't an overall solution to our dirty energy practices and clunky smartphones, but it's a big step in the right direction. Surely there will be design hurdles to overcome, which will probably delay implementation for some time, but this century is going to be great if we don't fuck it up too bad.
Also, if you can get past the paywall, here's a link to the nature materials article that the article didn't have: http://www.nature.com/nmat/jou...
America surely has a better fighter jet up its sleeve!!!1! The pentagon must be secretly spending the money elsewhere!
There don't seem to be very many good free alternatives other than microsoft's default package. I've wondered if it's possible for me to make my own security system, but I've never given it a good amount of thought.
If classification is the name of the game, couldn't you use some machine learning techniques based on what malware does and write your own classifier?
Somebody is throwing around some serious mod power in this post.
oh... and
last post!!
heheheh, suckers
what about another big bang sized cosmic quantum fluctuation?
ehhhh, forget it... it's probably really unlikely
It doesn't have to. At any given moment your body requires a certain amount of energy to maintain its current level of functionality. If there is more than that available, it will store the surplus. A prolonged surplus will result in the creation of fat to store it for the long term.
So if you routinely eat more calories than your body needs, you'll get fat. It doesn't matter how much of what you eat gets absorbed or what your specific caloric needs are or any other factors that change what your body needs at any given instant - eat too much, too often, you get fat. =Smidge=
Like you say, and as I said, calories certainly contribute to weight gain, but they are an imperfect approximation, and they take no account of how the type of food you eat interacts with metabolic processes and neurochemistry. For instance, one common measure of caloric content of food approximates the human metabolism as taking 85% of the energy content available in food. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
So in other words, they do help you lose weight as long as you don't change your other eating habits.
Not exactly. Artificial sweeteners in general have an impact on your gut chemistry. Here's a study that links non-caloric artificial sweeteners to metabolic diseases like diabetes: http://www.nature.com/nature/j...
How the hell else do you get fat? You consume more calories than you burn, your body mass will increase. It's really basic thermodynamics at work here...
It's true that eating more calories will contribute to weight gain, but it's not simply 'thermodynamics'. If you put chemicals in your body, a chemical reaction happens! Just like drugs, all food is based on nonlinear dynamics and chemical reactions. Your metabolism doesn't extract 100% of available calories, that depends on the bacteria in your gut along with a slew of other chemical activities.
Not to mention, food (and drugs) have an appreciable effect on our mood and actions. At this point, psychology depends on neurology, which in turn depends on metabolism, which depends on what chemicals you're putting in your body. The concept of a calorie is imperfect just like our aspirations of looking sexy are imperfect.
in other related news, researchers tightly focus light bulb light. They contend that their invention should have a wide spectrum of uses, but critics argue that their results aren't coherent.
I would imagine that if you have a strong inhomogeneous magnetic field, you could rip out particle-antiparticle pairs, and move them as a group before they recombine, in which case you've exerted momentum on massive particles, independent of the fact that the momentum of their individual reaction is conserved. I can only picture this working though if you ejected the particles out the back. The contraption is apparently entirely closed.
Fuck McAfee Mod +5 Insightful because you know it is.
How about the best free alternative to McAfee?
fickle fingers, watermarks, explosive data leaks, reducing bloat, secret backdoors. I mean it just doesn't help the fact that I ...
... oh man, I don't think I'm gonna make it to the bathroom.
I've always wondered about sitting on the floor with a pad and no back, and treating it like a meditative posture (so keeping a straight back is paramount). Has anyone tried this for work?
If not, has anyone spent a considerable amount of time meditating on the floor? I'm wondering if it's still stressful on your back a
"A terrible social crime". Sounds like he's mad because his wife couldn't read Facebook.
I experienced the outage all the way in the placer county area. My internet, phone and cable were affected since they all are run through wave broadband. Yes, having no internet for a day sucked, but it got me thinking. Those vandals cut a single line, and I effectively lost 3/4 of my modes of communication.
I had my cell phone, so I was able to call and text. If a coordinated group of terrorists or a nation wanted to attack US soil, it wouldn't be that hard to cut out the people's communication. Our communication infrastructure might be more vulnerable than you think.
Get me my fucking hover-bike. Now.
In time, there might be viable alternatives to the big ISPs, but for now, there's a huge disparity between the price/speed of the US vs other modern countries. Things only need to get bad enough for people to notice, then we'll either regulate it or somebody will find a more competitive option.