If you really want to get agitated about the earth's rotation slowing down, consider the moon. Tides act as a brake on the earth/moon system. So the rotation of the earth slows, and the moon (to conserve angular momentum) moves ever so slowly away from the earth.
The decceleration due to the Moon is about 1.4ms per day per century. The fluctuations they've come up with due to the atmosphere are about 100 times greater. Also, I don't think the research is aimed at ringing any kind of alarm bells. They're trying to use the Earth's rotation as an atmospheric instrument.
The same thing happens when you, e.g., stop a bicycle tire from spinning by gripping the brake pad. This produces heat. The total angular momentum is still there, but in a form that can't be converted back into rotation of the bicycle tire.
This is wrong. Angular momentum is conserved in a closed system and it has nothing to do with heat and energy. When you grab a spinning wheel the relevant closed system involves the wheel, your body and the entire Earth. The angular momentum of the wheel is transferred without loss to the Earth, possibly changing the length of the day by a picosecond or two. The angular momentum can be transferred from the Earth back to the wheel simply by spinning it up again. The energy required or liberated is irrelevant.
Yes, this is true. But what is the usual remedy for this? A transformer, which requires a certain quantity of ferromagnetic material such as iron. The result would be similar to the moving magnet and coil suggested in the article, but would probably be more elegant with less moving mass.
Yeah but they weren't trying to transport humans with the MK70, so why invent a low-G accelerator when all they wanted to do was test the scramjet?
Re:Doesn't matter if they count them or not...
on
MIT vs. Las Vegas
·
· Score: 2
Yes but dealers can still gain advantage for the house by counting along with the players. They simply re-shuffle the deck whenever the count goes high. Hell, they don't even need to count. If they're dealing to a suspected counter, they can re-shuffle whenever the player raises their bet.
Well I'm coming very late to this discussion but it's something I've thought about before. Many posters have pointed out that any breakthrough discovery is unlikely to be 10 or 20 years away from the rest of the scientific community, especially if you give a credible clue that the discovery exists to be made.
However one exception to this rule occurs to me. If you were to somehow develop advanced Artificial Intelligence that was thousands of times more intelligent than a human you could use this to solve a huge number of technical and scientific problems. If you could control the AI completely and safely (big if) it would be possible to develop technologies that would supress discovery of the same technique anywhere else in the world. How? One way would be development of advanced self-replicant nanotechnology that would allow you to surveil the entire Earth and subtly divert research efforts getting too close to your crucial discovery. Computers would mysteriously fail here and there, experiments would fail, etc. No one could detect your actions because, by definition, they don't have the detection technology.
Sounds crazy, I know. But all the rules go out the window if you assume the existance of a loyal machine that can think thousands or millions of times faster than we can. We'd all like to think it would be us to discover this first in our basements or something. In reality it's far more likely to be the NSA. Scary.
It's humerous that one of the biggest Japanese companies is so concerned with intellectual property. The Japanese reputation with regards to Patent enforcement is a model for the anti-Amazon burn-the-patents crowd. This is illustrated by, for example, Texas Instruments getting bent over by Fujitsu in 97.
Not only that, but I'd go so far as to say that between May 17 and May 19, Microsoft earned as much revenue as Linux did from June 3 to June 3 the following year. Think about it.
Requiring a mobile phone user to be within 100 meters of a station is extremely limiting.
Yes but the point of the article is that the same limitations may cause wi-fi to fail and you havn't spoken to that at all. One could equally argue that the idea of an ultraportable or PDA is that you can use it far from the receiving antenna. I don't see what you mean about the corless phones either. They may have a 100m range, but they're not portable. You can't take them with you and use them from a Starbucks.
The question is: Will Wi-Fi end up being replaced by, for example, 3G in the same way that Rabbit (and Iridium) were killed by GSM and cell phones?
The only important thing to know about Stuart Cheshire is that he created the the mindnumbingly addictive global internet phenomenom called Bolo. It was the first big non-text game to be played over the internet and it was huge when I was at uni 1993-96. He created it for his PhD and it's good to see he hasn't been idle since then!
I'm actually disgusted that my post was modded to 5:Funny. This is exactly the sort of post that makes me want to set a -2 penalty on funny posts in my preferences!
Just because someone works for NASA...Doesn't mean that they are the best minds in the world.
I couldn't agree more. That's why I never mentioned NASA.;) I said "the best minds of the world's space agencies" and made no reference to what the worst minds of those space agenciese might or might not be doing. Probably they are trying to work out what to do with the ISS...
Carbon nanotubes have become a hot item of discussion across all fields of engineering because, in part, the cylinders constructed from hexagonal links of carbon atoms are believed to be perhaps the strongest manmade material.
That should be "strongest material fullstop". The inference to natural materials can only be referring to spider silk. Spider dragline silk has a tensile strength comparable to steel, but will stretch 35% without breaking. It seems steel can achieve up to about 5 Gpa in tensile strength depending on quality, etc. Carbon nanotube fibres are expected to be in the hundreds of Gpa.
There is a cautious belief amongst materials scientists that carbon nanotubes may in fact be the strongest substance possible in terms of tensile strength.
Yes it's time for slashdotters to put their thinking caps on. I'm sure our geek aura will penetrate a problem that has had the best minds of the world's space agencies stumped for decades.
I await with glee the hoards of posts suggesting enormous ballistic inflatable penguins and fleets of linux powered robotic red swingline staplers. But what about prevention in the future? Easy, just make all space objects run Windows, that way they will crash themselves into the blue ocean of death eventually.
There, I've got it out of the way early so hopefully others won't need to.
Well, primes are very special for lots of reasons. For example, from an information theory point of view, primes provide a way to encode an arbitrary sequence of numbers into another single number. How? Each number has a unique factorisation into primes. For example 20 = 2^2 x 3^0 x 5^1 x 7^0 x... and so on for all the primes. So the sequence 2,0,1,0,0,... uniquely maps to the number 20. In this way you can map any sequence of numbers to the corresponding product of primes.
In the C programming language the corresponding concept is the struct which lets you wrap up several values into one. So primes are at least as fundamental to number theory as the struct is to programming.
Also, the news-for-nerds crowd only has to look to cryptography to see how important primes are.
They hardly bash it! There are a couple of sceptical half-hearted shots like "this would require the purchase of billions of dollars of new equipment". Hardly a compelling argument since billions of dollars of equipment will be purchased anyway in the next 5-10 years, it's just a matter of time and how long-term MS, Intel and AMD are prepared to think.
The strong arguments made in the Register article are completely lost on AP/CNN.
I think you've been watching too many made-for-tv movies. The Tunguska event flattened an area "half the size of Rhode island" according to this page. My geography isn't that good, but I'm pretty sure that's a fair bit smaller than Siberia.
Hurrican prediction and asteriod prediction are totally different ball games. With an asteroid you can potentially track the impact position with great accuracy if you have good enough tracking fascilities. Comets are more problematic because the volatile gasses boiling off the surface produce unpredictable shifts in the orbit. So perhaps these are a better analog for hurricanes.
If a rock like 2002MN had been detected and tracked early enough and found to be on a collision course, we could have weeks of notice to evacuate the impact area or the coastal regions that would be hit by tsunami if it was to impact on water.
I don't think we're going to see that much of a resurgence of sales from this. The fact is that most of the time you can't fit a whole DivX movie on a single CD. They usually almost-but-not-quite-fit, so you need 2 CDs which is a real pain. I believe it's already possible to convert DivX to MPEG-2 CDs (video CDs) and play them on a normal DVD player. I have a friend who has burned hour-long TV shows to a single VCD from the downloaded DivX (which admittedly was less than half the size of the MPEG-2 version).
I've never seen this type of thing on the front page before!
Uh, don't the editors do it all the time? The editors are no more journalists creating stories than the "readers" of slashdot (just look at JonKatz). Also it seems that the story being passed off was the ZDNet article, not so much his own comment.
In any event, this similarity between the Maxwell equations and the linearized Einstein equations is what gives rise to the gravitoelectric and gravitomagnetic fields (analogues to the electric and magnetic fields, of course). So don't think "bunk" when you encounter these terms. They're quite real, and are commonly found in the General Relativity literature.
Ok but isn't this "similarity" the basis for Chiao's Gravity Tranducer prediction? If so, then by asking us to accept the usage of "gravitoelectric" and "gravitomagnetic", you're more or less asking us to accept Chiao's ideas as well. Perhaps "pseudoscience" was too strong a word (I didn't use "bunk" as you seemed to quote me). But I still hold to the position that GE and GM should signal to the reader that this is fringe physics.
Slashdot Mirror
If you really want to get agitated about the earth's rotation slowing down, consider the moon. Tides act as a brake on the earth/moon system. So the rotation of the earth slows, and the moon (to conserve angular momentum) moves ever so slowly away from the earth.
The decceleration due to the Moon is about 1.4ms per day per century. The fluctuations they've come up with due to the atmosphere are about 100 times greater. Also, I don't think the research is aimed at ringing any kind of alarm bells. They're trying to use the Earth's rotation as an atmospheric instrument.
The same thing happens when you, e.g., stop a bicycle tire from spinning by gripping the brake pad. This produces heat. The total angular momentum is still there, but in a form that can't be converted back into rotation of the bicycle tire.
This is wrong. Angular momentum is conserved in a closed system and it has nothing to do with heat and energy. When you grab a spinning wheel the relevant closed system involves the wheel, your body and the entire Earth. The angular momentum of the wheel is transferred without loss to the Earth, possibly changing the length of the day by a picosecond or two. The angular momentum can be transferred from the Earth back to the wheel simply
by spinning it up again. The energy required or liberated is irrelevant.
Yes I studied physics for 2 years at uni.
Please, don't compare this space elevator lunacy with JFK.
Um, I think you'll find it was JFK's Apollo program that was lunacy.
Aaaahahaha.
Moon. Luna. Lunacy.
*tap*tap* Is this thing on?
Yes, this is true. But what is the usual remedy for this? A transformer, which requires a certain quantity of ferromagnetic material such as iron. The result would be similar to the moving magnet and coil suggested in the article, but would probably be more elegant with less moving mass.
Yeah but they weren't trying to transport humans with the MK70, so why invent a low-G accelerator when all they wanted to do was test the scramjet?
Yes but dealers can still gain advantage for the house by counting along with the players. They simply re-shuffle the deck whenever the count goes high. Hell, they don't even need to count. If they're dealing to a suspected counter, they can re-shuffle whenever the player raises their bet.
I believe that you can still find single card games in Atlantic City if you look hard enough.
:)
Single card games are also known as 2-bit magic tricks - "Is this your hidden card?"
Single deck games are fun too though.
Um, I wasn't talking about AI as a storage medium man. Don't think you read the comment you're replying to ;)
Well I'm coming very late to this discussion but it's something I've thought about before. Many posters have pointed out that any breakthrough discovery is unlikely to be 10 or 20 years away from the rest of the scientific community, especially if you give a credible clue that the discovery exists to be made.
However one exception to this rule occurs to me. If you were to somehow develop advanced Artificial Intelligence that was thousands of times more intelligent than a human you could use this to solve a huge number of technical and scientific problems. If you could control the AI completely and safely (big if) it would be possible to develop technologies that would supress discovery of the same technique anywhere else in the world. How? One way would be development of advanced self-replicant nanotechnology that would allow you to surveil the entire Earth and subtly divert research efforts getting too close to your crucial discovery. Computers would mysteriously fail here and there, experiments would fail, etc. No one could detect your actions because, by definition, they don't have the detection technology.
Sounds crazy, I know. But all the rules go out the window if you assume the existance of a loyal machine that can think thousands or millions of times faster than we can. We'd all like to think it would be us to discover this first in our basements or something. In reality it's far more likely to be the NSA. Scary.
It's humerous that one of the biggest Japanese companies is so concerned with intellectual property. The Japanese reputation with regards to Patent enforcement is a model for the anti-Amazon burn-the-patents crowd. This is illustrated by, for example, Texas Instruments getting bent over by Fujitsu in 97.
Not only that, but I'd go so far as to say that between May 17 and May 19, Microsoft earned as much revenue as Linux did from June 3 to June 3 the following year. Think about it.
Requiring a mobile phone user to be within 100 meters of a station is extremely limiting.
Yes but the point of the article is that the same limitations may cause wi-fi to fail and you havn't spoken to that at all. One could equally argue that the idea of an ultraportable or PDA is that you can use it far from the receiving antenna. I don't see what you mean about the corless phones either. They may have a 100m range, but they're not portable. You can't take them with you and use them from a Starbucks.
The question is: Will Wi-Fi end up being replaced by, for example, 3G in the same way that Rabbit (and Iridium) were killed by GSM and cell phones?
The only important thing to know about Stuart Cheshire is that he created the the mindnumbingly addictive global internet phenomenom called Bolo.
It was the first big non-text game to be played over the internet and it was huge when I was at uni 1993-96.
He created it for his PhD and it's good to see he hasn't been idle since then!
I'm actually disgusted that my post was modded to 5:Funny. This is exactly the sort of post that makes me want to set a -2 penalty on funny posts in my preferences!
Just because someone works for NASA...Doesn't mean that they are the best minds in the world.
;)
I couldn't agree more. That's why I never mentioned NASA.
I said "the best minds of the world's space agencies" and made no reference to what the worst minds of those space agenciese might or might not be doing. Probably they are trying to work out what to do with the ISS...
Carbon nanotubes have become a hot item of discussion across all fields of engineering because, in part, the cylinders constructed from hexagonal links of carbon atoms are believed to be perhaps the strongest manmade material.
That should be "strongest material fullstop". The inference to natural materials can only be referring to spider silk. Spider dragline silk has a tensile strength comparable to steel, but will stretch 35% without breaking. It seems steel can achieve up to about 5 Gpa in tensile strength depending on quality, etc. Carbon nanotube fibres are expected to be in the hundreds of Gpa.
There is a cautious belief amongst materials scientists that carbon nanotubes may in fact be the strongest substance possible in terms of tensile strength.
A great overview of nanotubes as a construction material can be found in Bradley Edward's Space Elevator manuscript. See also the slashdot discussion about it.
Yes it's time for slashdotters to put their thinking caps on. I'm sure our geek aura will penetrate a problem that has had the best minds of the world's space agencies stumped for decades.
I await with glee the hoards of posts suggesting enormous ballistic inflatable penguins and fleets of linux powered robotic red swingline staplers. But what about prevention in the future? Easy, just make all space objects run Windows, that way they will crash themselves into the blue ocean of death eventually.
There, I've got it out of the way early so hopefully others won't need to.
Well, primes are very special for lots of reasons. For example, from an information theory point of view, primes provide a way to encode an arbitrary sequence of numbers into another single number. How? Each number has a unique factorisation into primes. For example 20 = 2^2 x 3^0 x 5^1 x 7^0 x ... and so on for all the primes. So the sequence 2,0,1,0,0,... uniquely maps to the number 20. In this way you can map any sequence of numbers to the corresponding product of primes.
In the C programming language the corresponding concept is the struct which lets you wrap up several values into one. So primes are at least as fundamental to number theory as the struct is to programming.
Also, the news-for-nerds crowd only has to look to cryptography to see how important primes are.
They hardly bash it! There are a couple of sceptical half-hearted shots like "this would require the purchase of billions of dollars of new equipment". Hardly a compelling argument since billions of dollars of equipment will be purchased anyway in the next 5-10 years, it's just a matter of time and how long-term MS, Intel and AMD are prepared to think.
The strong arguments made in the Register article are completely lost on AP/CNN.
I think you've been watching too many made-for-tv movies. The Tunguska event flattened an area "half the size of Rhode island" according to this page. My geography isn't that good, but I'm pretty sure that's a fair bit smaller than Siberia.
Hurrican prediction and asteriod prediction are totally different ball games. With an asteroid you can potentially track the impact position with great accuracy if you have good enough tracking fascilities. Comets are more problematic because the volatile gasses boiling off the surface produce unpredictable shifts in the orbit. So perhaps these are a better analog for hurricanes.
If a rock like 2002MN had been detected and tracked early enough and found to be on a collision course, we could have weeks of notice to evacuate the impact area or the coastal regions that would be hit by tsunami if it was to impact on water.
Yes I'm just a misunderstood slashposter.
Thanks...I think.
It was probably out looking for a suicide booth and a quarter.
I don't think we're going to see that much of a resurgence of sales from this. The fact is that most of the time you can't fit a whole DivX movie on a single CD. They usually almost-but-not-quite-fit, so you need 2 CDs which is a real pain. I believe it's already possible to convert DivX to MPEG-2 CDs (video CDs) and play them on a normal DVD player. I have a friend who has burned hour-long TV shows to a single VCD from the downloaded DivX (which admittedly was less than half the size of the MPEG-2 version).
I've never seen this type of thing on the front page before!
Uh, don't the editors do it all the time? The editors are no more journalists creating stories than the "readers" of slashdot (just look at JonKatz). Also it seems that the story being passed off was the ZDNet article, not so much his own comment.
In any event, this similarity between the Maxwell equations and the linearized Einstein equations is what gives rise to the gravitoelectric and gravitomagnetic fields (analogues to the electric and magnetic fields, of course). So don't think "bunk" when you encounter these terms. They're quite real, and are commonly found in the General Relativity literature.
Ok but isn't this "similarity" the basis for Chiao's Gravity Tranducer prediction? If so, then by asking us to accept the usage of "gravitoelectric" and "gravitomagnetic", you're more or less asking us to accept Chiao's ideas as well. Perhaps "pseudoscience" was too strong a word (I didn't use "bunk" as you seemed to quote me). But I still hold to the position that GE and GM should signal to the reader that this is fringe physics.