The degree Celsius is exactly the same as the Kelvin except it's offset by 273.18K. This has the advantage, for daily use as opposed to scientific use, that you can tell when it's cold because the numbers go negative. And it just looks really silly in the computer age using a scale of temperature based on the temperatures of blood and a horse's arse.
Hey, I've switched to decaf. Actually many Quantum theories are among the best supported experimentally of any of our theories, due in part to the electronics industry and the immense commercial incentives to research in the field of the very small. Obviously they can be replaced by something better if it comes along, but it hasn't yet. Note that quantum theories should be kept distinct from interpretations of quantum mechanics (the many worlds model, the Copenhagen interpretation etc) which are just pet ideas and are mainly hogwash. They don't tell us anything and are just items of faith in the same way as vi/emacs wars until the time when one interpretation leads to a prediction that other interpretations do not make, and this prediction can be checked. But even such theories as quantum entanglement have been well documented and observed many times in the laboratory.
There are theories that include particles with FTL characteristics, and in fact General Relativity doesn't preclude them. Einstein thought they didn't make sense since he'd been working with Special Relativity for too long, so he chose a special set of General Relativity equations that ruled them out. But it's not necessary. The only proviso is that any particle travelling slower than the speed of light cannot attain the speed of light, and any partcle travelling faster than the speed of light (which would have zero energy when travelling infinitely fast) could never decelerate to the speed of light. This essentially says that particles can never reverse the way they are going through time, so I suppose although it breaks causality in the traditional sense you could actually have two independent causalities going on at once in the same time-stream, one for subluminal particles and one for superluminal particles. Of course, time does not pass at all for those particles (photons) which travel exactly at the speed of light.
Now on to dark matter...
The problems dark matter theories are postulated to explain are (1) the distribution of velocities of stars within galaxies; Newtonianally (which is good enough here because the stars are non-relativistic) we would expect the velocities to tail off with distance from the centre of the galaxy, in the same way that Pluto orbits the sun more slowly than Mercury. Actually this is not observed to happen in galaxies, requiring that either there is a large amount of matter at great distances from the nucleus that we can't see, or that our entire understanding of gravity is wrong. Since physicists never like to abandon a successful theory, a lot of time is spent looking for this matter. The other problem is (2) the large-scale structure of the Universe. In our current understanding of things, it is very hard to model the Universe in such a way that galaxies will have formed by now. They simply don't collapse fast enough. Also, we can't explain the very large-scale structure where galaxies form along the walls of vast bubble-like structures with huge utter voids within these bubbles. This cannot be predicted by conventional theory, but dark matter theories can (albeit in a not entirely satisfactory yet manner) start to offer an explanation.
According to any good cosmologist there are two speeds in the Universe: stationary, and the speed of light.:)
Broadly, hot dark matter is composed of very light massive particles travelling at approximately the speed of light. An example of this might be massive neutrinos. These theories are all very well, but simulations of them on big iron don't give rise to the large-scale structures we see in the Universe.
Cold dark matter is composed of very massive objects which are essentially stationary. Examples of these might be black holes, quark nuggets[0] etc. For various reasons these do not fit with experimental observations either (to explain the velocity distributions of mass within galaxies you would need an unusual distribution of the cold dark matter, with lots of black holes further out in the galactic halo and not very many in at the centre). A hybrid theory encompassing both types of dark matter can be teased out to give slightly more realistic models, and the ideas can be further extended with exotic dark matter types such as incredibly massive 1D filaments and 2D sheets embedded within space, like fractures in it. These might explain the very large scale bubble-like structure of space, but are completely hypothetical.
Anyway, I hope this interests you and makes amends for my earlier post. But if I'd really wanted to be insulting, of course, I would have posted:
"Your mother was a 'amster and your father smelt of elderberries!"
:-)
axolotl
[0] Quark nuggets are large aggregates of quarks, big enough to see with the naked eye, but very much denser than normal matter.
Why bother adding features to Linux when they're already implemented in BSD? In the free version of Plan 9? In {insert free OS here}
Because different OSes are suited for different things, different hackers enjoy working on different projects. There is room for more than one free UNIX in the world.
Can't they just do mount -o remount,rw/usr (or wherever)? Or can you get R/O switches on the actual hard drive in the same way as with floppies?
Is there a way of mounting / R/O bearing in mind that parts of/etc need to be R/W at least for root (mtab is one that springs to mind)? Can you do it with an initrd?
Do you actually understand anything more about dark matter than "it's got mass and we can't see it"? Your dark matter hypothesis (where the dark matter effect permeates space) would be essentially the same as conventional Hot Dark Matter theories, an example of which would be massive (but still very light!) neutrinos. Unfortunately HDM theories alone can explain observations no better than Cold Dark Matter theories on their own. It's a lot more complicated than just "we can't see all the mass that's out there".
Relativity is not 100% correct or the unified field theory would have been solved by now
Er. Calculus is not 100% correct or we would be able to symbolically integrate sinc(x). (cough)bullshit(/cough). You can't necessarily solve any given equation. Of course, I'm not saying relativity is necessarily right, just that your logic is flawed.
We are visually driven in our research and I believe that limits us somewhat
Oh, I suppose we should just listen to the stars instead? Yes, it would be nice to be able to sense gravitational fields directly in the brain or the like. But we can't and never will be able to. It's not an important consideration since we can't change it. What is far more limiting is that we are also economically driven in our research, so the important things often don't get funded because they are not of short-term commercial importance.
axolotl PS. Sorry if this comes across as flamage, but it irritates me a little when people try to convince others of their ideas when those ideas are half-formed, have no supporting evidence or theory and don't even fit with existing data, let alone predict anything. It's nothing more than cargo cult science and achieves only the spread of people with little clue about real science.
It seems this happens with every other probe they send up. Given that they could still contact the Voyagers when they were way out past Neptune[0], is it really too much to expect that they should be able to stay reliably in touch with something a mere ~40 million miles away?
axolotl
[0]OOI, is Neptune still the furthest planet out, or has Pluto's wacky orbit taken it out past Neptune again?
It's interesting, assuming this to be true, that so many people could empathise with the distorted, incorrect version of events, to the extent that he got thousands of e-mails saying "we were bullied like this too". I wonder whether there would have been half as much fuss if it had just been some madman with no motive killing people.
I think they can't (won't) do this because they want to sell the Corel Office part of the distribution; the rest is just supporting flab and so that they can break away from Windows. So if people are running off cheapbytes-style copies of Corel Linux, you can bet Corel are going to jump on them hard if they include the proprietary bits.
Now, you and I know that the Right Thing would be to give away a GPLed Corel Office and charge for support etc., but it'll take time to persuade Corel of this, obviously.
What about doing the karma calculation slightly differently: take the raw score and then divide by the number of posts that person has made recently? (It can of course be scaled appropriately). The point being that if someone posts a thousand items each of which keeps a score of 1, maybe with four that get moderated +1, he wouls have a score of 4 which would be the same as someone who posts only a couple of penetrating comments that are each moderated +2. However, IMHO the person whose posts are consistently good, albeit lower in quantity, ought to get a higher karma score.
With MP3's, you can create your own CD, promote and sell it on the web
So says the hype. I've been down this route with my band for a demo tape, recording the instruments on my soundcard, using a multitrack app etc., and then the band went into a studio and recorded a 6-track EP; we could just about afford it. The audio quality was reasonable but not great.
The fact is that without access to expensive studio equipment it is extremely difficult to get a master recording at a high enough quality to sell. Getting a record deal makes this a lot easier as the record company pays for the studio (in exchange for most of your profit...) So, unless you're willing to sink pretty much everything you have into equipment and studio time, record companies still have a pretty big part to play for most bands. Plus, of course, it's a chick-magnet being able to say, "oh yeah, well, we got our new record deal last month":)
I take it at least some people here have read Asimov's books about the spacers; basically they got all this tech where they could extend their lives to about 500 years or something; consequently their birth-rate became next to zero so that they didn't run out of living space. But this extended life-span made them paranoid about early death and due to the lack of upcoming young minds with different viewpoints their technological development ground to a halt and they were overtaken by the short-lived earthmen who didn't extend their lives. While the spacers all but died out the earthmen went on to colonise the galaxy. It seems to me to be a really bad idea to extend life, no matter how attractive it may be for the individual. After all, as far as the species is concerned, death is a pretty healthy part of life.
Not really on topic, but if these things increase blood flow, does this mean they might help combat AMS (Altitude sickness)? Or is the general lack of oxygen in the blood at altitude the limiting factor regardless of how fast it's going round the body?
This is old tech now. It's been done with Quaggas (no, not the beasts from rogue that start appearing after the 6th level or so and killing you, I mean the strange mix-of-horse-and-zebra things that used to live in S. Africa.) They now have a breeding population of about 60 (IIRC) and with selective breeding they're getting more Quagga-like every generation. They reckon purestrain Quaggas are maybe 5 years away (also IIRC).
You don't ever get mobile supercomputers. The computers used in space projects are old and slow simply because they've been tested to death and will never, ever (well ok, not often:)) fail. And you don't need that much CPUtime to steer a missile etc.
One of my favourite characters from the replacements was The Doctor (Voyager). I guess it was because he sort of combined bits of Spock and Bones. But he was still no substitute for the real McCoy.
Call me skeptical, but do you have proof that this actually was from Raster? (A pgp signature or something?) According to his website he denies having written the article/. mentioned last time and said that anything else he had to say would be on his own website. This could still just be some jerk fucking us (and him) around. Not that it's our business anyway. It's between him and Red Hat.
Slashdot Mirror
So.
Farewell then
AI lab.
You were instrumental
In the development of GNU
But now you are
0wn3d.
axolotl.
The degree Celsius is exactly the same as the Kelvin except it's offset by 273.18K. This has the advantage, for daily use as opposed to scientific use, that you can tell when it's cold because the numbers go negative. And it just looks really silly in the computer age using a scale of temperature based on the temperatures of blood and a horse's arse.
axolotl
Hey, I've switched to decaf.
:)
Actually many Quantum theories are among the best supported experimentally of any of our theories, due in part to the electronics industry and the immense commercial incentives to research in the field of the very small. Obviously they can be replaced by something better if it comes along, but it hasn't yet. Note that quantum theories should be kept distinct from interpretations of quantum mechanics (the many worlds model, the Copenhagen interpretation etc) which are just pet ideas and are mainly hogwash. They don't tell us anything and are just items of faith in the same way as vi/emacs wars until the time when one interpretation leads to a prediction that other interpretations do not make, and this prediction can be checked.
But even such theories as quantum entanglement have been well documented and observed many times in the laboratory.
There are theories that include particles with FTL characteristics, and in fact General Relativity doesn't preclude them. Einstein thought they didn't make sense since he'd been working with Special Relativity for too long, so he chose a special set of General Relativity equations that ruled them out. But it's not necessary. The only proviso is that any particle travelling slower than the speed of light cannot attain the speed of light, and any partcle travelling faster than the speed of light (which would have zero energy when travelling infinitely fast) could never decelerate to the speed of light. This essentially says that particles can never reverse the way they are going through time, so I suppose although it breaks causality in the traditional sense you could actually have two independent causalities going on at once in the same time-stream, one for subluminal particles and one for superluminal particles. Of course, time does not pass at all for those particles (photons) which travel exactly at the speed of light.
Now on to dark matter...
The problems dark matter theories are postulated to explain are (1) the distribution of velocities of stars within galaxies; Newtonianally (which is good enough here because the stars are non-relativistic) we would expect the velocities to tail off with distance from the centre of the galaxy, in the same way that Pluto orbits the sun more slowly than Mercury. Actually this is not observed to happen in galaxies, requiring that either there is a large amount of matter at great distances from the nucleus that we can't see, or that our entire understanding of gravity is wrong.
Since physicists never like to abandon a successful theory, a lot of time is spent looking for this matter.
The other problem is (2) the large-scale structure of the Universe. In our current understanding of things, it is very hard to model the Universe in such a way that galaxies will have formed by now. They simply don't collapse fast enough. Also, we can't explain the very large-scale structure where galaxies form along the walls of vast bubble-like structures with huge utter voids within these bubbles. This cannot be predicted by conventional theory, but dark matter theories can (albeit in a not entirely satisfactory yet manner) start to offer an explanation.
According to any good cosmologist there are two speeds in the Universe: stationary, and the speed of light.
Broadly, hot dark matter is composed of very light massive particles travelling at approximately the speed of light. An example of this might be massive neutrinos. These theories are all very well, but simulations of them on big iron don't give rise to the large-scale structures we see in the Universe.
Cold dark matter is composed of very massive objects which are essentially stationary. Examples of these might be black holes, quark nuggets[0] etc.
For various reasons these do not fit with experimental observations either (to explain the velocity distributions of mass within galaxies you would need an unusual distribution of the cold dark matter, with lots of black holes further out in the galactic halo and not very many in at the centre). A hybrid theory encompassing both types of dark matter can be teased out to give slightly more realistic models, and the ideas can be further extended with exotic dark matter types such as incredibly massive 1D filaments and 2D sheets embedded within space, like fractures in it. These might explain the very large scale bubble-like structure of space, but are completely hypothetical.
Anyway, I hope this interests you and makes amends for my earlier post. But if I'd really wanted to be insulting, of course, I would have posted:
"Your mother was a 'amster and your father smelt of elderberries!"
:-)
axolotl
[0] Quark nuggets are large aggregates of quarks, big enough to see with the naked eye, but very much denser than normal matter.
A BMW is to a hand-built swamp buggy as Solaris is to Linux
Yeah. And you can have a hell of a lot more fun in the swamp buggy!
axolotl
Why bother adding features to Linux when they're already implemented in BSD? In the free version of Plan 9? In {insert free OS here}
Because different OSes are suited for different things, different hackers enjoy working on different projects. There is room for more than one free UNIX in the world.
axolotl
Can't they just do mount -o remount,rw /usr (or wherever)? Or can you get R/O switches on the actual hard drive in the same way as with floppies?
/etc need to be R/W at least for root (mtab is one that springs to mind)? Can you do it with an initrd?
Is there a way of mounting / R/O bearing in mind that parts of
axolotl
Do you actually understand anything more about dark matter than "it's got mass and we can't see it"? Your dark matter hypothesis (where the dark matter effect permeates space) would be essentially the same as conventional Hot Dark Matter theories, an example of which would be massive (but still very light!) neutrinos. Unfortunately HDM theories alone can explain observations no better than Cold Dark Matter theories on their own. It's a lot more complicated than just "we can't see all the mass that's out there".
Relativity is not 100% correct or the unified field theory would have been solved by now
Er. Calculus is not 100% correct or we would be able to symbolically integrate sinc(x). (cough)bullshit(/cough).
You can't necessarily solve any given equation. Of course, I'm not saying relativity is necessarily right, just that your logic is flawed.
We are visually driven in our research and I believe that limits us somewhat
Oh, I suppose we should just listen to the stars instead?
Yes, it would be nice to be able to sense gravitational fields directly in the brain or the like. But we can't and never will be able to. It's not an important consideration since we can't change it. What is far more limiting is that we are also economically driven in our research, so the important things often don't get funded because they are not of short-term commercial importance.
axolotl
PS. Sorry if this comes across as flamage, but it irritates me a little when people try to convince others of their ideas when those ideas are half-formed, have no supporting evidence or theory and don't even fit with existing data, let alone predict anything. It's nothing more than cargo cult science and achieves only the spread of people with little clue about real science.
I would be really interested in seeing them post all of their equations and work so we can check for errors
Cool. Open Physics. So long as ESR doesn't get involved. He's even been deleting entries from the jargon file, y'know...
axolotl
'twas a Father Ted "eejit".
Oh, Ted, I've got some great news.
Oh, what's that? Have you been nominated for eejit priest of the year again?
Excellent.
axolotl
It seems this happens with every other probe they send up. Given that they could still contact the Voyagers when they were way out past Neptune[0], is it really too much to expect that they should be able to stay reliably in touch with something a mere ~40 million miles away?
axolotl
[0]OOI, is Neptune still the furthest planet out, or has Pluto's wacky orbit taken it out past Neptune again?
It's interesting, assuming this to be true, that so many people could empathise with the distorted, incorrect version of events, to the extent that he got thousands of e-mails saying "we were bullied like this too". I wonder whether there would have been half as much fuss if it had just been some madman with no motive killing people.
axolotl
It's closer to the BSD license since people can distribute binaries only etc.
axolotl
I think they can't (won't) do this because they want to sell the Corel Office part of the distribution; the rest is just supporting flab and so that they can break away from Windows. So if people are running off cheapbytes-style copies of Corel Linux, you can bet Corel are going to jump on them hard if they include the proprietary bits.
Now, you and I know that the Right Thing would be to give away a GPLed Corel Office and charge for support etc., but it'll take time to persuade Corel of this, obviously.
axolotl
Edgar Allan Poe is widely suspected of some pretty extreme crimes, but lots of people still read his books.
axolotl
Where the hell did the MEEPT! go? He was pretty funny.
What about doing the karma calculation slightly differently: take the raw score and then divide by the number of posts that person has made recently? (It can of course be scaled appropriately). The point being that if someone posts a thousand items each of which keeps a score of 1, maybe with four that get moderated +1, he wouls have a score of 4 which would be the same as someone who posts only a couple of penetrating comments that are each moderated +2. However, IMHO the person whose posts are consistently good, albeit lower in quantity, ought to get a higher karma score.
axolotl
With MP3's, you can create your own CD, promote and sell it on the web
:)
So says the hype. I've been down this route with my band for a demo tape, recording the instruments on my soundcard, using a multitrack app etc., and then the band went into a studio and recorded a 6-track EP; we could just about afford it. The audio quality was reasonable but not great.
The fact is that without access to expensive studio equipment it is extremely difficult to get a master recording at a high enough quality to sell. Getting a record deal makes this a lot easier as the record company pays for the studio (in exchange for most of your profit...) So, unless you're willing to sink pretty much everything you have into equipment and studio time, record companies still have a pretty big part to play for most bands. Plus, of course, it's a chick-magnet being able to say, "oh yeah, well, we got our new record deal last month"
axolotl
I take it at least some people here have read Asimov's books about the spacers; basically they got all this tech where they could extend their lives to about 500 years or something; consequently their birth-rate became next to zero so that they didn't run out of living space. But this extended life-span made them paranoid about early death and due to the lack of upcoming young minds with different viewpoints their technological development ground to a halt and they were overtaken by the short-lived earthmen who didn't extend their lives. While the spacers all but died out the earthmen went on to colonise the galaxy.
It seems to me to be a really bad idea to extend life, no matter how attractive it may be for the individual. After all, as far as the species is concerned, death is a pretty healthy part of life.
axolotl
Not really on topic, but if these things increase blood flow, does this mean they might help combat AMS (Altitude sickness)? Or is the general lack of oxygen in the blood at altitude the limiting factor regardless of how fast it's going round the body?
axolotl
Lighten up. It can be funny and twisted at the same time. Sort of HHOS.
This is old tech now. It's been done with Quaggas (no, not the beasts from rogue that start appearing after the 6th level or so and killing you, I mean the strange mix-of-horse-and-zebra things that used to live in S. Africa.) They now have a breeding population of about 60 (IIRC) and with selective breeding they're getting more Quagga-like every generation. They reckon purestrain Quaggas are maybe 5 years away (also IIRC).
Can't you just connect a couple of serial port pins to the reset switch?
You don't ever get mobile supercomputers. The computers used in space projects are old and slow simply because they've been tested to death and will never, ever (well ok, not often :)) fail. And you don't need that much CPUtime to steer a missile etc.
One of my favourite characters from the replacements was The Doctor (Voyager). I guess it was because he sort of combined bits of Spock and Bones.
But he was still no substitute for the real McCoy.
He will be missed.
axolotl
Call me skeptical, but do you have proof that this actually was from Raster? (A pgp signature or something?) According to his website he denies having written the article /. mentioned last time and said that anything else he had to say would be on his own website.
This could still just be some jerk fucking us (and him) around.
Not that it's our business anyway. It's between him and Red Hat.
axolotl