What you're talking about is very similar to the effects of braneworld theories, where our universe is living on a 3D brane to which we're confined. There are, of course, other branes hanging around in the wonderful 11D multiverse. In M theory, gravitons are closed strings and can float freely between the branes, while photons (and, indeed, the rest of the standard model particles) are open strings whose ends are confined to a brane. (Note that saying "In M theory" is itself a bit dubious since M theory doesn't really exist, but let's pass over that for a minute.) That means that if two branes pass close to one another, technically galactic clusters on each brane can interact gravitationally, but cannot interact electromagnetically.
Demonstrating much of this properly is, of course, another issue. We don't possess M theory, so we can't solve the system. The best we've done so far is make lower dimensional braneworlds - such as 3+1D branes hanging in a 4+1D universe - and see the effects. And there are some - effective masses for gravitons is one. Less pleasingly, you also have myriad causality issues what with, say, gravitons propagating off one brane and scattering off particles on another brane. If the branes are distorted in the right kind of configuration, an observer on the first brane will see a graviton propagating arbitrarily faster than light.
Then again, all this is basically results found from studying a toy model that people hope will in some way resemble an actual configuration from M theory. The reality may be very different. (And, of course, the reality may bear no resemblence to M theory at all, and may even be that we live in a 3+1D universe the way we've always thought.)
Not really. There's an enormous gulf between a religion and the more esoteric parts of string theory. One of them is a religion, and the other is, well, a more esoteric part of string theory. I think it's probably better to say that if a hypothesis can never be tested... it's slipped over to the maths side of things.
I suspect if they get someone it'll be for one or two years, after which they'll drop all the technical requirements and hire someone to focus on just the PR stuff, hoping that the rejigged machine outlasts Hawking.
Good thing the job isn't being advertised in southern California then. Unless something dramatic happened, Hawking divides his time chiefly between Cambridge and Waterloo.
It's a nice idea that gets suggested but it's a seriously bad one. In many cases these are not nice people. You'd be at risk of as much shit from the parents as you'd get from the children - and with even less prospect of control over them. I'd not be comfortable unleashing a lot of these parents on teachers who lack the means to deal with them.
Unfortunately there's a very quick end to that process, in the UK at least - if all but one of the schools in an area expel a child, the last school have to take them on and try and teach them, and will face extreme pressure not to expel them. You end up with dumping grounds for the pupils no-one else wants, or at least you did where and when I grew up (East Midlands of UK, at school in the 90s).
Yeah, but the word "sheeple" tends only to be used by people sitting on the outside insulting the mainstream - and in my experience, those who want to be so radically out there, don't think about what they're saying and just pick up on a tired cliche. And "sheeple" is most definitely not just a tired cliche but also distressingly adolescent. It's as if in lieu of a sane argument you call an otherwise unrelated group of people "sheeple" and then walk away with folded arms and smug grin thinking you've won the argument with your amazingly original wit.
No, you haven't, you've revealed yourself to have the wit of a 15 year-old, if that.
I must confess if I'm doing anything work-related on my Windows machine I just use MinGW and be done with it. The shell is OK and I can install most things I want, and since I typically program in Emacs I can run the native Windows version without problems.
Still, the replacement shells do interest me. I might play around a bit.
Looks quite interesting, though I don't think I'd replace my normal Windows shell with it anymore. (I would have done back on 98 or 2000, even if just for the sake of interest).
No, you're not, you're totally right - if you're pointing away from the sun then it doesn't contaminate anything. It depends where they're pointing it and what they're observing for whether it's an issue. You can mask out the sun but it will still be blocking a part of the sky - and more of it the nearer you are (obviously), and if you're any distance from it at all it will be many years before it gets out of the way.
The dust is probably more a problem though, I agree.
In addition to the points others have made, they want to be far from the sun so that it's not a significant contaminant. Whether you go out of the plane or stay in the plane you'll need to get to the same distance to do that. Also, they want to avoid the Zodiacal dust. Going a short way out of the plane means that the dust (and the sun) will be blocking large amounts of an entire hemisphere.
Also, probes going out to the outer reaches of the solar system can use gravitational slingshots to get extra speed. Going out of the plane means you have none of that - it would probably take *longer* to get to a reasonable viewing position, as well as costing an enormous amount more since you wouldn't be able to piggyback on an existing project.
Still, it's certainly an interesting suggestion, and I don't mean that sarcastically.
I *think* it's the UI; if I remember right I've actually run from the command-line, but I'll have to check on that. It wouldn't surprise me if it were crappy drivers on the PPC version of OSX, I must admit. Especially if you had problems with the drivers before.
As a totally off-topic question, why was MP3 designed with such large frames? To me it would have made sense to have fixed them to the CD, or to an integer divisor of them, since it must have been obvious from the start that a large use for MP3 would be storing audio from CDs?
Is it not worth my while going onto the forums and asking them to fix the infuriating habit VLC has of crashing repeatedly on OSX at the slightest hint of a buffer underrun? (How about the people who code(d) MPlayer OSX Extended, btw? That normally runs OK for me on Intel but the PPC version is the shittest piece of shit I've ever encountered, and I've encountered actual shit.)
These are actually serious questions, I'm getting mildly frustrated trying to find a properly stable Mac movie player that isn't bloated and features a few decent deinterlacers. Even with Perian I'm not a massive fan of QT...
Absolutely. The first story I uploaded came back with about 25 errors, none of which made any sense. The Word document was extremely tightly-styled, but meatgrinder refused to accept the style I put on it. I learned never to leave a style I wanted called "Normal", and to always use that document as a template - or I'll just get into another ten hour pissing contest with meatgrinder... I don't know why they won't accept at least HTML+CSS, and ideally an ePub (which for how I use ePub for is just the same thing, zipped). I get that they want to get clean versions of the lowest common denominator, but when I've built an ePub it's annoying to have to port it to Word and play around for hours just so that they can convert it back into an almost-identical ePub.
Ah well. At least I'm sticking with writing in LaTeX:)
Alas, I put stuff out through Smashwords and they *force* me to use MS Word, so that they can then generate an ePub almost, but not quite, identical to the one that I hand-construct (and therefore almost, but not quite, what I want). That's extremely frustrating even if I understand why they do it.
It would be pretty trivial for Amazon to keep backwards compatibility - Sony have already demonstrated that when they transitioned from LRF to ePub. It all went seamlessly, Readers still support LRF (so far as I know; certainly my old PRS-505 does) and read ePub no problem, or if you want you can go to the Sony store and redownload anything you'd bought as an LRF as an ePub instead. Amazon could do exactly the same - it's just a matter of adding ePub support (which would itself be trivial; Mobi and ePub aren't *that* different) and converting their eBook store into ePub.
I doubt they want to do this and that's their prerogative, but it would be trivial to do if they ever did choose to.
Slashdot Mirror
What you're talking about is very similar to the effects of braneworld theories, where our universe is living on a 3D brane to which we're confined. There are, of course, other branes hanging around in the wonderful 11D multiverse. In M theory, gravitons are closed strings and can float freely between the branes, while photons (and, indeed, the rest of the standard model particles) are open strings whose ends are confined to a brane. (Note that saying "In M theory" is itself a bit dubious since M theory doesn't really exist, but let's pass over that for a minute.) That means that if two branes pass close to one another, technically galactic clusters on each brane can interact gravitationally, but cannot interact electromagnetically.
Demonstrating much of this properly is, of course, another issue. We don't possess M theory, so we can't solve the system. The best we've done so far is make lower dimensional braneworlds - such as 3+1D branes hanging in a 4+1D universe - and see the effects. And there are some - effective masses for gravitons is one. Less pleasingly, you also have myriad causality issues what with, say, gravitons propagating off one brane and scattering off particles on another brane. If the branes are distorted in the right kind of configuration, an observer on the first brane will see a graviton propagating arbitrarily faster than light.
Then again, all this is basically results found from studying a toy model that people hope will in some way resemble an actual configuration from M theory. The reality may be very different. (And, of course, the reality may bear no resemblence to M theory at all, and may even be that we live in a 3+1D universe the way we've always thought.)
The job is based in Britain, so the pieces of paper won't be quite as green as you'd expect.
Not really. There's an enormous gulf between a religion and the more esoteric parts of string theory. One of them is a religion, and the other is, well, a more esoteric part of string theory. I think it's probably better to say that if a hypothesis can never be tested... it's slipped over to the maths side of things.
I suspect if they get someone it'll be for one or two years, after which they'll drop all the technical requirements and hire someone to focus on just the PR stuff, hoping that the rejigged machine outlasts Hawking.
Good thing the job isn't being advertised in southern California then. Unless something dramatic happened, Hawking divides his time chiefly between Cambridge and Waterloo.
Seriously, what?
It's a nice idea that gets suggested but it's a seriously bad one. In many cases these are not nice people. You'd be at risk of as much shit from the parents as you'd get from the children - and with even less prospect of control over them. I'd not be comfortable unleashing a lot of these parents on teachers who lack the means to deal with them.
Haha. That might be an entertaining proposition. In the current political climate it may even get through...
Unfortunately there's a very quick end to that process, in the UK at least - if all but one of the schools in an area expel a child, the last school have to take them on and try and teach them, and will face extreme pressure not to expel them. You end up with dumping grounds for the pupils no-one else wants, or at least you did where and when I grew up (East Midlands of UK, at school in the 90s).
Yeah, but the word "sheeple" tends only to be used by people sitting on the outside insulting the mainstream - and in my experience, those who want to be so radically out there, don't think about what they're saying and just pick up on a tired cliche. And "sheeple" is most definitely not just a tired cliche but also distressingly adolescent. It's as if in lieu of a sane argument you call an otherwise unrelated group of people "sheeple" and then walk away with folded arms and smug grin thinking you've won the argument with your amazingly original wit.
No, you haven't, you've revealed yourself to have the wit of a 15 year-old, if that.
I must confess if I'm doing anything work-related on my Windows machine I just use MinGW and be done with it. The shell is OK and I can install most things I want, and since I typically program in Emacs I can run the native Windows version without problems.
Still, the replacement shells do interest me. I might play around a bit.
I like the way you think.
Looks quite interesting, though I don't think I'd replace my normal Windows shell with it anymore. (I would have done back on 98 or 2000, even if just for the sake of interest).
mod parent up, i got sidetracked reading about how to actually go about putting kde on windows and ended up posting much less info, five minutes later
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_shell_replacement
http://windows.kde.org/
etc.
No, you're not, you're totally right - if you're pointing away from the sun then it doesn't contaminate anything. It depends where they're pointing it and what they're observing for whether it's an issue. You can mask out the sun but it will still be blocking a part of the sky - and more of it the nearer you are (obviously), and if you're any distance from it at all it will be many years before it gets out of the way.
The dust is probably more a problem though, I agree.
In addition to the points others have made, they want to be far from the sun so that it's not a significant contaminant. Whether you go out of the plane or stay in the plane you'll need to get to the same distance to do that. Also, they want to avoid the Zodiacal dust. Going a short way out of the plane means that the dust (and the sun) will be blocking large amounts of an entire hemisphere.
Also, probes going out to the outer reaches of the solar system can use gravitational slingshots to get extra speed. Going out of the plane means you have none of that - it would probably take *longer* to get to a reasonable viewing position, as well as costing an enormous amount more since you wouldn't be able to piggyback on an existing project.
Still, it's certainly an interesting suggestion, and I don't mean that sarcastically.
Thanks very much.
And a very good point about the number of frames :)
Possibly I guess.
I *think* it's the UI; if I remember right I've actually run from the command-line, but I'll have to check on that. It wouldn't surprise me if it were crappy drivers on the PPC version of OSX, I must admit. Especially if you had problems with the drivers before.
As a totally off-topic question, why was MP3 designed with such large frames? To me it would have made sense to have fixed them to the CD, or to an integer divisor of them, since it must have been obvious from the start that a large use for MP3 would be storing audio from CDs?
Is it not worth my while going onto the forums and asking them to fix the infuriating habit VLC has of crashing repeatedly on OSX at the slightest hint of a buffer underrun? (How about the people who code(d) MPlayer OSX Extended, btw? That normally runs OK for me on Intel but the PPC version is the shittest piece of shit I've ever encountered, and I've encountered actual shit.)
These are actually serious questions, I'm getting mildly frustrated trying to find a properly stable Mac movie player that isn't bloated and features a few decent deinterlacers. Even with Perian I'm not a massive fan of QT...
Absolutely. The first story I uploaded came back with about 25 errors, none of which made any sense. The Word document was extremely tightly-styled, but meatgrinder refused to accept the style I put on it. I learned never to leave a style I wanted called "Normal", and to always use that document as a template - or I'll just get into another ten hour pissing contest with meatgrinder... I don't know why they won't accept at least HTML+CSS, and ideally an ePub (which for how I use ePub for is just the same thing, zipped). I get that they want to get clean versions of the lowest common denominator, but when I've built an ePub it's annoying to have to port it to Word and play around for hours just so that they can convert it back into an almost-identical ePub.
Ah well. At least I'm sticking with writing in LaTeX :)
Alas, I put stuff out through Smashwords and they *force* me to use MS Word, so that they can then generate an ePub almost, but not quite, identical to the one that I hand-construct (and therefore almost, but not quite, what I want). That's extremely frustrating even if I understand why they do it.
Glad to see you're using LaTeX to build your eBooks too :)
It would be pretty trivial for Amazon to keep backwards compatibility - Sony have already demonstrated that when they transitioned from LRF to ePub. It all went seamlessly, Readers still support LRF (so far as I know; certainly my old PRS-505 does) and read ePub no problem, or if you want you can go to the Sony store and redownload anything you'd bought as an LRF as an ePub instead. Amazon could do exactly the same - it's just a matter of adding ePub support (which would itself be trivial; Mobi and ePub aren't *that* different) and converting their eBook store into ePub.
I doubt they want to do this and that's their prerogative, but it would be trivial to do if they ever did choose to.