I don't know how much help it'd be, but make sure the watch is near a window or, less ideally, the outermost wall, closest to Denver. It should attempt synchronization past midnight CST, when the station has greatest coverage and thus strongest signal. During the day you can pretend the signal is not there, because if that watch can't sync at night, it'll be hopeless during the day.
The same way it always was. Think of how you'd do it in any sort of mechanical measurements. You don't need the same level of accuracy to determine that something is more accurate. Most measurements have nice properties that must hold when you repeat the measurements, such as linearity. All you have to do, then, is to use the assumedly more accurate device to characterize the errors of a less accurate one. If you can reproduce your results and various expected properties hold, then there's no other explanation but that your new device is in fact more accurate.
The deal with the caesium atom is that it only defines a second to a certain accuracy. If you have a better time reference, it's not by definition less accurate, it's just that your standard has accuracy only to so many decimal digits and when you're past that you must get a better standard. You can use the better reference to characterize the inaccuracies in your standard (say various drifts, phase noise in case of time references, etc). Eventually, you redefine the second using the better standard, and you do it pretty much by appending some arbitrarily chosen digits to the new definition that reproduces the old one. They had second defined however, then they measured it using the caesium clock, got a bunch of results, averaged them, and said: that's the new second. A whole bunch of digits of the new definition were pretty arbitrary -- they original definition wasn't able to provide you with stable digits all the way. Same thing will happen again: the new clock will be used to measure the cesium one, and they'll average things and the new second will be a few orders of mangnitude more cycles of this nuclear clock; it will be matching the old clock within the old clock's accuracy, but the now-added digits will be entirely arbitrary. This is how it has happened with pretty much all the other measurements (distance, weight, etc).
Your watch is probably doing a rather lame decoding of the signal. Good receivers directly digitize the incoming signal, do filtering and demodulation numerically, and can correlate it with a model signal over minutes or even hours to get a lock. A friend of mine, a real RF nerd, has made such a receiver and it works where you can't even see the damn signal on a spectrum analyzer, with a decent antenna, on the narrowest bandwidth setting (10 or 15Hz IIRC). I think it routinely worked for him when he was staying in Cape Horn and even a couple hundred miles northeast from there for a couple of months.
The term "making sense" is, I believe, misapplied here. The quantum world is pretty much unavailable to our senses, neither do they exactly teach this stuff to kindergartners. So we have no early-life experience of any sort here, thus there's no common sense about the world at quantum scale. It won't ever make sense, and there's no reason for it to make any sense. It's just how the world happens to work, and there's nothing at all that we can do about it. This is in stark contrast to, say, bureaucracy, where certain ways of doing stuff are not how Nature works, but how humans happen to work -- very changeable if you can pull it off.
A whole lot of science and engineering needs this. We have communication networks that give us ability to distriute experiments and measurements, but a lot of those aren't very useful without a very precise time reference; the networks, as they are, are quite poor at distributing time. Examples: suppose you want to measure time-of-flight of particles across the globe (neutrinos or otherwise); large base telescope (whether radio or optical); more accurate global positioning. The prerequisite in all cases is an ultra-accurate timebase. In fact, large base optical telescopes will require very stable and accurate distributed local oscillators (heterodynes), lack of one is one of the reasons why we don't have optical-to-RF heterodynes for imaging; RF-to-RF heterodynes, even distributed ones, are nothing new and are used for radioastronomy all the time -- optical ones are hard because you need orders of magnitude better clock source in terms of phase noise and drift.
Thank you, dear oracle, sir. Obviously you know more than everyone else does. What you're saying is otherwise known as a self-fulfilling prophecy. They are guilty because that's who the justice system sees. Yay!... sigh
I'm not surprised. Their UI is disgusting, their scoring rules hidden behind a most amateurishly done video (they must expect you to write down fucking notes), and the whole project just seems in-your-face obnoxious. What a let-down:(
Not only that, they also seem to be illiterate. Having to watch a video tutorial, narrated by a girl who couldn't read a book for kids lest her live be saved, just to learn how the damn thing is scored? I thought they know how to write, being in the academia and all? Their results are obviously secret, because if you just happened to educate yourself on a puzzle that you can't solve, the par results are inaccessible. Big stinkin' sikret, I tell ya. But no, they must have included the stupid car game countdown, and time-wastin' transitions. And they think that just because it requires a mouse hover and has a fade-in and fade-out, it must be cool. I've been having a lot of genuine fun with the zooniverse project; phylo in comparison seems done by braindamaged web designers who never bothered using their own fine creation, and decided that once all the transitions, music and sfx are done, they'll proclaim it done. I have never been so genuinely disappointed by a project of that kind.
This is not as silly as you might think. If it weren't for generally fucked up academic politics, this would work wonders. Get a bunch of popular porn sites to accept phylo points as payment. My bet is that there'd be plenty teenagers and basement dwellers who can trade plenty of time for the money they don't have to pay for porn:)
Avoiding repository churn is an euphemism for being change averse as a way of life, no matter what. It's a negative personality trait. I wouldn't loudly proclaim it.
I mean, what the heck, do they worry that they'll overflow the revision counter in subversion of something? What kind of idiocy is that... I'm glad nobody has ever told me not to submit something just to prevent "repository churn". I hope it's not some wider-reaching phenomenon...
MuMetal is quite fragile -- it loses its magnetic shielding properties if you as much as bend it. It might be somewhat impractical to wear it -- it'd need to be bonded to a stiff substrate to protect it from being deformed too much.
They are not inherently any more efficient. With a ground source your heat sink is cooler, that makes it more efficient by definition, but how is an AC to blame here? If you fed your AC unit with similarly cold air, the thermodynamic efficiency would be matched. Such an AC unit would still be somewhat less efficient overall (not thermodynamically) because the fan blowing the air over the exterior heat exchanger dissipates more energy than an antifreeze pump, per unit of heat exchanged.
I'm not saying that you're wrong or right (I don't know!), but if it were true, then the whole premise that the prison-based rehabilitation system is based upon is obviously a dud. Heck, in a prison system, malice really pays off: if you're ever eligible for parole, you can (and should!) do everything you can to fake whatever emotions/behaviors are needed to get out. Your reward is getting out. OTOH, if you're non-malicious, or heck, someone wrongly convicted, you'll remain there until your time is up (if it's not life imprisonment) because you didn't fake the things that you'd be rewarded for.
I wonder what their intentions were. They could have been, of course, having a cruel intent. But then, they may have thought of it as some sort of a scientific experiment, and never thought it fully through. Even if the outcome is the same, and the kids need to fix their ways, I believe that the intentions count for a lot and how you'd guide them not to make the same mistake again hinges almost entirely on what the intentions were.
That's only 0.7uW. Still about a factor of a thousand away from what you need to run a rudimentary solar-powered pocket calculator. You'd need 10 billion of those LEDs to extract on the order of 1W of heat. I hope they make them small:)
All those engines need a heat sink. I wonder whether there's a temperature gradient across the junction in this LED. Because if there isn't, that'd be a true breakthrough. Otherwise, they have perhaps demonstrated some cool thermolectric-to-light effect, but that'd be it.
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I don't know how much help it'd be, but make sure the watch is near a window or, less ideally, the outermost wall, closest to Denver. It should attempt synchronization past midnight CST, when the station has greatest coverage and thus strongest signal. During the day you can pretend the signal is not there, because if that watch can't sync at night, it'll be hopeless during the day.
The same way it always was. Think of how you'd do it in any sort of mechanical measurements. You don't need the same level of accuracy to determine that something is more accurate. Most measurements have nice properties that must hold when you repeat the measurements, such as linearity. All you have to do, then, is to use the assumedly more accurate device to characterize the errors of a less accurate one. If you can reproduce your results and various expected properties hold, then there's no other explanation but that your new device is in fact more accurate.
The deal with the caesium atom is that it only defines a second to a certain accuracy. If you have a better time reference, it's not by definition less accurate, it's just that your standard has accuracy only to so many decimal digits and when you're past that you must get a better standard. You can use the better reference to characterize the inaccuracies in your standard (say various drifts, phase noise in case of time references, etc). Eventually, you redefine the second using the better standard, and you do it pretty much by appending some arbitrarily chosen digits to the new definition that reproduces the old one. They had second defined however, then they measured it using the caesium clock, got a bunch of results, averaged them, and said: that's the new second. A whole bunch of digits of the new definition were pretty arbitrary -- they original definition wasn't able to provide you with stable digits all the way. Same thing will happen again: the new clock will be used to measure the cesium one, and they'll average things and the new second will be a few orders of mangnitude more cycles of this nuclear clock; it will be matching the old clock within the old clock's accuracy, but the now-added digits will be entirely arbitrary. This is how it has happened with pretty much all the other measurements (distance, weight, etc).
Your watch is probably doing a rather lame decoding of the signal. Good receivers directly digitize the incoming signal, do filtering and demodulation numerically, and can correlate it with a model signal over minutes or even hours to get a lock. A friend of mine, a real RF nerd, has made such a receiver and it works where you can't even see the damn signal on a spectrum analyzer, with a decent antenna, on the narrowest bandwidth setting (10 or 15Hz IIRC). I think it routinely worked for him when he was staying in Cape Horn and even a couple hundred miles northeast from there for a couple of months.
The term "making sense" is, I believe, misapplied here. The quantum world is pretty much unavailable to our senses, neither do they exactly teach this stuff to kindergartners. So we have no early-life experience of any sort here, thus there's no common sense about the world at quantum scale. It won't ever make sense, and there's no reason for it to make any sense. It's just how the world happens to work, and there's nothing at all that we can do about it. This is in stark contrast to, say, bureaucracy, where certain ways of doing stuff are not how Nature works, but how humans happen to work -- very changeable if you can pull it off.
A whole lot of science and engineering needs this. We have communication networks that give us ability to distriute experiments and measurements, but a lot of those aren't very useful without a very precise time reference; the networks, as they are, are quite poor at distributing time. Examples: suppose you want to measure time-of-flight of particles across the globe (neutrinos or otherwise); large base telescope (whether radio or optical); more accurate global positioning. The prerequisite in all cases is an ultra-accurate timebase. In fact, large base optical telescopes will require very stable and accurate distributed local oscillators (heterodynes), lack of one is one of the reasons why we don't have optical-to-RF heterodynes for imaging; RF-to-RF heterodynes, even distributed ones, are nothing new and are used for radioastronomy all the time -- optical ones are hard because you need orders of magnitude better clock source in terms of phase noise and drift.
Thank you, dear oracle, sir. Obviously you know more than everyone else does. What you're saying is otherwise known as a self-fulfilling prophecy. They are guilty because that's who the justice system sees. Yay! ... sigh
I'm sure the families don't have to sit at the trial, unless they'd be called in as witnesses.
Wank and contribute to science in TDMA fashion, FTW!
I'm not surprised. Their UI is disgusting, their scoring rules hidden behind a most amateurishly done video (they must expect you to write down fucking notes), and the whole project just seems in-your-face obnoxious. What a let-down :(
Not only that, they also seem to be illiterate. Having to watch a video tutorial, narrated by a girl who couldn't read a book for kids lest her live be saved, just to learn how the damn thing is scored? I thought they know how to write, being in the academia and all? Their results are obviously secret, because if you just happened to educate yourself on a puzzle that you can't solve, the par results are inaccessible. Big stinkin' sikret, I tell ya. But no, they must have included the stupid car game countdown, and time-wastin' transitions. And they think that just because it requires a mouse hover and has a fade-in and fade-out, it must be cool. I've been having a lot of genuine fun with the zooniverse project; phylo in comparison seems done by braindamaged web designers who never bothered using their own fine creation, and decided that once all the transitions, music and sfx are done, they'll proclaim it done. I have never been so genuinely disappointed by a project of that kind.
This is not as silly as you might think. If it weren't for generally fucked up academic politics, this would work wonders. Get a bunch of popular porn sites to accept phylo points as payment. My bet is that there'd be plenty teenagers and basement dwellers who can trade plenty of time for the money they don't have to pay for porn :)
I do the same. Many commits are small, sometimes few-liners if I'm hunting bugs and writing/updating tests.
Avoiding repository churn is an euphemism for being change averse as a way of life, no matter what. It's a negative personality trait. I wouldn't loudly proclaim it.
I mean, what the heck, do they worry that they'll overflow the revision counter in subversion of something? What kind of idiocy is that ... I'm glad nobody has ever told me not to submit something just to prevent "repository churn". I hope it's not some wider-reaching phenomenon...
Duh, I should have thought of that ;) Thanks.
MuMetal is quite fragile -- it loses its magnetic shielding properties if you as much as bend it. It might be somewhat impractical to wear it -- it'd need to be bonded to a stiff substrate to protect it from being deformed too much.
They are not inherently any more efficient. With a ground source your heat sink is cooler, that makes it more efficient by definition, but how is an AC to blame here? If you fed your AC unit with similarly cold air, the thermodynamic efficiency would be matched. Such an AC unit would still be somewhat less efficient overall (not thermodynamically) because the fan blowing the air over the exterior heat exchanger dissipates more energy than an antifreeze pump, per unit of heat exchanged.
I'm not saying that you're wrong or right (I don't know!), but if it were true, then the whole premise that the prison-based rehabilitation system is based upon is obviously a dud. Heck, in a prison system, malice really pays off: if you're ever eligible for parole, you can (and should!) do everything you can to fake whatever emotions/behaviors are needed to get out. Your reward is getting out. OTOH, if you're non-malicious, or heck, someone wrongly convicted, you'll remain there until your time is up (if it's not life imprisonment) because you didn't fake the things that you'd be rewarded for.
I wonder what their intentions were. They could have been, of course, having a cruel intent. But then, they may have thought of it as some sort of a scientific experiment, and never thought it fully through. Even if the outcome is the same, and the kids need to fix their ways, I believe that the intentions count for a lot and how you'd guide them not to make the same mistake again hinges almost entirely on what the intentions were.
Hmm, it may be used as optical pumping for a laser!
That's exactly what I wanted to hear. +1 Informative! Thank you.
That's only 0.7uW. Still about a factor of a thousand away from what you need to run a rudimentary solar-powered pocket calculator. You'd need 10 billion of those LEDs to extract on the order of 1W of heat. I hope they make them small :)
Heck, the first modern computers were no faster than a room full of women and Marchand calculators. Feynman pulled that one off with his boys.
An air conditioner is a heat pump. So, you say that heat pumps are more efficient at cooling than heat pumps. That makes no sense.
All those engines need a heat sink. I wonder whether there's a temperature gradient across the junction in this LED. Because if there isn't, that'd be a true breakthrough. Otherwise, they have perhaps demonstrated some cool thermolectric-to-light effect, but that'd be it.
Now is that "~0" in the 10^-12 range, by any chance? Close to zero doesn't mean zero.