Actually, having a separate unit of temperature at all is quite artificial. In physical formulae, temperature always appears as a product kT; here k is Boltzmanns constant, which basically converts between your chosen units of temperature and energy.
Boltzmanns constant can often get cumbersome to drag around, so it's common to just set k=1 in physics. You then end up measuring temperature in units of energy (which makes sense since it is related to the thermal energy per particle), and as a bonus, this makes entropy dimensionless (so we can measure information in "bits", just as in computer science.)
The socialist education system is one of the things I like here in Norway: all universities are funded by the state, so there are no tuitions. You only have to cover your living expenses while studying, and the state provides student loans for that purpose. These student loans are interest-free for the duration of your studies, and upon graduation, 40% of the loans are converted to a scholarship.
This doesn't only cover studies in Norway. If you're a Norwegian citizen and get accepted to a high-profile university abroad, like Harvard or MIT, you accumulate the equivalent of $20000 per year in tuition loans, while the state covers the rest of the tuition with a scholarship.
What physicists call a theory is basically what laymen call a fact; it's a hypothesis that people have tested empirically over and over again, without falsifying it. Quantum mechanics is one of the most tested theories we've got, so if that's not "established fact", I'm not sure what is. It's true that quantum mechanics and general relativity aren't really compatible, so physics is not "complete" yet; but quantum mechanics does accurately describe systems where gravitation is irrelevant.
If you're still doubting that quantum mechanics can have real-world applications, here are some inventions that were based on quantum mechanics, from the top of my head: lasers, transistors and scanning tunneling microscopes. In addition, many other phenomena (chemistry, radioactive decay, degeneracy pressure, photoelectric effect, etc.) weren't really understood before quantum mechanics.
I bought a kindle about a month ago, and use it exclusively to read math and science. I'm a third year physics student, so most of the content is full of greek letters, mathematical notation, and stuff like hats and bars on letters. Of the 30-40 documents I've tried to read on it so far, I've only stumbled on a single document with a rendering error (where e^(-E) has the exponent pushed into the base number)...
The US is full of 40+ year old nuclear reactors that are still in active use, even though their safety is under debate. I presume that (a) old power plants won't be decommissioned until they have a replacement, and (b) new power plants produce a less or equal amount of radioactive waste compared to old ones. So why do they stop issuing nuclear power plant permits, instead of just requiring each new power plant to replace an old one?
For instance, most file formats for storing digital photographs, sound recordings and video clips are based on either the DCT or the DWT. Both these algorithms originate in Functional Analysis, a branch of mathematics that builds on the methods of Calculus.
Most users rely on existing libraries to parse and load multimedia files. However, someone wrote those libraries for you. And I'm quite sure those people knew a lot of math.
This sounds like an interesting opportunity to study convergent evolution:
1. Put ancient bacteria in different environments, and let their lineages diverge;
2. Move the evolved bacteria to similar environments, and check if they converge;
3. Repeat the experiment with differing numbers of generations spent in different environments. How does the convergence depend on the time spent diverging beforehand?
This has already been considered, but the current cosmological models and experimental evidence requires that the majority of dark matter be non-baryonic, i.e. composed of particles that are incapable of forming atoms and thence stars and planets.
Instead of "patents spurs innovation", the conclusion might be that within the current system "innovation spurs patents" and "patents spurs more patent laws".
Limited resources. My main computer is a netbook with limited resources. I tried KDE4 for a few weeks as recently as last january, but nepomuk, akonadi, etc. quickly brought my computer to a halt. I guess it's possible to manually disable all the features I don't need, but I don't have any motivation to do so when there are simpler alternatives.
Limited screen estate. Due to the limited screen estate, I only keep 1-3 applications per virtual desktop, and they're maximized or tiled. In order to keep things simple, my window manager automatically places chromium windows on one desktop, evince windows on the next, shotwell and spotify on another, and I litter the rest of my desktops with terminals. This setup is really easy to get using a tiling window manager like XMonad, but seems like extra work using KDE.
No need. I see the point of a desktop environment like KDE when you use the applications: you get a convenient integration of all the desktop components. However, I do all my file management and text editing in a terminal; use gmail, facebook and irc for communication; and I prefer chromium to konqueror. The only KDE applications I end up using are okular and konsole.
With terminal velocity, he is not referring to the velocity that would kill the mouse, but the largest velocity the mouse can acquire during free-fall. In other words, the term refers to the velocity where air drag and gravitational pull are equal in magnitude, leading to no net acceleration according to Newtons 2nd law.
In Norway, the government information about capital, income and taxes is actually made public. If you login to the webpage of the Norwegian tax department, you can snoop in the economy of any other citizen. That's the sneaky way of encouraging people to turn in their neighbors for tax fraud...
On Facebook, you use @ links to mention friends in a post or comment. So if you say something innocent like "I went to the movies with @Jane, @Peter and @Bob", that would trigger such a spam filter.
The problem would rather be if you kept leaking radioactive material over time, leading to a long-term heightened radiation level. I guess that's the problem with not cleaning up around Kola Peninsula in time.
I think the tipping point is when we can program an STM to create an array of microscopic STMs. When the time comes, we'll have atomic printers printing atomic printers.
Are you sure that they didn't? Researchers have identified a set of abstract symbols that show up repeatedly in various cave paintings, including the cro-magnon cave paintings in France. It's not inconceivable that this represents a form of early proto-writing.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, having a separate unit of temperature at all is quite artificial. In physical formulae, temperature always appears as a product kT; here k is Boltzmanns constant, which basically converts between your chosen units of temperature and energy.
Boltzmanns constant can often get cumbersome to drag around, so it's common to just set k=1 in physics. You then end up measuring temperature in units of energy (which makes sense since it is related to the thermal energy per particle), and as a bonus, this makes entropy dimensionless (so we can measure information in "bits", just as in computer science.)
The socialist education system is one of the things I like here in Norway: all universities are funded by the state, so there are no tuitions. You only have to cover your living expenses while studying, and the state provides student loans for that purpose. These student loans are interest-free for the duration of your studies, and upon graduation, 40% of the loans are converted to a scholarship.
This doesn't only cover studies in Norway. If you're a Norwegian citizen and get accepted to a high-profile university abroad, like Harvard or MIT, you accumulate the equivalent of $20000 per year in tuition loans, while the state covers the rest of the tuition with a scholarship.
What physicists call a theory is basically what laymen call a fact; it's a hypothesis that people have tested empirically over and over again, without falsifying it. Quantum mechanics is one of the most tested theories we've got, so if that's not "established fact", I'm not sure what is. It's true that quantum mechanics and general relativity aren't really compatible, so physics is not "complete" yet; but quantum mechanics does accurately describe systems where gravitation is irrelevant.
If you're still doubting that quantum mechanics can have real-world applications, here are some inventions that were based on quantum mechanics, from the top of my head: lasers, transistors and scanning tunneling microscopes. In addition, many other phenomena (chemistry, radioactive decay, degeneracy pressure, photoelectric effect, etc.) weren't really understood before quantum mechanics.
I bought a kindle about a month ago, and use it exclusively to read math and science. I'm a third year physics student, so most of the content is full of greek letters, mathematical notation, and stuff like hats and bars on letters. Of the 30-40 documents I've tried to read on it so far, I've only stumbled on a single document with a rendering error (where e^(-E) has the exponent pushed into the base number)...
The US is full of 40+ year old nuclear reactors that are still in active use, even though their safety is under debate. I presume that (a) old power plants won't be decommissioned until they have a replacement, and (b) new power plants produce a less or equal amount of radioactive waste compared to old ones. So why do they stop issuing nuclear power plant permits, instead of just requiring each new power plant to replace an old one?
For instance, most file formats for storing digital photographs, sound recordings and video clips are based on either the DCT or the DWT. Both these algorithms originate in Functional Analysis, a branch of mathematics that builds on the methods of Calculus.
Most users rely on existing libraries to parse and load multimedia files. However, someone wrote those libraries for you. And I'm quite sure those people knew a lot of math.
This sounds like an interesting opportunity to study convergent evolution:
1. Put ancient bacteria in different environments, and let their lineages diverge;
2. Move the evolved bacteria to similar environments, and check if they converge;
3. Repeat the experiment with differing numbers of generations spent in different environments. How does the convergence depend on the time spent diverging beforehand?
This has already been considered, but the current cosmological models and experimental evidence requires that the majority of dark matter be non-baryonic, i.e. composed of particles that are incapable of forming atoms and thence stars and planets.
Instead of "patents spurs innovation", the conclusion might be that within the current system "innovation spurs patents" and "patents spurs more patent laws".
I guess you could call it a... slashbot.
Limited resources. My main computer is a netbook with limited resources. I tried KDE4 for a few weeks as recently as last january, but nepomuk, akonadi, etc. quickly brought my computer to a halt. I guess it's possible to manually disable all the features I don't need, but I don't have any motivation to do so when there are simpler alternatives.
Limited screen estate. Due to the limited screen estate, I only keep 1-3 applications per virtual desktop, and they're maximized or tiled. In order to keep things simple, my window manager automatically places chromium windows on one desktop, evince windows on the next, shotwell and spotify on another, and I litter the rest of my desktops with terminals. This setup is really easy to get using a tiling window manager like XMonad, but seems like extra work using KDE.
No need. I see the point of a desktop environment like KDE when you use the applications: you get a convenient integration of all the desktop components. However, I do all my file management and text editing in a terminal; use gmail, facebook and irc for communication; and I prefer chromium to konqueror. The only KDE applications I end up using are okular and konsole.
That would be an exception, not a return value.
You mean the astrologists that use the Venus transit to predict a revolution?
With terminal velocity, he is not referring to the velocity that would kill the mouse, but the largest velocity the mouse can acquire during free-fall. In other words, the term refers to the velocity where air drag and gravitational pull are equal in magnitude, leading to no net acceleration according to Newtons 2nd law.
What about the surviving console browsers, like links and lynx?
In Norway, the government information about capital, income and taxes is actually made public. If you login to the webpage of the Norwegian tax department, you can snoop in the economy of any other citizen. That's the sneaky way of encouraging people to turn in their neighbors for tax fraud...
On Facebook, you use @ links to mention friends in a post or comment. So if you say something innocent like "I went to the movies with @Jane, @Peter and @Bob", that would trigger such a spam filter.
This makes me wonder -- when everyone is proven guilty and locked up, who will actually do something useful?
The problem would rather be if you kept leaking radioactive material over time, leading to a long-term heightened radiation level. I guess that's the problem with not cleaning up around Kola Peninsula in time.
If you haven't seen the words 'health care' in news headlines lately, you must be living under a rock.
Technically, I'm living on a rock. It lies about halfway around the globe from the U.S.
Alcubierre drives are also all over sci-fi. I would still get mighty impressed if someone actually made one.
I think the tipping point is when we can program an STM to create an array of microscopic STMs. When the time comes, we'll have atomic printers printing atomic printers.
...am I the only one who read that as "rational intelligent salesmen"?
Are you sure that they didn't? Researchers have identified a set of abstract symbols that show up repeatedly in various cave paintings, including the cro-magnon cave paintings in France. It's not inconceivable that this represents a form of early proto-writing.
high chance of silicate snow showers
Does this mean that it's basically raining sand?