"reaction rates etc differ without the shear force from gravity and it hasn't been looked at much yet."
[citation needed]
I'm a chemist, and I have yet to see a case where gravity plays a measurable role in standard single-phase chemical reactions. Yes, it may play a role in bulk biphasic reactions. But in a standard liquid-phase biochemical reaction, local diffusion forces (collisions) will overwhelm gravity. In addition, most biochemical reactions are stirred to maximize contact between reagents further reducing the effects of gravity.
You may be able to find a reaction or two that is affected by gravity, but those will be a few and far between.
Something I'm wondering about is why the batteries that the panels are recharging can't be intermittently charged for 1.5 hours every 12 hours until they're full again. At that point could they just fire Philae back up and run it until it's out of juice again? Solar chargers on earth are capable of this as long as there's not an external drain on the batteries.
So basically why can't Philae run with a X% duty cycle, where X is some number less than the 100 they were hoping for?
I'm sure there's a good reason why that won't work (is there an external drain?) but does anyone here know why?
Not that I don't believe it, but the only link in the story that directly refers to the explicit ban is a picture of an email that one guy sent to another. It says that he likes working at sugarstring, but spying and net neutrality are verboten topics.
Anyone have a contract or other bit of more concrete evidence? Or is this story solely based upon the image of an email?
I agree with all your points here. It seems like the "standard picture of inflation" curve is the crux of everything, and is referred to repeatedly. But he doesn't even define the axes well. (I agree with your complaint about the axes - he says the y-axis is energy, but the x-axis is specifically in units of energy).
I'm unclear on one apparently critical point that maybe someone can clarify. I see what he's saying that the universe dominated by vacuum energy expands much more quickly than one dominated by radiation or matter. But does this mean that it's expanding faster the the speed of light? It seems to me that he's saying the multiverse happens because there are these pockets within the multiverse of slow expansion (an individual universe within the "well") and fast expansion in between, right? But then the only way those pockets could not be observable between each other is if the "fast expansion" region is faster than light. Why does the fact the the expansion doesn't slow down in a vacuum dominated universe mean that certain parts of the universe are out of reach of other parts. Is gravity the culprit here?
Part of this comes down to his equation(s):
size ~ t^n, where n = 2/3, 1/2, or 1
First of all, what is "size"? Volume? Length? Area?
Second, and most importantly, why isn't that expansion rate linear in time for everything. What is it about the physics that makes a matter dominated universe expand differently than a radiation-dominated universe? Is that easy to explain? And if so, that's crucial for my understanding here.
Something that's never been clear to me in the expanding universe model is why the expansion of the universe results in red-shifting of light and shifting of the CMB to the microwave region. Can someone explain this? If the expansion is of space itself, which I interpret as the "grid" upon which matter/radiation exists, how does light or anything else know that the grid is expanding? In the silly picture in my head, I'm thinking that I won't know that my ruler is changing length since I'm changing length with it, just like how person A moving at near the speed of light relative to person B doesn't know that the space that they're in has "shrunk" according to person B. In the model of the expanding balloon with ants on the surface, how do the ants know that the expansion is occurring? If I were one of the ants, I'd draw a grid around me out to the next nearest ant. As the balloon (universe) expands, the grid would expand with it, so I would have no idea that the next ant is getting further away. Why is it different in the universe expanding? Is it just radiation that knows of the expansion? I'm clearly missing an important concept, but I don't know what it is.
Not sure why this is a troll, but I wish I had mod points to bump it up. I'm not the OP, but I was wondering the same thing regarding how this was a vaccine. This explanation makes complete sense and thanks for the clarification.
Just so I'm understanding correctly: the amount of HIV virus in the blood is very small after initial infection, so the idea is to use the vaccine to keep the level low (i.e. prevent the virus from ever ramping up again and destroying your immune system)?
So this would prevent infection for those without HIV, and keep HIV dormant for those that already are infected?
To follow up on that: jurors are not selected randomly. The defense and prosecution pick from a larger set of jurors. What are the chances all jurors would be female? That is 1.6% but not a coincidence. The prosecution surely would have gotten a couple of black people on the jury if they thought they had a solid race argument. Rather they opted for the female/mother angle ("what if Trayvon was your child?").
A lot of folks are asking what would have happened if Martin was white and Zimmerman was black. I think it's a good question to ask, and unfortunately the verdict could have been very different. Another question that I'd like those people to ask is "what if Zimmerman's last name was Sanchez, or Juarez, or Mesa (his mom's maiden name)?". Would there still be these claims of racism?
I'm a mass spec guy, so I certainly agree that different masses will focus differently. But in the ion drive schematics I see online, I don't see where there is a focussing step. The plasma is made, then just accelerated across a planar electrostatic voltage drop. No focussing needed. I'm also not seeing a x2 increase just from a slightly better ability to focus even if that did matter.
I agree that they should be paying taxes on money earned in the UK. But I would argue that the responsibility falls upon the government to create laws that fill in the loopholes and reduce deductions, rather than the company to apply its arbitrary set of ethical standards, in determining how much money the company owes to the government.
To rely on the company to decide how much to pay is equivalent to asking it to donate money to the government, which the company (or anybody for that matter) are not obliged to do.
Isn't the point of having a tax code so that we don't have to decide how much to pay in taxes based upon our ethics? The government tells us how much to pay based upon its tax code, so we pay it. At no point do they ask us to pay based upon our ethical standards.
I guess I wonder what should Google do. Should they pay the maximum amount the UK government wants, and avoid all possible deductions and loopholes? Or should they pick the "normal" deductions that other UK businesses use? Something in between? Which deductions/loopholes should they choose? Which ones are ethical? And by whose standards are they ethical?
I use my ethical standards when I donate to something like the Red Cross or UNICEF. I don't donate my money to the government. Taxes are a bill I pay to receive the benefits that the government provides to me. I'll find any way I can, within the letter of the law, to reduce that bill.
Do you happen to have a reference for your theory? The theories I've heard (which are proclaimed pessimistic) say nothing about water splitting due to solar radiation, but rather just evaporating and making its way up to the stratosphere, where it has a higher probability of being lost to space. It also sounds like the time frame for this process is not pinned down.
Welcome to the world of scientific research. It's a scientific article, which are almost always behind a paywall. ScienceDirect (operated by publisher Elsevier) is one of the largest scientific journal conglomerates. Universities pay 10's of thousands of dollars every year, if not more, to give their researchers access to these journals. So the authors make no money on it, but Elsevier makes loads on these articles.
Yeah I vaguely remember when I was a kid going to Ocean City in the summers and hearing my dad complain about OC being a dry town. He always had to run to the next town over to go pick up beer.
I'm originally from PA, and I couldn't agree with you more. I'm proud of a lot of things about PA (like Yuengling), but it has some really antiquated laws. I went to college in Pittsburgh, and every time we had a party on Saturday night, at 11:45p we would run out to the beer distributor and get another half-barrel, because once the clock struck 12, they couldn't sell any more.
I currently live in CT, and when I moved here I was completely floored by the fact that the supermarket had a whole aisle for beer! Quite a contrast to PA where you get carded just for walking into a liquor store.
Many more states in the country don't allow beer to be sold on Sundays. In some states (including PA), every once in awhile a politician floats the idea that they should start selling on Sundays, and supposedly local liquor/beer stores don't like it, because it means they'd have to pay staff to stay open one more day per week.
The Johnstown Flood Tax is such a joke, especially considering that, after a half dozen floods to hit the town (1936 was just one of them), Johnstown has been steadily shedding population (it's currently at a third of what it was during the 1930's).
In addition to the absurdity of the case at all, there are a couple other things that bother me a lot about this:
1) the prosecution asked for 4 year sentences. The judge upped it to 6 years. How often does a judge go beyond the prosecution's requested sentence?
2) this was held in the town that got devastated by the quake. What are the chances that they'd get a fair trial?
Somehow they've successfully alienated the scientific community and made their own judicial system look like a joke at the same time. If I was a scientist on any government advisory committee in Italy, I'd be stepping down right about now.
Along those lines, it should be pointed out that in the laser (spectroscopy) community, if we want a window that's transparent in the UV and visible, we typically use sapphire. Glass (ie BK7, float glass, or the like) absorbs UV, and the alternative, quartz, is not as strong. So it would make sense if they wanted to switch to sapphire for its strength, but didn't consider its UV transparency. Has anyone opened the camera up to see what else is between the sapphire and the element?
Yeah I saw the videos, which tell me that it's hard to knock Big Dog over. But I guess I was wondering what would happen if you knock it completely on its side, whether it can upright itself.
That's very good point about the power - wonder how much power this sucks up, but I'm sure it's much more than a rover of comparable size.
One thing I'm wondering about in regard to Big Dog is whether it can actually be knocked over. More importantly, if we were to lay it down on its side, would it be able to get back up? If I'm relying on it in the battlefield or as an emergency responder, the last thing I want is 400 lbs. of my supplies getting stuck on the back of a robot that's ended up on its side and stuck. If it can get back up, then I'd say we have something that would be an awesome replacement for a Mars rover, since it can certainly climb steeper slopes, and I don't have to worry about it getting stuck anywhere.
Monochromatic is not a prerequisite for laser light. Coherence and leverage of a population inversion are requirements for it to be laser light, with the latter being sometimes loosely applied. This pulse is as much a laser emission as that from any other, because it is coherent. Laser emission can come from continuous wave lasers (like most red laser pointers), which can be incredibly monochromatic (sub-MHz bandwidth) or from pulsed lasers, which can be incredibly non-monochromatic (many nanometers bandwidth).
a real bio-chemical engineer could easily get creative enough to make highly addictive chemicals that are hypnotics and have embed-able dispensers that release only when they receive encrypted transmissions
Uh, reference please?
Being in the field of biophysics, I can say that even the most advanced bioengineering institutes in the world, with tens of millions of dollars in funding, are very, very far from realizing anything like this. Hypnotics aren't drugs that hypnotize and allow someone to control you - they sedate and calm you, but they are frequently highly addictive. If by embed-able dispensers you mean macro-molecular sized release capsules, we are very close to realizing them, but controlling them with an encrypted transmission is impossible. If you mean larger RFID-based release mechanisms, they exist, but good luck getting them into the victim's body, or establishing an addiction.
Slashdot Mirror
"reaction rates etc differ without the shear force from gravity and it hasn't been looked at much yet."
[citation needed]
I'm a chemist, and I have yet to see a case where gravity plays a measurable role in standard single-phase chemical reactions. Yes, it may play a role in bulk biphasic reactions. But in a standard liquid-phase biochemical reaction, local diffusion forces (collisions) will overwhelm gravity. In addition, most biochemical reactions are stirred to maximize contact between reagents further reducing the effects of gravity.
You may be able to find a reaction or two that is affected by gravity, but those will be a few and far between.
Something I'm wondering about is why the batteries that the panels are recharging can't be intermittently charged for 1.5 hours every 12 hours until they're full again. At that point could they just fire Philae back up and run it until it's out of juice again? Solar chargers on earth are capable of this as long as there's not an external drain on the batteries.
So basically why can't Philae run with a X% duty cycle, where X is some number less than the 100 they were hoping for?
I'm sure there's a good reason why that won't work (is there an external drain?) but does anyone here know why?
Not that I don't believe it, but the only link in the story that directly refers to the explicit ban is a picture of an email that one guy sent to another. It says that he likes working at sugarstring, but spying and net neutrality are verboten topics.
Anyone have a contract or other bit of more concrete evidence? Or is this story solely based upon the image of an email?
I agree with all your points here. It seems like the "standard picture of inflation" curve is the crux of everything, and is referred to repeatedly. But he doesn't even define the axes well. (I agree with your complaint about the axes - he says the y-axis is energy, but the x-axis is specifically in units of energy).
I'm unclear on one apparently critical point that maybe someone can clarify. I see what he's saying that the universe dominated by vacuum energy expands much more quickly than one dominated by radiation or matter. But does this mean that it's expanding faster the the speed of light? It seems to me that he's saying the multiverse happens because there are these pockets within the multiverse of slow expansion (an individual universe within the "well") and fast expansion in between, right? But then the only way those pockets could not be observable between each other is if the "fast expansion" region is faster than light. Why does the fact the the expansion doesn't slow down in a vacuum dominated universe mean that certain parts of the universe are out of reach of other parts. Is gravity the culprit here?
Part of this comes down to his equation(s):
size ~ t^n, where n = 2/3, 1/2, or 1
First of all, what is "size"? Volume? Length? Area?
Second, and most importantly, why isn't that expansion rate linear in time for everything. What is it about the physics that makes a matter dominated universe expand differently than a radiation-dominated universe? Is that easy to explain? And if so, that's crucial for my understanding here.
Something that's never been clear to me in the expanding universe model is why the expansion of the universe results in red-shifting of light and shifting of the CMB to the microwave region. Can someone explain this? If the expansion is of space itself, which I interpret as the "grid" upon which matter/radiation exists, how does light or anything else know that the grid is expanding? In the silly picture in my head, I'm thinking that I won't know that my ruler is changing length since I'm changing length with it, just like how person A moving at near the speed of light relative to person B doesn't know that the space that they're in has "shrunk" according to person B. In the model of the expanding balloon with ants on the surface, how do the ants know that the expansion is occurring? If I were one of the ants, I'd draw a grid around me out to the next nearest ant. As the balloon (universe) expands, the grid would expand with it, so I would have no idea that the next ant is getting further away. Why is it different in the universe expanding? Is it just radiation that knows of the expansion? I'm clearly missing an important concept, but I don't know what it is.
Not sure why this is a troll, but I wish I had mod points to bump it up. I'm not the OP, but I was wondering the same thing regarding how this was a vaccine. This explanation makes complete sense and thanks for the clarification.
Just so I'm understanding correctly: the amount of HIV virus in the blood is very small after initial infection, so the idea is to use the vaccine to keep the level low (i.e. prevent the virus from ever ramping up again and destroying your immune system)?
So this would prevent infection for those without HIV, and keep HIV dormant for those that already are infected?
To follow up on that: jurors are not selected randomly. The defense and prosecution pick from a larger set of jurors. What are the chances all jurors would be female? That is 1.6% but not a coincidence. The prosecution surely would have gotten a couple of black people on the jury if they thought they had a solid race argument. Rather they opted for the female/mother angle ("what if Trayvon was your child?").
A lot of folks are asking what would have happened if Martin was white and Zimmerman was black. I think it's a good question to ask, and unfortunately the verdict could have been very different. Another question that I'd like those people to ask is "what if Zimmerman's last name was Sanchez, or Juarez, or Mesa (his mom's maiden name)?". Would there still be these claims of racism?
Where does 7 to 1 come from? 7 to 1 of what?
I think NASA's done pretty well for itself...
I'm a mass spec guy, so I certainly agree that different masses will focus differently. But in the ion drive schematics I see online, I don't see where there is a focussing step. The plasma is made, then just accelerated across a planar electrostatic voltage drop. No focussing needed. I'm also not seeing a x2 increase just from a slightly better ability to focus even if that did matter.
Why would isotopic purification increase the efficiency by a factor of 2?
I prefer WOPR.
Or maybe Joshua...
I agree that they should be paying taxes on money earned in the UK. But I would argue that the responsibility falls upon the government to create laws that fill in the loopholes and reduce deductions, rather than the company to apply its arbitrary set of ethical standards, in determining how much money the company owes to the government.
To rely on the company to decide how much to pay is equivalent to asking it to donate money to the government, which the company (or anybody for that matter) are not obliged to do.
Isn't the point of having a tax code so that we don't have to decide how much to pay in taxes based upon our ethics? The government tells us how much to pay based upon its tax code, so we pay it. At no point do they ask us to pay based upon our ethical standards.
I guess I wonder what should Google do. Should they pay the maximum amount the UK government wants, and avoid all possible deductions and loopholes? Or should they pick the "normal" deductions that other UK businesses use? Something in between? Which deductions/loopholes should they choose? Which ones are ethical? And by whose standards are they ethical?
I use my ethical standards when I donate to something like the Red Cross or UNICEF. I don't donate my money to the government. Taxes are a bill I pay to receive the benefits that the government provides to me. I'll find any way I can, within the letter of the law, to reduce that bill.
Do you happen to have a reference for your theory? The theories I've heard (which are proclaimed pessimistic) say nothing about water splitting due to solar radiation, but rather just evaporating and making its way up to the stratosphere, where it has a higher probability of being lost to space. It also sounds like the time frame for this process is not pinned down.
Welcome to the world of scientific research. It's a scientific article, which are almost always behind a paywall. ScienceDirect (operated by publisher Elsevier) is one of the largest scientific journal conglomerates. Universities pay 10's of thousands of dollars every year, if not more, to give their researchers access to these journals. So the authors make no money on it, but Elsevier makes loads on these articles.
Yeah I vaguely remember when I was a kid going to Ocean City in the summers and hearing my dad complain about OC being a dry town. He always had to run to the next town over to go pick up beer.
I'm originally from PA, and I couldn't agree with you more. I'm proud of a lot of things about PA (like Yuengling), but it has some really antiquated laws. I went to college in Pittsburgh, and every time we had a party on Saturday night, at 11:45p we would run out to the beer distributor and get another half-barrel, because once the clock struck 12, they couldn't sell any more.
I currently live in CT, and when I moved here I was completely floored by the fact that the supermarket had a whole aisle for beer! Quite a contrast to PA where you get carded just for walking into a liquor store.
Many more states in the country don't allow beer to be sold on Sundays. In some states (including PA), every once in awhile a politician floats the idea that they should start selling on Sundays, and supposedly local liquor/beer stores don't like it, because it means they'd have to pay staff to stay open one more day per week.
The Johnstown Flood Tax is such a joke, especially considering that, after a half dozen floods to hit the town (1936 was just one of them), Johnstown has been steadily shedding population (it's currently at a third of what it was during the 1930's).
In addition to the absurdity of the case at all, there are a couple other things that bother me a lot about this:
1) the prosecution asked for 4 year sentences. The judge upped it to 6 years. How often does a judge go beyond the prosecution's requested sentence?
2) this was held in the town that got devastated by the quake. What are the chances that they'd get a fair trial?
Somehow they've successfully alienated the scientific community and made their own judicial system look like a joke at the same time. If I was a scientist on any government advisory committee in Italy, I'd be stepping down right about now.
For what it's worth, actually it's "gases". "Gasses" is a present tense verb.
it would overtun and eviserate that last remaining shred that mainstream religion(mormons ans scientology don't count)
Not Necessarily.
Along those lines, it should be pointed out that in the laser (spectroscopy) community, if we want a window that's transparent in the UV and visible, we typically use sapphire. Glass (ie BK7, float glass, or the like) absorbs UV, and the alternative, quartz, is not as strong. So it would make sense if they wanted to switch to sapphire for its strength, but didn't consider its UV transparency. Has anyone opened the camera up to see what else is between the sapphire and the element?
Yeah that's pretty fantastic - thanks for the link.
Yeah I saw the videos, which tell me that it's hard to knock Big Dog over. But I guess I was wondering what would happen if you knock it completely on its side, whether it can upright itself.
That's very good point about the power - wonder how much power this sucks up, but I'm sure it's much more than a rover of comparable size.
One thing I'm wondering about in regard to Big Dog is whether it can actually be knocked over. More importantly, if we were to lay it down on its side, would it be able to get back up? If I'm relying on it in the battlefield or as an emergency responder, the last thing I want is 400 lbs. of my supplies getting stuck on the back of a robot that's ended up on its side and stuck. If it can get back up, then I'd say we have something that would be an awesome replacement for a Mars rover, since it can certainly climb steeper slopes, and I don't have to worry about it getting stuck anywhere.
Monochromatic is not a prerequisite for laser light. Coherence and leverage of a population inversion are requirements for it to be laser light, with the latter being sometimes loosely applied. This pulse is as much a laser emission as that from any other, because it is coherent. Laser emission can come from continuous wave lasers (like most red laser pointers), which can be incredibly monochromatic (sub-MHz bandwidth) or from pulsed lasers, which can be incredibly non-monochromatic (many nanometers bandwidth).
Uh, reference please?
Being in the field of biophysics, I can say that even the most advanced bioengineering institutes in the world, with tens of millions of dollars in funding, are very, very far from realizing anything like this. Hypnotics aren't drugs that hypnotize and allow someone to control you - they sedate and calm you, but they are frequently highly addictive. If by embed-able dispensers you mean macro-molecular sized release capsules, we are very close to realizing them, but controlling them with an encrypted transmission is impossible. If you mean larger RFID-based release mechanisms, they exist, but good luck getting them into the victim's body, or establishing an addiction.