I noticed his paper addressed quantum state change limits, apparently (without saying it) limited to fermions. It doesn't seem that his analysis would
apply to bosons as well, particularly photons. His paper seems to say that a given type of computer, a fermion computer, has these limits, but what about a boson computer?
IANAPhysicist, and this might be hogwash that doesn't even answer your question, but it seems that in this article, "1 kg" refers to
the maximum energy of the system rather than some
measure of actual mass. I have the possibly
totally wrong idea that if "to take full advantage of the memory space available, the ultimate laptop must turn all of its matter into energy," it must be completely bosonic anyway.
Now this raises a couple of other questions:
1. The article says, "...the maximum number of operations per second a 1 kg lump of matter can be made to perform is 5.4258e+50. This means that the speed of a computer is ultimately limited by the energy that is available to it." It seems to be saying that the maximum computing power of the system is based on its rest mass, but then turns around and says it's based on the total energy of the system. Isn't this a contradiction? If the energy of a system is equal to the energy equivalent of its mass, then there is no extra energy in the system for computational use, right?
2. First the article talks about what happens if all of the energy of the system is devoted to computation. Then it computes the maximum memory capacity of 1 kg of matter, and concludes that a system with a 1 kg energy equivalent would both compute and memorize with these specifications. Is this really consistent?
If you'd like to see something like this in a
planetarium, go to the American Museum of
Natural History in New York City. I just
happened to be visiting NYC just after the new
planetarium was built. They have a fantastic
show in there that includes an Orion Nebula
flythrough like this one -- and it's all
displayed gigantically on the big dome ceiling.
Even the waiting room is cool. They have
monitors displaying some of Hubble's better
photos with, IIRC, a bit of accompanying
narration. Their entire space science area is
worth seeing, in fact.
Nope. It's only about 330000 times as
massive as Earth.
This kid really has balls!
on
Duct Tape
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· Score: 1
Well, for a while, anyway.
This is how it really works.
on
Voyager Eulogy
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· Score: 1
I still remember this from back in the day when I studied ST tech books. I know what you're thinking. I think it too. Anyway, here's what I gathered:
For a long time, canon said that warp X meant you were going X^3 times the speed of light. So warp 1 was the same as c, warp 4 was 64c, warp 8 was 512c, and so on. The Excelsior, the first to use transwarp drive technology, had a listed maximum speed of warp 12.8 or something like that.
Then it changed for some reason, and warp 10 suddenly meant infinite speed. Clearly, the cubic relationship no longer held. Mr. Scott's Guide to the Enterprise gives relationships between warp number, energy usage, and speed. It says that integral warp numbers are more energy efficient than fractional ones because of the way concentric warp fields stack up or something. So you get a kind of sawtooth energy curve with ten troughs and peaks, one trough for each integral warp number from one to ten, that goes fairly steadily from zero energy to infinite energy.
The warp-number-to-speed relationship in this model is more complicated than a simple exponential or hyperbolic. I don't remember exact numbers, but warp 1 is still about light speed and warp 9 went from 729 (9^3) to something like 1500 times light speed.
So let's see...70000/1500=46.7 years. But Janeway recalls a 23-year trip in this last episode. Could it be I'm forgetting, and warp 9 is more like 3000c?
Another note. Don't worry about me. I don't even watch much Star Trek anymore. I've managed to develop a life.
Pull out your meta-mod styluses, people. This should not have been modded up.
First of all, the poster obviously didn't read the article.
Secondly, if our velocity has changed, then so has our orbit, which would be Bad. In other words, its effects would be -- and I'm euphemizing here -- a heck of a lot more obvious than a couple of probes straying from their expected courses.
I believe it is the poster that needs to Think Different(TM).
Antimatter is dumb, and so is God. What kind of
a stupid God would make antimatter that's not the
exact opposite of matter? God should have made
them exactly the same so that no one would be
around to go to Hell, argue about creationism, or
make bad software laws.
Or better, He should have made a universe where
antimatter could never exist in the first place.
That way we would have scientific simplicity
and war. The best of both worlds!
Instead, God made the universe all complicated,
with stupid antimatter and an umpteen-dimensional
space-time that isn't even flat. Noooo, He
couldn't just make it easy, could He? He had
to make some of the dimensions really small and
wadded up. What a spaz.
Does that mean they'll go back to the old-style Klingons?
If I recall The Undiscovered Country correctly, they have to. Didn't the Klingons change because of pollution and accompanying accelerated mutation rates? Klingons looked halfway between TOS and TNG in that movie.
Nah, wouldn't work. The weight of the air itself
would hold it down. That's why the air we have at
sea level doesn't escape to space. Sure there's
a pressure gradient, but just because you put it
in a tube doesn't mean it'll behave any
differently than air does outdoors.
Re:More thoughts on this matter...
on
Solar Clothes
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· Score: 1
...that's asking for it to be soaked and churned in water followed by tossed and heated in a dryer. I remember learning
something in school about water and electricity together being a Bad Idea, so the idea of making this tech into clothing seems out of the
question.
If you don't let any light into the washing machine, then there is no electricity.
The battery would have to be waterproof...
This fabric has no battery in it. It's a light-to-electricity converter, remember?
...the small amount [of power] that is actually being collected is discharging onto your sweat-covered body.
This might be a problem. I don't know. Does anybody have comments on this?
Spinning a planet 320 times larger than the Earth around once every 10 hours will do that to ya
Not a correction, really; just so people don't walk away from this post thinking that the number 320 represents Jupiter's diameter. The quote above refers to Jupiter's mass. Its diameter is about 11 times greater than Earth's.
The extra dimensions proposed in superstring theory are sub-microscopic. The "fifth" dimension described in the article is a macroscopic dimension. The article does not indicate whether M-theory requires a four-dimensional space-time model or whether it will work equally well with a five-dimensional one.
What you get from these findings is Msin(i),
the product of the planet's mass and (roughly)
the inclination of its orbital plane relative
to our line of sight.
So it could be of nominal mass in an orbit
that is coplanar with the Earth, or much more massive but in an orbit that "faces" us.
Absolutely, positively. Almost as a rule,
management either wants to or is forced to
try and cram a product with as many features as
possible, even at the cost of quality. They
squelch most attempts to do it right the first or
second time because they've overbid to get the
contract or are racing to create a more "advanced"
product than their competitors, and doing it right
requires a lot of time up front with little
tangible results. It's the lack of tangibility that scares them -- they want to see their little
worker bees typing away, not thinking, even though
it's well known that coding takes up only a small
fraction of the total development time if you're
working the way you should. It's no wonder that
most software is buggy and crappy. If you're
getting paid to do it, you're discouraged from
doing it right.
This is especially true in an older project that
has a lot of legacy code. No one understands the
system completely, and you're considered a slow
worker if you take the time to wrap your head
around a bug and find the best solution; that is,
a solution that minimizes risk and isn't a kludge.
Often, however, a kludge is your only choice
because the design is poor, either because the
original developer wasn't given enough time, there
was insufficient peer review, or the design is so
dreadfully old that it no longer serves the
system's requirements.
Eventually the development cycle goes into a kind
of "quality debt" in which there are so many bugs
that you're doing all you can just to stay on top
of them while updating your features for the new
version. Forget about paying proper attention to
thorough testing and good design.
The only thing exciting about this technology so far is the recharge time. NEC tries to make the energy density sound like a lot by saying its ten times greater than the double-layer capacitor, but it's still small compared to my Li+ battery.
If you look at the picture, you'll see the chunkier battery is rated at 12V/200mAh. My Li+ has 4500 mAh at not quite that same voltage. So my 1 kg or so laptop battery is equivalent to about 20 of NEC's blue thingy, which looks like it's 25-50% as massive.
The credit-card battery doesn't have nearly that capacity. I suppose this is alright if these things are *really* cheap and you have the space (and endurance) to lug around the amount that you need to get plenty of stand-alone usage, but this alternative seems like it would be a real pain in the butt.
Instead of waiting for holy-grail type breakthroughs in battery technology, lets look forward to commercialization of other established alternatives: Transmeta's lower power CPU and Kodak's up-and-coming organic LED display devices.
Slashdot Mirror
IANAPhysicist, and this might be hogwash that doesn't even answer your question, but it seems that in this article, "1 kg" refers to the maximum energy of the system rather than some measure of actual mass. I have the possibly totally wrong idea that if "to take full advantage of the memory space available, the ultimate laptop must turn all of its matter into energy," it must be completely bosonic anyway.
Now this raises a couple of other questions:
1. The article says, "...the maximum number of operations per second a 1 kg lump of matter can be made to perform is 5.4258e+50. This means that the speed of a computer is ultimately limited by the energy that is available to it." It seems to be saying that the maximum computing power of the system is based on its rest mass, but then turns around and says it's based on the total energy of the system. Isn't this a contradiction? If the energy of a system is equal to the energy equivalent of its mass, then there is no extra energy in the system for computational use, right?
2. First the article talks about what happens if all of the energy of the system is devoted to computation. Then it computes the maximum memory capacity of 1 kg of matter, and concludes that a system with a 1 kg energy equivalent would both compute and memorize with these specifications. Is this really consistent?
If you'd like to see something like this in a planetarium, go to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. I just happened to be visiting NYC just after the new planetarium was built. They have a fantastic show in there that includes an Orion Nebula flythrough like this one -- and it's all displayed gigantically on the big dome ceiling. Even the waiting room is cool. They have monitors displaying some of Hubble's better photos with, IIRC, a bit of accompanying narration. Their entire space science area is worth seeing, in fact.
Grrrr. We know life isn't fair. What's wrong with wanting to do something about it?
Nope. It's only about 330000 times as massive as Earth.
Well, for a while, anyway.
For a long time, canon said that warp X meant you were going X^3 times the speed of light. So warp 1 was the same as c, warp 4 was 64c, warp 8 was 512c, and so on. The Excelsior, the first to use transwarp drive technology, had a listed maximum speed of warp 12.8 or something like that.
Then it changed for some reason, and warp 10 suddenly meant infinite speed. Clearly, the cubic relationship no longer held. Mr. Scott's Guide to the Enterprise gives relationships between warp number, energy usage, and speed. It says that integral warp numbers are more energy efficient than fractional ones because of the way concentric warp fields stack up or something. So you get a kind of sawtooth energy curve with ten troughs and peaks, one trough for each integral warp number from one to ten, that goes fairly steadily from zero energy to infinite energy.
The warp-number-to-speed relationship in this model is more complicated than a simple exponential or hyperbolic. I don't remember exact numbers, but warp 1 is still about light speed and warp 9 went from 729 (9^3) to something like 1500 times light speed.
So let's see...70000/1500=46.7 years. But Janeway recalls a 23-year trip in this last episode. Could it be I'm forgetting, and warp 9 is more like 3000c?
Another note. Don't worry about me. I don't even watch much Star Trek anymore. I've managed to develop a life.
This obviously proves that the Creationists were right all along. Our projections weren't perfect, therefore the Universe was created 6000 years ago.
First of all, the poster obviously didn't read the article.
Secondly, if our velocity has changed, then so has our orbit, which would be Bad. In other words, its effects would be -- and I'm euphemizing here -- a heck of a lot more obvious than a couple of probes straying from their expected courses.
I believe it is the poster that needs to Think Different(TM).
Or better, He should have made a universe where antimatter could never exist in the first place. That way we would have scientific simplicity and war. The best of both worlds!
Instead, God made the universe all complicated, with stupid antimatter and an umpteen-dimensional space-time that isn't even flat. Noooo, He couldn't just make it easy, could He? He had to make some of the dimensions really small and wadded up. What a spaz.
If I recall The Undiscovered Country correctly, they have to. Didn't the Klingons change because of pollution and accompanying accelerated mutation rates? Klingons looked halfway between TOS and TNG in that movie.
I know. It's just a typo. :)
Nah, wouldn't work. The weight of the air itself would hold it down. That's why the air we have at sea level doesn't escape to space. Sure there's a pressure gradient, but just because you put it in a tube doesn't mean it'll behave any differently than air does outdoors.
If you don't let any light into the washing machine, then there is no electricity.
The battery would have to be waterproof...
This fabric has no battery in it. It's a light-to-electricity converter, remember?
This might be a problem. I don't know. Does anybody have comments on this?
Not a correction, really; just so people don't walk away from this post thinking that the number 320 represents Jupiter's diameter. The quote above refers to Jupiter's mass. Its diameter is about 11 times greater than Earth's.
The extra dimensions proposed in superstring theory are sub-microscopic. The "fifth" dimension described in the article is a macroscopic dimension. The article does not indicate whether M-theory requires a four-dimensional space-time model or whether it will work equally well with a five-dimensional one.
the product of the planet's mass and (roughly)
the inclination of its orbital plane relative
to our line of sight.
So it could be of nominal mass in an orbit
that is coplanar with the Earth, or much more
massive but in an orbit that "faces" us.
Yes, I'm a karma whore.
Absolutely, positively. Almost as a rule, management either wants to or is forced to try and cram a product with as many features as possible, even at the cost of quality. They squelch most attempts to do it right the first or second time because they've overbid to get the contract or are racing to create a more "advanced" product than their competitors, and doing it right requires a lot of time up front with little tangible results. It's the lack of tangibility that scares them -- they want to see their little worker bees typing away, not thinking, even though it's well known that coding takes up only a small fraction of the total development time if you're working the way you should. It's no wonder that most software is buggy and crappy. If you're getting paid to do it, you're discouraged from doing it right. This is especially true in an older project that has a lot of legacy code. No one understands the system completely, and you're considered a slow worker if you take the time to wrap your head around a bug and find the best solution; that is, a solution that minimizes risk and isn't a kludge. Often, however, a kludge is your only choice because the design is poor, either because the original developer wasn't given enough time, there was insufficient peer review, or the design is so dreadfully old that it no longer serves the system's requirements. Eventually the development cycle goes into a kind of "quality debt" in which there are so many bugs that you're doing all you can just to stay on top of them while updating your features for the new version. Forget about paying proper attention to thorough testing and good design.
It could take years just to figure out the dynamics of this matrix!
The link above takes you to a hideous picture some guy took of his own painfully distended anus. Wait until *after* dinner before viewing this.
Here's a direct link to the article. The problem with the link above is an extraneous period.
The only thing exciting about this technology so far is the recharge time. NEC tries to make the energy density sound like a lot by saying its ten times greater than the double-layer capacitor, but it's still small compared to my Li+ battery.
If you look at the picture, you'll see the chunkier battery is rated at 12V/200mAh. My Li+ has 4500 mAh at not quite that same voltage. So my 1 kg or so laptop battery is equivalent to about 20 of NEC's blue thingy, which looks like it's 25-50% as massive.
The credit-card battery doesn't have nearly that capacity. I suppose this is alright if these things are *really* cheap and you have the space (and endurance) to lug around the amount that you need to get plenty of stand-alone usage, but this alternative seems like it would be a real pain in the butt.
Instead of waiting for holy-grail type breakthroughs in battery technology, lets look forward to commercialization of other established alternatives: Transmeta's lower power CPU and Kodak's up-and-coming organic LED display devices.
Squiffy