You ahve to charge a line with capacitance C above a certain threshold voltage V to open the transistor gate F times a second, giving you dissipated power of F*CV^2/2 just for that one line -- note V _squared_.
I said scale, not scale linearly. I didn't want to confuse the issue.:)
Of course, that's only useful to the extent that you have signals that travel long distances on the chip, and of course a lot of the processor is devoted to computing things, not just transmitting them back and forth. Still, imagine if you could carry the contents of an entire cache line from L2 cache to L1 cache in just one or two or three plasmonic lines, and the entire cache line could arrive in one cycle. That seems somehow useful.
I agree - that's mainly what I was thinking.
The important thing to realize is that while the plasmonic line might be "running" at 100 THz (optical), the processor would not: because if it was, it'd just be waiting a huge amount of time for the data to arrive. A huge amount of time - if you assume that, say, the L1 cache is just 1 mm away, it'd be waiting over 2000 clock cycles, even if it's a plasmonic processor. It's more believable that the processor would be running at GHz speeds, and that plasmonic line would simply act to reduce 32 wires to 1. Speed of light still puts a strong upper bound on the ultimate switching speed of processors.
At that point you'd have to start changing processor designs, though, because instead of being bandwidth-starved, you'd be bandwidth-rich. Definitely a new problem.
If you are in doubt if the Earth is flat or round, how would you know that a Moon eclipse is the Earth's shadow?
If you measure carefully enough, you could see the shadow that a mountain on the side of the Earth casts on the Moon (which is not really feasible, but cool to mention).
Plus it's pretty hard for it to be anything else: if a bunch of people spread out over a large region of the Earth marked what position the Sun was in when the eclipse started, it'd be pretty easy to prove that it had to be the Earth that shadowed the Moon from the Sun.
Point to note: if the Earth was flat, then everyone would see the lunar eclipse exactly the same. The fact that the Sun is at different positions for different people on the planet during an eclipse could only happen if the Earth is round.
I don't think they'd have to be spaced out very far - maybe a few hundred miles or so would prove it.
Alternative answer: a Moon eclipse is when a dragon swallows the Moon.
Have you seen a lunar eclipse? The Moon doesn't disappear - it just turns a deep red.
Besides, I'll agree that laymen can come up with any reason to fit the facts. But if someone pointed out to them "look up there - that's the Earth's shadow on the Moon. See how it's round? That's because the Earth is round," it's quite a believable explanation. If the layman tried the dragon explanation, then you could explain that your friend 300 miles away didn't see this eclipse at all, and then use geometry.
How much heat are these things going to generate though. Because you know E = hf, if you have 100,000 times the frequency, your going to need to throw in 100,000 times the energy!! Of course that is simplification of what is really happening with these kinds of chips and it is much more complicated then just 100,000 times the energy needed. But it seems like these things might make the Pentium IV seems like a fridge!
Power does usually scale with the frequency, but it also scales with the signal strength (number of carriers: intensity in a photonic case, ~voltage in an electronic case). If you can up the frequency by a factor of two and cut the voltage (for instance) by a factor of two, it's the same power usage.
Of course, using E = hf is completely wrong here - that's the energy of a photon, and in a completely photonic chip, wouldn't matter in the tiniest bit - because the photons are emitted at one point, and absorbed at another, so there's no net energy loss.
Most of the places where the frequency dependence comes in are energy losses - like the resistance of a wire. With light, there's very little energy loss (in a fiber, for instance), so the chip will run very, very cool.
Claiming "100,000 times the frequency" is a little misleading. You're not talking about the processor running at terahertz speeds - simply put, you can't make things small enough to do that. Plasmonic signals, photonic signals, electronic signals - they all travel on the order of light speed. There really wouldn't be much point raising the clock frequency beyond the characteristic length of the processing unit (Pentium 4 designers understand this now - they had to put "drive" stages into the pipeline just to allow signals to propagate, and that deep pipeline lead to a very low IPC).
This would be useful for things like memory and processor interconnects, because you could shove gigantic amounts of data. Hence the reason that the article stresses their use as high-traffic freeways. I'm not sure I see the point in an all-plasmonic chip (unless they've got power advantages) because of size concerns.
Wouldn't atmospheric seeing generate a horizon as well?
Another answer, though, is the fact that the Earth casts a round shadow on the Moon during an eclipse. That doesn't *quite* prevent the Earth from being flat - although since it's a round shadow during the entire eclipse, it has to have *some* depth.
The super fast cosmic rays, we accept (albeit the number of researches having found them is much smaller than the researchers working on cold fusion.... or how it is called today: Low Energy Nuclear Reactions)
The field of researchers studying 'super fast cosmic rays' is far, far larger (and more respected) than the one studying cold fusion.
For one thing, the particle astrophysics field is the same field in which AMANDA, Ice-Cube, and other neutrino detectors are in as well. For a second, the people working in the field many times have also worked in other high-energy physics disciplines, including Nobel laureates.
It was my understanding that Hawking radiation is the emission of either a particle or antiparticle from a pair of the two generated just this side of the event horizon of a black hole, where the particle's partner falls into the event horizon and the particle floats on to live another day, appearing as radiation emitting from the black hole. The pair only comes into existence with a boost from the gravity of the black hole.
Your nick is strangely appropriate in this case, because that's the layman's explanation, and unfortunately, it's not a very strong answer. I've been able to justify to other physicists that it's not a "horrible" layman's explanation for what's going on, but it's certainly not descriptive in any sense.
What's actually going on is that the number operator (i.e. the mathematical expression that gives you the number of particles present) has a discontinuity at the horizon of the black hole, as the creation/annihilation operators aren't constant over the geometry.
So really, it's just an effect of the extreme curvature of the spacetime.
String theory is an attempt to merge other forces into a gravitational theory, so in this case, you're getting a black hole due to forces other than gravity. You still, however, could expect Hawking radiation to exist in the same sense, because you may still have a discontinuity at the horizon.
Then again, it's still quite bunk, and his belief that his theory agrees with the data pretty much seems to be based on the fact that the freezeout energy was close to (4/pi) times the average mass of a pion. (4/pi) is of order 1, and the object 'froze out' to pions. I really don't think that it's convincing evidence.
There will never be a discovery (publically at least) of indefinitely life-extending consequence. There will, however, be discoveries that prolong life. But not too much at a time.
No offense, but I think this view may be a bit naive.
Think about it this way: you always have to die of something. While we can say that someone died of old age, for instance, the truth is they died of something - heart failure, or a stroke, or organ failure. Saying that you can't extend life indefinitely is essentially like saying that the medical community will "give up" on something that kills people, and that's just silly.
It's not in the interest of commercialized medicine to research and discover CURES.
Thankfully, the commercialized medical community doesn't research the majority of treatments - government-sponsored research does. And I guarantee you that they are quite interested in cures.
I realize it wouldn't ONLY be you, but in a small subset (internet cafe, or whatnot), it could be an even bigger red flag. Hell, they might use that to say, "watch this stream carefully, he cares that we're watching him."
You're missing the point. Use a Linux box as a NATing gateway. Turn off timestamps.
Poof. All of the computers behind that gateway no longer have timestamps.
Once you can't get through a gateway anymore, anonymity comes back in a big way.
There are two warp ships shown in the intro (before Enterprise, of course) - one is the Phoenix and one is a ship heading to a Moon colony.
Also, being from Montana doesn't necessarily mean American - at least, not US. The Phoenix was launched after WW3 - the US might not have been around then.
Well, being more correct - leaves are multipurpose.
You could also imagine "repurposed" leaves if the planet was thrown from its Sun.
In any case, this is silly - it's not like we have any other data points besides our own planet to compare it to. We're also criticizing a show that has faster-than-light travel being realistic - it's not like you shouldn't be suspending disbelief.
Enterprise had several YEARS to build an audience to the point where UPN
Name the most successful show on UPN.
Go ahead. Look it up.
It's probably WWE Smackdown. Bias problems and finite statistics issues in Neilsen ratings basically mean you essentially can't distinguish between any of the low end stuff (but of course, Nielsen's will never tell you that - but your first clue should be the fact that they release people numbers with 2 digits of precision, and share numbers with 1 digit).
UPN is the problem, not Enterprise. They basically don't have a show more popular than the least popular show from NBC or CBS.
Heck, I can't even watch UPN, as the broadcast station isn't powerful enough to reach me. Where I was previously, it wasn't even on cable.
Sure, Viacom can say "but, but, the ratings are slipping" - yes, that's because no one watches UPN. Sure, viewers left because the show was weak the first two seasons - but UPN can't get new viewers at all, so once a show starts fading, it's in trouble.
As for Sci-Fi channel and Spike TV not wanting it, I'm sure that has more to do with the high production costs and the associated licensing fees of the show than with anything else.
Is it really surprising that Voyager and Enterprise had such low ratings when they were on the worst network out there?
These people should have had a tad more scientific curiosity in highschool biology when the teacher explained what leaves are for. I mean, nitpicking is one thing, but damn, people, follow through on the logical conclusions of "no sun"!
Leaves aren't for photosynthesis - chloroplasts are for photosynthesis. Plenty of plants without leaves use sunlight.
"Enterprise" is nearly an all-white western crew with the exception of a black driver and a vulcan.
And a Brit - well, that's "western" in the sense of "western culture..."
And an Asian woman.
Wait, that's uh... roughly the same percentage of racial diversity as the original crew.
TOS: One black woman, one Vulcan man, one male engineer with an accent, one Russian man, an American captain and doctor, and an Asian man.
Enterprise: One black man, one Asian woman, one British man, one male engineer with an accent, one Asian woman, an American captain, and a Vulcan woman (and a Denobulan doctor).
Except for the Denobulan replacing an American, and a British man replacing a Russian man, they look remarkably similar, don't they?
Abandon the scot bacula
The fact that you can't spell the lead actor's name right (who's quite well known) kindof weakens your (already weak) argument.
With the large number of absolute garbage shows that the networks develop and rapidly cancel each fall, why not try to run Trek in prime time on a large network? They haven't done that since 1969, and it just might work..
I agree regarding CBS. Alternatively, syndicate it, and accept that UPN is a disaster.
Primetime seems destined to fail, though, in my mind - there are a lot of shows you'd be up against, and Trek still has somewhat of a "stigma" associated with it.
Run it where TNG and DS9 did so well - Saturdays at 6 or 7 PM. To me, that seems very safe - a lot of people are just lounging around then, and if you flip through the channels and see that, you might just leave it on. Shift it around if you've got to have the "Will Lesbianism Destroy Your Family?" news shows. Geck.
...but I can't bring myself to pay to keep hearing that horrible opening theme. If they would promise to get a new theme, I would cough up some duckets.
Interestingly enough, multi-millionaires disagree with you.
From the press release:
Star Trek has inspired us, and particularly Enterprise, with its superb theme song that tells so much about our struggle to move space travel forward and closer to the public, this inspiration is so self evident, that Virgin Galactic has ordered a 5-sub orbital ship fleet from Scaled Composites, a 100 million dollar investment, and the first one being built is going to be christened 'VSS Enterprise.'
Actually, I agree with them. I don't like the cheesy lounge remix of it that happened in Season 3, but I loved the one from seasons 1 & 2. What would be cool is if on the DVD I could select between them.:)
Why is everyone convinced that the Nielsen ratings are perfect? Do you think it's a coincidence that most of the "Save XXX" campaigns that have succeeded ("Felicity", "Farscape") have been on minor networks? Why do you think they succeeded? Because they provided the networks with ammo for advertisers - "we have more viewers than the Nielsens show".
The "3.0M viewers" from the Nielsens is likely crap. Take *all* small-market numbers from the Nielsens with a grain of salt - they don't have a large enough sample size to correctly measure things in the 'off prime time and secondary network' market. Simple math can show that relatively quickly.
Granted, I like Enterprise and all, especially now that the show is actually getting good this season (and not to forget about T'Pol's boobies;-). But donating cash to a show/producer to produce a series that they're ultimately going to profit on like crazy in the long run is just insane.
Enterprise is on UPN. This is Paramount (and Viacom's) choice - which means it gets joke advertising revenue. Paramount probably isn't making much money on it at all right now.
There are enough viewers for Enterprise to survive on a more major network off prime time. Certainly there are other options for Viacom/CBS/etc, so you're right there. They *would* make a profit on it in the long run.
The problem is there isn't enough time. Once the sets are destroyed, it's virtually guaranteed that it's over. So the smartest way to handle it is to simply donate a small amount of money (say, $20 for each viewer) to make Paramount reconsider.
Personally, I don't mind. Many people don't get Enterprise on TV at all, and need to download it. (UPN wasn't even available on *cable* in the previous location I was at, and it's not broadcast strong enough here). In this case, all I feel I'm doing is paying Paramount just like I'd pay a cable company. You pay for cable, which subsidizes some shows (on HBO, it subsidizes a large portion of the show). What's so wrong about paying a small-broadcast network for a show?
Well, you could also restrict chess by removing pieces, thus making it "non-meaningless", but still pruning the tree down to a solvable size. You start off with 16 pieces on each side, so a total of 32 pieces - naively, you could imagine cutting the pieces by 8 and the board by 2, so 4 pieces to a side, on an 4x8 board (or doing something like 6x6 rather than 8x8 - gets you close enough).
That's just as pruned as the 5x5 Go example, but still strategic.
Go's main advantage isn't in the available number of states, but measuring how "good" each configuration is.
Basically, the idea is once you've got c, hbar, and the three basic unit types (mass, length, time), you've got a complete system of units.
Nope. You're still missing charge, and possibly something like baryon number or color or something bizarro like that.
For charge you have to measure the charge of the electron, and set it to 1. Then, as you said, more accurate measurements of e are refinements of the definition of a coloumb.
First of all, Plank constant is a unit of a quantity called "action" and is measured in Energy x Time (like JxS).
Or, more typically, a quantity called "angular momentum" (in "momentum * distance", or "kgm/s * m", which works out to be J*s as well). Planck's constant (well, hbar) is the smallest amount of angular momentum, not the smallest amount of energy.
There is, in fact, no 'smallest unit of energy' in current physics. To get that, you'd have to construct the Planck mass, which requires assuming that spacetime itself is quantized.
Candela essentially measures the same things as watts. Mole is just an number. It might be used in the definition of the kilogram, but in itself, it just relates the mass of a gram with 1/12 the rest mass of a carbon-12 atom. Kelvin is just a unit derived from mass, momentum, and kinetic energy. It is not a base unit.
Ampere might or might not be a base unit, I'm not sure about that one.
You are talking about base units of physics (and you're still very wrong there), not base units of measurement.
Take Kelvin, for instance. We'll ignore the fact that temperature really relates both energy and *fundamental statistics* (the temperature of a gas of fermions at a given temperature is different than a gas of bosons at a given temperature). But even if it didn't, and it was just "average kinetic energy over Boltzmann's constant", you could say that Kelvin is just inverse joules...
if you set Boltzmann's constant to 1, and have it be unitless. The problem is that you've now shifted any imprecision of measuring Boltzmann's constant into *all measurements of temperature*, rather than just keeping it in the connection between energy and temperature. So when you calibrate your new temperature scale in "inverse joules", you now face the same precision problems that you would face in measuring Boltzmann's constant. That is, you have to measure the average kinetic energy of an ideal gas, and label that on your "inverse joule" thermometer.
This is dumb. Of course, what you do is use Kelvin as a base unit, and *define* the scale using other processes (the triple point of water, if memory serves) and now you've got a perfectly calibrated scale to huge precision, and the only imprecision from measuring the Boltzmann constant comes when you want to convert to energy.
So, again - base units of measurement are not the same as base units of physics. The base units of physics are the fundamental quantum numbers of a particle, mass, charge, spin (and color). The base units of measurement are the SI units.
What you're talking about are "fundamental" units versus SI base units.
In a fundamental system of units, there are three base units: charge, mass, and angular momentum. (Gee, those sound suspiciously like the three properties that a black hole can possess - I wonder why). Everything else can be derived from those units (for the most part - we'll ignore stuff like baryon number, lepton number, etc. because those theories aren't complete yet. For instance, we now know that only global lepton number is conserved, not mu, e, and tau lepton number separately. I won't even touch color, as color is completely hidden anyway).
In fact, the existence of those units can be derived from the fact that space is invariant under the Poincare group, and has gauge symmetry.
However, those base units come because you've defined other constants to 1.
The problem is that several of those constants are imprecise and difficult to measure. It is easier to define a kilogram, for instance, then it is to somehow base it on the gravitational attraction of two objects, because G is horribly imprecise.
Similarly, it is easier to treat Kelvin as fundamental rather than derived from other units *if* Boltzmann's constant has poor precision.
So while it's *possible* to use fundamental-based units, it's often *impractical* and less precise. The base units in SI are those that can generate all other units with no loss in precision.
To give a very practical example, the mass of a proton is typically given in atomic mass units (amu) as ~1.007 amu. You might think that it should be given in grams, as "amu" isn't a fundamental unit of mass. But the conversion from "amu" to "grams" is less precise than the mass of the proton in atomic mass units. So in this case, "amu" would be appropriate as a base unit, as well as mass, even though the two can be directly converted.
The benefit is that you can compare the mass of a proton and the mass of a neutron in "amu", for instance, to better precision than you could in grams. It's similar (or was similar when SI was developed) with the other units.
Slashdot Mirror
You ahve to charge a line with capacitance C above a certain threshold voltage V to open the transistor gate F times a second, giving you dissipated power of F*CV^2/2 just for that one line -- note V _squared_.
:)
I said scale, not scale linearly. I didn't want to confuse the issue.
Of course, that's only useful to the extent that you have signals that travel long distances on the chip, and of course a lot of the processor is devoted to computing things, not just transmitting them back and forth. Still, imagine if you could carry the contents of an entire cache line from L2 cache to L1 cache in just one or two or three plasmonic lines, and the entire cache line could arrive in one cycle. That seems somehow useful.
I agree - that's mainly what I was thinking.
The important thing to realize is that while the plasmonic line might be "running" at 100 THz (optical), the processor would not: because if it was, it'd just be waiting a huge amount of time for the data to arrive. A huge amount of time - if you assume that, say, the L1 cache is just 1 mm away, it'd be waiting over 2000 clock cycles, even if it's a plasmonic processor. It's more believable that the processor would be running at GHz speeds, and that plasmonic line would simply act to reduce 32 wires to 1. Speed of light still puts a strong upper bound on the ultimate switching speed of processors.
At that point you'd have to start changing processor designs, though, because instead of being bandwidth-starved, you'd be bandwidth-rich. Definitely a new problem.
Did I say electrons?
Read it again. I said electronic signals, not electrons. I chose my words carefully. Read more carefully next time.
If you are in doubt if the Earth is flat or round, how would you know that a Moon eclipse is the Earth's shadow?
If you measure carefully enough, you could see the shadow that a mountain on the side of the Earth casts on the Moon (which is not really feasible, but cool to mention).
Plus it's pretty hard for it to be anything else: if a bunch of people spread out over a large region of the Earth marked what position the Sun was in when the eclipse started, it'd be pretty easy to prove that it had to be the Earth that shadowed the Moon from the Sun.
Point to note: if the Earth was flat, then everyone would see the lunar eclipse exactly the same. The fact that the Sun is at different positions for different people on the planet during an eclipse could only happen if the Earth is round.
I don't think they'd have to be spaced out very far - maybe a few hundred miles or so would prove it.
Alternative answer: a Moon eclipse is when a dragon swallows the Moon.
Have you seen a lunar eclipse? The Moon doesn't disappear - it just turns a deep red.
Besides, I'll agree that laymen can come up with any reason to fit the facts. But if someone pointed out to them "look up there - that's the Earth's shadow on the Moon. See how it's round? That's because the Earth is round," it's quite a believable explanation. If the layman tried the dragon explanation, then you could explain that your friend 300 miles away didn't see this eclipse at all, and then use geometry.
How much heat are these things going to generate though. Because you know E = hf, if you have 100,000 times the frequency, your going to need to throw in 100,000 times the energy!! Of course that is simplification of what is really happening with these kinds of chips and it is much more complicated then just 100,000 times the energy needed. But it seems like these things might make the Pentium IV seems like a fridge!
Power does usually scale with the frequency, but it also scales with the signal strength (number of carriers: intensity in a photonic case, ~voltage in an electronic case). If you can up the frequency by a factor of two and cut the voltage (for instance) by a factor of two, it's the same power usage.
Of course, using E = hf is completely wrong here - that's the energy of a photon, and in a completely photonic chip, wouldn't matter in the tiniest bit - because the photons are emitted at one point, and absorbed at another, so there's no net energy loss.
Most of the places where the frequency dependence comes in are energy losses - like the resistance of a wire. With light, there's very little energy loss (in a fiber, for instance), so the chip will run very, very cool.
Claiming "100,000 times the frequency" is a little misleading. You're not talking about the processor running at terahertz speeds - simply put, you can't make things small enough to do that. Plasmonic signals, photonic signals, electronic signals - they all travel on the order of light speed. There really wouldn't be much point raising the clock frequency beyond the characteristic length of the processing unit (Pentium 4 designers understand this now - they had to put "drive" stages into the pipeline just to allow signals to propagate, and that deep pipeline lead to a very low IPC).
This would be useful for things like memory and processor interconnects, because you could shove gigantic amounts of data. Hence the reason that the article stresses their use as high-traffic freeways. I'm not sure I see the point in an all-plasmonic chip (unless they've got power advantages) because of size concerns.
Wouldn't atmospheric seeing generate a horizon as well?
Another answer, though, is the fact that the Earth casts a round shadow on the Moon during an eclipse. That doesn't *quite* prevent the Earth from being flat - although since it's a round shadow during the entire eclipse, it has to have *some* depth.
The super fast cosmic rays, we accept (albeit the number of researches having found them is much smaller than the researchers working on cold fusion .... or how it is called today: Low Energy Nuclear Reactions)
The field of researchers studying 'super fast cosmic rays' is far, far larger (and more respected) than the one studying cold fusion.
For one thing, the particle astrophysics field is the same field in which AMANDA, Ice-Cube, and other neutrino detectors are in as well. For a second, the people working in the field many times have also worked in other high-energy physics disciplines, including Nobel laureates.
It was my understanding that Hawking radiation is the emission of either a particle or antiparticle from a pair of the two generated just this side of the event horizon of a black hole, where the particle's partner falls into the event horizon and the particle floats on to live another day, appearing as radiation emitting from the black hole. The pair only comes into existence with a boost from the gravity of the black hole.
Your nick is strangely appropriate in this case, because that's the layman's explanation, and unfortunately, it's not a very strong answer. I've been able to justify to other physicists that it's not a "horrible" layman's explanation for what's going on, but it's certainly not descriptive in any sense.
What's actually going on is that the number operator (i.e. the mathematical expression that gives you the number of particles present) has a discontinuity at the horizon of the black hole, as the creation/annihilation operators aren't constant over the geometry.
So really, it's just an effect of the extreme curvature of the spacetime.
String theory is an attempt to merge other forces into a gravitational theory, so in this case, you're getting a black hole due to forces other than gravity. You still, however, could expect Hawking radiation to exist in the same sense, because you may still have a discontinuity at the horizon.
Then again, it's still quite bunk, and his belief that his theory agrees with the data pretty much seems to be based on the fact that the freezeout energy was close to (4/pi) times the average mass of a pion. (4/pi) is of order 1, and the object 'froze out' to pions. I really don't think that it's convincing evidence.
There will never be a discovery (publically at least) of indefinitely life-extending consequence. There will, however, be discoveries that prolong life. But not too much at a time.
No offense, but I think this view may be a bit naive.
Think about it this way: you always have to die of something. While we can say that someone died of old age, for instance, the truth is they died of something - heart failure, or a stroke, or organ failure. Saying that you can't extend life indefinitely is essentially like saying that the medical community will "give up" on something that kills people, and that's just silly.
It's not in the interest of commercialized medicine to research and discover CURES.
Thankfully, the commercialized medical community doesn't research the majority of treatments - government-sponsored research does. And I guarantee you that they are quite interested in cures.
I realize it wouldn't ONLY be you, but in a small subset (internet cafe, or whatnot), it could be an even bigger red flag. Hell, they might use that to say, "watch this stream carefully, he cares that we're watching him."
You're missing the point. Use a Linux box as a NATing gateway. Turn off timestamps.
Poof. All of the computers behind that gateway no longer have timestamps.
Once you can't get through a gateway anymore, anonymity comes back in a big way.
There are two warp ships shown in the intro (before Enterprise, of course) - one is the Phoenix and one is a ship heading to a Moon colony.
Also, being from Montana doesn't necessarily mean American - at least, not US. The Phoenix was launched after WW3 - the US might not have been around then.
Well, being more correct - leaves are multipurpose.
You could also imagine "repurposed" leaves if the planet was thrown from its Sun.
In any case, this is silly - it's not like we have any other data points besides our own planet to compare it to. We're also criticizing a show that has faster-than-light travel being realistic - it's not like you shouldn't be suspending disbelief.
Enterprise had several YEARS to build an audience to the point where UPN
Name the most successful show on UPN.
Go ahead. Look it up.
It's probably WWE Smackdown. Bias problems and finite statistics issues in Neilsen ratings basically mean you essentially can't distinguish between any of the low end stuff (but of course, Nielsen's will never tell you that - but your first clue should be the fact that they release people numbers with 2 digits of precision, and share numbers with 1 digit).
UPN is the problem, not Enterprise. They basically don't have a show more popular than the least popular show from NBC or CBS.
Heck, I can't even watch UPN, as the broadcast station isn't powerful enough to reach me. Where I was previously, it wasn't even on cable.
Sure, Viacom can say "but, but, the ratings are slipping" - yes, that's because no one watches UPN. Sure, viewers left because the show was weak the first two seasons - but UPN can't get new viewers at all, so once a show starts fading, it's in trouble.
As for Sci-Fi channel and Spike TV not wanting it, I'm sure that has more to do with the high production costs and the associated licensing fees of the show than with anything else.
Is it really surprising that Voyager and Enterprise had such low ratings when they were on the worst network out there?
These people should have had a tad more scientific curiosity in highschool biology when the teacher explained what leaves are for.
I mean, nitpicking is one thing, but damn, people, follow through on the logical conclusions of "no sun"!
Leaves aren't for photosynthesis - chloroplasts are for photosynthesis. Plenty of plants without leaves use sunlight.
Leaves are for water capture.
"Enterprise" is nearly an all-white western crew with the exception of a black driver and a vulcan.
And a Brit - well, that's "western" in the sense of "western culture..."
And an Asian woman.
Wait, that's uh... roughly the same percentage of racial diversity as the original crew.
TOS: One black woman, one Vulcan man, one male engineer with an accent, one Russian man, an American captain and doctor, and an Asian man.
Enterprise: One black man, one Asian woman, one British man, one male engineer with an accent, one Asian woman, an American captain, and a Vulcan woman (and a Denobulan doctor).
Except for the Denobulan replacing an American, and a British man replacing a Russian man, they look remarkably similar, don't they?
Abandon the scot bacula
The fact that you can't spell the lead actor's name right (who's quite well known) kindof weakens your (already weak) argument.
With the large number of absolute garbage shows that the networks develop and rapidly cancel each fall, why not try to run Trek in prime time on a large network? They haven't done that since 1969, and it just might work..
I agree regarding CBS. Alternatively, syndicate it, and accept that UPN is a disaster.
Primetime seems destined to fail, though, in my mind - there are a lot of shows you'd be up against, and Trek still has somewhat of a "stigma" associated with it.
Run it where TNG and DS9 did so well - Saturdays at 6 or 7 PM. To me, that seems very safe - a lot of people are just lounging around then, and if you flip through the channels and see that, you might just leave it on. Shift it around if you've got to have the "Will Lesbianism Destroy Your Family?" news shows. Geck.
Interestingly enough, multi-millionaires disagree with you.
From the press release:
Actually, I agree with them. I don't like the cheesy lounge remix of it that happened in Season 3, but I loved the one from seasons 1 & 2. What would be cool is if on the DVD I could select between them.
Why is everyone convinced that the Nielsen ratings are perfect? Do you think it's a coincidence that most of the "Save XXX" campaigns that have succeeded ("Felicity", "Farscape") have been on minor networks? Why do you think they succeeded? Because they provided the networks with ammo for advertisers - "we have more viewers than the Nielsens show".
;-). But donating cash to a show/producer to produce a series that they're ultimately going to profit on like crazy in the long run is just insane.
The "3.0M viewers" from the Nielsens is likely crap. Take *all* small-market numbers from the Nielsens with a grain of salt - they don't have a large enough sample size to correctly measure things in the 'off prime time and secondary network' market. Simple math can show that relatively quickly.
Granted, I like Enterprise and all, especially now that the show is actually getting good this season (and not to forget about T'Pol's boobies
Enterprise is on UPN. This is Paramount (and Viacom's) choice - which means it gets joke advertising revenue. Paramount probably isn't making much money on it at all right now.
There are enough viewers for Enterprise to survive on a more major network off prime time. Certainly there are other options for Viacom/CBS/etc, so you're right there. They *would* make a profit on it in the long run.
The problem is there isn't enough time. Once the sets are destroyed, it's virtually guaranteed that it's over. So the smartest way to handle it is to simply donate a small amount of money (say, $20 for each viewer) to make Paramount reconsider.
Personally, I don't mind. Many people don't get Enterprise on TV at all, and need to download it. (UPN wasn't even available on *cable* in the previous location I was at, and it's not broadcast strong enough here). In this case, all I feel I'm doing is paying Paramount just like I'd pay a cable company. You pay for cable, which subsidizes some shows (on HBO, it subsidizes a large portion of the show). What's so wrong about paying a small-broadcast network for a show?
Well, you could also restrict chess by removing pieces, thus making it "non-meaningless", but still pruning the tree down to a solvable size. You start off with 16 pieces on each side, so a total of 32 pieces - naively, you could imagine cutting the pieces by 8 and the board by 2, so 4 pieces to a side, on an 4x8 board (or doing something like 6x6 rather than 8x8 - gets you close enough).
That's just as pruned as the 5x5 Go example, but still strategic.
Go's main advantage isn't in the available number of states, but measuring how "good" each configuration is.
Basically, the idea is once you've got c, hbar, and the three basic unit types (mass, length, time), you've got a complete system of units.
Nope. You're still missing charge, and possibly something like baryon number or color or something bizarro like that.
For charge you have to measure the charge of the electron, and set it to 1. Then, as you said, more accurate measurements of e are refinements of the definition of a coloumb.
First of all, Plank constant is a unit of a quantity called "action" and is measured in Energy x Time (like JxS).
Or, more typically, a quantity called "angular momentum" (in "momentum * distance", or "kgm/s * m", which works out to be J*s as well). Planck's constant (well, hbar) is the smallest amount of angular momentum, not the smallest amount of energy.
There is, in fact, no 'smallest unit of energy' in current physics. To get that, you'd have to construct the Planck mass, which requires assuming that spacetime itself is quantized.
Candela essentially measures the same things as watts.
Mole is just an number. It might be used in the definition of the kilogram, but in itself, it just relates the mass of a gram with 1/12 the rest mass of a carbon-12 atom.
Kelvin is just a unit derived from mass, momentum, and kinetic energy. It is not a base unit.
Ampere might or might not be a base unit, I'm not sure about that one.
You are talking about base units of physics (and you're still very wrong there), not base units of measurement.
Take Kelvin, for instance. We'll ignore the fact that temperature really relates both energy and *fundamental statistics* (the temperature of a gas of fermions at a given temperature is different than a gas of bosons at a given temperature). But even if it didn't, and it was just "average kinetic energy over Boltzmann's constant", you could say that Kelvin is just inverse joules...
if you set Boltzmann's constant to 1, and have it be unitless. The problem is that you've now shifted any imprecision of measuring Boltzmann's constant into *all measurements of temperature*, rather than just keeping it in the connection between energy and temperature. So when you calibrate your new temperature scale in "inverse joules", you now face the same precision problems that you would face in measuring Boltzmann's constant. That is, you have to measure the average kinetic energy of an ideal gas, and label that on your "inverse joule" thermometer.
This is dumb. Of course, what you do is use Kelvin as a base unit, and *define* the scale using other processes (the triple point of water, if memory serves) and now you've got a perfectly calibrated scale to huge precision, and the only imprecision from measuring the Boltzmann constant comes when you want to convert to energy.
So, again - base units of measurement are not the same as base units of physics. The base units of physics are the fundamental quantum numbers of a particle, mass, charge, spin (and color). The base units of measurement are the SI units.
What you're talking about are "fundamental" units versus SI base units.
In a fundamental system of units, there are three base units: charge, mass, and angular momentum. (Gee, those sound suspiciously like the three properties that a black hole can possess - I wonder why). Everything else can be derived from those units (for the most part - we'll ignore stuff like baryon number, lepton number, etc. because those theories aren't complete yet. For instance, we now know that only global lepton number is conserved, not mu, e, and tau lepton number separately. I won't even touch color, as color is completely hidden anyway).
In fact, the existence of those units can be derived from the fact that space is invariant under the Poincare group, and has gauge symmetry.
However, those base units come because you've defined other constants to 1.
The problem is that several of those constants are imprecise and difficult to measure. It is easier to define a kilogram, for instance, then it is to somehow base it on the gravitational attraction of two objects, because G is horribly imprecise.
Similarly, it is easier to treat Kelvin as fundamental rather than derived from other units *if* Boltzmann's constant has poor precision.
So while it's *possible* to use fundamental-based units, it's often *impractical* and less precise. The base units in SI are those that can generate all other units with no loss in precision.
To give a very practical example, the mass of a proton is typically given in atomic mass units (amu) as ~1.007 amu. You might think that it should be given in grams, as "amu" isn't a fundamental unit of mass. But the conversion from "amu" to "grams" is less precise than the mass of the proton in atomic mass units. So in this case, "amu" would be appropriate as a base unit, as well as mass, even though the two can be directly converted.
The benefit is that you can compare the mass of a proton and the mass of a neutron in "amu", for instance, to better precision than you could in grams. It's similar (or was similar when SI was developed) with the other units.
Of course, ignore the idiotic bad grammar and spelling (more properly, "that's" instead of "that").