My non-technical mother in law is interested in string theory but she has no clue what it's about, except that everything in the universe is made out of tiny "strings" that go into another dimension. She is a retired grade school teacher and knows what atoms and subatomic particles are, and she understands the idea of a line having zero width and a plane having zero thickness. I'm trying to come up with an analogy that will get across the basic idea.
Say the universe is two-dimensional, like the surface of a drum. No thickness, just a plane. Then say somebody outside of the universe pokes a needle through the drum head and pulls a piece of thread through it. The thread is one-dimensional, with no actual thickness, so the place where it goes through is just a point. Nobody who lived in the 2-dimensional surface could see the point because it has no thickness. But what if the thread vibrates like a guitar string... as it moves back and forth, the point where it goes through the drum also moves back and forth. The spot becomes a little line. If the string didn't vibrate exactly back and forth but kind of wandered around in a fuzzy pattern, the point would look like a hazy dot.
Because the string vibrates so fast, the people in the plane of the drumhead would never perceive it as a point, but only as a blurry spot (assuming they could see things that small).
That's what a subatomic particle is in our universe, except in 3 dimensions. Wherever a vibrating cosmic string passes through our universe, it forms a hazy dot-like pattern in space, which to us is a subatomic particle.
I know this is far from exact, but does it give enough of the general idea?
For two weeks back in the 80s I wrote code standing up in an over-airconditioned server room, wearing a down jacket and hat and walking in place to keep my legs and feet warm, with earplugs to cut down the noise. The computer terminal was on a piece of scrap plywood placed across a gap between two of those giant old washing-machine size disk-pack drives. It was at a mortuary supply company.
Nobody seems to be asking the key question: If news organizations want Google to pay them for linkage, why shouldn't the news organizations pay for the raw material in the first place?
Admittedly they sometimes do pay for interviews, but the vast majority of news material is, in the language of IP-speak, "stolen" material. When a television news crew shoots footage of a house fire they don't pay the homeowner, even though the homeowner is originating the event and the TV station is making a profit from it. Unless news organizations want to start paying for raw material, I think they should STFU and GBTW.
I couldn't agree more. Business people frequently see everything in the world as a tool to help them own more of it. It's getting more and more difficult to keep the world as a framework for life that people also do business in, rather than a business framework that people also live in.
The idea that consumers in your example have actually "judged" person A or person B is just a colloquialism used by economists. Consumers have no information about the efficiency of worker A or B, and therefore they can't be making a judgment in any realistic sense. Consumers could easily offset person A's higher efficiency by buying twenty times more of product B because they saw Christine Aguilera wear product B on television, and it would be no reflection on person A or B's worth.
In addition, it's very unlikely in real life that two workers doing the same job at the same company would have a difference of a factor of eight in their efficiency. If anything like that happened, then either worker B has a serious problem that should be addressed or worker A is a prodigy who should be promoted to training the other workers.
The idea of a 7x pay limit isn't incompatible with paying people more for better work. It's only meant to avoid wildly unrealistic assumptions about who deserves credit for the success of the team.
It won't be anytime soon, but I'm looking forward to the day when human drivers are completely out of the loop. I'm sure robotic cars will be highly controversial, and any accidents caused by technical failures will bring out the angry mobs with torches, but improving on the current rate of highway deaths per year seems like a pretty achievable target. If human-driven cars were a new invention today, they probably wouldn't be legal.
Is anybody else tired of following highly public legal cases for several years, only to have them end in secret settlements? Highly litigious entities like the RIAA have full access to their own records of how they settled past lawsuits, but their new opponents have no such information. This hardly seems fair. The outcomes of lawsuits become, in effect, laws we have to live by, and people have a right to know the law. I think there should be a threshold for lawsuits, maybe a certain amount of court time. If it takes longer, the outcome should be made public. After all, the public pays much of the actual costs of operating the court system. I think we're entitled to find out how these stories end.
I think I see where you're coming from but I don't think tolerance is the logical contradiction you make it out to be. It's not an abstraction where anything goes and criticizing anybody is wrong. In practical terms it means we reach a consensus about what is tolerable and what isn't. Slavery is not a tolerable practice in today's world. Neither is cannibalism or having sex with three-year-olds. Certain things we just don't tolerate, but the idea is to keep that range of intolerance narrow and as well defined as possible, keep it as much a consensus as possible, and not use one group's rulebook as the standard.
If I didn't know better I would think the vast majority of people might want different music copyright laws. Hey Legislators, knock-knock, it's us, the voters.
Cars going up and down? How do they pass each other? The only designs I've seen are one-way trips, with the cars being dismantled at the top and used to construct a space station.
The Coriolis force makes objects move toward the equator, and is zero at the equator, which is where the cable would be anchored. So I don't see why it's an issue. However, as the the mass of the climber and its payload moves away from the Earth it would place a drag on the ribbon in the direction opposite the Earth's rotation. Is this the actual issue?
Getting to that ice will require a team of hard-drinking, undisciplined misfits and renegades who know a lot about drilling and can learn all the space travel crap on the side.
Reminds me of a Phil Dick story in which people send copies of themselves on hazardous space missions. The original person sits safely at home on Earth, while the disposable duplicate with all the same skills and experience goes off and risks life and limb. Wish I could remember the title.
Shuttle launches are truly incredible to watch and hear in person. There are parks a few miles from Cape Canaveral where you can pull over and get a good view once the shuttle gets up in the sky a bit.
I hope somebody at NASA starts pushing for nuclear powered rockets based on Gaseous Core Nuclear Reactors. In a gaseous core reactor or "nuclear lightbulb" a cloud of gaseous uranium would be confined in the center of a sealed quartz bulb, by a buffer gas swirled around the inside of the bulb. The uranium gas heats up to 25,000C, emitting intense ultraviolet. Pure quartz is 100% permeable to UV, which passes through and heats a stream of liquid hydrogen flowing past the outside of the bulb. The superheated hydrogen expands and exits through a rocket nozzle to provide thrust. Keeping the nuclear fuel from touching anything overcomes the temperature limitation of solid fuel reactors, which can only be taken to about 3,500C without melting. They're also safe; completely destroying a GCNR in the atmosphere would release less than 1% of the nuclides from a single 1950 A-bomb test.
Here's an interesting hypothetical design for a 100% reusable, non-polluting GCNR-powered rocket using the Saturn-V form factor, which could life 1000 tons of payload into Earth orbit and return an equal size cargo to a fully powered landing. This rocket could launch a space hotel in a one shot or carry lavishly equipped missions to the moon or Mars, with dozens of crew and plenty of radiation shielding. True Buck Rogers style spaceships that take off and land vertically again and again.
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My non-technical mother in law is interested in string theory but she has no clue what it's about, except that everything in the universe is made out of tiny "strings" that go into another dimension. She is a retired grade school teacher and knows what atoms and subatomic particles are, and she understands the idea of a line having zero width and a plane having zero thickness. I'm trying to come up with an analogy that will get across the basic idea.
Say the universe is two-dimensional, like the surface of a drum. No thickness, just a plane. Then say somebody outside of the universe pokes a needle through the drum head and pulls a piece of thread through it. The thread is one-dimensional, with no actual thickness, so the place where it goes through is just a point. Nobody who lived in the 2-dimensional surface could see the point because it has no thickness. But what if the thread vibrates like a guitar string... as it moves back and forth, the point where it goes through the drum also moves back and forth. The spot becomes a little line. If the string didn't vibrate exactly back and forth but kind of wandered around in a fuzzy pattern, the point would look like a hazy dot.
Because the string vibrates so fast, the people in the plane of the drumhead would never perceive it as a point, but only as a blurry spot (assuming they could see things that small).
That's what a subatomic particle is in our universe, except in 3 dimensions. Wherever a vibrating cosmic string passes through our universe, it forms a hazy dot-like pattern in space, which to us is a subatomic particle.
I know this is far from exact, but does it give enough of the general idea?
For two weeks back in the 80s I wrote code standing up in an over-airconditioned server room, wearing a down jacket and hat and walking in place to keep my legs and feet warm, with earplugs to cut down the noise. The computer terminal was on a piece of scrap plywood placed across a gap between two of those giant old washing-machine size disk-pack drives. It was at a mortuary supply company.
WTF? Blow up the image and check out that "gun." To me it looks suspiciously like a Romulan disruptor or something similar from Star Trek.
Nobody seems to be asking the key question:
If news organizations want Google to pay them for linkage, why shouldn't the news organizations pay for the raw material in the first place?
Admittedly they sometimes do pay for interviews, but the vast majority of news material is, in the language of IP-speak, "stolen" material. When a television news crew shoots footage of a house fire they don't pay the homeowner, even though the homeowner is originating the event and the TV station is making a profit from it. Unless news organizations want to start paying for raw material, I think they should STFU and GBTW.
I couldn't agree more. Business people frequently see everything in the world as a tool to help them own more of it. It's getting more and more difficult to keep the world as a framework for life that people also do business in, rather than a business framework that people also live in.
Given that a PG-13 rating still allows Kirsten Dunst to be bra-less in the rain, I'm ok with it.
They could have received a Rule 34 sanction.
The idea that consumers in your example have actually "judged" person A or person B is just a colloquialism used by economists. Consumers have no information about the efficiency of worker A or B, and therefore they can't be making a judgment in any realistic sense. Consumers could easily offset person A's higher efficiency by buying twenty times more of product B because they saw Christine Aguilera wear product B on television, and it would be no reflection on person A or B's worth.
In addition, it's very unlikely in real life that two workers doing the same job at the same company would have a difference of a factor of eight in their efficiency. If anything like that happened, then either worker B has a serious problem that should be addressed or worker A is a prodigy who should be promoted to training the other workers.
The idea of a 7x pay limit isn't incompatible with paying people more for better work. It's only meant to avoid wildly unrealistic assumptions about who deserves credit for the success of the team.
Sounds like he needed the spider bite that lets you walk AND become invisible.
It won't be anytime soon, but I'm looking forward to the day when human drivers are completely out of the loop. I'm sure robotic cars will be highly controversial, and any accidents caused by technical failures will bring out the angry mobs with torches, but improving on the current rate of highway deaths per year seems like a pretty achievable target. If human-driven cars were a new invention today, they probably wouldn't be legal.
Is anybody else tired of following highly public legal cases for several years, only to have them end in secret settlements? Highly litigious entities like the RIAA have full access to their own records of how they settled past lawsuits, but their new opponents have no such information. This hardly seems fair. The outcomes of lawsuits become, in effect, laws we have to live by, and people have a right to know the law. I think there should be a threshold for lawsuits, maybe a certain amount of court time. If it takes longer, the outcome should be made public. After all, the public pays much of the actual costs of operating the court system. I think we're entitled to find out how these stories end.
I think I see where you're coming from but I don't think tolerance is the logical contradiction you make it out to be. It's not an abstraction where anything goes and criticizing anybody is wrong. In practical terms it means we reach a consensus about what is tolerable and what isn't. Slavery is not a tolerable practice in today's world. Neither is cannibalism or having sex with three-year-olds. Certain things we just don't tolerate, but the idea is to keep that range of intolerance narrow and as well defined as possible, keep it as much a consensus as possible, and not use one group's rulebook as the standard.
If I didn't know better I would think the vast majority of people might want different music copyright laws. Hey Legislators, knock-knock, it's us, the voters.
Isn't Coriolis force essentially centrifugal force throwing objects away from the Earth's axis?
Cars going up and down? How do they pass each other? The only designs I've seen are one-way trips, with the cars being dismantled at the top and used to construct a space station.
The Coriolis force makes objects move toward the equator, and is zero at the equator, which is where the cable would be anchored. So I don't see why it's an issue. However, as the the mass of the climber and its payload moves away from the Earth it would place a drag on the ribbon in the direction opposite the Earth's rotation. Is this the actual issue?
Getting to that ice will require a team of hard-drinking, undisciplined misfits and renegades who know a lot about drilling and can learn all the space travel crap on the side.
It would be sweet justice if a bunch of authors got together and sent OCLC a Cease and Desist for using author/title information without permission.
Reminds me of a Phil Dick story in which people send copies of themselves on hazardous space missions. The original person sits safely at home on Earth, while the disposable duplicate with all the same skills and experience goes off and risks life and limb. Wish I could remember the title.
I think of the liability litigation industry as a form of grey goo.
As long as we can round up a hardy crew of misfits and renegades and train them to be astronauts, we can handle anything!
Shuttle launches are truly incredible to watch and hear in person. There are parks a few miles from Cape Canaveral where you can pull over and get a good view once the shuttle gets up in the sky a bit.
I hope somebody at NASA starts pushing for nuclear powered rockets based on Gaseous Core Nuclear Reactors. In a gaseous core reactor or "nuclear lightbulb" a cloud of gaseous uranium would be confined in the center of a sealed quartz bulb, by a buffer gas swirled around the inside of the bulb. The uranium gas heats up to 25,000C, emitting intense ultraviolet. Pure quartz is 100% permeable to UV, which passes through and heats a stream of liquid hydrogen flowing past the outside of the bulb. The superheated hydrogen expands and exits through a rocket nozzle to provide thrust. Keeping the nuclear fuel from touching anything overcomes the temperature limitation of solid fuel reactors, which can only be taken to about 3,500C without melting. They're also safe; completely destroying a GCNR in the atmosphere would release less than 1% of the nuclides from a single 1950 A-bomb test.
Here's an interesting hypothetical design for a 100% reusable, non-polluting GCNR-powered rocket using the Saturn-V form factor, which could life 1000 tons of payload into Earth orbit and return an equal size cargo to a fully powered landing. This rocket could launch a space hotel in a one shot or carry lavishly equipped missions to the moon or Mars, with dozens of crew and plenty of radiation shielding. True Buck Rogers style spaceships that take off and land vertically again and again.
I thought the government was only supposed to provide services that the private sector can't or won't provide with reasonable cost and quality.
Serutan's Fun Factz #22583: Columbus is the capital of Ohio.
Serutan's Fun Factz #57661: The chemical formula for water is H20.
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