some of these blogs actually contain some pretty handy info from time to time [my emphasis]
yeh, that's true, but let's face it - the vast majority are complete and utter drivel and manage to make a cereal packet look like an interesting read.
Hmm. Sounds like the rest of the internet, really! Search engines before Google, perhaps?
I'm getting two fairly strong messages here. Firstly, there is a need for a useful search mechanism for retrieving the gold from the mess of Blog information. (And other forum-based or otherwise ephemeral content.)
The second message is that these ephemeral sources do not follow the same rules as other sites. My (normal, non-blog) website contains strategy articles and so-on for a computer game (Heroes of Might and Magic); that material is neither going to change nor to move, and I link to places that I do not expect to change or move, and to the best places I know of, rather than wherever I encountered things; and MapHaven is not part of an incestuous web of linking. Whereas with blogs, their links are distributed rather more freely; and the often deleterious effect on Google searches has been noted. And people here are also complaining of archived forum posts or web-message-boards polluting Google results with opinions rather than results.
I think it is only sensible that Google, in its quest to provide the most useful links for its users' searches, handle the different kinds of sources differently. Frankly, I'd be surprised and disappointed if they didn't improve their methods in this sort of way sooner or later. (Sooner or later someone else would - and Google would probably fall from its pinnacle as the most used search engine.)
The stable isotope of gold is 197Au anyway! (Mass 197, atomic number 79, note the re-use of digits; I use this often in my data files.)
There are several stable lead isotopes, so I'm sure someone can come up with a pair of reactions that turn one of those isotopes into 197Au, although getting rid of three protons is decidedly inconvenient - far harder than getting rid of two or four. But you'd probably lose most of the lead to other reactions, and it would indeed be a ridiculous waste of money. Gold is cheap.
Yes, I mean that. It's all relative, of course. That gold is expensive is 'common knowledge'. Still, many people realise that platinum and iridium are more expensive. Some fraction of them realise the value of other rare, useful elements - such as tantalum.
What's really expensive is isotopically enriched or pure material. (Weapons-grade uranium is a (cheap) example of an enriched material.) Such as the 196Hg that the previous poster mentioned. My PhD work required 176Lu, which we purchased 4 milligrams of stuff enriched to 50%, at about US$1600 per milligram (From memory of four years ago.) It's not the most expensive out there, either... What price does Gold fetch per ounce (30 grams?) There is only one isotope of gold, and it's relatively easy to chemically purify, and relatively common on the earth's crust. We make targets of it all the time - it's great for calibrations - the lab occasionally sends visitors home with a few cents worth of gold foil on their thumbnails.
Possibly the most valuable batch of nuclei in the world is a target made of the 16+ isomeric form of 178Hf - a truly microscopic quantity of material made by herculean effort at a big laboratory. The enrichment is something tiny like 3%.
Other materials that make gold look cheap are things like carbon nanotubes. Bucky-balls extended into pipes. There have been massive improvements in manufacturing processes - I think the cost of bucky-tubes is now comparable with that 176Lutetium I was talking about. As for the programmable materials the article refers to - they're going to start out vastly more expensive still, and it'll take a long time before the cost drops to near modern silicon technology - and you don't build your walls from RAM, do you? Don't expect to replace bricks with programmable materials, at least in your lifetime. Be impressed if artificial-atom materials get cheap enough to be used in common consumer goods.
The article is remarkably light in details, not even mentioning whether or not the experiment is looking for neutrinos or something else. There are a number of experiments involving big detection systems underground - most of them designed to pick out neutrinos - and there's an on-going discussion as to whether or not neutrinos have mass, because if they do, there's enough of them that they might well make up the missing mass of the universe.
To show that neutrinos have mass, it suffices to observe solar neutrinos and look for changes in neutrino flavour. Last I heard, although large regions in which the neutrino masses could have lain had been ruled out, the evidence was mounting in favour of flavour changes and neutrinos having mass.
However, with all I've heard about neutrino studies over the last few years in a Nuclear Physics department, this article doesn't give enough information to let me work out if I already know of the experiment or not (though I probably have attended seminars by associated researchers; these projects are not exactly three-person exercises capable of being missed!) They don't even give the experiment's *name* - NOMAD, CHORUS, SNO, etc (many listed on this page)
The article *might* be referring to the UK Dark Matter Collaboration who apparently look for neutralinos instead (neutralinos appear to crop up deep inside what we Nuclear Physicists call 'Particle Physics', which is full of leptons and mesons and other fun particles, fine, and some of the most brain-bending mathematics it has been my priviledge to not understand.)
4) I agree with the man comments. Man needs to be re-written. We maybe need to look at a wikiman.
Wikiman! The strengths and breadths of the Wikipedia approach, where people can add or edit essentially at will! I love the idea!
Wikipedia is an excellent project - I plan on rewriting and submitting a few chunks of my PhD thesis to improve the nuclear physics coverage. Wikipedia for linux documentation strikes me as being an excellent idea, allowing clueful users to boost documentation quality and cross-referencing. I'd contribute to that too:-) (And more readily than I would to source code; I'm better at documentation.)
There might need to be safeguards against script kiddies and vandals (a few bad apples...) - and, to limit or handle possible over-documentation, perhaps most contributions should be 'more detail' or 'case study' sort of things - so that the user finds the basic outlines first, then follows links to get more information as desired. (So perhaps package maintainers or approved delegates would approve changes to the basic info, and 'more info' stuff would be post-moderated. If 'more info' submissions were numerous, a rating system would be useful.)
Ah, what a lovely thought. Please mention the idea in more places, so that it has a chance of being taken up.
I can see there's a sore point there... though I'm not sure how I triggered it. My comment was not intended to be a rant (see the smileyfaces) and I was only taking a teasing poke at the slashdot stereotype of a computer-addict!:-)
I'm Australian and I haven't seen the kind of problems you describe. I suspect there's a big difference in our schoolyard culture. Anyway, I've mainly seen friends in long relationships with 'nice' partners.
If successful, perhaps one day you could give your love a diamond engagement CPU instead of a ring!
Because, God knows, women can be counted on for preferring a practical gift over a romantic one.
Which way are you joking?:-) This is why DeBeers had to spend so much money on their advertising campaign in the 1920s; why they had to make a movie thing of surprising the prospective bride with a ring; because, given the choice of him spending two months salary on a ring or on the downpayment on a house, her decision would almost invariably be for the house... an opinion that she doesn't get a chance to offer if the ring is a surprise.
Certainly in my circle of friends, the average cost of engagement rings is around one week's salary, not two months (by an odd coincidence most of the rings are sapphires of one form or another!); and most of the couples have mortgages (we live in a city where houses are affordable!)
Women do like romance, but it doesn't have to be expensive. The occasional surprise of one kind or another does go down well, but making special time together is far more important! Yes, this means leaving the computer!:-) Even (gasp, choke!) at times that might be inconvenient to you! (Quietly putting up with a bit of inconvenience, making her your priority, does a lot to make your lady feel loved.)
I concur with the other comments about Moore's law and the inappropriateness of an engagement CPU. Buy her the CPU later, when her computer needs upgrading. If the physics is substantiated and the massive climb from possibility to economic production completed, you probably won't be able to see or touch the diamonds inside the chip anyway.
Wow. You come from a place full of TLAs, don't you? (Three Letter Acronyms.)
I handed in my PhD thesis in nuclear physics earlier this month ("The effect of ground-state spin on fission and quasi-fission anisotropies" - I'm in fusion-fission research.) I used basically nothing but FORTRAN all the way through. One of the reasons this was practical was that my work involved only a few new equations - not all that much symbolic manipulation to be done. Further, it was reasonable to tweak and optimize the FORTRAN to get faster calculation times... when the newest Alpha in the department takes four days to crunch a single data point, believe me you devote a little time to optimizations and evaluating approximations!
For relatively pure and simple number-crunching like I was doing, FORTRAN is pretty well suited to the task. However, that isn't the real reason I used it. I used FORTRAN because everyone else in the department (and in most of the rest of the discipline, world wide) used FORTRAN - when I start my new job in may, the rest of my research group can look at my documentation and source code, and tweak and change it as required. And send it to other researchers who can do likewise. (A common type of change is to track and output a variable not previously considered important. This may be hard to introduce into Math-something calculations.)
(I write Perl for a website at home. Oh, the contrast!)
I've met Radware, but did most of my Nuclear Spectroscopy (during my honours year) using a solution peculiar to the ANU nuclear physics department; DCP. This in-house program slices, dices, drops the knife and needs to be poked or re-started occasionally... Argh; it gets the job done, and I understand many of its important features are not available in other programs, but it would really benefit from a total rewrite from a highly trained, intelligent, and approachable programmer like my partner. (The author of DCP is a prickly old fellow with lots of experience and (to the best of my knowledge) no theory to speak of. DCP reflects its author.)
What is the best tool for the job? Depends on the job, and the skills of you and the people around you.
I have another friend involved with facilities at Stromlo. He has described the process of making mirrors for telescopes such as these. The final polishing involves:
Setting up an interferometer to detect variations in the height of the surface at the sub-wavelength level;
Someone wearing silk gloves brushing lightly over the raised places on the mirror;
Coming back several hours later when the thermal effects have settled down, to repeat the process.
The mirror takes about a year to make. Most telescopes are three years from money to installation. My friend's company may get a telescope back on Stromlo as early as July, simply and solely because it was already coming, and the mirror is already made.
Anyway. The point I'm looking to make here is - it doesn't take much to ruin a telescope's mirror.
Photographs of the damage to the landscape, the buildings, and the telescopes were made available today, at http://www.mso.anu.edu.au/colless/StromloFire/. I find it interesting that the trees are all still standing - less only their leaves!
There was a quote somewhere saying that a heap of data could be recovered from even a square millimetre of hard disk platter.
So let's have a think about the maths. I don't know what the physical interior of a hard disk is like, but the exterior is in the vicinity of 10cm (4in) across. If the platter were square, that'd be 100*100 square millimetres. (It'd be round, so the actual number would be about 25% smaller.) Suppose we were talking about a 40gig disk. That's 4 meg per square millimeter.
Now if hard disks were made up of lots of layers, say 1000 of them, that's still 4K per square millimeter per layer, and you've got one hell of a pulverising job ahead of you!
There's good reason why high-security areas go through their elaborate sequences of electronic shredding (multiple data overwrites), physical shredding (makes the hammer look weak) and thermodynamic shredding (I daresay *someone* can get data off a hard-disk after you've treated it with thermite!)
I'm another like you, mrsmalkav; going through a trifle young, realising only afterwards that I was the only girl in many of my classes, because I never found it an issue. I think some of it is being thick skinned, and frankly not very observant; there might have been issues but they would have to be really blatant for me to notice, and under such circumstances (which only cropped up on a very few occasions) they were so obviously over the line that I had only to point it out.
Another part of it is parental support. I definitely had it. My parents would have encouraged me in anything I took an interest in; from repairing cars to embroidery. They *never* suggested there was anything I couldn't or shouldn't try to do, so there wasn't much chance of me taking notice of anyone else making that kind of suggestion.
And it helps to be brilliant, so that your ability can never be called into question. I wonder, just now, if that wasn't the most major contributor to my comfort in my chosen discipline; because no-one *ever* suggested I wasn't entirely capable of the work I was doing. There was altogether too much evidence showing I *was* capable. My university departments were happy to put me on an accelerated program, and find me projects and one-off courses.
Why isn't there a 50/50 gender balance? There *are* differences between the average strengths of men and women; but to me that only says that the numbers should be 40/60 or something like that. I do think social pressures significantly exaggerate the differences. These are probably exaggerated further in the case of IT - not only is the programmer or sysadmin stereotypically male, the stereotype covers youth, ego, lack of concern for appearance, and occasionally lack of hygiene. Girls at 16 are significantly more mature, and cultural pressures make them more aware of appearance; if there had been equal numbers of boys and girls at 13, playing in the computer labs at lunchtime, by 16 or 18 chances are that the small fraction of distinctly unpleasant males would have discouraged first a few and then just about all the females. It would eventually have worked even on me.
My discipline isn't computer science, but physics; which has similar problems to a slightly different extent. I went into physics because of an active interest in this field. I'm in the final month of a nuclear physics PhD.:-) It is, therefore, time I stopped posting to slashdot and started the current round of thesis editing.
I read through some of the basic info on the page (before some of it got Slashdotted) and then started reading the forums. That's when I started finding the unfortunate schwag like this thread [fusor.net]. The problem with all of these sorts of projects is that they tend to attract nutters who think they've rewritten the laws of physics in their garage from scratch using "maths" that they just can't divulge yet because they don't quite work. Ugh. Free energy weirdos and neuvo-quantum threory weirdos - two of a kind.
I think the phrase 'who think they've rewritten the laws of physics' captures the problem nicely. I'm currently writing up my PhD in Nuclear Physics, and I've been on the receiving end of two or three submissions from 'wilders'. There are a number of issues that all of these submissions had - and all the issues have to be addressed before a 'revolutionary' new idea gets accepted.
The simplest of these is communication. The 'wilder' must be able to communicate their idea to an expert in the field. Me, being a relative novice to the idea of getting mail from strangers about physical ideas, I read through the papers I got carefully, respectfully, with several different mathematical 'languages' to draw on and capacity to recognise all the other forms in which physical ideas can be clearly expressed. Classical equations. Lagrangians. Operators. Tensors.
No maths in the submissions. (Well, one had some. Strictly numerical, though; no variable names or symbols, just things like 1.666667 + 2.065.) Well, that'd be Ok if the text conveyed something. It didn't. It didn't have imposed structure (introduction, discussion, conclusion); it didn't 'tell a story', it didn't convey anything. I was left with this jumble of half-formed thoughts in no apparent order. When you are trying to share scientific ideas, you have to be able to communicate. Is that so hard to understand? Anyway, if an expert cannot understand the idea, they cannot distinguish a truly wonderful idea from a nutter's mis-formed thoughts... and guess which is by far more common?
The next issue is respect for existing theories. Many very clever people worked very hard and very long on those theories. If you're going to displace an existing theory, you have to (a) show how your theory agrees with existing theory, where existing theory agrees with experiment, and (b) show how your theory adds something new - either by disagreeing with existing theory in an experimentally accessible circumstance, or by making certain calculations vastly easier, or something like that. Both Quantum Mechanics and Relativity reduce to Newtonian Physics in the regime of macroscopic, slow-moving entities; except for a few odd effects that were puzzles before the new theories were advanced. If you're not prepared even to learn existing theories, which was the case in everything I received, then (1) chances are that neither (A) nor (B) above is fulfilled, and (2) my goodness you're being arrogant asking me to learn your theory!
Guess what? The agreement with existing theory, and advancement over existing theory, also has to be communicated. You can't just say 'this theory is wrong' - even if you have genuinely found a self-contradiction in a theory; you have to show how it is wrong, why, under what circumstances the problem arises... and even then there may be a way around it. Quantum Chromodynamics involves renormalisations to get rid of infinities. It's still the theory for the area.
Rest assured that where rival theories are proposed, the debate over which is better goes on for years. There's one theory I'm interested in; it's fifteen years since it was first published (compared to about twentyfive years for the rival theory). It has one very major flaw, in the applicability of a crucial assumption. However, that particular assumption is applicable under certain circumstances, and I may spend some months writing a paper about a theory combining the best of both approaches. If I'm actually right, in about fifteen years no-one will use anything else... but (a) that's a reasonably big if, and (b) that's a long time. Anyway, this leads to the last of my points about 'wilder' theories and why they rarely get taken seriously...
Effort. And credit.
One of the submissions I looked at was an inspiration that had apparently come to the author on January 14th, 1997. He'd been mailing off his papers ever since. Let me try an analogy:
You send a story idea to a famous author. You've spent
hours on it. You've generously offered the author half the credit - after all, the idea was all yours!
You've never prepared anything for publication, have you? How long do you think the author spends writing a book? It might only take you a few hours to read...
Prolific authors like Terry Pratchett think they're doing well to publish two books a year. That's six months of solid full time work. Having followed Pratchett for some time I suspect he actually invests more like eight or nine months per book; some authors take two years. Have you compared that to your few hours of work? This maybe isn't too surprising. How many pages did you write about your ideas? How many pages would the finished book comprise? Right, so how many more ideas and interactions and so-on would go into that? Then, too, most authors have plenty of ideas of their own, which fire their imagination already.
In fact, if you're lucky, you get back a form letter from the author's agent. It'll probably say "Write the story yourself." After all, it's your imagination that the ideas have fired. The author hasn't seen the submission, and won't; because they don't want to be sued if any of your ideas turn up independently in their work. (After all, people *do* get the same ideas independently! Especially where knights and dragons and schools of magic are concerned!) If you have written the story yourself, and sent in a manuscript, the form letter may suggest the right place to send the manuscript (a publisher's slush-pile.)
Scientific writing is a bit like that. It takes a lot of effort; I put nine months into my first publication (eight pages long.) It has to be rigorous. Thoroughly checked; exhaustively examined; every detail justified either by reference or by explanation. It has to genuinely say something new. And if your few hours of work goes to waste because I won't put several months of mine into it... well, sorry; plenty of times I've sunk weeks into my own ideas, til I found good reason to throw them away.
Rachel
Disclaimers:
(1) 'Wilders' is entirely my own term, borrowed for the purposes of this post. These ideas are my own, and may not be shared by my supervisors or other members of my department.
(2) From the sounds of it the website occasioning this slashdot story is vastly better expressed and had vastly more effort sunk into it than the submissions that got my goat. Congratulations; you have now submitted your manuscript to the publisher; about 1 or 2 percent make it to bookstore shelves.
Well, I certainly can't argue with your experiences. And googling for my significant other turns up quite a few different people. Often it's fairly obvious when that happens; the places and the roles vary widely.
I don't seem to share my google footprint with any other *people* - I just have an unfortunate name to start with. Well, it's not normally an issue, except around very juvenile individuals. And around Google. A (hypothetical; I haven't tried this example) Google for "John Hand" will return you references to "John's hand". My last name is 'Butt'. I get what looks like porn, but may just be something from a TV soap episode. My father shares his first name with at least one US president and some film stars; his google footprint is *far* more polluted.
I look forward to marrying; for many reasons, of course, but adopting my beloved's common and innocuous name is one of the minor benefits.
Incidentally, googling for screen names is often little or no better. I was surprised to find I share my screen name with an odd little organisation that appears to be chinese. And then there are all the screen names taken from books and games and so on...
What Einstein disagreed with were things like the Uncertainty Principle, the EPR paradox (If he had lived to see it),
You're telling me Einstein did not live to see the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox? The original paper was published in 1935 and a quick google tells me Einstein died in 1955...
What I mean is, I don't think an intelligent being would be capable of creating something that is more intelligent than himself.
My dad was:).
That doesn't prove anything. Your mum did very nearly everything.:-)
DragonSister
In Australia, this is about to be different.
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Yes, credit card companies have policies whereby they'll stop doing business with a merchant if the merchant passes on the cost of processing a credit card transaction.
The Australian financial watch dog (I think the Reserve Bank, but I'm not sure) has decided that this is unreasonable, and the credit card companies should no longer be permitted to enforce this 'equal prices' situation. I'm not sure when it kicks in - maybe at the beginning of the new year - but I'm really looking forward to seeing it, despite being in the group of people that benefits most from the status quo.
We have a credit card of the 'interest free for up to 55 days' sort. We have a mortgage. We spend off the credit card where practical and pay the balance each month, meaning we can keep more money on the mortgage. When differential pricing comes in, we'll stop doing this and keep the credit card for emergencies only...
And I hope that many other australians, faced with the credit-card surcharge, will make an effort to pay off their credit cards, and therefore get ahead of the debt-interest-fee curve. I know too many people who live with their credit cards near the limit, and if they *can't* break free of that they'll fall even further behind. So long as it's reasonably 'in your face' that you're paying extra for the priviledge of paying by credit card, people should make the change.
Heh. People can do some very silly things sometimes though. Credit card loyalty schemes tend to amount to giving you back 1% of what you spend (of course, they're charging the merchant 3%). So hands up everyone who would spend the extra 3% to get the points, not having realised that the points are worth 1%? Hands up who's spent more than they should, to get a 'freebie' that is worth less than the extra paid?
The majority of the world's opals are mined in Australia... and for the two months salary people keep mentioning for the diamond ring, you could fly out here, have a beaut holiday, and go home with a half-centimetre piece of eyecatchingly beautiful opal in a setting of your choice.
Most clear stones, to my mind, can be nicely mimicked with some paste. Lots of stuff glitters and shines. Opals, now - they have colour and depth, considerable variation in clarity, colour strength, etc etc; I told my beloved that if he really wanted to get me a stone, it should be a crystal opal with good colour and variation. (That's the sort of opal that can go into hot soapy water without damage. Doublet or Triplet opal, by contrast, has one (or two) layer of clear material glued to a layer of opal, and if you mistreat it the glue will fog up so that you can't see the opal.)
(I also told my beloved that since I so rarely wear any jewellery, and am a very practical creature, a plain gold band was likely to be best. And he told me we'd go buy a ring together after I submitted my PhD... now that's encouragement! )
What little jewellery I do have is dominated by opals. From AUS$10 rings (and you can get stuff with opal chips for AUS$5 or less; little opal goes to waste!) to an AUS$200 pendant of doublet opal, half-centimetre, good colour - well, that's what I like. Who needs diamonds?
If you know your future wife has, deep down, absorbed the diamond hype (and after 60 years it becomes culture, more than hype, for all the artificial origins), a possible compromise would be a setting involving some small diamonds and another stone. Mind you - you still have to ask where *they* came from. (And ask where the tantalum in your mobile phone comes from. And your oil. There's a nasty world out there, and the wars cluster around the resource-rich places; especially those with small valuable resources.) See what she thinks (there are, after all, other ways to surprise) - and I wish you good luck and a long, happy life together!
I've ecountered many regexpr's for email addresses, all of them work on your bog standard address, none of them work when deployed - there's always some guy with a % in their email address or some other oddity the author of the regexpr forgot or didn't know about (and lets not even think about trying to make an RFC compliant email address regexpr, it would have to handle "blarg@wibble"@slashdot.org)
Actually, my beloved did exactly that for his work. Built a fully RFC compliant regexp for finding out whether or not something was a valid email address, in Perl, by putting together bits of regexp according to the RFC. The assembled regexp (which can be displayed for debugging purposes) takes a full screen (or was it two?). I think the problem you're complaining about is that people get caught writing simple regexps for things that have potentially complex structure. Inadequate or incomplete testing or specification plagues most varieties of programming.
It must also be said that many more BMW drivers than Volvo drivers seem to have forgotten what the little orange lights are for.
I understand american cars don't have orange indicators. ('Blinkers' - the lights you use to indicate when you're going to turn or change lanes, or something like that.) Apparently car lights are restricted to white and red, and they don't see the point in changing that law...
So for any americans confused by the above, the poster is referring to the idiots who don't use indicators. I don't know how often this happens in american cities - Perth and Canberra are both sufficiently low traffic that you don't have to tell people what you're going to do next so that they make room for you to do it. In the larger cities of Sydney and Melbourne it is more likely that you'll need to rely on other drivers' cooperation.
:-/ I was wondering. It takes *me* 6-9 months to write a paper (well, I've done all of two; the first took 9 months, the second took 6) but my supervisors are markedly more efficient and I could believe that they'd get something from go to woe in one or two months... I've just never actually looked to see how fast they do it.
I guess that's rumour for you. I wonder if the comments about 'Victor being furious' applied to seeing him after he'd seen the first signs that the data might not show what it had been claimed to show.:-/
Context: I'm from the Australian National University Nuclear Physics department; and this is a topic for discussion this morning:-)
It has been suggested here that Victor Ninov is being made into a scapegoat.
Facts that you might be able to confirm or deny: The Physical Review Letter was submitted when Victor Ninov was away for a few weeks. He was furious because he didn't think the data was ready yet. (Implication from my colleague; not all the checks had been performed yet; if they had been the original announcement might never have been made. Colleague saw him at a conference not long after the paper submission.) The paper was published based on the earliest analysis of the data. (I guess you've already half-confirmed this one.)
People here have said that although it's clear some data was faked, it is *not* clear why or when. They see no motive for faking the original data, prior to the first publication. (We're talking about a field where the truth will out, sooner or later; one success should be followed within a year or two by someone else's confirmation. Even if that weren't the case, sooner or later false results get detected and replaced. It takes a lot of time, discussion, work, etc, to determine a) that something is wrong, b) which something is wrong, and c) why, but it happens. (I've recently been involved in exposing the limitations of a particular experimental method.)) It is suggested that the false data may have been inserted after the appearance of the PRL paper, when re-examination of the original data failed to return the 118 decay chains.
And if *that* is the case, then it could all be a terrible mistake. Because I *can* imagine inserting a few events into a copy of the run data, just to make sure that the data mining was working as it should. Indeed, if results were disappearing on me, I probably *would* make such a set of test data. Would I label it t for test, f for fake, a for artificial? Actually, I personally tend to long filenames, but that's because I've learned from experienced programmers and I've seen the confusion that can arise when single letter codes are used.
My point is that although one individual would know a set of data was faked, they might not realise that others in their group were doing datamining on the wrong files. Was data faked to test the analysis procedures? Or to cover someone's tails after the PRL publication came out? I'd suggest 'go over the logbooks' but combining computer analysis and handwritten logbooks requires a certain discipline that is rarely rewarded. Experiments are recorded in exhaustive detail - analysis often is recorded in patches. Why write down new filenames every half hour? And even if you think you've recorded what you've done, why, and where you plan on going next, you can find your own logbooks uninformative. So there's only a moderate chance that they'll reveal the whole story (I expect people have already reviewed them anyway.)
I don't know. Ninov might be the one copping the flak because someone didn't like him. I met him at a conference in Australia about 18 months ago. He listened to my presentation, then asked why I didn't talk about some things and tried to explain to me that there was something wrong with my research. Being a student listening to a bigwig, I tried to get what he was on about. When we started the third round of the conversational loop, I gave up. He did the same thing to my supervisors - they had to tell him "shut up and let us finish explaining" three times before he *did* listen, and then admitted they were right. Being swift to imagine flaws in data or method is a good trait in a scientist. Combining that with being slow to listen probably *would* make you enemies.
I admin a fansite for a game, and put datestamps on a lot of things. I'm australian, but half my visitors are american - and most of the rest european - the *only* way to be unambiguous is to stamp things '4 Jul 2002' or equivalent. (Well, when you write things to html pages, anyway. The Database can store things however it likes!)
As for the Metric system - for time - if anyone wants to see Decimal Time in use, there needs to be a simple way of marking decimal time as Decimal time (a D up the front, perhaps?) so that people don't get confused. Handy conversion ratios and utilities would also help. Then it can be adopted by a few groups of people, bit by bit, and spread as appropriate to its usefulness...
The normal 'second' is pretty well entrenched. Come to that, I've seen 'kiloseconds' in use in some scientific contexts.
I find it interesting that I thought the most awkward thing with establishing metric time would be finding good names for the units (especially the 'hour' equivalents, 1/10th of a day) - then I read the article, and that's a large part of what it covers:-)
So basically, I think there are some good ideas here with regard to protecting the federal government's investment in software and making sure they're not going down any paths simply because MS wants them to, but trying to wreck the monopoly just isn't in the charter of the OMB. Sorry.
Actually, I think it should be in the charter of the OMB... that is to say, either it is, or it ought to be. My father worked in the Australian Public Service, in Purchasing Policy, for several years, and he explained many times to friends and family that one of the high priorities in purchasing decisions was avoiding monopoly situations - since monopolies were very bad in the long run, in terms of both price and quality. Software supply is little different from anything else in this respect.
Even a single-player game, I don't know that there's a huge ultimate purpose. There are different styles of game. MMORPGS are related to games like Angband (Rogue, Moria) where you run around and kill monsters and level-up... I can't say that there's an awful lot of ongoing plot etc in those games either, yet I enjoyed far too many hours of Angband. Still do, occasionally, too. It sounds like that style of game isn't *your* style of game.
In some sense there's never any purpose. Turn your machine off, and all that's happened is that time has gone by.
And yet!
I play Heroes of Might and Magic (3, and preparing a website (http://heroes.mycomport.com/) for the imminent release of 4.) I make maps for Heroes of Might and Magic. My last one was a tale of a green dragon Going Gold - and I've heard back from a dozen people saying that they found it totally immersive, difficult to stop playing, highly enjoyable. (These are people who've played the game as much as I have - and grown inured to the usual gameplay.)
When you've done something that gives other people enjoyment, *then* you've made a difference that doesn't just evaporate when you turn off the computer.
Which someone else has mentioned: the 'mod' community. I'm exceedingly fond of Heroes of Might and Magic, which always ships with a map editor. I've made and released three maps for it myself, and played and reviewed a good many other amateur maps (and a good amateur map leaves the professional maps for dust!). And as a mapmaker, testing out maps, I use cheat-codes frequently. Gotta go see whether that new little corner works like it should, which means going here, doing this, and then going there. I could spend 2.5 hours playing the map to that point, or I could tap in a few cheatcodes and take a total of 8 minutes...
Of course one does full honest playtests as well. But the cheatcodes vastly accelerate much of the testing and polishing that needs to be done to produce a top-notch map.
Heroes of Might and Magic 4 is probably going to come up next March. And I'll be buying it immediately - which is a new thing for me. I wouldn't be doing it if it weren't so practical to make maps in Heroes of Might and Magic 3 - I wouldn't be playing the game any more. I'd probably only realise HOMM4 was out there about a year after it was released.
This is partly because most of the professional maps are suitable for multiplayer - and the AI is no match for a human. Nor is 'story' an important component of a multiplayer map - but it adds a lot to a singleplayer map!
The second expansion of HOMM3 brings the total of professional maps to about 87 (I think). By contrast, www.astralwizard.com has more than 400 amateur maps, of which more than 50 have been rated at 8+ - better than professional! And www.archangelcastle.com had more than 700 maps last time I looked.
And then there's the unofficial expansion 'In the Wake of Gods', which (to return to the topic of poring over numbers) was created by amateurs doing some reverse-engineering sort of stuff in their spare time. And as someone who's analysed game-play and mapmaking, I *can* tell that it's not a professional effort - but it's not *obviously* so... except, of course, in that you download it from a website (http://celestialheavens.com/WoG/) rather than buying it from a store.
Ouch. I read this and I wince. The story is very familiar... though it hasn't finished playing out here yet.
I'm in Canberra, Australia. There's a company called TransACT working on rolling out optical fibre and connecting houses in the city for much this sort of scheme... the particulars are different, but the extensive use of bleeding edge technology is very similar. My partner and I moved into one of the suburbs slated to be first in their roll-out process. When I first saw a roll-out schedule, the suburb was up for connection in January. We moved in in January. It's now October, and the optical fibre has been in place for months - but they haven't connected us yet, despite us applying in february.
They've stopped laying fibre trunk lines while they try and get a customer base going in the suburbs already equipped with fibre. They knocked on our door to sell us the service two weeks ago. "We've applied," we said. "How soon can you send us a technician?" The modem still occupies our phone line 24/7. (My partner works from home. We rely on mobile phones.) They have advertisements on city-wide radio - "TransACT is rolling out in your area now!"
*Someone* is screwing up. I don't know what is so difficult - possibly that bleeding edge technology - but they're going to have a hard time surviving if they can't even connect the first 2000 eager customers!
I really hope they survive... there's only been one vicious rumour so far. They do have a different business model to most american broadband providers. I want the service. Whatever their business model, though, I can't imagine the service surviving if they take so darn long to provide it to the people keen to buy it!
Slashdot Mirror
I'm getting two fairly strong messages here. Firstly, there is a need for a useful search mechanism for retrieving the gold from the mess of Blog information. (And other forum-based or otherwise ephemeral content.)
The second message is that these ephemeral sources do not follow the same rules as other sites. My (normal, non-blog) website contains strategy articles and so-on for a computer game (Heroes of Might and Magic); that material is neither going to change nor to move, and I link to places that I do not expect to change or move, and to the best places I know of, rather than wherever I encountered things; and MapHaven is not part of an incestuous web of linking. Whereas with blogs, their links are distributed rather more freely; and the often deleterious effect on Google searches has been noted. And people here are also complaining of archived forum posts or web-message-boards polluting Google results with opinions rather than results.
I think it is only sensible that Google, in its quest to provide the most useful links for its users' searches, handle the different kinds of sources differently. Frankly, I'd be surprised and disappointed if they didn't improve their methods in this sort of way sooner or later. (Sooner or later someone else would - and Google would probably fall from its pinnacle as the most used search engine.)
Rachel
There are several stable lead isotopes, so I'm sure someone can come up with a pair of reactions that turn one of those isotopes into 197Au, although getting rid of three protons is decidedly inconvenient - far harder than getting rid of two or four. But you'd probably lose most of the lead to other reactions, and it would indeed be a ridiculous waste of money. Gold is cheap.
Yes, I mean that. It's all relative, of course. That gold is expensive is 'common knowledge'. Still, many people realise that platinum and iridium are more expensive. Some fraction of them realise the value of other rare, useful elements - such as tantalum.
What's really expensive is isotopically enriched or pure material. (Weapons-grade uranium is a (cheap) example of an enriched material.) Such as the 196Hg that the previous poster mentioned. My PhD work required 176Lu, which we purchased 4 milligrams of stuff enriched to 50%, at about US$1600 per milligram (From memory of four years ago.) It's not the most expensive out there, either ... What price does Gold fetch per ounce (30 grams?) There is only one isotope of gold, and it's relatively easy to chemically purify, and relatively common on the earth's crust. We make targets of it all the time - it's great for calibrations - the lab occasionally sends visitors home with a few cents worth of gold foil on their thumbnails.
Possibly the most valuable batch of nuclei in the world is a target made of the 16+ isomeric form of 178Hf - a truly microscopic quantity of material made by herculean effort at a big laboratory. The enrichment is something tiny like 3%.
Other materials that make gold look cheap are things like carbon nanotubes. Bucky-balls extended into pipes. There have been massive improvements in manufacturing processes - I think the cost of bucky-tubes is now comparable with that 176Lutetium I was talking about. As for the programmable materials the article refers to - they're going to start out vastly more expensive still, and it'll take a long time before the cost drops to near modern silicon technology - and you don't build your walls from RAM, do you? Don't expect to replace bricks with programmable materials, at least in your lifetime. Be impressed if artificial-atom materials get cheap enough to be used in common consumer goods.
Rachel
To show that neutrinos have mass, it suffices to observe solar neutrinos and look for changes in neutrino flavour. Last I heard, although large regions in which the neutrino masses could have lain had been ruled out, the evidence was mounting in favour of flavour changes and neutrinos having mass.
However, with all I've heard about neutrino studies over the last few years in a Nuclear Physics department, this article doesn't give enough information to let me work out if I already know of the experiment or not (though I probably have attended seminars by associated researchers; these projects are not exactly three-person exercises capable of being missed!) They don't even give the experiment's *name* - NOMAD, CHORUS, SNO, etc (many listed on this page)
The article *might* be referring to the UK Dark Matter Collaboration who apparently look for neutralinos instead (neutralinos appear to crop up deep inside what we Nuclear Physicists call 'Particle Physics', which is full of leptons and mesons and other fun particles, fine, and some of the most brain-bending mathematics it has been my priviledge to not understand.)
Rachel
Wikiman! The strengths and breadths of the Wikipedia approach, where people can add or edit essentially at will! I love the idea!
Wikipedia is an excellent project - I plan on rewriting and submitting a few chunks of my PhD thesis to improve the nuclear physics coverage. Wikipedia for linux documentation strikes me as being an excellent idea, allowing clueful users to boost documentation quality and cross-referencing. I'd contribute to that too :-) (And more readily than I would to source code; I'm better at documentation.)
There might need to be safeguards against script kiddies and vandals (a few bad apples ...) - and, to limit or handle possible over-documentation, perhaps most contributions should be 'more detail' or 'case study' sort of things - so that the user finds the basic outlines first, then follows links to get more information as desired. (So perhaps package maintainers or approved delegates would approve changes to the basic info, and 'more info' stuff would be post-moderated. If 'more info' submissions were numerous, a rating system would be useful.)
Ah, what a lovely thought. Please mention the idea in more places, so that it has a chance of being taken up.
Rachel
I can see there's a sore point there ... though I'm not sure how I triggered it. My comment was not intended to be a rant (see the smileyfaces) and I was only taking a teasing poke at the slashdot stereotype of a computer-addict! :-)
I'm Australian and I haven't seen the kind of problems you describe. I suspect there's a big difference in our schoolyard culture. Anyway, I've mainly seen friends in long relationships with 'nice' partners.
Rachel
Because, God knows, women can be counted on for preferring a practical gift over a romantic one.
Which way are you joking? :-) This is why DeBeers had to spend so much money on their advertising campaign in the 1920s; why they had to make a movie thing of surprising the prospective bride with a ring; because, given the choice of him spending two months salary on a ring or on the downpayment on a house, her decision would almost invariably be for the house ... an opinion that she doesn't get a chance to offer if the ring is a surprise.
Certainly in my circle of friends, the average cost of engagement rings is around one week's salary, not two months (by an odd coincidence most of the rings are sapphires of one form or another!); and most of the couples have mortgages (we live in a city where houses are affordable!)
Women do like romance, but it doesn't have to be expensive. The occasional surprise of one kind or another does go down well, but making special time together is far more important! Yes, this means leaving the computer! :-) Even (gasp, choke!) at times that might be inconvenient to you! (Quietly putting up with a bit of inconvenience, making her your priority, does a lot to make your lady feel loved.)
I concur with the other comments about Moore's law and the inappropriateness of an engagement CPU. Buy her the CPU later, when her computer needs upgrading. If the physics is substantiated and the massive climb from possibility to economic production completed, you probably won't be able to see or touch the diamonds inside the chip anyway.
Rachel
Wow. You come from a place full of TLAs, don't you? (Three Letter Acronyms.)
... when the newest Alpha in the department takes four days to crunch a single data point, believe me you devote a little time to optimizations and evaluating approximations!
... Argh; it gets the job done, and I understand many of its important features are not available in other programs, but it would really benefit from a total rewrite from a highly trained, intelligent, and approachable programmer like my partner. (The author of DCP is a prickly old fellow with lots of experience and (to the best of my knowledge) no theory to speak of. DCP reflects its author.)
I handed in my PhD thesis in nuclear physics earlier this month ("The effect of ground-state spin on fission and quasi-fission anisotropies" - I'm in fusion-fission research.) I used basically nothing but FORTRAN all the way through. One of the reasons this was practical was that my work involved only a few new equations - not all that much symbolic manipulation to be done. Further, it was reasonable to tweak and optimize the FORTRAN to get faster calculation times
For relatively pure and simple number-crunching like I was doing, FORTRAN is pretty well suited to the task. However, that isn't the real reason I used it. I used FORTRAN because everyone else in the department (and in most of the rest of the discipline, world wide) used FORTRAN - when I start my new job in may, the rest of my research group can look at my documentation and source code, and tweak and change it as required. And send it to other researchers who can do likewise. (A common type of change is to track and output a variable not previously considered important. This may be hard to introduce into Math-something calculations.)
(I write Perl for a website at home. Oh, the contrast!)
I've met Radware, but did most of my Nuclear Spectroscopy (during my honours year) using a solution peculiar to the ANU nuclear physics department; DCP. This in-house program slices, dices, drops the knife and needs to be poked or re-started occasionally
What is the best tool for the job? Depends on the job, and the skills of you and the people around you.
Rachel
Setting up an interferometer to detect variations in the height of the surface at the sub-wavelength level;
Someone wearing silk gloves brushing lightly over the raised places on the mirror;
Coming back several hours later when the thermal effects have settled down, to repeat the process.
The mirror takes about a year to make. Most telescopes are three years from money to installation. My friend's company may get a telescope back on Stromlo as early as July, simply and solely because it was already coming, and the mirror is already made.
Anyway. The point I'm looking to make here is - it doesn't take much to ruin a telescope's mirror.
Photographs of the damage to the landscape, the buildings, and the telescopes were made available today, at http://www.mso.anu.edu.au/colless/StromloFire/. I find it interesting that the trees are all still standing - less only their leaves!
DragonSister
Depending how much someone is out to get you.
There was a quote somewhere saying that a heap of data could be recovered from even a square millimetre of hard disk platter.
So let's have a think about the maths. I don't know what the physical interior of a hard disk is like, but the exterior is in the vicinity of 10cm (4in) across. If the platter were square, that'd be 100*100 square millimetres. (It'd be round, so the actual number would be about 25% smaller.) Suppose we were talking about a 40gig disk. That's 4 meg per square millimeter.
Now if hard disks were made up of lots of layers, say 1000 of them, that's still 4K per square millimeter per layer, and you've got one hell of a pulverising job ahead of you!
There's good reason why high-security areas go through their elaborate sequences of electronic shredding (multiple data overwrites), physical shredding (makes the hammer look weak) and thermodynamic shredding (I daresay *someone* can get data off a hard-disk after you've treated it with thermite!)
Rachel
I'm another like you, mrsmalkav; going through a trifle young, realising only afterwards that I was the only girl in many of my classes, because I never found it an issue. I think some of it is being thick skinned, and frankly not very observant; there might have been issues but they would have to be really blatant for me to notice, and under such circumstances (which only cropped up on a very few occasions) they were so obviously over the line that I had only to point it out.
:-) It is, therefore, time I stopped posting to slashdot and started the current round of thesis editing.
Another part of it is parental support. I definitely had it. My parents would have encouraged me in anything I took an interest in; from repairing cars to embroidery. They *never* suggested there was anything I couldn't or shouldn't try to do, so there wasn't much chance of me taking notice of anyone else making that kind of suggestion.
And it helps to be brilliant, so that your ability can never be called into question. I wonder, just now, if that wasn't the most major contributor to my comfort in my chosen discipline; because no-one *ever* suggested I wasn't entirely capable of the work I was doing. There was altogether too much evidence showing I *was* capable. My university departments were happy to put me on an accelerated program, and find me projects and one-off courses.
Why isn't there a 50/50 gender balance? There *are* differences between the average strengths of men and women; but to me that only says that the numbers should be 40/60 or something like that. I do think social pressures significantly exaggerate the differences. These are probably exaggerated further in the case of IT - not only is the programmer or sysadmin stereotypically male, the stereotype covers youth, ego, lack of concern for appearance, and occasionally lack of hygiene. Girls at 16 are significantly more mature, and cultural pressures make them more aware of appearance; if there had been equal numbers of boys and girls at 13, playing in the computer labs at lunchtime, by 16 or 18 chances are that the small fraction of distinctly unpleasant males would have discouraged first a few and then just about all the females. It would eventually have worked even on me.
My discipline isn't computer science, but physics; which has similar problems to a slightly different extent. I went into physics because of an active interest in this field. I'm in the final month of a nuclear physics PhD.
Rachel
I think the phrase 'who think they've rewritten the laws of physics' captures the problem nicely. I'm currently writing up my PhD in Nuclear Physics, and I've been on the receiving end of two or three submissions from 'wilders'. There are a number of issues that all of these submissions had - and all the issues have to be addressed before a 'revolutionary' new idea gets accepted.
The simplest of these is communication. The 'wilder' must be able to communicate their idea to an expert in the field. Me, being a relative novice to the idea of getting mail from strangers about physical ideas, I read through the papers I got carefully, respectfully, with several different mathematical 'languages' to draw on and capacity to recognise all the other forms in which physical ideas can be clearly expressed. Classical equations. Lagrangians. Operators. Tensors.
No maths in the submissions. (Well, one had some. Strictly numerical, though; no variable names or symbols, just things like 1.666667 + 2.065.) Well, that'd be Ok if the text conveyed something. It didn't. It didn't have imposed structure (introduction, discussion, conclusion); it didn't 'tell a story', it didn't convey anything. I was left with this jumble of half-formed thoughts in no apparent order. When you are trying to share scientific ideas, you have to be able to communicate. Is that so hard to understand? Anyway, if an expert cannot understand the idea, they cannot distinguish a truly wonderful idea from a nutter's mis-formed thoughts ... and guess which is by far more common?
The next issue is respect for existing theories. Many very clever people worked very hard and very long on those theories. If you're going to displace an existing theory, you have to (a) show how your theory agrees with existing theory, where existing theory agrees with experiment, and (b) show how your theory adds something new - either by disagreeing with existing theory in an experimentally accessible circumstance, or by making certain calculations vastly easier, or something like that. Both Quantum Mechanics and Relativity reduce to Newtonian Physics in the regime of macroscopic, slow-moving entities; except for a few odd effects that were puzzles before the new theories were advanced. If you're not prepared even to learn existing theories, which was the case in everything I received, then (1) chances are that neither (A) nor (B) above is fulfilled, and (2) my goodness you're being arrogant asking me to learn your theory!
Guess what? The agreement with existing theory, and advancement over existing theory, also has to be communicated. You can't just say 'this theory is wrong' - even if you have genuinely found a self-contradiction in a theory; you have to show how it is wrong, why, under what circumstances the problem arises ... and even then there may be a way around it. Quantum Chromodynamics involves renormalisations to get rid of infinities. It's still the theory for the area.
Rest assured that where rival theories are proposed, the debate over which is better goes on for years. There's one theory I'm interested in; it's fifteen years since it was first published (compared to about twentyfive years for the rival theory). It has one very major flaw, in the applicability of a crucial assumption. However, that particular assumption is applicable under certain circumstances, and I may spend some months writing a paper about a theory combining the best of both approaches. If I'm actually right, in about fifteen years no-one will use anything else ... but (a) that's a reasonably big if, and (b) that's a long time. Anyway, this leads to the last of my points about 'wilder' theories and why they rarely get taken seriously ...
Effort. And credit.
One of the submissions I looked at was an inspiration that had apparently come to the author on January 14th, 1997. He'd been mailing off his papers ever since. Let me try an analogy:
Scientific writing is a bit like that. It takes a lot of effort; I put nine months into my first publication (eight pages long.) It has to be rigorous. Thoroughly checked; exhaustively examined; every detail justified either by reference or by explanation. It has to genuinely say something new. And if your few hours of work goes to waste because I won't put several months of mine into itRachel
Disclaimers:
(1) 'Wilders' is entirely my own term, borrowed for the purposes of this post. These ideas are my own, and may not be shared by my supervisors or other members of my department.
(2) From the sounds of it the website occasioning this slashdot story is vastly better expressed and had vastly more effort sunk into it than the submissions that got my goat. Congratulations; you have now submitted your manuscript to the publisher; about 1 or 2 percent make it to bookstore shelves.
Well, I certainly can't argue with your experiences. And googling for my significant other turns up quite a few different people. Often it's fairly obvious when that happens; the places and the roles vary widely.
...
I don't seem to share my google footprint with any other *people* - I just have an unfortunate name to start with. Well, it's not normally an issue, except around very juvenile individuals. And around Google. A (hypothetical; I haven't tried this example) Google for "John Hand" will return you references to "John's hand". My last name is 'Butt'. I get what looks like porn, but may just be something from a TV soap episode. My father shares his first name with at least one US president and some film stars; his google footprint is *far* more polluted.
I look forward to marrying; for many reasons, of course, but adopting my beloved's common and innocuous name is one of the minor benefits.
Incidentally, googling for screen names is often little or no better. I was surprised to find I share my screen name with an odd little organisation that appears to be chinese. And then there are all the screen names taken from books and games and so on
Rachel
You're telling me Einstein did not live to see the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox? The original paper was published in 1935 and a quick google tells me Einstein died in 1955 ...
Rachel
Nuclear Physics PhD student
My dad was :).
That doesn't prove anything. Your mum did very nearly everything. :-)
DragonSister
Yes, credit card companies have policies whereby they'll stop doing business with a merchant if the merchant passes on the cost of processing a credit card transaction.
...
The Australian financial watch dog (I think the Reserve Bank, but I'm not sure) has decided that this is unreasonable, and the credit card companies should no longer be permitted to enforce this 'equal prices' situation. I'm not sure when it kicks in - maybe at the beginning of the new year - but I'm really looking forward to seeing it, despite being in the group of people that benefits most from the status quo.
We have a credit card of the 'interest free for up to 55 days' sort. We have a mortgage. We spend off the credit card where practical and pay the balance each month, meaning we can keep more money on the mortgage. When differential pricing comes in, we'll stop doing this and keep the credit card for emergencies only
And I hope that many other australians, faced with the credit-card surcharge, will make an effort to pay off their credit cards, and therefore get ahead of the debt-interest-fee curve. I know too many people who live with their credit cards near the limit, and if they *can't* break free of that they'll fall even further behind. So long as it's reasonably 'in your face' that you're paying extra for the priviledge of paying by credit card, people should make the change.
Heh. People can do some very silly things sometimes though. Credit card loyalty schemes tend to amount to giving you back 1% of what you spend (of course, they're charging the merchant 3%). So hands up everyone who would spend the extra 3% to get the points, not having realised that the points are worth 1%? Hands up who's spent more than they should, to get a 'freebie' that is worth less than the extra paid?
Rachel
The majority of the world's opals are mined in Australia ... and for the two months salary people keep mentioning for the diamond ring, you could fly out here, have a beaut holiday, and go home with a half-centimetre piece of eyecatchingly beautiful opal in a setting of your choice.
... now that's encouragement! )
Most clear stones, to my mind, can be nicely mimicked with some paste. Lots of stuff glitters and shines. Opals, now - they have colour and depth, considerable variation in clarity, colour strength, etc etc; I told my beloved that if he really wanted to get me a stone, it should be a crystal opal with good colour and variation. (That's the sort of opal that can go into hot soapy water without damage. Doublet or Triplet opal, by contrast, has one (or two) layer of clear material glued to a layer of opal, and if you mistreat it the glue will fog up so that you can't see the opal.)
(I also told my beloved that since I so rarely wear any jewellery, and am a very practical creature, a plain gold band was likely to be best. And he told me we'd go buy a ring together after I submitted my PhD
What little jewellery I do have is dominated by opals. From AUS$10 rings (and you can get stuff with opal chips for AUS$5 or less; little opal goes to waste!) to an AUS$200 pendant of doublet opal, half-centimetre, good colour - well, that's what I like. Who needs diamonds?
If you know your future wife has, deep down, absorbed the diamond hype (and after 60 years it becomes culture, more than hype, for all the artificial origins), a possible compromise would be a setting involving some small diamonds and another stone. Mind you - you still have to ask where *they* came from. (And ask where the tantalum in your mobile phone comes from. And your oil. There's a nasty world out there, and the wars cluster around the resource-rich places; especially those with small valuable resources.) See what she thinks (there are, after all, other ways to surprise) - and I wish you good luck and a long, happy life together!
Rachel
Actually, my beloved did exactly that for his work. Built a fully RFC compliant regexp for finding out whether or not something was a valid email address, in Perl, by putting together bits of regexp according to the RFC. The assembled regexp (which can be displayed for debugging purposes) takes a full screen (or was it two?). I think the problem you're complaining about is that people get caught writing simple regexps for things that have potentially complex structure. Inadequate or incomplete testing or specification plagues most varieties of programming.
Rachel
I understand american cars don't have orange indicators. ('Blinkers' - the lights you use to indicate when you're going to turn or change lanes, or something like that.) Apparently car lights are restricted to white and red, and they don't see the point in changing that law ...
So for any americans confused by the above, the poster is referring to the idiots who don't use indicators. I don't know how often this happens in american cities - Perth and Canberra are both sufficiently low traffic that you don't have to tell people what you're going to do next so that they make room for you to do it. In the larger cities of Sydney and Melbourne it is more likely that you'll need to rely on other drivers' cooperation.
Rachel
:-/ I was wondering. It takes *me* 6-9 months to write a paper (well, I've done all of two; the first took 9 months, the second took 6) but my supervisors are markedly more efficient and I could believe that they'd get something from go to woe in one or two months ... I've just never actually looked to see how fast they do it.
:-/
I guess that's rumour for you. I wonder if the comments about 'Victor being furious' applied to seeing him after he'd seen the first signs that the data might not show what it had been claimed to show.
What was he like to work with, anyway?
Rachel
Context: I'm from the Australian National University Nuclear Physics department; and this is a topic for discussion this morning :-)
It has been suggested here that Victor Ninov is being made into a scapegoat.
Facts that you might be able to confirm or deny:
The Physical Review Letter was submitted when Victor Ninov was away for a few weeks.
He was furious because he didn't think the data was ready yet. (Implication from my colleague; not all the checks had been performed yet; if they had been the original announcement might never have been made. Colleague saw him at a conference not long after the paper submission.)
The paper was published based on the earliest analysis of the data. (I guess you've already half-confirmed this one.)
People here have said that although it's clear some data was faked, it is *not* clear why or when. They see no motive for faking the original data, prior to the first publication. (We're talking about a field where the truth will out, sooner or later; one success should be followed within a year or two by someone else's confirmation. Even if that weren't the case, sooner or later false results get detected and replaced. It takes a lot of time, discussion, work, etc, to determine a) that something is wrong, b) which something is wrong, and c) why, but it happens. (I've recently been involved in exposing the limitations of a particular experimental method.)) It is suggested that the false data may have been inserted after the appearance of the PRL paper, when re-examination of the original data failed to return the 118 decay chains.
And if *that* is the case, then it could all be a terrible mistake. Because I *can* imagine inserting a few events into a copy of the run data, just to make sure that the data mining was working as it should. Indeed, if results were disappearing on me, I probably *would* make such a set of test data. Would I label it t for test, f for fake, a for artificial? Actually, I personally tend to long filenames, but that's because I've learned from experienced programmers and I've seen the confusion that can arise when single letter codes are used.
My point is that although one individual would know a set of data was faked, they might not realise that others in their group were doing datamining on the wrong files. Was data faked to test the analysis procedures? Or to cover someone's tails after the PRL publication came out? I'd suggest 'go over the logbooks' but combining computer analysis and handwritten logbooks requires a certain discipline that is rarely rewarded. Experiments are recorded in exhaustive detail - analysis often is recorded in patches. Why write down new filenames every half hour? And even if you think you've recorded what you've done, why, and where you plan on going next, you can find your own logbooks uninformative. So there's only a moderate chance that they'll reveal the whole story (I expect people have already reviewed them anyway.)
I don't know. Ninov might be the one copping the flak because someone didn't like him. I met him at a conference in Australia about 18 months ago. He listened to my presentation, then asked why I didn't talk about some things and tried to explain to me that there was something wrong with my research. Being a student listening to a bigwig, I tried to get what he was on about. When we started the third round of the conversational loop, I gave up. He did the same thing to my supervisors - they had to tell him "shut up and let us finish explaining" three times before he *did* listen, and then admitted they were right. Being swift to imagine flaws in data or method is a good trait in a scientist. Combining that with being slow to listen probably *would* make you enemies.
Rachel
I admin a fansite for a game, and put datestamps on a lot of things. I'm australian, but half my visitors are american - and most of the rest european - the *only* way to be unambiguous is to stamp things '4 Jul 2002' or equivalent. (Well, when you write things to html pages, anyway. The Database can store things however it likes!)
...
:-)
As for the Metric system - for time - if anyone wants to see Decimal Time in use, there needs to be a simple way of marking decimal time as Decimal time (a D up the front, perhaps?) so that people don't get confused. Handy conversion ratios and utilities would also help. Then it can be adopted by a few groups of people, bit by bit, and spread as appropriate to its usefulness
The normal 'second' is pretty well entrenched. Come to that, I've seen 'kiloseconds' in use in some scientific contexts.
I find it interesting that I thought the most awkward thing with establishing metric time would be finding good names for the units (especially the 'hour' equivalents, 1/10th of a day) - then I read the article, and that's a large part of what it covers
Rachel
Actually, I think it should be in the charter of the OMB ... that is to say, either it is, or it ought to be. My father worked in the Australian Public Service, in Purchasing Policy, for several years, and he explained many times to friends and family that one of the high priorities in purchasing decisions was avoiding monopoly situations - since monopolies were very bad in the long run, in terms of both price and quality. Software supply is little different from anything else in this respect.
Rachel
Well, erm ...
... I can't say that there's an awful lot of ongoing plot etc in those games either, yet I enjoyed far too many hours of Angband. Still do, occasionally, too. It sounds like that style of game isn't *your* style of game.
It's a game, isn't it?
Even a single-player game, I don't know that there's a huge ultimate purpose. There are different styles of game. MMORPGS are related to games like Angband (Rogue, Moria) where you run around and kill monsters and level-up
In some sense there's never any purpose. Turn your machine off, and all that's happened is that time has gone by.
And yet!
I play Heroes of Might and Magic (3, and preparing a website (http://heroes.mycomport.com/) for the imminent release of 4.) I make maps for Heroes of Might and Magic. My last one was a tale of a green dragon Going Gold - and I've heard back from a dozen people saying that they found it totally immersive, difficult to stop playing, highly enjoyable. (These are people who've played the game as much as I have - and grown inured to the usual gameplay.)
When you've done something that gives other people enjoyment, *then* you've made a difference that doesn't just evaporate when you turn off the computer.
DragonSister
Which someone else has mentioned: the 'mod' community. I'm exceedingly fond of Heroes of Might and Magic, which always ships with a map editor. I've made and released three maps for it myself, and played and reviewed a good many other amateur maps (and a good amateur map leaves the professional maps for dust!). And as a mapmaker, testing out maps, I use cheat-codes frequently. Gotta go see whether that new little corner works like it should, which means going here, doing this, and then going there. I could spend 2.5 hours playing the map to that point, or I could tap in a few cheatcodes and take a total of 8 minutes ...
... except, of course, in that you download it from a website (http://celestialheavens.com/WoG/) rather than buying it from a store.
Of course one does full honest playtests as well. But the cheatcodes vastly accelerate much of the testing and polishing that needs to be done to produce a top-notch map.
Heroes of Might and Magic 4 is probably going to come up next March. And I'll be buying it immediately - which is a new thing for me. I wouldn't be doing it if it weren't so practical to make maps in Heroes of Might and Magic 3 - I wouldn't be playing the game any more. I'd probably only realise HOMM4 was out there about a year after it was released.
This is partly because most of the professional maps are suitable for multiplayer - and the AI is no match for a human. Nor is 'story' an important component of a multiplayer map - but it adds a lot to a singleplayer map!
The second expansion of HOMM3 brings the total of professional maps to about 87 (I think). By contrast, www.astralwizard.com has more than 400 amateur maps, of which more than 50 have been rated at 8+ - better than professional! And www.archangelcastle.com had more than 700 maps last time I looked.
And then there's the unofficial expansion 'In the Wake of Gods', which (to return to the topic of poring over numbers) was created by amateurs doing some reverse-engineering sort of stuff in their spare time. And as someone who's analysed game-play and mapmaking, I *can* tell that it's not a professional effort - but it's not *obviously* so
Rachel
Ouch. I read this and I wince. The story is very familiar ... though it hasn't finished playing out here yet.
... the particulars are different, but the extensive use of bleeding edge technology is very similar. My partner and I moved into one of the suburbs slated to be first in their roll-out process. When I first saw a roll-out schedule, the suburb was up for connection in January. We moved in in January. It's now October, and the optical fibre has been in place for months - but they haven't connected us yet, despite us applying in february.
... there's only been one vicious rumour so far. They do have a different business model to most american broadband providers. I want the service. Whatever their business model, though, I can't imagine the service surviving if they take so darn long to provide it to the people keen to buy it!
I'm in Canberra, Australia. There's a company called TransACT working on rolling out optical fibre and connecting houses in the city for much this sort of scheme
They've stopped laying fibre trunk lines while they try and get a customer base going in the suburbs already equipped with fibre. They knocked on our door to sell us the service two weeks ago. "We've applied," we said. "How soon can you send us a technician?" The modem still occupies our phone line 24/7. (My partner works from home. We rely on mobile phones.) They have advertisements on city-wide radio - "TransACT is rolling out in your area now!"
*Someone* is screwing up. I don't know what is so difficult - possibly that bleeding edge technology - but they're going to have a hard time surviving if they can't even connect the first 2000 eager customers!
I really hope they survive
Rachel Butt