Where's the beef? The facts: A pair of researchers have managed to adapt HIV to a virus which fights HIV. It's not their idea (as far as I can see), and so far they've only tested it in computer simulations (which are basically not to be trusted as a good model of the human immune system, trust me, I do computational biochem), also they've killed HIV in a petri dish.
Killing HIV in a petri dish is not new, there's quite a few things that do that.
I'm not dismissing the idea, but y'all better keep those champange bottles on ice for a few years until the in vivo studies have been conducted.
does Canada value freedom and speech in all the same ways as the USA does?
I really feel I need to adress this misconception. I was raised in the US, and moved to Europe in my teens. Before that, I pretty much had the same question.
What I soon learned: In the USA, these concepts are extremely hyped. Not that they're not important, but americans tend to think that these concepts somehow are unique to the USA, or unique in importance to Americans.
It's just not true. The whole western world has pretty much the same attitude on these issues.
(And this is one of the reasons of US-EU friction:Europeans, not hyping this stuff so much, are more aware that the difference is relatively small, I feel. So when Americans say stuff like this, they percieve it as an american "We're the only ones who truly understand freedom" attitude.)
The question is how you define 'freedom'? The right to bear arms? Some think this is an important freedom. Most people in the western world, do not. On the other hand, the USA has less freedoms in other ways. Scandinavians are proud that they have the freedom to enter the property of others. (not squatting in someone's front yard, of course, but say, taking a stroll in someone's forest)
You can't burn the flag in Italy. But some Americans want that too.
The political difference on the issue of fundamental freedoms varies no more between the US and other western democracies than it does within the US.
There is a major difference is that the USA has the approach of not changing laws, especially not the consititution, to ban things. Instead, things get handled through lawsuits. So in the USA, you may often have the 'freedom' to do something in the sense that it's not prohibited by law, but on the other hand, you'll get sued into oblivion.
So what? That's an argument of taste, not a technical one.
Animated gifs are supported by every browser, and by just about all presentation software. (OOo, Powerpoint, Kpresenter, etc)
Animated GIFs have far more uses than silly webpage graphics. It's just about the only way to go if you want a simple, lossless compression, don't need truecolor, but need to 'just work' on just about any machine you throw it at.
This is an issue for me, because I use both Windows and Linux and the Mac, and often give presentations with animations in them. I have yet to find any other format which works on so many platforms. You don't want to find out that the lecture hall machine doesn't have the codec you need on it 15 minutes before a big presentation.
Listen, opinion polls in Spain (and all of europe, with the exception of the UK) showed overwhelming resistance against the war. About 70% in Spain, I believe, and that was before the bombings.
This "Oh, they're all corrupt friends of Saddam" stuff is just pure propaganda the US administration put out there to discredit the opposition and draw attention away the fact that a vast majority of Europeans (in poll after poll) were against the war.
What I find most frightening is that this tactic works: The current administration and supporters thereof appear to be prepared to believe anything which supports their views, even when it flies in the face of easily made observations of reality.
Yes, with respect to the filesystem, wine is probably faster. But for games, this is not the most significant thing.
Most windows games use DirectX for graphics. DirectX is an API, i.e. a set of standard commands programs use. Most graphics cards provide a DirectX driver, so DirectX calls usually exploit the capabilities graphics card as much as possible.
Wine emulates DirectX through OpenGL, which is a different API. This makes for bottlenecks in several ways: Firstly, the DirectX calls have to be 'translated' into OpenGL ones. That takes some time. Secondly, there is the OpenGL driver. OpenGL is unfortunately not as well supported as DirectX by card makers. This means that the capabilities of the card may not be as well exploited, and that some things that could've been done in hardware are performed more slowly in software.
The second bottleneck is the bigger of the two, and there isn't much the Wine team can do about it, except hope that the card makers get better at supporting OpenGL. Nvidia is known for some pretty good work.
The first bottleneck is more directly related to Wine, but that overhead is the smaller of the two.
I'm not certain if you should expect Wine to ever run at the speed of windows, even if it is not impossible. But after all, you are adding another layer between your program and the OS.
But as processors get faster, and games continue to utilize as much of it as possible, you could expect this second bottleneck to get less and less significant, since its size is relatively constant. (The amount of computation increases faster than the number of system calls)
My personal favorite: Most people have seen this image at one time or another; Soviet troops raise the hammer-and-sicle over the remains of the Reichstag, 1945.
What most people do not know, is that this image has been retouched.
Look at the soldier holding the legs of the guy with the flag. He has a watch on his left arm. He used to have one on his right arm too.
Two watches? Looting. Officially, of course, the great Red Army never would behave in that way. So the watch came off. And this is the image the world knows.
Because I'm studying in Sweden, where you are not required to get an undergraduate degree before going on to a masters' (or rather, the equivalent thereof).
I did it all in one swoop, so of course, I count it all together as five years.
This is due to change though, The EU:s Bologna declaration means they're going to harmonize the standards of higher education in Europe. The current suggestion is to institute a more american-style system.
Comments noted, and I agree with everything you wrote.
But: the context here was the energy of a single gamma line-emission from a fission reaction, not the total amount of gamma-ray radiation from a nuclear blast, which is also a bit out of context, since energy production was the subject.
No I'm not kidding. I spent five years getting my masters' degree in physical chemistry. And so, I'd like to belive I know something about matter-radiation interactions, given that that's mostly what physical chemistry is about.
Heat is the term we apply to the average kinetic energy in the molecules in a given collection of matter.
Correct.
That collection might be in any phase; "heat" still applies to the kinetic energy of molecules or, in especially high-energy states, individual atoms, or even more elementary particles.
Wrong. The concept of 'heat' and temperature loses significance on level of the individual particle. As you pointed out, temperature is a statistical thing, you can't apply statistics to individual objects.
Or, in the words of my atomic physics professor: "Temperature is something which you measure with a thermometer"
However, a barrage of photons of different wavelengths can change the temperature (i.e., the total heat, expressed in relative terms) of a given collection of matter.
Yes. That's called absorption. Photons get absorbed. They don't continue to exist after that. Unless of course they're re-emitted. All matter is continuously emitting and absorbing heat radiation. (Hi, my name is Max Planck)
It get's worse than that, though: Quantum electrodynamics (Hi, my name is Richard Feynman), tells us that you cannot differentiate between kinetic heat and radiative heat are different things. In the classical picture, heat is transferred in collisions, but in the QED picture, as exchanges of virtual photons.
Actually, in the fission of 235U, about 83% of the energy appears as the kinetic energy of the fragments, about 2.5% as kinetic energy of the neutrons and
about 3.5% in the form of instantly emitted gamma rays. 11% is given off in the subsequent decays of the daughter nuclei.
If you knew what you were writing about you'd know that I'm not wrong.
Yes of course the energy is released as photons, and as kinetic energy. You can't really differentiate between the, anyway because heat radiation and kinetic motion rapidly form an equillibrium in solid matter.
Gamma photons are not heat. The heat radiation is in the infrared. VERY different part of the spectrum there. (X-ray patients don't warm up when they're being examined. They might get cancer though, through the ionization effects though.)
Why do you think nuclear reactors work through heating water instead of X-ray absorption? Hint: It's not just because it's easier.
Most of the energy is released as heat. Or 'heat photons' if you like. Lots of them. The gamma rays, by comparison, have much higher energy per photon, but they do NOT carry away most of the reaction energy.
I think you may have confused the concept of basing something on a few postulates with simplification.
A theory is not necessarily simple just because it derives from a few postulates. Heck, all of math and logic does, and they can be far from simple.
Anyway, the point is that Relativity and Quantum theory both derive as a logical consequence of a number of postulates. For special relativity, the two are: 1) Laws of physics remain unchanged regardless of the frame of motion. (Or: 'Why the earth seems to be standing still' )
2) Speed of light is constant regardless of frame of motion. (Weird! Yet in accordance with 100 years of observation)
The older theories, of gravity etc, are far more ad hoc than these modern ones. Newton never explained why his law of gravity was proportional to the square of the distance. Why the square and not, say, the cube? 'Because it works', would've been his answer.
Today, the answer is: 'Because we believe this-and-this-and-this is true, and therefore this must follow'.
Well, for one: It's the only theory of gravity we've got really. If you can come up with one from as few (or fewer) postulates, which fits as well into the what we already know, and make the same predictions, I'm certain people will listen.
It's not as if everyone here has 'decided' that dark matter simply exists. There are plenty of people at work with alternative explanations.
However: If the theory is correct, and dark matter does exist, how are you supposed to find it without looking?
Actually I tried it out, found one that didn't work for me..
I wanted to convert kJ to kcal/mols (chemistry), it could handle kcal but not moles. Gives a compatibility error, which is incorrect since a mole is not a unit but a quantity, and thus it is an energy unit.
Yes.. and on that side of the board, they have IBM mainframes beating them. SUN's niche has been between these two extremes of cheap, unreliable commodity hardware, and expensive ultra-reliable mainframes.
Unfortunately, this niche is disappearing as the PC's get better and more reliable, and the mainframes have gotten cheaper and started to move into the old UNIX-server market. (Linux/390, anyone?)
Or an example of hipocracy if you're correct, becaues Paul McCartney is a HUGE rights-owner to a big number of artists. All of Buddy Holly's old hits, for instance.
Slashdot Mirror
Where's the beef?
The facts: A pair of researchers have managed to adapt HIV to a virus which fights HIV. It's not their idea (as far as I can see), and so far they've only tested it in computer simulations (which are basically not to be trusted as a good model of the human immune system, trust me, I do computational biochem), also they've killed HIV in a petri dish.
Killing HIV in a petri dish is not new, there's quite a few things that do that.
I'm not dismissing the idea, but y'all better keep those champange bottles on ice for a few years until the in vivo studies have been conducted.
This great! My research requires doing big numerical calculations.
At last, a scientific explanation for my work ethic! I'll be showing this to the boss tomorrow!
does Canada value freedom and speech in all the same ways as the USA does?
I really feel I need to adress this misconception.
I was raised in the US, and moved to Europe in my teens. Before that, I pretty much had the same question.
What I soon learned: In the USA, these concepts are extremely hyped. Not that they're not important, but americans tend to think that these concepts somehow are unique to the USA, or unique in importance to Americans.
It's just not true. The whole western world has pretty much the same attitude on these issues.
(And this is one of the reasons of US-EU friction:Europeans, not hyping this stuff so much, are more aware that the difference is relatively small, I feel. So when Americans say stuff like this, they percieve it as an american "We're the only ones who truly understand freedom" attitude.)
The question is how you define 'freedom'? The right to bear arms? Some think this is an important freedom. Most people in the western world, do not. On the other hand, the USA has less freedoms in other ways. Scandinavians are proud that they have the freedom to enter the property of others. (not squatting in someone's front yard, of course, but say, taking a stroll in someone's forest)
You can't burn the flag in Italy. But some Americans want that too.
The political difference on the issue of fundamental freedoms varies no more between the US and other western democracies than it does within the US.
There is a major difference is that the USA has the approach of not changing laws, especially not the consititution, to ban things. Instead, things get handled through lawsuits. So in the USA, you may often have the 'freedom' to do something in the sense that it's not prohibited by law, but on the other hand, you'll get sued into oblivion.
So what? That's an argument of taste, not a technical one.
Animated gifs are supported by every browser, and by just about all presentation software.
(OOo, Powerpoint, Kpresenter, etc)
Animated GIFs have far more uses than silly webpage graphics. It's just about the only way to go if you want a simple, lossless compression, don't need truecolor, but need to 'just work' on just about any machine you throw it at.
This is an issue for me, because I use both Windows and Linux and the Mac, and often give presentations with animations in them. I have yet to find any other format which works on so many platforms.
You don't want to find out that the lecture hall machine doesn't have the codec you need on it 15 minutes before a big presentation.
That hardly explains why the other companies with that name are apparently desparately saying "it's not us!!" and have filed FCC complaints, etc.
Listen, opinion polls in Spain (and all of europe, with the exception of the UK) showed overwhelming resistance against the war.
About 70% in Spain, I believe, and that was before the bombings.
This "Oh, they're all corrupt friends of Saddam" stuff is just pure propaganda the US administration put out there to discredit the opposition and draw attention away the fact that a vast majority of Europeans (in poll after poll) were against the war.
What I find most frightening is that this tactic works: The current administration and supporters thereof appear to be prepared to believe anything which supports their views, even when it flies in the face of easily made observations of reality.
Yes, with respect to the filesystem, wine is probably faster. But for games, this is not the most significant thing.
Most windows games use DirectX for graphics. DirectX is an API, i.e. a set of standard commands programs use. Most graphics cards provide a DirectX driver, so DirectX calls usually exploit the capabilities graphics card as much as possible.
Wine emulates DirectX through OpenGL, which is a different API. This makes for bottlenecks in several ways:
Firstly, the DirectX calls have to be 'translated' into OpenGL ones. That takes some time.
Secondly, there is the OpenGL driver.
OpenGL is unfortunately not as well supported as DirectX by card makers. This means that the capabilities of the card may not be as well exploited, and that some things that could've been done in hardware are performed more slowly in software.
The second bottleneck is the bigger of the two, and there isn't much the Wine team can do about it, except hope that the card makers get better at supporting OpenGL. Nvidia is known for some pretty good work.
The first bottleneck is more directly related to Wine, but that overhead is the smaller of the two.
I'm not certain if you should expect Wine to ever run at the speed of windows, even if it is not impossible. But after all, you are adding another layer between your program and the OS.
But as processors get faster, and games continue to utilize as much of it as possible, you could expect this second bottleneck to get less and less significant, since its size is relatively constant.
(The amount of computation increases faster than the number of system calls)
Sorry 'bout that. :-)
Guess I should've payed more attention to geography and less to other things when I was there.
It's the flag of Bremen, a city in north Germany.
(nice place, actually)
8 stripes,red and white, with checkers on the short end closest to the pole.
Some Lower-Saxony patriot probably stuck it on there.
My personal favorite:
Most people have seen this image at one time or another; Soviet troops raise the hammer-and-sicle over the remains of the Reichstag, 1945.
What most people do not know, is that this image has been retouched.
Look at the soldier holding the legs of the guy with the flag. He has a watch on his left arm. He used to have one on his right arm too.
Two watches? Looting. Officially, of course, the great Red Army never would behave in that way. So the watch came off. And this is the image the world knows.
Because I'm studying in Sweden, where you are not required to get an undergraduate degree before going on to a masters' (or rather, the equivalent thereof).
I did it all in one swoop, so of course, I count it all together as five years.
This is due to change though, The EU:s Bologna declaration means they're going to harmonize the standards of higher education in Europe. The current suggestion is to institute a more american-style system.
Yeah, well once you get out of junior high-school I suppose you can tell me all about how bad my understanding of physics is.
Until then, perhaps you could give me some examples, with references, on what, exactly, was wrong with the grandparent post?
Comments noted, and I agree with everything you wrote.
But: the context here was the energy of a single gamma line-emission from a fission reaction, not the total amount of gamma-ray radiation from a nuclear blast, which is also a bit out of context, since energy production was the subject.
No I'm not kidding. I spent five years getting my masters' degree in physical chemistry. And so, I'd like to belive I know something about matter-radiation interactions, given that that's mostly what physical chemistry is about.
Heat is the term we apply to the average kinetic energy in the molecules in a given collection of matter.
Correct.
That collection might be in any phase; "heat" still applies to the kinetic energy of molecules or, in especially high-energy states, individual atoms, or even more elementary particles.
Wrong. The concept of 'heat' and temperature loses significance on level of the individual particle. As you pointed out, temperature is a statistical thing, you can't apply statistics to individual objects.
Or, in the words of my atomic physics professor: "Temperature is something which you measure with a thermometer"
Heat and photons are not related.
Yes they are, this has been known for 120 years or so. Please bother to learn about some physics 101 laws like Wiens radiation law, Stefan-Boltzmanns law and the Planck radiation law before spouting off stupid things like that.
However, a barrage of photons of different wavelengths can change the temperature (i.e., the total heat, expressed in relative terms) of a given collection of matter.
Yes. That's called absorption. Photons get absorbed. They don't continue to exist after that. Unless of course they're re-emitted. All matter is continuously emitting and absorbing heat radiation. (Hi, my name is Max Planck)
It get's worse than that, though:
Quantum electrodynamics (Hi, my name is Richard Feynman), tells us that you cannot differentiate between kinetic heat and radiative heat are different things. In the classical picture, heat is transferred in collisions, but in the QED picture, as exchanges of virtual photons.
Quote, emphasis mine:
If you knew what you were writing about you'd know that I'm not wrong.
Yes of course the energy is released as photons, and as kinetic energy. You can't really differentiate between the, anyway because heat radiation and kinetic motion rapidly form an equillibrium in solid matter.
Gamma photons are not heat.
The heat radiation is in the infrared. VERY different part of the spectrum there. (X-ray patients don't warm up when they're being examined. They might get cancer though, through the ionization effects though.)
Why do you think nuclear reactors work through heating water instead of X-ray absorption?
Hint: It's not just because it's easier.
Most of the energy is released as heat. Or 'heat photons' if you like. Lots of them. The gamma rays, by comparison, have much higher energy per photon, but they do NOT carry away most of the reaction energy.
but it takes the equivalent energy of about 620,000,000,000,000 million electron volts (MeV) per second to light up a 100-watt light bulb
Firstly: Yes, but this 2.5 MeV is per ray. How many rays do you think the thing emits?
Say we have a golf ball of the stuff. A quick calculation gives you have about 4.8e20 atoms of hafinum in a 2cm radius ball.
With a 31-year half life, that means about 2.4e11 rays per second for the first 31 years.
Only about a tenth of a watt. Oh dear, not many lightbulbs there.
Which brings me to the main point:
You are assuming most of the fission energy is released as gamma radiation. This is not true.
Most of the energy turns into motion (or: the heat) of the fission fragments.
It's not like David Bowie has fallen off the face of the earth.
No, I believe he fell to earth.
(If anyone else here saw that that film..)
I think you may have confused the concept of basing something on a few postulates with simplification.
A theory is not necessarily simple just because it derives from a few postulates. Heck, all of math and logic does, and they can be far from simple.
Anyway, the point is that Relativity and Quantum theory both derive as a logical consequence of a number of postulates.
For special relativity, the two are:
1) Laws of physics remain unchanged regardless of the frame of motion. (Or: 'Why the earth seems to be standing still' )
2) Speed of light is constant regardless of frame of motion. (Weird! Yet in accordance with 100 years of observation)
The older theories, of gravity etc, are far more ad hoc than these modern ones. Newton never explained why his law of gravity was proportional to the square of the distance. Why the square and not, say, the cube? 'Because it works', would've been his answer.
Today, the answer is: 'Because we believe this-and-this-and-this is true, and therefore this must follow'.
Well, for one: It's the only theory of gravity we've got really. If you can come up with one from as few (or fewer) postulates, which fits as well into the what we already know, and make the same predictions, I'm certain people will listen.
It's not as if everyone here has 'decided' that dark matter simply exists. There are plenty of people at work with alternative explanations.
However: If the theory is correct, and dark matter does exist, how are you supposed to find it without looking?
'With' how?
GCJ and SWT do not have compatible licenses, even if both are free (in the FSF sense), so the two will never be merged.
However, I don't think the GCJ people have much interest in merging SWT into libgcj either.
That aside, the gcj folks do keep an eye on SWT and make sure they're compatible.
The article links to the word list.
Blocking sites with "asian" in it must really help out those poor Chinese..
Actually I tried it out, found one that didn't work for me..
I wanted to convert kJ to kcal/mols (chemistry), it could handle kcal but not moles. Gives a compatibility error, which is incorrect since a mole is not a unit but a quantity, and thus it is an energy unit.
Yes.. and on that side of the board, they have IBM mainframes beating them. SUN's niche has been between these two extremes of cheap, unreliable commodity hardware, and expensive ultra-reliable mainframes.
Unfortunately, this niche is disappearing as the PC's get better and more reliable, and the mainframes have gotten cheaper and started to move into the old UNIX-server market.
(Linux/390, anyone?)
Bad example, I think.
Or an example of hipocracy if you're correct, becaues Paul McCartney is a HUGE rights-owner to a big number of artists. All of Buddy Holly's old hits, for instance.