Now wait a minute. I'm a teetotaler. The main reason is that I have a hiatal hernia with reflux, and alcohol exacerbates that, so I get stomach pains whenever I put more than an ounce of alcoholic beverage in my stomach. (My full 'off' list: Caffeine, carbonation, citrus, chocolate, alcohol and mint. Chocolate is the only one I eat regularly, because it's so hard to give up, and I'm getting a resistance to its bad effects. I drink caffeinated tea now and then, in moderation.)
But a secondary reason is that, because I never learned to drink very much, I don't like the taste of alcohol. Seriously, beer tastes like gym socks. Most wines are somewhere between vinegar and spoiled fruit. Rum is okay if well diluted with plenty of sugar, but I'd rather put it in baked goods and cook the alcohol out of it while retaining the flavor.
I don't drink because my palate never learned to appreciate alcoholic beverages. There's nothing uptight or judgmental about that. I just belong to a different culture. If you want to drink, more power to ya.
I just want to know if cooking with wine has the same health benefits. If so, I'm golden.
I hear what you're saying. But the problem is, if the inflationary theory is false then we need some other mechanism to explain the cosmic background. Inflation solves the problem without breaking the speed of light or special relativity -- both of which are kind of important to keep around.
Inflation *could*, ultimately, be proven false. But if that happens it will topple a lot of important theories along with it. So you can understand why most physicists are assuming it's the correct model, and trying to figure out exactly how it happened.
More likely, this is evidence that there never was a Snowball Earth. We've never been sure whether the entire Earth froze up or just large areas of it. If creatures lived through the glaciation, that's a good indication that unfrozen regions still existed.
Re:Other than books, what is an iPad for?
on
7-Inch iPad Rumored
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· Score: 4, Insightful
My girlfriend has an iPad. She uses it as a network appliance to check email and websites when we're in restaurants with WiFi. She uses it to entertain her children with games. They all use it to watch movies purchased with iTunes while on airplanes or car rides. And yes, she reads books on it.
I'm with you, I don't see it as useful for any dedicated purpose. But I think that's the key -- it's not dedicated to anything. It's a general purpose machine, and easy enough to use that the masses will be able to find something they like to do with it.
Give me a similar machine that runs on Linux and I'd purchase it tomorrow. I don't know what I'd do with it, but I know that I'll find something.
A vacuum balloon is going to be very difficult if not impossible.
A vacuum aerogel, however, might be in the realm of possibility. Aerogels have been made with evacuated bubbles inside, making the whole lighter than air. The record so far is apparently 1 mg/cm^3, which is just lighter than air at 1.2 mg/cm^3. That's not great, but it's a young technology that will get better.
Alas, a vacuum aerogel airship would need to be very large -- too large to make on Earth. We would need orbital manufacturing facilities to make this concept work. But theoretically it is possible.
Well, at least someone is making a stand. I really don't understand the push to 3-D. (...) It's just a way to increase ticket prices.
I think you understand the push to 3D just fine. Anything that allows the studios to charge twice as much for essentially the same product is going to be more addictive than crack for Hollywood execs.
But that's not necessarily true. You open up land mass at the poles, but lose it in once-temperate regions where the people actually live. Desertification increases and we don't have the nomadic lifestyle necessary to outrun it. Extinction of ocean species and the rising sea level makes sea-based food sources unreliable. The heat island effect turns modern cities into genuine health threats. Overcrowding turns new diseases that might kill a few in our tribal days into pandemics that threaten the entire species.
If anything, I would think a colder world would be more suited to industrial society. It would give us more options for dumping waste heat and gasses, and our tendency toward crowding together in cities would be an advantage in using resources.
What worked for tribal gatherers is going to be a serious problem for us.
For some nations, global warming may even be a big plus. While the southwestern U.S. will probably suffer, the farming belt will just shift north and the country at large will continue to prosper.
Also, the millions of refugee immigrants from the nations that have been flooded or destabilized will make excellent farm workers.
Canada will benefit greatly from more usable farmland.
With the extinction of almost all polar fauna, their new farmland will be even easier to maintain.
Europe is a toss-up because ocean and air currents which currently heat it are unpredictable, so anything could happen; but no matter what does, they have the economic and industrial power to cope.
After all, they can successfully handle any economic shock up to and including a failed Greek pension fund.
Wealthy island nations like Japan will find ways to cope and build sea walls and other defenses or adaptations.
And the non-wealthy island nations will be too far away for the smell of decaying bodies to bother anyone.
China will probably see desert shifting, but increased desertification isn't a foregone conclusion especially with their rapidly-expanding industrialization and huge workforce.
They're due to industrialize anyway. They have half a billion farmers picking rice by hand. Those farmers should have tractors, so they can plow encroaching sand away from their rice fields before picking them. That will be more efficient.
Russia would probably benefit.
Because they aren't dependent on third world energy reserves at all.
Indeed, it's only the third world--Africa, parts of Latin America, small island areas like Micronesia--which will certainly be negatively impacted. And while the humanitarian in me says, "It would be nice to help them," the realist in me says "Our civilizations got to the next level first.
And this is, after all, only a game, and there's no happiness drawback to having a sociopathic government. As long as it doesn't stop our progress along the space tech tree. In fact, we should probably just nuke those other countries. It's not like we're staying on this planet once we've got a space colony victory. Am I right?
A 'better planet for life' is not necessarily a better planet for human beings and human society. We are entering a period of warming that will bring average temperatures not seen for the last 120,000 years. Are you suggesting that modern, overcrowded industrial society will always flourish under the conditions that suited tribal hunter/gatherers?
Pfc. Bradley Manning is up a shit creek without a regulation latrine shovel. After the unbelievable scale of this leak, they'll never let him go. I'm just waiting to hear he's been transferred to Gitmo, after which he'll disappear completely.
How many people think that global warming is man-made, even though there is evidence to prove otherwise?
The entire point of the article is that people do not take facts into account when holding onto their opinions. Global warming is an excellent example, as you've proven. The facts show that it is man-made, without a doubt, but some people such as yourself refuse to believe it.
It's pretty obvious that the entire point of the "study" at UofM is to somehow prove that "misinformed" (or people on the right) people are believing lies more than the truth. This line of thinking is pretty typical of elitist leftists that feel they know what is better for the rest of society.
The study is showing that people are not believing in facts. You know -- facts? Unassailable truths arrived at by rigorous logic from concrete data?
This isn't a left or right thing, except that the right disagrees with more facts than the left does at this moment in history. In twenty years it'll be the other way around. But no matter who is doing it, I think we should all agree that people who cannot handle the facts are not being helpful to their society, especially when they involve themselves in setting public policy.
No, such a size is not defined. But it could be, if it were a useful measurement. It would have to be defined in relation to the gravitational fields in the neighborhood, which would make it around the same radius as the L1 Lagrange point. Voila, we have defined a gravitational 'size', and it can even be represented graphically.
Nothing exists unless someone has defined it; by the same token, anything can be defined in some way.
About 10 Earth radii, defined as the point where the Earth's magnetic field is stronger than the solar wind and thus becomes the dominant force on electrical particles.
Similarly, we define the proton's radius in terms of its charge distribution. See how easy that is? It only takes a simple definition to make a word like 'size' meaningful.
And in the case of the proton is *is* meaningful, because you are incorrect about the proton being a singularity. The proton is composed of three quarks, each with their own charges and charge fields.
The quarks inside a proton are held together by strong force interactions. So any change in the measurable size of a proton is a change in what we know about the strong force. This is significant. Either the strong force is 4% stronger than our calculations predict, or there is another mechanism that is squeezing that proton's charge field down. Another force? Another particle? It'll be exciting to find out, now that we know there's something there to find.
The journalists who write about science often use bad, confusing, or just plain nonsensical terms. But it's almost always the journalists, and you can't really fault them for dumbing down their story to appeal to the largest group of readers. Whatever you do, don't blame the scientists. They are doing good work. It's not their fault if journalists relate it improperly, nor is it the scientists' fault if you don't understand the explanations.
The problem is that fame doesn't last, but the memories of the military and intelligence institutions is forever. Eventually the cameras will get tired of him. Then they will be able to come for him with little or no press.
It sounds like he's hoping to change those institutions so that they would be too ashamed to go after him. I don't know if changing the world is a good strategy for self-defense, but I admire anyone with the balls to try it.
"iPod Touch" is a proper noun that describes an object. The construction "iPod Touch's" is correct -- it is the proper possessive for that proper noun. "iPod touches" is incorrect -- it separates the two pieces of the proper noun and conflates one of them into a verb. I'd rather not have my iPod touching anybody, thank you.
I love grammar nazis who don't know what they're talking about. They're like fish in a barrel, only less erudite.
Re:Oh good! The trolls are out in full force!
on
iOS 4 Releases Today
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Wait a second. 'Flexibility' is a neutral term -- it can be either good or bad. Flexibility controlled by the end user is almost always good. Flexibility controlled by the producer can be good, but has a history of being used in less than benevolent ways, especially in the computer industry.
Flexibility, improperly implemented, can be just another way for a corporation to screw over its customers. To my mind, the jury is still out on exactly how Apple intends to use its phones' flexibility.
Plenty of innovative technologies exist. What we need are innovative regulatory and marketing schemes. Only things are stopping wind power: Nobody wants a generator in their backyard, and the existing power generation industry owns all our politicians. Fix those things. The tech has been here.
This is great news. It gives us leverage to do what I said a long time ago we should do -- sell Afghanistan to the Chinese.
Think of the benefits! We get a large reduction in our national debt, which is mostly held by China. They get a potential source of minerals. And we get to see our biggest competitor -- China -- stuck in a land war in Asia. It's a win-win-win scenario!
If you were able to remove the event horizon, would that not mean that you would be destroying the singularity itself?
No. The only reason the event horizon exists is because gravity is pulling so hard that light can't escape. If you were to alter the system so that the pull of gravity is weaker, or is offset by some sort of relativistic frame dragging effect (which is I think what they're postulating here), then the event horizon could disappear while the singularity remains.
Think of the classic space-time fabric picture, where a black hole is an infinite vortex punched down through the fabric. They're pushing the fabric up so that it isn't an infinite funnel anymore -- now it's just a dimple. The singularity is still there in the center.
You might say that gravity is the only thing holding the singularity together, but we don't know that. If it has collapsed to a single point then it's no longer matter, and the rules no longer apply, and even if they did matter sharing the exact same point in space wouldn't fly apart anyhow. Maybe. Cracking open a black hole is the only way to be sure.
(Disclaimer: I Am A Physicist, but this is not my area of expertise, and only the experts understand those equations.)
It's not feeding it mass that does the trick; it's feeding it charge and angular momentum. The only reason you feed it more mass is because you need mass to carry the charge and momentum into the hole.
What you get if you feed it charge and angular momentum is a spinning monopole. I think they are postulating that a spinning monopole causes rotational frame dragging, and if you do it right you can get the charged frame dragging effects to cancel out the gravitational effects -- namely, the event horizon.
After you do all that, what will be left? Like the article says, nobody knows. That's why it's exciting.
The original printing of the book 2001, they went to Saturn. In the film they went to Jupiter. After seeing the film Clarke thought that made more sense, so he wrote the sequel based on the film, not his book.
Buffy rates so high because of the narrative style. That show set a role model for stories about empowered women, and simultaneously marked a high point in comedic banter that has yet to be rivaled. The character of Buffy by itself isn't inspiring, but the ensemble cast behind her was. Every supernatural show since, from Charmed to Torchwood, owes a debt to the narrative formula that was perfected with Buffy.
The real wildcard in the list, IMHO, is Edward Scissorhands. Did that movie really leave that much of an impression? I'd rather see Jack the Pumpkin King in that slot, to fill the same role, and even then I'm not sure it's worthy of the top ten.
The vapor pressure of 'dry' CO2 ice is larger than the partial fraction of gaseous CO2 in our atmosphere. That means that it will sublimate, even if it's below the freezing point. You have to go far below the freezing point, until you find the temperature where the vapor pressure is lower than the partial fraction.
This is why water ice will sublimate in very cold, very dry air. If the humidity is low enough, a blanket of snow will slowly disappear, even at -20 C. You can see that in the Midwest every winter.
Slashdot Mirror
Now wait a minute. I'm a teetotaler. The main reason is that I have a hiatal hernia with reflux, and alcohol exacerbates that, so I get stomach pains whenever I put more than an ounce of alcoholic beverage in my stomach. (My full 'off' list: Caffeine, carbonation, citrus, chocolate, alcohol and mint. Chocolate is the only one I eat regularly, because it's so hard to give up, and I'm getting a resistance to its bad effects. I drink caffeinated tea now and then, in moderation.)
But a secondary reason is that, because I never learned to drink very much, I don't like the taste of alcohol. Seriously, beer tastes like gym socks. Most wines are somewhere between vinegar and spoiled fruit. Rum is okay if well diluted with plenty of sugar, but I'd rather put it in baked goods and cook the alcohol out of it while retaining the flavor.
I don't drink because my palate never learned to appreciate alcoholic beverages. There's nothing uptight or judgmental about that. I just belong to a different culture. If you want to drink, more power to ya.
I just want to know if cooking with wine has the same health benefits. If so, I'm golden.
I hear what you're saying. But the problem is, if the inflationary theory is false then we need some other mechanism to explain the cosmic background. Inflation solves the problem without breaking the speed of light or special relativity -- both of which are kind of important to keep around.
Inflation *could*, ultimately, be proven false. But if that happens it will topple a lot of important theories along with it. So you can understand why most physicists are assuming it's the correct model, and trying to figure out exactly how it happened.
More likely, this is evidence that there never was a Snowball Earth. We've never been sure whether the entire Earth froze up or just large areas of it. If creatures lived through the glaciation, that's a good indication that unfrozen regions still existed.
My girlfriend has an iPad. She uses it as a network appliance to check email and websites when we're in restaurants with WiFi. She uses it to entertain her children with games. They all use it to watch movies purchased with iTunes while on airplanes or car rides. And yes, she reads books on it.
I'm with you, I don't see it as useful for any dedicated purpose. But I think that's the key -- it's not dedicated to anything. It's a general purpose machine, and easy enough to use that the masses will be able to find something they like to do with it.
Give me a similar machine that runs on Linux and I'd purchase it tomorrow. I don't know what I'd do with it, but I know that I'll find something.
A vacuum balloon is going to be very difficult if not impossible.
A vacuum aerogel, however, might be in the realm of possibility. Aerogels have been made with evacuated bubbles inside, making the whole lighter than air. The record so far is apparently 1 mg/cm^3, which is just lighter than air at 1.2 mg/cm^3. That's not great, but it's a young technology that will get better.
Alas, a vacuum aerogel airship would need to be very large -- too large to make on Earth. We would need orbital manufacturing facilities to make this concept work. But theoretically it is possible.
Well, at least someone is making a stand. I really don't understand the push to 3-D. (...) It's just a way to increase ticket prices.
I think you understand the push to 3D just fine. Anything that allows the studios to charge twice as much for essentially the same product is going to be more addictive than crack for Hollywood execs.
But that's not necessarily true. You open up land mass at the poles, but lose it in once-temperate regions where the people actually live. Desertification increases and we don't have the nomadic lifestyle necessary to outrun it. Extinction of ocean species and the rising sea level makes sea-based food sources unreliable. The heat island effect turns modern cities into genuine health threats. Overcrowding turns new diseases that might kill a few in our tribal days into pandemics that threaten the entire species.
If anything, I would think a colder world would be more suited to industrial society. It would give us more options for dumping waste heat and gasses, and our tendency toward crowding together in cities would be an advantage in using resources.
What worked for tribal gatherers is going to be a serious problem for us.
For some nations, global warming may even be a big plus. While the southwestern U.S. will probably suffer, the farming belt will just shift north and the country at large will continue to prosper.
Also, the millions of refugee immigrants from the nations that have been flooded or destabilized will make excellent farm workers.
Canada will benefit greatly from more usable farmland.
With the extinction of almost all polar fauna, their new farmland will be even easier to maintain.
Europe is a toss-up because ocean and air currents which currently heat it are unpredictable, so anything could happen; but no matter what does, they have the economic and industrial power to cope.
After all, they can successfully handle any economic shock up to and including a failed Greek pension fund.
Wealthy island nations like Japan will find ways to cope and build sea walls and other defenses or adaptations.
And the non-wealthy island nations will be too far away for the smell of decaying bodies to bother anyone.
China will probably see desert shifting, but increased desertification isn't a foregone conclusion especially with their rapidly-expanding industrialization and huge workforce.
They're due to industrialize anyway. They have half a billion farmers picking rice by hand. Those farmers should have tractors, so they can plow encroaching sand away from their rice fields before picking them. That will be more efficient.
Russia would probably benefit.
Because they aren't dependent on third world energy reserves at all.
Indeed, it's only the third world--Africa, parts of Latin America, small island areas like Micronesia--which will certainly be negatively impacted. And while the humanitarian in me says, "It would be nice to help them," the realist in me says "Our civilizations got to the next level first.
And this is, after all, only a game, and there's no happiness drawback to having a sociopathic government. As long as it doesn't stop our progress along the space tech tree. In fact, we should probably just nuke those other countries. It's not like we're staying on this planet once we've got a space colony victory. Am I right?
A 'better planet for life' is not necessarily a better planet for human beings and human society. We are entering a period of warming that will bring average temperatures not seen for the last 120,000 years. Are you suggesting that modern, overcrowded industrial society will always flourish under the conditions that suited tribal hunter/gatherers?
Oh, he was noticed. They just noticed him too late to stop the leak.
Pfc. Bradley Manning is up a shit creek without a regulation latrine shovel. After the unbelievable scale of this leak, they'll never let him go. I'm just waiting to hear he's been transferred to Gitmo, after which he'll disappear completely.
How many people think that global warming is man-made, even though there is evidence to prove otherwise?
The entire point of the article is that people do not take facts into account when holding onto their opinions. Global warming is an excellent example, as you've proven. The facts show that it is man-made, without a doubt, but some people such as yourself refuse to believe it.
It's pretty obvious that the entire point of the "study" at UofM is to somehow prove that "misinformed" (or people on the right) people are believing lies more than the truth. This line of thinking is pretty typical of elitist leftists that feel they know what is better for the rest of society.
The study is showing that people are not believing in facts. You know -- facts? Unassailable truths arrived at by rigorous logic from concrete data?
This isn't a left or right thing, except that the right disagrees with more facts than the left does at this moment in history. In twenty years it'll be the other way around. But no matter who is doing it, I think we should all agree that people who cannot handle the facts are not being helpful to their society, especially when they involve themselves in setting public policy.
No, such a size is not defined. But it could be, if it were a useful measurement. It would have to be defined in relation to the gravitational fields in the neighborhood, which would make it around the same radius as the L1 Lagrange point. Voila, we have defined a gravitational 'size', and it can even be represented graphically.
Nothing exists unless someone has defined it; by the same token, anything can be defined in some way.
Physicist here.
What's the diameter of the earth's magnetosphere?
About 10 Earth radii, defined as the point where the Earth's magnetic field is stronger than the solar wind and thus becomes the dominant force on electrical particles.
Similarly, we define the proton's radius in terms of its charge distribution. See how easy that is? It only takes a simple definition to make a word like 'size' meaningful.
And in the case of the proton is *is* meaningful, because you are incorrect about the proton being a singularity. The proton is composed of three quarks, each with their own charges and charge fields.
The quarks inside a proton are held together by strong force interactions. So any change in the measurable size of a proton is a change in what we know about the strong force. This is significant. Either the strong force is 4% stronger than our calculations predict, or there is another mechanism that is squeezing that proton's charge field down. Another force? Another particle? It'll be exciting to find out, now that we know there's something there to find.
The journalists who write about science often use bad, confusing, or just plain nonsensical terms. But it's almost always the journalists, and you can't really fault them for dumbing down their story to appeal to the largest group of readers. Whatever you do, don't blame the scientists. They are doing good work. It's not their fault if journalists relate it improperly, nor is it the scientists' fault if you don't understand the explanations.
The purpose of every human endeavor is, ultimately, to get laid.
Artists just get to lay the freakier chicks.
The problem is that fame doesn't last, but the memories of the military and intelligence institutions is forever. Eventually the cameras will get tired of him. Then they will be able to come for him with little or no press.
It sounds like he's hoping to change those institutions so that they would be too ashamed to go after him. I don't know if changing the world is a good strategy for self-defense, but I admire anyone with the balls to try it.
"iPod Touch" is a proper noun that describes an object. The construction "iPod Touch's" is correct -- it is the proper possessive for that proper noun. "iPod touches" is incorrect -- it separates the two pieces of the proper noun and conflates one of them into a verb. I'd rather not have my iPod touching anybody, thank you.
I love grammar nazis who don't know what they're talking about. They're like fish in a barrel, only less erudite.
Wait a second. 'Flexibility' is a neutral term -- it can be either good or bad. Flexibility controlled by the end user is almost always good. Flexibility controlled by the producer can be good, but has a history of being used in less than benevolent ways, especially in the computer industry.
Flexibility, improperly implemented, can be just another way for a corporation to screw over its customers. To my mind, the jury is still out on exactly how Apple intends to use its phones' flexibility.
That's been done with the Windbelt. (Wikipedia, Pop. Mech.)
Plenty of innovative technologies exist. What we need are innovative regulatory and marketing schemes. Only things are stopping wind power: Nobody wants a generator in their backyard, and the existing power generation industry owns all our politicians. Fix those things. The tech has been here.
Also, what makes a Wikipedia editor go neutral? Is it lust for gold? Power? Or were they just born with a heart full of neutrality?
This is great news. It gives us leverage to do what I said a long time ago we should do -- sell Afghanistan to the Chinese.
Think of the benefits! We get a large reduction in our national debt, which is mostly held by China. They get a potential source of minerals. And we get to see our biggest competitor -- China -- stuck in a land war in Asia. It's a win-win-win scenario!
If you were able to remove the event horizon, would that not mean that you would be destroying the singularity itself?
No. The only reason the event horizon exists is because gravity is pulling so hard that light can't escape. If you were to alter the system so that the pull of gravity is weaker, or is offset by some sort of relativistic frame dragging effect (which is I think what they're postulating here), then the event horizon could disappear while the singularity remains.
Think of the classic space-time fabric picture, where a black hole is an infinite vortex punched down through the fabric. They're pushing the fabric up so that it isn't an infinite funnel anymore -- now it's just a dimple. The singularity is still there in the center.
You might say that gravity is the only thing holding the singularity together, but we don't know that. If it has collapsed to a single point then it's no longer matter, and the rules no longer apply, and even if they did matter sharing the exact same point in space wouldn't fly apart anyhow. Maybe. Cracking open a black hole is the only way to be sure.
(Disclaimer: I Am A Physicist, but this is not my area of expertise, and only the experts understand those equations.)
It's not feeding it mass that does the trick; it's feeding it charge and angular momentum. The only reason you feed it more mass is because you need mass to carry the charge and momentum into the hole.
What you get if you feed it charge and angular momentum is a spinning monopole. I think they are postulating that a spinning monopole causes rotational frame dragging, and if you do it right you can get the charged frame dragging effects to cancel out the gravitational effects -- namely, the event horizon.
After you do all that, what will be left? Like the article says, nobody knows. That's why it's exciting.
The original printing of the book 2001, they went to Saturn. In the film they went to Jupiter. After seeing the film Clarke thought that made more sense, so he wrote the sequel based on the film, not his book.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001:_A_Space_Odyssey_(novel)#Differences_from_the_film
As far as I care, it's fair game as long as it isn't Europa. We should attempt no landings there.
Buffy rates so high because of the narrative style. That show set a role model for stories about empowered women, and simultaneously marked a high point in comedic banter that has yet to be rivaled. The character of Buffy by itself isn't inspiring, but the ensemble cast behind her was. Every supernatural show since, from Charmed to Torchwood, owes a debt to the narrative formula that was perfected with Buffy.
The real wildcard in the list, IMHO, is Edward Scissorhands. Did that movie really leave that much of an impression? I'd rather see Jack the Pumpkin King in that slot, to fill the same role, and even then I'm not sure it's worthy of the top ten.
The vapor pressure of 'dry' CO2 ice is larger than the partial fraction of gaseous CO2 in our atmosphere. That means that it will sublimate, even if it's below the freezing point. You have to go far below the freezing point, until you find the temperature where the vapor pressure is lower than the partial fraction.
This is why water ice will sublimate in very cold, very dry air. If the humidity is low enough, a blanket of snow will slowly disappear, even at -20 C. You can see that in the Midwest every winter.