This is about modulating the orbital angular momentum of photons, a property that wasn't even discovered until 1992.
Each photon can have an integer quantity of orbital angular momentum (0, 1, 2, 3...) without obvious limit (or in the opposite direction, -1, -2, -3...). In principle, and increasingly in experiment, it is possible to encode information by modulating the orbital angular momentum carried.
This provides and entirely separate channel with its own bandwidth in addition to traditionally understood modulation. They're right to be excited about it; it has the potential of being just as big in scope as was the invention of radio.
Am I missing something? These guys are proposing polarizing wireless transmissions.
Yes, you are, and no, they aren't.
This is about modulating the orbital angular momentum of photons, a property that wasn't even discovered until 1992.
Each photon can have an integer quantity of orbital angular momentum (0, 1, 2, 3...) without obvious limit (or in the opposite direction, -1, -2, -3...). In principle, and increasingly in experiment, it is possible to encode information by modulating the orbital angular momentum carried.
This provides and entirely separate channel with its own bandwidth in addition to traditionally understood modulation. They're right to be excited about it; it has the potential of being just as big in scope as was the invention of radio.
Interesting, thanks (and thx to anonymous, too). Clearly I've gotten too complacent about assuming I can just recompile anything and everything on a linux system (including porting and bug fixing if absolutely necessary).
I just picked up an n770, but haven't done much with it yet, so my mind has been buzzing with various possibilities -- obviously including some that may or may not be particularly feasible.;-)
I was merely pointing out fairly obvious observations about the ineffectiveness of your rhetorical tactics; your level of utterly uncalled-for rudeness in response simply makes you out to have a highly flawed character, to the extent that I can't see how you would do well even in grad school, let alone out in the real world.
And oh, the irony of you saying "self-absorbed pricks". Talk about projection of yourself onto others; you're a psychologist's dream.
And why do you think I would care what an anonymous coward has to say about kernel architecture, pretending for a moment that you even know the first thing about it?
Mr. AC, you're acting like it's just your debating opponent's opinion versus yours, as if you haven't heard the endless bad press about Vista.
You can't possibly have missed all of that bad press, so pretending it doesn't exist is what makes you sound like a completely fraudulent shill. If you want to sound honest, acknowledge the widespread bad press and try to address it.
Or continue as you have been, and expect to have zero credibility with 100% of the readers -- why even bother?
Trivially false. If a probabilistic algorithm returns a potential but not guaranteed factor of N, it takes merely one trial division to see if it was an actual factor or not.
You're probably mixing it up with probablistic primality tests, although even there "you can only hope" is not how we proceed in practice. Further details widely available via google.
I seem to have accidentally lost my longer response, so tersely: no, he doesn't have a reference, because strictly, he's just plain wrong. He's expressing an opinion; by no stretch of the imagination is he expressing a mathematical truth.
Worse, there are actually counter-examples -- although they are a curiosity only, being slower than the more widely used and known algorithms.
I hope he's not a mathematician, because it's rather bad form to claim opinion as fact in that field.
Point taken. Factoring primes is still not NP-Complete, which was the point I should have been trying to make.
You meant "factoring INTO primes", of course. Your typo is a common one, but people tend to be extremely unforgiving about that one, since idiots who don't know squat about the subject (such as Bush) have famously made it, too, presumably without understanding how fantastically ludicrous the phrase is. (I'm sure in your case it was merely a slip; I'm just saying...)
Well, it also turns out that this has nothing directly to do with the article, but might be +i, interesting nevertheless.
Your comments have everything to do with the paper in question.
How ironic. Usually people don't read the article, then make irrelevant comments that
they think are relevant; here you managed to do the exact opposite.
The story is grossly distorted -- what a surprise. I was going to say that at least it was distorted by author of the linked-to news item, rather than by the/. submitter, but now I see they seem to be the same person ("KFC" and "KentuckyFC").
The abstract that is linked to merely claims "numerical evidence", not "first observation",
and to get from that unobjectionable claim to the more sensational false accusation,
one must distort the paper itself ( http://arxiv.org/pdf/0803.0507v1 ), which says:
...a recent
work [11] has anticipated that the presence of Hawking radiation
in this setting can be unambiguosly revealed from
a very peculiar feature of the correlation function of density
fluctuations.
Here we report numerical experiments
that nicely confirm this prediction. Differently from most
previous works on analog models [6], our calculations are
based on the application of microscopic many-body techniques
to an experimentally realistic system and never
involve concepts of gravitational physics.
In this way,
our observations can be considered as a first independent
proof of the existence of Hawking radiation and rule out
the frequent concerns on the role of short wavelength,
"trans-Planckian" physics on the Hawking emission.
So for one thing, they never claimed "first observation", they
said "first independent proof", which is sharply different.
For another thing, they softened even that claim; they said
"our observations [of the simulation] can be considered" proof,
not that it is proof.
At any rate, it's interesting in general; they're talking about predictions
that Hawking-Unruh radiation might be found in many settings unrelated
to domains involving gravity or acceleration, and that their
simulation might be an independent confirmation of those predictions.
Reading your (few and ancient) journal entries, apparently you have wondered in the past why you have been called a Troll.
I don't get why Slashdot gives so much press to these people when they admit they can't maintain their own goals,
"Citation needed", except you're probably merely talking about the OLPC target price of $100 versus the recent actual price of $188. Well, duh, "target price" is a hope for the future. Initial price being higher is not "admitting they can't maintain their own goals". Sheesh.
the program is mired in political bullshit,
"Citation needed", very definitely. "Mired" is unsupportable, and "political bullshit" is created by their enemies (clearly including Intel at this point), but you phrase it as if OLPC themselves did something wrong. I call bullshit.
and the very idea of giving kids a laptop and acting as if it will cure all their ills is idealistic at absolute best.
"Citation needed" once again. You make me tired. Talk about hyperbole. No OLPC person has ever said that the OLPC goals will "cure all their ills". That's bigtime bullshit, and you should be ashamed for the misrepresentation, you really should.
OLPC is bust,
"Citation needed" yet again! They are shipping. They're an ongoing concern. There is no strong evidence that they have actually "failed" (either short term or long term) in any sense at all.
Netcraft confirms.
I searched Netcraft and saw nothing about OLPC, but maybe I just wasn't thorough enough. Still, this smacks of merely more of your trolling.
Before posting, I checked your slashdot journal and your website. Your research seems interesting, you seem superficially as if you might be an interesting person, but apparently once in a while you just get irrationally angry on some topic and, given what you yourself have said on the topics in question, do not understand that that's what you have done. Introspect more, then you will see why (once a year or so, since you post infrequently) people say you are a big time Troll.
You're being so much of a troll here that it makes me wonder what you did 5 years ago to get +1 Karma. Maybe you should wonder, too, and then try to repeat your positive side, rather than your negative side!
Indeed. Bandwidth may be a commodity, for instance, but in no way can it be a 'currency'.
I don't see your point. Basically, everyone wants to download data. How do you keep track of who's contributing to the P2P community and who's mooching? Face it, raw bytes are a de facto currency for a primitive marketv like P2P.
My point was merely that "currency" is the wrong word.
See pretty much any mainstream source that discusses the evolution of money from ancient barter systems up to today's rather abstract practices. The GGP post that I was replying to suggested http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money#Economic_charac teristics , and indeed it looks like a reasonable (although very terse) overview of the subject.
My point was not to argue against the technology under discussion. I've long taken for granted that eventually things like p2p will become pervasively integrated with all internet services (as will a variety of increasingly
sophisticated free, for-pay, micro-payment, barter, commodity, futures, derivatives, etc. market practices).
Indeed, I didn't notice anything notably new (i.e. never-before suggested) in the proposal at all, although certainly I may have overlooked some nuance, somewhere. Except, of course, for the misuse of the word "currency", which I think gave the story more zing and captured more attention. Does grabbing more attention justify mislabelling? Definitely not (digg and reddit overzealous poster's frequent practice notwithstanding).
As to your question about tracking contributors versus moochers, a large amount of work has been done on related topics. Here's one (semi-randomly selected) paper regarding related technology: "A Trusted Execution Platform for Multiparty Computation (2000)" http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/ajmani00trusted.html .
It may or may not be obvious how it's related, for those who haven't been following the evolution of the application of cryptographic systems to increasingly disparate real world problems beyond mere secret-message passing for its own sake -- which has become a pretty large research area. Cryptography turns out to be the basis for building complex systems similarly to the way that steel girders are the basis for building skyscrapers.
One of the requirements of money is that it is standardised across the economy. Internet bandwidth fails at so many points here, and that isn't the only problem.
Indeed. Bandwidth may be a commodity, for instance, but in no way can it be a 'currency'.
Mark Twain: "If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it one."
The advantage of currency is that it allows getting past the inefficient mechanism of barter. Bandwidth can be bartered, but it can't be stored, for instance. Unused bandwidth is forever wasted. The only way to prevent it being wasted is for someone to use it.
One of the things that irks me about so many wannabe futurists, xenophiles, and run-of-the-mill SF is a failure of technological vision. Why would one assume that sending radio signals between the stars makes any sense whatsoever for an advanced civilization, unless we assume that our science has reached a galactic pinnacle?
Even more irksome is when people make sweeping statements about
things supposedly missing from science fiction that has in fact
been extremelyv thoroughly explored over the decades.
(And trying
to be slippery by qualifying with "run-of-the-mill" doesn't help,
since that amounts to a circular reference -- if a story does
address non-radio-signal communication, then it doesn't count???)
Even in the earliest "space opera" stories (e.g. E. E. "Doc" Smith and his
cohorts) in the 1930's outright assumed that advanced civilizations
would use telepathy, tachyonic communication, etc., and it was not
rare even then to suggest that they had more or less forgotten about
ordinary radio waves as hopelessly antiquated.
Decades ago there was one particularly amusing story (author and title
forgotten, alas) with a series of vignettes, each suggesting a different
and clever explanation for the Fermi Paradox e.g. one civilization was
trying hard to communicate with Earth in particular, but they kept assuming
that their data rate of e.g. one bit per year was too fast, so they
kept slowing the rate down.
A very funny story (which I think is actually available online, these days)
talks about the incomprehensibility, to members of a far-flung multi-species
galactic civilization, of Earth having beings that "thought with meat",
as opposed to every other galactically-known species that had brains of plasma or electronic etc.
nature than were otherwise known. (This was not directly about SETI issues,
but such are strongly implied.)
The ultimate problem is not a lack of imagination -- many, many exotic notions
of ET communication have been considered -- but rather that the exotic modes
are not pragmatic. If ET's communicate with tachyons, well, alas, we don't
even know for sure whether tachyons exist or not, let alone how to try to
receive them from ET's.
Interesting recent example: in quite recent years, it turns out that there
is a previously-unnoticed theoretical prediction from quite orthodox
physics, that photons can carry, not just their intrinsic spin of 1, but
also an arbitrary number of additional units of angular momentum. This
seems to be little-known, so far, and no one knows how to either produce
or to detect that additional angular momentum in photons.
Nonetheless, many people immediately speculated about 2 things: whether
cosmological events may produce such photons, and whether ET's might
produce such photons.
Failure of imagination is not the problem. The problem is the
pragmatics of turning imagination into a realizable experiment.
You complain about the failure of the imagination of SF writers, futurists, etc, but what that says to me is that you are unaware of the rich imagination long ago represented by such people.
Perhaps the problem is merely that you read only "run of the mill" or mediocre fiction and futurism, hmm?
Hmm, do you suppose that an oil rich nation may sell their gas cheaply on the domestic market?
Certainly, that is an important point (that Iran sells gasoline domestically for 38 cents per gallon because they are oil-rich and their populace is mostly poor, so it makes sense for them to subsidize their relatively-small domestic gasoline market).
But the original poster was clueless of all such points, in claiming that only the U.S. has ever had cheap gasoline. That's simply not true, and implies lots more that isn't true.
People like to (rather snidely) point out how much more expensive gasoline is in many parts of the world (e.g. all of western europe), in order to scold Americans for feeling that their gasoline is expensive.
Thing is, European gasoline is expensive for precisely one reason: taxes. European gasoline taxes account for...I forget...1/2 to 2/3 of the price per gallon (liter), something like that.
To reiterate, European gasoline is expensive because it is heavily taxed. Not because gasoline is inherently expensive. American gasoline is also taxed, but at a much lower rate.
So people who say (directly or indirectly) "Americans are whiners when they complain about the price of gasoline, because it's much more expensive in Europe" -- that's comparing apples and oranges. Europeans voted for extremely high gasoline taxes, and Americans did not.
It's a complicated subject. Most rants (on either side) ignore the complications.
"What's currently running out is cheap light natural sweet crude. That's all. The era of $1/gal gasoline is over. Welcome to the era of $2-4/gal gasoline."
If you take out of the equation the USA, that era never started for anyone else.
Apparently you like snide soundbites without regard for accuracy. Skipping the history of prices over the last century, a single counterexample suffices to disprove your point: In Iran, gas recently rose to 38 cents per gallon.
Re:This is (now) a famous number-theory integer!
on
Censoring a Number
·
· Score: 1
I find your logic fascinatingly recursive.
I presume you're talking about my comment where I said:
Literally all numbers are interesting, as was first pointed out many decades ago, and by the same token, vanishingly few are actually fascinating.
...and you are being sardonic. But I'm talking about something well-known in the mathematical community (as was clearly implied by my saying "as was first pointed out many decades ago"), not some wild idiosyncratic self-contradictory foolish belief.
Someone else already explained about this, somewhere in this thread, but I guess you missed that comment -- so I will repeat the explanation (which, I stress, is quite old, and not original to me).
Hypothesis: not all integers are interesting.
Corollary: there is a smallest uninteresting integer; call it "a".
Contradiction: the first uninteresting integer, "a", is interesting because it is unique amongst all integers as being the smallest with that property.
That reduction ad absurdum means that there can be no smallest uninteresting integer, and therefore, there are no uninteresting integers at all.
The above argument originated with, and is widely accepted within, the mathematical community. If you find it unconvincing, go publish a pure math paper with your counter-argument.
Admittedly, I did add something to that well-known tired old thought; I said
and by the same token, vanishingly few are actually fascinating
...which is not, as far as I know, also an old tired topic, nor is it as easily defensible as the prior claim, but informally I think it's a reasonable thing to say, whether true (or even whether well-posed) or not.
And now here I have probably wasted my time typing this, because you no doubt don't particularly care about math, you were just being sardonic. Oh well.
No no, just a joke, not actually very unusual
on
Censoring a Number
·
· Score: 1
I am honestly surprised that there are relatively few prime numbers in the factorization. I am also impressed that 836256503069278983442067, which I assume to be prime but do not know a quick way of checking, shows up on a blog posting with the same factorization when searched for on google.
This truly is a number worth investigating and needs to be written about at length, posted everywhere, etc. Why so few prime numbers in an otherwise random string of numbers? It is actually interesting that the number is so close in size to such large, again assuming correctness of the assertion, prime numbers.
No no, I really was just joking (well, and offering a thin but arguable excuse for people to continue to mention the number).
Contrary to intuition, it is vastly more common than not for large numbers to have relatively few prime factors. This one is not all that atypical compared with what you'd expect to see if it were simply generated randomly. It does have a small surplus of small factors compared with typical, and its second-to-largest and third-to-largest prime factors are mildly unusually close in size (all of which conspires to make the largest prime factor somewhat larger than typical), but those things aren't outright surprising for a random number of this size. It's impossible for every number to be precisely typical.
The fact that the nearest primes are -27 and +31 away also is not even a little bit surprising, compared with what theory predicts for a typical number.
All in all, this actually is a completely unremarkable number -- at least in terms of the qualities I stated thus far. If one looked at it extensively, it might turn out to have more unusual properties (are there related Sophie Germain primes, irregular primes, etc. etc. ad infinitum). More than likely it would take quite a while to find something truly worthy of mention, though, with no guarantee of success to reward the effort.
Slashdot Mirror
It won't take but a second for you to stop guessing that it's about polarization once you see their clear explanation that it's different.
They're using physics that wasn't even discovered until 1992.
See http://www.physics.gla.ac.uk/Optics/play/photonOAM/
See http://www.physics.gla.ac.uk/Optics/play/photonOAM/
See http://www.physics.gla.ac.uk/Optics/play/photonOAM/
See http://www.physics.gla.ac.uk/Optics/play/photonOAM/
This is about modulating the orbital angular momentum of photons, a property that wasn't even discovered until 1992.
Each photon can have an integer quantity of orbital angular momentum (0, 1, 2, 3...) without obvious limit (or in the opposite direction, -1, -2, -3...). In principle, and increasingly in experiment, it is possible to encode information by modulating the orbital angular momentum carried. This provides and entirely separate channel with its own bandwidth in addition to traditionally understood modulation. They're right to be excited about it; it has the potential of being just as big in scope as was the invention of radio.
See http://www.physics.gla.ac.uk/Optics/play/photonOAM/
Yes, you are, and no, they aren't.
This is about modulating the orbital angular momentum of photons, a property that wasn't even discovered until 1992.
Each photon can have an integer quantity of orbital angular momentum (0, 1, 2, 3...) without obvious limit (or in the opposite direction, -1, -2, -3...). In principle, and increasingly in experiment, it is possible to encode information by modulating the orbital angular momentum carried. This provides and entirely separate channel with its own bandwidth in addition to traditionally understood modulation. They're right to be excited about it; it has the potential of being just as big in scope as was the invention of radio.
See http://www.physics.gla.ac.uk/Optics/play/photonOAM/
I just picked up an n770, but haven't done much with it yet, so my mind has been buzzing with various possibilities -- obviously including some that may or may not be particularly feasible. ;-)
Hmm? Why's that? Why would any firmware prevent Opera from running?
And regardless of that, one can update the Linux version on the thing, which surely would get around any problem, yes?
Hey!!! I thought it was ours, too!!! :-)
And oh, the irony of you saying "self-absorbed pricks". Talk about projection of yourself onto others; you're a psychologist's dream.
And why do you think I would care what an anonymous coward has to say about kernel architecture, pretending for a moment that you even know the first thing about it?
You can't possibly have missed all of that bad press, so pretending it doesn't exist is what makes you sound like a completely fraudulent shill. If you want to sound honest, acknowledge the widespread bad press and try to address it.
Or continue as you have been, and expect to have zero credibility with 100% of the readers -- why even bother?
You're probably mixing it up with probablistic primality tests, although even there "you can only hope" is not how we proceed in practice. Further details widely available via google.
Worse, there are actually counter-examples -- although they are a curiosity only, being slower than the more widely used and known algorithms.
I hope he's not a mathematician, because it's rather bad form to claim opinion as fact in that field.
You meant "factoring INTO primes", of course. Your typo is a common one, but people tend to be extremely unforgiving about that one, since idiots who don't know squat about the subject (such as Bush) have famously made it, too, presumably without understanding how fantastically ludicrous the phrase is. (I'm sure in your case it was merely a slip; I'm just saying...)
As for its complexity, you might want to refresh your memory. E.g.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integer_factorization#Difficulty_and_complexity
Your comments have everything to do with the paper in question.
How ironic. Usually people don't read the article, then make irrelevant comments that they think are relevant; here you managed to do the exact opposite.
The story is grossly distorted -- what a surprise. I was going to say that at least it was distorted by author of the linked-to news item, rather than by the /. submitter, but now I see they seem to be the same person ("KFC" and "KentuckyFC").
The abstract that is linked to merely claims "numerical evidence", not "first observation", and to get from that unobjectionable claim to the more sensational false accusation, one must distort the paper itself ( http://arxiv.org/pdf/0803.0507v1 ), which says:
So for one thing, they never claimed "first observation", they said "first independent proof", which is sharply different.
For another thing, they softened even that claim; they said "our observations [of the simulation] can be considered" proof, not that it is proof.
At any rate, it's interesting in general; they're talking about predictions that Hawking-Unruh radiation might be found in many settings unrelated to domains involving gravity or acceleration, and that their simulation might be an independent confirmation of those predictions.
"Citation needed", except you're probably merely talking about the OLPC target price of $100 versus the recent actual price of $188. Well, duh, "target price" is a hope for the future. Initial price being higher is not "admitting they can't maintain their own goals". Sheesh.
"Citation needed", very definitely. "Mired" is unsupportable, and "political bullshit" is created by their enemies (clearly including Intel at this point), but you phrase it as if OLPC themselves did something wrong. I call bullshit.
"Citation needed" once again. You make me tired. Talk about hyperbole. No OLPC person has ever said that the OLPC goals will "cure all their ills". That's bigtime bullshit, and you should be ashamed for the misrepresentation, you really should.
"Citation needed" yet again! They are shipping. They're an ongoing concern. There is no strong evidence that they have actually "failed" (either short term or long term) in any sense at all.
I searched Netcraft and saw nothing about OLPC, but maybe I just wasn't thorough enough. Still, this smacks of merely more of your trolling.
Before posting, I checked your slashdot journal and your website. Your research seems interesting, you seem superficially as if you might be an interesting person, but apparently once in a while you just get irrationally angry on some topic and, given what you yourself have said on the topics in question, do not understand that that's what you have done. Introspect more, then you will see why (once a year or so, since you post infrequently) people say you are a big time Troll.
You're being so much of a troll here that it makes me wonder what you did 5 years ago to get +1 Karma. Maybe you should wonder, too, and then try to repeat your positive side, rather than your negative side!
My point was merely that "currency" is the wrong word.
See pretty much any mainstream source that discusses the evolution of money from ancient barter systems up to today's rather abstract practices. The GGP post that I was replying to suggested http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money#Economic_charac teristics , and indeed it looks like a reasonable (although very terse) overview of the subject.
My point was not to argue against the technology under discussion. I've long taken for granted that eventually things like p2p will become pervasively integrated with all internet services (as will a variety of increasingly sophisticated free, for-pay, micro-payment, barter, commodity, futures, derivatives, etc. market practices).
Indeed, I didn't notice anything notably new (i.e. never-before suggested) in the proposal at all, although certainly I may have overlooked some nuance, somewhere. Except, of course, for the misuse of the word "currency", which I think gave the story more zing and captured more attention. Does grabbing more attention justify mislabelling? Definitely not (digg and reddit overzealous poster's frequent practice notwithstanding).
As to your question about tracking contributors versus moochers, a large amount of work has been done on related topics. Here's one (semi-randomly selected) paper regarding related technology: "A Trusted Execution Platform for Multiparty Computation (2000)" http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/ajmani00trusted.html .
It may or may not be obvious how it's related, for those who haven't been following the evolution of the application of cryptographic systems to increasingly disparate real world problems beyond mere secret-message passing for its own sake -- which has become a pretty large research area. Cryptography turns out to be the basis for building complex systems similarly to the way that steel girders are the basis for building skyscrapers.
Indeed. Bandwidth may be a commodity, for instance, but in no way can it be a 'currency'.
Mark Twain: "If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it one."
The advantage of currency is that it allows getting past the inefficient mechanism of barter. Bandwidth can be bartered, but it can't be stored, for instance. Unused bandwidth is forever wasted. The only way to prevent it being wasted is for someone to use it.
Even more irksome is when people make sweeping statements about things supposedly missing from science fiction that has in fact been extremelyv thoroughly explored over the decades.
(And trying to be slippery by qualifying with "run-of-the-mill" doesn't help, since that amounts to a circular reference -- if a story does address non-radio-signal communication, then it doesn't count???)
Even in the earliest "space opera" stories (e.g. E. E. "Doc" Smith and his cohorts) in the 1930's outright assumed that advanced civilizations would use telepathy, tachyonic communication, etc., and it was not rare even then to suggest that they had more or less forgotten about ordinary radio waves as hopelessly antiquated.
Decades ago there was one particularly amusing story (author and title forgotten, alas) with a series of vignettes, each suggesting a different and clever explanation for the Fermi Paradox e.g. one civilization was trying hard to communicate with Earth in particular, but they kept assuming that their data rate of e.g. one bit per year was too fast, so they kept slowing the rate down.
A very funny story (which I think is actually available online, these days) talks about the incomprehensibility, to members of a far-flung multi-species galactic civilization, of Earth having beings that "thought with meat", as opposed to every other galactically-known species that had brains of plasma or electronic etc. nature than were otherwise known. (This was not directly about SETI issues, but such are strongly implied.)
The ultimate problem is not a lack of imagination -- many, many exotic notions of ET communication have been considered -- but rather that the exotic modes are not pragmatic. If ET's communicate with tachyons, well, alas, we don't even know for sure whether tachyons exist or not, let alone how to try to receive them from ET's.
Interesting recent example: in quite recent years, it turns out that there is a previously-unnoticed theoretical prediction from quite orthodox physics, that photons can carry, not just their intrinsic spin of 1, but also an arbitrary number of additional units of angular momentum. This seems to be little-known, so far, and no one knows how to either produce or to detect that additional angular momentum in photons.
Nonetheless, many people immediately speculated about 2 things: whether cosmological events may produce such photons, and whether ET's might produce such photons.
Failure of imagination is not the problem. The problem is the pragmatics of turning imagination into a realizable experiment.
You complain about the failure of the imagination of SF writers, futurists, etc, but what that says to me is that you are unaware of the rich imagination long ago represented by such people.
Perhaps the problem is merely that you read only "run of the mill" or mediocre fiction and futurism, hmm?
Certainly, that is an important point (that Iran sells gasoline domestically for 38 cents per gallon because they are oil-rich and their populace is mostly poor, so it makes sense for them to subsidize their relatively-small domestic gasoline market).
But the original poster was clueless of all such points, in claiming that only the U.S. has ever had cheap gasoline. That's simply not true, and implies lots more that isn't true.
People like to (rather snidely) point out how much more expensive gasoline is in many parts of the world (e.g. all of western europe), in order to scold Americans for feeling that their gasoline is expensive.
Thing is, European gasoline is expensive for precisely one reason: taxes. European gasoline taxes account for...I forget...1/2 to 2/3 of the price per gallon (liter), something like that.
To reiterate, European gasoline is expensive because it is heavily taxed. Not because gasoline is inherently expensive. American gasoline is also taxed, but at a much lower rate.
So people who say (directly or indirectly) "Americans are whiners when they complain about the price of gasoline, because it's much more expensive in Europe" -- that's comparing apples and oranges. Europeans voted for extremely high gasoline taxes, and Americans did not.
It's a complicated subject. Most rants (on either side) ignore the complications.
Apparently you like snide soundbites without regard for accuracy. Skipping the history of prices over the last century, a single counterexample suffices to disprove your point: In Iran, gas recently rose to 38 cents per gallon.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070528/ap_on_bi_ge/ir an_economy
I presume you're talking about my comment where I said:
Someone else already explained about this, somewhere in this thread, but I guess you missed that comment -- so I will repeat the explanation (which, I stress, is quite old, and not original to me).
Hypothesis: not all integers are interesting.
Corollary: there is a smallest uninteresting integer; call it "a".
Contradiction: the first uninteresting integer, "a", is interesting because it is unique amongst all integers as being the smallest with that property.
That reduction ad absurdum means that there can be no smallest uninteresting integer, and therefore, there are no uninteresting integers at all.
The above argument originated with, and is widely accepted within, the mathematical community. If you find it unconvincing, go publish a pure math paper with your counter-argument.
Admittedly, I did add something to that well-known tired old thought; I said
And now here I have probably wasted my time typing this, because you no doubt don't particularly care about math, you were just being sardonic. Oh well.
No no, I really was just joking (well, and offering a thin but arguable excuse for people to continue to mention the number).
Contrary to intuition, it is vastly more common than not for large numbers to have relatively few prime factors. This one is not all that atypical compared with what you'd expect to see if it were simply generated randomly. It does have a small surplus of small factors compared with typical, and its second-to-largest and third-to-largest prime factors are mildly unusually close in size (all of which conspires to make the largest prime factor somewhat larger than typical), but those things aren't outright surprising for a random number of this size. It's impossible for every number to be precisely typical.
The fact that the nearest primes are -27 and +31 away also is not even a little bit surprising, compared with what theory predicts for a typical number.
All in all, this actually is a completely unremarkable number -- at least in terms of the qualities I stated thus far. If one looked at it extensively, it might turn out to have more unusual properties (are there related Sophie Germain primes, irregular primes, etc. etc. ad infinitum). More than likely it would take quite a while to find something truly worthy of mention, though, with no guarantee of success to reward the effort.