The major flaw in your proof is the supposition that a computer program can be written which replicates exactly the behavior of a human brain. This is somewhat like asking someone to draw a perfect circle--it can't be done, philosophically speaking. Regardless of how the problem is approached, the uncountably dense set of points which makes up a circle cannot be drawn with complete exactness: the lines of the circle you draw will have a certain thickness, not accurately representing the single point thickness of a mathematically defined circle. Also, the surface roughness of the paper causes what should be a strictly two-dimensional object to protrude slightly into the third dimension. The best we can do is create an approximation good enough that we neglect any error. The same is true in replicating the function of the human brain.
You know, I think it's pretty sad to see that my honest comment was marked as a troll. I know that most Slashdot folks vehemently abhor Microsoft, but there are those of us for whom using their products is a necessary evil. And that number is somewhere in the 25% range, apparently.
To say that the 25% of us who use IE should no longer be able to read the valuable contributions of other users here on this site simply because we're forced to use a crippled browser is akin to saying that handicapped access should not be granted to public facilities. I understand that this is taking the analogy too far, but I hope you get my point.
I could understand if lynx were not supported--the number of Slashdotters using that for web browsing on a daily basis probably is trivial. But to say that 25% of the user base doesn't count is ridiculous.
If your prof in college docked 25% off your exam score because he didn't feel like grading that part, I think you'd be pretty darn ticked. Twenty-five percent is not a trivial number, folks.
School, for a long time, has never been the place to get that "proper educations." Face it, schools are day care for teenagers. Everything that is important to learn, people will learn it on their own. This has been true in my life and in the lives of people I talk to.
What, like how to flip a burger? Seriously folks, I'm about a year away from getting a PhD in physics and it's all because of what I learned in high school. And if my parents hadn't watched me like a hawk and made sure I did my homework I would never have made it this far.
If gravity really is weak because it has to propagate through extra dimensions, why is it that the electrostatic force is comparatively so much stronger? I mean, they both follow inverse square force laws on macroscopic lengths so why should they scale differently as we probe smaller and smaller distance scales?
Perhaps the answer to my question lies in the properties of the underlying gauge bosons which mediate the field. The graviton is supposed to have very different properties from the photon (eg., the graviton is spin 2 while the photon is spin 1) so perhaps this would explain the discrepancy in scaling behavior necessary for this theory to work.
Presumably a gravity wave will hit all the detectors at the same time, since gravity moves as fast as it wants to and doesnt have to be held back by the speed of light rule
Actually, gravity waves do travel at the speed of light, at least according to the theory of general relativity. Of course, this is subject to experimental verification, which is one of the reasons why these gravity wave detectors are being built.
What's really amazing about this project is the fact that they're going to be looking for an extraordinarily weak signal in a bunch of background noise. So how do they know that what they're looking at is the real thing? Well, that's one of the main reasons for having multiple detectors. With the sites in both Washington and Louisiana, they'll be able to look at coinicdences between the signals to determine if the event was a gravity wave or simply some local fluctations due to seismic activity or fluctuations in the laser or one of the other countless things that might give rise to a false signal. I used to be skeptical that these things would be able to detect anything at all (except noise), given that the amplitude of the waves they're trying to detect is smaller than the size of an atom! But I now know (due to a class that I'm taking that's being taught by Kip Thorne) that a lot of thought has been put into all of this and I'm fairly confident that we'll see gravitational waves with LIGO. For more information on the project, check out the Caltech LIGO website.
Seems to me like some of these journalists have no regard for attributing comments to the original posts, so what's to stop them from posting their own inflamatory comments and quoting themselves? Well, with all of the noise at the low end of the moderation spectrum on/. I guess this wouldn't be necessary--all the juicy material is already there, ripe for the picking.
Part of the solar neutrino problem can be explained by neutrino oscillations (the conversion of one type of neutrino into another). If I'm not mistaken, most experiments look for only one type of neutrino and not the other two. Since a muon is one of the products of the interaction that the Antares project will be looking at, by conservation of lepton number, it must be only muon neutrinos that they will be be sensitive to.
Slashdot Mirror
The major flaw in your proof is the supposition that a computer program can be written which replicates exactly the behavior of a human brain. This is somewhat like asking someone to draw a perfect circle--it can't be done, philosophically speaking. Regardless of how the problem is approached, the uncountably dense set of points which makes up a circle cannot be drawn with complete exactness: the lines of the circle you draw will have a certain thickness, not accurately representing the single point thickness of a mathematically defined circle. Also, the surface roughness of the paper causes what should be a strictly two-dimensional object to protrude slightly into the third dimension. The best we can do is create an approximation good enough that we neglect any error. The same is true in replicating the function of the human brain.
You know, I think it's pretty sad to see that my honest comment was marked as a troll. I know that most Slashdot folks vehemently abhor Microsoft, but there are those of us for whom using their products is a necessary evil. And that number is somewhere in the 25% range, apparently.
To say that the 25% of us who use IE should no longer be able to read the valuable contributions of other users here on this site simply because we're forced to use a crippled browser is akin to saying that handicapped access should not be granted to public facilities. I understand that this is taking the analogy too far, but I hope you get my point.
I could understand if lynx were not supported--the number of Slashdotters using that for web browsing on a daily basis probably is trivial. But to say that 25% of the user base doesn't count is ridiculous.
If your prof in college docked 25% off your exam score because he didn't feel like grading that part, I think you'd be pretty darn ticked. Twenty-five percent is not a trivial number, folks.
School, for a long time, has never been the place to get that "proper educations." Face it, schools are day care for teenagers. Everything that is important to learn, people will learn it on their own. This has been true in my life and in the lives of people I talk to.
What, like how to flip a burger? Seriously folks, I'm about a year away from getting a PhD in physics and it's all because of what I learned in high school. And if my parents hadn't watched me like a hawk and made sure I did my homework I would never have made it this far.
If gravity really is weak because it has to propagate through extra dimensions, why is it that the electrostatic force is comparatively so much stronger? I mean, they both follow inverse square force laws on macroscopic lengths so why should they scale differently as we probe smaller and smaller distance scales?
Perhaps the answer to my question lies in the properties of the underlying gauge bosons which mediate the field. The graviton is supposed to have very different properties from the photon (eg., the graviton is spin 2 while the photon is spin 1) so perhaps this would explain the discrepancy in scaling behavior necessary for this theory to work.
Presumably a gravity wave will hit all the detectors at the same time, since gravity moves as fast as it wants to and doesnt have to be held back by the speed of light rule
Actually, gravity waves do travel at the speed of light, at least according to the theory of general relativity. Of course, this is subject to experimental verification, which is one of the reasons why these gravity wave detectors are being built.
What's really amazing about this project is the fact that they're going to be looking for an extraordinarily weak signal in a bunch of background noise. So how do they know that what they're looking at is the real thing? Well, that's one of the main reasons for having multiple detectors. With the sites in both Washington and Louisiana, they'll be able to look at coinicdences between the signals to determine if the event was a gravity wave or simply some local fluctations due to seismic activity or fluctuations in the laser or one of the other countless things that might give rise to a false signal. I used to be skeptical that these things would be able to detect anything at all (except noise), given that the amplitude of the waves they're trying to detect is smaller than the size of an atom! But I now know (due to a class that I'm taking that's being taught by Kip Thorne) that a lot of thought has been put into all of this and I'm fairly confident that we'll see gravitational waves with LIGO. For more information on the project, check out the Caltech LIGO website.
Seems to me like some of these journalists have no regard for attributing comments to the original posts, so what's to stop them from posting their own inflamatory comments and quoting themselves? Well, with all of the noise at the low end of the moderation spectrum on /. I guess this wouldn't be necessary--all the juicy material is already there, ripe for the picking.
Part of the solar neutrino problem can be explained by neutrino oscillations (the conversion of one type of neutrino into another). If I'm not mistaken, most experiments look for only one type of neutrino and not the other two. Since a muon is one of the products of the interaction that the Antares project will be looking at, by conservation of lepton number, it must be only muon neutrinos that they will be be sensitive to.
If you're using xfstt, you should be able to use Japanese true type fonts with the Gimp without any problems.
Stephan