Actually, the neutrino detectors weren't built to study the "Solar Neutrino Problem" either, although that has been a pleasant side effect. (Neutrino mass and oscillation was originally postulated to explain why the sun seemed to emit 1/3 the number of neutrinos that it should. If they oscillate, as hinted by current data, then 2/3 of them changed into forms undetectable by earlier neutrino observatories by the time they traveled from Sun to Earth.)
The REAL thing Super-K, Sudbury, et al. want to catch is a decaying proton. QCD theories say that a proton SHOULD be slightly unstable, with a half-life of something god-awful like 10^40 years. Therefore if you get 10^41 protons in one place and watch closely, you should get a hit per month. Unfortunately for the theories, nobody has seen one yet.
Although this sounds good as first glance, it's actually quite low resolution. To get 20 million pixels will be about 5000x4000 pixels. On a 10 foot screen, that's only around 40dpi. Why did they need to make it so large? A 4 or 5 foot display would have shown the same detail in a more palatable display area. I don't see what having it so big buys you...
RTFA(rticle). This is an intermediate step to the REAL display, which will be 69MPixels. Note also that this gadget isn't really that expensive - 64 PCs and 16 projectors add up to maybe a quarter million bucks. A couple of years from now, maybe 300 MPixels for no more money. Digital IMAX theaters, anyone?
The article mentions that one of these toys is under construction down the road at UT. I can see I'm going to have to be extra nice to my lapsed contacts in the CS department!
what I don't understand about that us plane landing in China is that the equipment on board didn't seem to have any self-destruct mechanisms. I think that with top secret equipment flying around the world they would take precautions...
They mostly use "off-the-shelf" receivers and computers, and the Chinese are welcome to them. The only highly classified goodies are the computer programs that analyze the data, and they can be (and were) zapped fairly quickly. In practice, the really good analysis programs aren't necessarily on the plane at all - they can bring back the telemetry tapes and plug 'em into some REAL hardware back at base. The ECM guys must have real-time capability, but that's not necessary for routine surveillance operations.
To quote a close acquaintance who spent some time in this racket, "It is no secret what we're doing. It's HIGHLY secret how good we are."
Forgive my ignorance, but surely if the screen has bad pixels when you buy it then it is faulty, and you can legitimately ask for the laptop to be replaced?
Surely you cannot. The Fine Print explicitly gives the number of bad pixels that the manufacter defines as "acceptable"; less than that and you do not have a warranty issue because it isn't "faulty" by definition. I've seen fine print that allowed FIFTY dead or always-on pixels. Your only real choice is to make sure your vendor has a "no questions asked" refund policy, get your money back, and try some other store and/or manufacturer.
Besides, (and you may get differing views on this), as a standard rule of thumb, the first thing you do after installing a system should always be to compile a fresh kernel. I expect the vast majority of Debian users do this as a rule.
Back in the Good Olde Days, sure. Now, I'd be willing to bet that a census would show the majority of Debian users out there are running Corel Linux with its (almost) single-click installation, and most Corel users would be terrified at the idea of compiling a kernel. Well, at lease those who know what a kernel IS.:)
Note that word "most" in the last paragraph. If you're using Corel Linux on a quad 1GMHz system overclocked to 2G with liquid helium, working 24-7 to develop Gnu/Linux 3.0 and Gnome 3.0, please don't flame me for the generalization.:)
Gee, I just happen to have a bunch of steel-ribbon tapes from a Univac I. Maybe that information is vital to civilization as we know it. Do you really think those tapes can be read today without tremendous expenditure of time and effort?
BTW, I think the original author missed one future problem - encrypted information. I foresee hardware-based encryption becoming almost ubiquitous so that most data is encrypted. If encryption becomes universal, then much info will be encrypted that really wasn't burn-before-reading secret. What happens to all that information - of potential interest to historians looking back on the 21st century - under those conditions?
I'm sorry to inform you there aren't any pictures of the inside of the moon. I assume this is what you wanted, since everyone over the age of six knows there certainly isn't any "dark side" on the OUTSIDE of the moon. Or did you mean pictures of the night side? Those are easy - turn off your monitor and you'll see the one I attached to this message.
Ah, it's nice to see an example of the proverbial Slashdot reader who has been behind a keyboard for so long he literally doesn't recognize a female when he sees one, let alone knows what to do with her if found. I had thought this stereotype was an urban legend.
For your information, Kim, the short action figure in the middle featuring a somewhat bulgy chest and noticable hips, is female.
It's nice to see a Nobel prize awarded for something we all learned NOT to do in elementary school! d'Hooft used a mathematical trick called "renormalization" to allow the Standard Model -- QED (quantum electrodynamics, i.e. electrons) plus QCD (quantum chromodynamics, i.e., quarks) -- to produce the "correct" results instead of nonsense (infinite) answers. Unfortunately, renormalization consists of a somewhat more sophisticated version of the following equations:
A/0 = B/0 {yes, that's dividing both sides by zero}
Therefore A = B.
Needless to say, this technique can, properly applied, solve ALL problems. Physicists are exceedingly unhappy about having to renormalize QED/QCD (which generated it's own set of Nobels for people like Feynman, Weinberg, Glashow, and Salam, among others) and it's widely felt this means the Standard Model is not the last word, even though it gives exquisitely accurate predictions that have been been subsequently borne out in the real world. Unfortunately, trying to apply the same techniques to a quantum theory of gravitation leads to infinities that cannot be renormalized (so far, anyway), so hopes of a TOE (theory of everything) are still nebulous. Nevertheless, a whole bunch of theoretical physicists are devoting their lives to that holy grail and its Nobel.
"Born in Lahore in colonial India in 1910, Chandrasekhar was the nephew of India's only other physics Nobelist (1930), Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman."
Hmm, that's quite a remarkable coincidence of both physics and name.
Not really. Chandrasekhar's mother (Raman's sister) intensely disliked her brother and, when she had a bright child, brought him up almost from birth to be bigger, better, and more famous than his Nobel-prize-winning uncle. For instance, Raman never left India, which somewhat limited his international fame, while Chandra's mother almost forced him to go to Cambridge for graduate studies. (His professor at Cambridge, Eddington, thought Chandra's ideas on white dwarves, neutron stars, and black holes were too outlandish, and so Chandra migrated to Chicago where he spent the next fifty years, duly collecting his Nobel for said outlandish ideas.)
By the way, Chandra's being born in Lahore was an embarrassing accident, his father being posted there at the time. In reality he was just as Tamil as Raman, and went to Madras University. (I've met a few southern Indians who like to point out things like this, along with the fact that the famous mathematician Srinivasa Aaiyangar Ramanujan was another Tamil, from a village quite near Raman/Chandra.)
According to the FAQ at his web page Knuth plans to finish Volume 4 (Combinatorial Algorithms) in 2004, and Volume 5 (Syntactic Algorithms) in 2009. Then he will revise Vol 1-3 yet again, followed by a one-volume "Readers Digest" version of 1-5. THEN come Volume 6 (Context-Free Languages) and 7 (Compiler Techniques), "but only if the things I want to say about those topics are still relevant and still haven't been said." In other words, he has his life planned out until about age 90.
PS - I went to Case with Don, and well remember the IBM 650 mentioned in the dedication to Volume 1, along with the SOAP assembler. I don't intimidate easily now, let alone when I was a teenager, but.... Hell of a note when you're 60 years old and a highlight is that you once sat at the next keypunch to a genius.
I am currently in my large bathtub, literally up to my (sore) neck in hot water, with my laptop on a large removable shelf spanning the tub about four or five inches above the water line. Every time I think my circulation needs a kick-start I simply hit the "on" button for the tub's jets. Every time I get cold, I run in more hot water. My practical limitations are (a) when I must have more coffee (it's 3 AM and my wife isn't going to be too cooperative on that front) or (b) my bladder reaches ultimate overload.
The laptop is set so it is slightly higher at the back, slanting the keyboard down so I can see/use it more easily. In practice I do most of my net surfing from the tub, and then I can hunker down so the only parts of me above the water line are my eyes and the hand controlling the mouse. The power supply brick is in a splashproof spot and is on a GFI besides, so everything is safe - except, of course, for trying to explain things to my wife if I should ever actually screw up and drop the laptop into the water.
BTW, the shelf is about 18" wide, so my midsection is decently covered, and friends and family can wander in and out without any averted eyes or my scrambling for something opaque!
Seriously, I've got significant neck problems, and I spend maybe four hours a day under water, in much more comfort than sitting at a chair. If I'm not using the laptop, I'm reading, using a stand sitting on the shelf to hold my book upright hands-free. Oh yes, I also have a pair of "terminal glasses" so I comfortably focus at the two-foot distance of screen or book; trying to read something higher than my head with bifocals would not further the ultimate goal of making my neck feel better.
I hope they've saved the ovum etc. for the tigers. Because it may already be too late to save them.
Not necessary and not really true. It may indeed be too late to save tigers in the wild, , but that's because they are very large predators needing very very large hunting areas, something incompatible with civilization. OTOH, every zoo in the world is up to its armpits in tiger cubs, because tigers are exceedingly prolific in captivity. Think of very large housecats. Also, like most cats of all sizes, they do not really like to exert themselves without need, so they take to captivity/domestication quite well. "Hey, if somebody else is gonna bring me my food..."
So: Wild tigers - probably not. Domestic tigers - definitely. No need for saving their DNA.
You may have been thinking of the Cheetah, which does not breed well, either in the wild or in captivity, because of genetic defects.
The other one was a biggie, though. They say that hCar is about 100 times the mass of the sun (right) and shines 5 times brighter (wrong). I'm guessing what was actually said was either "10^5 times brighter" or "5 orders of magnitude brighter". Might also have been "5 magnitudes brighter", but that would only be 100x brighter, which wouldn't be right.
Almost certainly the original was "five million times brighter" than the Sun. The bolometric absolute magnitude of Eta Car is about -12 at the moment and the Sun is +5. That's a factor of 6 million. The visual difference is a little less, because a LBV (Luminous Blue Variable) star like Eta Car emits much of its power in the ultraviolet. (Other notable LBVs are P Cygni and maybe Mu Cephei in our galaxy, and S Doradus in the Large Magellenic Cloud. (There are only a half dozen LBVs at any one time out of a couple hundred billion stars in a galaxy. They are exceedingly rare in the first place, and exceedingly short-lived besides.))
Re:Quality Assurance Tester
on
Rugged Laptops
·
· Score: 1
This reminds me of a comment made ten or twenty years ago by a photographer on the definition of a perfect "professional" camera: One which he could use to take pictures Monday through Friday, and as a hockey puck on the weekends. It was funny when he said it, but these days I suppose one could easily produce a ruggedized CCD camera that would survive a slap shot.
"...Yuri just felt that this was the right thing to do, just as when he championed SGML, or disabled access to online information...."
Ah, fond memories of both my old English teacher and my Old English teacher. It is amazing what an extra comma can do to destroy a man's reputation. [grin] This excerpt is much more complimentary if the second comma is removed!
Slashdot Mirror
The REAL thing Super-K, Sudbury, et al. want to catch is a decaying proton. QCD theories say that a proton SHOULD be slightly unstable, with a half-life of something god-awful like 10^40 years. Therefore if you get 10^41 protons in one place and watch closely, you should get a hit per month. Unfortunately for the theories, nobody has seen one yet.
RTFA(rticle). This is an intermediate step to the REAL display, which will be 69MPixels. Note also that this gadget isn't really that expensive - 64 PCs and 16 projectors add up to maybe a quarter million bucks. A couple of years from now, maybe 300 MPixels for no more money. Digital IMAX theaters, anyone?
The article mentions that one of these toys is under construction down the road at UT. I can see I'm going to have to be extra nice to my lapsed contacts in the CS department!
As has been said, the Law in its impartial majesty makes it illegal for both the rich and the poor to sleep under bridges or eat out of garbage cans.
They mostly use "off-the-shelf" receivers and computers, and the Chinese are welcome to them. The only highly classified goodies are the computer programs that analyze the data, and they can be (and were) zapped fairly quickly. In practice, the really good analysis programs aren't necessarily on the plane at all - they can bring back the telemetry tapes and plug 'em into some REAL hardware back at base. The ECM guys must have real-time capability, but that's not necessary for routine surveillance operations.
To quote a close acquaintance who spent some time in this racket, "It is no secret what we're doing. It's HIGHLY secret how good we are."
Forgive my ignorance, but surely if the screen has bad pixels when you buy it then it is faulty, and you can legitimately ask for the laptop to be replaced?
Surely you cannot. The Fine Print explicitly gives the number of bad pixels that the manufacter defines as "acceptable"; less than that and you do not have a warranty issue because it isn't "faulty" by definition. I've seen fine print that allowed FIFTY dead or always-on pixels. Your only real choice is to make sure your vendor has a "no questions asked" refund policy, get your money back, and try some other store and/or manufacturer.
Back in the Good Olde Days, sure. Now, I'd be willing to bet that a census would show the majority of Debian users out there are running Corel Linux with its (almost) single-click installation, and most Corel users would be terrified at the idea of compiling a kernel. Well, at lease those who know what a kernel IS. :)
Note that word "most" in the last paragraph. If you're using Corel Linux on a quad 1GMHz system overclocked to 2G with liquid helium, working 24-7 to develop Gnu/Linux 3.0 and Gnome 3.0, please don't flame me for the generalization. :)
BTW, I think the original author missed one future problem - encrypted information. I foresee hardware-based encryption becoming almost ubiquitous so that most data is encrypted. If encryption becomes universal, then much info will be encrypted that really wasn't burn-before-reading secret. What happens to all that information - of potential interest to historians looking back on the 21st century - under those conditions?
I'm sorry to inform you there aren't any pictures of the inside of the moon. I assume this is what you wanted, since everyone over the age of six knows there certainly isn't any "dark side" on the OUTSIDE of the moon. Or did you mean pictures of the night side? Those are easy - turn off your monitor and you'll see the one I attached to this message.
For your information, Kim, the short action figure in the middle featuring a somewhat bulgy chest and noticable hips, is female.
A/0 = B/0 {yes, that's dividing both sides by zero}
Therefore A = B.
Needless to say, this technique can, properly applied, solve ALL problems. Physicists are exceedingly unhappy about having to renormalize QED/QCD (which generated it's own set of Nobels for people like Feynman, Weinberg, Glashow, and Salam, among others) and it's widely felt this means the Standard Model is not the last word, even though it gives exquisitely accurate predictions that have been been subsequently borne out in the real world. Unfortunately, trying to apply the same techniques to a quantum theory of gravitation leads to infinities that cannot be renormalized (so far, anyway), so hopes of a TOE (theory of everything) are still nebulous. Nevertheless, a whole bunch of theoretical physicists are devoting their lives to that holy grail and its Nobel.
Hmm, that's quite a remarkable coincidence of both physics and name.
Not really. Chandrasekhar's mother (Raman's sister) intensely disliked her brother and, when she had a bright child, brought him up almost from birth to be bigger, better, and more famous than his Nobel-prize-winning uncle. For instance, Raman never left India, which somewhat limited his international fame, while Chandra's mother almost forced him to go to Cambridge for graduate studies. (His professor at Cambridge, Eddington, thought Chandra's ideas on white dwarves, neutron stars, and black holes were too outlandish, and so Chandra migrated to Chicago where he spent the next fifty years, duly collecting his Nobel for said outlandish ideas.)
By the way, Chandra's being born in Lahore was an embarrassing accident, his father being posted there at the time. In reality he was just as Tamil as Raman, and went to Madras University. (I've met a few southern Indians who like to point out things like this, along with the fact that the famous mathematician Srinivasa Aaiyangar Ramanujan was another Tamil, from a village quite near Raman/Chandra.)
PS - I went to Case with Don, and well remember the IBM 650 mentioned in the dedication to Volume 1, along with the SOAP assembler. I don't intimidate easily now, let alone when I was a teenager, but.... Hell of a note when you're 60 years old and a highlight is that you once sat at the next keypunch to a genius.
The laptop is set so it is slightly higher at the back, slanting the keyboard down so I can see/use it more easily. In practice I do most of my net surfing from the tub, and then I can hunker down so the only parts of me above the water line are my eyes and the hand controlling the mouse. The power supply brick is in a splashproof spot and is on a GFI besides, so everything is safe - except, of course, for trying to explain things to my wife if I should ever actually screw up and drop the laptop into the water.
BTW, the shelf is about 18" wide, so my midsection is decently covered, and friends and family can wander in and out without any averted eyes or my scrambling for something opaque!
Seriously, I've got significant neck problems, and I spend maybe four hours a day under water, in much more comfort than sitting at a chair. If I'm not using the laptop, I'm reading, using a stand sitting on the shelf to hold my book upright hands-free. Oh yes, I also have a pair of "terminal glasses" so I comfortably focus at the two-foot distance of screen or book; trying to read something higher than my head with bifocals would not further the ultimate goal of making my neck feel better.
Not necessary and not really true. It may indeed be too late to save tigers in the wild, , but that's because they are very large predators needing very very large hunting areas, something incompatible with civilization. OTOH, every zoo in the world is up to its armpits in tiger cubs, because tigers are exceedingly prolific in captivity. Think of very large housecats. Also, like most cats of all sizes, they do not really like to exert themselves without need, so they take to captivity/domestication quite well. "Hey, if somebody else is gonna bring me my food..."
So: Wild tigers - probably not. Domestic tigers - definitely. No need for saving their DNA.
You may have been thinking of the Cheetah, which does not breed well, either in the wild or in captivity, because of genetic defects.
The other one was a biggie, though. They say that hCar is about 100 times the mass of the sun (right) and shines 5 times brighter (wrong). I'm guessing what was actually said was either "10^5 times brighter" or "5 orders of magnitude brighter". Might also have been "5 magnitudes brighter", but that would only be 100x brighter, which wouldn't be right.
Almost certainly the original was "five million times brighter" than the Sun. The bolometric absolute magnitude of Eta Car is about -12 at the moment and the Sun is +5. That's a factor of 6 million. The visual difference is a little less, because a LBV (Luminous Blue Variable) star like Eta Car emits much of its power in the ultraviolet. (Other notable LBVs are P Cygni and maybe Mu Cephei in our galaxy, and S Doradus in the Large Magellenic Cloud. (There are only a half dozen LBVs at any one time out of a couple hundred billion stars in a galaxy. They are exceedingly rare in the first place, and exceedingly short-lived besides.))
This reminds me of a comment made ten or twenty years ago by a photographer on the definition of a perfect "professional" camera: One which he could use to take pictures Monday through Friday, and as a hockey puck on the weekends. It was funny when he said it, but these days I suppose one could easily produce a ruggedized CCD camera that would survive a slap shot.
Ah, fond memories of both my old English teacher and my Old English teacher. It is amazing what an extra comma can do to destroy a man's reputation. [grin] This excerpt is much more complimentary if the second comma is removed!