No, maintaining large distances and insisting on never using brakes lowers the throughput of the highway. The same people will want to try to use the highway (very few will switch to surface streets, because they can take even less) and your 3 seconds will end up being 3 feet because they'll all be going 3mph.
The problem is slow reactions (and is tied to the 20kph phase velocity of the jam in the circle). If everyone snapped back up to the speed limit as soon as they could, the jam zone would shrink, and everyone would be out sooner. But, this requires quick acceleration and braking.
Tailgating is not the problem as long as it causes no accidents, and if there's already congestion, it won't.
Krauss has posted a mea culpa on Woit's Not Even Wrong blog (http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=621#comments), apologizing for implying that the act of observation caused any sort of damage. He claims to have meant that observations of the CMB can constrain where we are in the course of the heat death of the universe.
Satellite observations speeding up heat death is so outrageous that it's silly to even rail against it, especially when we're talking about something as messy as a the whole friggin universe. Besides, the paper is talking about time-scales of decay rather than mechanisms for "backaction" ----- keyword to look for, for the type of thing the article was hinting at.
Most of the papers posted on Arxiv (especially the ones from otherwise untrusted scientists I am willing to believe) are in the exact format of the journal it will be accepted in. Arxiv papers benefit from the industry of peer-reviewed journals, even if they are nominally free.
Popular perception, perhaps. That's because more people go there, and more people care about USN&WR than care to hear the facts. Just ask an Asian parent.
Search for the THES World Rankings (it's a pdf). Caltech has been the best training ground for young scientists for the past decade. Look at the data for yourself.
They get into better grad schools (again, data available online), have higher starting jobs, work harder, play more sports, enjoy much better weather, have a huge legacy (Feynman, Millikan, Einstein, Hale, Beckman, Richter, and more) and have much more depth in education than anyone out there. They write the important papers, and do the hottest research.
If you want to be a scientist, Caltech is the place to be.
That's it. I'm tired of the editors not caring enough to read their own site, or preview their own posts, or spell words correctly.
I'm tired of the same old jokes and misconceptions being corrected every time (server's screeching to a halt, or "encrypting" file sharing systems to catch the RIAA with the DMCA). I'm tired of all the lame Microsoft bashing and Linux worshipping non-insightful commenting that show up in just about every article.
This is site isn't worth the time I spend on it, and I doubt it ever will be. Did you read the QC Language article earlier? The comments? Nothing but a bunch of hoo-haw. I can't wait for the dupe, so that Taco can say he broke the laws of physics by copying quantum information.
Slashdot is going in my block lists--I'm redirecting it to 127.0.0.1. I don't know where I'll get my news. Probably news.google.com. Maybe I'll try to start reading PRL when I need something distracting. This place has just gone horribly downhill. Even browsing at +3 isn't enough.
If I were you, I'd leave now. It's not worth it. Do something better with your life.
I did research in a laser lab for about a year, and learned to be very wary of the danger of lasers. Now, these may be different beasts, but the general information I'm about to provide is correct.
Laser light doesn't have to be in the visible range to blind. One of the large, pulsed lasers that I worked with was invisible had a mode that was invisible in addition to the main, visible mode. The problem was, the visible mode wasn't always activated, so you had to be very careful not to get at eye level with the beam table, because while it's tough to tell where light might be accidently reflected, for visible ranges, it's even tougher (ie, impossible) with that range.
We had beam targets that were sensitive to non-visible ranges, but you don't want to have to trust those, and I don't think that could be applied to these battlefield conditions.
Idiot! Can't you tell that this is the very thing he was alluding to?
For all you trolls out there, here's a little lesson in humor for you:
When someone intelligent says something, stupid/ignorant or otherwise, that begs a certain response--something that's so obvious it's almost as if they're setting themselves up for an insult or joke--guess what? They are!! That's the joke! You're supposed to understand the joke, laugh inside, and perhaps chuckle on the outside.
For those at the head of the class (and I hesitate to mention this to the Slashdot crowd), you can take it even further. You-the-other-person might respond in a stupid/ignorant or other manner, which just begs a reply from the other person, but which is *not* in the spirit of the expected reply. Get it? So that *they* are tempted to reply quickly.
Now, it's possibly you were using this second tactic in the parent. The problem is, the combination of your fairly awkward grammar here, and your lame joke on the last McDonalds article tend to point the other way.
But please. Let's try and have bring in some intelligent humor here. It's really lame how many "That is the sound of a webserv3r grinding to a halt" jokes still get modded up. Honk if you feel my pain.
I remember my first real experience with computers--my friend had a commodore 64, and we used to play on it all the time. He had tons of games, but it was frustrating sometimes trying to get them to run. The C64 had a weird prompt backed by a blue screen (!!) and you needed to follow a fairly complex set of instructions to get any games to actually load.
But it was this very machinery that led me to experiment with basic on my own PC, back in the day. Ah, the memories...
Woah, dude, hold it. It's in these companies' best interests to make money. There is no rational way for them to exist, or operate, except to make money. The ratings system may be archaic, but you can bet your ballooning bottom that it's been updated, and that it works.
The networks probably have at least one mathematician each guaranteeing them that it makes good business sense to poll people a certain way, and cut certain series. And that's pretty much all we can expect, unless they're really incompetent.
If you think that there's a gross injustice going on here, why don't you do an internship at a network company, get your hands a little dirty, and then come back to show us what's happing in la-la land.
I, for one, think there's more interesting applications than TV statistics out there. I've never seen an episode of Farscape in my life, but it sure sounds good:)
The problem is, most students, even up to junior high, and highschool in certain subjects, aren't prepared to learn what "electrisity" is, and would be completely unable to interpret data from any "expiriemnt" worth doing.
In fact, most colleges don't teach the real truth about magnetism--that magnetism is just an obvious consequence of the standard rules of electricty and special relativity.
I remember science classes in elementary school and junior high, and the books were pretty non-quantitative. I think we might've devoted a whole year to "Earth Science", where we talked about earthquake faults, and common landforms, and everyone's favorite: technical words for climates of the world. Yay.
This sort of thing is all well and good for learning about neat phenomena that occur in real life, but it's about as far from real science as most history. What we really need is to step up the use of math in education.
That's right, math, almost every normal student's least favorite subject. The quicker we ramp up students' "mathematical maturity" and ability to handle equations and mental math, or guess the qualitative behavor of expressions, the sooner we can add real meat to the sciences. Math has to be just about one of the highest brain processes available to us humans, and we should be emphasizing it as much as possible.
The only other thing I wish teachers would encourage is avid reading! Reading is incredibly helpful for the developing brain. It also introduces the student to stuff they might like, and better reading skills just speeds up the learning process in general.
Ah, but I wish that I'd been encouraged to memorize more stuff as a kid. It's the tough tasks your brain takes on early in life that prepare it for later. The more you challenge a young brain, the better off it'll be later in life.
When I was a kid, I read a lot of books. Like, non-stop, no-social-life, all-day in class. I attribute any and all intelligence bonus I have, at this point, to my early reading. Of course, once highschool started, and especially now in college, I had no time to read for fun, and I find myself having shorter attention spans when trying to read textbooks--I think now I know what it was like for those kids in elementary school who didn't like to read. That's how it goes, though, I can only hope I'm not ruining my brain with all this sleep deprivation and lack of reading.
Final comment: anyone who assigns more memorization that cutting/pasting/coloring stupid projects is ok in my book. Also, mental math should be an integral part of science classes. The more the better.
Am I the only one that thinks the wearable market, at least for right now, is a little overrated? Most people will admit to at least a small amount of suspicion that technology is taking over our lives. Many mention that they leave their cell phone's and PDA's *behind* when they want to be more productive, and express concern about the amount of technology (like cells, complex radio setups) that distracts drivers.
But HUD's in glasses, wireless pens, etc... isn't this all just geared more towards satisfying the cliche markets? Is there anything useful out there?
I can imagine a purpose for current PDA's--they're an appropriate size, and with a screen that can display a substantial amount of information, all with an acceptable battery life. And I can imagine that Bluetooth would be useful in a portable PDA-like system, but it seems like just like buzz on these "prototypes."
Woah, dude, you can do a lot of stuff in SR without calculus. In fact... I go to a pretty respectable college where we spent half a term on SR (so that we could understand E&M later). I'm pretty sure we didn't use any calculus in that whole section.
I do agree with your point, though. This guy is a fool, too.
Not so. There are several detectors around the world (TAMA in Japan... hehe, one of the few words I know) and LIGO in the US (Sponsored by Caltech/MIT) as well as a couple others in Europe, one in Australia. The gravity waves they're trying to detect are generally caused by neutron star pulsars, and cause stretching of space of amplitude like... 10^-18m or so, I think.
True, LIGO (which, btw, is the NSF's largest project ever--$500 mil) is not at full operational sensitivity yet, but it does work, and it is improving. The two LIGO (laser interferometer gravitational wave observatory) stations are in Louisiana and... Washington. Funny how politics works, eh?
Dot product works too. In fact, the paper probably uses "inner product" of which the dot product is the canonical example. He was uses cross product because they usually teach that by Algebra 2 in HS, and let's hope most slashdotters are that knowledgeable.
If the dot product (IP) between two vectors is zero, they're orthogonal.
How about this? Every encrypt an NTFS file and later regret it because you lost the password/user profile? Just use the backup wizard provided with XP. Copy it to some backup location using the option "remove security restrictions" and you're home free when you restore it. Pretty lame, if you ask me, but it helped when I needed it.
Actually, DMB just changed their taping policies. You're not technically supposed to "trade tapes" without personal interaction, now. There's still tons of other jam bands that allow swapping and DC++. Just hop on a channel and ask for someone's favorite obscure show.
Woah there. Have any of the mods actually read any Vinge?
Deepness in the Sky is the most boring, unprofessional, unimaginative Sci-fi novel I've read in the past 4 years. In fact, it's the only book I've checked out from the library in the past 4 years and *didn't finish*.
He's some prof at a no-name university where he has time to write junk like this, and trust me, it's not worth your time to read.
Try Haldeman's The Forever Peace, or Huxley's Brave New World (both classics). There's some interesting themes between the two.
Also, anything by Asimov--some of it's slow, but it's worth it. Finally, I *highly* recommend Willis' To Say Nothing of The Dog. It's a great book, full of puns, and non-geek humor that'll make you wanna sign up for a class on Latin classics. It's all about time-travel, but all from a non-techie perspective.
For my thoughts on Snow Crash (eh...) see an above AC post.
Slashdot Mirror
No, maintaining large distances and insisting on never using brakes lowers the throughput of the highway. The same people will want to try to use the highway (very few will switch to surface streets, because they can take even less) and your 3 seconds will end up being 3 feet because they'll all be going 3mph.
The problem is slow reactions (and is tied to the 20kph phase velocity of the jam in the circle). If everyone snapped back up to the speed limit as soon as they could, the jam zone would shrink, and everyone would be out sooner. But, this requires quick acceleration and braking.
Tailgating is not the problem as long as it causes no accidents, and if there's already congestion, it won't.
Krauss has posted a mea culpa on Woit's Not Even Wrong blog (http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=621#comments), apologizing for implying that the act of observation caused any sort of damage. He claims to have meant that observations of the CMB can constrain where we are in the course of the heat death of the universe.
Satellite observations speeding up heat death is so outrageous that it's silly to even rail against it, especially when we're talking about something as messy as a the whole friggin universe. Besides, the paper is talking about time-scales of decay rather than mechanisms for "backaction" ----- keyword to look for, for the type of thing the article was hinting at.
Most of the papers posted on Arxiv (especially the ones from otherwise untrusted
scientists I am willing to believe) are in the exact format of the journal it
will be accepted in. Arxiv papers benefit from the industry of peer-reviewed
journals, even if they are nominally free.
Popular perception, perhaps. That's because more people go there, and more people care about USN&WR than care to hear the facts. Just ask an Asian parent.
Search for the THES World Rankings (it's a pdf). Caltech has been the best training ground for young scientists for the past decade. Look at the data for yourself.
They get into better grad schools (again, data available online), have higher starting jobs, work harder, play more sports, enjoy much better weather, have a huge legacy (Feynman, Millikan, Einstein, Hale, Beckman, Richter, and more) and have much more depth in education than anyone out there. They write the important papers, and do the hottest research.
If you want to be a scientist, Caltech is the place to be.
I wish I could put everyone who's posted on this topic as a foe. What is wrong with you people?
This is not innovation. We've had this in Soviet Russia for years now.
That's it. I'm tired of the editors not caring enough to read their own site, or preview their own posts, or spell words correctly.
I'm tired of the same old jokes and misconceptions being corrected every time (server's screeching to a halt, or "encrypting" file sharing systems to catch the RIAA with the DMCA). I'm tired of all the lame Microsoft bashing and Linux worshipping non-insightful commenting that show up in just about every article.
This is site isn't worth the time I spend on it, and I doubt it ever will be. Did you read the QC Language article earlier? The comments? Nothing but a bunch of hoo-haw. I can't wait for the dupe, so that Taco can say he broke the laws of physics by copying quantum information.
Slashdot is going in my block lists--I'm redirecting it to 127.0.0.1. I don't know where I'll get my news. Probably news.google.com. Maybe I'll try to start reading PRL when I need something distracting. This place has just gone horribly downhill. Even browsing at +3 isn't enough.
If I were you, I'd leave now. It's not worth it. Do something better with your life.
I did research in a laser lab for about a year, and learned to be very wary of the danger of lasers. Now, these may be different beasts, but the general information I'm about to provide is correct.
Laser light doesn't have to be in the visible range to blind. One of the large, pulsed lasers that I worked with was invisible had a mode that was invisible in addition to the main, visible mode. The problem was, the visible mode wasn't always activated, so you had to be very careful not to get at eye level with the beam table, because while it's tough to tell where light might be accidently reflected, for visible ranges, it's even tougher (ie, impossible) with that range.
We had beam targets that were sensitive to non-visible ranges, but you don't want to have to trust those, and I don't think that could be applied to these battlefield conditions.
Idiot! Can't you tell that this is the very thing he was alluding to?
For all you trolls out there, here's a little lesson in humor for you:
When someone intelligent says something, stupid/ignorant or otherwise, that begs a certain response--something that's so obvious it's almost as if they're setting themselves up for an insult or joke--guess what? They are!! That's the joke! You're supposed to understand the joke, laugh inside, and perhaps chuckle on the outside.
For those at the head of the class (and I hesitate to mention this to the Slashdot crowd), you can take it even further. You-the-other-person might respond in a stupid/ignorant or other manner, which just begs a reply from the other person, but which is *not* in the spirit of the expected reply. Get it? So that *they* are tempted to reply quickly.
Now, it's possibly you were using this second tactic in the parent. The problem is, the combination of your fairly awkward grammar here, and your lame joke on the last McDonalds article tend to point the other way.
But please. Let's try and have bring in some intelligent humor here. It's really lame how many "That is the sound of a webserv3r grinding to a halt" jokes still get modded up. Honk if you feel my pain.
</karmaburn>
I remember my first real experience with computers--my friend had a commodore 64, and we used to play on it all the time. He had tons of games, but it was frustrating sometimes trying to get them to run. The C64 had a weird prompt backed by a blue screen (!!) and you needed to follow a fairly complex set of instructions to get any games to actually load.
But it was this very machinery that led me to experiment with basic on my own PC, back in the day. Ah, the memories...
Woah, dude, hold it. It's in these companies' best interests to make money. There is no rational way for them to exist, or operate, except to make money. The ratings system may be archaic, but you can bet your ballooning bottom that it's been updated, and that it works.
:)
The networks probably have at least one mathematician each guaranteeing them that it makes good business sense to poll people a certain way, and cut certain series. And that's pretty much all we can expect, unless they're really incompetent.
If you think that there's a gross injustice going on here, why don't you do an internship at a network company, get your hands a little dirty, and then come back to show us what's happing in la-la land.
I, for one, think there's more interesting applications than TV statistics out there. I've never seen an episode of Farscape in my life, but it sure sounds good
The problem is, most students, even up to junior high, and highschool in certain subjects, aren't prepared to learn what "electrisity" is, and would be completely unable to interpret data from any "expiriemnt" worth doing.
In fact, most colleges don't teach the real truth about magnetism--that magnetism is just an obvious consequence of the standard rules of electricty and special relativity.
I remember science classes in elementary school and junior high, and the books were pretty non-quantitative. I think we might've devoted a whole year to "Earth Science", where we talked about earthquake faults, and common landforms, and everyone's favorite: technical words for climates of the world. Yay.
This sort of thing is all well and good for learning about neat phenomena that occur in real life, but it's about as far from real science as most history. What we really need is to step up the use of math in education.
That's right, math, almost every normal student's least favorite subject. The quicker we ramp up students' "mathematical maturity" and ability to handle equations and mental math, or guess the qualitative behavor of expressions, the sooner we can add real meat to the sciences. Math has to be just about one of the highest brain processes available to us humans, and we should be emphasizing it as much as possible.
The only other thing I wish teachers would encourage is avid reading! Reading is incredibly helpful for the developing brain. It also introduces the student to stuff they might like, and better reading skills just speeds up the learning process in general.
Ah, but I wish that I'd been encouraged to memorize more stuff as a kid. It's the tough tasks your brain takes on early in life that prepare it for later. The more you challenge a young brain, the better off it'll be later in life.
When I was a kid, I read a lot of books. Like, non-stop, no-social-life, all-day in class. I attribute any and all intelligence bonus I have, at this point, to my early reading. Of course, once highschool started, and especially now in college, I had no time to read for fun, and I find myself having shorter attention spans when trying to read textbooks--I think now I know what it was like for those kids in elementary school who didn't like to read. That's how it goes, though, I can only hope I'm not ruining my brain with all this sleep deprivation and lack of reading.
Final comment: anyone who assigns more memorization that cutting/pasting/coloring stupid projects is ok in my book. Also, mental math should be an integral part of science classes. The more the better.
Am I the only one that thinks the wearable market, at least for right now, is a little overrated? Most people will admit to at least a small amount of suspicion that technology is taking over our lives. Many mention that they leave their cell phone's and PDA's *behind* when they want to be more productive, and express concern about the amount of technology (like cells, complex radio setups) that distracts drivers.
But HUD's in glasses, wireless pens, etc... isn't this all just geared more towards satisfying the cliche markets? Is there anything useful out there?
I can imagine a purpose for current PDA's--they're an appropriate size, and with a screen that can display a substantial amount of information, all with an acceptable battery life. And I can imagine that Bluetooth would be useful in a portable PDA-like system, but it seems like just like buzz on these "prototypes."
Woah, dude, you can do a lot of stuff in SR without calculus. In fact... I go to a pretty respectable college where we spent half a term on SR (so that we could understand E&M later). I'm pretty sure we didn't use any calculus in that whole section.
I do agree with your point, though. This guy is a fool, too.
Not so. There are several detectors around the world (TAMA in Japan... hehe, one of the few words I know) and LIGO in the US (Sponsored by Caltech/MIT) as well as a couple others in Europe, one in Australia. The gravity waves they're trying to detect are generally caused by neutron star pulsars, and cause stretching of space of amplitude like... 10^-18m or so, I think.
... Washington. Funny how politics works, eh?
True, LIGO (which, btw, is the NSF's largest project ever--$500 mil) is not at full operational sensitivity yet, but it does work, and it is improving. The two LIGO (laser interferometer gravitational wave observatory) stations are in Louisiana and
> (and 15 minutes of correcting it's massive mistakes)
You weren't making... grammar changes, were you?
Sorry, with error correcting and inefficiencies, it doesn't scale that easily.
Canadians and their math...
Dot product works too. In fact, the paper probably uses "inner product" of which the dot product is the canonical example. He was uses cross product because they usually teach that by Algebra 2 in HS, and let's hope most slashdotters are that knowledgeable.
If the dot product (IP) between two vectors is zero, they're orthogonal.
About, a year, realistically, considering the 0 money they give for finaid.
MIT doesn't want you. Go someplace where you're appreciated, and make a difference.
Dude, you sound like my old Matrix Theory prof, who cycled on the weekends. You better not ask me for a strict definition of integrability.
Perhaps the lack of comments by current customers indicates one of their major business problems...
On the other hand, maybe all their customers just haven't gotten new service yet.
How about this? Every encrypt an NTFS file and later regret it because you lost the password/user profile? Just use the backup wizard provided with XP. Copy it to some backup location using the option "remove security restrictions" and you're home free when you restore it. Pretty lame, if you ask me, but it helped when I needed it.
Actually, DMB just changed their taping policies. You're not technically supposed to "trade tapes" without personal interaction, now. There's still tons of other jam bands that allow swapping and DC++. Just hop on a channel and ask for someone's favorite obscure show.
Woah there. Have any of the mods actually read any Vinge?
Deepness in the Sky is the most boring, unprofessional, unimaginative Sci-fi novel I've read in the past 4 years. In fact, it's the only book I've checked out from the library in the past 4 years and *didn't finish*.
He's some prof at a no-name university where he has time to write junk like this, and trust me, it's not worth your time to read.
Try Haldeman's The Forever Peace, or Huxley's Brave New World (both classics). There's some interesting themes between the two.
Also, anything by Asimov--some of it's slow, but it's worth it. Finally, I *highly* recommend Willis' To Say Nothing of The Dog. It's a great book, full of puns, and non-geek humor that'll make you wanna sign up for a class on Latin classics. It's all about time-travel, but all from a non-techie perspective.
For my thoughts on Snow Crash (eh...) see an above AC post.