"Thermodynamics is all right but some of its laws get quirky at sufficiently small distances."
Not the first law and certainly not at the scale of a cubic decimeter of water (meaning ~3 x 10^22 water molecules). Without a net change of energy in the water sample to or from an outside source, conservation of energy dictates that one endothermic dissociation of a molecule must be countered by one exothermic combination of a molecule elsewhere in the system. The reason pH has to be defined based on a fixed temperature to begin with is because of what "temperature" is: a measure of the average kinetic energy of the molecules involved. A change in the activity of the molecules in the water sample, a change in its temperature, would require a change of the energy in a water sample, at which point you'd be more concerned with thermal expansion. So long as the temperature is constant, so is the dissociation constant (the ratio of free ions to water molecules).
"Maybe it's because of where they weighed it - the strength of gravity is not the same all over the planet,"
It would matter only if your method of measuring weight is based on the amount of force gravity exerts on it (such as measuring the compression of a spring). Realistically, using an artifact mass means using a beam balance, which relies on measuring the relative difference in the forces on the opposite ends of the beam, rather than measuring the force in absolute terms.
"And therefore, if its weight is changing, isn't it actually possible that the mass has remained constant"
If you're using an artifact as your standard of mass, realistically it means you're using a beam balance to compare other things to it, which means you are indeed measuring mass directly (unless the force of gravity is perceptibly different on different ends of the beam balance).
"One would think it'll still be a better reference than a chunk of rusty metal kept under lock."
They tried that. But water evaporates, dissolves things, is grossly susceptible to thermal expansion, and is far more susceptible to compression by atmospheric pressure. And don't forget that anything that alters its density also alters its buoyancy in the atmosphere.
Far better to find a substance like platinum-iridium (or even stainless steel) that doesn't corrode appreciably over the course of decades. The "cubic decimeter of water" definition was precise enough until the world industrialized and precision was required for manufacturing.
"if your scales show weight X on empty container (never mind what it is)"
Uh, no, I very much mind what it is. I need to know the container's density in order to adjust for atmospheric buoyancy. Unless you want to try to measure this liquid water in a vacuum...
"We can't use water as a reference since the molecules in the water are constantly splitting into ions and reforming as molecules."
OK, exactly how far up your ass did you have to reach to pull that one out?
See, we have this thing called "The First Law of Thermodynamics." At the molecular scale, water molecules don't just decide to break up and go their own way willy-nilly, not the least because both elements involved (hydrogen and oxygen) really don't like being alone (the two hydrogen atoms can go off on their own merry way as a diatomic molecule, but the oxygen will be lonely). Breaking molecular bonds in water takes energy, otherwise cracking water to produce hydrogen would be more cost-effective than cracking methanol (the carbon atoms have a more independent personality and are better able to get over any rejection issues it might have).
Beyond that, even if the energy to crack an individual water molecule were as trivially small as you believe, the energy would have to come from somewhere. Cracking water is endothermic, but so is making it (oxygen atoms, at least, need to be pried apart against their will first, assuming they're not in some kinky threeway), but even if one of those two reactions was exothermic, the energy required to do one act must necessarily equal the energy released by the other, meaning a net change in energy, and a net change in the number of water molecules, of zero.
The real reasons we don't use water are:
Corrosiveness (which you already covered)
Compressibility (there is no such thing as an incompressible substance, but liquids are more susceptible than solids)
Thermal expansion (something else solids are less susceptible to)
Last, but not least: evaporation
"So it is essentially impossible to get 1000 cm^3 of "pure" water."
Very easy, actually; the problem is maintaining its purity after it cools down from superheated steam.
"That's one reason we are trying to make a perfect sphere to replace the reference kilogram. "
Actually, there are a number of different proposals. One involves fixing the Avogadro constant as you say, but the other involves basing mass in terms of an electrical current through a device called a watt balance, which would reverse the current relationship between mass and electric current.
"You could specify the density of water at $PRESSURE and at its maximum density (somewhere around 4 C)."
Self-referential. Pressure is (force)/(length^2), or breaking it down further, (mass)/[(time^2)(length)]. This is why BIPM abandoned the "cubic deciliter of water" definition in favor of the current platinum-iridium artifact (less compressible, less affected by temperature, etc).
"The only problem with doing this for high-precision measurements is: what is water? Some fraction of the hydrogen will be deuterium, and that'll throw off the density. What fraction of the hydrogen should be deuterium for "standard water"?"
Not an issue, as the average rates of naturally occurring isotopes in the universe is already known (hence the non-integer masses in periodic tables). You'd have a greater problem establishing the purity of the water sample in question, at least if you insist on using it in its liquid state; they don't call it the "universal solvent" for nothing.
"It's all about the exercise-implicative control scheme and the very pointedly stressed family atmosphere."
Uh... wha? Even if you weren't full of hot air, it's the control scheme for playing games and the atmosphere for playing games. Nobody ever bought a video game console just to keep it on the shelf, never playing it, just rubbing it with a diaper.
"You want games? Only one of the three consoles mentioned in this news blurb can actually boast at least a full dozen legitimately great games."
But you can get a Wii and at least two games for the same price as a 360. And the games themselves are $10 cheaper. Number of titles doesn't matter if you can't afford them.
"It's still selling faster than any console on the market..."
Integrate. It has sold more, but is not selling faster, not by a long shot. I believe at this point that the 360 (but not the PS3) is selling faster worldwide.
And unless something catastrophic happens to Wii's momentum, not even the total sales record will stand for much longer.
"This reads as "He runs faster, despite his competitor, Bob, has no legs.""
No, it reads as "He has passed his competitor, despite Bob's head start." Being faster is a logical conclusion inferred by the statement, not the statement itself. The statement is that "X has gained more ground," rather than the first derivative of "X is moving faster."
"down here in Colombia (South America) you can get a wii quite easily"
Your PAL Wii won't work on our NTSC televisions. North of Mexico, we need to share Wii hardware with Japan, while you only need to compete with Europe and mainland Asia. Fixing the ratio of NTSC-to-PAL units manufactured takes weeks if not months to finally get from retooling the assembly line to the store shelf.
"but I wonder if Nintendo has shills trolling the/. boards?"
While I certainly can't guarantee that the answer is "no," I can point out that there is no need; note the almost complete lack of qualifiers in the statement "Wii has sold more consoles worldwide than its current-gen competitors." Not shipped, not manufactured, not in region X or region Y (though it would be interesting to see if it can pass the 360 in North America specifically), and not "in this past week." Without a need for marketspeak, there's no need for shills.
Contrast with a posting over at Sony Defense Force (a classic example of shilling/fanboyism at its worst*), which has to specify "this particular week," "in a particular market," and "more than a particular competitor" (I laughed at the absence of the Wii and the DS in the provided bar graph).
*I swear, if it's not satire and they're not on the Sony payroll, these fanboys resemble a cult so much that I'd sleep more soundly if I knew there was a covert FBI agent or two among their ranks.
Only Breath of Fire II and any later releases. Capcom wasn't sure about dabbling with RPG publishing outside of Japan, so they licensed the international publishing rights of the first one to Squaresoft, of "We'd rather charge $30 for Final Fantasy on the PSP than $5-$6 on the Virtual Console, and why isn't it selling very well?" fame. Even with this title I wouldn't hold my breath.
"Similarly, for every gazillionaire who was in the right place at the right time and capitalized, there are 99 people who had similar opportunities and did not make anything of them."
Doubtful; wealth begets wealth. 99 missed opportunities for more money, perhaps, but not 99 more individuals given opportunities.
"And for other factors, like knowing the right people, we can see that this does not always make for a complete success..."
This isn't about success so much as opportunity. One need not succeed even with the right Rolodex, but one will likely not have the opportunity to try without it.
"Because circumstances are always changing, there is no perfect balance of these elements which can be pre-defined, so there is no absolute guarantee of becoming a gazillionaire."
Oh, it's easy enough to hazard a guess at the balance: resources, networking, insight, luck, motivation, and hard work, in that order. With resources, people will come to you, making networking a non-issue. Members of your network can provide insight where yours is lacking, which is necessary in recognizing that you have an opportunity to roll the dice. Only after you have what you need and who you need, recognize an opportunity and decide that you want to take it does "hard work" become an issue, and by that point it tends to be fait accompli (hence the 99:1 ratio bandied about). I'd also propose that each factor is an order of magnitude more important than the next, as this would fit the observed data of tens of millions of working poor who struggle to make ends meet versus a paucity of vapid heiresses who never seem to be able to run out of money (a situation helped by keeping wages of the employees of the family business low).
Some days it's hard to tell the difference between socialism and plain ol' cynicism.
"Every rich person I know worked like crazy for years before they made it,"
Original poster didn't deny this, but simply pointed out that, for every rich person that "worked like crazy for years before they made it," there's 99 people who worked just as hard for just as long (if not moreso) that didn't.
It's not that they don't work hard, but that working hard isn't the deciding factor.
Oh no, I am sure to include all Canadians in my laughter at Canada. One of the things that make you so cute is this adorable little blood feud you sillies have for which language is a shibboleth.
I mean, how can one truly laugh at the Great White North without including this bit of emo-esque self-loathing?
Slashdot Mirror
"Thermodynamics is all right but some of its laws get quirky at sufficiently small distances."
Not the first law and certainly not at the scale of a cubic decimeter of water (meaning ~3 x 10^22 water molecules). Without a net change of energy in the water sample to or from an outside source, conservation of energy dictates that one endothermic dissociation of a molecule must be countered by one exothermic combination of a molecule elsewhere in the system. The reason pH has to be defined based on a fixed temperature to begin with is because of what "temperature" is: a measure of the average kinetic energy of the molecules involved. A change in the activity of the molecules in the water sample, a change in its temperature, would require a change of the energy in a water sample, at which point you'd be more concerned with thermal expansion. So long as the temperature is constant, so is the dissociation constant (the ratio of free ions to water molecules).
"E=mc^2"
This means it would take a (comparatively) whopping 1.49241789 * 10^-10 J to change the mass by 1.66053886 * 10^-27 kg, a difference of 17 zeros.
"depend on the configuration of those atoms and their energy states."
Long story short, we call that "temperature."
"Newton's been decomposing for centuries"
Could be worse: he could be Ohm.
Blasphemy! God would be using ed!
They're working on it.
"Maybe it's because of where they weighed it - the strength of gravity is not the same all over the planet,"
It would matter only if your method of measuring weight is based on the amount of force gravity exerts on it (such as measuring the compression of a spring). Realistically, using an artifact mass means using a beam balance, which relies on measuring the relative difference in the forces on the opposite ends of the beam, rather than measuring the force in absolute terms.
"And therefore, if its weight is changing, isn't it actually possible that the mass has remained constant"
If you're using an artifact as your standard of mass, realistically it means you're using a beam balance to compare other things to it, which means you are indeed measuring mass directly (unless the force of gravity is perceptibly different on different ends of the beam balance).
"Well, why wouldn't the copies' atoms be drifting off as well?"
They are, but not at identical rates.
"One would think it'll still be a better reference than a chunk of rusty metal kept under lock."
They tried that. But water evaporates, dissolves things, is grossly susceptible to thermal expansion, and is far more susceptible to compression by atmospheric pressure. And don't forget that anything that alters its density also alters its buoyancy in the atmosphere.
Far better to find a substance like platinum-iridium (or even stainless steel) that doesn't corrode appreciably over the course of decades. The "cubic decimeter of water" definition was precise enough until the world industrialized and precision was required for manufacturing.
"if your scales show weight X on empty container (never mind what it is)"
Uh, no, I very much mind what it is. I need to know the container's density in order to adjust for atmospheric buoyancy. Unless you want to try to measure this liquid water in a vacuum...
OK, exactly how far up your ass did you have to reach to pull that one out?
See, we have this thing called "The First Law of Thermodynamics." At the molecular scale, water molecules don't just decide to break up and go their own way willy-nilly, not the least because both elements involved (hydrogen and oxygen) really don't like being alone (the two hydrogen atoms can go off on their own merry way as a diatomic molecule, but the oxygen will be lonely). Breaking molecular bonds in water takes energy, otherwise cracking water to produce hydrogen would be more cost-effective than cracking methanol (the carbon atoms have a more independent personality and are better able to get over any rejection issues it might have).
Beyond that, even if the energy to crack an individual water molecule were as trivially small as you believe, the energy would have to come from somewhere. Cracking water is endothermic, but so is making it (oxygen atoms, at least, need to be pried apart against their will first, assuming they're not in some kinky threeway), but even if one of those two reactions was exothermic, the energy required to do one act must necessarily equal the energy released by the other, meaning a net change in energy, and a net change in the number of water molecules, of zero.
The real reasons we don't use water are:
- Corrosiveness (which you already covered)
- Compressibility (there is no such thing as an incompressible substance, but liquids are more susceptible than solids)
- Thermal expansion (something else solids are less susceptible to)
- Last, but not least: evaporation
"So it is essentially impossible to get 1000 cm^3 of "pure" water."Very easy, actually; the problem is maintaining its purity after it cools down from superheated steam.
"That's one reason we are trying to make a perfect sphere to replace the reference kilogram. "
Actually, there are a number of different proposals. One involves fixing the Avogadro constant as you say, but the other involves basing mass in terms of an electrical current through a device called a watt balance, which would reverse the current relationship between mass and electric current.
"You could specify the density of water at $PRESSURE and at its maximum density (somewhere around 4 C)."
Self-referential. Pressure is (force)/(length^2), or breaking it down further, (mass)/[(time^2)(length)]. This is why BIPM abandoned the "cubic deciliter of water" definition in favor of the current platinum-iridium artifact (less compressible, less affected by temperature, etc).
"The only problem with doing this for high-precision measurements is: what is water? Some fraction of the hydrogen will be deuterium, and that'll throw off the density. What fraction of the hydrogen should be deuterium for "standard water"?"
Not an issue, as the average rates of naturally occurring isotopes in the universe is already known (hence the non-integer masses in periodic tables). You'd have a greater problem establishing the purity of the water sample in question, at least if you insist on using it in its liquid state; they don't call it the "universal solvent" for nothing.
"water is essentially invariant to pressure."
If "essentially" were good enough, we wouldn't be using platinum-iridium.
"It's all about the exercise-implicative control scheme and the very pointedly stressed family atmosphere."
Uh... wha? Even if you weren't full of hot air, it's the control scheme for playing games and the atmosphere for playing games. Nobody ever bought a video game console just to keep it on the shelf, never playing it, just rubbing it with a diaper.
"You want games? Only one of the three consoles mentioned in this news blurb can actually boast at least a full dozen legitimately great games."
But you can get a Wii and at least two games for the same price as a 360. And the games themselves are $10 cheaper. Number of titles doesn't matter if you can't afford them.
"Honda Accord outsells Chevrolet Corvette. Gasp? These are completely different markets"
Only through your flawed analogy. With consoles, it's not about the consoles themselves but what you put in them: the games.
It's less about "Economy car versus sports car" and more "Purchasers of 87 octane versus purchasers of 93."
"It's still selling faster than any console on the market..."
Integrate. It has sold more, but is not selling faster, not by a long shot. I believe at this point that the 360 (but not the PS3) is selling faster worldwide.
And unless something catastrophic happens to Wii's momentum, not even the total sales record will stand for much longer.
"This reads as "He runs faster, despite his competitor, Bob, has no legs.""
No, it reads as "He has passed his competitor, despite Bob's head start." Being faster is a logical conclusion inferred by the statement, not the statement itself. The statement is that "X has gained more ground," rather than the first derivative of "X is moving faster."
"down here in Colombia (South America) you can get a wii quite easily"
Your PAL Wii won't work on our NTSC televisions. North of Mexico, we need to share Wii hardware with Japan, while you only need to compete with Europe and mainland Asia. Fixing the ratio of NTSC-to-PAL units manufactured takes weeks if not months to finally get from retooling the assembly line to the store shelf.
"they need to ramp production up and they need to do it 6 months ago."
This isn't Command & Conquer or StarCraft: real world factories need time to be built and to spool up productio.
"but I wonder if Nintendo has shills trolling the /. boards?"
While I certainly can't guarantee that the answer is "no," I can point out that there is no need; note the almost complete lack of qualifiers in the statement "Wii has sold more consoles worldwide than its current-gen competitors." Not shipped, not manufactured, not in region X or region Y (though it would be interesting to see if it can pass the 360 in North America specifically), and not "in this past week." Without a need for marketspeak, there's no need for shills.
Contrast with a posting over at Sony Defense Force (a classic example of shilling/fanboyism at its worst*), which has to specify "this particular week," "in a particular market," and "more than a particular competitor" (I laughed at the absence of the Wii and the DS in the provided bar graph).
*I swear, if it's not satire and they're not on the Sony payroll, these fanboys resemble a cult so much that I'd sleep more soundly if I knew there was a covert FBI agent or two among their ranks.
"but atleast they have Breath of Fire now."
Only Breath of Fire II and any later releases. Capcom wasn't sure about dabbling with RPG publishing outside of Japan, so they licensed the international publishing rights of the first one to Squaresoft, of "We'd rather charge $30 for Final Fantasy on the PSP than $5-$6 on the Virtual Console, and why isn't it selling very well?" fame. Even with this title I wouldn't hold my breath.
"Similarly, for every gazillionaire who was in the right place at the right time and capitalized, there are 99 people who had similar opportunities and did not make anything of them."
Doubtful; wealth begets wealth. 99 missed opportunities for more money, perhaps, but not 99 more individuals given opportunities.
"And for other factors, like knowing the right people, we can see that this does not always make for a complete success..."
This isn't about success so much as opportunity. One need not succeed even with the right Rolodex, but one will likely not have the opportunity to try without it.
"Because circumstances are always changing, there is no perfect balance of these elements which can be pre-defined, so there is no absolute guarantee of becoming a gazillionaire."
Oh, it's easy enough to hazard a guess at the balance: resources, networking, insight, luck, motivation, and hard work, in that order. With resources, people will come to you, making networking a non-issue. Members of your network can provide insight where yours is lacking, which is necessary in recognizing that you have an opportunity to roll the dice. Only after you have what you need and who you need, recognize an opportunity and decide that you want to take it does "hard work" become an issue, and by that point it tends to be fait accompli (hence the 99:1 ratio bandied about). I'd also propose that each factor is an order of magnitude more important than the next, as this would fit the observed data of tens of millions of working poor who struggle to make ends meet versus a paucity of vapid heiresses who never seem to be able to run out of money (a situation helped by keeping wages of the employees of the family business low).
Some days it's hard to tell the difference between socialism and plain ol' cynicism.
I did and it is. Show me the part where he said "They didn't work hard."
"One is a big 250,000lb, 1964 Boeing 707-138B airliner, and the other is a Gulf Stream."
What, no DC-8?
"Every rich person I know worked like crazy for years before they made it,"
Original poster didn't deny this, but simply pointed out that, for every rich person that "worked like crazy for years before they made it," there's 99 people who worked just as hard for just as long (if not moreso) that didn't.
It's not that they don't work hard, but that working hard isn't the deciding factor.
Oh no, I am sure to include all Canadians in my laughter at Canada. One of the things that make you so cute is this adorable little blood feud you sillies have for which language is a shibboleth.
I mean, how can one truly laugh at the Great White North without including this bit of emo-esque self-loathing?