Perhaps if the browsers reported web page syntax errors -- something blunt (but not crude), like "the web page you are attempting to display is broken and is not properly displayed" in a large translucent block font over the rendered result -- the web would be a more syntactically correct place.
1. It means you'll need to build in a strict parser and a normal parser into an agent. For example,
<img src=foo/bar-1.jpg alt="barbar">
is formally illegal since the '-' is not allowed outside quotes. I doubt that there is any browser that uses such strict rules for parsing. And if the browser has to parse everything twice, it will generate extra bloat.
2. It might be easy to set a flag in the parsing code whenever a "workaround procedure" is called, in order to get the warning message. However, the next thing your users will demand is an explanation about what is wrong. It isn't easy to generate human-readible error messages from a parser. The W3C validator often generates very cryptic messages. The above example will generate the message "required attribute "ALT" not specified". Go tell.
By the way, Opera has a hotkey, ctrl-alt-v, to submit a page to the W3C validator.
the moon's motion around the earth. It can be tapped in tidal power plants. In principle, this will cause the moon to crash into the earth one day, of course.
It's the other way around: the distance to the moon increases over time. And that happens anyway, whether we use the tidal energy to generate electricity or not.
Imagine you holding a stone on a piece of rope, spinning it around you. The rope is under tension, so it takes energy to make it shorter, while you extract energy by letting it go.
Actually, keeping the reactor safe is what real-time system would do. For example, [...] If there was a malfunction in the reactor, you'd have a serious problem.
What I meant is: the computer can have a hardware failure, a sensor cable may have a bad contact, the control room has a power outage, and so on. Or there might be a metric/imperial conversion bug that only turns up under specific circumstances.:)
Something as critical as a nuclear reactor should have non-digital safety measures built in, just in case the 'intelligent' mechanisms break. The RTOS may take care of regulating the steam pressure to the turbines and so on (which I suppose is similar to that in a coal power plant); if something goes wrong there a couple of hundred thousand people may be without electricity for a while, but there's at least no new Tsjernobyl disaster.
You run your web server on Linux. You run your nuclear reactor on QNX
I'd rather have a nuclear reactor that has inherent safety mechanisms rather than one that depends on a piece of silicon running human-written software for not going into meltdown.
Sure, some energy is needed to keep body temperature up and for the idle (basal) metabolism - but again, this is an extremely closely regulated mechanism, with virtually no difference between people
Hmm, I'm pretty sure from observations that there are significant differences in rest metabolism. I'm typically sitting in a t-shirt and sweating while my office mate is packed in several layers of clothes and feeling chilly. One difference is that muscles burn calories even while in rest, while fat tissue does not. (I'm not particularly muscular, though)
A healthy stomach/intestine can easily absorb 15,000 calories a day without wastage
Are you sure? That is 6 times a normal daily intake, equivalent to 6 kg of bread or 8 kg of steak.
You know, when you spend many hours on the bike while on quiet roads, you have things to think about.:)
200 W for cycling 32 km/h: my own measurements (measure deceleration as soon as you stop pedaling, combine with mass and velocity to obtain dissipated power), and an equation from a book about bicycle training (Dutch, forgot the title): P=4v+0.2v^3 (P in watts and v in m/s), which applies to racing bikes with lean athletes sitting on them.
Efficiency of the human body in converting food to energy: sitting on a computer-controlled stationary bike in a gym that says how many calories I burn per hour and how much power I deliver. That turns out to be a factor 4. Agrees roughly with what I've seen in tables (1 hour of cycling takes so-and-so many calories) in comparison with the previous point.
Glycogen storage: 300 g to 700 g depending on physical condition and activity/food intake during the past days, from aforementioned book.
Cycling holidays: personal experience. Food intake is usually between 18 and 24 MJ (4500-6000 kcal) per day.
Energy content of carbohydrates and fat: doesn't everybody know those? 18 MJ/kg and 35 MJ/kg. Fat is mostly hydrocarbons, as is gasoline. The small fraction of glycerol in fat won't make a big difference.
On an average weekend I ride over 100 miles on a bicycle, averaging about 20 mph. The amount of food and water required for these rides is actually very minimal and close to what I normally consume.
At that kind of speed (pretty impressive, unless you're doing that in a flock), your muscles deliver 200 W to the bicycle, which is about 800 W in terms of burned food. For those 100 miles, that is 14 MJ, equivalent to 0.9 kg carbohydrates, or 0.4 kg of fat/oil. A normal daily consumption for an inactive adult male is around 10 MJ. I strongly doubt that your inefficient metabolism is converting 14 MJ per non-weekend day into heat. It is more likely that you use your body fat (a couple of kg) and the glycogen storage in the muscles and liver (up to 700 g carbohydrates for a trained athlete). The rest of the week you replenish your fuel stock.
My experience is that I feel too tired to be hungry after a single day of cycling, which seems to agree with your observation. However, during a cycling holiday (3 weeks, 5-7 h per day) I surely eat massive amounts.
Anyway, fat and gasoline have about the same energy content, so a fast cyclist does 400 km per liter (1000 miles per gallon). Which is quite efficient compared to a car.
I suppose the helmet is to protect your brain while the rest of your body is horribly crushed and mutilated. Or something.
The added value of wearing a helmet while biking is usually overestimated.. (Google around to find more information from advocates and skeptics)
The requirements for a bicycle helmet are that an object the size and shape of a human head should not be exposed to harmful deceleration when dropped from 150 cm (or so). A helmet is typically a piece of styrofoam designed to be completely crushed by such an impact. Problems with this approach are:
In a realistic accident, it is not just a separate head, but a 5 kg head with 70 kg of body behind it. A fall from 150 cm corresponds to a velocity of 20 km/h upon impact. Most lethal accidents happen when a cyclist collides with a motor vehicle going at a much larger speed. All this means that in most lethal accidents, the helmet can only absorb a small fraction of the impact energy. Only in very few cases this will make the difference between lethal and nonlethal.
The brain is a bunch of soft tissue surrounded by a hard skull (that incidentally can handle much more abuse than that piece of styrofoam we call helmet). The brain cannot be compressed easily because there are no air pockets, but it can be torn apart relatively easily. Hence, a shock such as in the helmet test is much less likely to cause damage than a sudden rotational motion of the skull. The chance of the latter happening actually increases if you wear a helmet, since your head gets "bigger" and can more easily make a "sliding" contact.
The chance of dying due to head injury per hour of travel is about the same for someone in a car as for cyclists. Why don't automobilists wear helmets?
Of course, someone who cycles while drunk (not that that's a good idea anyway) had better wear a helmet because single-sided accidents are much more likely and there are less reflexes to protect the head during a fall.:) For the rest of the cyclists, a helmet is more likely to protect you from a couple of bruises than from dying in a crash.
That's probably part of the illusion of "warmth" -- just a simple lopping off of frequencies.
According to the research behind MP3 encoders (see HydrogenAudio), the frequency contents above 16 kHz has no effect on the perception of music. Sure, you might be able to hear a 20 kHz sine wave in an otherwise quiet environment, but in music, they do not matter.
when some flavor-of-the-month geek decides he knows about electronics and thinks that quoting V=IR proves that any speaker cable is as good as any other (leaving out KNOWN variables like 'skin effect' 'group delay'
Go to Audioholics to read why skin effect and other real-world imperfections do not play any role for signals up to 20 kHz, and how cables that are advertised as having special properties do not have those anyway.
Regarding skin effect: the resistance of a typical speaker cable will increase with no more than 3% at 20 kHz. That's the difference between a cable with a 2.5 mm^2 or 2.4 mm^2 cross-section.
and other real world imperfections usually not bothered with in circuit design).
Any skilled circuit designer has to keep imperfections in mind. Components are only perfect in introductory courses on electronics.
I am a phycisist, not a professional mathematician, and I didn't understand all steps in the whole
paper. However, the author mentions a series expansion with an infinite
number of terms in equation (6), although only the first n
terms are ever used in defining the solution. That sounds a bit strange to me. In any case, the exact solution for a third-order equation (n=3) involves lots of cube roots and I don't see those anywhere, which also suggests that it's all about an approximation method.
I would like to put a huge 2.4Ghz blaster outside your residence so you can not use any of your 2.4Ghz equipment...
Microwave ovens have a 800-watt source that is tuned to 2.45 GHz. I'm pretty sure that you can achieve your goals with some creativity. Just make sure that you don't cook any body parts while you're adjusting your device.:)
a GPU will normally do a bunch of calculations, then the raster goes *out* to the monitor, not *back* to the bus... I can see how getting data back out to the bus might be an issue.
On the general-purpose computation on gpus website there's an interesting article about a Beowulf^H^H^HWindows XP cluster of PCs with AGP gfx cards. They mention the asymmetric bandwidth: 2 GB/s to the card and 133 MB/s back. A high-end digital stereo signal (24 bit/192 kHz) is 1 MB/s, so I'm not so sure why you need the big backwards bandwidth.
Anyway, when will nVidia start selling boards that are optimized for calculations? No VGA output and multiple processors per board. I can see it in shops. The Supercomputing Expansion Card. Improve the performance of your PC up to 20-fold!
A typical GPU can rotate a 3x3 matrix using a hardware path: [...] that you want to rotate it by some sequence (euler angles are fun).
Normally you rotate 3-vectors by multiplying them by an appropriate 3x3 matrix. The matrix elements are lots of cosines and sines of the Euler angles. I'd guess that the GPU is very fast in creating those matrices and then applying them to tens of vectors in parallel.
Switching a 3 V voltage at tens to hundreds of MHz will lead to radiation (at the fundamental frequency and all the harmonics). It is not so efficient since there isn't a well-designed antenna, but it will happen in any device that contains a somewhat fast CPU. Whether the power emitted by an iPod is enough to cause interference is another question.
Actually, it's not that the handshake is done at higher power--it's that by picking the phone up, you're moving it far enough from the speaker/wires that the interference goes away.
That's not my experience (GSM). I once was bored and did a few experiments with my computer speakers as a broadcast strength indicator. (Funny, my hifi amplifier never has those problems) The handshake and the first few seconds are broadcast at higher power.
A phone knows how strong the signal from the base is, but does not know whether the base can hear the phone as well. In standby mode, a phone is just listening, only every now and then (30 minute intervals) it will give a "I'm alive" message. So, broadcasting initially happens at maximum power. If the base acknowledges that the signal level is strong enough, the signal level is stepped down.
>>PROVABLY unpredictable, e.g. radioactive decay and certain quantum effects.
>Wrong. Sorry. Physics cannot prove things.
You can't prove physical phenomena in a mathematical sense (based on axiomas), but you can prove them within a framework of theories. In the case of the unpredictability of quantum-mechanical effects: if they were predictable, an enormous part of the theory of quantum mechanics would be fundamentally flawed.
How do you prove that you are reading this message? You only have a best guess that you are reading this and that you are not having a dream or that you actually are a character in a computer game that I (a supersentient creature) am playing. Maybe I only need to terminate the program and you are no more? Can you disprove that?
As far as I know, most universities require thesis to use linespaces of 1.5 and even 2.I haven't seen any thesis using single line spacing as far as I can remember.
Well, since I don't use wordprocessors, I wasn't sure how that number was defined. Normally you'll want to print a 10-point Times-Roman with no less than 12 points of leading (distance between the baselines). Maybe wordprocessors call that "linespacing 1.2". You won't find any professionally-typeset books with more than 1.4 in this definition.
It escapes my comprehension why someone would require a large line distance for a publication. Before the final version, it is of course convenient for the purpose of making corrections.
You are a technical user, aren't you? Probably mathematician, physicist or something similar. LaTeX is the de facto standard in these fields.
I am a phycisist surround by chemists and phycisists. For math, it is standard. However, among phycisists it is somewhat common but by no means standard (personal experience from two universities and a research lab), except for theoretical physics. Chemists hardly ever use LaTeX. The reason that I referred to PhD theses was that I paged through a couple of them in order to get inspiration for my rant.:)
But secretaries want to write letters, hangouts for the pinboard, signs to put up above the coffeemachine
For single-page, single-copy documents, LaTeX makes less sense since the author will spend relatively much time on the style settings (although you might use a Wysiwyg front-end) and the reader won't spend much time reading it. I was thinking of scientific and technical documents that are lengthy and contain sections, figures, and maybe equations. More than one page also means that you will note that the bottom lines on the pages never align if you use Word (and probably AbiWord as well).
but why am I supposed to hate Word? Seems a decent product and the sharepoint shared workspaces has turned out to be real popular with my users.
The output of Word usually looks horrible from a typographic point of view, at least in the default settings that most people seem to use. Some of the most obvious examples:
No hyphenation. In technical texts, a long word will stretch the inter-word whitespace, or sometimes (even uglier), the intra-word whitespace.
Breaking words on existing hyphens. Something like "an inter-word whitespace" will be broken on the hyphen. Exactly where it shouldn't since it renders it ambiguous whether the writer meant to write it as one word or as two words.
Superscripts and subscripts will create an extra gap between that line containing them and the preceding or following line. That seems to be why PhD theses that contain chemical or mathematical formulas usually are typeset with linespace 1.5, which doesn't look good either.
Mathematical equations look horrible. If you want them to look better, you'll have to buy an add-on package---the better ones are actually based on a TeX engine.
Empty space is one of the most important ingredients in proper formatting. I don't know whether Word automatically formats section headers and figure captions in long document, or that people do it by hand, but the result sucks. Numbered or bulleted lists do not have extra white above and below in order to separate them from the text. Section headers have whitespace around them that is an integer multiple of the line spacing, which is usually too tight (no empty line) or too wide (one empty line).
As you might guess: I prefer LaTeX. The basics are not that hard; someone who's writing a PhD thesis should certainly be able to get used to it within an afternoon and with the default settings you'll get typographically good formatting. Of course, it requires more effort if you want to change the default settings, but that's typically something you've to figure out just once and then you can use those style settings for similar future documents.
A six-meter rock, if it doesn't break up in the atmosphere, will make a respectable crater -- maybe even knock down a few buildings.
I'm not sure what the relative velocity of the object compared to the earth's was, but if we estimate 20 km/s and a mass of 300 tons, then the kinetic energy of this object is about 6e13 J. That is about 15 kilotons of TNT worth of kinetic energy that you have to get rid of during the 1-2 seconds it takes to cross the atmosphere. The Hiroshima bomb was about 20 kilotons. I doubt that you will get away with just a few destroyed buildings if the asteroid reaches the earth surface in one piece.
The 9/11 Commission report clearly stated that the metal-detectors are calibrated to detect anything equal to or larger than metal content of a.22 caliber pistol.
So, if you don't wear other metal parts, you're supposed to pass through with a small knive? The 9/11 hijackers used stanley knive blades. Since then, sharp items (safety needles, scissors, pocket knives) are confiscated upon discovery (even in Europe), but the metal detectors are still not supposed to be triggered by them. Weird.
Opera may have an option to set the user agent string exactly,
I opened the Opera binary in emacs, searched for MSIE and found
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE %%s; %%s) Opera %s
in which I replaced Opera by 0pera (zero instead of O). That helped fine against "You need MSIE" messages, and it will still appear in the User-agent stats. Unfortunately, there's often some javascript stuff that doesn't work. (I use Opera 6, since it's much faster than Opera 7)
The energy carried by one photon of visible light (h*nu) is sufficient to move electrons...
Rotational and librational transitions are also quantum mechanical, though at much much lower frequencies. My point was that the absorption mechanism is mostly unrelated to the size of the absorber. I'm not sure what point you want to make. I agree with you that RF radiation will not break chemical bonds, but that does not prove that it has no biological effect. I am skeptical about the biological effects of RF and I won't try to avoid exposure, but the kind of reasoning in your post does not disprove the existance of biological effects; it only proves that that particular mechanism is not relevant.
Thus a large flux of RF photons (high power density) is needed to accumulate enough energy to have a measurable effect, whether by thermal or postulated non-thermal means.
You don't need to start new chemical reactions to have a biological effect. It is sufficient to interfere with fine-tuned processes in the living cell to an extent that a reaction is modified, slowed down, or accellerated. Example: sending a small current through a muscle will only slightly displace ions in the muscle cells and yet cause a strong contraction.
Current, voltage, and resulting heat within the body are higher (for a given field strength) at wavelengths where body parts form resonant antennas; bulk absorption is not the only mechanism at work at those wavelengths.
I'd say that that gives rise to additional absorption. It cannot decrease the bulk absorption.
Slashdot Mirror
1. It means you'll need to build in a strict parser and a normal parser into an agent. For example,
is formally illegal since the '-' is not allowed outside quotes. I doubt that there is any browser that uses such strict rules for parsing. And if the browser has to parse everything twice, it will generate extra bloat.
2. It might be easy to set a flag in the parsing code whenever a "workaround procedure" is called, in order to get the warning message. However, the next thing your users will demand is an explanation about what is wrong. It isn't easy to generate human-readible error messages from a parser. The W3C validator often generates very cryptic messages. The above example will generate the message "required attribute "ALT" not specified". Go tell.
By the way, Opera has a hotkey, ctrl-alt-v, to submit a page to the W3C validator.
It's the other way around: the distance to the moon increases over time. And that happens anyway, whether we use the tidal energy to generate electricity or not.
Imagine you holding a stone on a piece of rope, spinning it around you. The rope is under tension, so it takes energy to make it shorter, while you extract energy by letting it go.
What I meant is: the computer can have a hardware failure, a sensor cable may have a bad contact, the control room has a power outage, and so on. Or there might be a metric/imperial conversion bug that only turns up under specific circumstances. :)
Something as critical as a nuclear reactor should have non-digital safety measures built in, just in case the 'intelligent' mechanisms break. The RTOS may take care of regulating the steam pressure to the turbines and so on (which I suppose is similar to that in a coal power plant); if something goes wrong there a couple of hundred thousand people may be without electricity for a while, but there's at least no new Tsjernobyl disaster.
I'd rather have a nuclear reactor that has inherent safety mechanisms rather than one that depends on a piece of silicon running human-written software for not going into meltdown.
It's called Ortlieb, but apparently it's misspelled so often that they made a website mirror under the name ortleib.com...
Hmm, I'm pretty sure from observations that there are significant differences in rest metabolism. I'm typically sitting in a t-shirt and sweating while my office mate is packed in several layers of clothes and feeling chilly. One difference is that muscles burn calories even while in rest, while fat tissue does not. (I'm not particularly muscular, though)
A healthy stomach/intestine can easily absorb 15,000 calories a day without wastage
Are you sure? That is 6 times a normal daily intake, equivalent to 6 kg of bread or 8 kg of steak.
You know, when you spend many hours on the bike while on quiet roads, you have things to think about. :)
200 W for cycling 32 km/h: my own measurements (measure deceleration as soon as you stop pedaling, combine with mass and velocity to obtain dissipated power), and an equation from a book about bicycle training (Dutch, forgot the title): P=4v+0.2v^3 (P in watts and v in m/s), which applies to racing bikes with lean athletes sitting on them.
Efficiency of the human body in converting food to energy: sitting on a computer-controlled stationary bike in a gym that says how many calories I burn per hour and how much power I deliver. That turns out to be a factor 4. Agrees roughly with what I've seen in tables (1 hour of cycling takes so-and-so many calories) in comparison with the previous point.
Glycogen storage: 300 g to 700 g depending on physical condition and activity/food intake during the past days, from aforementioned book.
Cycling holidays: personal experience. Food intake is usually between 18 and 24 MJ (4500-6000 kcal) per day.
Energy content of carbohydrates and fat: doesn't everybody know those? 18 MJ/kg and 35 MJ/kg. Fat is mostly hydrocarbons, as is gasoline. The small fraction of glycerol in fat won't make a big difference.
At that kind of speed (pretty impressive, unless you're doing that in a flock), your muscles deliver 200 W to the bicycle, which is about 800 W in terms of burned food. For those 100 miles, that is 14 MJ, equivalent to 0.9 kg carbohydrates, or 0.4 kg of fat/oil. A normal daily consumption for an inactive adult male is around 10 MJ. I strongly doubt that your inefficient metabolism is converting 14 MJ per non-weekend day into heat. It is more likely that you use your body fat (a couple of kg) and the glycogen storage in the muscles and liver (up to 700 g carbohydrates for a trained athlete). The rest of the week you replenish your fuel stock.
My experience is that I feel too tired to be hungry after a single day of cycling, which seems to agree with your observation. However, during a cycling holiday (3 weeks, 5-7 h per day) I surely eat massive amounts.
Anyway, fat and gasoline have about the same energy content, so a fast cyclist does 400 km per liter (1000 miles per gallon). Which is quite efficient compared to a car.
The added value of wearing a helmet while biking is usually overestimated.. (Google around to find more information from advocates and skeptics)
The requirements for a bicycle helmet are that an object the size and shape of a human head should not be exposed to harmful deceleration when dropped from 150 cm (or so). A helmet is typically a piece of styrofoam designed to be completely crushed by such an impact. Problems with this approach are:
- In a realistic accident, it is not just a separate head, but a 5 kg head with 70 kg of body behind it. A fall from 150 cm corresponds to a velocity of 20 km/h upon impact. Most lethal accidents happen when a cyclist collides with a motor vehicle going at a much larger speed. All this means that in most lethal accidents, the helmet can only absorb a small fraction of the impact energy. Only in very few cases this will make the difference between lethal and nonlethal.
- The brain is a bunch of soft tissue surrounded by a hard skull (that incidentally can handle much more abuse than that piece of styrofoam we call helmet). The brain cannot be compressed easily because there are no air pockets, but it can be torn apart relatively easily. Hence, a shock such as in the helmet test is much less likely to cause damage than a sudden rotational motion of the skull. The chance of the latter happening actually increases if you wear a helmet, since your head gets "bigger" and can more easily make a "sliding" contact.
- The chance of dying due to head injury per hour of travel is about the same for someone in a car as for cyclists. Why don't automobilists wear helmets?
Of course, someone who cycles while drunk (not that that's a good idea anyway) had better wear a helmet because single-sided accidents are much more likely and there are less reflexes to protect the head during a fall.According to the research behind MP3 encoders (see HydrogenAudio), the frequency contents above 16 kHz has no effect on the perception of music. Sure, you might be able to hear a 20 kHz sine wave in an otherwise quiet environment, but in music, they do not matter.
Go to Audioholics to read why skin effect and other real-world imperfections do not play any role for signals up to 20 kHz, and how cables that are advertised as having special properties do not have those anyway.
Regarding skin effect: the resistance of a typical speaker cable will increase with no more than 3% at 20 kHz. That's the difference between a cable with a 2.5 mm^2 or 2.4 mm^2 cross-section.
and other real world imperfections usually not bothered with in circuit design).
Any skilled circuit designer has to keep imperfections in mind. Components are only perfect in introductory courses on electronics.
I am a phycisist, not a professional mathematician, and I didn't understand all steps in the whole paper. However, the author mentions a series expansion with an infinite number of terms in equation (6), although only the first n terms are ever used in defining the solution. That sounds a bit strange to me. In any case, the exact solution for a third-order equation (n=3) involves lots of cube roots and I don't see those anywhere, which also suggests that it's all about an approximation method.
Microwave ovens have a 800-watt source that is tuned to 2.45 GHz. I'm pretty sure that you can achieve your goals with some creativity. Just make sure that you don't cook any body parts while you're adjusting your device. :)
On the general-purpose computation on gpus website there's an interesting article about a Beowulf^H^H^HWindows XP cluster of PCs with AGP gfx cards. They mention the asymmetric bandwidth: 2 GB/s to the card and 133 MB/s back. A high-end digital stereo signal (24 bit/192 kHz) is 1 MB/s, so I'm not so sure why you need the big backwards bandwidth.
Anyway, when will nVidia start selling boards that are optimized for calculations? No VGA output and multiple processors per board. I can see it in shops. The Supercomputing Expansion Card. Improve the performance of your PC up to 20-fold!
Normally you rotate 3-vectors by multiplying them by an appropriate 3x3 matrix. The matrix elements are lots of cosines and sines of the Euler angles. I'd guess that the GPU is very fast in creating those matrices and then applying them to tens of vectors in parallel.
Switching a 3 V voltage at tens to hundreds of MHz will lead to radiation (at the fundamental frequency and all the harmonics). It is not so efficient since there isn't a well-designed antenna, but it will happen in any device that contains a somewhat fast CPU. Whether the power emitted by an iPod is enough to cause interference is another question.
That's not my experience (GSM). I once was bored and did a few experiments with my computer speakers as a broadcast strength indicator. (Funny, my hifi amplifier never has those problems) The handshake and the first few seconds are broadcast at higher power.
A phone knows how strong the signal from the base is, but does not know whether the base can hear the phone as well. In standby mode, a phone is just listening, only every now and then (30 minute intervals) it will give a "I'm alive" message. So, broadcasting initially happens at maximum power. If the base acknowledges that the signal level is strong enough, the signal level is stepped down.
>Wrong. Sorry. Physics cannot prove things.
You can't prove physical phenomena in a mathematical sense (based on axiomas), but you can prove them within a framework of theories. In the case of the unpredictability of quantum-mechanical effects: if they were predictable, an enormous part of the theory of quantum mechanics would be fundamentally flawed.
How do you prove that you are reading this message? You only have a best guess that you are reading this and that you are not having a dream or that you actually are a character in a computer game that I (a supersentient creature) am playing. Maybe I only need to terminate the program and you are no more? Can you disprove that?
Well, since I don't use wordprocessors, I wasn't sure how that number was defined. Normally you'll want to print a 10-point Times-Roman with no less than 12 points of leading (distance between the baselines). Maybe wordprocessors call that "linespacing 1.2". You won't find any professionally-typeset books with more than 1.4 in this definition.
It escapes my comprehension why someone would require a large line distance for a publication. Before the final version, it is of course convenient for the purpose of making corrections.
I am a phycisist surround by chemists and phycisists. For math, it is standard. However, among phycisists it is somewhat common but by no means standard (personal experience from two universities and a research lab), except for theoretical physics. Chemists hardly ever use LaTeX. The reason that I referred to PhD theses was that I paged through a couple of them in order to get inspiration for my rant. :)
But secretaries want to write letters, hangouts for the pinboard, signs to put up above the coffeemachine
For single-page, single-copy documents, LaTeX makes less sense since the author will spend relatively much time on the style settings (although you might use a Wysiwyg front-end) and the reader won't spend much time reading it. I was thinking of scientific and technical documents that are lengthy and contain sections, figures, and maybe equations. More than one page also means that you will note that the bottom lines on the pages never align if you use Word (and probably AbiWord as well).
The output of Word usually looks horrible from a typographic point of view, at least in the default settings that most people seem to use. Some of the most obvious examples:
- No hyphenation. In technical texts, a long word will stretch the inter-word whitespace, or sometimes (even uglier), the intra-word whitespace.
- Breaking words on existing hyphens. Something like "an inter-word whitespace" will be broken on the hyphen. Exactly where it shouldn't since it renders it ambiguous whether the writer meant to write it as one word or as two words.
- Superscripts and subscripts will create an extra gap between that line containing them and the preceding or following line. That seems to be why PhD theses that contain chemical or mathematical formulas usually are typeset with linespace 1.5, which doesn't look good either.
- Mathematical equations look horrible. If you want them to look better, you'll have to buy an add-on package---the better ones are actually based on a TeX engine.
- Empty space is one of the most important ingredients in proper formatting. I don't know whether Word automatically formats section headers and figure captions in long document, or that people do it by hand, but the result sucks. Numbered or bulleted lists do not have extra white above and below in order to separate them from the text. Section headers have whitespace around them that is an integer multiple of the line spacing, which is usually too tight (no empty line) or too wide (one empty line).
As you might guess: I prefer LaTeX. The basics are not that hard; someone who's writing a PhD thesis should certainly be able to get used to it within an afternoon and with the default settings you'll get typographically good formatting. Of course, it requires more effort if you want to change the default settings, but that's typically something you've to figure out just once and then you can use those style settings for similar future documents.I'm not sure what the relative velocity of the object compared to the earth's was, but if we estimate 20 km/s and a mass of 300 tons, then the kinetic energy of this object is about 6e13 J. That is about 15 kilotons of TNT worth of kinetic energy that you have to get rid of during the 1-2 seconds it takes to cross the atmosphere. The Hiroshima bomb was about 20 kilotons. I doubt that you will get away with just a few destroyed buildings if the asteroid reaches the earth surface in one piece.
So, if you don't wear other metal parts, you're supposed to pass through with a small knive? The 9/11 hijackers used stanley knive blades. Since then, sharp items (safety needles, scissors, pocket knives) are confiscated upon discovery (even in Europe), but the metal detectors are still not supposed to be triggered by them. Weird.
I opened the Opera binary in emacs, searched for MSIE and found
in which I replaced Opera by 0pera (zero instead of O). That helped fine against "You need MSIE" messages, and it will still appear in the User-agent stats. Unfortunately, there's often some javascript stuff that doesn't work. (I use Opera 6, since it's much faster than Opera 7)The energy carried by one photon of visible light (h*nu) is sufficient to move electrons...
Rotational and librational transitions are also quantum mechanical, though at much much lower frequencies. My point was that the absorption mechanism is mostly unrelated to the size of the absorber. I'm not sure what point you want to make. I agree with you that RF radiation will not break chemical bonds, but that does not prove that it has no biological effect. I am skeptical about the biological effects of RF and I won't try to avoid exposure, but the kind of reasoning in your post does not disprove the existance of biological effects; it only proves that that particular mechanism is not relevant.
Thus a large flux of RF photons (high power density) is needed to accumulate enough energy to have a measurable effect, whether by thermal or postulated non-thermal means.
You don't need to start new chemical reactions to have a biological effect. It is sufficient to interfere with fine-tuned processes in the living cell to an extent that a reaction is modified, slowed down, or accellerated. Example: sending a small current through a muscle will only slightly displace ions in the muscle cells and yet cause a strong contraction.
Current, voltage, and resulting heat within the body are higher (for a given field strength) at wavelengths where body parts form resonant antennas; bulk absorption is not the only mechanism at work at those wavelengths.
I'd say that that gives rise to additional absorption. It cannot decrease the bulk absorption.