Use your dictionary: the very first definition listed is "Of or relating to a written representation".
That depends on which dictionary you reference. The particular definition that you cite from that link is from American Heritage; further down the page the Webster's first definition of the word "graphical" is "Of or pertaining to the arts of painting and drawing." A true pedant consults the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), whose first definition for the word graphical is "Clearly traced," and is nonspecific as whether it is a word or pictoral representation that is being traced. The second definition refers the reader to the word "graphic", the first definition of which is "Drawn with a pencil or pen."
That's the oldest meaning of the word; the others are neologisms by comparison.
Again, consulting the OED reveals that the pictoral interpretation of the word "graphical" in the English predates the written word interpretation (1610 vs 1643).
Just as there are lies, damn lies, and statistics, I suppose that it's also true that there are liars, damn liars, and pedants.:-p
This article is about magnetic fields. Your CRT shoots electrons at a screen which then emits light. While moving electrons do produce a magnetic field, it is a very weak one: can you stick a metal screw to the side of your monitor and have it stick?
Actually, a CRT uses electromagnets to scan the electron beam across the screen--otherwise it would just shoot the electrons at the same spot on the screen, which would be pretty useless. An electromagnet is used because the magnetic field strength has to vary with time (otherwise you get a constant deflection and no scanning), so the magnetic field vanishes when you turn your CRT off. And even when the CRT is on, the magnetic field has to change very quickly in order to scan the screen quickly enough to avoid noticable flicker, so your monitor does in fact generate strong magnetic fields, just not strong CONSTANT magnetic fields.
It is implied that the number of women n who have been assigned to the job is an integer greater than or equal to one. It is also implied that the problem is being considered from a man's frame of reference (consider Henry VIII, for example). However, if we apply the tranformation "man"=>"woman", "women"=>"men" in order to consider the problem from a woman's frame of reference, the statement remains true.
Yeah, but that's a solution to a different problem. If you just want one child, there's no way to speed the process up by parallelism. Anyway, it's a joke, as I explain in this journal entry.
Larry Ellison probably wouldn't mind adding a F-18 to his collection (IIRC he already has a MIG-29). And he has enough money and clout to railroad an LOA or to buy his own island to fly it from.
To be completely unambiguous, you should state that electromagnetic field disturbances travel at the speed of light. Electrical currents travel much slower.
The article doesn't describe the technology -- is it electroabsorption? Mach-Zehnder?
Thanks to my university's online subscription, I was able to read the actual Nature article. The device is a phase modulator and it actually uses the free carrier plasma dispersion effect (not a classical electrooptic field effect like the Pockels effect) to modulate the refractive index of silicon. They achieve this effect using a MOS capacitor instead of carrier injection or depletion in a p-i-n device. By doing so, they've boosted the modulation speed from 20 Mbps to 1 Gbps. To convert the phase modulation to amplitude modulation, they fabricate the device in one arm of a waveguide Mach-Zender. Admittedly, it's not a great advance in overall bitrate, but it is a significant step forward for silicon as a photonic material.
Heh, I managed not to say that EM field amplitude falls off as 1/(r^2), so I'm ok. The amplitude falls off as 1/r, but the intensity falls off as 1/(r^2).
Teslas and gauss are both units for magnetic field strength. The tesla is the mks unit and represents a very large amount of magnetic field--only very strong magnets like those in an MRI even approach 1 Tesla. The gauss is a cgs unit and is more convenient for typical magnetic fields. The earth's magnetic field is about 0.5 gauss, which is equal to 0.00005 tesla.
There is very little interaction between chemical processes and power lines that are 20 meters away. That's because of Planck's constant: 6.626068 x 10-34 m2 kg/s. When you multiply normal events by a number that has a decimal point and 34 zeroes, the result is tiny.
Please explain how Planck's constant has any connection to this. First, there is no reason to quantize anything at a distance of 20 meters, and therefore one should not expect Planck's constant to enter the picture. Second, classical electrodynamics and the inverse square law are sufficient to explain why electromagnetic field strength decays substantially over any macroscopic distance.
The danger level is achieving 1 Telsa in the body. Now power lines may not reach that level (the EMF strength is reduced as the square of the distance after all), but things like electrical power meter boxes DO reach that kind of strength for a radius of 2-3 feet, and I was sleeping in such a field (there were 16 boxes on the other side of the wall. Based upon measurements of a single box in our house by the electric company, those boxes may have been producing as much as 25 Telsa at the point of my head, and less down the length of my body. That's thru a stone wall from the other side too.)
Where on earth did you live that you were subjected to an EMF field of 25 Tesla?! A typical MRI machine only generates a magnetic field of about 1 Tesla (see, for example, this link), and high magnetic field laboratories only achieve magnetic fields on the order of 10 Tesla with specially designed electromagnets powered by very high currents with lots of cooling (see, for example, this link) and only within small (maybe a cubic foot) volumes. I do hope that you can provide a citation to this article which claims causation between EMF and cancer, because I am only aware of studies claiming correlation between the two.
The Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer theory of superconductivity is widely accepted (see both Ashcroft & Mermin Solid State Physics and Kittel Introduction to Solid State Physics). Part of the reason for this is that the theoretical predictions it makes for various superconductive effects are in excellent agreement with experiment. I would say that proves the validity of the theory to the extent that any scientific theory can be proven, since scientific theories are always subject to revision based on experimental observations.
That said, I personally think the forced connection between these new Fermionic condensates and the possibility of room temperature superconductors is a gimmick to try to attract funding.:-p
I have a cell phone and I really should be using one of those hands free devices and I do intend on getting one.
A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that hands-free devices did not improve the safety of driving while talking on a cell phone. The reason is that talking on a cell phone distracts your attention from the road, regardless of whether or not your hands are free. This is different from talking to passenger, because the passenger can help pay attention to the road.
I think there might be a regulation (or maybe just common sense) dictating that vainty mirrors can only be on the passenger side, because I can't recall seeing a vanity mirror in the driver's side of any vehicle I've been in.
Why the fuck is this "interesting"?? It's all wrong
A link to the Nature article has been posted, and the linked article includes the supposedly non-existent quote. Furthermore, the quote does turn up on google--try it yourself.
The article is titled "Dodecahedral space topology as an explanation for weak wide-angle temperature correlations in the cosmic microwave background," and the dodecahedral topology they're referring to is Poincare dodecahedral space, so I guess the conjecture has relevance after all.
I think a lot of people have fallen for a troll, one named James A.C. Joyce.
While I'll admit the possibility that James A.C. Joyce, that does not validate the post that he was debunking. Poincare probably did a lot of different things in his lifetime, so citing an article (even one from Nature) that mentions Poincare's name does not prove relevance to the Poincare conjecture.
It's a really common misusage. I didn't realize that the former was a bastardization of the latter until a few years ago, probably because I'd heard the phrase a long time ago but only recently encountered the correct wording in print.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the root word is actually the noun "incentive". "Incentivize" (first used in 1968) actually predates "incent" (first used in 1977) and is more widespread in usage.
You do these researchers a great injustice by calling their work equivalent to shining a flashlight through water. First off, they've actually changed the group velocity of a light pulse, not just the phase velocity as is changed in propagation through water. Second, the change in the velocity of light in water is a scattering process, not a process of absorption and re-radiation. In the absence of external energy input, absorption and re-radiation generates radically different photons. In this research, there is external energy input, which is the energy cost of storing and re-radiating photons that are identical in every way--wavelength, polarization, position, and propagation direction. If anything, this sort of research is a breakthrough in the quantum control of light which is comparable to the invention of the laser.
He stated the 'color' of our photo receptors. Although our photo receptors pick up C, Y, and M -- it is because their colors (as he said) are R, G, and B.
ie: the Red Photoreceptor reflects RED, that is why it is a red colored photoreceptor. Since it reflects RED, it picks up BLUE and GREEN, which make one of the (secondary) colors you mentioned.
The statement of the photoreceptors picking up CYM is oversimplified to the point of being completely incorrect. One cannot generate cyan or magenta with photons of a single wavelength only. Your new statement that "One receptor picks up red to green..." is correct, and a logical conclusion to draw from this is that that the brain must synthesize the data it receives from the photoreceptors to determine exactly what color it is seeing.
The statement that the red photoreceptor reflects red represents, at the very least, a fundamental difference in interpretation. The graph that you linked is the absorption spectra for each receptor, and follows my convention of describing each photoreceptor by the color that it detects. What you have called the red photoreceptor would be called the blue photoreceptor under this interpretation.
I should also add that peak sensitivity is irrelevant. Besides the physical difficulty of generating a narrow absorption line, it would be an evolutionary disadvantage to have photoreceptors that were sensitive only to red, blue, and green, because then one would not be able to see spectrally pure yellow or orange objects, or even shades of red, blue or green that fell outside the absorption lines of the photoreceptors. The overlap of the absorption spectra enables the brain to know that a combination of red and green could be yellow or orange--once again, it's up to the brain to determine what color it's actually seeing.
In any case, I believe you and I would agree on one thing, which is that color vision is a much more complicated phenomenon than most people might think!;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Again, consulting the OED reveals that the pictoral interpretation of the word "graphical" in the English predates the written word interpretation (1610 vs 1643).
Just as there are lies, damn lies, and statistics, I suppose that it's also true that there are liars, damn liars, and pedants.
I guess then it's a good thing that it's not actually named "X Windows", but rather the "X Window System."
Mod parent up!
It is implied that the number of women n who have been assigned to the job is an integer greater than or equal to one. It is also implied that the problem is being considered from a man's frame of reference (consider Henry VIII, for example). However, if we apply the tranformation "man"=>"woman", "women"=>"men" in order to consider the problem from a woman's frame of reference, the statement remains true.
Yeah, but that's a solution to a different problem. If you just want one child, there's no way to speed the process up by parallelism. Anyway, it's a joke, as I explain in this journal entry.
Larry Ellison probably wouldn't mind adding a F-18 to his collection (IIRC he already has a MIG-29). And he has enough money and clout to railroad an LOA or to buy his own island to fly it from.
Heh, I managed not to say that EM field amplitude falls off as 1/(r^2), so I'm ok. The amplitude falls off as 1/r, but the intensity falls off as 1/(r^2).
Teslas and gauss are both units for magnetic field strength. The tesla is the mks unit and represents a very large amount of magnetic field--only very strong magnets like those in an MRI even approach 1 Tesla. The gauss is a cgs unit and is more convenient for typical magnetic fields. The earth's magnetic field is about 0.5 gauss, which is equal to 0.00005 tesla.
Where on earth did you live that you were subjected to an EMF field of 25 Tesla?! A typical MRI machine only generates a magnetic field of about 1 Tesla (see, for example, this link), and high magnetic field laboratories only achieve magnetic fields on the order of 10 Tesla with specially designed electromagnets powered by very high currents with lots of cooling (see, for example, this link) and only within small (maybe a cubic foot) volumes. I do hope that you can provide a citation to this article which claims causation between EMF and cancer, because I am only aware of studies claiming correlation between the two.
The Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer theory of superconductivity is widely accepted (see both Ashcroft & Mermin Solid State Physics and Kittel Introduction to Solid State Physics). Part of the reason for this is that the theoretical predictions it makes for various superconductive effects are in excellent agreement with experiment. I would say that proves the validity of the theory to the extent that any scientific theory can be proven, since scientific theories are always subject to revision based on experimental observations.
:-p
That said, I personally think the forced connection between these new Fermionic condensates and the possibility of room temperature superconductors is a gimmick to try to attract funding.
In your example, the near disaster was due to converting from imperial units to metric, which only reinforces the parent poster's point.
I think there might be a regulation (or maybe just common sense) dictating that vainty mirrors can only be on the passenger side, because I can't recall seeing a vanity mirror in the driver's side of any vehicle I've been in.
Smart people realize that money != happiness...
It's a really common misusage. I didn't realize that the former was a bastardization of the latter until a few years ago, probably because I'd heard the phrase a long time ago but only recently encountered the correct wording in print.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the root word is actually the noun "incentive". "Incentivize" (first used in 1968) actually predates "incent" (first used in 1977) and is more widespread in usage.
Or c) they might have been scores from a proper benchmark suite like SPEC or Linpack... :-p
You do these researchers a great injustice by calling their work equivalent to shining a flashlight through water. First off, they've actually changed the group velocity of a light pulse, not just the phase velocity as is changed in propagation through water. Second, the change in the velocity of light in water is a scattering process, not a process of absorption and re-radiation. In the absence of external energy input, absorption and re-radiation generates radically different photons. In this research, there is external energy input, which is the energy cost of storing and re-radiating photons that are identical in every way--wavelength, polarization, position, and propagation direction. If anything, this sort of research is a breakthrough in the quantum control of light which is comparable to the invention of the laser.
The statement that the red photoreceptor reflects red represents, at the very least, a fundamental difference in interpretation. The graph that you linked is the absorption spectra for each receptor, and follows my convention of describing each photoreceptor by the color that it detects. What you have called the red photoreceptor would be called the blue photoreceptor under this interpretation.
I should also add that peak sensitivity is irrelevant. Besides the physical difficulty of generating a narrow absorption line, it would be an evolutionary disadvantage to have photoreceptors that were sensitive only to red, blue, and green, because then one would not be able to see spectrally pure yellow or orange objects, or even shades of red, blue or green that fell outside the absorption lines of the photoreceptors. The overlap of the absorption spectra enables the brain to know that a combination of red and green could be yellow or orange--once again, it's up to the brain to determine what color it's actually seeing.
In any case, I believe you and I would agree on one thing, which is that color vision is a much more complicated phenomenon than most people might think!