Spacewatch.com covered this about as well as one could expect. Apparently a couple airline pilots saw the possible fireball, but that's about it. I've seen no photos yet (probably none were captured). So although we infer the thing burned up (or "exploded!one!!111!!eleven" as per the/. headline), it's not as sensationalistic as Our Editors make it out to be.
You only see the impact images where something pretty or exciting happened. For each of those, there are several thousands to several billions of ones where nothing happened. Additionally, there are a lot of quantities to be measured which don't show up on pictures of particles doing curlicues in magnetic fields, such as spectroscopy data (at least several megabytes from each of several hundreds of detectors per collision).
BackupPC is nice. Its pooling strategy is very good, it works brilliantly and painlessly when backup up linux -> linux (though I have to re-try it Windows -> linux), and their UI is what a lot of the other solutions need for people to browse/restore their own data using a web browser.
Its devs are responsive, too!
To get the questions out of the way, the Brownian ratchet at equilibrium has been shown not to work, exactly as we might expect from the laws of thermodynamics.
But that's not what they're talking about. They are hoping to use a Brownian ratchet at a temperature differential, which is a clever way to extract work from a temperature differential to be sure, but is fully in line with thermodynamics as we understand it today.
Perhaps I'm reading this wrong. How can having the ratchet at a temperature differential ("between different temperatures"? "in a gradient"?) be described as having it in thermodynamic equilibrium?
What if you could create a nano ratchet that can only go in one direction?
It's an interesting question. That's what people thought ratchets were in the first place. Then Smoluchowski (1912), Callen and Welton (1951), and later Feynman (as popularizer, mainly) showed that once the ratchets come to the same temperature as the "working fluid" in which they're placed, the ratchets can no longer be one-way devices. In fact, for any ratchet above absolute zero, it will occasionally "miss" and slip backwards. In other words, people who want ratchets to consistently extract energy from a fluid have to keep the ratchets at absolute zero, which means they're not in equilibrium with the fluid.
One of my friends got her degree in Linke's lab: http://www.uoregon.edu/~linke/res_ratchet.html . She was good at explaining the ratchets, and one of the things always stressed was that they don't work in thermal equilibrium---by definition!. In any case, Linke's website has good explanations.
Exactly. Feynman showed that unless the ratchet itself is at a lower temperature/higher enthalpy/lower entropy than the surroundings, there's no way to extract the energy which sits in the heat reservoir. Once you've stuck that ratchet in there, in full thermodynamic contact with those surroundings, it's going to quickly heat up and its "ratcheting" action quickly become just as random as everything else.
The Mathematica License limits you to student learning activities only and does not allow for actual research.
Hm. Could you point me toward that license? I used the student license in graduate school, and did not find that restriction. I've never liked Wolfram's licensing scheme, by the way. Too restrictive and expensive.
If by "special student-only version" you mean that---heavens! Mathematica prints a "student" edition banner upon printing a notebook---then you're right. Other than that, it's a distinction without a difference.
Thank you for mentioning Labplot (http://labplot.sourceforge.net/). I'd also like to put in a shout-out for QTIPlot (http://soft.proindependent.com/qtiplot.html) and Scilab (http://www.scilab.org/), and of course the aforementioned Sage (http://www.sagemath.org/).
QTIPlot and LabPlot, in particular, have amazingly responsive developers, who seems to go out of their ways to help people.
If you're going to mention that the Office costs $150 for a student version, you might as well mention that Mathematica's student version (identical to the full version, except for a banner upon printing) is $140.
Heck you can do far more broader things with a business degree or an MBA than you can with a degree in CS.
If I'm going to have to shoot myself (http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/susan/joke/foot.htm), I want to know how to do it in various coding languages, and know the reasons behind it. I'd rather not do it out of sheer boredom.
What? The "magnetic permeability" of a non-magnetic substance?
Yes. Vacuum has a magnetic permeability. If it didn't, there could be no electromagnetic radiation (some would say that if its permeability were zero, the radiation would be infinite, as the Poynting vector is proportional to 1/permeability). Did you look at the link you provided?
Anyway I think that the Slashdot usage of the term "Creationism" should be replaced by the phrase "Young Earth Creationism" (YEC for short)
Perhaps. At least the YECers have the balls to believe in something which is not only demonstrably inane, but has been disproven many times. Those OECers simply relegate their creator to misty Planck times. I call that moving the goalposts to a spot where they do no one any good whatsoever.
I just run the "BSOD" screensaver on my linux machine, with all error messages enabled. I love having people come in, pause, say, "Um... looks like your machine is really screwed up". Then I bump the machine out of screensaver mode, and their jaws drop.
I've learned to just click through to the article without reading the slashdot summary. It doesn't seem to have hurt my computer at all, but I -- Oh, wait. I just heard a bell. Gosh, I feel hungry right now.
Slashdot Mirror
Spacewatch.com covered this about as well as one could expect. Apparently a couple airline pilots saw the possible fireball, but that's about it. I've seen no photos yet (probably none were captured). So although we infer the thing burned up (or "exploded!one!!111!!eleven" as per the /. headline), it's not as sensationalistic as Our Editors make it out to be.
I made you a hadron, but your mom ated it.
You only see the impact images where something pretty or exciting happened. For each of those, there are several thousands to several billions of ones where nothing happened. Additionally, there are a lot of quantities to be measured which don't show up on pictures of particles doing curlicues in magnetic fields, such as spectroscopy data (at least several megabytes from each of several hundreds of detectors per collision).
BackupPC is nice. Its pooling strategy is very good, it works brilliantly and painlessly when backup up linux -> linux (though I have to re-try it Windows -> linux), and their UI is what a lot of the other solutions need for people to browse/restore their own data using a web browser.
Its devs are responsive, too!
To get the questions out of the way, the Brownian ratchet at equilibrium has been shown not to work, exactly as we might expect from the laws of thermodynamics.
But that's not what they're talking about. They are hoping to use a Brownian ratchet at a temperature differential, which is a clever way to extract work from a temperature differential to be sure, but is fully in line with thermodynamics as we understand it today.
Perhaps I'm reading this wrong. How can having the ratchet at a temperature differential ("between different temperatures"? "in a gradient"?) be described as having it in thermodynamic equilibrium?
What if you could create a nano ratchet that can only go in one direction?
It's an interesting question. That's what people thought ratchets were in the first place. Then Smoluchowski (1912), Callen and Welton (1951), and later Feynman (as popularizer, mainly) showed that once the ratchets come to the same temperature as the "working fluid" in which they're placed, the ratchets can no longer be one-way devices. In fact, for any ratchet above absolute zero, it will occasionally "miss" and slip backwards. In other words, people who want ratchets to consistently extract energy from a fluid have to keep the ratchets at absolute zero, which means they're not in equilibrium with the fluid.
PDF alert!
http://www.uoregon.edu/~linke/papers/Reimann97_PhysRep.pdf
One of my friends got her degree in Linke's lab: http://www.uoregon.edu/~linke/res_ratchet.html . She was good at explaining the ratchets, and one of the things always stressed was that they don't work in thermal equilibrium---by definition!. In any case, Linke's website has good explanations.
Exactly. Feynman showed that unless the ratchet itself is at a lower temperature/higher enthalpy/lower entropy than the surroundings, there's no way to extract the energy which sits in the heat reservoir. Once you've stuck that ratchet in there, in full thermodynamic contact with those surroundings, it's going to quickly heat up and its "ratcheting" action quickly become just as random as everything else.
The Mathematica License limits you to student learning activities only and does not allow for actual research.
Hm. Could you point me toward that license? I used the student license in graduate school, and did not find that restriction. I've never liked Wolfram's licensing scheme, by the way. Too restrictive and expensive.
If by "special student-only version" you mean that---heavens! Mathematica prints a "student" edition banner upon printing a notebook---then you're right. Other than that, it's a distinction without a difference.
Thank you for mentioning Labplot (http://labplot.sourceforge.net/). I'd also like to put in a shout-out for QTIPlot (http://soft.proindependent.com/qtiplot.html) and Scilab (http://www.scilab.org/), and of course the aforementioned Sage (http://www.sagemath.org/).
QTIPlot and LabPlot, in particular, have amazingly responsive developers, who seems to go out of their ways to help people.
Oh, and as for sharing w/ people who don't have Mathematica, that's what the free Mathematica Readers are for.
If you're going to mention that the Office costs $150 for a student version, you might as well mention that Mathematica's student version (identical to the full version, except for a banner upon printing) is $140.
Heck you can do far more broader things with a business degree or an MBA than you can with a degree in CS.
If I'm going to have to shoot myself (http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/susan/joke/foot.htm), I want to know how to do it in various coding languages, and know the reasons behind it. I'd rather not do it out of sheer boredom.
What? The "magnetic permeability" of a non-magnetic substance?
Yes. Vacuum has a magnetic permeability. If it didn't, there could be no electromagnetic radiation (some would say that if its permeability were zero, the radiation would be infinite, as the Poynting vector is proportional to 1/permeability). Did you look at the link you provided?
He's also Merciless!
We -- I -- those others -- do.
Anyway I think that the Slashdot usage of the term "Creationism" should be replaced by the phrase "Young Earth Creationism"
(YEC for short)
Perhaps. At least the YECers have the balls to believe in something which is not only demonstrably inane, but has been disproven many times. Those OECers simply relegate their creator to misty Planck times. I call that moving the goalposts to a spot where they do no one any good whatsoever.
I just run the "BSOD" screensaver on my linux machine, with all error messages enabled. I love having people come in, pause, say, "Um... looks like your machine is really screwed up". Then I bump the machine out of screensaver mode, and their jaws drop.
We didn't start the fire!
I've learned to just click through to the article without reading the slashdot summary. It doesn't seem to have hurt my computer at all, but I -- Oh, wait. I just heard a bell. Gosh, I feel hungry right now.
Where "quantum leap" doesn't mean "the smallest possible jump from one state to another"?
Pfft. That spokesduck is a tracer.
Actually, it's a perfectly cromulent use of "pronounced".