The NSA doesn't pwn Windows Me, either. I think they figure that if someone uses it, the user's already been punished above and beyond what prison could do.
The main problem - effects of long human exposure to microgravity are still barley known. On the other hand, the effects of barley (along with hops) on me are well known, and I like 'em.
don't get me wrong. it's fascinating stuff (I'm no scientist, I'm currently working at my cigar store), but string theory led to some strange developments (exactly how many dimensions does it need?). theorizing about bizarre physical states solely because the math leads you there doesn't seem to me to be physics, exactly. I mostly agree with you, that there are definitely times when theorizing can be taken too far. However, some points:
* Properly consistent quantum theory often requires Hilbert spaces of infinite dimensions. Yes, string theory is still pretty suspect, especially when you can't tell when it needs 10 spatial dimensions, or 26, or even more, but just because a theory admits more doesn't mean it's really all that crackpotty.
* Many physical theories were and are successful, based (almost) solely on math. Einstein was a master at relaxing one "conventional" restriction and then seeing where the math took him (photoelectric effect, special and general relativities). Dirac's postulation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_equation) of the positron based solely on where the math took him is a famous example. My own research in grad school was on evanescent waves (which are mainly just a consequence of taking the math seriously when it suggests you consider the meaning of some imaginary instead of real numbers). These are all real things, and you can make measurements on them.
So, yeah, probably most of the time just following the math might get you in trouble, especially when things can't be tested quickly or accurately. However, it's one of those ineffables that math works so damned well, and scientists have to learn to take the math pretty seriously, or risk missing some major developments.
Totally OT here: I checked out your webpage. I love the photos, and have actually run across the Phidippus audax ones before (my father also loves photographing these little guys). I also find your research fascinating. Thanks!
We have fewer rights now than ever before in the USA Careful. African Americans and women can own property, vote, and enjoy the rights that white males do. Gay marriage (and civil unions) is legal in some states now. A woman's right to choose the fate of her unborn child is protected. There are probably more rights which are guaranteed now which I can't think of off the top of my head. So although I agree that things aren't perfect in this country, most of the points raised by the parent poster are in no way new, and some things are much better than they have been at various points in the country's history.
Because "heat" is the most difficult form of energy to convert to other forms. Not difficult in an engineering sense, but difficult from a basic thermodynamics perspective. In order to convert heat into another form of energy, you have to have a reservoir available with lower heat density -- temperature. Otherwise your process won't spontaneously go (and that's the problem with energy; non-spontaneous conversion to another form only _appears_ non-spontaneous; thermodynamics guarantees that you've just overlooked a pathway in which the energy is being converted to a "less useful", or higher entropy, form). In this case, the reservoir with lower heat density (the river) doesn't have low _enough_ heat density (or it's restricted by environmental concerns).
That's just what the TVA is having problems with. After all, nuclear plants essentially use the heat produced by degrading high quality nuclear energy to lower quality steam or the equivalent. This is allowed to degrade to even lower quality by taking a steam jet with well-defined momentum, and impacting it on a turbine. After the turbine (producing electricity, etc.), the steam has almost no quality, and perhaps can be used for secondary heating purposes. At this stage, you have to get rid of the still-high-temperature but low quality steam, and they do that by rejecting the heat into the river.
I sure would like to read the supporting documents linked to in the summary (you know, to protect my liberties and, um, stuff like that), but they seem to be slow or absent. Anyone have a.torrent?
I just some feel that some times I might have a better idea how to spend the money that I work for. Me too. Seriously. I pay taxes also.:)
Aside from that, I tried to stress that although my/my colleagues' research may have military use in 10 - 20 years, it definitely has at least pedagogical and basic theoretical impact much sooner (as in now).
Does this mean if I steal my neighbours car he's guilty of theft, because he made it available? I never did like that sonofabitch. Good thing I tell his damned kids to keep OFF MA LAWN!
You might also take the point of view that practically every project at State Universities in the US are heavily federally funded. My school, for example, did lots of crop research, being a land-grant university. Loads of the money (I'd estimate---totally off-the-cuff on my part---up to 95%) was provided by the federal government (yours---and my---tax monies), and it wasn't weapons-related in any way (that I could see). It went towards figuring out better crop rotation schemes, genetic modifications to foodstuffs and building materials, and ways to treat/cure BSE and other problems in wild and domesticated animals. Not all the federal monies are military-based:)
I'm writing this as a beneficiary of Navy funds for my Doctorate thesis project; my roommate and many of my fellow students were beneficiaries of Air Force funding, etc.
We did research which may have considerable military application in 10 - 20 years. That's probably why we were funded. But what we learned (particularly Xavier Perez-Moreno's project, which was mentioned here on Slashdot about 5 months ago, and which was touted as having impact on optical switches for computers, etc.) was pretty important from a _fundamental_ point of view. My project helped elicidate evanescent waves (what all the faster-than-light crap was about on Slashdot yesterday); the Navy is very interested in these for various reasons. Xavi's project cuts to the core of quantum limits on various processes in optical fibers, and how molecules might be used for switches in computers; others' projects helped grow cleaner crystals in space for circuit boards, make better inkjet printers, understand holography, etc. And that's just a few people from my year in school in one department. All of these were mainly federally funded.
So, yeah, though federal funding is probably often about military projects, the funding agencies realize that there are a LOT of other things that good science can illuminate and discover. These projects may not have been funded otherwise. We, as the students benefiting from the funding, feel quite thankful that such monies exist.
Actually, you're talking about pulse-echo ultrasound, as when you see whether your unborn child has a wee-wee or goat horns or whatever. "Ultrasound" as used by people who work with it generally just refers to the frequency ranges above human hearing (as it should).
There is active ultrasound (baby monitors, etc.) and passive ultrasound, which relies on picking up sounds produced by whatever processes you're trying to monitor. I agree that large amounts of the acoustic energy produced by biological processes are going to be at relatively low frequencies. However, any process which produces sharp turn-on/turn-off signals (as, for example, aveoli in the lungs making their crackling noises, blood flowing in arteries, etc.) will have a fair amount of their energy at high frequencies. With narrow band-pass filters, it's remarkable how one can pull out high-frequency signals, even from processes where you wouldn't expect them to occur. As long as the signal is there, why not take advantage of it? After all, whatever information we can pull out of the human body has got to help.
Agreed, and I try to work around it with the following question line to clients: "Say you have two drivers. One is familiar with the state Driver's Handbook and traffic laws, having read up on them. The other has just got behind the wheel for the first time. Which one do you think would get in more accidents, and why?" Whichever one ATI wrote.
I would guess you are seeing a combination of the "Cheerio Effect" (see Wikipedia) and the mild feedback as popping and coalescing bubbles set up standing waves (approximately at the maxima of the J0 Bessel functions which would describe such waves confined at the liquid interface).
Re:MSN does some weiiiiiird things...
on
MSN Censors Your IM
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Yep, that's astoundingly annoying. IIRC, you can do a "Save To..." instead of allowing MSN to choose where to save it. Then it doesn't get deleted.
some alternate reality where everything has a greater degree of internal energy, requiring less heat to cook. Time for some mental vomiting...
If _everything_ has more internal energy, that leads to several quandaries:
i) What's important in energy transfer of any type, but especially with degraded energy types like heat, is an energy *difference* between the hot and cold regions. If you've added a fixed amount of energy to every object, then the transfer rate would still be the same as before, leading to no change. (However, see pt. ii, below). This assumes something like Newton's law of heating and cooling (or just dE/dt = k1(E2-E1), where k1 is roughly constant at a given energy).
If the energy was bumped up by an amount proportional to the energy already in the object, then the 25 degree difference mentioned by the parent makes some sense, because hotter (more energetic) objects would lose/absorb heat even faster to/from their surroundings (dE/dt = a*k1*(E2 - E1). Here, a>1, and was just factored out of the 'original' energies E1 and E2 mentioned above).
ii) More energy really does lead to more gravitational attraction due to E = mc^2. This would be absolutely negilible at our scales, but it would tend to make black holes more sucky, and might change galactic dynamics on long time scales.
iii) Most interesting to me is the fact that the Third Law of Thermodynamics defines a perfect crystal as having _no_ entropy at zero Kelvins (neglecting quantum effects like zero-point energy). Bumping up the energy of everything including this hypothetical crystal would lead to a breakdown of the temperature scale just above zero Kelvins. That might happen if everything except some hypothetical crystal were to have energy somehow magically added to it.
It's a pretty nice file manager. I've used it for about a year, and tended to prefer it over Konqueror, at least until I found Krusader. But it's not as though Konqueror will lose its capabilities to be a file manager; it just won't be the default choice in KDE 4.0.
if I shoot you and say "I'll give you $10k to keep quiet" then I'm compounding a crime. Couldn't you just save $10k and possible prosecution by shooting me again?
Forgot to mention that Logitech's driver for them, though, is a piece of shit. Consistently crashes Windows XP, and is outrageously huge. If you look carefully, you can find their old driver versions posted here and there on the web (which actually work, and aren't 45MB downloads).
In linux, though, I just have
InputDevice "LogitechMarble" "CorePointer"
and
# The following is for the Logitech Marble Trackball:
Slashdot Mirror
The NSA doesn't pwn Windows Me, either. I think they figure that if someone uses it, the user's already been punished above and beyond what prison could do.
Iz in teh elevatur, stealin' ur Beamer.
* Properly consistent quantum theory often requires Hilbert spaces of infinite dimensions. Yes, string theory is still pretty suspect, especially when you can't tell when it needs 10 spatial dimensions, or 26, or even more, but just because a theory admits more doesn't mean it's really all that crackpotty.
* Many physical theories were and are successful, based (almost) solely on math. Einstein was a master at relaxing one "conventional" restriction and then seeing where the math took him (photoelectric effect, special and general relativities). Dirac's postulation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_equation) of the positron based solely on where the math took him is a famous example. My own research in grad school was on evanescent waves (which are mainly just a consequence of taking the math seriously when it suggests you consider the meaning of some imaginary instead of real numbers). These are all real things, and you can make measurements on them.
So, yeah, probably most of the time just following the math might get you in trouble, especially when things can't be tested quickly or accurately. However, it's one of those ineffables that math works so damned well, and scientists have to learn to take the math pretty seriously, or risk missing some major developments.
Er... didn't make it to the bottom of the article?
Totally OT here: I checked out your webpage. I love the photos, and have actually run across the Phidippus audax ones before (my father also loves photographing these little guys). I also find your research fascinating. Thanks!
Because "heat" is the most difficult form of energy to convert to other forms. Not difficult in an engineering sense, but difficult from a basic thermodynamics perspective. In order to convert heat into another form of energy, you have to have a reservoir available with lower heat density -- temperature. Otherwise your process won't spontaneously go (and that's the problem with energy; non-spontaneous conversion to another form only _appears_ non-spontaneous; thermodynamics guarantees that you've just overlooked a pathway in which the energy is being converted to a "less useful", or higher entropy, form). In this case, the reservoir with lower heat density (the river) doesn't have low _enough_ heat density (or it's restricted by environmental concerns).
That's just what the TVA is having problems with. After all, nuclear plants essentially use the heat produced by degrading high quality nuclear energy to lower quality steam or the equivalent. This is allowed to degrade to even lower quality by taking a steam jet with well-defined momentum, and impacting it on a turbine. After the turbine (producing electricity, etc.), the steam has almost no quality, and perhaps can be used for secondary heating purposes. At this stage, you have to get rid of the still-high-temperature but low quality steam, and they do that by rejecting the heat into the river.
I sure would like to read the supporting documents linked to in the summary (you know, to protect my liberties and, um, stuff like that), but they seem to be slow or absent. Anyone have a .torrent?
Aside from that, I tried to stress that although my/my colleagues' research may have military use in 10 - 20 years, it definitely has at least pedagogical and basic theoretical impact much sooner (as in now).
You might also take the point of view that practically every project at State Universities in the US are heavily federally funded. My school, for example, did lots of crop research, being a land-grant university. Loads of the money (I'd estimate---totally off-the-cuff on my part---up to 95%) was provided by the federal government (yours---and my---tax monies), and it wasn't weapons-related in any way (that I could see). It went towards figuring out better crop rotation schemes, genetic modifications to foodstuffs and building materials, and ways to treat/cure BSE and other problems in wild and domesticated animals. Not all the federal monies are military-based :)
I'm writing this as a beneficiary of Navy funds for my Doctorate thesis project; my roommate and many of my fellow students were beneficiaries of Air Force funding, etc.
We did research which may have considerable military application in 10 - 20 years. That's probably why we were funded. But what we learned (particularly Xavier Perez-Moreno's project, which was mentioned here on Slashdot about 5 months ago, and which was touted as having impact on optical switches for computers, etc.) was pretty important from a _fundamental_ point of view. My project helped elicidate evanescent waves (what all the faster-than-light crap was about on Slashdot yesterday); the Navy is very interested in these for various reasons. Xavi's project cuts to the core of quantum limits on various processes in optical fibers, and how molecules might be used for switches in computers; others' projects helped grow cleaner crystals in space for circuit boards, make better inkjet printers, understand holography, etc. And that's just a few people from my year in school in one department. All of these were mainly federally funded.
So, yeah, though federal funding is probably often about military projects, the funding agencies realize that there are a LOT of other things that good science can illuminate and discover. These projects may not have been funded otherwise. We, as the students benefiting from the funding, feel quite thankful that such monies exist.
Duhhhh. It clogs the series of tubes.
Konqui gets blocked, also, but the site says that it's because I'm using Firefox. Way to go, site!
Here, too: http://medgadget.com/archives/2007/07/video_of_vri xp_system_from_deep_breeze.html
Actually, you're talking about pulse-echo ultrasound, as when you see whether your unborn child has a wee-wee or goat horns or whatever. "Ultrasound" as used by people who work with it generally just refers to the frequency ranges above human hearing (as it should).
There is active ultrasound (baby monitors, etc.) and passive ultrasound, which relies on picking up sounds produced by whatever processes you're trying to monitor. I agree that large amounts of the acoustic energy produced by biological processes are going to be at relatively low frequencies. However, any process which produces sharp turn-on/turn-off signals (as, for example, aveoli in the lungs making their crackling noises, blood flowing in arteries, etc.) will have a fair amount of their energy at high frequencies. With narrow band-pass filters, it's remarkable how one can pull out high-frequency signals, even from processes where you wouldn't expect them to occur. As long as the signal is there, why not take advantage of it? After all, whatever information we can pull out of the human body has got to help.
I would guess you are seeing a combination of the "Cheerio Effect" (see Wikipedia) and the mild feedback as popping and coalescing bubbles set up standing waves (approximately at the maxima of the J0 Bessel functions which would describe such waves confined at the liquid interface).
Yep, that's astoundingly annoying. IIRC, you can do a "Save To..." instead of allowing MSN to choose where to save it. Then it doesn't get deleted.
If _everything_ has more internal energy, that leads to several quandaries:
i) What's important in energy transfer of any type, but especially with degraded energy types like heat, is an energy *difference* between the hot and cold regions. If you've added a fixed amount of energy to every object, then the transfer rate would still be the same as before, leading to no change. (However, see pt. ii, below). This assumes something like Newton's law of heating and cooling (or just dE/dt = k1(E2-E1), where k1 is roughly constant at a given energy).
If the energy was bumped up by an amount proportional to the energy already in the object, then the 25 degree difference mentioned by the parent makes some sense, because hotter (more energetic) objects would lose/absorb heat even faster to/from their surroundings (dE/dt = a*k1*(E2 - E1). Here, a>1, and was just factored out of the 'original' energies E1 and E2 mentioned above).
ii) More energy really does lead to more gravitational attraction due to E = mc^2. This would be absolutely negilible at our scales, but it would tend to make black holes more sucky, and might change galactic dynamics on long time scales.
iii) Most interesting to me is the fact that the Third Law of Thermodynamics defines a perfect crystal as having _no_ entropy at zero Kelvins (neglecting quantum effects like zero-point energy). Bumping up the energy of everything including this hypothetical crystal would lead to a breakdown of the temperature scale just above zero Kelvins. That might happen if everything except some hypothetical crystal were to have energy somehow magically added to it.
I dunno. Time to go clean more floors.
It's a pretty nice file manager. I've used it for about a year, and tended to prefer it over Konqueror, at least until I found Krusader. But it's not as though Konqueror will lose its capabilities to be a file manager; it just won't be the default choice in KDE 4.0.
Damn. For a little while your post was modded "Redundant". That just made it more funny.
Forgot to mention that Logitech's driver for them, though, is a piece of shit. Consistently crashes Windows XP, and is outrageously huge. If you look carefully, you can find their old driver versions posted here and there on the web (which actually work, and aren't 45MB downloads).
In linux, though, I just have
InputDevice "LogitechMarble" "CorePointer"
and
# The following is for the Logitech Marble Trackball:
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "LogitechMarble"
Driver "mouse"
# Option "CorePointer"
Option "Protocol" "ExplorerPS/2"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "Buttons" "9"
# Option "SendCoreEvents" "true"
Option "Emulate3Buttons" "true"
Option "EmulateWheel" "1"
Option "EmulateWheelButton" "8"
Option "EmulateWheelInertia" "5"
Option "Emulate3Timeout" "50"
Option "ChordMiddle"
Option "XAxisMapping" "6 7"
Option "YAxisMapping" "4 5"
in my xorg.conf file. Works perfectly. Wish I could get the Windows behavior to be the same!