ROMs, sir? ROMS?? I'll have you know that the Speccy was a fully tape-based computer, except for the Amstrad ones cos some of them had disk drives (though they were crappy disk drives, three-inch thingies). The only ROMs I've ever seen in a Spectrum are the ones that hold the Operating System, and those are freely distributable according to Amstrad.
You may be thinking of the very very VERY small number of cartridge games (i.e. 2) that were available for extensions like the multiface, etc. Or you may be confusing a proper computer like wot the spectrum woz for a two-bit eight-bit console like the NES.
Re:...also, it's already black enough
on
Blacker Than Black
·
· Score: 1
Mainly accuracy. As aney fule no </molesworth>, the approximation that solar radiation==BB radiation is flawed dut to the absorption spectrum of the chromosphere. Not too much of a problem in the IR, because the stuff's hot enough to be monatomic so you don't get rotation or vib-rot absorption. But it still isn't perfect.
OTOH, I've seen spectra fitting the CMB radiation to BB radiation where the error bars have to be 400 sigma before you can even see them. That's damned accurate.:-)
Re:...also, it's already black enough
on
Blacker Than Black
·
· Score: 1
If you're going to be pointing things into space and measuring long wavelength energy distributions, there's a much better black body we call the Universe. I talk of course of the 2.7K cosmic uWave background radiation (the stuff that makes your TV go "SHHHH" when it's not tuned it properly).
Re:...also, it's already black enough
on
Blacker Than Black
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Is it? I was under the impression that the chromosphere kindof messed that up a little. Oh, and the Sun isn't in thermal equilibrium with anything. Actually, I suppose its own gravitational energy counts (over sufficiently short timescales)...executive decision? OTOH phenomena such as sunspots and other surface effects remove any homogeneity from the radiation, and don't forget the solar neutrino emission which is unlikely to be in thermal equilibrium.
Typically, black bodies are approximated by hollow ceramic ovens with a gold lining. The oven has a small hole in the side and is heated to the melting point of gold Thus you know exactly the temperature of the sides of the oven, you make the hole small enough that effusion doesn't upset the thermal equilibrium, et voila you have a blackbody standard.
Like the AC said, no, we're not reading your journal. No friend, no foe, no fof, which means you are in one of the journal cliques.
Of course you're wrong here. I've never understood all the karma/friend/whatever whoring that goes on; as far as I'm concerned this is just a forum and if people don't like what I post then they don't have to. However I was genuinely interested in whether or not people read the journal, so I knew whether or not to continue updating it. Which I don't do that regularly anyway.
FYI I don't know what you mean by journal clique; is there one? Are there some? What are they? How could they possily work? Did you shoot your mouth off without thinking?
But then how big's a market? I mean, Porsche build luxury cars and Peugeot build superminis, so why should they be considered the same market? OTOH you could look at demographic cross-section and show that Levis and Peugeots are going to be bought by the same people, so shouldn't there be some kind of protection in place there? £:-)
Peugeot trademarked the [0-9]0[0-9] number pattern, IIRC.
I certainly remember Intel trying and failing to get the =~/80[0-9]+86/ trademarked, and that it was thrown out because numbers are just numbers and already in common use. This is why the Pentium is called the Pentium (Latin "fifth"), and means that the Peugeot tale may not be universally valid. Certainly it can't be true in the US or UK, I'd have to check about France (their home country) though. And I don't want to:-P
The common use thing has chucked out many a trademark application in the past, or made the applicant rethink their strategy. For instance, the world is currently a patchwork of Windows(TM) and Microsoft(R) Windows(TM) products, depending upon whether or not MS were allowed to call Windows a mark.
I assume that the fact that it is called iCommune violates Apple's i[A-Z][a-z]+ trademark, and that the fact that it allows iTunes users to share files in a peer-to-peer style makes it a tool to circumvent copy protection systems. You've got 1xIP violation and 1xDMCA threat there.
Apple have threatened DMCA before, when a third-party extension to iDVD allowed the software to be used with non-Apple burners.
I think that the iCommune peeps should have given up while they were only marginally behind. They produced some extension to Apple's product, and Apple deemed it to be illegal so they sent a C+D and asked for their SDK back.
So the iCommune peeps decide that they're going to rewrite some software to do the same thing (give or take some added extras), release it under the same name only this time it'll be GPL'd. So the headlines in the popular techpress go from Apple tells author of small software plug-in to stop distributing to GNU Public software breaks Apple copyright, violates trademark.
This won't be good for FS/OSS publicity as the public will perceive GPL authors (they read:entire OSS lot) as a group of lawbreaking Communist zealots who flout C+D notices issued by hard-working companies just trynig to make a buck in today's world. Remember: the clueless person on the street doesn't see the problem with laws like the DMCA; they think it's just protection (try and explain to someone that it nearly made the marker pen an illegal tool).
Xerox PARC have issued an advisory stating that any combination lock can be "cracked" by a malicious terrorist with a finger. Due to the digital [sigh...] nature of this crime, it is now illegal to own a finger under the terms of the DMCA and patriotic Americans are being asked to remove all their fingers in a show of solidarity. U.S. President, George W. Bush, is said to be having some difficulty removing his finger from his arse. £:-)
BTW did the original story remind anyone else of the safe-cracking chapter in "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman"?
While I believe (out of kindness:-) that you're being sarcastic, this is exactly what I would do. I recently undertook a project that needed LISP, Perl and Pascal. Well I know a little Perl, it's been ages since I did Pascal and all I knew about LISP was that it's that scary thing with all the brackets in it. When I got stuck I found it easier to "debug" my code by printing it out, and sitting in the pub with a cup of coffee poring over the listing than I did by staring at the code on the screen. Of course, YMMV.
Why do you think so much effort been invested in areas such as advanced modelling tools but so little in improving debugging tools?
I think that very few people use them often enough to justify spending lots of R+D hours+$$$ on the debugging tools. How often do you see "-DDEBUG" in Makefiles? You'd think that if debuggers were so useful, you wouldn't need to switch in debugging code in the app. But many programmers feel more at home locating the bug using printfs or similar, then just reading through the code. Pencil and paper often helps too.
Something I learnt from my BASIC days, which I still use in *sh/Python code is the use of the interactive interpreter (a.k.a. "command line":-). This is especially helpful when trying to debug someone else's code - you can enter it line-at-a-time and see what happens. Yeah, so gdb can do that. But you think more about the code if you're typing it in yourself than you do repeatedly pressing the "step" key.
I have used debuggers such as disassemblers and monitors as well as gdb, the Delphi debugger etc. While they have uses I just don't find they do anything sufficiently different from manual debugging to make them worthwhile.
I was indeed talking about two separate things, however it appears that I was not clear in distinguishing them. I shall try and separate the two a little.
The Copenhagen interpretation does not say that matter is a localised wave. It says that matter is described by a wavefunction that extends over the whole Universe. It further says that when a measurement is made on some property of the wavefunction (e.g. the momentum, which is the first derivative of the wavefunction) then it must be found that the wave funtion is an eigenfunction of that property's operator. If the wavefunction previously was not, then it is said to "collapse" into one.
Einstein did not like the Copenhagen interpretation because it allowed for "spooky action at a distance" and various apparent paradoces.
When I pointed this out, someone replied to say that Einstein was not what we would think of as a Quantum Mechanic. I supplied evidence of multiple instances in modern QM where the groundwork was done by Einstein, including Bose-Einstein statistics, BECs, the photoelectric effect and others. The photoelectric effect is important because it was the first theory to give credibility to Planck's quantisation of the EM field.
I did not relate the photoelectric effect to Copenhagen. Oh and BTW your comment "in the photoelectric effect there is a cutoff wavelength before the number of electrons emitted is proportional to the intensity of light" is misleading. Properly there is a cutoff frequency given by, in meta-LaTeX, $h\nu_{min}=\Phi$, where $\Phi$ is the work function of the metal. It is an important distinction because the frequency of a photon with given energy is a constant, whereas the wavelength is variable and depends upon the refractive index of the medium.
Apologies if you thought that I was connecting the photoelectric effect with the Copenhagen interpretation. Of course any good philosophical interpretation of QM will be Physics-independent and yield correct answers for any problem. And the problem that Einstein had about non-locality is moot - here's a thought experiment for you, I hope it's explained succinctly enough - my degree doesn't have a very large written component!.
Imagine a source that emits two photons at a time, in opposite directions. We know that they must be oppositely polarised, so if I can set the polarisation of the photons you can measure them and I can send you a binary message, can't I?
We try it. I stand two light years away from the source in the -x direction with a Polaroid, you stand with a similar polaroid two light years away in the +x direction, and a detector one meter further away along the same axis. Now you keep your polaroid oriented so that it only transmits photons polarised with the z axis, I can choose whether to set mine along the z or y axes. So if I set a photon polarised y, you will see a photon in your detector. If I set a photon polarised along z, you will not. One and zero. We have a data transmitter. Or do we?
No. Because the photons that are emitted by the source are initially randomly polarised (or unpolarised, if you like). So whichever orientation I place my polaroid in, statistically we should expect 50% of the photons to be transmitted. No matter what I do, you will always see a random 50% of the photons in your detector. There is no useful information transmitted, and relativity is preserved.
Everything I know about Optics I read in Hecht. I'm still at the stage (3rd year u/grad) where everything I need to know can come from textbooks (assuming, of course, that the textbook authors have read their references properly:-). Papers I've read have mainly been out of interest to find out what's currently being discussed, although I did read the SR paper in my first year. It's interesting, and surprisingly readable.
What Einstein disagreed with were things like the Uncertainty Principle, the EPR paradox (If he had lived to see it), and most likely even Schrodinger's Cat[1]. He disagreed with the assumptions that led to these conclusions.
I think his main problem was the idea of Universal instantaneous collapse of the wavefunction (which leads to "spooky action at a distance"[2] and God playing "dice with the Universe"). These concepts came from the Copenhagen Interpretation, and was the best way the Quantum theoreticians could think to explain the seemingly counterintuitive results of QM - it's pure philosophy and has nothing to do with the Physics.
Of course not everyone necessarily subscribes Copenhagen now. My personal favourite explanation is the proposition popular in the 80s and in Sliders - that multiple Universes are created at each instant multiple outcomes are possible, each reflecting the different outcomes.
So Einstein was most definitely NOT a supporter of quantum mechanics as we now know it.
Quantum mechanics as we currently know it includes Bose-Einstein statistics describing the behaviour of systems of integer-spin particles (which leads to the concept of a Bose-Einstein condensate - a highly active area of research today); Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation (described at the atomic scale by the Einstein coefficients); quantisation of electromagnetic radiation (proposed by Einstein); Einstein's explanation of the photoelectric effect (for which he received the Nobel prize). Stretching the boundaries a little, there are equations for the equilibrium number of charge carriers in Solid State physics which rely on the quantisation of charge in the material. These are known as the Einstein equations.
Even the greatest can be mistaken.
Such as when he removed lambda from his equation on the state of the Universe (his "biggest blunder", indeed:-)).
[1]Point of order: even Schroedinger didn't believe in Schroedinger's Cat. He set it up as a thought experiment to show how absurd QM is (I mean, who could really believe in a dead/alive cat? Not him). The experiment has of course, since been done, sans cat.
[2]He believed that the "instantaneous" collapse of the wavefunction would lead to information being propagated instantaneously throughout the Universe. Of course, the wavefunction is not a measurable quantity so this does not occur.
He also said "look at me, everything I do is brilliant, you must listen to me, BTW I designed the H-bomb whilst hacking into someone's safe isn't that cool?".
My favourite quote from a quantum mechanic was Einstein's "Two things are infinite: the Universe, and human stupidity. Oh and I'm not so sure about the first one." If you're worried about the phrase quantum mechanic being applied to Einstein, I suggest you read about the photoelectric effect.
Is Slashdot written to the maxim "no news is new news"?
Charles Darwin is known to have cited other people's work that he hadn't read (I forget the name of the author involved - not being in the field myself). Then there was the entire field of molecular biology in the 1990s, which suffered more scandals than a dyslexic shoe factory.
Slightly more relevant (though still stretching back decades) is that some authors don't read the papers they co-author - look at all the people who co-authored papers with Jan Schoen, the team who, with Ninov, "discovered" Ununoctium, etc.
Next you'll be telling us that (shock! horror!) some scientist pass off other peoples' work as their own, with a fascinating NEW revelation about Rosalind Franklin's work in the discovery of the DNA structure.
Dec 1 08:57:14 heisenberg kernel: Switching off penguin.
However apart from that the drivers are very sweet and stable, as were the (free and not as good) nv drivers that I used for two days. I've had more trouble with the other graphics card in the box, which is the Intel i810. Used to have random lockups when that was my principle GFX card, especially when playing DVDs.
This would also explain why more people like "Space: 1999" than "Galactica 1980".
Actually, I'm going to stick my neck out and claim to be back on topic. The reason why calculating pi was traditionally done on any new fast computer was to check the logic of the computer - the algorithms used to calculate pi are well-known and simple, so the values the computer gives for any term in the expansion (usually a Taylor expansion of atan(1.0)) can be readily cross-checked - by hand if necessary. Then if there is a problem with the ALU the error will be noticed and troubleshooting may commence. Once it has been done, it can be repeated to check for hardware problems (although other checks are much quicker).
Of course these days, the computers are designed on computers and the logic is tested before the box is built, so calculating pi is no longer a consistency check. I'm afraid they just do it for fun.
There was an item on Channel 4's Big Breakfast (in the UK) a couple of years back, when DVDs had just started to become the de facto medium over here. It was a reasonably high-up copper in the Met, explaining how pirate DVDs aren't made to as high a quality as original DVDs, so the picture tends to fade over time. This was complete with example of faded movie.
So by the time I'd finished creasing on the floor with laughter, I wrote an e-mail to Channel 4 just asking "wtf?". It seems that a load of other people had too, because there was soon an apologetic controller (or may have been director) on BB.
She explained how they'd heard of this effect, and how although the copper hadn't actualy seen it in a DVD, he was willing to act as "expert witness". So they threw together a few special effects on the mixing desk, and bingo! One "pirate" "faded" "DVD".
size of the proton: ~ 1 fm = 10^-15 m
age of the universe: ~15 Gyr
speed of expansion ~ c = 3 x 10^8 m/s
[my emphasis above]
I'm not sure that the age of the universe isn't known well enough for it to be worth using as many as 40 sig. figs. in calculating the circumference - given that various claims run from ~10-~18Gyr then claiming pi=4 will provide a smaller contribution to your error than the contribution from the deviation on the age of the Universe.
BTW hello from an undergrad prep'ing for next term's finals (waves).:-)
Slashdot Mirror
ROMs, sir? ROMS?? I'll have you know that the Speccy was a fully tape-based computer, except for the Amstrad ones cos some of them had disk drives (though they were crappy disk drives, three-inch thingies). The only ROMs I've ever seen in a Spectrum are the ones that hold the Operating System, and those are freely distributable according to Amstrad.
You may be thinking of the very very VERY small number of cartridge games (i.e. 2) that were available for extensions like the multiface, etc. Or you may be confusing a proper computer like wot the spectrum woz for a two-bit eight-bit console like the NES.
Now that's not fair, according to a report from the University of Cambridge computing laboratory.
Dear God, what have they done?
Mainly accuracy. As aney fule no </molesworth>, the approximation that solar radiation==BB radiation is flawed dut to the absorption spectrum of the chromosphere. Not too much of a problem in the IR, because the stuff's hot enough to be monatomic so you don't get rotation or vib-rot absorption. But it still isn't perfect.
OTOH, I've seen spectra fitting the CMB radiation to BB radiation where the error bars have to be 400 sigma before you can even see them. That's damned accurate. :-)
If you're going to be pointing things into space and measuring long wavelength energy distributions, there's a much better black body we call the Universe. I talk of course of the 2.7K cosmic uWave background radiation (the stuff that makes your TV go "SHHHH" when it's not tuned it properly).
Is it? I was under the impression that the chromosphere kindof messed that up a little. Oh, and the Sun isn't in thermal equilibrium with anything. Actually, I suppose its own gravitational energy counts (over sufficiently short timescales)...executive decision? OTOH phenomena such as sunspots and other surface effects remove any homogeneity from the radiation, and don't forget the solar neutrino emission which is unlikely to be in thermal equilibrium.
Typically, black bodies are approximated by hollow ceramic ovens with a gold lining. The oven has a small hole in the side and is heated to the melting point of gold Thus you know exactly the temperature of the sides of the oven, you make the hole small enough that effusion doesn't upset the thermal equilibrium, et voila you have a blackbody standard.
Of course you're wrong here. I've never understood all the karma/friend/whatever whoring that goes on; as far as I'm concerned this is just a forum and if people don't like what I post then they don't have to. However I was genuinely interested in whether or not people read the journal, so I knew whether or not to continue updating it. Which I don't do that regularly anyway.
FYI I don't know what you mean by journal clique; is there one? Are there some? What are they? How could they possily work? Did you shoot your mouth off without thinking?
But then how big's a market? I mean, Porsche build luxury cars and Peugeot build superminis, so why should they be considered the same market? OTOH you could look at demographic cross-section and show that Levis and Peugeots are going to be bought by the same people, so shouldn't there be some kind of protection in place there? £:-)
I should imagine a can of whoopass being passed to Peugeot from Levi very soon in that case...
I certainly remember Intel trying and failing to get the =~/80[0-9]+86/ trademarked, and that it was thrown out because numbers are just numbers and already in common use. This is why the Pentium is called the Pentium (Latin "fifth"), and means that the Peugeot tale may not be universally valid. Certainly it can't be true in the US or UK, I'd have to check about France (their home country) though. And I don't want to :-P
The common use thing has chucked out many a trademark application in the past, or made the applicant rethink their strategy. For instance, the world is currently a patchwork of Windows(TM) and Microsoft(R) Windows(TM) products, depending upon whether or not MS were allowed to call Windows a mark.
I assume that the fact that it is called iCommune violates Apple's i[A-Z][a-z]+ trademark, and that the fact that it allows iTunes users to share files in a peer-to-peer style makes it a tool to circumvent copy protection systems. You've got 1xIP violation and 1xDMCA threat there.
Apple have threatened DMCA before, when a third-party extension to iDVD allowed the software to be used with non-Apple burners.
I think that the iCommune peeps should have given up while they were only marginally behind. They produced some extension to Apple's product, and Apple deemed it to be illegal so they sent a C+D and asked for their SDK back.
So the iCommune peeps decide that they're going to rewrite some software to do the same thing (give or take some added extras), release it under the same name only this time it'll be GPL'd. So the headlines in the popular techpress go from Apple tells author of small software plug-in to stop distributing to GNU Public software breaks Apple copyright, violates trademark.
This won't be good for FS/OSS publicity as the public will perceive GPL authors (they read:entire OSS lot) as a group of lawbreaking Communist zealots who flout C+D notices issued by hard-working companies just trynig to make a buck in today's world. Remember: the clueless person on the street doesn't see the problem with laws like the DMCA; they think it's just protection (try and explain to someone that it nearly made the marker pen an illegal tool).
BTW does no-one read my journal?
Xerox PARC have issued an advisory stating that any combination lock can be "cracked" by a malicious terrorist with a finger. Due to the digital [sigh...] nature of this crime, it is now illegal to own a finger under the terms of the DMCA and patriotic Americans are being asked to remove all their fingers in a show of solidarity. U.S. President, George W. Bush, is said to be having some difficulty removing his finger from his arse. £:-)
BTW did the original story remind anyone else of the safe-cracking chapter in "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman"?
While I believe (out of kindness :-) that you're being sarcastic, this is exactly what I would do. I recently undertook a project that needed LISP, Perl and Pascal. Well I know a little Perl, it's been ages since I did Pascal and all I knew about LISP was that it's that scary thing with all the brackets in it. When I got stuck I found it easier to "debug" my code by printing it out, and sitting in the pub with a cup of coffee poring over the listing than I did by staring at the code on the screen. Of course, YMMV.
Aeroflot, where the plane flies you.
I think that very few people use them often enough to justify spending lots of R+D hours+$$$ on the debugging tools. How often do you see "-DDEBUG" in Makefiles? You'd think that if debuggers were so useful, you wouldn't need to switch in debugging code in the app. But many programmers feel more at home locating the bug using printfs or similar, then just reading through the code. Pencil and paper often helps too.
Something I learnt from my BASIC days, which I still use in *sh/Python code is the use of the interactive interpreter (a.k.a. "command line" :-). This is especially helpful when trying to debug someone else's code - you can enter it line-at-a-time and see what happens. Yeah, so gdb can do that. But you think more about the code if you're typing it in yourself than you do repeatedly pressing the "step" key.
I have used debuggers such as disassemblers and monitors as well as gdb, the Delphi debugger etc. While they have uses I just don't find they do anything sufficiently different from manual debugging to make them worthwhile.
There's my £1E-2 :-)
I was indeed talking about two separate things, however it appears that I was not clear in distinguishing them. I shall try and separate the two a little.
The Copenhagen interpretation does not say that matter is a localised wave. It says that matter is described by a wavefunction that extends over the whole Universe. It further says that when a measurement is made on some property of the wavefunction (e.g. the momentum, which is the first derivative of the wavefunction) then it must be found that the wave funtion is an eigenfunction of that property's operator. If the wavefunction previously was not, then it is said to "collapse" into one.
Einstein did not like the Copenhagen interpretation because it allowed for "spooky action at a distance" and various apparent paradoces.
When I pointed this out, someone replied to say that Einstein was not what we would think of as a Quantum Mechanic. I supplied evidence of multiple instances in modern QM where the groundwork was done by Einstein, including Bose-Einstein statistics, BECs, the photoelectric effect and others. The photoelectric effect is important because it was the first theory to give credibility to Planck's quantisation of the EM field.
I did not relate the photoelectric effect to Copenhagen. Oh and BTW your comment "in the photoelectric effect there is a cutoff wavelength before the number of electrons emitted is proportional to the intensity of light" is misleading. Properly there is a cutoff frequency given by, in meta-LaTeX, $h\nu_{min}=\Phi$, where $\Phi$ is the work function of the metal. It is an important distinction because the frequency of a photon with given energy is a constant, whereas the wavelength is variable and depends upon the refractive index of the medium.
Apologies if you thought that I was connecting the photoelectric effect with the Copenhagen interpretation. Of course any good philosophical interpretation of QM will be Physics-independent and yield correct answers for any problem. And the problem that Einstein had about non-locality is moot - here's a thought experiment for you, I hope it's explained succinctly enough - my degree doesn't have a very large written component!.
Imagine a source that emits two photons at a time, in opposite directions. We know that they must be oppositely polarised, so if I can set the polarisation of the photons you can measure them and I can send you a binary message, can't I?
We try it. I stand two light years away from the source in the -x direction with a Polaroid, you stand with a similar polaroid two light years away in the +x direction, and a detector one meter further away along the same axis. Now you keep your polaroid oriented so that it only transmits photons polarised with the z axis, I can choose whether to set mine along the z or y axes. So if I set a photon polarised y, you will see a photon in your detector. If I set a photon polarised along z, you will not. One and zero. We have a data transmitter. Or do we?
No. Because the photons that are emitted by the source are initially randomly polarised (or unpolarised, if you like). So whichever orientation I place my polaroid in, statistically we should expect 50% of the photons to be transmitted. No matter what I do, you will always see a random 50% of the photons in your detector. There is no useful information transmitted, and relativity is preserved.
Everything I know about Optics I read in Hecht. I'm still at the stage (3rd year u/grad) where everything I need to know can come from textbooks (assuming, of course, that the textbook authors have read their references properly :-). Papers I've read have mainly been out of interest to find out what's currently being discussed, although I did read the SR paper in my first year. It's interesting, and surprisingly readable.
I think his main problem was the idea of Universal instantaneous collapse of the wavefunction (which leads to "spooky action at a distance"[2] and God playing "dice with the Universe"). These concepts came from the Copenhagen Interpretation, and was the best way the Quantum theoreticians could think to explain the seemingly counterintuitive results of QM - it's pure philosophy and has nothing to do with the Physics.
Of course not everyone necessarily subscribes Copenhagen now. My personal favourite explanation is the proposition popular in the 80s and in Sliders - that multiple Universes are created at each instant multiple outcomes are possible, each reflecting the different outcomes.
Quantum mechanics as we currently know it includes Bose-Einstein statistics describing the behaviour of systems of integer-spin particles (which leads to the concept of a Bose-Einstein condensate - a highly active area of research today); Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation (described at the atomic scale by the Einstein coefficients); quantisation of electromagnetic radiation (proposed by Einstein); Einstein's explanation of the photoelectric effect (for which he received the Nobel prize). Stretching the boundaries a little, there are equations for the equilibrium number of charge carriers in Solid State physics which rely on the quantisation of charge in the material. These are known as the Einstein equations.
Even the greatest can be mistaken.Such as when he removed lambda from his equation on the state of the Universe (his "biggest blunder", indeed :-)).
[1]Point of order: even Schroedinger didn't believe in Schroedinger's Cat. He set it up as a thought experiment to show how absurd QM is (I mean, who could really believe in a dead/alive cat? Not him). The experiment has of course, since been done, sans cat.
[2]He believed that the "instantaneous" collapse of the wavefunction would lead to information being propagated instantaneously throughout the Universe. Of course, the wavefunction is not a measurable quantity so this does not occur.
He also said "look at me, everything I do is brilliant, you must listen to me, BTW I designed the H-bomb whilst hacking into someone's safe isn't that cool?".
My favourite quote from a quantum mechanic was Einstein's "Two things are infinite: the Universe, and human stupidity. Oh and I'm not so sure about the first one." If you're worried about the phrase quantum mechanic being applied to Einstein, I suggest you read about the photoelectric effect.
Is Slashdot written to the maxim "no news is new news"?
Charles Darwin is known to have cited other people's work that he hadn't read (I forget the name of the author involved - not being in the field myself). Then there was the entire field of molecular biology in the 1990s, which suffered more scandals than a dyslexic shoe factory.
Slightly more relevant (though still stretching back decades) is that some authors don't read the papers they co-author - look at all the people who co-authored papers with Jan Schoen, the team who, with Ninov, "discovered" Ununoctium, etc.
Next you'll be telling us that (shock! horror!) some scientist pass off other peoples' work as their own, with a fascinating NEW revelation about Rosalind Franklin's work in the discovery of the DNA structure.
Does that make the symbol £* a
:-)
wait for it....
Basilisk?
This would also explain why more people like "Space: 1999" than "Galactica 1980".
Actually, I'm going to stick my neck out and claim to be back on topic. The reason why calculating pi was traditionally done on any new fast computer was to check the logic of the computer - the algorithms used to calculate pi are well-known and simple, so the values the computer gives for any term in the expansion (usually a Taylor expansion of atan(1.0)) can be readily cross-checked - by hand if necessary. Then if there is a problem with the ALU the error will be noticed and troubleshooting may commence. Once it has been done, it can be repeated to check for hardware problems (although other checks are much quicker).
Of course these days, the computers are designed on computers and the logic is tested before the box is built, so calculating pi is no longer a consistency check. I'm afraid they just do it for fun.
There was an item on Channel 4's Big Breakfast (in the UK) a couple of years back, when DVDs had just started to become the de facto medium over here. It was a reasonably high-up copper in the Met, explaining how pirate DVDs aren't made to as high a quality as original DVDs, so the picture tends to fade over time. This was complete with example of faded movie.
So by the time I'd finished creasing on the floor with laughter, I wrote an e-mail to Channel 4 just asking "wtf?". It seems that a load of other people had too, because there was soon an apologetic controller (or may have been director) on BB.
She explained how they'd heard of this effect, and how although the copper hadn't actualy seen it in a DVD, he was willing to act as "expert witness". So they threw together a few special effects on the mixing desk, and bingo! One "pirate" "faded" "DVD".
Made me laugh, anyway.
I'm not sure that the age of the universe isn't known well enough for it to be worth using as many as 40 sig. figs. in calculating the circumference - given that various claims run from ~10-~18Gyr then claiming pi=4 will provide a smaller contribution to your error than the contribution from the deviation on the age of the Universe.
BTW hello from an undergrad prep'ing for next term's finals (waves).
No, because in the Communist version the DVD tints YOU!!!
Sorry guys, the chance was there, my karma is good already, what can I say?