Here are his degrees: BSc (Maths), BA (Psych), MA (Hons), IS Doctorate Masters Thesis: Brian Systems and the Concept of Self PhD Thesis: Generating Group Agreement in Cooperative Computer Mediated Groups
He also suggests that our universe could be running on a "three-dimensional space-time screen", which doesn't make any sense given that space-time is 4 dimensional. The verbiage on page 2 of his paper continues to make it clear that besides not having any formal training in physics, he seems to only have a layperson's understanding of the modern physical concepts that would be needed to begin to make a coherent argument on this topic. The idea isn't total crap, but this guy does not seem qualified to champion it.
True. In my last post, when I said "matter", I meant "what we call matter" and when I said "anti-matter", I meant "what we call anti-matter". We could call them A and B to keep it arbitrary. The point is that there is a difference between them which is more complicated than just flipping signs.
Very nearly true. There's a small catch, and that's CP violation, which does allow matter and anti-matter to be distinguished by an experiment, even if the experimental apparatus is also of unknown (anti-)matter composition. (In other words, to use an oft-quoted example, if aliens are approaching the earth and we want to know whether we are made of matter or anti-matter, there are tests we can ask them to run inside their ship that will answer the question. It is not necessary to send any matter down from the ship to see if it explodes.)
However, the difference is so small that it is likely that life as we know it would be essentially unchanged if we were made of anti-matter.
I really don't understand why everyone is jumping on toothpaste as their example of how this rule bothers them. How about water? You can't bring a water bottle onto a plane. This means that you are completely at the mercy of the very slow cart that brings the tiny cups of soda once or twice during the flight. And airplanes are very dry places. When you're terribly thirsty and you realize that you were barred from doing anything about it by the TSA, you're going to be much more pissed than when you realized you would have to check your toothpaste.
55mph limit? Huh? It's usually 70 outside of cities on the Interstate. Sometimes 65, sometimes 75. Yes, it's 55 inside of most cities, but that's perfectly reasonable and does not add significantly to a long trip.
It is not hard for one person to drive 700 miles in a day, even if you follow speed limits strictly. I've done it several times. And since most people drive 5-15mph over the speed limit, so they can go even farther.
The article makes fun of the "Castlevania II: Simon's Quest" book using a quote that starts with "I will drink your spirit like cherry pop!"
But this is totally unfair! That quote is from the very beginning of the book when the main character is daydreaming. It's not from the main (and more serious) part of the story at all.
(Yes, I have all of the books sitting next to me...)
Each monitor is going to be used for 12 hours/day, every day? Sounds highly unlikely to me, despite e-mail/homework/IM/blogs/shopping/gaming/whatever. College student usually have 2-3 hours of class per day, and sleep 5-8 hours. This leaves no more than 17 hours, some of which will be spent commuting, in dead time between classes/events, eating out, watching TV, misc activities, doing homework that can't be done on the computer, or even (gasp) just socializing without a computer present.
To put it another way, 12 hours of computer use means waking up at 8 to go to class at 9, getting back from class at noon, sitting down in front of the computer and proceeding to use it constantly until midnight. To satisfy the formula we're using, this has to be done every single day year round, including weekends and holidays. And all 4 computers have to be used like that. Believe what you will, but that just doesn't sound likely to me.
In the end, they will have to estimate how many hours they actually use and figure out whether it's reasonable for them. I suspect they will find that it is not.
I don't see how my use of a monitor at work impacts my decision whether or not to buy an LCD for home. It's not the same monitor. At home, I pay. At work, my employer pays. My estimate was based on home usage, which is, after all, the topic of this whole conversation.
- The visible light, unless your monitor is aimed straight out a window, is almost all converted into heat when it hits objects in your room. Each time it hits an object, somewhere between 50% and 90% is absorbed, the rest is reflected, but most of that just hits another object in the room. And the windows don't transmit 100% either.
- The sound is almost all converted into heat when it hits objects in your room (unless a large fraction of the sound is sub-woofer and then it does get out fairly well).
- The airflow all gets converted to heat when it hits objects in your room, unless you have such powerful fans that there's a draft in or out of your house because of your computer.
- The radio waves are the only form of energy that gets out at a resonable rate. I didn't think about this because my computers use wired ethernet. However, this is still only a few watts out of several hundred and is negligable for most practical purposes.
In summary, my educated guess is that over 95% of the energy that comes in goes into heating your house.
Are you sure that gas is more expensive than electricity? In Minnesota, our natural gas prices are also very high this year, but electricity doesn't even come close to competing.
Check the cost per therm for gas and the cost per kWh for electricity. A therm is 29.3 kWh.
(By the way, if your radiator uses electric heat, what's the oil for?)
"A computer is a very inefficient way to heat a house. The amount of power it uses up will NOT simply come off your heating bill. Certainly not if your heating is anything other than electricity"
Ahem. Physicist here. First of all, he _said_ that he had electric heat. If you have electric heat, then running your computer while the heat is on is free, just as he says. A computer converts all of the energy it uses into heat, just as an electric heater does. If you're interested in making heat, then you could call both devices 100% efficient. The only difference is that in the computer, some of that energy does more interesting things before turning into heat.
As you say, if you have gas heat, this is not true. Gas is cheaper per unit of energy (although this is hard to tell from your bills, since they measure them in very different units!).
I use my 19 inch CRT about 2 hours a day on average. The monitor uses about 100W. A 19 inch LCD monitor would use perhaps 20W and cost me $400. This saves me 80W*2h =.16kWh per day or about 60kWh/year. A kWh costs me about 8 cents, so I would save less than $5/year. So after 80 years, I would have recouped the cost of the new monitor. Yay?
Or let's assume you use your monitor 12 hours a day and LCDs use no electricity at all. Now you save $35/year. Now the pay back time is only 10 years. Less than the lifetime of most monitors, but perhaps almost kinda worth it.
In summary: No, you will not save money by getting an LCD to replace your CRT, unless electricity is much much more expensive for you than it is for me.
(Of course, if you were going to get a new monitor anyway, you will save money on electricity if you get an LCD. But that's different.)
Anyone have any idea how they are identifying SkypeOut traffic? Skype makes a pretty serious effort to be hard to identify. Do they just block the login server?
Nope. Grandparent is completely correct (even though he says he's not in a later post). Burning is exactly analogous to nuclear reactions. Bonds are broken and energy is released. In both cases, matter is converted into energy. It does not matter whether the bonds are electromagnetic (chemical) or strong (nuclear).
In chemical reactions, the amount of mass converted to energy is very small and nearly impossible to measure, but that's not the point.
Example: To heat your house, you use on order of 1000kWh per month, obtained by burning natural gas. 1000 kWh = 3.6 * 10^9 Joules. E=mc^2, solving for m: 3.6 * 10^9 J / (3 * 10^8 m/s)^2 = 4 * 10^-8 kg =.04 milligrams.
My credentials: I'm a graduate student in physics at the University of Minnesota.
The table on that page does not provide a direct way of deciding whether one voting method is better than another. To say that IRV is worse than plurality (which is what you mean when you say "majority vote", I think) based on that table is silly.
IRV may fail mathematical tests, but I haven't heard of any _realistic_ situation in which it fails. I know, as do we all, of several very important realistic ways that plurality has failed.
That said, I don't think I would be opposed to Condorcet voting. (However, I'd like to see an introduction to it that is presented in a less dense way than the one at electionmethods.org. You know, something I could send other people to and actually expect them to read.) I advocate for IRV, but I'm really advocating against plurality.
I would _not_ go with approval because I like some candidates that I "approve of" more than others and I want to be able to express that. Approval is like plurality in that a you are constrained to vote pure "yes" or "no" for each person. I want to be able to say "I kinda like this person, but I'd rather have someone else".
"no grocery card. got one of the keychain things. much nicer!"
What's even nicer is to shop at grocery stores that don't require you to be willing to carry around an advertisement for them in order to shop there (affordably). (I'm also concerned with the privacy issues, but I think the extra crap they want me to always keep in my pocket actually bothers me more!)
'everyone is used to just "downloading and installing"'
I think you have a narrow view of "everyone". The people around my office certainly seem to expect software to come on a CD. To many people, putting Free Software on a CD gives it the same emotional validity as the proprietary software that comes on CDs.
I don't think paranoid is the right word. "Realistic" maybe. On the other hand, it's a lot easier to stop something that requires a huge lab and lots of money than something that requires one person and some leaves (smoking) or two people and nothing else (sex).
[Incidentally, since I remember being 14, I'd rather that more 14 year olds were given the opportunity to have sex, provided that they are first educated on how to (a) not get pregnant and (b) not get diseases.]
A lot of that "radiation" is gamma rays (speed of light) and neutrinos (.9999999999 speed of light). The rest would be going only a paltry.99999 speed of light or so. So you might theoretically get a day or so of warning before the heavy particles hit. But even that is wrong, because you can't see alpha particles, protons and the like speeding towards you, they are too small to reflect enough light for that.
I asked my father, a particle physicist at Fermilab, "Should I believe this?" and here was his response:
My answer is a resounding "sort of." I first note that this article cites no scientific publication or conference presentation as its source, only the Sunday Telegraph. By contrast, the Related Story "Cosmic laws may need revising, claim astrophysicists" refers to a Phys Rev Letters article published last year. So it is impossible (or at least hard) to check up on this story. On the other hand, strangelets are a respectable, is speculative, concept in Quantum Chromodynamics.
While the basic equations of QCD are pretty well established, it is an exceedingly difficult theory from which to do low-energy calculations, such as for bound states of quarks (baryons or mesons). For example, no one has been able to caclulate why the neutron is heavier than the proton, or why their mass is what it is. Nonethless, some
QCD models claim that quark matter containing roughly equal numbers of up, down and strange quarks may be meta-stable or even stable, or even may represent the "true ground state" of strongly interacting particles. Such strange quark matter (SQM) could exist on a large scale (some have suggested that neutron stars may actually be SQM stars) or in small "strangelets." Atlthough such calculations are hardly robust, this motivates
people to look for such "stranglets," either in accelerator experiments, in cosmic rays, or in astophysical observations.
With a little searching I found a couple of review articles that address this question (together with other related ones), which I attach. The first is one written by several highly respected physicists (both experimenter and theorists) to address
concerns that the high energy nuclear collisions at RHIC might somehow produce states of matter or of the vacuum that would destroy the earth or the universe. Production of strangelets of a particular type are among the scenarios they address. The second is a review from some conference that directly addresses astrophysical implications of the existence of strange quark matter, and what bounds we can put on the existence of SQM based on observations (section 6). Here they note in passing that earthquakes might be used as a signature for stranglets.
Thus it is plausible that a group at SMU has, indeed, examined earthquake records to look for evidence of strangelets hitting the earth. Without seeing their paper I cannot judge whether this is believed by them to be a "positive" result or merely a "non-negative" one. Experience shows that in searches like this, and in cosmic ray
experiments in general, there have been many observtions of new phenomena that later turned out to be very real and important, but also at least as many sightings that turn out not to be real. I wouldn't conclude that strange quark matter has been observed based on this article, but this is not obviously crack-pot nonsense either.
Sigh... Does anyone know whether "mb" (millibits) is supposed to mean MB (megabytes) or Mb (megabits)? I'm pretty sure that video RAM is nearly always measured in bytes, but I don't know if the same is true for L3 cache. You'd think that after 12543 stories getting people confused by a factor of 8, they'd learn to abbreviate correctly.
This is hardly a new theory. The only thing which I see that makes it distinct from the age-old theory with the same outline is that it invokes dark matter as part of the mechanism. Hopefully, if presented in scientific language rather than yahoo-interview, it has some interesting new twist, but I'm just not seeing it here.
Also, he says "When it's changing slowly, it's gravitationally self-repulsive and when it's changing fast, it picks up speed, it's gravitationally self-attractive". It's slow and repulsive now. What is supposed to ever make it speed up in the future since it's own existance is what is making it slow now?
Slashdot Mirror
Brian Whitworth, the author of the paper, is a senior lecturer in information technology at Massey University in New Zealand.
http://www.massey.ac.nz/~wwiims/people/b.whitworth/
Here are his degrees: BSc (Maths), BA (Psych), MA (Hons), IS Doctorate
Masters Thesis: Brian Systems and the Concept of Self
PhD Thesis: Generating Group Agreement in Cooperative Computer Mediated Groups
He also suggests that our universe could be running on a "three-dimensional space-time screen", which doesn't make any sense given that space-time is 4 dimensional. The verbiage on page 2 of his paper continues to make it clear that besides not having any formal training in physics, he seems to only have a layperson's understanding of the modern physical concepts that would be needed to begin to make a coherent argument on this topic. The idea isn't total crap, but this guy does not seem qualified to champion it.
It's worse than you think. The return is the paper you file with the IRS. The refund is the check they send you.
True. In my last post, when I said "matter", I meant "what we call matter" and when I said "anti-matter", I meant "what we call anti-matter". We could call them A and B to keep it arbitrary. The point is that there is a difference between them which is more complicated than just flipping signs.
Very nearly true. There's a small catch, and that's CP violation, which does allow matter and anti-matter to be distinguished by an experiment, even if the experimental apparatus is also of unknown (anti-)matter composition. (In other words, to use an oft-quoted example, if aliens are approaching the earth and we want to know whether we are made of matter or anti-matter, there are tests we can ask them to run inside their ship that will answer the question. It is not necessary to send any matter down from the ship to see if it explodes.)
However, the difference is so small that it is likely that life as we know it would be essentially unchanged if we were made of anti-matter.
I really don't understand why everyone is jumping on toothpaste as their example of how this rule bothers them. How about water? You can't bring a water bottle onto a plane. This means that you are completely at the mercy of the very slow cart that brings the tiny cups of soda once or twice during the flight. And airplanes are very dry places. When you're terribly thirsty and you realize that you were barred from doing anything about it by the TSA, you're going to be much more pissed than when you realized you would have to check your toothpaste.
55mph limit? Huh? It's usually 70 outside of cities on the Interstate. Sometimes 65, sometimes 75. Yes, it's 55 inside of most cities, but that's perfectly reasonable and does not add significantly to a long trip.
It is not hard for one person to drive 700 miles in a day, even if you follow speed limits strictly. I've done it several times. And since most people drive 5-15mph over the speed limit, so they can go even farther.
The article makes fun of the "Castlevania II: Simon's Quest" book using a quote that starts with "I will drink your spirit like cherry pop!"
But this is totally unfair! That quote is from the very beginning of the book when the main character is daydreaming. It's not from the main (and more serious) part of the story at all.
(Yes, I have all of the books sitting next to me...)
Each monitor is going to be used for 12 hours/day, every day? Sounds highly unlikely to me, despite e-mail/homework/IM/blogs/shopping/gaming/whatever. College student usually have 2-3 hours of class per day, and sleep 5-8 hours. This leaves no more than 17 hours, some of which will be spent commuting, in dead time between classes/events, eating out, watching TV, misc activities, doing homework that can't be done on the computer, or even (gasp) just socializing without a computer present.
To put it another way, 12 hours of computer use means waking up at 8 to go to class at 9, getting back from class at noon, sitting down in front of the computer and proceeding to use it constantly until midnight. To satisfy the formula we're using, this has to be done every single day year round, including weekends and holidays. And all 4 computers have to be used like that. Believe what you will, but that just doesn't sound likely to me.
In the end, they will have to estimate how many hours they actually use and figure out whether it's reasonable for them. I suspect they will find that it is not.
I don't see how my use of a monitor at work impacts my decision whether or not to buy an LCD for home. It's not the same monitor. At home, I pay. At work, my employer pays. My estimate was based on home usage, which is, after all, the topic of this whole conversation.
(And I assume you meant $26.28/year.)
You're right. It's non-zero, but it's negligible.
- The visible light, unless your monitor is aimed straight out a window, is almost all converted into heat when it hits objects in your room. Each time it hits an object, somewhere between 50% and 90% is absorbed, the rest is reflected, but most of that just hits another object in the room. And the windows don't transmit 100% either.
- The sound is almost all converted into heat when it hits objects in your room (unless a large fraction of the sound is sub-woofer and then it does get out fairly well).
- The airflow all gets converted to heat when it hits objects in your room, unless you have such powerful fans that there's a draft in or out of your house because of your computer.
- The radio waves are the only form of energy that gets out at a resonable rate. I didn't think about this because my computers use wired ethernet. However, this is still only a few watts out of several hundred and is negligable for most practical purposes.
In summary, my educated guess is that over 95% of the energy that comes in goes into heating your house.
Are you sure that gas is more expensive than electricity? In Minnesota, our natural gas prices are also very high this year, but electricity doesn't even come close to competing.
Check the cost per therm for gas and the cost per kWh for electricity. A therm is 29.3 kWh.
(By the way, if your radiator uses electric heat, what's the oil for?)
"A computer is a very inefficient way to heat a house. The amount of power it uses up will NOT simply come off your heating bill. Certainly not if your heating is anything other than electricity"
Ahem. Physicist here. First of all, he _said_ that he had electric heat. If you have electric heat, then running your computer while the heat is on is free, just as he says. A computer converts all of the energy it uses into heat, just as an electric heater does. If you're interested in making heat, then you could call both devices 100% efficient. The only difference is that in the computer, some of that energy does more interesting things before turning into heat.
As you say, if you have gas heat, this is not true. Gas is cheaper per unit of energy (although this is hard to tell from your bills, since they measure them in very different units!).
Wrong.
.16kWh per day or about 60kWh/year. A kWh costs me about 8 cents, so I would save less than $5/year. So after 80 years, I would have recouped the cost of the new monitor. Yay?
I use my 19 inch CRT about 2 hours a day on average. The monitor uses about 100W. A 19 inch LCD monitor would use perhaps 20W and cost me $400. This saves me 80W*2h =
Or let's assume you use your monitor 12 hours a day and LCDs use no electricity at all. Now you save $35/year. Now the pay back time is only 10 years. Less than the lifetime of most monitors, but perhaps almost kinda worth it.
In summary: No, you will not save money by getting an LCD to replace your CRT, unless electricity is much much more expensive for you than it is for me.
(Of course, if you were going to get a new monitor anyway, you will save money on electricity if you get an LCD. But that's different.)
Anyone have any idea how they are identifying SkypeOut traffic? Skype makes a pretty serious effort to be hard to identify. Do they just block the login server?
Nope. Grandparent is completely correct (even though he says he's not in a later post). Burning is exactly analogous to nuclear reactions. Bonds are broken and energy is released. In both cases, matter is converted into energy. It does not matter whether the bonds are electromagnetic (chemical) or strong (nuclear).
.04 milligrams.
In chemical reactions, the amount of mass converted to energy is very small and nearly impossible to measure, but that's not the point.
Example: To heat your house, you use on order of 1000kWh per month, obtained by burning natural gas. 1000 kWh = 3.6 * 10^9 Joules. E=mc^2, solving for m: 3.6 * 10^9 J / (3 * 10^8 m/s)^2 = 4 * 10^-8 kg =
My credentials: I'm a graduate student in physics at the University of Minnesota.
I don't understand why this is a new challenge. Why can't existing policies regarding floppy disks simply be applied to this?
The table on that page does not provide a direct way of deciding whether one voting method is better than another. To say that IRV is worse than plurality (which is what you mean when you say "majority vote", I think) based on that table is silly.
IRV may fail mathematical tests, but I haven't heard of any _realistic_ situation in which it fails. I know, as do we all, of several very important realistic ways that plurality has failed.
That said, I don't think I would be opposed to Condorcet voting. (However, I'd like to see an introduction to it that is presented in a less dense way than the one at electionmethods.org. You know, something I could send other people to and actually expect them to read.) I advocate for IRV, but I'm really advocating against plurality.
I would _not_ go with approval because I like some candidates that I "approve of" more than others and I want to be able to express that. Approval is like plurality in that a you are constrained to vote pure "yes" or "no" for each person. I want to be able to say "I kinda like this person, but I'd rather have someone else".
"no grocery card. got one of the keychain things. much nicer!"
What's even nicer is to shop at grocery stores that don't require you to be willing to carry around an advertisement for them in order to shop there (affordably). (I'm also concerned with the privacy issues, but I think the extra crap they want me to always keep in my pocket actually bothers me more!)
'everyone is used to just "downloading and installing"'
I think you have a narrow view of "everyone". The people around my office certainly seem to expect software to come on a CD. To many people, putting Free Software on a CD gives it the same emotional validity as the proprietary software that comes on CDs.
That's "motherlode", not "motherload".
http://m-w.com
Main Entry: mother lode
Function: noun
Date: 1874
1 : the principal vein or lode of a region
2 : a principal source or supply
The idea here is that you just found a lot of ore in one spot. It's the mother of lodes, not the load of your mother.
I don't think paranoid is the right word. "Realistic" maybe. On the other hand, it's a lot easier to stop something that requires a huge lab and lots of money than something that requires one person and some leaves (smoking) or two people and nothing else (sex).
[Incidentally, since I remember being 14, I'd rather that more 14 year olds were given the opportunity to have sex, provided that they are first educated on how to (a) not get pregnant and (b) not get diseases.]
A lot of that "radiation" is gamma rays (speed of light) and neutrinos (.9999999999 speed of light). The rest would be going only a paltry .99999 speed of light or so. So you might theoretically get a day or so of warning before the heavy particles hit. But even that is wrong, because you can't see alpha particles, protons and the like speeding towards you, they are too small to reflect enough light for that.
My answer is a resounding "sort of." I first note that this article cites no scientific publication or conference presentation as its source, only the Sunday Telegraph. By contrast, the Related Story "Cosmic laws may need revising, claim astrophysicists" refers to a Phys Rev Letters article published last year. So it is impossible (or at least hard) to check up on this story. On the other hand, strangelets are a respectable, is speculative, concept in Quantum Chromodynamics.
While the basic equations of QCD are pretty well established, it is an exceedingly difficult theory from which to do low-energy calculations, such as for bound states of quarks (baryons or mesons). For example, no one has been able to caclulate why the neutron is heavier than the proton, or why their mass is what it is. Nonethless, some QCD models claim that quark matter containing roughly equal numbers of up, down and strange quarks may be meta-stable or even stable, or even may represent the "true ground state" of strongly interacting particles. Such strange quark matter (SQM) could exist on a large scale (some have suggested that neutron stars may actually be SQM stars) or in small "strangelets." Atlthough such calculations are hardly robust, this motivates people to look for such "stranglets," either in accelerator experiments, in cosmic rays, or in astophysical observations.
With a little searching I found a couple of review articles that address this question (together with other related ones), which I attach. The first is one written by several highly respected physicists (both experimenter and theorists) to address concerns that the high energy nuclear collisions at RHIC might somehow produce states of matter or of the vacuum that would destroy the earth or the universe. Production of strangelets of a particular type are among the scenarios they address. The second is a review from some conference that directly addresses astrophysical implications of the existence of strange quark matter, and what bounds we can put on the existence of SQM based on observations (section 6). Here they note in passing that earthquakes might be used as a signature for stranglets.
Thus it is plausible that a group at SMU has, indeed, examined earthquake records to look for evidence of strangelets hitting the earth. Without seeing their paper I cannot judge whether this is believed by them to be a "positive" result or merely a "non-negative" one. Experience shows that in searches like this, and in cosmic ray experiments in general, there have been many observtions of new phenomena that later turned out to be very real and important, but also at least as many sightings that turn out not to be real. I wouldn't conclude that strange quark matter has been observed based on this article, but this is not obviously crack-pot nonsense either.
******
Here are the articles he cites: one, two.
Sigh... Does anyone know whether "mb" (millibits) is supposed to mean MB (megabytes) or Mb (megabits)? I'm pretty sure that video RAM is nearly always measured in bytes, but I don't know if the same is true for L3 cache. You'd think that after 12543 stories getting people confused by a factor of 8, they'd learn to abbreviate correctly.
This is hardly a new theory. The only thing which I see that makes it distinct from the age-old theory with the same outline is that it invokes dark matter as part of the mechanism. Hopefully, if presented in scientific language rather than yahoo-interview, it has some interesting new twist, but I'm just not seeing it here.
Also, he says "When it's changing slowly, it's gravitationally self-repulsive and when it's changing fast, it picks up speed, it's gravitationally self-attractive". It's slow and repulsive now. What is supposed to ever make it speed up in the future since it's own existance is what is making it slow now?