I highly recommend the book series on mathematical physics by Walter Thirring. The first volume is "Classical Mathematical Phyics: Dynamical Systems and Field Theories" and is available from Amazon for 35$ or so.
It is written in a mathemical language (Def, Theorem, Proof...) and is highly structured to help line out the mathematical basics behind classical mechanics and electrodynamics (some differential geometry is needed for the latter).
The second volume on quantum mechanics requires a pretty solid knowledge of functional analysis.
I've used S60 phones (Nokia in the past, a Sony P1i now) for quite some time now, and you're right on all accounts you mentioned.
I'd still consider getting an iPhone (if I could easily use it with my current $5 per month contract without any jailbreaking or stuff like), because the user interface is superior on almost all accounts.
It's just like the old iPod vs. anything else debate: Yes, you can get devices that have more features and are cheaper, but almost all feel a lot clunkier to use.
Any that's an important point, too, apart from specs.
I love to use TeXmacs to calculate stuff by hand, i.e. writing down some equation, using copy and paste to duplicate it and manipulate things line by line. It looks much better than writing everything on paper and is faster too, especially if you work like me and don't like to apply lots of operations in one line.
When I want to use the output for something serious I usually use the LaTeX export and just embed the equations in a "real" LaTeX document. That works quite well.
You demonstrated a complete misunderstanding of what I was comparing. Naturally a good photographer can take fantastic pictures with any kind of equipment, just as a bad photographer won't improve his skills by using a $3000 DSLR.
So I guess there's no point of ever comparing any two cameras now, because it all depends on the photographer?
Wrong, because there are still properties that can be compared objectively. The available lenses for SLR systems are usually better (measurable) than the fixed lenses on P&S cameras. So it's unfair to compare those two.
The metering and focusing systems are usually more accurate and faster on SLR cameras, making it again unfair to compare them with P&S cameras.
And those are just two examples of what might be compared, without even touching the digital vs. film issue.
And to a certain extent just giving an SLR to a P&S snapshot guy will improve his photos, even if it's just a better automatic exposure or less noise on higher ISO settings (he will still continue to take the same boring photos he has taken before of course).
A $200 film SLR will almost make better pictures than a point and shoot digital camera, but that is because I think you are comparing apples and oranges.
You'd have to compare film point and shoot cameras to digital point and shoot cameras or film SLRs to digital SLRs.
I've never heard any physicist call the Higgs 'God Particle' when talking to other physicists. The term does get mentioned in popular science books / articles, and I always think it's embarrassing and silly, because the Higgs solves only one of the many problems that remain in the Standard Model (albeit a very important problem). And as the Higgs would only be part of the SM, I wonder what mediating particles of unified theories like GWS+SU(3)c will be called, Uber-God Particle? Or the bosons of a theorie that includes gravity, Ultimaty-God Particle?
The "why" that you are referring to seems to be a rather philosophical "why", which is not what most physicist will be after. The important point is that we can calculate results for processes that involve the four interactions and compare them with our experiments. That's as far a "why" as physics is going to give to you.
We can't calculate or predict anything involving Dark Matter / Energy yet, because we know almost nothing about them except for the fact that they are needed at some point to make our models work.
Dark Energy is really just a term to describe the fact that we can't come up with an expanding universe even if we add up all the known effects that could cause an expansion. There isn't a working theory of Dark Energy yet, so while we know that "something" has to provide for the expansion of the universe, we still don't know what that might be.
The four forces are an entirely different matter. Electromagnetism, the strong and weak forces are summed up in the Standard Model of Particle Physics (in the form of the Electroweak Theory + Quantum Chromodynamics), which is very well tested and in fantastic agreement with experiments. Gravity doesn't fit into the mathematical framework of quantum mechanics, but the theory of General Relativity has been tested experimentally and is almost universally accepted.
So that's basically the reason... You have four interactions for which we have very well tested theories and mathematical tools, while we know almost knothing about Dark Energy except for the fact that we need it to make our cosmological models work
At least on Mac OS X 10.5, X11 is installed by default and should be available on any 10.5 Mac (unless the user specifically disabled that option during setup).
Idiots who trust legendary untrustworthiness of Babelfish for the official less important diplomatic file of the work spark.
There, I translated it to Dutch and back using Babelfish for some added clarity.
I love LaTeXit on the Mac. It's so tightly integrated in the Mac way of doing things that people don't even notice they're using LaTeX (well, apart from the syntax;). It features a small windows where you can enter snippets of LaTeX which it will compile and display. You can then drag and drop the image to basically any program where it will appear as a PDF, with transparent background and all.
This is my preferred way of typesetting equations for Keynote or Powerpoint presentations, btw. (There are similar methods involving OS X Services, but in my experience LaTeXit works smoother).
I wonder if Apple could get away with using a lock that restricts the phone to only accept SIMs from a specific country. This way they could sell phones that would behave like an unlocked phone, say, in Belgium, where they have to be unlocked by law, but still prohibit the use of foreign SIMs which would prevent phones being exported to other countries like the US.
Austrians and Germans have a nasty history of political and religious war with the Turks. The fighting only ended with the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire after WW1, and people on all sides still remember that. I don't think that's the reason. A huge number of people from Turkey were invited to come to Germany by the government to work in the mining and steel industries in the 60s and 70s (as were Italians before). Of course the incentives were decent pay, universal health care and all that, so the program was wildly popular. The tiny problem that the government didn't consider was that those people weren't going to leave after working for a few years. They were never really considered to be immigrants, so there were no requirements on languange proficiency or anything and the people were treated as foreign guest workers.
Naturally, not feeling welcome, the families from Turkey stayed very much within their minority, building what amounts to all small economy on grocery stores etc. You didn't even have to know German to live a decent life in that minority within Germany.
It has taken decades for the government and the public to realize that those people have, in fact, immigrated (a lot of them are German nationals by now, most of the second and third generation definitely), but nobody helped them to assimilate and the immigrants themselves, always having in mind that their stay would only be temporary, never cared to learn the language either.
All this combined with the fact that the mining and steel industries are by now pretty much defunct and that not being able to speak German pretty much rules out getting a well-paid job has lead to the rise of ghettos and a huge number of unemployed, uneducated Turkish youths (gangs and all that).
Strangely, Germany has also seen lots of immigrants from Poland and Italy and those groups have avoided all those problems I mentioned. The main reason is probably that they were better educated to begin with and thus able and willing to learn German (Most of the people from Turkey were from pretty backwards regions in the east).
Most applications are actually distributed in self-contained directories, you just have the choice of dragging it into your personal Applications folder or the system-wide one. In the latter case the Finder asks for your password (if you're allowed to sudo). In a true multi-user environment most users would probably keep their applications in ~/Applications, I guess. As most Macs are used as single-user boxes that directory is usually empty though, with all applications living in/Applications.
All other modern operating systems either have per-user copies of programs (Mac OS X) or only allow programs to write to per-user directories (UNIX).
I think Mac OS X usually keeps all apps in/Applications, readable for all users. The applications will then write per-user stuff in the ~/Library folder of that specific user. Or am I missing something here?
Agreed. I was just considering a point-to-point service for which an ICE doesn't make sense in my opinion. Of course, having long distance train service right from the airport station is a plus, you're right.
ICEs don't really accelerate quickly enough to be used as a high speed train on a 27km track, so that would probably not be economical. What they could do is just use a regular short distance train like on the Regional Express network. Depending on what kind of train they'd use they could hit up to 160km/h with a pretty decent acceleration. Cut the in-between stops and you could travel the distance in a bit more than 10 minutes (20km at 160 km/h would take 7.5 minutes; take 7 km for accelerating / decelerating).
Most of the caching is done using custom hardware that lives right in the detectors with latency in the order of s. The data output for permanent storage is (for the ATLAS detector, that's the one I know some stuff about) 200 MBytes / s, which is not gigantic. There are some PDF slides of a seminar talk on the triggering mechanism for ATLAS on my homepage in the Seminar section (in English even).
Still, the data aquisition and storage system is impressive. Most of the storage will be distributed over different sites, so I don't know if there will be a huge central storage system.
I really try to like like Opera, because the speed and rendering abilities are really awesome. The one thing that keeps me from using it is the awful user interface, at least on my Mac. Using it just feels clumsy compared to Safari or Camino (using Gecko).
That would probably be a bit too complicated for 6th grade. And considering that the original poster was talking about containment, I doubt that the small magnetic moment of the neutron would help in containing them using a magnetic field. dE/dx in matter is the only realistic way to shield off neutrons, as far as I know.
It's important to distinguish between the amount of data generated during an event right in the detector and the filtered data that in the end will be kept and saved on permanent storage. The ATLAS detector, for example, has a data rate in the order of terabits per sec during an event. There's a pretty sophisticated multi-level triggering system whose purpose it is to throw out most of that data (~98%) and only look for interesting events.
Right now, the average event size for ATLAS is 1.6 MByte and the system is designed to keep around 200 events per second, or roughly 300 MByte. This isn't much of course, but you have to consider that the bunch crossing rate (i.e. the rate at which bunches of protons will collide and generate events) is 40 MHz.
So you have to design a system that boils this rate from 40 MHz down to 200 Hz and only keeps the interesting parts, while also buffering all the data in the meantime. For this reason, the first trigger level is entirely implemented in hardware right in the detector and reduces the rate down to 75 KHz with a latency of 2.5 s. The rest of the trigger works on clusters using Linux computers and has a latency of o(1s).
They definitely should not have chosen Shure earphones for the test. Shure makes in-ear earphones that take a lot of time to get used to and are quite difficult to fit in a comfortable and good-sounding way. So unless the testers were all used to in-ear earphones already, the results are probably skewed quite a bit because of this.
The test would be on sounder ground if they used standard high-quality headphones.
There are commercially available quantum cryptography devices that use entanglement to safely transmit informationen (note: not instantanous, but safe, because interfering with it always causes the data to be manipulated).
If I recall correctly that made the news when they used quantum crypto. to make an electronic bank transfer in Austria.
Slashdot Mirror
The police already uses radio and cell phones and that isn't a reason to worry about radiation. That won't change.
It is written in a mathemical language (Def, Theorem, Proof...) and is highly structured to help line out the mathematical basics behind classical mechanics and electrodynamics (some differential geometry is needed for the latter).
The second volume on quantum mechanics requires a pretty solid knowledge of functional analysis.
I'd still consider getting an iPhone (if I could easily use it with my current $5 per month contract without any jailbreaking or stuff like), because the user interface is superior on almost all accounts.
It's just like the old iPod vs. anything else debate: Yes, you can get devices that have more features and are cheaper, but almost all feel a lot clunkier to use.
Any that's an important point, too, apart from specs.
When I want to use the output for something serious I usually use the LaTeX export and just embed the equations in a "real" LaTeX document. That works quite well.
So I guess there's no point of ever comparing any two cameras now, because it all depends on the photographer?
Wrong, because there are still properties that can be compared objectively. The available lenses for SLR systems are usually better (measurable) than the fixed lenses on P&S cameras. So it's unfair to compare those two.
The metering and focusing systems are usually more accurate and faster on SLR cameras, making it again unfair to compare them with P&S cameras.
And those are just two examples of what might be compared, without even touching the digital vs. film issue.
And to a certain extent just giving an SLR to a P&S snapshot guy will improve his photos, even if it's just a better automatic exposure or less noise on higher ISO settings (he will still continue to take the same boring photos he has taken before of course).
A $200 film SLR will almost make better pictures than a point and shoot digital camera, but that is because I think you are comparing apples and oranges. You'd have to compare film point and shoot cameras to digital point and shoot cameras or film SLRs to digital SLRs.
I've never heard any physicist call the Higgs 'God Particle' when talking to other physicists. The term does get mentioned in popular science books / articles, and I always think it's embarrassing and silly, because the Higgs solves only one of the many problems that remain in the Standard Model (albeit a very important problem). And as the Higgs would only be part of the SM, I wonder what mediating particles of unified theories like GWS+SU(3)c will be called, Uber-God Particle? Or the bosons of a theorie that includes gravity, Ultimaty-God Particle?
We can't calculate or predict anything involving Dark Matter / Energy yet, because we know almost nothing about them except for the fact that they are needed at some point to make our models work.
The four forces are an entirely different matter. Electromagnetism, the strong and weak forces are summed up in the Standard Model of Particle Physics (in the form of the Electroweak Theory + Quantum Chromodynamics), which is very well tested and in fantastic agreement with experiments. Gravity doesn't fit into the mathematical framework of quantum mechanics, but the theory of General Relativity has been tested experimentally and is almost universally accepted.
So that's basically the reason... You have four interactions for which we have very well tested theories and mathematical tools, while we know almost knothing about Dark Energy except for the fact that we need it to make our cosmological models work
Funnily, the Dyson from Quantum Field Theory is related to the vacuum cleaner Dyson.
At least on Mac OS X 10.5, X11 is installed by default and should be available on any 10.5 Mac (unless the user specifically disabled that option during setup).
Idiots who trust legendary untrustworthiness of Babelfish for the official less important diplomatic file of the work spark. There, I translated it to Dutch and back using Babelfish for some added clarity.
This is my preferred way of typesetting equations for Keynote or Powerpoint presentations, btw. (There are similar methods involving OS X Services, but in my experience LaTeXit works smoother).
I wonder if Apple could get away with using a lock that restricts the phone to only accept SIMs from a specific country. This way they could sell phones that would behave like an unlocked phone, say, in Belgium, where they have to be unlocked by law, but still prohibit the use of foreign SIMs which would prevent phones being exported to other countries like the US.
Naturally, not feeling welcome, the families from Turkey stayed very much within their minority, building what amounts to all small economy on grocery stores etc. You didn't even have to know German to live a decent life in that minority within Germany.
It has taken decades for the government and the public to realize that those people have, in fact, immigrated (a lot of them are German nationals by now, most of the second and third generation definitely), but nobody helped them to assimilate and the immigrants themselves, always having in mind that their stay would only be temporary, never cared to learn the language either.
All this combined with the fact that the mining and steel industries are by now pretty much defunct and that not being able to speak German pretty much rules out getting a well-paid job has lead to the rise of ghettos and a huge number of unemployed, uneducated Turkish youths (gangs and all that).
Strangely, Germany has also seen lots of immigrants from Poland and Italy and those groups have avoided all those problems I mentioned. The main reason is probably that they were better educated to begin with and thus able and willing to learn German (Most of the people from Turkey were from pretty backwards regions in the east).
Most applications are actually distributed in self-contained directories, you just have the choice of dragging it into your personal Applications folder or the system-wide one. In the latter case the Finder asks for your password (if you're allowed to sudo). In a true multi-user environment most users would probably keep their applications in ~/Applications, I guess. As most Macs are used as single-user boxes that directory is usually empty though, with all applications living in /Applications.
All other modern operating systems either have per-user copies of programs (Mac OS X) or only allow programs to write to per-user directories (UNIX).
I think Mac OS X usually keeps all apps inAgreed. I was just considering a point-to-point service for which an ICE doesn't make sense in my opinion. Of course, having long distance train service right from the airport station is a plus, you're right.
ICEs don't really accelerate quickly enough to be used as a high speed train on a 27km track, so that would probably not be economical. What they could do is just use a regular short distance train like on the Regional Express network. Depending on what kind of train they'd use they could hit up to 160km/h with a pretty decent acceleration. Cut the in-between stops and you could travel the distance in a bit more than 10 minutes (20km at 160 km/h would take 7.5 minutes; take 7 km for accelerating / decelerating).
Still, the data aquisition and storage system is impressive. Most of the storage will be distributed over different sites, so I don't know if there will be a huge central storage system.
I really try to like like Opera, because the speed and rendering abilities are really awesome. The one thing that keeps me from using it is the awful user interface, at least on my Mac. Using it just feels clumsy compared to Safari or Camino (using Gecko).
That would probably be a bit too complicated for 6th grade. And considering that the original poster was talking about containment, I doubt that the small magnetic moment of the neutron would help in containing them using a magnetic field. dE/dx in matter is the only realistic way to shield off neutrons, as far as I know.
Right now, the average event size for ATLAS is 1.6 MByte and the system is designed to keep around 200 events per second, or roughly 300 MByte. This isn't much of course, but you have to consider that the bunch crossing rate (i.e. the rate at which bunches of protons will collide and generate events) is 40 MHz.
So you have to design a system that boils this rate from 40 MHz down to 200 Hz and only keeps the interesting parts, while also buffering all the data in the meantime. For this reason, the first trigger level is entirely implemented in hardware right in the detector and reduces the rate down to 75 KHz with a latency of 2.5 s. The rest of the trigger works on clusters using Linux computers and has a latency of o(1s).
The test would be on sounder ground if they used standard high-quality headphones.
If I recall correctly that made the news when they used quantum crypto. to make an electronic bank transfer in Austria.