I agree with the less-cynical-sounding commenters: math is important in CS not just because of the history of the field, or because it shows your willingness to work hard, or because maybe one day you'll code in a domain that requires tensor analysis or what-have-you.
It's important because when you "grok" it, your mind is different than before you grokked. Garridan's comment (http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3805139&cid=43874611) is right on: you'll "sharpen your skills in symbolic manipulation". Pushups and bicep curls and stretching aren't sports: athletes do those things to condition their bodies for the real sports where nary a pushup is involved.
Maybe the marketplace for the kind of job you want demands a CompSci degree in these tough years, but I know many developers from a few years back who don't have one. Question yourself: would you be better off getting certifications plus a 2-year diploma and a 2-year headstart in the job market rather than a 4-year degree? You might do just fine with job-oriented training on top of your aptitude and some experience.
It's not 173 g, it's over 46000 g
on
1000-mph Car Planned
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Your typo: putting 2.8 (mach) in as 2.8 m/s.
Start over: centripetal a = v^2 / R
Plug in v = 476.5 m/s, R = 0.5 m (half of diameter); a = 454,000 m/s^2 approx.
I switched about a year ago. My Dvorak keying speed is about as good as my pre-switch QWERTY speed, but my QWERTY speed was damaged and has not come back to pre-switch speed.
I switched more for efficiency than speed - I was getting warning pains of RSI, which abated.
Using OS X / Windows, it's easy to switch layouts, so if I'm using someone else's computer I load Dvorak and put QWERTY back when done; vice-versa when others need to use mine. Perhaps if I practised QWERTY my speed would come back.
Worst consequence is that shortcuts were moved, especially cut / copy / paste. As another poster noted, in OS X you can load Dvorak but leave command-key shortcuts alone; my Windows PC at work has no equivalent. To avoid confusing myself in the early days of switching, I just accepted the new shortcut locations and now they're in muscle memory.
I don't know how easy it is to swap layouts per-application in Linux; my home laptop boots into Dvorak and I never switch it in shell, KDE, etc. so it might be easy (e.g. to use vi with QWERTY in a Terminal) or hard.
Other posters seem to have switched OK in a couple of weeks or less, but I had a month of reduced productivity, maybe because I've never been a lightning keyboarder to begin with. It was worth it to me as a health investment - and to see the faces of people who like to elbow me aside and start typing without asking.:-)
I switched to Dvorak layout some months ago. I pulled off & rearranged all the key caps on my home computer to help learn; the keyboard at work didn't allow this (the locking tabs went in different directions on different rows), so I just used a reference chart. When I got my 10-finger touch typing skill back w the new layout, I put the keys back in QWERTY on the home keyboard.
My speed using Dvorak is the same as my pre-switch QWERTY speed -- I'd hoped it would be higher, but perhaps because character frequency and spatial distribution in code are different than in English prose I'm not getting full benefit. Some punctuation oft-used in code is LESS convenient in Dvorak. Otoh, my (mild) wrist/forearm pains of last year have abated.
The only real drawbacks: I had a 3-week productivity hit and now my QWERTY speed sucks. (It matters when I have to type on someone else's machine, e.g. in a classroom, or at a coworker's work station, where it's not convenient to activate a Dvorak key map.) I plan to do touch-typing exercises in QWERTY so that I'll be just as fast on either layout.
Oh, and yes, I'm probably considered the weird co-worker in my office. Not without affection, I hope!:-)
They essentially patented using hashes for file identification.
Did they? The CNET article says "the process of identifying files on a peer-to-peer network using a 'hash,'" -- bad, but not as sweeping as id'ing files by hashes in general.
And tho' the CNET article doesn't say (and I find no patent info on Altnet's site) I wonder if the patent covers hashes (used this way) in general, or a specific implementation?...in which case other apps, using different implementations, will be unaffected.
In the article it looks like the lawsuit stems from RIAA's minions using the Kazaa implementation without a license. It would be scarier if Overpeer and MediaDefender were using unrelated tools and still were sued on the basis of the patent.
Thanks for the cogent reply, emaveneau -- I'll read the EFF links later today.
I'll look for Sarmite Bulte and Peggy Nash (NDP) with (better-)informed questions. Alas, too late for a paper letter before election day.
The CD levy... I'd like to see a GST clawback (fill out a form, keep receipts, whatever) on blank media used for archiving data. For now, as a "least-bad" mechanism, it feels more like "give every driver a speeding ticket" than a tax.
Have you a link / resource where I can see which artists have received $ to date? (Celine Dion... sigh...)
I was a bit surprised by what I read about the positions of the Liberals, Conservatives and especially the NDP. I would have hoped for a more civil-libertarian position from them.
Issues mentioned in the article that affect Cdns include copyright reform, a national ID card, anti-spam legislation, use of open source software by government, etc.
Canadians pay a levy on recordable media (incl blank CD's) which supposedly is collected to compensate artists for copying (as mentioned often on/. it's legal here! with some conditions) of their work. I know no-one who believes the artists will get the money.
re: the Canadian Heritage committee copyright report... MP Sarmite "Sam" Bulte is the 2-term Liberal candidate in MY riding & is campaigning hard for re-election. I had somehow forgotten that she chaired the Canadian Heritage committee; the report (referred to in article) has much in it that affects people in the tech / web sector. In particular, if I see her shaking hands outside the High Park TTC station again, I'll bring up some issues with her!
e.g.
ISP liability for copyrighted content;
licencing schemes for copyrighted educational materials.
names of ANY Cdn musicians who have received money from the levy I pay on DATA BACKUP MEDIA
Many groups are unhappy with the report's recommendations, including educators.
The basic idea is not hare-brained at all. In "classical" General Relativity, it is equivalent to asking whether the universe is closed (i.e. there's enough matter / energy in it to halt & reverse the expansion, eventually, into a Big Crunch) or open (will expand forever into the Big Cold).
Your speculation about stuff above/below us is considerably less established in the literature.:-)
Claims & disclaimers: I studied physics years ago, but never at the level of the article.
Both are strongly non-Aqua in appearance. Flagship is blue & gold, very contrasty but somehow not hard on the eyes. It took me a couple days to fully appreciate, but it has been our default home theme for months.
Latium has hand-drawn-looking widgets and an off-grey paper-looking background -- should look dirty or scratchy, but doesn't. (The v. atmospheric wallpapers help.)
Excellent execution and attention to detail can make unlikely-seeming concepts usable & pleasing.
Look, I was just answering your (rhetorical?) questions and picking nits with some of your specific assertions. And yes, expressing irritation with your tone; bad idea, wish I hadn't.
Wrong, they are not "truly random" anymore than anything else for which you have imperfect knowlege.
Actually, yes they are. A specific event of radioactive decay is unpredictable by nature of reality, according to quantum physics: the famous Heisenberg Principal of Indeterminacy, aka Uncertainty Principal. It's not that knowledge of the internals of the nucleus is imperfect or even unmeasurable in principal: the information isn't there. There are theorems proving absence of any "hidden variables" that could track the state of a nucleus behind the scenes.
Did you even RTFA? Or my post?
Yes, both. fwiw, the article didn't claim 'integer'; you didn't mention it either. But whatever...
To spell it out: the context of my answer of the value of one random number is that it be many bits long (I spelled that out), answering your original question in which you included this: "Or any other single random number." See, I did read your post.
Since when is an LCG a buzzword? Most people have never even heard of one.
That's right, most people haven't. It was a gratuitous reference. If you don't like 'buzzword', substitute 'technical term'.
[...] if we're calling those buzzwords, don't let me ever hear you say Quantum Mechanics
'Quantum physics' was part of my response concerning truly random events, and meant as a shorthand justification for my assertion.
As for an "abusive tone", I'll take what ever tone I like [...]
[...] Random numbers don't exist period, even taking them from external sources is still pseudo-random generation
Time series data from radioactive decay will generate truly random numbers in a non-uniform distribution. (Prerequisite: belief in quantum physics.)
[...] one of them is not.
Use one good one (many bits long) to seed your PRNG.
[...] You should read up on chaos theory and probability before you call someone an idiot jaz.
[...] and by the way, using a Lehmer Congruential Generator
Demonstrably wrong statements, an abusive tone and gratuitous play of buzzwords does nothing to make you look less an idiot.
stars are perfect emitters/absorbers (aka "black bodies")
"Perfect", they're not. Spectral analysis relies strongly on the presence of emission / absorption lines. That's how helium (from Greek word for "sun") was discovered: by its emission lines in sunlight. I'd call those "imperfections", even though they're the most useful features!
Yes, you can measure temperature by the blackbody component of a spectrum, and a nice, hot plasma's spectrum has a very nice blackbody curve overall.
"Go read up" -- them're fightin' words...:-)
Re:Preference for "geek" over "nerd"
on
We Are All Nerds Now
·
· Score: 3, Informative
nerd n.
1. [mainstream slang] Pejorative applied to anyone with an above-average IQ and few gifts at small talk and ordinary social rituals.
2. [jargon] Term of praise applied (in conscious ironic reference to sense 1) to someone who knows what's really important and interesting and doesn't care to be distracted by trivial chatter and silly status games. Compare geek.
geek n. A person who has chosen concentration rather than conformity; one who pursues skill (especially technical skill) and imagination, not mainstream social acceptance.
[...]
It seems (in slashdot, at least) that everyone has their own idea of what the differences are, but "geek" seems to be cooler than "nerd" in current usage.
I can understand the frustration that would lead an admin to attack SPEWS. I don't think it's right to have done so, but your position is simplistic.
"It's called doing your homework" eh? In my (limited) experience, SPEWS sometimes lists inappropriately wide IP ranges. If my hosting ISP's upstream provider is in the same block as another who provides bandwidth to someone who hosts someone who spams, my ISP doesn't have a business case for complaint against those hosting the spammer. We and our provider are not their customers. The big bandwidth provider may also be far removed from us -- it will take a while for our complaint to go up the chain, and a direct complaint from a non-customer may bear little weight.
The result? We have to wait for someone else to get our service restored for us.
In a case like this, I say SPEWS must also do its homework and block only an appropriate range of addresses. Where does one draw the line? In my (again, limited) experience, perhaps closer to the home of the wrong-doers than SPEWS may have done.
DOS-ing SPEWS might be someone's idea of a correct way to take issue with a high-handed policy, since as you point out "dont bitch to Spews. Spews wont care" and that may be how they feel SPEWS has treated them -- denied them service, without recourse.
I say again, I don't think it's right, I just think it's understandable and that an admin need not be a complete dumbass who misses the point, but could be someone who has a big problem with the implementation.
No indication of that in the articles (did you read them?) -- an Ethernet driver bug and boot problems on some models of Mac would be reason enough.
Beside, why pull the update? Smarter to release a separate (much-smaller) openssh patch afterwards rather than hold back the entire, ~40 Mb 10.2.8 package.
As a fellow dialer-up I feel your pain at the ever-larger updates. Fortunately, I have bandwidth at work and can bring home the standalone packages on a ZIP disk from an office Mac.
Yes, I wonder if the parent poster meant "socially liberal", which makes more sense to me.
Yay, my home and native land.
btw, what banned books do you mean? (Genuinely curious.) I know of cases in which Canada Customs seized shipments to certain bookstores at the border, but that's at the discretion of the agents (much mis-used, imo, but that's another issue).
As more people create quality themes, the value of this sort of utility keeps growing. I bought a Kaleidoscope license way back when -- alas, MacOS 8.x - 9.x only -- the tons of excellent themes made it worthwhile.
Intensity matters... ever use a microwave oven? That's non-ionizing radiation too, but hardly irrelevant to organic materials (hint: cooking breaks molecular bonds, too).
Also, as you point out, your physics properly applies only to metals. There are lots of lower-energy bonds one can excite in long organic molecules.
As to total energy deposition, evidence suggests that bulk heating is not required in long-term exposure. I have read that highway cops who used to sit with traffic radars next to their heads had a scary incidence of brain cancers. Last I heard, there was no way to argue away the increased incidence of childhood leukemia, etc. for people living under power lines, either.
How does non-ionizing, (relatively) low-power EM radiation affect overall health, immune disorders, incidence of cancer, etc.? I don't know, and neither do you.
Empirical evidence beats hand-waving from a first-year physics course. I'll try to limit my unnecessary exposure to non-ionizing EM radiation until conclusions are in from long term studies, where maybe the biophysics will be more subtle than the photoelectric effect. There are lots of ways to affect (and damage) big, complicated molecules than knocking single electrons out of them.
The reason why electrons (instead of nuclei) move in metals has nothing to do with relative accelerations. In a solid, the nuclei are fixed in place. They don't generate a positive electrical current at all, and the "equal and opposite" argument of the poster doesn't apply. (The fastenings on the wire take up the infinitesimal acceleration due to momentum change of the electrons.)
The poster is wrong again about "charged ions" (by which he should mean plasma). Plasma isn't a solid; both species (positive & negative) of ions move and contribute to the current.
I am not a plasma physicist but DID study university physics. The + and - carriers won't move in inverse proportion to their masses; they're not accelerating freely unless in a vacuum. They bump into stuff and can be treated as moving at constant velocity. Parent poster: look up "mean free path".
On the scale of individual ions, balancing charge is WAY more important than balancing masses when figuring the dynamics.
If you just say "F=ma" followed by anything you like, that's not a scientific explanation.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with the less-cynical-sounding commenters: math is important in CS not just because of the history of the field, or because it shows your willingness to work hard, or because maybe one day you'll code in a domain that requires tensor analysis or what-have-you.
It's important because when you "grok" it, your mind is different than before you grokked. Garridan's comment (http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3805139&cid=43874611) is right on: you'll "sharpen your skills in symbolic manipulation". Pushups and bicep curls and stretching aren't sports: athletes do those things to condition their bodies for the real sports where nary a pushup is involved.
Maybe the marketplace for the kind of job you want demands a CompSci degree in these tough years, but I know many developers from a few years back who don't have one. Question yourself: would you be better off getting certifications plus a 2-year diploma and a 2-year headstart in the job market rather than a 4-year degree? You might do just fine with job-oriented training on top of your aptitude and some experience.
Your typo: putting 2.8 (mach) in as 2.8 m/s.
Start over: centripetal a = v^2 / R
Plug in v = 476.5 m/s, R = 0.5 m (half of diameter); a = 454,000 m/s^2 approx.
Compare to g = 9.84 m/s^2 ; a is over 46,000 gee.
I switched about a year ago. My Dvorak keying speed is about as good as my pre-switch QWERTY speed, but my QWERTY speed was damaged and has not come back to pre-switch speed.
:-)
I switched more for efficiency than speed - I was getting warning pains of RSI, which abated.
Using OS X / Windows, it's easy to switch layouts, so if I'm using someone else's computer I load Dvorak and put QWERTY back when done; vice-versa when others need to use mine. Perhaps if I practised QWERTY my speed would come back.
Worst consequence is that shortcuts were moved, especially cut / copy / paste. As another poster noted, in OS X you can load Dvorak but leave command-key shortcuts alone; my Windows PC at work has no equivalent. To avoid confusing myself in the early days of switching, I just accepted the new shortcut locations and now they're in muscle memory.
I don't know how easy it is to swap layouts per-application in Linux; my home laptop boots into Dvorak and I never switch it in shell, KDE, etc. so it might be easy (e.g. to use vi with QWERTY in a Terminal) or hard.
Other posters seem to have switched OK in a couple of weeks or less, but I had a month of reduced productivity, maybe because I've never been a lightning keyboarder to begin with. It was worth it to me as a health investment - and to see the faces of people who like to elbow me aside and start typing without asking.
If you want us to use it, how about telling us WTF it is first?
Yes, because AC parent finds clicking the links TOO... MUCH... WORK...
I switched to Dvorak layout some months ago. I pulled off & rearranged all the key caps on my home computer to help learn; the keyboard at work didn't allow this (the locking tabs went in different directions on different rows), so I just used a reference chart. When I got my 10-finger touch typing skill back w the new layout, I put the keys back in QWERTY on the home keyboard.
:-)
My speed using Dvorak is the same as my pre-switch QWERTY speed -- I'd hoped it would be higher, but perhaps because character frequency and spatial distribution in code are different than in English prose I'm not getting full benefit. Some punctuation oft-used in code is LESS convenient in Dvorak. Otoh, my (mild) wrist/forearm pains of last year have abated.
The only real drawbacks: I had a 3-week productivity hit and now my QWERTY speed sucks. (It matters when I have to type on someone else's machine, e.g. in a classroom, or at a coworker's work station, where it's not convenient to activate a Dvorak key map.) I plan to do touch-typing exercises in QWERTY so that I'll be just as fast on either layout.
Oh, and yes, I'm probably considered the weird co-worker in my office. Not without affection, I hope!
Did they? The CNET article says "the process of identifying files on a peer-to-peer network using a 'hash,'" -- bad, but not as sweeping as id'ing files by hashes in general.
And tho' the CNET article doesn't say (and I find no patent info on Altnet's site) I wonder if the patent covers hashes (used this way) in general, or a specific implementation? ...in which case other apps, using different implementations, will be unaffected.
In the article it looks like the lawsuit stems from RIAA's minions using the Kazaa implementation without a license. It would be scarier if Overpeer and MediaDefender were using unrelated tools and still were sued on the basis of the patent.
Thanks for the cogent reply, emaveneau -- I'll read the EFF links later today.
I'll look for Sarmite Bulte and Peggy Nash (NDP) with (better-)informed questions. Alas, too late for a paper letter before election day.
The CD levy... I'd like to see a GST clawback (fill out a form, keep receipts, whatever) on blank media used for archiving data. For now, as a "least-bad" mechanism, it feels more like "give every driver a speeding ticket" than a tax.
Have you a link / resource where I can see which artists have received $ to date? (Celine Dion... sigh...)
I was a bit surprised by what I read about the positions of the Liberals, Conservatives and especially the NDP. I would have hoped for a more civil-libertarian position from them.
Issues mentioned in the article that affect Cdns include copyright reform, a national ID card, anti-spam legislation, use of open source software by government, etc.
Canadians pay a levy on recordable media (incl blank CD's) which supposedly is collected to compensate artists for copying (as mentioned often on /. it's legal here! with some conditions) of their work. I know no-one who believes the artists will get the money.
re: the Canadian Heritage committee copyright report... MP Sarmite "Sam" Bulte is the 2-term Liberal candidate in MY riding & is campaigning hard for re-election. I had somehow forgotten that she chaired the Canadian Heritage committee; the report (referred to in article) has much in it that affects people in the tech / web sector. In particular, if I see her shaking hands outside the High Park TTC station again, I'll bring up some issues with her!
Many groups are unhappy with the report's recommendations, including educators.
The report is available as PDF.
USians and other non-Cdns may find similarities & differences with your own countries' policies illuminating.
The basic idea is not hare-brained at all. In "classical" General Relativity, it is equivalent to asking whether the universe is closed (i.e. there's enough matter / energy in it to halt & reverse the expansion, eventually, into a Big Crunch) or open (will expand forever into the Big Cold).
Your speculation about stuff above/below us is considerably less established in the literature. :-)
Claims & disclaimers: I studied physics years ago, but never at the level of the article.
That's harsh, linzeal. Should the asker browse 100's of mini-reviews by any old posters and order books for $$$ on that basis alone?
Asking /. readers for opinions and reading highest-moderated posts seems like a sensible way to qualify the list.
I like Flagship by Topsy Designs and Latium by Harlan Lewis.
Both are strongly non-Aqua in appearance. Flagship is blue & gold, very contrasty but somehow not hard on the eyes. It took me a couple days to fully appreciate, but it has been our default home theme for months.
Latium has hand-drawn-looking widgets and an off-grey paper-looking background -- should look dirty or scratchy, but doesn't. (The v. atmospheric wallpapers help.)
Excellent execution and attention to detail can make unlikely-seeming concepts usable & pleasing.
Then you'll get only pseudo-random numbers, as far as you know... or half-heartedly true (unfaithful? adulterated???) random numbers...
:-)
Look, I was just answering your (rhetorical?) questions and picking nits with some of your specific assertions. And yes, expressing irritation with your tone; bad idea, wish I hadn't.
Actually, yes they are. A specific event of radioactive decay is unpredictable by nature of reality, according to quantum physics: the famous Heisenberg Principal of Indeterminacy, aka Uncertainty Principal. It's not that knowledge of the internals of the nucleus is imperfect or even unmeasurable in principal: the information isn't there. There are theorems proving absence of any "hidden variables" that could track the state of a nucleus behind the scenes.
Yes, both. fwiw, the article didn't claim 'integer'; you didn't mention it either. But whatever...
To spell it out: the context of my answer of the value of one random number is that it be many bits long (I spelled that out), answering your original question in which you included this: "Or any other single random number." See, I did read your post.
That's right, most people haven't. It was a gratuitous reference. If you don't like 'buzzword', substitute 'technical term'.
'Quantum physics' was part of my response concerning truly random events, and meant as a shorthand justification for my assertion.
Clearly.
Agreed.
Time series data from radioactive decay will generate truly random numbers in a non-uniform distribution. (Prerequisite: belief in quantum physics.)
Use one good one (many bits long) to seed your PRNG.
Demonstrably wrong statements, an abusive tone and gratuitous play of buzzwords does nothing to make you look less an idiot.
Yes, you can measure temperature by the blackbody component of a spectrum, and a nice, hot plasma's spectrum has a very nice blackbody curve overall.
"Go read up" -- them're fightin' words...
Go to the classics, comrade: ESR's Jargon File.
Excerpts: nerd:
And: geek
It seems (in slashdot, at least) that everyone has their own idea of what the differences are, but "geek" seems to be cooler than "nerd" in current usage.
...whereas I had to look it up.
explanation here
*Now* I feel the familiar warm, geeky goodness.
I can understand the frustration that would lead an admin to attack SPEWS. I don't think it's right to have done so, but your position is simplistic.
"It's called doing your homework" eh? In my (limited) experience, SPEWS sometimes lists inappropriately wide IP ranges. If my hosting ISP's upstream provider is in the same block as another who provides bandwidth to someone who hosts someone who spams, my ISP doesn't have a business case for complaint against those hosting the spammer. We and our provider are not their customers. The big bandwidth provider may also be far removed from us -- it will take a while for our complaint to go up the chain, and a direct complaint from a non-customer may bear little weight.
The result? We have to wait for someone else to get our service restored for us.
In a case like this, I say SPEWS must also do its homework and block only an appropriate range of addresses. Where does one draw the line? In my (again, limited) experience, perhaps closer to the home of the wrong-doers than SPEWS may have done.
DOS-ing SPEWS might be someone's idea of a correct way to take issue with a high-handed policy, since as you point out "dont bitch to Spews. Spews wont care" and that may be how they feel SPEWS has treated them -- denied them service, without recourse.
I say again, I don't think it's right, I just think it's understandable and that an admin need not be a complete dumbass who misses the point, but could be someone who has a big problem with the implementation.
No indication of that in the articles (did you read them?) -- an Ethernet driver bug and boot problems on some models of Mac would be reason enough.
Beside, why pull the update? Smarter to release a separate (much-smaller) openssh patch afterwards rather than hold back the entire, ~40 Mb 10.2.8 package.
As a fellow dialer-up I feel your pain at the ever-larger updates. Fortunately, I have bandwidth at work and can bring home the standalone packages on a ZIP disk from an office Mac.
Distan, the thing is really, really tall. (Think "goes into space".) The challenge is getting OUT of sight of it without leaving the hemisphere...
Yes, I wonder if the parent poster meant "socially liberal", which makes more sense to me.
Yay, my home and native land.
btw, what banned books do you mean? (Genuinely curious.) I know of cases in which Canada Customs seized shipments to certain bookstores at the border, but that's at the discretion of the agents (much mis-used, imo, but that's another issue).
I like the Duality theme changer, too.
As more people create quality themes, the value of this sort of utility keeps growing. I bought a Kaleidoscope license way back when -- alas, MacOS 8.x - 9.x only -- the tons of excellent themes made it worthwhile.
Intensity matters... ever use a microwave oven? That's non-ionizing radiation too, but hardly irrelevant to organic materials (hint: cooking breaks molecular bonds, too).
Also, as you point out, your physics properly applies only to metals. There are lots of lower-energy bonds one can excite in long organic molecules.
As to total energy deposition, evidence suggests that bulk heating is not required in long-term exposure. I have read that highway cops who used to sit with traffic radars next to their heads had a scary incidence of brain cancers. Last I heard, there was no way to argue away the increased incidence of childhood leukemia, etc. for people living under power lines, either.
How does non-ionizing, (relatively) low-power EM radiation affect overall health, immune disorders, incidence of cancer, etc.? I don't know, and neither do you.
Empirical evidence beats hand-waving from a first-year physics course. I'll try to limit my unnecessary exposure to non-ionizing EM radiation until conclusions are in from long term studies, where maybe the biophysics will be more subtle than the photoelectric effect. There are lots of ways to affect (and damage) big, complicated molecules than knocking single electrons out of them.
aka "frog blast the vent core"?
heh. Makes me want to fire up Marathon for the first time in ages...
The reason why electrons (instead of nuclei) move in metals has nothing to do with relative accelerations. In a solid, the nuclei are fixed in place. They don't generate a positive electrical current at all, and the "equal and opposite" argument of the poster doesn't apply. (The fastenings on the wire take up the infinitesimal acceleration due to momentum change of the electrons.)
The poster is wrong again about "charged ions" (by which he should mean plasma). Plasma isn't a solid; both species (positive & negative) of ions move and contribute to the current.
I am not a plasma physicist but DID study university physics. The + and - carriers won't move in inverse proportion to their masses; they're not accelerating freely unless in a vacuum. They bump into stuff and can be treated as moving at constant velocity. Parent poster: look up "mean free path".
On the scale of individual ions, balancing charge is WAY more important than balancing masses when figuring the dynamics.
If you just say "F=ma" followed by anything you like, that's not a scientific explanation.