If you think humans were successful endurance hunters, you've probably never tried to chase down so much as a dog.
I've also never tried to hunt a woolly mammoth with a sharpened stick but that does not mean that it did not happen. The same is true of persistence hunting.
US universities charge fees in the six-figure range. How is that 'for free' ?
Indeed they do but they don't pay any of that to non-US students who are effectively educating US students in cultures and societies beyond their borders. Hence the non-US students are providing an educational service to US students without being paid for doing so i.e. for free.
A non-US citizen in the US barely has any rights, and a visitor is taxed at a flat 30% having to go through excessive paperwork to cut it down to almost 20%.
As someone who is a non-US citizen and has lived in the US the first part - about rights - is most definitely true. It's only enhanced by the odd bloke who seems to think that as a foreigner in the US you are trespassing on hallowed ground (actually with some of the US cults there may be people who actually think that!). However the later is simply wrong - I was never taxed at a flat 30% rate. Although I did not enjoy the same generous automatic tax deductions as US citizens whilst a non-resident 'alien' I was taxed under the same system as US citizens and when I became a resident 'alien' the deductions finally became the same as well.
By comparison, A US citizen in, f.i., the EU (and elsewhere) has several, like free (as in 'free beer') medical coverage
In the UK it is even worse than that - whilst a British undergrad student I was denied coverage for prescriptions in the UK because when the form was finally opened at the government processing centre it happened to be just after the start of the summer holidays so they refused to let me deduct the rent I paid to the university for my room or any cost of living. My then US girlfriend, now wife, applied and, as a foreign student, was automatically granted free prescription coverage!
Meanwhile, they learn the local language and culture. They are more likely to do business with you.
The reverse is also true: US students will learn that there are people outside the US with different cultures and beliefs to their own and that, if they want to do business with them, they will need to take this into account. Since they provide this education for free to US students perhaps the question should be "Does the rest of the world owe the US an education?"...or we could just agree that its a mutually beneficial arrangement that we all learn about different peoples and cultures and leave it at that.
Otherwise it's being read as "Does the us" as in "Does the we".
There is a clear difference between 'US' and 'us': one is a capitalized abbreviation and the other is not so, UNLESS YOU ARE SHOUTING the difference is clear.
I've never understood why english titles capitalize every word either.
English titles do not capitalize every word 'small' words like 'a', 'the' and 'of' are not capitalized except at the start of the title. Americans, on the other hand, divided their country into states so they could have more than one capital and have an economy based on capitalism so it's perhaps not surprising that they like to capitalize every word in a title along with random other words like 'figure' and 'table' in their scientific literature! (no clue why these words deserve special treatment but I'm only English.;-).
I work in a big telco (2nd and 3rd line tech support) and I see a lot of people just linger on after their often expensive contract has ended.
Yes but are they lingering on because their phone is locked to that network or because they have better things to do than go through the hassle of setting up a new contract?
None of the money that come from grants pays for software development. Even if it was, my career would certainly advance more if I do research instead of software.
This depends on the field. In particle physics where we have massive computational challenges grants can specifically fund software development. In fact when I was a grad student there were even permanent positions called physics programmers and software development certainly can be very good for your career as long as it is combined with physics analysis - at least it has not hurt me so far. As for "needing a postdoc or a professor to do it well" I very much beg to differ - and I say that as a professor! Programming skills vary considerably at all levels but good grad students, while lacking experience, can be a step or two ahead in terms of modern programming savvy than their older colleagues who are sometimes prone to the FORTRAN++ coding style!
Once my report/paper/thesis/grant application is written I do not care about the software anymore.
Again this varies by field. Monte-carlo simulators for particle physics have a life well beyond any one project and in fact can be projects in themselves. In fact you are reading this page using a software technology developed at CERN to assist particle physics research - the world wide web. So even if you don't care about it anymore sometimes software developed for research can be amazingly useful outside that research.
Roman numerals are obsolete. Unless you live in clockwork world.
Roman numerals are notation and, as the OP says, notation changes but the core is still the same. We still use the concept of numbers but we use a different notation to express them.
I love how you ask the same, hackneyed "questions" that climate change deniers have been trotting out for a while now.
Read his post carefully. He is not "denying climate change" as you claim but is acknowledging that it is an established fact. What he is asking is how much of the current change is due to man-made influence. Frankly as a scientist (though not in climate change) I have the same question. The debate is not about climate change - that is a fact established so well that even recorded human history provides clear evidence. The debate is about how much of recent change is due to us burning fossil fuel, killing forests etc. and how much we should do to stop this.
My own opinion is that it seems plausible that we could be having an effect on the climate and, since we don't yet understand what that is, we should take steps to lessen our impact and research not only ways to do this but also how to better understand what impact we are having as well as understanding the natural forces which change the climate. If you want to argue for a wholesale dismantling of the economy you need to have some really hard evidence that this will prevent global warming...showing that this dismantling will be less disruptive than the global warming that would otherwise be caused would also be a bonus.
I think I'd rather have unlocking be legal even if it meant the end of subsidized devices.
Why would it mean the end of subsidized devices? You've signed a multi-year contract with the company to get the subsidized device so why should they care whose network you use it on - you will still be paying them their pound of flesh to use their network regardless of whichever other network you sign up for.
In fact it is very probably to their benefit for you to use another network since then they'll get the money and someone else will get the network traffic to deal with! The only possible benefit is that it lets them make huge profits on roaming but for the US only less than 40% (assuming a 300M population) of the US even have a passport so an even smaller fraction will travel abroad in any given year. In fact it probably is this which is driving it - in the EU, which has controlled roaming charges, unlocking a phone seems to be far more common (at least that's my impression without hard evidence to back it up).
You and a few other maybe, but most want to take advantage of having colour.
I can think of quite a few uses for a large, low power black and white display: airports, railway stations, bus stations, museums (interactive text for displays), shopping centre interactive maps etc. etc. In fact all the things which old black and white CRTs or paper used to be used for. The problem is that they cannot make e-Ink displays that large cheaply enough yet, not that there is no market for them if they could.
Antigua want's to do business in the US, but ignore US law.
No Antigua wants to let US residents to business in Antigua. Modern technology lets them do this without physically having to go there so the US passed a law which restricted trade with Antigua i.e. prevented its citizens from contacting Antigua and doing business there instead forcing them to do it in the US.
It's no different than say the EU passing a law to make it illegal for EU companies to purchase software written in the US because the US company that wrote the software did not allow control or regulation by EU authorities despite it being physically located in the US. The EU could certainly do this but it would be a clear violation of its promise to keep its markets open to US trade - it would be effectively implementing a significant trade barrier.
It's a mis-spelled neutrino!;-) Probably the easiest way to think of it is an electron but without an electric charge and even less mass (by at least five orders of magnitude). It comes in three flavours, one for each heavier cousin of the electron, and all of them are incredibly light - so light that nobody has been able to measure their masses. However the flavours oscillate over time and this can only happen if they have masses so while we have not been able to measure it we know that it is no zero. There is a far deeper lab here in Canada at SNOlab which does the same physics.
That doesn't mean we need them. They may or may not be a better option. Other countries get by without a monarch.
We need them, or something like them. Ultimately for every country there is always a "head of state" - at least as far as I am aware. They may call it something different, given them more or less power and have a different selection criteria but ultimately it is the same thing with a different label (and usually less competence and more cost).
IF you want to see the evolution of the CERN particle physics lab this this link. You can see the construction of some of the early accelerators (PS and ISR) which were in buildings (PS) or a large circular raised embankment (ISR). However the more modern accelerators you can only detect by the construction of new surface buildings (look for the ATLAS and LHC magnet assembly buildings appearing across the road from the main site towards the end.
Actually I disagree - we do need them for two reasons. First the monarch can break up political log jams by either dissolving or proroging parliament as required. This is a very limited power but used at the right time can keep the system flowing smoothly. Second having a monarch avoids the need for yet another clueless politician who only cares about getting reelected and will likely cost the tax payer far more than the monarch they replace.
While a monarchy may be somewhat old fashioned the only reason to get rid of something old which works is to replace it with something better. Frankly I have yet to see evidence that there is a better system out there. Given that power rests almost entirely with the elected parliaments I fail to see any gain in replacing a hereditary monarchy with, what will effectively be, an elected one.
If we can find a way to escape the tyranny of passwords that can generally be cracked by anyone who's determined anyway it can only be progress.
I agree but devices are not the way to go. The advantage of using your brain is that everyone is guaranteed to have one (whether or not they use it). Not everyone has a mobile phone and the same applies to any device you care to name. Even requiring biometric data such as finger prints or retina scans can rule out access to disabled people. There is a reason we still have passwords despite all their inherent disadvantages.
From what I know of physics, FTL travel isn't forbidden.
For v>c the gamma factor becomes imaginary. This leads to crazy things like imaginary momenta and energies. Combine that with QM and the result is that any particle over c will be an exponentially decaying wave function (called an evanescent wave) unless the particle itself has an imaginary mass which is how crazy theories about tachyons work. However even then you have a big issue because SR tells you that travelling faster than light is the same as being able to travel back in time. So, if relativity and causality are both correct - as the current understanding of the laws of physics requires - then FTL is forbidden.
SR only really becomes a factor in extreme situations unlike anything we deal with normally, whereas QM governs *everything*.
Sorry but this is simply wrong too. SR is exactly like QM in this regard. The effects might be too small to notice on an every day scale, just like they are with QM, but they are emphatically there. The time dilation effect of travelling at walking pace is very tiny but not zero. Atomic clocks on Concorde showed time dilation and, at smaller scales you can measure the transverse doppler shift - which is due to time dilation - using spinning discs and gamma ray sources and detectors.
We generally only see the really bizarre effects at extremely small scales, but nothing in the theory restricts it to those scales, and we have no real idea *why* we don't see the same effects at larger scales.
No actually we do have a good understanding of this - if we did not then QM would not be a viable theory because it would not reproduce the same macroscopic behaviour as Newton's laws (which it does).
Special relativity was already attacking causality before quantum mechanics. It made even the notion of which event happened first a matter of the reference frame observed from
NO! SR does not say that. For two depend events i.e. A causes B then A will always precede B in every inertial reference frame. The only way to can reverse the order of A and B is if they are causally disconnected i.e. that B is far enough away from A that there is no way that even something travelling at the speed of light could get from A in time to cause B to happen. In this case since there is no way that A can cause B it does not matter in which order anyone sees them because they are utterly independent events. Any basic SR intro text will take you through the steps of proving that if you are interested.
Until QM the fundamental assumption was that the universe operated according to deterministic principles
...and this is somehow more profound that the fact that time is a relative concept and there is no such thing as a "fundamental clock"? or that objects physically become shorter (not just appear to but actually are shorter) when moving rapidly? or that light always travels at the same speed even when you start moving towards or away from it? SR changed the fundamental way that we view time and space how can that possibly be any less profound than QM?
The entire planet could in fact spontaneously "evaporate" tomorrow due to meson decay without any outside influence or causal actor.
What?? No QM emphatically does NOT say that! First the planet does not contain mesons, except the virtual sort that transmit the strong nuclear force at nuclear scales, it contains protons, neutrons and electrons or those temporarily produced in cosmic ray showers. Second something like an electron cannot decay without violating some very fundamental symmetries of nature specifically conservation of energy or charge because there is no lighter particle with an electric charge. QM is not some magic wand you can wave and say "anything is possible but may be improbable". It has clear rules which it follows and some processes, such as the spontaneous evaporation of the Earth, have a zero probability of occurring.
You wouldn't see anything at FTL speeds as even radio waves would come on as gamma radiation.
How do you know? There is no known physics which can predict what FTL travel will look like because all the known laws of physics forbid FTL. This makes as much sense as using newtonian mechanics to explain quantum tunnelling: the existence of the phenomena you are trying to explain is forbidden by the very physics you are trying to describe it with! However that is NOT what the students did - they assumed a velocity very close to the speed of light but not greater than it then threw in the word "Millenium Falcon" which clearly excited the submitter so much they didn't bother to read the article and made up what they though sounded cool.
Having now got into a thoroughly grumpy mood I'm also astounded that what used to be one question on an assignment when I was a first year physics undergrad in the UK has now somehow morphed into an undergrad journal article. These used to publish original research done by senior undergrads not act as a means to publish first year assignment solutions, especially ones which even have existing web pages providing the answer with pictures generated by a computer program that not only solves the physics but generates the actual pictures too!
Really? Slashdot can't even understand something that would be taught in week one or two of high school physics?
At least in Canada moments of forces are no longer taught at school. They may get some basic archimedes lever-style principles but the first time students see proper rotational dynamics with moments of forces is when we teach it to them in a first year introductory physics course at university. Even AP physics B skips this stuff - you have to do physics C - so I imagine the US is the same.
Slashdot Mirror
If you think humans were successful endurance hunters, you've probably never tried to chase down so much as a dog.
I've also never tried to hunt a woolly mammoth with a sharpened stick but that does not mean that it did not happen. The same is true of persistence hunting.
US universities charge fees in the six-figure range. How is that 'for free' ?
Indeed they do but they don't pay any of that to non-US students who are effectively educating US students in cultures and societies beyond their borders. Hence the non-US students are providing an educational service to US students without being paid for doing so i.e. for free.
A non-US citizen in the US barely has any rights, and a visitor is taxed at a flat 30% having to go through excessive paperwork to cut it down to almost 20%.
As someone who is a non-US citizen and has lived in the US the first part - about rights - is most definitely true. It's only enhanced by the odd bloke who seems to think that as a foreigner in the US you are trespassing on hallowed ground (actually with some of the US cults there may be people who actually think that!). However the later is simply wrong - I was never taxed at a flat 30% rate. Although I did not enjoy the same generous automatic tax deductions as US citizens whilst a non-resident 'alien' I was taxed under the same system as US citizens and when I became a resident 'alien' the deductions finally became the same as well.
By comparison, A US citizen in, f.i., the EU (and elsewhere) has several, like free (as in 'free beer') medical coverage
In the UK it is even worse than that - whilst a British undergrad student I was denied coverage for prescriptions in the UK because when the form was finally opened at the government processing centre it happened to be just after the start of the summer holidays so they refused to let me deduct the rent I paid to the university for my room or any cost of living. My then US girlfriend, now wife, applied and, as a foreign student, was automatically granted free prescription coverage!
Meanwhile, they learn the local language and culture. They are more likely to do business with you.
The reverse is also true: US students will learn that there are people outside the US with different cultures and beliefs to their own and that, if they want to do business with them, they will need to take this into account. Since they provide this education for free to US students perhaps the question should be "Does the rest of the world owe the US an education?"...or we could just agree that its a mutually beneficial arrangement that we all learn about different peoples and cultures and leave it at that.
Otherwise it's being read as "Does the us" as in "Does the we".
There is a clear difference between 'US' and 'us': one is a capitalized abbreviation and the other is not so, UNLESS YOU ARE SHOUTING the difference is clear.
I've never understood why english titles capitalize every word either.
English titles do not capitalize every word 'small' words like 'a', 'the' and 'of' are not capitalized except at the start of the title. Americans, on the other hand, divided their country into states so they could have more than one capital and have an economy based on capitalism so it's perhaps not surprising that they like to capitalize every word in a title along with random other words like 'figure' and 'table' in their scientific literature! (no clue why these words deserve special treatment but I'm only English. ;-).
I work in a big telco (2nd and 3rd line tech support) and I see a lot of people just linger on after their often expensive contract has ended.
Yes but are they lingering on because their phone is locked to that network or because they have better things to do than go through the hassle of setting up a new contract?
None of the money that come from grants pays for software development. Even if it was, my career would certainly advance more if I do research instead of software.
This depends on the field. In particle physics where we have massive computational challenges grants can specifically fund software development. In fact when I was a grad student there were even permanent positions called physics programmers and software development certainly can be very good for your career as long as it is combined with physics analysis - at least it has not hurt me so far. As for "needing a postdoc or a professor to do it well" I very much beg to differ - and I say that as a professor! Programming skills vary considerably at all levels but good grad students, while lacking experience, can be a step or two ahead in terms of modern programming savvy than their older colleagues who are sometimes prone to the FORTRAN++ coding style!
Once my report/paper/thesis/grant application is written I do not care about the software anymore.
Again this varies by field. Monte-carlo simulators for particle physics have a life well beyond any one project and in fact can be projects in themselves. In fact you are reading this page using a software technology developed at CERN to assist particle physics research - the world wide web. So even if you don't care about it anymore sometimes software developed for research can be amazingly useful outside that research.
Roman numerals are obsolete. Unless you live in clockwork world.
Roman numerals are notation and, as the OP says, notation changes but the core is still the same. We still use the concept of numbers but we use a different notation to express them.
I love how you ask the same, hackneyed "questions" that climate change deniers have been trotting out for a while now.
Read his post carefully. He is not "denying climate change" as you claim but is acknowledging that it is an established fact. What he is asking is how much of the current change is due to man-made influence. Frankly as a scientist (though not in climate change) I have the same question. The debate is not about climate change - that is a fact established so well that even recorded human history provides clear evidence. The debate is about how much of recent change is due to us burning fossil fuel, killing forests etc. and how much we should do to stop this.
My own opinion is that it seems plausible that we could be having an effect on the climate and, since we don't yet understand what that is, we should take steps to lessen our impact and research not only ways to do this but also how to better understand what impact we are having as well as understanding the natural forces which change the climate. If you want to argue for a wholesale dismantling of the economy you need to have some really hard evidence that this will prevent global warming...showing that this dismantling will be less disruptive than the global warming that would otherwise be caused would also be a bonus.
I think I'd rather have unlocking be legal even if it meant the end of subsidized devices.
Why would it mean the end of subsidized devices? You've signed a multi-year contract with the company to get the subsidized device so why should they care whose network you use it on - you will still be paying them their pound of flesh to use their network regardless of whichever other network you sign up for.
In fact it is very probably to their benefit for you to use another network since then they'll get the money and someone else will get the network traffic to deal with! The only possible benefit is that it lets them make huge profits on roaming but for the US only less than 40% (assuming a 300M population) of the US even have a passport so an even smaller fraction will travel abroad in any given year. In fact it probably is this which is driving it - in the EU, which has controlled roaming charges, unlocking a phone seems to be far more common (at least that's my impression without hard evidence to back it up).
You and a few other maybe, but most want to take advantage of having colour.
I can think of quite a few uses for a large, low power black and white display: airports, railway stations, bus stations, museums (interactive text for displays), shopping centre interactive maps etc. etc. In fact all the things which old black and white CRTs or paper used to be used for. The problem is that they cannot make e-Ink displays that large cheaply enough yet, not that there is no market for them if they could.
Antigua want's to do business in the US, but ignore US law.
No Antigua wants to let US residents to business in Antigua. Modern technology lets them do this without physically having to go there so the US passed a law which restricted trade with Antigua i.e. prevented its citizens from contacting Antigua and doing business there instead forcing them to do it in the US.
It's no different than say the EU passing a law to make it illegal for EU companies to purchase software written in the US because the US company that wrote the software did not allow control or regulation by EU authorities despite it being physically located in the US. The EU could certainly do this but it would be a clear violation of its promise to keep its markets open to US trade - it would be effectively implementing a significant trade barrier.
...but I didn't understand what a nutrino was.
It's a mis-spelled neutrino! ;-) Probably the easiest way to think of it is an electron but without an electric charge and even less mass (by at least five orders of magnitude). It comes in three flavours, one for each heavier cousin of the electron, and all of them are incredibly light - so light that nobody has been able to measure their masses. However the flavours oscillate over time and this can only happen if they have masses so while we have not been able to measure it we know that it is no zero. There is a far deeper lab here in Canada at SNOlab which does the same physics.
I know - that's part of the problem.
it seemed absurd then, and it seems absurd now, to live on another continent and have such loyalty to such useless crap
I quite agree, the British have been wondering that about you Americans for years.
That doesn't mean we need them. They may or may not be a better option. Other countries get by without a monarch.
We need them, or something like them. Ultimately for every country there is always a "head of state" - at least as far as I am aware. They may call it something different, given them more or less power and have a different selection criteria but ultimately it is the same thing with a different label (and usually less competence and more cost).
Ah but Canada has it even better. We get to avoid the unnecessary expense of a politician and have another country pay for the monarch. ;-)
IF you want to see the evolution of the CERN particle physics lab this this link. You can see the construction of some of the early accelerators (PS and ISR) which were in buildings (PS) or a large circular raised embankment (ISR). However the more modern accelerators you can only detect by the construction of new surface buildings (look for the ATLAS and LHC magnet assembly buildings appearing across the road from the main site towards the end.
We don't *need* them.
Actually I disagree - we do need them for two reasons. First the monarch can break up political log jams by either dissolving or proroging parliament as required. This is a very limited power but used at the right time can keep the system flowing smoothly. Second having a monarch avoids the need for yet another clueless politician who only cares about getting reelected and will likely cost the tax payer far more than the monarch they replace.
While a monarchy may be somewhat old fashioned the only reason to get rid of something old which works is to replace it with something better. Frankly I have yet to see evidence that there is a better system out there. Given that power rests almost entirely with the elected parliaments I fail to see any gain in replacing a hereditary monarchy with, what will effectively be, an elected one.
If we can find a way to escape the tyranny of passwords that can generally be cracked by anyone who's determined anyway it can only be progress.
I agree but devices are not the way to go. The advantage of using your brain is that everyone is guaranteed to have one (whether or not they use it). Not everyone has a mobile phone and the same applies to any device you care to name. Even requiring biometric data such as finger prints or retina scans can rule out access to disabled people. There is a reason we still have passwords despite all their inherent disadvantages.
From what I know of physics, FTL travel isn't forbidden.
For v>c the gamma factor becomes imaginary. This leads to crazy things like imaginary momenta and energies. Combine that with QM and the result is that any particle over c will be an exponentially decaying wave function (called an evanescent wave) unless the particle itself has an imaginary mass which is how crazy theories about tachyons work. However even then you have a big issue because SR tells you that travelling faster than light is the same as being able to travel back in time. So, if relativity and causality are both correct - as the current understanding of the laws of physics requires - then FTL is forbidden.
SR only really becomes a factor in extreme situations unlike anything we deal with normally, whereas QM governs *everything*.
Sorry but this is simply wrong too. SR is exactly like QM in this regard. The effects might be too small to notice on an every day scale, just like they are with QM, but they are emphatically there. The time dilation effect of travelling at walking pace is very tiny but not zero. Atomic clocks on Concorde showed time dilation and, at smaller scales you can measure the transverse doppler shift - which is due to time dilation - using spinning discs and gamma ray sources and detectors.
We generally only see the really bizarre effects at extremely small scales, but nothing in the theory restricts it to those scales, and we have no real idea *why* we don't see the same effects at larger scales.
No actually we do have a good understanding of this - if we did not then QM would not be a viable theory because it would not reproduce the same macroscopic behaviour as Newton's laws (which it does).
Special relativity was already attacking causality before quantum mechanics. It made even the notion of which event happened first a matter of the reference frame observed from
NO! SR does not say that. For two depend events i.e. A causes B then A will always precede B in every inertial reference frame. The only way to can reverse the order of A and B is if they are causally disconnected i.e. that B is far enough away from A that there is no way that even something travelling at the speed of light could get from A in time to cause B to happen. In this case since there is no way that A can cause B it does not matter in which order anyone sees them because they are utterly independent events. Any basic SR intro text will take you through the steps of proving that if you are interested.
Until QM the fundamental assumption was that the universe operated according to deterministic principles
The entire planet could in fact spontaneously "evaporate" tomorrow due to meson decay without any outside influence or causal actor.
What?? No QM emphatically does NOT say that! First the planet does not contain mesons, except the virtual sort that transmit the strong nuclear force at nuclear scales, it contains protons, neutrons and electrons or those temporarily produced in cosmic ray showers. Second something like an electron cannot decay without violating some very fundamental symmetries of nature specifically conservation of energy or charge because there is no lighter particle with an electric charge. QM is not some magic wand you can wave and say "anything is possible but may be improbable". It has clear rules which it follows and some processes, such as the spontaneous evaporation of the Earth, have a zero probability of occurring.
You wouldn't see anything at FTL speeds as even radio waves would come on as gamma radiation.
How do you know? There is no known physics which can predict what FTL travel will look like because all the known laws of physics forbid FTL. This makes as much sense as using newtonian mechanics to explain quantum tunnelling: the existence of the phenomena you are trying to explain is forbidden by the very physics you are trying to describe it with! However that is NOT what the students did - they assumed a velocity very close to the speed of light but not greater than it then threw in the word "Millenium Falcon" which clearly excited the submitter so much they didn't bother to read the article and made up what they though sounded cool.
Having now got into a thoroughly grumpy mood I'm also astounded that what used to be one question on an assignment when I was a first year physics undergrad in the UK has now somehow morphed into an undergrad journal article. These used to publish original research done by senior undergrads not act as a means to publish first year assignment solutions, especially ones which even have existing web pages providing the answer with pictures generated by a computer program that not only solves the physics but generates the actual pictures too!
Really? Slashdot can't even understand something that would be taught in week one or two of high school physics?
At least in Canada moments of forces are no longer taught at school. They may get some basic archimedes lever-style principles but the first time students see proper rotational dynamics with moments of forces is when we teach it to them in a first year introductory physics course at university. Even AP physics B skips this stuff - you have to do physics C - so I imagine the US is the same.