...and if anyone needs any evidence just look at what was on the front page of my newspaper this morning. If the local schools are going to implement this idiocy then it is going to be exceedingly hard on the students when they get to university and find out that not only do they get a zero if they fail to and in an assignment but they'll get zero if they hand it in late too.
Still he did miss one opportunity: if you cannot award a zero for work that is not handed in you could give them an imaginary grade for their imaginary work - they might even learn something about complex numbers when they ask why they got 100i% for a fully imaginary assignment.
I think Churchill said it better: "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others which have been tried.". I agree that democracy - at least in the form we have it in the west - is seriously broken. However I have not seen a better model than democracy - every other form of government gives worse results on average. So we are stuck with democracy until someone has a better idea.
Wow you're a dumbass. Obama added almost 6 trillion to the national debt in four years.
You do realize that this does not contradict the OP? Obama could have done as you say and STILL have the lowest spending record of the last 60 years (I'm assuming that is adjusted for inflation otherwise I think it unlikely). All it needs to happen is a huge drop in income from taxes which, with the current economy I would guess is a definite possibility.
Disclaimer: not American, no clue what or what not Obama has done and I don't really care anyway.
My apologies - you are correct and I meant to get the scales the other way around. Although the scale is ~82 GeV since it is a W, not a Z;-). Since I have not had a chance to properly read the paper yet (which also does not help! it's on my list for next week) what was the reason for the large range of scales? Anyway its great to finally see you lattice guys really start to make in-roads on some interesting QCD calculations - it will be nice to see some QCD predictions which depend on the fundamental physics which we can then go an experimentally check rather than predictions based on simplifications and assumptions.
Note that the states are often referred to as K1 and K2.
Not quite, K1 and K2 are different: the real, physical states are KL and KS. The K1 and K2 states are the pure CP eigenstates. If CP were a perfect symmetry of nature then you would be correct and the physical long lived state would be the same as the CP=-1 state (which can be either the K1 or K2 state depending on your convention) and the short lived state would be pure CP=+1. However because CP is not a perfect symmetry the long-lived kaon state, KL = N*(K1 + epsilon*K2) and KS=N*(K2+epsilon*K1) where N is a normalization factor (=1/sqrt(1+|epsilon|^2)) [NOTE: K1 and K2 can be swapped depending on your convention]. So the KL and KS states are NOT the same as the K1 and K2 states because of CP violation. "Weak Interactions" by Cummins and Bucksbaum has a full rendition of the physics starting without the assumption of CPT conservation (which gives two different mixing constants for KL and KS). It's a beautiful example of QM mixing.
Not that I want to make you more depressed but the above post was at a level somewhat below what I'd expect final year undergraduates will understand - at least the ones who have taken an undergrad particle course. The only exception being the A_0 and A_2 amplitudes which is specialized kaon physics. If you are studying matter/antimatter interactions then you ought to know this stuff. There is a good undergrad book by Griffiths, "Introduction to Elementary Particles", which has a section on CP violation including the the B meson sector. I'd also happily share by lecture slides on this but my university has not yet implemented public access to course material.
Since the blog entry contains no reference - and the one hint there is is wrong - here is the actual article reference: Phys. Rev. Lett. 108:141601 (2012) - which was published on 6th April, not 30th March at the article states!
Now onto the physics, sorry but your summary is almost completely wrong. Kaons are mesons which are a bound state of a quark and anti-quark. In the case of neutral kaons this is a strange and anti-down (or vice versa for the anti-kaon IIRC). What is interesting about the kaon is that the neutral states can oscillate between kaon and anti-kaon through a weak interaction. What you end up with is a long-lived kaon (KL) and a short lived one (KS). The simplest way to demonstrate that this system differentiates between matter and anti-matter is to look at the long lived kaon decaying in to muons (heavy cousins of the electron). The number of anti-muons will be about 0.1% different from the number of muons produced.
However the decay to pions is far more closely studied because it can tell us far more information - in particular whether this symmetry breaking occurs in the decay mechanism (direct CP violation) or only in the weak mixing of a kaon to anti-kaon (indirect CP violation). The experiment I worked on as a grad student, NA48, observed this direct CP violation unambiguously for the first time, confirming the previous NA31 result. This ruled out more exotic types of CP violation from a new "superweak" interaction and, in broad terms, was consistent with the Standard Model.
However this was not really confirmation of the Standard Model because the actual calculation of CP violation occurring in the SM is really hard to calculate: it involves quark/W boson loops which must have contributions from all three generations of quarks (specifically including the top quark!). These so-called penguin diagrams (blame the name on John Ellis' dart playing skills!) are really hard to calculate - at least to the accuracy needed for CP violation in kaons. Kaons must decay through a weak interaction because only the weak interaction can change the strange quark into an up quark which is needed for pion decay. However there is also a strong component to the decay.
Strong (QCD) processes are really hard to calculate because perturbation theory does not work for them (the interaction is far too strong). One approach to solve this is lattice QCD which literally simulates all the colour (QCD) fields on a 4D grid of space-time points. However this is really CPU-intensive so only small grids can be simulated. This is not too bad if you have a strong process because, being 'strong' it happens quickly in a small region. However the weak part of the decay occurs more slowly over a larger area. What the authors seem to have done is overcome this simulation problem of both weak and strong forces in the same decay which raises the prospect of accurate calculations of the CP violation in kaon decays which has never been possible before. For the technically minded this paper calculates the Isospin=2 decay amplitude (A_2) whose phase shift, relative to the isospin 0 amplitude (A_0) is what makes direct CP violation visible - it's a really interesting paper - at least if you have ever been involved in kaon physics!
Americans *do* have greater freedom. They have *much* greater freedom of expression than many other countries (for example, "hate speech" legislation...
Yes...and no. The US government might not be able to put you in gaol but your US employer can fire you. My experience of living in the US was somewhat surprising. I certainly expected to find it as a place where people were far more free to express political ideas and beliefs.
However freedom is a two-edged sword: while you are free to express your opinions your employer is free to fire you because of them and society is free to exclude you. The result is that, outside of some socially accepted areas e.g. religion, I would say that the US has far less freedom of expression - but that lack of freedom comes from society itself not the government (at least when it's following its own constitution).
Be careful what you wish for. You just might get it.
If that is the moral then the article author might be in trouble given his stance. His last sentence is:
I’ll make technologists a deal, I’ll give up my song copyrights if you give up your software patents.
So how do we accept? More telling is that I think it shows he really does not understand the digital side of things very well. Outside major corporations or patent trolls I imagine many people would happy see software patents disappear.
It is not a "sign of respect" to provide responses to a subpoena when a motion to quash the subpoena is pending; it is a "sign of contempt".
Why would they even know about the impending motion to quash? Are people who get served subpoenas now expected to follow the intimate details of the related court case and then make an educated guess as to whether or not they should be complying?
And you'll probably find that judges get increasingly cranky about that sort of thing as it shows a certain lack of respect for them.
Really? I thought court orders gave deadlines by which something had to be done not "it must be done on this day". Complying quickly with an order is a sign of respect rather than dragging your heels until the last possible minute. Still this is the law so judges can be arbitrary and unreasonable on a whim and common sense rarely seems to apply!
The problem here is that it only really works out to the advantage those holding absurdly-large and unrealistic (for the overwhelming majority of private citizens) amounts/ratios of debt to income...
Not entirely true. For a start it is an advantage to anyone with a mortgage on their house - so while a majority might not be affected I'd drop the "overwhelming" part. However inflation has one other "good" effect - it makes people spend and invest. The continuous drop in value means that, if you have a large amount of cash, you have a very strong motivation to either spend it on what you need or invest it in the economy somehow in order to preserve its value. This investment money is where businesses get funds to grow, expand and employ more people.
he was NOT a patent troll, since he BUILT the stuff he patented.
True but he was a different kind of patent "troll". For example with the light bulb once Swan had patented his design in the UK Edison submitted a almost direct copy for patenting in the US and then tried to sue Swan for patent infringement in the UK! The two eventually settled out of court with Swan running the UK side of things and Edison in the US. So by today's standards he was not a troll but he was certainly some sort of unpleasant creature living under the patent bridge - a patent orc perhaps since he liked to raid others patents and got away with it due to his wealth?
Solar eclipse during night time? Now, this is literally fantastic (i.e. pertaining to fantasy).
Check the article title: now you know why it is a _rare_ annular eclipse...normal annular solar eclipses are almost annual too (not quite but once every 1-3 years).
The sun might be big but it does not generate that kind of energy - its energy output is about 100 times smaller than your number at 5 million tons of mass per second converted to energy which it gets from the 700 million tons of hydrogen it fuses into helium every second.
Why do we need academic publishing companies at all? Everything they do can be done by universities working together over the Internet, and the lower costs could help reduce tuition rates.
Academic publishers do two things: for research journals they provide a peer-review system which, when it is working properly, ensures that only peer-reviewed content is published in the journal so that we do not waste our time reading papers with little to no scientific value. Second, for text books, they provide editing and publishing services which ensure that text books have quality content and are readable (to some extent - it would be worse without editors believe me!).
While I think it certainly could be possible for universities to take on this role it will require organization and leadership to set up the same infrastructure whcih will be a huge job. In addition this would incur extra costs - someone has to edit books, run the peer-review system etc. Since the costs of editing, royalties etc. for a textbook are paid for by students purchasing the book were a university to do this it would increase the cost of tuition which would hopefully be offset by cheaper books. For research journals the cost savings would be against libraries budgets for purchasing so this would lower research costs and make more grant overhead money available - but this has to go for research not teaching because it comes from granting agencies.
So overall you probably win - certainly the onerous copyright issues would go away - but it is not a magic pill which will suddenly make everything cost free.
There are a scary number of professors who write textbooks in order to make money, rather than to communicate their knowledge to students.
It is publishers, not authors, who make the money in the text book world. The few academic text book authors whom I have talked with all said the same - you do it because you want to have good teaching resources not to make money. Yes you make some but it is only a small supplement to your salary in most cases.
The mere fact that it's a law that gives protection only to specific classes of people...
What class of people would that be? There are no restrictions on who can submit a paper to a journal - it just has to be good enough to pass peer review.
...but still just a bandaid on some pretty serious issues with censorship.
The scientific paper exclusion is just one aspect of the bill. It also introduces truth as a defence. So, as long as you are telling the truth, there will be no censorship from libel.
So, until the paper is peer-reviewed, it's still vulnerable to libel.
Except that journals will not publish a paper until it is peer-reviewed and, until something is published, there is no libel. Of course this does mean that if you submit a version to a preprint server you might be in trouble. Fortunately I'm a particle physicist and I doubt Higgs bosons will sue us for "making it look fat" if we measure a mass that's on the high side.
Slashdot Mirror
Seems strange that they would block 64.89 instead of 46.89 or 89.64 - must be all that US software they are using...
...and if anyone needs any evidence just look at what was on the front page of my newspaper this morning. If the local schools are going to implement this idiocy then it is going to be exceedingly hard on the students when they get to university and find out that not only do they get a zero if they fail to and in an assignment but they'll get zero if they hand it in late too.
Still he did miss one opportunity: if you cannot award a zero for work that is not handed in you could give them an imaginary grade for their imaginary work - they might even learn something about complex numbers when they ask why they got 100i% for a fully imaginary assignment.
Democracy is a failed political model.
I think Churchill said it better: "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others which have been tried.". I agree that democracy - at least in the form we have it in the west - is seriously broken. However I have not seen a better model than democracy - every other form of government gives worse results on average. So we are stuck with democracy until someone has a better idea.
Wow you're a dumbass. Obama added almost 6 trillion to the national debt in four years.
You do realize that this does not contradict the OP? Obama could have done as you say and STILL have the lowest spending record of the last 60 years (I'm assuming that is adjusted for inflation otherwise I think it unlikely). All it needs to happen is a huge drop in income from taxes which, with the current economy I would guess is a definite possibility.
Disclaimer: not American, no clue what or what not Obama has done and I don't really care anyway.
My apologies - you are correct and I meant to get the scales the other way around. Although the scale is ~82 GeV since it is a W, not a Z ;-). Since I have not had a chance to properly read the paper yet (which also does not help! it's on my list for next week) what was the reason for the large range of scales? Anyway its great to finally see you lattice guys really start to make in-roads on some interesting QCD calculations - it will be nice to see some QCD predictions which depend on the fundamental physics which we can then go an experimentally check rather than predictions based on simplifications and assumptions.
Note that the states are often referred to as K1 and K2.
Not quite, K1 and K2 are different: the real, physical states are KL and KS. The K1 and K2 states are the pure CP eigenstates. If CP were a perfect symmetry of nature then you would be correct and the physical long lived state would be the same as the CP=-1 state (which can be either the K1 or K2 state depending on your convention) and the short lived state would be pure CP=+1. However because CP is not a perfect symmetry the long-lived kaon state, KL = N*(K1 + epsilon*K2) and KS=N*(K2+epsilon*K1) where N is a normalization factor (=1/sqrt(1+|epsilon|^2)) [NOTE: K1 and K2 can be swapped depending on your convention]. So the KL and KS states are NOT the same as the K1 and K2 states because of CP violation. "Weak Interactions" by Cummins and Bucksbaum has a full rendition of the physics starting without the assumption of CPT conservation (which gives two different mixing constants for KL and KS). It's a beautiful example of QM mixing.
Not that I want to make you more depressed but the above post was at a level somewhat below what I'd expect final year undergraduates will understand - at least the ones who have taken an undergrad particle course. The only exception being the A_0 and A_2 amplitudes which is specialized kaon physics. If you are studying matter/antimatter interactions then you ought to know this stuff. There is a good undergrad book by Griffiths, "Introduction to Elementary Particles", which has a section on CP violation including the the B meson sector. I'd also happily share by lecture slides on this but my university has not yet implemented public access to course material.
Since the blog entry contains no reference - and the one hint there is is wrong - here is the actual article reference: Phys. Rev. Lett. 108:141601 (2012) - which was published on 6th April, not 30th March at the article states!
Now onto the physics, sorry but your summary is almost completely wrong. Kaons are mesons which are a bound state of a quark and anti-quark. In the case of neutral kaons this is a strange and anti-down (or vice versa for the anti-kaon IIRC). What is interesting about the kaon is that the neutral states can oscillate between kaon and anti-kaon through a weak interaction. What you end up with is a long-lived kaon (KL) and a short lived one (KS). The simplest way to demonstrate that this system differentiates between matter and anti-matter is to look at the long lived kaon decaying in to muons (heavy cousins of the electron). The number of anti-muons will be about 0.1% different from the number of muons produced.
However the decay to pions is far more closely studied because it can tell us far more information - in particular whether this symmetry breaking occurs in the decay mechanism (direct CP violation) or only in the weak mixing of a kaon to anti-kaon (indirect CP violation). The experiment I worked on as a grad student, NA48, observed this direct CP violation unambiguously for the first time, confirming the previous NA31 result. This ruled out more exotic types of CP violation from a new "superweak" interaction and, in broad terms, was consistent with the Standard Model.
However this was not really confirmation of the Standard Model because the actual calculation of CP violation occurring in the SM is really hard to calculate: it involves quark/W boson loops which must have contributions from all three generations of quarks (specifically including the top quark!). These so-called penguin diagrams (blame the name on John Ellis' dart playing skills!) are really hard to calculate - at least to the accuracy needed for CP violation in kaons. Kaons must decay through a weak interaction because only the weak interaction can change the strange quark into an up quark which is needed for pion decay. However there is also a strong component to the decay.
Strong (QCD) processes are really hard to calculate because perturbation theory does not work for them (the interaction is far too strong). One approach to solve this is lattice QCD which literally simulates all the colour (QCD) fields on a 4D grid of space-time points. However this is really CPU-intensive so only small grids can be simulated. This is not too bad if you have a strong process because, being 'strong' it happens quickly in a small region. However the weak part of the decay occurs more slowly over a larger area. What the authors seem to have done is overcome this simulation problem of both weak and strong forces in the same decay which raises the prospect of accurate calculations of the CP violation in kaon decays which has never been possible before. For the technically minded this paper calculates the Isospin=2 decay amplitude (A_2) whose phase shift, relative to the isospin 0 amplitude (A_0) is what makes direct CP violation visible - it's a really interesting paper - at least if you have ever been involved in kaon physics!
Americans *do* have greater freedom. They have *much* greater freedom of expression than many other countries (for example, "hate speech" legislation...
Yes...and no. The US government might not be able to put you in gaol but your US employer can fire you. My experience of living in the US was somewhat surprising. I certainly expected to find it as a place where people were far more free to express political ideas and beliefs.
However freedom is a two-edged sword: while you are free to express your opinions your employer is free to fire you because of them and society is free to exclude you. The result is that, outside of some socially accepted areas e.g. religion, I would say that the US has far less freedom of expression - but that lack of freedom comes from society itself not the government (at least when it's following its own constitution).
Personally I don't have a problem with that as i never watch free-to-air anyway
So not only are you missing the commercials you are missing all the product placements in the program as well? I'd start looking for a lawyer...
Be careful what you wish for. You just might get it.
If that is the moral then the article author might be in trouble given his stance. His last sentence is:
I’ll make technologists a deal, I’ll give up my song copyrights if you give up your software patents.
So how do we accept? More telling is that I think it shows he really does not understand the digital side of things very well. Outside major corporations or patent trolls I imagine many people would happy see software patents disappear.
Like, if you're a Slashdotter who has a large mortgage, yet still lives in his mom's basement.
I'm an inverse Slashdotter - my mum lives in my basement (but only for short periods when she visits!).
It is not a "sign of respect" to provide responses to a subpoena when a motion to quash the subpoena is pending; it is a "sign of contempt".
Why would they even know about the impending motion to quash? Are people who get served subpoenas now expected to follow the intimate details of the related court case and then make an educated guess as to whether or not they should be complying?
And you'll probably find that judges get increasingly cranky about that sort of thing as it shows a certain lack of respect for them.
Really? I thought court orders gave deadlines by which something had to be done not "it must be done on this day". Complying quickly with an order is a sign of respect rather than dragging your heels until the last possible minute. Still this is the law so judges can be arbitrary and unreasonable on a whim and common sense rarely seems to apply!
The problem here is that it only really works out to the advantage those holding absurdly-large and unrealistic (for the overwhelming majority of private citizens) amounts/ratios of debt to income...
Not entirely true. For a start it is an advantage to anyone with a mortgage on their house - so while a majority might not be affected I'd drop the "overwhelming" part. However inflation has one other "good" effect - it makes people spend and invest. The continuous drop in value means that, if you have a large amount of cash, you have a very strong motivation to either spend it on what you need or invest it in the economy somehow in order to preserve its value. This investment money is where businesses get funds to grow, expand and employ more people.
I haven't needed to pirate anything in years, everything has a free and good-enough equivalent now. What does anyone pirate today?
Oil tankers off the coast of Somalia apparently. Clearly piracy today is getting back to its traditional roots.
he was NOT a patent troll, since he BUILT the stuff he patented.
True but he was a different kind of patent "troll". For example with the light bulb once Swan had patented his design in the UK Edison submitted a almost direct copy for patenting in the US and then tried to sue Swan for patent infringement in the UK! The two eventually settled out of court with Swan running the UK side of things and Edison in the US. So by today's standards he was not a troll but he was certainly some sort of unpleasant creature living under the patent bridge - a patent orc perhaps since he liked to raid others patents and got away with it due to his wealth?
Solar eclipse during night time? Now, this is literally fantastic (i.e. pertaining to fantasy).
Check the article title: now you know why it is a _rare_ annular eclipse...normal annular solar eclipses are almost annual too (not quite but once every 1-3 years).
The sun might be big but it does not generate that kind of energy - its energy output is about 100 times smaller than your number at 5 million tons of mass per second converted to energy which it gets from the 700 million tons of hydrogen it fuses into helium every second.
Also garbled passwords are going to be far harder for people to memorize if seen by accident.
Not if they do not recognize it as a password e.g. "Remember the lepton-jet meeting at 8am" would look more like a reminder than a password.
Really? Because yours is the only industrialized nation that I know of that has data caps on landlines.
Let me introduce you to Canada and the UK.
Why do we need academic publishing companies at all? Everything they do can be done by universities working together over the Internet, and the lower costs could help reduce tuition rates.
Academic publishers do two things: for research journals they provide a peer-review system which, when it is working properly, ensures that only peer-reviewed content is published in the journal so that we do not waste our time reading papers with little to no scientific value. Second, for text books, they provide editing and publishing services which ensure that text books have quality content and are readable (to some extent - it would be worse without editors believe me!).
While I think it certainly could be possible for universities to take on this role it will require organization and leadership to set up the same infrastructure whcih will be a huge job. In addition this would incur extra costs - someone has to edit books, run the peer-review system etc. Since the costs of editing, royalties etc. for a textbook are paid for by students purchasing the book were a university to do this it would increase the cost of tuition which would hopefully be offset by cheaper books. For research journals the cost savings would be against libraries budgets for purchasing so this would lower research costs and make more grant overhead money available - but this has to go for research not teaching because it comes from granting agencies.
So overall you probably win - certainly the onerous copyright issues would go away - but it is not a magic pill which will suddenly make everything cost free.
There are a scary number of professors who write textbooks in order to make money, rather than to communicate their knowledge to students.
It is publishers, not authors, who make the money in the text book world. The few academic text book authors whom I have talked with all said the same - you do it because you want to have good teaching resources not to make money. Yes you make some but it is only a small supplement to your salary in most cases.
The mere fact that it's a law that gives protection only to specific classes of people...
What class of people would that be? There are no restrictions on who can submit a paper to a journal - it just has to be good enough to pass peer review.
...but still just a bandaid on some pretty serious issues with censorship.
The scientific paper exclusion is just one aspect of the bill. It also introduces truth as a defence. So, as long as you are telling the truth, there will be no censorship from libel.
So, until the paper is peer-reviewed, it's still vulnerable to libel.
Except that journals will not publish a paper until it is peer-reviewed and, until something is published, there is no libel. Of course this does mean that if you submit a version to a preprint server you might be in trouble. Fortunately I'm a particle physicist and I doubt Higgs bosons will sue us for "making it look fat" if we measure a mass that's on the high side.