Of course, the Hobbits should technically all be Brummie
Why? Tolkien based the shire on Yorkshire so Hobbits ought to have Yorkshire accents. In fact, not to burst your bubble but, according to Wikipedia he apparently based Mordor on the Black Country so really the orcs should be speaking with a Brummie accent!
...because they're living where the language was spoken during medieval times
I think that's probably the main reason - not just because of the modern association that a US accent brings but because if you want outdoor scenery with real medieval buildings and castles you need to be in Europe and so it is cheaper to hire English actors than American ones. In fact that was one of the problems I had with the Lord of the Rings films. While the scenery was certainly spectacular it was far too pristine and untouched for a land which had supposedly been lived on for thousands of years, Europe would have been a far better a choice but probably a lot harder due to the need to avoid anything modern.
Most often, they are portrayed with either English or Scottish accents
Actually, depending on the which English accent is used, it may well be accurate. The Yorkshire accent is actually very close to Danish which is not too surprising when you realize that this area of the UK was under Viking rule for a period before 1066 and many of the place names have Scandinavian in origin. Certainly as a Yorkshireman I've found some Danish accents to be so similar that I'm not even sure whether the speaker is British or Danish and I know that some Danes have less trouble than Londoners understanding strong Yorkshire accents up in the dales.
I don't think field strength is the limiting factor in the diameter.
It is for proton machines. The synchrotron radiation goes as 1/m^5 IIRC so while this is the limiting factor for light particles like electrons for protons, which are ~2,000 times more massive, the limiting factor is magnetic field strength not synchrotron radiation. The linear collider you mention is designed to do precision studies of new physics from the LHC and this requires an electron/positron machine hence, in that case, synchrotron is an issue just not (yet) for protons.
There's nothing "Christian" about All Hallows Eve.
Just because it has pagan roots does not mean that it was not adapted by early christianity to make it easier to convert pagans. The same is true of Christmas.
The members of the mainstream press who blew things out of proportion and dumbed down the story...
Sorry but this time the press are most certainly NOT to blame. OPERA was by no means "scientifically fine" and they did not present it as "odd data" they specifically made the claim that neutrinos were travelling faster than light and asked for help to verify this. Read the paper if you don't believe me - it is there in the abstract. They specifically claim than the anomalous timing was consistent with faster-than-light neutrinos. This is NOT the paper you write if you have some data which seem crazy and you are not sure whether they are correct.
Something like "I have odd data but I can't figure out what I did wrong" was the start of many scientific discoveries.
Correct. However this does not mean that the moment you have some odd data you rush to publish. First you talk it over with colleagues and see if they can find fault (and OPERA did this internally which is fine). After that you could publish a paper explaining every single timing correction systematic error you have considered in full gory detail and at the end say that your final measured time of flight "appears to be" inconsistent with relativity. Better yet, for data with massive implications like this, you could invite a pannel of external reviewers to go over the data and experiment to look for mistakes with an agreement that if it is confirmed by them that they will publish their findings after the first paper laying out the full gory details.
What you do NOT do is publish an initial short paper with most of the details left out in a rush which claims the data are due to faster-than-light neutrinos. The mistake OPERA made was not in publishing but in HOW they published.
Twitter, however, is visible to the whole world, so anything undesirable must be just as visibly punished.
Correct - so when did the punishment for swearing become expulsion? They are a school after all - don't they have a duty to educate? Require a public apology (via the same medium) and a publicly visible punishment like picking up litter from the school grounds. That sends the message, both to the pupil and the student body, that swearing is not tolerated and that rules are enforced. Expelling him for a minor offence like this sends the message that the school is vindictive and unreasonable and it completely undermines any moral authority they have.
I think what you're basically saying is that someone who incites a murder should be charged as if he committed the murder himself.
Not quite - it's even milder. I'm saying that speech which incites a murder should be treated in the same way as physical actions which "incite" a murder. If you physically assist a murderer then you would be guilty as an accomplice so I'd say speech which incites a murder should be treated in a similar manner. You did not commit the murder but you certainly helped it to occur.
Maybe, but the problem with the present case is that nothing physical has happened and the person is still being harshly punished.
Correction - nothing that we can directly attribute to the postings has happened (at least so far). If you went around handing out loaded guns to 10 random strangers then probably nothing would happen but if enough people did it to enough random strangers eventually it would lead to a murder. If the guns were untraceable then you would not know who gave them the gun but, frankly does it matter? You clearly want to stop any loaded guns from being handed out so you ban handing out loaded guns.
The same is true for racial incitement. If you are trying to incite racial violence then you should expect to get into trouble with the law. If you want to discuss non-violent racism then, while I find those views abhorrent myself, it should be legal, and given that the British National Party exists it clearly is.
They banned mention of Halloween because it suggests paganism.
Hallowe'en is short for "All Hallows Eve" is a Christian feast coming before All Saints Day (see Wikipedia). While it was conveniently timed to coincide with a traditional pagan holiday so was Christmas. Hence Hallowe'en suggests paganism as much as Christmas does.
I suggest a new rule: those put in charge of education should be required to have had one.
There is no real democracy without freedom of speech. When you aren't allowed to discuss your point of view, how are you going to discuss politics?
There is a huge difference between discussing a political point of view and inciting others to commit violent crimes. This is where the US seems to miss the point completely. The important concept is freedom of conscience and to discuss that with others NOT that you should be free to say whatever you want whenever you want. If your speech impacts the health and wellbeing of others (e.g. making threatening phone calls) then you should expect similar consequences to physical actions with the same impact...after all speech is a physical action.
If things are ideal you can use it to store large amounts of energy indefinitely
If the critical field strength is so high that it is a practical energy storage device then building a far smaller version of the Large Hadron Collider would be possible. At the moment the LHC is limited by the largest _reliable_ magnetic field strength we can create. If we can replace those with magnets 100 times more powerful which do not need liquid helium cooling then we could shrink the ring from 27km round to 270m round - or increase the energy of the LHC by an order of magnitude or so.
Careful - the statistics you show are ALL visits to the US not just visits for tourism. For example Canada counts as 21 million and I'm sure most of those visits were to buy things south of the border not for "real" tourism, not to mention the large number of business trips. I must say I do find the statistics surprising though but I note that some places like the UK and Japan show a marked drop in numbers of visits so if the OP cames from somewhere like there that may be the reason for his impression in a drop in US tourism.
Maybe they did, but the pub told them to screw off. You're assuming that the media has told the entire story
So it comes down to whether journalists are being honest or lawyers are being reasonable. I now wonder if there is a third, more plausible explanation.
They weren't sued out of existence, just asked to pay the license fee and stop using trademarked items.
That's what they are saying now, after Stephen Fry got involved. Beforehand I refer you to this article where, I quote:
Lawyers representing the Saul Zaentz Company (SZC) in California have told the pub it must carry out a complete rebranding before the end of May, or face legal action due to copyright infringement.
Since the story is that the actors' intervention has saved the pub I expect that the $100 licensing fee is something new. After all receiving a request for a $100 to license your use of the names would hardly be controversial and newsworthy would it?
Are you sure about that? At that field strength you have a sufficiently large diamagnetic effect to levitate small animals like a frog. A quick search on Google suggests that 7T might be the number you are looking for.
How much stronger would a field have to be to protect a hypothetical ship the size of the space shuttle from solar winds
The deflection of charged particles in a magnetic field is roughly proportional to the strength of the field and the "thickness" of the field i.e. the distance that the charged particle travels through it. So (ignoring important complexities like varying field strength, ship geomtery etc.) a 100T field 1 m around the craft would be roughly as effective as a 1T field extending 100m around the craft.
Lets assume the fishing license was expensive and I sunk considerable capital into fishing on that day. How fair would it be for the government to issue a license and then after I began using it they change the rules prior to it expiring?
Lets take a concrete example should we: the banning of flights in Europe when the Icelandic volcano erupted in 2010. Regulations changed temporarily to protect passenger safety and airlines lost money. Should the EU government have recompensed the airlines? It gave them a license to operate after all? Of course it did not recompense them because it was not its fault that the volcano erupted but the regulation was required because otherwise some airlines would certainly have attempted to fly!
Not all government regulation is politically motivated and bad (although far too much is!). If they change rules on political whims then yes, compensation is due. But changing rules due to a change in circumstances outside their control when action is clearly needed is just tough luck.
Is their liability for the reactor unlimited? No. It clearly isn't. I mean, that isn't a controversial point. It's a matter of contract that their liability has an exact dollar figure.
Contract? Did the US government ask them to build and operate a reactor? If so then I agree with you - you follow the terms of the contract. I was operating under the assumption that they US government had simply permitted a company which wanted to build and run a reactor to do so in much the same way that it would permit a company to build a factory i.e. the company chose to do this because they think they can make money from it not that the government contracted with them to do it.
Something that is irritating about many regulations is that they're very casually passed sometimes without really considering what the rule actually costs. If these fellows didn't save enough by the standards of the old cost projections then I see no fault with them.
That might be an irritating factor with many regulations but suppose the reason for the new regulation is well justified by science? For example if a factory was built several decades ago using asbestos and then decommissioned today the costs would be significantly higher than the original projections because, in the interim, we have discovered that asbestos is dangerous. So should a government be expected to pay the increased costs because they passed regulations to require asbestos to be safely removed? It's not their fault that asbestos turned out to be dangerous anymore than it is the company's fault.
I would argue that any increase in decommissioning costs due to regulations changing is a "risk of doing business" and therefore entirely the responsibility of the company who ran the plant. Governments are naturally motivated to keep these risks to a minimum in order to encourage businesses to flourish and keep costs to a minimum for their voters so there is a balance.
In the same vein but different: what are your thoughts on General Fusion. As a physicist myself, but not in the area of plasma/fusion research, their premise seems reasonable and they acknowledge that they may only have a 10-50% chance of success in their design. As experts in the field are there any clear reasons why such a design will not work and, if not, why is there not more support for such efforts within the plasma/fusion academic community?
That would be wrong - they are not atoms. You fuse nuclei, not atoms. Atoms are an electrically neutral object consisting of a nucleus and bound electrons. At the temperatures required for fusion the collisions are sufficiently high energy that atoms break up and form a plasma of free electrons and nuclei (which is why the sun is not transparent despite being made of helium and hydrogen).
Where you basically say "cost be damned, were doing this".....or saving our collective asses ( cheap fusion power )
Do you not see the problem there? You cannot say "cost be damned" if the aim is to make cheap fusion power. ITER and/or NIF may succeed in making fusion power but I doubt very much it will be cheap fusion power.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, the Hobbits should technically all be Brummie
Why? Tolkien based the shire on Yorkshire so Hobbits ought to have Yorkshire accents. In fact, not to burst your bubble but, according to Wikipedia he apparently based Mordor on the Black Country so really the orcs should be speaking with a Brummie accent!
...because they're living where the language was spoken during medieval times
I think that's probably the main reason - not just because of the modern association that a US accent brings but because if you want outdoor scenery with real medieval buildings and castles you need to be in Europe and so it is cheaper to hire English actors than American ones. In fact that was one of the problems I had with the Lord of the Rings films. While the scenery was certainly spectacular it was far too pristine and untouched for a land which had supposedly been lived on for thousands of years, Europe would have been a far better a choice but probably a lot harder due to the need to avoid anything modern.
Most often, they are portrayed with either English or Scottish accents
Actually, depending on the which English accent is used, it may well be accurate. The Yorkshire accent is actually very close to Danish which is not too surprising when you realize that this area of the UK was under Viking rule for a period before 1066 and many of the place names have Scandinavian in origin. Certainly as a Yorkshireman I've found some Danish accents to be so similar that I'm not even sure whether the speaker is British or Danish and I know that some Danes have less trouble than Londoners understanding strong Yorkshire accents up in the dales.
I don't think field strength is the limiting factor in the diameter.
It is for proton machines. The synchrotron radiation goes as 1/m^5 IIRC so while this is the limiting factor for light particles like electrons for protons, which are ~2,000 times more massive, the limiting factor is magnetic field strength not synchrotron radiation. The linear collider you mention is designed to do precision studies of new physics from the LHC and this requires an electron/positron machine hence, in that case, synchrotron is an issue just not (yet) for protons.
There's nothing "Christian" about All Hallows Eve.
Just because it has pagan roots does not mean that it was not adapted by early christianity to make it easier to convert pagans. The same is true of Christmas.
The members of the mainstream press who blew things out of proportion and dumbed down the story...
Sorry but this time the press are most certainly NOT to blame. OPERA was by no means "scientifically fine" and they did not present it as "odd data" they specifically made the claim that neutrinos were travelling faster than light and asked for help to verify this. Read the paper if you don't believe me - it is there in the abstract. They specifically claim than the anomalous timing was consistent with faster-than-light neutrinos. This is NOT the paper you write if you have some data which seem crazy and you are not sure whether they are correct.
Something like "I have odd data but I can't figure out what I did wrong" was the start of many scientific discoveries.
Correct. However this does not mean that the moment you have some odd data you rush to publish. First you talk it over with colleagues and see if they can find fault (and OPERA did this internally which is fine). After that you could publish a paper explaining every single timing correction systematic error you have considered in full gory detail and at the end say that your final measured time of flight "appears to be" inconsistent with relativity. Better yet, for data with massive implications like this, you could invite a pannel of external reviewers to go over the data and experiment to look for mistakes with an agreement that if it is confirmed by them that they will publish their findings after the first paper laying out the full gory details.
What you do NOT do is publish an initial short paper with most of the details left out in a rush which claims the data are due to faster-than-light neutrinos. The mistake OPERA made was not in publishing but in HOW they published.
Twitter, however, is visible to the whole world, so anything undesirable must be just as visibly punished.
Correct - so when did the punishment for swearing become expulsion? They are a school after all - don't they have a duty to educate? Require a public apology (via the same medium) and a publicly visible punishment like picking up litter from the school grounds. That sends the message, both to the pupil and the student body, that swearing is not tolerated and that rules are enforced. Expelling him for a minor offence like this sends the message that the school is vindictive and unreasonable and it completely undermines any moral authority they have.
I think what you're basically saying is that someone who incites a murder should be charged as if he committed the murder himself.
Not quite - it's even milder. I'm saying that speech which incites a murder should be treated in the same way as physical actions which "incite" a murder. If you physically assist a murderer then you would be guilty as an accomplice so I'd say speech which incites a murder should be treated in a similar manner. You did not commit the murder but you certainly helped it to occur.
Maybe, but the problem with the present case is that nothing physical has happened and the person is still being harshly punished.
Correction - nothing that we can directly attribute to the postings has happened (at least so far). If you went around handing out loaded guns to 10 random strangers then probably nothing would happen but if enough people did it to enough random strangers eventually it would lead to a murder. If the guns were untraceable then you would not know who gave them the gun but, frankly does it matter? You clearly want to stop any loaded guns from being handed out so you ban handing out loaded guns.
The same is true for racial incitement. If you are trying to incite racial violence then you should expect to get into trouble with the law. If you want to discuss non-violent racism then, while I find those views abhorrent myself, it should be legal, and given that the British National Party exists it clearly is.
They banned mention of Halloween because it suggests paganism.
Hallowe'en is short for "All Hallows Eve" is a Christian feast coming before All Saints Day (see Wikipedia). While it was conveniently timed to coincide with a traditional pagan holiday so was Christmas. Hence Hallowe'en suggests paganism as much as Christmas does.
I suggest a new rule: those put in charge of education should be required to have had one.
There is no real democracy without freedom of speech. When you aren't allowed to discuss your point of view, how are you going to discuss politics?
There is a huge difference between discussing a political point of view and inciting others to commit violent crimes. This is where the US seems to miss the point completely. The important concept is freedom of conscience and to discuss that with others NOT that you should be free to say whatever you want whenever you want. If your speech impacts the health and wellbeing of others (e.g. making threatening phone calls) then you should expect similar consequences to physical actions with the same impact...after all speech is a physical action.
If things are ideal you can use it to store large amounts of energy indefinitely
If the critical field strength is so high that it is a practical energy storage device then building a far smaller version of the Large Hadron Collider would be possible. At the moment the LHC is limited by the largest _reliable_ magnetic field strength we can create. If we can replace those with magnets 100 times more powerful which do not need liquid helium cooling then we could shrink the ring from 27km round to 270m round - or increase the energy of the LHC by an order of magnitude or so.
Why not just use the reptilian version of python and skip the AI?
Probably because its targeting system may not discriminate as well between squirrels, birds and small children.
Wow, US tourism is absolutely booming!
Careful - the statistics you show are ALL visits to the US not just visits for tourism. For example Canada counts as 21 million and I'm sure most of those visits were to buy things south of the border not for "real" tourism, not to mention the large number of business trips. I must say I do find the statistics surprising though but I note that some places like the UK and Japan show a marked drop in numbers of visits so if the OP cames from somewhere like there that may be the reason for his impression in a drop in US tourism.
Maybe they did, but the pub told them to screw off. You're assuming that the media has told the entire story
So it comes down to whether journalists are being honest or lawyers are being reasonable. I now wonder if there is a third, more plausible explanation.
They weren't sued out of existence, just asked to pay the license fee and stop using trademarked items.
That's what they are saying now, after Stephen Fry got involved. Beforehand I refer you to this article where, I quote:
Lawyers representing the Saul Zaentz Company (SZC) in California have told the pub it must carry out a complete rebranding before the end of May, or face legal action due to copyright infringement.
Since the story is that the actors' intervention has saved the pub I expect that the $100 licensing fee is something new. After all receiving a request for a $100 to license your use of the names would hardly be controversial and newsworthy would it?
Small animals MRI machines go up to 17T.
Are you sure about that? At that field strength you have a sufficiently large diamagnetic effect to levitate small animals like a frog. A quick search on Google suggests that 7T might be the number you are looking for.
How much stronger would a field have to be to protect a hypothetical ship the size of the space shuttle from solar winds
The deflection of charged particles in a magnetic field is roughly proportional to the strength of the field and the "thickness" of the field i.e. the distance that the charged particle travels through it. So (ignoring important complexities like varying field strength, ship geomtery etc.) a 100T field 1 m around the craft would be roughly as effective as a 1T field extending 100m around the craft.
Lets assume the fishing license was expensive and I sunk considerable capital into fishing on that day. How fair would it be for the government to issue a license and then after I began using it they change the rules prior to it expiring?
Lets take a concrete example should we: the banning of flights in Europe when the Icelandic volcano erupted in 2010. Regulations changed temporarily to protect passenger safety and airlines lost money. Should the EU government have recompensed the airlines? It gave them a license to operate after all? Of course it did not recompense them because it was not its fault that the volcano erupted but the regulation was required because otherwise some airlines would certainly have attempted to fly!
Not all government regulation is politically motivated and bad (although far too much is!). If they change rules on political whims then yes, compensation is due. But changing rules due to a change in circumstances outside their control when action is clearly needed is just tough luck.
But imagery from the LotR movies does not predate Tolkien, and the pub has been gratuitously using that in recent years.
So why not tell them to stop doing that rather than trying to sue them out of existence?
It's the Hobbit pub. It comes in half pints, you insensitive clod!
Is that a European or an American hobbit? (An American Hobbit is only 0.42 pints).
Is their liability for the reactor unlimited? No. It clearly isn't. I mean, that isn't a controversial point. It's a matter of contract that their liability has an exact dollar figure.
Contract? Did the US government ask them to build and operate a reactor? If so then I agree with you - you follow the terms of the contract. I was operating under the assumption that they US government had simply permitted a company which wanted to build and run a reactor to do so in much the same way that it would permit a company to build a factory i.e. the company chose to do this because they think they can make money from it not that the government contracted with them to do it.
Something that is irritating about many regulations is that they're very casually passed sometimes without really considering what the rule actually costs. If these fellows didn't save enough by the standards of the old cost projections then I see no fault with them.
That might be an irritating factor with many regulations but suppose the reason for the new regulation is well justified by science? For example if a factory was built several decades ago using asbestos and then decommissioned today the costs would be significantly higher than the original projections because, in the interim, we have discovered that asbestos is dangerous. So should a government be expected to pay the increased costs because they passed regulations to require asbestos to be safely removed? It's not their fault that asbestos turned out to be dangerous anymore than it is the company's fault.
I would argue that any increase in decommissioning costs due to regulations changing is a "risk of doing business" and therefore entirely the responsibility of the company who ran the plant. Governments are naturally motivated to keep these risks to a minimum in order to encourage businesses to flourish and keep costs to a minimum for their voters so there is a balance.
In the same vein but different: what are your thoughts on General Fusion. As a physicist myself, but not in the area of plasma/fusion research, their premise seems reasonable and they acknowledge that they may only have a 10-50% chance of success in their design. As experts in the field are there any clear reasons why such a design will not work and, if not, why is there not more support for such efforts within the plasma/fusion academic community?
Then why not just say "light atoms"
That would be wrong - they are not atoms. You fuse nuclei, not atoms. Atoms are an electrically neutral object consisting of a nucleus and bound electrons. At the temperatures required for fusion the collisions are sufficiently high energy that atoms break up and form a plasma of free electrons and nuclei (which is why the sun is not transparent despite being made of helium and hydrogen).
Where you basically say "cost be damned, were doing this". ....or saving our collective asses ( cheap fusion power )
Do you not see the problem there? You cannot say "cost be damned" if the aim is to make cheap fusion power. ITER and/or NIF may succeed in making fusion power but I doubt very much it will be cheap fusion power.