How do you know that U235 and U238 are produced in roughly equal abundance?
Models of supernovae explosions. I'm not a nuclear astrophysicist so I don't know the details, nor how robust the prediction is though. However trying to figure out what was going on in our neighbourhood 5+ billion years ago is likely to be fraught with inaccuracies and require some level of assumption.
The trick is to keep things as simple as possible (otherwise politicians get confused). So how about:
Legal owners of copyright material have the right to copy, modify, format shift etc. the copyright material for their own purposes and have the right to transfer this right to another if they give it up themselves i.e. sell the material to someone else.
Content which ships with DRM that violates these rights is not protected by copyright i.e. if you can break the DRM then you can copy and distribute it at will.
So if producers release material in compliant formats then they get the full protection of the law. However if they try to use technology to restrict rights beyond the law then they get the protection of that technology but not the law i.e. if you don't respect consumers rights then they don't have to respect yours. Seems to have a nice symmetry....
...only with big mixing angles, unlike the almost-zero angles in the quark sector's CKM matrix.
Careful - you are confusing quark mixing with CP violation. The complex phase which gives CP violation in quark mixing is almost zero, the actual quark mixing angle is quite significant. For example the Cabibbo mixing angle for udsc mixing is ~13 degrees.
However the effect is due to General Relativity and is amazingly tiny. GPS satellites have to include corrections of ~nanoseconds due to the Earth's gravitational field i.e. 20+ orders of magnitude larger than a human. So even scaled over a human lifetime the effect will be almost unmeasureably tiny.
Something PROVEN TO BE missing from the Standard Model? Was shocking when it was first shown by SNO and SuperK 10 years ago.
All Opera will hopefully eventually show is that the ALREADY DISCOVERED neutrino oscillations convert muon neutrinos into predominantly tau neutrinos....and yes I use the future tense. One axiom of particle physics is that you never, ever believe single events because the statistics are simply too low to be certain that there is not a background fluctuation (no matter how low you think your backgrounds are - suppose you missed something?).
Paris has a disadvantage compared to Chicago...history.
Some might consider that an advantage...having narrow streets full of old buildings might not be good for motorists but I'd rather wander around Paris than Chicago any day.
Native Americans have long known the sun to be on an (average) FIFTEEN (15) year cycle.
They are demonstrably wrong. The data is unequivocal that the cycle has been 11 years in length for the past several hundred years. Look at the plot in this article. There is no way that this is in any way consistent with a 15 years cycle. There may be other, longer cycles which the sun goes though - certainly there are multiple cycles for Earth's ice ages - but there is no evidence whatsoever to support a 15 year cycle.
Off the top of my head I can think of two ways to put a firm upper and lower boundary on the sun's age:
Upper bound from the ratio of U235 and U238. In supernovae these are produced in roughly equal quantities and each has a half life measured in billions of years. Currently the Uranium on Earth is about 99.3% U-238 and 0.7% U-235 so, using the different half-lives, you can calculate the age of the supernovae which preceded the solar systems formation as about 6 billion years ago so the sun must be younger than this.
Lower bound from the age of the Earth itself. Again radio dating techniques used on rocks put the age of the planet as about 4.5 billion years so the sun must be older than this.
Combine this with simulations about how long it would take an Earth sized mass to form an cool and you can probably come up with reasonably accurate value for the age of the sun. Of course this is just off the top of my head - there may be better and more accurate techniques which geologists and astophysicists have developed.
...but that doesn't mean that a thorough and rigorous testing process should not be conducted.
No it does not: what it does mean is that the, admittedly low (assuming it passes the tests), risks of consuming the new foodstuff should be offset against its benefits over established foods. Increasing the profits of companies is not a good benefit for the consumer who is taking the risk but the possible health benefits of this food probably are.
If there are any specific risks or complaints about specific new products, that's fine
How about: it is a completely new and unproven food stuff and it is impossible to completely test for all possible interactions with a massively compex, and not fully understood biological system? There is always an inherent risk in any new foodstuff. Since this particular one aims to reduce fat intake without losing taste there are known health benefits to offset the unknown risks so it is probably worth the chance but that is not the case when the main aim is to simply increase a company's profit margin which is the more typical goal.
But it's nanofood. NANO! "Nano" means better, just like "digital".
In that case atto-physics should be a billion times better than nano-physics...but try telling that to a funding agency as a particle physicist working at atto-metre scales and you won't get very far...
I would agree with you if I thought that the food industry would also play by those rules - use neutral, 3rd party science to determine what was safe, effective, etc.
Even if they did all of that science is still not perfect. Biological systems are fantastically complex and not fully understood. Even if the science shows no adverse effects in the short term and with massive doses the long term effects of consumption cannot always be known nor can all possible interactions be tested for in the lab. Hence there is always a risk with any completely new foodstuff. However if they managed to produce low fat foods which taste the same as the originals and thereby greatly reduce the chance of heart disease etc. the risk equation becomes a lot more balanced.
Still my usual attitude with this type of thing is let those who are keen about it field test is first and if they don't drop dead in a year or two my interest will start to grow.
Unless Einstein explicitly said "this will not be possible, ever"
He did not - as you suspect what he meant was that it was "not possible with current technology" and certainly not that it was impossible in the same vein as "it is not possible to travel faster than light". It would be like someone today saying that it is impossible to build a 500PB hard disk - what they clearly mean is that it is impossible AT THIS MOMENT IN TIME to build a 500PB disk not that it will never, ever be possible to do so.
Of course being a famous physicist the media have no qualms about hyping it as if somehow they have done something that contradicts Einstein because it attracts attention and cannot be proven to be wrong even it is extremely clear what he really meant.
Just try not to go batshiat insane and bulk mail your newly discovered GUT... to the entire physics department directory
Ha! I get those about once a month. What always amazes me is how much these nutters like to beat up on Einstein. It's never Dirac, Schroedinger, or anyone else it's always Einstein and particularly the fact that nothing can travel faster than light. I often wonder if these guys are serial speeders who find something fundamentally insulting about having someone tell them that they cannot go faster than a certain speed.
Heck, around here (Montana), if you buy a bottle of NyQuil at one pharmacy, then go to another and buy one, you're going to be arrested almost immediately.
That's nothing. Just north of you in Alberta if you ask for nasal decongestant without paracetemol (which I think you call acetominophen in the US) you get the third degree from the pharmacist because the paracetemol, as well as its medical effects, makes it harder to use for Meth manufacture. I've even had one pharmacist tell me to just get the stuff with the paracetemol added...at least until I asked him whether it was ethical for him to advise me to take unnecessary medication simply because he did not want to fill out the paperwork. Judging by his immediate capitulation I'm guessing that it wasn't...
Why use any special equipment? Get involved in theoretical physics and all you will need is paper, pens, perhaps a black board and internet access to the arXiv server (which is free) so there is no obstacle to you making significant contributions to, say, string theory...at least once you have got your maths up to that level!;-)
You found a US immigration agent with a sense of humor?
Actually I've found the US immigration and border patrol people you meet in Canada are generally very good and, as long as you do you best to follow the rules, they have all been very helpful. I like to think that being based here means that a little of Canada is rubbing of on them. This is in stark contrast to the ones I used to meeting while living in the US with a green card who frankly seemed to be actively looking for any excuse not to let you enter.
...all they have to do is keep making things increasingly difficult to the point that a growing number of people give up and stop pirating.
At which point you will have achieved your aim, although perhaps in a less principled manner. Personally I would guess that pirates fall into two categories: those who want to find out what they want to purchase by "trying" it first and those who, while they might be interested in watching a movie or listening to some music, attach a far, far lower value to it than Hollywood is willing to let them have it for. So if they ever do managed to stop piracy I would be very surprised to see any increase in sales for them. The first group will certainly buy less and while the second group may purchase a little more it will be far less than the number of movies/CDs/... which they currently download.
Personally I see the situation as similar to that of the Cornish smugglers in the 18th century. This outbreak of smuggling was caused by huge import taxes being imposed by London with the result of an ever increasing escalation between the smugglers and excise men. The problem was really only solved when the taxes were lowered to the point where people were willing to pay for the legally imported goods, at which point there was a vastly reduced incentive to smuggle. The problem the music and film industry face is that for ephemeral content such as music and films I would guess that this price point is low enough that there will be huge repercussions for the industry.
He goes through some pretty good justifications for his "illegal" downloading.
His best justification is one he doesn't realize though. He stated that he lives in London but yet has created an iTunes account to access US TV shows because 'it's legal' when it actually isn't. The iTunes conditions of purchase say that you must be in the country of the store when downloading because the US store does not have the rights to sell a US TV show to someone in the UK. The reason being that Hollywood has likely sold the rights to the show to a British broadcaster who will be very annoyed if they lose audience (and revenue) because someone else is illegally selling the show to their viewers.
Personally I think that it is only a matter of time before Apple start using GeoIP to restrict store access....like the BBC does for iPlayer. What we really need is some sensible, international way to access content. As a Brit living in Canada I would love to be able to watch BBC 1+2 on iPlayer - and would happily pay an equivalent to the UK licence fee to be able to do so (and no, BBC Canada is NOT the same).
...I already do! One of the great things about the LCG is that you can submit and monitor jobs from anywhere. It is used by far more than the 1,000 physicists the article mentions. There are 2,500+ on ATLAS alone and then there is CMS and LHCb to count as well.
It depends on which CERN guys you talk to. When I was a grad student we had a 1 GHz ADC (with fewer channels and only 8 bits IIRC) reading out scintillator which timed protons in a beam to O(10ps) timing resolution. I've been more involved with triggers than front end digitization since then but 200 kHz and 400 channels is nothing - the ATLAS calorimeter alone has 110,000 channels and its ADC's operate in the 10's MHz range (IIRC - you'd have to look up the ATLAS detector paper for exact numbers).
Actually until the law is actually passed presumably what he has done is not yet illegal. In fact this could be an exceedingly devious scheme to convince people that the law is actually needed...although I highly doubt that is the case.
That is best dealt with via educational, not electoral reform. e.g. the ability to solve complex maths problems like: 'if there are 2,143 people on the electoral roll for my polling station what is the minimum number of ballot papers I need?'.
Electoral reform is to solve problems like why does it take approximately 4 times more votes to get one lib dem politician vs. labour/conservative ones?
Slashdot Mirror
How do you know that U235 and U238 are produced in roughly equal abundance?
Models of supernovae explosions. I'm not a nuclear astrophysicist so I don't know the details, nor how robust the prediction is though. However trying to figure out what was going on in our neighbourhood 5+ billion years ago is likely to be fraught with inaccuracies and require some level of assumption.
So if producers release material in compliant formats then they get the full protection of the law. However if they try to use technology to restrict rights beyond the law then they get the protection of that technology but not the law i.e. if you don't respect consumers rights then they don't have to respect yours. Seems to have a nice symmetry....
...only with big mixing angles, unlike the almost-zero angles in the quark sector's CKM matrix.
Careful - you are confusing quark mixing with CP violation. The complex phase which gives CP violation in quark mixing is almost zero, the actual quark mixing angle is quite significant. For example the Cabibbo mixing angle for udsc mixing is ~13 degrees.
However the effect is due to General Relativity and is amazingly tiny. GPS satellites have to include corrections of ~nanoseconds due to the Earth's gravitational field i.e. 20+ orders of magnitude larger than a human. So even scaled over a human lifetime the effect will be almost unmeasureably tiny.
Something PROVEN TO BE missing from the Standard Model? Was shocking when it was first shown by SNO and SuperK 10 years ago.
All Opera will hopefully eventually show is that the ALREADY DISCOVERED neutrino oscillations convert muon neutrinos into predominantly tau neutrinos....and yes I use the future tense. One axiom of particle physics is that you never, ever believe single events because the statistics are simply too low to be certain that there is not a background fluctuation (no matter how low you think your backgrounds are - suppose you missed something?).
Paris has a disadvantage compared to Chicago...history.
Some might consider that an advantage...having narrow streets full of old buildings might not be good for motorists but I'd rather wander around Paris than Chicago any day.
Native Americans have long known the sun to be on an (average) FIFTEEN (15) year cycle.
They are demonstrably wrong. The data is unequivocal that the cycle has been 11 years in length for the past several hundred years. Look at the plot in this article. There is no way that this is in any way consistent with a 15 years cycle. There may be other, longer cycles which the sun goes though - certainly there are multiple cycles for Earth's ice ages - but there is no evidence whatsoever to support a 15 year cycle.
Combine this with simulations about how long it would take an Earth sized mass to form an cool and you can probably come up with reasonably accurate value for the age of the sun. Of course this is just off the top of my head - there may be better and more accurate techniques which geologists and astophysicists have developed.
...but that doesn't mean that a thorough and rigorous testing process should not be conducted.
No it does not: what it does mean is that the, admittedly low (assuming it passes the tests), risks of consuming the new foodstuff should be offset against its benefits over established foods. Increasing the profits of companies is not a good benefit for the consumer who is taking the risk but the possible health benefits of this food probably are.
If there are any specific risks or complaints about specific new products, that's fine
How about: it is a completely new and unproven food stuff and it is impossible to completely test for all possible interactions with a massively compex, and not fully understood biological system? There is always an inherent risk in any new foodstuff. Since this particular one aims to reduce fat intake without losing taste there are known health benefits to offset the unknown risks so it is probably worth the chance but that is not the case when the main aim is to simply increase a company's profit margin which is the more typical goal.
But it's nanofood. NANO! "Nano" means better, just like "digital".
In that case atto-physics should be a billion times better than nano-physics...but try telling that to a funding agency as a particle physicist working at atto-metre scales and you won't get very far...
I would agree with you if I thought that the food industry would also play by those rules - use neutral, 3rd party science to determine what was safe, effective, etc.
Even if they did all of that science is still not perfect. Biological systems are fantastically complex and not fully understood. Even if the science shows no adverse effects in the short term and with massive doses the long term effects of consumption cannot always be known nor can all possible interactions be tested for in the lab. Hence there is always a risk with any completely new foodstuff. However if they managed to produce low fat foods which taste the same as the originals and thereby greatly reduce the chance of heart disease etc. the risk equation becomes a lot more balanced.
Still my usual attitude with this type of thing is let those who are keen about it field test is first and if they don't drop dead in a year or two my interest will start to grow.
Unless Einstein explicitly said "this will not be possible, ever"
He did not - as you suspect what he meant was that it was "not possible with current technology" and certainly not that it was impossible in the same vein as "it is not possible to travel faster than light". It would be like someone today saying that it is impossible to build a 500PB hard disk - what they clearly mean is that it is impossible AT THIS MOMENT IN TIME to build a 500PB disk not that it will never, ever be possible to do so.
Of course being a famous physicist the media have no qualms about hyping it as if somehow they have done something that contradicts Einstein because it attracts attention and cannot be proven to be wrong even it is extremely clear what he really meant.
Just try not to go batshiat insane and bulk mail your newly discovered GUT ... to the entire physics department directory
Ha! I get those about once a month. What always amazes me is how much these nutters like to beat up on Einstein. It's never Dirac, Schroedinger, or anyone else it's always Einstein and particularly the fact that nothing can travel faster than light. I often wonder if these guys are serial speeders who find something fundamentally insulting about having someone tell them that they cannot go faster than a certain speed.
Heck, around here (Montana), if you buy a bottle of NyQuil at one pharmacy, then go to another and buy one, you're going to be arrested almost immediately.
That's nothing. Just north of you in Alberta if you ask for nasal decongestant without paracetemol (which I think you call acetominophen in the US) you get the third degree from the pharmacist because the paracetemol, as well as its medical effects, makes it harder to use for Meth manufacture. I've even had one pharmacist tell me to just get the stuff with the paracetemol added...at least until I asked him whether it was ethical for him to advise me to take unnecessary medication simply because he did not want to fill out the paperwork. Judging by his immediate capitulation I'm guessing that it wasn't...
Why use any special equipment? Get involved in theoretical physics and all you will need is paper, pens, perhaps a black board and internet access to the arXiv server (which is free) so there is no obstacle to you making significant contributions to, say, string theory...at least once you have got your maths up to that level! ;-)
You found a US immigration agent with a sense of humor?
Actually I've found the US immigration and border patrol people you meet in Canada are generally very good and, as long as you do you best to follow the rules, they have all been very helpful. I like to think that being based here means that a little of Canada is rubbing of on them. This is in stark contrast to the ones I used to meeting while living in the US with a green card who frankly seemed to be actively looking for any excuse not to let you enter.
...all they have to do is keep making things increasingly difficult to the point that a growing number of people give up and stop pirating.
At which point you will have achieved your aim, although perhaps in a less principled manner. Personally I would guess that pirates fall into two categories: those who want to find out what they want to purchase by "trying" it first and those who, while they might be interested in watching a movie or listening to some music, attach a far, far lower value to it than Hollywood is willing to let them have it for. So if they ever do managed to stop piracy I would be very surprised to see any increase in sales for them. The first group will certainly buy less and while the second group may purchase a little more it will be far less than the number of movies/CDs/... which they currently download.
Personally I see the situation as similar to that of the Cornish smugglers in the 18th century. This outbreak of smuggling was caused by huge import taxes being imposed by London with the result of an ever increasing escalation between the smugglers and excise men. The problem was really only solved when the taxes were lowered to the point where people were willing to pay for the legally imported goods, at which point there was a vastly reduced incentive to smuggle. The problem the music and film industry face is that for ephemeral content such as music and films I would guess that this price point is low enough that there will be huge repercussions for the industry.
He goes through some pretty good justifications for his "illegal" downloading.
His best justification is one he doesn't realize though. He stated that he lives in London but yet has created an iTunes account to access US TV shows because 'it's legal' when it actually isn't. The iTunes conditions of purchase say that you must be in the country of the store when downloading because the US store does not have the rights to sell a US TV show to someone in the UK. The reason being that Hollywood has likely sold the rights to the show to a British broadcaster who will be very annoyed if they lose audience (and revenue) because someone else is illegally selling the show to their viewers.
Personally I think that it is only a matter of time before Apple start using GeoIP to restrict store access....like the BBC does for iPlayer. What we really need is some sensible, international way to access content. As a Brit living in Canada I would love to be able to watch BBC 1+2 on iPlayer - and would happily pay an equivalent to the UK licence fee to be able to do so (and no, BBC Canada is NOT the same).
...I already do! One of the great things about the LCG is that you can submit and monitor jobs from anywhere. It is used by far more than the 1,000 physicists the article mentions. There are 2,500+ on ATLAS alone and then there is CMS and LHCb to count as well.
It depends on which CERN guys you talk to. When I was a grad student we had a 1 GHz ADC (with fewer channels and only 8 bits IIRC) reading out scintillator which timed protons in a beam to O(10ps) timing resolution. I've been more involved with triggers than front end digitization since then but 200 kHz and 400 channels is nothing - the ATLAS calorimeter alone has 110,000 channels and its ADC's operate in the 10's MHz range (IIRC - you'd have to look up the ATLAS detector paper for exact numbers).
Actually until the law is actually passed presumably what he has done is not yet illegal. In fact this could be an exceedingly devious scheme to convince people that the law is actually needed...although I highly doubt that is the case.
That is best dealt with via educational, not electoral reform. e.g. the ability to solve complex maths problems like: 'if there are 2,143 people on the electoral roll for my polling station what is the minimum number of ballot papers I need?'.
Electoral reform is to solve problems like why does it take approximately 4 times more votes to get one lib dem politician vs. labour/conservative ones?
And only crazy hippies vote libdem.
I think we'd be in even worse trouble if 23% of the country were 'crazy hippies'.
I don't think it should be called a hung parliament until someone shows up with 6500 metres of good strong rope.
That would be a hanged parliament. The closest we got to that was 1605...and we still celebrate it every year to this day.