So, perhaps 15 kg TNT of energy would be absorbed by several grams of tissue in a long stripe.
The amount will be far, far less than that because it takes time for the hadronic shower produced by the protons to develop. Energy deposition is not linear but peaks at a distance into the material (this is why lower energy proton beams are used for treating brain tumours). So while you may end up dead, depending on what the beam hits or from the radiation later, I doubt it will be in any way "spectacular". The vast majority of the energy will go right through you but tissue close to the beam will get effectively cooked.
Remember, faster than light means time travel (&, thus, causality violations), so I can understand caution.
This only holds under relativity. If relativity is not correct then its results are also no longer neccessarily true. However it is true to say that we have never observed any phenomenon which can transmit information faster than light so any new theory will have to explain this.
It's strange to me that Dvali would abandon his model for allowing FTL propagation of information unless he experimentally checked the conditions in question
It's not strange at all - that's normal. There are so many theoretical possibilities that you cannot possibly experimentally check every single one of them. You use your intuition and experience to concentrate your time on the ones that appear more likely to agree with existing experimental data. This is why the most important contributions often come from younger, less experienced scientists. They don't have the experience that gets in the way of trying detailed calculations of a crazy new idea. Of course 99.99...% of the time experience is correct but in some rare cases things work out differently than expected and that is what leads to breakthroughs.
As someone who's traveled quite a bit in the past few years (I did over 150k miles in the past 12 months), I would recommend against the booze.
As long as you don't over do it a little alcohol is very good. My usual routine from Canada to Europe is to have a glass or two of wine. This is enough to relax you and help you get to sleep but not enough to dehydrate you and cause a hangover (which is very easy to do given the 0% humidity environment onboard). As an added bonus alcohol metabolizes into chemicals that act as stimulants so when you wake up close to landing it helps wake you up enough to get through the airport and either to your hotel or onto the next flight. You do need to make sure to drink lots of water though - it is very easy to get a hangover if you are not careful due to the dehydrating environment.
It would also be a good place to store a Linux distribution...of course that might not display the ads which is why I highly doubt that Google will do it. It would be far too easy to strip out the Google OS and install your own.
But low-speed collisions and beam tuning are not what the LHC is designed to do.
You do realize that even at the injection energy the speed of the protons is 99.99978% of the speed of light in vacuum and at full energy the speed of the protons has only increased to 99.9999991%? The collisions are both equally high speed thanks to relativity: what is interesting is the collision energy.
Splash events from the ATLAS experiment, from beam hitting an upstream collimator, can be seen here (updated regularly). The plan is to have low energy collisions within a week to help test the detectors. Accelerating the beams, in preparation for high energy collisions, will happen next year (so no black holes until then!). More details are available from the LHC commissioning and status pages. There is even a CERN tweet available for all you twits.
Time to get into the mirror business! It's a lot easier to deflect protons than bullets, I'll tell you that.
That's strange considering that bullets, at least lead ones, are 40% protons by mass. It's also a real shame that you didn't tell us that before we designed the LHC - it would have been a lot easier to use mirrors to bounce the protons beams about the ring instead of using superconducting magnets. Perhaps you meant photons....
How's this for a solution: upon graduation from high school you pick 3 teachers that have been the most influential in your life.
You are confusing effectiveness with popularity. Teachers are there to educate you not to make you feel good about yourself. All this will do is reward the teachers that are either popular or whom taught subjects that you used during your university education. It will NOT reward the teachers who are actually good at their job, althogh there may be some degree of overlap.
First I did not attribute who prevented ownership only why ownership was not possible. However a lot of those involved in the fighting on the British side were Canadians. True back then Canadian was not a separate nationality but the concept of Canadian still existed. Although I am British, I regard myself as a Yorkshireman since that is where I am originally from despite "Yorkshire" not being a nationality (yet!).
How does this capture content from a whiteboard? Your links look like a way of representing it once cpatured but actual hardware to do the capturing unless I missed something. Capturing the content as pen strokes with times is a very good idea since you can then sync it with the audio. You should look at LiveScribe for a system which already does this - but that only works with pens and paper - if they had a whiteboard version it would be fantastic.
The last thing I want my students doing is mindlessly copying stuff - I want them engaging their brains and thinking about the content which is something that is not easy to achieve! In addition to the use of clickers and questions in the lecture, to relieve the writing part I make the OpenOffice (no PowerPoint!) slides available on the website along with a video podcast of the lecture audio and the computer screen. This lets students listen again to any part they found hard to understand... or to catch up if they "accidentally" miss a lecture!
Unfortunately slides are only part of the issue and I do a good bit of writing on the whiteboard as well (derivations, answers to student questions which need diagrams etc.). So far I have found no easy way to capture this - I know that there are solutions but the ones I have found are not portable and since I lecture in different rooms from term-to-term they are not viable.
In terms of slides bundled with the books a lot of the text books for low level, high enrolment courses come with such material for the professor. Personally I find the slides a complete waste of time - all they are is pictures from the book with a few bullet points. The exception are the concept question slides which can occasionally be useful. In addition to this publishers also provide all the diagrams in electronic form which is what I usually make use of - although I more often draw my own instead.
I use OpenOffice for all my course content: slides, handouts, exams, diagrams.... For physics both the built in equation editor or the ability to embed editable LaTeX (via OooLatex) make it vastly superior to MS Office despite being slightly less polished. The other advantage is that I have a Makefile to automatically generate PDF files with one slide and 2x2 slides versions. If I could get OO to run in batch without needing an X11 connection to somewhere (even though it does not open a window!) I could probably embed the whole thing into Moodle and have it generate PDFs to student specifications on the fly.
Not owning the game but listening to the comments here I am not at all happy with what they imply. I have no problem with optional DLC provided that the advertising/nagging is done outside of the game itself i.e. while loading, in the main menu etc. Being continuously nagged about DLC in the middle of in-character conversations is NOT acceptable because it gets in the way of me enjoying the game that I already paid for. Apart from destroying the atmosphere - which is a good portion of the appeal of a good RPG - who wants to be continuously reminded about all the stuff that they are missing?
The US 110v socket/plug just doesn't overheat easily
Based on experience staying in US and Canadian hotels I would strongly disagree with that. However I will admit that I don't know whether that is attributable to a poor plug design or a the hotels not following the relevant standards - either way it is a noticeable problem.
But it does starkly illuminate the safety/convenience trade-off.
True but how much inconvenience is a slightly larger plug? Far, far less inconvenient that wearing a crash helmet or kevlar vest (which, since there are not that many shooting deaths in Europe, would be pretty much useless in any case). Indeed if you compare it to the death rate from cycling (784 in the US in 2005) and factor in that just under half of cycle deaths are due to head injuries and that a bicycle helmet would only offer effective protection in ~70% of the head injury cases. The result is a comparable number to the effect of having safer plugs and yet nobody seems to bat an eye at suggesting that everyone use bike helmets. Besides I am sure that now, given advances in material science and design we could come up with a plug just as safe as the UK one but which is less bulky.
Dark matter has Sweet Fuck All to do with the cosmic microwave background, which was explained very well in the 1960s using conventional physics and the big bang theory.
I'd suggest you do a little reading about the WMAP probe and the fluctuations it measured in the Cosmic Microwave background. So far the only consistent Big Bang models which can explain these fluctuations involve large amounts of Dark Matter and Dark Energy. Indeed Dark Matter and Energy is the only way we can make the observed fluctuations consistent with existing physics and the Big Bang so you really could not be more wrong if you tried because without Dark Matter we MUST have either new, unconventional physics or something other than a Big Bang.
Of course there is considerably more evidence than just WMAP. One in particular, the bullet cluster, is extremely hard to explain using modified newtonian dynamics or the other models which at the alternatives to Dark Matter. However science has advanced from the 1960s and with the data we now have it is not possible to construct consistent models with conventional physis
The issue is less electrocution and far more fires. How many deaths are due to fires caused by electrical faults? The small pins and low voltage (so large currents) lead to far more heating. With 110V you might be safer from electrocution but that won't be much of a consolation if your house burns down with you in it!
If we bring plug shape into this, I'd maintain that the English plug is more dangerous - you could step on the pins.
Stepping on the pins will not kill you. The house fire caused by a short in an appliance can and GFI and circuit breakers will not necessarily trigger on these because they cover multiple sockets and so, typically, have very high amperage rates 30A or higher vs. the 10-15A that it is safe to draw from one socket.
It is house fires, not electrocution, that is the problem. The fuse stops excessive currents causing fires, the better design prevents shorts and the higher voltage reduces currents. For the US electrical fires are the third leading cause of house fires and the second leading cause of fire deaths (Google "leading cause house fires" - many pages). However I cannot find any statistics for the leading UK causes nor actual rates of fires with causes for more accurate comparisons between the US and UK.
The simple fact of the matter is that the pins on the US plug are so short that by the point it is far enough out of the socket to expose enough of the pins to touch them with your fingers
Unless you are a kid with small fingers. Plus the short length means less contact area which can lead to considerable heating, even to the point where the plug melts. Ihave had this happen on more than on occassion when plugging things in in hotel rooms in the US and Canada because the plug socket had bad contacts. Never had that happen in the UK, ever.
Shutters on the sockets are a very recent development in the US, and a probably just being copied from the UK for no other reason than shutter envy.
Shutters are not new in the UK - they have been common since at least the 1970's.
A major advantage of the USA plug is that it's smaller
True - like most things safety features have to have a trade-off and in this case it is size. So how many lives is the convenience of a smaller plug worth to you?
They may be larger but they are far, far safer. As most things it is a trade off. The question you need to ask is exactly how many people's lives is the convenience of a smaller plug worth?
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Boxes are dangerous! The Republicans are absolutely correct when they insist on cowering in fear whenever they see a box.
As they should be. All politicians should be afraid of ballot boxes.
So, perhaps 15 kg TNT of energy would be absorbed by several grams of tissue in a long stripe.
The amount will be far, far less than that because it takes time for the hadronic shower produced by the protons to develop. Energy deposition is not linear but peaks at a distance into the material (this is why lower energy proton beams are used for treating brain tumours). So while you may end up dead, depending on what the beam hits or from the radiation later, I doubt it will be in any way "spectacular". The vast majority of the energy will go right through you but tissue close to the beam will get effectively cooked.
Remember, faster than light means time travel (&, thus, causality violations), so I can understand caution.
This only holds under relativity. If relativity is not correct then its results are also no longer neccessarily true. However it is true to say that we have never observed any phenomenon which can transmit information faster than light so any new theory will have to explain this.
It's strange to me that Dvali would abandon his model for allowing FTL propagation of information unless he experimentally checked the conditions in question
It's not strange at all - that's normal. There are so many theoretical possibilities that you cannot possibly experimentally check every single one of them. You use your intuition and experience to concentrate your time on the ones that appear more likely to agree with existing experimental data. This is why the most important contributions often come from younger, less experienced scientists. They don't have the experience that gets in the way of trying detailed calculations of a crazy new idea. Of course 99.99...% of the time experience is correct but in some rare cases things work out differently than expected and that is what leads to breakthroughs.
As someone who's traveled quite a bit in the past few years (I did over 150k miles in the past 12 months), I would recommend against the booze.
As long as you don't over do it a little alcohol is very good. My usual routine from Canada to Europe is to have a glass or two of wine. This is enough to relax you and help you get to sleep but not enough to dehydrate you and cause a hangover (which is very easy to do given the 0% humidity environment onboard). As an added bonus alcohol metabolizes into chemicals that act as stimulants so when you wake up close to landing it helps wake you up enough to get through the airport and either to your hotel or onto the next flight. You do need to make sure to drink lots of water though - it is very easy to get a hangover if you are not careful due to the dehydrating environment.
It would also be a good place to store a Linux distribution...of course that might not display the ads which is why I highly doubt that Google will do it. It would be far too easy to strip out the Google OS and install your own.
They are colliding at a paltry 450 GeV, a level we have been able to produce at other colliders for many years.
But low-speed collisions and beam tuning are not what the LHC is designed to do.
You do realize that even at the injection energy the speed of the protons is 99.99978% of the speed of light in vacuum and at full energy the speed of the protons has only increased to 99.9999991%? The collisions are both equally high speed thanks to relativity: what is interesting is the collision energy.
Splash events from the ATLAS experiment, from beam hitting an upstream collimator, can be seen here (updated regularly). The plan is to have low energy collisions within a week to help test the detectors. Accelerating the beams, in preparation for high energy collisions, will happen next year (so no black holes until then!). More details are available from the LHC commissioning and status pages. There is even a CERN tweet available for all you twits.
Time to get into the mirror business! It's a lot easier to deflect protons than bullets, I'll tell you that.
That's strange considering that bullets, at least lead ones, are 40% protons by mass. It's also a real shame that you didn't tell us that before we designed the LHC - it would have been a lot easier to use mirrors to bounce the protons beams about the ring instead of using superconducting magnets. Perhaps you meant photons....
How's this for a solution: upon graduation from high school you pick 3 teachers that have been the most influential in your life.
You are confusing effectiveness with popularity. Teachers are there to educate you not to make you feel good about yourself. All this will do is reward the teachers that are either popular or whom taught subjects that you used during your university education. It will NOT reward the teachers who are actually good at their job, althogh there may be some degree of overlap.
First I did not attribute who prevented ownership only why ownership was not possible. However a lot of those involved in the fighting on the British side were Canadians. True back then Canadian was not a separate nationality but the concept of Canadian still existed. Although I am British, I regard myself as a Yorkshireman since that is where I am originally from despite "Yorkshire" not being a nationality (yet!).
How does this capture content from a whiteboard? Your links look like a way of representing it once cpatured but actual hardware to do the capturing unless I missed something. Capturing the content as pen strokes with times is a very good idea since you can then sync it with the audio. You should look at LiveScribe for a system which already does this - but that only works with pens and paper - if they had a whiteboard version it would be fantastic.
The last thing I want my students doing is mindlessly copying stuff - I want them engaging their brains and thinking about the content which is something that is not easy to achieve! In addition to the use of clickers and questions in the lecture, to relieve the writing part I make the OpenOffice (no PowerPoint!) slides available on the website along with a video podcast of the lecture audio and the computer screen. This lets students listen again to any part they found hard to understand... or to catch up if they "accidentally" miss a lecture!
Unfortunately slides are only part of the issue and I do a good bit of writing on the whiteboard as well (derivations, answers to student questions which need diagrams etc.). So far I have found no easy way to capture this - I know that there are solutions but the ones I have found are not portable and since I lecture in different rooms from term-to-term they are not viable.
In terms of slides bundled with the books a lot of the text books for low level, high enrolment courses come with such material for the professor. Personally I find the slides a complete waste of time - all they are is pictures from the book with a few bullet points. The exception are the concept question slides which can occasionally be useful. In addition to this publishers also provide all the diagrams in electronic form which is what I usually make use of - although I more often draw my own instead.
I use OpenOffice for all my course content: slides, handouts, exams, diagrams.... For physics both the built in equation editor or the ability to embed editable LaTeX (via OooLatex) make it vastly superior to MS Office despite being slightly less polished. The other advantage is that I have a Makefile to automatically generate PDF files with one slide and 2x2 slides versions. If I could get OO to run in batch without needing an X11 connection to somewhere (even though it does not open a window!) I could probably embed the whole thing into Moodle and have it generate PDFs to student specifications on the fly.
Not owning the game but listening to the comments here I am not at all happy with what they imply. I have no problem with optional DLC provided that the advertising/nagging is done outside of the game itself i.e. while loading, in the main menu etc. Being continuously nagged about DLC in the middle of in-character conversations is NOT acceptable because it gets in the way of me enjoying the game that I already paid for. Apart from destroying the atmosphere - which is a good portion of the appeal of a good RPG - who wants to be continuously reminded about all the stuff that they are missing?
The US 110v socket/plug just doesn't overheat easily
Based on experience staying in US and Canadian hotels I would strongly disagree with that. However I will admit that I don't know whether that is attributable to a poor plug design or a the hotels not following the relevant standards - either way it is a noticeable problem.
But it does starkly illuminate the safety/convenience trade-off.
True but how much inconvenience is a slightly larger plug? Far, far less inconvenient that wearing a crash helmet or kevlar vest (which, since there are not that many shooting deaths in Europe, would be pretty much useless in any case). Indeed if you compare it to the death rate from cycling (784 in the US in 2005) and factor in that just under half of cycle deaths are due to head injuries and that a bicycle helmet would only offer effective protection in ~70% of the head injury cases. The result is a comparable number to the effect of having safer plugs and yet nobody seems to bat an eye at suggesting that everyone use bike helmets. Besides I am sure that now, given advances in material science and design we could come up with a plug just as safe as the UK one but which is less bulky.
Dark matter has Sweet Fuck All to do with the cosmic microwave background, which was explained very well in the 1960s using conventional physics and the big bang theory.
I'd suggest you do a little reading about the WMAP probe and the fluctuations it measured in the Cosmic Microwave background. So far the only consistent Big Bang models which can explain these fluctuations involve large amounts of Dark Matter and Dark Energy. Indeed Dark Matter and Energy is the only way we can make the observed fluctuations consistent with existing physics and the Big Bang so you really could not be more wrong if you tried because without Dark Matter we MUST have either new, unconventional physics or something other than a Big Bang.
Of course there is considerably more evidence than just WMAP. One in particular, the bullet cluster, is extremely hard to explain using modified newtonian dynamics or the other models which at the alternatives to Dark Matter. However science has advanced from the 1960s and with the data we now have it is not possible to construct consistent models with conventional physis
The issue is less electrocution and far more fires. How many deaths are due to fires caused by electrical faults? The small pins and low voltage (so large currents) lead to far more heating. With 110V you might be safer from electrocution but that won't be much of a consolation if your house burns down with you in it!
Yay natural healing!
Actually I think that should be "Yay, evolution!". In fact that deserves a nomination for a Darwin award.
Can you clarify? Why can't I own Canadians?
If we bring plug shape into this, I'd maintain that the English plug is more dangerous - you could step on the pins.
Stepping on the pins will not kill you. The house fire caused by a short in an appliance can and GFI and circuit breakers will not necessarily trigger on these because they cover multiple sockets and so, typically, have very high amperage rates 30A or higher vs. the 10-15A that it is safe to draw from one socket.
It is house fires, not electrocution, that is the problem. The fuse stops excessive currents causing fires, the better design prevents shorts and the higher voltage reduces currents. For the US electrical fires are the third leading cause of house fires and the second leading cause of fire deaths (Google "leading cause house fires" - many pages). However I cannot find any statistics for the leading UK causes nor actual rates of fires with causes for more accurate comparisons between the US and UK.
The simple fact of the matter is that the pins on the US plug are so short that by the point it is far enough out of the socket to expose enough of the pins to touch them with your fingers
Unless you are a kid with small fingers. Plus the short length means less contact area which can lead to considerable heating, even to the point where the plug melts. Ihave had this happen on more than on occassion when plugging things in in hotel rooms in the US and Canada because the plug socket had bad contacts. Never had that happen in the UK, ever.
Shutters on the sockets are a very recent development in the US, and a probably just being copied from the UK for no other reason than shutter envy.
Shutters are not new in the UK - they have been common since at least the 1970's.
A major advantage of the USA plug is that it's smaller
True - like most things safety features have to have a trade-off and in this case it is size. So how many lives is the convenience of a smaller plug worth to you?
They may be larger but they are far, far safer. As most things it is a trade off. The question you need to ask is exactly how many people's lives is the convenience of a smaller plug worth?