I'm actually criticising Europe for not promoting its achievements or those of its citizens.
It's not just Europe. Did you know that the electric light bulb was invented in Canada? It was then improved by Swann in England to use tungsten and all Edison did was buy the original Canadian patent and steal Swann's improvements.
Swann successfully sued Edison in the UK and won. However, since it was (and still is) impossible to win patent suits in the US courts as a foreigner (the US patent office cheerfully boasts that 98.5% of all foreign brought cases in the US fail!), Edison made enough money to buy out the UK assets he was forced to hand over to Swann.
Makes me wonder if in 100 years everyone will be being taught that Bill Gates invented the computer .
Communism is not a subset of fascism. In fact they're the two opposite sides of a spectrum.
A communist is just a lying facist. (The facist says "all power to the government", the communist says "all power to the people", meaning the government.)
We can therefore conclude that Bush must be communist!
Is it just me or is this "discovery" just simple quantum mechanics? From Heisenberg we know that:
delat E x delta t >= hbar/2
So, given that any event involves an energy transfer we either know nothing about the energy (i.e nothing about the event ever taking place) or else the time can never be exactly specified.
I always understood this to be one of the basic tenets of quantum theory: there is no longer any exact coordinates or exact times: everything is fuzzy when you look in enough detail.
As for the paradox with quantum mechanics there isn't one: the man's position is "uncertain" once you get beyond a particular accuracy. i.e. you just cannot keep dividing the distance up for ever because it is meaningless beyond a certain point.
"Scientists...now know how the universe will end and are on the brink of understanding its beginning."
If we are truly on the brink of undertanding the beginning of the Universe then this would also entail understanding what caused the Big Bang. What are the candidate theories as to the cause and how can we experimentally validate them?
If we constrain our notion of the Universe to be post-Big Bang then are you claiming that we are on the brink of truly understanding physics at the Planck scale (~10^-41 s post Big Bang)? If so what is your justification for this?
As a scientist this sort of hype really irritates me since it makes us look arrogant at the time and then like idiots when the hype gets proved wrong.
My guess is that the book is a hyped up discussion of the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy probe. This probe looked at minor fluctuations in the cosimc microwave background (much like COBE but with far better resolution).
The probe provided some really interesting data which has ended up posing far more questions than it answers (always the best type of experiment!). The data show that if the Big Bang model is correct that the Universe will end in heat death i.e. there will be no big crunch.
However it also shows that only ~5% of the Universes matter is "baryonic" i.e. what you would call "normal" matter. About ~20% is non-baryoninc matter and a whopping ~75% is dark energy. Currently the physics that we know about cannot account for most of the non-baryonic dark matter let alone the "dark energy". So to say that we know how the Universe is going to end when we only understand about 5% of what it actually is shows that the statement is clearly pure hype.
However this is also the reason that science is fun: we have a lot more of the Universe to understand. Either there is a lot of new fundamental physics out there for us to find or the Big Bang model predictions of the energy content are wrong. It's just best to wait until we do understand it before we make predictions.
Civil war? I think you mean revolution unless you still regard yourselves as British. I know you still have a mad king...er....president George but its not quite the same you know.
Here's a simple experiment to prove Gold wrong. Take a fan, put a piece of paper in front of it and turn it on. The paper will blow away just as you would expect. However it we now analyse it in Gold's terms the procedure is indentical in every important aspect to a solar sail.
The incoming gas (the air) is at the essentially the same temperature as that leaving the the paper and so, if this were a carnot heat engine, the paper could do no work.
This exposes the fallacy in his argument. The proposed solar sail is not a heat engine i.e. it is not extracting useful work from the heat energy of the photons. Were it to rely on lowering the photons energy to do work then it would be a heat energine. However instead it relies on the mechanical energy of the photons to do work. The fact that photons are radiated heat is irrelevant for this excercise, they could just as well be ping pong balls.
I don't see why he had the right to use Intel's equipment (servers and associated hardware) to distribute his message. Granted, it's open to the public but that doesn't mean there is some right for anyone to use the equipment.
...but strictly speaking he didn't "use" any machines at Intel. The only machine he directly used was whatever machine he wrote the email on and whatever machine it connected to to send the message on. After that he has absolutely no control over which machines it passes through and, so I would argue, cannot be held responsible for "using" them.
As for Intel reserving the right to restrict access I don't see anyone denying them that right. They are free to block email addresses or take whatever other measures them deem appropriate. Afterall, if they really objected to it they could simply refuse all incoming external emails or even put in a content filter if they could make one complex enough to catch any Intel based criticism.
All in all I'm amazed that all the courts didn't agree. Speaking as a European isn't one of the major points of the American constitution freedom of speech? (at least that's what you guys keep telling us all the time!) The guy didn't cause any damage and even unsubscribed people who asked to be removed. If he was lying then Intel should have sued him for slander: the fact that they didn't only lends credence to his complaints.
No. Maxwell's demon is to do with thermodynamics and not quantum mechanics. The demon selects which particles to let through. This device is simply a plasma wall which stops everything getting through, it doesn't select the energy. I suppose it you bombarded it will really high energy particles then it won't stop them but neither will it stop them coming back so you haven't actually actually separated them.
However, the point of Maxwell's thought experiment was that what if you could make something that would separate out the hot and cold particles it could potentially break the second law of thermodynamics which says that the entropy (essentially randomness) of a closed system must increase. Well, interestingly enough this has already happened. Australian researchers have measured entropy decreasing over short periods of time (~0.1s) for a system composed of latex beads trapped in a laser beam. For longer periods (>2s) the entropy will increase. You can read the New Scientist article
here.
This raises a very interesting point. Would strict enforcement of software licenses actually help open source projects?
After all, if the main reason for pirating business software is because the company cannot afford to purchase the license then having those licenses strictly enforced would likely force those companies to using OpenSource software.
Just read a review of Nokia's 5100 mobile phone. This phone has an integrated flashlight, FM tuner, a calorie burn application, sound meter and thermometer. And yet there is no Bluetooth capabilites. Is the cell phone market getting so desperate that companies are adding everything including the kitchen sink to sell these phones? Why would you want a sound meter or a calorie tracking application in a cell phone?"
I don't know why you'd want a calorie tracking application, but a calorie burn one....
I think I could use one of those!
No - what people forget all the time with these end-of-the-universe predictions is the fact that nature already produces interactions at energies far in excess of anything we can produce in colliders today. Cosmic rays, which are high energy protons, strike the earth's atmosphere continuously. The measured energy spectrum of these protons goes up to energies literally thousands of times larger that the LHC.
So don't worry - if the LHC could create anything dangerous nature would have already produced it and we wouldn't be sitting here having this discussion!
Being a physicist and Yorkshireman I can't help commenting on this...The mine in question is the Boulby Potash mine and there have been Dark matter experiments going on there for quite a few years.
Although these experiments are performed deep underground, like neutrino, experiments their physics is somewhat different. Dark matter experiments are aimed at finding new fundamental particles as yet unknown to physics. Neutrino experiments, on the otherhand, study the properities of neutrinos and it is these experiments (SNO, SuperKamiokande) which have produced the exciting discovery of neutrino oscillations.
The reason dark matter is such an interesting field at the moment is because of the WMAP result. This indicates that only ~5% of the universe is what we call "baryonic matter" i.e. the stuff that we are made of. A further ~20% is made up of non-baryonic matter. This includes things like neutrinos, but just neutrinos is nowhere near enough. So, if we believe the WMAP result, there is a sizeable amount of matter which we cannot account for given our current understanding of physics.
However, dark matter experiments are not the only ones out there looking for this missing mass. I'm working on a collider experiment called D0 on the Tevatron collider at Fermilab near Chicago. This is currently the highest energy collider in the world (until the LHC at CERN, Geneva starts in ~2006). As such it is an excellent place to look for new physics and one such example is something called SuperSymmetry. You can essentially think of this as a symmetery between force and matter (in technical terms its a symmetry between fermions and bosons) and it doubles the number of fundamental particles.
So how does this explain the dark matter? Well, a lot of supersymmetrical models have the lightest supersymmetric particle being stable i.e. it cannot decay. Now being neutral, stable and weakly interacting, this would be an ideal candidate for dark matter and might make up the missing mass of the universe. So instead of looking for these particles scattering off nuclei (as dark matter experiments do) we can actually look to see if we can make them in high energy interactions.
Some interesting web sites you might like to read for more information are
With more public acknowledgement of the problem, we could develop something like the Patriot missile defense system for extraterrestrial bodies so things like this would not happen.
Not sure something modelled on the patriot system is such a good idea. Given the trouble they have been having recently they might actually mistake a meteor for a Volkswagen Beetle.
The techniques they describe in this article are absoultely nothing new: physicists (and probably many other scientists) have been using them for years. In my particular field, particle physics, we use large detectors to look at high energy particle interactions.
Unfortunately these detectors never give an exact picture of what happens, instead their response varies randomly. However by knowing how the detector randomizes things we can, on average, extract the original picture and find out what happened.
So it seems to me that IBM has just reinvented the wheel. What would have made it more interesting is if they had some way to randomize the answers automatically without having to trust the company since without this the whole process is useless and asking visitors to randomize the answers themselves has two problems:
How many people would actually do it properly rather than just get through the stupid forms as fast as possible? If you completely lie then there is no way to extract the truth (unless you can show that everyone's lies form some statistical pattern)
Is human randomness truly random? If not (and it's almost certainly not!) then a lot of work will be needed to extract the correct distributions, especially since there may be correlations. For example when asked to randomize their age are women more likely to subtract 10 years than add 10 years? Are teenagers more likely to add 10 years than subtract it etc. What might solve the second problem is a browser plugin that would display forms and add randomization to them when submitted. However I don't see any way to solve the first problem so I think this is really a none starter.
Actually I was interested to read that MS might be willing to swap IP licenses for OpenGL allowing them to get into the OpenGL market place without the usual expensive startup costs.
Prehaps this could indicate that they are interested in getting involved with OpenGL and not just shut it down.
Actually the Fermilab article pointed to concerns a cluster of machines used for the L3 trigger of the D0 experiment (of which I'm a member). This actually has very little to do with the GRID since it is used as the final stage of a three stage trigger process which decides when an "interesting" event has been produced by the collider. The previous stage, L2, also uses Linux/Alpha machines but is not really a cluster since these custom built boards sit in various crates of electronics and process only a fraction of the data that the L3 sees (however our time budget at L2 is 100 microseconds compared to L3's 100 milliseconds!).
However, that said, D0 is heavily involved with the GRID project and has what is arguably one of the first production GRID applications, called SAM. This system essentially manages all of our data files around the entire globe and allows any member to run an analysis job on a selected set of data files. SAM then handles the task of getting those files to the machine where the job is running using whatever means is required (rcp or fetching it from a tape store). SAM also allows remote institutes to add data to the store which is used primarily by large farms of remote Linux boxes which run event simulations. We are also currently working on integrating SAM into our desktop Linux cluster which will allow us to use the incredibly cheap disk and CPU which is available for Linux machines. For more details you can consult the followng web pages:
http://www-d0.fnal.gov/ - the D0 homepage
http://d0db.fnal.gov/sam - the SAM homepage
Slashdot Mirror
It's not just Europe. Did you know that the electric light bulb was invented in Canada? It was then improved by Swann in England to use tungsten and all Edison did was buy the original Canadian patent and steal Swann's improvements.
Swann successfully sued Edison in the UK and won. However, since it was (and still is) impossible to win patent suits in the US courts as a foreigner (the US patent office cheerfully boasts that 98.5% of all foreign brought cases in the US fail!), Edison made enough money to buy out the UK assets he was forced to hand over to Swann.
Makes me wonder if in 100 years everyone will be being taught that Bill Gates invented the computer .
Communism is not a subset of fascism. In fact they're the two opposite sides of a spectrum.
A communist is just a lying facist. (The facist says "all power to the government", the communist says "all power to the people", meaning the government.)
We can therefore conclude that Bush must be communist!
This would work until the spammers start using the new protocol.
Is it just me or is this "discovery" just simple quantum mechanics? From Heisenberg we know that:
delat E x delta t >= hbar/2
So, given that any event involves an energy transfer we either know nothing about the energy (i.e nothing about the event ever taking place) or else the time can never be exactly specified.
I always understood this to be one of the basic tenets of quantum theory: there is no longer any exact coordinates or exact times: everything is fuzzy when you look in enough detail.
As for the paradox with quantum mechanics there isn't one: the man's position is "uncertain" once you get beyond a particular accuracy. i.e. you just cannot keep dividing the distance up for ever because it is meaningless beyond a certain point.
You state that:
"Scientists...now know how the universe will end and are on the brink of understanding its beginning."
If we are truly on the brink of undertanding the beginning of the Universe then this would also entail understanding what caused the Big Bang. What are the candidate theories as to the cause and how can we experimentally validate them? If we constrain our notion of the Universe to be post-Big Bang then are you claiming that we are on the brink of truly understanding physics at the Planck scale (~10^-41 s post Big Bang)? If so what is your justification for this?
My guess is that the book is a hyped up discussion of the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy probe. This probe looked at minor fluctuations in the cosimc microwave background (much like COBE but with far better resolution).
The probe provided some really interesting data which has ended up posing far more questions than it answers (always the best type of experiment!). The data show that if the Big Bang model is correct that the Universe will end in heat death i.e. there will be no big crunch.
However it also shows that only ~5% of the Universes matter is "baryonic" i.e. what you would call "normal" matter. About ~20% is non-baryoninc matter and a whopping ~75% is dark energy. Currently the physics that we know about cannot account for most of the non-baryonic dark matter let alone the "dark energy". So to say that we know how the Universe is going to end when we only understand about 5% of what it actually is shows that the statement is clearly pure hype.
However this is also the reason that science is fun: we have a lot more of the Universe to understand. Either there is a lot of new fundamental physics out there for us to find or the Big Bang model predictions of the energy content are wrong. It's just best to wait until we do understand it before we make predictions.
Civil war? I think you mean revolution unless you still regard yourselves as British. I know you still have a mad king...er....president George but its not quite the same you know.
The incoming gas (the air) is at the essentially the same temperature as that leaving the the paper and so, if this were a carnot heat engine, the paper could do no work.
This exposes the fallacy in his argument. The proposed solar sail is not a heat engine i.e. it is not extracting useful work from the heat energy of the photons. Were it to rely on lowering the photons energy to do work then it would be a heat energine. However instead it relies on the mechanical energy of the photons to do work. The fact that photons are radiated heat is irrelevant for this excercise, they could just as well be ping pong balls.
As for Intel reserving the right to restrict access I don't see anyone denying them that right. They are free to block email addresses or take whatever other measures them deem appropriate. Afterall, if they really objected to it they could simply refuse all incoming external emails or even put in a content filter if they could make one complex enough to catch any Intel based criticism.
All in all I'm amazed that all the courts didn't agree. Speaking as a European isn't one of the major points of the American constitution freedom of speech? (at least that's what you guys keep telling us all the time!) The guy didn't cause any damage and even unsubscribed people who asked to be removed. If he was lying then Intel should have sued him for slander: the fact that they didn't only lends credence to his complaints.
However, the point of Maxwell's thought experiment was that what if you could make something that would separate out the hot and cold particles it could potentially break the second law of thermodynamics which says that the entropy (essentially randomness) of a closed system must increase. Well, interestingly enough this has already happened. Australian researchers have measured entropy decreasing over short periods of time (~0.1s) for a system composed of latex beads trapped in a laser beam. For longer periods (>2s) the entropy will increase. You can read the New Scientist article here.
After all, if the main reason for pirating business software is because the company cannot afford to purchase the license then having those licenses strictly enforced would likely force those companies to using OpenSource software.
"With its own weapons was it worsted!" - Aragorn
I don't know why you'd want a calorie tracking application, but a calorie burn one.... I think I could use one of those!
So don't worry - if the LHC could create anything dangerous nature would have already produced it and we wouldn't be sitting here having this discussion!
They have managed to prove one thing:
infinity != 6
Although these experiments are performed deep underground, like neutrino, experiments their physics is somewhat different. Dark matter experiments are aimed at finding new fundamental particles as yet unknown to physics. Neutrino experiments, on the otherhand, study the properities of neutrinos and it is these experiments (SNO, SuperKamiokande) which have produced the exciting discovery of neutrino oscillations.
The reason dark matter is such an interesting field at the moment is because of the WMAP result. This indicates that only ~5% of the universe is what we call "baryonic matter" i.e. the stuff that we are made of. A further ~20% is made up of non-baryonic matter. This includes things like neutrinos, but just neutrinos is nowhere near enough. So, if we believe the WMAP result, there is a sizeable amount of matter which we cannot account for given our current understanding of physics.
However, dark matter experiments are not the only ones out there looking for this missing mass. I'm working on a collider experiment called D0 on the Tevatron collider at Fermilab near Chicago. This is currently the highest energy collider in the world (until the LHC at CERN, Geneva starts in ~2006). As such it is an excellent place to look for new physics and one such example is something called SuperSymmetry. You can essentially think of this as a symmetery between force and matter (in technical terms its a symmetry between fermions and bosons) and it doubles the number of fundamental particles.
So how does this explain the dark matter? Well, a lot of supersymmetrical models have the lightest supersymmetric particle being stable i.e. it cannot decay. Now being neutral, stable and weakly interacting, this would be an ideal candidate for dark matter and might make up the missing mass of the universe. So instead of looking for these particles scattering off nuclei (as dark matter experiments do) we can actually look to see if we can make them in high energy interactions.
Some interesting web sites you might like to read for more information are
-
UK Dark Matter Collaboration
-
D0 Public Information Page
-
The Particle Adventure: Basic explanation of particle physics
I'd particularly recommend the last site if you want to know how much we still have to understand! (click on "Unsolved Mysteries")Not sure something modelled on the patriot system is such a good idea. Given the trouble they have been having recently they might actually mistake a meteor for a Volkswagen Beetle.
So it seems to me that IBM has just reinvented the wheel. What would have made it more interesting is if they had some way to randomize the answers automatically without having to trust the company since without this the whole process is useless and asking visitors to randomize the answers themselves has two problems:
How many people would actually do it properly rather than just get through the stupid forms as fast as possible? If you completely lie then there is no way to extract the truth (unless you can show that everyone's lies form some statistical pattern)
Is human randomness truly random? If not (and it's almost certainly not!) then a lot of work will be needed to extract the correct distributions, especially since there may be correlations. For example when asked to randomize their age are women more likely to subtract 10 years than add 10 years? Are teenagers more likely to add 10 years than subtract it etc.
What might solve the second problem is a browser plugin that would display forms and add randomization to them when submitted. However I don't see any way to solve the first problem so I think this is really a none starter.
Actually I was interested to read that MS might be willing to swap IP licenses for OpenGL allowing them to get into the OpenGL market place without the usual expensive startup costs.
Prehaps this could indicate that they are interested in getting involved with OpenGL and not just shut it down.
Actually the Fermilab article pointed to concerns a cluster of machines used for the L3 trigger of the D0 experiment (of which I'm a member). This actually has very little to do with the GRID since it is used as the final stage of a three stage trigger process which decides when an "interesting" event has been produced by the collider. The previous stage, L2, also uses Linux/Alpha machines but is not really a cluster since these custom built boards sit in various crates of electronics and process only a fraction of the data that the L3 sees (however our time budget at L2 is 100 microseconds compared to L3's 100 milliseconds!).
However, that said, D0 is heavily involved with the GRID project and has what is arguably one of the first production GRID applications, called SAM. This system essentially manages all of our data files around the entire globe and allows any member to run an analysis job on a selected set of data files. SAM then handles the task of getting those files to the machine where the job is running using whatever means is required (rcp or fetching it from a tape store). SAM also allows remote institutes to add data to the store which is used primarily by large farms of remote Linux boxes which run event simulations. We are also currently working on integrating SAM into our desktop Linux cluster which will allow us to use the incredibly cheap disk and CPU which is available for Linux machines. For more details you can consult the followng web pages:
http://www-d0.fnal.gov/ - the D0 homepage
http://d0db.fnal.gov/sam - the SAM homepage