I'm thinking this is also about what we consider "alike" or "the same"
Sort of but I'm thinking that it is more about the process vs. result. Convergent evolution is about the end results: there appear to be only a certain number of basic eye designs which work and so evolution tends to converge on one of these solutions no matter where it starts. This result is talking about the fact that given the same starting point and the same environment identical organisms will evolve in the same way i.e. there are not just stable solutions which you arrive at but stable paths along which you travel to get there.
Anyway this is definitely the most interesting bioscience result I've seen in a while so I'll have to quiz my biological colleagues about it when I get the chance!
It does not appear to be quite the same thing as convergent evolution (but I'm a physicist not a biologist!). My understanding of covergent evolutions is that it is when two wildly different evolutionary paths end up with the same solution to a problem e.g. an octopus eye and a human eye are functionally very similar even though our last common ancestor certainly had nothing like it.
This is rather the claim that evolution is reproducible in the short term i.e. if you put the same strain of bacteria in the same conditions they will evolve in the exact same way and not find different evolutionary paths to the same goal. This means that evolution becomes predictable and you can then predict with some degree of accuracy how a virus, bacteria or cell will evolve. This has obvious applications for disease control and perhaps cancer too.
Throttling netflix at the peer reduces load on those trunks without affecting other services.
I understood that, or at least guessed that this was the reason. However when you are restricting the connection like that yourself you cannot go and claim that it is the fault of the other party. Either you need to admit that the limiting factor is your own internal network or you need to spend some of the large amount of cash that is flowing in from your subscribers to upgrade that network to handle it instead of using it to see whether you can break the record for executive bonuses.
I'm in no way condoning the OP since I have no idea of the problems Australia faces but your rebuttal argument here is a primary school level one. The bad behaviour of a government in an adjacent continent (geographically Australia is not part of Asia, it's a continent by itself) does not give every nearby government a license to misbehave and even if it did Europe is also adjacent to Asia and by your logic is in the same situation. Besides if you are going to pick an Asian government to compare yourself to why not North Korea? Using your argument this would suggest it is ok to use famine as a carbon reduction strategy.
The moral of this is that if you are going to make an unpopular decision for reasons that you believe are important stand up and be honest about your reasoning. People might disagree but at least we can have an honest debate about the real points. Indeed I thought that open and frank speaking was a well known and widely admired Australian trait?
This is not a fantasy it is a useful result. Previously it was thought that negative mass was fundamentally incompatible with GR i.e. you could not have negative mass in our universe according to one of our most fundamental theories. This result, if confirmed, suggests that actually you can have negative mass in a way that is compatible with GR.
It is important to note that this does NOT mean that negative mass exists, only that, so far as we know, it could exist. All it means is that it is now another possible tool in the theorists arsenal to explain experimental observations without rewriting GR. However if I were to apply Occam's Razor to this discovery then I would argue that if something is allowed by GR we would expect it to be possible to produce because otherwise you need some additional mechanism beyond GR to prevent it from existing. Hence the simpler model is one where negative mass can exist...not that this means that it does. We are talking theoretical possibilities here, not experimental observations.
8 galaxies and 255 stars aren't so impressive if you consider it was generated by procedural generation.
Except that at the time almost nobody was doing this and they actually used the built in BBC Micro random number generator which is why it took so long to get the game ported to other platforms!
What was really impressive was one of the sequels, Frontier: Elite. This game was really ahead of its time, as it contained not just star systems, but real planets you could land on, seamlessly, with cities, some vegetation, atmosphere, clouds...
...and bugs! I'll agree that it was as ambitious as Elite but it was full of often serious bugs where Elite was not. In addition to that there were some serious design issues such as your relative speed indicator switching to the planet you were trying to land on when you were far too close to the planet to be able to slow down. This resulted in having to approach at a snail's pace to ensure that you did not just add a crater to the existing surface features!
Easy: Braben and Bell who wrote 'Elite'. This game was so far ahead of its time it was simply unbelievable. It was one of (if not the) first true 3D game and contained 8 galaxies of 255 stars on a machine with 32kB of memory. It also introduced true "sandbox" gameplay. It might not stand up to today's standards and the sequels, while great games, were nowhere near as revolutionary, although it remains to be seen how Elite: Dangerous turns out - I have my fingers crossed!
So, no matter how you spin it, there is no way that you can deny that they were true Elite programmers!;-)
I have no clue which alternate reality you have come from but in this one Einstein was most definitely NOT a school dropout, for details see Wikipedia. The worst that can be said about his education is that he initially failed to meet the required standard in the general entrance exam for the Zurich Polytechnic (although he excelled in the physics and maths portion) and had to go to a secondary school elsewhere for a few years before being admitted (at the age of 17) to the Polytechnic where he graduated with a maths and physics teaching diploma.
Unfortunately anesthetics take quite a while to wear off during which you may feel even worse than if you had been awake for the entire time. This would also make them dangerous in case of emergencies.
Pushing is nowhere near as effective in cleanup operations which is why vacuum cleaners suck instead of blow (and very early victorian models did). Suction concentrates the particles in a fixed location whereas blowing scatters them.
Forget the comedy - this might be an invention that could make long distance flying bearable! Turn off your brain after take off and back on for landing with no memory of many hours of sitting in a tin can in between.
And immortal 2014 human living in the year 3000 would be like a Homo habilis hanging around us.
Not unless something radical happens with evolution. It would be more like a viking, anglo-saxon or celt from the year 1028 hanging around us. They may have different standards of acceptable behaviour but they would likely quickly learn how to fit into modern society because they are no less intelligent than we are. In fact they might quite possibly more intelligent on average given that they had no safety labels or health and safety inspectors to reduce attrition at the bottom end of the spectrum.
You are wrong. email can be any level of security you want.
Only if you control the entire network and all the servers used. This is not really practical in 99.9% of the use cases of email since it means you need to form a separate email network, isolated from the outside world to prevent any forwarding over insecure networks or to insecure servers.
Through a combination of carelessness and cluelessness, this employee managed to put hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars of customer funds at risk.
Sending information like this via email is where the mistake happened, not mistyping the address. Email is not secure even if it is sent to the right address you have no control over how it gets there and it could be easily intercepted and read enroute. Their reputation loss has already occurred by admitting that they use email for highly sensitive information like this.
Even professors that don't like using that concept warn their grad students about it because it comes up in papers still
Not in particle physics - I've never seen that notation used: 'm' always means the invariant mass. Perhaps if you go back to the 1950's but then you are really using textbooks and not papers and again they use invariant mass. If you write momentum as 'mv' I bet you would not find a single physicist in any reputable particle physics group that would think you meant it as a relativistic expression.
Other text books ranging from Coh-Tannoudjio to multiple modern physics and university level intro physics textbooks still stick with the relativistic mass system when glossing over stuff.
Rubbish. The intro texts typically introduce relativistic mass and then describe it as an incorrect and flawed concept (often citing Einstein) and then never, or rarely, mention it again. Senior undergrad particle texts never even mention the concept nor do the grad level texts or modern papers.
And the Lagrangian for that is Lorentz invariant, but that doesn't mean energy is invariant under Lorentz transformations...
Correct but a particle's mass comes from the energy it has in its rest frame which IS an invariant quantity and which is determined by the Higgs coupling for fundamental particles.
Would it even be ethical to tell a truth that would cause an economic disaster?
Even in this situation it still does not make it ethical to fudge the data and lie: you simply shut up and say nothing. To know whether it would be ethical to reveal the truth you need to know the consequence of keeping quiet. For example if you found that a certain company was in financial trouble but still had a chance to pull through (and were acting to maximize that chance without dragging in new investors) you might keep quiet to help avoid financial disaster for those affected. However it would still be wrong to fudge the data and publish a report claiming that they were financially sound.
Better magnetic "mirrors" and/or "lenses" for focusing beams in things like the LHC or even just an electron microscope?
Actually it is not the focussing magnets for the LHC but more the bending magnets. Doubling the field strength will roughly double the energy we could reach. However you have to be able to make several tens of kilometres of these magnets for that which means they have to be incredibly stable otherwise the machine will not work. Currently we use 9.6T bending magnets - this is no where near a world record but stability is very important.
Yes...and that does not work at all for relativity since you are missing the gamma factor.
F=ma doesn't work naively in any case where the mass is not constant, relativistic or not.
True but it doesn't work even when mass is constant e.g. for an instant of time under relativity because the 'gamma' factor is a correction to the velocity, and here you have acceleration so there is no simple gamma factor. You are also wrong that it is purely pedagogical because at a fundamental level we know that e.g. the mass of an electron is due to its coupling to the Higgs field. This coupling does not become larger with an increase in energy hence the electron mass remains constant. Still not convinced? Einstein himself argued against the concept.
Slashdot Mirror
A Darth Vader voice would be more fun for misbehaving kids:
"I find your lack of behaviour disturbing"
"I am your father"
"That was before you misbehaved, now I am altering the deal...pray I do not alter it any further."
"I hope so for your sake, your mother is not as forgiving as I am”
I'm thinking this is also about what we consider "alike" or "the same"
Sort of but I'm thinking that it is more about the process vs. result. Convergent evolution is about the end results: there appear to be only a certain number of basic eye designs which work and so evolution tends to converge on one of these solutions no matter where it starts. This result is talking about the fact that given the same starting point and the same environment identical organisms will evolve in the same way i.e. there are not just stable solutions which you arrive at but stable paths along which you travel to get there.
Anyway this is definitely the most interesting bioscience result I've seen in a while so I'll have to quiz my biological colleagues about it when I get the chance!
It does not appear to be quite the same thing as convergent evolution (but I'm a physicist not a biologist!). My understanding of covergent evolutions is that it is when two wildly different evolutionary paths end up with the same solution to a problem e.g. an octopus eye and a human eye are functionally very similar even though our last common ancestor certainly had nothing like it.
This is rather the claim that evolution is reproducible in the short term i.e. if you put the same strain of bacteria in the same conditions they will evolve in the exact same way and not find different evolutionary paths to the same goal. This means that evolution becomes predictable and you can then predict with some degree of accuracy how a virus, bacteria or cell will evolve. This has obvious applications for disease control and perhaps cancer too.
Throttling netflix at the peer reduces load on those trunks without affecting other services.
I understood that, or at least guessed that this was the reason. However when you are restricting the connection like that yourself you cannot go and claim that it is the fault of the other party. Either you need to admit that the limiting factor is your own internal network or you need to spend some of the large amount of cash that is flowing in from your subscribers to upgrade that network to handle it instead of using it to see whether you can break the record for executive bonuses.
Here in Australia, we are part of Asia.
I'm in no way condoning the OP since I have no idea of the problems Australia faces but your rebuttal argument here is a primary school level one. The bad behaviour of a government in an adjacent continent (geographically Australia is not part of Asia, it's a continent by itself) does not give every nearby government a license to misbehave and even if it did Europe is also adjacent to Asia and by your logic is in the same situation. Besides if you are going to pick an Asian government to compare yourself to why not North Korea? Using your argument this would suggest it is ok to use famine as a carbon reduction strategy.
The moral of this is that if you are going to make an unpopular decision for reasons that you believe are important stand up and be honest about your reasoning. People might disagree but at least we can have an honest debate about the real points. Indeed I thought that open and frank speaking was a well known and widely admired Australian trait?
This is not a fantasy it is a useful result. Previously it was thought that negative mass was fundamentally incompatible with GR i.e. you could not have negative mass in our universe according to one of our most fundamental theories. This result, if confirmed, suggests that actually you can have negative mass in a way that is compatible with GR.
It is important to note that this does NOT mean that negative mass exists, only that, so far as we know, it could exist. All it means is that it is now another possible tool in the theorists arsenal to explain experimental observations without rewriting GR. However if I were to apply Occam's Razor to this discovery then I would argue that if something is allowed by GR we would expect it to be possible to produce because otherwise you need some additional mechanism beyond GR to prevent it from existing. Hence the simpler model is one where negative mass can exist...not that this means that it does. We are talking theoretical possibilities here, not experimental observations.
Agreed - there is no reason to require the program be written in perl.
Wow - I never knew you could tell a real programmer by their choice of bathroom cleaner.
8 galaxies and 255 stars aren't so impressive if you consider it was generated by procedural generation.
Except that at the time almost nobody was doing this and they actually used the built in BBC Micro random number generator which is why it took so long to get the game ported to other platforms!
What was really impressive was one of the sequels, Frontier: Elite. This game was really ahead of its time, as it contained not just star systems, but real planets you could land on, seamlessly, with cities, some vegetation, atmosphere, clouds...
Who's the best game programmer?
Easy: Braben and Bell who wrote 'Elite'. This game was so far ahead of its time it was simply unbelievable. It was one of (if not the) first true 3D game and contained 8 galaxies of 255 stars on a machine with 32kB of memory. It also introduced true "sandbox" gameplay. It might not stand up to today's standards and the sequels, while great games, were nowhere near as revolutionary, although it remains to be seen how Elite: Dangerous turns out - I have my fingers crossed!
;-)
So, no matter how you spin it, there is no way that you can deny that they were true Elite programmers!
Einstein and Edison were school dropouts.
I have no clue which alternate reality you have come from but in this one Einstein was most definitely NOT a school dropout, for details see Wikipedia. The worst that can be said about his education is that he initially failed to meet the required standard in the general entrance exam for the Zurich Polytechnic (although he excelled in the physics and maths portion) and had to go to a secondary school elsewhere for a few years before being admitted (at the age of 17) to the Polytechnic where he graduated with a maths and physics teaching diploma.
Unfortunately anesthetics take quite a while to wear off during which you may feel even worse than if you had been awake for the entire time. This would also make them dangerous in case of emergencies.
Pushing is nowhere near as effective in cleanup operations which is why vacuum cleaners suck instead of blow (and very early victorian models did). Suction concentrates the particles in a fixed location whereas blowing scatters them.
Forget the comedy - this might be an invention that could make long distance flying bearable! Turn off your brain after take off and back on for landing with no memory of many hours of sitting in a tin can in between.
And immortal 2014 human living in the year 3000 would be like a Homo habilis hanging around us.
Not unless something radical happens with evolution. It would be more like a viking, anglo-saxon or celt from the year 1028 hanging around us. They may have different standards of acceptable behaviour but they would likely quickly learn how to fit into modern society because they are no less intelligent than we are. In fact they might quite possibly more intelligent on average given that they had no safety labels or health and safety inspectors to reduce attrition at the bottom end of the spectrum.
You are wrong. email can be any level of security you want.
Only if you control the entire network and all the servers used. This is not really practical in 99.9% of the use cases of email since it means you need to form a separate email network, isolated from the outside world to prevent any forwarding over insecure networks or to insecure servers.
Unless someone has email forwarding set up.
Through a combination of carelessness and cluelessness, this employee managed to put hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars of customer funds at risk.
Sending information like this via email is where the mistake happened, not mistyping the address. Email is not secure even if it is sent to the right address you have no control over how it gets there and it could be easily intercepted and read enroute. Their reputation loss has already occurred by admitting that they use email for highly sensitive information like this.
But the NSA is spying indiscriminately on virtually anybody (unless you're covered by the Five-Eyes-No-Spy-Agreement)!
True but the only reason for that is because we are stupid enough to spy on ourselves and then hand the data over to the NSA.
Even professors that don't like using that concept warn their grad students about it because it comes up in papers still
Not in particle physics - I've never seen that notation used: 'm' always means the invariant mass. Perhaps if you go back to the 1950's but then you are really using textbooks and not papers and again they use invariant mass. If you write momentum as 'mv' I bet you would not find a single physicist in any reputable particle physics group that would think you meant it as a relativistic expression.
Other text books ranging from Coh-Tannoudjio to multiple modern physics and university level intro physics textbooks still stick with the relativistic mass system when glossing over stuff.
Rubbish. The intro texts typically introduce relativistic mass and then describe it as an incorrect and flawed concept (often citing Einstein) and then never, or rarely, mention it again. Senior undergrad particle texts never even mention the concept nor do the grad level texts or modern papers.
And the Lagrangian for that is Lorentz invariant, but that doesn't mean energy is invariant under Lorentz transformations...
Correct but a particle's mass comes from the energy it has in its rest frame which IS an invariant quantity and which is determined by the Higgs coupling for fundamental particles.
Would it even be ethical to tell a truth that would cause an economic disaster?
Even in this situation it still does not make it ethical to fudge the data and lie: you simply shut up and say nothing. To know whether it would be ethical to reveal the truth you need to know the consequence of keeping quiet. For example if you found that a certain company was in financial trouble but still had a chance to pull through (and were acting to maximize that chance without dragging in new investors) you might keep quiet to help avoid financial disaster for those affected. However it would still be wrong to fudge the data and publish a report claiming that they were financially sound.
Ah but apparently 87.235% of astrologers are so good at making shit up they even manage to fool themselves into believing it's real!
this an improvement that's hard to imagine practical applications for.
Well you could using this field strength to levitate frogs which would make for a cool lecture demonstration!
Better magnetic "mirrors" and/or "lenses" for focusing beams in things like the LHC or even just an electron microscope?
Actually it is not the focussing magnets for the LHC but more the bending magnets. Doubling the field strength will roughly double the energy we could reach. However you have to be able to make several tens of kilometres of these magnets for that which means they have to be incredibly stable otherwise the machine will not work. Currently we use 9.6T bending magnets - this is no where near a world record but stability is very important.
Try using F=d/dt mv ...
Yes...and that does not work at all for relativity since you are missing the gamma factor.
F=ma doesn't work naively in any case where the mass is not constant, relativistic or not.
True but it doesn't work even when mass is constant e.g. for an instant of time under relativity because the 'gamma' factor is a correction to the velocity, and here you have acceleration so there is no simple gamma factor. You are also wrong that it is purely pedagogical because at a fundamental level we know that e.g. the mass of an electron is due to its coupling to the Higgs field. This coupling does not become larger with an increase in energy hence the electron mass remains constant. Still not convinced? Einstein himself argued against the concept.