" i thought that was pretty clear...the earth's rotation would be 3 microseconds faster..."
If you thought that the article said that a single earth's rotation would be faster by 3 microseconds then you're mistaken. The article said nothing of the sort. It said "caused the planet to spin 3 microseconds, or 3 millionths of a second, faster". 'spin' is a verb that doesn't mean any set number of rotations so this statement is scientifically meaningless.
Reading the Reuters article it was immediately apparent that the information given was unqualified and not meaningful. Just because you ASSUMED it was "per day" doesn't make the article any less inaccurate. This is exactly what the grandfather post was complaining about and rightly so. It didn't say 3 microseconds per day. It could have been 3 microseconds per rotation (not the same thing). It could have been 3 mocroseconds per year or 3 microseconds per century.
A quick search on google for more information shows that the information was misquoted and that the original quote was that "May have shortened the day by 3 microseconds" which IS a meaningful statement.
I've noticed that problems like these are virtually always a journalist trying to reword a quote to make it sound "better" but screwing things up severely because they don't understand what's being said.
My roomate had asked for an application of the math they were doing.
While I totally agree with you that firing a cannon off a cliff may be an uncommon (or even useless to some) application of polynomials, it never the less IS an application of the math.
In contrast, the answer his teacher gave of solving a math problem because someone asked you to solve that math problem may be a real-world problem, but it IS NOT an application of the math.
I believe you failed to see this distinction. So to your question "Is the physics answer any better?" I said YES, because the answer the teacher gave is not even an application of the math.
An application of math is not limited to things that are common or even real events.
To "Apply" something is to put it into practice or a particular use. It's using the math to represent (be applied to) something else and solve a problem OTHER THAN THE MATH PROBLEM ITSELF. To do the math for the math's sake is not an application of the math.
Yes, and most newer phones including mine is small enough that I am easily able to cover the entire phone with my hands.
From a physics standpoint alone, I think you'd have to be clueless to think that a signal that easily goes through the walls of your house is stopped significantly by a layer of dead skin.
Hint: The point was real-world application of the math.
So, yes, the physics answer is obviously better in this context because my roomate was asking for a real-world use of the math. If you think that the answer the teacher gave is a real-world application of the use or application of polynomials then you seriously need a course in critical thinking.
you went to an excellent high school... you must not be american.
Sorry to disagree with your generalization, but I live in the United States and had all of the above mathematics and more in high school. While I admit that not all of the teachers were up to par, I believe the opportunity is available at most high schools.:) We also were expected to use a lot of the above in real-world applications in high school physics, etc.
I enjoy math and majored in mathematics but agree that most of the teachers I've had didn't know the power or use of what they were teaching. I had an education-major roomate ask his college math teacher for an application or example real-world use of the math they were learning and to my surprise and sadness the teacher said "Well, suppose someone comes up to you on the street and asks 'what are the roots of this polynomial?' "
Physics is what made it all work for me. If you get a decent physics teacher, there's direct and extremely usefull and straight forward applications for everything up through trig, calculus and differential equations even at a high school physics level.
For general application of math, I would highly recommend "The Heart of Mathematics: An Invitation to Effective Thinking" by Edward B. Burger. I had a friend (music major) who had it for a class and she really got a lot out of it. She asked me about some of the more advanced topics and I was amazed by the breadth of the book. I actually went out and bought both the first and second additions just to have on hand as a reference I could point people to. I've seriously considered giving this one as a gift to my nieces and nephews when they get old enough. (A math text as a Christmas present!??!!);)
With cell phones there is a small amount of radiation but....
Your outer skin is dead and acts as a great resistor.
The signal does not get through your dead outer skin to the inner living skin to mutate it. Every cell phone goes through tests on this.
Do you seriously believe this nonsense?
Try this experiment...
Call someone on your cell phone.
While talking, cup your hand over your cell phone's antenna (or preferably the entire phone).
Say "Can you hear me now";)
You could even call your your land-line phone so you can hear for yourself that the signal DOES get through your skin with no discernable impairment.
Just out of curiosity, where did you hear such a ridiculous claim?
A few years ago, I read about some blinded taste tests of popular bottled waters and water from other sources. The results? The number one best tasting water...New York City tap water.;)
Also, studies by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) found that bottled waters tended to be less safe from a microbiological-purity standpoint. You can read more in a Scientific Amierican artlcle here
My point, again, is that it is simply not correct to view the content without the ads. I'm not saying it's illegal, I'm saying it's wrong
And we're saying that it's not wrong. Where did you get the idea that it's wrong to block ads? Do you honestly believe that people are under a MORAL obligation to watch advertizing? Talk about a screwed up sense of morality.
Advertizers put out ads knowing that "many" will watch them and "some" will be influenced by them. It's a statistics game. Do you honestly think THEY believe everyone is under a moral obligation to watch their ads? (With the exception of psychos like Ted Turner of course);)
I'm sure that advertizing execs sleep soundly at night knowing that there are subservient sheep like you in the world. Heck, you're their wildest fantasy come true!
Yes, but according to that theory the atoms do have to hold the energy for some amount of time or there would be no change in the speed of light.
There are other problems with the theory also. If the absorbtion/re-emission were caused by proximity to atoms as the photon passed through the material, there would be a gaussian distribution of speeds centered around a main 'index of refraction'. Atoms who missed more atoms would travel more quickly through the material than atoms which were absorbed/re-emitted more often. This would cause a general spreading out of any light pulse. We do see spreading, but what we see is specifically frequency dependent. This is the property used in a photo-spectrometer.
As to your other question, it's not the density of mater/energy alone that causes the change in how well space conducts electric/magnetic fields, but also the vector orientation of those fields, and possibly the frequency of the fields. Otherwise you would not see birefringent matterials such as calcite (which has the index of refraction dependent on alignment of a photon's EM fields).
Anyway, like everything else, it's currently just a theory.;)
the skin of the Apollo landers was no thicker than tin foil
Do you have a citation for that claim? The Apollo landers had a foil shilding, but the only claims I've found like the one above are from "fake moon landing" sites. The walls have to support one atmophere at a minimum which is over a ton of pressure per square foot.
doesn't refraction have to do with the absorption and re-emission of photons by atoms?
No, that's just what a lot of physics classes teach.;) Atoms can only absorb discrete frequencies of radiation and wouldn't provide the continuous responce across large parts of the EM spectrum like we see in the index of refraction of materials. The materials actually cause an effectivfe change in the permitivity and permeability of the space they occupy which results in the change in the speed of light (c = 1/sqrt( mu0 * epsilon0 )). This is due to the missing vector terms in Maxwell's equations which provide that dynamic EM fields themselves alter the permitivity and permeability of space.;)
Why not use our radioactive waste to generate electricity? Duh.
That would be too obvious of a solution.:) Seriously, it would seem like a pretty big waste to jetison it into the sun. It has such valuable uses for food sterilization (irradiation) or even to prevent cancer (checkout the results of research on the Taiwan radioactive housing incident). Like anything else powerful, it just needs to be used carefully. We really need to abolish LNT before good progress can be made though.
I used to have a.5GB Jumpdrive and the case broke. My brother pointed out one he had that's great for being able to take the abuse.
The 1GB JOGR is small rugged USB 2.0 drive designed to be waterproof, shockproof, and hotplugable (unlike the jumpdrive which would get corrupted if you didn't unmount it first).
It's encapsulated in a thick rubber casing and rated to withstand 1000Gs. It's $92
"The fact that the FCC regulates something does not give you any right to it."
No, but it does prohibit other parties (such as universities) from trying to regulate spectrum use themselves.
You go off the deep end on an irrelevant tangent of "fundamental rights" when this is simply about a univerisity overstepping it's authority. The FCC clearly is the only authority which has any legal right to regulate use of the spectrum.
"... we hereby state, pursuant to the Digit
al Millennium Copyright Act, Title 17 United States Code Section 512, that
the information in this notification is accurate and that we have a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not
authorized by the copyright owners, their respective agents, or the law.
Also pursuant to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we hereby state, under penalty of perjury, that we are authorized to act on behalf of the owners of the exclusive rights being infringed as set forth in this notification"
Any casual look at the content of this 113kb file is enough to determine without a doubt that these are NOT infringing files. There should be a law against this type of harassment without so much as a glance at the facts.
Re:He really isn't, he is advertising Linux. Reall
on
Ballmer on Linux
·
· Score: 1
Um... it's called "Damage Control". Or an attempt at it anyway.;)
Slashdot Mirror
If you thought that the article said that a single earth's rotation would be faster by 3 microseconds then you're mistaken. The article said nothing of the sort. It said "caused the planet to spin 3 microseconds, or 3 millionths of a second, faster". 'spin' is a verb that doesn't mean any set number of rotations so this statement is scientifically meaningless.
Reading the Reuters article it was immediately apparent that the information given was unqualified and not meaningful. Just because you ASSUMED it was "per day" doesn't make the article any less inaccurate. This is exactly what the grandfather post was complaining about and rightly so. It didn't say 3 microseconds per day. It could have been 3 microseconds per rotation (not the same thing). It could have been 3 mocroseconds per year or 3 microseconds per century.
A quick search on google for more information shows that the information was misquoted and that the original quote was that "May have shortened the day by 3 microseconds" which IS a meaningful statement.
I've noticed that problems like these are virtually always a journalist trying to reword a quote to make it sound "better" but screwing things up severely because they don't understand what's being said.
While I totally agree with you that firing a cannon off a cliff may be an uncommon (or even useless to some) application of polynomials, it never the less IS an application of the math.
In contrast, the answer his teacher gave of solving a math problem because someone asked you to solve that math problem may be a real-world problem, but it IS NOT an application of the math.
I believe you failed to see this distinction. So to your question "Is the physics answer any better?" I said YES, because the answer the teacher gave is not even an application of the math.
An application of math is not limited to things that are common or even real events.
To "Apply" something is to put it into practice or a particular use. It's using the math to represent (be applied to) something else and solve a problem OTHER THAN THE MATH PROBLEM ITSELF. To do the math for the math's sake is not an application of the math.
That's all I was trying to say. :)
From a physics standpoint alone, I think you'd have to be clueless to think that a signal that easily goes through the walls of your house is stopped significantly by a layer of dead skin.
Hint: The point was real-world application of the math.
So, yes, the physics answer is obviously better in this context because my roomate was asking for a real-world use of the math. If you think that the answer the teacher gave is a real-world application of the use or application of polynomials then you seriously need a course in critical thinking.
Sorry to disagree with your generalization, but I live in the United States and had all of the above mathematics and more in high school. While I admit that not all of the teachers were up to par, I believe the opportunity is available at most high schools. :) We also were expected to use a lot of the above in real-world applications in high school physics, etc.
Just FYI, here is a reference to the latest edition of "The Heart of Mathematics". You can get the earlier addition new or used through Amazon.
Physics is what made it all work for me. If you get a decent physics teacher, there's direct and extremely usefull and straight forward applications for everything up through trig, calculus and differential equations even at a high school physics level.
For general application of math, I would highly recommend "The Heart of Mathematics: An Invitation to Effective Thinking" by Edward B. Burger. I had a friend (music major) who had it for a class and she really got a lot out of it. She asked me about some of the more advanced topics and I was amazed by the breadth of the book. I actually went out and bought both the first and second additions just to have on hand as a reference I could point people to. I've seriously considered giving this one as a gift to my nieces and nephews when they get old enough. (A math text as a Christmas present!??!!) ;)
I tried this and my signal is fine. Maybe you have an old/crappy phone... or huge hands? ;)
I suspect if you do see a problem you are correct that the water in your hands would be the culprit rather than dead skin cells. :)
Try this experiment...
- Call someone on your cell phone.
- While talking, cup your hand over your cell phone's antenna (or preferably the entire phone).
- Say "Can you hear me now"
;)
You could even call your your land-line phone so you can hear for yourself that the signal DOES get through your skin with no discernable impairment.Just out of curiosity, where did you hear such a ridiculous claim?
A few years ago, I read about some blinded taste tests of popular bottled waters and water from other sources. The results? The number one best tasting water...New York City tap water. ;)
Also, studies by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) found that bottled waters tended to be less safe from a microbiological-purity standpoint. You can read more in a Scientific Amierican artlcle here
And we're saying that it's not wrong. Where did you get the idea that it's wrong to block ads? Do you honestly believe that people are under a MORAL obligation to watch advertizing? Talk about a screwed up sense of morality.
Advertizers put out ads knowing that "many" will watch them and "some" will be influenced by them. It's a statistics game. Do you honestly think THEY believe everyone is under a moral obligation to watch their ads? (With the exception of psychos like Ted Turner of course) ;)
I'm sure that advertizing execs sleep soundly at night knowing that there are subservient sheep like you in the world. Heck, you're their wildest fantasy come true!
There are other problems with the theory also. If the absorbtion/re-emission were caused by proximity to atoms as the photon passed through the material, there would be a gaussian distribution of speeds centered around a main 'index of refraction'. Atoms who missed more atoms would travel more quickly through the material than atoms which were absorbed/re-emitted more often. This would cause a general spreading out of any light pulse. We do see spreading, but what we see is specifically frequency dependent. This is the property used in a photo-spectrometer.
As to your other question, it's not the density of mater/energy alone that causes the change in how well space conducts electric/magnetic fields, but also the vector orientation of those fields, and possibly the frequency of the fields. Otherwise you would not see birefringent matterials such as calcite (which has the index of refraction dependent on alignment of a photon's EM fields).
Anyway, like everything else, it's currently just a theory. ;)
Do you have a citation for that claim? The Apollo landers had a foil shilding, but the only claims I've found like the one above are from "fake moon landing" sites. The walls have to support one atmophere at a minimum which is over a ton of pressure per square foot.
No, that's just what a lot of physics classes teach. ;) Atoms can only absorb discrete frequencies of radiation and wouldn't provide the continuous responce across large parts of the EM spectrum like we see in the index of refraction of materials. The materials actually cause an effectivfe change in the permitivity and permeability of the space they occupy which results in the change in the speed of light (c = 1/sqrt( mu0 * epsilon0 )). This is due to the missing vector terms in Maxwell's equations which provide that dynamic EM fields themselves alter the permitivity and permeability of space. ;)
That would be too obvious of a solution. :) Seriously, it would seem like a pretty big waste to jetison it into the sun. It has such valuable uses for food sterilization (irradiation) or even to prevent cancer (checkout the results of research on the Taiwan radioactive housing incident). Like anything else powerful, it just needs to be used carefully. We really need to abolish LNT before good progress can be made though.
Prosecute Sco ... Honestly, it's the fist thing that popped into my mind when I read "prosco.net". ;)
The space shuttle can do a two week turnaround and re-launch? I don't think so! ;)
The 1GB JOGR is small rugged USB 2.0 drive designed to be waterproof, shockproof, and hotplugable (unlike the jumpdrive which would get corrupted if you didn't unmount it first).
It's encapsulated in a thick rubber casing and rated to withstand 1000Gs. It's $92
I bought two. ;)
Brand: JOGR ;)
Capacity: 1 GB
Interface: USB 2.0
Price: $105 shipped
I love this thing!
I get "Unspecified fatal error encountered, aborting" and log messages of "Failed to load Pango module for id: 'Basic ScriptEngineWin32'".
Anyone else getting this message? Oh... this is on Win XP until I can get my gentoo for amd64 working.
No, but it does prohibit other parties (such as universities) from trying to regulate spectrum use themselves.
You go off the deep end on an irrelevant tangent of "fundamental rights" when this is simply about a univerisity overstepping it's authority. The FCC clearly is the only authority which has any legal right to regulate use of the spectrum.
Sorry... I can't believe I misspelled perjury. Ouch! ;) Always preview!
Any casual look at the content of this 113kb file is enough to determine without a doubt that these are NOT infringing files. There should be a law against this type of harassment without so much as a glance at the facts.
Um... it's called "Damage Control". Or an attempt at it anyway. ;)
Exactly what I was thinking. Probably would have bought one in a second. :)