Every D&B I've been to has DDR, but very rarely is it used. Most often, D&B is used as a place for drunken ski-ball, arcade style basketball free throws and overly elaborate pachinko style gambling. Any other game is something to do while waiting for something else. Video games are now HOME entertainment.
You should try talking to the people at National Instruments. You can have the best electronics setup in the world, but if you don't have an appropriate way of digitizing the data, your results will suffer. If all of your digitization is being done elsewhere and you don't have a ton of data to save, then you won't need a very good computer, but you also won't be able to use the computer as an active part of the experiment.
You can digitize the data just fine at the computer, just amplify and buffer it beforehand. Don't use a sound card, you will have difficulty with DC signals or offsets, and regular DAQ cards are available for similar prices. Gathering data directly is always preferable to using some sort of digital middle-man such as GPIB, because it will allow you to respond to the data much more quickly. A computer can be used to mimic and improve the effects of many other devices. Most lock-in amplifiers these days are digital anyway, why not have complete control of it? If you're good, you can get a whole lot of funtionality out of what is really a very cheap piece of hardware.
I believe what you are looking for is called physics.
Re:Video games, MMO's and RPG's supplanting table
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Dungeons and Shadows
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· Score: 1
I couldn't disagree more. I think as MMOs spread, you will see more tabletop gaming. WoW is a very poor replacement for D&D, but it gets people over that "nerd" barrier which seems to exist for tabletop games, which are inherantly more fun (as there does not need to be anything you don't want to do). As for simplicity, there are plenty of very, very simple tabletop games out there, you probably just have not seen them. Personally, I relish the opportunity to get into very complicated game mechanics.
In physics, you are expected to be able to make connections beyond what is in the text books. In a good physics program, your tests will not consist of material which you have already covered, but the material which logically follows from it (and maddingly is never covered in the text). Anyone who can pass such tests has learned the material, there is no other way around it. I think it's possible for an 8 year old who has a natural gift for logic and math to learn enough physics to pass. I don't think there are any age requirements on knowing how to solve a Hamiltonian.
That said, I knew one such progidy back in college (not 8, and not physics, but still very young). He was very good in all of his classes. He committed suicide. There are things other than mathmatics that people need to get out of childhood.
So... don't go around breathing in nanotubes. I hope we've learned from our past health failings enough to use these materials responsibly. Who am I kidding though?
People are not going to understand that the cancer probe or glucose sensor made of nanotubes is actually safe, while the nanotube sweaters may be a bad idea.
As a nanotube researcher, I usually have some snotty remark about how no one pays attention to reality when it comes to carbon nanotube research. However, this thing works. It's really not that complicated, and has passed scientific review multiple times. These people have been in the nanotube research community almost as long as it has existed. They are real scientists, doing real work.
I'm not saying they're going to hit the exact specs they're shooting for, just that the basic science is prooven, and that working test devices really have already been made out of nanotubes.
I remember my undergraduate physics education being hard, sure. I also know that the grad students I compete with from Europe and Asia beat the hell out of me in my first year of grad school in many subjects. They were not taking "science lite" in college. How is it that with harder, more complete courses other cultures are able to put out a high percentage of science and engineering students?
I am a physicist who works in nanotechnology, carbon nanotubes even. I guess I would be one of those physicists who looks through a microscope, and not a telescope. I'm really not sure if you were trying to make a point with that line, but it seems a funny thing to say in a discussion about nanotechnology.
The things which are coming will blow your mind, but a space elevator with nanotubes isn't happening any time soon, despite what any historians may tell you. Contrary to what the "article" suggests, NASA IS working on this technology. They have spent a huge amount of money trying to get someone to grow a rope of continuous nanotubes just 1 meter long. Some of the best people in the world at nanotube growth are working on this (and have been working on this), and it will take a few years yet before they actually do it. Consider that two nanotubes tied (welded, bound, woven...) together are nowhere near as strong as one continuous nanotube. Consider also that nanotubes grow at around 10^-5 meters/s. Geosynchronous orbit is about 3.6*10^7 meters away. Here, really is the fundamental problem if we're going to try to grow a space elevator. If you go through the math, it would take about 10^5 years with today's technology, which makes the prediction of centuries very optimistic. I think it will take less than centuries (as in, I think we will find new growth or welding techniques), but there may be better ways of getting into space.
As scientests, we already go through a lot to make sure our articles and letters are as clear and correct as possible. In fact, we have quite an elaborate system in place to ensure that. There are plenty of main-stream communication avenues which use this peer reviewed research to effectivly report on science. The "News and Views" section of Nature and Scientific American are two examples off the top of my head that fit this description. They do this by employing writers with a scientific background.
I don't think there's any conspiracy against science by humanists, rather I think that few people have enough scientific education. An educated person should understand science which is around 50 years old. That's quite far from what most people get right now. Most people don't understand what the "quantum" means in quantum mechanics, and that's a concept over 100 years old. There's no technical difficulty there, just an idea, and there's no reason anyone couldn't learn it.
They got people to gather in centralized locations so that they could more effectively distribute aid. You want aid dropped randomly around the city so that these tired, half-drowned people have to swim a few blocks to get it?
It was not a perfect plan, obviously things could have been done much better. Before the hurricane, the city should have been more forceful in getting people to leave, as that was their best opportunity to get people out of the city. In hindsight there's always improvements to be made. Why don't we criticize the founders of the city for putting it in a place with restricted land access and a vulnerability to flooding?
It's rediculous to suggest that shooting at doctors and police during such an emergency is in any way justified. Just two years removed from being consumed in riots, Los Angeles somehow managed NOT to erupt in violence after the Northridge earthquake. I don't remember any shooting in San Diego when it was on fire last summer.
You deserve a good smack yourself for suggesting that these people who are risking their lives to try and help somehow deserve the violence they're facing.
Not enough people are helping, and those that do help are to blame for the problems? Absurd!
Tokamak technology goes back around 60 years, not 30. It was invented in the 1940s. There is a replica of the original Tokamak style reactor in a small museum at General Atomics in San Diego.
General Atomics, by the way, is in a very Republican area. GA has one of the biggest fusion programs around, AND is part of the established energy industry. They do have a gigantic magnetic fusion reactor there, but also a number of groups working on alternative fusion technologies.
This is a great point. One of the reasons the US initially wasn't involved in this was that scientests here would not go along with a project that claimed to be a commercial prototype when no such thing was yet possible.
I don't actually get to decide this kind of thing (who does?), but if I did, I would say...
It's not really a new form, it's just Bose-Einstein condensate which has been repackaged. We don't have bosonic solids and fermionic solids as separate forms, I don't see why we should have bosonic condensate and fermionic condensate as separate forms.
That leaves us with: solids, liquids, gasses, plasmas, condensates
With condensates being any form of matter which is quantum mechanically degenerate. That would include this stuff, neutron stars, BEC, and so on.
There's plenty of "tech" which can be used outside.
I remember going out to the desert to go stargazing and learing how to use a compass and read a topographic map. These days, with GPS, satellite maps and a host of other gadgets, there's more than enough to combine geek culture with the great outdoors.
I don't think I've ever met a kid who wasn't fascinated by a really cool telescope.
The parent obviously needs to get out of academia. The system is screwed up, but there are alternatives.
The government absolutely pays for a lot of reseearch, and a lot of it esoteric. Many of these DARPA projects you hear about are done by academic researchers. There's also the entire budget of the NSF and a significant amount of money from the DOE, NIH and DOD and I'm sure others. My lab has government grants for things which go way, way beyond "No Child Left Behind". The government doesn't spend enough on research, but it spends a lot.
I'm a physicist and I knew going in to physics that you don't do it for the money. It seems the same with most academic research. We all get paid too little, and yes, that sucks. If it really bothers you, try your hand at fixing it in University administration or politics. The problem is most of us would work for next to nothing just to the chance to stay in the lab.
There are a whole lot of people who come in to academia thinking they're smart shit and going to get paid well for it. In a lot of the really cool areas, everyone is smart shit, and any extra money in the budget will buy some equipment to give you an edge.
It seems to me, that to make it in academic research, you have to be the kind of person who will work at it in your spare time, at night and on the weekends, and you'll like it. Anything less and you won't compete in the big areas, because there are too many smart people out there working all the time. In short, you do research because it's what you were going to do anyway, not because you get paid well for it. If that's not the case you'll end up like the parent, raving on some webpage or blog about how society doesn't have its head on strait.
Getting slightly back on topic... the parent is right that researchers rarely spend money irresponsably, but one of the few extra big costs is getting things published and then buying a subscription. Everyone has to deal with this funding problem (despite the parent's complaints it's better in the US than in most places). At some point, we're all going to realize that it's silly to pay a commercial publishing house for a service we already provide to ourselves just about at cost. Many top journals are published by trade associations like APS or ACS, and the money they make off of them goes right back into the reseach community.
The recent mention of Orson Scott Card had me thinking about Ender's Game recently. It really does make sense for the military to use some sort of game to gauge the moral and psychology of it's soldiers. An MMOG would probably work really well.
Re:great result, but not really a "discovery"
on
Nuclear Fusion Discovered
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Magnetically confined fusion plamas reached the "break even" point a number of years ago.
The point now is to make a fusion reactor which can get that energy out safely in a useful form for less than $1 billion in hardware. Also, they do inject high temperature ions into the chamber, it would be silly not to.
Finally, if you think expensive and complicated are what get physicists prestige, you don't know enough about physicists.
In a real superconductor, any magnetic fields are expelled from the metal, that doesn't happen in a nanotube (at least as far as I know).
So for a superconductor "turned on" in a magnetic field, a balance is reached between the current and the magnetic field. The current and the resulting countering magnetic field are retained even when the original field is turned off. That effect is what keeps the current flowing forever, if it were to stop, the magnetic field excluded by the metal would change and violate that rule of superconductivity. In a nanotube made into a perfect ring, there would be no consequence to changing the magnetic field and the current which you had put in would simply stop and end up as a static charge in a ring. Sorry...
Of course nanotubes have all sorts of other really amazing magnetic properties which someone will get around to exploring someday.
Yeah, it would make more sense, but that's not the way research is done.
That money isn't a reward or a bounty, like the X prize, it's money that's going to be used right now to fund the research. There's very few other places that they're going to get the money to fund themselves, no venture capital or investments.
The goal in science is not to make money, it's to do great research. Other people are scrambling to do it first, and they've been given they're own funding.
A metallic carbon nanotube carries 4 quanta of current (4 charge carriers at a time): 2 conducting channels, 2 spins per channel. That's what NASA is referring to as a quantum wire.
Most of the resistance in such a wire is due to the fact that only a very few number of charge carriers can be transmitted at any time. The electrons going through the wire do not lose any energy in the wire, as there are no available lower energy states for them scatter into, and only two possible directions of motion (foward and backward). Thus, a perfect nanotube can be thought of as a "ballistic" conductor. There is some resistance to putting current into it and getting it back out, but in between, there is no resistance in the normal sense. (Although this sounds a little like superconductivity, it is definitely not.)
In a real nanotube, there are defects, contact resistances, impurities and environmental factors which act as transmission barriers, raising the probablility that an injected electron will reflect back to the source and not make it all the way through. It will be interesting to see how the Rice guys plan on annealing or growing their meter long wire to maintain the desired properties (and that's where the money comes in). Simply weaving a bunch of small nanotubes together is not going to cut it.
Why do people insist on getting science from press releases? University press releases are one of the worst things to happen to the integrity of science. Of course it doesn't help that some people do so much to encourage them...
Slashdot Mirror
Every D&B I've been to has DDR, but very rarely is it used. Most often, D&B is used as a place for drunken ski-ball, arcade style basketball free throws and overly elaborate pachinko style gambling. Any other game is something to do while waiting for something else. Video games are now HOME entertainment.
You should try talking to the people at National Instruments. You can have the best electronics setup in the world, but if you don't have an appropriate way of digitizing the data, your results will suffer. If all of your digitization is being done elsewhere and you don't have a ton of data to save, then you won't need a very good computer, but you also won't be able to use the computer as an active part of the experiment.
You can digitize the data just fine at the computer, just amplify and buffer it beforehand. Don't use a sound card, you will have difficulty with DC signals or offsets, and regular DAQ cards are available for similar prices. Gathering data directly is always preferable to using some sort of digital middle-man such as GPIB, because it will allow you to respond to the data much more quickly. A computer can be used to mimic and improve the effects of many other devices. Most lock-in amplifiers these days are digital anyway, why not have complete control of it? If you're good, you can get a whole lot of funtionality out of what is really a very cheap piece of hardware.
I believe what you are looking for is called physics.
I couldn't disagree more. I think as MMOs spread, you will see more tabletop gaming. WoW is a very poor replacement for D&D, but it gets people over that "nerd" barrier which seems to exist for tabletop games, which are inherantly more fun (as there does not need to be anything you don't want to do). As for simplicity, there are plenty of very, very simple tabletop games out there, you probably just have not seen them. Personally, I relish the opportunity to get into very complicated game mechanics.
In physics, you are expected to be able to make connections beyond what is in the text books. In a good physics program, your tests will not consist of material which you have already covered, but the material which logically follows from it (and maddingly is never covered in the text). Anyone who can pass such tests has learned the material, there is no other way around it. I think it's possible for an 8 year old who has a natural gift for logic and math to learn enough physics to pass. I don't think there are any age requirements on knowing how to solve a Hamiltonian.
That said, I knew one such progidy back in college (not 8, and not physics, but still very young). He was very good in all of his classes. He committed suicide. There are things other than mathmatics that people need to get out of childhood.
Good effort, but you can be funnier next time. :)
It may be me, but I usually read the headlines before TFP or TFA, and I had that same initial reaction.
Are nanotubes and like materials dangerous?
Yes.
So... don't go around breathing in nanotubes. I hope we've learned from our past health failings enough to use these materials responsibly. Who am I kidding though?
People are not going to understand that the cancer probe or glucose sensor made of nanotubes is actually safe, while the nanotube sweaters may be a bad idea.
As a nanotube researcher, I usually have some snotty remark about how no one pays attention to reality when it comes to carbon nanotube research. However, this thing works. It's really not that complicated, and has passed scientific review multiple times. These people have been in the nanotube research community almost as long as it has existed. They are real scientists, doing real work.
I'm not saying they're going to hit the exact specs they're shooting for, just that the basic science is prooven, and that working test devices really have already been made out of nanotubes.
I remember my undergraduate physics education being hard, sure. I also know that the grad students I compete with from Europe and Asia beat the hell out of me in my first year of grad school in many subjects. They were not taking "science lite" in college. How is it that with harder, more complete courses other cultures are able to put out a high percentage of science and engineering students?
I am a physicist who works in nanotechnology, carbon nanotubes even. I guess I would be one of those physicists who looks through a microscope, and not a telescope. I'm really not sure if you were trying to make a point with that line, but it seems a funny thing to say in a discussion about nanotechnology.
The things which are coming will blow your mind, but a space elevator with nanotubes isn't happening any time soon, despite what any historians may tell you. Contrary to what the "article" suggests, NASA IS working on this technology. They have spent a huge amount of money trying to get someone to grow a rope of continuous nanotubes just 1 meter long. Some of the best people in the world at nanotube growth are working on this (and have been working on this), and it will take a few years yet before they actually do it. Consider that two nanotubes tied (welded, bound, woven...) together are nowhere near as strong as one continuous nanotube. Consider also that nanotubes grow at around 10^-5 meters/s. Geosynchronous orbit is about 3.6*10^7 meters away. Here, really is the fundamental problem if we're going to try to grow a space elevator. If you go through the math, it would take about 10^5 years with today's technology, which makes the prediction of centuries very optimistic. I think it will take less than centuries (as in, I think we will find new growth or welding techniques), but there may be better ways of getting into space.
it's a sad, sad day when our best source for science news is Yahoo
As scientests, we already go through a lot to make sure our articles and letters are as clear and correct as possible. In fact, we have quite an elaborate system in place to ensure that. There are plenty of main-stream communication avenues which use this peer reviewed research to effectivly report on science. The "News and Views" section of Nature and Scientific American are two examples off the top of my head that fit this description. They do this by employing writers with a scientific background.
I don't think there's any conspiracy against science by humanists, rather I think that few people have enough scientific education. An educated person should understand science which is around 50 years old. That's quite far from what most people get right now. Most people don't understand what the "quantum" means in quantum mechanics, and that's a concept over 100 years old. There's no technical difficulty there, just an idea, and there's no reason anyone couldn't learn it.
They got people to gather in centralized locations so that they could more effectively distribute aid. You want aid dropped randomly around the city so that these tired, half-drowned people have to swim a few blocks to get it?
It was not a perfect plan, obviously things could have been done much better. Before the hurricane, the city should have been more forceful in getting people to leave, as that was their best opportunity to get people out of the city. In hindsight there's always improvements to be made. Why don't we criticize the founders of the city for putting it in a place with restricted land access and a vulnerability to flooding?
It's rediculous to suggest that shooting at doctors and police during such an emergency is in any way justified. Just two years removed from being consumed in riots, Los Angeles somehow managed NOT to erupt in violence after the Northridge earthquake. I don't remember any shooting in San Diego when it was on fire last summer.
You deserve a good smack yourself for suggesting that these people who are risking their lives to try and help somehow deserve the violence they're facing.
Not enough people are helping, and those that do help are to blame for the problems? Absurd!
Tokamak technology goes back around 60 years, not 30. It was invented in the 1940s. There is a replica of the original Tokamak style reactor in a small museum at General Atomics in San Diego.
General Atomics, by the way, is in a very Republican area. GA has one of the biggest fusion programs around, AND is part of the established energy industry. They do have a gigantic magnetic fusion reactor there, but also a number of groups working on alternative fusion technologies.
This is a great point. One of the reasons the US initially wasn't involved in this was that scientests here would not go along with a project that claimed to be a commercial prototype when no such thing was yet possible.
I don't actually get to decide this kind of thing (who does?), but if I did, I would say...
It's not really a new form, it's just Bose-Einstein condensate which has been repackaged. We don't have bosonic solids and fermionic solids as separate forms, I don't see why we should have bosonic condensate and fermionic condensate as separate forms.
That leaves us with:
solids, liquids, gasses, plasmas, condensates
With condensates being any form of matter which is quantum mechanically degenerate. That would include this stuff, neutron stars, BEC, and so on.
There's plenty of "tech" which can be used outside.
I remember going out to the desert to go stargazing and learing how to use a compass and read a topographic map. These days, with GPS, satellite maps and a host of other gadgets, there's more than enough to combine geek culture with the great outdoors.
I don't think I've ever met a kid who wasn't fascinated by a really cool telescope.
The parent obviously needs to get out of academia. The system is screwed up, but there are alternatives.
The government absolutely pays for a lot of reseearch, and a lot of it esoteric. Many of these DARPA projects you hear about are done by academic researchers. There's also the entire budget of the NSF and a significant amount of money from the DOE, NIH and DOD and I'm sure others. My lab has government grants for things which go way, way beyond "No Child Left Behind". The government doesn't spend enough on research, but it spends a lot.
I'm a physicist and I knew going in to physics that you don't do it for the money. It seems the same with most academic research. We all get paid too little, and yes, that sucks. If it really bothers you, try your hand at fixing it in University administration or politics. The problem is most of us would work for next to nothing just to the chance to stay in the lab.
There are a whole lot of people who come in to academia thinking they're smart shit and going to get paid well for it. In a lot of the really cool areas, everyone is smart shit, and any extra money in the budget will buy some equipment to give you an edge.
It seems to me, that to make it in academic research, you have to be the kind of person who will work at it in your spare time, at night and on the weekends, and you'll like it. Anything less and you won't compete in the big areas, because there are too many smart people out there working all the time. In short, you do research because it's what you were going to do anyway, not because you get paid well for it. If that's not the case you'll end up like the parent, raving on some webpage or blog about how society doesn't have its head on strait.
Getting slightly back on topic... the parent is right that researchers rarely spend money irresponsably, but one of the few extra big costs is getting things published and then buying a subscription. Everyone has to deal with this funding problem (despite the parent's complaints it's better in the US than in most places). At some point, we're all going to realize that it's silly to pay a commercial publishing house for a service we already provide to ourselves just about at cost. Many top journals are published by trade associations like APS or ACS, and the money they make off of them goes right back into the reseach community.
The recent mention of Orson Scott Card had me thinking about Ender's Game recently. It really does make sense for the military to use some sort of game to gauge the moral and psychology of it's soldiers. An MMOG would probably work really well.
Magnetically confined fusion plamas reached the "break even" point a number of years ago.
The point now is to make a fusion reactor which can get that energy out safely in a useful form for less than $1 billion in hardware. Also, they do inject high temperature ions into the chamber, it would be silly not to.
Finally, if you think expensive and complicated are what get physicists prestige, you don't know enough about physicists.
In a real superconductor, any magnetic fields are expelled from the metal, that doesn't happen in a nanotube (at least as far as I know).
So for a superconductor "turned on" in a magnetic field, a balance is reached between the current and the magnetic field. The current and the resulting countering magnetic field are retained even when the original field is turned off. That effect is what keeps the current flowing forever, if it were to stop, the magnetic field excluded by the metal would change and violate that rule of superconductivity. In a nanotube made into a perfect ring, there would be no consequence to changing the magnetic field and the current which you had put in would simply stop and end up as a static charge in a ring. Sorry...
Of course nanotubes have all sorts of other really amazing magnetic properties which someone will get around to exploring someday.
Yeah, it would make more sense, but that's not the way research is done.
That money isn't a reward or a bounty, like the X prize, it's money that's going to be used right now to fund the research. There's very few other places that they're going to get the money to fund themselves, no venture capital or investments.
The goal in science is not to make money, it's to do great research. Other people are scrambling to do it first, and they've been given they're own funding.
Yes, they are.
A metallic carbon nanotube carries 4 quanta of current (4 charge carriers at a time): 2 conducting channels, 2 spins per channel. That's what NASA is referring to as a quantum wire.
Most of the resistance in such a wire is due to the fact that only a very few number of charge carriers can be transmitted at any time. The electrons going through the wire do not lose any energy in the wire, as there are no available lower energy states for them scatter into, and only two possible directions of motion (foward and backward). Thus, a perfect nanotube can be thought of as a "ballistic" conductor. There is some resistance to putting current into it and getting it back out, but in between, there is no resistance in the normal sense. (Although this sounds a little like superconductivity, it is definitely not.)
In a real nanotube, there are defects, contact resistances, impurities and environmental factors which act as transmission barriers, raising the probablility that an injected electron will reflect back to the source and not make it all the way through. It will be interesting to see how the Rice guys plan on annealing or growing their meter long wire to maintain the desired properties (and that's where the money comes in). Simply weaving a bunch of small nanotubes together is not going to cut it.
two year old research, repackaged and remarketed.
Why do people insist on getting science from press releases? University press releases are one of the worst things to happen to the integrity of science. Of course it doesn't help that some people do so much to encourage them...