I don't know who you know in the SCA, but the group I used to run around with in San Diego was nothing like that.
The first thing you had to be able to do to be considered a "real" member was learn how to sew. Then, you had to learn some woodworking skills. Third you had to learn to cook. This was because everyone was expected to help out around camp and generally keep things going. We were very much about being self sufficient, but self sufficient within the level of being able to pick up tools and raw materials at Home Depot.
We had a few projects we were well known for. We did things such as build a bridge, portable showers (heated, I might add), and our own trailers.
No one I know in the SCA pretends that we're doing everything on our own. I joined the SCA because I wanted to learn how things work. In the process I learned how a lathe works (at the take it apart, put it together level), and machine tools in general. I learned how to judge a piece of wood and do some basic woodworking. I learned how to cold shape metal, how to cook, how to sew, and how to make and build a large number of small, simple devices. I learned the basics of brewing beer, making soap, and making cloth.
Most of all I learned to appreciate the modern world and that it makes it so easy to do all those things.
As far as steel goes, I never heard anyone in the SCA talk about making it, but I have that covered too. I'm working on a PhD in Materials Physics. (I agree with you on the chain mail thing... I don't see why anyone would WANT to do that)
I found most of what I learned as a physics student in college to be review. The only new stuff I learned was mathmatics and some personalized history... with the exception of a few "optional" classes.
Now that I'm in graduate school, I have to join a "special" program so that I'm not doing more review with a little bit more challenging math.
The point is that I think math should be taught at a much, much accellerated pace to what it is now. There are plenty of things (group theory for example) that are not hard to grasp even for your average "geek" at 10 or 11. Then we could skip all the B.S. that math, science and engineering students have to go through to get a degree and concentrate on what actually differentiates the fields.
I worked in the San Diego medical examiners office (tech support, of course).
Some of the statistics on what kills people appalled me. In a given month, there were about 2500 people who died from some un-natural cause. Over 2000 died from car accidents. Ever since I saw that I've been a firm proponent of Mass Transit. The sooner, the better. It can be expensive and pollute and even crash once in a while... it still can't be as expensive and destructive and people-controlled cars are.
You must have physics confused with some other field...
Have you read the Feynman lectures? Those are basically what you want right there. You descibed them perfectly. The compilation is some of the best QM, and is a required "free time" book for physics people.
I've found that quantum chemistry or solid state books often give a better "real world" account of QM. Something like Atkins Molecular Quantum Mechanics or Levine's Quantum Chemstry covers chemistry and Kittel's Solid State covers the rest.
If particle physics and field quantization is more your thing, depending on your level, you might want to start with something like Griffiths or Gasiorowicz. That's what the basic undergrad book is. If those look too simple, I highly recommend Sakurai. Start with his regular book before you look at the advanced one. You won't get through the advanced book unless you really, really know your stuff, but it covers the most mind-blowing aspects of quantum.
(Disclaimer: I study condensed matter, so I might be biased on what is applicable to the real world)
Oh, one other thing. If you want to learn some quantum, the first thing you have to do is learn what the action, Lagrangian and Hamiltonian are. You can try to learn it like a chemist does... in ignorance, but you will actually understand what you're doing if you know what those things are first.
The guy is an aerospace engineer. That has close to nothing to do with condensed matter physics. He has no business patenting a theoretical device in a field he does not participate in. He can offer up any excuses he wants, it's still a slap in the face to those of us who ACTUALLY work in the field.
And you can bet that there's NO WAY I'm going to work on something that's already been patented... just so he can thank me and run off with credit for MY research.
I study nanotechnology, I still have to make the lithography and the little boxes of electronics I use in my research, even though lithography and basic electronics are already well understood.
This is the way academic research goes. It takes a lot of time, and a lot of money. People like Minsky can do whatever they want, but most of us don't have the resources to have other people do all the grunt work.
You also have to think. If the biggest hangup these AI students are having is that "peice of kit with IR sensors," then maybe the biggest problem in AI is getting those things working. If it wasn't a real problem, you wouldn't be having it now. (all right that is a little far fetched, maybe it's the quality of your students you need to worry about)
What they're really claiming is the world's smallest solid state light emmitter. I guess if you define a nanotube as the smallest possible solid state structure, there you go.
Dr. Wilson Ho has been doing this for a while at UCI with individual atoms.
You really should check that out. It's hard to believe, but true.
Unfortunately that's the way it is in a lot of cases. The best thing to do is buy a late printing of a textbook, one that is in between versions. It will usually have a lot of the errors fixed.
Just today, when I pointed out an error to my professor in a graduate solid state class, he said that "sometimes you have to be confident you have the right answer"... so there you have it.
I'm sorry you don't like whomever is running your university. Perhaps YOU could try to run it... or would that be too much work? You'd rather have a rich dead grandfather?
I work in nanoscience. There is no reason to even mention nanomachines right now. What we work with is dirt. I was very glad that this article knew that.
One of the most advanced nanotechnology fabrication techniques out there is to burn pure graphite at a high temperature quickly. Use specific gasses/temperatures/pressures to get desired nanotube characteristics.
Yup, that's scary stuff. Ash. Dirt. I'm afraid.
The article wasn't bad, it had it's points, but except for nanotubes, every example of nanotechnology it gave was really just saying: hey this dirt we found over here, yeah, it might not be good for us. I think that should be pretty obvious to mankind at this point. We're beyond the dirt eating stage of evolution.
Nano-particles are things we've been dealing with since the industrial revolution. I'm not going to pretend that they're all perfectly safe, I have no idea. To treat the field any differently than chemistry, or solid state physics is crazy. People don't go around inhaling things in chemistry labs.
I do think that we should be looking at the health hazards that might accompany nanotechnology. What I got out of the PDF was that quite a few people are doing that. That makes me warm and fuzzy inside, I feel like we are being responsible scientests and not recommending anything for mass production before we know what it does.
The alarmist tone of the article is completely undeserved. The amount of material we work with in the lab is insignificant. The only real commercial nanotechnology product is titanium dioxide, which was developed as a SAFE replacement for lead in paint quite a while ago.
Imagine humans make it to another planet. I'm sure that we'll spend decades doing nothing more than mutilating cattle and leaving cryptic clues to our existance in the middle of convieniently placed fields. ESPECIALLY if there is someone else there to talk to. We would never want to see what another intelligent race would think, we would only be interested in their agriculture.
That's what any highly advanced race which has spent untold generations, money, and effort building machines to travel such large distances would do. It's the only logical solution.
I should have thought of this example a couple months ago when I was teaching introductory analog circuits. This would have made a really great qualitative final question!
UCSD's music department offers an undergraduate computer music class. I took the class and we did some swarm based music. In fact, as a final project in the class, I wrote a program to produce music based on fusion plasma simulations in a tokamak (my job at the time), which contains similar algorythms.
I just finished teaching a electronics lab class which was *very* active. My students appreciated the effort I went through in class to get them to understand the material, and I would say that many of them took a more active approach to learning due to it.
That's not to say there weren't problems. There were two things the students had to do before lab. The first was to read the lab for the week, the second was to submit some online answers to selected prelab questions. I would say 75% of my students did the prelab questions while about 50% read the lab. This led to horrible scores on the quizzes at the beggining of the lab period (which were based on the other prelab questions).
I agree completely that is the job of the educator to get the students interested in a subject, but as an educator, it is very, very frustrating to see the students put in a fraction of the minimal amount of work needed for a class.
The students were fine while I there to encourage them and keep them from getting frustrated. There were many students who were genuinely interested in applications of the circuits we were making, but they were interested in the applications, not the circuits. They wanted to skip the basics and jump strait into MEMS and superconductors and things like that.
I would often get complaints about equipment being broken only to walk over and see that their scale was set improperly, or that a wire was unplugged. Those things were ok the first few weeks of class, but to not check those things after 8 weeks is not a good sign.
In my opinion, there were some students there that should think long and hard on whether they should be studing physics or electrical engineering. I think that's the root of the problem. Too many people try to fit themselves into a field that they think they like, only to find that they have no aptitude for it, or that the nuts and bolts of the field aren't interesting to them.
That all said, I did have some really awesome students who were a pleasure to teach. I am looking foward to teaching the next lab in the series next quarter.
I hate to burst your bubble (being from the US, feet and inches still seem "normal" to me too), but it's actually the meter that is based on the speed of light. A light nanosecond is really only around 98% of a foot.
Sorry, the defined purpose of the patent office is to make discoveries available to the public and spread knowledge (it's obviously not doing that now).
If you want to hoard your work, go ahead, don't copyright it then.
If you copyright something, not only does it mean you want to protect it, but you want other people to know about it. I would argue that you would be worse than the Disney people. By using a copyright to deny anyone from seeing your work you would be depriving the public of the work all together; at least you can buy it from Disney. It's that kind of elitist attitude that Franklin sought to discourage by creating the patent office.
If you want to limit yourself like that, there's no need to patent. Why put your work out in a publicly available patent?
Another strong argument in support of this is that genetics does not determine everything about a person. It is just not mathmatically possible. You can be genetically predisposed to be athletic or intelligent, but unless you actually do the work, you won't be. DNA does not magically create knowledge or grow muscles where there is no reason to have them. A lot of people don't understand that that's what "genetically predisposed" means. It doesn't mean that you put in some code and out comes an Albert Einstein who can run a four minute mile, but it can make the work easier, and the plateaus higher.
In the US, for all our free market talk, it's illegal to buy foreign steel. That's the kind of thing I don't like, and wouldn't want to see. I can't support the idea that it's the government's job to protect a company.
One thing that seems to pop up in both your posts is the idea that small and medium sized businesses should have much reduced taxes compared to large businesses. In a way, this could be seen as a kind of small business grant. I am, however, a big fan of this idea, mainly because it's presented as a difference in taxation rather than propping up some business that can't make it (perception is reality, I guess). I could even go for reduced taxes for keeping jobs local, as this would lead to more local economic activity (effectively an outsourcing tax).
You're right when you say everything is not hunkydory. Here in California, for all my talk, things are very much NOT hunkdory... largely because of large companies, and poor management of government resources. I would have much rather we lowered small business taxes, increased University funding and our government didn't give Enron hundreds of millions of dollars just because they could (and did) shut off the whole state's electricity.
Take a trip to California some time, and see what subjecting movies, technology and programming to the market has done here. You might be surprised, but Hollywood and Silicon Valley actually MAKE the government here quite a bit of money... for, you know, schools, universities and such.
Hey, yeah, I completely forgot about that. You're right as far as I know.
Re:New Scientist
on
The Big Rip
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Black holes have already been shown to "evaporate". That's Stephan Hawking's claim to fame really. Basically, by using conservation of energy and quantum mechanics, he was able to show that black holes would convert mass into very high energy light waves, which would then tunnel out. Small black holes could then potentially evaporate away.
You have to watch out for those definitions. By your definition of optical, and x-ray diffraction machine is a far higher resolution optical microscope than this.
I agree with you that there appears to be no real practicle use for this, it's cool, but it's hard to get excited over it when an AFM is getting delivered to my lab monday.
Diamond films are inexpensive, in fact, if you have a decent watch, or glasses you already have one. That's what they use as a scratch resistant coating on a lot of things.
They generally make them from a slab of graphite, which is then heated, sputtered (hit it with high energy gas particles) or otherwise made to vaporize. Then you place what you want to have the film over it above the slab and if you've set the conditions properly (temerpature, pressure, how hot is your carbon vapor), you get a diamond film. All in all, it's relatively inexpensive, but produces nothing like a gem.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know who you know in the SCA, but the group I used to run around with in San Diego was nothing like that.
The first thing you had to be able to do to be considered a "real" member was learn how to sew. Then, you had to learn some woodworking skills. Third you had to learn to cook. This was because everyone was expected to help out around camp and generally keep things going. We were very much about being self sufficient, but self sufficient within the level of being able to pick up tools and raw materials at Home Depot.
We had a few projects we were well known for. We did things such as build a bridge, portable showers (heated, I might add), and our own trailers.
No one I know in the SCA pretends that we're doing everything on our own. I joined the SCA because I wanted to learn how things work. In the process I learned how a lathe works (at the take it apart, put it together level), and machine tools in general. I learned how to judge a piece of wood and do some basic woodworking. I learned how to cold shape metal, how to cook, how to sew, and how to make and build a large number of small, simple devices. I learned the basics of brewing beer, making soap, and making cloth.
Most of all I learned to appreciate the modern world and that it makes it so easy to do all those things.
As far as steel goes, I never heard anyone in the SCA talk about making it, but I have that covered too. I'm working on a PhD in Materials Physics. (I agree with you on the chain mail thing... I don't see why anyone would WANT to do that)
I empathize completely, but why stop at college.
I found most of what I learned as a physics student in college to be review. The only new stuff I learned was mathmatics and some personalized history... with the exception of a few "optional" classes.
Now that I'm in graduate school, I have to join a "special" program so that I'm not doing more review with a little bit more challenging math.
The point is that I think math should be taught at a much, much accellerated pace to what it is now. There are plenty of things (group theory for example) that are not hard to grasp even for your average "geek" at 10 or 11. Then we could skip all the B.S. that math, science and engineering students have to go through to get a degree and concentrate on what actually differentiates the fields.
I worked in the San Diego medical examiners office (tech support, of course).
Some of the statistics on what kills people appalled me. In a given month, there were about 2500 people who died from some un-natural cause. Over 2000 died from car accidents. Ever since I saw that I've been a firm proponent of Mass Transit. The sooner, the better. It can be expensive and pollute and even crash once in a while... it still can't be as expensive and destructive and people-controlled cars are.
Griffiths made you burst into laughter?
I always thought the jokes were the worst part of that book.
real world examples!
You must have physics confused with some other field...
Have you read the Feynman lectures? Those are basically what you want right there. You descibed them perfectly. The compilation is some of the best QM, and is a required "free time" book for physics people.
I've found that quantum chemistry or solid state books often give a better "real world" account of QM. Something like Atkins Molecular Quantum Mechanics or Levine's Quantum Chemstry covers chemistry and Kittel's Solid State covers the rest.
If particle physics and field quantization is more your thing, depending on your level, you might want to start with something like Griffiths or Gasiorowicz. That's what the basic undergrad book is. If those look too simple, I highly recommend Sakurai. Start with his regular book before you look at the advanced one. You won't get through the advanced book unless you really, really know your stuff, but it covers the most mind-blowing aspects of quantum.
(Disclaimer: I study condensed matter, so I might be biased on what is applicable to the real world)
Oh, one other thing. If you want to learn some quantum, the first thing you have to do is learn what the action, Lagrangian and Hamiltonian are. You can try to learn it like a chemist does... in ignorance, but you will actually understand what you're doing if you know what those things are first.
The guy is an aerospace engineer. That has close to nothing to do with condensed matter physics. He has no business patenting a theoretical device in a field he does not participate in. He can offer up any excuses he wants, it's still a slap in the face to those of us who ACTUALLY work in the field.
And you can bet that there's NO WAY I'm going to work on something that's already been patented... just so he can thank me and run off with credit for MY research.
I study nanotechnology, I still have to make the lithography and the little boxes of electronics I use in my research, even though lithography and basic electronics are already well understood.
This is the way academic research goes. It takes a lot of time, and a lot of money. People like Minsky can do whatever they want, but most of us don't have the resources to have other people do all the grunt work.
You also have to think. If the biggest hangup these AI students are having is that "peice of kit with IR sensors," then maybe the biggest problem in AI is getting those things working. If it wasn't a real problem, you wouldn't be having it now. (all right that is a little far fetched, maybe it's the quality of your students you need to worry about)
What they're really claiming is the world's smallest solid state light emmitter. I guess if you define a nanotube as the smallest possible solid state structure, there you go.
Dr. Wilson Ho has been doing this for a while at UCI with individual atoms.
You really should check that out. It's hard to believe, but true.
Unfortunately that's the way it is in a lot of cases. The best thing to do is buy a late printing of a textbook, one that is in between versions. It will usually have a lot of the errors fixed.
Just today, when I pointed out an error to my professor in a graduate solid state class, he said that "sometimes you have to be confident you have the right answer"... so there you have it.
I'm sorry you don't like whomever is running your university. Perhaps YOU could try to run it... or would that be too much work? You'd rather have a rich dead grandfather?
Whiner.
I work in nanoscience. There is no reason to even mention nanomachines right now. What we work with is dirt. I was very glad that this article knew that.
One of the most advanced nanotechnology fabrication techniques out there is to burn pure graphite at a high temperature quickly. Use specific gasses/temperatures/pressures to get desired nanotube characteristics.
Yup, that's scary stuff. Ash. Dirt. I'm afraid.
The article wasn't bad, it had it's points, but except for nanotubes, every example of nanotechnology it gave was really just saying: hey this dirt we found over here, yeah, it might not be good for us. I think that should be pretty obvious to mankind at this point. We're beyond the dirt eating stage of evolution.
Nano-particles are things we've been dealing with since the industrial revolution. I'm not going to pretend that they're all perfectly safe, I have no idea. To treat the field any differently than chemistry, or solid state physics is crazy. People don't go around inhaling things in chemistry labs.
I do think that we should be looking at the health hazards that might accompany nanotechnology. What I got out of the PDF was that quite a few people are doing that. That makes me warm and fuzzy inside, I feel like we are being responsible scientests and not recommending anything for mass production before we know what it does.
The alarmist tone of the article is completely undeserved. The amount of material we work with in the lab is insignificant. The only real commercial nanotechnology product is titanium dioxide, which was developed as a SAFE replacement for lead in paint quite a while ago.
Imagine humans make it to another planet. I'm sure that we'll spend decades doing nothing more than mutilating cattle and leaving cryptic clues to our existance in the middle of convieniently placed fields. ESPECIALLY if there is someone else there to talk to. We would never want to see what another intelligent race would think, we would only be interested in their agriculture.
That's what any highly advanced race which has spent untold generations, money, and effort building machines to travel such large distances would do. It's the only logical solution.
I should have thought of this example a couple months ago when I was teaching introductory analog circuits. This would have made a really great qualitative final question!
I could have used your post for the key too.
UCSD's music department offers an undergraduate computer music class. I took the class and we did some swarm based music. In fact, as a final project in the class, I wrote a program to produce music based on fusion plasma simulations in a tokamak (my job at the time), which contains similar algorythms.
These are not especially new ideas.
I just finished teaching a electronics lab class which was *very* active. My students appreciated the effort I went through in class to get them to understand the material, and I would say that many of them took a more active approach to learning due to it.
That's not to say there weren't problems. There were two things the students had to do before lab. The first was to read the lab for the week, the second was to submit some online answers to selected prelab questions. I would say 75% of my students did the prelab questions while about 50% read the lab. This led to horrible scores on the quizzes at the beggining of the lab period (which were based on the other prelab questions).
I agree completely that is the job of the educator to get the students interested in a subject, but as an educator, it is very, very frustrating to see the students put in a fraction of the minimal amount of work needed for a class.
The students were fine while I there to encourage them and keep them from getting frustrated. There were many students who were genuinely interested in applications of the circuits we were making, but they were interested in the applications, not the circuits. They wanted to skip the basics and jump strait into MEMS and superconductors and things like that.
I would often get complaints about equipment being broken only to walk over and see that their scale was set improperly, or that a wire was unplugged. Those things were ok the first few weeks of class, but to not check those things after 8 weeks is not a good sign.
In my opinion, there were some students there that should think long and hard on whether they should be studing physics or electrical engineering. I think that's the root of the problem. Too many people try to fit themselves into a field that they think they like, only to find that they have no aptitude for it, or that the nuts and bolts of the field aren't interesting to them.
That all said, I did have some really awesome students who were a pleasure to teach. I am looking foward to teaching the next lab in the series next quarter.
I hate to burst your bubble (being from the US, feet and inches still seem "normal" to me too), but it's actually the meter that is based on the speed of light. A light nanosecond is really only around 98% of a foot.
Sorry, the defined purpose of the patent office is to make discoveries available to the public and spread knowledge (it's obviously not doing that now).
If you want to hoard your work, go ahead, don't copyright it then.
If you copyright something, not only does it mean you want to protect it, but you want other people to know about it. I would argue that you would be worse than the Disney people. By using a copyright to deny anyone from seeing your work you would be depriving the public of the work all together; at least you can buy it from Disney. It's that kind of elitist attitude that Franklin sought to discourage by creating the patent office.
If you want to limit yourself like that, there's no need to patent. Why put your work out in a publicly available patent?
If your work can't bring in enough money to support itself, it might as well be in the public domain, right?
Another strong argument in support of this is that genetics does not determine everything about a person. It is just not mathmatically possible. You can be genetically predisposed to be athletic or intelligent, but unless you actually do the work, you won't be. DNA does not magically create knowledge or grow muscles where there is no reason to have them. A lot of people don't understand that that's what "genetically predisposed" means. It doesn't mean that you put in some code and out comes an Albert Einstein who can run a four minute mile, but it can make the work easier, and the plateaus higher.
In the US, for all our free market talk, it's illegal to buy foreign steel. That's the kind of thing I don't like, and wouldn't want to see. I can't support the idea that it's the government's job to protect a company.
One thing that seems to pop up in both your posts is the idea that small and medium sized businesses should have much reduced taxes compared to large businesses. In a way, this could be seen as a kind of small business grant. I am, however, a big fan of this idea, mainly because it's presented as a difference in taxation rather than propping up some business that can't make it (perception is reality, I guess). I could even go for reduced taxes for keeping jobs local, as this would lead to more local economic activity (effectively an outsourcing tax).
You're right when you say everything is not hunkydory. Here in California, for all my talk, things are very much NOT hunkdory... largely because of large companies, and poor management of government resources. I would have much rather we lowered small business taxes, increased University funding and our government didn't give Enron hundreds of millions of dollars just because they could (and did) shut off the whole state's electricity.
Take a trip to California some time, and see what subjecting movies, technology and programming to the market has done here. You might be surprised, but Hollywood and Silicon Valley actually MAKE the government here quite a bit of money... for, you know, schools, universities and such.
Hey, yeah, I completely forgot about that. You're right as far as I know.
Black holes have already been shown to "evaporate". That's Stephan Hawking's claim to fame really. Basically, by using conservation of energy and quantum mechanics, he was able to show that black holes would convert mass into very high energy light waves, which would then tunnel out. Small black holes could then potentially evaporate away.
You have to watch out for those definitions. By your definition of optical, and x-ray diffraction machine is a far higher resolution optical microscope than this.
I agree with you that there appears to be no real practicle use for this, it's cool, but it's hard to get excited over it when an AFM is getting delivered to my lab monday.
Diamond films are inexpensive, in fact, if you have a decent watch, or glasses you already have one. That's what they use as a scratch resistant coating on a lot of things.
They generally make them from a slab of graphite, which is then heated, sputtered (hit it with high energy gas particles) or otherwise made to vaporize. Then you place what you want to have the film over it above the slab and if you've set the conditions properly (temerpature, pressure, how hot is your carbon vapor), you get a diamond film. All in all, it's relatively inexpensive, but produces nothing like a gem.