It's been warm and temperate for me every October. But then again, I live in southern California... is it supposed to be cold in October?
But back to topic... there are even more crazy things that could go on. For instance, if this planet had a vocanically active, inhabitable moon, you might see something like you have between Jupiter and Io; a large electric potential just sitting there. Couple that with the strange solar wind conditions that you would find there, and you might never have dark, the sky might always glow like the Aurora Borealis.
If you have a local natural history museum, consider leaving it with them. You can probably set something up so that you still own it, but they get to display it and hold on to it for you.
As a graduate student here, I appreciate what they do. There was nothing as aggravating as finding your "high speed" access slowed to a crawl by everyone else downloading movies, music and games (ok, so that's what I was downloading too...)
Now that I actually need that high speed acess to do things like transfer experimental data halfway across the world, it's nice that it's there and available. The connection would suck just as much for P2P if they didn't do that because a lot more people would be moving files around.
You get the internet access for free just for living on campus (if you disagree, try getting an apartment off campus...) be happy with what you have.
I also went to UCSD, and I wholeheartedly agree with you.
While I was there, they condemned the entire building that is the Che Cafe. A couple of orginizations I was part of (Darkstar and the SCA) were offered the opportunity to clean up the building and surrounding area and we would be given office space there.
So we spent a summer picking up trash and cleaning out the rats, beer bottles and drug paraphanelia from the Che. We were given probationary office space under the directions that we keep the area clean.
Meanwhile, the Che people never left, actively tried to prevent us from cleaning up, and continued to have concerts (which were NEVER advertized on campus and were not attended by UCSD students). They also continued to serve food despite being shut down by the health department.
All the while, they resented anyone else even being near the Che and in general behaved like the de facto tyrranical dictators of the building.
They said they stood up for environmentalism, yet they were killing one of the best park areas on campus with trash. They say they were "for the people" yet they are some of the worst elitist snobs you will ever see. They also claim to be a UCSD organization yet they seem to detest UCSD students and go out of their way to ensure that as few UCSD students as possible take part in activities there... unless they're being overcharged for bad food. Evidently the worst in capitalism is still good enough for them.
Re:What's up With the Populariy of Princess Monono
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Sen To, X-Men 2
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I totally agree with you.
I've noticed a whole bunch of people here seem to take that disney comment as meaning it was bad. There are things disney does well.
Mononoke was as good as many Disney movies as far as I'm concerned. It tried to make you think (to a certain extent... ) and it tried to redefine some traditional values... and it came off as movies whith too much thought put into it... it was all too manufactured. Packaged to be popular. It's like the Fantasia of anime.
I don't expect a good story out of any movie (2 hours just isn't nearly enough), I expect entertainment. Anime delivers that part nicely.
All this space elevator talk is fine and dandy, but where are they going to get these nanotubes?
I've read that some car company in Japan is providing them with carbon nanotube technology to build this out of. No mention of what company, or what process is being used.
Now... if someone out there has developed a way to make long nanotubes on a bulk scale, they should really tell all the scientests out there who are working on that, they'll be glad to know it's been done. I'm sure some people in Stockholm would also be very interested.
If someone can point me to somewhere detailing how this has been achieved, that would be great. Otherwise, I wouldn't invest a dime or an hour in that company.
Unfortunately, it's not just the "conservatives" who are out to push responsibility for violence on video games. As often as its the "liberals".
Case in point would be Senator Leiberman, perhaps the most visible and high ranking politician calling for censorship in video games.
I just moved from a fairly liberal area to a very conservative area, and just from reading the newspaper here, I can tell that people are much more interested in being able to do what they want than keeping other people from playing video games... which was an obsession with the more liberal newspaper.
Of course, the bars (or rather... bar) here do close at midnight.
I think it's just that people have different impressions of the languages. Now, for all my talk, I can't actually program in C... so would I recommend it? Because I have been denied a (very nice) lab position simply because I have lots of FORTRAN and IDL experiance, but no C experiance. And it is highly recommended by my current employer that I learn C as soon as I can.
In a way... "hard programming language" isn't really my phrase, it's the word of the physicist who didn't hire me.
Spreadsheets are usefull, yes, but if you're trying to do something your spreadsheet can't handle, chances are you should probably not be using it.
I suggest you use a program like Mathmatica, or program in Fortran or similar "easy" programming language. Spreadsheets are really only usefull in physics for data collection and mining on a small scale.
I don't think that proof as you are stating is required. There have been many cases in which verbal and implied contracts were upheld, and a EULA is far more concrete than a verbal or implied contract.
The strongest argument against EULA is like you say, there are certain things you can't sign away. No matter how witnessed and signed a contract is, if a court decides it was unreasonable (and many EULAs contain unreasonable clauses), then it gets thrown out.
You have no idea how annoying it is to try and study for finals in the library when every two minutes some idiot with a cell phone comes by talking loudly trying to find that idiot with a cell phone that went by just a few seconds ago!
That said, I agree with you, accuracy of "within one floor"? That's not going to cut it to actually find someone. Also, I don't know if they noticed, but the campus is huge (it now consists of six colleges, a medical school and the Scripps Institute). I really doubt that this will work across campus without some sort of amplification.
This paper is certainly good stuff, but it's not a revolution. This is related to an idea that has been floating around for a while, he just generalized it a little bit more, so now it's not a huge pain in the ass to experimentally try and measure this, just a regular sized pain in the ass.
As far as antigravity goes, if gravity fits in with particle physics, then if there is a way to block gravitons or gravity waves, whatever you want to call them, then you block the force (easier said than done).
I agree. I live in San Diego, and driving over the San Diego "river" is a joke. There hasn't been any water in it in my 21 years of life. Most of the times, there isn't even any mud.
I don't know which Sim City you played, but in the original, I never built roads in any of the cities I built and they came out fine. Actually, I never really liked the other Sim City games, there were too many options.
As far as zoning and what not, sure, that sounds good...wait, they did that in the last one. True there are no farms, and you don't HAVE to have 95% open space, but you START with 100% open space, how is getting to 95% a problem?
Sim City isn't a game that made it on it's nifty graphics or some gimmic, the gameplay and flexibility are what made the game popular.
However, I will agree that if they automatically build roads, they have crossed the line. The whole point for me was to build a city without roads.
He shifts his focus on the cellular automations from randomness to reversibility, and describes several rule-sets that both lead to complexity and are reversible. This behavior is an apparent violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Any physicist who has studied modern particle theory can tell you that reversibility has to do with more than just entropy. It is a basic fact of perticle theory, having to do with the symmetry of operators.
When you (this is experimental by the way) change the charge of particle, it's fundamental properties change in some cases, meaning that this is not a symmetric operation. When you change the parity (think of rotating a coordinate axis), it's fundamental properties change in some cases. In most cases, when you change both parity and charge at the same time, the fundamental properties of a particle remain the same, meaning together they are symmetric operators. Under the weak interaction, this does not hold.
When you reverse time for one particle (now theoretically), it should not change the physics or properties of the particle. We have seen that CP violation occurs in weak interactions, but CPT (charge, parity and time) violation does not. If time did not change the properties of the particle, CPT would have the same ~2% violation CP does. Because we can see that CPT is not violated, time reversal is not a symmetric operator.
All this means is that there is more than just entropy preventing a reversal of time, there is a seperate rule which prevents a reversal of time in any case where the weak interaction is involved.
Not to mention, that generally in science when we come up against a Law, we try to find an error in our data or thinking BEFORE claiming the law is invalid.
I hope you do well. I know there are lawyers out there doing the right thing, and I agree that the best way to fix things is from the inside. I also agree it's too difficult to understand.
Most of the legally minded people I know are good people, they just fail to see what they could do with what they have. They don't understand what anything really means - they grasp the law, but not it's ramifications for regular people.
And I'll go easy on lawyers now that I know a "good" one.
My parents are both lawyers. My brother is studying to be a lawyer. My roomate is going to law school next year (wants to do IP). I have innumerable other friends and aquantainces who want to be lawyers.
The common thread between them all? The main reason they want to practice law is to make money.
I have yet to meet someone who wants to practice law simply to help people. So, when the legal profession gets a soul, I'll be there to back them up. Until then, I reserve the right to lawyer bash (I like my friends so I keep it to a respectable minimum... about the same abount of flak they give me for studying physics).
My lawyer bashing tends to be along the lines that in an ideal society we wouldn't need lawyers (but with a fat chance of us ever developing an ideal society), and that historically speaking, law is an exclusive field, developed in England to maintain the monopoly of the government by the upper class.
They usually point out then that with my extra two years of graduate school, I will be making all of negative $30,000 compared to them by that time.
Alpha (the fine structure constant) is the charge of an electron squared, divided by h-bar times c.
Any change in alpha would hint at either a chnage in the charge of an electron (in Coulombs - also a man-made construct), h-bar (and erg-second) or c (meters per second). Now the thing that really blows your mind is that all of these constants are interdependant. A change in one MUST cause a change in another, or terrible things like electrons with no detectable mass will appear. This is why people think alpha is a good number, because even with changes it should remain constant.
Simply because all of these constants depend ultimately on how long a meter is, and a meter is measured using c... we would never notice a change in c. We would only be able to notice the relative change in alpha. A change in alpha would signal a lot of difficulties in quantum theory.
For those of you who have actually read the article, and know something about the changes in physics he is proposing:
I fear that the poor man has forgotten about entropy (chaos, whatever you want to call it). It seems silly these days to even suggest that you could predict such complex systems as those he suggests (free will?). Non linear dynamics is not solely based on equasions and "old" math. It is very much rooted in computation, iteration, cellular structure and the like. However, I will absolutely read his book. If he turns out to be right... well, that would be something.
If the whole book is full of his explainations along the lines that: "I can just do them and can know absolutely - definitively - I got the right answer and understand what's going on." without some sort evidence to back it up, that's a different story.
I agree that before Mars, we have to do other, more economically suitable things.
You must have missed the authors of the bill agreeing with us though. Finding 11: "While the ultimate goal of human space flight in the inner solar system is the exploration of the planet Mars, there are other important goals for exploration of the inner solar system that will advance our scientific understanding and allow the United States to develop and demonstrate capabilities that will be needed for the scientific exploration and eventual settlement of Mars."
This is the only time in the bill that the settlement of Mars, or even a permanant base on Mars is discussed. They suggest, prior to that, setting up a base on the moon, at the L1 and L2 points in the Earth orbit, and on a moon of Mars, in addition to exploring some NEAs for potential refueling stations or bases. I think they are delusional if they think we can accomplish all that in the time frame they suggest, but thier steps and expectations are otherwise reasonable.
In the next hundred years or so, we should develop the necessary economics to at least attempt a large part of this plan. Technology will likely stay ahead of funding and politics. The real problem with this bill isn't where they want to end up, or how they want to get there, it's that they're attempting to do too much, too soon.
If we learned anything from the moon missions, it's that simply getting somewhere isn't enough. Just as you imply, the point is to get there and stay, not get there, turn around and go back.
For all these years, people who have been opponents of gun control kept yelling and screaming that when you take away one right, the others are right behind.
Slashdot Mirror
It's been warm and temperate for me every October. But then again, I live in southern California... is it supposed to be cold in October?
But back to topic... there are even more crazy things that could go on. For instance, if this planet had a vocanically active, inhabitable moon, you might see something like you have between Jupiter and Io; a large electric potential just sitting there. Couple that with the strange solar wind conditions that you would find there, and you might never have dark, the sky might always glow like the Aurora Borealis.
If you have a local natural history museum, consider leaving it with them. You can probably set something up so that you still own it, but they get to display it and hold on to it for you.
As a graduate student here, I appreciate what they do. There was nothing as aggravating as finding your "high speed" access slowed to a crawl by everyone else downloading movies, music and games (ok, so that's what I was downloading too...)
Now that I actually need that high speed acess to do things like transfer experimental data halfway across the world, it's nice that it's there and available. The connection would suck just as much for P2P if they didn't do that because a lot more people would be moving files around.
You get the internet access for free just for living on campus (if you disagree, try getting an apartment off campus...) be happy with what you have.
I also went to UCSD, and I wholeheartedly agree with you.
While I was there, they condemned the entire building that is the Che Cafe. A couple of orginizations I was part of (Darkstar and the SCA) were offered the opportunity to clean up the building and surrounding area and we would be given office space there.
So we spent a summer picking up trash and cleaning out the rats, beer bottles and drug paraphanelia from the Che. We were given probationary office space under the directions that we keep the area clean.
Meanwhile, the Che people never left, actively tried to prevent us from cleaning up, and continued to have concerts (which were NEVER advertized on campus and were not attended by UCSD students). They also continued to serve food despite being shut down by the health department.
All the while, they resented anyone else even being near the Che and in general behaved like the de facto tyrranical dictators of the building.
They said they stood up for environmentalism, yet they were killing one of the best park areas on campus with trash. They say they were "for the people" yet they are some of the worst elitist snobs you will ever see. They also claim to be a UCSD organization yet they seem to detest UCSD students and go out of their way to ensure that as few UCSD students as possible take part in activities there... unless they're being overcharged for bad food. Evidently the worst in capitalism is still good enough for them.
That's English units... not American.
The task at NASA is to advance mankinds reach.
I totally agree with you.
... and it came off as movies whith too much thought put into it... it was all too manufactured. Packaged to be popular. It's like the Fantasia of anime.
I've noticed a whole bunch of people here seem to take that disney comment as meaning it was bad. There are things disney does well.
Mononoke was as good as many Disney movies as far as I'm concerned. It tried to make you think (to a certain extent... ) and it tried to redefine some traditional values
I don't expect a good story out of any movie (2 hours just isn't nearly enough), I expect entertainment. Anime delivers that part nicely.
All this space elevator talk is fine and dandy, but where are they going to get these nanotubes?
I've read that some car company in Japan is providing them with carbon nanotube technology to build this out of. No mention of what company, or what process is being used.
Now... if someone out there has developed a way to make long nanotubes on a bulk scale, they should really tell all the scientests out there who are working on that, they'll be glad to know it's been done. I'm sure some people in Stockholm would also be very interested.
If someone can point me to somewhere detailing how this has been achieved, that would be great. Otherwise, I wouldn't invest a dime or an hour in that company.
Unfortunately, it's not just the "conservatives" who are out to push responsibility for violence on video games. As often as its the "liberals".
Case in point would be Senator Leiberman, perhaps the most visible and high ranking politician calling for censorship in video games.
I just moved from a fairly liberal area to a very conservative area, and just from reading the newspaper here, I can tell that people are much more interested in being able to do what they want than keeping other people from playing video games... which was an obsession with the more liberal newspaper.
Of course, the bars (or rather... bar) here do close at midnight.
C is exactly what I was thinking of.
I think it's just that people have different impressions of the languages. Now, for all my talk, I can't actually program in C... so would I recommend it? Because I have been denied a (very nice) lab position simply because I have lots of FORTRAN and IDL experiance, but no C experiance. And it is highly recommended by my current employer that I learn C as soon as I can.
In a way... "hard programming language" isn't really my phrase, it's the word of the physicist who didn't hire me.
Spreadsheets are usefull, yes, but if you're trying to do something your spreadsheet can't handle, chances are you should probably not be using it.
I suggest you use a program like Mathmatica, or program in Fortran or similar "easy" programming language. Spreadsheets are really only usefull in physics for data collection and mining on a small scale.
Wow, an intellegent comment!
I agree.
I don't think that proof as you are stating is required. There have been many cases in which verbal and implied contracts were upheld, and a EULA is far more concrete than a verbal or implied contract.
The strongest argument against EULA is like you say, there are certain things you can't sign away. No matter how witnessed and signed a contract is, if a court decides it was unreasonable (and many EULAs contain unreasonable clauses), then it gets thrown out.
You have no idea how annoying it is to try and study for finals in the library when every two minutes some idiot with a cell phone comes by talking loudly trying to find that idiot with a cell phone that went by just a few seconds ago!
That said, I agree with you, accuracy of "within one floor"? That's not going to cut it to actually find someone. Also, I don't know if they noticed, but the campus is huge (it now consists of six colleges, a medical school and the Scripps Institute). I really doubt that this will work across campus without some sort of amplification.
This paper is certainly good stuff, but it's not a revolution. This is related to an idea that has been floating around for a while, he just generalized it a little bit more, so now it's not a huge pain in the ass to experimentally try and measure this, just a regular sized pain in the ass.
As far as antigravity goes, if gravity fits in with particle physics, then if there is a way to block gravitons or gravity waves, whatever you want to call them, then you block the force (easier said than done).
Next time you ask people this question, pretend you're a performance artist who needs this type of stuff to record your work.
The way it's stated right now, you come across as someone (not a journalist) trying to do something unethical, and probably illegal.
I agree.
I live in San Diego, and driving over the San Diego "river" is a joke. There hasn't been any water in it in my 21 years of life. Most of the times, there isn't even any mud.
I don't know which Sim City you played, but in the original, I never built roads in any of the cities I built and they came out fine. Actually, I never really liked the other Sim City games, there were too many options.
As far as zoning and what not, sure, that sounds good...wait, they did that in the last one. True there are no farms, and you don't HAVE to have 95% open space, but you START with 100% open space, how is getting to 95% a problem?
Sim City isn't a game that made it on it's nifty graphics or some gimmic, the gameplay and flexibility are what made the game popular.
However, I will agree that if they automatically build roads, they have crossed the line. The whole point for me was to build a city without roads.
He shifts his focus on the cellular automations from randomness to reversibility, and describes several rule-sets that both lead to complexity and are reversible. This behavior is an apparent violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Any physicist who has studied modern particle theory can tell you that reversibility has to do with more than just entropy. It is a basic fact of perticle theory, having to do with the symmetry of operators.
When you (this is experimental by the way) change the charge of particle, it's fundamental properties change in some cases, meaning that this is not a symmetric operation. When you change the parity (think of rotating a coordinate axis), it's fundamental properties change in some cases. In most cases, when you change both parity and charge at the same time, the fundamental properties of a particle remain the same, meaning together they are symmetric operators. Under the weak interaction, this does not hold.
When you reverse time for one particle (now theoretically), it should not change the physics or properties of the particle. We have seen that CP violation occurs in weak interactions, but CPT (charge, parity and time) violation does not. If time did not change the properties of the particle, CPT would have the same ~2% violation CP does. Because we can see that CPT is not violated, time reversal is not a symmetric operator.
All this means is that there is more than just entropy preventing a reversal of time, there is a seperate rule which prevents a reversal of time in any case where the weak interaction is involved.
Not to mention, that generally in science when we come up against a Law, we try to find an error in our data or thinking BEFORE claiming the law is invalid.
Good!
I hope you do well. I know there are lawyers out there doing the right thing, and I agree that the best way to fix things is from the inside. I also agree it's too difficult to understand.
Most of the legally minded people I know are good people, they just fail to see what they could do with what they have. They don't understand what anything really means - they grasp the law, but not it's ramifications for regular people.
And I'll go easy on lawyers now that I know a "good" one.
You forgot the fundraising.
The endless, endless fundraising...
unless you come pre-packaged with gobs of money.
My parents are both lawyers.
My brother is studying to be a lawyer.
My roomate is going to law school next year (wants to do IP).
I have innumerable other friends and aquantainces who want to be lawyers.
The common thread between them all?
The main reason they want to practice law is to make money.
I have yet to meet someone who wants to practice law simply to help people. So, when the legal profession gets a soul, I'll be there to back them up. Until then, I reserve the right to lawyer bash (I like my friends so I keep it to a respectable minimum... about the same abount of flak they give me for studying physics).
My lawyer bashing tends to be along the lines that in an ideal society we wouldn't need lawyers (but with a fat chance of us ever developing an ideal society), and that historically speaking, law is an exclusive field, developed in England to maintain the monopoly of the government by the upper class.
They usually point out then that with my extra two years of graduate school, I will be making all of negative $30,000 compared to them by that time.
Alpha (the fine structure constant) is the charge of an electron squared, divided by h-bar times c.
Any change in alpha would hint at either a chnage in the charge of an electron (in Coulombs - also a man-made construct), h-bar (and erg-second) or c (meters per second). Now the thing that really blows your mind is that all of these constants are interdependant. A change in one MUST cause a change in another, or terrible things like electrons with no detectable mass will appear. This is why people think alpha is a good number, because even with changes it should remain constant.
Simply because all of these constants depend ultimately on how long a meter is, and a meter is measured using c... we would never notice a change in c. We would only be able to notice the relative change in alpha. A change in alpha would signal a lot of difficulties in quantum theory.
For those of you who have actually read the article, and know something about the changes in physics he is proposing:
I fear that the poor man has forgotten about entropy (chaos, whatever you want to call it). It seems silly these days to even suggest that you could predict such complex systems as those he suggests (free will?). Non linear dynamics is not solely based on equasions and "old" math. It is very much rooted in computation, iteration, cellular structure and the like. However, I will absolutely read his book. If he turns out to be right... well, that would be something.
If the whole book is full of his explainations along the lines that:
"I can just do them and can know absolutely - definitively - I got the right answer and understand what's going on."
without some sort evidence to back it up, that's a different story.
I agree that before Mars, we have to do other, more economically suitable things.
You must have missed the authors of the bill agreeing with us though.
Finding 11:
"While the ultimate goal of human space flight in the inner solar system is the exploration of the planet Mars, there are other important goals for exploration of the inner solar system that will advance our scientific understanding and allow the United States to develop and demonstrate capabilities that will be needed for the scientific exploration and eventual settlement of Mars."
This is the only time in the bill that the settlement of Mars, or even a permanant base on Mars is discussed. They suggest, prior to that, setting up a base on the moon, at the L1 and L2 points in the Earth orbit, and on a moon of Mars, in addition to exploring some NEAs for potential refueling stations or bases. I think they are delusional if they think we can accomplish all that in the time frame they suggest, but thier steps and expectations are otherwise reasonable.
In the next hundred years or so, we should develop the necessary economics to at least attempt a large part of this plan. Technology will likely stay ahead of funding and politics. The real problem with this bill isn't where they want to end up, or how they want to get there, it's that they're attempting to do too much, too soon.
If we learned anything from the moon missions, it's that simply getting somewhere isn't enough. Just as you imply, the point is to get there and stay, not get there, turn around and go back.
True, true.
For all these years, people who have been opponents of gun control kept yelling and screaming that when you take away one right, the others are right behind.
I guess we were right.