Sure, most students on receiving these notes will just print them, but there are some advantages to having the notes available in electronic format. Once electronicized the notes can be made available to students into the future, but photocopied notes won't be available to future years. I've taken courses where the previous lecturer's notes were more useful than those of the lecturer giving the course in my year.
Come on, storage is cheap these days, so even scanned PDF's aren't prihibitively large. Various journals have their archives as scanned pages, from when they were produced by less electronic means, and the filesizes, although around 10 times the size of pucker electronic files, are not so large that they strain the bandwidth of an academic network connection.
Actually it's the other way around: You CANNOT build 'quantum' repeaters, and switches/routers would be pretty hard without being able to read the stream(reading it would change the data inside the stream, which is a big no-no).
You may be right, but CANNOT is pretty strong language. I can see that one cannot "read" the data without collapsing the wavefunction, but I wonder if one cannot create further entanglements that copy the information or otherwise permit manipulation of the data streams inside a sealed Schroedinger box.
That would violate what in quantum mechanics is called the no-cloning theorem. It is possible to prove that a quantum state cannot be duplicated. The classic reference is: Wootters, W. K., and W. H. Zurek, 1982, ''A single quantum
cannot be cloned,'' Nature (London) 299, 802-803.
For me, the best feature of gnuplot was the pslatex terminal, which allows you to let LaTeX take care of typesetting the labels, legends and so forth, making the graph you include look much more integrated into your document than including just a plain.eps exported from some other software. Apparently there is now also an epslatex terminal, and I would be interested to find out what benefits using this instead has.
On a side note, xfig allows the creation of simple diagrams with LaTeX formatted captions. Together, these programs take care of making the prettiest figures in your document, though I'd like to know about any other software that produces split PostScript/LaTeX files.
If I attempt to perform a calculation in my head, I can often see the tricks to make it doable, but can't hold on to more than a couple of intermediate values. Particularly if I'm trying to keep track of mantissas and exponents at the same time. I usually need some random access storage (pen and paper) to hold the temporary variables.
Who remembers things like "off disk copy protection", or disks that were purposely damaged to as to be uncopyable?...most people... had to put up with looking up codes in manuals or long load times (because of drives choking on bad sectors). There was a backlash, and now you don't see that anymore...
Pretty much every PC game these days comes with a CD you need in the drive when it runs, probably using something like SafeDisc or SecuROM. Admittedly, you can often get round the protection by finding a crack or a program like Alcohol 120%, but not an awful lot has really changed. And these protected discs usually end up breaking the CD-ROM standards, so people can have problems if their hardware is slightly unusual, or they scratch the disc slightly.
Not to troll but... this technique has been used for years!
Indeed, Chu took the 1997 Nobel prize in physics along with Phillips and Cohen-Tannoudji. The Nobel site includes an illustrated presentation of how laser cooling works.
The energy from the absorbed laser photons is not lost, so there is a heating effect somewhere. The experimental setups are clever enough that the atoms are cooled, but since each atom in the process of being cooled reradiates as many photons in random directions as it absorbs, these are free to go off and heat things up. In a typical experiment, they will hit the stainless steel walls of the vacuum chamber and heat them up very slightly.
In case anyone is interested, thermodynamics isn't violated either. The decrease in entropy (disorder) of the cooled atoms is more than matched by the large increase in entropy of the photons, which go from being in a highly ordered coherent beam with high mode occupancy to being in all sorts of random modes with no coherence.
Is this related to Compton scattering (usually between an electron and a photon)?
It isn't particularly related, except that the ideas of quantum mechanics that are demonstrated in the Compton effect are important for understanding laser cooling.
Compton scattering is an elastic collision of a photon (usually a rather high energy one, like an X-ray) and an electron. The target electron is initially a free stationary particle.
Laser cooling involves the absorption of a photon (probably visible or infra-red) by an atom, which has been brought into resonance with that photon by a Doppler shift (and possible also a Zeeman shift in an magneto-optical trap or MOT). Therefore one of the electrons in that atom is promoted to a higher energy level. The atom stays in such an excited state until spontaneously decaying, releasing another photon in a random direction. The cooling occurs because the momentum of all the photons absorbed act to slow the atom down (or push it to the centre of a trap in a MOT), but the photons emitted can go in any direction so have no net effect.
Okay, well on Windows the Update system tends to be reasonably easy (except for the rebooting), but it only manages to patch Windows itself. What about all the other software you have installed? Most Linux distributions will patch all the other software you happen to use along with the OS and GUI, so you can get patching your entire system down to a single command.
An Access database (usually a.mdb file) is just a binary file.... You can fit a small Access database on a floppy....
Are you aware that the data in a MySQL database can be ripped out to a file with the mysqldump command? Okay, perhaps passing it through bzip2 or similar will improve the odds of fitting it on a floppy.
And an Access database in an MDB file is hardly standalone, you still need a machine running Access to get much use out of it.
We use some type of fancy sensor to convert a real world analog signal to digital information, then we convert the digital information back to analog to humans can understand it intuitively?
You pretty much described every electronice device in the world that has a user interface.
What about analog(ue) electronics? An older oscilloscope doesn't work with digital signals. It's mostly a whole load of op-amps.
RTCW was the last game I'm ever buying from id/activision, as the CD key never let me connect for multiplayer, and I emailed about it and never got a response.
I don't really see why storing discs horizontally should matter. I can see it would be bad to have a huge pile of them as the weight of all the ones on top might squash the ones underneath. Though a jewel case ought to help with that quite a lot. And in a storage rack, the cases sit on individual supports anyway.
The only thing I can think of is that the CD, supported only at its centre in a jewel case, might very slowly bend under the weight of the edges, becoming slightly convex as viewed from above. This wouldn't happen if the CD were vertical.
Actually, there are innuendo-free reasons to want to keep one hand free.
I'm right-handed, but sometimes switch the mouse to my left hand, as I can point and click my way around the web, and write (pen and paper) with my right hand simultaneously.
I'd quite like a keyboard that only needs one hand (but isn't too choosy about which one) so that when in keyboard mode I could still scribble diagrams and maths, or drink coffee.
Plus giving one hand a rest sometimes is probably an RSI bonus.
On a side note, am I unusual in preferring to operate a computer using soley a mouse (browsing), or soley a keyboard (coding), but never liking to use both simultaneously?
My guiltiest pleasure is probably playing all through the evening, night, and some of the next morning in a marathon gaming session, and not getting any work done the next day due to the eventual need for sleep.
About the only reason to use MP3 anymore is if you're married to Linux/MacOS.
Huh? If you're married to Linux, you probably go the whole open-source, patent-free hog and go with OGG. And if you're married to MacOS you probably like iTMS and AAC.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, most students on receiving these notes will just print them, but there are some advantages to having the notes available in electronic format. Once electronicized the notes can be made available to students into the future, but photocopied notes won't be available to future years. I've taken courses where the previous lecturer's notes were more useful than those of the lecturer giving the course in my year.
Come on, storage is cheap these days, so even scanned PDF's aren't prihibitively large. Various journals have their archives as scanned pages, from when they were produced by less electronic means, and the filesizes, although around 10 times the size of pucker electronic files, are not so large that they strain the bandwidth of an academic network connection.
That would violate what in quantum mechanics is called the no-cloning theorem. It is possible to prove that a quantum state cannot be duplicated. The classic reference is: Wootters, W. K., and W. H. Zurek, 1982, ''A single quantum cannot be cloned,'' Nature (London) 299, 802-803.
You're clearly not a true geek.
For me, the best feature of gnuplot was the pslatex terminal, which allows you to let LaTeX take care of typesetting the labels, legends and so forth, making the graph you include look much more integrated into your document than including just a plain .eps exported from some other software. Apparently there is now also an epslatex terminal, and I would be interested to find out what benefits using this instead has.
On a side note, xfig allows the creation of simple diagrams with LaTeX formatted captions. Together, these programs take care of making the prettiest figures in your document, though I'd like to know about any other software that produces split PostScript/LaTeX files.
It's not exactly surprising that they waste complexity on an ATM when they have this bloated Flash website.
If I attempt to perform a calculation in my head, I can often see the tricks to make it doable, but can't hold on to more than a couple of intermediate values. Particularly if I'm trying to keep track of mantissas and exponents at the same time. I usually need some random access storage (pen and paper) to hold the temporary variables.
Pretty much every PC game these days comes with a CD you need in the drive when it runs, probably using something like SafeDisc or SecuROM. Admittedly, you can often get round the protection by finding a crack or a program like Alcohol 120%, but not an awful lot has really changed. And these protected discs usually end up breaking the CD-ROM standards, so people can have problems if their hardware is slightly unusual, or they scratch the disc slightly.
Except that 2 has only a single prime factor, namely 2. 1 is not a prime number. (Explanation here.)
Indeed, Chu took the 1997 Nobel prize in physics along with Phillips and Cohen-Tannoudji. The Nobel site includes an illustrated presentation of how laser cooling works.
The energy from the absorbed laser photons is not lost, so there is a heating effect somewhere. The experimental setups are clever enough that the atoms are cooled, but since each atom in the process of being cooled reradiates as many photons in random directions as it absorbs, these are free to go off and heat things up. In a typical experiment, they will hit the stainless steel walls of the vacuum chamber and heat them up very slightly.
In case anyone is interested, thermodynamics isn't violated either. The decrease in entropy (disorder) of the cooled atoms is more than matched by the large increase in entropy of the photons, which go from being in a highly ordered coherent beam with high mode occupancy to being in all sorts of random modes with no coherence.
It isn't particularly related, except that the ideas of quantum mechanics that are demonstrated in the Compton effect are important for understanding laser cooling.
Compton scattering is an elastic collision of a photon (usually a rather high energy one, like an X-ray) and an electron. The target electron is initially a free stationary particle.
Laser cooling involves the absorption of a photon (probably visible or infra-red) by an atom, which has been brought into resonance with that photon by a Doppler shift (and possible also a Zeeman shift in an magneto-optical trap or MOT). Therefore one of the electrons in that atom is promoted to a higher energy level. The atom stays in such an excited state until spontaneously decaying, releasing another photon in a random direction. The cooling occurs because the momentum of all the photons absorbed act to slow the atom down (or push it to the centre of a trap in a MOT), but the photons emitted can go in any direction so have no net effect.
Okay, well on Windows the Update system tends to be reasonably easy (except for the rebooting), but it only manages to patch Windows itself. What about all the other software you have installed? Most Linux distributions will patch all the other software you happen to use along with the OS and GUI, so you can get patching your entire system down to a single command.
Are you aware that the data in a MySQL database can be ripped out to a file with the mysqldump command? Okay, perhaps passing it through bzip2 or similar will improve the odds of fitting it on a floppy.
And an Access database in an MDB file is hardly standalone, you still need a machine running Access to get much use out of it.
What about analog(ue) electronics? An older oscilloscope doesn't work with digital signals. It's mostly a whole load of op-amps.
I guess you consider '$' as a good representation of a monster?
But '$' would be an an awful representation of a monster. Monsters should be shown as alphabetic characters.
RTCW was the last game I'm ever buying from id/activision, as the CD key never let me connect for multiplayer, and I emailed about it and never got a response.
Sorry, just wanted to bitch.
I don't really see why storing discs horizontally should matter. I can see it would be bad to have a huge pile of them as the weight of all the ones on top might squash the ones underneath. Though a jewel case ought to help with that quite a lot. And in a storage rack, the cases sit on individual supports anyway.
The only thing I can think of is that the CD, supported only at its centre in a jewel case, might very slowly bend under the weight of the edges, becoming slightly convex as viewed from above. This wouldn't happen if the CD were vertical.
No, Helium-2 could possible exist, it would just have two protons and zero neutrons. ... But how exactly do you get an anti-neutron?
IANANPAIAAAP (I am not a nuclear physicist although I am an atomic physicist)
I think that He-2 can't exist as it can't form a bound state at all, not even a really unstable one.
As for an anti-neutron, just get two d-bar quarks and an u-bar quark and put them in a 1/2 spin state...
Now they want me to pay for the air in the tires?
The last time I put air in my tyres, it cost me 10p. Money well spent. Still, I'm glad I can breathe the standard-pressure air that is still free.
Actually, there are innuendo-free reasons to want to keep one hand free.
I'm right-handed, but sometimes switch the mouse to my left hand, as I can point and click my way around the web, and write (pen and paper) with my right hand simultaneously.
I'd quite like a keyboard that only needs one hand (but isn't too choosy about which one) so that when in keyboard mode I could still scribble diagrams and maths, or drink coffee.
Plus giving one hand a rest sometimes is probably an RSI bonus.
On a side note, am I unusual in preferring to operate a computer using soley a mouse (browsing), or soley a keyboard (coding), but never liking to use both simultaneously?
Amongst my friends, when we're in the pub, the only permitted uses of a mobile phone are:
My guiltiest pleasure is probably playing all through the evening, night, and some of the next morning in a marathon gaming session, and not getting any work done the next day due to the eventual need for sleep.
If you would like support by phone, press 1.
If you would not like support by phone, press 2.
While you wait for someone to tell you to reboot your computer, please hold and listen to some muzak.
Huh? If you're married to Linux, you probably go the whole open-source, patent-free hog and go with OGG. And if you're married to MacOS you probably like iTMS and AAC.
Isn't the average IQ 100 by definition?