Look at it this way: most (all?) libraries have photocopy machines in them, which can be used legally (just as shared folders may be used to distribute uncopyrighted material), or to make illegal copies of the copyrighted material stored in the library.
Can the library be sued by publishers for making it possible for others to violate the law and copy, without any evidence that such violations have actually taken place? If a publishing house sends an agent who copies one of their own books, is that evidence that a violation has occurred?
We asked Murray if he intends to stay on Usmanov's back. He replied: "There is room on Usmanov's back for an awful lot of people. You could get even more on his stomach, and possibly lose some under the overlap of his chins."
The result was that higher energy photons arrived later, and therefore (IF they were emitted at the same time) moved slower, not faster (which is what adding a mass would do).
There is no even remotely conventional way to explain such a result.
First of all, this observation is FAR more likely to be due to variations at the source (which may have simply emitted the high-energy photons a little later than the low energy ones) then to some huge new discovery.
Second, if this really is due to fundamental physics, it's a violation of Lorentz invariance (special relativity) and it would be about the best possible *disconfirmation* of string theory you could ask for (IAAST). If there's one basic prediction of string theory, it's Lorentz invariance (the Ellis-Nanopolous stuff is, in just about every other physicist's opinion, nonsense).
But it goes much further than string theory. Lorentz invariance is something physicists - not just string theorists - are almost certain is true, and for good reason. It's been extremely well-tested in many different ways over the years and just about all our modern theories rely on it to constrain what might be possible. Without Lorentz invariance, the rules of the game shift fundamentally, so if this observation turns out to mean it isn't exact it's very, very important.
...suing the Red Cross for trademark infringement is unbelievably stupid. Few people are going to bother to RTFA and find out that there might actually be some legitimate dispute here. Instead, they're simply going to hear that a huge rich multinational drug company is suing a charitable organization to stop them from using their own symbol. It's hard to imagine worse PR than that. Whatever minimal financial gain a successful suit might bring will be massively outweighed by the bad publicity, possible boycotts, lowered employee morale, etc.
It's fascinating how such incredibly bad decisions get made. Maybe they've hired Donald Rumsfeld as an advisor?
You're trying to draw a binary distinction where none exists - that if we "catch" some dark matter that would mean we know for sure it exists, but until then it has the same status as ID.
That's simply nonsense - a direct detection of DM would mean you built a detector and it registered some hits. Assuming the particles detected had the correct properties, that would be taken by most as confirmation of the existence of DM - but you could assail it on precisely the same grounds, that scientists interpreted that as evidence for DM only because the can't imagine other explanations, etc.
The point is, all you can ever do is accumulate evidence for or against theories. At some point the evidence becomes convincing and the theory generally accepted, but it's not an either/or situation - it's gradual. There is massive evidence for DM, from all sorts of different observations. Direct detection would be additional very strong evidence, but the theory is already on a pretty firm foundation (and people have thought of MANY other possibilities, by the way - it's just that none of them are consistent with the data).
The originator of this theory (http://www.electric-cosmos.org/) is a total nutjob, at least judging by that website. As one of many examples I could pick he states (about astrophysicists):
"They rarely take any courses in electrodynamic field theory, and thus they try to explain every new discovery via gravity, magnetism, and fluid dynamics which is all they understand."
Which is interesting since every astro Ph.D. program that I know of has an advanced course in electrodynamics as a basic requirement. Not to mention that "magnetism" is simply one aspect of electrodynamics...
Why is slashdot wasting its precious collective time discussing cranks?
Among the 50 illegal games, 26 are pirated game software including Age of Mythology: the Titans, The Sims 2, Manhunt, FIFA 2005, Battlefield Vietnam and Painkiller: Battle out of Hell. The remaining are illegally distributed foreign games including Conflict Vietnam, Vietcong: Fist Alpha and Devastation.
It's quite clear from the text that they are NOT banning these games because of some political agenda (at least not the 26 games in the first category). They're not banning the games at all, per se. They're just banning the sale of some widely distributed illegal copies. Having been in China recently, I can tell you that it's easy to purchase pirated software (even in relatively large stores), and they are try to crack down (or at least make it look that way).
From the article:
"The major search engines all return a mix of regular results, based solely on relevance to the search terms entered, and sponsored links, for which a Web site had paid money to get displayed more prominently."
The thing is, I've read that many websites hire consultants to try to increase their ranking in the "free" results, rather than paying google or whomever directly. So the distinction is a bit vauge anyway.
His argument, at least based on the text of his talk (with no equations - the only thing I had available) makes no sense. First, he reminds us that black holes swallow things, that is, in BH spacetimes the final state is independent of the initial state. That's true, nad it's essentially the statement of the info paradox. Then he points out, again correctly, that trivial topologies (that is, no BH horizons) ARE unitary, that is, they preserve info.
Then comes the nonsense - he says, sum over both (a reasonable thing to do in a Euclidean gravity path integral) and that's unitary... huh??? You add unitary to non-unitary, and sorry, buddy, you get non-unitary...
The only way it would make sense is if you never sum over BH spacetimes, but that's not what he says, and anyway it would mean there are no BHs.
The author seems to be a bit cukoo himself... if you look at some of his publications on tachyons (I looked at the one about the electron neutrino being a tachyon), you see that he is more than a little crazy, not to mention has a rather weak grasp on physics. I'm amazed he managed to get it published in Physical Review. For one thing, making the rest mass of a field imaginary does NOT make the corresponding particle travel faster than light; rather, it indicates an instability in the theory, and it means that there are no particle excitations at all. If you want FTL particles, you have to change the sign of the kinetic term, which introduces all sorts of major problems and makes the theory non-unitary.
Yes, and not only physicists - many mathemeticians publish there as well. The arxiv has been around for more than 10 years now, which makes it extremely easy to look up any paper from that period - you can access them almost instantly, free of charge, as well as do global citation searches and such.
Furthermore, for the last several years many theoretical physicists have been publishing in JHEP (Journal of High Energy Physics), which is peer-reviewsd and available free of charge on the web. Since it's necessary for tenure etc. to publish in peer-reviewed journals, JHEP provides a very nice alternative to the extremely expensive paper journals. So the biologists are way behind the times...
One thing you might keep in mind is that some non-IE browsers identify themselves as IE. For example, I use Opera and usually have it set to identify at IE (because some pages won't load otherwise).
Weird that in an article about mathematics, all the people quoted (not counting Erdos) are physicists... Overbye must be too lazy to update his address book.
For some reason, that game really got into my head. I dreamed about it for weeks after I finished it, and every now and then that line will suddenly pop into my mind, a year or more later. Kind of makes you wonder what effect these games have on our unconscious.....
I think most people are missing the point when discussing global warming. The fact is, global temperatures are rising rapidly. Whether or not they are rising more rapidly than they did at some other period in history is irrelevant. It doesn't even matter so much what fraction of this effect is due to pollution. The point is, the ice caps are melting and the sea is rising, weather patterns are changing, etc. And if this process keeps going, we are screwed. Think of how many major cities in the world are on the ocean. What will happen to them if the sea level rises by 20 or 30 feet? What will happen to millions and billions of poor farmers in most of the world if the weather patterns change drastically?
So whether this change is natural or man-made, we need to figure out how, or if, we can stop it, or at least slow it down. That's where our energy should be going. Obviously, studying past patterns of weather is important for this, but let's face the fact that we have a problem and stop taking the attitude that well, if it's natural, if it happened before, it's ok.
Sorry - but we're just as wet and hungry if it's natural as if it's not!
I _do_ know about the physical processes involved, and while I'm a physicist rather than an engineer (and hence less quick at estimating these things), this idea sounds completetly loony. You'd need to transmit an enormous amount of power to move a big chunk of rock even a small distance, because the power radiated by your transmitter will fall off rapidly with distance, and the rock will only absorb a small part of the radio wave anyway (for the same reason the walls of your house don't block radio reception).
And don't forget - NASA is funding research into an anti-gravity machine too, so the fact that they may be taking this seriously is no sign that it makes any sense....
Re:Humanity's egocentrism
on
One of Many
·
· Score: 3, Informative
"Why do we seem to assume that the scale of reality is finite and coincidentally matches the same scale at which we exist? I think that based upon all of our prior fumblings we would be more likely to conclude that reality extends to a much smaller scale than the quantum and a much greater scale than that of the observible universe; even that it is infinite in both directions."
Why do you think scientists make this assumption? The quantum scale I think you're referring to is approximately 30 orders of magnitude (10^30) below the scale we are familiar with in every day life. The size of the observable universe is 30 orders above our scale. And no one is saying that's the end - you can easily construct models, which are consistent with observation, in which the final volume of the universe is infinite. As for the smallest scale, there is a natural length scale in nature. It's the only length you can make by combining the fundamental constants in nature (Planck's constant, the speed of light, and the gravitational constant), and it's the very short quantum scale I referred to above. We *do* think something special happens there, but it may or may not preclude shorter lengths from being a meaningful concept.
So certainly no practicing scientist who thinks about these issues would make the assumption that there's anything special about human scales - in fact, precisely the opposite. One of the powerful principles of modern cosmology is the idea that we do *not* live in a special time or place, and therefore that we have to explain why the conditions we inhabit are generic.
Uh... resolution does not "vary with the square of the pixel count." The pixel count is the total number of pixels, and therefore determines the resolution. It's not the number of pixels per side, or something, which is what you perhaps had in mind.
Slashdot Mirror
Look at it this way: most (all?) libraries have photocopy machines in them, which can be used legally (just as shared folders may be used to distribute uncopyrighted material), or to make illegal copies of the copyrighted material stored in the library.
Can the library be sued by publishers for making it possible for others to violate the law and copy, without any evidence that such violations have actually taken place? If a publishing house sends an agent who copies one of their own books, is that evidence that a violation has occurred?
Obviously not, and I don't see the difference.
We asked Murray if he intends to stay on Usmanov's back. He replied: "There is room on Usmanov's back for an awful lot of people. You could get even more on his stomach, and possibly lose some under the overlap of his chins."
We think that's a "yes".
There is no even remotely conventional way to explain such a result.
First of all, this observation is FAR more likely to be due to variations at the source (which may have simply emitted the high-energy photons a little later than the low energy ones) then to some huge new discovery.
Second, if this really is due to fundamental physics, it's a violation of Lorentz invariance (special relativity) and it would be about the best possible *disconfirmation* of string theory you could ask for (IAAST). If there's one basic prediction of string theory, it's Lorentz invariance (the Ellis-Nanopolous stuff is, in just about every other physicist's opinion, nonsense).
But it goes much further than string theory. Lorentz invariance is something physicists - not just string theorists - are almost certain is true, and for good reason. It's been extremely well-tested in many different ways over the years and just about all our modern theories rely on it to constrain what might be possible. Without Lorentz invariance, the rules of the game shift fundamentally, so if this observation turns out to mean it isn't exact it's very, very important.
It's fascinating how such incredibly bad decisions get made. Maybe they've hired Donald Rumsfeld as an advisor?
You're trying to draw a binary distinction where none exists - that if we "catch" some dark matter that would mean we know for sure it exists, but until then it has the same status as ID.
That's simply nonsense - a direct detection of DM would mean you built a detector and it registered some hits. Assuming the particles detected had the correct properties, that would be taken by most as confirmation of the existence of DM - but you could assail it on precisely the same grounds, that scientists interpreted that as evidence for DM only because the can't imagine other explanations, etc.
The point is, all you can ever do is accumulate evidence for or against theories. At some point the evidence becomes convincing and the theory generally accepted, but it's not an either/or situation - it's gradual. There is massive evidence for DM, from all sorts of different observations. Direct detection would be additional very strong evidence, but the theory is already on a pretty firm foundation (and people have thought of MANY other possibilities, by the way - it's just that none of them are consistent with the data).
Here's a photo:
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/9503272/
"They rarely take any courses in electrodynamic field theory, and thus they try to explain every new discovery via gravity, magnetism, and fluid dynamics which is all they understand."
Which is interesting since every astro Ph.D. program that I know of has an advanced course in electrodynamics as a basic requirement. Not to mention that "magnetism" is simply one aspect of electrodynamics...
Why is slashdot wasting its precious collective time discussing cranks?
Among the 50 illegal games, 26 are pirated game software including Age of Mythology: the Titans, The Sims 2, Manhunt, FIFA 2005, Battlefield Vietnam and Painkiller: Battle out of Hell. The remaining are illegally distributed foreign games including Conflict Vietnam, Vietcong: Fist Alpha and Devastation.
It's quite clear from the text that they are NOT banning these games because of some political agenda (at least not the 26 games in the first category). They're not banning the games at all, per se. They're just banning the sale of some widely distributed illegal copies. Having been in China recently, I can tell you that it's easy to purchase pirated software (even in relatively large stores), and they are try to crack down (or at least make it look that way).
From the article: "The major search engines all return a mix of regular results, based solely on relevance to the search terms entered, and sponsored links, for which a Web site had paid money to get displayed more prominently." The thing is, I've read that many websites hire consultants to try to increase their ranking in the "free" results, rather than paying google or whomever directly. So the distinction is a bit vauge anyway.
Then comes the nonsense - he says, sum over both (a reasonable thing to do in a Euclidean gravity path integral) and that's unitary... huh??? You add unitary to non-unitary, and sorry, buddy, you get non-unitary...
The only way it would make sense is if you never sum over BH spacetimes, but that's not what he says, and anyway it would mean there are no BHs.
Anyway, if you want a coherent, and probably correct discussion, see http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0106112
The author seems to be a bit cukoo himself... if you look at some of his publications on tachyons (I looked at the one about the electron neutrino being a tachyon), you see that he is more than a little crazy, not to mention has a rather weak grasp on physics. I'm amazed he managed to get it published in Physical Review. For one thing, making the rest mass of a field imaginary does NOT make the corresponding particle travel faster than light; rather, it indicates an instability in the theory, and it means that there are no particle excitations at all. If you want FTL particles, you have to change the sign of the kinetic term, which introduces all sorts of major problems and makes the theory non-unitary.
Yes, and not only physicists - many mathemeticians publish there as well. The arxiv has been around for more than 10 years now, which makes it extremely easy to look up any paper from that period - you can access them almost instantly, free of charge, as well as do global citation searches and such. Furthermore, for the last several years many theoretical physicists have been publishing in JHEP (Journal of High Energy Physics), which is peer-reviewsd and available free of charge on the web. Since it's necessary for tenure etc. to publish in peer-reviewed journals, JHEP provides a very nice alternative to the extremely expensive paper journals. So the biologists are way behind the times...
One thing you might keep in mind is that some non-IE browsers identify themselves as IE. For example, I use Opera and usually have it set to identify at IE (because some pages won't load otherwise).
Gee, what a surprise - a study that ATI was involved in concluded that more monitors are good...
Weird that in an article about mathematics, all the people quoted (not counting Erdos) are physicists... Overbye must be too lazy to update his address book.
For some reason, that game really got into my head. I dreamed about it for weeks after I finished it, and every now and then that line will suddenly pop into my mind, a year or more later. Kind of makes you wonder what effect these games have on our unconscious.....
So whether this change is natural or man-made, we need to figure out how, or if, we can stop it, or at least slow it down. That's where our energy should be going. Obviously, studying past patterns of weather is important for this, but let's face the fact that we have a problem and stop taking the attitude that well, if it's natural, if it happened before, it's ok. Sorry - but we're just as wet and hungry if it's natural as if it's not!
I _do_ know about the physical processes involved, and while I'm a physicist rather than an engineer (and hence less quick at estimating these things), this idea sounds completetly loony. You'd need to transmit an enormous amount of power to move a big chunk of rock even a small distance, because the power radiated by your transmitter will fall off rapidly with distance, and the rock will only absorb a small part of the radio wave anyway (for the same reason the walls of your house don't block radio reception).
And don't forget - NASA is funding research into an anti-gravity machine too, so the fact that they may be taking this seriously is no sign that it makes any sense....
"Why do we seem to assume that the scale of reality is finite and coincidentally matches the same scale at which we exist? I think that based upon all of our prior fumblings we would be more likely to conclude that reality extends to a much smaller scale than the quantum and a much greater scale than that of the observible universe; even that it is infinite in both directions."
Why do you think scientists make this assumption? The quantum scale I think you're referring to is approximately 30 orders of magnitude (10^30) below the scale we are familiar with in every day life. The size of the observable universe is 30 orders above our scale. And no one is saying that's the end - you can easily construct models, which are consistent with observation, in which the final volume of the universe is infinite. As for the smallest scale, there is a natural length scale in nature. It's the only length you can make by combining the fundamental constants in nature (Planck's constant, the speed of light, and the gravitational constant), and it's the very short quantum scale I referred to above. We *do* think something special happens there, but it may or may not preclude shorter lengths from being a meaningful concept.
So certainly no practicing scientist who thinks about these issues would make the assumption that there's anything special about human scales - in fact, precisely the opposite. One of the powerful principles of modern cosmology is the idea that we do *not* live in a special time or place, and therefore that we have to explain why the conditions we inhabit are generic.
Uh... resolution does not "vary with the square of the pixel count." The pixel count is the total number of pixels, and therefore determines the resolution. It's not the number of pixels per side, or something, which is what you perhaps had in mind.