I don't know about geeks or hacking but...
on
A Good Summer Read?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I highly recommend the Dark Tower series, starting with The Gunslinger, by Stephen King. It kinda sorta falls into the class of sci-fi, but it is also a fantasy type of book. So maybe not your exact genre, but if you like that type of book you would probably like this one.
One day, we will be able to apply a photonic band gap material to the surrounding area of the LED material itself. This will hopefully reduce the wasted heat, and instead perfectly reflect those photons back at the LED material, where they can be reabsorbed and then remitted till they get emitted in the right direction. This could increase the efficiency to near 95+%.
The worst is when you submit, it gets rejected, and then the same story gets accepted a few days later. And worse than that is when it gets ACCEPTED, and then never gets posted because another editor posted a similar article. Ah, the bitter taste of frustration...
It's not just the Republicans that are in cahoots with the RIAA- the Democrats are just as bad. Even if we had a different executive administration, the RIAA would still have governmental support in cases like this. How can the American public's voice be heard when its elected officials repeated do not accurately represent them, and kowtow to corporate interests? What can be done?
Man, that is OLD school. My first computer experience was in '81 or '82 at the local library on a TRS-80, playing 'Hunt the Wampus' and I think "Ice Climber" or some such thing. Anyone else remember this system and its games?
This is funny- yesterday I was picking up a print out here in the Physics Department, and I happened to notice a stray copy of this article lying next to the printer. It is a super easy read for anyone versed in physics up to the intro-graduate level, and took up just 1 or 2 pages. The beautiful thing about this experiment is that it SCALES- in other words it works for very very small things (think nanomotors) and larger things (macroscopic systems, like the actual experimental setup). Just a beautiful piece of physics literature.
Beautiful movie- a visual tone poem. Produced by Francis Ford Coppola, directed by Goddfrey Reggio, with music by Philip Glass. Unbelieveable. Rent it from your library and sit in a dark room with a good sound system.
My depend on which department. In every physics department I have been in, the individual professors choose which book, though usually they tend to use the same book as the previous professor. This is much less true at the graduate level, though there are exceptions (J.D. Jackson's Classical Electrodynamics comes to mind, the scourge of physics grad students across the world). My point is that no one is TELLING them which book to use- and if they use the same one as the last guy, it could be because it is just easier to do that as far as creating solutions, assigning what problems, etc.
Isn't it true that an electron microscope is not really seeing the sample? Rather, it is observing the density of states, which is then 'translated' into an image on a monitor. Anyone else have any idea about what I am talking about? Someone told me this a while back and it seemed to make sense.
Also, anyone have any idea what the magnification reached was? If they are measuring sub-nm features, that would be about an order of magnitude or two improvement on the best electron microscopes out there. BUT it doesn't seem that it will provide the same kind of image, just as an AFM doesn't do what an SEM does, which is different from a TEM. It will be another tool to do imaging for specific samples looking for specific features of the properties of said sample. But I guess that goes without saying.
Well, I have seen people use either Mathematic OR Matlab, but usually not both. I am a big proponet of Mathematica, and use it on almost all of my problem sets. My advisor also uses it instead of Matlab- I am inclined to say that there is a slight preference for Mathematica over Matlab, but then again, everyone in my research group has ties to the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, which is where Stephen Wolfram invented Mathematica, and where Wolfram Research is based. Dr. Wolfram was a professor at the UIUC Physics Dept.
When I come across a more specific problem that requires large arrays, I have resorted to using a combination of C/C++ code compiled on a UNIX box with the LAPACK package. This has been rare for me to do, the last time being about 3 or 4 years ago, but it was something that Mathematica could not due easily nor quickly. I don't want to reinvent the wheel, so if it happens that something is out there already coded, and I just need to tweak the code and compile, I will resort to that in place of Mathematica.
For quickie stuff, like generating a table of values to input to some kind of program, I tend to code something in either quickbasic for Mac, or something in C on a Unix box. If it is really simple, I will even use (gulp!) Excel. So, I use whatever will get that which I am trying to accomplish most quickly and efficiently. There is no one size fits all mathematical package/program/method for Physics.
Ha ha. Colombia has been a democracy since the early 19th century. And while it has it problems now, the government has been continuous since the beginning, which is more than can be said for its neighbors. So maybe its not impressive due to a lack of knowledge on the part of./ readers, or better yet, the American public in general.
By the way, the terror to drug link in Afghanistan? 80% of your coke and heroin is coming from Colombia. Betcha didn't know that either.
For flamebait, we have a pretty interesting discussion going on here! I have a pet peeve about people that can't spell the name of South America's oldest democracy correctly.
How could this be modded to informative? What a bunch of useless tripe. First of all, it's not Columbia, it's ColOmbia, there is no u. Colombia is the country in South America that controls the.co domain, and I don't believe the National University of Colombia owns it- almost all Colombian newspapers and media are using the.co domain. Columbia is the name of various cities, counties, rivers, etc. in the United States- notice the 'u', and is not to be confused with Colombia the country.
that the next Star Wars won't suck like the last two? I don't want to be a troll or flamebaiter here, but this seems like another step by Lucas towards films that exclusively rely on their special effects rather than plot. Whatever happened to the director that put together American Graffiti, and the original Star Wars trilogy, parts of which were heavily influenced by Kurosawa? I mean, I'd even take the George Lucas that produced the first two Indiana Jones movies, but this tripe of the last few years... ugh. No character development, no REAL excitement, nothing of substance underneath those spectacular special effects.
Well, all the Pauli stuff people have been bringing up before is just one example. Unfortunatley, I am not a theorist- I am an experimentalist. As much as I'd like to debate the finer points of quantum mechanics, I really can't- I just know how to use it, not how to predict how much more difficult it would be to use quantum entanglement to transport the wavefunction of a fermion from point A to point B. As for the boson thing, you are right, but the fact is that anything we would want to transport is fermionic (is that a word?). People are fermions, food is fermions, computers are fermions, STUFF is basically fermions. That is why I am saying that is still a far cry from the teleportation seen in Star Trek. I'm not saying it's impossible, I am saying it would be more difficult because the quantum mechanics for fermions is fundamentally different from that of bosons; ditto with the statistical mechanics. Given this fact, it seems likely that what works for bosons in this case might not necessarily work for fermions.
Yeah the problem with that is that if you wanted to transport a living organism, which is composed of a gazillion different molecules and elements, how are you going to transfer its wavefunction to something else? Photons are everywhere; the chemicals found in a single bacteria are very unlikely to be where you want them to be so as to receive the wavefunction via quantum entanglement. But doesn't this work via annhiliation anyways? You would have to do something very funky to fermions en masse to allow this to work.
Photons are massless particles. They are part of a large class of particles known as bosons. All particles are either bosons or fermions. Most massive particles with which we are familiar are fermions. These include electrons, neutrons, and protons, the basic building blocks of matter. Quarks too. Bosons are the particles that mediate the four forces between the fermions. Photons, for instance, are the carrier of the electromagnetic interaction. Gravitons are the bosons that give rise to the gravitational interaction.
My point? It is one thing to teleport a photon, which is a massless boson. It is quite another thing to teleport a massive fermion, let alone a collection of them as would be found in any massive object of appreciable size. The physics of teleportation would most likely be very different, since the quantum mechanics and statistics of bosons are quite different from those of fermions. So don't get your hopes up yet regarding teleportation a la Star Trek.
Slashdot Mirror
I highly recommend the Dark Tower series, starting with The Gunslinger, by Stephen King. It kinda sorta falls into the class of sci-fi, but it is also a fantasy type of book. So maybe not your exact genre, but if you like that type of book you would probably like this one.
One day, we will be able to apply a photonic band gap material to the surrounding area of the LED material itself. This will hopefully reduce the wasted heat, and instead perfectly reflect those photons back at the LED material, where they can be reabsorbed and then remitted till they get emitted in the right direction. This could increase the efficiency to near 95+%.
The worst is when you submit, it gets rejected, and then the same story gets accepted a few days later. And worse than that is when it gets ACCEPTED, and then never gets posted because another editor posted a similar article. Ah, the bitter taste of frustration...
It's not just the Republicans that are in cahoots with the RIAA- the Democrats are just as bad. Even if we had a different executive administration, the RIAA would still have governmental support in cases like this. How can the American public's voice be heard when its elected officials repeated do not accurately represent them, and kowtow to corporate interests? What can be done?
Man, that is OLD school. My first computer experience was in '81 or '82 at the local library on a TRS-80, playing 'Hunt the Wampus' and I think "Ice Climber" or some such thing. Anyone else remember this system and its games?
These electrons... should be hit with shoes.
This is funny- yesterday I was picking up a print out here in the Physics Department, and I happened to notice a stray copy of this article lying next to the printer. It is a super easy read for anyone versed in physics up to the intro-graduate level, and took up just 1 or 2 pages. The beautiful thing about this experiment is that it SCALES- in other words it works for very very small things (think nanomotors) and larger things (macroscopic systems, like the actual experimental setup). Just a beautiful piece of physics literature.
Beautiful movie- a visual tone poem. Produced by Francis Ford Coppola, directed by Goddfrey Reggio, with music by Philip Glass. Unbelieveable. Rent it from your library and sit in a dark room with a good sound system.
It seems that ./ readers do not also read Stephen King novels... but thanks for the mod!!! ;-)
Whatever you do, stay away from guys with the initials RF.
My depend on which department. In every physics department I have been in, the individual professors choose which book, though usually they tend to use the same book as the previous professor. This is much less true at the graduate level, though there are exceptions (J.D. Jackson's Classical Electrodynamics comes to mind, the scourge of physics grad students across the world). My point is that no one is TELLING them which book to use- and if they use the same one as the last guy, it could be because it is just easier to do that as far as creating solutions, assigning what problems, etc.
Isn't it true that an electron microscope is not really seeing the sample? Rather, it is observing the density of states, which is then 'translated' into an image on a monitor. Anyone else have any idea about what I am talking about? Someone told me this a while back and it seemed to make sense. Also, anyone have any idea what the magnification reached was? If they are measuring sub-nm features, that would be about an order of magnitude or two improvement on the best electron microscopes out there. BUT it doesn't seem that it will provide the same kind of image, just as an AFM doesn't do what an SEM does, which is different from a TEM. It will be another tool to do imaging for specific samples looking for specific features of the properties of said sample. But I guess that goes without saying.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! Funny, mod that shit up! Leibniz! GET IT?
can it find the wavefunction in problem 12.3 in Merzbacher? Goddamn Hilbert spaces!
When I come across a more specific problem that requires large arrays, I have resorted to using a combination of C/C++ code compiled on a UNIX box with the LAPACK package. This has been rare for me to do, the last time being about 3 or 4 years ago, but it was something that Mathematica could not due easily nor quickly. I don't want to reinvent the wheel, so if it happens that something is out there already coded, and I just need to tweak the code and compile, I will resort to that in place of Mathematica.
For quickie stuff, like generating a table of values to input to some kind of program, I tend to code something in either quickbasic for Mac, or something in C on a Unix box. If it is really simple, I will even use (gulp!) Excel. So, I use whatever will get that which I am trying to accomplish most quickly and efficiently. There is no one size fits all mathematical package/program/method for Physics.
Ha ha. Colombia has been a democracy since the early 19th century. And while it has it problems now, the government has been continuous since the beginning, which is more than can be said for its neighbors. So maybe its not impressive due to a lack of knowledge on the part of ./ readers, or better yet, the American public in general.
By the way, the terror to drug link in Afghanistan? 80% of your coke and heroin is coming from Colombia. Betcha didn't know that either.
For flamebait, we have a pretty interesting discussion going on here! I have a pet peeve about people that can't spell the name of South America's oldest democracy correctly.
How could this be modded to informative? What a bunch of useless tripe. First of all, it's not Columbia, it's ColOmbia, there is no u. Colombia is the country in South America that controls the .co domain, and I don't believe the National University of Colombia owns it- almost all Colombian newspapers and media are using the .co domain. Columbia is the name of various cities, counties, rivers, etc. in the United States- notice the 'u', and is not to be confused with Colombia the country.
Well, maybe then they can insert it into Britney's genome.
I see your Schwarz is as big as mine...
But they ARE spectacular...
Well, all the Pauli stuff people have been bringing up before is just one example. Unfortunatley, I am not a theorist- I am an experimentalist. As much as I'd like to debate the finer points of quantum mechanics, I really can't- I just know how to use it, not how to predict how much more difficult it would be to use quantum entanglement to transport the wavefunction of a fermion from point A to point B. As for the boson thing, you are right, but the fact is that anything we would want to transport is fermionic (is that a word?). People are fermions, food is fermions, computers are fermions, STUFF is basically fermions. That is why I am saying that is still a far cry from the teleportation seen in Star Trek. I'm not saying it's impossible, I am saying it would be more difficult because the quantum mechanics for fermions is fundamentally different from that of bosons; ditto with the statistical mechanics. Given this fact, it seems likely that what works for bosons in this case might not necessarily work for fermions.
Yeah the problem with that is that if you wanted to transport a living organism, which is composed of a gazillion different molecules and elements, how are you going to transfer its wavefunction to something else? Photons are everywhere; the chemicals found in a single bacteria are very unlikely to be where you want them to be so as to receive the wavefunction via quantum entanglement. But doesn't this work via annhiliation anyways? You would have to do something very funky to fermions en masse to allow this to work.
My point? It is one thing to teleport a photon, which is a massless boson. It is quite another thing to teleport a massive fermion, let alone a collection of them as would be found in any massive object of appreciable size. The physics of teleportation would most likely be very different, since the quantum mechanics and statistics of bosons are quite different from those of fermions. So don't get your hopes up yet regarding teleportation a la Star Trek.
Maybe, but playing quake, counterstrike, and battlefield with that kind of lag is going to SUCK.