The greater the mass, the greater the force, not the acceleration. Go and get a cannon ball and a ping-pong ball and drop them from the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. (Caveats: blah, blah, air resistance, blah, blah, higher order relativistic effects, blah, blah, apocryphal story, blah, blah...)
Buy her a drink, or tell a joke...
on
How Ice Melts
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Radiation is a consequence of the instability of the nuclei of certain atoms. The process of burning only affects the bonds between atoms, not the nuclei of individual atoms. When you burn wood, the resulting by-products do contain carbon, it's true, but only because carbon atoms existed in the wood, to start with. If you burn magnesium, for example, you get oxides of magnesium, but no carbon, because there was no carbon to start with.
There are processes which can change the nuclei of certain atoms, converting them to material which is 'less' radioactive before they're disposed of, but I'm afraid I don't have the details of them: anyone else care to contribute?
As for being flamed for asking reasonable science questions: I would hope that the majority of readers would have more contempt for the flamer than the flamee.
I'm not sure what's so great about this. I have a Motorola MPX200 'Smartphone' (my one concession to the world of Windows), with a 256MB SD card stuffed in it. It plays four or five albums of MP3s and battery life is no problem. (Ring tones are.wav files, of up to about 1MB.) OK, I can't plug it into iTunes, but that's really no big deal, is it?
What's more, with a bit of unlocking to run uncertificated apps, I have a decent music player, a good simulator of a TI scientific calc., blah, blah, blah.
It even lets me talk to other people over a digital network: whatever next?
Apparently the 'D' stands for 'day'. Try here: http://www.channel4.com/history/timeteam/2004_dday _why.html
(Remove any spaces in URL, as necessary.)
(Frankly if you can't trust Tony and the Team, who can you trust? This recommendation, of course, may mean nothing to non-UK TV viewers.)
Puppets? Puppets!
Well, thank you very much for ruining all of my childhood dreams. Besides, if they were puppets, how did they manage to help Santa every year? Huh? Huh?
Hey, wait a minute...
Waaaaaaah!
I know that my Slashdot experience is regularly ruined by the misogynistic comments of its readers, but this takes the prize. What is even worse, what really finishes it off, is that it gets scored "4: Funny". Funny? How can people so smart when it comes to matters technical be so mind-numbingly stupid when the wider world comes into play?
Whilst I agree that much (if not all) of string theory remains just that, i.e. theory, it does produce results that are strongly suggestive of an underlying truth. I just finished a degree in theoretical physics, and am about to start a PhD on cosmological implications of string theory (oh, and since this is/., I'll also mention that I'm female, since we're somewhat under-represented here!). My final-year undergrad. project looked at a string-theoretic treatment (Vafa, Strominger, et al.) of Hawking radiation, comparing it with Hawking's own treatment using quantum field theory in asymptotically flat space-time. Hawking's theory raises the problem of black-hole entropy: it can be calculated in terms of the area of the black hole, but what exactly is 'disordered' to produce this entropy? A string theoretic treatment of black holes, considering intersections of higher-dimension 'strings' ('Dirichlet branes') and the interactions of strings with boundary conditions on these branes, gives a result for the entropy of the black hole which corresponds to the quantum-field-based result, including numerical factors.
OK, so this is all quite non-trivial, but the point is that (a) I have a fair idea of what I'm talking about, up to a point, and (b) there are strong indications that string theory is pointing the way to a viable theory of quantum gravity. It may not be the right answer, it probably isn't the right answer, but just as Newtonian physics pointed the way to relativistic mechanics, and was subsumed by it, so I believe string theory will provide insights vital to the next stage in our understanding of 'how it all works'.
...I'm pretty sure I could identify a cow by forming an image of it on my retina, even if it tried to hide amongst chickens, or even sheep. If it's such a problem, couldn't ranchers just spray 'cow' in red paint on the sides of the beasts?
It seems ironic, in a rather dark way, that when I viewed this post it was accompanied by banner mini-advertisements for on-line suppliers of both ritalin and razor blades.
Slashdot Mirror
Waltzing Matilda, Waltzing Matilda...
Nice work eddm. That's a new low for Slashdot, I gotta say.
What an apposite turn of phrase.
The greater the mass, the greater the force, not the acceleration. Go and get a cannon ball and a ping-pong ball and drop them from the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. (Caveats: blah, blah, air resistance, blah, blah, higher order relativistic effects, blah, blah, apocryphal story, blah, blah...)
...that's generally how I get the ice to melt.
Yep, have to agree with the AC on this one.
Wasn't this generation's Cold Fusion, Cold Fusion?
God drinks sake? So desu ne.
Actually, Google is a plaything of the international lesbian conspiracy. But I've said too much...
Radiation is a consequence of the instability of the nuclei of certain atoms. The process of burning only affects the bonds between atoms, not the nuclei of individual atoms. When you burn wood, the resulting by-products do contain carbon, it's true, but only because carbon atoms existed in the wood, to start with. If you burn magnesium, for example, you get oxides of magnesium, but no carbon, because there was no carbon to start with. There are processes which can change the nuclei of certain atoms, converting them to material which is 'less' radioactive before they're disposed of, but I'm afraid I don't have the details of them: anyone else care to contribute? As for being flamed for asking reasonable science questions: I would hope that the majority of readers would have more contempt for the flamer than the flamee.
I'm not sure what's so great about this. I have a Motorola MPX200 'Smartphone' (my one concession to the world of Windows), with a 256MB SD card stuffed in it. It plays four or five albums of MP3s and battery life is no problem. (Ring tones are .wav files, of up to about 1MB.) OK, I can't plug it into iTunes, but that's really no big deal, is it?
What's more, with a bit of unlocking to run uncertificated apps, I have a decent music player, a good simulator of a TI scientific calc., blah, blah, blah.
It even lets me talk to other people over a digital network: whatever next?
...must have really sucked. I wonder what happened to the director (or, at least, to his body)?
Apparently the 'D' stands for 'day'. Try here: http://www.channel4.com/history/timeteam/2004_dday _why.html
(Remove any spaces in URL, as necessary.)
(Frankly if you can't trust Tony and the Team, who can you trust? This recommendation, of course, may mean nothing to non-UK TV viewers.)
Yeah, that's "lets". (Preview-schmeview.)
about:config also let's you change the 'Mozilla' bit, too. Mozzerella Seasquid here.
Puppets? Puppets! Well, thank you very much for ruining all of my childhood dreams. Besides, if they were puppets, how did they manage to help Santa every year? Huh? Huh? Hey, wait a minute... Waaaaaaah!
That's 'amphibian'.
I know that my Slashdot experience is regularly ruined by the misogynistic comments of its readers, but this takes the prize. What is even worse, what really finishes it off, is that it gets scored "4: Funny". Funny? How can people so smart when it comes to matters technical be so mind-numbingly stupid when the wider world comes into play?
Whilst I agree that much (if not all) of string theory remains just that, i.e. theory, it does produce results that are strongly suggestive of an underlying truth. I just finished a degree in theoretical physics, and am about to start a PhD on cosmological implications of string theory (oh, and since this is /., I'll also mention that I'm female, since we're somewhat under-represented here!). My final-year undergrad. project looked at a string-theoretic treatment (Vafa, Strominger, et al.) of Hawking radiation, comparing it with Hawking's own treatment using quantum field theory in asymptotically flat space-time. Hawking's theory raises the problem of black-hole entropy: it can be calculated in terms of the area of the black hole, but what exactly is 'disordered' to produce this entropy? A string theoretic treatment of black holes, considering intersections of higher-dimension 'strings' ('Dirichlet branes') and the interactions of strings with boundary conditions on these branes, gives a result for the entropy of the black hole which corresponds to the quantum-field-based result, including numerical factors.
OK, so this is all quite non-trivial, but the point is that (a) I have a fair idea of what I'm talking about, up to a point, and (b) there are strong indications that string theory is pointing the way to a viable theory of quantum gravity. It may not be the right answer, it probably isn't the right answer, but just as Newtonian physics pointed the way to relativistic mechanics, and was subsumed by it, so I believe string theory will provide insights vital to the next stage in our understanding of 'how it all works'.
...I'm pretty sure I could identify a cow by forming an image of it on my retina, even if it tried to hide amongst chickens, or even sheep. If it's such a problem, couldn't ranchers just spray 'cow' in red paint on the sides of the beasts?
It seems ironic, in a rather dark way, that when I viewed this post it was accompanied by banner mini-advertisements for on-line suppliers of both ritalin and razor blades.