Aha! That explains we we have shorter lives today than the 35 years people lived in the middle ages. It's because they pumped more pollution into the air in those days. Very enlightening!
I'd put money on it in fact being impossible to view a lump of coal at that distance. In fact, I propose someone do a lump of coal viewing test. These people can get away with all sorts of silly analogies to make themselves seem impressive and nobody calls their bluff.
some string theorists supporting a semi-deterministic worldview
This is largely irrelevant to String Theory (ST). ST is built on Quantum Mechanics (QM). It really doesn't modify QM at all - it builds on QM's foundations. QM sets out a very general framework within which you can construct theories and ST is just one example. So any of the philosophical questions (indeterminacy, multiple universes etc.) that QM raises are still there and ST does little or nothing to change that. It's conceivable that some kind of magic will pop out of ST at some point that will radically change things and feed back down into QM modifying it. AFAIK that hasn't happened. So any string theorist who has anything to say about determinacy is doing so as a general quantum mechanic.
+5, uses neural network technology
+2, academic researcher
+2, academic researcher studying biologically inspired hardware and software
+1, biometrics
+1, researcher teaches multimedia
+2, researcher teaches computers in society
+2, no history of employment in real world
-1, degree in physics
------------------
+14, almost certainly bullshit
Housework has gone down for most people. Did you see that TV series 1900 house? A bunch of modern British people decided to live for 3 months as if in 1900. Life for the women was one long chore. The amount of work was unbelievable. Just doing the washing was an entire day's work. Cooking was hell as a stove needed to be maintained. It was hard and slow to cook with. I can't even begin to reconut how much work these people did!
People predicted the working week would decrease dramatically over the last half-century. We now seem to work much harder. People predicted a paperless office. On the contrary we use more paper than ever because we can print on it so damn fast! Who knows what the outcome of more robots will be? Judging by the last 50 years it'll mean more and harder work for all of us.
I said the whole polarization thing worked, silly! The problem is not with the polarization, it's with the direction your eyes have to look in. Normal polarized 3D displays have the left and right image superimposed on the display. In this case they are separated making them very hard to view even if the polarization works 100% perfectly.
They're mostly not underpaid. These are actually pretty good jobs in India. Even some of the jobs we consider pretty shitty here, like telephone technical support, attract well qualified in India who do very well.
The value of something is a function of how much the seller needs the money and how much the buyer needs the something. There is no such thing as a fixed value independent of the buyer and seller. Someone in India may sell their labor for a lot less than someone in the US and still feel well recompensed.
Yup. I just tried it. I used some plastic wrap from Safeway and I actually found it easier just to cross my eyes. The plastic film as all sorts of irregularities in it making it hard to merge the two images as they are quite different.
On the other hand it's kinda fun to just play with without trying to produce 3D effects.
caused by the disparity in particle/antiparticle generation
I don't see it that way at all. But...
...this discussion reminds me of a letter I once saw in an electronics magazine. The writer was convinced that Fourier theory was all hogwash because something like a single square pulse wasn't really an infinite sum of sinusoidal waves. When I use 'is' in "the electromagnetic force is mediated by exchange of virtual photons" I'm using it the way I use 'is' in "a pulse is a sum of sine waves".
And I didn't think that there -was- a way to solve NAGTs perturbatively without...
Not NAGTs necessarily but there are lots of other models that can be solved in other ways. Just changing variables in your Lagrangian is probably enough to result in a completely different set if Feynman diagrams even though the physics should be unchanged, but don't ask me to construct examples right now!
Yes, that's exactly what it is. A pretty powerful picture too. Unfortunately that's never said in popular science writing and so people take it literally, get very confused, and are liable to consider the whole thing to be voodoo.
It's worth noting that many problems can be solved perturbatively in different ways leading to completely different sets of Feynman diagrams and hence different virtual particles. A good example is the use of ghost particles in gauge theory.
Eg Hawking radiation given off by a black hole is explained via the invocation of virtual particle pairs.
No it isn't. Sounds like you're competent to do the calculations yourself. Pick up a book or paper on Hawking radiation. No need to use that nonsense about pair-production with one half falling past the event horizon. That's just a story made up for the popular science press. It comes from the fact that in curved spacetime there is no natural choice of time coordinate and so you can't distinguish between positive and negative energy modes meaning that you can't distinguish properly between creation and annihilation operators.
Many cornerstones of modern physics started off as mathematical construct introduced to aid calculations
And if they can't be eliminated from the computation there comes a point where you need to treat them as real. You can compute the Casimir force strength without them so there's no need to invoke them.
Gravity is absolutely definitely not an issue. Measuring gravity at that level is well beyond present technology. Unless you're suggesting the presence of a deviation from the inverse square law at short distances, something that has been proposed before.
AFAIK The forces measured are of the correct order of magnitude to fit the Casimir effect. I believe there has been significant error in the experiments but getting the computation exactly right is not easy. But they're way off for gravity.
This talk of "virtual" photons is pretty fictitious. The Casimir effect is computed from the zero-point field ie. the lowest energy state for each wavelength. Ie. it's computed assuming no real photons. But I don't see where "virtual" photons come in either. You don't need to do any Feynman diagram computations to get the result. "Virtual" photons are just labels given to edges in Feynman graphs. No perturbation, no need to talk of "virtual" photons.
I wonder what that nonsense is meant to say. There's very little the Casimir effect explains. It's a prediction of quantum field theory that was borne out by experiment. The experiment did a good job of verifying the theory wasn't bullshit but it doesn't explain very much.
I have no idea what Heisenberg's Quantum Vacuum Fluctuation Theory is. I'm pretty sure there's no such thing. And the Casimir Effect is more a consequence of quantum field theory which was largely pioneered by workers after Heisenberg. Vanilla quantum mechanics itself doesn't predict the Casimir effect.
And going along with what Feynman had to say about miniaturization: the Casimir effect doesn't set limits. On the contrary it is another force that engineers can work with to get what they want done. Forces are good - they give interactions between parts. No interactions, no machine. It does mean you have to throw out even more of your classical mechanics intuition and replace it with a quantum one. That can only be good.
It's faster to run apps on a slow PocketPC using XT-CE, say, than run them under Bochs with a fast Apple. Admittedly XT-CE only emulates up to a 80186 but it's better to emulate that than have something so slow you can't actually do anything useful with it.
Oh yeah. I remember now. Just because I can't do X, X must be good. I'll remember that next time I see a unicycling comedian no matter how lame the jokes are.
Actually, I thought Luxo Jr was pretty good. But that was long ago now.
The naming relationship of CS Oracle and the Matrix Oracle only exists because they both draw from the same, more general use of the term: one who knows all
Incorrect. They are both explicitly about self-knowledge, not omniscience. They are both about the contradiction that happens in such a situation. Don't forget. We're not just talking about any old self-reference. This is explicitly a movie about computing machines. The Oracle appears to be an oracle.
Come on now! What was written over the door as Neo enters the kitchen. "Know Thyself". If that's not an invitation to self-reference I don't know what is. The whole conversation revolves around would I do this if I knew that she knew that I was going to do it.... What is the Oracle called? "The Oracle". What is the Comp Sci terminology for a system than can solve the halting problem? An "Oracle".
Much of the Architect scene is about how the Matrix is inherently flawed, like any axiom system. The video displays are like an explicit enumeration of Neo's responses which Neo wants to act differently from. The diagonal argument, clear as day.
Slashdot Mirror
Aha! That explains we we have shorter lives today than the 35 years people lived in the middle ages. It's because they pumped more pollution into the air in those days. Very enlightening!
I'd put money on it in fact being impossible to view a lump of coal at that distance. In fact, I propose someone do a lump of coal viewing test. These people can get away with all sorts of silly analogies to make themselves seem impressive and nobody calls their bluff.
+5, uses neural network technology
+2, academic researcher
+2, academic researcher studying biologically inspired hardware and software
+1, biometrics
+1, researcher teaches multimedia
+2, researcher teaches computers in society
+2, no history of employment in real world
-1, degree in physics
------------------
+14, almost certainly bullshit
...now
...this done in the seventies? Everyone in the games business knows this. What did this guy get paid for this article?
Housework has gone down for most people. Did you see that TV series 1900 house? A bunch of modern British people decided to live for 3 months as if in 1900. Life for the women was one long chore. The amount of work was unbelievable. Just doing the washing was an entire day's work. Cooking was hell as a stove needed to be maintained. It was hard and slow to cook with. I can't even begin to reconut how much work these people did!
People predicted the working week would decrease dramatically over the last half-century. We now seem to work much harder. People predicted a paperless office. On the contrary we use more paper than ever because we can print on it so damn fast! Who knows what the outcome of more robots will be? Judging by the last 50 years it'll mean more and harder work for all of us.
I mean do well financially. I know how crap TS is as a customer!
I said the whole polarization thing worked, silly! The problem is not with the polarization, it's with the direction your eyes have to look in. Normal polarized 3D displays have the left and right image superimposed on the display. In this case they are separated making them very hard to view even if the polarization works 100% perfectly.
The value of something is a function of how much the seller needs the money and how much the buyer needs the something. There is no such thing as a fixed value independent of the buyer and seller. Someone in India may sell their labor for a lot less than someone in the US and still feel well recompensed.
On the other hand it's kinda fun to just play with without trying to produce 3D effects.
...who modded that down to -1, Interesting.
...this discussion reminds me of a letter I once saw in an electronics magazine. The writer was convinced that Fourier theory was all hogwash because something like a single square pulse wasn't really an infinite sum of sinusoidal waves. When I use 'is' in "the electromagnetic force is mediated by exchange of virtual photons" I'm using it the way I use 'is' in "a pulse is a sum of sine waves".
Not NAGTs necessarily but there are lots of other models that can be solved in other ways. Just changing variables in your Lagrangian is probably enough to result in a completely different set if Feynman diagrams even though the physics should be unchanged, but don't ask me to construct examples right now!It's worth noting that many problems can be solved perturbatively in different ways leading to completely different sets of Feynman diagrams and hence different virtual particles. A good example is the use of ghost particles in gauge theory.
I ask.
AFAIK The forces measured are of the correct order of magnitude to fit the Casimir effect. I believe there has been significant error in the experiments but getting the computation exactly right is not easy. But they're way off for gravity.
This talk of "virtual" photons is pretty fictitious. The Casimir effect is computed from the zero-point field ie. the lowest energy state for each wavelength. Ie. it's computed assuming no real photons. But I don't see where "virtual" photons come in either. You don't need to do any Feynman diagram computations to get the result. "Virtual" photons are just labels given to edges in Feynman graphs. No perturbation, no need to talk of "virtual" photons.
I have no idea what Heisenberg's Quantum Vacuum Fluctuation Theory is. I'm pretty sure there's no such thing. And the Casimir Effect is more a consequence of quantum field theory which was largely pioneered by workers after Heisenberg. Vanilla quantum mechanics itself doesn't predict the Casimir effect.
And going along with what Feynman had to say about miniaturization: the Casimir effect doesn't set limits. On the contrary it is another force that engineers can work with to get what they want done. Forces are good - they give interactions between parts. No interactions, no machine. It does mean you have to throw out even more of your classical mechanics intuition and replace it with a quantum one. That can only be good.
It's faster to run apps on a slow PocketPC using XT-CE, say, than run them under Bochs with a fast Apple. Admittedly XT-CE only emulates up to a 80186 but it's better to emulate that than have something so slow you can't actually do anything useful with it.
BTW Did I mention I have an academy award? I don't think I did. Not that qualifications have anything to do with judging quality.
Actually, I thought Luxo Jr was pretty good. But that was long ago now.
More to come tomorrow, it's getting late...
Much of the Architect scene is about how the Matrix is inherently flawed, like any axiom system. The video displays are like an explicit enumeration of Neo's responses which Neo wants to act differently from. The diagonal argument, clear as day.
And it goes on...