I would think the human body would still have a few frequencies that are dangerous. You would not explode or turn into goo, but would still die from long exposures to the right frequency. The best example I heard was of a factory that was built near a chicken farm. It produced some loud low frequency noise that seemed to kill the chickens after a while. The source is a questionable though (if you want to see the source, look at the sample code of "sound" in the Turbo C++ v3.0 help file).
It's not the most interesting thing to read for pleasure, but I find it useful since I am currently looking for a new video card. I would like to decide for myself which one is better. It's nice to see tests done on several games, so you know its not a single game that just happens to be optimized more for one card than the other. At least now they include things beyond frame rates, like image quality.
At least I now know (actually I knew before since it is good to check several reviews) that I can get the ATI 9800 and know that the extra $100 for the 5900 would not have been worth it. I would still think this even if the 5900 was 1% faster on every test which would likely cause the conclusion to be that the 5900 was better.
Besides, most reviews have a nice navigation thing at the bottom that lets you skip to the exact benchmark you want to see, or straight to the conclusion.
Things get really wierd in four dimensions. When I took a topology class, we proved that in four dimensions its impossible to tie your shoelaces. In other words no matter how you wrapped up two strings, they would fall apart. I'd imagine doing more complicated things like machinary would be really wierd and beyond our ability to visualize.
Iâ(TM)ve heard of these plasma values before and one of the biggest practical applications I heard of is electron welding. Basically metal is bombarded with a beam of electrons to weld them together (I donâ(TM)t know the exact details) but the problem is that the items being welded have to be in a vacuum which is expensive depending on the size and material of the object to be welded. Using one of these plasma valves, an electron beam can be generated in a vacuum and sent through the value to be used on an object in the normal atmosphere. This would be similar to the more research oriented uses of separating the vacuum of a particle accelerator from a target at a higher pressure.
Der Ring des Nibelungen
on
LOTR The Musical!
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· Score: 3, Interesting
This would only make sense since an influence of LOTR was Wagner's opera Ring Cycle with a summary here . Both are based on Norse mythology and there are many similarities including both deal with the destruction of a powerful,cursed ring that everyone wants. The linked website lists some more similarities. The LOTR musical has the possibility of being good, but I doubt it will rival the original.
I just noticed that the Botox LD50 may be off, the LD50 of Botox, depending on type, is between severel tens to several tenths of nanograms per kilogram of body mass. I am pretty sure the inorganic stuff is correct and believe every thing else is too (ignoring my bad html tags).
There are three lines for plutonium since it was tested with different animals. See the link above since the full table with animals and type of exposure would not pass the posting filter. Also, um means microgram.
These values are a lot lower than what you found although they were for exposure by IV injection. The mostly likely to occur and be damaging would be to breath in plutonium dust. It looks like caffeine is higher than plutonium, but plutonium can compete as the most deadly inorganic compound. Botox is a lot worse though, which I have "heard" can kill a single cell with only few or single molecule.
The definition of a black hole is something with enough gravity and small enough that light cannot escape. When they refer to the "radius" of a black hole, they mean the radius of the event horizon, which is the point of no return where light cannot escape. The only difference between a big black hole and a small one is that the big ones (excluding the supermassive ones...) have a mass several times the sun and a radius of a few kilometers. These small ones have a radius many times smaller than an atom, if light were able to get within that radius it would still not escape.
Even if the theory is wrong, Earth has been bombarded by cosmic rays at much higher energies than we will ever produce. I've heard that there are protons with the momentum of 100 mph baseballs. These would produce much larger things when they hit Earth, and it would seem we haven't turned into a black hole yet. There were even theories that the Tungusta explosion in Siberia in 1908 was caused by a small black hole hitting Earth (they were pretty sure it was a comet chunk the last I heard).
FYI: If the Earth were a black hole, it would have a diameter of a third of an inch.
Re:What else is new?
on
Gator Examined
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I am sure software like this has caused big problems for a lot of people. I've had two bad run-ins with stuff like this.
The first was some software similar to Gator called WebHancer. I still have no idea how it got on my computer. Between my lack of patience and my dialup connection at the time, I never downloaded software or anything more than web browsing on my home computer. When I was on the internet one day, I lost the connection and all of a sudden my dialup software would not reconnect due to some weird error. I called the ISP and they said that they could not fix it, it had something to do with conflicting software. Then I found this software. After uninstalling it and reinstalling the dialup software several times, I still had the same problem. I exchanged several emails (I kept professional since I knew it would not help to yell insults and my real thoughts at them) with the company behind WebHancer. They consistently told me that what had happened could not have happened. It was "impossible" to have gotten it on my system without clicking through two EULAs (and I actually read EULAs for what I install). They also said there was no way it could mess up my internet access and that the uninstall program removes it. Finally I solved it by purposely downloading their software elsewhere and installing and uninstalling it on my system which fixed it.
The second incident happened a week ago. While reading some software reviews, a window came up that looked like one of those stupid popups designed to look like a dialog box. It would not let me close it. Then I noticed it had a status bar claiming it was searching my computer and optimizing or some euphemism for downloading and installing. Thanks to my quick LAN connection, by the time I got the task manager up to nuke it, it had finished. I checked the readme and it said to run the uninstaller to remove it, but of course running the uninstalling simply generates an error message saying uninstall failed. This one I was able to remove by deleting files and cleaning the registry. I am not sure how this one installed though, since I have my settings to prompt me for pretty much every action.
For some time now I had thought if the machines had any intelligence they would have made a matrix within a matrix to confuse the humans and the second movie might confirm this. But when talking with some friends, we were trying to think of an alternative answer. One that we came up with is that Neo now has some connection with the machines, even in the real world, due to his encounter with Agent Smith. As Smith said, they exchange parts of each other, so Agent Smith has some of Neo and visa versa.
Some of us were hoping it might be different from a matrix within a matrix since this idea has been done before (see some of the posts above), but the whole concept of the matrix is an old idea, so they still might go with that explanation. I guess we just wait to the next movie.
I didn't mean observe a single particle several times, but have millions of pairs of entangled particles and observe the first particle, then the second, and the third and so on. I was thinking of a variation of the teleportation done with Bell states.
But I do agree with what you said. Of course it doesn't work since FTL communication is not possible without something drastic like warping space. But there is a difference between knowing the answer and knowing exactly why that answer is true (like say 42). I haven't had the time to play with the math of the system I was think about, especially since I have now been awake for almost 36 hours working on other things(yeah there are better things to do than reading slashdot, but a break every so often helps).
Lets not forget all of that science fiction that is polluting my intuition that things should be different they are, since we would all want FTL communication.
As far as I understand it, most methods of quantum teleportation are done with quantum entanglement of two particles, meaning if you do something to one, it instantly affects the other one, even if they are separated by huge distances. So you can manipulate one particle at the source and then a person at the destination can see the changes in the other particle. The only problem, is by observing the particle at the destination, the state of both particles is changed (the whole uncertainty principle thing). So you have to send a signal, limited by the speed of light, that they have changed the source particles so it is safe to observe the destination particles.
Even with a quantum mechanics background, the one thing I don't get is why not have a lot of these particles and observe one after another waiting for a change. A lot would be wasted, but I would imagine with error correction and such, you could get useful information by observing changes. May be I will go bug some the people running the quantum teleportation experiments where I work.
There are several different schemes for quantum teleportation with reasons similar to the above that requires some light speed transmission to be made before any teleportation can be done. For a general introduction to quantum teleportation, I would recommend the Scientific American article that was one the cover of their April 2000 issue. I checked the website and I don't think this article is available on the web from sciam.com, so you would have to find a dead-tree copy.
Unfortunately even the transmission of information by quantum teleportation is limited by the speed of light. Unless you are thinking of quantum tunneling which allows stuff to go faster than light, but kind of needs a solid barrier between the source and destination. There are some alternates, but they would probably require the same amount technological as warp drive.
I think its obvious that humans are not the sole cause of warming trends. The point is that our green house gases are causing warming of some degree. The basic physics shows these gases cause some warming (as in they don't make the planet cooler), but we just don't know the how much warming. It could easily be that the warming by our gases are insignificant and we can't stop the warming trends or it could be that we are the central cause. The point is either way, the emission of greenhouse gases is not helping.
The best analogy I could come up with is to say look at your diet. You could easily have a slow metabolism and gain weight easily due to genetics, which could be hard to control (ok, so not being lazy and exercising is not as hard stopping the forces of nature, but its close enough). If you notice yourself gaining weight after you started the habit of having donuts every morning for breakfast, it might be a good idea to stop eating the donuts to see if that helps you lose weight. Of course it might not make a difference (because your other meals are fattier than you think, or your having other medical issues) and is an inconvenience to actually do, but by not eating the donuts you reduced the risks of problems by some amount and could then actually determine if it makes a difference.
Biodiesel is not exactly the same as cooking oil. You add sodium methoxide (sodium hydroxide and methanol mixed) to break the triglycerides in oil into glycerin (which is removed) and methyl esters which are simpler chains than the three pronged (think E shaped) triglycerides.
Re:A few years late on the news front
on
Run Your Car on Grease
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I worked for a small company performing research into alterations to diesel engines. One of the things we played with was vegetable oil and biodiesel. Biodiesel is a great fuel since it produces no net carbon dioxide (all of the carbon in it was pulled from the air by the plants) and it lacks the sulfur found in normal diesel.
You can also run an engine on straight vegetable oil, which is different from biodiesel. The only problem is that the oil is really thick, so you have to start and stop the engine with normal fuel to heat it up, then switch to the vegetable oil after a minute or two. I've heard of products that will do this automatically for vehicles, but we just switched fuels manually. Although it doesn't burn to well, and the fuel economy is not a good as diesel (as in volume of fuel/power) but the pollution is not that bad. There is a slight increase in the particulates (smoke) produced, but otherwise its comparable to normal diesel without the sulfur. Also (this being appreciated more when you're standing around the engine all day) the smell of fries is a decent change from normal exhaust.
Knowing a lot of healthy physicists that have been exposed to many times the power of a cell phone (like my boss that works with equipment that pulse around 10 kA and 5 kV), it would seem that small sources like that would not be much a threat.
Also, I have seen various results for the number of cell phone users that have cancer, and many of them indicate that they are less likely to get cancer than the population in general. I don't have the papers with me now, but I am sure someone less lazy than me can find it on google.
I also looked up the heat loss of the head in a book of physical constants of mine, and the head radiates around 4.6 W of energy, so unless the cell phone (around 1 W I believe) zaps a very small part of your brain like a magnifying glass, you should be able to dissipate the heat rather quickly between radiating it and cooling by the blood. I can't imagine it being any worse than a mild fever, otherwise you would be able to feel it with your hand or something.
I should have said that voltage does not control the brightness well (I feel ashamed, getting current and voltage backwards is a mistake I shouldn't make).
Like you said you can control the current, but it is a lot simpler to apply a voltage. There is only a small range in which the voltage controls the brightness, and there is a voltage threshold for the LED to turn on. Hence pulsing simplifies the circuit, especially in digital circuits.
I have also had quite a bit of exposure to this and related software. When I was in high school, I believe they were using the similar software for keeping grades and were debating whether to post them online or not. Especially since graduating, I have not kept up with what has been going on, but grading software like this has been a huge pain for the school district. There was a point they spent nearly half a million dollars a year for several years in a row to either replace or patch faulty grade keeping software. This made things worse for a district already having severe money problems. Every other days would be announcements not to use the grading/attendance software due to problems, or to resubmit info because the system was reset. At the worst point, teachers were told to file grades both in the new electronic way and in old paper work way that the software was to replace since they were afraid the software might crash. What's the moral of my ramblings? It seems "fancy" grading software such as in this post can costs a school district lots of money and possibly make things worse because they don't work well. I just kind of expect that when $750,000 is spent on grading software, the software should work so that doesn't have to be replaced the next for another half million.
PS I think Pinnacle software is what they finally settle on, but it was still having trouble when I left.
Relativity only uses c, the speed of light in the vacuum. Hence this doesn't affect relativity.
When particles go through a material faster than light goes through that material the result is Cerenkov Radiation, with quick google search gives a short and quick description here and a longer in depth one here. Cerenkov radiation is basically like a sonic boom of light that produces the blue glow seen around nuclear reactors where the beta particles from the fisson are travelling faster than light through the surrounding water.
Slashdot Mirror
I would think the human body would still have a few frequencies that are dangerous. You would not explode or turn into goo, but would still die from long exposures to the right frequency. The best example I heard was of a factory that was built near a chicken farm. It produced some loud low frequency noise that seemed to kill the chickens after a while. The source is a questionable though (if you want to see the source, look at the sample code of "sound" in the Turbo C++ v3.0 help file).
It's not the most interesting thing to read for pleasure, but I find it useful since I am currently looking for a new video card. I would like to decide for myself which one is better. It's nice to see tests done on several games, so you know its not a single game that just happens to be optimized more for one card than the other. At least now they include things beyond frame rates, like image quality.
At least I now know (actually I knew before since it is good to check several reviews) that I can get the ATI 9800 and know that the extra $100 for the 5900 would not have been worth it. I would still think this even if the 5900 was 1% faster on every test which would likely cause the conclusion to be that the 5900 was better.
Besides, most reviews have a nice navigation thing at the bottom that lets you skip to the exact benchmark you want to see, or straight to the conclusion.
Things get really wierd in four dimensions. When I took a topology class, we proved that in four dimensions its impossible to tie your shoelaces. In other words no matter how you wrapped up two strings, they would fall apart. I'd imagine doing more complicated things like machinary would be really wierd and beyond our ability to visualize.
Iâ(TM)ve heard of these plasma values before and one of the biggest practical applications I heard of is electron welding. Basically metal is bombarded with a beam of electrons to weld them together (I donâ(TM)t know the exact details) but the problem is that the items being welded have to be in a vacuum which is expensive depending on the size and material of the object to be welded. Using one of these plasma valves, an electron beam can be generated in a vacuum and sent through the value to be used on an object in the normal atmosphere. This would be similar to the more research oriented uses of separating the vacuum of a particle accelerator from a target at a higher pressure.
This would only make sense since an influence of LOTR was Wagner's opera Ring Cycle with a summary here . Both are based on Norse mythology and there are many similarities including both deal with the destruction of a powerful,cursed ring that everyone wants. The linked website lists some more similarities. The LOTR musical has the possibility of being good, but I doubt it will rival the original.
I just noticed that the Botox LD50 may be off, the LD50 of Botox, depending on type, is between severel tens to several tenths of nanograms per kilogram of body mass. I am pretty sure the inorganic stuff is correct and believe every thing else is too (ignoring my bad html tags).
There are three lines for plutonium since it was tested with different animals. See the link above since the full table with animals and type of exposure would not pass the posting filter. Also, um means microgram.
These values are a lot lower than what you found although they were for exposure by IV injection. The mostly likely to occur and be damaging would be to breath in plutonium dust. It looks like caffeine is higher than plutonium, but plutonium can compete as the most deadly inorganic compound. Botox is a lot worse though, which I have "heard" can kill a single cell with only few or single molecule.
The definition of a black hole is something with enough gravity and small enough that light cannot escape. When they refer to the "radius" of a black hole, they mean the radius of the event horizon, which is the point of no return where light cannot escape. The only difference between a big black hole and a small one is that the big ones (excluding the supermassive ones...) have a mass several times the sun and a radius of a few kilometers. These small ones have a radius many times smaller than an atom, if light were able to get within that radius it would still not escape.
Even if the theory is wrong, Earth has been bombarded by cosmic rays at much higher energies than we will ever produce. I've heard that there are protons with the momentum of 100 mph baseballs. These would produce much larger things when they hit Earth, and it would seem we haven't turned into a black hole yet. There were even theories that the Tungusta explosion in Siberia in 1908 was caused by a small black hole hitting Earth (they were pretty sure it was a comet chunk the last I heard).
FYI: If the Earth were a black hole, it would have a diameter of a third of an inch.
I am sure software like this has caused big problems for a lot of people. I've had two bad run-ins with stuff like this.
The first was some software similar to Gator called WebHancer. I still have no idea how it got on my computer. Between my lack of patience and my dialup connection at the time, I never downloaded software or anything more than web browsing on my home computer. When I was on the internet one day, I lost the connection and all of a sudden my dialup software would not reconnect due to some weird error. I called the ISP and they said that they could not fix it, it had something to do with conflicting software. Then I found this software. After uninstalling it and reinstalling the dialup software several times, I still had the same problem. I exchanged several emails (I kept professional since I knew it would not help to yell insults and my real thoughts at them) with the company behind WebHancer. They consistently told me that what had happened could not have happened. It was "impossible" to have gotten it on my system without clicking through two EULAs (and I actually read EULAs for what I install). They also said there was no way it could mess up my internet access and that the uninstall program removes it. Finally I solved it by purposely downloading their software elsewhere and installing and uninstalling it on my system which fixed it.
The second incident happened a week ago. While reading some software reviews, a window came up that looked like one of those stupid popups designed to look like a dialog box. It would not let me close it. Then I noticed it had a status bar claiming it was searching my computer and optimizing or some euphemism for downloading and installing. Thanks to my quick LAN connection, by the time I got the task manager up to nuke it, it had finished. I checked the readme and it said to run the uninstaller to remove it, but of course running the uninstalling simply generates an error message saying uninstall failed. This one I was able to remove by deleting files and cleaning the registry. I am not sure how this one installed though, since I have my settings to prompt me for pretty much every action.
For some time now I had thought if the machines had any intelligence they would have made a matrix within a matrix to confuse the humans and the second movie might confirm this. But when talking with some friends, we were trying to think of an alternative answer. One that we came up with is that Neo now has some connection with the machines, even in the real world, due to his encounter with Agent Smith. As Smith said, they exchange parts of each other, so Agent Smith has some of Neo and visa versa.
Some of us were hoping it might be different from a matrix within a matrix since this idea has been done before (see some of the posts above), but the whole concept of the matrix is an old idea, so they still might go with that explanation. I guess we just wait to the next movie.
I didn't mean observe a single particle several times, but have millions of pairs of entangled particles and observe the first particle, then the second, and the third and so on. I was thinking of a variation of the teleportation done with Bell states.
But I do agree with what you said. Of course it doesn't work since FTL communication is not possible without something drastic like warping space. But there is a difference between knowing the answer and knowing exactly why that answer is true (like say 42). I haven't had the time to play with the math of the system I was think about, especially since I have now been awake for almost 36 hours working on other things(yeah there are better things to do than reading slashdot, but a break every so often helps).
Lets not forget all of that science fiction that is polluting my intuition that things should be different they are, since we would all want FTL communication.
As far as I understand it, most methods of quantum teleportation are done with quantum entanglement of two particles, meaning if you do something to one, it instantly affects the other one, even if they are separated by huge distances. So you can manipulate one particle at the source and then a person at the destination can see the changes in the other particle. The only problem, is by observing the particle at the destination, the state of both particles is changed (the whole uncertainty principle thing). So you have to send a signal, limited by the speed of light, that they have changed the source particles so it is safe to observe the destination particles.
Even with a quantum mechanics background, the one thing I don't get is why not have a lot of these particles and observe one after another waiting for a change. A lot would be wasted, but I would imagine with error correction and such, you could get useful information by observing changes. May be I will go bug some the people running the quantum teleportation experiments where I work.
There are several different schemes for quantum teleportation with reasons similar to the above that requires some light speed transmission to be made before any teleportation can be done. For a general introduction to quantum teleportation, I would recommend the Scientific American article that was one the cover of their April 2000 issue. I checked the website and I don't think this article is available on the web from sciam.com, so you would have to find a dead-tree copy.
Unfortunately even the transmission of information by quantum teleportation is limited by the speed of light. Unless you are thinking of quantum tunneling which allows stuff to go faster than light, but kind of needs a solid barrier between the source and destination. There are some alternates, but they would probably require the same amount technological as warp drive.
We know the answer is 42, we are just trying to fix the problem that we only have 4.2 now.
I think its obvious that humans are not the sole cause of warming trends. The point is that our green house gases are causing warming of some degree. The basic physics shows these gases cause some warming (as in they don't make the planet cooler), but we just don't know the how much warming. It could easily be that the warming by our gases are insignificant and we can't stop the warming trends or it could be that we are the central cause. The point is either way, the emission of greenhouse gases is not helping.
The best analogy I could come up with is to say look at your diet. You could easily have a slow metabolism and gain weight easily due to genetics, which could be hard to control (ok, so not being lazy and exercising is not as hard stopping the forces of nature, but its close enough). If you notice yourself gaining weight after you started the habit of having donuts every morning for breakfast, it might be a good idea to stop eating the donuts to see if that helps you lose weight. Of course it might not make a difference (because your other meals are fattier than you think, or your having other medical issues) and is an inconvenience to actually do, but by not eating the donuts you reduced the risks of problems by some amount and could then actually determine if it makes a difference.
Biodiesel is not exactly the same as cooking oil. You add sodium methoxide (sodium hydroxide and methanol mixed) to break the triglycerides in oil into glycerin (which is removed) and methyl esters which are simpler chains than the three pronged (think E shaped) triglycerides.
I worked for a small company performing research into alterations to diesel engines. One of the things we played with was vegetable oil and biodiesel. Biodiesel is a great fuel since it produces no net carbon dioxide (all of the carbon in it was pulled from the air by the plants) and it lacks the sulfur found in normal diesel.
You can also run an engine on straight vegetable oil, which is different from biodiesel. The only problem is that the oil is really thick, so you have to start and stop the engine with normal fuel to heat it up, then switch to the vegetable oil after a minute or two. I've heard of products that will do this automatically for vehicles, but we just switched fuels manually. Although it doesn't burn to well, and the fuel economy is not a good as diesel (as in volume of fuel/power) but the pollution is not that bad. There is a slight increase in the particulates (smoke) produced, but otherwise its comparable to normal diesel without the sulfur. Also (this being appreciated more when you're standing around the engine all day) the smell of fries is a decent change from normal exhaust.
There are already plans to license out the Doom III engine for Quake IV.
Knowing a lot of healthy physicists that have been exposed to many times the power of a cell phone (like my boss that works with equipment that pulse around 10 kA and 5 kV), it would seem that small sources like that would not be much a threat.
Also, I have seen various results for the number of cell phone users that have cancer, and many of them indicate that they are less likely to get cancer than the population in general. I don't have the papers with me now, but I am sure someone less lazy than me can find it on google.
I also looked up the heat loss of the head in a book of physical constants of mine, and the head radiates around 4.6 W of energy, so unless the cell phone (around 1 W I believe) zaps a very small part of your brain like a magnifying glass, you should be able to dissipate the heat rather quickly between radiating it and cooling by the blood. I can't imagine it being any worse than a mild fever, otherwise you would be able to feel it with your hand or something.
I should have said that voltage does not control the brightness well (I feel ashamed, getting current and voltage backwards is a mistake I shouldn't make).
Like you said you can control the current, but it is a lot simpler to apply a voltage. There is only a small range in which the voltage controls the brightness, and there is a voltage threshold for the LED to turn on. Hence pulsing simplifies the circuit, especially in digital circuits.
I have also had quite a bit of exposure to this and related software. When I was in high school, I believe they were using the similar software for keeping grades and were debating whether to post them online or not. Especially since graduating, I have not kept up with what has been going on, but grading software like this has been a huge pain for the school district. There was a point they spent nearly half a million dollars a year for several years in a row to either replace or patch faulty grade keeping software. This made things worse for a district already having severe money problems. Every other days would be announcements not to use the grading/attendance software due to problems, or to resubmit info because the system was reset. At the worst point, teachers were told to file grades both in the new electronic way and in old paper work way that the software was to replace since they were afraid the software might crash. What's the moral of my ramblings? It seems "fancy" grading software such as in this post can costs a school district lots of money and possibly make things worse because they don't work well. I just kind of expect that when $750,000 is spent on grading software, the software should work so that doesn't have to be replaced the next for another half million.
PS I think Pinnacle software is what they finally settle on, but it was still having trouble when I left.
To adjust LED brightness, you always want to use pulses since the current does not control brightness well (there is pretty much an on and an off).
Relativity only uses c, the speed of light in the vacuum. Hence this doesn't affect relativity.
When particles go through a material faster than light goes through that material the result is Cerenkov Radiation, with quick google search gives a short and quick description here and a longer in depth one here. Cerenkov radiation is basically like a sonic boom of light that produces the blue glow seen around nuclear reactors where the beta particles from the fisson are travelling faster than light through the surrounding water.
This movie takes on a whole new meaning if you ever attend Caltech (aka Pacific Tech).