Very few monkeys could write obfuscated code that works though. Don't think of this as a programming contest - think of it as a form of cryptography contest.
I wonder if you could do this by saturating two of the cones, then looking at an object which is at the center of the third cone's range. After looking at a solid color for some time, the cones that are activated by that color become more and more difficult to activate for a short time after (if you stare at a red object, then look at a white wall, it appears to be cyan for a short time).
Gravitational Waves vs. Higgs Boson
on
Odds-on Science
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· Score: 1
I'm really surprised at the odds placed here. I'd switch the odds for gravitational waves and finding the Higgs boson. Gravitational waves have been very well supported from experimental astrophysics evidence (someone got a nobel prize for it - it was based on looking at binary systems with pulsars and measuring the change in the rotation rate, which was consistent with the expected amount of gravitational radiation). Plus, particle accelerator experiments may suffer from other things than 'what we're looking for isn't there', such as the vagaries of funding cuts, delays from damaged equipment, etc. On the other hand, I don't know how close various projects to build the detection equipment are to completion, so maybe this is more of a bet about 'will this experimental device be built by 2010'
Well, both cases aren't necessarily true. If you're using massive particles, you don't have to worry as much about quantum effects. And the way to create configurations like that is the same way we get crystals of salt, which have a structure like that.
However, it is true that you're unlikely to build that exact structure by flinging around protons and electrons. Which is why I said in an earlier post that to really solve the problem, rather than just prove the concept, you'd have to simulate different configurations and see if:
1. They occur naturally when you throw the extra thing into the mix. 2. How much is the energy lowered as a result?
Well, it wouldn't have to be a chemical catalyst. I'm thinking of what you can do with arrangements of charges to make that barrier smaller. Take for example the following (impractical) situation:
+ - +
+ - + - +
The first is your standard 'bring the nuclei together in isolation' situation. There the barrier is E0 = q^2 / R where R is the radius at which the strong force kicks in.
In the second case, the net charge of the system is still the same, but now the barrier is E = q^2*(1/R-1/(R+d)+1/(R+2d)) where d is the separation between charges. For d=10R, an attempt at a reasonable value, the barrier is lowered to (10/231)E0 (at least, if I got the numbers right), so basically you improve by an order of magnitude. Of course, for the real case you'd need to ensure that a configuration like that is stable, and if the negative charge is an electron, worry about how its distributed over space, etc.
Well, if you're a chemist you should know about catalysts. Now, I don't know how catalysts for various reactions are actually found (trial and error? some stuff catalyzes a really common slow step, so that it affects many reactions?) but it'd seem like a useful vein of research to me to try to run some simulations and see if there's anything that can lower the activation energy somehow when it's present in a system with the reactants. Of course, that could get really nasty if you have to simulate it on the level of nucleons instead of atoms, so maybe sometime in the next 20 years once computing power catches up to the problem we'll see it done.
I'd say its more that mathematics is just mathematics until it touches on some other field. It'd be meaningless to take some random branch of mathematics and say 'this corresponds to our universe'. Rather, mathematics is a set of tools such that given something that does follow some particular rule, we can figure out what that rule implies in a rigorous manner. The Banach-Tarski paradox, for instance, fails to occur physically because no particle can actually be a geometric point, so the size of the cut object is significant, whereas in the abstract geometry of solids and surfaces, that limit does not exist. Without reference to some measurable phenomenon, mathematics just tells us what could be, not what is.
As for tachyons, I believe thats more of a relativistic 'missing object', and one where you basically say 'hey, what does it imply if I pick a mass/energy as having this strange value...' as opposed to something demanded by the theory which simply hasn't been observed. The 'search for the Higgs boson' thing might be a better case, but then, if we don't find it even though we're looking where it should be found, we have to conclude that the theory that implies it is wrong, not that it exists but we're just unable to measure it.
The stuff shown by quantum mechanics is entirely physical, and you can see its effects quite easily. You're using the behavior of an electron encountering a step potential right now to read this post. If that doesn't satisfy, then just take a look at any image from an STM taken around atomic resolution. Corral See all the waves?
The call for physical proof is significant: mathematics can describe things which don't/can't exist in this universe. Just because mathematics says that I can take any solid and rearrange it into any other solid using rigid motions, even if they don't have the same volume (Banach-Tarski Paradox) doesn't mean that I should expect to actually accomplish this on any physical object.
On the other hand, people have explored more complicated cases using simulations (colliding black holes, etc). It may not be an analytic solution, but beyond a certain resolution in timesteps and grid, it should capture the different phenomenological aspects.
Gravitational waves should be subject to gravitational lensing just as EM waves are, so you might see an effect there. However, I doubt that anything local would produce strong enough gravitational radiation to be measurable with something like this. The experiment to detect gravitational waves involves deviations in a laser's path length of a few atom widths over a kilometer.
Photons have zero rest mass (which really doesn't apply to photons anyhow since they can't be at rest), but non-zero mass-energy. The momentum of a photon is proportional to its energy (with a direction degree of freedom).
However, you're unlikely to be shelling out cash for the windows. More likely, it will be included in the cost of your house which is paid back over time. So as long as you can get a better interest rate on your money than the interest rate on your loan, you can do better (though not necessarily break-even)
The estimate is probably derived by first estimating the density of alien civilizations (i.e. in a region of space 1 ly by 1 ly by 1 ly, what's the probability that it contains a communicating alien civilization that transmits the sort of stuff we're looking for). Then find the volume where that probability reaches some threshold you've set (50%? 90%?). So you can say something like 'based on these estimated parameters, there is an x% probability that there is an alien civilization within 1000 lightyears of us that we should be able to detect'.
Of course, it's still based on estimates of the parameters, so that's going to make things a bit more malleable. So what it could be is that they picked two sets of extremes for the parameters - the ones that give the highest density of alien civilizations thats still 'reasonable' and the ones that give the lowest density thats still 'reasonable' and used those to get the 200-1000 ly range.
The question is really: who is harmed if they do make a copy? If you're alive, and they make a copy, you can argue that you're harmed because maybe you wanted to sell it, or maybe it had some secret that would be damaging to you if it got into the public or a ton of other reasons. If you're dead, there's no 'you' to be harmed by their actions. They could copy it a million times, destroy it, use it as a coaster for drinks, and none of those actions could possibly have any effect on you (since theres no longer a you to affect).
The way I see it is, you have a right to do anything, as long as that doesn't interfere with the rights of others. If the author is still alive, and you believer that creators have the right to control distribution of what they produce, then it's reasonable to say that someone making a copy without their permission is an immoral act. But if the author is dead, it's no longer possible to interfere with their rights, or at least no more than you could interfere with the rights of a piece of rock or other inanimate objects.
For solar system which condensed out of a big gas cloud, stuff in the solar system distributes the original angular momentum of the gas cloud. The energy minimum of any orbit with a constrained angular momentum (which they all are, neglecting perturbations) is the circular orbit. So you'd expect orbits a solar system with many bodies to become more and more circular. For some freak flyby though, that isn't a constraint (solar system grabbed a piece of junk moving past it, and it dumped enough energy somewhere so that it went into a bound orbit)
Still, every so often a planet gets flung out of it's solar system due to some orbital instability (a 'rogue' planet). I don't know that we've ever detected one (the smaller planets tend to be flung out first), but there's probably people trying to use gravitational microlensing to find them (basically, you look for an increase in the light curve rather than a dip for some background star, since light is being focused by the gravitational field of the object.)
Well, I suppose those 7 days could also be the close approach of an object in a very elliptical orbit. So instead of being fried by the star constantly, it could just get fried for a week, then deep frozen for another 30 months.
That only matters if he actually wants your respect, or some particular thing you and you alone posess. So unless he's a fanatic admirer of you, a fan on artifacts from your childhood, or in desperate need of a particular piece of land you have the deed to, he can get most things from someone who IS willing to trade them for the money. Like a business.
Well, if the thing you admit to has a smaller penalty than the penalty for not providing your name, you're set. Just admit to jaywalking, or a minor traffic violation.
Bioweapons are limited by how quickly they kill whatever they infect. If a bioweapon unfailingly kills its host within 24 hours, then that's only 24 hours it has to spread to other hosts, give or take however long it can survive without a constant source of energy (we're talking airborne here, since anything else won't spread fast enough to be a doomsday scenario). So there's some optimization between time for the host to communicate the disease and the actual effectiveness - something that takes a long time to take effect gives a long time for someone to come up with a treatment, or to just reproduce. Of course, you could just have something that doesn't kill the host, but instead makes them sterile. That wouldn't kill this generation, but it'd have a better chance of eliminating the species as a whole. Still, given 40 years or so and a desperate need, I'd put good odds on someone figuring out a way around the sterility or a way of repairing the damage.
Just make him pay for it out of his assets or with his insurance, or refuse to admit him to the hospital. You can bet that soon insurance providers will be having car companies put detectors to see if seatbelts are used, and if not, your rates skyrocket.
That sort of sounds like a book called 'Killing Star', which is about the 'kill them before they get a chance to kill you' philosophy when an unstoppable weapon exists (massive missiles hurled at a significant fraction of the speed of light - by the time you saw it, too late to stop it).
The funny thing is that the dynamics for the probabilities are all themselves deterministic, so you don't have to worry about randomness until you want to have your system-of-interest interact with some macroscopic, external system. Until that point, the only physically important information - that is, the only stuff which will affect future measurements aside from the uncertainty involved in that measurement process - is that which you are able to know, even if that knowledge doesn't specify both position and momentum, or all three axes of spin or whatever.
So you can take the same reasoning out for the universe as a whole, that the universe is your system-of-interest, and you don't have to worry about randomness until it interacts with something that you haven't explicitly included in your calculations. Of course, solving those equations for the universe as a whole is a formidable task.
Slashdot Mirror
Very few monkeys could write obfuscated code that works though. Don't think of this as a programming contest - think of it as a form of cryptography contest.
I wonder if you could do this by saturating two of the cones, then looking at an object which is at the center of the third cone's range. After looking at a solid color for some time, the cones that are activated by that color become more and more difficult to activate for a short time after (if you stare at a red object, then look at a white wall, it appears to be cyan for a short time).
I'm really surprised at the odds placed here. I'd switch the odds for gravitational waves and finding the Higgs boson. Gravitational waves have been very well supported from experimental astrophysics evidence (someone got a nobel prize for it - it was based on looking at binary systems with pulsars and measuring the change in the rotation rate, which was consistent with the expected amount of gravitational radiation). Plus, particle accelerator experiments may suffer from other things than 'what we're looking for isn't there', such as the vagaries of funding cuts, delays from damaged equipment, etc. On the other hand, I don't know how close various projects to build the detection equipment are to completion, so maybe this is more of a bet about 'will this experimental device be built by 2010'
Well, both cases aren't necessarily true. If you're using massive particles, you don't have to worry as much about quantum effects. And the way to create configurations like that is the same way we get crystals of salt, which have a structure like that.
However, it is true that you're unlikely to build that exact structure by flinging around protons and electrons. Which is why I said in an earlier post that to really solve the problem, rather than just prove the concept, you'd have to simulate different configurations and see if:
1. They occur naturally when you throw the extra thing into the mix.
2. How much is the energy lowered as a result?
The diagram didn't show up correctly. It should be something more like:
_ ___+
____+___________________+
+_-_+_______________
The far '+' is the incoming proton.
Well, it wouldn't have to be a chemical catalyst. I'm thinking of what you can do with arrangements of charges to make that barrier smaller. Take for example the following (impractical) situation:
+ - +
+ - + - +
The first is your standard 'bring the nuclei together in isolation' situation. There the barrier is E0 = q^2 / R where R is the radius at which the strong force kicks in.
In the second case, the net charge of the system is still the same, but now the barrier is E = q^2*(1/R-1/(R+d)+1/(R+2d)) where d is the separation between charges. For d=10R, an attempt at a reasonable value, the barrier is lowered to (10/231)E0 (at least, if I got the numbers right), so basically you improve by an order of magnitude. Of course, for the real case you'd need to ensure that a configuration like that is stable, and if the negative charge is an electron, worry about how its distributed over space, etc.
Well, if you're a chemist you should know about catalysts. Now, I don't know how catalysts for various reactions are actually found (trial and error? some stuff catalyzes a really common slow step, so that it affects many reactions?) but it'd seem like a useful vein of research to me to try to run some simulations and see if there's anything that can lower the activation energy somehow when it's present in a system with the reactants. Of course, that could get really nasty if you have to simulate it on the level of nucleons instead of atoms, so maybe sometime in the next 20 years once computing power catches up to the problem we'll see it done.
I'd say its more that mathematics is just mathematics until it touches on some other field. It'd be meaningless to take some random branch of mathematics and say 'this corresponds to our universe'. Rather, mathematics is a set of tools such that given something that does follow some particular rule, we can figure out what that rule implies in a rigorous manner. The Banach-Tarski paradox, for instance, fails to occur physically because no particle can actually be a geometric point, so the size of the cut object is significant, whereas in the abstract geometry of solids and surfaces, that limit does not exist. Without reference to some measurable phenomenon, mathematics just tells us what could be, not what is.
As for tachyons, I believe thats more of a relativistic 'missing object', and one where you basically say 'hey, what does it imply if I pick a mass/energy as having this strange value...' as opposed to something demanded by the theory which simply hasn't been observed. The 'search for the Higgs boson' thing might be a better case, but then, if we don't find it even though we're looking where it should be found, we have to conclude that the theory that implies it is wrong, not that it exists but we're just unable to measure it.
The stuff shown by quantum mechanics is entirely physical, and you can see its effects quite easily. You're using the behavior of an electron encountering a step potential right now to read this post. If that doesn't satisfy, then just take a look at any image from an STM taken around atomic resolution.
Corral See all the waves?
The call for physical proof is significant:
mathematics can describe things which don't/can't exist in this universe. Just because mathematics says that I can take any solid and rearrange it into any other solid using rigid motions, even if they don't have the same volume (Banach-Tarski Paradox) doesn't mean that I should expect to actually accomplish this on any physical object.
On the other hand, people have explored more complicated cases using simulations (colliding black holes, etc). It may not be an analytic solution, but beyond a certain resolution in timesteps and grid, it should capture the different phenomenological aspects.
Gravitational waves should be subject to gravitational lensing just as EM waves are, so you might see an effect there. However, I doubt that anything local would produce strong enough gravitational radiation to be measurable with something like this. The experiment to detect gravitational waves involves deviations in a laser's path length of a few atom widths over a kilometer.
Photons have zero rest mass (which really doesn't apply to photons anyhow since they can't be at rest), but non-zero mass-energy. The momentum of a photon is proportional to its energy (with a direction degree of freedom).
However, you're unlikely to be shelling out cash for the windows. More likely, it will be included in the cost of your house which is paid back over time. So as long as you can get a better interest rate on your money than the interest rate on your loan, you can do better (though not necessarily break-even)
The estimate is probably derived by first estimating the density of alien civilizations (i.e. in a region of space 1 ly by 1 ly by 1 ly, what's the probability that it contains a communicating alien civilization that transmits the sort of stuff we're looking for). Then find the volume where that probability reaches some threshold you've set (50%? 90%?). So you can say something like 'based on these estimated parameters, there is an x% probability that there is an alien civilization within 1000 lightyears of us that we should be able to detect'.
Of course, it's still based on estimates of the parameters, so that's going to make things a bit more malleable. So what it could be is that they picked two sets of extremes for the parameters - the ones that give the highest density of alien civilizations thats still 'reasonable' and the ones that give the lowest density thats still 'reasonable' and used those to get the 200-1000 ly range.
The question is really: who is harmed if they do make a copy? If you're alive, and they make a copy, you can argue that you're harmed because maybe you wanted to sell it, or maybe it had some secret that would be damaging to you if it got into the public or a ton of other reasons. If you're dead, there's no 'you' to be harmed by their actions. They could copy it a million times, destroy it, use it as a coaster for drinks, and none of those actions could possibly have any effect on you (since theres no longer a you to affect).
The way I see it is, you have a right to do anything, as long as that doesn't interfere with the rights of others. If the author is still alive, and you believer that creators have the right to control distribution of what they produce, then it's reasonable to say that someone making a copy without their permission is an immoral act. But if the author is dead, it's no longer possible to interfere with their rights, or at least no more than you could interfere with the rights of a piece of rock or other inanimate objects.
If it's really that much of a razor-thin margin, what happens if you have 12 real cans, but have an unexpected 2-hour delay?
For solar system which condensed out of a big gas cloud, stuff in the solar system distributes the original angular momentum of the gas cloud. The energy minimum of any orbit with a constrained angular momentum (which they all are, neglecting perturbations) is the circular orbit. So you'd expect orbits a solar system with many bodies to become more and more circular. For some freak flyby though, that isn't a constraint (solar system grabbed a piece of junk moving past it, and it dumped enough energy somewhere so that it went into a bound orbit)
Still, every so often a planet gets flung out of it's solar system due to some orbital instability (a 'rogue' planet). I don't know that we've ever detected one (the smaller planets tend to be flung out first), but there's probably people trying to use gravitational microlensing to find them (basically, you look for an increase in the light curve rather than a dip for some background star, since light is being focused by the gravitational field of the object.)
Well, I suppose those 7 days could also be the close approach of an object in a very elliptical orbit. So instead of being fried by the star constantly, it could just get fried for a week, then deep frozen for another 30 months.
That only matters if he actually wants your respect, or some particular thing you and you alone posess. So unless he's a fanatic admirer of you, a fan on artifacts from your childhood, or in desperate need of a particular piece of land you have the deed to, he can get most things from someone who IS willing to trade them for the money. Like a business.
Well, if the thing you admit to has a smaller penalty than the penalty for not providing your name, you're set. Just admit to jaywalking, or a minor traffic violation.
Bioweapons are limited by how quickly they kill whatever they infect. If a bioweapon unfailingly kills its host within 24 hours, then that's only 24 hours it has to spread to other hosts, give or take however long it can survive without a constant source of energy (we're talking airborne here, since anything else won't spread fast enough to be a doomsday scenario). So there's some optimization between time for the host to communicate the disease and the actual effectiveness - something that takes a long time to take effect gives a long time for someone to come up with a treatment, or to just reproduce. Of course, you could just have something that doesn't kill the host, but instead makes them sterile. That wouldn't kill this generation, but it'd have a better chance of eliminating the species as a whole. Still, given 40 years or so and a desperate need, I'd put good odds on someone figuring out a way around the sterility or a way of repairing the damage.
If the Singaporeans started demanding that we non-Singaporeans enacted similar laws, then I'd saw we're definitely fit to criticize that.
Just make him pay for it out of his assets or with his insurance, or refuse to admit him to the hospital. You can bet that soon insurance providers will be having car companies put detectors to see if seatbelts are used, and if not, your rates skyrocket.
That sort of sounds like a book called 'Killing Star', which is about the 'kill them before they get a chance to kill you' philosophy when an unstoppable weapon exists (massive missiles hurled at a significant fraction of the speed of light - by the time you saw it, too late to stop it).
The funny thing is that the dynamics for the probabilities are all themselves deterministic, so you don't have to worry about randomness until you want to have your system-of-interest interact with some macroscopic, external system. Until that point, the only physically important information - that is, the only stuff which will affect future measurements aside from the uncertainty involved in that measurement process - is that which you are able to know, even if that knowledge doesn't specify both position and momentum, or all three axes of spin or whatever.
So you can take the same reasoning out for the universe as a whole, that the universe is your system-of-interest, and you don't have to worry about randomness until it interacts with something that you haven't explicitly included in your calculations. Of course, solving those equations for the universe as a whole is a formidable task.