It's not 'Waalaah.' It's voilà. The last character is an 'a' with a grave accent, in case it doesn't come through on your setup (Slashdot does not allow me to use the HTML entity.)
Just to clarify, every scientifically informed person in 1492 knew that Columbus's plan was baloney. There is no way he could have reached Asia, and everyone else knew it. If the moron hadn't lucked into this huge continent of America lying across his path, he would have failed miserably. His wasn't some carefully planned scientific expedition, it was a crackpot sailor charging at a windmill.
Columbus quoted the smallest diameter of the earth that he could find, and the largest extent of Asia that he could find, and even if both were true, he barely would have made it.
The mission that Columbus sent on was pretty damn cheap, and was pretty much given to him to get rid of him.
Similarly, every scientifically informed person knows that there are few real science experiments that can be done on the International Space Station that serve any purpose other than figuring out how things behave in space stations. But, we continue to do it as a pork-barrel subsidy for the aerospace industry, while clueless Slashdotters claim that this is a great thing for preparing for future space colonies, or some other malarkey.
Justify Cassini on scientific grounds, or on entertainment grounds, not on some nonsense like "Exploration is inherent in our nature." So is violence. Luckily, we have, to some small degree, the power of reason, so we can rationally decide when our "inherent nature" should be followed or not.
His point was that this kind of problem isn't going to take "a little time." You are going to want supercomputer time in rather large chunks, not little bits at a time.
If you had a problem that a supercomputer could solve in just a few minutes, you could probably use a much cheaper computer for a few hours/days instead. If this is an infrequent problem, just use the much cheaper computer full time, and avoid paying any IBM bill.
The only advantage of the supercomputer would be the turnaround time. In the end, you get what you pay for.
You miss my point. You weren't holding Enron bonds, the state is paying interest on bonds issued by your state (I'm guessing California).
California decided to borrow money to pay for electric power. The easiest way to do that is to issue bonds (i.e., let people volunteer to give money to the state, in exchange for a bond, which is a promise to pay interest in the future). You are paying taxes to back up California's promise to holders of California bonds. That money eventually went to power companies, with Enron getting a commission.
Your tax money is not going to Enron's bondholders.
To claim that every Enron manager is criminally culpable for the energy market manipulations is a bit naive.
I don't think Worldcom is worried about widget sales being helped. Instead, their sales people can take their Rolodex with them to a *competitor*, and start (in order of revenue, of course), calling them and telling them yarns about how everybody with talent is fleeing Worldcom, so expect their service to go to hell quick. Better change your ISP and telephone service, before I start telling people other than my golfing buddies.
You think selling widgets is the same as selling telecom services? That's like saying database programmers can get jobs programming embedded systems in a week. They're both programmers, right? Sure, good programmers are good programmers, but knowledge of customers and markets are valuable to have as a salesperson.
Yet another "+4 Insightful" that deserves to be "-1 Has No Clue" None of this is coming from taxpayers. When Enron crashed, the (same?) batch of slashdotters complained about bondholders getting mythical compensation from the government.
The real loss was suffered by stockholders when their stock became worthless, and by employees laid off when the fiction of profit could no longer be sustained. Bond and debt holders now get to stand in line to get whatever is left of value in the company, for instance, by reconstituting the company, issuing new stock in exchange for the bonds and debts. So instead of an IOU, they get stock in the new company, for whatever that is worth.
The theoretical reason for the bonuses is that the company is worth more when enough people are left that know how things are actually set up. These clueful people are the most likely to be able to get jobs at competitors (and taking with them access to good customers), so you need a bonus to keep them from doing so.
The ethical problem, of course, is that the clueful people either were aware or should have been aware of the rampant misstatements of the accounting reality. But hey, if I'm stuck with a Worldcom IOU, I'm more interested in getting my 25 cents on the dollar than in making sure everyone gets what they deserve.
Lesson in life: we rarely get what we deserve. Better make do with what you can.
All of the fun Apple projects (Aqua et. al.) that I would be interested in tweaking are closed-source.
Hmmm. Perhaps Apple is keeping all these things closed source so you CAN'T indulge your interest in "tweaking." Perhaps these elements are fundamental enough to Apple's core goal for OS X that they don't want to be distracted by hundreds of amateurs submitting what they think are improvements. Instead, these tweakers will proliferate yet more useless "skins" for Linux desktop environments.
The kind of thing I'm sure Linux hackers would love to add: X window "compatible" cut and paste behavior, various redundant widgets with unpolished appearance and behavior, font rendering "optimizations" that gain 10% in throughput while adding 100% in butt-ugliness, etc. Thank god you can't add those to Aqua.
Your math neglected a very important part of the process: you also had to pay all the researchers who worked on compounds that turned out not to work (ineffective, too many side effects, poisonous, too hard to synthesize, too hard to purify...), because you can't know in advance.
Batteries: 4 AA batteries Height: 4.5 inches Width: 3.2 inches Depth: 1.3 inches Weight: 0.75 pounds (340 g for you metric folks) (not clear whether this includes batteries).
iPod specs: Built-in rechargeable lithium polymer battery (1200 mAh) Size and weight (20GB model) Height: 4.0 in Width: 2.4 in Depth: 0.84 in Weight: 7.2 oz (204 g)
Actually, if the anti-hydrogen is cold enough, you can store it in a magnetic trap. I believe it has to be of a particular spin polarization to stay trapped, however. Check out this proposal.
Reading the paper, I'd say the reason to be suspicious is that they seem to only have detected the radiation due to matter-anti-matter annihilation, with the requirement that an anti-proton and positron event happen at pretty much the same time and place. Then they use various comparisons to give additional confidence in the result.
However, as they say, they can't tell what quantum state these atoms are in.
Until they see [anti]hydrogen spectral lines, I'm not 100% sure they have real anti-hydrogen atoms; for now, I'd say 85% sure. Maybe Gabrielse knows of some ways that the same signature can be generated by other crap thrown around by the trapping and mixing processes.
In comparing the quantities, you should keep in mind that the storage rings you are talking about have very "hot" (high kinetic energy) antiprotons.
The real achievement is to cool the antiprotons down to about 15 K, and combining them with positrons. The yield of that whole process is very low. I.e., you need large quantities of hot antiprotons to produce 50k atoms of "cold" antihydrogen.
This is Don Lancaster's (author of Incredible Secret Money Machine) take on patents. He's a unique character, and sometimes off-the-mark, but you should consider carefully before rejecting his advice.
He estimates the breakeven point for a patent is over 12 million in gross sales. His catch phrase is that it is useless to patent a mere million dollar idea.
R2 was being *sent* explicitly to Obi-wan Kenobi, on Tatooine. Remember that little message that R2 had to deliver? From a daughter of Vader, to the trainer of Vader, using a droid of Vader, on Vader's home planet, which just happens to have Vader's son on it as well. Of course, I know the Lucas fans will say there is some lame way (are human memories routinely erased in the Star Wars universe?) that *Vader* doesn't notice this, but still can remember enough about Obi-Wan and his past to say that Kenobi's "failure will be complete."
Anyhow, to get back to the parent post: it's rather hard to deliver a personal message without being able to recognize the recipient.
Oh, come on. The emporer isn't an innocent unarmed *bystander*. If you believe the Empire is evil, then he is the ultimate target of all the Rebel sacrifice. A soldier who takes a shot at the enemy leadership isn't experiencing *murderous* rage, he's just using adrenaline-driven anger to get the job done. It isn't good for his health, but it is good for the cause, and it his job.
Lots of soldiers have to kill the enemy. It's a foul thing, it ain't pacifism, and it isn't glorious, but it isn't evil, either. Just brutal, nasty, but necessary. If you have any humanity, it will deeply affect you, but if you realize it was all ultimately for the cause of good, then you will deal with it.
Murderous rage is burning down villages, raping civilians, and killing prisoners and surrendering enemies, which doesn't serve any cause.
Lucas has us believe that somehow killing the emperor ipso facto would turn Luke evil, while killing stormtroopers apparently doesn't have that effect.
Yeah, I've heard of LabView. As a programmer, I hated it (caveat: this was 1995).
The thing that hooks you onto LabView is you've got a bunch of test equipment that you want to automate. National Instruments has a HUGE list of "virtual" instruments that match the ones on your bench. Great, you say: these modules will be just the thing, and I'll be done in no time at all, because they've done all the work. WRONG.
The main feature of the NI VIs was that they could reproduce, on your computer screen, a GUI version of the front panel of the test equipment. (The other trend was to sell you a piece of test equipment that plugged into an expansion slot of your PC or an external chassis, and had a GUI instead of a front panel, but that is a separate topic.)
Well, big f**king deal. If I wanted to click an button-shaped icon on a GUI all day, I would have stuck with pushing the real button on the front panel. I want to write a PROGRAM, i.e., something more abstract than pressing the button.
The only real abstraction that LabView provided was a block which could have dataflow "wires" connected to the terminals. Once there were more than four terminals (think, function parameters), it became impossible to keep the wires neat, or keep straight which terminal was which.
Plus, the blocks were either ridiculously low-level (a GPIB command or two) or ridiculously baroque (a series of GPIB commands, with input wires for every possible setting of the instrument). I often had to resort to looking at the source, reading the GPIB sequences, then reading the instrument manual to translate into English.
Any kind of structured programming, other than blocks (functions) required some hokey GUI expression, often involving multiple-page (like tabs in a modern dialog box) displays. By design, you couldn't see the multiple branches of a case statement at the same time. Plus, the need to keep sane wiring meant that these pages kept growing to hold the most complex case, so programs of any sophistication became huge.
Forget it. I ended up writing my data collection code in a bastardized Pascal-like language supported by my data analysis program (Igor Pro). That was gross, but at least I could write a for loop without going insane, and I got a decent graphing environment.
When I say spacetime, what I mean is simply "solutions to Einstein's equations describing general relativity."
If Einstein's equations describe the physical universe, as far as we can determine, then it is physics. If not, then it is simply mathematics. If there is some astronomical observation tomorrow that shows that Einstein's equations' do not describe gravity, then the physics is wrong, but the mathematics is still correct.
I am simply taking the position of an apologist for mathematicians. Not an apologist for physicists.
What he is an apologist for is not "crackpot" science. It's basically applied mathematics. Even if one accepts your idea that "spacetime is fixed," which is only a classical concept, particles' "lifelines" are paths through that spacetime geometry.
Just like in geometry, we can imagine what possible shapes those paths can take. I can imagine, for instance, what sort of "straight" lines I can draw on the surface of a sphere. For the usual definitions of "straight," on a sphere, those lines are arcs about the center of the sphere, leading to spherical trigonometry, great circles, etc.
When the geometry is that of spacetime in the presence of gravity, the definition of "straight" lines in spacetime gets a lot more complicated. What sort of lines can be drawn in spacetime?
The basic question that the physicists you mention are trying to answer is whether it is possible for spacetime to be so twisted up that a line drawn in spacetime can form a closed path. It's simply a problem of geometry. They aren't suggesting that spacetime ever is that twisted, or that you could do anything like construct a spacetime that twisted, just whether it is mathematically possible as a geometry problem.
Re:The proof that physic isn't full of fraud...
on
Ununoctium Wrapup
·
· Score: 2
You're pretty optimistic when you say fraud is "always discovered." I believe that the physics community is demonstrating its general integrity in the treatment of these cases, so I think it is unlikely that fraud goes undiscovered for very long if the field is an active one, and the results major.
At least in the Schon case, the discovery of the alleged fraud relied pretty much on blind luck. A pretty major player was paying enough attention to the actual graphs to notice a very subtle similarity between traces of unrelated graphs. If you think about this, it is a pretty remarkable thing to have noticed. If Schon had been only slightly more careful (assuming it actually was deliberate fraud), he could have applied some random perturbations to the curves, and avoided this really damning "coincidence."
People were having trouble reproducing Schon's results, and eventually, he would have been unable to back up his main supporting claim, which was that his oxide barriers were much better quality than his competitors'. That's only because his competitors eventually would have insisted on watching Schon produce samples for their measurements. And that's only because Schon was really making a lot of noise about his results.
I'm quite confident that if I had fraudulently produced fake data in my thesis and publications, no one would have discovered it. Hell, not too many people noticed the truthful data. I just don't matter enough to the physics community for them to bother checking me out so carefully.
An A-D converter is not necessarily a truly hybrid device. The point is that there are transistors that are good for producing gain, possibly at high frequencies. Those make up what are generically called "linear" chips. Mostly op-amps and so on. These tend to be bipolar junction transistors or related technologies. The key thing is that they tend to pass current all the time.
Then, there are transistors which are good for switching, for creating logic gates & CPU logic. These tend to be CMOS field-effect transistors which are designed to only pass current when they are switching, in order to reduce power consumption so that you can raise the clock rate to obscene levels. However, logic gates are ideally non-linear: either on or off, with nothing in between.
The problem is that these technologies are differently optimized, and aren't naturally compatible. Coming up with a process that can produce nice linear transistors along with high-performance logic gates is tough. You can also try to approach it from the other end: come up with some kind of circuit which can make nicer amplifiers out of lousy transistors.
That's what makes true mixed-signal chips difficult: you either give up linear behavior, or increase current draw, or you give up the gate density and clock performance.
You are completely right about mixed signal chips being a reality for a long time: you don't need to look any further than a video card in your computer to see that. Intel mentions "silicon radio" as if it is a new idea, but a company already exists called Cambridge Silicon Radio, so you can see it isn't just Intel in this business.
I have a feeling that something important is being left out of this article. If you look at the original press release you see that it is a total mishmash of different Intel developments. The poor journalist was stuck trying to find a lead in this story (other than "Intel has bunches o' innovation") and zeroed in on the part that mentioned Moore's law, which he had heard before.
The most interesting part that I see is the tunable laser using silicon photonics. Si has an indirect band-gap, which makes it not very good for making lasers and optical devices. That could be big news.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not 'Waalaah.' It's voilà. The last character is an 'a' with a grave accent, in case it doesn't come through on your setup (Slashdot does not allow me to use the HTML entity.)
Et voilà.
Just to clarify, every scientifically informed person in 1492 knew that Columbus's plan was baloney. There is no way he could have reached Asia, and everyone else knew it. If the moron hadn't lucked into this huge continent of America lying across his path, he would have failed miserably. His wasn't some carefully planned scientific expedition, it was a crackpot sailor charging at a windmill.
Columbus quoted the smallest diameter of the earth that he could find, and the largest extent of Asia that he could find, and even if both were true, he barely would have made it.
The mission that Columbus sent on was pretty damn cheap, and was pretty much given to him to get rid of him.
Similarly, every scientifically informed person knows that there are few real science experiments that can be done on the International Space Station that serve any purpose other than figuring out how things behave in space stations. But, we continue to do it as a pork-barrel subsidy for the aerospace industry, while clueless Slashdotters claim that this is a great thing for preparing for future space colonies, or some other malarkey.
Justify Cassini on scientific grounds, or on entertainment grounds, not on some nonsense like "Exploration is inherent in our nature." So is violence. Luckily, we have, to some small degree, the power of reason, so we can rationally decide when our "inherent nature" should be followed or not.
His point was that this kind of problem isn't going to take "a little time." You are going to want supercomputer time in rather large chunks, not little bits at a time.
If you had a problem that a supercomputer could solve in just a few minutes, you could probably use a much cheaper computer for a few hours/days instead. If this is an infrequent problem, just use the much cheaper computer full time, and avoid paying any IBM bill.
The only advantage of the supercomputer would be the turnaround time. In the end, you get what you pay for.
You miss my point. You weren't holding Enron bonds, the state is paying interest on bonds issued by your state (I'm guessing California).
California decided to borrow money to pay for electric power. The easiest way to do that is to issue bonds (i.e., let people volunteer to give money to the state, in exchange for a bond, which is a promise to pay interest in the future). You are paying taxes to back up California's promise to holders of California bonds. That money eventually went to power companies, with Enron getting a commission.
Your tax money is not going to Enron's bondholders.
To claim that every Enron manager is criminally culpable for the energy market manipulations is a bit naive.
I don't think Worldcom is worried about widget sales being helped. Instead, their sales people can take their Rolodex with them to a *competitor*, and start (in order of revenue, of course), calling them and telling them yarns about how everybody with talent is fleeing Worldcom, so expect their service to go to hell quick. Better change your ISP and telephone service, before I start telling people other than my golfing buddies.
You think selling widgets is the same as selling telecom services? That's like saying database programmers can get jobs programming embedded systems in a week. They're both programmers, right? Sure, good programmers are good programmers, but knowledge of customers and markets are valuable to have as a salesperson.
Yet another "+4 Insightful" that deserves to be "-1 Has No Clue" None of this is coming from taxpayers. When Enron crashed, the (same?) batch of slashdotters complained about bondholders getting mythical compensation from the government.
The real loss was suffered by stockholders when their stock became worthless, and by employees laid off when the fiction of profit could no longer be sustained. Bond and debt holders now get to stand in line to get whatever is left of value in the company, for instance, by reconstituting the company, issuing new stock in exchange for the bonds and debts. So instead of an IOU, they get stock in the new company, for whatever that is worth.
The theoretical reason for the bonuses is that the company is worth more when enough people are left that know how things are actually set up. These clueful people are the most likely to be able to get jobs at competitors (and taking with them access to good customers), so you need a bonus to keep them from doing so.
The ethical problem, of course, is that the clueful people either were aware or should have been aware of the rampant misstatements of the accounting reality. But hey, if I'm stuck with a Worldcom IOU, I'm more interested in getting my 25 cents on the dollar than in making sure everyone gets what they deserve.
Lesson in life: we rarely get what we deserve. Better make do with what you can.
All of the fun Apple projects (Aqua et. al.) that I would be interested in tweaking are closed-source.
Hmmm. Perhaps Apple is keeping all these things closed source so you CAN'T indulge your interest in "tweaking." Perhaps these elements are fundamental enough to Apple's core goal for OS X that they don't want to be distracted by hundreds of amateurs submitting what they think are improvements. Instead, these tweakers will proliferate yet more useless "skins" for Linux desktop environments.
The kind of thing I'm sure Linux hackers would love to add: X window "compatible" cut and paste behavior, various redundant widgets with unpolished appearance and behavior, font rendering "optimizations" that gain 10% in throughput while adding 100% in butt-ugliness, etc. Thank god you can't add those to Aqua.
Your math neglected a very important part of the process: you also had to pay all the researchers who worked on compounds that turned out not to work (ineffective, too many side effects, poisonous, too hard to synthesize, too hard to purify...), because you can't know in advance.
Archos Jukebox 20 GB data
Batteries: 4 AA batteries
Height: 4.5 inches
Width: 3.2 inches
Depth: 1.3 inches
Weight: 0.75 pounds (340 g for you metric folks)
(not clear whether this includes batteries).
iPod specs:
Built-in rechargeable lithium polymer battery (1200 mAh)
Size and weight (20GB model)
Height: 4.0 in
Width: 2.4 in
Depth: 0.84 in
Weight: 7.2 oz (204 g)
You do the math.
Actually, if the anti-hydrogen is cold enough, you can store it in a magnetic trap. I believe it has to be of a particular spin polarization to stay trapped, however. Check out this proposal.
Reading the paper, I'd say the reason to be suspicious is that they seem to only have detected the radiation due to matter-anti-matter annihilation, with the requirement that an anti-proton and positron event happen at pretty much the same time and place. Then they use various comparisons to give additional confidence in the result.
However, as they say, they can't tell what quantum state these atoms are in.
Until they see [anti]hydrogen spectral lines, I'm not 100% sure they have real anti-hydrogen atoms; for now, I'd say 85% sure. Maybe Gabrielse knows of some ways that the same signature can be generated by other crap thrown around by the trapping and mixing processes.
Actually, you need 20 feet of anticopper tubing. And anti-H2O cubes. And an anti-SiO2 glass. But your method still works, in principle....
This link describes how the ATRAP collaboration cools the ingredients of Antihydrogen.
In comparing the quantities, you should keep in mind that the storage rings you are talking about have very "hot" (high kinetic energy) antiprotons.
The real achievement is to cool the antiprotons down to about 15 K, and combining them with positrons. The yield of that whole process is very low. I.e., you need large quantities of hot antiprotons to produce 50k atoms of "cold" antihydrogen.
This is Don Lancaster's (author of Incredible Secret Money Machine) take on patents. He's a unique character, and sometimes off-the-mark, but you should consider carefully before rejecting his advice.
He estimates the breakeven point for a patent is over 12 million in gross sales. His catch phrase is that it is useless to patent a mere million dollar idea.
Because she is one of them. The barbarians sacked Rome, but they also crowned themselves rulers of Rome.
R2 was being *sent* explicitly to Obi-wan Kenobi, on Tatooine. Remember that little message that R2 had to deliver? From a daughter of Vader, to the trainer of Vader, using a droid of Vader, on Vader's home planet, which just happens to have Vader's son on it as well. Of course, I know the Lucas fans will say there is some lame way (are human memories routinely erased in the Star Wars universe?) that *Vader* doesn't notice this, but still can remember enough about Obi-Wan and his past to say that Kenobi's "failure will be complete."
Anyhow, to get back to the parent post: it's rather hard to deliver a personal message without being able to recognize the recipient.
Oh, come on. The emporer isn't an innocent unarmed *bystander*. If you believe the Empire is evil, then he is the ultimate target of all the Rebel sacrifice. A soldier who takes a shot at the enemy leadership isn't experiencing *murderous* rage, he's just using adrenaline-driven anger to get the job done. It isn't good for his health, but it is good for the cause, and it his job.
Lots of soldiers have to kill the enemy. It's a foul thing, it ain't pacifism, and it isn't glorious, but it isn't evil, either. Just brutal, nasty, but necessary. If you have any humanity, it will deeply affect you, but if you realize it was all ultimately for the cause of good, then you will deal with it.
Murderous rage is burning down villages, raping civilians, and killing prisoners and surrendering enemies, which doesn't serve any cause.
Lucas has us believe that somehow killing the emperor ipso facto would turn Luke evil, while killing stormtroopers apparently doesn't have that effect.
Yeah, I've heard of LabView. As a programmer, I hated it (caveat: this was 1995).
The thing that hooks you onto LabView is you've got a bunch of test equipment that you want to automate. National Instruments has a HUGE list of "virtual" instruments that match the ones on your bench. Great, you say: these modules will be just the thing, and I'll be done in no time at all, because they've done all the work. WRONG.
The main feature of the NI VIs was that they could reproduce, on your computer screen, a GUI version of the front panel of the test equipment. (The other trend was to sell you a piece of test equipment that plugged into an expansion slot of your PC or an external chassis, and had a GUI instead of a front panel, but that is a separate topic.)
Well, big f**king deal. If I wanted to click an button-shaped icon on a GUI all day, I would have stuck with pushing the real button on the front panel. I want to write a PROGRAM, i.e., something more abstract than pressing the button.
The only real abstraction that LabView provided was a block which could have dataflow "wires" connected to the terminals. Once there were more than four terminals (think, function parameters), it became impossible to keep the wires neat, or keep straight which terminal was which.
Plus, the blocks were either ridiculously low-level (a GPIB command or two) or ridiculously baroque (a series of GPIB commands, with input wires for every possible setting of the instrument). I often had to resort to looking at the source, reading the GPIB sequences, then reading the instrument manual to translate into English.
Any kind of structured programming, other than blocks (functions) required some hokey GUI expression, often involving multiple-page (like tabs in a modern dialog box) displays. By design, you couldn't see the multiple branches of a case statement at the same time. Plus, the need to keep sane wiring meant that these pages kept growing to hold the most complex case, so programs of any sophistication became huge.
Forget it. I ended up writing my data collection code in a bastardized Pascal-like language supported by my data analysis program (Igor Pro). That was gross, but at least I could write a for loop without going insane, and I got a decent graphing environment.
When I say spacetime, what I mean is simply "solutions to Einstein's equations describing general relativity."
If Einstein's equations describe the physical universe, as far as we can determine, then it is physics. If not, then it is simply mathematics. If there is some astronomical observation tomorrow that shows that Einstein's equations' do not describe gravity, then the physics is wrong, but the mathematics is still correct.
I am simply taking the position of an apologist for mathematicians. Not an apologist for physicists.
What he is an apologist for is not "crackpot" science. It's basically applied mathematics. Even if one accepts your idea that "spacetime is fixed," which is only a classical concept, particles' "lifelines" are paths through that spacetime geometry.
Just like in geometry, we can imagine what possible shapes those paths can take. I can imagine, for instance, what sort of "straight" lines I can draw on the surface of a sphere. For the usual definitions of "straight," on a sphere, those lines are arcs about the center of the sphere, leading to spherical trigonometry, great circles, etc.
When the geometry is that of spacetime in the presence of gravity, the definition of "straight" lines in spacetime gets a lot more complicated. What sort of lines can be drawn in spacetime?
The basic question that the physicists you mention are trying to answer is whether it is possible for spacetime to be so twisted up that a line drawn in spacetime can form a closed path. It's simply a problem of geometry. They aren't suggesting that spacetime ever is that twisted, or that you could do anything like construct a spacetime that twisted, just whether it is mathematically possible as a geometry problem.
You're pretty optimistic when you say fraud is "always discovered." I believe that the physics community is demonstrating its general integrity in the treatment of these cases, so I think it is unlikely that fraud goes undiscovered for very long if the field is an active one, and the results major.
At least in the Schon case, the discovery of the alleged fraud relied pretty much on blind luck. A pretty major player was paying enough attention to the actual graphs to notice a very subtle similarity between traces of unrelated graphs. If you think about this, it is a pretty remarkable thing to have noticed. If Schon had been only slightly more careful (assuming it actually was deliberate fraud), he could have applied some random perturbations to the curves, and avoided this really damning "coincidence."
People were having trouble reproducing Schon's results, and eventually, he would have been unable to back up his main supporting claim, which was that his oxide barriers were much better quality than his competitors'. That's only because his competitors eventually would have insisted on watching Schon produce samples for their measurements. And that's only because Schon was really making a lot of noise about his results.
I'm quite confident that if I had fraudulently produced fake data in my thesis and publications, no one would have discovered it. Hell, not too many people noticed the truthful data. I just don't matter enough to the physics community for them to bother checking me out so carefully.
Thank you for explaining the SiGe heterojunction advance! Just wish I could have given you some of the mod points that went toward my post.
An A-D converter is not necessarily a truly hybrid device. The point is that there are transistors that are good for producing gain, possibly at high frequencies. Those make up what are generically called "linear" chips. Mostly op-amps and so on.
These tend to be bipolar junction transistors or related technologies. The key thing is that they tend to pass current all the time.
Then, there are transistors which are good for switching, for creating logic gates & CPU logic. These tend to be CMOS field-effect transistors which are designed to only pass current when they are switching, in order to reduce power consumption so that you can raise the clock rate to obscene levels. However, logic gates are ideally non-linear: either on or off, with nothing in between.
The problem is that these technologies are differently optimized, and aren't naturally compatible. Coming up with a process that can produce nice linear transistors along with high-performance logic gates is tough. You can also try to approach it from the other end: come up with some kind of circuit which can make nicer amplifiers out of lousy transistors.
That's what makes true mixed-signal chips difficult: you either give up linear behavior, or increase current draw, or you give up the gate density and clock performance.
You are completely right about mixed signal chips being a reality for a long time: you don't need to look any further than a video card in your computer to see that. Intel mentions "silicon radio" as if it is a new idea, but a company already exists called Cambridge Silicon Radio, so you can see it isn't just Intel in this business.
I have a feeling that something important is being left out of this article. If you look at the original press release you see that it is a total mishmash of different Intel developments. The poor journalist was stuck trying to find a lead in this story (other than "Intel has bunches o' innovation") and zeroed in on the part that mentioned Moore's law, which he had heard before.
The most interesting part that I see is the tunable laser using silicon photonics. Si has an indirect band-gap, which makes it not very good for making lasers and optical devices. That could be big news.