Look, the Ansible is not possible with quantum entanglement. Also, the original science fiction concept of the Ansible did not involve quantum entanglement. A fictional Ansible is built from a fictional particle that exists simultaneously in two locations and never decays. For an Ansible to work, there must be a special frame of reference in Relativity, but General Relativity does not allow for treating any frame differently from any other frame.
Entanglement is the splitting of a bit of quantum information across two interactions. Neither of the two interactions can possibly have any effect on the other; all that happens is that the entangled measurements from both interactions sum to zero. Every interaction between particles either creates entanglement or destroys it or performs some combination of the two.
Consider that they must sum to zero in every frame of reference under General Relativity: no interaction can determine the results of another because then there would exist some frame of reference where the effect would precede the cause.
That's the bonkers thing about entanglement: it implies determinism but also sidesteps it at the same time.
In my own experience with Diablo III, in the thirty-or-so hours I gave it, I never once got a loot drop that I thought was excellent. I bought most of my equipment on the gold auction house -- no real money involved -- and it allowed me to pretty easily stay ahead of the curve. At the same time, I didn't sell anything that way; it was just easier to sell every half-decent piece of loot to the shop.
Maybe the worst decision they made was to make the auction available to just anyone. It totally bypasses the loot cycle for the first two difficulty levels of the game. The player just buys good loot for game gold, blows through every level easily, and never experiences the excitement of a rare loot drop. "Oh, a yellow item? Yeah, I just bought one better than that for 500 gold."
If you could only access the auction once you reached Hell level, maybe the first hours of gameplay would be a, um, hell of a lot more fun.
It doesn't take any special training. You just gently extend the wing, extend the flight feathers, and cut about 2/3 of the length off the four longest feathers. Just don't cut to the quick!
Clipping the flight feathers doesn't actually stop them from flying. It just makes it very difficult for them to gain altitude. Clipped birds can still make short flights or flutter safely to the ground from any height, but they also can't fly into a ceiling fan if they get spooked.
The arrow of time is the reason why random bits of shrapnel and chemicals don't fly together and "un-detonate" to become hand grenades. In one direction of time, entropy in the universe always increases; in the other, it always decreases. The question is, why? If everything at the quantum level always worked the same way forwards as it does backwards, then entropy would be constant; the universe would be in some kind of steady state and nothing would matter because we wouldn't be here.
I think at this stage of research, it's more about finding clues than it is about trying to put them together into a coherent explanation. But if that's not true, I'd love to hear from someone who really knows this stuff..
I just listened to some Schoenberg stuff out of curiosity. It sounded to me like an orchestra out of tune, except every now and then there would be a nice harmonious moment. I think the general horribleness of it made the harmonious moments nicer.
But if you think about it, it's like being in an elevator full of farts and occasionally getting a whiff of perfume.
I would be okay with having government funded pure research, with its results becoming public domain. We share the cost and the risk, and we share the reward.
Each and every one of us benefit every day by discoveries fellow humans have made dating back to the discovery of flint spearheads and controlling fire. Can you imagine where the human species would be if the first people to hammer on flint rocks made a trade secret of their discoveries?
We'd probably be extinct.
I think I can be sort-of ok with patents and copyright on things that are pure luxuries. But when your life expectancy is beholden to someone who can charge you literally whatever they want, we have a serious problem.
Look, if it costs others many hours of labor to extend your life by one hour, then certainly a very high price for that extended health is justified. But when the cost of your life-saving medicine comes from nothing more than someone holding a secret, we have SERIOUS problems.
I'm old enough to remember when the Rain Forest was the "treasure trove" of new medicines.
Even then, the documentarians had the wit to point out that the main goal of researching all those new wonderful plant cures would be to figure out how they could create synthetic versions of nature's miracles and patent them.
So, you know what? I don't give a shit. If somebody finds something revolutionary and decides to share it with humanity, then by all means please slap me around some and make sure I am aware of it. Because not even the invention of aspirin (developed from old common knowledge about the medicinal properties of willow bark) went without patent-related controversy.
My rule of thumb is to allocate 40 minutes to watch 1 hour of TV. The 20-minute difference is the duration of the advertisements less the time it takes to skip them.It works pretty well.
Look, if you just want to be able to only write fresh stuff, you're useless. Your new code will become "legacy" code next month. Requirements are likely to change, or at least be refined. This is because project managers are not prescient and nobody ever really understands the real requirements until an alpha gets put into the hands of the end user.
It won't be long before you're going to have to go back and deal with the turds you yourself are crapping out. You might not think they're turds, but they are. That's because you're not prescient either. And if you spend too much of your energy striving for the most elegant, perfect code, then you're also constipated.
You're a better engineer if you can effectively reverse engineer other people's turds and polish them up a bit. If you can somehow find within yourself the ability to feel a bit of pride in addition to the disgust of dealing with other people's crappy code, you'll be happier in your lot.
You haven't made your bones as a programmer until you've spent five minutes cursing the idiocy of a programmer that came before you, whose crappy code you are having to fix, and then you look up the revision history to see who the offender is and discover that it was YOU.
Will that destroy the remote particle's self-interference fringes? If so, then we have our ansible.
You can't get enough information from a single particle to know for sure whether or not it interfered with itself as it passed through the slits. And when you try it with multiple particles, you can only figure out which ones interfered and which ones did not after you match them up with measurements taken at the other end of the experiment.
Whether the particles are entangled or not, the results at both detectors taken in aggregate look the same. The effects of entanglement only appear when you correlate both result sets.
I never realized that solar tides are so strong, and of course they would be stronger on Venus than Earth. And it does make sense that the tidal effects on liquid water are going to have a much more dynamic effect on a planet than those that just affect solid rock. Thank you for helping educate me.
What the hell happened to Venus? It's about 80 percent of the earth's mass. Why on Venus wouldn't it have a plate tectonics? Just because you can't see it happen doesn't mean it's not there.
Because it does not have tidal forces from a large nearby moon tugging on it like Earth does.
I'm no expert in this, but I dont think you understand whats going on here at all. Flipping one doesn't instantly flip the other. You cant communicate information via entanglement.
This is correct.
Please, someone correct me if im wrong, but my understanding is its like having a red, and blue ball in seperate bags. You throw one ball (in its bag) across the room, then open the other bag. The open bag is blue, you now know the red one is across the room.
This is not correct. What you are describing is classical information: the ball in each bag is either red or blue, you just don't know which ball is in which bag until you look.
To try to extend your analogy to how it really works, the balls would both be purple until you opened a bag and took the ball out. At that point, the ball would decide to be either red or blue, and the other ball would decide to be the opposite. But up until the bag is opened, each ball MUST be able to become red or blue when it is opened.
The reason has to do with how quantum observations are done. I'll use polarization of photons as an example. You cannot measure the exact angle of a photon's polarization. All you can do is pass that photon through a polarizing filter and see whether the photon passes through or not. If you don't know the state of the photon, then it passes through 50% of the time.
Once the photon passes through a polarizer set at a particular angle, it will thereafter always pass through a polarizer set at that exact angle. Its chance of passing through a polarizer at a different angle is the square of the cosine of the difference in angles. Suppose you have a stream of photons polarized at 0 degrees, then those photons have a 50% chance of passing through a filter set at 45 degrees and a 0% chance of passing through a filter set at 90 degrees. So far, this is all classical stuff that can be observed easily if you have a flashlight and a pair of polarized glass discs.
Now, at the quantum level, entanglement arises out of conservation laws. Each quantum interaction has to conserve energy and momentum and information and certain quantum properties of the objects that interacted like spin. So if you hit an atom with a photon, and that atom absorbs the photon, then releases the energy as two photons to return to its ground state, those two photons will be entangled. Each will carry away half of the energy (because each action must have an equal and opposite reaction)
Photons have spin. Spin is a conserved property. This means that when one quantum event creates two photons, those photons' spins must cancel each other out. Spin determines a photon's angle of polarization. So, the two newly created photons will have orthogonal polarizations. At the same time, it is not possible to know anything about the spin of the newly-emitted photons at the time of their creation. So, you've now got a pair of polarization-entangled photons. They have spin and their spins add to zero and you know nothing about their spins. (If you did something to generate photons with known spin values, those photons would not be spin-entangled. Entanglement and information are two sides of the same coin.)
One of the consequences of measuring pairs of polarization-entangled photons is that in order to conserve spin, the results of measuring their polarizations correlate. If photon A passes through a 0-degree filter, then photon B must never pass a 0-degree filter, because that would mean that their spins did not cancel. If A passes through a 0-degree filter, then B will pass through a 90-degree filter. This relationship holds true for any pair of angles you choose: if the angles are the same, then only one photon from each pair will pass the filter. If the angles are 90 degrees apart, then either both of them or neither of them will pass the filter (with an even chance of each outcome). They correlate, even though they are distant from each
Nowadays when a senior citizen pays with a check at the grocery store, the cash register just scans the routing and account numbers and runs the transaction electronically just like as if it were a debit card. It will even print the amount on the check for you. When done, the cashier will hand the check back along with a receipt that looks much like a debit card receipt.
All that said, I still pay a few of my bills by writing and mailing checks, because the organization I'm making the payment to insists on adding a surcharge if I want to pay online.
You know, that song has a pretty mean hook. The chorus is probably gonna keep me earwormed for a few hours today. I'M A SOFTWARE DEVELOPER AND I'M DEVELOPING 4 THE REST OF MY LIFE.
I doubt the number is 99%. Otherwise, auto parts stores wouldn't stay in business and Car Talk wouldn't have an audience.
The tire pressure monitors (my vehicle has them) are an interesting thing, though, because they don't tell you anything you can't see just by walking around your car and giving it a quick inspection before jumping in and driving it in the morning. If you're paying even the slightest attention, you can see that a tire is losing pressure well before it's dangerously flat...
I listen to NPR during my daily work commute, and that has definitely made me much more well-informed about world news.
I've caught snippets of Car Talk on the occasional Saturday morning where I'm out driving early, and it's always been entertaining. I'm no expert in cars, but I've replaced my own brake pads, changed my own oil, and recently even worked through a do-it-yourself oxygen sensor replacement. The show is both entertaining and informative; the hosts are witty and the subject matter is at the right level for someone who realizes that you don't have to get screwed over by a repair shop for a burnt-out headlamp.
On a recent road trip, I found myself in a weird no-man's land somewhere in North Carolina where I could only pick up talk radio and country music. I ended up actually listening to Rush Limbaugh for a short stretch. I was absolutely amazed at the complete lack of substance in his show. It was nothing but taking a random fact and then spewing heavily slanted personal opinion about it.
For those who choose to listen to that kind of crap over something like Diane Rhem or All Things Considered or Kojo Nnamdi, all I can do is just beg: Give it one hour. Any of those three shows. You will get twenty times the information and one twentieth the spoon-fed opinion from it than you will get from Rush.
Listening to conservative talk radio is for those who can't be bothered to learn the truth or think for themselves. If you won't listen to NPR because you think it's "liberal" then you are doing yourself and your species a huge disservice, and you are worth nothing but contempt.
And they say that gravity is the weakest of the fundamental forces. Gravity can trap unbelievable amounts of matter until the the heat death of the universe; it can shape the orbits of galaxies that are millions of light-years in diameter; it can create conditions that we simply don't have the math to explain. Gravity is the one force that we don't have a good theory to explain yet.
Pshaw. Gravity sees your Strong Force and raises you a Theory of Everything.:)
We assume that people wearing them are busy or oblivious, so now people wear them to appear busy or oblivious â" even without music.
I work in a software development environment that embraces Agile principles. We wear multiple hats. We operate transparently. We communicate with each other, frequently.
But sometimes, when I need to go into the Code Zone and focus on getting shit done, I need to operate without the possibility of my train of thought being derailed. When that happens, I put on my headphones and I queue up a playlist I've listened to a dozen times before.
The headphones and the music drown out the background distractions. Since I'm overly familiar with the music, I don't listen to it with my conscious mind. But the yammering little goblin in the back of my brain eats that shit up. And while he's pacified, I can build immense structures of pure logic in the forefront of my consciousness and go about the business of translating those glorious edifices into executable symbolic logic.
And while my subconscious is busy doing karaoke with the Barenaked Ladies or Neil Diamond or whatever else I chose to "listen" to, other people know (or at least can pretend) that if I don't respond to whatever they're yammering on about at any given moment, it's because I just didn't hear them.
I'm just guessing here, but I'd expect the "science" was testing with auditory stimuli designed to engage the conscious mind, whereas those of us who use headphones and music as an important shield specifically choose to use music that we don't actually have to listen to.
I didn't read TFA. Often I do, but for this one I don't think I have to. I know that if I need to focus on getting certain types of work done, you can either give me a private quiet space to do it in and leave me the fuck alone, or you can respect the headphones and leave me the fuck alone. The actual headphones and whatever may or may not be piped through them is irrelevant.
I think the thing you're missing is that the event horizon forms from a point and expands outward. The matter doesn't transition the event horizon; the even horizon engulfs it!
The point is this guy's friend would never consider using a piece of tin can on his bike, and would always buy the expensive part every time because he's the kind of guy that associates paying for something with quality.
Recently I had to take care of a bad oxygen sensor in my truck. I had these options:
1> Take it to a shop and pay $100 for diagnostics, $250 for the part, and another $150 for the labor
2> Buy an OEM replacement part for $135 and install it myself
3> Buy a third-party "universal" part for $60, cut the plug off my original part, splice the wires to the replacement part, hope I got the wiring right, install it myself, and hope the whole thing doesn't come apart when the engine heats up or I drive too fast over a speed bump.
Taking it to the shop is buying Windows pre-installed and paying for annual support. Buying the OEM replacement part and installing it myself is buying Windows and installing it myself. Buying the universal part etc. is installing and using Linux.
Someone who doesn't want to worry about anything takes Option 1. Someone who knows a few things and can research problems takes Option 2. Someone who lives and breathes computers takes Option 3.
Me, I've been using Linux on hobby machines since the mid-nineties, when I had to download Slackware as a series of floppy disk images, but I just flat can't make it work as a full-time machine. As for my truck -- well, it's my sole means of transportation and I'd have had to take Option 1 if the particular bad oxygen sensor didn't happen to be one of the easier ones to access.
I'm guessing that the bike part replacement you mention is more complex than just cutting up a tin can and jamming a piece of metal into the bike.
Slashdot Mirror
Look, the Ansible is not possible with quantum entanglement. Also, the original science fiction concept of the Ansible did not involve quantum entanglement. A fictional Ansible is built from a fictional particle that exists simultaneously in two locations and never decays. For an Ansible to work, there must be a special frame of reference in Relativity, but General Relativity does not allow for treating any frame differently from any other frame.
Entanglement is the splitting of a bit of quantum information across two interactions. Neither of the two interactions can possibly have any effect on the other; all that happens is that the entangled measurements from both interactions sum to zero. Every interaction between particles either creates entanglement or destroys it or performs some combination of the two.
Consider that they must sum to zero in every frame of reference under General Relativity: no interaction can determine the results of another because then there would exist some frame of reference where the effect would precede the cause.
That's the bonkers thing about entanglement: it implies determinism but also sidesteps it at the same time.
In my own experience with Diablo III, in the thirty-or-so hours I gave it, I never once got a loot drop that I thought was excellent. I bought most of my equipment on the gold auction house -- no real money involved -- and it allowed me to pretty easily stay ahead of the curve. At the same time, I didn't sell anything that way; it was just easier to sell every half-decent piece of loot to the shop.
Maybe the worst decision they made was to make the auction available to just anyone. It totally bypasses the loot cycle for the first two difficulty levels of the game. The player just buys good loot for game gold, blows through every level easily, and never experiences the excitement of a rare loot drop. "Oh, a yellow item? Yeah, I just bought one better than that for 500 gold."
If you could only access the auction once you reached Hell level, maybe the first hours of gameplay would be a, um, hell of a lot more fun.
It doesn't take any special training. You just gently extend the wing, extend the flight feathers, and cut about 2/3 of the length off the four longest feathers. Just don't cut to the quick!
Clipping the flight feathers doesn't actually stop them from flying. It just makes it very difficult for them to gain altitude. Clipped birds can still make short flights or flutter safely to the ground from any height, but they also can't fly into a ceiling fan if they get spooked.
The arrow of time is the reason why random bits of shrapnel and chemicals don't fly together and "un-detonate" to become hand grenades. In one direction of time, entropy in the universe always increases; in the other, it always decreases. The question is, why? If everything at the quantum level always worked the same way forwards as it does backwards, then entropy would be constant; the universe would be in some kind of steady state and nothing would matter because we wouldn't be here.
I think at this stage of research, it's more about finding clues than it is about trying to put them together into a coherent explanation. But if that's not true, I'd love to hear from someone who really knows this stuff..
I just listened to some Schoenberg stuff out of curiosity. It sounded to me like an orchestra out of tune, except every now and then there would be a nice harmonious moment. I think the general horribleness of it made the harmonious moments nicer.
But if you think about it, it's like being in an elevator full of farts and occasionally getting a whiff of perfume.
I'm sure it's an acquired taste.
Not only that, it's not actually a fiscal cliff. It's more like a manageably steep slope.
I would be okay with having government funded pure research, with its results becoming public domain. We share the cost and the risk, and we share the reward.
Each and every one of us benefit every day by discoveries fellow humans have made dating back to the discovery of flint spearheads and controlling fire. Can you imagine where the human species would be if the first people to hammer on flint rocks made a trade secret of their discoveries?
We'd probably be extinct.
I think I can be sort-of ok with patents and copyright on things that are pure luxuries. But when your life expectancy is beholden to someone who can charge you literally whatever they want, we have a serious problem.
Look, if it costs others many hours of labor to extend your life by one hour, then certainly a very high price for that extended health is justified. But when the cost of your life-saving medicine comes from nothing more than someone holding a secret, we have SERIOUS problems.
I'm old enough to remember when the Rain Forest was the "treasure trove" of new medicines.
Even then, the documentarians had the wit to point out that the main goal of researching all those new wonderful plant cures would be to figure out how they could create synthetic versions of nature's miracles and patent them.
So, you know what? I don't give a shit. If somebody finds something revolutionary and decides to share it with humanity, then by all means please slap me around some and make sure I am aware of it. Because not even the invention of aspirin (developed from old common knowledge about the medicinal properties of willow bark) went without patent-related controversy.
My rule of thumb is to allocate 40 minutes to watch 1 hour of TV. The 20-minute difference is the duration of the advertisements less the time it takes to skip them.It works pretty well.
Everything you just said is true. Several years ago.
Look, if you just want to be able to only write fresh stuff, you're useless. Your new code will become "legacy" code next month. Requirements are likely to change, or at least be refined. This is because project managers are not prescient and nobody ever really understands the real requirements until an alpha gets put into the hands of the end user.
It won't be long before you're going to have to go back and deal with the turds you yourself are crapping out. You might not think they're turds, but they are. That's because you're not prescient either. And if you spend too much of your energy striving for the most elegant, perfect code, then you're also constipated.
You're a better engineer if you can effectively reverse engineer other people's turds and polish them up a bit. If you can somehow find within yourself the ability to feel a bit of pride in addition to the disgust of dealing with other people's crappy code, you'll be happier in your lot.
You haven't made your bones as a programmer until you've spent five minutes cursing the idiocy of a programmer that came before you, whose crappy code you are having to fix, and then you look up the revision history to see who the offender is and discover that it was YOU.
More like the quantum encryption is.
You can't get enough information from a single particle to know for sure whether or not it interfered with itself as it passed through the slits. And when you try it with multiple particles, you can only figure out which ones interfered and which ones did not after you match them up with measurements taken at the other end of the experiment.
Whether the particles are entangled or not, the results at both detectors taken in aggregate look the same. The effects of entanglement only appear when you correlate both result sets.
Apparently the effect slows the rate of decay, meaning the isotopes are actually slightly older than estimated.
I never realized that solar tides are so strong, and of course they would be stronger on Venus than Earth. And it does make sense that the tidal effects on liquid water are going to have a much more dynamic effect on a planet than those that just affect solid rock. Thank you for helping educate me.
Because it does not have tidal forces from a large nearby moon tugging on it like Earth does.
This is correct.
This is not correct. What you are describing is classical information: the ball in each bag is either red or blue, you just don't know which ball is in which bag until you look.
To try to extend your analogy to how it really works, the balls would both be purple until you opened a bag and took the ball out. At that point, the ball would decide to be either red or blue, and the other ball would decide to be the opposite. But up until the bag is opened, each ball MUST be able to become red or blue when it is opened.
The reason has to do with how quantum observations are done. I'll use polarization of photons as an example. You cannot measure the exact angle of a photon's polarization. All you can do is pass that photon through a polarizing filter and see whether the photon passes through or not. If you don't know the state of the photon, then it passes through 50% of the time.
Once the photon passes through a polarizer set at a particular angle, it will thereafter always pass through a polarizer set at that exact angle. Its chance of passing through a polarizer at a different angle is the square of the cosine of the difference in angles. Suppose you have a stream of photons polarized at 0 degrees, then those photons have a 50% chance of passing through a filter set at 45 degrees and a 0% chance of passing through a filter set at 90 degrees. So far, this is all classical stuff that can be observed easily if you have a flashlight and a pair of polarized glass discs.
Now, at the quantum level, entanglement arises out of conservation laws. Each quantum interaction has to conserve energy and momentum and information and certain quantum properties of the objects that interacted like spin. So if you hit an atom with a photon, and that atom absorbs the photon, then releases the energy as two photons to return to its ground state, those two photons will be entangled. Each will carry away half of the energy (because each action must have an equal and opposite reaction)
Photons have spin. Spin is a conserved property. This means that when one quantum event creates two photons, those photons' spins must cancel each other out. Spin determines a photon's angle of polarization. So, the two newly created photons will have orthogonal polarizations. At the same time, it is not possible to know anything about the spin of the newly-emitted photons at the time of their creation. So, you've now got a pair of polarization-entangled photons. They have spin and their spins add to zero and you know nothing about their spins. (If you did something to generate photons with known spin values, those photons would not be spin-entangled. Entanglement and information are two sides of the same coin.)
One of the consequences of measuring pairs of polarization-entangled photons is that in order to conserve spin, the results of measuring their polarizations correlate. If photon A passes through a 0-degree filter, then photon B must never pass a 0-degree filter, because that would mean that their spins did not cancel. If A passes through a 0-degree filter, then B will pass through a 90-degree filter. This relationship holds true for any pair of angles you choose: if the angles are the same, then only one photon from each pair will pass the filter. If the angles are 90 degrees apart, then either both of them or neither of them will pass the filter (with an even chance of each outcome). They correlate, even though they are distant from each
Nowadays when a senior citizen pays with a check at the grocery store, the cash register just scans the routing and account numbers and runs the transaction electronically just like as if it were a debit card. It will even print the amount on the check for you. When done, the cashier will hand the check back along with a receipt that looks much like a debit card receipt.
All that said, I still pay a few of my bills by writing and mailing checks, because the organization I'm making the payment to insists on adding a surcharge if I want to pay online.
You know, that song has a pretty mean hook. The chorus is probably gonna keep me earwormed for a few hours today. I'M A SOFTWARE DEVELOPER AND I'M DEVELOPING 4 THE REST OF MY LIFE.
I doubt the number is 99%. Otherwise, auto parts stores wouldn't stay in business and Car Talk wouldn't have an audience.
The tire pressure monitors (my vehicle has them) are an interesting thing, though, because they don't tell you anything you can't see just by walking around your car and giving it a quick inspection before jumping in and driving it in the morning. If you're paying even the slightest attention, you can see that a tire is losing pressure well before it's dangerously flat...
I listen to NPR during my daily work commute, and that has definitely made me much more well-informed about world news.
I've caught snippets of Car Talk on the occasional Saturday morning where I'm out driving early, and it's always been entertaining. I'm no expert in cars, but I've replaced my own brake pads, changed my own oil, and recently even worked through a do-it-yourself oxygen sensor replacement. The show is both entertaining and informative; the hosts are witty and the subject matter is at the right level for someone who realizes that you don't have to get screwed over by a repair shop for a burnt-out headlamp.
On a recent road trip, I found myself in a weird no-man's land somewhere in North Carolina where I could only pick up talk radio and country music. I ended up actually listening to Rush Limbaugh for a short stretch. I was absolutely amazed at the complete lack of substance in his show. It was nothing but taking a random fact and then spewing heavily slanted personal opinion about it.
For those who choose to listen to that kind of crap over something like Diane Rhem or All Things Considered or Kojo Nnamdi, all I can do is just beg: Give it one hour. Any of those three shows. You will get twenty times the information and one twentieth the spoon-fed opinion from it than you will get from Rush.
Listening to conservative talk radio is for those who can't be bothered to learn the truth or think for themselves. If you won't listen to NPR because you think it's "liberal" then you are doing yourself and your species a huge disservice, and you are worth nothing but contempt.
And they say that gravity is the weakest of the fundamental forces. Gravity can trap unbelievable amounts of matter until the the heat death of the universe; it can shape the orbits of galaxies that are millions of light-years in diameter; it can create conditions that we simply don't have the math to explain. Gravity is the one force that we don't have a good theory to explain yet.
:)
Pshaw. Gravity sees your Strong Force and raises you a Theory of Everything.
I work in a software development environment that embraces Agile principles. We wear multiple hats. We operate transparently. We communicate with each other, frequently.
But sometimes, when I need to go into the Code Zone and focus on getting shit done, I need to operate without the possibility of my train of thought being derailed. When that happens, I put on my headphones and I queue up a playlist I've listened to a dozen times before.
The headphones and the music drown out the background distractions. Since I'm overly familiar with the music, I don't listen to it with my conscious mind. But the yammering little goblin in the back of my brain eats that shit up. And while he's pacified, I can build immense structures of pure logic in the forefront of my consciousness and go about the business of translating those glorious edifices into executable symbolic logic.
And while my subconscious is busy doing karaoke with the Barenaked Ladies or Neil Diamond or whatever else I chose to "listen" to, other people know (or at least can pretend) that if I don't respond to whatever they're yammering on about at any given moment, it's because I just didn't hear them.
I'm just guessing here, but I'd expect the "science" was testing with auditory stimuli designed to engage the conscious mind, whereas those of us who use headphones and music as an important shield specifically choose to use music that we don't actually have to listen to.
I didn't read TFA. Often I do, but for this one I don't think I have to. I know that if I need to focus on getting certain types of work done, you can either give me a private quiet space to do it in and leave me the fuck alone, or you can respect the headphones and leave me the fuck alone. The actual headphones and whatever may or may not be piped through them is irrelevant.
I think the thing you're missing is that the event horizon forms from a point and expands outward. The matter doesn't transition the event horizon; the even horizon engulfs it!
Recently I had to take care of a bad oxygen sensor in my truck. I had these options:
1> Take it to a shop and pay $100 for diagnostics, $250 for the part, and another $150 for the labor
2> Buy an OEM replacement part for $135 and install it myself
3> Buy a third-party "universal" part for $60, cut the plug off my original part, splice the wires to the replacement part, hope I got the wiring right, install it myself, and hope the whole thing doesn't come apart when the engine heats up or I drive too fast over a speed bump.
Taking it to the shop is buying Windows pre-installed and paying for annual support. Buying the OEM replacement part and installing it myself is buying Windows and installing it myself. Buying the universal part etc. is installing and using Linux.
Someone who doesn't want to worry about anything takes Option 1. Someone who knows a few things and can research problems takes Option 2. Someone who lives and breathes computers takes Option 3.
Me, I've been using Linux on hobby machines since the mid-nineties, when I had to download Slackware as a series of floppy disk images, but I just flat can't make it work as a full-time machine. As for my truck -- well, it's my sole means of transportation and I'd have had to take Option 1 if the particular bad oxygen sensor didn't happen to be one of the easier ones to access.
I'm guessing that the bike part replacement you mention is more complex than just cutting up a tin can and jamming a piece of metal into the bike.