I think the parent was inferring that they used a high level language with a compiler that took their rough code which indicates their general intension and produced something fast efficient and compact which did exactly what they wanted to do with minimal effort on their part, mainly because the compiler subconsciously wanted to sleep with them. I have certainly been such a compiler before, damn woman, they're too good at this programming milarky. They are very good at selecting the right tool for the job:)
The laws of thermodynamics only are statistical and only apply to macroscopic processes and are in that sense incorrect. In theory a closed system could spontainously start to lose entropy but it is extremely unlikely. So it is possible to violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics but they are very good approximations to some underlying more fundimental theory.
Actually it is relegated to be being a theory forever. You wont have a law of evolution. It has gone out of fashion to call things laws in science. In fact the only reason we have laws is that they are a hold over from times when the scientific method was less wellunderstood. A law implies that something works that way and is true. However you can never ever prove a scientific theory (only disprove), so you have no way of knowing if its really correct. Hence you cant have a law.
Incidently Newtons laws and the laws of thermodynanics are incorrect and have been disproved by experiment. However they are a pretty good approximation of some underlying theory (ie general relativity/special relativity for Newton) at macroscopic scales at speeds not close to the speed of light.
First of all they are using anti-hydrogen for two reasons. First of, gravity is proprotional to mass and positrons have a mass of 0.5MeV while protons have a mass of a GeV or so. Thats a difference in mass of a factor of 2000. The second reason is that the electromagnetism is many many many orders of magnitude stronger than gravity, the EM coupling constant is around 1/137 while gravities coupling constant is around 1/ (1.2x10^{19}). So unless the object is electrically neutral, the EM force will vastly dwarf the gravitation force making any measurement extremely difficult (ie impossible practically speaking). Positrons and anti-protons are of course charged, hence you need to combine them into anti-hydrogen.
Secondly it is only clear that the electrons and positrons have the same absolute mass. The formula you are refering is actually E^2 = (pc)^2 + (mc^2)^2 not E=mc^2. Hence you lose sign information.
I fail to follow the rest of your post.
Dr Grom, DPhil (Oxon), Particle Physicist working at CERN (although not on this experiment)
I made a conscious decision to purchase a copy of vista home when building my recent box from parts. For what its worth I use linux extensively at work and dual boot and I like linux. Vista was frustrating at first but actually its pretty much like XP but fractionally better in a few areas. What I dislike about it is that they didnt push the boat out enough with the ui candy, I would kill for multiple desktops and expose (features both Mac and Linux have). And would it freaking kill them to have an "always on top" button on each window, linux has had that for like ever. For these reasons windows isnt my work OS but it makes a pretty nice play OS which for as sad as it is, linux and Mac OS arent fully there yet.
So to summaries, basically Vista a better option on a new PC at home than XP in my opinion. It beats Mac OS and Linux for "play" in my opinion but fairs worse for "work". However on my laptop bought just pre-vista, I have no desire to upgrade it to Vista from XP as it the slight improvements from Vista arent worth it.
Also, for those in the science community, evo.caltech.edu is a nice Java-based collaboration tool. Your definition of nice seems to differ from mine. Its of course much better than vrvs but it seems to have issues and doubly so for video. Its not reliable yet and sometimes if CMS and/or ATLAS are having a large meeting, grinds to a halt. Although to be fair it is rapidly improving. I have observed that (pulling number out of...) it has only a 60% success rate. Additionally it is more designed for large prearranged meetings and is not as immediate as say ichat when you want an adhoc meeting to discuss something.
Interesting, thats different to here, I didnt know that, thanks for the info. Incidentally I probably should have mentioned my parents live in Scotland where the FCC doesnt have a whole lot of clout:)
It all depends on the location. In a built up neighbourhood, sure it isnt too bad, as you say other people probably have worse. But in remote, isolated, often stunningly beautiful places with extremely little development, it can look a little jarring.
Cunning plan, I like your thinking. Also its true, something that was an eyesore with enough time often becomes a defining characteristic of the area and instead of people wanting to knock it down, people want to stop people knocking it down.
Incidentally, if you like that dish you could probably get it on the cheap as Jordrell Bank might be closing soon due to incredibly stupid short sighted funding cuts. Down with STFC, the lying UK Government and Keith Mason!!
Re:Potentially crazy suggestion:
on
Dealing With Dialup
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
this is almost exactly what my parents did in a similar situation. Couldnt have a dish on the outside (both planning and aesthetic reasons) but they could build a small shed outside without planning permission. Volia, dish goes in shed with the special roof (although they might be trying it without roof for a while to see if its worth the money for the tiles). Also has the added advantage that passing ner-do-wells dont start wondering why that old isolated cottage has a big dish outside it.
Okay this reply is nothing to do with the parent. Its shameless top whoring. Mods, your call. I've got karma to burn on this. But the next half a page is only +5 funnys and doesnt answer the question.
That out of the way, you must see CMS or ATLAS, preferably both. This really is your last chance to see them. I work on CMS and even I probably will have major difficulties seeing it ever again after this saturday. The shear scale of these detectors are breathtaking, they are several stories high and look every inch of what you would expect, ie large hunks of detector and huge amounts of cables everywhere. It gets even more mind blowing when you release that these huge detectors are designed to detect subatomic particles. That lump of lead on CMS will manage to accurately detect a single photon by completely absorbing its energy.
To make it even more enticing, these detectors (and I say this fully believing this) are likely to produce a fundamental change in physics. Basically we are going to find something new, our theories break down at this scale (WW scattering will violate unitary if theres no new particles). In 1-10 years we will have a new breakthough. In 40-70 years, the discoveries here made by those detectors may well underpin our entire society (compare with quantum physics producing the transistor). Wouldnt you want to be able to see the machines that made this possible shown to you by the people that built them if you had the chance?
I think thats a little harsh although has some grounding in reality. It is true that theoretically, there are many many theories out there which predict unobserved particles and one is invented almost every week. The Higgs for example, supersymmetry (SUSY) is another mainstream one. Simply put we have no idea whats going on except that the Standard Model seems to describe it amazingly well. However its incomplete, has many prob such as the baryon asymmetry one being discussed, then the many theories which try to solve these problems and all (or almost all) bring in new particles. This is the scientific method, we do an experiment, we note we dont full understand it and then we hypothesize a theory to explain it. We then test this theory to see if its correct and this is where most of the new theories fall down.
In particle physics right now, the problem is that we have a model, the Standard Model, which we know is incomplete (doesnt include gravity for a start) but it more or less explains every experimental result we've every produced (neutrino masses are argueably accommodated with some small extension). We lack experimental data to even give us a hint what might be beyond it and this has been the case for a long time. So theory has had nothing to do but invent crazy models and wait for the experimentalists to catch up (which we hope to do this year, it'll be exciting). Hence why you see a lot of crazy models around with zero experimental evidence supporting them.
The other problem is that we are all tired and sick of the Standard Model, we want to know whats beyond it so people really really want to find evidence of new physics beyond it. This means that people are quick to jump on small effects and claim its new physics which is probably where you are coming from. Usually they get shouted down by the rest of the quickly community but it does happen with alarming regularity (see pentaquarks, 160 GeV Higgs last year as two recent examples). Whats worse is that for something like the result in the article, its an indirect evidence in a QCD environment which basically means there are so many effects going on, this could easily be explained by the Standard Model. So basically nobody believes it for now. QCD is what binds mesons (such as the B+,B0) and baryons (such as the proton and neutron) together. Unfortunately, we cant solve it right now, except for high energies so often there are many effects which later turn out just because we make a mistake in our approximations in order to get a solution. Compare with the CDF Run I jet excess which later just turned out because QCD effects werent being taken into account. This is the reason that physicists wont believe anything which says new physics right now unless theres a clear unambiguous peak in a mass spectrum, ie make and detect a new particle in your detector. Now this could be genuine evidence but we've all been here before so I think the community takes the feeling that we'll wait for more supporting evidence and for people to offer up alternative explanations before we say its new physics.
Same here, red lights dont keep me awake, neither do blue lights on their own. However I've always found that turning on a flashing red and blue light behind me will instantly make me awake and fully alert,no matter what. The effect is amazing:)
Well its nice we had this Frank Exchange of Views. Its a Reasonable Excuse that he might want something with Very Little Gravitas Indeed or even Zero Gravitas. I'm a Recent Convert and when I'm Killing Time, I might read one of his books, enjoying them I see as Youthful Indiscretion of mine.
If you disagree, you can Kiss My Ass:)
Re:Excession and Look to Windward?
on
Matter
·
· Score: 1
Well I sort of agree. Use of Weapons is by far the best one without a shadow of a doubt, atleast for me. Just read it if you havent. I liked Look to the Windward but The Player of Games is perhaps slightly better. Both are very good. Excession, I agree is probably the worst of the lot. Dont get me wrong, I liked it and for what it is (a more traditional scifi space opera) it does the job and I though it was fun but I definately file it under very light reading and very different to the others.
Ah but you can only address 4GB of ram in 32-bit windows. That includes your graphics cards memory, after all its got to be addressable. High end video cards have lots of ram. So one 8800GTX knocks your addressable ram to ~3.25Gb and two in sli knocks it to 2.5 GB. Suddenly see why alot of people have 2gb of RAM when running with high end graphic cards...
Yes I can see how it can appear elitist. And yes it is elitist in a sense. Because its really hard. A PhD student typically has to do about 3 years hard work to get out an analysis sufficient quality and thats with help from experts. Before that they have 4 years of advanced physics. I'm not saying the common man cant do it, just it'll take them years of hard work to understand it to analysis physics results which have already had 800 physicists pour over it to extract most things of value. However as I said, its really easy to think you've understood the data in a week or so and produce bogus results which I suspect most people would do.
As for the few geniuses who can handle the data better than any of us, yes its a noble idea and it sounds nice in practice. However these geniuses are still going to have to slog through the data and its still going to be hard, even for them to do it by them selfs. Its not something some wiz kid will pick up and by the afternoon have a nobel prize. However if they are really interested, they can stop by their local particle physics lab and talk to the people there. Its not as if we dont ever give out our data, lots of students (undergraduates and 6th formers (high schoolers for yanks) over the years have been given a copy and helped to understand it. If you want it badly enough you'll probably get some sort of access to old data. Sure some may fall through the cracks but thats unavoidable.
Also incidentally the most bogus results I'm afraid of are not from the general public but from our theoretical colleagues who are actually the people we are most concerned about hiding the data from:) A lot (but not all) think that data analysis is easy and have a vested interest in proving a certain model so subconsciously they might misinterpret the data or not rigorously check it when it looks like its proving what they want it to prove. Then all of a sudden you have headlines like Prof. X from Ivy League University Y has found a new physics Z in Tevatron/LHC data which if true would be the most significant discovery in physics in the last 30 years and so is splashed all over the media. The public and media just knows this guy is an ivy league professor but doesnt know that he is little more qualified to analysis the results than they are so they believe him. Arguments would then ensure of the significance of the finding and then eventually a retraction is printed. But this would be in the public and in the media and I think this is damaging to science as the general public starts thinking "these stupid scientists, always changing their mind, should we believe anything they say". Plus you would get an increase in the usual crazy science results but this time with data whose analysis most people cant tell is rubbish. Slashdot would be happy as they tend to like crappy science:) but its not something scientists would be happy with.
As a researcher myself (particle physics), I echo others comments in this thread that a) its a nice idea but b) isnt going to happen. There are three main problems, the first two are solvable, the third isnt
1) trivially, 3TB is no where near enough to store my data
Bit of a non issue for the overall concept but if google wants my data, they really are going to have to up the storage by a few orders of magnitude.
2) as others stated, we work really really hard to acquire our data, research is about 10% inspiration, 90% perspiration. We are not giving up our data till we have milked it for all its worth.
This again is solvable, we release our data after we have all the publishable results we can think of and them let others have a crack. Somebody might find something useful and if not, well its great for younger scientists as you say. At the very least, people can reconfirm results at a later date easier. Main reason I like it.
3) The deal killer, for my field and I suspect others, it is really really difficult to understand our data and its really easy to misinterpret it.
New particles have been "discovered" so many times by grad students (and some professors who should know better) in particle physics data that I'm terrified of what somebody with no training outside the system might conclude from the data. At CDF (a fermilab expt) it took us (800 physicists) about 2-3 years to understand the data from the experiment enough to get proper physics results out of it. Even now, it takes a new comer about a year to get upto speed and thats with help from all the experts. But its very easy to think you understand things after a few weeks when infact your missing some incredibly subtle point and so I'm sure we would be flooded by bogus results due to misinterpretations from the data if we release it.
Anyway this all comes from a particle physics view point but I suspect quite a few other fields will be similar.
My flatmates remember that scene too. They came running to figure out why I suddenly screamed quite loudly out of the blue:) Yes I felt embarrassed afterwards.
You're right, you need to play bioshock at full to get the maximum experience. Theres usually a lot of bashing of the people who spend $600-700 on a graphics card but god it really makes a difference to the immersion, the little details like the shadow not being quite right being too hard to notice on crap resolutions.
That said, bioshock started to bore me a bit when it losses the creepiness halfway through the game when you suddenly realise that the biggest and baddest thing walking through the Rapture is yourself. It then turns from really good creepy shooter into a run of the mill shooter feast albeit one with great visual design and a good story.
Thanks for that. And its not karma whoring as this actually required some work and was usefull:)
Seeing the last one now (I couldnt be bothered to keep clicking) leads me to believe that they must have been a victim of the BSA's somewhat onerous required level of proof. I doubt they were intentionally infringing and I bet that in most cases either a) they had paid for it but lost the invoice (but probably had other proof which isnt accepted) b) the software hadnt been properly deleted from a machine but the user wasnt using it (eg a secretary getting a hand me down machine which has something like autodesk). This is just wild speculation but its happened before to Ernie Ball.
The main reason I think this is that Payless ShoeSource has ~4000 stores nationwide so its a fairly large operation. Theres a lot of infringing software listed but yet the fine is relatively small which would lead me to suspect that its a small overall percentage of the software in question. I suspect the Borland + Autodesk were accidental hand me downs and the rest either isolated mistakes or missing receipts. Now this may not be the case but if it is, its pretty off naming and shaming your customers for unintentional violations, given that license compliance can be pretty damn complicated anyways. I wish this article hadnt been posted to slashdot (and I rarely think an article shouldnt have been posted) as at best its pointless and at worse its unfair to the companies involved.
Chances are, they would bring up a weapon that is powerful enough to blow the asteroid before it hit Mars.
So you're saying all they need is a big fucking gun and they'll be fine. Do you really think they'll be able to find such a beast:)
Sorry, Rutherford's synchrotron is nothing like the Tevatron. And none of the US's remaining facilities are anything like the Tevatron. The Tevatron is a high energy particle collider (in fact the highest energy one ever built) which has about 1000 times more power than your typical synchrotron. Only the LHC in Europe (which on paper looks 7 times more powerful but in practice is about 3-4 times more powerful) can revival it and its only going to come on line next summer. Put it this way, if RALs synchrotron is a firework rocket, the Tevatron is the space shuttle:) Leading the world in making firework rockets is a tad different from leading the world in space technology.
Basically you need that energy to fundamental physics research which you just cant do with the low energy standard ones. For the record, I spent my PhD using Tevatron data to search for evidence that we had managed to rip a whole in our 3 dimensional space and sent a particle into the 5th dimension. You need a fair amount of energy to do that.
Dr Grom
Former Tevatron Physicist (as of about 4 months ago)
Current Rutherford Staff, working on the LHC
Yes its a perfect fit. Particularly as Wikipedia has now supplanted the Encyclopedia Britannica in many places as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom. Although it has many omissions, contains much that is apocryphal, or at least widely inaccurate, it scores over the older more pedestrian work in two important ways.
* 1. It is slightly cheaper
* 2. It has the words "You can copy and edit me for free" inscribed in large friendly letters in the license.
Also like the guide, although it cannot hope to be useful or informative on all matters, it does make the reassuring claim that where it is inaccurate, it is at least definitively inaccurate:)
Slashdot Mirror
whoosh.
:)
I think the parent was inferring that they used a high level language with a compiler that took their rough code which indicates their general intension and produced something fast efficient and compact which did exactly what they wanted to do with minimal effort on their part, mainly because the compiler subconsciously wanted to sleep with them. I have certainly been such a compiler before, damn woman, they're too good at this programming milarky. They are very good at selecting the right tool for the job
The laws of thermodynamics only are statistical and only apply to macroscopic processes and are in that sense incorrect. In theory a closed system could spontainously start to lose entropy but it is extremely unlikely. So it is possible to violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics but they are very good approximations to some underlying more fundimental theory.
Actually it is relegated to be being a theory forever. You wont have a law of evolution. It has gone out of fashion to call things laws in science. In fact the only reason we have laws is that they are a hold over from times when the scientific method was less wellunderstood. A law implies that something works that way and is true. However you can never ever prove a scientific theory (only disprove), so you have no way of knowing if its really correct. Hence you cant have a law.
Incidently Newtons laws and the laws of thermodynanics are incorrect and have been disproved by experiment. However they are a pretty good approximation of some underlying theory (ie general relativity/special relativity for Newton) at macroscopic scales at speeds not close to the speed of light.
Um I think you are confused.
First of all they are using anti-hydrogen for two reasons. First of, gravity is proprotional to mass and positrons have a mass of 0.5MeV while protons have a mass of a GeV or so. Thats a difference in mass of a factor of 2000. The second reason is that the electromagnetism is many many many orders of magnitude stronger than gravity, the EM coupling constant is around 1/137 while gravities coupling constant is around 1/ (1.2x10^{19}). So unless the object is electrically neutral, the EM force will vastly dwarf the gravitation force making any measurement extremely difficult (ie impossible practically speaking). Positrons and anti-protons are of course charged, hence you need to combine them into anti-hydrogen.
Secondly it is only clear that the electrons and positrons have the same absolute mass. The formula you are refering is actually E^2 = (pc)^2 + (mc^2)^2 not E=mc^2. Hence you lose sign information.
I fail to follow the rest of your post.
Dr Grom, DPhil (Oxon), Particle Physicist working at CERN (although not on this experiment)
me.
I made a conscious decision to purchase a copy of vista home when building my recent box from parts. For what its worth I use linux extensively at work and dual boot and I like linux. Vista was frustrating at first but actually its pretty much like XP but fractionally better in a few areas. What I dislike about it is that they didnt push the boat out enough with the ui candy, I would kill for multiple desktops and expose (features both Mac and Linux have). And would it freaking kill them to have an "always on top" button on each window, linux has had that for like ever. For these reasons windows isnt my work OS but it makes a pretty nice play OS which for as sad as it is, linux and Mac OS arent fully there yet.
So to summaries, basically Vista a better option on a new PC at home than XP in my opinion. It beats Mac OS and Linux for "play" in my opinion but fairs worse for "work". However on my laptop bought just pre-vista, I have no desire to upgrade it to Vista from XP as it the slight improvements from Vista arent worth it.
well it was obvious that the symmetry would be broken from the fact that the file is massive
Interesting, thats different to here, I didnt know that, thanks for the info. Incidentally I probably should have mentioned my parents live in Scotland where the FCC doesnt have a whole lot of clout :)
It all depends on the location. In a built up neighbourhood, sure it isnt too bad, as you say other people probably have worse. But in remote, isolated, often stunningly beautiful places with extremely little development, it can look a little jarring.
Cunning plan, I like your thinking. Also its true, something that was an eyesore with enough time often becomes a defining characteristic of the area and instead of people wanting to knock it down, people want to stop people knocking it down.
Incidentally, if you like that dish you could probably get it on the cheap as Jordrell Bank might be closing soon due to incredibly stupid short sighted funding cuts. Down with STFC, the lying UK Government and Keith Mason!!
this is almost exactly what my parents did in a similar situation. Couldnt have a dish on the outside (both planning and aesthetic reasons) but they could build a small shed outside without planning permission. Volia, dish goes in shed with the special roof (although they might be trying it without roof for a while to see if its worth the money for the tiles). Also has the added advantage that passing ner-do-wells dont start wondering why that old isolated cottage has a big dish outside it.
Okay this reply is nothing to do with the parent. Its shameless top whoring. Mods, your call. I've got karma to burn on this. But the next half a page is only +5 funnys and doesnt answer the question.
That out of the way, you must see CMS or ATLAS, preferably both. This really is your last chance to see them. I work on CMS and even I probably will have major difficulties seeing it ever again after this saturday. The shear scale of these detectors are breathtaking, they are several stories high and look every inch of what you would expect, ie large hunks of detector and huge amounts of cables everywhere. It gets even more mind blowing when you release that these huge detectors are designed to detect subatomic particles. That lump of lead on CMS will manage to accurately detect a single photon by completely absorbing its energy.
To make it even more enticing, these detectors (and I say this fully believing this) are likely to produce a fundamental change in physics. Basically we are going to find something new, our theories break down at this scale (WW scattering will violate unitary if theres no new particles). In 1-10 years we will have a new breakthough. In 40-70 years, the discoveries here made by those detectors may well underpin our entire society (compare with quantum physics producing the transistor). Wouldnt you want to be able to see the machines that made this possible shown to you by the people that built them if you had the chance?
okay fair enough, I hadnt had my morning cup of tea :)
I think thats a little harsh although has some grounding in reality. It is true that theoretically, there are many many theories out there which predict unobserved particles and one is invented almost every week. The Higgs for example, supersymmetry (SUSY) is another mainstream one. Simply put we have no idea whats going on except that the Standard Model seems to describe it amazingly well. However its incomplete, has many prob such as the baryon asymmetry one being discussed, then the many theories which try to solve these problems and all (or almost all) bring in new particles. This is the scientific method, we do an experiment, we note we dont full understand it and then we hypothesize a theory to explain it. We then test this theory to see if its correct and this is where most of the new theories fall down.
In particle physics right now, the problem is that we have a model, the Standard Model, which we know is incomplete (doesnt include gravity for a start) but it more or less explains every experimental result we've every produced (neutrino masses are argueably accommodated with some small extension). We lack experimental data to even give us a hint what might be beyond it and this has been the case for a long time. So theory has had nothing to do but invent crazy models and wait for the experimentalists to catch up (which we hope to do this year, it'll be exciting). Hence why you see a lot of crazy models around with zero experimental evidence supporting them.
The other problem is that we are all tired and sick of the Standard Model, we want to know whats beyond it so people really really want to find evidence of new physics beyond it. This means that people are quick to jump on small effects and claim its new physics which is probably where you are coming from. Usually they get shouted down by the rest of the quickly community but it does happen with alarming regularity (see pentaquarks, 160 GeV Higgs last year as two recent examples). Whats worse is that for something like the result in the article, its an indirect evidence in a QCD environment which basically means there are so many effects going on, this could easily be explained by the Standard Model. So basically nobody believes it for now. QCD is what binds mesons (such as the B+,B0) and baryons (such as the proton and neutron) together. Unfortunately, we cant solve it right now, except for high energies so often there are many effects which later turn out just because we make a mistake in our approximations in order to get a solution. Compare with the CDF Run I jet excess which later just turned out because QCD effects werent being taken into account. This is the reason that physicists wont believe anything which says new physics right now unless theres a clear unambiguous peak in a mass spectrum, ie make and detect a new particle in your detector. Now this could be genuine evidence but we've all been here before so I think the community takes the feeling that we'll wait for more supporting evidence and for people to offer up alternative explanations before we say its new physics.
Same here, red lights dont keep me awake, neither do blue lights on their own. However I've always found that turning on a flashing red and blue light behind me will instantly make me awake and fully alert,no matter what. The effect is amazing :)
Well its nice we had this Frank Exchange of Views. Its a Reasonable Excuse that he might want something with Very Little Gravitas Indeed or even Zero Gravitas. I'm a Recent Convert and when I'm Killing Time, I might read one of his books, enjoying them I see as Youthful Indiscretion of mine.
:)
If you disagree, you can Kiss My Ass
Well I sort of agree. Use of Weapons is by far the best one without a shadow of a doubt, atleast for me. Just read it if you havent. I liked Look to the Windward but The Player of Games is perhaps slightly better. Both are very good. Excession, I agree is probably the worst of the lot. Dont get me wrong, I liked it and for what it is (a more traditional scifi space opera) it does the job and I though it was fun but I definately file it under very light reading and very different to the others.
Ah but you can only address 4GB of ram in 32-bit windows. That includes your graphics cards memory, after all its got to be addressable. High end video cards have lots of ram. So one 8800GTX knocks your addressable ram to ~3.25Gb and two in sli knocks it to 2.5 GB. Suddenly see why alot of people have 2gb of RAM when running with high end graphic cards...
Yes I can see how it can appear elitist. And yes it is elitist in a sense. Because its really hard. A PhD student typically has to do about 3 years hard work to get out an analysis sufficient quality and thats with help from experts. Before that they have 4 years of advanced physics. I'm not saying the common man cant do it, just it'll take them years of hard work to understand it to analysis physics results which have already had 800 physicists pour over it to extract most things of value. However as I said, its really easy to think you've understood the data in a week or so and produce bogus results which I suspect most people would do.
:) A lot (but not all) think that data analysis is easy and have a vested interest in proving a certain model so subconsciously they might misinterpret the data or not rigorously check it when it looks like its proving what they want it to prove. Then all of a sudden you have headlines like Prof. X from Ivy League University Y has found a new physics Z in Tevatron/LHC data which if true would be the most significant discovery in physics in the last 30 years and so is splashed all over the media. The public and media just knows this guy is an ivy league professor but doesnt know that he is little more qualified to analysis the results than they are so they believe him. Arguments would then ensure of the significance of the finding and then eventually a retraction is printed. But this would be in the public and in the media and I think this is damaging to science as the general public starts thinking "these stupid scientists, always changing their mind, should we believe anything they say". Plus you would get an increase in the usual crazy science results but this time with data whose analysis most people cant tell is rubbish. Slashdot would be happy as they tend to like crappy science :) but its not something scientists would be happy with.
As for the few geniuses who can handle the data better than any of us, yes its a noble idea and it sounds nice in practice. However these geniuses are still going to have to slog through the data and its still going to be hard, even for them to do it by them selfs. Its not something some wiz kid will pick up and by the afternoon have a nobel prize. However if they are really interested, they can stop by their local particle physics lab and talk to the people there. Its not as if we dont ever give out our data, lots of students (undergraduates and 6th formers (high schoolers for yanks) over the years have been given a copy and helped to understand it. If you want it badly enough you'll probably get some sort of access to old data. Sure some may fall through the cracks but thats unavoidable.
Also incidentally the most bogus results I'm afraid of are not from the general public but from our theoretical colleagues who are actually the people we are most concerned about hiding the data from
As a researcher myself (particle physics), I echo others comments in this thread that a) its a nice idea but b) isnt going to happen. There are three main problems, the first two are solvable, the third isnt
1) trivially, 3TB is no where near enough to store my data
Bit of a non issue for the overall concept but if google wants my data, they really are going to have to up the storage by a few orders of magnitude.
2) as others stated, we work really really hard to acquire our data, research is about 10% inspiration, 90% perspiration. We are not giving up our data till we have milked it for all its worth.
This again is solvable, we release our data after we have all the publishable results we can think of and them let others have a crack. Somebody might find something useful and if not, well its great for younger scientists as you say. At the very least, people can reconfirm results at a later date easier. Main reason I like it.
3) The deal killer, for my field and I suspect others, it is really really difficult to understand our data and its really easy to misinterpret it.
New particles have been "discovered" so many times by grad students (and some professors who should know better) in particle physics data that I'm terrified of what somebody with no training outside the system might conclude from the data. At CDF (a fermilab expt) it took us (800 physicists) about 2-3 years to understand the data from the experiment enough to get proper physics results out of it. Even now, it takes a new comer about a year to get upto speed and thats with help from all the experts. But its very easy to think you understand things after a few weeks when infact your missing some incredibly subtle point and so I'm sure we would be flooded by bogus results due to misinterpretations from the data if we release it.
Anyway this all comes from a particle physics view point but I suspect quite a few other fields will be similar.
My flatmates remember that scene too. They came running to figure out why I suddenly screamed quite loudly out of the blue :) Yes I felt embarrassed afterwards.
You're right, you need to play bioshock at full to get the maximum experience. Theres usually a lot of bashing of the people who spend $600-700 on a graphics card but god it really makes a difference to the immersion, the little details like the shadow not being quite right being too hard to notice on crap resolutions.
That said, bioshock started to bore me a bit when it losses the creepiness halfway through the game when you suddenly realise that the biggest and baddest thing walking through the Rapture is yourself. It then turns from really good creepy shooter into a run of the mill shooter feast albeit one with great visual design and a good story.
Thanks for that. And its not karma whoring as this actually required some work and was usefull :)
Seeing the last one now (I couldnt be bothered to keep clicking) leads me to believe that they must have been a victim of the BSA's somewhat onerous required level of proof. I doubt they were intentionally infringing and I bet that in most cases either a) they had paid for it but lost the invoice (but probably had other proof which isnt accepted) b) the software hadnt been properly deleted from a machine but the user wasnt using it (eg a secretary getting a hand me down machine which has something like autodesk). This is just wild speculation but its happened before to Ernie Ball.
The main reason I think this is that Payless ShoeSource has ~4000 stores nationwide so its a fairly large operation. Theres a lot of infringing software listed but yet the fine is relatively small which would lead me to suspect that its a small overall percentage of the software in question. I suspect the Borland + Autodesk were accidental hand me downs and the rest either isolated mistakes or missing receipts. Now this may not be the case but if it is, its pretty off naming and shaming your customers for unintentional violations, given that license compliance can be pretty damn complicated anyways. I wish this article hadnt been posted to slashdot (and I rarely think an article shouldnt have been posted) as at best its pointless and at worse its unfair to the companies involved.
So you're saying all they need is a big fucking gun and they'll be fine. Do you really think they'll be able to find such a beast
Sorry, Rutherford's synchrotron is nothing like the Tevatron. And none of the US's remaining facilities are anything like the Tevatron. The Tevatron is a high energy particle collider (in fact the highest energy one ever built) which has about 1000 times more power than your typical synchrotron. Only the LHC in Europe (which on paper looks 7 times more powerful but in practice is about 3-4 times more powerful) can revival it and its only going to come on line next summer. Put it this way, if RALs synchrotron is a firework rocket, the Tevatron is the space shuttle :) Leading the world in making firework rockets is a tad different from leading the world in space technology.
Basically you need that energy to fundamental physics research which you just cant do with the low energy standard ones. For the record, I spent my PhD using Tevatron data to search for evidence that we had managed to rip a whole in our 3 dimensional space and sent a particle into the 5th dimension. You need a fair amount of energy to do that.
Dr Grom
Former Tevatron Physicist (as of about 4 months ago)
Current Rutherford Staff, working on the LHC
Yes its a perfect fit. Particularly as Wikipedia has now supplanted the Encyclopedia Britannica in many places as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom. Although it has many omissions, contains much that is apocryphal, or at least widely inaccurate, it scores over the older more pedestrian work in two important ways.
:)
* 1. It is slightly cheaper
* 2. It has the words "You can copy and edit me for free" inscribed in large friendly letters in the license.
Also like the guide, although it cannot hope to be useful or informative on all matters, it does make the reassuring claim that where it is inaccurate, it is at least definitively inaccurate