This is not good news; it promotes a trend in a technological approach to making money in the stock market that should be flat out illegal.
Why? I know what it is, how it works, how it makes money, and I'm not overly concerned. So they make a market, and they make it really fast. Eh.
All I ever hear as a rationalization for dislike of it is "workers of the world unite" and "1% OWS" and "something bad happened to the markets, I don't like witches, so lets hang the witch because she has property I like that we can take from her" and "I hate the rich" and all that sort of stuff. I never hear a good moral or ethical explanation of why doing what you normally do, but really fast, is so wrong.
Another good question, is assuming you "make it illegal" how in the world would you enforce that? What would the reg look like? Like... your connection to the market must be this far away blah blah even if it means making a 1000 KM coil of fiber on the data center floor, or maybe all traders must connect to "the market" over geosync satellite links so the average latency is both long and more or less equal?
Please don't confuse conventional HFT with "Flash trading" which is basically window dressed up insider trading, corrupt as all heck. If you do insider trading and trade your own book etc thats just illegal, but if you do it really fast people like to pretend its just "flash trading" and not wrong.
The easiest way to "get rid of" HFT is to fix decimalization. Back when we traded on eights thats too wide to make money on a HFT strategy, and if we allowed millionth of a penny trading quotes that would narrow bid/ask resulting in too little money generated by HFT. Decimalization seems to be almost the perfect pricing system to result in massive HFT strategies, so if you really hate HFT (and WHY?) then just fix the pricing structure so its not profitable anymore. Rather than playing games with legal enforcement of favored or disfavored behavior, simply make disfavored behavior unprofitable. I suppose the opposite solution of going big would work just as well, fine we'll only trade stocks on dollar values now no fractions of a dollar.
Good luck getting more than 8 inches/ns with real world cables and real world fiber. You can get darn near 11 inches/ns with ladder line and open wire and exotic RF stuff like that (yes it is easily possible to buy faster copper than fiber, if by faster you mean lower latency). Wake me when they switch to ladder line instead of fiber, that'll be the weird day.
The term to google for is velocity of propagation.
No technical commentary at all? Come on/. try harder.
I'm curious how they'll integrate with the numerous distros and numerous desktop environments, or sadly, more likely not integrate at all.
I've often thought an interesting add on for apt-get and friends would be the limited support required to set up a "for pay/for donation" app store. Anything other than a really ugly hack would require lots of work.
Several puzzles to solve. Proper place in the file system hierarchy? Assuming its some place in/opt, modifying the path? Icons for popular desktops (or just some?) Integration with the universal menu system? Dependency management?
Of the eleven supported archs seen on debian.org/ports, and twenty three supported plus unsupported archs, which will steam support? Sadly I'm guessing i386 only, not even amd64.
I speak from experience that its much more work to be on Debian but not in Debian, than it is to be on Debian and in Debian.
A funny way to implement this would be to do it all by virtualization. Your host can be redhat or whatever, but you're going to be running a virtualized hypercustomized ubuntu image.
The "new" BSG was merely remaking the "old" BSG, and I used to be able to find a link explaining which world war 2 aircraft carrier movie each old BSG episode was ripping off. There was the WWII movie about the carrier that caught fire after the kamikaze hit it, then there was the WWII movie dramatization about the battle of midway, and they even got that weird pink submarine movie in there wedged in kinda sideways. The ultimate example of soft sci fi, we'll just rip off someone elses movie, and add laser pistols so they can't sue us for directly ripping them off. If only copyright was used to get rid of shovelware like that... Look, its my little pony but it has photon torpedos therefore its really sci fi.
Philip K. Dick (one of the true great writers of the soft sci-fi subgenre).
Sorry for the spoilers but he's pretty hard sci fi:
Scanner Darkly - What happens to society if a "illegal" drug were invented / produced that was optimized for industrial profit, more or less. You could soft sci fi it by simply redoing scarface with shakey cam and lasers.
Blade Runner - What happens to society when you can build robotic slaves that are almost indistinguishable from humans? You could soft sci fi it by redoing pretty much any of the slavery epic stories, lets say the start of "Roots" but the dude's got robot legs and techno music.
Total recall - What happens to society when you can operate on people's memories just like you can remove and implant kidneys? You could soft sci fi it by doing pretty much any old psychological horror movie but the evil doctor is in full steampunk costume.
Minority report - What happens to society when google search can predict when I'm about to commit a crime? "Google how do I make chloroform" typical florida story. You could soft sci fi it, by redoing "tombstone" aka the shootout at the OK Corral, but now they all hold laser guns instead of pistols so that makes it sci fi.
Basically soft sci fi is created by adding science to the props or as a replacement for magic. Hard sci fi is created by adding science to the story and see what happens. Its like the difference between sewing a gear on your coat and calling yourself a steampunk, and building a steam powered car that you ride on while wearing victorian era clothing.
but 2010 dropped most of the hard SF from the book (the exploration of Jupiter's moons), save the ending, in favour of cold-war thriller elements.
Good example of hard sci fi vs soft sci fi.
Hard sci fi is where adding technology makes the movie better. Primer, not OK it was mostly treated as a magic black box. If a magician puffed into existence and gave them a magic lamp instead of their little box it wouldn't change the story at all. Pretty much everything in the "Red Mars" series of books would count. Several John Ringo novels, like the posleen series are at least plausible. I've often wished for one of his railguns to shoot down seagulls. The doomsday planet eater star trek TOS episode would be pretty stereotypical, without the concept of a planet eater of mass destruction, it would have been a pretty dull episode. If the facebook movie were made 20 years ago, it would be pretty hard sci fi.
Soft sci fi is where removing technology makes the movie better because all that techie stuff was merely distracting the director from his remake of a love boat / 90210 / Shakespearean play, it was just scenery for the same old remake. Maybe they won't notice we ripped off every good episode of Gunsmoke if we give them lasers. Any star trek DS9 episode involving the home life of the ferengi would qualify, any tech just gets in the way of subtle? social commentary.
There has been a flow for many decades now where the new and tiny stuff comes solely from the US (and a couple europeans) and as that process ages it flows to the asian tigers, then eventually China. I kinda mentioned that in the original post, I donno if you can buy domestic made ancient chips like 555 741 7805 anything TTL series, etc.
It has interesting Moore's Law implications when the shrinking stops, we'll eventually (5 years or so later) completely stop mfgr semiconductors.
So no, "because it can't work" isn't a valid way to disprove a scientific claim.
LOL. So here's a steel cable with a one inch cross section and a 10kpsi tensile strength. Hang a 11k pound weight and my calculations show it'll snap. You can live in the world of mathematics and testable, disprovable scientific hypothesis, or you can dream about pleasant things and what if.
It's similar to the idea that we can't go faster than the speed of light
Not at all. Its similar to the idea that we can't go faster than the speed of light with a roll of duct tape, a model rocket engine, and a case of beer. The numbers show that yes indeed that will not work. All the wishful thinking in the world won't help given an enormous amount of scientific and engineering knowledge in a pretty stable field. If, accidentally, it turns out that real warp drives require duct tape, sulfur, and ethanol, that doesn't mean I was right all along.
One of my friends in grade 7 gave up and taught himself calculus during math class
LOL I did the exact same thing at the same age, picked up a calc book, started reading, liked it. Calc is believed to be exotic and complicated such that none of it can be learned until university, however 50% of it can be learned at a pretty low educational level. To learn 100% of calc requires the full preparation, but 50% is possible at a pretty early age. How hard is it to explain the geometric concept of a first, second, third, etc derivative to a reasonably bright gradeschool kid? The limit definition of a derivative? The concept that a integral is just a backwards derivative, sorta? A couple different schemes for numerical integration that aren't much worse than using the quadratic formula?
failing to explain the mechanism for is not "making irrational stuff up". It's "presenting an hypothesis"
Ahhh but he was not "failing to explain" as in the dog ate his homework or he hadn't gotten to it yet, he was "failing" as in if the earth's innards were hot enough without atomic decay heat to recently float the continents, then X million years ago it must have been hotter because that heat is obviously radiating away. Liquid rock is Really Hot.
His theory was absolute nonsense for the physics of the time. Do some simple thermodynamics math and if the continents were floating recently, this implies certain things:
1) no liquid water could have existed on the earth until recently, so all theories directly or tangentially involving the formation of sedimentary rock older than a few thousand years are completely wrong. Also the rate of volcanism must decline with rate of heat disappearing, so 1 million years ago we should have had a volcano in every back yard, so everything we know about igneous rock is also wrong. And heck metamorphic rocks too because we don't have the correct depth vs temp curves to form them. So yeah we can float continents if we merely discard everything we know about geology... not gonna happen. Also this is going to piss off the evolutionary biologists because we have no liquid seas until very recently, in fact too hot for life as we know it until recently. A world of liquid rock and polar bears just doesn't go together very well.
2) Or maybe we have no idea how thermodynamics works despite the successful application of the age of steam. LOL this is not gonna happen. Thomas the tank engine is not going to suddenly freeze in place because he noticed some map similarities.
3) Or maybe the chemists are wrong and there is a magic way to squeeze phlogiston out of rocks or "vital force" to generate heat. All they have to do is scrap a couple centuries of industrial chemistry, why won't they do that? I have a seashell on a mountain top therefore the entire world of chemistry is Wrong.
4) Or maybe magic occurs (this is what turned out to be atomic decay heat). And that worked out pretty well.
You can't come along with a theory that can only be taken seriously if and only if you completely toss out entire scientific disciplines that have a trivial proof showing your theory must be wrong. That's irrational and making stuff up.
Fine tuning, exotic conditions, yes thats great. Newton was completely wrong about F=ma, near the speed of light. But it works fine most of the time. This dude was asking people to scrap entire fields of human endeavor, that's going a bit far.
Having someone say "You must be wrong because we don't know how it works" is not science, it is arrogance.
Because it can't work, is completely different than because we don't know how it works.
Because it can't work is a perfectly valid way to disprove a scientific theory. Based on heat flux thru the surface of a cooling body with no internal source of heat, either no liquid water exists on the surface of the earth before a recent interval for which we have nearly universal geologic evidence of water deposited sedimentary rock, or the bulk average temperature of the earth is frozen solid rock. Does not prevent substantial local variation from global average such as an occasional volcano. With out atomic decay heat there is no way to melt the core and float the continents. Therefore his theory is disproven as outright impossible, until the 1930s / 1940s.
There were also some pretty serious fluid dynamics issues until some simulations were run. For example, by surface tension alone, the solid parts should intuitively glom together, and rotation of the earth should put all the continental mass at the equator. Turns out if you do enough fluid dynamics simulations, you can whip the numbers into allowing the observed slow drift, and then apply the whipped numbers to seismological simulation and you see wave propagation that fits. But you pretty much need computers and recording seismographs and lots and lots of data. None of which existed before and the intuitive answer makes a lot of sense.
I am primarily guilty of not worshipping at the feet of a saint, which doesn't really bother me. It turns out he was correct but at the time of his flights of fancy, he was completely wrong, his theories simply don't work unless you have atomic energy and computers and electronics. Until then its just coincidence or anecdotal data, not a real unifying theory.
Just a side comment, but don't you think it's a little demeaning to dismiss the heartfelt beliefs of major segments of today's human population as "mythology"?
No because I thought it was a pretty extreme fringe belief, like only maybe 1% of Christians even know the mythology of the shroud of turin and of that 1% who have heard of it, only perhaps another 1% have the "shroud story" as a heartfelt belief. Not a major segment of today's human population. I am willing to admit I might be wrong and maybe there are tens of thousands of adherents, although I doubt it. As if majority rule defines the truth, or its OK to make fun of people solely because there are not many of them, anyway. I thought it was funny you'd argue on that basis, of all things.
Besides, religion is just mythology that isn't dead yet. Now that statement is how you demean the beliefs of major segments of today's human population, etc. As you can see I could have done a much better job of it, if I had intended to do so...
I recently watched the "Star Wars" hexology or 6-ology or whatever and noticed all the spacecraft have jet engines, both stylistically and audibly. Which is a little weird in space. Then again the whole point of the series is "knights in shining armor fighting with swords over princesses" so its not the most anachronistic feature of the movies anyway.
it will actually allow us to MAKE the first of our four initial SPACE COMMAND films
So you've got the bills paid... that means you release to a torrent site and make profit off tee shirt sales or signed movie posters or ?
If you're not willing to CC license, then how much more would the kickstarter have to be to CC license?
Is product placement in the financial picture as per above (like they happen to use ipads as tablets, or whatever they use as a computer interface boots up with a Apple logo?)
Hard sci fi or Soft sci fi? There are no hard sci fi movies, at least from the past 20 years, or at least soft sci fi outnumbers hard sci fi by about 200 to 1. In books I'd dare say the ratios approach 50:50 or at least not as intensely skewed.
Your kickstarter page lists Asimov and Clarke as partial inspiration implies hard sci fi, yet also has PR stuff about how people "like the look" which implies ultra-soft sci fi.
For people who don't know the difference, just Fing google it, or wikipedia it, and the reason why its important is people who like one genre invariably can't stand the other genre and even make comments about how they can't imagine why someone would like the opposite genre. Sometimes the trash talking is the easiest way to understand the perspectives.
That happened with eproms in the 80s. Even industrial lighting outputs enough UV to erase a eprom. Thats why eproms after a certain era in the 80s always had a paper tape over the clear window when not being actively erased.
Simply laying a late generation eprom out in the sun for a week or so works pretty well. I've done it when my eraser bulb burned out. Obviously this not economical for a commercial dev, but for a dude fooling around in his basement it works pretty well.
Also this stretches your definition of useless, but there was at least one low current opamp I used that had to be used in the dark because the plastic case was transparent enough that it was enough of a photodiode to screw up some small signal figure (I think it was the input offset current, obviously not the gain or slew rate). Shining a 60 hz fluorescent light at it created 120 hz noise in the output not from EMI but from being a poor photodiode. I don't remember if this was a thermocouple amp or a psuedo-wanna-be-electrometer.
Some background you'll never see anywhere else, written by me:
First of all these funny numbers come from the ITRS. This is not just random numbers, process stages are not a "preferred number system" like resistor values where statistics determines the weird values. Process stage size steps are indirectly determined by physics. ITRS is an industry association of companies who actually make this stuff. Wikipedia has a page for each stage, yes there is a wiki page called "22nm" or something like that. This "20 nm" process is actually a "half step" from the 22nm process. The next "real" step is 16 nm.
(opinion alert!) Now this is a half step from 22nm to 16nm and is considered a failure. Put your efforts into cheaper higher yield more economic 22 or advance the field to 16, don't screw around halfway at 20. Another interpretation is oxide thicknesses are getting too small at the 22nm process to make anything smaller like 16nm, essentially they're giving up on 16nm because its economically impossible(end opinion alert!) The rest of my post is pretty much factual, as far as I know.
Another interesting thing about process sizes is this is a half-pitch (essentially a radius) of an array cell. Its dumb and/or marketing to spec half-pitch instead of pitch if you're talking memory. One cell of memory using a "20nm process" is actually 40 nm across. You'll read all kinds of foolishness about how the interconnects are 20 nm across, or a unit memory cell is a 20nm on a side square, or the oxide layer being 20 nm across (which would actually be Fing huge by current standards). Basically almost all size comparisons will just be random crap and no journalist or marketing PR guy ever makes a correct analogy using half pitch, they'll say absolutely anything other than the correct answer, which has made me laugh for decades now.
Everyone knows everything comes from China. Including semiconductors. Well, actually, no. There's a nice list of plants at wikipedia. You'll see a lot of US addresses. Yes you can probably buy a knock off 555 or 741 from China, but they have almost no small scale plants at all. Pretty much processors come from the USA and a scattering of small time players around the globe. That's interesting. We (USA) make really tiny processors and really giant industrial machinery and not a whole heck of a lot in between. You want a 500000 ton mining dragline? We got it. You want a 22nm processor? We got it. You want a shoe? No we don't make those in this country anymore. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Semiconductor_Fabrication_Plants
Finally processes are a moving target and different mfgrs and different products are at each stage. There are a couple plants being built for 16 nm process and there are prototypes of "real 16 nm chips" floating around. 22nm process memory was shipping two years ago, 22nm process CPUs are much harder to design. Intel is already shipping 22nm process family CPUs, so AMD gets a golf clap for promising to catch up later this year with something microscopically better. To the best of my knowledge 11nm is not out of the lab yet even for fooling around with.
And that's about all I know from making some investments in mfgrs since the 80s, some of which worked, some not so good. Not currently investing in this market, but I still keep up with the times and I do a lot of electronics in my basement.
It was completely ridiculous before atomic energy and computers.
In a pre-atomic era, there seems to be no rational way to avoid a frozen solid earth. Frozen solid = no movement.
Virtually no effort was put into why the continents move and it took decades to come up with a reasonable story based on all kinds of wild fluid dynamics.
He was, of course, right.
He was, of course, making irrational stuff up, that accidentally happened to turn out to be correct. Kind of like the ancient greek version of atomic theory.
If real, usable, economic warp speed spacecraft propulsion is ever invented, that doesn't mean the "star trek" writers should get credit.
A lot of the initial geomagnetic reversal theory was figured out by basically plotting magnetic field strips across the sea floor using pretty crude equipment. Screwing around with the field that much would seem easy to detect now?
I had a geologist roommate once... I know just enough about geology to be really dangerous (like programmer with screwdriver)
Would this mean carbon dating is inaccurate for items older than 1300 years?
Things that were alive in 775 appear to have more C14 than usual, so even after centuries of decay, they'd still have more C14 than usual, which would make them measure younger. This is my understanding from reading the "Amateur Scientist" column in "Scientific American" about doing radiocarbon dating at home. SciAm used to be a pretty cool magazine, well, 50 years ago. When I was a high school kid I spent about two weeks one summer reading on microfilm pretty much every Amateur Scientist column from the 30s (when it was all telescopes) until the 70s when it started sucking. You can buy a collection of those columns on a cdrom now, of course.
Time to redate the Shroud of Turin?
I'm not up on my mythology, but I think it's made of woven plant or animal fibers, and this would have no effect unless the plants or animals that made it were alive in 775. If it was grown in 775, then it would be misdated to be somewhat younger. I might misremember but isn't the mythology something along the lines that it was grown just a short time before year 0 ? This error is going in the opposite direction then. Or theres some alternate mythology as regards templars and freemasons and such, which is too recent to be fixed by the error.
Or the TLDR summary version of the above is... "no, and no".
Wouldn't this entire problem be solved with proctored tests?
Yes, not a new idea, that worked pretty well about a decade ago when I was taking online classes. I would make the 2 hour drive to a satellite campus to take my finals. The receptionist even had a meeting room next to her area to proctor everyone who showed up, sometimes she had people sitting in the hallways.
Last time I took a Cisco cert test was about that long ago. I'm assuming Prometric or whatever they were called are probably salivating over the online class profit opportunity.
Aside from school employees, they had a bizarre assortment of people allowed to proctor. Your minister or priest? A lawyer (god only knows the hourly charge for that). Medical doctor? A police or other law officer (I guess for incarcerated students?).
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This is not good news; it promotes a trend in a technological approach to making money in the stock market that should be flat out illegal.
Why? I know what it is, how it works, how it makes money, and I'm not overly concerned. So they make a market, and they make it really fast. Eh.
All I ever hear as a rationalization for dislike of it is "workers of the world unite" and "1% OWS" and "something bad happened to the markets, I don't like witches, so lets hang the witch because she has property I like that we can take from her" and "I hate the rich" and all that sort of stuff. I never hear a good moral or ethical explanation of why doing what you normally do, but really fast, is so wrong.
Another good question, is assuming you "make it illegal" how in the world would you enforce that? What would the reg look like? Like... your connection to the market must be this far away blah blah even if it means making a 1000 KM coil of fiber on the data center floor, or maybe all traders must connect to "the market" over geosync satellite links so the average latency is both long and more or less equal?
Please don't confuse conventional HFT with "Flash trading" which is basically window dressed up insider trading, corrupt as all heck. If you do insider trading and trade your own book etc thats just illegal, but if you do it really fast people like to pretend its just "flash trading" and not wrong.
The easiest way to "get rid of" HFT is to fix decimalization. Back when we traded on eights thats too wide to make money on a HFT strategy, and if we allowed millionth of a penny trading quotes that would narrow bid/ask resulting in too little money generated by HFT. Decimalization seems to be almost the perfect pricing system to result in massive HFT strategies, so if you really hate HFT (and WHY?) then just fix the pricing structure so its not profitable anymore. Rather than playing games with legal enforcement of favored or disfavored behavior, simply make disfavored behavior unprofitable. I suppose the opposite solution of going big would work just as well, fine we'll only trade stocks on dollar values now no fractions of a dollar.
Good luck getting more than 8 inches/ns with real world cables and real world fiber. You can get darn near 11 inches/ns with ladder line and open wire and exotic RF stuff like that (yes it is easily possible to buy faster copper than fiber, if by faster you mean lower latency). Wake me when they switch to ladder line instead of fiber, that'll be the weird day.
The term to google for is velocity of propagation.
No technical commentary at all? Come on /. try harder.
I'm curious how they'll integrate with the numerous distros and numerous desktop environments, or sadly, more likely not integrate at all.
I've often thought an interesting add on for apt-get and friends would be the limited support required to set up a "for pay/for donation" app store. Anything other than a really ugly hack would require lots of work.
Several puzzles to solve. Proper place in the file system hierarchy? Assuming its some place in /opt, modifying the path? Icons for popular desktops (or just some?) Integration with the universal menu system? Dependency management?
Of the eleven supported archs seen on debian.org/ports, and twenty three supported plus unsupported archs, which will steam support? Sadly I'm guessing i386 only, not even amd64.
I speak from experience that its much more work to be on Debian but not in Debian, than it is to be on Debian and in Debian.
A funny way to implement this would be to do it all by virtualization. Your host can be redhat or whatever, but you're going to be running a virtualized hypercustomized ubuntu image.
Crashes are no big deal, more or less... The real mental problem was probably lifetime painkiller addiction.
BSG was by no means hard science fiction.
The "new" BSG was merely remaking the "old" BSG, and I used to be able to find a link explaining which world war 2 aircraft carrier movie each old BSG episode was ripping off. There was the WWII movie about the carrier that caught fire after the kamikaze hit it, then there was the WWII movie dramatization about the battle of midway, and they even got that weird pink submarine movie in there wedged in kinda sideways. The ultimate example of soft sci fi, we'll just rip off someone elses movie, and add laser pistols so they can't sue us for directly ripping them off. If only copyright was used to get rid of shovelware like that... Look, its my little pony but it has photon torpedos therefore its really sci fi.
Philip K. Dick (one of the true great writers of the soft sci-fi subgenre).
Sorry for the spoilers but he's pretty hard sci fi:
Scanner Darkly - What happens to society if a "illegal" drug were invented / produced that was optimized for industrial profit, more or less. You could soft sci fi it by simply redoing scarface with shakey cam and lasers.
Blade Runner - What happens to society when you can build robotic slaves that are almost indistinguishable from humans? You could soft sci fi it by redoing pretty much any of the slavery epic stories, lets say the start of "Roots" but the dude's got robot legs and techno music.
Total recall - What happens to society when you can operate on people's memories just like you can remove and implant kidneys? You could soft sci fi it by doing pretty much any old psychological horror movie but the evil doctor is in full steampunk costume.
Minority report - What happens to society when google search can predict when I'm about to commit a crime? "Google how do I make chloroform" typical florida story. You could soft sci fi it, by redoing "tombstone" aka the shootout at the OK Corral, but now they all hold laser guns instead of pistols so that makes it sci fi.
Basically soft sci fi is created by adding science to the props or as a replacement for magic. Hard sci fi is created by adding science to the story and see what happens. Its like the difference between sewing a gear on your coat and calling yourself a steampunk, and building a steam powered car that you ride on while wearing victorian era clothing.
but 2010 dropped most of the hard SF from the book (the exploration of Jupiter's moons), save the ending, in favour of cold-war thriller elements.
Good example of hard sci fi vs soft sci fi.
Hard sci fi is where adding technology makes the movie better. Primer, not OK it was mostly treated as a magic black box. If a magician puffed into existence and gave them a magic lamp instead of their little box it wouldn't change the story at all. Pretty much everything in the "Red Mars" series of books would count. Several John Ringo novels, like the posleen series are at least plausible. I've often wished for one of his railguns to shoot down seagulls. The doomsday planet eater star trek TOS episode would be pretty stereotypical, without the concept of a planet eater of mass destruction, it would have been a pretty dull episode. If the facebook movie were made 20 years ago, it would be pretty hard sci fi.
Soft sci fi is where removing technology makes the movie better because all that techie stuff was merely distracting the director from his remake of a love boat / 90210 / Shakespearean play, it was just scenery for the same old remake. Maybe they won't notice we ripped off every good episode of Gunsmoke if we give them lasers. Any star trek DS9 episode involving the home life of the ferengi would qualify, any tech just gets in the way of subtle? social commentary.
There has been a flow for many decades now where the new and tiny stuff comes solely from the US (and a couple europeans) and as that process ages it flows to the asian tigers, then eventually China. I kinda mentioned that in the original post, I donno if you can buy domestic made ancient chips like 555 741 7805 anything TTL series, etc.
It has interesting Moore's Law implications when the shrinking stops, we'll eventually (5 years or so later) completely stop mfgr semiconductors.
So no, "because it can't work" isn't a valid way to disprove a scientific claim.
LOL. So here's a steel cable with a one inch cross section and a 10kpsi tensile strength. Hang a 11k pound weight and my calculations show it'll snap. You can live in the world of mathematics and testable, disprovable scientific hypothesis, or you can dream about pleasant things and what if.
It's similar to the idea that we can't go faster than the speed of light
Not at all. Its similar to the idea that we can't go faster than the speed of light with a roll of duct tape, a model rocket engine, and a case of beer. The numbers show that yes indeed that will not work. All the wishful thinking in the world won't help given an enormous amount of scientific and engineering knowledge in a pretty stable field. If, accidentally, it turns out that real warp drives require duct tape, sulfur, and ethanol, that doesn't mean I was right all along.
One of my friends in grade 7 gave up and taught himself calculus during math class
LOL I did the exact same thing at the same age, picked up a calc book, started reading, liked it. Calc is believed to be exotic and complicated such that none of it can be learned until university, however 50% of it can be learned at a pretty low educational level. To learn 100% of calc requires the full preparation, but 50% is possible at a pretty early age. How hard is it to explain the geometric concept of a first, second, third, etc derivative to a reasonably bright gradeschool kid? The limit definition of a derivative? The concept that a integral is just a backwards derivative, sorta? A couple different schemes for numerical integration that aren't much worse than using the quadratic formula?
failing to explain the mechanism for is not "making irrational stuff up". It's "presenting an hypothesis"
Ahhh but he was not "failing to explain" as in the dog ate his homework or he hadn't gotten to it yet, he was "failing" as in if the earth's innards were hot enough without atomic decay heat to recently float the continents, then X million years ago it must have been hotter because that heat is obviously radiating away. Liquid rock is Really Hot.
His theory was absolute nonsense for the physics of the time. Do some simple thermodynamics math and if the continents were floating recently, this implies certain things:
1) no liquid water could have existed on the earth until recently, so all theories directly or tangentially involving the formation of sedimentary rock older than a few thousand years are completely wrong. Also the rate of volcanism must decline with rate of heat disappearing, so 1 million years ago we should have had a volcano in every back yard, so everything we know about igneous rock is also wrong. And heck metamorphic rocks too because we don't have the correct depth vs temp curves to form them. So yeah we can float continents if we merely discard everything we know about geology... not gonna happen. Also this is going to piss off the evolutionary biologists because we have no liquid seas until very recently, in fact too hot for life as we know it until recently. A world of liquid rock and polar bears just doesn't go together very well.
2) Or maybe we have no idea how thermodynamics works despite the successful application of the age of steam. LOL this is not gonna happen. Thomas the tank engine is not going to suddenly freeze in place because he noticed some map similarities.
3) Or maybe the chemists are wrong and there is a magic way to squeeze phlogiston out of rocks or "vital force" to generate heat. All they have to do is scrap a couple centuries of industrial chemistry, why won't they do that? I have a seashell on a mountain top therefore the entire world of chemistry is Wrong.
4) Or maybe magic occurs (this is what turned out to be atomic decay heat). And that worked out pretty well.
You can't come along with a theory that can only be taken seriously if and only if you completely toss out entire scientific disciplines that have a trivial proof showing your theory must be wrong. That's irrational and making stuff up.
Fine tuning, exotic conditions, yes thats great. Newton was completely wrong about F=ma, near the speed of light. But it works fine most of the time. This dude was asking people to scrap entire fields of human endeavor, that's going a bit far.
Having someone say "You must be wrong because we don't know how it works" is not science, it is arrogance.
Because it can't work, is completely different than because we don't know how it works.
Because it can't work is a perfectly valid way to disprove a scientific theory. Based on heat flux thru the surface of a cooling body with no internal source of heat, either no liquid water exists on the surface of the earth before a recent interval for which we have nearly universal geologic evidence of water deposited sedimentary rock, or the bulk average temperature of the earth is frozen solid rock. Does not prevent substantial local variation from global average such as an occasional volcano. With out atomic decay heat there is no way to melt the core and float the continents. Therefore his theory is disproven as outright impossible, until the 1930s / 1940s.
There were also some pretty serious fluid dynamics issues until some simulations were run. For example, by surface tension alone, the solid parts should intuitively glom together, and rotation of the earth should put all the continental mass at the equator. Turns out if you do enough fluid dynamics simulations, you can whip the numbers into allowing the observed slow drift, and then apply the whipped numbers to seismological simulation and you see wave propagation that fits. But you pretty much need computers and recording seismographs and lots and lots of data. None of which existed before and the intuitive answer makes a lot of sense.
I am primarily guilty of not worshipping at the feet of a saint, which doesn't really bother me. It turns out he was correct but at the time of his flights of fancy, he was completely wrong, his theories simply don't work unless you have atomic energy and computers and electronics. Until then its just coincidence or anecdotal data, not a real unifying theory.
Just a side comment, but don't you think it's a little demeaning to dismiss the heartfelt beliefs of major segments of today's human population as "mythology"?
No because I thought it was a pretty extreme fringe belief, like only maybe 1% of Christians even know the mythology of the shroud of turin and of that 1% who have heard of it, only perhaps another 1% have the "shroud story" as a heartfelt belief. Not a major segment of today's human population. I am willing to admit I might be wrong and maybe there are tens of thousands of adherents, although I doubt it. As if majority rule defines the truth, or its OK to make fun of people solely because there are not many of them, anyway. I thought it was funny you'd argue on that basis, of all things.
Besides, religion is just mythology that isn't dead yet. Now that statement is how you demean the beliefs of major segments of today's human population, etc. As you can see I could have done a much better job of it, if I had intended to do so...
taking place during the nighttime in Eurasia, nobody would see it but native Americans and Pacific islanders. But that seems unlikely too
Well that's like 50:50 odds right there, not "unlikely". Then add in lost records, add in weather phenomena (cloudy can't see sun today)...
Why are there wings in space?
I recently watched the "Star Wars" hexology or 6-ology or whatever and noticed all the spacecraft have jet engines, both stylistically and audibly. Which is a little weird in space. Then again the whole point of the series is "knights in shining armor fighting with swords over princesses" so its not the most anachronistic feature of the movies anyway.
it will actually allow us to MAKE the first of our four initial SPACE COMMAND films
So you've got the bills paid... that means you release to a torrent site and make profit off tee shirt sales or signed movie posters or ?
If you're not willing to CC license, then how much more would the kickstarter have to be to CC license?
Is product placement in the financial picture as per above (like they happen to use ipads as tablets, or whatever they use as a computer interface boots up with a Apple logo?)
Comment on how "hollywood accounting" and "kickstarter accounting" interact with each other, if at all.
Hard sci fi or Soft sci fi? There are no hard sci fi movies, at least from the past 20 years, or at least soft sci fi outnumbers hard sci fi by about 200 to 1. In books I'd dare say the ratios approach 50:50 or at least not as intensely skewed.
Your kickstarter page lists Asimov and Clarke as partial inspiration implies hard sci fi, yet also has PR stuff about how people "like the look" which implies ultra-soft sci fi.
For people who don't know the difference, just Fing google it, or wikipedia it, and the reason why its important is people who like one genre invariably can't stand the other genre and even make comments about how they can't imagine why someone would like the opposite genre. Sometimes the trash talking is the easiest way to understand the perspectives.
That happened with eproms in the 80s. Even industrial lighting outputs enough UV to erase a eprom. Thats why eproms after a certain era in the 80s always had a paper tape over the clear window when not being actively erased.
Simply laying a late generation eprom out in the sun for a week or so works pretty well. I've done it when my eraser bulb burned out. Obviously this not economical for a commercial dev, but for a dude fooling around in his basement it works pretty well.
Also this stretches your definition of useless, but there was at least one low current opamp I used that had to be used in the dark because the plastic case was transparent enough that it was enough of a photodiode to screw up some small signal figure (I think it was the input offset current, obviously not the gain or slew rate). Shining a 60 hz fluorescent light at it created 120 hz noise in the output not from EMI but from being a poor photodiode. I don't remember if this was a thermocouple amp or a psuedo-wanna-be-electrometer.
Some background you'll never see anywhere else, written by me:
First of all these funny numbers come from the ITRS. This is not just random numbers, process stages are not a "preferred number system" like resistor values where statistics determines the weird values. Process stage size steps are indirectly determined by physics. ITRS is an industry association of companies who actually make this stuff. Wikipedia has a page for each stage, yes there is a wiki page called "22nm" or something like that. This "20 nm" process is actually a "half step" from the 22nm process. The next "real" step is 16 nm.
(opinion alert!) Now this is a half step from 22nm to 16nm and is considered a failure. Put your efforts into cheaper higher yield more economic 22 or advance the field to 16, don't screw around halfway at 20. Another interpretation is oxide thicknesses are getting too small at the 22nm process to make anything smaller like 16nm, essentially they're giving up on 16nm because its economically impossible(end opinion alert!) The rest of my post is pretty much factual, as far as I know.
Another interesting thing about process sizes is this is a half-pitch (essentially a radius) of an array cell. Its dumb and/or marketing to spec half-pitch instead of pitch if you're talking memory. One cell of memory using a "20nm process" is actually 40 nm across. You'll read all kinds of foolishness about how the interconnects are 20 nm across, or a unit memory cell is a 20nm on a side square, or the oxide layer being 20 nm across (which would actually be Fing huge by current standards). Basically almost all size comparisons will just be random crap and no journalist or marketing PR guy ever makes a correct analogy using half pitch, they'll say absolutely anything other than the correct answer, which has made me laugh for decades now.
Everyone knows everything comes from China. Including semiconductors. Well, actually, no. There's a nice list of plants at wikipedia. You'll see a lot of US addresses. Yes you can probably buy a knock off 555 or 741 from China, but they have almost no small scale plants at all. Pretty much processors come from the USA and a scattering of small time players around the globe. That's interesting. We (USA) make really tiny processors and really giant industrial machinery and not a whole heck of a lot in between. You want a 500000 ton mining dragline? We got it. You want a 22nm processor? We got it. You want a shoe? No we don't make those in this country anymore.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Semiconductor_Fabrication_Plants
Finally processes are a moving target and different mfgrs and different products are at each stage. There are a couple plants being built for 16 nm process and there are prototypes of "real 16 nm chips" floating around. 22nm process memory was shipping two years ago, 22nm process CPUs are much harder to design. Intel is already shipping 22nm process family CPUs, so AMD gets a golf clap for promising to catch up later this year with something microscopically better. To the best of my knowledge 11nm is not out of the lab yet even for fooling around with.
And that's about all I know from making some investments in mfgrs since the 80s, some of which worked, some not so good. Not currently investing in this market, but I still keep up with the times and I do a lot of electronics in my basement.
denounced them as ridiculous
It was completely ridiculous before atomic energy and computers.
In a pre-atomic era, there seems to be no rational way to avoid a frozen solid earth. Frozen solid = no movement.
Virtually no effort was put into why the continents move and it took decades to come up with a reasonable story based on all kinds of wild fluid dynamics.
He was, of course, right.
He was, of course, making irrational stuff up, that accidentally happened to turn out to be correct. Kind of like the ancient greek version of atomic theory.
If real, usable, economic warp speed spacecraft propulsion is ever invented, that doesn't mean the "star trek" writers should get credit.
It has the further advantage of not leaving a large number of highly visible effects
What about geological magnetic field records?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetostratigraphy
A lot of the initial geomagnetic reversal theory was figured out by basically plotting magnetic field strips across the sea floor using pretty crude equipment. Screwing around with the field that much would seem easy to detect now?
I had a geologist roommate once... I know just enough about geology to be really dangerous (like programmer with screwdriver)
Would this mean carbon dating is inaccurate for items older than 1300 years?
Things that were alive in 775 appear to have more C14 than usual, so even after centuries of decay, they'd still have more C14 than usual, which would make them measure younger. This is my understanding from reading the "Amateur Scientist" column in "Scientific American" about doing radiocarbon dating at home. SciAm used to be a pretty cool magazine, well, 50 years ago. When I was a high school kid I spent about two weeks one summer reading on microfilm pretty much every Amateur Scientist column from the 30s (when it was all telescopes) until the 70s when it started sucking. You can buy a collection of those columns on a cdrom now, of course.
Time to redate the Shroud of Turin?
I'm not up on my mythology, but I think it's made of woven plant or animal fibers, and this would have no effect unless the plants or animals that made it were alive in 775. If it was grown in 775, then it would be misdated to be somewhat younger. I might misremember but isn't the mythology something along the lines that it was grown just a short time before year 0 ? This error is going in the opposite direction then. Or theres some alternate mythology as regards templars and freemasons and such, which is too recent to be fixed by the error.
Or the TLDR summary version of the above is ... "no, and no".
Yet, as the only known events that can produce a 14C spike are supernova explosions or ... and neither event was observed at the time
... was observed at the time in surviving northern written records.
Are there any detailed written astronomical observations from the southern hemisphere from that long ago?
Also it would be pretty funny if the two guys recording solar observations in 775 both had a rainstorm the day of the largest solar flare.
Wouldn't this entire problem be solved with proctored tests?
Yes, not a new idea, that worked pretty well about a decade ago when I was taking online classes. I would make the 2 hour drive to a satellite campus to take my finals. The receptionist even had a meeting room next to her area to proctor everyone who showed up, sometimes she had people sitting in the hallways.
Last time I took a Cisco cert test was about that long ago. I'm assuming Prometric or whatever they were called are probably salivating over the online class profit opportunity.
Aside from school employees, they had a bizarre assortment of people allowed to proctor. Your minister or priest? A lawyer (god only knows the hourly charge for that). Medical doctor? A police or other law officer (I guess for incarcerated students?).