Her mom was an 'analyst', so she probably wasn't incapable or ignorant. I agree, though, that children are the future, which is why my children will all use Macs.
"The speed of light is a real and unbreakable rule as a result nothing more than 4 or 5 light years away is reachable."
An insertion here about relativity: if the ship were traveling fast enough, you mightn't need several generations just for 4-5 years. Because of relativistic time dilation, the astronauts in the spaceship would feel considerably less time elapse, while the journey would seem to take decades to everyone on earth. The question then becomes whether people would be willing to spend trillions of dollars on something only their children and grandchildren would see.
Scientists are skeptical because it hasn't been submitted for peer review. Yes, but that's true for any new scientific discovery. It's not entirely fair to spin that into "this quantum computer might not really work".
Also, while the article claims it might not be a "true quantum computer", it never really says how that's different from a "computer that uses quantum mechanics to solve certain problems", and given its audience, can't possibly expect its readers to know. To me, this just sounds like journalists looking for something to hype about.
I love the way the names get better and better each year. Two terms ago it was just plain 'ol Hairy Cdr and the Chamber of Stata. I think Grimson and the Registrar were trolls.
It's often very convenient to measure in eV/m, just because if you're dealing with electrons/protons and many other fundamental particles which all have charges that are multiples of e, you don't have to carry along that constant wherever you go - it's simply understood. Sometimes you're just interested in momentum or energy or speed - and even though their units are properly [kg][m][s] and so on, it's more convenient in eV/c, eV and/c.
Electron Volts per Meter (eV/m) is actually a perfectly valid measure of electric field. It's how much energy an electron going through the field would gain per meter. To get the actual electric field, you would just divide by the elementary charge e = 1.6*10^-19 C.
In relativity and particle physics, one often sees masses expressed in eV/c^2 and momenta in eV/c. It's just a convenient notation to absorb unweildy constants such as e and c, and show the numbers that really matter.
You can't actually photograph light. You can only photograph stuff. When you photograph something, you're recording the light that bounces off it. Light doesn't bounce off other light, so it's impossible to photograph. Light does interfere with other light (high school double slit experiments), and you can record the patterns, but that's not the point of the article. It's point is that the waves in question are not electromagnetic, but vibrational - "oscillations moving through a plasma" - like sound waves move through air. The fact that they're traveling close to the speed of light is pretty cool, but cooler are the gigantic electric fields that these vibrations produce. And coolest is that all you have to do is shoot a laser through a plasma, instead of creating and maintaining a vacuum and uniform E & B fields thousands of meters long.
"... Thus instead of an original XY for man and XX for woman, we originally had an X and Y with a half leg extending out the lower right quadrant. When that piece was removed from the original man, and combined with another to form the first XX chromosome..."
The "Y" chromosome is also X-shaped - and then only when the cell is dividing. The chromosomes double themselves, coagulate, and are linked to their doubles in the "middle", giving them an X-shape. When the cell is going about its other functions, however, the chromosomes are pretty formless.
... "And since everything is relative, Wearing a magnet on your wrist makes it stationary in comparison to your wrist, thus wearing magnets is pointless. QED. "
Actually, no. While it is true that the magnet is stationary w.r.t your wrist (or whichever part of your body), it is not stationary with respect to the moving ions that make up the electric current within the cells. The presence of the magnetic field will deflect the charges according to a force F = Charge * Field x Velocity. Charges coming in from further away might get deflected away from their original destination, allegedly altering the healing process.
Mirrors don't have negative refractive indices: the language in the article is misleading. Light entering a medium with a negative refractive index still bends, but the refracted ray is on the same side of the surface normal as the incident ray. These sorts of materials are called "left handed" in this regard.
Here is the wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamaterial
I'm a female physics major at MIT - a school with more than its share of hollering women-in-science crusaders. Even thought we have a "fair" 50-50 gender split, it's funny to watch the fraction of girls in my physics classes drop as the terms go by. Everyone has to take Physics I and II, but not Quantum I or Relativity. The only courses I know of where that doesn't happen are Biology, Econ/Management, and the humanities.
Bipeds like us don't need to bend over to pick things up. We can either squat or crouch. As far as I remember from a tour of the labs, the biped robot research at MIT is aimed at least in part at making the sorts of spider like robots you mention more efficient at walking. Apparently, biped walking is more energy efficient than most.
Well, they can 'talk' to each other can't they? EM waves and stuff? What the article doesn't discuss is whether this is a significant phenomenon or not... Nobody's ever put a microphone to bubbles in coke.
Slashdot Mirror
Her mom was an 'analyst', so she probably wasn't incapable or ignorant. I agree, though, that children are the future, which is why my children will all use Macs.
It's AISLE! Not isle - that's a landmass surrounded on all sides by water. Aisle. [shudders]
Yes, but that's hardly the porn's fault. You wouldn't say the same thing about alcohol, would you?
"The speed of light is a real and unbreakable rule as a result nothing more than 4 or 5 light years away is reachable."
An insertion here about relativity: if the ship were traveling fast enough, you mightn't need several generations just for 4-5 years. Because of relativistic time dilation, the astronauts in the spaceship would feel considerably less time elapse, while the journey would seem to take decades to everyone on earth. The question then becomes whether people would be willing to spend trillions of dollars on something only their children and grandchildren would see.
Scientists are skeptical because it hasn't been submitted for peer review. Yes, but that's true for any new scientific discovery. It's not entirely fair to spin that into "this quantum computer might not really work".
Also, while the article claims it might not be a "true quantum computer", it never really says how that's different from a "computer that uses quantum mechanics to solve certain problems", and given its audience, can't possibly expect its readers to know. To me, this just sounds like journalists looking for something to hype about.
Only till Mega qubits and Giga qubits come along.
I love the way the names get better and better each year. Two terms ago it was just plain 'ol Hairy Cdr and the Chamber of Stata. I think Grimson and the Registrar were trolls.
Some more information on the Celtic myth: http://www.mystical-www.co.uk/arthuriana2z/h.htm
A fraction of an amp? They'd better be talking about nanoamps, because anything higher would be hell of a lot to have coursing down your arms!
Yay for Prof. Tegmark and 8.033! That's twice on Slashdot I've counted, and that's got to be worth something.
3 cheers for Admiral Rickover! (Any Rickoids out there?)
It's often very convenient to measure in eV/m, just because if you're dealing with electrons/protons and many other fundamental particles which all have charges that are multiples of e, you don't have to carry along that constant wherever you go - it's simply understood. Sometimes you're just interested in momentum or energy or speed - and even though their units are properly [kg][m][s] and so on, it's more convenient in eV/c, eV and /c.
Electron Volts per Meter (eV/m) is actually a perfectly valid measure of electric field. It's how much energy an electron going through the field would gain per meter. To get the actual electric field, you would just divide by the elementary charge e = 1.6*10^-19 C. In relativity and particle physics, one often sees masses expressed in eV/c^2 and momenta in eV/c. It's just a convenient notation to absorb unweildy constants such as e and c, and show the numbers that really matter.
You can't actually photograph light. You can only photograph stuff. When you photograph something, you're recording the light that bounces off it. Light doesn't bounce off other light, so it's impossible to photograph. Light does interfere with other light (high school double slit experiments), and you can record the patterns, but that's not the point of the article. It's point is that the waves in question are not electromagnetic, but vibrational - "oscillations moving through a plasma" - like sound waves move through air. The fact that they're traveling close to the speed of light is pretty cool, but cooler are the gigantic electric fields that these vibrations produce. And coolest is that all you have to do is shoot a laser through a plasma, instead of creating and maintaining a vacuum and uniform E & B fields thousands of meters long.
"... Thus instead of an original XY for man and XX for woman, we originally had an X and Y with a half leg extending out the lower right quadrant. When that piece was removed from the original man, and combined with another to form the first XX chromosome..."
The "Y" chromosome is also X-shaped - and then only when the cell is dividing. The chromosomes double themselves, coagulate, and are linked to their doubles in the "middle", giving them an X-shape. When the cell is going about its other functions, however, the chromosomes are pretty formless.
Actually, no. While it is true that the magnet is stationary w.r.t your wrist (or whichever part of your body), it is not stationary with respect to the moving ions that make up the electric current within the cells. The presence of the magnetic field will deflect the charges according to a force F = Charge * Field x Velocity. Charges coming in from further away might get deflected away from their original destination, allegedly altering the healing process.
So wearing magnets might not be pointless.
Mirrors don't have negative refractive indices: the language in the article is misleading. Light entering a medium with a negative refractive index still bends, but the refracted ray is on the same side of the surface normal as the incident ray. These sorts of materials are called "left handed" in this regard. Here is the wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamaterial
I'm a female physics major at MIT - a school with more than its share of hollering women-in-science crusaders. Even thought we have a "fair" 50-50 gender split, it's funny to watch the fraction of girls in my physics classes drop as the terms go by. Everyone has to take Physics I and II, but not Quantum I or Relativity. The only courses I know of where that doesn't happen are Biology, Econ/Management, and the humanities.
There should be more stringeant rules...
Stringent rules, but where would we be without Interpol? INTERnational criminal POLice organisation.
How cool is that - Max Tegmark taught me Relativity last term.
Bipeds like us don't need to bend over to pick things up. We can either squat or crouch. As far as I remember from a tour of the labs, the biped robot research at MIT is aimed at least in part at making the sorts of spider like robots you mention more efficient at walking. Apparently, biped walking is more energy efficient than most.
Well, they can 'talk' to each other can't they? EM waves and stuff? What the article doesn't discuss is whether this is a significant phenomenon or not... Nobody's ever put a microphone to bubbles in coke.