"Do they really think the average person who reads the dot-truth.com site is dumb enough not to notice that this is not a fair comparison? " Yes, they do. And the're probably right. Ask yourself the following question: Who usually approves purchases, "suits" or "techs?" Mind you, a few years ago when I was working in a retail store (it paid the bills before I started grad school) I had people asking whether the latest hardware could be added to a 386. Worse still, I even had someone ask whether we carried software. Reason: They had a Commodore-64. Mind you, this was only 4 years ago. Someone had told the customer that a 1541 floppy drive was compatible with IBM formatted disks, and I had to spend 40 minutes trying to convince him that whether that was the case or not, Windows apps would NEVER run on a C-64. Some people just don't get it, and unfortunately many of those people are the one who make the real decisions.
And yes, I have been asked "Linux? Does that run under Windows?" My response: "No. It runs INSTEAD of Windows."
"All animals specialize and we are no different. Thing is, we specialize in NOT specializing! " I think Desmond Morris said it best when he said all animals have one big trick that enables them to survive, and that our big trick is a whole bunch of small tricks.
"With an observer in the brain, this consciousness selects the things that happen in the external world." I'm going to assume here (which is probably not a valid assumption) that most readers are familiar with the concepts of Wigner's Friend and Bell's Theorem, as well as the results of the Aspect experiment. If you're not, then do a little bit of research, because explaining them would require more time than I'm willing to spend at the moment, and more space than most people are willing to read.
Gedankenexperiment: Similar to the Aspect experiment, with three vital exceptions: 1 Have one "conscious" observer at each detector. Rather than a computer correlating results, the observers exchange lab notebooks at the end of the experiment. 2 The photons leaving the source both pass through vertically oriented polarization filters to give us vertically polarized light, then their circular polarizations are determined at the detectors. 3 We verify that the momentum of the source does not change. Otherwise, the photons are not correlated in a way meaningful to conduct the experiment.
For simplicity's sake, we'll just use one data point. (bad experimental procedure, but the results should be the same for the purposes of the gedankenexperiment)
Observer A notices his photon is polarized clockwise. (or counterclockwise, it really doesn't matter) He should expect (due to Aspect) Observer B's results to be the same relative to direction of propagation(assuming the photons travel opposite directions).
Observer B, who is also conscious and therefore capable of independently collapsing the wavefunction, looks at her detector. According to Wigner's Friend, she hasn't exchanged notes to the wavefunction is still indeterminate to her, so her photon has a 50% chance of being polarized clockwise and a 50% chance of being polarized counterclockwise. She records her observation.
The two observers exchange notebooks. This is where things get hairy.
Possibility 1: The notebooks must agree, indicating that only one observer is truly conscious and capable of collapsing the wavefunction. Implication: There is only room in the universe for one conscious entity. I'm not trying to encourage solipsism here, so on to the other possibilities.
Possibility 2: The notebooks sometimes disagree. The polarization is tied to the momentum of the photons, so this means that momentum is not conserved. Implication: Even basic physical laws like conservation of momentum do not apply in a universe with more than one conscious entity. (Make a long story short: Wigner's Friend is not true.)
Possibility 3: Observer A reads what he expected to, and Observer B reads what she expected, regardless of what each wrote. OK. It's hard to find the exact wording for that, but the implication is straightforward: Two conscious entities may never communicate reality, they may only observe reality themselves. Fundamentally, this is like Possibility 1 except each observer has his/her own "reality." In fact, as far as the observers are concerned it is identical to Possibility 1.
Possibility 4: Collapsing the wavefunction has nothing whatsoever to do with consciousness, so the notebooks agree. The notebooks will agree.
If the notebooks agree, we have possibilities 1, 3, and 4. 1 and 3 are virtually the same thing. (one consciousness per universe)
If the notebooks disagree, we either assume the experiment was in error, or scrap our most basic assumptions about the universe: Namely, that there are universal laws that MUST be followed.
I'm leaning away from #1 so we don't get into an argument about which one of us is conscious. (And why waste time arguing with people who aren't really conscious, anyway?)
Too much stuff makes sense in this world for #2 to hold.
If #3 is true, it's pointless for me to post this message (except to gratify my ego, but in a different sense than #1)
This leaves #4. Frankly, I think people read too much into the word "observation" when they discuss quantum mechanics. And while the Turing test seems a point to start from when defining intelligence, I have yet to see a definition of "consciousness" that is truly meaningful. To state that a little more clearly, every attempt at definition of consciousness I've ever seen revolves around awareness (especially self-awareness), but nothing anyone (aside from the supposedly conscious being) can observe.
I'm not saying consciousness is an illusion, just that it is an abstraction, and as such it has no physical meaning or implications.
Actually, there is another distributed computing effort under discussion on the mailing list nanodream@egroups.com.
The idea is to design a nanotech computer. All things considered, it might be worthwhile since molecular electronics could provide us with the computing power we need to make future distributed computing projects unnecessary.
Maybe I'm mistaken, but isn't AMD going to use Slot B on their SMP mobo's? Seems like I've heard of chipsets being designed to handle both K7 and Alpha.
I should point out that unlike the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, mammals don't spontaneously change sex.
Not to mention that these will hardly be breeding out of control even if eventually other mammoths of the opposite sex are cloned. If this species was only nine feet tall as an adult, it couldn't be harder to control than an African elephant.
Finally, remember we used to hunt these things several thousand years ago. If we could kill them with spears, we can kill them with guns.
"Checking the weather data for my city, i see that at 3 PM, the temperature was 82 F, and at 5 PM, it was 79 F. These are not exact values, so let us assume that the temperature was between 81 and 83 at 3 PM and between 78 and 80 at 5 PM.
By the Intermediate Value Theorem, we see that the temperature must have been exactly 80.5 at some time between 3 and 5 PM. (Assuming that temperature behaves continuously, of course.)
Now, assuming that f is the probability density function for temperature in my area, the probability that the temperature is exactly 80.5 at any given time is
P(80.5 = T = 80.5) = int{80.5, 80.5} f(x) dx [1]
Since the limits are the same, the integral is zero (by FTC, re-take Calculus I for details).
The temperature *was* exactly 80.5 at some time today, yet the probability of it being so was zero." OK, let's look at this. The temperature, as you stated is not precise. Stating that the recorded temperature "is" a certain number really means that the temperature lies within a finite interval containing that number. Thus, a finite probability rather than a zero probability.
On the other hand, I would agree with you--provided that temperature is indeed continuous wrt time. However,this still leaves the problem of whether the temperature is exactly 80.5 for any finite amount of time. In order for this to be possible, clearly some nth derivative of the function is not continuous.
"P.S. I do not believe myself to be an idiot. (However, i do not have a proof of this.)
-- Mike"
I believe myself to be an idiot. (I just need to find one counterexample to disprove this. Sounds easier than your way.)
"I'm making an assumption in this hypothesis, which I haven't tried to test (via math), that the hole's increasing mass will tend to give it an ever increasing elliptical orbit. Whose range would eventually exceed the radius of the Earth, and quite likely swing out past the gravitational equilibrium point between Earth and the Sun at some point"
But the sum of the momentum of the earth and the black hole must remain constant, so the black hole will actually slow down as it becomes more massive. Thus, if it isn't created moving at escape velocity, eventually we will wind up with a black hole with the same mass as earth in the same orbit around the sun.
"[e.g. any set with a denomberable number of elements has Lebesgue mesure equal to 0 in a Real vector space... still it is not empty]"
But then the probability density isn't zero. In that case, you're not looking for the probability of a specific event, but of a range of events. Mind you, this is headed off-topic very quickly, but there are cases where even the probability density is zero--such as the probability density of finding a particle in the node of the corresponding wavefunction. The particle will never be found at such a location.
I see what you are saying, but this leads into studying the Surreal Numbers. Is a differential or infinitessimal probability the same as no probability? I think not.
>It's not my math that's in error. I simply misworded. You might also want to check your units. I noticed you were using cm^-2 instead of cm^2 for the cross-section.
Can you tell I sepent the last two semesters teaching chemistry lab?:-)
"So how many times does this black hole, with a cross section of (pi x RS2) hit something? It's about (column density) x (cross section) = (3.8 x 1033 cm^-2) x (3.0 x 10-98 cm-2) = once every 1.1 x 10-64 orbits.
Since each orbit takes about 20 minutes, this means the mini black hole suffers a collision every 3 x 1059 years" How can this be? I multiply 1.1e-64 orbits/collision by 20 min/orbit and get 2.2e-63 min/collision. This is 1.32e-61 s/collision, or roughly 10^61 collisions/sec. Assuming atoms are roughly an angstrom apart, this meand the singularity is travelling 10^51 m/s, or 3e42 times the speed of light. Please check your math!
"If this will cause the universe to reboot itself, will it be courteous enough to flash me a Blue Screen of Death(tm) first"
Quick! Let's all petition God (or whoever) to GPL the universe! Just because: 1) I don't remember agreeing to this in the license agreement, and 2) After 15 billion years, there's no way it's under any sort of warranty anymore. Think about it.
>>I wonder what a beowulf of black holes would do?
>Don't even bother thinking about it. It would *really* suck.
Yeah, but think of the spin states. Couple them together and you could have a beowulf quantum cluster. At least, as long as Microsoft doesn't require us to license the Grand Unified Theory.
"And if, as they state, this experiment is significantly different to those being conducted at the Tevatron, why is it not significantly different to upper atmosphere collisions?"
Because upper atmosphere collisions involve molecules such as ozone, oxygen and nitrogen rather than free nucleons.
"Now a stable orbit isn't likely to form from a black hole created in the described manner. So, when enough mass is accumulated, the elliptical orbit will toss this thing far enough into space that the Sun's gravity will get ahold of it. In which case it would begin eating the Sun, and anything else in its orbit. The same process would likely happen there, and eventually it would be tossed out of our solar system, to go eat Alpha Centari or something else. Of course it may just eat everything, but it would still take a while." So what you're saying is, the black hole will eventually swallow up the earth and have the mass of the earth, and some previously unidentified force will mysteriously fling earth's mass from its current orbit? This violates both conservation of momentum and conservation of energy. Even if a black hole did form, it would be as someone has already described: A black hole with the same mass and momentum as earth. So no consequences would extend beyond our planet.
"Now a stable orbit isn't likely to form from a black hole created in the described manner. So, when enough mass is accumulated, the elliptical orbit will toss this thing far enough into space that the Sun's gravity will get ahold of it. In which case it would begin eating the Sun, and anything else in its orbit. The same process would likely happen there, and eventually it would be tossed out of our solar system, to go eat Alpha Centari or something else. Of course it may just eat everything, but it would still take a while." So what you're saying is, the black hole will eventually swallow up the earth and have the mass of the earth, and some previously unidentified force will mysteriously fling earth's mass from it's current orbit? This violates both conservation of momentum and conservation of energy. Even if a black hole did form, it would be as someone has already described: A black hole with the same mass and momentum as earth. So no consequences would extend beyond our planet.
Basic lesson in probability here. If an event has probability zero, it will never occur. Ever. If anyone ever told you an event had probability zero and it did occur, they were an idiot.
Sorry, this will probably be rated as flamebait, but I can't stand when people who don't understand probability and statistics write it off as bullshit simply because they don't understand.
I strongly recommend the book Innumeracy by John Allen Paulos to anyone who has a problem with statistics. Maybe it won't teach you the subject in great detail, but it WILL show you how easily you can be ripped off by not understanding statistics. (Good read even if you think you already know.)
Sorry about the rant, but I come from a profession where manipulation and fabrication of figures (as is done by marketers to attract the public) would quickly end any prospects of future employment.
According to current theory, quarks come in six flavors: top and bottom (sometimes called truth and beauty), strange and charmed, up and down.
Ondinary particles in the atomic nucleus (neutrons and protons) consist only of up quarks and down quarks. The other types of quarks may be produced in high-energy collisions, however.
IIRC, Strange matter is composed of these other types of quarks. In general, these particles are unstable and sooner or later (usually MUCH sooner) turn into normal quarks, giving off radiation in the process. Some people still worry about some chain reaction where strange matter converts normal matter into more strange matter, but I find this highly unlikely.
Earth is constantly bombarded by muons (related to electrons like strange quarks are to up quarks) and hasn't imploded on itself yet, even after billions of years. I really doubt we'll succeed in the 0.00000000000000000000003 seconds the collisions in the accelerator will last.
I'm partially skeptical about quantum computing. Granted, I haven't read a whole lot about the subject, but what I have read indicates that hardware and software are one and the same. The machine is designed for one specific problem, and cannot be reprogrammed short of being disassembled and built into a new machine. If anyone knows of evidence to the contrary, I'd appreciate a link.
The problem with your argument is that the 640K limit was just an arbitrary limit imposed by designers of early PC's. Maybe they had reason for it, maybe not. The current situation is completely different, however. There are very real physical limits to how small you can make a silicon transistor. I think Lucent made one sixty atoms across a while back. Any smaller than that, and quantum effects prevent it from working altogether.
OTOH, molecular transistors have been made which are considerably smaller, and operate by a different mechanism altogether, but so far no one has found a way to link these together into a useful circuit. This would probably boost CPU's from microwave frequencies (which we're just now reaching) to visible or even UV frequencies. Also consider diffusion of dopant atoms within the semiconductor. Smaller transistors are more readily destroyed by this, which is one reason your P3 has a fan and heat sink where a typical 486 did not. Smaller transistors are more susceptible to heat damage (unlike what I have heard some people say) and will probably have to be supercooled.
So, I expect speed to hit the wall in a few more years, then after a delay perhaps it will suddenly increase by several orders of magnitude almost overnight.
Also, it goes without mentioning that if the clock frequency times Plank's constant even gets close to the bandgap energy of the semiconductor, the device will be useless as electrons are rised to the conduction band by the clock signal. For that matter, clocks themselves probably won't run at that speed for the same reason.
Last I heard, Lucent could make CD-sized discs holding 25 or 50 Gigabytes of data. They wanted to push it up to 100GB before they even tried to work on a marketable product, though. That was a year ago. Also, about a year before that IIRC researchers at SUNY developed 3-D optical storage with density of 2.1 GB/cubic cm. Problems were access time and expense of materials.
As I posted on DejaNews: "I think the obvious question is not how AMD will compete with Intel, but whether it even needs to. Considering that the Athlon already uses EV6, Sledgehammer will probably be Alpha-compatible. Face it, Intel is not THE standard for all types of processors, considering they are already nearly a decade behind in developing 64-bit processors. Is it really that big of a problem if AMD doesn't care about IA64?" Seriously, if the 64-bit market is flooded with low-cost Alphas and Alpha-clones, Intel can't run away. Merced and Pentium III processors will both find themselves being outrun for less money, plus Merced (whoops, Itanium) will be non-standard, while AMD will simply reinforce Compaq's standards. Why worry about AMD's future when Intel is the one wandering off away from accepted standards?
OK, most of us are familiar with the arguments about shortened telomeres, etc. leading to premature aging of clones.(Someone needs to write a sci-fi story about that.) Anyhow, we hear about how cancer cells don't have that problem. Some people think you can build an organism from cancer cells, but then you just have a custom-built tumor. Here's my idea, I hope someone with more biochemistry knowledge can respond: Instead of modifying the dna with cancer genes, inject the corresponding mRNA into the cell. This produces the enzymes, you basically regenerate the telomeres and create a growing tumor. This is where things change: Because you used mRNA instead of DNA, the mRNA eventually breaks down. The enzymes are dispersed between the cells during replication, plus enzymes eventually become degraded. So at some point, The cells cease to be cancerous and revert to normal specialization and replication.
Are there any obvious gaping flaws in this idea? I know how we've recently discovered how to add the necessary genes to human cells to cause cancer, how much of a stretch is it to just add the mRNA or perhaps the enzymes themselves?
Slashdot Mirror
"Do they really think the average person who reads the dot-truth.com site is dumb enough not to notice that this is not a fair comparison? "
Yes, they do. And the're probably right. Ask yourself the following question: Who usually approves purchases, "suits" or "techs?"
Mind you, a few years ago when I was working in a retail store (it paid the bills before I started grad school) I had people asking whether the latest hardware could be added to a 386.
Worse still, I even had someone ask whether we carried software. Reason: They had a Commodore-64. Mind you, this was only 4 years ago.
Someone had told the customer that a 1541 floppy drive was compatible with IBM formatted disks, and I had to spend 40 minutes trying to convince him that whether that was the case or not, Windows apps would NEVER run on a C-64. Some people just don't get it, and unfortunately many of those people are the one who make the real decisions.
And yes, I have been asked "Linux? Does that run under Windows?"
My response: "No. It runs INSTEAD of Windows."
"All animals specialize and we are no different. Thing is, we specialize in NOT specializing! "
I think Desmond Morris said it best when he said all animals have one big trick that enables them to survive, and that our big trick is a whole bunch of small tricks.
"With an observer in the brain, this consciousness selects the things that happen in the external world."
I'm going to assume here (which is probably not a valid assumption) that most readers are familiar with the concepts of Wigner's Friend and Bell's Theorem, as well as the results of the Aspect experiment. If you're not, then do a little bit of research, because explaining them would require more time than I'm willing to spend at the moment, and more space than most people are willing to read.
Gedankenexperiment:
Similar to the Aspect experiment, with three vital exceptions:
1
Have one "conscious" observer at each detector. Rather than a computer correlating results, the observers exchange lab notebooks at the end of the experiment.
2
The photons leaving the source both pass through vertically oriented polarization filters to give us vertically polarized light, then their circular polarizations are determined at the detectors.
3
We verify that the momentum of the source does not change. Otherwise, the photons are not correlated in a way meaningful to conduct the experiment.
For simplicity's sake, we'll just use one data point. (bad experimental procedure, but the results should be the same for the purposes of the gedankenexperiment)
Observer A notices his photon is polarized clockwise. (or counterclockwise, it really doesn't matter) He should expect (due to Aspect) Observer B's results to be the same relative to direction of propagation(assuming the photons travel opposite directions).
Observer B, who is also conscious and therefore capable of independently collapsing the wavefunction, looks at her detector. According to Wigner's Friend, she hasn't exchanged notes to the wavefunction is still indeterminate to her, so her photon has a 50% chance of being polarized clockwise and a 50% chance of being polarized counterclockwise. She records her observation.
The two observers exchange notebooks. This is where things get hairy.
Possibility 1:
The notebooks must agree, indicating that only one observer is truly conscious and capable of collapsing the wavefunction. Implication: There is only room in the universe for one conscious entity. I'm not trying to encourage solipsism here, so on to the other possibilities.
Possibility 2:
The notebooks sometimes disagree.
The polarization is tied to the momentum of the photons, so this means that momentum is not conserved. Implication: Even basic physical laws like conservation of momentum do not apply in a universe with more than one conscious entity. (Make a long story short: Wigner's Friend is not true.)
Possibility 3:
Observer A reads what he expected to, and Observer B reads what she expected, regardless of
what each wrote.
OK. It's hard to find the exact wording for that, but the implication is straightforward: Two conscious entities may never communicate reality, they may only observe reality themselves. Fundamentally, this is like Possibility 1 except each observer has his/her own "reality." In fact, as far as the observers are concerned it is identical to Possibility 1.
Possibility 4:
Collapsing the wavefunction has nothing whatsoever to do with consciousness, so the notebooks agree. The notebooks will agree.
If the notebooks agree, we have possibilities 1, 3, and 4. 1 and 3 are virtually the same thing. (one consciousness per universe)
If the notebooks disagree, we either assume the experiment was in error, or scrap our most basic assumptions about the universe: Namely, that there are universal laws that MUST be followed.
I'm leaning away from #1 so we don't get into an argument about which one of us is conscious. (And why waste time arguing with people who aren't really conscious, anyway?)
Too much stuff makes sense in this world for #2 to hold.
If #3 is true, it's pointless for me to post this message (except to gratify my ego, but in a different sense than #1)
This leaves #4. Frankly, I think people read too much into the word "observation" when they discuss quantum mechanics. And while the Turing test seems a point to start from when defining intelligence, I have yet to see a definition of "consciousness" that is truly meaningful. To state that a little more clearly, every attempt at definition of consciousness I've ever seen revolves around awareness (especially self-awareness), but nothing anyone (aside from the supposedly conscious being) can observe.
I'm not saying consciousness is an illusion, just that it is an abstraction, and as such it has no physical meaning or implications.
Isn't it obvious from all the recently lost space probes? The Martians are using them to build a Beowulf cluster.
Actually, there is another distributed computing effort under discussion on the mailing list nanodream@egroups.com.
The idea is to design a nanotech computer. All things considered, it might be worthwhile since molecular electronics could provide us with the computing power we need to make future distributed computing projects unnecessary.
"The chipset (EV6) is the same. However, the slot for an Athlon is Slot A. The 21264 Alphas use Slot B."
I'm probably going to be moderated down for repetition, but isn't a Slot B Athlon in the works for SMP machines?
Maybe I'm mistaken, but isn't AMD going to use Slot B on their SMP mobo's? Seems like I've heard of chipsets being designed to handle both K7 and Alpha.
I should point out that unlike the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, mammals don't spontaneously change sex.
Not to mention that these will hardly be breeding out of control even if eventually other mammoths of the opposite sex are cloned. If this species was only nine feet tall as an adult, it couldn't be harder to control than an African elephant.
Finally, remember we used to hunt these things several thousand years ago. If we could kill them with spears, we can kill them with guns.
"Checking the weather data for my city, i see that at 3 PM, the temperature was 82 F, and at 5 PM, it was 79 F. These are not exact values, so let us assume that the temperature was between 81 and 83 at 3 PM and between 78 and 80 at 5 PM.
By the Intermediate Value Theorem, we see that the temperature must have been exactly 80.5 at some time between 3 and 5 PM. (Assuming that temperature behaves continuously, of course.)
Now, assuming that f is the probability density function for temperature in my area, the probability that the temperature is exactly 80.5 at any given time is
P(80.5 = T = 80.5) = int{80.5, 80.5} f(x) dx [1]
Since the limits are the same, the integral is zero (by FTC, re-take Calculus I for details).
The temperature *was* exactly 80.5 at some time today, yet the probability of it being so was zero."
OK, let's look at this.
The temperature, as you stated is not precise. Stating that the recorded temperature "is" a certain number really means that the temperature lies within a finite interval containing that number. Thus, a finite probability rather than a zero probability.
On the other hand, I would agree with you--provided that temperature is indeed continuous wrt time. However,this still leaves the problem of whether the temperature is exactly 80.5 for any finite amount of time. In order for this to be possible, clearly some nth derivative of the function is not continuous.
"P.S. I do not believe myself to be an idiot. (However, i do not have a proof of this.)
-- Mike"
I believe myself to be an idiot. (I just need to find one counterexample to disprove this. Sounds easier than your way.)
--Chris
"I'm making an assumption in this hypothesis, which I haven't tried to test (via math), that the hole's increasing mass will tend to give it an ever increasing elliptical orbit. Whose range would eventually exceed the radius of the Earth, and quite likely swing out past the gravitational equilibrium point between Earth and the Sun at some point"
But the sum of the momentum of the earth and the black hole must remain constant, so the black hole will actually slow down as it becomes more massive. Thus, if it isn't created moving at escape velocity, eventually we will wind up with a black hole with the same mass as earth in the same orbit around the sun.
"[e.g. any set with a denomberable number of elements has Lebesgue mesure equal to 0 in a Real vector space... still it is not empty]"
But then the probability density isn't zero. In that case, you're not looking for the probability of a specific event, but of a range of events. Mind you, this is headed off-topic very quickly, but there are cases where even the probability density is zero--such as the probability density of finding a particle in the node of the corresponding wavefunction. The particle will never be found at such a location.
I see what you are saying, but this leads into studying the Surreal Numbers. Is a differential or infinitessimal probability the same as no probability? I think not.
>It's not my math that's in error. I simply misworded.
:-)
You might also want to check your units. I noticed you were using cm^-2 instead of cm^2 for the cross-section.
Can you tell I sepent the last two semesters teaching chemistry lab?
"So how many times does this black hole, with a cross section of (pi x RS2) hit something? It's about
(column density) x (cross section) = (3.8 x 1033 cm^-2) x (3.0 x 10-98 cm-2) = once every 1.1 x 10-64 orbits.
Since each orbit takes about 20 minutes, this means the mini black hole suffers a collision every 3 x 1059 years"
How can this be? I multiply 1.1e-64 orbits/collision by 20 min/orbit and get 2.2e-63 min/collision. This is 1.32e-61 s/collision, or roughly 10^61 collisions/sec. Assuming atoms are roughly an angstrom apart, this meand the singularity is travelling 10^51 m/s, or 3e42 times the speed of light. Please check your math!
"If this will cause the universe to reboot itself, will it be courteous enough to flash me a Blue Screen of Death(tm) first"
Quick! Let's all petition God (or whoever) to GPL the universe!
Just because:
1) I don't remember agreeing to this in the license agreement, and
2) After 15 billion years, there's no way it's under any sort of warranty anymore. Think about it.
>>I wonder what a beowulf of black holes would do?
>Don't even bother thinking about it. It would *really* suck.
Yeah, but think of the spin states. Couple them together and you could have a beowulf quantum cluster. At least, as long as Microsoft doesn't require us to license the Grand Unified Theory.
"And if, as they state, this experiment is significantly different to those being conducted at the Tevatron, why is it not significantly different to upper atmosphere collisions?"
Because upper atmosphere collisions involve molecules such as ozone, oxygen and nitrogen rather than free nucleons.
"Now a stable orbit isn't likely to form from a black hole created in the described manner. So, when enough mass is accumulated, the elliptical orbit will toss this thing far enough into space that the Sun's gravity will get ahold of it. In which case it would begin eating the Sun, and anything else in its orbit. The same process would likely happen there, and eventually it would be tossed out of our solar system, to go eat Alpha Centari or something else. Of course it may just eat everything, but it would still take a while."
So what you're saying is, the black hole will eventually swallow up the earth and have the mass of the earth, and some previously unidentified force will mysteriously fling earth's mass from its current orbit? This violates both conservation of momentum and conservation of energy. Even if a black hole did form, it would be as someone has already described: A black hole with the same mass and momentum as earth. So no consequences would extend beyond our planet.
"Now a stable orbit isn't likely to form from a black hole created in the described manner. So, when enough mass is accumulated, the elliptical orbit will toss this thing far enough into space that the Sun's gravity will get ahold of it. In which case it would begin eating the Sun, and anything else in its orbit. The same process would likely happen there, and eventually it would be tossed out of our solar system, to go eat Alpha Centari or something else. Of course it may just eat everything, but it would still take a while."
So what you're saying is, the black hole will eventually swallow up the earth and have the mass of the earth, and some previously unidentified force will mysteriously fling earth's mass from it's current orbit? This violates both conservation of momentum and conservation of energy. Even if a black hole did form, it would be as someone has already described: A black hole with the same mass and momentum as earth. So no consequences would extend beyond our planet.
Basic lesson in probability here. If an event has probability zero, it will never occur. Ever.
If anyone ever told you an event had probability zero and it did occur, they were an idiot.
Sorry, this will probably be rated as flamebait, but I can't stand when people who don't understand probability and statistics write it off as bullshit simply because they don't understand.
I strongly recommend the book Innumeracy by John Allen Paulos to anyone who has a problem with statistics. Maybe it won't teach you the subject in great detail, but it WILL show you how easily you can be ripped off by not understanding statistics. (Good read even if you think you already know.)
Sorry about the rant, but I come from a profession where manipulation and fabrication of figures (as is done by marketers to attract the public) would quickly end any prospects of future employment.
According to current theory, quarks come in six flavors: top and bottom (sometimes called truth and beauty), strange and charmed, up and down.
Ondinary particles in the atomic nucleus (neutrons and protons) consist only of up quarks and down quarks. The other types of quarks may be produced in high-energy collisions, however.
IIRC, Strange matter is composed of these other types of quarks. In general, these particles are unstable and sooner or later (usually MUCH sooner) turn into normal quarks, giving off radiation in the process. Some people still worry about some chain reaction where strange matter converts normal matter into more strange matter, but I find this highly unlikely.
Earth is constantly bombarded by muons (related to electrons like strange quarks are to up quarks) and hasn't imploded on itself yet, even after billions of years. I really doubt we'll succeed in the 0.00000000000000000000003 seconds the collisions in the accelerator will last.
I'm partially skeptical about quantum computing. Granted, I haven't read a whole lot about the subject, but what I have read indicates that hardware and software are one and the same. The machine is designed for one specific problem, and cannot be reprogrammed short of being disassembled and built into a new machine. If anyone knows of evidence to the contrary, I'd appreciate a link.
The problem with your argument is that the 640K limit was just an arbitrary limit imposed by designers of early PC's. Maybe they had reason for it, maybe not.
The current situation is completely different, however. There are very real physical limits to how small you can make a silicon transistor. I think Lucent made one sixty atoms across a while back. Any smaller than that, and quantum effects prevent it from working altogether.
OTOH, molecular transistors have been made which are considerably smaller, and operate by a different mechanism altogether, but so far no one has found a way to link these together into a useful circuit. This would probably boost CPU's from microwave frequencies (which we're just now reaching) to visible or even UV frequencies.
Also consider diffusion of dopant atoms within the semiconductor. Smaller transistors are more readily destroyed by this, which is one reason your P3 has a fan and heat sink where a typical 486 did not. Smaller transistors are more susceptible to heat damage (unlike what I have heard some people say) and will probably have to be supercooled.
So, I expect speed to hit the wall in a few more years, then after a delay perhaps it will suddenly increase by several orders of magnitude almost overnight.
Also, it goes without mentioning that if the clock frequency times Plank's constant even gets close to the bandgap energy of the semiconductor, the device will be useless as electrons are rised to the conduction band by the clock signal. For that matter, clocks themselves probably won't run at that speed for the same reason.
Last I heard, Lucent could make CD-sized discs holding 25 or 50 Gigabytes of data. They wanted to push it up to 100GB before they even tried to work on a marketable product, though. That was a year ago.
Also, about a year before that IIRC researchers at SUNY developed 3-D optical storage with density of 2.1 GB/cubic cm. Problems were access time and expense of materials.
As I posted on DejaNews:
"I think the obvious question is not how AMD will compete with Intel, but whether it even needs to. Considering that the Athlon already uses EV6, Sledgehammer will probably be Alpha-compatible. Face it, Intel is not THE standard for all types of processors, considering they are already nearly a decade behind in developing 64-bit processors. Is it really that big of a problem if AMD doesn't care about IA64?"
Seriously, if the 64-bit market is flooded with low-cost Alphas and Alpha-clones, Intel can't run away. Merced and Pentium III processors will both find themselves being outrun for less money, plus Merced (whoops, Itanium) will be non-standard, while AMD will simply reinforce Compaq's standards. Why worry about AMD's future when Intel is the one wandering off away from accepted standards?
OK, most of us are familiar with the arguments about shortened telomeres, etc. leading to premature aging of clones.(Someone needs to write a sci-fi story about that.)
Anyhow, we hear about how cancer cells don't have that problem. Some people think you can build an organism from cancer cells, but then you just have a custom-built tumor.
Here's my idea, I hope someone with more biochemistry knowledge can respond: Instead of modifying the dna with cancer genes, inject the corresponding mRNA into the cell. This produces the enzymes, you basically regenerate the telomeres and create a growing tumor.
This is where things change: Because you used mRNA instead of DNA, the mRNA eventually breaks down. The enzymes are dispersed between the cells during replication, plus enzymes eventually become degraded. So at some point, The cells cease to be cancerous and revert to normal specialization and replication.
Are there any obvious gaping flaws in this idea? I know how we've recently discovered how to add the necessary genes to human cells to cause cancer, how much of a stretch is it to just add the mRNA or perhaps the enzymes themselves?