Nah, it's just part of the viral marketing for District 9. Tristar have been buying up ex-solviet nuclear-tipped ICBMs and retrofitting them for a space mission. The rest of the spots will spell out "buy coke" (they gotta have a product placement as well, right?)
We do, though. An examination of the paper indicates that this is a phase change to a new state of matter that happens when you pump a massive quantity of (specifically-tuned) laser energy into a small area, and the state doesn't last very long before collapsing into a good old-fashioned plasma.
Now, I should clarify. Lasers themselves operate by a process of population inversion, finding long-lived upper states which can then collapse coherently. The high-energy states of Al atoms involved in the parent article fundamentally disrupt the electronic structure of the metal, and relax extremely quickly. Even if a population inversion could be maintained by virtue of the decay process being forbidden under quantum selection rules (lasers have solved this, and such a process might be applicable here), the material would most likely not retain any of the physical properties of aluminium, in addition to not absorbing UV light.
I'm not poopooing further research in this area, I'm just saying that there are a lot of promising avenues towards transparent windows and the parent article is no more likely to achieve that goal than the release of linux 2.8. That is to say, it's impressive, but your hope stems from a misreading of the secondary journalistic fallout.
See, your comment is a perfect example of the cancer that is "science" journalism. This experimental result is in no way something that could ever be made into windows or body armour. This was a misconception due to certain words (like transparent) having rigorous meanings in the scientific community.
A suitable analogy: Journalist reads wikipedia page on the stanford Z-Machine, sees "wires move fast". Could this be the next step in automatic cheese-slicing technology? No.
Another analogy: The superheated plasma in the core of the sun is so dense/electromagnetically active that photons of light are randomly reflected on a squiggly path. Could nuclear fusion lead to portable full-length mirrors? No.
Because your image is only viewed by your friends, that's what, 100 impressions? And the clickthroughs are abysmal. There ain't a micropayment system small enough to tackle this. This is similar to an advert with a mirror in it, or saying "I bet you know some happily married people, come to quickshag.com to be like them". Ok, data-mining your own profile for information to use to advertise to you is pretty scummy, but at least it ends up being relevant. Because of my listed interests, I get relevant ads.
Fwiw, I still disabled the ad usage, but come on, get some perspective. This is the internet, this is facebook. They're not about to use you as the next face of Levi's and frolic evilly in a pile of your money.
oh noooOOooOOOoOoOo, hexane! Worrying about trace levels of that in your food is like worrying that the 1% argon in air will asphyxiate you. Yeah, ok, if I huffed a bag of hexane I'd get high, vomit, and possibly collapse and die. Otherwise, meh.
Amen. As an academic exercise, if I was satan and I wanted to undermine christianity, I wouldn't remove another millimeter from britney's neckline, I'd encourage those guys. The hellfire and damnation preachers. The gay-bashing uptight holier-than-thou proclamation-shouting judgemental weasels who popularised this law. They're human beings and I love them and forgive them, but they have to stop. They are damaging christianity and turning millions of people away from God.
Think of the typical slashdotter's attitude towards us. That exists because of these guys, because of the media, because of the angry internet atheists. I guess it's like my opinion of America. I have this vague idea of litigious fat assholes, but of course every american I've personally met is an awesome dude or dudette.
Just out of interest, what if the $deity coincidentally happens to fit all the details of the torah/bible/koran? It's the same probability of being a flying spaghetti monster;)
> "previous events with loud music at the same premises"
If I am a well-known troll and I show up in a thread doing the text version of cracking my knuckles and going "well, let's get busy" then yeah, ban me.
If it looked exactly like an all-night rave would on facebook, and indavertently used some innocent terms which could be euphamisms for drug-taking, then I don't blame the police for investigating. It's easy for us to say "they could have scouted it first" but is that typical rave-busting procedure?
As for not backing down when they got there, it's not the ground police's job to make calls like that, unless it was really blatant. Needs more info, as you say.
This sort of thing pisses me off, because everyone has thier own spin and then at the end of the day, the public "wins" and the police get even more declawed, demoralised, and afraid of doing thier job. Hooray.
I couldn't agree more. Using a trackpad is like trying to use a mouse with a broken arm swaddled in plaster. you're lucky if you can get the pointer 1/3 of the way across the screen without reseating your finger, and at higher sensitivities it's even more of a cumbersome pain to use.
Spotify mobile is a killer - if I want an album, it's usually £5 secondhand (given my tastes) so where spotify shines is a vast list of really random tracks, one-hit wonders that I previously had to either download an entire album for, or trawl through the dregs of emule. I mostly use my portable music player for podcasts and the like, but occasionally I'd like to walk down the street listening to some of the random crap I have on at the moment.
Robot wars here in the UK had a few contenders for alternate paradigms - there was one particularly expensive and high-tech bot that had a stabbing axe that could punch through a respectable layer of armour. There was also one that had a spiked flywheel that debuted by tearing a schoolboy entry into tiny chunks.
Problem is, if you don't have something to right yourself after a flip, you may as well just throw in the towel on your first match against a flipping bot. There was an early episode, a previously-dominating flipper bot got turned over by a wedge bot, and we thought it was all over, the announcer called it for the wedge and then the flipper bot promptly did a sumersault. The idea of self-righting never entered our minds until it happened in that match.
This was only an example RSS feed shipped with the app for checking, and I presume that the actual app would have been empty of pre-installed feeds. The reviewer had no way of knowing that though.
A feed reader isn't exactly a kid-friendly app, so this is a "whoopsie" along the same kind of lines as, say, an adult-targeted podcast about fishing or video games saying "f*ck" and then forgetting to set the "explicit" flat. A technical slipup, nowhere near as bad as accidentally putting porn links on an XO.
I don't blame apple for the reaction though. It was a little dumb not to take 2 seconds to submit the app with a known-inoffensive feed like disney.com (or for brownie points, apple's own news feed:) )
"Atheism is a religion to the same extent that not collecting stamps is a hobby."
Yeah, those fucking stamp collectors. I take any opportunity to belittle them. Cocktail parties, the post office, any excuse really. It's not a passion of mine, I don't care about stamps. Those stamps make me so mad! Everyone who collects stamps makes me sick and should be shot, and I have written petitions and use bumper stickers to loudly proclaim this. Not a hobby, nope.
Hahahaha, it's so true. When I was an undergraduate we joked about that, until I walked into one of the bathrooms. A respected professor was washing his hands, then dried them and went up to the urinal next to me.
No, in those disciplines the guy with the degree who draw the plans, and the guy in the hard hat who builds it, aren't the same person. I do a few hours of bookwork a day, and the rest is practical.
You know the levels in water are far below theraputic, right? The point I specifically raised to stop someone like you from missing the point.
Of course, I accept that "theraputic" doses have side-effects such as mental dullening. Even a 1 point IQ drop across the tapwater range would be unacceptable.
Look. This is levels in drinking water. Presumeably, it varies with geographical area, composition of the rocks draining into the water table. One of the more likely variables NOT to be correlated with social/human factors.
If it turns out this is genuinely a correlation, and it reduces the incidence of suicide, then further studies are required. For example, doping everyone up to the eyeballs with anti-schitzophrenia meds will probably reduce the suicide rate, but at a terrible cost: Mental dullening, health implications and so on.
Fortunately, because of the aforementioned independance from social/human factors, it would be easy to spot other trends linked to lithium levels in the water. Perhaps it's associated with a lower average IQ, or a greater risk of heart disease, or even a lessened lust for life. Then, we'd do nothing.
After all of these decision paths, we might arrive at a state where we think low levels of lithium in drinking water reduce the suicide rate without any negative consequences. Knowing that, say, 100 people in abnormally-deficient lithium areas will kill themselves needlessly, it would be immoral not to act on this knowledge. You say a person has a right to kill themself. I say, that decision is being swayed by a low lithium level somehow.
Slashdot Mirror
Nah, it's just part of the viral marketing for District 9. Tristar have been buying up ex-solviet nuclear-tipped ICBMs and retrofitting them for a space mission. The rest of the spots will spell out "buy coke" (they gotta have a product placement as well, right?)
we won't know until we try
We do, though. An examination of the paper indicates that this is a phase change to a new state of matter that happens when you pump a massive quantity of (specifically-tuned) laser energy into a small area, and the state doesn't last very long before collapsing into a good old-fashioned plasma.
Now, I should clarify. Lasers themselves operate by a process of population inversion, finding long-lived upper states which can then collapse coherently. The high-energy states of Al atoms involved in the parent article fundamentally disrupt the electronic structure of the metal, and relax extremely quickly. Even if a population inversion could be maintained by virtue of the decay process being forbidden under quantum selection rules (lasers have solved this, and such a process might be applicable here), the material would most likely not retain any of the physical properties of aluminium, in addition to not absorbing UV light.
I'm not poopooing further research in this area, I'm just saying that there are a lot of promising avenues towards transparent windows and the parent article is no more likely to achieve that goal than the release of linux 2.8. That is to say, it's impressive, but your hope stems from a misreading of the secondary journalistic fallout.
See, your comment is a perfect example of the cancer that is "science" journalism. This experimental result is in no way something that could ever be made into windows or body armour. This was a misconception due to certain words (like transparent) having rigorous meanings in the scientific community.
A suitable analogy: Journalist reads wikipedia page on the stanford Z-Machine, sees "wires move fast". Could this be the next step in automatic cheese-slicing technology? No.
Another analogy: The superheated plasma in the core of the sun is so dense/electromagnetically active that photons of light are randomly reflected on a squiggly path. Could nuclear fusion lead to portable full-length mirrors? No.
Because your image is only viewed by your friends, that's what, 100 impressions? And the clickthroughs are abysmal. There ain't a micropayment system small enough to tackle this. This is similar to an advert with a mirror in it, or saying "I bet you know some happily married people, come to quickshag.com to be like them". Ok, data-mining your own profile for information to use to advertise to you is pretty scummy, but at least it ends up being relevant. Because of my listed interests, I get relevant ads.
Fwiw, I still disabled the ad usage, but come on, get some perspective. This is the internet, this is facebook. They're not about to use you as the next face of Levi's and frolic evilly in a pile of your money.
oh noooOOooOOOoOoOo, hexane! Worrying about trace levels of that in your food is like worrying that the 1% argon in air will asphyxiate you. Yeah, ok, if I huffed a bag of hexane I'd get high, vomit, and possibly collapse and die. Otherwise, meh.
Amen. As an academic exercise, if I was satan and I wanted to undermine christianity, I wouldn't remove another millimeter from britney's neckline, I'd encourage those guys. The hellfire and damnation preachers. The gay-bashing uptight holier-than-thou proclamation-shouting judgemental weasels who popularised this law. They're human beings and I love them and forgive them, but they have to stop. They are damaging christianity and turning millions of people away from God.
Think of the typical slashdotter's attitude towards us. That exists because of these guys, because of the media, because of the angry internet atheists. I guess it's like my opinion of America. I have this vague idea of litigious fat assholes, but of course every american I've personally met is an awesome dude or dudette.
Too right, I modded you insightful for this.
Just out of interest, what if the $deity coincidentally happens to fit all the details of the torah/bible/koran? It's the same probability of being a flying spaghetti monster ;)
> "previous events with loud music at the same premises"
If I am a well-known troll and I show up in a thread doing the text version of cracking my knuckles and going "well, let's get busy" then yeah, ban me.
If it looked exactly like an all-night rave would on facebook, and indavertently used some innocent terms which could be euphamisms for drug-taking, then I don't blame the police for investigating. It's easy for us to say "they could have scouted it first" but is that typical rave-busting procedure?
As for not backing down when they got there, it's not the ground police's job to make calls like that, unless it was really blatant. Needs more info, as you say.
This sort of thing pisses me off, because everyone has thier own spin and then at the end of the day, the public "wins" and the police get even more declawed, demoralised, and afraid of doing thier job. Hooray.
I couldn't agree more. Using a trackpad is like trying to use a mouse with a broken arm swaddled in plaster. you're lucky if you can get the pointer 1/3 of the way across the screen without reseating your finger, and at higher sensitivities it's even more of a cumbersome pain to use.
Spotify mobile is a killer - if I want an album, it's usually £5 secondhand (given my tastes) so where spotify shines is a vast list of really random tracks, one-hit wonders that I previously had to either download an entire album for, or trawl through the dregs of emule. I mostly use my portable music player for podcasts and the like, but occasionally I'd like to walk down the street listening to some of the random crap I have on at the moment.
Hawking and feynman are irreplaceable human beings. Smart AND randy. Look it up.
If the telomeres in fast-dividing cells are staying long, then she really will live for ever.
Robot wars here in the UK had a few contenders for alternate paradigms - there was one particularly expensive and high-tech bot that had a stabbing axe that could punch through a respectable layer of armour. There was also one that had a spiked flywheel that debuted by tearing a schoolboy entry into tiny chunks.
Problem is, if you don't have something to right yourself after a flip, you may as well just throw in the towel on your first match against a flipping bot. There was an early episode, a previously-dominating flipper bot got turned over by a wedge bot, and we thought it was all over, the announcer called it for the wedge and then the flipper bot promptly did a sumersault. The idea of self-righting never entered our minds until it happened in that match.
The story is showing in red on the main page - perhaps reflecting the fear of a red mars in all of us. Oh, wait...
This was only an example RSS feed shipped with the app for checking, and I presume that the actual app would have been empty of pre-installed feeds. The reviewer had no way of knowing that though.
A feed reader isn't exactly a kid-friendly app, so this is a "whoopsie" along the same kind of lines as, say, an adult-targeted podcast about fishing or video games saying "f*ck" and then forgetting to set the "explicit" flat. A technical slipup, nowhere near as bad as accidentally putting porn links on an XO.
I don't blame apple for the reaction though. It was a little dumb not to take 2 seconds to submit the app with a known-inoffensive feed like disney.com (or for brownie points, apple's own news feed :) )
Why not, I know people who collect stamps religiously :D
"Atheism is a religion to the same extent that not collecting stamps is a hobby."
Yeah, those fucking stamp collectors. I take any opportunity to belittle them. Cocktail parties, the post office, any excuse really. It's not a passion of mine, I don't care about stamps. Those stamps make me so mad! Everyone who collects stamps makes me sick and should be shot, and I have written petitions and use bumper stickers to loudly proclaim this. Not a hobby, nope.
Hahahaha, it's so true. When I was an undergraduate we joked about that, until I walked into one of the bathrooms. A respected professor was washing his hands, then dried them and went up to the urinal next to me.
No, in those disciplines the guy with the degree who draw the plans, and the guy in the hard hat who builds it, aren't the same person. I do a few hours of bookwork a day, and the rest is practical.
I am a chemistry graduate and I've always said that for a high science, chemistry is very blue-collar. Let's look at the facts:
We are on our feet all day and work with our hands.
Most people I know in the field have burns, scars, or callouses.
We listen to Radio 1 all day.
'course, I wouldn't do it if I didn't love it.
Wow, that guy must think himself a lot smarter than he actually is, where did you find the link?
You know the levels in water are far below theraputic, right? The point I specifically raised to stop someone like you from missing the point.
Of course, I accept that "theraputic" doses have side-effects such as mental dullening. Even a 1 point IQ drop across the tapwater range would be unacceptable.
Look. This is levels in drinking water. Presumeably, it varies with geographical area, composition of the rocks draining into the water table. One of the more likely variables NOT to be correlated with social/human factors.
If it turns out this is genuinely a correlation, and it reduces the incidence of suicide, then further studies are required. For example, doping everyone up to the eyeballs with anti-schitzophrenia meds will probably reduce the suicide rate, but at a terrible cost: Mental dullening, health implications and so on.
Fortunately, because of the aforementioned independance from social/human factors, it would be easy to spot other trends linked to lithium levels in the water. Perhaps it's associated with a lower average IQ, or a greater risk of heart disease, or even a lessened lust for life. Then, we'd do nothing.
After all of these decision paths, we might arrive at a state where we think low levels of lithium in drinking water reduce the suicide rate without any negative consequences. Knowing that, say, 100 people in abnormally-deficient lithium areas will kill themselves needlessly, it would be immoral not to act on this knowledge. You say a person has a right to kill themself. I say, that decision is being swayed by a low lithium level somehow.