You're on the right track, but the energy/time uncertainty relation doesn't really follow from the generalized uncertainty principle.
The generalized uncertainty principle basically says that two non-commuting operators have a commutator [A,B]=iC where i is the sqrt(-1), then a limit on the product of their uncertainties is delta_A*delta_B>=/2. Where delta_A is, as you indicated, a statistical calculation of the uncertainty, or standard deviation. This can be explicitly proven (and was actually one of the questions on my quantum mechanics midterm 2 years ago). (In case anyone is wondering, a commutator [A,B]=AB-BA. It is not generally zero, because A and B are operators, not variables. In programming talk, it's actually very similar to how ++c and c++ differ. Ie, it depends if the increment comes before/after the value is returned.)
This is most popular in terms of position/momentum, where the basic commutator of position/momentum operators is [x,p]=i*hbar. Thus, delta_x*delta_p>=hbar/2. Actually, the fact that [x,p]=i*hbar is one of the fundamental bases upon which most of quantum mechanics is based. (in case people are curious, in position space, momentum is referred to as the generator of translations, and thus will translate the position by some amount when it is measured. That's why position/momentum operators don't commute).
Energy and time are somewhat different. Position and momentum are specific operators. Energy is an eigenvalue of the Hamiltonian operator (sometimes). But time is a parameter, not an operator. So you cannot apply the generalized uncertainty relation here.
Now there is a rough uncertainty principle for energy/time, which goes as delta_E*delta_T>=hbar, but that isn't specifically well defined.
Finally, yes there can be local violations of conservation of energy. And this is due to the energy/time uncertainty. In other words, particles and antiparticles can spontaneously form out of the vacuum on VERY SMALL time scales. Ie, in such a small time scale, you have, at minimum, a large energy uncertainty. And thus within this uncertainty energy is conserved. Thus, local violations of energy conservation.
Wow, a radio station not owned by ClearChannel. Must be nice.
Seriously.
The local classic rock station here in Baltimore was owned by ClearChannel, and it was okay Not great, but played most of the basic classic rock repertoir. But they didn't really expand beyond their basic format playlists much, and also would play Bush's speaches whenever he would give them, etc.
Luckily, they're so profit driven the suits realized they could make more money on a smooth-jazz format (as compared to other cities). So one day they just changed formats.
Within a week or so another classic rock station popped up, not owned by ClearChannel, and is much much better! More variety in the playlists, no soulless corporate overlord to kiss up to (well that I know of, at least), etc.
Anyway, classical spectrography, at IR, optical, and UV wavelengths, only measures certain modes of vibrations. This is a lower-frequency scale, to measure even lower vibrational and rotational energy scales, if that's really what they're looking for in the detection methods.
Frankly, this seems kind of lame.
Sure, and so is anything else that's not at the forefront of pure physics research. Ie, applied physics, chemistry, biochemistry, biology, all engineering, must then be similarly lame as the fundamental concepts have all been discovered so far.
Anyway, if it extends spectrography into other frequencies, then it's in no way more lame than the plethora of slashdot articles mentioning the latest higher-clock-speed CPU, more cluster flops, newest version of the linux kernel, latest version of java, etc.
This device is effectively an electronic 'nose'. Currently it's used for the "War on Drugs", which is probably how they got their funding.
Forget about that for the moment, look at the bigger picture. You can perhaps install these in airports, with the noses fine-tuned to gunpowder and other explosive agents. What's the result? Much better detection of explosives and weapons, and at significant less hassle than standing in line with random searches.
Imagine an airport where you can just walk through the 'metal detector' gate like a normal hallway. That's an ultimate useful application of this technology.
Or, like someone else said, tune the 'nose' to things like Anthrax, and the USPS can sift through the mail quicker and with less threat to potential anthrax targets.
Don't just knee-jerk this all to a "The War on Drugs is Bad, mmmkay" because it's really the same as "Drugs are Bad, mmmkay" mantra you're against in the first place.
As you were evidently being sarcastic, what would you do? Sit back and let them continue to bulldoze your houses to make way for their settlements?
You mean, instead the Palestinians should actually give the Israelis a reason for justifying their actions of bulldozing houses?
As per your logic, should then Israel just sit back and let the terrorists keep coming in blowing up their civilians? Terrorism and attacks were committed against Israel and Israelis long before there ever was any occupation.
Of course bulldozing houses, as you and I know, doesn't instill in the Palestinians any semblence of trust. But neither does blowing up Israelis and subsequently being martyred by Palestinian society as well (regardless of what the PA says deploring it in English).
BTW, your quote shows that you are relatively ignorant of the situation, and have just bought into the over-sensationalization of it. You describe two actions, and mixed them together in a misleading way. Both of which are definitely bad, but putting a causal relation on them is misleading, in attempt to justify Palestinian terror.
Houses are being bulldozed, yes, when it has been a bomber's house, if suspected of being a weapons lab, if it was the site of a shootout, if a high-level hamas/islamic jihad member was in it, etc. (No, I don't agree with bulldozing these houses).
Settlements are expanding, and in nearly all cases they are expanding to undeveloped land. Yes, this land is in Palestine, and yes, it is a land grab. And again, I don't agree with it.
But when you put a causal relation between these two, and state Israel is bulldozing houses to put their new settlements on top, then you're intentionally misleading events in the region to promote your own bias. And that definitely doesn't help for an eventual peaceful solution. In other words, you seem to indicate you hate Israel more than you like the Palestinians or want to see peace. I sincerely hope this isn't the case.
Anyway, the point is that neither side is really doing anything to build the trust of the other side. And to the parent's post, the reason Israel's actions get such public Israeli support is BECAUSE of the terrorist bombings.
If instead the Palestinians all joined hands at the border and sang "We Shall Overcome" while lighting candles, or something like that, and if they still had their houses bulldozed and were shot and killed, then you'd instantly see 99% of all Israelis overthrow their government in a heartbeat. But instead, unfortunately, one sees mostly violence. And violence begets violence.
Yes, this is fairly well accepted. There is lots of info out there showing that Jordan will not let Jews become national citizens.
Read this for starters. If it was utter lies, even the Jerusalem Post wouldn't let it be posted there.
Then read this one . Specifically Item #3, but alot of the info there will challenge the (Israel is all bad, Israel is only bad) mantra most of the "liberals" repeat. To quote it
Turning a blind eye to article 15, Great Britain also decided that no Jews could reside or buy land in the newly created Emirate. This policy was ratified -- after the emirate became a kingdom -- by Jordan's law no. 6, sect. 3, on April 3, 1954, and reactivated in law no. 7, sect. 2, on April 1, 1963. It states that any person may become a citizen of Jordan unless he is a Jew. King Hussein made peace with Israel in 1994, but the Judenrein legislation remains valid today.
The first quote is a column by Alan Dershowitz, if you hate pro-Israel folks then skip to the 2nd link, but I don't know who wrote it. But if either of these was pure propoganda or lies, then surely they would have been challenged by now.
Anyway, regarding the conflict, I'm not saying Israel is innocent. But to treat the situation like Israel is doing these things in a vacuum, instead of in reaction to decades of similar violence and hatred against it, is foolish and misleading.
Remember all the leftists that came out yesterday and today trying to prevent criticism of China and it's human rights record in the slashdot discussions? Don't be racist and complain about China, let's look at their aerospace accomplishments instead.
Notice that these kind of emails are notably absent now? Yeah. It's bad to criticize other countries if not about the current topic. Oh wait, unless it's Israel, those damn zionist racist apartheid colonial occupying thieves.
You thought the anti-Chinese comments from yesterday from their successful launch were bad and racist? This is really the worst thread discussion I have seen on/. in a LONG time. Seriously. Maybe about 15% tops of the comments posted so far are related to the topic at hand.
If it was any other country with similar or worse human rights record, say Sudan, people would be rejoicing at their rejection of MSFT. But Israel bashing is just too chic these days.
I'm saddened that with the China thread on slashdot many open-minded people went out of their way to say "Don't bash China for their human rights, let's celebrate this achievement instead." But only hours later, there's silence as the ignorant masses troll away.
No, definitely not. The building had been deserted for awhile, and much of the stuff was old unkempt junk. In fact, it had been there for 2-3 days before we decided to look for interesting stuff. It seems that the owner of the building wanted to clear out the old things left behind to try to sell the place.
Just yesterday, here in the USA, my girlfriend and I just picked up a good sewing machine and a cute desk from trash on the curb. Along with that was ALOT of old audio equipment that I'm sure works well, including an ancient speaker-cabinet-furniture-thingy with built-in phonograph and 8-track. Anyway, I just wanted to point out that here in the wasteful USA you can also get useful equipment bneing thrown out.
Another example - about 6 years ago I picked up a pair of old Leslie speakers (this kind was solid-state, and used for electric pianos, not organs) someone was throwing out. A total score, especially for a keyboardist who loves old-school equipment. My girlfriend and I were also bummed out yesterday because of the trash cache we just found, there was an older sewing machine, about 60+ years old, in good condition, but was gone by the time we came to snatch it up.
Anyhoo, really great stuff can be gotten from 'trash' piles.
What really turned me off Star Trek in the latter years was the constant morality being forced down my throat in just about every episode - racial equality, child abuse, etc... not to mention the constant political correctness in having the token black, Asian, etc, in each show's cast...
Star Trek was always like that, not just in the latter years. Especially the old season, and I think it was actually really cool. Remember there was Chekov, and this was broadcast during the Cold War. And of course Uhura, and the first inter-racial kiss with Kirk. And just other random aliens to push the racial integration further, such as Spock. And Worf in TNG.
And there was morality too. Did you see that episode in the original series where there were a people whose faces were half-black and half-white? Their arch enemies were those people whose faces were mirror-imaged. That episode just took the racism card and turned it on it's head. It was utterly brilliant! To our untrained eyes, these two half-black half-white people looked the exact same, only when you look at the parity do you even notice a difference.
So yeah, morality and racial political correction were in Star Trek from day 1.
I have also worked in both auto repair garages and semiconductor labs, and I'm not sure which chemical agents the original poster was referring to as being worse in the auto repair world. Well, there is asbestos dust in brakes, and perhaps some solvents like brake cleaner and bad things in used motor oil. I once saw a leaking lead-acid battery, and once a battery blew up when a guy was charing it (had no liquid to spew out as it blew up, which was why it blew up in the first place). But I don't think that's nearly as bad as HF or arsine gas.
The difference is that in an autoshop it's really easily to spill hot motor oil on yourself, burn your hands trying to get off an oil filter just beyond a piping-hot exhaust system, skin your knuckles pulling a bolt loose too quickly, etc. In a lab you've got gloves and are working in a hood. But the MSDS's for the chemicals involved are certainly much nastier in semiconductor fabrication.
Anyway, the bunny suits aren't for protecting the worker, but opposite - for protecting the cleanroom FROM the worker. In a clean room you've got to cut the particle count down dramatically, which comes from clothing, shoes, etc. In a decent cleanroom things like regular paper aren't allowed, for instance (there is special cleanroom notebook paper).
Yes, HF is super nasty stuff, but it's usually called Hydrofluoric Acid. Somebody caused a small HF spill at a lab I worked in last summer, and while only a few drops spilled (on the counter, not on anybody) the environmental cleanup people said HF was the one chemical they fear the most.
The fluorine ions go right through the skin and eat the calcium in the bones. And one doesn't notice the reaction (unless it's high concentration HF) until hours later. Besides dissolving bones, the fluorine ions attack other parts of the nervous system, and one can get fluorine poisoning. Very nasty stuff.
Another response here says to wash off HF in ethanol, which I've never heard of. Here in our lab we have a tube of Calcium Gluconate, which one would use in case of a spill. The theory being the HF eats that calcium instead of in one's bones.
Besides HF, as you've mentioned, two common poisons used in the semiconducting industry are phosphine gas and arsine gas (used for InP and GaAs respectively). I've worked in labs that have used these gases, and I do feel kind of uncomfortable knowing there's a tank of poison gas right near me, and hoping that all tubes and leak detectors are fully functioning properly.
Arsine smells like almonds, and phosphine like garlic. And rumour has it that by the time you can smell these gases you've already been lethally exposed to the poisons. Not sure how true that is, but there have been many deaths this way.
In one of my old labs long before I worked there, somebody committed suicide by opening the arsine gas lines purposely. In another urban legend I've heard, a guy wanted a few weeks of paid sick leave. So before a mandatory employee arsenic test, he inhaled a small amount of arsine gas, so as to test positive for arsenic exposure. He died a few days later.
Anyway, those are some of the worse chemicals. But there's alot of 'generic' stuff which can be bad over long times, like acetone, hexane, benzene, etc. Lithography and crystal growing is a much nastier business than it seems!
The English language is being eroded gradually by ignorance.
Do you appreciate the beauty of other languages? Have you learned any Romance languages, for example?
These languages all evolved from a common source (Latin, or Indoeuropean depending how far back you go). It is local dialects and 'gradual erosions' that evolve the language over time. That's why Spanish, Italian, French, Portugese, etc, are all very similar yet different.
If you're so interested in keeping English uncoroded, wherefore art thou not employing Olde English of daies gone by?
It's part of the natural beauty of language. Many of the words that you probably revere because they're good ol' bona-fide English words are actually mispellings and mispronunciations of older dialects and different languages, and accepted abbreviations.
You sound more like a grumpy old man that refuses to deal with change than someone genuinely interested in preservation of languages.
well, one of diamond's characteristics is high thermal conductivity, so presumably generated heat could easily be carried away with heat-sinking technologies.
Yeah, same with Spider Man too. IIRC, he was bit by a radioactive spider in the original comic. Now it was changed into a biotech-modified spider for the movie.
Basically, the writers are taking one previously not-fully-understood-yet-sexy (at the time) scientific genre and replacing it by another current not-fully-understood-yet-sexy scientific genre.
I'm glad this issue has finally seen some light on slashdot. As many have pointed out previously, it was commonplace to pronounce 10^9 as "jigga" before the advent of gigabyte hard disks, and that the root is similar to the word for 'gigantic'. One guy I know even claimed his friend would pronounce it as "jyga" instead, to correspond to gigantic.
But anyway, it was typically 'jigga' all the way. I have been to several RF and optics conferences where many of the speakers still talk about bandwidths and frequencies in "jiggahertz". It's pretty cool to hear it pronounced like that.
It seems the hard-g pronunciation was picked up through by computer users, as spread through literature (magazines, hard disk ads, etc). It seems natural to pronounce it with a hard 'G'. whereas the 'jigga' folks were most likely RF engineers learning the vernacular from their peers.
Maybe some '1337 computer folks will start measuring their disk sizes in 'jigga-bytes' and the like, bringing back in the old-school pronunciation.
Oh, and FWIW, I was reading some article about lightning a few years ago, and it said that bolts of lightning typically emit a few GW of power. I was psyched that some of the BttF writers did their homework.
Using a simple pumped He3 system, which we just set up in our lab last week, you can easily reach about 300 mK. You use a pumped He4 bath to surround your insert, keeping it at about 1.5 K, and then pump the He3 with a charcoal sorb, to get to 300 mK. In space, you can use blackbody radiation to cool you to the ambient temperature of space (I forget whwat it is, somewhere between 3 to 7 K), and then use He3 pumping to go colder.
You can also get to about 10 mK if you use a dilution regridgerator, which uses a mix of He3 and He4 and relies on changes of entropy as you add them together, and then separate them out.
However, this all assumes that the highest CCD's need to actually go this low. But if for some reason this is needed, these refridgeration techniques are much more efficient and easier than laser cooling. Laser cooling is when you need to go COLD, like microKelvins.
I've brought this up on slashdot before, but strangely nobody has been able to demonstrate any points, either pro or con, about this claim. Since I'm not immediately hopping on the 'windpower is perfect' bandwagon, people might try to accuse me of being a "rich environmentalist" as the parent refers to anti-windfarmers, but let's burn some karma anyway.
Basically, wind turbines may introduce other environmental problems, just as most other energy plants do. They're not entirely "clean" as many would like to believe at first glance.
The main problem, which has been quietly stepped aside by all wind power advocates I talk to, is the environmental effects of removing such vastly huge amounts of kinetic energy from wind flows, in order to harness the power. Think globally.
Wind is an important environmental factor, it equilibriates (sp) places around the globe. You can feel the 'north wind' around the changing of the seasons (up here in North America at least) when cold air rushes north or south, depending on whether Canada is heating up or cooling down. Trade winds flow across the oceans, the Jet Stream equilibriates around the globe over land and sea. Vast arrays of wind turbines will extract large amounts of kinetic energy from these streams, and can (note, I don't say 'will', but nobody has ever accurately affirmed or denied this) severely disrupt global equilibrium cycles.
The effect could be colder Canadian winters and warmer Mexican summers, and parallel for Europe/Asia and southern hemisphere. I'm sure many of the Europeans reading this right now are thinking of the heat wave currently encompassing Europe. From what I understand, this is a slow-moving pocket of hot air that is taking awhile to disperse. Imagine more effects like this, where there is reduced ability for thermal air equilibrium over large-scale continental distances. Canadians might not like to have more severely-cold winters, nor Mexicans with hotter summers either. But these are possible outcomes of massive installations of wind farms, yet few people want to think about them.
That said, if some modelled this sufficiently, perhaps the effects could be minimal. Perhaps they could even be beneficial, such as preventing hurricanes and tornadoes. But to deny any side effects of long-range wind extraction is foolish.
Someone here on slashdot tried making the argument that the area needed for windfarms exceeds the rate of deforestation, but (s)he just pulled stock quotes and numbers from wind websites, and didn't account for the fact that the turbines need to be spaced out, they can't be stacked one right on the other. Also, someone (same or different, I can't remember) tried implying that the amount of kinetic energy harnessed from the turbines is dwarfed by lost kinetic energy of forests swaying in the wind. If someone wants to make that argument again, please provide numerical rates of energy loss for these forest wind shears. Thanks.
Anyway, this is the primary concern of mine against large-scale deployment of windfarms. Hopefully these problems won't be an issue, but let's be careful about the potential problems before praising them as the end-all-be-all of our power problems.
Obligatory Simpson's quote, from the "Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show" episode.
"Excuse me, but "proactive" and "paradigm"? Aren't these just
buzzwords that dumb people use to sound important?
[backpedaling] Not that I'm accusing you of anything like that.
[pause] I'm fired, aren't I?
Slashdot Mirror
The generalized uncertainty principle basically says that two non-commuting operators have a commutator [A,B]=iC where i is the sqrt(-1), then a limit on the product of their uncertainties is delta_A*delta_B>=/2. Where delta_A is, as you indicated, a statistical calculation of the uncertainty, or standard deviation. This can be explicitly proven (and was actually one of the questions on my quantum mechanics midterm 2 years ago). (In case anyone is wondering, a commutator [A,B]=AB-BA. It is not generally zero, because A and B are operators, not variables. In programming talk, it's actually very similar to how ++c and c++ differ. Ie, it depends if the increment comes before/after the value is returned.)
This is most popular in terms of position/momentum, where the basic commutator of position/momentum operators is [x,p]=i*hbar. Thus, delta_x*delta_p>=hbar/2. Actually, the fact that [x,p]=i*hbar is one of the fundamental bases upon which most of quantum mechanics is based. (in case people are curious, in position space, momentum is referred to as the generator of translations, and thus will translate the position by some amount when it is measured. That's why position/momentum operators don't commute).
Energy and time are somewhat different. Position and momentum are specific operators. Energy is an eigenvalue of the Hamiltonian operator (sometimes). But time is a parameter, not an operator. So you cannot apply the generalized uncertainty relation here.
Now there is a rough uncertainty principle for energy/time, which goes as delta_E*delta_T>=hbar, but that isn't specifically well defined.
Finally, yes there can be local violations of conservation of energy. And this is due to the energy/time uncertainty. In other words, particles and antiparticles can spontaneously form out of the vacuum on VERY SMALL time scales. Ie, in such a small time scale, you have, at minimum, a large energy uncertainty. And thus within this uncertainty energy is conserved. Thus, local violations of energy conservation.
Seriously.
The local classic rock station here in Baltimore was owned by ClearChannel, and it was okay Not great, but played most of the basic classic rock repertoir. But they didn't really expand beyond their basic format playlists much, and also would play Bush's speaches whenever he would give them, etc.
Luckily, they're so profit driven the suits realized they could make more money on a smooth-jazz format (as compared to other cities). So one day they just changed formats.
Within a week or so another classic rock station popped up, not owned by ClearChannel, and is much much better! More variety in the playlists, no soulless corporate overlord to kiss up to (well that I know of, at least), etc.
Now the people trying to score E and speed can more easily track down sellers and labs to buy their stash. ;-)
Anyway, classical spectrography, at IR, optical, and UV wavelengths, only measures certain modes of vibrations. This is a lower-frequency scale, to measure even lower vibrational and rotational energy scales, if that's really what they're looking for in the detection methods.
Frankly, this seems kind of lame.
Sure, and so is anything else that's not at the forefront of pure physics research. Ie, applied physics, chemistry, biochemistry, biology, all engineering, must then be similarly lame as the fundamental concepts have all been discovered so far.
Anyway, if it extends spectrography into other frequencies, then it's in no way more lame than the plethora of slashdot articles mentioning the latest higher-clock-speed CPU, more cluster flops, newest version of the linux kernel, latest version of java, etc.
This device is effectively an electronic 'nose'. Currently it's used for the "War on Drugs", which is probably how they got their funding.
Forget about that for the moment, look at the bigger picture. You can perhaps install these in airports, with the noses fine-tuned to gunpowder and other explosive agents. What's the result? Much better detection of explosives and weapons, and at significant less hassle than standing in line with random searches.
Imagine an airport where you can just walk through the 'metal detector' gate like a normal hallway. That's an ultimate useful application of this technology.
Or, like someone else said, tune the 'nose' to things like Anthrax, and the USPS can sift through the mail quicker and with less threat to potential anthrax targets.
Don't just knee-jerk this all to a "The War on Drugs is Bad, mmmkay" because it's really the same as "Drugs are Bad, mmmkay" mantra you're against in the first place.
That's right, it's not like the Chinese, or any other civilization, ever built a wall...
You mean, instead the Palestinians should actually give the Israelis a reason for justifying their actions of bulldozing houses?
As per your logic, should then Israel just sit back and let the terrorists keep coming in blowing up their civilians? Terrorism and attacks were committed against Israel and Israelis long before there ever was any occupation.
Of course bulldozing houses, as you and I know, doesn't instill in the Palestinians any semblence of trust. But neither does blowing up Israelis and subsequently being martyred by Palestinian society as well (regardless of what the PA says deploring it in English).
BTW, your quote shows that you are relatively ignorant of the situation, and have just bought into the over-sensationalization of it. You describe two actions, and mixed them together in a misleading way. Both of which are definitely bad, but putting a causal relation on them is misleading, in attempt to justify Palestinian terror.
- Houses are being bulldozed, yes, when it has been a bomber's house, if suspected of being a weapons lab, if it was the site of a shootout, if a high-level hamas/islamic jihad member was in it, etc. (No, I don't agree with bulldozing these houses).
- Settlements are expanding, and in nearly all cases they are expanding to undeveloped land. Yes, this land is in Palestine, and yes, it is a land grab. And again, I don't agree with it.
But when you put a causal relation between these two, and state Israel is bulldozing houses to put their new settlements on top, then you're intentionally misleading events in the region to promote your own bias. And that definitely doesn't help for an eventual peaceful solution. In other words, you seem to indicate you hate Israel more than you like the Palestinians or want to see peace. I sincerely hope this isn't the case.Anyway, the point is that neither side is really doing anything to build the trust of the other side. And to the parent's post, the reason Israel's actions get such public Israeli support is BECAUSE of the terrorist bombings.
If instead the Palestinians all joined hands at the border and sang "We Shall Overcome" while lighting candles, or something like that, and if they still had their houses bulldozed and were shot and killed, then you'd instantly see 99% of all Israelis overthrow their government in a heartbeat. But instead, unfortunately, one sees mostly violence. And violence begets violence.
Read this for starters. If it was utter lies, even the Jerusalem Post wouldn't let it be posted there.
Then read this one . Specifically Item #3, but alot of the info there will challenge the (Israel is all bad, Israel is only bad) mantra most of the "liberals" repeat. To quote it
The first quote is a column by Alan Dershowitz, if you hate pro-Israel folks then skip to the 2nd link, but I don't know who wrote it. But if either of these was pure propoganda or lies, then surely they would have been challenged by now.
Anyway, regarding the conflict, I'm not saying Israel is innocent. But to treat the situation like Israel is doing these things in a vacuum, instead of in reaction to decades of similar violence and hatred against it, is foolish and misleading.
Remember all the leftists that came out yesterday and today trying to prevent criticism of China and it's human rights record in the slashdot discussions? Don't be racist and complain about China, let's look at their aerospace accomplishments instead.
Notice that these kind of emails are notably absent now? Yeah. It's bad to criticize other countries if not about the current topic. Oh wait, unless it's Israel, those damn zionist racist apartheid colonial occupying thieves.
Welcome to slashdot.
You thought the anti-Chinese comments from yesterday from their successful launch were bad and racist? This is really the worst thread discussion I have seen on /. in a LONG time. Seriously. Maybe about 15% tops of the comments posted so far are related to the topic at hand.
If it was any other country with similar or worse human rights record, say Sudan, people would be rejoicing at their rejection of MSFT. But Israel bashing is just too chic these days.
I'm saddened that with the China thread on slashdot many open-minded people went out of their way to say "Don't bash China for their human rights, let's celebrate this achievement instead." But only hours later, there's silence as the ignorant masses troll away.
Just yesterday, here in the USA, my girlfriend and I just picked up a good sewing machine and a cute desk from trash on the curb. Along with that was ALOT of old audio equipment that I'm sure works well, including an ancient speaker-cabinet-furniture-thingy with built-in phonograph and 8-track. Anyway, I just wanted to point out that here in the wasteful USA you can also get useful equipment bneing thrown out.
Another example - about 6 years ago I picked up a pair of old Leslie speakers (this kind was solid-state, and used for electric pianos, not organs) someone was throwing out. A total score, especially for a keyboardist who loves old-school equipment. My girlfriend and I were also bummed out yesterday because of the trash cache we just found, there was an older sewing machine, about 60+ years old, in good condition, but was gone by the time we came to snatch it up.
Anyhoo, really great stuff can be gotten from 'trash' piles.
Don't forget the age-old adage about space travel :
"To make a small fortune in the space business, start with a large one."
Star Trek was always like that, not just in the latter years. Especially the old season, and I think it was actually really cool. Remember there was Chekov, and this was broadcast during the Cold War. And of course Uhura, and the first inter-racial kiss with Kirk. And just other random aliens to push the racial integration further, such as Spock. And Worf in TNG.
And there was morality too. Did you see that episode in the original series where there were a people whose faces were half-black and half-white? Their arch enemies were those people whose faces were mirror-imaged. That episode just took the racism card and turned it on it's head. It was utterly brilliant! To our untrained eyes, these two half-black half-white people looked the exact same, only when you look at the parity do you even notice a difference.
So yeah, morality and racial political correction were in Star Trek from day 1.
Do you pay taxes?
The difference is that in an autoshop it's really easily to spill hot motor oil on yourself, burn your hands trying to get off an oil filter just beyond a piping-hot exhaust system, skin your knuckles pulling a bolt loose too quickly, etc. In a lab you've got gloves and are working in a hood. But the MSDS's for the chemicals involved are certainly much nastier in semiconductor fabrication.
Anyway, the bunny suits aren't for protecting the worker, but opposite - for protecting the cleanroom FROM the worker. In a clean room you've got to cut the particle count down dramatically, which comes from clothing, shoes, etc. In a decent cleanroom things like regular paper aren't allowed, for instance (there is special cleanroom notebook paper).
The fluorine ions go right through the skin and eat the calcium in the bones. And one doesn't notice the reaction (unless it's high concentration HF) until hours later. Besides dissolving bones, the fluorine ions attack other parts of the nervous system, and one can get fluorine poisoning. Very nasty stuff.
Another response here says to wash off HF in ethanol, which I've never heard of. Here in our lab we have a tube of Calcium Gluconate, which one would use in case of a spill. The theory being the HF eats that calcium instead of in one's bones.
Besides HF, as you've mentioned, two common poisons used in the semiconducting industry are phosphine gas and arsine gas (used for InP and GaAs respectively). I've worked in labs that have used these gases, and I do feel kind of uncomfortable knowing there's a tank of poison gas right near me, and hoping that all tubes and leak detectors are fully functioning properly.
Arsine smells like almonds, and phosphine like garlic. And rumour has it that by the time you can smell these gases you've already been lethally exposed to the poisons. Not sure how true that is, but there have been many deaths this way.
In one of my old labs long before I worked there, somebody committed suicide by opening the arsine gas lines purposely. In another urban legend I've heard, a guy wanted a few weeks of paid sick leave. So before a mandatory employee arsenic test, he inhaled a small amount of arsine gas, so as to test positive for arsenic exposure. He died a few days later.
Anyway, those are some of the worse chemicals. But there's alot of 'generic' stuff which can be bad over long times, like acetone, hexane, benzene, etc. Lithography and crystal growing is a much nastier business than it seems!
Do you appreciate the beauty of other languages? Have you learned any Romance languages, for example?
These languages all evolved from a common source (Latin, or Indoeuropean depending how far back you go). It is local dialects and 'gradual erosions' that evolve the language over time. That's why Spanish, Italian, French, Portugese, etc, are all very similar yet different.
If you're so interested in keeping English uncoroded, wherefore art thou not employing Olde English of daies gone by?
It's part of the natural beauty of language. Many of the words that you probably revere because they're good ol' bona-fide English words are actually mispellings and mispronunciations of older dialects and different languages, and accepted abbreviations.
You sound more like a grumpy old man that refuses to deal with change than someone genuinely interested in preservation of languages.
Off-topic, and not really a troll, but what do you mean by this? I'm just bored/curious.
The tungsten filament in a light-bulb gets significantly hotter than this, for instance.
well, one of diamond's characteristics is high thermal conductivity, so presumably generated heat could easily be carried away with heat-sinking technologies.
Basically, the writers are taking one previously not-fully-understood-yet-sexy (at the time) scientific genre and replacing it by another current not-fully-understood-yet-sexy scientific genre.
But anyway, it was typically 'jigga' all the way. I have been to several RF and optics conferences where many of the speakers still talk about bandwidths and frequencies in "jiggahertz". It's pretty cool to hear it pronounced like that.
It seems the hard-g pronunciation was picked up through by computer users, as spread through literature (magazines, hard disk ads, etc). It seems natural to pronounce it with a hard 'G'. whereas the 'jigga' folks were most likely RF engineers learning the vernacular from their peers.
Maybe some '1337 computer folks will start measuring their disk sizes in 'jigga-bytes' and the like, bringing back in the old-school pronunciation.
Oh, and FWIW, I was reading some article about lightning a few years ago, and it said that bolts of lightning typically emit a few GW of power. I was psyched that some of the BttF writers did their homework.
Using a simple pumped He3 system, which we just set up in our lab last week, you can easily reach about 300 mK. You use a pumped He4 bath to surround your insert, keeping it at about 1.5 K, and then pump the He3 with a charcoal sorb, to get to 300 mK. In space, you can use blackbody radiation to cool you to the ambient temperature of space (I forget whwat it is, somewhere between 3 to 7 K), and then use He3 pumping to go colder.
You can also get to about 10 mK if you use a dilution regridgerator, which uses a mix of He3 and He4 and relies on changes of entropy as you add them together, and then separate them out.
However, this all assumes that the highest CCD's need to actually go this low. But if for some reason this is needed, these refridgeration techniques are much more efficient and easier than laser cooling. Laser cooling is when you need to go COLD, like microKelvins.
Basically, wind turbines may introduce other environmental problems, just as most other energy plants do. They're not entirely "clean" as many would like to believe at first glance.
The main problem, which has been quietly stepped aside by all wind power advocates I talk to, is the environmental effects of removing such vastly huge amounts of kinetic energy from wind flows, in order to harness the power. Think globally.
Wind is an important environmental factor, it equilibriates (sp) places around the globe. You can feel the 'north wind' around the changing of the seasons (up here in North America at least) when cold air rushes north or south, depending on whether Canada is heating up or cooling down. Trade winds flow across the oceans, the Jet Stream equilibriates around the globe over land and sea. Vast arrays of wind turbines will extract large amounts of kinetic energy from these streams, and can (note, I don't say 'will', but nobody has ever accurately affirmed or denied this) severely disrupt global equilibrium cycles.
The effect could be colder Canadian winters and warmer Mexican summers, and parallel for Europe/Asia and southern hemisphere. I'm sure many of the Europeans reading this right now are thinking of the heat wave currently encompassing Europe. From what I understand, this is a slow-moving pocket of hot air that is taking awhile to disperse. Imagine more effects like this, where there is reduced ability for thermal air equilibrium over large-scale continental distances. Canadians might not like to have more severely-cold winters, nor Mexicans with hotter summers either. But these are possible outcomes of massive installations of wind farms, yet few people want to think about them.
That said, if some modelled this sufficiently, perhaps the effects could be minimal. Perhaps they could even be beneficial, such as preventing hurricanes and tornadoes. But to deny any side effects of long-range wind extraction is foolish.
Someone here on slashdot tried making the argument that the area needed for windfarms exceeds the rate of deforestation, but (s)he just pulled stock quotes and numbers from wind websites, and didn't account for the fact that the turbines need to be spaced out, they can't be stacked one right on the other. Also, someone (same or different, I can't remember) tried implying that the amount of kinetic energy harnessed from the turbines is dwarfed by lost kinetic energy of forests swaying in the wind. If someone wants to make that argument again, please provide numerical rates of energy loss for these forest wind shears. Thanks.
Anyway, this is the primary concern of mine against large-scale deployment of windfarms. Hopefully these problems won't be an issue, but let's be careful about the potential problems before praising them as the end-all-be-all of our power problems.
"Excuse me, but "proactive" and "paradigm"? Aren't these just buzzwords that dumb people use to sound important?
[backpedaling] Not that I'm accusing you of anything like that.
[pause] I'm fired, aren't I?