What you're thinking is that when there is an eclipse, it's visible everywhere on earth, I think. Solar eclipses are only visible in certain places.
Lunar eclipses are visble everywhere on Earth that one could see (eclipsed portion of) the Moon. I.e., from approximately (actually a bit more than) half the Earth.
Similarly, Solar eclipses are visible everywhere on the Moon that one could see the eclipsed portion of the Earth (again, about half the Moon).:)
Of course, those living on the Moon might refer to Lunar eclipses as Solar eclipses and Solar eclipses as Terran eclipses.
I am indeed being very careful about my choice of words, but that is because it is difficult to separate meaning from words.
Regarding quantum entanglement, there are aspects of quantum entanglement that travel faster-than-light. However, as other posters have pointed out, these aspects do not permit information transference. Without information transference there can be no direction of casuality. This is very important when one realizes there is no such thing as instantaneous travel(in an absolute sense, at least).
Regarding instantaneous: as my previous qualification might suggest I will back-pedal on this a little. In any given reference frame, one can define simultaneous events as those from which a hypothetical photon eminating from both events would reach pass each other at a midpoint exactly between those two events in space (as defined for that reference frame). Instantaneous would have a similar definition. However, to someone traveling near the speed of light (relative to the first reference frame), they would have a vastly different idea about which events are simultaneous. They would see your two simulataneous events (which I will call A and B) such that A happened before B. (Assuming travel is not perpendicular to the axis containing A and B). Furthermore, someone traveling in the opposite direction would see that event B happened before A. Therefore if A had a causal impact on B (or vice-versa), one of these two new observers would claim that the causality ordering principle (COP) had been violated. I have very carefully chosen the words information and causal/causality here.
As for the shadow example, imagine this: Star A is 10 light-years away. Very large object B (which we will assume actually has no mass and so is not bending star A's light, but yet magically can occlude all light from A that falls on it) is 5 light-years away and is traveling at 0.75c perpendicularly to the line of sight. How fast would its shadow travel against a very, very large white screen? Simple geometry reveals that the answer is 1.5c. I don't think this qualifies as any kind of "trick". However, if one considers the situation carefully, it can be shown that no information from moving either the star A, nor the object B can travel faster than light!
Despite what the popular press might say, the speed of light has never been claimed to be a constant. The speed of light in a vacuum (c), however, is asserted to be a constant. Frozen light does not challenge this assertion at all.
Instantaneous travel is impossible for the simple reason that "instantaneous" has no meaning. Quantum entanglement does not allow the transfer of information at faster-than-light speeds. It is worth noting that all kinds of things can travel faster than light (e.g., it is trival to show that shadows, humorously enough, can travel faster-than-light), but information is not one of those things.
We (Americans) have decided that from henceforth, the phrase "imperial units" will no longer be used as it slanderously implies that we are an empire. Instead, the correct phrase will now be "republican units".:P
My state (VA) also allows me to file taxes directly through them, and I think that's basically a better alternative. (Having written tax software myself long ago, I know it's not exactly brain surgery.) However, I found the process (slightly) less intuitive than the 3rd party site I used to file my federal taxes. That comes from the benefit of competition, IMO. I do agree that the downside of the 3rd party is that one more party has my personal information than needs it. Luckily for me, as a grad student, if my income information gets leaked out, I'll actually get less spam.;)
I don't drink beer, so I don't have first-hand experience on the matter, but to hear all the jokes about US beer (e.g., "How is American Beer like making love in a canoe?", from Monty Python's Live at the Hollywood Bowl), I'm surprised the overseas market for Budweiser is that large. Is this one of those cases where people complain about how bad a product is, and then they buy it anyway?
The main site has some crackpottery...
on
Mapping the Mind
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The main site has a bit of questionable material (not all bad, but not all good, either), but his criticism of Rita's work rings true to me.
First of all, he does tell you to feel free to take it with a grain of salt, but "to check it with an expert on brain anatomy or clinical neuroscience".
Secondly, what he says (for the most part) agrees with what I've learned in my research. I am no expert, but my research does involve reproducing cognitive and neurophysiological phenomena of the hippocampus (working on a Ph.D. in Computer Science), and much of my background reading agrees with what Yehouda is saying. Assuming that his quotes of Rita's are valid (I have not read her book), Rita is vastly exaggerating what we know about the brain.
As I'm sure you know, neutrinos very rarely interact with matter, but they do interact. Now, currently we are bathed with a flux of approximately 5,000,000 neutrinos/cm^2/s (could be off by a factor of 3, and depends on what kind of neutrinos you're talking about). At this flux, interactions are extremely rare and we have to set up huge tubs of water or cleaning fluid in order to detect them. However, what if the flux was not 5 x 10^6, but was on the order of 10^10? Well, I don't know, but I expect we'd still be OK, although we suddenly would be exposed to an increased amount of radiation from the 10,000-fold increase in neutrino interactions. We might even notice the occasional flashes in our retinas (although I doubt it). Now, what if that was increased to 10^30 neutrinos/cm^2/s? Now we're talking about an increase similar to Avogadro's number. I'm fairly certain we would notice that, and I expect it would not be healthy. Perhaps I'm wrong about that, but I'm certain you agree that there's some flux of neutrinos that definitely qualifies as being "a very bad thing".
There are two types of enhancment surgeries open to baseball players: laser eye surgery and Tommy John surgery. The first one is fairly ubiquitous and currently not very scrutinized. Improve your vision and you are better able to see what the pitcher is throwing your way. The second almost seems like a response to the first: they drill holes in your arm bones, figure-eight your tendons, and suddenly the pitcher can pitch better than he ever has before. Currently, AFAIK, the latter is only done on "injured" pitchers, but as my scare quotes are meant to indicate, the threshold for what injured means seems to be getting lower.
I'm 6'2", and I'm taller than about 97% of other men (in the US). If you're 6'5", you're taller than about 99.7% of other men, and if you're 6'8", well, you're just too tall, at least according to this calculator. (6'6" is taller than 99.9% of other men, but that's as high as the calculator goes.)
P.S. The calculator is a pop-up, so you'll need to allow those if you want to use the calcuator.
Hey, anyone is free to use it - all I'm saying is that it's going to create more bloated shit than anything else, and then who do you think is going to have to fix it (also explaining why it costs so much more, when it "can't be that hard, 'cause we were able to do stuff using Metafor")
Sounds like someone has a case of the Mondays.;) Seriously, you appear to be speaking from your experience as someone who has to support idiots (AKA the general population). OTOH, I'm speaking from my experience in the sciences where the amount of time spent writing code is frequently larger than the amount of time spent running the code. In many instances (not all) bloat is less of a problem than time wasted tracking down the reasons behind a segfault. That's one reason why many scientists "code" in Mathematica and/or MATLAB. Again, I'm not saying that this particular solution is any good, just arguing for the value in making programming easier at the expense of making the programs less efficient in space/time.
People are going to use it for stuff it's NOT suitable for - that's human nature. Give someone a hammer, everything becomes a nail.
Give a mother a band-aid, and everything's a boo-boo. I still remember that time when I had my legs and arms separated from my body - blood was spurting everywhere! - and my mother was trying to fix it with a band-aid (well, four band-aids). Luckily, I finally convinced her that this was a job for a surgeon.
and it should be made impossible for anyone untrained (or out of practice) in languages that meet your standard of snobbishness
Definitely, at least when it comes to business apps.
But not all code is written for business apps. What about scientists who understand logic fairly well, but who have difficulty in C or C++? (There are a surprising number of such people.)
Would you trust a surgeon who's 15 years out-of-date to operate on you?
Would you prevent a mother with no medical training to put a band-aid on her son's skinned knee? Sure, a trained doctor would know more about exactly how much (if any!) antibiotics to apply to the wound before applying the bandage, but surely you agree that the mother should be forced to pay his fees for this fairly trivial service?
I agree that this might not be for everyone or every project, and this particular instantiation might not even be for anyone or any project, but surely you must understand the importance of allowing the casual/hobbyist programmer to increase the tools in his toolbox!
But it did go a good way towards defraying them. From what I remember, SS1 cost ~$20M, so the $10M prize helped, but it definitely didn't cover development costs. This doesn't dispute your main point, however. The real reward for SS1 is yet to come...
From what I can tell, the good news about this laptop is that you don't need glasses to get the 3D effect.
The bad news is that you have to put your left eye where the left "viewing diamond" is and your right eye where the right "viewing diamond" is. Of course, this might just be my pessimistic side talking.
That appears to be a credit union primarily for employees of USAA, whereas USAA is for members of the armed services and their immediate family. According to their membership page, "employees of Americhem Company, International Business Machines and Otis Elevator Company, who work in any United Services Automobile Association Building or field office" are also eligible, as are their immediate family. However, since they do not mention armed service personnel, this differs quite a bit from USAA Federal Savings Bank, which I still suspect is actually a "bank".
However, you have answered one long-standing question of mine. USAA apparently stands for "United Services Automobile Association" (this information is not readily found at USAA.com).
USAA is much more than a bank (insurance, etc.), but I guess your question is is the USAA Federal Savings Bank, technically a "bank"? My answer is that I don't know, but I think they are. I'm not sure if they count as being a Credit Union, and, if so, if that disqualifies them from being a "bank", but my instinct (which with $2 might get you a coffee from Starbucks) tells me that they are a bank.
Some new credit card machines require at least a few somewhat recognizable characters. At Harris Teeter when I use my credit card, I have to alter my signature in order for the machine to accept it. I find this somewhat amusing, and somewhat disturbing.
you need to get a different bank. My bank (USAA) not only doesn't charge me for every ATM transaction at a foreign terminal, it reimburses me for charges made by those foreign terminals (up to a certain dollar value per month). I believe ING does this as well. Both of these banks have the drawback that they don't have a brick-and-mortar presence, but I think that, in USAA's case at least, it is more than mitigated by all of the pluses. Another big downside for USAA (to you, probably) is that it only accepts certain types of customers. ING is all-inclusive, I believe, but I know far less about ING.
Slashdot Mirror
Lunar eclipses are visble everywhere on Earth that one could see (eclipsed portion of) the Moon. I.e., from approximately (actually a bit more than) half the Earth.
Similarly, Solar eclipses are visible everywhere on the Moon that one could see the eclipsed portion of the Earth (again, about half the Moon). :)
Of course, those living on the Moon might refer to Lunar eclipses as Solar eclipses and Solar eclipses as Terran eclipses.
I am indeed being very careful about my choice of words, but that is because it is difficult to separate meaning from words.
Regarding quantum entanglement, there are aspects of quantum entanglement that travel faster-than-light. However, as other posters have pointed out, these aspects do not permit information transference. Without information transference there can be no direction of casuality. This is very important when one realizes there is no such thing as instantaneous travel(in an absolute sense, at least).
Regarding instantaneous: as my previous qualification might suggest I will back-pedal on this a little. In any given reference frame, one can define simultaneous events as those from which a hypothetical photon eminating from both events would reach pass each other at a midpoint exactly between those two events in space (as defined for that reference frame). Instantaneous would have a similar definition. However, to someone traveling near the speed of light (relative to the first reference frame), they would have a vastly different idea about which events are simultaneous. They would see your two simulataneous events (which I will call A and B) such that A happened before B. (Assuming travel is not perpendicular to the axis containing A and B). Furthermore, someone traveling in the opposite direction would see that event B happened before A. Therefore if A had a causal impact on B (or vice-versa), one of these two new observers would claim that the causality ordering principle (COP) had been violated. I have very carefully chosen the words information and causal/causality here.
As for the shadow example, imagine this: Star A is 10 light-years away. Very large object B (which we will assume actually has no mass and so is not bending star A's light, but yet magically can occlude all light from A that falls on it) is 5 light-years away and is traveling at 0.75c perpendicularly to the line of sight. How fast would its shadow travel against a very, very large white screen? Simple geometry reveals that the answer is 1.5c. I don't think this qualifies as any kind of "trick". However, if one considers the situation carefully, it can be shown that no information from moving either the star A, nor the object B can travel faster than light!
We (Americans) have decided that from henceforth, the phrase "imperial units" will no longer be used as it slanderously implies that we are an empire. Instead, the correct phrase will now be "republican units". :P
Con as in anti, not Con as in confidence man. :)
My state (VA) also allows me to file taxes directly through them, and I think that's basically a better alternative. (Having written tax software myself long ago, I know it's not exactly brain surgery.) However, I found the process (slightly) less intuitive than the 3rd party site I used to file my federal taxes. That comes from the benefit of competition, IMO. I do agree that the downside of the 3rd party is that one more party has my personal information than needs it. Luckily for me, as a grad student, if my income information gets leaked out, I'll actually get less spam. ;)
According to the IRS, all those 3rd parties are free (including TurboTax) if you come from the IRS free-file page.
Would you say that all people who make broad generalizations are idiots? ;)
I don't drink beer, so I don't have first-hand experience on the matter, but to hear all the jokes about US beer (e.g., "How is American Beer like making love in a canoe?", from Monty Python's Live at the Hollywood Bowl), I'm surprised the overseas market for Budweiser is that large. Is this one of those cases where people complain about how bad a product is, and then they buy it anyway?
The main site has a bit of questionable material (not all bad, but not all good, either), but his criticism of Rita's work rings true to me.
First of all, he does tell you to feel free to take it with a grain of salt, but "to check it with an expert on brain anatomy or clinical neuroscience".
Secondly, what he says (for the most part) agrees with what I've learned in my research. I am no expert, but my research does involve reproducing cognitive and neurophysiological phenomena of the hippocampus (working on a Ph.D. in Computer Science), and much of my background reading agrees with what Yehouda is saying. Assuming that his quotes of Rita's are valid (I have not read her book), Rita is vastly exaggerating what we know about the brain.
Consider this:
As I'm sure you know, neutrinos very rarely interact with matter, but they do interact. Now, currently we are bathed with a flux of approximately 5,000,000 neutrinos/cm^2/s (could be off by a factor of 3, and depends on what kind of neutrinos you're talking about). At this flux, interactions are extremely rare and we have to set up huge tubs of water or cleaning fluid in order to detect them. However, what if the flux was not 5 x 10^6, but was on the order of 10^10? Well, I don't know, but I expect we'd still be OK, although we suddenly would be exposed to an increased amount of radiation from the 10,000-fold increase in neutrino interactions. We might even notice the occasional flashes in our retinas (although I doubt it). Now, what if that was increased to 10^30 neutrinos/cm^2/s? Now we're talking about an increase similar to Avogadro's number. I'm fairly certain we would notice that, and I expect it would not be healthy. Perhaps I'm wrong about that, but I'm certain you agree that there's some flux of neutrinos that definitely qualifies as being "a very bad thing".
There are two types of enhancment surgeries open to baseball players: laser eye surgery and Tommy John surgery. The first one is fairly ubiquitous and currently not very scrutinized. Improve your vision and you are better able to see what the pitcher is throwing your way. The second almost seems like a response to the first: they drill holes in your arm bones, figure-eight your tendons, and suddenly the pitcher can pitch better than he ever has before. Currently, AFAIK, the latter is only done on "injured" pitchers, but as my scare quotes are meant to indicate, the threshold for what injured means seems to be getting lower.
I'm 6'2", and I'm taller than about 97% of other men (in the US). If you're 6'5", you're taller than about 99.7% of other men, and if you're 6'8", well, you're just too tall, at least according to this calculator. (6'6" is taller than 99.9% of other men, but that's as high as the calculator goes.)
P.S. The calculator is a pop-up, so you'll need to allow those if you want to use the calcuator.
If your name is somewhat rare, search on your name in the search engine.
Sounds like someone has a case of the Mondays. ;) Seriously, you appear to be speaking from your experience as someone who has to support idiots (AKA the general population). OTOH, I'm speaking from my experience in the sciences where the amount of time spent writing code is frequently larger than the amount of time spent running the code. In many instances (not all) bloat is less of a problem than time wasted tracking down the reasons behind a segfault. That's one reason why many scientists "code" in Mathematica and/or MATLAB. Again, I'm not saying that this particular solution is any good, just arguing for the value in making programming easier at the expense of making the programs less efficient in space/time.
Give a mother a band-aid, and everything's a boo-boo. I still remember that time when I had my legs and arms separated from my body - blood was spurting everywhere! - and my mother was trying to fix it with a band-aid (well, four band-aids). Luckily, I finally convinced her that this was a job for a surgeon.
But not all code is written for business apps. What about scientists who understand logic fairly well, but who have difficulty in C or C++? (There are a surprising number of such people.)
Would you prevent a mother with no medical training to put a band-aid on her son's skinned knee? Sure, a trained doctor would know more about exactly how much (if any!) antibiotics to apply to the wound before applying the bandage, but surely you agree that the mother should be forced to pay his fees for this fairly trivial service?
I agree that this might not be for everyone or every project, and this particular instantiation might not even be for anyone or any project, but surely you must understand the importance of allowing the casual/hobbyist programmer to increase the tools in his toolbox!
Static electricity?
Sorry, recently finished reading a rant on the misuse of the word "literally". This one goes out to you Deni!
It's imperative that you do use a credit card when you're buying semtex (or other plastic explosives) or anthrax. Just don't use your credit card!
I wish I had mod points!
But it did go a good way towards defraying them. From what I remember, SS1 cost ~$20M, so the $10M prize helped, but it definitely didn't cover development costs. This doesn't dispute your main point, however. The real reward for SS1 is yet to come...
From what I can tell, the good news about this laptop is that you don't need glasses to get the 3D effect.
The bad news is that you have to put your left eye where the left "viewing diamond" is and your right eye where the right "viewing diamond" is. Of course, this might just be my pessimistic side talking.
That appears to be a credit union primarily for employees of USAA, whereas USAA is for members of the armed services and their immediate family. According to their membership page, "employees of Americhem Company, International Business Machines and Otis Elevator Company, who work in any United Services Automobile Association Building or field office" are also eligible, as are their immediate family. However, since they do not mention armed service personnel, this differs quite a bit from USAA Federal Savings Bank, which I still suspect is actually a "bank".
However, you have answered one long-standing question of mine. USAA apparently stands for "United Services Automobile Association" (this information is not readily found at USAA.com).
USAA is much more than a bank (insurance, etc.), but I guess your question is is the USAA Federal Savings Bank, technically a "bank"? My answer is that I don't know, but I think they are. I'm not sure if they count as being a Credit Union, and, if so, if that disqualifies them from being a "bank", but my instinct (which with $2 might get you a coffee from Starbucks) tells me that they are a bank.
Some new credit card machines require at least a few somewhat recognizable characters. At Harris Teeter when I use my credit card, I have to alter my signature in order for the machine to accept it. I find this somewhat amusing, and somewhat disturbing.
you need to get a different bank. My bank (USAA) not only doesn't charge me for every ATM transaction at a foreign terminal, it reimburses me for charges made by those foreign terminals (up to a certain dollar value per month). I believe ING does this as well. Both of these banks have the drawback that they don't have a brick-and-mortar presence, but I think that, in USAA's case at least, it is more than mitigated by all of the pluses. Another big downside for USAA (to you, probably) is that it only accepts certain types of customers. ING is all-inclusive, I believe, but I know far less about ING.
And, is one of his aliases peter303?
Sorry, couldn't resist. ;)